bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poetic Voice
Authors: Wolosky Shira
Published: November 2023

Poetic voice is often assumed, in the lyric, to mean the voice of the poet. A generalized speaker, called a “lyric I,” allows the poet to speak in some pure language, perhaps as the spirit of poetry itself. This notion, however, applies to only one kind of poetic voice. Even in cases where the poem does seem to present the poet as speaking in general, there always remains the individual person as well. Conversely, when the poet seems to speak in his or her own voice, she or he still is speaking as a poet, in poetic language, and not merely privately or casually.
Poetic Rhythm: Sound and Rhyme
Authors: Wolosky Shira
Published: November 2023

Like metrical rhythms, sound rhythms of poetry are at once the most natural and the most technical of poetic features; mechanical to study and yet a compelling and even defining element of poetry. As with meter, sound patterns can be identified, but in a different sense their effects resist discussion. And, as with meter, the sound structures and patterns that make a poem can’t be appreciated outside the many overlaying patterns of language in a text. Yet they do not merely correspond to some other feature, such as a “meaning” (which may be in any case only part of what the poem is about) which they in some way illustrate or imitate. Sounds exist first at a level of pure sense enjoyment, of appreciation of words for their own sake, as rhythmic play that may also include multiple relationships through etymology and pun (paranomasia). Language in poetry is, to an exceptional degree, material. Poetry celebrates the materiality of language: the shape, sound, body of words, as they embody, and structure, linguistic experience.
Antoine Du Pinet And His Models
Authors: Backus Irena
Published: November 2023

The identity of Antoine du Pinet remains uncertain to this day. A certain Antoine Pignet was minister at Ville-la-Grand in the Chablais, near Geneva, in October 1538. Judging by the correspondence between him and Calvin in the years 1538–1540, Pignet was the corrector of Calvin’s works during the reformer’s exile in Strasbourg. On 4 October 1539, he wrote to Calvin to say that he had just read the Latin version of the latter’s Reply to Sadolet and was so struck by its elegance and importance that he proposed to translate it into French so as to make it available to a wider public. On 27 October of the same year, in a letter to Guillaume Farel, Calvin made it quite clear that two translators of the Reply were working in competition with one another and that one of them was Pignet. The French translation finally appeared in Geneva in 1540 from the presses of Michel du Bois, with nothing to indicate whether it was the work of Antoine Pignet or of his competitor.
The Apocalypse And The Zurich Reformers
Authors: Backus Irena
Published: November 2023

Leo Jud was born at Gemar in Alsace, southwest of Strasbourg and attended the Latin School at Selestat at the same time as Martin Bucer. In 1499, he matriculated at the University of Basel, where he met and became friends with Ulrich Zwingli. He intended to study medicine but soon turned to theology under the influence of Thomas Wyttenbach. Jud was ordained a priest in Rome in 1507. From 1507 until 1512, he was deacon at Saint Theodore’s in Basel, and from 1512 to 1518, he was preacher at Saint Hippolyte in Alsace. In 1519, he succeeded Zwingli at Einsiedeln, while becoming increasingly favorable to the Reformation. In 1522, he was chosen, on Zwingli’s recommendation, to become pastor of Saint Peter’s in Zurich, where he took up his duties on 2 February 1523. He was at Zwingli’s side during the Second Zurich Disputation (26–28 October 1523) and during the confrontation with the radical Anabaptists in 1525. He was a judge (one of the two clergymen together with four laymen) of the marriage court from its inception in 1525.
Introduction
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

In American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions, I detailed the immense impact that the Euro-American discovery of Asian religions had not only on European Romanticism, but above all, on American Transcendentalism. There I argued that the Transcendentalists’ discovery of the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other world scriptures was critical in the entire movement, pivotal not only for the well-known figures like Emerson and Thoreau, but also for lesser known later figures like Samuel Johnson and William Rounseville Alger. That Transcendentalism emerged out of this new knowledge of the world’s religious traditions I have no doubt. But there were also pre-existing traditions in western Europe that contributed a great deal to the emergence, not only of Transcendentalism, but also of what has come to be known as the American Renaissance, that extraordinary period during the mid-nineteenth century when so much of American literature came into being. Primary among these European traditions was Western esotericism.
Esotericism in Early America
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

Reading most histories of colonial America gives one little indication that there was any presence of Western esotericism in the New World at all. Historians have been chiefly concerned with the realm of events, of wars and famines, of treaties and exploration of the new continent, and have paid very little attention at all to whether or how the various currents of Western esotericism made their way into the colonies. Yet when we look more closely at the lives of colonists in North America, we discover that all manner of esoteric disciplines were brought over from Europe, and sometimes played major roles in people’s lives. Generally speaking, the forms of esotericism brought from Europe to colonial America can be separated into two main categories: pragmatic esotericism and spiritual esotericism.
Greaves
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

