Kingdom Come Research Articles

주기도문의 “나라가 임하시오며” (ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου)와 기독교 공동체 윤리

주기도문의 “나라가 임하시오며” (ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου)와 기독교 공동체 윤리

Representation of Medieval Realia in PC game: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

The study describes the Czech computer game Kingdom Come: Deliverance and the scale of its historical depiction of medieval realia. The well-known title is set in the medieval Czech Kingdom in 1403 and the player is presented with a complex world where he has to survive, acquire the game mechanics and complete historically inspired quests within and besides the main storyline. In this study, we will present various historical aspects of the game, such as political background, geographical setting, social depiction of the part of medieval Bohemia, late medieval armour and weapons in comparison with reality. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is sometimes referred to as a medieval simulator or a learning tool, based on its effort to realistically demonstrate history.

Something Extraordinary Keeps Happening: J. G. Ballard's Enclave World

AbstractThis essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) as a programmatic fictional project. It identifies five key formal and thematic elements of the late sequence, paying particular attention to the question of setting. In Ballard's late fictions, the gated enclave figures as a privileged spatial agent within the diegesis; the central quality of these enclaves is that they are at once ordinary and extraordinary—set off from any shared social fabric and representative of general psychic and material qualities. Methodologically, the essay begins with critical description, following the grain of Ballard's late novels to show how their plots, themes, and characters relate to their settings. The essay then explores Ballard's autocritical explanation of his mature fiction as a belated response to his childhood in the extraterritorial International Settlement of Shanghai, drawing on his autobiographies as well as new research in his personal manuscripts, now collected at the British Library. Any full exploration of the late novels' autocritical energies must go beyond the project of critical description, which by itself produces a historically flat and argumentatively recursive account of Ballard's extraordinary literary accomplishment.

‘The Problem of This Trash Society’: Anthropogenic Waste and the Neoliberal City in <i>Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come</i>

This essay examines the role of waste objects in J.G. Ballard’s critique of neoliberalism in Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come.1 It focuses on the ways in which waste matter resists the reader’s—and characters’—gaze, obstructs the flow of capital, and/or enlivens them to the eerie underside of the streamlined systems that make up the societies in these texts. To approach these questions, I combine historical materialist, Structural anthropological, and New Materialist approaches to waste. Waste, I argue, requires a multi-dimensional framework that takes into account the interrelation of socio-economic, psycho-pathological and tribal ramifications as well as an understanding of its relationship to the natural world. It is ultimately more fruitful to examine Ballard’s waste objects both as allegories and as elements enmeshed in a wider framework (one that often eludes the imperialist aspirations of the human beings involved) than to choose one interpretative mode over the other. It allows us to consider the extent to which both the plotlines of Ballard’s novels and the ideas they put forth are contingent upon not only the circulation of objects between people—their ‘social life’, as Appadurai would term it—but their interrelation with the environment of which they are a part. In his exploration of capital, power, and the built environment, Ballard seizes upon the fact that matter—both manufactured and natural—exists even when we are not looking at it, and that this life beyond the social has significant repercussions.

Design and implementation of a non-linear symphonic soundtrack of a video game

ABSTRACTThe music in the contemporary video games is often interactive. The music playback is based on transitions between pieces of available music material. These transitions happen in response to evolving gameplay. This paradigm is referred to as the adaptive music. Our challenge was to design, create, and implement the soundtrack of the upcoming video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Our soundtrack is a collection of compositions with symphonic orchestration. Per our design decision, our intention was to implement the adaptive music in a way which respected the nature of the orchestral film score. We created our own adaptive music middleware, called Sequence Music Engine, implementing a high-level music logic as well as the low-level playback infrastructure. Our system can handle hours of video game music, helps maintain the relevance of the music throughout the video game, and minimises the repetitiveness of the individual pieces.

