Subject Of Religion Research Articles

Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey

Reviewed by: Religion Around Mary Shelley by Jennifer L. Airey Staci Stone RELIGION AROUND MARY SHELLEY, by Jennifer L. Airey. Religion Around. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 231 pp. $79.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Readers interested in an overview of Mary Shelley’s works through the lens of religion and belief will find Jennifer L. Airey’s Religion Around Mary Shelley useful for its accurate biographical summary and thorough analysis of Shelley’s works, including those published after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Airey’s monograph, which treats Mary Shelley’s “shifting depictions of religion across the length of her career” in order “to foreground Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period,” is a welcome addition to Shelley scholarship (p. 2). Airey’s expertise in British religious history and gender provides a valuable perspective on Shelley’s works, as Airey achieves her goal of examining both the historical moment “and the ways in which [Shelley’s] works reflect and engage with the religious controversies of her day” (p. 3). [End Page 354] The titles of Airey’s main chapters focusing on Shelley’s works—“Doubt,” “Despair,” and “Domesticity”—simultaneously gesture toward stages of Shelley’s life, her psychological state, and religious faith. Interestingly, Airey subtitles her conclusion “On Ghosts” yet does not discuss the short Shelley essay of the same title, which refers to the “spirits” Shelley mourns in her later travel writings. Airey’s knowledgeable summary of religious movements and thought from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries provides an expansive backdrop for Shelley’s own beliefs, which, as Airey points out, were informed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Rational Dissent, William Godwin’s Calvinism, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s atheism, and her reading of Humphry Davy, William Lawrence, John Milton, Constantine François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, and others. Ultimately, Airey provides convincing evidence to support her main claim that Shelley’s works reveal her movement “from doubt to despair to domestic contentment” as she increasingly embraced “the feminine religious heritage of her mother over the doubts of her father and husband” (p. 66). This book, then, participates in bridging Shelley-as-wife and Shelley-as-daughter scholarship, as categorized by Charlotte Sussman in her article “Daughter of the Revolution: Mary Shelley in Our Times” (2004). As one would expect from a book on Shelley and religion, examples from Frankenstein (1818) abound—from discussion of John Milton’s Satan and the way Shelley rewrites his Paradise Lost (1667) to organized religion’s treatment of women. Airey also deftly uses examples from Shelley’s “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman” (1819) and Mathilda (1819–1820), offering the main characters as versions of Frankenstein’s creature. Airey argues that these early works illustrate that Shelley had taken up the theme of religion in the 1810s when she was struggling with doubt and atheism. However, Airey also points to the ways that Shelley observes the power and potential of writing, and her later works, such as Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826), are a celebration of human creativity and capability. By including “The Convent of Chaillot” (1828) as an example to support her argument—referencing the story in four separate places, noting only at the last mention that Shelley’s authorship is in question—Airey has taken up the challenge presented by Charles E. Robinson in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (1976) and Nora Crook in “Sleuthing towards a Mary Shelley Canon” (2006) that scholars provide additional support for attributing this work to Shelley. Airey weaves a peripheral argument about Shelley’s authorship of this tale, as she uses details from other Shelley works to bolster the same points supported by “The Convent of Chaillot.” Airey jumps from the theme of “human happiness in a world without divine love” evident in Shelley’s mid-career stories and novels to Evangelicalism, arguing that “Shelley’s later works are not explicitly [End Page 355] religious, yet in them she adopts an argument common to many Evangelical texts” (pp. 68, 128). While Mary Poovey, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley...

Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives by Hardiman Louise (review)

