British Christian Research Articles

Multiculturalism and Legal Plurality in Australia

The great multicultural experiment that is Australia has engendered a reconsideration of core values. Even the traditionally conservative legal system has not been immune. While the law remains anchored in its British Christian common-law traditions, the influence of other cultures and beliefs are emerging. The primary two instances of this are the partial accommodation of Indigenous customary law and a debate over the accommodation of Islamic law principles.The adoption of “foreign” legal concepts goes to the essence of what it means to be a liberal democratic society: does it mean wholesale legal plurality, or are there foreign legal principles excluded because they are unacceptable to a free and equal society? Putting this in the Australian context, should Australia accept the customary and religious laws of minorities, or is multiculturalism about establishing one legal framework that applies to all, equally, and without discrimination?This article explores the implications for the legal system of an increasingly multicultural Australia. It will be observed that legal plurality does exist in Australia but largely in the shadows where the vulnerable of society lack protection.

Present state and prospects of development of Еmerging church

The article examines the present state and prospects of development of Emerging It is found that in the first decade of the XXI century Emerging Church movement to a certain extent abandoned the evangelistic strategies. The main possible options for the future of the organization: the cessation of activity, because it is mostly has served its purpose; adoption of Emergent role of provocateur (Prophet), which will carry out publishing projects and hold annual conferences to discuss various topics; full decentralization of the organization to the level of local and regional communities, denominational and ethnic networks; transformation Emergent to act energetically network that will provide information and advice to community leaders and denominational networks. Noticed that the British Christianity makes theological interpretation of forms of church life that received the generalized name new manifestations of church. Joint initiatives of Anglican and Methodist churches manifested, particularly in these theological ideas and practical actions: the transition from the idea of the universal Church to the concept of cultural communities; replacement of professionals priests for professional communities; rejection of a parachurch organizations in favor of parallel communities; relations between Church and education in Christian schools which, while not play a weighty role in increasing the number of supporters of the traditional Church, but create a space for the emergence of social groups that are open to joining the Christian faith.

Performing Religion in Public ed. by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Religion in Public ed. by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman Roy Brooks-Delphin PERFORMING RELIGION IN PUBLIC. Edited by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. 304. Critically shifting Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, Performing Religion in Public turns toward performance, that “essentially contested concept” (17), to investigate the slipperiness of Habermas’s sequestering of the public sphere from religion. As an anthology, these essays contribute to recent conversations on religion and publics demonstrated by works like Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen’s The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011) and Christopher Balme’s The Theatrical Public Sphere (2014). Performing Religion in Public stands apart, however, by framing performance studies as equipped to engage the “un-translatability” between the sacred and the secular, asking: “How do we not understand each other?” (13; emphasis in original). Taking up Habermas’s assertion that religious speech ought to hold sway in public discourse only when rationally translated, Performing Religion contests the limitations of insider/outsider binaries, noting the inseparability of performance from public world-making. The bracketing of publics and self from experience disregards existence with and as the world (15). Performance studies, then, through reflexivity and its “use of an analysis of performative events and practices as a means to gain access to the network of relations” (16) engages untranslatability by troubling the disentanglement of the private from the public. Performance subverts conventional ways of thinking through its processes of knowing, producing, and encountering difference: “reason’s lack is supplied by performance” (18). [End Page 577] Drawing from a spectrum of religious traditions and theorists, Performing Religion boasts varied voices and topics, including generous discussions among contributors ending each section. The book is organized into four theoretically driven parts: “Publics and the Non-Democratic State”; “Visceral Publics”; “Publics and Commodification”; and “Ephemeral Publics.” Each part is made up of three chapters, and while a quarter of them treat geographically English religious practices or personalities, all chapters weigh factors of space, identity, world-making, and performative economies. The first part principally addresses how governing bodies regulate or appropriate religious discourse to maintain influence. Simon du Toit examines the sixteenth-century Puritan preaching of John Stockwood and Richard Greenham in “The Market for Argument,” contending that performances of spiritual interiority and prophetic (and anti-theatrical) speech produced a counter-public competing for religious authority, blurring boundaries of public and private, and essentially politicizing Puritan zeal. Similarly analyzing embodiment, Joy Palacios’s contribution on France’s early seminaries shows how seventeenth-century communal prayer carefully regulated publics to form religious community. South African political and racial conflicts come alive in Michael Lambert and Tamantha Hammerschlag’s chapter, “The Durban Passion Play,” which questions the publics that these performances sanction in the pluralistic and postcolonial nation. Part 2, “Visceral Publics,” investigates how performances generate fear, joy, and sacrifice in the service of religious rhetoric and public hailing. Challenging Habermas’s concept of public reason, each chapter illuminates how religious discourse functions beyond reason and agreement. Tom Grimwood and Peter Yeandle distinguish the “entextualizing” rhetoric of preacher and theatre director Stewart Headlam (1847–1924) from moral ontological structures of the fractured English Christian community. An outstanding project awaits them in addressing Headlam’s productions. Joshua Edelman’s essay on American street preaching probes the practice’s offensiveness and formation of “intolerable publics,” challenging the criteria of “willingness” in defining publics. He demonstrates the necessity of rejection, tracing the affective potential of street preaching’s awkward and ineffective means, and details how intimate publics can arise beyond public debate and consent. Kris Messer documents the intermixing of personal and public discourse in “Faith, Fright, and Excessive Feeling,” inviting deeper reflection on communities informing and performing idealized publics and identities through a look at three separate hell houses. Part 3, “Publics and Commodification,” presents three cultural contexts whereby capitalism, choice, and secularisms infiltrate and redefine religious publics. Jo Robinson and Lucie Sutherland expose the emerging fierceness of religious competition in “Congregations, Audiences, Actors: Religious Performance and the Individual in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nottingham.” Mapping religious and...

