bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: The Voice from the Coffin
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

At an early moment in William Faulkner’s novel about dying, Doctor Peabody treats us to a view of death that is worth pondering: “I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” Faulkner’s interest, in this book as in all his books, lies with the communal as much as with the individual, and we can expect him to pay as much attention to the tenement as to the tenant. In fact, we will come to see that death is only to be understood as a kind of “moving” venture. The more one considers this notion, the more we have to credit Peabody with a theory of fiction: death as the fiction of cessation and finality in a world of pure process. Death, understood as “end stage,” is close to the very bedrock of our Western metaphysics; it authorizes our belief in time and meaningful sequence, and it is never distant, ontologically, from our notions of presence and absence, here and there, now and then, or, as Faulkner likes to say, is and was. As I Lay Dying stands as Faulkner’s most remarkable text about death, a stark mediation and gloss on the medieval memento mori, on the scandal of matter and decomposing flesh, on the rituals of burial and bereavement that bear witness to every culture’s deepest beliefs.
John Hawkes, Skin Trader
Authors: Weinstein Arnold
Published: November 2023

We encounter, as entry to John Hawkes’s Blood Oranges, lines cited from one of the master tales of foiled desire in modern fiction, Ford Madox Ford’s Good Soldier: “Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?” It will be recalled that Dowell, Ford’s broken narrator, closes his vision of desired harmony by contrasting it to the cacophony he had experienced: “Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords —broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?”1 This plaint could effectively stand over a great many of Hawkes’s novels, for it signals, in its duet of mellifluous nostalgic tones and bitter reprisals, the double bind that marks Hawkes’s world: the curse visited on desire and the writerly project of fashioning a realm where it may be—somehow— gratified. Life, in Ford’s text, emerges as an affective syntax, an utterance that is structured, parsed, and punctuated by pain and madness, a rhythmic punishment and denial of pleasure.
General Introduction: The Uncertain Quest and the Need for a Firmer Foundation
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

The word “uncertain” does not mean that the search for Johannine history has not been valuable. On the contrary it has brought to attention a mass of interesting material. The synagogue ban, for instance, received fresh prominence from J. L. Martyn (esp. 1979, 24-62, 156-57). Yet, from the gnostic claims of Bultmann (e.g., 1955, 10-14) to the complex reconstructions of Brown (xxxiv-xxxix; 1979; 1982, 69-115), the entire search seems to lurch unpredictably from one fragile hypothesis to the next. And so, amid all the valuable insights, there is an unavoidable feeling that the enterprise needs to be more firmly grounded. In order to clarify the full extent of the problem and of its progress to date it is first necessary to review it (Part I: The Uncertain Quest). Then, in the next major section, there is a partial investigation of the way in which a firmer foundation may be established-by tracing John ‘s mode of composition, specifically his use of sources (Part II: Towards Establishing a Partial Guide to History: John ‘s Composition [Use of Sources]). Finally a summary is given of the way in which the mode of composition effects the main aspects of the quest for history (Part III: The Quest Resumed: Initial Conclusions).
The Quest for the Religious Background
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

In seeking to explain the distinctiveness of John ‘s religious thought, including his images and language, modern research has suggested three main influences-gnosticism (esp. Bultmann), Hellenism (esp. Dodd, 1953), and Judaism. “Gnosticism,” a relatively modern word, is used concerning a wide variety of religious groups that flourished during the first centuries of Christianity. They generally saw the world and human bodies as evil, the products of an evil power, and, as a key to salvation from the oppressiveness of the material world, they offered gnosis, “knowledge.” “Such knowledge was diverse, although it generally dealt with the intimate relationship of the self to the transcendent source of all being, and this knowledge was often conveyed by a revealer figure” (Attridge, 1985, 349; cf. Bultmann, 9-10). The teachings of these groups sometimes contained oppressive structures of thought-for in stance, concerning the evil nature of the material world-and partly for that reason they were regarded by many early church writers as false. It is doubtful, however, whether gnosticism proper existed at the time the gospel was written. “There is no extant document which indubitably originated with the Gnostics from the first century AD” (Fujita, 1986, 189).
John’s Systematic Use of Part of Luke-Acts
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Brown (330, 184) notes that the character of Nicodemus (John 3:1-21) is like that of Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39), and that the account of Samaria ‘s acceptance of Jesus (John 4:1-42) would seem to reflect the evangelization of Samaria by Philip, Peter, and John-an event which is reported in Acts 8:lb-25. Brown does not suggest that the texts are connected-that John used Acts-but it is on the basis of the texts that he makes his observations, and so there is obviously some form of link, literary or otherwise, between the texts. An investigation of the adjacent episodes in Table 10.1 shows further connectedness. The text of Acts alone does not account fully for John. In itself it is insufficient, and besides, it has already been seen that to some degree John’s text is based on Mark and Matthew. What Acts supplies therefore is a complementary component. In Acts the hostility of the Jewish authorities leads first to a drama of light and darkness-the apostles are released at night by an angel but the authorities are left “in the dark” (5:17-26)-and then to a Sanhedrin scene in which the apostles bear witness concerning the saving role of Jesus. The apostles would have been put to death, but Gamaliel intervened, aware that this new movement might be from God.
The Religious Background
Authors: Brodie Thomas L
Published: November 2023

