Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Letter of Jeremiah"

AbstractAccording to Jer. xxxiv 7, the Babylonian army, while advancing towards Jerusalem ca. 589 B.C.E., conquered all Judean fortresses except for Azekah and Lachish. On the other hand, the contemporary Lachish letter 4 was interpreted as signifying that Azekah had fallen into the hands of the Babylonians before the letter had been sent to Lachish from a nearby fortress. A fourth century B.C.E. ostracon indicates that that fortress could be Maresha. Since there is no line of vision between Maresha and Azekah, the dramatic interpretation of the Lachish letter 4 should be rejected and thus the letter does not contradict Jer. xxxiv 7. A new interpretation to the Lachish letter 4 is proposed, from which the main conclusion is that the defenders of Maresha, being unable to see Azekah, looked out southwards for the signals from Lachish in order to afford themselves an early warning of an attack from the north.

From the Dublin Diocesan Archives a May 1958 letter from Maynooth Sociology Professor Jeremiah Newman to the Director of the Dublin Institute of Catholic Sociology appraises the contribution that a group of students about to be ordained for the Dublin archdiocese might best make to the Institute's work. A Cold War context of politico-ideological struggle links this peculiarly Irish epistle with an international literature concerning letters of recommendation and reports to police agencies about practitioners of sociology.

Abstract The essay examines the Spirit/letter antithesis used by Paul (also in Rom. 2:27-29 and 7:6) as parallel to outward and visible/hidden and circumcision of flesh/heart antitheses. A close study of the 2 Corinthians 3 context draws out the importance of the allusions to Jeremiah 31:31-34, Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26-27, and the use of Exodus 34:29-35. The conclusion reflects on the Spirit/letter contrast today, in shaping expectations when reading Scripture, with a reminder that systems of dogma and ecclesiastical structure can reinforce the letter and lose sight of the S/spirit.

Two apocrypha of Różewicz reading in context of afew verses of the Book of JeremiahThe article Two apocrypha of Różewicz reading in context of afew verses of the Book of Jeremiah discusses one of the key problems of the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz — intertextuality. Additional context is created by Bible. Thanks to an analysis of texts we can show, that it is possible to reinterpret two poems of Różewicz because of two verses of the Book of Jeremiah, The discussion is based on the poem [reality…] from the Regio collection and Unknown letter from Conversation with the Prince collection. Through the thesis that this poem is arecord of apositive epiphany the article attempts to argue with the accepted in literary criticism interpretation of Ryszard Nycz, Monika Witosz and Katarzyna Sawicka.

Abstract While biblical texts generally tend to conciliatory endings, this does not seem to hold true regarding the traumatic destruction of Jerusalem in 587 v.Chr. (cf. 2 Kgs 25//Jer 52). The article presents how some texts manage to transport comforting messages along with the reference to the catastrophic event, e.g. Lev 26; Dtn 4 and 28–32 as well as 2 Kgs 25 in the context of Jos 1 – 2 Kgs 17 and more specifically 2 Kgs 17–24. Jer 52 is interpreted in connection with Jer 39–40 and 29–33. Thr 1; 3 and 5 at the end open up some comfort in the hope of being heard by God. 2 Chr 36 presents the catastrophe as a way to new beginnings. Bar 4–5 and the Letter of Jeremiah can be read as continuations of the Book of Jeremiah with a stronger accent on hope.

AbstractUnderstanding the significance of the of the implanted word in James 1:21 has divided between two lines of interpretation: (1) those that invest it with cosmological significance and understand it as something akin to human reason or (2) those who invest it with soteriological significance and relate it to Christian conversion. The argument in this article supports the soteriological line of reasoning and attempts to demonstrate through an examination of pagan, Jewish and Christian sources that the implanted word in James conveys the notion of divine enablement, a notion that was especially suited for articulating the hope of divine enablement for faithfulness promised in the new covenant of Jeremiah.

