You are here: Home / Archives for Social Sciences / Religion

1950s blast from the past: Carl Jung’s message to Mr. Harrison at the New Republic newspaper is up for auction

June 1, 2013 by

Carl Jung, author of Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (From Vols. 10 and 18, Collected Works), claimed in a letter to  Mr. Harrison (an editor at the New Republic) that unidentified flying objects do exist. The letter was originally written in 1957 and just recently went up for auction at Swann Auction Galleries.  Mr. Harrison wrote a letter to Jung first, asking him to write a UFO article for the New Republic magazine for the launch of his book. The message up for auction appears to be a response to Mr. Harrison’s proposal.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jung was primarily interested in the psychological aspects of UFOs rather than collecting physical evidence that they exist. His research was centered around how the high number of UFO sightings might have been a societal response to the pressures of the 1950s.  Whether or not these mysterious objects are extraterrestials from another galaxy or some other alien construct remains up for debate. One thing, however, was certain in Jung’s mind: People didn’t imagine the mysterious objects in the skies; They had simply begun to take notice of the physical entities traversing the outer limits of the atmosphere.

Read more about Jung’s UFO letter here: http://www.openminds.tv/carl-jung-ufo-letter-up-for-auction-1025/

Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. (From Vols. 10 and 18, Collected Works)
C. G. Jung 

“In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets…. Even people who would never have thought that a religious problem could be a serious matter that concerned them personally are beginning to ask themselves fundamental questions. Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by `visions,’ by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.”–C. G. Jung, in Flying Saucers

Jung’s primary concern in Flying Saucers is not with the reality or unreality of UFOs but with their psychic aspect. Rather than speculate about their possible nature and extraterrestrial origin as alleged spacecraft, he asks what it may signify that these phenomena, whether real or imagined, are seen in such numbers just at a time when humankind is menaced as never before in history. The UFOs represent, in Jung’s phrase, “a modern myth.”

 

Filed Under: Psychology, Religion, Social Sciences, Spirit, Twitter

Reflections on Kierkegaard

May 8, 2013 by

Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary makes you think back and realize that maybe you treated your last ex perfectly fine. At least you didn’t toy with their emotions for the fun of it- or maybe you did, in which case: no judgment. M.G Piety on the Piety on Kierkegaard blog would say that The Seducer’s Diary incited different thoughts on the famed philosopher.

The new edition of The Seducer’s Diary brought back memories of years past in which Piety wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books about John Updike’s review of The Seducer’s Diary and statement that Kierkegaard had visited a brothel and subsequently fathered a child. For a man who believed that life had three stages with the first being the aesthetic- the stage which basically condemns boredom as an ultimate evil- I wouldn’t really put it past him. Bored? Go to a brothel, have some fun, emerge and go on to stage two of life: the ethical.

Check out all the links and decide for yourself!

 

“In the vast literature of love, The Seducer’s Diary is an intricate curiosity–a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast,” observes John Updike in his foreword to Søren Kierkegaard’s narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard’s first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of “indirect communication.” The Seducer’s Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard’s attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her.

Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

Filed Under: Philosophy, Religion, Twitter

Discovering Descartes

April 22, 2013 by

Descartes famously wrote “I am, I exist” and “I think, therefore I am.” But who was he? Kevin Hart of The Australian explores who the man behind these words was and the legacy that he left as described in Steven Nadler’s new book The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes.

Capturing the ‘am’ of a great thinker

MANY people will be familiar with the most familiar image of French philosopher Rene Descartes. It depicts the head and shoulders of a middle-aged man with long dark hair, a moustache and a small beard under his lip.

He has a starched white collar that is folded over a black coat in the manner of 17th-century Dutch burghers. A strong aquiline nose and eyes with lids that seem about to cover them mark a face that gazes out at us a little quizzically.

Frans Hals, the great Dutch painter, once had Descartes sit for him. Was the portrait lost? Or did he simply do something small and quick, a portrait composed of short, broad strokes of paint applied roughly? We do not know for sure about a lost, full portrait, but we know the small one because it hangs in a museum in Copenhagen, and has been copied many times.

