Christian Culture Research Articles

Христианское население города Маджара и его округи по данным археологических и письменных источников

Introduction. The article deals with the issue of Christian communities of different denominations to have resided in the city of Majar, the latter localized around Majar hillfort on the Kuma riverside. Christian cult objects have been discovered in the commercial and crafts quarter of the hillfort. Archaeological and written sources make it possible to identify certain groups of Christians — Orthodox, Catholic, and Gregorian (Armenian) ones — within the city’s population. Goals. The study aims to summarize data on Christians in Majar. Nowadays, there is archaeological evidence confirming Majar had been also inhabited by ethnic Russians and Armenians. Materials and methods. The work analyzes the First Sophia Chronicle, sources on Latin missionary activity in the Golden Horde published by Ph. Bruun, A. Malyshev, and R. Hautala, a 1774 map of the Caucasus compiled by Georg Treitel, and archaeological materials. The study employs a number of research methods, such as the historical/systemic, historical/comparative, and cartographic ones. Results. The year 1245 had witnessed earliest contacts between the papacy and the Mongol Empire. In 1260, relations between the Golden Horde and the Byzantine Empire were set up. And in 1267, Metropolitan Kirill II of Kiev received a jarlig from Khan Mengu-Timur. Rulers of the Golden Horde were seeking to achieve various domestic and foreign policy goals through the agenda of religious tolerance. Franciscan missions, parishes of the Alan Metropolitanate, Diocese of Sarai, and the Armenian Church were functioning across the early 14th-century North Caucasus. Some 16th–18th century written sources attest to the presence of a Christian temple within the hillfort of Majar. Materials published by Ph. Bruun, A. Malyshev, and R. Hautala provide evidence Majar and its neighborhood used to host several Franciscan missions throughout the 14th century. Christian cult objects (encolpion cross, copper icon) discovered in the territory of Majar’s trade and crafts quarter testify to that Orthodox Christians had also lived there and had a temple of their own. The Armenian cross-stone (khachkar) which had been part of a church and found at the ancient site suggests there may have been an Armenian community and an Armenian temple too. Conclusions. The available evidence of the presence of different Christian denominations in Majar insufficiently reveals their role in the city’s life. And it gets urgent to localize the Christian quarter at the ancient site of Majar. So, the search for archival materials and archaeological explorations of the site should be continued.

Chrzest Polski – najważniejsze wydarzenie w dziejach naszego kraju

The article outlines historical conditions of the baptism carried by Mieszko I in 966 and presents the most important contemporary theories referring to the time and place of that act. It follows with a characteristics of the three crucial aspects of that event: religious (chance for salvation for Mieszko, his subjects and their descendants), civilizational (entering the sphere of Christian culture, encouraging a development of science and technology), and state-building (joining the European community referred to as Christianitas, improving state management and creating opportunities for diplomatic activity). Finally, it emphasised the utmost importance of Christianity and the Church for maintaining the national identity of the Poles, especially in the period of national enslavement.

Quo vadis, Homo spiritualis?

Introduction. Where are you going, spiritual man? – humanity has been facing this question since antiquity, when Christian culture was an alternative to sacred teachings. Modern society in recent “pandemic” years, against the background of a stable state of traditional religiosity, has shown an explosive interest in esotericism. Theoretical analysis. The ontological approach to the phenomenon of the esoteric tradition made it possible to show its dialectical nature: sacred teachings contained values that could serve as the basis for the spirituality of society or one of the reasons for its cultural decadence. The syncretism of mythological and mass consciousness allows esoteric culture to remain the constant of society. The socio-philosophical analysis of the functional features of myth-thinking made it possible to discover a platform for stable positions of existence in the universal culture of the esoteric tradition. Conclusion. Today, the existence of esotericism in human practice is at a bifurcation point, where some values are actively filling the intellectually elitist trend in the development of culture, while others are being redirected into the ordinary form of presence in society. Aspects of myth-thinking are systematized, thanks to which the esoteric tradition ensures its functional stability in society.

