Representation Of Christ Research Articles

The Liturgical Environment: What the Documents Say 3rd Edition by Mark G. Boyer

Reviewed by: The Liturgical Environment: What the Documents Say 3rd Edition by Mark G. Boyer Duncan G. Stroik Mark G. Boyer The Liturgical Environment: What the Documents Say, 3rd Edition Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2015 276 pages. Paperback. $29.95. When did people start thinking that liturgical law was architectural law? In the past fifty years, this genre of book has been quite popular, assisting one to navigate the manifold documents of Vatican II in order to re-imagine churches in keeping with the spirit of the Council. On the one hand, Boyer tries to be thorough by combing liturgical documents for anything that might have relevance to the design of the ambry or the location of the tabernacle. On the other hand, the book suffers from the liturgical functional views of the famous little pamphlet Environment and Art in Catholic Worship (U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Liturgy, 1976), from which it quotes. Thus, rather than beginning with the representation of Christ’s one immemorial sacrifice, or the feeding on the Word of God and the Bread of Life, every chapter commences with the “the norm of active participation of the assembly in liturgical celebration.” In his introduction the author notes that Redemptionis Sacramentum “attempts to get at an interiority or spirituality that is an important part of active participation, insisting that not everyone must have something concrete to do beyond the usual actions and gestures of the assembly” (xii–xiii). Unfortunately, the rest of the book interprets “full and active participation” as everyone actively doing something, and architectural success is [End Page 352] judged by how much the liturgical elements foster activity. In Boyer’s treatment of the building shape he sees the basilica as historically enabling participation because there was no seating and “people could see and hear each other” (8). In the cruciform shape, participation was at a minimum due to the fact that people sat in pews and “saw only the backs of the heads of people” (8). Not only are these false conclusions, but the author shows his limited knowledge of Church history. It was in the Middle Ages that the cruciform plan developed, while pews did not come into popular use until the Reformation. Boyer sees the post-Vatican II “theater church” as a great improvement over the cruciform since worshippers can see each other and are closer to the action. Recognizing the problem of adapting an entertainment model for a church with active participation, Boyer criticizes the stage as encouraging passive watching. Even better and more participatory in his view is the elliptical sports stadium where “all are in full view of each other and interact with each other” (9). This leads us back to the so-called original environment, the house church or living room, beloved by liturgical design consultants, where furniture is arranged in a circle similar to a stadium. The modernist liturgical design consultant either likes, or has been trained to prefer, a minimalist northern European space and works at finding theological reasons why these preferences should be universal. To support this agenda Boyer offers five principles: suitability, simplicity, genuineness, audibility & visibility, and dignity. Simplicity means a clutter-free church, no distracting flowers on old high altars, and “a sufficient distance should separate the tabernacle and altar” (19–20). Even better is to employ lighting or some other device to separate the tabernacle during Mass so that one is not distracted by it. His minimalist interpretation of Church documents leads him to say in regard to genuineness that “wood should look like wood…stone should look like stone” (21) and that fake appointments (tube candles, silk flowers, faux marble) imply that the liturgy is fake. These false syllogisms and others run through the book. Visibility implies that the assembly can see the ministers at the altar, the ambo, and the chair, while ministers can see members of the assembly and make eye contact with them. The principle of visibility, one of the most insidious ideas in church architecture, [End Page 353] has led to the destruction of many historic churches and has led to a pseudo sacrament of proximity. One of the ways that modern church architecture has fostered...

