Christian Themes Research Articles

Shpion vs. Casus: Ottoman and Russian Intelligence in the Balkans during the Crimean War (1853–56)

In October 1853, a war erupted between the Russian and the Ottoman empires, which became the celebrated Crimean War in the following year. The Danubian theatre, one of the crucial scenes of the war, witnessed both belligerents trying to discover the other's activities and planned operations. As they were inhabited by cosmopolitan and heterogeneous populations, Dobruca (Dobruja) and Bessarabia were the most convenient places for both parties to gather military intelligence. The Ottomans acquired information via the Wallachians and the Cossacks, as well as by diplomatic missions and various merchants. The Ottoman Empire's Orthodox Christian subjects – the Bulgarians and Greeks – assisted Russia in gathering information from the right bank of the Danube. Some of these reports were unreliable, as were the spies themselves. The Russian and Ottoman archives have rich resources related to military intelligence, which is an understudied aspect of the Crimean War. Relying upon the archival sources, this paper aims to discuss an entirely ignored topic: the espionage activities in the Balkan theatre during the Crimean War.

Book Review: The Gospel According to Shakespeare

The Gospel According to Shakespeare. By Piero Boitani. Trans. Vittorio Montemaggi and Rachel Jacoff. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-268-02235-8. Pp. xiii + 156. $27.00. Piero Boitani's study of Hamlet, King Lear, and four late romances is a beautiful work of literary criticism. The learning is prodigious, prose elegant, and insights thought-provoking and memorable. Boitani focuses on Shakespeare's Christian themes as developed in these plays; on characters who seem to modeled on biblical figures, including Job, Christ, and God; and on biblical echoes in wording and in idea. The study leaves reader with new insights regarding Shakespeare's works, and, with its focus on Gospel, or Good News that incarnation brought, should of major interest not only to readers of Christianity and Literature but also to readers in general. Boitani, an eminent Italian scholar and literary critic specializing in medieval literature, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. Among his numerous books on Medieval literature and classics are Cambridge Chaucer Companion (1986), original essays by European and American scholars intended to introduce reader to Chaucer's work, a collection which he edited with Jill Mann; and Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Literature (1984), another series of essays by medieval scholars, though subject matter is broader in including medieval European culture--this series edited with Anna Torti. In The Bible and its Rewritings (in Italian, 1997; trans. Anita Weston, 1999), Boitani anticipates The Gospel According to Shakespeare as he finds in Pericles' recognition of his daughter Marina a retelling of Mary Magdalene's recognition of resurrected Jesus near tomb in Gospel of John. The Genius to Improve an Invention: Literary Transitions (1999 in Italian; 2002 in English) complements previous Rewritings, continuing theme of recognition in Shakespeare as it discusses Hamlet and King Lear. In 2002, Boitani was awarded Feltrinelli Prize for Literary Criticism. Published in Italian in 2009, Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded 2010 De Sanctis Prize for literature. In this study, Boitani shows an incredible grasp of classical literature, medieval literature, Renaissance literature, and Bible as well as literary criticism, both major works of past and contemporary theory. He argues that in Hamlet and King Lear Christian message of faith, salvation, and peace is presented as if from a distance but that in romances the themes of transcendence, immanence, role of deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged (xi). He relates plays to Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Gorgias, Virgil, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Appollonius, John Gower, and Christopher Marlowe (especially Doctor Faustus). The chapter on Hamlet focuses on change in Hamlet after his return from aborted voyage to England with pirates. Before that voyage, he was melancholy and indecisive, pretended to mad, and failed to act; after Hamlet's return, reader finds Shakespeare meditating on providence, on forgiveness, and on goodness and happiness, and ... doing so in Christian terms (2). Boitani points out that Hamlets pivotal speech in Act 5, Scene 2, when he tells Horatio that God is concerned with fall of a sparrow, is an allusion to Jesus' statement, Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to ground unperceived by your Father. When Hamlet continues that the is all, he is referring to Christian's trusting Providence as there's a divinity that shapes our ends. Boitani also notes that Let be with which Hamlet ends readiness speech means amen (20-21). The chapter on King Lear focuses on sacrifice, suffering, and purification--themes developed further in romances. …

