Religious Redemption Research Articles

Broken and Disorienting: An Exploration of Religious Views under Toynbee's Concept of Civilization

Toynbee, a famous British historical philosopher, emphasized the importance of the religious view in historical development in A Study of History and attempted to solve the contradictions facing the development of modern Western society through the concept of religious redemption. However, Toynbee's concept of religious redemption is not a perfect solution. The concept of religious redemption is the ideological product of modern Western society in the process of industrialization and modernization. Its religious background is closely related to Western history, aiming to free human beings from the shackles of egocentrism and cultivate universal love so as to enter the world of great harmony. Toynbee's idealized pursuit of the spiritual level also made him ignore the diversity of “love” generated by different freedom ideals, and he was caught in a dilemma of advancing human civilization towards self-determination through universal love. Human beings must achieve the realm of fraternity by promoting the comprehensive development of individuals and then uniting all mankind. Through an in-depth analysis of Toynbee's religious concept, this paper reveals the significance and limitations of the concept of religious redemption in the development of human civilization and discusses its enlightenment to the development of modern social civilization.

Evangelical Christianity and Criminal Rehabilitation

Crime and religion are social constructs that indicate what society considers acceptable and deviant behavior. The connection is further complicated when considering how the formerly incarcerated integrate back into society after incarceration. This article is an engaged scholarship that utilizes clinical sociology to understand the role of religious redemption and criminal rehabilitation. The article specifically utilizes elements of symbolic interactionism to explore how identity, religious conversion, and community impact ex-felons. The author argues that religious redemption is essential for the formerly incarcerated because it allows them to replace their criminal identity with a new one and reinterpret previous mistakes into their life narrative. The article ends with action steps that can be put into practice by religious organizations, nonprofits, and governmental agencies.

열반 적정과 엘리엇의 『네 사중주』

Four Quartets expresses suffering as the universal condition of human beings and seeks a way to escape from it through the theme of time. By mixing individual sensibility and intelligence with thoughts of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the poem atriculates the themes in phrases and sentences with various connotative and contradictory meanings. Typical examples include phrases such as “The first world”, “Rose garden”, “Midwinter spring”, “Zero summer”, “A white light still and moving”, and a sentence “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement.” These connotative and contradictory meanings would be hard to understand by common readers. Foregrounding Nirvana Samatha in Buddhism as a main subject of Four Quartet, this article delves into the sub-themes such as time(world of phenomenon), eternity, and salvation(redeption). As a Christian poet, Eliot presents Christ/God as the redeemer of humanity in diverse and, even, contradictory ways in the poem. The Lord becomes the end point toward which sufferings human being strive to save themselves, and the archytype of human redemption. Ways to go toward the Lord include repentance, prayer, emptying, humility, and practicing love. Buddhism’s nirvana is much similar to this, but seems a little different from Christianity in the method of seeking. Nirvana is based on internal inquiry. But Both of them are ultimately equal in that they are based on salvation for the eternal happiness of mankind. The ending of the poem, where a fire and a rose become one, visually signifies that humanity can be redeemed by empting herself and loving each other genuinely, and exemplies a poetic expression that unites the religious redemption of the East and the West.

Paradox and Aporia on Religious Redemption in August Wilson’s Plays

Paradox and Aporia on Religious Redemption in August Wilson’s Plays

The Guitar’s Apostle: Imaginaries and Narratives Surrounding Andrés Segovia’s Religious Redemption of the Classical Guitar

ABSTRACT Media and scholarly publications often depict Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia as an apostle who redeemed the classical guitar from its relegation to the periphery of art music. Such ideas should be challenge by arguing that Segovia put a myth into circulation that has significantly distorted dominant historiographies of the guitar until today. Discussions about the roots and essence of the Spanish nation, the emergence of sound-reproduction technologies, and Segovia’s mediation helped to help establish a narrative that, through a religious rhetoric, positioned his artistic debut as a breaking point in the history of the classical guitar.

