Broken World Research Articles

"But Bryant? What of Bryant in Bryan?": The Religious Implications of the Allusion to "A Forest Hymn" in The Sun Also Rises

Although he asserts that knowing its sources and influences is unnecessary for understanding the novel, James Hinkle, in "Some Unexpected Sources for The Sun Also Rises ," intimates that Bill Gorton's allusion to William Cullen Bryant's "A Forest Hymn," embedded within his discourse on William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalism, has significance beyond Bill's playful association of similar-sounding names. Had Hinkle, in fact, further probed his own trenchant questions—"But Bryant? What of Bryant in Bryan?"—he might have discovered how Bill's conjoined references to William Cullen Bryant and William Jennings Bryan—American icons long venerated for their personal piety—provide an ironic counterpoint to one of The Sun Also Rises 's central issues—Jake Barnes's ongoing quest for spiritual values in a broken world.

As We Forgive—Case History of a Burglary

In 1979, Pastoral Psychology published the first of a series of articles I wrote based on non-risk-free research. The last was “The Extra Mile—Case History of a Homicide” (1993) and in it a point was stressed: Ministers who practice psychotherapy will profit prophetically if pastoral theology accepts the responsibility to (1) articulate contemporary ultimateconcerns, (2) clarify healthy avenues for compensation, and (3) tell stories about the hopeful revelations of God's providence in a broken world. “As We Forgive” is also a case study—wrapped in a novella—and it illustrates these three ingredients with an emphasis on spiritual self-awareness and thereality of Providence.

PROCLAIMING THE CRUCIFIED CHRIST IN A BROKEN WORLD: An Asian Perspective

AbstractThis article originally delivered as a keynote address at the IAMS Tenth International Conference in Hammanskraal, South Africa, is a passionate call to attend to the atrocities being committed against Tamils in the "broken world" of contemporary Sri Lanka. As the author puts it: "Disbelief and forgetfulness are the weapons of those who are opposed to humanity therefore to God. Forgetfulness is the antidote to truth and truthfulness of memory. Looking at this indescribable suffering of the innocent I have often felt that we all live in a world that has become unresponsive to the cries of the poor and under privileged. Such an attitude calls for solidarity among the victims and the oppressed. We also live in a world where a common agenda seems to unite all those who have chosen to be the enemies of humanity. It is our duty to fight this mute silence of the world with the power of the WORD. We should allow the word of Truth about the poor and innocent about voiceless women, men and children, to seek refuge and self-exile. Let us speak this word to the powers that be. All that we carry with us now is the memory of our life and that of the death of our fellow Tamils."

Violence in Schools: Rage Against a Broken World

Violence in Schools: Rage Against a Broken World

The Crucified Reflected in Africa's Cross-Bearers

AbstractIn this article, given as a keynote address at the Tenth International Congress of IAMS in Hammaskraal, South Africa, South African theologian Tinyiko Maluleke attempts to paint a rough picture of popular African Christology in the light of the Conference theme: "Reflecting Jesus Christ: Crucified and Living in a Broken World." He first notes that grass-root African Christianity harbors a dialectic of identification and non-identification with the suffering and experiences of Christ. On the one hand he is recognizable to Africans in his suffering and yet on the other hand it is recognized that he is like no one. Secondly, Maluleke reflects upon the challenge of reconciliation in Africa and in the light of the crucified and broken body of Christ. He explores the notions of forgiveness and truth and their relation to power. Thirdly, he considers the need and scarcity of hope in Africa. Hopelessness is in a sense one of the greatest indicators of Africa's brokenness. Fourth, Maluleke notes and briefly explores some possible implications of the shift of Christian gravity and the place of Africa in it. Fifth, he notes some contradictions to the massive Christian presence on the continent. Our theological approaches, he says, must acknowledge and own up to the brokenness of the continent. Only thus can African Christians come to appreciate the reality and worth of Jesus' brokenness for themselves. Perhaps in this way African Christians may be able to reflect (on) something of both the death and the resurrection of Christ.

