The Rijksmuseum identifies Dirck’s Jacob Cornelisz Painting his Wife Anna as a commemorative family portrait, which has been the most common interpretation of Dirck’s painting in recent scholarships of the past two decades. In fact, the Renaissance experienced increasing social and cultural practices to commemorate family identity and lineage through various means, including the commemoration of the dead through art production such as portraiture and bust sculpture.
Read MoreWhile the philosophy of religion project requires an outsider perspective, the African American student—as a cultural insider whose religious background lies in the Black Church—examining gospel music cannot always separate personal memories and experiences from their inclination to interpret Mother Ford’s experience as religious or mystical. Having witnessed the frenzied behaviors of individuals singing gospel makes an outsider perspective difficult to attain for those individuals. In this article, I blur the lines of the Durkheimian perspective on the sacred/profane dichotomy to underscore the nuances of reading gospel as religious material.
Read MoreEvgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–1921) was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1929–1930) met a similar fate just nine years later, and both writers suffered extreme marginalization afterward. Given this, one wonders why and how they and so many other authors of the period criticized the regime indirectly at all.
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