Vision Of Relations Research Articles

Disrupted biographies and gendered identities: A qualitative study exploring sexuality and blood cancer

PurposeThis study examines how blood cancer impacts patients’ sexuality and sense of gendered identity. MethodsAn interpretive epistemological framework necessitated a qualitative study design. Participants (6 male and 6 female), recruited from a hospital Haematology department in a large Northern English City, took part in semi-structured in-depth interviews to gather rich data about their subjective experiences. ResultsA key theme from the qualitative data was a sense of disruption in relation to several aspects of their gendered identities and sexual life. Participants explained disruption to their sexual function and sexual sense of self. They narrated concerns about future imagined relationships. The emotional burden of sexuality related concerns was strongly articulated. A gendered perspective enabled the similarities and differences between men and women to be explored. ConclusionThis study, drawing on rich qualitative data, documents the sexuality concerns of blood cancer patients; for some such concerns arise many years post treatment. The findings highlight the need for gender appropriate care around sexuality which should continue to be accessible well after diagnosis and treatment phases have ceased.

Cartographic Anxiety on the Thar Desert: The Border Security Force and Jaisalmer’s Tanot Mata Mandir

The spatiality of the Tanot Mata Temple, in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, places it at the crossroads of religion and nationalism. Firstly, its location near the international border makes it a marker of territorial integrity as well as the bearer of a ‘cartographic anxiety’ which aspires to keep the periphery intact and unharmed. Secondly, its spatiality is defined in terms of majoritarian religious beliefs which have been shaped in postcolonial India over a period of cultural and ideological interactions between the dominant and the marginal, mainstream and vernacular. Despite its past, which attests to fluid regional connections and itinerant migratory circuits, the temple’s sacredness operates today within a repository of visual registers which celebrates a specific kind of patriotism that is both exclusive and retaliatory. This paper will discuss a range of literary and visual material that establishes the temple’s legend on precincts founded on an imagined relationship of the citizen with the land.

Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence by Neil ten Kortenaar

Reviewed by: Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence by Neil ten Kortenaar Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (bio) Neil ten Kortenaar. Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence. McGill-Queen's UP, 2021. Pp. 282. CAD $34.95. In several of his essays and public engagements, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe underscores the power of literature to re-educate people and revamp the maligned identities of marginalised social groups or colonised nations. In his book Hopes and Impediments (1988), the chapter on "The Novelist as Teacher" articulates his stance on the pedagogic role writers can play in society, stating that literature should be applied to the re-education of Africans. Neil ten Kortenaar's Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence illustrates this point in engaging prose, delineating how African writers attempt to project their vision of the state and society shortly after their countries emerged out of colonial rule. The literary scholar and academic extols Achebe as a pedagogue, framing his novels as invested in political education and citizenship formation in pre-independence Nigeria. Kortenaar stages his arguments through ten chapters, demonstrating a firm grasp of African literary traditions. The introduction presents methodological and theoretical contexts and prefaces how Achebe and his fellow African writers conceive of and contend with the emergence of the modern state, a colonial inheritance. Kortenaar's methodology is framed by the question of faith, or more precisely, trust, which he contends is political—and economical, I should add. The principle of trust organizes his careful reading of novels by African authors. Kortenaar explains trust in terms of credit, debt, and reciprocity, showing how it is central to the imagined relationship between the writer and the reader and between the citizen and the modern state. Achebe and his cohorts recognize the need to gain their readers' trust in literature and its potential to imagine a new nation, one founded more on interpersonal reciprocity and less on total submission (a characteristic of the colonial regime). As Kortennar argues, the first generation of Nigerian novelists embraced realist fiction because it illuminated "the connection between that genre and political formation, between readers and citizens, and they were concerned with creating citizens" (8). Kortenaar's choice of novels set in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods shows how African writers have been thinking about questions of trust, power, succession, legitimacy, and sovereignty. Moreover, he demonstrates that the idea of the state was never absent from the cultural imaginary of African writers, regardless of the period in which they lived. [End Page 157] The first three chapters of the book focus on the characters of Unoka and Okonkwo, father and son, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). In Chapter One, "Crediting African Literature," Kortenaar argues that Achebe created Okonkwo to show that trust and creditworthiness underpin moral character. Chapter Two, "Reciprocity," states that the precolonial Igbo democracy was built on a relational structure of gifts and debts, underlining how reciprocity can function to ensure social justice. And Chapter Three, "Sovereign Debt," considers the subject of sacrifice, especially if an individual is indebted to a sovereign authority symbolized by the gods or the state. The preceding chapters, thus, reveal how the establishment of the modern state in Africa changed the notion of debt and social relations. In a stateless or village society, such as the precolonial Igbo nation, debt was based on reciprocity, and individuals were expected to repay their debt as a matter of faith. Therefore, an interpersonal debt system shaped the relationship between the creditor and the debtor. However, the modern state supplanted this system with its rule of law and instituted itself as an "impersonal creditor" to whom every citizen was indebted infinitely. This form of debt was unrepayable so long as the individual was living within the state's territory. While Chapter Four, "Of Confidence and Markets," explores how tricksters undermine trust and the social order, tracing the contrast between Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) in their narratives of market exchange, Chapter Five, "Women and the Cowrie Zone," identifies Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966) as an example of the market...

