bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
CHAPTER 12 Rubinstein's “Magnificent Faultiness”
Authors: Lott R. Allen
Published: May 2008

Although Anton Rubinstein's performances were generally praised, there were occasional comments that he had technical flaws and memory lapses, partly attributable to his greater commitment to composing than performing. His tempestuousness as a performer caused him to lose physical control, but it was his passion that helped his performances transcend their technical inadequacies. Although at first critics thought Rubinstein's performances were faithful to the composer's intent, as the season wore on they were more likely to take exception to his highly individualistic and mannered performances. His own works for piano were conservative and often neoclassical. Rubinstein's concerts reflect the sacralization of music, which was no longer just entertainment but art that needed to be carefully studied and listened to respectfully. Performers demanded reverence in the concert hall and fulfilled the function of priests who interpreted to the laity the ineffable mysteries of the great works of art.
The Golden Rule
Authors: Gerhardt Michael J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines the multiple factors (ignored by most social scientists and legal scholars) limiting the path dependency of precedent—or the extent to which precedent forecloses or mandates outcomes—in constitutional law. These factors help to explain an essential dynamic in constitutional law, the golden rule of precedent: justices and other constitutional actors must demonstrate respect for the precedent of others or risk having others not respect theirs. The golden rule of precedent explains why precedent generally may matter in constitutional law but particular precedents may not constrain constitutional decision making very much.
Nonjudicial Precedent
Authors: Gerhardt Michael J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter suggests that precedent is often discounted as a source in constitutional decision making because it is usually understood narrowly as judicial decisions. But it shows that a broader definition of precedent encompasses nonjudicial precedent (any of the past constitutional judgments of nonjudicial actors which judicial or other authorities seek to invest with normative power). It shows how nonjudicial precedent is important not only to courts, but to nonjudicial actors.
8 The Sense of the Ending inLa clemenza di Tito
Authors: Waldoff Jessica
Published: May 2008

La clemenza di Tito, a political allegory, dramatizes clemency as a central tenet of enlightened governance. The events of the plot allow dark tendencies in human nature to threaten enlightenment values (and Rome itself), but ultimately suggest the futility of rebellion against a virtuous and benevolent ruler. The restoration of these values depends on recognition scenes in which the three central protagonists overcome their baser instincts: Vitellia her jealousy and ambition, Sesto his abandonment of reason for passion, and Tito his angry renunciation of his merciful policies. These recognition scenes are shown to be central to the opera's dramatization of enlightenment themes. At the dénouement, Tito pardons the conspirators, reaffirms his policy of clemency, and exclaims, “Let it be known in Rome that I am myself” — a moment of self-recognition vital to the sense of the ending.
African American Religious Music from a Theomusicological Perspective
Authors: Spencer Jon Michael
Published: May 2008

This chapter lays out a complex framework for a theomusicology of African American sacred music. Sacred practices provide common denominators for styles and practices from black preaching to spirituals to the blues to gospel songs. Drawing upon critical theory in African American studies from the 1980s and 1990s, the chapter makes a case for a much deeper level of religious experience in the historical and modern styles of African American music. As a discipline theomusicology is expansive and inclusive, and it serves to connect the diverse elements of black religious experience. The theology of William C. Turner Jr joins that of James Cone, laying the groundwork for new approaches to music from the varied theological premises of African and African American religion.
Nusach and Identity
Authors: Summit Jeffrey A.
Published: May 2008

Drawing upon fieldwork in five different Jewish communities or synagogues in the Boston area, this chapter examines nusach as an adaptive strategy. It uses an emic, or insider's, perspective to interpret nusach's complex dimensions, on one hand, traditional Jewish prayer modes and metrical songs, on the other; the metaphorical sense of being “torn away” from tradition, and the resulting mixing with local and individual practices of music and worship. Jewish sacred song opens outward to accommodate the religious experience of liberal and orthodox Jews in Boston, and it provides a context for their lives, allowing decisions that make Judaism in America inclusive and exclusive. Specific songs, such as “Arba'im shanah” (“Forty Years”) from the Sabbath eve service, provide case studies.
Aesthetics and Theology in Congregational Song
Authors: Saliers Don E.
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines the decision-making processes that lead congregations and denominations to choose new hymnals. In the historical longue durée of American religious experience hymnals have undergone continuous change, making it possible for them to reflect changing theological conditions and to absorb the different sounds and aesthetics of song itself. Looking primarily at the United Methodist Hymnal, this chapter compares individual responses to favorite hymns and the new materials and liturgical concepts emerging from denominational decisions. Hymn and hymnal choice, therefore, reflects both top-down and bottom-up aesthetic and theological decisions, thus giving the hymnal the power to mediate and create a religious experience in which differences are accommodated and given voice.
The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn
Authors: Grave Floyd , Grave Margaret
Published: May 2008