In the apocryphal text of the Letter (Epistle) of Jeremiah (Ep Jer), a long list of reasons is given by the implied author as to why certain entities alleged to be gods are not in fact such. Brief summaries of the author’s various points characterise scholarly perspectives thereon. What has been overlooked in the research, however, and the topic of this article, concerns the converse fact that, in the construction of a negative identity for divinity, the text also assumes a lot about what a god must actually be like. Moreover, what is implicit in these “meta-theistic” presuppositions has never before been identified; hence the need for an attempted inferential reconstruction of what, according to the polemics of Ep Jer, makes a god divine.

Abstract This article explores the usage of plural νόμοι versus singular νόμος throughout the whole corpus of the Greek Bible. Obviously, the singular is predominant. If we put aside later variants and textual traditions, the rare passages where the plural νόμοι is used (in Proverbs, Jeremiah, Esther, and 2 Maccabees) mutually elucidate each other: the plural occurs where the translators wanted to stress that the law(s) in question should be distinguished from the Torah. With respect to Jer 31:31–34 (LXX 38:31–34) and the quotations from it in Hebrews, the article demonstrates that the plural νόμοι in the LXX cannot be explained by the Vorlage, as many modern researchers suggest, but was a conscious device used by the LXX translator. The aim of the translator, followed by the author of Hebrews, was to stress the distinction between the Law of Moses and the Laws of the New Covenant.

The story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) has a long, complex history. Well-known in the Latin West, the story was neglected but not forgotten in the East. Incorporated within Late Antique and Early Medieval Gospel manuscripts, depicted in Christian art, East and West, and included within the developing liturgies of Rome and Constantinople, the passage has fascinated interpreters for centuries despite irregularities in its transmission.1 Throughout this long history, one narrative detail has been of particular interest: the content and significance of Jesus— writing. Discussed in sermons, elaborated in manuscripts, and depicted in magnificent illuminations, Jesus— writing has inspired interpreters at least since the fourth century, when Ambrose of Milan first mentioned it. Offering his opinion on the propriety of capital punishment, the bishop turned to the pericope in order to argue that Christians do well to advocate on behalf of the condemned since, by doing so, they imitate the mercy of Christ. Nevertheless, he averred, the imposition of capital punishment remains an option for Christian rulers and judges. After all, God also judges and condemns, as Christ showed when, responding to the men questioning him and accusing the adulteress, he wrote twice on the ground. Demonstrating that “the Jews were condemned by both testaments,” Christ bent over and wrote “with the finger with which he had written the law,” or so the bishop claimed.2 Ambrose offered a further conjecture in a subsequent letter: Jesus wrote “earth, earth, write that these men have been disowned,” a saying he attributes to Jeremiah (compare Jer 22:29),3. As Jeremiah also explains, “Those who have been disowned by their Father are written on the ground,” but the names of Christians are written in heaven.4

В данном исследовании на нескольких примерах рассматривается метод и экзегеза Оригена для назидания христианской общины. Как известно, Св. Писание в доникейский период было практически единственным и важнейшим текстом для обоснования разных аспектов христианской жизни, в том числе и духовно-нравственного. Хороший экзегет — это хороший наставник и добрый пастырь. Ориген часто противопоставляет своё толкование иудейскому и маркионову, что было весьма актуально в III в. Всю ветхозаветную историю Израиля, Закон, пророков он рассматривает в контексте Нового Завета как прообразы или аналогии будущего. Ориген учит христиан под буквой видеть духовный смысл, что необходимо для понимания Св. Писания. This study uses several examples to examine Origen’s method and exegesis for the edification of the Christian community. As St. John the Baptist is known. The Holy Scripture in the pre-Nicene period was almost the only and most important text for the justification of various aspects of Christian life, including spiritual and moral. A good exegete is a good mentor and a good shepherd. Origen often contrasts his interpretation with the Jewish and Marcion’s, which was very relevant in the third century. He considers the entire Old Testament history of Israel, the law, and the prophets in the context of the New Testament as a prototypes or analogies of the future. Origen teaches Christians to see the spiritual meaning under the letter, which is necessary for understanding the Holy Scriptures.

