A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

Author(s):  
James Tweedie

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.


Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Sally Eden

Geographical approaches to human-environment relations have been diverse and dynamic over the last century. They have also been heavily influenced not only by academic disciplines outside geography but by popular and policy concerns outside academia. From an initial flurry of activity about how the environment influences society in the early part of the century, British geography then took a detour to other topics even as other disciplines discovered the environment as a topic of interest. This left geographers playing ‘catch-up’ in the late twentieth century, as the discipline sought to reoccupy the ground previously abandoned. This is not over yet: in the 1990s, research into ‘the environment’ and ‘nature’ was scattered across academia. This chapter examines the relationship between humans and the contemporary environment, focusing on environmental protection, environmental management and ecological science, environmental policy and management, environmentalism, and environment and history.


Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence

The conclusion traces how the psychoanalytical approach utilised in late twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of Tasso’s life and work, by Margaret Ferguson and Giampiero Giamperi for example, had been pre-empted in English biographical accounts of the poet from the second half of the nineteenth century. J. A. Symonds and Leigh Hunt both focus on the same autobiographical poem, the unfinished Canzone al Metauro, as these later psycho-biographical readings to try to account for Tasso’s troubled relationships with his absent mother and particularly his father Bernardo. The conclusion argues that the absence of a clearly defined vocabulary for psychoanalytical discourse pre-Freud does not diminish the acuity of these earlier biographical observations on the poet.


Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


Author(s):  
Ken van Someren ◽  
Glyn Howatson

Organized physical training in the pursuit of sporting excellence is not a recent phenomenon. Reports of structured athletic training programmes date back to the ancient Greeks, when they were used for both military and Olympic preparation. Despite an extensive history, it was not until the mid to late twentieth century that what is now considered a scientific approach to training theory developed. The description of the General Adaptation Syndrome by Dr Hans Selye in 1956, which examined the relationship between training stress and adaptation, and the work of Metveyev, Harre, and others in the 1970s and 1980s developed the foundation of training theory and its application to athletic training programmes....


Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Marion ◽  
Dan Arbib ◽  
David Tracy

This book provides an introduction to the life and work of philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion through a set of interviews, discussing his educational career, his work on Descartes, his phenomenology, his theology, his philosophical methodology, and his views on the future of Catholicism in France. It presents all of his major ideas in fluid dialogue and conversational tone with his former student Dan Arbib. At the same time, it provides an account of French intellectual life, especially in regard to philosophy and theology, in the late twentieth century. Marion also reflects on the relationship of philosophy to history, theology, aesthetics, and literature. The dialogues include discussions of all of his books and present their central arguments in easily comprehensible fashion. They show the overall unity of his work in terms of its focus on giveness, the gift, and the event.


2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton

This article reports on some of the findings of a study into fear of crime among a group of Australians, examining the relationship between assessments of personal risk of being a victim of six specified crimes and worry about being a victim of these crimes. The findings revealed that while the two are related, assessments of risk tended to be higher than assessments of worry in relation to the same crime. Participants drew on their perception of their own vulnerability based on such attributes as gender, age and everyday routines, their personal experiences of crime, knowledge of others' experiences and media accounts to explain their assessments. Also underlying their notions of risk and fear were two paradoxical discourses on victimisation. The first discourse represents individuals as able to control their destiny and responsible for protecting themselves from crime. The second represented victimisation as a product of fate, against which it was impossible to fully protect oneself. It is argued that these notions of victimisation are underpinned by wider discourses in western societies that emphasise the vulnerability of individuals to risk and danger but also the importance of approaching the world as an active, entrepreneurial subject who refuses the victim status.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document