Divine economy and repentance in Discourse 4 of The Enlightener by Iosif Volotskii

The article examines the relatively neglected Discourse 4 of The Enlightener, Iosif Volotskii’s famous treatise written to defend Orthodoxy against religious dissidents known to history as the “Judaizing” heretics. In Discourse 4, Iosif deals with the divine economy, the possibility of repentance, and with God’s deviousness in achieving his purposes. In contrast to the other discourses of The Enlightener, here in Discourse 4 Iosif argues his case in a relatively non-polemical manner. The text has some significance for evaluating his work as a father confessor, and for his well-known severity towards heretics and apostates.     

Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference

The dilemmas and opportunities of interpellation and intelligibility play out also in the sexual domain. In “Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference,” Stephen Hartman shows how interpellation makes both him and Darren intelligible and therefore anxious: The power of discourse to legitimate desire means that you can lose your legitimacy and fall into abjection if you ever refuse your interpellation. Here Hartman, interpellated by The New York Times announcement of his marriage to another man, desexualizes and abjects his patient by interpellating his desire as a desire to be a married gay guy, a “good gay” too.     

Piet Draghoender's Lament

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a context for “Piet Draghoender's Lament, “a most remarkable piece of oral literature composed spontaneously by a 76‐year‐old illiterate Coloured farmer facing eviction from his birthplace. His feelings and attitudes are representative of the entire Kat River community.

The paper explains the claim of the Draghoenders to their land in terms of the concept of “bloedgrond”: the blood which they inherited and the blood which they spilled to “free” the ground and to make it their own. It also analyses the agonised conflict in Draghoender's mind between his innate resentment and his religious conviction that it is his duty to submit to the will of God. The paper concludes by recounting the subsequent history of the Draghoender family, which illustrates the way in which their religious beliefs undermined their ability to fight for their rights.     

Anality: News From the Front

“Anality: News From the Front” is a critical commentary on Jeffrey Guss's (this issue) paper, “The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject” and Stephen Botticelli's “Clinical Example.” In her analysis of Guss's argument, Sedgwick situates the dangerous potential of transgressive anal desire as “a revolutionary flash-point to be sought out and exploited” and highlights what she views as Guss's underlying assumption: that “danger is now altogether a thing to be decried and avoided.” Her response to Botticelli is a lively imagined relationship to Botticelli as a therapist, based on his clinical observations documented in “Clinical Example.”     

Where Influence and Authority Were,Inquiry and Authenticity Shall Be A View of Stephen Mitchell's Journey

Taking as a horrifying example a 1993 triple child homicide in West Memphis, Arkansas, in which bitemark evidence figures prominently, this article explores some ramifications of “the Oral Father”—a figure of paternity associated with the most primitive appetite and aggressivity. The Oral Father is the preoedipal, anti-(or ante-) genital paternal analog of that familiar image of polymorphous maternity known as the “Phallic Mother.” Although the image of the Phallic Mother has, almost from the inception of psychoanalysis, embodied the tropology and aetiology of perversion, she cannot and should not represent alone the dark side of the parental unconscious. Furthermore, psychoanalysis has always used the Phallic Mother to represent the eros of the (usually male) child (of whatever age), not that of the parent. The Oral Father does not work alone; the term refers not only to an actual father or custodial male who breaches what should be the boundaries between himself and his children in particular ways, but to the entire network of paternalist, patriarchal, oedipal practices, discourses, and institutions that support and cover for him. In too many cases, however, physical evidence testifies to the fact that little boys have reason to fear being eaten up, and even emasculated, by their father—his appetite is not a figment of their imagination.     

Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Constructing the Celibate Priest

This paper looks at the way sexual teachings and power transactions are interconnected, so that misogyny, homophobia, and a penitential code regulating sexuality enforced through confession provide the scaffolding for a hierarchical system, run by celibate males. It is a system that feminist theologian Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1999) has termed “Kyriarchy” or “the rule of the emperor/master/lord/father/husband over his subordinates” (p. 114). The paper reviews the historical evolution of the Church's teachings on sex and gender that have not only created the context for the recent pedophilia scandal, but, have pervaded Western thinking about these matters.     

