The Sisters of Mercy :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

The Sisters of Mercy   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   For this assignment, I decided to research the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order of nuns.   I never before realized that there is so much behind their amazing devotion to the Catholic Church and God. I must admit that they are beautiful examples of God's teaching, and I feel truly blessed to be involved with the Sisters of Mercy. Each and every one of them has a unique story to tell about her life, but none is more intriguing than that of Sister Mary Joel Hopkinson. Having only heard bits and pieces, and not knowing for sure the steps that each of these women had to take to become who she is today, I asked Sister Mary Joel to share her story with me.    When she was born into a Protestant family in New England, no one could have guessed that Sister Joel would end up becoming a Catholic, let alone a Sister of Mercy. But as it turned out, as Sister Mary Joel Hopkinson says, "There was no way to deny it; this is what God wanted for me." Sister Joel has been a Sister of Mercy for almost fifty years. What is so interesting about her story is that she has been a Catholic for only fifty years. Only a little more than a year after she converted to Catholicism, she found herself looking to enter a convent. She explained that all her life she had had Catholic friends. At one of her jobs, she was the only non-Catholic in the carpool. The Catholic Church intrigued her, and she was of a curious nature, but not until years later did she realize that God was sending her a sign. She puts it rather bluntly when she says, "God pushed me out of the window and into the convent." Sister Joel was not always a businesswoman; in fact, she worke d in a building in Brooklyn, New York, cleaning windows on the second floor. It was a rather old building, and the chains on the windows had been painted over a number of times. Once, while struggling to pull the window down, she lost her footing and fell out the window. The reason she says God pushed her is that the only ambulance on call that day was from St.

Aristotle as a Critic

ARISTOTLE AS A CRITIC. Aristotle (384-322 B. C. E. ), the son of a physician, was the student of Plato from approximately 367 B. C. until his mentor's death in 348/347. After carrying on philosophical and scientific investigations elsewhere in the Greek world and serving as the tutor to Alexander the Great, he returned to Athens in 335 B. C. E. to found the Lyceum, a major philosophical center, which he used as his base for prolific investigations into many areas of philosophy.Aristotle is a towering figure in ancient Greek philosophy, making contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance and theatre. As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas referred to him simply as â€Å"The Philosopher. † In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive.Unfortunately for us, thes e works are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today. [There has been long speculation that the original Poetics comprised two books, our extant Poetics and a lost second book that supposedly dealt with comedy and catharsis.No firm evidence for the existence of this second book has been adduced. Our (knowledge of the text of the Poetics depends principally on a manuscript of the tenth or eleventh century and a second manuscript dating from the fourteenth century. ] (not to write in notes)*. Aristotle could be considered the first popular literary critic. Unlike Plato, who all but condemned written verse, Aristotle breaks it down and a nalyses it so as to separate the good from the bad. On a number of subjects Aristotle developed positions that significantly differed from those of his teacher.We very clearly note this profound difference of opinion with Plato and, indeed, observe the overt correction of his erstwhile master in Aristotle's literary and aesthetic theories. Aristotelian aesthetics directly contradicts Plato's negative view of art by establishing a potent intellectual role. The principal source of our knowledge of Aristotle's aesthetic and literary theory is the Poetics, but important supplementary information is found in other treatises, chiefly the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.Aristotle's main contribution to criticism may well be the idea that poetry is after all an art with an object of its own, that it can be rationally understood and reduced to an intelligible set of rules (that is, it is an â€Å"art,† according to the definition in the Ethics). The main concern of the rules of the Poetics, however, is not with the composition of literary works; it is rather with their critical evaluation. Consequently, criticism can be a science, and not a mass of random principles and intuitions. Aristotle speaks of the educative value of visual, musical and verbal arts.Both the Rhetoric and the Poetics can be considered –to be expansions of this view. We might say that Aristotle sets literature free from Plato's radical moralism and didacticism, while he still expects it to be conformable to a moral understanding of the world. For him, literature is a rational and beneficial activity, and not an irrational and dangerous one, as it was for Plato. Aristotle? s approach to literature is mainly philosophical: he is more concerned with the nature and the structure of poetry than with its origin.The origins of poetry had been grounded on the instinct of imitation which is natural to man. The first poetical works were spontaneous improvisations. The origins of the different genres is justified by Aristotle thus: â€Å"Poetry soon branched into two channels, according to the temperaments of individual poets. The more serious-minded among them represented noble actions and the doings of noble persons, while the more trivial wrote about the meaner sort of people; thus, while the one type wrote hymns and anegyrics, these others began by writing invectives. (Poetics II). † The development goes through serious or comic epic poems such as those written by Homer to comedy and tragedy; â€Å"these new forms were both grander and more highly regarded than the earlier† (Poetics II). Aristotle does not, however, decide on whether tragedy (and by implication, literature) has already developed as far as it can; but he does assert that it has come to a standstill.Aristotle makes a brief outline of the history of tragedy: â€Å"At first the poets had used the tetrameter because they were writing satyr-poetry, which was more closely rel ated to the dance; but once dialogue had been introduced, by its very nature it hit upon the right measure, for the iambic is of all measures the one best suited to speech . . . . Another change was the increased number of episodes, or acts. (Poetics II). † Aristotle also deals briefly with the rise of comedy: â€Å"the early history of comedy. . . s obscure, because it was not taken seriously. Comedy had already acquired certain clear-cut forms before there is any mention of those who are named as its poets. Nor is it known who introduced masks, or prologues, or a plurality of actors, and other things of that kind. Of Athenian poets Crates was the first to discard the lampoon pattern and to adopt stories and plots of a more general nature. (Poetics II). † The work of Aristotle as a whole may be considered to be an attempt to develop a structural and metalinguistic approach to literature.Although it preserves a concern with valuation, its main thrust is towards the defi nition of theoretical possibilities and general laws. Some critics have spoken of Aristotle's sin of omission in relationship with lyric poetry and the inspirational element in literature. This is a fact. But it does not seem so important when we look at what Aristotle does say and the principles he establishes. We can barely recognize the aspect of criticism after Aristotle's work, if we compare it to its previous state. His is the most important single contribution to criticism in the whole history of the discipline.

