Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway wrote novels that won critical acclaim and popular success: The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. All three writers were involved with the Left at the time, and that commitment informed their fiction. Milton Cohen examines their motives for involvement with the Left; their novels' political themes; and why they separated from the Left after the novels were published. These writers were deeply conflicted about their political commitments, and Cohen explores the tensions that arose between politics and art, resulting in the abandonment of a political attachment.

Between 1550 and 1620, nearly twenty sermons and treatises on natural disasters were published, mostly in Prague. Their authors, Utraquist priests, responded to contemporary catastrophic events – plague epidemics, earthquakes, storms, floods, fires, famine, war, and locust infestations – as well as celestial phenomena and monstrous births. Reflecting the intellectual landscape of the time, these sermons also incorporated scientific findings, micro-stories, and songs or prayers. All sermons interpreted catastrophes as divine messages: expressions of God’s wrath, signs of the approaching Judgment Day, but also manifestations of God’s fatherly care and love. This paper explores the representation of catastrophes and the oscillation of preachers between established literary topoi and individual authorial experience. Additionally, I examine the role of climatic stress and the broader social crisis of the period in as reflected in what is known as Wunderzeichen literature and consider how the society responded to these challenges.

Divine hiddenness in the Hebrew Bible is widely construed as the conceptual equivalent to divine absence. This article challenges this influential account in light of Psalm 88—where the hidden God is hostilely present, not absent—and reevaluates divine hiddenness. Divine hiddenness is not conterminous with divine absence. Rather, with its roots in the ancient Near Eastern idea of the royal and cultic audience, the meaning of “hide the face” (סתר + פנים) may be construed as a refusal of an audience with the divine king YHWH. Building on this insight, I argue that divine hiddenness possesses a petitionary logic and develop a distinction between the experiential and petitionary inaccessibility of salvific divine presence. Divine absence and hostile divine presence denote the former, while divine hiddenness the latter. I probe the relationships between divine hiddenness, divine absence, and hostile divine presence, concluding that the absent or hostilely present God is not ipso facto hidden.

This study aims to examine how crime films released and distributed in mainland China reflect the country’s social context of crime and to further explore the cultural symbols embedded in their social representations. In this research, “new typical crime films” refers to Chinese crime cinema that, within the local sociocultural framework, centers on criminal events and attributes the causes of crime to deeper structural issues within society. The study draws upon A. J. Greimas’s narrative semiotics theory to analyze class consciousness within the specific social environments depicted in Chinese crime films, with Wrath of Silence (2018) as the primary case. As a new subgenre within contemporary Chinese crime cinema, this film stands out as distinctive among films released in the Chinese market for its depiction of social stratification. Through both surface and deep narrative analysis, the findings indicate that economic disparity and social imbalance between classes constitute the fundamental causes of violence among characters. The director seeks to expose how China’s upper class, in pursuit of exclusive control over power and interests, engages in primitive criminal acts and exercises hegemonic violence, thereby provoking retaliatory resistance. Analysis of the Violence Narrative in the Chinese Crime Film Wrath of Silence This study looks at how contemporary Chinese crime films, specifically Wrath of Silence (2018), reflect social problems and power dynamics in modern China. By using a semiotic approach to narrative analysis, the research shows how the film links acts of violence to deep social classes. The film highlights the stark differences between the wealthy and the poor, portraying silence as a response to injustice. For the oppressed, silence represents their inability to speak out, while for the powerful, it is a tool to hide corruption. Violence in the film is not just a personal act but a reflection of a broken social system. The study argues that Wrath of Silence uses violence as a lens to examine issues of class division, moral decay, and systemic injustice in China’s rapidly changing society.

This poem points out the misdeeds of human in their journey to overpower the nature and Mother Earth through science and technology and how the greed has led to the nature growing wild and deadly against human race by this COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent evidence indicates that priming participants with religious concepts promotes prosocial sharing behaviour. In the present study, we investigated whether religious priming also promotes the costly punishment of unfair behaviour. A total of 304 participants played a punishment game. Before the punishment stage began, participants were subliminally primed with religion primes, secular punishment primes or control primes. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviours for a subset of our participants—those who had previously donated to a religious organization. We discuss two proximate mechanisms potentially underpinning this effect. The first is a ‘supernatural watcher’ mechanism, whereby religious participants punish unfair behaviours when primed because they sense that not doing so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second is a ‘behavioural priming’ mechanism, whereby religious primes activate cultural norms pertaining to fairness and its enforcement and occasion behaviour consistent with those norms. We conclude that our results are consistent with dual inheritance proposals about religion and cooperation, whereby religions harness the byproducts of genetically inherited cognitive mechanisms in ways that enhance the survival prospects of their adherents.

