Crossing the Sacred-Profane Divide in Gnosticism and John's Gospel

Hodges, Horace Jeffery 이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원 2011 탈경계 인문학 Vol.4 No.1

Marcel Mauss and Mary Douglas together offer a theoretical understanding of gift-giving that enables us to draw a crucial distinction between the crossing of the sacred-profane boundary in Gnostic systems and the Johannine one. This distinction is particularly evident when such crossing leads to transactions involving the offer of nourishment. The sacred and the profane do not easily mix in any system, but in Gnostic texts and John's Gospel, the conflict between these dynamic forces of the two realms is presented as working itself out differently. This conflict is irresolvable the former due to its substance dualism, but it is resolvable in the lat ter due to its ethical dualism . Gifts of nourishment accentuate this difference, such that the reciprocity and ambiguity that Mauss sees in gift-giving work out their implications differently. Conflict is shown to be accentuated Gnostic systems, but ultimately resolved in the Johannine one.

Milton's Tree of Knowledge: Why "Sacred" Fruit?

Hodges, Horace Jeffery 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2006 중세근세영문학 Vol.16 No.2

John Milton has Adam describe fruit from the tree of knowledge as "sacred fruit" (PL 9.924), which raises three questions. (1) Does Adam express Milton's own view? Answer: yes, but whether Adam shares Milton's understanding of two sorts of sacredness remains unclear. (2) What might "sacred" mean here? Milton seems to mean not the dynamic power of holiness but the holy as pure and set apart, whereas Adam's view on this point remains unclear. (3) Would the fruit remain sacred after being taken? Milton portrays the fruit as no longer sacred after its plucking but as "unhallowd" in the strong sense of being imbued with a force of impurity, a point that Adam fails to recognize. An excursus on chaos and evil follows after these points and argues that chaos is not intrinsically evil, for it is not intrinsically impure, but also that it can be misused for impure, evil purposes.(Korea University)

Ironic Gifts of Death and Life : A Somewhat Fictive Account

HODGES, Horace Jeffery 이화여자대학교 이화인문과학원 2013 탈경계인문학 Vol.6 No.3

In an abrupt, yet hopefully plausible transition using serious playful irony— what the Renaissance thinkers called serio ludere, or playful seriousness—in order to transit, tresspass, and transgress rigid disciplinary boundaries, as well as difficult, resistant boundaries of various sorts, this brief paper moves abruptly from the secular economics of our contemporary postmodern world through the sacred economy of salvation in the thinking of such varied earlier figures as St. Paul, Mark Twain, and Jean Calvin to such related, if distinct, religious writings of antiquity as the Gospel of John and Gnostic texts on the economy of gift–giving, reflecting upon the relevant Greek terms along the way, and translating from the Hebrew, German, and Syriac, where needed, while also drawing upon the cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas, among other writers on food and drink, and then moving on into the paper’s decentered center, an un–derided jack–of–all–trades Derrida, then out again by means of literary critic David Lodge’s ironically postmodern comedy–of–manners novel Small World, to an optimistic conclusion through a counter–Feuerbachian deus ex machina move via the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, though with a nod of metaphsical appreciation to the contemporary analytical philosopher William F. Vallicella and his concept of the extramental “external unifier,” all the while dealing with the paradoxical notion of the unreturnable gift that can, after all, be returned, such that reciprocity in divine–human dealings is maintained, with the result that the denoument of my essay dwindles ineluctably off into an indefinite ellipse …

Suppression of stochastic pinning in magnetic nanowire devices using “virtual” domain walls

Hodges, M. P. P.,Bryan, M. T.,Fry, P. W.,Im, M.-Y.,Fischer, P.,Hayward, T. J. American Institute of Physics 2014 Journal of Applied Physics Vol.116 No.12

