Christian Themes Research Articles

EASSESSING ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S DIALOGUE WITH FRIEDRICH SCHILLER IN “THE DEAD PAN”

Widely interpreted as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s justification for incorporating Christian themes within poetic discourse, “The Dead Pan” offers a Christian perspective in response to Friedrich Schiller’s favourable portrayal of Ancient Greek paganism in “Gods of Greece.” The poem epitomises Victorian pietism, exemplifying the period’s religious fervour and advocating for the synthesis of Christian content in poetry to enrich the literary canon. This advocacy originates from Browning’s belief that Christianity offers superior truths and values compared to Greek paganism. However, this study proposes a reassessment of Barrett Browning’s interpretation of Schiller’s work, suggesting that she may have misconstrued his allusions to Greek mythology as a straightforward endorsement of paganism. It is crucial to recognise that Schiller’s critique of Christianity primarily condemns the exploitation of the faith by religious and secular authorities to oppress and control the populace, rather than an outright denunciation of the religion itself. By examining the genesis of “The Dead Pan” through Barrett Browning’s personal correspondence, this study illuminates her specific objectives and her responses to Schiller’s perspectives. Additionally, by contextualising “Gods of Greece” within its socio-political and theological framework, this paper demonstrates that while Browning and Schiller have divergent approaches to Ancient Greek culture and Christianity, Barrett Browning overlooks Schiller’s nuanced criticism of the misuse of religion by religious and secular authorities.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN ICONOGRAPHY IN THE VI-VII CENTURIES

The II-III centuries represented the period of the birth of Christian sacred art through Christians imitating the custom of pagans, from whose ranks most of them came, to decorate their graves, sarcophagi or mausoleums with images and even by borrowing some pagan symbols and themes, to which they obviously gave a new, Christian meaning, to which, of course, exclusively Christian themes were added, most often of biblical origin, most of them having a narrative-historical character. In the 4th-5th centuries, under the careful supervision of the Church, a synthesis was made regarding the themes addressed, by abandoning some, by taking over others from the imperial imaginary, prevalence acquiring a dogmatic character, from the desire to express and through the mediation of figurative art, not only through the poetic, transposed into songs, the truths of faith formulated at the first four ecumenical synods, but also in terms of styles. In this second stage of the history of Christian sacred art, especially in the 5th century, as a result of the synthesis achieved in the capital of the empire between the two great artistic currents that manifested themselves in painting, the Hellenistic-Alexandrian and the SyroPalestinian, was formed the Constantinopolitan painting school and the stylistic features specific to this school crystallized . The present study aims to point out the main characteristics and developments of Christian sacred art in the Byzantine Empire starting from the time of Emperor Justinian I until the outbreak of Byzantine iconoclasm.

Проект «Апофатика» Гора Чахала. Религиозная тема в искусстве российских новых медиа 2010-х годов

The article is devoted to the consideration and art criticism of the Apophatica multimedia art project (2016), the author of which is the Moscow artist Gor Chakhal. For several decades, he has been addressing religious topics in contemporary art, defining his work as Christ‐centered. This trend has long been of deep interest in world and Russian art, but its comprehension, place in the artistic process, and functional significance have not yet been definitively determined and differ in Russia and other countries. In this article, the Apophatica project is considered from the point of view of some traditions of Eastern Christian art, such as hierotopy. Additionally, an attempt is made to integrate the project into the innovative world context of art that addresses Christian themes, which is not easy with the difference in terminology. Many foreign researchers prefer the term ‘spirituality’. Apophatica is an example of a modern statement by a Russian artist on the theme of the eternal dialogue between man and God in the language of fine arts.

