Suddenly, it seems, meditation is all the rage. Prestigious medical schools (Harvard, Duke, etc.) have whole departments devoted to “Integrative Medicine” in which meditation plays an essential part. Troubled teens are given a healthy dose of mindfulness and their behavior improves. Long-term prisoners in maximum security prisons have gone on ten day meditation retreats, sitting for 12 hours a day in a makeshift gymnasium ashram. There is meditation for alcoholics and heroin addicts and overworked corporate attorneys, for those facing death from untreatable illness and for those nearing the day when, with the grace of God or Nature or Luck, they will give birth. Studies have shown that meditation helps in medical conditions from depression to diabetes, psoriasis to high blood pressure to the side effects of cancer treatments.

How come?

Spiritually, meditation’s efficacy stems from the power of the mind to shape reality. From yoga’s two-thousand-year-old goal of “stilling the movements of the mind” to most any eclectic spiritual teacher of today, we are told that how we think is an essential constituent of the world we inhabit. Familiar examples of this truth are not hard to find. Think that a room full of strangers won’t like you, and you’ll most likely be withdrawn, suspicious, or a tad hostile, provoking a comparable response. Treat co-workers as if they deserve respect and kindness, and there’s a good chance you’ll get that back from them. Live in constant state of stress and you will burn out your immune system.

Even more, our values and beliefs color the entire fabric of existence. After all, if a pickpocket sees a saint all he sees are pockets. People for whom only success or wealth are important become blind to simple beauty, moments of tenderness, the ability to enjoy what they have instead of always wanting more. A glass is half empty or half-full not because of how much liquid is in it, but because of what we believe.

This all relates to meditation because meditation is a kind of yoga of the mind, doing for our consciousness what yoga postures do for our muscles and bones. With meditation we discover not only how much the mind shapes what we see in the world, but how much we ourselves can determine the mind’s contents. We realize that it is both crucially important and malleable. We can detach from it, examine it, decide what part makes sense and what doesn’t and act—or better think—accordingly.

The two main dimensions of meditation are awareness and focus. In the first, which is the core of the widely taught vipassanā or insight meditation that is a major component of integrative medicine, you simply sit comfortably and attend to your breath, allowing thoughts to come and go, learning to witness thought forms, bodily sensations, and emotional patterns. Extended practice of vipassanā can help us answer basic questions: What thoughts keep appearing, no matter what else is going on? How do we define the world for ourselves? How many of our thoughts really make sense and how many are simply unthinking, irrational, even destructive habits?

In my first extended experience of meditation I found myself in near agony sitting in a cross-legged position with strained my hips and aching knees. Being the Type AA personality I am, I kept myself in the position until the session ended. Then, with a blinding flash of insight (which any acquaintance could surely have told me!) I realized how much of my life was defined by setting goals, doing anything to meet them, and ignoring the unpleasant consequences to myself or (as the inevitable fatigue, irritation, or depression resulted) to others.

Perhaps the ultimate gift of simply watching one’s mind is the ability not—or not necessarily—to be moved by what one is thinking. Chronic anxiety, lasting grief, burning rage, even a maddening itch between the shoulder blades—all these can be witnessed, experienced, and understood without driving us to act. The constituent parts of emotions and sensation—where they arise, how long they last, whether they burn or throb, vacillate or stay the same—start to lose their power over us. Instead of doing something because we want a drink, are angry at our mothers, or are nervous about an upcoming test, we simply note the discomfort, study it, and let it pass. The result can be a precious inner calm, one that not only makes our experience a lot more pleasant but has manifold healing effects on our nervous system, glands, and soft tissues.