The Art of Empire: Christian Art in Its Imperial Context ed. by Robin M. Jensen and Lee M. Jefferson

Reviewed by: The Art of Empire: Christian Art in Its Imperial Context ed. by Robin M. Jensen and Lee M. Jefferson Daniel C. Cochran The Art of Empire: Christian Art in Its Imperial Context Robin M. Jensen and Lee M. Jefferson, Eds. Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2015. Pp. xi + 356. ISBN 978–1-4514–8766–4 The Art of Empire brings together nine scholars to reconsider the relationship between Roman imperial and Christian art during the fourth and fifth centuries. Grabar and Kitzinger once argued that in the wake of Constantine’s conversion Christians abandoned the popular funerary representations of Jesus as a peaceful miracle worker and humble shepherd in favor of images that rendered Jesus as a powerful king. No longer dressed in plain robes and carrying a simple wand or scraggly sheep, this post-Constantinian Christ donned royal purple and golden garments and sat confidently upon a jewel-encrusted throne. With the imperial adoption of Christianity, these scholars argue, came Christianity’s adoption of imperial art, language, and ritual. Mathews was among the first to critique this widely accepted narrative. In his provocative study, The Clash of Gods (1993), Mathews argued against what he refers to as the “Emperor Mystique,” that is, the thesis that post-Constantinian Christian art adopted wholesale the style and iconography of Roman imperial art. He proposed instead that Christians sought to depict Jesus as superior to the most powerful pagan gods. While Mathews’s central thesis remains controversial, his work succeeded in sparking debate about the nature of imperial influence on Christian art. The essays in The Art of Empire build upon Mathews’s work, offering critiques of his thesis while also seeking to extend his efforts to nuance our understanding of late antique Christian art within the context of the Roman Empire. After a brief introduction that situates the volume in relation to this past scholarship, Jensen’s opening chapter explores the relationship between imperial images of tribute, adventus, and apotheosis and Christian representations of the adoration of the magi, the entry into Jerusalem, and the [End Page 287] ascension. Jensen critiques both the traditional assumption that the Christian motifs simply adopted imperial iconography and Mathews’s argument that Christians looked to secular motifs such as the gentleman’s homecoming. Drawing on the writings of Tertullian and Leo the Great, Jensen argues instead that Christians presented Jesus as a foil to the emperor; they appropriated but subverted the iconography of imperial power, proclaiming that the reign of Jesus was “different from that of any secular ruler” (33). Jefferson also explores the subversive possibilities of early Christian art, arguing that the traditio legis motif popular in the fourth century was a proclamation of ecclesiastical authority and not, as sometimes argued, an attempt to present Christ as an emperor. Jefferson argues that the motif highlights Peter more than Christ, emphasizing the apostle’s role as a new Moses and leader of the universal church. While Jefferson draws on a wide range of material, he does not allow for variant interpretations. This reader wonders, for example, if the traditio legis on the sarcophagi of aristocratic converts really had the same connotations of ecclesiastical authority as images commissioned for basilicas and viewed within the context of the liturgy. Boin’s essay likewise focuses on Peter, suggesting that memories of Peter were used in the fourth century to excuse the integration of Christians into Roman society and, conversely, to argue for their rigid separation. Boin contends that the integration of Christian and mythological scenes in such mausolea as Rome’s Tor de’Schiavi reveals that the more flexible approach to religious identity persisted well into the fourth century, much to the consternation of bishops. Boin’s essay deals less with Christian art than the other contributions but his conclusion adds further nuance to the study of Christian identities in Late Antiquity. Harley-McGowan’s essay defends Grabar against Mathews’s harsh critique, arguing that Grabar’s approach emphasizes the creativity of artisans who appropriated and transformed imperial motifs to fit Christian theological contexts. She demonstrates, for example, that early depictions of Christ’s victory over death relied upon the subtle alteration of imperial...

The Baptism of Christ. in Muscovite Iconography. Tradition and Innovation

The Baptism of Christ in its Early Christian representations is rendered with a naked Christ immersed in the waters of the Jordan River with John the Forerunner and attending angels present. In Eastern Christian tradition this representation perseveres until the late 13th century, when a girded Christ appears in images at Mt. Athos and becomes dominant in Balkan iconography. The girded Christ makes its way to Rus, but aside from some rare frescoes in Novgorod actually ascribed to Serbian artists, the girded Christ is apparently limited to Moscow and its environs. This study attempts to account for the emergence of the girded Christ in Orthodox iconography and to account for its singular distribution in Muscovite Rus.

