Secular Domain Research Articles

Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (review)

Reviewed by: Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom Alex Woolf Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom. By David Rollason. Pp. xxviii, 339. ISBN 0 521 81335 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. £55.00. David Rollason's book on Northumbria is a tour de force. His narrative takes us forward from the Germanic settlement to carving up of the kingdom between the Scots and the English, concluding with a brief discussion of the historiographical swansong of the early twelfth century. Rollason writes in such a way that while the novice will be guided gently through the quagmire of sources—textual, toponymic and archaeological—the scholar will also find insights and new perspectives on almost every page. To some extent this work is a culmination of much of Rollason's previous writing, from his Sources for York History to 1100 produced for the York Archaeological Trust (1998) to his magisterial edition of Simeon of Durham's Libellus de Exordio for Oxford Medieval [End Page 132] Texts (2000). This is also a very nicely produced book with plenty of attractive and useful maps and plans. One of the strengths of Rollason's approach is that he is not too didactic. This is particularly clearly illustrated in his discussion of the Anglo-Saxon conquests in chapter three 'The Northumbrians: Origins of a People'. This topic is extraordinarily fraught in the contemporary historiography and is generally framed as dialogue of the deaf with the dumb. Those (mostly archaeologists) who believe in a small number of Germanic conquerors whose culture was voluntarily adopted by the bulk of the native population are barely on speaking terms with those (mostly linguists) who argue for a more extreme and violent scenario, whilst others (mostly historians) dither in an inconsistent and internally incoherent fashion. Rollason deals with this problem by presenting each model in a thorough and fair fashion and while at the end you are fairly certain that you know where he stands (you will have to read the book) you do not feel that he is bullying you into going along with him. This even-handedness and a willingness to describe the primary source material, verbal and material, in some detail characterises the whole volume. Perhaps the most original portion of the book lies in his discussion of the role of the city of York in both the pre-Viking and the Anglo-Scandinavian eras. He makes a very convincing case that in neither period was York principally a royal centre but that it, and particularly the portion within the walls of the Roman fortress, remained an ecclesiastical preserve dominated by the Archbishops and focussed on a number of churches. It was, in effect, what in Ireland would be turned a 'monastic city' (or, following Colmán Etchingham's dictatus, a 'church settlement'). Both archaeological and textual evidence, Rollason argues, places the secular domain, mercantile and royal, outwith the fortress and not too heavily dug in. One implication of this reading of the material is that our view of a 'Viking Kingdom of York', dominating affairs from 867 to 954 must be revised and it is slightly disappointing that although Rollason points out (p. 215) that 'our sources never use the expression "kingdom of York" in connection with the Viking kings, or indeed at any other time', he continues to use the phrase 'Viking Kingdom of York'. He is trapped in his habit and intellectual knowledge alone cannot break it. This book is not faultless, however; it was disappointing to see Historia Brittonum uncritically attributed to Nennius and, indeed, to see the kingdom of Dumbarton in the eighth century referred to as Strathclyde (the terminology changes in the 870s and doubtless reflects some real change in the political geography of the northern Britons). Indeed, the Clyde seems to be Rollason's blind spot for he misdates the sacking of Dumbarton (870) to 889 (the death date of Eochaid son of Rhun, which can be inferred from the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba) and he seems not to be aware of Benjamin Hudson's important article in Scottish Gaelic Studies 15 (1988) which exploded the late medieval myth of a Scottish...