Steven Nadler’s charming introduction to Descartes begins with an evocation of Hals’s portrait of the philosopher, and the whole book is itself an intimate portrait of the man and his times. More exactly, it tells the story of how the portrait came to be painted.

[Read the complete article at The Australian]

Filed Under: Art and Architecture, European History, Philosophy, Religion, Twitter

Fred Borsch to speak at Nassau Presbyterian in Princeton, April 21st

April 16, 2013 by

j9684[1]Join the adult education program at Nassau Presbyterian in Princeton, NJ on Sunday, April 21, for a wonderful program with Fred Borsch. Borsch will give a talk titled “A Brief History of Religious Pluralism at Princeton and Other Universities”.

Borsch is currently the Chair of Anglican Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia but from 1981 to 1988, he was dean of the chapel at Princeton University. In this position he observed many religious shifts on campus first-hand which he documents in his recent book Keeping Faith at Princeton: A Brief History of Religious Pluralism at Princeton and Other Universities.

The program convenes at 9:15 in the Assembly Room at the church.

Nassau Presbyterian

61 Nassau Street

Princeton, NJ

Filed Under: Events, Princeton, Religion, Twitter

‘Keeping Faith at Princeton’ Event in Princeton

April 10, 2013 by

Are you in the Princeton area? Frederick Borsch will be giving a talk at Nassau Presbyterian Church on his book Keeping Faith at Princeton: A Brief History of Religious Pluralism at Princeton and Other Universities on Sunday, April 21st at 9:15 am.

For more information about the event, visit www.nassauchurch.org.

4-10 Borsch_KeepingFaithIn 1981, Frederick Houk Borsch returned to Princeton University, his alma mater, to serve as dean of the chapel at the Ivy League school. In Keeping Faith at Princeton, Borsch tells the story of Princeton’s journey from its founding in 1746 as a college for Presbyterian ministers to the religiously diverse institution it is today. He sets this landmark narrative history against the backdrop of his own quest for spiritual illumination, first as a student at Princeton in the 1950s and later as campus minister amid the turmoil and uncertainty of 1980s America.

Borsch traces how the trauma of the Depression and two world wars challenged the idea of progress through education and religion–the very idea on which Princeton was founded. Even as the numbers of students gaining access to higher education grew exponentially after World War II, student demographics at Princeton and other elite schools remained all male, predominantly white, and Protestant. Then came the 1960s. Campuses across America became battlegrounds for the antiwar movement, civil rights, and gender equality. By the dawn of the Reagan era, women and blacks were being admitted to Princeton. So were greater numbers of Jews, Catholics, and others. Borsch gives an electrifying insider’s account of this era of upheaval and great promise.

With warmth, clarity, and penetrating firsthand insights, Keeping Faith at Princeton demonstrates how Princeton and other major American universities learned to promote religious diversity among their students, teachers, and administrators.

Frederick Houk Borsch is the Chair of Anglican Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia and was Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles. His many books include The Spirit Searches Everything: Keeping Life’s Questions. From 1981 to 1988, he was dean of the chapel at Princeton University.

 

Filed Under: Events, Religion, Twitter

Peter Brown author of ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ Profiled in The Chronicle

March 18, 2013 by

j9807[1]Princeton author Peter Brown is profiled in The Chronicle for his impressive work surrounding ancient Rome and Christianity, which he most recently covered in his book Through the Eye of a Needle. Brown is an accomplished historian who is “deservedly famous” for his originality and style. Critics hailed Through the Eye of a Needle and it won numerous awards including the 2012 R. R. Hawkins Award through the Association of American Publishers, the 2012 PROSE Award- Classics & Ancient History through the Association of American Publishers, and the 2012 PROSE Award- Humanities also through the Association of American Publishers.

Read the profile below.

Roman Yeoman

By Peter Monaghan

Historians and classicists considered the last centuries of the Roman Empire an era of obscurity and decline until Peter Brown led a generation of scholars in illuminating them.

From Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, until Brown’s first books, in the 1960s, the period from the third century AD to about the eighth, when Christianity thrived in the barbarian kingdoms that swept Rome away, was commonly conceived as an auxiliary Later Roman Empire and even as the Dark Ages. Now, thanks in large part to Brown, those centuries are Late Antiquity, an acknowledgment that Western civilization did, indeed, continue to advance.

With his latest book, the Irish-born Brown, now an emeritus professor of history at Princeton University, provides more compelling evidence about just what those years were like in the increasingly Christian West, and in particular about the role of wealth as institutional Christianity gained ground. The book, released late last year by Princeton University Press, has a title as imposing as the text—540 pages plus 200 more of notes: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

The title, of course, comes from Jesus’ proverb that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Elsewhere, Jesus tells a wealthy man to “sell what you possess and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.”

That posed a problem for wealthy Christians, and even for those of modest means. Brown’s view is that they resolved it by believing they could save themselves from the depredations of money by making the church flush, so that it could provide welfare in an empire in crisis. That transformed Christianity into a worldly power and with that, writes Brown, began Europe’s progress toward the opulent Roman Catholic culture of the Middle Ages.

Brown shows that the concept of righteous giving, while not fully divesting one’s wealth, took hold after an ascetic attitude lost out to a more earthly one, espoused by St. Augustine. He argued that to renounce all material goods thwarted the church’s worldly work. What came to drive donors’ “daily acts of kindness and generosity,” then, was their deep conviction that any generosity to the church “joined heaven and earth.”

Writing in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Kyle Harper, an associate professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, said that thanks to the “unerring moral balance” Brown brings to his subject, “perhaps for the first time, the problem of wealth in early Christianity is treated in full, with no righteous fury at blatant hypocrisy nor any apology for a church that rationalized its enrichment by feeding the poor.”

“Predictably brilliant,” “a masterpiece,” “vast,” “remarkably readable,” was the estimation of Garry Wills, who has called Brown’s book his favorite of 2012.

Last month the Princeton press received the R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers for “professional and scholarly excellence.” It was not the first honor for Brown; in 2008 he was one of two winners of the Library of Congress’s Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, and shared its $1-million purse.

Continue reading the full article at The Chronicle.

Filed Under: Classics, Religion, Twitter

Book Fact Friday: The Latino Catholic Experience in America

March 15, 2013 by

InMatovina_LatinoCatholicism light of the recent election of Pope Francis, a native Spanish speaker and the first of his position to hail from the Americas, we thought an excerpt on Catholicism among those in the United States with origins in Latin America would pique your interest.

FACT: “Catholics comprise the largest religious group in the United States, encompassing nearly a fourth of all U.S. residents. Hispanics constitute more than a third of U.S. Catholics. They are the reason why Catholicism is holding its own relative to other religions in the United States. According to researchers of the American Religious Identification Survey, without the ever-growing number of Latinos in this country, the U.S. Catholic population would be declining at a rate similar to mainline Protestant groups. And given the relative youthfulness of the Latino community, Hispanic Catholics will continue to represent an increasing percentage of U.S. Catholics over time. They already comprise more than half of U.S. Catholics under the age of twenty-five and more than three-fourths of Catholics under eighteen in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Robert Putnam and David Campbell succinctly sum up these demographics in their much-discussed 2010 study about the state of American religion, avowing that the Catholic Church in the United States ‘is on its way to becoming a majority-Latino institution.’”
—Timothy Matovina in Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church

Read chapter one here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9545.pdf

Most histories of Catholicism in the United States focus on the experience of Euro-American Catholics, whose views on such concerns as church reform, social issues, and sexual ethics have dominated public debates. Latino Catholicism provides a comprehensive overview of the Latino Catholic experience in America from the sixteenth century to today, and offers the most in-depth examination to date of the important ways the U.S. Catholic Church, its evolving Latino majority, and American culture are mutually transforming one another.

