bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Renunciation and Society: The Inner Conflict of Tradition
Authors: Olivelle Patrick
Published: November 2023

As the Samnyāsa UpaniĀsads need to be located within the broader literary tradition of Brāhmarsm, so the renunciatory life and ideals of India can be adequately studied only in their historical context and within the framework of their interaction with societal religion and ethics. That the ascetic way of life and the so-called life-negating and world-denying ideals and ideologies are central elements or even defining characteristics of Indian religions is often taken as axiomatic by scholars and lay observers alike. Such assumptions, however, often create the impression of a monolithic religion unrelated to historical vicissitudes. Albert Schweitzer’s evaluation of the Indian religious ethos and its presumed contrast to the Hellenistic, or more generally the Western ethos is representative:
Two Kinds of Sectarianism
Authors: Marsden George M
Published: November 2023

The “ambition and tyranny” of the Presbyterians, Thomas Jefferson fumed to his friend Thomas Cooper in 1822, “would tolerate no rival if they had power.” Jefferson’s contempt for the Presbyterians assumed Voltairian proportions. “Systematical in grasping at the ascendancy over all the sects, they aim, like the Jesuits, at engrossing the education of the country, are hostile to every institution which they do not direct, and jealous at seeing others begin to attend at all to that object.” 1 Presbyterians, Jefferson was convinced, yearned to reinstitute a Protestant inquisition that would, as Calvin had done to Servetus, “exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic Creed.” As it was, they controlled by manipulating “public opinion, that Lord of the universe.” Jefferson was convinced nonetheless that he had reason on his side. Despite Presbyterian “fulminations against endeavors to enlighten the general mind, to improve the reason of the people, and to encourage them in the use of it,” he assured another correspondent, “the liberality of this State will support this institution [the University of Virginia] and give fair play to the cultivation of reason.”2The aging revolutionary had cause to resent the Presbyterians. For over forty years he had been attempting to found a first-rate nonsectarian university in Virginia, a step he considered essential for the health of the republic. By now, however, the Presbyterians had emerged as the principal rivals to his republican dreams for higher education. Demanding an educated clergy, the Presbyterians, although no longer as numerous as the more populist Baptists and Methodists, were by now the leaders in American higher education and gaining in strength. Although Jefferson persisted in his plans to found a revolutionary university and the Jeffersonians were holding on in educational influence, Jefferson had reason to fear that Presbyterians might represent the wave of the future.
The Trouble with the Old-Time Religion
Authors: Marsden George M
Published: November 2023

“Blasting at the Rock of Ages” In May 1909 Cosmopolitan magazine published the first in an announced three-part series on what was being taught at American colleges. The sensationally written articles paid secondary attention to controversial economic views, but the revolution in religion was the major theme. The first of the essays, “Blasting at the Rock of Ages,” immediately created a stir in pulpits around the country. The editors, sensing that they had hit on something, extended the series for two additional months, devoting the last two essays entirely to religious questions. The author, Harold Boice, followed the typical muckraking conventions. After visiting a number of campuses, sitting in on classes, and interviewing professors, he adopted an attitude of consternation in disclosing his discoveries. The editors, borrowing a number of Bolce’s phrases, summarized both the content and the breathless tone of the message: Those who are in not in close touch with the great colleges of the country, will be astonished to learn the creeds being foisted by the faculties of our great universities. In hundreds of class-rooms it is being taught daily that the decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus; that the home as an institution is doomed; that there are no absolute evils; that immorality is simply an act in contravention of society’s accepted standards; that democracy is a failure and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric; that the change from one religion to another is like getting a new hat; that moral precepts are passing shibboleths; that conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress; . . . and that there can be and are holier alliances without the marriage bond than within it. Despite the hyperbole, Boice correctly identified the direction in which higher education was heading and the revolution that already had taken place regarding traditional Christianity. He acknowledged that by no means all professors agreed with the most progressive views; but he quoted many of the best known and most influential academics throughout the country-William James, Josiah Royce, George Howison, William Graham Sumner, Edward Ross, Albion Small, Shailer Mathews, Andrew
The Fundamentalist Menace
Authors: Marsden George M
Published: November 2023

