Biblical Form Research Articles

Form And Content Of Poetry Of Restive Regions: A Critique Of Select Collection Of Poems From The Boko Haram And Bandits’ Occupied Northern States

Modern African poetry is characterized by shifts in both its form and preoccupation. It began with a call for self-governance in an amateurish language. Then came the Soyinkas (the disillusioned poets), whose poems are crafted in a rather difficult style that suggests colonial hang-ups. A major turnaround came in the 1980s when the Osundares’, criticizing the Soyinkas for their untold difficulty, provided a staple, known as the Alter-Native tradition. It seeks to address African conditions using African allusions. They, unlike the largely Greco-Roman, Euro-centric and Biblical form of the Soyinkas, provide an enative alternative. Both Othman and Okpanachi, (then lecturers in the far North-Eastern Nigerian University of Maiduguri) belong to the latter and they write amid the terrific Boko Haram insurgency that threatened to extinct the region. This paper seeks to uncover their style in exposing some of the most horrific acts of both the Boko haram and the herdsmen’s unleashed terror on innocent souls. The paper, harping on the postcolonial discourses of the Palestinian Said, Caribbean Fanon, Indian Bhabha, and Nigerian Chinweizu, looks at the factors and motives behind the assailants’ missions as presented in the collections. It shows how they reveal the misgivings of the current African democracy as embedded in evil acts. These Poets seem to unravel the brazen incompetency of the modern African democratic governments, citing Nigeria as an example. The paper also offers a critique of some other collections of poems from northern Nigerian authors. From 1999 to the mid-2000, the region was ravaged by Boko Haram mayhem. And by 2015 to date, it has been faced with a series of terror activities that range from banditry, and cattle rustling to kidnapping. The region is absolved in fear of terror everywhere. Thus the paper also attempts to critique some of the accounts contained in the poems.

Greek literature

Stephen Halliwell has, at last, completed his three-volume verse translation of Aristophanes. The first instalment, published in 1997, covered Aristophanes’ ‘longest play, Birds, his sexiest play, Lysistrata, and two works from very near the end of his career, Assembly-Women and Wealth’. Geoffrey Arnott's review of that first volume was positive: ‘H.'s style is lively, modern, and generally effective, closer perhaps in its presentation of the complexities of Aristophanic detail and reference than most of his rivals…He is virtually always accurate without being over-literal, and far more often graphically idiomatic than flat.’ Arnott's assessment was generally favourable, although he did identify some imperfections: ‘errors in detail are few and far between (Birds 244, “marshy greens”, not “rolling hills”; 266, “like a stone curlew”, not “with a waterfall of sound”; Eccl. 1092, βολβoί not “onions”; Plut. 192, μάζα not “bread”)’, and Halliwell ‘would have benefited from having his translation of Birds vetted by an ornithologist, who would have removed the phantasmagorical blue thrush (979), and turned the moorhen (304), siskins (1079), and curlews (1140) into gallinule, chaffinches, and stone curlews’. I confess that I could not possibly have managed that menagerie myself; Arnott, of course, was an accomplished ornithologist. Halliwell's original plan was to deal with ‘the “political” plays from the 420s, Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, and Peace’ in the second instalment, and ‘the comedies on more “cultural” themes, Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Frogs’ in the third. In the event, the sequence of ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ volumes was recast in biblical form: ‘the last shall be first and the first shall be last’ (Matthew 20.16). Or, perhaps, vice versa. The format for each volume is, at any rate, consistent: each volume has a substantial introduction, with a bibliography and brief chronology; and each play has its own introduction, together with fourteen or so pages of explanatory notes. As a sample of Halliwell's translation, consider (for example) this taster from Peace (996–1,014):Blend all us Greeks,As we once used to be,In an essence of friendship, and mix our mindsIn a milder spirit of sympathy.Allow our market to teem with goods:From Megara bring us heads of garlic,Early cucumbers, apples, pomegranates,Fancy cloaks for slaves to wear.From Boiotian traders we'd like to seeGeese, ducks, wood-pigeons, and wrens,As well as baskets of Kopaic eels.Then may we all crowd round these basketsAnd buying our food get into a jostleWith Morychos, Teleas, Glauketes,And numerous other gluttons. And nextMay Melanthios come to the market too late,When the eels are all sold: let him ululate,Then sing a solo from his Medea,‘I'm doomed, I'm doomed, now quite bereftOf a female embedded in beetroot’.

