Crisis Of Faith Research Articles

John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science, and the Humanities by Jane Rupert

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 96 tropes and emphases of English-language Patristic studies have been, since Newman, Newman’s. His accounts of Athanasius’s person and work, in particular, have continued to inform scholarly accounts of the theological history that unfolded at and after the council of Nicea. Whether the bishop of Alexandria should continue to enjoy the status he has in Newman’s writings, for the reasons Newman adduced, is a question that King thinks is worth asking. He does not presume to answer it completely. He does identify the interpretive issues that an answer would have to take into account. Charles Hefling Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Religion, Science, and the Humanities. By Jane Rupert. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Pages: 128. Cloth: ISBN 0–7391–4047–7. $55.00. Newman’s reputation as a champion of reason has extended far beyond the English-speaking world. It was especially prevalent in southern Germany when a young seminarian named Joseph Ratzinger was studying theology. Ratzinger was introduced to Newman’s writings by his prefect, Alfred Läpple, who was writing a doctoral thesis on Newman’s understanding of conscience. Ratzinger’s interest in Newman should come as no surprise, given that he was much more impressed by Romanticism’s engagement with history and emphasis on the affective dimension of faith than he was with the dry scholasticism that had become the staple seminary diet. Although it is not Rupert’s task to examine the connection between Newman and Ratzinger,the parallels rightly emerge from her analysis.Her main goal is to show that Newman was deeply concerned about our habituation to a single method of inquiry.“The modern crisis in faith,” she writes, is “rooted in a narrow idea of the mind” (111).This rings a chord with Pope Benedict’s invitation to cultivate the “vast potential of human reason” which is “purified by faith” and thus “emboldened to pursue its noble purpose” (Meeting with Muslim Religious Leaders, 9 May 2009).“I believe a particularly urgent task of religion,” the pope insists,“is to unveil the vast potential of human reason” (Meeting with Muslim Community, 19 March 2009). In this book,Rupert reviews the main writings in which Newman shows himself a great defender of this more expansive idea of reason in an age narrowly constricted to empirical inquiry. She shows that Newman had an abiding concern to retrieve scientific reason as understood prior to the modern era. This “verbal theoretical thought” begins with “ideas, accepted universals” and “assumed principles” (2). It functions in conjunction with the imagination and feelings as can be seen in the thought patterns of religion and poetry. Rupert explains that the Empiricists were sorely mistaken in thinking that literature pertains only to “tastes” and “feelings” understood in a narrow sense.To the contrary,literature expands the power of reason by a nuanced use of language best acquired during childhood and adolescence.There will always be time to probe first principles later. At a more tender age, the most important thing is to have a competent teacher who approaches his or her art as an Newman Journal V9 Issue 1_Newman Journal V9 Issue 1 2/1/12 10:13 AM Page 96 97 interpersonal process allowing the pupil to connect subconsciously what he or she learns through the humanities to the deeper principles underlying them. Rupert fleshes out the distinction between reasoning in empirical science and Newman’s broader notion of reasoning by focusing on the principles isolated by the former and the cool, neutral judgments to which they lead. Newman pointed to the insufficiency of these principles for effective moral deliberation.To cultivate the latter one must employ rhetoric, which examines a given issue from several different angles. Principles are by no means absent from this process, as rhetoric necessarily uses contradictions, opposites, and negative cases.Yet unlike the empirical sciences, honing the skills of moral deliberation does not require superior intelligence insofar as imagination, the faculty at the core of the process, is available to the educated and uneducated alike. Imagination particularly relies on analogy, which is why words like “Father” and “Son...

Chapitre 7. Undue game of baseline principles: the physician-patient relationship from a bioethical perspective

This article is inspired by an accident in a hospital where a pregnant woman died on the operating table because her husband was unwilling to sign the operation consent form. What's lurking behind this tragedy is the crisis of faith between doctors and patients in China. The crisis is a product of the Marketization of the health care system, which generates an unequal relationship between doctors and patients. Such a relationship makes patients unable to actively protect their rights. From a bioethical perspective, health is a basic right for everyone. In order to improve the physician-patient relationship, health rights must be considered as a priority in policy making. Although the Chinese government has been trying to implement universal health coverage, a progress indeed, problems and difficulties still exist in equalizing status between patients and doctors and in rebuilding a benign physician-patient relationship.

