bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Why Rivers Purify (And Only Bad Witches Are Ugly)
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: November 2023

A common theme that runs through many studies of Hinduism and other religions emphasizes the identity, or at least interconnectedness, of natural and moral conceptions. More specifically, the view that pollution and sin are somehow identical rests on the assumed failure of certain cultures to distinguish between the natural and moral order of being. The ultimate goal of purification, as Van der Leeuw observed in 1933, “is no more liberation from actual dirt in the sense of modern hygiene, but release from evil and the induction of good.”
The Adharmic Force of Punishment (Dati4a)
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: November 2023

Up to this point we have looked at the implications of horizontal spatial metaphors in imagining dharma and its violation. This chapter focuses on punishment and the restoration of dharma so ably violated by thieves and lovers. It will become evident that since the notion of punishment is embodied in the royal staff, we shall have to explore this switch to metaphors of verticality. In chapter 5 we have seen that horizontal space is clearly related to human existence and action in the world, to will, change, and even contingency. In short, metaphors of horizontality even include spatialized time as a context for action, both dharmic, and nondharmic. However, even there, verticality played a subsidiary role to horizontal movement: the thief or devotee must crawl under a fence or climb over it; Rama had to get above the ocean (unless he were to dry it up-which he threatened to do), and so forth. The movement up or down seems merely instrumental for getting across. Even the religious crossing of firtha takes place mainly in horizontal space, though the climbing of stairs and mountains plays a key role. Absolute verticality, in contrast, is the movement up or down without any corresponding travel in horizontal space.
God: The Supreme Historical Agent
Authors: Kirkpatrick Frank G
Published: November 2023

With Pols’ explication of agent-act as our foundation, we can now begin to develop its application to a concept of God as the supreme Agent who acts decisively in history. The notion of personal agency as a model for divine action is not new in Christian theology.1 Our task is to show how a ‘literal’ application of agency is appropriate to God as the Agent who is together bound with us in the deepest possible kind of mutual relationship. In particular we want to show that this relationship must include the possibility of divine action at particular times and places, in addition to an overarching divine act through which everything created is sustained in existence. At the same time, however, we need to identify those elements in the concept of God as Agent that distinguish it from the concept of the human being as agent. We will have to walk a rather narrow tight rope between reducing God to the status of being simply a very powerful human-type agent and extending God to a transcendent realm so utterly different from that in which we human agents act that God’s being becomes absolutely unintelligible to us.
The Credibility of Biblical Claims That God Has Acted Historically and the Problem of Evil
Authors: Kirkpatrick Frank G
Published: November 2023

What I have tried to do to this point is establish the metaphysical credibility, in principle, of divine acts in the world. What now needs attention is the question of whether there is historical credibility to the claim that there have been, in fact, some divine acts in the world. Without denying that such acts could have occurred (and probably did) in the historical experience of many different peoples and persons, I will focus my attention upon the record of what Jews and Christians have traditionally believed to be such acts, namely the Bible.
The History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

When the late Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture appeared in 1985, it was universally hailed as a masterpiece--one of the finest books on architecture ever written. The New York Times Book Review, in a front cover review, called it "a magnificent guided tour through mankind's architecture," and The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "Kostof...has enthralled a generation of students.... Now he has done the same thing for the public at large, in an extraordinary book that is a new kind of architectural history." This magisterial work has now been revised and expanded by Greg Castillo, Kostof's colleague and literary executor. Insightful, engagingly written, and graced with almost a thousand superb illustrations, the Second Edition of this classic volume offers a sweeping narrative that examines architecture as it reflects the social, economic, and technological systems of human history. The scope of the book is astonishing. No mere survey of famous buildings, Kostof's History examines a surprisingly wide variety of manmade structures: prehistoric huts and the TVA, the pyramids at Giza and the Rome railway station, the ziggurat and the department store. Indeed, Kostof considered every building worthy of attention, every structure or shelter a potential source of insight, whether it be the prehistoric hunting camps at Terra Amata, or the caves at Lascaux with their magnificent paintings, or a twenty-story hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The Second Edition features a new concluding chapter, "Designing the Fin de Si`ecle," based on Kostof's last lecture notes and prepared by Castillo, as well as an all-new 16-page color section. Many of the original line drawings by Richard Tobias, as well as some 50 photographs, have also been updated or replaced, for improved clarity. Visually and intellectually stimulating, this book is at once a compelling history and an indispensable reference on all aspects of our built environment. It achieves for architecture what Janson's history accomplished for visual art.
The Architecture of Ancient Egypt
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

