Yumiko Kurahashi (倉橋 由美子, Kurahashi Yumiko, October 10, 1935 – June 10, 2005) was a Japanese writer. Her married name was Yumiko Kumagai (熊谷 由美子, Kumagai Yumiko), but she wrote under her birth name.
Her work was experimental and antirealist, questioning prevailing societal norms regarding sexual relations, violence, and social order. Her antinovels employed pastiche, parody, and other elements typical of postmodernist writing.
Early life and education
Kurahashi was born in Kami, Japan, the eldest daughter of Toshio and Misae Kurahashi.[1] Her godfather was Tokutomi Sohō, who knew her father. Her father was a family dentist in the town of Kami in Kōchi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. After one year studying Japanese literature at the Kyoto Women's University, she moved under pressure from her father to Tokyo to obtain a certificate as a dental hygienist and for medical training. Following her completion of the requirements to take the state exam for medical practice, however, she instead entered the Department of French Literature at Meiji University, where she attended lectures by prominent Japanese post-war literary figures such as Mitsuo Nakamura, Kenji Yoshida, and Ken Hirano. During her university years, Kurahashi was enthusiastically introduced to the body of modern literature, reading Rimbaud, Camus, Kafka, Blanchot, and Valéry. Her thesis was devoted to an analysis of Sartre's treatise Being and Nothingness.
Kurahashi and Kenzaburō Ōe have some biographical similarities: like Kurahashi, Ōe also was born in 1935, grew up on Shikoku, and moved to Tokyo, where he studied French literature, did graduate work on Sartre, and debuted in their student days with politically tinged short stories which drew the recognition of Ken Hirano. At a certain point, though, their paths diverge. Ōe went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature while the path chosen by Kurahashi led to her ostracization by the Japanese literary world.
Literary beginnings and controversy
While studying for her master's degree, Kurahashi made her literary debut in 1960 with the publication in the Meiji University literary magazine of the story The Party (パルタイ, Parutai), an acute satire on the communist left-wing sentiment commonplace among students at that time, as well as the bureaucratic dogmatism of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) (which was not named but strongly alluded to by the title).[2] The story won a university-wide prize and was commended by the prominent literary critic Ken Hirano in his review in the Mainichi Shimbun. A controversy erupted when Hirano used his influence within the Bundan to have Kurahashi's story reprinted in the prominent literary magazine Bungakukai.[2] The so-called "Parutai Debate" (Parutai ronsо̄) broke out across several literary magazines as Japanese writers and critics debated whether Kurahashi's story had "literary merit" and the propriety of Hirano's promoting it, in what became a proxy war for competing views on the influence of the Communist Party in the literary world.[2] Historian Nick Kapur argues that the Parutai debate also reflected unspoken displeasure within the male-dominated Bundan that a critic as prominent as Hirano was promoting the work of a young female author, in their view at the expense of males.[2] Although the Parutai controversy never reached any definitive conclusion, it won Kurahashi many spoken and unspoken enemies and would shadow her throughout her career.
Also in 1960, Kurahashi published the short novel End of Summer (夏の終り, Natsu no owari), which was also championed by Hirano and was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. Although Kurahashi did not win, she was considered, along with other new writers debuting at the same time - Takeshi Kaiko, Shintaro Ishihara, and Kenzaburō Ōe - to be ranked highly among the so-called "third wave" generation of young Japanese writers.
Kurahashi's 1961 novel (in fact antinovel) Blue Journeys (暗い旅, Kuroi tabi), written in the formal second person caused much controversy among critics and led Jun Etō to accuse her of plagiarism. In Etō's view, Kurahashi's novel simply imitated the earlier novel La modification (Second Thoughts) by the French writer Michel Butor. A fierce debate broke out in the press; Kurahashi's defenders were joined by Takeo Okuno [ja]. Whether influenced by the dispute or by the death of her father in 1962, after this Kurahashi left the graduate school.
Later life and works
In 1964 Kurahashi married Tomihiro Kumagai, who was then working as a producer for the Japan Broadcasting Corporation. Despite significant health problems, in 1966 she went to study at the University of Iowa in the United States, where she spent about a year with a Fulbright scholarship.
In 1969 Kurahashi published the phantasmagoric and dystopian novel Adventures of Sumiyakisto Q (スミヤキストQの冒険). A dramatic turnaround in her work was heralded by her novels such as Virginia (1970), Anti-Tragedies (反悲劇) (1971), and The Bridge of Dreams (夢の浮橋) (1971). While she continued to author both short and long stories such as A castle inside the castle (城の中の城) (1981), Symposion (シュンポシオン) (1985), and Popoi (1987), her Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults (大人のための残酷童話), and Kurahashi's Short Ghost Stories (倉橋由美子の怪奇掌編) became her most popular works during her lifetime. In 1987 she was awarded the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature for her massive antiutopian work Journey to Amanon (アマノン国往還記).
Final years
In her later years, despite her deteriorating health, Kurahashi authored several books, including Kôkan (交歓) (1989), Yume no Kayoiji (夢の通ひ路) (1989), The Gallery of Fantasy Art (幻想絵画館) (1991), Between the Earthly World and the Other World (よもつひらさか往還) (2002), and Cruel Fairy Tales for Old People (老人のための残酷童話) (2003). Kurahashi is also known for her translation of children's literature such as Shel Silverstein's The Missing Piece (ぼくを探しに) (1977) and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O (ビッグ・オーとの出会い : 続ぼくを探しに) (1982). Her last work was a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, which she finished one day before her death.
Yumiko Kurahashi died at the age of 69 of dilated cardiomyopathy. The disease was incurable, but Kurahashi consistently refused even those operations which could have prolonged her life.
Courtesy – Wikipedia
- Yumiko Kurahashi
William Shakespeare was born on 26 April 1564 at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England and died on 23 April 1616 at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
He was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have been continually adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain popular and are studied, performed, and reinterpreted through various cultural and political contexts around the world.
