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Yes, I was bored.
May. 1st, 2010 01:25 pmMy thesis, as Wordle (excluding the bibliography).
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2010 09:05 pmWell. Tonight I sent off the corrected version of my thesis to the examiners. I feel - sort of numb, actually.
On another note, I have just come back from the Lent devotions at church; silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, compline and a very attenuated Benediction. Intense (and my knees are still stiff), but very good.
I find praying in front of the Sacrament powerful and helpful, but the bit of Benediction that always moves me most is right at the start, when the priest carries the Sacrament from the tabernacle to the monstrance on the altar, wrapped in the humeral veil and held close against his chest. It almost looks like the way you would carry a very small child, wrapped up against the cold, and somehow it speaks to me very powerfully of the way in which God, for our sake, empties himself of his power, becoming human, becoming even more vulnerable in the bread and wine of the sacrament, which he makes his flesh. And how that insignificant fragment of what seems to be bread is more powerful and worthy of reverence than - pretty much any thing, really.
On another note, I have just come back from the Lent devotions at church; silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, compline and a very attenuated Benediction. Intense (and my knees are still stiff), but very good.
I find praying in front of the Sacrament powerful and helpful, but the bit of Benediction that always moves me most is right at the start, when the priest carries the Sacrament from the tabernacle to the monstrance on the altar, wrapped in the humeral veil and held close against his chest. It almost looks like the way you would carry a very small child, wrapped up against the cold, and somehow it speaks to me very powerfully of the way in which God, for our sake, empties himself of his power, becoming human, becoming even more vulnerable in the bread and wine of the sacrament, which he makes his flesh. And how that insignificant fragment of what seems to be bread is more powerful and worthy of reverence than - pretty much any thing, really.
(no subject)
Dec. 29th, 2009 06:33 pmI am doing my corrections (starting with the ones I spotted myself, because it's less dispiriting that way).
I may die of boredom.
Also, my mother has just announced "It's precipitating - something."
But, on an unrelated note - GO STUART BROAD!
I may die of boredom.
Also, my mother has just announced "It's precipitating - something."
But, on an unrelated note - GO STUART BROAD!
Metal detectorist makes amazing Anglo-Saxon find!
He sounds a bit eccentric - but it's a fantastic find.
In other news, printing my thesis is rapidly becoming economically ruinous - college seems to have put their prices up!
He sounds a bit eccentric - but it's a fantastic find.
In other news, printing my thesis is rapidly becoming economically ruinous - college seems to have put their prices up!
One of these things is not like the other
Jun. 16th, 2009 02:48 pmMy bibliography currently has the following run of books at the top of p 24:
Reifenberg, Hermann. 1994. “Blut Christi: Liturgisch und frömmigkeitsgeschichtlich” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 2. 3rd edition. Ed Walter Kaspar, Konrad Baumgartner, et al. Freiburg/Br.: Herder.
Reynolds, P.L. 1989. “Bullitio and the God Beyond God: Meister Eckhart’s Trinitarian Theology,” New Blackfriars, 70, 169-181 and 235-244.
Rhodes, Ed. 2007. “Identifying Human Modification of River Channels” in Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 133-152.
Riches, Samantha JE and Salih, Sarah. 2002. “Introduction. Gender and holiness: performance and representation in the later Middle Ages” in Gender and Holiness. Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe. Edited by Samantha JE Riches and Sarah Salih. London: Routledge.
Ringler, Siegfried. 1980. Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur im Frauenklöster des Mittelalters. Stuttgart: Hiersemann.
Rordorf, Willy. 1980. ‘Martyre II : Théologie et spiritualité du martyre’ Dictionnaire spiritualité X. Ed M Viller, F Cavallera, A Derville et al. Paris: Beauchesne.
Well, it amuses me, anyway.
Reifenberg, Hermann. 1994. “Blut Christi: Liturgisch und frömmigkeitsgeschichtlich” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 2. 3rd edition. Ed Walter Kaspar, Konrad Baumgartner, et al. Freiburg/Br.: Herder.
Reynolds, P.L. 1989. “Bullitio and the God Beyond God: Meister Eckhart’s Trinitarian Theology,” New Blackfriars, 70, 169-181 and 235-244.
Rhodes, Ed. 2007. “Identifying Human Modification of River Channels” in Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 133-152.
Riches, Samantha JE and Salih, Sarah. 2002. “Introduction. Gender and holiness: performance and representation in the later Middle Ages” in Gender and Holiness. Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe. Edited by Samantha JE Riches and Sarah Salih. London: Routledge.
Ringler, Siegfried. 1980. Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur im Frauenklöster des Mittelalters. Stuttgart: Hiersemann.
Rordorf, Willy. 1980. ‘Martyre II : Théologie et spiritualité du martyre’ Dictionnaire spiritualité X. Ed M Viller, F Cavallera, A Derville et al. Paris: Beauchesne.
Well, it amuses me, anyway.
Looking back through some notes I made, about theoretical debates in ethnography - actually, the volume it came from was quite helpful, given that I was thinking about how to describe another culture, and the difficulty of explaining it in its terms rather than mine (which is one of the things the thesis is about. However for one article* a section of my notes reads:
OH 80S POSTMODERNISM! Writing is a totalizing will to power – 'to represent means to have a kind of magical power over appearances, to be able to bring into presence what is absent, and that is why writing, the most powerful means of representation, was called grammarye, a magical act' (I am not sure why he thinks magic is necessarily a bad thing; dangerous, maybe, but…) – writing 'increased out capacity to create totalistic illusions with which to have power over things or over others as if they were things' The answer is to be self-consciously fragmented, a la Benjamin and Adorno.
