bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Constitutionalism without Borders and Governance beyond the States
Authors: Maduro Miguel Poiares , Komesar Neil
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the role of governments, governance, and constitutions in an increasingly interdependent world. Interdependence has always led to governance. As world interdependence grows, so does the need and claims for governance beyond the state. At the same time, the forms of governance beyond the state we see developing are strongly contested and, more importantly, difficult to map and assess. Furthermore, those forms of governance beyond the state seem to increasingly depart from the paradigm of state delegation and eliminate the distinction between the state as an international and internal actor. In some cases, they also increasingly recognize individuals as actors of the global order. The chapter exposes the way through which processes of governance beyond the state change the forms and locus of power at the national as well as the international levels. They also challenge the character and conditions supporting state constitutionalism and with it they require a rethinking of constitutionalism itself. Even if the constitutional nature of the emerging forms of transnational and global governance is contested, what cannot be denied is their impact on state constitutionalism. The chapter sets out an approach to understanding how state constitutions and the governance mechanisms or, even, constitutionalism of the world interact. In considering those questions of constitutionalism, the chapter tries to avoid a common but deadly analytical trap: perfectionism or single institutionalism. Instead it adopts and articulates a comparative institutional alternative. The chapter argues that there may be many competing goals or values at play in considering constitutions and constitutionalism beyond the state, but how well any of these will be achieved will be determined by the functioning of the decision-making institutions chosen and, in turn, the functioning of these institutional alternatives will be determined by the dynamics or patterns of participation.
Cosmopolitan Pluralist Hybrid Tribunals
Authors: Baylis Elena
Published: October 2020

This chapter assesses hybrid tribunals as an example of cosmopolitan pluralist engagement. Hybrid tribunals, also known as internationalized criminal tribunals or hybrid courts, are ad hoc courts that incorporate a blend of international and national components and have jurisdiction over atrocity crimes such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These tribunals are expected to achieve their transitional justice and rule of law goals in no small part through the mechanism of pluralist engagement among multiple international and national legal communities. This chapter reviews the evolution of hybrid courts’ original core features of mixed staffing, mixed law, domestic location, and close relationship to the national legal system, including the emergence of new elements such as victim participation and domestic outreach. It evaluates their efforts to promote the goals of domestic perceived legitimacy, capacity building, and norm penetration, assesses the inclusivity of their design processes, and considers their influence on norm fragmentation in international criminal law. Overall, as institutions, some hybrid tribunals offer substantial opportunities for cosmopolitan pluralist engagement between international and local actors, while others are significantly constrained by institutional design or operational choices.
The Future of Religious Arbitration in the United States: Looking Through a Pluralist Lens
Authors: Helfand Michael A.
Published: October 2020

In recent years, religious arbitration has received increasing attention both in the American press and academy. For some, this attention is driven by concern that state enforcement of decisions issued by religious tribunals has the power to undermine the objectives of the U.S. legal system. For others, it is driven by a recognition that religious arbitration enables communities to enhance their process of dispute resolution by ensuring that it comports with shared religious principles and values. And, as is often the case, both perspectives contain important elements of truth. As a paradigmatic legal pluralism institution, religious arbitration has the capacity to both enhance and undermine the U.S. legal system. But if U.S. law is to capitalize on the growing religious arbitration system within its jurisdiction, it must identify both the range of unique benefits religious tribunals provide as well as the unique challenges they present. This chapter takes a first step in that direction, using legal pluralism as a lens to explore the motivations driving the religious arbitration regime in the United States. In so doing, it considers how both state and nonstate law can benefit from the religious arbitration system, and how those dual objectives require U.S. law to tinker with its treatment of religious arbitration so as to unlock its full potential.
Reformed Theology in North America
Authors: Lim Paul Chang-Ha , Martin Drew
Published: October 2020

The development of Reformed theology in North America is inextricably linked with the story of European immigration and settlement of the New World. Just as diverse geographic and political circumstances crucially shaped a variegated network of Reformed churches in Europe, the immigration of key groups and figures from this network brought a similar diversity of Reformed Christian thought and practice to the New World. These interrelated traditions then developed in the context of colonial settlements and ultimately hand and hand with the formation and development of national identities. In America, the experience and consequences of the Civil War and its aftermath fundamentally formed the institutional entities and cultural realities in which the Reformed tradition developed in the nineteenth century, and also set the trajectory for its shaping influences in the twentieth century, and in contemporary life as well. This background provides a key hermeneutical lens through which to see the theological conflicts between Reformed Christians who identified closely with the classical Protestant past and those who desired to drive the tradition in a direction more consistent with what they took to be its inevitable modern future. Reformed theology in North America today is thus the product of the planting of various Reformed roots in colonial soil in the midst of the transition to modernity.
The Westminster Standards
Authors: Van Dixhoorn Chad
Published: October 2020