Striving to Understand 9/11 : Some Religious Dimensions of the Attack

Hodges, Horace Jeffery 한신대학교 한신인문학연구소 2002 한신인문학연구 Vol.3 No.-

Thus, orthodox Islam has generally maintained that the so-called "sword verse" of Sura 9: 598) "annuls the 124 verses that originally encouraged tolerance."99) Those hadith stating that Muhammad himself led Muslims in battle and forcibly converted the Meccans when he finally conquered the city would, moreover, tend to support the usual position that the Medinan sword verse abrogates the early Meccan verse of tolerance. We can, however, raise a fundamental question about this. Can we know for certain that the early history of Islam was so violent as many of the hadith portray? These traditions were collected some 200 years after Muhammad’s death, more than enough time for false traditions to have been invented.100) Bukhari and other compilers recognized this and established principles intended to distinguish authentic from inauthentic traditions by reviewing the reliability of the isnad (i.e., chain of narrators). Yet, the existence of ‘authenitc’ hadith that contradict each other suggests that new principles are needed, as many scholars have already argued. For instance, one might apply a principle used in Biblical scholarship, the principle of dissimilarity, which holds that a tradition is likely authentic if it is dissimilar to what the early church might have invented. If we apply this principle to early, imperialistic Islam, then those hadith that report violence and military jihad on Muhammad’s part are questionable since they could easily have been invented to justify the imperial conquest by which Islam spread so rapidly and the unequal status that imperial Islam accorded to Muslims and non-Muslims. Ye’or acknowledges this same point: Those hadith [concerning jihad ideology and the dhimmi rules] were composed during the period of the Islamic conquest in the eighth or ninth century, at a time of strong military confrontation between Christianity and Islam, giving them a militant orientation.101) Even the very conservative Muslim apologist Ruqaiyyah Maqsood102) recognizes that many false hadith are in wide circulation among Muslims: It is commonplace to read numerous very weak and highly suspect hadith in countless Muslim articles and publications, often copied from one modern article to the next, without the least concern for scholarship or the veracity of the hadith.103) Maqsood, nevertheless, accepts the traditional "rules for deciding whether a hadith was sahih(authentic), da’if(weak), or maudu’(doubtful),"104) but if contemporary Muslims use hadith without concern for their authenticity, then early Muslims probably did the same, and we have already noted that the principles applied for establishing the authenticity of an isnad have not eliminated contradictory hadith. Maqsood herself admits of early Islam that it is "a well-known fact that false hadith were soon in circulation, however pious the intentions of those who fabricated them."105) The more liberal Muslim Cyril Glass? even asserts: Hadith have [sometimes] been invented in order to justify some legal opinion or school of thought.106) Assuming such a state of affairs - i.e., the existence of hadith recognizably fabricated for juridical purposes and the need for legal rules applicable to the new conditions of a rapidly expanding Islamic empire - then a hermeneutics of suspicion is justified, and one could therefore also justifiably ask if the sword verse has been illegitimately used to abrogate the tolerance verse.107) Of course, the radical Islamists who urge military jihad are unlikely to be swayed through questions of hermeneutics raised by non-Muslims - probably not even by those non-Muslims willing to turn a critical eye upon American foreign policy. Bin Laden, for instance, has said, "We do not care what the Americans believe,"108) and he does not qualify this statement. Nevertheless, there are a few encouraging signs in some parts of the Muslim world. According to a recent article from Egypt: The 12 leaders of the militant al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya… Egypt’s bloodiest and most ruthless Muslim group, were pictured in a popular weekly news magazine voicing remorse and promising that there would be no return to the violence of the past 20 years… They were quoted as saying that they had misinterpreted the Islamic concept of jihad to justify killing Christian Egyptians, tourists, and police officers, and [were also quoted] as renouncing their use of violence to force women to respect Islamic dress codes.109) Some militants, it seems, can moderate their views, and it would be interesting to know what changed their minds. There is also the case of Iran, which is having second thoughts about its Islamic radicalism.110) As noted by Daniel Pipes, one of radical Islams severest public critics: Militant Islam is on the ascendant almost everywhere around the globe - except in the nation that has experienced it longest and knows it best. In Iran, it is on the defensive and perhaps in retreat.111) Significantly, this is occurring not just because a new generation has grown up that "wants freedom from a regime that bullies them personally, tyrannizes them politically, depresses them economically and isolates them culturally"112) but also because some in the ruling elite itself have become disillusioned. The Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, who had played a role in overthrowing the shah and establishing the Islamic regime’s intolerance, has resigned from his important position as prayer leader because the Islamic Republic has only brought "crookedness, negligence, weakness, poverty and indigence."113) Pipes suggests: Muslims who have suffered from the full debilitation inflicted by militant Islam over a period of decades, it seems, are immune to the charms of this totalitarianism and prepared to take on the challenge of finding an alternative vision to it.114) He attributes this to "a maturation of the Iranian body politic" resulting from the fact that by overthrowing the Shah, "the Iranian population realized that it had control over and responsibility over its destiny" and that from this more mature perspective, it "has looked at its choices and… [has] come… down in favor of democracy and a cautious foreign policy."115) Thomas Friedman agrees that the Islamists are losing in Iran: because the young generation in Iran today knows two things: (1) They’ve had enough democracy to know they want more of it. (2) They’ve had enough theocracy crammed down their throats to know they want less of it.116) Friedman adds that this younger generation: will force a new balance in Iran, involving real democracy and an honored place for Islam, but not an imposed one.117) John L. Esposito and Ahmed Rashid, among others, would seem largely to agree with this assessment.118) For perhaps similar reasons, it would appear, Pipes agrees that "there is nothing in Islam that necessarily contradicts democracy," though he holds that for Muslims to achieve democracy, they must also secularize ? by which, he seems primarily to mean that Muslims must separate religion and state and subordinate the former to the latter.119) That, of course, is a big question: Can the Islamic world, in this sense, truly secularize? More to the point, can this huge community that considers itself to have been founded by a religious leader to replace all previous religions and civilizations, this community convinced of its own cultural superiority and obsessed with its great weakness, this community afflicted with a homing sense of shame and deeply wounded honor120) for the historically superior status that it has lost - can this community secularize, especially when the impulse toward secularization comes from a distrusted West that has undergone an Enlightenment era that the Muslim world has never experienced,121) a West that has at times used the instrumental, secular rationality stemming from this Enlightenment to dominate much of the Islamic world?122) And this leads to a second big question: Even if the Islamic world can secularize, can it succeed in secularizing the militant mind of radical Islamists? The fact that millions of evangelical Christians in America are not comfortably reconciled with secular modernity strongly suggests that we should not be especially optimistic about Islam successfully, comprehensively, and profoundly secularizing itself. We have perhaps even less reason for optimism given the fact that historically, the most authoritative Islamic thinkers have never recognized the genuine legitimacy of an enduring, legal separation between religion and state.123) We thus have considerable reason for concern that at least some percentage - and therefore potentially a large number - of radical Muslims will perhaps never come to satisfactory terms with secular modernity.124) If so, then for a fearfully long time, we may have to live with radical Islamists - and increasingly die with them.125)

