2020–1 Day of prayer (and period of prayer) during the coronavirus pandemic

Sunday 22 March 2020 (United Kingdom), and 17–23 March 2020 (England)

A coronavirus pandemic (code-named COVID-19) began in China in November 2019. It spread rapidly to other nations, placing health and hospital systems under severe strain and leading to large numbers of deaths. The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency on 30 January 2020. On the following day, the first cases of the disease were reported in the United Kingdom; the first deaths were announced in early March. From February, as the number of cases and estimates of the likely death toll increased, the government of the United Kingdom and the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland announced a series of measures to try and contain the spread of the disease, and to prevent the National Health Service from becoming overwhelmed. These included ‘social distancing’ – keeping a two-metre distance between people who were not members of the same household. Health regulations issued by church leaders as well as the governments placed increasing limits on public worship and church business. On 10 March, Justin Welby and John Sentamu, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, advised that the chalice should not be used at holy communion. On 16 March, the UK government announced regulations against large gatherings and all ‘non-essential’ travel and contact with other people. This resulted in all churches and religious faiths announcing the suspension of services in their places of worship.

Introduction

One of the cardinal notions about rivers and related water bodies is that they have immense social, cultural, spiritual, and economic significance. While the proof of the social, cultural, and spiritual significance of rivers was the objective of most of the previous chapters in this book, the last two chapters focus primarily on the economic aspects of the exploitation of rivers in Africa and the world at large. Both chapters explored the relationship between rivers and other water bodies (such as rivers and seas) in the forging of trade relationships between countries and undertaking intra-regional and international trades and exchanges. It goes without saying that rivers are important means of moving people, products, and ideas from one location to another. While a resilient future for international trade is anticipated by certain current trends and dynamics such as recent technological advancements, rise in the adoption and execution of regional multilateral agreements, and improvements in infrastructure building and transportation logistics, the fact, however, is that river transport systems in Africa are currently facing a multitude of challenges, including infrastructure deficits, security concerns, and environmental impacts. Rivers will remain a significant contributor to the delivery of the projected future of international trade, most especially in intra- African trade and export of agricultural produce, which depends largely on the use of rivers for production, management, processing, and transportation.

As the major economic activity embarked upon by humans since the dawn of time, agriculture is one of the important aspects of human needs, and rivers have been found to have utility and significance.

This chapter examines Paul Cullen’s interest in history, moral theology, and the politcal, theological, and social climate of Papal Rome under Gregory XVI.

On 22 April 1947, the first performance of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra to be given in his native Hungary took place, some two years after the composer's death in exile in 1945. The work's accessibility immediately divided critical opinion. Modernists condemned its stylistic pluralism and genial virtuosity as a ruinous concession to popular taste; socialists proclaimed its emancipation from the ‘coldly lit world of the laboratory’ and praised its engagement with melody, harmony and counterpoint as agents of reception and sheer auditory pleasure.1 This, at last, was music that expressed the vox populi in the new socialist dispensation of postwar Hungary, but music which nevertheless belonged to one of the greatest European composers of the twentieth century. In a political regime which took its cue from Stalin's vehement indictments of formalism (condemnations which could and did lead to the concentration camp), the attenuation of Bartók's musical modernism in his last great work was not merely a matter of aesthetic preference or debate. It seemed instead to signal – however fortuitously – the collapse of a musical progressivism that had championed the serial (and resolutely non-tonal) hegemony of European modernism which would endure in the West, but which in the East would be decisively supplanted by the restoration of tonality and of ‘music for the people’.

After revisiting the main arguments and evidence presented in the book, the epilogue offers avenues for future research and returns to the collective mechanisms that fostered tolerance for peithō’s ambiguity and coerciveness in ancient Greece. To demonstrate the potential applicability of this study to other contexts, the epilogue surveys texts from fields outside Classics that express similar concerns about the paradoxes of persuasion in society today. It concludes by contrasting the psychosocial preparedness of ancient Greek communities with the experiences of modern-day jurors subjected to prolonged coercive persuasion during a trial.

Writing about the possibility of ‘Yeats as an Example’, Seamus Heaney tried to characterise the relationship between biography and art that Yeats's work constantly affirms in the following way:

All through his life, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen's terms, let him call the tune, and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

The only detriment to Heaney's rhetoric is that no one needs to make excuses for W. B. Yeats, whose poetry lives at once in the world and as an expression of Irish history (depending on who reads it). The fallibility, the mere vulnerability of Yeats as a man disappears sooner or later into the imperishable resilience of the poetry, even if his biographers are also historians who remind us that there is another Yeats, a determined apologist for the enterprise of art in the vision of Ireland which he helped to create, with or without the fairies.

This chapter sets the scene for later analyses, providing a historical overview of African RIOs. I trace the evolution of African RIOs, and discuss how leaders developed RIO policies in response to domestic and transnational threats against their political stability, as well as changing international norms.

