bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mimetic Monsters
Authors: Beal Timothy
Published: March 2015

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?
The Hollywood Gospel and its Scholars
Authors: Walsh Richard Gregg
Published: March 2015

Stigmata, a 1999 film, dramatizes the recovery of a lost Jesus gospel by placing it within the story of the possession of an atheist beautician, who is also a stigmatic. The discovery of the reason for her possession and her exorcism leads ultimately to the publication of the lost, now found gospel. Stigmata cadges selections from the Gospel of Thomas together to create this gospel, which is a version of the Hollywood gospel hallowing the heroic individual above all things and empowering the fantasy of the subjective, expressive individual. This Hollywood gospel—unlike the Gospel of Thomas—is also scientific (or, at least, empirical and pragmatic), materialist, and democratic. It is, in short, a belated, peculiarly American form of gnosticism. Intriguingly, Stigmata’s drama also sheds some light on scholarship, revealing among other things the cultural embeddedness of scholarship and its interaction with popular fiction, particularly at the points of lost gospels and the notion of heroic individuals struggling against corrupt institutions.
Editor's Preface
Authors: Stolow Jeremy , Gitelman Lisa
Published: March 2015

This is the introduction for the special issue, "Inscriptions," co-edited by Jeremy Stolow and Lisa Gitelman
“Channeling” the powers of God’s Word
Authors: Schulz Dorothea E.
Published: March 2015

Starting with the controversial esoteric employment of audio recordings by followers of the charismatic Muslim preacher Sharif Haidara in Mali, the article explores the dynamics emerging at the interface of different technologies and techniques employed by those engaging the realm of the Divine. I focus attention on the “border zone” between, on the one hand, techniques for appropriating scriptures based on long-standing religious conventions, and, on the other, audio recording technologies, whose adoption not yet established authoritative and standardized forms of practice, thereby generating insecurities and becoming the subject of heated debate. I argue that “recyclage” aptly describes the dynamics of this “border zone” because it captures the ways conventional techniques of accessing the Divine are reassessed and reemployed, by integrating new materials and rituals. Historically, appropriations of the Qur’an for esoteric purposes have been widespread in Muslim West Africa. These esoteric appropriations are at the basis of the considerable continuities, overlaps and crossovers, between scripture-related esoteric practices on one side, and the treatment by Sharif Haidara’s followers of audio taped sermons as vessels of his spiritual power, on the other.
Comic Book Karma
Authors: Scott J. Barton
Published: March 2015

Virgin Comics, a transnational corporation with offices in India and the U.S., has tried to put its chosen medium—the comic book— to novel use. In 2006, Virgin (now Liquid Comics) began marketing titles that remobilize Hindu mythology for the global entertainment market. Paying particular attention to the series Devi (2006-), this article situates Virgin’s comics within several discursive and institutional conjunctures. First, I trace how Virgin’s chief “visionaries” sought to “modernize” the Indian comic. By bringing the vocabularies of Nehruvian developmentalism to bear on this popular cultural form, Virgin signals that in post-liberalization India the aesthetic has outpaced the industrial as the byword of global modernity. Second, I consider Virgin’s attempt to render the comic book a fully fungible medium, which facilitates the development and exchange of intellectual property across entertainment platforms. Newly dematerialized, Virgin’s ethereally cosmopolitan comics are nonetheless haunted by the material specificities of the postcolonial nation-state.
The Disobedient Subject
Authors: Marsh Victor E.
Published: March 2015

In conservative religious discourse, “homosexuality” is configured as mutually incompatible with a sincere engagement in religious belief and praxis, and the subject positionings common within the gay liberation project have tended to reinforce the opposition. Here I suggest how some marginalized subjectivities have liberated themselves from the toxic representations of hostile discourses by exploring new possibilities for being and becoming that are distinctly different from those provided by dominant, heteronormative models of identity, especially those held in place by conventional religious teaching. From recent literary theory I adopt the notion of self as a constructed narrative, and examine the extent to which the emerging genre of “queer spiritual autobiography” (Stewart 2002), in particular, contributes to a reverse discourse, becoming a site for contestation and resistance. First-person testimony in the form of memoir and autobiographical writing takes up the project of renarrativizing the self and disrupting authorized versions of male identity, spirituality and sexuality. I illustrate this through the work of the British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood, a seminal proponent of the genre, to delineate how the positioning of self is renegotiated in queer spiritual autobiography. I draw attention to the integrative potential that Isherwood found in particular teachings and practices of Advaita Vedanta, in which he was trained by his spiritual teacher, that are often misunderstood in Isherwood scholarship. The impact of Vedanta on Isherwood’s textual personae, his experiments with first-person point of view, his interrogation of the problematics of writing religion, and a sustained engagement with a religious inquiry and praxis not predicated on a repudiation of his sexuality, all contribute to make him a writer of exemplary interest today.
Return of the Eunuch
Authors: Baker Dallas J.
Published: March 2015