Approaches to the Investigation of Speech Genres in the Qur'an

This contribution provides a methodological overview of the investigation of speech genres in the Qur’an. Drawing on Biblical form criticism, the ethnography of speech, and Bakhtin's theory of speech genres, as well as recent studies devoted to the form criticism of the Qur’an and earlier Qur’anic studies scholarship on individual genres, it points out the importance of generic conventions for the interpretation of Qur’anic passages, highlights the types of evidence on which investigators ought to focus in the investigation of genres, and identifies oversights and pitfalls that have affected earlier scholarship and should be taken into account in future work. Close attention must be paid to generic labels, meta-generic discourse, repeated elements, conventional features of individual genres such as introductory formulas, concluding formulas, and characteristic words, phrases, and constructions. The discussion highlights the ways in which texts that belong to individual genres are embedded in suras or longer passages within suras and points out that the Qur’an not only draws on pre-existing genres but also modifies and transforms them.

Embracing Evolution: How Understanding Science Can Strengthen Your Christian Life

EMBRACING EVOLUTION: How Understanding Science Can Strengthen Your Christian Life by Matthew Nelson Hill. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020. 152 pages. Paperback; $20.00. ISBN: 9780830852833. *This is a short and very readable book whose main purpose is to connect the average churchgoing Christian with a modern and theologically sympathetic understanding of evolution. The general perspective taken by the book is that human understanding of anything (science, art, theology, politics, and so forth) is significantly contextual. The author takes care in the first chapter to explain his perspective on science/faith issues in general, and organizes the book into three parts. *The first part is that of understanding our "biblical lens," namely, exploring the ways in which we are shaped to read scripture, and how this, in turn, influences our beliefs. Do we read the Bible for formation or for information? The two are not mutually incompatible, but neither are they equivalent, and how we balance the two is pertinent to our theological understanding of evolution. This section of the book addresses what are perhaps the two main questions emerging from the early chapters of Genesis: our understanding of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and the place of predation and death in God's creation. The latter troubles the author much more than the former, and the response presented is not wholly satisfying, even to the author himself. Overall, this section is a good presentation of hermeneutics that focuses on Genesis without bogging down the reader with too much theological weight. *The second part of the book addresses how we understand our "scientific lens." A full chapter is devoted to the basic theory of evolution (its "nuts and bolts") and a subsequent chapter to what is meant by scientific truth and its integration (or not) with faith. The author does a good job of distilling the philosophy of science for the intelligent lay reader without "dumbing it down"--not an easy task. Sometimes, however, the treatment is lacking, particularly concerning the imago Dei in light of evolution. Are we (as appears to be the inference on page 69) special simply because we were evolutionarily lucky to have large brains? *The remainder of the book--its third part--is devoted to how we might integrate an evolutionary understanding of biology with Christian faith. Many books have been written on this subject, and it is difficult for anyone these days to say what has not already been said. The theme running through this section of the book is that an evolutionary perspective can be empowering, primarily because knowledge of fact and truth allows a Christian to better carry out the ministry of Jesus in his/her life and in the world. Knowledge of the roots of our negative genetic urges (for example, the tendency to overeat) can empower us to overcome these urges through a combination of human choice and the grace of God. The final chapter discusses how the Christian church, girded with an appropriate integration of evolutionary knowledge and scriptural foundation, is best positioned to foster the virtues of the kingdom of God through community. *I liked this book, and I think it is definitely one for discussion and use in an adult Sunday school class. It does, however, avoid a number of awkward questions and issues. For example, why does it matter if our negative/positive tendencies are evolutionarily based? Wouldn't we, as Christians, act the same if they had some other origin? There is also an assumption by the author of a transcendent morality--but where does this come from? Are our morals likewise a product of evolution? If so, how does this square with biblical (and other) forms of revelation? And as far as the problem of death is concerned, isn't this a problem of sin in the world? Doesn't it mean that sin is present at the outset of creation? *That said, this is very much a positive contribution to the ongoing evolution/creation issue. Without denying our evolutionary origins, it calls us to transcend them as followers of Jesus. I am sure it will foster interesting discussions in many a church and Sunday school class. *Reviewed by Robert B. Mann, Professor of Physics & Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1.