Australian Squatter Space 1850–1880

Young men of empire seeking their fortune in Australia incorporated violence against Indigenous people into their lives as part of leisure. This derived from the persona created by romanticism. Squatters created an emotional community that valued capital at the expense of family and emphasised uniformity, they were a transitory people travelling to England and Europe. They held a specific relationship to the Aboriginal polity in which they lived and a loose and imaginative relationship to government. This paper explores squatter space as they saw it.

New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy

New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy

The Lutheran transformation of passion devotion, 1520–1560, and lessons for today

AbstractThis article examines how early Lutheran authors transformed three pedagogical strategies prominent in late‐medieval passion books: the use of Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as models for feeling in relationship to Christ; graphic depiction of Christ's wounded body; and the practice of “composition of place,” that is, imagining oneself in the scene of the crucifixion. It argues that early Lutheran authors transformed these strategies to equip lay Christians to endure temporal setbacks and persecution; they were to find Christ's body in the present, in themselves and their neighbors, and to discern invulnerability and triumph underneath the apparent opposite. This article commends practices of imagined relationship to Christ and of reading the present through the passion for Christians and the church today. Equally important are the warnings about human vulnerability to deceit found in these texts, which insist on the interconnection of discernment, feeling, and relationship.

A paradigm for assessing adults' and children's concepts of artificially intelligent virtual characters

Children's social networks are filled with real and imagined relationship partners, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have generated a host of possible relationships with virtual characters. However, little is known about how children conceptualize virtual characters, and how they might be viewed as friendship partners. These studies were designed to develop a paradigm for investigating children's concepts of virtual characters. In Study 1, items were developed that could be used in a task with children. Adults (N = 144) attributed a range of properties (biological, psychological, and social) to four child agents: a real child, a child on a video chat program, an AI child, and a doll. Items that captured adult concepts were used in a task with children (N = 30; aged 5 to 8 years old). This task was designed to: (a) control for idiosyncratic features of the four child agents, (b) enable the expression of uncertainty, and (c) assess concepts of reciprocal relationships. In Study 1, adults did not differentiate between the AI child and the doll on the social property; however, a subset of adults favored the AI child over the doll for sharing secrets. In Study 2, a subset of children indicated a preference for the doll over the AI child on opportunities for reciprocal love and companionship. These findings suggest that virtual characters afford select social opportunities that may differ between adults and children, raising further questions as to the design goals for virtual characters and the functions they serve in our day-to-day lives.

