Mark Jordan Research Articles

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Iberia - Iconosphere of Religious Otherness: The “Sodomitic Moor” in 16th-Century Spanish Painting

This text proposes a genealogy of the trope of the “Sodomitic Moor” in medieval Iberian culture and its consolidation from the Modern Age onwards, coinciding with the imperialist/colonialist expansion towards America. The object of the study are the literary sources that describe the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius in the 10th century (Raguel and Rosvita of Gandersheim) and the visual representations of the same subject in the 16th-century Spanish painting, specifically the images that make up the altarpiece of Saint Pelagius painted by Master of Becerril, which is now in Malaga’s Cathedral. The analysis of the sources will be carried out considering the contributions of queer theory to the study of medieval Iberian cultures through authors such as Mark Jordan or Gregory Hutchenson. As for the visual analysis, the text reviews the historiography of Spanish art history on the images that make up this altarpiece, as well as other contributions such as Francisco de Holanda’s theory of painting, the persecutions for sodomy that were consolidated at the end of the 15th century with the approval of the Pragmatic against Sodomy by the Catholic monarchs, or the principle of ‘interconnected Otherness’ defined by Victor Stoichita, which allows us to understand how the Muslim religious Other is interconnected with the racialized Indian Other from the end of the 15th century onwards.

Sodomites, witches, and Indians: Another look at Foucault’s history of sexuality, volume one

Does Foucault’s work on sexuality open toward the possibility of a genealogy of sex understood as binary anatomical and genetic sexual difference? I believe that it does. I argue that, if we take seriously work by Mark Jordan, Ann Laura Stoler, and Sylvia Federici, coupled with Foucault’s own statement at the end of HS1 that sex is not an anchor for sexuality but, rather, “a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality” (152), the possibility of a time before sex or an elsewhere apart from sex becomes quite thinkable. Constructing such a genealogy would likely require careful research into ways in which Europeans imposed binary sex upon those they terrorized and colonized around the globe. Examples gestured toward here include the Yorùbá in Africa as well as a number of peoples of the Americas.

Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman

Reviewed by: Foucault's Theatres ed. by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman David Kornhaber FOUCAULT'S THEATRES. Edited by Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 250. "I would like to know how illness has been staged, how madness has been staged, how crime has been staged" (222), says Michel Foucault of his own body of work in the rare and revealing 1978 interview "The Philosophical Scene," newly translated and printed as an appendix to Tony Fisher and Kélina Gotman's important edited collection Foucault's Theatres. That Foucault has for so long evaded a book-length treatment in the realm of theatre and performance studies even as his methods have infused the same has always been something of a mystery. Finally, in Fisher and Gotman's new compendium, he takes center stage. In the same interview, Foucault describes his own books as "dramaturgies" (223); here at last they are submitted to dramatic analysis. Of course, Foucault has hardly been absent from theatre and performance studies in any total sense. "A quick survey," Fisher and Gotman write, "suggests that it is obligatory to mention Foucault, but rarely to inhabit his thought: to cite and to enlist but not to engage" (7). That is in part a reflection of the purposefully fractured and fractious nature of Foucault's discourses, what Gotman describes as "the anarchaeology of movement-towards 'truth' … a form of thinking that embraces concurrence without shying away, without pretense to universal or objectivizing certainty or totality" (64–65; emphasis in original). The scene of Foucault's thought is always changing, the narrative always turning. Yet for Fisher and Gotman, the complexity of Foucault's intellectual dramaturgy offers exciting opportunities. As they state in their joint introduction, their collection seeks "to remedy what we believe to be the neglect within theatre and performance studies of systemic engagement with Foucault's intellectual contribution to theatre and performance thinking" (9). It is a mission that extends in at least two directions: to better situate Foucault within the study of theatre and performance and to better situate theatre and performance within the study of Foucault. More so than most, Foucault's elusive philosophy is well-suited to the multivocality of the edited collection over the monovocal proclamations of the monograph. With twelve chapters as well as an introduction, afterword, and interview, Foucault's Theatres offers many entry points to the multiple theatres of the volume's title. The first four entries cover "Truth, Methods, Genealogies" and investigate the theatrical and performative elements of Foucault's different discursive modes. "Foucault often writes at the edge of some stage," writes Mark Jordan in [End Page 446] the evocative opening of his essay on "Foucault's philosophical theatres" (25). The description applies equally well to the visceral sites that frequently feature in Foucault's writing—the executioner's platform, the monarch's dais—as to the degree to which his philosophy always exists in proximity to the performative. Thus Jordan offers an explication of what Foucault himself describes as "philosophy not as thought, but as theatre" (27). Aline Wiame continues this line of inquiry in her synchronous subsequent essay "The Dramas of Knowledge: Foucault's Genealogical Theatre of Truth." Noting Foucault's description of his youthful encounter with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a "rupture" in his experience as a philosophy student, she expounds on the degree to which "Foucault's style of writing is theatrical, or more precisely, dramatic" and convincingly argues that "Foucault develops a particular kind of writing which is not about theatre but which thinks through theatre," using the tropes and topos of the theatre as a means of newly understanding topics from history to philosophy (38–39; emphasis in original). Turning to another mode of discourse, Magnolia Pauker offers an original examination of Foucault as interview subject. Acknowledging the paradox of the intensely private author's preponderance of printed interviews (over a hundred across eighty publications in just twenty-three years), she demonstrates that "the performative scene of the interview offers a particular opportunity for counterhegemonic analysis" (50). Gotman herself turns to the lecture hall, examining Foucault's 1979–80 lectures on...

