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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Desecrating Scriptures, James W. Watts Jan 2009

Desecrating Scriptures, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

Desecrations of books of scripture appear regularly in media coverage of religious and political conflicts. Twenty-first century news media have reported scripture desecrations in various Western, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian countries. Though political tensions also arise from the desecration of sacred sites, objects, and persons, books of scripture have emerged as particularly potent objects of contestation. That is because, as a (very) old form of media themselves, scriptures encapsulate the religious experiences of many people who are used to handling the physical book with veneration. News of such a book’s desecration thus inverts a common religious experience and …


Roma Historical And Cultural Heritage Sites In Poland, Samuel D. Gruber Jan 2009

Roma Historical And Cultural Heritage Sites In Poland, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

2009 report from the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad on Roma historical and cultural heritage sites in Poland. Includes information on the history and current conditions of various sites, includes places of martyrdom, places of pilgrimage, settlements, cemeteries, museums, and commemorative sites.


Ritual Rhetoric In Ancient Near Eastern Texts, James W. Watts Jan 2009

Ritual Rhetoric In Ancient Near Eastern Texts, James W. Watts

Religion - All Scholarship

Many ancient Near Eastern texts reflect a concern for ritual accuracy. They depict ancient kings justifying their ritual practices on the basis of supposedly invariable tradition and, frequently, on the basis of old ritual texts. They also invoke ritual acts and omissions to explain the course of past history and to promise future punishments and rewards. In fact, very many texts assert that ritual performance is the most determinative factor in the success or failure of rulers and nations. The rhetoric of ritual therefore pervaded royal propaganda as well as temple texts. It also provided the principal rationale for criticizing …


Human, Life, And Other Sacred Stuff, William Robert Jan 2009

Human, Life, And Other Sacred Stuff, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Carnal Excess: Flesh At The Limits Of Imagination, Virginia Burrus Jan 2009

Carnal Excess: Flesh At The Limits Of Imagination, Virginia Burrus

Religion - All Scholarship

This essay explores representations of fleshly excess in Christian and Jewish texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries, from the cosmically-scaled figures of Adam and the resurrected Christ in Genesis Rabbah and Augustine's City of God, on the one hand, to the hagiographical portraits of fat rabbis and monks in the tractate Baba Metsia of the Babylonian Talmud and the Lausiac History of Palladius, on the other. The Platonic figure of the khora is initially invoked to frame two main arguments: first, that these late ancient texts discover transcendence within, rather than outside of, the boundlessness of materiality; …