Pure Christian Research Articles

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

Soul in Vedanta Metaphysics and Emersonian Philosophy

Vedanta philosophy, as the foundation of Hindu philosophy, has talked much about the existence and role of Atma in life in depth, and Atma’s relationship to Paramatma as the unity of the worldly living beings and the absolute, Brahma. This notion deals with the idea that Atma is immortal and unchanged, but it undergoes transformation from body to body. The western Christian philosophy also has the notion of Atma with the name "the soul," but Christian philosophy gives the message of the changeability of the soul. Being brought up in Christian culture and tradition, Emerson focuses on the soul's spirituality in his writings and develops the theory of transcendentalism, but as influenced by Vedantic philosophy, his concept of the soul departs from pure Christian tradition and gets linked with the Vedantic concept of Atma and Paramatma. This study examines how Vedanta metaphysics and Emersonian transcendentalism share common ground in the perception of Atma and Paramatma, and finds the connection between Vedantic metaphysical notion of the soul as Atma and Paramatma and American transcendental view of the soul and the Over-soul proposed in Emerson’s writings. This study is significant to make a meaningful connection between the Eastern Vedic viewpoints with the Western viewpoints in the mode of philosophical understanding.

As Though “Wit” Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in The Wife's Lament

As Though “Wit” Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in <i>The Wife's Lament</i>

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Kant investigates the concept of faith [Glaube] several times in his philosophy and under various perspectives. In one of them, the author investigates this concept, contrasting it with the definitions of opinion and knowledge (cf., for example, KrV, A 822/ B 850; KU, §91, AA 05: 454; Log, AA 09: 66). Another perspective on which Kant investigates the concept of faith is pointing to the distinction between pure religious faith, as the one that can establish a true Church, and ecclesiastical faith, as a historical faith, not having “the most important mark of its [Church] truth, namely the legitimate claim to universality” (RGV, AA 06: 109).Many questions have arisen in the contemporary debate on these topics, such as the various and divergent positions on Kant’s claim “I had (…) to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief” (B XXX), the relationship between different types of faith and pure religious faith, the proximity between the Kantian concept of pure rational faith and Christianity or questions related to faith in organization of human being, in order to create an ethical community.&#x0D; Recebido / Received: 27.8.2019.Aprovado / Approved: 4.10.2019.

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay

Reviewed by: Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 by Daniel Livesay Olivia Carpenter Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early Americah History and Culture; Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2018). Pp. 432; 12 half-tones, 4 figures, 3 graphs, 4 tables. $45.00 cloth. Daniel Livesay's beautifully researched 2018 monograph Children of Uncertain Fortune further enlivens an ongoing conversation in our field about the British eighteenth century's complicated relationship to race. Before, during, and after race comes to be associated with notions of an indelible, biological, and bodily phenomenon, we see eighteenth-century British literature and culture struggling to come to grips with how best to categorize, define, and control human difference. Livesay's book engages scholarly methods in the study of race in the eighteenth century that pay particular attention to the ways race was constructed across the Atlantic. Children of Uncertain Fortune thus speaks to the work of scholars like Nicole Aljoe, whose 2012 monograph Creole Testimonies invites consideration of eighteenth-century race and racism, among other things, through the lens of slave narratives and testimony in the British West Indies. Marisa Fuentes also demands a transatlantic look at race in the eighteenth century when she invites her readers to imagine the lives of enslaved Caribbean women and the spaces they inhabited in Dispossessed Lives (2016). Sharon Block's Colonial Complexions (2018) posits race in the period as a process of stripping African-descended and enslaved subjects of personal specificity in media circulating in British North America. Children of Uncertain Fortune joins these scholars in thinking in both transatlantic and trans-historic ways about race, while also focusing on the ways the concept is constructed outside of, and beyond, any fixed bodily category. Family dynamics as we find them in archival documents such as wills, assembly records, and letters provide the primary lens through which Livesay investigates race in Children of Uncertain Fortune. Livesay introduces crucial nuance to the ways we think about race in the eighteenth century by mapping out, in wonderfully rich detail, the unique case of the small but substantial portion of [End Page 311] mixed-race Jamaicans of African descent who were acknowledged and supported by white families in both Jamaica and Great Britain. This research presents readers with a fascinating set of case studies that, together, convince us just how profoundly the dauntingly hegemonic discourse of eighteenth-century racism contains points at which its power begins to break down. After all, Livesay's text foregrounds the chosen few mixed–race Jamaicans who were able to benefit from these very points, special cases in which kinship connections and affective bonds trumped the brutal ideological and economic commitments most at work in colonialism and chattel slavery. This special case of a group navigating "an awkward position between an enslaved class defined primarily by African ancestry and a ruling class open almost exclusively to those of supposedly pure Christian European heritage" (3) illuminates a pressure point in a British empire that perpetually renegotiated and reinvented itself through its all too fraught relationship with colonial politics. Livesay's sharp, insightful writing brings to life the points at which the unique colonial situation in Jamaica bred its own particular narratives of race and politics, complementary to but in many ways divergent from contemporaneous discourse on race in Great Britain. Putting this small, privileged group of well–educated and often well–traveled individuals in historical context, Livesay considers their fraught relationship with the issues of chattel slavery and Abolitionism, early fights against racist legal structures, and struggles for Black rights. Moving chronologically from the early eighteenth century all the way to British emancipation in 1833, Livesay traces the fates of several mixed-race Jamaicans of African descent who show up in a diverse set of archives and puts their stories in conversation with shifting attitudes surrounding race as well as discourses of kinship, politics, and inheritance. Livesay's introduction is a gem, making a solid and compelling case for familial, interpersonal, and intimate relationships as a crucial lens through which...

