This article fuses a survey of the play's most important standard interpretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of England's ...catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play's reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation discourse. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of perspective and the dying Hamlet's request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end of the play. Keywords: Shakespeare, Hamlet, revenge, modern subject, reformation discourse, meta-drama, manipulation of perspective, never-ending narrative loop Clanek zdruzuje pregled najpomembnejsih sandardnih interpretacij s tistimi vidiki, ki bi lahko bili se posebej fascinantni o tem tekstu: konflikt angleske katoliske preteklosti s protestantsko kulturo v obdubje zgodnje modern, meta-dramatsko dimenzijo igre, teatralicnost renesancnega dvornega zivljenja, itd. Kljucne besede: Shakespeare, Hamlet, mascevanje, pripovedna zanka, reformacijski diskurz, meta-drama
In this paper, Eric Santner’s theory of political flesh is appreciated in its relation to philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In the first part of the paper, Santner’s speculative concept ...is brought into conversation with the debate on embodiment, incarnation, and a hermeneutics of the flesh. Santner’s conception of the flesh is shown to follow a logic of excarnation, or rather disincorporation, and thus to be at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that attempt to think body and spirit together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner’s theory lies precisely in its antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being – a dimension overlooked by most recent theories of embodiment. The second part of the article develops a reading of Protestantism as a “religion of the flesh” in line with Santner’s argument. In doing so, it is shown that the Protestant narrative of self-modernization and progress (Hegel’s “religion of freedom”) can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner, revealing a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism. In a re-reading of the theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and John Calvin, it is shown that the Protestant understanding of the church can be made transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. In the end, the question is raised whether this figure of an “undead” Christ might not be interpreted as a paradoxological intervention in the sense of Eric Santner.
Containing detailed readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, as well as poetry and prose, this book provides a major historical and critical reassessment of the relationship between ...early modern Protestantism and drama. Examining the complex and painful shift from late medieval religious culture to a society dominated by the ideas of the Reformers, Adrian Streete presents a fresh understanding of Reformed theology and the representation of early modern subjectivity. Through close analysis of major thinkers such as Augustine, William of Ockham, Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, the book argues for the profoundly Christological focus of Reformed theology and explores how this manifests itself in early modern drama. Moving beyond questions of authorial 'belief', Streete assesses Elizabethan and Jacobean drama's engagement with the challenges of the Reformation.
This paper offers a critique of certain aspects of the spiritual formation movement as it has been manifested in evangelical churches in the past few decades. My experience with this facet of the ...spiritual formation movement has grown out of my former ministry as a pastor in a large, evangelical, suburban congregation and out of my current role as a professor serving at a Christian university and seminary. It is a friendly critique, offered by a person who has been directly involved in facilitating spiritual formation in various settings within the evangelical community. Taken together, the points of unease I will identify are not a “cease and desist” order, but rather a cautionary word for all of us who seek to press the spiritual formation movement forward. These points of unease include: 1) unease about a dualistic tendency to value spirituality at the expense of the material world, 2) unease with devotional practices grown in the soil of monastic Catholicism rather than Protestantism, 3) unease with a rhetorical strategy that sharply distinguishes between being and doing, 4) unease with devotional practices that fail the “soccer mom” test, and 5) an unease with certain ways of using Scripture which are devotionally fruitful but hermeneutically faulty.
As well as outlining the shape of Welsh religious history generally, this volume describes the development of Calvinistic Methodist thought up to and beyond the secession from the Established Church ...in 1811, and the way in which the Evangelical Revival impacted the Older Dissent to create a vibrant popular Nonconformity. Along with analysing aspects of theology and doctrine, the narrative assesses the contribution of such key personalities as William Williams Pantycelyn, Thomas Charles of Bala andThomas Jones of Denbigh, and the Nonconformists Titus Lewis, Joseph Harris 'Gomer', George Lewis, David Rees and Gwilym Hiraethog. Following the notorious 'Treachery of the Blue Books' of 1847 and the Religious Census of 1851, Anglicanism regained ground, and among the themes treated in the latter chapters are the influence of High Church Tractarianism and the Broad Church 'Lampeter Theology' in the parishes. The volume concludes by assessing the intellectual culture of evangelicalism personified by Lewis Edwards and Thomas Charles Edwards, and describes the challenges of Darwinism, philosophical Idealism and a more critical attitude to the biblical text.
Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to ...Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.
In The Rise and Fall of Protestant
Brooklyn , Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C.
Altschuler tell the story of nineteenth-century Brooklyn's
domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in
...Puritan New England. This lively history describes the
unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse
groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the twentieth
century.
Before it became a prime American example of urban ethnic
diversity, Brooklyn was a lovely and salubrious "town across the
river" from Manhattan, celebrated for its churches and upright
suburban living. But challenges to this way of life issued from the
sheer growth of the city, from new secular institutions-department
stores, theaters, professional baseball-and from the licit and
illicit attractions of Coney Island, all of which were at odds with
post-Puritan piety and behavior.
Despite these developments, the Yankee-Protestant hegemony
largely held until the massive influx of Southern and Eastern
European immigrants in the twentieth century. As The Rise and
Fall of Protestant Brooklyn demonstrates, in their churches,
synagogues, and other communal institutions, and on their
neighborhood streets, the new Brooklynites established the ethnic
mosaic that laid the groundwork for the theory of cultural
pluralism, giving it a central place within the American Creed.