Response

Response Leslie Peirce (bio) I would like to begin by saying what a privilege it is for me to have three new colleagues—Indrani Chatterjee, Julie Hardwick, and Patricia Skinner—comment so thoughtfully on my work, and what an opportunity it is for all of us to have this forum for the exchange of ideas and information and even of good book titles. So I thank each commentator individually for her insights and I also thank the editors of Journal of Women's History for making this exchange possible. My immediate reactions upon reading the three essays were several. The first was just plain excitement at the sheer volume of fascinating insights that such a comparative project can spawn. At the simplest level, comparative history has the power to highlight what is specific to the cultures we study as well as what is universal, or at least trans-regional, either because of the basic demands of human existence or the limited repertoire of mechanisms available to governments in controlling their populations. My second reaction was consciousness of my own shortcomings: I was rather sorry I hadn't thought of the incisive phrases that pepper the three comments—learned normativity, collusion with the dominant discourse as a positive tactic of women in court—which might have saved some pages of labored explication. I also felt "unnerved," to borrow from Hardwick's confession, by my ignorance of histories that ran on intersecting tracks with the history I attempted to recount. My ignorance was willed to a degree (this is not an excuse), as I sat myself mentally in Aintab in order to work out what was going on locally and didn't look much beyond the surrounding region, except occasionally towards Istanbul. In the process, I seem to have reinvented some wheels that might have moved the project along more rapidly had I done more comparative reading. In what follows, I will not comment for the most part on commonalities among the histories featured here, since the reader can deduce these for herself. I would rather use this space to raise a few bigger issues that stem from (apparent) difference. But I cannot restrain myself from citing at least a few shared features of which I am now aware as a result of reading the three commentaries (those I cite are from Skinner's): the matter of publica fama, the transfer of land ownership to the person who had cultivated it unchallenged, and the persecution as witches/heretics of older, resourceless women. I am not sure why it is a pleasurable sensation to recognize shared foibles, habits, and aspirations among peoples across time and [End Page 197] space—perhaps it is our defensive attachment to the societies we study. It may also be useful here, while I am getting things out of the way, to mark one major difference that contributed to legal life in the Ottoman empire: the tribal communities that populated the hinterlands of Ottoman Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and even the Balkans, with its Gypsy communities. One of the "backstories" to the evolution of Ottoman legal practice was the challenge of controlling these fiercely independent and fractious sectors of the population. One of the big questions that was sparked by my reading of the commentaries is whether there is a domain that can be isolated as "secular" in the early modern Ottoman world. This question was inspired by Skinner's recognition that tensions between religious and secular domains were shared by Europeans and Ottomans, and Hardwick's comments about the rise of secular courts. "Secular" is a word I rarely use in my writing or teaching (if I did use it in the book, the word is probably in quotes). We would not, I think, speak of a specifically secularist thrust, in the sense of derivation from non-religious sources of authority, in law or any other domain until later, modern, times in the Ottoman empire. In the realm of law, kanun—which can mean both customary and imperial law, law that is normative in large part because it is based on actual practice or practical needs—may at first seem a secular counterbalance to sharia (Islamic jurisprudence and...

The body, its organs and senses: a study of metaphor in medieval Hebrew poetry of praise*

This article offers an analysis of metaphor in medieval Hebrew poetry. Departing from an understanding of metaphor as a matter of thought, more than a matter of speech, it brings into sharp focus one of the most common conceptual metaphors, that which projects the structure of the human body onto the social body and explores its manifestations in language. Sharing in Ricoeur's conviction that metaphor works at different levels, the study is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the use of body-based metaphor at the level of the word and the sentence. The second part explores how this metaphor works throughout a poem. All the examples provided are either poems of praise or elegies, written from the 10th to the 12th centuries. Because these examples are considered against the backdrop of liturgical poetry, this article ultimately intends to present a reflection on the use of metaphor in the intersection between the secular and liturgical poetical domains.

On Being Curious About Fundamentalisms and Human Rights

In her recent book, Cynthia Enloe writes about curiosity. (1) She explores the differences to scholarly enquiry when we are curious about the obvious. She gives as examples, the words natural, or always, or, my favorite, cheap (she questions why, for example, we do not refer instead to labor made cheap). I take up the gauntlet thrown down by Enloe to be curious, my curiosity starts with the title of this panel. There are three questions I trip over in approaching First, what are the human named in the panel's title? Second, where, how, in what context do we imagine rights fundamentalisms coming together? That is, what is the and that joins human fundamentalisms? Third, what narratives of international law are required made possible by a panel on fundamentalisms rights? Let me begin with the first question: what are the rights fundamentalisms of which we speak? I confess to being uneasy with both human Although the term traces its roots back to early nineteenth-century Christianity in the United States, its more current usage needs to be assessed in the harsh light of its common association with certain Islamic sects or actors. In the context of prevailing anti-Islamic sentiment, invoking brings with it the possibilities of other, pejorative meanings. Furthermore, fundamentalist is a sweeping conclusive category. It suggests a known, coherent quantity, notwithstanding the vast array of social science literature that maps the differences contradictions among religious orthodox actors. I wonder if, in the blinding glare of the term fundamentalism, it is easier to see some religions as more extreme than others? What of the human side of the fundamentalisms rights equation? Why is it, I wonder, that we tend to see fundamentalism as posing the most significant threat to women's rights? Here too, seems to operate as a bit of blinding search light, subjecting to its harsh gaze, making strangely luminescent, women's rights. While there is no doubt that women's rights are an important issue in this context, is there a danger that women's rights are hyper-visible in this debate, that this hyper-visibility might reinforce existing tropes of civilized uncivilized? As a feminist concerned about women's rights, I wonder if our focus on the nexus between women's rights is drawn in such a way that we see only certain types of challenges to women's rights, not those once again cast into the shadow, such as global trade or wars on terrorism? Perhaps it might be helpful to step back from the extremes limitations implied in our terms human to consider more generally what might be some of the assumptions we are making about its relationship to international law? Where is it that we see--or assume we ought to look for--the encounters between religious orthodoxy rights? This question is motivated in part by the work of Talal Asad, who argues that the categories politics religion, far from being distinct, turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought. For Asad, a recognition of the relationship between secularity challenges the simplistic characterization of religion as infecting the secular domain or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts. (2) Taking Asad's lead, we might consider what assumptions, or dichotomous thinking, inform how where we see the relationship between international law. First, perhaps most obviously, we would consider international law's own roots in Christianity the ways in which Christianity was mobilized to justify international legal sanction of the colonial project. …

The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular through the Theology of Karl Barth

theological revolution that Karl Barth inspired was by no means a dismissive reaction to modern culture but, rather, was a dynamic and carefully nuanced encounter with the concerns of his day. This excellent new work by Paul Lewis Metzger provides an exposition and extension of Barth's engagement of culture in view of his doctrine of the Word. Metzger demonstrates that Barth endeavored to relate Christ to culture in inseparable terms while maintaining a distinction between them. Working from an intimate knowledge of all of Barth's writings, Metzger shows how Barth's doctrine of the Word provides a sound basis on which to build a theological model of culture that guards against the two extremes of either the divinization or the secularization of culture, while at the same time nurturing a healthy appreciation for the secular domain. first part of the book analyzes Barth's formative theological period, which is characterized by his engagement with culture and what is termed Protestantism. second part of the book focuses on how Barth's answer -- a dialectical model of the Word -- enabled him to offer a constructive synthesis of Christ and culture. final section of the book traces the way Barth was able to frame culture within his theological model and yet continue to champion the secular domain. The Word of Christ and the World of Culture is a superb volume that will benefit anyone studying Barth, modern theology, or the relation of Christianity and culture.

Das Ende der Reichskirche in der großen Säkularisation 1803

SUMMARY The German language has Säkularisation as meaning the transfer of persons and material goods from the ecclesiastical to the secular domain—not the mental process which alienated men from religion (Säkularisierung), itself of course closely connected to Säkularisation. As in other European countries, secularization of material goods happened in the Holy Roman Empire as a consequence of the Reformation and to a greater extent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Several peace treaties and an imperial law, the so-called Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803, distributed almost all Church property, including the sovereign rights of ecclesiastical princes, to secular territories that had lost property and rights on the left bank of the Rhine to France. Apart from many minor territories which benefited, Prussia and Bavaria profited most by winning territorial rights from the ecclesiastical princes, and real estate and numerous works of art from the monks and nuns. Procedure differed in those areas under French law from those under the German secular princes, but everywhere the winners were the treasuries, which used the newly acquired riches mainly for military purposes; the losers were the weaker parts of society and cultural treasures. The year 1803 marked not only the suppression of many monasteries, but the end of ecclesiastical estates in the imperial diet (the Emperor Francis II abdicated only three years later) as well as of the estates in those German territories which had, longer than any other European countries, preserved these institutions from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Practical Theology in the Public Sphere: Reflections on Church Community and Youth Work Education

This article describes the role of theology within a church-based degree course in community and youth work in a university setting. It describes how the original course was constructed and the way in which practical theology was subsequently integrated within the programme. Consequently, it contributes to the discussion of theological discourse as public theology. This study explores the nature of this theological engagement, the issues raised and the common concerns. Furthermore, it identifies the conflicts that are inherent when a theological discipline from the perspective of a Christian worldview enters a secular domain and requires academic space.