Encompassing sixty-eight works composed over a span of more than four decades, Haydn's quartet oeuvre contributed to the establishment, solidification, and refinement of late 18th-century chamber-music practices, notably by furnishing superlative models of idiomatic ensemble technique (involving textural diversity and continuous change in relationship among the instruments), style (highlighting the play of formal conventions and musical customs associated with folk music, popular dance, opera, concerto, and other genres), and compositional process (featuring motivic elaboration, harmonic novelty, and narrative intrigue). Conventions Haydn adapted for quartet use include those of sonata form, the minuet-trio complex, variation, rondo, and fugue. In addition, he established norms of his own for the sequence of movements in a quartet and for the design of the opus groups, each of which encompasses a particular constellation of variety and consistency in form, style, and ensemble technique. Examination of the opus groups reveals insights into the circumstances under which they were written, the musical resources on which they drew, their innovations, their points of connection with other opus groups, their manifestations of both change and continuity in outlook and style, and their reflections of Haydn's artistic personality — in particular his penchant for novelty in sonority, theme, metrical play, phraseology, and large-scale structure; his gift for musical irony in drawing connections between seemingly unrelated ideas; and his irrepressible musical wit and humor, typically involving strokes of surprise, thwarted expectation, and the whimsical juxtaposition of incongruous elements.
9 Op. 9 (ca. 1768–70) and Op. 17 (1771)
Authors: Grave Floyd , Grave Margaret
Published: May 2008

Like their predecessors, these quartets, Op. 9 and Op. 17, circulated in manuscript prior to publication in Paris and Amsterdam. While recalling many of the earlier quartets' traits, they engage in a reassessment of the genre's possibilities and an exploration of new directions. The five-movement cycle is abandoned in favor of a four-movement plan that would become standard; and the first violin now stands out as a commanding thematic presence and a vehicle for brilliant execution in the outer movements. The two sets betray a host of interopus connections, the latter set revisiting the former from various perspectives, including aspects of form and style in individual movements, matters of cyclic profile, and the design of the opus as a whole. Taken together, the two groups constitute a foundation for Haydn's subsequent endeavors in the medium.
11 Op. 33 (1781) and Op.42([?1784‐] 1785)
Authors: Grave Floyd , Grave Margaret
Published: May 2008

Celebrating the terms of a redrawn employment contract that now allowed him to sell his music directly to subscribers and publishers, Haydn boasted that the quartets of Op. 33 exemplified “a new, quite special way”. Recasting the genre with regard to character, tone, and technical difficulty, the set emphasizes sentiment, melodic simplicity, structural transparency, and general accessibility. Rhythmic animation and bantering ensemble play suggest opera buffa influence, and the spirit of carefree exuberance is especially pronounced in the finales. There are new insights into idiomatic string-quartet technique, notably in the accent on motivic process and thematic texture, especially in the first movements. Slow movements, like those of previous sets, focus on the first violin as soloist. Dance movements, now bearing the title “scherzo”, fulfill the promise of playful adventure to varying degrees. The lone Op. 42 quartet is notable for its small dimensions, symmetrical proportions, and serious demeanor.
Rule and Resistance
Authors: King Charles
Published: May 2008

The Caucasus is sometimes portrayed as an Islamic wall blocking the expansion of Russia to the Near East. While the north Caucasus is home to many Muslim communities, Islam was not always a source of resistance to Russian imperialism. This chapter charts the varied forms of governance and rebellion in the Russian Caucasus from the 1820s to the 1860s, the period of intense warfare for control of the highlands. Themes include the resistance movement led by Shamil, the period in office of the reforming viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, and the exile of Circassians at the end of the Caucasus wars.
Time of Troubles
Authors: King Charles
Published: May 2008

The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by the long tenure in office of important Communist Party secretaries in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, including Heydar Aliyev and Eduard Shevardnadze. All were involved in building modern and stable Soviet republics after the disruptions of Stalinism, but each also spent a great deal of time battling corruption. Nationalism prompted the three south Caucasus republics to exit the Soviet Union, but it also created serious problems internally, given the secession of territories such as Abkhazia and Nagorno‐Karabakh. Russia's own secessionist struggle with Chechnya defined the north Caucasus in the 1990s.
Great Tradition, Grand Manner, Golden Age
Authors: Hamilton Kenneth
Published: May 2008

