Female sexuality today: challenging cultural repression Robert T. Francoeur In the first millennium B.C.E., human cultures clearly experienced an Axial Period in a striking transformation of human consciousness. The transformation occurred independently in three geographic regions: in China, in India and Persia, and in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Israel and Greece. In this cultural transformation, […]
Category: Cross Currents
What went wrong? Feminism and freedom from the prison of gender roles Rita M. Gross In his novel The Town Beyond the Wall, Elie Wiesel tells the story of a time when God and humans changed places and the human, now God, refused to revert to the original order. But after infinite amounts of time, […]
When Theology’s God Rushes In. . – Books – Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of Theological Voice – book review Mark Bauerlein Laurence Paul Hemming Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of Theological Voice. University of Notre Dame Press 2002, $45.00 (cloth). IN THIS PONDEROUS, thorough book, Laurence Paul Hemming faces an acute problem: to determine the status […]
Brains, bodies, beliefs, and behavior William J. Carl, III Eight years ago a physician appeared in my office in Dallas, Texas and said, “Bill, I am in charge of the program next year for the International Society for the Advancement of Humanistic Studies in Medicine (now known as SHIM, the Society for Humanism in Medicine). […]
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Blackface as religious expression
Blackface as religious expression Lisa Silberman Brenner This past year, two young Jewish men toured North America with a seemingly odd pairing for a musical: the Book of Job and the politics of hip-hop’s meteoric rise to power in the entertainment business. In their original production Job: The Hip-Hop Musical, Eli Batalion and Jerome Saibil […]
Unmasking the differences: Nonviolence and social control Gloria Albrecht Stanley Hauerwas’s emphasis on the social construction of character within a community of particular stories and practices resonates with feminists who also reject the liberal concept of self However, for feminists a next step becomes critical. What is the character of those communities that form our […]
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a male Passion for violence
Mel Gibson’s alter ego: a male Passion for violence Bjorn Krondorfer The new millennium now has its own Jesus film: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. At its core is the visual display of a human body systematically beaten into a bloody pulp. Even before opening night, the movie has unleashed controversy, and the […]
Himala: the temptress, the virgin, and the elusive miracle Antonio D. Sison The Filipino film Himala (Miracle, dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1982) is set in a marginal barrio awash in folk religiosity and superstition. Desert-like, poor, and believed to be cursed, the veritable nowhereland craves for a miracle. The miracle incarnate is Elsa, a deceptively simple […]
Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ Scott Bader-Saye What is eaten in the Eucharist is the Jewish body of Christ. I was recently lecturing on the Gospel of Luke in my introductory Bible class, when a student raised her hand and asked, “When does the story stop being about Jews and […]
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Martin Buber and Jewish-Arab peace
Martin Buber and Jewish-Arab peace – German Jewish philosopher and theologian Dan Leon The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the establishment of the state of Israel were separated by about half a year (January and May 1949). Writing in 1938, Gandhi had not been sympathetic to the Jewish national home in Palestine since he thought […]