Possibility Of Redemption Research Articles

“A More Powerful Effect upon the Body”: Early Mormonism's Theory of Racial Redemption and American Religious Theories of Race

This paper examines Joseph Smith's construction of a racialized theology, which drew upon conceptions of Abrahamic lineage and the possibility of “racial redemption” for peoples of African descent through conversion to Mormonism. This ran against the grain of his Protestant and Catholic contemporaries’ religious understandings of race. He expanded upon earlier iterations of his ideas with the introduction of new rituals and liturgy related to LDS temples. Smith's wife may have invited a person of African descent to participate in this new liturgy before his murder in June 1844. The views he expressed about peoples of African descent before his death are inchoate, although high-ranking Mormons related to Smith seemed to have agreed with the possibility of racial redemption. After Smith's death, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders framed the LDS temple and priesthood restriction in terms of Smith's liturgy rather than any of Smith's varied teachings on race. This paper also argues that Mormonism's racial restriction arose from its roots in the sealing ritual rather than ecclesiological power structures. Mormonism's racial doctrine has often been described as a “priesthood ban,” referring to ecclesiastical authority. However, this discounts the religious contexts in which it arose and excludes the experiences of women and children, who were not allowed to participate in the endowment or sealing ordinances. This paper places Mormonism's temple liturgy at the front and center of the LDS Church's priesthood and temple restriction.

Off the grid but on the radar: disconnected celebrity in Alaskan subsistence television

ABSTRACTAlaska-based reality shows have constituted a sizeable presence of late, with dozens of unscripted series debuting since 2010. Set against the bulk of this programming, The Last Alaskans promises audiences more holistic, less commercialised representations of Alaskan life. Shows like this, which I call ‘subsistence TV,’ follow solitary individuals or families living off-grid in landscapes fetishised as remote and unforgiving. As a platform selling the redemptive possibilities of individual autonomy and self-optimisation, Alaska reality TV generally – and subsistence TV specifically – appear to combine the neoliberal vernacular of reality programming with the loaded mythology of the American frontier. Focusing on the figure of Heimo Korth – who has been the subject of a book, two documentaries, and is a main character on the show The Last Alaskans – this essay explores the limits of fame represented by those whose lives exist largely outside the ecosystem of celebrity production, circulation, and consumption. Through a discourse and textual analysis of The Last Alaskans and other Korth-aligned media texts, I argue that he, The Last Alaskans, and subsistence TV open new lines of inquiry into presumptions about celebrity ecology as well as the conjunctions of labour, gender, and space that inform prevailing understandings of fame.

Blanchot and Klossowski on the Eternal Return of Nietzsche

Abstract What does it mean to say “Yes” to life? What does it mean to affirm life? What does it mean to not be nihilistic? One possible answer is the appropriation of finitude. But Klossowski argues that this amounts to a “voluntarist” fatalism. Though Klossowski draws attention to the temptation of “voluntarist” fatalism on the part of Nietzsche and readers of Nietzsche, he himself is tempted by redemption, i.e., by being redeemed from the weight of responsibility. Using the very “logic” of Klossowski’s own reading of the eternal return, Blanchot will call this possibility of redemption (on the part of Klossowski) into question. Blanchot’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return draws attention to that moment (within the work of Nietzsche) when death as possibility turns into death as impossibility. This weakening of the negative brings, according to Blanchot, not redemption from the burden of responsibility, but infinite responsibility.

Selfish Giants and Child Redeemers: Refiguring Environmental Hope in Oscar Wilde’s and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant

In this paper, I explore how stories of lost and broken worlds have been tied to hopes about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation. I historicize and complicate the idea of children as environmental stewards of an imagined planetary future. I investigate the issue further by examining the particular figure of the child redeemer and our “investment in the image of the child as a sign of the future, as defence against loss of significance in the world” (Lebeau 179). Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and Clio Barnard’s recent film adaptation of Wilde’s book will be the objects of my discussion. Barnard’s film, set in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford, England, offers child protagonists who unsettle the familiar fantasy of redemption and invite us to think past sentimental and nostalgic arguments for ecological preservation (premised on preserving an unjust world as it is). While it is important not to topple the myth of childhood innocence only to resurrect another myth of childhood agency, I am interested in these moments of refusal and how they point to the limits of a sentimental ecology.

Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay's Erotic Dialogical

One of the lingering questions in Martin Buber's mature thought is the place of the erotic within it. Despite some earlier remarks on the subject, and the potentiality for I-You relations to emerge from erotic encounters, Buber's later work seems solely concerned with the objectifying tendencies in Eros, rather than its redemptive possibilities. This article reads Buber together with a lesser-known dialogical thinker, Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization in the United States, who developed what he called subject-SUBJECT consciousness: a nonobjectifying, nonhierarchical dialogical relationship between gay male subjects. Though apparently unaware of Buber, Hay's parallel dialogical system centers desire and Eros as generative of a redemptive politics and ethics. After introducing the reader to Hay's dialogical philosophy, I propose that, on the one hand, Hay's inclusion of eroticism enriches our readings of Buber and, on the other, that Buber's nonessentialist and nongendered thought is a necessary complement to Hay's. Reading Buber through Hay offers one approach to a nonhierarchical and sex-positive erotic ethos in the context of dialogical thought, and reading Hay through dialogical philosophy offers a way to recover subject-SUBJECT consciousness in a postessentialist frame.

Trans/Post-humanist Poetics in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Among various philosophical and cultural paradigms, it is transhumanism and posthumanism that increasingly foreground the impact of technological and bioscientific advancements on the concept of mankind. Although conceptually divergent, these two theoretical approaches serve to convey respectively utopian and dystopian tensions in Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods (2007) in which technology is presented both as a tool of progress and destruction. Scrutinizing the interplay between the transhumanist and posthumanist poetics, the aim of this paper is to analyze the role of technology in reconfigurating the traditional idea of the human . By projecting a dystopian vision of excessive technological advancements, Winterson not only foregrounds the issue of dehumanization in a post-anthropocentric world, but she also implies a possibility of redemption through a new form of human/non-human connectedness, which constitutes a post-postmodern turn in her novel.

Selfish Giants and Child Redeemers: Refiguring Environmental Hope in Oscar Wilde's and Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant

In this paper, I explore how stories of lost and broken worlds have been tied to hopes about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation. I historicize and complicate the idea of children as environmental stewards of an imagined planetary future. I investigate the issue further by examining the particular figure of the child redeemer and our “investment in the image of the child as a sign of the future, as defence against loss of significance in the world” (Lebeau 179). Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and Clio Barnard’s recent film adaptation of Wilde’s book will be the objects of my discussion. Barnard’s film, set in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford, England, offers child protagonists who unsettle the familiar fantasy of redemption and invite us to think past sentimental and nostalgic arguments for ecological preservation (premised on preserving an unjust world as it is). While it is important not to topple the myth of childhood innocence only to resurrect another myth of childhood agency, I am interested in these moments of refusal and how they point to the limits of a sentimental ecology.

The Colonial (Dis)order and the (Im)possibility of Redemption: Jeong, Abolition, and Living from the “End of the World”

ABSTRACTThis article develops the oppositional edge of postcolonial theologies by way of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial desire for the “end of the world.” It connects W. Anne Joh’s elaboration of jeong – the living in excess of (neo)colonial violence – to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-fascist critique of the godlike desires of European humanism (the sicut deus). The overall aim of the article is to clarify and assess what is at stake in a project of eschatological decolonialism. What might it mean to think theologically about salvation as abolition? And what might it look like to live from the “end of the world?”

“Cap, my little man, be a woman!”

In E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, an allusion to the book of Judith points to parallels in its formalist elements—intertextuality, plot features, and genre (comedy)—and in themes—its protagonists’ challenge of gender roles and emphasis on God’s sovereignty. They also share a mixed critical interpretation. The similarities are tempered by Southworth’s rejection of Old Testament-style violence and her New Testament belief in the possibility of redemption for all souls. The resulting tensions manifest in ambiguities that correlate with feminist theologians’ disparate interpretations of Judith, particularly those that note a spiritual progression from Judith to Mary that moves from “righteous” violence to acts of peace.

