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Hodder, “Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society”

This month, Cambridge will publish Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society, by 9781107047334Ian Hodder (Stanford University). The publisher’s description follows.

This book tackles the topic of religion, a broad subject exciting renewed interest across the social and historical sciences. The volume is tightly focused on the early farming village of Çatalhöyük, which has generated much interest both within and outside of archaeology, especially for its contributions to the understanding of early religion. The volume discusses contemporary themes such as materiality, animism, object vitality, and material dimensions of spirituality while at the same time exploring broad evolutionary changes in the ways in which religion has influenced society. The volume results from a unique collaboration between an archaeological team and a range of specialists in ritual and religion.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

The Massacre of the Innocents

Photo from The Guardian

From the New York Times this Christmas morning:

At least 26 people were killed and 38 others wounded on Wednesday when a car bomb exploded in a parking lot near St. John’s Catholic Church in Dura, south of Baghdad, according to the police and medical sources.

The bomb detonated at the end of Christmas prayers as worshipers were leaving the church, the officials said.

The victims, most of them Christians, included women and children, as well as number police officers posted as guards.

A few minutes before the church bombing, and barely a half-mile away, a series of three other bombings in a market in an Assyrian Christian neighborhood left 11 people dead and 22 wounded.

What can be said?

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Merry Christmas

Gospel Manuscript (Armenian, 14th Century)

To all who celebrate today, a very Merry Christmas. Now bring us some figgy pudding.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Repairs Begin on Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity

Here’s some good news, for a change, about Christianity in the Middle East. This fall, workers began much-needed repairs to the roof Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the traditional site of the birth of Christ.

The roof of the church has been in a terrible state for some time. Experts warn it could collapse at any moment. Getting agreement on repairs has been exceptionally difficult, however. There were geopolitical issues. To qualify for UN restoration funds, the building had to be added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites. This proved controversial–the US and Israel worried about the implications naming the site would have for Palestinian statehood–but the church was ultimately added to the list last year. (The church has long been a flashpoint for world intrigue. In the nineteenth century, someone stole the star that marks the place of Christ’s birth; the theft led to the Crimean War.)

The most significant hurdle, though, has been getting the agreement of the Christian communions that share the church–Armenian Apostolic, Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic. The three share the church under the “Status Quo,” a set of rules and customs that date back centuries to Ottoman times, and which also govern other Christian sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. According to custom, repairing part of the church, or even paying for repairs, is an assertion of ownership. As a result, each communion carefully guards against the possibility that another will undertake repairs in common areas, like the roof, and thereby gain rights by a sort of adverse possession. Fistfights among the monks are not uncommon.

How did the three communions reach agreement on the repairs this time? No one’s saying much, but the AP reports:

A senior church official said the three denominations would never have been able to reach an agreement on their own. But once the Palestinian Authority stepped in, all three churches accepted the decision. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to discuss the matter with the media.

Well, anyway, the point is they did agree and the church will be preserved. And that is wonderful news for Christians and people of good will generally. Congratulations to everyone concerned. And Merry Christmas!

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Cheetham, Pratt, & Thomas, “Understanding Interreligious Relations”

Next month, Oxford University Press will publish Understanding Interreligious Relations by David Cheetham (European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies), Douglas Pratt (University of St. Andrews), and David Thomas (University of Birmingham). The publisher’s description follows. Cover

The ways in which religious communities interact with one another is an increasing focus of scholarly research and teaching. Issues of interreligious engagement, inclusive of dialogue more specifically and relations more generally, attract widespread interest and concern. In a religiously pluralist world, how different communities get along with each other is not just an academic question; it is very much a focus of socio-political and wider community attention. The study of religions and religion in the 21st century world must necessarily take account of relations within and between religions, whether this is approached from a theological, historical, political, or any other disciplinary point of view.

Understanding Interreligious Relations is a reference work of relevance to students and scholars as well as of interest to a wider informed public. It comprises two main parts. The first provides expositions and critical discussions of the ways in which “the other” has been construed and addressed from within the major religious traditions. The second presents analysis and discussions of key issues and topics in which interreligious relations are an integral constituent.

The editors have assembled an authoritative and scholarly work that discusses perspectives on the religious “other” and interreligious relations that are typical of the major religious traditions; together with substantial original chapters from a cross-section of emerging and established scholars on main debates and issues in the wider field of interreligious relations.

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Meshal, “Sharia and the Making of the Modern Egyptian: Islamic Law and Custom in the Courts of Ottoman Cairo”

Next month, the American University in Cairo Press will publish Sharia and the Making of the Modern Egyptian: Islamic Law and Custom in the Courts of Ottoman Cairo by Reem Meshal (Louisiana State University). The publisher’s description follows. 

