Personal Witness Research Articles

Comparative Theology Is Not “Business-as-Usual Theology”: Personal Witness from a Buddhist Christian

Comparative Theology Is Not “Business-as-Usual Theology”: Personal Witness from a Buddhist Christian

Comprehensive personal witness: a model to enlarge missional involvement of the local church

In the The Split-Level Fellowship, Wesley Baker analysed the role of individual members in the Church. He gave a name to a tragic phenomenon with which Church leaders are familiar. Although true of society in general it is especially true of the church. Baker called the difference between the committed few and the uninvolved many, Factor Beta. This reality triggers the question: Why are the majority of Christians in the world not missionally involved through personal witness and which factors consequently influence personal witness and missional involvement? This article explains how the range of personal witness and missional involvement found in local churches are rooted in certain fundamental factors and conditions which are mutually influencing each other and ultimately contribute towards forming a certain paradigm. This paradigm acts as the basis from which certain behavioural patterns (witness) will manifest. The factors influencing witness are either described as accelerators or decelerators and their relativity and mutual relationships are considered. Factors acting as decelerators can severely hamper or even annul witness, while accelerators on the other hand, can have an immensely positive effect to enlarge the transformational influence of witness. In conclusion a transformational model is developed through which paradigms can be influenced and eventually changed. This model fulfils a diagnostic and remedial function and will support local churches to enlarge the individual and corporate missional involvement of believers.

The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, ed. D. Kempf and M.G. Bull

The crusades were a written construction, not just a lived experience. To a notable extent, from their very inception, perceptions of the wars of the cross—at least among social and clerical elites—appear to have been moulded by the circulation of texts. Prominent among these were the many Latin chronicles composed and compiled in the generation following the First Crusade, a uniquely concentrated explosion of literary commentary and cultural memorialisation. Combining elements drawn from Biblical models, vernacular epics, patristic theology, old soldiers’ tales and the refined imaginations of their authors, these narratives set events in artfully constructed frames, even when affecting linear clarity or assuming the authenticity of personal witness. Judged on the survival of medieval manuscripts (at least 84, according to the editors of this new edition), the most widely disseminated of the histories of the First Crusade was that usually attributed to Robert, failed abbot of St Remi in Reims and later attached to the monastery at Sénuc. The editors confirm the probability, but not certainty, of Robert’s authorship, while, picking up on references that imply the recent death of Philip I of France, they argue for a slightly later date for composition than that usually suggested—shortly after, rather than shortly before, 1108. The Capetian dimension to Robert’s text and intentions provides one of the editors’ consistent themes. The lasting power of such texts was evident in shaping later attitudes, the written, oral and visual images stimulated by the First Crusade exerting a potent, self-referential hold on subsequent promoters and witnesses. Although barely explored in the editors’ succinct introduction, the transmission of Robert’s version of events through media other than copies of the chronicle itself, such as the poetic version by Gunther of Pairis, formed one of many such strands that consolidated contemporary understanding and even perhaps aspirations.

Self-perception of knowledge and confidence in performing basic life support among medical students

Before implementing new workshops and teaching in our faculty for performing basic life support (BLS), we aimed to determine the level of self-confidence of medical students with regard to the management of cardiac arrest (CA). We conducted a preinterventional study. A questionnaire was sent to third-year to sixth-year medical students. We recorded sex, year of training, and personal witnessing of CA. We asked them about their theoretical knowledge on 10 main items of BLS and their self-perception of qualification to conduct a CA situation. We tested the respective influence of sex, year of training, and personal witnessing of CA. In total, 592 (37%) students completed the questionnaire, 42% of them were men. Less than a third of the students (30%) thought of themselves as being sufficiently qualified to conduct BLS. After the third year, the level of study did not influence their theoretical knowledge or their self-perception of qualification. Male sex and the number of CAs witnessed were the only factors positively associated with better self-confidence regarding qualification. Self-perception of qualification in BLS is poor in our faculty. In our study, personal witnessing of CA greatly influenced confidence, whereas level of study did not.