This article surveys tensions in Buddhist scripture around gender norms and gender abnormality and argues that, in the context of Vajrayana (or Tantric) Buddhism, gender disobedience—or “gender insubordination,” to deploy Judith Butler’s phraseology—can be understood to be a legitimate path to Awakening, in and of itself. It extends the notion of gender disobedience beyond an engagement with the transgender to a practice/performance of the sexless and genderless which is evoked by the figure of the eunuch. The article uses the traditional Tibetan sacred image of the enlightened protector (Wrathful Buddha) Gonpo Maning Nagpo as a case in point. The article is reflective as well as theoretical and informed by spiritual praxis and foregrounds similarities between Buddhist and Queer Studies perspectives on sex, gender and sexuality.
Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Six
Authors: Mack Burton
Published: March 2015

Part 6 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.
Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Two
Authors: Mack Burton
Published: March 2015

Part 2 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.
Slavery, Women's Rights, and the Beginnings of Feminist Biblical Interpretation in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Setzer Claudia
Published: March 2015

Progressive movements create social changes that reach far beyond their original contexts. Such movements challenge authoritative texts and interpretations in the culture, generate alternative understandings of authoritative works that may be applied to other struggles, create a social arena for the dissemination of ideas, create patterns of thought that may be re-constituted in other forms, and may leave intact some related social problems. The abolitionist movement demanded a confrontation with slavery in the Bible and the development of non-literal exegesis. It also provided a conduit for the new methods of European biblical scholarship, particularly through the preaching and writings of abolitionist Theodore Parker. Three nineteenth-century women, Sarah Grimké, Frances Willard, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in spite of differences in their biographies and religious commitments, shared similar methods of interpreting the Bible to argue for women’s rights. This article argues that habits of interpretation and knowledge of emerging historical-critical scholarship that these women learned in the abolition movement carried over into their fight for women’s rights. Like many nineteenth-century Christians, they subscribed to a belief in progressive revelation, occasional Orientalism, and a sometime negative evaluation of Judaism. Yet they show a remarkable anticipation of contemporary feminist biblical scholarship in their understandings of the effect of culture on interpretation, their view of gender as socially constructed, and their descriptions of God and Jesus as both male and female.
‘Rise Up, Ye Women’
Authors: Powery Emerson B.
Published: March 2015

Harriet Jacobs was the first female to write and publish a narrative about her earlier life in slavery. It is a story unlike any written by her male counterparts, especially as she details the psychological impact of the harrowing sexual exploitation of nineteenth-century antebellum enslavement. Her Incidents is full of citations of and allusions to the Bible, which she learned to read as a very young girl. She developed a strategy for interpreting the pages of the Bible to challenge commonly held southern interpretations that supported the slaveholding aristocracy surrounding her. Her appropriation of the Bible allowed her to defend her humanity and maintain her dignity.
Lot's Wife in the Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier
Authors: Peters Janelle
Published: March 2015

The biblical figure of Lot’s wife in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.
Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood
Authors: Vasquez Manuel A. , Peterson Anna L.
Published: March 2015

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization
To Endure or Ignore?
Authors: MacKenzie C. James
Published: March 2015

In the context of an increasingly centrist hierarchy, the fate of various progressive Catholic post-Vatican II evangelizing movements is unclear. I consider here how two progressive priests in Guatemala have dealt with hierarchical discipline. I examine the role of these priests and their superiors in a vertically and horizontally structured religious field. While one priest, a proponent of Charismatic Catholicism, feels alienated from the hierarchy and his congregation and imagines alternatives in terms of schism, the other, a proponent of inculturation theology, found practical freedom from both grassroots and hierarchy through the development of networks, which I analyze using models derived from Castells. Together, these cases demonstrate how religious power, while strongly centralized in the context of the Catholic Church, can adapt—if imperfectly—to different organizational structures simultaneously.
The Tell-Tale Iconic Book
Authors: Graham M. Patrick
Published: March 2015

