In Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, James Carter traces the life of Tanxu, an unknown but extraordinary Buddhist monk. Defined by a desire for a desire for an activist Chinese nationalism that maintained the nation’s cultural and social traditions Tanxu’s life story portrays twentieth century China from empire to republic, through war, famine, and revolution.

A century ago, Tanxu used his temples to establish physical links between Buddhism and Chinese nationalism. At the same time, though, he was guided by the belief that the physical world was illusory. The title of his memoir, “Recollections of Shadows and Dust,” uses a common Buddhist phrase meant to convey the impermanence and illusion of the material world, hardly the theological emphasis one might expect from a man who transformed cityscapes with his work in brick and mortar. I tried to understand this apparent paradox as I researched Tanxu’s career, but my connection to him remained impersonal, even distant, and strictly academic.

This all changed with the unexpected series of events that led me to the Bronx. My research turned up a commentary that Tanxu had written on the Heart Sutra (a Buddhist sutra is a sacred text, usually purporting to record the spoken teachings of the historical Buddha). This brief and very popular text includes the famous construction “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Tanxu’s commentary was translated into English and widely read by Western Buddhists. One morning from my office in Philadelphia I emailed the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), in New York, to request a copy. They were happy to comply, but more interesting was this aside in their response: “By the way…[our] Master Lok To is a dharma heir disciple of Master Tanxu.”
…
Tanxu and Lok To worked together closely during the 1950’s and Lok To came to North America with Tanxu’s encouragement. He settled in the Bronx at the invitation of local Buddhist laity, and established the Buddhist Association of the United States there in 1964. Ten years later, he moved to his current location, on Davidson Avenue and founded the Young Men’s Buddhist Association as a center for his translation work. There he has been for nearly forty years.
…
Sitting with Lok To, Lu Bin (a young nun), and Hoi Sang Yu (a lay Buddhist who would become one of my most important guides through Tanxu’s world), I share my interest in Tanxu, and what I know about him. I’ve been to Harbin, and Yingkou, and Changchun, places they’ve never visited. Had I been to Qingdao, they wanted to know? Not yet. But that was the Master’s most important temple – I had to visit there: they could arrange it. They could coordinate my travels to most of the important stops on Tanxu’s itinerary, including Ningbo, where Tanxu studied to become a monk, and Tiantai Mountain, where his sect of Buddhism was established 1,100 years ago. Lok To was formally the abbot of Chamshan Temple in Hong Kong, where Tanxu’s remains were interred. I was welcome there anytime.
…
The moment was exciting, but also unsettling. I am by training and disposition an academic: keen to observe, less eager to participate. Journalists are warned to report, not to become, the story. Was I not risking just this by accepting invitations to temples and posing before Tanxu’s memorial shrine? And there was the question of faith. I make no claims for or against the beliefs that Tanxu, Lok To, and the other monks shared. Did I belong here?

Five months later, I stand in a mountainside clearing overlooking Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong’s New Territories. A white stupa housing Tanxu’s earthly remains gleams in the tropical sun. It is a beautiful scene of green cliffs plunging into the azure waters of the South China Sea. As I contemplate the view, a monkey emerges from the forest and, with barely a glance my way, walks to the plate of offerings on the altar in front of Tanxu’s stupa. Taking an orange form the plate, it saunters casually back into the forest.
…
My immersion in Tanxu’s world is most complete as I follow the story of his ordination in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai. Ningbo teems with an easy going affluence. Centuries ago it was one of the largest ports in Asia. Today, less hurried than Shanghai, less uncertain than Hong Kong, and less paranoid than Beijing, it is no longer one of China’s great cities, but seems to have found a comfortable rhythm being past its prime. And, like almost all Chinese coastal cities, Ningbo is in the midst of an explosive construction boom.
…
The day I arrived, the temple appears shabby and dark, but active. A handful of monks move among the pavilions. The temple’s abbot, Master Yixang, less than five feet tall with a long gray beard, greets us. He did not know Tanxu personally, but he is familiar with one of the temple’s most famous students, and he is happy to meet visitors who know about Tanxu, for it is a rare occurrence. He shows me where Tanxu prayed, studied, and slept. In the gathering twilight, the abbot leads us from these faded buildings to his office, where he brings out the architectural drawings for renovations to Guanzong Temple and the Ningbo Buddhist Association: it will be a grand, brightly colored compound with marble floors replacing the worn wood that creaks under my feet as I look over the plans. It will be an impressive complex, but I feel fortunate that I arrived before the renovations and can tread the very same boards Tanxu walked decades before.

As Tanxu studied in this monastery in the 1910s, approaching his fiftieth birthday, he no doubt reflected on all the brutality and deprivation he had observed in his life. The first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths declares, “All existence is suffering”: Tanxu had suffered, and had dedicated much of his life to the path that would enable humans to transcend that suffering. My travels with Tanxu had taken me across the world, several times, but the only way to get to the start of the story was to travel back in time. This story begins neither in New York nor Hong Kong nor Ningbo, but in the poverty and political turmoil that was North China in the late nineteenth century.

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and the author of several books and articles on modern China, most recently Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk.

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The charismatic Elder Price of Broadway’s Book of Mormon musical famously and energetically sings “I Believe!” in a boisterous catechism of odd Mormon beliefs. But Elder Price is only one voice in a chorus broadcasting Mormonism’s strangest doctrines. While the Mormons portrayed in the musical are presented as basically good if generally deluded, many discussions of the Mormon tradition emphasize the utter absurdity of their beliefs. The average reader is left wondering how on earth Mormons could be so credulous. In context, though, these caricatured beliefs make a certain kind of sense.

There are two general points that need to be made before discussing any relevant context for specific beliefs, though. First, Mormon belief is as diverse as that of any other religious tradition. Mormons include dogmatic fundamentalists and believers not unlike mainline Protestants, while large numbers of practicing Mormons hold few-to-none of the beliefs circulating in the media. Second, Mormonism began at the tail end of the early modern era, and we now look back at its history across a cultural chasm. Early Mormons sounded like many of their peers and predecessors in early America. Several traditional Mormon beliefs are fossils of a lost worldview at the same time as Mormons participate in modern American society. Anecdotally, Mormons currently boast the top women’s historian in the nation, a successful financier running for president, and a conspiracy theorist with a chalkboard selling gold on cable television. All are true to their Mormon roots and they signal the diversity of Mormon belief.

With those two caveats in mind, let’s consider two of the more distinctive beliefs attributed to modern Mormonism.

Humans will have their own planets in the afterlife, and God lives on one such planet named Kolob.

In the phrase of the Book of Mormon musical, Mormons “believe that God has a plan for me, and that plan includes me getting my own planet,” and “God lives on a planet called Kolob.” These phrases roughly approximate the beliefs of some, though far from all, Mormons even now. The context for these beliefs requires understanding the role of family and the significance of ancient views of the universe in early Mormonism.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith believed that the work of the universe was the creation of relationships, connections he framed within a notion of the family that encompassed all of humanity, indeed the entire cosmos. Ancient ideas about parallels between the structure of the universe and human existence heavily influenced Smith’s views. Smith and his followers understood celestial bodies as participating in a kind of family relationship parallel to that of humans. Family relationships, especially those between parent and child, were central to the Mormon worldview, and Mormons saw the relationship between God and Jesus as parental (they strongly rejected the traditional Trinitarian view of God dominant within Christianity). Mormons therefore believed that the basic meaning of life was to parent. After Smith’s death, several of his closest followers tried to imagine what it would mean to (a) be like God and Christ, and (b) parent in heaven. They imagined that they would participate in creation the way God and Christ had. It seemed logical that their participation could potentially result in the creation of new planets.

In Smith’s cosmic family of celestial bodies, Kolob (probably a minor variant of kokab, the Hebrew word for star) was understood to be the star closest to the actual location of heaven. Though relatively few Americans would endorse an actual physical heaven now, it wasn’t so uncommon when Mormonism arose and reflects in part the concrete way early Mormons read the Bible. If God truly existed, they thought, wouldn’t it be possible to encounter him in a literal heaven somewhere in the heavens?

Mormons wear magic underwear

Smith told his followers that the way to establish the family relationships that could interconnect all humanity was through special rituals that took place in buildings called temples. The Mormon temple liturgy contains various rites that think through what it means to be human and to create. As part of the temple system, Mormons acquire sacred undergarments, essentially an undershirt and boxer shorts. Mormon “garments” draw on images and themes from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and Masonry, much as the temple liturgy does. These garments recall, respectively, the clothing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Old Testament priestly robes, Jesus’ burial shroud, and the robes of angels. By wearing this clothing Mormons affirm their commitment to Mormonism, their connections to all humanity and their new life in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Academics also see this clothing as a marker of cultural difference–a way to remind Mormons that they are indeed Mormons, a tool to resist the influence of outsiders. Something as richly symbolic as this garment would almost certainly be seen by some as having special power; various Mormons over the years (including hotel magnate Willard Marriott on “60 Minutes” in 1996) have made impressively literal claims about the power of these garments. Such beliefs are not much different from folk Catholic beliefs about the power of holy water or saintly relics, or modern American beliefs about the power of pomegranate juice, antioxidants, or St. John’s wort.

In historical context, some of the early Mormon beliefs that have persisted into portions of modern Mormonism are primarily concerned with puzzling through the meaning of life, our integration into the universe, the persistence and scope of human relationships. Though at times these beliefs bear a more antique flavor than many contemporary observers would favor, the Mormon tradition vigorously attempts to make sense of the world. In some respects these Mormon beliefs recall, in idiosyncratic specificity, the visceral stirrings of awe that strike many of us at some point when we stare into the night sky and wonder how we could possibly fit into the universe.

Samuel Brown is Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah/Intermountain Medical Center and the author of In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. He is also the translator of Aleksandr Men’s Son of Man.

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One of the reviews of The Bible Now that was favorable on the whole criticized us on one point in our chapter on homosexuality. The reviewer said that we were liberals, with a liberal agenda, and that we had twisted the clear meaning of the biblical law to fulfill that agenda.

Others have criticized us at times in our careers for being conservative.

As we said in the book, we are scholars, not politicians. Our job isn’t to score points for a side, push an agenda or to re-size the Bible to fit our personal views. So far as we know, all the other reviews and endorsements we have received thus far have gotten that point. That doesn’t make this one claim in this one review wrong. We don’t determine the truth by majority vote. Nor have we ever written a response to a review. So what are we supposed to do when someone criticizes both our scholarship and our integrity in one shot? We do what scholars are supposed to do. We go back to the evidence. So here’s the text and a summary of the evidence:

“You shall not lay a male the layings of a woman; it is a to’ebah” (offensive thing)
(Leviticus 18:22).

“And a man who will lay a male the layings of a woman: the two of them have done a to’ebah (offensive thing). They shall be put to death. Their blood is on them”
(Leviticus 20:13).

We just want to remind you first that this is just one point in a larger treatment of a very controversial subject, and there’s much more to the chapter. There are several points here that call for treatment: Why does the text prohibit only male homosexual acts and not female? Which acts does it forbid: only penetrative intercourse, or all acts? These are in that chapter, and they’re important, but they’re not the subject of this post.

The point on which we were thought to be “twisting” came up later in our discussion. We acknowledged that many people have recognized that these two texts pretty clearly do prohibit at least some kinds of male-male sex, but they have asked whether there is any legitimate “way out,” anything in the text that might provide for some change in the law. For example, one of our students once pointed out that it is, after all, impossible to lie with a man in the way one does with a woman — namely, vaginal sex — so no one can violate this commandment! That’s a clever, even fascinating idea, but why then would the commandment exist if it prohibits something that is impossible anyway? And besides, the plural phrase “a woman’s layings” (miskebê ‘issah) implies that many acts, not just vaginal sex, are included here.

Similarly, a daughter of one of the authors of this book pointed out that a homosexual man may not mind a commandment that tells him that he can’t lie with men the way he lies with women because he does not lie with women! This, too, is not a compelling argument (though it’s clever). We considered other such arguments as well but found all of them inadequate. For left or right, liberal or conservative, gay or straight, we don’t think that we can define our way out of the question by looking for such loopholes in the law. The law really means what pretty much everyone has taken it to mean for centuries. Whatever view one takes, one must address the law fairly in terms of what it says.

