Spring 2013 marks two significant anniversaries for Alexander Pope, perhaps the most representative and alien English poet of the 18th century. Pope is memorialized both for the 325th anniversary of his birth, on 21 May 1688, and for the 300th anniversary of two significant literary acts: one a publication, the other a proposal to publish.

On the 7 March 1713, Pope published one of his most important poems. Windsor Forest was published the same month as the signing of the multi-stage Treaty of Utrecht, with which, in part, the poem deals: “Hail, sacred Peace! hail long-expected days” (Windsor Forest, line 353). The redistribution of territories determined by that treaty created various, continuing friction points between Protestant Britain and its Catholic adversaries: France ceded vast North American territories to Great Britain leaving French Canada surrounded by English lands, while Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain and acquired the Falkland islands (Islas Malvinas). It was a period of global, territorial conflicts, but passions were inflamed by the Protestant/Catholic schism.

Later that same year, Pope made public, and sought subscriptions for, a proposal for the first major English translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey since that of Shakespeare’s contemporary George Chapman (1559–1634). Pope’s Homeric effort became one of the major cultural accomplishments of the period. In a letter of 4 October 1726, Voltaire praised Pope’s fingers, “which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an english coat”.

As a man, Pope himself has at least two claims on our attention, though his anniversary will undoubtedly rank lower in public attention than would that of many other poets of these Isles. A Google search on English poets by forename and surname lets us plot a rough graph of Internet popularity:

However, there are other digital measures of a poet’s popularity. Pope’s epigrammatic style and his rhyming couplets, which suffered critically at the hands of the Romantics and later generations, now proves to be remarkably popular among the choruses of Twitter, where there are a number of “Pope” persona:

— and endless Pope Tweets, quoting (or misquoting) lines from his verse. Pope’s epigrammatic couplets were crafted to place a succinct thought within a limited number of words:

One of the things that continues to intrigue about Pope, is his extraordinary confidence and ability to focus on his vision of what he should do and be in life. Two years before the date marked by this anniversary, Pope published one of his two great “epigrammatic essays” — An Essay on Criticism (first published anonymously, 15 May 1711). Pope was only 23, and the work does more than mark him out as a singular and singularly memorable essayist on the human condition. It presents us with the noteworthy instance of a young man, still at the beginning of his literary career, publicly admonishing and correcting the established critical community. It reminds me of the equally confident, if often less accessible, manifestoes of the Modernist movement.

For Pope was no social or cultural insider, but what might be thought of as a “corporeal and incorporeal outsider.” Pope was twice marginalized in his world. Marginalized once for his beliefs — as a Catholic, then barred from teaching, attending university, voting, or holding public office on pain of imprisonment. The anti-Catholic sentiment was aggravated by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), which led to a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles (16 km) of either London or Westminster.

These constraints would have pinched especially hard on the ambitions of Pope’s essentially middle class family. They were prosperous enough, however, to be able to escape to the country, moving to a small estate in Binfield (or Bynfield), Berkshire, when Alexander was twelve. Binfield was only a dozen kilometres west of Great Windsor Park, though remains of the ancient royal hunting grounds of Windsor Forest undoubtedly “crown’d with tufted trees” (Windsor Forest, line 27) various plots between the two. On the verges of these forests, you could pretend to be anyone, and one’s beliefs could be recast in the poetic imagery of patriotism and Classical analogy we find in Windsor Forest.

Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain”. © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32

Pope could never escape his second marginalization, however, for he literally carried it with him on his back. From the age of twelve, exactly at the time of the family move from London, Pope suffered from a form of tuberculosis that affected the bone, deforming his body, stunting his growth. Pope grew to a height of only 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m), and was left with a severe hunchback.

The disease received its formal medical description in Pope’s lifetime, though too late to help the poet. A decade before Pope’s death in 1744, a Liverpool surgeon, H. Park, wrote an epistolary volume in which characteristics and (painful) treatments of the disease were described: An Account of a new method of treating diseases of the joints of the knee and elbow, in a letter to Mr. Percival Pott. (London: J. Johnson, 1733). The recipient of the “letter”, the remarkable English surgeon Sir Percivall Pott (1714–1788) was one of the founders of orthopedy, and the first scientist to demonstrate that cancer may be caused by an environmental carcinogen. He published a volume on Some few general remarks on fractures and dislocations (London: Hawes, Clarke and Collins, 1768), providing the first clinical description of extrapulmonary tuberculosis (tuberculous spondylitis), the disease with which Pope suffered, subsequently known as Pott’s disease.

I recommend a re-reading of Windsor Forest with some sense of the twice-excluded author in mind. All good poems can be read in many ways, but one of the things this re-reading proposes is the struggle of an outsider to create a re-vision of the world that contains and excludes him.

Dr. Robert V. McNamee is the Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: (1) Alexander Pope portrait. NYPL Digital Gallery. (2) Google searches for poets. Copyright Dr. Robert V. McNamee. Used with permission. (3) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (4) Screengrab from Twitter by Dr. Robert V. McNamee. (5) Estates at Windsor, Berkshire — British Library, “The unveiling of Britain.” © The British Library Board Royal Ms. 18.D.III, f.32. Used with permission. (6) From a mid-19th century text book. Out of copyright.

The post The marginalized Alexander Pope appeared first on OUPblog.

I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: Courtesy of Alec Ryrie. Do not use without permission.

The post The missing children of early modern religion appeared first on OUPblog.

Justin Welby recently used his first Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to warn of the dangers of investing too much faith in frail and fallible human leaders, be they politicians or priests. Blind belief in the power of any single individual to bring about true change in any sphere, he argued, was simplistic and wrong, and led inevitably to disillusionment and disappointment. Surely this was the point in the sermon when a member of his flock was duty-bound to heckle ‘But what about that bloke called Jesus!’ Unfortunately, good manners triumphed and the leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans was able to continue his sermon. ‘Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation’ he told the congregation at Canterbury cathedral. ‘They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve’.

Bishop Welby’s sermon reminded me of Max Weber’s famous essay of 1919 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ with its warnings against ‘infantile’ understandings of politics and its emphasis on the complexities of governing and the need to hold realistic expectations of what politics – and therefore politicians – can deliver. ‘Politics is’ as Weber maintained ‘a strong and slow boring of hard woods’ and one might argue that almost a century later the challenges of governing have, if anything, become far greater and more complex. And yet there was a nagging part of Bishop Welby’s sermon that left me disheartened, frustrated, and possibly even angry. It was, for me, as if the new Bishop had accepted the advice of Bernard Baruch to ‘vote for the man [or woman] who promises the least as they’ll be least disappointing’. Surely one of the key social roles of politicians and priests is to inspire, to promote hope, to make their communities believe they can deliver positive social change. Might it therefore be that in warning against ‘the hero leader culture’, Bishop Welby revealed his own weakness? In the sense that he seemingly does not understand exactly why certain social groups seem so willing to grasp ‘quick, easy and gratifying solutions’ to even the most intractable problems.

Bishop Welby suggests that people could only escape ‘cynical despair’ by acknowledging God and trusting in his power but if you’re living in poverty, and face a multitude of social challenges that conspire to limit your life chances from birth, then I can understand why individuals fall for the cheap tricks and empty promises of rogue politicians. Put slightly differently, instead of arguing that too many people look to politicians for simple and pain free solutions to complex and painful problems that simply do not exist, might it not be equally true to suggest that encouraging people to accept human fallibility and to trust on God is just a different form of expectation inflation that is almost guaranteed to fail – a ‘mere cruelty’ of a different kind?

Canterbury Cathedral, and the Portal Nave Cross-spire

I for one am actually quite glad that Barack Obama did not turn out to be Superman and Bishop Welby is surely correct that we should not set people or institutions up to the heights where they cannot do anything but fail. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that individuals cannot make a positive difference, or to deny that some politicians have in fact delivered on their promises, or that – when all is said and done – democratic politics generally delivers far more than most people seem to recognise. Welby concluded his sermon by quoting the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, from his poem Threshold, on the human need for communication with God,

‘I am alone on the surface / of a turning planet. What / to do but, like Michelangelo’s / Adam, put my hand / out into unknown space, / hoping for the reciprocating touch?

And yet once again my moral soul was irked by such platitudes; I could not help but think that what most humans crave is not so much communication with God but communication with each other. It is the increased social fragmentation that threatens humanity not some form of existential angst or theological breakdown. My concern is therefore not so much that the public demands too much of politics and politicians but that at many levels the public’s expectations are actually too low. Local elections, for example, are due to take place in the UK in a matter of days but have so far been met with a deafening silence in terms of public debate or interest. There seems little evidence of the blind faith or hero leader culture that Bishop Welby warns against in any of the 36 English and Welsh Councils that will be contested on 2 May. I’m not suggesting that one sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury has single-handedly dampened expectations that would otherwise have had the local election campaign buzzing across the country, but I am suggesting that the Bishop’s position is too simplistic. We actually need more trust in political leaders and more active community engagement at the local level alongside a measured dose of healthy scepticism about what our local political leaders can realistically deliver.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was educated at a succession of Catholic schools and is still recovering from this experience. Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts here.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only politics and law articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Canterbury Cathedral and the Portal Nave Cross-spire. Photo by Hans Musil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Saints and sinners, politicians and priests, and the 2013 local elections appeared first on OUPblog.

The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?

Kierkegaard did not doubt his mission: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be . . . to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not’. Christianity, he contended, entailed belief in an interruptive event (an Incarnation of God) which does not fit the normal flow of history. The Enlightenment had been a blow to the Christian claim. Politely suggesting that any such ‘historical’ religion was the business of theologians, Kant treated the biblical saga of Fall and redemption as but a mythical expression of human self-understanding. In his wake, Hegel reduced Christianity simply to ‘concepts’ and thought these concepts a mere stage in human development, while Feuerbach pronounced Christian doctrine a projection. As a student, Kierkegaard witnessed the advance of scholarship that sought to explain biblical texts in terms of their setting of origin.

Cognisant that the notion of an Incarnation, a God/man, is to reason paradoxical (a contradiction in terms), Kierkegaard advocated relating to it out of the passion of subjective inwardness that is ‘faith’. We should recognise, however, that he held to pre-modern suppositions that made such a notion, if not rational, at least conceivable. Living a century and a half after Newton, Kierkegaard had little sense that nature and history form an inter-related causal nexus; that events are one of a kind, predictable and repeatable, there being no one-off occurrences. He was, in the parlance of the day, a ‘supernaturalist’ not a ‘naturalist’, believing in miracles. God is conceived to be directly behind each and every happening, such that just about anything can transpire.

For Kierkegaard, pressing directly on our world, the eternal is bound into each moment in time. It is within such a context that the human being is held to be a synthesis of body and spirit, through his very nature made for divinity. Thus Kierkegaard commented that, while it is true that (as Aristotle had said) a plant gives rise to a plant, a man to a man, ‘by this nothing is explained, thought is not satisfied … for an eternal being cannot be born’. Within such a context, once more the idea of Incarnation acquires plausibility. Was it the subsequent Darwinian revolution that led humanity to conceive of their nature otherwise?

Kierkegaard’s outlook had social implications. Far from uncaring, his former professor remarked: ‘It was typical of him to want to look after precisely those people whom the public did not value’. Nevertheless, in view of eternity, our present existence becomes for him a ‘meanwhile’. Thus he considered it of more importance that a beggar behave beautifully, mindful that, disturbed by his presence, others may be led to question God’s goodness, than whether the man live or die. He advises that a charwoman should not aspire to be called ‘Madame’, given that the world is but a stage on which we act our roles, while before God she is anyone’s equal. No wonder Hegel had averred that ‘the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world’. His disciple Marx was five years Kierkegaard’s junior.

In his Works of Love, a spiritual classic, Kierkegaard entreats us to love and respect each ‘other’ as God loves us, never assimilating that other person to self. Horrified by the advent of democracy, ‘government by the numerical’ as he quips derisively, he was nonetheless quick to take advantage of freedom of the press to attack a complacent establishment in both church and state. He writes sarcastically of the ‘distinguished corruption’ of those who flee from one distinguished circle to another, taking care lest in the poor they should meet another human being. If today in celebration of their famous son the Queen of Denmark will parade from church to university, it was not ever thus. Rather, it was a motley crew of students and the poor who accompanied his funeral cortège from that same church to grave. These things are far from simple.

Fearing in his blacker moods that his authorship, penned in a minor European tongue, might lie undiscovered, Kierkegaard remarked of his fellow countrymen: ‘I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric; my literary activity… a sort of hobby [like] fishing and such’. Would he could but know of the affection and respect in which in our day he is held by those who will gather to celebrate his bicentennial. His work is translated into languages from Korean to Hungarian. An eclectic and imaginative author, Kierkegaard is considered the Ur-father of existentialism, the originator of dialectical theology and (on account of his style) the progenitor of post-modernism. Regarded by many Danes as the greatest prose writer of their language, his provocative authorship in equal measure engages and delights.

