Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  His new book, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History, looks at the legendary story of the ten lost tribes of Israel and offers a unique prism through which to view the many facets of encounters between cultures, the processes of colonization, and the growth of geographical knowledge.  In the excerpt from the introduction below, we learn why God scattered the tribes.

In the beginning, there was one unified kingdom under the great kings, David and Solomon, in the land of Israel, home of the twelve tribes, who had descended from the third patriarch, Jacob. Things were good under Solomon and the kingdom enjoyed prosperity and many years of peace. However, as Solomon aged, he began to sin. He married foreign women and worshipped their gods. He even built altars for these gods in Jerusalem, next to the temple he himself had built for the Lord God. As a result, God becomes angry with him and sends his messenger Ahijah the Shilonite to a “mighty man of valor” from the tribe of Ephraim, Jeroboam, son of Nebat. He is to lead the Ephraimites out of the kingdom and tear it into two.

As the biblical account has it, on his way out of Jerusalem, Jeroboam encounters Ahijah, who in a dramatic gesture tears his own new garment into twelve pieces. He then turns to Jeroboam: “take thee ten pieces: for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee.” Ahijah explains that one tribe, Judah, will remain in the hands of the Davidic house, “for my servant David’s sake and for Jerusalem’s sake, the city that I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel.” The prophet soon repeats this message, again speaking of God’s plan to divide up the united Davidic kingdom: “But I will take the kingdom out of his son’s hand and will give unto thee even ten tribes”.

This prophecy is the first mention in the biblical narrative of the “ten tribes” – indeed, it coins the term, which appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible of the New Testament. Here, it appears twice within a few verses. God chooses a man specifically from the tribe of Ephraim for the job of leading the ten tribes. Ephraim and Manasseh, sons of Jacob’s most beloved lost son, Joseph, receive a deathbed blessing from the patriarch. Like Judah, they belong in the category of “blessed tribes.” But while both of them are blessed, in a significant dramatic gesture, Jacob crosses his arms and places his right (indicating greater blessing) hand on the head of his youngest grandson – Ephraim.

Ahijah’s prophecy quickly becomes reality. Solomon’s son and successor, Rehoboam, is far less smart than his father and grandfather. He rules tyrannically and foolishly and abuses the dominion over the rest of the tribes given to the tribe of Judah. Schisms and unrest spread among the people of the kingdom. Armed with God’s promise, Jeroboam rebels and leads his tribe of Ephraim to secede from the united Davidic kingdom, creating a separate dominion in the northern part of the Holy Land. Nine other tribes follow him, and the Ephraimite monarchy becomes the kingdom of Israel, home of the ten tribes. The great united kingdom of Israel no longer exists. Instead, there are the smaller Israel and Judah. The new Israelite kingdom controls an expanse of land from a point only a few kilometers north of Jerusalem to the mountains of Lebanon. In the south, the house of David remains with only two tribes, Judah and its smaller neighbor, Benjamin, and wth the temple in Jerusalem, which is still the cultural and religious center of all twelve tribes.

But the story does not end there. Fearing that the people of the new secessionist kingdom might revert to Judah’s dominion when they go to worship in Jerusalem, Jeroboam decides to build a new center for worship within the boundaries of his won domain. The Bible tells us that he “took two calves of gold” and said to the people: “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold they gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt”. Jeroboams’s political and cultural shrewdness proves to be grave error with everlasting consequences. Worshipping the two calves is the “original sin” of the ten tribes, and it never leaves them…

In a typical burst of wrath, God vows to destroy not only the clan of Jeroboam, but his entire kingdom. The same Ahijah the Shilonite delivers another horrifying prophecy: “For the Lord shall smite Israel as a reed is shaken in the water and he shall root up Israel out of this good land which he gave to their fathers and shall scatter them beyond the river because they have made their graves provoking the Lord to anger”. This banishment form the divine domain, perhaps a historical recasting and transposition of the story of the expulsion from Eden, is crucial in the later formulations of the tribes’ location. It would later be come to be understood as expulsion from the inhabited civilized world.

In the wake of Ahijah’s prophecy, the Israelite kingdom is plunged into 200 years of political turbulence that culminate in its destruction. The house of Jeroboam falls first, and the kingdom sees many dynasties rise and fall. None of the kings removes the golden calves that had made God so angry. On the contrary, they begin worshipping even more foreign gods. The country continues to suffer from chronic political instability. Israel’s end finally comes when the Assyrian Empire, the “Rod of God,” as the prophet Isaiah so loved to call it, conquers Israel and deports its people. The biblical narrative laconically reports, “In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into Assyria and places them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan and in the cities of the Medes”.

The authors of 2 Kings hasten to remind the reader why it all happened: because Israel had sinned against God and deserted him. “Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and remove them out of his sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah only”….

We at OUP UK were delighted recently when we heard that Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon had won The Dingle Prize. It is awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science for the best book in the history of science, technology and medicine accessible to a non-expert readership, with the judges declaring that Thomas Dixon’s book “is clearly and concisely written, well argued, and accessible to the non-expert; it should appeal to a wide readership not only beyond the history of science community but also outside academia”.

Below is an extract taken from the book, regarding Darwin and evolution. Thomas Dixon has previously written two posts for OUPblog, which can be found here and here.

In his early 20s, Darwin was looking forward to a career in the Church of England. He had embarked on medical training in Edinburgh a few years earlier but had found the lectures boring and the demonstrations of surgery disgusting. Now his father sent him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where young Charles signed up to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and set about studying mathematics and theology with a view to entering holy orders after graduation. But Darwin found that theology appealed about as much as surgery. His real passion at this time was for beetle-hunting rather than Bible-reading, and he had an early triumph when one of the specimens he had identified appeared in print in an instalment of Illustrations of British Entomology. In 1831 this enthusiastic young amateur naturalist was invited to join the HMS Beagle as a companion to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, and to undertake collections and observations on matters of natural-historical interest. Perhaps he was not, after all, destined to become the Reverend Charles Darwin.

