“… I think of an Athenian Poland, but of an Athens immensely perfected by the greatness of Christianity” (19-year old Karol Wojtyla, in a letter to a friend in 1939, on the eve of World War II. Quoted in Shulz 108). NOTE:  This is a draft manuscript; please do not quote.  Work for this project was supported […]
On Good Friday, one of the most significant days in the Christian calendar, when Christians commemorate Jesus’ death on the cross, LifeChurch.tv’s Church Online gathered for an online global prayer outreach for upcoming Easter Services. Essentially, individuals from around the world—who understand each other through the magic of translation software—logged onto http://babelwith.me and prayed together for friends and family who had not yet begun a relationship with Jesus.
The art of magic has enjoyed increasing visibility and a resurgence of interest, as demonstrated by the rising popularity of magicians, such as David Blaine, Hans Klok, Franz Harary, David Copperfield, and the production of two major motion pictures within a single year – The Prestige and The Illusionist. With his number one-rated cable television show and his recent ten-year contract for a major Vegas show with Cirque de Soleil at the Luxor, Criss Angel personifies the modern-day magician who is at the forefront of the magic renaissance. This paper attempts to examine the rhetorical potency of magic by analyzing the first season of Criss Angel’s award-winning television show, Mindfreak. By using Kenneth Burke’s concepts of symbolic action and identification, this paper explores the symbolic, albeit persuasive, dimension to magic as exemplified by Criss Angel.
Early in the 1970s, as increasingly diverse students were granted access to higher education through measures like the G.I. Bill, the discussion surrounding ESL students in the composition classroom began to note a distinction between how instruction should be designed for English language learners as opposed to instruction for native speakers. Authors argued that ESL students could not be assessed in the same manner as other students.
On Good Friday, one of the most significant days in the Christian calendar, when Christians commemorate Jesus’ death on the cross, LifeChurch.tv’s Church Online gathered for an online global prayer outreach for upcoming Easter Services. Essentially, individuals from around the world—who understand each other through the magic of translation software—logged onto http://babelwith.me and prayed together for friends and family who had not yet begun a relationship with Jesus. This community of people is serious about the role they play in fulfilling the mission of God on earth, that is, connecting men and women to God and to each other in spite of the fact that most of them have never met in person.
Ours is a world fundamentally determined by the politics of panic. It seems that time itself has fallen prey to the capitalistic logic of scarcity, a scarcity carefully managed by politicians and bureaucratic experts for the cultivation of both wealth and power. Recent market woes have only served to fuel this pathological urgency, rendering the creative cessation of consumptive patterns economically perilous; the willful pause for reflexive contemplation socially subversive; and the life-giving power of “free time†implicitly bound to the therapeutic satisfaction of “needs†shaped by marketers and polling data.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries especially, narratives of human progress have been increasingly presented in terms of acceleration in a phenomenon testifying to what can be termed “the ecstasy of speed.†In considering, unpacking, and interrogating such ecstasy, we investigate the ways in which individuals and cultures seek to rush towards the beyond of present realities.