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On Web Watching: Finding the Soul of Place

John Paul Lederach

in The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

This chapter discusses a critical but overlooked component of peacebuilding: the craft of watching webs. The web approach suggests that the way out of the pattern of repeated violence goes through ... More

This chapter discusses a critical but overlooked component of peacebuilding: the craft of watching webs. The web approach suggests that the way out of the pattern of repeated violence goes through the web of relational spaces in the context. Finding the relational spaces will mean that the location for sustaining social change in the context can be found. The approach of web watching also suggests that the process of locating webs demands careful attention to how we are in and how we relate to the setting.Less

The Foundations of the Monastic Life: A Presentation of the Practice of Stillness

Robert E. Sinkewicz

in Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus

This chapter presents an English translation of the ascetic corpus writing of Evagrius of Pontus about the foundations of the monastic life and the practice of stillness. This piece is devoted to a ... More

This chapter presents an English translation of the ascetic corpus writing of Evagrius of Pontus about the foundations of the monastic life and the practice of stillness. This piece is devoted to a discussion of the necessary conditions for the cultivation of stillness and the hazards to be avoided in preserving it. He explains the requirements for achieving and maintaining stillness. These include withdrawing from society to take a solitary life, adoption of a lifestyle free from unnecessary distractions, and the exercise of great caution in human relationships.Less

Living Voices

Patricia Appelbaum

in St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America's Most Popular Saint

The author conducted a qualitative survey of contemporary Americans about their relationships to St. Francis, asking about memories, knowledge, practices, feelings, and spiritual sensibilities. This ... More

The author conducted a qualitative survey of contemporary Americans about their relationships to St. Francis, asking about memories, knowledge, practices, feelings, and spiritual sensibilities. This chapter reports on the results. The first section is an overview of the collected responses. The second section looks more closely at selected personal stories. The chapter then draws several conclusions from the responses. First, although most people use materials available in the wider culture, they appropriate these materials in creative ways. Second, the use of images shows especially wide variation. Third, for many people, Francis signifies an alternative to the surrounding culture. Notably, an emerging critique of contemporary culture associates Francis with quietude, stillness, and focus. Finally, personal ways of engaging with Francis often replicate traditional spiritual practices.Less

Solitude, Silence, and Stillness: Light from the Palestinian Desert

John Chryssavgis

in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality

This chapter focuses on the influence of Palestinian monasticism on the Philokalia through the themes of solitude, silence and stillness.

Conclusion

Louise Hornby

in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film

The conclusion to the book underscores its central preoccupation with stillness’s impossibility, or difficulty. This impossibility or inhuman (objective) aspect of photography has frequently been ... More

The conclusion to the book underscores its central preoccupation with stillness’s impossibility, or difficulty. This impossibility or inhuman (objective) aspect of photography has frequently been used as a means to dismiss the medium in favor of representational strategies that more closely mimic human vision. However, the ability to step out of time and out of selfhood is a critical model for the authors, photographers, and filmmakers discussed in the book, and suggests a means to a new understanding of empathy.Less

Samuel Beckett and Choreography

Susan Jones

in Literature, Modernism, and Dance

Extending the theme of close relationships between dance and drama, this final chapter turns to Samuel Beckett's experimental drama as an important site for choreographic innovation in the twentieth ... More

Extending the theme of close relationships between dance and drama, this final chapter turns to Samuel Beckett's experimental drama as an important site for choreographic innovation in the twentieth century. The discussion suggests new sources for specific plays, showing that Beckett's understanding of contemporary choreography began with his spectatorship of dance in the 1930s. The chapter identifies two kinds of movement in the plays, one mimetic, and one abstract, and sources or allusions to dance come from the Diaghilev production of Petrouchka and Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Dances. The chapter examines Beckett's philosophical interest in the relationship between human and mechanical movement and self-consciousness, drawing on the discussions of Arnold Geulincx, Heinrich von Keist, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Beckett's choreography places his work in a long European tradition of innovations in drama and dance that continue in the work of European and American choreographers to this day.Less

