The role of the concept of idolatry in Levinas’ thought. Idolatry and Totalitarian thought.

The life of Felix Weil, one of the creators of Frankfurt’s Institut for Social Research, the cradle of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory..

Gay men have been severely affected by the AIDS crisis, and gay subjectivity, sexual ethics, and politics continue to be deeply influenced by HIV to this day. PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a new, drug-based HIV prevention technique, that allows disentangling gay sex from its widespread, 40 yearlong association with illness and death. This…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is a repository of texts spanning more than a millennium of Jewish history, including thousands of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts now held in collections around the world. Among these are fragments from at least 25 separate Qur’an manuscripts in Arabic script, all of which lack any traces of Hebrew writing. Their…[Read more]

I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to
raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors
of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people
up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious…[Read more]

Some of Dave Chappelle’s uses of storytelling about seemingly mundane events, like his experiences with his “white friend Chip” and the police, are examples of what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “Positive Propaganda.” This is in contrast to “Demagoguery,” the sort of propaganda described by Jason Stanley that obstructs empathic recognition of others, and u…[Read more]

The representations of religious tension between the polytheistic humans and the monotheistic Cylons in the Sci Fi (now Syfy) channel’s hit series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009) is nowhere more evident than in the human “convert” to monotheism, Gaius Baltar, who struggles to proselytize his minority beliefs to other humans. Ancient Jewish…[Read more]

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents provide readers with often radical re- visions and critiques of biblical texts. This article asks how the principal characters’ affective engagements with Scripture vary, and considers the extent to which fiction may “play” with the Bible, despite its authoritative distanc…[Read more]

Modern science fiction writers often draw upon the biblical flood story as inspiration for their own narratives. It is not uncommon to find humans fleeing on space arks to escape some cosmic disaster. In the process of adapting the biblical narrative to contemporary circumstances, these writers also frequently transform the unnamed female…[Read more]

In the virtual world elaborated in Marvel’s movies (the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” or MCU), “science” is creatively, strategically confused with “magic” and/or “religion.” Key supernatural/magical elements of the franchise’s comic-book source material are “retconned” (retroactively granted new narrative coherence and continuity) as advanced…[Read more]

This article considers several instances of biblical reception in the science-fiction role-playing game Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games/Sony, 2017). The game’s characterisation of technology, science, and religion has led some commentators to understand Horizon Zero Dawn as presenting a firm rejection of religious narratives in favour of s…[Read more]

Introduction, Greek text, and English translation of 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John, a Byzantine question-and-answer dialogue between Abraham and John set after Jesus’s ascension.

What has proportion to do with humor or irony? And what do either of these have to do with being human? Jokes, laughter, and funniness connote excess, exaggeration, incongruity, dissonance, etc., the opposite of proportion–balance, symmetry, Aristotle’s golden mean. Yet, The Philosopher maintains, the wit has found the ideal moderate position b…[Read more]

Was Swift correct that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired” (Letter to a Young Gentleman)? If so, what recourse is there to change attitudes especially among those who continue to fervently believe unjustified claims and act upon them in a way that affects other people? I will answer the…[Read more]

The discovery of mirror neurons in both primates and humans has led to an enormous amount of research and speculation as to how conscious beings are able to interact so effortlessly among one another. Mirror neurons might provide an embodied basis for passive synthesis and the eventual process of further communalization through empathy, as…[Read more]

I argue that the overt subjugation in the system of American slavery and its subsequent effects offer a case study for an existentialist analysis of freedom, oppression and humor. Concentrating on the writings and experiences of Frederick Douglass and the existentialists Simone De Beauvoir and Lewis Gordon, I investigate how the concepts of…[Read more]

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer’s notion of “seriousness” and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartr…[Read more]