Brethren Again: Personal Witness to a Search for Healing

This autobiographical account in narrative and art charts the continuing journey of a scholar and artist to keep alive the memory of those who perished in the Shoah and to find reconciliation and healing with the “other.” Her story reminds us of the need for compassion, understanding, and a shared sense of responsibility as Jews and Christians strive to walk together. Author’s note: The word holocaust derives from the Greek word meaning “burnt offering,” which seems to give the event a religious significance. There was nothing religious about Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Therefore, I prefer to use the Hebrew word shoah, meaning “catastrophe,” the term used by modern scholars in reference to that event. In keeping with the Jewish belief that the name of the Divine should not be pronounced, I use the spelling G­d.

Gospel as Personal Knowing: Theological Reflections on Not Just a Literary Genre

The Gospel is taken here as a model of the type of personal knowing and witness that gives its peculiar status to knowledge in the humanities. The Gospel according to Matthew is viewed in comparison with the other canonical Gospels in order to bring out its peculiar slant, particularly the way it reads Jesus’s life retrospectively in the light of Easter. This is especially apt for bringing out the way that the Gospel story is made to serve as a narrative illustration of what is known theologically through faith in Christ as experienced in worship and liturgy. The question of literary genre as raised by the Gospel threatens to crack the system of genres and force an acknowledgment of the uncanny type of knowledge that the humanities entail.

Alzheimer and self-awareness: the awakening through art

William Utermohlen (1933–2007), Self-portrait, 1967; Self.portrait, 1997; A head, 2000. Private collection, New York Academy of Medicine. A retaliation for longevity is the increase in some chronic diseases. Among them, dementia involves the destruction of personality. In each chronic disease, the caregiver bares the weight of the care for his relative, but in dementia, the family ties become gradually weaker, and the relationship appears less meaningful as time goes by. The value of the ‘‘self’’ in Alzheimer’s disease seems lost. The perception of a poor quality of life leads to the ‘‘logical’’ conclusion that life itself has lost its dignity. Apuleius (Rome, 125–170 AD) wrote: ‘‘... for madness cannot know itself any more than blindness can see itself’’. But when William Utermohlen learned in 1995 he had Alzheimer’s, he began to try to paint autoportraits to better understand what was happening to him, the nature of his disease, as well as to retain self-awareness. The first selfportrait (made on his 34) is enlivened with a penetrating and determined expression; the 1997 work, done after 2 years of illness, shows emptiness and nothingness, both in the face as in the surrounding background. Suffering and aloneness are highlighted by the black blade of the saw on the right, which has no apparent reason, no relation and no texture with the man: decorative rather than substantial piece in the work, it is an empty black, framing the color of the life. In the third painting shown here (‘‘A head, 2000’’), the human face and his identity are almost completely lost, except for those two eyes, still looking around to grasp a meaning in a foreign environment. The artist died in 2007 and even his latest works offer, however, a personal witness of the truth of the persistence of his self-perception,

Agapeic Theism: Personifying Evidence and Moral Struggle

The epistemology of monotheism offered by philosophers has given inadequate attention to the kind of foundational evidence to be expected of a personal God whose moral character is agapeic, or perfectly loving, toward all other agents. This article counters this deficiency with the basis of a theistic epistemology that accommodates the distinctive moral character of a God worthy of worship. It captures the widely neglected agonic, or struggle-oriented, character of a God who seeks, by way of personal witness and intentional action, to realize and manifest agape among humans who suffer from selfishness. In doing so, the article identifies the overlooked role of personifying evidence of God in human moral character formation. In agreement with some prominent New Testament themes, the new perspective offered ties the epistemology of monotheism to robust agapeic morality in a way that makes such epistemology ethically challenging for inquirers about God’s existence. Accordingly, such theistic epistemology will no longer be a candidate for ethically neutral, spectator reflection.