Men as Meat: Exploiting Jewish Law in Ælfric’s Translation of Maccabees

Ælfric’s Old English homiletic-hagiographical translation of Maccabees, “Passio Machabeorum,” manifests the unique problems and opportunities presented by Old Testament food taboos to early medieval English Christianity. Taking up Giorgio Agamben’s observation that the division between human and animal life occurs within the human as a condition of human possibility (an observation he extends analogously to Christians and Jews) and Kenneth R. Stow’s documentation of the association between Jews and dogs as a primary channel of Christian supersession over Judaism, I argue that Ælfric exploits an unlikely similarity between Jewish dietary law and his own program of Christian orthodoxy: the centrality to each system of the classification and separation of orders of being, particularly animal orders. This shared investment provides an irresistible opportunity for Ælfric, in whose hands Jewish food and sacrifice laws first appear as anthropologically curious aspects of the radical difference between Christians and nonbelievers, but quickly become the very index of that difference. Ælfric appropriates Jewish food laws to create interlinked hierarchical distinctions between humans and animals, Christians and non-Christians. Written at the height of the Viking invasions, Ælfric’s homily on Maccabees shores up Christian humanity against its human and animal others in a time of crisis.

The Effects of Religion on Translating Humor from English into Persian through Figurative Language

The present study investigated the integral role of religion and culture in translation of humor from English Christian short stories into Persian. The main focus was to discover how figurative languages could be transferred from source text into target text. Four humorous Christian short stories were given to ten M.A. Persian students of Translation Studies to observe whether they could transfer the whole humorous concepts. To this end, through Newmark's faithful, cognitive, and adaptation methods, translated texts were scrutinized. Due to the religious and social differences between English and Persian cultures, the researcher concludes that the transference of figurative languages and humor from English into Persian could not take place thoroughly.

Christian versus Muslim employment in Mandatory Palestine

During the British Mandate in Palestine, there existed among the majority Muslim Arab population a perception that the British favoured Christian Arabs for administrative positions. While such a preference was arguably justifiable during the early years of the Mandate, inasmuch as Christian Arabs were initially more qualified from an educational standpoint, over the ensuing years, the number of Muslim youths with a suitable, secular-based education very quickly increased. There nonetheless persisted a perception of Christian favouritism – that is, that Christians still enjoyed preferential treatment with respect to government employment – and this soon came to define a significant Muslim grievance, one that would periodically prove divisive between Muslim and Christian Arabs, not least within the context of the Palestinian nationalist movement. This article seeks to ascertain whether, on the basis of a statistical analysis of the actual numbers of Muslim and Christian Arabs employed by the British Mandatory government and their respective educational qualifications, Christian Arabs did in fact constitute a privileged group. Also considered (in light of certain sociological concepts regarding group and national identity) are the ramifications of such a perception – regardless of whether reflective of the actual reality – with respect to Muslim–Christian unity, the shaping of Palestinian Arab national identity and the relationship between Arab national identity and Islam.