The voyage of the Beagle lasted from 1831 to 1836. The primary purpose of the expedition was to complete the British Admiralty’s survey of the coast of South America, but its five-year itinerary also took in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Darwin’s observations of rock formations, plants, animals, and indigenous peoples were incidental to the purpose of the expedition but absolutely central to his own intellectual development. On board the Beagle, Darwin’s religious views started to evolve too. He had no doubt that the natural world was the work of God. In his notebook he recorded his impressions of the South American jungle: ‘Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah.’ To Darwin, these jungles were ‘temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature’, in which no-one could stand without ‘feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’. He even admired the civilizing effects of the work of Christian missionaries too, observing that ‘so excellent is the Christian faith, that the outward conduct of the believers is said most decidedly to have been improved by its doctrines’.

Back in England, however, after the voyage, Darwin would start to have doubts. His grandfather, father, and elder brother had all rejected Christianity, adopting either Deism or outright freethinking unbelief. He seemed to be heading in a similar direction. His reasons were many. His travels had revealed to him at first hand the great variety of religious beliefs and practices around the world. All these different religions claimed to have a special revelation from God, but they could not all be right. Then there was his moral revulsion at the Christian doctrine that while the faithful would be saved, unbelievers and heathens, along with unrepentant sinners, would be consigned to an eternity of damnation. Darwin thought this was a ‘damnable doctrine’ and could not see how anyone could wish it to be true. This objection hit him with particular force after the death of his unbelieving father in 1848.

There were two ways in which Darwin’s re-reading of the book of nature also gave him reasons to re-think his religion. He and others before him had seen in the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments evidence of the power and wisdom of God. But Darwin now thought he saw something else. Hard though it was for him to believe it himself – the human eye could still give him a shudder of incredulity – he came to think that all these adaptations came about by natural processes. Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design. Secondly, along with the silent beauty of the jungle he had also observed all sorts of cruelty and violence in nature, which he could not believe a benevolent and omnipotent God could have willed. Why, for example, would God have created the ichneumon wasp? The ichneumon lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, with the effect that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive. Why would God create cuckoos which eject their foster siblings from the nest? Why make ants that enslave other species of ant? Why give queen bees the instinct of murderous hatred towards their daughters? ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write’, Darwin exclaimed, ‘on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!’

Darwin never became an atheist. At the time he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still a theist, although not a Christian. By the end of his life he preferred to adopt the label ‘agnostic’, which had been coined by his friend Thomas Huxley in 1869. Darwin, for the most part, kept his religious doubts to himself. He had many reasons to do so, not least his desire for a quiet life and social respectability. The most important reason, though, was his wife Emma. In the early years of their marriage, Emma, a pious evangelical Christian, wrote a letter to Charles of her fears about his loss of faith in Christianity and the consequences for his salvation. She could not bear the thought that his doubts would mean they were not reunited after death in heaven. The death of their beloved young daughter Annie in 1851 brought home again the need for the consolation of an afterlife. The difference between Charles and Emma on this question was a painful one. Among Darwin’s papers after his death, Emma found the letter she had written to him on the subject 40 years earlier. On it her husband had added a short note of his own: ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this.’

When Professor Henry Chadwick passed away last year, a finished manuscript was discovered which he had put to one side in the early 1980s. It was a biography of the giant of Christian thought, Augustine of Hippo. Augustine’s life and works have shaped the development of the Christian Church, sparking controversy and influencing the ideas of theologians through subsequent centuries. In Augustine of Hippo: A Life, which OUP are publishing in the UK next month, Chadwick charts Augustine’s intellectual journey from schoolboy and student to Bishop and champion of Western Christendom. Below is a short excerpt from the first chapter.

Augustine was born on 13 November 354.

He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was the child of small-town parents in Thagaste in the province of Numidia, now the large village of Souk-Ahras in Algeria not far from the Tunisian border. Thagaste lies in hilly country about 60 miles inland, south of Hippo on the coast. Hardly more than a few ruins of the bath-house now survive to remind the visitor of its Roman past (unlike Hippo of which much more has been found by the French archaeologists). Augustine’s father Patrick sat on the town council and had the status of a curialis, in the late empire a hard-pressed class expected by the government to keep their local community going on their personal resources. Patrick owned but a few acres. His wife Monnica bore not only Augustine but also another son and two daughters. Their relative ages are never mentioned. Monnica came of a Christian family, but Patrick remained a pagan almost until the end of his life. Monnica was regular in giving alms for the poor, devoted to the honour of the martyrs of the African churches, and daily attendant at prayers in the local church morning and evening. Her constant devotions did not make her careless, and she avoided gossip. She was often influenced by her dream-life through which she felt that God guided her.

Both Augustine’s parents are likely to have been of Berber stock, but Romanized and Latin-speaking. Numidian peasants of the fourth century spoke not Latin but Punic, inherited from the Phoenician settlers who came from Tyre and Sidon a millennium before to set up their trading station and maritime power at Carthage. In Hannibal they had once offered a frightening threat to Rome’s ambitions to conquer the Mediterranean. As Romans settled in their North African provinces, many took Berber- or Punic-speaking wives. In the second century ad Apuleius, of Madauros near Thagaste, author of the Golden Ass, had a Punic-speaking wife. In Augustine’s time the Punic-speakers retained a consciousness of their old Phoenician forefathers, and could manifest a lack of enthusiasm for the Roman administration of their country now established for over five centuries. Latin culture was a veneer; those who had it tended to despise those who had not. Augustine acquired a conversational knowledge of the patois, and never speaks of Punic language or culture with the least touch of scorn as the pagan Maximus of Madauros did. But his parents and nurses spoke to him in Latin, and education at the Thagaste school was principally in Latin language and literature, a subject which ancient men called ‘grammar’, taught by the grammaticus.

