Breadth Of Scholarship Research Articles

Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy

The rise of the religious right in societies around the world has brought back the contentious issue of religion's place in modern life. The secularization thesis is constantly invoked to explain the historical devaluation of religion's function in society (at least in the Protestant world) from normative to nominal as religion is relegated to the private space of individual belief. While the subject has engaged historians, sociologists, and religious scholars for a long time, yielding a vast and proliferating body of work (Asad; Berger; Casanova; Connolly; Taylor,Secular Age;Wilson), the field of literary studies has not witnessed a corresponding breadth of scholarship. This may be partly due to literature's self-definition as a secular vehicle for ideas whose possible religious origins were subsequently effaced as religious sensibility became absorbed into aesthetic form and imagery, especially in modernist writing. Contributing in no small measure to the perception that literature represents an outgrowth of secularism is Matthew Arnold's influential claim that literature succeeds a depleted Christianity and contains the moral values and direction once supplied by a religious ethos.

Intertextual resonance in Christopher Okigbo's poetry

Artistic creativity can be demonstrated in several ways, one of which is in the area of intertextuality as a literary endeavour. Intertextuality is the by-product of wide scholarship, which Christopher Okigbo exemplifies in his poetry. No work of art exists in a vacuum, as every writer is said to operate within a given literary tradition that has preceded him. This being the case, the issue of virginal purity in works of art is ruled out completely, if not partially. And rather than being a vice, this artistic device is a virtue. If anything, it is a demonstration of literary creativity; how a writer is able to re-echo the theme, structure and style of other writers before him. That is to say, no text is totally independent of the influence of other texts. Accordingly, Christopher Okigbo in his Labyrinth With Path of Thunder re-echoes the themes and style of other texts such as the Bible, classical literary sources of ancient Babylonian, Greek, Roman and some nineteenth and twentieth century literary traditions of Hopkin's The Wreck of the Deutschland, Debussy's Nocturne, Melville's Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eliot's Waste Land, etc. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 3 () 2006: pp.109-120

The Mass Repatriation of the Armenians from Iran in 1946-1947 (Some Statistical Data)

AbstractAfter the independence of Armenia following the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, most of hitherto closed archive materials became accessible for wide scholarship. This paper is an attempt to present a statistical analysis of the data concerning the Armenian migrants from Iran during a mass repatriation in 1946-1947. It is based mainly on the archive documents preserved in the Armenian National Archives in Yerevan. The paper provides detailed information on various demographical parameters of the repatriates including gender, age, profession, marital status, education level, employment, and literacy.