Painting the sacred in the Age of Romanticism

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This extensive and in-depth study attempts to elevate Nazarene art from the lesser place it has come to occupy in the art historical canon. It is, however, much more a performance of the pleasures of close reading. A reader could hardly form the impression that Grewe has looked too thoroughly or read too much into a work; one always comes to feel that the art objects in question reward a prolonged gaze. Stated specifically, the author's argument concerns visual literacy in relation to biblical motifs, or how Old Testament typology in Nazarene art is linked to its later antitypes. Starting with works by Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Grewe investigates themes including friendship, brotherly love and familial love, and the importance of personal witnessing (which is introduced to account for the profusion of self-portraiture during the period). Grewe examines how the Lukasbund , or the Brotherhood of St. Luke, formed in Vienna in 1809, employed Old Testament imagery, refiguring it in a style distinct from the allegorical one that generally guides the reception of Romantic art. Grewe asserts that Pforr's work is allegorical insofar as it is religious at heart, yet it is also quite open to secular themes. She advances her argument about Nazarene secularization by highlighting the interaction between the artists' intellectual engagements and their religious practices. Starting from this methodological point, her study's six thoughtful and thorough chapters approach Nazarene painting from a wide variety of perspectives.Grewe's study of Overbeck's drawing Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving him Rachel in Place of Leah (1807/1808) is a good example of refined close reading. Here the author attributes substantial intentionality to Overbeck, yet it is really Grewe herself who brings to the image an attention to stillness and a fascination with the figures' emotional states. She examines how Rachel gazes at Leah, and how the story is told through gestures and expressions. What emerges is the refined ekphrasis of the art historian, who sees pathos and desire in the figures' body language. There is something in Overbeck's faces and forms--in their curvature and personality--that permits Grewe to supplement the work persuasively with powerful narrative. She is best where she examines female figures such as Sulamith and Maria, who regularly appear as doubles of one another in Nazarene art. In Pforr's 1811 oil painting, for example, Maria appears as a figure for unsatisfied longing and unfulfilled destiny. Studying the erotic economy (82) of Sulamith and Maria , the author demonstrates a keen eye for detail.The quality of the reproductions throughout the book is impressive, and Grewe was fortunate to have published with Ashgate, who has provided her with ample space for images. To choose one example: the colors in Victor Orsel's Le Bien et Le Mal (1832) are arresting. In her discussion of that work Grewe both plots the trajectory from the Lukasbund to the Nazarenes, and explores how St. …

Amitav Ghosh's Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide

Focusing on Amitav Ghosh's novel The Hungry Tide, this article explores the challenges faced by cosmopolitans seeking to make an ethical intervention in a subaltern space. By dramatizing the encounter between bourgeois characters and the traumatic history of people inhabiting the Sundarbans region of Bengal, Ghosh suggests that an unreconstructed cosmopolitanism is incapable of addressing social injustices; to effect any positive change, the cosmopolitan must undergo a transformation. This paper locates affect as the agent of that critical transformation, a surplus that is transmitted beyond the horizon of personal witnessing and into the larger community of writers and readers.

The Technological Gaze

The Technological Gaze

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Political, social, and cultural developments in recent years have imparted a new sense of urgency to reflections on the changing relationship between faith and culture throughout the world. Those reflections at one stage focused on speculations concerning how culture would be reshaped when its religious foundations had been repudiated and eradicated. But in recent years we find terms such as "the death of the death of God" used in a book title by Jacob Neusner and "desecularization" in a book title by Peter Berger, and the questions in the foreground now pertain to the proper relationship between faith and cultural-political life in the face of the persistence of religious belief. The current state of such questions is anticipated aptly in a pair of lectures given by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1978: "The End of Christendom," and "But Not of Christ."1 Muggeridge offers a personal witness to the efforts in the twentieth century to destroy Christianity especially in the Soviet Union and presciently reports that those efforts in the Soviet Union had failed—and this before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the success of Solidarity in Poland, and the implosion of the Soviet regime and empire. It is not coincidental to the account given in these lectures that Muggeridge himself converted to Christianity and just a few years after delivering these lectures became a Catholic. [End Page 5] The end of Christendom in Muggeridge's terms indicates the collapse of a civilization in which Christianity is deeply entwined in the political, social, and cultural structures of power. He sees in the twentieth century a parallel to what St. Augustine encountered when faced with the collapse of Rome: the inevitable transience of historical civilizations in contrast to which the eternity that comes to light through Christianity shines out all the more clearly, as he envisions anew Augustine's distinction between the ephemeral City of Man and the everlasting City of God. Muggeridge in these essays offers witness to what he understands to be a great historical period of transition, and his reminder in the lectures that he speaks as a journalist and not as a scholar seems apt. His account imparts a personal character to the movement of history especially as he reports what he has witnessed of the failed effort in the Soviet Union to destroy Christianity and of the resurgence of Christian truth through the great figure of Solzhenitsyn as well as through his sense of moral and cultural decline in the West. To his credit, Muggeridge in the second essay, "But Not [the End] of Christ," recognizes the danger of egoism involved in crafting denunciations of the culture around him and applies self-restraint as he falls back upon the hope that flows from his own deeply held Christian faith. Muggeridge can be viewed in these lectures as establishing the ground for a new set of challenges that he himself does not fully address—at one moment he movingly speaks of himself as living in the vicinity of death (although he lived for another twelve years after delivering these lectures), and while he knows that Christ and Christianity will live on beyond what he sees as the end of Christendom, he does not ask what new relationships between Christianity and political and cultural life might emerge in a new historical period. Perhaps Muggeridge was not well prepared for such questions because in these lectures he focuses on Christ and on great Christian thinkers and artists such as Newman and Dostoevsky but does not bring into focus Christ's presence in the world through the Christian church. In any case, one measure of historical development [End Page 6] in the three decades since Muggeridge delivered these lectures is that new questions about how Christianity should participate in contemporary public and cultural affairs are being thoughtfully and energetically pursued. Among the many important initiatives in this area—and of course the Institute on Religion and Public Life and its journal, First Things, must be lauded in this context—is a new organization called "Theos: A Public Theology Think Tank," launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Cardinal...