In 1842, Emerson wrote in his journal a passage with a startling reference to a little-known English author and mystic. The passage reads: “And yet there are books of no vulgar origin but the work & the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the universe which they paint, that although one shuts them also with meaner ones, yet he says with a sigh the while, this were to be read in long thousands of years by some stream in Paradise. Swedenborg, Behmen, Plato, Proclus, Rabelais, & Greaves.”1 Plato and Proclus come as no surprise and need no introduction, nor, probably, do Swedenborg, Jacob Böhme and Rabelais. It is a peculiar list, made more peculiar by its concluding name, Greaves. Who on earth is this, and what is he doing in this list of luminaries, Emerson’s literary-religious pantheon of writers to be read in Paradise? To answer this question is to understand how American Transcendentalism was deeply influenced by Böhmean German theosophy—filtered through the English author Greaves.
Dickinson
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

At first glance, Dickinson is certainly the most unexpected of authors to encounter in our study of Western esotericism in the American Renaissance. There is only scant evidence of her reading, and none that she read directly on topics like alchemy or mysticism. What is more, there is just a modicum of evidence that she was interested in the vulgarized esotericism of spiritualism or mesmerism, despite the fact that, as Robert Weisbuch observed with only mild exaggeration, “nearly every poem Dickinson wrote has to do with death.”1
Pilgrimage to an Earthly City
Authors: Fenn Richard K
Published: November 2023

The Loss of A providential viewpoint leaves us at the mercy of societies that are self-organizing and self-justifying. The span of history offers little consolation or challenge to such a system; the challenges come from the environment, which is full of threat and possibility at any given time. The long view remains a staple of political rhetoric, whereas decision making follows the polls and the quarterly report. Such societies offer little in the way of symbolic gratification to the individual who is seeking to find in the nation or larger society a personificationof his or her values and commitments.

Such societies demystify the passage of time and leave individuals on their own to sort out their ultimate loyalties. As a result, individuals are not torn between this world and some other world that is the consummation of every hope and longing. On the contrary, one is left with the sense that time is the only arena for human struggle. That is, one is no longer torn between allegiance to an earthly or a heavenly city; most conflicts are more mundane, for example, between the city of one’s origin and the one to which one has emigrated later in life. Many immigrants in fact do shuttle back and forth between the countries of their origin and later residence. Those who stay put still live in a welter of earthly allegiances and may indeed be divided by conflicts, say, between home and work. However, it is a minority who long for another world in the midst of this one; their spiritual disease is not inevitable or beyond secular cure.
Introduction
Authors: Tasić Vladimir
Published: November 2023

The antagonism between two vaguely conceived entities, colloquially labeled “science” and “postmodernism,” seems to have become part of public life. In the past few years, pages filled with entertaining invective have sprung up both on the Internet and in print. attracting the attention of such mainstream media as The New York Times, The Guardian, and Libération. These exchanges come under the heading “science wars.”

This passionate debate—which revolves around the problem of how science in general and mathematics in particular are read or misread—raises a number of social. historical. and even political questions. I am primarily interested in the following one: Why would various postmodern intellectuals bother invoking mathematics in their theories at all?
Around The Cartesian Circuit
Authors: Tasić Vladimir
Published: November 2023

It does not seem reasonable to try to provide a self-contained account of the work of a dozen eminent philosophers in a few pages. Instead of attempting the impossible, I will restrict myself to establishing a few reference points needed for subsequent discussion. There is little content that is specifically mathematical at this stage, because many questions about mathematical knowledge are questions about knowledge in general.

One school of thought, the seventeenth-century rationalism of René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, is traditionally believed to have held that mathematics is entirely the business of pure reason. But if mathematics is a mere invention of the spirit, why does it work in practice? If it is reducible to purely logical relations, then it seems that all mathematics is in a sense based on trivialities. However, the wealth and applicability of mathematics make it seem like something that is not at all trivial.
Beyend The code
Authors: Tasić Vladimir
Published: November 2023

Brouwer was not the only mathematician who objected to the “atomistic” view of space and time, and to the limitations of a linguistically obsessed view of mathematics. German mathematician Hermann Weyl made similar objections, as well as Henri Poincaré and several other French mathematicians to whom Brouwer referred as “pre-intuitionists.”

It is important to note that none of them denied the practical value of the atomist view, including the idea of time as a “line” filled with points-moments that are in essence regarded as linguistically accessible entities. This mathematical idealization proved itself an invaluable methodological tool for modeling physical phenomena, motion in particular. That was not under dispute at all. What came under fire was the deeper issue of whether this atomic theory is satisfactory when it presumes to offer objective knowledge of the continuum.
Postmodern Enigmas
Authors: Tasić Vladimir
Published: November 2023

Now that we have a reasonably large data bank of analogies at our disposal, we can begin a critical reconstruction of the basics of “postmodern” argumentation. Derrida’s work is particularly interesting in the present context, because he seems aware of its mathematical tributaries.