The ancient Egyptians were in all likelihood an indigenous people, though they were not as isolated from the rest of the Mediterranean world as it has sometimes been claimed. From the beginning they traded with the communities of Western Asia across the Sinai Pen insula, and with the Libyan tribes to the west across the Delta. They imported cedarwood from Lebanon and exploited the gold mines of Nubia (Ethiopia) to the south.
The Hellenistic Realm
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

The crowning age of the polis-the administrative and social unit of the Greek commonwealth- was the fifth century B.c. By then this vigorous institution had begun to leave its mark beyond the Greek sphere. To some degree, the example of Greek Sicily and southern Italy had touched the citymaking of the Etruscans even before. Rome itself had come about, in the eighth century B.c., by a process akin to the "synoecism" that Aristotle diagnosed as the agent of early Greek urbanization . In fact, quasiurban settlements in Spain and in central and northwestern Europe at the time of the polis indicate that Greek practice was now being heeded beyond the coastline of the Mediterranean, in areas where the usual pattern had been one of hill forts.
Rome: Caput Mundi
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

To hear her later advocates tell it, Rome had known from the start that she was destined for great things. The site, a healthy spot amid infested land, was chosen by the founder, Romulus, far enough away from sea to escape invasion, and yet close enough to reap the benefits of trade: that was Cicero's opinion. To Vitruvius, Italy was ideally situated between north and south, just as Jupiter lay between Mars, which is very hot, and Saturn, which is very cold.
The Mediterranean in the Early Middle Ages
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

Emperor Justinian died in 565, his dream of restoring Roman rule around the Mediterranean unfulfilled. The Greek-speaking Eastern half of the empire-the Byzantine Empire-lived on for nine more eventful centuries. (Fig. 12.1) The West had been permanently fractured under the steady pressure of Germanic tribes.
Spain and The New World
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

European colonialism began with the Crusades. When their fast gains were lost and the trade routes to the Far East were permanently blocked by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, Europe turned elsewhere. The lead nations this time were Portugal and Spain. The targets: Africa, the coasts of South Asia, and the hitherto unknown lands across the Atlantic. Slaves and gold more than any lasting benefit of diversified trade repaid the crowned heads who launched the expeditions. To the colonists fell the chance for a new life.
The American Experience
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

In 1842, several years before the Great Exhibition in London, the famous English novelist Charles Dickens made an extended visit to America, "that vast countinghouse which lies beyond the Atlantic." He disembarked at Boston where he spent two weeks, visiting its hospitals and correctional institutions, walking its streets, taking side trips out to Harvard and the textile mills at Lowell. He found the city beautiful, clean, and sparkling, and so slight and insubstantial in appearance that every street "looked exactly like a scene in a pantomine." The houses for the most part were large and elegant-some of brick; others, white wooden houses with green jalousie blinds. The public buildings were handsome; he mentioned specifically the new customs house, the two theaters, and the State House built on Beacon Hill with the green enclosure of the Common sloping down before it.
The Ends of Modernism
Authors: Kostof Spiro , Castillo Greg , Tobias Richard
Published: November 2023

There is no room in such unsettled waters for the cocksure or prophetic. We are confused. The best start is to observe and describe what has been happening: let stories overlap and contradictions go unreconciled. This is the way to come to terms with our confusion and so consign these times to the embrace of history, where we too will find a measure of understanding.
Introduction: The Offense and Us
Authors: mccracken David
Published: November 2023

In 1848, Sdren Kierkegaard wrote, “Offense is never mentioned these days-alas.” Now, however, it is not quite true that offense is never mentioned; it-or itsnear relation, scandal-is mentioned, for example, by Levi-Strauss, Derrida, and Bakhtin, but it is also not quite true that in 1848 offense was “never mentioned.” It had in fact been discussed at some length by Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript and by Vigilius Haufniensus in The Concept of Anxiety, and it was about to be discussed at still greater length by AntiClimacus in The Sickness unto Death and later in Practice in Christianity. All of these books, of course, were written by Kierkegaard himself; the putative authors, representing different points of view, were part of his ventriloquistic strategy to awaken his readers to things unknown to the Hegelians and the established church. Offense, for Kierkegaard, is something of profound human and religious importance, as is apparent from the full lament, of which I have quoted only a part: “Offense,” he wrote in his journal, “is never mentioned these daysalas, and even to the disciples, the believing disciples, Christ said: You will be offended in me” lfournals 3: 3028; cf. Matt. 26:31 and Mark 14:27). But the truth is that in this sense the offense is still seldom mentioned, in spite of Kierkegaard’s best efforts to awaken the world to what he called the essential offense. Kierkegaard would find his “alas” no less applicable today than in 1848.
The Offensiveness of Offense
Authors: mccracken David
Published: November 2023

