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Item Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness(Duke University Press, 2023) Pinn, Anthony B.Anthony Pinn examines how hip hop artists challenge white supremacist definitions of Blackness by challenging white distinctions between life and death.Item Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Whither Being Spiritual but Not Religious(Michigan State University Press, 2022) Parsons, William B.Item Foucault and Brown: Disciplinary Intersections(Copenhagen Business School, 2022) Clements, Niki KasumiFrom the 1981 “Sexuality and Solitude” to the 1982 “Le combat de la chasteté” to the 1984 History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Michel Foucault’s published works have long recognized the influence of the historian of late antiquity, Peter Brown. With the 2018 publication of Foucault’s draft of Les Aveux de la chair (Confessions of the Flesh) bearing no mention of Brown, the depth of this influence requires further elaboration. Despite Brown not appearing in the “Index of Modern Authors,” Confessions of the Flesh reflects Foucault’s debt to Brown for his readings of Augustine of Hippo and his conceptualizations of sexuality and subjectivity. Analyzing archival evidence alongside biographical narratives helps us better understand Brown’s vital influence as Foucault was shifting his History of Sexuality project, his archival practices, and his genealogy of subjectivity. Appreciating the textual and conceptual engagement between Foucault and Brown thus illuminates not only Confessions of the Flesh as Volume 4 in the History of Sexuality series but also the conceptual and methodological developments of both scholars in their disciplinary intersections.Item Dialogues: anthropology and theology(Wiley, 2022) Havea, Jione; Tomlinson, Matt; Al-Azem, Talal; Rasanayagam, Johan; Juewei, Venerable; Mair, Jonathan; Bongmba, Elias Kifon; Haynes, Naomi; Lamb, Ramdas; Sivakumar, Deeksha; Furani, Khaled; Moosa, EbrahimItem Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together(Duke University Press, 2021) Pinn, Anthony B.In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things, and he traces how pop art and readymades point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens's performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means by which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things.Item Foucault’s Christianities(Oxford University Press, 2021) Clements, Niki KasumiThe publication of Michel Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair (History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh) thirty-four years after his death highlights and complicates the relevance of Christian texts—notably from the second through fifth centuries—to Foucault’s forms of critical analysis between 1974 and 1984, as his interests migrate from monastic disciplines to pastoral power to governmentality to the care of the self. What begins as suspicion towards confession as a tool of Catholic power anticipating modern psychoanalysis becomes a critical genealogy of subjectivity from western antiquity to modernity. To frame Foucault’s dynamic engagement with forms of Christianity, I establish three stages over his last decade as he moves from diagnosing mechanisms of power to analyzing ethics as care of the self. Tracing Foucault’s textual and critical developments enables better analysis of Confessions of the Flesh and affirms methodological possibilities in the study of religion today.Item "Why Can't I Be Both?": Jean-Michel Basquiat and Aesthetics of Black Bodies Reconstituted(The Pennsylvania State University, 2013) Pinn, Anthony B.This essay explores the nature and significance of blackness in relationship to an aesthetics of meaning, a method that offers insights into how religion, or the quest for complex subjectivity, is articulated through the visual arts. The essay sketches particular examples of blackness in relationship to aesthetics in a way that involves loose movement through particular periods and locations, ultimately coming to rest on the work of one particular artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I explore Basquiat’s work in connection to the politics and production of the aesthetic language of identity formation, examining how artistic production articulates or chronicles particular attention to this quest for complex subjectivity. And I offer a sense of this theory of religion’s applicability within multiple contexts.Item "Why Can't I Be Both?": Jean-Michel Basquiat and Aesthetics of Black Bodies Reconstituted(The Pennsylvania State University, 2013) Pinn, Anthony B.This essay explores the nature and significance of blackness in relationship to an aesthetics of meaning, a method that offers insights into how religion, or the quest for complex subjectivity, is articulated through the visual arts. The essay sketches particular examples of blackness in relationship to aesthetics in a way that involves loose movement through particular periods and locations, ultimately coming to rest on the work of one particular artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I explore Basquiat's work in connection to the politics and production of the aesthetic language of identity formation, examining how artistic production articulates or chronicles particular attention to this quest for complex subjectivity. And I offer a sense of this theory of religion's applicability within multiple contexts.Item Shimmering Magic: Cross-cultural Explorations of the Aesthetic, Moral, and Mystical Significance of Reflecting and Deflecting Shine(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) Romberg, Raquel; Fanger, ClaireThis introduction lays basic theoretical groundwork that helps tie together these different articles on ritual uses of shimmer. Contributors examine not only how contemporary technologies of mass production (tinfoil, plastic sequins) and reproduction (photographs) have entered both iconoclast and iconophile ritual and popular