The Relationship between the State and the Catholic Church in Postcolonial Vietnam: The Case of Christian Village of Phung Khoang

Christian missionaries found Vietnam a spiritual country, and many Vietnamese converted to Christianity. On the other hand, during history, the Christian religious identity has brought various tensions due to the issues of colonialism, nationalism, and communism. Most Vietnamese Christians lived in pure Christian villages (lang cong giao toan tong) or mixed villages with Christians accounting for about a half of the population (lang cong giao xoi do). They have played an important role in the social, economic and cultural life of these villages. This article presents the historical background of a mixed village called Phung Khoang, contrasting the Christian vs. non-Christian cultural-religious views, and then discussing both the collaboration and tension played out over various historical periods.

Biblijsko utemeljenje misije Svetog Save

The greatest Serbian enlightener and missionary, who had laid solid foundations of Christian faith in Serbia, was Saint Sava. He devoted his whole life to ensure that the Serbs truly embraced pure Christian faith. Immediately after returning to Serbia, in 1208, he procured books and wrote typikons and the Nomocanon to enlighten the Serbs. However, in order for his missionary work to be successful, he also invested great efforts in providing autocephaly for the Serbian Orthodox Church. In his sermons, Saint Sava often preached his missionary ideas. What we perceive, however, is that the Serbs tend to emphasize that they cherish the tradition and the spirit of Saint Sava, but that, at the same time, they disregard his true Christian inspirations. Thus, this paper intends to lay emphasis on the Biblical motifs which encouraged Saint Sava to pursue missionary work. The current shepherds of the Church should be advised to do the same.

La leggenda del regno del Prete Gianni

The reign of Prester John (Prete Gianni), one of the most interesting legends of the Middle Ages, can ignite the imagination even today. It is not surprising that the eyes and hearts of the monarchs and popes were facing east, where they sought their legendary kingdom characterized by unimaginable power, wealth, miracles and at the same time a pure Christian life.

God Returns as Nihilist Caritas

Gianni Vattimo refers his weak interpretation of metaphysics to its Christian provenance. He argues that his nihilist secularization theory divulges the full and ultimate meaning of Christianity. This model understands Christianity as God who ‘returns,’ not as an eternal (pre-modern) substance but as one who in his return reveals himself as becoming the current nihilist hermeneutic flux that is reality. Vattimo takes kenosis as the model of the destiny of ontology. God takes a distance from the eternal origin and lets go of his transcendent divinity. From this, Vattimo learns that truth becomes a purely ‘wordly’ matter without any external, c.q. metaphysical or sacred reference. The Good message is: there are only messages, no facts. God’s return has to be understood epistmo-theologically. Revelation is now completely accomplished in a nihilist, endless way: Christianity means keeping thought away from petrifying into truth, fact, and reality. This is pure Christian caritas in that it does away with the violence of metaphysics and the sacred and thereby discourages all human attempts toward violence. Redeeming though this may sound, perhaps Vattimo is too naive (as Girard claims) and too theologically shallow.

