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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Music Of The Invisible: Messiaen’S "Saint Francis", Paul G. Crowley
Music Of The Invisible: Messiaen’S "Saint Francis", Paul G. Crowley
Religious Studies
Saint Francois d'Assise, Olivier Messiaen's only operatic work, received its world premiere in Paris in 1983. It has rarely been performed since, partly because of the sheer scope and audacity of the project, but also because of its subject matter--faith itself. This fall, the San Francisco Opera, newly directed by Pamela Rosenberg, gave the opera its U.S. premiere in its namesake city. It was a brilliant gamble, possibly opening a new operatic door in America. This is an opera unlike any other--an unabashed paean to music, to nature, and to the mystical path to joy seen in the figure of …
“The Chinese Believe In Spirits”: Belief And Believing In The Study Of Religion, Catherine M. Bell
“The Chinese Believe In Spirits”: Belief And Believing In The Study Of Religion, Catherine M. Bell
Religious Studies
A recent round of books, both popular and scholarly, reveal that as a society we are, once again, fascinated with the issue of belief. While the more popular books tend to adopt a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated notion of believing and then find major problems of rationality, the more scholarly books readily accept a type of rationality to beliefs while problematizing the act of believing in other, more involuted ways. Both types of argument remind the scholar of religion that the academic discipline of religious studies has not contributed much to this discussion for quite a while. As described in …