Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse.

journal article

LitStream Collection

The Return of the TribeJews, Counterculture, and Native Americans

Schorsch, Jonathan

2021 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754x-8723035

As a part of “Xenophilia: A Symposium on Xenophobia’s Contrary” in Common Knowledge, this essay examines the interest in, affection for, friendship with, and romanticization of Native Americans by Jews in the United States since the 1960s. The affinity is frequent among Jews with “progressive” or “countercultural” inclinations, especially those with strong environmental concerns and those interested in new forms of community and spirituality. For such Jews, Native Americans serve as mirror, prod, role model, projection, and fictive kin. They are regarded as having a holistic and integrated culture and religiosity, an unbroken connection to premodern attitudes and practices, an intimate relationship with the earth and with nonhuman creatures, along with positive feelings toward their own traditions and a simple, honest, and direct way of living. All of these presumed characteristics offer to progressive Jews parallels and contrasts to contemporary Jewishness and Judaism. For some, Native America has become a path back to a reconstructed Jewishness and Judaism; for others, a path away. Each path is assessed in this article with respect to questions of authenticity, psychobiography, family history, theology, and theopolitics.

journal article

LitStream Collection

The Xenophilia of a Japanese Ethnomusicologist

Urita, Michiko

2021 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754x-8723047

This autobiographical, sociological, and musicological essay, written for a symposium on xenophilia, concerns how the love of a foreign culture can lead to a better understanding and renewed love of one’s own. The author, a Japanese musicologist, studied Hindustani music with North Indian masters, both Hindu and Muslim, and concluded that it is the shared concept of a “sound-god” that brings them together on stage in peaceful celebration with audiences from religious communities often at odds. The author’s training in ethnomusicology began in India in 1992, immediately after the violent demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya by militant Hindus, but even at that time she found no trace of such belligerence in the Hindustani musical world. Years later, while conducting research on the Shinto music rituals of her own culture, she discovered a little-known imperial and aristocratic cult of Myō’onten, a Japanese form of the Hindu goddess of music, Saraswati, who is presently an object of devotion for both Hindu and Muslim musicians in North India. This essay, based on nearly three decades of research in India and Japan, offers some answers to a question raised repeatedly in the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia: What is the source of the xenophilic impulse and the power that sustains it?

journal article

LitStream Collection

Unsung Prophets and Dead Messiahs by Orphaned Land

Petel, Adir H.

2021 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754x-8723093

journal article

LitStream Collection

Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray

SJ, Francis X. Clooney,

2021 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754x-8723105