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For shared book reading to be effective for language development, the adult and child need to be highly engaged. The current paper adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate caregiver’s language-boosting behaviours and children’s engagement during shared book reading. The results revealed there were more instances of joint attention and caregiver’s use of prompts during moments of higher engagement. However, instances of most language-boosting behaviours were similar across episodes of higher and lower engagement. Qualitative analysis assessing the link between children’s engagement and caregiver’s use of speech acts, revealed that speech acts do seem to contribute to high engagement, in combination with other aspects of the interaction.
This chapter explores Blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the Bible, literature and art. In his engagement with Milton and the Bible, Blake carved out for himself a creative space in his use of both, and criticised their shortcomings, while recognising the significance of what he had taken from them. In wrestling with Milton’s texts, Blake pioneered an interpretative method for any who sought a more creative and contemporary relationship with the tradition they received. Similarly, engaging with the Bible’s major themes informed his critique of the contemporary church and politics and enabled him to criticise other, to him, less palatable biblical themes, as well as pointing to a different kind of society. In so doing, Blake brought out the latent meaning of the words of the Bible, exposing the shortcomings of the biblical texts while preserving their truths. A crucial part of this hermeneutical process is the way in which Blake regarded boundaries and constraints as the necessary complement to inspiration and imagination, both crucial components of Blake’s art and his understanding of human life.
This chapter is an exposition of a visionary, apocalyptic perspective in Christian intellectual history of the early modern period which contrasts with a mainstream mistrust of apocalyptic claims. Discussion of Anne Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, and William Blake concludes with a consideration of the centrality of such an apocalyptic perspective in the New Testament.
Some biblical scholars realised that to understand the historical, political and social background of the Vietnam War and found them in the social sciences. The works of this group were among the seminal studies for social-scientific readings of the Bible. Norman Gottwald used sociological and social-anthropological theory to argue that ancient Israel was not established by external immigration, but by social conflicts within Canaanite society. Initially social-science readings primarily employed theories and models from sociology and social anthropology. The focus on foreignness made social anthropology more relevant than sociology based on studies of modern societies. The emphasis on the foreignness of the biblical texts represents a contrast to the hermeneutics of Rudolf Bultmann, who saw the similarities in understanding of life between the New Testament and its modern readers. One of the strongest criticisms of social-science approaches as they have been practised by male scholars has come from feminist perspectives.
The mass changes of the Gulf of Alaska (GoA) glaciers are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite range-rate data for the period April 2003–September 2007. Through the application of unique processing techniques and a surface mass concentration (mascon) parameterization, the mass variations in the GoA glacier regions have been estimated at high temporal (10 day) and spatial (2 × 2 arc-degrees) resolution. The mascon solutions are directly estimated from a reduction of the GRACE K-band inter-satellite range-rate data and, unlike previous GRACE solutions for the GoA glaciers, do not exhibit contamination by leakage from mass change occurring outside the region of interest. The mascon solutions reveal considerable temporal and spatial variation within the GoA glacier region, with the largest negative mass balances observed in the St Elias Mountains including the Yakutat and Glacier Bay regions. The most rapid losses occurred during the 2004 melt season due to record temperatures in Alaska during that year. The total mass balance of the GoA glacier region was −84 ± 5 Gt a−1 contributing 0.23 ± 0.01 mm a−1 to global sea-level rise from April 2003 through March 2007. Highlighting the large seasonal and interannual variability of the GoA glaciers, the rate determined over the period April 2003–March 2006 is −102 ± 5 Gt a−1, which includes the anomalously high temperatures of 2004 and does not include the large 2007 winter balance-year snowfall. The mascon solutions agree well with regional patterns of glacier mass loss determined from aircraft altimetry and in situ measurements.