AbstractIn his brief note on a compositor's pun, the author refers to Prof. Marita Mathijsen's handbook on the discipline of editing, Naar de letter. Handboek editiewetenschap (Assen 1995), where she observes a difference between intentional interference and unintentional alteration in a given text. In the first category she mentions six reasons for a copyist or compositor to interfere in a text: (1) he wants to correct a mistake, (2) he disapproves of a particular construction, (3) he wants to alter the spelling, (4) he wants to alter the interpunction, (5) acting as a censor, he deletes, and (6) he has problems of a technical nature. The author mentions yet another possibility: the compositor wants to have some fun. In addition to the examples occurring in Die historie van Reynaert die Vos (Gouda, Leeu, 1479), mentioned by Hellinga-Querido and Gondrie - see note 2, the author has discovered another compositor's pun in Die excellente Cronike van Vlaanderen (Antwerpen, Willem Vorstcrman, 1531). On fo. 123v. of this edition the Christian name Adriaen occurs twice, the first time printed 'Adriaen', the second time 'Aaaa' when pronounced in Dutch 'Adriaen' could be understood to denote 'A three a's'. The author suggests that the compositor might have been inspired by an often quoted biblical reminiscence of Jeremiah 1, 6.

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”

Karoliina Lummaa: Kui trittitii! Finnish Avian Poetics. Trans. Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (main text), Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah (poems), photography Oskari Härmä and Ari Kuusela. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters 2017, 262 s.

Article ‘Language etiquette in Letters on exhausted paper by Agnieszka Osiecka and Jeremi Przybora’ is a linguistic analysis of about 100 letters of correspondents. Speech acts presented in this correspondence include: addressees’ formulas, requests, thanks, compliments and farewell acts. This article mentions the names and research of eminent linguists, such as Małgorzata Marcjanik, Krystyna Data or Eugeniusz Grodziński. It is worth noting that the courtesy formulas conceived by the correspondents express the ties between them, creating the appearance of direct contact.

В предпринята попытка проследить изменения во взглядах немецких протестантов на православие в конце 1570-х – начале 1580-х гг., которые хорошо проявились в двух разных описаниях одного и того же события (воспоминания и впечатления от личной встречи с русскими послами) в письмах Давида Хитреуса. Делается вывод о том, что общее разочарование ходом переписки тюбингенских теологов с патриархом Иеремией II заставило Хитреуса более трезво подойти к вопросу о доктринальном сходстве православия и протестантизма. This article attempts to trace the changes in Protestants’ views on Orthodoxy in the late 1570’s and early 1580’s. These changes are well observable in two accounts of the same event (impressions from personal meetings with Russian ambassadors) in the letters of D. Chytraeus. It is concluded that the general disappointment with the course of correspondence between the Tübingen theologians and Patriarch Jeremiah II compelled D. Chytraeus to describe similarities between Orthodoxy and Protestantism more circumstantially.

My analysis of Jer 29 argues for including v. 15 in the unit describing God’s ‘good plans’, which is delimitated almost always as vv. 10-14. A review of translations and commentators reveals v. 15 to be a crux interpretum, which often is ‘solved’ through textual transposition. Discussing the omission of vv. 16-20 in Jer-LXX as well as some standard indicators of delimitation, such as speech formulas, conjunctions, and scribal paragraph markers, I argue for reading v. 15 as the exiles’ direct response to the preceding divine promises. This understanding of the structure of Jer 29 shifts the main message of the prophet’s letter from God’s ‘good plans’ to the addressee’s rejection of these plans. For a post-exilic readership, the letter explains the suspension of divine restoration and elevates the New Covenant promises of Jer 30-31.