REVIEWS 169 modern Russian theatre’ (p. 171). Similarly, a detached audience member at the Teatr ‘Sovremennik’ in the 1970s, or at Efremov’s touring MKhAT productions in 1980s London, might consider the director’s designation as Stanislavskii’s heir (pp. 179–91 passim) to be a case of wishful thinking. The whole amounts to a well-intentioned attempt at introducing important Russian theatre work to a new student readership and, despite its flaws, can be commended for a less conventional and more inclusive sense of both gender and genre. London Nick Worrall Hardiman, Louise and Kozicharow, Nicola (eds). Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives. OpenBook Publishers, Cambridge, 2017. 310 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £24.95 (paperback). From the very outset of this volume, Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow claim that their goal as its editors was to ‘energise debate […] on the diverse ways in which themes of religion and spirituality were central to the work of artists and critics during the rise of Russian modernism’ (p. 10). Over the course of the eleven essays which comprise the text, this objective is definitively met. The book begins with an effectively written introduction by Hardiman and Kozicharow which provides a historical summary of religion in Russian art, a discussion of changing attitudes towards icons and an understated justification for the book’s focus on the period from the 1880s through the 1960s. Also threaded through this introduction are subtle but important new claims about the nature of Russian modernism and, as the authors assert, the ways in which ‘notions of the spiritual […] helped shape modernism in Russian art and underpinned some of its most radical experiments’ (p. 13). The individual case studies that comprise the main body of the volume begin with Maria Taroutina’s investigation of the frescoes that Mikhail Vrubel painted in the Church of St Cyril in Kyiv in 1884. These important works show how: ‘Vrubel was able to anticipate many of the formal and conceptual innovations of the future’ (p. 67) by embracing the artistic traditions of the past. Effectively argued and beautifully researched, Taroutina’s contribution adroitly weaves the voice of Vrubel with others from his time to create a multilayered argument that is as conceptually rigorous as it is convincing. Louise Hardiman then probes the debates surrounding the ‘Church of the Spirit’ commissioned by Maria Tenisheva, the founder of the Talashkino colony, before turning to the theosophical beliefs of Aleksandra Pogosskaia, a leading purveyor of Russian peasant art mostly in the West. In the third essay of the volume, Myroslava Mudrak creates a sophisticated new understanding SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 170 of how a group of Symbolist-style paintings produced by Kazimir Malevich between 1907–08 (sometimes referred to as the ‘Yellow Series’) should be understood as an integral part of Malevich’s progression to Suprematism. Mudrak intertwines succinct readings of individual paintings with effective comparisons to the works of Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard to create a persuasive sense of how the spiritual traditions of Orthodoxy lie at the heart of Malevich’s utopian trajectory. This is followed by Oleg Tarasov’s essay, which begins by exploring the epistemological differences between icons and avant-garde images before moving into the ‘specific features of Russian image veneration’ (p. 120). While Tarasov makes several fascinating points, his essay contains some odd contradictions which distract from the potential impact of his discussion of Malevich in the context of the conceptual space between icons and modern art. Tarasov’s work is counterbalanced, however, by Nina Gurianova’s assessment of how hand-painted Old-Believers’ religious lubki and manuscript books influenced painters like Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov at the beginningofthetwentiethcentury.Gurianovaalsopointsoutthebroadinterest members of the avant-garde had in various ‘archaic and traditional cultures’ (p. 144) beyond just the Old Believers. She calls this ‘pluralist expansiveness’ (p. 144) and provides brief, but significant comparisons to the primitivist interests of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as well as to the differences between Russian and Italian Futurism. Sebastian Borkhardt then delivers an in-depth examination of the German interpretations of Vasilii Kandinskii’s paintings in terms of ideas then circulating regarding the German soul and Russian...

Book announcements – “To take note of”

Acta Theologica is the official and accredited theological journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Acta Theologica is an accredited South African journal publishing independently reviewed research articles on broad Christian-theological and religion topics, aimed at a national and international academic audience/readership. The Editorial Board accepts and considers for possible publication articles in English, written from a responsible point of view on subjects in a relevant field of study within the Christian-theology science. The opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board. Acta Theologica appears bi-annually. Occasional monographs or longer contributions are published in a concurrent series of Supplementa.

Rethinking Dynamo: False Motherhood and the Illusion of Immortality

ABSTRACT This article examines one of Eugene O'Neill's undervalued plays, Dynamo, in the framework of two strands of modern psychological thought: attachment disorder and death anxiety. Dynamo, with its ostensible theme of religion versus science, has often been dismissed as sophomoric and histrionic. However, an analysis of the “secondary” plot of protagonist Reuben Light's dysfunctional relationship with his mother illustrates a more complex storyline; an attachment disorder in action, leading to Reuben's fatal fixation on obtaining an illusory everlasting maternal presence vis-à-vis a hydroelectric power-plant. The themes of this article are drawn predominantly on the pioneering works of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott, and on Ernest Becker's seminal books The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. Infants and young children who have insecure attachment to their primary caregivers typically grow into adolescents and adults with free-floating anxiety, unconsciously craving a mother substitute. This is what tragically happened to Reuben Light.