- William Shakespeare
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, He is born on 12 January 1952 (age 68 years), Los Angeles, California, United States and has received Edgar Grand Master Award, Edgar Award for Best Novel, National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters etc
Mosley was born in California. His mother, Ella (born Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk; her ancestors had immigrated from Russia. His father, Leroy Mosley (1924–1993), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army during the Second World War. His parents tried to marry in 1951 but, though the union was legal in California where they were living, no one would give them a marriage license.
He was an only child and ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies". Walter Mosley attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to more comfortably affluent, working-class west LA.[6] He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School in 1970. Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates". His mother encouraged him to read European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez. He was largely raised in a non-political family culture, although there were racial conflicts flaring throughout L A at the time. He later became more highly politicised and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which are a context of much of his fiction.
He went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. Mosley dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work programming computers. He moved to New York in 1981 and met the dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. They separated 10 years later and were divorced in 2001. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem after being inspired by Alice Walker's book, The Color Purple.[8] One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor to him and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein." Mosley still resides in New York City.
Mosley says that he identifies as both African-American and Jewish, with strong feelings for both groups.
Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than forty books and often publishing two books a year. He has written in a variety of fiction categories, including mystery and afro futurist science fiction, as well as non-fiction politics. His work has been translated into 21 languages. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors. Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates.
His first published book, Devil in a Blue Dress, was the basis of a 1995 movie starring Denzel Washington, and the following year a 10-part abridgement of the novel by Margaret Busby, read by Paul Winfield, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The world premiere of Mosley's first play, The Fall of Heaven, was staged at the Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, Ohio, in January 2010. Mosley has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. Mosley is on the board of the Trans Africa Forum.
In 2010, there was a debate in academic literary circles as to whether Mosley's work should be considered Jewish literature. Similar debate has occurred as to whether he should be described as a black author, given his status as a best-selling writer. Mosley has said that he prefers to be called a novelist. He explains his desire to write about "black male heroes" saying "hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes... There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes."
In 2019, after working in the writers room for the series Snowfall, Mosley was hired by Alex Kurtzman for a similar role on the third season of Star Trek: Discovery. After working on the series for three weeks, Mosley was notified by CBS of a complaint made against him by another member of the writers room for Mosley's use of the word "nigger" while telling a story. CBS told Mosley this was usually a fireable offence, but said no further action would be taken and asked that he not use the word again outside of a script. Mosley chose to leave the series, quitting without informing Kurtzman and Paradise and explaining his decision in an op-ed for The New York Times in September 2019. He did not identify Discovery as the series he was working on in the op-ed, but this was confirmed in reports on the op-ed shortly after its release.
- Walter Mosley
Voltaire
He was originally known as François-Marie Arouet. He was famous among people by his pen name Voltaire. He was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. He was Born on 21 November 1694, Paris, France and Died on 30 May 1778, Paris, France
He was a public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed. To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, an article will be structured in a particular way. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced.
- VoltaireTom Robbins, in full Thomas Eugene Robbins, (born July 22, 1932, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, U.S.), American novelist noted for his eccentric characters, playful optimism, and self-conscious wordplay.
Robbins was educated at Washington and Lee University, Richmond Professional Institute, and the University of Washington. He served in the U.S. Air Force, hitchhiked across the United States, and worked as a journalist and art critic. His first two novels became popular only when they were released in paperback editions. Another Roadside Attraction (1971), anchored by extensive research into early Christianity, is about a native of rural Washington who steals the mummy of Jesus Christ. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976; filmed 1994) is the story of a female hitchhiker with enormous thumbs who visits a woman’s spa in South Dakota.
Robbins’s later novels included Still Life with Woodpecker (1980); Jitterbug Perfume (1984), which centres on a medieval king who lives for 1,000 years before becoming a janitor in Albert Einstein’s laboratory; Skinny Legs and All (1990), a fantastical novel that follows five inanimate objects on a journey to Jerusalem while exploring the Arab-Israeli conflict and religious fundamentalism, among other political themes; Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994); Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000), the story of a hedonistic CIA operative who is cursed by a Peruvian shaman to forever keep his feet off the ground lest he die; and Villa Incognito (2003). Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005) is a collection of assorted writings that includes essays, travelogues, and poems. The memoir Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life was published in 2014.
Courtesy - The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.
- Tom RobbinsTitus Maccius Plautus (/ˈplɔːtəs/; c. 254 – 184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine /ˈplɔːtaɪn/ refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.
Biography
Not much is known about Titus Maccius Plautus's early life. It is believed that he was born in Sarsina, a small town in Emilia Romagna in northern Italy, around 254 BC.[2] According to Morris Marples, Plautus worked as a stage-carpenter or scene-shifter in his early years.[3] It is from this work, perhaps, that his love of the theater originated. His acting talent was eventually discovered; and he adopted the names "Maccius" (a clownish stock-character in popular farces) and "Plautus" (a term meaning either "flat-footed" or "flat-eared", like the ears of a hound).[4] Tradition holds that he made enough money to go into the nautical business, but that the venture collapsed. He is then said to have worked as a manual laborer and to have studied Greek drama—particularly the New Comedy of Menander—in his leisure. His studies allowed him to produce his plays, which were released between c. 205 and 184 BC. Plautus attained such popularity that his name alone became a hallmark of theatrical success.
Plautus's comedies are mostly adapted from Greek models for a Roman audience, and are often based directly on the works of the Greek playwrights. He reworked the Greek texts to give them a flavour that would appeal to the local Roman audiences. They are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature.
Plautus's epitaph read:
postquam est mortem aptus Plautus, Comoedia luget,
scaena deserta, dein risus, ludus iocusque
et numeri innumeri simul omnes conlacrimarunt.
Since Plautus is dead, Comedy mourns,
The stage is deserted; then Laughter, Jest and Wit,
And all Melody's countless numbers wept together.
Courtesy – Wikipedia
- Titus M PlautusThiruvalluvar ( Tamil : திருவள்ளுவர் ) is an eminent Tamil poet who created Thirukural, a work on ethics in Tamil literature . He is also known by other names like Theva Pulvar, Valluvar and Poyamodi Pulvar.