For most spiritual teachers it is a profound truth that, as Buddha taught: “Whatever harm an enemy may do to an enemy, or a hater to a hater, an ill-directed mind inflicts on oneself a greater harm.” Thus the second form of meditation — common in both religious tradition and contemporary, non-traditional spirituality — is focus: concentrating the mind on a thought or image, a desired virtue (kindness or humility), or a sacred figure (God or some inspiring teacher). Here “What kind of person do I want to be?” becomes for a time the question “What do I want to think about?” And so a Christian might meditate on an image of Jesus—a face of love and perfect forgiveness; or as He was blessing a repentant sinner. A Jew might take one line, or even one word, from a familiar prayer. Someone who finds the divine in nature might concentrate on the grace of a bird in flight, the healing powers of a forest, or the generosity of the web of life. A purely secular person could reflect on someone she particularly respects.

Through mental reflection we seek to absorb the qualities we want to manifest. Equanimity, gratitude, compassion, love—such things are not simply a matter of will, but of practice. And as we practice thinking about them, thinking of them, this practice can help us face disappointment, conflict, and danger in ways that promote a calm, energetic, and connected life.

For ultimately what we do on the meditation mat or the prayer room is of little consequence until it can be made real in work, family, and community. Can I recognize my agitation and respond skillfully when my kids act self-destructively? Can I face the mammogram results with acceptance and gratitude for what I have; or if the news is truly bad, can I accept my fear without trying to escape it? If I am a Christian, can I treat hostile people as Jesus taught me to? If Muslim, can I remember that only Allah is God, not money, fame, or the seductive delights of telling everyone how holy I am? If I am “spiritual but not religious,” can I face a decidedly non-spiritual world with the virtues that attracted me to spiritual life to begin with?

Attending to the mind, focusing on our highest values—we are more likely to answer such questions in the affirmative.

Can there be a single greater gift to our lives?

Professor of Philosophy (WPI) Roger S. Gottlieb’s most recent book is the Nautilus Book Award-winning Spirituality: What it Is and Why it Matters. You can read the Introduction on his website or his previous post on the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Photo by Robert Bejil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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Despite its controversial history, the Book of Common Prayer is an influential religious text and one of the most compelling works of English literature. How has this document retained its relevancy even after numerous revisions? What can it teach us about British history and the English language? We spoke with Brian Cummings, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer, about the importance of this text.

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Brian Cummings received his BA at Cambridge University, where he also took his PhD under the supervision of the poet Geoffrey Hill and the church historian Eamon Duffy. He was previously a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge before moving to Sussex, and, from October 2012, the University of York. He was a British Academy Exchange Fellow at the Huntington Library, California, in 2007 and held a three-year Major Research Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust from 2009 to 2012. He is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter, Facebook, and the OUPblog.

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The modern idea of spirituality—divorced from religious tradition, dependent on a personal choice of creed, centered on feeling good and avoiding stress—easily invites criticism or even contempt. Many see it as an evasion of religious truth and moral responsibility, a narcissistic choose-your-own-at-the-mall self-indulgence that has nothing to do with serious religious, ethical, or political life.

I beg to differ. Of course there are many for whom spirituality is just what the critics accuse it of being. But this hardly settles the matter, for there are also many religious traditionalists who are sanctimonious hypocrites, many political liberals who are narrow-minded, and many self-styled ethical people who blissfully ignore their own failings.

Thus the question is not “What is spirituality at its worst?” but rather “Is there at the heart of spirituality a powerful, redemptive, and transformative idea?”

I believe there is, one that is simply expressed but often excruciatingly hard to put into practice. The idea is this: our lives will be far happier, in an enduring and deep way, and we will be a lot more fun to be around, if we seek to live by certain virtues. To the extent that we choose to be mindful, accepting, grateful, compassionate, and loving, our own contentment will grow and our interpersonal behavior will be increasingly caring, respectful, and just.

A quick glance at these virtues should make anyone who thinks spirituality is easy think again. Each time we face a life choice, cultivate one habit or another, or find ourselves in a morally confusing and painful situation the virtues come into play. We have to decide whether we can accept disappointment without obsessing over not getting what we so richly deserve; try to understand the experience of people who bore or frustrate us; take the time and attention to examine the contents of our own mind rather than act out of fear or rage; and look deeply into our society’s fundamental structures to how whether our personal lives reflect vast and impersonal forms of injustice.

