bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
What our ancestors knew
Authors: Kaimal Girija 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
As we map our journey across time, it is increasingly clear that creative self-expression in art forms is as old as human history itself. Examples such as prehistoric rock art are reminders that artistic expression has been a part of all human communities and civilizations. To fully immerse ourselves in the current contexts of creative expression, we must examine the role of indigenous and traditional artistic practices, particularly as they relate to promoting health and well-being. Indigenous and traditional artforms have elements that connect seamlessly from ancient to modern life and serve as reminders of the timeless aspects of the human condition. Many of these art forms have survived to this day, and each of us could trace back to a community of origin. In particular, the aspects of storytelling and narrative, contemplative and meditative practices, connection to nature, and sustaining a nurturing community are reminders from these arts practices. The unfortunate and oppressive history of colonialism and imperialism minimized the value and importance of these practices. Contemporary efforts in research and practice to better understand the value of these deeply integrated creative practices could offset some of these irretrievable losses.
Navigating adversity in adulthood through creative self-expression
Authors: Kaimal Girija 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
This chapter focuses on how adults can navigate trauma and adversity through self-expression. Creative self-expression plays a unique role in the times of adversity and challenges that we all inevitably face in life. Trauma and adversity across the lifespan can be mitigated with artistic practices. These creative expressive options are on a continuum, with distraction on one end and transformation, by making sense of our experiences, on the other. Stress and trauma might devastate us but they can also transform us, as seen in recent research on creative and post-traumatic growth. Our creative capacity as humans has helped us cope, innovate, adapt, and learn, especially in times of difficulty and adversity. In this chapter, the author shares specific examples where art therapy can been useful, including cancer patients and caregivers and military service members with post-traumatic stress.
Cosmic Debt in Greece and India
Authors: Seaford Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
This chapter describes ideas of cosmic debt in the sixth and fifth centuries bce in Greece and (at about the same time) in India. The earliest Greek ideas of impersonal cosmic necessity, in the fragments of the Ionians Anaximander and Herakleitos, are a cosmization (cosmic projection) of the quantified debt that was central to the newly monetized economy of the polis. But whereas the Ionians cosmize debt as the agent of communal circulation, what the wealthy Eleatic Parmenides cosmizes, from the perspective of individual ownership, is the separation of universal abstract value-substance of money from circulation, its debtless self-sufficiency: Abstract Being is all that exists, is “inviolate,” and is said to be (incomprehensibly to modern scholars) not created by debt. The monetization of northern India in the same period also promoted a metaphysical revolution, in which universal abstract value-substance is cosmized as unchanging invisible brahman, the debt-driven circulation of money is cosmized as the misery of reincarnation, and the power of individually accumulated money in (and to escape) debt-driven circulation is cosmized (and ethicized) as karma. Along with fundamental similarities, the differences between the monetized metaphysics of Greece and of India are related to the social and religious differences between the two societies.
Debt, Debt Bondage, and the Early Islamic Economy
Authors: Bonner Michael 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
This chapter reconsiders the impact of Islam on the economies of the Near East. It falls into two halves. The first examines the problem of debt peonage in early Islam. Scholarship in this field has often been concerned with the dating of juristic texts. Most notably, there has been an intense debate on the chronology of ḥadīth, records of the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muhammad. While it is clear that debt peonage existed in the first generations of Islam, these source problems make it impossible to determine whether it was a native practice or a recent import from the neighboring empires of Rome and Iran. The second half of the chapter explores the relationship of Islam to commerce more broadly. The early Islamic world featured bustling markets and trade, including large-scale traffic in human beings. At the same time, it also set clear limits to the commodification of persons; most notably, in mature Islamic law, debt bondage is condemned and outlawed. The chapter suggests that this rejection of commodification derived in part from a pre-Islamic Arabian commercial culture that celebrated archaic morality, exalting gift-giving and competition for noble status over commoditization and market exchange.
The Uncertainty Principle
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
John Bunyan and the Puritans gave the modern world two gifts, one of which was unintended. The first was a robust faith in Christ; the second was an equally robust uncertainty with regard to personal salvation. Bunyan’s Grace Abounding is riddled with Puritanism’s Big Question: How do I know I am saved? Bunyan hears voices. They tell him he is unsavable. In response, hopeful passages of scripture fly to his defense. Uncertainty is a near pathology that runs through his autobiography from start to finish. Puritan self-analysis laid the groundwork for introspective theology and modern analysis. Succeeding generations are its heirs. A despised tinker, Bunyan’s spiritual and social standing are mirror images of each other. Yet he writes with a native, untutored energy that has captivated readers for generations. In the after-story to his memoir, he is arrested and becomes the longest-serving nonconformist in England. With the assurance of the gospel, he writes and preaches and becomes a legend.