This chapter uncovers the roots of the myth of a pianistic golden age in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, along with offering a preliminary discussion of national performance styles, and the influence of Beethoven, Czerny, Liszt, and Chopin. The vexed claim of a “continuous performance tradition” is analysed and shown to be erroneous.
A Suitable Prelude
Authors: Hamilton Kenneth
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines the virtually universal custom before the mid-decades of the 20th-century of pianists improvising preludes and transitions between pieces, with especial attention to Chopin, Czerny, Liszt, von Bülow, Busoni, and Grainger. Possible reasons for the origin and eventual demise of the custom are suggested.
1 Introduction
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: May 2008

This chapter provides an overview of methodological approaches used in the book and briefly introduces the culture and history of ancient Israel. The methodology is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, and important to the study are verbal and nonverbal forms of cultural expression that feature portrayals of hair. Treatments of hair in African art provide an excellent model for the exploration of hair in ancient Near Eastern art, including works produced in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and ancient Israel. The contributions of anthropologists, sociologists, art historians, and scholars of religion also frame the work, including Victor Turner’s observations about rites of passages, Gananath Obeyesekere’s emphasis on the emotional, personal, and psychological roots and dimensions of embodied symbols, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock’s examination of “the social body” and “the body politic.”
3 Samson
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: May 2008

This chapter explores the nexus in Israelite culture between maleness, charisma, warrior status, and hair. Central to this chapter is a close reading of tales in Judges 13–16 about the superhero Samson, a Nazirite from birth. Themes of us versus them, Israelite versus Philistine, are in part created by images of hair. The chapter also includes a close philological analysis of Judges 5:2, an important line about warriors in an ancient poem, and a study of the long-haired, would-be hero Absalom, ambitious and rebellious son of King David, whose hair suggests charisma only to become a source and symbol of his undoing.
4 The Nazirite Vow
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: May 2008

The focus of this chapter is Numbers 6, a ritual text that describes a vow undertaken by an individual to become a Nazirite for a specified period of time. A close reading, with help from methodological perspectives introduced earlier, reveals a different version of Nazirism than that described for Samson. The vow in Numbers 6 has been shaped by a particular priestly worldview that is highly concerned with issues of purity even while democratizing holy status, evidencing the worldview of postexilic priestly writers of the Persian period. A man or a woman may take the vow voluntarily. This form of Nazirism allows women of means an opportunity for some kind of sacred status, but it is temporary and no threat to the male Levitical priesthood. An interesting thread in this chapter concerns economic status and the Nazirite vow.
1 An Invitation to an Event
Authors: Shipley Thomas F.
Published: May 2008

This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance of events. It then focuses on four traditional object-perception issues and considers potential analogies to event perception. These are segmentation and grouping; what makes two events similar; representation; and feature binding. An event taxonomy is then presented. It is argued that events, like objects, have boundaries. These boundaries may reflect the statistical structure of events as we have experienced them, either individually or as a species.
5 Pragmatics of Human Action
Authors: Baldwin Dare , Loucks Jeffery , Sabbagh Mark
Published: May 2008

This chapter presents novel ideas about one set of possible constraining forces that guide inferences about others' intentions and goals. In particular, it proposes that action processing is guided in part by rationality assumptions akin to Grice's pragmatic principles. It begins by laying the conceptual groundwork for the proposal, which involves considering, in general terms, why such a proposal is warranted, and then reviewing the core elements of Grice's account of the pragmatics of communication. It suggests ways in which a novel twist on the Gricean account makes it possible to extend the analysis in meaningful ways to a so-called “simple action” — that is, action that is directed toward achieving concrete causal effects in the world. Although communicative action and simple action differ along a variety of dimensions, it is argued that analogous pragmatic phenomena can be identified in each. Specific ways in which the Grice-inspired proposal can account for inferences about others' simple actions are outlined, and evidence supporting the proposal's plausibility is considered.
19 Shining Spotlights, Zooming Lenses, Grabbing Hands, and Pecking Chickens: The Ebb and Flow of Attention During Events
Authors: Levin Daniel T. , Saylor Megan M.
Published: May 2008

This chapter proposes a new metaphor to guide research on visual attention: instead of a spotlight, hand, or zoom lens, attention is sometimes better likened to a pecking chicken. This metaphor may capture visual attention in situations where it only sometimes samples the visual world and does not track all objects over space and time. A set of metaphors for visual attention is reviewed and some of the ways in which these metaphors arise from the tasks used to study visual attention are discussed. Research documenting a range of failures of visual awareness that has questioned this understanding is described. Some implications for a model of attention that is less continuous than previous models but which produces a close link between knowledge and perceptual information during the specific moments when perceivers need to understand a visual scene are discussed.
21 The Boundaries of Episodic Memories
Authors: Williams Helen L. , Conway Martin A. , Baddeley Alan D.
Published: May 2008