The Ambiguities of Christian Sexual Discourse in Post‐War Britain: The British Council of Churches and Its Early Moral Welfare Work

This article extends and develops recent historical discussion on the relationship between British Christianity, sexuality, and modernity, proposing some ways forward for future scholarship. Recent accounts have concentrated on liberal Anglican positions on issues of sexuality, but here the focus is on the British Council of Churches, its early moral welfare work, and interdenominational efforts to reconsider Christian sex teaching in the immediate post‐war years. While examining broader trends towards positive statements about sex and attempts to assemble self‐regulating sexual citizens in Christian moral welfare thinking, the article suggests that, far from a narrative of relatively untroubled and gradual acceptance of progressive Christian views on sex, this was a halting and uncertain process. The article reflects closely on the complexities of post‐war Christian attempts to work with new ideas about sexuality and to formulate their own version of them, the difficulties and ambiguities involved in developing a cogent position in a debate where Christian opinion was so fiercely divided, as well as the complicated nature of institutional decision‐making. As a case study, the British Council of Churches reflects earlier, problematic attempts to alter Christian sex teaching, as well as the unfolding of later difficulties for the British churches.

Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada by Benjamin T. Jones

Reviewed by: Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada by Benjamin T. Jones Angela Woollacott Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada. By benjamin t. jones. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. 299 pp. $100.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Australian and Canadian history shared significant similarities both in politics and on their frontiers in the nineteenth century, along with important differences. While the expanding field of settler colonial history now often brings these histories into the same frame of analysis, studies that directly connect or compare them at length are not common. For this reason, Benjamin Jones’s study of the development of responsible government in the two places in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be welcomed. Republicanism and Responsible Government contributes to world history in the sense of connecting two disparate sites through this shared political evolution, though it does not seek to place these stories of political maturation in a broader global framework. Its methodology involves drawing connections more than making full-blown comparisons. Jones is as much—if not more—interested in political philosophy as in history. His focus is squarely on civic republicanism, which he defines as “a society of citizens engaging in activities to promote the body politic” and “to counter the desire for self-gain (corruption) with the desire for the greater good (virtue)” (pp. 18–19). This is a political philosophy now enjoying currency in both Spain and Switzerland, not least through the work of philosopher Philip Pettit. Jones presents a history of the ideas he sees in civic republicanism, and explains that the aim of his book is to show how the reform leaders in Canada and Australia from the 1830s through the 1850s drew on this intellectual tradition at least as much as they did from Lockean liberalism. He also puts forward the [End Page 698] concept of Christian civic republicanism, arguing that nonconformist religion was significant in shaping a shared vision of “a British Christian society dedicated to civic virtue, civic duty, and a civic religion” (p. 16). Further, Jones is at pains to argue that separatist (that is, anti-monarchical) republicanism was a minor strain in the politics of the day, and of much less import than civic republicanism. Beside the two introductory and one concluding chapters framing the book, there are four chapters on Canada and three on Australia. The Canadian chapters cover the rebellions of 1837–1838 in Upper and Lower Canada; Lord Durham’s 1838 Report on the Affairs of British North America and its significance; the role of newspaper editor Joseph Howe in pressing for responsible government in Nova Scotia; and those of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine in Upper and Lower Canada, respectively. The Australian chapters deal with the political career and significance of the Presbyterian cleric John Dunmore Lang and his role in the movement for representative and responsible government in New South Wales; the Anti-Transportation League and its campaign to stop the shipping of convicts to Australia; and the story of the Eureka Stockade on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854 and the consequent 1855 trials. I am insufficiently expert in Canadian history to assess how original those chapters are, though I found them interesting. In relation to the chapters on Australia, that on John Dunmore Lang is welcome because while his name is familiar, he has not been the subject of much historical attention in recent decades. The Anti-Transportation League has received more attention, as in the recently completed doctoral dissertation by Chris Holdridge, comparing the opposition to convict transportation in both South Africa and Australia and showing the connections among those movements, the push for colonial constitutional reform, and the emerging settler polities.20 My main reservation about Jones’s book concerns his presentation of the Eureka Stockade. He is familiar with the debate in Australian historiography surrounding Eureka, even citing some of the prominent historians who have objected to its mythological elevation in Australian history and pointing out the consequent distortions. Nevertheless, Jones contends that civic republicanism “drove the miners to take their fateful stand and resulted soon after in the...

