Crisis Of Faith Research Articles

Genetic End of the Line

Anita Mason was a Booker Prize-nominated novelist who taught Creative Writing at the University of Warwick from 2007 until 2009. At the time of her death in September 2020, she left behind three unpublished short novels that provide a powerful, if disturbing, coda to the main body of her work. The novels are typical of Mason in that their settings are diverse: Chuichui is set in Haiti; Suppose in contemporary Israel; and Andromeda in a dystopian south-west England. Thematically, their concerns are contemporary and seem equally varied: political violence and corruption in Chuichui; the falsifying of history and culture in Suppose; and the consequences of the abuse of the natural world in Andromeda. This article contends, however, that beyond this diversity these works share deeper concerns that indicate a darker authorial outlook than that suggested by Mason’s published work, and that amount to a crisis of faith in artistic representation and even in human civilisation itself.

A‘mâk-ı Hayâl Romanında “Mise En Abyme”

In heraldry “mise en abyme” is described as a smaller shield bearing the same ensign inside the big one, and it literally means “to put in the infinite abyss”. André Gide introduced mise en abyme to literature inspired by the effect of reflection and depth in the visual arrangement of heraldic. He expanded the framework of the concept with different contexts of “picture within a picture” and “play within a play” and provided examples of mise en abyme as a literary technique in his novel The Counterfeiters. Gide's placement of smaller units representing/reflecting the whole in the narrative and his inclusion of the process of writing the novel as a theme in the fiction also influenced the literary views of the New Novelists and postmodernist writers. The works of many researchers such as Claude Magny, Lucien Dällenbach and Marcus Snow have brought about the emergence of different characteristics of mise en abyme and the expansion of its conceptual framework. In this study, the traces of the term mise en abyme in Şehbenderzâde Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi's novel A'mâk-ı Hayâl, are followed. The connection between microstructures and macrostructure in the novel, showing a helispherical organisation in terms of its form and content, has been analyzed. The novel, telling the story of Râci's journey to the truth to get rid of the crisis of faith into which he falls, is analyzed by considering the different features of mise en abyme such as reflection, repetition, resemblance and a part-whole relationship. The structures setting by Ahmed Hilmi in the centre/heart of A'mâk-ı Hayâl are analyzed.

Legislating Medicare Fraud: The Politics of Self-Regulation and the Creation of Professional Standards Review Organizations

AbstractNot long after the 1966 enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, evidence emerged that unscrupulous physicians and health care organizations were gaming the system. Research over the past 50 years shows that around 10 percent of the federal government’s annual cost for these programs is attributed to fraudulent claims or abuses where hospitals and treatments have been overused for undue provider profit. This article examines early congressional attention to this problem and describes lawmakers’ attempts to find legislative solutions to it. It historicizes the dilemma of balancing the ideological limits of government regulation with cultural assumptions about professional self-regulation, focusing on a major 1972 law, the Professional Standards Review Organization (PSRO) Act. The law launched a 10-year career for PSROs, physician-staffed peer-review boards designed to identify and sanction efforts to overcharge Medicare. The article contextualizes multiple actors’ concerns over cost containment and the crisis of faith in medical authority that persisted following failures to control professional malfeasance.

Exploring Life Narratives on Challenged Religious Vocation

Vocation research has advocated that the current Catholic Church is facing issues regarding its decreasing numbers of religious missionaries, hindering their evangelical pursuits. The purpose of the study was to explore the reactive nature of differing approaches to targeted communities. The study applied a qualitative phenomenological method to the lived experiences of those involved. Three Christian brothers from the congregation of the Alliance of Two Hearts served as participants and engaged in face-to-face interviews. Findings revealed that six themes of discussion emerged from the interviews: calling as communication between God and religious brothers; the call of a religious vocation; resources for conversion efforts; discernment and nurturing in vocation; resilience in the face of troubled conversion; and the impact of vocation on the Christian lifestyle. Additionally, the recognition of one’s calling often involves a period of doubt or crisis of faith. To carry out missionary works, one must recognize the value of doubt in vocation, and how it may be utilized to strengthen one’s beliefs and efforts.