Episodic memories must have beginnings and endings, but these remain unknown. This chapter presents two initial exploratory studies that attempt to identify the beginnings and endings of various recent and remote episodic memories. It also considers the nature of episodic and autobiographical memory, as well as what is known about the perception of event boundaries, which must surely play a role in the formation of memories of experienced events.
5 An Entirely New War
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

The massive Chinese intervention in the Korean War in late November 1950 created a new sense of crisis in Washington. Attempting to learn from the mistakes they had made in June, senior officials tried to provide a more forceful lead, reaching out to figures from across the political spectrum in order to foster a new sense of unity. But, initially at least, the administration's public efforts were little short of disastrous. The military situation was partly to blame. With events in Korea so murky, officials were unable to provide a clear sense of the scale of the defeat. In Tokyo, MacArthur soon stepped into the vacuum, issuing a string of statements that suggested a major catastrophe was in the cards. In Washington, Truman compounded matters when he told reporters that the A‐bomb was “under active consideration,” a phrase that suggested Korea was about to escalate in a truly terrifying fashion.
9 The Macarthur Controversy
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

Truman's decision to fire MacArthur in April 1951 initially threatened to make the domestic situation even worse. Indeed, Republicans hoped to exploit the opportunity to challenge the administration's whole Asian policy, and perhaps even impeach one or two senior officials. Within weeks, however, the MacArthur controversy worked to the administration's benefit. For the first time in months, senior officials engaged in a sustained and coordinated effort to make the case for war. MacArthur was thus outgunned. He was also placed on the defensive, having to rebut the official claim that his vision would result in a disastrous world war. More broadly, crucial figures in Congress, both southern Democrats and internationalist Republicans, rallied behind Truman's position, ending the disastrous prospect that had loomed so large in the winter—the prospect that the broad bipartisan Cold War coalition would soon collapse.
Reenchanting Confucius
Authors: Furlong John J.
Published: May 2008

When teaching the Analects to Western students, it is imperative first to “defamiliarize” or “disenchant” students from their fetishized Confucian and ancient Chinese schemata by using materials from the Warring States project instrumentally, reading the Analects in that “positivist” cultural‐historical context. One then may “reenchant” or “refamiliarize” the Analects —make it “mean” and connect to students' own conceptual schemes and culturally shaped religious and philosophical yearnings, while refusing to reduce the text to those cultural shapes. The project of reenchanting Confucius should not resolve the question of whether the Analects is a religious or philosophical or uniquely historico‐cultural product of some other nature but rather constantly to defer it, refuse to foreclose it, continue to address and appreciate its complexities and conundra.
Taking Religion Seriously in Public Universities
Authors: Nord Warren A.
Published: May 2008

Nord argues that the study of religion is necessary if students are to understand either the religious or the secular dimensions of the world in which they live and concludes that taking religion seriously will require a significant curricular commitment on the part of public colleges and universities. Furthermore, teaching in the area of religious studies should focus on living religious traditions and should not treat religion in a merely historical or reductionistic fashion. Nord makes his case based on the ideals of liberal learning and academic freedom, on Supreme Court decisions, and on moral and civic concerns.
Religious Pluralism, the Study of Religion, and “Postsecular” Culture
Authors: Porterfield Amanda
Published: May 2008

Porterfield warns that “religious pluralism” often serves as a code word in higher education for an approach to the study of religion that idealizes the positive aspects of religion and understates the negative. She argues, instead, that the academic study of religion needs to be rigorously objective and appropriately critical. Worrying that talk about a postsecular turn in American culture may also encourage an advocatory and non‐critical approach to religion, she champions a genuinely “secular” pedagogy (but not secularist) which neither promotes nor denigrates religion.
The Social Sciences and the Professional Discipline of Black Religion
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

Social sciences pathologized the religious experience of black southerners at the turn of the 20th century. The new psychology of G. Stanley Hall and his disciples was a major northern cultural authority that provided an ideology for the oppression of blacks in the South. New psychologists, building on the popular theories of white Protestant missionaries and educators (in the South and abroad) severed the connection between black religion and the moral sense (that is, ethics or morality) by arguing that black religion had no effect on blacks' moral life and was simply depraved emotionalism. By thus pathologizing black religion, the social scientists supported widespread claims of black degeneracy and argued that a naturally criminal and immoral African character was the culprit for the oppression that blacks endured at the hands of the lynch mobs and the state in the Jim Crow South. The new psychology theorized black religion as the emotional effluvium of primitive childlike minds and thus rendered blacks as archaic outsiders in an industrial modern nation.
6 Sanctifying Biodiversity
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

Theologians such as Rasmussen, Northcott, and Moltmann ground normative respect for creation in the experience of God's love. Each in his own way suggests that as humans are conformed to God's love for creation, they perceive and can respond to creation's integrity. As it brings them into friendship with God, grace brings humans to their creaturely senses, opening them to a world of normative value. But those theologians left unexplained why conforming ourselves to creation could be part of becoming friends with God, or why life with God might make us more at home on earth. This chapter turns to Thomas Aquinas to look for an explanation, seeking the soteriological conditions for ecojustice.
The Literary Tradition of Beit El
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

