scholarly journals Hope found, hope lost – eschatological aspects in the interpretations of Israelites’ wilderness wanderings. Two sides of one story: Origen’s 27. Homily on the Book of Numbers and Jerome’s Letter 78

Vox Patrum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 727-742
Author(s):  
Marcin Wysocki

The writings of Origen and Jerome, which are the source of the article, al­though in a different literary form – a homily and a letter – and written for a diffe­rent purpose and at different times, both are exegesis of the chapter 33 of the Book of Numbers in which the stops of the Israelites in the desert on the road to the Promised Land are described. Both texts are the classic examples of allegorical interpretation of the Scripture. Both authors interpret the 42 “stages” of Israel’s wilderness wanderings above all as God’s roadmap for the spiritual growth of individual believers, but there are present as well eschatological elements in their interpretations. In the presented paper there are shown these eschatological ideas of both authors included in their interpretations of the wandering of the Chosen People on their way to the Promised Land, sources of their interpretations, simi­larities and differences, and the dependence of Jerome on Origen in the interpre­tation of the stages, with the focuse on the idea of realized eschatology, present in Alexandrinian’s work. Origen has presented in his interpretation a very rich picture of the future hope, but Jerome almost nothing mentioned in his letter about hopes of the way towards God after death.

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-416
Author(s):  
Brooks Berndt

Today’s climate crisis provokes dystopian and utopian narratives of the future faced by humanity. To navigate the theological terrain between the present and an uncertain future, this article explores passages pertaining to the journey of Moses and the Israelites to the Promised Land. The guiding point of orientation for this exploration comes from a verse that captures the seeming powerlessness of the Israelites in the face of the giants inhabiting the Promised Land. Numbers 13:33 reads, “To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Of crucial importance in coming to terms with such honest self-assessment is the period of discernment and growth that comes from being in the wilderness with the presence of a God who loves and empowers grasshoppers in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Because the future of the Body of Christ is inseparable from how the climate crisis is confronted, the journey through the wilderness becomes not merely a story for self-coping but rather a story about churches finding a way forward, even as some dystopian narratives place churches on the road to irrelevance and ultimately extinction. This article explores how the story of exodus provides a sacred ground for imagining a different, even if difficult, future.


1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Richard Shaull

“At a time when neo-orthodox theology was dominant, [Reinhold] Niebuhr was able to use effectively, with far-reaching social consequences, the metaphysical-ontological categories of transcendence. Today it is important to recognize not only that these concepts have little meaning for another generation, but also that the biblical symbols point us in a different direction. The transcendent reality described in the biblical myths and images is not so much the God who stands above all human attainments, judging them and raising man to a higher order, but the God who goes ahead of us, opening the way for greater fulfillment on the road to the future. He is one whose actions in the totality of man's hisotyr lead to new events that open new possibilities. Thus the basic Christian symbols suggest that human life is free because it is lived, in history, in the context of ‘gracious’ sovereignty.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.


1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-8
Author(s):  
Burton W. Kreitlow
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 167-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Stineback

In The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.


2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 126-130
Author(s):  
Tyseer Aboulnast

The Honourable Mr Stephane Dion, Leader of the Liberal party of Canada,M. Gilles Duceppe, chef de la Parti Bloc Quebecois, The Honourable JackLayton, Leader of the NDP party, senators and parliamentarians, Mr. Ararand Dr. Mazigh, honored guests, or in likely more appropriate terms for thisevent, friends and fellow Canadians:Assalamu Alaykum. May you all be in Peace.Let me welcome you all with the greeting of Islam on behalf of theCanadian Muslim network; a network of Muslim organizations acrossCanada from BC to Alberta all the way to Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.The network was put in place to create an environment of collaborationand communication between Muslim organizations on issues of interestto Muslim Canadians nationally as well as to enhance communication andcollaboration between Canadians of Muslim faith with Canadians of all otherfaiths.The list of names of the organizations in the network is at the back ofyour program (attached here as appendix), and I invite you to look at it indetail to appreciate the breadth of representation here tonight. This initiativeis also supported by a multitude of other organizations that are also listed atthe back.As you may expect civil liberties is high on our agenda. The CanadianMuslim Network is proud to have organized this incredible event to pay tributeto our cherished civil liberties in Canada, to recognize the massive effortthat many in this room exerted to ensure we restore our civil liberties and protectthem for the future of our children and to remind ourselves that while wehave reasons to celebrate our recent successes, the road ahead is still long.We are here today to pay tribute to civil liberties in Canada. Canada is acountry that was never defined by the colour of the skin of its people or theirreligion, rather Canada was always a country defined by its values. Canada ...


Author(s):  
J C Rigby ◽  
J McWilliams ◽  
J Johnson

Developments in the command and control of offboard maritime assets, and evolution of the design of the assets themselves, have opened up new avenues to navies, industry and research institutes to change the way in which they consider and conduct Mine Countermeasures (MCM) operations.  However this shift, driven by the opportunity for risk reduction and a potential increase in operational tempo, requires a change in Concepts of Operations; this will affect the way both MCM vessels and the associated MCM equipment are designed and operated in the future. This paper explores how BMT and QinetiQ have investigated the changes this new disruptive technology will have on MCM operations, and the concept of operations that can be adopted to maximise the use of this technology. Working with mine warfare and autonomous systems industry leaders, along with lessons from Unmanned Warrior 2016, and drawing on the experience of operators from several navies, the team established a range of operational concepts that can be employed to clear a minefield or hunt individual mines. Detailed Operational Analysis (OA) was carried out to validate these concepts and determine the required Unmanned Vehicle (UxV) numbers and capabilities. Aligned with this approach is the development of QinetiQ’s Equipment Agnostic Mission Enabling Infrastructure Technology (EAMEITS); a flexible system which maximises the use of UxV technology without adding to the operator burden. The outcome of this work is a new breed of MCM platform design which, thanks to the significant effort in developing the concepts of operation and the underlying OA over a number of years, is able to deliver mine warfare as technology transitions from the current capability to the future. This paper outlines the road taken to arrive at this design and the technology incorporated within, the lessons learnt along the way and what this means for the future of mine countermeasures operations.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document