Confronted with one who in terms of the span of history lived so recently yet whose thought-world is so foreign, we are brought to recognise the remarkable revolutions that we in Europe have undergone. Fascinated by steam engines and hot air balloons, Kierkegaard (inconsistently) did not much like the march of history, thinking scientific progress to distract man from his true ends. To step into his shoes is a startling revelation as to differences in presuppositions. What, however, would seem to make little sense is to contend that Christians have always proclaimed ‘faith’ in the face of ‘reason’, failing to consider the context that made the object of such a faith thinkable. From this it does not follow that we should not think out how today we had best conceive of that dimension of reality that is ‘God’.

Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in Continental Philosophy from Warwick. The author of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought, she has for many years engaged with the Lutheran tradition, in particular the work of Kierkegaard. Author of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique, you can find more about Daphne Hampson by visiting her website.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Kierkegaard statue. Photo by Arne List. Creative commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Celebrating Kierkegaard’s bicentenary appeared first on OUPblog.

If I have learned anything as a lifelong student of the world’s multitude of religious traditions, it is that reality for humans is malleable and quite varied — nothing is essential in human experience. Almost everything gets filtered through and shaped by a particular cultural lens. Something as simple as a tree is not so simple after all. From a biological perspective trees have much in common worldwide, but from a cultural perspective there exists an immense difference between them. Human perception and understanding of any aspect of the world seems to be determined largely by the particular interpretive lens through which it is viewed. Importantly, different cultural perspectives result in different experiences and behavior. What is a tree when seen from another cultural viewpoint? What range of interactive experiences is possible with it?

Historically tree worship has been a vital feature of much religious activity worldwide, and trees are still commonly found at the center of religious shrines in India. In this context they are typically regarded as powerful sentient divine beings with whom humans can have mutually beneficial relationships.

A religious shrine in India.

The personhood of trees is taken seriously as people interact with them in a variety of ways. The pipal or bodhi tree is often considered to be the most sacred tree in India. Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under this tree and many Hindus consider it to be an embodied form of the mighty god Vishnu.

The bodhi tree

Because of its highly beneficial medicinal qualities, the neem tree is frequently called the village pharmacy. It is commonly regarded as the body of the goddess Shitala. In some parts of India this tree is dressed with colorful cloth and a metal facemask is attached to the trunk of the tree as a way of honoring it and facilitating a more intimate connection with it.

The neem tree with a metal facemask attached

Banyan trees are often identified with the god Shiva and are associated with longevity and immortality, since they have the ability to live indefinitely. They send down aerial roots, which over the course of time become massive trunks that in turn send out aerial roots of their own, creating an ever-expanding and self-perpetuating forest. They too are the recipients of a wide range of religious offerings and worship.

A banyan tree

Trees are clearly amazing forms of life that have captured the human imagination in a number of ways. A question we might ask on this Arbor Day is: what possibilities would be available to us in our relationships with trees if we were to expand our understanding of them, inspired by the perceptions of our own ancestors or those of people living in different cultures today, such as the many tree worshipers of India?

David Haberman is Professor of  Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
All photos courtesy of the author.

The post Looking at trees in a new way appeared first on OUPblog.

In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources by advancing the view that humans exist apart from and above all the rest of creation, whose sole purpose it is to meet the needs of humanity.

As a scholar of the emergence of science and technology in medieval Europe, White’s primary interest was to show how Christian views of humanity’s relation to nature gave rise to Baconian science and technology, which treated nature as an object to be investigated and mastered for human benefit. With a quick dig at Ronald Reagan’s alleged anti-environmentalist quip, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all,” White wrote:

To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

At a time when many assumed that technological solutions could be found for the mounting problems caused by industrialization, White argued that more technology would not solve anything. What was needed was a fundamental shift in worldview and values.

Sacred grove near Sikupati, courtesy of author.

White’s controversial essay inspired a flurry of response. Some scholars argued against his damning critique of Christianity and described the many expressions of Christianity that foster a less exploitative approach to the environment. Others pursued the hints scattered throughout his essay that non-Western religions might promote more sustainable values in relation to natural resource use.  My own research on the sacred groves of India was initially inspired by the hope that these diminutive islands of biodiversity might teach us something about how Hindu values put deliberate limits on consumption, even in a context of enormously pressing material need.

In the forty years since White’s essay was first published, we have learned that the deep values undergirding our actions are remarkably impervious to change. It’s even doubtful that our minds harbor any single, coherent foundation for our actions. Rather, our deeds are more likely motivated by a welter of thoughts, needs, desires, and impulses, many of which are not even under our conscious control.

Consider the discouraging fact that even those of us who espouse values of sustainability live lives of flagrant contradiction. We jet off to far flung lands, wearing clothes from China and eating food from Mexico, quietly oblivious of our carbon footprints ballooning out like the shoes of some perverse circus clown. Once made aware of the effects of our choices, we are able to rationalize them away with ease. If White argued that greater scientific understanding and more sophisticated technological fixes would not reverse the damage of industrialization, our inability to change even the most egregiously destructive behaviors—transcontinental airline travel, eating strawberries in January—suggests that consciousness-raising exercises alone aren’t going to do much either.

Yet, with it’s punchy prose and sweeping argument, White’s article not only inspired the creation of an academic subfield—religion and environmentalism—it also inspired the religious environmentalism movement, a more pragmatic if equally fragmented effort to enlist religion in the service of ecology. Organizations of people of faith such as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation based in the UK, Eco-Friends in India, and the US-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), among many others, bring people together to educate, advocate, and implement concrete changes in their communities.

These movements demonstrate several crucial aspects about religion that make it a potent force for catalyzing the kind of radical changes that White anticipated, and that we so desperately need today. First, religion is more than just beliefs or ideas. Beyond equipping people with cosmologies that orient them to each other, to the divine, and to the non-human world, religions offer a way for people to act in groups. Privatized responses to the dire environmental threats we face today are largely ineffective. But when they are multiplied by thousands, and by millions, they can have a profound effect.  Love it or hate it, religion has an excellent track-record for motivating this kind of collective action.

Second, religious people are motivated by many things besides what we might define as religion. Rural residents of India who preserve (and sometimes cut down) sacred groves are driven by many things: needs for agricultural land, fodder and fuel-wood, aspirations for a better life, desires to conform to new or transformed identities. The same could be said for religious urban dwellers in the United States faced with competing interests, like whether to expand the church’s parking lot or preserve 75-year old maple trees that give shade to a picnic area.

This is not to say that religion acts as a mere ideological cover for materialistic motivations, as when the felling of a sacred grove to build a modern concrete temple, or a maple tree to build a parking lot, is seen as a way to bring in more people and more revenue. Or that people are being simply pious when they enforce the sanctions that protect sacred groves from overuse, or put solar panels on the roof of their churches. Rather, more truthful understandings of how faith, religious practice, community, and natural resource use are intertwined are only possible when we recognize that religious people are also workers, family members, citizens, and residents of places that are precious in manifold ways.

Eliza F. Kent is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University and the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India and Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Sacred groves appeared first on OUPblog.

Cleora Emily Bainbridge was born 8 November 1868, and passed away on 14 April 1870. Her father was a clergyman, and her mother, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, was director of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City Mission Society. In 1883, her father, William Folwell Bainbridge, imagined what her life might have been like by casting her as the heroine of his novel Self-Giving, where she became a Christian missionary and died a martyr.

Cleora’s brother, William Seaman Bainbridge, born 17 February 1870, became an internationally prominent surgeon and medical scientist, living a full life until 22 September 1947. Had Cleora lived, she would have accompanied her brother and parents as they toured American Baptist missions around the world, 1879-1880, which prepared her brother for many more such voyages. He co-founded the International Committee of Military Medicine in Belgium in 1921, and two years later, he had the equivalent of an email address, Bridgebain, receiving telegrams sent to it from anywhere in the world.

Long dead, a sister and brother have now returned to life inside virtual worlds, as avatars: Cleora in fantasy role-playing game EverQuest II, and William in two science fiction virtual worlds where medical science advanced to frightening levels, Fallen Earth and Tabula Rasa.

• Cleora Emily Bainbridge (1868-1870)

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-1-e1364488108240.jpg

  The only surviving photograph

  la

• Cleora's Avatar, a Half-Elf Conjuror Mage in EverQuest II

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-2.jpg
  la

• William Seaman Bainbridge (1870-1947)

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-3-e1364488025876.jpg

  At his most idealistic and ambitious, playing the role of Columbus at festivities marking the 400th anniversary of his discovery of the New World in 1892 at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a remarkable educational resort founded in 1874.

  la

• Bridgebain in His Crude Chemtown Laboratory in Fallen Earth

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-4-e1364488155664.jpg
  la

• Bridgebain and the Clone He Made of Himself, after a Battle in Tabula Rasa

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-5-e1364488126719.jpg
  la

Long ago, the gods abandoned Norrath, the world of EverQuest II. The game imagines the gods as creeping back to regain their lost status as lords of all the lands; it presents a cynical view of religion. Given Cleora’s history, I cast her avatar as ambivalent about deities. Her perspective made her an excellent vantage point for research.

The post-apocalyptic gameworld of Fallen Earth depicts conflict between numerous small gangs and cults in a chaotic corner of the United States, some years after the fall of civilization caused by a plague that may have resulted from unconstrained genetic engineering. Set in and around the Grand Canyon in Arizona, including simplified versions of many real locations, the game requires avatars to scavenge materials from the environment so they can craft weapons and medicines in order to survive the new Dark Ages. Bridgebain joined the Tech faction—scientists and engineers who believe only technology can restore civilization—and set up his headquarters in an advanced Tech base named Chemtown.

Tabula Rasa imagined that the Earth was invaded by a vicious extraterrestrial army called the Bane, but a few humans were able to escape to the planets Foreas and Arieki, where they formed alliances with the indigenous civilizations against the invaders. In addition to exploring these alien worlds and battling the Bane, Bridgebain collected Logos symbols from widely dispersed and often hidden shrines, where they were left by an ancient civilization named called the Eloh. Assembled into sentences, these Logos elements are like scientific theories or engineering designs that give the user advanced powers. Bridgebain collected all the Logos symbols, learned new medical skills like cloning himself, and eventually battled back from the stars to a point in New York City only a few blocks from Gramercy Park where the real doctor had lived.

Cleora and the two Bridgebains are Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs), a new way of memorializing, enjoying, and learning from deceased family members, especially for a secular society in which traditional ways of dealing emotionally with death have lost plausibility. When operating an AVA inside a virtual world, the user can draw upon personal knowledge of the dearly departed (many written records as in the case of Bridgebain), and a hopeful sense of what a life might have been like in a particular social context (as in the case of Cleora). The goal is as much to enrich the life of the user as to fulfill a duty to the deceased. Indeed, the user gains a richer sense of human life by experiencing a challenging virtual world from the perspective of another person.

William Sims Bainbridge is a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science, and popular culture. He serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation. His books include eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming, Leadership in Science and Technology, The Warcraft Civilization, Online Multiplayer Games, Across the Secular Abyss, and The Virtual Future. He is the grandnephew of Cleora Bainbridge and grandson of William Seaman Bainbridge.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
All images courtesy of author.

The post eIncarnations appeared first on OUPblog.

The history of American witchcraft is indelibly associated with Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1692 nineteen people were executed as witches after the accusations of two young girls sparked a wave of fear. The village of Salem, the centre of the events of 1692, is now the town of Danvers, with the focus of today’s witchcraft industry centred on Salem city. But there are numerous other Salems in America, born of the country’s religious heritage – Salem in Hebraic means “peace”. But forget colonial Salem for a moment, as on two occasions in America’s more recent past Salem was the scene of trials related to witchcraft.

Salem 1878. In May 1878 the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, Massachusetts, considered:

That the said Daniel H. Spofford of Newburyport is a mesmerist, and practices the art of mesmerism, and that by his power and influence he is capable of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others, and does by said means so injure them. That the said Daniel H. Spofford has at divers times and places since the year 1875 wrongfully, maliciously and with the intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body, severe spinal pains and neuralgia, and temporary suspension of mind.

The charge reads remarkably like the indictments for witchcraft two centuries earlier, and the trial’s location further underscored the association in the minds of commentators.

Profoundly influenced by both mesmerism and spiritualism in her early adult life, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), conceived a source of spiritual harm that came to be known as “malicious animal magnetism” or “MAM”. This was the malign use of willpower, the projection of harmful thoughts to cause physical damage. MAM become something of a preoccupation amongst early members of the movement.

In 1870 Daniel Spofford and his wife had entered into an agreement with Eddy that she would teach them the healing art for the sum of $100 cash and ten per cent of the commercial income from their future Christian Science healing practice. The Spoffords fell out with Eddy over other matters and declined to pay the tithe. So in 1878 Eddy launched a lawsuit against them. It was one of several legal actions that the litigious Eddy instigated against former followers at the time.

Things got worse for Spofford when, as this case was pending, Lucretia Brown, a 48-year-old spinster who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, lodged a suit against Spofford that Lucretia had suffered a spinal injury as a child, but while an invalid she was able to run a crocheting agency, employing local women working for pin money. An erstwhile Congregationalist, she was converted to Christian Science in 1876 after successful treatment by a female Christian Science healer from the town of Lynn named Dr Dorcas Rawson, herself a former Methodist. Lucretia was rejuvenated and was able to walk for miles for the first time since childhood, but she had a relapse following several visits by Spofford. She consulted Dorcas again who diagnosed that Spofford had been using mesmerism against her. And so Lucretia decided to take legal action, with some subsequently suggesting that Eddy put her up to it. The case was dismissed.

