BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE AESTHETICS OF THE ANALOGY OF BEING (PART ONE)

This essay is concerned with modern and postmodern theories of the sublime and with a possible theological response to them. The essay first discusses the “modern sublime” (as typified in Kant) and the “postmodern sublime” (as typified in Jean‐Luc Nancy), and shows how these versions of the sublime terminate in one or the other form of “pure immanence” and, hence, are not sublime in any standard sense of the term. The essay then argues, in a second part, for an aesthetic of the beautiful and the sublime based upon the theological doctrine of the analogy of being as articulated in the past century by Erich Przywara, S. J.     

VOCATION AND CREATION: BEYOND THE GENTILE‐HOMOSEXUAL ANALOGY

One strand of the church's conversation about homosexuality compares present‐day acceptance of homosexuals to the church's acceptance of Gentiles in Acts 15. In a previous article, “Gentiles and Homosexuals,” I presented the history of that strand. In a reply to my article, Olson proposes to reimagine the analogy via the “radical new perspective on Paul” and argues that doing so exposes problems with my original analysis. I defend myself against these criticisms, while also entering into the spirit of Olson's reimagined analogy. Expanding the scope beyond Acts to Paul opens up important facets that might otherwise be obscured. In particular, it includes voices that are sometimes silenced, and presses both sides for an account of sexuality grounded in vocation and God's purposes in creation.     

大地感：日常美学

一、引言 一位少女,一匹牝马,一把竖琴以及一只陶罐,这是大希庇亚为了回答苏格拉底对于美的提问而选取的例子。关于美学概念的辩论正是起始于此,     

NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE: THE BEING OF THE TAO

The Tao Te Ching begins enigmatically with the following lines:
The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name.     

BEYOND THE BONDAGE OF BOUNDARIES

This narrative seeks to describe a route towards the roots of personal and cultural identity through shared journeys of loss and grief. It attempts to find lived spaces for spiritual growth and reconciliation through the complexity of shared experiences and through the search for ways of transcending the boundaries of cultural identity and culturally prescribed ways of grieving. The complex interplay of these juxtaposing themes and interconnecting tensions and paradoxes provides opportunities for new ways of being and the possibility of transcendence of barriers such as gender, ethnicity, culture, language difference, and social class. This is achieved in consideration of context and environment and through the metaphor of ''pushing out the boundaries of lived experience beyond common understanding.''     

THE PRIMORDIAL ROOTS OF BEING

Abstract. Suffering, alongside the feeling of sanctity of life, pervades human experience, generating primal anxiety, which humans learn to shore up with social solidarity and with the practice of communication in religious rituals. The roots of social belonging spring from the primordial sentiments toward ethnicity, race, language, religion, customs and traditions, and region. Self–identity, mediated by mental formations derived from social relations, is composed of thinking and values. Daily experience reveals that cultural differences produce blind spots in thinking and barriers in values—-governing areas of activity, social relations, the world, and identity of being—-that impedes cross—-cultural understanding.     

THE UNBEARABLE HEAVINESS OF BEING

In response to Simone de Beauvoir's claim that for women ‘biology is Destiny’ Judith Butler says, ‘not biology, but culture becomes destiny’ (Butler, Judith. 1990 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]. Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 8). The Memoirs by Sharan-Jeet Shan, Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Jasvinder Sanghera and Rupinder Gill confirm that culture and gender shape women's lives and destinies. Especially, immigrant women often engage in a life-threatening struggle to change this destiny. This is not to suggest that men do not also face and transcend some of the same issues as women. In If You Don't Know Me by Now (2008), Sathnam Sanghera complains that in immigrant societies men are as trapped by culture as women but the media tends to portray them – men – as ‘beneficiaries’ rather than victims of culture. Although one would not want to create hierarchies of suffering and victimization, the memoirs considered here reveal that cultural codes do not hold men in the same kind of thrall as they do women.