Ontological ekphrasis Elena Shvarts’ poem “Memory of the Fresco of Fra Beato Angelico ‘Baptism’ at the Sight of the Head of John the Baptist in Rome”

Scientific interest in the problem of ekphrasis and the peculiarities of ekphrastic description has increased over the past decades. The article analyzes the ekphrastic poetics of E. Shvarts’ poem “Memory of Fra Beato Angelico’s fresco ‘Baptism’ at the sight of the head of John the Baptist in Rome”. The aim of this article is to identify the intermedial correlation of the verbal level with the visual level, revealing the ontological ekphrasis in this poem. The author of the article examined how the three levels of the image in the poem correlate in their ratio: artistic text, frescoes’ visual images, and symbolism (cultural codes). Ontological ekphrasis helps the poet find new ways to reveal traditional Christian themes. Visual images of the early Renaissance fresco acquire an ontological status in the text (dove, “rose,” gray color, water, fog, coal [fire], flower, river, blood, wine, relics [the head of John the Baptist], Lapis Niger, dawn). Through symbols and cultural codes, these images reveal the metaphysics of Baptism from a historical, cultural, and modern perspective, leaving the reader with options for interpretation. In the spirit of the early Renaissance artist himself, Shvarts ontologically recodes the medieval symbolism of Baptism, immersing it into thereality, perceiving Christian history as a struggle of life and death, culminating in the eschatological hope of the Second Coming of Christ. Fra Angelico turned out to be in tune with Shvarts precisely as an artist of the early Renaissance, in the painter’s movement of medieval mysticism to Renaissance ontologism and humanism.

“Rakstu Avots” – Latvijas Evaņģēliski luteriskās baznīcas grāmatu sērijas ideja un tās īstenojums (1932–1940)

Appreciating the essential role of books in shaping the worldview of individuals, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (LELB) and its pastors actively published books on Christian themes in the independent Republic of Latvia (1918–1940). Among them was the book series “Source of Writings” (Rakstu Avots) initiated and edited by a pastor, bibliophile, and librarian Gustavs Šaurums (1883–1952). Almost 90 titles of books were published in the series from 1933 until the Soviet occupation in the summer of 1940. The aim of the book series was to prevent the influence of “harmful” literature on society, offering good religious reading material instead. The research aims to determine the opinion of LELB pastors about the most important ethical values and reading material needed by society, as well as society’s attitude towards this literature. The main source of the research is the book set of the series. The bibliographic method (collection of bibliographic information about the book series and its analysis) used in the research allows us to ascertain the range of authors and works chosen by the publishers, the frequency of publishing, the circulation and other important characteristics of books. The text analysis method provides an opportunity to determine the essential ideas the publisher wanted to popularise and strengthen in society. The publishing frequency of the series (one printed work every month) and the consistently low price (the annual set cost one lat) are commendable. The annual sets of the series did have 12 issues, but they were small in size, modestly designed, and mostly printed in Gothic script (except for the children’s books, which were printed in antique type and usually illustrated). The works postulated a strong Christian faith and complete trust in God’s destiny as a fundamental ethical value. The works of the series, kept in the spirit of conservatism, did not take into account the complex life situation of the 20th-century individual, in which he had to face various spiritual, intellectual movements and growing secularism. The series gained attention only in the LELB environment.

Spiritual-semantic approach as a methodological basis for the analysing religious music (on the example of V. Stepurko’s cycle “Monologues of the Ages”)

Spiritual-semantic approach as a methodological basis for the analysing religious music (on the example of V. Stepurko’s cycle “Monologues of the Ages”)

Unsettling Man in Europe: Wynter and the Race–Religion Constellation

Sylvia Wynter brings to light a structural entanglement between race and religion that is fundamental to identifying racism’s logic. This logic is continuous albeit often masked in particular in European race–religion constellations such as antisemitism and islamophobia. Focusing on the Americas, Wynter reveals a structural epistemic continuity between ‘religious’, rational and scientific racism. Nonetheless, Wynter marks a discontinuity between pre- and post-1492, by distinguishing between the Christian subject and Man, the overrepresentation of the human. In this essay, which focuses on European entanglements of race and religion, a process of dehumanization and its historical and geographic continuities is more discernible. As such, I question Wynter’s discontinuity, arguing that the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human (although not without debate or inconsistencies), which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded from the political community and suffered degrees of dehumanization. Within the concept of dehumanization, I focus on the entanglement of race and religion, or more specifically Whiteness and Christianity, as distinct markers of supremacy/difference and show that the Church had, and asserted, the power to produce both lesser and non-humans.