I believe that at this stage we are in a position to infer what appears to be one of the “central” insights of the otherwise decentered thought-constellation known as poststructuralism. More precisely, we can derive this corollary by means of Poincaré’s critique of impredicative definitions and givenness of identity. That indeed seems to be what Derrida has done ( although for the sake of clarity I will suppress the dark lyricism that clouds his writing).
Under Spanish Rule
Authors: Tedlock Dennis
Published: November 2023

The European invasion of highland Guatemala first took the form of what Mayans called nima kamik ch’aq, “the great death of the flesh,” or simply yawab’il, “the sickness.” This was a smallpox epidemic, arriving in 1520. Four years later came military forces led by Pedro de Alvarado, crossing the border that separated the easternmost province of the Aztec empire from the westernmost reach of the Quiché kingdom—the same border that separates Mexico from Guatemala today. At that time the rulers of the Quiché kingdom were Three Deer and Nine Dog, members of the same noble lineage as Cawek of the Forest People in the Rabinal play. When the massive army they sent to stop Alvarado was defeated, they invited him to a peace conference at their capital, the citadel of Old Camp. He turned the conference into a trial, taking them prisoner, torturing them until they confessed to plotting against him, and burning them at the stake.
Group Activities
Authors: Practice Writing
Published: November 2023

The activities described in this chapter are among my favorites, mostly because I have enormous fun working with noncompetitive groups to create a play, a scenario, or a novel. Such projects not only can be fun, the right group can offer the student insights into dialogue and structure that he might not acquire on his own. Aside from the application of the group exercises to fiction and playwriting, the major focus of the present chapter is on understanding stock types and situations that we find throughout literature. The importance of understanding recurrent characters, plots, and situations cannot be overemphasized. For if the student is freed from the burden of having to invent his own, then he finds much of his creativity and energy going into other facets of the work, not into reinventing the wheel. This is not to say that great or good writing is done by formula. On the contrary, too much attention to conventions can lead to over calculation and paralysis. But we do need to remember that the greatest English speaking writer seldom, if ever, invented his own plots and characters. I believe there are at most two or three of Shakespeare’s plays whose sources have eluded scholarly identification.
The Birth Of The Star System And The Shaping Of The Modern Self
Authors: Cohen Paula Marantz
Published: November 2023

What constitutes the self? What causes it to undergo elaboration and revision in a culture? “In or about December 19w, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf pronounced in 1924.2 She was alluding to the postimpressionist exhibition held in London on that date, suggesting that it had a far-reaching influence on those who saw it. The statement reflects the ironic vigor characteristic of Woolf’s style: she uses hyperbole to emphasize both the importance of the event and its limited public appeal. But she would not have had to engage in this kind of satirical overstatement had she slightly amended her dates, crossed the Atlantic, and referred to something else as the basis for the change she had in mind-say, to the first publicity stunt surrounding a motion picture actress (Florence Lawrence in March 19w) or the first mention in print of the phrase “motion picture star” (Florence Turner in June 19w) or the first appearance of a movie star’s photograph on the cover of a magazine (Mary Pickford in December 1911).3 Had Woolf been referring to the birth of the American star system rather than to a European exhibition of highbrow art, she would have seemed less culturally refined but more accurate in connecting the event to a new shape for human character.
Exciting Times: The Religious World of Saul Tarsus and Yeshua
Authors: Akenson Donald Harman
Published: November 2023

saul and yeshua lived in an era that was the most inventive, most imaginative, most ideationally fecund in matters of religion of any time that is adequately recorded in human history. Even if we limit our time horizon to the century covered, roughly by years 30 bce to 70 ce, and even if we limit our geographical vision to Eretz Israel and to the Diaspora communities in the Near East that owed their allegiance to Judahism, even so the perpetual swirl of new ideas, new sects, and the splintering and recombination of old ideas and older factions, is dizzying. Take the twentieth-century American propensity to create new religious movements and to borrow and combine disparate concepts, and compress that amount of creativity into a population one-fiftieth its number, most of its members living in an area the size of Massachusetts, and one has an idea what it must have been like. Try to conceive of a mental world so rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants, and god-drunk fanatics that it was the equivalent of a night-sky kept alight by thousands and thousands of fire-flies, brief-lived, incandescent, luminous. That’s what Yeshua and Saul witnessed.
Saul’s Life and Letters
Authors: Akenson Donald Harman
Published: November 2023

