There are no religious phenomena, only religious interpretations of phenomena. But while the religious interpretation of phenomena refers to a particular form of human activity, this activity ...responds paradoxically to the imposition of a fundamental curb on any possible activity. That curb is encountered to the extent to which the religious hermeneutic imposes itself in the event of the appearance itself. In this sense the religious structure of experience is that which appears affectively and contingently as beyond the power of the self to regulate. In exploring the place of the self with respect to the religious phenomenon, this article explores the place of the self in its capacity and incapacity with respect to phenomenal objects. In working through this understanding of the self, the irreducible affectivity of the self's constitutive relations—specifically with respect to love, hope, awe, and anxiety—is discussed. As an affectively constituted being, the self recognizes itself as subject to an irreducibly foreign origin and destiny. In examining this position of a “passionate self” the article concludes with a phenomenology of fortune and contingency, which it is argued is fundamental to any understanding of the religious phenomenon.
Although traditional, unitary models of language standardisation have been prominent in minority languages, it is contended that this approach reproduces dominant language hierarchies and hegemonies, ...diminishes linguistic diversity and marginalises speakers who do not conform to prestige models. The polynomic model has been described as an alternative that is possibly more efficacious in minority language maintenance, revitalisation and revival. Focusing on the codification of written Irish, this article assesses the efficacy of unitary and polynomic models of codification. The Irish context offers a rich locus for the study of these issues, owing to the long-standing presence there of conflicting ideologies of uniformity and plurality with regard to codification of the written variety. These conflicting orientations are manifest in the development of the 1958 unitary written standard, in a recent review of this standard for writing, and in the rejection of this review in favour of a more unitary model. The article demonstrates that many ideological, pragmatic, pedagogical and political obstacles inhibit the effectiveness of standardisation efforts in minority language situations, whether efforts are based on unitary or polynomic principles.
This article presents an understanding of time and temporality as adverbial. In normal discourse we speak of time as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to ...live anachronistically or to be before her time. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untimely. Crucial to this is rhythm, and access to time so understood is acoustic rather than visual. We hear time, we do not see it, or if we do see time we do so only through its rhythmic, acoustic, and indeed musical structure. Discussing the Book of Ecclesiastes, philosophers such as Nancy and Lefebvre, as well as music theorists, this article articulates the different rhythms of the timely/untimely. It shows time as a living rhythm between the “energy of beginnings” and mechanicity.
This special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum emerged from the first Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium held at University College Dublin in June 2015. The Symposium, in turn, focused on ...themes that permeate research on the sociolinguistics of the Celtic languages, including intergenerational transmission; language and identity; language in education; language in the media and attitudes to linguistic variation.
Language revival often retains founding overt beliefs rooted in an ideological commitment to a specific language because of its role as the authentic, legitimate cultural vehicle of a distinct ...people. Revival is thus the reinstatement of cultural distinctiveness based on traditional language. Revivalists have afforded traditional language varieties prestige status based on perceived ethnolinguistic authenticity. However, after a century of language revivalism, some minoritised languages have regained some of their vitality through 'new speakers' who have no direct relationship with the traditional language. The ways that new speakers and 'learners' of displaced languages negotiate linguistic authenticity and ethno-cultural legitimacy in "late modernity" provide challenges to established perceptions about language revitalisation and regeneration of traditional speech communities and the belief in the prestige of 'native' speech as the target variety. This discussion draws on interviews with speakers of Irish and Manx Gaelic to analyse both their overt and more hidden beliefs about the utility and legitimacy of traditional and revival speech. It will argue that 'traditional' and 'new' speakers do not live parallel sociolinguistic realities in which they are sociolinguistically isolated from one another, but that contemporary speakers contest the prestige of both traditional and innovative varieties in a multifaceted fashion.
Phenomenology speaks not directly of phenomena but rather of the appearing of phenomena. In so speaking it moves from the level of things with generic or proper names to the level of universal terms. ...In speaking and thinking the phenomenon Phenomenology comes "after" in the twofold sense of being too late and desiring for that which is to come. This paper explores this place of phenomenology with respect to the relation of faith and reason, the manner of speaking phenomenologically and the affective and temporal situation of experience. Drawing on the pre-modern concept of the transcendentals and on an account of emphatic consciousness of things, this article argues that the future of phenomenology is as a form of metaphysics which remains focused on experience and the "promise" of things that guides and structures perception.
The Thorne hoop conjecture is an attempt to make precise the notion that gravitational collapse occurs if enough energy is compressed into a small enough volume, with the "size" being defined by the ...circumference. We can make a precise statement of this form, in spherical symmetry, using the Brown-York mass as our measure of the energy. Consider a spherical 2-surface in a spherically symmetric spacetime. If the Brown-York mass M{BY} and the circumference C satisfy C<2piM{BY}, then the system must either have emerged from a white hole or will collapse into a black hole. We show that no equivalent result can hold true using either the Liu-Yau mass M{LY} or the Wang-Yau mass M{WY}. This forms a major obstacle to any attempt to establish a Thorne-type hoop theorem in the general case based on either the Liu-Yau or the Wang-Yau mass.
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