The Black Side of the Sun

Albert Camus is typically categorized as an atheistic thinker, in the same breath as Sartre. Yet there is a sizable, often sympathetic, theological response to his works, which deal at great length with Christian themes, wrestle with the problem of evil, and are animated by his own avowed desire — in strong contrast with Sartre and other existentialists — to preserve a sense of the sacred without belief in human immortality. This essay reconstructs three components of Camus’s rapport and disagreement with Christian theology, which he approached pre-eminently through the figure of Augustine, central to his early Diplôme thesis. First, we recount the young Camus’s neopagan “religiosity” — a sense of the inhuman majesty and beauty of the natural world at the heart of what he termed (and later regretted terming) the “absurd,” and rooted in Camus’s own unitive experiences growing up amidst the sea, sand, and blazing sun of North Africa. Second, we look at Camus’s engagement with the problem of evil, which for Camus — as for many early modern thinkers such as Bayle or Voltaire — represented the decisive immanent tension in later medieval theology, vindicating — in ethical terms — the modern rebellions against altar, pulpit, and throne. The essay closes by rebutting the charge, strongly argued recently by Ronald Srigley, that Camus was (both) anti-modern because anti-Christian. Camus’s aim, we propose, was instead to bring together a neopagan sense of the wonder of the natural world and our participation in it, with the egalitarian components of Christian ethics, severed from secularized eschatological content.

Holden Caulfield: Sort of a Christian

Many critics have remarked on the deeply religious character of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; the novel has been discussed, for example, in terms of Zen Buddhism and Gnosticism. Catcher’s treatment of Christianity, however, has received little attention. This omission is regrettable given the characteristic acuity with which its narrator, Holden Caulfield, addresses Christian sources and themes. The aim of this article, therefore, is to consider in detail Holden’s conflicted attitude toward Christianity. It contends that despite Holden’s biting complaints against Christians (e.g., that many are hypocritical, cliquish, or ostentatious), he manifests an affinity for Christ and an attraction to Christian forms of religious life. This approach to the novel makes much of Holden’s allusion to the story, found in the Synoptic Gospels, of Legion, the Gerasene demoniac. Holden, like Legion, seems ostracized, masochistic, and obsessed by death, but in the novel’s climactic scene at the carousel, he finds healing. Furthermore, in the carousel scene especially, one can detect parallels between Catcher and the Divine Comedy. Just as Dante is guided from hell, through purgatory, to the beatific vision, so Holden is led (principally by his deceased brother Allie and his sister Phoebe) from misery, through purgation, to a moment of ineffable joy. The novel therefore may be read, this article contends, as a religious quest in which Holden comes to perceive the fundamental goodness of the world and its Creator.

A “Double Alienation”

Scholarship on Christianity in Malaysia has been dominated by denominational church history, as well as the study of urban, middle-class and English-speaking church congregations in the post-Independence period. In focusing on the vernacular Chinese Protestant church in Malaysia, and one of its most prominent para-church organisations, called The Bridge, this paper draws attention to the variegated histories of Christian conversion and dissemination in Malaysia, and the various modes and meanings of Christian identity as incorporated into different local communities and cultures. The history of the Chinese Protestant church suggested in the first part of the paper takes as its point of departure the distinction between mission and migrant churches, the latter being the origin of the vernacular Chinese churches in Malaysia. The second part of the paper traces the emergence of a Chinese para-church lay organisation called The Bridge, and the Chinese Christian intellectuals behind it, in their mission to engage the larger Chinese and national public through literary publications and other media outreach activities. In so doing, these Chinese Christian intellectuals also drew on the resources of an East Asian and overseas Chinese Christian network, while searching for their destiny as Chinese Christians in the national context of Malaysia. By pointing to the importance of regional, Chinese-language Christian networks, and the complexity of vernacular Christian subjectivity, the paper hopes to fill a gap in the existing literature on Christianity in Malaysia, as well as make a contribution to on-going debates on issues of localisation, globalisation and authenticity in global Christianity.

Numerically-linguistic Anomalies of Gematria

The article considers the numerically-linguistic anomaly for the theme of Christianity that is investigated by the probability theory methods. It is shown that the probability of casual occurrence of considered anomalies is rather small.

Discernment in 1 Thessalonians

Catherine of Siena’s wisdom on discernment represents a significant development in the history of this essential Christian theme. Her teaching is the fruit of personal wisdom rather than formal study as she was an uneducated lay woman in fourteenth century Italy. In this article I show how Scripture was central to Catherine’s wisdom. First I show that she was exposed to Scripture primarily orally and that she assimilated what she heard through her life of prayer and relationship with God. I describe the central biblical themes at the heart of her teaching on discernment, namely growth in charity and capacity for truth, and I show how these are related to her wisdom on discernment. I then examine how Catherine applied her teaching through an analysis of a letter to Pope Gregory XI.