აგიოგრაფიული ტრადიციები და სამეგრელოს ქრისტიანული რეალიები

Samegrelo is a particularly interesting region for studying the identity and uniqueness of Georgian Christian culture. This book analyzes various source materials relevant to this topic. Christian cultural ideals, paradigms or symbols are clearly revealed in these sources. Source materials are distinguished thematically, chronologically, and functionally: words, concepts, phrases; poetic or other genres folkloric texts including proverbs, parables, myths; relics depicting liturgical, ethnographic-ritual practices and related terms; micro and macro toponyms; vocabulary containing symbols of trees, plants, animals and numbers; facts about everyday life. The book is divided into separate articles and sub-chapters based on the content and systematic grouping of the obtained information. Through comparing these genres, the parallels between hagiography and the mentioned materials are particularly interesting and reveal obvious similarities between them. Hagiography is the main source of medieval Georgian religious knowledge. Certain systems of thought; a special form of contemplation of the world; aesthetic and ethical views; philosophical thought - all of these were formed in Georgia during the medieval period and are sometimes expressed in the form of theoretical discussions in Georgian hagiography, and sometimes through pieces of art. The worldview established by Christianity was most clearly reflected in hagiography. Since it is the most reliable source for the study of medieval thought, the assessment of the Christian realities of Samegrelo is mainly based on comparison with hagiographic literary traditions.

Przestrzenie inspiracji biblijnych w literaturze

The article shows inspiration of biblical text in Polish literature. The author has focused attention on the presence of different spaces of Scripture in the literary work. Pointed out, on the basis of selected examples, the presence of figurative, styling, styling, theme, axiological and formal recalls. Also defined the meaning and function of them. Emphasized the value of Polish culture rooted in the words of Christian culture. With regard to the last poems of Czesław Milosz she asked the question about the consequences of contemporary absence (or presence minimized) the Bible in literary works.

Just Tell the Truth: A Call to Faith, Hope, and Courage by Richard Lischer

Reviewed by: Just Tell the Truth: A Call to Faith, Hope, and Courage by Richard Lischer Mark Koschmann Just Tell the Truth: A Call to Faith, Hope, and Courage. By Richard Lischer. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2021. 210pp. This book is a collection of sermons, scripture meditations, and theological essays. In each chapter the author balances Law and Gospel, calling for “Christians of all parties and in all walks of life” [End Page 461] to discover again “what it really means to be a follower of the Way” (xi). As in his previous book, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (2002), Lischer uses a narrative approach to apply the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus to contemporary concerns. The author gives a clear and passionate account of God’s story of salvation which culminates in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. While sociopolitical and ethical concerns appear, the key is to convey “what the book of Acts calls ‘the facts about Jesus’—who he is, what he did, what he demands, and the sort of people he empowers us to be” (xi). By interpreting scripture and applying it to the contemporary American social context, Lischer succeeds in giving a descriptive account of the callings Christians have today, in particular calling to speak about the radical grace God gives to the world. The book is organized around the liturgical seasons. In the first section the author uses the season of Lent to guide readers to reflect on the brokenness, sorrow, and disappointments of human life. In the second section Lischer explores a Christian ethos of hope with meditations on the liturgical seasons of Christmas and Pentecost, as well as reflections on the Psalms. As noted in his introduction, “COVID-19 created a universal field of suffering and anxiety to such an extent that it was impossible to think or write about anything else” (xi). These two sections take on deeper meaning, then, when viewed as a response to the suffering people have experienced during the pandemic. In the third section Lischer turns to Holy Week to expound on the victory that is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The fourth section illustrates the ways that God calls people to live their faith in action through their vocations. The fifth section describes saints as God’s teachers who show how to forgive, reject power, tell the truth, be humble and serve others, and “teach us how to die” (164). The last section includes a series of writings on “Public Callings” urging Christians to live out their vocations for thoughtful and informed living. I assigned this book to undergraduate students in an intermediate theology course at Concordia University, St. Paul. The book connected well to themes of the course and the experiences of students in Minneapolis-St. Paul following the murder of George Floyd. His [End Page 462] death prompted courageous outcries for truth and justice. In one of the first sessions, while on a walking tour near campus, students came upon a scorched debris-ridden area. The experience breathed life into the text. “In Christ, even the chaos of ashes finds a form. We don’t receive the ashes on Ash Wednesday only; we bring them to the altar every day. The little box we carry is our own. Only in Jesus are they gathered into the shape of the cross” (6). This articulation of the theology of the cross offered hope to students in the face of tragic injustice. Lischer excels in his description of liturgy, especially to interpret God’s work in the world today. He emphasizes that the baptized are redeemed by Christ the crucified, writing that the baptismal promise “can never be taken away from you, but it does leave an indelible mark” (209). However, for those who are less familiar with the church’s liturgical life, these references may be lost, missed, or confused. Still, the liturgical and sacramental references provide opportunities for teaching about the promises of God in Jesus Christ. Overall, this book is a remarkable achievement for its engaging devotional approach, biblical insights, and clear application of the Christian Gospel. In one essay on Psalm 46 the author...