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau

Reviewed by: Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau J. David Moser Embracing Wisdom: The Summa theologiae as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau, S.J. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015), xi + 221 pp. Gilles Mongeau, S.J., is professor of theology at Regis College at the University of Toronto. His book ties together three threads in recent scholarship on Saint Thomas Aquinas's theology. First, it examines its sapiential and spiritual character, expanding on the work of Jean-Pierre Torrell. Second, it joins recent studies that attempt to give an account of sacra doctrina, particularly its meaning and function in the Summa theologiae [ST]. Third, it explores Aquinas's rhetorical and pedagogical methods that constitute the form of his theology. At a basic level, the book is an analysis of Aquinas's rhetorical methods in the Summa theologiae, and it focuses on those formal patterns of memory, repetition, and affect that Saint Thomas used to train student pastors and lectors in sacra doctrina. For Aquinas, as Mongeau claims, sacra doctrina is ordered to Christian practice, or the spiritual life, since revealed doctrine is the highest wisdom (ST I, q. 1, a. 4, corp.). For Mongeau, these formal structures tell us that the Summa is a series of "spiritual exercises" that Aquinas designed to teach students the way of spiritual wisdom. The first part of the book (chs. 1–4) provides the historical context that grounds the study of the Summa theologiae's rhetorical strategies in the second part (chs. 5–10). In chapter 1, Mongeau observes the ways his own argument differs from the recent rhetorical studies of Aquinas's theology. Unlike Mark Jordan, whose important work focused on dialectic in Aquinas's theology, Mongeau's book "points to the anchoring of Aquinas's text in the symbolic, the aesthetic-dramatic, and the affective elements of meaning, as well as the way in which the rhetorical form of the text mediates religious meaning" (5). For him, the Summa theologiae is a "deliberative rhetoric" that is designed to elicit actions on the part of its readers (5). It does so precisely by means of these symbolic and affective elements of meaning. Through this formal pedagogical quality, the Summa reorders the student's acts of knowing and willing to God in Christ. In chapter 2, Mongeau explains how rhetoric conveyed meaning in ancient and medieval contexts. Drawing on the work of Alain Michel, Kathryn Tanner, and Bernard Lonergan, Mongeau argues that every culture is the product of "the dialectic of 'human-centered' and 'cosmos-centered' meaning" (36). In every culture, agents attempt to negotiate and renegotiate the relation of these two poles as new social and economic contexts arise. One way Christians did this in the ancient and medieval world was through teaching rhetoric, the "science of aesthetic [End Page 712] -dramatic meaning" (39). Mongeau observes that if this recent proposal about culture is correct, then we will surely find evidence that "Thomas in the Summa is concerned with forming persons to exercise a certain cultural agency," that is, to renegotiate the way the Church mediates its teaching about Christ in the thirteenth century (29). Chapter 3 addresses the historical context that informed Aquinas's pastoral concerns and pedagogy. Drawing heavily on Mary Carruthers's studies of medieval memorial practices, Mongeau argues that Aquinas adopted memorial schemes in his writings. These memorial strategies were often based on the movements of the liturgy. Teachers of rhetoric described them as a ductus: the movement of the student's mind through the rhetorical and literary contours of a composition (43). Then Mongeau surveys some of the social, cultural, and economic changes in the medieval world that drove intellectual developments, including the reforms of the monasteries of Cluny and Cîteaux and the rise of the merchant class: these, along with the problems of a poorly catechized peasantry, drove the need for the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council and the Dominican order's concern for preaching and education. Aquinas understood his own vocation as a theologian within this context and became involved in the educational reforms and spiritual renewal of Lateran IV (80). Chapter 4 covers the...

