In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

How do we know if animals can think? In extension of the previous debate on human-animal relations, this book analyzes the conditions and contexts of the scientific acquisition of our knowledge of animals. The current discussions within animal philosophy revolve around the three central questions of whether we can attribute a mind to animals, what…[Read more]

In current debates about the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals, knowledge about animals is often adopted from the sciences. However, this largely ignores the fact that relationships of this kind also exist in empirical animal research and that these constellations between researchers and the researched have both ethical and…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

“Steven Schroeder’s most recent collection of poems, Still, offers an amazing juxtaposition of imaginary elements and sensible phenomena that keeps the reader turning page after page in wonder. Poems of varied textures, from Zen-like shorts to lengthier narratives, offer shifts in perspective that surprise and delight, many with seasonal beauty or…[Read more]

The title of this collection, taken from the poem with which the collection closes, calls to mind Helen Frankenthaler’s description of the places where colors converge on raw canvas in her “soak-stain” paintings. That closing poem is a meditation on her “Seven Forms of Ambiguity” in the “1940s to Now” section of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Ark…[Read more]

I contend that the modern discipline of Sociology, as understood in the West, has evolved into a socio-philosophy from within an existential system of theology. Two systems of philosophy confront one another in the contemporary world, i.e., classical philosophy based on the authority of Hellenistic philosophy and an existential philosophy based on…[Read more]

I contend that the modern discipline of Sociology, as understood in the West, has evolved into a socio-philosophy from within an existential system of theology. Two systems of philosophy confront one another in the contemporary world, i.e., classical philosophy based on the authority of Hellenistic philosophy and an existential philosophy based on…[Read more]

I contend that the modern discipline of Sociology, as understood in the West, has evolved into a socio-philosophy from within an existential system of theology. Two systems of philosophy confront one another in the contemporary world, i.e., classical philosophy based on the authority of Hellenistic philosophy and an existential philosophy based on…[Read more]

मध्यप्रदेश हाईकोर्ट ने 27 जनवरी, 2012 के अपने फैसले में राज्य की भाजपा सरकार द्वारा स्कूलों में ‘गीता सार’ पढ़ाए जाने को उचित ठहराते हुए कहा था कि गीता हिंदू धर्म ग्रंथ नहीं, बल्कि भारतीय दर्शन है। यह टिप्पणी उसी संदर्भ में है।

प्रमोद रंजन इस लेख के माध्यम से सामाजिक कार्यकर्ता राणा बैनर्जी के बहुमुखी प्रतिभा को सामने लाते हैं। पटना के संस्कृतिकर्मी राणा बैनर्जी ने वर्ष 2008 में गंगा में कूदकर आत्महत्या कर लिया था। जब कवि और लेखक आत्महत्या करने लगे तो यह समझ लेना चाहिए कि देश पर, समाज पर गहरा संकट आनेवाला है। आत्महत्या स्वजनित नहीं होती अपितु परिस्थितिजन्य होती है…[Read more]

This chapter is from the *The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Christianity in the middle East* (2021).

This chapter is from section five, The Story of Middle Eastern Christianity by Country and in the World Context.

In this chapter, the author argues that Christianity has a lengthy and deep history in that region of Arabia known today as…[Read more]

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” This essay contrasts the fragmented lyric self of modernism with current approaches to a lyric “we” and puts three conte…[Read more]

This chapter is part of a book that explores the theology, anthropology and sociology of so-called Insider Movements (IM). In this chapter the author gives an account of his field research in Asia Minor among Muslim-background believers (MBBs). The chapter also explores the original context of Christians in Antakya (Antioch) in the first century,…[Read more]

Although the prohibition of avodah zarah (literally, “strange/foreign worship,” but more loosely translated as “idolatry”) is included in both the Torah’s 613 mitzvos for Jews and in the seven Noahide laws, many authorities maintain that the exact parameters of the prohibition differ when applied to Jews versus when applied to non-Jews. There is…[Read more]