Augustine’s schoolmaster, first at Thagaste, then until his sixteenth year at nearby Madauros, appears more notable for his skill with the cane than for offering a positive education. To the end of his days Augustine can hardly refer to the life of a schoolboy without recalling the misery of cruel floggings. He would not say it did him no good, for it was a training for the far greater troubles of adult life. But ‘we learn better when freely trying to satisfy our curiosity than under fear or force’. Once he had been handed Virgil’s Aeneid, his young mind was kindled to excitement by the exquisite poetry. His school also made him learn Greek, a language spoken by a substantial minority of the North African population with links to Sicily and South Italy where Greek was widespread. A mere hundred miles of sea separate Sicily from the North African coast. Augustine found Greek hard; the difficulty soured even the reading of Homer whose poetic power he admired. In later life he was generally inclined to protest too much his ignorance of Greek. After his schooldays he did not read classical Greek texts. But he could read the language with a dictionary. In 415 in the City of God he makes his own translation into Latin of a piece of Plotinus, and when writing On the Trinity he consulted works by acknowledged masters of the Greek East. Nevertheless a very Latin pride in the cultural world of Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Terence, and his fellow-countryman Apuleius helped him to treat Greek theologians and philosophers as constructive helps rather than as authorities to be slavishly imitated. Aristotle first came before him in his early twenties when he was studying at Carthage. Except for Cicero’s translation of the Timaeus, he seems to have read no Plato before he reached Milan in 384 aged 30. The standard education of the time was primarily in the art of persuasive oratory, including some logic. Looking back he realized he had come to think a fault in speech much graver than a failure in morality. Most of the philosophy he knew he taught himself by his reading. For the contemporary professional teachers of philosophy in the Latin West, he speaks in a letter of 386 in terms of utter contempt.

From his boyhood his health gave cause for anxiety. Aged about 7 he fell seriously ill with chest pains; when his death was expected he asked Monnica to arrange for his baptism. (As an infant he had been made a catechumen with the sign of the cross and salt on his tongue.) Recovery led to deferment. Throughout his life his health was precarious, and a series of bouts of sickness made him appear prematurely old in middle age. Although after he had become a bishop his burdens were far heavier, he nevertheless seems to have enjoyed better health under greater strain. The optimum degree of tension is not nil.

Patrick nursed ambitions for his clever son. Towards Patrick Augustine shows small sign of sympathy. The devout Monnica hoped to persuade Patrick to become a Christian; perhaps once faith had come, her often erring husband would be more faithful to her. In pagan households of the time the master of the house took it for granted that he had a right to sleep with his serving girls, and preachers did not find it easy to convince Christian congregations that this right should not be exercised. Patrick was hot-tempered, but Monnica kept out of his way when he was cross, and so ‘escaped the battering other wives receive’. Yet when serene, he was kind. Monnica herself felt it a harmonious relationship. They both realized that if finance could be found, an education at the metropolis at Carthage (by modern Tunis) could open the door to success in the great world. But when Augustine was 16, Patrick died, after being baptized during his last sickness. For Augustine a wild demoralized year followed while means were sought to enable him to continue his studies, a project in which he was eventually assisted by a wealthy landowner of Thagaste, Romanianus. (His name appears on an inscription dug up at Thagaste.) In the Confessions Augustine vividly describes how he stole pears from a nearby orchard not out of any wish for the fruit, which was of inferior quality, but because there is a pleasure in doing something forbidden. As he looked back on the incident, he felt himself to be repeating the experience of Adam in Genesis. The pears were accidental to the substance of his enjoyment which was simply the doing wrong; that made the story significant, not a mere adolescent prank of the most boring triviality. He went to Carthage with his mother’s timely exhortation that he avoid fornication, above all adultery with another man’s wife.

Are nuns cloistered and inaccessible ‘brides of Christ’, or socially engaged women, active in the outside world impossible for their secular sisters? Silvia Evangelisti examined this question in her book Nuns: A History of Convent Life 1450-1700. In the excerpt from the book below, she points out that is misleading to think that all women entered the convent in order to fulfil their spiritual aspirations, or to avoid marriage. Indeed, many women took the vows also as a result of family pressures and patrimonial strategies.

One tradition dating back to medieval times was for kings and queens, as well as lay wealthy aristocrats, to establish and support churches and religious institutions in the hope of obtaining divine protection and ultimately salvation. Queen Christina of Sweden, a fervent supporter of the Franciscans, founded a convent of Poor Clares in Copenaghen in 1497, which hosted mainly burgher classes and some poorer women. A few years later, she opened another Franciscan house in Odense. Similarly, Queen D. Leonor of Portugal founded in 1509 the Clarissan convent of Madre de Deus de Xabregas, located just outside Lisbon on the river Tajo. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Habsburgs threw themselves into the development of convents. In Madrid they built at least three female religious houses in just fifty-seven years: Princess Juana of Portugal founded Las Descalzas Reales in 1554; Alonso Orozco, the preacher of King Philip II, built La Visitación in 1589; Philip III and Margaret of Austria started La Encarnación in 1611. They followed the same policy in their transatlantic possessions. In Cuzco, Peru, they set up three religious houses between 1558 and 1673, vital institutions for implanting European society in the colonies.

These ‘gated’ communities served multiple purposes, and were particularly attractive and convenient locations for hosting the daughters of the elites. Aristocratic and emerging mercantile families established their power and social status on the basis of financial wealth and property. Nunneries offered them a safe, honourable, and economically attractive alternative to marriage, a means to soften the onerous impact of supporting female offspring. The convent dowry, or ‘spiritual dowry’—the sum of money required to place a woman in monastic retreat—was usually lower than a marriage dowry, allowing families to compensate for the dispersal of family patrimonies inevitably caused by the high costs of marriage. Furthermore, convents provided the kind of basic education that parents sought for their daughters, and—like colleges and schools— represented an invaluable opportunity for networking, helping families to reinforce ties within their social rank, and opening up paths for social mobility.