Othello’s Testicles, Sybil’s Womb: The Interracial Child in Harlem Duet and its Progenitor

Othello’s Testicles, Sybil’s Womb: The Interracial Child in Harlem Duet and its Progenitor David Huebert (bio) What is a penis without testicles? It is something severed, detached, incomplete—a hand without a thumb. It is unmistakably queer. I mean the word “queer” both in the quotidian sense offered by the oed—“strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric” (def. 1a)—and in the way Lee Edelman defines it: “queers—by which I mean all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism” (No Future 17). The queer subject, in this line of thinking, is that which does not conform to the heterocentric injunction to procreate. The penis, thought without the testicles, likewise stands apart from the symbolic landscape of reproduction. Like Edelman’s “future-negating queer,” the unhinged penis exists outside the order of “pro-procreative ideology” (No Future 26, 12). The testicles themselves, unlike their isolated counterpart, are the primordial locus of futurity. The testicles in this sense have more in common with womb than penis. This article will examine testicles and wombs and, more specifically, the forms of futurity lurking within them, in Djanet Sears’s 1997 play Harlem Duet and its primary progenitor, William Shakespeare’s Othello. While Edelman is concerned with a “figural Child” who “affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself” and “seems [End Page 23] to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow” (No Future 11, 18), I want to consider the representative of a different kind of future: the interracial child. Harlem Duet, like Othello, imagines an interracial child who is only ever hypothetical but who takes on all the more phobic resonance in its absence. In both cases, a child threatens to emerge from the union of a white woman and a black man and violate communal purity (Shakespeare 1.3.393). Complicating Edelman’s claim that the child is “the obligatory token of futurity” (No Future 12), I would like to draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s critique of the racial homogeneity at work in Edelman’s analysis in order to suggest that the interracial child in Harlem Duet is by no means the radiant signifier of the heteronormative order. This paper argues that Harlem Duet, in spite of Sears’s largely radical and productive feminist adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, retains a certain conservativism insofar as Billie expresses an inverted version of the interracial phobia of Othello—she, like Shakespeare’s Venice, fears that the uniracial community will be contaminated by the hypothetical interracial child.1 Harlem Duet, like its Shakespearian predecessor, presents interracial coupling, and by extension the hypothetical/symbolic interracial child, primarily as a menace, a threat to the future of community. Reading Harlem Duet alongside Othello in the context of the work of queer theorists Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz raises pertinent questions for the potentially troublesome join of queer and racially motivated methodologies and the possibility of subversive Shakespearian adaptation.2 Can this would-be reparative [End Page 24] adaptation of a racially phobic play do more than recast Othello’s trajectory toward an ethnically pure Christian Venice as Billie’s desire for a racially pure black community in Harlem? How do Othello and Harlem Duet’s paranoid anxieties about the menacing interracial child trouble Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism, wherein the child is the telos of a hegemonic white heterotopia? Can a queer politics that opposes the normativities of reproductive futurism still find a place for the interracial child? Ultimately, I show that Sears’s larger project in Harlem Duet transcends and casts doubt on Billie’s homoracialism and suggest that the play refuses to recapitulate Othello’s interracial phobia by leaving Mona, Othello, and their hypothetical child to enter an ambiguous future together. A central element of Edelman’s refusal of reproductive futurism is his radical claim that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (No Future 17). Queerness, rather than a purveyor of any kind of production, is for Edelman a chaotic force aligned with a Lacanian death drive. In the context of this view, the...

