Christian Themes Research Articles

Made by Migrants: Southeast Asian Ivories for Local and Global Markets, ca. 1590–1640

Investigation of the early development of ivory carving and trade centered around colonial Manila from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries reveals that the production of ivories depicting Christian subjects in the Spanish Philippines was inextricably linked to three interlocking developments in Southeast Asia: maritime trade, migration, and competition. Ivory carvers in Southeast Asia supplied the quickly rising ivory market on a regional and transoceanic scale with visually impactful sculptures of Christian iconography, which claimed authoritative status as preferred religious objects in the colonial Spanish territories.

БИБЛЕЙСКИЙ ТЕКСТ В ПЬЕСЕ ЭДВАРДА ОЛБИ «ШАТКОЕ РАВНОВЕСИЕ»

The author explores the Bible motifs in Edward Albee’s play «A Delicate Balance». Over the past few decades the theme of religiosity in literature has acquired special significance in connection with the rethinking of Christian values in the postmodernism. Edward Albee’s play «A Delicate Balance» defined in many ways the Christian theme in the work of American playwright which contradicted the established opinion of domestic literary critics about the incompatibility of Albee’s plays with the ideas of Christianity. The author conducts a conceptual analysis of the New Testament and Old Testament plots (the parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of Tobias from the Book of Tobit) and their interpretation in the drama. The author focuses on the intertextuality of the postmodern text: its cento form (allusions, parodies, paraphrases), the features of presence of the biblical text in the text of the play. Consequently, the article shows the distorted representation of the idea of brotherly love on the example of the interpretation of the parable about the Good Samaritan and the story about Toby. It is underlined that Edward Albee’s work is a continuation of the tradition established in American literature, including didactic and prophetic (messianic) principles.

African Traditional Oath-Swearing: An Evaluation from a Ghanaian Pentecostal Perspective

Although it has been acknowledged that the early European Christian missionaries to Africa have contributed significantly to the emergence and growth of Christianity on the continent, it is also obvious that the ethnocentric tendencies that accompanied their missionary zeal caused them to demonize many aspects of the African cultures. This demonization led to a long-standing debate among African Christians themselves on whether one can be truly African and truly Christian. Despite the fact that the situation seems to have improved greatly in contemporary times, one of the key areas of contention within African Christianity, which has persisted to date, is the chieftaincy institution. To the best of my knowledge however, not much has been researched in this field from Pentecostal perspectives. Using personal observations and participation in Christian Royal conferences as well as personal conversations with some Pentecostal church leaders and some royals in Ghana, this paper examines the functions of the traditional oath swearing for Christians who are chiefs. The paper argues that although, the oath swearing by itself is not inimical to Christian beliefs, Christians who swear oaths should be mindful of the deity invoked in the swearing process. The paper also recommends that to be able to transform unethical and unscriptural aspects of traditional practices and make disciples of all nations, Pentecostal Christians should not be ignorant of traditional practices within their communities. These include the traditional oath swearing, which is the focus of this paper. The paper is therefore an attempt to initiate an important dialogue among African Pentecostals, both scholars and practitioners, on the subject of Christianity and chieftaincy within contemporary times.

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

The Prose Narrative of P.Freib. IV 47 Some Textual and Interpretative Remarks

Abstract P.Freib. IV 47 (two separate fragments) preserves a narrative text that is too fragmentary to allow the reconstruction of a plot. In the present paper, we suggest improvements to the text and collect parallels which reinforce the current view that it comes from a lost novel; we also address the possibility that this novel could have a Christian theme.

Ein Muslimischer Pascha im Zentrum der Orientalischen Frage: Muhammed Ali von Ägypten

The Eastern Question of the 19th century is a short-hand for the problems between the Christian subjects of the Sultan and the Sublime Porte as well as the efforts of the European states to mediate between them. In addressing this issue, participants sought to maintain the balance between small and great powers of the Europe, while at the same time trying to satisfy both the Sublime Porte and the Christian subjects of the Sultan. In actual fact, however, the Eastern Question of the 1830s focused on the relationship, or rather the crisis, between the Sublime Porte and its Muslim Pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, who threatened to destroy the Ottoman Empire twice in the third decade of the 19th century. The present study analyses the Eastern Question on the basis of the available literature as well as the testimonies of contemporary witnesses. It argues that the positioning of the great powers not only vis-à-vis the Ottoman reforms themselves, but also their assessment of the Ottomans’ ability and inclination for reform, was the result of their real political considerations about the crisis between the Sultan and Muhammad Ali. Not surprisingly, the support of and even push for reform in the Ottoman Empire which became a fundamental principle of British foreign policy in the 1830s was shaped by the Eastern Question.