in minnesota in my youth, I spent a fair bit of time with an old Swedish-Baptist preacher. He could have been sent to us by the casting director for any of Ingmar Bergman’s early films, except he wasn’t as much fun. He was compelling, though, in a way that could easily have been mistaken for self-importance. Everything he said, he said slowly, and he expected you to listen to the end of whatever point he was making, even though you were cocksure what that would be. But he fooled you, and sometimes to his own quiet delight, himself, just often enough to keep you coming back: raising the kind of half-anguished, half-smartassed kind of questions that priests and pastors and rabbis have been putting up with from shortly after Creation. He did not read a great deal by the standards of his vocation, but what he read, he studied very carefully indeed. One day, on winter holiday from Yale College, I talked to him about a then-fashionable commentator on the New Testament whom we were studying. He had not read the man, he said, and probably never would. He paused: long. And then added. “In my life, I have frequently found that the Bible throws a good deal of light on the commentaries.”
Missionary in a Swirling Universe
Authors: Akenson Donald Harman
Published: November 2023

because saul was such an exceptional personality, it is easy to forget that much of what he did was ordinary; and when he was doing something unusual, often it was making more explicit, or taking to logical limits, beliefs and practices that were the common currency of his own times. Much of what he did was simply to act as a Judahist of his own times, for there was plenty of variation in the Yahweh-faith, as we have demonstrated earlier, enough to encompass easily most of his apparent eccentricities. His missionary activity is a case in point.
Saul and Four Basic “Facts” About the Historical Yeshua
Authors: Akenson Donald Harman
Published: November 2023

When we listen carefully to saul, we have strong and direct evidence for one set – and only one of many sets – of beliefs concerning the historical Yeshua that were held by his devout followers in the thirty years after his crucifixion. Ultimately, one hopes that what Saul believed characterized Yeshua’s earthly existence has some relationship to what we limply think of as “historical reality.” That, though, is as much a matter of faith as of epistemology. While one can live with the forever-sophomoric objection that we can never really know any historical event (not fully, not too percent, we grant and then get back to work), there lingers the more unsettling question that is apt to be raised by anyone who has lived for a while and has paid attention to humanity’s bent behaviour: can we trust Saul?
Circular Design in Ceremony
Authors: Bell Robert C
Published: November 2023

The standard native american myth pattern uses the hero-quest as a framework in which to establish prototype ceremonial procedures for curing rituals called chantways. Mythic plot embodies reasons for the diverse and intricate procedures and items of ritual and, in addition, involves a detailed description of legendary events that explains rite, properties, and behavior. Thus, the mythic narrative (text) itself is figural and symbolic. So, in their New World variations on the hero­ quest pattern-the worldwide “monomyth” of separation, initiation, and return-most american ceremonial myths provide a hero or heroine who gets into a series of predicaments or suffer injuries (usually transformations in mind and body) that require supernatural aid-”Thus the hero acquires the ceremonial knowledge and power essential for establishing a chantway.”
Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Authors: Allen Paula Gunn
Published: November 2023

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m taking “sacred” to refer to any material that is drawn from ritual and myth. This definition might extend to include “little stories,” the kind that are told to children, and it certainly includes most arcane information that can be culled from a variety of scholarly or native sources.
Guilty Creatures
Authors: Kezar Dennis
Published: November 2023

This is a study of how poets treat the theme of killing and various other depravities and immoralities in Renaissance poetry. The book explores the self-consciousness of the poet that accompanies literary killing, and explores fundamental moments in particular writings in which Renaissance poets admit themselves accountable and to a degree guilty of a process whereby the literary subject is brought to some kind of destruction. Included among the many poems Kezar uses to explore the concept of authorial guilt raised by violent representations are Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Milton’s Samson Agonistes.
Introduction
Authors: Kezar Dennis
Published: November 2023

In The Familiar Platonic Debate between Poet and Philosopher, imitation elicits indictment and defense. The failure of mimesis to correspond exactly with its object does not necessarily threaten the object itself, but it constitutes a potential social problem in its seductive distortion of truth. Early modern poetry, however, engages a Platonic critique that goes further—substituting for “imitation” a “representation” not merely deficient but capable of destroying its subjects. Even Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie—which exculpates the poet by removing literature from history and locating it in a harmless imaginative realm where nothing is affirmed—concludes by threatening its critics with this capacity: if the enemies of poetry are not “to be rhymed to death, as it is said to be done in Ireland;” their “memory” will nevertheless “die from the earth” through a reciprocal literary antagonism. That this threat seems playful does not remove it from the cultural context that calls for the Defence, a context in which the boundaries between representation and sociohistorical violence are increasingly insecure.
Courting Heresy and Taking the Subject
Authors: Kezar Dennis
Published: November 2023

