Religion Dispatches
A new book reveals the historical roots and conservative uses of the positive thinking movement, showing how it encourages victim-blaming, political complacency, and a culture-wide flight from realism.
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When the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II, a Dutch pope (Adrian VI), came to Rome for the first time. The cardinals proudly gave him a tour of the Belvedere. He was shocked and outraged, informing them (in Latin no less) that “these are nothing but pagan idols!” He threatened to sell off the whole collection, and in the interim built cabinets for them, locked the doors, and kept the key to himself.
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“This book is mainly about the problem of freedom in Islam. I argue that Islam, as its very core, is a religion that liberated the individual from the bond of the tribe and similar collective bodies. But I also show how the initial impetus of the faith was partly overshadowed as a result of some early theological controversies, and, moreover, political decisions. This also means that some of those early debates can be reopened, and coercive elements in Islamic law and culture can be reformed. And I am saying all these within a particularly Turkish outlook, as I explain the little known history of ‘Muslim liberalism’ that emerged in the late Ottoman Empire and modern-day Turkey.”
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Anybody who sets himself the task of acquitting God from the charge of being a “moral monster” has his work cut out for him. Paul Copan knows this, but in his attempt to acquit God he seems to be standing at the bottom of a pit wielding a shovel. How do you get out of a hole with that tool?
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“Christianity is not supposed to make you secure. Christianity is supposed to give you the courage to walk into an insecure world knowing that you’re not alone and to embrace the radical insecurity. If you’ve got to spend your time proving that you’re better than someone else—males are better than females, whites are better than blacks, heterosexuals are better than homosexuals—you’re always building yourself up by pushing somebody else down. But, you shouldn’t need to build yourself up unless you’re radically insecure. Religion feeds into that radical insecurity with triumphalism—ours is the only religious route you can take to get to God. That’s a really strange idea.”
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Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too.
In their new book, Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future, Gary Macy, William T. Ditewig, and Phyllis Zagano revisit the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike ordination to the priesthood, women’s ordination to the diaconate has unambiguous roots in the Christian New Testament, where Phoebe is named as a deacon of the church.
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The biggest misconception about the crusades is the belief that everyone understood them as religious wars between Christianity and Islam. Latin Christians understood it in that fashion, but for Greek Christians, the crusaders were essentially mercenaries employed against a rival empire. Both the Sunni Turks and the Shi‘i Egyptians probably understood the crusades in similar terms. It would take the Muslims several decades to learn to think of the battles against the Franks as religious wars rather than as conflicts over the control of frontier settlements.
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As I learned in college, religious studies is predicated on a notion of bracketing. “When we study religion academically,” professors tell students every semester, “we bracket our own beliefs and ideas so we can better understand others.” When I tell a stranger that I study religion in America the first question is always “What do you plan to do with that?” But the second question always begins, “so, what do you think about…” Sometimes I try to bend the question to some neutral space where I can offer a well-informed opinion that brings historical clarity without actually taking a side. Other times I just mutter something and go back to my book and wonder if this bracketing is rude, unnecessary, and silly. Shouldn’t I just tell the tourist in seat 17B what I really think?
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