The written word has been a central bearer of culture since antiquity. But its position is now being challenged by the powerful media of electronic communication. In this penetrating and witty book James O'Donnell takes a reading on the promise and the threat of electronic technology for our literate future.
In Avatars of the Word O'Donnell reinterprets today's communication revolution through a series of refracted comparisons with earlier revolutionary periods: the transition from oral to written culture, from the papyrus scroll to the codex, from copied manuscript to print. His engaging portrayals of these analogous epochal moments suggest that our steps into cyberspace are not as radical as we might think. Observing how technologies of the word have affected the shaping of culture in the past, and how technological transformation has been managed, we regain models that can help us navigate the electronic transformation now underway. Concluding with a focus on the need to rethink the modern university, O'Donnell specifically addresses learning and teaching in the humanities, proposing ways to seek the greatest benefit from electronic technologies while steering clear of their potential pitfalls.
The Concheros blend Catholic and indigenous traditions in their performances, but are not governed by a predetermined set of beliefs; rather they are bound together by long standing interpersonal connections framed by the discipline of their tradition. The Concheros manifest their spirituality by means of the dance. Rostas traces how they construct their identity and beliefs, both individual and communal, by its means. The book offers new insights into the experience of dancing as a Conchero while also exploring their history, organization and practices.
Carrying the Word provides a new way for audiences to understand the Conchero's dance tradition, and will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Mesoamerica. Those studying identity, religion, and tradition will find this social-anthropological work particularly enlightening.
A Publishers Weekly Best Religion Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
For many Americans, being Christian is central to their political outlook. Political Christianity is most often associated with the Religious Right, but the Christian faith has actually been a source of deep disagreement about what American society and government should look like. While some identify Christianity with Western civilization and unfettered individualism, others have maintained that Christian principles call for racial equality, international cooperation, and social justice. At once incisive and timely, Christian delves into the intersection of faith and political identity and offers an essential reconsideration of what it means to be Christian in America today.
“Bowman is fast establishing a reputation as a significant commentator on the culture and politics of the United States.”
—Church Times
“Bowman looks to tease out how religious groups in American history have defined, used, and even wielded the word Christian as a means of understanding themselves and pressing for their own idiosyncratic visions of genuine faith and healthy democracy.”
—Christian Century
“A fascinating examination of the twists and turns in American Christianity, showing that the current state of political/religious alignment was not necessarily inevitable, nor even probable.”
—Deseret News
Communicating the Word is a record of the 2008 Building Bridges seminar, an annual dialogue between leading Christian and Muslim scholars convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Featuring the insights of internationally known Christian and Muslim scholars, the essays collected here focus attention on key scriptural texts but also engage with both classical and contemporary Islamic and Christian thought. Issues addressed include, among others, the different ways in which Christians and Muslims think of their scriptures as the “Word of God,” the possibilities and challenges of translating scripture, and the methods—and conflicts—involved in interpreting scripture in the past and today.
In his concluding reflections, Archbishop Rowan Williams draws attention to a fundamental point emerging from these fascinating contributions: “Islam and Christianity alike give a high valuation to the conviction that God speaks to us. Grasping what that does and does not mean . . . is challenging theological work.”
This book contains two volumes of African American folk tales collected by J. Mason Brewer.
The stories included in Dog Ghosts are as varied as the Texas landscape, as full of contrasts as Texas weather. Among them are tales that have their roots deeply imbedded in African, Irish, and Welsh mythology; others have parallels in pre-Columbian Mexican tradition, and a few have versions that can be traced back to Chaucer's England. All make delightful reading. The title Dog Ghosts is drawn from the unique stories of dog spirits which Dr. Brewer collected in the Red River bottoms and elsewhere in Texas.
The Word on the Brazos is a delightful collection of "preacher tales" from the Brazos River bottom in Texas. J. Mason Brewer worked side by side with field hands in the Brazos bottoms; he lived in their homes, worshipped in their churches, and shared the moments of relaxation in which laughter held full sway.
Many of the tales these people told were related to religion—both "good religion" and "bad religion." Some of them concerned preachers and their families, while others were stories told in pulpits. Mr. Brewer has set all of these stories down in authentic yet easily readable dialect. They will delight all who are interested in the historic culture of rural African-American Texans, as well as those who simply enjoy fine humorous stories skillfully told.
A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception
How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.
Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics.
Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere.
Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for “premodern” Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews.
Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.
Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it’s the word and the way I was looking for."
Giamo also seeks IT—"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the ‘real’ concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to ‘the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."
The Victorians were image obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres—illustration and narrative painting—that blurred the line between the visual and textual.
Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race.
Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.
In nineteenth-century America, many black women left their homes, their husbands, and their children to spread the Word of God. Descendants of slaves or former “slave girls” themselves, they traveled all over the country, even abroad, preaching to audiences composed of various races, denominations, sexes, and classes, offering their own interpretations of the Bible. When they were denied the pulpit because of their sex, they preached in tents, bush clearings, meeting halls, private homes, and other spaces. They dealt with domestic ideologies that positioned them as subservient in the home, and with racist ideologies that positioned them as naturally inferior to whites. They also faced legalities restricting blacks socially and physically and the socioeconomic reality of often being part of a large body of unskilled laborers.
Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Maria Stewart, and Frances Gaudet were four women preachers who endured such hardships because of their religious convictions. Often quoting from the scripture, they insisted that they were indeed prophesying daughters whom God called upon to preach. Significantly, many of these women preachers wrote autobiographies in which they present images of assertive, progressive, pious women—steadfast and unmovable in their religious beliefs and bold in voicing their concerns about the moral standing of their race and society at large.
Chanta M. Haywood examines these autobiographies to provide new insight into the nature of prophesying, offering an alternative approach to literature with strong religious imagery. She analyzes how these four women employed rhetorical and political devices in their narratives, using religious discourse to deconstruct race, class, and gender issues of the nineteenth century.
By exploring how religious beliefs become an avenue for creating alternative ideologies, Prophesying Daughters will appeal to students and scholars of African American literature, women’s studies, and religious studies.
Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Olga Peters Hasty establishes the basic themes of the Orphic Complex—the poet’s longing to mediate between the embodied physical world and an “elsewhere,” the poet’s inability to do so, the primacy of the voice over the visual world, the insistence on concrete imagery, the costs of the poet’s gift—and orders her arguments in the tragic shape of the Orpheus myth as it worked itself out organically in Tsvetaeva’s own life. Hasty delineates the connections between the Orpheus myth and other key mythological and literary figures in the poet’s life—including Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Rainer Maria Rilke—to make an important and original critical contribution.
In search of the origins of some of the most fundamental problems that have beset philosophers in English-speaking countries in the past century, Claire Ortiz Hill maintains that philosophers are treating symptoms of ills whose causes lie buried in history. Substantial linguistic hurdles have blocked access to Gottlob Frege's thought and even to Bertrand Russell's work to remedy the problems he found in it. Misleading translations of key concepts like intention, content, presentation, idea, meaning, concept, etc., severed analytic philosophy from its roots.
Hill argues that once linguistic and historical barriers are removed, Edmund Husserl's critical study of Frege's logic in his 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic provides important insights into issues in philosophy now.
She supports her conclusions with analyses of Frege's, Husserl's, and Russell's works, including Principia Mathematica, and with linguistic analyses of the principal concepts of analytic philosophy. She re-establishes links that existed between English and Continental thought to show Husserl's expertise as a philosopher of mathematics and logic who had been Weierstrass's assistant and had long maintained ties with Cantor, Hilbert, and Zermelo.
Remembered today primarily as a poet, calligrapher, and critic, the protean Su Shi was an outspoken player in the contentious politics and intellectual debates of the Northern Song dynasty. In this comprehensive study, Ronald C. Egan analyzes Su’s literary and artistic work against the background of eleventh-century developments within Buddhist and Confucian thought and Su’s dogged disagreement with the New Policies of Wang Anshi.
Egan explicates Su’s views on governance, the classics, and Buddhism; and he describes Su’s social-welfare initiatives, arrest for disloyalty, and exiles. Finding a key to the richness of Su’s artistic activities in his vacillation on the significance of aesthetic pursuits, Egan explores Su’s shi and ci poetry and Su’s promotion of painting and calligraphy, looking specially at the problem of subjectivity. In a concluding chapter, he reconsiders Su’s role as a founder of the wenren (“literati”) and challenges the conventional understanding of both Su and the Northern Song wenren generally.