Nothing did more to consolidate dominant academic opinion behind the cause of academic freedom than the fundamentalist attacks of the 1920s. While there might still be some religious traditionalists at major universities, almost no one, either administrator or faculty, would countenance the extreme demands of fundamentalists, which would have turned back the clock forty years. Traditional teachings still prevailed in the vast majority of Protestant pulpits and traditional belief was even stronger in the pews. This meant that as immense cultural changes proceeded on other fronts, the potential for an explosive showdown steadily increased. Within each of the major denominations there had already been scrimmages and minor wars over this or that change, often centered, as we have seen, on educational institutions. Not until after World War I, however, were the conservative forces effectively organized into a national campaign. The war itself was the immediate precipitant of the sense of a national religious crisis among Protestant conservatives. Promoted as a moral crusade, it heightened consciousness of the issue of national righteousness and made it everybody’s business. Preserving doctrinal purity was therefore not just a church concern, but a national issue as well. Under Wilson’s guidance the Puritan ideal of a national covenant had reemerged as a popular ideal. It was a mixed blessing. One unexpected consequence was that the heightened national moral consciousness immediately raised the question for Protestant conservatives of why the liberals were setting the terms. Moreover, the example of the perceived moral monstrosity in Germany suggested to conservatives what happened to civilizations that forsook their Christian foundations. It was an easy step from that observation to another that pointed out the formidable German influences on America’s educational elite and especially how
Liberal Protestantism without Protestantism
Authors: Marsden George M
Published: November 2023

In 1951 Robert Maynard Hutchins resigned as chancellor of the University of Chicago after years of frustration. Weary of having many of his most cherished proposals blocked by recalcitrant faculty Hutchins determined that he could do more for his educational ideals as an associate director of the Ford Foundation. Hutchins was, next to John Dewey, the best known American educator of the era. Twice he was honored with the closest thing to canonization by the American hierarchy, a cover appearance on Time magazine. His resignation, however, may be taken as a signal that even a person of immense prestige and ability could not deflect the educational stream that was by now so firmly set in its course. As Hutchins put it, “The academic administrators of America remind one of the French Revolutionist who said, is in the streets. I must find out where they are going, for I am their leader.’ “1“Civilization is doomed,” Hutchins wrote in the Journal of Higher Education in 1947, “unless the hearts and minds of men can be changed, and unless we can bring about a moral, intellectual and spiritual reformation.’’2 Modern Americans were never more open to such a reformation than in the postwar years. Western civilization had just survived the nightmare of Nazism and was faced totalitarian Stalinism. Religious leaders of all stripes were calling for return to first principles. Had there been a realistic hope for such a return to first principles in academic life, Hutchins’s first principles should have been prime candidates. They appealed to the authority of reason and thus were more broadly based than appeals to particular religious traditions, yet they allowed room for theological expression.
The USAA: Analysis of Legislative History
Authors: Macneil Ian R
Published: November 2023

The A.B.A. bill submitted to Congress in 1923 set out a comprehensive integrated modern arbitration law containing everything needed for a complete system of arbitration, other than the basic contract law necessarily underlying any such system. This was true of both the federal and the arbitration aspects of the proposed acts. The structure of each is revealing of the exclusively federal nature of the USAA.
Human Rights in Constitutional Order and in Political Practice in Latin America
Authors: Fruhling Hugo E
Published: November 2023

Historically, the constitution and the evolution of the concept of constitutionalism have been associated with the notion of limited power, especially the limitation of governmental power.1 This evolution reached its utmost expression in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, especially in the United States, where the constitution is not only the set of rules governing the political organization of the nation, but also, and more importantly, the entity defending human rights against possible violation by the government.2 In the Latin American tradition, it seems to us, the constitution is always the product of a political-rationalistic approach, and its objective is not so much to limit the government as to offer the latter a tool for governing society. Early Latin American history abounds in examples of the view of constitutions as extremely important documents that contributed to ensuring social rule during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In this sense, Simon Bolivar, in the Manifesto of Cartagena (1813), attributes the fall of the Republic primarily to the defects of 1811 Constitution, and in his famous speech of Angostura (1819) he tells legislators that their success is fundamental to the freedom, prosperity, and happiness of the country; without it, the country will lapse into slavery.3 In this century, the importance given to constitutional debate in Chile in the throes of the 1920 crisis, and today in Brazil and Argentina, shows that the constitutional process is still of great political and cultural relevance to Latin America social life.
Perspectives on the Current Constitutional Situation in Poland
Authors: Osiatynski Wiktor
Published: November 2023

Today all the countries of central Europe have many problems in common; each of them, however, has taken a somewhat different road away from Communism. In Poland where political transformations started first, changes seem to occur at a slower pace and without the spectacular successes in overthrowing the Communist system as have taken place in the other countries. On the other hand, Poland’s prolonged struggle based on compromises has resulted in a greater political maturity of society and its leading elites. Moreover, the Poles seem to have already experienced a good deal of the disappointments and revaluations necessary to the process of departing from Communism.
Calling Good and Evil by Name: The Communist Lie Confronted
Authors: Weigel George
Published: November 2023