Fat, Syn, and Disordered Eating: The Dangers and Powers of Excess

This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body that has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders that hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating.

Christ, Creature, and Reader:

ABSTRACT This article reads The Book of Margery Kempe as a rhetorically innovative visionary text that offered late medieval readers a powerful new method of accessing the vernacular Word of God. Through the textual representation of Christ's visionary speech and Margery's spoken responses, the Book establishes a devotional mode within which Margery's imitative prayer and public instruction exemplify effective verbal engagement with Christ. This departure from traditional critical views of the Book as the quintessential expression of medieval women's affective corporeality shows the Book in a new light: as the textual exemplar of a literary mode of engagement with the divine through vernacular reading and participatory speech.

“O demônio não é tão feio como se pinta”: representações do inferno e dos demônios na obra Desengano dos Pecadores, do padre Alexandre Perier (1724)

Current paper investigates Christian representations of hell and the devils in the Jesuit priest Alexandre Perier´s Desengano dos Pecadores . Discourses and engravings that illustrate the book, published in Portugal in 1724, are analyzed to identify representations of the devil, associations established between sin, hell and the damnation of souls and the effects of the author´s experience who worked in the northeastern region of Brazil by the end of the 17 th century. Fourteen discourses are included, with suggestions for a virtuous and holy life.

Christ, Creature, and Reader: Verbal Devotion in The Book of Margery Kempe

This article reads The Book of Margery Kempe as a rhetorically innovative visionary text that offered late medieval readers a powerful new method of accessing the vernacular Word of God. Through the textual representation of Christ’s visionary speech and Margery’s spoken responses, the Book establishes a devotional mode within which Margery’s imitative prayer and public instruction exemplify effective verbal engagement with Christ. This departure from traditional critical views of the Book as the quintessential expression of medieval women’s affective corporeality shows the Book in a new light: as the textual exemplar of a literary mode of engagement with the divine through vernacular reading and participatory speech.

Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake (review)

Reviewed by: Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake Carly Daniel-Hughes Susanna Drake Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 Pp. 173. $55.00 Slandering the Jew traces the production of a stereotype: the sexually degenerate Jew. In this revised dissertation, Drake analyzes representations of Jews as sexually perverse, effeminate, and dangerously sexually aggressive as a “topos” that featured in Christian writings from the first to the fifth centuries (2). A lucid and sophisticated study, this work builds on recent discussions of how early Christian discourses of alterity and deployments of sexual slander contributed to Christian self-definition. Drake follows other late antique historians (notably Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus) in applying post-colonial theories—in this case hybridity and stereotype—to explore Christian representations of Jews as an assertion and repetition of difference precisely where “border-lines” were least secure. Drake argues that sexual slander, with its imagery of “permeability, penetration, and adulteration” (54), enabled Christians to figure Jews as Other, thereby shoring up Christian subjectivity. Perhaps her most important contribution is establishing how this discursive production intensified when Christian claims to Jewish scriptures coupled with their assertions of ascetic identity. Chapter One begins with Paul, who contributes indirectly to the stereotype that she outlines. It is not the sexual predilections of Jews, but of Gentiles, that he uses to enjoin sexual purity on his Christ-believing audience. Informed by New Paul scholars like Stanley Stowers and Caroline Johnson Hodge, Drake reads Paul as utilizing Jewish stereotypes about licentious nations, in combination with Greek and Roman moral discourse, to construct his virtuous community. Later Christian writers, she argues, reworked Paul’s rhetoric of sexual in combination with his dichotomy between flesh and spirit to support their supersessionist claims to Jewish scripture (83). Drake completes the chapter with a survey of second-century materials to demonstrate that, while attested (e.g., the Dialogue with Trypho), sexual slander was neither inspired by Paul nor a regular feature of anti-Jewish polemic in this period. Origen of Alexandria—the subject of Chapter Two—did utilize Paul’s rhetoric, however, to advance the image of a sexually deviant and hermeneutically challenged Jew. The “Jew” provided a foil by which the church father authenticated both the allegorical reading practices of early Christians and their ascetic identity. Helpfully, Drake does not attempt to reconcile Origen’s characterization of Jewish interpretation with his congenial interactions with Jewish scholars themselves, as others have done. Guided by post-colonial approaches, she argues that the “Jew” in Origen’s texts occupies an ambivalent place, at once “desired and disavowed” (8; 57). For Origen, the “Jew” indicated the constant presence of the literal (and with it the carnal) that threatened to undermine the ascetic Christian exegete. Chapter Three treats early Christian interpretations of the book of Susanna as it appears in the Greek version by Theodotion. Drake maps a hermeneutical trajectory of early Christian readings that begins with Hippolytus’s Commentary on [End Page 589] Daniel, includes visual representations of the narrative from the Catacombs, and focuses primarily on Origen’s Letter to Africanus. In these readings the lascivious elders commonly stand in for the Jews, and Susanna, the chaste maiden, for the Christians. Drake argues that early Christians seized upon gendered implications of this story to establish Jewish-Christian difference. For Origen, the narrative offered another opportunity to fuse chaste sexuality with allegorical interpretation, and perverse sexuality with literal reading. This study closes with an analysis of John Chrysostom’s eight homilies Adversus Iudaeos, with their imagery of Jews as pseudo-men and prostitutes, and of Judaizers (those who attend synagogues and observe Jewish festivities) as predators who easily beguile Christian women. Relying on Homi Bhabha’s conception of stereotype, Drake argues that Chrysostom’s construction of the licentious Jew and Judaizers represents an “anxious” repetition of difference (97), revealing (and perhaps also supporting) the instability of Jewish and Christian identities and communal borders in late antique Antioch. Drake’s conclusion asks us to consider Christian violence enacted on Jews in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries as a “material effect” of...

