'Politics, Passion, Prejudice: Alice Childress's Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White'

Cashman, N. (2009). 'Politics, Passion, Prejudice: Alice Childress's Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White', Journal of American Studies, 43, 3, pp. 407?423 Sponsorship: APRS

The Mongol mission : narratives and letters of the Franciscan missionaries in Mongolia and China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Translated by a nun of Stanbrook Abbey.

http://www.archive.org/details/mongolmission008646mbp

Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life: A Description of the Project

John Templeton Foundation

Narratives of Holiness Identity: The "Sanctified Person" in the Church of the Nazarene

This dissertation is an exercise in practical theology, which investigates and responds to the problem of changing holiness identity in the Church of the Nazarene. The first part of the study is an empirical investigation into the social context of contemporary Nazarene holiness identity and practices among Nazarenes in three congregations located in the Northeast United States. Previous research relied too heavily on secularization and sect-church theory to understand the dynamics of religious identity change among Nazarenes. The theological result was a pessimistic appraisal of the future possibilities of holiness identity and practice in the Church of the Nazarene. This study employs an alternative theory—Nancy T. Ammerman's theory of narrative religious identity—to understand the dynamics of lived religious life within these congregations and to identify the various holiness narratives at play. Ammerman's theory facilitates an empirical description of the multiple holiness identities emerging out of the social contexts of these Nazarene congregations and offers a way to account for identity change. At the heart of this research is the theoretical notion that a particular religious identity, in the case of the Church of the Nazarene, the "sanctified person," emerges out of a particular ecclesial context characterized by religious narratives and practices that shape this identity. Chapter one reviews the problem of holiness identity in the Church of the Nazarene and offers an analysis of recent sociological attempts to understand the changing identity among Nazarenes. Chapter two draws on sociological research to describe and depict the range of views of holiness held by some contemporary Nazarenes. Chapter three identifies the varieties of holiness identity within the three Nazarene congregations that are part of the study. Chapter four investigates the social sources that shape the various holiness identities discovered in these congregations. Chapter five is a description of the many ways religious narratives are enacted and engaged within these congregations. The second part of the study is a theological critique of contemporary Nazarene holiness identity. Chapter six draws on the theory of narrative identity proposed by Nancy Ammerman and outlines a theoretical model which describes the social conditions necessary to shape holiness identity, "the sanctified person," within the context of the local congregation. Finally, chapter seven draws on the theological resources of Mennonite scholar and historian John Howard Yoder to propose a way of construing and facilitating holiness identity formation that takes the ecclesiality of hoilness more seriously, emphasizes a clearer relationship between Jesus and the "Christlikeness" that is central to holiness, and highlights the importance of religious practices in the formation of a holiness identity.

Narratives in early Irish law tracts

This thesis presents a study of the 112 narratives collected from the Corpus Iuris Hibernici. The selection of narratives is based on criteria informed by modern narratological theories. The significant presence of narratives in early Irish law tracts appears at odds with the normal conception of law texts as consisting solely of provisions, and therefore needs to be accounted for. Since no systematic study has been conducted of these legal narratives, this thesis serves as an introduction by giving firstly an index of narratives and secondly a categorisation of them in terms of distribution, dates and functions. It then carries out a general analysis of the relationship between legal narratives and early Irish literature, and a selected case study of the relationship between legal narratives and the legal institutions in the context of which the narratives are located. It has become clearer, with the progress of argument, that the use of narratives was an integral part of legal writing in medieval Ireland; and the narratives, though having many idiosyncratic features of themselves, are profoundly connected with the learned tradition at large. The legal narratives reveal the intellectual background and compositional concerns of medieval Irish jurists, and they formed a crucial part of the effort to accommodate law tracts into the dynamic tradition of senchas. Two appendices are included at the end: one consists of translations of 34 narratives from the index, and the other is a critical edition of one of the narratives discussed in detail, together with translations of some relevant passages.

