Corporation Acts Research Articles

Институт «номинальный руководитель компании»: сущность, формы, мотивы и риски применения

The article is a multidimensional study of the institution of figurehead in the contexts of Russian corporate governance, legal regulation and judicial enforcement. Applying analytical methods of scientific research to analyze the institution of figurehead, the author seeks to consider various aspects of this institution, including its essence, forms, motives for use, punishability and associated risks. The work reveals the approach of Russian judicial practice to the definition of a “nominal leader” as a formal, not actual leader. The author hypothesizes that shadow corporate governance is one of the subsystems of the domestic shadow economy, and that “nominal management of the company’s operating practices” is a class of diverse structures, the generation of one part of which pursues frankly destructive goals in social terms, the other is situationally reasonable. Analyzing scientific publications, legislative acts, and judicial practice, the authors reveal individual forms of nominal management of a company: nominal shareholder, nominal company, nominal corporate act, nominal member of the board of directors, “multi-machine operator”, “technical premier”, member of the family business team, the executor of the instructions of the team of actual leaders, the textbook nominal director and situational-transit versions of the nominal leadership. The article highlights the risks of using forms of figurehead: a fundamental change in law enforcement practice, loss of time for management approvals, loss of confidential information, reputational and entrepreneurial, loss of business, withdrawal of assets and raider takeover. Administrative-legal, expert and corporate approaches are described in the discussion about the limits of punishment for “nominalities”, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of the institutional interpretation of the phenomenon of nominalities. In general, the article offers a broad scientific and applied discussion on interdisciplinary methodological grounds.

Shareholder agreement as the main manifestation of discretion in the corporate law of Ukraine

The article discusses the prerequisites for establishing comprehensive legal regulation of the shareholder agreement in the corporate law of Ukraine. It argues that the shareholder agreement is an essential tool for regulating corporate relations and ensuring effective interaction among corporation members. The article emphasizes that the shareholder agreement is the main manifestation of discretion in the corporate law of Ukraine, and outlines its advantages over corporation charter, including greater flexibility, adaptability to unique circumstances, and the ability to establish optimal methods of responsibility for the parties. The article also highlights the advantages of using compensation as a mechanism for ensuring "satisfaction" in the event of a violation of the shareholder agreement, while also noting that parties can choose alternative mechanisms of responsibility that best suit their interests.
 It pays particular attention to the interaction between the shareholder agreement and legislative regulation and local corporate acts, such as the charter and bylaws of corporations. The article argues that the provisions of the shareholder agreement are limited by the imperative provisions of corporate legislation and the rules of the charter, which is the main local corporate act of the company. It recommends changes to corporate legislation to clarify the distinction between the provisions of the charter and the shareholder agreement, particularly in relation to the preemptive right of members of LLCs and ALLs, to avoid conflicts between the two.
 The argument is made that changes to corporate legislation are necessary in order to improve certain provisions. One such improvement would be to clarify the provision regarding the nullity of the shareholder agreement, which should include an obligation to vote in accordance with the instructions of the company's management bodies. Additionally, the range of subjects to which this provision applies should be expanded to include the company's subsidiaries and any other company bodies. It is also important to prohibit the inclusion of provisions in shareholder agreements that are aimed at harming the rights and interests of other members or shareholders of the corporation, as well as the interests of the company itself.