Generations and Regeneration: “Sexceptionalism” and Group Identity among Puritans in Colonial New England

A s P u r i t A n c o l o n i s t s v e n t u r e d to North america, they experienced a set of obligations deeply connected to their identity as English subjects. To the Crown they pledged the settlement of a new continent that would further promote the monarchy’s growing empire. To God they vowed to be models of “Christian charitie” as they cared for each other in a harsh new environment. and for their own fulfillment they promised commitment to pure Christianity, extending the dissent that had led them to pursue distance from England as well as its church. While colonial New

The queer life of Christian exceptionalism

This response to Jasbir Puar's monograph, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), brings Puar's analysis to bear on the current attraction to ‘Christian identity’ as a historical analytic in the fields of New Testament and early Christian Studies, and to increasing associations of the ancient emergence of ‘Christian identity’ with transgressive queerness. I argue that this latter trend, especially, abets certain forms of Christian exceptionalism under the guise of resistance against empire, but I also suggest that this scholarship reveals certain affinities between the notion of queerness as pure transgression and contemporary Christianity.

The phenomenon of Ukrainian religious pluralism

Ukraine is a religiously plural country since its appearance on the world map. Already in the first of its power formation, the Kiev-Rus power coexisted the beliefs of their gods of the Gentiles of various tribes, an attempt to combine them into a single pantheon sought to implement (albeit unsuccessfully) Prince Vladimir in 982. In our own way, our people perceived in their spiritual world and Christianity after his baptism by Prince Vladimir in 988. He united in his beliefs this religion with paganism, and thus became two-sided. And it could not be otherwise. Paganism is a religious picture of nature and human activity in it. Christianity is the religious picture of man in her relationship with other people and God. That is why, having come to our lands, Christianity, because of the absence of any of its specific natural connotations, could not replace, but rather supersede paganism. It baptized him. Therefore, we now have virtually no pure Christianity in the beliefs of the people, but Christianized paganism and, at the same time, lucid Christianity. This syncretism is one of the foundations of the religious plurality that characterizes the spiritual world of our people.

WHY THEY MATTERED: THE RETURN OF POLITICS TO PURITAN NEW ENGLAND

Puritans had big stories to tell, and they cast themselves big parts to play in those stories. The fervent English Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church urgently needed further reformation, and the self-selecting band among them who went on to colonize New England, were sure that they could re-create the churches of the apostolic age, and eliminate centuries’ worth of Romish accretions. By instituting scriptural forms of worship, these purified churches might have a beneficial influence on the state as well, and bring about the rule of the godly. If a purified English church and state could inaugurate reformation across all of Christendom, spread the gospel to infidels around the globe, and usher in the millennium, then all the better. In 1641, an anonymous tract called A Glimpse of Sions Glory announced that the new puritan-controlled Parliament would bring on “Babylon's destruction . . . The work of the day [is] to give God no rest till he sets up Jerusalem in the praise of the whole world.” The leading minister of colonial Boston at the time, John Cotton, predicted that as soon as 1655, as Michael Winship summarizes Cotton: the states and Christian princes of Europe, under irresistible supernatural influence, would have instituted congregationalism [Massachusetts’ form of church polity] and overthrown Antichrist and Muslim Turkey. The example of their churches’ pure Christianity would have brought about the conversion of Jews and pagans across the globe. Thereafter, the churches of Christ would enjoy the millennium's thousand years of peace before the climactic battle with Gog and Magog at the end of time. Those are big stories.

Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss

Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss

Problems of Tolerating Interfaith Relations in Ukraine

Ukraine has been a religiously pluralistic country since its appearance on the world map. Already in its first power formation, the Kyivan Rus state coexisted in believing in their gods pagans of different tribes, an attempt to unite in one pantheon sought to execute (though unsuccessfully) Prince Vladimir in 982. In our own way, our people perceived their spiritual world and Christianity after being baptized by Prince Vladimir in 988. He combined this religion with paganism in his beliefs and thus became a two-man. Otherwise it could not be. Paganism is a religious picture of nature and human activity in it. Christianity is a religious picture of man in his relationship with other people and God. That is why, having come to our territories, Christianity, because of the lack of some specific nature of its nature, could not replace or supplant paganism. It baptized him. That is why we now have practically not pure Christianity in the beliefs of the people, but Christianized paganism and at the same time linguistic Christianity. This syncretism is one of the foundations of the religious pluralism that characterizes the spiritual world of our people.