Cristina Maria Cervone Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of LovePoetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love. Cristina Maria Cervone. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 312.

The issue of Incarnational “agency” provides the focus for chapter 3, particularly the representations of Christ as both “doer” and “love deed,” as both subject and object. Taking as its main text the common Charter of Christ, this chapter returns to the issue of the Word-made-flesh and this genre’s exploitation of the associations between “deed” as physical act and “deed” as a land-grant document. Within this type of text, in the same way as the “deed” is written on vellum to be recorded in perpetuity, so Christ’s own Incarnational “deed” is written on his own skin in blood after the sacrifice of the crucifixion. Tracing the poem’s charter metaphor, followed by its côte armure manifestations, the chapter successfully uncovers the poetics of both lordship and agency as imbricated in late medieval Incarnational theology.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Schulbuchforschung interreligiös. Erfahrungen und Perspektiven

Abstract Based on the research project, “the representation of Christianity in textbooks of countries with an Islamic tradition”, the article describes experiences, possibilities and insights in the field of Interreligious Textbook Research and Development. Interreligious Textbook Research is of particular relevance in the face of sweeping generalisations, prejudice and stereotypes regarding other religions and cultures (“Islam is like this”, “the West is like that”) that were, and still are, to be found in school textbooks. Within the project discussions between scholars and education authorities in different countries have taken place. The main results are summarised in a proposal for a series of standards as possible guidelines for author teams and publishers, for education authorities and curriculum planners.

神学的普遍性を巡る討議

神学的普遍性を巡る討議

Olaudah Equiano’s Views of Europe and European Christianity

Abstract This article investigates Olaudah Equiano’s representations of Europe and European Christianity. It argues that Equiano’s depictions of Europe are ambiguous, reflecting both his admiration for Europe’s grandeur and development as well as his rejection of Europe’s exploitative practices. His descriptions of Igboland mainly reflect European abolitionist and colonial discourses. Equiano’s religious representations are multi-facetted; they mirror his evangelical convictions, yet also express an appreciation for Islam and Igbo religiosity. The overall purpose of Equiano’s territorial as religious representations seems reinforcement of his abolitionist advocacy.

