Search Results (10)

YT521-B homology (YTH) domain-containing RNA-binding proteins (YTPs) are important N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A) readers that have crucial roles in determining the destiny of m⁶A-modified RNAs, which are the most widespread RNA modifications in eukaryotes. Tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.) hold significant importance in both dietary consumption patterns and scientific inquiries. While the YTP gene family has been characterized in tomatoes, their specific reactions to the low temperature and waterlogging stresses remain to be elucidated. In our study, nine tomato SlYTPs could be divided into five subclasses, YTHDFa-c and YTHDCa-b. After gene cloning and measuring their expression levels under stress conditions, it was revealed that SlYTP8 exhibited increased sensitivity to low-temperature treatment, while the expression levels of SlYTP9 were notably upregulated in leaf tissues subjected to waterlogging conditions. As members of the YTHDFc subfamily, SlYTP8 and SlYTP9 are both localized in the cytoplasm. Nevertheless, overexpression (OE) of SlYTP8 increased the sensitivity of tomato plants to low-temperature treatment, which was manifested by a higher accumulation of malondialdehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and a weaker reactive oxygen species scavenging ability compared to wild-type (WT) tomatoes. However, in comparison to WT plants, the leaves of SlYTP9 OE tomatoes showed higher chlorophyll content and a stronger reactive oxygen species scavenging ability after 3 days of waterlogging treatment, thereby increasing the resistance of tomatoes to waterlogging stress. Moreover, in order to investigate the possible molecular mechanisms underlying their responses to the low temperature and waterlogging stresses, the transcription factors and interacting protein networks associated with SlYTP8/9 promoters and proteins were also predicted, respectively. These results could fill the gap in the understanding of tomato YTPs in response to the low temperature and waterlogging stresses, while also providing a theoretical and experimental basis for subsequent studies on their molecular mechanisms. Full article

The fiction “Quanxiang Pinghua”, published by Jianyang 建陽 Yushi 虞氏 in the Yuan Dynasty, depicts public religious concepts using a set of organized illustrations of etiquette. As a popular cultural reading material of the Yuan Dynasty, the fiction’s illustrations are a mixture of mainstream religious ideas, such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, reflecting the Jianyang people’s compromised identification of the three religions and their value of faith. The illustrations shape the religious view of “the impermanence of destiny”. With the help of the spatial narrative of the political and religious order of Confucianism and the public construction of the ritualistic landscapes of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, these images reflect the ethical enlightenment and religious beliefs of the three religions in social life. From the perspective of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, this article adopted interdisciplinary methods to analyze inherent religious ethics in the illustrations of the fiction and explore religious beliefs among the people in the Yuan Dynasty. This article suggested that, by depicting religious rituals, the illustrations in the fiction reflect the comprehensive acceptance of the benevolence and righteousness, filial piety, loyalty, and kindness of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism by the public of the Yuan Dynasty. The illustrations in the fiction manifest Confucian order and moral ethics, of which the extension is interconnected with the concepts of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and living ethics, manifesting the inner interpretation of Confucian ethics in Jianyang popular literature and art and the collective regulation of folk religious beliefs. Full article

“Post-traditional” Jewishness—a distinctively modern condition wherein past sources of theological authority and religious normativity are no longer self-evident—has been one of the most abiding interests in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s writings for more than four decades. The present article traces the contours of this concern over time. In a number of publications between 1978 and 1987, Mendes-Flohr highlights “secular religiosity” as a manifestation of post-traditional Jewishness, exemplified by figures such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. These early writings intimate the possibility of a critical and yet nonetheless integrated Jewish religious subject, grounded hermeneutically in Jewish sources and sociologically in the Jewish community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). Starting in the late 1980s, however, Mendes-Flohr’s representations of post-traditional Jewishness begin to emphasize greater degrees of complexity and, indeed, fragmentation. These later writings gesture less to visions of secular religiosity than toward postures of “undogmatic, pluralistic, and open” self-reflectivity before the ever-changing faces of reality. Throughout this rich trajectory in Mendes-Flohr’s thought, though, we see that he returns continually—and ever more trenchantly—to dialogical life as a grounding principle. Full article