Luke

Spencer’s Luke, as a contribution to the Two Horizons New Testament Commentary, first and foremost bridges the disciplines of biblical scholarship and systematic theology. As the introduction, “Reading Luke Theologically,” states, the commentary is also interdisciplinary in other respects, in that it is “theologically centered,” “philosophically expanded,” “canonically connected,” “salvifically aimed,” ecclesiastically located,” and “emotionally invested.” The final criterion explains Spencer’s frequent utilization of psychological theory to discuss not only the text’s impact on the emotions, or pathos, of the reader but the inner psychology of the Gospel’s characters, such Mary in Luke 2:19.Following the introduction, the commentary (pp. 25–635) provides a theological interpretation of the Gospel. Spencer divides the text into five major sections highlighting how Luke wishes readers to attain the knowledge of God through: an assurance about the story of Jesus (1:1–4); the “birth and growth of Jesus” (1:5–4:13); the work of the liberating Savior in word and miracles (4:14–9:50); seeing the Savior via his travels (9:51–19:44); and the suffering and resurrection of the Savior (19:45–24:51). Spencer states Luke’s proclamation of Jesus’s liberating message is announced early in the Magnificat and the Benedictus, as well as in Jesus’s initial sermon in Nazareth in 4:14–30. These narratives not only provide the basis of Luke’s understanding of Jesus’s person and significance but also set the agenda of the commentary’s theological program; where Jesus’s person and message not only are important for religious redemption but are also programmatic for social reformation.The commentary focuses on the final form of the text. Redactional and textual issues are not highlighted. Textual issues, however, are not neglected. For example, the textual variants in 22:17–20, 43–44, and 23:34 are discussed in some detail. In fact, eight pages are devoted to 23:34, “Father forgive them.” This attention to a textually questionable text is somewhat surprising. While there may be internal and external reasons for accepting this verse, Spencer nevertheless devotes a surprising amount of space unpacking a doubtful saying.Likewise, as a theological commentary, sparse attention is devoted to historical details. Once again, however, when relevant, such issues are not neglected. For example, in the discussion of 5:1–11, Spencer notes how Antipas’s claim to the produce of the Lake of Gennesaret corresponded to Augustus’s assertion of ownership of the produce of the Mediterranean. The fees for licenses for fishing in Lake Gennesaret would have been suffocating, and the language of Jesus’s call for the disciples to fish for people provides a “new bold path of lordship” which highlights an opposition to the corrupt practices of Rome and its clients (p. 136). Spencer also agrees, probably correctly, with Addison Wright’s classic 1982 Catholic Biblical Quarterly essay on how the story of the widow’s mite (21:1–4//Mark 12:41–44) reflects not a commendation of the widow but a condemnation of the rapacious practices of the temple (pp. 530–32). Spencer’s interpretation of the parable of the persistent widow (18:1–8) as, at least in part, a commentary on Rome’s oppressive colonialism (pp. 448–49), however, likely imposes an agenda on the parable that it cannot bear.Spencer’s greatest contribution may be his understanding of the complexities of Luke’s narrative. Special attention is given throughout the commentary to how Luke uses parallelism in his presentation of Jesus. This is very helpful as it enables the reader to gain an appreciation for the complexities of Luke’s literary art. Also, Spencer recognizes Luke’s nuanced use of characterization. In particular, while Luke’s Jesus is quick to condemn opponents as hypocrites (see 13:15), there are friendly interactions between Jesus and Pharisees, such as when Jesus accepts invitations to dine with Pharisees (see 7:36). Even more striking is 13:31–35, when Pharisees warn Jesus of Antipas’s plot to kill him. Thus, Luke’s presentation of the Pharisees appears more rounded than Matthew’s or Mark’s.Following the commentary is a theological reflection (pp. 637–732). This section has great promise but is somewhat disappointing. Spencer’s theological reflections derive from his self-consciously Baptist heritage, diminishing the ecumenical appeal of this part of the book. Furthermore, his zeal to emphasize the social impact of Luke’s message leads to some unfortunate generalizations, seen when Spencer contrasts Rauschenbusch’s social agenda with Finney’s evangelistic work (p. 706). Unfortunately, Spencer overlooks Finney’s postmillennial commitment to social issues that in many respects prefigured Rauschenbusch’s.When evaluating Spencer’s Luke, we need to be aware of the purpose of the work. As a pastoral resource that encourages teachers and preachers to think holistically about the Gospel of Luke, the work succeeds. Whatever failings the book may derive from its bold attempt to approach the text from a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective, it attempts to do much. In much, though not all, it succeeds.

