Popular Reading Research Articles

Religion, Politics, and the Parish in Tudor England and Wales: A View from the Marches of Wales, 1534–1553

Historians of early modern England benefit from a rich and varied array of contemporary accounts by individuals that shed light on the local, regional, and wider impact of religious and other policies of successive monarchs. These include the narrative of Robert Parkyn, a Yorkshire priest, of the years 1532–54, Rose Hickman's recollections of Protestant life during the reign of Mary Tudor, to the chronicle of Henry Machyn in 1550–1563, to name but a few. More broadly, too, the history of the book and its import in illuminating various aspects of medieval and early modern popular culture, devotion, piety, reading practices and other related topics has been widely recognised. They have been successfully mined in recent years by various scholars of medieval and early modern England, Ireland, and beyond, from Eamon Duffy to Salvador Ryan and Raymond Gillespie.

Autobiography and Authority in the Writings of the Iranian Diaspora

The proliferation of popular memoirs by Iranian American women that began in 2003 engendered a vigorous debate in the scholarly community, particularly among Iranian American scholars. Much of the debate has centered on the perception that the memoirists are offering a personal story that is frequently misinterpreted by its popular readership as a national story, thereby distorting the more accurate picture that can be offered by scholarly research and writing. Critics argue that this is particularly dangerous at this critical juncture in the history of American–Middle East relations, when the American reader is particularly hungry for information about Iran and the Middle East. Ironically, though most of the critics of the memoirs have established scholarly records, they have responded to the memoirs in forms that emphasize their own autobiographical experience. Why this insistence on the autobiographical by scholars to legitimate information about Iran? Heretofore an immigrant group largely absent from public discourse as such, I argue that the debate over the memoir has made the Iranian diaspora community produce (and reproduce) itself by publicly staging textual debates over autobiography, scholarship, and the limits of authenticity and authority.

An Investigation of Critical Reading in Reading Textbooks: A Qualitative Analysis

As a technique for discovering and evaluating information within texts, critical reading might be a panacea for those learners whose voices and choices are muted and ignored. A crucial question is thus to ask whether and to what extent popular reading textbooks meet the criteria for the development of critical reading. To this end, the present article seeks to identify and investigate the presence of those items within reading textbooks which help promote critical reading. Based on the literature on critical thinking, the cornerstone of critical reading, a checklist is provided whose items are indicator of whether a particular text promotes critical reading or not. Moreover, it is recognized that autonomy and engagement are prerequisites for enhancement of critical reading and that they can be achieved through strategy instruction and task-based instruction, respectively. Three reading textbooks (Select Readings: Upper-intermediate, Active Skills for Reading: Book 4, and Mosaic Reading 2) are leveled against three criteria: Critical thinking items, the use of appropriate tasks, and strategic instruction. The results indicate that these textbooks meet the first criterion to some extent, but seriously lack the last two ones.

Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare, Sex, and Love Elizabeth Klett (bio) Stanley Wells. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 304. $27.95. Stanley Wells is one of the few Shakespeare scholars, on either side of the Atlantic, to have attained anything like a popular readership for his books outside of the academy. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love is the most recent entry in a body of work that includes Shakespeare for All Time (2002) and Shakespeare and Co. (2006). Wells's goal with this new book is no small undertaking: he aims to provide a wide survey of attitudes toward love, lust, and sexual practices within Shakespeare's life, times, and works. He begins by noting the purging of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays by past generations of editors and directors, which has been balanced by an interest (particularly in recent years) in digging beneath the surface of the texts to find sexual meanings not immediately apparent. Wells explores the intriguing dialectic between negation and augmentation of sexuality primarily through a focus on the vexed relationship between love and lust, "the spiritual and the earthly" (7). Throughout this elegantly written study, Wells mediates between popular criticism and academic scholarship, between bolstering Shakespearean authority and contextualizing the plays by examining shared authorship and performance choices, and finally between when a reading is "gratuitous" or "pornographic" and when it is "true" to the text. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, "Life and Times," Wells delves into the sexual mores and practices of Shakespeare's times, with a particular focus on the scanty facts of Shakespeare's own life; in the second, "Plays and Poems," he provides readings of nearly all the works in the canon. In the introduction Wells critiques other works on the same topic for not encompassing the scope of the subject of sexuality. The historical sections in part 1 are generally more interesting than the textual analyses in part 2, primarily because the book as a whole sacrifices original close readings to breadth of coverage. Some of Wells's most persuasive points relate to homosexual practices and poetics; for example, in his analysis of Troilus and Cressida in part 2, he points out the homophobia of critics like Jan Kott who (assuming the role occupied by Thersites within the text) have used derogatory language to describe the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Even more effectively, in the second chapter of part 1, he expands Mary Bly's assertion that there was a "self-aware homoerotic community in early modern London" by claiming that certain late sixteenth-century writers "were aware of a body of readers specially attracted by homoerotic literature, and that they attempted to satisfy those readers' tastes" (50–51). Wells focuses on Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield (the only Elizabethan poet other than Shakespeare to address sonnets to a male), and Michael Drayton, who he argues formed "a group of poets with linked interests in homoerotic subject matter for poetry, and there are clear signs of direct influence and aesthetic fellowship among them" (57). [End Page 134] Part of Wells's point in theorizing a "homoerotic community" among these three poets is to separate Shakespeare and his work from this fellowship, with the implication that Shakespeare is superior. There is latent bardolatry in Wells's approach (although I suspect he would never use this term) that shows up throughout the book as a whole, marking it as popular, rather than wholly scholarly. Extravagant praises of Shakespeare are made mostly in passing, such as when he describes the plays as "whole and perfect" (122) and says of Romeo and Juliet, "Shakespeare deploys his mastery of language to differentiate character with virtuosic skill" (167). Other cues that Wells wrote the book primarily for a popular audiences (despite the fact that it was published by Oxford) include his accessible, almost breezy writing style, which employs contractions, the occasional colloquialism, and eschews jargon. He also plays down academic scholarship, sometimes omitting scholars' names within the body of the text and keeping the footnotes minimal. The title itself, with its three keywords guaranteed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, combined with the handsomely produced volume that...

Poaching on Crusoe's Island: Popular Reading and Chapbook Editions of Robinson Crusoe

In this essay, the author argues that chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe should be viewed not simply as impoverished abridgments of Defoe's novel, but as striking examples of the popular “appropriation” of an elite text by plebeian readers. The ruthless editorial decisions required to reduce a 400-page novel to a 24-page chapbook with woodcut illustrations may appear haphazard at times, omitting such vital scenes as Crusoe's discovery of the footprint, for instance, but actually express the preferences, interests, and reading practices of common readers. Popular reading often challenges and confounds the aesthetic and narrative expectations of experienced readers. Similarly, popular chapbook editions of Robinson Crusoe contest, dispute, and sometimes reject the ideological underpinnings of their elite source text.

How intelligence happens

Human intelligence is among the most powerful forces on earth. It builds sprawling cities, vast cornfields and coffee plantations, complex microchips; it takes us from the atom to the limits of the universe. Understanding how brains build intelligence is among the most fascinating challenges of modern science. does the biological brain, a collection of billions of cells, enable us to do things no other species can do? In this book John Duncan, a scientist who has spent thirty years studying the human brain, offers an adventure story - the story of the hunt for basic principles of human intelligence, behaviour, and thought. Using results drawn from classical studies of intelligence testing; from attempts to build computers that think; from studies of how minds change after brain damage; from modern discoveries of brain imaging; and from groundbreaking recent research, Duncan synthesizes often difficult-to-understand information into a book that will delight scientific and popular readers alike. He explains how brains break down problems into useful, solvable parts and then assemble these parts into the complex mental programmes of human thought and action. Moving from the foundations of psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience to the most current scientific thinking, How Intelligence Happens is for all those curious to understand how their own mind works.

Popular Science Between News and Education: A European Perspective

Typically, scholars that do research on models and structures of science education understand their work as rather independent of issues like popularization and journalism. Further academic pursuits that ask about the history of popular science including its specific audiences and genres on the one hand and that try to explore the preferable ways for journalists to write about news from science and technology on the other hand may exist in their own right. Systematic science education, one may hold, in particular as it is related to institutions such as schools and universities must be confounded neither with popular readings that blend entertainment with telling stories about science nor with science news within the daily press. While the latter would be too unsystematic to count as education, the former may not really teach new skills but rather amount to second-order discussion on scientific developments. Education, popularization, and journalism may hence appear as distinguishable endeavors that all relate to science but do not necessary function in connection. The collection of five papers in this special issue intends to disproof this view—at least to some extent. The argument becomes particularly strong from a wider European perspective, and rather than concentrating on the ‘‘big’’ science nations like Britain, Germany and France one may consider the developments in the European periphery, where educational institutions (even in the twentieth century) still had to develop a wide availability and an independent standing (Daum 2009; Papanelopoulou et al. 2009). Within the process of creating a general scientific literacy the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish cases show to what extent popularization and science news in the daily press have contributed to a complex educational project. Along the same lines it is often hard to distinguish popular books on science from early science textbooks, a distinction that is just so obvious for academic professionalism in the ‘‘big’’ science nations. For this reason it appears reasonable not to divide the various discourses on science too quickly into education, popularization, and science news and better to concentrate on the circulation of knowledge— or on ‘‘knowledge in transit’’ (Secord 2004)—in which all three fields may participate and interact. This view opens up a particular diverse field. Events like earth quakes or solar

Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (review)

Reviewed by: Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere Derek Risse (bio) Richard M. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011, 368 pp. $70.00 cloth, 35.00 paper. Bringing together discourses of rhetoric, information science, and the life sciences, the final text in Richard Doyle’s “Transhuman Trilogy” is nothing short of a radical rethinking of our most enduring evolutionary narrative: survival of the fittest. Contra popular (mis)readings of Charles Darwin’s work, Darwin’s Pharmacy argues that survival is not so much determined by an organism’s toughness or propensity for battle, but by its ability to meaningfully manipulate information, whether this be in speech, bird song, dance, or writing. Building on his work in the first and second books of this trilogy, On Beyond Living (1997) and Wetwares (2003), Doyle uses the concept “rhetorical software” to describe how fluctuations in patterned behavior incite attention and sexuality. This conceptual pairing is particularly useful, because it greatly revises our notion of the import of rhetoric [End Page 325] in the life sciences. Seeing rhetorical efficacy as being determined by an organism’s ability to manipulate information, Doyle emphasizes the already rhetorical nature of the life sciences, while providing researchers and theorists a methodology for following similar connections in literary and new media studies. The chapters of Darwin’s Pharmacy function as standalone essays, but add up to a carefully woven argument when read together. In chapter 1, “The Flowers of Perception,” Doyle takes up Henri Michaux’s and Aldous Huxley’s mid-twentieth-century writings on mescaline in an effort to explain how the concept of rhetorical software might (re)orient our thinking about “trip reports,” a genre devoted largely to user accounts of their experience with psychedelic substances. Despite contrasts in writing style, Michaux’s The Miserable Miracle and Huxley’s The Doors of Perception both function algorithmically, providing protocols for the dissemination of psychedelics (pp. 52–53). These complex rhetorical and programmatic responses do not report on psychedelic experience; rather, Doyle argues, they transmit psychedelic experience through their use of rhetorical devices. For example, Huxley’s troping of “flowers” in The Doors shows us how trip reports tune and amplify our interconnection with the environment (p. 71); here, Doyle proposes a way of reading that emphasizes what trip reports “do,” as opposed to what they “say” (p. 91). Building on this premise, chapter 2, “Rhetorical Mycelium,” unpacks a networked theory of rhetorical ecologies wherein utterances and writings operate like feedback loops, enabling the replication of psychedelic experience (p. 115). For Doyle, the side effects of ingesting plants are profoundly rhetorical. Borrowing from Louis Althusser’s concept of “interpellation,” he argues that trip reports “hail” the reader, turning us to the experience of ecodelic interconnection. Doyle uses the term “ecodelic” to describe the human experience of “radical interconnection” with an ecosystem; a relationship that renders information we can mime and investigate (p. 33). In chapter 3, “Rhetorical Adjuncts and the Evolution of Rhetoric,” Doyle shows us that Darwin’s writings foreground the role and importance of similar “attention-management devices” in sexual selection. Although battle is a key component of this economy, so is charm: Darwin’s corpus is interesting, because it “introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but the sexiest, those who are adepts of attention gathering” (p. 139). Drawing on influential work in cybernetics and information science, Doyle notes that attention is maintained through rhetorical invention—deviations in patterns of song or movement that sustain the interest of potential mates. Like blips in code, organisms select their partners based on their ability to manipulate information. Truly an interdisciplinary gesture, Doyle’s most telling work comes in his pairing of three examples: birdsong, Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac, and the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The GCP studies the direct effects of consciousness on “physical systems” by calculating fluctuations in over fifty EGG (electrogaiagram) devices that have been distributed around the planet. Experiments show that human consciousness can make the string of numbers that the EGG produces shift (p. 157). As Doyle points out...

