Why me? -- Sticks and stones -- Hammer of God -- God is great -- The problem of atheists -- Guardian angels -- Nations under God -- God knows.

This chapter contains sections titled: Ho, Ho, History Arius and Theological Controversy The Council of Nicaea – a Jolly Occasion Float like an Acolyte, Sting like the See Does Theology Really Matter? Here Comes Santa Claus – into the Twenty‐First Century The Nicholas of History and the Santa of Faith?

At least since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, it has increasingly become accepted that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause, and that religious faith is an entirely non-rational matter--the province of those who willingly refuse to accept the dramatic advances of modern cosmology. Are belief in God and belief in science really mutually exclusive? Or, as noted philosopher of science and religion Richard Swinburne puts forth, can the very same criteria which scientists use to (...) reach theories about everything from DNA to the Big Bang be used to argue for the existence of God? In Is There a God? Swinburne presents a powerful and approachable case for the existence of God. Using the methods of scientific reasoning, Swinburne rigorously argues that science, far from replacing God, provides good grounds for belief in God. With each new discovery and advance, from black holes to quarks, superstrings to continuing evolution, science brings us closer to a complete understanding of how things work--but science can only go so far. Though it can explain much of how the universe works, science doesn't tell us why there is a universe at all. We can understand much of how life evolved, but why is there any life on earth? We can name and explicate scientific laws, but how is it that they operate in the universe? The Darwinian theory holds that the complex animal and human bodies that are here today exist because, ages ago, there were certain chemicals on earth, and given the laws of evolution, it was probable that complex organisms would emerge. But why those laws rather than any other? Why those chemicals? In Swinburne's view, the ultimate grand unifying theory is possible only by a belief in what he calls theism, acknowledging the existence of God: it was God who brought about the natural laws so that humans and animals would evolve. The watch may have been made, Swinburne asserts in reference to Richard Dawkins, with the aid of some blind screwdrivers (or even a blind watchmaking machine), but they were guided by a watchmaker with some very clear sight. At the heart of his argument is Swinburne's belief that the very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing there is an even deeper cause of that order. By embracing a belief in God that acknowledges the truth in science, Swinburne's elegant argument supplies an essential spiritual element to our understanding of order and beauty, the structure beneath the chaos of the natural world. This informed and provocative volume will be essential reading for all readers of popular science, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

If he were alive today, what might Heidegger say about _Halo, _the popular video game franchise? What would Augustine think about _Assassin’s Creed _? What could Maimonides teach us about Nintendo’s eponymous hero, Mario? While some critics might dismiss such inquiries outright, protesting that these great thinkers would never concern themselves with a medium so crude and mindless as video games, it is impor­tant to recognize that games like these are, in fact, becoming the defining medium of our time. We (...) spend more time and money on video games than on books, television, or film, and any serious thinker of our age should be concerned with these games, what they are saying about us, and what we are learning from them. Yet video games still remain relatively unexplored by both scholars and pundits alike. Few have advanced beyond out­moded and futile attempts to tie gameplay to violent behavior. With this canard now thoroughly and repeatedly disproven, it is time to delve deeper. Just as the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan recently acquired fourteen games as part of its permanent collection, so too must we seek to add a serious consideration of virtual worlds to the pantheon of philoso-phical inquiry. In _God in the Machine, _author Liel Leibovitz leads a fas­cinating tour of the emerging virtual landscape and its many dazzling vistas from which we are offered new vantage points on age-old theological and philosophical questions. Free will vs. determinism, the importance of ritual, transcendence through mastery, notions of the self, justice and sin, life, death, and resurrection—these all come into play in the video games that some critics so easily write off as mind-numbing wastes of time. When one looks closely at how these games are designed, at their inherent logic, and at the cognitive effects they have on players, it becomes clear that playing these games creates a state of awareness vastly different from that which occurs when we watch television or read a book. Indeed, gameplay is a far more engaged process—one that draws on various faculties of mind and body to evoke sensa­tions that might more commonly be associated with religious experience. Getting swept away in an engrossing game can be a profoundly spiritual activity. It is not _to think_, but rather simply _to be_, a logic that sustained our ancestors for millennia as they looked heavenward for answers. Today, as more and more of us look screenward, it is important to investigate these games for their vast potential as fine instruments of moral training. Anyone seeking a concise and well-reasoned introduction to the subject would do well to start with _God in the Machine_. By illuminating both where video game storytelling is now and where it currently butts up against certain inherent limitations, Liebovitz intriguingly implies how the field and, in turn, our experiences might continue to evolve and advance in the coming years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gambling with God: The Use of the Lot by the Moravian Brethren in the Eighteenth CenturyElisabeth SommerThe use of the lot in decision-making marks the Moravian Brethren as peculiar in eighteenth-century Europe. Their belief that the lot represented the true will of Christ stands at odds with a century which had inherited a changing world view in which a strong confidence in the power of human reason gradually replaced (...) the assumption of God’s providential power. 1 Historian Andrew Fix has traced this intellectual shift as it affected the seventeenth-century Dutch Collegiants, who moved from a spiritualist to a rationalist approach to religious questions. The Moravian Brethren, known in Europe as the Renewed Unity of the Brethren, resisted the triumph of reason over revelation into the late eighteenth century. In this they reflected the general hostility toward the emphasis on science and reason to which George Becker has pointed as a hallmark of the Halle Pietists. 2 This similarity is not surprising given the fact that the Brethren were very much a part of the later Pietist movement and had strong ties with Halle during the formative years of the Unity. Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the dominant influence in the development of the new Unity, attended the Pädegogium at Halle from 1710 to 1716 and modeled his initial projects on his estate after similar ones in Halle. 3Halle preceded the Brethren in a struggle over the role of reason in spiritual life. In the 1740s the philosophy of Christian Wolff (and hence also of Leibniz) [End Page 267] became popular among many at Halle, despite his having been removed from the faculty in 1722. Although the Halle Pietists did not reject science and reason out of hand, some among the faculty had perceived a distinct threat to faith from Wolff’s particular focus. 4 Through his view of reason as the divine source of human knowledge, Wolff shifted the ultimate test of religious insight from revelation to reason. 5 This same decade saw the Brethren’s piety reach a height of intensely emotional, even sensual, expression. This may have prevented Wolffian ideas from extending their influence into the Unity at that time. By the 1790s, however, it became clear that, at least among many of the lay members of the Unity, the Enlightenment stress on the primacy of reason was winning. Just as the Collegiants had come to view “free prophecy” as a function of human reason, several of the Brethren ultimately saw the lot as something open to human manipulation and objected to its use, arguing that decisions were best left simply to “brotherly reason.” 6Although the emphasis on reason invaded the Unity later than it entered Halle, they shared traits that made them vulnerable. In both cases piety was linked to behavior and a certain level of indoctrination. The tendency to drill young people in proper belief and conduct created a climate in which rival ideas could prove quite seductive. 7 A study of the Unity’s use of the lot and its place within their spiritual life over the course of the century reveals this process. It also reveals something of the nature of authority within the Unity since the change was driven by the laity, while the leadership struggled, largely in vain, to maintain the old order. Most importantly, the debate over the use of the lot shows the dynamics of changing ideas outside of the realm of the university and seminary. This allows a view of the impact of practical concerns and individual desires on intellectual change and illuminates the relationship between abstract ideas and social reality.The Unity of the Brethren began as a gathering of Protestant exiles who settled on the Saxon estate of Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. There they founded the village of Herrnhut, and in 1727, under Zinzendorf’s watchful eye, they drew up a set of village statutes in which they sought to preserve its character as a community “built by the living God and a work of his almighty hand.” 8 Their vision of a godly community resulted in a fusion of spiritual authority with economic and domestic authority... (shrink)

'Excellent, extremely entertaining, utterly compelling, wonderfully unique' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH There isn't a person left in the valley who hasn't turned against Sam Marsdyke. Under the brooding eye of his father he spends his days alone on the moors tending sheep, watching wide-eyed ramblers march past and 'towns' move in, turning farms into second homes. Then a new family arrives, eager for 'welly weekends and a postcard view out the bedroom window', and Marsdyke catches sight of their young daughter. What (...) begins as an unlikely friendship turns into something altogether more unnerving. Brilliantly comic and deeply unsettling. God's Own Country traces a journey across the Yorkshire landscape and into the mind of one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction. 'Remarkable, compelling, very funny and very distrubing . . . like no other character in contemporay fiction' SUNDAY TIMES. (shrink)

I Know There is a God explores the creation of the world and the role of the Designer God. The book refutes the arguments of neo-Darwinism and Punctuated Equilibrium; expounds upon Paley's imagery of the watch as evidence that both the watch and the world need a maker; and seeks to answer Nietzsche's question of whether or not the watchmaker is still alive.