Survivors of a Shipwreck: Ivories from a Manila Galleon of 1601

This article explores a find of ivories excavated in the first decade of the current century from a shipwreck in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Mariana Islands, almost 1500 miles from the Philippines, along the route the Manila galleons took on their way to Mexico. In 1601 one of those galleons, the Santa Margarita, sank, along with its rich cargo of goods from the Philippines. The cargo included ivory sculptures, over 300 of which have now been excavated. They consist of fragments of sculptures, and occasionally virtually complete small-scale works, mostly representing Christian subjects, carved by Chinese and Filipino sculptors in the Philippines. This is the first time a specific group of such ivories known to have come from a dated shipwreck has been examined and published. The date of the shipwreck suggests that we should revise the dates of similar pieces, formerly thought to have been carved later on in the seventeenth century, to an earlier date.Este artículo explora el descubrimiento en la primera década de este siglo de unos marfiles excavados en un pecio hundido en el océano Pacífico, cerca de la costa de las islas Marianas, a casi 2500 kilómetros de las Islas Filipinas, en la ruta que los galeones procedentes de Manila seguían hacia México. En 1601 uno de estos galeones, el Santa Margarita, se hundió junto con el rico cargamento que transportaba procedente de Filipinas. El cargamento incluía esculturas de marfil, trescientas de las cuales ya han sido extraídas del pecio hundido. Las piezas rescatadas son en su mayoría fragmentos de esculturas y ocasionalmente obras de pequeño tamaño prácticamente completas. En su mayoría representan temas cristianos, tallados en Filipinas por escultores chinos y filipinos. Esta es la primera vez que se conoce un grupo de este tipo específico de marfiles procedentes de un naufragio fechado, examinado y publicado. La fecha del naufragio sugiere que se debería revisar la datación aproximada de este tipo de piezas a una fecha más temprana, ya que siempre se ha pensado que fueron talladas más adelante en el siglo XVII.

Recasting the Image: Celso Costantini and the Role of Sacred Art and Architecture in the Indigenization of the Chinese Catholic Church, 1922–1933

How can Christianity not be viewed as a foreign religion in China? It is not a new question: Celso Costantini (1876–1958), apostolic delegate to China, wrestled with the same question during the tumultuous 1920s. As a Roman Catholic, Costantini didn’t approach indigenization through the well-known Protestant “three-self” formula. Rather, he encouraged local artists to paint Christian themes using Chinese motifs. He promoted the use of Chinese architectural styles, rather than Western edifices, in Catholic buildings. Through the indigenization of sacred art and architecture, Costantini sought to recast the image of the Christian church in China.

Hidden Images of Christ in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis acutely conscious of the hiddenness of God, of the inexhaustible mystery of the Divine, according to Kallistos Ware, Bishop of Diokleia and the Spalding Lecturer in Orthodox Studies at Oxford University. It is an awareness Lewis held in common with the Orthodox tradition (God 56). Although Lewis's apologetic works, Ware continues, with their almost overconfident reliance on reason and moral law, are cataphatic in tenor, an apophatic side is evident in his imaginative writings. (1) Michael Ward argues that Ware's insight is applicable to Lewis's general theological vision, his continual emphasis on God's unperceived omnipresence and proximity: major feature of his spirituality is the exercising of Enjoyment consciousness in order to experience that divinity (Planet 227). This paper will build on those comments and show that a subtle mixture of hiddenness and revelation is characteristic of Lewis's imaging of Christ in his major fiction--the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Till We Have Faces. Such a hidden approach is apparent in Lewis's earliest work of fiction, Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. Hiding the Christian references was easier then than it was later in Lewis's career. Today Lewis is well known as one of the twentieth century's leading defenders of the Christian faith, and readers expect to find, and thus look for, Christian themes in his fiction. But that was not the case in 1938. At that point his name would have been recognized only by literary scholars. They knew it because of the recent publication of a brilliant study of the courtly love tradition, The Allegory of Love. That book, and a half-dozen scholarly articles, marked Lewis as a leading figure in the post-war generation of literary scholars. The only other things he had published at that point were three books with very low sales figures: a collection of war poems entitled Spirits in Bondage; a long narrative poem, Dymer (both published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton--his own first name and his mother's maiden name); and a rather strange work entitled The Pilgrim's Regress, which is an allegorical account of his sojourns as an agnostic (he said atheist) in his teens and twenties, and his journey back to the Christian faith, which culminated in 1931. It is now evident from The Pilgrim's Regress that Lewis had begun using his writing skills in support of the faith to which he had returned, but readers then would not be aware of this. In Out of the Silent Planet, a middle-aged professor, Elwin Ransom, who reminds the reader of both Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, is kidnapped by a scientist and an adventurer (Edward Rolles Weston and Richard Devine), and taken with them on a space vehicle to Mars (though called by its Old Solar name, Malacandra, in the novel). The flight is a journey into experience and self-knowledge for Ransom as he learns, for example, that space is not cold, empty, and barren, but is pulsating with light and spiritual life. After arriving on Malacandra, he escapes from his captors and spends several months living with the hrossa, the poets and musicians of the planet: rational, gentle, charitable creatures. They live in perfect peace and cooperativeness with two other rational species, the sorns (scientists and philosophers) and the pfifltriggi (craftsmen and artists). From the hrossa and sorns, Ransom learns about the spiritual beings who look after Malacandra. Each planet in the solar system has a guardian angel called Oyarsa, who is served by numberless lesser angels called eldils. But the Oyarsas are not the supreme spiritual beings. When Ransom asks the hrossa if the Malacandrian Oyarsa had the planet, their answer is the first example of Lewis providing an image of Christ that simultaneously reveals and conceals: Did people in Thulcandra [Earth] not know that Maleldil the Young had and still ruled the world? (106). For readers familiar with the Bible, this passage clearly betrays that Maleldil the Young is the Malacadrian name for Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who is creator and ruler of Earth: Through him all things were made; without him nothing was that has been made (John 1. …

Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 by Davide Rodogno (review)

Reviewed by: Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 by Davide Rodogno Anna M. Mirkova Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914. By Davide Rodogno. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011. 376 pp. $39.50 (cloth and e-book). Davide Rodogno’s Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (a part of the Emergence of a European Concept and International Practice series) analyzes the confluence between humanitarian intervention and geopolitical rivalries in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book explores how legal scholars, politicians, and public figures in Europe defined humanitarian intervention with respect to the Ottoman Empire—a state Europeans never considered fully civilized and whose sovereignty was always up for debate even after the Treaty of Paris (1856) briefly admitted the Muslim empire, albeit as inferior, into the Christian Family of Nations. Against Massacre raises the following question: In what specific historical contexts and geopolitical constellations did the Great Powers decide to intervene on behalf of humanity (i.e., to stop and prevent future massacres of and atrocities against Christian [never Muslim] Ottoman subjects)? Or, alternatively, when did the powers stand on the sidelines despite evidence of gross violations against humanity? Rodogno’s cogently argued, meticulously researched, and well-written answer shows that Great Power governments assessed the severity of violence that the Ottoman state perpetrated against its rebellious Christian subjects and crafted responses according to a few major considerations: Europe’s collective security; the commercial interests of each power; shifting alliances for “balance of power” among Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany; and the success of the broader colonial projects of each power in Asia and Africa. Meanwhile the perceived and real failures of the nineteenth-century Ottoman efforts at sweeping administrative, economic, legal, and military reforms provided the Great Powers with plenty of opportunities to exercise diplomatic pressures on Ottoman governments for betraying their pledge to enforce “good government” (p. 29). Ottoman reformers faced a real [End Page 715] challenge in this respect: how to address long-standing social problems (like the abuses of tax farming, for instance) in a new political framework, one that appeared not to value the balance, hierarchal and imperfect to be sure, among confessional groups but demanded loyalty to the integrity of a modernizing Ottoman state in exchange for individual equality. Frustration with lingering or new problems in this era of reforms often erupted in violence, which the European powers saw as proof of the inherent deficiencies of Ottoman rule. Thus European humanitarian intervention occurred at the interface between Ottoman reforms and Great Power rivalries. Methodologically Rodogno focuses on Great Britain and France, culling diplomatic documents from the foreign office archives of the two countries and supplementing them with a rich variety of published documents as well as memories, diaries, and the writings of contemporary legal scholars. By delving into the writings of legal scholars as well as political figures in the first two chapters, Rodogno explains how the idea of modern humanitarian intervention was articulated and became so important to “balance-of-power” politics on the European continent as well as to European imperial ambitions in the long nineteenth century. In the remaining chapters of Against Massacre Rodogno deftly analyzes specific cases so as to elucidate the logics behind intervention and non-intervention on the grounds of saving strangers from massacre and atrocity. Rodogno’s argument is especially compelling when he discusses the complex relationship between public opinion and governments’ decisions regarding humanitarian intervention in the Ottoman Empire. Publicly, intervention was usually justified with the brutalization of Christians, as was the case in the Greek Revolt (1821), or thereafter with Ottoman failed reforms resulting in massacres, as was the case in Ottoman Lebanon and Syria (1860) and Crete (1866). Each episode of bloodshed stirred especially British and French public opinion (liberal, conservative, religious), prompting the outburst of publications about Ottoman barbarity and misrule, encouraging relief efforts, and stimulating the formation of domestic and, by the end of the nineteenth century, international associations dedicated to advocating intervention against a particular massacre (Greek Christians in Crete, Slavic Christians in the Balkans, Armenian Christians in eastern Anatolia). Macedonian revolutionaries in particular...

