Idea Of Sin Research Articles

A cross‐continental conversation about sin and shame with Marcia Blasi and Marit Trelstad

AbstractThis is a cross‐continental conversation about contextual understandings of sin and shame in the context of women in Latin America and Africa, and students in the United States. Marcia Blasi brings the experience of working with women throughout the world in her role in the Lutheran World Federation, and both authors work in Lutheran and feminist theologies. In particular, this interview highlights how individualized understandings of sin, often focused on morality and behavior, serve to shame women and reinforce notions of inferiority in patriarchal systems. In these systems, women are never doing enough for others and pride in one's self is not allowed. At the same time, social understandings of sin as systematic injustice serve to fight against these ideas of sin and the concomitant production of shame because they contextualize a person's actions within a broader culture and its expectations. The authors here seek to understand what real grace means and feels like for female‐identifying people and how confession of sin would be altered if seen through the lens of women globally.

How Holy War became Unholy

Abstract The Livonian war in the second half of the 16th century was understood by its participants within the Christian Providentialist discourse and was seen primarily through the optics of Christian ethics (the idea of sin and its punishment, the idea of ‘God’s penalty’ which every person has to pay as a potential sinner by undergoing pain and trials, the idea of retribution and reward for feats and sins, etc.). Since the war coincided with the aggravation of religious confrontations in the region (Catholics vs Protestants, the Orthodox vs Catholics and Protestants amongst themselves), there were attempts to turn the conflict into something bigger than a war over territories and political ambitions. But the idea of a religious war failed. For Europeans, the religious factor in the Livonian conflict had very little symbolic expression. No cults of Livonian saints, martyrs for the faith, etc. emerged. For the Orthodox Church a number of significant religious and propagandistic actions were organized at the beginning of the war (‘the Narva miracle,’ creation of hagiographic monuments, etc.) that glorified the victory of the Orthodox Cross and Russian arms. However, as the conflict developed, the significance of these actions faded and was reduced to local memory objects. The defense of Pskov from King Stephen Bathory in 1581 was the most resonant and significant event. Its image was embodied in many objects of both local and all-Russian historical memory, which retain their importance to the present day.

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF THE CULTURAL CATEGORY OF SINFULNESS IN THE WORKS OF A. DE CUSTINE AND T. GAUTIER

The cultural category of sinfulness is widely represented in the literature of the 19th century, in particular in the books of A. de Custine “Russia in 1839” and T. Gauthier “Journey to Russia”. The culturological study A. de Custine’s and T. Gautier’s works seems relevant, since the first underlies the background ideas of Europeans about the culture of Russia and it is the basis of permanent myths, and the second belongs to the pen of a famous French writer and arouses the interest of numerous modern scientists. In addition, the works written in the same era represent the presentation of the opposing views of the authors, which provides valuable material for analysis. It is also important to identify and study morphological units of cultural knowledge on a specific material, ensuring its preservation and translation. The aim of the work is to analyze the facts of objectification of the cultural category of sinfulness in the works of A. de Custine “Russia in 1839” and T. Gautier “Journey to Russia” (published in 1867). The main methods of research were the method of continuous sampling from the text of books of fragments and sayings correlated with the idea of sin and the cultural category of sinfulness itself, the method of observing the facts of objectification of cultural categories, the structural and functional method of unit analysis. The results of the work were the analysis of the selected units correlating with the concepts (understood as structural parts of the category) of sin and holiness. In the book of A. de Custine, in describing Russian culture, the concepts of such sins as pride, envy, sloth are objectified. In T. Gautier’s work is represented the concept of holiness in connection with the author’s image of “holy Russia”.