“The Long Lost Friend” was one of the most widely consulted books on how to deal with witches and witchcraft in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

Salem 1893. The town of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, was a thriving settlement founded by the Quakers. Its inhabitants numbered over 6,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, at which time it was described by one observer as displaying “order, prosperity, thrift, and comfort”. But in 1893 the peace after which the town was named was shattered by a virulent witchcraft dispute.

A few miles south of Salem, at a place known as McCracken Corner, lived a farmer named Jacob Culp. Born in Germany around 1839, he and his family emigrated to America when he was a boy. By 1860 the young man had taken up farming and married Hannah Loop, a Pennsylvanian woman fifteen years his senior, becoming step father to two children from her previous marriage. Culp worked hard and became one of the most prosperous members of the community. Sometime during the 1870s Hannah’s mother Mary Loop and her disabled brother Ephraim moved in to the Culp’s home for a few years. When Mary died, some neighbours, including a couple of the Loop sisters, cast accusing glances at Jacob. When Hannah also died sometime around 1887 and Jacob married Hattie, a woman twenty-five years younger, rumour had it he had bumped Hannah off too by his witchcraft.

The principal rumour-monger was Culp’s sister-in-law, Sadie Loop. Sadie was a key member of Hart Methodist Church, having served it as a Sunday School teacher and sexton. In November 1892, following further family misfortunes and illnesses, which no doctor could help, Sadie decided to call upon a herb doctress named Louise Burns. She told Sadie that she had a very bad brother-in-law, and when she was asked which one, Burns replied “the one that came across the ocean.” This could only be Jacob.

Sadie told a farmer and church Class Leader named Homer B. Shelton of her suspicions. He subsequently made a formal complaint about Sadie:

The undersigned a member of the Methodist Episcopal church, complains to you that Sadie Loop, a member of the same church, has been guilty of immoral conduct, and she is hereby charged therewith as follows: Charge, falsehood.

Specification 1. The said Sadie Loop on or about the 27^th day of April, 1893, did utter and publish, contrary to the word of God and the discipline, the following false and evil matter of and concerning Jacob Culp, to wit that he, meaning the said Jacob Culp was a wizard and practiced witchcraft.

H.B. Shelton

A church trial was held in the classroom of Salem Methodist Church. The presiding Judge, Rev. Smith, concluded after hearing all the evidence that he had no alternative but to expel Sadie Loop from the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hart Church never recovered from these traumatic events. Today it is marked only by a small graveyard along Route 45 a few miles south of Salem.

These nineteenth-century Salem witch trials are a reminder that, two hundred years after the last legal executions for witchcraft in the USA, accusations of witchcraft and malign occult influence could still shake communities to their core, revealing that fear of witchery was as much a part of modern American life as it was in the colonial days.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and has written extensively on the subject of magic. His new book America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem is the first full history of witchcraft in modern America.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: From John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts & Remedies (Harrisburg, 1856). Image provided by Dr Owen Davies. Do not reproduce without permission.

The post The other Salem witch trials appeared first on OUPblog.

While interest in Islam has grown in recent years—both in the media and in educational institutions—there remains a persistent misunderstanding of the religion’s practices, beliefs, and adherents, who now number over one and half billion people. Addressing this problem is not simply an academic exercise, for the past decade especially has shown that our understanding of Islam can have enormous consequences on foreign and domestic policies, as well as on social relations. The growth of the Muslim community in the West, the continued American involvement in Muslim-majority countries, the burgeoning global economy, and the new opportunities at dialogue presented by the Arab Spring make understanding the Muslim world more important than ever.

Since its launch in 2007, Oxford Islamic Studies Online (OISO) has served as a hub for Oxford University Press (OUP)’s growing list of reference works, translations, and monographs related to the Muslim world. Updated multiple times a year, OISO includes over 5,000 articles, hundreds of maps and images, and a number of chaptered works, primary source documents, timelines, lesson plans, interviews, and editorials that are meant to promote a more informed understanding of Islam.

Oxford recently partnered with the American Library Association and the National Endowment of the Humanities to make OISO a centerpiece of the Muslim Journeys project, a public education initiative run by the two organizations. Muslim Journeys encourages students and scholars to explore the field by utilizing the most authoritative content available. Over 900 libraries, humanities councils, and community colleges applied to participate in the project, which provides a collection of books, films, and other resources to familiarize users with the Islamic world. Participating institutions will also receive a year’s subscription to OISO, which will vastly expand the number of subscribers to the site, giving OUP a unique opportunity to share this acclaimed learning tool with a wider audience.

To help the new subscribers get the most out of their experience, Oxford’s Product Specialists have been holding webinars to introduce users to the content available on OISO (you can see an example of a webinar). In addition, Oxford’s Marketing team has provided users with links to the content on the site that best highlights the core themes of the Muslim Journeys project:

• American Stories: an exploration of Muslim communities in the United States, from colonial times to the present.
• Connected Histories: a new way of understanding the relationship between the Muslim world and the West, showing the shared intellectual inheritance among the cultures.
• Literary Reflections: a survey of the major works of fiction and poetry inspired by Islam.
• Pathways of Faith: the spiritual experiences of the Islamic faith, from the stories of Prophet’s life to interpretations of the Qur’an to the mystical poetry of Rumi.
• Points of View: personal narratives from the Muslim world, including the popular graphic novel Persepolis and the memoir In the Country of Men.

To highlight the history of American Islam in particular, Oxford has recruited Edward E. Curtis IV, author of Muslims in America (OUP, 2011), to edit a series of articles on topics such as Muslim politics, congregations, religious leaders, family life, and media perceptions in the United States (premiering in the fall of 2013), which will be supported by new primary source documents. Finally, the Muslim Journeys project coincides with a larger effort to revise and expand the content of the site. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (originally published in 2009), which forms the bulk of OISO’s content, continues to grow with the addition of spinoff titles, such as the Encyclopedia of Islam and Women (Natana DeLong-Bas, editor), the Encyclopedia of Islam and Law (Jonathan Brown, editor), and the Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics (Emad Shahin, editor). The Arab Spring section of the site will continue to provide new essays on the unfolding revolutions taking place in the Middle East. Oxford will also reach out to participating colleges to commission new lesson plans, based on the subscribers’ experiences with the resources of the Muslim Journeys project.

We hope that together, OISO and Muslims Journeys will bring a greater understanding of the Muslim world.

Robert Repino is an Editor in the Reference department of Oxford University Press. After serving in the Peace Corps in Grenada, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The African American National Biography (2nd Edition), The Literary Review, The Coachella Review, Hobart, and JMWW.  His debut novel is forthcoming from Soho Press in 2014.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online is an authoritative, dynamic resource that brings together the best current scholarship in the field for students, scholars, government officials, community groups, and librarians to foster a more accurate and informed understanding of the Islamic world. Oxford Islamic Studies Online features reference content and commentary by renowned scholars in areas such as global Islamic history, concepts, people, practices, politics, and culture, and is regularly updated as new content is commissioned and approved under the guidance of the Editor in Chief, John L. Esposito.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Understanding the Muslim world appeared first on OUPblog.

Holocaust Remembrance Day was originally declared a state holiday in Israel in 1951. The date, the 27^th of the month of Nissan, was chosen in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the United States, a week-long series of “Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust” was ratified by US Congress in 1979 to coincide with Yom HaShoah, which falls sometime during April or May. This year, it is held on 8 April 2013. In Israel, the United States, and Canada (which followed suit in 2000), Yom HaShoah remembrances are built on the sacred obligation to commemorate the martyrs and victims, to honor the survivors, and to pay respects to the liberators.

In Europe, on the other hand, Holocaust memory is inevitably bound up with troubling questions about perpetration and collaboration. For every life that was taken, someone pulled the trigger, someone watched, someone profited, and someone processed the paperwork. Wherever the Holocaust is commemorated in the European community, multiple layers of individual and corporate guilt are evoked. The presence of this guilt, even in the third and fourth generation, makes Holocaust remembrance awkward. The inability to come to terms with guilt for the Jewish genocide may explain why it took the European Union until 2013 to put the “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” on its official calendar.

Since 1945, European governments had developed various memorial strategies that gingerly sidestepped the problem of personal, institutional, and communal complicity and collusion in Nazi killing programs. Many constructed narratives of victimization and/or heroic resistance that were designed to alleviate moral qualms. The most infamous examples involved the governments of Austria, East Germany, and Poland, all of whom claimed victim status at the hands of (fascist) Nazi Germany. Such claims to victimization allowed individuals and institutions to deny responsibility for collaboration in the Holocaust. West Germany was the least successful in claiming the victim mantel—though not for lack of trying. Naturally, these victim narratives of oppression and powerlessness were not entirely wrong. But they obscured and falsified local histories of betrayal and persecution of Jews at the hand their Gentile Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, French, Austrian neighbors. No matter how much a country or particular persons suffered at the hands of the German Nazi regime, they could still be active in the brutalization of their Jewish neighbors.

The European Union declared 27 January its day of remembrance, following the 2005 resolution by the United Nations that also designated 27 January as “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” Notably, this day does not follow the Jewish calendar, but marks the day of liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army in 1945.

One million people were killed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz; its name has become synonymous with the Nazi achievement of turning mass murder into an industrialized process using innovative technologies, such as gas chambers and crematories. At no other extermination site were so many people killed at the hands of so few. In Auschwitz, the inmates themselves were forced to become cogs in the machinery of death and recruited to perform the grueling labor of extermination. This death camp was explicitly designed to shield SS-personnel from the human costs of killing—although there was still unspeakable brutality committed by individuals. But the focus on Auschwitz allows European officials, once again, to sidestep local histories of collusion and complicity. In its extremity, Auschwitz allows disassociation and distancing from the human ordinariness of those who plan, administrate, and commit mass murder. Surely, the brutes in charge of that camp could not have been Ordinary Men, to quote Christopher Browning’s book, and could not have lived as ordinary businessmen, doctors, teachers, and policemen in the post-war world (which they did).

The Holocaust was not committed by an alien species of evil Nazis, who invaded, hijacked, and occupied various countries and forced their populations to stand by and watch the unfolding of genocide. On the contrary, the systematic murder of six million required the active participation of many people across Europe, who were convinced that discriminating, humiliating, disowning, ghettoizing, enslaving, deporting, and killing Jews was the proper and profitable thing to do. Unless their perspective and precise nature of culpable wrongdoing can be openly articulated, the memory of the Holocaust will continue to be affected and infected by denial and evasion. It is not possible to honor the victims without acknowledging the perpetrators. Their guilt manifests in the compulsive drive toward exculpation which seeps into and distorts national memorial strategies.

It may not be a bad thing that the world now observes two separate dates in remembrance of the Holocaust, one anchored in the Jewish calendar, the other rooted in the Western calendar of the liberation of Auschwitz. But unless we strive to connect the histories of victimization and perpetration and join in commemoration as descendants of Jewish victims and Gentile perpetrators, we will not be able to repair this rift or build a reconciled future.

Katharina von Kellenbach is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and author of Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings and the forthcoming The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: A lit Yom Hashoah candle in a dark room on Yom Hashoah. Photo by Valley2city, Wikimedia Commons.

The post Holocaust Remembrance Day appeared first on OUPblog.

In this interview on Today, Riley discusses the rise of interfaith marriages and what that means for America.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. She is the author of ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, God on the Quad, and The Faculty Lounges.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post The rise of interfaith marriage appeared first on OUPblog.

Christians today owe a tremendous debt to the Roman emperor Constantine. He changed the place of the Church in the Roman World, moving it through his own conversion from the persecuted fringe of the empire’s religious landscape to the center of the empire’s system of belief. He also tackled huge problems with the way Christians understood their community. The three most important things the church owed to Constantine were a roadmap for reuniting communities split by persecution, a universal definition of the Church’s teaching, and a fixed date for the celebration of Easter. His solutions to the second and third issues remain in place to this day.

Constantine dealt with all three of the Church’s major issues at the conference he summoned at the ancient city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) in June of 325 AD. The issue of persecution stemmed from a period of bitter conflict with the imperial government that had ended just over ten years before the council convened, while the debate over the Church’s teaching had exploded a few years before Nicaea (the issue was Jesus’ humanity). The Easter question had been festering for centuries, and the problems were inextricably tied up with the fact that no one recorded the actual day of the Crucifixion.

All that people could know on the basis of Christian Scripture was that the crucifixion was linked to the celebration of Passover, which meant that it should come at some point in the spring. But when? Since the date of Passover, then as now, is celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar, the correlation with the Julian calendar used by Christians and most other inhabitants of the Roman Empire was always inexact. Some Christians believed that the best way to solve the problem was to celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, another group held that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the opening of Passover, while yet another group felt that the timing of the Christian festival should not be determined by the timing of Passover and should instead be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.

Emperor Constantine I, presenting a model of the city to Virgin Pary. Detail of the southwestern entrance mosaic in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey). Photo by Myrabella. Creative Commons License.