Early Christian Representations of the Economy: Evidence from New Testament Texts

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of economic issues that permeate certain aspects of the New Testament narrative world. After critically discussing the proper methodological patterns, the essay explores the possibility of reconstructing the socio-economic world in which these narratives emerged and evolved. We then proceed to assess the economic norms embedded in a rich diversity of New Testament texts, and we analyse how these religious discourses affected the economic attitudes of their respective audiences. To avoid overgeneralization, we properly differentiate the distinctive responses to the problem of economic necessity, in conformity to the particular social setting. We in turn suggest an alternative reading of some economic aspects of these texts; in so doing, we employ theories that advance a new understanding of the ancient economy. Finally, findings are summarized and further propositions are formulated.

Christus Virgo

The description of Christ as a virgin, 'Christus virgo', does occur at rare occasions in Early Christian and late antique texts. Considering that 'virgo' was a term that most commonly described the sexual and moral status of a member of the female sex, such representations of Christ as a virgin may exemplify some of the complex negotiations over gender, salvation, sanctity and Christology that we find in the writings of the Church fathers. The article provides some suggestions as to how we can understand the notion of the virgin Christ within the context of early Christian and late antique theological debates on the one hand, and in light of the growing interest in sacred virginity on the other.

“A Nasty Thumping at the Top of Your Head”: Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone

“A Nasty Thumping at the Top of Your Head”:Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone Lara Karpenko (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Cecioni, Adriano. “Mr. Wilkie Collins, The Novelist Who Invented Sensation.” Illustration. Vanity Fair. 3 February 1872: 38. Photo Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. Call number FA 51.925 (January-June 1872.) [End Page 132] In 1872, as part of its famed “Men of the Day” series, Vanity Fair featured a caricature of Wilkie Collins (fig. 1). Shortly after introducing the series as a regular feature of Vanity Fair, owner and editor Thomas Gibson Bowles promised that the featured caricatures would seize “the essential point” of the subject (qtd. in Matthews and Mellini 24) and Collins’s depiction seems no exception. Portraying the celebrated novelist as prominently bespectacled and weakly slumped in a chair, the cartoon suggests that Collins’s “essential point” is that his body exemplifies a non-normative masculinity. While the cartoon focuses on Collins’s body, the accompanying caption shifts that focus to the readerly body. Appearing after both The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) had entranced the Victorian public, the caption deems Collins “The Novelist Who Invented Sensation.”1 Though any Victorian reader would have connected Collins to the category of sensation fiction, the Vanity Fair caption cheekily associates him with the larger category of “sensation,” a term that was explicitly physiological.2 By crediting Collins with not only perpetuating but also inventing the heightened sense of physicality commonly associated with the word “sensation,” the cartoon suggests that Collins and his novels remade the collective body of the Victorian reading public. Within the cartoon, then, Wilkie Collins, exaggerated embodiment, abnormal masculinity, and the genre of the novel become inseparably intertwined. To some extent, this paper proceeds from the assumption that the Vanity Fair caricature is correct. While I will not argue that Collins invented the biological category of sensation, I will suggest that he had a physiological conception of the novel and consciously attempted to remake the readerly body via the genre of the novel. More specifically, I situate The Moonstone against the backdrop of the muscular Christian movement and suggest that Collins deployed the popular sensation novel in order to invent a form of masculinity that opposed the muscular ideal in its uncontrolled physicality but also rivalled it in terms of its extensive popularity.3 Muscular Christianity represented a popular, if not inescapable, ideal of masculinity at mid-century. As James Eli Adams points out, Charles Kingsley, [End Page 133] Thomas Hughes, and a group of public-school men were primarily responsible for “the remarkably rapid diffusion of muscular Christianity” (108). Unlike Collins’s pathologized heroes, muscular Christian men represented a specific model of excessively athletic, emotionally stoic, and piously spiritual masculinity—a model that was itself originally located in and disseminated by the popular novel.4 Ultimately, the muscular Christian was a contradictory figure: one whose heightened state of healthy embodiment was a necessary and somewhat paradoxical precursor to the moment where he could become, in Kingsley’s phrase, “unconscious of [his] body” (Letters 2:18). As muscular Christianity and male athleticism were becoming increasingly associated with ideal masculinity and with encouraging men to control and forget their bodies, Collins published The Moonstone in tantalizing weekly installments in All the Year Round. Heralded by T.S. Eliot as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (410), The Moonstone features a slew of unathletic men (among them only one professional detective)5 who attempt to uncover the crimes of the novel’s resident muscular Christian, Godfrey Ablewhite. By consistently associating admirable men with crime detection, Collins saturates his novel with alternate models of ideal masculinity and relocates masculine morality from the muscular Christian body to the detective’s logical mind and nervous body. Though Collins’s construction of masculine identity has attracted sustained scholarly attention, few critics have noted his interest in the muscular Christian movement. Further, when critics like Norman Page, Richard L. Newby, Deirdre David, and Tamara S. Wagner do explicitly consider Collins’s representation of muscular Christianity, they all focus almost exclusively on the novel that followed The...