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England ed. by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

Reviewed by: The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England ed. by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole Lieke Stelling (bio) The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England Edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvi + 304 pp. $99.99 hardcover. This volume marks a compelling new step in the analysis of the early modern English literary exploration of religion. The body of research on religious themes in early modern literature, and notably in Shakespeare, is vast, but, as this collection of fine essays demonstrates, far from exhaustive. If the majority of studies have concerned themselves with questions as to which parts of scripture were being alluded to in the literary culture of the Protestant Reformation, this volume considers how literary works were interested not so much in citing as in examining specific problems of interpreting the Bible, which were at the core of the Reformation. Thus, one of the threads that runs through the chapters is the deceptive understanding of literal and figurative interpretation as antithetical. In addition, the contributions discuss, through a Shakespearean lens, the wider social, theological and textual ramifications of biblical hermeneutics in relation to other important sites and forms of interpretation, including sermons and sermonizing, translation, topography and material aspects of the Bible. The first chapter, by Bruce Gordon, lays the groundwork for the volume by offering an extensive discussion of biblical production, translation, scholarship and dissemination in the age of Shakespeare. He does so by carefully tracing continental debates on and developments in approaches to translation from the languages of the Bible into Latin and vernacular tongues, and relating these issues to the production and use of Bibles in England, notably the Geneva and Bishop’s Bible. Aaron T. Pratt, remaining [End Page 210] on the topic of translation, zooms in on the question of which versions of Protestant Bibles Shakespeare and his contemporaries consumed, making the paradoxical and intriguing observation that translation is in fact less, and paratext more helpful in answering this question than is often assumed. Jay Zysk opens a new section that consists of four chapters and is dedicated to “Reformation reading practices in the theater” (49). Focusing on Measure for Measure, Zysk addresses Angelo’s mentioning of “chewing God’s name” in relation to John 6 and to the heated controversy around the issue of tran-substantiation (51). Zysk shows how the play presents the distinction between the literal and figurative reading of the Eucharist as far from clear-cut, and, more importantly, as far from trivial, but a matter of life and death. Kristen Poole, in the subsequent chapter on Hamlet, further elaborates on the issue of early modern Protestant “literalism” (71) and expounds the linguistic and theological significance of amphibology and the pun. She notes that aspects of a great deal of Hamlet’s puns bear similarities to structures of Protestant allegory in contemporary sermons. In addition, she shows that the figure of Hamlet personifies an early modern conception of the self that was shaped by the Bible in terms of its textual content as well as its material form. Beatrice Groves sheds fresh light on the moment of Henry IV’s decease in the so-called Jerusalem chamber, and his ironic observation that he always thought he would die in the Holy Land. She convincingly explains that this moment, when read in a context in which England was often typologically interpreted as the Holy Land, is closer to fulfillment than is often admitted. Tom Bishop, in the final chapter of this section, turns to the slippery concepts of “reading” (103) and “studying” (105) scripture, from the fruitful vantage point of the speech of the imprisoned Richard of Bordeaux (and former King Richard II) in Pomfret Castle. Section three, on the interplay between biblical forms and other genres, is opened by Adrian Streete’s insightful contribution about the interrelationships between classical Roman Stoic and biblical understandings of lamentation. These are brought together, Streete shows, in Shakespeare’s most gruesome play—Titus Andronicus—and inform the tensions within the identities of the tragedy’s lamenting protagonists. Hannibal Hamlin problematizes biblical allusions in Pericles (and, to a...

Creature Comfort

Can human co-existence with wild animals can be mediated by an ethic of hospitality? Some Christian environmental and animal ethicists have outlined ways Christians can model a more expansive, imaginative, and informed hospitality toward non-human animals. This paper will explore philosophical and theological underpinnings for such a practice, to ask whether it can have any prescriptive “teeth” when the interests of humans and non-human, non-domestic animals collide in ways that humans perceive as costly. The paper will argue that a commitment to interspecies hospitality can indeed function as a biocentric and biblical form of justice that adapts and extends community to our fellow creatures.