The Easter story was extremely important to Constantine. Conscious as he was that he had been raised as a pagan, and that he had done things in his earlier life of which he was not proud (he never tells us what those things were), he felt that he had experienced a sort of moral resurrection when he became a Christian. He credited his extraordinary military career to God’s willingness to forgive his past sins and he wanted to make sure that he ruled in a way that would repay the benefits he believed his God had given him. In a sense there was nothing more obvious to Constantine than that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first New Moon of Spring.

The solution to the Easter issue had the added advantage of allowing him to make an important concession to the group whose definition of the Faith he was rejecting outright at Nicaea, the so-called Arian faction, named for the Egyptian priest who had aggressively preached a doctrine asserting the human aspect of Christ. Constantine liked his God, like his empire, to be completely united, which is what we see today in the Nicene Creed in the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That desire for unity also enabled him to arrive at an acceptable solution to the divisions that had arisen out of the period of persecution as he essentially argued that the two sides should bury the hatchet and recognize each other as Christians first. That approach has not had nearly so much influence as his approach to Easter or to the Trinity.

Constantine was a complex and at times difficult man, a passionate one with a ferocious temper. But he was also a man who was able to recognize his own weaknesses. It may have been that self-knowledge which enabled him to come to the new faith he hoped would make him a better ruler, and gave him the ability to find and forge compromises to build a better and more unified society.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Constantine the Emperor, The Victor’s Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Constantine and Easter appeared first on OUPblog.

“Carnival time is over,” the newly-elected Pope Francis is reported to have said when he was offered an ermine-trimmed mozzetta such as most of his predecessors had worn round their shoulders during the winter season. He may not have been alluding to the thirteen-day sede vacante which had just reached its much-anticipated conclusion, but it does seem fair to say that this papal interregnum was arguably the jolliest on record. Previous interregna included a period of mourning before the cardinals entered the conclave; this one made history precisely because it didn’t. That did much to lighten the atmosphere.

In 2005, after the death of John Paul II, interest in the ensuing conclave did not seem to extend much beyond predicting — presumably for gambling purposes — who would be elected. The procedures of the conclave were explained for the benefit of the wider public, but opportunities to bring the entire experience to life with reference to what is known of past conclaves were rarely, if ever, taken. In some quarters there might still be an assumption that the history of conclaves must be a subject dry enough to rival Stubbs on Archbishop Stigand, but the greater variety of media platforms created during the last eight years has allowed a little more conclave history to trickle out this time round. We have also seen some splendid online graphics illustrating the balloting process as it currently exists, complete with cartoon cardinals waddling up penguin-like to cast their votes.

It would be interesting to know whether any broadcasters amended their schedules in the last few weeks in order to screen cinematic accounts of past conclaves: the nearest that most of us will ever get to the real thing. In 2002 the streets of Rome were deserted when RAI broadcast the John XXIII biopic Papa Giovanni, starring the American Edward Asner in the title role. In that production much attention is devoted to the reading of the ballot papers, with the number of votes for Cardinal Roncalli increasing scrutiny by scrutiny. When Cardinal Seán Brady spoke of his reaction at hearing the name “Bergoglio” read out time after time, it brought to mind the conclave scenes in Papa Giovanni. One feature of conclaves that has not survived since Pope John’s election in 1958 is the practice of cardinals — as collective rulers of the Church in the absence of a papal monarch — sitting beneath baldacchini which they cause to collapse when the new pope is elected. That particular carnival is well and truly over, but it is certainly instructive to see it on screen.

As conclave films go, rather more fanciful is The Conclave (2006), a loose dramatisation of Pius II’s account of his own election in 1458, twisted in order to feature Rodrigo Borgia, the most junior cardinal deacon, in scenes far removed from ecclesiastical politics. Pius’s unparalleled memoirs are as rich in inside information as they are overtly hostile towards his French counterparts. There is, however, something deeply unconvincing about the casting of Brian Blessed as Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Let’s settle for his beard as the source of the problem. Clerical beards deserve a blog post all of their own, and would doubtless have received one had the Capuchin Seán O’Malley been elected last week. In the fifteenth century the beard that mattered was that of the Greek cardinal Bessarion who, as Pope Pius relates, quite literally came within a whisker of being elected in 1455, until the Breton cardinal Alain de Coëtivy urged his fellow electors not to entrust the Latin Church to a man whose facial hair suggested that he was an easterner at heart. Bessarion is one of the lesser characters in The Conclave, the very existence of which suggests that we shall never see the conclave of 1455 depicted in film.

As far as we non-cardinals are aware, the most dramatic conclave of the modern period was that of 1903, when the Austrian veto was pronounced against Cardinal Rampolla, whose votes steadily declined while the name “Sarto” was read out with increasing frequency. That might well have cinematic potential, but at least it seems to have inspired the novel Hadrian VII, which was published the following year. Had this month’s conclave lasted any longer than it did there might have been serious anxiety in many a Catholic household, as clerics and laymen alike suspected they might be about to experience their Corvo moment. Productions of Peter Luke’s play of the novel allow us to revel in a stage full of cardinals.

The dramatic impact of Pope Benedict’s helicopter flight into the sunset is not something that could be repeated with anything like the same effect. Indeed, in the light of recent events, papal resignations now look like becoming the norm, with papal elections therefore becoming less of a surprise and more matter-of-fact. After decades of inertia in the Vatican, Pope Francis probably needs to be a pontiff in a hurry and, thus far, is proving to be precisely that. If his simplifying agenda extends to papal elections, perhaps we shall have all the more need of fictional conclaves to illustrate what we have lost.

Stella Fletcher was a founding editorial board member of Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, and has made a number of contributions, including Cardinals. Her publications include Princes of the Church: a history of the English cardinals (2001) and Roscoe and Italy (2012). She is honorary secretary of the Ecclesiastical History Society, of which she has also written ‘A Very AgreeableSociety’: The Ecclesiastical History Society, 1961-2011.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Vatican, Vatican City State – March 13, 2013: Black smoke emerges from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican after the cardinal vote for a new pope. Black smoke indicates that no pope was elected. It is the second day of the conclave to elect a pope. Photo by omada, iStockphoto.

The post Oh! what a lovely conclave appeared first on OUPblog.

By Owen Davies

Magic in the modern world
The recent battle between religion and science conducted in the media, spearheaded by Professor Richard Dawkins and other high-profile figures, has garnered much international attention. The debate is not new of course; it stretches back several centuries. One aspect of the debate that receives less attention today is the issue of magic: a concept which is inextricably linked to the history of science and religion. The notion of both science and religion as magic is as relevant today as it ever was.

Magic: what’s in a word?
Magic continues to pervade popular imagination and language. Today the term ‘magic’ can be used to describe the supernatural, superstition, simple illusion, religious miracles, and fantasies of the imagination.  It can also be applied to the ‘wonders’ of science, or used as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as ‘magical realism’ has considerable appeal, as demonstrated by the success of Life of Pi. Modern scientists have even incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their ‘magic acid’ (a super acid developed in the 1960s) and ‘magic angles’ (an angle of 54.7356°) .

Click here to view the embedded video.

Magic and primitivism
Since the Enlightenment – which the study of magic reveals as a problematic historical concept in itself – magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development, and yet across the modern globalised world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic  and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. While in the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalism decries the continued public threat posed by magic, and in our pluralistic spiritual democracy some have redefined magical practices as a form of religion.

Global magic
The debate over religion, magic, and science in the modern world is also too often conceived within a Judaeo-Christian western framework of intellectual development, with the magical and religious beliefs of much of the rest of the world ignored in general histories and debates. The magic of the literary cultures of China, India, and Asia are as rich and ancient as those of the Mediterranean world and are equally important to understanding what influenced developments in western magic. Understanding how different cultures have negotiated the relationship between science, religion and magic over the centuries and millennia also help us put Western developments in context. The influence of the Bible and Koran on magical traditions in Africa, the Americas and the Middle East are equally illuminating. The vast resource of oral traditions regarding magic, science, and religion in non-literary cultures also needs to be considered on an equal footing in our consideration of past and present human understanding. It is only by studying and comparing oral and literary magic cultures of the world that we can breakdown notions of primitiveness based on western assumptions.

Magic in your car
Twentieth-century technology is not immune from magical interference. Across the globe today talismans are placed in cars to protect them as much as the occupants. Ethnographers working in the bocage region of Normandy during the 1970s and 1980s found that car accidents or breakdowns were sometimes blamed on witchcraft. This notion is merely a technological version of the frequent accusations in earlier European sources that witches caused cart wheels to break or wagons to get stuck in the mud. In parts of Africa the introduction of tractors added a new dimension to agricultural witchcraft disputes. A study of road travel in Ghana found that the wrecks of cars and lorries at accident black spots on otherwise good, new road surfaces attracted suspicions of witchcraft.

Wishful thinking: magic?
We all have our magic moments. Have you ever urged your car to go faster as it struggles up a slope? Have you ever made a wish or believed that an event was more than coincidence? A desire for something to happen – ‘I hope she loses her job’ – may be expressed rationally, but if it comes true it may be interpreted magically. These are phenomena of our waking hours. In our dreams our minds lead us into magical worlds and activities. Far from espousing a rational view of the world, parents from cultures across the globe actively encourage magical thinking in pre-school children. It provides explanations to satisfy children in their early stages of inquisitiveness about why things work or happen. Children’s books feed magical fantasies, and early-years children’s television present magical worlds that bear no relationship to the real world. Why do we nourish magical thinking? It shields our ignorance, helps parents avoid uncomfortable questions, and provides a satisfying shared realm of adult and infant imagination and escapism.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, and ghosts, including Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (OUP, 2009), The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave, 2007), Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011), and Magic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Magic moments appeared first on OUPblog.

What can the reader expect of the Chronicles of Narnia series to reveal about Christianity? According to Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Narnia series serves as a refreshing take on what it means to experience the divine in daily life. Christianity is portrayed in a more humanizing light through C.S. Lewis’s imaginative interpretation of Christian doctrine. In the following excerpt from The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Williams examines the portrayal of female characters in the Narnia series.

The charges of sexism or misogyny, though, are harder to counter. Even a very sympathetic commentator like Stella Gibbons (author of Cold Comfort Farm and a rather unexpected admirer of Lewis) complains that Lewis disliked “women who have entered rather boldly into the world that men have reserved for themselves. The domesticated, fussy, kind woman gets an occasional pat on her little head — (Mrs Beaver in The Lion, Ivy Maggs in That Hideous Strength).” Much feeling has been generated by the banishment of Susan from Last Battle because “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up” (Last Battle Ch. 12 , p. 741). Susan has forgotten Narnia apparently with the onset of puberty, and this has led some to conclude that she is “damned” for reaching sexual maturity.

This is unfair. We have already met (in The Horse) a mature Narnian Susan, courted by the heir to the Calormene throne. Her failure is not growing up. It is the denial of what she has known, rooted in her “keenness” not to grow up but to be grown-up, a very different matter. “It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grownups who are most grown-up,” we are told in Chapter 16 of The Silver Chair (p. 661). Susan is guilty of what Edmund in The Lion is initially guilty of, no more and no less, which is the refusal to admit the reality of Narnia when you have actually lived there. In The Lion this denial is one of the things that open the door to Edmund’s more serious treachery (so it is hardly a gender-specific matter); the issue is precisely that truthfulness which again and again — as we shall see — emerges as the central moral focus of the Narnia stories. And of course Susan’s longer-term future as an adult in “our” world is left entirely open. Lewis himself wrote in 1960 to a young reader distressed by Susan’s defection that he was reluctant to write the story of Susan’s rediscovery of Narnia.

Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?

Nor does Lewis in fact give us a series of weak or ill-defined female characters. Lucy’s courage and determination are a constant theme in the books where she appears. In Prince Caspian, when Edmund says “’to Peter and the Dwarf’ that girls ‘can never carry a map in their heads’”, it is Lucy who retorts “That’s because our heads have got something inside them” (Prince Caspian Ch. 9 , p. 370) and ends the conversation. In Dawn Treader Chapter 8, Lucy again castigates her male companions for being such “swaggering, bullying idiots” when Edmund and Caspian quarrel over who will be overlord of the island where water magically turns things to gold (p. 484). Aravis in The Horse is as forceful and intelligent a figure as any. It is true enough that Lewis seems to be all too ready to deal with the extremes of the spectrum where female characters are concerned — witch-queens and nannies. But in between there is rather more than some readers have noticed of ordinary female intelligence; and the depiction of male jostling for position among both boys and men, and the lethal consequences of this male pride, is none too flattering. It will not do to see Lewis as a simple misogynist. It is tempting to say that the further he gets away from theorizing about gender characteristics, the better he is in depicting women; the problem with the ill-starred Jane in That Hideous Strength is — as Stella Gibbons once again observes — that she has to carry an uncomfortable weight of theory in the very complex plot of that strange work.

Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. A poet and theologian, he is the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. He is the author of The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, published this month in the United States by Oxford University Press USA.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Skandar Keynes, Ben Barnes and Georgie Henley in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Copyright 20th Century Fox and Walden Media, LLC. Used for the purposes of illustration.

The post Female characters in the Narnia series appeared first on OUPblog.

We have a new Pope: Francis — a name honouring St. Francis of Assisi, who venerated poverty and recommended it to his followers.