David A. Wells (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2005 855 his tact is best seen as a successful stratagem, to produce precisely the sense of an irreconcilable dichotomy. San Roman's essay thus opens up a more interesting ques? tion about the rhetoric of tact, but draws back from furtherinvestigation. Likewise, Henry Ettinghausen's description of the way in which seventeenthcentury Spanish new sources extolled Spanish might, disparaged the Turkish infidel, and generally served as a mechanism of social control (no great revelations there, I feel) rather misses a trick when he passes almost silently over the observation that the Crown would use these pamphlets also as 'a semi-official kite-flying exercise', testing reactions to proposals and so establishing 'a dialectical relationship between government and public opinion' (p. 239). Ettinghausen's missed opportunity is per? haps symptomatic of the way in which a collection that sets out to be so ambitious in the ends suffersfrom its own lack of assertiveness. University of British Columbia Jon Beasley-Murray The Central Franconian Rhyming Bible ('Mittelfrankische Reimbibel'): An Early Twelfth-Century German Verse Homiliary. A Thematic and Exegetical Commen? tary with the Text and a Translation into English. By David A. Wells. (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 155) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2004. xvi + 359 pp. ?90. ISBN 90-420-0860-1. This well-conceived and attractively presented volume constitutes a definitive guide to the so-called Central Franconian Rhyming Bible, a fragmentary Early Middle High German work thought to date fromthe firsthalf ofthe twelfthcentury. To supplement the text itself (which is essentially that of Friedrich Maurer's edition of 1964, with a few emendations based on more recent scholarship), David Wells offersan accurate and carefully nuanced translation into English, as well as an admirable section-bysection commentary. The commentary is particularly valuable, not only because ofthe way in which it elucidates this particular literarywork, but also because itconstitutes a thesaurus of information on early medieval theological traditions, exegetical practices, and spiritual commonplaces; the breadth of scholarship on display will be of potential benefit to all scholars working on Middle High German religious literature. The detailed introductory and concluding sections provide a careful assessment of this text in its literary,liturgical, and theological context, and make particularly good use of recent developments in sermon studies. The Central Franconian Rhyming Bible includes select episodes from the Old Tes? tament (mostly from Genesis and Exodus); certain incidents from the life of Christ; and a few hagiographical narratives (including accounts of the Inventio Crucis and the Exaltatio Crucis). In its presentation of this material, the work is characterized by a certain ambiguity in genre, a feature which is compounded by its fragmentary sta? tus. Although earlier scholars believed that the surviving fragments might represent a religious epic encompassing the whole of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement, this view has been superseded, and the work is now thought to have stronger generic connections with the sermon (or collection of sermons) than with the epic, or with other forms of comprehensive biblical narrative. As Wells points out, even the use of the term 'Bible' in the title is something of a misnomer, since the work is 'primarily a sequence of homiletic narratives more familiar from analogous texts in prose' (p. 3). With respect to the ordering of the material, Wells draws particular attention to the tension between the anonymous poet's narrative mode, which would appear to favour the presentation of episodes on the basis of their historical sequence, and the liturgical framework attaching to the homiletic source material. Wells suggests that this unresolved tension between the historical and liturgical approaches is the 856 Reviews most serious indicator of the poet's 'literary ineptitude and lack of control' (p. 276), but also notes that the body of vernacular homiletic material on which this poet was drawing is unlikely to have been available in a particularly coherent or well-structured form. By way of contrast, Wells draws on the Old English homiletic corpus of i^Elfric of Eynsham, which has been organized by 'a single tidy mind' (p. 266). However, although Wells makes no claims for any particular aesthetic merits in this text, he clearly communicates enthusiasm...

Rethinking research on psychosocial interventions in biopsychosocial oncology: an essay written in honor of the scholarly contributions of Bernard H. Fox.

In his best known contribution to the field of psychooncology, the late Dr Bernard H. Fox applied his breadth of scholarship in biopsychosocial cancer epidemiology to address the question of whether and to what extent stress and other psychosocial factors may contribute to cancer risk. Less well known but equally important to the field is his incisive critique of the 1989 study by Spiegel et al. on survival time of patients with metastatic breast cancer following a psychosocial intervention. This essay represents an attempt to take Fox's line of thought to the next logical level of rethinking research on psychosocial interventions in biopsychosocial oncology. Following an analysis of the inadequacy of randomized clinical trials (RCT) to evaluate the causal effects of psychosocial interventions on cancer outcomes and distinguish these from mere prediction, an integrated RCT design is suggested to take into account the psychogenicity of a given intervention, potential mediating mechanisms, and individual differences that could help illuminate hypothesized causal processes linking an experimental intervention and cancer outcomes.

Theology and psychology: an essay review on Fraser Watts

In his recent book Theology and Psychology, Fraser Watts explores an area of interdisciplinary dialogue that has become active on many fronts. He traces the main areas of engagement while limiting his purview mostly to psychological explorations of the formation of the human spirit and of religious experience, and theology directed to parallel concepts. Psychology is largely pursued within its subdisciplines pertaining to introspective psychologies, neuroscience, and social psychology. The theology is mostly within the Christian, and especially Anglican, tradition, yet the variety of voices here is also well known. Within these broad limits, and with impressive depth and breadth of scholarship, Watts addresses topics as diverse as evolutionary theory, the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, the foundations of morality, the soul, immortality, divine action, the doctrine of the Fall, eschatology, and the origin of belief. Although he provides fair representations of various views, he consistently rejects 'greedy' forms of 'nothing buttery', because he believes that the human person and religious experience are so multifaceted that they cannot be grasped from any single standpoint. In addition, as he points out, various reductionistic claims are simply inaccurate. It is suggested that Watts's thinking shows many parallels with theories developing within the new sciences of complexity. Further development of his work along these lines might have significance both for his own contribution and for the growing field of complexity studies.