The Westminster Standards were penned at the end of England’s second Reformation, and symbolized the high-water mark of Protestant scholasticism. The cluster of 1640s texts both codified prior developments in Reformed doctrine and standardized theological vocabulary, with the result that they have played an enduring role in the history of theology. This chapter addresses the unique contributions of the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and the flow and coherence of the Westminster Confession of Faith. Doctrinal topics, and the manner in which the Westminster assembly linked these loci, are discussed, and themes which find their place throughout the Standards are given particular emphasis. Since soteriological concerns dominate the Standards, they are given special attention in this précis. Select revisions of the Standards are also discussed.
Creation and Providence
Authors: van der Kooi Cornelis
Published: October 2020

Reformed thought on creation is throughout its history deeply influenced by the knowledge that this world comes from the triune God, who we know as Father, Son, and Spirit. The world is approached with the expectation that it somehow bears the traces of the Father, Christ, and the Spirit. God remains actively involved in the continuation of his creation. Already in Calvin’s work this aspect is very clear in his rejection of the Epicurean idea of distant divinity who does not interact with the world. The continued reality of God’s rule as sovereign over all that exists is one of the basic elements of the Reformed theological tradition. At the same time it has been and still is one of the most contested doctrines.
Covenant
Authors: Horton Michael S.
Published: October 2020

As the Reformed tradition faced different contexts, both in time and place, there could be a spectrum of emphases. Covenant has been a crucial theme for helping to hold together those emphases and maintain a sense of biblical and theological breadth and proportion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, federal or covenant theology employed the covenant concept as one organizing theme for viewing all redemptive history and observing connections across various Christian doctrines. At its best, the Reformed tradition has been able to emphasize mutual obligation without surrendering to neonomianism as well as the absolute, unconditional, and unilateral basis of the covenant without succumbing to antinomianism. And if that is possible, then the tension that exists in federal theology may be a sign that we are dealing with a relationship in history between God and human beings that is as complex and real as it is presented in the Bible.
Redemption Applied
Authors: Billings J. Todd
Published: October 2020

Union with Christ is a crucial theme for Reformed soteriology with far-reaching implications in numerous areas, including the theology of the covenant, the sacraments, eschatology, and the outworking of the doctrine of grace as justification and sanctification in Christ. Through engagement with scriptural exegesis and the refining of various catholic and characteristically Reformed elements, a Reformed doctrine of union with Christ has much to offer to the broader theological and ecclesial discussion. Rather than reducing salvation to simply a forensic act or a gradual transformation, the Reformed tradition holds together God’s forensic declaration with the Spirit’s indwelling, transformative work. Rather than approaching the various acts of God in salvation as temporal stages for human ascent to God, God’s electing action unfolding in justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification are ‘manifestations’ of union with Christ. Rather than reducing salvation to a purely vertical or purely horizontal affair, the Reformed hold together communion with God in Christ with covenantal, reconciled communion with others who are adopted into his household. This cluster of topics continues to generate considerable debate and development in contemporary biblical and theological circles, and promises to be an area for lively discussion for years to come.
Holy Scripture
Authors: Treier Daniel J.
Published: October 2020

Since key concepts in the Reformed doctrine of scripture resonate with John’s Gospel, this exposition begins with an account of the Word (John 1:1–18) in relation to God’s Spirit, the living water for which we are thirsty (John 4:10–13, 19–26; 7:37–9). Then the exposition turns to the font of the Reformed tradition on scripture, notably John Calvin; the early flow of the Reformed tradition on scripture, namely the boundaries set in historic confessions and scholastic interpretations; and the major tributaries that flowed from there. These tributaries emerged as modern contexts led Reformed Christians to extend key concepts into new territory: from Westminster, scripture’s communication of revealed truth; from Amsterdam, scripture’s comprehensive harmony with created reality; from Basel, scripture’s personal revelation of God in Jesus Christ; and from the margins, scripture’s liberating truth. Finally, a possible new tributary places scripture within a drama of saving wisdom.
Politics, Society, and Law
Authors: Fergusson David
Published: October 2020

