By Julia Liu, Wren McMillan, Ann Rayburn In our group discussions, we started by understanding the commonalities between different visions and thinking about why they are in common. One aspect we found across multiple visions is the aspect of retelling. The vision is not just for the visionary to keep, but to spread it to other people so they can witness it too. The visionary is in a sense only…
So we did something a little different for this post: I asked questions to Wren and Julia, and I recorded their answers. So here’s that. Benjamin makes an implicit distinction between gore and violence, saying that gore ≠ violence, but how much do you believe gore adds to violence? Wren: She remembered Niles saying something important about bloodshed and its ability to impurify the body by mixing the self with…
Introduction “The ta’ziyah drama of the betrayal and murder of Imam Hussayn does not cease to bring an Iranian audience to tears no matter how many times they have seen the martyrdom enacted. On the contrary. They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” Susan Sontag opens an incredibly interesting box with…
by Kaedy Puckett, Clare Kemmerer, Dannie Griggs, and Maya Ordonez
The search for a “perfect moral system” to live one’s life by is a question that has baffled philosophers since the beginning of time, and the question of how to create a set of laws to bind a just society often follows. Throughout history religious texts have acted as moral codes and stand-in legal systems, the Bible is no exception. Its stories and messages have been used as a…
Of all the fascinating passages in The Life of St. Margaret, the passage that most gave me pause was Margaret’s interaction with Rufus (the “brother of the devil”) in the form of a dragon. As a student who has had relatively little interaction with hagiography, I had rarely encountered dragons in Christian texts; as such, I decided to dig a little deeper into the tradition of battling dragons within Christian…
Reading Augustine’s story of Alypius just before reading Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag raises several rather fruitful questions, two of which we find particularly interesting: first, how have the ethics of witnessing violence changed since the 4th century, and second, how does Alypius’ experience fit in with Sontag’s conception of the three basic viewpoints from which one can relate to violence? Though Alypius recognizes the moral dangers…
While Andreas’ account of Jesus’ miracles in parts V, VI, and VII is certainly not the most gripping passage of the poem, it is indeed one of the most fascinating in terms of scriptural interpretation. In these scenes, Andreas is confronted by “The Lord of the angels, Saviour of Men” (engla þeoden, / neregend fira)1 in the form of a “Sentinel of the sea” (weges weard: the “ward of the journey/‘way’”),…
Group: Julia Liu, Ann Rayburn, Wren McMillan This week, we have opted to explore the The Life of St. Margaret through three different poetic styles. The first poem, “Untitled” by Julia Liu, utilizes a free verse structure. The next, another untitled piece by Ann Rayburn, is also in free verse, but is intensely inspired by the works of e.e. cummings and makes ample use of formatting elements. The third poem,…
In this post I will very briefly discuss the discourse surrounding the ethics of the role of emotion in testimony of suffering/evil. This stuff is incredibly complex- I’ve just included some things I found interesting. Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil- was written with an apathetic tone which was met with intense criticism and accused of “‘heartlessness’…