Imitation of Life: Cinema and the Moral Imagination

The influence of film's compelling images, characters and storylines has polarized perspectives on cinema and the moral imagination. Does film stimulate the audience's imagination and foster imitation in morally dangerous ways, or elicit ethical insight and empathy? Might the presentation of images on screen denude the capacity to conjure images in the mind's eye, or cultivate the imaginative capacity for moral vision as spectators attend to the plight of protagonists? Using Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) to interrogate paradoxical perspectives on the cinematic imagination, this article develops an account of the moral imagination focusing on sensory, emotional and empathic aspects of the audience's imaginative relationship with screen characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings.

Here Come the ‘Computer People’: Anthropomorphosis, Command, and Control in Early Personal Computing

Drawing on advertising and promotional materials for early microcomputers, I argue that anthropomorphization, or endowing the machine with human qualities, was central to the imagined relationship between computers and computer hobbyists of Silicon Valley in the late 1970s. These visions of the “personal” computer were tied tightly to male fantasies of dominance, command, and control; through the subordination of machines, this discourse elevated hobbyist status as part of a new “computer priesthood” while retaining a narrow, exclusionary definition of “computer person.”

Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris

Reviewed by: Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational ed. by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris Corey L. Twitchell Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, eds. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Hardcover $85, ebook $69.95. ISBN 978-0472130122, 0-47213-012-9. Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, edited by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, represents a valuable contribution to German Studies, Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, Transnational Studies, and Memory Studies, to name but just the most striking interdisciplinary points of contact in which the fourteen smartly wri en and convincingly argued essays contained in this volume productively engage. As its title suggests, this collection not only delves into the entanglements of German and Jewish in German-Jewish culture and history but also investigates the wider cultural, historical, linguistic, and political ramifications when the "bilateral relationship between German Jews and non-Jewish Germans" is further complicated by a third, far-reaching component: transnationalism. (1) Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin's life and work and with specific reference to his 1928 collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street, Three-Way Street is energized by the German Jewish philosopher's approach to historiography, reflecting "the urgency of collecting the fragments and pieces of the past as they are about to recede and [the insistence] on the necessity of reading history as a collection of fragments, as part of a constellation rather than a chronology of events." (1) Combining the multivalent concept of the "transnational" as formulated by Young-Sun Hong with a Benjaminian impulse toward uncoupling the teleological from the historical, Three-Way Street tells many different stories about real and imagined relationships between Germans, Jews, German Jews, Eastern European Jews, Jewish immigrants to the United States and other countries (to name just a handful of permutations), bringing to the fore the highly complex, crisscrossing nature of history, geography, language, and politics when mapped onto the very real human experiences of exile, immigration, and migration. From within this transnational network, the German-speaking world endures as a literal and figurative point of departure for the essays in this volume, for "Germany was an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture, including religious practice, philosophy, literature, and art beyond Germany." (7) Three-Way Street is divided into three sections. Part 1, "To Germany, from Germany: The Promise of an Unpromised Land?" recalibrates "the discussion about Jews and Germans from one of a static one-way street of emigration and exile to a fuller discussion of the complex and ongoing entanglements of Jews and Germans." (9) To this end, Deborah Her examines the fascinating financial, geographical, and philosophical zigzagging that characterized revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg's life, both public and private. Jeffrey Grossmann "seeks to reverse the optic and to consider the impact of German and German-Jewish culture on Sholem Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Anna Margolin, and Der Nister," (10) and Ofer Ashkenazi explores the intersections between photography, filmmaking, and Zionist politics in his essay on Helmar Lerski's 1935 Avodah (Work), a film that takes [End Page 260] inspiration from German classics such as Metropolis to construct a Zionist vision of the future. Alan Levenson discusses what he terms the "triple immersion" that helped shape the lives and work of twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals Joseph Soloveitchik, Jacob Ka, Nehama Leibowi, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Part 2, "Germany, the Portable Homeland," engages with "the canonical notion of Jewish culture formulated by German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who famously declared not Germany but rather the Hebrew Bible the 'portable Homeland,' to consider various textual reimaginings of Germany." (11) Jay Geller takes a fresh look at the intricate relationships between Germany and the various members of the Scholem family, looking closely not only at Gershom (Gerhard) and the lingering "Germanness" of his identity after se ling in pre-state Palestine, but also at the fate and ultimately ambivalent a itudes of his brothers Reinhold and Erich. Michael Berkowi discusses the transnational issues that underpinned the photography of Walter and Helmut Gernsheim, German-Jewish émigrés in Britain, while Richard Mc-Cormick offers a tantalizing portrait of the Eastern...

