Religious Martyrdom Research Articles

Nietzsche on Socrates, Jesus, and the slave revolt in morality

ABSTRACT This article shows how the triumph of Socratic optimism in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is due to a slave revolt in morality that promulgates a religious faith in the value of scientific truth. This early argument parallels his critique of the ascetic ideal that infects science in The Genealogy of Morality. I draw out the resemblance between Socrates’s martyrdom in The Birth and Jesus’s crucifixion in the Genealogy in order to illuminate how ritual human sacrifice mythically immortalizes both figures, together inaugurating the ascetic ideals that Christianity will eventually unite. I discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of religious martyrdom and his explanation for the success of Christian Platonism, whose ascetic ideals ground the European value system that he is known for attacking.

The Suffering Body in Pepe Sales's Poetry

The poems of Pepe Sales (Barcelona, 1954-1994) are marked by his experience as a homosexual, drug addict and AIDS sufferer. He was a key member of the Barcelona counterculture, along with Pau Riba, Pau Malvido and Genís Cano, and has gone down in history as one of the poètes maudits of contemporary Catalan literature. The aim of this article is to analyse the representation of pain and distress in his poems and songs, with some additional references to his paintings. To this end, I draw on the critical work of Susan Sontag, Sara Ahmed, David Le Breton and Joanna Bourke, who conceive pain in general, not as a private and personal experience, but as a cultural and historical event that creates identity and community bonds. The main strategies used by Sales to convey his pain are the scream, animalisation, weapons and wounds and, especially, religious martyrdom. The basic finding is that the poet’s pain is not simply a testimony to the suffering of a lost generation of junkies and misfits that the official account of the transition from Francoism to democracy has stigmatised. On the contrary, it reminds us of an unfair medical, political and financial system that inflicted great suffering on them.

Dismantling the Stereotype of Jihad: A Reading of Aboulela's The Kindness of Enemies

The present paper aims at exploring the concept of jihad as represented by the Muslim woman writer Leila Aboulela in relation to the interpretation of the term by Islamist political parties and the stereotypes assigned to it in Western media and Western thinking. Unfortunately, Islam’s position concerning jihad has been distorted, misrepresented, and misappropriated for political and economic aims. Jihad has come to be equated with terrorism, barbarism, and violence “Western popular media – particularly news media and mainstream film – reduces jihad to a one-dimensional caricature of terrorism as religious martyrdom” (Tagg 319). Allie Kirchner states that “By focusing on the narrow concept of jihad used by terrorists, the U.S. media has inadvertently reinforced the link between terrorism and Islam within the American consciousness” (Kirchner). This paper attempts to deconstruct these stereotypes and unveil the real facade of this obligation in Islam; its meaning, rules, and aims as stated clearly in the teachings in the Quran and Sunna. The methodology of this paper is to apply the concept of hybridity as a positive stance which helps Aboulela to deconstruct the false representations allotted to jihad and establish reconciliation between cultural disparities.