Philosophical dimensions of the concept of health

The article is devoted to the philosophical aspects of interpretation and understanding of the concept of health. The study of the essence of the concept of health allows authors to get a complete picture of the dichotomy of the categories «health» - «disease». In the course of the work, the concept of Health is analyzed from the point of view of its methodological foundations, namely through the prism of holistic epistemology. Using the historical and genetic method, the stages of development of the concept of health from the ancient period to the latest are analyzed and highlighted. It is proved that the concept of Health has been the focus of many researchers for a very long time. Even the first philosophers and healers considered health as a complete complex phenomenon. At the same time, health has long remained on the periphery of research in the philosophy and theory of Medicine. The authors analyzed the concept of health as a basic concept of the philosophy of Medicine, based on the hermeneutical approach and current trends in considering the dichotomy of the categories «health» ‒ «disease» based on holistic epistemology. Using the historical and genetic method, the authors identified the stages of development of the concept of Health. In contrast to the ancient period, when medical knowledge is formed, the basic principles of medical ethics are created, which have not yet lost their relevance (the famous «Hippocratic oath»), in the Middle Ages there is a significant departure from the ancient concept of Health, which is due to a new reading of the idea of integrity. The concept of medieval health is based on the ideas of sin and salvation. Man is devoid of integrity, because from birth he is defined as a sinful being. Life is understood as the path to death in the moment of salvation and resurrection, the transition from a divided, lower existence in sin to a holistic stay with God. Instead of the ancient ideal of harmony of soul and body, the idea of salvation becomes the leading one, which involves giving up bodily desires and mastering spiritual exercises. The transition to the classical concept of Health is taking place in our time and involves an appeal to the physical dimension of Health, the formation of a mechanistic view of the relationship between the categories «health» and «disease», which leads to the loss of a holistic vision of a person. The return to integrity in the interpretation of a person occurs with the formation of a non-classical concept of Health, in which life becomes the main object of study, taking into account rational-objective and irrational-subjective factors. The post-non-classical concept of Health is characterized by the desubstantialization of the categories «health» and «disease». Health is described as an integral phenomenon, an open dynamic system in the unity of biological, psychological, social and environmental factors.

THE EXPRESSION OF DESTRUCTIVE LOVE IN OVID’S HEROIDS WITH EMOTIONAL MEANS

The search of scientists of the XXI century is increasingly focused on a sphere that is not available for direct observation – the sphere of emotions. Therefore, the issue of the emotive component of a literary text at different levels relates to priority areas not only of modern linguistics. Emotions represent the linguistic picture of the artistic universe of the poet, reveal the inner world of his characters. The existential-sensual sphere is a manifestation of the subjective attitude of a person to the surrounding reality and himself in the mental space of the artist. Ovid subtly reproduces the spiritual world of a loving woman in the inexhaustible wealth of emotional manifestations and unique individual identities. The main object of unfortunate love in Heroides is a married woman or hetaera. Ovid is a vivid representative of the sensually-earthly Eros. The ancient man, for whom the idea of sin was extraneous, was not embarrassed by the sensual nature of his love in various forms, focusing all his interest in earthly existence, adored desires. However, the sensual Eros of Heroides with not the happy ending is aesthetically beautiful. Having refused from the usual August poetry themes related to the historical past of Rome or the events of his personal life, Ovid in Heroids turns exclusively to mythological themes, popular in Neo-Téric poetry or Hellenistic poetry, depicting the heroines of Greek mythology and Sappho herself by the psychology of contemporary Roman women. Ovid's Heroides reflects the fact that the psychology of a loving woman has not changed much since the time of the Roman Empire.

‘Smell Your Sheep, Shepherd’: What Does It Mean to Be Catholic for the Dalit?

The anthropology of Christianity has emerged as an exciting field in the last decade or so. Themes of interest for us in India and South Asia in general include issues of caste, conversion and belief, the ideas of sin and morality, individualism, and the like. As part of this growing field, the issue of belief in particular has gained considerable importance. It has been argued that the strict reliance on belief is obstructive and counterproductive for the understanding of non-Western Christianity, particularly where religious affiliations may be shifting rather than stable. Moreover, it has been suggested that belief could be laid aside in favor of the notion of commitment, wherein the latter term encompasses presence, embodiment, shared social location, and the like. This paper argues that while the discourse oscillates between belief on the one hand and commitment on the other, the intermediating term between these might be community. There are social and spiritual divisions, which the available discourse does not immediately allow us to contend with. In the words of one Dalit Catholic, the church must be with its people, the Bishop-Shepherd must ‘smell’ his sheep. This paper will explore how it is precisely the absence of community that Dalit Catholics experience when they find that Christian equality becomes physical separation and Christian fraternity remains outside the social domain and will suggest the implications this has for the anthropology of Christianity.