In the reinscribing of white supremacy in the United States, the contemporary university as a place of exclusion presents a problem of religion. Approaching religion as “the search for depth” and addressing the “techno-myths” of betterment, longevity, and the rituals of enacting these myths that capture today’s social imaginaries, this paper proposes an alternative to religious faith in “rising” and the rhetoric of the contemporary American technocratic-meritrocratic paradigm. Adopting the posthumanist methodologies of reflexivity and diffraction, the author argues for an embodied catholicity of the university as a community, an open system rather than a pre-formed locus to which racially minoritized students are “added” or “included”. In advancing the co-creativity of a Catholic-pluriversal university via an ethic of love and care, the author presents a Christian spirituality that is itself a technology that offers the hope of enacting a more life-giving congruence between the sacred and the secular than the myth of Manifest Destiny and the racialized violence that is the continued manifestation of that mythos. Embodied in the posthuman mystic’s practices of “re-memory,” the author presents Christianity as a performative-pluralistic religion of evolution, one of common action with the potential to draw into something new the energies of creativity in today’s university. Full article

The origins and use of national space rhetoric used by NASA, the US government, and the media in America began during the Cold War era and relied, in part, on religious imagery to convey a message of exploration and conquest. The concept of space as a “New Frontier” was used in political speech, television, and advertising to reawaken a sense of manifest destiny in postwar America by reviving notions of religious freedom, courage, and exceptionalism—the same ideals that originally drove expansionist boosters first to the New World and then to the West. Using advertisements, political speeches, NASA documents, and other media, this paper will demonstrate how this rhetoric served to reinforce a culture held by many Americans who maintained a long tradition of believing that they were called on by God to settle New Frontiers and how this culture continues to influence how human spaceflight is portrayed today. Full article

This paper outlines the means by which candidates training for Christian ministry are encouraged to engage with the deontological positionality of anti-racism as a substantive element of Christian praxis. The first part of the paper provides some brief historical reflections on what was then the conventional approach to teaching an anti-racist ethic for Christian ministry, namely, the practice of “racism awareness”. Following these reflections, the author proceeds to outline the epistemological change that has occurred in his own ethical teaching, moving from the focus on racism awareness to a more critical, postcolonial deconstruction of Whiteness and its concomitant links to Mission Christianity. Mission Christianity, the religion that underpinned the British Empire, is identified as the repository that helped to institutionalise the existence of “white supremacy” and racism within the body politic of colonialism and the rise of notions of “manifest destiny”. In switching the modus operandi for an anti-racist ethic within Christian ministry, this paper seeks to reframe the ways in which the ethical basis for opposing and resisting racism is effected within Christian theology Full article

Historically, the United States has always been a country of immigration. Yet, in light of recent political events, a form of nativism and sedentarism is re-emerging that seeks to preserve what is generally perceived as essentially American: an ethnically white and male identity that has its origins in the foundational myths of the pastoral, the frontier, and the West. The American Midwest is where the allegedly “real” America lies: it is what Anthony D. Smith has termed an 2ethnoscape”: a landscape imbued with historical and cultural meaning that has come to represent true “Americanness”. In her 1989 novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee uses the figure of Jasmine, an undocumented female immigrant from India, to disrupt this traditional trope of “the West” as the perceived location of American cultural identity. She liberates the land from its national, historical, and ethnic inscriptions by subverting the very foundational myths of the pastoral, the frontier, manifest destiny, virgin land, and the melting-pot, that are so crucial to the justification of this exclusive as well as exclusionary identity… This article analyzes the processes and mechanisms through which Mukherjee liberates the landscape: Firstly, she satirizes the ideal of the American pastoral and exposes the assumption of a stable, uniquely American landscape as purely imaginative. She then subverts the notion of the global city as the ideal location of immigrants, where “the other” can be safely contained outside the homeland and instead makes the Midwest ethnoscape the space where her protagonist uproots American national identity. Through her presence in the American heartland, Jasmine disturbs and challenges naturalized notions of America and constructs a new homeland that is open for all immigrants following her. Mukherjee thus shifts the perspective away from seeing the American homeland as a pre-existing place in need of defense, and proposes a fluid understanding of home that has acquired new relevance in light of recent political events. Full article