White Dogs

After helping alert the country to a serious earthquake (Montenegro is seismically very active and suffered a severe quake in the year Mandić was born), the protagonists leave the country to live in Vienna for a time, hoping the change of scene will revitalize their relationship and allow Koko to get pregnant. It should be added that Montenegro has a very low birth rate, in addition to an exodus of the young and well-educated population. The latter issue is also a theme in the story “Leaving ,” by Slađana Kavarić (b. 1991), in which two young people are torn between wanting to immigrate and find a perspective abroad and not wanting to lose the modicum of security and familiarity they have at home, despite the mess the country is in. We are glad to present this piece by a young woman writer because Montenegro’s literary scene is heavily male-dominated. Among the female voices that have gained a degree of attention in recent years are two novelists, who also translate their own work into English: Ksenija Popović (Boy from the Water and A Lullaby for No Man’s Wolf) and Olja Knežević (From London, with Love). The poets Tanja Bakić and Lena Ruth Stefanović have received attention at home and abroad and also deserve mention in this context. Having followed Montenegrin writing closely for the last ten years, I still find it hard to put my finger on a common, unifying feature. Given the turmoil of the past and present as well as the ethnically diverse reality most Montenegrins live in, perhaps it is precisely a certain openness, eclecticism, and variability in perspective that characterize many of these writers. My impression is that they are less inclined to dwell on narrowly national themes and trends than their peers in Croatia or Serbia, for example. Together, the three pieces in this issue of WLT give a diverse insight into contemporary Montenegrin prose writing. Will Firth (www.willfirth.de) was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has lived in Berlin, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities (from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croat). His best-received translations of recent years have been Robert Perišić‘s Our Man in Iraq, Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come, and Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una. photo : barn images ift . tt / 1 phxbx 2 30 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 White Dogs by Milovan Radojević S ince you intend to kill yourself anyway, why don’t you fit your death into our plans? We need heroes, and it’s all the same to you, he thought about a character from the novel as he rocked to and fro in the packed streetcar. “Slow down, why don’t you. We’ll all be killed!” yelled a fat woman with a bun on her head, and Matija’s ears rang painfully from her piercing, shrill voice. One of his reasons for being an avid reader was to detach himself from his vacuous clerical job. So he also read on the way to the office, fifteen stops from the building where he lived. He was standing in the stuffy streetcar once more, hemmed in by puffy-faced people and trying to focus on the print of his paperback. And then, as if he suddenly remembered something, he looked out the window. There’s the “Three Brothers” bakery, so it’s the fourteenth stop, he realized, and then he noticed a familiar female figure among the passengers. Maybe I should try to write some short stories, he mused and made his way to the door, which opened with a hiss. Big, melancholic eyes watched him as he descended the metal steps. Once I used to drown in those eyes, he thought and nearly stumbled. Yes, I’ll try, he resolved, and turned to look back into those black vortexes, as if to thank them for their silent encouragement. Their owner stared at him, holding on to the bar in front of her with both hands, as the streetcar moved away from the fifteenth stop. special...