MAKING SENSE OF FREQUENCY

Nick Ellis's article is impressive for its breadth of scholarship and the cogent case made for frequency as an important factor in second language acquisition (SLA). This response begins with a brief historical sketch, which aims to contextualize the frequency factor in terms of the evolution of SLA research. Although researchers have known about a frequency effect for some time, until recently, we have lacked neurologically plausible models and technologically convenient means of measuring and testing frequency effects in input. Still, as relevant and important as a frequency factor is, it requires greater definition and qualification. For instance, L2 learners are agents of their own learning process. They do not merely record frequency; they categorize frequently occurring patterns, abstract, and generalize from them. Higher level generalizations emerge from interactions, impose top-down expectancies on future data, and, in turn, are altered by the data in a perpetually dynamic interplay. In a similar fashion, it is incumbent on SLA researchers not to be satisfied with a frequency explanation, but to interpret it—in short, to make sense of frequency.

:The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology

Eerdmans' third edition of Dowey's The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology is both a welcomed and noteworthy publishing event, welcomed because its publication makes available for a new generation Dowey's substantive analysis of Calvin's thought and noteworthy because its author's breadth of scholarship, then and now, endows the work, with its expanded appendices, with a lively, penetrat ing, and judicious perspective from which to assess Calvin's theological genius. With incisive clarity, Dowey both explains and criticizes Calvin's principle of the duplex cognitio domini, illuminating how the Reformer's concept of the knowledge of God the Creator and the knowledge of God the Redeemer controls and contributes to the whole of Calvin's thought. Although first published over forty years ago, Dowey's comprehensive study still remains the best on the subject. - Theology Today

Myth, cult and reality in Ovid'sFasti

The relation of Ovid'sFastito Roman religion has been discussed many times, but has never been dealt with properly. Despite a radical re-evaluation, in recent years, of Ovid's literary sophistication, scholars of Roman religion still tend to offer a negative judgment on Ovid's value. Criticisms have been varied. Ovid's unseriousness – frivolous tales in a context so solemn–has been considered exasperating. He has been accused (for example by Fr. Altheim) of lacking any religious sense whatsoever and of destroying respect for religion. Others, like Wissowa, have judged him to possess neither wide scholarship nor even the capacity of bringing his analyses to any proper conclusion. And it is not just authorities of the past who talk in these terms of moral outrage. Even today many historians of religion ignore or even reject theFastias any kind of reliable ‘source’. Hiscausaeare, they say, incomplete and incoherent; and he is further criticized for being unable to make a final decision between all the explanations he offers. In the camp of theOvidiomastiges, shocked by the poet's amateurishness, one also finds those interested in Rome's mythology: evidence earlier than theFastibeing missing in most of the cases, the mythologists deeply resent Ovid's elusive art which frustrates their expectations. I will not here reconsider all the criticism nor will I offer a final defence or condemnation of the author of theFasti, I will simply claim that there is no case to answer.

Islamic Art (review)