Like Most of John Skelton’s Poetry, Phyllyp Sparowe eludes classification and description, reflecting the spirit of an author who seems to have “tried to write himself out of literary history” in an almost “perverse refusal to act like a ‘transitional’ figure.” Such an assessment is at least the sensible response to the Work’s critical history. The poem has been labeled both “reactionary” and “revolutionary; ‘ “medieval” and “Renaissance.” Applauding its bubble-like levity, C. S. Lewis has called the poem England’s “first great poem of childhood.” Focusing on its graver, more disturbing rhetorical moments, however, Stanley Fish has argued that the poem gives voice to artistic world-weariness and despair. The lyric has also presented challenges for those attempting to reconcile Skelton’s roles as devout priest and satirical poet. In an early study, Ian Gordon tentatively compared Phyllyp Sparowe’s liturgical allusions with the tradition of goliardic parody; but more recently F. L. Brownlow and Arthur Kinney have claimed that the poem’s liturgical fabric-based specifically and extensively on the Catholic burial service-should be read as a devotional adaptation of church ritual.
Spenser and the Poetics of Indiscretion
Authors: Kezar Dennis
Published: November 2023

How Can The Elegist Disclaim culpable opportunism when his poem renders its subject a spectacularly linguistic “occasion”; when the theatrical audience of his poem is imagined as a predatory “monster” of misconstruction and slander; and when the poet’s epistemological transactions with a sick world, a world apparently bereft of” good lookers on; ‘ necessarily implicates him in the economy he would abjure? Like Phyllyp Sparowe, Donne’s Anatomy presents less a precise example of elegy than a fascinating exploration of generic motivations, consequences, and contaminations. In fact the possibility of formal “discord” and confusion informs one of the most startling lines in a poem full of surprises: “Wicked is not much worse then indiscreet.” As for Skelton, Donne’s venture into the poetry of praise coextends with a recognition of the “rude incongruitee” Work’s critical history.
The Properties of Shakespeare’s Globe
Authors: Kezar Dennis
Published: November 2023

For an Antitheatricalist Like Stephen Gosson, the Renaissance stage travesties the courtroom, leaving the defendant with no voice and replacing a single judge with an injudicious jury:

At stage plays it is ridiculous, for the parties accused to reply, no indifference of judgment can be had, because the worst sort of people have the hearing of it, which in respect of their ignorance, of their fickleness, and of their fury, are not to be admitted in place of judgment. A judge must be grave, sober, discreet, wise, well exercised in cases of government, which qualities are never found in the baser sort.

In his indictment of drama, Gosson charges poets and players with reducing the accused to a lifeless and common text, “openly blown into the ears of many and made a byword” (167); and he charges the audience, “carried away with every rumor,” with blind injustice: “they run together by heaps, they know not whither; and lay about with their clubs, they see not why. Which thing the ancient Philosophers considering called them a monster of many heads” (164).
The Era of Cooperative Competition, 1911–1933: Trade and Labor Associations, Political Majorities, and Speech Rights
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

The two decades between 1911 and 1933 were a time of accelerating, sometimes cataclysmic, change in the economic, political, and cultural currents of everyday life in America. The First World War produced the most evident upheaval, not only in the physical and economic ravages of war but also in its political aftermath. In the United States, the Great War stands as the great divide between an earlier era of progressive politics and a decade of conservative Republican administrations. If the 1930s are recalled as the decade of the Great Depression, the twenty years preceding it should be remembered, much as we view the 1960s, as an era of turmoil—of tyrannies, resistances, and excesses. Not only World War I and its international aftermath, but also the first women’s movement in America, urban race riots and a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, labor uprisings, repression of dissident speech, the burlesque of Prohibition, and an anti-immigrant nativism betray any effort to portray those years in harmonious terms.
Rhetorics of Free Competition, 1968–1980: Efficiency, Property Rights, and Equality
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

For many of us, the year 1968 and the quarter century since then may be too close to observe as history. As historical perspective shortens, events loom larger on the horizon. There is the tendency to grant greater importance to more recent events, events that have touched our lives. The 1968 murders of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. seem to cast longer shadows than does the 1881 assassination of James A. Garfield, the last President of the United States born in a log cabin and a respected politician whose death was deeply mourned at the time. The shorter the temporal distance, the more discernible the past becomes in its particulars, the more complex in its insinuations. The recent past approaches like a crowd of counter-memories pushing against the present—an unsettling re-collection of what the present might have been, for better and for worse.
Concluding Thoughts: On The Limits of Competition Policy
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