Gregory of Nyssa’s Shifting Scenes of Instruction

Gregory of Nyssa’s emphasis on constantly stretching (epektasis) desire into an ever-deepening darkness is one of the best-known aspects of his thought. And yet, scholars continue to struggle to understand how this stretching theorizes Christian perfection or how it orients growth in virtue. This article turns to one of Gregory’s earlier texts, The Treatise on the Inscriptions of the Psalms, which patterns much of Gregory’s later works. It argues that Gregory’s literary practice of writing what Mark Jordan calls “scenes of instruction” sheds light on what expanding desire might look like. Gregory frames the journey through a series of accommodated, shifting scenes in order to orient and entice Christians to continue onward in perfection.

Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau

Reviewed by: Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogyby Gilles Mongeau Michael A. Dauphinais Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogy. By G illesM ongeau, S.J.Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015. Pp. xi + 221. $30.00 (paper). ISBN:978-0-88844-422-6. Gilles Mongeau has written an illuminating book with many enjoyable insights. This is no small praise for a book that adds to the innumerable discussions of the structure and aims of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae. According to the introduction, Mongeau's work draws upon various streams of Thomistic and medieval studies: Thomas Hibbs's attention to dialectic and narrative in the Summa contra Gentiles, Jean-Pierre Torrell's treatment of the spiritual theology of the Summa theologiae, and Mary Carruthers's retrieval of the rhetorical shape of medieval and Dominican life. Mongeau thus offers a reading of the Summa theologiaeas rhetorically constructed to lead its reader into deeper conformity with the wisdom it seeks to communicate. [End Page 303] He formulates the purpose of his work in his first chapter, "A Wisdom that Makes One Holy." The theme of wisdom as transformative plays a central role in this book. Mongeau thus seeks to overcome some of the separations that have occurred in scholarship on Aquinas. He helpfully summarizes the work of Mark Jordan, Guy-H. Allard, Peter Candler, and Fáinche Ryan and their distinct approaches to viewing the Summathrough the respective lenses of wisdom, rhetoric, deification, and sanctification. He seeks to add to their various emphases a more historical focus on thirteenth-century rhetorical practices. He then turns to a presentation of sacra doctrinaas both scientia(knowledge) and sapientia(wisdom). As scientia, sacra doctrinaconforms the mind to reality. As sapientia, sacra doctrinahelps the wise person order all things both theoretically and practically. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Hadot, Mongeau discerns in such wisdom a way of life, in particular, the way of life embodied in the Dominican friars whom Aquinas sought to instruct. Mongeau summarizes the goal of his book as follows: "I hope that my readers, having become aware of and open to the rhetorical dynamics present in the text, might allow the spiritual pedagogy of the Summa theologiaeto work in them as it did in Thomas' students, leading them to Wisdom's embrace" (17). The book has two major parts. The first part (chapters 2-4) examines the rhetorical order of the Summa theologiaeand presents the work as a ductus—a directed motion or a leading—into divine wisdom. Here the emphasis is on "the historical and methodological context for reading the Summa theologiaeas sacra doctrina" (16). The remainder of the book (chaps. 5-9) deploys that same context in the service of close readings of various parts of the Summa. In each instance, Aquinas's presentation of Christ as the Incarnate Word is revealed as the pattern for contemplating such divine wisdom and handing it on to others. Mongeau, in analyzing many sections of the Summa, "[brings] to the fore the rhetorical ductusthat unites Aquinas' systematic and spiritual concerns" (17). Chapters 2-4 present the heart of the book's thesis, namely, that the often-overlooked rhetorical element of the Summais easily demonstrated when Aquinas's writings and life are placed within their thirteenth-century Dominican context. Mongeau considers the interplay of meaning and culture as found in ancients such as Aristotle and Cicero as well as Philo, Augustine, and Boethius, along with their shared attention to rhetoric within philosophy and theology. Following Marshall McLuhan, Mongeau observes that the rhetorical dimension of meaning has been radically diminished in the post-Cartesian streams of philosophy and theology in the West. In contrast, he avers that rhetoric should be seen as "the art and science which allowed Christian thinkers, pastors, and poets to mediate the intersubjective, aesthetic, and dramatic power of meaning during the patristic and early-medieval period" (38). The recognition of the indispensable role of rhetoric and meaning within the search for truth as opposed to a sterile rationalism is certainly sound and welcome. Furthermore, Mongeau implicitly avoids any [End Page 304]reduction of...