From Turmoil and Diversity: Contemporary Montenegrin Prose Writing

photo : nico trinkhaus 28 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 special section Contemporary Montenegrin Prose featuring Milovan Radojević 30 Brano Mandić 37 Slađana Kavarić 39 Guest-edited & introduced by Will Firth A monument featuring singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky in Podgorica, Montenegro. N estled between Croatia, BosniaHerzegovina , Serbia, Kosovo , and Albania, Montenegro (“black mountain”) is slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut and has a population of around 620,000. The country has been independent since 2006, when it seceded from the last manifestation of rump Yugoslavia (“Serbia and Montenegro ”) after a narrowly won referendum. Despite efforts at industrialization in the decades following the Second World War, Montenegro remained one of the least-developed regions of former Yugoslavia . The northern half of the country is mountainous and has a continental climate . Agriculture and manufacturing are concentrated in the flatter, central belt near the capital city, Podgorica [pronounced pod-goh-ree-tsa], while the south has a Mediterranean climate and cities dating back to the Venetian period and earlier. With 293km of Adriatic coast, tourism is the most important source of income. Most of the country’s industries are in decline (aluminum smelting) or have collapsed entirely (heavy machinery manufacturing, salt production). Economic crisis, corruption , crime, and brain drain are ongoing problems. Most mainstream discourses in Montenegro and the neighboring countries say that society is “in transition” (the background notion being that of a progression from evil socialism to radiant capitalism). But given the complex situation they are in, many Montenegrins ask themselves: transition to what?! Despite these difficulties, Montenegro has a lively and vibrant cultural scene centered in Podgorica but also present in the former royal capital, Cetinje [tsehtin -yeh], as well as Budva and Kotor on the coast. The majority of the population is comprised of Montenegrins, Serbs, and Bosniaks , who speak closely related variants of what we may call Serbo-Croat (the main language of former Yugoslavia). There are also several minorities, particularly Albanians and Romanies. The Cyrillic script is still in use but is increasingly being sidelined by the Latin alphabet. Arguably the best-known Montenegrin writer was Petar II Petrović Njegoš (1813– 51), prince-bishop of Montenegro, whose dynasty carved out a de facto independent principality within the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. His epic poem The Mountain Wreath, written in the vernacular , is known and loved by many. At the same time, it cannot be considered a work of purely national, Montenegrin literature because it addresses broader political and cultural issues that overarch any narrowly defined Montenegrin reality. This is an interesting trait, which we shall return to in a moment. Twentieth-century Montenegrin writers , or those with a Montenegrin element to their identity, included Danilo Kiš (1935–89), best known for his books A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead, and Borislav Pekić (1930–92), whose Time of Miracles and How to Quiet a Vampire have been translated into English. Promising Montenegrin writers of recent years are Andrej Nikolaidis and Ognjen Spahić—winners of the EU Prize for Literature in 2011 and 2014, respectively; novelist, poet, and short-story writer Balša Brković; and Dragan Radulović. All four of these writers have fielded stories for the Best European Fiction anthology published by Dalkey Archive Press. Together with a handful of other authors who have won acclaim in the Serbo-Croat-speaking region, they have sometimes been dubbed the “Montenegrin New Wave” of prose writing. Three of Nikolaidis’s short novels (The Coming, The Son, and Till Kingdom Come) have been published in English by Londonbased Istros Books, as has Spahić’s “forgotten gem” Hansen’s Children, which won several regional literary prizes but failed to make much impact internationally due to the vagaries of reception. In his tale in this issue of WLT about a writer and his creative crises, “White Dogs,” Milovan Radojević (b. 1960) touches on the ex-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a traumatic part of the consciousness of many Montenegrins. The story is set in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, which reflects the close links many people in Montenegro still have with Serbia, despite their country ’s secession from the joint state. The story “Koko and Raden...

Risto Jukko and Jaako Rusama (eds). 2014. Your Kingdom Come: The International Mission Partnership Consultation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, March 31 – April 3, 2014. Helsinki: Publications of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland 12. ISBN-13: 9789517894678.

Your Kingdom Come : The International Mission Partnership Consultation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, March 31-April 3, 2014

Book Review: Kingdom Come: Beth M. Stovell, Mapping Metaphorical Discourse in the Fourth Gospel: John’s Eternal King

Book Review: Kingdom Come: Beth M. Stovell, Mapping Metaphorical Discourse in the Fourth Gospel: John’s Eternal King

Italy from Berlusconi to Grillo: Kingdom Come

Italy from Berlusconi to Grillo: Kingdom Come

Calvin’s Interpretation of "Thy Kingdom Come"

In this article I compare Calvin’s exegesis of the Second Petition of The Lord's Prayer in the 1541-57 editions of the Institutes with the one he offers in the last edition of his work (1560). My close reading is based on the French editions only with a rhetorical approach. First, it is interesting to note that for the last edition Calvin rewrote his paragraph on the Second Petition entirely, which he had also done with the First Petition. Second, the formal structures as well as the content are somewhat different. In the 1541-57 editions, the paragraph is divided into two parts: (1) He explains the reason why we pray that God be considered our only king – implicitly no other (earthly) ruler should be accepted. (2) He explains why right here on Earth already we are punished, if we do not accept this principle and follow another ruler. Therefore, "Thy Kingdom come" is not only about the future, but also about now. It is an existential issue. In the 1560 edition, Calvin divides his paragraph into three parts: (1) He claims that the First and the Second Petitions say basically the same thing. So the reason for the repetition is just because we are too slow to understand God. Besides, if we believe in Him, we have to deny ourselves and despise our earthly life, and consider the Lord our only ruler and king, right here and now. (2) We pray that God destroy the Evil that is in everyone. (3) We pray that we live according to God’s rule alone. To conclude, two important differences are stressed: (1) In the last edition, Calvin puts more emphasis on the evil spirit in humans. (2) Although in all the editions of the Institutes the crucial role of the Holy Spirit is mentioned, it is only in the last edition that the name of Christ appears, the Son without whom we cannot live in God’s Kingdom.

