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This book argues that we have been mistaken about the fundamental assumption that Christianity is the key to understanding the “Christian” martyr. Examining martyrdom in early Christian history, Matt Recla argues that the violent deaths of martyrs, real and imagined, were appropriated for Christian institutional life. Through deconstructing martyrdom and appreciating the complexity of the martyr, we recognize martyrdom not as a socio-historical phenomenon inherent to particular ideologies, and not as a religious “identity” but as the institutional co-optation of violence. The Christian apologist Tertullian argued that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, but while the seed may be the key to martyrdom, the blood is the key to the martyr. The book shows how martyrs exceed the bounds of institutional narrative. Centering analysis of martyrdom first around the martyr's existential difference and the complex biological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors that lead to willing death, this book sheds new light on the motivations of martyrs, our fascination with them, and the parasitic relationship of religion to violent death. In challenging long-held beliefs about the praiseworthiness of martyrdom, this book is of interest to scholars of religion as well as those concerned about the relationship between religion and violence.
Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.
Martyrs create space and time through the actions they take, the fate they suffer, the stories they prompt, the cultural narratives against which they take place and the retelling of their tales in different places and contexts. The title "Desiring Martyrs" is meant in two senses. First, it refers to protagonists and antagonists of the martyrdom narratives who as literary characters seek martyrs and the way they inscribe certain kinds of cultural and social desire. Second, it describes the later celebration of martyrs via narrative, martyrdom acts, monuments, inscriptions, martyria, liturgical commemoration, pilgrimage, etc. Here there is a cultural desire to tell or remember a particular kind of story about the past that serves particular communal interests and goals. By applying the spatial turn to these ancient texts the volume seeks to advance a still nascent social geographical understanding of emergent Christian and Jewish martyrdom. It explores how martyr narratives engage pre-existing time-space configurations to result in new appropriations of earlier traditions.
Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women to express themselves. But not so within the social sphere of the séance--a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and most important, influence as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead. The Fox sisters inspired some of the era’s best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. While in the throes of a trance, Emma Hardinge Britten delivered powerful speeches to crowds of thousands. Victoria Woodhull claimed guidance from the spirit world as she took on the millionaires of Wall Street before becoming America’s first female presidential candidate. And Georgina Weldon narrowly escaped the asylum before becoming a celebrity campaigner against archaic lunacy laws. Drawing on diaries, letters, and rarely seen memoirs and texts, Emily Midorikawa illuminates a radical history of female influence that has been confined to the dark until now.
Through the examination of different themes and subjects the book provides an in depth analysis of the concept of deterrence and its utility in dealing effectively with current threats. Although the concept of deterrence precedes the Cold War, in modern times and in its traditional form deterrence is seen as the product of the Cold War, which transformed 'narrow' deterrence approaches into widespread orthodoxy. Increasingly however emerging threats and challenges call into question the traditional concept of deterrence. There are many elements that challenge the concept of deterrence and its effectiveness. For instance it is not just that the concept can be ambiguous and broad, but also there have to be a number of conditions for it to be successfully implemented. This collection contributes to a growing field of research in a relatively under-studied area of interrogating the concept of deterrence itself through a multi-disciplinary approach. Through the use of primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews, this book covers a wide range of disciplinary approaches on deterrence and the contributors cover a broad array of subjects. The research assembled here focuses on deterring extremism, conflict resolution and diplomacy, investigating technological developments, effects of globalisation, social movements, economics, the relationship of resilience to effective deterrence, and the associated complexity of contemporary interdependencies to create a contextualised concept of modern deterrence. Social science and historical methodologies are utilized to gain a comprehensive cross-section of analysis that will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the use of deterrence as a national security strategy, as well as highlighting the various types of power available for use by the state to create multi-faceted deterrence in order to deal effectively and efficiently with complex emerging challenges.
This second volume of essays by Professor Kelley takes the study of history as its starting point, then extends explorations into adjacent fields of legal, political, and social thought to confront some of the larger questions of the modern human sciences. The first group of papers examine the historiography of the Protestant Reformation and then of the Romantic and Victorian periods; the last section focuses on the legal tradition and its interpretation in relation to social and cultural, as well as historical thought, in the period from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. Throughout, the author’s interest is to analyse how people at different times have viewed their past - and reconstructed and utilised it in the service of their present concerns.
"The proper study of mankind," said Alexander Pope, "is man'' -an apt summary of the spirit of his age of rationalism. All of Christian tradition protests against this mockery of the true state of things; divine revelation contradicts it outright; a just philosophy recoils from so limited an approach to reality. That distilled wisdom of Catholicism which is theology knows one subject and one subject only: God. But theology first considers God as he is the cause of all things and their exemplar; in this vision it considers all of reality, which is more true in divine thought than when seen directly in itself. Now the theologian turns to study God as he is the end and perfecting goal of creatures in their return to him from whom they first came forth; in particular he will study the creature who alone holds the reins of his own conduct: man. (from the Introduction) This edition is a scanned facsimile of the original edition published in 1959 by Priory Press