Probably the best working hypothesis is that, insofar as he was able, the evangelist used everything, or at least tested everything. The fact that his sources ranged from Genesis to Ephesians and that he used these sources systematically, suggests a process which was all-encompassing. This corroborates the view that John is to be seen against the back ground of first-century syncretism. Cullmann, for instance, had linked him with syncretistic Judaism (1976, 46-53, 89-91) and MacRae with syncretistic Hellenism (1970). But syncretism does not do justice to the fourth gospel; it suggests an artificial unity, a combining of elements that, in fact, are alien to one another. John’s unity was thorough and authentic. Much of his genius consisted of his ability to find the essence of his many sources and to see how, when rightly understood, they blended together. This does not mean that his picture of unity is one of uniformity. For the evangelist, truth is complex; Barrett (1972, 49-69) would say it is dialectical. And so the gospel, even in its carefully crafted unity, is complex. Rather than describe the evangelist as syncretistic it seems better to speak of him as encyclopedic-an encyclopedic theologian. Such an idea was not new. It followed a Jewish tradition which reached back to the composition of the Torah of Moses. As the Torah writers had sifted discriminatingly the cultures.
The Example of Irving
Authors: Bryant John
Published: November 2023

On 31 July 1847, Herman Melville, author of Typee and Omoo, dined at Astor House with Evert Duyckinck, former editor for Putnam’s and co-founder of The Literary World. At the time, Melville’s career was bounding. He was soon to marry Elizabeth Shaw, and by September he would move with her, his mother, sisters, brother, and sister-in-law into a town house near Astor Place. Those Manhattan years were tumultuous: The author would plunge avidly into Duyckinck’s library; immerse himself in metaphysics, literature, and politics; and write three books (Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket). He would witness (it is likely) the Astor Place Riot of May 1849 almost on his doorstep, and would travel to England—this time as an accomplished literary figure, not a seaman. It was the beginning of a tre mendous “unfolding.” Duyckinck had published the American edition of Typee, had helped Melville secure a contract for Omoo, and had assigned Melville to review a book on whaling for his new magazine. He had sent Typee to Hawthorne, and in 1850 he would facilitate the famous meeting between Hawthorne and Mel ville. More than anyone else, he was Melville’s mentor and promoter.’ Duyckinck was a literary radical despite his conservative demeanor. He founded the Tetractys Club and “Young America” to promote the development of a National Literature. To be anti-establishment in New York was to be anti-Knickerbocker, or at least disparaging of those Jonathan Oldstyle elitists who in the pages of The Knicker bocker (headed by Lewis Gaylord Clark) worried over Jacksonianism, attacked such upstarts as Poe, and paid homage to the recusant Washington lrving.2
The Contest for Narrative Authority in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Authors: Wonham Henry B
Published: November 2023

During the winter and early spring of 1875, as Twain worked to produce regular serial installments for “Old Times on the Mississippi,” a 400-page fragment of what would become his first novel lay incomplete on his writing desk. The manuscript had bogged down some time during the preceding year, when its author experienced a shortage of what he called his “stock of materials.” Twain later explained his belief that “when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep-also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable celebration is going on.” An unconscious celebration apparently was in progress while Twain composed “Old Times,” for he needed only two months to complete the unfinished manuscript when he returned to it in May 1875. On July 5, he wrote to Howells that he had “finished the story ... about 900 of MS, and maybe 1000 when I’ve finished ‘working out’ the vague places.”
Exploring the Relationship Between Authorship and Reading
Authors: Greene Stuart
Published: November 2023

Attempts to integrate reading and writing in literature or composition courses have brought into focus the extent to which comprehending, like composing, is a constructive, rhetorical act. In turn, we have begun to consider some of the ways we can enhance students’ understanding of what they read, making them aware that reading is a strategic process that entails reconstructing some of the choices and decisions writers make in a given situation. This renewed interest in how readers construct meaning is important in thinking about how to foster the development of critical literacy; but I want to go a step further by thinking about students as authors who have opportunities to contribute knowledge to a community of readers.
Exploring Feedback: Writers Meet Readers
Authors: Sitko Barbara M
Published: November 2023