From the sixteenth century, the Reformed movement was committed to a programme of social reform in which church and civil authorities worked together in partnership not only in the cause of ecclesiastical reform but with a view to establishing a ‘godly society’ in accordance with the Word of God. Sanctification thus extended to the entire social order, often through appeal to Old Testament ideals and the concept of ‘covenant’. This chapter explores that programme with reference to its democratic impulses, political criticism and concerns for a just legal and economic order. Within the later context of modernity, the Reformed reception of human rights, nationalism, and religious toleration is examined. Finally, the twentieth-century contributions of Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth are assessed with respect to their relevance for contemporary Reformed social thought.
Reformed Theology in the Context of the Reformation(s)
Authors: Trueman Carl R.
Published: October 2020

Reformed theology developed in the Reformation as both a positive appropriation of, and reaction to, Lutheranism. In its soteriology it was close to that of Martin Luther, but in its understanding of the Lord’s Supper it rejected the objective presence of Christ in the elements. As the sixteenth century wore on, Reformed theologians addressed issues of worship, where the development of the Regulative Principle was central. Also, Reformed theologians of the Bucer–Calvin trajectory went further than the Lutherans in pressing for a clearer demarcation between church and state on ecclesiastical matters, even though they were not able to achieve their ideal. As the century drew to a close, the rise of movements within the Reformed camp, particularly that of the Arminians, set the scene for increasingly rarefied and divisive debates over the basic elements of the Reformed understanding of grace.
Reformed Theology in Modern Europe (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)
Authors: Eglinton James
Published: October 2020

The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe is one of upheaval. How did modern European Reformed theologians and theologies fare as the social, political, cultural, and intellectual ground upon which they stood was shifting? This chapter explores developments in Reformed theology in Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Hungary. It argues that the nineteenth century saw Reformed theology coming to terms with the Enlightenment—conforming to it, in the case of classical liberal theology, and challenging it, in the case of the Réveil. In the twentieth century, the two most historically important attempts to reimagine the Reformed faith in a culturally modern Europe were neo-Calvinism (Bavinck and Kuyper) and neo-Orthodoxy (Barth). The story of twentieth-century European Reformed theology, for the most part, was the story of Reformed theologians reorienting themselves in relation to Basel and Amsterdam, as the ground moved beneath their feet.
The Role and Representation of Betrayal in the Irish Short Story since Dubliners
Authors: Smyth Gerry
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the emergence of betrayal as a central theme in James Joyce’s work and tracks its influence on subsequent Irish fiction. It explains how Joyce saw betrayal everywhere he looked: in Irish history, in the novel as a form, and in his own life. Already apparent in his earliest writings, Joyce’s major work represents a relentless dissection of the anatomy of betrayal in all its shapes and degrees. This obsession, moreover, was to have a lively afterlife in subsequent Irish literary discourse as generations of writers, from Frank O’Connor and Elizabeth Bowen to Bernard MacLaverty and Anne Enright, returned to this theme time and again until, following the economic and ethical crises of the early twenty-first century, society at large learned to speak the Joycean language of betrayal.
‘Proud of Our Wee Ulster’? Writing Region and Identity in Ulster Fiction
Authors: Vance Norman
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses Northern Irish prose fiction in the decades after the partition of the island of Ireland in 1920. In doing so, it challenges critical perspectives that link the emergence of a distinctive tradition of Northern writing to the renewal of political violence in the late 1960s. The chapter explains that much Ulster fiction from 1920 onwards was concerned with exploring different manifestations of regional distinctiveness and the problematic of regional identity in a divided society. Works in which this difficult history is examined, by authors such as St John Ervine, Janet McNeill, Brian Moore, and Sam Hanna Bell, are critically scrutinized. The chapter also considers the tendency of critics to minimize Northern distinctiveness and contends that there is a continuum and a creative interplay in Ulster writing between the non-fictional and the fictional, and between historical discourse and the narrative imagination, which is too easily overlooked.
Lethal in Two Languages
Authors: de Paor Louis
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the parallels and disjunctions between Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Flann O’Brien, with particular reference to the extent to which formal experiment in both writers owes as much to the specific circumstances of Irish culture, politics, and language in the middle decades of the twentieth century as it does to European modernism and postmodernism. The chapter examines the centrality of both writers’ detailed knowledge of the Irish language and its narrative traditions to their experimental prose fictions. The chapter argues that Ó Cadhain’s insight into lives blighted by economic injustice and bureaucratic tyranny has lost little of its political urgency in the half-century since his death, while Ó Nualláin’s work continues to deride a world in which absurdity insists on being taken seriously and the distortion of language is a defining attribute of power.
Shame is the Spur
Authors: Murphy James H.
Published: October 2020