Rama or ahimsa? Terror or Passive Resistance? Revolutionary Methods of Hindu Students from London University and the Christian Response, 1909–17

The assassination in London on the evening of 1 July 1909 of Sir Curzon Wyllie, aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by a twenty-six-year-old Indian student named Madar Lai Dhingra stunned the nation. The background to the shooting and its consequences shed light on the attitudes of British Christians to Indian Hindus. In turn light is shed on the response of Hindus, most crucially that of the eventual leader of the successful campaign for Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in the crucial decade before the First World War.

The Influence of Religious Coping and Religious Social Support on Health Behaviour, Health Status and Health Attitudes in a British Christian Sample.

Previous research has established a relationship between religion and health. However, the specific aspects of religion which may influence health are not fully understood. The present study investigates the effect of religious social support and religious coping on health behaviours, health status and attitudes to health whilst controlling for age and non-religious social support. The results indicate religious coping and religious social support positively impact on self-reported current health status, depression, health outlook and resistance susceptibility. However, negative religious coping was predictive of increased alcohol consumption. Overall congregational support and negative religious coping had the greatest impact on health.

Engaging the Congregation: The Place of Metadiscourse in Contemporary Preaching

Most forms of contemporary preaching elevate the role of the listeners, who are seen as co-constructors of the sermon. This article investigates how preachers may respond to a call from homiletics to ‘turn-to-the-listener’ through their deployment of metadiscourse, operationalized as a framework for understanding preaching not primarily as gospel proclamation, but as a form of social and communicative engagement. A quantitative analysis of 150 sermons from three well-established English Christian denominations finds that metadiscourse is a prolific feature in preaching, with almost one word in 10 performing a metadiscursive function, most prominently by recourse to interactional metadiscursive resources. A qualitative analysis shows that, across the three denominations, preachers adopt metadiscursive practices that may serve to address expectations in the turn-to-the-listener preaching paradigm. The findings will inform further applied analysis of religious discourse, and will add constructively to discussions within homiletics, not least by suggesting how empirical and applied approaches to language can be of service to homiletics and the teaching of preaching.

With God on our side. British Christian responses to the Spanish Civil War. By Ben Edwards. Pp. vii+321. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. £49.99. 978 1 4438 4807 7

With God on our side. British Christian responses to the Spanish Civil War. By Ben Edwards. Pp. vii+321. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. £49.99. 978 1 4438 4807 7 - Volume 65 Issue 4

Globalising British Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: The Imperial Anglican Emigrant Chaplaincy 1846–c. 1910

This article argues for the importance of religion in mass emigration from Britain in the nineteenth century. It does so by examining the origins and development of the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy developed from the 1840s to nurture the spiritual welfare of British emigrants departing for the British settler colonies over the rest of the nineteenth century. Developed over succeeding decades by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the chaplaincy expanded into a global network. By the 1880s it incorporated chaplains at British ports of embarkation and colonial ones of disembarkation, chaplains travelling on ships with emigrants and matrons supervising parties of single women. Although principally concerned with caring for Anglican emigrants, the chaplains regarded it as their business, as clergy of the national church, to provide ministry to a wide variety of emigrants, including Nonconformists, Germans and Jews. The article argues for the significance of the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy as an international network enabling the expansion of British Christianity and the export of social capital in the form of religious connectivity throughout the settler colonies of the British Empire.