The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, by Werner Sollors

The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, by Werner Sollors. Harvard University Press, 2014. 400 pages. The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, the title of Werner Sollors's distinguished volume devoted to the immediate post-world war period in Germany--that is, the last five years of the decade--manages to be both vague and lurid. Its strangeness, moreover, is linked to the fact that for all the focus the author brings to the years of the American occupation of Germany, the title itself is borrowed from a French Catholic novel by the eminent right-wing polemicist and sometime celebrant of radical anti-Semitism, Georges Bernanos. The novel, published in 1926, is Sous le soleil de Satan (whose second section is titled "La Tentation du desespoir"), and it periodically resurfaces in Sollors's book as if to say that German history at its most tragic was in fact written within the medium of French literature, specifically by way of its obsession with Bernanos's novel. A first example is Wintergewitter (Winter Thunderstorm), the little-known novel by Kurt Ihlenfeld of a mass escape of German refugees from Silesia, fleeing the advancing Soviet army after the war. At a key juncture, the novel's protagonist waxes lyrical on his desire to meet Abbe Donissan, the fictive country priest whose encounter, under "Satan's sun," with evil in Bernanos's "La Tentation du desespoir" had "entered him more deeply than many a real person whose path he crossed every day" (130). That the Catholic, sometime royalist Bernanos of 1926, that is, should resurface in a novel of World War II as a guide to the dilemmas of democratizing a defeated Germany after the war and do so to the point of gracing Werner Sollors's book with its title is anomalous indeed. Or take the more familiar, politically reprehensible--and intellectually renowned--figure of Carl Schmitt, the theorist of the "state of exception" and "crown jurist" of the Third Reich, whose "denazification" after the war offers the substance of a gripping chapter in Sollors's volume. It begins with an epigraph quoted from a Schmitt diary entry of July 1930 that reads as follows: "Apathetic, depressions, listless and indifferent, just lying around, a feeling of decline and destruction. There is only one who can wake me up and strike me: Bernanos, and even he only with Under Satan's Sun" (153). Once again, and in a way that seems to orient a central chapter, the displacement in space (from Germany to Bernanos's northern France) but also in time (from pre- to post-Hitlerian) is striking. That temporal displacement opens up the interesting question of what precisely Bernanos was imagining in the postwar period on which Sollors concentrates. The answer is intriguing. The French author's final work, The Dialogues of the Carmelites, which may be more familiar to the reader as the libretto of Poulenc's opera of the same name, stages the martyrdom--at the guillotine--of a group of Carmelites in 1794. The episode had been interpreted in 1931 by Gertrud von le Fort, Bernanos's German source, as the final sequence of the French Revolution, but more intriguingly still, in an intuition that harmonizes enigmatically with the resonance established by Sollors between the prewar Bernanos text of his title and the postwar world which is the subject of his book, as the embodiment of a very contemporary "fear of dissolution of a moribund age (pre-Hitlerian Germany)" that she would proceed (in The Song at the Scaffold) to transpose retroactively into the French eighteenth century once she had happened upon the episode of the martyred Carmelites while browsing in the archives of the Munich University Library (44-45). The source of Bernanos's drama of religious martyrdom at the hands of an apparatus of state terrorism, the Revolution, that is, was rife with an anticipation of the tragedy that would befall the Jews, the catastrophe whose afterlife is at the core of Sollors's oddly vague subtitle, Tales of the 1940s. …

Killing as Piety?: Exploring Ideological Contexts Shaping the Gospel of John

Discerning the contexts shaping the Gospel of John is as crucial as it is contested. John 16:2, which predicts martyrdom at the hands of those who purportedly think themselves to be offering faithful service to God, suggests that one dimension of the Gospel’s ideological setting engages first-century Jewish debates regarding the laying down of life for piety. A survey of several early Jewish texts demonstrates that the rhetoric of pious execution of perceived idolaters (articulated with reference to the biblical exemplars of Phinehas, Levi, and Abraham) was alive in key points across a spectrum of Jewish communities. Analysis of John 8:31–59 shows narrative engagement with themes and figures central to these ideological debates, suggesting Johannine polemic against ideologies of religious violence. Within the Jewish ideological struggles to articulate “true” Jewish faithfulness in the face of Roman imperialism, the Gospel of John critiques “pious” violence and reconfigures faithfulness around Jesus’s crucifixion as an ideal martyr. This study substantiates the shaping role of the ideological discourse of religious martyrdom and highlights the sharp political and social thrust of this spiritual Gospel.

종교개혁자들과 선교

The purpose of this paper is to examine some religious reformers and mission ideas. There are some negative aspects on the mission ideas of Religious reformers until now. Except theologians of Roman Catholic Church, Gustav Warneck, who is the father of modern missiology, also evaluated that there were not any mission ideas and mission activities to religious reformers, for Luther did not recognize mission duty, compared with those Roman Catholic which made inroad and was active abroad more than before.However, the study that there was mission to religious reformers was presented by western and Korean scholars. Despite of this positive study, the center of criticism is that if they have mission ideas and theology, how their ideas and theology are systematic and have persuasive power. Therefore, the evaluation to them may be more negative judging from the circumstances resulted in the geographical expansion of gospel and numerical increase of believers because the mission of christianity after 19th century which was called as ‘The Great Century,’ produced a large number of missionaries abroad.Through the examination of results and a limit about the study on the mission ideas of religious reformers until now, this paper, on the other, presented the mission as ‘a witness.’ Jesus Christ gave Great Commission to his disciples, and all of them carried out their duties as the witness of gospel through religious martyrdom. The Latin ‘martyrium’ of ‘martyrdom’ came from the Hellas ‘μαρτυριον.’ The ‘μαρτυριον’ means originally the word ‘witness’ and ‘evidence.’ The etymology of the word ‘witness’ and ‘evidence’ is the same.The martyrdom is the ultimate evidence of gospel. Martyrs strongly impressed to christian community as the witnesses of gospel in their lives, and took the role of enthusiastic missionaries leading the others to faith. Consequently, this paper analyzed their practice more than their theory on the mission of religious reformers, that is, their lives as a martyr for the truth, Jesus Christ. This is because the martyrdom for gospel is the most obvious witness and mission of gospel at once.