This chapter discusses key trends in the development of Irish Catholic fiction written between the 1870s and 1920s. During this period, novelists from the majority religiously-identified tradition on the island tested imagined future Irelands in their fiction. The realities to be tested were those within their own community, one dominated by a vision of a rural, small-farmer, family-aspirational, faith-sustained solidarity. Some late nineteenth-century Irish novelists cherished that solidarity, though they were not uncritical of it, while others critiqued its perceived darker side, a mean-spirited materialism and clerical authoritarianism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of novelists emerged from an educated and generally urban context which valued liberal individualism. Working as priests, teachers, political activists, and journalists, they promoted an intelligentsia critique of the dominant communitarianism of the Ireland of their day. This chapter examines these developments with reference to a range of novels.
‘Our Nameless Desires’
Authors: Cronin Michael G.
Published: October 2020

The chapter surveys the development of Irish lesbian and gay fiction since the early 1990s. It traces the emergence of a generation of gay-identified authors who, buoyed by the gains made by the lesbian and gay movement since the 1970s, which culminated in the decriminalization of male homosexuality in the Republic in 1993, sought to give literary expression to the diversity of lesbian and gay identities in contemporary Ireland. The analysis distinguishes between two significant compositional principles in this body of fiction—plots that are structured temporally and those that are structured spatially—and examines their treatment in novels by Mary Dorcey, Emma Donoghue, Tom Lennon, Colm Tóibín, Micheál Ó Conghaile, Keith Ridgway, Barry McCrea, and others.
Epic Modernism
Authors: Slote Sam
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores how James Joyce transvalues epic, the novel, and Ireland in tandem through an encyclopaedic multi-perspectivalism. Writers of the Irish Literary Revival engaged within a variety of genres but they especially privileged drama and poetry as the vehicles for a recrudescence of an authentic Irish identity. As a counter to this, Joyce’s writings implicitly and explicitly make the case that the kind of transvaluation requisite to an Irish Revival could be better accommodated through the genre of the novel, in that only the novel was sufficiently malleable and protean to encompass the heterogeneities that were often suppressed or ignored amongst various discordant factions of the Revival. This chapter shows how in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce exults in the heteroglossia afforded by the novel by making it a vehicle for a multitude of concurrent perspectives and for languages that are mixed and multiple.
The Fiction of the Irish in England
Authors: Murray Tony
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the way in which Irish fiction has engaged with one of the most persistent features of Irish history over the last 200 years, the migration of its people to England. In doing so, it highlights how novels and short stories have played a role in mediating the experiences of Irish migrants in England and how writers have used fiction to fashion a means by which to articulate a sense of Irish cultural identity abroad. The analysis demonstrates how, over two centuries of fiction about the Irish in England, there has been a discernible shift of emphasis away from matters of primarily public concern to those of a more private dimension, resulting in works that illuminate latent as well as manifest features of the diasporic experience and its attendant cultural allegiances and identities.
George Moore
Authors: Grubgeld Elizabeth
Published: October 2020

This chapter examines the significance of George Moore’s contribution to the development of modern Irish fiction, and in particular his significance as Ireland’s first modernist novelist. It argues that Moore’s novels from early to late bring to Irish fiction not only a frank discussion of gender and desire but also present ongoing challenges to the conventions of fiction and the boundaries of genre. The discussion explains how, through his focus on gender and sexuality and a boldly experimental approach to narrative voice and structure, Moore propelled the Irish novel into the twentieth century, moving it beyond political melodrama, retellings of folklore, and the Anglo-Irish Gothic.
The Parallax of Irish-Language Modernism, 1900–1940
Authors: Ó Conchubhair Brian
Published: October 2020

This chapter traces the emergence and development of modernism in Irish-language fiction from 1900 to 1940, a period incorporating the rise of cultural and linguistic nationalism, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the establishment of the Irish Free State. In literary and linguistic terms, these decades saw a seismic transition from editing and annotating classical Irish-language texts to the privileging of vernacular forms of the spoken language and the cultivation of contemporary fiction in vernacular dialects. This chapter assesses the importance and relevance of Irish-language modernist fiction in national and wider European terms, paying attention to writers’ narrative strategies in dealing with the complexities of modernity and to the manner in which they expanded the range and scope of Irish-language fiction beyond the nativist folkloric aesthetic endorsed by cultural nationalists.
Prizes
Authors: Hahn Daniel
Published: October 2020

Literary prizes are among the most powerful ways by which authorship is made visible to the wider world. The vast majority of people do not pay close attention to the literary scene and may be wholly ignorant as to which authors currently count as notable or significant. But a prize announcement can disrupt this status quo, and briefly move a previously obscure name into the spotlight. At least this is true for the handful of literary prizes (among them the Nobel and the Man Booker) that count as truly influential. Yet, Daniel Hahn argues that prizes, aside from reflecting what James F. English has called ‘the economy of prestige’, can actively be used to challenge cultural biases, by making bold statements about what is, and what should be, valuable to a culture.
Electrophysiology in developmental populations: Key methods and findings
Authors: Barry-Anwar Ryan , Riggins Tracy , Scott Lisa S.
Published: October 2020