Preaching through a Faith Crisis

On the morning of September 28, 2009, my life was changed forever. I received a phone call from the nursing facility that had been providing care for my mother, telling me that she was not respondi...

Pregnancy, Thirdness, and The Aesthetics of Catastrophe in Heinrich Von Kleist

In documenting his own personal crisis of faith in Enlightenment rationalism through letters and essays, Kleist exposes the epistemological fissures in its edifice. This paper explores in psychoanalytic terms the dilemmas associated with knowing and not knowing, and the relationship between self and other, revealed by these texts. Kleist’s literary work goes beyond expressing this crisis of knowledge to enact a kind of solution to it, not resolving the contradictions that are central in his world but presenting them aesthetically, intact and precariously balanced. More specifically, a pregnancy conceived without the knowledge of the mother-to-be—in his novella “The Marquise of O” (1807a)—suggests a modification of the psychoanalytic third to include within it the catastrophe that it also mitigates.

The Religious Landscape of Revolutionary St. Petersburg, 1905-1918

Although legitimately associated with a crisis of faith and the rapid spread of atheistic-socialism, the revolutionary period 1905-1918 in St. Petersburg/Petrograd can and should also be understood as one of unprecedented religious experimentation and spiritual growth, even among the working classes. Rejecting overly simplistic notions of “secularization” and de-Christianization, this article offers a necessarily fluid and pluralistic portrait of Petersburg religious culture, the contours of which were shaped by tensions between rural and urban practices, popular and official institutions, and competing notions of the sacred and the profane in the city’s increasingly diverse marketplace of beliefs. It examines the new and varied demands that working-class believers voiced with respect to the role of the Orthodox faith and Church in their lives and investigates urban Orthodoxy as it was “lived,” including changes and continuities in religious practice, sacramental life, icon worship, and pilgrimage.

The Bible and the Victorians: An Interview with Timothy Larsen

The Bible and the Victorians: An Interview with Timothy Larsen Donald A. Yerxa and Timothy Larsen It is Often Thought that the Truly Authentic Religious experience of Victorian Britain was an expression of a crisis of faith. But in Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2007) Timothy Larsen offered a provocative corrective. Now, in A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford University Press, 2011) Larsen reveals how scripture-saturated the Victorians were. Larsen is the McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He began the research for this book as a visiting fellow in history at Trinity College, Cambridge. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed him in March 2011. Donald A. Yerxa: What are you attempting to accomplish in A People of One Book? Timothy Larsen: I wanted to display the profound way in which a deep knowledge of the Bible pervaded and shaped the whole of Victorian culture. Everyone spoke through biblical language, reasoned through scriptural categories, and cited biblical proof texts to clinch their arguments. It was more than just that they knew the contents of the Bible very well, although that is unquestionably true. It is that the Bible really was at the center culturally; almost all Victorians tried to get the Bible on their side in any cause they espoused. A minority tried to defy scripture head on, but even that was a backhanded tribute to the centrality of the Bible. No one just went on their way without scriptural cadences calibrating their stride. I came to think of the centrality of the Bible as kind of a key to the age that has been hiding in plain sight. It has always been in plain sight in the sense that every Victorian scholar would tell you that scripture infused 19th-century culture—high and low, popular and elite. Nevertheless, it has been hidden. There are several reasons for this. Past generations of Victorian scholars who were themselves raised in societies where the Bible is more prominent than it is now found this point so obvious that they had no interest in documenting it. They became obsessed with those Victorians who were skeptical about the Bible because what really interested them was not displaying the scripture-saturated culture of the Victorians but rather finding the seeds of its demise. They focused on challenges to the Bible or its authority while failing to appreciate that even attacks on the Bible were another manifestation of the Victorian obsession with the Bible. Scholars more recently have tended to interrogate the Victorians about issues that preoccupy us today such as gender, race, sexuality, and imperialism. This means that if they read Victorian writings on the Bible at all, they tend to mine them for what they ostensibly reveal about these other issues (and, alas, too often they misread them in the process). And many scholars deem biblical commentaries and devotional literature too tedious to endure and don’t read them at all. Moreover, scholars today are often themselves biblically illiterate so they miss the allusions, or they take what was a perfectly conventional statement in a scripture-saturated culture and erroneously imagine that it is really about something else lying hidden beneath the surface. Click for larger view View full resolution Family Bible reading from Sunday Magazine for Family Reading (London, 1878) Yerxa: How did you go about selecting representative Victorians from various religious traditions? Larsen: I should say that the structure of the book is to cover all the main religious and skeptical traditions in 19th-century England, from atheism to Judaism, from spiritualism to Methodism. I do this with in-depth case studies of one or sometimes two representative figures. My first aim was that scholars whose work focuses on that particular tradition would agree that the person was a fitting representative. Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster, for example, is my Roman Catholic: as he was formally the leader of the Catholic Church in England, his representativeness is an easy claim to make. A second goal was to try to achieve a gender balance. I would therefore ask...