Hidden land and changing landscape: Narratives about Mount Khangchendzonga among the Lepcha and the Lhopo

This article explores contemporary ‘hidden land’ narrative constructs of Máyel Lyáng and Beyul Dremojong in Sikkim, India, as conceived by the Lepcha and the Lhopo, two ‘scheduled tribes’. Lepcha and Lhopo narratives about these hidden lands in Mount Khangchendzonga inform us about their contemporary and historical, indigenous and Buddhist contexts and the interactions between these contexts. Lhopo perspectives on the hidden Beyul Dremojong echo classical Tibetan Buddhist ‘revealed treasure’ guidebooks and exist within the complex and reciprocal relationship between the Lhopo and the land they inhabit; development initiatives are understood to have caused illness and death in the Lhopo community of Tashiding, often referred to as the geographical ‘center’ of Beyul Dremojong. Contemporary Lepcha comprehensions of Máyel Lyáng, described in oral narratives within an ethnic community whose cosmology is intimately connected with Mount Khangchendzonga, today show some influence of Lhopo interpretations of Beyul Dremojong and the treasure texts; they also reflect Lepcha fears about cultural dispersion. Present-day narratives about both hidden lands reference notable political events in modern Sikkimese history (encounters with the British; the Chinese occupation of Tibet).

Daniel Giovannangeli, La Passion de l’origine, Paris :Galilée, 1995, 137 p.

Paris

Metaphors and metamorphoses: narratives of identity during times of crisis

The narrative of transformative crisis appears in both autobiographical and fictional accounts of individual lives; it typically involves a difficult or traumatic episode and a period of self-questioning out of which a person emerges more able and more emotionally mature than before (Booker, 2005; Erikson, 1968; Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1995). The present study used interviews to elicit 22 narratives about crises experienced between the ages of 25 and 40, and about any developmental transformation and change that surrounded these crises. Analysis revealed a common four-phase process to the crisis episodes, common metaphors and recurrent descriptions of identity metamorphosis, ie. of ‘becoming a new person’. Comparison of these findings with theory on fictional plots shows a clear parallel between the four-phase process of crisis found in the current study and the ‘rebirth’ plot described by Booker (2005). The theoretical significance of these findings and interpretations is discussed.

The Great War on the small screen: televisual narratives of the First World War.

In Britain since the 1960s television has been the site where the Western Front of popular culture has clashed with the Western Front of history. This talk will examine the ways in which those involved in the production of historical documentaries for this most influential media have struggled to communicate the stories of the First World War to British audiences. From the landmark epic series The Great War (BBC, 1964) up to more recent controversial productions such as The Trench (BBC, 2002) and Not Forgotten: The Men Who Wouldn't Fight (BBC, 2008), Emma Hanna will give an overview of the production, broadcast and reception of a number of British television documentaries to examine the difficult relationship between the war's history and its popular memory. [From the Author]

Bystander Narratives: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee and the Holocaust

J.M. Coetzee’s novels are suffused with a pervasive, though often oblique, Holocaust awareness. Direct references to the event and to the historical era to which it belongs, subtle stylistic and thematic echoes of Holocaust writing, and the recurrent mobilization of Holocaust imagery in Coetzee’s novels all contribute to suggest the significance of the event to the author’s work and thought. Providing Coetzee with a lens through which to view the contemporary situation, both local and global, the Holocaust offers Coetzee a means by which difficult and complex questions of ethics and historiographical truth may be approached. Above all, the Holocaust and its representation contribute to Coetzee’s exploration of the dilemmas of translating the traumatic lived experience of atrocity – including, but not limited to, life in apartheid South Africa – into narrative form. Taken as a whole, Coetzee’s oeuvre initially anticipates and later responds to, in characteristically oblique fashion, the narrative project(s) facing post-apartheid South Africa as the newly-democratic nation sought to make sense of its past through a variety of means, the most important of which was the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Implicitly challenging the TRC’s findings as well as its narrative assumptions, the Coetzean oeuvre accordingly invites being read as offering a continuous and evolving counter-narrative to the TRC and its construction of a narrative of the apartheid past for the post-apartheid nation. In utilizing the Holocaust, its representations, and the reception thereof to frame his response to apartheid, Coetzee implicates both in a critique of the Western model of modernity, suggesting, in the process, the importance of reconfiguring modernity in a more ethical shape.