scholarly journals LEBANESE NATIONAL RECONCILIATION AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MARONITE CHURCH THROUGH THE PURIFICATION OF MEMORY

Author(s):  
Ziad Fahed

The post-war period in Lebanon brought to the open all sensitive subjects that have marked the history of Lebanon: how to avoid falling into such a crisis? How not repeating such war? How can the Lebanese society eradicate the reasons that may lead to any other war? The Lebanese crisis had challenged the Church inviting her to move from being a passive witness to an active participant in the peaceful struggle for the liberation of the Lebanese society and help the country to complete its incorrect reading of history. Can the Maronite Patriarchate have a positive role in this regard? Can the Maronite Patriarchate bring about the purifi cation of the memory in a multiconfessional country? In this paper, and after defi ning the meaning of the purifi cation of memory in the Lebanese context, we will consider the important challenges that must precede any serious and defi nitive solution to the crisis in Lebanon and how can the Lebanese Church contribute in the development of a national identity and in the building of a new state free from any kind of domination. The purpose of this paper is not to justify what has happened in the past 34 years, i.e. since the beginning of the Lebanese war, but to contribute in searching for a sustainable peace.

Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 217-248
Author(s):  
Roma Bončkutė

SOURCES OF SIMONAS DAUKANTAS’S BUDĄ SENOWĘS-LËTUWIÛ KALNIENÛ ĨR ƵÁMAJTIÛ (1845) The article investigates Simonas Daukantas’s (1793–1864) BUDĄ Senowęs-Lëtuwiû Kalnienû ĩr Ƶámajtiû (The Character of the Lithuanian Highlanders and Samogitians of the Old Times, 1845; hereafter Bd) with regards to genre, origin of the title, and the dominant German sources of the work. It claims that Daukantas conceived Bd because he understood that the future of Lithuania is closely related to its past. A single, united version of Lithuanian history, accepted by the whole nation, was necessary for the development of Lithuanian national identity and collective feeling. The history, which up until then had not been published in Lithuanian, could have helped to create the contours of a new society by presenting the paradigmatic events of the past. The collective awareness of the difference between the present and the past (and future) should have given the Lithuanian community an incentive to move forward. Daukantas wrote Bd quickly, between 1842 and May 28, 1844, because he drew on his previous work ISTORYJE ƵEMAYTYSZKA (History of the Lithuanian Lowlands, ~1831–1834; IƵ). Based on the findings of previous researchers of Daukantas’s works, after studying the dominant sources of Bd and examining their nature, this article comes to the conclusion that the work has features of both cultural history and regional historiography. The graphically highlighted form of the word “BUDĄ” used in the work’s title should be considered the author’s code. Daukantas, influenced by the newest culturological research and comparative linguistics of the 18th–19th centuries, propagated that Lithuanians originate from India and, like many others, found evidence of this in the Lithuanian language and culture. He considered the Budini (Greek Βουδίνοι), who are associated with the followers of Buddha, to be Lithuanian ancestors. He found proof of this claim in the language and chose the word “būdas” (character), which evokes aforementioned associations, to express the idea of the work.


Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Noiret

AbstractThis article traces the origins and development of public history in Italy, a field not anymore without this name today. Public history in Italy has its roots in historical institutions born in the nineteenth century and in the post WW2 first Italian Republic. The concept of “public use of history” (1993), the important role played by memory issues in post-war society, local and national identity issues, the birth of public archaeology (2015) before public history, the emergence of history festivals in the new millennium are all important moments shaping the history of the field and described in this essay. The foundation of the “Italian Association of Public History” (AIPH) in 2016/2017, and the promotion of an Italian Public History Manifesto (2018) together with the creation of Public History masters in universities, are all concrete signs of a vital development of the field in the Peninsula.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki L. Brennan

Bringing together historical and ethnographic materials, this article analyses how members of the Cherubim and Seraphim churches of Nigeria engage with and remember the history of the church through singing hymns, which thus serves as a mode of historical consciousness. In their performance of hymns church members articulate a conception of the relationship between musical practice and spiritual healing in Cherubim and Seraphim worship that draws on a particular conception of the past in order to legitimate certain worship practices. In doing so church members are able to attract God's power and to localise it in a particular space. Because of this hymns continue to be an important spiritual healing practice for church members.


