Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 426 g
Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 426 g
ISBN: 978-0-231-12756-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press
Why do biblical themes continue to have such an impact on the popular imagination? Why do Mary-like mothers and Jesus-like sons play such a prominent role not only in the late Middle Ages and the Reformation but also in the Enlightenment; the nineteenth century, with its faith in science; and even our time, in such movies as The Terminator and the Star Wars saga to the extent that we can count them among Western society's leading cultural archetypes? And what does the figure of the father-God reveal about the social and familial institutions of male-dominated society?
In this provocative and engaging book, Albrecht Koschorke suggests that the story of the Holy Family has become a cultural code embedded in secular society. The Western nuclear family consists of the Christian prototype of mother, father, and child. Thus the Holy Family has come to be a model for modern family dynamics. The holy child stands at the center of centuries of art history, just as the child stands at the center of parental attention today. Similarly, the roles of modern women and men provide dramatic parallels to the surrogate mother Mary and to Joseph, a proxy for the absent father. But as the position of the father in Christianity remains ambiguous, Koschorke argues, the Holy Family model actually disrupts the nuclear "ideal," with reverberations throughout Western culture, including art, literature, film, popular culture, and political ideology. The anomalies of the Christian nativity a present but nonbiological father and an absent spiritual father, for example support the ideology of the state as a powerful and patriarchal determinant of society.
Ranging over two millennia of history and culture, Koschorke deftly contrasts the cultural archetype of the Holy Family with the theories of Freud and Weber and with the literary works of Rousseau, Kleist, and others in an exploration that illuminates issues of historical, religious, artistic, psychological, and cultural significance.
Fachgebiete
- Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
- Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
- Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
- Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Bibelwissenschaften
Weitere Infos & Material
Preface to the American EditionPart I Dispositions 1. Around the Year Zero2. Faith and Code3. Positions I: Jesus and His Fathers4. Positions II: Mary and the Trinity5. From the Jewish Birth Family to the Christian Destination Family6. The Man Joseph and Monotheistic Religion7. The Inimitable Model8. Combinatorics I: The Mother-Son Axis9. Combinatorics II: The Sacred Marriage10. Combinatorics III: The Father-Son Axis11. The Dissolution of DistinctionsPart II Theories 12. The Family Novel of Religions13. Beyond Gender14. The Question of PowerPart III Consequences 15. Christianity: On the Road to Becoming the Religion of the Empire16. The Church's Marriage Policy in the Middle Ages17. The Protestant Holy Family18. The Return of Joseph19. Joseph, Abelard, Saint-Preux20. Holy Family, Bourgeois Family21. Christ and Oedipus: Freud's Coup22. Remnant Families in the Welfare State23. Theology and Family in George Lucas's Star WarsNotesIndex
