Representation Of God Research Articles

Beyond Manichean Poetics

ITHE TITLE OF OUR CONFERENCE, God's back with vengeance, alludes to banishment that precedes coming back. return explains how has manoeuvred its way back into the discursive practices of political society. Manoeuvring connotes war, and all wars are marked by subterfuges. Thus time and the passing of time are implied. title, I take it, does however mean that representations of God have ever been absent from the personal and collective consciousness of any people. What the title of our conference implies, rather, is the fusion of the public and personal domains in such way that faith has come to play important role in shaping public policies.In the west, as in the rest of the world, the end of the Cold War has ushered in new reality. new reality engenders narratives of transition, which are, more often than not, marked by fear, consternation, and angst. Such narratives attempt to account for the dramatic collision between self and history. In the process the collision produces an unhappy consciousness, to quote from Hegel. Apocalyptic stories become the staple diet of people with such consciousness. Ironically, the new reality represents the future in reverse. We are back to the future. Our responses to the new reality also resemble those of the past. We find solace in paths already trail-blazed by others before us. Let me cite example with anecdote.A man is seen on stage looking for something in well-lit spot. A policeman joins the man, and asks him what it is he is looking for. The key to my house, he answers. policeman then joins in the search. After while and with no key in sight, the policeman asks, Are you sure you lost it here? No, says the man, and pointing to dark corner of the stage: Over there. Bewildered, the policeman then asks the man, Then why are you looking for it here? There is no light over there, says the man.When subjected to overt interpretations, anecdotes lose their lustre and crispness, but bear with me for second as I flush out some points by violating the sanctity of the joke. A man loses the key to his house/home, with all that it connotes: coziness, comfort, security. key is lost in dark, unlit place, yet the search for it takes place in well-lit spot. This is what I am driving at. anecdote registers in us the need for mustering courage in looking for the lost key, and by extension, for answers to our troubled world in places unlit by early epistemological expeditions. We have come to epistemological dead end. To get out of this dead end, we must re-examine and rethink the terms and assumptions that dot the landscape of our syllogistic propositions. These terms and assumptions define, consciously or unconsciously, our perceptions of the world. Here I propose the following:First, there is no single ontological model, master narrative that explains all other narratives.Second, history does have single telos whose desired end product is the replication of western modernity.Third, the modern world-the Renaissance-is, to quote from Menocal, not beginning but end, and lamentable closure. Renaissance brought to end human experiment, universal endeavour to inaugurate a highly productive hybridity.1Fourth, secularism does mean the absence of religion. Rather, it denotes the separation between religion and state. secular state was put in place in order to end all wars.Fifth, fundamentalism is universal movement. It is movement that started in the US in the 1870s. From its very inception, the movement emphasized the infallibility of scriptures and the shoring up of eschatological beliefs-resurrection from death and the second coming of the Christ. Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 dealt blow to the spread of the movement in the US. In the Muslim world, there is debate over the relevance of the term in describing the activities of Islamist movements. …

In Woman’s Image: An Iconography for God

Historical representations of God are deeply masculinist within the Christian tradition. In spite of the theoretical recognition that God transcends gender, Christian tradition failed to produce fully autonomous female images of God. While representations of the Virgin Mary were the only expressions of the divine as feminine, the figure of Mary was shrouded in ambivalence since she was often shown as both authoritative and submissive. In spite of these limitations, she can serve as an inspiration to feminist artists and theologians. Contemporary renditions of Mary, inspired by the images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, show her as triumphant, and actively involved in women’s struggle. Other artistic works from Native American and Goddess traditions display the sacred women as selfdetermined and capable of creativity at various stages in life. This article proposes that within a visual culture like ours, figures of God as feminine are crucial in challenging the reigning masculine symbols for God.

Idols and Symbols: Divine Representation in First Millennium Mesopotamian Art and Its Bearing on the Second Commandment

Idols and Symbols: Divine Representation in First Millennium Mesopotamian Art and Its Bearing on the Second Commandment

Idols and Symbols: Divine Representation in First Millennium Mesopotamian Art and Its Bearing on the Second Commandment

First-millennium Mesopotamian art reveals a strong tendency to avoid the representation of human-shaped deities. Considering the historical framework, such a tendency may suggest Mesopotamian inspiration in the ancient Israelite negation of divine representation as articulated in the biblical image ban. This inspiration may indicate that biblical repudiation of the image of the divine was not necessarily shaped as a response to opposed alien religious imagery but was rather inspired by related prevalent seventh–fifth century Assyro-Babylonian concepts.