The Beit El kabbalists root their practice in Sharʾabi's theoretical writings, which are uneven and call for much interpretation. Sharʾabi produced a number of mystical prayers and also formalized penitential rituals of self‐mortification. Much of the literary activity of the Beit El kabbalists is devoted to resolving the desiderata and discrepancies remaining in Sharʾabi's writings, The most widely known evidence of Sharʾabi's activity is “his” prayer book, the Siddur ha‐RaShaSh, which was compiled posthumously by many hands. As a result of these factors, there are many versions and editions of the prayer book. In order to reinforce Sharʾabi's authority and spiritual hegemony, the Beit El kabbalists continued the Lurianic limitations of the kabbalistic canon.
Conditions of a Key Employee Agreement
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

Key employee agreements, sometimes required of high-level employees, often restrict employees from establishing relationships with competing companies for specified periods of time after they leave the company. This is called a noncompetition agreement. In this case, the agreement specified what was meant by competition: “ownership interest amounting to at least 1% in the competing enterprise, an officership, directorship, or other policy-making position in the competing enterprise.” Semantics and syntax analysis, including grammatical scope, the semantic meaning of “other,” and intonation were used to help resolve the ambiguity found in this agreement.
Brain Damage from a Cleaning Product
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

This product liability case brought against a company that produced a ship cleaning product centered on the warning label for the cleaning product, which had caused a worker's brain damage. Comparison was made between the industry safety standards for the precautionary labeling of industrial chemicals and the text on the cleaning product's container. The wording of the warning section on the container was not prominent to the potential danger of the product. The communication of the dangers that users might encounter were unclear, and the advice about what to do if users got into trouble using it were not conveyed explicitly. The discourse sequencing within the warnings placed the least crucial information before the most crucial and provided no information about what to do to avoid the hazards that the product contained. The plaintiff also rewrote the text of the container to show how it could have been user-friendly and to communicate useful information and prevent further harm.
Racial Steering in Real Estate
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

A nonprofit organization created to eliminate unlawful, discriminatory housing routinely investigates complaints by black citizens who complain about being steered to all-black areas of housing. This organization routinely uses “testers” of both races to determine the adequacy of the complaints in telephone inquiries about available apartments and houses. One instance of this procedure led to a discrimination suit against a real estate firm. The plaintiffs lost the case because the statute of limitations had run out relating to the specific incident. The appeals court then reversed the decision, noting that the realtors' practice was a pervasive, ongoing event rather than a single instance. The linguistic issue then became whether the race of Vernacular Black English speakers could be identified in telephone conversations. Nine sample phone calls made by both black and white speakers were used in a study made by the nonprofit group. The linguist was asked to identify the phonological, grammatical, and lexical features that were characteristic of the racially mixed speakers on tapes of these conversations. The linguist also called on the literature on this subject regarding both the linguistic feature of VBE and the subjective reaction research in Detroit that showed how both black and white listeners were able to identify race approximately 80 percent of the time.
Falun Gong and the Future of China
Authors: Ownby David
Published: May 2008

This book treats Falun Gong as an example of one form of Chinese popular religion, and the core of the volume, based on a close reading of founder Li Hongzhi's writings and on fieldwork among Falun Gong practitioners in the Chinese diaspora in North America, offers a detailed description of the doctrine, practices, and appeal of Falun Dafa (the term practitioners use to describe their “cultivation practice”). It is argued that Falun Gong, and the larger qigong movement out of which Falun Gong emerged, should be understood as part of reform era China's religious revival and that the historical roots of Falun Gong may be traced through qigong to the redemptive societies of the Republican period and even to the White Lotus sectarian tradition of late imperial times. The nature and historical importance of these groups has often been obscured by a state discourse of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which the study of Falun Gong allows us to problematize. The ongoing campaign of suppression waged by the Chinese state against Falun Gong suggests that this discourse is alive and well and illustrates the state's role in the politicization of popular religious organizations. The volume concludes that religions like Falun Gong have played a more important role in China's modern history than has been recognized and are likely to continue to play such roles in China's future.
The Foundations of Covert Empire
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This chapter describes the prewar and wartime formation of the British intelligence community in the Middle East, tracing its informality to the particular circumstances in which it was formed, and describes its various diplomatic, military, and civilian participants. It explains how this community was inducted into the formal intelligence and military establishments of the war, and how they and the institutions they developed, including the Arab Bureau, continued to defy bureaucratic discipline. Finally, it explains how their task expanded to include spying on their Arab allies, in anticipation of peacetime arrangements. As their brief as intelligence agents widened, they laid the foundation for a postwar covert empire in which intelligence agents would wield executive power.
8 Covert Empire
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This chapter describes the postwar consolidation of a new style of covert empire, in which real executive power in the Middle Eastern colonies was held by intelligence agents operating in hidden reaches of the bureaucracy. The scheme evolved informally after the failure of proposals for a more formal intelligence network, which were deemed impolitic. The covert style allowed colonial control in the increasingly anti-imperial postwar world, in places where more overt control would be strenuously resisted but where paranoia dictated some kind of control. The discreet air control scheme was the centerpiece of this system. The covert mode enabled the British to remain in Iraq well after the declaration of Iraqi independence in 1932, through the fifties. The chapter closes with a description of the growing paranoia of Iraqis and other powers in the region about the British presence and British incredulity in response.
Saul: Three Anointings, Two Wrongdoings, One Good Son Between
Authors: Borgman Paul
Published: May 2008

