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This article examines, how the reformist attempts of some Iranian religious intellectuals—consciously or unconsciously—lead to the desacralization of Islamic concepts, using the Iranian jurist and activist Seddigha Wasmaghi as an example. The reformists are, as will be shown with reference to Wasmaghi, concerned with establishing that the normative as well as the theological assumptions in Islam are results of human cognition. Any idea that is qualified as a human assumption, i.e., not sacred and thus open to challenge, can be critically examined, re-read, and perhaps even changed or overruled. Such approaches include, for example, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari’s understanding of the Qurʾan as a ‘prophetic reading of the world’ and ʿAbdolkarim Sorush’s interpretation of revelation as ‘prophet’s dreams’. Among the most recent attempts of this kind is Seddigha Wasmaghi’s perception of ‘prophecy as a human construction’. This argument is presented and critically analyzed in this paper.

The desacralization of Western social institutions and practices over the last few centuries, partly brought about by the conquests of science, has changed the functioning of society and individual thinking. The literary representation of Western societies in three contemporary French novels depicts a materialistic world that represses the spiritual dimension that forms part of the human condition. L’Anomalie (2020), an apocalyptic account of a cosmic crisis that confounds scientists and philosophers, illustrates Jean-Marc Ferry’s “post-secular” perspective according to which recent scientific discoveries, far from solving the enigmas of the universe, are uncovering its thousand mysteries, rendering the idea of the supernatural less and less implausible. Jean Brun describes humankind’s sense of alienation from the mystery of existence as an “ontological separation.” Humans try to abolish this separation and conquer time and space through science. In Sérotonine (2019), medical science succeeds in keeping the depressed protagonist alive temporarily by regulating his hormones, but his emotional and spiritual crisis takes over in an individualistic world devoid of communal rites. Le Voyant d’Étampes (2021) traces the efforts of a failed academic to navigate a world governed by constantly changing normative rules prescribed and described by the social sciences. In societies where neither traditional religion nor the sciences provide solutions to existential crises, these contemporary novels turn to various forms of resacralization: love as secular spirituality, the subliminal nature of poetry, and the new doctrines of woke ideology.

This article examines the poetic work of one of the brightest representatives of the Bessarabian poetry – poet from Izmail, Andrei Butakov. In his poems the poet aims to convey the individual feelings against the background of postmodern reality. The motifs of loneliness and despair, moving into the world of personal feelings bring A.Butakov's creativity closer to the theme of the lyrical works of poets of the Silver Age of Russian literature. In the works of the Bessarabian poet there is a tendency to combine the spiritual heritage of this period with modernity. In the studied lyrical texts, this effect is achieved using a characteristic of the postmodern aesthetic techniques of the quoting and styling.

Violence is often considered through its causes or effects, but seldom by its source. As to that, opinion is also divided. Some say that human culture is the source of violence and that love and peace can only come from ‘outside’; others claim that precisely this ‘outside’ is the source of violence and that love can only blossom in a society that cancels all arbitrary reference to any ‘outside’. These positions are articulated by, respectively, René Girard and Gianni Vattimo. This article confronts both positions and tries to learn from them, even though no scientific proof can decide between them.

Museums' growing integration of Web 2.0 techniques is indicative of their readiness to redefine their relationship with their audience. While visitors were traditionally kept at arm's length, the use of these techniques now involves them at every stage in implementing the museum offer online. By scrutinizing the Web sites of institutions and the tools they use, the authors are able to highlight the different roles that now fall to the audience in terms of communication, mediation and artistic creation. The authors go on to analyze the ramifications of visitor involvement. While such involvement may well add to audience competencies and make museums more accessible and less \"stuffy,\" it also challenges their authority and legitimacy. L'intégration croissante des techniques du Web 2.0 dans les musées révèle que ceux-ci sont prêts à redéfinir leur relation avec leur public. Alors que les visiteurs étaient traditionnellement tenus à distance, le recours à ces techniques sollicite maintenant leur participation à chaque étape de l'implantation de l'offre du musée en ligne. Grâce à un examen des sites Web des institutions et des outils qu'ils emploient, les auteurs font ressortir les différents rôles qui sont maintenant assignés au public en termes de communication, de médiation et de création artistique. Ils analysent les ramifications de l'engagement du visiteur. Cet engagement, qui est susceptible d'accroître les compétences du public et de rendre les musées plus accessibles et moins «ennuyeux», représente aussi un défi pour leur autorité et leur légitimité. La integración creciente de técnicas Web 2.0 por parte de los museos nos indica que están preparados a redefinir su relación con su público. Mientras que tradicionalmente a los visitantes se les mantenía a cierta distancia, ahora la utilización de estas técnicas los involucra en todas las etapas de la oferta en línea del museo. Al examinar con atención los sitios Web de las instituciones y los instrumentos que utilizan, los autores destacan los diferentes papeles que desempeña ahora el público en los ámbitos de la comunicación, la mediación, y la creación artística. Los autores analizan también las consecuencias de involucrar al visitante. Mientras que una tal participación puede aumentar las competencias del público y hacer que los museos sean más accesibles y menos \"aburridos\", al mismo tiempo representa un desafío para su autoridad y su legitimidad.