On January 1, 1990, two days after the Velvet Revolution reached its exhilarating apogee with his election as president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel gave the traditional New Year’s Day address to his countrymen over Czech and Slovak radio and television.
Catholics and Commissars: 1917–1978
Authors: Weigel George
Published: November 2023

On June 10, 1988, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the secretary of state of the Holy See, addressed a glittering celebration in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater marking the millennium of Christianity among the eastern Slavs. The cardinal brought the personal greetings of Pope John Paul II to Patriarch Pimen and his Holy Synod, and offered congratulations to the government of Mikhail Gorbachev for its new appreciation of the role of Christian believers in the process of perestroika. Three days later, on June 13, Gorbachev met with Cardinal Casaroli and his entourage and was presented with a private letter from John Paul II, which the pope had given Casaroli in the hope that Gorbachev would receive it. On June 16, Msgr. Audrys Bačkis, a member of the Vatican delegation to Moscow and undersecretary of the Vatican’s foreign ministry, told Vatican Radio that Mr. Gorbachev had responded positively to the pope’s suggestion that “regular contacts” (meaning diplomatic relations) be established between the Kremlin and the Holy See, as indeed they were following Gorbachev’s 1989 visit to Rome.
No Monopolies on Virtue: Christian Conviction and the Democratic Prospect
Authors: Weigel George
Published: November 2023

The final revolution is not the end of history. It is the restoration of history to human dimensions.
Old Women as the Link Between the Generations
Authors: Sered Susan Starr
Published: November 2023

Listening to the Day Center women and observing their behavior it becomes clear that they share certain motivations and functions that define their role within the religious domain. The old women who frequent the Day Center consider themselves to be the spiritual guardians of their extended families. The women understand the concept of “family “ in an extraordinarily broad sense, indicating descendants and ancestors, both biological and mythical. As young and middle-aged women they tended and cared for their families, and in old age this role has become spiritualized. Serving as spiritual guardians is function of both age and sex-men and younger women have much more limited contact with ancestors and have almost no responsibility (in the spiritual sphere) for the well-being of their children. Seeing themselves as the link between the generations, old women are responsible for soliciting the help of ancestors whenever their descendants are faced with problems such as illness, infertility, war, or economic troubles. The old women are widely respected for their expertise in guarding the family.
Introductory note to *1970
Authors: Adams Robert M
Published: November 2023

Gödel showed his *1970 to Dana Scott, and discussed it with him, in February 1970. Gödel was very concerned about his health at that time, feared that his death was near, and evidently wished to insure that this proof would not perish with him. Later in 1970, however, he apparently told Oskar Morgenstern that though he was “satisfied” with the proof, he hesitated to publish it, for fear it would be thought “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions [completeness, etc.], correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”a
Filling in the Silences: Tillie Olsen,s Reading Lists
Authors: Dizard Robin
Published: November 2023

There is a little snapshot of Tillie Olsen beaming at the camera (and at Jack Olsen), seated at the feet of Marx and Engels, represented in larger-than-lifesized bronzes in a public square somewhere in the Soviet Union in 1984.1 The photograph is more than suggestive of Olsen’s background. Daughter of socialists who escaped czarist Russia, schooled by American rebels and friendly with America’s West Coast Communist Party leaders, Olsen is a lifelong member of the old Left. Class consciousness is her second nature. (Whether she joined the CP-USA, or when she left is immaterial; she joined the Young Communist League in her teens. In her twenties she attended a partysponsored school of labor organizers. In her thirties and forties, during the anti-communist crusades, when the FBI worked to make communists pariahs, she lived within the diminished but resilient red circles in San Francisco.) Her trip to the USSR was a return of the exile. The snapshot is a metonymy of her background. 2
The Self Resubmitted
Authors: Ramsey Bennett
Published: November 2023