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Ethnography

A lightening rod for an array of criticism, Coming of Age in Samoa also attained monumental popularity with both scholarly and popular reading audiences, convincing many that it captured the sexual and social lives of Samoan adolescent girls and that North American girls might be instructed by this portrait. Taking a “recovery and reappraisal” approach, this article argues that the text is neither a collection of detailed, field note-anchored observations nor a cross cultural critique, but a love story to place. The text has much in common with postmodern conceptions of ethnography, which acknowledge “writing culture” as mediated by interpretive, representational and linguistic considerations. Like many postmodern ethnographers, Mead self-consciously constructs an authorial position rather than attempting to remain absent and objective. Part of the persona she constructs is that she is a scientist sharing data; yet she no sooner invokes standards of scientific rigor than she shifts course to promise us a good “tale”. If contemporary readers can read the text through a postmodern lens, when she wrote, her approach was unprecedented. Her awareness of transgressing scientific method emerges in the “Introduction” to the book, where she self-reflects on her decisions about authorship as performance and text as storied, artful and intimate.

María Moliner y las bibliotecas públicas: un compromiso con la democracia republicana y la difusión de la cultura

Castellano: En este artículo se estudia la trayectoria profesional de la bibliotecaria María Moliner, incidiendo en el período republicano, donde realizó su trabajo más original y fructífero desde el Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas en Valencia, culminando con la elaboración del Plan de organización general de Bibliotecas del Estado en 1938, aunque nunca pudo ponerse en práctica por la retrógrada política del franquismo. El  período republicano supuso un punto de inflexión en la valoración social del libro y la lectura porque se pasó de la lectura popular a la lectura pública. Esta transformación se plasmó en la política bibliotecaria del régimen democrático, en las estrategias editoriales y en la actitud del público hacia estas iniciativas. La socialización del libro y la lectura se abordó desde distintos ámbitos: por un lado las políticas estatales, a través de las bibliotecas escolares y municipales, destinadas fundamentalmente al medio agrario. Asimismo María Moliner durante la guerra civil alcanzó las máximas responsabilidades en materia bibliotecaria. Por esta actuación fue represaliada por la dictadura y consagró sus energías hacia la redacción del magno Diccionario del uso del español. English: This article looks at Maria Moliner's career as a librarian, with particular attention to the Republican period, when she did her most original and fruitful work at the Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas in Valencia. This period culminated in her drawing up the General Organization of National Libraries Plan in 1938, although it was never put into practice owing to the Franco régime's retrograde library policy. The Republican period was a turning point in the value that society placed on books and reading, as popular reading became public reading. This transformation acquired a definite form in the Republican government's library policy, in the publishing houses' strategies, and in the attitude of the general public towards these initiatives. The socialization of books and reading was approached from a number of directions: public policy, through school and council libraries, mainly targeted at the rural world. During the Civil War, María Moliner was entrusted with top-level responsibilities in library matters. As a result, she suffered reprisals at the hands of the dictatorship and devoted her energies to the great dictionary for which she is best known, the Diccionario de uso del español.

Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam

Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle’s Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflectionon Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims is a comprehensive, engaging,and original rereading of the formative Islamic texts and traditions. Targetedat both academic and popular readers, the book has two prime objectives:to push heterosexual Muslims to confront their own prejudices abouthomosexuality within the Muslim community, and to give lesbian, gay, andtransgender Muslims greater confidence and the ability to speak about theirsexual realities in regard to the Islamic intellectual tradition ...

Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family by Linda H. Matthews

 Reviews to commemorate the centennial of woman suffrage in Washington in 2010. This book summarizes these results in an attractive and readable format, supplemented by numerous images,timelines,short biographies,footnotes, and a bibliography. In addition to its appeal for general readers, it will be a great resource for teachers who wish to incorporate women’s history into their curricula. The first three chapters focus on the woman suffrage movement in Washington. Chapter 1 discusses initial efforts to win suffrage from the territorial legislature, the speaking tour of Abigail Scott Duniway and Susan B. Anthony through the region, the foundation of the first suffrage organizations, and changes in the legal status of women, primarily relating to married women’s rights. Chapter 2 traces the developments that resulted in the enfranchisement of Washington women by the territorial legislature in 1883, the subsequent legal challenges that led to disfranchisement in 1888, the connection between suffrage and statehood, and the growing influence of Populism, which culminated in an unsuccessful referendum in 1898. Chapter 3 examines the crucial 1910 victory by describing socioeconomic changes in the status of women, the new suffrage leadership , and their campaign strategies, including vital associations with labor, farmer, and other progressive groups. Chapter 4 outlines many of the state legislative accomplishments supported by Washington women; their contributions to the national suffrage movement, including a new organization of enfranchised women, the National Council of Women Voters; and expanding roles for women during and after World War I. The fifth chapter skips to more recent times to discuss the role of Washington women in modern feminist campaigns,especially the Equal RightsAmendment and reproductive rights, and highlights the unusually large number of female elected officials, especially in recent years. The last chapter provides short individual biographies of prominentWashington women.The author has made a good effort to include information relating to racial-ethnic and working-class women,although this is still largely an account of white, middle-class women’s activity. One of the strengths of this book is that it addresses the question of what women did with their votes once achieved. Until recently, analysts have concluded that the suffragists splintered according to their different interests and affiliations, failed to form a distinct female voting bloc,and thus won few concrete achievements.These conclusions,based largely on national studies of the conservative decade of the 1920s, overlook important activities on the state level during the 1910s, as the Washington example makes clear. The book is not particularly strong on events between 1920 and the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1960s, nor does it provide an extensive discussion of that development, but that is because its primary focus is on the early historical period. In summary, this is not a deeply analytical book, but that is not its purpose. It is an effective synthesis of recent secondary research as well as extensive primary source material, and it should be of considerable interest to popular readers as well as an excellent educational supplement. Rebecca J. Mead Northern Michigan University Middling Folk: Three Seas, Three Centuries, One Scots-Irish Family by Linda H. Matthews Chicago Review Press, Chicago, 2009. Illustrations, notes, index. 384 pages. $24.95 cloth. Linda H. Matthews has written an interesting and impressive book about the course of a family — her family — from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Matthews has recreated the Hammill family as it  OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 lived in Scotland and Ireland and traveled from there to,first,the colonial Chesapeake and then on to the Pacific Northwest. She tells the story of the Hammills with verve and imagination. She also well serves a larger purpose, which is to restore to our accounts of the past the experiences of middling folk. While Matthews does not trumpet her own intellectual significance, this larger purpose is actually the book’s most important scholarly contribution. Matthews is quite correct that scholars have always focused on the high and mighty — and, over the past forty years, with the rise of social history, also the lowly and powerless. Presidents, and now slaves, have received their due,but people whom we might consider“middle class,”such as...

Maracatu como macroecumenismo possível

The present article will report the experience that we have the possibility of a macro-ecumenical practice in whoopee, which is called the Maracatu of Fortaleza, the capital of Ceara. In the Maracatu we can experience the living between Christian, Indian and Afro-descendant religiosity. In this party, we are learning how to see the religions as God’s work. By playing we rehearse how to make our popular reading of Bible ethnical.

Giorgio Agamben: The signature of all things: on method, Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (tr.)

Not unlike Foucault’s reflection on his own method in 1969’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, Agamben’s reflection is written almost like a confession. And, like all good confessions, each of the three essays in this work exhibits Agamben’s own practices all while constructing them. Exemplifying this notion of a ‘‘constructivediscovery,’’ the last essay in this collection (‘‘Philosophical Archaeology’’) clarifies, to a greater degree than ever, how Agamben understands research practice and how he believes the researcher is, can, and perhaps even ought to be oriented. Further, the first and second essays serve to retroactively reveal an orientation in Agamben’s entire corpus which, if read attentively, allow us to situate his archival research within and to differentiate it from contemporary trends in critical theory such as anti-humanism, deconstruction, and ecology. In the end, this book will serve to correct the popular reading of Agamben as a specialist of the ‘‘state of exception’’ and solidify his place as a thinker of utmost importance not only for a specialized field of research, not only for the humanities, but for philosophy and for thinking as such.

Towards a sight word list in Arabic

While the English language boasts a century of research into its most frequently-used words, no such attempt has ever formally been made in the Arab world. This pioneering study presents a list of 500 commonly-used words in the Arabic language based on compilations of words gathered from a number of popular reading series in Lebanon, spanning grades K to 3. This list can serve as a powerful tool for language teachers—who face several challenges posed by the inherent nature of Arabic in terms of diglossia, orthography and morphology—and provide them with a handy list of words for their pupils. The study has its limitations in terms of scope, breadth and the nature of the technology used for counting words. Nonetheless, it makes a number of recommendations for the future, including the development of a readability formula based on this list, the expansion of the scope of this word list and improvement to increase its technical accuracy.