Orthodoxy and the Politics of Christian Subjectivity: A Case Study of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)

AbstractInformed by theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I argue that Christian orthodoxy is a colonial power formation that manufactures the subjectivities of those within the Church and those without. The operation of biopolitics and necropolitics coalesces around two Christian bodies – the local body and the corporate body catholic – and is thus explicable according to the synthetic framework of ‘body politics.’ Within the body-political calculus, orthodox Christians qualify as genuine lives and, consequently, benefit from biopolitical interventions to promote their flourishing; heretics, by contrast, represent (non-)subjects whose bodies orthodoxy/colonialism consigns to destruction. As a case study to illustrate the import of my theoretical analysis for ecclesiological reflection, I examine the rhetoric of the leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), who, despite presenting their movement as a decolonial project, espouse a body-political theology and, therefore, remain firmly within the matrix of Christian colonial orthodoxy.

Is Sino-Christian Theology Truly “Theology”? Problematizing Sino-Christian Theology as a Public Theology

Abstract Most participants in the Sino-Christian theology movement are not affiliated with the church. This state of affairs naturally raises the question whether what scholarship arises is really a kind of theology or merely writings on public and/or political issues with reference to Christian themes. And yet the movement is more influential than the church in the Chinese public realm in terms of its ability to produce a Christian voice. The purpose of this article is first to examine the historical development of Sino-Christian theology over the past several decades. Some particular themes of this movement are then explored. These themes are intertwined with the discussion of polytheistic values, nationalism, and self-identity in times of cultural conflict: all of these matters are of wide public concern. There are evident tensions within the Sino-Christian theology movement: the intention is to show points of difference can be transformed and become a creative drive behind the construction of a new kind of theology in the Chinese public realm.

Von der (Un-)Möglichkeit des Scheiterns. Zu Intertextualität und Autorschaft in Hieronymus ep. 1

The article explores the metapoetic (self-)reflections on Christian authorship in the framing text passages of Jerome’s Epistula 1. The analysis shows that this literary debut, in which the author’s purported inability is offset by the brilliance of his writing, is, in fact, a literary showpiece of Jerome, which refutes the irrelevance of aesthetics in Christian themes. The analysis of quotations from the classics in particular underlines that he defines Christian writing through Christian themes and religious beliefs while at the same time holding on to the aesthetic norms of classical antiquity and thus - through rhetorical elegantia - recommending himself to a lettered and demanding audience. In an age which technically does not allow for professional poets being supported by patronage and remuneration as was common during the classical period, Jerome virtually wants to establish himself as a Christian Virgil of prose writing.

SKETSA GLOCAL THEOLOGY

Local theology is a model of theology that existed in postmodernism that emphasized the theology of the local cultural context. It means emphasize the efforts to meet church traditions and Christian themes with the reality of the life of the people around them. Simple theology always understands local sources which consist of local rituals, everyday language, folk songs, proverbs and art buildings. By using these elements means a theologian theologically contextually. The theologian was present and lived with people and listened to their voices. In this case, the simple theology seeks to respect and use the wisdom that is in the local culture, so that local people can easily interpret that wisdom in the light of the Gospel. Therefore this article will contribute a thought on how to build a sketch of Glocal theology.

Islamic Law on the Provincial Margins: Christian Patrons and Muslim Notaries in Upper Egypt, 2nd-5th/8th-11th Centuries

Abstract This article examines the interaction of Coptic Christians with Islamic legal institutions in provincial Egypt on the basis of a corpus of 193 Arabic legal documents, as well as relevant Coptic ones, dating to the 2nd-5th/8th-11th centuries. I argue that around the 3rd/9th century Islamic Egypt’s Christian subjects began to make routine use of Islamic legal institutions to organize their economic affairs, including especially inheritance and related matters internal to Christian families. They did so in preference to the Christian authorities and Coptic deeds that had been their standard resource in the first two centuries of Muslim rule. The changing character of the Egyptian judiciary encouraged this shift in practice, as qāḍīs who adhered to fiqh procedural rules increasingly filled judicial roles formerly held by administrative officials. By eschewing and nudging into disuse a previously vital Coptic legal tradition, Christian provincials participated in the Islamization of ʿAbbāsid and Fāṭimid Egypt.