Vernon Sternberg of the S.I.U Press was responsible for bringing out the first edition of this collection of occasional pieces. In addition to the title piece, written in 1940, it includes other blank verses: “Machine Tools,” 1940; “The Historical Attempt by Man to Convert His Evolution from a Subjective to an Objective Process,” 1948; “Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage,” 1917–62; “The Fuller Research Foundation,” 1946–51; A Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science,” 1956; and two prose essays with geometrical diagrams and tables, (...) “Introduction to Omnidirectional Halo,” 1959, and “omnidirectional Halo,” 1960. I once asked Fuller whether No More Secondhand God meant secondhand as in clothes or second hand as in watch? He seemed bemused by the question and answered with a casualness I found suspect—”Now that you mention it,” he said, “I suppose both.” Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller. (shrink)

The best life is realized when all existents are in such harmony with one another that all can play their assigned roles. Suffering always comes from disharmony. The vital harmony of life is harmony between creatures and Creator; and the way in which a creature fits with the existence of the Creator is a necessary condition for the creature's survival. Among all creatures, human beings are able to have comprehensive knowledge of God and achieve an active harmony with God in (...) all aspects. The earth is a testing ground in which humans can prepare themselves epistemically and then practically to contribute actively to harmony with God. Since a laboratory has its own rules, we should not expect an ideal life in the earthly laboratory. After the laboratorial role that one plays in the present world, one still is on the watch and can share in the experiences of living people and develop epistemically so that one receives an epistemic safe point that is necessary for harmony with God. (shrink)

In this narrative, we explore the story of Ananias and Sapphira from the book of Acts in the Christian scriptures. We examine the story in the light of a recent book by Dominic Johnson, God Is Watching You, and other related research. The idea of a punitive God and/or the belief in a punitive God may have significant effects on group functioning. The troubling story of Ananias and Sapphira may be seen as a central cog in the cooperative coming (...) together of what became the Christian Church. In our modern world, a punitive God is an idea we seek to avoid but it may be the one that is essential for a peaceful cooperative world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rome's Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their GodsHans-Friedrich MuellerJason P. Davies. Rome's Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their Gods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x + 341 pp. Cloth, $85.Did the Romans believe in their gods? This question, Davies argues, has too long dominated scholarship on Roman religion, and his challenging book eschews this question (along with its dichotomous counterpart: skepticism), aiming instead to (...) engage vigorously more recent scholarship on Roman religion. Davies has read Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus with sensitive attention to expressions of general religious sentiment and categories, and he has placed his findings squarely in the context of current historiographical analyses of Roman religion's literary functions. Davies sums up nicely: "What we seek here is the nature of the complex cognitive relationship between historiography and religion" (12). Generally excluded from the conversation are scholars who are deceased and who do not write in English. More rigorously excluded are cross-references to ancient authors beyond Davies' chosen three (although they do creep in from time to time, one will not come to this book for Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, et al.). Instead, Davies attempts by well-enunciated and conscious choice to conduct a series of experiments: he reads each of his chosen authors in isolation in order to build a coherent and consistent picture of the religious system of each in close conversation with the last two decades' debates on what Roman religion was really about.Although I shall in due course address my own reservations about his methodology, I would argue that we may applaud Davies for his experimental daring. The progress of knowledge requires room for failures as well as successes. We learn from both, and Davies brings before us three separate experiments: two chapters on Livy and one each on Tacitus and Ammianus. Starting from the premise that for the Romans the gods existed, and that Roman society's basic intellectual framework was "Roman religion" (whatever this may have meant to its many and varied practitioners over the course of the centuries preceding Livy), Davies' fresh readings describe what this religion appears to have entailed for each of his chosen authors. Each of those readings yields an instance or "moment" in the history of the religions of Rome and, as such, is a contribution to "Rome's religious history" (thus fulfilling, to this extent, the promise of the volume's title).After a general introduction outlining this methodology (chap. 1), Davies devotes the next two chapters to Livy (chap. 2: "Livy and the Invention of Roman Religion" and chap. 3: "Gods and Men in Livy"). We find, as we would expect, some discussion of Papirius Cursor, who in 293 B.C.E. arose in the third watch of the night to solicit the requisite impetrative auspicium before engaging the Samnites in battle (Livy 10.40.2). Papirius consulted a keeper of the sacred chickens, who announced a tripudium solistimum, despite the fact that the chickens would not eat (10.40.4). On the basis of this false report, Papirius declares that the auspicium [End Page 313] is excellent (egregium), and he orders the troops to prepare for battle (10.40.5). Papirius' nephew, however, learns from some of the cavalry who had overheard an argument among the pullarii that the pullarius' report was suspect, and he dutifully informs his uncle (10.40.9–10). Livy describes the youth as a "iuuenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus" (10.40.10). Papirius subsequently commends the youth but commences battle (ultimately victorious) on the grounds that the report he had requested and received itself constituted the auspicium, regardless of these other circumstances, and that any consequences for mendacity would be borne by the liar (10.40.11). The keepers of the sacred chickens are ordered to the front line, and the guilty pullarius is struck, and mortally wounded, by a javelin (10.40.12–13). This the consul interprets in turn as confirmation of his own interpretation of the auspicium as well as expiation of wrongdoing by the guilty party; the consul's statement to this effect... (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between monumental commemoration and memory, placing Rachel Whiteread's Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah (2000) as the physical manifestation of Derrida's archive as a place where memory, power, writing and representation intersect. I consider the context and characteristics of Whiteread's memorial alongside the concept of the crypt, formulated by Derrida in his ‘Fors’ to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word (1976). I propose that the archive, formed as it (...) as around the crypt, is a place where death and desire co-habit, and that the Holocaust, the subject of Whiteread's sculpture, is itself an archive that has been constructed around what Maria Torok terms the ‘exquisite corpse’. This exquisite corpse of the Holocaust encrypts, even in its own commemoration, the erotics and desires of the ‘Nazi father’ or ‘Hitler in uns’, what Derrida terms ‘the tombstone of the illicit’. This paper poses the question that we are, even as we remember the Jewish dead, simultaneously re-encrypting the forgetful, murderous Nazi father, and advocates that we maintain a watchfulness on the threshold of the archive, the monument, the text, in order to resist total resolution, complete meaning, the forgetful re-inscription of acts of atrocity. (shrink)

William Paley in his famous statement in 1800 of the Argument from Design, imagined that he found a watch lying on a heath and set to wondering how it came to be there. “The inference is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which.

Both Zora Neale Hurston's "Seraph on the Suwanee" (1948) and Carolyn Chute's "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite contemporary critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated concern with Hurston's other works, particularly "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers find it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical reception of Seraph, The Beans, (...) and Their Eyes reveals the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification. (shrink)