Hybrid Commodities, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Comparison: A Response to Moretti’s ‘The Novel: History and Theory’

In his provocative article, Franco Moretti raises issues central to the criticism of the novel, and his insights generated a vibrant cross-disciplinary conversation between the authors of this response. In this essay, we introduce several alternative approaches that redirect and extend Moretti’s argument. Instead of reifying the opposition between Chinese novels (as aesthetic objects) and English novels (as commodities), we see the chiasmus of aestheticization and commodification in both novel traditions. Further, the quantitative approach to the novel field and the focus on prose excludes hybrid forms produced and consumed by women readers. The opposition of extensive, desultory reading to aesthetic concentration, we propose, came into being in the critical enterprise contemporaneous with the ‘rise’ of the novel – an enterprise grounded in the gendered economy of popular reading.

Antiquarian Attitudes: Crossed Legs, Crusaders and the Evolution of an Idea

AbstractSince the sixteenth century, both scholarly and popular readings of tomb monuments have assigned a series of interpretations to medieval effigies with crossed legs. These have included the beliefs that the effigies dated from before the Norman Conquest; that they commemorated crusaders, or those who had taken crusading vows; and that they commemorated Knights Templar. The ‘crusader’ theory has proved particularly tenacious, and, although largely discredited by scholars, continues to flourish in folk wisdom. This paper charts the emergence and dissemination of these several ideas and the debates they engendered. It argues that the early modern identification of the cross-legged attitude as a noteworthy feature was, despite its mistaken associations, a landmark in the story of the formulation of techniques for the typological diagnosis of antiquities.

How Who I am Affects What I See: Reading Mark with Latin American Eyes

This article examines the dynamics of the interpretation of the book of Mark with regard to the social location of the interpreter. On one hand, the original meaning of a text is irremediably unreachable, on the other, the text can only have any meaning through its readers, and it changes with them. These dynamics allow for the infinite translatability of the Gospel, which makes possible for it to be ‘at home’ in different cultures and social contexts. The Latin American movement of biblical popular reading exemplifies the attempt to make such a translation. It seeks to position common people again as themain interpreters of the biblical text, thereby preventing both the danger of developing a pastoral action without biblical foundations as well as the danger of developing biblical exegesis without any pastoral orientation. In relation specifically to Mark, this interpretive practice produces a reading that does not strip the Gospel of Mark from its political contents, that highlights the viewpoint of the victims of the Empire, that fosters a certain identification between the ‘third-world’ contemporary audiences and the content of the Gospel. Two major themes treated in Mark come to the fore: The Kingdom of God and resistance to the Empire, which continue to represent alternative orders.

The Uses of the Past and European Integration: Austria between Lisbon, Ireland, and EURO 08

This article examines Austrian national identity negotiations through a qualitative analysis of the country's ideologically heterogeneous media, with a focus on Austria's most widely read paper (and its popular readers’ letters pages) between April and August 2008. This turbulent period coincided with widening opposition to the EU's Lisbon reform treaty, Austria's co-hosting of the European football championship, and the collapse of the country's coalition government. This analysis of media coverage and readers’ letters focuses on the rhetorical strategies underpinning various discursive constructions of Austria's place within the EU. The following key findings are discussed: projections of perceived social ills and resulting anxieties onto the EU; the interpretative uses of the past—historical episodes selected from Austrian and other national contexts—to make sense of and politicize the present; constructions of ‘European ideals’ in juxtaposition to perceived ‘European realities’; and competing models of national identity in relation to the European ‘network state.’

Lectura popular de la Biblia:

The circles of the Bible’s popular reading join to the Ecclesiastic Community of Base have reminded a growing interest in order to understand their approaching to the Holy Scripture. So that, there are a wish of more participation and approximation to the bible in these groups. Such event is seen like and opportunity of approaching from the Christians to the Bible. They discover in it the God’s essential word with which appeal their lives. Their approximation is realized since the own reality and context. Nevertheless in front of this method of reading exist risks like the document about “the interpretation of the Bible in the church” (1993) says. However, in the circles of the Bible’s popular reading. We glimpse the conciliate spirit of receiving the Revelation as the God’s gift in the History.