So we sought to contribute another perspective that we believe can be helpful on this subject. The text identifies male homosexual acts by the technical term to’ebah, translated in English here as “an offensive thing” or in older translations as “an abomination.” This is important because most things that are forbidden in biblical law are not identified with this word. In both of the contexts in Leviticus (chapters 18 and 20), male homosexuality is the only act to be called this. (Other acts are included broadly in a line at the end of chapter 18.) So this term, which is an important one in the Bible in general, is particularly important with regard to the law about male homosexual acts.

The question is: Is this term to’ebah an absolute, meaning that an act that is a to’ebah is wrong in itself and can never be otherwise? Or is the term relative — meaning that something that is a to’ebah to one person may not be offensive to another, or something that is a to’ebah in one culture may not be offensive in another, or something that is a to’ebah in one generation or time period may not be offensive in another — in which case the law may change as people’s perceptions change?

When one examines all the occurrences of this technical term in the Hebrew Bible, one finds that elsewhere the term is in fact relative. For example, in the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis, Joseph tells his brothers that, if the Pharaoh asks them what their occupation is, they should say that they’re cowherds. They must not say that they are shepherds. Why? Because, Joseph explains, all shepherds are an offensive thing (to’ebah) to the Egyptians. But shepherds are not an offensive thing to the Israelites or Moabites or many other cultures. In another passage in that story, we read that Egyptians don’t eat with Israelites because that would be an offensive thing (to’ebah) to them. But Arameans and Canaanites eat with Israelites and don’t find it offensive. See also the story of the Exodus from Egypt, where Moses tells Pharaoh that the things that Israelites sacrifice would be an offensive thing (to’ebah) to the Egyptians. But these things are certainly not an offensive thing to the Israelites.

A former student of ours pointed out that right here in this text, in the broad inclusion of laws that are to’ebah at the end of Leviticus 18, are some that prohibit actions that the great patriarchs of the Bible had done. For example, Abraham marries his half-sister Sarah. He says:

“She is, in fact, my sister, my father’s daughter but not my mother’s daughter, and she became a wife to me” (Genesis 20:12).

But the law in Leviticus explicitly forbids such relations with a half-sister:

“Your sister’s nudity — your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, born home or born outside — you shall not expose their nudity” (Leviticus 18:9).

So what is not a to’ebah in the generation of the patriarchs has changed and become one in the generation of Moses. In a somewhat different way, the land itself can change from not being a to’ebah and can become a to’ebah as a result of the behavior of its residents on it. The prophet Jeremiah says:

“You defiled my land, and made my possession into an offensive thing (to’ebah)” (Jeremiah 2:7).

An act or an object that is not a to’ebah can become one, depending on time and circumstances. The word to’ebah does not automatically mean that something is immoral. Depending on the context, the period and the persons involved, it means that it offends some group.

Now, one might respond that the law here is different because it concerns an offensive thing to God — and is therefore not subject to the relativity of human values. But that is actually not the case here. The Bible specifically identifies such laws about things that are divine offenses with the phrase “an offensive thing to the LORD” (to’ebat yhwh). That phrase is not used here in the law about male homosexual acts. It is not one of the laws that are identified as a to’ebah to God!

If this is right, then it is an amazing irony. Calling male homosexual acts a to’ebah was precisely what made the biblical text seem so absolutely anti-homosexual and without the possibility of change. But it is precisely the fact of to’ebah that opens the possibility of the law’s change. So, (1) whatever position one takes on this matter, left or right, conservative or liberal, one should acknowledge that the law really does forbid homosexual sex between males but not between females. And (2) one should recognize that the biblical prohibition is not one that is eternal and unchanging. The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive. This could involve arguments and evidence from specialists in biology, psychology and culture. They are beyond our range of expertise as Bible scholars. Our task here has been to make the biblical evidence known.

Our colleagues with expertise in biblical scholarship and especially in biblical Hebrew may agree with or challenge this analysis. So far they have been complimentary. But that reviewer claimed that we are playing a “game,” that we find the text in Leviticus to be “an embarrassment,” that we “belong to the category of Bible-seekers who do not believe that the Bible is divinely revealed,” and he completely misunderstood our treatment of the context of this law in the ancient world, calling it “a remarkable performance.” He thinks he knows our motives, our religious beliefs and our political side — and, apparently, our ethics. We can’t deny that this is hurtful and frustrating to be so badly misread. The reviewer does not come on as an enemy. On the contrary, he writes, “The Bible Now is an honorable book.” He just apparently thought we had dropped the honorable ball in this one section.

So, in the end, how do you decide if this is serious scholarship or if that person was right to think that we were doing the twist? We always hated authors who answer every question with, “Read my book.” But, in all honesty, to answer this question, that’s exactly what the discerning reader ought to do: Read the whole thing yourself.

Note: The review appeared in Tablet on July 5 2011 and was republished in The New Republic online on July 12. The author was Adam Kirsch. It should not be confused with a review by Jonathan Kirsch, who wrote that “Their approach is based on an exacting and meticulous examination of what the biblical text actually says and means.” (JewishJournal.com, June 16)

Richard Elliott Friedman is Ann & Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies and Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization Emeritus, University of Georgia and University of California, San Diego, and Shawna Dolansky is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Northeastern University. They are the authors of The Bible Now. This article first appeared on Huffington Post.

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January 3, 1521

Luther excommunicated by Catholic Church

On January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X issued the papal bull Decet Romanum pontificem (“It pleases the Roman Pontiff”), which excommunicated Martin Luther, a German theologian and monk who had been causing the Roman Catholic Church no end of trouble since 1517. With that, the Pope cast Luther out of the Catholic Church—and thereby helped spur the development of the Lutheran church and the Protestant Reformation.

The trouble had begun back on October 31, 1517, when Luther sent his 95 Theses, protesting several Church practices and doctrines, to the Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg. By the next summer, Church authorities began to call Luther’s views heretical, though it took three years before Leo X moved formally against him. On June 15, 1520, he issued the bull Exsurge Domine (“Arise Oh Lord”) stating that 41 sentences in Luther’s 95 Theses were heresy.

The Pope gave Luther 60 days to recant these words and another 60 to inform the papacy of his cooperation. If not, the bull said, Luther would be excommunicated.

Luther at first thought the bull might be a trick created by enemies. Once he became convinced the document was indeed from the pope, he attacked it. In November, he published a treatise titled Assertion of All the Articles Wrongly Condemned in the Papal Bull, in which he defended his views—and called the Pope the Antichrist. Meanwhile, Luther’s own works were being burned by supporters of the Pope.

On December 10, sixty days after he had received the bull, Luther summoned his supporters to a gathering in Wittenberg, Germany, and had them build a bonfire. Into it they cast books of canon, or Church, law and Church-supported theological writings. To punctuate his defiance, Luther added a copy of Exsurge Domine to the fire. That response prompted Leo to carry out his threat and issue the excommunication.

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December 27, 537

Hagia Sophia consecrated

Impatient, the Emperor Justinian did not wait for the arrival of Menas, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Rather than entering the new cathedral jointly with the religious leader, he went in alone. Dazzled by the beauty of his structure, particularly its massive dome with a 105-foot diameter—meant to echo the vault of heaven—circled by forty windows at the base, the emperor is said to have proclaimed that he had outdone Solomon, builder of the famous temple of Jerusalem more than a thousand years before. Eventually, the patriarch arrived to consecrate the cathedral, called the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), one of the most renowned buildings in the world.

The Hagia Sophia was actually the third church of its name built on the site. Construction of the first was completed in 360, but it was destroyed in a riot forty-four years later. The second church was erected in 515 but destroyed in the Nika riots of 532. Justinian immediately ordered the building of a new cathedral, larger and more beautiful than its predecessor. Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus designed the building. Construction took only five years.

The original dome partly collapsed in 558 as a result of an earthquake and had to be restored. In 1453, after the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire, the building was converted into a mosque. The four minarets added in this repurposing also provide structural supports to the building. Some years after Kemal Ataturk founded Turkey in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, he converted the building into a museum, which it remains today.

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Liberals claim that the founding fathers separated church and state, while conservatives argue that the founders made faith a foundation of our government. Both sides argue that America once enjoyed a freedom to worship that they seek to preserve. Yet neither side gets it right.

1. The Constitution has always protected religious freedom.

December 12, 1531

Virgin of Guadalupe appears to Mexican peasant

According to the tradition accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, a fifty-five-year old Native American who had converted to Christianity was moving down Tepeyac Hill to a church in Mexico City to attend mass. Suddenly, he beheld a vision of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ and an iconic figure in the Catholic Church. She instructed him to tell the local bishop to build a shrine to her on the spot. The Native American, Juan Diego, hurried to the bishop to relate the story. The bishop was intrigued but unconvinced; he needed proof, he said. Three days after the first encounter, on December 12, 1531, Diego saw the vision again. Asking for a sign, Mary told him to gather roses and carry them in his cloak to the bishop. When Diego opened his cloak and the roses fell out, the image of the Virgin Mary was embedded in the fabric of the inside of the cloak. A shrine was built on the site, and later a basilica.

The account is not universally accepted. The bishop identified in the story did not reach office until three years after the visitation was said to take place, and his papers say nothing of the event nor of Juan Diego. Indeed, documentary evidence about the visitation comes from more than a century later. Nevertheless, since the 1550s, the site has been home to a shrine—one of many dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe across Mexico. The Virgin of Guadalupe was named the patron saint of Mexico and recently was named the patroness of all the Americas. She has long been a national symbol for Mexicans. Today, the basilica in Tepeyac Hill contains a cloth said to be the original cloak—and is a much-visited pilgrimage destination.

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December 7, 374

Ambrose consecrated Bishop of Milan

On December 7, 374, after a quickly arranged baptism and eight days of instruction, Ambrose was consecrated as a bishop. No one, perhaps, was more surprised by this turn of events than the new bishop himself.

At the time Milan was in the midst of two decades of religious turmoil. For twenty years, Bishop Auxentius had ruled the see. Auxentius followed the Arian faith, a Christian doctrine that denied the divinity of Jesus and thus the Trinity, and the bishop made sure that much of the priesthood was Arian as well. Most people in the city followed the faith that developed into orthodox Roman Catholicism, however, and they chafed under Arian control. When Auxentius died late in 374, a succession crisis arose. Orthodox Catholic officials asked the emperor Valentinian to name his successor, but he insisted on leaving the decisions to the priests. A noisy meeting was being held in the city’s basilica, with the priesthood on one side and a crowd of citizens on the other. Ambrose, the Roman governor of the province of Milan, had the task of keeping order. According to tradition, after he finished a speech aimed at calming emotions, a voice shouted, “Ambrose, Bishop.” The suggestion was loudly acclaimed, and the selection approved by an official vote. The emperor confirmed the appointment, and Ambrose reluctantly accepted.

In his twenty-five years as bishop, Ambrose became one of the leading figures of the early church. He worked to remove Arian influence in Milan, promoted the incorporation of Greek learning into Catholic thought, introduced new music and wrote hymns, gained renown for his strict morality, and tried to assert the church’s moral authority by criticizing actions by different emperors that he thought reprehensible. He also was a principal figure in the conversion of Augustine of Hippo, who—like Ambrose himself—is considered one of the fathers of the church. It was quite a career for the accidental bishop.

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Pilgrimages, saints, shrines, indulgences and miracles were central to western medieval culture and religious experience.  Yet, although much has been written, what has often been overlooked by historians is the economic underpinning of medieval religious beliefs and practices.

Pilgrimage itself was founded on an implicit contract between the pilgrim and the church.  Those who embarked on a lengthy pilgrimage to one of the three great pilgrimage centres (Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostella) were making a costly commitment.  Firstly, there was the devotional journey, which might involve an absence of a year or more, and the associated expenditure on transport, food, and lodging etcetera.  Secondly, there were major risks in the form of shipwreck, disease, exhaustion and robbery.  And, finally, there were the offerings to be made to the shrine of destination as well as the other shrines en route.

In return for their commitment, pilgrims were offered two primary benefits: the possibility of miraculous intervention by the saints whose shrines were venerated, and the prospect of indulgences (remission from purgatory) according to a fixed scale sanctioned by the Pope.