“Make no provision for the flesh”: recognizing the incarnation in and after Augustine

ABSTRACTThis article argues for the importance of the intelligibility of the sexed body to incarnational theology. Building on Mark Jordan's reading of Augustine, I focus on the paradox of the incarnation as both the bodily sign (signa) of God and God Godself as the thing that the sign signifies (res). Through an analysis of the debates around Leo Steinberg's work on the meaning of Christ's genitals in Renaissance art, I explore the ways in which depicting the incarnation is a paradoxical exercise of depicting God's fully human body. I argue that attention to the paradox of the incarnation as both sign and thing can disrupt ideologies of sexual difference that force bodies to be intelligible as unambiguously sexed, while the question of sexual difference can work within incarnational theology to disturb the equivalence of full humanity and unambiguous maleness.

Christopher Scott Sevier, Aquinas on Beauty. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. xii, 227. $85. ISBN: 978-0-7391-8424-0.

Christopher Scott Sevier, <i>Aquinas on Beauty</i>. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. xii, 227. $85. ISBN: 978-0-7391-8424-0.

Aquinas and the Democratic Virtues: An Introduction

AbstractCan the theology of Thomas Aquinas serve as a resource for reflection on democratic civic virtue? That is the central question taken up by Mark Jordan, Adam Eitel, John Bowlin, and Michael Lamb in this focus issue. The four authors agree on one thing: Aquinas himself was no fan of democracy. They disagree, though, over whether Aquinas can offer resources for theorizing democratic virtues. Bowlin, Eitel, and Lamb believe he can, and propose Thomistic accounts of tolerance, civic friendship, and democratic hope, respectively. Jordan, in contrast, issues a cautionary note against such enterprises. This divergence is due in part to different judgments about what it would mean to claim certain resources as “Thomistic.” In part, too, it flows from a disagreement about whether Aquinas himself countenances genuine virtues among non‐Christian citizens, and about whether Christians and non‐Christians can be said to share even proximate ends. This conversation is an important one, since accounts of the democratic virtues constructed using Thomistic resources have the potential to move discussions of democratic and theological virtues beyond common impasses.