Utopian Possibility in the Apocalyptic Era: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

현대는 유토피아 상상력을 대신하여 아포칼립스 상상력이 지배하는 시대이다. 근대를 지배했던 꿈을 깨뜨리는 것이 생존의 힘이자 윤리라고 인식하는 흐름이 비평적 주류를 형성하고 있다. 종말론 이후의 폐허가 인간이 직면해야 할 세계로 인식되고 있다. 이런 종말론의 세계에서 현재와 다른 질서, 다른 미래를 상상하는 유토피아 담론은 과격한 비판의 대상이 되거나 담론의 재조정을 요구받고 있다. 이 글은 종말론 담론의 압도적 위세 속에서 유토피아 담론이 종말론과 갖는 관계를 이론적으로 검토해보고, 이를 코맥 맥카시의 작품에서 구체적으로 점검한다. 맥카시의 『로드』는 생존과 선, 절망과 희망이 길항하는 소설이다. 『로드』는 비인간성의 한가운데서 인간이 되는 길을 선택하고, 인간과 세계의 질적 변화를 추구함으로써 미래를 열어놓는다. 이 글은 『로드』를 사로잡는 생존과 도덕, 파괴와 구원의 길항을 아포칼립스적 상상력과 유토피아적 상상력의 경합과 결합이라는 관점에서 접근함으로써 현대 문화의 지평에서 사라진 듯 보이는 유토피아 상상의 출현양상을 살펴본다. 이런 관점은 희망과 구원을 값싼 감상성이나 휴머니즘으로의 퇴행으로 읽어내는 주도적 비평흐름에 맞서 유토피아 상상을 복원하는 의미를 지닌다. 종말 이후의 동물화된 세계에 대한 사실주의적 기술과 아버지의 멜랑콜리적 시선, 부자가 나누는 베케트적 대화와 아들의 언어를 통해 드러나는 그의 윤리적 차이, 그리고 소설 말미에 덧붙여진 자연묘사는 작품에서 아포칼립스적 상상과 유토피아적 상상이 표현되는 특징적 양태이다.Contemporary world can be characterized by the dominance of apocalyptic imagination. Shattering modern utopian dreams is accepted both as a viable survival force and an ethical position, which are represented as apocalyptic narrative. This article examines the relationship of utopian imagination with apocalyptic imagination in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The Road is a novel that tells a mythical story and touches contrasting yet opposite values, good and evil, hope and despair. This article discusses how McCarthy’s novel is playing with opposites as its discourse contains elements of utopia as well as apocalypse. Realistic descriptions of animal-like world after the unknown disaster and the father’s melancholic view, Beckettian dialogue between the father and the boy and the latter’s ethical difference through his verbal act and moral action, and nature poems in the epilogue are three distinctive modes through which apocalyptic imagination and utopian imagination are represented in the novel.

Where was I? Taking alternative visual perspectives can make us (briefly) misplace our own.

How do we imagine what the world looks like from another visual perspective? The two most common proposals-embodiment and array rotation-imply that we must briefly imagine either movement of the self (embodiment) or movement of the scene (array rotation). What is not clear is what this process might mean for our real, egocentric perspective of the world. We present a novel task in which participants had to locate a target from an alternative perspective but make a manual response consistent with their own. We found that when errors occurred they were usually manual responses that would have been correct from the computed alternative perspective. This was the case both when participants were instructed to find the target from another perspective and when they were asked to imagine the scene itself rotated. We interpret this as direct evidence that perspective-taking leads to the brief adoption of a computed perspective-a new imagined relationship between ourselves and the scene-to the detriment of our own, egocentric point of view.

