• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.527-544
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• 2013

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.

• Journal of Christian Education in Korea
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• v.71
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• pp.371-399
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• 2022

The era we are living in is an era of hyperconnectivity where boundaries and limitations of each field and domain disappear and organically converge and share with each other. Christians living in the age of hyperconnectivity are losing their direction of life due to various divisions and severances, such as holiness and secularity, church and world, soul and body, faith and life, and humans and nature. However, in a hyperconnected society, it is necessary to break free from division and conflict caused by disconnection, and realize the kingdom of God through connection and solidarity between humans, nature, and the world. In order to explore the direction of Christian education for this purpose, this study examined the characteristics of the era of hyperconnectivity and the principle of solidarity, which is the core of hyperconnectivity. The theological meaning of solidarity was examined in terms of humans, nature, and the world, and based on this understanding, the direction of Christian education in the era of hyperconnectivity was sought. It can be summarized as having a religious understanding of human beings of Homoconnectus with a pericoretic mode of existence. Third, education on the kingdom of justice and peace where we can live together in a solidarity relationship can be summarized.