This chapter aims to provide a methodological and empirical overview of electrophysiological techniques used to study human development including: 1) electroencephalogram (EEG), 2) event-related potentials (ERPs), and 3) steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs). This overview is written to encourage the use of multiple techniques in electrophysiological studies of development. The chapter begins with an introduction to electrophysiological methods and the underlying neural events that give rise to the EEG signal. Second, each technique is described and important electrophysiological empirical contributions to our understanding of development from infancy through childhood and into adolescence are highlighted. Third, considerations and recommendations for the collection, processing, analysis, and publication of developmental electrophysiological data are discussed. Finally, the chapter ends with a look at the future of electrophysiology for the study of development.
Roman Catholicism
Authors: McGowan Anne
Published: October 2020

Worshippers at Catholic Christmas services may come seeking festivities focused on the infant Jesus but will find in the Scriptures proclaimed and the proper texts of the Christmas liturgies all-encompassing theological claims about salvation through an adult Christ who suffered, died, and rose from the dead. The official Christmas liturgies of the Roman rite were shaped by doctrinal concerns and historical circumstances. They emphasize a ‘holy exchange’ between divinity and humanity in Christ incarnate that opens a way for redemption accomplished historically, celebrated liturgically, and fully realized eschatologically. The celebration of Christmas in Roman Catholic worshipping communities involves situating Christ’s birth in the broader context of his death and Resurrection, negotiating the placement of paraliturgical and cultural customs that nourish the piety of the people and contextualize the feast, and preaching the Gospel in ways that inspire worshippers to become witnesses for Christ in the world.
St Nicholas to Santa Claus
Authors: English Adam C.
Published: October 2020

Little is known for certain about the original St Nicholas, the early-fourth century bishop of Myra, but his identity came to be linked with Christmas by the celebration of his feast day in December and by a few dramatic stories of generosity, kindness, and courage. These stories were enhanced by legendary tales from the famous Council of Nicaea. This chapter gives attention to those stories and their legacy and then traces the development of Santa Claus in America—his image, personality, and cultural status, as well as his role in advertising, marketing, and entertainment. With regards to these developments, the importance of the poem, “The Night Before Christmas,” cannot be overstated. Outside the United States, St Nicholas continues to play a prominent role in Christmas customs, family traditions, and public parades. Consideration is given to various regional traditions and customs, and to notable sidekicks and companions of St Nicholas, such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Krampus, and Zwarte Piet.
Food and Drink
Authors: Freedman Paul
Published: October 2020

Christmas food traditions around the world differ, both as to what foods and drinks are consumed and when the main festive meal takes place (Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, or Epiphany). Charles Dickens can be credited or blamed for many aspects of what are now regarded as age-old Christmas foods and ceremonies. The countries with the greatest international influence have been Germany and Britain, providing models especially for sweet cakes and biscuits. Christmas food tends to evoke a more-or-less medieval precedent, one emphasizing good cheer rather than religious adoration. Spicy and sugary treats such as gingerbread, and food or drink seldom eaten at other times (eggnog, plum pudding) give the occasion a special quality, connected to an imagined past.
Carols and Music to 1900
Authors: Leigh-Choate Tova
Published: October 2020

From the beginning, music has played an important role in the celebration of Christmas as both a holy day and a holiday, its various expressions reflecting different religious, cultural, and political contexts. To the standard Latin hymns and chants of the medieval Church were added tropes, rhymed songs, and liturgical dramas. Vernacular songs and carols, including those in mystery plays and Nativity representations, expressed both sacred and secular sentiments, and rose and fell in popularity according to such factors as religious allegiance and nationalism. Protestant denominations varied in their approach to the music of Advent and Christmas, with Lutherans promoting elaborate chorale settings like cantatas and oratorios, and Anglicans and Dissenting and Reformed Protestants at first limiting, or even banning, Christmas music-making. The collection of songs and carols, general acceptance of the hymn, and rise of cheap printing in the 1800s encouraged mass participation in Christmas services and concerts that included songs both ‘old and new’, masterpieces such as Handel’s Messiah, and songs about Santa Claus.
Bethlehem and the Middle East
Authors: Monier Elizabeth
Published: October 2020

