Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Louis René Beres
According to ancient Jewish tradition traced back to the time of Isaiah, the world rests upon thirty-six just men — the Lamed-Vov. For these men who have been chosen and must remain unknown even to themselves, the spectacle of the world is insufferable beyond description. Eternally inconsolable at the extent of human pain and woe, so goes the Hasidic tale, they can never even expect a single moment of real tranquility.
By Jason Rosenhouse
In more than a decade of socializing with creationists and other religious fundamentalists, I frequently encountered blinkered arguments about mathematics. This attack on set theory, however, was new to me. I cannot even imagine why anyone would think set theory is relevant to discussions of whether it is man or God who creates math. Perhaps the problem is that set theorists often speak a bit casually about infinity, which some people think is tantamount to discussing God. Alas, this line of criticism is too blinkered to take seriously.
By John Hale
John Milton wrote his systematic theology, De Doctrina Christiana, his “dearest possession,” in Latin — a usual choice for a theological work, but with many unusual aspects. Language was a choice, not a foregone conclusion. Continental theologians could be rendered into English (for instance, the work by Johannes Wolleb).
By Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen
This fall about ten million undergraduate students will be heading back to America’s 2500 four-year colleges and universities, and they will be attending schools that are significantly more attuned to religion than they were ten or twenty or thirty years ago. Today’s students encounter religion in a wide variety of forms and settings, both on campus and off.
By David Biale
Two years ago, I agreed to serve as the head of an international team of nine scholars from the US, UK, Poland and Israel who are attempting to write a history of Hasidism, the eighteenth-century Eastern European pietistic movement that remains an important force in the Orthodox Jewish world today. I was perhaps not the obvious choice for this role: although I’ve written several articles and book chapters on Hasidism, it has not been my main area of research.
By William D. Romanowski
When Protestant evangelicals opened a Hollywood front in the late twentieth-century “culture wars,” the result was an odd mixture of moral reproach and commercialization of religion. To no avail, they famously protested MCA/Universal over The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and then joined conservative Catholics — outraged over the movie Priest (1995) — in a boycott of the Walt Disney Company, the world’s largest provider of family entertainment.
It is trite to say that one’s pet subject is interdisciplinary. These days what subject isn’t? The prostate? But myth really is interdisciplinary. For there is no study of myth as myth, the way, by contrast, there is said to be the study of literature as literature or of religion as religion. Myth is studied by other disciplines, above all by sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy, literature, and religious studies.
By Richard Payne
In a previous post, we argued that the geo-political categories commonly employed in both popular and academic representations of Buddhism are problematic. The problems were grouped into rhetorical and lexical; the rhetorical consequences having been considered there, we now turn to the lexical. Specifically, the lexical distinction between mass nouns and count nouns clarifies how thinking about the subject of study logically (and implicitly) follow from ways of talking about that subject.
By Richard Payne
The categorization of Buddhism along geo-political lines is perhaps the most common organizing principle today. It also tends to be accepted uncritically. Thus we find, without explanation, such expressions as “Indian Buddhism,” “Tibetan Buddhism,” “Chinese Buddhism,” “Burmese Buddhism,” and so on.
By Ananda Rose
The subject of illegal immigration continues to spark passionate debate across the nation, and as the 2012 election heats up, the issue can be expected to take a central role on the political stage. In a highly unusual turn of events, many religious groups — otherwise divided on social issues, such as gay marriage or abortion — have found themselves aligned in their support of immigrant rights, including brokering pathways to legality for the undocumented.
Intellectual debates which command rock-star levels of mass appeal are rare, to say the least – but ‘religion versus science’ can still pull in the crowds like the best of the old stadium bands. It goes without saying that an Oxford debate between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins in February this year was packed out on the day, but it’s now also currently near 30,000 hits on YouTube.
Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. There is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious “damn,” to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. In his latest book, historian and award-winning commentator William Romanowski explores the complicated and remarkable relationship between Protestants and the American film industry. In it he reveals the surprising story of how mainline church leaders opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience.
By Daniel Philpott
What is the meaning of justice in the wake of massive injustices? This question confronts the countries of the Arab Spring, just as it confronted tens of countries emerging from war and dictatorship over the past generation. How the Arab Spring countries address the evils of yesterday affects their prospects for peace and democracy tomorrow. Today only Tunisia is reasonably stable.
By Samuel Brown
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the after-effects of a highly divisive campaign against gay marriage in California have brought intense media scrutiny to the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the attention has been salutary: the academic study of Mormonism is finally taking off, and respected presses are publishing important new books on Mormonism.
By F. E. Peters
The Imitatio Christi, composed by the German monk Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471), is a classic of Christian spirituality, widely read and translated from Latin into a variety of languages. It is not of course an instructional manual for the imitation of Christ — how does one imitate the Son of God? — nor Jesus of Nazareth, the man born of woman who was revealed to be the Son of God. Kempis’ famous work has little to do with the Jesus of the Gospels and more to do with Aristotle and the theology faculty at the University of Paris (he disapproved) and the Fathers of the Desert in early Christian Egypt (he approved, with reservations; they were a bit excessive in their asceticism).
This Day in World History
After months of standoff between India’s government and Sikh dissidents, the Indian army attacked those dissidents who had taken refuge in the holiest Sikh shrine — the Golden Temple, in Amritsar, India — on June 6, 1984. The fighting left hundreds dead and more captured. The attack also enraged many Sikhs across India, which would have fatal consequences for Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had ordered the assault.