5 Rethinking reproductive politics in time, and time in UK reproductive politics: 1978‐2008

This paper explores two different but interlinked and contemporaneous debates over reproductive politics in which we can observe at least three distinct combinations of time. In the first part, I describe the shift in the 1980s to a ‘biologized’ time by British Christian Right‐to‐Life groups, who began to use a secularized ontogeny to promote and defend a religious definition of ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ – an altered ‘theo‐ontology’ based on the equivalence of the absolute value of human life, the truth (of biological life), and faith in Christ (as everlasting life). In the second part, I describe a differently ‘remixed’, and opposing, ontology (secular and semi‐secular, using a hybrid bio‐legal chronometry but orientated toward the timeless horizon of progress) that characterized the debate over the future of in vitro fertilization in the same period, leading up to the adoption of the first Human Fertilization and Embryology (HFE) Act in the UK in 1990. In the third part, I examine the legacy of these debates insofar as they are evident in the more recent political conflicts accompanying passage of an amended HFE Act in 2008 and the debate over so‐called ‘cybrid embryos’. These episodes reveal how social movements ‘are profoundly shaped by mediations and conflicts between diverse representations, technologies, social disciplines and rhythms of time’. I argue that the varied constructions of temporality in reproductive politics evident in these three distinct episodes are crucial to anthropological understandings of the meaning of ‘biological control’ in the context of stem cell research, cloning, tissue engineering, and reproductive biomedicine.

The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. By Rebecca Anne Goetz. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race . By Rebecca Anne Goetz . Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2012. xvi + 224 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this enterprising study, Rebecca Goetz, a historian at Rice University, charts what she identifies as the process whereby Virginia slaveholders used Christianity to invent race in the English colony. The Baptism of Early Virginia is the first substantial study of race in the Anglo-American colonies to engage centrally with what Goetz calls This was the idea that Christianity was a heritable condition and that non-Christian peoples--particularly Indians and Africans--were naturally incapable or less capable of conversion.She explains the conflict between Virginia's missionaries, who sought to convert Indians and Africans, and the planters who generally opposed their efforts by claiming that Africans were naturally incapable of such. She then charts the legislation, social divisions, labor practices, and theological arguments concerning hereditary heathenism in Virginia. In chapter 1, Goetz states that before colonizing Virginia, the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish (whom they colonized) and from Muslims and American Indians by emphasizing cultural as opposed to racial distinctions. Since these peoples were judged capable of conversion, she claims, they were not racially defined. Conspicuously absent in this chapter is a discussion of how English Christians engaged with Jews. Chapter 2 argues that violent Anglo-Indian wars undermined the optimism of English settlers that Indians might convert to Christianity. Instead, the English began to promote the ideology of hereditary heathenism. Chapter 3 examines English settler proscriptions against interracial sex and marriage (especially between the English and Africans). By 1705, Goetz concludes, these attitudes had fully hardened into race. The fourth chapter examines the legal and theological administration of baptism in Virginia. Whereas and not physical appearance dominated at the time the earliest African slaves arrived in Virginia, Goetz proffers, the 1700s witnessed the triumph of phenotype over religious identity as the basis of social status in Virginia. And baptism operated eventually as a racial institution imposing the ideology that only the English could be truly Christian (111). In her fifth chapter, Goetz specifically examines how Virginia's English settlers articulated whiteness as a racial identity, a process she connects to an emerging religious toleration in the colony that extended to Quakers but not to Catholic convicts, blacks, Indians, and mulattoes (137). And in chapter 6, Goetz examines how some free and enslaved Africans pursued both Christianity and freedom (these were metonymic), thereby challenging the ideology of hereditary heathenism. An epilogue provides a tidy recap of the foregoing arguments.The book is without question a seasoned demonstration of historical method. Goetz's lucid prose reveals her detailed, intimate mastery of archival sources--court records, pamphlets, and correspondence. And she distills her discussion of the primary works through a disciplined command over the larger historical context of Virginia. She explains, for instance, that the Virginia Indians provided food for English settlers because this was a Native convention for dealing with political inferiors. And she explicates the intricate political philosophy that guided Anglo-Indian intermarriage from the perspective of the Virginia Indians. Experts in the history of English colonialism will also appreciate the fresh reading Goetz brings to this study of the Chesapeake because she combines incredibly rich historical detail with an exciting query into how Virginia's slaveholding elite shaped religion and race in the colony. Thus, it is easy to see that this monograph, which contributes so uniquely to her field, will serve professional researchers as a valuable source of historical data for years to come. …