All that is in the world is lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes or pride of life. Libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi. Wretched is the cursed land consumed rather than watered by these three rivers of fire! Happy are those who are beside those rivers, not standing but sitting, in a low and safe position. They will not rise thence before the light, but, after resting in peace, stretch out their hands to him who shall raise them to stand upright and steady in the porches of Jerusalem the blessed, where pride shall no more be able to fight against them and lay them low; and yet they weep, not at the sight of all the perishable things swept away by these torrents, but at the memory of their beloved home, the heavenly Jerusalem, which they constantly remember through the long years of their exile. Blaise Pascal, Pensees Once and only once William James played the part of a public orator. It was on May 31, 1897, at the Boston Music Hall, on the occasion of the unveiling of a war memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.1 The oration was, by James’s own admission, not very distinguished: “The task is a mechanical one, “ he complained in a letter to Benjamin Paul Blood, “and the result somewhat of a school-boy composition. “2 There was also something slightly incongruous about James’s presence in the midst of this public celebration of war.
More Letters to “Dear Sammy”
Authors: Charles Wallace
Published: November 2023

Susanna Wesley’s correspondence with her son continues, but our record of it is incomplete. A gap of nearly two years (between consecutively numbered pages of his Letter Book) probably is explained by Susanna’s reference to a theft in her letter of 18 March 1707. Samuel probably had accumulated a large batch of her letters and lost them before he had the opportunity to copy them.
The Rectory Fire
Authors: Charles Wallace
Published: November 2023

The night of Wednesday, 9 February 1709, looms large in Susanna Wesley’s life story, as well as in Methodist legend. Near midnight a fire, probably the latest mischief of the rector’s enemies in the parish, engulfed the house. The family all rushed or were carried to safety-miraculous enough, it might have seemed, that night. However, the subsequent career of John Wesley has focused special attention on the rescue of the then six-year-old “Jacky,” trapped in an upstairs bedroom by the flames. With the help of neighbors he was lifted down to safety, leading him to regard himself as providentially set apart, a “brand plucked from the burning,” a phrase eagerly repeated by his Methodist followers.
The Apostles’ Creed Explicated in a Letter to Her Daughter Susanna
Authors: Charles Wallace
Published: November 2023

The teacher’s calling did not dissipate for Susanna Wesley when her children grew. As the correspondence shows, she kept in touch with all three sons when they left home for school, university, and careers in the church. She also felt an obligation to those who remained behind in the rectory, namely, her daughters. One way to continue her teaching was to write, not just letters but also extended treatises, a project she had already embarked on before the rectory fire struck in early 1709. Corresponding with her son Samuel the following autumn, she re counted her plan: “I had been for several years collecting from my little reading, but chiefly from my own observation and experience, some things which I hoped would ha’ been useful to you all.” The “little manual” she was assembling dealt with her views on natural and revealed religion, an extended reflection on her decision (at age 12!) to leave the ranks of dissent and join the established church, and a “short discourse” on the sacrament.
Public Debate About Competition Policy, 1888-1911: Free Competition And Freedom Of Contract
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

The first extended public deliberations about enacting competition policy as positive law in America occurred around the Sherman Act debates between 1888 and 1890. In the Fiftieth Congress, differing views of free competition, freedom of contract, and their proper affiliations inspired almost two years of contentious debate, two radically different antitrust bills, and a split Senate. For two decades following passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, cases calling for interpretation of the statute divided the Supreme Court into war­ ring factions. These disputes over antitrust policy took place in a historical period rife with political and economic conflict-sometimes fought in the streets, often argued in courtrooms and legislative chambers, almost daily emblazoned across the pages of newspapers and popular magazines.
The New Deal’s Political Economy, 1933-1948: From Organic Body Politic To Unified Body Economic
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

The New Deal is understood by historians, political scientists, economists, legal scholars, and other students of political economy as two New Deals. The early New Deal, identified most of all with the National Industrial Recovery Act, is seen as a dangerous episode, as the collectivist impulse that failed. This brief period of central planning, as it is viewed, was already a national fiasco when the Supreme Court handed down the unanimous ALA Schechter Poultry (1935) decision, which held the NIRA unconstitutional. Within minutes of the decision, Justice Brandeis was heard to say to Tommy Corcoran, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s close advisors, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the President that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything. It’s come to an end.” Roosevelt, and Congress, would take heed of Brandeis’s warning. Indeed, the later New Deal’s turn toward decentralized planning, toward competitive markets as economic regulator, was symbolized by an Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice. Yale law professor Thurman Arnold would lead the division’s assault on the economy’s collectivist mentalite, cultivated at least as early as Herbert Hoover’s regime of trade associationalism.
Competition, Pluralism, And The Problem Of Persistent Oligarchy, 1948–1967
Authors: Peritz Rudolph J R
Published: November 2023