Некоторые геометрические мотивы на Кавказе и в Каппадокии в эпоху Средневековья: размышления об их истоках и смысле

Introduction. The article deals with the frescoes of the specific style “red signs” on the rock. They were widespread in the architectural monuments of Cappadocia. The focus of the research is the motifs of triangular and rhombus (with the dots inside and without it) between the 9th and 10th centuries. Methods. These motifs are compared to the similar images on the stone reliefs (architectural decoration) from the territory of the Northern Caucasus and Western Georgia of the medieval period. A certain number of common features are underlined and studied. Analysis. In both situations the representations are made in primitive planar graphic style with the minimal set of technical means. The iconographical repertoire is rich in zoomorphic images (their biological identification is difficult to determine), geometrical signs, and rosettes. The origins of the motif are traced back up to the ancient cultures in Asia Minor, Caucasus and the Near East. Its development is shown by means of ethnographical witnesses. Results. In conclusion, there is supposition that the permanent presence of the motif in sacral and traditional every day culture of the Northern Caucasus and Western Georgia is due to the influence of the Koban-Colchis cultural and historical community. In medieval Christian culture, it could have function of apotropeia. So, the article deals with the specific aspect of very interesting theme that is the culture of the barbaric periphery of the Byzantine empire in the period between 9th and 10th centuries.

Nowa ewangelizacja w kontekście wybranych zagadnień współczesnej kultury i komunikacji

The new evangelization is the enthusiasm to live the faith passed on to communities that are still unaware of the Good News. Contemporary evangelizers, for whom Saint Paul is a model, should undertake activities in the area of “modern areopagos” – large urban agglomerations, and proclaim the Gospel also through the means of communication used today by the broadly understood culture. There are two main tasks facing the new evangelization: updating the forms of communication to the contemporary language of communication, as well as shaping culture in accordance with the Gospel, creating a Christian culture.

Carnival in Africa

Carnival in Africa

Itineraries of Medieval Slavic Legal Texts: Byzantine “Farmer’s Law” in Ms. Slav. 466 from Hilandar Monastery

The author aims to summarize, analyze, and supplement the knowledge about the Slavic copy of the Byzantine Farmer’s Law in Ms. Slav 466 from Hilandar monastery, second quarter of the 15th century. It has long been in the focus of Serbian philology and history of law. The current observations refer to the following spheres: the relationship between text and manuscript, the axiological significance of precedential texts in culture, the importance of this copy for Byzantine-Slavic interactions in the legal system, the uninterrupted cultural role of Holly Mountain’s monasteries for Eastern Christian culture. The Slavic copy of the “Farmer’s Law” in Hil. 466 is unique by structure and peculiarities. The manuscript testifies to the only known combination of the Farmer’s Law and the Prochiron in the South Slavic tradition. It is hypothesized that this combination was a conscious choice of the compilers of the collection influenced by tendencies in the post-Byzantine tradition. It corresponded to the strong anti-heretical line of the overall manuscript, inherited from the struggles against heresies on Mount Athos in the 14th century. The manuscript is a typical monastic miscellany. The linguistic nature of the “Farmer‘s Law” copy reveals its undoubted South-Slavic character, without russification, strongly influenced from the Greek protograph. Copy and translation may probably be of close chronology. Owing to being a precedential text, the Slavonic copy of the “Farmer’s Law” in Ms. Slav. 466 holds a special place in the attempts of reconstructing the stages and processes of reception of the Byzantine juridical legacy among South Slavs, of establishing the geographic-areal scope and the cultural itineraries of the spread of this text.

Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (By Bruce B. Lawrence)

Reviewed by: Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit by Bruce B. Lawrence Gordon D. Newby (bio) Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit Bruce B. Lawrence New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos, 2021. 192 Pages. Professor Bruce B. Lawrence, The Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Duke University, has published his latest work, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, in the Wiley-Blackwell Manifesto series. In an introductory overview, Lawrence declares his work to be a Manifesto in three words and six chapters. His choice of the genre of manifesto gives this work a personal, confessional voice and a hortative message that encourages the reader to adopt a different historical worldview and a new analytic vocabulary. His starting point is to return to and invite into the intellectual and moral worldview of Marshall G. S. Hodgson, the author of the posthumously published three-volume work, The Venture of Islam. Each of the three words of the title of this manifesto point to three interconnected aspects found in Hodgson’s major work that has the subtitle of “Conscience and History in a World Civilization,” placing Hodgson’s project in a moral as well as a historical dimension.1 In Lawrence’s view, the Hodgsonian mission failed to bring about the shift in thinking that he hoped. Lawrence writes, “At the most basic level each [term in the title, Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit] connotes a surplus: Islamicate is more than Islamic or Muslim, Cosmopolitan is more than congenial or civil, and Spirit is more than subject or agent. Together Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit projects the presence of a tidal wave in world history that remains hidden for most, [End Page 92] opaque for many, and misunderstood even by experts” (p. xvi). In this manifesto, Lawrence exhorts us to take strong action to revise our thinking and those of our students to a pan-world perspective. Because Lawrence’s Manifesto is so closely linked to Hodgson’s Venture, it must be viewed with Venture in mind. Marshall Hodgson, a professor at the University of Chicago and chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought, died in 1968, and his Venture of Islam was completed from his notes and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1974. Its broad vision of the role of Islamicate civilization was quickly embroiled in controversy over his use of the term “Islamicate.” This neologism was meant to distinguish between the religion of Islam, that is things and ideas Islamic, and the wider civilization that was Islamicate. This distinction was meant to open a discussion of Islamicate civilization to include groups usually identified as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and others who were part of the culture and history of the Islamicate world and decenter the discussion of world civilization away from the teleological imperative of Western Christian culture and the subject of religion. In Lawrence’s “Preamble,” he asks, “Why Islamicate, why now, why me?” His answers inform the reader who he is and why he is so strongly engaged with this subject in the manifesto. It is a reference to Hodgson’s urging that we reveal who we are and the pre-commitments that we bring to any discussion. For Hodgson, this is the beginning of realizing the force of Conscience in the projects of writing and teaching world history. In Lawrence’s work, we learn that he started using The Venture of Islam for an undergraduate class at Duke University in 1976, only a year after its publication.2 As Lawrence recalls Venture’s reception among his students and colleagues, his experience reflects a broader reception among students and colleagues who struggled with Hodgson’s neologisms and his challenges to re-think and re-center our values when we make our modern Euro-American world the standard against which we measure the rest of the world and its past. Even before 1979, the year that the Iranian Revolution brought Islam to Western headlines and consciousness, the term Islam had acquired fraught and pejorative connotations and distorted interpretations that entailed prejudices and misinterpretations. The word had become too loaded and charged to be analytically useful for talking about the fourteen centuries of Islam’s existence and its world-wide spread. Prophet Muhammad’s...