Thiruvalluvar was born in Mylapore . His wife Vasuki was a chaste and devoted woman, an ideal wife who never disobeyed her husband's orders and obeyed them scrupulously. Thiruvalluvar told people that one can live a divine life or a pure and holy life along with living the life of a Grihastha or Grihasthaswamy. He told the people that there is no need to leave the family and become a sannyasin to lead a divine life full of pure and sacredness. His wise sayings and teachings are now present in the form of a book known as ' Thirukkural '. [1] The Tamil calendar dates from that time and is referred to as Tiruvalluvar Aandu (year).
The time of existence of Thiruvalluvar is based mostly on linguistic evidence rather than archaeological evidence as no archaeological evidence has yet been determined. His period is estimated at 200 BC. and 30 B.C. placed between.
Traditional account
The name Tiruvalluvar (Tiru Valluvar) is derived from Tiru (a Tamil word meaning honorable , similar to Sri ) [4] and Valluvar ( a polite name for Valluvan according to Tamil tradition ) . The name Valluvan is a common name that represents his caste/occupation rather than his real name. However, the question whether the author of Thirukural (Valluvan) is named after his community or vice versa remains unanswered till date. Shaiva, Vaishnava, Jain , BuddhistThe sects argue that Thiruvalluvar is related to them. There are some legends about the birth of Tiruvalluvar in which he is said to be a Jain sramana saint. But there is no evidence available about his religion. Kamatchi Srinivasan "Kural Kuram Samayam", Tirukkural Publications, Madurai Kamaraj University, 1979. The work begins with a chapter offering respectful obeisances to the Almighty Lord. That is why it can be said that Thiruvalluvar was a theist. But their Lord is omnipotent, the creator of the whole world and the one who protects his devotees. Actually Kural does not advocate any specific or sectarian religious faith. One legend links them to Madurai, the ancient capital of the Pandya rulers, who vigorously promoted Tamil literature . According to another, he was born and brought up in Mylapore .which is currently a part of the city of Madras and traveled to Madurai to submit his work Tirukkural to gain approval from the king (Pandyan) and his group of poets. His wife's name is Vasuki .
There are more traditional stories which state that the Tamil Sangam (regularly held conference/gathering of eminent scholars and researchers) of Madurai was the authority through which Thirukkural was introduced to the world. Thiruvalluvar may have spent most of his life in Madurai as it was under the Pandiya rulers where many Tamil poets flourished. More recently, the Kanyakumari Historical and Cultural Research Center (KHCRC) claimed that Valluvar was a king who ruled over Valluvanadu, a hill region in the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu .
Most of the researchers and great researchers of Tamil like George Uglo Pope or G.U Pope who spent many years in Tamil Nadu and translated many texts into English including Tirukkural, have identified Tiruvalluvar as Paraiyar. Karl Groll (1814–1864) had already characterized Tirukkural as a work of the Buddhist pantheon by 1855 (Groll also included Jains under Buddhists). In this connection it was of particular interest that Tiruvalluvar, the author of the Thirukkural, was identified in the Tamil tradition as Paraiyar (as, incidentally, was the case with other well-known ancient Tamil authors, e.g., Auvaiyar; cf. Pope 1886: i–ii, x–xi). It is possible that Groul also included Jains under Buddhists (Groul 1865: xi note).
Jain
Jain scholars and many historians believe that Tiruvalluvar was a Jain monk, as the first chapter of Tirukkural is dedicated to Rishabhdeva , the first Tirthankara of Jainism. Apart from this, the teachings of Thirukkural coincide with the teachings of Jainism. In Kural Kavya, a book published by Bhartiya Jnanpeeth, it is clearly written that Thiruvalluvar was a Jain.
Thirukkural is one of the most revered ancient works in Tamil [7] . The Kural is considered to be the 'common faith of the world' [ citation needed ] as it shows the way to human morality and betterment in life. The Kural has probably been translated into the most languages after the Bible, the Quran and the Gita. [ please add citation ] . The Latin translation of Thirukkural by Costanzo Beschi in 1730 helped European intellectuals to discover the beauty and richness of Tamil literature in a remarkable way.
Tirukkural is formed by combining two words Tiru and Kural, ie Tiru + Kural = Tirukkural.
The Thirukkural is divided into three sections. The first section deals with good moral behavior ("right conduct") with aram , prudence and honor. In section two the porul properly discusses worldly affairs and in the third section inbam , the love relationship between man and woman. The first volume has 38 chapters, the second has 70 chapters and the third has 25 chapters. There are a total of 10 couplets or Kurals in each chapter and in all there are 1330 couplets in the work.
Courtesy – Wikipedia
- TiruvalluvarTilopa (Prakrit; Sanskrit: Talika or Tilopadā; 988–1069) was an Indian Buddhist monk in the tantric Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
He lived along the Ganges River, with wild ladies as a tantric practitioner and mahasiddha.[1] He practiced Anuttarayoga Tantra, a set of spiritual practices intended to accelerate the process of attaining Buddhahood. He became a holder of all the tantric lineages, possibly the only person in his day to do so. As well as the way of insight, and Mahamudra he learned and passed on the Way of Methods, today known as the 6 Yogas of Naropa, and guru yoga.[2] Naropa is considered his main student.
Life
Tilopa was born into the priestly caste – according to some sources, a royal family – but he adopted the monastic life upon receiving orders from a dakini (female buddha whose activity is to inspire practitioners) who told him to adopt a mendicant and itinerant existence. From the beginning, she made it clear to Tilopa that his real parents were not the persons who had raised him, but instead were primordial wisdom and universal voidness. Advised by the dakini, Tilopa gradually took up a monk's life, taking the monastic vows and becoming an erudite scholar. The frequent visits of his dakini teacher continued to guide his spiritual path and close the gap to enlightenment.[3][page needed]
He was born in either Chativavo (Chittagong) or Jagora in Bengal, India.
