Desacralization of Islamic Values in 'Bismillah Cinta'

This study aims to analyze the construction of an ustadz (Moslem teacher) in the religious drama series (sinetron) 'Bismillah Cinta'. The research is focussed on exploring the desacralization aspect related to the commodification of the ustadz character shown in 'Bismillah Cinta' drama series. The researchers used qualitative research method with the semiotic approach of Charles Sanders Pierce. There are 5 scenes that have been selected based on the criteria of the desacralization in the ustadz character. Data collection techniques were carried out through observation and documentation. The results showed that the commodification of the ustadz character in the drama series of 'Bismillah Cinta' did not reflect an ustadz who hold the role in keeping peaceful and harmony with the religious messages.

“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester

This article investigates the relationship between sin and its retribution as depicted in three Middle English biblical plays concerned with retribution, Noah’s Flood, the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement, in the Chester biblical drama collection. The plays’ general tenor is, to modern sensibilities, conservative and disciplinarian with respect to social mores. Yet, studying the portrayal of sin against the plays’ social background may uncover secular mutations of the Christian conceptualisation of sin as a function of gender as well as estate. Chester’s Last Judgement dramatises sin in accordance with fifteenth-century ecclesiastical and secular developments which criminalise people along gender-specific, not just trade-specific, lines. In showing Mulier as the only human being whom Christ leaves behind in hell after his redemptive descensus, the Harrowing dooms not just the brewers’ and alehouse-keepers’ dishonesty, as imputed to brewsters in late medieval England, but women themselves, if under the guise of their trade-related dishonesty. The underside of the Chester Noahs’ cleansing voyage is women’s ideological and social suppression. Whether or not we regard the Good Gossips’ wine-drinking – for fear of the surging waters – or Mrs Noah’s defiant resistance to her husband as a performance of the sin of humankind calling for the punitive deluge, the script gives female characters a voice not only to show their sinfulness. Rather, like the Harrowing of Hell and less so the Last Judgement, Noah’s Flood, I argue, participates in a hegemonic game which appropriates one sin of the tongue, gossip, to make it backfire against those incriminated for using it in the first place: women.

Religious Drama and the Polemics of Conversion in Madrid

16th- and 17th- century Spanish theatre became a vehicle through which to explore the politics and polemics of conversion in a multicultural empire that presented itself as the champion of Catholic orthodoxy. As the chapter suggests, the appeal of many of these works was not their didactic nature, but rather their playful recreation of the fundamental tensions that surrounded the idea of religious and social conversion in early modern Spain.

“The Comedy about David and Galiad” in Context of Western European Drama of the 16th–17th Centuries

The article is devoted to “The Comedy about David and Galiad,” staged at the court of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich in 1676, in the context of Western European drama of the 16th–17th centuries. The material was a mounting sheet of the comedy of 1676, plays by French playwrights of the 16th century and texts of Russian court plays of the 1670s. The paper shows that the Russian comedy based on the story of David and Goliath fit well into the context of religious drama and could be correlated with the events of the Church reform in Russia. Special attention is paid to the comparative analysis of the plays of the French Calvinist playwrights Joachim de Coignac and Louis De Masur in order to identify common typological features of the Russian play and Western drama. The play ‘Temir-Aksakov Action” by Yu. M. Givner was brought to consideration in order to put forward a hypothesis about the possible author of the play of German origin. The author presents the latest development of the reconstruction of “The Comedy about David and Galiad,” based on a comparative approach and typological analysis of the literary and historical context of the 16th–17th centuries. The analysis shows the content aspect of the Russian play about David and Goliath, which incorporated the characteristic features of the Moscow court drama of the last third of the 17th century.

Revelation and Prophecy

This chapter clarifies Nahmanides's theories of revelation and prophecy, his concept of history, and his reasons for the commandments. It discusses the religious drama of Nahmanides's esoteric commentary on the Torah that revolves around the variable and dynamic relationship between Tif 'eret and Shekhinah. It also describes the other components of the sefirotic structure: Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah, which have brief mentions in the very first lines of Nahmanides's Torah commentary on Genesis and in his fragmentary commentary on Sefer Yetzirah. The chapter talks about the sefirah of Binah and its connection to the doctrine of cosmic cycles. It describes the postlapsarian world where Shekhinah assumes its position at the lowest level of the Godhead.