Saints worked their miracles through their bodily remains.  Since the miraculous power of a saint’s relics was as much in the parts of a body as the whole, it became common to dismember the remains and distribute separate limbs.  Similarly, the custodians of Beckett’s shrine at Canterbury were able to offer limitless ampoules of the martyr’s blood mixed with water – the efficacy of the holy solution being unaffected by dilution.  This practice allowed the (theoretically limited) supply of saintly remains to meet the growing demand for relics throughout Christendom.

While miracles catered for pilgrims’ needs on earth, indulgences offered relief in the afterlife.  According to early Christian doctrine the super-abundant merits of Christ and the saints created a “treasure” of superfluous merit, which, through the intermediation of the church, could be drawn upon to expiate the sins of the faithful.  The church distributed this treasure to willing purchasers who had received absolution.  Testators would often leave bequests for surrogate pilgrims to travel and make offerings on their behalf in the hope that indulgences would be granted to relieve their suffering in the next world.  It appears that there was a pool of “stipendiary” pilgrims available for hire to meet the demand for surrogate pilgrimage from testators and those too ill to travel.

In addition, it seems that our medieval forebears were very much aware of what we describe today as “brand management”.  Shrine managers targeted their clientele, promoted their advantages over competitors, and provided supporting evidence for miraculous claims with story collections.

Medieval pilgrimage shrines can also be viewed as a form of franchise business operating under the umbrella brand of the universal church:  the local shrine managers marketed their patron saint and took in large-scale offerings that were recycled, in varying proportions, to the clergy, church building programmes and the poor.  As franchiser, the Papacy exercised an important degree of control over the operation of franchisees and the use of its umbrella brand, while preventing competition from unauthorised sources.  This was achieved through the papal monopoly on the creation of saints, the Pope’s discretionary powers relating to indulgences and, less successfully, through the validation of miracles and relics.

In this business model, the shrine was a profit centre and the shrine custodians (local churches or abbeys) benefited directly as franchisees, since they had discretion over the use of the offerings they received.  A typical split might be one third to the clergy, one third to building maintenance and one third to the poor.  The Papacy on the other hand was not, in the early medieval period, entitled to any share of the receipts of churches outside Rome itself.  The value of the franchise to the Pope lay in the fact that the shrine network supported the wider church’s financial needs while strengthening and extending the devotion of the Christian faithful.  However, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries the Papacy began to exploit indulgences as a source of revenue: a great shrine wishing to apply for a plenary indulgence could expect to pay an upfront fee and a percentage of the proceeds.

It was the task of shrine custodians to promote pilgrimage offerings by marketing their patron saints.  The most effective way for a shrine to strengthen its competitive position was to proclaim the superior efficacy of its spiritual services in the form of miracles and indulgences.  For example, Canterbury became associated with a stream of miracles after the martyrdom of Beckett in 1170, provoking St Cuthbert to respond by performing a sudden spate of miracles at his rival shrine in Durham.  Reading Abbey, another contending shrine whose prime relic was the hand of St James, reacted to the competitive threat from Canterbury in a similar manner.  In one of Reading’s 12^th century miracle stories, a girl who went to Canterbury to obtain a cure for her wasting illness was confronted in a dream by St James.  The apostle told her “You will certainly not receive a cure here but go to Reading, to my monastery, and there you will be healed” – a promise that was duly fulfilled when the girl abandoned Canterbury in favour of Reading.

Adrian R. Bell is Professor in the History of Finance at the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading. Adrian has recently completed a major Economic and Social Research Council-funded project (together with Professor Chris Brooks), Credit Finance in the Middle Ages: Loans to the English Crown c. 1272–1340. He has published widely in this area in academic journals such as the Journal of Banking and Finance, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Medieval History and History and has a jointly authored book, The English Wool Market c. 1230-1327 (2007).

Richard S. Dale is Professor Emeritus of International Banking at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor of Financial Regulation at the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading. He has published widely in academic journals such as the Economic History Review and his recent books include ‘Napolean is Dead’: Lord Cochrane and the Great Stock Exchange Scandal (2006), The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (2004) and Who Killed Sir Walter Ralegh? (2011).

Bell and Dale’s paper, The Medieval Pilgrimage Business, has been made publicly available by the journal Enterprise and Society. You can read it in full and for free here.

Like many people I first came across the Book of Common Prayer in a church pew; I must have been in my late teens. But it felt as if I already knew the book: many things in it were already familiar, like the marriage vows ‘for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.’ To me, brought up an atheist, other parts seemed very strange. Yet even as a non-churchgoer, the book felt as if it belonged to me. It announced itself as ‘common’ prayer, and also as somehow quintessentially English, everyday, ubiquitous. The Book of Common Prayer wasn’t just a church book; it contained so much else that was evocative of our culture and history – prayers to be said at sea, ways of calculating Easter dates, lists of members of the family you were forbidden to marry.

When I was a student, I was surprised to find that there wasn’t an edition of the text available which also explained the history, interpretations and significance of the Book of Common Prayer. The book was still in print, of course, but only in church editions. By now I knew that what I had thought of as a book of the 1660s was in fact much older, going back to Thomas Cranmer and the beginning of the English Reformation; and also that it had existed in a number of different forms. My favourite guide to this was a huge two-volume book called The English Rite by F.E. Brightman, by now long out of print. This printed different versions of the Book of Common Prayer in parallel text, and also contained a monumental introduction. It had the sprawling, hefty form of old-style scholarship which nobody seemed to author anymore, and no publisher could afford to print in any case. There was also an Everyman edition comprising the 1549 and 1552 texts, which I found in a second-hand bookshop and I continued to treasure for many years, using it in teaching in due course.

When asked by OUP if I was happy to prepare a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer, I immediately accepted despite foreseeing that the work would be very time-consuming. It just felt like something you don’t say no to, and I couldn’t help but think of this new edition also ending up in second-hand bookshops in time. The sense of familiarity and commonness I had developed with the text over the years also inspired me to provide an edition for the common reader; one which would explain its contexts, controversies and historical importance as well as the unnoticed ways in which the book has been part of shared experience and lived emotion over several centuries.

I print the text in three versions – a little like Brightman’s old book, only my choice of texts is different. In between the first edition of 1549 and the Restoration text of 1662 my edition contains the Elizabethan version of 1559. This was the text Shakespeare would have been familiar with – and also the one used by John Donne when he was Dean of Old St Paul’s in the 1620s. I also include more or less a small book of explanatory notes, in which I endeavour to explain the politics which brought it into being, the religious motivations which inspired it, its revisions, and how it caused trouble right through the Civil War and beyond.

In my mind, I fostered the simile of the Book of Common Prayer as an English church building such as St Paul’s Cathedral. There is what you see at first sight – how this monument appears today; but there is also a kind of visible archaeology of human memory underlying this all. In the case of modern St Paul’s, the cathedral we see now was begun in the 1660s, in the same decade as the 1662 standard edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Yet beneath the present building, you can stand in the crypt amid the stones of the gothic cathedral which preceded it, which by the late sixteenth century was but a dilapidated wreck following a lightning strike in 1561 and human intervention by iconoclasts in the reign of Edward VI. Similarly, the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer rests upon the beleaguered history of the 1549 and 1559 editions.

By 1662, the Book of Common Prayer had become a rich melting pot: of words personally written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; words written for earlier experiments of Protestant worship including English versions of the Te Deum or the Magnificat; words taken from medieval service books such as the marriage vows. Yet back in 1549, many doubted that the latest service book could work. A rebellion in Devon and Cornwall began when the 1549 edition was introduced, arguing that prayers in English were simply not effective and demanding for the mass in Latin to return. But they were also just as concerned with how the mass was said, insisting that the host should be elevated as it used to be, but which was banned as ‘superstitious’ by the new service book.

A hundred years later these sentiments were reversed in new political trouble surrounding the Book of Common Prayer. By then a more thoroughly Protestant version had replaced the text of 1549, but Puritans in the 1640s nonetheless called the Book of Common Prayer a ‘mass book’ and were just as worried about ritual and manual gestures by the priest (whom they preferred to call a ‘minister’), such as signing the cross on the forehead of the baptized – only they felt such practices were a kind of mumbo jumbo. These were also the two periods in which the Book of Common Prayer was banned. In 1554 Queen Mary abolished the English prayer book and in 1556 Cranmer was burned at the stake as a heretic. In 1645 these events were mirrored as Archbishop William Laud – associated with a series of ritual practices abhorred by Puritans, including restoring altars to the east end of churches rather than in the body of the nave –was executed in the Civil War, and the Book of Common Prayer was banned once again. Thus, a book which had been taken as destroying Catholic ritual in 1549 was now conceived as restoring Catholicism in 1645.

So, like a church such as St Paul’s with its tumultuous history texturing its current visage, the Book of Common Prayer also contains a kind of archaeology of human emotion. It shows us the everyday rituals of life, how we come to terms not only with a creator but with ordinary and extraordinary pain and suffering or joy or happiness. Why do people bless themselves, or kiss each other in a gesture of peace, or give each other rings, or lay hands on their children’s heads, or throw soil or herbs or flowers onto the coffin of a friend? In addition to seeing this as a religious tome, I want readers to feel this is a book which shows how we have shared a language of emotions over centuries, and still feel the influence of its cultural architecture today.

Brian Cummings is editor of The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. He is Professor of English at University of Sussex and he currently holds a three-year Major Research Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust (2009-12).

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There was a time in American culture, only a few generations ago, when religious differences were major. Baptists were not Methodists, and both were definitely not Presbyterians. Catholics were absolutely not Protestant, and Protestants doubted that Catholics were even Christians. Jews and Mormons were whole other species. Non-religious Americans were beyond the pale. And Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus were heathen living in faraway places. The problem with that world, we now see, was the destructive bigotry, misunderstanding, conflict and sometimes hatred that went with it. Let us call that world one of sectarian conflict.

We have come in America today to a very different world, which we might call liberal whateverism. This outlook reacts against sectarian conflict by dramatically discounting the claims of religion. The more aggressive side of this view asserts that religion per se is pernicious and should be eliminated or radically privatized. The more accommodating side says religion is fine as a personal lifestyle commodity, but that religious inclinations are ultimately arbitrary and should not be taken too seriously.

I have been studying the lives of American teenagers and emerging adults for the past decade. Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood describes the larger world in which liberal whateverism makes sense. Many emerging adults have few considered moral bearings, are devoted to mass consumerism, routinely become intoxicated and engage in casual sexual hook-ups, are civically and politically uninformed and alienated. Our story is not a tirade against “kids these days.” It is about wider, deeper problems in American society and culture — concerns that should trouble liberals and conservatives — which show up in disquieting ways in the lives of youth.

Liberal whateverism was obvious among most of the emerging adults we studied. About 10 percent were militantly atheistic. But the vast majority opted for the more accommodating “whatever” default. Anyone could take religion or leave it. It was an individual “opinion” that didn’t matter much.

Most interesting was the belief of a significant minority in “karma.” This meant to them simply the idea that, in some mysterious way, good and bad people would get what they deserve in this life. Few emerging adults know anything about the religious traditions that seriously teach karma. “Karma” is simply a reminder that they should try to do the right thing and a substitute for anger or revenge against bad people by believing they will soon get their comeuppance. Karma is a way to try to sustain justice in our moral universe without having to appeal to a personal God or a real judgment day.

As a sociologist, I view this belief in karma as socially functional and psychologically therapeutic. But I doubt it works over time. Good and bad people do not always get what they deserve. Sometimes the wicked prosper and horrible things happen to good people. Without a metaphysical view explaining the reality and power of karma, belief in its mysterious capacity to achieve this-worldly justice can easily slide into cynicism. And from most faith perspectives, pop karma is shallow, naïve and perhaps even disrespectful to the religious traditions which teach it. Claiming it as many emerging adults do is somehow like stealing candy from the Bhagavad Gita giftshop.

Is there not a better way for all of us to take religion more seriously without descending into sectarian conflict? That is one of the most important questions of our day.