Christian Art in D.V. Aynalov’s Legacy of the Kazan Period

D.V. Aynalov (1862—1939), a Russian Byzantinist, art critic and historian of Russian art, during his years at Kazan University (1890—1903) studied the issues of ancient Christian culture. For the first time, the article involves Aynalov’s newly studied iconographic heritage, which allows describing the creative laboratory of the Byzantinist and his original method of analyzing monuments. The author finds that the development of a new research methodology was facilitated by the expansion of the empirical base, which, in addition to apocryphal texts, included Aynalov’s own drawings, and photographs of monuments made by order of the scientist. In the article, D.V. Aynalov’s lectures on “Ancient Christian Art” are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, allowing to reveal the argumentation of the scientist’s main idea about the connection between the late Antique style and early Christian art. Aynalov made two important discoveries in the history of Christian art. The first discovery was that, using the example of the mosaics of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Aynalov managed to identify an important moment in the transformation of the image of the Virgin Mary into the image of the royal Virgin. The second discovery was the transformation of the symbolic image of Christ in the form of a lamb into the image in the form of a man, using the example of the mosaics of Albenga. The implementation of a comprehensive interpretation of Aynalov’s iconographic heritage in the context of his ideas allows us to understand the scientist’s system of evidence and reveal his original concept of the development of Christian art in the West and East. His research made a significant contribution to the new concept of the universal history of art, in which a special place belonged to Byzantium, and later to ancient Russian art. Aynalov’s works contributed a great deal to the development of the scientific base on Christian art, art history and Byzantine studies in Kazan. The republication of D.V. Aynalov’s legacy of the Kazan period is of interest for both modern Byzantine studies and the history of cultural studies.

Предисловие к переводу

In this article, we provide the first commented edition and translation of an important fragment from Vladimir Zabugin’s posthumous work “The History of the Christian Renaissance in Italy” (Milan, 1924). Zabugin was a Russian historian, philologist and thinker, who lived and worked in Italy in the first quarter of the 20th century. He made an important contribution to the history of ideas with his concept of “Christian Renaissance”, abolishing the postulated antithesis of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well as the idea of the Renaissance as the revival of antiquity. A sudden death in a mountaineering accident in the Italian Alps prevented Zabugin from completing his outstanding monography: editing the text, compiling notes, bibliography, name index, the absence of which made it very difficult for specialists to refer to the text. That is because a special focus of the present article lies in commenting the fragment and guiding the reader through Zabugin’s key conceptional points. The presented fragment of the first chapter of the book sought to emphasize the continuity of classical and christian culture in Italian proto-Renaissance literature, philosophy, architecture, fine arts. Refering to the eve of the Renaissance (13th century), Zabugin clearly demonstrates how the Christian culture “imperat” here, and the pagan one “ministrat”.

Aljamiado retellings of the Hebrew Bible

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the fourteenth century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalised retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to Christians and Muslims, and are a lens through which to study the cultural life of late Spanish Islam in its negotiation with the dominant Christian culture. The vernacular language and culture shared by Moriscos and Christians was a powerful medium for creating fictional Biblical storyworlds, mental models of the reality represented by the Biblical narratives. These retellings both exalt Islamic beliefs, traditions, rituals, and doctrines in the face of social marginalization and persecution, while at the same time validating their experience as speakers of Spanish and Aragonese and as participants in a vernacular culture shared between Moriscos and Christians.

На перекрестке грузинской и русской культур

This article is devoted to a conceptual analysis of the basic values of Russian and Georgian linguistic cultures — the concept of “bread”, which is included in the repertoire of the most recurrent axiologemes of national language pictures of the world. The authors of the work come to the conclusion that the value picture of the world serves as a teleological vector for the development of culture. At the level of a descriptive essay, the work establishes a correlation between the mentality and the value level of the picture of the world. The corpus of texts (dictionary, paremiological, artistic) of the Russian and Georgian languages, in which the concept of “bread” is represented, served as an illustrative material for the analysis. Typical convergences and divergences of concepts in cognizable cultures are established. The conclusion is made about the common perception of the value of “bread”, which is based on the foundation of Christian culture.

Breaking Up With Jesus

Breaking Up With Jesus

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HELL FROM JEWISH TO CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY: a Biblical Guide to Hell and Its Existence

According to the view that is relatively common in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell basically deserve compensation for the kind of earthly life we lead. Good people go to heaven as a worthy reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scale of justice is sometimes considered balanced. But almost all Christian theologians regard such a view, however commonly it may be in popular culture, as too simplistic and unsampled; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is much more subtle than that. It is important to acknowledge the polemical and apologetic setting of its development. Judaism underwent modifications to protect the Jewish faith and chastise apostates in the face of invading Hellenism. For the early Christ-movement, continued growth was necessary to defend itself against both internal defection and first-century Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. The early church fathers believed that using the dread of damnation to uphold moral standards was ideologically motivated. As a result, the evolution of the afterlife may be viewed as a social construct, the effects of which in the contemporary day have had a permanent, harmful influence on many individuals.