When writers receive feedback about a text, they are often faced with a series of decisions. The primary decision of whether or not to make changes to their work embeds a cluster of other choices, and if we could listen in on the thought processes of these writers, we would see that they consider more alternatives than they might be aware of. One important alternative concerns how to imagine other ways of seeing their text. In order to imagine ways in which readers might have become confused or lost a point, for example, writers must reproduce a mental version of their texts as seen by the eyes and minds of their readers. Such flexibility in creating alternative representations of words, sentences, and organization is not easy for most writers. Yet this is only the first step. Once writers are able to represent the text from the point of view of their readers, a second cluster of decisions focuses on their strategies for fixing the text (Flower, Hayes, Carey, Stratman, & Schriver, 1986), and a third set of options concerns how they test any changes they decide to make. Thus feedback motivates writers to enter into complex decision making, renegotiating the multiple demands of the writing process (Flower & Hayes, 1981) and reconsidering their original plan (Flower, Schriver, Carey, Haas, & Hayes, in press) in ways they might not have envisioned.
On the Equality of the Sexes
Authors: Harris Sharon M
Published: November 2023

Is it upon mature consideration we adopt the idea, that nature is thus partial in her distributions? Is it indeed a fact, that she hath yielded to one half of the human species so unquestionable a mental superiority? I know that to both sexes elevated understandings, and the reverse, are common. But, suffer me to ask, in what the minds of females are so notoriously deficient, or unequal. May not the intellectual powers be ranged under these four heads—imagination, reason, memory and judgment. The province of imagination hath long since been surrendered up to us, and we have been crowned undoubted sovereigns of the regions of fancy. Invention is perhaps the most arduous effort of the mind; this branch of imagination hath been particularly ceded to us, and we have been time out of mind invested with that creative faculty.
Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms
Authors: Harris Sharon M
Published: November 2023

I think, to teach young minds to aspire, ought to be the ground work of education: many a laudable achievement is lost, from a persuasion that our efforts are unequal to the arduous attainment. Ambition is a noble principle, which properly directed, may be productive of the most valuable consequences. It is amazing to what heights the mind by exertion may tow’r: I would, therefore, have my pupils believe, that every thing in the compass of mortality, was placed within their grasp, and that, the avidity of application, the intenseness of study, were only requisite to endow them with every external grace, and mental accomplishment. Thus I should impel them to progress on, if I could not lead them to the heights I would wish them to attain. It is too common with parents to expatiate in their hearing, upon all the foibles of their children, and to let their virtues pass, in appearance, unregarded: this they do, least they should, (were they to commend) swell their little hearts to pride, and implant in their tender minds, undue conceptions of their own importance.
Necessity of Religion, Especially in Adversity
Authors: Harris Sharon M
Published: November 2023

No—Atheism will never do. The prime procurer and minister of the French arrangements, at length accedes to this axiom; and Gallia, having guillotined her sovereign, and blasphemously sought to dethrone and annihilate the Monarch of Heaven, becomes, in her present resolutions, solicitous to re-establish the Deity in her systems, to invest the Supreme with those divine honours, which the language of nature hasteth to bestow, which the dictates of reason invariably award.
Spirit Independent of Matter
Authors: Harris Sharon M
Published: November 2023

As there is no idea, by which I am so exquisitely tortured, as that of annihilation, I naturally turn, with disgust and horror, from the reasonings of him, who, laying impious hands on that principle of animation which originates in Deity, would confound it with the common mass of matter; and who, with grub like industry, having enveloped himself in his earthy cone, entertains as little expectation of breaking his sepulcl1ral enclosure, as the reptile who thus mechanically encrusts itself.
Conventional Criticism and Unconventional Black Literature
Authors: duCille Ann
Published: November 2023

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife.” This oft-quoted opening line from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice suggests both the degree to which the marriage plot is mdigenous to the genre of the novel and the extent to which the middle and upper classes have historically been preoccupied with matrimony and affairs of the heart and pocketbook. It is a truth not so widely acknowledged, however, that the single everyman in Jane Austen’s universal is not only wealthy but white. This study is concerned with what happens when the players change, when the fictive figures “in love and trouble,” to use Alice Walker’s metaphor, cease to be white men and women of means and property and become black men and women, poor as well as propertied. What happens to the marriage tradition-to Leslie Fiedler’s notion of love as “the subject par excellence of the novel,” for example-when it is considered in the context of a literature by and about American men and women who for generations were denied the hegemonic, “universal truth” of legal marriage?
The Identity Of Slavery
Authors: Samuels Shirley
Published: November 2023

