Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Salazar, “Words Are Weapons”

7750a0573a62c46fce179f78d9b48006A bishop once explained to me the rhetorical appeal of Islam to the Christians of late antiquity this way. “Think of the Nicene Creed,” he said. “It goes on for paragraphs and is so complex that it takes years of study really to understand it. What does it say to the average person?” Whereas the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, is powerfully concise — only a sentence long. “Think how appealing that must have been to Byzantine Christians tired of theological dispute.” A forthcoming book from University of Cape Town scholar Phillipe-Joseph Salazar, Words are Weapons: Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror (Yale) addresses the power of words, including the Shahada, in the appeal of the Islamic State today. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

 The first book to offer a rigorous, sophisticated analysis of ISIS’s rhetoric and why it is so persuasive

ISIS wages war not only on the battlefield but also online and in the media. Through a close examination of the words and images ISIS uses, with particular attention to the “digital caliphate” on the web, Philippe-Joseph Salazar theorizes an aesthetic of ISIS and its self-presentation. As a philosopher and historian of ideas, well versed in both the Western and the Islamic traditions, Salazar posits an interpretation of Islam that places speech—the profession of faith—at the center of devotion and argues that evocation of the simple yet profound utterance of faith is what gives power to the rhetoric that ISIS and others employ. At the same time, Salazar contends that Western discourse has undergone a “rhetorical disarmament.” To win the fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism, Western democracies, their media, politicians, and counterterrorism agencies must consider radically changing their approach to Islamic extremism.

Posted on by Liam Ray

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tackett, “The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution”

9780674979895-lgNot too far from our university’s Paris campus, on the way to the Jardin du Luxembourg, is the site of the old Carmelite Monastery. A marker commemorates an incident that occurred there that seems entirely incongruous with the quiet neighborhood today: the murder of hundreds of Catholic priests in 1792, part of the September Massacres that took place during the Revolution. I’m not sure if this forthcoming book from Harvard addresses that massacre, or the more famous murder of several Carmelite nuns a couple of years later, but it looks to be a worthwhile history of the Reign of Terror. The book is The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution and the author is UC-Irvine historian Timothy Tackett. Here’s the description from the Harvard website:

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution’s lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror?

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution offers a new interpretation of this turning point in world history. Timothy Tackett traces the inexorable emergence of a culture of violence among the Revolution’s political elite amid the turbulence of popular uprisings, pervasive subversion, and foreign invasion. Violence was neither a preplanned strategy nor an ideological imperative but rather the consequence of multiple factors of the Revolutionary process itself, including an initial breakdown in authority, the impact of the popular classes, and a cycle of rumors, denunciations, and panic fed by fear—fear of counterrevolutionary conspiracies, fear of anarchy, fear of oneself becoming the target of vengeance. To comprehend the coming of the Terror, we must understand the contagion of fear that left the revolutionaries themselves terrorized.

Tackett recreates the sights, sounds, and emotions of the Revolution through the observations of nearly a hundred men and women who experienced and recorded it firsthand. Penetrating the mentality of Revolutionary elites on the eve of the Terror, he reveals how suspicion and mistrust escalated and helped propel their actions, ultimately consuming them and the Revolution itself.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Cohick & Hughes, “Christian Women in the Patristic World”

9780801039553The patristic period is a fascinating epoch in Christian history and one that speaks to our own time. The lessons the early Christians learned in accommodating a hostile pagan culture may come in handy sometime soon. Here is a new book from Baker Academic Publishing the looks worthwhile, Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries. Many notable names appear in the table of contents, including Thecla, Perpetua, the Empress Helena, and others. The authors are Lynn H. Cohick (Wheaton College) and Amy Brown Hughes (Gordon College). Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

From facing wild beasts in the arena to governing the Roman Empire, Christian women–as preachers and philosophers, martyrs and empresses, virgins and mothers–influenced the shape of the church in its formative centuries.

Christian Women in the Patristic World provides in a single volume a nearly complete compendium of extant evidence about Christian women in the second through fifth centuries. Through a careful examination of literary and material evidence, the book highlights the social and theological contributions women made to shaping early Christian beliefs and practices, integrating their influence into the history of the patristic church and showing how their achievements can be edifying for contemporary Christians.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Luther, “The Ninety-Five Theses” (Russell, ed.)