To "Hamlet" or Not to "Hamlet: Notes on an Arts Secondary School Students’ "Hamlet"

This article discusses a 2018 theatrical production of Hamlet with Romanian teenage arts students, directed by one of the article’s authors, actress and academic Dana Trifan Enache. As an artist, she believes that the art of theatre spectacle depends pre-eminently on the actors’ enactment, and hones her students’ acting skills and technique accordingly. The other voice in the article comes from an academic in a cognate discipline within the broad field of arts and humanities. As a feminist and medievalist, the latter has investigated the political underside of representations of the body in religious drama, amongst others. The analytic duo reflects as much the authors’ different professional formation and academic interests as their asymmetrical positioning vis-à-vis the show as respectively the play’s director and one of its spectators. Their shared occupational investment, teaching to form and hone highly specialized professional skills, and shared object of professional interest (broadly conceived), text interpretation, account nevertheless for the possibility of fruitful interdisciplinary reflection on the 2018 Hamlet. This in-depth analysis of the circumstances of the performance and technical solutions it sought challenges stereotyped dismissals of a students’ Hamlet as superannuated, flimsy or gratuitously provocative. Furthermore, a gender-aware examination of the adaptation’s original handling of characters and scenes indicates unexpected cross-cultural and diachronic commonalities between the dramatic world of the 2018 Romanian production of Hamlet and socio-cultural developments emergent in pre-Shakespearean England.

MainLine Protestantism in Latin America

Far from being a newcomer, mainline Protestantism has played a number of roles in the Latin American religious drama. In the colonial era, it represented the dangerous Other vis-à-vis the political, social, and religious structures. In the late eighteenth century, Protestantism was identified with Enlightenment ideas that were perceived as dangerous to the colonial order. During the independence period of the early nineteenth century, Protestant churches confronted a number of challenges of the new republics: debating religious liberty, challenging Roman Catholic hegemony, settling the countryside, and forming leaders who supported politically liberal causes. Though often considered a foreign element representative of European and US sociopolitical interests, mainline Protestant churches have largely come into their own, breaking from missionary or immigrant roots to form their own ecclesial, educational, and interdenominational structures, to develop their own leaders, and to form vital theological perspectives within local and national contexts. For the past century, main-line Protestantism has represented an alternative theological and ecclesiastical voice to Catholicism and evangelicalism, seeking to address Latin America’s challenges of poverty, war, and corruption through their faith traditions.

The Sultan Hernán Cortés

In 1541, the Franciscan friar Motolinía sent to Spain an account of the Tlaxcalan people performing the religious drama The Conquest of Jerusalem in Tlaxcala, New Spain. Previous scholars have read his festival account to reflect only local political interests. I argue that it is a palimpsest, containing both the Tlaxcalans’ ambitious diplomatic strategy, expressed in their performance, and Motolinía’s efforts to steer Castile’s policies in the Americas and the greater Mediterranean.

Der Calderón’sche auto sacramental in neuem Gewand. Spielarten seiner produktiven Rezeption zwischen Spanien, Frankreich und Mexiko

The staging of the Calderonian auto sacramental The Great Theatre of the World during the Salzburg Festival of 1922 marks the beginning of the discovery of this form of religious drama for the dramatic practice and theatre writing in the 20th century. The present paper aims to deal with the recuperation of this genre by well known Spanish, French and Mexican authors (Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti; Albert Camus and Emilio Carballido). They use this obsolescent genre, paradoxically, to renovate contemporary theatre. It is the allegorical structure of these plays that provides them with a pattern for the construction of an intentionally antinaturalistic theatre. The post-Tridentine obsession with the free will dogma is substituted by a more philosophical, non religious and, sometimes even irreverent, debate of human liberty. In the modern Mexican autos sacramentales the tendency to a syncretistic mixture of Christian and indigenous ideas and forms, inaugurated by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famous nun from New Spain, finds an ironic continuation.