The uncertain status of the body in slavery discourse may be evoked by two images from the cultural history of slavery. First, the female “topsy-turvy doll” popular in the nineteenth-century American South (and still produced). Held one way, the doll appears as a white woman with long skirts. Flipping over her skirts does not reveal her legs, but rather exposes another racial identity: the head of a black woman, whose long skirts now cover the head of the white woman. This visual and physical change from white to black and black to white appears also in a second form of popular representation, Lydia Maria Child’s 1831 children’s story, “Mary French and Susan Easton,” in which two little girls, one white, one black, are kidnapped and sold into slavery. The white girl has been disguised; she appears black, but her tears gradually dissolve this surface identity, revealing the white body beneath the black surface, and she is restored to her family. Her friend’s tears cannot accomplish a similar miracle: because they do not change her surface identity, she is left in slavery.
The End of Religious Establishment and the Beginning of Religious Politics: The Parallel Rise of Churches and Political Parties
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

Politics are a part of religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as a part of their duty to God.

Charles Grandison Finney I claim that the pulpit has a right and a duty to discuss social questions, moral questions in politics, slavery, war, peace, and the intercourse of nations. Henry Ward Beecher
The Market for Religious Controversy
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

At the hour designated I called with my friends. Brigham Young was standing in front of one of his houses-the “Bee Hive,” in which was his reception room. He received us with a smile, and invited us to enter. He was very sociable; asked us many questions, and promptly answered ours. Finally he said with a chuckle, “Barnum what will you give to exhibit me in New York and the Eastern cities?”
Selling Religion in the Workplace: Wage Earners and the Pressures of Marketed Morality
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

It is the culmination of Christianity-the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl! It is the reign of the Prince of Peace!
Recent Market Entries: Contemporary Evangelicals and Purveyors of the New Age
Authors: Moore R Laurence
Published: November 2023

To get anywhere with faith, learn to pray big prayers. God will rate you according to the size of your prayers.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking Following World War II, religiously inspired commodities saturated the American cultural landscape. It was as if a hundred fifty years of history had worked with determined persistence to produce the purported spiritual awakening of the late 1940s and the 1950s. The mass media tallied the evidence. In 1949, Newsweek reported an increasing number of religious books on the non-Action best-seller lists. These included Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, Fulton J. Sheen’s Peace of Soul, and Norman Vincent Peale’s A Guide to Confident Living. Sheen and Peale were already known to Americans because of their radio preaching, and Sheen would shortly make himself a master of television. Another Catholic, Fulton Oursler, scored big with his 1949 retelling of the life of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Two years later his narrative version of the Old Testament, The Greatest Book Ever Written, found almost as many readers. When the paperback boom started in the mid- 195os, religious titles were a strong part of the market.1
Firstborn of All Creation
Authors: Greenspahn Frederick E
Published: November 2023

All seven of the original Mercury astronauts were the oldest children in their families, as are a disporportionately large number of college students and professors, poets and presidents.1 This concentration of firstborns among high achievers has been recognized for some time. Over a century ago, the British scientist Francis Galton observed a preponderance of firstborns among his colleagues.2 Since then, similar findings have accumulated for a wide range of occupations and accomplishments.
Introduction
Authors: Edwards Douglas R
Published: November 2023

Power and its association with religious and mythic symbols permeate society. In 1991, as I worked on this book, the Iraqi conflict provided both sides an opportunity to invest traditional religious and mythic symbols with power. Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, associated his rule with such powerful military and religious figures as Saladin and Nebuchadnezzar, whose own battles drew on religious symbols. Visual symbols on currency, architecture, posters, and television spots combined religion and the historical and mythic past to bolster the power and prestige of his regime. Similarly, our symbol-laden media portrayed former president George Bush, with head bowed, praying for the allies during church services. The Israeli-Palestinian accords of 1993 saw President Bill Clinton citing passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Koran to help reconcile old adversaries. Countless other examples could be cited.
The Power of the Past
Authors: Edwards Douglas R
Published: November 2023

How are we to interpret the role of tradition in the Greek East? Does a core of inherited cultural traits pass from generation to generation, or do persons symbolically construct the past to speak to the present? Individuals who copied Homeric themes in literature or emulated the sculptural programs of fifth-century Greek sculptors did not receive a static and clearly articulated tradition. Certainly, the artists of antiquity believed they had appropriated faithfully and accurately fixed and immutable traditions. Innovation was viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Ancient protests to the contrary, the particular images selected from the past took on a new life, a new existence, when they reappeared in literature, sculpture, art, and architecture. These individuals reinvented tradition.
Nature and Object of Faith
Authors: Avery Dulles S J
Published: November 2023

The term “faith” is frequently used in a generic sense without any religious or theological significance. Philosophers and others use it to mean the acceptance as true or real of anything that is not immediately evident or demonstrable. In this sense faith is an ingredient in virtually all human knowledge and activity. Whenever I read the newspapers, speak about history or science, and in fact whenever I get on a train, eat a meal, or perform many other ordinary actions, I am implicitly making acts of human or natural—that is to say, non-theological—faith. In so doing I may be following a spontaneous instinct, an acquired habit, or a free, voluntary decision. I may be said to be exercising faith in my senses, in my memory, in the reliability of a machine, or in the competence and integrity of other persons.