Love In A Cold Climate

It’s tempting to think that the genesis for the bleak Polish film Cold War came when director Pawel Pawlikowski picked up a copy of Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry , read Chapter 1, “On The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” struck his forehead with his fist

Spatial poetics, place, non-place and storyworlds: Intimate spaces for metaverse avatars

Abstract This article will ask questions that connect the conceptions of Marc Augé's 'place/non-place' and Gaston Bachelard's 'poetic space' to the avatar of real-time, perpetual, online, three-dimensional virtual builder's worlds, also known as the metaverse. Are metaverses 'places' or 'non-places'? Do we actually live in the metaverse or do we just traverse these worlds very much in the sense that Marc Augé defines them as transitional loci that are assigned only to circumscribed and specific positions? The question following from this is whether there are nevertheless three-dimensionally embodied virtual spaces that go beyond being transitional 'non-places' to locations in which an imaginative relationship to architecture in the sense in which Bachelard describes them in his seminal work or that correspond to Marc Augé's definition of 'place' exist.

The Jew and the Odalisque: Two Tropes Lost on the Way from Classic Orientalism to Islamophobia

Contemporary Islamophobic discourses lack two of the important figures of classic orientalism: (1) the “Jew” as an “oriental” ethnoreligious figure akin to “Muslim,” and (2) of the “harem” as an eroticized trope of male domination. Their near-disappearance signals that Islamophobia is no longer entirely generated by the same impulses as the classic orientalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Islamophobia is defined by hostility to Muslims, but classic orientalism also included other forms of affect. Islamophobia imagines Islam and Muslims as the irredeemably Other, with no links to the Christian traditions of the West, while classic Orientalism typically saw Islam as a Semitic religion akin to Judaism, and therefore as representing an inferior but nevertheless related form of civilization to Christianity. The “Semitic race,” too, was held to be white, while Islamophobia today has contributed to the racialization of the prototypical Muslim as “brown.” The imagined relationship between Christianity and Islam in twenty-first-century Islamophobia recognizes no historical and theological contiguity, and has replaced supersession with the clash of civilizations as the form of imagining the relationship between the West and Islam and Muslims. The clash of civilization concept has no use for the harem inmate, a figure that, as the target of overt desire, had not been entirely removed into absolute alterity. This image of the lascivious Orient was connected to that of the Semitic Jew, the “Jewess” being the trope in classical orientalism that united the gendered biblical imagination with the orientalist. To be sure, in spite of the large affective gamut of classic orientalism it was still at its core a discourse of colonial power and white supremacy. It is just that, with the disappearance of the two complex tropes of the Semitic Jew and the harem inmate in contemporary Islamophobia, the unadorned nucleus of orientalism has been starkly revealed, and everything else has been shed.