This chapter traces the collapse of the alliance between Irish Catholicism and the British Liberal party due to William Gladstone’s attempt to reform Irish higher education against the wishes of much of his own party and Paul Cullen. The result wa a parliamentary defeat, Gladstone’s (temporary) resignation, and the end of a previously fruitful political relationship.

Many pages have been filled regarding the question whether there was one Enlightenment, or many: that is, if there was one encompassing intellectual movement, or if there was a variety of different manifestations and appropriations, a history of intellectual entanglements for which ‘even the Hasidic Jews qualify’. A researcher's position on that matter will strongly depend on their disciplinary background and the resulting methodological toolkits: intellectual historians in a classical sense, who consider their voices as part of the public debate, will lean towards more essentializing approaches which, more or less explicitly, support a political narrative that roots ‘Western values’ in the eighteenth century. Followers of a conceptually more advanced history of science and scholarship, on the other hand, will put more emphasis on the preferred topics of the cultural turn, like practices, spaces and materialities, thereby, often deliberately, cutting ties with politics and science journalism.

To be sure, intellectual historians have also made efforts to re-contextualize and de-essentialize the epic of the Enlightenment. But what is the result for a public debate, in the German-speaking world and elsewhere, in which the historical self-assuring of liberal democracies is so intimately tied to a rather a-historical concept of ‘Aufklärung’?

What can productively be observed in the discussion, however, is the way in which present academic cultures, embedded in a variety of different political and media settings, strongly shape the view of a historical object which in itself is fluid and the result of decades-long processes of positive and negative intellectual genealogizing.

In an essay published in The New York Review of Books on 5 October 2023, George B. Stauffer remarked that the Metropolitan Opera in New York ‘has not presented an opera written by a woman since Kaija Saariaho's L’Amour de loin in 2016’. ‘More astonishing still’, Stauffer continues, ‘in the 140 years since its founding in 1883, the Met has produced only one other work by a female composer: Ethel M. Smyth's Der Wald (The Forest) in 1903. Given the remarkable advances in equality made by women in America and Europe in the past fifty years, including entry into professional music circles, that is a jaw-dropping statistic’.

This kind of marginal presence would not come as an astonishment, however, to those musicologists (many of whom are women) currently preoccupied by the retrieval of women composers, and indeed of women musicians generally, from the archives of silence. While it is unmistakably the case that the contribution of women to art music as performers (notably in opera and on the concert platform), and more recently as conductors, is a subject of incremental interest to journalists, scholars and film-makers (among many other people), the programming and circulation of music written by women remains peripheral not only in North America, but throughout Europe. In Ireland, initiatives such as the Women and Music in Ireland conferences (2010–2012) and the volume of the same name arising from these proceedings (published in 2023), together with the Sounding the Feminists project (2017–2023) have mapped both the extent of this neglect and the means of redressing it.

The next morning saw the two once again on the veranda. “Well, Franzl, let's stick to the plan. Article One: How did you sleep? Article Two: What did you dream about?”

“I’m afraid it was a bit confused. I saw Szabo, the old colonel, in a company of beautiful ladies, who immediately formed a circle around him, full of curiosity. And then a voice told me that they would be talking about me. So I went into a window recess, the better to listen in, which is improper, but in three quarters of comedies, there's someone eavesdropping—so you must forgive me if I can't shed all of my old habits immediately. At least not in my dreams.”

“Nor should you. Stay just as you are. But go on, go on. You were eavesdropping.”

“Yes, for a while, at least. But very soon, I crept closer and could see that the circle of beautiful women had turned into a circle of old military men, all with thick gold epaulettes, and only Szabo seemed the same. But when I took a closer look, it wasn't Szabo anymore but Gorgey.”

“You saw the picture in the gallery, and that's how it got into your dream. Or is this all fiction?”

“Fiction and truth. I altered it a little, to make a bridge.” “A bridge? Where to? What for?”

“To questions that seem political, but really aren’t. They’re questions that are very personal—questions about life.”

Remembrance, the annual commemoration of men and women killed in the service of the nation, the empire and later the commonwealth, was created in the aftermath of the First World War. It differs in several ways from the early modern state anniversaries. The state did not order a religious anniversary, require church services or appoint a holiday, and in most of the inter-war years the commemoration was spread over two or even three days. Remembrance consisted of several types of commemoration, initiated and developed piecemeal by different authorities during a period of seven years, from 1919 to 1925, and was shaped to a considerable degree by public opinion, in a democratization of national commemoration. This democratic effect, indicative of large social, religious and political changes since the early modern period, was especially evident in local communities, where commemoration consisted not just of church services but also of public ceremonies associated with the tens of thousands of war memorials that were constructed in cities, towns and villages throughout the United Kingdom.

The national, imperial and commonwealth commemorations, the subject of this edition, have four main elements. Two were organized by the state on a fixed date: a two-minute silence throughout the empire, and a ceremony at the Cenotaph, the imperial war memorial in London. The heads of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland recommended religious services and prayers. The Church of England archbishops encouraged a diversity of local observances, to suit the circumstances of particular churches, in a marked change from its earlier practices.