Biblical Analogy Research Articles

Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan

Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan

Consequences of an Analysis Using Biblical Analogies for Automated Vehicle Control Design

"The paper proposes an analysis of learning-based approaches for automated vehicle control systems from an ethical viewpoint. An analysis using analogies between selected biblical texts and operation concepts of learning-based approaches is performed. Thus, analogies for supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning-based approaches are created. Through the analogies, the root of the automatic control design problems, i.e. forming objective functions, on a theological level is explored. The analysis leads to three consequences, which are related to the difficulty of forming control objective, the difficulty of considering human objectives in control, and the necessity of viewing systems in all their complexity. The paper proposes the application of the consequences in an illustrative route selection vehicle control example. A multi-layer control concept involving the consequences of the analysis is proposed, with which some ethical challenges of the selected control problem can be handled. Keywords: biblical analogies, automated vehicle control, ethical challenges, machine learning "

Presidents, priests, and prophets: covenantal Christian nationalism and the challenge of biblical analogy

AbstractThis article explores the elaboration and application of the Old Testament idea of ‘covenant’ among Zambian church leaders who are Christian nationalist activists. In this framework, Zambia serves as an analogue of biblical Israel, while contemporary government and church leaders are the analogues of Old Testament kings, priests, and prophets. This covenantal approach presents challenges. On the one hand, government support for Christian nationalism encourages the compliance of church leaders with state‐led religious projects; on the other hand, however, the analogical reading of the biblical text on which this support depends casts the church in a prophetic role, which in turn opens the door for criticism of the government. Christian nationalist activists in Zambia therefore find themselves caught in a double‐bind that simultaneously encourages submission and critique. An analysis of this process contributes an important non‐Western perspective to contemporary discussions of Christian nationalism. It also complicates easy interpretations of Christian nationalism as abetting state power by demonstrating its critical possibilities.

Elizabeth I, Thomas Tallis and Judith: music, resistance and the iconography of power

Abstract The use of biblical analogies hailing Elizabeth by comparing her to biblical figures has long been recognized as important for the establishment of her rule. Elizabeth was compared to the apocryphal heroine Judith throughout her reign in a positive way. Yet in the wake and aftermath of the Northern Rising, the Papal Bull and the Ridolfi plot the comparison was challenged, as were Elizabethan politics, by another Judith appearing on stage, Mary Stuart. By reading the famous motet, Spem in alium, composed by the Elizabethan court musician Thomas Tallis as a work that makes use of both Protestant and Catholic appropriations of the biblical heroine, the Essay shows the possibilities of musical communication covering a middle ground in this pivotal period of the reign. By commissioning the piece, one of the most eminent Catholic nobles, Henry Fitzalan, twelfth earl of Arundel, used a musically couched reading of the biblical story of Judith to negotiate his personal relationship with the queen after having been implicated in the Ridolfi plot. As such the motet allows new insights in the communicative interactions of Catholics and Protestants and shows the heuristic value of musical sources for understanding Elizabethan politics.

Imagining the Kenyan Canaan dream journey in cyber space

With technological advances made in contemporary times, new literary genres have emerged in digital space, with an attendant rise in the performance of rhetorical discourse on social media platforms. In the run up to Kenyan elections on 8 August 2017, the opposition leader Raila Odinga, whose father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga wrote a book titled Not Yet Uhuru, packaged himself as the biblical Joshua with a quest to liberate Kenyans and take them to the Promised Land, Canaan. This biblical analogy depicted in Odinga’s speeches propelled Kenyans to engage in creative descriptions of the Canaan journey using social media. This play on imaginings of a Canaan journey, as displayed in cyber space, became a performance of biblical analogies, dreams, and expectations by rival characters in an ensuing online drama. In this article I examine the digital orality in the emergent texts found on Kenyan social media platforms as a form of online liveness. It focuses on social media exchanges that are inspired by Odinga’s quest (as captured in his speeches) to take Kenyans to Canaan. Placed within the framework of online liveness studies, it analyses how, using digital media, spatially dispersed Kenyans shared creative memes, messages, and tweets that allowed them to vicariously undertake the Canaan journey online. I utilise Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and collective unconscious to explore the journey motif, framed within an analogy of the Israelites’ journey from captivity, with Odinga portrayed as a hero who pursues the political quest of delivering Kenyans to the land of Canaan.