Being & Some 20thCentury Thomists by John F. X. Knasas

148 BOOK REVIEWS Ultimately, I cannot see how what goes under Rowland's rubric of "postmodern" and "Augustinian" coheres with what goes under the rubric of "Thomism." It is therefore no accident that she never tries to explain what she means by the term: it cannot be given a credible definition in the light of the "postmodern" and"Augustinian" assumptions driving this book. While it would take more space than I have here to explain why this is so, I would say that it has something to do with another famous Greek term that Rowland neglects to consider: physis. One can grant to de Lubac (as Gilson did) that the Thomist tradition went wrong in its parsing of the nature-grace distinction while at the same time maintaining the importance of that distinction and the intelligibility of nature as the terminus of God's first gift in creation. One can also grant that culture has a profound influence on nature without collapsing the latter into the former. If nature is intelligible apart from grace and culture, then it can indeed serve as a starting point for an account of the human good that does not make explicit appeal to revelation and so can serve as a way to talk about that good to those who are not inside the circle. The simple fact that separates Thomas from us-he lived in a culture permeated by Catholic Christianity and we do not-means that we need some moral language that allows us a voice in the secular domain. Such language is not a substitute for evangelization and critique, both of which need to go on, but it is in the meantime a way of talking to strangers that can promote the common human good (including human rights) this side of the coming of the kingdom. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. BRIAN]. SHANLEY, O.P. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists. By JOHN F. X. KNASAS. Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2003. Pp. 335. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-82322248 -9. Being and Thomism are two very elusive ideas. Knasas's book tries to pin them both down in no uncertain terms and, one might add, in function of one another. Thomism is taken primarily as a unique philosophy of being in a realistic sense and this realistic sense is taken to mean one thing only in the approach to the question of being: namely, that which is derived only from sense experience. Being & Some 20'h Century Thomists comes as a response to other accounts of Thomism and its evolution in the twentieth century, such as that of Gerald McCool's From Unity to Plurality (also published by Fordham University Press, in 1992). In fact, it could be viewed as a response of the Toronto school, or more precisely the Joseph Owens school, to the transcendental Thomism BOOK REVIEWS 149 propounded by Joseph Donceel of Fordham. The argument of the book, to put it perhaps too succinctly, is to show that versions of Thomism other than that of Joseph Owens, especially those labeled as idealist but also some thought to be realist, fail the test of realism in their approach to the question of being and therefore fail the test of Thomism as found in the writings of St. Thomas. "Generally speaking," we are told in the introduction, "Existential Thomism is a posteriori. It is built from extra-mental reality as presented in the data of sensible experience. It is specified by the perception of a basic intelligibility, or commonality, in those real things of sensation" (xvii). The problem for the author is that this Existential Thomism, as he conceives it, is only a species of Neo-Thomism, which must be distinguished from and defended against other species because it is the only one that really works as an elaboration of the ratio entis. In chapter 1 Knasas gives his own version of the Neo-Thomist revival contra that of the man he calls "the dean of the twentieth-century Thomist narrative, Gerald McCool, S.J."(29) Knasas names most of those one would think of as part of this revival and then divides them into what he calls three...