An Assortment of Meditations

An Assortment of Meditations

The New Calling

The New Calling

버지니아 울프 소설에 나타난 타자 철학

The purpose of this paper is to throw new light on the novels of Virginia Woolf, whose fictions explore aesthetic, political, ethical, and epistemological concerns from the post-structuralist perspective. In Jacob’s Room(1922), Mrs. Dalloway(1925), and To the Lighthouse(1927), Woolf concerns herself with the issue of how another person can be understood and known. Emerging from the Great War crisis of faith in the possibility of truthful understanding and complete knowledge, a sense of unknowability shapes and saturates Woolf’s fictions. Such a failure of communication is a familiar characteristic of modernist works. However, I argue that Woolf’s novels emphasize the idea of reading such gaps as the encounter with alterity that defines the ethics of modernism. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics based on responsibility for the absolute other enables a more complex understanding of Woolf’s experimental fictions. Reading her novels in dialogue with Levinas helps to clarify Woolf’s philosophy of the other.

Interstitial and Abyssal geographies

Against the backdrop of the contemporary crisis of faith in modern reasoning, work on islands and with island cultures has come to the fore in the development of alternative, non-Eurocentric, non-modern, ways of being and knowing. Much attention has surrounded a wide range of critical work associated with the ‘ontological’ or the ‘relational’ turn, highlighting interstitial, entangled, post- and more-than-human creative encounters of becoming. This paper examines the emergence of what we call ‘abyssal thought’, a related but distinctly different analytical approach drawing largely from critical Black studies. Central to abyssal approaches is the understanding of the world as ontologically inseparable from its violent forging through antiblackness. In putting coloniality at the heart of the modernist problematic, abyssal work turns to the Caribbean in particular as a gateway, door or ‘punctum’, a space of ‘abyssal geographies’, inviting a deconstruction or unmaking of the world. Exploring how, this paper draws out three key aspects of the abyssal analytic: (1) the abyssal ‘subject’ forged through the ontological violence of the making of the modern world, (2) the abyssal as a refusal of impositions of spatial and temporal fixities, and (3) the methodological approach of ‘paraontology’. Thus, its key concerns are those of refusal, deconstruction and ‘suspension’ rather than of creative becoming. In distinction to relational ontologies of interstital island work, the desire is not to save or to remake understandings of the human and the world but rather to negate them.

Doubt and Desire

Doubt and Desire

State‐society relations and inter‐communal dynamics in conflict: Non‐Muslim minorities in post‐IS Iraq

AbstractThis article examines state‐society relations and inter‐communal dynamics in conflict, focusing on the case study of non‐Muslim minorities in Iraq. It draws on interview data to analyse the lived experiences of Iraq's Yazidis and Christians before, during and after Islamic State (IS) rule. It finds that the attacks by the IS on Iraq's Yazidi and Christian communities not only caused considerable suffering but also led to a renewed crisis of faith in the Iraqi state and a further breakdown in relations with other groups, especially Sunni Arabs. However, Iraq's Yazidis and Christian have also demonstrated remarkable resilience in terms of returning to their ancient homelands and rebuilding their fractured communities. Together, these findings raise further questions about the legitimacy of the Iraqi state in the eyes of its non‐Muslim minorities and the prospects of a peaceful multicultural future for Iraq.

Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical videogames

For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholars in this fieldhave shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human actors. This work holds out another way of reading the encounter between gaming and auto/biography: as a catalyst for new forms of posthumanist life-writing, in which the autobiographical mode co-exists with what this article dubs the ludobiographical mode. If games are autobiographical to the extent that they involve creators giving an account of episodes from their own life, they are ludobiographical to the extent that they foreground the challenges videogames pose to humanism’s vision of autonomous individuals in possession of their own bodies, stories and identities. This idea is elaborated through an analysis of That Dragon, Cancer ( Numinous Games, 2016 ). Created by Ryan and Amy Green, the game documents the death of their developmentally disabled son Joel and their consequent crisis of faith. Controversial and widely discussed, it constitutes a rich case study in how autobiographical videogames raise irreducibly political questions about agency, identity and the (post)human.

Abraham the Father of Faith (Gen 12-17) – Challenge to Christians in Nigeria

In Abraham, Israel's first Patriarch, God begins a new development in his plan of the creation and salvation of the world by specially choosing the people of Israel (Gen 12-50), after the general account of the creation and development of mankind from the beginning of the book of Genesis (Gen 1-11). Abraham stands out in his relationship with God and is thus, for those who believe in God and who acknowledge His self-revelation in the OT, the father of faith. Many Christians in Nigeria today suffer from the crisis of faith which often breeds lukewarmness and syncretism in their actual practice of it – and even outright rejection of the same faith in neo-paganism. The others who try to remain steadfast, are naturally distracted by the negative activities of these other brothers and sisters with whom they are supposed to be professing the same faith. This paper presents the steadfast legacy in the faith of Abraham, the proto-type of Jesus in the OT, as an enlivening challenge to all Christians, especially here in Nigeria. Abraham’s steadfast faith in God, in all the circumstances of his life, challenges the Nigerian Christians of today, as they face all sorts of difficulties in the practice of their faith. It also challenges the institutionalized Churches towards the provision of a sustained catechetical growth for all their members for a more active and vibrant Christian life in our dear country that is today menaced with many religious, social, economic and political problems. To arrive at its goal, this paper employs the exegetico-analytical method of enquiry. In the final analysis, apart from the pertinence of all the points raised in it, this work has the added importance of taking us to the very fertile roots of our faith in God in the person and life of Abraham, thereby helping to engender stronger conviction in the believing audience that would read it.

A RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE CATHOLIC ECUMENICAL CONCEPT IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE WITH ISLAM

The Enlightenment philosophical concept led to the formation of the understanding that religion must serve the common good and justice in society, otherwise it cannot function freely in the public space. Protestant criticism of the biblical text largely reflects the main trends of the crisis of faith in the social environment of the Enlightenment, and they also laid the foundation for the formation of liberal theology. In the Catholic environment, such phenomena have been criticized, but over time there is an understanding of the need for an adequate reaction of the traditional Church. As an option to solve this issue, the creation of conditions for the separation of religious and non-religious spheres, which will make it possible to achieve objectivity on the part of the secular authorities with the simultaneous inclusion of the legally regulated functioning of religious organizations, which can carry out social activities in the plane of ecumenical actions, can be done. The analysis of social phenomena that gave impetus to the formation of the ecumenical movement in its current forms and manifestations is extremely significant, as it is a reading and forecasting of the further development of the ecumenical concept as a whole, which requires a detailed delineation of the impact of postmodern trends on the cultural change of society. The question of rationalization of religious beliefs, which satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the planet’s population, arises more and more often in the religious and philosophical environment, but the question of the probability of the disappearance of these beliefs or, even more, their elimination from the cultural and worldview plane of humanity, is not raised in any way.

КОНЦЕПТ КРАСИ У РАННІЙ ТВОРЧОСТІ В. ВИННИЧЕНКА

The article reveals the specifics of artistic manifestation of the beauty concept based on V. Vynnychenko’s early works. This is due to the presence of a number of search lines in the writer’s interpretation of aesthetic and to a significant number of works representing current issues. Beauty is defined as a fundamental component of life in the works by V. Vynnychenko and several author’s plots of its comprehension are revealed. Firstly, it is found that in writer’s early works the characters experience a crisis of faith, emphasize the relativity of absolute truth and Christian ethics, rethink the concept of sin and sacred Christian commandments («Love your neighbour as yourself», «Do not deceive», «Do not kill», and «In the sweat of your brow, eat your bread»), professing dual moral standards and the idea of «benevolent selfishness». The writer places material values into the center of existence instead of spiritual Christian ones. The former acquire absolute status and most importantly are able to ensure the realization of the fundamental goal – to maintain vitality in the project of «fullness» of earthly existence. It is emphasized that in his early works, V. Vynnychenko substantiates the concept of «life-as-a-market», where you can get financial or moral compensation through «selling/buying/exchanging» valuables, among which female beauty is one of the fundamental values. The analysis confirms the idea that woman’s beauty and love are mercantilized due to the devaluation of spiritual values, they lose their ideal metaphysical essence and are transformed into ordinary goods and vital cycle of values components. That is closely connected with the problems of «exchange-purchase-sale» of the values, money cynicism and the interpretation of the family as an economic contract (the case of the story «The Poor People», dramas «Bazaar», «Young Blood», «Crucified»). In V. Vynnychenko’s art world, several search lines are connected with the category of beauty, particularly the problem of coordination of bodily, physically expressed female beauty with spiritual beauty in the context of «exchange of values». The author also experiments with the concept of free marriage, which is considered an alternative to an unhappy family as an economic project.

La Iglesia, la fe y la realidad de la crisis

The Church, Holy, catholic and apostolic, built on the unbreakable foundation of the Apostles, faithfully transmits the truth that has been entrusted to her and the richness of the deposit of faith that she has preserved intact throughout time. This truth is infallibly transmitted. If there is this authentic transmission of revealed truth, why is there still a crisis of faith in the lives of believers? Where do crises come from? Are crises of faith beneficial? Is the Church going through moments of crisis? Why does God allow moments of crisis in the lives of his loved ones? Speaking of the crisis as a phenomenon that can have both positive and negative effects, depending on how it is managed, we can intuit that the most appropriate attitude to go through the crisis is hope. With this in mind, I ended my article by referring to the Pope’s audience on September 20, 2017: do not give up on the night, remember that the first enemy to defeat is not outside of you: it is within. Therefore, do not give space to bitter, dark thoughts. This world is the first miracle that God made; He placed in our hands the grace of new wonders. This is our hope in the moments of crisis: God never disappoints. Hope is the attitude with which we go through times of crisis, hope and trust in God. We know that with God everything is possible, and that where our strength is weakened, His grace comes to our aid.