The concept of “Amen” translated as “Ase” in Okun language is a term that cuts across nations, cultures and religions, even though it may be translated or transliterated differently in terms of linguistic and discourse structures. Amen could probably be assumed to be the commonest word of human speech. Its use among the three great religions—Christianity, Islam and Traditional religion—cannot be overemphasized. For instance, the Old Testament usage of it is always at the end of a speech, while in the New Testament, Jesus used it mostly at the beginning of his message to his audience. Paul the Apostle oftentimes used it at the end of his letters to close his doxological statements and greetings to the churches. And also, the term is being used as a seal of an oath for legal backing or pronouncement of a curse as it is in the book of Deuteronomy 27 and Nehemiah 5:13. Jeremiah at another instance used Amen as an affirmation of God’s statements of the blessings and the curses of the covenant in Jeremiah 11:5. In our contemporary time, the Christians use it intermittently in the middle of a message delivery to show complete agreement with the minister. Similarly, in the socio-cultural and religious settings of the Okun speakers, Ase is an African philosophical concept through which the Okun people affirm the power to make things happen and produce change. It is used most often at the end of the pronouncement of a blessing, prayers offered, declaration of curse on certain norms or laws if broken, or to prove the innocence of a person in a controversial issue. In any case, the meanings are similar or the same in accordance to the context in which they are being used culturally and religiously. As the saying goes, “As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen, amen”; in Okun language it is Ase, ase. “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and amen” (Psalm 41:13).

Artykuł dotyczy domniemanego listu senatora przedrozbiorowej Rzeczypospolitej, biskupa krakowskiego Kajetana Ignacego Sołtyka (1715–1788), skierowanego do kolegów senatorów oraz członków polskiego rządu. Prawdziwy autor listu nie jest znany, lecz z jego treści wnioskować można, iż leżały mu na sercu zmagania konfederatów barskich w latach 1768–1772 przeciwko rosyjskiej agresji w Polsce i na Litwie. Był zatem jednym z nich. Na ich opór bez wątpienia wpływ miała zarysowana w zaprezentowanym liście niezłomna postawa więzionego w Rosji biskupa Sołtyka i jego towarzyszy. Z mroków historii wydobyto w nim także pozytywnych bohaterów Polski i Litwy: św. Stanisława ze Szczepanowa, prymasa Jakuba Uchańskiego, hetmana Jana Karola Chodkiewicza, Radziwiłłów, księcia Jeremiego Michała Wiśniowieckiego, Jana III Sobieskiego, a nawet bohaterów starożytnego Rzymu. W rękopiśmiennych kopiach „List Biskupa Krakowskiego” był przechowywany po dworach szlacheckich, mając wpływ na patriotyczne postawy także następnych pokoleń młodzieży i będąc przyczyną wstępowania młodych ludzi w Polsce i na Litwie do oddziałów wojskowych walczących z Rosją. Letter presumed to be from the Bishop of Krakow “under Russian captivity” to the Polish Senate and Government This article concerns a letter presumed to be from a senator in the pre-Partition Commonwealth of Poland, the Bishop of Krakow, Kajetan Ignacy Sołtyk (1715–1788), addressed to his fellow senators and members of the Polish government. The real author of the letter is unknown, but its contents indicate that he felt strongly about the struggles of the Bar confederates in the years 1768–1772 against Russian aggression in Poland and Lithuania. Therefore, he was most likely one of them. Their resistance was certainly fuelled by the unyielding endurance under Russian captivity of Bishop Sołtyk and his companions, as outlined in the letter presented. It also entered the depths of history to find important figures from Poland and Lithuania, such as: Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów, the Primate of Poland Jakub Uchański, Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, the Radziwiłłs, Prince Jeremi Michał Wiśniowiecki and John III Sobieski, and even ancient Roman heroes. Handwritten copies of the “Letter from the Bishop of Kraków” were kept at manor houses, serving to educate and inspire future generations in Poland and Lithuania to join military units to fight Russia.

Abstract In this hitherto unpublished manuscript essay (c. 1848), Thomas Carlyle uses ancient Dionysian ritual as a symbol for a complex of contemporaneous social tendencies that he deplores. Foremost among these tendencies is the displacement of piety and duty by the exaltation of sensualism and romantic love, which Carlyle associates with revolutionary France, George Sand and her epigones, and circulating-library fiction more generally. “Phallus-worship” represents a jointure between Carlyle’s humane youthful writings and the authoritarian jeremiads of his old age, combining the literary virtuosity of the former with the caustic perspective of the latter. More broadly, “Phallus-worship” is a textual locus of the shift between early and mid-Victorian sensibilities, as Carlyle’s own residual puritanism marked the limits of his capacity to engage with the literary and cultural developments that interested a rising generation of Victorian men and women of letters.