This article explores the representation of wrath in relation to the topic of shipwreck in literary texts from 17th-century Spain. As seen in the emblematic genre of the time, as well as in novellas and theatre plays, wrath is represented as the shipwreck of reason. Lack of control and the destruction of the mind as consequences of anger are associated with the capsizing of ships in marine storms. From the Renaissance and well into the late 17th-century, a sound mind is figuratively equivalent to the tranquil voyage in which the ship is in control of the maritime space. By contrast, the reckless and uncontrollable mind is comparable to the ship tossed and destroyed by the tempest, unable to return from the abyss of the ocean depths. As demonstrated in the literary texts of the time, to let the mind be taken over by the passions, particularly wrath and love, was frequently correlated with madness and, thus, with moral decline, as under contemporaneous thought, insanity was connected to ethical degeneration and conversely, sanity with Christian virtues. Moreover, the symbolic implication of the shipwreck motif in Early Modern Spanish literature also reflected the medical notions of the time—namely those related to the bodily humors. Within these sociocultural coordinates, wrath and unrequited love are correlated to choleric and melancholic natures that can lead to madness and social unrest. In sum, the connection of wrath to nautical devastation is an effective means to convey social and political commentary and transmit didactic messages.

Reviewing John Barclay's Paul and the Gift, Susan Eastman recognises the need for ‘fuller analysis of judgment’ in Paul to accompany such penetrating work on grace. The dearth of interest in wrath often perpetuates the Marcionite premise that wrath precludes mercy, a false antithesis that especially skews interpretation of Romans. This presumed opposition leads scholars to find dithering dialectic, two covenants, two Israels or contradictory fantasy in Rom 9–11. Replacing the simple binary with a thicker lens of provisional judgement clarifies Paul's argument that God strikes Israel in wrath in order to heal them.

The epistle to the Ephesians, like other Christian texts, teaches that life in the new creation, although not yet fully manifest, is already powerfully and sufficiently available to the church. However, this epistle uniquely has the predominant description of this new life in terms of entering into the household, or family, of God. Ephesians 1–5 makes this evident in the specific use of family language, the clustering of certain word groups (such as terms associated with wrath and peace), and the connection between promise and inheritance. This paper focuses on the instructions to children and fathers (Eph 6:1–4), showing that the teaching on the church in familial terms as the locus of the new creation is intended to be the basis for the way children and fathers are commanded to live their new life in their families. The description of the church contrasts with that of those outside the church, indicating that Christians are adopted children of God the Father, while those outside are “sons of disobedience” (2:2) and “children of wrath” (2:3). The instructions for children to be obedient and for fathers not to provoke their children to anger are best understood in this context.

Regarding Judah’s exilic realities and forced migration experience, this article proposes that the sage responsible for this poem functioned as a carrier group in articulating a narrative of collective trauma. The paper begins by summarizing key components of cultural trauma theory as developed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. It also situates the shared socio-historical context of the final textual forms of Jeremiah and Proverbs within the exilic/post-exilic realities of the Judahite community. It next traces the trope of wine inebriation across several Jeremiah texts, focusing especially on Jeremiah 25:15–29 to show how this motif is integrally woven into the book’s overarching themes of indictment, judgment, and exile. A conventional wisdom reading of Proverbs 23:29–35 yields a moralistic warning about the self-destructive cycle of wine intoxication of the fools in the book of Proverbs. But a cultural trauma hermeneutic of the poem—when paired with intertextual echoes of Jeremiah 25:15–29—opens the poem to a deeper reading. Within this framework, the sapiential poem emerges as a creative, dramatic and theologically rich act of trauma storytelling, depicting foolish Judah’s metaphorical intoxication as an embodiment of exilic indictment, woes and suffering, yet gesturing toward the possibility of healing and restoration through wisdom reflection and re-narration of their past.