The Heart of What Matters shows that literature has a powerful and unique role to play in understanding life's deepest ethical problems. Anthony Cunningham provides a rigorous critique of Kantian ethics, which has enjoyed a preeminent place in moral philosophy in the United States, arguing that it does not do justice to the reality of our lives. He demonstrates how fine literature can play an important role in honing our capacity to see clearly and choose wisely as he develops a (...) moral philosophy that engages with our intimate emotional concerns. Written in an accessible style and drawing from a provocative body of contemporary literature, this book shows how moral philosophy can reach a far wider audience than it has. -/- In part one of this book, Cunningham sketches out the theoretical basis for a redefined conception of moral philosophy. In part two, he engages in extended analyses of novels that address significant life and character issues, specifically Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Seraph on the Suwanee. Cunningham shows exactly how works like these can inform moral philosophy. Drawing from film, history, psychology, and other social sciences in addition to literature, this book adds to the growing number of works that use literature for ethical analysis and to the growing controversy over Kantian ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Love centers Zora Neale Hurston's art and her life. Her most celebrated novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her sharply criticized autobiography, Dust Tracks on A Road, explore the beauty and difficulties of love for women in the early twentieth century. Janie in Their Eyes was forced to choose between love and freedom to be herself. For Hurston, passionate love for one man competed with her deep desire for a career as a writer and playwright. In all (...) instances, self-fulfillment won out over love. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Forms of Life and Cultural EndowmentsVictor Peterson IIYou know, honey, us colored folk is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.—Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God 15)what does it mean when we speak of a form of life? When speaking of a form of life, we consider one different from others by way of its mode of expression, that is, by (...) its means of construction. This interpretation lends itself to a functional analysis of the material put to use and whose operations jointly express the concept we are after. Modes of expression can be plotted between a rhetorical and semantic axis (Gates 48). As such, "[t]he level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and association, is the point where already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional more active ideological dimensions" (Hall 56). Coordinates within this domain encode signifying practices, revitalizing the traditional concept of signification as a function of what's signified with respect to a signifier. The content of a syntagm in this coordinate system, a point in this plane, indexes its function with respect to others. As such, we will conceive of the content of modes of expression functionally.A function is defined by pairing an element from a domain and another from a sub/co-domain whereby that pair is an element of that function. In this way, we can treat functions as abstract objects. If we treat a domain as what determines the availability of an expression, and a sub/co-domain as representative of its range of application, then the function of applying some proposition maps a movement from a domain of selection to one of composition, that is, its use with respect to others. The function of an expression, then, represents an operation over the possible worlds of its appropriate application (Taylor 201–02, 269, 276). This becomes more interesting when considering assertions whereby one subject is known to be the case for another, a concept that's modeled when a proposition from one is appearing in the object position of another (Fara 65–73). Resultingly, a proposal for an [End Page 26] ontology constituted by modes of interaction rather than identity stipulations to physical entities arises. It follows that if a form of life is understood by way of its mode of expression, then its content is expressed as an ensemble of the functions of its operations. Let this ensemble of functions be called an endowment.There is a pervasive debate in cultural studies that obsesses over proprietary notions as well as the ability to locate an origin. With that in mind, let us consider a coordinate system where there are two perpendicular axes, and we define positions within the space provided at the intersection of lines drawn from each. Each axis is represented by an ordered series of markers. A line drawn from each axis indicates that the coordinates indexed at their intersection is a function of these two markers. This locates an individual at a point in that domain, indexing a relation between the axes framing that space. Therefore, that coordinate-wise space, here a domain of possible expression, is not "empty" as pessimists would claim, but is filled with functional-content, albeit functions yet applied and marked by a point in that plane.Although we are currently speaking of two-dimensional space, the same follows for as many dimensions as we want. A point's location is a function of three values in three dimensions, four in four dimensions, and so on. Forms of life, then, will be comprised of four dimensions. This allows for a space-time conception, wherein joint expressions bend space-time and that space dictates those individuals' possible movements. From this, we construct a geometrical model of space-time represented as a cube composed of two-dimensional slices with these slices extending in a particular direction like cards stacked one on top of the other to model time.We want our conception of a form of life to be spatial. After all, it... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The law, serving as a codification of the commitments and values of “White space,” often treats love and justice as separable and separate values, experiences, and institutions. Black love, on the contrary, is bound up with and, even, identified with justice. This inextricability is painted masterfully in the interstices of Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The story, widely framed as a woman's journey to autonomy and love, is just as much the story of her search (...) for justice. This article uses Hurston's narrative of love and justice, Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy of humanization, and law to illustrate the implications of Black love for engaging legal justice in White space. It concludes that liberation for Black people demands humanizing legal praxis. (shrink)

In this paper I present a linguistic investigation of the literary style known as free indirect discourse within the framework of formal semantics. I will argue that a semantics for free indirect discourse involves more than a mechanism for the independent context shifting of pronouns and other deictic elements. My argumentation is fueled by literary examples of free indirect discourse involving what I call language shifts: -/- Most of the great flame-throwers were there and naturally, handling Big John de Conquer (...) and his works. How he had done everything big on earth, then went up tuh heben without dying atall. Went up there picking a guitar and got all de angels doing the ring-shout round and round de throne...that brought them back to Tea Cake. How come he couldn’t hit that box a lick or two? (Hurston 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God) -/- Free indirect discourse combines elements of both, but it seems decidedly closer to direct discourse. I examine the reigning semantic analysis of free indirect discourse, a variant of the demonstrative account of direct discourse featuring “double context dependence” (Banfield 1982,Schlenker 2004). After showing that this type of account has fundamental difficulties with language shift data like (1), I close with a brief sketch of an alternative analysis based on “mixed quotation.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A comparative analysis of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Flora Nwapa's Efuru suggests the importance of romantic love to the self- actualization of the heroines of these novels, whose authors share similar biographies, concerns, and literary positions in the spheres of African American and African literatures respectively. For Hurston, eros paradoxically represents the ultimately unfulfilled possibility for self-realization that finally may be achieved only in and through the self. By contrast, for Nwapa, the focus (...) shifts from the centrality of romantic love to the complex and contradictory place of childbearing in female self-realization. However, finally, self-actualization is achieved with other women in identification with Mammywater, the powerful Igbo lake goddess. (shrink)

Based on the poem by Saint Augustine "The Beauty of Creation Bears Witness to God," this is a story about how the author's son, Nick, sees the wonderful presence of God in nature, and how the wonder of Nick himself shines through the story of his wonder watching.

Why do people enjoy watching scary movies? Should we bet on the existence of God? Why is pleasure better than pain? And when is a duck not a duck? Mini Philosophy is a fascinating journey into what some of the greatest minds of the last 2500 years have to say about the big questions in life, and why they are relevant to us today. Covering everything from Sun Tzu's strategy for winning at board games to Freud's insights into our (...) 'death drive'; why De Beauvoir believed the mothering instinct is a myth to why Schopenhauer probably wasn't much fun at parties, these mini meditations will expand your mind (and bend it too). (shrink)

As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premisses that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the lawfulness and orderliness of the whole universe. Since 1859, it has formed the intellectual heart of creationist opposition to the Darwinian hypothesis that organisms evolved their adaptive features by the mindless process of natural selection. Although the design argument developed as a defense of theism, the logic of the argument in fact encompasses a larger set of issues. William (...) Paley saw clearly that we sometimes have an excellent reason to postulate the existence of an intelligent designer. If we find a watch on the heath, we reasonably infer that it was produced by an intelligent watchmaker. This design argument makes perfect sense. Why is it any different to claim that the eye was produced by an intelligent designer? Both critics and defenders of the design argument need to understand what the ground rules are for inferring that an intelligent designer is the unseen cause of an observed effect. (shrink)

Many theists regard the claim that certain fundamental constants of nature are fine-tuned for life as the best scientific argument for the existence of God since Paley’s watch. Even atheist physicists find these so-called “anthropic coincidences” difficult to explain naturally and many think they need to invoke multiple universes and the so-called “anthropic principle” to do so. Certainly if there are many universes, fine-tuning is simple. Our universe is not fine-tuned for life. Life is fine-tuned to our universe. While multiple (...) universes are expected from modern cosmological theories, theists and some scientists object that invoking the unobservable is not science. Of course, God is unobservable too, so the best theists can claim is a standoff. (shrink)

In recent years, researchers have paid special attention to religiosity and the practice of religious beliefs. If people put religiosity at the forefront of their affairs and maintain the roots of religion in various aspects of work and family life, they will see God present and watchful in doing all things, and the result of such a vision will be the successful performance of deeds and walking the path of perfection. Having a heartfelt belief in the value of work and (...) adhering to it will result in a greater desire to work. Religiosity is a variable that can be related to job variables. In addition, it can play an important role in the behaviours of employees. In Islam, work is a virtue and is necessary to balance the personal and social life of the individual. Given the importance of this issue, the present study aimed to evaluate the relationship between Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction of Muslim teachers in Malaysia. In total, 2200 Muslim teachers of Kuala Lumpur and Penang were selected for the study by simple random sampling. Data were collected by using standard questionnaires and analysed by Pearson's correlation coefficient in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). According to the results, there was a significant and positive relationship between teachers' Islamic religiosity and job satisfaction as P = 0.784 and T = 0.000 which was less than the Sig level of 0.05. CONTRIBUTION: According to Islamic teachings, working for a Muslim is like worship. Based on the findings of this research, teachers with higher Islamic religiosity enjoy higher job satisfaction. (shrink)