He began to travel throughout India, receiving teachings from many gurus:
from Saryapa he learned of inner heat (Sanskrit: caṇḍalī, Tib. tummo, inner heat);
from Nagarjuna he received the radiant light (Sanskrit: prabashvara) and illusory body (Sanskrit: maya deha, Tib. gyulu) teachings (Cakrasaṃvara Tantra), Lagusamvara tantra, or Heruka Abhidharma;
from Lawapa, the dream yoga;
from Sukhasiddhi, the teachings on life, death, and the bardo (between life states, and consciousness transference) (phowa);
from Indrabhuti, he learned of wisdom (prajña);
and from Matangi, the resurrection of the dead body.
As advised by Matangi, Tilopa started to work at a brothel in Bengal for a prostitute called Dharima as her solicitor and bouncer. During the day, he was grinding sesame seeds for his living.[5] During a meditation, he received a vision of Vajradhara and, according to legend, the entirety of mahamudra was directly transmitted to Tilopa. After receiving the transmission, Tilopa meditated in two caves, and bound himself with heavy chains to hold the correct meditation posture. He practiced for many years and then met the mind of all buddhas in the form of Diamond Holder Vajradhara. He is considered the grandfather of today's Kagyu Lineage.[2] Naropa, his most important student, became his successor and carried and passed on the teachings.
At Pashupatinath Temple premise, greatest Hindu shrine of Nepal, there are two caves where Tilopa attained Siddhi and initiated his disciple Naropa.
Courtesy – Wikipedia
- TilopaTierno Bokar (Fula: Cerno Bokar), full name Tierno Bokar Saalif Tall (1875 – 1939), was a Malian mystic, Sufi sage, and a Muslim spiritual teacher of the early twentieth century famous for his message of religious tolerance and universal love.
Life
Tierno[note 1] Bokar was born in Segou, Mali, in 1875. Bokar was the son of Salif (a Tukolor prince) and Aissata. His grandfather, Seydou Hann, was respected as a great Sufi mystic. As a child, Bokar was educated in the Tijani Order. By the age of 15, Tierno had memorized most of the Koran, Islamic rituals and laws, and the lives of many saints. In 1890, Bokar's father left his family in Segou in order to continue to fight against the French as Segou fell into French hands without resistance. Bokar moved with his mother to the village of Bandiagara in 1893. At the age of 18, he studied under Amadou Tafsir Ba, who introduced him to the secrets of the thought of the Tijani founder, Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani. After his education was complete Ba requested that Bokar take over his school, but Bokar refused to be anything more than Ba's assistant until Ba died. At the age of 26 he married Nene Amadou Thiam. When he was 33 his teacher passed, and he became the leader of his own school.
Daily Schedule
Tierno Bokar led his school for 29 years, and during its heyday taught almost 200 students. He kept a simple schedule so repetitive that at any time of the day it could be known where he was. He woke up every morning at 3 am and prayed until dawn. At dawn he would go from hut to hut calling the people to first prayer. Tierno Bokar did not lead the prayer, but would mingle afterwards with those who had attended. After the prayer he would spend some time in meditation, then head home (the school was centered in his home) where he would have breakfast with his students. The students would then be separated by their levels of learning in the courtyard and the lessons would begin. The morning would be dedicated to the Koran first, after which the law and commentaries would be studied until the second meal and second prayer of the day. After the second prayer teaching would continue until the mid-afternoon prayer (third prayer), after which the students were dismissed to handle their own business. Tierno recited his rosary until the sunset prayer (fourth prayer) at the mosque, where he would remain until the nightfall prayer (fifth prayer). After that he would visit his friends and family for enjoyment and social interaction until it was time for sleep.
Persecution and Death
In 1937, Tierno Bokar visited and became a follower of Cherif Hammallah in Nioro du Sahel.
A disagreement over the proper number of repetitions for a Sufi prayer (Hamallayya prescribed 11 times as opposed to 12) rose dramatically in scale. The difference in repetitions held little to no religious significance but due to historical factors was associated with rival clans. Intense infighting among rival clans and religious factions in French Sudan, as well as involvement of the French colonial authority eventually led to massacres and the exile of Hammallah. Tierno Bokar followed 11 repetitions in his prayer for religious reasons but many members of his clan viewed it as a deep betrayal due to the prayer being associated with a rival clan. In Bandiagara, Bokar was ostracized by his clan and family and forbidden to teach or pray publicly. Bokar's school was destroyed and he and his two wives and children were placed under house arrest.
Bokar died in Bandiagara in 1939, where he is buried in the cemetery "at his mother’s feet, under a small tree".
Courtesy – Wikipedia
- Tierno BokarAlbius Tibullus, (born c. 55 BC—died c. 19 BC), Roman poet, the second in the classical sequence of great Latin writers of elegiacs that begins with Cornelius Gallus and continues through Tibullus and Sextus Propertius to Ovid. Quintilian considered Tibullus to be the finest of them all.
Apart from his own poems, the only sources for the life of Tibullus are a few references in ancient writers and an extremely short Vita of doubtful authority. He was of equestrian rank (according to the Vita) and inherited an estate but seems to have lost most of it in 41 BC, when Mark Antony and Octavian confiscated land for their soldiers. As a young man, however, Tibullus won the friendship and patronage of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, the statesman, soldier, and man of letters, and became a prominent member of Messalla’s literary circle. This circle, unlike that of Gaius Maecenas, kept itself aloof from the court of Augustus, whom Tibullus does not even mention in his poems. Tibullus seems to have divided his time between Rome and his country estate, strongly preferring the latter. The Albius addressed by Horace in Odes, i, 33, and Epistles, i, 4, is generally identified with Tibullus.
Tibullus’ first important love affair, the main subject of Book i of his poems, was with the woman whom he calls Delia. Sometimes he presents her as unmarried, sometimes as having a husband (unless the term conjunx is meant to mean “protector”). It is clear, however, that Tibullus took advantage of the “husband’s” absence on military service in Cilicia to establish his relationship with Delia and that this relationship was carried on clandestinely after the soldier’s return. Tibullus ultimately discovered that Delia was receiving other lovers as well as himself; then, after fruitless protests, he ceased to pursue her.