If we focus on one particular spiritual virtue—compassion—we will see that while the spiritual life is tied neither to a literal reading of scripture nor religious authority, it is still far from a walk in the park designed for the lazy.

Compassion may be understood as both an emotional openness to the suffering of others and an active response which seeks to lessen that suffering, and can be found in religious tradition and contemporary spiritual teachings. It is a Mahayana Buddhist ideal (the Bodhisattva seeks to end the suffering of all sentient beings). God in the Hebrew Bible (Deut: 4:31) and Jesus in the Christian (Matt: 14:14) are described as compassionate. The term resonates with virtually all contemporary eclectic and non-denominational teachers.

Sometimes compassion is relatively easy. If we encounter a good person whose suffering is not his fault and is easily remedied (take care of him for an afternoon, offer a hug, give a small amount of money), then compassion may flow easily.

Kannon, Bodhisattva of Compassion

But think of Steve, who is always overspending: here he is again, desperately needing cash. And at the same time I am facing my own serious money troubles (family illness, stolen car). Now compassion may give way to impatience or irritation. “What about me?” I will think; or “For God’s sake, stop creating your own troubles.”

What if the suffering we encounter is part of the endless round of misery that accosts any well-informed person in today’s information overload society? Famine in Sudan, tornadoes in Missouri, pollution induced lung disease in China—and that could be just a single website on any given morning. Here we might develop what psychologist Kaetha Weingarten calls “common shock”—physical and emotional distress caused by witnessing the pain of others. We numb out and retreat, thinking “I just don’t want to hear about it.”

Here is the most difficult setting: can we have compassion for the perpetrators of crimes as well as their victims? After the Boston Marathon bombing, could we think of the killers as human beings marked by enormous emotional and moral disorientation, lacking the gift of being able to have an empathic connection to the innocent strangers they meant to kill? Can we think of cruel, selfish people as deserving of happiness? Can we, as Dante asked, have compassion for the damned?

To be compassionate even when we are needy or suffering requires that we observe our own distress without using it as an excuse to feel disdain for all those who “don’t really suffer like I do.” Dealing with common shock requires a vigilant awareness not only of all the terrible things happening in the world but of the effect of our knowledge of those things on our own minds and bodies. It requires the humility and self-awareness to admit “I simply cannot take in any more information now,” the faith that life is worthwhile even with all the suffering in the world, and the far-sightedness to see that despite all their pain human beings are more than the sum of their woes.

And the ruthless dictators, drug lords, and smiling CEOs who pollute? Don’t they deserve to be hated? Yet compassion asks us to recognize everyone’s suffering—even that of people who act very badly. The spiritual task here includes admitting our own moral weaknesses so that we can see what we have in common with the guilty; and also developing a moral clarity that allows us to act caringly against injustice without needing to be motivated by hatred.

Finally, we need to be open not only to other people’s suffering but also to their own understanding of their lives, to what we have to learn from those we would help as much as what we have to teach them. “Compassion,” insists Catholic priest Gregory Bolye, who spent decades intervening in Los Angeles gang violence, “is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals.” Anglican Archbishop Rowan William’s suggests that this covenantal relationship requires a loving attention which allows other people to develop, choose freely, and come to a better, truer life by their own energies. The great temptation, says Williams, is seeking to have the last word, to control what the other says and how they live. This may be relatively easy if the person is an innocent victim. The more they are complicit in their suffering (an addict, say), or a victimizer rather than a victim, the more difficult it becomes.

Thus, true compassion might well take a whole lifetime to get good at it, let alone master. And this is true for all the other spiritual virtues, which always require attention, energy, and a willingness to let go of old habits and attachments. Each day, every moment, I am invited to choose love over hate, gratitude over bitterness, confidence in my connection to people and the world over frightened isolation.

In this light, then, spirituality is not a relaxed or cheapened version of traditional faith, or an escape from social life, but a demanding and in some ways heightened version of both religion and social engagement.

Professor of Philosophy (WPI) Roger S. Gottlieb’s most recent book is the Nautilus Book Award-winning Spirituality: What it Is and Why it Matters. You can read the Introduction on his website.