Religious education in French private schools: Categories, conflations, and inequities

ABSTRACT France’s secular political culture, Catholic heritage, and tumultuous relationship with Islam have had a significant impact on 21st-century interpretations, perceptions, and politicisations of religious education in French society. Since religious education is relegated to the French private school system, it is decentralised, complex, and vastly plural – especially compared to France’s hyper-centralised public education. Religious education’s plurality and decentralisation have deepened with the recent expansion of Muslim and independent schooling. This article offers a comparative analysis of the variety of interpretations and manifestations of religious education across France’s private education system. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in more than fifteen French private Muslim, Catholic, and secular schools intermittently from 2012 to 2020, I illustrate how Catholic school actors and supposedly ‘secular’ school actors imparting Christian culture can operate with significantly more freedom than their Muslim school counterparts. Despite significant variation in approaches to religious education across the system, religious education in Muslim schools is quite parallel to other schooling communities. Nonetheless, Muslim school actors face disproportionate barriers to equitable treatment. This discrimination is facilitated by the complexities and ambiguities of RE and is representative of efforts to restrict the imparting of Muslim culture(s) to youth in French schools.

The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions by Maureen Connors Santelli

Reviewed by: The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions by Maureen Connors Santelli Ada Dialla (bio) Maureen Connors Santelli, The Greek Fire: American-Ottoman Relations and Democratic Fervor in the Age of Revolutions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 250. Hardcover $44.95. The famous Greek leader Petrobeis Mavromihalis, upon the start of the Greek Revolution in the Peloponnese, sent to the Americans a document titled “Declaration to the Americans by the Kalamata Messinian Senate and the Field Marshal Petros Mavromihalis” (March 1821). In the document, the political affinity between Greeks and Americans was stressed. Despite the geographical distance, wrote Mavromihalis, the revolutionaries regarded the Americans as familiar; they regarded them as friends and fellow citizens, philanthropists, brave and with the Bible in hand. With this “Declaration,” Mavromihalis hoped to provoke the philhellenic sentiments of the Americans. Regarding European Philhellenism, most researchers agree that the phil-hellenic discourse included—and was based on—three main pillars: (a) religion, namely Christian religion, which in those days witnessed various changes in Europe as a vehicle for reshaping society, with Christianity associated with civilization and Europe/the West identified with Christian civilization; (b) antiquity, with Greek antiquity as the cradle of civilization (actually of European civilization, which was then seen as global); and (c) humanitarianism. When the Greek Revolution erupted, politicians, intellectuals, and public figures—everyone who could speak, write, and comment on what was happening among the Orthodox Greeks of the Ottoman Empire—had no difficulty in associating the uprising with the discourse on slavery and in empathizing with the Christian populations ruled by the Sublime Porte, seeing them as having been enslaved by the Sultan and as victims of various barbarities. From the first moment, language was mobilized which was intended to evoke humanitarian sentiments. Words and phrases such as “extermination,” “annihilation,” “effusion of blood,” “massacres,” and “slavery” were in common use. Elsewhere, Philhellenism, as a movement for supporting the revolutionaries, expressed itself in poems, art, [End Page 494] articles, fiery speeches, fundraising, the creation of various active committees and societies, and so on. But what was the reception in the United States of the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian revolutionaries, subjects of the Sultan? This is a little-known and seldom-discussed subject: one of the few exceptions is an extended chapter titled “Americans and Greeks” in Gary Bass’s 2008 book Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. And this gap in the literature is what Maureen Connors Santelli has come to address. The philhellenic movement in the United States and elsewhere developed mainly in the wake of the Chios massacre of April 1822. In the US, the philhellenic movement had reached a peak by 1824, with the press referring to the “Greek Fire,” a phrase that alluded to Byzantine liquid fire but that also underscored how the philhellenic movement was spreading like fire across the whole of the United States. This book examines American philhellenism at two levels: (a) as a movement of support for the Greek insurgents; and (b) as an issue internal to American society, linked with discussions of the need for social and political reforms, especially regarding the questions of slavery and the emancipation of women. Santelli’s study thus connects, in an original manner, issues of foreign policy with burning internal questions. It examines Philhellenism, within a global framework and in terms of the interrelationship and overall movement of ideas, as a model for popular political action. In the United States, Philhellenism raised important questions of collective identity—a result of Americans’ comparison of themselves to European societies across the Atlantic, including with respect to stereotypes regarding the Ottomans—and of the political affinities between Americans and Greeks. The author begins her presentation by bringing to the fore the history and context of the period immediately prior to the Greek Revolution and shedding light on the little-known subject of US-Ottoman relations. The United States was not yet a great power. Its presence in the Mediterranean, though conspicuous, was not a result of diplomatic missions or international trade agreements. As the author explains in an initial chapter titled “Americans, Greeks, and Ottomans before 1821,” the...