Reckoning the Revolt on Rekenpenningen

This article examines the Rijksmuseum’s collection of rekenpenningen (jetons or casting counters) from the Eighty Years’ War that were struck with Old Testament imagery. Practical in function, jetons were used by government officials to aid incounting, such as with the computation of taxes. They also served as an effective propaganda medium, as they regularly depicted and allegorized events of the first half of the Revolt (c. 1570-1609). On jetons the marriage of contemporary war and biblical episodes was transformed into erudite, visual-textual idioms: a struck image on the obverse interrelated to one on the reverse, crystalized by circumscribing Latin legends. With three case studies, this article examines the visualsources that inspired the counters and explains the surprisingly learned commentary that arises from the biblical analogies and text. The function of counting accentuates the persuasive effect of the counters: numerically and metaphorically accumulating support for the war. The Rijksmuseum’s collection of jetons is one of the most notable in the Netherlands and has not been studied from an art historical perspective before.

„Z gór, gdzie dźwigali” — a słuchali w salonach. Zygmunta Krasińskiego transgresje na szczycie góry

"Z GÓR, GDZIE DŹWIGALI" "FROM MOUNTAINS, WHERE THEY CARIED" - AND LISTENED TO THE SALONS. ZYGMUNT KRASIŃSKI' TRANSGRESSIONS ON THE TOP OF A MOUNTAINThe present Article is an attempt at an analysis and interpretation of Zygmunt Krasiński’s 1847 poem “Z gór, gdzie dźwigali” From the mountains, where they carried. The poem, full of sceptical pessimism, refers to the Biblical episode featuring Moses, whom God showed the vast expanse of the promised land from the top of a mountain, telling him, however, that he would see the land but would never enter it. Krasiński addressed this Biblical analogy to participants in the Great Emigration and his entire generation. The metaphorical mountain carries an ambiguous message: on the one hand it radiates heavenly light and on the other is a symbolic place of suffering, a Golgotha on the top of which each participants in the Messianic process carries his own cross — the burden of superhuman torment and penance. The mountain top is a place in which each of them experiences transgression, overcoming their own physical and intellectual weaknesses, and achieving spiritual stability by accepting the ungrateful role of “intermediaries” in the journey towards a free homeland. When it comes to the literature of Polish Romanticism, this is a noteworthy and important reflection.]]>

Библейские аналогии в хакасском сказании «Семь гор — семь дев Читi хыс»

In the article, some parallels of biblical, Turkic-Mongolian myths and the Khakass story Seven Mountains — the Seven Girls of Chiti Khys are considered on the basis of comparativism. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that the revealed biblical analogies in the Khakass legend confirm the earlier conclusions that as a result of the first contacts on the territory of the Fore Asia of the Siberian Scythian-Cimmerian civilization of the Sayanids and Middle Eastern Semitic culture in the VIII-VII centuries BC the Altai-Sayan myth influenced the formation of a complex of biblical ideas. Researchers note the external character of the penetration of early and late Christianity into the religious mythological representations of the Turkic-Mongols. The presence in the North Asian legends of specific biblical stories and symbolism is explained by the mutual influence of the Proto-Turko-Mongolian ethnic substratum and the ancient Jews in the Fertile Crescent. One of the proofs of this is the biblical parallels discovered by us in the Khakass legend Seven Mountains — the Seven Girls of Chiti Khys: the similarity of the appearance of Giant Girls with biblical Giants and Angels; The presence in the Khakass legend of biblical stories Assault of Heaven, Great Flood; the transformation of Giant Girls into stone.

Новые референции концепта «земля» в русской литературе революционных лет (1917–1920-е)

The paper demonstrates the change in the topic of Russian literature under the pressure of revolutionary events in Russia from 1917 to 1921. The author considers the gap between the concepts of “land” and “people”, traditionally indivisible in the Russian linguistic image of the world. On the one hand, the “motherland” plays a redemptive role in relation to the people betrayed by her, on the other, being ready to take them into her space, she is more worthy than her people. Historical and biblical analogies are also given in the paper. The author traces the deconstruction of the concept “people” in Russian literature in the 20th century and at the turn of the 20th and the 21st century. She determines the connection of this process not only to the unique history of 20th-century Russia but also to the worldwide globalization process and notes the apparent weakening of the traditional relationship between “lands” and their people. The author analyzes the works written by D. Merezhkovsky, S. Bulgakov, M. Prishvin, A. Remizov, S. Durylin, and M. Voloshin between 1917 and 1920. She uses historical-typological and hermeneutical methods and also conceptual and mythopoetic approaches in her paper.