I think we need to reject both sectarian conflict and liberal whateverism and commit ourselves instead to an authentic pluralism. Genuine pluralism fosters a culture that honors rather than isolates and disparages religious difference. It affirms the right of others to believe and practice their faith, not only in their private lives but also in the public square — while expecting them to allow still others to do the same. Authentic pluralism does not minimize religious differences by saying that “all religions are ultimately the same.” That is false and insipid. Pluralism encourages good conversations and arguments across differences, taking them seriously precisely because they are understood to be about important truths, not merely private “opinions.” It is possible, authentic pluralism insists, to profoundly disagree with others while at the same time respecting, honoring, and perhaps even loving them. Genuine pluralism suspects the multi-cultural regime’s too-easy blanket affirmations of “tolerance” of being patronizing and dismissive. Pluralism, however, also counts atheist Americans as deserving equal public respect, since their beliefs are based as much on a considered faith as are religious views and so should not be automatically denigrated.

We as a society and a culture have much to learn about ourselves from teenagers and emerging adults, both good and bad. One of those things, I believe, is the need to get beyond not only sectarian conflict but also liberal whateverism, to a more respectful and just world of authentic religious pluralism.

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, Director of the Notre Dame Center for Social Research, Principal Investigator of the National Study of Youth and Religion, and Principal Investigator of the Science of Generosity Initiative. His books include Souls in Transition, Moral, Believing Animals, Soul Searching, and Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood.

A version of this article appeared on the Huffington Post.
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Hesiod and Homer brought order to the world of the gods for the Greeks, describing their genealogical connections, allocating honours, powers, and areas of responsibility among them, and giving them distinct appearances. This is how Herodotus put it.

Every city revered its own particular divinities. Most gods are attested already in the Mycenaean period, while others were ‘discovered’ in the fields and woods or via encounters in the Orient. In emergency situations, the oracle at Delphi might recommend that communities establish cults devoted to this or that divinity. The power of the gods could be experienced, and they needed to be honoured everywhere. Although we have no way of reconstructing the precise details, even the priests at Delphi made a great effort to show proper devotion to Dionysus, who represented the exact opposite of Apollo.

Many of the gods were common to all Greeks: countless communities, for example, considered Athena Polias the protectress of the city. But other gods appeared only in specific places. One of the most stunning of the surviving Greek temples is the one of the otherwise unknown goddess Aphaea on the island of Aegina.

Homer described the small circle of Olympic gods, which consisted of Zeus’ immediate family, and Greek communities tended to adapt to them their own divinities, which often had marked peculiarities. These might be expressed in the gods’ epithets. In addition, there were more than a few other deities that were often also common to many Greek poleis. They include Hestia (the goddess of the hearth) and Themis (the goddess of customary law), who was honoured in close conjunction with the goddess of the earth, her mother Gē or Gaia.

Just as Poseidon controlled the seas, Zeus the weather, and Hades the underworld, Artemis was responsible for hunting, Zeus’ wife Hera for marriage, Aphrodite for love, and Hephaestus (together with Athena Ergane) for handicrafts. Hermes kept a protective watch over trade although he was also the god of thieves, Demeter over grain and harvest, and Dionysus was the god of wine and, later, the theatre. But divine ‘responsibilities’ often exceeded the boundaries of the gods’ core identities. Among other functions, Apollo brought assistance and health, and his son Asclepius was the god of medicine. Special characteristics were often indicated in the ancillary names (epithets) many gods were given. Zeus Xenios was the god to whom Greeks could pray when abroad and appealing to the rules of hospitality; Zeus Hikesios was the god of suppliants, and Zeus Agoraios the god enabling agreement in the political arena of the agoras.

The Greeks saw or at least suspected the influence of higher forces everywhere, and they sought to identify, name, and characterize divinities in order to ask for favours, to swear oaths, make vows and sacrifices, and express their gratitude as well. Poets honoured the friendly muses. Impulses and effects were credited to divine forces. The attic community of Rhamnus in the fifth century BC devoted a grand temple to Nemesis, who represented retribution and just anger (in reaction to inappropriate actions). Themis stood for custom and enactment. She regulated Greek social life and ordered the popular assemblies where citizens deliberated and made common decisions.

The entire uncertainty and difficulty in understanding what people experience seems to have led to the postulation of forces that soon coalesced into easily visualized images of divinities. And because the gods were conceived as real beings, in the words of Richard Harder, they had ‘to contain within them also deep-seated experiences of real-life cruelty and crass deception’.

We do not know to what extent people in real life believed in the supernatural powers of the gods as conceived by the poets, but it is likely that Greek literature, with all its vivid imagination, mirrored the tangible everyday Greek reality of a world subject to incalculable external factors, comprising everything from the weather to poetic grace and the success of political order. They experienced such factors, for instance, in the surprising energy of men going off to battle, as well as the utter desperation in which people, for whatever reason, occasionally find themselves. Greeks could not even be certain of how they themselves or their friends and enemies would behave. Their tendency to say that people’s dispositions depended on the type of day that Zeus brought forth was probably more than just a colourful way of suggesting that people sometimes get out of bed the wrong way. Rather, it expressed the experience of being subjected to imponderables which could neither be controlled nor avoided, but which one wanted to confront in order to articulate it.

By the eighth century at the latest, the Greeks found all aspects of life beyond the procurement of basic necessities (and sometimes even there) to be influenced by a high degree of flux. Happiness alternated with misery, profit with loss, rise with fall. There was only a limited amount of security to be had, and life was particularly fraught with danger for those who did not restrict themselves to living within certain limits.

Political authorities and priests were hardly able to make people feel that conditions of life were steady and reliable. Nor were they capable of controlling and regulating access to divine powers. Greek ideas about the gods were formed not by them but by the poets and singers, respected men who travelled freely among cities, followed specific pan-Hellenic and broadly accepted standards, and thus were able to shape and expand Greek myth—independently of whatever happened to be the rituals of any particular place. But the fact that the divine cosmos they depict is the only one that remains accessible to us does not mean that individuals and communities did not have their own ideas about the gods.

In any case, the dominant and undeniable impression of the unpredictability of the gods could not be limited or pushed aside; rather, it was openly—one might even say, realistically and humbly—accepted and captured in words and images. As concrete and direct as their social life in small poleis was, the Greeks still had a keen sensitivity for all that lay beyond what they could see, touch, and form. The divine world was a realm of fantasies, wishes, and fears, but also a sphere of free thinking. Precisely because Greeks had every reason to be keen observers, they must also have been very conscious of the boundaries of what was perceptible and calculable. Hence, their fundamental questions had to be directed beyond such limitations.

The above post is an excerpt from Christian Meier’s latest book A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe. Meier is one of the foremost classical historians of his generation and the author of numerous books, both on the classical world and in the sphere of cultural history. He was formerly Chairman of the Association of German Historians and President of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt. In 2003 he received the prestigious Jacob Grimm prize for German Literature.

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The American Catholic Church of today is a product of many dramatic transformations, especially those that took place in the 1960s. Below is an excerpt from The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever where Mark S. Massa recounts some of the practices Archbishop James Francis McIntyre instituted in Los Angeles.

James Francis McIntyre entered St. Joseph’s (Dunwoodie) Seminary in Yonkers, New York, in 1916. Dunwoodie was then considered a showplace of the American seminary system of priestly formation. In interviews with fifty priests who had passed through its doors between 1915 and 1929, Philip Murnion found that almost all felt they had completed “a superior regimen of intellectual formation.” But superiority in seminary formation, as in so much else, lies in the eye of the beholder.  Michael Gannon, studying the Yonkers seminary in those very years, came to a somewhat different conclusion than the alumni. Gannon offered a bleaker picture of the intellectual world encountered by the young McIntyre: “The course work required little or no reading outside the textbooks and some notes; no papers to do; a library open to students only two hours on Sunday and Wednesday mornings; and an institutionalized four hours and forty minutes of study.”

But whatever intellectual shortchanging occurred at St. Joseph’s Seminary did not slow McIntyre’s rise into the upper reaches of the American hierarchy.  Ordained as a priest in 1921 at the age of thirty-five, he was quickly appointed assistant to the chancellor of the archdiocese of New York, and was named chancellor himself in 1934. His preeminence in that position—running the vast network of parishes, schools, hospitals, and orphanages on a day-to-day basis—brought him national visibility. McIntyre managed to refinance dozens of debt-ridden parishes under his care during the Great Depression, making him indispensable to his ecclesiastical mentor, Francis Cardinal Spellman.  But Chancellor McIntyre’s relations with the priests of New York, who actually ran the operation on the parish level, reflected the theological poverty that was his inheritance from the Dunwoodie Seminary. Things in the Church didn’t (or couldn’t) change, so that the duty of his underlings was to learn the correct answer, and simply apply it. Usually this meant McIntyre’s answers.  Thus many of the clergy who reported to McIntyre in those years found him to be authoritarian, even harsh, in dealing with subordinates. He was respected for his business acuity and for his economic abilities, but this prominent alumnus of St. Joseph’s Seminary was also “a pragmatic man not noted for the range of his intellectual interests or sympathies.”

[…]

McIntyre carried his dismissive attitude toward liberals, and indeed toward anyone who sought to change what he took to the changeless truths of Catholicism he learned in seminary, to the other side of the continent, when he was named archbishop of Los Angeles in March 1949. The death of his predecessor, the much-respected John Cantwell, opened up what had been the See of a desert city known more for its battles over water rights that its Catholic identity. But that had changed quickly after the Great Depression.  A million new parishioners had swelled the ranks of the faithful during the 1930’s and 1940’s, so that what had been a largely sleepy diocese now needed a bricks-and-mortar leader, someone who could oversee a massive expansion of parishes, schools, and Catholic social services. McIntyre’s boss, Cardinal Spellman, informed Romae that he had just the man for the job in the person of his chancellor, and (not surprisingly, given Spellman’s powerful influence at the Vatican) McIntyre got the job. He oversaw an impressive institutional expansion: the number of parishes grew from 221 to 318 during his years there, and the number of Catholic schools doubled from 159 to 351.

[…]

By November 1965 the order’s General Council decided that they needed to send one of their own to the Eternal City to report back, first-hand, on what the Universal Church was legislating regarding the reform of women’s religious orders. Mother Caspary was duly selected to make the trip and provide personal commentary on the council’s documents when those decrees were finally promulgated. But Caspary only just arrived in Rome when she received a disturbing phone call from the vicar-general, Sister Elizabeth Ann Flynn who was overseeing the day-to-day affairs of the community in her absence. Flynn informed the nonplussed Caspary that Cardinal McIntyre had decided, without previous warning, that the order was to undergo an “official visitation” from priests of the archdiocese. Theirs, moreover, was to be the only community of women in the archdiocese to be visited.

Caspary immediately intuited that something other than concern for the spiritual well-being of her sisters had motivated such a surprise visitation, especially given its irregularity in Church law. Church tradition called for the regular visitation of religious orders at five-year intervals, usually undertaken by a single priest appointed by the local bishop. McIntyre himself had undertaken a special canonical visitation of the order just six months before Caspary left for Rome. But the vicar-general informed an astonished Caspary that the cardinal had appointed not one, but a team of priests from the diocese to conduct the visitation, and this less than a year after the previous one. Flynn had protested to the chancery that such a visitation would be most inconvenient, given Caspary’s absence in Rome. But McIntyre would not be put off: the visitation would take place, and the cardinal fully expected Mother Caspary to be present for it. Caspary later reported that many in the archdiocesan chancery interpreted the visitation as a “form of persecution of the community.” What she found when she arrived back in Los Angeles confirmed her fears:

Once home, with a sense of helplessness I heard from the sisters of the humiliating interrogations by the visiting priests. The fear the sisters felt soon gave way to honest indignation as each one faced questions designed, it would appear, to undermine their faith in the renewal process… “Do you think it would take too much time to fix your hair if you were to change your habit?” “Do you have any books by non-Catholics in your library?” “Do you want to look like a floozie on Hollywood Boulevard?” “Do you have hootenanny masses?” “Do you read and approve of the diocesan newspaper?”

Mark S. Massa, S.J. is Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, at Fordham University.

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November 13, 354

Augustine of Hippo born

On November 13, 354, in a small town named Tagaste in Roman Numidia (modern Algeria) near the port of Hippo (now Annaba), Augustine—one of the preeminent early Christian thinkers—was born. Though his mother was a devout Christian, he was not baptized as an infant.