Hope’s Promise for Christians in the Not Yet and In Between

Hope’s Promise for Christians in the Not Yet and In Between Douglas V. Henry (bio) I. Introduction We naturally fall into habits of thought, into comfortable and convenient ways of drawing distinctions and expressing ideas, and in the ordinary course of things we do not even recognize the exercise of such habits. We simply find ourselves, without special self-awareness, recurring to the tried and true. Sometimes, though, we are jarred into moments of self-critical realization in which we discern that we do not have to think of things as usual. Such opportunities for recasting our imagination over familiar terrain must be cherished; we often make discernible progress in our understanding just on those occasions. In this vein, Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Spe salvi calls us to consider how modernity has tamed the transcendent credentials and horizons of Christian hope, and thus how modernity has domesticated Christians, mostly without our notice. With Francis Bacon’s vision for the restoration of reason, the Pope writes, “The foundations of the modern age” were laid and “a new correlation between science and praxis” was established.1 The resulting “transformation of Christian faith-hope in the modern age” has given rise [End Page 104] to circumstances in which “Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man” (SS, 40, 65). Benedict gravely assesses the consequences: A disturbing step has been taken: up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay “redemption.” Now, this “redemption,” the restoration of the lost “Paradise,” is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times, and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith, which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope. Thus hope too, in Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. (SS, 42) Far from standing exempt from modernity’s recast form of hope, Benedict writes that Christians have fallen prey, often unwittingly, to customary ways of thinking that narrow and distort the scope of faithful witness. As he puts it: “Modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task” (SS, 57). Benedict for these reasons critiques the constrained and false hope engendered by modernity in the general culture as well as within the Church’s own culture. He invites us to share this critical task, writing: A self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what they have [End Page 105] to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity, which must constantly renew its self-understanding setting out from its roots. (SS, 50–51) SS undertakes both of the kinds of self-critique that Benedict identifies, and it calls all faithful followers of Christ to deepen and extend those critiques for the sake of the true hope found in Jesus of Nazareth. SS offers a gift that we should embrace: the gift of being shaken out of stultifying habits of thought and life by being confronted by the ever-renewing wellsprings of genuinely hopeful Christian understanding and witness. Because Christians always need imaginative resources for cooperating with God’s work in the world, we should take Benedict’s message about “the true shape of Christian hope” as a welcome opportunity to reexamine habits of thought typical of Western intellectual life, both...

“You Wouldn’t Shoot Your Fellow Jews”: Jewish Identity & Nostalgia in Joann Sfar’s Klezmer

While many associate the prewar Ashkenazi community with Fiddler on the Roof ’s “Tradition,” Joann Sfar’s Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East (2006) disrupts this comforting image of community with internal violence, crises of faith, and individual isolation. By redefining nostalgia in Svetlana Boym’s terms of “restorative nostalgia” and “reflective nostalgia,” this essay explores how Sfar’s work challenges restorative methods while embracing reflective nostalgic impulses, valorizing the culture of Diaspora within Judaism. Klezmer music, then, becomes a site for Sfar to examine the Ashkenazi past while questioning the role of Zionism in Jewish identity. Is Jewish identity primarily to be found through communal unity and strong shared objectives? Or is Jewish identity more closely related to the tensions and uncertainties of a Diasporic condition?

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Cha...