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Biblical Analogues in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Biblical Analogues in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

"Courageous, Zealous, Learned, Wise, and Chaste" – Queen Elizabeth I's Biblical Analogies After Her Death

During her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England was the subject of various biblical analogies. Much of the current historiography, however, does not continue analysis of these literary devices after the Queen's death in 1603. Primary source documents show that their use did not cease with the Queen's death. These analogies appear to have continued for two primary purposes. Analogies legitimised a questionable event that had occurred during Elizabeth's reign, and portrayed these decisions as an example for the current Protestant monarch to imitate. Also, in the years after the Queen's death, analogies reinforced England's Protestantism (and its divine sanction), and gave the Stuart monarchs an example to emulate in religio-political matters.

The long‐haired kings of the Franks: ‘like so many Samsons?’1

As the paradigm of Germanic sacral kingship has lost its appeal, historians have begun to rethink the concept of Merovingian kingship. Most of the arguments once used in support of its alleged Germanic and pagan character have now been refuted. However, the meaning of their long hair has thus far proven difficult to explain. This article will argue that the Merovingian hairstyle took up Christian meaning shortly after their conversion, presenting them in the image of the biblical Samson. Consequently, their use of biblical analogies to legitimize royal power further challenges the once‐held dichotomy between Merovingian and Carolingian kingship.

The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing

This essay contends that broad-based community organizing is best framed as an extension and development of American populism. To make this link it is necessary to focus on how the ‘dean’ of community organising, Saul Alinsky, drew on and developed key aspects of American populism. The link between Alinsky and populism is conceptual, genealogical, and sociological and a taproot that community organizing shares with certain elements of the civil rights movement and other forms of grassroots activism, both democratic and authoritarian.1 However, there are good reasons for refusing such a linkage when it comes to Alinsky. Not least among these is the consistent failure and lack of relationship between the constituency that formed the Populist movement and the People’s Party of the 1890s (primarily ‘yeoman’ farmers in alliance with miners and railroad workers) and the urban and predominantly Catholic industrial workers of that era, a lack of relationship that is central to the failure of the People’s Party to break the duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats and establish itself as a third force in American politics.2 Yet it was precisely among the urban industrial workers that Alinsky developed his craft as an organizer. However, like the Populists, Alinsky consistently and insistently drew conceptually on the Jeffersonian tradition of democracy, which was for him a key reference point in his teaching and writing, combining these with Biblical analogies and allusions. The Political Populism of Saul Alinsky and Broad Based Organizing

Sex, Silver, and Biblical Analogues: Thematic and Intertextual Resolutions at the End of Nostromo

Sex, Silver, and Biblical Analogues: Thematic and Intertextual Resolutions at the End of Nostromo

Biblical Analogy and Secondary Allegory in Chaucer's the Knight's Tale

For a number of years, at least two major strains of interpretation of The Knight's Tale have had this much in common, that they have viewed the tale as capturing a world fully pagan. Their analyses with respect to this reading have led to two broad conclusions: either that Chaucer's intention in the tale is to condemn paganism by showing its deficiencies (implicit in Theseus's closing speech), or, apart from any condemnatory purpose, that he wishes to present for philosophical consideration an alternative ethical system to the dominant Christian ethos. (1) There is good sense in both of these readings: the setting of the tale is ancient Athens, a world, as Brenda Deen Schildgen has said, where Christians nowhere to be found (12); moreover, both Egeus's and Theseus's philosophies stated near the conclusion, though not entirely antithetical to Christian thinking, present identifiable antique views of life, offered by the characters formulating them, as prescriptions for proper living. Scholars of the former school of thought who see the tale as a critique of these philosophies generally have contended that Chaucer suggests a Christian solution by implication only, chiefly by pointing outside the tale itself to more overtly Christian tales--even to the last of The Canterbury Tales, The Parson's Tale (Brooks and Fowler 142). What I argue in this essay is that readers of the tale have rather surprisingly overlooked a series of imbedded biblical allegories--perhaps analogies would be the better word--that constitute an implied internal critique of the pre-Christian world Chaucer constructs in the poem. The Athenians and Thebans in the poem obviously are ignorant of these analogies, but the Christian audience and certainly Chaucer himself are not. These analogies serve as a reminder even within the antique environment of the tale of the greater, truer world toward which the larger pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales itself points. My goal is to highlight the analogies and establish as I go their importance to what I call the allegory of love, compared to the more prominent, though not necessarily the more important, allegory of the poem, namely, the allegory of rule or order. The first of these biblical analogies appears in the prima pars in the famous Maying scene where first Palamon and then Arcite see Emelye for the first time. Of Palamon's initial A! we learn: And so bifel, by aventure or cas, That thurgh a wyndow, thikke of many a barre Of iren greet and square as any sparre, He cast his eye upon Emelya, And therwithal he bleynte and cride, A! As though he stongen were unto the herte. (KT 1074-1079) (2) Soon after, Arcite also sees Emelye, and the great and thoroughly silly debate over who saw what and who saw first begins. Yet the silliness is complicated by Chaucer's first biblical analogy, here a clear correspondence to the David and Bathsheba episode in 2 Sam. 11:2, translated by Wycliffe as follows: While these thingis weren doon, it befelde, that Dauid roos in a dai fro his bed after mydday, and walkide in the soler of the kyngis hows; and he siy a womman waischynge hir silf euen ayens on hir soler; sotheli the womman was ful fair. (3) The similarity of the passages is obvious enough. David and the Theban cousins look down from on high at a woman below them whose beauty fully captivates them and yet who is completely ignorant of their gaze. The event in both cases is entirely fortuitous. Admittedly, differences exist in time of day and the activities of the women. Still, the similarities are remarkable, and it is hard to believe that a man as fully conversant with the Bible as Chaucer would have missed the analogy. The incident in the poem may seem to support D. W. Robertson's assertion of the allegory of order over concupiscence, specifically, of Athenian proper rule over Theban concupiscence (265-66). …