Liberation theology is widely referred to in discussions of politics and religion but not always adequately understood. The second edition of this Companion brings the story of the movement's continuing importance and impact up to date. Additional essays, which complement those in the original edition, expand upon the issues by dealing with gender and sexuality and the important matter of epistemology. In the light of a more conservative ethos in Roman Catholicism, and in theology generally, liberation theology is often said to have been an intellectual movement tied to a particular period of ecumenical and political theology. These essays indicate its continuing importance in different contexts and enable readers to locate its distinctive intellectual ethos within the evolving contextual and cultural concerns of theology and religious studies. This book will be of interest to students of theology as well as to sociologists, political theorists and historians.
May Day in 1983 will always remain indelibly etched on my memory. It was my first
Saturday in Brazil, in the middle of a period of military dictatorship in that
country, and I was taken to visit some theologians working with base ecclesial
communities in São Paulo. I recall entering a large building which served as a
community centre for one of the shanty towns on the periphery of this enormous city.
Inside there were about forty men and women listening to a woman expound the first
chapter of the book of Revelation. She was standing at a table at which were sitting
two men. Her lecture was constantly interrupted by her audience sharing their
experience of situations parallel with that of John on Patmos: witness, endurance,
and tribulation. One man who had been active in trade unions spoke with me after the
meeting describing the way in which the book of Revelation spoke to his situation: he
had been imprisoned without trial, and a Church which had seemed so irrelevant and
remote had become a shelter and inspiration for his life. There was an atmosphere of
utter comprehension of, and accord with, John’s situation, as trade union
activists, catechists and human rights workers shared their experiences of
persecution and harassment as a result of their work with the poor and marginalised.
They found in John a kindred spirit as they sought to understand and build up their
communities in the face of the contemporary beast of poverty and oppression. It was
readily apparent as I listened to their eager attempts to relate Revelation to their
situation that they had discovered a text which spoke to them because they had not
been desensitised by an ordered and respectable life of accommodation and
assimilation. The woman and one of the men at the front of the meeting were teachers
at the local seminary and the other man the local Roman Catholic bishop.
Readers of this book may wonder whether its subject-matter is merely a phase of
modern political theology at a time when a critical Marxism, unfettered by the
rigidities of its Eastern European manifestations, pervaded the social teaching of
late twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, only to be snuffed out by a determined
reaction from a more traditionalist papacy. That would be a superficial assessment.
We are dealing with a movement whose high point as the topic of discussion on the
agenda at every theological conference may now have passed, but whose influence, in a
multitude of ways, direct and indirect, is as strong as ever. The issues which
concern liberation theologians today are more inclusive and extend to questions of
race, gender, popular religion, and, more recently, the environment, and have taken
root in other situations and religions apart from Christianity. So when the leaders
of Roman Catholicism can proclaim that liberation theology is dead, sentiments echoed
by some who hitherto have been exponents of liberation theology, they miss the
enormous impact that this way of setting about the theological task continues to have
in many parts of the world, not least in the citadels of Catholicism itself: 'the
fundamental tenets of liberation theology had - almost surreptitiously - been broadly
accepted in many parts of the Catholic church'. So, having flourished in the Third
World many of the fundamental tenets of liberation theology are firmly established in
the First World, sometimes in institutions of higher education, more often in the
life of the Church at the grassroots, in popular education and among groups working
for justice and peace. In thinking of it as a mere epiphenomenon of the radical
social movements of the sixties and seventies, we miss the extent of its impact.
Different portrayals of visions from the Apocalypse exhibit particular ‘readings’ of the text and reflect some of the contrasting exegetical approaches familiar to biblical exegetes. The article surveys the various ways in which artists have sought to enter into, and re-express, the content and character of the visions of John, offers synchronic interpretations of the Apocalypse, gives varying interpretations of the four horsemen, explores the dialectic between heaven and earth in ecclesial and eschatological readings, and engages in political interpretations of the Apocalypse. Historical analogies are offered in order to compare the exercise of imagination in art with other examples of visualizing biblical texts.