As we have seen, the confines of competition policy during the last century have been capacious. Yet, there have been well-defined limits. Competition policy and its limits have been articulated in twin rhetorics of free competition, in two clusters of images and arguments expressing ethical commitments to liberty and equality. One rhetoric has reflected a primary commitment to individual liberty, to competition free of government power, in appeals to freedom of contract, wealth maximization, private property rights, or freedom of speech. The other rhetoric has reflected a primary commitment to rough equality, to competition free of excessive economic power, in appeals to fair competition, consumerism, majoritarianism, or Jeffersonian entrepreneurialism.Sometimes, one rhetoric has sought to appropriate the other’s appeals—for example, to consumerism or freedom of speech. At other times, both rhetorics have incorporated parallel appeals—for example, to fair profits, efficiency, or cooperative enterprise. Although the appeals have shifted from time to time, what has remained constant is each competition rhetoric’s primary ethical commitment—one to individual liberty and the other to rough equality.
Madness and Divinization in Early Christian Monasticism
Authors: Stroumsa Guy G
Published: November 2023

The most radical forms of self-transformation involve leaving human nature altogether. This can be done either from the bottom or from the top: one can become either a beast or an angel. Pascal, who knew something about the coincidentia oppositorum, warned us long ago, “Qui veut faire I’ange fait la bete.” In the following pages, I shall argue that in religious history, these two forms of self-transformation have not always been diametrically opposed to one another. Some examples might even suggest that one should appear to be a beast in order to become an angel. My argument will focus on the”Fools for Christ’s sake,” the saloi saints of late antiquity, and in particular on the most famous among them, Symeon, the Holy Fool from sixth-century Emesa. These odd figures, both male and female, whose behavior was meant to shock, all came from the monastic milieux in Egypt and Palestine. Extravagant behavior within ecstatic or charismatic movements is, of course, well known in the ancient world. The frenzy of the Bacchic maenads comes immediately to mind. Ecstasy, or trance, on the part of religious virtuosi is also a wellknown phenomenon.2 Israelite prophecy is here a classic example, with its connections with madness: “for every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet” (le-khol ish meshuga’ u-mitnabe), says Jeremiah (29:26), while Hosea (9:7) refers to “the prophet [who] is a fool, the spiritual man [who] is mad” (ewil ha-navi, meshuga’ ish ha-ruah). Beyond such phenomena as prophecy and madness, so very different in their motivation and yet sometimes quite similar in expression, other specialists of the spiritual world, such as magicians or shamans, could appear to the outsider as set in radical contradistinction to “normal” behavior. Plato, for instance, sets Socrates’ wisdom in opposition to human wisdom.
Possessed Transsexuals in Antiquity: A Double Transformation
Authors: Grottanelli Cristiano
Published: November 2023

In preparing this essay, I started out with two hypotheses that I tested and found to be wrong. The first was that the idea of feigned possession, and of the resulting false prophecy, that was so striking in Apuleius’s novel Metamorphoseon Libri XI or Asinus aureus, was a typical aspect of Hellenistic and Roman imperial philosophical and theological reflection. The second was that the other transformation attributed to the ancient votaries of Oriental goddesses by Greek and Latin texts-that is, transsexual behavior, often including emasculation-was connected both to their addiction to possession trance and to their connection with female deities - in other words, that the votaries were effeminate males because they were believed to be possessed by female deities.
Madness and Suffering in the Myths of Hercules
Authors: Cancik-Lindemaier Hildegard
Published: November 2023

“My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies” - these are the first words of Ovid’s poem that we have become used to citing under the Greek title “Metamorphoses,” “transformations.” At the end of this poem, book 15, the philosopher Pythagoras is introduced, expounding the doctrine that the world is but change: “everything,” he says, “is changing; nothing perishes.” Ovid brings to the fore an ample semantic field: words denoting ‘the same’ and ‘the other,’ ‘the former’ and ‘the new,’ ‘staying the same’ and ‘being changed, altered, transformed, converted’ keep recurring, as do formulas playing with the tenses of the verb ‘to be’: “and what we have been or what we are we shall not be tomorrow.”
From Platonic to Hasidic Eros Transformations of an Idle Man’s Story
Authors: Idel Moshe
Published: November 2023

The search for a transformation of human nature must surely be one of the main purposes of mystical literature. Though present in religion in general, this search for an other, better, more spiritual, perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, immortal identity motivates those religious paths that may be described as mystical more than any other factor. These transformations presuppose a quandary about the nature of reality. If reality is good, why look for something better? And if the good God created it, why did he not create us perfect from the very beginning? Transformations in fact point toward a certain duality, explicit or dormant, at the very center of reality: there is a perfect nature, which created something that is less than perfect, and its very existence invites creatures to come closer to or even become identical with this creative nature. This quandary may take extreme forms, such as Gnosticism; or it may have more moderate expressions of duality, such as Platonism and Neoplatonism; or it may be mitigated in some forms of pantheism, which reduces the gap between nature and the ideal. However, it seems that the distance is only very rarely obliterated at the creational level, that is, during the process of creation. Given this persistent distance or initial dissonance, mysticism, and mystical techniques in particular, strive to reduce the distance, sometimes even to undo it. In other words, a search for some forms of deification, or of theosis, or in more moderate forms, apotheosis, underlies the mystical pursuit. The concepts of immortality, omnipotence, or omniscience are not only forms of conceptualizing the divine in itself but also different ways of imagining the perfect nature toward which the mystic strives.
Communities of Practice
Authors: Mather Lynn , McEwen Craig A , Maiman Richard J
Published: November 2023