What Will Survive of Us Is Love
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
The letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise constitute the most famous such exchange in the history of Western literature. They are the rock stars of the twelfth century. In their own words, the letters tell the story of their disastrous love, their fall, their ruin, and their redemption. Now a prioress, Heloise is a bitter shell. She still desires Abelard but can never have him. Abelard, on the other hand, has reinvented himself as a theologian. The letters reveal a man who has grown rigid in the expression of God’s justice, but unable, or unwilling, to look into his own soul; whereas Heloise’s letters display a deep self-awareness and a capacity for self-expression that far exceeds Abelard’s. She still knows the language of love. In the face of ruin, they both soldier on and, in the reinvention of themselves, ultimately find redemption.
Last Lessons
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison relates, in his own words, his journey toward death. A rising star in the theological world of Germany, he is now reckoning with what it means to stripped of everything and to live before God with nothing. Writing to his friend Eberhard Bethge, he gradually sloughs off his trust in church and religious formulations. He strives to “just be”—but always in the presence of God. In this desire he resembles the Dutch prisoner Etty Hillesum. Bonhoeffer will also exchange letters with his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer. These letters reveal how much this young woman, half his age, has taught him about love. In their correspondence, they plan for a future they will never have. Their exchange reveals an emotionally vulnerable side of Bonhoeffer not readily discernible in his more famous letters. Maria continues steadfast in her love until Dietrich, like Etty before him, disappears into the darkness.
Witness
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl bears witness not only to the cruelties of slavery, but to the religious and moral hypocrisy of its perpetrators. It reminds Whites in the North and South of their moral complicity in America’s original sin. Harriet Jacobs skillfully recreates the world of enslavement in a small southern town, Edenton, North Carolina. In intimate detail, she tells of her master’s sexual advances, her attempted escape, and her long imprisonment in her grandmother’s attic. Her narrative bridges the world of enslavement in the South with the urban world of Jim Crow freedom in the North. Her freedom has been bought. She greets such “freedom” with joy and irony. Her memoir does what the best memoirs do: it illumines the soul and the conditions that affect it. Jacobs tells her personal story against the canvas of a vast historical epoch. In style, Incidents owes some of its sentiment to Uncle Tom’s Cabin but does not consent to Stowe’s sentimentalism and religious moralism.
A Revised Itinerary
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Kathleen Norris’s several memoirs reflect a sea change in spiritual autobiography. They do not recreate a moment of dramatic conversion; nor do they express a warm attachment to the person of Jesus. They reconstruct the search for and discovery of a new life in community—beginning with a small town in South Dakota, and then an even smaller community of priests and nuns. In this community, she is nurtured daily by the psalms, by spiritual relationships, and by the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. Her writing implicitly challenges one of the traditional assumptions of autobiography, namely its focus on the achievement of personal identity over the repressiveness of the group. In Norris’s counternarrative, she discovers what is truest about herself in the Christian community of others.
A Ministry in the South Bronx
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Heidi Neumark’s Breathing Space is not about her conversion or her call. It tells the story of her ministry in one of the most dangerous and impoverished sectors of America, the South Bronx. Her memoir recreates the Bronx of the 1980s, with its speed, AIDS, routine crime, and rat-infested housing projects. She is the new pastor of a small Spanish-language Lutheran Church named Transfiguration. It is her first parish. She stays for twenty years. She conveys no vocational anguish or uncertainty about her calling. It’s all about the work. She is meant to be there. Breathing Space is mainly a story of people, and especially the many children, who are suffocating in numerous ways. Neumark tells their stories, often interleaving them with stories from the scriptures. The book’s plotline is provided by her parish’s ten-year effort to build a new parish hall. Its completion marks the conclusion of her ministry and a move to another equally demanding New York City parish.