Understanding the Difference Between Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism

Understanding the Difference Between Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism Marianne Moyaert (bio) In his article, John Pawlikowski begins by discussing the Church's ambivalent position vis-à-vis the history of antisemitism. On the one hand, Pope John Paul II explicitly condemned antisemitism as a sin, a condemnation, which Pawlikowski notes, "represents the strongest theological statement against this pernicious disease." He also makes explicit what steps have been taken, especially since the Second Vatican Council, by both ecclesial authorities and theological scholars to remove anti-Jewish legacies from their theology. On the other hand, there are reasons to doubt whether the Church has taken responsibility for its implication in the history of antisemitism. The Church has tended towards arguing "that antisemitism came only from fringe elements in the Church who were muscled by wayward preachers and teachers." Such an argument denies the pervasive and systemic problem of antisemitism and disavows the view that it is deeply embedded in the Catholic tradition. The document We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (1998), which Pawlikowski also mentions, is exemplary in this regard. While this document makes clear the necessity of thoroughgoing scholarly research to better understand the mechanisms that finally led to the Shoah and emphasizes that Christians have to confront the injustices of [End Page 373] the past to open up a new future (memoria futuri), the document also shifts responsibility away from the Church and its theological traditions to those Christians who failed to live according to what "might have been expected from Christ's followers."1 Rather than recognizing antisemitism as a form of systemic racialization legitimized and institutionalized by Catholic tradition and its authorities, the document tends to reduce the problem of antisemitism to the personal failure of some.2 To make matters worse, the document immediately contrasts the few rotten apples to the many initiatives taken by ecclesial authorities to halt the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis. In addition, We Remember emphasizes that National Socialism was in fact a modern, anti-Christian, pagan racist regime, which ought to be clearly distinguished from Christian anti-Judaism. By way of conclusion, the document acknowledges that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people" contributed to "feelings of hostility towards this people," but points out that such interpretations have been "totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council." Understood in this way, the problem of Christian anti-Judaism belongs to the past and has been dealt with appropriately within the Church; the problem of racist antisemitism is inimical to Christian tradition and its theological vision about the unity of the human race, and has been condemned in the strongest words. In contrast to We Remember, Pawlikowski explicitly states that "thus far the roots of antisemitism in the Catholic Church have [not] been fully erased from Catholic consciousness." To this day, Pawlikowski asserts, there is a problem of latent or dormant antisemitism, which can become the ground for new more explicit expressions of hatred, such as the attacks on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. To uproot antisemitism from Catholic tradition, Pawlikowski suggests a research program focused on biblical exegesis and the Patristic tradition, as well as on the failure of the Church to acknowledge how its anti-Jewish traditions provided fertile ground for the Shoah. Finally, he also urges us to revisit the issue of the Church's evangelizing mandate in relation to the Jewish people. [End Page 374] I am a Catholic comparative theologian working after Nostra Aetate and I find myself in full agreement with Pawlikowski. The history of Christian antisemitism covers almost 2,000 years and we only started to grapple with it in the aftermath of the Shoah. Far from it being merely a surface issue, antisemitic discourse has seeped deeply into the core of (European) Christian culture. Antisemitic patterns of thinking were imprinted on the Christian imagination through liturgy, prayer, and sermons, but also through art, illuminated manuscripts, theatre, music, as well as legislation. Even when one is dedicated to moving beyond antisemitism, it remains difficult to step outside of this framework. As David Nirenberg states, "The peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great": when we...