culture spheres; they also illustrate how metaphoric and metonymic forms of agency and presence are attributed to shimmering properties and substances. Contributors have a common purpose in probing the limit of common sense assumptions about the agency of shine as presencing (rather than just representing) the divine.Item Interoception, contemplative practice, and health(Frontiers Media, 2015) Farb, Norman; Daubenmier, Jennifer; Price, Cynthia J.; Gard, Tim; Kerr, Catherine; Dunn, Barnaby D.; Klein, Anne Carolyn; Paulus, Martin P.; Mehling, Wolf E.Interoception can be broadly defined as the sense of signals originating within the body. As such, interoception is critical for our sense of embodiment, motivation, and well-being. And yet, despite its importance, interoception remains poorly understood within modern science. This paper reviews interdisciplinary perspectives on interoception, with the goal of presenting a unified perspective from diverse fields such as neuroscience, clinical practice, and contemplative studies. It is hoped that this integrative effort will advance our understanding of how interoception determines well-being, and identify the central challenges to such understanding. To this end, we introduce an expanded taxonomy of interoceptive processes, arguing that many of these processes can be understood through an emerging predictive coding model for mindﾖbody integration. The model, which describes the tension between expected and felt body sensation, parallels contemplative theories, and implicates interoception in a variety of affective and psychosomatic disorders. We conclude that maladaptive construal of bodily sensations may lie at the heart of many contemporary maladies, and that contemplative practices may attenuate these interpretative biases, restoring a personﾒs sense of presence and agency in the world.Item Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987)(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Kripal, Jeffrey J.Trauma, Trick, and Transcendence in the Life of a Horror Writer: The Case of Whitley Strieber. This essay treats the theorization of horror in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987). It also pushes us to consider more honestly and forthrightly the question of “real monsters,” that is, the phenomenology of encounters with fantastic presences routinely experienced in the environment. Historical contextualization of Strieber's abduction experiences in the Hudson Valley region and theories of other species from Charles Fort to William James are invoked to radicalize the question further.Item Magic(Oxford University Press, 2013) Fanger, Claire; Pollmann, Karla; Otten, WillemienThis section of The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine explores magic. The author discusses: magic in Aug.'s thought; medieval reception-encyclopedic and legal; medieval reception-theological and philosophical; Renaissance magic and the Protestant Reformation; and modern academic and Max Weber.Item Sefirotic Depiction, Divine Noesis, and Aristotelian Kabbalah: Abraham ben Meir de Balmes and Italian Renaissance Thought(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Ogren, BrianIn 1509, the famed Italian Jewish linguist and philosopher Abraham ben Meir de Balmes wrote a patently Averroean commentary on the kabbalistic hypostases known as the sefirot. This commentary is entitled Igeret ha-ʻaśiriyah, or Epistle of the Decad, and it is a prime example of an Aristotelian trend of kabbalistic interpretation within the Italian Renaissance. After briefly reconstructing and discussing the importance of de Balmes’s life and works, this article focuses on the Epistle of the Decad and its unique synthesis between kabbalah and Aristotelian concepts of intellection and divine noesis. Possible influences on de Balmes in the drafting of the Epistle are examined, as is the structure of the Epistle itself. Finally, detail is given to de Balmes’s casting of the sefirot as tziyyurim, or divine depictions. The article describes de Balmes’s Aristotelian sense of divine noesis through the medium of the sefirotic depictions as phantasms. This is contrasted with the Neoplatonic sense of some of his contemporaries, such as Isaac Abravanel and Yohanan Alemanno, which sees the sefirot as divine depictions in relation to Platonic Ideas. De Balmes’s unique Aristotelian portrayal hearkens back to a concept of ultimate unity and singularity in the godhead, with the sefirot as processes of human to divine cognition that allow for a cognitive unity with the divine.Item Like Pearls: Sacred Moments in Healthcare(2013) Brennan, MarciaItem Protestant Churchmen in the German Enlightenment--Mere Tools of Temporal Government?(Max Hueber Verlag, 1978) Stroup, John; Schade, Richard E.; Glenn, JerryItem Political Theology and Secularization Theory in Germany, 1918-1939: Emanuel Hirsch as a Phenomenon of His Time(Cambridge University Press, 1987-07) Stroup, JohnItem Occulture in the Academy? The Case of Joseph P. Farrell(Acumen, 2013) Stroup, John; DeConick, April D.; Adamson, GrantItem The Idea of Theological Education at the University of Berlin: From Schleiermacher to Harnack(Fortress Press, 1984) Stroup, John; Henry, PatrickItem For the love and respect of the service: Applied aesthetics and palliative care(Scientific Research, 2013) Brennan, MarciaIn this article, the author discusses her experiences as an artist in residence in the Department of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Emphasis is placed on applied aesthetics in palliative care and their implications for addressing communication, spiritual, and health care issues for military service members. Drawing on six vivid case studies, the author examines the various ways in which end of life narratives can shed valuable light on key issues concerning individualsﾒ life experiences in the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force. These cherished images strengthened peopleﾒs spirits at the end of life, and each of the men told their stories with pride.