The Gratuitiousness of the Presence of Christ in the Broken World of Latin America

AbstractIn this plenary presentation from the Tenth IAMS Conference in Hammanskraal, South Africa, IAMS (then) vice-president Paulo Suess speaks about the importance of gratuitousness, proximity and universality in developing a Latin American missiology that is not just for the poor and indigenous, but with them as well. As he puts it: "From any point of the world we may access the network of gratuitousness and sharing, that questions accumulation, to the network of proximity, that challenges indifference and exclusion, and to the network of universality, that contests restrictive globalization. To transform the world of exclusion and poverty, and to incorporate the option for the protagonism of the poor in Christian communities and in society, the paschal experience--the experience of Jesus Christ crucified and living in the poor--lends wings to our imagination and sandals to the reasons of our hope."

The Broken World of Sacrifice. J. C. Heesterman

<i>The Broken World of Sacrifice</i>. J. C. Heesterman

The Lineaments of Foreign Policy: The United States and a “New World Order,” 1919–39

The idea of a “new world order,” of an opportunity to remake a broken world into a more liberal and democratic place, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some historians were encouraged to look at earlier periods with this concept in mind, and this essay is the result of one such attempt. The whole idea of an attempt to build a new world order has a very positive ring about it. At the least it seems to assume a plan, and an active personality or two behind the plan; it also assumes a global reach. If these are in any sense requirements, the United States during the interwar period fulfilled them only partially and erratically. Certainly, if one looks for the strong, general pattern in American foreign policy during this period, the culmination of many smaller plans and patterns, one can be found: the drive to convince the world to adopt policies leading to an international economy characterised by free trade, convertible currencies and open markets, and along with that, the drive to convince countries to disarm. All American administrations from 1919 to 1939 would have agreed with these policy imperatives. But what is undeniable is that they varied in their emphases, in the efforts which US governments themselves made to get these policies accepted. Only Woodrow Wilson had a plan, and only he sought to involve the US Government permanently in this process, to the extent of tying it down to future responsibilities: all others preferred, when feasible, merely to give indicative guidance.

A Christian Philosopher in a “Broken World”

A Christian Philosopher in a “Broken World”

Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson's Use of the Gothic

Mrs. Arnold of Shirley Jackson's story Colloquy (1944) feels driven to see a psychiatrist because of her confusion and bewilderment over her loss of 'a where a lot of people lived too and they all lived together and things went along like that with no fuss.' 1 The psychiatrist tries to get her to accept reality, which to him means to accept and adapt to a with patterns rapidly disintegrating. Mrs. Arnold refuses to adapt to the doctor's disoriented world and leaves his office. But the reader senses that the price for her refusal to accept the doctor's, and the rest of society's, definition of reality will be loneliness and madness. This story is in many ways representative of the concern of most of Jackson's fiction, which is to reveal and chronicle the outrage, at times tempered with laughter, stemming from the violation of the self by a broken world. Through the effective use of gothic conventions Jackson reveals the contours of human madness and loneliness in a disintegrating generally bereft of the meliorating power of love and forgiveness.2 The broken depicted in Shirley Jackson's fiction, with its attendant madness and possibilities of evil, has been the subject of much analysis in recent years. Robert Jay Lifton writes of the breakdown of fundamental human boundaries due to several major psychohistorical developments-a loss of a vital and nourishing connection with the cultural past, the flooding of imagery produced by the mass media, and the threat of nuclear disaster. These forces have brought about what he calls an Age of Numbing.3 Rollo May describes the contemporary experience as schizoid where people are out of touch with their feelings and thus avoid close relationships.4 R. D. Laing argues that contemporary culture is schizophrenic and that

“An Inconceivable Vastness”: Rereading E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room