Conquering Megalomania and Despair: a Niebuhrian Response to the Politico-Economic Impasse

Abstract The works of Reinhold Niebuhr contain invaluable examples of how Christian resources can be fruitfully exploited to address urgent economic and political issues. The ideas of sin and continuous redemption, which arguably belong to the core of the Christian faith, are creatively translated by Niebuhr, so that they can be included in public debates and interdisciplinary dialogues. In this article, his conception of sin as the perversion of the will-to-live into the will-to-power is endorsed. Its counterforce, it is argued, is human love infused with divine love. Love is, therefore, not a simple possibility, which can be applied to our economic and political problems. Instead, it is the impossible possibility, the ultimate and critical perspective from which prevailing forms of justice and philanthropy are judged. Through the public theology of Niebuhr, the ideal of love becomes a universally valid alternative to the rationalist and naturalist approaches to human morality.

Spinoza, Sin as Debt, and the Sin of the Prophets

In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood examines different forms of debt and their various interrelations. Her work invites, but does not provide, an account or philosophy of debt or its deep implication in Christian beliefs such as sin, satisfaction, and atonement. This paper aims to bring to light insights into the link between debt and some aspects of Christian belief, especially the ideas of sin and satisfaction. It draws upon another unlikely source-the Ethics and political treatises of Spinoza. Spinoza’s view at least implies that the idea that sin (understood as the voluntary actions of a free agent) creates a ‘debt’ that is ‘paid’ by punishment is a potentially dangerous ‘fiction.’ Spinoza intuits that the subsumption of the idea of debt into notions of retribution, vengeance, satisfaction, or atonement, are driven by ‘superstition,’ envy, and hatred, and through imitating others’ hateful ideas of oneself. The idea of ‘debt’ is an artefact of civil authority that can only assume affective, normative purchase through internalizing fear of the implicit threat of punishment inherent in law. I will seek, finally, to suggest an implicit critique in Spinoza of the imaginative subsumption of debt into the space of religio.

Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee

Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee

Sickness and healing in the institutional imaginary

Focusing on representations of healing in institutional spaces in Middle English religious texts, this essay analyses the ways that medicine and medical practice underpin the ideas of sin and salvation. I argue that this relationship between medicine and religion is achieved through recourse to a register common to both spheres. I consider three examples – the injunctions of a monastic customary pertaining to its infirmary, a hagiography set in a prison, and a visionary account of purgatory – and show how they share an institutional imaginary predicated on the integration of punishment, marginalisation, and care. Such an analysis, informed by Foucauldian perspectives on space and power, contributes to the medical humanities by emphasising the importance of discourse both in affirming institutional hierarchies and questioning them.

“I Always Have the Idea of Sin in My Mind. …”: Family of Origin, Religion, and Chilean Young Gay Men

This research aimed to explore the influences of family's values and religiosity on the sexual identity life course of Chilean young gay men. Volunteer participants were recruited through invitations published by two sexual minority organizations based in Santiago. Six same-sex-attracted Chilean men between 18 and 24 years old were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to explore how discourses about their sexual identity development were constructed, including the implications for subjectivity and the location of these compressions within a social and historical context. Findings revealed feelings of self-rejection and self-recrimination featured in the life course development of participants’ sexual identities that were embedded within the familiar and sociohistorical context in which they lived. In particular, parents’ religious beliefs regarding the abnormal and unnatural view of “homosexuality” shaped by Catholic and Evangelical churches played a crucial role in lack of acceptance during their development. The study showed the internal struggle faced by these Chilean young gay men to achieve their own acceptance and perceived normalization of their sexual orientation. Implications for therapy and education with young gay men living in a predominantly Christian cultural context and Latino countries are reviewed.