Dada Embraced Self-Expression, Impulse, Spontaneity and...

2. Dada embraced self-expression, impulse, spontaneity and imagination. Why were these particular qualities appealing to Dadaists as artists and social commentators? Ciaran Bullen. The World at War. To appreciate Dada, one must first know the context of its time. To truly understand Dada, one must understand the deep pain of the artists, the ferocity of the disgust toward the bestiality of their supposedly modern world, and the deep longing for change at the hearts of its various contributors. During the onset of the first world war, many European artists were horrified at humanities bourgeois and violent nature, the nationalism that consumed its thoughts, and the authoritarianism that defined it. Early Dadaists were born out of†¦show more content†¦As it became popular toward the end of the year of 1916, Cabaret Voltaire proved to be as much as a haven from the extremities of war as Zurich itself, providing music, dancing, spoken word and all manner of performance. These early Dadaists were a predictably rebellious bunch not just in principle, but in action. The nights at the Cabaret Voltaire were loud and raucous affairs, full of experimentation and an embodiment of t he liberty art elicits. The infectious inhibition of those early days gave birth to such imagination and spontaneity in the artists’ self-expression that in it, new shoots of art form and performance were created, such as sound poetry, which bridges between literary and musical composition, creating verse without the confines of words, focusing more on phonetic sound as opposed to semantic or syntactic form. Another example can be found in movement poetry readings, which consisted of the poems being exaggerated with primitive and sharp movements. Such art was often reflecting the chaos of the world it was born out of, mirroring the emotions of its enthusiasts by emulating the turmoil of world war one, and the storm that consumed the populations thoughts, fears and dreams. The audience would often respond by attacking performers, a cruel irony considering why such provocative art came into being. As such, due to this provocation and capturing of its audiences imaginations and despite the Cabaret Voltaire being