In the build up to his election, a good deal of attention was naturally directed to the challenges facing the Catholic Church. Not least of these is the question of social justice and the plight of the global poor. As Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis had faced these with dignity, eschewing the trappings of office and choosing to live the example of a simple and humble lifestyle. The way he presented himself to the world on Wednesday night was no different. There was the same hint of an extempore independence of spirit.

But if these details seem to suggest a Catholic Church bringing itself up to speed with the world, they also offer a pause for reflection about continuity between the Pope Emeritus and this new Pope. And if poverty and a regard for the marginalized is the theme, then St. Augustine of Hippo might become the source of that reflection, as well as the link between the two men – Benedict, the Augustinian scholar and long time “doctrinal watchdog,” and Francis, the third world candidate of a modernizing Vatican.

Augustine was a sublime and prodigious scholar and a Defensor fidei. He wrote tirelessly against the major heresies and schisms of the early Church and promoted orthodoxy through that work. Yet he was also the Bishop of Hippo Regius in a declining province of Roman North Africa. The son of modest parents, he established a strict monastic discipline for himself and enforced it on his priests in the name of leadership and good example. It is often remarked upon by scholars how extraordinary it is that so much that remains foundational today in the Western Church – as indeed in the whole Western tradition of philosophy and ideas – flowed from so simple a pen in such a far-flung corner of the Empire. It does indeed make you think of Pope Francis’ words from the balcony on Wednesday night: “It seems that my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world to choose a pope!”

But to Augustine at least, these two aspects of his life were always united in a single conception that he was anxious should not be separated. For of course one of the age-long challenges for Christianity and the Church has been to meet and overcome the world’s confidence when it claims that it understands realism best. This is not surprising: Christ proclaimed an otherworldly message on behalf of the spirituality of the human soul, and since then a critical purpose of the Church’s mission has been to preserve that otherworldly beauty in the integrity of its sacraments. At a time like now, when the world feels confident again to remind the Church that she should remain in touch with real problems, Augustine’s life and preaching offer a more nuanced perspective.

Poverty, injustice, and the general-case “problem of pain,” are not, he taught, proofs that the world should bring against the Church. The Church must of course move with the times and periodically reform herself, but the love and sympathy which alleviates suffering, one human reaching to another, is nobody’s possession but the God Who made all heaven and earth — and all men and women in His image. It is a subtle point of deep theology, threatened on either side by the ideologies that can just as quickly be made out of the cause of poverty as they can out of the cause of wealth. In Augustine’s teaching, both the rich man and the poor man prove a sacramental truth to each other before they join forces to make a better society.

Although a marbled house does contain you, although fretted ceilings cover you, you and the poor man together have for covering that roof of the universe, the sky… In the bowels of your mothers you were both naked. [En. in Ps., LXXII, 13]

On Thursday, in a Sistine Chapel Mass, Pope Francis urged:

If we do not confess to Christ, what would we be? We would end up a compassionate NGO. What would happen would be like when children make sand castles and then it all falls down.

And similarly, on 27 February, in his last General Audience, Pope Benedict called the faithful back to this reality of the barque of Saint Peter:

But I always knew that the Lord is in this barque; and I always knew that the barque of the Church is something that belongs neither to me, nor to us, but to Him alone. And the Lord will not let her sink: for it is He Himself Who leads her. This happens through the men he has chosen, certainly – but only because this is how He wants it.

This is a distinctly Augustinian call. When Augustine became a bishop and chose a monastic poverty he saw it in these terms. Human ingenuity has added to the sophistications of life and created through them the concept of progress through time — as well as the yardsticks of that progress in the rich and the poor, the developed and the undeveloped world. But if the Church is not merely to become a “compassionate NGO” she must remember that she has been appointed to remain, in the first instance, above these distinctions. It is only by continuing as the Lord’s possession (and no human’s) that she can credibly draw true seekers to her incorporeal vision of Beauty.

Beyond count are the things made by various crafts in garments, shoes, utensils, and so on – not to mention the visionary creations of artists! Men have taken this course and added all these to the allurements of the eyes, outwardly pursuing the things they make, but inwardly forsaking Him by Whom they were made; and therefore actually destroying what they were made to be… For the beautiful visions transmitted through the artists’ souls into their hands all come from that very Beauty which is above their souls, and for which my soul sighs by day and by night. [Confess., X, 34, 53]

Miles Hollingworth is Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at St. John’s College, Durham University, in the United Kingdom. His writing on Augustine has won awards from the Society of Authors (2009 Elizabeth Longford Grant for Historical Biography) and the Royal Society of Literature (2009 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction). He is the author of The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought, which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone History Book Prize, and St. Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: “Habemus Papam” – Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., has been elected Pope Francis I. Source: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk via CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. St. Augustine and four States of a fraternity. Source: WikiPaintings.

The post Benedict XVI, Francis, and St. Augustine of Hippo appeared first on OUPblog.

By Kirsty Doole

March is International Women’s History Month, so what better time to suggest some feminist-friendly classics from our Oxford World’s Classics series? Below you’ll find a mixture of fiction, politics, and religion, and while some will probably be familiar, I’ve thrown in a couple of less conventional choices for a feminist list. Agree with these choices? Disagree? What have I missed out? Let us know in the comments.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

This seminal 18^th century work reveals Wollstonecraft’s developing understanding of women’s involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. It is her response to those who did not believe women should get an education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be “companions” to their husbands, rather than mere wives.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

One of the most famous novels in English Literature, Jane Eyre is sometimes called a proto-feminist novel. Yes, Reader, Jane does marry Mr Rochester, but only on her own terms. As Jane herself says, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”

A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women’s creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas (1938), however, Woolf argues that women’s historical exclusion offers them the chance to form a political and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war.

Kate Chopin

“She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.”

Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna’s rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

“’But it’s bad – it’s bad,’ Mr Tulliver added – `a woman’s no business wi’ being so clever; it’ll turn to trouble, I doubt.’”

Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Recalling her own experiences as a girl, George Eliot describes Maggie’s turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The Mill on the Floss among the most immediately attractive she ever wrote. As Maggie Tulliver approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfilment.

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell’s second novel challenged contemporary social attitudes by taking as its heroine a fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is an orphan and an overworked seamstress, an innocent preyed upon by a weak, wealthy seducer. When he heartlessly abandons her she finds shelter and kindness in the home of a dissenting minister and his sister, who do not reject her when she gives birth to an illegitimate child. But Ruth’s self-sacrificing love and devotion are tested to the limit by a twist of fate that brings her past back to haunt her.

Gaskell’s depiction of Ruth lays bare Victorian hypocrisy and sexual double-standards, and her novel is a remarkable story of love, of the sanctuary and tyranny of the family, and of the consequences of lies and deception.

The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Lyndall, Schreiner’s articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation.

Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner’s daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man

A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa’s high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society’s greatest fears: the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women’s social and political independence.

The Life of Christina of Markyate

While not a conventional choice for a list of feminist works, this is a remarkable story of a woman who knew her own mind and stuck to her principles come what may. The twelfth-century recluse Christina became prioress of Markyate, near St Albans in Hertfordshire. Determined to devote her life to God and to remain a virgin, Christina repulses the sexual advances of the bishop of Durham. In revenge he arranges her betrothal to a young nobleman but Christina steadfastly refuses to consummate the marriage and defies her parents’ cruel coercion. Sustained by visions, she finds refuge with the hermit Roger, and lives concealed at Markyate for four years, enduring terrible physical and emotional torment. Although Christina is supported by the abbot of St Albans, she never achieves the recognition that he intended for her.

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America’s leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. Her 6000-word story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” — in which an apparently depressed woman is shut up in her room and not allowed to read or work, leading to a descent into madness — is regarded as one of the most important early works of American feminist literature, illustrating nineteenth-century attitudes towards women’s physical and mental health.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Portrait of Kate Chopin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The post A feminist reading list from Oxford World’s Classics appeared first on OUPblog.

Does the world have a voice? Do particular places have a distinctive vocabulary, grammar, and syntax all their own? Can we learn this language, learn to attune our ears to its music and perhaps in this way come to inhabit the world with more care and feeling? These are not new questions, nor are they original to me. The ancient Stoics had a sense of the Logos or Word as a fiery substance moving through all matter. Early Christians (and Jews before them, although not in quite the same way) spoke also of a Word through whom the world came into being and continued to be sustained. Medieval visionaries such as Hildegard of Bingen have expressed this intuition in terms of a prima vox or “primary voice” whispering through all living things. For Henry David Thoreau, one of the critical tasks for anyone wanting to know the world is learning to attune the ear to the gramática parda or “tawny grammar” arising from the life of wild beings. Similarly, the great French writer Jean Giono spoke of the necessity of becoming sensitive to what he called simply “le chant du monde.”

No, these are not new questions. But they have taken on new meaning and urgency in the present moment as the fabric of world continues to fray and ever-greater numbers of places are at risk of falling silent forever. The need to listen, to learn the language of the world has become one of the urgent moral tasks of our time. But what precisely are we listening to or for? A Voice behind or within the world? The simple eloquence of the world itself? And what of the silence behind and within things? A silence that some have argued is primordial, the sources of all language. How might the contemplative practice of listening contribute to the work of repairing the world?

This, as it turns out, is where Chet Raymo and I recently picked up the thread of a conversation begun many years ago at a small Thai restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had been invited to Cambridge in the fall of 2000 by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (from the Forum on Religion and Ecology) to participate in a conference on “The Ecological Imagination: Nature, Place and Spirituality.” I had read Chet’s work before [Honey from Stone: A Naturalists’s Search for God (Cowley, 1995); Natural Prayers (Ruminator Books, 1999)], but this was my first time meeting him. We hit it off, the scientist and theologian finding common ground in our love of particular places (the Dingle Peninsula) and literatures (the Catholic mystical tradition). And we stayed in touch over the years.

Recently Chet sent me a note to let me know he had been reading The Blue Sapphire of the Mind and had written about it on his “Science Musings” blog. I read his comments and sent him a response, which he also posted on his blog. The debate on the possible relationship between science and religion (or spirituality) has become one of the most fraught areas of our contemporary public discourse, and it seems unlikely that this modest exchange will make any significant difference, especially for those who are convinced that there is little point in even attempting a rapprochement between them. Still, there is something worthwhile in the simple act of listening to another speak of his or her own subjective experiences of and feeling for the natural world. Listening and perhaps offering a response arising out of what may well be a very different kind of experience. I make reference to it here as a gesture toward the possibility of further engagement with these questions by anyone who may wish to take them up.

A note about the place and the context that gave rise to the conversation: I refer in the book to a place called the Sinkyone Wilderness (or Lost Coast), one of wildest and most remote places on the northern California coast, a place where I have spent part of every summer for the past fifteen years. It is there that I became acquainted with the White-crowned Sparrow, a bird common to many parts of the Pacific Coast and whose lilting song I came to associate with the plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Sinkyone Wilderness. Almost every day I would sit on the gnarled, bleached branches of a fallen eucalyptus tree in the field below our cabin. Sooner or later I would hear the song of that sparrow, sharp, sweet, insistent. It became for me an essential part of the “tawny grammar” of that place. And on the occasions when I wandered up the road to Redwoods Monastery to sit in silence and chant psalms with the members of that community, the song of the sparrow subtly entered into and became part of another, sacred grammar. After a while I had a hard time distinguishing them from one another.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Douglas E. Christie is Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University, and the author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology and The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Photo of the Sinkyone tree by Douglas E. Christie. Used with permission.

The post A conversation with Chet Raymo on White-crowned Sparrows and other matters appeared first on OUPblog.

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI retired from his papal duties with the intention to lead a life of prayer in seclusion. His sudden abdication has left many of the faithful wondering who will step in as his successor. While there are rumors that the next Pope may be from Latin America or Africa, the exact process of how a Pope is chosen is still shrouded in mystery. With the help of OUP’s resources, I hope to help answer the questions of those whose curiosity in Papal elections and history was sparked by the recent turn of events.

THE PAPACY’S EARLIER YEARS

To better understand the how the modern Papacy came about, it’s good to explore how it has evolved from its earlier years to recent times. Here are some helpful resources that go into greater detail on Papal history:

• The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250
• A History of the Popes 1830-1914
• Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity

THE MODERN PAPACY

While the lives of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been well documented, how much is known of the modern popes that came before them? Here’s a rundown of the 20th Century popes who influenced the Papacy as we know it today:

St. Pius X: The son of a seamstress and a village postman, Pius X wasn’t the first choice to succeed Leo XIII. An imperial veto from Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria forced the cardinals to go into another round of voting in protest of the Emperor’s involvement. Pius X was eventually chosen because the cardinals preferred a successor who would take the Papacy in a different direction from his predecessor. He was renowned for his more traditional take on Catholicism, his reforms on Canon Law, and his major reforms within the church. Pius X remained in office until his death in 1914 and was canonized in 1954.

Benedict XV: He was the son of a poor but aristocratic family who earned doctorates in theology and canon law. His later training in papal diplomatic service made him a successful candidate to succeed Pius X. He is remembered for his pontificate occurring during the First World War, having the Vatican remain neutral during that time, and ending the feud between traditionalists and modernists. He remained in office until his death in 1922.