The plurality of religious life in Ukraine

Ukraine has been a religiously pluralistic country since its appearance on the world map. Already in its first power formation, the Kyivan Rus state coexisted in believing in their gods pagans of different tribes, an attempt to unite in one pantheon sought to execute (though unsuccessfully) Prince Vladimir in 982. In our own way, our people perceived their spiritual world and Christianity after being baptized by Prince Vladimir in 988. He combined this religion with paganism in his beliefs and thus became a two-man. Otherwise it could not be. Paganism is a religious picture of nature and human activity in it. Christianity is a religious picture of man in his relationship with other people and God. That is why, having come to our territories, Christianity, because of the lack of some specific nature of its nature, could not replace or supplant paganism. It baptized him. That is why we now have practically not pure Christianity in the beliefs of the people, but Christianized paganism and at the same time linguistic Christianity. This syncretism is one of the foundations of the religious pluralism that characterizes the spiritual world of our people.

Filantropija postkomunistinėje visuomenėje: strateginis veiksmas ar socialinio atsakingumo apraiška?

Together with the national Independence and the free market re-establishment, philanthropic tradition are returning back to the Lithuanian society. However philanthropy already appears in its modern qualities based not only on pure Christian morality, but also having some expressions of corporative social responsibility, strategic action. This paper is dwelling on the analysis of philanthropic phenomenon in post-communist settings revealing the dichotomy between philanthropy as social responsibility and its corporative strategic aspects. The analysis is based on interpretation of empirical and statistical data, as well as theoretical insights.

Polemical Aspects of Hume's Natural History of Religion

DAVID HUME'S Natural History of Religion aroused controversy even before its publication in 1757. Bishop Warburton wrote the publisher of the work, Millar, asking that it be suppressed on the assumption that its purpose was to establish naturalism, a species of atheism, instead of religion. Reverend Caleb Fleming defended Hume's work on the grounds that Hume had finely exposed superstition and popery: professeth himself an advocate of pure theism, and as far as he a theist, he cannot be an enemy pure Christianity.1 Hume's avowed purpose, in his introduction the work, purely scholarly and apparently disinterested: What those principles are, which give rise the original belief [in religion], and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation, the subject of our present enquiry.2 Modern commentators have accepted Hume's claim at face value. H. E. Root, though he points out the one-sidedness of Hume's presentation, says There no question here of Hume's philosophical sincerity and honesty.3 J. 0. Higgins views the work similarly: the Natural History of Religion (NHR) is what its title suggests, not anti-religious propaganda, although it contained a good deal that was critical of religion or, as Hume termed it, 'popular religion,' but a natural history in the eighteenth-century style, intended

The Basis of National Security

All America is united by common interests which are clearly defined and distinct from that of other nations. While we all recognize this fact, the principles involved are so imperfectly worked out that we fail to see either the grandeur of our culture or its defects. The traditional, the tribal and the battle cries of particular epochs get an emphasis out of all proportion to their importance. They cause us to submerge general principles and lofty ideals under the chaff and d6bris of fresh emotional outbursts. This culture is not a homogeneous growth based on home experience, but is the product of foreign thought consciously imported and yet made vital to us by our own experience. We are thus prevented from seeing the essence of these importations and thus separating its husk from its kernel. Our early culture came in the form of Christianity, whose basal concepts are brother love, sacrifice, conscience and charity. There are, however, two varieties of Christianity-the pure and the composite. Organized Christianity has through the centuries received impure currents of thought from outside influences; as a result it is possible to give an interpretation of it that makes the foreign elements overshadow the real essence of our culture. The old and the foreign have not been displaced even by the radical reformer. We find, therefore, a political admixture that becomes dominant whenever state needs dominate over spiritual ends. Peace in the one sense is meek docility or the absence of the spirit of rebellion. In a pure Christianity peace is a state of mind, a freedom from external coercion. In its secondary sense it means a harmonious life coupled with a perfect adjustment to vironal conditions. Force and peace are contrasts, the one being the essence of political domination; the other is a rule of conscience, a flow of feeling and the joy of adjustment. Discipline as a political concept means a subordination of interest and life to some superior: to those accepting the pure Christian view it means a unity of action for common ends with 1