A Snake Handler’s Faith
Authors: Lischer Richard 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Dennis Covington offers a participant-observer’s description of an exotic religious practice in Salvation on Sand Mountain. He begins as a journalistic observer of snake-handling congregations and ends as a handler himself. He writes about marginalized people who handle copperheads as a means of testing God’s faithfulness. Covington captures the atmosphere of Southern White Pentecostalism—the raucous music, glossolalia, holy dancing, and the moment of truth when the snakes come out of the boxes. He also bears witness to a mysterious urge in himself to be a part of it, to fit in, and to handle. As with John Bunyan, Covington makes the connection between the extremities of religious zealotry and the extremities of social exclusion. The combination results in a Baldwin-like exorcism of a bizarre religious practice and of something worrisome in himself. Covington is a man probing his own roots and hoping to discover exactly what he believes.
Enfranchisement and Partisan Alignment
Authors: Wagner Regina L. , Shafer Byron E. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
A major challenger to social class as a cleavage shaping American politics across the postwar period has been racial background. Focused most centrally on civil rights as a policy domain, racial background has interacted with other policy domains and other social cleavages on the way to changing the very nature of its attachment to the political parties. Beginning as the domain that was most tightly aligned by geographic region at the start, it was to alter this relationship as it altered others. Partisan enfranchisement, the formal expansion of the electorate, proved to be the dynamic central to all of this.
The Fourth Evangelist and the Son of God
Authors: Bryan Christopher 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
The Word with which John’s gospel begins is eternal, beyond and transcending creation. Indeed, the Word is God’s agent in creation, to be identified with the Divine Wisdom of Israel’s Scriptures. But the Word of John’s gospel is also the Word incarnate, whereby the divine, holy and eternal is becomes one with the transient: an audacious claim, as Augustine saw. As the Word made flash, Jesus is appropriately spoken of as God’s only begotten son, who is God’s agent in redemption, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Through Jesus his followers also become children of God.
“Why Have They Been Numbered among the Sons of God? And Why Is Their Lot among the Saints?”
Authors: Bryan Christopher 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
A feature of Jesus’ teaching, made especially clear in the Lord’s Prayer, is that he invites his followers to share his relation to the Father, telling them to pray to his Abba as he does. Hence divine sonship in the New Testament is the mirror image of divine sonship in the Scriptures of Israel. In the Scriptures of Israel, divine sonship begins with Israel, God’s people, and is subsequently focused on the figure of the Davidic king. In the New Testament divine sonship begins with the person of Jesus, the Davidic messiah, and subsequently radiates outward from him to his followers who become by their association with him the sons and daughters (or children) of God, also referred to as “the saints,” who have hope amid the despair of the world.
A Fixation Thesis and a Secondary Proceduralization: Constitution as Positive Law
Authors: Michelman Frank I. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
According to a “liberal principle of legitimacy” proposed by John Rawls in Political Liberalism, expectations of willing submission by citizens in democracies to laws and policies with which they disagree are justified on the condition that those laws and policies have issued in accordance with “a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse.” Does “unwritten constitution,” there, perhaps refer to regularities of political practice empirically observable but not received or established as normative requirements? Alternatively, does that expression envisage a set of directives canonically established in the country’s political practice, although not in codified written-down form—subsisting then as common law but not code law, or perhaps subsisting only in the medium of custom or convention and not at all as positive law? Chapter 2 sets going, but does not yet carry to full completion, a probe into this dimension of the Rawlsian proposal for justification-by-constitution. It should leave the readers with some confidence that Rawls arrived at his proposal thinking mainly within the frame of what the chapter classes as a positivist conception of constitutional law.
A Realistic Utopia?
Authors: Michelman Frank I. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Chapter 6 takes up the political sociology behind the proposal of John Rawls for justification-by-constitution (“the liberal principle of legitimacy”). That proposal depends on a prior premise that some or other discrete set of constitutional essentials can register as reasonably acceptable to a wide preponderance of inhabitants of a liberal free society, engaging them all as presumptively reasonable. This chapter looks into what the Rawlsian materials have to say or suggest about further beliefs or assumptions required to make that a sociologically realistic possibility (a “realistic utopia”). Ideas will come into play both of liberal common grounds and of liberal acceptance of burdens of judgment leading to tolerance for disagreement. Those ideas of liberal reason will not suffice, however, to finish the job. Additionally required is an attribution to members of a society stably under liberal democratic law of a certain disposition of passion beyond reason—sometimes named by Rawls as “civility,” and distinguished by others under names such as “sacrifice” and “gift.”