In associating the offense primarily with the idols that Yahweh “lays” and “becomes” in the Hebrew Bible and with Jesus in the New Testament, and in asserting, with Kierkegaard, that the offense is essential to faith, I appear to be arguing-as indeed I am-that the Bible posits the offense as both necessary and valuable. Although the offense may be seen as an obstacle that blocks the way to truth and alienates one from God, this commonsense view presents problems as soon as Yahweh or Jesus becomes the offense. But even where Yahweh or Jesus does not obviously or clearly constitute the offense, it is evident that in its biblical usage the offense also may lead one to “walk in the way of the LORD” (Judg. 2:22). The stumbling block is a way not only of testing the Israelites but also of revealing their hearts’ desires, which may be unknown even to themselves. The revelation may or may not lead to the divine. If they desire God, they are his people. If not, their desires alienate them from God.
Training the Scribes of the Kingdom
Authors: mccracken David
Published: November 2023

The argument that parables are the scandalous word of Jesus, that they constitute a collision between the world and the kingdom, and that they bring the reader to a threshold experience, may, I am well aware, seem to violate common sense. Some readers of Crossan’s In Parables found his arguments that a parable “shatters world” (26- 27, 114-15) unconvincing, perhaps because they had read parables for years without the reading ever having been accompanied by anything resembling a shattered world. Experientially, it seems more sensible to look for, and find, meanings in these utterances. Parables seem to cry out for explanations. Why not respond with explanations? Many, perhaps most, hearers or readers feel that the role of interpreter, looking for codifiable meanings, whether through allegorical, exemplary, or metaphorical readings, is a reasonable role to assume. It even has a biblical basis: parables are told by Jesus to (among others) twelve chosen disciples who want to know what they mean, and Jesus, as teacher, ex.plains them, asking the disciples whether they understand them and sometimes reprimanding them for their slowness in understanding. In such a context, it is little wonder we should keep asking, “What do they mean?”
Life in the Between: Nathan and the Good Samaritan
Authors: mccracken David
Published: November 2023

In chapter 4, I presented Kierkegaard’s account of offense, which constitutes the ground of my argument, by examining his narratives of offense and the voices of his speakers. His narratives include such oddities as a judge wrestling with the contradiction of offensive corns on the feet of a beautiful woman, as well as the more weighty attempt by Quidam to extricate himself &om an engagement without offending his fiancee. Kierkegaard’s various voices belong to a wide range of characters: the aesthetic Johannes the Seducer, the ethical Judge William, and the differently religious Johannes Climacus and Anti Climacus, among others. The narrative, voice-oriented approach offers a way of presenting Kierkegaard’s views without falsifying them as something abstract, mechanical, or systematic. But although Kierkegaard presents the idea of offense through narratives, he does not explore the narrative manifestations of offense in the Gospels, nor does he examine parables as occasions for offense. He makes it clear that Jesus is an offense, but apart &om his powerful and subtle presentations of the offense and of Jesus as offense, he does not provide us with much in the way of models or tools for the study of Gospel narratives.
Enlightenment Individualism
Authors: Christians Clifford G , Ferre John P , Fackler P Mark
Published: November 2023

The roots of Anglo-American news lie in the Enlightenment. Although definitive in shaping the Western mind until now, the eighteenth century was not a smooth and singular time. The intellectual revolutions of the previous two centuries-the Age of Reason and the Age of Science, as they are often called-exploded into this rough-hewn era.1 The elite philosophers and scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Locke, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, saturated Enlightenment culture. Immutable laws were presumed to govern both the universe and human reality. Most of the writers and thinkers were popularizers, journalistic types centered largely in France and known as philosophes: Frarn;ois Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Jean Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Baron Holbach, and Antoine Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
The Evangelical Mission: The Spirit of True Christianity:, 1820-1831
Authors: Butler Diana Hochstedt
Published: November 2023

At fourteen, Charles Pettit Mcllvaine matriculated at Princeton College. As the son of a military man, lawyer, and United States senator, and grandson of the governor of Pennsylvania, Mcllvaine prepared for a career fit for such an illustrious family and received training as a republican gentleman at Princeton.1 His parents, Joseph and Maria Mcllvaine, did not hold strong religious views. They attended an Episcopal church but remained unbaptized and did not join the church. His two older brothers, both Princeton graduates, achieved success in law and business. The parents expected their third son to follow the family tradition of public service, and Charles gave no indication that he would choose a clerical career.
Reassessing Calvin’s Understating of the Divine-Human Realtionship
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