This paper, studies the way how St. Bonaventure deepens to the “Christian Socratism” . St. Bonaventure through the philosophical, theological and Franciscans sources understands that the soul is united with the Good. The anthropology is not only philosophical, and the Good is not only a concept of the philosophy. San Buenaventura adds to the schemes of Plato and Aristotle, the Biblical scheme who understand that the soul is “image of God”. In Itinerarium mentis in Deum an alternative motto to the (...) self knowledge sets out to us. It is invited to us to watch the soul that is loved itself, which supposes one of the sources of voluntarism.El artículo estudia el modo cómo san Buenaventura profundiza el “socratismo cristiano” . San Buenaventura a través de las fuentes filosóficas, teológicas y franciscanas entiende que el alma se une con el Bien. Pero ni la antropología es sólo filosófica, ni el Bien es sólo un concepto de la filosofía. San Buenaventura añade a los esquemas de Platón y Aristóteles, el bíblico que muestra que el alma es “imagen de Dios”. En el Itinerarium mentis in Deum se nos propone un lema alternativo al autoconocimiento. Se nos invita a mirar el alma que se ama a sí misma, lo que supone una de las fuentes del voluntarismo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2004 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. AdeneyThe 2004 meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in San Antonio, Texas, 19–20 November 2004. This year's theme was "Dealing with Illness and Promoting Healing: Buddhist and Christian Resources." During the first session panelists Laura Habgood Arsta, Jay McDaniel, and Beth Blizman presented Christian views on dealing with illness, and Rita Gross responded from a Buddhist (...) perspective. The second session focused Buddhist resources for promoting healing by panelists Francis Tsio and Grace Buford, with Laurel Curran presenting a Christian response.Laura Habgood Arsta presented research done by undergraduate students in border communities between the United States and Mexico. The topic was the connection between the Pentecostal movement and environmental health. Pentecostal Christianity (250–400 million members worldwide) emphasizes the signs that accompany the presence of Christ, evidenced by experiences of spirit baptism and faith healing.Their sample indicated that poor and minority people don't identify with the environmental movement until personal health problems emerge. One possible reason for Pentecostal religion thriving, according to this research, might be that exposure to toxins and poverty draws people to healing, a theological pillar of Pentecostalism. Religious services provide an emotional outlet and inspire self-confidence, which can become a mental health component of a healing solution. Women are free to share and lead services, finding leadership opportunities and a social group in churches. As an inexpensive alternative to medical care, healing in the Pentecostal church provides a sense of physical healing as well as help in overcoming addictions.Beth Blizman informed the group of the toxicity of the Lake Erie area of northern Ohio. Cancer is becoming normalized in this region, which has the highest level of multiple cancers in the United States. Beth feels called to heal her own body and become part of the healing process of that region. She argued that an attitude that disrespects the earth leads to disrespect of one another. "How can healing be found?" she asked. She discussed many resources from ancient monastics to modern women religious, from process and feminist thought to new cosmologies. Finally she connected [End Page 149] Audre Lourde's work on the rejection of difference to the bioregional studies that she has been doing on toxicity and illness.Jay McDaniels followed by giving a Christian perspective on Alzheimer's disease as an ecumenical Christian influenced by Buddhism. He addressed three questions that Christians ask in this situation. The first question is "Where is God now? Is God inside my loved one? How?" In response to this question, Jay outlined an evangelical view of God that understands God as a transcendent being, "way up there, watching from a distance." He contrasted this view with a process view of God as an "umbrella of compassion that envelops the world without smothering it." In this view, God is the great companion, sharing the confusion and anxiety of the ill person.So where is the person as they experience personality changes caused by the disease? Jay addressed this second question through process theology, stating that in process theology the person is defined in Buddhist terms, inheriting from the past and contributing to the future. A person is constantly in flux or transformation, so the person with illness may be a different person than they once were but can be embraced as the person that they are now. The multidimensional universe of process theology allows for a person to live "with one foot on earth and one foot in heaven."Help for dealing with Alzheimer's disease, Jay's third question, can be found in the Benedictine vow of obedience, stability, and ongoing conversion. The deepest need for those with Alzheimer's is to be with them, being available to others to listen. Stability is the vow to stay with the relationship through these changes. Ongoing conversion can come through Alzheimer's as those with this disease invite us into a space of creative imagination and a new kind of respect.Rita Gross responded to the three presentations by arguing that how one perceives a situation changes it tremendously. Two Buddhist principles that apply here are... (shrink)

The argument from design stands as one of the most intuitively compelling arguments for the existence of a divine Creator. Yet, for many scientists and philosophers, Hume's critique and Darwin's theory of natural selection have definitely undermined the idea that we can draw any analogy from design in artifacts to design in nature. Here, we examine empirical studies from developmental and experimental psychology to investigate the cognitive basis of the design argument. From this it becomes clear that humans spontaneously discern (...) purpose in nature. When constructed theologically and philosophically correctly, the design argument is not presented as conclusive evidence for God's existence but rather as an abductive, probabilistic argument. We examine the cognitive basis of probabilistic judgments in relationship to natural theology. Placing emphasis on how people assess improbable events, we clarify the intuitive appeal of Paley's watch analogy. We conclude that the reason why some scientists find the design argument compelling and others do not lies not in any intrinsic differences in assessing design in nature but rather in the prior probability they place on complexity being produced by chance events or by a Creator. This difference provides atheists and theists with a rational basis for disagreement. (shrink)

Abstract:Thoreau’s story of climbing Saddleback (Mt. Greylock) in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) preserves his memories associated with the place and establishes the cultural significance of the mountain. The interpolation is about Thoreau’s quest to find a place of meaning and permanence amid the rapid changes in his life and the development of rural New England from industrialization. Places are integrations of space and time created by stories with personal and cultural significance. Such places must be (...) preserved. The hike is a pilgrimage to a paradise where he has a transcendental vision of a new world. Thoreau is born again on the mountain. The Greylock story is one of the most studied places in A Week. Literary critics have discussed how Thoreau’s ascent and the sunrise at the summit are the climax of the Romantic hero’s journey through nature, space, and time. None have noticed the symbolism of Thomas Carlyle’s “untamable fly” appearing instead of God, and none have explored Greylock as a Thoreauvian place. Thoreau’s trip to Greylock and the Catskills was a search for inspiration, and he was inspired to write Walden (1854). He stayed in cabins that prefigured his house at Walden Pond, and he saw things that reminded him of Harvard, Boston, Staten Island, and other mountains he had climbed. At the summit he found water, nibbled supper with the mice, conceived of a book about nature, and watched the sunrise of his new life. The history of Greylock is the story of the environmental impact of unregulated lumbering and development and the resulting conservation efforts. The old growth forest is now protected state land, with rare birds and a ghost. The mountain is a literary place also associated with Hawthorne, Melville, and Rowling. Since 1994, Thoreau’s climb up Greylock has been commemorated by an annual hike retracing his footsteps. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Weight I Just Can’t LoseShelley Lynn MeyersI have always been a “fat person”. According to the medical definition though, I have not always been obese. I have spent most of my life on a journey from chubby to obese, finally ending at my current “overweight” status. After years of struggling with obesity I had gastric bypass surgery, finally losing enough weight to be “normal.” However, regardless of the (...) number on the scale or the BMI category into which I fell, I was still “fat”. I may have lost weight but I did not lose the experience and memories of life as an obese person. I was a fat girl on the inside.My earliest memories of childhood consist of feeling fat and awkward. I was the kid reading a book, watching other little girls practice their cartwheels and boys play tag. I was the kid who also hated gym class, especially the days we practiced tumbling or had to climb ropes. I heard the other kids laugh when I had difficulty doing these things. It’s no surprise that I was last or next to last when we had to choose teams for sports. At least when we played flag football I could play center and use my weight as an asset, blocking players from the other team.Certainly, taunts about my weight and even my own intrusive condemning thoughts were not constant, but they were frequent. Admittedly, I probably berated myself much more often than my peers did. I hated being different. What saddens me to this very day are promises I would make to God if I only I could be “like everyone else”. Oh the things that I would change, or give up for the gift of being a normal size. Even my good qualities, such as academic achievement, became another characteristic that made me stand out when all I wanted to do was hide amongst the crowd. I would have happily traded the high GPA for a lower number on the scale. [End Page E4]Some memories from that era seem to be forever etched into my mind. It has been more than thirty years since I was in the seventh grade, but I remember one particular incident very clearly. I went to my first school dance and was thrilled that I actually slow danced with a boy that I had liked since the fourth grade, Jeff1*. We danced to “How Much I Feel” by Ambrosia. Jeff wore a plaid flannel shirt, and I remember how soft it felt when I put my arms around his neck. The puppy love joy I felt that night was short-lived. At school the next day I read a note written by a female classmate. She wrote about the dance, saying that she had wanted to dance with Jeff, but “he was dancing with that fat pig”. She included my name as well, so there was no mistaking to whom she was referring. I felt nauseous. I decided that happiness was just a set-up for disappointment.Even though I thinned out somewhat during high school, I was still larger than most of my friends and saw myself as fat. I received few actual comments about my weight but I just knew they were thinking it. My best friends were exceptionally thin (one, I would later find out had an eating disorder), which added to my distorted body image. I also was the “friend”, rather than the “girlfriend”, with boys asking me to introduce them to my skinny friends. I was ecstatic when I had a horrible case of the flu and lost a lot of weight due to vomiting and the inability to keep food down. I remember hoping that I could get the flu every couple of months.I read fashion magazines and studied the latest, greatest ways to lose weight. Diet pills, fad soup diets and low calorie frozen dinners were popular and I tried most of them. Sadly, the very methods I tried to “get skinny” likely put me on the path to obesity. Starving myself just led to unhealthy eating, cravings and quite possibly, a metabolism that had no... (shrink)