This study draws on the corpus of images from sixteenth-century publications available in the Digital Image Archive to explore how books are used in printed images related to biblical interpretation. The investigation finds that images of books are used to indicate: (1) authorship of biblical works; (2) defend the orthodoxy of later writers; (3) to affirm the learning, piety, and social standing of certain writers, saints, and other figures from antiquity; (4) to contend that the message and ministries of certain biblical figures were based on Scripture; and (5) to link antiquity with the Early Modern period.
Muṣḥaf and the Material Boundaries of the Qur’an
Authors: Suit Natalia K.
Published: March 2015

Mushaf is what Muslims call the physical body of the Qur'an, its pages, binding, and print. Scholars traditionally focused on the textual analysis of the Qur'ân as theological, political, historical or literary productions, favoring a semantic dimension of the text and detaching it from its materiality. In this article, I propose to shift our attention from the understanding of the Qur'ân exclusively as message to its material existence as mushaf in the hands of its manufacturers and users in order to highlight the process through which the status of the Qur'ân as a sacred message is negotiated.
Iconic Books from Below
Authors: Parmenter Dorina Miller
Published: March 2015

Investigating the Christian Bible as “America’s Iconic Book” (following Marty 1982) reveals that this icon is generated and maintained not only through lofty theology and high church rituals, but also through mundane and often invisible biblical practices. By examining how people engage with their personal Bibles, scholars can better understand how status and authority is generated not only through semantic meaning, but also through material and embodied actions. This article looks at one example of this in contemporary American Evangelical Christianity: the display of worn-out Bibles and the discourses that surround the phenomena of duct-taped Bibles.
Engaging with the Guru
Authors: Myrvold Kristina
Published: March 2015

The Sikhs have perhaps taken the concept of a sacred scripture much further than any other religious community by treating the Guru Granth Sahib as a living guru. This essay analyzes various religious beliefs and practices by which contemporary Sikhs construct and maintain conceptions of their scripture as a guru with spiritual authority. A distinction is made between religious practices that serve to mediate and interpret the semantic content of the scripture, performative acts that are enacted to transform the social world, and rituals that aim to give the scripture a careful ministration and celebrate different stages of its worldly life. The various ritualized uses of Guru Granth Sahib can be approached as external strategies by which the Sikhs personify their scripture and make it socially alive as a living guru.
Possession and Repetition
Authors: Yoo Yohan
Published: March 2015

This article demonstrates the need for the iconic status and function of Buddhist scripture to receive more attention by illuminating how lay Korean Buddhists try to appropriate the power of sutras. The oral and aural aspects of scripture, explained by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, provide only a limited understanding of the characteristics of scripture. It should be noted that, before modern times, most lay people, not only in Buddhist cultures but also in Christian and other traditions, neither had the chance to recite scriptures nor to listen to their recitations regularly. Several clear examples demonstrate contemporary Korean Buddhists’ acceptance of the iconic status of sutras and their attempt to appropriate the power and status of those sacred texts. In contemporary Korea, lay Buddhists try to claim the power of scriptures in their daily lives by repeating and possessing them. Twenty-first century lay believers who cannot read or recite in a traditional style have found new methods of repetition, such as internet programs for copying sacred texts and for playing recordings of their recitations. In addition, many Korean Buddhists consider the act of having sutras in one’s possession to be an effective way of accessing the sacred status and power of these texts. Hence, various ways of possessing them have been developed in a wide range of products, from fancy gilded sutras to sneakers embroidered with mantras.
The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Ancient Christianity
Authors: Larson Jason T.
Published: March 2015