This mechanism generated a growth in female professions, and induced patterns of gentrification. According to a trend that has been observed in many European countries, a high number of patrician women dwelled in monastic houses. In Madrid, for instance, in 1674, there was a queue of up to 160 women waiting to enter one of the city’s convents. Favouritism was not infrequent as the girls from noble houses were likely to be preferred to their less prosperous or less noble peers. A member of the German guard, who petitioned to the Council of Castile the Camara de Castilla—in order to obtain a place for his daughter, received a negative reply. He was told that future vacancies would be reserved to women of a higher status. In some areas, such as Italy, this trend seems particularly clear when marriage dowries reached their peak.

Unsurprisingly, forced monastic professions were not infrequent, as families did not hesitate to sacrifice their daughters for economic convenience. The result of this was that many nuns lived in religious houses against their will:

two thousand or more noble women . . . in this city live locked up in monasteries as if they were a public store . . . they are confined within those walls not for spirit of devotion but because of their families, making their freedom, so dear even to those lacking the use of reason, a gift not only to God, but also to their city, the world, and their closest relatives.

According to the Venetian nun who wrote these lines, the extraordinarily incisive Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52), it was politics rather than devotion that brought women to the cloister. Tarabotti bravely denounced the role assigned to women in family politics, who were treated by their ruthless fathers as goods to be bought and sold:

They do not give as brides for Christ the most beautiful and virtuous, but instead the ugly and deformed, and if there are daughters who are lame, hunchbacked, or have any other crippling torment, as if the defect of nature was a defect of theirs, they are condemned to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Tarabotti was referring here to her own situation: she was disabled and the oldest of five daughters, and therefore unappealing to the marriage market. She was the only one of the five that her father destined to the cloister. Tarabotti was one of the many voices against forced monasticism. When we listen to early modern scholars, playwrights, or authors of travel literature, we learn of the troubles of miserable women who had been sent to the cloister without vocation by cruel parents who therefore deprived them of their freedom, and condemned them to eternal unhappiness, with great offence to God. Uncommon though it was for these women to escape and be released from their vows, it was not completely impossible and some of them were married off: ‘Don Francisco de Luzón’, reads a Spanish document, ‘married one sister of señor Conde de la Puebla del Maestre, who had been a professed nun in Saint Clare for fourteen years, and had managed to escape from her convent.’

If forced monasticism became a favourite subject for many authors, and for nuns’ and monks’ claims before ecclesiastical courts, the best portrait of an unwilling nun can be found in the pages of Diderot’s novel The Nun. Probably inspired by a real court case involving a forced nun, it told the tragic story of Suzanne Simonin, a nun without vocation who experienced first her parents’ violence, then the unsolicited sexual attentions and harassment of the mother abbess. ‘No, Sir,’ she replied to the question whether she, already a novice living in the cloister, wished to profess the sacred vows. This was only the beginning of her unhappy existence.

A careful observer of his own times, Diderot was determined to attack the constraints of religion. His work vividly recreated the unbearable pressures, as well as the complicity between the family and the monastic institution, that could determine the entrance of women into religious life. Diderot’s heroine experienced injustice and violence, both psychological and physical. Unable to make her voice heard—if not through the author’s pen—her tragedy lay in the vows she took against her will, as much as in her awareness of her hopeless situation. Diderot’s scenario recalled the case of Arcangela Tarabotti. But Tarabotti, unlike Suzanne, was not a character in a novel. She was made of flesh and blood, just like the many other women who remained cloistered for life, without having much of a true inclination to be so.

Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.  His new book, Guardians of the Revoltion: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs, he traces the course of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution.  In the excerpt below we learn about the relationship between Iran and Syria.

Among the most enduring yet anomalous alliances in the Middle East is the Syrian-Iranian relationship.  On the surface it may seem improbable for a Shiite regime determined to redeem the region for the forces of religious virtue and a secular state devoted to pan-Arabism to come together.  Yet a series of shared antagonisms led both sides to overlook the incongruity of their alliance and collaborate on a range of critical issues…In the end, a strategically opportunistic Hafiz al-Asad would find the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini an uneasy partner.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution came at an opportune time for the Syrian regime…  The Camp David Accords had led Egypt’s defection from the struggle against Israel and left Syria to face a strengthened Jewish state on its periphery.  In Damascus the fear was that the Reagan administration was hoping to facilitate additional peace treaties…  In the meantime, the perennially bad relations between the two Ba’athist parties governing Syria and Iraq had only worsened amid charges of interference in each other’s internal politics.  Through its willingness to oppose Syria’s Israeli and Iraqi nemeses, Iran’s revolution altered the Middle East’s political configuration.  The Islamic Republic’s embrace of anti-Americanism as a core element of its foreign policy distanced Tehran not only from the United States but also from the conservative Arab states, which were wary of Syria.  In one fell swoop, the Middle East’s balance of power changed, leading Damascus to escape its insularity and become a more critical player in Arab politics.

For an Islamic Republic determined to both wage war against Iraq and pursue a harsher policy toward Israel, the alliance with Syria proved particularly valuable.  The Asad regime’s willingness to supply arms to Tehran came at a time when the American-led embargo was depleting Iran’s arsenal.  Moreover, an alignment with an Arab state fractured the wall of Arab solidarity and diminished Saddam’s ability to portray his war as a contest between Arabs and Persians.  The alliance also offered Iran a reach beyond its borders, as Tehran suddenly had access to Lebanon and could more vigorously pursue its anti-Israel campaign.  In perverse manner, in order for Iran to wage its Islamist crusade against Israel and displace Saddam’s regime, it had to forge a relationship with a state whose internal composition must have been anathema to the mullahs.