Die Christelike lewensvisie van aartsbiskop Desmond M. Tutu: ’n Algemene oorsig

The Christian worldview of Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu: A general review In the light of the sad fact that Archbishop Tutu’s writings are often neither known nor read by the Afrikaans-speaking community, this tribute intends to be a brief, academic but accessible introduction to his thought – especially in the light of the fact that the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education recently honoured him with an honorary doctorate for his significant contribution to Christian thought and life in South Africa and the rest of the world. The focus of the article is not on Tutu as a person or his theology (which has been characterised in different ways), but provides an overview of his Christian worldview. Firstly, the different sources of his worldview are investigated. Secondly, an exposition is given of its six basic components: (1) Tutu’s idea of God; (2) of God’s laws for creation; (3) of time and history and (4) of our natural environment. The second article will deal separately with the two remaining components, viz (5) Tutu’s view of being human and (6) of society, because they should be regarded as his most important contribution in shaping a genuine Christian worldview. The preliminary conclusion is that, because Tutu listened carefully and obediently to God’s threefold revelation, he succeeded in proclaiming both an integral and a relevant Christian worldview. This worldview is not dualistic in nature, dividing life in secular and sacred domains; it emphasises God’s sovereignty over everything and religion as an all-encompassing service to God and our neighbour. The relevance of Tutu’s worldview can not be confined to the apartheid era – it offers valuable perspectives and directions for Christian life in our increasingly secularised contemporary world.

From Samburu Heirloom to New Age Artifact: The Cross‐Cultural Consumption of Mporo Marriage Beads

Antique Venetian trade beads used in Samburu women's marriage necklaces (mporo) have recently undergone intense recommodif ication in the transnational trade bead market concurrent with their appropriation by Euro‐American women in both religious and secular domains. The article offers duai ethnographies of this mporo bead in order to advance anthropological understandings of precious objects in the context of globalization. Samburu and Euro‐American desires for the "same" bead have been both reciprocal and distinct: Whereas Samburu desires for and exchange of mporo beads have been rooted in Samburu cultural forms, Euro‐American desires for the same bead are linked to a kind of "fictional inalienability" that is not embedded in Samburu social relations but is instead rich in spiritual associations imagined through Euro‐American women's vague understandings of the bead's "original" African owners. [Keywords: material culture, globalization, United States, Kenya, pastoralists]

Don’t Forget to Ask: Working with Women and with Men in Aboriginal Australia

Until fairly recently, and with some notable exceptions, there was an absence of substantive data on the nature of Aboriginal women's lives, gender relations and women's relationships to land in Australian anthropology. This historical circumstance resulted in inadequate documentation of women's role and status, and interpretations which often confined women to domestic and secular domains and pursuits. Similarly to early data recorded in other subsistence economies such as Canada, America and Africa, the productive and reproductive roles of women (their food gathering and preparation responsibilities, and ability to give birth and to lactate) were often given precedence over women's involvement in land-based ritual and religious ceremonies (Endicott, 1999:411-418).

Of Mammon Clothed Divinely: The Profanization of Sacred Dress

This article addresses the cultural commodification of the dress sign of the sacred body from contexts of `God' to its recontextualization within contexts of consumer capitalism or `Mammon'. The concept of religious dress `commodification' is employed heuristically to help make sociological sense of the seepage of dress sacra from religious contexts of origin to secular contexts of use. While other readings of the late modern career of the religious dress `text' are indeed possible, the suggestion here is that it can be seen to float freely between the religious and secular domains and thus belongs to both as signage adding `religious' value to the material body for whatever purposes ñ commercial, erotic, ludic among others.

Elders' Authority and Women's Protest: The Masay Ritual and Social Change Among the Iraqw of Tanzania

Anthropological theories of religion have demonstrated the role ofritual in supporting structures of power and authority. This article focuses on the relationship between ritual, ideology and authority over time in an Iraqw community. The analysis incorporates attention to changes in the wider political- economic context in which ritual is performed. In so doing, it illustrates the limits of ritual's effective- ness in securing consent to, and recognition of; authority. The ritual authority of male elders in Iraqw communities is increasingly dependent on legitimation by elder women, because the key ritual - the masay - no longer communicates universally shared values. This article thus explores competing arenas ofvalue and the effects that wider ideological debates in Tanzanian society may have on the future ofthe masay ritual. Introduction: historical transformations and behind-the-scenes events This article describes the masay ritual among the Iraqw in northern Tanzania. It ex- plores the relationship of ritual to power and authority, and traces developments in the ritual's effectiveness in perpetuating traditional authority. Power and authority are examined in both the ritual and secular domain. By incorporating these two spheres in my analysis, I show how elders' participation in ritual is shaped by their lives in non-ritual contexts. Elders hold the masay ritual to cleanse the community and enable the rains to fall. In performing masay, elders emphasize their critical role as the guardians of the community's welfare. For without rain, the harvests and livestock on which people depend for their livelihood would be threatened. By examining the ritual over time, it is apparent that while performing the masay ritual may once have reaffirmed elders' authority in both ritual and secular life, today their authority is largely lim- ited to the ritual domain. Thus, the performance of masay provides a window onto shifts in power and authority and illuminates the complexities of the structures of power. If ritual is, as Bloch (1986) states, the primary conduit of ideology, it appears that the elders' ideology is no longer a dominant one as it may have been during the pre-colonial period, as the power and authority of the Tanzanian state have largely relegated elders' authority to the ritual sphere. Their authority in this sphere, and thus their importance to the community's welfare, are increasingly dependent on female elders' legitimation of their role as community guardians.