The first is the long legacy of “confessional “ treatments of Calvin. These familiar discussions ate frankly concerned with Calvin because he is the seminal figure from which the scholars’ own theological tradition takes its reference. As such, they make no pre-tense to “objectivity. “ Sometimes, somewhat naively, they address themselves primarily to readers who share their own indebtedness to Calvin and his heritage as well as their assumptions about his importance and authority. In any case, their discus-sions and evaluations take for granted commitment to the general theological worldview of Calvinism, and seek (with varying degrees of critical awareness) to clarify, adjust, extend, or update this worldview. They stand within a certain theo-logical frame of reference shared and prototypically shaped by Calvin, and their study of his thought willingly affirms his legacy as the living tradition of a historical faith community.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

It seems appropriate to launch a volume of shipboard and shoreline mystery stories with a tale of murder, mayhem, and mutiny on deck. This also happens to be the account of the first case undertaken by the world’s great consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes was introduced in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887, “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” published six years later, holds a special place in the canon of Holmes stories. Here Holmes recounts the case that revealed to him that his extraordinary skills at observation might serve him-and others in need-as more than the “hobby” of a restless intellect.
M. Mc DONNELL BODKIN (1850–1933)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

The steamship Titanic slides smoothly through the waves-setting out from New York as though it had survived its first fateful voyage to that city from Southampton, England-in this 1908 story written before the actual ship made its disastrous maiden voyage in 1912. M. McDonnell Bodkin may have read about plans for the luxury ship’s construction, since he describes the vessel as “the largest and fastest passenger boat afloat.” Unaware of the ship’s doom, Bodkin wrote a story in which the only anxiety a passenger might entertain during a voyage is the fear of encountering cardsharpers.
Lester Dent (1905–1959)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

It seems fitting that Lester Dent made a living as a night-shift telegrapher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sending out words at high speeds for the Associated Press, when he decided to try his hand at writing. A coworker had sold a story to a magazine for handsome pay, and Dent, who at age twenty had given up his notion of becoming a banker when he learned that telegraphers earned more, was attracted to writing when he saw money in it. Telegraphing by night and writing rapidly by day for pay-by-the-word pulp magazines, Dent wrote up to 140,000 words a month during his next, most energetic decade, the 1930s. He swiftly honed a style that relied on quick dialogue sparked with wisecracks. Within three years of picking up a pen, he was able to leave the Associated Press and make his way to New York, where he became a house writer for Dell Publishing and contributed to a variety of pulp magazines. He created the immensely successful Doc Savage series un der the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson in 1935 and continued the series to more than 160 novels. The Doc Savage series brought him financial success, enabling him to return to LaPlata, Missouri, where he was born and had spent the latter part of his childhood on a dairy farm. He had spent his earliest years on a ranch in Wyoming.
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

A Nobel laureate in literature, the southern-born William Faulkner became one of the foremost American novelists of his generation. His work, set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, mapped the territory in both a physical and moral sense. He knew his southern scene well. Born William Cuthbert Falkner (he later changed the spelling of the family name), he grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, where he did not complete high school. He joined Canada’s Royal Air Force, then attended the University of Mississippi, where he served as the university postmaster. He also produced a privately printed book of poetry before living briefly in New Orleans and writing sketches for newspapers there. He traveled to Europe and later returned to Oxford, where he married, had one daughter, and embarked upon his career as a full-time writer.
Ellery Queen
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