This article considers the intersection of Christian and imperial memory in the physical Gospel book. Besides describing the function of gospel books in the post-Constantine Roman Empire, it examines the connection between the Roman construction and production of sites of memory that established Roman imperium in the Mediterranean and the development of the Christian Gospel codex as a site of memory within Christianity. It also explores the related issues of imperial and divine power as manifest through material things, the rhetoric of seeing and iconicity, and the invented tradition of Christian orthodoxy. The article shows that the Christian Gospels and Roman sites of memory, despite a vast difference in their intended functions and original uses, both established imperium. It maintains that the creation of the Gospels' imperial iconicity was not based on their function as texts of spiritual enlightenment in late ancient Christianity, but on the fact that the production of Gospels as material cultural objects depended on Roman cultural exemplars and ideological rhetoric.
Possessing the Iconic Book
Authors: Camp Claudia V.
Published: March 2015

I propose that the notion of possession adds an important ideological nuance to the analyses of iconic books set forth by Martin Marty (1980) and, more recently, by James Watts (2006). Using the early second century BCE book of Sirach as a case study, I tease out some of the symbolic dynamics through which the Bible achieved iconic status in the first place, that is, the conditions in which significance was attached to its material, finite shape. For Ben Sira, this symbolism was deeply tied to his honor-shame ethos in which women posed a threat to the honor of his eternal name, a threat resolved through his possession of Torah figured as the Woman Wisdom. What my analysis suggests is that the conflicted perceptions of gender in Ben Sira’s text is fundamental to his appropriation of, and attempt to produce, authoritative religious literature, and thus essential for understanding his relationship to this emerging canon. Torah, conceived as female, was the core of this canon, but Ben Sira adds his own literary production to this female “body” (or feminized corpus, if you will), becoming the voice of both through the experience of perfect possession.
Ancient Iconic Texts and Scholarly Expertise
Authors: Watts James W.
Published: March 2015

This essay probes the origins of iconic textuality in the ancient Near East, informed by post-colonial perspectives on iconic texts. The surviving art and texts from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia exhibit at least four forms of iconic textuality: monumental inscriptions, portraits of scribes, displays and manipulations of ritual texts, and beliefs in heavenly texts. The spread of literacy did not displace the social prestige of scribal expertise that was established in antiquity. The every-growing number and complexity of texts accounts for the continuing cultural authority of scholarly expertise. The tension between expert and non-specialist uses of texts, however, explains scholarship’s avoidance of the subject of iconic books and texts while drawing constant attention to their semantic interpretation instead.
Between the Textual and the Visual
Authors: Elitzur Zeev
Published: March 2015

A book is not a regular object. Like other objects, it can be perceived by the sense of sight. Unlike other objects, the visual form of the book subordinates itself to the linguistic sphere. Thus we tend to overlook the outer appearance of books in favor of their contents. In other words we tend to read books as opposed to viewing them. The iconic dimension of the book appears where this assertion fails—that is, when people notice (or even emphasize) the visual form of books. This article develops this observation in the context of late antique Judaism and Christianity. It describes two modes of crossing the boundaries between the book as an object of reading and the book as an object of viewing. In both traditions, the iconic dimension of the book bypasses the textual level and highlights the visual level. In the Jewish world, the transition is between the textual perception of the written sign and the visual perception thereof. In other words, it is between two alternative modes of perceiving the written sign. This is exemplified by several instances of “Visual Midrash”—a midrash that is based on graphical data. In the Christian world, the transition is between the textual function of the book and its subordination to the hegemony of the visual image—an historical process beginning with the Pauline visual encounter with Christ and culminating with the triumph of the image in eighth century Byzantium.
Serious Texts in Funny Places
Authors: Dennis Mark
Published: March 2015

This article examines three canonical Buddhist texts attributed to Japan’s Prince Shōtoku (574–622 CE) through the lens of a non-traditional medium: the Japanese manga, or comic book. It does so as a way to expand the range of serious academic inquiry beyond the many highly technical studies that have understood these texts mainly as vehicles for transmitting the original meaning of the prince. While the manga, as a quintessentially consumerist genre, may seem an unusual subject for the study of serious religious texts, Tessa Morris-Suzuki argues that this medium has, in fact, “reached a huge audience and had a profound effect on the historical imagination of Japan’s postwar generations,” shaping, she believes, the Japanese public’s understanding of its history to the same degree as historical textbooks. This article takes the manga seriously as a medium for transmitting important “non-exegetical” meaning about these texts that are part of a living textual tradition.
Re-Imagining Text - Re-Imagining Hermeneutics
Authors: Duncanson-Hales Christopher
Published: March 2015