Timothy Matovina assesses how Latinos’ attempts to celebrate their faith and bring it to bear on the everyday realities of their lives have shaped parishes, apostolic movements, leadership, ministries, worship, voting patterns, social activism, and much more. At the same time, the lives and faith of Latino Catholics are being dramatically refashioned through the multiple pressures of assimilation, the upsurge of Pentecostal and evangelical religion, other types of religious pluralism, growing secularization, and ongoing controversies over immigration and clergy sexual abuse. Going beyond the widely noted divide between progressive and conservative Catholics, Matovina shows how U.S. Catholicism is being shaped by the rise of a largely working-class Latino population in a church whose leadership at all levels is still predominantly Euro-American and middle class.

Latino Catholicism highlights the vital contributions of Latinos to American religious and social life, demonstrating in particular how their engagement with the U.S. cultural milieu is the most significant factor behind their ecclesial and societal impact.

Filed Under: Book Fact Friday, History, Latin American Studies, Religion, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , ,

An academic quarrel over the Dead Sea Scrolls leads to jail time

February 20, 2013 by

Battles over scholarship are nothing new. The halls of academia are infamous grounds for feuds between professors and researchers with opposing ideas and theories. Rarely do these disagreements spill outside the campus walls or end up in court, but as the New York Times reports, a recent quarrel over the Dead Sea Scrolls has landed one person in jail.

Rafael Golb has, according to the New York Times article, been convicted of “waging an Internet campaign against his father’s academic rivals, including sending e-mails under a rival professor’s name.”

We recently published a biography of The Dead Sea Scrolls by John J. Collins. Listen in to a recent interview with Fresh Air, or read this quick excerpt from the book to throw some light on the recent news:

 

Rafael Golb

There would be yet another lawsuit relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most bizarre of all.

On November 19, 2010, the New York Times reported on page A24 that Rafael Golb, son of Norman Golb, was convicted in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan of establishing e-mail accounts pretending to be Lawrence Schiffman, and sending messages to university officials in which Schiffman supposedly confessed to plagiarism. Golb, a fifty-year-old real estate lawyer in New York, with a PhD from Harvard, said that the e-mails were merely parodies, but that he believed that Schiffman had plagiarized the work of his father Norman. (Schiffman and the elder Golb disagree on most issues relating to the Scrolls.) Golb had allegedly also sent e-mails in the name of other scholars, and sometimes anonymous e-mails, complaining that exhibitions of the Scrolls did not adequately represent the views of his father. (The father has been consistently and vocally critical of museum exhibits on the Scrolls, in blogs and letters to board members.) The younger Golb was present at the conference in the Blood Center in New York in 1992, when Schiffman had taken the lead in criticizing the work of Wise and Eisenman. His motivation has not been articulated, but it would seem to arise from a concern to defend his father’s views and to discomfit his perceived opponents. At the time of writing he has appealed his conviction.

 

Why the Fury?

Two famous sayings come to mind in rehearsing these disputes. One is Henry Kissinger’s dictum that academic disputes are so bitter because there is so little at stake. The other is Edmund Burke’s judgment on the French revolution: “vanity made the revolution; liberty was only the excuse.”

There can be little doubt that scholarly, and unscholarly, egos played an enormous role in the most heated disputes. Editors who were reluctant to make texts available to other scholars were guarding their position of privilege, even if they honestly believed that open access would lead to the proliferation of nonsense by incompetent headline seekers. Those who pressed most vocally for the release of the scrolls were not free of self-interest, either. There were reputations to be made and standing in the scholarly world to be achieved. Scholars set great store by claims to have been the first to publish something, even though the significance of the achievement may not be universally appreciated. Heated debates sometimes gave rise to personal animosities, and these contributed to some of the most bitter controversies. It should be said, however, that the acrimonious disputes involved only a small number of people at any time. Most scholars in the field have good collegial relations and only a limited appetite for controversy.

 

bookjacket
The Dead Sea Scrolls
A Biography
John J. Collins
Filed Under: Jewish Studies, Religion, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Everyone’s Been Wondering: Why Do We Tolerate Religion?