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Kimberly VanEsveld Adams (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, by Winter Jade Werner; pp. vii + 210. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020, $79.95, $24.95 ebook. I always thought that in Jane Eyre (1847), the dangerous passion of St. John Rivers is for Rosamond Oliver, the bewitching daughter of a wealthy mill owner. He suppresses his emotions, since he considers her unfit to be a missionary’s wife. But no—the danger [End Page 702] is the “‘hot action’ of India,” or the attractiveness of native women. St. John manfully seeks to resist temptation by pressuring his unloved cousin Jane to become his helpmeet, or, as Jade Winter Werner says, his “prophylactic” (134). In Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Werner explores the development of missionaries’ claims to, and concern with, world citizenship. Charlotte Brontë’s novel provides the most vivid example. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, intermarriage between British missionaries and female converts (preferably from influential native families) was seen as positive, a demonstration of universal human kinship. But misgivings began to emerge by the 1820s: missionaries’ “going native,” the challenge to British superiority of biracial bicultural families, the disapproval of white slaveholders in South Africa, and what came to be seen as the corrupting effect of interracial union. The last is exemplified in Jane Eyre by Mr. Rochester’s brutal descriptions of his marriage to Bertha Mason, a Jamaican-born planter’s daughter. The new policy of British missionary societies was for men to marry before going overseas. St. John’s endogamous proposal to his cousin, Werner argues, shows an extreme effort to avoid contamination. The thesis of Werner’s book is that “cosmopolitanism both fueled and found an unlikely champion in the modern missionary movement” (3). The Dissenting missionaries who are her primary focus were not, as opponents claimed, irrational enthusiasts, ill-educated “pious tinkers” (77), or as Sydney Smith said, “little detachments of maniacs” (qtd. in Werner 3). Nor were they unthinkingly allied with empire, as some scholars contend. The missionaries’ often-repeated claims to be “cosmopolites,” or world citizens, were based, Werner found, on the ongoing interactions between Protestantism and Enlightenment (or Enlightenment-Liberal) beliefs and values, such as a common human nature, individual freedom and tolerance, reason, and the benefits of scientific knowledge and global trade (71). A difficulty with this argument is that the core religious beliefs and practices of the denominations—Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and evangelical Anglicans—are not described. That makes it difficult for the reader to assess when the missionaries’ use of Enlightenment ideas is a matter of Christian morals, as they claimed, or when it is strategy, or appropriation of available terminology. Moreover, some points would have been clarified or strengthened with use of a wider range of materials and more extensive historical evidence. Werner for example shows that during the French Revolution, missionary cosmopolitans who spoke of universal benevolence and the rights of man were accused of republican sympathies, despite their professions to have no political agenda. But Werner’s discussion here might have gone beyond the quarreling periodicals, since there is some basis for the charge of republicanism. Dissenters were prominent not just in missionary societies but also among British working-class radicals and American revolutionaries, particularly those from colonies such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In Britain, Dissenters resented legal restrictions on their religious and civic liberty. Only with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 was their access to political and military office unrestricted (if they were men). Werner centers the four chapters of her book on literary texts because these reveal the tensions within missionary cosmopolitanism, in contrast to the propaganda of the various societies. In her second chapter, “Robert Southey and the Case for Christian Colonialism,” Werner demonstrates the Romantic author’s interest in Dissenting missions. Southey published reviews of societies’ periodicals between 1802 and 1809. But he broke [End Page 703] from the missionaries in considering forceful colonization necessary for the spread of Christianity. In A Tale of Paraguay (1825), Southey’s verse narrative based on the 1784 account...

Criminal Liability Committed by Corporations for Environmental Damage as a Result of Forest and Land Fires (Case Study Case Number 59/PID). B/LH/2020/PN. RGT)

The deforestation process that occurs in Riau is very worrying, forest and land fires are proof that environmental management and utilization are no longer reliable. These forest and land fires are proven to involve companies involved in the cultivation and utilization of forest products. For this reason, the corporation must be criminally responsible because UUPPLH No. 32 of 2009 has recognized the corporation as the subject of criminal law. Efforts to hold companies accountable aren't easy — many companies actually stop investigations because they don't have enough evidence. Therefore, the author wants to know the criteria of corporations that are said to commit forest and land fire crimes, as well as how the form of criminal accountability. This research method uses normative legal methods and sculptural approaches that are approaches through legislation. The results of the investigation, the criteria of the corporation to commit the crime of forest and land fires if it meets the elements in the preparation of articles of forest and land fires, namely land clearing by burning and exceeding environmental quality standards. The violation is committed by a person for work or other relationship reasons within the scope of the business entity. If the crime is committed by, for, or on behalf of a business entity, it shall be considered a corporate act. The form of corporate criminal liability in the criminal act of forest and land fires is preliminary, because the error lies with the corporate administrator (director) who is the mastermind or owner of control of the company's operational activities (Director Mind). Because in PP No. 4 of 2001 Article 13 that the director as the person in charge of all commercial activities whose business can cause damage and environmental pollution must comply with government regulation No. forest and land fires.