Remembering and Disremembering the Dead: Posthumous Punishment, Harm and Redemption over Time

This book is a multidisciplinary work that investigates the notion of posthumous harm over time. The question what is and when is death, affects how we understand the possibility of posthumous harm and redemption. Whilst it is impossible to hurt the dead, it is possible to harm the wishes, beliefs and memories of persons that once lived. In this way, this book highlights the vulnerability of the dead, and makes connections to a historical oeuvre, to add critical value to similar concepts in history that are overlooked by most philosophers. There is a long historical view of case studies that illustrate the conceptual character of posthumous punishment; that is, dissection and gibbetting of the criminal corpse after the Murder Act (1752), and those shot at dawn during the First World War. A long historical view is also taken of posthumous harm; that is, body-snatching in the late Georgian period, and organ-snatching at Alder Hey in the 1990s.

Presentism, Redemption, and Moral Development

AbstractThis paper explores what could justify some intuitive temporal asymmetries regarding redemption and the distribution of ills and goods throughout an agent's lifespan. After exposing the inadequacies of causal explanations – based on our differential ability to affect the future, but not the past – a metaphysical explanation is outlined in relation to three competing temporal‐ontological profiles of agents, and their varying accounts of a being's development. Only one of those conceptions of agents – supported by Presentism, the thesis that everything is present – offers an account justifying the intuitive temporal asymmetries. Finally, consequences are then drawn for the possibility of true redemption.

At the Mind’s Limits and German-Jewish Symbiosis: Or, Améry on Guilt and the Possibility of Redemption

At the 50th anniversary of the Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, published in English as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, this work is garnering increased attention in the Anglophone world. Perhaps it should not be surprising that there is increased interest in this book at this moment when our attention is repeatedly drawn to the plight of immigrants and exiles, state sanctioned use of torture, and police violence—all themes At the Mind’s Limits deals with at length. While this recent attention is certainly appropriate, it nevertheless tends to blur the specific and particular socio-political and cultural contours of the work. Améry becomes a writer about the plight of the victim in general, such that specificity of his Jewishness is lost and the already submerged theological dimensions of his work remain obscure.

"Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat." Die evangelischen Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie 1970–1990 by Michael Schüring

Reviewed by: "Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat." Die evangelischen Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie 1970–1990 by Michael Schüring Heath Spencer "Bekennen gegen den Atomstaat." Die evangelischen Kirchen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die Konflikte um die Atomenergie 1970–1990. By Michael Schüring. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Pp. 317. Cloth €29.90. ISBN 978-3835316959. While Christian churches no longer have as much public power as in the past, they are still a significant element in the political landscape of contemporary European societies. However, church leaders and churchgoers are faced with difficult choices when it comes to collective political engagement. A position of neutrality carries the risk of marginalization or complicity, whereas overt political engagement can be divisive and often alienates members who are out of step with the political trajectory of the institution. Michael Schüring's research explores how Protestants faced such questions in the midst of heated conflicts over nuclear energy in the Federal Republic of Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. On the national level Protestant leaders initially adopted a position of formal neutrality, hoping that the church could facilitate dialogue as well as ongoing study and reflection. Though an activist minority demanded a more confrontational and prophetic stance, the church leadership did not modify its position until 1986, when the Chernobyl disaster brought about a widespread reorientation of public opinion. However, even before this shift occurred, "the conflict over nuclear energy in Germany was culturally and religiously coded," and there were numerous points of connection between the church's traditions and the "discursive strategies of the opponents of nuclear power" (8). Although the church was not central to the antinuclear movement, two decades of engagement led to the emergence of a new protest culture within the church itself. Protestant theologians in the antinuclear movement drew on a common fund of Biblical symbols, narratives, and motifs but either had to bend them toward an environmentalist agenda or draw on resources outside of their own tradition (for example, an apocryphal speech attributed to Chief Seattle). Other theologians, along with the church hierarchy, were skeptical of this "ecoBiblicism" as well as various doomsday scenarios that seemed to forecast destruction without the possibility of redemption. At the parish level, a minority of pastors and parishioners joined in [End Page 699] dramatic acts of protest and disobedience, including major demonstrations at Brokdorf (1976), Grohnde an der Weser (1977), Saint Peter's Church in Hamburg (1979), and Gorleben (1980). Some pastors wore their vestments and led services "in the field," to the dismay of a church leadership that wanted to avoid the appearance of taking sides. Many conservative members feared that their church had been coopted by leftists, anarchists, and Marxists. Schüring notes that many antinuclear activists made references to the complicity of the churches during the Nazi era and hoped to avoid taking on a similar burden of guilt in their own moment of crisis. A rich array of symbols enhanced this tendency to equate nuclear energy with the crimes of the Third Reich, including the barbed wire that enclosed construction sites for nuclear power plants, the use of (tear) gas to disperse protesters, references to nuclear waste disposal sites as Endlager, and clever word play—for example, the phrase "Volk ohne Strom" brought to mind "Volk ohne Raum" and implied that one justification was as dubious as the other (103). Of course, such comparisons raised the stakes and made political compromise seem inappropriate. Although protests and demonstrations drew the most attention, equally important was the educational work carried out by the church's environmental commission under the leadership of Pastor Kurt Oeser, as well as Protestant academies like the Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft. Over time, the work of these institutions led to a growing consensus that the church had a responsibility to raise awareness of environmental issues, including the risks associated with nuclear energy, through preaching, parish work, and faith formation. Schüring's analysis of Protestant mentalities and their application to the nuclear energy debate is impressive, and his focus on three key areas (theology, politics, and culture) yields important results. However, the evidence within each chapter is poorly...