En las páginas siguientes, inspirados por el concepto sartreano de mirada y el concepto foucaultiano de panóptico , analizamos el papel de la mirada y de la observación panóptica en la película Aguirre, la cólera de Dios, de Werner Herzog. Ponemos el foco en cómo los cuerpos de los compañeros del conquistador Lope de Aguirre son dominados por éste; cómo, mediante esta relación, son transformados; y, finalmente, discutimos el significado y naturaleza de la película, más relacionado con la representación del (...) individuo sublime que con la mera narración de la Conquista.In the following pages, inspired by Sartre's concept of "regard" and Foucault's concept of "panopticon," we consider the role of regarding and of panoptical watching in the film Aguirre, God's Wrath , by Werner Herzog. We point out how the bodies of Aguirre's fellow conquistadors are dominated by him; how, by this relation they are transformed; and, finally, we discuss the meaning and nature of the film, which is more linked with the representation of a sublime individual than with a mere story about the American Conquest. (shrink)

The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius deals with a band of heroes one generation before the great warriors at Troy, and the narrative does not really concern itself directly with the later generation. Some of the familiar heroes of Homer may never seem very far from Apollonius' narrative, but they tend not to appear in the poem themselves. One who does is Achilles, twice in fact: once in the first book and once in the last. Both of these passages deal with (...) his early life: the first when he is in the care of Chiron and his wife , the second when he is in the family home with Peleus and Thetis . In the former the gods of heaven and nymphs of Pelion are described as watching the departure of the Argo from Thessaly bound for Colchis. Chiron then comes down from Pelion and waves the heroes goodbye. His wife meanwhile holds Achilles on her arm and shows the child to his father Peleus as he departs with the Argonauts. The later passage describes the failed attempt of Thetis to make her son immortal. In this account Thetis addresses Peleus for the first time since their separation , and then vanishes into the depths of ocean. Their separation occurred some time earlier when she disappeared in anger after her failure to make the young Achilles immortal. She tried to do this by placing him in the fire during the night, and anointing him with ambrosia during the day :The attempt fails when Peleus happens to see his son's immersion in the flames, and gives out a terrible cry, whereupon Thetis throws the boy down, goes away herself, and does not return. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ST. AUGUSTINE'S NOVELISTIC CONVERSION Tyler Graham Syracuse University In his famous biography of St. Augustine, Peter Brown attempts to explainwhat set the Confessions "apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine belonged" (Augustine ofHippo 169). While he concedes that "the Confessions are a masterpiece ofstrictly intellectual autobiography" (167), he concludes that it is more important to realize that they "are, quite succinctly, the story of Augustine's 'heart,' or of (...) his 'feelings'—his affectus"(169). He continues to explain that "in the Confessions, however, the evocation of Augustine's feelings forms part of the wider study of the evolution ofhis will" (172). Thus, Brown suggests that Augustine's central anthropological concern is to determine the origin and/or causes ofhuman desire (i.e. the "evolution of will"). Augustine's "exhaustive analysis ofhis motives" (as Brown describes it) is linked to his lifetime struggle to explain the complex interaction between his free will and a divine will (grace) to transform his "sinful" desires and create a "new heart" within him. In Brown's view, the Confessions reflect Augustine's struggle to discover whether desire originates in God or man. We can agree with Brown that this theological agenda is important to Augustine, for it will resurface in all of his theological struggles stretching from his pre-Christian engagement with the Manichees to his final battle with Pelagius. Nevertheless, I will argue in this paper that the Confessions reflect another important dimension to Augustine's morphology ofdesire. Regardless 136Tyler Graham of its divine or human source, Augustine's desires often begin with the imitation of another person. In portraying examples of his life up to and including his famous conversion in the year 386 (Book VIII), Augustine consistently shows that his desires have been copies or imitations ofvarious models whom he has chosen to follow. Writers such as Brown have considered the importance ofdesire (or the will) in the Confessions, and critics like Geoffrey Harpham (whom we will address later) have examined Augustine's interest in mimesis during various scenes in the book. Yet, with the exception ofAvitol Wohlman, no one (to my knowledge) has adequately considered the combination of the two: mimetic desire. In the first book ofthe Confessions, Augustine recounts his childhood, and, by the eighth chapter, he has already introduced a theme which will haunt the entire work: the link between desire and language. My desires were internal; adults were external to me and had no means ofentering into my soul. So I threw my limbs about and uttered sounds, signs resembling my wishes. (1:8) Language is born as a result ofthe need to express desire. For Augustine, words, gestures, and all utterances connect the "internal" wants to the "external" object ofcommunication (in this case, adults). In fact, ifAugustine links desire with the soul (external adults could not "enter his soul"), then language becomes the bridge between souls: it communicates desire from soul to soul. When Augustine reaches boyhood, and he begins to learn the accepted modes of articulation, the link between language and desire remains: "By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavor to express the intentions ofmy heart to persuade people to bow to my will" (1:13). Language communicates desire, but it also seeks to transform and generate desire. Beyond simply explaining his wishes, Augustine's language is persuasive, seeking to get others to "bow to my will." Whereas some people would like to remember their childhood as a time of innocence, joy, and peace, Augustine depicts his early life as "sinful," unhappy, and fraught with tears and conflicting interests. For an infant ofthat age, could itbe reckoned good to use tears in trying to obtain what it would have been harmful to get?.. The feebleness of infant limbs is innocent, not the infant's mind. (1:11) St. Augustine 's Novelistic Conversion137 Although he does notrememberbis own infancy, Augustine extrapolates from his analysis ofother children. I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not yet speak and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother's milk. Who is unaware ofthis fact ofexperience? Envy among infants is universal... (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected to (...) have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bucky Flies, Almost!Govinda SrinivasanOne day Bucky the monkey saw birds high up in the sky. He was looking at the Harpy Eagle soaring beautifully in the sky. He wished he too could fly like that. He knew how to get to the top of the canopy, but then how to fly free in the sky? That was the great problem. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 109]Now (...) he looked at himself and said, “I don’t have any wings. But I do have a tail for balance.” He wagged his tail with joy. “Now how do I get wings?” He looked at the whole upper canopy. He saw some huge leaves of the teak tree. He took eight leaves, two for each limb. He tied the leaves to his arms and legs. Crossy-Cross. He felt panic and excitement. Bucky flapped his arms and leapt into the sky. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 110]The birds looked at him from the sky. Bucky flew for a quarter of a minute and then... “Aaaaaaaaeeeh! Click for larger view View full resolutionEeeeeeeeeh! Oooooooh!” cried Bucky as he desperately caught hold of a branch and hung on to it. The branch creaked and broke. Bucky was much too heavy.[End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolutionLucky Bucky. He fell through the canopy into the swamp. “SPLASH!” A Manatee took him back to the bank. Bucky said, “Thank you!” in a dizzy tone. He did not give up though. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 112]Next time he tried something different. He made friends with the Harpy Eagles. He asked four of them to carry him up in the sky and leave him high in the sky.Bucky then started flapping his leafy wings. The leaves tore away. “Aaaaah! Eeeeeh! Oooooh!” again. One of the Harpy Eagles was swift and it swooped down and held Bucky by his tail just as he was about to crash into the canopy. “Thank God!” said Bucky. “No, No, Thank you, Harpy,” Bucky corrected himself. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 113]Professor Beaver was watching, and so were all the students in his class. All the animals in the Amazon Rainforest saw Bucky. Then two Weaver birds came and told Bucky, “We can help you stitch big wings.” Then the beavers came and said, “We will help you build a big yet light frame for the wings.” They began working as a team. All kinds of spiders came and shared their super-strong silk threads. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]Soon the forest was humming with activity. Bucky got a pair of wings. Then he asked for advice from the birds. The Tawny Owl said, “You know, Bucky, why don’t you try to glide first. You can learn it from the Flying Squirrels.” Bucky said, “What a great idea! I can learn to fly from a fellow mammal.” Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 115]Bucky went in search of the squirrels dragging his wings along. He searched all day, but the Flying Squirrels were not to be found. “Well, Bucky, Flying Squirrels are nocturnal. You will have to wait until dark,” said the Tawny Owl. “OK! I shall wait then,” said Bucky. Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 116]At night, the Flying Squirrels came out and started flying from tree to tree. Bucky begged them to teach him how to fly. They said, “We don’t fly. We glide. We are called Flying Squirrels, but we don’t fly.” “Oh! Dear! Let me learn to glide then. Gliding is surely better than falling like a rock,” said Bucky. He climbed to the top of trees with the squirrels and jumped across just like them. They glided to the tree trunks far far away.But Bucky fell yet again with a big thud, and a bigger scream. “Aaaah! Eeeeeh!! Ooooooh!!!” He woke up the whole forest in the middle of the night. The animals were... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Victorian DoorsErnest L. FontanaILet us begin with a simple observation. If we confine ourselves to mid- and late-nineteenth Anglophone (Victorian) poetry that employs traditional verse stanzas or rooms, it is perhaps not surprising that a line terminating with door most often rhymes with more, particularly as more is found in such locutions as no more or evermore.1 For example, in the work of Emily Dickinson, door rhymes with a (...) more phoneme in 14 of 20 instances. What is of special interest, and the focus of this essay, is the use of door as a rhymed word at the end or near the end of a poem. Of related but secondary interest is its appearance as a rhymed word at the end of an intermediate stanza. Since more signifies a quantitative concept, the frequent use of it to rhyme with door suggests that the designated door often demarcates a site of transition from a state that is quantitatively different (most often less) from the state to which one passes through the door. This imagined other state often involves quantities of time as in the frequent use of no more and evermore. In the first instance the time imagined is completely negated, in the second it is affirmed as a perpetual duration. Poe acknowledged the significance of the door/evermore rhyme in the "The Raven" in which this rhyme occurs at the end of 5 of its 18 stanzas.2 Thus this common English rhyme of door and more requires a signification of transition from one state to another that differ from each other in quantity. Often, particularly in Dickinson, the other state lies beyond the walled or enclosed room of [End Page 277] the self. My essay raises the question of whether without this accidental acoustical concurrence in English, the signification in Anglophone poetry of an implied transition from certain quotidian or phenomenal states to certain visionary or noumenal states would be as frequent or so easily rendered. Does this accidental rhyme in fact generate certain significations or metaphors?3I shall begin my demonstration with what I believe are telling examples of doors as a closural effect of both poems and stanzas.4 In the second, revised version of Hopkins's sonnet "In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez: Laybrother of the Society of Jesus," written in Dublin in 1888, the concluding sestet of this Italian sonnet ends with door.Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alphonso watched the door.5The sonnet is built on the contrast between honor that is "flashed off exploit," the highly visible exploits of the early Jesuit martyrs and missionaries, with the "Unseen," apparently un-heroic life of the obscure Spanish Jesuit laybrother and hall porter, whose war was "within." While God, through his Jesuit martyrs, "could crown [His] career with conquest," Alphonsus's life passed "without event" as he "watched the door." Hopkins's rhymes his terminal door with the more that results from the silent "trickling increment" of God's ongoing creative act. The foregrounded closural door of the poem becomes, through its position and rhyme, a metaphor for a passage to the abundance resulting from God's creative action, a quantification that extends beyond the perceptible world.Alphonsus is the guardian of the passage to this abundance, one that is subtly implied by the more/door rhyme. The sonnet ends with the reader and Alphonsus positioned on the threshold of an unnamable abundance that is signified by the silence and blank space that follows upon this terminal door. In Browning's "A Lovers' Quarrel," from Men and Women (1855), the male speaker recalls, during the advent of an Italian spring, the amatory intimacies he and his beloved shared during the past winter in their Tuscan farmhouse: "'Twas a time when the heart could shew / All'" (ll. 75–76).6 But the amatory union of the [End Page 278] two lovers has been ruptured by an unidentified, chance "hasty word" spoken... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rembrandt BookProfessor Emeritus John Adkins RichardsonThe Rembrandt Book by Gary Schwartz. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006, 384 pp. $40.95, cloth.This truly is the Rembrandt book. Substantial in every way, it is physically imposing, magnificently printed on heavy, glossy stock and profusely illustrated with splendid color reproductions of all the master’s major works and many sketches and preparatory drawings, as well as etchings and dry-point engravings. Gary (...) Schwartz, who studied art history at New York University and Johns Hopkins University, is now living in the Netherlands. The merits of his book are enormous. Not only is it filled with magnificent reproductions, there are tables and graphs detailing such things as the number of Rembrandt paintings in catalogues from 1836 to 1992; analyses of the artist’s borrowings and adaptations in five-year periods; key dates in the life of the man; Rembrandt’s relation to the forms of sale for paintings in the Dutch seventeenth century; and so on. There is even a computer rendering of the famous depiction of Captain Banning Cocq’s Company of Guards at the Gates of Amsterdam (popularly called The Night Watch), specifying the weapons shown and identifying all present, either by name and title or by a description, such as “girl in gold and blue,” “pikeman,” “musketeer,” etc.A sampling of the chapter headings and subcategories suggests just how comprehensive is Schwartz’s treatment: 1. Introduction, 2. A Dutch Artist’s Life, 3. Family, Loved Ones, Households, 4. Craft, 5. Earning and Spending, 6. Patrons, 7. Landscape, 8. Humankind, 9. Man and God. Just the specifics of the last chapter are remarkably capacious: Holy Family; Christ’s Ministry; Passion, Death and Afterlife; Divine Intervention; Holy People; Moral Examples from the Old Testament; The Man of God, Simeon; Afterlife; and Rembrandt as a Christian Rhetorician of the Brush. It’s hard to imagine a better reference for the lay reader than The Rembrandt Book.The book is also full of interesting contrasts of opinion as well as some surprising remarks. As for one of the latter, Schwartz writes that Rembrandt’s “portraits are said to be more ‘psychological’ than those of his contemporaries. What this might mean I frankly do not understand” (213). He goes on to note that the field of psychology did not exist in Rembrandt’s time. However, from long before its invention people spoke of Rembrandt’s ability to reveal the soul of the sitter. Indeed, the reason I was not surprised, although somewhat distressed, when the Rembrandt Research Project—a group of connoisseurs set up in 1969 with the explicit charge of authenticating all works ascribed to the master—announced in 1985 that The Man with a Golden Helmet in Berlin was not by the master at all, was that I had all along been troubled by this face that lacked the quality of animation in repose so [End Page 115] characteristic of Rembrandt portraits. Schwartz thinks the artist would have to have relied upon the ancient theory of the humors to do “characterological descriptions” of his sitters, and that in portraiture, “such characterizations would quickly resemble caricatures.” And, indeed, they do, but in profoundly subtle ways, much as someone like the popular illustrator Norman Rockwell employed tiny caricature-like distortions to project a kind of homely Americanism. I’m not comparing Rockwell to Rembrandt but choosing a realistic illustrator in whose work the trick is more apparent. Caricature can be as broad as it is in Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, or Honoré Daumier and yet be a feature of true art. Or so it seems to me, admittedly, a sometimes cartoonist as well as painter and engraver.Schwartz’s completeness of coverage leads him to include, in addition to superb drawings and prints, some that are so careless and hasty as to make one doubt their authenticity. One of the works of marginal quality is an etching of Six’s Bridge, which is said to have been created outdoors, hastily, on the site. This is a hotly debated issue. Rembrandt is known to have carried “varnished”—that is, grounded—copper etching plates, so there wouldn’t seem much reason to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of FaithKate RowlandSometimes I’m jealous of my patients’ faith. As a former happily religious person I miss the benefits I used to get from an active faith. I know that some of my patients must struggle with their faith, and I know the struggle probably affects their well–being. For those who simply believe or those who simply don’t believe, it’s easy. And for those who do believe, (...) there can be so much serenity and so much reward.As a doctor, I spend a lot of time reading science, weighing evidence, and making recommendations. Religion has been a respite from this. Faith, for me, has never been a series of decisions based on the best available evidence. I could analyze it as much as I wanted, peel its layers apart, question it, but in the end, it was just faith, not a hypothesis. It has always been something that I believe (or don’t), and practicing my faith had always been a relatively pleasant decision of figuring out what kind of community I want to share in.My faith life has been in shambles for the past several years. I feel distant from and unwelcome in the church where I was raised, and I haven’t found anywhere else to land. I cannot decide how to raise my own small children. I want them to have grounding in God, but I can’t decide how much I believe in God anymore, and I am fixated on the idea that I don’t want to be hypocritical or lie to [End Page 210] them. I don’t want them to see me worshipping in a way that is not really authentic to me.My husband is agnostic—literally—on the issue. He is open to introducing a loving, kind, forgiving God, but unsure about a God incarnate. We both worry about the identity with a particular religion usurping the actual relationship with God: I am [religion], therefore I believe [this], therefore my God does [this] or is [this].And so all of these fears and doubts have led us to live with no religion, and no outward faith. Our children attend a parochial nursery school run by a religion other than one where we were raised, and they have an apparently happy but neutral opinion of religion and God. They understand ceremonies. At age four, they have a more active faith life than I do, since they attend weekly services at school. But then, they have fewer choices than I do. They do what the teachers tell them. They would do what I told them to do, if I could ever decide what I believed in.I spend so many hours a week with my patients that they have become my main source of demonstration of active, living faith. I know that they share mostly good parts with me. I see so much of the good because I mostly see patients who get to choose how to practice their own religions; they don’t feel oppressed by religious or culturo–religious demands or expectations. It’s interesting that I see the positive sides of their faith, not the struggle, because I otherwise see a lot of the struggling parts of their lives. I see the flinty, edgy woman, the patient who has spent more time in the hospital in the past month than I have, the woman who is sick of her low platelet count that keeps her from living a normal life. And every day she has some message of faith: she tells our medical team what Bible passage is keeping her strong, she tells us how God watches over her when we tell her that her counts are better, she tells us to have a blessed day. Sometimes she curses at the hospital or her condition or at her medications, sometimes at us. So far her faith is unshaken.I take care of a woman who has burning mouth syndrome, a chronic condition that causes her lips, her tongue, and her palate to feel as though they are on fire. Eating makes it worse, drinking makes it worse, breathing makes it worse... (shrink)