January 31, 2013 by

1-31 whytolerateblogBy the end of 2012 it seems like everyone was asking themselves the same question- “why do we tolerate religion?” Brian Leiter’s book Why Tolerate Religion? had plenty of folks wondering to themselves why exactly they accept religious justifications for both social stances and legal issues. Leiter had critics reflecting on his various examples of religious preferences through the example of a Sikh boy who carries a ceremonial dagger around his neck to school versus a rural boy who carries a family heirloom dagger and brings it to school. The Sikh boy would have a better chance of being permitted to carry his dagger in comparison to the the rural boy who would probably not only have his confiscated, but he would probably be reprimanded for bringing a weapon to school. Leiter challenges the reader to reflect on why we tolerate religion in such a way that, as Kevin Hartnett says in his blog for the Boston Globe, lets us “think of religious-based objections to homosexuality as deserving of more toleration” than “garden-variety homophobia.”

So why do we tolerate religion? Maybe it’s because we don’t want to look disrespectful for not accepting someone’s religion because surely we would look like a bigot if we were to say, “hey, your god may think it is okay for you to carry around a knife but I value my safety more than I value your beliefs.” In his book, Leiter explains exactly why we tolerate religion.

Check out these articles and reviews on Leiter’s book and join in on the conversation.

Filed Under: Religion, Twitter

Looking Back at 2012 “Through the Eye of a Needle”

December 28, 2012 by

As we come to the end of the holiday season and are almost to the New Year, we take the time to reflect on the magnum opus of the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

2012 has seen reviews of Brown’s important book in the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and in the UK in BBC History Magazine, The Guardian, The Literary Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, to list just a few.

Why the interest in how Christianity and conceptions of wealth changed over a period of a two hundred years a few millenia ago? With ongoing discussions about how much each of us owes society (whether we’re talking holiday gifts or taxes and the so-called fiscal cliff), the issues around giving and our beliefs couldn’t be more timely–and it certainly can’t hurt that Brown is the top scholar to draw connections between the ancient past and today. As Glen W. Bowersock writes in the New Republic:

It is exciting to watch a historian who has already written so extensively on Late Antiquity absorb so much new scholarship, revise his old reviews, and re-imagine the world we thought we knew from him. . . . Through the Eye of a Needle is a tremendous achievement, even for a scholar who has already achieved so much. Its range is as vast as its originality, and readers will find everywhere the kinds of memorable aperçus and turns of phrase for which its author is deservedly famous. . . . There can be no doubt that we are in the presence of a historian and teacher of genius.

In his piece “A Masterpiece on the Rise of Christianity” in the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills (who also selected the title as his book of the year in the Chicago Tribune) says:

To compare it with earlier surveys of this period is to move from the X-ray to the cinema….Every page is full of information and argument, and savoring one’s way through the book is an education. It is a privilege to live in an age that could produce such a masterpiece of the historical literature.

Writing in his five-star online review at Christianity Today, Peter Leithart affectionately calls the book “deliriously complicated,” and goes on to write:

As usual, Brown leaves no stone unturned in his search for insight and evidence. … He paints a colorful social setting for early church debates about theology and ethics without becoming reductively sociological, and often overturns accepted mytho-history in the process. He quietly draws on contemporary theory but typically lets ancients speak for themselves because his aim is to introduce us to an exotic world. Through it all, he focuses on the masses of details by treating attitudes, beliefs, and practices about wealth as a ‘stethoscope’ to hear the heartbeat of late Roman and early Christian civilization. … Brown has captured the rough texture of real history. It is testimony to the success of Brown’s subtle, provocative, and beautifully written book.

Across the pond, Tom Holland champions Peter Brown and the book in History Today, BBC History Magazine, and Twitter. In History Today, Holland calls Brown the “greatest living historian of late antiquity.” He goes on in BBC History Magazine:

Through the Eye of a Needle is the crowning masterpiece of Peter Brown, the great historian who virtually invented late antiquity as a periodisation. The book’s theme might seem specialised: the evolution of attitudes towards wealth in the last century and a half of the Roman empire in the west, and the century that followed its collapse. In reality, like so many of Brown’s books, it gives us a world vivid with colour and alive with a symphony of voices. It is not only the most compassionate study of late antiquity in the west ever written, but also a profoundly subtle meditation on our own tempestuous relationship with money.