"A N IN C O N C E IV A B L E V A S T N E S S ": R ER EA D IN G E.E. C U M M IN G S 'S THE ENORMOUS ROOM GARY A. BOIRE McMaster University our ultimate responsibility, E.E. Cummings suggests, is to be continually reborn. "We can never be born enough. We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves." 1 Cummings's call for a perpetual renewal, a cyclical evolution of selfhood, is typical of the intellectual convulsions of his time. Like the majority of writers during the post-war period, he is intensely aware of the need for a spiritual rejuvenation in a world where "Everything [is] blague."2 Indeed, his poetry and prose of 19 18-38 is charac­ terized by a virtual obsession with the necessity of a revitalizing and everdeveloping "process of identity." It is in his first novel, The Enormous Room (1922), however, that Cummings explores most forcefully the fundamental structures of his broken world and the means by which one might achieve a personal harmony, a viable reintegration of the self. Hardly war fiction per se, The Enormous Room, rather, possesses an affinity with such diverse works as Dos Passos's Three Soldiers (1921), Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and Heming­ way's A Farewell to Arms (1929). As Cummings himself informs us, the novel "actually uses war: to explore an inconceivable vastness ... something more unimaginably huge than the most prodigious of all universes ... the individual" (pp vii-viii). In effect, "w ar" - social and political upheaval - is present in the work only insofar as it functions as a background or filter through which the author evaluates man and his quest for identity and meaning in the modern world. Like Dos Passos, Eliot, Lawrence, and Hemingway, Cummings is intent on dealing straightforwardly with the crucial problems of nada and human exis­ tence - the eternal questions that haunted the writers of the twenties. And, like these writers, Cummings deliberately exploits a variety of generic forms to construct his own type of fictional evaluation; the most apparent, of course, are dystopia, direct political invective, beast fable, quest motifs, and archetypal image patterns. It is in his choice of an overall structure, however, that Cummings reaches back to a most fundamental of literary forms and thereby establishes for himself a position unique among the modern writers. It is the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , rv, 3 , F all 19 7 8 3 3 1 intention of this discussion to examine in some detail Cummings's uses of this basic form: the spiritual autobiography.3 Historically, the spiritual autobiography is essentially a religious document that charts the author's initial loss, then gradual reclamation of divine grace.4 Historians of the genre have identified its roots in Augustine's Confessions, its subsequent growth throughout the Renaissance, and its culmination during the Restoration and early eighteenth century - a direct result of the Puritan conviction of sin and ensuing directive to the faithful to evaluate daily their own "soul experiences."5 The process of writing itself, then, functions as a spiritual exercise through which one may study the state of one's soul and its progress through the Wilderness. Since the Christian experience is an inclusive, univer­ sal one, the narrative of one man's growth and regeneration may serve as a didactic, archetypal exemplum. With the innovations of such writers as Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill in England, and Emerson, Thoreau, and, one might add, Whitman, in America, spiritual autobiography loses its characteristic emphasis on the fire and brimstone awaiting the slipshod Christian warrior. The genre's principal pur­ pose to lead man ever onward to God is replaced by an attempt to lead man ever inward to himself. That is, there exists a definite shift in definition from a supra-natural Celestial City to an internal Beulah of the human self as the ultimate...

