Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

Previous work on inter-ethnic coexistence in Mauritius has portrayed secularism as the only possible site of the national, which is at the same time described as clearly separated from religious traditions. In contrast, focusing on understandings of secularism among Mauritian Muslims in the context of a politics of diasporic ‘ancestral c…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

This is one of a series of film reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[Read more]

This discussion of Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (2014), a magisterial contribution to South Asian literature edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, situates this work within broader trends within the discipline of comparative literature and cross-cultural poetics. I consider how this volume…[Read more]

This course covers autobiographical writings in Persian from premodern times to contemporary Iran. It reflects the emergence of autobiographical writing in the first days of Islam and an evolving sense of self, identity, and cultural cohesion, and then records transitions within the political/economic power structures in the geographical region.…[Read more]

An essay on why foot washing (washing of the saints’ feet) should remain a valuable practice for Original Free Will Baptists and Christianity. In this essay, I explore the ministerial implications foot washing has for identity formation, tradition, and community building. I suggest that foot washing is a visible and physical reminder of what our…[Read more]

An exploration of the rhythms and relationships that come from theological conversation. This paper explores the necessity of relationship and connection when doing theology. I argue that theology must be relational beginning with a theological encounter with the other. This paper incorporates the thoughts of Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Luc Nancy, and…[Read more]

This paper takes a new approach to the contentious area of the etymology of Metatron, applying the lessons learnt from biblical folk-etymologies which have been shown to actively influence the writing of narratives. In the first section one such possible folk-etymology is proposed, based around the sequence TTR as a Divine Name in Metatron, along…[Read more]

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an…[Read more]

The attempts of Mordecai Kaplan and Ludwig Wittgenstein at reforming Jewish theology and analytic philosophy respectively share some important traits. While Kaplan’s scientifically respectable “atheistic” Judaism sought to reinterpret theological principles in line with a modern-day materialist vision of the cosmos, Wittgenstein’s reducti…[Read more]

In this article I make a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to…[Read more]

Marco HEILES, Die Handschrift MS Broxbourne 84.3 der Bodleian Library, Manuskript, Oxford 2010.

Manuscript description of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne 84.3, German manuscript, 15th century (a. 1469).

Literary and historical analysis of the passage at Num 9:1–14

Presents a new compositional history of the centralization law.

In this essay I sketch an outline of how the book of Isaiah presents its politics, working from the assumption—based on the research of Peter Ackroyd and others—that the presentation of Isaiah, the prophet, in the book’s opening chapters is key. I end up arguing that the book advocates for Davidic politics, as others have claimed, but that its d…[Read more]

A review of Sören Petershans’s revised dissertation entitled Offenbarung des Namens und versöhntes Leben: Eine Untersuchung zur Gotteslehre bei Kornelis Heiko Miskotte, Arbeiten zur Systematischen Theologie 11 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016).

The fourth issue of “Cinema” addresses the topic of philosophy of religion and its connections with cinematic art. Film and religion have been fruitful research topics taken in conjunction. Researchers in this specific field have focused on particular periods (like the censorship era in the USA), on representations of religious traditions and pra…[Read more]

This paper is a reading of André Bazin’s article “Cinema and Theology”, an appraisal of “Cielo sulla palude” (“Heaven Over the Marshes”, 1949) that also reflects on the relation between film and theology. The reading takes into account Bazin’s ontology of cinema, which has been at times simplistically described as a belief in the simple transpare…[Read more]