Malise Ruthven reviews Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam at the NYRB . One of the key themes of the book is that the US has mistaken the identity of its opponents by treating them as ideologues rather than as . . . . Continue Reading »
At the end of his Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge , Raymond van Dam suggests that Constantine’s opponent, Maxentius, had his own inspiration before the battle: “During his reign Maxentius had represented himself as the defender of Rome, ‘his city.’ Perhaps it . . . . Continue Reading »
Jeremy MyNott begins his TLS review of Birds & People with this wonderful overview of ornith-anthropology: “Birds are everywhere. They span the globe from the most inhospitable regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, across oceans and seas, through desert, mountain and plain, forest and . . . . Continue Reading »
Alain Badiou begins his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by describing the simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation of late modern civilization. The homogenization he links to the globalization of capitalism economic structures: there is free circulation, but free circulation of . . . . Continue Reading »
Princeton University Press recently launched a new series, “Lives of Great Religious Books.” Each volume examines an important book - Genesis, Augustine’s Confessions , the Bhagavad Gita - and traces the book’s origins, history and uses. They are brief (some are a little . . . . Continue Reading »
Ask Eusebius of Caesarea, and he won’t give a straight answer. Ask Jerome, and he knows it was the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia. Ask anyone between the sixth and the sixteenth century, and they’ll tell you, with great assurance, Sylvester of Rome. Hans Pohlsander ( Emperor Constantine , . . . . Continue Reading »
Even after extensive research, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham hasn’t quite cracked Egypt’s secretive Muslim Brotherhood . But the TLS reviewer gives enough to leave us worried. The Brotherhood’s emphasis on the status and dignity of Muslims alone was a break with Egyptian . . . . Continue Reading »
From the Economist ‘s review of Vic Gatrell’s The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age , the book sounds like a colorful read. Gatrell focuses on 18th-century London and finds it a merry old place: “At general elections in Westminster hecklers threw dead or . . . . Continue Reading »
The title of Mark Edwards’s Origen Against Plato bluntly gives the gist of the book. Contrary to the popular wisdom, Origen was not a Platonist, denying all of the premises of the Platonism of his time - that objects are defined because they participate in forms that dwell in an incorporeal . . . . Continue Reading »
Pastor Jeff Meyers writes to correct my quotation of Kuyper on Christian conversions to Islam, and points me to Rodney Stark’s The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (204-5). Stark disputes the “widespread belief that Muslim . . . . Continue Reading »
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