Lawyers inhabit layered and overlapping communities of practice that help to constitute the multiple meanings of legal professionalism. In the eyes of some theorists and many bar leaders and law teachers, the legal profession as a whole provides the community that defines professional norms and shapes the conduct of practitioners. Yet, such claims have been challenged by those who view the decisions of lawyers as reflective of personal identities or as shaped by their work settings and clients instead. In this chapter we try to draw these different perspectives together to trace a more complex and differentiated view of collegial communities of practice. These communities provide the context for the construction of varying versions of professionalism in practice.
The Boundaries of Expertise
Authors: Mather Lynn , McEwen Craig A , Maiman Richard J
Published: November 2023

The concept of expertise has always been central to debates about the meaning of professionalism. For the functionalists who pioneered the sociological study of professions, it was the professional’s expertise—the mastery of a body of knowledge of value to society—that both justified and necessitated self-regulation of professional behavior to ensure that it served the public interest (Parsons 19 39; Goode 19 57). To varying degrees, the more recent scholars of the professions have been less willing than their predecessors to accept at face value the idea that professionals actually possess distinctive expertise (Larson 1977; Abel 1989; Kritzer 1998b). Even the skeptics agree, however, that the sine qua non for the success of an occupational group seeking to establish itself as a profession is the capacity to persuade the public to accept its claims to special knowledge.
Before Publication
Authors: Callahan John F
Published: November 2023

Sometime not too long after beginning Invisible Man in the summer of 1945, Ellison composed his “Working Notes for Invisible Man.” He began the document by meditating on American Negro personality and the factors that led to the condition of invisibility. He then situates “our character” in the South for what will evolve into the early chapters of Invisible Man. Section II is a discursive outline of Ellison’s early plan for the episodes and action of the novel to be set in New York. Read alongside the published text of Invisible Man, the “Working Notes” provide rich clues to the evolution of Ellison’s protagonist and story, and his developing craft as a novelist. I have also included excerpts from four of Ellison’s letters to Albert Murray, first published in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Written over the two years prior to Invisible Man’s publication on April 19, 1952, the letters show Ellison running a self-revealing gamut of emotions. By turns confident, uncertain, anxious, proud, playful, wary, and eager, his words have the self-deprecating and self-absorbed quality of someone at a crossroads in his life letting his hair down to a trusted friend.
Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture
Authors: Dickstein Morris
Published: November 2023

In the standard views of American culture after the war, and especially of the 1950s, the arts and intellectual life turned deeply conservative, reflecting the imperatives of the cold war, the migration to the suburbs, the new domesticity, and the rise of McCarthyism. A small academic industry has sprung up, linking every cultural development of the postwar period to the clenched mind-set of the cold war. At the same time, it has been more and more evident that the facile contrast between the fifties and the sixties is based on a deep simplification. The fifties were a far more restless, dynamic, and contradictory period than we have generally allowed. It can be easily shown how the roots of the sixties lay in the new energies of the postwar years, when writers, along with jazz musicians, abstract painters, and maverick filmmakers, contributed to a creative ferment that matched the growth of the economy and the spread of American influence. Working just outside the mainstream, often seemingly apolitical, these writers and artists helped shape a counterculture focused on the youthful dropout, the rebel without a cause, the disgruntled outsider who embodied new cultural values: improvisation, spontaneity, an experimental attitude. This last phrase comes not from the Beats but, surprisingly, from Ralph Ellison describing his 1952 novel Invisible Man as he accepted the National Book Award. It may be hard to imagine Ellison, always so correct and elegant in his personal demeanor, as any kind of radical, or as a forerunner of the counterculture. Moreover, no black writer was more warmly welcomed by the literary establishment or more reviled by his young successors when the catchwords of black nationalism took hold in the 1960s and ‘70s. Even before then, left-wing critics like Irving Howe had indicted Ellison and James Baldwin for turning their backs on the militant traditions of black anger associated with their mentor, Richard Wright.
Designing Democracy
Authors: Sunstein Cass R
Published: November 2023