Pastoral care and moral government: early nineteenth century nursing and solutions to the Irish question.

This paper re-examines the role of the early nineteenth century nurses, conventionally depicted in nursing histories as the well-meaning but untrained Catholic nursing nuns or, in post-Reformation Europe, servants and fellow patients. It will be argued here that professional and capable nursing had begun to transform the care of the sick poor and to demonstrate its importance to the success of medical/surgical innovation long before Florence Nightingale and her call to Scutari. Moreover, the case is put that the emergence of nineteenth century forms of care for the sick occurred in response to the pressing problems of population management in Ireland, Great Britain and North America. The pastoral concerns of the first Irish nurses, with their expertise in both the spiritual and material domains, provided the prototype for what was to follow: a spiritual form of life that addressed the governmental concerns of its time. Finally, it is argued that given the overt moral imperatives of nineteenth century nurses of all persuasions, the depiction of nursing history as a crossing from the religious to the secular domain is challenged.

Romanticism and the Anglican Newman

Goslee s study maintains that Newman s Anglican writing, although widely considered irrelevant to the main currents of the post-Enlightenment, in fact reinterprets Romantic transcendence within a uniquely dialogic paradigm. It is this paradigm, he argues, that critics need to explore as a link between sacred and secular domains within Victorian culture. Goslee s own exploration is accomplished in three parts. First he describes Newman s early renunciation of modern thought, then analyzes the dialogic Romanticism that informs New man s Anglican works, particularly its power to expand his conception of personal identity, spiritual election, militant purpose, self-criticism, and cultural critique. Finally, he follows the collapse of this Romantic synthesis under the burden of its own success: natural and preternatural presences break into Newman s dialogue with his God, and then his God becomes transformed into a threat that must be constrained within an institutional church. Throughout this study, Goslee follows a hermeneutic strategy suggested by Newman s own descriptions of his compositional practice examining thematically related passages from different times and contexts to see just how far Newman s ideas might take him. Goslee concludes that this leading nineteenth-century religious writer, who rejected Romanticism for its decadent modern subjectivity, nevertheless clearly participated in the secular Romanticism of his day.

L'enjeu européen du discours de flatterie

Georges Mary : The European dimension of flattery. The correspondence between Gustav III of Sweden and count Creutz, his ambassador in Paris from 1766 to 1783, reveals both the diplomatic role played by the latter and his importance as a go-between between the Prince and French philosophes of the Enlightenment. A careful strategy of flattery is deployed to help the ideas of the philosophes enter the dominant language of power so that the princes could appeal to it and thus regain in the secular domain what they were losing in the sacred domain. At the same time the philosophes gained status and legitimacy from this royal favour. Thus there was worked out a sort of contract laying down, in an ambiguous, typically 18th-century relationship, the link between the political and the philosophical.

Eaters, Food, and Social Hierarchy in Ancient India: A Dietary Guide to a Revolution of Values

IN THE MOST ANCIENT texts of India, power and dominance were unabashedly embraced and unashamedly displayed-in the religious sphere of ritual no less than in more secular domains. Vedic ideology Sylvain Levi once called brutal and materialistic (Levi:9) is nowhere more brutally and materialistically articulated than in the discourse concerning and eaters. As one text succinctly puts it, The eater of food and food indeed are everything here (SB 11.1.6.19), and what might appear as a culinary metaphor was really meant as a descriptive account of the natural world organized into a hierarchically ordered food chain. later Indian image of ungoverned life reverting to the law of the fishes (bigger fish eat littler fish) has its roots in this Vedic vision. But in the older literature the harsh reality of a dog-eatdog world was not contrasted to a more easily digestible ideal or a soteriological alternative (i.e. moksa or liberation). In the Veda, violence and power-that is, power over another, the power the eater has over food-were celebrated on their own terms.'