Pius XI: The son of a silk factory manager, he was elected as Pope after a long and difficult election process. He is most remembered for the Lateran Pacts (1929), where the Vatican came to be recognized as a neutral, independent state. Other achievements during his time as pope include his involvement with missions, consecrating the first Chinese bishops, and modernizing the Vatican Library. He remained in office until his death in 1939.

Pius XII: As the son of a lawyer with ties to the Vatican, he was inspired early on to pursue the priesthood. He succeeded Pius XI after a short election because he was one of the most influential cardinals at the time and because of his extensive experience in foreign policy and relations. He is known for heavily promoting peace before the onset of World War II. During the war he was known for his neutrality and for making the Vatican an asylum for refugees during Hitler’s occupation of Rome. His dedication to peace and neutrality helped raise the number of dioceses to 2,048 by the time of his death. He remained in office until his death in 1958.

John XXIII: Born in a small village, he served as an ambassador (called a nuncio) with his diplomatic missions to Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. He was elected Pope after a three day election, mainly due to the fact that many Cardinals believed his advanced age would lead to a short papacy. He is famous for calling together the Second Vatican Council in order to revive and update the teachings and organization of the church. He remained in office until his death in 1963.

Paul VI: The often ill son of a lawyer and newspaper editor, Paul pursued his early theological studies from his home. He was his predecessor’s confidant and played an important role in helping to bring about the Second Vatican Council. Due to his close relationship with John XXIII, he was viewed as the next likely successor and was elected Pope after six ballots. As he promised his predecessor, he continued the Second Vatican Council and dedicated himself to implementing the changes in canon law brought about by the council. He is well-known for traveling with the nickname the “pilgrim pope” and for declaring St Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and St Catherine of Siena (1347–80) the first women doctors of the church. He remained in office until his death in 1978.

John Paul I: From a working class family with socialist ties, he was appointed the bishop of Vittorio Venetoby by his predecessor in 1958. He became an active and eminent  member of Italian Conference of Bishops before being elected pope. After a short round of ballots in 1978, he was chosen as the new pope mainly out of the desire for a new style of leadership. He is most remembered for his short papacy.

POPES WHO HAVE RESIGNED

You’ve heard it countless times on the news; Pope Benedict XVI is the first pope in about 600 years to resign. But who were the previous popes who made the same decision and what were their reasons for leaving office? Here are a few notable popes who either chose or were coerced into retirement:

St. Silverius: This pope’s papacy was plagued by political intrigue and he was forced to abdicate after accusations of being pro-Goth. While he was later given the chance for a fair trial, he was exiled again by his successor Vigilius.

John XVIII: Little is known about his time in office, but it is speculated that his Papacy was a result of the influence of John II Crescentius. It is known that he died at a monastery after possibly resigning as pope. The reasons behind his resignation are still up to speculation, but some believe his falling out of favor with John II Crescentius may have been one of the reasons.

Celestine V: Elected as pope in 1294 after much persuasion because of his hesitance to take on the role. He chose to abdicate after five months because of his unwillingness to act as a puppet under the control of Charles II of Sicily.

For more information on papal resignations, you can read last week’s Papal resignations through the years.

PAPAL CANDIDATES 2013

Along with the ceremony of  the papal elections themselves, the leading candidates are still a matter of speculation. Business Insider has compiled a helpful list of the rumored front runners for the upcoming election:

Cardinal Marc Ouellet
Where is he from: Canada
Possibility of Election: He’s the current Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops and has extensive experience in missionary work. He’s also known to be fluent in six languages.

Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson
Where is he from: Ghana
Possibility of Election: He is the current President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He also has the reputation of being a good public speaker and he represents the global presence of Catholicism.

Cardinal Leonardo Sandri
Where is he from: Argentina
Possibility of Election: Currently the President of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and is said to speak five languages. He is also rumored to have influential friends in the Curia.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi
Where is he from: Italy
Possibility of Election: Current President of the Pontifical Council for Culture and a well-respected man within the church.

ELECTION PROCESS INFORMATION

The most commonly known aspect of the election process is the smoke signal, black smoke to indicate that the cardinals are still undecided and white to indicate that a choice has been made. But what occurs just before the smoke signal? What is the election process like? CNN’s Bruce Schneier gives us the step by step process of how popes are elected:

I.      In the first phase of voting, cardinals are given paper ballots to write their choices on. After the ballots are handed out, nine of the cardinals are chosen as election officials that are divided into three groups: the group who counts the votes, the group who checks the ballot results, and the group who collects the votes from cardinals who could not be present. After the election officials are chosen, the cardinals all cast their votes.

II.     The second phase involves each cardinal individually placing their ballots into a chalice. The third group also adds in the votes of the cardinals who could not be present. After all the cardinals have placed their ballots in the chalice, the group who counts the votes begins their work. The first official shakes the chalice and then the three officials count the ballots while passing them into a second chalice. The third official reads the names aloud while all three officials keep a tally of the names chosen.

III.   The final phase involves the ballot counters tallying up all the candidates from the second phase. After their work is done, the group who checks the ballot results go over the entire process and the results. After ensuring that the election process was fair, they burn the ballots. Depending on their findings, the election will conclude with a new pope or the election process will start over again.

MORE RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

If you crave even more information on all things Papal, here are a few more resources to look into:

• The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI
• Papacy and the Atlantic World
• “African Christian Communities”
• Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession
• The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know (forthcoming)
• Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI
• Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction
• The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd edition
• The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever
• The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice
• Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith
• Dictionary of Popes

Kimberly Hernandez is a social media intern at Oxford University Press.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image Credit: (1) St. Peter’s and the Vatican, Rome. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.
(2) Pope Benedict XVI during general audition, 2007. Photo by Tadeusz Górny. Released into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post An Oxford Companion to the 2013 Papal Elections appeared first on OUPblog.

Last night at the Oscars, the Academy awarded a golden statuette to a film about a flawed hero who we the audience empathize with, who departs their normal life, enters a strange world, but returns triumphantly. Did I just describe Best Picture Winner Argo?

Yes, but also best animated short winner, Paperman, best animated feature winner, Brave, and best live action short winner, Curfew.

So whether the hero is a CIA operative, an besotted office worker, an Scottish princess or a suicidal man, and whether the journey is to revolutionary Iran, to a world of sentient paper airplanes, to a dark forest, or to a magical bowling alley, these films, and it’s safe to say, most of their fellow nominees, have spiritually uplifting themes, and generally follow a pattern of a mythic journey to redemption. (Indeed as my colleague’s S. Brent Plate pointed out, religion permeates all nine best picture nominees and the ceremonies themselves.)

Academy members, and audiences in general, like and expect movies to be heroic journeys of redemption. One 2012 film, Cosmopolis, is about a journey that’s anything but heroic and redemptive. Indeed, the film, based on a short novel by Don DeLillo, charts a billionaire’s limo ride across Manhattan to get a haircut as ironic, pointless and even destructive. Unsurprisingly, Cosmopolis received precisely zero Oscar nominations. Now, I’m not here to argue that this film was better than any of the nine nominated films.

One reason that the film’s director and screenwriter, David Cronenberg, despite being widely regarded as one of the world’s best living filmmakers, has never been nominated for, let alone won, an Academy Award, is because all his films explicitly reject themes of “redemption” and “spiritual uplift.”

Cronenberg is known not only an originator of the body horror subgenre (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), and for adapting difficult works of literature (Naked Lunch, Crash, Cosmopolis), but for being one of the few filmmakers who explicitly identifies as atheist, and whose work ignores all religious themes. Cronenberg’s public atheism is all the more notable considering his association with horror, a genre often analyzed as fundamentally religious. Think about all the horror films that include one of more of the following: the dead displaced, satanic cults, covens, possession, exorcism, ghosts, and curses. Or think how often religious symbols a church or a crucifix, become sites of terror. So it is significant that none of Cronenberg’s films have any religious or supernatural elements. And this is not coincidence, but his conscious choice. More succinctly, he told me when I interviewed him at his home in Toronto, he does not “want to promote supernatural thinking.”

More significantly, both his earlier horror films and his later more literary films eschew the thematic underpinning virtually every Hollywood film ever: the battle between good and evil. Cronenberg’s films do not provide the visual and aural clues that conventional Hollywood cinema uses to denote good and evil. His heroes are not particularly altruistic or, indeed, heroic. The protagonists of several of his films [SPOILER ALERT], including Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers die—but their deaths are neither redemptive nor sacrificial, nor do they result in any kind of triumphant return, symbolic or otherwise.

Many of his films do not have traditional villains. Even his seemingly conventional antagonists, from the sex parasites in Shivers to the multinational corporation Spectacular Optical in Videodrome to Naked Lunch’s Dr. Benway, are sinister and scary, but function as necessary agents of change.

When Cronenberg does use religious imagery to suggest evil, it is neither supernatural nor transcendent. Rather, his religious imagery evokes authoritarian institutions. Dead Ringers, based on a true story of twin gynecologists’ descent into madness and addiction, includes examination scenes set in the Mantle Clinic, their medical practice. The clinic functions as a kind of quasi-religious institution and the scenes are terrifying (even though this is not at all a traditional horror film), inasmuch as they show the power that doctors have over patients, and that men have over women (see Image).

In both his personal philosophy and his films, David Cronenberg sees no need for transcendence, or for the fulfillment of the hero’s quest, or for cosmic reward and punishment. And yet his films wrestle with the same questions of meaning that our favorite “religious” films do (questions of sex and death, power and desire, family and society, identity and transformation) but that do so in a uniquely nonreligious way. The Oscars may never give Cronenberg his due, but anyone interested in religion, film and their relationship, needs to.

Elijah Siegler is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. His article “David Cronenberg: The secular auteur as critic of religion” was recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

The Journal of the American Academy of Religion is generally considered to be the top academic journal in the field of religious studies. This international quarterly journal publishes top scholarly articles that cover the full range of world religious traditions together with provocative studies of the methodologies by which these traditions are explored.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Do the Oscars snub films without redemptive messages? appeared first on OUPblog.

On Sunday, 29 March 1739, two young men, aspiring authors and student friends from Eton College and Cambridge, departed Dover for the Continent. The twenty-two year old Horace Walpole, 4th earl of Orford (1717–1797), was setting out on his turn at the Grand Tour. Accompanying him on the journey, which would take them through France to Italy, was Thomas Gray (1716–1771), future author of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. The pair stayed abroad until September 1741, when an argument saw Gray return to England alone.

Travelling through Catholic domains, they would witness at arms-length one of the longest transfers of papal power in history, only four days shorter than the Interregnum, later imposed by the Napoleonic French, between the expulsion from the Papal States of Pius VI (who died 1799) and the election of Pius VII (14 March 1800). The on-going power struggle between the papacy and Catholic rulers of Europe, particularly with France, Spain and Portugal, had reached new levels of intensity — the latter two objecting in particular to unwelcome Jesuit interference in their treatment (read, “mistreatment”) of native populations in their overseas empires. The issue was still critical twenty years later, when Voltaire, under the pseudonym M. Demand, wrote to the Journal encyclopédique (1 April 1759), in the guise of identifying the real author of Candide, offering in partial evidence reports from the confrontations between Jesuits and colonial officials over their dealings with native populations in Paraguay.

The correspondence and journals of Gray and Walpole chart their travels, visits and discoveries across France and into Italy. The two young English travellers arrived in Florence on 16 December 1739, after a two days’ journey from Bologna across the Apennines. It was only two months before the ancient drama of papal passing and election would attract the attention of the world. Gray reported this news, when it came, to his friend Dr Thomas Wharton, writing on Saturday, 12 March 1740:

I conclude you will write to me; won’t you? oh! yes, when you know, that in a week I set out for Rome, & that the Pope is dead, & that I shall be (I should say, God willing; & if nothing extraordinary intervene; & if I’m alive, & well; & in all human probability) at the Coronation of a new one.

Clement XII (Papa Clemens duodecimus, born Lorenzo Corsini) had been pope from his election on 12 July 1730. He was the oldest person to become pope until Benedict XVI was elected in 2005. Clement died on 6 February 1740, and was eventually succeeded by Benedict XIV (Papa Benedictus quartus decimus, born Pròspero Lorenzo Lambertini), who was elected six months later on 17 August 1740. In a well-known anecdote of the election, Benedict is reported to have said to the cardinals: “If you wish to elect a saint, choose Gotti; a statesman, Aldrovandi; an honest man, me” (M. J. Walsh, Pocket Dictionary of Popes, London: Burns & Oates, 2006) — though as we will see from a contemporary report below, this is a rather colourless translation of the original.

A week later, Gray wrote to his mother Dorothy (Saturday, 19 March 1740):

The Pope is at last dead, and we are to set out for Rome on Monday next. The Conclave is still sitting there, and likely to continue so some time longer, as the two French Cardinals are but just arrived, and the German ones are still expected. It agrees mighty ill with those that remain inclosed: Ottoboni is already dead of an apoplexy; Altieri and several others are said to be dying, or very bad: Yet it is not expected to break up till after Easter. We shall lie at Sienna the first night, spend a day there, and in two more get to Rome. One begins to see in this country the first promises of an Italian spring, clear unclouded skies, and warm suns, such as are not often felt in England; yet, for your sake, I hope at present you have your proportion of them, and that all your frosts, and snows, and short-breaths are, by this time, utterly vanished. I have nothing new or particular to inform you of; and, if you see things at home go on much in their old course, you must not imagine them more various abroad. The diversions of a Florentine Lent are composed of a sermon in the morning, full of hell and the devil; a dinner at noon, full of fish and meager diet; and, in the evening, what is called a Conversazione, a sort of aſsembly at the principal people’s houses, full of I cannot tell what: Besides this, there is twice a week a very grand concert.