Gathering and Scattering in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: Poetic Form, Biblical Criticism, and Coleridge’s Tropes of the Imagination

ABSTRACTSituating the theoretical preoccupation with unity and division that underpins Coleridge’s theory of the imagination in relation to his critical appreciation for the Bible as literature, the following essay examines Coleridge’s incorporation of biblical forms within his own poetry. In the particular case of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge figures the imagination’s functions of gathering and scattering through three tropes that adapt the parallelism of biblical poetry: chiasmus, synesthesia, and merismus. Through the inverted sequences of chiasmus, sensory combinations of synesthesia, and condensed pairings of merismus, “The Ancient Mariner” recalls and revises various biblical accounts of the creation and ordering of the cosmos. These tropes work to question the dominion assigned to humankind in the Genesis creation myths by evoking the sublimity of the natural world expressed in the divine speeches of the Book of Job. Coleridge’s imaginative engagement with scripture in “The Ancient Mariner” thereby shows that the creation stories in Genesis and the survey of nature in Job depend not merely on narrative but, more particularly, on poetic form.

Reclaiming Biblical Relevance in Preaching. The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Biblical Relevance in Preaching

The desired outcome of biblical communication is application – the process of the listener relating his or her life to the truth of God’s word. Consequently, the goal of biblical communication is relevance – the process of relating truth of God’s word to the listener. At the heart of the biblical equation of communication stands the question of the necessary and sufficient conditions which must obtain for a sermon to count as being biblically relevant. The article analyzes the content and form of biblical communication seeking to determine its relationship to the consciousness of the listener (intellect, affection and will). The paper contends for an objective foundation of biblical relevance found in the biblical content always aiming at the will of the listener and the biblical form framing the content for the intellect of the hearer. The sermon is biblically relevant to the extent to which the above relationships obtain in the process of communication.

Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus: The Methodology of John Wansbrough through the Lens of Biblical Studies

John Wansbrough’s scholarship on the Qur??n has had a significant impacton Qur??nic Studies over the last forty years. His ideas continue to stimulateresearch into historical and literary dimensions of the Qur??n, even thoughassessments vary greatly regarding the plausibility of some of his major ideas,and his subtle arguments can be difficult to follow. This essay clarifies andevaluates Wansbrough’s thinking about the composition of the Qur??n byelucidating the models from Biblical Studies that he appropriated. Detailedtreatment is given to biblical form criticism and Wansbrough’s application ofthis method to the qur??nic accounts of the prophet Shu?ayb. It is suggestedthat Wansbrough’s form-critical research yielded positive insights into theQur??n, but also left certain questions unanswered. It is then proposed thatanother model taken from Biblical Studies, the idea of a “rolling corpus”as developed in research on the book of Jeremiah, can sharpen and refineWansbrough’s conclusions.

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non-Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro-active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo-classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.

The verbal noun of the qal stem in Rabbinic Hebrew traditions and qĕṭēlâ/qĕṭîlâ alternations

The verbal noun הפָירִשְׂ ‘burning’ in Rabbinic Hebrew stands in contrast to its biblical counterpart הפָרֵשְׂ ‘fire’ both in form and in function. This contrast is not, as has been suggested, a simple alternation between nominal patterns or between vowels, but rather part of a wide morphological change in Rabbinic Hebrew: the transition of the verbal nouns into a grammatical category, which can be seen in other forms and other nominal patterns as well. The inherited biblical forms that, like הפָרֵשְׂ did not fit the new alignment and were not considered appropriate verbal nouns any more, were kept in use and maintained their potential lexical status, but for expressing the verbal noun they were often replaced by other patterns.

Monastic Exegesis and the Biblical Typology of Monasticism in the Patristic Period

Monastic exegesis of the Bible in the Patristic period was characterized by ascetic pragmatism, reminiscence and meditation of the canonical text and at the same time its extra-verbal literal and spiritual interpretation. The consequence of such a manner of reading the text of the Bible was to acknowledge the monastic way of life as the royal path (via regia) and the monk as the one possessing certain spiritual knowledge and living faith. Systematic ignoring of the original Hebrew text by ancient monks, as well as by the Fathers of the Church, in using literal – spiritual and anagogical exegesis led to every biblical text being understood in a spiritual manner, i.e. as a text leading a monk to salvation. The biblical typologies of the monastic life also started to be derived from the theological rule of the Testaments. Those typologies resulted from the formerly adopted Christocentric theological premise assuming that the whole Bible tells about Christ and leads to Christ. They were the spiritual interpretation of the biblical text and were aimed at accounting for monasticism as the biblical form of life.