The Book of Mormon’s narrative privileges Isaiah over other sources, provocatively interpreting and at times inventively reworking the biblical text. Joseph M. Spencer sees within the Book of Mormon a programmatic investigation regarding the meaning and relevance of the Book of Isaiah in a world increasingly removed from the context of the times that produced it. Working from the crossroads of reception studies and Mormon studies, Spencer investigates and clarifies the Book of Mormon’s questions about the vitality of Isaiah’s prophetic project. Spencer’s analysis focuses on the Book of Mormon’s three interactions with the prophet: the character of Abinadi; the resurrected Jesus Christ; and the nation-founding figure of Nephi. Working from the Book of Mormon as it was dictated, Spencer details its vital and overlooked place in Isaiah’s reception while recognizing the interpretation of Isaiah as an organizing force behind the Book of Mormon.
Editor’s Introduction
by Dan Vogel
[p.vii]Belief in continuing revelation and an open canon of scripture distinguishes Mormonism from mainstream Christianity. That the church founded by Joseph Smith would proceed on grounds of continuing revelation was established at the outset. The day the church was organized, 6 April 1830, Joseph Smith dictated a revelation commanding the church to “give heed unto all his words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them,… for his words ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith” (LDS D&C 21:4-5; RLDS D&C 19:2). Another revelation declared that the Lord had “given him the keys of the mysteries, and the revelations which are sealed” (LDS D&C 28:7; RLDS D&C 27:12). The principle of continuing revelation insured a gradual unfolding and canonization of various doctrines.
In addition to the Bible, the official canon of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints includes the Book of Mormon (first published in Palymra, New York, in 1830), the Doctrine and Covenants (issued in 1833 as A Book of Commandments [incomplete] and in 1835 in Kirtland, Ohio), and the Pearl of Great Price (first published in England in 1851 and republished with changes in Salt Lake City in 1880). This latter volume of scripture contains selections from Joseph Smith’s writings including the Book of Moses (extracted from Smith’s “inspired version” or “translation” of the Bible) and the Book of Abraham (taken from Smith’s interpretation of an ancient Egyptian papyrus). The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Independence, [p.viii] Missouri, the second largest institution tracing its origins to Joseph Smith, publishes its own editions of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants, as well as Smith’s revision of the Bible, but has not canonized the Book of Abraham.
All but one of the following fifteen essays chosen for inclusion in The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture were written by Mormons from either the LDS or RLDS tradition. (The exception is Susan Curtis.) However, rather than being guided by institutional imperatives, each author has attempted to understand Mormon scripture on its own terms. Additionally, each essay wrestles with the problem of the human and the divine in scripture.
Because one’s belief about revelation affects how one approaches scripture, debate about scriptural interpretation often centers on the nature of revelation. The written “word of God” does not come to us direct but rather through human intermediaries. In the words of J. R. Dummelow, writing in A Commentary on The Holy Bible (New York) in 1908, “It is as sunlight through a painted window—the light must come to us coloured by the medium… It is foolish to ignore the existence of the human medium through which the light has come” (p. cxxxv). Book of Mormon prophets, for instance, repeatedly express anxiety over human limitations to convey in language their spiritual teachings. Nephi prays that “the words which I have written in weakness will be made strong” (LDS 2 Ne. 33:4; RLDS 2 Ne. 15:5), and Moroni writes, “if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God” (Title Page); A position which does not account for the human in revelation will undoubtedly produce disillusionment or distortion.
To consider the human aspects of prophets, revelation, or scripture does not detract from religion, as some traditionalists fear. On the contrary, what cultural and environmental studies challenge are simplistic assumptions about the nature of revelation. Again, Dummelow notes, “Because of our false theory of Verbal Inspiration we are puzzled when the divine is mingled with the human. We must learn that the divine is mingled with the human” (ibid.). We must seek a definition of revelation which accounts for the spectrum of characteristics we encounter in scripture.
Even when we acknowledge the human in revelation and scripture, what exactly is its role and influence? These are not easy [p.ix] questions to answer. But the more precise our identification of human influence on scripture, the more refined our definition of revelation will become. It is hoped that this collection of essays will contribute to that process of understanding.
An awareness of revelation and scripture is an ongoing process and there are differing positions. Readers should therefore understand that neither the authors nor the editor necessarily agree with the views and conclusions reached in all of the essays that follow.