The Cambridge Seven, Late Victorian Culture, and the Chinese Frontier

While some gender studies have examined dimensions of British masculinity with regard to the empire, they often have neglected the constitutive role that Christian faith played in the formation of British masculinity and the ways that British Christians constructed ideal masculine character. This essay reassesses the Cambridge Seven’s significance in the construction of a British evangelical masculinity in the late Victorian period. It argues that British evangelicals utilized the ideals the Seven collectively represented to construct a Christian masculinity in relation to the foreign frontier. This analysis suggests that both faith and the foreign mission field were integral dimensions of British evangelical masculinity. Ultimately, the Seven’s experiences in China challenged and subverted many of these ideal constructions.

Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 by Eamon Duffy, and: Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations by Eamon Duffy

203 Book review not to explicitly situate this work in the realm of liturgical scholarship . What he did intend was to “aid the reader to discover the face of God in liturgical worship” (xvi). To this end, Fr. Chupungco has left his readers a valuable gift. Leonard J. DeLorenzo University of Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana Eamon Duffy Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011 xiv+202 pages. Paperback. $25.00. Eamon Duffy Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012 viii+311 pages. Hardbound. $29.95. Eamon Duffy has established himself as one of the foremost historians of Christianity and, especially, of the religious history of Tudor England. In The Stripping of the Altars, first published in 1992 and now in its second edition (Yale University Press, 2005), Duffy argued persuasively on behalf of the health and vitality of late medieval Christianity in England, challenging the received interpretation that a decrepit, stagnant and moribund Catholic practice laid the foundation for the rebirth of (a more authentic) Christian piety in the Reformation. Such a view believes that King Henry VIII and his successors merely gave official impetus to the yearning for reform that was latent in late medieval England . In Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition and Marking the Hours Duffy returns to this terrain and brings more evidence to show just how vibrant religious devotion was in late medieval England and how slow, complex and torturous was the eventual success of the Reformation . Both of these volumes, but especially Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition, can be seen as companion pieces to The Stripping of the Altars. Indeed, that magisterial treatment of late medieval English Christianity provides the background for many of the topics that Duffy treats in Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. Consequently, like a 204 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) great epic poem, it seems that this volume begins in medias res, the reader’s knowledge of the argument of The Stripping of the Altars and its critical reception being presupposed. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is in many ways Duffy’s response to his critics. He clearly bristles at the suggestion that he is a mere “Catholic revisionist historian,” and in the first part of the book (including the Introduction and first two chapters), he provides a wonderful survey of the historiography surrounding the English Reformation to show his autonomy from confessional allegiances and defend his argument. Duffy admits , as he had already said in the Introduction to the second edition , “that The Stripping of the Altars was a self-consciously polemical work” (4). This does not mean, however, that Duffy intended it as a work of Catholic propaganda. His survey of the justifications for, and interpretations of, the success of the Reformation shows that if he is to be accused of “revisionism,” then his critics, defenders of the established and heretofore authoritative view, must acknowledge that their conception has a rather striking affinity to positions developed in the polemical debates that erupted along confessional lines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is not a conventional narrative history—so much in vogue these days—in which Duffy attempts to re-present and re-argue the story of the English Reformation. Rather, he deepens and solidifies the argument of The Stripping of the Altars. The reader gets the sense that Duffy gathered much of the material that is included in this volume from the “cutting room floor.” The book contains eleven chapters that are arranged in four parts. Duffy characterizes these chapters as “essays,” and, although each could exist as an independent article, there is an overarching unity to the volume. His goal is to “illuminate one aspect or another of the fraught and highly confessionalized history of religion in Tudor England” (13). Once again he wants to show the vibrant place that religion held in late medieval English society. To this end he presents evidence for the importance of Catholic Christianity among both lay people and intellectual elites (e.g., Cardinals Fisher and Pole) in order to give a unified picture of religion in Tudor England. One gets the sense that in...