Gifted to Learn (review)

Reviewed by: Gifted to Learn Jesse Rae Archibald Barber (bio) Gloria Mehlmann . Gifted to Learn. University of Alberta Press. 2008. xv, 326. $24.95 In Gifted to Learn, Gloria Mehlmann recounts her experiences as a First Nations teacher in Regina public schools during the 1960s and 70s. She was a trailblazer in a time when there were no Aboriginal teachers in the education system to mentor her, and no Aboriginal programs to help deal with the stereotyping of Indians that shaped Canada's public policy and filled the schoolbooks of the day. Unhappy with how such material made one more a 'keeper of half-truths' than a teacher, Mehlmann went on to help develop a curriculum that better reflects 'a complete account of Canadian history and culture.' She discusses in detail how she went about this project and includes a brief methodology for teaching Aboriginal history. At the same time, while Mehlmann addresses how public schools tended to overlook the 'unique qualities that make up individuality,' the book does not read as an indictment of society or the education system. She does not dwell on the issues of racism and social divisions, but rather focuses on the difficulties and the success stories common to Aboriginal, Canadian, and immigrant students new to Canada. Although the book is not a typical work of research and criticism, it does not disappoint the academic or historian. Illustrating 'how societal change and reactive policy affects teaching and learning,' Mehlmann chronicles several events of the 1960s and 1970s that provide a backdrop to her teaching career, including the first space flights, the computer age, the Vietnam War, social revolution, the economy, globalization, and women's equality. She reaches further critical depth with her ongoing reflections on how she lost her Indian status through marriage, and, witnessing the general breakdown of the traditional family unit, she [End Page 307] compares the experience of colonization on Indians to the effects that globalization has had on all Canadians. This leads her to recount her own crisis of faith and her views on the existential instability of identity. Despite these weighty historical matters, Mehlmann spares the reader a tedious chronological narrative, but instead organizes her memoir into chapters that contain 'many rooms of psychological time where stories dwell.' From her passion for teaching, her early inspirations and doubts, identifying student learning patterns, engaging with parents, facing discrimination and finding success, she traces the many incidents that shaped her teaching. The book's form is not without its faults, though, as this type of psychological structure often lacks a coherent through line, and the work can meander and get caught up in too much reflection, almost losing its way at times. It can give the impression that we are learning from the same mistakes over and over, just in different ways. However, in a certain sense, this form may reflect the very message of the work - that teaching is a lifelong collaborative learning process, fraught with uncertainties, but always with a goal, even if it is not always direct. 'Real learning takes time' - and this point provides the fundamental pattern to the work, as each of her recollections is accompanied by related stories of her students, colleagues, and her own teachers, all interspersed with an epistolary correspondence with her closest friend and confidant. Thus, the book is not so much a work of analysis as an analogy guided by its main kernel of wisdom: 'Learning to teach comes with the children themselves.' In this way, all of her stories connect with what is most important in her profession: the students, and their remarkable resilience to overcome great obstacles. Mehlmann writes with honesty and insight about one of the most important developments in Canadian education. The work is not only important to Aboriginal educators in Regina, but to educators across Canada, as well as to parents and students. Gifted to Learn is a gift to all learners. Jesse Rae Archibald Barber Jesse Archibald-Barber, Department of English, First Nations University of Canada Copyright © 2011 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Response to Laura Henry's review of Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities

Both the labor and environmental movements have recently experienced significant crises of faith in their ability to mobilize enough popular support to carry on with their respective missions. At a 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a report entitled “The Death of Environmentalism” proclaimed that environmentalism as a special interest group had accomplished its goal of raising awareness but had ultimately failed to galvanize a sustainable social movement. Mirroring that debate within the environmental movement, in 2004 the Service Employees International Union called for major reforms within the AFL-CIO; demanding that the labor federation focus on organizing new workers rather than defending its existing members. This divide within the AFL-CIO ultimately led to the formation of the Change to Win coalition, with several other major unions joining the SEIU in a new reformist coalition federation.

Earthquakes and the Crises of Faith: Social Transformation in Late Antique Cyprus

The fourth century AD marked a watershed change for the development of Cyprus cultural identity. Transformed by external factors, the Cyprus that emerged by AD 400 is recognizably the forerunner of modern Cyprus. A series of earthquakes during the course of that century caused both the traditional pagan religions and the newly visible and vibrant Christianity to undergo crises of faith. The Cypriot pagan response is to reject the temple cult and turn inward following neo-Platonic teachings before quietly fading away. This is inferred from surviving mosaic floors. The Christian response is expressed in a massive campaign of church construction. The theological framework for this expansion is an understanding of the Providence of God as mercy and judgment inseparably together which forms the foundation for the Cypriot church.