Bethlehem is the backdrop to many of the Christmas scenes we associate with the season, but what is it like to celebrate Christmas in the place where Christ was born? In the West, many people do not realize that Christmas is celebrated in the Middle East, yet there are many ancient Christian communities in the region for whom their roots, traditions, and homelands link them to biblical stories. To understand what Christmas means in the Middle East and how it is celebrated reveals the ways in which Christmas traditions are shared and adapted throughout the region in ways that both support and change the way Christians practise their faith in the region. It also deepens our understanding of Muslim–Christian relations and the ways in which religious and cultural traditions can interact to bring communities together.
Germany and Scandinavia
Authors: Perry Joe
Published: October 2020

The peoples of Scandinavia and Germany created an impressive array of Christmas observances. This chapter explores their history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when today’s holiday took shape. Even as nineteenth-century ethnographers were conducting studies of the holiday’s roots in pre-Christian pagan traditions, celebrants were drawing on existing religious, aristocratic, and peasant traditions to reinvent a holiday that celebrated middle-class family values; new observances centred on the Christmas tree, the jultomten (Christmas gnome), and Father Christmas. After 1900, Christmas was deeply influenced by the consolidation of consumer culture, exemplified in the history of the Christmas market and the department store, and the evolving mass media, including family Christmas literature. Along the way, Christmas was also politicized and nationalized, especially in Germany, where Marxist Social Democrats, National Socialists, and Cold War Communists and liberals all tried to shape a Christmas that advanced their political agendas. This history suggests that Christmas observances in northern Europe crossed boundaries normally kept separate: between the sacred and the secular, the public and the private, the personal and the political, the commercial and the authentic. While critics repeatedly complained that waning piety, excessive commercialization, or drunken frivolity threatened the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas, this chapter argues that such changes were both inventive and productive. Christmas in Germany and Scandinavia (and elsewhere) was never static, but instead opened space for the contestation and reproduction of changing ideals of faith, family, and community belonging.
Russia
Authors: Silano Francesca
Published: October 2020

Christmas was a contested holiday from the moment of its introduction into the Russian lands, and continues to be so today. The history of Christmas celebrations in Orthodox Russia reveals how conceptions of time and human nature were reflected upon and through the Christmas holidays in rural and urban Russia and, later, through the Bolsheviks’ attempts to suppress these same holidays. In this chapter, the Orthodox Christmas season in Russia is described from the Nativity fast to New Year and then Epiphany celebrations. The chapter includes discussion of the origins of various facets of the Russian Christmas, including Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and the elka (the Christmas tree), and of Russian Christmas stories, such as Dostoevsky’s ‘The Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party’.
Secularity
Authors: Nash David
Published: October 2020

This chapter observes that secularist and atheist objections to the Christmas festival have been remarkably sparse since the nineteenth century, noting that while overall church attendance in Britain continues to decline, attendance at religious services during the Christmas period is actually increasing. A number of theories about this are discussed, including the view that Christmas services evoke a ‘Chain of Memory’, that the pull of family traditions is involved, and that it is because Christmas itself does not substantially contain the messages of sacrifice, sin, and atonement that characterize other aspects of the Christian calendar. Robert Ingersoll’s nineteenth-century campaign to take Christmas back from Christianity is described. Whilst atheists and secularists have to co-exist with Christmas, this chapter notes how they acquired the impetus and ideas to rebrand this holiday for themselves, invoking both religious indifference and the right to freedom of choice. This involved a greater effort to note that Christianity’s grip on the winter festival may be fleeting and transitory, giving secularist and atheists a glance into their secularized future. This, it is argued, may not be fully secular but instead may entail offering many alternative choices, a stance that has characterized atheist and secular approaches to other rites of passage.
Jesus Christ and the Incarnation
Authors: Sonderegger Katherine
Published: October 2020

Christmas as the Festival of the Incarnation poses special problems and offers particular insights for the doctrine of Christology. Jesus Christ, born at Christmas, has been given the name, Love, for in his Person and his life, a compassion for the suffering and lost animates his ministry and death. Such a name implies a joining of birth and death, Person and Passion. This is the view of the ancient Church. But modern theologians have accented the Person of Jesus Christ, distinct from his saving work, making Christ at once more universal and more tied to Christmas as a festival of joy. Central to both views, however, is the key teaching of the Council of Chalcedon, that the Person of Christ is both fully human and fully divine. This is the Mystery of Christ who enters the creaturely realm as child and Redeemer.
James on the Perception of Space
Authors: Hatfield Gary
Published: October 2020