Daddy

Daddy Molly Haskell (bio) Seasoned with Oedipal Sin—Daddy Review, Village Voice, 1973 I know there are a great number of people, among them some of my best friends, who live in perfect harmony with their libidos, like a man and his dog. They (the libidos) sit, unleashed, by their mistress's side, never misbehaving, asking only for a regular outing where they frisk up but never stray too far afield. These are the lucky women who somehow managed to escape the scars of sexual repression. They took to the whole business like a duck takes to water—they have glowingly healthy sex lives (although they don't look any different from you or me), they bounce around on water beds, make it in taxi cabs, and indulge in a little spouse-swapping at the drop of an after-dinner hint. But I tend to be of the order indicated by Luis Bunuel, who was quoted by Carlos Fuentes in his excellent recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine Section as saying, "Sexual plea sure for me is directly linked with the idea of sin and only exists in a religious context." We don't have to light candles on Saints' days to feel the permanent guilt of sexual transgression. And the sense of sin associated with Oedipal desire may be the most powerful source of eroticism there is. It is in the memory-mold of a Catholic girlhood and a lecherously hovering Daddy-figure that English sculptress Niki de St. Phalle, in conjunction with director Peter Whitehead, casts her first film. "DADDY," which may turn out to be the most controversial of the New Directors Series at the Museum of Modern Art (although advance rumors that "Men hate it, women love it" always make me want to join the other team) is a three-part fantasy in which Niki de St. Phalle as Agnes I, and the two girls who play the snaggle-tooth [End Page 610] moppet Agnes II and the convent-chaste Lolita Agnes III, expose, abuse, tantalize, torture, and finally fling their collective arms around the memory of a father who in life alternated between indifference to and lust for his daughter, but who has finally shaped her emotional pattern as inalterably as Fate. I have made the film sound conceptually coherent whereas it is actually something more and less—a wildly uneven succession of images, of black-and-white and color photography, cartoons, collage, sculpture, action desecration, destructivist art, charades and masquerades, with a look that falls between avant-garde de cadence and soft-core pornography. Titillating passages alternate with dull, plodding ones; terrible dialogue contrasts with occasional electrifying images, and poor acting with provocative ideas. Its cavalierly pursued structure is a progression or—depending on how you look at—retrogression from child to adult. In the first section, the attempt to exorcise the father by envisioning him as a kind of comic Count Dracula in a combination high-school play horror film doesn't work on any level. The foppish German father becomes an unequal match for the girl (at one point she almost succeeds in killing him by kicking him down the steps to see if his blind man's bluff is just a bluff) in a stylized mini-film whose point of view is that of neither the frightened child nor the ironic adult, but seems rather to emanate from the sexual and artistic no man's land of adolescence. The second, where she actually caters to the prurient fantasies of the father (bound in a wheelchair) is ironically the most effective. First (or, as they kept saying on the Academy Awards, firstly) Agnes I has adolescent Agnes shimmy and slowly remove her schoolgirl frock in front of an altar, the centerpiece of a church that is actually a bar, with mirror-top tables and leering playboys. Then she instructs her in the arts of seduction and feigned orgasm. (This provides the occasion of the film's one great line: after the child has given a most convincing display of autoeroticism and ecstasy, her mentor tells her, "You'll make a great actress." "No, I won't," she replies, "I...