Although the end of World War II opened a period of domestic economic expansion and unrivalled international influence for the United States, it was also a time of intense domestic conflict and national self-doubt. The New Deal’s egalitarian ethic and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal platform, as well as economic growth fuelled by government investment such as the GI Bill and a national highway construction program, increased pressures for more equal distribution of economic benefits and better protection of civil rights. Amid much legislation, Congress enacted the highly contested Civil Rights Act of 1948 and, two years later, the less controversial Celle Kefauver amendment to the Clayton Act’s provision regulating corporate mergers. It was the early 1960s before the Supreme Court had occasion to corroborate the egalitarian concerns driving both pieces of legislation: “one person, one vote” in the political marketplace, and “Congress’ fear not only of concentration of economic power on economic grounds, but also of the threat to other values a trend toward concentration was thought to pose.”1 Today, almost fifty years later, neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Celler Kefauver amendment has settled very much in its respective domain. Race relations too often incite physical confrontation, while proposals to regulate economic power seldom produce more than policy debate. Within its own precinct, each egalitarian impulse still provokes tensions, which have grown sharper during the last decade as more and more Americans have fallen out of the middle-class circle of prosperity created by the ethic of equality, prosperity sustained, to some extent, by those very in egalitarian institutions targeted by the legislation.
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.
Anderson: The Play of Winesburg, Ohio
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

When Susan Sontag announced in 1964 that Winesburg, Ohio was “bad to the point of being laughable,” she put something of a nail into the already formed coffin of Sherwood Anderson’s falling reputation. The put-downs had begun much earlier, right after the poor man’s death, with Lionel Trilling’s influential depiction of Anderson’s work as arrested adolescence, and ever since then Winesburg has had the taint of damaged goods, even when dealt with sympathetically and generously. The argument for Anderson has rarely been an exciting one: he is credited with (now dated) psychological discoveries, with sincerity, with love for his land, with a keen sense of the threats of modernism, with compassion. At the core of the disfavor is his provincialism, and Welford Taylor is right in pointing to the cosmopolitan bias that prompted such judgments. Benjamin Spencer, in his efforts to reclaim Anderson for the canon as a “mythopoeist,” explains why it was that Sontag and that crowd could not abide Anderson: “Addicted to the New Wave of French fiction, with its commitment to sensory surfaces and psychic fragmentation as contrasted with Anderson’s concern for inwardness and identity, her [Sontag’s] verdict is inevitable.” We can begin to see why Sherwood Anderson is not at the center of things: considered “minor” (by himself as well as critics), unpossessed of continental sophistication, he has left us an uneven body of work that peaked with the publication of Winesburg in 1919 and has failed to spark much critical interest in the past several decades.
Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby: Fiction as Greatness
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

In a study of self-making and freedom of speech in American fiction, The Great Gatsby stands inevitably as a sort of flagship in the armada, and if it sinks, the whole fleet deserves to go down. Fitzgerald’s text picks up all the strands of this study: the crafting of identity as demiurgic activity, the American scheme of self-worth in terms of documentation and material possessions, the play of desire as maneuvering room for the American subject, the pivotal role of language as instrument of assertion, and, most crucially and most underrecognized, the mysterious nature of belief—the sustaining and actualizing forces that make us real to one another, that marshal our energies and affections, that fuel the very system of free enterprise, that underlie the transformation from Nobody to somebody, that keep the fleet afloat. Credit itself, the sort of thing that sustains Donald Trumps and Jay Gatsbys, means belief.
The Quest for the History of a Johannine Community
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

In recent decades a relatively new preoccupation has entered NT studies-the quest for the history of the Johannine community. Aspects of this quest were under investigation for some time-for instance, in the work of Oscar Cullmann. But it was not until 1975 that Cullmann ‘s work was gathered into a single, synthesizing volume (1976), and it was only around that time also that several other researchers began to concentrate their efforts on this search. The purpose in this brief review is not to analyze methods but simply to summarize results. This does not do justice to the depth and complexity of the various arguments, but it helps to highlight the extraordinary difficulty of the whole undertaking. (For sources, see Culpepper, 1975; Richter, 1975 [Eng. summary by Mattill, 1977]; Cullmann, 1976; Boismard and Lamouille, 1977; Martyn, 1978, 1979; Brown, 1979; Wengst, 1983. For some summaries, see Brown, 1979, 171-82; Kysar, 1985, 2432-35). The community was essentially a school, like one of the ancient Greco Roman schools. There are a number of connections between these ancient schools and the Johannine literature, particularly that of revering a foundational central figure-such as the beloved disciple.
The Thesis
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