Poetry: A Consideration of What Makes Poetry 'Poetry'

Hodges, Horace Jeffery 한신대학교 한신인문학연구소 2001 한신인문학연구 Vol.2 No.-

Poetry is popular again in America, and not only on university campuses. We hear, or at least hear of, readings in bars or cafes or bookstores, at parking lots or shopping malls or plazas, on street corners or subway trams or city buses - or even on MTV Behind this current resurgence stands rap music, which reintroduced the rhythm and rhyme of the spoken word to ears that had become more accustomed to hearing the raucous din of heavy-metal music. Now more alert to the inherent music of the word, many young people are tuning their ears and turning their hands to composing their own poetry - or what they will call poetry. Yet, what is poetry, and why should it interest us?

Information Systems Development Contracts : An Exploratory Study of Australian Legal Practitioners` and Information Systems Professionals` Perceptions

Kathryn Hodges,Phil Joyce,Ross Smith 한국경영정보학회 2001 한국경영정보학회 학술대회논문집 Vol.2001 No.-

Milton's Muse as Brooding Dove: Unstable Image on a Chaos of Sources

Horace Jeffery Hodges 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2002 중세근세영문학 Vol.12 No.2

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

HORACE JEFFERY HODGES 계명대학교 한국학연구원 2009 Acta Koreana Vol.12 No.2

When Did Adam Fall in Paradise Lost?

( Horace Jeffery Hodges ) 한국밀턴과 근세영문학회(구 한국밀턴학회) 2007 중세근세영문학 Vol.17 No.2