Beyond Guilt and Stigma: Changing Attitudes among Israeli Migrants in Canada

Over 60 years ago, the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Millions of Jews immigrated to Israel over the twentieth century, a process known as aliya (literally, “going up”). Yet over the years, thousands of Israelis have also chosen to leave Israel in a movement termed yerida (“going down”). As the term suggests, this reverse migration has been highly stigmatized. During the 1960s and 1970s, emigrants were publicly disparaged in the Israeli media for having abandoned a struggling state. Consequently, Israeli migrants suffered strong feelings of guilt that often, hampered their integration process abroad, a phenomenon observed as late as the 1990s. This paper, however, reveals that feelings of stigmatization have greatly decreased among Israeli migrants in recent years. The study is based on research that I conducted in 2008–2009, involving nine months of participant observation in Vancouver’s Israeli community and 34 in‐depth interviews. Unlike in previous studies, most of my informants expressed no feelings of guilt over having left Israel. Of those who did, most framed their guilt as a longing for family and friends rather than the patriotic longing for the land as expressed by previous generations. Previous studies have also found that Israelis harbour a “myth of return”– a continuously expressed desire to return to Israel and a reluctance to accept their stay abroad as permanent. However, I have not found that the myth of return is still strong today, despite the continued prevalence of a strong sense of Israeli identity among Israelis abroad. I suggest that these changing attitudes are the product of shifting ideals in Israeli society that have developed as the state of Israel has matured. This paper thus serves to update the outdated image of Israeli migrants as it exists in the prevailing literature.     

“The Compass of Our Life”: A Qualitative Study of Marriage and Faith Among Chinese Immigrants

Twenty highly religious Chinese Christian married couples (n = 40) were interviewed to examine how religious faith influenced their perceptions of marriage and family life. Most participants held advanced graduate degrees (14 PhD and 13 MS degrees). Their ages ranged from 28 to 66, and the number of children ranged from one to four. Grounded theory methods (including open coding and axial coding) were applied to analyze the data. Based on the interview data three emergent themes were identified: (1) Moving from atheism to theism (“God is love”), (2) changing perceptions of marriage (“Marriage is established by God”), and (3) a new priority (“Put God first”). Supporting qualitative data are presented in connection with each theme. Implications for research and practice related to Chinese immigrants’ marriage and family in the United States are discussed.     

Effects of Parental Divorce on God Image Among Young Adults at a Christian University

We used path analysis to investigate the impact of parental divorce on God image, mediated by father–child and mother–child attachments, among 178 college students at a Christian university. Findings revealed that parental divorce negatively impacts father–child attachment; however, father–child attachment does not impact God image. Instead, the quality of mother–child attachment, which does not seem to be influenced by parental divorce, best predicts the development of a healthy God image. Thus, preliminary findings elucidated that parental divorce undermines the quality of attachment between father and child but not mother and child, and mother–child attachment ultimately influences God image. Further research is needed to replicate and generalize these preliminary findings.     

"In search of a tale they can live with": about loss, family secrets, and selective disclosure

Several authors have written about family secrets in the family therapy literature in interesting ways. According to these authors, the questions “who knows the secret?” and “who does not know the secret?” are central. In the present study, we have qualitatively analyzed the documentary film Familiegeheim (Family Secret) by the Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk. The film shows van Hoewijk’s investigation into the death of his father in 1974 and tells the story of a family in which the suicide of the father is kept secret from the three children. Our analysis of the film highlights the complex ways in which families deal with sensitive issues like loss, grief, and suicide. The concept of family secrets seems to poorly capture this complexity, focusing one‐sidedly on the destructive effects of withholding delicate information. The concept of selective disclosure is proposed as an alternative. Selective disclosure refers to the complex processes involved in dealing with the dialectic tension between sharing information and keeping it secret. The concept is not only focused on the destructiveness of secrecy but, in addition, also makes room for an appreciation of the caution with which family members deal with sensitive family issues.     

