Search Results

Chapter 4 combines a discussion of the developments of non-Chalcedonian church life with an account of how the imperial government tried to reintegrate the centrifugal elements in the eastern provinces. After a few years in exile the non-Chalcedonian bishops started to ordain a separate hierarchy that challenged the sacramental authority of the Chalcedonians—most visible by taking a non-Chalcedonian Eucharist. Prominent among the non-Chalcedonians appears John of Tella whose mass ordinations made him one of Justinian's dangerous opponents (and perhaps also an advocate of a different (eucharistic) ecclesiology). The problems which the religious controversy caused for the average layperson are addressed as well as the development of the different Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian liturgies (especially the case of the Trisagion). If read in context, the sources show that Justinian responded with a genuine attempt of rapprochement towards the non-Chalcedonians in the early 530s.

In the past 30 years, physicians and social scientists have begun to study the salutary effects of religious belief and practice on mental and physical health, concluding in general that a correlation exists between religiosity and health. Recently, some of these researchers have written for popular audiences, books and articles advocating religiosity for its health benefits. Generally speaking, these authors assume the existence of religion as such and of a universal human capacity for religiosity. This chapter suggests that the religion of this contemporary rapprochement is a distinctly modern phenomenon, a product of contemporary culture's cult of the self‐interested individual and a variant of the ancient Christian heresy called Gnosticism.

This is the second of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It looks at American perceptions of China’s capabilities as a military power, discussing them in relation to the successive conflicts in which China was involved: the Korean war, the two Taiwan Straits crises, the Sino-Indian and Sino-Soviet border conflicts, the Vietnam war and the Sino-Vietnamese fighting in 1979. The discussion marks the transition from the Truman and Eisenhower administration appraisals of China’s conventional strength as a ‘candidate great power’ (in military terms), to the perceptions in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, that China had not developed advanced conventional forces, and had been sufficiently weakened through its domestic and foreign policies eventually to require it to embark on a domestic modernization programme that led to the reduction and then ending of its support for the national liberation struggles it had previously championed. Moreover, it needed American military protection to help it deal with Soviet encirclement. This evolution in the understanding of China’s needs and capacities helped ease the path to the rapprochement and then normalization of relations between these two former military opponents, much as America’s own defeat in Vietnam made it easier for Mao to turn to Washington.

This chapter describes how the Kennedy administration secretly explored the alternative of accommodation in dealing with Cuba, despite the administration’s otherwise infamously aggressive actions against the country. Given that more aggressive options proved unequal to the task of ousting Castro, and the missile crisis dramatically demonstrated the dangers of hostility, the more civil option of trying to domesticate him through dialogue gained adherents—including the president himself. Amid economic destabilization, covert operations, and assassination plots, the Kennedy administration secretly but actively began to pursue what classified National Security Council (NSC) and CIA records referred to as “the rapprochement track” with Cuba.

This chapter examines how Obama changed the domestic political dynamics of U.S.-Cuban relations, making new thinking about Cuba politically feasible. Obama promised to end restrictions on remittances and family travel for Cuban Americans, resume “people-to-people” educational and cultural exchanges, and engage Cuba in talks on issues of mutual interest. Engagement, he argued, offered the best hope for promoting “a democratic opening in Cuba,” which would be “the foremost objective of our policy.” As the new president took the oath of office, conditions for a rapprochement between Cuba and the United States appeared more propitious than at any time in a half century.

This chapter studies how peace and the abolition of the censor paved the way for the Canard to become slightly less openly pacifist and frankly antimilitarist. It shows that about a year after the peace treaty was signed, the weekly started to air its pessimism through a pun that eventually became a topos. The writers manipulated the dual meanings of the phrase la dernière guerre, which means the most recent war, and invented the phrase prochaine dernière guerre, or “next last war.” The Canard not only attacked those who criticized the efforts at Franco-German rapprochement and who continued to trade in anti-German hysteria, but also cynically greeted the peace offensives of Aristide Briand.

This chapter provides a discussion on the emerging rapprochement between cognitive and ecological analyses. It introduces three of advances, namely embodied cognition, architectures of cognition, and soft constraints. In addition, it describes a research from the CogWorks Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that illustrates how these three advances yield an understanding of the functional task environment that is the key to the rapprochement between cognitive and ecological analyses. It also discusses two related questions, both of which ignore resource limits to focus on design limits. The reported work suggests that ignoring the analysis of optimality may lead one to draw false conclusions about people's willingness or success at implementing different strategies in a given task environment. Advances in the study of embodied cognition have led to the realization that properties of functional cognition and of the world are in a tight loop.

The chapter elucidates the friendly takeover of the world of contemporary composition by the serialists. In the 1950s the two leading camps in the world of contemporary composition, the followers of Arnold Schoenberg and those of Igor Stravinsky, who had inhabited opposite sides of the barricades for well nigh half a century, finally made peace. The eventuality was sometimes referred to as a “rapprochement,” but for some composers, Stravinsky among them, it was actually more like a friendly takeover on the part of the serialists. The music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern in the 1920s was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but the composers now appear to have used musical form. In addition, classicism was quite superficial and the music that flowed from Schoenberg's pen was essentially modern. For Nabokov serialism had the “earmarks of a Messianic cult,” and far from being innovative it was the last stage in a harmonic development that could be traced back to 1600, whereas Stravinsky, on the other hand, had proclaimed a new domain that would start a new cycle—the domain of rhythm.