Counter-Spaces as Resistance in Conflict Zones

SUMMARY Women's voices, roles, and contributions are die most misunderstood issues in the analysis of war zones and conflict areas. This paper brings the feminist lens into the analysis of Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It examines the effect and legacy of policies inflicted by the doctrines of “no safe haven” and of “security reasoning” in relation to women, explores the way it shapes women's interactions with their family members, and discusses the ways in which continued and unpredictable political oppression creates an art of resistance with therapeutic qualities. By using a collection of narratives, personal witnessing, and analyses of studies gathered since the onset of the second Intifada, the researcher reveals how women have managed to develop women-oriented strategies that protected the domestic space and produced innovative transcripts that created counter-spaces of safety to rebuild (actually or metaphorically) the family home. The paper concludes by showing how the processes of displacement and the attacks on the domestic sphere, nevertheless, engender agency and creative resistance and calls for front-line feminist activism.

How Music Created a Public

The phrase sphere, originating as a tool for clarifying the nature of a diffuse but perfectly genuine phenomenon, has declined into a piece of slack intellectual shorthand. Its main usefulness today is to illustrate the problems that arise when a deductive formulation is mistakenly assumed to possess explanatory power. In fact it explains nothing at all. If we wish to understand the ways in which private persons learned how to communicate with each other in a public way during the Enlightenment, or the creation of institu tional foundations, independent of the state, for the critical use of reason, we need to descend, with Adrian Johns and David Zaret, to much lower levels of organization and the specific kinds of work it took to sustain them.1 We would also need to accept that different national cultures had very different notions of the public/private distinction and that they acquired these along very dif ferent timelines. My concern here is primarily with the Anglophone working through of this distinction, which is only one strand of a much more complex story, though one that is agreed to have exercised a formative influence. Our problems with the historical public sphere begin with the assumption that it originated from the discursive culture of the London coffeehouses and was enlarged by the freeing of journalism and pamphleteering from prepublica tion censorship. This seems intuitively plausible; yet it has never satisfactorily been explained how such inherently separatist institutions as coffeehouses and newspapers could have been responsible for the creation of a public. In the early seventeenth century, London and through it the nation had, indeed, possessed a single, vast clearinghouse for news and opinion in the form of Paul's walk— the central aisle of the cathedral—to which every Londoner with the itch for news would go in person every day to tap into what had been delivered by rumor, gossip, or personal witness; but this space and the secondary oral information hub of the Royal Exchange were destroyed by the great fire of 1666, and no par ticular venue was ever to recover their dominance. The retreat to the coffee