Two weeks later, after their arrival in Rome, Gray wrote another Saturday letter to his mother (2 April 1740):

St. Peter’s I saw the day after we arrived, and was struck dumb with wonder. I there saw the Cardinal d’Auvergne, one of the French ones, who, upon coming off his journey, immediately repaired hither to offer up his vows at the high altar, and went directly into the Conclave; the doors of which we saw opened to him, and all the other immured Cardinals came thither to receive him. Upon his entrance they were closed again directly. It is supposed they will not come to an agreement about a Pope till after Easter, though the confinement is very disagreeable.”

The conflict between catholic rulers, their national churches and the papacy led to prolonged disagreements and manoeuvrings in the Conclave, as evidenced by this letter from Walpole and Gray to their schoolboy friend, then fellow of King’s College Cambridge (Rome, 14 May 1740):

Boileau’s Discord dwelt in a College of Monks. At present the Lady is in the Conclave. Cardinal Corsini has been interrogated about certain Millions of Crowns that are absent from the Apostolic Chamber; He refuses giving Account, but to a Pope: However he has set several Arithmeticians to work, to compose Summs, & flourish out Expenses, which probably never existed. Cardinal Cibo pretends to have a Banker at Genoa, who will prove that he has received three Millions on the Part of the Eminent Corsini. This Cibo is a madman, but set on by others. He had formerly some great office in the government, from whence they are generally rais’d to the Cardinalate. After a time, not being promoted as he expected, he resign’d his Post, and retir’d to a Mountain where He built a most magnificient Hermitage. There He inhabited for two years, grew tir’d, came back and received the Hat.

Other feuds have been between Card. Portia and the Faction of Benedict the Thirteenth, by whom He was made Cardinal. About a month ago, he was within three Votes of being Pope. he did not apply to any Party, but went gleaning privately from all & of a sudden burst out with a Number; but too soon, & that threw Him quite out. Having been since left out of their Meetings, he ask’d one of the Benedictine Cardinals the reason; who replied, that he never had been their Friend, & never should be of their assemblies; & did not even hesitate to call him Apostate. This flung Portia into such a Rage that He spit blood, & instantly left the Conclave with all his Baggage. But the great Cause of their Antipathy to Him, was His having been one of the Four, that voted for putting Coscia to Death; Who now regains his Interest, & may prove somewhat disagreable to his Enemies; Whose Honesty is not abundantly heavier than His Own. He met Corsini t’other Day, & told Him, He heard His Eminence had a mind to his Cell: Corsini answer’d He was very well contented with that He had. Oh, says Coscia, I don’t mean here in the Conclave; but in the Castle St. Angelo.

With all these Animosities, One is near having a Pope. Card. Gotti, an Old, inoffensive Dominican, without any Relations, wanted yesterday but two voices; & is still most likely to succeed. Card. Altieri has been sent for from Albano, whither he was retir’d upon account of his Brother’s Death, & his own Illness; & where He was to stay till the Election drew nigh. There! there’s a sufficient Competency of Conclave News, I think. We have miserable Weather for the Season; Coud You think I was writing to You by my fireside at Rome in the middle of May? the Common People say tis occasion’d by the Pope’s Soul, which cannot find Rest.

As the bickering and accusations continued, Gray returned to Florence, where he reported to his father Philip (10 July 1740):

The Conclave we left in greater uncertainty than ever; the more than ordinary liberty they enjoy there, and the unusual coolneſs of the season, makes the confinement leſs disagreeable to them than common, and, consequently, maintains them in their irresolution. There have been very high words, one or two (it is said) have come even to blows; two more are dead within this last month, Cenci and Portia; the latter died distracted; and we left another (Altieri) at the extremity: Yet nobody dreams of an election till the latter end of September. All this gives great scandal to all good catholics, and everybody talks very freely on the subject.

Finally, on Sunday, 21 August 1740, Gray wrote again to his mother with the news of the new pope’s election:

The day before yesterday arrived the news of a Pope; and I have the mortification of being within four days journey of Rome, and not seeing his coronation, the heats being violent, and the infectious air now at its height. We had an instance, the other day, that it is not only fancy. Two country fellows, strong men, and used to the country about Rome, having occasion to come from thence hither, and travelling on foot, as common with them, one died suddenly on the road; the other got hither, but extremely weak, and in a manner stupid; he was carried to the hospital, but died in two days. So, between fear and lazineſs, we remain here, and must be satisfied with the accounts other people give us of the matter. The new Pope is called Benedict XIV. being created Cardinal by Benedict XIII. the last Pope but one. His name is Lambertini, a noble Bolognese, and Archbishop of that city. When I was first there, I remember to have seen him two or three times; he is a short, fat man, about sixty-five years of age, of a hearty, merry countenance, and likely to live some years. He bears a good character for generosity, affability, and other virtues; and, they say, wants neither knowledge nor capacity. The worst side of him is, that he has a nephew or two; besides a certain young favourite, called Melara, who is said to have had, for some time, the arbitrary disposal of his purse and family. He is reported to have made a little speech to the Cardinals in the Conclave, while they were undetermined about an election, as follows: ‘Most eminent Lords, here are three Bolognese of different characters, but all equally proper for the Popedom. If it be your pleasures, to pitch upon a Saint, there is Cardinal Gotti; if upon a Politician, there is Aldrovandi; if upon a Booby, here am I.’ The Italian is much more expreſsive, and, indeed, not to be translated; wherefore, if you meet with any body that understands it, you may show them what he said in the language he spoke it. ‘Eminſsimi. Sigri. Ci siamo tré, diversi sì, mà tutti idonei al Papato. Si vi piace un Santo, c’ è l’Gotti; se volete una testa scaltra, e Politica, c’ è l’Aldrovandé;c se un Coglione, eccomi!’ Cardinal Coscia is restored to his liberty, and, it is said, will be to all his benefices. Corsini (the late Pope’s nephew) as he has had no hand in this election, it is hoped, will be called to account for all his villanous practices.”

Dr. Robert V. McNamee is the Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century — reconstructing one of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image Credit: (1) Print Collection portrait file, Thomas Gray, Portraits. Source NYPL Digital Gallery
(2) Print Collection portrait file, B, Pope Benedict XIV. Source NYPL Digital Gallery

The post Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole on Grand Tour, spread news of a papal election, 1739/1740 appeared first on OUPblog.

Pope Benedict XVI has led the Catholic Church since 2005, during a time of great change and difficulty. During his time as Pope, he rejected calls for a debate on the issue of clerical celibacy and reaffirmed the ban on Communion for divorced Catholics who remarry. He has also reaffirmed the Church’s strict positions on abortion, euthanasia, and gay partnerships. After eight years, Pope Benedict announced on Monday 11 February that he would step down as pontiff within two weeks. In his resignation statement the 85-year-old Pope said: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

While abdication is not unheard of, it is the first papal resignation in almost 600 years. To give an overview of the history of papal resignations, we present selected entries from A Dictionary of Popes. (Full entries for the following Popes can be found on Oxford Reference.)

St Pontian (21 July 230–28 Sept. 235)

For most of his reign the Roman church enjoyed freedom from persecution as a result of the tolerant policies of Emperor Alexander Severus (222–35). Maximinus Thrax, however, acclaimed emperor in Mar. 235, abandoned toleration and singled out Christian leaders for attack. Among the first victims were Pontian and Hippolytus, who were both arrested and deported to Sardinia, the notorious ‘island of death’. Since deportation was normally for life and few survived it, Pontian abdicated (the first pope to do so), presumably to allow a successor to assume the leadership as soon as possible. He did so, according to the 4th-century Liberian Catalogue, on 28 Sept. 235, the first precisely recorded date in papal history (other apparently secure dates are based on inference).

St Marcellinus (30 June 296–?304; d. 25 Oct. 304)

On 23 Feb. 303, during St Marcellinus’s reign, Emperor Diocletian (284–305) issued his first persecuting edict ordering the destruction of churches, the surrender of sacred books, and the offering of sacrifice by those attending law-courts. Marcellinus complied and handed over copies of the Scriptures; he also, apparently, offered incense to the gods. His surrender of sacred books disqualified him from the priesthood, and if he was not actually deposed (as some scholars argue) he must have left the Roman church without an acknowledged head. The date of his abdication or deposition, however, is not known.

John XVII (16 May–6 Nov. 1003)

John XVII short-lived papacy is so obscure, the circumstances of his abdication, and indeed his death, are unknown.

Benedict IX (21 Oct. 1032–Sept. 1044; 10 Mar.–1 May 1045; 8 Nov. 1047–16 July 1048: d. 1055/6)

In 1032, Alberic III, head of the ruling Tusculan family, bribed the electorate and had his son Theophylact, elected as Pope, and the following day enthroned, with the style Benedict IX. Still a layman, he was not, as later gossip alleged, a lad of 10 or 12 but was probably in his late twenties; his personal life, even allowing for exaggerated reports, was scandalously violent and dissolute. If for twelve years he proved a competent pontiff, he owed this in part to native resourcefulness, but in part also to an able entourage and to the firm control which his father exercised over Rome. He was the only pope to hold office, at any rate de facto, for three separate spells.

St Peter Celestine V (5 July–13 Dec. 1294: d. 19 May 1296)

Naive and incompetent, and so ill educated that Italian had to be used in consistory instead of Latin, St Peter Celestine V let the day-to-day administration of the church fall into confusion.

Aware of his shortfalls, he considered handing over the government of the church to three cardinals, but the plan was sharply opposed. Finally, on 13 Dec. of the same year, he abdicated, was stripped off the papal insignia, and became once more ‘brother Pietro’.

And if you were wondering if there was any other way that a Pope could end their reign, the following Popes were deposed:

Liberius (17 May 352–24 Sept. 366)

A Roman by birth, he was elected at a time when the pro-Arian faction was in the ascendant in the east and Constantius II (337–61), now sole emperor, was taking steps to force the western episcopate to fall into line and join the east in anathematizing Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), always the symbol of Nicene orthodoxy.

Since Liberius held out against this, resisting bribery and then threats, he was brought by force to Milan and then, proving unyielding, banished to Beroea in Thrace (and, as such, deposed). Here his morale collapsed, overcome by boredom, said Jerome, and under pressure from the local bishop, and, in painful contrast to his previous resolute stand, after two years he acquiesced in Athanasius’ excommunication, accepted the ambiguous First Creed of Sirmium (which omitted the Nicene ‘one in being with the Father’), and made abject submission to the emperor.

With the death of Constantius (3 Nov. 361), however, he was free to reassume his role as champion of Nicene orthodoxy.

Gregory VI (1 May 1045–20 Dec. 1046: d. late 1047)

An elderly man respected in reforming circles, John Gratian (who became Gregory VI) was archpriest of St John at the Latin Gate when his godson Benedict IX (see above), recently restored to the papal throne, made out a deed of abdication in his favour on 1 May 1045. A huge sum of money apparently changed hands; and according to most sources Benedict sold the papal office, whilst according to others the Roman people had to be bribed. The whole transaction remains obscure, probably because it was deliberately kept dark at the time.

The bribery was ultimately unsuccessful, and on 20 Dec. the next year Gregory VI appeared before the synod of Sutri, near Rome. After the circumstances of his election had been investigated, the emperor and the synod pronounced him guilty of simony in obtaining the papal office, and deposed him.

Gregory XII (30 Nov. 1406–4 July 1415: d. 18 Oct. 1417)

In their eagerness to see the end of the Great Schism (1378–1417), each of the fourteen Roman cardinals at the conclave following Innocent VII’s death swore that, if elected, he would abdicate provided Antipope Benedict XIII did the same or should die.

At first it seemed that the hopes everywhere aroused by his election would be speedily fulfilled. However, Gregory’s attitude altered; personal doubts and fears, combined with pressures from quarters apprehensive of what might ensue if he had to resign, made him eventually refuse the planned meeting with Benedict XIII. As the negotiations dragged on, Gregory’s cardinals became increasingly restive. They joined forces with four of Benedict’s cardinals at Livorno, made a solemn agreement with them to establish the peace of the church by a general council, and in early July sent out with them a united summons for such a council to meet at Pisa in March 1409.

Both popes were invited to attend the forthcoming council, but both naturally refused. The council of Pisa duly met, under the presidency of the united college of cardinals, in the Duomo on 25 Mar. Charges of bad faith, and even of collusion, were laid in great detail against both popes. At the 15th session, on 5 June, Gregory and Benedict were both formally deposed as schismatics, obdurate heretics, and perjurors, and the holy seat was declared vacant. On 26 June the cardinals elected a new pope, Alexander V.

Adapted from multiple entries in A Dictionary of Popes, Second edition, by J N D Kelly and Michael Walsh, also available online as part of Oxford Reference. This fascinating dictionary gives concise accounts of every officially recognized pope in history, from St Peter to Pope Benedict XVI, as well as all of their irregularly elected rivals, the so-called antipopes.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Papal resignations through the years appeared first on OUPblog.