Bernard Shaw's The black girl in search of God: the story behind the story

Leon Hugo's study is a groundbreaking account of the behind the of Shaw's allegory The Black Girl in Search of God, a short fable written by Shaw in a remote coastal village in South Africa. Illustrated by John Farleigh, the book was published in 1932 and became a best-seller. The story is a fable of a black girl, converted by Christian missionaries, who tries to find the answer to the question Where is God? by making a journey of the soul. Along the way she meets with a number of representations of God, from the New and Old Testaments of the Bible and from the Koran, who disgust and appall her with their hopelessly outdated embodiments of deity. The reaction from critics and readers of the day ranged from cries of blasphemy to allegations that Shaw was moving to madness. The volume was banned in public libraries and in Ireland. Several tracts and books sought to repudiate, ridicule, or develop Shaw's religious argument, and there were adaptations for stage performances and for radio broadcasts. This literary event is recounted, examined, and assessed by Leon Hugo. He surveys the close kinship between Shaw and Voltaire - a dominant presence in a tale that itself echoes Candide. The final chapter considers the black girl as a Shavian champion of religious freedom, feminist rights, and political emancipation. Illustrations revive a selection of Farleigh's captivating artwork, and Hugo includes representative illustrations from the rebutting tracts and books that followed Black Girl as well.

Charles le Chauve trônant et la Maiestas Domini. Réflexion à propos de trois manuscrits

Charles the Bald enthroned and Majestas Domini : about three manuscripts. The development of the representation of the enthroned sovereign in religious manuscripts corresponds to the enlargment, in the same period, of the notion of what the good king and the good government are The place of the throne in these portraits, an image evolving from the field of divine representations to that of the emperors, enables to set forth the continuity and well-being of the kingdom. Christological themes such as Majestas Domini connected to those portraits make up an iconological programm on which the stability of hierarchies of the earthly and heavenly worlds is founded.

La iconografía divina en Celtiberia: una revisión crítica

In this paper the author revises the supposed indigenous gods' images documented in Celtiberia, to conclude that only some of them can be considered as such a divine representations, and that these images seem to be connected with the Roman presence in the Celtiberian area since they are dated from the 1st. century B.C. to the 1 st. century A.C.

Personality variables, self-esteem and depression and an individual's perception of God

A person's perception of God is likely to be consistent with their personality. To investigate this relationship, three hypotheses were tested: first, that perceiving God as caring would be associated with positive personality characteristics, higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression; second, that perceiving God as present in daily life would be associated with a sense of well being; and third, that perceiving God as negative would be associated with negative personality characteristics. The sample consisted of 132 females and 69 males, all reporting themselves to be regular churchgoing Anglicans. All respondents completed the Religious Status Inventory (RSI, Hadlock, 1988; Massey, 1988); the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI, Derogatis & Spencer, 1982); the MMPI-2 (Greene, 2000), Self-Liking Self-Competence Scale (Tafarodi & Swann, 1995) as part of a battery of tests. Three dependent variables were constructed out of the Religious Status Inventory. God Cares , describing God as caring, God in Life , describing God as present in life, and Negative Image of God , describing God in negative terms. For females, Self-Liking significantly, positively predicted scores on all three variables. For males, Depression negatively predicted God Cares . Rebelliousness negatively predicted, and Artistry and Self-Liking positively predicted God in Life . Self-Competence negatively predicted and Depression positively predicted Negative Image of God . Personality characteristics may interact with a person's inner representations of God, so that how one perceives oneself influences how one sees God.

Mental God-Representation Reconsidered: Probing Collective Representation of Cultural Symbol

The current methods in psychoanalytic studies of God images and representations have focused almost exclusively on individual, internal processes. This article examines how psychological anthropologists go about formulating symbolic representations of deity in their research, in comparison with the object relations method of God-representations. Drawing on Melford Spiro's integrative proposal for interpreting the mental and collective representations in religious symbol systems, this paper proposes that there is a need for a comprehensive model of the representational process in the Eastern world in order to suit its cultural traditions. The author uses both theoretical and historical materials as well as personal narrative throughout its entirety to balance the two in a mutual and coherent flow of understanding. Noting the culturally patterned interactions with culturally postulated God-symbols, the object relations method of God-representations will be utilized to probe how God is both created and found on a collective (cultural) level as well as individual level.

Les cartouches divins

The use, from the end of the New Kingdom on, of the picture of the cartouche enclosing the name of a god as a substitute for the human representation of gods does not derive from scattered precedents but belongs to a tradition which was largely developed in the New Kingdom. Whereas the royal cartouche reveals some idea of the divinity of the king, the use of the cartouches for gods names displays the will to bring the gods to a level closer to humans. The gods names enclosed in the cartouches appear on the one hand in the context deriving from the royal ideology which associates them to the solar disk; on the other hand, they are also associated, more deliberately, to the solar destiny in spell 16 of the Book of the Dead, especially in the iconography of Theban coffins after the N.K.

