The view from somewhere smart

Published on September 27, 2010 in History. Closed

9780061472817When it comes to scholarly explorations of religion and history it is very difficult to find works which I can recommend to casually interested friends. On the one hand you have very narrow monographs on a specific topic, for example the possible connection between Monothelitism and Maronite Christianity. Set next to these you have broadly written and engaging works of semi-scholarship with very strong viewpoints which operationally reinforce the preconceptions or biases of the audience. Karen Armstrong’s body of work is an exemplar of this. Much of it is filled with fascinating detail, but she invariably shades the framing of the past so as to make it congenial to her religiously liberal Western audience. Armstrong’s opposite in viewpoint would be Rodney Stark. A sociologist by training Starks’ early work on religion always came with a large dollop of opinion, but it was sound in terms of scholarship. But of late he’s moved in a far more polemical direction, exemplified by books such as God’s Battalians: The Case for the Crusades. Starks’ recent work can be compared to the more crass Afrocentric projects, they’re long drawn out arguments which show that the greatest of human achievements necessarily come from the tradition which conservative Western Christians are singular modern representatives of (not just Western, Stark attempts to dismiss the intellectual achievements of Classical Greeks in The Victory of Reason; rather atrociously in my opinion).

A strong viewpoint is not always a problem. The ideal of objectivity is often an illusion, and only produces a muddle. But in the case of both Stark and Armstrong’s work if you are moderately familiar with their area of focus you can pick out many errors of omission and interpretation. Naturally these flaws in their reading of the literature are always in the direction of their conclusion of preference. If you have a thick network of background facts and frames into which you can inject data and analysis, bias need not be a problem. I am an atheist but I have no issue reading the New Testament for its historical and literary value, despite the fact that it has a clear viewpoint. But that viewpoint is very transparent and obvious to someone who does not share it. Much of popular historical writing has the problem that the audience is not aware of the bias and selectivity of the authors as they frame their arguments. Rodney Stark and Karen Armstrong have a much more fluent grasp of medieval history than the vast majority of their readers, so their obfuscations and distortions, conscious or not, will not be transparent to the audience. It is with all this said that I wholeheartedly recommend Philip Jenkins oeuvre to anyone who will listen. Jenkins’ own perspective colors his scholarship, but he is frank and honest with the reader as to his sympathies, while at the same time correcting the enthusiasms of his “own side.” This is far preferable to the illusion of the “view of from nowhere.” Because his cards are on the table the lay audience can weight his assertions appropriately.

Jenkins is an Episcopalian who has an affinity for the more traditionalist streams of Christian faith and practice coming out of what is now termed the “Global South.” He is probably most well known for his lengthy exposition on this topic in his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, though I personally find that his book on Europe, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, more original. In his popular works Philip Jenkins writes in a manner which makes it clear that he is broadly in agreement with the claims of the Christian religion. There is no doubt in that. But he is also a man who can say something like this:

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Judaism then and now

Published on October 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

a thought: judaism as we understand is a creation of christianity. judaism as it was for the past 2,000 years was mostly a christian (and muslim) creation. as some of you might know before the year 300 or so there were many judaisms. specifically there was a difference between what might be called ‘hellenistic’ judaism and rabbnical judaism. orthodox judaism is the direct line descendant of the latter. with a few exceptions rabbnical judaism had the floor for nearly 1500 years, between 300 and 1800. what happened to hellenistic judaism? many argue most hellenistic jews became christian, that christianity is actually just a successful hellenistic jewish cult. the differences between rabbnical judaism and christianity are stark. those between hellenistic judaism (which was a plural movement which we define post facto) and christianity likely less so. in a christian environment rabbinical judaism was the only stable equilibrium for jews, or more precisely, the jewish community.

i thought about this when reading about the catholic church in the hapsburgh empire auditing jewish writings and works to make sure that it didn’t go beyond “old testament” principles. jews were given sufferance to exist because they were witness to the pre-christian covenant, and christians had specific ideas of what jews could be. this changed after 1800 as the monopoly of the christian church was broken, and constraints on jewish religious creativity were removed. reform judaism wouldn’t have been possible before 1800 because they would have been persecuted as heretical by christians and rabbincal jews. there is a reason that many reform jews explicitly feel kinship with hellenistic judaism: they fill the same space on the religious spectrum.