This chapter draws on psychoanalytically inflected theories of ideology to offer a new explanation of the apparent inconsistencies of Arnim's antisemitism. Slavoj Žižek's concept of the “social fantasy” and Homi Bhabha's notion of “colonial mimicry” both stipulate that ideologies can incorporate a great deal of inconsistency and ambivalence without losing their effectiveness. These post-Freudian theories shed new light on Arnim precisely because ambiguity and ambivalence proliferate in his writings around the motif of interreligious love. It is shown that romantic attachments are the means by which Arnim figures the possibilities and the limits of Christian-Jewish rapprochement. It is also argued that interfaith love stories fulfill a distinct function in Arnim's political thought, which combines German nationalism with a critique of rising industrial capitalism. Arnim wrote several texts that either stage the emergence of a German community that excludes Jews or depict the corrosion of such a community through French occupation and rising industrial capitalism. These texts include the openly antisemitic speech “On the Distinguishing Signs of Jewishness,” the unpublished prose fragment “Reconciliation in the Summer Holiday,” and the complex novella Gentry by Entailment (Die Majorats-Herren). In each of these texts, the dramatization of failing Christian-Jewish love affairs serves to gloss over the tensions that trouble Arnim's visions of social harmony and political unity.

The Sino-Soviet conflict, which first surfaced in the late 1950s and degenerated into armed border clashes in 1969, proved to be the main catalyst for Sino-American rapprochement. The China question almost immediately entered into the dialogue of the Kissinger-Dobrynin channel. Publicly, the Nixon administration said it would pursue relationships with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Privately, Nixon and Kissinger hoped to play the Soviets and the Chinese off each other—the concept of triangular diplomacy. Triangular diplomacy had less to do with the concrete and crude move of playing the powers off each other than it did with trying to influence the perceptions and emotions of Communist leaders. The documentary record suggests that it was only after Sino-American rapprochement had been set in motion in April-May 1971, with the Chinese Ping Pong diplomacy and the secret traffic through the Pakistani channel, that U.S. policymakers began to talk of playing the Communist powers off one another for American advantage.

Georgiana continues to party in the palace, and a year later marries a Scotsman, John Jeffrey, who is twenty years younger. James Freeman Clarke writes a touching Sketch of George in The Dial. Isabel Keats dies in the palace of a gunshot wound to the chest, a likely suicide. Jeffrey writes to Monckton Milnes to offer transcriptions of John Keats’ letters, which he provides in a ragged form. Georgiana and Jeffrey have a marital spat, leading to her miscarrying his baby. Jeffrey commences a career of far- flung travels, installing gasworks. They move to Cincinnati, where the marriage settles down, although he is often away. A brief description of the Keats children as adults, including a visit to Emma Keats Speed by Oscar Wilde.

The introduction provides a grounding in the diplomatic history of Anglo-American relations and surveys the main events of the so-called ‘Great Rapprochement’ between the two countries, including the Alaskan Boundary Dispute, Britain’s response to the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the US’s subsequent attitude to Britain’s war with the Boers. The introduction analyses the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and discusses the ways in which it was important both to the Pilgrims Society and to official Anglo-American relations. The introduction also provides a chapter by chapter breakdown of the rest of the book and outlines the argument that while the Pilgrims never set the agenda for official Anglo-American relations it nevertheless played a leading role in public diplomacy and, by extension, in how people have thought about how Britain and the United States have related to each other.

This chapter analyzes the border clashes between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union in March 1969. It details the development of Chinese leader Mao Zedong's perception of the Soviet Union as a challenge to China's autonomy and the (cultural) revolution, underscoring Mao's failure to understand how the Soviet Union interpreted his actions as a credible threat. Employing his own frame of reference, Mao failed to grasp that the Soviet Union did not see the border conflict as a catalyst for internal mobilization and political control at home and in its satellite states, but as yet another manifestation of the seeming irrationality of Chinese foreign policy. Mao's surprise and feeling of hostile encirclement, as well as the deepening of Soviet distrust, paved the way in turn for China's famous rapprochement with the United States under President Richard Nixon.

Chapter 9 explores Islamic theology related to Jesus in light of its implications for Muslim-Christian cooperation, pluralism, and world peace. Saritoprak emphasizes the importance of dialogue and pluralism in Islamic tradition and discusses the place of dialogue and the concept of the “People of the Book” in the Qur’an. He builds on a consideration of Qur’anic and historical associations between Muslims and Christians to address their current relationships and the many practical, philosophical, and theological efforts at rapprochement now under way. Such efforts include those of Fethullah Gülen as well as the Islamic idea of a “common word” which is being used to advance Christian-Muslim fellowship and dialogue through the Common Word Initiative. Such initiatives, Saritoprak argues, hold out promise of possibilities for broader transreligious and transcultural dialogue.