120 Reviews speech in the Canterbury Tales' is less focussed as an essay, perhaps because stories about saints do not have such a primary function for Chaucer as they do for Christine de Pisan. The essay of Jo Ann McNamara, 'The need to give: suffering and female sanctity in the Middle Ages' matches that of Vauchez in breadth of scholarship and vision. She looks at the way in which communities of religious women were gradually transformed from being centres of active care-giving to being relatively impoverished communities in which women pursed a vocation of spiritual purification on behalf of the wider community. In a restrictive society, ambitious women turned to setf-imposed deprivation to continue to be the caregivers of society. The essays of John Coakley, 'Friars as confidants of holy women in medieval Dominican hagiography', Elizabeth Robertson, 'The corporeality of female sanctity in The life of Saint Margaret' and indirectly that of Richard Kieckheffer 'Holiness and the culture of devotion: remarks on some late medieval male saints' all draw attention to the differences between male and female saints. Here is a subject worthy of a volume on its own. As with so many volumes that emanate from conferences, this coUection is a mixed bag. It contains sufficient treasure, however, for it not to be missed. Constant J. M e w s Department of History Monash University Brend, Barbara, Islamic Art, London, British Museum Press, 1991; paper; pp. 240; 105 colour and 60 black and white illustrations; R.R.P. AUSS49.95 [distributed in Australia by Thames and Hudson]. Early eighth-century Islamic traditions were evolved by the architects and artists of the conquered Byzantine principalities surrounding the Mediterranean and those of the Persian Sassanid empire extending from Iraq to Central Asia. Later on, the symphony of blue and white ornamentation on tiles bonowed from the Chinese and the stone carvings of the Indians bestowed on the Islamic monuments brilliance and glamour of indescribable beauty and delicacy. The arrangements of arch forms, domes and minarets in conjunction with geometrical patterns, vegetal ornamentations and different calligraphic styles in their mosques, khanqahs (stiff monasteries) and madrasas (seminaries) were, however, dictated by their own religious needs to demonstrate the Oneness and omnipotence of the Divine Almighty. Only a few specimens of Islamic metal work, pottery, jade, jewels, ivory, arts of the book, paintings,textiles,carpet and wood carvings have survived in museums and private collections. Nevertheless they go a long way towards showing cross-cultural influences from the artistic traditions of both east and west Reviews 121 Barbara Brend in her book traces historically the period styles and individual media of Islamic art and architecture over 1200 years. Starting with the legacy of the Umayyads, who ruled from 661 to 750, and their successors the 'Abbasids, who were overthrown by the Mongol conquerors in 1258, she goes on to describe the distinctive features of Islamic art in the lands of the West (Egypt North Africa and Spain), and in the regions ruled by Turks extending from Transoxiana to Western Iran and Anatolia. Before describing the majestic tile work on the monuments of the Mongols in Tabriz, Samarqand and Shahr-i Sabz and the fourteenth and fifteenth century Persian paintings of the Mongols, who had converted to Islam, she picks up some of the architectural monuments in Aleppo and Cairo which were built by the rulers of the dynasties who ruled over Northern Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt in the wake of the expulsion of the Crusaders from the region. She then discusses the artistic achievements of the Safavids and Qajars of Iran and those of the Ottomans both in the east and also west of the Bosphoras. Her last chapter deals with the development of Islamic art in the Indian environment under the Sultans of Delhi and the Mughal emperors. In her conclusion she points out the Western interest in Islamic patterns in passing. Barbara Brend, who is a lecturer for the British Museum and British Library, has developed a knack to explain complex artistic concepts to lay visitors. Whtie summarizing from the standard works on the subject she brings to bear upon her book her sktil of simplifying controversial issues for general...

Evaluating the Growth of Helplessness Literature

Evaluating the Growth of Helplessness Literature

Africa's Nuclear Capability

Theimpact of nuclear weapons on the present and future trends in international relations continues to attract wide scholarship. While the literature on the subject has been growing apace, nuclear technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the dangers posed to the survival of mankind are becoming much more acute than hitherto. In broad terms, the fears expressed about these weapons tend to centre around the implications of three major issues: the emergence of greater first-strike inclinations in the two super-power nuclear forces; the possibility of a perceived strategic imbalance favouring either the United States or the Soviet Union; and the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Heinrich Pesch's Solidarism and Boris Ischboldin's Scientific Reformism

Professor Boris Ischboldin has devoted a lifetime of productive scholarship to economic science. By virtue of his native gifts and a highly cultured background he has attained to a breadth of scholarship which is reminiscent of that giant of modern economics, Joseph Schumpeter. Ischboldin's linguistic skills have enabled him to acquire an uncommon familiarity with the works of economists that is truly international in scope, and that is one factor which prompts me to compare him with Schumpeter. Among the results of his efforts are an approach to, or school of, economics which he chooses to call the School of Economic Synthesis. It involves, among other things, a synthesis of various approaches to analysing economic realities—approaches whose various practitioners often tended to regard their own as the one correct and only legitimate method. In less skillful hands, or perhaps because of less charitable hearts, diversity often resulted in a kind of tension that was not always creative, as well as a mutual exclusiveness and even scholastic in‐tolerance which put an unneeded burden on the progress of the science. With Professor Ischboldin and the co‐founder of the School of Economic Synthesis, Arthur Spiethoff, variety became instead the basis for complementary creativity! Thus, such disparate figures as David Ricardo and Wesley Mitchell, or Leon Walras and John Commons find themselves embraced into a single schema that Ischboldin calls, “a theory of economic laws and methodology”.