Hegel and Christian Theology

Hegel and Christian Theology Guy Mansini O.S.B. Several years ago, Mark Jordan pointed out what a great mistake it is to think that contemporary theologians are to do what patristic and medieval theologians did by bending regnant philosophical discourse to dogmatic expression and systematic understanding of the mysteries of faith.1 As Augustine employed Plato, and Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, so the sapient theologian should take up Kant, as Georg Hermes did, or Schelling, as Johann Sebastian Drey did, and fashion a contemporary theological expression and understanding suited for the culture formed, or at least expressed, in part by these same philosophers.2 Jordan argued that this is a great mistake. Plato and Aristotle, innocent of the Gospel as they were, took up no position relative to its truth, for or against. Their metaphysical projects were underdetermined by the questions that Trinity, creation, Incarnation, and the end of man in the resurrection and beatifying vision pose. They remained plastic to the form of the gospel, which left its imprint across the board on the intussuscepted thought of Plato and Plotinus, of Aristotle and the Stoa. Post-Christian, modern philosophers, however, define themselves over against the Gospel, over against the doctrines of the Church. Their definition, what is essential to them, consists in their [End Page 993] anti-Christian character. If we adjust Enlightenment reason in such a way as to admit the truth of the Gospel, a truth beyond what reason can anticipate or demonstrate or judge but can only receive, if we adjust Enlightenment strictures on the power of God and the closure of the world so that miracles are possible, if we adjust Enlightenment standards of evidence so that miracles can reasonably be recognized, or if we adjust Enlightenment morality so that the love of friendship is not reduced to a higher concupiscence, then what is left? A sort of positivism that cannot even recognize itself as such and thinks it is the default position of unprejudiced reason. Nothing theologically useful is left. But this leaves out the post-Enlightenment Idealists, who mourned the passing of God even as the Romantics did that of the gods, and who regretted the wounds inflicted on European culture by those who ignored the wounds of Christ. Was there not a better way than the alternatives between the Reformation or Baroque versions of Christianity, on the one hand, and religion within reason’s limits, on the other? If, contrary to Kant, what we think is the real, and if how we think it, even in thinking its contraries, is to think how it is in itself, and if, contrary to Aristotle, potency is prior to act, then we can have a god who makes himself three in making the world, comes to consciousness in the logos of man, and pours out his spirit in the German state. Further, what the art of Europe expressed plastically and musically and dramatically, what the peasant celebrated in church and chapel, is stated in its complete and epic truth in the university tradition of that same German state, of which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, by his own estimation, is the crown and completion. Should so heterodox a Hegel be invited to the conversation of Christian theology?3 But he has already been invited. Part 3 of the first volume of Cyril O’Regan’s Anatomy details Hans Urs von Balthasar’s assessment of Jürgen Moltmann’s heavily Hegelianized Christology and Trinitarian theology.4 And Moltmann is not alone. In addition, Balthasar’s own list includes K. Barth, E. Jüngel, W. Pannenberg, K. Rahner, H. Küng, C. Bruaire, A. Chapelle, E. Brito, A. Léonard, and [End Page 994] G. Fessard—these are “unthinkable apart from Hegel.”5 O’Regan delimits the task thus: Balthasar’s engagement of modern philosophy must, on the one hand, recollect the Christian theological tradition more comprehensively and persuasively than Hegel’s remembrance of it and, on the other, show his deformation of it. For the first, Balthasar must be a more encyclopedic reader than Hegel. For the second, if the deformations and deflections of Hegel’s divine narrative fail to measure up...

On the Government of the Living

It has been widely claimed that Foucault's 1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (GL), constituted an important turning point in his thinking. That course would begin a series of lecture courses at the Collège that would end in March 1984, just before his death, all devoted to core issues arising in Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology. While Christian practices of penance and confession are a focus of GL, as Mark Jordan has claimed, throughout what has been termed his “Greco-Roman” trip Foucault always emphasized “the historical importance of pastoral power for modern subjectivity.” There is, then, a definite link between what is often described as the “final Foucault,” with his interest in Patristic Christianity and its own governmental practices, on one hand, and, on the other, the broader question of “government,” both of the self and of others, as well as the historical modes of subject formation, all concerns that characterized the whole of Foucault's oeuvre. Indeed, as Foucault says in his conclusion to GL, the obligation “to tell the truth about oneself” has shaped not just Christianity, but Western modernity too; indeed “the whole social system to which we belong” (312).

