Documents found
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661.More information
“Rite of Passage” describes a court case raised by an android/artificial intelligence who wishes to apply for citizenship but can only do so if recognized as a human. Among others, the case exposes the vague definition of the term “human”, and the trouble of supplying evidence of sentience or consciousness even in humans. The ethical problems involved in the story can be ascribed to many actual events, among them the recent debate on splicing monkey and human DNA for the sake of producing hybrids with organs suitable for transplantation. The story also touches upon ethical conflicts with regards to endangered wildlife, global warming, media exploitation, commodification, and labor unions.
Keywords: android, artificial intelligence, climate fiction, commodification, consciousness, global warming, geoengineering, citizenship, human rights, android, intelligence artificielle, fiction climatique, commodification, conscience, réchauffement climatique, géoingénierie, citoyenneté, droits humains
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666.
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667.More information
Women rabbis have been depicted in fiction for close to fifty years. In the second decade and then in the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century over a dozen fictional women rabbis appear as central or important characters in novels, short stories, and on the silver screen. Most of them make their first appearance. This article takes note of the authors of these works, and then looks at the characters themselves, contrasting their “fictional” experiences with the published experiences of “real-life” women rabbis. It discusses these fictional women rabbis in terms of their theology/sense of tradition; religious/educational backgrounds; gender identification; and where that information is dealt with in the storyline, how these women address some of the challenges facing women rabbis such as dressed for success; pay inequity; and matters of sexual harassment. This is followed by a section on how women regard success in the rabbinate. A caveat: the real-lived experiences of women rabbis, their definitions of success and their joys/concerns/issues/disquiets are not necessarily the subjects that concern writers of fiction that feature women rabbis as characters.
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668.More information
Around 1489–90, during the period of his service for the house of Bentivoglio, Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti wrote the Gynevera de le clare donne, a catalogue containing thirty-three lives of exemplary women, for Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio, Giovanni II’s wife and counsellor. Even though throughout his work Sabadino insists on the virtues and perfection of his addressee, chroniclers wrote extensively about Ginevra’s cruelty, wrath, and vindictive personality as well as her unfaithfulness towards her first husband. Although all these features clearly contrast with the behaviours of the women included in the Gynevera, the perfection of the first of the protagonists of the book, Theodelinda of Bavaria, is constructed by Sabadino through allusion to a series of characteristics exactly opposed to those that the contemporary chroniclers attributed to Ginevra. In this article, I study Sabadino’s biography of Theodelinda as a paradigm of perfect woman and ruler, comparing it to the features that, according to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century chroniclers, made Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio an imperfect wife and counsellor.
Keywords: Sabadino degli Arienti, Sabadino degli Arienti, Querelle des Femmes, Querelle des Femmes, Biographies Exemplaires, Exemplary Biographies, Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio, Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio, Théodelinde de Bavière, Theodelinda of Bavaria
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669.More information
The paradigm of the prisca theologia, developed by Marsilio Ficino in the second half of the fifteenth century, had a huge influence throughout the early modern period. Its influence on the Reformation debates, however, has not yet been investigated. In the present article, I make an initial contribution to filling this gap. In the first part, I show that theprisca theologia was widely disseminated in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century, including at the University of Erfurt where Martin Luther was educated. In the second half, I focus on two figures central to the Reformation debates: Johann Eck and Martin Luther. As I show, Eck had an ambivalent attitude towards theprisca theologia: on the one hand, he aimed to reconcile the scholastic tradition with the ancient doctrines of theprisci theologi; on the other hand, he distanced himself from the Hermetic and magical implications of theprisca theologia. Luther, meanwhile, developed an anti-paradigm to Ficino’s prisca theologia: he argued that the improper mixing of black and white magic was born in Persia and then developed in Egypt and Greece.
Keywords: Prisca theologia, Marsilio Ficino, Martin Luther, Johann Eck, Hermeticism, Reformation
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670.More information
The relations of production in Deep South regions like the Mississippi Delta require a high degree of control over race and class configurations. While the overt, de jure White supremacy that marked the post-Reconstruction era allowed for effective repression of dissent, the promise of federal intervention and grassroots organizing during the years of the civil rights movement required White elites to recalibrate methods of control. By integrating theories of racialization of space, internal colonialism, and Althusser’s (2006) notion of the ideological state apparatus, I suggest that this transition from overt to implicit control was accomplished by creating a culture of neighborly surveillance in which everyday Whites were deputized to surveil and report on civil rights organizing at the grassroots level. By neighborly surveillance, I refer to surveillance between and amongst private citizens enacted outside the purview of the formal state but in the interest of the powerful elite who control the state. I document this process through analysis of the archives of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an official state agency tasked with spying on and counteracting civil rights activity. These records demonstrate the extent to which non-state actors assumed the roles originally exercised by the de jure Jim Crow regime. Beyond augmenting understandings of the civil rights movement-era US South, this article contributes analytical insights to social and ideological transitions in other post-colonial, post-authoritarian spatial contexts.
Keywords: Post-Jim Crow, Mississippi Delta, ideological state apparatus, racialization of space, internal colonialism