The term “faith” is especially appropriate in the case of firm beliefs involving implicit trust in another person or other persons. Faith in this case is closely connected with love and loyalty. The English word “believe” is etymologically connected with the word “love,” just as the Latin credereimplies a gift of the heart (cordare). Faith normally leads to faithful action, which is a matter of”keeping faith” with persons or living up to one’s commitments.

When a person is said to have or profess a faith, the reference may be to a com­prehensive vision that serves to give an interpretation of life as whole, including a scale of values. For convinced adherents, philosophical systems such as Platonism and ideologies such as Marxist Communism serve as faiths of a quasi-religious type. Faith in the theological sense includes everything connected with the secular meaning of the term. But over and above this, it is a response to God as he acts and manifests himself in the world and in human consciousness.
The Society Of The Muslim Brothers
Authors: Mitchell Richard P
Published: November 2023

Since its first publication in 1969, this book continues to be routinely cited as the standard source for the history of the revivalist Egyptian movement, the Muslim Brethren, up to the time of Nasser. This classic work is now accessible to a new generation of scholars and students interested in the Muslim revival. Professor John Voll of the University of New Hampshire, a leading scholar of Islam in the English speaking world, contributes a Foreword to the paperback edition.
Occidentalism as a Counter-Discourse He shang Controversy
Authors: Chen Xiaomei
Published: November 2023

Throughout contemporary Chinese history, literary and political texts have often been composed by different and diverse groups of the intelligentsia as deliberate endeavors to promote anti-official discourse. Although impoverished in political power and material wealth, the Chinese intelligentsia has nevertheless been blessed with knowledge and literacy-qualities that have been ingeniously and repeatedly used against the “powerful” status quo. The ability to write, especially as it enables the production of anti-official agendas, points to an obvious advantage of the urban intellectuals over the peasants, the majority of whom have remained illiterate even in postrevolutionary China. Indeed the very act of public writing is itself a form of anti-official Occidentalism and thus a critique of Mao’s antiurbanism, which, as we have seen, is itself a result of, and a reaction to, Chinese Orientalism. Yet the creation of an anti-official Occidentalism by the Chinese intelligentsia for diverse and complicated reasons is more than a coincidental product of its literacy. It was preconditioned by the parameters of Maoist political discourse, which categorized anything opposed to its political dominance as “Western” or “Westernized.” To prevent China from being “Westernized” or “capitalized,” for instance, was commonly advanced as the reason for starting the Cultural Revolution, and for persecuting numerous intellectuals. In this situation, the adoption of an Occidentalist discourse was a strategic move by dissenting intellectuals.
Introduction
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

The construal of Calvin’s “Christian vision “1 developed in this book is one in which the divine-human relationship is understood according to a pervasively trinitarian paradigm.2 In my view this is an obvious way of interpreting the Genevan Reformer’s thought that unfortunately-for reasons I will detail in Chapter 1-has been over-looked consistently throughout the history of Calvin studies.
Biblical and Catholic Priorities in Calvin’s Trinitarian Paradigm for the Divine-Human Relationship
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

Our overarching purpose to this point has been to substantiate the hypothesis that Calvin’s understanding of God’s redemptive relationship with humanity was perva-sively “trinitarian. “ In so doing, however, we are not suggesting that he made a cal-culated effort to construct a dogmatic understanding of the divine-human relation-ship by careful logical inference from the classic patristic formulations of the doctrine. If we may speak-for the sake of making this point-in scholastic terms which Calvin himself studiously avoided, “the Trinity in its external operations “ received a great deal more emphasis in Calvin’s understanding of the divine-human relation-ship than did “the Trinity in its internal relations. “ By definition, of course, the divine-human relationship is the arena of the trinitarian operations ad extra. If Calvin’s chief theological concern was for the former, then it should not be surpris-ing that his doctrine of the Trinity focused on the latter.
Human Response,The Trinity as the Dynamic of God’s Relationship with Humanity
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