The most unusual piece in this volume is a radio play created at the height of World War II by the Ellery Queen writing team at the request of the United States Office of War Information. While “The Adventure of the Murdered Ship” has been both praised as a patriotic effort and denigrated as propaganda, there is no doubt that this drama, first broadcast in January 1943, remains an important piece of documentary evidence about the time in which it was written and the ways in which writers of popular fiction were asked to use their talents.
Richard Deming (1915–1983)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Richard Deming’s tale of seduction and murder during a honeymoon cruise is a fine example of post-pulp magazine fiction that uses sexual tension to hook the reader. When Deming wrote “Honeymoon Cruise” at the age of fifty-one, he was already an experienced fiction and television writer, used to depicting enough sexuality to titillate the reader or television viewer without upsetting the censors. A native of Iowa, Deming served in the army and worked briefly as a social worker and for the Red Cross before becoming a full-time writer at the age of thirty-five. He used seven pseudonyms during a career in which he progressed from writing for pulps to digest-sized mystery magazines, then paperback original novels, and finally to novelizations of the Charlie’s  Angels and Starsky  and  Hutch television series, written under the pseudonym Max Franklin. Under his own name, he turned out novels and short stories centered on the activities of the wisecracking Manville “Manny” Moon and hard boiled police procedurals featuring Matt Rudd, as well as novelizations of The  Mod  Squad television series. He also penned ten novels using the pseudonym Ellery Queen (as other authors did at the time) between 1962 and 1970. In addition, he wrote nonfiction volumes on subjects as diverse as American spies, civil and criminal law, sleep, and the metric system.
Edward D. Hoch (1930–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Edward Dentinger Hoch has said, 1always have my ears and eyes open for story possibilities, especially looking for odd and unusual facts.” Hoch’s ability to see life in terms of story ideas has made him a rare bird indeed: a writer who makes his living largely from writing short fiction. His publication of nearly 800 short stories is especially remarkable considering that this was accomplished during four decades when magazine markets were folding. At a time when most other writers of crime, mystery, adventure, westerns, fantasy, and science fiction-all genres that Hoch has explored-turned to the more healthy paperback or hardcover novel markets, Hoch continued to pro duce short stories of reliable quality that gained him recognition as “the most important post-World War II writer of mystery and detective short stories” (Critical  Survey  of  Mystery  and  Detective  Fiction, edited by Frank N. Magill). In fact, so steady is Hoch’s output that Ellery  Queen  Mystery  Magazine has run a story by Hoch in every issue of the magazine from 1973 to the present. With the exception of two stories published in 1992, they were all newly written.
John Mortimer (1923–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Hilda Rumpole is determined to enjoy a second honeymoon on a cruise ship with her long-suffering husband, the “Old Bailey hack” Horace Rumpole. “She Who Must Be Obeyed” prevaiIs, and the two set out for a Mediterranean cruise, which becomes a busman’s honeymoon for the barrister when his shipmates-including a despised judge-are convinced that a passenger has mysteriously and suspiciously disappeared. This story proves again John Mortimer’s inimitable abilities to entertain while making a serious case for the fundamental tenets of British justice. It is also one of a corpus of stories so substantial that it can be considered a canon in the crime and mystery genre, as are the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Martin Edwards (1955–)
Authors: Herbert Rosemary
Published: November 2023

A conference in Nottingham, England, the restoration of the underground headquarters of the Allied Command in Liverpool, and Martin Edwards’s legal expertise all led to the creation of this tale that turns on a point of law. Ac cording to Edwards, soon after he was invited to create an original story for this volume at the 1995 World Mystery Convention, or Bouchercon, in Nottingham, he took a tour of the World War II military nerve center. “I had an idea for my shipboard story then but going underground gave it more body,” Edwards recalled.
The African Imagination
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

This collection of essays by one of Africa’s leading scholars examines African literary traditions in the broad sense, and places the work of individual authors in context. Here F. Abiola Irele presents probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hapae Ba, and Amadou Kourouma, among others. In addition to discussing texts central to the evolving canon of African literature, The African Imagination addresses both the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West.
Study in Ambiguity
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

The name of Amadou Hampaté Bâ, the veteran Malian scholar of African folklore and traditional culture, is now firmly associated with a famous remark he once made at a UNESCO conference in Paris concerning the oral tradition in Africa: “En Afrique, chaque fois qu’un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui est brûlée” (In Africa, each time an old person dies, it’s a library that burns down). The remark has acquired the status of an aphorism, expressing as it does, in graphic terms, the urgent necessity of collecting the oral tradition in Africa before its final disappearance with the last of its guardians, in whose memory its textual values are preserved. The import of the remark derives in the first place from what it demonstrates of the mode of existence of the oral text in Africa.
Return of the Native
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

In his book The Poet’s Africa, devoted to a comparative study of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Aimé Césaire, Josaphat Kubayanda moves from the general observation that “Africa is central to the Caribbean search for signification” to an examination of the ramifications of the African theme in the work of the two great Caribbean poets, not merely in its primary significance as a counterdiscourse to Western representations of the Black race but, more fundamentally, as a focus for an enlivening sense of antecedents beyond the degradation of slavery in the Afro-Caribbean consciousness. Kubayanda’s analysis demonstrates that, for both Guillen and Cesaire, Africa functions ultimately as a symbol of personal redemption and as a source of new poetic and spiritual values.
A National Voice
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

In considering the work of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, one of the most creative and forceful imaginative minds at work on the African continent today, it is perhaps best to start with a general observation, namely, that there are two distinct but related impulses behind his expression. The first is the necessity he felt to convey the uniqueness of his experience of place and time. It was not enough for him to write in an undifferentiated and falsely universal way; it was imperative rather to situate his expression so precisely, in terms of subject matter and specific references, as to impress upon it the mark of an individual consciousness in immediate and active relationship to its shaping environment. From this fundamental preoccupation derives the second impulse: to find the most adequate terms in which to capture the distinctive quality of his experience and thus to establish in his work both an individual vision and a personal tone of address. These impulses, as well as the particular circumstances in which Clark-Bekederemo’s work has evolved, have imposed upon him the demands of a constant experimentation with language and form, so that the continuous adjustment of his expressive means to an unfolding pattern of experience represents an essential part of his creative project.
Parables of the African Condition
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

