“The Lord Was with Them,and They Were Not Found Out”: Jews,Christians, and the Veneration of Saints in Medieval Ashkenaz

This study takes a fresh look at the tale of Rabbi Amram of Mainz, which appears in both Gedalyah ibn Ya?ya’s Hebrew Shalshelet haqabbalah (Venice, 1587) and the Yiddish Mayse bukh (Basel, 1602). Based on the legend of Saint Emmeram of Regensburg, the tale has long been considered a classic case of Jewish narrative borrowing from Christian hagiography. Drawing on both literary and archival sources of both Christian and Jewish provenance to place the tale in its local context, the article shows that the legend’s narrators in fact appropriated the Christian saint in a very sophisticated way. Rather than simply dressing a Jewish hero in a Christian plot, they implied that their own, clearly derivative version was the one containing ultimate religious truth and that the ostensibly more successful Christian cult was a fraud. They thus used their intimate knowledge of Christian legendry to beat the church with its own weapons. In this sense, the narrative does testify to the great attraction that the veneration of saints must have held for medieval Jews; at the same time, it is a monument to its narrators’ sense of self-preservation in the face of the Christian master narrative so dominant in medieval Europe.     

Inter‐cultural learning and inter‐religious dialogue: Problems in the way of understanding between Muslims and Christians

There are fundamental difficulties which make dialogue and social communication between Muslims and Christians difficult, and at times impossible. There are already substantial Muslim minorities in most Western countries, and it is thus of enormous importance to find ways of coping with these difficulties. A well‐functioning dialogue between Muslims and the indigenous inhabitants of these societies is essential for the success of a ‘Multi‐cultural Society’. Kandil puts forward his views in ten short propositions, which imply that the difficulties in communication between these two groups are not primarily religious in character; instead, they have cultural and political roots. These he tries to identify.     

Defining Muslims on the Afghan Frontier: T. P. Hughes and His Dictionary of Islam

ABSTRACT

Christian missionaries working in India in the nineteenth century made numerous important contributions to European and North American understandings of Islam. One such contribution was the Dictionary of Islam compiled by the Anglican missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes, who was serving in Peshawar on the border between British India and Afghanistan. Drawing upon sources such as collections of Hadith, he provided both brief definitions and some longer analyses of a wide range of aspects of Muslim beliefs, practices and history. However, his compilation was not entirely based on textual sources, but was also informed by daily contact with Muslims in and around Peshawar, particularly Maulavi Ahmad of Tangi. Hughes combined his interest in defining Islam with a passion for exploring and explaining Afghan culture and politics to his readership in Britain. Although situated on ‘the edges of empire’, Hughes nonetheless found himself at the centre of world events as the intrigue between Britain and Russia resulted in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Although located in what some considered a minor province on the periphery of the Muslim world, he nonetheless produced a major reference work on Islam that is still in print.     

“Error That Is Anguish to Its Own Nobleness”: Shame and Tragedy in The Mill on the Floss

In George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, early unresolved emotional conflicts in Maggie set a pattern that leads her to "tragic error" as a young adult. Eliot links Maggie's dilemma with Sophocles's Ajax, in which the Greek hero takes his life after shame pushes him blindly to an action that results in only deeper humiliation and a shattering of his social being. In both works, emotional conflict is driven by a desire to transcend shame and ultimately leads to a mortifying error that is recognized only after the fact as tragic in its consequences.     

“Learning the Beautiful Language of Homer:” Judeo-Spanish Speaking Jews and the Greek Language and Culture between the Wars

The incorporation of Salonica into Greece following the Balkan Wars caused major changes in the lives of the local Jewish community. Once a religious minority in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state, the Jews now found themselves a minority in a national state. Amidst this climate, the language question became a critical issue for Greek Jewry, particularly after the overwhelmingly Judeo-Spanish community of Salonica was required to adopt Greek. This article explores debates about language choice and acculturation that were published in Judeo-Spanish and consumed by readers, mainly in Salonica. It suggests that the community's educational system played a central role in the acculturation process. By dedicating a large share of the curricula to instruction of Greek and to teaching Greek history and geography, it was believed, the younger generation could be acquainted with Greek culture and thus able to participate fully in Greek public life. The older generation educated under Ottoman rule and fully ignorant of Greek language presented another challenge for those seeking linguistic assimilation. They had to be approached through Judeo-Spanish writing. The translations of Greek books and lectures given in Judeo-Spanish on Greek civilization were believed to enable them the absorption of Greek civilization. Even as sources such as this were published, the wide-spread use of Judeo-Spanish as a means of acculturation was believed to be temporary. As the language was not considered by anyone to serve as a national language, it was doomed to disappear even prior to the Holocaust, which eventually put an end to the thriving community of Salonica. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Do Christians and Muslims Believe in the Same God? Reflections on Miroslav Volf's Allah: A Christian Response