Corporate Crime in Indonesian Criminal Law System

The Criminal Code (KUHP) has not listed corporations as legal subjects that can be held criminally liable. This is because the description of the perpetrators of crimes is still often associated with acts that are physically carried out by perpetrators while in the socio-economic environment, a criminal offender does not always need to physically commit a crime. Corporate actions are always manifested through human actions that are normally carried out by administrator or management. Therefore, the delegation of management responsibility can become corporate actions (Legal entity) if the act in the socio-economic environment acts as a corporate act. Specific to economic crimes in their efforts to solve them are still using Emergency Law Number 7 of 1955 on Economic Crimes, where corporations can be imposed criminal sanctions when committing economic crimes that fall within the scope of their business activities, theoretically and practically, criminal law subjects that can be accounted for criminally are humans (natuurlijke persoon) and legal entities (rechtpersoon).

Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)

Abstract The dialectics of tradition and modernity in the South Asian context often focus on the female body. Developing this discourse, Sunder Rajan [Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1993). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.] discusses a new brand of woman that features in contemporary culture: the “New Indian Woman.” This figure is able to perfectly harmonize the conflict between tradition and modernity and negotiate seamlessly between the public and private spheres. Based on close readings, I will extend Sunder Rajan’s analysis of the New Indian Woman to Shashi Deshpande’s 1980 novel The Dark Holds No Terrors. Informed by ideas of embodiment, silence and performance, this paper considers how the unobtainability of the New Indian Woman myth in Deshpande’s novel results in a splitting of the self for the protagonist, Sarita. I argue that the splitting of the self occurs on two levels: while represented as a psychological breakdown experienced by Sarita, I contend that it is also reflected as a corporeal act through the violating literary depiction of rape.

Dissenting Pessimism in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Radical Writing

This paper attempts to identify the sources of Anna L. Barbauld’s pessimistic vision of the future Britain, which distinguishes her from her fellow Dissenters, especially Joseph Priestley. A millennialist outlook on history pervades Priestley’s An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), a defense of the rights of Dissenters, and his 1788 sermon on the slave trade. Here Priestley’s commitment to radical causes is based on the assumption that the course of human history is progressive―that even social evils of slavery and religious discrimination are part of the process by which the human race is progressing towards a free, just society under God’s providence. Barbauld, however, departs from an optimistic view of history held by her co-religionists. Her engagement with issues of Dissent, An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), is full of unwomanly rage at an infringement of Dissenters’ civil rights, which seemed to her a betrayal of the ideals of liberty that the British had upheld. Her Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791) also unleashes fury at the appalling state of moral decay in her country. In the poet’s judgment, Britain is doomed to self-destruction by not abandoning slavery and hence extinguishing the spirit of liberty. Barbauld’s break with the mainstream of Dissenting thought, i.e., her apocalyptic vision of the nation’s decline and fall, becomes more evident in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). As a liberal Dissenter, Barbauld had a firm belief in the idea of individual liberty and so found herself despairing of the political state of Britain, which gradually distanced her from Dissenting millenarianism. This distance made her political writing truly radical.

Abnormal Mothers: Breastfeeding, Governmentality and Emotion Amongst Regional Australian Women

Australia’s apparently poor rates of breastfeeding are a frequent feature in mainstream news reports. Underpinning these discussions is the breast is best discourse, which implies that not breastfeeding is indicative of bad motherhood. Alongside this dominant discourse is the persisting construction of breastfeeding as a private, corporeal act. This article examines the governing gridlock formed by these two dominant discourses, analysing interview data gathered from mothers in regional Western Australia about their complex experiences with breastfeeding. I aim to highlight how the governance of these breastfeeding discourses disguises the various ways in which women’s choices about breastfeeding are constrained. While these discourses may govern women in different ways, combined they represent a cultural paradigm clash which silences women about their difficulties with breastfeeding—the challenges women encounter in negotiating breastfeeding in contemporary daily life—both as a corporeal act and because of its corporeality. I argue that to avoid making women who do not breastfeed feel abnormal, this clash needs to be challenged in—and by—the wider Australian populace.