The author of the article applies synchronic and diachronic approach to describe consistent patterns in Russian word formation, when the facts in contemporary Russian are explained with due regard to the history of their development and formation. The research focuses on commonly used derivatives of the Church Slavic, which have not lost their sacred meaning despite the general secularization beyond religious discourse of evangelic lexis in Russian (as well as in other Slavic languages). The preservation of the sacred meaning is influenced by a specific process of differentiation between the sacred and the secular by means of word­building formants in cognate synonyms (for example, [‘Christmas’]/ [‘birth’]; [‘the life (of a saint)’]/ [‘ordinary life’]; [‘Resurrection’]/ [‘Sunday’]; [‘to redeem’], [‘the Redeemer’] [‘to buy out’] etc.). The last section of the article considers the process of semantic specification in diachrony of originally synonymic cognate derivatives like [‘belly’], [‘the life (of a saint)’], [‘life’], which has led to a complete change of the semantics of the lexeme [‘belly’] (a gradual strengthening of its physical component has led to the modern meaning ‘belly, part of body’) and the prevalence of the word (with its Old Slavonic suffix ­ ). The latter, having absorbed the “life­related” semantic of lexemes ‘belly’ and ‘the life (of a saint)’, expresses all aspects of its understanding and interpretation by the contemporary language community. The author assumes that this process could also have been influenced by the general correlation between the Church Slavonicisms (both elevated and general denominations) and native Russian words (both concrete and ordinary denominations) in Russian. Word­building formants play a significant role in the differentiation of the sacred and the secular (and preserving the sacred) when the religious lexicon of the Church Slavonic origin enters the modern Russian language.

The ritual of Mandi Safar, bathing together on the beach using the prayer rajahs performed by the community on every Wednesday of the last week of Safar (second month of Hijri), has been designed by the local government as one of the supporting programs for economic development in Air HitamLaut Village, Jambi. The tradition that derived from religious rituals in the Malay society to avoid catastrophes and calamities along Safar faced controversy at first because it was considered as heresy by some Muslims. Nevertheless, the ritual evolved simultaneously into a popular cross-ethnic tradition and had been planned as one of the national tourism icons of Jambi Province since 2017. Through political sociology and psychoanalysis approaches in social change, this paper analyzes the programming processes of this agenda and its impact. The result shows that marine tourism program of Mandi Safar provides a positive basis for economic development in Air HitamLaut. The program has spurred the development of local infrastructure on the one hand and has led to social change in society on the other side. Previously, the process of desacralization of the Mandi Safar ritual as well as the role of local customary-religious elites as a mobilizer became the key variables to empowerment process.

Existió en nuestras sociedades un verdadero culto por la Literatura. Reaccionando contra este culto, se ha desarrollado en las últimas décadas una indiferencia, si no un desprecio, por una Literatura que ha ido perdiendo no solo su capital simbólico, sino también su visibilidad y por lo tanto también su derecho a existir. Este artículo vuelve sobre estos aspectos para interrogarlos desde un enfoque cultural e histórico. Centrándose en las controversias dadas en el ámbito académico francés contemporáneo, traza la aparición histórica de tal fenómeno y los discursos críticos contemporáneos sobre el debilitamiento de una cierta idea de lo literario que se confunde a menudo con el fin de la Literatura.

The opening events of the French Revolution have stood as some of the most familiar in modern European history. Traumatic Politics emerges as a fresh voice from the existing historiography of this widely studied course of events. In applying a psychological lens to the classic problem of why the French Revolution’s first representative assembly was unable to reach a workable accommodation with Louis XVI, Barry Shapiro contends that some of the key political decisions made by the Constituent Assembly were, in large measure, the product of traumatic reactions to the threats to the lives of its members in the summer of 1789. As a result, Assembly policy frequently reflected a preoccupation with what had happened in the past rather than active engagement with present political realities. In arguing that the manner in which the Assembly dealt with the king bears the imprint of the behavior that typically follows exposure to traumatic events, Shapiro focuses on oscillating periods of traumatic repetition and traumatic denial. Highlighting the historical impact of what could be viewed as a relatively “mild” trauma, he suggests that trauma theory has a much wider field of potential applicability than that previously established by historians, who have generally confined themselves to studying the impact of massively traumatic events such as war and genocide. Moreover, in emphasizing the extent to which monarchical loyalties remained intact on the eve of the Revolution, this book also challenges the widely accepted contention that prerevolutionary cultural and discursive innovations had “desacralized” the king well before 1789.

En este artículo se examinan las obras de Odi Gonzales y Boris Espezúa, autores cuyas poéticas se confguran a partir de un notable predominio de elementos que pertenecen al imaginario andino. Esta característica genera en sus textos tensiones en el plano discursivo y epistemológico, lo que hace que sus poéticas adopten rasgos peculiares que las distancian de los paradigmas estéticos y literarios desarrollados en la capital limeña durante la década de los 80. El análisis de los textos se enfocará en aquellas marcas geoculturales que muestran la vigencia del imaginario andino, a partir del cual se proponen formas alternas de hacer poesía y entender lo poético.