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature Editor: Richard D. Keller, Emporia Kansas State College Staff: Robert J. Brophy, California State University at Long Beach; John D. Burlinson, Texas A&M University; Thomas J. Lyon, Utah State University; Valerie Neal, University of Minnesota; Donald S. Pady, Iowa State University; Robyn Reed, Utah State University; Ann Ronald, University of Nevada; Gregory S. Sojka, Bowling Green State Univer­ sity; Lucille Spinder, Emporia Kansas State College. Anyone interested in joining the bibliographical staff is invited to write to Richard Keller, English Department, Emporia Kansas State College, Emporia, Kansas 66801. Authors of books and articles are encouraged to call our attention to items for inclusion in the bibliography. Atherton, Gertrude. McClure, Charlotte S. “A Checklist of the Writings of and About Gertrude Atherton.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, IX (Spring 1976), 103-62. ---------. “Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948).” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, IX (Spring 1976), 95-101. Bibliographies. Bullen, John S. “Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature.” Western American Literature, X (February 1976), 311-20. Cracroft, Richard H. “Research in Western American Literature,” Western American Literature, X (February 1976), 321-26. “Guide to Dissertations on American Literary Figures, 1870-1910; Part Two.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, VIII (Autumn 1975), 291-348. Maxton, Bonnie L. “Sources and Literature for Western American History. A List of Dissertations. Literature and Art.” Western Historical Quar­ terly, VII (July 1976), 304-305. ---------. “Sources and Literature for Western American History. Recent Articles; Literature, Music and Folklore.” Western Historical Quarterly, VII (July 1976), 348-349. 332 Western American Literature Pady, Donald S. “Annual Bibliography of Studies in Midwestern Literature: 1974.” MidAmerica III (1976), 135-47. Powell, Donald M. “Current Arizona Bibliography.” Arizona Quarterly, XXXII (Spring 1976), 57-60. Blake, Forrester. Legris, Maurice. “The Western World of Forrester Blake.” South Dakota Review, XIII (Winter 1975-76), 64-76. Bliven, Bruce. Greb, Gordon. “Seven Million Words Later: An Interview with Bruce Bliven.” San Jose Studies, II (May 1976), 62-73. Bly, Robert. Molesworth, Charles. “Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert Bly.” Rocky Mountain Review, XXIX (Autumn 1975), 95-117. Brautigan, Richard. Jones, Stephen R. “Richard Brautigan: A Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibli­ ography, XXXIII (January 1976), 53-59. Kern, Robert. “Williams, Brautigan, and the Poetics of Primitivism.” Chi­ cago Review, XXVII (Summer 1975), 47-57. Castaneda, Carlos. Brown, Carl R. V. “Journey to Ixtlan: Inside the American Indian Oral Tradition.” Arizona Quarterly, XXXII (Summer 1976), 138-45. Cather, Willa. Halac, Dennis. “Novel or Biography?” Commonweal, CIII (March 26, 1976), 210-11. Hamner, Eugenie Lambert. “Affirmations in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady.” Midwest Quarterly, XVII (Spring 1976), 245-51. Helmick, Evelyn Thomas. “The Broken World: Medievalism in A Lost Lady.” Renascence, XXVIII (Autumn 1975), 39-48. ---------. “The Mysteries of Antonia.” Midwest Quarterly, XVII (Winter 1976), 173-85. Murphy, John J. “The Art of Shadows on the Rock.” Prairie Schooner, L (Spring 1976), 37-51. Roulston, Robert. “The Contrapuntal Complexity of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark.” Midwest Quarterly, XVII (Summer 1976), 350-68. Clemens, Samuel. Coard, Robert L. “Tom Sawyer, Sturdy Centenarian.” Midwest Quarterly, XVII (Summer 1976), 329-49. Davis, Philip E. “Mark Twain as Moral Philosopher.” San Jose Studies, II (May 1976), 83-93. Fatout, Paul, ed. Mark Twain Speaking. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976. Schwartz, Thomas D. “Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll: The Freethought Connection.” American Literature, XLVIII (May 1976), 183-93. Bibliography 333 Towers, Tom H. “ ‘I Never Thought We Might Want to Come Back’: Strategies of Transcendence in Tom Sawyer.” Modern Fiction Studies, XXI (Winter 1975/76), 509-20. Ziff, Larzer. “Authorship and Craft: The Example of Mark Twain.” The Southern Review, XII (Spring 1976), 246-60. Cooper, James Fenimore. Butler, Michael D. “Narrative Structure and Historical Process in The Last of the Mohicans.” American Literature, XLVIII (May 1976), 117-39. Ross, Morton L. “Cooper’s The Pioneers and the Ethnographic Impulse.” American Studies, XVI (Autumn 1975), 49-65. Crane, Stephen. Kinnamon, Jon M. “Henry James, the Bartender in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel.’” Arizona Quarterly, XXX (Summer 1974), 160-166. Cunningham, J. V. Kaye, Frances W. “The West as Desolation: J. V. Cunningham’s To What Strangers, What Welcome.” The...

The Gentlemen Negotiators, A Diplomatic History of the First World War, by Z. A. B. Zeman ; A Broken World, 1919-1939, by Raymond Sontag

The Gentlemen Negotiators, A Diplomatic History of the First World War, <i>by Z. A. B. Zeman ; </i> A Broken World, 1919-1939, <i>by Raymond Sontag</i>

Raymond J. Sontag. &lt;italic&gt;A Broken World, 1919–1939&lt;/italic&gt;. (The Rise of Modern Europe: A Survey of European History in Its Political, Economic, and Cultural Aspects from the End of the Middle Ages to the Present.) New York: Harper and Row. 1971. Pp. xviii, 415. $8.95

Raymond J. Sontag. &lt;italic&gt;A Broken World, 1919–1939&lt;/italic&gt;. (The Rise of Modern Europe: A Survey of European History in Its Political, Economic, and Cultural Aspects from the End of the Middle Ages to the Present.) New York: Harper and Row. 1971. Pp. xviii, 415. $8.95

The Broken World of Arvo Valton's "Eight Japanese Girls"

The Broken World of Arvo Valton's "Eight Japanese Girls"

African Field Reports: 1952-1961

African Field Reports: 1952-1961

New radium in Canada will break world monopoly

New radium in Canada will break world monopoly