Christian motives in Soviet cinema

The paper highlights the history of emergence and development of Christian motives in Soviet cinema, from the times of persecution against the Church in 1920–1930 up to the era of Perestroika. There is a difference in the perception of Christianity as the basis of traditional ethno-cultural identity and as the basis of universal moral values, which in both cases contributed to the gradual legitimization of Christian subjects in Soviet culture in spite of the multilevel system of ideological censorship. This paper analyzes the deep ideological trends in the evolution of Soviet culture, which allowed, on the one hand, the atheistic authorities themselves and, on the other hand, the experimenting filmmakers to address the topic of religion in general, Christianity in particular and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church in different ways in different periods of Soviet history. The illustrative examples of using various Christian symbols, Biblical quotations, events of religious history, the representation of the image of a Christian priest and a believer as such in Soviet films, as well as the increasingly noticeable appeal of Soviet filmmakers to Christian associations and allusions are also shown here. The author pays special attention to contradictory ideological trends during the three basic periods of Soviet history in the second half of the twentieth century: The Khrushchev Thaw, the Era of Stagnation and Perestroika. All three contributed to the legitimization of religious themes in Soviet cinema and determined the specifics of the attitude to religion in the late Soviet period. The films by such directors as Mikhail Romm, Marlen Khutsiev, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Kalik, Andrei Konchalovsky, Nikita Mikhalkov, Gleb Panfilov and others are considered in the paper as the most significant precedents. Hypotheses are put forward about further ideological strategies of the Soviet state regarding Orthodox Christianity, if the Communist Party had been able to retain its power.

«Unearthing the divine horrors»

This study looks into H. P. Lovecraft’s masterful craft of cosmic horror, examining his adept fusion of Christian cosmological elements with subversion and mockery, while concurrently forging a unique cosmic framework. Lovecraft subtly weaves Christian themes into his mythos, introducing his eldritch terrors, deities reminiscent of Christian demonology. These entities, residing in abyssal depths, bear distinctly demonic attributes, highlighting the profound influence of Christian cosmology. The enigmatic entity Dagon, rooted in biblical mythology, is a focal point. Its appearances correlate with catastrophic consequences and the underworld, subverting Christian narratives and invoking a sense of dread through an alternative lens. Lovecraft strategically manipulates Christian celebrations, such as May-Eve and All-Hallows, challenging their significance and intensifying readers’ religious discomfort. Lovecraft’s cosmic framework is non-anthropocentric, portraying an indifferent universe inhabited by ancient cosmic entities beyond human comprehension. However, he alludes to an impending chaos, drawing subtle parallels with the biblical Apocalypse. Lovecraft’s narratives interweave Christian cosmology, subversion, and mockery, challenging religious frameworks while invoking terror and fascination, providing a rich tapestry for scholarly analysis in cosmic horror literature.

К вопросу о К. Д. Ушинском как переводчике

The article continues the development of the topic "K. D. Ushinsky as a translator", started about 10 years ago by V. G. Bezrogov and M. V. Tendriakova and some other researchers. It is shown that the study of K. Ushinsky's translation work is carried out in several directions: the study of the European source base of Ushinsky's textbooks, and the special features of his translations of works by Western academics. This article provides new information on K.D. Ushinsky's translation of "Der Unterricht in der Klein-Kinder-Schule", a manual for teachers of elementary schools, by Friedrich Adolph Disterweg (1790-1866), one of the leading German teachers of the 19th century. Disterweg's manual is intended for teachers working with 5-7-year-olds and is a model for the holistic approach to primary education, combining "real" knowledge and Christian education in the classroom. Der Unterricht in der Klein-Kinder-Schule" is known to the Russian-speaking reader in the translation by K.D. Ushinsky as "Beginnings of Children's Schooling". For reasons not entirely clear, Ushinsky's translation significantly reduced the material of religious content, which is reflected not only in the removal from the translation of the religious-song section, but also in the compressed presentation of some other places of Christian themes.