Investigating Family Shared Realities With Factor Mixture Modeling

The authors introduce factor mixture modeling (FMM) and its implications for assessing varying degrees of shared reality in families. FMM extends the typical factor analytic model that uses a set of observed indicators to identify an unobservable factor and its structure. FMM examines the possibility a sample is a mixture of “classes,” each with unique factor structures. To demonstrate, varying factor structures of father involvement are identified using father, mother, and child reports as observed indicators. Three classes were identified and relate to varying degrees of shared reality regarding the father. Predictors and outcomes of these classes are modeled. The class in which the child's view most overlapped with his or her parents' view was predicted by higher child agreeableness and higher levels of maternal depressive symptoms. As hypothesized, membership in this class predicted lower levels of parental conflict and fewer parental attempts to involve their children in their conflicts.     

Riding Instincts,Even to Die

This paper develops the concept of riding instincts, even to die through a queer reading of Winnicott’s “Primary Maternal Preoccupation.” Primary preoccupation narrates the ongoing establishment of what Winnicott calls “instinctual life.” Turning to queer social history and a clinical case, a relational-structural similarity between pederasty and primary preoccupation is proposed, and the concept of pederastic enactments is used to capture the fraughtness of this similarity. A patient’s deadened instinctual life is explored in relation to his family history and queer identity, and the difficulty of riding instincts, even to die in the treatment is connected to the neoliberalization of desire.     

THE BRIDLED BRIDE OF PALESTINE: ORIENTALISM,ZIONISM, AND THE TROUBLED URBAN IMAGINATION

Through ethnographic and archival research centered in Jaffa, this article analyzes how the image of the Jewish-Arab mixed city has been represented and (re)produced in the Zionist historical imagination since the establishment of the state of Israel to the present. Vacillating between romantic historicity and political violence, the image of Jaffa poses a political and hermeneutic challenge to the territorial project of urban Judaization, which ultimately failed to define and establish the national-cum-cultural identity of this “New-Old” city. This failure, I argue, results in a persistent pattern of semiotic ambivalence which, from the Jewish-Israeli point of view, positions Jaffa both as a source of identity and longing (in the distant past) as well as a symbol of alterity and enmity (in the recent past)— an object of desire and fear alike. As such, Jaffa and other ethnically mixed towns (including Ramle, Lydda, Haifa, and Acre) occupy a problematic place in Israeli and Palestinian political and cultural imagination. A bi-national borderland in which Arabs and Jews live de facto together, these cities bring to the fore, on the one hand, the paradox of Palestinian citizens in a fundamentally Jewish state, while simultaneously suggesting, by the very spatial and social realization of “mixed-ness,” the potential imaginary of its solution. Unfolding through four distinct historical modalities of urban Orientalism, this article historicizes the highly politicized image of the Jewish-Arab city and the discourse on its future. These discursive formations reconfigured the public space that enabled, paradoxically since the October 2000 events, new political claims for equal citizenship, bi-national cooperation, and Palestinian presence.     

De-Americanizing the global?: Overcoming fundamentalism in a volatile world

Abstract

This article discusses the role of different fundamentalisms in the dramatic escalation of the desire to 'de-Americanize' the global in the post-September 11 world. I argue that the line between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist tendencies in world views is blurred, and that fundamentalism should not be dismissed as something totally alien from the life of liberal-democratic societies. In particular, the current process of US-dominated globalization has tended to produce a rise in fundamentalist ways of thinking in different parts of the world, as people resort to defending their embattled traditions and identities as a mode of resistance against the unsettling forces of globalization. And as the US mode of dominating the world is couched in an American fundamentalist frame, it will inevitably engender and reinforce new anti-American fundamentalisms.     