Moments of Millennium: Three Fictionalisations of Revelation 20 in Relation to Zoroastrian Eschatology

Abstract While the Millennium as described in Revelation 20 is the penultimate terminus in the premillennial dispensational end-time scheme, not much attention has been given by scholars or commentators to its precise nature. Scant mention is made of the nature of human life during this period. Claiming fidelity to absolute literalism, yet lavish in artistic license, three authors have recently plotted fictional accounts of what they imagine will happen after Christ returns to earth to reign for 1000 years. These novels are 1000. . .a Novel of the Millennium by Salem Kirban, Kingdom Come by LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Thunder in Paradise: Satan’s Last Storm by Jonathan Cash. This article seeks to draw out a correlation between these animated accounts and the text of Revelation 20, and in a step further, to examine their apparent resemblances to ancient Iranian texts in the post-exilic period.

Consumerism's Endgame: Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard's Late Fiction

J.G. Ballard's final four novels constitute a discrete phase of the novelist's career, revealing a writer preoccupied with the relation of violence to community. In each novel, Ballard's narrator is initially repulsed yet later seduced by the allure of violence. Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) suggest that, rather than silencing and isolating individuals, the spectacle of violence unites and revives communities. Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) develop the representation of violence and community into a critique of consumer society. Ballard's late fiction indicates that the infantilizing illusions promoted by consumerism will result in boredom punctured only by outbreaks of violence. Consequently, analysis of these novels in relation to violence reveals the ways in which Ballard envisions the end state of consumerism to consist of a perpetual cycle of sedation and psychopathy.