Israel's second king, David, will commit what looks like far greater wrong than anything done by God's first choice, King Saul. But David proves much the superior leader. Why might God have given up so quickly on Saul, and what does this intimate about God's reversal of choices, for David? Possible answers begin to emerge with the narrator's presentation of Saul's three anointings and paralleled wrongdoing, the latter sandwiching a picture of Jonathan, of everything good that Saul isn't. With Saul we find an anatomy of failure that goes beyond mere wrongdoing. Something within Saul is tragically lacking, a flaw that will prove definitive as a contrast with David. Brought into a unifying vision by this and other patterns are “blocks” of material considered quite disparate by many biblical scholars.
David Spares an Enemy, Three Times in a Row
Authors: Borgman Paul
Published: May 2008

In the middle of flight from Saul, which was explored in the prior chapter, David twice has the opportunity to take the king's life but does not do so. Between these paralleled scenes, David spares the life of another enemy, a fool, but not before he is spared from his own worst instincts through the agency of Abigail, a wise and beautiful woman. In these three linked accounts we are offered a display of what appears to be David's capacity for combining political savvy with a surprising morality and genuine devotion to God. First, David spares a foolish King Saul (1, 24); next, he spares a boorish fool—and is spared from his own worst instincts (1, 25); then, once more, he spares foolish King Saul, displaying both political savvy and genuine devotion (1, 26).
3 Issues in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Definite Descriptions in English
Authors: Abbott Barbara
Published: May 2008

This chapter defends an analysis of definite descriptions according to which they express a presupposition of existence and a conventional implicature of uniqueness. It replies to analyses offered by Szabó (2000) and Ludlow & Segal (2004), according to which definite descriptions semantically encode familiarity and give rise to a conversational implicature of uniqueness. Evidence is provided that the familiarity implicature is cancelable and calculable, unlike the (conventional) implicature of uniqueness, and is thus conversational. Descriptions with stressed the either contrast uniqueness with non-uniqueness or express a hyperbolic extension of uniqueness such as importance or prominence. Two counterarguments of Szabó and Ludlow and Segal, involving kinds of determiner meanings in languages of the world and the definiteness effect in existential sentences, are briefly replied to.
4 Equatives and Deferred Reference
Authors: Ward Gregory
Published: May 2008

Previous accounts of deferred reference (e.g. Nunberg 1995) have argued that all (non-ostensive) deferred reference is the result of meaning transfer, a shift in the sense of a nominal or predicate expression. An analysis of deferred equatives (I'm the Pad Thai) suggests an alternative account based on the notion of pragmatic mapping: a contextually licensed mapping operation between (sets of) discourse entities, neither of which undergoes a transfer of meaning. Moreover, the use of a deferred equative requires the presence of a contextually licensed open proposition (Prince 1986) whose instantiation encodes the particular mapping between entities, both of which remain accessible to varying degrees within the discourse context. Finally, it is shown how a complete account of deferred reference must provide for transfers of reference as well as sense.
3 Construal
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: May 2008

An expression's meaning depends not only on the conceptual content it evokes but also on the construal it imposes on that content. Broad classes of construal phenomena include specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective. Specificity (or its inverse, schematicity) is the degree of precision and detail at which a situation is characterized. One kind of focusing involves various kinds of organization into foreground vs. background, such as given vs. new in a discourse, or the asymmetry in complex expressions between component elements and the composite whole (the expression's compositional path). Another dimension of focusing is organization in terms of maximal scope (the full range of content an expression evokes), immediate scope (the general locus of attention), and profile (the specific focus of attention). Focusing is a kind of prominence, of which there are many sorts. Two are especially revelevant for grammar: profiling, a matter of what an expression designates (refers to); and trajector vs. landmark, the first and second most prominent participants in a profiled relationship. Subsumed under perspective are the overall viewing arrangement, vantage point, the viewing asymmetry between the subject and object of conception, and the time course of conception (sequence of mental access). Descriptive notions are supported by converging evidence from three sources: what is known independently about cognition; what is needed for viable semantic description; and utility in an optimal account of grammar. Varied evidence can be brought to bear on particular semantic descriptions, including paths of grammaticization and predictions concerning distribution and judgments of well-formedness.
10 Nominal Structure
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: May 2008

