ABSOLUTE ACTION: DIVINE HIDDENNESS IN KIERKEGAARD'S FEAR AND TREMBLING

This article reads Fear and Trembling constructively as a theological work. Abraham's faith is a lived movement irreducible to either ontology or epistemology. Faith is an action that waits upon what it alone could never accomplish. This is absolute action. In Abraham's case, he offers up Isaac to death with the absurd expectancy that Isaac will be returned. This double movement is a doxological abandonment of oneself and one's world to God that waits expectantly to receive them back as gifts. It is these dynamics of faith that show God to be hidden, precisely within the intimate drawing near of God. The article concludes with a constructive gesture toward an “apophaticism of action.”     

THE SOCIAL ARTICULATION OF TIME IN EUGEN ROSENSTOCK‐HUESSY

Sociologists and theologians have both devoted considerable attention and energy to time, but the two rarely speak to one another. Sociologists investigate the effects of clock time, railway schedules, and calendars on culture, while theologians examine God's relation to time, usually the time of physics. The neglected German‐American thinker Eugen Rosenstock‐Huessy can help to bridge this gap. In his historical work, he paid particular attention to the role of rituals and calendars in shaping time, but he was also a Christian thinker who confessed that Jesus Christ brought in the “fullness of time.” This article considers some aspects of Rosenstock‐Huessy's rich account of time in the hopes that both theologians and sociologists, but especially theologians with sociological interests, will find his insights fruitful and mine them further for the productive possibilities.     

Choreography Styles in Figure Skating

Fifty‐eight figure skating trainers from fifteen different countries acted as volunteers in this study on choreography styles. The styles were based on reports of artistic‐creative strategies in composing music, drawing, writing poems or novels, and in making dances. The prevalence of the Mozartian (at the onset the choreographer already has a more or less complete plan in mind), Beethovenian (the choreographer does not start with a complete plan, but instead focuses on a succession of single and detailed elements) and Avant‐garde Style (instead of starting from the music, as the impulse for creating movements, trainers choreograph straight from movement ideas) is 77.2%, 56.4%, and 16.1% respectively. The results from a CATPCA reveal that the features, associated with the three choreography styles have loadings on two dimensions, one representing features predominantly belonging to primary process thinking (Mozartian), the other representing features predominantly related to secondary process thinking (Beethovenian and Avant‐Garde). In the discussion attention is paid to 1) why the Mozartian and Beethovenian are more popular than the AvantGarde Style, to 2) the universal quality of artistic‐creative styles in a wide range of artistic endeavors, and to 3) the differences between elite, runner‐up, and novice trainers on experience, on using the assistance of a professional choreographer, and on using the Avant‐Garde Style.