Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Dowland, “Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right”

In October, the University of Pennsylvania Press will release “Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right” by Seth Dowland (Pacific Lutheran University). The publisher’s description follows:

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust “family values” onto the nation’s consciousness. Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism.

Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers—a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs—known collectively as family values—became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Brinton, “Preaching Islamic Renewal”

In October, the University of California Press will release “Preaching Islamic Renewal: Religious Authority and Media in Contemporary Egypt,” by Jacquelene Brinton (University of Kansas). The publisher’s description follows:

Preaching Islamic Renewal examines the life and work of Muhammad Mitwalli Sha‘rawi, one of Egypt’s most beloved and successful Islamic  preachers. His wildly popular TV program aired every Friday for years until his death in 1998. At the height of his career, it was estimated that up to 30 million people tuned in to his show each week. Yet despite his pervasive and continued influence in Egypt and the wider Muslim world, Sha‘rawi was for a long time neglected by academics. While much of the academic literature that focuses on Islam in modern Egypt repeats the claim that traditionally trained Muslim scholars suffered the loss of religious authority, Sha‘rawi is instead an example of a well-trained Sunni scholar who became a national media sensation. As an advisor to the rulers of Egypt as well as the first Arab television preacher, he was one of the most important and controversial religious figures in late-twentieth-century Egypt. Thanks to the repurposing of his videos on television and on the Internet, Sha‘rawi’s performances are still regularly viewed. Jacquelene Brinton uses Sha‘rawi and his work as a lens to explore how traditional Muslim authorities have used various media to put forth a unique vision of how Islam can be renewed and revived in the contemporary world. Through his weekly television appearances he popularized long held theological and ethical beliefs and became a scholar-celebrity who impacted social and political life in Egypt.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Cook, “Understanding Jihad”

In September, the University of California Press will release “Understanding Jihad,” by David Cook (Rice University). The publisher’s description follows:

First published in 2005, Understanding Jihad unravels the tangled historical, intellectual, and political meanings of jihad within the context of Islamic life. In this revised and expanded second edition, author David Cook has included new material in light of pivotal developments such as the extraordinary events of the Arab Spring, the death of Usama b. Ladin, and the rise of new Islamic factions such as ISIS.

Jihad is one of the most loaded and misunderstood terms in the news today. Contrary to popular understanding, the term does not mean “holy war.” Nor does it simply refer to an inner spiritual struggle. This judiciously balanced, accessibly written, and highly relevant book looks closely at a range of sources from sacred Islamic texts to modern interpretations, opening a critically important perspective on the role of Islam in the contemporary world.

David Cook cites from scriptural, legal, and newly translated texts to give readers insight into the often ambiguous information that is used to construct Islamic doctrine. He sheds light on legal developments relevant to fighting and warfare and places the internal, spiritual jihad within the larger context of Islamic religion. He describes some of the conflicts that occur in radical groups and shows how the more mainstream supporters of these groups have come to understand and justify violence. He has also included a special appendix of relevant documents including materials related to the September 11 attacks and published manifestos issued by Usama b. Ladin and Palestinian suicide-martyrs.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Ever Hear of This Guy?

A book out this summer, on Renaissance banker Jacob Fugger, is getting lots of the-richest-man-who-ever-lived-9781451688559_lgattention. The Richest Man Who Ever Lived claims that Fugger, of whom pretty much no one has ever heard, was one of the most influential people in his age — and all of history, in fact. According to the author, journalist and securities analyst Greg Steinmetz, Fugger is indirectly responsible both for the end of the Catholic Church’s ban on the taking of interest and, in a roundabout way, the Protestant Reformation. From the Washington Post‘s review:

Fugger’s “greatest talent was an ability to borrow the money he needed to invest,” Steinmetz writes. “He convinced cardinals, bishops, dukes, and counts to loan him oceans of money. . . . Financial leverage catapulted him to the top.” But in order to charge and offer interest payments, he had to battle the church’s long-standing ban on usury. Here Fugger’s links to Rome, buttressed through bribes for high church officials, became useful. Through artful lobbying and the staging of a high-profile public debate, he helped persuade Pope Leo X to sign a papal bull acknowledging the legitimacy of interest, which became permissible as long as the loan involved labor, cost or risk on behalf of the lender. “And what loan didn’t involve one of the three?” Steinmetz asks. After this victory, “debt financing accelerated,” he writes. “The modern economy was underway.”

It was a system that soon prompted controversies and suffered attacks, whether peasant revolts or even the Protestant Reformation. Clerical offices were for sale then, and Fugger financed the purchase of an influential job — the archbishop of Mainz, one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. In order to repay the loan, the new bishop and the pontiff concocted a scheme: the sale of sin-forgiving indulgences to the faithful, ostensibly to refurbish St. Peter’s Basilica but in large part to repay Fugger. A 33-year-old priest and theologian by the name of Martin Luther was outraged at the church cashing in on popular fears of damnation and posted his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. You know what happened next.

I’m always suspicious of claims that an author has discovered a previously unknown person who changed the course of history. But who knows? Anyway, the book looks interesting, and it’s nice to see the history of law and religion getting some attention in the  media.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Payne, “A State of Mixture”

In September, the University of California Press will release “A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity,” by Richard E. Payne (University of Chicago). The publisher’s description follows: 

Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.