9780143107583All this year, we’ve been noting the many books that publishers are releasing for the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, the document that initiated the Protestant Reformation. Out today from Penguin Random House is a new translation, The Ninety-Five Theses and Other Writings, by Luther scholar William Russell. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

For the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, a new translation of Martin Luther’s most famous works by leading Luther scholar and pastor William Russell

This volume contains selections from Martin Luther’s most evocative and provocative writings, freshly translated, for the 21st century. These documents, which span the Reformer’s literary career, point to the enduring and flexible character of his central ideas. As Luther’s reform proposals emerged, they coalesced around some basic priorities, which he delivered to wide-ranging audiences–writing for children, preaching in congregations, formulating academic treatises, penning letters to family and friends, counter-punching critics, summarizing Biblical books, crafting confessions of faith, and more. This book demonstrates that range and provides entry points, for non-specialists and specialists alike, into the thought and life of the epoch-defining, fascinating, and controversial Martin Luther. With attention to the breadth of his literary output, it draws from his letters, sermons, popular writings, and formal theological works. This breadth allows readers to encounter Luther the man: the sinner and the saint, the public activist and the private counselor, the theologian and the pastor. These writings possess a practical, accessible arc, as Luther does not write only for specialists and church officials, but he applies his chief insights to the “real-life” issues that faced his rather wide variety of audiences.

Posted on by Liam Ray

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Karagiannis, “The New Political Islam”

15749This looks like an interesting book. In The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice, Emmanuel Karagiannis (King’s College London) argues that political Islam, notwithstanding its monolithic reputation in the West, is actually a multi-faceted phenomenon. Islamist groups, he maintains, take concepts that are current in contemporary globalist ideology, like human rights and democracy, and adapt them to local conditions. The result is a political movement with a recognizable core but different local expressions. The book will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press this coming December. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website:

Islamist political parties and groups are on the rise throughout the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West. Owing largely to the threat of terrorism, political Islam is often portrayed as a monolithic movement embodying fundamentalism and theocracy, an image magnified by the rise of populism and xenophobia in the United States and Europe. Reality, however, is far more complicated. Political Islam has evolved considerably since its spectacular rise decades ago, and today it features divergent viewpoints and contributes to discrete but simultaneous developments worldwide. This is a new political Islam, more global in scope but increasingly local in action.

Emmanuel Karagiannis offers a sophisticated analysis of the different manifestations of contemporary Islamism. In a context of global economic and social changes, he finds local manifestations of Islamism are becoming both more prevalent and more diverse. Many Islamists turn to activism, still more participate formally in the democratic process, and some, in far fewer numbers, advocate violence—a wide range of political persuasions and tactics that reflects real and perceived political, cultural, and identity differences.

Synthesizing prodigious research and integrating insights from the globalization debate and the literature on social movements, The New Political Islam seeks to explain the processes and factors leading to distinctive fusions of “the global” and “the local” across the landscape of contemporary political Islam. Examining converts to Islam in Europe, nonviolent Islamists with global reach, Islamist parties in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, and militant Shia and Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq, Karagiannis demonstrates that Islamists have embraced ideas and practices from the global marketplace and have attempted to implement them locally. He looks closely at the ways in which Islamist activists, politicians, and militants have utilized the language of human rights, democracy, and justice to gain influence and popular support and to contend for power.

 

Posted on by Liam Ray

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Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Hawley, “Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism”

Here’s a very interesting contribution from political scientist, George Hawley–newly in paperback (first published last year)–which Hawleydescribes some of the fissures within contemporary American conservatism, some of which centrally concern the place of religion in American political life. The publisher is University of Kansas Press and the description is below.

The American conservative movement as we know it faces an existential crisis as the nation’s demographics shift away from its core constituents—older white middle-class Christians. It is the American conservatism that we don’t know that concerns George Hawley in this book. During its ascendancy, leaders within the conservative establishment have energetically policed the movement’s boundaries, effectively keeping alternative versions of conservatism out of view. Returning those neglected voices to the story, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism offers a more complete, complex, and nuanced account of the American right in all its dissonance in history and in our day.

The right-wing intellectual movements considered here differ both from mainstream conservatism and from each other when it comes to fundamental premises, such as the value of equality, the proper role of the state, the importance of free markets, the place of religion in politics, and attitudes toward race. In clear and dispassionate terms, Hawley examines localists who exhibit equal skepticism toward big business and big government, paleoconservatives who look to the distant past for guidance and wish to turn back the clock, radical libertarians who are not content to be junior partners in the conservative movement, and various strains of white supremacy and the radical right in America.

In the Internet age, where access is no longer determined by the select few, the independent right has far greater opportunities to make its many voices heard. This timely work puts those voices into context and historical perspective, clarifying our understanding of the American right—past, present, and future.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Wenger, “Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal”

A new book about religious freedom from a distinctively deconstructionist, left CLS Wengerperspective. The book presents religious freedom as an American device for systematic privileging of white Christians and suppression of others (chapter 1 is titled, “Making the Imperial Subject”). In conversation, if not of a piece, with other scholarship today (in religious studies and elsewhere) that aims to debunk religious freedom as a category. It is interesting to see these kinds of accounts continue to flourish in the literature, just as right critical scholarship on this subject begins to flower as well. The publisher is UNC Press. The description is below.

Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse–Wenger calls it “religious freedom talk”–that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire.

More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.