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Philosophical and theological hermeneutics have been invigorated by a de-regionalization of the interpretation of texts that corresponds with this journal’s mandate to “cross traditional boundaries, bringing different disciplinary tools to the process of analysis and opening up a sustained dialogue between and among scholars and others who are interested in religion, textuality, media, and mediation and the contemporary world.” Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing meaning to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s threefold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the temporal boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves.
Jesus in the Gutter
Authors: Elliott Scott S.
Published: March 2015

Graphic novels and comics have long provided a venue for visually portraying biblical narratives. While some provide a clever hook for devotees to capture the imagination in order to safely entertain the existing flock or to entice would-be converts into the fold, others are not concerned primarily with any “faithful” visual rendering of biblical narrative. These productions interrogate and/or appropriate biblical narrative in a variety of ways while maintaining a high degree of fidelity to the requirements of the art form and to the expectations of its readers. This article investigates two works focused on the figure of Jesus, both of which share and exploit the iconoclastic nature and marginal status of the genre, and find in the figure of Jesus a narrative and character uniquely befitting of the form. While neither aims to render Jesus directly, each manages to capture something of both the discursive aspects of the gospel literature, and perhaps something of whatever counter-cultural message and disposition the historical Jesus may have had. Moreover, each manipulates the closure that readers provide through recourse to the familiar biblical text. I contend that these productions faithfully, if ironically, refract the subversive potential of both the biblical narrative and the figure of Jesus precisely by their infidelity to what might be loosely described as a more orthodox Christ.
Editorial
Authors: Crossley James
Published: March 2015

Professor James Crossley introduces the articles dedicated to "Biblical Literacy".
Red songs and the main melody
Authors: Wang Qian
Published: March 2015

Red songs were revolutionary songs and propaganda songs. In recent years, the government has repackaged red songs as popular music and adapted popular music into red song repertoire simultaneously. The fusion between red songs and popular music makes young people’s ideological education more effective. The classification of red song repertoire and the identification of the main melody publicize what kind of (popular) cultural product the government welcomes for reward, benefit and profit. Highlighting the cultural context of nationalism can soften the coerciveness and aggressiveness of political propaganda. The popularity of red song TV singing contests and local singing activities demonstrates that politics and culture, propaganda and commerce, education and entertainment are all mixed together for the smooth operation of ideological control in today’s China. But to a certain extent, the commercialization of red songs into entertainment also corrupts the seriousness of political propaganda.
German-Indigenous musical flows at Ntaria in the 1960s
Authors: Hurley Andrew Wright
Published: March 2015

This article focuses on aspects of Indigenous musical life in the 1960s at and around Ntaria (formerly Hermannsburg) in Central Australia, and isolates one flow between German missionary sources and the Indigenous musical culture—the Christmas carol ‘Stille Nacht’ (aka ‘Silent Night’), which became ‘Inguwa inturtai’, now also known as ‘Hymn 44’. I explore some of the meanings that are invested in a particularly striking yet ambiguous deployment of that song by Tiger Tjalkalyeri, and argue that, in a setting where white Australians have approached Indigenous music with their own classificatory expectations, an ‘Indigenized’ German Christmas carol could have a strange power. ‘Inguwa inturtai’ could upset and unsettle white Australian attitudes towards the ‘authentic’.
Sahajasri
Authors: Guang Kuan
Published: March 2015

He was born in Nepal but orphaned soon after, ordained and educated in Kashmir, then despite old age and the long, harsh journey, this fourteenthcentury Buddhist monk travelled to China where he lived for the rest of his life. This is what this article is about — the life of the great Buddhist missionary Sahajasri. Through various sources, mainly in Chinese, this paper will investigate what inspired or impelled him to leave Kashmir and travel to China. China was in a dynastic transitional period. When Sahajasri arrived he was well received, against all expectations, by both Mongol and Chinese emperors. However, it seems that Sahajasri’s achievement in Chinese Buddhism has not been recognized. By putting all the fragmentary accounts about Sahajasri together, this article aims to reconstruct Sahajasri’s life in Ming China.
Happy, Holy or Anglican
Authors: Hale Christopher
Published: March 2015

.
Landscape of Identity
Authors: Anderson-McLean Maire
Published: March 2015

.
Imagining India
Authors: Neufeld Ronald
Published: March 2015

.
Christians and Jews and Proselytizing
Authors: Thiessen Elmer John
Published: March 2015