On religion

Published on September 18, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments Tags: , .
  • Religion is a human construct.
  • Religion means many things.
  • Religion manifests on the level of the human mind, derived from innate presuppositions, intuitions and biases.  In other words, the human mind naturally believes that the world is filled with supernatural agents and powers.
  • Religion manifests on the level of the society.  Tribes pray together, and their relationship to the common god binds them together.
  • Religion manifests across history, evolving as a multi-dimensional phenomenon.
  • Religion and its intersection with philosophy results in theology and the textual foci of “higher religoins.”
  • Because of religion’s phenomenological scope it is nearly impossible to easily extricate it from other aspects of human affairs.
  • Due to the fact that in many early modern societies, such as the American republic, there was a relative uniformity of religious practice but variations along fine details of orthodoxy, a separationist logic based on neutrality in terms of matters of belief was practicable.
  • When the variation in religious traditions increases this makes such a minimalist separationist ideology impossible.
  • Because of religion’s psychological grounding it is difficult to banish or extinguish without a great deal of exogenous pressure; e.g., the persecutions under Communism.  And in situations where religion is supplanted, it is usually replaced by an ideology with quasi-religious characteristics.
  • Atheists are often psychologically peculiar.  In “officially atheist” cultures like North Korea there tends to emerge quasi-religious personality cults.
  • The fact that a thorough skeptical scientific materialist Weltanschauung is going to be unappealing or unnatural for most of humanity has to be taken as a starting position or axiom about the nature of the universe.
  • This implies that “militant atheism” is a vacuous and futile position.
  • So from a stance of radical materialism the question is how to accommodate the instincts and inclinations of most humans; how to appease and compromise, establish common sets of norms.

the ism temptation

Published on July 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

but i think a common sense reality here is that the “ism” temptation is a structural outcome of the nature of our lived experiences as people.  the specific orientalism which said pointed to was only an element in the larger set of social phenomena.  it is basically the fact that any human when examining a system of belief or culture which is not one’s own sees the world through their own subjective viewpoint. their own values and norms have a distortionary effect on perception.

this shows up with muslims obviously.  i recall when aziz claimed that ‘the west’ was defined by its opposition to islam. that’s what i’ll call occidentalism; aziz is looking at the west from a muslim perspective so that muslim-christian conflicts loom large.  he naturally doesn’t privilege the genocide which pagan prussians and lithuanians suffered during the period between 1100-1400 which were also called crusades on behalf of the catholic church and german civilization against the northern barbarians. because the prussians were exterminated or assimilated and the lithuanians eventually made their peace with catholic civilization this northern “front” which helped defined catholic christiendom is not particular emphasized today despite its contemporary salience (some of the crusaders who went to the holy land went to the baltic first).

but there is another civilization against which the west did define itself, and that is russian orthodoxy.  within russia there have been those who identified with the west, but historically the stronger and more resilient strand has been a slavophile-orthodox anti-western impulse which defines itself in opposition to *both* islam and catholic christendom (even when catholic christendom split in half).  intellectuals of the orthodox world can engage in both orientalism and occidentalism, because their tradition is one which is at tension with both islam and the west.

finally, let’s move outside the west to the east.  in china when roman catholic missionaries arrived in the 16th century with the iberian powers in the south china sea they were initially assumed by locals to be another sect of pure land buddhism.  the necessity of co-option of local terms to communicate the christian religious message meant that this sort of confusion was natural.  additionally, there was long the ethnographic problem for the jews of kaifeng that the han chinese had a difficult time perceiving what difference there was between their religion and islam (after some natural catastrophes those kaifeng jews who were not absorbed into the han population often became muslim but remain identifiable by a few cultural markers; e.g., wearing a black cap instead of white at masjid), the two seemed fundamentally so similar to the chinese.

the voyages of chinese to kerala and later the portuguese illustrate the importance of subjectivity.  the chinese who visited kerala made little distinction among the monotheists (muslims, christians and jews), assuming them all to be a variant of islam.  the hindus they believed to be buddhists.  in contrast, the portuguese were precise in their understanding of islam, but vasco dama doffed a hat to local brahmins because he assumed that they were catholic priests, as he initially confused hinduism with catholicism.

all this is not to give in to the post-modern temptation, and assert there can be no cross-cultural communication. i believe there are common semantic currencies which may be developed.  familiarity breeds intelligibility; no chinese would confuse a christian with a muslim today.  the importance of the intellectual revolution of the past generation is not that all fact becomes opinion, but that opinion has a causal relationship in terms of the perception of fact.

There is no god

Published on April 9, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

…but there will always be a prophet.