Tentando Vados: The Martyrdom Politics of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza

This article examines how Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza's personal choice of religious martyrdom is problematized by her deep political concern. Carvajal, a Spanish aristocrat closely connected to the Society of Jesus, traveled to London shortly after the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in order to seek converts to Catholicism. Her exalted and highly subjective expression of spiritual growth is offset by her enthusiastic, yet earthly, engagement in the imperial dreams of a universal Catholic monarchy. Her letters and autobiography show her engagement in contemporary politics and cast a new light on the tense and always problematic relations between England and Spain. At a time when England was turning its eyes toward Spain both out of anxiety and wonder, as a model to imitate and as an enemy to defeat, Carvajal y Mendoza stands as a fascinating illustration of how the fixed categories of genre and gender imposed by modern criticism on early modern national literatures need to be reassessed as far more permeable and unstable.

Christian Martyrdom and the "Dialect of the Holy Scriptures": The Literal, the Allegorical, the Martyrological

AbstractThis paper seeks to test a venerable scholarly and popular commonplace: that the ideology of religious martyrdom is based upon and further reflects a literal or even hyper-literal interpretation of Scriptures. Through two test-cases from late antique Christian writings, Tertullian's scorpiace and Origen's exhortatio ad martyrium, I seek to demonstrate the inadequacy of the literal/allegorical dichotomy to comprise and comprehend the complex, ingenious ways in which "the dialect of the holy Scriptures" (Origen's phrase) is claimed to speak in one unambiguous voice that instructs the Christian to accept martyrdom under persecution through confession. Self- and other-characterizations using the labels of "literal" and "allegorical" readings abound in these writings, but are not confined to one side or another. Via such "fighting words," the lexicon of hermeneutical claims of fidelity to or apostasy from the Scriptures is pressed into service by authors who, like Tertullian in Carthage and Origen in Caesarea, craft careful apologetic and protreptic arguments to support the claim that for Christians "it is better to prefer a religious death to an irreligious life."

Eating in Remembrance of Themselves: Mythic Saints and Martyrs in Two Stories by Julia O’Faolain

Woman ought to be able to find herself among other things, through images of herself already deposited in and the conditions of production of the work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy. Luce Irigaray An Ethics of Sexual Difference Introduction LIKE HER COMPATRIOTS Edna O'Brien and Jennifer Johnston, contemporary author Julia O'Faolain has consistently engaged with the dominant myths that have informed Western culture, placing especial focus on detrimental myths of femininity. The bulk of her existing oeuvre was produced between the late 1980's and early 1980's-arguably the most volatile period of the Troubles when the Republican Army waged a guerrilla war against the British government to end some seven hundred years of occupation. Many of O'Faolain's works focus specifically on the ways in which the Republican myth of a pure and unadulterated encouraged the strict surveillance of behaviour that was deemed to be non-traditional or deviant. Several critics have noted how such ideals were embodied in the myth of which, especially through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prescribed feminine behaviour based on old legends about beautiful, loyal, and passive women who would inspire war and revolution but not actively engage in such activities. Throughout the of its colonization; C.L. Innes has argued, Ireland has been represented by British imperialists well nationalists and artists female: she is Hibernia, Eire, Mother Ireland, the Poor Old Woman, the Shan Van Vocht, Cathleen ni Houlihan, the Dark Rosaleen (2). These very distinct manifestations of a mythical feminine have been subsumed in the rhetoric of andocentric militarism (the IRA) and patriarchal religion (the Catholic Church) for the purpose of disseminating feminine passivity and subservience. To be sure, women traditionally served activists within paramilitary organizations as symbols of an oppressed nation and models of republican morality, yet they were discouraged from participating actively in the actual rebellions (Curtin 1.33). The broader focus of O'Faolain's work, elaborated most prominently in her celebrated novel No Country for Young Men (1980), is the transgenerational impact of such feminine myths, which are transmitted by an older generation and instilled in the minds of the young. Laura B. Vandale argues that such myths generate in the character of Judith, the old convent nun in No Country, two intertwining and destructive forces-her passion for and her passion against her sexual awakening and attraction to men (22). As turns out, Judith is the aunt of the story's other female protagonist, Grainne, who has been catechized by a monastic tradition that had described a bag of shit; it [therefore] followed that sexual release into such a receptacle was a topic about fit for sober discussion a bowel movement (O'Faolain, No Country 1.55). O'Faolain's typically acerbic humour responds to the combined forces of politics and religion and underscores what Thomas R. Moore calls a of control and entrapment of women throughout history (9). Such a paradigm demanded that women adhere to an established order based on inherited myths about women who willingly sacrifice their bodies for the nourishment of the nation. As in much of O'Faolain's longer fiction, her short stories critique the legacy of a paternally endorsed mythology that confines woman to the restrictive categories of saint and whore, martyr and malefactor. While her best known work explores how mythological traditions resonate in contemporary society, O'Faolain devotes just much time to the wider European traditions of Christianity, which helped to shape what became known Irish Catholicism:' By focusing on one story from each context (sixth-century Gaul and twentieth-century Ireland), I intend to show how the larger body of O'Faolain's work contributes to the task of what Judith Butler calls a feminist genealogy (9, 165, 188), which uncovers and exposes women's disfigurement (Cornell, Beyond Accommodation 166) and traces the various ways in which women's bodies have functioned historically and mythically sites of religious martyrdom. …