USE SPIRITUALITY RELATED BELIEFS IN TREATMENT OF PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESSES

Background: Spirituality is a theme of religion and philosophy, which are Humanities and work on empirical principals. Psychology and psychiatry are developed from philosophy but have scientific attitude. Patient care is a complex issue and needs conversion of both of these principles.
 Aim: We made an attempt to evaluate that use of spirituality principles in patient’s treatment is helpful or not.
 Material and methods: Total 510 patients were evaluated. Study group of 260 patients were given spiritual consideration in standard treatment and control group of 250 patients were only given standard treatment. World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL)-BREF raw score were compared using student t test.
 Results: We found that there was significantly more improvement in study group as compared to control group in terms of World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL)-BREF score.
 Conclusion: We arrived at the conclusion that spiritual consideration gives added improvement in treatment of psychiatric illnesses. We should not ignore spiritual beliefs of patients.
 Keywords: spirituality, beliefs, psychiatric illness, psychology

A review of the book "Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis"

The theme of religion still cares about the world and Ukraine, and therefore the books coming out of this problem, and especially about Ukrainian religious events, fall into the sight of not only specialists (religious scholars or theologians) but also ordinary readers. For Ukrainians, at least some of them, it's interesting to write about an object in which almost everyone understands. Particular attention is drawn to the book of foreign origin, which describes and analyzes the Ukrainian religious life. Here, the monograph, edited by Andrei Kravchuk and Thomas Bremer, which was reviewed by us, did not remain unobtrusive in Ukraine. In order to better understand what we think about us in other countries, in particular our church affairs, we will briefly consider the contents of this book.

To Flower and Fructify: Rational Religion and the Seeds of Islam in Nazir Ahmad’s (1830–1912) Late-career Religious Non-fiction

Abstract Known primarily for his popular and moralizing novels, Nazir Ahmad’s (1830–1912) accomplishments as a scholar of Islam are often omitted from his biography. Yet in addition to working for the British Government of India, participating in Muslim social, political, and educational initiatives on the subcontinent, and demonstrating his linguistic and legal acumen by translating the law codes of British India into vernacular Urdu, Nazir Ahmad also translated religious texts and penned his own original compositions on themes of religion, society, and ethics. Reviewing the ideas presented in his comprehensive three-volume al-Ḥuqūq va-l-farāʾiż (1905–6) and his shorter catechism Ijtihād (1906), this article outlines Nazir Ahmad’s theory of worldly religion and introduces his concept of Islamic humanism in response to ulema-centric approaches to Islamic revival and reform in British India.

South Sudanese primary school textbooks: Transforming and reinforcing conflict

Primary school textbooks can provide space for learning about peace and inclusion but can also reinforce messages of inequality and division. This article describes a thematic analysis of South Sudan’s textbooks for pupils in Grade 4 Social Studies, English, and Christian Religious Education. The analysis uses a conceptual framework that positions education as having multiple potential overlapping roles in relation to conflict—victim, accomplice, and transformer—to show that the textbooks’ content contains some motions toward social change, but more often passively reinforces the status quo. While peace and social acceptance of diversity and gender equality are sometimes explicitly promoted, there is an overarching emphasis on maintaining and accepting social norms without critically interrogating the social structures that can foster inequality and lead to conflict. This analysis positions the textbooks primarily as accomplices to conflict, with some movement toward transformation, across the themes of religion and ethnicity, governance, gender, and conflict.

Looking for Black Religions in 20th Century Comics, 1931–1993

Relationships between religion and comics are generally unexplored in the academic literature. This article provides a brief history of Black religions in comic books, cartoons, animation, and newspaper strips, looking at African American Christianity, Islam, Africana (African diaspora) religions, and folk traditions such as Hoodoo and Conjure in the 20th century. Even though the treatment of Black religions in the comics was informed by stereotypical depictions of race and religion in United States (US) popular culture, African American comics creators contested these by offering alternatives in their treatment of Black religion themes.

INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINA LANDMAN

Acta Theologica is the official and accredited theological journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Acta Theologica is an accredited South African journal publishing independently reviewed research articles on broad Christian-theological and religion topics, aimed at a national and international academic audience/readership. The Editorial Board accepts and considers for possible publication articles in English, written from a responsible point of view on subjects in a relevant field of study within the Christian-theology science. The opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board. Acta Theologica appears bi-annually. Occasional monographs or longer contributions are published in a concurrent series of Supplementa.