Performing Ritual: Physical and Musical Gesture in Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River

Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River (1964) defies traditional genre labels, exhibiting characteristics of opera, Japanese Noh drama, and religious ritual. Set in medieval England and given a Christian theme, Curlew River is based on the Noh play Sumidagawa and uses a unique language of physical gesture inspired by Noh traditions. The integration of these physical gestures with the music is one of the ways in which Curlew River projects an atmosphere of ritual. In this paper I examine two passages from Curlew River, each of which demonstrates a close connection between the development of individual musical gestures and the progression of physical actions performed at the same time. In the arietta “Near the Black Mountains,” sung by the character of the Madwoman, the subtle development of a single musical figure is linked to the gradual transformation of the actor’s posture. A similar relationship is present in the Ferryman’s introductory scene, in which physical movements act as punctuation for a sequence of musical statements. In both instances, musical and physical gesture are integrated into a unified form of expression, the intensity and focus of which lend Curlew River its ritual quality.

ANDRIĆISM

Andrić’s fiction is closely identified with Bosnia and often taken for a faithful reflection of that country’s culture, social relations, and tragic history. Rather than reflecting Bosnian pluralism, however, his oeuvre undermines its very metaphysical underpinnings, in part because his works are so firmly rooted in the European experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the perspective of a dominant modernity, certain cultures and peoples came to be presented as un-European, Oriental, and essentially foreign. Bosnia, which had always been a religiously plural society, now became one where ideological models excluded its Muslim inhabitants. In line with long-standing European practice, Andrić drew an image of the Bosnian Muslim as Turk and the Turk as Bosnian Muslim, converting the real content of Bosnian society into a plastic material for the ideologues of homogenous societies to use in modelling external and internal enemies that were essentially identical. This process required as its precondition the destruction of that enemy through a process described as the social and cultural liberation of the Christian subject. Over time, this exclusion took on forms now termed genocide. In creating this image, Andrić deployed narrative techniques whose function may fairly be characterized as the aesthetic dissimulation of our ethical responsibilities towards the other and the different. Such elements from his oeuvre have been used in the nationalist ideologies anti-Muslimism serves as a building block. In this paper, certain aspects of the ideological reading and interpretation of Andrić’s oeuvre are presented.

The Arno Valley Landscape in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting

The article argues for the importance of the Arno Valley as a feature of backgrounds in paintings on pagan and Christian subjects. It shows how the Arno Valley is an expression of the benevolent participation of the Medici family in the state affairs of their native city and as a manifestation of the fear of Arno floods. The fluvial landscape was not portrayed uniformly but was adjusted according to the subject of the painting or text, revealing the impact of the Valley on the history and culture of Florence and those writers, patrons, and artists who worked to represent it. The fluvial landscape in the Nativity and Baptism frescoes by Baldovinetti and Ghirlandaio showed a view of the Arno Valley spreading in direction of neighboring Prato, a perspective differing from the view in Pollaiuolo’s paintings of Hercules, a formative tale in the early history of Florence. The zigzag shoreline of the Arno River is emphasized by Botticelli. Descriptions of the Arno River by Landino, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Polizi...

When Did God Create Hell?

The concept of hell as a place for eternal punishment is a central theme in both Christianity and Islam. The followers of these religions believe that after the last judgment all wrongdoers (sinners) will be consigned to hell to suffer everlasting punishment, while non-sinners will go to heaven to enjoy a life of everlasting happiness (Mbugua 2011). This paper attempts a dismissal of the existence of Hell. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p411

A Muslim Reflects on Christ Crucified: Stumbling-Block or Blessing?