Peel's Other Repeal: The Test and Corporation Acts, 1828

This article considers Robert Peel's role in the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. Traditionally overshadowed by the larger campaign to secure catholic emancipation in 1829, the repeal legislation assumes importance in Peel's political career for three reasons. It was Peel's first major challenge as leader of the house of commons in Wellington's ministry; his handling of the issue revealed all his strengths and weaknesses in the role. Peel's insistence on the active participation of the anglican Church hierarchy in passing repeal with appropriate safeguards (through a declaration to be taken by the majority of officeholders) foreshadowed his later tactics in settling contentious Church issues by negotiation with the Church's leaders (leading to the formation of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1835). The success of Russell's original repeal motion challenged the expectation (shared by Peel) that repeal would follow, rather than precede, emancipation. The necessity of confronting repeal head‐on formed a backdrop to that ‘ripening’ of Peel's views which commentators and historians have detected during this period.

Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 by Orianne Smith

Orianne Smith. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 293. $95. Situated between studies of millenarianism's class consciousness and the feminist reappraisal of women's writing in the Romantic period, Orianne Smith's Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826 argues that not only was visionary, apocalyptic writing undertaken by women as well as men, but this writing is a complex form of social protest. Part secular, part sacred, sometimes catastrophic in orientation, sometimes progressive, such writing was a means by which women attempted to achieve world-historical relevance at a time when patriarchal institutions afforded them few if any legitimate opportunities for expression. Perhaps ironically, it is the flexibility rather than univocity of what Ian Balfour has called the that proves, in Smith's analysis, especially important to its generic coherence. Thanks to their hermeneutic resourcefulness--or, according to critics, a typological excess productive of deranged and manic exegesis (14)--prophets, speaking in the same style as each other, might read the same historical event in radically different ways. Take the French Revolution. For Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Helen Maria Williams, and [Anna] Barbauld, and Dissenting sympathizers like Wollstonecraft, progressive millennialism [spurred by the Revolution] brought with it a renewed faith in the eventual abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the eradication of gender inequality (17). At the same time, Anglicans such as Joseph Galloway and Hannah More believed that the events across the channel signaled something like the beginning of Armageddon (19). What Smith's work reveals, then, is that thanks to the prophetic mode women were capable of participating in debates about nationalism, religion, and world history in ways that cannot be homogenized. Smith argues, instead, that what these writers share is a turn to illocutionary speech act, a kind of saying that accomplishes--or tries to accomplish--what it announces through its mode of performance (23). Thus, promising and cursing do not merely describe situations but manifest a political and social intent in the very fact of their utterance. Over the course of six compact chapters and a brief Epilogue, Smith explores the specific practices of five very different Romantic women writers engaged in political (33), situating their performative prophetic writing within larger cultural and artistic trends in the later eighteenth century including acts of improvisation, the discourse of sympathy, the Gothic genre, and moral philosophy. In her first chapter, Verbal magic: an etymology of female enthusiasm, Smith looks back to the sectarian female prophets of the English Civil War to contextualize prophetic writing and practice by women in Romanticism. In spite of enthusiasm's bad reputation--cemented during the Restoration--and its generally diminished cultural currency in the more sober eighteenth century, Smith argues that Romantic women prophets draw on these precursors and participate in a of such writing. The use of the word 'tradition' here and elsewhere is deliberate (6), Smith insists early on, situating the phenomenon of female prophecy within the controversy between tradition and right as two different grounds of authority. Female prophecy, for Smith, draws its power from both sides. Because women from Hester Lynch Piozzi to Helen Maria Williams to Mary Shelley situated themselves with the prophetic tradition, Smith argues, their claims to political legitimacy carried more weight with Burkeans and other conservative thinkers. At the same time, Smith stresses that the performative nature of prophetic writing bases its authority in its autonomy: like a rights claim, female prophecy is expressed by fiat and makes a transcendental gesture beyond any limiting (and often discouraging, patriarchal) tradition. …