Author, the Atheist, and the Academic Study of Religion

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the publication of popular biblical criticisms, as exemplified by the popular works of scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Bart Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar, as well as by theological thinkers such as Bishop John Shelby Spong. My paper draws upon two years of formal anthropological fieldwork conducted at five North American mainline liberal churches that feature reading and discussion groups involved in the study of biblical criticism at a lay or popular level. In offering an analysis of progressive Christianity that engages with the scholarly works of Pierre Bourdieu, I propose to do two things. First, I argue that the study of religion and biblical criticism by progressive Christians serves as an ideal venue in which they are able to construct, articulate and proudly assume an alternative, non-normative Christian identity. I suggest that this identity is one that is formed in opposition to an evangelical or fundamentalist representation of Christianity, which I term, following Jonathan Z. Smith, a ‘Protestant proximate other’ (Smith 2004: 253).

Representations of Christ’s parables in Serbian medieval churches: The case of Decani

The article examines the six parables included in the painted decoration of the Monastery of Decani. The soteriological and eschatological content of the four parables depicted in the parecclesion of Saint Nicholas leads to the conclusion that it was most likely used for memorial services, however its use cannot be specified. The choice of these particular allegorical stories is due to their liturgical importance in the Sabaitic Typikon, which was adopted by the Serbian Church since the early fourteenth century. During this period parables in general are beginning to be included in the iconographic program of Serbian, for the most part, churches.

Virtual realities. The representation of Christianity in govinda’s world. Pieces from a Hungarian Krishna devotee’s blog

In the present paper a Hungarian Krishna devotee’s attitude towards Christianity is being scrutinized. It is postuleted that the devotee’s re-interpretation of Christian doctrines of faith can be regarded as an aim of inculturation which is in accordance with his religious community’s main principles. The temporary virtual communities formed by readers leaving comments are also included in the analysis.

Representation of Islam and Christianity in the Swiss Media

Abstract What is the role of the media in multi-religious societies? Are they aggravating latent tensions between religions or rather helping to promote mutual understanding? These are the key research questions addressed in this paper. The discussion in this paper refers to narration and framing as two theoretical approaches from communication science. The empirical findings of a media content analysis in Switzerland show strong differences between Islam and Christianity: While Christianity and its denominations are mainly presented in positive frames and positive narratives (e.g. “good mother”), the image of Islam is rather negative. Islam receives relatively high media attention, but the focus is not on Islam in Switzerland, but on Islam abroad. A number of qualitative interviews with journalists and representatives of religious organisations show that this negative image is not caused by anti-muslim attitudes, but rather the outcome of journalistic routines. The paper discusses these findings against the background of the research questions and concludes with some recommendations for journalists and representatives of religious organizations.