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Edition of Coptic letter from the collection of the Ghent University Library (P. Gand. Inv. 47). The letter is addressed to a certain Dioscorus, most probably Dioscorus of Aphrodite. The fragmentary status of the letter does not allow a full understanding of the text, but the formulary clearly shows a monastic context, in all likelihood the monastery of Apa Apollos founded by Dioscorus’ father in 537 CE. Since the senders address Dioscorus as their ‘brother’, it is likely that the letter belongs to the little-known last period of Dioscorus’ life, when he retired to his father’s monastery around 573 CE.

Devil’s Weblog: Satirising Religion in a Totalitarian Theocracy Book review. Pakzad, Sorush. (2012). Craposyncrasies. H&S Media.

Awjila Berber is marked by a high frequency of the vowel i. This is due to historical development that caused *a, *ə, *ă and *e to merge with *i. This article examines the conditionings of these developments, and discusses what effects these shifts had on the system of plural nouns in Awjila.

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At first sight it appears that Miłosz’s poetry shares many features with modernist and postmodernist poetics. One of its main themes is the impossibility of verifying the veracity of man’s sensual impressions (i.e. their referring to an ‘external’ world), which seems to undermine the traditional concept of literature as ‘mimesis’. However, Miłosz expressly rejected the postmodernist point of view that literature as ‘mimesis’ is merely a textual effect. Even when the speakers in his poems expressly deny the possibility of recreating the external world of man’s sense-impressions by means of language, they seem to achieve the very thing they wanted to deny. One of Miłosz’s favourite devices in the poetry of his middle period was the so-called ‘irony of self-betrayal’. But this negative way of affirming the covenant between the self and the world did not satisfy him in the long run. Wishing to overcome the antinomies of mimesis he attempted to work out a poetical strategy allowing him to describe the astonishing richness of being more directly. This strategy required a metaphysical justification. The veracity of man’s sensual and intellectual involvement with the world turned out to be rooted in the religious perspective of ‘apokatastasis’. ‘Time past’ and ‘time present’ are one in a process that both redeems and transcends time, without annihilating the moments of which it consists. Miłosz’s long poems of the sixties and seventies should therefore not be simply understood as ‘literature’ or independent ‘works of art’ (poésie pure) that could be separated from other forms of being. In fact they are part of a process of redemption that occurs ‘here and now’, although it remains unclear when it will be completed. For that reason Miłosz’s longer poems should be read as ‘open texts’ or – but in a sense opposite to the postmodernist idea of ‘unfinishedness’ – ‘work in progress’. They purport to present the manifold phenomena of a man’s existential autobiography simultaneously.

This article explores how the climate crisis and specifically the underlying “crisis of the imagination” (Bendor 2018, 132) exacerbate the entrenchment of environmental communication, and how modifying commercial video games (ecomodding) can facilitate the use of games as effective communication infrastructures to address this issue. Environmental communication challenges are well-studied, but remain difficult to tackle in practice. Timothy Morton summarizes these challenges by defining climate change and related phenomena as “hyperobjects” (Morton 2013), which appear tangible but are always only partially knowable and communicable. In recent years, games have been increasingly regarded as a potential solution to these problems (e.g. Chang 2013); as games provide agency to players, they can be specifically effective as “tools to communicate about climate (change) uncertainty” (van Pelt et al. 2015). More recently, though, the promises of ecogames are offset against more critical questions. For example, (Asplund 2020) addresses “credibility aspects in research-based gaming”, and researchers become more aware of the inequities of “discursive gaming” (Voorhees 2012) like the carbon footprint of contemporary gaming technology and the disproportionate influence of larger publishers and platform owners. To address this issue, the article develops a comparative perspective on “ecocritical” (Bohunicky 2017) modifications of commercial games (ecomods) as an ongoing discursive process. Ecomods for two major game franchises – The Sims and Civilization – are analyzed as communicative acts over time, quoting, re-phrasing or outright challenging the procedural rhetoric of the original games. The definition of eco games as boundary objects (van Pelt et al. 2015) is thereby adapted to the characteristic multiplicity and redundancy of ecomods. This perspective acknowledges how modding can affect the games as communication infrastructure, e.g. considering that both franchises recently ‘responded’ with official expansions including environmental themes, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (2019) and The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle (2020). To conclude, the article briefly reports on an exploratory workshop, in which students applied ecomodding techniques to repurpose Epic Games’ Fortnite (2017-) as a platform for academic communication on the climate crisis. Due to the game’s immense popularity, climate researchers and activists have tentatively used Fortnite, e.g. via the ‘ClimateFortnite’ channel , where players can “find climate researchers and others discussing global warming while they play” (Boykoff 2019, 22), or a 2019 WWF ad campaign . These approaches, however, are characteristically relegated to small existing ‘niches’ within the “ecology of communication” (Altheide 2019) surrounding the game because they cannot modify or otherwise appropriate its contents. The workshop outlines how ecomodding not only constitutes a uniquely productive site for societal debate, but may also hold potential for augmenting academic communication on the climate crisis.