The fourth evangelist was a wide-ranging writer, in some ways encyclopedic, who sought to produce a new theological synthesis, and who in doing so used a diverse range of sources-some non-canonical material, the OT, at least one epistle (Ephesians), and, above all, the synoptics, especially Mark. The claim that John is an encyclopedic snythesis requires qualification. The fourth evangelist did not set out to integrate every detail and disputed question. Major events and central themes are never mentioned explicitly. The words “church” and “prayer,” for instance, never occur. And there is no reference to the Sermon on the Mount or the transfiguration. Yet it is a complete synthesis insofar as it probes the entire range of both the divine and the human-the divine plan in its full duration and depth, even from the beginning within God, and the human reality in its essential fullness from the years of facile optimism (1:1-2:22), to the time of struggling realism (2:23-chap. 6), to the final phase of seeking God even in the face of death (chaps. 7-21; see Brodie, 1992, chapter 4 of the introduction). Thus, it is a theology which is applied, a vision of God ‘s Christ-centered providence which is written in such a way that, however high-flown at one level, at another is thoroughly down-to earth, thoroughly related to the passage of human life. Here more than ever the Word becomes flesh.
The Ban As God’s Justice
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: November 2023

The ideology of the ban as sacrifice never disappears in Israelite thought as noted above, but side by side with it in the Hebrew Scriptures, indeed overpowering it, is the related and transformed ideology of the ban as God’s justice. The Deuteronomic writers, supporters of the Josianic reform, consider the ban a means of rooting out what they believe to be impure, sinful forces damaging to the solid and pure relationship between Israel and God.

As the story of the reform goes (2 Kings 22), during the reign of a young and good king Josiah, a “book of the law” is found in the temple which is undergoing repairs. The book explains to Josiah the reason for all of Israel’s recent failings: “Great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book.” (2 Kgs 22:8) The king undertakes a reform. The finding of a “book of truth” [the meaning of this event is further explained by the prophetess Hulda (2 Kgs 22:14-20)] is a common cross-cultural motif, but we assume Josiah’s reform to have been an actual event in Israel’s history, governed by a particular set of beliefs and values.
The Bardic Tradition of War
Authors: Niditch Susan
Published: November 2023

Alongside the two types of ban texts in Hebrew Scriptures are threads of material, betokening views of war quite different from either ideology of the ban or the priestly ideology of Numbers 31. For the student of the Bible as traditional literature, the most interesting of these threads involves the interaction between groups of heroes, often called “mighty men,” and an apparent chivalric code of conduct in regard to war. The heroes are sometimes bound by kinship relations; their battles display traits of a form of fighting Q. Wright and others have called “the duel”; accompanying the duel is a stylized feature of fighting behavior, “the taunt.”
Transformations of Christianity
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

Each historical instance of an attempt to Christianize a society is unique and dependent upon many factors. Yet in most instances, the fundamental human equation is the same: an individual or small group of highly motivated advocates of Christianity seek to transform the beliefs, attitudes, values, and behavior of a target society. Whether the advocates of Christianity are Anglo-Saxon missionaries in eighth-century Frisia or American missionaries in present-day Uganda, the primary long-term problem is usually one of cultural confrontation.
Conversion, Christianization, and Germanization
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

“Conversion” and “Christianization” are terms which are used frequently, interchangeably, and inconsistently. This contributes to a considerable degree of ambiguity. When the concepts that these terms represent lie at the center of a religious and historical inquiry, it is particularly important to define the context in which they will be used, as well as to understand the context in which they have been used.
Sociohistorical Aspects of Religious Transformation
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

To better understand the religious transformation which resulted from the encounter of the Germanic peoples with Christianity, it is useful to be come familiar with other instances of pre-Christian and non-Christian religious transformation, particularly those in which a folk-religious society encountered a universal religious movement. Of special interest is the religious transformation which occurred when the folk-religious Indo European societies of ancient Greece and Rome encountered “proto Christian” mystery cults during the Hellenistic age. An examination of Hellenistic and Jewish religious and philosophical currents should con tribute toward the development of a general model of the interaction between folk-religious societies and universal religions, and of the religious transformation which stems from it. This model will then be applied to the encounter of the Germanic peoples with Christianity.
Sociopsychological Aspects of Religious Transformation
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

A comparison of the sociopsychological forces operating within the anomic urban centers of the Roman Empire, and those operating among the predominantly rural societies of the Germanic peoples, will aid in under standing the different responses to Christianity in each of these disparate social environments.
Germanic Religiosity and Social Structure
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