New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison ed. by Jeff Forret, Christine E. Sears

Reviewed by: New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison ed. by Jeff Forret, Christine E. Sears Isabela Morales New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison. Edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. 272pp. $47.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-6115-9. Since Stanley Elkins published his controversial Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), scholars have worked to revise and complicate conceptions of the men and women entangled in United States slavery. In the following decades, [End Page 267] scores of studies on enslaved people’s lives, labor, and struggles against oppression overthrew Elkins’s thesis that slavery transformed bondspeople into passive ‘Sambos.’ Today, more than fifty years later, the wave of important scholarship on slavery and enslaved people has yet to ebb. But the very frequency and quality of new historical work has made keeping up-to-date on the state of the field—as Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears note—a near “Herculean mission” (p. 1). New Directions in Slavery Studies, a collection of twelve essays edited by Forret and Sears, identifies three major thrusts in recent historiography: the commodification of enslaved people as property and capital; community formation as well as fissures in slave communities; and comparative studies both within and outside the American South. Other themes, however, emerge to cut across these three organizational categories, bringing chapters on commodification, community, and comparative slavery into conversation with each other. Contributors featured in each section of the anthology reveal the intimate links between slavery and modernity, emphasizing the role of enslaved people in the development of urban life and capitalist practices. Others highlight the risks new forms of commodification posed to enslaved people’s families and communities. And some, questioning the reliability of sources or the very nature of conventional categories of analysis, provide insight into the difficulties inherent in studying slavery altogether. In their respective chapters, Bonnie Martin, Karen Ryder, and Calvin Schermerhorn examine how enslaved people’s commodification bolstered and accelerated early American capitalism. Slave owners took out life insurance policies on their human property, used slaves as collateral, and leveraged them for credit. Essays in the comparative section—particularly those by Enrico Dal Lago and Mariana Dantas—also explore the links between slavery and modernity. Dal Lago looks beyond the American South to Rio Grande do Sul’s revolt against the Brazilian Empire (1835–41) and eastern Cuba’s attempted secession from the Spanish Empire (1868–78). Like southern Confederates, Brazilian and Cuban planter elites set slavery at the center of modern nation-building efforts. Dantas’s study of urban slavery in Baltimore, [End Page 268] Maryland, and Sabará, Brazil, examines the significant roles enslaved women played in city-building, contributing to economic diversification and urbanization. John Davies’s and Kathleen Hilliard’s essays, categorized as studies of slave community, tackle urban slavery as well. While Davies describes the relationships among slaves, free people of color, and white refugees from the Haitian Revolution in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Hilliard discusses the increasing dependency of white men and women on enslaved people’s underground economic networks during Confederate Richmond’s decline and fall. Anthony Kaye’s chapter challenges scholars to think critically about their use of the concept of autonomy—a favorite category of analysis for revisionist historians—in slavery studies. His call for more nuanced understandings of enslaved people’s agency is answered throughout the anthology. Damian Alan Pargas’s comparison of family separation in northern Virginia and the South Carolina Lowcountry illustrates how strongly regional differences in agricultural production, labor markets, and slaveholding patterns influenced whether slave families could expect to be forced apart. While all enslaved people lived with the threat of sale and separation, Pargas’s research specifically pinpoints where enslaved men and women had the ability to form lasting families and communities. Sears’s and Forret’s essays further illustrate that community formation and solidarity among bondspeople was by no means a given. In the Mediterranean city of Algiers—Sears’s subject of study—differences in rank, nationality, access to money, and the possibility of redemption from slavery mitigated against communal...

