University of St Andrews: Journal Hosting Service
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Poem: Churches Will Open for Private Prayer
No full textWhen COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were eased in the UK in June 2020, one of the first measures to be introduced was to allow places of worship to open for private individual prayer. This poem reflects on the experience of visiting a church building for the first time following this re-opening, albeit with social distancing and other safety measures in place
An Unfortunate Outcome of Banning Statistical Support for Belief
Full text linkThe concept of Banning Statistical Support for Belief (BSSB) is often used to respond to the lottery paradox. This paper will claim that th the rational status is response is inadequate due to BSSB having strong consequences on everyday beliefs. The paper will first make a case for avoiding BSSB due to its impact on everyday beliefs. Second, the paper will discuss motivations for adopting BSSB. I will then discuss distinctions between credence and beliefs as attitudes, aiming to prove that since many of our beliefs are statistically based, BSSB is highly impactful. I will finish by addressing objections and clarifying why it is important to care about the consequences BSSB poses
Imagination, theology, and literature (D. W. D. Shaw memorial lecture 2022)
No full textIn the first annual D. W. D. Shaw memorial lecture, delivered on 9 February 2022 Prof Paul Fiddes considers the human capacity for imagination, theology, and the literary arts. Looking at the interplay between creativity and order, Fiddes underscores the indispensable role that images play in theology alongside its commitment to concepts, and argues for the necessity of imagination for the work of theology as a response to God’s self-revelation. Without it, he contends, theology finds itself devoid of movement and life, stuck in an attempt to enforce complete conceptual control on imagination’s creations
The Westminster Confession: Unfinished business
Full text linkIn an extended study, Dr Macdonald gives an historical account of the changing status of the Westminster Confession of Faith in the Scottish Reformed churches. He focuses in particular on the debate within the Church of Scotland about what place a seventeenth-century statement of faith should have in a modern church, and whether the Westminster Confession should continue to be considered the Kirk’s ‘principal subordinate standard’ or simply a ‘historic statement of the faith of the Reformed Church’. In examining the issues and the work that went into formulating potential ways forward on this, Dr Macdonald shares useful insights as to the purpose and value of confessions and statements of faith. He concludes by suggesting that the status of the Westminster Confession is an issue the Church of Scotland would do well to return to.Note: This paper was originally published in Theology in Scotland vol. 23, no. 2 (2016) 
AN EXISTENTIAL MANIFESTO INSPIRED BY ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK: AUTOGRAPHY, ABSOLUTE STYLE AND THE ANTHROPOLOGIST
Full text linkThe Collins English Dictionary (2021) defines autography as “the writing of something in one\u27s own handwriting; something handwritten” and as “the precise reproduction of an illustration or of writing”. I use the word “autography” in another sense. I define it as a journal of existence. It does not consist of an autobiography that builds up a story of one’s life, that is to say a life in a constructed form. Neither is it an auto-ethnography that concerns personal experiences of the ethnographer, with a view to shedding light on social and cultural realities. Neither is an autography a journal or notebook written by an ethnographer during his ethnographic fieldwork, specifically about his investigation. An autography is a text by oneself on oneself, written as continuously as possible, without any link to a specific field site, in the form of a journal and fragments, to understand not social facts, but one human being. Through this form, which is not reworked into a narrative story, it is existence that offers itself as a field for study
Borrowed Dreams: Joseph Cornell and the Archive as Psychic Imprint
Full text linkDuring the first screening of Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1936, the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí forcefully knocked over the film projector in a rage, accusing Cornell of having stolen the idea for the film from Dalí’s own subconscious. A foundational figure in American surrealism, Cornell had produced a new and startling variation on the compilation film. Rose Hobart represented the first attempt by the filmmaker to produce an intimate psychological exploration through found images drawn from the informal archive of the junk shop, a dramatic break from the compilation filmmakers for whom the archive primarily served an evidentiary role. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer surveys Cornell’s films, focusing on the artist’s relationship to his own rough, provisional archive as a site of psychic provocation. This video essay addresses the oneiric singularity of Cornell\u27s films by visually remixing the films, integrating them alongside compilation, surrealist, and trance films, and in doing so explores Cornell’s use of the hard cut to suggest reaction, contrast and equivalence. 
The Student Experience with Dating within the COVID-19 Pandemic: Dating Apps, Isolation and Blurred Lines
Full text linkWhen the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic was declared in the UK in March 2020, I, like many others, turned to Tinder and began having conversations with strangers , whilst confined to the four walls of my bedroom, as emotions of isolation, and anxiety grew nationally (YoungMinds, 2021). As restrictions eased, I forgot I had the app, but come September, with Covid-19 guidelines tightening again when I returned to university, I found myself turning to Tinder, where I met my boyfriend. My personal experience with dating. This made me reflect about the ways in which university students have been dating within the pandemic, inspiring me to have conversations with my peers. The main topics that arose was how to define dating, with the distinction between dating and a relationship, and why people were turning to dating apps, when Burton and Baym claim that the people are unable to make real connections with others online, viewing profiles as personas (Baym, 2015; Burton, 2020). We also discussed the emotional impact of the pandemic towards attitudes of dating, the timing of relationships changing, and finally what it was actually like to go on dates throughout the pandemic
Remediating the Archive: Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Film Quilts as Forms of Material Knowledge
Full text linkThis article argues that the quilting works of Sabrina Gschwandtner, which sew archival 16 mm film strips into complex and colourful visual patterns, offer an understanding of film archives as embodied sites of historical, gendered, knowledge. As cinematic objects, Gschwandtner’s film quilts veer from and expand the conception of cinema as a projected medium, while the artisanal labour of sewing spatializes the process of editing, “lending [it] a concreteness” (Walley 2020, 327). The quilts, I argue, embody a form of archiveology, drawing on “archival material to produce knowledge about how history has been represented and how representations […] are actually historical in themselves and have anthropological value” (Russell 2018, 22). The historical knowledge of these objects is no longer transmitted didactically and orally (as in the found footage documentaries she uses), but rather through the very materiality of the quilting process. Gschwandtner’s artisanal work mirrors the gendered labour of film editors, while reflecting on the historical significance of quilts as carriers of information transmitted in gendered and racialised circles. I contend that the film quilts are sensory vectors of archival knowledge. While offering crucial considerations on the disregard of American institutions (and archives) towards feminized artisanal labour, Gschwandtner’s work also remediates these archival materials, calling attention to their deterioration as slowly decaying, sensory objects. This remediation allows me to consider archives as sites of sensorial interactions and constantly evolving historical and embodied knowledge
Diasporic Archives and Hauntological Accretions
Full text linkCentering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers.