This essay in both literary criticism and negative theology treats three widely diverse cases of women who “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring.” The three cases are of the poet Sappho, the mystic Margarite Porete, and the philosopher Simone Weil. Each of them underwent “an experience of decreation, or so she tells us.” Decreation, which is Simone Weil’s coinage, is here defined as “an undoing of the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self and defined (...) by self. But to undo self one must move through self to the very inside of its definition.” The audacious, unconventional spirituality of these women led society to “pass judgments on the authenticity” of their “ways of being.” Weil has been termed “neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake” by many readers of both her work and the biographies written about her. Marguerite Porete was condemned at trial for being not only a heretic but also a pseudo-mulier—a “fake woman”—while “Sappho’s ancient biographers tried to discredit her seriousness by assuring us she lived a life of unrestrained and incoherent sexual indulgence.” These women, however, “know what love is,” namely “the touchstone of a true or a false spirituality,” and each of them finds a means of “telling God.”. (shrink)

Evans explains that universities are producing less innovative ideas to empower and enrich cultures. Her account provides a carefully researched analysis of the state of universities today and their function.

Despite current rhetoric around the civic purposes of higher education, in practice higher education has been increasingly captured by ‘market values’, the ‘corporate’ university and a technicist language of ‘teaching and learning’ that displaces more complex notions of curriculum and pedagogy. This article seeks to develop alternative languages of teaching and learning in higher education to enable explorations of the intersections of pedagogy, culture and power. Two languages are described: a pedagogy of ‘recognition’ and an ‘Arendtian’ pedagogy. A case study (...) of teaching German Popular Culture is then presented as an exemplar of what such critical pedagogies might look like in action. At issue is the keeping open of the spaces in higher education wherein the democratic possibilities and social justice purposes of universities might be argued for and practised through curriculum and pedagogical work in concrete sites. (shrink)