By Gerald O’Collins, SJ

“Pope Benedict is 78 years of age. Father O’Collins, do you think he’ll resign at 80?” “Brian,” I said, “give him a chance. He hasn’t even started yet.” It was the afternoon of 19 April 2005, and I was high above St Peter’s Square standing on the BBC World TV platform with Brian Hanrahan. The senior cardinal deacon had just announced from the balcony of St Peter’s to a hundred thousand people gathered in the square: “Habemus Papam.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been elected pope.

Less than an hour earlier, white smoke pouring from a chimney poking up from the Sistine Chapel let the world know that the cardinal electors had chosen a successor to Pope John Paul II. The bells of Rome were supposed to ring out the news at once. But it took a quarter of an hour for them to chime in. When Hanrahan asked me why the bells hadn’t come in on cue, I pointed the finger at local inefficiency: “We’re in Italy, Brian.”

I was wrong. The keys to the telephone that should have let someone contact the bellringers were in the pocket of the dean of the college of cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger. He had gone into a change room to put on his white papal attire, and didn’t hand over the keys until he came out dressed as pope.

One of the oldest cardinals ever to be elected pope, after less than eight years in office Benedict XVI has now bravely decided to retire or, to use the “correct” word, abdicate. His declining health has made him surrender his role as Bishop of Rome, successor of St Peter, and visible head of the Catholic Christendom. He no longer has the stamina to give the Church the leadership it deserves and needs.

Years ago an Irish lady, after watching Benedict’s predecessor in action, said to me: “He popes well.” You didn’t need to be a specialized Vatican watcher to notice how John Paul II and Benedict “poped” very differently.

A charismatic, photogenic, and media-savvy leader, John Paul II proved a global, political figure who did as much as anyone to end European Communism. He more or less died on camera, with thousands of young people holding candles as they prayed and wept for their papal friend dying in his dimly lit apartment above St Peter’s Square.

Now Benedict’s papacy ends very differently. He will not be laid out for several million people to file past his open coffin. His fisherman’s ring will not be ceremoniously broken. There will be no official nine days of mourning or funeral service attended by world leaders and followed on television or radio by several billion people. He will not be lifted high above the crowd like a Viking king, as his coffin is carried for burial into the Basilica of St Peter’s. The first pope to use a pacemaker will quietly walk off the world stage.

In my latest book, an introduction to Catholicism, I naturally included a (smiling) picture of Pope Benedict. But he pales in comparison with the photos of John Paul II anointing and blessing the sick on a 1982 visit to the UK; meeting the Dalai Lama before going to pray for world peace in Assisi; in a prison cell visiting Mehmet Ali Agca, who had tried to assassinate him in May 1981; and hugging Mother Teresa of Calcutta after visiting one of her homes for the destitute and dying.

Yet the bibliography of that introduction contains no book written by John Paul II either before or after he became pope. But it does contain the enduring classic by Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (originally published 1967). Both as pope and earlier, it was through the force of his ideas rather than the force of his personality that Benedict XVI exercised his leadership.

The public relations record of Pope Benedict was far from perfect. He will be remembered for quoting some dismissive remarks about Islam made by a Byzantine emperor. That 2006  speech in Regensburg led to riots and worse in the Muslim world. Many have forgotten his visit later that year to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul when he turned towards Mecca and joined his hosts in silent prayer.

Catholics and other Christians around the world hope now for a forward-looking pope who can offer fresh leadership and deal quickly with some crying needs like the ordination of married men and the return to the local churches of the decision-making that some Vatican offices have arrogated to themselves.

When he speaks at midday from his apartment to the people gathered in St Peter’s Square on 24 February, the last Sunday before his resignation kicks in, Pope Benedict will be making his final public appearance before the people of Rome. A vast crowd will have streamed in from the city and suburbs to thank him with their thunderous applause. They cherished the clear, straightforward language of his sermons and homilies, and admire him for what will prove the defining moment of his papacy—his courageous decision to resign and pass the baton to a much younger person.

Gerald O’Collins received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at Pembroke College. From 1973-2006, he taught at the Gregorian University (Rome) where he was also dean of the theology faculty (1985-91). Alone or with others, he has published fifty books, including Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction and The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions. As well as receiving over the years numerous honorary doctorates and other awards, in 2006 he was created a Companion of the General Division of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest civil honour granted through the Australian government. Currently he is a research professor of theology at St Mary’s University College,Twickenham (UK).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image Credits: Pope Benedict XVI during general audition By Tadeusz Górny, public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Church of the Carmine, Martina Franca, Apulia, Italy. Statues of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II By Tango7174, creative commons licence via Wikimedia Commons

The post The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI appeared first on OUPblog.

After the judge’s ruling Monday in Guatemala City, the crowd outside erupted into cheers and set off fireworks. The unthinkable had happened: Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez had cleared the way for retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, who between 1982 and 1983 had overseen the darkest years of that nation’s 36-year long armed conflict, would stand trial for genocide. In that conflict (1960-1996), more than 150,000 Guatemalans died, the majority at the hands of their own government, which used their lives to prosecute a ferocious counterinsurgency war against a group of Marxist guerrillas who had hoped to bring a Sandinista-style socialist regime to Guatemala. For many, General Ríos Montt represented the face of this war, because it was during his short terms as president between March 1982 and August 1983 (he both came to power and was expelled in military coup d’états), that the Guatemalan army undertook the most bloody operation of the war, a violent scorched-earth campaign that not only nearly eliminated the guerrillas military operation, but which also killed many thousands of civilians, the vast majority of them Maya “Indians.” Now, some thirty years later, Ríos Montt will be prosecuted along with his former chief of intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sánchez, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Specifically, he will be charged with ordering the killings of more than 1,700 Maya Ixil people in a series of massacres that the Army conducted in the northern part of the country in 1982.

The axiom “justice delayed is justice denied” notwithstanding, the prosecution of fatally misguided leaders and despots such as Serbia’s Radovan Karadžić  or Hutu leader Beatrice Munyenyezi  is not unusual in the early 21^st century. Trials such as these are designed to serve the cause of justice, of course, but they are also instrumental in helping a traumatized society create a coherent narrative and build a collective historical memory around what happened in its recent past. What is unusual about the case against Ríos Montt is that almost no one foresaw the day when such a trial would ever take place in Guatemala. In large part, this stems from Guatemala’s long-standing culture of impunity, where few people, from common criminals all the way up to corrupt businessmen and military officers, are held accountable for their crimes; generally speaking, the rule of law there simply does not rule. Beyond that, Ríos Montt’s continued influence in the country—among other things, he established and headed a powerful political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco in the 1989, and he run an unsuccessful campaign for president as recently as 2003—further mitigated against expectations for his prosecution. His daughter, Zury Ríos Montt (who is married to former US Congressman Jerry Weller) is a rising and powerful young politician; her support for her father is so absolute that she stormed out of the courtroom yesterday before the judge could finalize his pronouncement. But most of all, the prosecution of Ríos Montt seemed most unlikely because, in the strange paradox of power that sometimes comes with authoritarian regimes, there were, and still continue to be, some Guatemalans who continue to respect him, remembering his bloody rule as a time when one could walk the streets of the capital safely and when the “raging wolves” of communism were kept at bay.

Adding to the complexity of this case is that fact that, at the time he served as chief of state in the early 1980s, (although called “President,” he did not actually hold this title, having taken power in a coup), Ríos Montt was a newly born again Christian, a member of a neo-Pentecostal denomination called the Church of the Word (Verbo). Fresh from the rush of his conversion, Ríos Montt addressed the nation weekly during his term of office, offering what people called his “Sunday sermons,”—discourses in which he drifted freely from topics ranging from his desire to defeat the “subversion,” to advice on wholesome family living, to his particular vision of a “New Guatemala” where all peoples would live together as one (a jab at the unassimilated Maya), in compliant obedience to a benign government that served the general good. Ríos Montt’s dream of a New Guatemala was in many ways as elusive as quicksilver, and in his sermons, he made no mention of the carnage going on in the countryside. The sacrifice of the Maya people and other “subversives” was not at all too high a price to pay, in his estimation, for the New Guatemala.

But the elegance, even the peaceability of his language, along with his strong affiliation with the Church of the Word (his closes advisors were church leaders, not his fellow generals) in that moment made Ríos Montt the darling of the emergent leaders of the Christian Right in the United States who were coming of age during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. For them, as for the Reagan administration, Ríos Montt seemed to have emerged out of nowhere from the turmoil of the Central American crisis of the early 1980s as an anti-communist Christian soldier and ally. It seemed unthinkable to them that the same man who, with one hand, reached out to called for honesty and familial devotion from his people, would order the killing of his own people with his other. And so it seems to some Guatemalans even today. Yet the strong and irrefutable body of evidence that produced yesterday’s ruling tells a very different, and much more tragic story.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett is a Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Texas-Austin and the author of Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt 1982-1983.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only religion articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Ríos Montt to face genocide trial in Guatemala appeared first on OUPblog.

As a teacher I have sometimes offered a million pounds to any student who can form any one of the following beliefs: that they can fly; that they were born on the moon; or that sheep are carnivorous. Needless to say, I have never had to pay up.  The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass might have been able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but that is a feat few of us can match. In fact, it is doubtful whether the formation of belief is under voluntary control at all. Adopting a belief seems to be more like digesting or metabolizing and rather unlike looking or speaking—it seems to be something that happens to one rather than something that one does.

But unlike digestion or metabolizing, the upshot of belief-formation has a direct impact on how we behave. Although we don’t always act in accordance with our beliefs, it goes without saying that what we believe plays a huge role in governing what we do. More importantly, a rational person ought to act on the basis of their beliefs; indeed, failing to act in light of one’s beliefs is a form of irrationality.

In and of themselves the two claims that we have just examined—that belief-formation is involuntary and that a person’s beliefs justify their actions—are unobjectionable. Trouble looms, however, when we put them together. From Francisco Pizarro to Tomás de Torquemada, and from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Anders Breivik, history is littered with the carnage wrought by the actions of sincere but misguided individuals—people who have regarded the superiority of their religion, race or ideology as legitimizing actions that we regard as horrific.

How should we regard such individuals? If the formation of belief is involuntary, then, one might think, we cannot justifiably condemn them for holding the beliefs that motivated their actions. Can we condemn them for acting on those beliefs? Arguably not, for how else is a person to act if not on the basis of their beliefs? But if we cannot condemn them either for forming their beliefs or for acting in light of their beliefs, what grounds do we have for condemning them at all?

Some might be tempted to respond that we don’t have any grounds for condemning such individuals, and that those who act on the basis of their sincerely held beliefs shouldn’t be denounced for what they do, no matter how awful their deeds. We could, of course, continue to regard such agents as legally responsible for their crimes, but—according to this line of thought—we have no grounds for holding them morally guilty for the actions that they carry out in light of their convictions.

Although some might be happy to settle for this solution, I suspect that for many of us it is a response of last resort—a position to be adopted only when all other avenues are exhausted. Are there any other avenues available to us?

Perhaps we were too quick to embrace the idea that belief-formation is always involuntary. Although it is clear that we cannot simply decide to adopt any old proposition that is put to us, it doesn’t follow—and it may not be true—that we have no intentional control over what we believe. For example, it is surely plausible to suppose that we have some control over whether or not to subject our beliefs to critical scrutiny. One can deliberate about whether or not to believe those propositions that are open questions for one. And if deliberation lies within one’s voluntary control, then perhaps one can be justifiably blamed for failing to deliberate appropriately.

Perhaps so, but does this solve our puzzle? I suspect not. For one thing, I very much doubt whether the beliefs that motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Anders Breivik were ‘open questions’ from their point of view.  Instead, I suspect that they regarded them as self-evident truths, claims no more deserving of critical scrutiny than the belief that 2+2=4 or the belief that there is water at the bottom of the ocean. Moreover, even if they were guilty of failing to subject their beliefs to the kind of scrutiny that they should have, that failing would surely be relatively minor rather than an instance of gross moral turpitude of the kind for which we are inclined to hold them guilty.

So, how should we resolve this puzzle? I don’t have a full solution to offer, but here is one line of thought that I find tempting. Although belief-formation is responsive to evidence, it is also influenced by desire and motivation: how we take the world to be is heavily influenced by how we would like the world to be. And one of the central sources of belief in the superiority of one’s religion, race or ideology is surely the desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings.

And here, perhaps, we can see the hint of a solution to our puzzle. What the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds and Anders Breiviks of this world are guilty of is not the fact that they have voluntarily adopted unjustified beliefs, for we have seen that it is doubtful whether their beliefs were voluntarily acquired. Rather, their guilt lies in the character traits that their beliefs manifest. Our condemnation of them is justified insofar as the beliefs that motivated their actions were grounded in intolerance, arrogance and self-aggrandizement.

Tim Bayne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He has taught at the University of Canterbury, Macquarie University, and the University of Oxford. His main interests are in the philosophy of psychology, with a particular focus on consciousness. A native of New Zealand, he divides his time between Manchester and Geneva. His is the author of Thought: A Very Short Introduction .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

 Image Credit: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, upon capture. Taken by U.S. forces when KSM was captured  [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Thought Control appeared first on OUPblog.