in their book on religious ceremonies, Bernard and Picart brought out similarities between Western religious practices and those found in Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. As the authors of The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (213-4) . . . . Continue Reading »
Before he wrote on religious ceremonies, Jean Frederic Bernard wrote a treatise on the State of Man in Original Sin , which reworked the notorious On Original Sin (1678) written by Adrianus van Beverland. Beverland had argued that the fall story of Genesis 3 was an allegory for the discovery of . . . . Continue Reading »
The title tells the main story that Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt want to tell: The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World . The book in question was a seven-volume illustrated encyclopedia of religious practices throughout . . . . Continue Reading »
Nelson Mandela is a titanic figure on the world stage, but in a recent TNR piece Eve Fairbanks observes that many younger South Africans view him as a traitor who sold out the cause. One reason for this perception is the economic disproportion in South Africa since apartheid: “white South . . . . Continue Reading »
More from Peter Brown, this from a review of Bowerstock’s Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity : “Bowersock shows, through a combination of archaeological and textual evidence, that the short-lived Sassanian conquest of the Middle East did not leave the former provinces of East Rome . . . . Continue Reading »
Reviewing GW Bowerstock’s The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam at the NYRB , Peter Brown points to the “religious wars” between Christian Rome and Persia that provided the context for the rise of Islam: “Bowersock also shows how the two great empires of the . . . . Continue Reading »
If you’re looking for Marxist sacramental theology , check out the Trinity House site this morning. . . . . Continue Reading »
The heroic story of Mandel’s and the ANC’s struggle against apartheid is, Stephen Ellis thinks, mythological. In External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 , he sets out to dispel the myth. Tom Lodge’s TLS review summarizes some of his findings: “ANC leaders were by no . . . . Continue Reading »
From David Hawkes’s TLS review of Landon Storrs’s The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left , Storrs strikes a rare balance on the contested history of McCarthy and the HUAC. On the one hand, Storrs argues that the targets were often social democrats rather than . . . . Continue Reading »
Sheehan ends his Representations (2009) by noting the cost of privatizing sacrifice, and with it religion: “The modern ethic of sacrifice denuded of utility, unhinged from exchange and divorced from law, bears virtually no resemblance to its early modern incarnations. Now sacrifice stands . . . . Continue Reading »
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