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This essay traces the features of a symbolic construct which seldom garners much attention among scholars of biblical and Second Temple texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely, the likening of earth and womb. It contends that understanding this symbolism brings clarity to several texts whose interpretation is disputed and illuminates important aspects of sectarian thought, including a perspective on human sexuality which has escaped some current scholarship. The representation of the sexed body in the Thanksgiving Psalms (or “Hodayot”) receives extended attention. These psalms, it is shown, have been influenced by the negative rhetorical application of the phrase “born of woman” as found in the book of Job and by a tradition reflected in Jubilees and 4Q265 which employs the creation of Adam and Eve as a paradigm for the purification of new mothers (as described in Lev 12). The argument will show how a homology of earth and womb lies behind or can be derived from each of these traditions and how it comes to shape a profoundly negative, if highly contextualized, view of sexuality in the Psalms of Thanksgiving.

A study of the Lachish letters (ostraca) that goes beyond treating conventional formulae as simply epistolary phenomena or scribal preference shows that such language, along with other forms of language expressed in the letters, reflects a culture of high politeness. However, this culture is not restrictive. The senders also feel free to express their opinion and even criticise the recipient at times, with a corresponding reduction in respectful language. Such adjustment of language use to topic and/or emotion explains the variation in both conventional and other forms of polite language. When compared to biblical narrative and prayer, the letters affirm the biblical portrayal of social relationships. That is, the biblical portrayal of generally high politeness to a social superior or deity yet freedom to express opinion and criticism, along with the reduction in politeness that naturally occurs, with it reflects social reality of the time.

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the \"white Negro\" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. InTaking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies likeRamboandTwister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Manprovocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Mystical Social Imaginary Francis of Assisi and the Early Companions Clare of Assisi and Her Community Bonaventure's Franciscan Mystical Theology Franciscan Trajectories: Theophany, Poverty, and Annihilation References

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.

This chapter contains sections titled: Creating an open and respectful climate Hierarchies that impair Humbleness and courage Outstanding studies Dialogue, feedback and how to manage supervisors Notes