‘A Poem in a Foreign Language’?: Jane Eyre, the King James Bible and the Modern Reader

It is frequently said that modern readers’ lack of knowledge of the Bible must ‘impoverish’ their response to nineteenth-century novels. In this paper, I argue that modern readers who cannot identify specific biblical allusions nevertheless respond to the memorable rhythms and vivid imagery of the King James Bible, which have passed into everyday usage, treasured, repeated and adapted through time because they shape and heighten recurring human emotions. Charlotte Brontë’s knowledge of the Bible was so thorough as to amount to a ‘mother tongue’, and in this paper, drawing on scholarly analyses of the Bible and of Charlotte Brontë’s prose, I demonstrate that the characteristic style of Jane Eyre, especially in moments of high emotion, echoes biblical forms of sentence structure, vocabulary and imagery, and I argue that specific allusions to the Bible are less important in her work than the powerful emotional force carried by a biblical style.

Letting Moses Go: Hurston and Reed, Disowning Exodus

In the introduction to a 1992 edition of Legends of the Bible, Louis Ginzberg's collection of Jewish lore. Shalom Spiegel defines by describing the persistent allure of Hebrew scripture to new readers: legend may be taken to imply whatever will come to be read by successive ages into an event or record of the past: the ever-new and ever-changing rereading of sources by new generations of men. ... Each following period pours its inner life into the patient and pliant texts of old (xi). The vitality of the Tanakh derives from its endless applicability; it is an flask into which we can pour and repour new wine. Students of African-American history thus commonly note the ways in which enslaved and free blacks poured themselves into the stories of the Exodus. In novels, hymns, songs, poems, speeches, and sermons, African Americans cast themselves in the role of the Israelites. enslaved but chosen by God for a glorious new freedom, oppressed but selected for a divine destiny. Indeed, in The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, Allen Dwight Callahan argues that African Americans heard, read, and retold the story of the Exodus more than any other biblical narrative. ... Exodus was the Bible's narrative argument that God was opposed to American slavery and would return a catastrophic judgment against the nation as he had against Egypt [and] signified God's will that African Americans too would no longer be sold as bondspeople, that they too would go free. (83) If Exodus was God's love letter to African Americans and a firm promise that He would liberate and deliver retributive justice. American blacks' corporate identification with Biblical Hebrews also served as a foundation for establishing group identity. Werner Sollors terms the process by which a people comes to develop a group consciousness through identification with a text (57), and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. analyzes instances of the Biblical form of typological ethnogenesis in nineteenth-century African-American communities, arguing that blacks' identification with the Israelites was crucial to the development of their concepts of group and national unity. (1) By seeing themselves in the enslaved Hebrews, nineteenth-century blacks built a vocabulary of African-American peoplehood--and effectively founded African America. Glaude's study could easily extend into the twentieth century, revealing numerous examples of African Americans' continued appropriation of the Torah's stories of Moses and the Israelites. However, in its passage into the post-bellum period and the twentieth century, the idiom began to show signs of wear. Though the end of the Civil War formally abolished slavery, Southern sharecropping kept many of its worst aspects intact, and while the Exodus narrative promised not only freedom but a promised land, blacks living in America remained in a nation scarred. by the memories of their oppression. (2) Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow laws demonstrated that African-American freedom was an attenuated version of true liberty, a condition that only became more discomfiting as the decades passed and emancipation did not give way to total equality, especially in the American South. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968--along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965--ended many forms of institutionalized racism, prejudice and violence continued through the 1970s. The Exodus myth thus provided a decreasingly effective template for re-imagining African-American experience. (3) Two twentieth-century African-American novelists who understood this were Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed, and in their fictions both questioned the usefulness of the Exodus story for black culture in the twentieth century. In 1939, on the brink of World War II, and near the end of the Great Migration that brought millions of black Americans from the still-segregated, Jim Crow South to the urban North, Zora Neale Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, a novel-length reworking of the Torah that features an ethnically ambiguous Moses enlisted by a shadowy Mountain god to free a people who are not his own. …

Critical Approaches to the "Farewell Khutba" in Ibn Ishaq's Life of the Prophet

Ibn Ishaq’s rhetorical use of genre in his edited biography of the life of the Prophet Muhammad instances the authority accorded by the early Muslim community to Biblical forms familiar to them. The genre in question is the “universal history” modeled by the Genesis-through-Kings saga contained in the Hebrew Bible. At the “center” of this saga stands the Deuteronomic restatement of Mosaic law; likewise, at the “center” of Ibn Ishaq’s biography stands a restatement of Qur’anic legislation contained in the Prophet’s “Farewell Sermon.” Ibn Ishaq’s biography subtly accomplishes both Muslim Biblical interpretation and legal interpretation by means of a rhetorical use of allusion.

