Missionary positions: reading the Bible in Forster's "The life to come".
E. M. Forster's short story "The Life to Come" intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.
Gay Men’s and Their Religiously Conservative Family Allies’ Scriptural Engagement
The present study offered a mixed-methods analysis of the scriptural interpretation strategies of 23 gay men and 15 of their family allies from conservative Christian and Modern-Orthodox Jewish backgrounds. Qualitative analysis of participant interviews suggested that participants used strategies that both questioned relational applications (while maintaining a prohibition premise) and those that questioned the text/prohibition. Statistically significant differences between the number of strategies used by gay men and their family allies emerged, as well as variations in the strategy type favored by each cultural/family group. Additional qualitative analyses suggested that differences in gay men’s and their family allies’ religious practice and community contexts impacted their scriptural engagement and perceived interpretive authority. While the current study was unique in its simultaneous inclusion of multiple religious groups and members of the same family unit, further research is needed to assess the generalizability of the present findings.
Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences
PART 1 - BIOCHEMICAL THERMODYNAMICS PART 2- THE KINETICS OF LIFE PROCESSES PART 3 - BIOMOLECULAR STRUCTURE PART 4 - BIOMOLECULAR SPECTROSCOPY