The study of Germanic religiosity has always suffered from a paucity of reliable extant sources. However, the work of Georges Dumezil in the field of comparative mythology provides a framework through which this deficiency may be compensated in certain instances. Dumezil’s comparative model of Indo-European societies posits the existence of a fundamental similarity in the ideological and sometimes the social structure among the ancient societies of India, Persia, Greece, Rome, and pre-Christian northern Europe. This association permits the careful application of evidence regarding a fundamental ideological concept or “mythologem”1 found in one or more Indo-European societies to that mythologem as it exists in another lndo-European society. Through such a process of analogy, one may enhance the understanding of that mythologem in the latter society, for which the currently available documentation may be scanty or inconclusive. When Dumezil’s model is applied to pre-Christian Germanic religiosity, various aspects of form and structure hitherto interpreted solely as local, Germanic phenomena, acquire a new dimension, derived from their association with the greater Indo-European family of peoples.
Germanization and Christianization: 376-678
Authors: Russell James C
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a comprehensive historico religious survey of the Germanic peoples from their initial entrance into the Roman Empire in 376 until the Anglo-Saxon mission inaugurated by Bishop Wilfrid of York’s visit to Frisia in 678. It is rather to examine those developments during this period that seem to most clearly reveal the operation of the processes of Germanization and Christianization. This examination will be conducted in light of the sociohistorical and socio psychological observations of the preceding chapters. The developments which will be examined include the expansion of Germanic Arianism, the affiliation of the Merovingians with the Catholic Church, the development of the Eigenkirche and Eigenkloster institutions and the Adelsheilige hagiog raphies, the unification of socio-politico-religious attributes in Germanic kingship, the influence of the Irish mission, and the metaphysical conflict between Germanic and Christian concepts of time.
E. A. Poe and T. B. Thorpe: Two Models of Deceit
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

Poe’s hoaxes avoid the traditional framed structure of the tall tale, and yet they develop the technique of the unreliable con man narrator to its fullest. As sharp, even bitter attacks upon the reader, they test our wits against the writer’s, but somehow the cards are always unfairly stacked against us. Poe’s famous tale of ratiocination, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” does not induce a “perpetual interrogative” of self, nature, illusion, and truth, but suppresses the doubt it raises about irrationality and sex. And in “Ligeia” imagination and transcendence are the bait in an elaborate confidence game against readers. Finally, there is little playing along in Poe; his put-ons are putdowns. Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “Big Bear of Arkansas,” however, employs silences (rather than stings) to lure us more effectively into a community of liars and players. This more genial hoax was the better model for containing factionalism and regionalism within a larger metaphysical vision. More than Poe, Thorpe effected a convincing reconciliation of humor and satire within America’s comic debate. In Thorpe, we find America and repose; in Poe, the anxieties of self and ideality. Melville combined the best of both.
The Emergence of Tall Narrative in American Writing
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

Benjamin Franklin may have been among the first patriots to challenge foreign readers with an example of tall humor, yet by the end of the eighteenth century Americans were already notorious for their seemingly irrational and depraved love of exaggeration, and no account of travel through the western and southern settlements was complete without some anecdote intended to illustrate this idiosyncrasy of the national character. Some of the more credulous early visitors to America inadvertently provided evidence of the nation’s passion for yarn spinning by including information gleaned from native sources in their notes on the geography, history, institutions, and people of the new country. Travelling across western Maryland and Virginia shortly after the Revolution, for example, Isaac Weld witnessed several typical narrative performances by settlers who must have detected in Weld’s harsh opinion of American culture an opportunity to practice their own peculiar brand of satire. The gentleman writes that he encountered “four or five” invalids whose testicles- so he was told- had been torn off in combat with barbarous neighbors. Deaf to the laughter his hosts must have been sharing behind his back, Weld goes on to report: “I have been credibly assured that [in the Carolinas and Georgia] the people are still more depraved … and that in some particular parts of these states, every third or fourth man appears with one eye.”
Mark Twain’s Development as a Literary Yarn Spinner
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

In 1847, the year Sam Clemens entered the newspaper trade as a printer’s devil, the Hannibal, Missouri, Journal reported on the exceptional durability of some local homespun. After explaining how he inadvertently uprooted a nine-foot-wide tree stump with the seat of his pants, the correspondent declared proudly: “My wife made the cloth for them pantaloons, and I han’t worn any other kind since.” In a similar spirit, Orion Clemens, editor of the Hannibal Western Union, comforted local farmers in August 1851 with a report that the soil in Maine is so poor that before planting, the downeasters must “look for crivices in the rocks, and shoot the grains in with a musket.” Conditions in one Virginia county were even more desperate that year, according to the Western Union, which reported that horses there “are so thin that it takes twelve of them to make a shadow, and when they kill a beef they have to hold him up to knock him down.”
Joyous Heresy: Travelling with the Innocent Abroad
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

