Arts and Humanities Commons^™

We Wretched Of The Earth: The Search For A Language Of Justice, John C. Hawley

English

"In the beginning was the Word," writes John-God's revealing utterance that "was made flesh and lived among us." This incarnational character of the Word, this "living among us," has demanded of Christians in each age a reinterpretation of its original and ongoing meaning. If the protean nature of God's self-expression has seen a continuing "translation" in each age, though, it is becoming increasingly evident among church members that a similar task is also required in each ethnic milieu. The "us" among whom the Word lives is made up of many communities of discourse, and a logocentric theology like Christianity must …

Contemporary Religious Life: Death Or Transformation?, Sandra Marie Schneiders

Jesuit School of Theology

No one who attends carefully to the present experience of religious life in North America can be entirely sanguine about its present or its future. Despite the celebratory character of this gathering (and certainly the twenty-five year work of the Institute for Religious is something to celebrate) we are all aware of the signs of diminishment that mark contemporary religious life: aging membership, decline in recruitment, dwindling financial resources in the face of relentlessly rising costs, loss of institutions, if we attend only to the material problems. When these are compounded by ecclesiastical harassment of individual members in their ministries …

Mongo Beti And Jean Marc Éla: Literary And Christian Liberation In Cameroon, John C. Hawley

English

In his fascinating study of contemporary African intellectuals and their struggle to set themselves apart from their European educations, K wame Anthony Appiah describes the intellectual ferment throughout the continent as producing "new, unpredictable fusions" because Africans "have the great advantage of having before [them] the European and American--and the Asian and Latin American--experiments with modernity to ponder as [they] make [their] choices" (134). Appiah uses the example of his own sister's wedding in Ghana to exemplify the hybridized role that religion continues to play in that self-definition. The ceremony followed the Methodist ritual; a Roman Catholic bishop offered the …

Literature And The Evolution Of Religious Discourse: A Concluding Essay, John C. Hawley

English

Religion and literature do not play identical roles in society, but they both rely heavily on imagination. This book has provided an examination of representative writings from both fields to demonstrate this fact, and to suggest points at which the differences between the two disciplines become less important. Viewed together, these examples. raise interesting questions regarding the viability of discussing enduring truths outside the realms of imagination. This paradox, in turn, points to the limitations of rationality · in the pursuit of such truths, and the inevitability of subjectivity in the quest for the objectively true.

These are important philosophical …

Blessed With Orchards, Cheered With Vine: Ideologies Of Agriculture In The Transformation Of Alta California, Virginia C. Czosek

Research Manuscript Series

Prior to the arrival of the first Europeans on her shores, California was ecologically and visually a radically different land than she would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first prolonged European intervention in the region in the form of the Spanish missions, as well as the successive waves of . American immigration with the Gold Rush of the 1850's, left a lasting legacy in the form of their tremendous impact on the environment of California. Agriculture fundamentally altered the appearance of the territory, replacing its native environment with a man-made, cultivated one. The groves of oaks and …

A River Ran Through It... : The Cultural Ecology Of The Santa Clara Valley Riparian Zone, Erin M. Reilly

Research Manuscript Series

This study addresses the nature of human interaction with the riparian environment in the Santa Clara Valley over time. This is not a new anthropological theme. Literature dates to 1863 The Earth as Modified by Human Action, by George P. Marsh); cultural ecologist Betty J Meggars stated: "The relationship- of culture to environment is one of the oldest problems in the science of anthropology ... "(Meggars, 1968:19); and, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber said: "no culture is wholly intelligible without reference to the nonculture, or so-called environmental factors with which it is in relation and which condition it "(Kroeber 1906:297).

Along these …