.
Monasticism in 5th -- 7th c. Ireland
Authors: Friesen Milton J
Published: March 2015

.
Rise and Fall of the Christian Democrats’ Movement in Poland after 1989
Authors: Sowa Kazimerz Z
Published: March 2015

This article sets out to explain why Poland has not been successful in establishing a Christian political party...this in the face of the overwheming evidence of religiosity in the Polish national ethos. Drawing on historical and cultural elements, it details a Polish reluctance to link together Church and State so thoroughly when religion already influences the State in other less-overt political ways.
Getting Past Orientalism
Authors: Hawley Michael
Published: March 2015

This paper considers the issue of multiculturalism through an examination of the way Gandhi’s relationship with the West has been understood. This discussion of Gandhi, the West, and multiculturalism proceeds in an historical framework. It begins by offering a short characterization of the way many, though certainly not all, Europeans involved in the colonial project understood their relationship with India and Indians. This provides the necessary context to sketch the postcolonial critic of Europe’s engagement with India, as well as to show how Gandhi actively played upon Western cultural values in his own thinking. The author argues that these two ways, “the colonial and the postcolonial” are insufficient for understanding Gandhi’s views on identity and multiculturalism. Instead, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, a third option is proposed. This third option casts the concept of multiculturalism and our understanding of Gandhi in a new light.
From Qumran to Nazareth
Authors: Perrin Andrew B
Published: March 2015

Much scholarly activity has focused on the texts of the Qumran community and their potential parallels to the New Testament, a process over which some care must be taken lest too much be read across from one source to another. Clearly the Scrolls tell us that within the Second Temple era great diversity reigned, making it a difficult task to make simple historical connections. In this article, we will explore two aspects of Jesus’ messianic portrayal by the New Testament authors and then attempt to determine clues from the Scrolls that will aid in formulating a critical theology of Jesus as the Messiah. The study will deal with the explicit claims of Jesus’ divine sonship and the implicit notion of how Jesus’ actions and deeds are indicative of his identity as Israel’s awaited Messiah.
Studying Hinduism in Practice, edited by Hillary Rodrigues
Authors: Pintchman Tracy
Published: March 2015

Studying Hinduism in Practice, edited by Hillary Rodrigues. Routledge, 2011. 195pp., $36.67. ISBN–13: 9780415468473.
Sinister Yogis, by David Gordon White
Authors: Rodrigues Hillary
Published: March 2015

Sinister Yogis, by David Gordon White. University of Chicago Press, 2009. 376 pp., Pb., $29.00. ISBN-13: 9780226895147.
Abduction of Sri-Rukmini
Authors: Austin Christopher R
Published: March 2015

This article examines the Harivamsa’s rendering of Vasudeva Krsna’s encounter with and marriage to Rukmini of Vidarbha (HV 87–90), and proposes that this episode of Krsna’s life is of special importance to the Harivamsa’s larger concern to develop in full the Mahabharata’s partial portrait of the adult Vasudeva Krsna. I argue that the Harivamsa’s basic work of unpacking Krsna’s adult identity advances on three fronts simultaneously: genealogical, political and theological, and that it is especially by recounting Krsna’s relationship with Rukmini that the poets are able to develop all at once some of the key political, genealogical and theological dimensions of Krsna’s identity revealed only partially in the Mahabharata.
On “Parents” and “Children” in Vedic Tradition
Authors: Sandness Adéla
Published: March 2015

In the symbolic language of Vedic tradition, parental relationships are among the ways used by poets to articulate relationships between the one and the many, the parts and the whole. Mythological figures, and the principles they represent, are named as offspring to indicate that they are made manifest by an originator or “parent.” In some cases, what is named is the inter-relationship of principles through a cyclical process of “reverse” parenting. Prajapati, or Sacrifice, for example, is the father of his son, the fire god Agní and yet Agní, in turn, gives birth to him. There is also a well-known pattern of creation by an original “parent” or “one,” who gives birth to a “second,” and from these two “parents” arises the manifest world of the many. This paper will examine ideas of creation and re-creation through a study of parental relationships in Vedic tradition.
Inglorious Bodhisattvas
Authors: Atanasiu Cristina
Published: March 2015