<em>Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The ‘‘Darwinians’’ and their Critics</em>, by Bernard Lightman

Reviewed by: Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The 'Darwinians' and their Critics Jim Endersby (bio) Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The 'Darwinians' and their Critics, by Bernard Lightman ; pp. xx + 326. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009, £85.00, $149.95. Bernard Lightman's name is closely connected with two topics that are among the most important for scholars of the Victorian period. His groundbreaking first book, The Origins of Agnosticism (1987), established him as one of the world's most significant scholars of the complexities of the impact of science on Victorian religious faith. More recently, books such as Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) provide important new insights into the lay audiences for Victorian science. These two strands of his work inform most of the essays in the volume under review, the earliest of which dates from 1989, but most of which appeared in the last decade. Discussions of the Victorian crisis of faith traditionally centred on the literate elites, whose diaries, letters, and novels provided the bulk of the primary sources through which scholars assessed the ebbing of the sea of faith. The impact of science-particularly of Alfred Tennyson's "terrible muses," geology and astronomy-was the central focus of such scholarship, but again the emphasis was on the elite writers and readers whose ideas about evolution, energy, and entropy seemed to have had such a profound impact on the [End Page 553] Victorians. In recent decades, however, historians of science have turned their attention away from elite science and its practitioners in an attempt to assess wider questions about scientific audiences and the roles that non-expert readers and writers played in creating, disseminating, and responding to the scientific discoveries that reshaped Victorian Britain (see, for example, James Secord's Victorian Sensation [2000] or Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability [2001]). In several of the essays in this collection, Lightman applies the methods and insights of reception-based histories of science to well-established themes-notably those of faith and doubt-and also to the closely connected question of the professionalisation of Victorian science. Recent scholarship challenges the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas were a banner under which a group of would-be scientific professionals united in order to drive the parson-naturalists and the Oxbridge Anglican elite out of British science. Lightman's introduction shows how inadequate this story has become, particularly the assumption that scientific naturalism-the assumption that nature can be explained entirely by natural as opposed to supernatural causes-became dominant in the late nineteenth century. Lightman instead emphasises the continuing power and influence of Christianity in its many different forms and analyzes the diversity of both those lumped together as professionals and those who opposed them. The latter group, long overlooked as history's losers, are in particular need of greater scholarly attention, and in this volume Lightman makes important contributions toward providing it. Given Lightman's focus on audience and reception, however, it seems appropriate to ask who the audience for the present volume is intended to be. The quality and importance of the scholarship is beyond doubt, but the same cannot be said for Ashgate's publishing strategy. This book is part of their Variorum series, which republishes articles with their original pagination and formatting. The series is presumably intended to facilitate access to items that would otherwise be difficult to find, but with the availability of many scholarly journals online and the fact that most of the essays in the present volume are from edited collections that are still in print, few items are difficult to find in libraries. There are, of course, scholars whose natural medium is the short article, rather than the longer book, and in such cases a collection like this would present an ideal opportunity to assess the overall shape and scope of their work; Lightman is, however, as adept at the monograph as he is at shorter pieces, and he provides overviews of his work in several excellent monographs. One cannot, therefore, help wondering why books like this still appear in the twenty-first century, particularly at such an astronomical cost. Who does Ashgate imagine is going to buy them...

Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine's School for Girls, and: Reading Transtr�mer in Bangladesh, and: En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith, and: To the Bangladeshi Cab Driver in San Francisco

Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine's School for Girls, and: Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh, and: En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith, and: To the Bangladeshi Cab Driver in San Francisco Tarfia Faizullah (bio) Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine's School for Girls Tarfia Faizullah (bio) "If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow." —Orhan Pamuk, Snow Before the hanging cross, the girlstake turns standing at attention beforeus with eyes closed or hands clasped, headbands bright green or banglesyellow, glints that fill the silence likefalling snow. They recite poems they have carried in their mouths for days,and my desire to go back, to be oneamong these slender, long-haired girls is a thistle, sharp and twisting at myside. The words psalm, blessing, lordrise in me like bees heavy with pollen, and the teenager I once was unzipsherself from me, emerges, a crocusbristling through snow. She is back in the old chapel where the priestagain lifts into the air the Bible,declaims about the kingdom of God, gifts promised only the righteous—the girl I was, heavy and slow in herthick glasses, knew she would never enter heaven, never be these young girlssinging, arms pale and slim as the whitebirch whose branches, dappled with gold, [End Page 22] shade the stained-glass window. In Pamuk'snovel, the headscarf girls in Eastern Turkeyhang themselves rather than go uncovered, and still I desire that certainty of conviction,even as the self beside me pulls on her hair,sucks long strands of it deep into her mouth, so I gather her in my arms, shake her, tellher to listen, that the sky will always happen,these branches. Sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, she sings beside thesegirls who will grow into or away from theirbodies, and I know I must push the heavy amber of her back inside me. Help me, Lord.There are so many bodies inside this clumsy one. [End Page 23] Tarfia Faizullah [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="02i" baseline-shift="floatLeft"/] "In a letter to Edward Garnett, Joseph Conrad wrote, 'I feel nothing clearly. And I am frightened when I remember that I have to drag it all out of myself.' These poems, I hope, attempt the impossible task Conrad describes by trying to enact the complexities of both obsessive memory and grief and to show how they rise up in odd and devastating ways in foreign or familiar settings. "Three of these poems, 'Poetry Reading at St. Catherine's School for Girls,' 'Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh' and 'En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith,' owe incomparable debts to three visionary writers whose work I always return to, particularly in the aftermath of difficult losses. Both 'Poetry Reading at St. Catherine's School for Girls' and 'To the Bangladeshi Cab Driver in San Francisco' owe a debt to my awkward and confused younger self, who likes to show up when I least expect it." Tarfia Faizullah's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, diode, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award and is currently based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh Tarfia Faizullah (bio) for Meherunnessa Chowdhury, 1924-2010 i. In Grandmother's house,we are each a room thatmust remain locked. Insideit, a prayer mat carelesslyfolded on a low table, asthough hands that oncepressed down on it are notbelow ground. Who hasstripped bare the whitewalls of the black velvettapestry depicting Ka'bah,house of God? I let inthe netherworld. Somethingrose from underneath. I sit,wait through my cousin'ssobs. This morning, anothersudden loss: a classmate'sdeath, she says. Sordiddetails flare out like sailsof a ship: mother trappedin an asylum, father weeping,son's warm body cradledin his arms, bone still lodgedin his young throat. To whomwould this not be an inelegant...