In this new study, the author examines sijills, the official documents of the Ottoman Islamic courts, to understand how sharia law, society, and the early-modern economy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Cairo related to the practice of custom in determining rulings. In the sixteenth century, a new legal and cultural orthodoxy fostered the development of an early-modern Islam that broke new ground, giving rise to a new concept of the citizen and his role. Contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, this work adopts the position that local custom began to diminish and decline as a source of authority. These issues resonate today, several centuries later, in the continuing discussions of individual rights in relation to Islamic law.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Prince Charles Draws Attention to Persecution of Mideast Christians

Photo from the BBC

This year has been a dreadful one for Mideast Christians. In Egypt, Islamists frustrated at the fall of the Morsi government have singled out Copts for vengeance. By some accounts, Copts are suffering the worst persecution they have experienced in 700 years. In Syria, Islamist rebels are targeting Christians, whom they accuse of siding with the Assad regime.  In Iraq, Islamist gangs demand exorbitant protection money from the few Christians who remain–unless the Christians agree to convert to Islam. Across the region, Christians are being kidnapped, driven from their homes, killed. Their churches are being burned, their schools bombed. Christianity faces an existential threat in the place where it was born.

Mostly, the persecution of Mideast Christians has failed to attract attention in the West–although the media seems to be catching on. Mideast Christians lack strong lobbies in Western capitals, and the Western human rights community has a hard time seeing any Christians as victims rather than oppressors. So praise goes to Britain’s Prince Charles, who last week met with representatives of Mideast Christians in London to draw attention to the ongoing persecution:

“It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are, increasingly, being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants,” he said. Noting Christianity’s roots in the region, the Prince observed that today the Middle East and North Africa have the lowest concentration of Christians in the world—just 4 percent—and that this has “dropped dramatically over the last century and is falling still further.” He said that the effect of this was that “we all lose something immensely and irreplaceably precious when such a rich tradition dating back 2,000 years begins to disappear.”

The BBC’s report of the Prince’s meeting is here.

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Beorn, “Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus”

This January, Harvard University Press will publish Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus by Waitman Wade Beorn Marching Into Darkness(University of Nebraska at Omaha).  The publisher’s description follows.

On October 10, 1941, the entire Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. While Nazi death squads routinely carried out mass executions on the Eastern Front, this particular atrocity was not the work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis.

Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement at the local level has been lacking. Among the crimes Waitman Wade Beorn unearths are forced labor, sexual violence, and graverobbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. By meticulously reconstructing the German army’s activities in Belarus in 1941, Marching into Darkness reveals in stark detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Early efforts at improvised extermination progressively became much more methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize “Jew hunts.” Beorn also demonstrates how the Wehrmacht used the pretense of anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans.

Through archival research into military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of a professional army’s descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

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Kertzer, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret Life of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe”

Next month, Random House will publish The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret Life of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, by David I. Kertzer (Brown Pope and MussoliniUniversity). The publisher’s description follows.

 The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. (“We have many interests to protect,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals.

In a challenge to the conventional history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had lost and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last years of his life—as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler—the pontiff’s faith in this treacherous bargain started to waver. With his health failing, he began to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Horrified by the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle, including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had served both the Church and the dictator for many years.

 The Pope and Mussolini brims with memorable portraits of the men who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of widespread derision who lacked the stature—literally and figuratively—to stand up to the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, whose political skills and ambition made him Mussolini’s most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose actions during World War II would be subject for debate for decades to come.

With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the full story of the Pope’s complex relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every turn, The Pope and Mussolini is history writ large and with the lightning hand of truth.

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The Top Five New Law & Religion Papers on SSRN

From SSRN’s list of most frequently downloaded law and religion papers posted in the last 60 days, here are the current top five. This week, Michal Gilad remains at #1, Patrick McKinley Brennan is at #2; Wilson Ray Huhn is at #3; Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman are at #4; and Asifa Quraishi-Landes and Najeeba Syeed Miller complete the list at #5.

1.In God’s Shadow: Unveiling the Hidden World of Domestic Violence Victims in Religious Communities by Michal Gilad (University of Pennsylvania Law School) [773 downloads]

2.Resisting the Grand Coalition in Favor of the Status Quo by Giving Full Scope to the Libertas Ecclesiae by Patrick McKinley Brennan (Villanova University School of Law) [157 downloads]

3.Slaves to Contradictions: 13 Myths that Sustained Slavery by Wilson Ray Huhn (University of Akron- School of Law) [147 downloads]

4.Some Realism about Corporate Rights by Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman (University of Virginia School of Law, University of Virginia School of Law) [146 downloads]

5.No Altars: A Survey of Islamic Family Law in United States) by Asifa Quraishi-Landes and Najeeba Syeed Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison-Law School,  Unaffiliated Authors-Independent) [132 downloads]