Keberpihakan Hukum Islam Terhadap Perlindungan Anak

Child protection has become an important issue in the modern world. To guarantee the future generations, children must be protected from all forms of of interference, threats, violence and exploitation carried out by adults. Protection is not only charged to parents, but also to the community, nation and state. This article tries to examine the attitude of Islam towards the issue of child protection through a search of syara arguments. Especially in the Qur'an and in the Hadith. This study finds out that Islam has a broader perspective. In guaranteeing the needs of children. The guarantees start when they are still in the wombs (fetus) to adulthood. This can be understood from the provisions of the Shari'ah which prohibits abortion and provide relief for pregnant women not to fast during the month of Ramadan. In addition, Islam also gives rights to children, such as the right to life, the right to have aqiqah (religious redemption), the right to have a good name, the right to receive breastfeeding for two years, and so on.

Derwent Moultrie Coleridge's Australian Exile

The literary career and troubled life of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge (1828–80), Derwent Coleridge's eldest son (S. T. Coleridge's first grandson) has been critically overlooked. After a period of alcohol-related, reckless behaviour at Cambridge University, he was exiled to Australia in November 1850, lest he continue to dishonour his father and the Coleridge name. Despite struggling considerably, he quickly became part of an Australian literary circle and he often contributed poems to Sydney newspapers. This essay analyses the most biographical of his poems that was published in the Australian press, ‘The Loafer's Christmas’ (1871) – a hitherto unknown poem – looking, in particular, at the dialogues in which the poem engages with his family, especially S. T. Coleridge's ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. I also contextualise ‘The Loafer's Christmas’ within nineteenth-century Australian culture. Looking at issues of exile, idleness, addiction, family, home(lessness), and religious redemption, this essay explores the ways in which Derwent Moultrie's exile proved to be both a literary liberation and a dead end, trapping him between times and spaces, real and imaginary. In so doing, I show how the lost life and writings of Derwent Moultrie Coleridge can offer us new perspectives on the Coleridge legacy.

Saving the child for the sake of the nation: Moral framing and the civic, moral and religious redemption of children

This article argues that a range of child welfare interventions that sought to relocate children away from their birth families and home communities between the middle decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drew on a common moral frame. These interventions – child migration schemes, assimilationist policies towards indigenous children, institutions of corrective confinement and the child protection movement – have typically been previously studied as isolated national or organisational phenomena. However, this article outlines a common moral frame to which they made reference structured around the figure of the redeemable child, vulnerable to the effects of polluted social environments, seen as needing to be re-located to new environments that would enable their civic, moral and spiritual redemption. This argument is situated within a discussion of the articulation of moral meanings as a social practice, which addresses both the central elements of this moral frame and the contexts in which it was articulated. This moral frame did not determine child-care practices within these schemes, but was one source of influence on them. In particular, the article examines the role of economic rationality in the management of these schemes, arguing that the sacralised status of the child within the family discussed in the work of Vivianna Zelizer was not extended to the children to whom these schemes were addressed. The article concludes by identifying key areas for future comparative study of these diverse schemes in relation to these shared moral meanings.

Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism Mark Grzeskowiak Ehrhard Bahr . Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. 378 pp. US$ 39.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25128-8. Ehrhard Bahr's book is a thoroughly researched "collection of case studies" on an important group of German intellectuals and artists living in Los Angeles during the Second World War. According to Bahr, the work of exiles such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Schoenberg can be read within the context of a broader "crisis of modernism," and he persuasively argues that the "exile culture" that existed in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1958 "deserves its place among the global cityscapes of modernism." Weimar on the Pacific differs from previous scholarship in German exile studies in both its language (i.e., it is written in English) and in its exclusive focus on exiles living in the city of Los Angeles during the war. Bahr has based his definition of a particular "crisis of modernism" on British cultural historian Raymond Williams's contention that modernism can be understood as a response to dramatic changes "in the media of cultural production" in the nineteenth century and on Russell A. Berman's tripartite division of German modernist prose writing into "fascist modernism, leftist modernism, and a modernism of social individuality." Rather than present his readers with "another publication on German exile literature," his objective in Weimar on the Pacific is to examine "a particular chapter in the cultural history of Los Angeles" and the "specific German answer" to modernism that found expression there in architecture, film, music, philosophy, and theatre. For some exiled artists, this crisis in modernism provoked a retreat from modernism. Bahr's chapter on Franz Werfel, for example, shows how the Prague novelist and poet alternated between modernism and antimodernism while in his Californian exile. The same can be said of the novelist Alfred Döblin, whose Karl und Rosa, with its message of religious redemption over politics, also indicates a renunciation of modernism. On the other hand, and as is demonstrated in close readings of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Bahr is also able to demonstrate how some of the artists exiled in Los Angeles overcame this crisis and reconstituted modernism in light of their new historical and political situations. In the case of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, for example, Bahr shows how the composer combined traditional liturgy with modernism to produce an oratorio intended as a "commemoration of Jewish identity during a period of persecution." In the case of Doktor Faustus, Bahr employs Walter Benjamin's concept of antinomic allegory to argue that Mann's protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, needs to be read "dialectically" against a background of fascist Germany and modernist art, rather than to be simply identified with either. The employment of a "dialectical reading" is central to Bahr's approach. Drawing upon Brecht's assertion that "emigration is the best school of dialectics," Bahr argues [End Page 482] that the exiled artists and intellectuals treated in his book adopted a "dialectical stance" towards Los Angeles, with its ocean-side bungalows and lush gardens, and that this distancing allowed them to see their new home as a "cityscape of modernism," rather than as a "natural paradise." In this sense, according to Bahr, the dialectic functioned as both a "structural and an intellectual argument in art and literature." To support the latter (intellectual) argument, Bahr relies heavily upon Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which provides a general philosophical backdrop to the book's various case studies. Bahr sees in the Horkheimer/Adorno study "a comprehensive assessment and analysis of modernism and its crisis in the 1940s," and it of enormous benefit to his book that his analysis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment not only addresses its philosophical argument, but also attempts to place it within a specific historical setting. Despite its reliance on close reading and at times...

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rule of Scandal in Japan and the United States. By Mark D. West. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. viii+368. $45.00 cloth.