Most early Mahayana sutras glorify virya—vigor, or manliness—as the most desirable quality of a bodhisattva. But was this always the case? The purpose of this article is to argue that shifting notions of exemplar masculinity parallel the change from the early Mahayana, to mature developments of this Buddhist tradition. To prove my point, I will examine four influential early Mahayana sutras: the Ugrapariprccha, the Astasahasrika, the Surangamasamadhisutra, and the Vimalakirtinirdesa, to argue that the bodhisattva-path discourse became gradually more assertive and authoritative. Buddha Sakyamuni’s image lost focus, while bodhisattvas’ attitude towards arhats evolved from respectful submission to open humiliation. By now the bodhisattva transformation was complete, an inglorious coup that marked the Mahayana take-over.
Captivity, Masculinity and Degradation in an Early Rabbinic Tale
Authors: Daum Robert A
Published: March 2015

This article examines differences between versions of an erotic Rabbinic narrative about rescuing a captive boy, who had been carried away from Roman-occupied Jerusalem and was enduring (or facing) sexual exploitation at the hands of Roman captors. A synoptic reading suggests a pattern of retroactive “touching up” of scandalous elements in early versions of the tale by the time it appears in early medieval manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud. These changes soften the scandalous implications of a sophisticated Palestinian Jewish appropriation of an Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman homoerotic narrative. The comparatively inelegant later version suggests efforts to de-eroticize the plot, masculinize the captive, and lessen his degradation. Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that these changes might have been motivated by the fact that in earlier versions the captive was anonymous, whilst in later versions he is identified as a pillar of the talmudic tradition.
Hungering for Maleness
Authors: White James
Published: March 2015

Catherine of Siena is famous as both a fasting female mystic and a key political figure in late medieval Italy. Scholarship on the saint, however, frequently separates the religious and political aspects of her life. This article argues that the two were inextricably intertwined. Through an examination of Catherine’s letters and her vita, written by her confessor, I argue that Catherine’s religious fasting enabled the creation of her public, political persona. Extreme ascetic malnutrition generally pushes the female body to cease menstruation, which we can speculate happened in Catherine’s case. Masculinized via her spiritual “use” of food and other discursive practices, Catherine assumed the (otherwise masculine) authority to intervene in political executions, exhort monarchs, and help end the Avignon papacy.
Promise Keepers Canada and Christian Relational Masculinities
Authors: Dube Siphiwe Ignatius
Published: March 2015

This article addresses two questions regarding the Christian men’s organization Promise Keepers Canada (PKC). First, why is it that despite Canada’s geographical and cultural proximity to the United States, the PKC has not followed the same historical trajectory and elicited similarly negative responses as its American counterpart? Second, is there something particular about Canadian experiences of masculinities that accounts for the differences? The article uses the concept of “culture wars” as one of the keys to explaining the differences in public reception. The article also demonstrates that PKC participates within a largely intersubjective tradition of masculine identity formation that is particular to Canada. While acknowledging that the discourse of relationality has resulted in a more interdependent or inter-subjective notion of religious hegemonic masculinities in the Canadian context, the article also notes the limits of this discourse.
Bring Me (Men) Integrity
Authors: Morton M S I
Published: March 2015

United States military policy on gays and lesbians “evolves” within an institutionally developed environment of religiously reified “sexual mythologies”; these sexual mythologies assert and exploit a determinative connectivity between anatomical sex categories and gender expression. For the past fifty years, the Air Force Academy’s detailed construction of sexual mythologies reveals an overwhelming institutional commitment to a complex foundational expression of heteronormative hypermasculinity. Within the last two decades however, the Academy’s mythological re-buttressing of these foundational illusions has encountered ever more “unsettling trouble.” This article explores the Academy’s use of conservative Christian religious rhetoric, and the mercantile tactics of evangelical Christian organizations to re-mythologize and re-stabilize the foundational hypermasculinity so essential to what Timothy Kaufman-Osborn regards as “the logic of masculinized militarism.”
Portraits of literacy across families, communities and schools: Intersections and tensions. Jim Anderson, Maureen Kendrick, Theresa Rogers and Suzanne Smythe (eds) (2005)
Authors: Konidaris Ephie
Published: March 2015