En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith

En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith

Friends in Warm Places

Friends in Warm Places Michael J. Jarvis (bio) Larry Gragg . The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. x + 192 pp. Map, bibliography, and index. $39.95. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Barbados was the richest, most populous, and economically most productive colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Its planters were the first to embrace a slave plantation system, providing a model that English settlers copied elsewhere in the Caribbean and North America. Successful Barbadian planters displayed their wealth to all through their clothes, lavish entertainments, and fine mansions. The island was among the closest to England and Africa in terms of maritime distances: it was the first port of call for many western-bound English vessels, as well as for the rising tide of English slavers operating on the West African coast. Virginia and Massachusetts are the darlings of many colonial historians, but Barbados was the single most dynamic, trend-setting colony in the half-century before 1700. Considering the vanity, rampant materialism, and brutal slave-based labor regime that characterized seventeenth-century Barbados, one would not expect George Fox's radical Quaker faith to flourish there. And yet Barbados was home to the largest Quaker population in the Americas prior to Pennsylvania's founding. Larry Gragg has followed up his recent general history of early Barbados with a slim but meticulously researched investigation of Barbadian Quakers that is both a community study of island Friends and a recovery of their transatlantic and intercolonial networks and connections. As he charts the rise and decline of Quakers in Barbados from the 1650s through the early eighteenth century, Gragg profiles who became "convinced" and how Quakers dealt with slavery, the ultimate source of the island's prosperity. He argues that Barbadian Quakers formed a counterculture that aggressively challenged the island's dominant planter class, directly and through their example of leading lives of peace, simplicity, and equality within a rigidly hierarchical society.1 Gragg starts with an appraisal of the turbulent times in England from which George Fox and his Society of Friends emerged. Fox grew up in a comfortable "middling" Midlands household and wanted for little until, at [End Page 595] the age of nineteen, he experienced a crisis of faith. Over the next four years, he wandered spiritually through an England wracked with religious and civil discord. Even as Calvinist, Arminian, and Episcopal clergymen debated theology, attacked one another, and sought adherents, a large segment of the English populace remained unchurched and ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Fox floundered within "this confusing milieu of conflicting beliefs and apathy" until he experienced "a mystic union with the divine" and discovered a guiding inner light (p. 14). Further revelations led him to embrace the egalitarian worldview that shaped the central tenets of Quaker belief: rejection of vanity and hierarchy, a commitment to peace, belief in direct divine revelation, and social and gender equality. Rejecting predestination, Fox promised widespread salvation to a nation in spiritual disarray. Established clergymen condemned Fox's "blasphemy," but his message was highly appealing and spread quickly during the 1650s, especially among the families of yeomen and craftsmen in rural northern counties. Despite civil and clerical authorities' vigorous efforts to suppress Fox and his followers, the ranks of England's Quakers swelled to an estimated 50,000 by 1660—and Quaker missionaries and pamphlets were fanning out to Ireland, Continental Europe, and the colonies to spread Fox's radical message even farther afield. The first Quaker itinerants arrived in Barbados in the mid-1650s and found a colony in the midst of dynamic change. As sugar supplanted tobacco and great planters bought out their poor and middling neighbors, settlement patterns established during the island's first decades were radically altered. English political, ecclesiastical, and legal institutions transplanted in Barbados survived the sugar revolution intact, but the island's society and landscape became markedly different from that of England. The growing number of enslaved Africans working under a coercive and oppressive labor regime stoked racism and white fears of violent revolt. As the gulf in wealth between great planters, middling landowners, and the many English and...

Zhang Ziyi and China’s Celebrity–Philanthropy Scandals

In January 2010, the internationally acclaimed Chinese actor, Zhang Ziyi, became a focus of public criticism for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. That earthquake not only killed 70,000 people and left five million homeless, but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in China. Philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan, exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade. Zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in interactive media forums of both charity fraud and generating a nationwide crisis of faith in the philanthropic activities of the rich and famous. Dubbed ‘donation-gate’, the ensuing controversy obliged Zhang Ziyi to hire a team of USA-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the China Daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name. Hence, contrary to claims that celebrity philanthropy is an apolitical mode of philanthropy, an examination of the Zhang Ziyi scandal and its disaster-relief precursors demonstrates that celebrity philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China is a political affair.

Using EMDR With Survivors of Sexual Abuse Perpetrated by Roman Catholic Priests

This article reviews research that investigated the idiosyncratic effects of sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests and makes related treatment recommendations. The research determined that this distinct form of sexual trauma generated unique posttraumatic symptoms not accounted for within the existing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder conceptual frameworks. These included significant anxiety and distress in areas such as theological belief, crisis of faith, and fears surrounding the participant’s own mortality. This article makes recommendations about EMDR treatment with clergy abuse survivors, based on these research findings utilizing a survivor’s story to illustrate case formulation and the utilization of process and content cognitive interweaves in addressing episodes of blocked processing.

“TO FACE APPARENT DISCREPANCIES WITH REVELATION”: EXAMINING THE FOSSIL RECORD IN CHARLOTTE YONGE'S THE TRIAL

Charlotte Yonge placed religious belief at the centre of her world view, yet this did not prevent her from engaging with nineteenth-century geological theories traditionally associated with crises of faith, namely the discovery that the earth pre-dates the existence of humans by millions of years and that forms of life long extinct once populated its surface. Fossils, which call to mind both geological “deep time” and the extinction of species, figure prominently in her 1864 novel The Trial, and Yonge herself avidly collected fossils. Yonge represents fossils in The Trial as buried traces uncovered after an unfathomably long time, and this article will argue that they serve as metaphors for a divine providence which eventually reveals the truth, despite the apparent success of erroneous human judgement. Instead of symptoms of a deep religious anxiety, Yonge's fossils allowed Victorian readers to further appreciate the transcendence of God.

Eucharist (or ‘The Lark Ascending’)

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