Recently a monograph appeared dealing with Roman epigraphical monuments from the West-Serbian town of Cacak and its neighbourhood (S. Ferjancic / G. Jeremic / A. Gojgic, Roman Epigraphic Monuments from Cacak and its Vicinity Cacak 2008, Engl. Summary pp. 103-107). Authored by one specialist in Roman history and epigraphy and two archaeologists, the book is rather thin and does not provide much new data, apart from the identification of the equestrian officer Tiberius Claudius Gallus with Severus' senator - which was taken from my PhD thesis without citing it - and from two inscriptions, ? 20 and ? 21, forming the subject of the present paper. Published here for the first time, they both contain important information which the co-authors failed to notice. The consuls of 227 A.D. in an inscription from Cacak The ? 21 (fig. 1) was found in the site of Gradina on the mountain Jelica, S. of Cacak. It is engraved on a whitish limestone monument, apparently an ara, the middle and lower parts of which are preserved after it has been reshaped to be used as building material. The four-line inscription was read by the editors as follows: [- - -] Aur(elius) F[- - - v(otum)] l(ibens) p(osuit) Mal+[- - -]et Al[- - - co(n)s(ulibus)] Idibus [- - -]. Unable to identify the pair of consuls mentioned in lines two and three, the authors interpret the inscription as a funerary one: [- - -]Aur(elius or -elio) F[- - - vix(it) ann(is)] L P. Mal+[- - -]et Al[- - - f(ecerunt) ? die ?] Idibus [- - -]. In fact, they misread the final cluster of the line two, by having mistaken for L the long right serif of M (in ligature with A) together with a trace of a subsequent letter, which proves to be an X. The alignment of the letters at the beginning of the lines suggests that the left side of the inscription is entirely preserved. The inscription reads as folows: ] \ Aur(elius) F+[ -] \ l(ibens) p(osuit) Max[imo] \ et Al[bino co(n)s(ulibus)] \ Idibus [ -]. M. Laelius Maximus Aemilianus (PIR2 L56) - probably son of Marcus Laelius Maximus (PIR2 L55), one of the leading senators under Septimius Severus - and M. Nummius Senecio Albinus (PIR2 N235) were the eponymous consuls of 227. The pair is attested in several inscriptions, e.g. CIL VIII 18831 from Numidia which resembles this one in recording the exact date: Bacaci Aug(usto) \ sac(rum) \ Albino et Ma\ximo co(n)s(ulibus) \ Kal(endis) Mai(is) [3] Si\ttius Novellus \ et Q. Galerius Mu\stianus magg(istri) \ [Thib(ilitanorum?)]. Here Albinus' name precedes that of Maximus, which is usually the case. Nevertheless, a parallel with Maximus named before Albinus is provided by an inscription from Dacia (ILD 774, near Cluj): Deae Ne\mesi sac\rum Aur(elius) Ru[f]inus \ be(ne)f(iciarius) co(n)s(ularis) \ leg(ionis) XIII Gem(inae) \ Sever(ianae) v(otum) l(ibens) p(osuit) Maximo et Albi\[no] co(n)s(ulibus). Consequently, ? 21 is a votive inscription, largely restorable and precisely datable. The Collegium curatorum of the Cohors II Delmatarum in an inscription from Cacak Forty years ago within the Ascension Church yard in Cacak the lower part of a Roman limestone monument has been accidentally unearthed, bearing an inscription, three last lines of which are partially preserved (? 20 of the catalogue, (fig. 2), wherein only the mention of a cohort was recognized by the editors, who read: ]\[- - -]ALB[- - -| -]GIATI +[- - -|- - -co]h(ortis) eiusde(m) [- - -|- - - The elegant, shaded letters are lined up one below the other, which suggests that the text was arranged following the principle of centering. Above the L in the first line there is a trace of an O or a Q, unnoticed by the editors. So, there are 4 lines partially preserved. The space left between the lines 2 and 3 being larger than that between 1-2 and 3-4 respectively, the two last lines seem to constitute a separate entry. The genitive case cohortis eiusdem implies a preceding designation of the dedicant(s), and what we have before is a nominative plural ending in ?giati followed by a word of which only the first letter, C or O, is still discernible. As the most probable, if not the only possible, we propose the following restoration of the last two lines (fig. 8): [colle]giati c[urat(ores)]|[co]h(ortis) eiusde[m] possibly with a p(osuerunt) or d(edicaverunt) in the end. Despite its fragmentariness, the present inscription bears an important testimony to the existence, within the Roman army, of professional associations (collegia militaria) independent of regular military structures. The evidence for them is based solely on epigraphic sources; some hundred inscriptions contradict the paragraph of the Digesta (47.22) forbidding the soldiers to organize corporate associations in the camps. The cohort in question is doubtless the cohors II Aurelia Delmatarum milliaria equitata, which is known to have been stationed permanently, from the seventies of the second century A.D. to the fifties of the third century, in the eastern part of Dalmatia around the modern city of Cacak. It was a mixed infantry and cavalry unit, and the rank of curator (curator equitum singularium, curator alae, curator cohortis) is attested exclusively in the mounted units of the Roman army. It was higher than the simple eques; in the auxiliary troops, the curators may have been charged with special tactical or economic-administrative tasks. The lower officers (principales) and the soldiers with special tasks were allowed to form private associations fostering loyalty to the Emperor. All Roman collegia including the military ones, had their religious purpose and their official meeting room (schola) was also a sanctuary of their patron deity. It might be a part of the headquarters building, as in the case of the Castra Nova equitum singularium in Rome, where, beneath the Basilica of St John Lateran an Ionic capitel was uncovered with inscription on it dated with AD 197 recording the dedication of the schola curatorum to Minerva Augusta (AE 1935 156 = AE 1968, 8b).