In his description of the boat race in the fifth book of the "Aeneid", Vergil's comparison of the ships to chariots can be read not only as an allusion to the Homeric model on which the scene is based but also as part of a larger attempt to recast the episode as a contemporary circus spectacle. Like the Augustan circus, Vergil's boat race offers an image of cosmic and political order. However, beyond its symbolic function the Roman circus also played (...) an active role in realizing the hierarchies it depicted by incorporating its spectators into a unified vision of state and universe. So the boat race too, far from constituting a hiatus in the action of the poem, becomes an instrument for the socialization of those who watch it. The spectacle gives its audience a glimpse of the gods in action and of the leadership of Aeneas himself, whose past accomplishments are reflected in the conduct of the captains. Moreover, the careful organization of internal audiences within the narrative allows every spectator to identify with another figure closer to the center of events and, by extension, invites Vergil's own readers to see themselves as participants in the scene. Thus Vergil uses the model of circus spectacle to bridge the gap separating his audience from the epic past by restaging that past in a form that both was a part of the immediate experience of the contemporary Roman and also provided a crucial context for the constitution of Roman civic life. (shrink)

[We present below a preliminary translation of an ancient Greek manuscript, recently discovered by Dr. __________, containing two variations on the myth of Sisyphus. The document is in fragments, with gaps at the beginning and partway through.… [Upon] his capture, Sisyphus was brought before the council of the gods, who were informed of all his crimes. After withdrawing from the chamber for many hours, they returned to sentence Sisyphus to his fate. He was doomed to roll a rock up a (...) hill, watch it roll back to its starting place, and begin again, and to repeat this for all eternity. He would do this alone, without the comfort of company, in perpetual dark. He would not need sleep, food, or drink, and so would not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 405-413 [Access article in PDF] Boxers and Generals At Mount Eryx David A. Traill The boxing match between Dares and Entellus gives rise to one of the most unusual similes in the Aeneid. Entellus, the older man, stands his ground, warily watching his opponent and dodging the blows, while Dares, the younger man, dances around him, looking for an opening. Dares' restless (...) probing is compared to the efforts of a general to find a weak spot in the defenses of a besieged mountain stronghold (5.437-42):stat gravis Entellus nisuque immotus eodemcorpore tela modo atque oculis vigilantibus exit.ille, velut celsam oppugnat qui molibus urbem440aut montana sedet circum castella sub armis,nunc hos, nunc illos aditus, omnemque pererratarte locum et variis adsultibus inritus urget. Stolidly, Entellus stands his ground and, poised in the same stance, dodges the blows with body movements only and with watchful eyes. Dares, like one who attacks a city towering high with massive walls or invests a mountain stronghold with armed troops, looks for a way in, now here, now there, and skillfully ranges over the whole terrain, pressing the attack with varied but futile assaults. Like the famous opening simile of the Aeneid (1.148-53), in which Neptune's quelling of the storm is compared to the calming effect of an honored statesman's eloquence on a disorderly crowd, the comparison of the boxer to the besieging general is distinctly Roman and quite unexpected. Both similes are unexpected in that they are, in a sense, inverted. 1 Comparing the hush that spreads over an unruly crowd to the sudden calming of a storm would have been straightforward and traditional, but the reverse is striking. Similarly, comparing two well-matched [End Page 405] generals to opponents in a boxing match was rather trite by Virgil's day. Inverted, however, the simile is fresh and arresting. 2 John Conington (1884, 373) assures us that "the comparison is Vergil's own." This is certainly true in the strict sense, but the whole truth is considerably more complex.The intrusion of a Roman ethos into the scene and the reference to siege warfare invite us to wonder if Virgil may be making an allusion here to later Roman history. Heinze, however, maintains that in the boxing match, in contrast to the boat race, Virgil "strongly emphasizes the mythical aspect" and "is careful to avoid making any historical implications." 3 Perhaps taking their cue from Heinze, scholars have tended to eschew any consideration of historical implications and to focus on how Virgil has shaped for his own purposes the material he has borrowed from earlier authors. 4 In this article I will argue that historical implications were very much on Virgil's mind and that he used the boxing match to link the Trojan present to the Roman future.First, let us consider where the boxing match takes place. Aeneas and his followers are forced ashore by a storm in the vicinity of Drepana--the inlaetabilis ora (3.707) where Anchises died a year earlier. While they are still at sea, Palinurus indicates that the litora... fida of Eryx and the Sicanian harbor (Drepana, though the name is used only in bk. 3) are not far off (5.23-24). Acestes sees them "procul ex celso... vertice montis" (5.35). This can only mean the summit of Mount Eryx itself or the top of [End Page 406] one of its spurs, as Trápani (Drepana) itself is so low-lying that the buildings "seem to float upon the waters" (Freeman 1891, 199). Once ashore, presumably at the harbor of Drepana, Aeneas delivers a speech, in which he points out that one year after his father's death the gods have brought him "ad cineres ipsius et ossa parentis" (5.55). He then leads a procession to the tomb, where ritual offerings are made (5.75-103). These rites are followed after an eight-day interval by the games. The first of these, the boat race (5.114-285), naturally takes place... (shrink)