In Book ii of his poems, Delia’s place is taken by Nemesis (also a fictitious name), who was a courtesan of the higher class, with several lovers. Though he complains bitterly of her rapacity and hardheartedness, Tibullus seems to have remained subjugated to her for the rest of his life. He is known to have died young, very shortly after Virgil (19 BC). Ovid commemorated his death in his Amores (iii, 9).
The character of Tibullus, as reflected in his poems, is an amiable one. He was a man of generous impulses and a gentle, unselfish disposition. He was not attracted to an active life; his ideal was a quiet retirement in the countryside with a loved one by him. Tibullus was loyal to his friends and more constant to his mistresses than they would seem to have deserved. His tenderness toward women is enhanced by a refinement and delicacy rare among the ancients.
For idyllic simplicity, grace, tenderness, and exquisiteness of feeling and expression, Tibullus stands alone among the Roman elegists. In many of his poems, moreover, a symmetry of composition can be discerned, though they are never forced into any fixed or inelastic scheme. His clear and unaffected style, which made him a great favourite among Roman readers, is far more polished than that of his rival Propertius and far less loaded with Alexandrian learning, but in range of imagination and in richness and variety of poetical treatment, Propertius is the superior. In his handling of metre, Tibullus is likewise smooth and musical, whereas Propertius, with occasional harshness, is vigorous and varied.
The works of Tibullus, as they have survived, form part of what is generally known as the Corpus Tibullianum, a collection of poetry that seems most probably to have been deliberately put together to represent the work of Messalla’s circle. The first two of the four books in the Corpus are undoubtedly by Tibullus. In its entirety the collection forms a unique and charming document for the literary life of Augustan Rome.
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- TibullusThomas Merton, original name of Father M. Louis, (born January 31, 1915, Prades, France—died December 10, 1968, Bangkok, Thailand), Roman Catholic monk, poet, and prolific writer on spiritual and social themes, one of the most important American Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.
Merton was the son of a New Zealand-born father, Owen Merton, and an American-born mother, Ruth Jenkins, who were both artists living in France. He was baptized in the Church of England but otherwise received little religious education. The family moved to the United States during World War I, and his mother died of stomach cancer a few years later, in 1921, when Merton was six years old. He lived variously with his father and his grandparents before he was finally settled with his father in France in 1926 and then in England in 1928. As a youth, he largely attended boarding schools in England and France. After a year at the University of Cambridge, he entered Columbia University, New York City, where he earned B.A. (1938) and M.A. (1939) degrees. Following years of agnosticism, he converted to Catholicism during his time at Columbia and began exploring the idea of entering religious life. After teaching English at Columbia (1938–39) and at St. Bonaventure University (1939–41) near Olean, New York, he entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. The Trappists are considered one of the most ascetic of the Roman Catholic monastic orders, and there Merton grew as a mystic and pursued imaginative spiritual quests through dozens of writings. He was ordained a priest in 1949.
Merton’s first published works were collections of poems—Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), and Figures for an Apocalypse (1948). With the publication of the autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain (1948), he gained an international reputation. His early works are strictly spiritual, but his writings of the early 1960s tend toward social criticism and touch on civil rights, nonviolence and pacifism, and the nuclear arms race. Many of his later works reveal a profound understanding of Eastern philosophy and mysticism unusual in a Westerner. Toward the end of his life he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, and in promoting interfaith dialogue. During a trip to Asia in 1968, he met several times with the Dalai Lama, who praised him as having more insight into Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. It was during this trip that Merton was fatally electrocuted by a faulty wire at an international monastic convention in Thailand.
Merton’s only novel, My Argument with the Gestapo, written in 1941, was published posthumously in 1969. His other writings included The Waters of Siloe (1949), a history of the Trappists; Seeds of Contemplation (1949); and The Living Bread (1956), a meditation on the Eucharist. Further posthumous publications included the essay collection Contemplation in a World of Action (1971); The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973); seven volumes of his private journals; and several volumes of his correspondence.
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.
- Thomas MertonThomas John Carlisle (October 11, 1913 – August 17, 1992) was an American poet, Presbyterian minister, and an expert on Emily Dickinson. He was born in Plattsburgh, New York, the only son of Ruby Grace Mann and Thomas H. Carlisle. He was educated at Williams College and Union Theological Seminary, New York. He married Dorothy Mae Davis (1912–1990) on August 20, 1936, and was ordained minister at First Presbyterian Church of Plattsburgh in 1937. He also served as minister in Tupper Lake and Delhi, New York. He served as pastor at Stone Street Presbyterian Church, Watertown, New York from 1949–1978. He retired from active ministry in 1978.
His published poetry collections include I Need a Century (1963), You! Jonah! (1968), Celebration (1970), Mistaken Identity (1973), Journey with Job (1976), Eve and After: Old Testament Women in Portrait (1984), Beginning with Mary: Women of the Gospels in Portrait (1986), "Journey with Jonah" (1984); Invisible Harvest (1987), and Looking for Jesus: Poems in Search of the Christ of the Gospels (1993). His poetry has also appeared in the publications alive now! (published by The Upper Room), the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. His love poem "Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One" with music by Dr. Arthur W. Frackenpohl has been published as a choir anthem and as a solo by Shawnee Press, Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. He is buried at Brookside Cemetery, Watertown, New York. The Thomas John Carlisle Papers are housed at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.
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- Thomas J CarlisleThomas Hardy, (born June 2, 1840, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England—died January 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset), English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.
Early life and works
Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason and jobbing builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an isolated cottage on the edge of open heathland. Though he was often ill as a child, his early experience of rural life, with its seasonal rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing. He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to schools in Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good grounding in mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, and in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday, he moved to London and became a draftsman in the busy office of Arthur Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to Dorset by ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth architect G.R. Crickmay.
Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest. His habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic skills. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form in later volumes (e.g., “Neutral Tones,” “Retty’s Phases”), but when none of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly turned to prose.