The Burdened Body: Byzantine Enkolpia and the Weight of the Sacred

Abstract Few products of human artistry seem as insistently concerned with self-representation as jewelry. In Georg Simmel’s classic formulation, articles of personal adornment work to enhance an individual’s social persona by magnifying their Ausstrahlung. While medieval Christian devotional jewels were well-equipped to operate in this manner, their true significance lay elsewhere. Objects such as pectoral crosses, reliquary rings, rosaries, and prayer nuts were designed not so much to mediate between self and society, but rather to stage and facilitate an encounter of the self with itself. Focusing on Byzantine devotional neck pendants, or enkolpia, this essay considers how religiously significant wearables participated in introspective spiritual practices aimed at forming and reforming the Christian subject. The essay, more specifically, attends to the enkolpion as an instrument of self-imposed discipline and explores how the corporeal experience of carrying this object and feeling its weight, however minimal, on the body contributed to the wearer’s cultivation of inner vigilance.

The Persian Campaign of Peter I on the pages of the Vedomosti newspaper

The first printed newspaper Vedomosti, founded by Peter the Great, is an important source for studying the history of Russian-Ottoman and Russian-Iranian relations in the ϐirst quarter of the 18th century. A lot of attention in the Vedomosti was paid to the international situation of the Ottoman Empire and Russian-Turkish relations. In general, the newspaper characterizes the Ottoman state as an enemy of Russia and all Christian peoples. Under the constant attention of the Vedomosti were the most important changes in the government of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730), in the foreign policy priorities of Turkey, as well as domestic political issues the situation of its Christian subjects. The newspaper’s materials provide information about international relations on the eve and during the Persian campaign of Peter I of 1722– 1723, as well as about the representation of newly acquired possessions in the Eastern Caucasus. The Vedomosti newspaper was the ϐirst periodical that introduced the Russian society to the peoples of the Caucasus, the geography of the region and the military-political situation in the Western Caspian region.

К вопросу об интертекстуальных связях отечественной феноменологической традиции и философии всеединства в романе Б. Пастернака «Доктор Живаго»

The article shows how the peculiarities of the development of the Christian theme in Doctor Zhivago were predetermined not only by the author’s personality, but also by the philosophical and theological searches of the first third of the 20th century — the philosophy of the unity of S.N. Bulgakov, the phenomenological school of E. Husserl in the transmission of G. Shpet, as well as the domestic phenomenological tradition analyzed by S.L. Frank. In this regard, for the first time, we have attempted to compare the phenomenological image in Christian hymnography with the artistic image of the novel, which tried to capture the Divine in the earthly, which made it possible to identify the uniqueness of the phenomenological image in the work. The unity of man with the world and the Creator — this theme defines the range of thoughts of the author and his protagonist and corresponds to one of the main provisions of the “Philosophy of Economy” S.N. Bulgakov on the identity of subject and object, which determines the presence of intertextual links between the “Philosophy of Economy” and the text of the novel. A special Christian phenomenology, which creates a certain image of the world, is closely connected with the philosophy of unity. Thus, earthly life appears spiritualized by the Divine presence and, in a certain sense, becomes a phenomenon of the noumenal essence. The article shows that Pasternak’s comprehension of spiritual reality has its own distinctive features. In this regard, the article reveals similarities and differences between the spiritual texts of modern Pasternak — the Akathist of Mitr. Trifon (Turkestanov) “Thank God for everything!” and the text of the novel. Thus, if the Russian phenomenological tradition represented in the akathist, according to S.L. Frank, is characterized by a combination of “the immanent presence of the Divine principle <…> with a keen sense of transcendence”, then in the image of Pasternak, striving to capture the divine in the material, there is an immanent, soul-sensual comprehension of spiritual reality, the ideal domain of meanings becomes immanent to the earthly dimensions, the phenomenological image, sometimes, ceases to denote the noumenal essence. This development of the Christian theme in the novel, in particular, is associated with a sense of equality between man and God, but not with the hierarchy of the world, which is consonant with the general type of worldview of the beginning 20th century.

What Does It Mean to Be a Christian? The Implications of Badiou’s, Butler’s, and Whitehead’s Views for Understanding the Christian Subject

This article explores the implications of Whitehead’s, Butler’s, and Badiou’s views for understanding the Christian subject. Since postmodernists’ declaration of ‘the death of the subject’, the traditional view of the subject as a fixed and self-identical substance no longer suffices. These three thinkers present dynamic and original views of the subject. For Whitehead, the subject emerges out of the process of becoming and, by perishing, contributes to future processes of becoming. Butler claims that subjectivity is performative. For Badiou, the subject is the bearer of a fidelity to an event. With those views in mind, this article argues first, that the Christian subject is the bearer of fidelity to a truth-event of God; second, that Christian subjectivity is performative; and third, that a Christian is one who performs death and, by doing so, contributes to, and brings the novelty into, the world.