The aim of this article is to encourage Muslim readers to consider the possibility of seeing the crucifixion as an actual historical event whose occurrence can be affirmed on the basis of qur'anic teachings. Following a description of the difficulty that arises for someone with a Christian mindset who encounters the qur'anic denial (or seeming denial) of the crucifixion, given its centrality to the Christian message, the article summarizes qur'anic exegeses that allow for an affirmation of the crucifixion based on Q 4.157–158. This is followed by discussions of: the relevance of the crucifixion to the human condition; the factors that have contributed to a denial of the crucifixion based on Q 4.157–8; Christian and Islamic themes that have the potential to facilitate a view from within Islam of Christ's death as redemptive; and what Christ's death may be seen to reveal about the divine nature. Lastly, the article presents ways in which Christians down the ages have experienced the crucifixion and resurrection as events and as symbols, and as an inspiration for service and the love of God.

In search of the Holy Presence of the Blessed Mary in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

The presence of the Catholic framework in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium has long been the subject of debate. Various Tolkien scholars and literary critics have already written different critical interpretations to consider whether to assign The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to Christian Mythology or not; numerous attempts have been made to clarify this statement. Therefore, the reasons, why it should be included in this category are many and various. There are several examples in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that can be studied in relation to Christian themes and motives. Consequently, the aims of this paper are to study the possible similarities of Varda, Queen of the Stars, and Galadriel, the Lady of Light, to the Blessed Virgin Mary in Christian contexts. Moreover, to study the influence of Tolkien’s strong faith, which shaped his Catholic imagination, all through his legendarium, and subsequently leads us to observe Tolkien’s complete obedience to Catholicism, and especially, his profound devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Religious Motivations for Cooperation: An Experimental Investigation Using Explicit Primes

The role of religion in human cooperation remains a highly contested topic. Recent studies using economic game experiments to explore this issue have been largely inconclusive, yielding a range of conflicting results. In this study, we investigate the ability of religion to promote cooperation using explicit theological primes. In a first study conducted in a church, we find that subjects who report a stronger connection with a Christian religious passage about charitable giving subsequently are more likely to cooperate in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In a second study conducted over the Internet, we find that Christian subjects are more likely to cooperate after reading a particular Christian religious passage compared to a neutral passage, but that the particular Hindu and secular passages have no significant effect on Christians, and that none of the passages (Christian, Hindu or Secular) have an effect among non-Christians. Our results show the potential power of explicit religious exhortations for promoting cooperation, and also their selectivity.

Religious motivations for cooperation: an experimental investigation using explicit primes

The role of religion in human cooperation remains a highly contested topic. Recent studies using economic game experiments to explore this issue have been largely inconclusive, yielding a range of conflicting results. In this study, we investigate the ability of religion to promote cooperation by using explicit theological primes. In the first study, conducted in a church, we find that subjects who report a stronger connection with a Christian passage about charitable giving are subsequently more likely to cooperate in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game. In the second study, conducted over the Internet, we find that Christian subjects are more likely to cooperate after reading a Christian passage than a neutral one. However, in the same study, we find that Hindu and secular passages have no significant effect on Christians, and that none of the passages (Christian, Hindu, or secular) have an effect on non-Christians. Our results show the potential power of explicitly religious exhortations that promote cooperation, and also their selectivity.

Verbal Charms Against Authorities and Judges in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia

In the 17-18th century Russian manuscript tradition there were no fewer than nine collections (sborniki) consisting of verbal charms that are exclusively or primarily addressed to social issues, and meant to have an effect on judges, military commanders, landowners, bureaucrats, and, not least, on the tsar himself and members of the royal family. The magical purpose of these verbal charms was to have an influence on authorities and judges, to alter the way they felt and their will, their mood and spiritual condition. The tradition of incantations if seen as a whole did not force a person to take this or that specific attitude toward the authorities, but rather offered the possibility of choice either to consider the object of the charm as an implacable foe, deserving of annihilation (if only symbolic), or as someone more positive, from whom love is coaxed. The first type led to the use of “bestial” imagery that was of pagan origin; these charms allowed for the sublimation of aggression and the feeling of social inferiority, channeling these into the creation of fantasy images. The second type makes use of Christian subjects and symbols. Turning to folkloric and then in turn to Christian images, a person would not necessarily contradict himself or play the hypocrite, but rather attempt to resolve on a symbolic plane those practical conflicts that occupied him in real life.