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rule of Scandal in Japan and the United States. By Mark D. West. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. viii+368. $45.00 cloth. West offers a colorful as well as penetrating account of the making of Japanese scandals. Using the United States as a baseline for comparison and analyzing cases from all realms of public life (business, entertainment, politics, sports, religion, and education), he argues compellingly that law, social organization, and culture combine to determine the logic of scandal in Japan. The book does an excellent job of showing how Japanese law affects the social and legal dynamics of high-profile cases. Significant factors at work here are the organization of Japanese prosecutors, lack of whistle-blowing protection, lax white-collar crime enforcement, underdeveloped (by Western standards) sexual harassment laws, and ambiguities in sex norms. Strict defamation laws are particularly important. Truth does not constitute a defense in Japan, and there is no requirement of malice or economic harm. Damage to honor suffices. As a result, public officials are fairly protected against moral attacks. But since damages awarded by courts are low, the press does not always mince its words; thus many scandals are played out in the form of defamation cases. The bifurcated structure of the Japanese media also has a bearing on scandal activity. Elite media constitute a closed world operating through exclusive press clubs, whose members tend to shy away from scandal both because of high-mindedness and because of their dependence on the elite of the nation. The weeklies and the television wide-shows, in contrast, revel in raunchy and irreverent coverage. For instance, the sex story about the adulterous relationship between Japanese Prime Minister Uno and a geisha was rebuffed by the elite press in 1989, but it was made public by a weekly. A particularly perspicuous chapter compares the pragmatics of public apology in Japan and United States. Among other things, West finds that individual apologies in Japan are often made for the benefit of groups and that they rarely adopt the trope of religious redemption, as is often the case in America. What is more, the apologizers are often chosen by the organization or group that the scandal implicates. The book takes on a good deal of common wisdom about Japan. We find, for instance, that the Japanese are fairly litigious. Japanese politicians and celebrities routinely have recourse to law to defend their honor. West reports that 741 defamation complaints were filed in Japan during 2004. …

GOD'S POLITICS IN ISRAEL'S SUPREME COURT

The movement of religious settlers in Israel's occupied territories began as a messianic mission intended to sweep the Jewish people and the State of Israel into the process of religious redemption. It ended up, however, submitting to the moral authority of the state, a fact which became manifest in the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, when the overwhelming majority of settlers refused to defy the decision about unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. This article argues that submission to the state's moral authority was foreshadowed in the early 1980s by a consciously pragmatic decision to avert a full‐fledged clash with the state's sovereignty in the aftermath of a Supreme Court order to dismantle the settlement of Elon Moreh.

Panting Sentinels: Erotics, Politics, and Redemption in the Friendship Poetry of Katherine Philips (1631–1664)

After reviewing recent literary criticism regarding the erotic potential and political implications of Katherine Philips’s friendship verses, this essay works directly from Poems (1667) to argue that the poet’s conceptualization of friendship was as a vehicle for religious redemption inspired by Queen Henrietta Maria’s devout humanism and the Caroline court’s Religion of Love. Although current Philips criticism discusses the stated devotional aims of same-sex friendship as the poet’s efforts to deflect potential sexualized readings, this essay finds that in the only edition of Philips’s poetry that was authorized by the poet, friendship and religious redemption are thoroughly intertwined.