Stillness and the Bond of Love: Venise sauvée

Yoon Sook Cha

in Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other

This chapter, a reading of Venise sauvée, considers Jaffier’s decision to spare Venice from destruction. This apparently negative action upsets the notion of wielding power as an inevitable outcome ... More

This chapter, a reading of Venise sauvée, considers Jaffier’s decision to spare Venice from destruction. This apparently negative action upsets the notion of wielding power as an inevitable outcome of force. To act without power, it is argued, disrupts the mechanics of the transmission of violence that submits the weaker to the stronger, as well as the self-perpetuation of force that ensures its continued transmission. It begs us to consider the particular claim that helplessness and vulnerability have – exactly the claim that Venice, in its open defenselessness, has upon Jaffier. The bond of love Jaffier feels for Venice which surpasses linguistic capture nonetheless produces an urgency to express it. The negative use of power seems to be inextricably tied to a certain stillness of speech, at once pressing “the silent thing that must be expressed,” as Weil puts it, and preserving its essential silence.Less

Pausing, Waiting, Repeating: Urban Temporality in Mrs. Dalloway and The Years

Tamar Katz

in Woolf and the City

This chapter evokes recent critical interest in space and mobility in Woolf's London and it reminds us that temporality and stillness are crucial aspects of Woolf's city. Focusing on a slightly ... More

This chapter evokes recent critical interest in space and mobility in Woolf's London and it reminds us that temporality and stillness are crucial aspects of Woolf's city. Focusing on a slightly different aspect of Woolf's city, the chapter then attempts to recast the relation of spatial and temporal structures, and—drawing on Ben Highmore's suggestion that studies of urban life engage in what he terms, citing Henri Lefebvre, “rhythmanalysis”—thinks about how urban life in Woolf has a characteristic time and rhythm and why this might matter. In particular, the chapter talks about how characters pause, wait, stop, and start, in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and about the revisions of this rhythm later in The Years (1937); for pausing and waiting, related practices in the novels, are acts of suspension in both time and place.Less

Movement/embodiment: learning habits (1)

Peter Kraftl

in Geographies of alternative education: Diverse learning spaces for children and young people

Building on chapter 5, this chapter examines a distinct set of ways in which alternative learning spaces may be enlivened: in the movement of human bodies within and between learning spaces. Many ... More

Building on chapter 5, this chapter examines a distinct set of ways in which alternative learning spaces may be enlivened: in the movement of human bodies within and between learning spaces. Many alternative educators argue that children in their learning spaces should cultivate different kinds of bodily movements from learners in mainstream schools. These diverse movements include combination, movement-between places, stillness, walking, repetition and gradual withdrawal. Thereafter, the chapter demonstrates how some educators are engaged in the production of particular learning habits, which flow from those bodily movements. The work of Félix Ravaisson on habit is developed to explore how habits are channelled and worked-out in interpersonal relations in alternative learning spaces. In so doing, this chapter provides a key bridging point to the book's remaining chapters. It also contributes to recent theorisations of mobility and habit in the social sciences.Less

Movement and Stillness: Versions of Medea

Richard Buxton

in Myths and Tragedies in their Ancient Greek Contexts

This chapter begins with the portrayal of Medea by Apollonios of Rhodes, concentrating on Medea's oscillations between movement and stillness. In particular, it is when exercising control through ... More

This chapter begins with the portrayal of Medea by Apollonios of Rhodes, concentrating on Medea's oscillations between movement and stillness. In particular, it is when exercising control through magic that she is motionless, whereas her domestically-generated anguish drives her into motion. The argument then widens out to consider, firstly, the stillness/movement polarity in other versions of the Medea myth both in art and in literature, and, secondly, the stillness/movement polarity in Greek culture as a whole.Less