«РОМАНТИЧЕСКИЙ» АБСУРД: «ВТОРЖЕНИЕ» АРТЮРА АДАМОВА И «ЧАТТЕРТОН» АЛЬФРЕДА ДЕ ВИНЬИ

The article contains an intertextual analysis of the play “The Invasion” (1949) by Arthur Adamov, one of the classical examples of the drama of the absurd. In his dramaturgical experience of 1949, Arthur Adamov demonstrates the acceptance of the XIX century French literature romantic tradition and significant refraction of this tradition in the coordinate system of the poetics of the absurd. Being open about his main source — the play “Chatterton” (1834) by Alfred de Vigny — Adamov intentionally strengthens and sharpens the theme of the tragic forlornness of a great artist who lost faith in himself in the face of a crisis of faith in the world mind. Adamov’s principal character is a filiation of the image of the romantic poetmessiah. The principal character of de Vigny and the principal character of Adamov have in common a vocation associated with the sacred power of the Word (the Poet and the Keeper of the Message), and fervor in following this high vocation; opposition to the world of ordinary people; loyalty to the individual life code. In the context of the mid-twentieth century philosophical views system, based on the idea of the absurd, Adamov revises the rules by which the artistic world is constructed, and transforms some romantic motives and characteristics. Love and creativity no longer perform a saving function; escape becomes the movement of an individual into the space of the inner prison. The fate of Adamov’s principal character cannot be shared by anyone else. The principal character is devoid of a demiurgical quality; he is doomed to plumb the depths of the concept of comprehensive futility and observe the loss of meanings at all levels of human existence. The analysis of the figurative system of “The Invasion” proves the romantic genesis of the absurdism of the twentieth century, confirming the theoretical concept of romanticism as a stable paradigm of artistic consciousness, which has retained its relevance in the modern era.

Introduction: The Civic Reconstruction of Higher Education and the Future of the Good Society

Introduction: The Civic Reconstruction of Higher Education and the Future of the Good Society

Prophetic Disappointment and Ideological Change among Israeli Settlers’ Rabbis: The Case of Rabbis Yehuda Amital and Shmuel Tal

In this article, I examine the role of prophetic disappointment in creating ideological change. I discuss the response of two Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924–2010) and Rabbi Shmuel Tal (b. 1962), to the crisis of faith they encountered regarding the role of Zionism in the messianic drama. This research describes the process of religious switching they have gone through due to failure of prophetic faith. This work argues that their transformation was an attempt to cope with the tension that results from cognitive dissonance in two different instances while blaming a third party for misunderstanding the true will of God. Their religious switching was an act of theodicy, justifying God’s justice, while renouncing their previous held beliefs.

“Breonna Taylor Could Have Been Me”: Bearing Witness to Faith in Black (Feminist) Futurity at the Speed Art Museum’s Promise, Witness, Remembrance Exhibit

This article explores the Speed Art Museum’s exhibit, Promise, Witness, Remembrance, as a site of meaning-making in the wake of the state-sponsored killing of Breonna Taylor. The article focuses on how the curators engaged the felt sense of vulnerability to premature death among Black viewers identified with Taylor in ways that held in tension a crisis of faith in, and an insistence upon, Black futurity.

Why did Pope John Paul II visit Ireland? The 1979 papal visit in context

Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in 1979 was an iconic moment in the history of twentieth-century Irish Catholicism. It has, however, received little detailed historical scrutiny. Based on state archival and hitherto unavailable diocesan material, this article contextualizes the visit by explaining the pastoral and leadership challenges that confronted the Irish hierarchy. Second, this article discusses how close the pope came to visiting Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. This was of concern not just to the hierarchy but to the Irish and British governments. Third, the organization of the visit, which was closely tied to the pastoral concerns of the Irish bishops, is surveyed. Lastly, the pastoral impact of the visit is considered. If the Catholic hierarchy hoped that the papal visit might arrest the declining institutional influence of the Catholic Church, reverse a quiet but growing faith crisis, or hasten a cessation of violence in Northern Ireland, then those expectations were misplaced. Ultimately, the pastoral impulse of the 1979 papal visit to Ireland was to preserve rather than renew the Irish Catholic tradition at a time when Irish Catholics were fixed on future material advancement rather than fidelity to their spiritual past.