Jesus said, This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. John assures us several times in our sermon text that our sins will be cleansed and forgiven. If we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses from sin. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive our sins and cleanse us. If anyone sins, we have an Advocate... Read more
When John first talks about sin, he connects it to fellowship and walking in the light. He does not say, “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and as a result we have fellowship with one another.” He says, “If we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another; and as we walk in fellowship, the blood of Jesus cleanses us.” The sequence is not walk – cleansing – fellowship; it’s walk –... Read more
Stallybrass and White critize Bakhtin for conceptualizing the fair purely as a place of communal celebration, ignoring the commercial activities of the fair: “In developing this concept, Bakhtin succumbs to that separation of the festive and the commercial which is distinctive of capitalist rationality as it emerged in the Renaissance. As the bourgeoisie laboured to produce the economic as a separate domain, partitioned off from its intimate and manifold interconnectedness with the festive calendar, so they laboured conceptually to re-form... Read more
Stallybrass and White again: The classical form “was far more than an aesthetic standard or model.” It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical body “structured, from the inside as it were, the characteristically ‘high’ discourses of philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, as well as literature, as they emerged from the Renaissance. In the classical discursive body were encoded those regulated systems which were... Read more
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ( The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ) summarize a point from Bakhtin: “Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two forms of iconography ‘embodied’ utterly contrary registers of being. To begin with, the classical statue was always mounted on a plinth which meant that it was elevated, static and monumental.... Read more
Theologians normally treat the incarnation-to-burial of Jesus as the humiliation of the Son; resurrection-to-ascension exaltation. That’s correct, but there are other angles too. God hid His face behind a veil from the time of Moses to the incarnation. This is His humiliation – we might almost say, a display of His modesty. (He does not, like Orual, hide to veil his ugliness but His beauty.) At the incarnation, the Father is seen in the Son, and the Word tabernacles in... Read more
Andre Gide wrote: “Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet’s character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int a metaphysics whose remarkable fruit seems to me ‘To be or not to be.’ I already perceive all of German subjectivism in the celebrated monologue . . . . On his return from Germany, he has lost his will; he... Read more
Plays might be promoted as a kind of opiate of the masses: Mass entertainment that keeps them from more violent entertainments like rioting and pillaging. This could be problematic, if the entertainments were too heady for most people to follow. Thomas Heywood (1612) suggested that playwrights should “ayme . . . to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections, to present them with the... Read more
How regulated was Shakespeare’s own theater? And for what reasons? Patterson highlights various reasons for closing or permitting theaters: audience composition, including the fear that a large collection of workers might be distruptive; public health; economic concerns; religious and moral concerns, especially Sabbatarian; and “a shifting and elusive imperative to political surveillance, shifting according to the relative stability or instabiity of the larger political environment.” Mostly, she finds that the regulation of the theater was sporadic and inconsistent: “The major... Read more
Shakespeare’s fortunes in the US were, understandably, different from in England. Initially, Shakespeare was America’s most popular playwright, appealing to a wide sector of the American populace. Patterson notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century ‘Shakespeare’ had become a cultural icon, the property only of the ‘legitimate theater,’ if indeed of the theater at all; for his plays had been effectively transferred into an academic safety-deposit . . . . (more…) Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In