When “Living Stories” Encounter the Living Word

This article focuses on biblical forms (psalms, proverbs, and parables) and story genres (inspirational, paradoxical, and miraculous) that inform the pastoral counseling process in ways that make the stories of our lives become more vivid. It does so primarily by examining Donald Capps’ contributions in Living Stories and Biblical Approaches to Pastoral Counseling by studying the living stories in juxtaposition to the biblical forms.

Życie i działanie św. Pawła Apostoła w świetle liturgii Kościoła

In the liturgical calendar St. Paul is mentioned twice – for the first time on the day of his conversion (25 January), and then during the celebration – in common with St. Peter the Apostle – when the congregation contemplates his life and martyr’s death (29 June). In this article, through the analysis of liturgical texts about St. Paul – biblical readings and forms of the Holy Mass, and Liturgy of the Hours – the spiritual richness and depth of mysteries of salvation are transmitted to the Church community by this Apostle of the Nations. The Apostle of Tarsus, through his life and deeds, showed us the power of the Holy Spirit operating in mankind, who makes us God’s children and lets us live not according to worldly but according to spiritual values. By giving His gifts to people, He contributes to the development of the Church. The Apostle is also the example of acceptance of the Gospel, which is revealed through preaching the Good News to all peoples. He shows that one can endure pain and suffering for sake of the Gospel. And sacrificing our life, giving it for the act of salvation leads to friendship with Christ and brotherly love. The liturgical texts which are designed to be prayed on St. Paul’s days deeper the certainty that God’s people have that Jesus was resurrected and is alive, and wishes to lead each man on the way to salvation.

‘Bibeldichtung’ und dichterische Darstellung. Kain in der Literatur um 1800: Klopstock, Gessner, Coleridge, Byron

Biblical poetry is a still neglected genre in literary history. The current approaches are misleading both systematically and historically because they tend to split literary matter and biblical form, and they see biblical poetry as part of a broad secularization process. Four rewritings of Cain's biblical story, all written around 1800, show that literary approaches to the bible tended to produce new forms and innovative genres, such as an “undramatic” drama (Klopstock), a pastoral that implicitly criticises the pastoral worldview (Gessner), a prose poem that systematically blurs the border between poetry and prose (Coleridge), and a drama that combines the radial rebellion of Cain with the reinforcement of the biblical norms (Byron).

The courage to be Protestant: truth-lovers, marketers, and emergents in the postmodern world

It takes no courage to sign up as a Protestant. These words begin this bold new work -- the culmination of David Wells's long-standing critique of the evangelical landscape. But toliveas a true Protestant -- well, that's another matter. This book is a jeremiad against new versions of evangelicalism -- marketers and emergents -- and a summons to return to the historic faith, defined by the Reformationsolas(grace, faith, and Scripture alone) and by a high regard for doctrine. Wells argues that historic, classical evangelicalism is marked by doctrinal seriousness, as opposed to the new movements of the marketing church and the emergent church. He energetically confronts the marketing communities and their tendency to try to win parishioners as consumers rather than worshipers, advertising the most palatable environment rather than trusting the truth to be attractive. He takes particular issue with the most popular evangelical movement in recent years -- the emergent church. Emergents, he says, are postmodern and postconservative and postfoundational, embracing a less absolute understanding of the authority of Scripture than traditionally held. The Courage to Be Protestantis a forceful argument for the courage to be faithful to what Christianity in its biblical forms has always stood for, thereby securing hope for the church's future.

Die intrinsieke verband tussen opvoeding en spiritualiteit

The intrinsic relationship between education and spirituality After having researched the phenomenon of (especially young) people turning their backs on mainstream religions and finding refuge in “new” forms of spirituality, the authors concluded that, as always, the education of children cannot be done justice to unless attention is also devoted to the development of their spirituality. To defend this contention, they firstly analyse religion as a phenomenon. They find it to be multi-layered, with spirituality forming the innermost layer. They then discuss the emergence of “new” forms of spirituality and find them to be alien to the Biblical concept of spirituality. After discussing the intrinsic link between education and both the “new” and the Biblical forms of spirituality, the authors find their initial conclusion to have been vindicated.