Lawyer and Counselor as an Interdisciplinary Team: Preparing the Father for Custody*

Traditionally, the mother received custody of the children unless she was clearly proven to be “unfit.“ The “unfit mother” concept has been superseded by a doctrine which would indicate that either parent has an equal right to custody, and the proper measure is what is in the “best interest of the children.” A father who seeks custody faces unique problems which the mother does not face because of her personal familiarity with the children, their needs and activities. Educating the father to fulfill these needs and to develop proper parenting skills is the role of the marriage and family counselor. Proving to the judge or jury who should be custodian is the duty of the lawyer with the guidance of the counselor. This article suggests areas which should be familiar to every father who is preparing for trial and provides a checklist for objective testimony.     

Woman and Desire Why Women May Not Want to Want

Questioning why it is that female genitalia and desire are viewed in psychoanalytic theory as hidden, inaccessible, and lacking, the author examines 1) female genital representation, 2) girls' erotically desirous relationships to their mothers, and 3) the nature of women's experience in sexuality. The author proposes that the marker “absent” regarding female genitalia and desire may be a particular female form or protection against “castration” of sexual desire; males inflate whereas females may deflate their genital representation and desire. The author suggests that the female body lends itself-and, abetted by culture and psychoanalytic theory, is unconsciously used by females—to a specific form or protection of female desire.     

Killing the Father: Childhood and Renewal of Self-Narrative in Dambudzo Marechera's Fiction

Abstract

The contradictory impulses that characterise writing on Dambudzo Marechera's life and times were foreshadowed a long time ago in 1971 in an obligatory testimonial by his high school principal, Father Daniel Pearce, an Anglican priest. I discuss briefly the ways in which he maps Marechera's life, and suggest that he prefigured so much of its seeming intricacy and mythical qualities. Subsequent critics of his writing have only elaborated the contradictory templates of Father Pearce's hagiographic writing. What his critics have often missed in these writings and readings is Marechera's own effort at renewing his own self-narrative in the face of such readings of himself. The source of this narrative regeneration is in his recollection and uses of childhood to reflect on a longing for self-capitalisation, which is achieved by setting aside the narratives of the father (in multiple symbolic senses). His ideas of self-writing should be gleaned from his understanding and uses of childhood.     

Max weber's vision of economic sociology

Max Weber's economic sociology is usually associated with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), but in this paper I show that what Weber himself called his “Wirtschaftssoziologie”, or economic sociology, looked quite different and was something that he developed during the last year of his life, 1919–1920. I present and outline Weber's (later) economic sociology and pay particular attention to his ideas of “economic (social) action” and of the three different forms of capitalism (rational capitalism, political capitalism and traditional capitalism). I also show that to Weber, economic sociology was part of a more general science of economics that he often referred to as “social economics” (“Sozialökonomik”). The paper ends with a comparison between the paradigm of economic sociology, which can be found in the work of Max Weber, and the paradigm of what is known as New Economic Sociology.     

New Parents' Psychological Adjustment and Trajectories of Early Parental Involvement

Trajectories of parental involvement time (engagement and child care) across 3, 6, and 9 months postpartum and associations with parents' own and their partners' psychological adjustment (dysphoria, anxiety, and empathic personal distress) were examined using a sample of dual‐earner couples experiencing first‐time parenthood (N = 182 couples). Using time diary measures that captured intensive parenting moments, hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that patterns of associations between psychological adjustment and parental involvement time depended on the parenting domain, aspect of psychological adjustment, and parent gender. Psychological adjustment difficulties tended to bias the 2‐parent system toward a gendered pattern of “mother step in” and “father step out,” as father involvement tended to decrease and mother involvement either remained unchanged or increased in response to their own and their partners' psychological adjustment difficulties. In contrast, few significant effects were found in models using parental involvement to predict psychological adjustment.