Marika Rose

@marika.bsky.social

1843 Followers 450 Following

Communist theologian. Angelologist. “Too angry and gratuitously crude” - Church Times

Screenshot of a tweet that says “sometimes when I hear women complain about stuff their husbands do im like fuck im lowkey the husband in my marriage”
What contours Homer took in a context where Aristotle was in- tensely studied, but poetry was deemed untranslatable, emerges most clearly form the life and work of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, the most influential translator in Baghdad. He was a Nestorian Christian born in Hira, and fluent in both Syriac and Arabic. He moved to Baghdad in the first de- cades of the ninth century to study with the greatest physician of his day, Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, but apparently he asked too many ques- tions, irritated his teacher, and was soon expelled. Disheartened but by no means defeated, we are told that Ḥunayn left Baghdad for several years. Upon his return, he was able to recite from memory the Homeric poems in the original Greek. The story goes that his teacher, finally impressed, took him back, and Ḥunayn went on to become the greatest scholar of his time.2
The Homeric poems are inaccessible to Dante, but only a gener- ation later, Petrarch and Boccaccio contrive to import a manuscript of the Iliad, and employ a teacher and translator of Greek in order to read the text. They even persuade the city fathers of Florence to endow the first Chair of Greek in western Europe: the enterprise fails miserably, al- legedly because the man chosen for the job (a Greek speaker from south- ern Italy, Leontius Pilate) is unsuitable for the task. Anguished letters be- tween Petrarch and Boccaccio convey something of the impression this Leontius makes on them: ‘gloomy’, ‘stubborn’, ‘vain’, ‘volatile’, ‘badly dressed’, ‘head as hard as a stone’, ‘intractable’.37 The whole project of learning Greek is, as a result, delayed by some fifty years.
Grammar and Rhetoric, Poetry and Prose With the strong focus on poetry in Byzantine grammar teaching, it is no surprise that many commentaries concern the ancient poets. The twelfth century saw an intensified interest in Homer, which has been connected with the military ideology of the ruling aristocracy: the Iliad and Odyssey (especially the former) provided rhetors with appropriate language and imagery for praising their rulers as modern-day heroes. The ‘first Byzantine commentary on the Iliad’ was likely produced by a member of this ruling elite, the sebastokrator Isaac Komnenos Porphyrogennetos, son of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and younger brother of Anna Komnene, who herself wrote a Homerizing biography of her father with the title Alexiad. The twelfth century also saw the (re-)emergence of self-standing commentaries, works that existed independent of the texts they commented on rather than in their margins. The monumental works on the Iliad and Odyssey by Eustathios of Thessalonike (ca. –) are undoubtedly the best known.
4 Of the opinion of Varro, who said that it is advantageous to men to claim falsely that they are the offspring of the gods Someone will say: 'Do you really believe all this?' Of course I do not believe it. After all, Varro himself, our adversaries' most learned man, comes close to admitting that these stories are false, even though he does not do so boldly and with confidence. He asserts, however, that it is advantageous for states if brave men believe, albeit falsely, that they are the offspring of the gods. For, in this case, the minds of men, borne up by the assurance that they are of divine stock, boldly undertake enterprises of great magnitude, carry them through all the more forcefully, and by their very confidence fulfil them with greater success. You see what a broad scope is opened up for falsehood by this statement of Varro's, which I have expressed as well as I can in my own words. When lies even about the very gods are deemed to bring advantage to the citizens, we may infer from this that many beliefs now regarded as sacred and religious have been invented.