Sind Transzendenz-Erfahrungen göttliche Offenbarungen?

The commentator (1) appreciates the author's proposal to describe religious evidence in the framework of a psychology which uses qualitative, esp. hermeneutical methods; he criticizes, however, the author's linear co-lecture of texts of Teresa and of himself, and he would not accept a binary contrast of outer and inner experience resp. a spiritualizing concept of mysticism. (2) The commentator agrees fully with the author's use of the strictly functional term "transcendence-experiences" (not a priori deciding about non-empirical elements) on the level of scientific description; and he suggests to openly use the term "revelation" on the level of interior perspective in the context of a particular language-game resp. socio-cultural group. He doubts, however, whether the author's description is fully in accordance with his own criteria. (3) The author's interpretation of his experience, which might be called a "private revelation" of personally binding nature, can be regarded as consonant with the "revelation" in the Bible resp. New Testament in some important aspects, whereas other elements represent the modern, in a sense heterodox ethical and chiliastic transformation of Christian faith. (4) Dream, trauma, and testimony are indeed biblical analogies to "transcendence-experiences", which deserve a more scrupulous analysis.

Rereading James Joyces's The Sisters – A Bakhtinian approach

This article applies Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic method to James Joyce's The Sisters. Although the surface structure, which consists of many Biblical analogies, implies that this text presents a strictly Christian point of view, the deep structure turns that perspective upside down. As a process of dialogization, The Sisters contrasts Catholic Dublin with the ancient roots of dialogism which Joyce must have rediscovered independently from Bakhtin: the Socratic Dialogue and the Carnivalesque which is closely related to Nietzsche's principle of the Dionysiac. As Joyce presents his central character James Flynn not only as a broken man who had to spend his terminal days in paralytic silence, but also as an ironic reincarnation of Jesus, Socrates and Dionysus, his early story turns out to be a polyphonic text whose multi-voicedness subverts Christianity with Socratic freedom of thought and Pagan festivity.

Fallible or inerrant? A belated review of the ‘constructivist's bible’ Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+236. ISBN 0-521-44913-8. £15.95 (paperback).

When Jan Golinski's Making Natural Knowledge was published in 1998 it was generally applauded for its ecumenical stance between the empirical ‘art’ of historians and the theoretical focus of the social sciences. Indeed, such a middling position was a unique approach to be taken in wake of the ‘science wars’ and this, in combination with the book's clear organization and (for the most part) forthright prose, quickly earned it a place upon HPS, STS and SSK postgraduate reading lists. Now, five years since its first edition was published (hardback, 1998), the work has become a standard introduction to historically minded scholars interested in the constructivist programme. In fact, it has been called the ‘constructivist's bible’ in many a conference corridor. Since the book has attained such a status (and since it has not been reviewed in the BJHS), it is perhaps worth reflecting on whether or not such canonical text (to use a biblical analogy) is fallible or inerrant – especially in relation to its content and pedagogical efficacy.

Teaching About Domestic Violence

This piece offers a systematic approach for introducing the concept of domestic violence into Jewish education. Through formal and informal educational activities, this curriculum provides a basis for instructing Jewish students of all ages about the existence of domestic violence in the Jewish community. From values and morals to biblical analogies and religious law implications, this curriculum offers a variety of methods for students to connect with the topic of domestic violence.