For the “respectable” part of society there can be a presumption of virtuousness, rather like the presumption of innocence in the law. In both cases, the presumption can be defeated, as we learn more and get into specifics. We still might insist that to be genuinely virtuous is to be able to pass the more familiar sorts of tests of virtue, and to be reliably virtuous also in the ordinary business of life, especially in things that really matter. Something like (...) this is a necessary condition for virtue. Factors of motivation, especially those related to what a person's basic concerns are, can vary enormously. Imagine an extreme case. Someone might be inherently indifferent to what happens to other people, and have no sense of the inherent dignity or worthiness of moral principles, but also be totally convinced that God is watching his or her every move, and that the prospects of heaven or hell depend heavily on one's following accepted morality at every step. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Five Poems AMIT MAJMUDAR Observing Orpheus I hear the meaning turn back in his throat like Eurydice on the way up from the darkness. Music’s meaning is its making. As for me, I am one more animal in his entourage, learning a new thirst, finding a new south. None of us knew we had this instinct in us. If deserts hide wildflowers until first rain, bright ears are blossoming (...) out of our skulls. He doesn’t have much longer. I know this myth. A God douses the fire with a beehive. The Maenads smear their faces with a warpaint made of stoneground fireflies and pine sap. Hands—hands like his, that drew music through lyre strings into our forest like pieces of bread through a prison fence— are reaching for his body now, his lyre. Their weapons are hands, nothing but hands. They are infinite. They are enough. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Her Metamorphoses First a beetle, body armor forged of chitin, exoskeleton he’ll never bruise, Undiscovered, unapologetically hermetic on her own Galapagos. Next a fruit bat, echolocating tangerines like a blind woman singing up at stars. Then a patio lizard, sunning herself for as long as she needs, A better place for keeping warm than bed with him. Next a sleek water moccasin, quick to make out another woman’s heat signature on his neck, Even quicker to strike. A caterpillar to poke holes in his lying roses And from that destruction to fashion two beautiful wings for herself. A buzzard, to clean up the roadside pile he left of her. A woman in full with no more soft blind pupa stages of her life cycle left, No more forms to force herself to fit for the sake of his pleasure, No more shapeshifts, no more slimming stripes, no more abdominal crunches: Just this body, just this last name, just this apartment, just this bowl of midnight cereal. Just her. 106 five poems Sisyphus Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent Till your boulder goes weightless and races ahead in descent. Force its dark door open inch by grim inch, Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent, Heels dug deep in hell’s steep hillside, teeth clenched. What gravity strips from you, gravity grants you again. Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent Till your body goes weightless and races ahead in ascent. Amit Majmudar 107 A Trinket for Persephone A deathwatch beetle burrows in the pale hall of your marrow, your underground, your tube of bone on which you’re riding home alone. This blackwinged locket with your soul emerges rattling from a hole, a rattle in your emptied throat, the diva’s final, graceless notes, a clicking echoed in the rafters, this bugbear insect coming after to scuttle across the marshy chest, sinkhole navel, and pubic nest out to the yard, below the porch untrackable by any torch until this bug with you inside has burrowed to the other side. It drops into the underworld, as if from some cocoon unfurled, to scale a queenly wrist and rest your brooch of black upon her breast. 108 five poems Four Ways of Looking at Argus 1. His Vigil These hundred eyes, these hundred balloons Tied to the boy-small wrist of my mind Are down to ninety-nine. I lost one to a bee sting late last June— I never thought of them as fragile Until that pinprick broke my vigil. I’m slowing down. I didn’t blink in time. I have no inkling why I keep This vigil—surely not to watch, Panoptic from this mountaintop, A heifer drifting off to sleep? I’m here, I must be here, to see A signal fire from the east That warns of Olympus under siege And Ares gory from a rout, Athena’s owl’s eyes gouged out, The naiads naked in a pen, The whole world given up to men. The Gods will need a monster then. 2. After Martial Hermes was in a fix: He needed lullabies To shutter Argus’s one hundred eyes And get the tethered heifer—coal-eyed Io—free Of Hera’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Disability and the Resurrection of the Body:Identity and ImaginationMedi Ann VolpeI love Star Wars. I watched Luke destroy the Death Star as a wide-eyed eight-year-old and I relished the downfall of the imperial walkers on the ice planet Hoth. I rejoiced with Luke at seeing his father, Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader), restored in death to the Good Side of the Force, glowing faintly alongside Obi-wan Kenobi and the Jedi (...) master Yoda. In the 1983 version of The Return of the Jedi,' Anakin's Force ghost looked like the old, wounded, disabled man whose body Luke rescued from the second Death Star about to explode. Hayden Christiansen, who plays Anakin as a young man in the prequels Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith, was only two years old then; yet the 1983 film has since been edited so that his image is the Force ghost alongside Obi-wan Kenobi and Yoda. I find this troubling—and not just because I am a cantankerous old fan who likes things the way they were.For a theologian with an interest in disability,1 the swap calls to mind the worries of some disability theologians2 about continuity and discontinuity [End Page 993] in the resurrection: if disabilities that marked us or our loved ones in this life are eradicated, how does identity persist? George Lucas explained in an interview that, when Anakin Skywalker was "redeemed," he went back to being the person he was before he was consumed by the Dark Side: the real Anakin ceased to be when he became Darth Vader.3 But the replacement of the post–Darth Vader Anakin with the young, pre-Darth Vader Anakin creates enormous problems for thinking about the resurrection, even in the fictional Star Wars universe.4 Anakin seems to lose most of his adult life. Would he remember that he had been Darth Vader, or that he saved Luke's life? If he does not remember the event, how can this Force ghost be the same person that Luke rescued from Death Star 2.0? George Lucas's decision to replace Sebastian Shaw, who played Darth Vader in the original Return of the Jedi, with Hayden Christiansen introduces radical discontinuity into the narrative. The substitution does not give us the "real" Anakin; instead, we are left with neither Anakin nor Darth Vader, but a different person; someone Luke would not have recognized, and who might well not recognize either Luke or himself.In a similar vein, Nancy Eiesland mused that, without her disability, caused by a congenital, degenerative bone disease, she would be "unknown to [herself] and perhaps to God."5 Her perception of resurrection healing was that she would be as different in the resurrection as Hayden Christiansen is to Sebastian Shaw. Drawing on classical Christian teaching from Gregory of Nyssa to Matthias Scheeben,6 I will show in this essay that Eiesland's concern [End Page 994] is misplaced. Considering the way that the resurrection body is often portrayed, however, her concern is understandable. Disability theologians' qualms about the resurrection deserve a retrieval of the classical doctrine that addresses their suspicions about the discontinuity of identity in the resurrection and upholds the full humanity of people with disabilities, even profound intellectual disabilities.IIn one sense, the questions raised by disability theologians are not new.7 First-century Christians argued about the transformation that St. Paul envisaged, which involved continuity and change. In 1 Corinthians, he tells us "a mystery … we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality" (15:51–53). Christians debated the nature of the change involved in putting on immortality and in their debates asked questions about the continuity of identity. Early Christian thinkers, like the early-third-century theologian Tertullian (AD 160–220), were keen to establish that the ensouled body resurrected to punishment or reward was the same as the earthly... (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pentheus and the Spectator in Euripides’ BacchaeJames BarrettIn an article examining the various reports from Cithaeron in Euripides’ Bacchae, Richard Buxton argues against reading the narratives of Euripidean messengers as impartial or transparent accounts of the events they describe. In concluding his careful analysis of the messengers in this play he claims that “these narrators too stand firmly within the drama” (1991, 46).1 From articulating what distinguishes the narratives (...) of these figures, Buxton proceeds to including the messengers with the other dramatis personae in a single category of those “within the drama.” The narratives of the messengers, like everything else said onstage, Buxton argues, are imbued with their own distinctive emotion and rhetoric: “in no two cases is the relationship between content and narrator identical” (1991, 40). His argument directs itself against a tendency among critics silently to grant a distinct and privileged status to the narratives of tragic messengers.2Buxton’s analysis complements that of de Jong (1991), who argues against the practice of regarding the messenger’s narrative as a privileged form of discourse. Buxton in fact rejects the use of the term “messenger” in the singular as injuriously general and neglectful of “the subtle divergences between the reports” (1991, 46). But laudable as it is for [End Page 337] the attention it pays to rhetorical variation in the narratives it studies, Buxton’s formulation simplifies the status of the messengers in Euripides’ play. Rather than being “firmly within the drama,” the messengers occupy a place on the stage very different from that of the other dramatis personae. A reading founded on metatheatrical studies of the play shows that an important part of Bacchae’s self–conscious interest is directed at the status of the messengers, particularly with respect to how they define and are defined by Pentheus. I argue here that the play produces messengers substantially “outside” the drama—virtual “spectators–in–the–text”3—and in so doing expands our notion of what is possible on the tragic stage while clarifying the status of the spectator within the play’s metatheater.The metatheatricality of the play has found extensive critical exposition in recent years. The studies of Segal (1982, 215–71) and Foley (1985, 205–58)4 remain central to any discussion of the play as meta-theater, while that of Bierl (1991, 186–217) pushes the fundamental insights of Segal and Foley close to their limits. All of these studies depart in principle from the fact that Dionysos is both the god of theater and the focus of the play: with this as a foundation, the text amply suggests that we read it as a prolonged reflection on theater itself.Both Segal and Foley astutely discuss the play–within–the–play, Dionysos as director and Pentheus as unwitting protagonist. Segal remarks: “As an actor among actors, Dionysus stands on the same level as the other characters in the orchestra. But he is also director, dressing and instructing his ‘actors’ for the role they will have to play” (1982, 225). Pentheus’ pilgrimage to Mount Cithaeron to watch the Maenads and the sparagmos that forms the climax of the play become under Dionysos’ direction a performance akin to tragedy in the theater of Dionysos at Athens. Indeed, the play–within–the–play coincides largely with the play we call Bacchae.As Segal and Foley have shown, Pentheus’ status as would–be spectator is central to the play’s metatheatricality: much of the elaborate “drama” organized by Dionysos turns on Pentheus’ desire to watch the Maenads in the mountains while remaining unseen himself. He, like the audience in the theater, wants to be a (829). And like the spectator in the theater, he is tempted by the offer Dionysos makes to [End Page 338] see the “performance” on the mountain. In fact, the persistent thematic importance of vision underlies much of the metatheater of the play: the prospect of seeing the Bacchants marks a turning point for Pentheus. Dionysos asks him:(811)Do you want to see them sitting together in the mountains?And if Dionysos’ taunt,(829)You are no longer eager to be the spectator of Maenads,suggests the parallel with... (shrink)