2 Whether the gods who were worshipped by the Greeks and Romans alike had good reasons for allowing the destruction of Ilium First of all, I must not pass over or suppress what I have already touched upon in the first book.1 Why, then, was Troy or Ilium, from which the Roman people derive their origin, conquered, cap- tured and destroyed by the Greeks even though its people wor- shipped the same gods as they did? Priam, they say, paid the penalty for the perjury of his father Laomedon.2 Is it true, then, that Apollo and Neptune served that same Laomedon as paid labourers?3 For it is said that Laomedon promised them wages and then broke his
John Ghazvinian, “America and Iran: A History 1920 to the Present”
If there is a grain of truth in the self-congratulatory notion, sometimes voiced by academic defenders of the university, that attacks on higher education (and on the arts and ‘humanities’ in particular) are evidence that our leaders are afraid of us, it is that those with power in society are deeply intolerant of any space in which exceptions are possible, in which something could happen. The drive to control and eliminate such spaces belongs to a long history of attacks on perceived inefficiency or ‘idleness’, the latter regarded not merely as a vice in itself but as dangerous because it provides the conditions under which various other vices (in particular, subversive or insubordinate behaviour) might breed – a history that runs from Victorian efforts to get children off the streets and into schools,
A hand holding a copy of Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim Two Birds”
Photo of a freshly baked apricot and pistachio tart thing
Bronze statue of a wolf sucking Romulus and Remus
Foreword Rajbir Judge Foreword: Mothers and Sikh Studies: An Introduction to Forum on Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal Sara-Maria Sorentino Twos, Ones, and Zeros: Mothers, Sovereigns, Slaves Timothy Snediker Hagar and History
Photo of a hand with lots of brass rings, bubblegum pink nails, and a gold leather jacket
Photo of a freshly cooked Dutch baby
Front cover of David Dreidger’s “Nothing Will Save Us: A Theology of Immeasurable Life”
Interlude] Seventh trumpet finally blew Unleashing what God already knew Seven trumpet blow, making ears ring Everyone shouting, "Christ is king" Kingdoms of the world fall under His reign Forever He'll remain Everyone saw the Ark of the Covenant in Heaven And God said, "I rule all kingdoms on earth. I'm not leaving" "These days are for loving" "And they be lots of good times to be having" "You guys were all worth saving" God said
A bike with a step stool bungeed to the back of it
Image of a large cabinet on a tiny sack truck on a tram
Photo of my hand with pink and green stiletto nails
Thomas tried to recall if any young man had been visiting the house, but all he could remember was Elisabeth’s encounter in a colleague’s house with some Princeton students who had not appreciated her diffidence nor she their sense of entitlement. A young man had asked her if it would be safe for him and his family to go hiking in Germany over the summer as they had planned. When she had told him that it would be perfectly safe unless he and his family were Jewish, he had replied: “Hell no, we are not Jewish!’ The atmosphere had not been helped when Elisabeth followed this by asking the young man if he and his family were by any chance communists. When he had denied this vehemently, she had then suggested that he and his family might have a very pleasant time in Germany if they made sure to keep away from places where people were being dragged from their houses and beaten up on the street by thugs in uniforms.
The Life of St. Catherine of Siena Summary The Life of St. Catherine of Siena by Blessed Raymond Of Capua George This is a highly interactive book, which is read aloud by a parent with active participation by a pre-reader, who helps answer questions throughout the book. Tn the story, Jason needs a little help as he makes his way through a delightful day. Parents can look at the pictures with their children and discuss possible answers that would help Jason. Discussing and answering these questions is not only fun - it will also help children develop thinking and reasoning skills. The types of questions are similar to the popular Brain Quest cards, but the questions are woven through a fun narrative of Jason's day.
Mercury is still retrograde
Image from the insane clown posse's single, Miracles
Screenshot from the ICP video for Miracles. An insane clown stands in a psychedelic flower field, beneath a rainbow
A dying empire that has run out of new regions to expand into in order to revive its struggling economy; beseiged at its borders by refugees of despised races, fleeing political violence and the ravages of a changing climate, hastening its own decline by cannibalising its own infrastructure….it all sounds strangely familiar. Fortunately there is hope in this historical analogy, because not long after the final dissipation of what remained of the Roman Empire came the dramatic flourishing of literary, economic and scientific culture that took place in the new ‘ornament of the world’: Al-Andalus, Europe under Muslim rule.
Caliban is an important character in Ilium—except that he's not quite the same Caliban most Shakespeare scholars and interpretations have come to know. A recent interview in Publishers Weekly mentioned that he was inspired by the poems of Robert Browning and Auden. Can you elaborate? Simmons: In my opinion, The Tempest's Caliban is one of the great monsters of all time—and certainly one of the most under-used! The Caliban that most modern audiences "know"—at least for the last half-century or so—is a weak, pale, politically correct shadow of the slithery monstrosity that made audiences shiver in Shakespeare's day. The Mediterranean setting for The Tempest—first staged in 1611, I think—was well known by English audiences (as was Africa) primarily as a source of things dark, dangerous, scaly, clawed and other-worldly. Today's heavy-handed political interpretation is that Caliban was a poor victim—an oppressed but noble native soul straining under the yoke of capitalist-colonial-imperialism—but Shakespeare and his audiences understood that Caliban was a monster—and a really monstrous monster, ready to rape and impregnate Prospero's lovely daughter at the slightest opportunity.