In modern nations, political disagreement is the source of both the gravest danger and the greatest security, writes Cass Sunstein. All democracies face intense political conflict. But is this conflict necessarily something to fear? In this provocative book, one of our leading political and legal theorists reveals how a nation's divisions of conviction and belief can be used to safeguard democracy. Confronting one explosive political issue after another, from presidential impeachment to the limits of religious liberty, from discrimination against women and gays to the role of the judiciary, Sunstein constructs a powerful new perspective from which to show how democracies negotiate their most divisive real-world problems. He focuses on a series of concrete concerns that go to the heart of the relationship between the idea of democracy and the idea of constitutionalism. Illustrating his discussion with examples from constitutional debates and court-cases in South Africa, Eastern Europe, Israel, America, and elsewhere, Sunstein takes readers through a number of highly charged questions: When should government be permitted to control discriminatory behavior by or within religious organizations? Does it make sense to govern on the basis of popular referenda? Can the right to have an abortion be defended? Can we defend Internet regulation? Should the law step in if children are being schooled in discriminatory preferences and beliefs? Should a constitution protect rights to food, shelter, and health care? Disputes over questions such as these can be fierce enough to pose a grave threat. But in a paradox whose elaboration forms the core of Sunstein's book, it is a nation’s apparently threatening diversity of opinion that can ensure its integrity. Extending his important recent work on the way deliberation within like-minded groups can produce extremism, Sunstein breaks new ground in identifying the mechanisms behind political conflict in democratic nations. At the same time, he develops a profound understanding of a constitutional democracy’s system of checks and balances. Sunstein shows how a good constitution, fostering a “republic of reasons,” enables people of opposing ethical and religious commitments to reach agreement where agreement is necessary, while making it unnecessary to reach agreement when agreement is impossible. A marvel of lucid, subtle reasoning, DESIGNING DEMOCRACY makes invaluable reading for anyone concerned with the promises and pitfalls of the democratic experiment.
The Anticaste Principle
Authors: Sunstein Cass R
Published: November 2023

In chapter 1, we saw the importance of protecting deliberating enclaves, largely to ensure the emergence of arguments that would otherwise be squelched in general debate. I argued too that in some deliberative processes, members of low-status groups generally speak less and are given less respectful attention. If people are not heard, and if they do not speak, both democracy and deliberation are at risk. And if members of certain groups receive less respectful attention, both liberty and equality are at risk. Deliberating enclaves are a partial solution. But much more should be done.
Sex Equality versus Religion
Authors: Sunstein Cass R
Published: November 2023

What is the relationship between religious liberty and the anticaste principle? Consider the following potential conficts between sex equality and freedom of religion, conflits that arise in one or another form in many nations: Certain Jewish synagogues educate boys separately from girls, and certain Jewish schools refuse to admit girls. Some Jewish girls and their parents contend that this is a form of sex discrimination that contributes to sex-role stereotyping, in a way that produces second-class citizenship for women. They object in particular to the fact that such stereotyping is taken for granted in much of their community.
Native and Christian
Authors: Martin Joel sW
Published: November 2023

One November morning in 1818 near Lookout Mountain,Tennessee, a heartbreaking scene was played out between a young Cherokee woman and her parents. Catharine Brown, age eighteen, was a student at Brainerd, a boarding school established by Christian missionaries from New England for the benefit of Cherokee youth. Catharine, in little more than a year of residence at the school, had found a second home and great fulfillment. She had grown fond of the missionaries and their wives. It was as if she had become a member of their families. Their religion fascinated her. Catharine Brown had committed herself to learning about it and becoming a Christian. Now her parents insisted she interrupt her studies and accompany them to a new Cherokee home­land in the West.
A Passion For Justice
Authors: Yarbrough Tinsley E
Published: November 2023

An eighth-generation Charlestonian with a prestigious address, impeccable social credentials, and years of intimate association with segregationist politicians, U.S. District Court Judge Julius Waties Waring shocked family, friends, and an entire state in 1945 when, at age sixty-five, he divorced his wife of more than thirty years and embarked upon a far-reaching challenge to the most fundamental racial values of his native region. The first jurist in modern times to declare segregated schooling “inequality per se,” Waring also ordered the equalization of teachers’ salaries and outlawed South Carolina’s white primary. Off the bench, he and his second wife--a twice-divorced, politically liberal Northerner who was even more outspoken in her political views than Waring himself--castigated Dixiecrats and southern liberals alike for their defense of segregation, condemned the “sickness” of white southern society, urged a complete breakdown of state-enforced bars to racial intermingling, and entertained blacks in their home, becoming pariahs in South Carolina and controversial figures nationally. Tinsley Yarbrough examines the life and career of this fascinating but neglected jurist, assessing the controversy he generated, his place in the early history of the modern civil rights movement, and the forces motivating his repudiation of his past.