Stillness

Song Hwee Lim

in Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness

This chapter explores the notion of slowness in cinema through the staging of stillness in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. It first discusses the meaning of stillness in “motion pictures” or “moving ... More

This chapter explores the notion of slowness in cinema through the staging of stillness in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. It first discusses the meaning of stillness in “motion pictures” or “moving images.” It then delineates how a cinema of stillness is a conscious stylistic choice by filmmakers who eschew dramatic tendencies, narrative impulses, and spectacular effects. The main body of the chapter analyzes two aspects of stillness: stillness of the camera and stillness of diegetic action. It examines three films with the longest average shot lengths (ASLs) and the least camera movement in Tsai's oeuvre: What Time, which averages 65.09 seconds per shot and contains not a single shot with camera movement; I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, which averages 70.92 seconds per shot and has only five shots (or 5.2 percent of the 97 shots in total) with camera movement; and Visage, which averages 90.11 seconds per shot and contains nine shots (or 10.3 percent of the 87 shots in total) with camera movement. It is argued that the strategies of camera stillness and narrative emptiness allow ample time to instill a sense of slowness and to create moments of nothing happening, during which our minds can contemplate as well as drift.Less

The Polyphony of Prayer

Carol Harrison

in The Art of Listening in the Early Church

This chapter examines the odd case of Christian prayer and asks just who the speaker and who the listener are in the practice of prayer. It is based on a number of early Christian treatises on ... More

This chapter examines the odd case of Christian prayer and asks just who the speaker and who the listener are in the practice of prayer. It is based on a number of early Christian treatises on prayer, especially those on the Lord's Prayer, and attempts to demonstrate that, in fact, the one who actually listens in prayer, and is thereby transformed by it, is the believer, who is inspired to respond to God's address to them in his Word. True prayer is thus shown to be a matter of listening to God and of responding to His presence and revelation, rather than an address to Him. The chapter argues that this is an attitude characteristic of true hearing, which, by attending to God, is transformed by Him.Less

Introduction

Louise Hornby

in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film

The introduction provides an overview of the book and sets out the photographic stakes of stillness in the historical context of the early twentieth century and the invention of motion pictures. ... More

The introduction provides an overview of the book and sets out the photographic stakes of stillness in the historical context of the early twentieth century and the invention of motion pictures. These two technologies—photography and motion pictures—provide the ground for reframing the modernist debate around stasis-kinesis, which has typically played out unevenly on the side of discourses of speed and acceleration, focusing on the creation and impact of ever newer and ever faster technologies of motion, such as the railway, the motor car, the modern assembly line, and motion pictures. However, stillness remains an obdurate stopping point and necessary critical intervention in such kinetic economies. Charting the book’s interdisciplinary terrain, the introduction brings art history and film studies to bear upon each other to determine the critical purchase of stillness, how it accrued a negative meaning, and how modernist writers, filmmakers, and artists negotiated its limits.Less

Wonder as the Culmination of Isaac of Nineveh’s Eschatology

Jason Scully

in Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology

This chapter examines Isaac’s synthetic account of wonder and astonishment, which makes use of all the source material discussed in the previous three chapters. According to Isaac, the human soul is ... More

This chapter examines Isaac’s synthetic account of wonder and astonishment, which makes use of all the source material discussed in the previous three chapters. According to Isaac, the human soul is capable of processing material sensations with temporal reasoning, but it cannot process spiritual forms of knowledge. Since spiritual insights are immaterial and cannot be understood through temporal reasoning, the soul enters into a state of uncomprehending astonishment when it receives spiritual insights from divine revelation. The mind, by contrast, is capable of comprehending spiritual insights through wonder. The transition from astonishment to wonder represents the moment when a person moves from soul to mind and begins to comprehend the mysteries of the future world through ecstasy. Once people understand the mysteries of the future world, they begin to live the heavenly way of life while remaining in the material world.Less