The inspiration and interpretation of Scripture: What the early church can teach us

Acta Theologica is the official and accredited theological journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Acta Theologica is an accredited South African journal publishing independently reviewed research articles on broad Christian-theological and religion topics, aimed at a national and international academic audience/readership. The Editorial Board accepts and considers for possible publication articles in English, written from a responsible point of view on subjects in a relevant field of study within the Christian-theology science. The opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board. Acta Theologica appears bi-annually. Occasional monographs or longer contributions are published in a concurrent series of Supplementa.

Locating Medieval Armenia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Spanning 13 centuries, the exhibition “Armenia!” brings together some 140 objects to present the medieval art and culture of the Armenian peoples in a global context. Armenia has often existed at the borders of medieval art in contemporary scholarship, due to its complex history and continuously shifting borders, which undermine basic understandings of empires and polities. This exhibition seeks to “locate” Armenia through the twin themes of religion and trade, documenting the myriad ways in which Armenians employed visual culture to construct images of the self and community. The works on display demonstrate the distinctive qualities of the Armenian artistic and religious culture, while also documenting contact with an ever-shifting and expanding group of neighbors and trading partners. At once complimenting and extending the reach of the exhibition, the catalog provides scholars with a trove of insightful essays and catalog entries that are, characteristically, deeply researched and will serve as a touchstone in the field for decades to come. Together, this exhibition and catalog calls on medievalists to rethink the way we study and teach medieval art, recognizing the inner diversities, interlocking histories, and extraordinary artistic achievements of Christian communities in the east.

Looking for Langston: Themes of Religion, Sexuality, and Evasion in the Life and Work of Langston Hughes

ABSTRACT Langston Hughes wrote as much about religion as he did any other topic. His evasiveness about his own “personal” religion, however, has prevented forthright analyses of his religious writings, leading to the false conclusion that he was antireligious. Hughes was just as evasive about his sexuality even though he is widely considered to have been gay. I contend that Hughes's evasiveness about religion and sexuality was strategic and a style of life that eschewed the notion of fixed identities. Hughes's approach to religion was not static and his sexuality was most likely on a spectrum, making attempts to mark him religiously or in terms of a particular sexual identity difficult, if not impossible. What we learn from Hughes's example is that a lack of personal faith does not equate anti-religiosity and that one's sexuality can be a matter of personal construction. Contemporary notions of “the closet” and the performance of “coming out” most often police the personal construction of sexuality while it affirms normalcy and the religious and sexual status quo.

Yoga for Every(body)? A Critical Analysis of the Evolution of Yoga Representation across Four Decades in Yoga Journal

This paper examines forty-one covers of Yoga Journal magazine from 1975 to 2016. Using qualitative visual and linguist frame analysis of magazine covers, this project critically examines how yoga representations have evolved from a mental discipline to a commercialized form of exercise. Themes of religion, art, exercise, spiritual connection, and (male Indian) expertise were prominent cover displays from the 1970s through the 1990s. However, in the 2000s, thin young white female bodies came to signify the practice of yoga, anchored to hegemonic notions of femininity displayed on the covers in objectified and commercialized forms. Implications for public-health messaging, political-economic pressures on magazines, and mainstream perceptions of yoga are discussed.

“Religion and Modernity” and Southeast Asia Studies

During the past few decades, “religion and modernity” has become a major theme across a wide range of human and social sciences. This theme has been well established among Southeast Asianists in the English-speaking world, but it is not so common among scholars in Japan. How does the theme of religion and modernity matter in general and to Southeast Asian Studies in particular? In pursuing this question, this article draws insights especially from Webb Keane, whose ethnographic studies set in Indonesia have inspired heated discussions within and beyond Southeast Asian Studies. A defining quality of a modern religion is, according to Keane, its repudiation of ritual and insistence on sincerity. Sincerity is a quality required of a modern believer, who needs to understand—as opposed to merely recite—the scripture. While Keane’s work focuses on Christians, the ideal of sincerity has been influential not only to other religions, but also secularist movements. Many of the reform movements of the 20th century led by Muslim and Buddhist modernizers in Southeast Asia can be understood as efforts to incorporate this new ideal. The relationship between these modernist movements and nation-building projects is a rich topic, which can be fruitfully pursued across Southeast Asia.

