The Pianist

This is a review of The Pianist (2002)

Katyn

This is a review of Katyn (2007)

Catholicism in the New Poland: A Religion and Society in Transition

Excerpt: Polish society is divided along a number of lines; hardly unusual in any contemporary pluralistic society. The new divisions have not been adequately named. Michał Kuź, a Polish political scientist, has coined the self-explanatory terms “localists” and “internationalists” to describe perhaps the most pertinent current divide within European societies.1 These worldview divides are also visible along political party lines. The proportions of the parties of the divide are naturally different in Poland than in countries of the old Europe. It is relatively easy to indicate which of the parties in the political landscape of the country within the localist and internationalist divide places more emphasis on patriotism.2 Poles generally consider themselves European and their attitude toward the European Union remains quite positive across the board, with only a small group of genuine Eurosceptics present in the society.3 To put it in more traditional terms, in Polish society there is a small group of cosmopolitans and strong nationalists at opposite ends of the spectrum, while most citizens range somewhere in between. These divisions naturally play out at various levels in the field of religious life as well. However, to begin to understand the place of religion in Polish society, it is best to start at its most basic unit: the family

Book Review: Anna Niedźwiedź and Kaja Kajder, eds., Mapy miasta: Dziedzictwa i sacrum w przestrzeni Krakowa / Maps of the City: Heritages and the Sacred within Kraków’s Cityscape.

The book Maps of the City is the result of an exhibition at The Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków that was held between November 2017 and February 2018. As the subtitle makes clear, the exhibition focused on the place of heritage and the sacred within Kraków’s cityscape, together with the relationship between the two, both for the city’s residents and visitors. The latter group includes pilgrims. The curator of the exhibition was Anna Niedźwiedź, a cultural anthropologist at Jagiellonian University and author of The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and Popular Religion (2010). She is also one of the editors of the book. This richly illustrated volume is no mere catalogue of a museum exhibition. The editors, together with their team of anthropologists, have written essays based on original research that forms the basis of the exhibition and the chapters of the book. What we have in the end is a book that is both for the broader reading public and the scholar, and due to its bilingual form, both for Polish and English readers

The War in Ukraine and Political Theology in Poland

In the broadest of terms, political theology can be defined as “the analysis of political arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social, and economic aspects) from the perspective of God’s ways with the world.”1 Since the world changes, as do the politics accompanying them, political theology is of necessity a dynamic branch of the theological enterprise. The editors to the second edition of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology note a number of such changes that justify the expanded second edition of their handbook, including—what is most pertinent for understanding political theology at present in Poland—“the discourse on religion and violence, and new modalities of war.”2 A substantive chapter in this vein, by Emmanuel Katongole, starts with a news item concerning civil war in Ivory Coast in 2011. The author follows this sample news stressing the problems of “power struggle, corruption, sham elections, and civil war that characterize politics of much of sub-Saharan Africa.”3 Political theology is not new to Poland, but obviously the full- scale invasion by Russia of the neighboring Ukraine on February 24, 2022, together with the accompanying atrocities has had a similar impact in the field in the country to that of a number of the authors in the handbook. This article will provide an introductory view of a significant part of this ongoing response in the country

The Catholic Imagination in Martin Scorsese\u27s The Last Waltz

The author examines Martin Scorsese\u27s rockumentary The Last Waltz of 1978 as an encounter between the communitarian focus of the Catholic imagination (cf. Greeley Catholic Imagination) and the more individualistic ethos dominant in contemporary society (cf. Taylor Ethics of Authenticity). He claims the encounter not only shapes Scorsese\u27s fiction films but also exhibit\u27s his notion of the filmmaker\u27s mission. The subject matter of the film lends itself to this examination because a rock band balances between the individuality of its performers and the communality of its form. Moreover, overt religious values and themes of the film are explored in relation to the above questions

The passage of Zeppelin

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1982.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Includes bibliographical references.by Lorilee S. Garbowski.M.S.V.S

Katyn

This is a review of Katyn (2007)

Synergistic intracellular iron chelation combinations: mechanisms and conditions for optimizing iron mobilization

Iron chelators are increasingly combined clinically but the optimal conditions for cellular iron mobilization and mechanisms of interaction are unclear. Speciation plots for iron(III) binding of paired combinations of the licensed iron chelators desferrioxamine (DFO), deferiprone (DFP) and deferasirox (DFX) suggest conditions under which chelators can combine as ‘shuttle’ and ‘sink’ molecules but this approach does not consider their relative access and interaction with cellular iron pools. To address this issue, a sensitive ferrozine‐based detection system for intracellular iron removal from the human hepatocyte cell line (HuH‐7) was developed. Antagonism, synergism or additivity with paired chelator combinations was distinguished using mathematical isobologram analysis over clinically relevant chelator concentrations. All combinations showed synergistic iron mobilization at 8 h with clinically achievable concentrations of sink and shuttle chelators. Greatest synergism was achieved by combining DFP with DFX, where about 60% of mobilized iron was attributable to synergistic interaction. These findings predict that the DFX dose required for a half‐maximum effect can be reduced by 3·8‐fold when only 1 μmol/l DFP is added. Mechanisms for the synergy are suggested by consideration of the iron‐chelate speciation plots together with the size, charge and lipid solubilities for each chelator. Hydroxypyridinones with low lipid solubilities but otherwise similar properties to DFP were used to interrogate the mechanistic interactions of chelator pairs. These studies confirm that synergistic cellular iron mobilization requires one chelator to have the physicochemical properties to enter cells, chelate intracellular iron and subsequently donate iron to a second ‘sink’ chelator