Meanwhile, Peter Thornemann of the Times Literary Supplement calls it “[O]utstanding. . . . Brown lays before us a vast panorama of the entire culture and society of the late Roman west.” And at The Guardian, Tim Whitmarsh writes,”His sparkling prose, laced with humour and humanity, brings his subjects to life with an uncommon sympathy and feeling for their situation.”

Through the Eye of the Needle has also been selected as a best book of the year at the Institute of Public Affairs blog, among others. Doubtless, the interest in the origins of how society balances faith and finances will continue well into 2013 and we would do well to heed the fascinating lessons of Brown’s much-lauded work.

To learn more about the author and his latest book:

bookjacket

Through the Eye of a Needle
Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
By Peter Brown
Filed Under: Archaeology and Ancient History, Classics, Religion, Twitter

Through the Eye of a Needle and Rethinking the Other in Antiquity are selected as Cambridge Heffer’s Classic Books of 2012

December 11, 2012 by

Through the Eye of a Needle:
Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

Peter Brown

Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven.

“To compare it with earlier surveys of this period is to move from the X-ray to the cinema. . . . Every page is full of information and argument, and savoring one’s way through the book is an education. It is a privilege to live in an age that could produce such a masterpiece of the historical literature.”–Gary Wills, New York Review of Books

 

bookjacketRethinking the Other in Antiquity

Erich S. Gruen

Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome’s embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature.

Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.

“[T]he range of research, and the depth of thought, are extraordinary. Gruen has taken on a massively important subject, and he has brought a genuinely new perspective to the scholarly conversation.”–Emily Wilson, New Republic

Filed Under: Archaeology and Ancient History, Awards, Classics, Prizes, Religion, Twitter

Exclusive Sneak Peek at the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought — West, The

November 28, 2012 by

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought is the first reference to Islamic political thought from the birth of Islam to today. Comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, the Encyclopedia provides much-needed context for understanding contemporary politics in the Islamic world and beyond. In this exclusive excerpt, Professor John R. Bowen of Washington University, visits the various views on Muslim immigration among contemporary scholars:

West, The

Although Muslims have resided in parts of Europe for centuries, and many slaves taken from Africa to North America were Muslims, the question of Islam in the West rose in importance after World War II. European countries encouraged workers from North and West Africa, South Asia, and Turkey to add their labor power to the postwar recovery, and most of those workers were Muslims. By the late 1960s, many of those workers had settled in Europe with their families. Immigration to the United States increased at about the same time, and Muslims, particularly from South Asia, were among those who settled there. Among the new arrivals were many Muslim scholars who offered opinions about how ordinary Muslims were to live religious lives in lands where they were minorities and where not all Islamic religious institutions were available. At the same time, many African American Muslims were turning from the specific teachings of the Nation of Islam toward a more broadly distributed Sunni Islam. Contemporary scholars of diverse origins increasingly provide opinions through broader networks that stretch across the Atlantic and include scholars from non- Western centers of learning. Muslims have posed questions about (1) the legitimacy of participating in Western political institutions and (2) how best to adapt their individual, everyday behavior to their new, non- Islamic environments. One major response has been the call to develop “legal theory for Muslim minorities‘ (flqh al-aqalliyyăt) or a distinct jurisprudence for Muslims living as minorities in non- Muslim societies. In Europe the idea has been most closely associated with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a scholar born in 1926 in Egypt who was educated and taught at Azhar University before moving to Qatar, where he created a faculty of shari’a and became well- known through his books, his website, and his broadcasts on Aljazeera television. He played a major role on the popular website Islam Online and in the European Council for Fatwa and Research, an association of scholars mainly living in (although not originating from) European countries.

View the rest of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought excerpt here: West, The
Filed Under: International Relations, Middle Eastern Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Reference, Religion, Twitter, World History
«Older Posts