Envisioning a Catholic Past, Present and Future: Conversion, Recuperation and Andean Christianity in Talavera, Peru

In the colonial era, many Spanish missionaries in the Andes sought a total temporal and cultural break between the pagan past and desired a Christian future of indigenous Andeans. Discussions of Christian conversion in the modern-day Andes have often echoed this line of thinking, portraying conversion—whether to Protestantism or to Roman Catholicism—as an event of radical discontinuity, and mapping the rupture of conversion onto the rupture of the Spanish invasion and subsequent evangelisation of the Americas. In doing so, however, scholars have often portrayed Catholicism as a veneer over the ‘authentic’ Andes—which was assumed to not be Catholic, and indeed could never be. Recently, however, in the south-central Peruvian Andean parish of Talavera—under the guidance of a first generation of an indigenous Catholic priesthood, made up entirely of men born and raised in the local area—discourses surrounding conversion portray the past as a source of continuity rather than discontinuity with Catholicism. Drawing from historical and ethnographic sources, this article demonstrates that although conversion has been and continues to be an important point of reference in contemporary Roman Catholicism in the Andes, the question of what people convert from has shifted. Today, the Andes are spoken of as already inherently and profoundly Catholic; conversion, in the sense of the need to make the Andes ‘really’ Catholic, is considered long accomplished. As the article discusses, in a national context where Catholicism is dominant and ubiquitous to the point of hegemony, this is an inherently political stance which runs counter to longstanding harmful stereotypes of indigenous Andeans as not ‘real’ Catholics and thus unable to be ‘real’ Peruvians.

Narrative Approach To Living Heritage

This paper attempts to sketch out a theoretical framework that addresses the particular needs of living heritage. ICCROM has been at the forefront of developing a conservation practice which addresses the concerns of living heritage such as religious and pilgrimage sites (e.g. Wijesuriya 2015; Wijesuriya, Thompson, and Court 2017), and others have considered the implications for the conservation process (e.g. Poulios 2014). However, to date there has been no attempt to develop a theoretical foundation for these practices. In place of the still-dominant understanding (at least as encountered in much Western practice) of historic buildings as primarily art-historical, this paper proposes a narrative approach that allows the site or building to remain within its cultural/religious context, including an acceptance of ongoing change. While the argument proceeds from Western sources, it invites dialogue with complementary understandings of the working of tradition from other regions of the world. Any theoretical model for living heritage must address the central question of how living buildings endure between generations, that is, their continuity between past, present and future. Since modernity entails a commitment to a radical discontinuity with the past, such an approach must engage with the resources of premodernity to develop (or perhaps return to) a non-modern understanding of tradition as developmental and creative (Author, 2017). The principal sources used in the investigation of this proposed narrative approach include Alasdair MacIntyre’s rehabilitation of tradition, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s development of philosophical hermeneutics and Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative and time.

Ten Principles for Theologians Interpreting the Scriptures

This chapter proposes principles that should guide the theological appropriation of the Scriptures. It invites theologians to be prayerfully faithful hearers and academically active readers of the inspired Scriptures. Recognizing how the Scriptures converge on Christ, theologians should be guided by the historical creeds built around his life, death, and resurrection and the gift of the Spirit. Classic metathemes and metanarratives of the Bible, which can be illuminated by an exegetical consensus, find their heart in the radical discontinuity/continuity of the Easter mystery. Respect for the eschatological provisionality of the Scriptures refers theologians to the final consummation of all things in Christ. Inculturating efforts can join philosophical reason in developing and supporting a biblical message about Christ, the light of all nations and all cultures.

Epilogue

By the end of the Han, specialists in the analysis and prediction of the motions of the heavenly bodies had established ways of working which were, in their essentials, to be continued and developed without radical discontinuity for the rest of the imperial age. The stability of these methods was underpinned by their incorporation into the ideology of imperial legitimacy, which claimed that the emperor had not simply the right, but the duty, to ‘grant the seasons’ to his people—a duty which was imagined to have been fulfilled by the model rulers of high antiquity....

Małgorzata Daszkiewicz, Michael Meyer, Octavian Munteanu, Vasile Iarmulschi, Pottery found at the Horodca Mică and Ulmu Iron Age settlements – results of archaeoceramological analysis

One of the major questions of the Pre-Roman Iron Age settlements in the East part of the Carpathians Region is the relationship between the Getic culture and the Poieneşti-Lukaşevka culture. There are any connections between the settlers of both cultures, or are we dealing with a demolition of the settlements and a complete resettlement by “immigrants” from the north part of Europe? The “getics” pottery in the settlements of the Poieneşti-Lukaşevka culture speaks against a radical discontinuity, the extensive restructuring of the settlement system, the new burial grounds and ceramic molds are used for a far-reaching resettlement. The following article assumes that the destruction of settlements and new immigration can be seen in a clearly evident change in ceramic technology and the associated supply of raw materials. It is assumed that extensive continuities in the production of ceramics require an undisturbed knowledge transfer between the actors, which cannot be the case in a complete new settlement. In particular, this can be traced back to archaeometric analyzes of ceramics, whereby local or non-local sound supply, leaning, sound processing and burning techniques have meaning.