Americans expended considerable energy attempting to answer criticism from European travellers in the New World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In their defense, writers such as Royall Tyler were understandably prone to grasp at what-ever advantage they could claim, with the result that many of the earliest responses to European criticism probably provoked more amusement than respect on the other side of the Atlantic. As one of the first and best known patriots to brandish a pen in the nation’s defense, Tyler helped to initiate a tradition of American response to European censure by producing his own observations of travel in England, published anonymously in 1808 as The Yankey in London. In a typical passage, the American writer condemns what he considers the pernicious habit among members of the most polite British society of polluting their language with “evanescent vulgarisms of fashionable colloquy,” or slang. He goes on to object that “there are a number of words now familiar, not merely in transient converse, but even in English fine writing, which are of vulgar origin and illegitimate descent, which … degrade their finest modern compositions by a grotesque air of pert vivacity.”
The Demonic Image of the Witch in Standard Babylonian Literature: The Reworking of Popular Conceptions by Learned Exorcists
Authors: Abusch Tzvi
Published: November 2023

When I was invited to write this paper, I considered presenting one or another aspect of Mesopotamian magic within a framework that had earlier allowed me to study the native materials with a high degree of freedom from the constraints of artificial definitions. I should then have followed a distinction between religion and magic such as the one pro posed by the anthropologist Mischa Titiev: religious rites are calendrical and communal, whereas magical rites deal with emergencies and often treat the crises of an individual.1 Surely this classification provides a sounder basis for work and yields better results than the more common dichotomy that equates gods, sin, and supplication with religion, and demons, witchcraft, and “manipulative” rituals with magic. The more conventional distinction hamstrings the interpreter in his attempts to organize and understand what native Mesopotamians termed asipTltu, the texts and craft of the professional exorcist, for therein materials and attitudes conventionally defined as religion and magic occur together in varying patterns and combinations.
Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neoplatonism
Authors: Luck Georg
Published: November 2023

The need of pagan believers to enter into direct contact with their gods led to the development of a certain technique or a set of techniques codified during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, it seems, and given the name “theurgy.”1 It was the subject of philosophical discussions within the Neoplatonist schools, and many followers of Plotinus accepted it enthusiastically, almost as a way of life. The man who wrote the code in the second century A.D. is known as Julian the Theurgist, to distinguish him from his father, Julian the Chaldaean. The code itself is known as the Dracula Chaldaica, a collection of logia or sayings in Greek hexameters, of which fragments have survived.2 In its original form, the collection might be called the “Bible” of theurgy, although its enigmatic style and its use of exuberant imagery would have made it difficult to use even then without the help of a spiritual guide or mentor. It seems to address itself to readers who knew already what the theurgical experience is like.
Romances Of The Republic
Authors: Samuels Shirley
Published: November 2023

Samuels looks at the relations among sexual, political, and familial rhetoric in American writing from 1790 to the 1850s. With a special focus on the depictions of the American Revolution and the use of the family as model and instrument of political forces, she examines how the historical novel formalizes some of the more extravagant features of the gothic novel while incorporating a sentimental vision of the family.
Wieland: Alien And Infidel
Authors: Samuels Shirley
Published: November 2023

The Alien and Sedition Acts were a major late-eighteenth-century American attempt to maintain national insularity by promoting a sense of threat. Shortly before Congress was to vote on the measures, Senator Humphrey Marshall, who supported the Alien Act, turned t poetry to explain its necessity. Marshall begins “The Aliens, A Patriotic Poem,” by praising the qualities of the United States that attract aliens. But the wrong aliens are attracted. A troop of “venal wretches,” the French, have come to the United States because they were “At home involv’d in horrid war, / And all the vices, that curse the mind.” The proper recourse: Not surprisingly, the poem cordons off the “safe” alien from the potentially contagious one, but the paradox of America, epitomized by Philadelphia as the center of both government and aliens, is that its very order, especially its “laws, like those divine, / Calleth the Alien, from afar.” Attracting those “Aliens” it wishes to repel, America must act to contain the threat of the Alien, perversely drawn by the order that his coming threatens to disrupt. Invoking the same model of attracting and even promoting disorder while producing a desire for familial and social order, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or The Transformation, published the year the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, might be read as their novelistic response, but also counterpart.