"Until This Day" and the Preexilic Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formula omitted.) (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Over a century ago Abraham Kuenen identified two distinct strata in book of Kings.1 one stratum, he observed that phrase until this day both confirms realities no longer true after exile and occurs in passages bound to very structure of book (2 Kgs 8:16-24; 14:1-7; 16:1-9)-a structure Kuenen attributed to a Deuteronomistic redactor (his Rd^sup 1^).2 His analysis of other occurrences of until this day in Kings led him to conclude that they all derived from Rd^sup 1^-a conclusion that was subsequently embraced by Julius Wellhausen, and, when combined with Martin Noth's landmark study a half century later, helped lay foundation for Frank Moore Cross's theory of a dual redaction of Deuteronomistic History (DH).3 Since Cross's original studies, theory of a dual redaction of DH had numerous defenders and now stands on firmer evidentiary ground.4 The purpose of this article is not to retread this ground but to pick up where Kuenen left off in identifying source of until this day not just for Kings but for whole of DH. Although only study devoted solely to this phrase argued that until this day derives from different redactors,5 there are compelling reasons to assign this phrase to one redactor: Deuteronomistic Historian (Dtr), who employed until this day as his own personal witness to geographical, political, and cultic realities mentioned in his sources that still existed at time of his historical enterprise. Moreover, evidence of until this day indicates that Dtr was active during reign of Josiah and that his preexilic history contained most of what we now have before us (as Cross originally argued). Finally, Dtr's use of until this day suggests that, when compiling DH, he sought to represent interests of both Judean monarchy and Levitical priesthood. I. The Redactional Nature of Until This Day in Deuteronomistic History his 1963 JBL article A Study of Formula 'Until This Day,' Brevard S. Childs demonstrates on linguistic grounds that until this day, in nearly all of its occurrences, has been secondarily added as a redactional commentary on existing traditions.6 light of its redactional nature, Childs argues that biblical historian employed until this day much as his Greek and Roman counterparts used similar formulae: to validate some aspect of tradition which can still be verified in his own time. Childs writes: In our opinion, use of formula in OT is closely paralleled to this latter usage, namely, to historian's personal witness. To answer question of who is responsible for this formula of personal testimony, Childs turns to source analysis, where he observes that until this day appears across a variety of literary strata. This variety is nowhere more obvious than in books of Kings, about which Childs writes: The formula appears in material most likely from source styled Book of Acts of Solomon (1 Kgs 11:41; cf. 8:8; 9:21), from material in Book of Chronicles of Kings of Judah (2 Kgs 8:23; cf. 2 Kgs 8:22; 10:27, etc.), from a collection of prophetic narratives (2 Kgs 2:2), and only infrequently from Deuteronomistic historian (2 Kgs 17:23, 34). Based on diversity of sources in which until this day appears, Childs concludes that the formula reflects age of many different redactors. Since Childs's study, redactional nature of until this day been widely accepted, and even further elucidated, by subsequent scholarship.7 However, Childs's determination that until this day derives from a variety of different redactors not received much attention, even though his reasons for this conclusion are problematic. …

Good News after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World (review)

