Download or read book The Rhetoric of Purity written by Mark A. Cheetham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-29 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Rhetoric of Purity, Mark Cheetham explores the historical and theoretical relations between early abstract painting in Europe and the notion of purity. For Gauguin, Serusier, Mondrian and Kandinsky - the pioneering abstractionists whose written and visual works Cheetham discusses in detail - purity is the crucial quality that painting must possess. Purity, however, was itself only a password for what Cheetham defines as an 'essentialist' philosophy inaugurated by Plato's vision of a perfect, non-mimetic art form and practised by the founders of abstraction. The essentialism of late nineteenth-century French discussion of 'abstraction', Cheetham argues, also infects the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky. These visions of abstraction are central to the development of Modernism and are closely tied to the philosophical traditions of Plato, Hegel and Schopenhauer. As a conclusion, Cheetham provides a postmodern reading of Klee's rejection of the rhetoric of purity and claims that Klee's refusal speaks to contemporary concerns in visual theory and culture. By acting as an antidote to the seductive appeal of purity in art and society, Cheetham's final critique of the trope of purity seeks to preserve the possibility of visual discourse itself.
Download or read book Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity written by Michael L. Butterworth and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Butterworth argues that baseball cannot be viewed as an innocent diversion or escape and that by promoting myths of citizenship and purity, post-9/11 discourse concerning baseball ironically threatens the health of the democratic system. Instead, he highlights how the game on the field reflects a more complex and diverse worldview, and he makes a plea for the game's recovery, both as a national pastime and as a site for celebrating the best of who we are and who we can be. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution written by Yohan Yoo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.
Download or read book Cosmologies of Pure Realms and the Rhetoric of Pollution written by Yohan Yoo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.
Download or read book Abstinence Cinema written by Casey Ryan Kelly and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding echoes of the evangelical movement’s abstinence-only rhetoric in everything from Easy A to Taken. Casey Ryan Kelly tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. As he demonstrates, these movies are particularly disempowering for young women, concocting plots in which the decision to refrain from sex until marriage is the young woman’s primary source of agency and arbiter of moral worth. Locating these regressive sexual politics not only in expected sites, like the Twilight films, but surprising ones, like the raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow, Kelly makes a compelling case that Hollywood films have taken a significant step backward in recent years. Abstinence Cinema offers close readings of movies from a wide spectrum of genres, and it puts these films into conversation with rhetoric that has emerged in other arenas of American culture. Challenging assumptions that we are living in a more liberated era, the book sounds a warning bell about the powerful cultural forces that seek to demonize sexuality and curtail female sexual agency.
Download or read book Power and Purity written by Mark T. Mitchell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Marriage Made in Hell Where did they come from, these furiously self-righteous “social justice warriors”? The growing radicalism and intolerance on the American left is the result of the strange union of Nietzsche’s “will to power” and a secularized Puritan moralism. In this penetrating study, Mark T. Mitchell explains how this marriage made in hell gave birth to a powerful and destructive political and social movement. Having declared that “God is dead,” Friedrich Nietzsche identified the “will to power” as the fundamental force of human life. There is no good or evil in a Nietzschean world—only the interests of the strong. Reason and the common good have no place there. The Puritan, by contrast, is morally rigorous, zealous to promote virtue and punish vice. America’s Puritan tradition, now thoroughly de-Christianized, has been reduced to a self-righteous moral absolutism that focuses on the faults of others, intent on avenging the sins of society, institutions, and the past in pursuit of the secularized ideals of equality, diversity, and social justice. As Nietzsche’s ideas have permeated our culture, a new generation of radicals has embraced the rhetoric and tactics of the will to power. But the strength of America’s residual Puritanism keeps them only half-baked Nietzscheans. More Christian than they care to admit, they cling to a moralism that Nietzsche would despise. The incoherence of their mixed creed dooms social justice warriors to perpetual frustration. Their identity politics generates ever more radical demands that can never be satisfied, further fracturing a society in desperate need of a unifying myth. We seem to be left with only two options, Mitchell concludes—Nietzsche or Christ, the will to power or the will to truth. The choice is bracingly simple.
Download or read book Against Purity written by Alexis Shotwell and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Fiction written by Wayne C. Booth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."