The ensuing association with Syria reflected the Islamic Republic’s propensity to prioritize its ideological antagonisms.  The contradictions between an Islamist regime predicating its policy on pristine religious values and a secular, Ba’athist state became starkly evident during the 1982 rebellion in the city of Hamah, when Asad viciously decimated his fundamentalist opposition…Iran’s response to the massacre was to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood “as a gang carrying out the Camp David conspiracy against Syria.”  A theocratic state ostensibly devoted to propagating its divine message not only stood by as fellow fundamentalists were annihilated but offered words of support to the offending regime as well.  …this was a question of priority.   Waging war again Iraq and weakening Israel ranked higher than the fate of Syria’s beleaguered Islamists.

The strategic tensions underlying the Syria-Iran alliance became evident in Iraq.  For Iran, the alliance proved nothing but beneficial.  Beyond gaining an important source of weaponry, Syria’s closure of Iraq’s oil pipeline, which traversed its territory, inflicted an economic penalty on Baghdad.  The support of a major Arab nationalist state allowed some of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms to hedge and not sever their ties to Tehran…It is arguable that, without the Arab cover provided by Damascus, these sheikdoms could not have disregarded the nearly uniform Arab consensus for isolation of Tehran.  As Rafsanjani recalled with gratitude, Asad did not disassociate “himself from a country that advocated Islam because this country is not an Arab country.”

As the war dragged on, the Syrian regime found it had to reconsider its approach to its problematic ally.  In Damascus, the initial justification for supporting Iran was that Saddam’s invasion had diverted the resources of an important Arab country from the main struggle against Israel.  Thus, Baghdad’s opportunistic designs were actually damaging the Arabs and constituted yet another defection from the main anti-Israeli cause.  Saddam’s invasion was even more egregious give that the state he targeted was willing to devote its national power to battling Israel.  It was Saddam who had destroyed the “eastern front” and prevented both Iran and Iraq from concentrating their resources on Jerusalem.  Beyond such assertions, Syria sought to further rationalize its alliance by suggesting that its close ties to the Islamic Republic gave it sufficient credibility to mediate the conflict and even impose restraint on the theocracy.

Syria’s claims became more difficult to justify as Iran appeared dogmatic in its pursuit of the war and seemed prone to expand the conflict into the Persian Gulf.  As a champion of Arab nationalism, Damascus could ill afford a prolonged alliance with a country that disregarded Arab sensibilities and was determined to dispatch its armies into Iraq and disrupt the Gulf commerce…Moreover, Asad’s reliance on aid from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait meant that he could not always ignore the estrangement of the oil-rich sheikdoms…The tensions between supporting Iran and sustaining a place in the Arab system led Damascus to oppose certain Iranian measures.  After 1982, when Iran successfully evicted Iraq from its territory and took the offensive, Syria disapproved of extending the war to the Gulf states and went so far as to promise to support Kuwait against Iranian aggression.  By the mid-1980s, Syria had come to oppose Iran’s appropriation of Arab lands, a policy that was articulated in a variety of Arab summits and emphasized to Iranian emissaries.  Had the war continued beyond 1988 or had Iran triumphed in the conflict, Asad might have been forced to make some fundamental choices and reassess his ties to the Islamic Republic…

…Nonetheless, the fact that the alliance has persisted for so long should not surprise us.  Indeed, it reflects the Middle East’s basic inability to resolve its conflicts, the continuance of which often serves Iran’s larger strategic ends…

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. Professor Lim’s columns are usually up on Mondays, but our lovely blog editor is on vacation, so please excuse our tardiness this week. In the article below he looks at Obama and the issue of abortion. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The pro-lifers single-mindedly protesting President Barack Obama’s receipt of an honorary degree from Notre Dame University have reduced the Catholic Catechism to a single issue. And it is precisely in the single-mindedness of such pro-life proponents that it can be showed that their concern is not, ultimately, about life.

The President is on the right side of Catholicism on immigration and the environment, just as previous Presidents Notre Dame has honored have been on the wrong side of the Church on issues like capital punishment and support for nuclear weapons. To pick on the current president is to pick one particular issue as the litmus test of a person’s contribution to advancing human excellence (the qualification for a honorary degree).

That is myopic, but worse still, many pro-lifers proffer their arguments in bad faith, or so Professor Sonu Bedi at Dartmouth argues (28:15 onwards). If opponents of abortion want to make the State compel women to carry their fetuses to term, Sonu Bedi compellingly asks: why don’t pro-lifers also demand that the State compels citizens who are uniquely situated to save a particular life to do so?

The latter are what Bedi calls “forced samaritan laws.” As Judith Jarvis Thomson made clear decades ago, a law prohibiting abortion is a forced samaritan law, because a woman considering abortion would be told by the State that she must perform her duty of preserving a life.

Fair enough. Perhaps we should legislate such a world, but the truth is we have not, and are not even trying. In the Common Law of the US, there is, in general, no duty to rescue. That is to say, no person can be held liable for doing nothing while another person’s life is in peril. In Vermont, one can be slapped with a $100 fine if one is uniquely positioned to save a life but fails to do so. Consider the glaring asymmetry of the law: $100 versus $2000-5000 in Texas if a woman is found to have undergone an illegal abortion.

Ah, but as the rejoinder goes, perhaps a woman has consented to sex and perhaps that is why she has a special duty to the child she helped create, and not so for the random passer-by who chooses not to save a drowning child. OK, (assuming consenting to sex is the same as consenting to procreation) why don’t we talk about laws alongside abortion laws that will also exact commensurate obligations on the father who also consented to the sexual intercourse that begot the child? Why are we so quick to pin consent and duty squarely on the woman seeking an abortion? Pro-lifers who seek laws against abortion but not laws for forced samaritanism are too quick to dismiss the immense physical and emotional costs of child-bearing that women have silently borne for millennia. And if they care only about protecting one type of life (and burdening only one group of people), then surely they are not, paradoxically, truly concerned about life but about something else, such as the preservation of traditional roles in the family.