Bisexual Women as Emblematic Sexual Healers and the Problematics of the Embodied Sacred Whore

The image of woman as Erotic Priestess or Goddess- sometimes seen also as Sacred Whore-is a central part of new popular sacred sex cosmologies. The Sacred Whore, as we know her, originated during the second waveoffeminism during the Seventies. She was imagined as an archetype evocative of ancient times when Erotic Priestesses plied their sexual healing arts in temples dedicated to female deities. Since the 1990s an expanding range of people-from sex workers to nurses, massage therapists, ministers, counselors, and New Age tantra practitioners-have all begun to call themselves holy prostitute or something similar; taking their place among artists, activists and philosophers redefining contemporary cultural constructs of sexuality, spirituality, and the connections between them. For centuries bisexual women, closeted or not, have been prominent in the ranks of sex educators and erotic healers since we love beyond gender and teach others to serve as societal/erotic change agents as well. However, we often work within a system of heteronormativity and male dominance which eroticizes us more as objects than as representations of divinity. These adverse conditions cause the very sacred sex practices meant to facilitate gender transcendence to instead reify gender and re-enforce constrictive roles of gender and sexual orientation. This article examines current feminist theorizing on The Sacred Whore. It analyzes (1) why she has become embodied now, especially in bi women, (2) the pros and cons of her embodiment, and (3) the prospects for developing inclusive, egalitarian erotic communities within current constraints of gender and sexual orientation that dictate an erotic healer role that is still gender-bound.

AT KBAL SPEAN

‘Eyes filled and deserted by divinity, that is our condition.’1 ‘What remains to be said.’2 The source of the Siem Riep River, which traverses the site of Angkor in Kampuchea, originates some thirty kilometres north east of the Bayon, in the Kulen Mountains. At Kbal Spean, the river passes under a natural rock bridge, and over a waterfall, before continuing on past the temple of Bantea Srei, into the plain of Angkor. Kbal Spean means ‘bridge head.’ Alongside the bridge, Vishnu appears on a rock face, reclining to give birth to Brahma from a lotus growing out of his navel. On the stone river bed are innumerable grids of lingams, oriented to the cardinal directions. At the ‘River of 1000 Lingams,’ the source, which irrigates and inseminates the plain of Angkor, washes over and is washed by its passage over these surfaces. There is a scholarship concerned with interpreting the sacred precinct as an incorporation, localisation, and representation of divinity. This scholarship persists, but persists in exhaustion: that is to say, everything has always-already been said, we are always-already without words. The gods have abandoned their places—Heidegger, who also held that the temple represents or portrays (Vorstellen) nothing recognised the possibility3—and yet we are not without the opportunity of a thinking. This condition -‘the death of God’, the apriori condition of modernity—is not an event of closure. Rather, in the ‘death of God,’ and in the midst of this exhausted scholarship, we are initiated into this experience, this encounter—God presents himself in and as his very abstention. What might Kbal Spean signify today? What might it mean for a generation of Khmers, raised in the violence of a recent past? What might it represent to a generation of scholars, raised in the shadow of the École Française d'Extrême Orient? Working across Heidegger, Nancy, Blanchot and Agamben, this text explores the contours of a possible thinking writing and speaking about the sacred, about sacred places and about sacred architecture—that is to say, a possible scholarship of exhaustion in which nothing remains to be said.

Bild und text: Mediale und historische perspektiven auf das alttestamentliche bilderverbot

This essay is trying to shed new light on the prohibition of cultic images in the Hebrew Bible. The first part shows the relationship between written texts and images when viewed as media of the divine or the divine will. It is important to note that the prohibition of cultic images in the Pentateuch is closely related to the concept of Moses'/Gods' writing down the divine revelation. In the second part the paper is dealing with the main function of cultic images in the society's system of religious symbols, i.e. as representations of Gods in a full sense. The third part tries to outline how the written text more and more replaces cultic images as manifestations and media of God and his commandments. The fourth part concludes with the assumption that public reading, recitation and enactment of holy texts generate a new mystery - the mystery of the divine body and form.

Identity, Love, and the Imaginary Father

The “father of personal prehistory” serves as the earliest and most enduring representation of God. This sexually undifferentiated “father” is identified by Freud as “both parents” and the flow of feeling between them. Kristeva elaborates to say that the first “father” creates the foundation for the infant's sexual differentiation, that is, a primary narcissistic screen. When parental flow of feeling provides inadequate compensation for the loss of oneness with Mother, the infant intrapsychically constructs its own “foundation,” an Other that has both parents' ideal qualities, a God who is a psychologically necessary “He.” Consequently, females have different experiences than males as they form and relate to their self- and God-representations.