Traum, Physiologie, Biographie. Jean Pauls Schreiblabor

This article points at the historical constellation of Johannes von Muller’s and Johann Evangelista Pukinje’s physiological discourse on the one hand and Jean Paul’s reflections on writing as a corporeal act and its productive effects on the other. Subjective images’ (‘subjektive Bilder’), dreams, the concomitance of handwriting and brainwriting are topics that Jean Paul, the reading expert on novel discourses in medicine, addresses. The evolving writing strategies can be tracked in numerous manuscripts by the author’s hand; an early one from the “Satiren” will be presented here. Finally, the article deals with the complex interplay of literal productivity and the cognitive effects of writing—so significant in the case of a ‘paper worker’ who has produced more than 10,000 pages of aesthetic value in his life.

Faithful Accounts?: The Hampton Court Conference and The King James Bible in Early Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Histories

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, English Dissenters composed several histories in order to vindicate the theological standards of Protestant nonconformity, to agitate for the civil liberties denied Dissenters by the Test and Corporation Acts, and to fashion new identities for the latest generation of Dissenters which was suffering defections to the Anglican Church. Interestingly, the 1611 translation received remarkably little notice in the three most notable histories from the three Dissenting traditions. Following Edmund Calamy's Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's Narrative (1702), arguably the most noteworthy Dissenting histories of the era were A Vindication of the Dissenters (1717 and 1718) by the presbyterian James Peirce, The History of the Puritans published in the 1730s by the Independent minister Daniel Neal (1678-1743), and The History of the English Baptists (1738-1740) written by the Baptist mathematician Thomas Crosby (c.1685-1752). This article summarizes the depictions of James I, the Hampton Court conference, and the resulting translation in the histories and the article contends that the treatments of the conference and translation serve as windows to the overarching arguments of the histories.

Theatre On Call: Participatory fainting and Grand-Guignol theatre

This short piece examines the idea of the fainting spectator, drawing on the work of one of the twentieth century's most successful ‘theatre[s] of horror’, the Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, particularly during the artistic directorship of Max Maurey from 1898 to 1914. Maurey, during this period, encouraged an escalation of the visual aspect of the graphically representative violence for which the Grand-Guignol had become known since its inception in 1897, speculating that increased audience stimulation would have a similar effect on box office figures. A significant aspect of the response to Maurey's idea was the frequent fainting of audience members, who became physically overwhelmed at such a rate that Maurey, delightedly and very publicly, hired an in-house doctor in order to aid the increasing numbers of spectators who appeared to require medical assistance. My discussion of this phenomenon at the Grand-Guignol aims to raise questions regarding the increasingly participatory nature of this apparently uncontrollable corporeal act. I hope to show how the emphasis placed on fainting by the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol during this period shifts preconceptions about an involuntary bodily reaction momentarily in the direction of audience performance, encouraging us to think of the corporeal reality of the faint in a different way. Furthermore, the piece's conclusion will speculate that fainting at the Grand-Guignol can be seen as a movement in the direction of synchronization: the physical response to what was apparently unwatchable allowing both spectator and director to develop additionally strategic behaviours, far from the one-sided overpowering of audience members to which our assumptions might otherwise adhere.