Reviewed by: “Good News” after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World Martin Rumscheidt “Good News” after Auschwitz? Christian Faith in a Post-Holocaust World, edited and introduced by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001. 215 pp. $39.95. Do an institution and a faith that have been infested almost from their beginning and for centuries since with a sense of their superiority over the Synagogue and a hostility towards the faith of Jews have anything left to speak that can be called “good news?” What options do people have whom the Holocaust has so radically alerted to that infestation but who refuse simply to abandon the Christian faith and leave the Church, knowing that doing so, or merely lamenting the sin of Christianity, preserves the status quo of Christian anti-Judaism? What commandment comes to them out of the horrors of Auschwitz which, if left unheeded, turns what the “faith of our fathers” has to proclaim into renewed assaults on Jews and Judaism? The fourteen contributors to this book, all claiming to be Christian, know that questions like these irrevocably challenge Christian faith as well as their own personal witness as followers of Jesus of Nazareth. They are convinced that the Holocaust is not an adiaphoron, a matter of no direct significance to the substance of Christian theology and faith. All are steeped in the history of the Church’s anti-Judaism, of the Western world’s antisemitism, and of how both have aided and abetted the Shoah. And however aware they are of the challenge of Auschwitz also to the faith of Jews, they are even more aware of how utterly deeply the Holocaust and all that prepared for it has compromised, if not irreparably distorted, Christianity itself and the Church as such. Six overarching foci direct the explorations and proposals of this book. First, Christians need to be honest about and remorseful for the anti-Jewish history of Christianity and the Church. Second, the Jewish origins of the Christian faith and the [End Page 168] Jewish identity of Jesus need to be clearly acknowledged, studied with much greater care, and willingly affirmed. Images or understandings of Jesus need to be presented that are free of anti-Judaism. All this in a context that upholds the unbroken vitality of the Jewish people and their traditions. Third, liturgies and scriptural interpretations that promote the infestations named earlier need to be identified and replaced. Fourth, the conviction that is at the heart of Christian faith and practice needs to be prominently upheld, namely the great commandment to love the neighbor inclusively and hospitably because, as Martin Buber renders the Hebrew: he/she is like you. Fifth, the awareness that faithfulness to God entails human responsibility needs to be intensified. And, finally, a determined commitment is required that the darkness of injustice, evil, and death will not overcome the light of justice, goodness, and life itself (pp. 190–191). The authors confess, some explicitly, others more implicitly, their own complicity in Christian anti-Judaism by acknowledging that they had learned and subsequently made use of the methods and conclusions of dominant biblical exegesis. But they also acknowledge that, as a result of long, arduous, painful but finally very fruitful work with Jewish thinkers, they have learned to be self-critical and to develop new methods and new theologies. To this reviewer, such confession and the concomitant mourning for both the actual presence of Christian anti-Judaism in the Church and one’s own personal, perhaps even unconscious, transmission of it, is a hope-filled sign, a portent of possible “good news” after Auschwitz. And the determination to unlearn and relearn but, above all, to learn new things and methods, to draw new conclusions, strikes one as truly heartening. Here, the presence of Jewish colleagues is simply irreplaceable, as all the authors confirm. As a result of such togetherness, this book urges the recognition and unreserved embrace of the fact that between Jews and Christians there is a humanly irreconcilable difference. This enjoins the deepening of fully mutual respect. Since such respect is made present and real by and in significant events and the people...

Finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events

The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/87 1 Finding aids to the past: bearing personal witness to traumatic public events Barbie Zelizer The past compels us for what it tells us about the present. It is no wonder, then, that nearly everyone with a voice claims territoriality for it wide-ranging collectives like nation-states; large-scale interested groups bonded by ethnicity, class and race; professional communities driven by expertise, like historians, filmmakers or journalists. Each strives to colonize connections to the past as a way of lending credence, cohesion or even a simple perspective to life in the present. But the past's compelling aspects in particular, its lived and experienced dimensions do not begin when we position ourselves as members of groups. Rather, they draw us already as individuals, amateur presences who connect through a personal need to interact with the past. This need makes us act in atypical ways, particularly when we face public events of a traumatic nature. Situated as bystanders to history-in-the-making, individuals in such cases often respond in ways that are out of the ordinary. They hoard and store newspapers from events of days long past. They compile personal videotape archives of television news broadcasts from events as wide-ranging as the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf War or the death of Princess Diana. And, as in the recent case of thousands of New Yorkers and others who painfully plodded to the site of the World Trade Center attacks, they allow time to stand still as they search for a way to respond to the trauma that unfolded there. What is it, then, that propels actions that are so out of the ordinary yet patterned in their typicality across space and time? This article attempts to clarify what it means to forge a personal connection with a traumatic public past. It ponders whether there is a space for connecting as individuals to the past that in turn shapes its ensuing collective appropriations. The project is unevenly structured, considering two very different kinds of traumatic pasts one long gone, the other which we are still experiencing. It uses the responses by individual liberators to the liberation of the concentration camps in the Second World War as a template for considering the responses now being shaped to the 11 September World Trade Center attacks by residents, firefighters, police and emergency medical personnel. In each case, the personal need to respond to traumatic public events generates individual acts of bearing witness that unify the collective, forged primarily through one mode of documentation photography. Photography, and the ritual practices it involves, helps individuals establish moral accountability in a way that helps them move on, and in so doing they reinstate the collective after traumatic events temporarily shatter its boundaries. Bearing witness to a traumatic past Although trauma initially denoted a term for the physical wounds causing pain and suffering, it now reflects a range of cognitive-emotional states caused by suffering and existential pain. Scholarship on public trauma first drew attention during the late 19th century, when spreading industrialization and the use of technology produced industrial accidents to which the public was unaccustomed (Young, 1996). Technology both increased the occurrence of traumatic acts and access to them. The responses to traumatic events unfold in patterned ways. Public trauma occurs when actions wars, major disasters or other large-scale cataclysmic events rattle default notions of what it means morally to remain members of a collective. Individual response is key here, for individuals face fundamental questions about the collective's capacity to accommodate both the personal and group needs arising from the trauma at hand. It is no surprise, then, that when faced with public trauma, people work towards recovery by drawing upon personal aspects of their identity, which remain at the core of recovery's three stages -establishing safety, engaging in remembrance and mourning, and reconnecting

Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature by Sonia Saldívar-Hull

402 WAL 36.4 WINTER 2002 Feminism on the Border: Chicana Qender Politics and Literature. By Sonia Saldivar-Hull. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 226 pages, $45.00/$16.95. Reviewed by Francine K. Richter Sul Ross State University, Rio Grande College, Uvalde, Texas In a daring contribution to contemporary Chicana feminist theory, Sonia Saldivar-Hull offers readers a significantly different text of literary and cultural criticism. She recounts her own very personal experience and development as the first child of a traditional and repressive (for the females) Hispanic family, through her young teenage years, and on to becoming the dutiful working wife of a medical student. In taking this particularly subjective approach, SaldivarHull opens herself up to possible complaints of unreliable methodology, but this is a necessary circumstance for the author, who states that “[a]s Chicanas . . . our specific experiences as working-class-origin, ethnic women under the law of the fathers undergird our theories” (12). Besides describing in depth her personal journey to political conscious­ ness, Saldivar-Hull atypically seeks out “alternative archives” and discourses in place of the sanctioned historical archives, many of which leave out women’s stories. She agrees with following feminist critical practices, such as gendered analyses of historical records, and she poses the difficult questions that earlier historians so often neglected. The alternative archives include such cultural spaces as “late-night kitchen-table talks,” gossip, rumors, and stories passed down from one female to another. The author explains that different methods must be employed when it comes to Chicana feminist criticism because race, gender, and the specificity of their existences demand an alternative approach. Saldivar-Hull’s brand of feminism was born and bred on the border (literally and figuratively) between the United States and Mexico in the deep Southwest. It developed because of a quite specific material experience and is never ahistorical . The concerns of brown women of this geopolitical area are vastly differ­ ent from those of Anglo-Saxon Protestant women who do not experience the constraints and oppressions peculiar to Chicana women’s moment and place in history. Anglo feminism does not begin to address these crucial issues for women of color. Perhaps one would have to live on the border to understand, but even as a White, urban, Northern-bred academic, I cannot help but share Saldivar-Hull’s assessment of Chicanas’ subaltern place in border society. Just last semester, one of my young female students could not finish her work because her parents saw no reason for her to continue her education when she was getting married and the husband would then be responsible for her support. The three Chicana authors whose work is discussed in detail by SaldivarHull likewise differ significantly from mainstream criticism and authorship. Gloria Anzaldua, for instance, advocates a “New Mestiza consciousness,” one that “illuminates how to enact a (border) crossing, from marginalized other to B O O K R E V IE W S 403 whole woman” (66). Her type of feminism occurs in “a borderland grounded in but not limited to geographic space” (66). Sandra Cisneros, too, is driven by a cultural, gendered imperative: by virtue of her own history, she is com­ pelled to record the previously ignored history of women of color on the bor­ der. One ofher literary acts of resistance is that the “borderlands” in The House on Mango Street is meant as anywhere Mexican Americans have gathered as a group, thereby extending the arbitrary borders that the United States observes politically. Helena Maria Viramontes seeks viable alternatives for women’s lives in her cuentos (usually “stories,” but here “cultural artifacts”). In her work, the concept of the Chicano family does not need to be erased; rather, it needs to be transformed and reworked. As another border literary artist, Viramontes embraces oral history and other “historias,” the tern used by Saldivar-Hull to describe forms of testimonio (personal witness). This project began for Saldivar-Hull in the 1980s, and one can tell from its depth and insight that it would take a great many years to articulate so strongly and lucidly the contemporary feminism of the border. & Call for Papers W E S T OF H ER E...