His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia – By J. Hedda

His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia – By J. Hedda

The Bible and American culture: a sourcebook

INTRODUCTION The Place of the Bible in the Paradox of America Biblical Archetypes and the Idea of 'America' How the Bible is Interpreted What is the Bible? Criteria for Selection Overview of the Chapters CHAPTER ONE: SPREADING THE WORD Missionizing Production and Distribution Translation The Book among books? John Eliot's Brief Narrative Charter of College of William and Mary Jonathan Edwards, 'A Divine and Supernatural Light' Continental Congress Authorizes Bible Printing The Jefferson Bible The American Bible Society Liberal Responses to Calvinism The Student Volunteer Movement Isaac Leeser and the Translation of Hebrew Scripture Francis Kenrick's Translation of the Pentateuch The Jewish Publication Society Dei Verbum The New American Bible The Gullah Bible The Green Bible Biblezines CHAPTER TWO: THE BIBLE AND THE REPUBLIC Settlement and God's Providence The First Charter of Virginia John Winthrop, 'A Model of Christian Charity' Fundamental Orders of Connecticut Dissent Among the Dissenters: The Bible and the Challenges of Colonial Governance The Examination of Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newton The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials Cotton Mather, from Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions Samuel Parris, 'Christ Knows How Many Devils There Are' John Hale, 'A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft' Quaker Pennsylvania and 'The Keithian Schism' Founding the Republic Prayer Before the First Continental Congress The Prayer of Rev. Duche Before the Continental Congress The Call to War, the Challenge of Peace Patrick Henry's Call for Revolution Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Nation's Pastor Congress Declares the Bible 'the Word of God' Public Display of Religion Abington v. Schempp The Ten Commandments in the Alabama Courthouse Legal Responses Sporting Events and Religious Expression Verses in Eye Black CHAPTER THREE: THE BIBLE AND AMERICA'S GREAT DEBATES Slavery and Abolitionism: Pro-Slavery Arguments The Sin of Ham Slavery and the New Testament Slave Owners' Publications A Slave Catechism After Emancipation Slavery and Abolitionism: Anti-Slavery Arguments The Barnes Hypothesis Theodore Dwight Weld The Spirit of the Scriptures Biblical Typology Experiences of African Americans Resistance and Revolt in Charleston Frederick Douglass Women's Public Role and the Vote Sarah Grimke Sojourner Truth Preaching the Bible and Women's Equality Anna Julia Cooper Women and Social Reform The Woman's Bible Anti-Suffrage Arguments and Scripture Horace Bushnell James Cardinal Gibbons Debating the Bible's Authority: The Higher Criticism Controversy William Newton Clarke Inspiration: The 'Princeton Doctrine' The Briggs Case Debating the Bible's Authority: The Modernist/Fundamentalist Showdown The Fundamentals Curtis Lee Laws Harry Emerson Fosdick Debating the Bible's Authority: Evolution and Creationism T. DeWitt Talmage Henry Ward Beecher John Zahm William Jennings Bryan The Scopes Trial Reforming Society The Social Gospel The City as Menace Labor Unions Temperance The Women's Christian Temperance Union The Struggle for Civil Rights Anticipating the Movement Support for Segregation Martin Luther King, Jr. Fannie Lou Hamer Black Liberation Theology Inclusion of Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transexual Persons Paul's Statements in Romans 1 Another Interpretation of Romans 1 CHAPTER FOUR: READING IN THE MARGINS Identity and Textual Interpretation Jarena Lee The Bible as Patriarchal African American Women's Experience The Text Interprets Itself The Prophetic Corrective A 'Hermeneutics of Suspicion' A Gay Theology of Liberation The Bible as Intimate Friend Experience and the Authority of Spirit The Holiness Movement The Azusa Street Revival Letter from Bro. Parham Speaking in Tongues Catholic Charismatic Renewal Imagining Babylon and Thy Kingdom Come The Shakers 'I, Nephi,...': The Book of Mormon William Miller Ellen G. White on 'The Book of Books' Charles Taze Russell, 'Earth's Night of Sin to Terminate in a Morning of Joy' Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science Elijah Muhammad, 'What is Islam? What is a Muslim?' Jim Jones, 'The Letter Killeth' Message from the Apostle David Koresh and the Seven Seals CHAPTER FIVE: THE BIBLE AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Art Edward Hicks, Peacable Kingdom Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt Edmonia Lewis Bessie Harvey Tobi Kahn Poetry Phillis Wheatley Emily Dickinson Robert Lowell Samuel Menashe Musical Lyric 'There is a Balm in Gilead' 'My Mother's Bible' 'The Greatest Story Ever Told' 'Hallelujah' Lauryn Hill, 'Forgive Them Father' The Novel Herman Melville, selection from Moby Dick James Baldwin, selection from Go Tell It on the Mountain

On the Literary Use of Superheroes; or, Batman and Superman Fistfight in Heaven

Cates's essay considers the benefits and constraints of genre within superhero comics and recent alternative comics that make use of the figure of the superhero. Individual superheroes (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man) emerge as nearly allegorical figures for particular ideas or ideologies; the figure of the superhero more generally is also figured in these works as a symbol of arrested maturity, both within the fictions and within a larger metafiction about the genre. Works discussed in detail include Frank Miller's The Dark KnightReturns (1986), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986–87), Mark Waid and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come (1997), Chris Ware's JimmyCorrigan (2000), and Daniel Clowes's David Boring (2002) and “The Death Ray” (2004).

The Middle Class, Boredom and Violence: Reading J. G. Ballard’s Suburban Disaster Quartet of Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come

The Middle Class, Boredom and Violence: Reading J. G. Ballard’s Suburban Disaster Quartet of Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come

“Your Kingdom Come”: Practical Theology as Living out Three Great Pillars of Christianity

This is to be a reflection on how to understand the discipline of theology, and practical theology in particular. The reflection entails what it means to engage in practical theology in the educational ministry of the church. In the process, a modest proposal will develop for the trajectory of practical theology that is characterized as a lifelong habitus that every Christian of all ages is engaged in as a part of God's kingdom. This habitus is propelled by what I propose as the Three Pillars of Christianity: the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and the Great Communion. These biblical maxims reveal the identity of and calling for the people of God within the very ministry of the triune God in his kingdom on earth.