Appreciation is extended to the following authors and publications for permission to reproduce, sometimes in a different format and/or under a different title, many of the essays appearing here: to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for essays by Kevin L. Barney, Lester E. Bush, A. Bruce Lindgren, William D. Russell, and George D. Smith; to Sunstone for essays by Anthony A. Hutchinson, Melodie Moench Charles, and Mark D. Thomas; to the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal for essays by Susan Curtis and James E. Lancaster; to Courage for the essay by Richard P. Howard; and to University Bulletin (RLDS) for the essay by Geoffrey F. Spencer. Three of the essays—”Joseph Smith’s Scriptural Cosmology,” by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe; and “Reducing Dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study” and “Making the Scriptures ‘Indeed One in Our Hands,'” both by Edward H. Ashment—are published here for the first time.
Throughout the essays standardized parenthetical scriptural references are provided for the most recent editions published by both the LDS and RLDS churches. Thus LDS D&C 76:1 refers to the most recent edition of the Doctrine and Covenants published by the LDS church, section 76, verse 1. RLDS 1 Ne. 2:4 refers to the Book of First Nephi, chapter 2, verse 4, in the most recent edition of the Book of Mormon published by the RLDS church. JST means the Joseph Smith translation of the King James Bible published by the RLDS church; Moses to the Book of Moses and Abr. to the Book of Abraham as found in current editions of the Pearl of Great Price (PGP) published by the LDS church.[p.1]
Since the 1970s, Islam has been undergoing a tremendous resurgence throughout the world. This resurgence has often been labeled "Islamic fundamentalism" by the media, but it includes believers of every persuasion, from the most conservative to the most liberal.
Given this fact, it is vital for the West to understand the terms in which Islam thinks and to communicate effectively with Muslims. This anthology includes writings central to Islamic thought, some translated earlier but here redone, and others which have never before appeared in any Western language.
The selections include an interpretation of the Qur'an, as well as portions of the Hadith, or sayings and actions of the Prophet; Islamic law; mysticism (Sufism); theology; and sectarian writings. A final essay on Islam today places these writings in their contemporary context and shows the breadth and variety of Islamic belief and practice.
Compiled with the intention of letting Islam describe itself in its own words, the book is an important source for all students of Muslim culture and world religions. This book is similar in scope to Williams' well-known 1961 George Braziller publication, but freshly written and much improved.
Borchard’s account offers a graphic, disturbing, and profoundly moving picture of life on Las Vegas’s streets, depicting the strategies that homeless men employ in order to survive, from the search for a safe place to sleep at night to the challenges of finding food, maintaining personal hygiene, and finding an acceptable place to rest during a long day on the street.
That such misery and desperation exist in the midst of Las Vegas’s hedonistic tourist economy and booming urban development is a cruel irony, according to the author, and it threatens the city’s future as a prime tourist destination. The book will be of interest to social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, politicians, and all those concerned about changing the misery on the street.
"The Word On the Street invites humanities scholars to move beyond the classroom and the monograph to share the pleasures of art in ways that engage the intelligence of the common reader, cultivating the critical imagination so vital to American cultural democracy. Lively and thought-provoking, Teres lays out contemporary debates and wades into them with gusto."
---Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University
"At a moment when questions about the literary, 'bookishness,' and the future of print are being urgently raised, with incessant national attention to the perceived crises of literacy and reading, Teres' thoughtful, broadly democratic, but also tough-minded examination of both 'common readers' and academic readers makes a real contribution to the debate."
---Julie Ellison, University of Michigan
Despite significant changes since the mid-twentieth century in American critical culture---the culture emanating from the serious review of books, ideas, and the arts---it attracts only a small and declining minority of Americans. However productive this culture has been, American society has not approached the realization of Emerson's or Dewey's vision of a highly participatory American cultural democracy. Such a culture requires critics who are read by the average citizen, but the migration of critics and intellectuals from the public to the academy has resulted in fewer efforts to engage with ordinary citizens. The Word on the Street investigates this disjunction between the study of literature in the academy and the interests of the common reader and society at large, arguing the vital importance of publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities. Teres chronicles how the once central function of the humanities professorate---to teach students to appreciate and be inspired by literature---has increasingly been lost to literary and cultural studies in the last thirty years.
The Word on the Street argues for a return to an earlier model of the public intellectual and a literary and cultural criticism that is accessible to ordinary citizens. Along the way, Teres offers an illuminating account of the current problem and potential solutions, with the goal of prompting a future vision of publicly engaged scholarship that resonates with the common reader and promotes an informed citizenry.
Harvey Teres is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University.
Cover image: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux
The New Public Scholarship
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