As a child and young teen, Augustine proved a ready scholar. While his family owned land, they could not afford further studies. However, a wealthy man from Tagaste paid Augustine’s expenses for more advanced study in Carthage. Three years later, the young man returned to Tagaste and opened his own school; soon after, he moved to Carthage to teach rhetoric. He gained some success, had a son with the young woman he lived with, and became attracted to the dualistic religion of Manichaeism. In 384, he moved to Italy and gained a teaching post in Milan. By this time, he had lost interest in Manichaeism but was in the midst of a period of intense spiritual turmoil. After two years of professional success and this inner tumult, he resigned his position and prepared himself to adopt Christianity. Baptized by Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in 387, he soon suffered the death of his mother and his son. (The son’s mother he seems to have cast aside.) Back in Africa, Augustine became a priest in 391 and was named bishop of Hippo just five years later.

For the next 35 years, he became one of the leading thinkers of the Church. His Confessions, written around 400, recounts his own spiritual journey and celebrates God’s glory. He played significant roles breaking the Donatist and Pelagian heresies, thereby helping shape orthodox Roman Catholic beliefs. His masterwork, The City of God—written in the wake of the sack of Rome by Visigoths led by Alaric—is an extensive argument against paganism and offers a vision of the true destiny of the world as the unfolding of God’s will. Ironically, he died not long before invading Vandals captured Hippo and Carthage, putting his homeland into non-Roman—and non-orthodox Christian—hands.

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October 23, 4004 BCE

World created (according to Bishop Ussher)

Ever wonder when the universe began? Bishop James Ussher, a seventeenth-century Anglican cleric and biblical scholar had the answer. God created the world, he said in a 1658 chronology titled The Annals of the World, on October 23, 4004 BCE.

Ussher was not, in fact, the first to pick that particular date as the beginning of the universe. Sir John Lightfoot, an official at Cambridge University, beat him to the punch by fourteen years. Like Ussher, Lightfoot based his calculations on information in the Bible. He differed from Ussher on the time of day that creation took place, however. Ussher said the world began on “the evening preceding that first day.” Lightfoot put creation at nine o’clock in the morning.

Ussher worked not only from the Bible but also from histories of the ancient Near East. Because he was widely respected as a scholar, his calculations gained more acceptance than Lightfoot’s, and the determination was chiefly credited to him. By 1701, Ussher’s date was incorporated into printed versions of the Bible. It remained an accepted date until the first half of the nineteenth century, when the scientific evidence for a much older planet began to emerge.

The Creation. William Blake’s (1757-1827) image of the creation is one of the most famous and enduring. The Creator is set within a blazing sun and clasps a pair of giant calipers to order the universe. Source: Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division

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If February 11, 2011 demonstrated the very best of Egypt, then October 9, 2011 demonstrated the very worst of Egypt. The only way to describe what unfolded in front of the state television building (and subsequently Tahrir Square), where Copts were protesting over not-so-subtle official efforts to stoke sectarian tension over a church being constructed in Aswan, was an anti-Christian pogrom. The death toll stands at 25 with 300 injured. There have been scattered reports of soldiers and policemen injured, but by far the Copts took the brunt of the violence. Typically, the partisans have now settled into tightly held narratives about what happened. The military maintains that rock and knife wielding Coptic activists set upon security personnel who had no choice but to defend themselves. Copts and those Muslims who sought to defend their fellow Egyptians tell of a different, far more harrowing story of thugs and Salafi activists attacking them for no apparent reason with the complicity of soldiers and policemen. Both sides claim to have video proof of their accounts.

The specific rights and wrongs of this disturbing episode will be litigated on Twitter, Facebook, and Egypt’s lively talk shows, but largely to no real good or progress. Egypt is a society that is increasingly polarized—a stunning turn from the apparent national unity of late January and the first eleven days of February. The violence of the 9th and the lingering mistrust make a mockery of the billboards declaring “We are all Egyptians” that now dot Egypt’s roadways and buildings. What happened? How did the Egyptians get here?

From my vantage point (which, as I write, is at 35,000 feet and a few hundred miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia), there are three interrelated reasons for the seeming breakdown of social cohesion.

1. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces may hold executive power, but it has exercised precious little in the way of national leadership. Rather than provide a clear political horizon for Egyptians, Field Marshal Tantawi prefers to issue communiqués (really trial balloons) that are then subject to an unpredictable political process that pits Egypt’s myriad social forces against each other, with the military compromising or taking sides as its interests dictate. This has only contributed to confusion, discontent, polarization, and ultimately violence. This does not seem to be the result of some nefarious plot—though instability could, like the Free Officers in 1954, conceivably serve the SCAF’s interests—but rather a distinct lack of strategic thinking and a fair amount of incompetence.

2. There is no moral leadership in Egypt right now. Liberals had hoped that Mohammed ElBaradei would play that role even before the uprising. ElBaradei is in many ways an appealing politician, but there are big questions whether he can attract Egyptians beyond a relatively small group of liberals. In addition, he has been cagey about getting directly involved in Egypt’s tumultuous political arena. He seems to want to play it safe for the moment for fear of undermining his credibility by riding the news cycles, but the tweets and statements from behind the walls of Garana compound just won’t do it. If ElBaradei wants to be the moral conscience and leader of a new political order like so many had hoped when he returned to Egypt in February 2010, he had better get more engaged before the opportunity passes him by, unless it already has. Who else is out there? Abdel Monem Aboul Futouh—the self proclaimed “Egyptian Erdogan?” He is seems suspect in the eyes of many. Selim al Awa? Unlikely. Ahmad Shafiq? Moral authority? Omar Suleiman? Only in the wildest dream of the Israelis. Who is the Egyptian who has the prestige across communities, political groups, social movements, and activists who can be the badly needed moral conscience necessary to midwifing a new, more decent political order? I don’t know.

3. Finally, the ghosts of the past regime have come back to haunt Egyptians. Mubarak and his henchmen did not create sectarian tension, but they accentuated it for their own ends. Mubarak and Habib al Adly did not invent the Salafist current, but they gave it succor. Mubarak and his associates did not invent manipulation, but they made it a high art form. The former president perniciously manipulated Egyptian society, slicing and dicing it through three decades of power all in the service of perpetuating Mubarakism. Egyptians are now paying the price for this cynicism.

In a recent FP.com piece, I was generally optimistic that Egyptians were debating openly and intensely what kind of society they want. The recent spasm of sectarian violence has the potential to shut down that healthy development. I hope it doesn’t.

Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A leading expert on Arab and Turkish politics, he is author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.

This article appears courtesy of CFR.
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October 10, 680 CE

Hussein ibn Ali killed at Karbala

October 10 marks a signal date in Islamic history. On that day, Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was defeated and killed at Karbala, in modern Iraq. His death cemented deep and lasting division among Muslims that persist to this day.

Hussein was the son of Ali – Muhammad’s cousin, close friend, and trusted aide – and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Before his death, Muhammad had made statements praising Ali that some members of the Muslim community interpreted as naming him as his successor. When Muhammad died in 632, however, three others were chosen in turn as caliph (literally, “successor”) before Ali’s turn came in 656. Ali’s rule was marked by rebellions, and just four years after taking office, he was assassinated. As a result of his death, Shiites (from Arabic for “the party of Ali”) split from the majority Muslim community, called Sunnis.

The Shiites were restive under the rule of Ali’s successor, Muawiya. Though Hussein accepted his authority, he balked when Muawiya’s son Yazid claimed office upon the his father’s death. The Shiites of Kufa (in Iraq) threatened revolt and asked Hussein to join them. He left for the city but arrived after Sunni forces had reached the area and—unknown to Hussein—enforced allegiance. Expecting reinforcements, Hussein led his force of fewer than a hundred against an army of a few thousand. No help arrived, and he and his men (and Hussein’s youngest child) were all killed.  After the battle, their bodies were mutilated.  The debacle at Karbala gave the Shiites a martyr to idolize—and solidified their anger at the Sunni majority.

Shiites around the world commemorate Hussein’s death in the religious festival of Ashura.  Comparable in its solemnity to Yom Kippur or Good Friday in the Jewish and Christian calendars, Ashura traditionally was celebrated by processions of flagellants passing thought the streets, beating themselves to expiate for the sufferings of Imam Hussein and his tiny band of companions.   In Iran, where the population is overwhelmingly Shia, the death of Hussein—“leader of the martyrs”—is regularly commemorated in passion plays not unlike Good Friday celebrations in many parts of the Christian world.

Ashura celebration in Bangladesh. Source: Associated Press

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Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex.

Toward the end of the conversation (48:16 in the video link above), Savage poses a hypothetical to Douthat: Imagine a couple in which one partner—for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s the husband—is a foot fetishist. His wife is physically repulsed by his fetish—feet gross her out—but she wants him to be happy. So she sends him to a professional, who can satisfy his fetish without involving her. Savage asks Douthat: What’s so wrong with this?

I’ll get to Douthat’s response in a second, but first, let’s note the fact that this conversation is happening at all. We often think of the conservative, particularly the social conservative, as someone who puts his head in the sand or fingers in his ears, refusing to listen to or participate in the conversation around him. Watching Douthat’s body language in response to Savage’s language language—how visibly uncomfortable he is with all the dirty talk being visited upon him—only confirms that stereotype. (Though after a while, Douthat gets into the Savage swing of things, even saying at one point that he thinks the husband who goes to the professional “is doing something less impressive than than the guy who locks his dick up.” With a mouth like that, perhaps Savage should consider hiring him as a guest columnist?)

But it’s important to remember that Douthat is having this conversation at all, as have conservatives since the Sexual Revolution. In my book, I offer an early example of this conversation from the mid-70s—Beverly and Tim LaHaye’s The Act of Marriage, which Susan Faludi rightly called “the evangelical equivalent of The Joy of Sex”—when the Christian Right was forced into the fray of sexual liberation and sought to harness its tropes to the institution of traditional marriage. The result was some fairly bawdy Godly talk.

The LaHayes claimed that “women are much too passive in lovemaking.” God, the LaHayes told their female readers, “placed [your clitoris] there for your enjoyment.” They also complained that “some husbands are carryovers from the Dark Ages, like the one who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.”

More recently, Robbie George, Princeton’s arch-conservative philosopher of sex and the single gal, told the New York Times Magazine that he’s been forced by the challenge of gay marriage to engage in all sorts of naughty talk about what constitutes good sex in a marriage.  Much to the horror of his ever-so traditional Catholic mother.

His mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, taught her children “some pretty firm ideas about sexual morality,” George told me, and then he begged me not to repeat some of his more recent arguments on the subject. “Mom, I have got to explain!” George said, raising his voice to imitate first himself and then his mother: “ ‘George’s opposition to sodomy! What are you doing talking about sodomy? You shouldn’t even know what that is! Why do people have to know your views about that?’

If my book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it disabuses us of our notion that conservatism is somehow the great Refusenik of modernity. It’s not. From its beginning, conservatism has participated in all the great conversations of modernity—often, to be sure, against its will. But even when it takes an antagonistic stance toward modern developments, conservatism is forced, by the very fact of its participation in the broader culture, to incorporate modern sensibilities and sensitivities (e.g., Beverly and Tim LaHaye instructing husbands in the ways and means of the clitoris).

There’s actually no better example of the right’s modernity than Douthat’s response to Savage’s challenge. After Savage pummels him repeatedly, asking why it’s better for the husband to repress his fetish than for the wife to grant him a reprieve outside the bedroom, Douthat says of the latter (at 51:40 in the above link):

Dan, I think it’s a sadder and more squalid and more depressing form of self-sacrifice than the guy who figures out how to live with not getting his rocks off over his foot fetish.  And there is a value judgment and I’m not going to be able to prove it to you, you’re right. [Pause and then cross talk.] And some of this comes down to a worldview…

One of the great rallying points of the modern American right has been that it stands for firm, objective, demonstrable principles of right and wrong, of good and evil, over the relativism and situational ethics, the general culture of permissive tolerance, that one finds on the left. This has been a cry not only among politicos and pundits but also among serious philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and historians like Gertrude Himmelfarb.