It is not, I think, too much to affirm that in the new literature of Africa expressed in the European languages, the correspondence is a direct one between the themes and preoccupations that have governed the direction of the creative imagination and the distinctive aspects of modern African experience. Indeed those aspects that have gone into the shaping of the modern African consciousness, as much in its bold and broad configurations as in its more intimate manifestations, have also determined the lines of articulation of our contemporary literature. In the process of expressing the tensions set up in our modern awareness by the varied and often contradictory elements of the collective experience, the literature has come both to reflect that experience and to carry its imprint in the modes and particular accents with which our writers have sought to formulate its manifold character and to register its significant moments. This literature has served both as a direct and objective representation of our modern experience as well as a symbolization of the states of mind in Tduced by that experience.
Barth and Bonhoeffer on the Worldliness of Revelation
Authors: Marsh Charles
Published: November 2023

Bonhoeffer discovered Karl Barth’s theology sometime between his visit to Rome in the winter of 1924 and the beginning of work on Sanctorum Communio in the summer months of 1925.1 Bonhoeffer sounds very much the student of the Berlin school in his journal entry of August 1924: “I have a very interesting book, Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion After Weber I also propose to read Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and to finish off Husserl-and, if I have time, to tackle Schleiermacher thoroughly.”2 However, in May and June of 1925 the tone of his journal entries and letters dramatically changed. He began reading works by Barth and by many of the other so-called dialectical theologians and, as Bethge says, an” ‘entirely new’ note crept in.”3 Bonhoeffer became such an admirer of Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man that he implored his mother to read it (which she read alongside Troeltsch, in whom her son had by now lost interest) and also presented a copy of the book as a gift to his god-father, Hans von Hase.
Looking Ahead: Toward a New Paradigm
Authors: Johnston Douglas
Published: November 2023

For all their diversities, there are certain properties that most of the major religions hold in common: the premise that self-centeredness is the source of most unhappiness, that help is needed to overcome this condition, and that there is a “divine ground” from which humankind has sprung and in relation to which one’s true worth is to be sought. Finally, and perhaps most important, they also contain some version of the Golden Rule. These represent significant commonalities on which to build in promoting interfaith dialogue and the nonviolent resolution of differences.
Denominationalism and the Black Church
Authors: Maffly-Kipp Laurie F
Published: November 2023

Given the many pressing social, economic, and political concerns within the contemporary African-American community, one need not search far for explanations as to why denominationalism and its implications for mainline black churches have not been “front-burner” subjects of debate in recent years. Yet this apparent neglect has a much longer history. With the important exception of Carter G. Woodson, scholars of the twentieth century have, in general, demonstrated significantly less interest in black denominations than did their nineteenth-century counterparts.1 But the significance of denominationalism is a topic that bears reexamination in light of the current resurgence of interest in African-American religious history. Understanding the twentieth-century neglect of black denominations both provides important insights into their historical relevance and suggests new avenues for studying these religious institutions.
The Question of Denominational Histories in the United States: Dead End or Creative Beginning?
Authors: Long Charles H
Published: November 2023

I do not know exactly why I was asked to comment on the topic of denominational histories in the United States, since this has not been one of my scholarly areas of concern. As a matter of fact, the history of the Christian church in the United States, at least from a conventional point of view, has not occupied a great deal of my time. I suppose, therefore, that I was invited precisely because I might express views regarding the nature of religion in the United States that could enhance or offer alternatives to the present malaise in which research and writing in denominational histories find themselves. Whatever problems I have are probably shared by most of the contributors to this volume. I can best discuss them by asking several sorts of questions about the study of religion in the United States.
Remembering, Recovering, and Inventing What Being the People of God Means: Reflections on Method in the Scholarly Writing of Denominational History
Authors: Shipps Jan
Published: November 2023

The fire fed by the bodies of Bishops Latimer and Ridley in 1555 still burns, but scholarly studies of the Reformation seem almost to have reduced the story of how the blood of Anglican martyrs became the seed of English Protestantism to that lovely quotation from Foxe’s account in which Latimer told Master Ridley to “be of good cheer.” For, said he, “we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”1 This is not to say that modern critical histories of the English Reformation entirely ignore religious matters or even that they completely neglect the story of the persecutions endured by the Protestants during Queen Mary’s reign. What happened where, when, and to whom is typically described, sometimes very well indeed. But modern scholars tend to look beyond religion for explanation, predicating the establishment of the Anglican Church on the crisis in the aristocracy, the politicization of the culture, the rise of the middle class, and other social factors.2 Similarly, the flame that warmed John Wesley’s heart flickers only faintly in the accounts of scholars who see the modernization of England in Methodism and use the Wesleyan movement to explain the “making of the English working class.”3
African Methodisms and the Rise of Black Denominationalism
Authors: Gravely Will B
Published: November 2023