Porneia, Homosexuality, and the Need for Homiletic Evolution

Does preaching about human sexuality fixate upon the themes of porneia and homosexuality? And if so, do those homiletic preferences narrowly characterize the sexual body politic of the United States? Engaging the writings of Patrick Cheng, Kyle Harper, Mark Jordan, and Jeff Chu, Gerald C. Liu examines genealogical and empirical accounts of porneia and homosexuality to request broader conceptions of sexual difference from preachers who dare to speak about sex, especially with respect to race and in particular, Asian American male sexual identity.

Proportionality and Divine Naming: Did St. Thomas Change His Mind about Analogy?

531 The Thomist 77 (2013): 531-58 PROPORTIONALITY AND DIVINE NAMING: DID ST. THOMAS CHANGE HIS MIND ABOUT ANALOGY? JOSHUA P. HOCHSCHILD Mount St. Mary’s University Emmitsburg, Maryland HERE IS A QUASI-“GENRE” of passages in which Aquinas distinguishes varieties of analogy in a theological context. In several works across his career, he introduces analogy as the crucial part of an answer to a question about how to understand the relationship between creatures and God. The elaborations of analogy in these various passages share at least three common features: (1) they locate analogy between univocation and equivocation; (2) they classify at least two, and sometimes more, different kinds of analogy, often with examples of each kind; and (3) they indicate that one of the kinds of analogy thus distinguished is the one most relevant to understanding divine naming.1 Six such passages which are often discussed are (in chronological order): I Sentences, d. 19, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1; I Sentences, d. 35, q. 1, a. 4 (in this case, no examples are given); De Veritate, q. 2, a. 11; De Potentia Dei, q. 7, a. 7; Summa Contra Gentiles I, c. 34; and Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 5. Scholars today typically treat one text in this genre—one of the most detailed and apparently comprehensive passages on 1 Different commentators have explored individual texts with great care. To give just two examples: I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1 is the main subject of Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas and Analogy: The Logician and the Metaphysician,” in idem, Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 81-95; De Potentia, q. 7, a. 7 is treated at length by Mark Jordan in “The Names of God and the Being of Names,” in Alfred Freddoso, ed., The Existence and Nature of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). T 532 JOSHUA P. HOCHSCHILD analogy in all of Aquinas—as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative of Aquinas’s thought. The prevailing view is that question 2, article 11 of De Veritate represents an approach to analogy which Aquinas only temporarily entertained, and soon abandoned. As John Wippel describes this view in his magisterial treatment of Aquinas’s metaphysics: “Most more recent scholars regard this particular discussion of Thomas as uncharacteristic of his earlier and later thinking on analogical predication of the divine names, and hence as not reflecting his definitive position.”2 It is intriguing to find it so widely accepted that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy—indeed that he changed it twice, soon before and soon after writing one of his most extensive elaborations of a classification of analogy. In this paper I will discuss Aquinas’s classification of analogy in De Veritate, and summarize the reasons that recent scholars have given for regarding this classification as atypical. While the text does appeal to the notion of “proportionality” in a way that the other texts do not, we will see that the other texts are diverse enough that De Veritate hardly seems to deserve to be singled out. Then, by offering some philosophical clarifications about the notion of proportionality, I will show that the teaching of De Veritate is, in principle, philosophically consistent with Aquinas’s teachings on analogy in other places, and further that there are good theological and philosophical reasons why Aquinas might emphasize different things in this passage than he might in other passages that are otherwise similar. The hypothesis that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy turns out to be unnecessary once we take sufficient account of his attention to dialectical context. 2 John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 553. As Wippel’s footnotes make clear, the modern consensus has roots in the work of Klubertanz, Lyttkens, and especially Montagnes, the last to be discussed below. PROPORTIONALITY AND DIVINE NAMING 533 I. DE VERITATE, Q. 2, A. 11 AND ITS COUSINS In the Disputed Questions on Truth, question 2, article 11, Aquinas raises the question of how a predicate, in this case “knowledge” (scientia), can apply both to...