Personal pronouns and proper names are inherently grounded. The structure of other nominals tends to reflect semantic function, with the head noun as core, grounding as the outermost layer, and modifiers in between. Noun modification is varied both semantically and in its structural implementation. When nominal and relational expressions combine grammatically, there is often a discrepancy between the nominal expression's profile and the entity which participates most directly in the relationship—its active zone with respect to that relationship. Noun classes have varying degrees of semantic motivation. Distributional classes, defined by participation in particular patterns, may be semantically arbitrary. While gender-type classes have semantic prototypes, the class as a whole is defined by a consistent set of grammatical behaviors. In a usage based approach, such classes are characterized by families of constructional schemas. Noun classifiers likewise have prototypical values semantically extended to a range of other cases. They represent a distinct kind of nominal structure in which the classifier functions as a schematic head noun. Classifiers are related to quantifier constructions allowing the unitization of a mass. Nouns bear various kinds of grammatical markings. Most intrinsic to nouns are elements deriving them from other classes. There is no sharp distinction between such derivation and noun inflection. Markings of gender and number are intermediate. More extrinsic are markings indicating a nominal's role in higher-level grammatical constructions. These are meaningful in a symbolic account of grammar. Such an account accommodates both agreement—the multiple realization of semantic specifications—and cases where multiple specifications are realized by a single, unanalyzable form. Analyzability is a matter of degree.
EIGHT Emotion
Authors: Woodruff Paul
Published: May 2008

The art of theater engages an audience through emotion by bringing them to care about the characters. Caring is not the same as sympathy. The absence of caring is boredom, which is fatal to theater. Good theater has an audience that cares, and is therefore subject to emotions on behalf of its characters. A complete emotion is felt by a subject, makes the subject feel like taking a certain action, and is at something or someone. A complete emotion therefore requires subjectivity, motivation to action, and intentionality. Emotion in theater presents two problems. The knowledge problem arises because intentionality does not seem to be able to take fictional objects. The action problem is due to the impossibility of taking action across the line between audience and performance. Some thinkers have been moved by these problems to deny that complete emotions arise in theater, but these problems are easily resolved, even for mimetic theater.
NINE Empathy
Authors: Woodruff Paul
Published: May 2008

Good audiences bring a capacity for empathy to theater. “Empathy” is used for a variety of emotional responses to others, some of which are goals of the art of theater more than others. Some responses that have been called “empathy” are not compatible with understanding. Tonal sympathy is analogous to the sympathetic vibration of one violin string with another, and this is independent of understanding. Tonal sympathy, identification, and related responses tend to undermine the ability of an audience to watch carefully what is presented to them. Bertolt Brecht therefore argued for an epic model of theater that did not aim to generate empathy at all. But cognitive empathy supports the art of theater because it finds human action worth watching, and this kind of empathy requires understanding.
TWELVE The Mask of Wisdom
Authors: Woodruff Paul
Published: May 2008

Divine wisdom is not found in human life or on any human stage. Human wisdom may be found, but with difficulty, because it always conceals itself. Human wisdom knows its own weakness too well to profess wisdom in public. The art of theater is one of the masks of wisdom. Plato accused theater of pretending to a wisdom it does not have, but the reverse is the case. When theater carries wisdom it does so in concealment, with the result that only artful watchers may take it in. Chapter 12 explores the qualities that allow good watchers to gather wisdom about themselves and about what it is to be human, from watching in theater. Mimesis in theater supports the growth of wisdom, as does dialogue between opposed positions. Performers too gain wisdom from practicing the art of theater. The inversion of watchers and watched brings new wisdom to both groups, while merging them together, although it brings theater to an end, leads to the furthest wisdom we can derive from theater.
Apparitions of Asia
Authors: Park Josephine Nock-Hee
Published: May 2008