Emasculated Bodies of Hijras

The article examines through a historical lens, how the emasculated body of hijras takes on different and often contrasting meanings embodied in social roles, statuses and identities. It follows the trajectory of the historical space occupied by hijras since the beginning of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century and traces the roles and identities of hijras that have continuously been in a state of dynamism through their construction, reconstruction and reinvention in time and space. It is argued in the article that the corporeal act of emasculation performed on the body of hijras is a medium through which identities have been imposed, resisted and negotiated. From eunuch-slaves to cultural performers, religious ascetics and followers of Bahuchara Mata, the differentiated bodies of hijras have served as the single most important vehicle of their identity formation and their social interaction with society. What is essentially brought out then is the interplay of traditional and rational action through the retention of the ritualised practice of emasculation centred on the worship of the goddess Bahuchara, and the redefinition of traditional roles in response to changing social structures.

The Indian Farmer, Middlemen and the APMCs

The Indian Farmer, Middlemen and the APMCs

Cycling as Reading a Cityscape: A Phenomenological Approach to Interface-Shaped Perception

This essay attempts to assess whether the perceptual issues posed by the contemporary interface culture, and the constant attitude shift demanded by the new media between the “natural” and the “as if” modes, might be considered a significant challenge for phenomenological aesthetics as understood in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. To demonstrate how the use of a particular interface profoundly shapes the form and structure of an activity as well as enabling perception of a particular kind, the author does not focus directly on the state-of-the-art smart interfaces, but describes the experience of cycling in a large city, with the interface in the form of the bicycle upgraded with an imagined ride simulator. While the former enables a very particular entrance into the world of perception, shaped by its moderate speed and detachment from the ground, the latter enables techno-shaped perception in the “as if” screenic mode. The experience described raises questions concerning the kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and motor features contributing to the cyclist’s mobile perception, as well as pointing to issues related to the reading of the city’s network as a particular spatial configuration generated by the cyclist’s realtime activity. This is the space-time-event-ridescape maintained and modified by the corporeal act of cycling. The spatiality of such a ride does not presume the notion of a space that contains the cyclist, but builds on notions of being-in-the-ridescape (as a kind of cityscape), in terms not only of full corporeal and mental engagement, but also of bodily literacy. The reading of the cityscape enabled by the combination of two interfaces, the bicycle and the ride simulator, is discussed in relation to de Certeau’s account of pedestrian (walking) experience in a big city, his distinction between strategies and tactics, and the notion that each cyclist contributes a novel story to ridetext, which is viewed not as an aesthetic object but as the production of puzzles for the rider to solve. The paper concludes by questioning the capacity of phenomenology to accommodate the contemporary phenomenon of a “mixed” or “augmented reality” either in concept or in relation to the demands of the phenomenological reduction and the ends of the epoché.

The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2009The Colonial Subtext of Anna Letitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"Francesco CroccoFrancesco Crocco Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 2Spring 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043602 Views: 40Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Georges Bernanos and Francis Poulenc: Catholic Convergences in Dialogues of the Carmelites