The perception of space was a central topic in the philosophy, psychology, and sensory physiology of the nineteenth century. William James engaged all three of these approaches to spatial perception. On the prominent issue of nativism versus empirism, he supported nativism, holding that space is innately given in sensory perception. This chapter focuses on James’s discussions of the physiology and psychology of spatial perception in his Principles of Psychology. It first examines the historical context for James’s work, guided by (and commenting on) his own account of that history. Included here are his arguments for nativism. It then examines central aspects of his theory of spatial sensation, perception, and conception. Finally, it touches on the reception of his nativism, his phenomenological holism, his characterization of perception as involving active processes of discernment and construction, and his conception of perceiving organisms as environmentally embedded.
James and Medicine
Authors: Croce Paul J.
Published: October 2020

Throughout his career in psychology and philosophy, William James consistently based his insights on natural facts. He began his career as a scientist, earning a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 on his path toward learning physiology for psychological understanding. In his youth and for the rest of his life, he also engaged in alternative medical practices. He found value in both scientific and “sectarian” medicine, with each attending to different parts of natural experience and each empirical, with experimental and experiential access to natural facts. From scientific medicine, he learned methods of rigorous specialized inquiry and the importance supporting speculation with factual material evidence, and from sectarian medicine, he learned about the range of lived natural experiences and their interactions. Most significantly, immersion in the medical marketplace of his time encouraged his non-dualist way of understanding the natural world with interaction of material facts and non-material mind and emotions. His immersion in medical practices prepared him for both his contributions to professional psychology and philosophy, and his explorations of alternative consciousness in religious beliefs and depth psychology. Throughout, he maintained fidelity to the facts of experience.
James and the Metaphysics of Intentionality
Authors: Dunham Jeremy
Published: October 2020

This chapter argues that from the 1880s to the very end of James’s life, some of the central developments in his metaphysics were driven by the aim of providing an adequate response to the problem of intentionality highlighted by Josiah Royce’s argument from error. The chapter shows that James made several attempts to show how his philosophy could provide a solution to the problem, but, on two occasions, his eventual dissatisfaction with these solutions led him to major revisions of his metaphysics. The chapter argues that it was by means of his conversion to Bergsonism—in response to the Miller-Bode objections—that he was able to find a solution with which he could remain happy.
Medievalism as an Instrument of Political Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Authors: Gentry Francis G.
Published: October 2020

The medieval period provided for nineteenth-century German-speaking lands the ostensible model to fulfil the general yearning for a unified Germany, namely as a country with a Kaiser (emperor) at its head. This striving took the better part of the nineteenth century and involved all levels of society and all types of activity. For much of the century, for example, the completion of Cologne cathedral was the most important symbol of the hoped-for national and confessional unity. In the end, however, it was the political/diplomatic manoeuvres of Bismarck that enabled Wilhelm I in 1871 to assume the title of ‘Kaiser des deutschen Reiches’. With that, Germany was, to be sure, unified in terms of language, but the high ideals of earlier in the century remained unfulfilled.
Pre-Raphaelite Poetry
Authors: Helsinger Elizabeth
Published: October 2020

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris in the early stages of their careers sought to turn modern poetry in new directions by reinterpreting both the body and the spirit of the arts practised in Europe and Britain before Raphael. Four things marked their encounter with the past. First, both went directly to primary sources. Second, they began by making their own translations, verbal or visual; the act of translating brought to consciousness the particularities of both past and present. Third, both moved from translation to pastiche and invention, finding new ways to use the past to create in the present the shock of the new. And finally, these activities were shared projects, fired by the exchange of work and ideas among a circle of family, friends, and fellow artists and poets.
Building Utopia
Authors: Waithe Marcus
Published: October 2020

William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) contains many detailed descriptions of buildings. As products of the utopian society described, most of these buildings are new. Yet their form is evidently ‘medieval’, or ‘medievalist’ (and therefore at odds, in some sense, with our preconceptions of the ‘new’). This chapter asks what such terms mean, or might mean, in the context of a built environment that stands outside the margin of known history. In the process, it describes the structural features to which Morris draws attention, with more historical and conceptual precision than has yet been attempted. At the heart of this discussion is a concern to classify a future architecture that resembles medieval architecture without any conscious effort of stylistic homage on the part of its builders. The problematic implication is that ‘medieval’ architecture will always be the natural, or ‘structural’, style of a happy and liberated people.
Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages
Authors: Beebe Kathryne
Published: October 2020