Navajo Sandpainting: From Religious Act to Commercial Art

This study documents the recent commercialization and secularization of a form of religious art by the Navajo Indians of northern Arizona and New Mexico. The form, commercial sandpainting, is made of pulverized dry materials glued onto a permanent backing. Sacred sandpaintings are impermanent pictures that attract powerful supernaturals who are invoked to cure and to bless. The paintings are intentionally destroyed at the end of the ceremony and their use is surrounded by supernaturally sanctioned prescriptions. Unlike the sacred form from which the decorative art stemmed, commercial sandpaintings are designed and made as part of the national Indian arts and crafts market. The development of commercial sandpaintings, therefore, involved a shift from a sacred to a secular domain and a shift from native use to non-native consumption. The purpose of this work is to understand how and why a group of people decided to commercialize a sacred art form and the social and artistic repercussions of intentional sale to outsiders and the breaking of widely held religious rules. It focuses on the mechanisms of this complex process of innovation and diffusion. Basically it identifies the innovators and founders (both Navajo and Anglo-American), when and where these events occurred, how the idea to make commercial sandpaintings spread, and why Navajos who subsequently became sandpainters decided to pursue the craft. It will be shown that while reasons were numerous, economics was always of central importance. It is concluded that the commercialization of ethnic art occurs because of poverty situations when makers have few economic alternatives and there is a demand for luxury items by another group.

The Three Strands of Tillich's Theory of Religious Symbols

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Three Strands of Tillich's Theory of Religious SymbolsLewis S. FordLewis S. Ford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 46, Number 1, Part 2Jan., 1966Part 2: In Memoriam. Paul Tillich 1886-1965 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/485880 Views: 9Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1966 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ryan McAnnally-Linz The Multivalence of Participation in Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology, The Journal of Religion 92, no.33 (Jul 2015): 373–391.https://doi.org/10.1086/665041

Buddhism and Asian Politics

In any part of the world, the relation of religion to politics defies simple interpretation. This is certainly true in the case of Buddhism and its role in regard to various Asian governments. Buddhism, like other world religions, is concerned with the perennial problems of human existence. It is inclined to view its relation to the socioeconomic and political realms from the soteriological standpoint. In principle, the goal set forth by Buddhism has always been, and always will be, the attainment of Nirvana or Nibbana, however these terms are understood. Buddhism has been aware of the necessity and desirability of peace, order, and harmony in this world, as evidenced by the scattered references regarding Gautama Buddha's attitude toward monarchs and principalities. In general, Buddhism accepted certain Indian concepts such as those of elective kingship and conventional law while some Buddhist statesmen were marked by their high moral attitudes and qualities. But Buddhism as such has never articulated what might be termed a Buddhist social or political philosophy. It could also be pointed out that, contrary to the popular notion that Gautama was a social reformer, fighting for the cause of the common man against the evils of the caste ridden society of his time, there is no evidence that he attempted, directly at any rate, to change the social order. To him, the transformation of society would come only as a by-product of the religious transformation of individuals who constitute the social group. From its inception, the Buddhist movement developed a fellowship of monastics and laity that aspired to follow the path of the Buddha. The central core of the Buddhist fellowship was the monastic order, which soon formulated minute regulations to guide religious life in the cloister. The rapid growth of monasticism, however, resulted in a sharp distinction between the spiritual and secular domains of life. In this dualistic view of society, the Vinaya, or the code of monastic discipline, was considered normative for the religious sphere, while the Arthasastra, the traditional Indian science of politics, was regarded as appropriate for socio-political affairs. Meanwhile, pious legends began to portray Gautama, who was probably the son of a minor tribal chief in Northern India, as a mighty prince who forsook luxury, wealth. and the power of his principality in order to establish a spiritual kingdom on earth. Such a deification of a religious leader, so common in the history of religions, made Gautama a universal spiritual ruler (Cakravartin), whose law (the Dharma) underlies, inspires and maintains both the Vinaya and Arthasastra.