Miroslav Volf's Allah: A Christian Response is an important book that advances Christian–Muslim dialogue. This article outlines Volf's thesis, critically evaluates some key claims made in the book, and examines some of the methodological presuppositions in Volf's project. It also seeks to situate Volf's claim about the “same God” within a Christian typology of “revelation” so that the significance of his claims might be better understood.     

On “The private life of the psychotherapist” and the psychology of caring

This paper is an extended book review of The private life of the psychotherapist by James Guy, an associate professor of psychology at Biola University. This review discusses the joys, stresses and realities of being a therapist. After an overview of joining, remaining in, and retiring from the profession, the next sections deal with the relation between the core skills of psychotherapy as a generic form and the psychological consequences that they are likely to produce.     

Object Relations Perspectives on “Phantom of the Opera” and Its Demon Lover Theme: The Modern Film

This study of the modern film version of “Phantom of the Opera” employs a mythic theme to illustrate how women can involve themselves with charismatic and eroticized narcissistic men, who are unavailable for true relationship within the conscious world of societal connection. How can the healthy-heroic woman extricate herself from the seductive web of such men, men who seek to own the women—not through sexual relations—but through ownership and control of the women's creative talents? What are the developmental, internal world, dynamics that spell out the muse turned demon/lover theme in British and American Object Relations terms? Similar to the mythic vampire who entrances women to suck their blood, the male muse haunts the female artist to possess her talents. The “demon lover” creates himself to woo the unsuspecting female with potential but yet unrealized creative talents. He woos through entrancement, like so many psychologically wounded narcissistic characters who require mirroring to have any sense of existence!     

The “beam of darkness”: Spreading of the attentional blink within and between objects

When two targets (T1 and T2) are inserted into a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of nontargets, observers are impaired at identifying T2 when it is presented within half a second after T1. This transient drop in performance, or attentional blink (AB), has been attributed to a temporary unavailability of task-critical processing resources. In the present study, we investigated how object-based attention modulates the AB, by presenting four synchronized RSVP streams in the corners of two rectangular bars (e.g., one above and one below fixation). The results from four experiments revealed that the AB increased within short temporal lags (of up to ～400 msec) when T2 was presented on the same, rather than a different, bar as T1 (with T1–T2 spatial distance controlled for). Thus, the AB is seen to spread across entire object groupings, suggesting that the spatiotemporal resolution of attention is modulated by global-object information.     

Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Problem of “OOMPH”

Thomas Reid developed an important theory of freedom and moral responsibility resting on the concept of agent-causation, by which he meant the power of a rational agent to cause or not cause a volition resulting in an action. He held that this power is limited in that occasions occur when one's emotions or other forces may preclude its exercise. John Martin Fischer has raised an objection – the not enough ‘Oomph’ objection – against any incompatibilist account of freedom and moral responsibility. In this essay I argue that Fischer's not enough ‘Oomph’ objection fails to provide any reasons for rejecting Reid's incompatibilist, agent-causation account of freedom and moral responsibility.     

The “concept of time” and the “being of the clock”: Bergson, Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality of modernism

The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the “concept” of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s durée or “duration” in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Temporality “is” not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it “is not.”     

Heidegger,Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’

The article examines Heidegger's lectures on St Paul and provides, in particular, a reading of their discussion of the remarks on the parousia in the letters to the Thessalonians. This reading serves a number of purposes. First, it makes clear how Heidegger's appropriation of a certain ‘anti-theological’ tradition helped first give a sense to his notion of ‘the theoretical attitude’, a problematic notion that plays a central role in his mature early philosophy. Second, it illustrates, and thus helps to refine the identity of, a particular kind of recognizably ‘phenomenological’ reflection that attempts to distance itself precisely from that ‘attitude’; and third, it points to a new perspective on some central and problematic themes in Heidegger's better known early writings and, in particular, their discussion of assertions. An identification of some remarkable similarities between Heidegger's remarks on the Last Judgement and remarks of Wittgenstein's help identify this perspective.     