Classics and Comics ed. by George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall (review)

Reviewed by: Classics and Comics ed. by George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall Colin Shelton George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall, eds. Classics and Comics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 265. CDN $108.95. ISBN 9780199734184. Superman was inspired by Hercules, and Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess named Diana. Comic books (or graphic novels or sequential art, if you prefer) have long drawn classical material into their orbit. For many students, to say nothing of professional classicists, first contact with the classics comes while exploring the comic book universe. This collection of essays can persuade classicists who have yet to venture into comics to go boldly. The editors lay out the book’s gambit in their introduction: comic books, at least in Anglophone North America, “have always languished in pejorative associations of low culture, categorized with or as pulp fiction” (vii). But, as the papers in the volume make clear, comic books have flourished in part by incorporating Greek and Roman “classics”, and however classicists may feel about their own discipline, outside of our club, the “classics” are often treated as a synecdoche for “high culture.” Although comics are now a medium of sophisticated storytelling, and can incorporate both faithful evocations and creative transformations of ancient art, history, and myth, exploring how they do so is also an opportunity to recast the mismatched cultural roles assigned to comics and classics. The papers in this book are at their most provocative when they combine detailed studies of comic book classicizing with this broader concern. The papers are gathered in four parts: “Seeing the Past Through Sequential Art”, “Gods and Superheroes”, “Drawing (on) History” and “The Desires of Troy”. Those in Part One deal with “classics” and “comics” in their most abstracted form. For instance, Brett M. Rogers examines how Joseph Campbell’s analysis of classical hero myths has influenced the plots of superhero comics. Focusing on changes in storytelling about Spider-Man from the 1960s to the twenty-first century, Rogers makes a compelling case that imposing “classical” models on comic storytelling can be detrimental to its richness and relevance. This must be, partly, because comics have developed a cache of stories and characters that in diversity, and internal contradictions, and in the creative rationalization of those contradictions is much more like the myth encountered in classical sources than Campbell’s structurally filtered mythology. C. W. Marshall opens Part Two with a “test case” in the elaborate intertextuality of commercial superhero comics (90). He details the incorporation of the Furies into the “DC [Comics] Universe” in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and its spinoffs, and subsequent transformations of these now comic-booked Furies in Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman story The Hiketeia. R. Clinton Simms on the changing character of Ares through [End Page 270] comics, and Benjamin Stevens on the conflation of biblical and comics intertexts in Kingdom Come provide similarly impressive “test cases” in the creative appropriation of both classical and comics mythology. These essays show that comic storytelling can gain from classics, but it does so when incorporating the classical into its own sophisticated discourse. Papers throughout the volume generally focus on the writer’s side of comics, more than the artist’s. Perhaps there is good reason for this. Among Part Three’s discussions of ancient history in comics, Anise K. Strong examines the treatment of Augustus’s imperial policy in the Sandman issue “August”. She amply demonstrates the creative manipulation of sources like Suetonius in this comic. But she also shows that visual details of the comic have been drawn from the BBC production of I, Claudius even in contradiction of ancient artistic depictions of, for example, the empress Livia (176). Similarly, Emily Fairey’s study of Persians in Frank Miller’s 300 makes a convincing case that Miller’s vision of the Persians comes not from Achaemenid monuments, or Athenian vase painting, but by translating the hostility to Persians expressed in Athenian literature into the idiom Miller has developed for depicting villainy and social deviance in his other comics. Some comic book artists do take inspiration from ancient art, though. Part Four approaches the Trojan War in comics, especially in Eric Shanower’s...

‘Thy Kingdom Come’: The Impact of Colonization and Proselytization on Religion among the Nagas

Does socio-political circumstance have an impact on religion, religious conversion or religious beliefs? Assuming it does, how does such circumstance shape the theology and beliefs of a people who exist amid a turbulent socio-political situation? In this paper I will analyze the impact of socio-political turbulence on Nagas and assert that among the Nagas there is a correlation between the height of political violence and the rapid conversion to Christianity. The long history of colonial violence and suppression coupled with the undermining of Naga cultural values and practices by the process of proselytization created an atmosphere conducive for conversion to Christianity and shaped the Nagas’ theological choices.