Religious competence and individuality: three studies in the Roman Empire

Abstract

The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly remote past is perhaps best viewed as a heuristic device whose main value, at least in the context of Graeco-Roman history, is to question the excessive dominance of a model of religious action as essentially collective, which is perhaps proximately Durkheimian but in the Classical field goes back ultimately to early scholarship on ancient Judaism. Terminology is a basic problem in this context. Religious individuality can be defined as the construction of personal religious achievement or the practice of mastery defined by sui generis rules. In the case of the Roman Empire, five types of such achievement have been suggested: pragmatic; moral; competitive; representative; or exemplary/ reflexive. All these distinguishable types of individuality are linked, at least indirectly, to the complex and highly differentiated social, political, economic and moral structures of the Empire. Specifically religious individuation emerges only with the development of religion as a distinctive field of (social) action and thus the possibility of specifically religious distinction. If sustained over the long term, any such achievement is to be seen as individualisation under ancient conditions. This article briefly explores three types of religious distinction based on a conviction and lived practice of such individualised competence: the figure of the Weberian mystagogue in his Mediterranean forms; the figure of the practitioner skilled in Graeco-Egyptian ‘magic’; and the idealised figure of Pythagoras as projected by Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean life (c.300 CE).     

Theodor Bibliander's Machumetis saracenorum principis eiusque successorum vitae,doctrina ac ipse alcoran (1543) as the Sixteenth-century “Encyclopedia” of Islam

The Machumetis saracenorum principis (1543, second edition 1550), compiled by the Zurich theologian Theodor Bibliander, has long been recognized as one of the most significant texts on Islam published in the Latin West in the Early Modern era. The Qur'an translation it contained (the first ever to be printed) was not superseded for over 100 years. This article explores how the work functions as a whole text in the context of Bibliander's life and theology, with particular attention paid to its paratexts (that is, its framing devices) and organization. Bibliander's compilation is discovered to be a self-contradictory, problematic text. In the sixteenth century, new information on the Turks and their religion did not replace, but rather was placed simply alongside other materials, sometimes substantiating older materials, sometimes directly contradicting them. This ambiguity opened up space for new and different readings while supporting, simultaneously, the received tradition. All of this points to the important transitional nature of the sixteenth century in Christian–Islamic engagement.     

Sins of the American Empire and Pastoral Responses

This article describes attributes of the American Empire and addresses characteristic sins—pride, sloth, greed, and idolatry—that are necessary for maintaining the domestic and foreign policies aimed toward expanding the economic and military power of the United States. In particular, I claim that theo-political narratives and rituals extant in U.S. culture are internalized, structuring our collective psyches and shaping both our wills and actions. Pride, sloth, greed, and idolatry signify the distortion of will, giving rise to actions that result in harm and alienation. To address this reality, several pastoral strategies are depicted.

Silent No Longer

This article, arising from the work of the Council for World Mission's Legacies of Slavery project, investigates the historical roots of racism present in the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS). It offers an analysis of the ways in which a missionary society colluded with Empire in constructing a racist hierarchy that it imposed on White people at home in the United Kingdom as much as it did on African and African descendant peoples. It acknowledges the personal and structural benefits that the LMS and its officers made from enslavement and their efforts to silence calls for emancipation, and offers a class and gender perspective on the forces shaping this distinctively British organization.     

Pushing against Gender Barriers

This article presents the case study of Lilija Otīlija Grīviņa's calling to China. Her ministry is one example of how the practice of mission facilitates self-identification, as a person responds to the call of God regardless of their gender. The major sources of the study are archive materials from the Liebenzell Mission and the Latvian Lutheran Church, as well as Grīviņa's newsletters published in Chinas Millionen. To provide theological background for the missionary service of women, the study also looks at the work of German missiologists Gustav Warneck and Theodore Christlieb. The research uses a main historical comparative methodology to uncover the development of thought of women missionaries in the specific historical context.     

Complex Adaptive Systems and Global Capitalism: The Risk of a New Ideology of Global Complexity

Since the foundation of the Santa Fe Institute, the new science of complex adaptive systems (CAS) has seen extraordinary development, breaking with previous, more epistemological, trends in complexity theory. This article makes a critique of CAS as a model of the current global complexity. Its basic model, the cellular automaton, which focuses on the interactive dynamics among components, ignores the nature of any complex system as constructed by the observer/actor and is unable to explain the sociohistorical construction of the agents/subjects (analyzed by Foucault) and the social structure in which they are located (analyzed by Bourdieu), thus being unable to accurately represent the overall social complexity.     

From Belsen to Gaza: The Promise (2011), British and British-Jewish identity

This article discusses Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and investigates the intense public responses it engendered in Britain. The first part of the article explores how the miniseries takes the lead from the liberation of Belsen to engage with issues of British national self-perception. Drawing on the notion of ‘postimperial melancholia’, the article argues that The Promise explores important issues related to Britain’s past and present, in particular the lasting heritage of Empire. The second part engages with the intense reception of the miniseries among opinion makers and the general public, with many critics seeing The Promise as aimed at delegitimising the State of Israel. In thus doing, the article situates the debate within broader discussions on the supposed relationship between anti-Zionism and “new anti-Semitism”, and more specifically discussion of the role of anti-Zionist Jews. The debate around The Promise is a case study for the exploration of two related controversies. The first one pertains to Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular regarding the international role of Israel in the twenty-first century. The second one is more specifically infra-Jewish and revolves around the issue of which subjects are legitimate to speak out as Jews and in the name of which values.     

Religious toleration and the limits of liberal secularism: The case of India

ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been a resurgence of public discourse about the role of tolerance as one of the key elements of the Western philosophical heritage. The fact that Western societies remain largely oblivious to the importance and benefits of diversity points to the pitfalls of the liberal model of religious toleration. Jakob De Roover’s monograph ‘Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism’ offers a new analysis of the deficiencies of secularism and demonstrates why its application to other societies, such as India, is a problematic enterprise. This article argues that Comparative Political Theory has the potential to help forge new conceptual categories and analytical tools that can be utilized to explore diverse modes of tackling religious diversity and fostering tolerance.     

Blond, tall, with honey-colored eyes: Jewish ownership of slaves in the Ottoman Empire

Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records (sijillat), and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding – particularly of females of slavic origin – in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modern period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways. I dealt with two of them: The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children; the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community. These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata. Research for this article was carried out during my postdoctoral fellowship as a Mandel Scholar at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center, the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The article is based on a lecture delivered at a conference in honor of Prof. Amnon Cohen in June 2005 at the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem; and in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2005. I thank Prof. Kenneth Stow for his kind and friendly guidance.