What happens when the fundamental “baptist”1 interpretation of freedom, once thought to be a radical notion, becomes largely mainstreamed and included in the constitutions of most Western democracies? What happens when, in relation to the church and the state, free-church baptist polity largely dictates the worldview of most, if not all, other Christian traditions, even if it has not yet influenced the very doctrinal and theological structures of those mainstream denominations? What happens when the four “fragile freedoms” of baptist life (soul freedom, Bible freedom, church freedom and religious freedom) are undermined by fellow-baptists and others who decry such freedom as too radical, “a figment of some infidel’s imagination,” or an ungodly paean to a “woke” culture gone mad? This article addresses those questions in the context of two “emancipation proclamations” in Scripture, that of the prophet Jeremiah (34:8-9) to King Zedekiah and of Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1,13-16a). Still other historical moments of the “baptist” faith-heritage underscore such biblical liberties further undoing any notion that being “woke” in the current cultural and political setting is a new concept at all. Indeed, it is this very old, already “woke,” biblical “baptist” worldview that holds out the greatest promise for Christian witness in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Inculturation emerged as a result of paradigm shifts in the missionary outlook of the Church necessitated by a heightened sense of culture, especially the plurality of cultures. This outlook saw culture as a tool for the transmission of the Gospel message to different frontiers. In view of this, dialogue with culture has passed from being an exception to the rule to becoming normative. Inculturation is a complex process, which must be undertaken gradually and critically. Overall, it aims to incarnate the Gospel in every culture by maintaining a healthy balance between tradition and progress. In this paper, the method of inculturation that is highlighted is the one developed by Charles Kraft and Anscar Chupungco known as “dynamic equivalence,” which seeks to build a “communicational bridge” between the Gospel message and human experience. This paper, therefore, embarks upon the discussion of faith-culture dialogue, keeping in mind Church’s efforts to proclaim the message of the Gospel: first, by first tracing the historical development of Inculturation, highlighting the Church’s disposition towards faith culture dialogue; second, by discussing the nature and dynamics of inculturation, focusing on its essential characteristics; and lastly, delineating the process of inculturation, which underscores dynamic equivalence as method. References Acevedo, Marcelo S.J., Inculturation and the Challenge of Modernity. Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1982. Alberigo, Giuseppe “The Announcement of the Council: From Security of the Fortress to the Lure of Quest,” in History of Vatican II, 1 Announcing and Preparing Vatican II: Toward a New Era in Catholicism, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 1-54. 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Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. 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