Fritz Loewe 1895–1974

Summary Dr Fritz Loewe, geographer, meteorologist and glaciologist, left Germany after the rise of Nazism, and established in Melbourne the first University Department of Meteorology. He brought to Geography in Australia a wide personal knowledge of some of the great men of German Geography, wide scholarship, and the inspiration of his own outstanding energy and courage.

Attenuated Infection: The Germ Theory in Contemporary Perspective by Harold J. Simon (review)

transfer studies in Amoeba (Danielli). All the articles are worth reading, some are stimulating , and the volume is, in general, recommended. Variation among the authors' precision in writing is notable. One can wonder about the value ofreferring to "transduced characters" and "transduced clones," as one author does (and in the same sentence). The considerations by Pritchard ofrecombinational analysis are probably the most analytical in the volume; he reports interesting observations which support the hypothesis that homologous contact between chromosomes is a limiting factor in recombination. For the person with a general interest in genetics, this volume will be a helpful up-to-date summary, and for the specialist in this area, necessary reading. M. L. Morse University ofColorado Attenuated fofection: The Germ Theory in Contemporary Perspective. By HaroldJ. Simon. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., i960. Pp. xvi + 349. $10.00. The period 1950-60 witnessed a revival and extension ofthe perspectives to infectious disease which were earlier promulgated by Charles Nicolle and Karl F. Meyer. The concept ofinfection without disease as a particular phase of a host-parasite relationship has been widely attended by virtue ofthe variety ofstudies directed toward a better understanding ofnatural resistance. It was inevitable that a new surge ofinterest would follow the many observatons that cells ofpresumably healthy hosts harbored infective agents, whether these agents be bacteriophages, plant or animal viruses, or bacterial or protozoan forms. Activation of silent infections—or as Simon prefers to term them, "attenuated infections"—by hormones, drug dierapies, irradiation, or a host ofodier activating procedures ^—has fostered the view that die state ofinfection is a much more normal condition in nature dian the state ofinfectious disease. Simon argues that the infection state is an almost universal condition in nature. He has written a comprehensive exposition of this thesis ofaberration in the form ofovert infectious disease. By the most far-ranging excursions into all areas ofbiological interaction at different levels ofintegration, Simon provocatively organizes the data on attenuated infection, or coexistence, into the subcategories of latency, microbial persistence, and the carrier state, depending upon the particular qualities of die parasite at the time it is isolated from the host. It is not the easiest classification to use experimentally, because it is difficult to assign relative weights to die altered qualities which the parasite may possess in one or another ofthese infection states. The uniqueness ofthis work lies in its interdisciplinary approach and the breadth of scholarship, which is reflected by the author's success in synthesizing a very coherent description ofthe various levek on which host and parasite may come to equilibrium.The privilege ofhaving for this purpose over 300 pages in which to make the case would have been morejustified ifthe actual sets ofdata needed to document the arguments had been included in the text. A minor point on which I would take issue with the work is the lack ofclarity concerning which aspects of the "germ theory" are in question or need refinement. The 383 main thesis is that, while the etiologic agent may be present, there are predisposing factors which act to allow the parasite toexploit its presence. The concept ofdieliving agent ofdisease is obviously not in question, but the concept ofthe specific element certainly is—that is, the weight to be attached to the specificity aspect in the causation ofinfectious diseases. The organization ofthe book is excellent. After certain necessary redefinition ofterms is accomplished and the scope ofthe thesis is laid out, Dr. Simon surveys the breadth of occurrence ofattenuated infection in nature through the animal and plant kingdoms and through the variousphyla ofplant and animalparasites. Atthis pointadiscussionofmeans ofunmasking the latent or silent infection in living cells is followed by a comprehensive review ofthe various mechanisms and factors operating in all varieties ofhosts to affect the fulfilment of the infectious process. To some, but not entirely a rewarding, extent the phenomenainvolved in mixed infection are analyzed with reference to synergism and antagonism; but veryingenuous treatment is given to those situations. Perhaps leastwell treated are the implications in lysogeny and the consequent induction oftoxin-forming ability. A delightful introduction to socio-medical and politico-medical problems as they bear upon respiratory troubles and air pollution as well as radiation illness and modern...