Portraits of literacy across families, communities and schools: Intersections and tensions. Jim Anderson, Maureen Kendrick, Theresa Rogers and Suzanne Smythe (eds) (2005) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 398pp. ISBN: 0–8058–4859–2
Phonological and cultural innovations in the speech of Samoans in Southern California
Authors: Duranti Alessandro , Reynolds Jennifer F.
Published: March 2015

Bilingualism is a concept that critically relies on and interacts with a variety of other theoretical constructs, including the notions of ”language”, ”speakers”, and ”community”. Subjecting these key notions to new empirical and theoretical challenges, this study struggles to invent a new language able to describe what we are learning to see without the faulty presuppositions of earlier labels. This is particularly difficult in the study of what is probably the most emblematic phenomenon of bilingualism, namely, code-switching. Starting from these considerations, this paper examines audio-visual recordings of spontaneous interactions collected during a three year project in a Samoan community in Southern California, with the goal of applying an anthropological approach to code-switching. The paper concentrates on three phenomena: (i) the routine adoption of kinship terms like Dad and Mom in Samoan discourse; (ii) the ”island-like” status of certain proper names which are not adapted to the Samoan phonological register called ”bad speech” spoken at home; (iii) the code-switching to Samoan words that do have an English equivalent and are associated with church activities.
Indeterminacy and Regularization: a process-based approach to the study of sociolinguistic variation and language ideologies
Authors: Jaffe Alexandra M
Published: March 2015

This article explores the concept of indeterminacy as a fundamental property of social life (Falk-Moore 1978) as it relates to key issues in sociolinguistic theory: the relationship between structure and agency and the way that linguistic signs are invested with social meanings. Indeterminacy emerges as a fundamental principle of sociolinguistic variables, context, speaker identity and participation structures, as a resource for speakers and as a possible objective of communicative practice. It stands in constant tension with processes of sociolinguistic regularization, as it is instantiated across texts, time and discourses and as it is embedded in particular social and political fields. The article argues that studying this tension is how a contemporary sociolinguistics can approach a coherent account of agency and constraint, change and continuity, reproduction and contestation of normative practices and dominant language ideologies.
Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Wives and Daughters. A sociolinguistic study with special reference to the representation of nonstandard dialect
Authors: Melchers Gunnel
Published: March 2015

This paper is an attempt to assess the representation of non-standard dialect in nineteenth-century speech communities as created and described in two works of fiction by the same writer: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Wives and Daughters (1866). The reasons for choosing these particular works are various: they exhibit a wider range of society than most other contemporary novels; they should reflect regional/nonstandard usage not too distant in time from the authentic speech documented by the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Orton et al., 1962-71); their author is generally acknowledged to be a keen observer and known to be conversant with various layers of society (Uglow, 1993:47f.). Her linguistic reliability was recognized by Joseph Wright in that he used two of her novels (Mary Barton and Sylvia’s Lovers), exemplifying two different dialect areas, as data for specimens in his monumental English Dialect Dictionary (EDD). This was an honour bestowed on comparatively few writers of fiction. In Gaskell’s case we are also greatly helped by her own comments on language in letters as well as her literary texts. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that great caution should be taken in interpreting patterns of social/ regional variation based on data from a work of fiction. The author may, for one thing, have had a particular purpose in using nonstandard features, which could be a distractor in the representation of authentic speech.
Social networks and minority languages speakers: the use of social networking sites among young people
Authors: Morris Delyth , Cunliffe Daniel , Prys Cynog
Published: March 2015

This paper outlines the results of a project carried out in Wales in 2010 looking at how extensively young Welsh speakers used the language within their social networks. A study of 200 young people aged 13-18 years was conducted in four Welsh medium secondary schools, two in south east Wales and two in north west Wales. An on-line questionnaire was used to gather information about the young people’s family and educational background, the language of their home, their self-perceived language ability, their use of Welsh and English in different social contexts, and their use of Welsh and English in emails, texting and social networking sites. Then a series of focus groups discussed these issues in more depth. We found that almost 90 per cent of the young people interviewed used Social Networking Sites regularly, and the language they used on these sites reflected to a large extent the language they used with contacts in the real world. There was some evidence that Social Networking Sites afforded young people in the more Anglicised areas of Wales the opportunity to use Welsh on a daily basis, and thus the use of Social Networking Sites can be useful in maintaining a minority language. However, it is necessary to consider innovative ways of encouraging young people to use it within their favoured social media.