"Examines the work of postimpressionist painters - Van Gogh, Seurat, Cezanne, and Gauguin - and how they responded to cultural and spiritual crisis in the avant-garde world. Boime reconsiders familiar masterpieces and draws analogies with literary sources and social, personal, and political strategies to produce revelations that have eluded most art historians"--Provided by publisher.
The investigation centres on the role of the Spirit in Revelation, which the author considers is best defined as the Spirit of Prophecy. A survey of scholarship on the pneumatology of the Apocalypse is followed by a study of intertextual connections. The author’s own religious context within Pentecostalism then informs a possible hermeneutic that is faithful to the ethos of the movement. Biblical and literary studies are situated within the context of a Pentecostal community as attention is paid to the prophecy concerning the temple and the witnesses in Rev 11. This key passage is shown to form the theological as well as the literary centre of the Spirit’s role in Revelation.
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.
The Shape of Revelation highlights the image of form-creation, sheer presence, lyric pathos, rhythmic repetition, open spatial dynamism, and erotic pulse unique in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and German Expressionism in order to explore the overlap between revelation and aesthetic shape from the perspective of Judaism.
This invaluable tool seriously discusses profound truths that apply to every facet of life. Biblical truth should be made applicable to the total personality. The "inescapable questions of life" are answered from the standard of God's authoritative Word.
For fruitful discussion within the Church, for a meaningful dialogue with other Christians, for the renewal of the theology of preaching--for these and many other reasons, we need a new understanding of the nature of revelation. The usual apologetical treatment of revelation, bent on proving its existence, touches but the fringe of the reality. Our day and age needs a theology of revelation which probes the nature, depths and dimensions of the mystery. Father Latourelle's study is a significant contribution in this unfurrowed field, and may well be recognized as a landmark for years to come. His treatment of scriptural data on the notion of revelation is grounded on the advances of twentieth century exegesis. He admirably handles the multifaceted Old Testament notion of revelation; and his detailed study of the Synoptics, Acts, Paul, and John heightens the point that the Old Testament's revelation foreshadowed the New, and the New is only intelligible against the background of the Old. His summary of the patristic idea of revelation is erudite and stimulating, and probes the thoughts of twenty writers from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine. The richness of patristic insight contrasts sharply with later theological studies of the nature of revelation. His study of the theological thought of the scholastic and neo-scholastic schools is critical and informative. Their approach culminated in overstressing the apologetical aspects of revelation--a course which modern theology is abandoning to re-discover a theology of revelation that is Christ-centered, Scriptural, historical and interpersonal. In treating of the magisterium, the author presents a splendid analysis of official documents from Trent to Vatican II, and his summary underscores the point that the Church documents present a view of revelation that closely resembles that of the biblical and patristic sources. The author's personal reflections enable us to view many aspects of revelation in a new light. He draws on the insights of modern linguistics to give a new dimension to revelation's traditional definition, locutio Dei. He elucidates the point that revelation is neither event alone nor word alone--its structure is sacramental and consists of events interpreted by word . . . In dealing with preaching, miracles and other themes, Father Latourelle combines wide erudition and lucidity, and his work stands as a major contribution to modern theological thought.
Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.
Walter W. Bryden was Principal of Knox College, Toronto, after the Second World War, and one of the leading Presbyterian theologians of the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. In The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W.W. Bryden, John Vissers makes an important contribution by analysing Bryden's thought, placing it in the context of contemporary European and American theology. Vissers emphasises in particular Bryden's role in introducing and popularising the ideas of Karl Barth in North America prior to the translation of Barth's Commentary on Romans into English, and his Neo-Orthodox theology owed much to Barthian ideas. In his most important work, The Christian's Knowledge of God, Bryden challenged the modernist emphasis on the rational, arguing for a Christocentric doctrine of Revelation. Vissers brings a wealth of scholarship and research to his subject, revealing Bryden's pivotal role in the development of neo-orthodoxy within the Protestant tradition in North America, a role that previous studies have often failed to explore.
Timothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.
