A Time to Laugh: Religious Humor in Contemporary Russia

Contemporary Russian religious humor continues the tradition of this spiritual and selfsacrificial laughter. The anecdotes that are gathered here make fun not only of religion and its characteristic attributes, but of human imperfections and shortcomings, which manifest themselves in relation to various aspects of worship. Everything is good in moderation, including religious zeal that is not the goal by itself, but the instrument of spiritual and moral development. There is a proverbial saying in Russia—force a fool to pray to God and he will beat his forehead. Many anecdotes portray in a comic light this certain pseudo-piety, the eternal human intention to follow the letter of religion to the detriment of its spirit, while remaining the same stingy, calculating, deceitful, vain, and lustful creatures that care not a bit about their own inner transformation. Religious anecdotes mock blind imitation of the authorities, literal (and often absurd) interpretation of the Scriptures, inappropriate claims to sainthood, and the insatiable desire to use God and religion in self-interest. Religious humor, therefore, purifies human souls from the filth of intolerance and fanaticism. It awakens respect and compassion toward those people who profess another faith or hold different views and opinions, and belong to diverse races, nations, classes and civilizations. Thus, religious humor teaches us to love and appreciate religion in ourselves and not ourselves in religion—an attitude needed in our contemporary post-Cold War world, stricken by the fever of religious terrorism

The end of the essay?

The essay has been called the 'default genre' in high school and university education. This paper examines the nature, history and function of the essay in this role, including feminist critiques of the genre. It explores in particular the dialogic or multi-voiced character of most academic essays, and suggests that it is through dialogic structuring that new forms of academic writing might be generated. Excerpts from five student essays, and other forms of coursework and examination work are studied. The paper suggests that the handing in of essays and their role in the assessment of student performance is an elaborate game that students and teachers/lecturers have to learn to play well in order for both sides to enjoy and gain from the experience; it also concludes that it is time to recognise more formally the diverse forms of student expression as valid contributions to the demonstration of emerging knowledge

Ghost writing: the work of Muriel Spark

No abstract available

Meaghan Morris Thing

Certainly, when people say to me, as they often have done, ‘I can’t remember anything afterward,’ I think, Great, that’s the point! The work is not there to be repeated or identified with, but something works on you.Adam Phillips1 ‘Ironically,’ Meaghan Morris writes, ‘no text is more bleached of cultural particularity than the one which relentlessly theorizes “difference” without ever once stumbling over some stray material fact—a poem, a press photo, a snatch of TV news—that could, in its everyday density, take “theory” by surprise.’2 Ecstasy and Economics itself pops up as a ‘stray material fact’ that took me by surprise as a student more than two decades ago, and it still does. First, consider its surprising contents page: it dedicates what it terms ‘American essays’ to the late Australian poet John Forbes, a pairing at face value as surprising as the pairing of ecstasy and economics. That surprise extends to the pun of its cover photograph, a parody of Max Dupain’s 1937 photo The Sunbaker by Anne Zahalka, an image which recalibrates the photograph’s late Modern complexion by substituting a bleached and blurry beach surround for the deep shadows of the original. This image feels as historical now as the Dupain’s earlier subtlety of tone; Ecstasy and Economics analyses that ‘bleaching’ itself, the ‘stumbling’ into theory (as John Mowitt would say) where the unexpected ‘stray material fact’ renews analysis against sheer stultification.3 In the case of its cover photo the stray fact is hue, shade, distinction: a head of red hair whose capacity to surprise installs difference as surprise