Convergences

From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge -- at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

A range of themes—race and gender, sexuality, otherness, sisterhood, and agency—run throughout this collection, and the chapters constitute a collective discourse at the intersection of Black feminist thought and continental philosophy, converging on a similar set of questions and concerns. These convergences are not random or forced, but are in many ways natural and necessary: the same issues of agency, identity, alienation, and power inevitably are addressed by both camps. Never before has a group of scholars worked together to examine the resources these two traditions can offer one another. By bringing the relationship between these two critical fields of thought to the forefront, the book will encourage scholars to engage in new dialogues about how each can inform the other. If contemporary philosophy is troubled by the fact that it can be too limited, too closed, too white, too male, then this groundbreaking book confronts and challenges these problems.

This anthology is an amalgam of the authors output in the domains of interpretation, translation, and literary scholarship. It is a serious attempt to highlight the cardinal traits common to said fields. This research is a vested trek into the inner workings of the authors profession; interpretation and translation, as well as his standing engagement with literary genres throughout the ages. The books uniqueness resides in treating a diversity of matters interrelated in various ways, although on the surface it appears to make up a queer admixture of dissimilar elementshence the title, Convergences. Interpretation and translation are twin vocations, and between them, convergence is all encompassing. Both transform a message from a source to a target language. Complementary and mutually supportive as they are, yet there is a train of difference in the execution of these two inseparable professions: the method, nature and techniques involved in each. Interpretation is the instantaneous, the simultaneous, in a word the express mode of communication; and translation is the meditative, the slow or the local medium of correspondence. Concomitantly, literature is the crucible for teleologically permeable convergences and incredible divergences. It has a noble ontological message and brings out humanitys hidden treasures, experiences, thoughts, and choices. Literatures lofty missive is grounded in understanding the scenes, events, and characters it depicts excerpts of which feed into discourses to be interpreted and translated. Clients come up with multiple interpretations depending on circumstances and the context in which texts are couched.

In an age of theological fragmentation, Hans Urs von Balthasar urges a reintegration of theology. The increasing specialization and compartmentalization to which theology has been subjected leads to confusion and disunity. Convergences: To the Source of Christian Mystery begins by showing the unity between Christian thought (theology) and Christian living (spirituality). Then Balthasar turns to the specializations and divisions of theology, and shows how the unity of dogma governs and directs the specializations. Next, he examines "the dreadful multiplicity of churches and its pseudo-justfication through the alleged variety of theologies" in the New Testament". Finally, Balthasar has the reader focus on himself, challenging him to consider where "the integrated simplicity of his own existence might lie". Balthasar argues against an imprudent simplification of theology which seeks to return to the simplicity of ancient Christian thought by throwing away allegedly useless accretions. It is thought, says Balthasar in the Foreword, that liberating unity is achieved by ridding oneself of superfluous amassed goods. One cannot remain true to theology, argues Balthasar, by throwing parts of the tradition overboard in an attempt to find a lost, longed-for theological unity. A prior experience of the unity of theology is required to make sound judgments about what is useless and what is helpful.

La difficoltà di "collocare" le attività economiche derivanti dalla cultura e dalla creatività in un contesto di coerenza ed intelligibilità ha impedito agli studiosi e ai responsabili delle politiche economiche di giungere a conclusioni condivise sui criteri di definizione di questo settore economico. La mancanza di chiarezza nella terminologia raggiunse l'apice alla fine degli anni Novanta, quando le "industrie creative" sostituirono le "industrie culturali", termine fino ad allora ampiamente diffuso e utilizzato nelle politiche culturali nazionali e internazionali. Alla luce dell'intenso dibattito accademico sviluppato attorno alle industrie culturali e creative, la prima parte di questo libro analizza tensioni, dibattiti e divergenze nelle definizioni, nonché le peculiari caratteristiche di queste industrie. Vengono inoltre illustrati gli effetti dell'applicazione di diversi schemi di classificazione del settore culturale e creativo sul suo peso economico, e discusse le difficoltà che esso incontra nella competizione con altri settori per accedere ai programmi di finanziamento europeo. La seconda parte del libro indaga le molteplici relazioni che le industrie creative installano tra di loro e con il contesto urbano. I modelli di localizzazione delle imprese creative vengono analizzati in un caso di studio nella Città metropolitana di Roma. Le distribuzioni spaziali dei diversi settori creativi sono studiate utilizzando punti georiferiti come input per un modello statistico basato sulla funzione K di Ripley. Un'ipotesi nulla di distribuzione casuale viene verificata per le seguenti condizioni: analizzando la distribuzione spaziale di ogni singolo settore creativo rispetto al resto delle attività creative; confrontando a coppie i settori creativi per identificare quelli che rivelano attrazione reciproca; confrontando, per ciascun settore creativo, i modelli di localizzazione delle attività core-creative rispetto alla localizzazione delle rispettive funzioni di servizio. L'analisi empirica ha mostrato che, nella maggior parte dei casi, i settori core-creativi hanno la tendenza di raggrupparsi nello spazio a piccole distanze mentre i rispettivi settori di servizio sono dispersi internamente e disposti attorno al cuore. I confronti reciproci hanno rivelato l'esistenza di cluster creativi urbani caratterizzati dalla coesistenza di diverse attività creative.