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The article focuses on one of Kafka’s short parables written in September 1920 and published for the first time in 1936. The text tells — from the first person plural perspective — about a group of five friends, and a sixth person who vainly seeks entrance into their brotherhood. The article discusses Kafka’s “analysis” of the inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics of this group formation, as well as the question about the fiction of this community. Confronted with contemporary events and episodes of Kafka’s life, there will also be a presumption of Kafka’s reflection of racial and national tensions with its anti-Semitic and anti-German incidents and demonstrations that disrupted life in Prague in 1920.

This article examines the language of seed reception within the Parable of the Sower in Mark and Luke. The paper argues that Mark's diction introduces reproductive terms into the seed figure and that Luke edits Mark to include even more distinctively gynaecological and reproductive terminology. The result is a parable in Luke that turns the audience into uterine receptacles of the seed/logos.

The climate crisis and the alarming loss of biodiversity require urgent action. One of the most popular tools to tackle these crises is offsetting, an accounting logic through which environmental damages can be compensated elsewhere with environmental benefits. Developed to help address the climate crisis, the carbon offsetting logic has also been transposed to address biodiversity loss. Biodiversity offsets permit the compensation of residual environmental damages through equivalent gains undertaken elsewhere. This article identifies three arguments that show why such a transposition is problematic. To explain the fundamental problem with biodiversity offsetting, the famous Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise” Ring Parable ( Ringparabel ) is proposed as an allegoric interpretation of the biodiversity offsetting logic, stressing that unique entities lose their uniqueness and power once people try to replicate them.

This article is a reflective analysis of an assignment in which undergraduate students developed dystopian, postapocalyptic, fantasy, and fictional short story parables to illustrate their understanding of sociological theory. In a social theory course, students were assigned a final paper in which they designed a short story that integrated sociological theory, including classical and contemporary concepts, which were applied to these fictional worlds. The assignment encouraged students to develop both macro- and micro-level creative social theory analysis using a fictional society that often touches on the themes of futurism, science fiction, or postapocalyptic settings. These scenarios allowed students to engage in world-building linked to systems of oppression that were analyzed through various perspectives, including Marxist theories, critical race theory, and feminist theories. The assignment is a creative way for students to apply their sociological imagination with the world-building process for an in-depth understanding of sociological theory.

Scholars most often interpret the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), one of the best-known passages in the New Testament, in the context of intergroup hostility between Jews and Samaritans. Drawing on recent work on Samaritans in Jewish studies and Samaritan studies, I argue that there is little reason to continue framing the parable in terms of polarized Samaritan ethnic or religious alterity. Ancient texts contemporaneous with Luke-Acts often include Samaritans within Israel without marginalization or classification as absolute non-Jewish Others. The emphasis on absolute difference emerges, rather, from a scholarly habit of both racialized and polemicized readings of the text. In contrast, I suggest an alternative reading: the Samaritan is better read, along with priests and Levites, as a limit concept to regulate the proper behavior of those included within a programmatic restored Israel.

Scholarship on the parables has at times negatively evaluated Luke's treatment of the good Samaritan. While many scholars claim to hear in Luke 10:30-35 nothing less than the ipsissima vox Jesu, the verses' supposed lack of \"fit\" within their Lukan frame have precipitated descriptions of the Third Evangelist as an editorial bungler. I attempt to rescue Luke from this criticism by suggesting that the parable's content forces Jesus's conversation partner (by means of the inherent reciprocity at work in the relationship that people living in the ancient world shared with their \"neighbors\") to admit his ironic indebtedness to all Samaritans. Through the power of a metaphorical story that Jesus asks the lawyer to interpret for himself, Samaritans become for him \"those who have shown mercy.\" This realization serves as the ground for Jesus's request that he \"go and do likewise.\"

(16) Overpowered by hunger and seeing that they have given him some money but without bothering to read the letter or take a look at the precise denomination of the bill, Adams rushes off to dine at a cheap restaurant and when approached for payment, offers the note which he had tucked in his vest-pocket and casually asks for change. First published in the Century in January 1893, and soon gathered in The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories, it was initially perceived to be \"highly farcical and amusing,\" as a critic in the London Times opined (13), the notable piece in an otherwise uneven collection. Completed at the resplendent Villa Viviani outside of Florence in the fall of 1892, it was published during the financially troubled years when the depressed economy, Clemens's notoriously imprudent investments in the Paige compositor, and the decline of his publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, forced him into bankruptcy (Paine 957). Arguably, this hotel was the base of operations from which Twain launched himself as a public figure in England, and it is the specific location where the protagonist of âeuroœThe £1,000,000 Bank-Noteâeuro becomes the object of a wager by the Langham brothers.