Seeing Sodomy in theBibles moralisées

It has long been remarked by historians of sexuality that sodomy is an incoherent category. Michel Foucault has insisted on the concept's “utterly confused” status; Jonathan Goldberg has mediated between highlighting sodomy's categorical confusions in Renaissance England and deployments of the category in modern contexts (especially in North America) that continue to be precarious; Alan Bray has emphasized how sodomy emerges into visibility only through discursive performance, on the bodies of those who disrupt social and religious stability; and Mark Jordan has traced the category's development in the moral theology of the Church and draws attention to its incoherences and illogicalities, even at the moment of its invention. Yet impossible as it might seem, under the circumstances, to pin it down to particular bodies and pleasures, scholars continue to be drawn to the question of sodomy's relationship to what we now call homosexuality, whether as a distinct identity or as a variety of erotic practice. Th...

Recruiting young love: how Christians talk about homosexuality

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Caught up in stakes of debate, neither American Christians nor scholars of American religions often pause to ask how this largely Christian dispute emerged in its current terms or why it seems to center on sexual identify formation of teenaged boys. In this fascinating volume, Mark Jordan steps beyond bounds of Roman Catholic tradition to explore these questions with his trademark blend of history, cultural studies, theology, ethics, and rhetorical criticism, which here takes center stage. Also characteristically, Jordan points from conversations that were to those that could be.Jordan argues that Christian talk about has been composed of a series of erratic fast rhetorics built on a foundation of enduring slow rhetorics (211-12). Both have focused primarily on white males in their vulnerable adolescence. Jordan's starting points are psychologists G. Stanley Hall, whose Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904) arguably invented term, and Havelock Ellis, to whose work on sexuality Hall alluded elliptically, as well as novelist Forman Brown, in whose semi-autobiographical Better Angel (New York: Greenberg, 1933) psycho-spiritual rhetoric of homosexuality that would typify next seventy years of American conversation was activated by 1933 (25).On this stage Jordan artfully erects a series of roughly chronological tableaux (xix) that illustrate repetition, development, and metamorphosis of this basic rhetoric. The first is composed of Kinsey reports, which normalized same-sex sexual interaction, and pulp novels like Gore Vidal's The City and Pillar (New York: Dutton, 1948), which provided a glimpse into gay life, wrapped in imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both performed earlier rhetoric in a new key for a wider public, forcing religious leaders who disliked their permissiveness to employ their language, setting a precedent for combining scientific idiom of psychology with those of sin, virtue, and tragedy.In next scene, American Christian moralists and churches divide discourse: action from person, moral judgment from legal recommendation, and individual tendency from social cause, creating a space for the homosexual to find an outlet for his desire and to live uncondemned, if tragically. Jordan also traces mid-century rise of homophile groups where gay men--read as members of an oppressed race--could pursue what they were already calling their spirituality at a safe distance from Egypt. In this tableau sexual orientation becomes a matter of birth, and therefore something with which God must reckon.Jordan also notes early Quaker and Episcopalian efforts to describe as non-pathological. Ironically, public homophobia abetted this development: urban Christian youth ministry programs pursued queer youth at behest of homophile organizations which--out of public fear of recruitment and sexual exploitation of adolescents--were explicitly forbidden to work with them.Next on docket are post-Christian utopian spiritual visions and gay ire at Christian homophobia, a dialectical pairing that makes room for celebrations of created goodness of in self-consciously Christian gay movements. Jordan notes unintended consequences: gay liberationists replaced idea of adolescence with idea of coming out in young adulthood, leaving behind chronological adolescents. …

Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers – By Mark Jordan

Journal of Religious HistoryVolume 35, Issue 3 p. 431-432 Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers – By Mark Jordan ROSEMARY DUNN, ROSEMARY DUNN James Cook UniversitySearch for more papers by this author ROSEMARY DUNN, ROSEMARY DUNN James Cook UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 August 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2010.01044.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume35, Issue3September 2011Pages 431-432 RelatedInformation

Seducing Augustine: bodies, desires, confessions

Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text.Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes-secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theologicalvision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction.In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy.They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

The Alleged Thomism of Mark Jordan

The Alleged Thomism of Mark Jordan