If we value life, then we should dedicate our lobbying energy to saving any life writ large that is in imminent peril, and not merely the life in the womb. The burden of being pro-life should be equally born by all. Not only by women. If we are to be pro-life, then let us be pro-all-life, not just those lives that only women are uniquely privileged/burdened to save.

Readers in the UK might have recently seen ‘The Narnia Code‘, a documentary on BBC1 featuring OUP author Michael Ward and his decoding of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The post below is an extract from Michael’s book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, which talks about the more famous explanation of the stories in Christological terms, and explains why he thinks this isn’t the correct decoding.

You can watch ‘The Narnia Code’ via the BBC iPlayer (until the end of this Thursday) and you can read Michael’s previous OUPblog posts here and here.

Could it be its Christological dimension that provides the key to the Narniad’s unity? In a letter to a young girl named Anne Jenkins, Lewis wrote, ‘the whole Narnian story is about Christ’; and in The Horse and His Boy he makes Shasta observe that Aslan ‘seems to be at the back of all the stories.’ A Christocentric reading has a good deal to recommend it because Aslan, the Christ-figure, is the only character who appears in all seven books. But in the précis of the series which Lewis provides for Anne we are reminded that Aslan, in fact, has definitively Christological roles to play in only three of the seven stories:

The Magician’s Nephew tells the Creation and how evil entered Narnia.
The Lion etc the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Prince Caspian restoration of the true religion after a corruption.
The Horse and His Boy the calling and conversion of a heathen.
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep).
The Silver Chair the continued war against the powers of darkness.
The Last Battle the coming of the Antichrist (the Ape). The end of the
world and the Last Judgement.

Aslan is creator in the Narnian genesis (The Magician’s Nephew); redeemer in the Narnian gospel account (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe); and judge in its version of the apocalypse (The Last Battle). These books make up less than half the sequence. What Christocentric explanation can account for Aslan’s roles in the remaining four books? One might reasonably expect parallels to the annunciation, the nativity, the boyhood, and the ascension of Christ; his sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost might receive a treatment. That would be the natural way of proceeding if Lewis was intending to produce a Christological series. Instead, Aslan in these other four books represents no particular Christological office or stage of Christ’s incarnation or the missio dei. His appearances are very various and irregular: he is mistaken for two lions in The Horse and His Boy; he flies in a sunbeam in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’; he enters the story among dancing trees in Prince Caspian; and in The Silver Chair he does not appear bodily within Narnia at all, but is confined to his own high country above the clouds. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, Christologically speaking, for these stories.

Perhaps we should simply bite our critical tongues and accept this trilogyplus-quartet analysis. Chad Walsh is content to do so. He identifies the three ‘Biblical’ books and categorises the others as taking place within ‘Act IV’ of the Narnian drama, between the resurrection of Aslan and the end of the world. Aslan’s role in these other four books, Walsh argues, is ‘relatively marginal.’ But it is not marginal. In every one of these four books Aslan is mentioned earlier than in either The Lion or The Magician’s Nephew; his first appearance and his first words occur earlier in these four books than in either The Lion or The Last Battle; and his overall involvement in these stories is at least as substantial as in the trio of books dealing with what Walsh calls ‘grand, cosmic deeds.’ And if heilsgeschichte is meant to be our interpretative grid, why is there no indication that Aslan’s mode of appearance in The Lion—where he is ‘incarnate’—is any different from his appearances elsewhere, which would be the Narnian equivalent of Christophanies? Should we not expect his appearances in ‘Act IV’ to relate to Church history in some way? Should we not at least expect his appearances in ‘Act IV’ to betray a family likeness? As it is, Aslan’s roles in these stories show no uniform features nor any discernible link to particular historical or prophesied events between Christ’s ascension and second coming. Rather than presenting his theory as ‘3+4,’ Walsh ought to admit it is ‘3+1+1+1+1.’

In short, we have to conclude that, if the whole series is ‘about Christ,’ it is so in a way that neither scriptural source material nor the major events of salvation history can make sense of.

We find ourselves in this dead-end as a result of attaching too much significance to Lewis’s letter to Anne Jenkins. The summaries given there are so brief and general as to be of little explanatory use. For instance, to say that The Dawn Treader is concerned with ‘the spiritual life’ does almost nothing to distinguish it from any of the other six books. This letter is best understood as an example of Lewis’s avuncular and pastoral interest in one small child (one among hundreds to whom he wrote over the years); it is not a serious piece of literary self-disclosure. Anne is being given a broad and breezy welcome to the series, not a key to its internal workings.

This is not to imply that Aslan is not the most important character in the series, nor is it to deny that Lewis had serious Christological purposes at heart: we will look at those purposes later in this book. However, it is to say that, in attempting to find the Narniad’s unity, we must move away from the assumption that the Christology it displays is chiefly based on biblical passages that have been reimagined for the purposes of a ‘suppositional’ world. Since four out of the seven stories do not accord with such a scheme, plainly it is not the solution to the problem of composition.

Setting aside Lewis’s remarks to Anne Jenkins, we bring forward for examination his comments to Charles Wrong, who had been his pupil in the 1930s, to whom he indicated that there was another governing theme, apparently connected not with Christology, but with numerology. (This I take as the first of the two recorded hints Lewis dropped about the secret.) According to Wrong, Lewis ‘happened to have had an idea that he wanted to try out, and by now, having worked it out to the full, he did not plan to write any more.’ Wrong reports Lewis as adding, ‘I had to write three volumes, of course, or seven, or nine. Those are the magic numbers.’