He then dissolves into a sort of mysticism - he rejects both the idea of thought as ascent and thought as descent, and speaks of his wish to evoke 'that stillness at the centre where there is neither higher nor lower, forward nor back, past nor future, when space and time cancel each other out in that familiar fantasy we all know as the everyday, commonplace world, that breach in time, that ever present, never present simultaneity of reality and fantasy that is the return to the commonsense world, floating like the Lord Brahma, motionless in the surfaceless void, all potentiality suspended within us in perfect realization, a return that is not a climax, terminus, stable image or homeostatic equilibrium, but a reduction of tension as the moment of transcendence simultaneously approaches, draws near, and departs without ever having arrived.' Which is… kind of nice, but perhaps he ought to try saying his prayers or reading Eckhart or Dante, rather than looking for God in Ethnography Today?
Though to be fair it is poor theology to think that God can't be in Ethnography Today. Expecting the Beatific Vision is pushing, it, though; for one thing I can't imagine how you could peer-review it.
In not-actually-related news, I really hate older scholarship on women mystics/ religious writers. While I can't blame anyone who thought Elsbeth von Oye (and her maggots) was mentally ill, it becomes clearly both patronising and misleading when dealing with someone like Catherine of Sienna, who may have thought about pain in ways we'd now rightly be cautious about, but was also an obviously brilliant and intelligent thinker. But the prize for total misogynist stupidity, and refusing to see what's in front of you, goes to two 'scholars' working on Julian of Norwich, who speculate that her visions 'were hallucinations showing precarious mental balance' (RH Thouless, 1928) or suggest that she suffered from "acute neurosis induced perhaps by an over-enthusiastic life of penance and solitude." (C Pepler, 1958). Pepler was a Dominican, apparently; I thought better of the OP.
I mean, Julian. She's the sanest and least neurotic theologian I can think of. Oh well: at least things have moved on in some respects. I was getting worked up about this as an example of How To Silence Women, but in this case, there's relatively little need to worry, it being so glaringly obvious that Julian Is More Awesome Than Them. All the same, though, how could they?
... I think I need to do something, eg eating, to bring my blood sugar level up! And also go and take books back to the library (town).
* Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. "Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document" in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122-140.
OH 80S POSTMODERNISM! Writing is a totalizing will to power – 'to represent means to have a kind of magical power over appearances, to be able to bring into presence what is absent, and that is why writing, the most powerful means of representation, was called grammarye, a magical act' (I am not sure why he thinks magic is necessarily a bad thing; dangerous, maybe, but…) – writing 'increased out capacity to create totalistic illusions with which to have power over things or over others as if they were things' The answer is to be self-consciously fragmented, a la Benjamin and Adorno.
He then dissolves into a sort of mysticism - he rejects both the idea of thought as ascent and thought as descent, and speaks of his wish to evoke 'that stillness at the centre where there is neither higher nor lower, forward nor back, past nor future, when space and time cancel each other out in that familiar fantasy we all know as the everyday, commonplace world, that breach in time, that ever present, never present simultaneity of reality and fantasy that is the return to the commonsense world, floating like the Lord Brahma, motionless in the surfaceless void, all potentiality suspended within us in perfect realization, a return that is not a climax, terminus, stable image or homeostatic equilibrium, but a reduction of tension as the moment of transcendence simultaneously approaches, draws near, and departs without ever having arrived.' Which is… kind of nice, but perhaps he ought to try saying his prayers or reading Eckhart or Dante, rather than looking for God in Ethnography Today?
Though to be fair it is poor theology to think that God can't be in Ethnography Today. Expecting the Beatific Vision is pushing, it, though; for one thing I can't imagine how you could peer-review it.
In not-actually-related news, I really hate older scholarship on women mystics/ religious writers. While I can't blame anyone who thought Elsbeth von Oye (and her maggots) was mentally ill, it becomes clearly both patronising and misleading when dealing with someone like Catherine of Sienna, who may have thought about pain in ways we'd now rightly be cautious about, but was also an obviously brilliant and intelligent thinker. But the prize for total misogynist stupidity, and refusing to see what's in front of you, goes to two 'scholars' working on Julian of Norwich, who speculate that her visions 'were hallucinations showing precarious mental balance' (RH Thouless, 1928) or suggest that she suffered from "acute neurosis induced perhaps by an over-enthusiastic life of penance and solitude." (C Pepler, 1958). Pepler was a Dominican, apparently; I thought better of the OP.
I mean, Julian. She's the sanest and least neurotic theologian I can think of. Oh well: at least things have moved on in some respects. I was getting worked up about this as an example of How To Silence Women, but in this case, there's relatively little need to worry, it being so glaringly obvious that Julian Is More Awesome Than Them. All the same, though, how could they?
... I think I need to do something, eg eating, to bring my blood sugar level up! And also go and take books back to the library (town).
* Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. "Post-modern ethnography: from document of the occult to occult document" in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122-140.