We just got a healthy dose of it from David Brooks. Summarizing a new study that shows that young people don’t have a clear sense of morality, Brooks concludes:

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

As proof, Brooks cites some comments from a few youngsters:

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”

But now listen to Douthat, the New York Times‘s resident court philosopher of the right, and tell me if you hear anything that different. Yes, he’s saying he believes it’s better to satisfy, or repress, one’s sexual needs within the confines of a marriage, but he also acknowledges that that is  “a value judgment,” that he can’t persuade someone of a different view of the value of that judgment, and that it reflects his broader worldview, which Savage doesn’t share.

That’s a far far cry from the medieval Thomist, or even today’s neo-Thomist, who believes that reason can provide a yardstick of right and wrong, good and evil, and that it can adjudicate moral disputes between rival traditions. It’s also a far cry from Brooks’ appeal to a shared tradition, authority, and like.

When the right’s back is pushed up against the wall, it’s often forced not only to acknowledge the pluralism of modern life and intractability of moral conflict, but also to ground its claims on its own feelings and preferences, its un-argued and self-confessedly arbitrary and idiosyncratic belief system. (Douthat even admits in a later exchange with Savage, which I discuss below, that he knows he sounds “absurd.”) The right might claim that its beliefs are better, but it has no grounds, as Douthat admits, for assuming that you would agree with that or persuading you of that. (You can find a similar version of that argument in Patrick Devlin‘s classic defense of traditional morality The Enforcement of Morals, which was probably the opening salvo of the modern culture wars.)

There’s a final point I want to extract from this exchange. Toward the end, Douthat gets his mojo back and starts pressing his argument for repression. After Savage makes the case that repression is destabilizing—an interesting claim in itself that challenges our standard left-right distinction; the left is supposed to stand for liberation, while the right is supposed to stand for order, no? Well, no, as it turns out—Douthat defends repression not on the grounds that it is stabilizing but because “the nature of human excellence depends on—this, I, sound absurd—overcoming impulses for the sake of your partner, your children, the people you love.”

And here we come to Ground Zero of conservative commitment. The conservative believes in excellence, as Douthat says, but it is a vision of excellence defined as and dependent on “overcoming.” It’s a vision that abhors the easy path of acceptance, of tolerating human frailty and need, not because that path is wrong but because it is easy.  Or, to put it differently, it’s wrong precisely because it is easy. And though that vision often claims Aristotle as its inspiration, its true sources are Nietzschean.

The conservative believes the excellent person is a kind of mountain climber, a moral athlete who is constantly overcoming or trying to overcome his limits, pushing himself ever higher and higher.  When it comes to sex, he’s not unlike the Foucauldian transgressor, that sexual athlete of novelty and experiment: but where Foucault believes that taboos against sex are all too easily reached (that’s why, if we are to attain the peaks of experience, we have to move beyond those limits), the conservative’s remain out of reach. The value of a rule lies in its difficulty and potential unattainability, the ardor of the struggle it imposes upon us. We might call this ethic the ardor of adversity.*

Liberals and leftists often miss this ardor of adversity, and it’s a critical error because it overlooks just how romantic and impassioned, how fervid and fervent, conservative morality, not just about sex but about a great many matters, actually is.  And that is part of conservatism’s appeal. Savage in fact commits that very error when he says that Douthat’s vision of marriage eliminates the element of “adventure.” Not so. Douthat’s vision is profoundly adventurous—it’s the adventure of ascent, of trying to reach a summit of moral excellence that you probably cannot reach. It’s an adventure filled with risk—the risk of failure, of shame, of the self-loathing and castigation that comes with that failure and shame—and it’s one that the conservative, no matter how terrified he might be of that risk, is loathe to give up. No matter the cost: for if he were to give up on it, all that’d be left for him is the culture of mediocrity, of complacence and compliance, which defines for the conservative the liberal worldview.

That’s what connects the neoconservative, with his vision of warrior excellence, to the libertarian, with his vision of economic excellence, to the moral traditionalist. All three elements of what has been called the conservative three-legged stool—the warrior, the capitalist, the priest—subscribe to the dictum offered by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India:

The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same. The latter have their value and only the saint rejects them, but their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are held in the hand.

Or, as the Supremes put it more simply…

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*I recognize that Douthat is saying here that it is for the sake of the partner and children that we have to overcome our impulses, but the trope of overcoming appears too often in the conservative canon to put too much emphasis on that qualifier. Furthermore, the point is that the husband will demonstrate his excellence by overcoming himself for the sake of something outside himself. That, it seems to me, is the point.

Update: After I posted this, I was reminded by a friend of this excellent article on Dan Savage by Mark Oppenheimer that kicked this whole conversation off. Oppenheimer gives us a masterful exposition of Savage’s extraordinarily adroit mind, which is on sharp display in that exchange with Douthat. Check it out.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com, where this post originally appeared.

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In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic beliefs – active cataclysmic – that is the belief that this transition from evil to good demands massive destruction, and that we true believers are the agents of that destruction, warriors of God, Mujahidin. Death cults, cults of martyrdom and mass murder…destroying the world to save it.

Nor were these beliefs magical, like the far better known Christian, but largely passive-cataclysmic, Rapture scenarios where one must await God’s intervention. They had practical means and goals. In the same year 1989, that Bin Laden drove the Russians from Afghanistan, Khoumeini issued a global fatwah against Rushdie, and the West trembled. Iran and Afghanistan, however, like so many utopias born of such death cults, proved terrifyingly dystopic – acid in the faces of unveiled women. But these bitter new heavens on earth also showed remarkable staying power… and spreading power. So when Bin Laden struck with such spectacular force on 9/11, he took his Jihad, already declared in 1998 against America (the “Second ‘Ad”), to the next level. He put deeds to words.

We, in the West, were taken totally by surprise. Who are these people? Why haven’t we heard about them before? (NB: the blogosphere, which first “took off” in the early “aughts” is largely the product of a vast number of people turning to cyberspace for information that their mainstream news media had conspicuously failed to deliver.)

What was the logic of such a monstrously cruel attack that targeted civilians? A warning shot to pay attention and address grievances? Or the opening shot in a battle for world domination? Was this primarily an act of retribution for wrongs suffered, i.e., somewhat rational? Or global revenge at global humiliation, i.e., a bottomless pit of grievance?

Some of us said, “What can they possibly believe to make them hate so?” Others, “What did we do to make them hate us so?” And while both are legitimate questions, over the last decade, the “aughts” (‘00s), we have split into two camps, each of which will not allow the other question’s consideration.

A Frenchwoman said to me in 2003, “after 9/11, there are two kinds of people: those who understand that we are at war, and those in denial.” Some pointed to a culture of genocidal incitement in the ideology of this religious enemy. They identified the totalistic reasoning, and warned that what these Mujahidin said in their own language was radically different from how “moderate” Muslims portrayed them to the West.

Others dismissed and downplayed these issues, pointing to rational and moderate trends among Muslims, and insisted that the vast majority are peaceful and moderate who can be reached by dialogue, and that rounding up the tiny percentage who are terrorists can be, and should be, a matter of criminal proceedings. They showed more concern for the tendency of fascist war-mongering movements to appear in Western culture than deal with far more advanced such trends in Muslim political culture; they favored a moral relativism that permits one to spread the blame. Some showed a near-messianic will to self-criticize: “Aren’t we guilty of terrorism when we let people starve to death?” opined Derrida. Others delighted in moral inversion: Chomsky “reminded” us that the USA is the world’s worst terrorist. After all, those alleged civilians were really little Eichmanns, cogs in the wheel of a genocide of “people of color.”

At one extreme, then, we find racists and xenophobes who want to get rid of all Muslims; at the other, oikophobes, who don’t even believe there’s a Muslim-inspired terror, but that 9/11 – the whole threat – was invented by fascist Western politicians looking to establish their dictatorships. “My side right or wrong,” vs. “Their side right or wrong.” Both end up supporting fascism – ours, or theirs.

By and large, we tend to label these two directions of political thinking “right and left.” Using this distinction, however, reflects primarily the “policy” postures involved rather than serious political thought. Since the “left” adopts a discourse and posture of accommodation, it seems like the party of peace and understanding; anyone pointing out the evidence for implacable enmity, and the counter-indicated effects of pursuing peace with such a foe, seems like the party of war.

Now if it were merely a matter of different emphases, this could be a productive tension. Indeed, I’m convinced that there are a host of rightfully troubled thinkers who, despite strong liberal and progressive impulses, nonetheless acknowledge the evidence and want to talk about it. There is a hugely creative and productive conversation still waiting to take place, one that would include people from all faiths and ethnicities, of people genuinely committed to societies committed to the freedom and dignity of all their people. One that was not afraid of its own shadow.

But during the aughts that conversation has not place: on the contrary, the “left” has asserted a strong grip on the public sphere, exiling those who begin to pay attention to the problems with Islam rather than focus on the sins of the West, muffling both their voice, and the Muslim voices to which they point. I remember Fox News interviewing me on 9/11. When I identified this as part of an apocalyptic global Jihad, the interviewer informed me that that was impossible because – here quoting President Bush, “Islam is a religion of Peace.” They never played the interview and didn’t come to interview me again.

Those who doubt the wisdom of pursuing messianic demands for self-criticism and openness on the West at this time, who suggest we exercise our free speech and lay some of the moral onus here at the feet of Muslim spokesmen, who themselves so loudly denounce our racism and prejudice, but tolerate so much among their own – such people have rapidly found themselves labeled “right wing” and exiled from the “mainstream.” “If I speak of Muslim anti-Semitism,” confessed one French colleague to me in 2005, “it’s the last invitation to speak at a conference that I’ll get.”

As a result of this animosity, the adversarial “right-left” axis has reached dysfunctional proportions. The “left” views the right as at best mean-spirited, increasingly as malevolent; the “right” views the left as traitors and fools, as useful infidels. And these two camps now so bitterly speak about each other, that the presidential campaign of 2012 looks like a nightmare of inappropriate candidates. And in the meantime, our disarray fills the sails of our apocalyptic enemy. As one of my friends said to me recently, “I thought that Mayan 2012 stuff was ridiculous. Now I see how global disaster really could happen by then.”

And among the elements that played into making this situation far worse, one of the cruelest winds blew from Europe and from the “progressive left.” It’s worth remembering that the week before 9/11, the UN had assembled at Durban all the major “human rights” NGOs, representing the “best of the left,” to fight racism world-wide, an assembly that turned into of demopath’s delight, an orgy of hatred aimed at two Western democracies, by a voting bloc with members who still engage in slavery. When the “Magnificent 19” struck, they had every reason to believe that they would be cheered on by a Western elite, a global tribe, called “left wing”, inebriated with anti-Americanism.

And they were, to some extent, right. Although the initial European response to 9/11 was sympathy for the US – the next day, Le Monde wrote “Nous sommes tous des américains” – it did not take long for anti-Americanism to emerge. Ten days later, Jean Baudrillard wrote a masterpiece of what Nietzsche would call ressentiment in a Le Monde: “It’s natural to want to strike at such a suffocating hegemon as the USA…They did it, we wanted it.” According to Nidra Poller, within weeks of the event, le tout Paris resounded with this kind of Schadenfreude. “America had it coming.” When Michael Moore’s sophomoric Fahrenheit 9/11 came to Europe, crowds stood and cheered.

No good deed goes unpunished by the envious. The French find it easier to forgive the Germans for conquering them, than the Americans for saving them, twice. When David Marash resigned as editor in chief of Al Jazeera English because it was so anti-American, he commented that it was the British, not the Arabs, who were the worst – and by that he meant the products of a media elite that clusters around a BBC-Guardian nexus.

The anti-American left, like courtiers in a 21^st century production of the emperor’s new clothes, embraced Jihadis who struggled so mightily against American hegemony. The “peace” rallies of 2003 against Bush’s war in Iraq brought the pacifist left and the Mujahidin together in common cause. One Pakistani participant in Islamabad wore a headband with Kill Jews; Berkeley radicals would not be outclassed in their demonizing. And yet, too few were disturbed by the oxymoron of an anti-Semitic peace rally. They failed to note that in apocalyptic politics, my enemy’s enemy is my enemy.