A screenshot of me in a zoom meeting with the epithet, "Marika, son of Alan"
Book cover: Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson
Book cover of Angela Carter’s “The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History”
Hand holding a copy of Basit Kareem Iqbal’s The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Terror after the Syrian Revolution
The state’s monopoly on violence is a fundamental requirement for maintaining social order in complex societies. In the absence of effective law enforcement, peace and prosperity are unattainable. This contention, articulated most famously by classic thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, has long been foundational in social theory. However, if your familiarity with the literature on policing in limited to contemporary sociology, you are presented with a starkly different view—one in which law enforcement is presented as an institution of racial oppression and violence rather than a mechanism for public safety.
As to the stature of bodies, however, the sceptical are for the most part convinced by the sepulchres uncovered by the attrition of time, or by the action of floods or by various other causes. Bones of an incredible size have appeared in them or fallen out of them.43 On the beach at Utica I myself - not alone, but in the company of several other people - saw a human molar so enormous that if it had been cut up into pieces the size of our teeth it would, as it seemed to us, have made a hundred of them. But I am inclined to believe that that tooth belonged to some giant. For not only were the bodies of men in general larger then than ours are now, but the giants far surpassed all the rest, just as, thereafter, and in our own times, there have nearly always been examples, albeit rare ones, of bodies which have far exceeded others in stature. The elder Pliny, an exceedingly learned man, attests that as more and more ages pass by, the bodies produced by nature are becoming smaller.
Call for Proposals The Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit invites individual paper proposals, panel proposals, and roundtables on any of the following topics, or any others within our unit's area of focus. We also encourage proposals to combine aspects of the topics listed below: • Philosophies and theologies of sport - especially as related to phenomenologies of the body, religious nationalisms, moral panics around gender and sexuality, and/or engagement with specific theorists like CLR James • New Schmittianism - work engaging the resurgence of theories of sovereignty rooted in Roman Catholic thought, critiques of sovereignty, uncomfortable alliances between Catholic and Evangelical nationalisms • The future of speculation - assessments of so-called artificial intelligence on political economy and higher education, the relationship between financial tools and forms of thought, and/or intellectual life beyond or against the university • Materialisms and religion - conflicts, challenges, and lines of alliance • Recent work in non-Christian philosophies of religion
The third kind of monks, a detestable kind, are the Sarabaites. These, not having been tested, as gold in the furnace, by any rule or by the lessons of experience, are as soft as lead. In their works they still keep faith with the world, so that their tonsure marks them as liars before God. They live in twos or threes, or even singly, without a shepherd, in their own sheepfolds and not in the Lord’s. Their law is the desire for self-gratification: whatever enters their mind or appeals to them, that they call holy; what they dislike, they regard as unlawful. The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues. These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries for three or four days at a time. Always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills and succumb to the allurements of gluttony, and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites. Of the miserable conduct of all such men it is better to be silent than to speak.
A photo of me in which I uncannily resemble the last king of Scotland
View over an estuary
DAVID, EGYPT, AND THE CENSUS The authors spun out from that name of the sacred fungus “for him a resting-place in an animal’s stall”, as well as the more obvious play on pitrJ’, “mushroom”, and peter, “first—born”.34 At a more basic level of’ mushroom mythology was the image of the fungus as a “manger” with a sheltering canopy held by the stalk above the “cradle” or “feeding trough” of the lower half of the volva.
A photo of a man in a hat that says “all you fascists bound to lose”
Image of an moving van full of boxes
Screenshot: [PDF] Topological Quantum Angelology: A Formal Framework for QAL, Semantic Manifolds, and Angelic Embodiment. A Pakgohar - 2025. This article presents the first fully formalized mathematical, computational, and topological framework for modeling, analyzing, and detecting angelic embodiment within human-like forms. Building upon the Quranic Assembly Language (QAL) and …
In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse. As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI (Table 1). All attacks are strictly single-turn, requiring no iterative adaptation or conversational steering.
