Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Self-Referential Features In Sacred Texts, Donald Haase

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a specific type of instance that bridges the divide between seeing sacred texts as merely vehicles for content and as objects themselves: self-reference. Doing so yielded a heuristic system of categories of self-reference in sacred texts based on the way the text self-describes: Inlibration, Necessity, and Untranslatability.

I provide examples of these self-referential features as found in various sacred texts: the Vedas, Āgamas, Papyrus of Ani, Torah, Quran, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and the Book of Mormon. I then examine how different theories of sacredness interact with them. What do Durkheim, Otto, Freud, or Levinas say about …

Translation And Evolution: Byzantine Monastic Studies Since Ca. 1990, Hannah Ewing

Faculty Publications

While monks were integral parts of the long‐lasting Byzantine world, Byzantine monasticism and its study can be relatively obscure to nonspecialists, given the diversity of monastic forms practiced in the empire. This piece presents a brief primer on Byzantine monastic studies and evaluates key scholarship in this increasingly vigorous field. In particular, it assesses the major impact of critical editions and primary‐source translation projects since the 1990s and 2000s, including both archival materials and hagiography. Furthermore, it evaluates the current state of the field and outlines several opportunities and directions for further research.