In 1867–68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which was sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never published. George Meredith, as a publisher’s reader, advised Hardy to write a more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the contemporary “sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much more distinctively his own. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own father shortly before Hardy’s own birth.
In March 1870 Hardy had been sent to make an architectural assessment of the lonely and dilapidated Church of St. Juliot in Cornwall. There—in romantic circumstances later poignantly recalled in prose and verse—he first met the rector’s vivacious sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who became his wife four years later. She actively encouraged and assisted him in his literary endeavours, and his next novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), drew heavily upon the circumstances of their courtship for its wild Cornish setting and its melodramatic story of a young woman (somewhat resembling Emma Gifford) and the two men, friends become rivals, who successively pursue, misunderstand, and fail her.
Hardy’s break with architecture occurred in the summer of 1872, when he undertook to supply Tinsley’s Magazine with the 11 monthly installments of A Pair of Blue Eyes—an initially risky commitment to a literary career that was soon validated by an invitation to contribute a serial to the far more prestigious Cornhill Magazine. The resulting novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), introduced Wessex for the first time and made Hardy famous by its agricultural settings and its distinctive blend of humorous, melodramatic, pastoral, and tragic elements. The book is a vigorous portrayal of the beautiful and impulsive Bathsheba Everdene and her marital choices among Sergeant Troy, the dashing but irresponsible soldier; William Boldwood, the deeply obsessive farmer; and Gabriel Oak, her loyal and resourceful shepherd.
Middle period
Hardy and Emma Gifford were married, against the wishes of both their families, in September 1874. At first they moved rather restlessly about, living sometimes in London, sometimes in Dorset. His record as a novelist during this period was somewhat mixed. The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), an artificial social comedy turning on versions and inversions of the British class system, was poorly received and has never been widely popular. The Return of the Native (1878), on the other hand, was increasingly admired for its powerfully evoked setting of Egdon Heath, which was based on the sombre countryside Hardy had known as a child. The novel depicts the disastrous marriage between Eustacia Vye, who yearns romantically for passionate experiences beyond the hated heath, and Clym Yeobright, the returning native, who is blinded to his wife’s needs by a naively idealistic zeal for the moral improvement of Egdon’s impervious inhabitants. Hardy’s next works were The Trumpet-Major (1880), set in the Napoleonic period, and two more novels generally considered “minor”—A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882). The serious illness which hampered completion of A Laodicean decided the Hardys to move to Wimborne in 1881 and to Dorchester in 1883.
It was not easy for Hardy to establish himself as a member of the professional middle class in a town where his humbler background was well known. He signaled his determination to stay by accepting an appointment as a local magistrate and by designing and building Max Gate, the house just outside Dorchester in which he lived until his death. Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) incorporates recognizable details of Dorchester’s history and topography. The busy market-town of Casterbridge becomes the setting for a tragic struggle, at once economic and deeply personal, between the powerful but unstable Michael Henchard, who has risen from workman to mayor by sheer natural energy, and the more shrewdly calculating Donald Farfrae, who starts out in Casterbridge as Henchard’s protégé but ultimately dispossesses him of everything that he had once owned and loved. In Hardy’s next novel, The Woodlanders (1887), socioeconomic issues again become central as the permutations of sexual advance and retreat are played out among the very trees from which the characters make their living, and Giles Winterborne’s loss of livelihood is integrally bound up with his loss of Grace Melbury and, finally, of life itself.
Wessex Tales (1888) was the first collection of the short stories that Hardy had long been publishing in magazines. His subsequent short-story collections are A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man (1913). Hardy’s short novel The Well-Beloved (serialized 1892, revised for volume publication 1897) displays a hostility to marriage that was related to increasing frictions within his own marriage.
Late novels of Thomas Hardy
The closing phase of Hardy’s career in fiction was marked by the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), which are generally considered his finest novels. Though Tess is the most richly “poetic” of Hardy’s novels, and Jude the most bleakly written, both books offer deeply sympathetic representations of working-class figures: Tess Durbeyfield, the erring milkmaid, and Jude Fawley, the studious stonemason. In powerful, implicitly moralized narratives, Hardy traces these characters’ initially hopeful, momentarily ecstatic, but persistently troubled journeys toward eventual deprivation and death.
Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels anticipate the 20th century in regard to the nature and treatment of their subject matter. Tess profoundly questions society’s sexual mores by its compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is seduced, and perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has an illegitimate child, suffers rejection by the man she loves and marries, and is finally hanged for murdering her original seducer. In Jude the Obscure the class-ridden educational system of the day is challenged by the defeat of Jude’s earnest aspirations to knowledge, while conventional morality is affronted by the way in which the sympathetically presented Jude and Sue change partners, live together, and have children with little regard for the institution of marriage. Both books encountered some brutally hostile reviews, and Hardy’s sensitivity to such attacks partly precipitated his long-contemplated transition from fiction to poetry.
Poetry
Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex Poems (1898), his first significant public appearance as a poet, included verse written during his years as a novelist as well as revised versions of poems dating from the 1860s. As a collection it was often perceived as miscellaneous and uneven—an impression reinforced by the author’s own idiosyncratic illustrations—and acceptance of Hardy’s verse was slowed, then and later, by the persistence of his reputation as a novelist. Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) contained nearly twice as many poems as its predecessor, most of them newly written. Some of the poems are explicitly or implicitly grouped by subject or theme. There are, for example, 11 “War Poems” prompted by the South African War (e.g., “Drummer Hodge,” “The Souls of the Slain”) and a sequence of disenchantedly “philosophical” poems (e.g., “The Mother Mourns,” “The Subalterns,” “To an Unborn Pauper Child”). In Time’s Laughingstocks (1909), the poems are again arranged under headings, but on principles that often remain elusive. Indeed, there is no clear line of development in Hardy’s poetry from immaturity to maturity; his style undergoes no significant change over time. His best poems can be found mixed together with inferior verse in any particular volume, and new poems are often juxtaposed to reworkings of poems written or drafted years before. The range of poems within any particular volume is also extremely broad—from lyric to meditation to ballad to satirical vignette to dramatic monologue or dialogue—and Hardy persistently experiments with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres.