As the reader proceeds from Book II to Book III of the final version of the Institutes, a discernable shift of emphasis is evident. The theological movement of Book II re-flects the trinitarian pattern of the divine-human relationship, with emphasis on the Son and the second article of the creed. The theological movement of Book III, how-ever, focuses attention on the way the Trinity is the dynamic of the divine-human relationship, with emphasis on the Spirit and the third article of the creed. In 1559 Institutes 1.13.19, Calvin had interpreted the scriptures as attributing to the Spirit the “power and efficacy “ of God’s external operation. It is no surprise, then, that where divine empowerment, enablement, or efficacy are at issue, Calvin characteristically appeals to the Holy Spirit.1 But Book III, with its unexpected title, “The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ: What Benefits Come to Us from It, and What Effects Follow, “2 appears to shift attention to the human side of the divine-human relationship; the human recep-tion and appropriation of what God has done in Christ. Thus, the relationship be-tween God’s action and the human action of Christian believers takes center stage. In its perichoretically trinitarian focus on the Holy Spirit as the divine dynamic of authentic human response, Book III explores profoundly-if not often overtly-the way in which, for Calvin, God’s gracious action in us can also and at the same time via the Trinity be authentically human response.
Baptism, Trinity, and Comprehensiveness
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 7 we saw how Calvin’s trinitarian understanding of the divine-human relationship reinforced a profound concern for the “visibility of grace “ as it took expression in the corporeal context of the visible church. This concern came to further expression in his trinitarian understanding of baptism. In particular, Calvin saw an intrinsic connection between trinitarian baptism and the long catholic tradition of comprehensive catechesis of the baptized in Christian worship, doctrine, and practice. Through this connection of baptism and catechesis, trinitarian baptism was understood as a visible reflection of the comprehensiveness of God’s grace for each aspect of the Christian life.
Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

When the locked-room mystery occurs on board ship, it is more accurately termed a locked-cabin crime. Agatha Christie presents one such puzzle to Hercule Poirot in “Problem at Sea,” a story concerning the death of a rich and disagreeable woman who belittles her apparently devoted husband, leaving everyone wondering why he doesn’t “take a hatchet to her.” In most puzzle-centered mysteries, in both short stories and novels, the corpse is discovered early on. The rest of the story concerns the sleuth’s activities in solving the mystery. In “Problem at Sea,” Christie spends more time setting up the trick than in solving it. Behaving like a good conjurer, she presents all that is needed to see the solution while causing observers to look upon the evidence in a misleading manner. Once the solution is revealed, the clues that the audience has already seen suddenly form a new pattern requiring little explanation.
Georges Simenon (1903–1989)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Belgian-born Georges Ooseph Christian) Simenon was the son of an account ant and a frustrated social climber. Throughout his writing career, he used the tensions that he saw in his parents’ marriage as a foundation for a view that prized the solid values of the petite bourgeoisie and denigrated social pretensions as ultimately leading to disillusionment. When he was sixteen years old, with his father seriously ill, Simenon left school in order to support his struggling family. He tried his hand at two jobs before he found success in news paper work. Within a year he published his first novel, Au  pant  des  arches (1921 ), and his fantastically prolific career was launched. In 1929 he wrote his first work centering on Chief Inspector of the Police Judicaire, Jules Maigret, “Pietr-le-Letton” (1931; The  Strange  Case  of  Peter  the  Lett, 1933), and wrote nineteen more between 1930 and 1934. He is said to have written one romance novel in a single morning and a thousand stories in a three-year period. Typically, he spent three to five days writing a novel. Simenon re counted his writing and living habits in Memoires  intimes (1981; Intimate  Memoirs, 1984), a controversial book that discusses his two failed marriages, boasts about his sexual exploits, and speculates about the suicide of his daughter.
Catherine Aird (1930–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

From the first sentence in Catherine Aird’s “The Man Who Rowed for the Shore,” the reader knows whodunit. The interest in this little tale of a murder’s aftermath can be summarized in the question, “Will he get away with it?” and in the author’s impeccable craftsmanship and wit. Close examination of Aird’s story reveals the author’s marvelous sense of timing, which shows a wicked sense of humor and also anchors a perfectly executed plot. The comic yet poignant action centers upon a murderous husband, a handful of his late wife’s relatives, and their efforts to dispose of the deceased’s ashes in as dignified a manner as is possible.
Janwillem Van De Wetering (1931–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Despite the title’s playful tone, “Messing About in Boats” by Janwillem van de Wetering bears little resemblance to Kenneth Grahame’s The  Wind  in  the  Willows, from which the title is derived. Cultures and personalities clash with murderous result during a boating outing taken by a Dutch professor of philosophy and his all-too-devoted Japanese secretary. This piece is an excellent example of the author’s preoccupation with character and the missed connections that can spark explosive situations. Van de Wetering draws upon his acquaintanceship with Japan, where he lived for a year while studying Zen Buddhism in a Kyoto monastery.
Chris Rippen (1940–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Finally, the editor has the pleasure of introducing a new discovery to English speaking readers. Written especially for this volume, “Ferry Noir” is the work of Chris Rippen, a Dutch writer well-established in his native Netherlands and in Germany, where his work appears in translation. This is his first story published in English. Rippen was born during World War II in Haarlem in the Netherlands, where he spent his boyhood and youth. He recalls his hometown, located in the western part of his country near the North Sea, as a place famous for its historical center, magnificent pipe organs, and nearby blooming bulb fields. He also retains “less sharp memories of German soldiers in the streets, fire, an execution in the neighborhood.” His first published novel, Sporen (1987), uses themes of resistance and betrayal during that time.
Orallty, Literacy, and African Literature
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