Heros und Messias: Holderlins messianische Mythogenese und das judische Denken

Charlier, Robert. Heros and Messias: Holderlins messianische Mythogenese and das judische Wurzburg-- Konigshausen and Neumann, 1999. DM 58.00 paperback. In his TU Berlin dissertation, painstakingly researched and composed in the dense style of a scientific treatise, Robert Charlier takes on a formidable task thus far not attempted in the enormous body of scholarship concerning Friedrich Holderlin. By tracking markers of Jewish and pre-Christian influence within Holderlin's poetic corpus, he aims to demonstrate that the inherent in the conceptual framework of the poet's writings and embodied in the mythic figures that inhabit them produces a unique model of religious redemption and speculative progress influenced not only by Christian typology but also by Judaic thought. This messianic idea expresses itself, according to Charlier, through a complex progression of images that Holderlin confronts throughout his productive life. Reconstructing several key points along this trajectory, from the Magisterspecimen of 1790 to the late Nachtgesdnge, Charlier blazes a unique and sometimes daunting path through some very well trodden material. The result is an uneven treatment of a multitude of texts and themes that offers some truly original insights while leaving other points very much in question. Charlier sets out by asserting that in the final decade of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth century, Holderlin's work focuses virtually in its entirety on the idea: Wie ist eine universelle Erlosung durch das immanente Eingreifen einer transzendenten Instanz moglich and welchen geistigen oder politischen Anted konnen die groBen einzelnen als Seher, Kunder oder Fuhrer daran nehmen? (9). He concedes that the late eighteenth century saw numerous attempts within philosophy to secularize in speculative form messianic traditions handed down since the Middle Ages: Kant's Garantie des ewigen Friedens, Schiller's Asthetische Briefe, even Holderlin's own collaboration with Hegel and Schelling on the Alteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. However, he argues that Holderlin's own poetry and theoretical reflections represent a singular attempt to think through the messianic idea as an eschatological or Zeitbruch simultaneously in religious, aesthetic and political registers; Christian and Jewish influences converge in the dualities of interiority and exteriority, pneumatism and political action, Geistprinzip and Tatprinzip that structure this concept. To describe the process by which Holderlin represents that moment poetically, Charlier proposes the term Mythogenese: a synthesis of imageless abstraction (the messianic idea as theological construct) and concrete manifestation in the heroic figures of Greek mythology that inhabit Holderlin's poetry from its outset. Rewriting the Greek heroes anew in the spirit of Jewish and Christian typologies, he endows them with a messianic force that in the final analysis comes to represent a modern Uberwindung des Tragischen. But the title of this book promises more than an illumination of this mythogenetic mode in Holderlin's poetry, for it juxtaposes that term provocatively with judisches Denken. How is it possible to align Holderlin's thought-a thought so immediately determined by the figures and tropes of both Greek mythology and Christian theology-with a Jewish tradition to which he never directly refers? In the first two chapters Charlier delves into this question with a thorough consideration of origins, examining formative moments in Holderlin's education at the Tubinger Stift: his course of study under the Orientalist Schnurrer, who encouraged his students to approach bible exegesis from a hermeneutical standpoint rather than a theological one; the ardent rhetorical parallelism of his 1990 Magisterspecimen, in which he attempts a critical comparison of biblical text and contemporary politics; the trajectories of influence through which he may have come into contact with Jewish thought via the gospel of John and with the messianic speculations of the late Hellenic philosopher Philo via the writings of Pseudo-Longinus. …

“A Higher Power to Feel”

This article examines the relationship among gender identity, spirituality, and emotion and addresses the largely unexamined subject of male grief in Victorian America by analyzing the way in which mid—nineteenth-century Spiritualist men deployed grief in their narratives of religious redemption. Participating in a broader cultural conversation about gender in the Victorian middle class, these men suggested that grief and Spiritualist commitment would counteract the repressive effects of the market revolution and the ideology of domesticity on male identity—and reinforce male power—by encouraging an emotionally expressive and domestically engaged style of manhood. Spiritualist men publicly presented their private experiences of introspective “grief work” to do the “cultural work” of shaping a conception of masculinity suitable to a rising Victorian middle class.