At least since 1921, when Carter G. Woodson published his classic survey, History of the Negro Church, it has been commonplace to refer to religious separatism in the free black communities of the post-Revolutionary generation as “the independent church movement.”1 A quarter century earlier, Bishop James W Hood of the African Methodist Episcopal, Zion Church used a similar idiom to describe the origins of northern black congregations. Discounting denominational differences among antebellum black Protestants, Hood argued that a common racial bond made for “a general, grand, united and simultaneous Negro movement.” Regretting the scarcity of early sources and the absence of comprehensive histories, the bishop declared, “there was more in it than what appears on the surface,” for “it was a general exodus of colored members out of white churches.”2
“Denominational” Colleges in Antebellum America?: A Case Study of Presbyterians and Methodists in the South
Authors: Longfield Bradley J
Published: November 2023

Since the early settlement of Massachusetts Bay by English Puritans, Christians in America have sought to unite religion and learning through the founding of academies of higher education. The relationship between these schools and Protestant denominations in the years before the Civil War has become a matter of some debate among historians of higher education. For years, Donald Tewksbury’s claim that “the ‘denominational college’ was the prevailing American college of the middle period of our history”1 held sway and was widely echoed in general surveys. More recently, however, numerous scholars have been challenging the portrayal of antebellum colleges as “denominational” institutions. In an influential essay, David Potts, for example, claims that “there is good reason to anticipate that the traditional generalization concerning a basic trend from sectarianism toward secularism, when applied to American collegiate history during the nineteenth century, will have to be inverted.”
Denominational History as Public History: The Lutheran Case
Authors: Klein Christa R
Published: November 2023

Lutherans are burdened with expectations. In 1961 Winthrop Hudson wrote in the last paragraph of his bold American Protestantism that Lutherans might play an increasing role in the renewal of American Protestantism. Having been “insulated from American life for a long time,” Lutherans still had access to the resources of the Christian past through their confessional tradition, liturgical practice, and communal life.1 The question at hand—is there a difference in doing denominational history when the group under study bears certain ethnic and confessional traditions—probes more than historiography. It fingers unresolved expectations about a peculiarly Lutheran vocation in American culture.
Automobile Accidents
Authors: Dewees Don , Duff David , Trebilcock Michael
Published: November 2023

Injuries stemming from automobile accidents are the most numerous and costly of all personal injuries in North America. They are also one of the most fertile areas of current experience and debate regarding the role of the tort system and its alternatives. In 1989, roughly 5 million Americans experienced auto-related injuries, 47,000 of which were fatal.1 In Canada, more than 200,000 people were injured in motor vehicle accidents in 1985 and more than 6,000 died.2 To put these figures in perspective, between 1945 and 1985 more Canadians died as a result of automobile accidents (168,319) than the combined total of Canadians killed in both world wars (102,703)..The costs of these injuries are enormous. In 1985, the economic costs (medical expenses, wage losses, and other out-of-pocket expenses) of automobile injuries in the United States are estimated to have totalled $50 billion, .and another estimate assessed the 1986 costs at $74.2 billion.5 Further, despite steady decreases in the annual number of traffic fatalities in Canada and the United States since the mid-1970s, injury insurance costs have risen sharply during this period, increasing by about 140% in the United States from 1977 to 1987..Largely in response to liability premium increases, governments and policy makers have shown renewed interest in no-fault alternatives to tort law in this area, after a long period of inaction following the initial enactment of no-fault schemes in 16 U.S. states and the province of Quebec between 1971 and 1977. Ontario adopted a no-fault regime in 1989, and existing approaches to preventing and compensating automobile injuries have come under increasing scrutiny as policy makers seek empirical evidence to guide current policy choices. This chapter reviews this evidence on the tort system and on alternative methods of injury prevention and compensation.
Product-Related Accidents
Authors: Dewees Don , Duff David , Trebilcock Michael
Published: November 2023