Ikonotheka ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 169-197
Author(s):  
Wojciech M. Głowacki

Despite the considerable influence he exerted on post-war church architecture in Poland, the designer Władysław Pieńkowski (1907–1991) is today an altogether forgotten figure. The current paper outlines his biography and his early oeuvre; this is because his experience in designing office blocks and industrial plants gained while working under the supervision of the most outstanding Polish architects of the mid-20th century, was to be of key importance to his later, independent designs for ecclesiastical buildings. The paper focuses on a particularly important work, one which in many ways constitutes a breakthrough in the architect’s career, namely the church of St. Michael the Archangel in the Mokotów district of Warsaw. This was the first entirely new church to be erected in the capital of Poland after the year 1945. Its construction depended on the dynamic changes in the balance of political forces. The church could be built owing to the support of the PAX Association circle, including the direct involvement of Bolesław Piasecki. In spite of their patronage, however, construction works were repeatedly halted and extended over several years, and the architectural design had to be reworked. The paper contains an analysis of three fundamental designs for the church, now held in the St. Michael the Archangel parish archive and in the architect’s records preserved by his heirs. The first design dates from the period of 1948/9–1951, the subsequent one from the year 1954, and the final one from 1956–1961. The evolution of the design moved from the initial continuation of forms typical of the pre-war Modernised Revivalism, through a peculiar reference to Socialist Realism, to rigorous Modernism. The church of St. Michael the Archangel became Pieńkowski’s testing ground; there, he tried out several solutions which he would consistently utilise in the subsequent years of his career, e.g. the large-scale application of prefabricated elements in both the construction and the decoration of the edifice. The construction of this church was concurrent with important events of a political (the Thaw) and religious nature (the Second Vatican Council). Tracing the history of the design for the Warsaw church and clarifying its connections with contemporaneous church architecture in Poland and in Western Europe made it possible to present the key problems faced by the Polish designers of ecclesiastical architecture in the first decades of the People’s Republic of Poland.


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Salmon

In his monographic article on Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, first published in 1934, Rudolf Wittkower relegated the history of its siting within the canonica (claustral buildings) of San Lorenzo to a third appendix. Since then a number of scholars have given detailed consideration to the site history, realizing it to be a significant aspect of Michelangelo's early career as an architect. The present paper maintains that some study of the canonica as Michelangelo probably encountered it should be prerequisite to any account of the site and presents new observations, measurements, and previously unnoticed 18th-century plans preserved in Prague to make such a study. The comprehensive publication of Michelangelo's correspondence, records, and drawings during the past 20 years facilitates reconstruction of the sequence of events in his development of the site, and this further illuminates the artist's working methods and relations with both his patron and his assistant. Consideration is also given to an abandoned idea for a library beyond the confines of the canonica, bordering on piazza San Lorenzo and perpendicular to the church façade. Documents from the Florence State Archive confirm the identity and location of properties as shown on Michelangelo's own plan of the vicinity, which is newly oriented, and the rejected scheme is briefly examined in relation to contemporary urban redevelopment in Florence.


Exchange ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lovemore Togarasei

AbstractThe past twenty to thirty years in the history of Zimbabwean Christianity have witnessed the emergence of a new breed of Pentecostalism that tends to attract the middle and upper classes urban residents. This paper presentsfindings from a case study of one such movement, the Family of God church. It describes and analyses the origins, growth and development of this church as an urban modern Pentecostal movement. Thefirst section of the paper discusses the origins and development of the church focusing on the life of the founder. The second section focuses on the teaching and practices of the church. The church's doctrines and practices are here analysed tofind out the extent to which these have been influenced by the socio-political and economic challenges in the urban areas. The paper concludes that the modern Pentecostal movement is meant to address urban needs.


1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (45) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Simon Trussler

Acting style is arguably the most elusive of the theatre's always ephemeral traces – not least because each generation, while proclaiming its own actors to be more ‘natural’ than their predecessors, has tended in its criticism, as in actors' memoirs, to take style as a ‘given’. Anecdotage and plot synopsis have accordingly taken precedence over analysis of how performers actually worked and appeared on stage – let alone prepared their performances. Here, Simon Trussler introduces a project being launched at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Reader in Drama, to utilize the immense storage capacity of the CD-ROM both to record the evidence, verbal and pictorial, that has come down to us from the past, and to assess its relevance to present approaches to acting and to the playing of the classical repertoire. Specifically, the project aims to explore the ways in which the national identity – the quality of ‘Englishness’ – has been both reflected in and influenced by the ways in which it has been rendered on stage. In the succeeding article, Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues its consideration raises in relation to the Goldsmiths project. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the original Theatre Quarterly in 1971, and has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since its inception. The most recent of his many books on theatre and drama, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, was runner-up for the 1994 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Libraries Association, being cited as ‘an outstanding contribution to the literature of the theatre’.


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