When Bin Laden’s men took out the twin towers, they, in a typical act of cognitive egocentrism, thought they would bring down the arrogant and empty tyrant of the US. What they did accomplish, however unintentionally, was to fend their foe – us – into two self-recriminating and dysfunctional halves. These halves, who so inaccurately identify themselves as “right” and “left,” seem to despise each other more than they do an enemy who passionately hates both of them – us! – a foe that hates all we collectively believe in about those messy and productive societies that treasure tolerance and dignity and freedom.

Demotic polities that protect everyone’s rights and request everyone’s disciplined participation, are rare historical accomplishments. They’re based on the difficult civil meme: “whoever is right, my side or not.” They need high levels of ability among their citizens for self-criticism, compromise, positive-sum behavior, and mutual trust and respect. Eli Sagan, one of the more astute observers of these issues notes: “Democracy is a miracle, considering human psychological disabilities.” However imperfect our democracies, they are as valuable as they are vulnerable.

Among the many memes widely circulating in Western circles, one of the most absurdly noxious is “Who are we to judge?” All the great progressive victories of demotic polities – equality before the law, freedom of religion and dissent, respect for those disadvantaged by “might makes right,” women, workers, weak – arises from harsh value judgments on the authoritarianism that exploits them: patriarchy, exploitation, cruelty. Not judging too quickly – admirable; not judging at all – folly. We end up ferociously judging ourselves, and giving others, whose values and motives are far more base, a free pass. In doing so we illustrate Pascale’s warning, “the more we want to be angels, the more we become beasts.”

So when, in order to seem peaceful, we abandon non-westerners to brutal political cultures in the name of some quasi-religious commitment to cultural relativism, we betray everything we claim we support. Such attitudes seem particularly inadvisable when facing an apocalyptic foe dedicated to the destruction of all our progressive values.

If the only people who fight Islamic triumphalism are really on the right, their solutions will obviously favor harsh responses. Liberals and progressives would, presumably, struggle harder to come up with more creative and less violent forms of effective resistance. So it constitutes a catastrophic loss of creative energy to have a “left” that believes that somehow, if only we were nicer to Muslims, they’d be nicer to us, one that views as an alarming embarrassment anyone who points out the Islamic contribution to the problem, as a saboteur of this effort at placation, an “enemy of peace.” It also represents a colossal betrayal of genuine Muslims moderates who really do want to live in a vibrant civil society that respects everyone; where Muslims respect infidels, and infidels respect Islam.

If the aughts were a debacle of culture wars in the West and a period of growing radicalization in Islamic circles, let the teens be a period when finally, we turn around this self-destructive behavior. The well-being of billions of people on this planet depend on our commitment to Western progressive values.

Richard Landes is Associate Professor of History and directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He is the author of the blog The Augean Stables and his most recent book is Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience.

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Not long after his return from Cairo, where he was doing fieldwork, I spoke with Talal Asad at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Distinguished indeed: with books like Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular, as well as numerous articles, Asad’s work has been formative for current scholarly conversation about religion and secularity, stressing both global context and the ways in which their interaction has been shaped by local histories, in the West and the Middle East. Most recently, he co-authored (along with Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood, and Judith Butler) Is Critique Secular? and contributed a chapter to the just published SSRC volume Rethinking Secularism.

*        *        *

NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having a dawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

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Whose country is this? It’s ours. That’s been the recurring answer to that persistent question. Of course, in religiously and ethnically plural America that means many groups have claimed the nation as their own. As Reverend Josiah Strong did in his 1885 book Our Country, some have proposed that this is an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation. But others have proclaimed primacy too. There was already a grid of tribal nations here when Europeans started planting flags and raising crosses. Catholics got here before Protestants, and Spaniards of Jewish heritage sailed with Catholics on the first ships to the hemisphere. Mormons, including those now running for president, can make their case too, since among sacred scriptures only the Book of Mormon claims to reveal America’s role in the cosmic drama of salvation. So whose nation is it? Or, to pose the question differently, in a country with the First Amendment’s prohibition against “establishing” any faith as the official one–but with a legal guarantee of “free exercise” and an unwritten agreement that religions can try to exert influence–how do religions assert their presence in American national life? And who’s won that competition?

Some recent developments might suggest Catholics have won. One event in the capital in October 2010 would have worried Reverend Strong: during the “Red Mass” (the annual Catholic rite for lawyers and politicians and attended by five Supreme Court justices that year) a Catholic Vice President, Joe Biden, shook hands with a Catholic Chief Justice, John Roberts Jr., during the ritualized greeting or “sign of peace.” For Protestants who agree with Strong, it gets worse: another Catholic, John Boehner, serves as Speaker of the House, and the highest court includes no Protestants, three Jews, and six Catholics. So was this always–or has it become–a Catholic nation?

Well, I’m not foolish enough to get in the middle of that fight. But I can tell you a bit about how the battle’s been waged and how Catholics have done. Better yet, let me rush ahead to the moral of the story. Here are America’s (spoken and unspoken) Rules of Religious Competition, guidelines that Catholics helped to set and, like other faiths, sometimes violated.

Fight it out in the capital. The religious can try to have influence in legislative chambers, media outlets, and federal courtrooms; but another site is crucial in a nation constrained by the First Amendment — the streets of Washington. Since Congress officially founded the District of Columbia in 1790, citizens have taken to the streets — in parades and demonstrations — to ritually claim civic space. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech as part of the March on Washington; and many others inspired by religious principles have walked the streets to make their presence known or shape public policy, from the Million Man March to the March for Life. It’s the American way. Faiths also have asserted presence by erecting memorials and building churches in Washington. That’s the American way, too. Many monuments use religious language or appeal to the nation’s divine guardian. Further, the original plan for the District even called for a national church, and in 1893 Congress approved a National Cathedral that would be associated with a single Protestant group, Episcopalians.

Give 110%. If we had a nickel for every athlete who said that before a competition, we could balance the federal budget. But we know what those athletes mean: they’ll try hard. Similarly, the religious can work vigorously to gain ground in civic space, our rules suggest. And just because the field’s not level or you’re losing the competition doesn’t mean you give up. Catholics didn’t. They took to the streets in processions, demonstrations, and parades, as with the 1924 Holy Name Society Parade, when President Coolidge spoke to 100,000 Catholics. That same year an archbishop dedicated the Nuns of the Battlefield Memorial and a priest celebrated the first mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Catholicism’s counter to the Episcopalian National Cathedral across town. By the 1920s, as local journalists reported, D.C. had become the “spiritual capital.” With Catholic influence, that ritual and architectural competition in Washington became part of the American way of being religious.

Fight Fair. This religious battle isn’t a free for all. Some lines can’t be crossed–or can’t be crossed without someone crying foul. For example, in 1854 an anti-Catholic group stole the stone donated by Pope Pius IX and intended for the Washington Monument because they feared that Catholics “will burn our Bibles, bind our consciences, [and] make slaves of us.” More than a half-century later “a guerilla warfare of words” broke out because each Thanksgiving between 1909 and 1913 the standing U.S. president, first Taft and then Wilson, attended a mass at a Washington Catholic church and thereby seemed to endorse “the attempt to convert our national Thanksgiving holiday into a Roman Catholic festival.” Both incidents reveal religious intolerance, but there’s a hint about the American rules of public religion in those responses too. To place a Catholic stone in that civic monument would establish one faith, the protester’s logic went. Either include a stone from every faith or disallow all of them. The ritual controversy had a similar logic: you can’t link a national holiday like Thanksgiving with one denomination. It’s just not fair. So, in America, you can fight vigorously for the nation’s soul, but you can’t make your faith the official one or prevent other faiths from competing. Denominations can win a battle or two: Episcopalians preside at the worship space where presidents get memorialized; Catholics enjoy more than their share of Supreme Court justices and many of them, along with politicians, attend the Red Mass. But that just means, by America’s rules, other faiths need to try harder–and give 110%.

Thomas A. Tweed is Shive, Lindsay, and Gray Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent book is America’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital.

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On Aug. 6, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will lead a prayer rally in Houston despite criticism that his event violates the separation of church and state. Though Perry said recently that he felt “called” to run for the presidency, he also told a Christian radio show that the rally will not be political. “This is simply people calling out to God,” he said.

The governor is the latest would-be presidential candidate injecting religion into Republican politics while disavowing political intent. But once they pocket the votes of fellow Christians, do these politicos keep the faith?

The track record is spotty. George W. Bush, who claimed in a 1999 Republican primary debate that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher, promised $8 billion to churches and other religious groups. Once elected, he created an executive office for faith-based initiatives; the first grants of $15 million went to small churches and other religious groups that offered job training and unemployment services in the economic slump after the 9/11 attacks.

But of the promised $8 billion, only about $500 million was delivered. The rest was lost to the Bush tax cuts. Moreover, David Kuo, a special assistant to Bush for faith-based initiatives, claimed that supposedly nonpartisan conferences convened in 2002 to help religious charities apply for federal funds took place in districts where Republican incumbents were in trouble. “It had to look like the idea came from members of Congress, just another way incumbent representatives were serving their communities,” Kuo wrote later. “This approach inoculated us against accusations that we were using religion and religious leaders to promote specific candidates.”

This dynamic — candidate courts evangelical voters, then strays from the path after Election Day — is not new. Billy Graham, the face of evangelical Christianity since his first crusades to find converts in the late 1940s, struck up an alliance with Richard Nixon when Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Though not an evangelical, Nixon seemed sympathetic to Graham’s vision and made evangelicals central to his electoral strategy after the upheavals of the 1960s.

Graham shilled for Nixon during the 1968 campaign but consistently denied that he played a political role, even after he allowed Nixon to address a crusade in 1970. Deflecting criticism of the choice months later, Graham offered an explanation that betrayed either naivete or cynicism: “I wouldn’t think that you’d call the president political.”

Graham would have regrets after the Watergate scandal. He had thought that aligning himself with power would advance the evangelical cause. With the release of a partial transcript of the White House tapes, however, Graham was crushed. He said later that when he saw the real Nixon — profane, vindictive and petty — he “felt like a sheep led to the slaughter.” No presidential candidate ever addressed a Graham crusade again. Rehabilitating his image as a nonpartisan adviser to commanders in chief, Graham offered prayers at the inaugurations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it,” he said in 1981.

But evangelicals continued in politics without Graham. By the time Ronald Reagan rose to prominence, they had become a permanent part of the GOP base. When Reagan appeared before 15,000 religious leaders at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing in 1980, he told the crowd: “I know you can’t endorse me . . . but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, called Reagan’s election “the greatest day for the cause of conservatism and morality in my adult life.” Reagan had counted on the televangelist to help him defeat former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the South. An alliance like the one between Graham and Nixon seemed mutually beneficial.

Yet Reagan did little for evangelicals once he reached the Oval Office. He gave them few key appointments in his administration, and in 1981, he met with Falwell and Paul Weyrich, founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and asked that they put their agenda on the back burner while he negotiated with Congress over taxes. They agreed — and later regretted it. Though Reagan put pro-life justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and made like-minded William Rehnquist chief justice, he also nominated Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, co-authors of the 1992 opinion Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld Roe v. Wade. Evangelicals wanted a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but Reagan proved unwilling to push for legislation doomed to die in a Democratic Congress. “The religious right was sweet-talked,” Weyrich complained at the end of Reagan’s first term.

That evangelicals have been so disappointed with the presidents they elect suggests that politics might not be the best avenue to achieve their aims. Politics demands compromise and conciliation that counter evangelical calls for purity. When Michele Bachmann insists that “social conservatism is fiscal conservatism,” does she understand that conservative Christians want to do more than cut taxes? When Tim Pawlenty names his “political heroes” — “I love Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ” — does he know that making war wasn’t part of the carpenter from Judea’s program?

If Perry thinks politicking is more important than proselytizing, conservative Christians will not fare well in 2012, even if their candidates win. Perhaps they should turn to Matthew 10:16: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents.” After all, mixing religion and politics is a slithery business.

David Sehat is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University and author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Listen to his interview on The Oxford Comment here.

The article appears with permission from The Washington Post.
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By Mark Peters

I’ve been seeing gods everywhere lately.

