scholarly journals Incorporating Space: Protestant Fundamentalism and Astronomical Authorization

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 594
Author(s):  
James S. Bielo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Protestant Fundamentalism

The problem of authority is vital for understanding the development of Protestant creationism. Two discursive fields have figured centrally in this religious movement’s claims to authoritative knowledge: The Bible and science. The former has been remarkably stable over a century with a continuing emphasis on inerrancy and literalism, while the latter has been more mutable. Creationism’s rejection of scientific evolution has endured, but its orientation to a range of scientific models, technologies, and disciplines has changed. Astronomy is a prime example; once relatively absent in creationist cultural production, it emerged as yet another arena where creationists seek to corrode scientific authority and bolster biblical fundamentalism. Drawing on archival documents of creationist publications and the ongoing media production of an influential creationist ministry based in Kentucky, this article illustrates how creationism has sought to incorporate astronomy into their orbit of religious authorization. Ultimately, the case of incorporating space helps clarify fundamentalism’s machinations of power.

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Cultural Turn

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

The Hermeneutical Framework of Social-Scientific Criticism: How much can Evangelicals get involved?

2003 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Kenneth Berding
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Models ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Social Scientific

How can an evangelical read and benefit from the writings of the socalled social-scientific critic? To what extent can an evangelical participate in this approach to interpreting the Bible? This article seeks answers to these questions. It lays out and evaluates the hermeneutical assumptions and methodology of some of the most prolific writers among those practicing social-scientific criticism. The conclusion is that there are a couple fundamental issues at stake, a few non-fundamental differences of degree, but many potential areas of benefit for the evangelical interpreter who wants to draw upon cultural-anthropological and social-scientific models in interpreting the Bible.

Songs of the Golden Age in the Democratic Republic

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-107
Author(s):  
Lonán Ó Briain
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Mass Medium ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Vietnamese History ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Cultural Programming ◽  
Indochina War

Following the Geneva Accords of 1954, the VOV employed an array of ensembles that performed newly composed red music and revolutionary songs (ca khúc cách mạng) from the First Indochina War. Chapter 3 examines the construction of the DRV’s broadcasting and performing arts infrastructure at a time when radio was the principal mass medium for sound-based communications and the primary source for news and cultural programming. These infrastructural developments coincided with an escalation of tensions in the Second Indochina War (1955–75), when the DRV used radio to inundate southern listeners with their propaganda. With a particular focus on the central site for cultural production (state radio) and the most prominent musical form of the era (red music), this chapter illustrates how the DRV’s Ministry of Culture used radio productions on socialist themes as technologies of governmentality. Broadcasters reified the roles of men, women, and children in the ears and minds of their listening public. Their productions also played a crucial role in defining cultural boundaries between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as broadcasters sought to sonically territorialize the socialist state. Based on interviews with former station employees, analyses of iconic songs, and archival documents, the research suggests the ongoing veneration of singers, songs, and stories from this golden age of radio music constructs a particular narrative about Vietnamese history that commemorates the achievements of the CPV and perpetuates its control in the reform era.

City of Refuge

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Social Program ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
New Haven ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Distinctive Type ◽  
City Of Refuge ◽  
Education Science

The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. This book takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution. Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but this book shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, this book shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia. The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More's Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, this book alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.

scholarly journals “No Worshipping the Images of Saints... ”: the Perception of the Biblical Pohibition in the Culture of the Russian Subbotniks in the 18th –19th Centuries

2018 ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Tatyana Khizhaya
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Textual Community ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Official Sources ◽  
The Church

One of the main markers of the Russian Subbotniks movement was the prohibition of icon-worship, mentioned in the earliest official sources about the Judaizers. Case investigations reflected in the archival documents bristle with information about rejection of icons by sectarians. But besides these uninformative stereotype accusations, we also find more detailed descriptions of iconoclastic ideas and practices of the «Russian Jews». These were diverse practices – individual, collective, secret, public – of rejecting images. Some of them became specific rituals of revealing followers of «Mosaic Law» to the church and secular authorities. These were practices of desecration of icons – also more or less concealed and demonstrative; some of them were harsh and aggressive. Proving the importance of the prohibition of the icon worship, the Judaizers traditionally referred to the Old Testament texts – i.e. the Pentateuch, the Book of Psalms and Book of Wisdom. The Molokan-Subbotniks in similar cases used the New Testament as well. The attitude to the sacred images became a popular subject of disputes between the Judaizers and missionaries in the last decades of the 19th century. The efforts of the missionaries to distinguish between icons and idols were in vain. The Subbotniks did not accept arguments that were not based on the quotes from the sacred texts. And the Orthodox Christians priests, in turn, could not adequately use the potential of patristic theology, revealing the essence of Christian worship of icons. Their arguments turned out to be irrelevant for representatives of a typical textual community. Strict prohibition of icon-worship did not exclude substitute and visualization practices in the Subbotnik communities. These were the replacing of icons by the Bible and sacred inscriptions, the use of paintings of the Old Testament subjects as well as drawings depicting the All-Seeing Eye and the ritual of venerating the image of Moses, reminiscent of the worship of the icon in the Orthodox Christianity.

scholarly journals Comrades in Arts: The Soviet Dekada of National Art and the Friendship of Peoples

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-94
Author(s):  
Isabelle R. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Union Committee

This article examines the dekady of national art, a series of Soviet festivals fi rst staged in the mid-1930s to highlight the cultures and artistic accomplishments of the various non-Russian republics of the USSR. The institution of the dekada, I contend, made considerable contributions to Soviet nationbuilding eff orts and the construction of multiethnic culture. The article unfolds in three sections. The fi rst relies on archival documents to trace the origins and evolution of the dekada of national art in the context of its bureaucratic home, the All-Union Committee on Arts Aff airs. The second draws largely on periodical sources to consider the ways in which the larger currents of Stalin-era culture are refl ected in the dekady of national art and, in particular in the national operas that served as the centerpieces of the dekady. The fi nal section turns to the Friendship of Peoples campaign, identifying one aspect of it - that Soviet citizens appreciate not only their own national art but the art of other Soviet nations - as central to the dekady. Analyzing the public rhetoric surrounding the dekady, I identify several themes that emerge and their implications for forging a common pan-Soviet culture. I conclude that it is not only national cultural production, but the consumption of national cultural products by a multiethnic audience that is central to nation-building on multiple levels as well as a means to unite the ethnically diverse Soviet people, and that the dekada festivals aimed to bring the Soviet nations closer together by providing them an opportunity to consume one another’s cultural products.

Performing the Bible

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James S. Bielo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Theme Park ◽  
The Bible

This chapter explores the phenomenon of performing the Bible; that is, transforming the written words of scriptures into materialized, experiential environments. Throughout the United States, the Bible is performed as replicas and re-creations of particular and general biblical scenes, characters, and stories through registers of museum, theme park, and garden. Distinctive insights into key dynamics of religious materiality and American religious history can be gained by closely analyzing the cultural production of sites that perform the Bible. Ultimately, the chapter argues that performing the Bible is a strategy for actualizing a problem that animates any and every lived expression of Christianity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document