During the mid-1980s most U.S. jurisdictions faced a crisis in the availability and affordability of liability insurance: premiums skyrocketed, sometimes by several hundred percent in one year; in some cases, coverage itself became unavailable. Total premiums for general liability insurance, which includes product liability, tripled in only 2 years in the mid-1980s, from $6.5 billion in 1984 to over $19.4 billion in 1986.2 Over the decade 1968-78, general liability insurance premiums written increased from $] .13 billion to $6.49 billion (a real annual growth rate of 8.8%). From 1979 to 1988, premiums increased from $6.61 billion to $19.08 billion (a real annual growth rate of more than 4%)..Between 1975 and 1989 the number of product liability claims filed annually in federal district courts increased from 2,393 to 13,408 (a 460% increase) and from 2.04 to 5.76 as a percentage of all federal civil cases over this period.. Average product liability jury awards increased from $195,020 in 1971 to $1,535,944 in 1988, and median awards increased from $71,500 to $405,000 over this period, an annual increase in real terms of between 4% and 6%..However, some scholars have argued that the perception of a crisis in product liability is unfounded. Corley and Hanson contend that empirical evidence does not support a negative interpretation of the above cited trends and that the expansion of product liability in fact furthers the deterrence and insurance goals of tort. While not disputing the statistics themselves, Corley and Hanson argue that the rise in insurance premiums represents an internalization of costs that had been externalized prior to liability expansion; thus, the rising costs of insurance and withdrawal of products from the market evidence a shift to a more efficient level of deterrence..
Selkirk the Town
Authors: Neville Gwen Kennedy
Published: November 2023

Selkirk is most beautiful from Peebles Road, set far across the meadow on the other side of the River Ettrick, a silhouette of rooftops and spires on the hillside above the river valley below. This is especially true in late spring and early summer when the meadows are in bloom and the sun comes out for some midday hours, brightening up the cricket field and rugby fields just past Phillipaugh, the ancient farm on burgh lands. One crosses the river over the bridge that when first built in 1820 was called the New Bridge and has been called that over several reconstructions. On the Peebles Road side of the river lies Bannerfield, the sprawling housing estate built after World War II to shelter a growing population. Just beyond the river is the mill haugh, built up since the early 1800s with textile cloth-manufacturing facilities of various types and sizes, now mostly buildings taken over by other kinds of businesses or used for other functions. Newer metal buildings cover spaces now devoted to Selkirk’s largest employer, Exacta Corporation, a maker of printed circuits for the computer industry, stretching along a road that was once the site of the “old toll.” Tannery, building yard, and garage sit near the area known as the “Green.” On a hill to the right at Heatherlie Park are two stately houses turned into hotels.
Anthropological Readings: Ritual, Symbol, and Experience
Authors: Neville Gwen Kennedy
Published: November 2023

Anthropologists addressing the problems of performance analysis, the analysis of ritual, play studies, and the literary criticism of cultural texts sometimes work out their own puzzles as if the pictures they are assembling have separate meanings and can be discussed in entirely separate segmented “schools” of puzzle solving in separate languages of conversation. In my own attempts to understand and describe analytically the intricacies of the common riding, I have often been led down one or another path toward these separate outcomes as if they are mutually exclusive or, in any case, mutually unintelligible. Yet time and again I am drawn back to the central feature of the event itself as a series of actions embedded in its own particular historical and social setting with its own separateness and integrity, fitting into an overall pattern of meanings and symbols over time and space. There is a real event here. There are real horses and riders, band members and flutes, walkers in processions, and so on. And these people and their celebration are not easily fitted into anthropologists’ categories, not easily explained by one or another pure and elegant theoretical system.
Introduction
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

The more the development [of religion] tends toward the conception of a transcendental unitary god who is universal, the more there arises the problem of how the extraordinary power of such a god may be reconciled with the imperfection of the world that he has created and ruled over.
The Bavli: Canonical Echoes, Intimations of Dissent
Authors: Kraemer David
Published: November 2023

With the Babylonian Talmud (henceforth: the Bavli) we come to the final and, in the opinion of many, definitive expression of classical rabbinic Judaism. The Bavli is a work of independent spirit, drawing widely on the earlier tradition but allowing no earlier authority to dictate its views. As in so many other matters, the Bavli not only records traditional opinions on suffering and related issues but also expresses opinions that have no rabbinic precedents, opinions that, when viewed against the earlier rabbinic canon, are genuinely radical.
The Great Mother
Authors: Motz Lotte
Published: November 2023

The concept of an all-embracing maternal divinity, a Great Mother, ruling religious life, manifest in the earliest symbolic expressions, and en during and unfolding through the ages in an infinite variety of forms, has been widely recognized by scholars of various disciplines. Her earliest epiphany has been discerned in statuettes of ivory or stone that were found in dwelling places of the Upper Paleolithic Aurignac-Solutrean cultures, dating back as far as 30,000 B.C.E. The artifacts were unearthed in such widely separated places as Austria, Russia, and Spain, yet show a certain homogeneity in certain aspects of the body. Frequently, the woman is of great obesity, with sagging breasts, protruding stomach, and enormous haunches, though slim and stylized versions have also been encountered. Since the woman’s form is suggestive of the state of pregnancy, she has been regarded as a power of fecundity who gives expression to the deeply felt mystery of birth and generation.