This evidence is highly intriguing. If Lewis felt he ‘had to write’ at least three books (in order to make a magic number), what did he mean when he told Laurence Krieg that, at the outset, he did not know that he was going to write more than one book? And if his idea had been worked out ‘to the full’ after seven books, why did he mention to Wrong the number three and the number nine?

I suspect that Lewis was deflecting Wrong from asking questions about this ‘idea’ that originally issued in a single story but that, upon further reflection, required seven outworkings for its completion. When writing about the Chronicles in public he took care never to draw attention to such numerological considerations. For instance, in an article in The New York Times Book Review, he said that the imaginative process began with seeing pictures in his mind’s eye (a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion), pictures that gradually resolved themselves into a story with a particular form. That was what ‘the Author’ in him did. Then ‘the Man’ set to work and gave to this form the desired Christian orientation. But he says nothing about needing at least three volumes.

Similarly, in an article for the Junior Section of the Radio Times, he reveals that the one thing he is sure of is that the Chronicles ‘began with seeing pictures in my head,’ but he makes no reference to an idea that might require to be expressed, say, ninefold. Instead, rather curiously, he tells his young audience, ‘you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books.’ Then, because this statement has an obvious implication, he straightaway goes on to add: ‘This is not because they mean to tell lies. It is because a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it.’

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at presidents and church. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John’s Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public already believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas’ new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fueled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn’t even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshiping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John’s as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

Andrew R. Murphy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  His most recent book, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment From New England to 9/11 reveals how Americans’ powerful attachment to an idealized past continue to shape public life. America’s supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in our political and religious rhetoric.  In the post below Murphy reveals how this theme is never far from forefront in America.

Viewers tuning in to “Larry King Live” on Monday night, March 23, witnessed an intriguing sight. There was Meghan McCain, daughter of last year’s Republican nominee for president, telling Larry King that, on cultural issues, there is “a very big generation gap between me and my father”:

I consider myself a progressive Republican. I am liberal on social issues. And I think that the party is at a place where social issues shouldn’t be the issues that define the party. And I have taken heat, but in fairness to me, I am a different generation than the people that are giving me heat. I’m 24 years old. I’m not in my 40s, I’m not in my 50s and older….We have a very big generation gap between me and my father….I believe in gay marriage. … I personally am pro-life, but I’m not going to judge someone that’s pro-choice. It is not my place to judge other people and what they do with their body.

The whole thrust of this appearance, on the face of it, would seem to reinforce a common piece of conventional wisdom in American politics: the 2008 presidential election illustrated that the nation was tired of the divisive cultural politics of the Christian Right, and wanted to move beyond arguing over the 1960s and come together to face our common economic challenges; the Christian Right is populated by dinosaurs (James Dobson, Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell) who are increasingly out of touch with ordinary, younger Americans; the real issues of 2009 and beyond will be economic ones that don’t lend themselves easily to moralism or divisive culture wars.

Now this may be true. But just a day after Meghan McCain’s appearance with Larry King, when it seemed that all the nation’s news was economic news – with round-the-clock coverage of the AIG bonuses, “toxic assets,” ballooning deficits, and the shaky tenure of Treasury Secretary Geithner – the culture wars roared back into the headlines. A glance at the New York Times in the past several days reveals that the hot-button issues that drove the rise of the Christian Right during the 1970s and 1980s, and fueled conservative talk-radio during the 1990s – issues of culture, religion, and sexuality – remain with us, and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

The abortion issue showed up on the front page headline of the March 24, 2009, New York Times: “Morning-After Pill for Younger Women.” Federal judge Edward Korman – nominated to the bench by none other than Ronald Reagan! – ruled that the Food and Drug Administration had given in to political pressure in 2006, when it set the minimum age for women to receive the Plan B “morning after” birth control pill at 18. Korman ordered the FDA to make the pill available, without a prescription, to women as young as 17. Not surprisingly, the ruling was hailed by women’s rights groups, and condemned by social conservatives. Chris Gacek, Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs at the Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs, criticized the judge for having “accepted lock, stock, and barrel all of the claims of a political ideology promoting sexual license for teens.” (The Council’s mission statement states that “God is the author of life, liberty, and the family” and that the Council “promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.”)

Then came news that – while the nation waits for the California Supreme Court’s ruling on that state’s recently-passed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the state – the Vermont State Senate had voted (and voted 26-4, at that) to legalize same-sex marriage. Vermont had already achieved a singular role in the history of gay rights in America, as in 2000 it was the first state to approve civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. That step, however, was taken in response to a court order; yesterday’s action represented the overwhelming vote of a democratically-elected branch of state government, and not the decree of the judicial branch. Passage in the Vermont House also seem likely, though the bill’s prospects with the state’s governor – who supports civil unions, but not gay marriage – are less certain. (According to CNN, if the bill becomes law, Vermont will become the first state to legalize same-sex marriage without being forced to do so by the courts.)

Although there was a specific historical context for the emergence of the Christian Right – it arose in reaction to the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s – its political rhetoric and religious politics reflect far deeper and longstanding dynamics in American history. Both the lions of the Christian Right during its heyday in the 1980s (Robertson, Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Dobson) as well its more recent leaders (Gary Bauer, David Barton, Tony Perkins) look back to a pre-1960s cultural consensus, and tell a powerful political story about a prodigal nation, once richly blessed, that has squandered God’s blessing by embracing a national morality of secular humanism, sexual liberation and gay rights, radical individualism and feminism, and abortion on demand. This nostalgia for a time when (Christian) religion enjoyed a more dominant public role frames the Christian Right agenda even into the Obama years: restoring public school prayer, for example, or opposing same-sex marriage, or reimposing restrictions on abortion. Ralph Reed, who directed the Christian Coalition during much of the 1990s, once described the Coalition’s political vision of the American future as follows:

America would look much as it did for most of the first two centuries of its existence, before the social dislocation caused by Vietnam, the sexual revolution, Watergate, and the explosion of the welfare state. Our nation would once again be ascendant, self-confident, proud, and morally strong. Government would be strong, the citizenry virtuous, and mediating institutions such as churches and voluntary organizations would carry out many of the functions currently relegated to the bureaucracy.