TAMIL TIGER ’MARTYRDOM’ IN SRI LANKA: FAITH IN SUICIDE FOR NATIONHOOD?

The article focuses on the ‘suicide-martyrdom’ deployed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka as a political strategy for self determination and liberation from the ‘Sinhala hegemony’. The protagonists have given a new political-religious meaning to the historically celebrated acts of religious martyrdom, which took place in the name of faith and belief. Suicide strikers do not believe that the suicide acts they commit are lethal. They are portrayed to be valiant acts of honour and sacrifice on behalf of the family, ethnic community, and more importantly against the ‘terrorising other’ whose ‘acts of violence’ must be terminated. It is performed not as an act of violence, but a resolute sacrifice for the sake of compatriots and their freedom. The author draws some aspects from the research and writings of Peter Schalk and Michael Roberts who have addressed the same subject area on martyrdom as a form of secular resistance, and the latter, on religious aspects in the military formation of a suicide striker and in the aftermath of the mission. He argues that the reconstruction of an astute faith in suicide and its ritualisation as a well crafted political tool and as a powerful means to instil fear psychosis in the enemy for the creation of a separate state. The concept of suicide and the suicide striker within the LTTE with its primary secular political hermeneutic has now embraced a phase of expanding into a notion of patriotic heroism, in the name of statehood of Tamil Eelam bordering on religiouscultural sentiments. This altruistic suicide is linked to liberation of their compatriots from tyranny and injustice which is considered sublime and transcendental even though there is no definitive reward of a paradise as in the case of Jihadist suicide strikers. The political rhetoric behind the war slogans with religious connotations and statements is socio-political cancer, which has infected many conflict ridden localities across the globe. Sri Lanka remains one example of a majority-minority conflict zone and displays an ardent obstinacy both by the majority and the minority in the conflict, in portraying the ‘other’ as the sole enemy of the ‘self’. They have not only been emulated by the likes of Hamas in the Palestinian campaign against Israeli occupation but also by the Al-Qaeda terror network. A suicide striker is different to a solider who goes to the battle field, and is not focused on dying but counterattacking the enemy. The suicide striker kills so that others may live through his or her act of heroism, a devotional sacrifice for the cause of Tamil Eelam. The abandonment of a Black Tiger life is not suicide, but a gift of oneself which has Christian nuances. LTTE hero is a ‘secular’ hero. However, it must be noted that LTTE on their part fail to obliterate the centuries old psychosocial phenomenon of religiosity, embedded in the Tamil folk psyche with the Hindu worldview. The representational death of a Black tiger enhances and pontificates the Tamil ethnic roots and heritage as brave, courageous and surpassing those of the enemy which endows the Tamil public with a sense of heroism and national pride. He/she is a hero of the Tamil Eelam and nothing more and nothing less. Schlak relentlessly tries to separate the LTTE’s ideological secularity from being ‘religious’ but he undermines the ethnic Tamil religiosity which is very much Saivite Hindu and Catholic which determine the parameters of a new cult, within the space provided by the LTTE, where the masses have found meaning and connectedness in times of despair and loss. It is in this sense that new religious meanings have been collated around death and dying, in the name of liberation and suicide, however violent, self destructive and undesirable, within the religious world of the popular masses.