Christian themes in the works of Yuri Ischenko

Purpose of the article is to study Christian motives and themes in the works ofcontemporary Ukrainian composer Yuriy Ishchenko. The basis of the research methodology is theintegrated approach, historical-biographical, analytical method, which make it possible todetermine the main stages of artistic formation of the composer. A scientific novelty. For the firsttime, the formation and development of Christian themes at different stages of the creative way ofYuriy Ishchenko was analyzed. Conclusions. Christian ideas, gradually emerging in the work ofYuriy Ishchenko in the 1970s, gradually reach their heights since the 2000s. The religious tradition,concentrated in moral ideas, is an imaginative area of the works of the author, acts as a valuableimpulse that brings down artistic author's search for an understanding of the spiritual and aestheticvalues of the Orthodox tradition and Ukrainian culture. The ideas of repentance, crying, silence,silence, prayer, Favorsky light, transfiguration, panegyric, praiseful motives become the mainstylistic and cognitive constants in choral, chamber-instrumental and symphonic compositions bythe composer of a mature period of creativity.Key words: creativity of composer Yuriy Ishchenko, Christian themes, psalms, symphonicmysteries

On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649) by Francisco Pacheco

Reviewed by: On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649) by Francisco Pacheco Tanya J. Tiffany On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649). By Francisco Pacheco. With an introduction and the Spanish text translated by Jeremy Roe with Carles Gutiérrez Sanfeliu; Latin text translated by José Solís de los Santos. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Volume 16.] (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph University Press. 2017. Pp. xxv, 340. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-91610-189-3.) In 1638, at age seventy-four, the learned Sevillian painter Francisco Pacheco completed his life's work, the Arte de la Pintura (Art of Painting), a treatise published posthumously in 1644. A monumental text, the Arte consists of three books on the nobility, theory, and practice of painting, with a particular emphasis on sacred images. Scholars have long valued the Arte for the light it sheds on intellectual life in early modern Seville and especially on the career of Pacheco's most illustrious pupil, Diego Velázquez. Until now, however, only fragments of the Arte have been available in English. The translation under review is therefore most welcome for making Pacheco's treatise more widely accessible to students and scholars of early modern art history. As indicated by the book's title, Jeremy Roe and Carles Gutiérrez Sanfeliu have chosen to focus on the ample sections of the Arte devoted to decorum in religious painting. This decision follows the precepts of Pacheco himself, who affirmed that it was by representing Christian subjects with both "majesty" and historical accuracy that painters fulfilled their ultimate purpose: to create images that "serve[d] as truthful books" for the faithful (p. 46). In his introduction, Roe provides a nuanced perspective on the relationship between Pacheco's artistic theory and his practice as a painter of sacred subjects. Building upon Bonaventura Bassegoda's critical edition of the Arte (1990), he highlights Pacheco's close engagement with writings by Sevillian churchmen and by post-Tridentine figures of international renown, among them Gabriele Paleotti [End Page 145] and Johannes Molanus. He also emphasizes Pacheco's commitment to establishing new sacred iconographies, as illustrated by the artist's paintings and codified in his text. Like other Catholic Reformers, Pacheco opposed the invention of novel religious iconography for its own sake, but at the same time he sought to abandon pictorial conventions that failed to adhere to the letter of scriptural truth. In an example well known to specialists, Pacheco thus used historical evidence to affirm that Christ's crucifixion should be depicted with four nails, rather than the usual three. He also sought to correct the "improprieties" seen in versions of the Last Judgment by Michelangelo and others (p. 56); according to a cleric quoted in the Arte, Pacheco rejected images of a "terrible and fearful" Christ and, in his own Last Judgment, instead depicted the Lord as "merciful and joyful," in keeping with biblical evidence of God's "delight" in saving the just (p. 66). Yet as Roe contends, Pacheco's portrayal of a gentle Christ benignly delivering judgment means that his painting lacks the very narrative clarity and emotional impact that he and other post-Tridentine painters sought to achieve. Roe also explores how this painstaking search for historical precision distinguished Pacheco from other artists of the day, among them his rival in Madrid, the Florentine-born Vicente Carducho, who ridiculed ongoing "disputes over … how Christ our Lord was crucified" and affirmed that pious painters should simply focus on representing "the essential" aspects of sacred history (quoted on pp. 28–29). For the translation itself, Roe and Gutiérrez have included chapters from the Arte dealing with "Order, Decency, and Decorum" and the Last Judgment (chapters 2–4 of Book Two) as well as Pacheco's lengthy appendix on the iconography of various Christian themes, the Adiciones a algunas imágenes (Further matters raised by a number of images; appendix to Book Three). They have rendered Pacheco's often unwieldy Spanish prose into lucid English, and have included English translations by José Solís de los Santos of Pacheco's quotations from Latin. Accompanying the text are 123 reproductions of works either...

Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley

Reviewed by: Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature Steven Epley Northwestern University Press, 2016. 240 pp. $99.95 cloth. $34.95 paperback. It has become somewhat common in recent years to speak of a religious turn in the study of American literature. A wide range of scholarly work produced in the past two decades reveals a revitalized interest in the complex relationships between the (ever-shifting) categories of religion and literature. At the same time, reassessments of the very methods and reading practices underpinning literary study have called into question the field's own claims to secularity. Steven Epley's Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature draws on this line of critical thinking and extends its reach through a meticulous assessment of Susanna Rowson's fictional oeuvre. As Epley rightly notes, Rowson is one of the most important literary figures of the early republic. She remains known primarily for her novel Charlotte Temple, an acclaimed best-seller in its own time—appearing in forty-two editions between 1791 and 1812—and an ubiquitous presence in American literature anthologies and syllabuses today. Rowson's lasting influence on American sentimentalism and her engagement with the charged gender politics of her time have been topics of interest to critics for many years. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the religious aspects of her writing. In taking Rowson seriously as a religious writer, Epley's book fills a critical gap in the study of her work [End Page 149] and initiates what I suspect will be ongoing conversations about Rowson's work in particular and the role of religion in fictions produced during this tumultuous period in US history more broadly. This book thus stands as an important contribution to the field, not only for its own specific argument, but also because it offers a model of engagement with religious issues in texts typically deemed secular. In examining Rowson's body of work, Epley draws a rather startling conclusion about her religious perspective. Though she was a lifelong Anglican and a preeminent writer of what might be termed Christian fiction, Rowson, Epley argues, "ironically owes more to the Hebrew Bible than to Christianity, particularly the latter's trope of spiritual conversion" (3). Sentimental Prophet thus provocatively suggests that "the widespread introduction of Jewish values into American culture, traditionally associated with largescale Jewish immigration between roughly 1880 and 1940, actually begins in the early republic" (3). Decentering the notions of spiritual conversion and Christian piety that so often undergird studies of religion in this context, Epley asserts that Rowson's clearest religious influence in her fictions is the Hebrew Bible. Her writing, he contends, "shows abundant evidence of a preternaturally strong dependence on Deuteronomistic covenant theology and a concomitant lack of attention to central Christian themes" (6). This line of analysis uncovers a previously unexamined religious genealogy for Rowson's work, and, in so doing, it opens the door for rethinking both the religious commitments at play in the period's other literary productions and, potentially, the vast body of sentimental writing that followed Rowson's lead in the century that followed. Sentimental Prophet is organized in chapters addressing each of Rowson's major works: her sweeping biblical paraphrase, Biblical Dialogues; Charlotte Temple; her lone historical novel, Reuben and Rachel; and Charlotte Temple's sequel, Lucy Temple. Each chapter situates its specific text in relation to a prophetic or narrative figure in the Hebrew Bible—Moses, Huldah, Hosea, Ruth, and Isaiah—to show how Rowson, "no doubt unconsciously, organized her major works along the arc of Hebrew scriptural history" (5). This is a compelling frame through which to view these texts, but the fact that there are two chapters about Charlotte Temple (taking Huldah and Hosea as their models) makes the book feel a bit unbalanced. Charlotte Temple already has received much more attention from critics than anything else in Rowson's body of work, and the framework Epley builds in this book is so compelling, that I would have preferred a chapter on a different, lesser-read work. Epley's analysis of Charlotte Temple...

Древнерусское «Сказание о сивиллах» в восприятии читателя XVIII в.