Although the nation’s attention might seem fixed on the massive economic downturn right now, we should never underestimate the power nostalgic and moralizing laments for “the way things used to be.” Indeed, Americans have been lamenting their immoral society, and pining for a lost Golden Age, for as long as there have been Americans.

Here in the UK we recently put together a fun little free book to promote the Very Short Introductions called Very Short Answers to Very Big Questions. In it, we asked some weighty questions like How modern is China? Is euthanasia murder? Is privacy a fundamental human right? Is globalization slowing down?

In the post below, I’ve reprinted the answer to the question ‘Why are more women active in the Christian Church than men?’. The answer comes from Linda Woodhead and her book Christianity: A Very Short Introduction.

Christianity has much to offer women. Women benefit in two ways: first, by the restraint that appeal to Christian values may place on the unbridled exercise of male power; and second, by the recognition and affirmation of the value of typically feminine roles, virtues, and dispositions.

Even though the New Testament contains no unambiguous endorsement of female equality, and certainly offers no support to female dominance, there are hints and glimmers of a ‘kingdom’ in which things could be different. Jesus not only ministers amongst and with women, he teaches that humility, poverty of spirit, and sincere devotion are more important than worldly power or priestly status. He speaks of a love whose exercise knows no limits or distinctions, a love which, as Paul puts it, ‘is patient and kind . . . not jealous or boastful . . . not arrogant or rude . . . does not insist on its own way . . . ’. Such a message could inspire and empower those whose daily work and care were often ascribed little economic or cultural, let alone spiritual, value.

Christianity could also offer women congenial social space. In theory at least, the church community is bound only by ties of love – love for one another and for the God whose Son gives His life for His church. The resonance with the ethos of the family is striking, and it is no coincidence that the image of the family should be so central to ecclesiastical self-understanding (the church as the ‘family of God’). Though this image could be used to reinforce the rule of fathers, it could also have profound significance for those whose daily lives were taken up with the unrewarded tasks of loving, caring, and sacrificing for others. Women with children have much to gain from an institution like the church that supports the family, exalts the domestic role, offers support and companionship in the task of rearing and educating children, and, once children have left home, can find other caring roles for women to perform. In any case, women seem more inclined than men to join a community for the good of community and relationship alone, irrespective of any other roles or privileges that membership might bring.

What is more, for much of Christian history the church has been the only public space that women have been allowed to occupy besides the home – certainly the only one that wives and daughters might be allowed to attend independent of husbands and fathers. The later medieval period saw a flourishing of female piety, still evident in the rich flowering of feminized art and sculpture that occurred at that time, in which images of female saints abound. Despite Protestantism’s hostility to such images, some post-Reformation churches offered women new opportunities for education, literacy, and even public ministry. In the 19th century, missionary work and charitable activities offered women an outlet for energies and ambitions that would otherwise have been frustrated. Though the avowed aim of (for example) female-led temperance movements might be to curb the consumption of alcohol, the deeper concern was often to bridle men and machismo – male spending, male sexuality, and male violence. Even though it could not be made explicit, such organizations sometimes harboured elements of a feminist agenda. Churchmen might have become worried about such activities, but it was hard to control women who claimed to be carrying out the injunctions of Christ. Though the scriptures had more often been used to justify male control of women, it was possible for the tables to be turned.

But even if Christianity can attract women by affirming feminine virtue and providing congenial social space and tools of resistance to masculine domination, does not its close association of masculinity and divinity have the opposite effect? Not necessarily. In fact, women may be more attracted to the worship of a male God and saviour than men, and the reason is not hard to see. If society encourages women to love, serve, obey, and even worship men, then it is not difficult to transfer such attitudes to a male God – or for devotion to a male God to reinforce such behaviours. Indeed, in so far as society reinforces heterosexuality, it is much more natural for a woman to offer intense, emotional devotion to a male deity than for a man to do the same. Whilst men may have no difficulty in bowing down before the power, majesty, and fatherly authority of God, they are less likely than women to ‘give their hearts to Jesus’ or enter into an intense, emotional relationship with him. ‘Brides of Christ’ would surrender to Christ the heavenly bridegroom and feel themselves melting into him. Such imagery is not confined to the past. In many Biblical and Charismatic Christian circles today women still engage in romance with Christ, and still affirm – to quote one Evangelical ‘bride’ – that ‘Jesus alone understands me, forgives me and loves me’.

Such erotic piety may have different social and personal implications. It may reinforce patriarchal norms and encourage women to accept forms of male domination to which they would not otherwise be willing to submit. It may offer women a means of coping with such domination, but prevent them from questioning the social order of which it is a part. Or it may equip them with an effective means of resisting male domination and constructing different social arrangements. In Catholicism, for example, ‘brides of Christ’ could – and still can – escape earthly marriage altogether by entering a convent where they gather with like-minded women and may attain considerable independence from men.

In the context of patriarchal societies, Christianity may therefore appeal to women because of its masculine bias, rather than in spite of it. Christianity may have much to offer women who wish to turn their backs on power and embrace the virtues of love, humility, powerlessness, and self-sacrifice. But it also has a considerable amount to offer those who want some share in such power. For if power is concentrated in a male God and His church, there is much more to be gained by joining it than by rejecting it. Not only could Christian women claim the protection of the Almighty Father God, they could also enter into a relationship with Him that was every bit as close and intense as that enjoyed by a man. By such means a handful of women in Christian history have claimed the right to do theology, to speak for themselves, even to command kings and popes; in the societies in which they lived it is hard to imagine any other route by which they could have done so.