In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three volumes of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that is written mostly in blank verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with Napoleon”—though it was not intended for actual performance. The sequence of major historical events—Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and so on—is diversified by prose episodes involving ordinary soldiers and civilians and by an ongoing cosmic commentary from such personified “Intelligences” as the “Spirit of the Years” and the “Spirit of the Pities.” Hardy, who once described his poems as a “series of seemings” rather than expressions of a single consistent viewpoint, found in the contrasted moral and philosophical positions of the various Intelligences a means of articulating his own intellectual ambiguities. The Dynasts as a whole served to project his central vision of a universe governed by the purposeless movements of a blind, unconscious force that he called the Immanent Will. Though subsequent criticism has tended to find its structures cumbersome and its verse inert, The Dynasts remains an impressive—and highly readable—achievement, and its publication certainly reinforced both Hardy’s “national” image (he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910) and his enormous fame worldwide.
The sudden death of Emma Hardy in 1912 brought to an end some 20 years of domestic estrangement. It also stirred Hardy to profundities of regret and remorse and to the composition of “After a Journey,” “The Voice,” and the other “Poems of 1912–13,” which are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement. In 1914 Hardy married Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 38 years his junior. While his second wife sometimes found her situation difficult—as when the inclusion of “Poems of 1912–13” in the collection Satires of Circumstance (1914) publicly proclaimed her husband’s continuing devotion to her predecessor—her attention to Hardy’s health, comfort, and privacy made a crucial contribution to his remarkable productivity in old age. Late in his eighth decade he published a fifth volume of verse, Moments of Vision (1917), and wrote in secret an official “life” of himself for posthumous publication under the name of his widow. In his ninth decade Hardy published two more poetry collections, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human Shows (1925), and put together the posthumously published Winter Words (1928). Following his death, on January 11, 1928, his cremated remains were interred with national pomp in Westminster Abbey, while his separated heart was buried in the churchyard of his native parish.
Legacy of Thomas Hardy
The continuing popularity of Hardy’s novels owes much to their richly varied yet always accessible style and their combination of romantic plots with convincingly presented characters. Equally important—particularly in terms of their suitability to film and television adaptation—is their nostalgic evocation of a vanished rural world through the creation of highly particularized regional settings. Hardy’s verse has been slower to win full acceptance, but his unique status as a major 20th-century poet as well as a major 19th-century novelist is now universally recognized.
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- Thomas HardyThomas Fuller, (born June 19, 1608, Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, Eng.—died Aug. 16, 1661, London), British scholar, preacher, and one of the most witty and prolific authors of the 17th century.
Fuller was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge (M.A., 1628; B.D., 1635). Achieving great repute in the pulpit, he was appointed preacher at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, in 1641. He officiated there until 1643, when the deteriorating political situation, which had led to the first battles of the English Civil Wars a year before, forced him to leave London for Oxford.
For a time during the fighting, he served as chaplain to the Royalist army and, for nearly two years, was in attendance on the household of the infant princess Henrietta at Exeter. He returned to London in 1646 and wrote Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), a satire against Oliver Cromwell. In 1649 he was given the parish of Waltham Abbey, Essex, where he became a friend of the other leading biographer of the age, Izaak Walton.
Fuller was again appointed to a pulpit in London (1652). There he completed The Church-History of Britain (1655), notable for its number of excellent character sketches, and added to it The History of the University of Cambridge and The History of Waltham-Abbey in Essex (1655). In 1658 he was given the parish of Cranford, near London, and continued to preach in the capital. Upon the reestablishment of the monarchy (1660), all Fuller’s ecclesiastical privileges were restored, and he became a doctor of divinity at Cambridge.
By enriching his factual accounts with descriptions of psychological oddities and other details of human interest, Fuller widened the scope of English biographical writing. His History of the Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662, was the first attempt at a dictionary of national biography. He was also a historian who gathered facts from original sources, producing works that provide much valuable antiquarian information. He acquired a reputation for quaintness because his writings abound with epigrams, anecdotes, puns, and other conceits, but he also paid careful attention to literary form.
For the modern reader, Fuller’s most interesting work is probably The Holy State, the Profane State (1642), an entertaining collection of character sketches important to the historian of English literature.
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- Thomas FullerSir Thomas Browne, (born Oct. 19, 1605, London—died Oct. 19, 1682, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng.), English physician and author, best known for his book of reflections, Religio Medici.
After studying at Winchester and Oxford, Browne probably was an assistant to a doctor near Oxford. After taking his M.D. at Leiden in 1633, he practiced at Shibden Hall near Halifax, in Yorkshire, from 1634, until he was admitted as an M.D. at Oxford; he settled in Norwich in 1637. At Shibden Hall Browne had begun his parallel career as a writer with Religio Medici, a journal largely about the mysteries of God, nature, and man, which he himself described as “a private exercise directed to myself.” It circulated at first only in manuscript among his friends. In 1642, however, it was printed without his permission in London and so had to be acknowledged, an authorized version being published in 1643. An immediate success in England, the book soon circulated widely in Europe in a Latin translation and was also translated into Dutch and French.
Browne began early to compile notebooks of miscellaneous jottings and, using these as a quarry, he compiled his second and larger work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenets, and commonly presumed truths (1646), often known as Browne’s Vulgar Errors. In it he tried to correct many popular beliefs and superstitions. In 1658 he published his third book, two treatises on antiquarian subjects, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients. Around the theme of the urns he wove a tissue of solemn reflections on death and the transience of human fame in his most luxuriant style; in The Garden, in which he traces the history of horticulture from the garden of Eden to the Persian gardens in the reign of Cyrus, he is especially fascinated by the quincunx. A smaller work of great beauty and subtlety, entitled A Letter to a Friend, Upon occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend, was published posthumously in 1690.