The Rarest of Senses

The Rarest of Senses Monique Truong (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 120] WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger. Hunger at its most basic is the lack of food, and therefore a body’s need and craving for food. If we are very lucky in this world, we feel hunger as a minor physical discomfort that can be readily sated: a sandwich to go, a bag of chips from a vending machine, a cup of soup in the microwave. Hunger, of course, can also mean a craving for something that food represents or promises but somehow has failed to deliver to us. The ritual of sitting down to a meal, is this not the theater of community and family? Eating a dish prepared by someone who cares for you and your well-being, is this not the tangible representation of love and caring? Then, there’s the intake of flavors, vivid and deep, nurtured by the sunlight above and the earth beneath our feet, is this not the epitome of a sense of place and the pleasure of belonging? It’s this latter form of hunger—the hunger of the spirit more so than the body, though they are often intertwined—that my novels and essays fixate on. As a writer, I’m interested in food and eating as performance, ritual, replacement, reward, punishment, pleasure, resistance, and as means of creativity and communication. Basically, everything but the food itself. If I write about a tree-ripened plum, its purple skin split by the sun, I don’t do so in order to make the reader desire the plum itself, but for what that plum represents within the narrative and the text. In life, I desire the plum too. In literature, the plum is a bit more complicated than that. [End Page 121] My novels are often described as being rich in food. But they are also rich in hunger. In 2003, after my first novel The Book of Salt was published, I was asked by the pen/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D.C., to write a response to Eudora Welty’s collection of autobiographical essays entitled One Writer’s Beginnings. As Welty had done so eloquently, I was tasked with tracing my memories back to a moment when writing, which for me means writing larded with hunger, became a necessity. I found myself back in San Diego County, California, at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, which in April of 1975 was a relocation camp for Vietnamese refugees, and what I found there was a ridiculously symbolic “first” meal in the United States of America—hamburger and fries—and a note, penned by my mother, that helped us procure this sustenance that otherwise would have been out of reach. Written in English, the note contained words that I couldn’t yet read but would continue to feed me. It was a memory so submerged that I had to telephone my mother to make sure that I had not made it all up. Click for larger view View full resolution Rooted in a moment of forced migration that altered and shaped my perspective on food and my imaginative relationship to it as well, that meal and note explained why my belly and my brain have had such a decidedly codependent relationship; why food and words are my conjoined obsession. All those thousands of refugees, standing in long lines, hour after hour for their own first meals, were in shock, in grief, and unmoored, but the one thing that they probably were not was physically hungry, especially considering the food at Camp Pendleton. Yet, food there was the obsession, the sole focus and task of the long days of otherwise not knowing what would come next. Instead of seeking the larger, overwhelming, unimaginable answers, we refugees focused on which truck had the fresher fruits, which one had chicken, which one was trying to serve us something called “egg foo young,” a dish that we certainly did not recognize and that everyone called mửa, or throw-up. [End Page 122] When we left Camp Pendleton, my family came to Boiling Springs...

Imagining London: The role of the geographical imagination in migrant subjectivity and decision‐making

This article employs a qualitative, biographical approach, to explore the motivations and subjectivities behind migration of middle‐class Brazilians to London. It uses the concept of the geographical imagination to understand how migrants imagine not only their destinations and places of origin but also how their own identity is shaped by their imagined relationship to these places. The paper argues that for many middle‐class Brazilians, their motivation to migrate is couched in terms of “societal alienation”: a feeling of distance from the place of origin resulting from a lack of identification and trust in its institutions and the very culture of the place itself. This is in contrast to the more popularly understood concept of migrating due to “material alienation”: migrating to access a higher level of material consumption or to acquire financial capital to use “back home.” For those who migrate due to “societal alienation” what is “fetishised” is the cultural and less material aspects of the ‘quality of life’ of the migration destination, which become a kind of commodity in their own right. It argues that social class which often intersects with regional and racial divisions within Brazilian society, is a key marker of difference in these two types of imaginary.

Ecologies of debt in Claire Denis’s L’Intrus/The Intruder (2004)

In reading Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, the author enters into a dialogue with two recent publications that consider her cinema in light of contemporary discussions on ecology and economy: Laura McMahon’s work on the ‘ecological impulse’ at play in Denis’s films and Rosalind Galt’s analysis of the way in which Denis’s ‘default cinema’ resists contemporary neoliberal formations. The author examines the complex notions of indebtedness that shaped the film and its production. Moreover, she explores how the idea of nature in L’Intrus appears as a construct in which economic and ecological relationships of debt are mediated through imaginaries of place. Rather than proposing new ecological or economic imaginaries, she argues that L’Intrus is a significant ecological text precisely because it makes legible how debt-ridden imaginaries of nature intrude upon another and affect the experience of places and the policies that regulate them. Furthermore, L’Intrus’s complementary depiction of imaginaries of the South Sea islands and the Northern mountain forest suggests that the imagined relationship to a place that is unknown and far away is dependent upon an imagined relationship to the natural environment that is familiar and close by.