CONCEPTS OF RELIGION IN MODERN AMERICAN RAP LYRICS

The article studies verbalization mean of religious concepts in Kendrick Lamar’s songs of his 2017 album DAMN. After introducing the inventory of lexemes representing themes of religion, the authors argue for correlations with basic concepts and explain the structure of the thematic field, representing religion in all fourteen songs of the album. The album structure and each song of it include over a hundred tokens referring to various religious concepts – mainly GOD, SIN, and PRAY, each of them being verbalized by a group of lexemes, fifteen total, which share certain semantic components. The micro-contexts with biblical quotes will be regarded as convergence points of the album’s text and analyzed individually for their stylistic value, but in general contributing to the general view of the album as a spiritual challenge. Through each next song a new aspect of religious concepts adds to the existing inventory, certain repetitions and cross-contextual allusions confirm and support them, adding coherence and continuity to the album’s structure. Out of fourteen songs of the album seven directly verbalize basic religious concepts through the notions of God, pride, humility, lust, love, loyalty, fear. This explicit structural feature together with the ambiguous title offer a series of logical steps in evaluating the sinful vs virtuous choices. This contrast is identified and sustained through such stylistic devices as repetitions, allusions, rhetorical questions and others.

Preacher girl – Uldine Utley and the industry of revival

Acta Theologica is the official and accredited theological journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Acta Theologica is an accredited South African journal publishing independently reviewed research articles on broad Christian-theological and religion topics, aimed at a national and international academic audience/readership. The Editorial Board accepts and considers for possible publication articles in English, written from a responsible point of view on subjects in a relevant field of study within the Christian-theology science. The opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board. Acta Theologica appears bi-annually. Occasional monographs or longer contributions are published in a concurrent series of Supplementa.

INTERVIEW WITH PROF JOHAN CILLIERS

Acta Theologica is the official and accredited theological journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Acta Theologica is an accredited South African journal publishing independently reviewed research articles on broad Christian-theological and religion topics, aimed at a national and international academic audience/readership. The Editorial Board accepts and considers for possible publication articles in English, written from a responsible point of view on subjects in a relevant field of study within the Christian-theology science. The opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board. Acta Theologica appears bi-annually. Occasional monographs or longer contributions are published in a concurrent series of Supplementa.

Public stigma of obsessive compulsive disorder and schizophrenic disorder: Is there really any difference?

A substantial delay for help-seeking is a serious problem for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a heterogeneous and debilitating mental health condition. Stigma is a major barrier to treatment seeking and further cause social and occupational impairment. Lack of comprehensive research led us to examine the public's stigmatizing attitudes towards checking, contamination, sexuality, aggression, and religion-related OCD symptoms, compared to schizophrenia. After reading one of six random case vignettes, 621 adults completed social distance scale. Analysis of Covariance or ANCOVA indicated that social distance towards violence and sexuality-related OCD symptoms and schizophrenia did not differ; but social distance for those was higher than religion, contamination, and checking subtypes. Although the contamination vignette did not differ from religion and checking vignettes, the theme of religion had a higher social distance than checking symptoms. Consequently, the current findings imply that there is a difference in public stigma among various symptoms of OCD and symptoms related to sexuality and violence, as well as schizophrenia, are associated with more social rejection. Thus, the general public needs access to educational methods of intervention and contact to eliminate stigma and improve the quality of life for people with mental health disorders.

Recent Research in Religion

This paper reports the results of a study of the citations accompanying research published over ten years in the fields of theology, religious studies, and biblical studies. The purpose of the citation analysis project was to determine patterns of material usage by scholars in the discipline of Religion. The project proposed to seek answers to questions that frequently cross the minds of theological librarians, including, among others, the types of sources used by researchers in our fields, the prominence of primary sources, the currency of sources cited, dominant languages of publication and research, and most frequently used journals. 
 A sample of peer-reviewed articles from these fields, chosen from journals indexed by the ATLA Religion Database, was examined from a variety of angles. 4107 cited references from 96 articles were analyzed for source type, publication language, dating, and authorship; articles were further examined for the peer review status of the publishing journal and the subject area covered. 
 The cited references of the 96 articles analyzed were primarily monographs, published in English, published and created within the decades before the publication of the citing articles, and most had a single author. The 14 most frequently cited journals covered topics in religion and the social sciences.
 The results reported here are expected to be informative to theological librarians in making collection development decisions and building subject liaison relationships. Librarians may choose monograph acquisitions over other types, or consider promoting other types of resources differently to encourage use. Theological librarians might consider subscribing to journal titles which overlap in subject coverage with the social sciences. Librarians and discipline faculty will likely find many conversation points among the data presented here.