Download or read book Talking Back to Purity Culture written by Rachel Joy Welcher and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The generation born into evangelical purity culture has grown up, but many still struggle with its complicated legacy. Examining purity culture's teachings through the lens of Scripture, Rachel Joy Welcher charts a path forward in the ongoing debates about sexuality—one that rejects legalism and license alike, steering us back instead to the good news of Jesus.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Purity written by Raʻanan S. Boustan and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls written by Bruce McComiskey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovered in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Israelite documents, many of which were written by a Jewish sectarian community at Qumran living in self-exile from the priesthood of the Second Temple. This first book-length study of the rhetoric of these texts illustrates how the Essenes employed different rhetorics over time as they struggled to understand God’s word and their mission to their people, who seemed to have turned away from God and his purposes. Applying methods of rhetorical analysis to six substantive texts—Miqṣat Maʿaśeh ha-Torah, Rule of the Community, Damascus Document, Purification Rules, Temple Scroll, and Habakkuk Pesher—Bruce McComiskey traces the Essenes’ use of rhetorical strategies based on identification, dissociation, entitlement, and interpretation. Through his analysis, McComiskey uncovers a unique, fascinating story of an ancient religious community that had sought to reintegrate into Temple life but, dejected, instead established itself as the new covenant people of God for this world, only to turn ultimately to a trust in a metaphysical afterlife. Presenting forms of ancient Jewish rhetoric largely uninfluenced by classical rhetoric, this book broadens our understanding of human and religious rhetorical practice, even as it provides new insight into the events that led to the emergence of the Talmudic period. Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls will be useful to scholars working in the fields of religious rhetoric, Jewish studies, and early Christianity.
Download or read book Making Chastity Sexy written by Christine J. Gardner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though they are immersed in sex-saturated society, millions of teens are pledging to remain virgins until their wedding night. How are evangelical Christians persuading young people to wait until marriage? Christine J. Gardner looks closely at the language of the chastity movement and discovers a savvy campaign that uses sex to "sell" abstinence. Drawing from interviews with evangelical leaders and teenagers, she examines the strategy to shift from a negative "just say no" approach to a positive one: "just say yes" to great sex within marriage. Making Chastity Sexy sheds new light on an abstinence campaign that has successfully recast a traditionally feminist idea—"my body, my choice"—into a powerful message, but one that Gardner suggests may ultimately reduce evangelicalism’s transformative power. Focusing on the United States, her study also includes a comparative dimension by examining the export of this evangelical agenda to sub-Saharan Africa.
Download or read book Honor Patronage Kinship Purity written by David A. deSilva and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a milestone study, a careful explanation of four essential cultural themes offers readers a window into how early Christians sustained commitment to distinctly Christian identity and practice, and with it, a new appreciation of the New Testament, the gospel, and Christian discipleship.
Download or read book Superchurch written by Jonathan J. Edwards and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Fundamentalism is a doctrine and a discourse in tension. Fundamentalists describe themselves as both marginal and a majority. They announce the imminent end of the world while building massive megachurches and political lobbying organizations. They speak of the need for purity and separation from the outside world while continually innovating in their search for more effective and persuasive ways to communicate with and convert outsiders. To many outsiders, Fundamentalist speech seems contradictory, irrational, intolerant, and dangerously antidemocratic. To understand the complexity of Fundamentalism, we have to look inside the tensions and the paradoxes. We have to take seriously the ways in which Fundamentalists describe themselves to themselves, and to do that, we must begin by exploring the central role of “the church” in Fundamentalist rhetoric and politics. Drawing on five fascinating case studies, Superchurch blends a complex yet readable treatment of rhetorical and political theory with a sophisticated approach to Fundamentalism that neither dismisses its appeal nor glosses over its irresolvable tensions. Edwards challenges theories of rhetoric, counterpublics, deliberation, and civility while offering critical new insights into the evolution and continuing influence of one of the most significant cultural and political movements of the past century.
Download or read book James in Postcolonial Perspective written by K. Jason Coker and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James confronts the exploitive wealthy; it also opposes Pauline hybridity. K. Jason Coker argues that postcolonial perspectives allow us to understand how these themes converge in the letter. James opposes the exploitation of the Roman Empire and a peculiar Pauline form of hybridity that compromises with it; refutes Roman cultural practices, such as the patronage system and economic practices, that threaten the identity of the letter’s recipients; and condemns those who would transgress the boundaries between purity and impurity, God and “world.”
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Conservative U S Christianity written by Elizabeth Gish and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spiritual Modalities written by William FitzGerald and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores prayer as a rhetorical art, examining situations, strategies, and performative modes of discourse directed to the divine"--Provided by publisher.