As founding editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, John L. O’Sullivan (1813–1895) preached a particular form of Christian nationalism that centered on expansionist fever occurring during the 1830s and 1840s. O’Sullivan’s Christian nationalism was known as “Manifest Destiny”. He famously coined the term in 1845 while defending the right of the United States to annex the Republic of Texas. The central argument of this essay is that Manifest Destiny, as O’Sullivan articulated it in the pages of the Democratic Review, follows the contours of the innovative and heterodox political religion developed by Elie Kedourie and expounded upon by Anthony D. Smith. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny was a conglomerated nationalistic paradigm consisting of elements from Protestant theology, Lyman Beecher’s vision for civilizing the West, and German idealism via George Bancroft’s use of historicism in his History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent. As a form of Christian nationalism located in the context of antebellum America, Manifest Destiny is helpful to historians as they trace both continuity and change over time in how Americans have self-identified in religious terms since their origin as a collection of colonial, and later independent, polities. Full article

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”. Despite his initial affirmation of Bergson’s understanding of experience as connected with tradition, Benjamin criticizes the philosopher’s account for sidestepping “the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism” in reaction to which, as Benjamin insists, Bergson’s philosophy of memory developed. Yet even as Bergson shuts out the historical import of modernization, according to Benjamin, he also spotlights a “complementary” visual experience “in the form of its spontaneous afterimage”. Benjamin subsequently defines Bergson’s philosophy as “an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record”, an endeavor that inadvertently “furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself undistorted to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader”. If the literary critic might be viewed here as weighing in on a long-running antagonism between philosophy and literature, then his assessment is resolute: by praising the self-conscious historicity of Baudelaire’s lyric, Benjamin declares that poetry succeeds where Lebensphilosophie fails. Notably, Baudelaire is not the only figure to upstage “ahistorical” Bergson, since Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud facilitate this victory. To contextualize the second section of “Motifs”, where Benjamin discusses the novelist’s “immanent critique of Bergson” this essay offers a reading of “On the Image of Proust” as a propadeutic to Benjamin’s privileging of “Baudelaire” over “Bergson” in the first section of “Motifs” to broach the destinies of diminished perception before he turns to Freud in the third section. Drawing upon Freud’s thermodynamic model of a selective and protective perceptual-conscious system from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin explains how perception calcifies in adapting to industrialism. Notably, however, his “energetics” does not remain bound by closed-system economic premises insofar as he conceives Baudelaire’s correspondances as an antidote to reification and modernization fatigue. The resulting configuration emerges against the backdrop of a lament about the decline of tradition-infused, long-term experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies the rise of isolated experience [Erlebnis]. In tracking Benjamin’s seemingly melancholic emplotment of the literary image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire”, the essay ultimately focuses on how he amplifies its sociohistorical potential to attest to the dehiscence of tradition as a community-sustaining force. Full article

Drawing from a variety of examples in world literature, this paper exposits a pervasive, diachronic literary motif in which an early human—the mythic protohuman—exists superior to contemporary humans, whose greatness is reflected in physical stature and aesthetic form, and whose eventual spiritual “fall” is physically manifested in diminished stature and deformity. Indo-European creation myths, the biblical Genesis, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth legendaria are examined in support of the thesis that Western literature has recapitulated the mythological notion that the archetypal ancestor possessed a quality and grace that has been slowly lost in time and is represented by a corresponding physical decay. This notion, then, when read as anagogical symbol, serves to furnish society with insights into reiterated social constructs preoccupied with human degeneration and decay, as well as questions about its beliefs concerning humankind’s origin, nature, and destiny. Full article