There seems little doubt that the attention devoted to the oral tradition in Africa in recent times has contributed in no small way to the renewed scholarly interest in the question of orality and its relation to literacy. It is of course true that the study of African oral forms has itself benefited from a preexisting climate of scholarly endeavor so that such research could be undertaken with seriousness. In this respect, it is worth men tioning two specific factors that were conducive to such a climate and thus facilitated the extensive consideration of African orality as a cultural phenomenon. First, the development of structural linguistics, in both its Saussurian formulation and its North American variant associated with Leonard Bloomfield, drew attention to the oral basis of language and all but made this fact into an orthodox precept of linguistic investigation.
African letters
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

In the introduction to the first edition of his collection of tales (published in 1947), the late Birago Diop explains the circumstance in which he came to produce the work that has secured for him an enduring place in the corpus of modern African literature. Ascribing the tales to the family griot, Amadou Koumba, Diop downplays his own participation in their composition; he makes the modest claim that his role was limited to transcribing the tales as he heard them from the griot in their original versions in Wolof and translating them into French so as to make them accessible to a wider audience of readers. It is this condition of their gen eration as written texts that is reflected in the titles of the first two collections, Les contes d’Amadou Koumba and Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba. The griot’s name is conjoined to the material that Diop presents as a way of insisting upon its true provenance.
At the Front Lines of the Revolution: East Germany’s Churches Give Sanctuary and Succor to the Purveyors of Change
Authors: Steele David
Published: November 2023

The Berlin Wall was intended to cement the division of Germany into East and West. Throughout the Cold War, as East Germany struggled to maintain a separate identity, its citizens watched their brethren across the wall develop one of the world’s premier democracies. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika in the mid-1980s, however, raised hopes that the freedom and prosperity of the West might one day be replicated in the East. Theoretically, atheism, as a major tenet of communism, should have rendered religion obsolete in the Eastern bloc. Instead, the churches in East Germany not only flourished in their own right but were positioned to play a critical role in the revolution to come.
Faith at the Ramparts: The Philippine Catholic Church and the 1986 Revolution
Authors: Wooster Henry
Published: November 2023

Three centuries of Spanish domination of the Philippines were followed by American rule in the first half of the twentieth century, which set the stage for an era of close ties with the United States. Throughout the Cold War, two U.S. military bases there served as key assets and critical links to Asia. But the Philippines was unable to match the economic dynamism of its regional neighbors. The authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos, who came to power in 1965, failed to achieve equitable economic growth and political stability. Population growth, poverty, and the lack of land reform, together with a communist insurgency, produced massive social discontent that by the mid-1980s made Marcos’s hold on power increasingly tenuous.
Introduction
Authors: Spoo Robert
Published: November 2023

The word “history” reverberates throughout Ulysses like the laugh ofa ghost. Fiercely contested and continually appropriated, it can probably lay claim to more transformations than the protean dog Stephen Dedalus watches on Sandymount Strand. The Englishman Haines observes with imperial serenity that “it seems history is to blame” for his nation’s treatment of Ireland (1.649), while Stephen complains that “history ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (2.377). Mr. Deasy, the prating, imperturbable Orangeman, affirms that history moves “towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” (2.381), but the outsider Leopold Bloom, bearding the superpatriotic Citizen in his gloryhole, offers a less sanguine opinion: “Persecution ... all the history of the world is full ofit Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred” (12.1417, 1481-82). A provocatively complex word whenever Joyce uses it, “history” carries an especially heavy, shifting freight of meaning in Ulysses that makes it the verbal counterpart of Stephen, who personally labors under the burden of the past.
The Workings of The Cynical Public Mind
Authors: Cappella Joseph N , Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: November 2023

The Research we presented in Chapters 6 and 7 focused on learning from news in the broadest sense—learning explicit information, both substantive and strategic, and acquiring implicit, unintended information in the form of cynical judgments of mistrust. The model we proposed in Chapter 4 provides a framework for understanding these effects through processes such as priming, spreading activation, and changes in accessibility (for learning) and automatic trait activation and on-line tallying (for cynical attributions). In this chapter, we provide additional data on learning and cynicism following leads suggested by the framing model of Chapter 4.