The article is devoted to a special copy of the Old Russian Tale of the Sibyls from the second half of the eighteenth century in which the texts of prophecies are supplemented with vernacular verses of divinatory character. The Sibylline prophecies, devoted exclusively to Christian themes in the Middle Ages (the Coming of Christ, his birth from the immaculate Virgin, and the Day of Judgment), acquired in modern times a lower, everyday role. The regularity of such attitude towards a medieval text on the part of the eighteenth-century reader is shown against the background of a wide range of medieval and new Western European and Russian literary works.

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...

AGGIOMA-MENTO САКРАЛЬНОЇ СКЛАДОВОЇ МИСТЕЦТВА КАТОЛИЦИЗМУ

The article is devoted to the study of the content and role of religious art in Catholicism. The focus is on the modernization tendencies of the religious art of contemporary Catholicism. The semantic load of this type of art and its symbolic meaning are analyzed. The reasons for the modernization of the traditional designs of Catholic worship are explored. The reasons for the need for renewal that emerged under the influence of both external and internal social and social factors are being explored. It has been investigated that the reaction of contemporary Catholicism to the processes occurring in art in general and in religious in particular is somewhat problematic. Religious images and subjects in contemporary art are increasingly becoming abstract categories. The latter, as if overcoming the limits of the present day, go beyond the limits of the actual religious idea aimed at the future. In architecture, fine arts, music, cinema, etc., which are actively used by the Church, there is a kind of demythologization of Christian subjects and images. They are often transformed into a form of philosophical generalizations, a martyr's comprehension of present problems from the standpoint of eternity, in search of universal, transient values.It is revealed that the convergence of the Church with modern art is primarily due to the fact that modernism, by deforming reality, schematizing or destroying the natural terrestrial images of things, phenomena and people, allows to give these images a religious interpretation, to associate them with the supernatural. The desire for the supernatural affords the contemporary artist with metaphysics. After all, the metaphysician seizes the spiritual in the idea, and the artist catches it in the flesh. This surrealism is achieved most precisely by modern art.

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

Libretto of the G. Presgurvic’s musical «Romeo and Juliet»: author’s original source and literary translation as an interpretation of the first text

Spiritual Song in Ukrainian Folklore Milieu

The paper outlines the original phenomenon of a spiritual song in the Ukrainian oral tradition, determines characteristic features of these texts and their functions. Besides, the author focuses on some special research issues concerning the folklore religious repertoire, first of all, the specificity of the relationship between spiritual and secular epic songs.
 The spiritual song in the Ukrainian oral tradition is a large group of poetical and musical works, united primarily by the religious Christian themes and endowed with the ability to acquire special spiritual meaning in the life of a believer, exercise an important function of satisfying his/her spiritual religious needs. Another defining feature of these songs is a lack of clear attachment to a certain rite, time, occasion. An episodic attachment of individual texts to the rite only reveals their multifunctionality, since, as a rule, the same work may be used in various rituals, appear in the repertoire of professional singers, and perform some other functions simultaneously. Essential for the differentiation of the spiritual song phenomenon in the folklore milieu is the fact of distinguishing this group of works and perceiving it as integrity by the bearers of tradition themselves until now. They use special folk concepts for its designation (‘God’s songs’, ‘psalms’). At the same time, this large stratum of folk repertoire is divided into two sub-groups, namely folklorized songs of book origin and those of folk origin. Thus, the phenomenon of a spiritual song in the Ukrainian oral tradition is characterized by a rich variety of texts in terms of character, time of emergence, nature, form, style, and genre features.
 The practice of perception, recording, and comprehension of spiritual songs has developed certain concepts and approaches. The present paper offers an attempt to systematize the previous experience and distinguish the problems that were raised in the works by various researchers and remained topical, often lacking a proper resolution. Attention to the system of the research approaches gives a guideline to the author and forms a sense of the continuing tradition.

Re-Enchanting Nature and Medicine

AbstractResponding to Max Weber’s modern diagnosis of nature, science, and medicine as disenchanted, this article aims to reenvision nature and medicine with a sense of enchantment drawing from the Christian themes of creation, Christology, suffering, and redemption. By reenvisioning nature as enchanted with these theological themes, the vocation of medicine might be revitalized in terms of suffering presence, healing care, and works of mercy toward the neighbor in need.