The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints’ lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story, A State of Mixture helps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Noll, “In the Beginning Was the Word”

In September, the Oxford University Press will release “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783,” by Mark A. Noll (University of Notre Dame). The publisher’s description follows: 

In the beginning of American history, the Word was in Spanish, Latin, and native languages like Nahuatal. But while Spanish and Catholic Christianity reached the New World in 1492, it was only with settlements in the seventeenth century that English-language Bibles and Protestant Christendom arrived. The Puritans brought with them intense devotion to Scripture, as well as their ideal of Christendom — a civilization characterized by a thorough intermingling of the Bible with everything else. That ideal began this country’s journey from the Puritan’s City on a Hill to the Bible-quoting country the U.S. is today. In the Beginning Was the Word shows how important the Bible remained, even as that Puritan ideal changed considerably through the early stages of American history.

Author Mark Noll shows how seventeenth-century Americans received conflicting models of scriptural authority from Europe: the Bible under Christendom (high Anglicanism), the Bible over Christendom (moderate Puritanism), and the Bible against Christendom (Anabaptists, enthusiasts, Quakers). In the eighteenth century, the colonists turned increasingly to the Bible against Christendom, a stance that fueled the Revolution against Anglican Britain and prepared the way for a new country founded on the separation of church and state.

One of the foremost scholars of American Christianity, Mark Noll brings a wealth of research and wisdom to In the Beginning Was the Word, providing a sweeping, engaging, and insightful survey of the relationship between the Bible and public issues from the beginning of European settlement. A seminal new work from a world-class scholar, this book offers a fresh account of the contested, sometimes ambiguous, but definite biblical roots of American history.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Conditions in Which Private Groups May Perform Civic Functions

Here’s an insightful post by Paul Horwitz on the Garnett, Inazu, McConnell essay that I commented on a few days ago. Paul introduces his post with a discussion about contemporary attitudes toward government’s “insist[ence] that private organizations comply with its own sense of the good,” and he claims that though many people continue to believe that such insistence is illegitimate, “the momentum” within the elite classes (or call them how you will) “is on the other side.” I am always pleased when Paul shares at least some of my sensibilities.

One more thought connected to Paul’s comment on these interesting matters. Tax exemption for private nonprofit organizations made a certain amount of sense when two conditions obtained: (1) the size of government, and the scope of its role in American social life, was a good deal smaller than it is today, thereby both necessitating and making space for the involvement of private nonprofit institutions for the support of civil society; and (2) the view that these private institutions could and should play an independent role in shaping civil society in accordance with their own senses of the political and moral good, senses that might diverge in important respects from the state’s.

The conditions are mutually reinforcing and mutually dependent. As government becomes larger, both the need and the space for private institutions shrinks as does the perception that private institutions might actually have something of value to say in the way civic formation that is very different from what the state says. The “need” question is complex, because the breakdown of condition #1 would not necessarily mean that we would see fewer private institutions performing the sort of work that they had performed in the past. Indeed, the increase in the size and scope of the government’s role might itself necessitate greater numbers of private institutions to help it fulfill its enlarged offices. But we should expect to see a sharp decline in private institutions engaged in civic formation whose values differed sharply from the government’s. Whatever public/private partnerships endured after the fall of condition #1 could not continue to operate under the premises of condition #2. One might say that this is to be expected–indeed, it might be said to validate a hoary separationist rallying cry: if private institutions want to be in the business of performing civic functions, they ought to expect pressure to conform to the government’s preferred views of the civic, political, and moral good (a footnote: I’m always struck by how decidedly Protestant the theology supporting these kinds of separationist arguments seems). All true, though one could offer in return that such increased pressure is not inevitable but the product of a historical contingency: the breakdown of the two conditions above.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

In Defense of Christians to Hold National Convention Next Month

In Defense of Christians, a non-profit organization that publicizes the plight of Mideast Christians and seeks assistance for them, will hold its National Leadership Convention in Washington, DC next month. The meeting will include roundtables and open discussions with religious and political leaders; policy briefings with congressional leaders; panels on international religious freedom; and an ecumenical discussion on bridging gaps between Eastern and Western Christians–all with the aim of raising awareness about the human rights of Mideast Christians. Details are here.

 

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Around the Web this Week

Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Rahman, “Locale, Everyday Islam, and Modernity”

In September, Oxford University Press will release “Locale, Everyday Islam, and Modernity: Qasbah Towns and Muslim Life in Colonial India,” by M. Raisur Rahman (Wake Forest University). The publisher’s description follows:

Scholarship has mostly privileged larger cities as the leading centres in India at the expense of belittling the role and significance of smaller entities. Villages are typically seen on the receiving end of the spectrum and qasbahs (small towns) are often clubbed with them. This book presents qasbahs as centers of intense intellectual and cultural activity in colonial India and as networks of social life, education, print culture, literary production, and intellectual dialogue. Drawing upon a wealth of untapped Urdu, English, Hindi, and Persian sources, it focuses on qasbahs as the new nuclei of Muslim social and cultural life upon the decline of the regional Indian states and their urban centers in the late nineteenth century, just as the successor-states had taken over from the Mughal Empire earlier. It also demonstrates that the emergence of modernity among the Muslims was a process during their colonial encounter in which qasbah residents were active agents and the Islam that emerged was that of everyday living. This volume looks into why locales remain major identity-markers, in addition to affiliations such as nation and religion, and what makes qasbahs still invoke memory and nostalgia among related Muslim individuals and families across the globe.