Offsets to Proceduralism
Authors: Michelman Frank I. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Chapter 8 takes up a question left hanging by Chapter 7. Satisfaction of John Rawls’s justificatory criterion of reciprocity may require, of a citizen acting in support of some controversial political act or policy, a sincere belief that a socially trusted referee has ruled or would rule in favor of the constitutional compliance of that policy. Reciprocity might further demand the citizen’s own sincere belief in constitutionality, to go along with the official judgment. If reciprocity does so additionally require, a question still remains about how far citizens may or should let their own judgments on constitutionality take guidance from those of a supreme court. Chapter 8 uses various scenarios to show how forms and degrees of resistance to supreme court authority can and do regularly appear within an overall social practice of taking the constitution seriously, thus compromising to some degree but not overthrowing ideas of institutional settlement and proceduralist political justification. These reflections then lead back to renewed consideration of Rawls’s allowance (see Chapter 2) of the possible superiority, for some countries at some times, of a regime of parliamentary supremacy over one of dualist democracy.
Constitutional Application: Between Will and Reason
Authors: Michelman Frank I. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
With Chapter 9, this book turns from its work of exposition of the Rawlsian proposal for justification-by-constitution (tied together with some wide-angle impressions of a constitutional democracy thus envisaged in action over time) to more focused debates regarding the authority of a supreme court and the contours of its assignment as arbiter of constitutional compliance. Attention to a justificatory function to go side by side with a regulatory function for constitutional law, Chapter 9 starts by suggesting, can help to explain the seeming interminability of debates over “originalist” as opposed to “philosophical” approaches to judicial constitutional interpretation. Between a principle of applying a scripted set of constitutional essentials as required in reason to sustain a liberal justification for the force of law, and a principle of reading and applying the essentials to match the will or understanding of some historical author, lies a gap that cannot be closed. A comparable gap can furthermore be found to lie within a constitution’s justificatory function as conceived by Rawls, inasmuch as (taking up the slogan from prior chapters) “justificatory ambition presupposes regulatory effect.” In developing these thoughts, this chapter finds occasion to join Ronald Dworkin with Rawls among liberal-minded philosophical protagonists for a primary justificatory function for constitutional law.
Legal Formalism and the Rule of Law
Authors: Michelman Frank I. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
Used in a political (as opposed to what we may call a “metaphysical”) sense, the expression “the rule of law” names not a cosmic force to which we are beholden like it or not, but a type of desired or ideal governmental practice comprising elements of authority, obligation, restraint, regularity, fairness, evenhandedness, transparency, and accountability. In a parallel use, “legal formalism” names a preference respecting modes of expression of legal norms. Formalist-minded lawyers and judges seek rendition of applicable legal norms wherever possible in the grammatical mode of “rule” rather than “principle” or “standard.” Prompted by a recent suggestion that attractions to legal formalism and to rule-of-law metaphysics, both deemed problematic for democracy, are “quintessentially liberal,” Chapter 12 asks to what extent those tendencies appear in the political-liberal constitutional thought of John Rawls. The answer, briefly, is that Rawls is not a constitutional-legal formalist, and that his commendations of a due regard for the rule of law as a liberal constitutional essential all refer to a political-not-metaphysical notion with which democracy-minded critics should have no quarrel. A trace of rule-of-law metaphysics may nevertheless be said to remain in Rawls’s constitution-centered liberal principle of legitimacy. Democracy-minded critics might take issue with that, but the difference to their own models may not lie exactly where they sometimes seem to suppose.
Manuscripts without Readers?
Authors: Michelson David A. 
Published: October 2022

Abstract
This chapter is a cautionary prologue to the study of medieval Syriac readers. It investigates why little attention has been paid to the topic of Syriac monastic readers over the past two centuries of Western scholarship on Syriac texts. This chapter finds an answer through a case study of the descriptions of the Syriac manuscript collection at the British Museum and Library, a collection acquired in the nineteenth century from Dayr al-Suryān, the Syrian monastery in Egypt. The academics who catalogued these manuscripts, William Cureton and William Wright, made foundational contributions to the study of Syriac literature. These men were also, however, constrained by the prejudices of their era. As nineteenth-century European scholars writing in an age of empires based on ideologies of civilizational and racial superiority, they largely ignored or disparaged the role of Syriac monasticism as an historical milieu for the reading of Syriac texts. Their attitudes reflect the interests of Europeans reading Syriac literature in the British Museum, a context far removed from the medieval Syriac readers who first copied and transmitted these texts. The findings of this chapter pose a methodological challenge to future scholarship. Recovery of the neglected history of Syriac contemplative reading must not only be aware of how modern perspectives on reading might mislead but also seek to identify the concerns of past readers within the Syriac monastic traditions.