Life of Jesus in the Liturgical Books


 
 
 In this article, we will explore the central theme of Christianity –The life of Christ– by examining a selection of liturgical texts that focus on different aspects of Jesus’ life. Additionally, we will investigate the origin of a censer that is currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Old-Cairo, analyzing its features to determine its potential source and cultural significance.
 
 

The Black Millenarian Jeremiads of William Monroe Trotter

Abstract William Monroe Trotter remains a fixture in historical memory because of his opposition to Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee normal school and the leading black figure of his generation. Trotter founded the Guardian in 1901 and served as editor of the newspaper for three decades. Numerous scholars and countless historians have detailed the confrontation between Washington and Trotter in the context of their disagreements over segregation, disfranchisement and racial violence. This essay examines the importance of religious ideas and Christian themes in the rhetoric of the Guardian and in the writings of Trotter. Trotter immersed himself in the literature of the antislavery movement and the history of abolitionism. Drawing on this tradition, Trotter employed the black millennial jeremiad discourse to deliver a message of racial reform to the American public. By explicating his pubic declarations, editorials, and orations, this paper analyzes Trotter’s usage of the black millennial jeremiad discourse to exhort the American public to oppose racial oppression.

Claustrophobia, Race, and The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man

ABSTRACT The universal Christian subject at the center of The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of Manhode is a figure dependent on racist difference for a coherent experience of self. This essay focuses on the allegorical scene of perception, in which the deformed body of a personified figure becomes an exercise in pedagogical explanation. Taking claustrophobia as symptomatic of the poem’s investment in sensory information, the essay explores a neglected figure, a bishop with horns referred to as “Moses” or “like Moses,” whose depiction is the moment where Jewishness enters the poem’s field of vision: subordinate to the demands of Christian allegory and yet condensing a historical significance that exceeds it.

Representation of Power and Sacrifice in T S Eliots's Murder In The Cathedral

The dramas began to emerge in the 20th century and it became One of the prosperous and more popular genre in the world of literature most of the dramas was previously based on the Christian themes and religions themes the modern drama reached to its peak with the words, imagination, verse and thoughts of T S Elliot. Murder in the Cathedral depicts the conflicts of good and bad, power and sacrifice, truth and untruth it possesses sequences of interlude which describes the before and after portion of the play. Murder in the Cathedral views perfect image and struggle between The Archbishop and The King between the good and the bad.

Theology and identity

In this book, Kwame Bediako explores the theme of identity and Christianity from a broad perspective, addressing many issues modern scholars have battled with. Although Bediako’s focus is postmissionary Christianity in Africa, dating from the 1960s to the present, he gives a foundational background to issues related to culture and identity since the birth of Christianity in the first century AD.

‘Not-All-There’ in the Necropolis: Afterlife and Madness in Urban Novels

The paper takes its departure point from a seemingly innocuous idiom that common English parlance uses to describe a person who has lost possession of their rational mind: “not all there.” Interrogating the locality that this deictic “there” implies, the argument juxtaposes it with recent religious scholarship on the Afterlife, which posits that, by extension, from the absence of the risen Christ from the tomb, the Christian subject is essentially similarly ‘not there’. Thus, the paper treads a thin line between sacredness and profanity in attempting to map out the spatial coordinates and configuration of the imaginary realms of the life-less and mind-less, that is, the Afterlife and madness, respectively. This examination is conducted through late 20th-century literary representations of, on the one hand, the Afterlife as an urban netherworld, experienced as infernal and life-negating, and of the city perceived through a schizophrenic mind, which displays an uncanny similarity to Hell: disorienting, dissipating, and ghostly. In this manner, following recent scholarship of embodied cognition, the paper demonstrates an unexpected and hitherto unexplored affinity between the Afterlife as a key concept of conventional religious thought and madness and the mad subject as an oft-reviled cultural, social, and literary figure.