«Emotions in the Prayer of Sirach 22:27–23:6», in Stefan C. Reif – Renate Egger-Wenzel (eds.), Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions. Emotions Associated with Jewish Prayer in and around the Second Temple Period (DCLS 26), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015, 145-160. (original) (raw)
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Emotions in the prayer of Sir 22:27-23:6
2015
is more interested in prayer than any other wisdom writer. In his book of wisdom, we find several instances of advice on how to pray and some real prayers too, both individual and communal. Sir 22:27-23:6 is a good example of individual prayer. The person who recites the prayer (a disciple, or perhaps Ben Sira himself) asks God for help in avoiding sins of the tongue and unruly passions. After giving a short survey of research and an annotated translation of the Greek text, we will focus on the close relationship between the language of the prayer and the emotions it reveals. We intend to show that Ben Sira uses the emotions expressed in 23:4-6 with a pedagogical intent.
Emotions in the Prayers of the Wisdom of Solomon
Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions, 2015
The book of the Wisdom of Solomon, written in the late-first century BCE or in the early-first century CE, arguably in Alexandria, presents a unique mixture of sapiential instructions in the tradition of Proverbs and Ben Sira, and a specific form of exegesis of the exodus narrative in the Pentateuch. Also mentioned-as is typical of sapiential scriptures which aim for comprehensive human formation (παιδεία) 1-are emotions, together with their essence, function and handling. A basis for understanding the portrayal of emotions in the prayers of the Wisdom of Solomon may be found in two lectures given in the context of an ISDCL conference. At the inaugural ISDCL conference in 2003, Helmut Engel gave a programmatic lecture on "Prayer in the Book of Wisdom." In this lecture, Engel sets out the immense compositional and text-pragmatic significance of prayer for the whole book of Wisdom. In his analysis, he orients his treatment by using the phenomenon of second-person descriptions of God's actions found in the third part of the Wisdom of Solomon (11:2-19:22). These descriptions of the workings of wisdom and of God are continually interrupted by short doxological addresses to God as "You." At the 2010 ISDCL conference, which was devoted to the theme "Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul," Friedrich Reiterer provided an inventory of the "Emotions, Feelings and Affects in the Book of Wisdom." Reiterer made two essential observations. First, emotions are culturally determined and play a significant role in the construction of social and religious identities. Second, a methodological focus on the emotions articulated in a text can contribute to a deeper understanding of that text, with regard to both its original authors and its later recipients. In the following, I would like to attempt a synthesis of the approaches found in Engel and Reiterer. The synthesis will proceed in two stages. First, I shall give a short review of the terms and forms of prayer in the book of Wisdom. I shall then analyse selected prayers with reference || * I warmly thank Tobias Tan (Oxford) for correcting the English version of this article. 1 Compare recently Brown, Wisdom's Wonder, 10-11.
Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion: The Case of Sermons
Journal of Religious History, 2021
This article examines the challenges posed by combining the categories of religion and emotion in historical studies. It analyses two major ways of framing this: religious emotion and emotions in religion. By taking sermons as a case study, both as a religious practice and a genre of historical source, an approach that retains the useful elements of each approach is developed. At the same time, the article explores the potentials of sermons as a source for the history of emotions, noting important consequences in the history of religious communication for the history of emotions and vice versa. In particular, reception history approaches are explored as a way to enrich accounts of the emotional aspects of sermons. Further, the article serves as an introduction for the collection of articles: "Preaching and Passions: Sermons and the History of Emotions."
"Fall and Die", "Scatter by Fire": Language of Emotion in Christian Liturgical Prayers
Prayer as a form of social interactions touches issues that affect people in every area of life. Its importance and sensitivity make people obsessed in getting their problems solved and needs met through it. Despite its importance in everybody's life, little attempt has been made to study its language in Christian religion. Few studies have been on prayer and emotion management but without empirical evidence. None of these studies dealt with the pragmatics of emotions, using language to arouse the emotion of the laity in Christian prayer sessions. A gap this study fills. MFM's prayer is an aggressive and warlike. Interest was created at studying how the Church pragmatically uses language, intentionally or unintentionally, to stimulate and arouse the emotions of the laity to be aggressive, enthusiastic and gestural in warfare prayers. Linguistic theories of emotion were employed in the identification, contextualisation of emotion types. Emotion types identified are classified into positive and negative. Negative emotions identified manifest anger and fear because the language of warfare prayers is confrontational and warlike. Positive emotions of excitement and relief are aroused through positive/ prophetic declarations that ignite the exciting feelings of the laity. Warfare prayer utterances in MFM consist of emotionology and metaphorical analogies which are lexically and contextually conceptualised with the aim of capturing the religious psycho-social experiences of the people. They also help in shaping of thoughts and cognitive mapping of religious experiences. The clergy in MFM use emotion-inducing stimuli metaphorically in communicating prayer utterances which automatically or reflexively trigger bodily responses from the laity described as cognitive pragmatic behavioural gestures. This study attempts a significant contribution to existing knowledge in Cognitive Linguistics in the Nigerian context by providing insightful knowledge on language of emotions in social interactions in Nigeria.
In Richard Meek & Erin Sullivan (eds), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 45-64. A fundamental aim of English Protestantism was to make the Bible available to all. Yet the Bible is a potentially dangerous text, not least in its frank portrayal of unstable, confusing and even frightening emotions, both human and divine. Taking three test cases (the function of emotion-words in the order for Morning Prayer, the defusing of anti-Jewish emotionality in the Good Friday liturgy, and the tempering of Eucharistic devotion in the order for Holy Communion), this chapter shows how the 1559 Book of Common Prayer and I and II Homilies served to mediate and moderate the emotional repertoire of the Bible. It argues that criticisms of the emotional restraint of the BCP by the likes of the Admonitioners in the sixteenth century and of John Milton in the seventeenth should be seen in this context. A comparison with recent research on the emotionality of the German Reformation helps to contextualise this attempt to create a Protestant ‘community of emotion’ on English soil.