Discovering God: the origins of the great religions and the evolution of belief

Discovering God is a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone to the Modern Age. Sociologist Rodney Stark surveys the birth and growth of religions around the world--from the prehistoric era of primal beliefs; the history of the pyramids found in Iraq, Egypt, Mexico, and Cambodia; and the great Axial Age of Plato, Zoroaster, Confucius, and the Buddha, to the modern Christian missions and the global spread of Islam. He argues for a free-market theory of religion and for the controversial thesis that under the best, unimpeded conditions, the true, most authentic religions will survive and thrive. Among his many conclusions: Despite decades of faulty reports that early religions were crude muddles of superstition, it turns out that primitive humans had surprisingly sophisticated notions about God and Creation.The idea of sin appeared suddenly in the sixth century BCE and quickly reshaped religious ideas from Europe to China.Some major world religions seem to lack any plausible traces of divine inspiration.Ironically, some famous figures who attempted to found Godless religions ended up being worshiped as Gods.Most people believe in the existence of God (or Gods), and this has apparently been so throughout human history. Many modern biologists and psychologists reject these spiritual ideas, especially those about the existence of God, as delusional. They claim that religion is a primitive survival mechanism that should have been discarded as humans evolved beyond the stage where belief in God served any useful purpose--that in modern societies, faith is a misleading crutch and an impediment to reason. In Discovering God, award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark responds to this position, arguing that it is our capacity to understand God that has evolved--that humans now know much more about God than they did in ancient times.

Wiccanomics?

This paper looks at the doctrines of ‘Wicca’, or what might be termed as pagan or white magic by its adherents, in terms of the economics of religion. The primary focus of the paper is the issue of the degree of product differentiation involved from established religion in terms of two things: the concept of God (or deities) and the ideas of sin. The main contribution of the paper is that it presents (for the first time ever, so far as the author is aware) an economic analysis of the doctrine of a ‘rebound’ effect of any attempts to do harm to other people through the practice of magic. Some basic microeconomic concepts suggest that the moral force of this rebound law is a difficult one to sustain except under very unreasonable assumptions.

Missing the Mark

Abstract In this article, the idea of sin and a significantly altered version of Winnicott's potential space are brought together to depict the complex relational and psychological dynamics of sin in counseling interactions. From this perspective, sin signifies the total or partial collapse of potential spacesubjugation to the other's constructed representations, which includes the absence of recognition of one's assertions and the concomitant negation of the other's desires and needs, and overwhelming experiences of distrust, betrayal, and hopelessness that attend chaotic disruption and associated hopelessness of repair. In those moments, there is reduced potential subjectivity, spontaneity, agency, communion, value, aliveness, meaning, and continuity unless the other is confronted with his/her sin. It is argued that this perspective accounts for the presence of multiple self-states as well as oft-neglected aspects of the client-counselor interaction. Specifically, this view draws attention to the shifti...

“Sin” talk as postmodern text: A view from savvy insiders

This article presents clergy members’ talk of “sin” as postmodern text. Definitions and negotiations of sin are examined from the perspectives of 72 people interviewed. Ideas of sin as textual symbol of identity and indicator of social address are proposed. The implications of the meanings attached to sin for postmodernism and the project of sociology are addressed.

Anxiety and religious growth: A talmudic perspective

A religious person's commitment to the ideas of sin and penitence represents an aspect of religious life that is inextricably tied to that religionist's sense of being and self-understanding. Penitence and the feeling of regret following sin are mechanisms by which one rises from the pitfall of sin and reverts to or perhaps surpasses one's pretransgression status. Repentance, in other words, can be understood as a return to status quo at the minimum level and further strengthening of one's spiritual status at the optimum level. As anticipated by the ancient kabbalistic Zohar, "There is a higher and lower order of penitence. If a man repents of his evil deeds and ceases to do them again, this is the lower form. If he repents of his evil deeds and strives to perform good deeds, this penitence is the higher type."1 The rabbis of the Talmud (a post-biblical compilation of law and extralegal material redacted ca. 500 CE) were also keenly sensitive to the role played and the function served by penitence for the religious personality. Further, as recognized empiricists and pragmatists, the rabbis often speculated and theo rized about matters universal as well as specifically Jewish. Therefore, many of their astute observations applied and are still relevant to all mankind. This is especially the case with regard to their theories about psychology, or what we today would call psychology. In view of this, I would like to discuss in this paper the talmudic conception of the nature and relevance of penitence and its related emotional states?not only as psychological and religious phenomena sui ge neris, but also as phenomena with great meaning for man's existence-as-such.

The Idea of Sin in the Modern World

The Idea of Sin in the Modern World