The Salvific Power of Friendship, Memory, and Time in Augustine's Confessions and in the Revived Doctor Who

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is widely recognized historically as being the most influential theologian in Western Christianity. Doctor Who is a vastly popular current British television series in which an alien known as “the Doctor” roams all of time and space yet has a special fondness for the human species and regularly saves the planet. While some of the devoted followers of either of these individuals may be surprised at the thought of profound commonalities between the two, a thoughtful comparison points to shared convictions on the sacred nature of friendship or companionship. Both Augustine and the Doctor reflect on the power of memory and its relationship to the mystery of time. For each of them, memory can open a path to redemptive possibilities.

Redemption and the imagination of childhood: Dickens’s representation of children in <i>A Christmas Carol</i>

This article considers the representation of children in Dickens’s most famous Christmas book. Central to the article is a consideration of historical circumstances in which the book was written, as well as Dickens’s own childhood, and the possibility of redemption through the force of the imagination from the negative consequences of social circumstances and personal choices. The changing conception of the Victorian child, from a conception of sinfulness to that of innocence, provides historical and theoretical positioning of the literary work. The role of childhood memory and its influence on Dickens’s work is presented. The work of Edmund Wilson and the children’s literary scholar Adrienne Gavin is included in this consideration of the short novel.

“Is it manipulative? Sure. But that’s how you tell stories”: The graphic novel, metahistory and the artist in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye has become a cause célèbre in contemporary Singapore. Much popular discussion of the novel has, however, been reductive, often describing it as simply presenting alternative histories in contrast to a hegemonic historical narrative celebrating Singapore’s rise as a developmental state. Close reading of the novel’s use of both graphic and textual elements reveals that The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye does not simply counterpoise other histories to a dominant national narrative, but rather asks questions about the historical memorialization of decolonization and storytelling in a postcolony such as Singapore. While the medium of comics provides Liew with an expanded toolbox of metafictional techniques, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye also celebrates the redemptive possibilities of narrative. In doing so, and through its status as a fictional biography, it also asks uncomfortable questions regarding the agency of the artist, and, by extension, the individual, in a society marked by postcolonial processes of neo-liberal subjectification, questions that resonate beyond the city state of Singapore itself.

A Russian Journal: John Steinbeck's Quixotic Quest to the Soviet Union

Abstract In the years following the Second World War, a time when Joseph Stalin let few Americans into the Soviet Union, John Steinbeck was granted exceptional access to travel to the red empire. He fashioned a long, if part-time, journalistic career alongside his fiction writing and in 1947 convinced the New York Herald Tribune to sponsor a six-week trip. Steinbeck saw himself as a reporter determined to bring back news from beyond the Iron Curtain. He also suffered debilitating episodes of depression throughout his life, and in the months leading up to his departure Steinbeck hoped that his Soviet journey might offer him an opportunity to reconnect with a vitality once found at home. As the sociologist Peter Berger has argued, travel to the East could hold with it all the productive and redemptive possibilities of the quixotic quest. For the Oriental flight, as imagined for centuries by adventurers such as Steinbeck, depended on “a belief that there is another reality” far away from one's own.

Issues of Sin and the Possibility of Redemption in The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party

Issues of Sin and the Possibility of Redemption in The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party

The Weakness of God in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

ABSTRACTThis essay enlists John D. Caputo’s notion of the weakness of God to support a hopeful interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel often read as nihilistic due to its relentless violence. Although the sovereign God of traditional theism is nowhere to be found in this dark work, McCarthy’s cryptic religious imagery maintains the faint promise of the sacred. Sharing McCarthy’s distrust of metaphysical absolutes, Caputo’s weak theology centers on divine potential rather than presence. I use this postmodern reimagining of God as a weak force to illuminate the redemptive possibilities of Blood Meridian’s central conflict: the kid’s passive resistance to the tyrannical judge.