« Skalds of America »: Bayard Taylor et Samuel Kneeland au millénaire de la colonisation de l’Islande (1874)

In the Romantic period, Travel mixed writing about elsewhere with writing about oneself. The naturalist Samuel Kneeland and the poet and journalist Bayard Taylor, travelling to Iceland in 1874, took advantage of this new plasticity offered by travel writing. The two Americans composed a unique literary relationship in which scholarly discourse faded away to give way to an imaginative relationship with reality.

The Emptied Christ of Philippians: Mahayana Meditations by John P. Keenan

Reviewed by: The Emptied Christ of Philippians: Mahayana Meditations by John P. Keenan Paul Knitter John P. Keenan, The Emptied Christ of Philippians: Mahayana Meditations. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015. Pp. 342. $40.00, paper. If comparative theology makes bold promises about how it can enliven Christian self-understanding, Keenan, a long-time and well-published practitioner of said theology, shows again that those promises can be realized—and richly so. Applying the methodology of what he calls "interfaith theology" (p. xv), Keenan chooses the philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism, in place of traditional Greek ontology, as his new "handmaiden" or "hermeneutic guide" to unpack what was so foreign to the Greeks: kenosis—the focal category by which Paul and his Philippian community articulated what it meant to be a Jesus-follower (pp. 170–171). Following his Mahayana guide, as well as listening carefully to contemporary Pauline exegetes, Keenan shows convincingly that the life and self-understanding of Paul and the Philippians were grounded in a mystical experience of "being in Christ," of "putting on the mind of Christ"—of oneness with a self-emptied, risen Christ who is "supplied by the Spirit" (pp. 92–93, and 168). From a Mahayana perspective, "To be in Christ is not to nurture an imagined relationship with the man Jesus, but rather to abide in the wisdom-mind of Christ" (p. 38; also see p. 116). More explicitly, "The hymn of the empty Christ . . . empties the historical character of Jesus" (p. 172), which is why, "in Philippians, the very life of Christ expands beyond the historical Jesus to become the life of Paul and of the communities of faith" (p. 97). This Christ is "indeed the flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth, but no longer restricted to his historical presence as still remembered by some in Paul's day or as sought by scholars in our day" (p. 239). From this pivotal identification with the Christ whose "very being is emptying" (p. 173), Keenan goes on to hear Paul with Mahayana ears, as it were, and to offer what results as a reconstruction of Christian doctrine, as follows. On God: Keenan holds that "Paul calls into question not only his 'I' but also the object of a God 'out there' whom he might love" (p. 57). For Paul, therefore, God is "not a center of self-consciousness" or a "sovereign controller of the universe," but, rather, God is "the presence that encompasses us often in its absence, transcending the polarity of subject-object discrimination" (pp. 135 and 176). On eschatology: Connecting the coming "day of Christ Jesus" with Mahayana's calls to strive "without ever reaching any final point" (p. 301), Keenan [End Page 346] suggests that the eschaton is "not a definite point of time when Christ will appear . . . not a moment in linear time." Rather, "Awaiting the day of the Lord describes an always present-mind . . . End-time living is a way of living the now time" (pp. 50–51, and 68). On liberation theology: From a Buddhist perspective, Paul "was no advocate of opposing the social and cultural norms of his time" (p. 81). The emptied Christ that he preached was "not a political or social messiah who might deliver Israel from its Roman occupation" but, rather, "the Christ who delivers the Philippians from their self-enclosed and dead-end lives" (p. 40). Only if personally so transformed can they then strive "to create a just and peace-abiding world without accommodating to the power of fixations of some selves over other selves" (p. 260). In content and expression, this book both engages academically and at the same time inspires profoundly. Its subtitle is entirely appropriate, for these are meditations. Keenan once again proves himself to be both scholar and spiritual teacher. Paul Knitter Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY Copyright © 2017 Journal of Ecumenical Studies