Not gods like Thor, Ganesha, and God. My cinnamon rolls have been deity-free, if not gluten-free. It’s lexical gods I can’t seem to escape. Everywhere I look someone is thanking, cursing, or begging some specific group of supreme beings.

For example, I’ve recently spotted the following religious invocations:

• In her funny book, My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me, a nervous, sweaty, date-bound Hilary Winston wrote, “I alternated the air vents of the VW Jetta at my armpits and temples. I drove slow and prayed to the dating gods for help.”

• On ESPN.com, NBA maven Marc Stein noted that it was “interesting, after Game 4 and Game 5, to hear both (Dwayne) Wade and Mavs coach Rick Carlisle make a ‘basketball gods’ reference, proving that it’s not just us media types who spout this stuff.”

• On Twitter, my friend (and awesome author) Judy McGuire wrote, “Let us pray that the check gods will smile on me today.”

• During some awful luck at billiards, I even noticed myself falling into the trend, whining, “I wonder what I’ve done to anger the pool gods and the ball community.”

I’ve been around long enough to know when the column gods are sending me a sign, so I decided to plumb the depths of Twitter for examples of the “X gods” formula. I’ve been searching for a month, but I could’ve probably written an article based on the examples from a single day. It turns out the sky is filled with a lot more than Heaven, Asgard, Mars, and the Klingon homeworld: there are pantheons of happiness gods, hippo gods, bagel gods, dog-healing gods, moped gods, taco gods, registration gods, and even perm gods for the hair-focused. Though monotheism dominates the world, polytheism still reigns over our vocabulary.

One of the major topics for such prayers is sports. As a resident of Buffalo, NY, I am well aware of how cruel the sports gods can be, particularly the football gods who caused the Buffalo Bills to lose four straight Super Bowls in the nineties, not that I’m still bitter. Speaking of the football gods, they’ve been a highlight of Gregg Easterbrook’s columns for years, including this mention back in 2001: “Cronus tormented Uranus, Zeus tormented Cronus, Hera tormented Hercules, Paris tormented Hera, Hades tormented Persephone, Aphrodite tormented Helen, and now the football gods have chosen to torment the Tennessee Titans.” In the past month, I spotted numerous references to the baseball gods, bowling gods, hockey gods, racing gods, tennis gods, and pro wrestling gods. Given the bounced balls, pulled groins, and other unpredictable events in the world of sports, ESPN might be the network that generates the most prayer.

We all like to believe we’re the quarterback or point guard of our life, so we call on similar gods in any situation that troubles us. The employment gods are frequently beseeched and cursed, as are the lottery gods. I saw many pleas to the travel gods and the weather gods, which is fitting since those pantheons tend to team up to make our lives miserable. Since technology is up there with the weather as a powerful, mindless force shaping our world, people praise and curse the Twitter gods, Google gods, iPhone gods, DVR gods, YouTube gods, Apple gods, laptop gods, social media gods, Blackberry gods, data center gods, Internet gods, satellite radio gods, iPod album shuffle gods, email gods, autosave gods, and the ultra-vague technology gods. Here, a frighteningly stereotypical texter makes a prayer that would make St. Paul roll over in his basilica: “thank the txt gods for unlimited txtn!lol!;)”

While some people pray to “the gods of employment,” “the gods of medicine,” or “the Gods of cross-browser compatibility,” that form doesn’t seem as common, at least on Twitter, where brevity is king. Speaking of brevity, some prayers are tiny even by tweet standards: they make the Hail Mary seem like War and Peace. This shows great respect for the busy schedules of the gods, if not the gravitas of the gods, as seen in this sleepy hornball’s request: “boobies please, dream gods”. I’m copying this one into my prayerbook for the next time I make an involuntary protein spill: “Screw you barf gods”.  You have to appreciate the fist-shaking anger behind “Dear Words With Friends gods, I hate you” and “I’m trapped. DAMN you tic tac toe gods!!!”

These tweets are a testimonial to how egocentric yet humorous we can be. No matter what we’re doing, we want to believe a divine force is helping and hindering us, that our Google searches and shopping binges are written in the cosmos. Fortunately, we’re too self-aware to believe that malarkey. Even more fortunately, we can’t totally fight the feeling, so we compose preposterous prayers: “Credit card gods please keep me out of TJ Maxx.”

I’m thankful to the book gods for putting this quote by David Mamet (from Writing in Restaurants) in my path while writing this column: “Our tenuous monotheism disappears in the face of our great insecurities, and we live once again overtly in an animistic universe surrounded by superbeings.”

To close, here are some of the most eloquent prayers to ad hoc deities I spotted in the last month or so. Thank you, tweet gods. Amen.



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Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.

By Ian Ker

Oxford University Press recently published my new book, G. K. Chesterton:  A Biography.  The reviews remind me of the reviews I received when OUP published my biography of John Henry Newman more than twenty years ago, although the kind of reviewer who is asked to review a life of Chesterton is quite likely to be a very different kind of reviewer from the reviewer who would review a life of Newman.  However, there are similarities between the responses to the two books and they have caused me to reflect on the kind of biography I try to write.

First and most obviously, I am not a popular biographer:  I am not just interested in the ‘story’ of my subject’s life.  A reviewer who wants that kind of life is going to be annoyed because my biographies are academic critical biographies and therefore are not going to be short. I have described the two biographies I have written as intellectual and literary lives.  They are ‘lives’ because they attempt to bring their subjects to life; they are not simply studies of their writings.  Nevertheless the only reason I have for writing the lives of writers and thinkers like Newman and Chesterton is because I think they are important writers and thinkers and I assume that is, if not the only, certainly the, or a major part of, the reason why anyone would wish to read their biographies.  I therefore do attempt to bring to life both their thought and their writings for the reader. A reader of a biography of Jane Austen, say, can be assumed to have read all the relatively few novels she wrote, but very few readers of a biography of Newman and Chesterton can be assumed to have read anything more than a tiny portion of their voluminous works.

I can give a personal illustration of this ordinary reader.  I am at present reading a hefty, nine hundred and fifty page biography of John Ruskin.  Now Ruskin’s personal life is certainly interesting if only because of his disastrous marriage to Effie Gray and his unhappy love for Rose La Touche.  But the reason I wanted to read what purports to be an academic rather than popular life was because I wanted to know more about Ruskin’s voluminous writings, of which I have only read a very small fraction.  But while this is a hugely detailed personal biography, the author frustratingly does not introduce me into Ruskin’s writings in the way I was hoping he would.  He may make Ruskin as a man come alive, but he does not attempt to make him come alive as a writer.

I would want to emphasise the word ‘alive’.  A biography which is not simply interested in the ‘story’ of the subject’s life is not therefore entitled to be boring.  An intellectual and literary biographer must be discriminating and selective.  I am, in particular, very suspicious of what I call the lazy block quotation which enables the biographer to switch off at the expense of the reader.  That certainly doesn’t mean I am against quoting.  On the contrary, the subject of the biographer can only come alive if their voice is heard, whether their conversational voice (which usually means quoting from letters) or their voice as a writer.  But quotation should be highly selective and discriminating and the long indented quotation needs prior justification.  The reader needs persuasion against the temptation to skip!

Some reviewers are going to dismiss the kind of biography I write as what they call hagiography.  It is dismissed as old-fashioned biography because it seeks to praise rather than detract.  Such reviewers are, of course, inconsistent:  they expect a biographer of Hitler to write the opposite of hagiography and would be scandalized if the biographer sought in any way to justify his persecution of the Jews.  Now I certainly don’t try and hide any damaging evidence nor am I totally uncritical:  thus, in the case of Chesterton, I am very clear that he is not a major novelist or poet; I am also quite candid about the ways in which he was selfish as a result of being spoiled as a child, and I do accept that there is some justification for the charge of anti-Semitism.  But – and this is another respect in which I differ from many contemporary biographers – I am not interested in what I would call idle speculation (generally of a sexual nature) in order to present a critical ‘revisionist’ portrait.  The Victorians liked to have heroes, we like to pull people down from their pedestals – and the biographer who fails to do that will certainly be branded as a hagiographer.  But I can’t conceive of writing a biography of someone I don’t admire as a person and as a writer and thinker.

Ian Ker has taught both English literature and theology in universities in the United States and Britain, where he currently teaches in the Oxford University theology faculty.  He is the author and editor of more than twenty books on Newman, including John Henry Newman:  A Biography, as well as the author of The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961. His latest book is G. K. Chesterton: A Biography.

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By Paul Strohm

Among ethical concepts, conscience is a remarkable survivor.  During the 2000 years of its existence it has had ups and downs, but has never gone away.  Originating as Roman conscientia, it was adopted by the Catholic Church, redefined and competitively claimed by Luther and the Protestants during the Reformation, adapted to secular philosophy during the Enlightenment, and is still actively abroad in the world today.  Yet the last few decades have been cloudy ones for conscience, a unique time of trial.

The problem for conscience has always been its precarious authorization.   It is both a uniquely personal impulse and a matter of institutional consensus, a strongly felt personal view and a shared norm upon which all reasonable or ethical people are expected to agree.   As a result of its mixed mandate, conscience performs in differing and even contradictory ways.   It lends support to the dissenting individual or exponent of unpopular or even aberrant claims.  But it is also summoned in support of the norm, and broadly accepted ethical standards.

Each of these authorizations—the personal and the institutional—has its pitfalls.  The fervent individual, summoned by burning personal conviction about the rightness of his or her cause, lies open to suspicions of solipsism or arrogance. But, on the other hand, institutionally or state-sponsored conscience, or conscience speaking for settled public opinion, risk complacency or ethically stunted orthodoxy.  One recalls the predicament of Huckleberry Finn, who suffers what he identifies as conscience pangs for his decision to assist Jim to escape from enslavement, when this bourgeois or ‘churchified’ conscience is obviously a false friend and enemy to his superior ethical intuitions.

Despite such issues, conscience remains a force for much good in the world.  Its most crucial function, and perhaps the one most in need of support, is its encouragement to the private  individual struggling with institutional tyrannies—most dramatically, with various forms of state tyranny.  We have witnessed the incarceration and continued surveillance of China’s Ai Weiwei.  Ai has recently been called ‘China’s conscience’, but his more urgent need might be less public and more personal, the need to enjoy his own conscience undisturbed by governmental or other external intervention.  Remarkable individuals like Ai have proven willing to endure sacrifice for conscientious belief–and sacrifice they have.   Recently Lasantha Wickramatunge, a courageous Sri Lankan journalist, gave his life to expose corruption.  He wrote a farewell dispatch, which amounted to his own obituary letter, which concluded, ‘There is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security.  It is the call of conscience.’ Salman Taseer, governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, declared in a 1 Jaunary 2011 television interview that ‘If I do not stand by my conscience, then who will?’—three days before his assassination. Less dramatically, but still tellingly, one may consider some of the smaller cases of conscience that people confront daily.  Explaining his break with his political party to support a faltering gay marriage bill, Fred W. Thiele Jr, a  New York state Assemblyman, explained, ‘There’s that little voice inside of you that tells you when you’ve done something right, and when you’ve done something wrong. . .  That little voice kept gnawing away at me.’ Anh Cao, the sole Republican congressman to vote in support of an embattled American healthcare bill and marked for defeat in last year’s elections, explained, ‘I had to make a decision of conscience.’   Such figures become exemplars of conscience exactly by articulating positions that their larger social group or sponsorship does not encourage.

Conscience’s voice is a stern one.  Its mode is to ‘prick’ or ‘nag’, and its vistations are rarely welcome.  Those who follow it have no guarantee or reward or success, or even of conscience’s own infallibility.   Thomas Aquinas treated it as a form of applied knowledge which intends the good but is prone to err in its particular applications.   Still, with Thomas, we can agree that intending the good is better than intending nothing at all—that hard choices must be made in the world and seeking to make good ones is our only option.   Additionally in conscience’s favour is the fact that it not only seeks to do good, but demands that we stir ourselves; that, having heard conscience’s voice, we do something in consequence.   The only way to silence a nagging conscience is by choices and deeds.  As a spur and stimulant to act upon our views and beliefs, conscience remains an urgently needed clarion in the world.

Paul Strohm is the Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was formerly J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where he continues as Research Fellow of St Anne’s College. His new book is Conscience: A Very Short Introduction.

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