Theologization of Greek Terms and Concepts in the Septuagint and New Testament

Hellenistic literature, having great achievements in the fields of philosophy, drama, and poetry, did not know the theological concepts and issues which underlie the texts contained in the Hebrew Bible. So when the creators of the Septuagint, and then also the authors of the New Testament, used the Greek language to convey God’s inspired truths to the world, they were forced to give secular terms a new theological meaning, frequently choosing neutral words for this purpose, not burdened with ne­gative associations. With their translation work, they built a kind of bridge between Hellenic and Jewish cultures. On the one hand, the Septuagint allowed Jews reading the Bible in Greek to remain connected not only with the religious heritage of their fathers, but also with the cultural values that were closely related to that language and its world. In turn, for the Greeks, who after some time began to appreciate this work and gained knowledge of its content, it opened vast horizons of new religious and spiritual values, which until then were completely alien to them. The work of the authors of the Septuagint was continued and developed by the authors of the New Testament, which added to their theological output many new religious and moral values arising from the teaching of Jesus Christ. That way they contributed considerably to the development of the Koinē Greek and significantly transformed the spiritual life of the people speaking the language.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes by hinting at the broader implications for understanding the clergy’s political resistance thought during this time period. The clergy’s justification of political resistance in the American Revolution cannot be used to argue for a major shift in American Protestant thought. Nor should the Revolution be understood in purely secular terms. The justifications of resistance made by the clerical leaders highlight the religious nature of many people’s thought processes in this time period. While the patriot clergy rejected political absolutism and supported active measures of defensive resistance, this should not be understood as a defection from their historic Protestant tradition.

Jesuit Kaddish and I

James Bernauer’s Jesuit Kaddish about Jews and Jesuits in the shadow of the Holocaust is not a work of ordinary secular history. It is grounded in two distinctly Jesuit spiritual practices. This essay grapples with how to translate so avowedly Jesuit an account into a more universal one. It uses this work to think about how one might use its insights to think in more secular terms about the great wrong that haunts America: the legacy of racism. Finally, it understands Bernauer’s book as insisting that we reflect on broader questions: of complicity, of obligations to repair the wounds of the past, of responsibility. A book devoted to Jesuit versions of these sorts of issues invites a more general consideration. The contrast between a more secular and a Jesuit account of all these matters is refracted in part through the author’s personal relationship to the Holocaust.

Decolonial Translation: Destabilizing Coloniality in Secular Translations of Islamic Law

Contemporary Islamic legal studies – both inside and outside the Muslim world – commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tradition into “religion” (the non-secular) and Islamic law into “sharia” – a term intended to represent the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word شريعة (sharīʿah). I explore the differences between historical Islamic terms and secular terms in order to demonstrate that coloniality generates religion and religious law; in turn, these two notions convert شريعة (sharīʿah) into “sharia” in both Arabic and non-Arabic languages. Consequently, the notion of “sharia” is part of a colonial system of meaning.

A remark on renormalization group theoretical perturbation in a class of ordinary differential equations

We revisit the renormalization group (RG) theoretical perturbation theory on oscillator type second order ordinary differential equations. For a class of potentials, we show a simple functional relation among secular coefficients of the harmonics in the naive perturbation series. It leads to an inversion formula between bare and renormalized amplitudes and an elementary proof of the absence of secular terms in all order of the RG series. The result covers non-autonomous as well as autonomous cases and refines earlier studies including the classic examples as Van der Pol, Mathieu, Duffing and Rayleigh equations.

Examining instabilities due to driven scalars in AdS

We extend the study of the non-linear perturbative theory of weakly turbulent energy cascades in AdSd+1 to include solutions of driven systems, i.e. those with time-dependent sources on the AdS boundary. This necessitates the activation of non-normalizable modes in the linear solution for the massive bulk scalar field, which couple to the metric and normalizable scalar modes. We determine analytic expressions for secular terms in the renormalization flow equations mass values $$ {m}_{BF}^2<{m}^2\le 0 $$ m BF 2 < m 2 ≤ 0 , and for various driving functions. Finally, we numerically evaluate these sources for d = 4 and discuss what role these driven solutions play in the perturbative stability of AdS.

Natural Law and Ethical Non-Naturalism

There is a lack of clarity in the literature about what constitutes the natural law approach to ethics and what is incompatible with it. The standard, and largely historical, way of understanding the natural law approach risks overlooking theoretical differences of fundamental importance regarding what the natural law approach is usually taken to uphold. Against Craig Paterson, I argue that a necessary condition for an ethical account to uphold fully the natural law approach is that it does not contain any dependence upon the metaethical category of non-naturalism understood in non-supernaturalist (secular) terms. Using the ‘new natural law’ theory of John Finnis to illustrate my case, I also argue that an ethical theory can be largely in keeping with the natural law approach but nonetheless contain elements at odds with it: the issue is more complex than a simple binary. This is an under-explored possibility in natural law ethics.

Winter model in the quasi-continuum limit

We study Winter or [Formula: see text]-shell model at finite volume (length), describing a small resonating cavity weakly-coupled to a large one. For generic values of the coupling, a resonance of the usual model corresponds, in the finite-volume case, to a compression of the spectral lines; for specific values of the coupling, a resonance corresponds instead to a degenerate or a quasi-degenerate doublet. A secular term of the form [Formula: see text] occurs in the perturbative expansion of the momenta (or of the energies) of the particle at third order in [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the coupling among the cavities and [Formula: see text] is the ratio of the length of the large cavity over the length of the small one. These secular terms, which tend to spoil the convergence of the perturbative series in the large volume case, [Formula: see text], are resummed to all orders in [Formula: see text] by means of standard multiscale methods. The resulting improved perturbative expansions provide a rather complete analytic description of resonance dynamics at finite volume.

Prologue

This prologue provides an overview of the Secular Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. In the Western world, art, music, science, politics, and even the categories of space and time had undergone a gradual process of secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause. This book then aims to understand the major intellectual currents of the century that gave birth to the label “secular.”