The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France Robert A. Nye David S. Barnes. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. xiv + 305 pp. Ill. $42.00. This book makes a notable contribution to the growing literature on medical thinking as a cultural or ideological system. In this instance David S. Barnes explores the history of tuberculosis in late-nineteenth-century France as an aspect of the wider history of cultural and political crisis in that nation, plagued as it was by a host of debilitating social and biological “pathologies” and faced with a powerful external threat in newly united Germany. Tuberculosis was the greatest and most puzzling danger to French health, and so it provoked, Barnes argues, more emotional response and concern than any other threat to the [End Page 528] “race.” Barnes limits himself here to an analysis of the public and professional discourse that considered the causes and possible prevention of the disease, because this dimension of the debate impinged most directly on other issues of contemporary ideological concern. Barnes follows these debates in great detail over the period 1880–1914, but he begins his study with chapters that pass in review the earlier cultural history of tuberculosis as a symbol of individual suffering and a source of aesthetic and religious redemption. He then outlines the contagionist/environmentalist debate that preceded the rise of germ theory and Robert Koch’s isolation of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, and concludes, surprisingly, that germ theory, far from breathing new vigor into a discredited contagionism, simply inspired more concern about the environmental circumstances in which the bacillus reaped the greatest number of victims. This search for environing causes was partly the result of a deeply rooted style of etiological thinking that generally marked French thought, but it was inspired also by the reasoning that since the bacillus seemed more or less ubiquitous, then individual constitution or circumstance must provide the key to who became ill and who did not. According to Barnes, a rather one-sided debate emerged over the exact nature of this etiology. The majority “official” view piggybacked on ancient ecological notions that the disease struck down those who lived or worked in dark, overcrowded, airless spaces, as indicated by demographic data linking mortality and population density. Left-wing physicians and syndicalist theorists held the minority opinion that physical overwork and malnutrition were the truly damaging aspects of the environment, and they coupled this argument with demands for the eight-hour day and higher wages. Their liberal and “solidarist” opponents balked at the far-reaching implications of such an argument and supported the far less expensive and less threatening option of domestic sanitary reform and more salubrious housing. Barnes shows how these arguments played out in Paris and in Le Havre, the northern port that suffered the highest rate of tuberculosis deaths in France. He concludes that in this case, as in so many other matters, the French political and hygiene establishments chose collective rhetorical and moral appeals rather than any root-and-branch experiments in public welfare, and he contrasts this national style of dealing with the dread disease with British individualism and German state interventionism. Barnes hopes his account of the history of tuberculosis will provide support for the view that in the years before the discovery of an inoculation treatment, an improvement in living and working standards had far more effect on bringing down the mortality rates of tuberculosis than did hygienic intervention. In the end, I think, his cultural history of the disease cannot actually decide that question, but he does very effectively illuminate the ways in which tuberculosis served as a powerful metaphor grafted by Frenchmen onto issues that fundamentally divided them, while simultaneously reminding them of the common fate they shared. Robert A. Nye Oregon State University Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

General Considerations on Method in Research

THIS statement on in research and inquiry was first developed to aid Ph. D. students in the field of Religion and Personality at The University of Chicago. Without some such aid as this, most of them tended to assume that method referred only to technical procedures. And yet, important as technical procedures are in any inquiry, they can not be regarded as exhausting The present statement is, then, an attempt to recapture a more balanced comprehension of method. It is not intended to depreciate the importance of technical procedures. Written for those planning to study in the area relating religion to studies of personality, this statement is not guaranteed to be equally relevant to other realms of inquiry in the psychological sciences. But at least in a general way, we believe it may be relevant; and we solicit comment as to how alterations in it could make it more useful beyond the special field of study that gave rise to it. Two principal temptations seem to confront the beginning researcher in this general field. According to the first, he begins by selecting some very large area of interest (e.g., the relation between psychotherapy and religious redemption), and then proceeds to read or count or measure at a great rate, in the mistaken conviction that things will become more specific and clear as he goes along. What he will find instead is that he will have, as Sam Goldwyn is reported to have put it, included nothing out. His project may be full of thought-starters, but none will have been pursued. The second temptation is for the researcher to concentrate so exclusively upon his technical procedures-even to the point of equating those with the entirety of his method-that the other necessary aspects of are not examined critically. When this is done, the mountain may labor and bring forth a mouse or, more probably, a specimen that defies any classification at all. At first glance, these two temptations appear to be almost opposite logically. Psychologically, however, they are similar, for both play into an illusory economy of mental effort. If this illusion can be resisted in the early stages of planning a study, then a genuine economy of effort can be reached later on at those points in the study when the consumption of time is greatest; i.e., when the data must be brought together to confront relevantly and significantly some specific problem, or to sharpen issues demanding further attention. With these temptations in the mental background, it becomes possible and desirable to state the several aspects of the total of a study. These, as enumerated below, tend to move from chronologically early to chronologically late, in the sense that explicit attention is given to one before another. But the chronological movement does not mean that the first is taken care of once the second has been entered upon. Each of these aspects becomes clarified as the next is entered upon. In addition, backtracking of all kinds, and steadily, is needed.