Idea Of Grace Research Articles

Grace, the Body, and the Aesthetic in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

This essay revisits J. M. Coetzee’s representation of Friday’s body in his 1986 novel Foe in the context of his long-standing interest in the idea of grace. Through a reading of Friday’s dancing in Foe, I argue that Coetzee’s representation of Friday consistently invokes grace as a physical and aesthetic concept, rather than the theological emphasis that has prevailed in critical discussions to date. The reading is amplified by evidence from the Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, which points towards Coetzee’s engagement in the early 1980s with the work of German writer Heinrich von Kleist and his ‘On the Puppet Theatre’. I draw on contemporary scholarship that revisits aesthetic theory, the backdrop for Kleist’s dialogue, in the context of the transatlantic slave trade in order to understand the implications of Coetzee’s use of the figure of the puppet and the significance of grace as an aesthetic concept for his novel.

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

An Ultramontane Jansenist? Charles Hersent's Panegyric of St Louis (1650)

Viewed with hindsight, the link between Jansenism and Gallican resistance to papal pronouncements can seem inevitable. Before 1653, however, Rome's reluctance to commit itself unambiguously to condemning Jansen's ideas of grace made the idea of gaining papal support conceivable to some of his supporters. This article examines one hitherto ignored moment: the panegyric delivered in Rome by Charles Hersent, whose career in controversy combined ultramontane views with Jansenist theology. The episode reveals the broader volatility of these years, often missing from accounts that present the condemnation of Jansenism as inevitable, and the fact that Jansenism was not yet fused with Gallicanism.

Flannery O'Connor: la violencia y la gracia

Este artículo es resultado de la lectura de algunos relatos de Flannery O’Connor desde la perspectiva del llamado “gótico americano”. El propósito es explorar el tema de la violencia que predomina en la narrativa de esta autora acompañado de su idea de la gracia, en el sentido cristiano del término. O’Connor era una escritora profundamente católica y en sus cuentos busca que la gracia llegue no sólo a sus personajes sino también a sus lectores. Se trata de una suerte de revelación que puede tener lugar en su conciencia a partir de una experiencia terrible que lostransforma.

Catholic Predilections in the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Seamus Heaney

AbstractSeamus Heaney has reiterated the importance of Gerard Manley Hopkins in shaping his own poetic voice. This essay studies the way Hopkins’s and Heaney’s poetics are related to their Catholic formation. While their sacramental approaches to language and their ideas of grace and self-discipline result in similar linguistic and formal features in their poems, the two poets’ different understandings of the temporality of the world/Word also gives rise to the contrast between Hopkins’s poetic rendering of dynamic, variegated existence and Heaney’s vision of a realm of “verbless” purity. Based on an understanding of the world as everoccurring Incarnation, Hopkins’s poems often foreground a dialogic, transgressive element, trying to capture the vivifying principle of the Word, whereas Heaney’s anxiety to override the contingencies of time gradually lures him to a visionary space where time is momentarily suspended and actions frozen.

Reason, grace and charity: Augustine and the impact of church doctrine on the construction of intellectual disability

This paper examines how early church doctrine influenced the construction of and response to intellectual disability. Though the main focus of the paper is on intellectual disability, much of the discussion is more broadly relevant to other types of impairments and human differences. The vehicle for this examination is the work of the key figure in the development and codification of church doctrine, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430 CE). The paper concludes that while church doctrine mitigated the stark association of reason and human value found in classical Greek thought, it did not engender an attitude of equality in this world. The ideas of grace and the ‘divine plan’, while opening up a limited space for acceptance and broad equality in the eyes of God, also reinforced and legitimated an inferior position in this world, leaving those considered to have an intellectual disability on the margins of social life and subject to a charity ultimately undertaken for the salvation of the giver, rather than for the welfare of the recipient. Subsidiary themes related to the construction of intellectual disability, such as ‘object lessons to the wise’ or as ‘monsters’, use as sources of amusement, innocence and their association with children and the charity ethic, are also examined.

William Collins, grace and the “cest of amplest power”

The aesthetic concept of “grace” has usually been neglected by scholars in favour of the Burkean sublime. This article aims to contextualise the complexity of the idea of grace by relating it to discussions of ethics, religion and literature, considering, among others, critics such as Shaftesbury, William Warburton, John Gilbert Cooper and Schiller. William Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1746) will be read against the complexity of this idea; especially one image, that of the “cest of amplest power,” the cestus of chastity (Spenser) and inspiration (Collins), will be considered as a medium through which poetic inspiration can be conferred on the supplicating poet. Collins’s rewriting and inverting of traditional (creation) gender stereotypes, the ambivalent mythological figure of Aphrodite, Spenser’s Florimel episode as well as Collins’s manipulations of myths and texts culminate in a unique application of the concept of grace which testifies to the importance that such an important poet as Collins assigned to it.

'Certain Sweet Movements' the Development of the Concept of Grace in 15th-Century Italian Dance and Painting

The history of court dance and the history of the manners of courtly society have often been seen as analogous. One of the reasons for this is that the concept of'grace' is central in both these activities. While scholars such as Mark Franko have established the similarity between the dance and courtly behaviour for the 16th century,' the same has not been done for the 15th century. Franko hypothesised that this similarity existed in both centuries, but while his reference to dance relied on both 15th and 16th century material, he used only 16th century courtesy literature to establish the norms of courtly behaviour. This paper, then, shifts the emphasis back. It argues that fifty years before Castiglione, and one hundred years before Stefano Guazzo and Giovanni Della Casa, the concept of 'grace' was already significantly present in courtly society. After a short preface summarising the 16th century idea of grace, as exemplified in Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, this paper draws upon fifteenth-century Italian dance treatises and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on painting to establish the distinctive character of earlier attitudes to it. The notion of grace in Alberti's work is shown to be very similar to that in the dance treatises, supporting the view that, in the 15th century as well as the 16th century, the emphasis on 'grace' in dance reflected general attitudes in courtly society.

Inner-Worldly Individualism and the Institutionalization of Puritanism in Late Seventeenth-Century New England

This paper argues that one important « moment » in the development of the modern notion of the ethically autonomous individual was predicated on a particular set of historical circumstances connected with the transformation of Puritanism in the late seventeenth century. These included : a) the introjection within the individual of a particular dimension of grace; b) the development of a new set of individual and collective identities; c) the emergence of the above as a result of the particular problems of institutionalizing Puritan salvational doctrines within the orders of the world. Argument is made that these developments can only be properly appreciated when treated as a particular instance of the articular instance of the articulation and institutionalization of charisma in society. Analysis concentrates on seventeenth-century New England Congregational Puritanism as a paradigmatic case of the institutionalization of sectarian or ascetic-Puritanism. The problems of the early communities of « visible saints » to construct a polity based on « grace are analysed in terms of the particular contradictions inherent to Puritan ideas of grace as a charismatic model for social and political organization