The organisation of military violence in the 21st century

In this article, I analyse the sociological foundations of military violence in the 21st century. The first part of the article engages critically with the three dominant contemporary approaches in the study of organised violence: (a) the decline of violence perspective, (b) the new wars theories and (c) the technological displacement approach. I argue that despite their obvious merits, these three perspectives do not provide adequate interpretation of recent social change. In particular, I contest their emphasis on the radical discontinuity in the character of the contemporary military violence when compared to the previous historical periods. Hence, to remedy this – in the second part of the article – I develop an alternative, a longue durée, sociological interpretation centred on the role of organisational, ideological and micro-interactional powers in the transformation of military violence. In contrast to the three dominant perspectives, I argue that the 21st-century organisation of military violence has changed but it still exhibits much more organisational continuity with the last two centuries than usually assumed. More specifically, my argument centres on the long-term impact of the three historical processes that have shaped the dynamics of military violence over long stretches of time: the cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion, centrifugal ideologisation and the envelopment of micro-solidarity.

Signs as functions: Edusemiotic and ontological foundations for a semiotic concept of a sign

As a branch of theoretical semiotics that aims to contribute to the development of the theory of both semiotics and education, edusemiotics must also problematize the most foundational semiotic conceptions of sign and semiosis. The biosemiotic notion that a sign relation is necessarily dependent on learning restricts semiotics to the biological sphere, to living beings. This fits well with education, which can be seen as transition from the zoosemiotic sphere to the anthroposemiotic sphere. However this radical discontinuity between living and non-living spheres makes it difficult to understand how signs and semiosis are viable at all and what their basic nature is. Ontologically we can imagine that sign relations must also be somehow based on the features of non-living beings. In this article I will analyze how a concept of a sign can be seen as a general model of interaction between any beings. This paper develops the conception of semiosis and signification with regard to the competence (or habits) of the subject experiencing the meaning. Such task requires the explication of the ontological basis of semiosis – a step often perceived as dangerous by semioticians or ignored by educators.

Constructing Spirituality

How we define “spirituality” and also distinguish and describe different traditions of spirituality is not a simple matter of objective observation. All definitions and descriptions are a matter of interpretation which, in turn, involves preferences, assumptions and choices. In that sense, our approaches to spirituality may often be effectively “political” in that they express values and commitments. Sometimes our historical narratives also reflect the interests of dominant groups – whether in a religious institutional, theological or socio-cultural sense. This process may sometimes be conscious but is more often unconscious and uncritical. This essay first of all explores some of the issues surrounding the question of definition in the study and presentation of Christian spirituality in particular. Second, the essay examines how the history of Christian spirituality has been shaped by certain underlying “narratives”. However, following the thought of Paul Ricoeur, narrative and story are not to be rejected in favour of a quest for history as a form of pure factual “truth”. Rather, what is needed is a more conscious understanding of the power of narrative, its importance and the potential released by identifying forgotten or repressed human stories. Third, the essay then asks whether our approaches to, and descriptions of, particular spiritual traditions have masked prior assumptions about their autonomy, purity and their radical discontinuity (or “rupture”) from what went before or what lies alongside them. Two examples are briefly outlined: the supposed Catholic-Protestant spiritual divide and the often unacknowledged impact of another faith (for example, Sufi Islam) on certain Christian spiritual or mystical traditions. Fourth, the regular geographical-cultural biases in the study of Christian spirituality are noted and one response to this among Spanish-speaking Christians of the Americas, known as “traditioning”, is outlined. Finally, the importance of critical self-awareness in how we employ interpretative frameworks is underlined.

Hume and the Historicity of Human Nature

This paper urges a reconsideration of Hume’s role in the philosophy of history. It begins by challenging the common perception of Hume as a proto-positivist hoping to draw from history a mechanical causal account of the unchanging human nature. It draws attention instead to his grasp of historical contingency, the sui generis nature of the social world, and the complexity of the relationships of recognition and identity-formation which structure its operation. The paper goes on to examine Hume’s position in the light of the idea of the historicity of human nature. It is argued that Hume could be perfectly comfortable with the idea of changes in human nature as well as with the contextual dependence of terms in which human nature comes to define and redefine itself over time. What Hume cannot countenance is the prospect of a radical discontinuity within human nature, the potential significance of which is downplayed by his methodological reliance, qua a historian, on critical common sense and the moralistic vocabulary of folk psychology associated with it.

A unified account of abstract structure and conceptual change: Probabilistic models and early learning mechanisms

We need not propose, as Carey does, a radical discontinuity between core cognition, which is responsible for abstract structure, and language and “Quinian bootstrapping,” which are responsible for learning and conceptual change. From a probabilistic models view, conceptual structure and learning reflect the same principles, and they are both in place from the beginning.