Browne had always been a Royalist, and his fame both as doctor and as writer gained him a knighthood when Charles II visited Norwich in 1671. He seldom left the city but corresponded with such men of learning as John Evelyn, Sir William Dugdale, and John Aubrey. Most of his surviving letters, however, were written to his eldest son, Edward Browne, and these give an intimate picture of his medical practice and his relations with his family. Browne has been criticized for the part he played in 1664 as a witness in the condemnation of two women as witches.
The first edition of Browne’s collected works was published in 1686; the standard edition (including letters) is Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vol., new ed. (1964). Keynes also compiled A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne Kt. M.D., 2nd ed. rev. and augmented (1968).
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- Thomas BrownThomas Berry, CP (November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009) was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, and scholar of the world’s religions, especially Asian traditions. Later, as he studied Earth history and evolution, he called himself a “geologian.”
He rejected the label “theologian” or “ecotheologian” as too narrow and not descriptive of his cultural studies in history of religions. He was drawn early on to respond to the growing ecological and climate crisis and proposed the need for a "New Story" of evolution in 1978. In this essay he suggested that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species.
Berry believed that humanity, after generations spent in despoiling the planet, is poised to embrace a new role as a vital part of a larger, interdependent Earth community, consisting of a “communion of subjects not a collection of objects.” He felt that we were at a critical turning point, moving out of the Cenozoic era and entering into a new evolutionary phase, which would either be an Ecozoic Era, characterized by mutually-enhancing human-Earth relations, or a Techozoic Era, where we dominate and exploit the planet via our technological mastery.
Berry said the transformation of humanity’s priorities will not come easily. It requires what he called “the great work” — the title of one of his books — in four institutional realms: the political and legal order; the economic and industrial world; education; and religion.
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- Thomas BerryThomas à Kempis, original name Thomas Hemerken, (born 1379/80, Kempen, near Düsseldorf, Rhineland [Germany]—died August 8, 1471, Agnietenberg, near Zwolle, Bishopric of Utrecht [now in the Netherlands]), Christian theologian, the probable author of Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ), a devotional book that, with the exception of the Bible, has been considered one of the most influential works in Christian literature.
About 1392 Thomas went to Deventer, Netherlands, headquarters of the learned Brethren of the Common Life, a community devoted to education and the care of the poor. There he studied under the theologian Florentius Radewyns, who in 1387 had founded the Congregation of Windesheim, a congregation of Augustinian canons regular (i.e., ecclesiastics living in community and bound by vows). Thomas joined the Windesheim congregation at Agnietenberg monastery, where he remained almost continually for over 70 years. He took his vows in 1408, was ordained in 1413, and devoted his life to copying manuscripts and to directing novices.
Although the authorship is in dispute, he probably wrote the Imitation. Remarkable for its simple language and style, it emphasizes the spiritual rather than the materialistic life, affirms the rewards of being Christ-centred, and supports Communion as a means to strengthen faith. His writings offer possibly the best representation of the devotio moderna (a religious movement created by Geert Groote, founder of the Brethren of the Common Life) that made religion intelligible and practicable for the “modern” attitude arising in the Netherlands at the end of the 14th century. Thomas stressed asceticism rather than mysticism as well as moderate—not extreme—austerity.
A critical edition of his Opera Omnia (17 vol., 1902–22; “Complete Works”) was published by M.J. Pohl.
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.
- Thomas A KempisTheodore Parker, (born August 24, 1810, Lexington, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 10, 1860, Florence, Italy), American Unitarian theologian, pastor, scholar, and social reformer who was active in the antislavery movement. Theologically, he repudiated much traditional Christian dogma, putting in its place an intuitive knowledge of God derived from man’s experience of nature and insight into his own mind. Parker resembled Ralph Waldo Emerson and other New England Transcendentalists in his emphasis on intuition but differed in the way he tempered his romanticism with rationalist and scientific interest.
Although Parker passed the entrance examination for Harvard College in 1830, he had no funds to attend. He was allowed, however, to take the examinations for his course of study without enrolling and was granted an honorary degree. He then attended Harvard Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1836. The next year he was ordained pastor of the Unitarian Church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
By 1841 Parker had formulated his liberal religious views and had incorporated them in the sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” The transient, to him, was Christianity’s theological and scriptural dogma, and the permanent was its moral truths. He elaborated his views in lectures published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. Opposition to his liberalism increased, and he soon resigned his pastorate. His supporters founded the 28th Congregational Society of Boston and installed him as minister.
Parker worked for prison reform, temperance, women’s education, and other such causes. He made impassioned speeches against slavery, helped fugitive slaves to escape, and wrote an abolitionist tract, A Letter to the People of the United States Touching the Matter of Slavery (1848). He also served on the secret committee that aided the abolitionist John Brown.
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- Theodore ParkarTheodore H. White, in full Theodore Harold White, (born May 6, 1915, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 15, 1986, New York, New York), American journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for his astute, suspenseful accounts of the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections.
The son of a lawyer, White grew up in Boston and graduated from Boston Latin School in 1932. After graduating from Harvard in 1938, he served as one of Time magazine’s first foreign correspondents, being stationed in East Asia from 1939 to 1945. He then served as European correspondent for the Overseas News Agency (1948–50) and for The Reporter (1950–53). With this extensive background in analyzing other cultures, White was well equipped to tackle the American scene in The Making of the President, 1960 (1961) and The Making of the President, 1964 (1965). Accepted as standard histories of presidential campaigns, these books present their subjects by intelligently juxtaposing events and treating politicians as personalities rather than as symbols.
White’s intimate style of journalism, which had its critics as well as its supporters, had a great influence on campaign coverage. He won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for The Making of the President, 1960; he was also acclaimed for his exclusive interview with Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, in which White compared the short-lived presidency of John F. Kennedy with the legend of Camelot. White went on to analyze the elections of 1968 and 1972 in later books.
White was the coauthor (with Annalee Jacoby) of Thunder Out of China (1946) and also wrote Fire in the Ashes (1953), The Mountain Road (1958), Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (1975), the autobiographical In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (1978), and America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956–1980 (1982). His books convey a genuine excitement about American institutions and politics.
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- Theodore H white