In the field experiments of the previous chapters, people were exposed to five days of news—print, broadcast, or a combination over a week’s duration. The effects on learning and on cynicism seem to depend on exposure to a large dose of strategically framed news. The theory set forth in Chapter 4, however, does not assume that dosage is important.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau:Putting the Polis in Command
Authors: Porter Dennis
Published: November 2023

Given the argument I am developing in this book, it should be pointed out right away that what interests me here is not Rousseau but “Rousseau,” not the man or his writings for their own sake but what he has come to mean in the light of his legacy. My focus is on those aspects of his life and work that contributed after the fact to the emergence of a cultural hero of a novel type or normative idea that I am calling “the writer.” I am concerned with a new practice of writing and the self-representations of its first important practitioner, whose influence has been determinative in a number of important ways far beyond the romantic period in which it is usually assumed to have been ascendant.
The Cultural Twilight of Roland Barthes
Authors: Porter Dennis
Published: November 2023

The epigraph, taken from Barthes’s poststructuralist autobiography Roland Barthes, is significant here because it is clear from the context that he does not mean writer in the sense that Sartre was a writer, or Rousseau before him-that is, “a writer ”-but in the generic sense in which the word is sometimes a synonym for “man of letters.” The regret that Barthes came to express by the year of publication of Roland Barthes, 1975, was of the disappearance from French culture of the very desire to live and write in the way that, earlier in the century, two writers who were very important to him, Andre Gide and Marcel Proust, had lived and written.
Why Should Jews Suvive?
Authors: Goldberg Michael
Published: November 2023

The Jewish holiday preceding Passover is Purim. It celebrates one of the best-known stories in the Bible. Virtually every child with even a minimum of Jewish education knows the story, both because it is told each year (ad nauseam) in most religious schools and because practically every synagogue has some sort of Purim observance that children are expressly invited to attend.
Consent to Pregnancy
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

The concept of consent has figured centrally in the abortion debate, as in the right of minors to obtain an abortion without the consent of a parent or parental surrogate, the right of a woman to give her informed consent to abortion procedures, and the right of husbands to consent to abortions by their wives. The one type of consent that is completely missing from the abortion debate, however, is the right of a woman to consent to a pregnancy relationship with a fertilized ovum. Yet identification of the fertilized ovum as the cause of a woman’s pregnancy makes her consent to its implantation the key issue in the abortion debate. It reframes her fundamental right as the right to consent to be pregnant rather than merely the right to choose an abortion.
Wrongful Pregnancy
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that protecting the fetus as a form of human life is a profound state interest from the moment of conception, which increases to a compelling interest by the time of fetal viability.1 While the fetus’s status as a person may be in a potential rather than an actual stage, the law nonetheless does not treat the fetus as if it were a subhuman species, such as a dog or a cat, or a natural force, such as a disease, hurricane, fire, or Rood. To the contrary, the state protects the fetus as human life, albeit unborn human life, which may or may not be an actual person. When the fetus causes pregnancy, it does so in its capacity as valuable, state-protected human life. But if a woman does not consent to the fetus’s imposition of pregnancy, it causes what the law terms a wrongful pregnancy.
Abortion Funding and Due Process
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

When the Supreme Court established a woman’s constitutional right to choose an abortion in Roe, it did so on due process grounds. As framed in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Due Process Clause specifies, “No State shall ... deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law: In previous cases, the Court had ruled that due process rights guarantee freedom from government interference when people are making choices about such private activities as whether to use contraceptives, whom to marry, what materials to read, and where to send their children to school. In Roe, the Court ruled that this right to privacy, guaranteed by the Due Process Clause, “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” without interference from the state.
From Due Process to Equal Protection
Authors: McDonagh Eileen L
Published: November 2023

The right to an abortion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for obtaining one. Abortions also must be available. Medical personnel must be trained to perform them, clinics must be able to operate to provide them, and women must be able to afford them. It is this last factor that is the most serious impediment to the reproductive rights of thousands of indigent women who lack the funds to pay for an abortion. Although the constitutional right to an abortion appears to be secure after the Court upheld it in Casey, the job of ensuring women’s reproductive rights is far from done. At the top of the list of things still to be accomplished is establishing the constitutional grounds that guarantee the right to abortion funding.