Tag Archives: philosophy/religion

3 Emblems Within a Crown

Posted on April 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Power * Legitimacy * Victory

The Norman conqueror William I wore his crown three times each year: at Winchester at Easter, Westminster at Whitsuntide and at midwinter at Gloucester. But, as Shakespeare tells us, ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.’ For the crown stands for the three emblems of power, legitimacy, and victory, but also for an ordained blood sacrifice as epitomized by the crown of thorns.

As an icon of power the crown has numerous lines of descent: the double crowns worn by the pharaohs of Egypt, the laurel wreaths of victory awarded to Greek heroes (and turned into the finest gold for Greek kings), the jewel-studded diadem worn on the brow by Persian and Hellenistic monarchs. The truest line of descent for the Western crown seems to have been the Greek radiant crown—Lucian’s ‘chaplet with sunbeams’—which was placed on statues of the sun god and which Constantine the Great co-opted in his fusing of the cult of the unconquered sun to the newly formed symbolism of a Christian emperor.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Cultural Literacy: Dark Ages

Posted on April 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Dark Ages.

In posting this document, I understand that I’m dealing with a contested term. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the period became better understood, historians began restricting its use to the Early Middle Ages, generally the first few centuries following the fall of Rome. When I was teaching global studies in New York, one of the concepts that was chronically overlooked while my co-teacher droned on in a recitation of decontextualized historical facts was the difference between periods of intellectual enlightenment and intellectual repression–indeed, the active promotion of ignorance and superstition.

If one looks at intellectual history, this oscillation between lightness and darkness, as Petrarch framed it, recurs fairly regularly (in fact, we’re arguably in the middle of such a period as I write this). I always thought that in teaching global studies, we ought to use the trial and death of Socrates as an illustration of the contest between intellectual freedom and the superstition and ignorance which opposes it. Once we accomplished that, we can cite this phenomenon everytime it expresses itself in history. It would make introducing the Carolingian Renaissance, the Renaissance itself, and the Enlightenment (and its antithesis, Romanticism) a simpler and deeper conceptual endeavor at once. In United States history, this dynamic expresses itself, I submit, in everything from the First and Second Great Awakenings to the McCarthy Era.

And we end up with those big concepts in historical inquiry that Claude Levi-Strauss called binary oppositions: faith and reason, law and anarchy, science and religion, knowledge and ignorance, and so forth. Those pairs, I think, are what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe had in mind when they talked about identifying (and helping students to understand) “big ideas” in instructional planning.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Allegory

Posted on April 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Allegory: A series of symbols existing harmoniously in a larger system of meaning. While a symbol most often takes the place of a letter, word, or image, such as the cross as a symbol of Christianity, allegory takes symbolism one step further by using images and/or stories to stand in for other ideas or abstract concepts. Picasso’s Guernica, rooted in events from the Spanish Civil War, works as an allegory for total war. (Disputed symbols include the wounded horse and the bull, representing Republican Spain and fascism, respectively.) From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, the primacy of abstract art made the use of allegory seem out of date. But with the advent of postmodernism and a return to figurative and narrative works, allegory has again flourished. Modernists Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Jose Clemente Orozco make use of allegory, as do postmodernists Anselm Kiefer and Francisco Clemente.“

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Book of Answers: Dante’s Inferno

Posted on April 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

“According to Dante’s Inferno (1321), who is at the bottom of hell? In the lowest circle of hell, the place for traitors, a three-faced Satan chews on three people: Brutus and Cassius, betrayers of Julius Caesar, and Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus Christ.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Constructivism

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Constructivism: The creation of three-dimensional abstractions from materials used in modern technics, e.g., wire, iron, plastic, glass, wood. The first constructivist exhibition took place in Moscow in 1920. With its emphasis on rationality and modern technology, constructivist sculpture focused on space rather than mass. Begun as a Russian abstract style, it is sometimes called Tatlinism, after one of the earliest constructivists. Leader constructivists are Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin both applied constructivist principles to architecture and design.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Doris Lessing

Posted on March 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Doris Lessing: (1919-2013) English novelist and short-story writer, born in Persia and for many years a resident of southern Rhodesia. Lessing’s first two published works, The Grass Is Singing (1950) and the stories in This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), are sent in Africa. She then began work on a series called ‘The Children of Violence’—including Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969)—that established her as a vividly realistic novelist, with an intense commitment to socialism and a particular capacity for identifying the social and emotional forces that shape women’s lives. The Golden Nottebook (1962), and ambitious experimental novel about a woman writer’s struggle to discover the meaning of ‘self’ has become a classic of feminist literature. While the primary interest in all of her work has remained the delicate, often destructive interplay between men and women, Lessing has continually expanded both her field of focus and her stylistic experiments. Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Summer Before the Dark (1973) delve into aspects of neurotic disorders and madness. The ‘Canopus in Argus: Archives’ series, which is made up of RE: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), The Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983) is a series of visionary, allegorical novels of the future in which archetypal images of men and women interact in a cosmos consisting of six zones, or ‘levels of being.’ Human concerns are dwarfed by the competition between galactic empires for control of the universe, but these conflicts also are an image of human history. The Good Terrorist, a novel, appeared in 1986. Lessing has also gained high praise as a writer of short stories. Among the most noteworthy of her collections are African Stories (1965), The Habit of Loving (1958), and The Stories of Doris Lessing (1978). Nonfiction works include African Laughter (1992), and Under My Skin (1994), a collection of essays.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Education and Personal Freedom

Posted on March 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities of higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Speech before Senate Judiciary Committee, 18 Jan. 1892

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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The Weekly Text, 26 March 2021, Women’s History Month 2021 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Second-Feminism

Posted on March 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text, for the final Friday of Women’s History Month 2021, is a reading on second-wave feminism along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

While I understood the historical divide between feminisms, my understanding was mostly intuitive and instinctive. This short reading explains well the difference between first-wave feminism, to wit the Women’s Suffrage movement which culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the second wave, which began in the 1960s. The second wave, incidentally, apparently continues to today, as reversals, or the threat of reversals, of the gains made necessitate the ongoing function of a feminist movement.

In any event, this reading summarizes this history concisely, as well as supplying students with a quick way to gain this vital piece of prior knowledge about United States history.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Jeanette Rankin

Posted on March 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Jeanette Rankin: (1880-1973) U.S. reformer, first woman member of the U.S. Congress (1917-1919, 1941-1943). Born in Missoula, Montana, she was social worker from 1909 and became active in women’s suffrage work. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, she introduced the first bill to give women the vote. A pacifist, she voted against declaring war on Germany (1917). She lost her bid for a U.S. Senate seat (1918) and returned to social work. In 1940 she won reelection to the House, where she became the only legislator to vote against declaration of war on Japan. Declining to seek reelection, she continued to lecture on social reform. In 1968, at 87, she led 5,000 women, the “Jeanette Rankin Brigade,” to protest the Vietnam War.”

­­­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Margaret Mead on Her Epistemological Obligation

Posted on March 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.”

Margaret Mead, Quote in N.Y. Times, 9 Aug. 1964

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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