Hagar Requited

This paper provides a unique and textually justified reading that affords greater understanding of the biblical representation of Sarah, Hagar, Abraham, Ishmael and God. It argues for the privileged position of Hagar's suffering in God's precise economy of crime and punishment, details the conspicuous parallels between Hagar's ordeal and Moses' experience and demonstrates that the biblical imperative to deal righteously with the stranger is the conscience-shaping ethical consequence of the sacrifice of Hagar. The Hagar stories are not about male or ethnic dominance but about divine justice and human compassion.

'I Will Be Who I Will Be’: The Representation of God in Postmodern Jewish Feminist Theology and Contemporary Religious Education

In this paper I argue that Jewish feminist theology has significant implications for the ways in which religious educators present the Jewish God to children. After outlining some of the main elements of the Jewish feminist critique and its postmodern or late modern Jewish context, I suggest that for teachers to image the Jewish God in female as well as masculine terms is not to import a religious politics into the teaching of Judaism to which parents and governors might object. Rather, it is to introduce and represent the Jewish God in ways that are true to the prophetic, plurivocal, self‐revising and theologically enigmatic nature of Jewish tradition itself

Misreading and re-reading: interpretation in comparative religion

Religion should no longer only be equated with a doctrine or philosophy which, although important, is but one aspect or dimension of the phenomenon religion. Apart from presenting the intellectual or rational aspects of Buddhism, we should aim at a balanced view by also focusing on the mythical or narrative axioms of the Buddhist doctrines, as well as on the practical and ritual, the experiential and emotional, the ethical and legal, the social and institutional, and the material and artistic dimensions of the religious phenomenon known as Buddhism. This will help us to arrive at a balanced, unbiased and holistic conception of the subject matter. We must be careful not to impose the ethnocentric conceptions of our time, or to fall into the trap of reductionism, or to project our own idiosyncratic or personal beliefs onto the subject of our research. For example, according to Marco Polo, the Sinhalese Buddhists were 'idolaters', in other words worshippers of idols. This interpretation of the Sinhalese custom of placing offerings such as flowers, incense and lights before the Buddha image is quite understandable, because it is one of the most conspicuous feature of Sinhalese Buddhism even today. However, in conceiving of Buddhists as 'idolaters', Polo was uncritically using the concept of the then prevailing ethnocentric Christian discourse, by which the worshippers of other religions used idols, images or representations of God or the divine as objects of worship, a false God, as it were. Christians, on the other hand, worshipped the only true God.

Images of the Supernatural World: Bactria-Margiana Seals and Relations With the Near East and the Indus

AbstractThis paper focuses on one aspect of the representation of divinity in the Oxus region: the way in which animal and human characteristics are combined to create various supernatural creatures. Both the presence and absence of certain attributes are emphasized in the attempt to define the extent to which the Oxus region relates to that of its neighbours both east and west. There are some pervasive similarities in the artistic rendering of divine power throughout the Near East, western Central Asia and the Indus Valley. However, there are also major differences, which seem to illustrate the impact of Mesopotamian divine imagery on Harappan art, while the deities and demons of Bactria-Margiana belong to a world similar, in part, to that expressed in the arts of southern Iran.

Madonna del Parto, par Piero della Francesca : une saisie ethnographique

Representations of divinity confront the fact that, all too often, a picture is worth a thousand words. Giving up the prescriptive assumptions intrinsic to the (theoretical / theological) discursive mode, provides the basis for a descriptive understanding. Consider the birth of Jesus according to the gospel of Luke, a narrative motif refigured by Piero della Francesca in Madonna del Parto. An empirically founded apprehension of this object relies upon the anthropologist's grasp of its active properties: the divine Word penetrates a virgin's closed /open body; the artist transposes that which can not be represented into gestures that open / close the body's veils. The interaction between the image and he / she who penetrates it appears to be governed by the relational and cognitive structure of reciprocity. The embedding of a humanised divinity upon a blind wall is the result of optical and volumetric processes whereby the onlooker is drawn into the setting - he / she is put on the spot - and thereby implicated hic et nunc in the mental (re)construction of the scene portrayed.

Images of the Supernatural World: Bactria-Margiana Seals and Relations With the Near East and the Indus

AbstractThis paper focuses on one aspect of the representation of divinity in the Oxus region: the way in which animal and human characteristics are combined to create various supernatural creatures. Both the presence and absence of certain attributes are emphasized in the attempt to define the extent to which the Oxus region relates to that of its neighbours both east and west. There are some pervasive similarities in the artistic rendering of divine power throughout the Near East, western Central Asia and the Indus Valley. However, there are also major differences, which seem to illustrate the impact of Mesopotamian divine imagery on Harappan art, while the deities and demons of Bactria-Margiana belong to a world similar, in part, to that expressed in the arts of southern Iran.