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From the Light and into the Dark: the Transformation to the Early Middle Ages
No full textFrom a historic perspective, the period of Roman rule and the following Middle Ages are polar opposites. For most, the city of Rome and the Western Roman Empire represent a time of advancement for the Mediterranean world while the Middle Ages are viewed as a regression of sorts for Europe. The reasons explaining the underlying cause of this transition from the Western Roman Empire to the Middle Ages are numerous but this paper will specifically focus on the practices started by the Romans themselves and how they contributed to the rise of the Early Middle Ages on the Italian Peninsula. More specifically, economic turmoil and urbanization following the 3rd century crisis in the city of Rome laid the groundwork for social, legislative, and political changes that thread the path to the fundamental characteristics of the Middle Ages. Changing views of the city and the countryside, the construction of latifundia and villas, and the passing of legislation that restricted the rights of laborers, in addition to other transformations in late Rome, all contributed to the decentralized governance, rural life, and serfdom that are characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to illustrate that despite the major differences that exist between the Roman period and the Middle Ages, the practices of the late Western Roman Empire were often directly carried over into the Middle Ages and, as a result, for one to truly understand the origins of the Middle Ages, it is essential to comprehend the traditions started by the late Romans
D.H. Lawrence's Death Eaters in Women in Love
No full textThis paper offers a Derridian reading of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, with excerpts from the novel’s prequel The Rainbow. Through Derrida’s ideas of difference and the imaginary origin, I explore the relationship between female reproductive potential and representation as means to a female sexual power, which Lawrence’s men attempt to destroy and subvert. By attacking realms of representation, like art, the novel’s male characters seek to dominate female reproductive power to assert patriarchal visions of modernity and modernism. These violent sexual dichotomies are found in the male characters’ relations to modern capitalism/colonialism and the modernist artistic project to “make it new.” Their masculine worldviews are perpetuated by consuming the death of representation, but they can never destroy the feminine cycle of reproductive potential and life
Véronique Altglas, From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage
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Deborah A. Thomas. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham: Duke UP
No full textBlack Preaching in Brown Places: Towards the Development of a Black Mestizo Homiletic
No full textMany Black neighborhoods across the United States are becoming increasingly Latin@. Black churches in these neighborhoods will need to adjust their ministry practices in order to build community amongst this changing demographic. Borrowing Elizondo’s notion of mestizo as one who can operate as both insider and outsider in different cultural locations, this paper begins to reimagine Black preaching in the churches that serve these changing neighborhoods. Using the postcolonial themes of marginality, hybridity, and self-reflexivity, this paper proposes the beginnings of a Black Mestizo homiletic that looks to merge Black and Latin@ preaching traditions in order to form congregations representative of the community
Kimberly Bracken Long, ed., Feasting on the Word Worship Companion: Liturgies for Year B, Volume 2, Trinity Sunday Through Reign of Christ
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The Incongruous Self: Facing the Fallibility
No full textIn contrast to humor derived from incongruity between the reader's own expectations and perceptions in Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent," post-World War I literature is characterized by a internal incongruity wrought by the characters' own subjectivity. As the period following World War I fostered internal skepticism through recognition of one’s fallibility and faulty perspective, the characters’ discovery of their own incongruity fuels the transition from external to internal subjectivity in Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim" and Graham Greene's "Heart of the Matter." However, the contradiction manifests itself differently in each – via humor in "Lucky Jim" and tragedy in "The Heart of the Matter." More specifically, Lucky Jim’s Dixon represents the clash with absurdity through comical outward expression, while Scobie in The Heart of the Matter commits suicide in the face of his own contradiction
Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator: His Reliance on Societal Values, Limits in Inspiring Altruism, and Application in Today's Context
No full textIn his comprehensive overview of moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith made a key contribution through the concept of the “impartial spectator”—an imagined third party who allows an individual to objectively judge the ethical status of his or her actions. Also called the “man within the breast,” the impartial spectator is a tool through which individuals divide themselves into the “judge” and “the judged” to examine their own conduct in an unbiased manner. While Smith conceptualizes this imaginary figure as an embodiment of universal morality, and hence not limited to the values of one’s immediate community, I argue that this is largely impossible due to the character’s society-reliant nature. The impartial spectator is inevitably a local figure, a judge who, while objective, adjudicates based on the context of one’s immediate social milieu. Furthermore, due to his dependence on community norms, the impartial spectator is unable to motivate individuals to care for those outside conventional society’s concerns, and is ultimately restricted in his capacity to inspire moral improvement. Interestingly, however, the “man within the breast’s” society-driven nature seem less problematic and debilitating to Smith’s overall self-evaluation method in the context of today’s globalized, equality-driven world. His reliance on community norms does not serve as a key hindrance factor for inspiring altruism today, which demonstrates that Smith’s introspective technique may be better-suit for application in the present than in the philosopher’s time
Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848-1912. Durham: Duke UP.
No full textThe Role of Intellectual Property in Collaborative Research: Crossing the “Valley of Death” by Turning Discovery Into Health
No full textTechnology transfer is the process of transforming basic scientific discoveries into commercial products that can be sold to the public. Historically, the federal government has been the country’s largest funder of basic biomedical research through institutions such as the National Institute of Health (NIH). Private corporations utilize scientific knowledge generated at NIH to design drugs and medical devices that are then marketed to the American public. As a taxpayer funded institution, NIH has a fundamental responsibility to optimize the technology transfer process so that the American public receives the greatest return on its investment in the form of new healthcare products. Various laws passed in the 1980s have set up the technology transfer system to revolve around the dispensation of intellectual property rights. In recent years several prominent critiques of the technology transfer system’s use of intellectual property rights have emerged in academic literature. In order to assess the validity of these critiques I conducted ten oral history interviews with administrators at NIH that are deeply involved in the technology transfer process. This paper will demonstrate that many of the criticisms that are posed in academic literature do not impact research at NIH. However, interviews with officials at NIH indicate that there is still friction in the system that prevents the American public from receiving the maximum return on its investment