Are Muslims a Distinctive Minority? An Empirical Analysis of Religiosity, Social Attitudes, and Islam

Scholarly and public discourses on Muslim immigrants in Europe have questioned if Islam is an impediment to sociocultural adaptation and whether Muslims are a distinctive group in their religiosity and social values. We use a new survey of 480 British Muslims in conjunction with the British Social Attitudes Survey to examine differences between Muslim and non‐Muslim Britons on religiosity (practice, belief, salience) and moral and social issues regarding gender, abortion, and homosexuality. Muslims are more religious than other Britons, including both British Christians and religious “nones.” Muslims also are more conservative than other Britons across the range of social and moral attitudes. Multivariate analysis shows, however, that much of the difference on moral issues is due to socioeconomic disadvantage and high religiosity among Muslims. Although being a highly religious group in an otherwise secular country renders Muslims distinctive, factors that predict social conservatism among all Britons—high religiosity and low SES—apply similarly to Muslims.

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell has returned to examine characters who were bit-players in her first book Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, 1993). By reconstructing the common origins, connected if divergent careers and interests, and the strikingly different personalities and opinions of the Sanskritist John Muir and the Arabist and Islamist William Muir, Powell makes an empirically substantiated argument regarding the complexity of Orientalist scholarship and its fraught relationship with the power dynamics of imperialism. In continuity with her lifelong interest in inter-cultural and inter-religious contact, especially between evangelically-minded British Christians and Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of north India, the book connects these two scholar-administrators with their Scottish intellectual heritage on one side, and their Indian interlocutors on the other, thus also making a significant new contribution to the much-studied field of Islamic modernism in India, and its best-known exponent, Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan. The book begins with a reconstruction of the Muir brothers' origins in the dense networks of familial relations, patronage, globalized commercial links and imperial rule, and their education within the Scottish Academy and University systems, where the traditions of Enlightenment scholarship lingered into the nineteenth century. The book then proceeds to trace the origins of their Orientalist interests through a deft reconstruction of the linguistic training provided at the Haileybury College for East India Company recruits. The story then moves to India where the distinct interests and personalities of the brothers emerge. While both brothers articulated a religious commitment to the moral improvement of India, and both asserted the need for the acculturation of pedagogic schemes and material, John Muir emerged as the reclusive Sanskritist with a distaste for inter-cultural denunciation, while the more careerist, combative but also sociable William Muir became the Evangelical Arabist, using his specialist knowledge to engage in public debates over the relative values of Christianity and Islam. In their respective mid-nineteenth-century magnum opus, each scholar-administrator is shown to have expressed his fully-developed social vision--John Muir rejecting, on the basis of linguistic theories popularised in the eighteenth century, the biological racism of the mid-nineteenth, and William Muir expressing the doctrinally rigid view that Islam was a false religion preached by a deluded, if historical man whose increasing personal degeneration set the pattern for the institutionalisation of an irredeemably socially damaging set of religious values. Their lives and careers diverged more widely around the time of the rebellion of 1857, with John retired and already ensconced in a life of scholarship in Edinburgh, while William remained to observe and comment on one of the biggest challenges to British rule and India, and formulate educational and social policies in post-pacification northern India. …

British Christian Print Media and the Framing of Islam and Muslims through the Lens of Christian Persecution

‘Christian persecution’ has been widely referred to as a popular phrase to describe the suffering of Christians on the basis of their faith. Within Christianity itself, persecution has become a religious vocabulary that is commonly related to the construction and formation of Christian identity. In relation to modern and contemporary news reporting, very often ‘Christian persecution’ becomes a hot topic as far as the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Muslim-majority countries is concerned. In what circumstances does Christian persecution occur in Muslim-majority countries? To what extent can Christian persecution be understood in the light of the media representation of Islam and Muslims? Drawing on the empirical data from four British Christian print media (Church Times, The Tablet, Evangelicals Now and Evangelical Times), this article aims to explore and examine the narrative of Christian persecution and how Islam and Muslims are represented in the journalistic texts distributed in these four print media.