The “Making and Unmaking” of Prejudice Against Australian Muslims and Gay Men and Lesbians: The Role of Religious Development and Fundamentalism

Despite the growing international interest in the relation between religion and prejudice, there has been a dearth of studies conducted within Australia. We used the Faith Development Scale (FDS) to examine the relation between religious maturity and attitudes toward Muslims and toward gay men and lesbians in an Australian context using a sample of churchgoers from the Perth metropolitan area (N = 139). Respondents who scored lower on the FDS were more prejudiced toward both target groups than were high scorers. Furthermore, participants who scored lower on the FDS were more prejudiced against gay men and lesbians than they were against Muslim Australians. The FDS was a better predictor of attitudes toward the two groups than was the Quest Scale. Contrary to overseas studies, we found that religious fundamentalists held more prejudiced attitudes toward gay men and lesbians than toward those of a different religion (Australian Muslims). Right-wing political orientation was also found to be predictive of prejudice against Australian Muslims and against gay men and lesbians independently of religious development. Results suggest that religious maturity, as well as fundamentalism and right-wing political views, plays an important role in the “making” or “unmaking” of prejudice against Australian Muslims and against gay men and lesbians. Evidence is presented that suggests that the Quest Scale and the FDS are measuring different aspects of religious development.     

Nietzsche and “we knowers”: Comments on Reginster's The Will to Nothingness

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality is strikingly book-ended by the theme of knowledge-seeking: the Preface opens with the ominous claim that “[w]e are unknown to ourselves, we knowers”, and the Third Essay's climax is the assertion that scientific, scholarly activity does not stand in opposition to the ascetic ideal but is instead only that ideal's most recent and insidious instantiation. This feature of the text is absent from Reginster's The Will to Nothingness. Nonetheless, the interpretive machinery that Reginster develops in his reading of the Genealogy as a genealogy and critique of morality can also go a long way towards helping us to make sense of the text as, at the same time, a genealogy and critique of knowledge-seeking. Making use of Reginster's account in this way serves to illuminate both the interpretive power and some of the limitations of his reading.     

The “Blurring” of the Lifecourse: Narrative, Memory and the Question of Authenticity

The view that aging provokes its own form of masquerade raises the question of what lies behind the mask and whether it is possible to outline what an authentic existence in later life might be like. Contemporary trends toward a narrative explanation of identity, exemplified by the growth of narrative therapies, may pose particular difficulties for theorising about aging. These therapies are associated with a submersion of the personal and social past under demands in the here and now and the de-contextualisation of old age from the lifecourse as it has been lived. Memory and lifecourse context are examined as possible foundations for authenticity and a model is suggested that contains postmodern preoccupations with multiple identity choices, the personal past and the possibilities for expression made available by particular social spaces or contexts.     

Heroes and Mentors: A Consideration of Relational-Cultural Theory and “The Hero’s Journey”

Derived from mythology around the world and over the ages, Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” provides a conceptual roadmap for confronting life’s challenges. The way in which clients navigate these challenges may also have a profound effect on their relational development. This article examines The Hero’s Journey through the lens of relational-cultural theory and illustrates ways in which counselors can aid clients in making sense of the struggles they face on their own personal journeys.     

The Ape That Kicked the Hornet's Nest: Response to Commentaries on “The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock”

We respond to the commentaries on our target article, “The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock.” We start with specific issues raised by the article. These relate to the magnitude of human sex differences; the evolution and relative importance of pair bonding, paternal care, and polygyny in our species; and the distinction between the males-compete/females-choose (MCFC) model of human sexual psychology and the mutual mate choice (MMC) model. We then evaluate two competing theories of human sex differences and similarities: Social Role Theory and Attachment Fertility Theory. We conclude with some thoughts about how to present and teach evolutionary psychological research and theories without conveying an exaggerated impression of the scale of human sex differences.