FRANCIS POULENC'S DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES RANKS as one of the most Catholic operas of the twentieth century, as theologically insightful as it is lyrically beautiful. Except perhaps for Olivier Messiaen's modernist masterpiece Saint Francois d'Assise (which has sadly had only one U.S. production to date, San Francisco Opera, 2000), no other opera in the canon combines twentieth-century musical sensibilities with such profound theological themes on Catholic mysticism, martyrdom, and redemption. In this regard Dialogues has no peer in stature, recognition, and performance. Part of the opera's beauty is due to Poulenc's own musical genius; part is due to Georges Bernanos's text that Poulenc was inspired to use as his libretto; and part is due to the deep understanding of Catholic faith that both Poulenc and Bernanos shared. Composed in 1956, the opera is based on the true story of sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compienge, guillotined during the final throes of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Their story of martyrdom is a remarkable episode in the history of the Catholic faith in revolutionary France. As early as September 1792, the Carmelites of Compienge, like all other monastic religious institutions in France, were forced to leave their cloister and disband. Forbidden by law to meet or hold religious services, they decided secretly to make a corporate act of consecration whereby they would offer themselves as a sacrifice that the ills afflicting the Church and our unhappy kingdom might cease. (1) The disbanded nuns were thus arrested on June 21, 1794, for the crime of assembling illegally. They were placed in a prison at Compiegne with another order of religious women, the English Benedictines of Cambrai, who were awaiting their deportation back to England. During the three weeks they shared in prison, the two communities of nuns clandestinely prayed and offered comfort to one another. The Carmelites were then transferred to the Conciergerie in Paris on July 12 to await their trial and execution. For four days they remained there, comforting prisoners and secretly celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on July 16. As the documented records of the Revolutionary Tribunal attest, they were judged guilty of being counterrevolutionaries and were executed on July 17, 1794. (2) There were numerous eyewitness reports that the Carmelites sang together the Miserere, the Salve Regina, and the Te Deum as they were led to the scaffold. They intoned the Veni Creator at the foot of the scaffold, and sang the Laudate Dominum omnes gentes as each nun climbed to her death. As they were guillotined, their voices diminished until only the Prioress was left singing, the last to die. Ten days after their execution, the Reign of Terror ended, and French Catholics immediately interpreted the martyrdom of the Carmelites as a mystical expiation for the sins of France. The cult surrounding these nuns was kept alive not only by the French faithful, but by the Benedictine nuns of Cambrai, now returned to Stanbrook Abbey, England. The sixteen Carmelites were beatified by the Church in 1906 and, as their cult spread, their story became the inspiration for a bestselling novel, two dramas, a film, and Poulenc's opera. (3) Given the often cliched notion that the twentieth century was the most secular of times, it is surprising that Poulenc's Dialogues has been such a success, both in his own life and in the contemporary canon of musical opera today. It is with regard to this point that I would like to consider the historical circumstances and spiritual conjunctions from which this opera was produced. I will frame the thesis as two questions: First, how did traditional Catholicism become intellectually compatible with all that was modern and progressive in French culture in the early part of the twentieth century? The second question follows: How are Georges Bernanos and Francis Poulenc artistic players in this Catholic revival? …

THE LIMITS OF THE CONFESSIONAL STATE: ELECTORAL RELIGION IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES II

ABSTRACTFrom 1670 there were sustained attempts to use excommunication as a tool to influence parliamentary elections. Excommunicants could not qualify for membership of municipal corporations under the Test and Corporation Acts. Towards the end of Charles II's reign, as fear of protestant dissent grew, excommunication was, however, used to deny voters the right to exercise their franchise. There was a concerted attempt, encouraged by the king, to ensure the election of a compliant tory parliament through the use of excommunication in elections in borough seats. The attempt, reliant on bishops and spiritual courts, represented the high water mark of the ‘confessional state’. Of questionable legality, the exclusion of excommunicants from the right to vote was short-lived. The accession of James II, and his Catholicizing policies, created new alliances between Anglicans and dissenters and eroded the willingness of bishops to use excommunication as an electoral instrument. In 1689, the Toleration Act removed the principal cause of the persecution of dissent. The use of excommunication, nevertheless, represented an important attempt to unite the church and state for electoral reasons.

Sin and Bioethics: Why a Liturgical Anthropology is Foundational

The project of articulating a coherent, canonical, content-full, secular morality-cum-bioethics fails, because it does not acknowledge sin, which is to say, it does not acknowledge the centrality of holiness, which is essential to a non-distorted understanding of human existence and of morality. Secular morality cannot establish a particular moral content, the harmony of the good and the right, or the necessary precedence of morality over prudence, because such is possible only in terms of an ultimate point of reference: God. The necessity of a rightly ordered appreciation of God places centrally the focus on holiness and the avoidance of sin. Because the cardinal relationship of creatures to their Creator is worship, and because the cardinal corporate act of human worship is the Liturgy, morality in general and bioethics in particular can be understood in terms of the conditions necessary, so as worthily to enter into Eucharistic liturgical participation. Morality can be summed up in terms of the requirements of ritual purity. A liturgical anthropology is foundational to an account of the content- full morality and bioethics that should bind humans, since humans are first and foremost creatures obliged to join in rightly ordered worship of their Creator. When humans worship correctly, when they avoid sin and pursue holiness, they participate in restoring created reality.