The Al Qaeda 9/11 instructions: a study in the construction of religious martyrdom

A growing global concern about suicide attacks has led to attempts from various disciplines to understand the psychological profiles of persons willing to commit suicide terrorist attacks. Recent reports have suggested that more powerful explanatory models might be discovered using social psychological concepts, with a shift of focus from the individual to the group within which the individual acts and by which the individual is influenced. This paper attempts to do so by presenting an analysis of the Al Qaeda ‘final instructions’ document, which sheds light on the way members of this group were mobilised towards conducting one of the most devastating assaults in modern history. We discuss the use of religious doctrine and rhetorical devices as a psychological strategy employed by this group to inspire, control and mobilise its members before and during the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Enduring creation: art, pain, and fortitude

Nigel Spivey takes on one of the greatest taboos in Western culture in this brilliantly original work of cultural history: why is so much pain depicted in the art of the West? Beginning with a meditation on Auschwitz, the prizewinning author then takes us on a journey that encompasses the stone-bound screams of classical sculpture, the many depictions of the Crucifixion, the Massacre of the Innocents and St. Sebastians pierced with arrows, self-portraits of the aging Rembrandt, and the tortured art of Vincent van Gogh. Exploring the tender, complex rapport between art and pain, Spivey guides us through the twentieth-century photographs of casualties of war, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and back to the recorded horrors of the Holocaust. Beauty and disfigurement, violence and thrill, horror and comfort--these are pairings fostered throughout Western art, for causes as various as religious martyrdom, judicial torment, artistic virtuosity, and erotic gratification. The ancient Greeks invented tragic drama: but how far was pity for tragedy's victims tempered by the notion of just deserts? The first Christians preached Christ Crucified: why then did it take some five hundred years before images appeared of Christ on the cross? The Massacre of the Innocents was an event that never happened: for what reasons were artists of the Italian Renaissance so eager to show it convincingly? Enduring Creation reveals the amazing power of art to console, to warn, to prepare the viewer for the harsher experiences of life, raising intriguing questions: Can pain be beautiful? Do we always pity suffering? Are sainthood and sadomasochism linked? This compelling study concludes with a positive message of hope for the enduring human spirit.

Promises to keep

PAGE 106 PAGE 106 THE BLA CK LA W JOURNAL THE BLACK LA WIOURNAL PROMISES TO KEEP By J. SKELLY WRIGHT* T HE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION is now 20 years old. The first, one hundred years ago, lasted only half that long. Is this cause for celebration or only a good reason to hold our breath? I am not at all sure. That first voyage toward racial justice was simply deserted by the winds of history. It would be imprudent to ignore that our sails today have gone rather ominously still. The parallels are somewhat disturbing. As in the 1870's, the political landscape has been devastated. Martin Luther King is dead, and Whitney Young, Medgar Evers, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, and Lyndon John- son. Gone too is that coalition of Blacks, the young, labor and the churches which broke a filibuster older than the Senate chamber. The liveliest political movement in the land belongs to the man who stood in the schoolhouse door. Congress toys with bills aimed at restricting the equitable powers, and purposes, of the courts. At the highest tribunal in the judicial branch, eight of the nine justices who joined in Brown are gone. Orders of desegregation are no longer unan- imously affirmed; some, indeed, may be destined for reversal. And the remaining branch of government has its own problems, strangely similar in some respects to those of the First Reconstruction presidency. As in the 1870's, the issue of race today has nearly everywhere lost its sense of moral urgency. It is not so much a replacement of virtue by vice as a fading of awareness into in- difference. Having been ingrained for over three centuries, apparently our habits of racial injustice are imperceptible unless we are ex- periencing a veritable fever of the moral senses. Before we could emancipate the slaves, we had to war against each other in a spirit of religious martyrdom: As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free. In proposing the original Civil Rights Act, Charles Sumner spoke of the true grandeur in an example of justice, mak- ing the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down prejudice, like Satan, under our feet. So too with us. Martin Luther King gave us all a dream, and James Baldwin, pointing to an old Negro spiritual, convinced us that the dream's fruition was nigh, for continued delay would surely destroy us: God gave Noah the Rainbow sign; No more water, the fire next time. NDEED THE FIRES CAME. In most of our cities, one can still see a great deal of cold charcoal, and the poet of the moment would appear to be Robert Frost: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Public discussion today echoes the weariness of 100 years ago. President Grant com- plained: The whole public are tired out with these annual Autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the *Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Co- lumbia Circuit.