This book traces an American literary history of transpacific alliances which spans the 20th century. Increasing material and economic ties between the U.S. and East Asia at the end of the 19th century facilitated an imagined spiritual and aesthetic accord that bridged the Pacific, and this study reads the expression and repercussions of these links in American Orientalist and Asian American poetry. After considering both the transcendence and constraints of a structure of alliance between East and West in the introductory chapter, the first half of the study examines two key American instigators of Orientalist poetics, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, who imagined an identity between Eastern philosophy and idealized notions of America. Their literary alliances imposed a singular burden on Asian American poets, and the second half of the study considers a range of formal negotiations with this legacy in the poetry of Lawson Fusao Inada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Myung Mi Kim. In examining avant‐garde Asian American poetry against an American Orientalist past, this book reads the intersection of modernist and minority poetics.
Introduction
Authors: Nock-Hee Park Josephine
Published: May 2008

The introduction reads figures of transpacific alliance in the Orientalist verse of Walt Whitman and Ernest Fenollosa. Their grand visions of a union between East and West installed a poetics of transpacific accord and fueled modernist innovation. Against this backdrop, the introduction considers the rise of Asian America and sketches a genealogy of theorizing Asian American literature which grapples with a legacy of resistance to an Orientalist past.
The Triumph of the Cross
Authors: Viladesau Richard
Published: May 2008

This volume, a sequel to the author's earlier book The Beauty of the Cross, carries the study of Christian soteriology into the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter‐Reformation eras. Drawing on original documents and classic works of art and music, it uses the theology of the passion to exemplify the parallels and the divergences between conceptual and aesthetic theologies of this era, which represented a crucial turning point in both religion and the arts. The book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, showing how they affected each other and transformed Christian thinking and imagination. After an introductory section dealing with a “paradigmatic” artistic portrayal of the Passion, each chapter examines the “theoretical” as well as the “aesthetic” mediations of the theology of the Passion of Christ and its relationship to human salvation. The theologies of Savonarola, Vincent Ferrer, Gabriel Biel and the nominalists, Luther, Calvin, Robert Bellarmine, and the Council of Trent are examined as examples of the early Catholic Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter‐Reformation. These are placed in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Frà Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Cranach, and the Mannerists. In addition to specifically theological themes, the book explores the effects of theology and preaching on the arts, examining the iconoclasm of some of the early Reformers, the use of pictorial art in service of the word in Lutheranism, and the regulation of the arts by the Council of Trent.
Ritual and the Subjunctive
Authors: Seligman Adam B. , Weller Robert P. , Puett Michael J. , Simon Bennett
Published: May 2008

This chapter begins with a serious consideration of the understandings of ritual in traditions that take it as central, especially Judaism and Confucianism. It argues that such traditions understand the world as fundamentally fractured and discontinuous, with ritual allowing us to live in it by creating temporary order through the construction of a performative, subjunctive world. This is a world “as if”, with ritual understood in its indexical qualities. The chapter continues with a general consideration of major contemporary understandings of ritual and their limitations. It questions the common contemporary reduction of ritual either to its functions or to its meanings. Instead, the chapter concentrates on the work of ritual to create alternative worlds.
Inner Grace
Authors: Cary Phillip
Published: May 2008

Rather than constituting a break with his Platonism, Augustine's doctrines of grace and free will are formed from the beginning by Platonist conceptions of happiness, wisdom, intellect, virtue, purification, conversion, faith, and love. Divine grace is inner help for the will, and our need for it expands “outward” over the course of Augustine's career, being required originally for attaining the happiness of wisdom (i.e., the intellectual vision of God), then for rightly ordered love (i.e., charity), and eventually for Christian faith. Reading the apostle Paul, Augustine emphasizes the difficulty of willing and loving the good, and eventually concludes that even the human choice to believe depends on grace, though this comes to us in the external words of a “suitable call,” which does not directly change the will from within. However, in his later polemics against Pelagianism, Augustine reconceives grace as wholly inward, a divine inner teaching that turns our will and causes us to believe. Since God foresees how he will give the gift of grace, this raises questions of predestination and especially election: why does God choose to bring some people rather than others to conversion, faith, and ultimate salvation? A more biblical and external doctrine of election, in which the chosen people are a blessing for those outside them, would avoid the anxieties of Augustine's doctrine of predestination.
Platonist Grace
Authors: Cary Phillip
Published: May 2008

Augustine's doctrine of grace has roots in his Platonism, in which happiness is attained by wisdom (i.e., intellectual vision of divine Truth) and wisdom is attained by virtue, which consists of rightly ordered love, involving purification from attachment to lower (external, sensible, temporal) things and conversion to higher (inner, intelligible, eternal) things. Free will therefore means not autonomy from God but the capacity to love divine Beauty, and grace means that God inwardly helps human free will turn from slavish obedience out of fear (which Augustine associates with the Jews) to an inner delight in God that is like falling in love (a theme he picks up from Platonism). As Augustine's doctrine of grace develops, our dependence on this inward divine help, which any Platonist regards as necessary to achieve the goal of intellectual vision, gradually expands “outward” to include rightly ordered love and even Christian faith.