From spontaneous to induced neurological mutations: a personal witness of the ascent of the mouse model.

The mouse is arguably the most versatile animal model for studying the mechanisms of normal development and the pathogenesis of congenital malformations of the human nervous system. It does not offer the enormous potentials for manipulation by molecular genetics of small invertebrates, nor does it have the advantage of a large brain size and the similarity to the human that has been exploited by neuroanatomists and neurophysiologists in the nonhuman primates. However, as a small, relatively fast-reproducing mammal, with several well-defined inbred strains, it has became an unexcelled tool in modern developmental neurobiology. In addition, with the impeding completion of its genome sequence, the enlargement of the repertoire of spontaneous and induced mutations, combined with the creation of mosaic animals, the mouse has become an essential model system in almost every area of neurobiology and experimental neuropathology.KeywordsPurkinje CellGranule CellDendritic SpineCerebellar CortexBinocular CompetitionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Special Feature: The Physician as Witness

The Physician as Witness Suzanne Poirier (bio) The three articles that follow may at first glance seem to be unrelated. Stevan Weine writes about his experience working both with survivors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and with a playwright and actors who depict one such survivor. Douglas Reifler reports on a course he has developed that asks medical students to write about their experiences in gross anatomy—at times even asking them to imagine their cadavers’ experiences. Finally, Marjorie Sirridge and Brenda Pfannenstiel bring us a selection of the rich reading they have found in the lives of early women physicians. All of these articles partake of the notion of witnessing, a familiar concept long associated with the courts and the pulpit but more recently coming to dramatic attention through the stories of survivors of illness, domestic violence, and genocide. Most studies of witnessing focus on trauma. To the extent that Sirridge and Pfannenstiel’s autobiographers were women breaking into a man’s profession, these women were survivors as well as pioneers. Their tales often contain humor but also contain the hurts of hazing, rejection, and isolation. Reifler’s students struggle to incorporate their often upsetting confrontations with their cadavers into their understanding of themselves as physicians and their cadavers as human beings—to sustain the humanity of them both. Stevan Weine finds that hearing the stories of survivors of the genocide in Bosnia is not enough. In searching a broader arena to publicize the outrage of these events he seeks as well to find a way to conceptualize the health professional who, in turn, bears witness. One of the reasons why witnessing may have captured the attention of scholars may be the multiple levels on which it operates. In its clearest form, the witness is one who recounts his or her experience. What, though, do we call the people who hear and respond to that witness? Weine’s decision to serve as dramaturg to a play about one survivor of mass rape in Bosnia is the most vivid example of such a response in these three papers, but Reifler’s decision to write about (and quote) his students’ stories and Sirridge and Pfannenstiel’s impulse to share the autobiographies that have inspired them also partake of [End Page 165] this next level of witnessing. Their articles report other people’s experiences, but they also reflect the authors’ own responses to those other people. Moreover, the impulses that sent Sirridge (who later engaged Pfannenstiel) to find women physicians’ autobiographies, Reifler to create Reflections on Gross Anatomy, and Weine to begin working with survivors of ethnic cleansing speak of other levels of personal witness that are only implicit in most of these articles. Witnessing thus spins out, creating more accounts and enmeshing more people’s responses. Such a process raises issues that are literary as well as social and political. Scholars who study trauma and witnessing are as diverse in their interests and their understandings as—probably even more than—are Weine, Reifler, and Sirridge and Pfannenstiel. To highlight some of the ways in which these three articles complement each other and challenge the reader, I have invited two noted scholars to respond to them. Kali Tal comes to trauma studies from literature. Her book Worlds of Hurt examines novels of wartime, and she takes the approach of a literary scholar who seeks to plumb and honor the trauma of the unique voices and experiences of survivors. Jonathan Shay is a physician who has also studied the stories of combat survivors, in his book Achilles in Vietnam, but he asks, through the concept of communalization, how we can best fight conditions that brutalize others in the name of the public good. Between them, they offer other lenses through which to think about the articles in this feature. This special feature, however, serves an additional purpose. As I have described in the Editor’s Column, this issue of Literature and Medicine marks the inauguration of the Literature and Medicine Home Page. A major feature of the home page is a section of Letters to the Editor. These three articles and their provocative responses invite considerations—of the physician as witness, of ways...