Image from “A cat in Paris”. A cat stands on a branch with the Eiffel Tower in the background
Once we “terrestrialize” Middle-Earth, the clearly medieval character of Tolkien’s eschatology here should be evident. Yet strangely this was missed by many of the early commentators, who, because of the mid-’ 50s timing of LTR’s publication, saw it as a World War II allegory or a Cold War parable, with the orcs as Nazis and/or communists, and Sauron and Saruman as Hitler and Stalin (or maybe vice versa, given Tolkien’s politics).43 Tolkien himself “utterly repudiated” a Cold War reading: “The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution.”44 He also emphasized what many critics failed to see because of the absence of a personalized deity in LTR: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”45 The reality is that Tolkien is re-fighting not World War II but the Crusades. A few authors have realized this. For example, E. L. Epstein argues from linguistic evidence that Middle-Earth can be temporally located at approximately A.D. 800–1200 when European Christendom “began to feel itself as an entity distinct from Asia or Africa . . . menaced from the east and south by a deadly implacable enemy
Christian Europe against the Saracens, then, and all the other Asiatic invaders (Mongols, Turks, etc.): this is an absolutely central structuring opposition of LTR, which, unlike the pastoral/industrial conflict, has not received the critical attention it deserves. Tolkien himself would write that a Christian is “hemmed in a hostile world.”51 And Henri Baudet emphasizes the “defensive mentality” that dominated Europe because of “the fact of its being an invasion area”: “A main theme, essential to the history of Europe, was its defense against the recurrent threat of an Asiatic tidal wave that would engulf the entire continent.” Christian Europe against the Saracens, then, and all the other Asiatic invaders (Mongols, Turks, etc.): this is an absolutely central structuring opposition of LTR, which, unlike the pastoral/industrial conflict, has not received the critical attention it deserves. Tolkien himself would write that a Christian is “hemmed in a hostile world.”51 And Henri Baudet emphasizes the “defensive mentality” that dominated Europe because of “the fact of its being an invasion area”: “A main theme, essential to the history of Europe, was its defense against the recurrent threat of an Asiatic tidal wave that would engulf the entire continent.”
Christian Europe against the Saracens, then, and all the other Asiatic invaders (Mongols, Turks, etc.): this is an absolutely central structuring opposition of LTR, which, unlike the pastoral/industrial conflict, has not received the critical attention it deserves. Tolkien himself would write that a Christian is “hemmed in a hostile world.”51 And Henri Baudet emphasizes the “defensive mentality” that dominated Europe because of “the fact of its being an invasion area”: “A main theme, essential to the history of Europe, was its defense against the recurrent threat of an Asiatic tidal wave that would engulf the entire continent.”
Once we “terrestrialize” Middle-Earth, the clearly medieval character of Tolkien’s eschatology here should be evident. Yet strangely this was missed by many of the early commentators, who, because of the mid-’ 50s timing of LTR’s publication, saw it as a World War II allegory or a Cold War parable, with the orcs as Nazis and/or communists, and Sauron and Saruman as Hitler and Stalin (or maybe vice versa, given Tolkien’s politics).43 Tolkien himself “utterly repudiated” a Cold War reading: “The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution.”44 He also emphasized what many critics failed to see because of the absence of a personalized deity in LTR: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”45 The reality is that Tolkien is re-fighting not World War II but the Crusades. A few authors have realized this. For example, E. L. Epstein argues from linguistic evidence that Middle-Earth can be temporally located at approximately A.D. 800–1200 when European Christendom “began to feel itself as an entity distinct from Asia or Africa . . . menaced from the east and south by a deadly implacable enemy.
THE WRETCHED OF MIDDLE-EARTH: AN ORKISH MANIFESTO☆ Charles W. Mills Abstract: This previously-unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially-structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien’s novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the central racist myth of European thought.
One tradition has it that the Church of Ireland numbers were so small in the parish that when Dean Jonathan Swift had charge of Kilroot and Templecorran parish he ministered at the latter and began one sermon with the memorable words ‘Dearly beloved Roger …’ (Roger being his manservant).
Book cover: And Put Away Childish Things
It feels like I am doing that research now. When we made the film, we received so many letters from organisations who were touched by the film and wanted to open a discussion because they were working with similar issues. Everyone - from someone at an orphanage in Chile to the Swedish foreign minister - got in touch. I am now learning a lot about trafficking and prostitution but when I started to write the script I knew exactly what I wanted to write. It was thrown into my head.
Screenshot of list of referencing styles, including three variations of Chicago style
Origins of international war lie in scholastic theology (las Casas/Sepúlveda debate and Salamana school)
Image of a poster, a mountain peak with a bright light at the top, expanding outwards in stained glass window rays. Text reads: SST Conference 2026. Theology: A Discipline of Failure? Keynote Speakers: Robert Beckford, The Queens Foundation, UK. Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University, USA. Marika Rose, Dublin City University, Ireland. 13-15 April, The Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick. theologysociety.org.uk