Observant reform is central to the religious, social, cultural, economic, and political changes fundamental to late medieval Europe. However, modern scholars have traditionally devoted scant attention to it, focusing instead on pre-1300 religious movements or the changes of the Reformation. Yet in the past two decades, more work focusing on the ‘Observance Movement’ has begun to remedy that neglect. This chapter highlights the essential questions and issues that drive recent studies, such as property, the involvement of women and the laity, and resistance to reform. It evaluates the current challenges presented by the conceptualization of an emerging field and argues that while greater collaboration between scholars and the production of basic overviews are needed, we should also strive to understand those who professed or embodied Observant ideals not just from the viewpoint of our own labels and concepts, but also to understand them in their own terms.
Monasticism in the Oriental Orthodox Churches
Authors: Rubenson Samuel
Published: October 2020

The Christian monastic tradition has its origins in the Middle East. It has been and remains a constitutive institution in the Oriental Orthodox Churches, which are the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox Churches. In Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Syriac-speaking Christian traditions, the monasteries have been the most important educational institutions in which language and literature have been transmitted. A strong emphasis on charismatic authority in Oriental monasticism, as well as a lack of political support for the hierarchy in the Coptic and Syrian traditions, has strengthened the role of the monasteries. The monasteries had a major importance for the spread of Christianity in central Asia, south India, and the Horn of Africa in the medieval period. A remarkable revival of Coptic monasticism beginning in the mid-twentieth century is of importance for all the churches.
Religious Women
Authors: Hirbodian Sigrid
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores how the identities of religious women in the late Middle Ages were projected and perceived. Beyond the life led by regular nuns, the Middle Ages saw the emergence of many different opportunities for women who wished to lead religious or ‘pious’ lives. The focus is on women who, in terms of Church law, belonged somewhere between the secular and the religious, but who thought of themselves as leading religious lives—in particular, secular canonesses and beguines. The example of Strasbourg is used to demonstrate the varieties of women’s religious communities existing at a given time (here the second half of the fifteenth century) in a single place. It argues that regional circumstances, along with the support of influential religious and secular personalities, shaped the various monastic landscapes and largely defined the religious identity of women’s communities.
Monasticism in Africa South of the Sahara
Authors: Higgs Catherine
Published: October 2020

This chapter explores the intersections between European missionary outreach, political and commercial concerns, and the African reception and adaptation of Christianity south of the Sahara, beginning in the late fifteenth century ce and extending through the early twenty-first century. For the most part, missionaries, not monastics, spread the faith. The message from the outset was intertwined with political and commercial considerations—initially a trade in slaves, foodstuffs, and other commodities, and eventually, in the late nineteenth century, colonialism. Neither conquest nor evangelization proved formulaic or easy. In 1910, perhaps nine per cent of Africans were Christians, including those in the ancient north-eastern centres of Egypt and Ethiopia. By 2010, an estimated fifty per cent of Africans were Christians, most living south of the Sahara. Christianity has been redefined as an African faith, across a continuum that includes independent and indigenous interpretations, and, re-emerging in the twentieth century, a few Catholic monastics.
The ‘New Monasticism’
Authors: Christie Douglas E. , Flanagan Bernadette
Published: October 2020

The chapter provides a description and analysis of the contemporary phenomenon known as ‘new monasticism’. It examines key figures whose work influenced the rise and development of the movement (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, George MacLeod, Teilhard de Chardin, and Thomas Merton). It offers a typology of new monasticism (conceptual, classical, and contextual) based on the sources on which it draws. It describes the various experiments of monastic living that characterize the different approaches: conceptual (e.g. Rutba House, the Simple Way); classical (e.g. Monasteries of the Heart, Céli Dé); and contextual (e.g. Taizé, Focolare, mayBe, Kumla). And it examines how new monasticism can be situated—socially, culturally, and spiritually—in relation to other contemporary movements in spirituality and ‘lived religion’.
The Molecular Basis of Age-Modulated Plant De Novo Root Regeneration Decline in Arabidopsis thaliana
Authors: Sun Lili , Zhu Ziqiang
Published: October 2020

Plants possess a regeneration capacity that enables them to survive after wounding. For example, detached Arabidopsis thaliana leaves are able to form adventitious roots from their cutting sites even in the absence of exogenous hormone supplements, as process termed de novo root regeneration (DNRR). Wounding rapidly induces auxin biosynthesis at the cutting sites and then elicits a signaling cascade to promote cell fate transitions and finally generate the adventitious roots. However, rooting rates in older plants are much lower than in younger leaf explants. In this review, we highlight the recent breakthroughs in the understanding of DNRR decay in older plants from at least two independent signaling routes: (i) via the accumulation of EIN3 protein in older plants, which directly suppresses expression of WUSCHEL RELATED HOMEOBOX (WOX) genes to inhibit rooting; (ii) the miR156-SPLs-AP2/ERFs pathway, which modulates root regeneration by reducing auxin biosynthesis.