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Image credit: Kano Motonobu, ”White-robed Kannon, Bodhisattva of Compassion”, c. first half of the 16th century. Hanging scroll. Ink, color and gold on silk. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Kirsty Doole

The great works of the Eastern world have provided inspiration for this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list. From those you have probably heard of (like the Kamasutra) to those you may not have (such as The Recognition of Sakuntala), these classic works provide a window on the classical worlds of India, China, and the Middle East.

Sayings of the Buddha, edited and translated by Rupert Gethin

Buddhist religious and philosophical beliefs derive from the teachings of Gotama the Buddha, a wandering ascetic in India during the fifth century BCE. One of the main sources for knowledge of his teachings is the four Pali Nikayas, or ‘collections’ of his sayings. Written in the ancient Indian language Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the Nikayas are among the oldest of all Buddhist texts.

This selection of the Buddha’s sayings reflect the full variety of the Pali Nikayas, covering the Buddha’s biography, philosophical discourse, instruction on morality, meditation, and his ideas on the spiritual life.

Myths of Mesopotamia, edited and translated by Stephanie Dalley

The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was located between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The myths collected here, originally written in cuneiform on clay tablets, include the Creation and the Flood, and the famous Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man of great strength, whose heroic quest for immortality is dashed through one moment of weakness.

Stephanie Dalley, who translated and edited this volume for Oxford World’s Classics, may be familiar to readers as the author of The Mystery Of The Hanging Garden Of Babylon, a new book that questions whether the Hanging Garden of Babylon was really in Babylon at all.

Statue of Laozi in Quanzhou, China.

Daodejing by Laozi; edited and translated by Edmund Ryden; introduction by Benjamin Penny

The Daodejing by Laozi is one of the most important texts in the philosophical tradition of Daoism, and is one of the most widely-known texts in China. Also called the Classic of the Way and the Life-Force, it expresses the main beliefs of Daoism, and upholds it as a way of life as well as a philosophy and religion. The dominant image is of the Way, the mysterious path through the whole cosmos modelled on the Milky Way. A life-giving stream, the Way gives rise to all things and enables the individual, and society as a whole, to harmonize the various demands of daily life and achieve a more profound level of understanding.

The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa; translated by W. J. Johnson

The Recognition of Sakuntala is a play in seven acts originally written in Sanskrit in the fourth century CE. It follows the relationship between King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, as they fall in love, are separated by a curse, and are ultimately reunited. Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to a mystical experience.

Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, edited by Robert L. Mack

The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment is famous as being the first literary appearance of Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba, among others.

The Sultan Schahriar’s misguided resolution to shelter himself from the possible infidelities of his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in his kingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourceful Scheherazade. Scheherazade nightly postpones Schahriar’s murderous intent by telling him tales that have entered our language like no others. The stories contained in this ‘store house of ingenious fiction’ initiate a pattern of literary reference and influence which today remains as powerful and intense as it ever was.

Pañcatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom, edited and translated by Patrick Olivelle

The Pañcatantra is the most famous collection of fables in India and was one of the first Indian books to be translated into a Western language. A significant influence on the Arabian Nights and the Fables of La Fontaine, the Pañcatantra teaches the principles of good government through the medium of animal stories. Its positive attitude towards life and its advocacy of ambition and enterprise counters any preconceived ideas of passivity and other-worldliness in ancient Indian society.

The Bodhicaryavatara by Sanideva; edited by Paul Williams; translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton

Written in India in the early eighth century AD, Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara became one of the most popular accounts of the Buddhist’s spiritual path. It takes as its subject the profound desire to become a Buddha and save all beings from suffering, enacted by a Bodhisattva. Santideva not only sets out what the Bodhisattva must do and become, he also invokes the intense feelings of aspiration which underlie such a commitment.

Important as a manual of training among Mahayana Buddhists, especially in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Bodhicaryavatara continues to be used as the basis for teaching by modern Buddhist teachers.

Kamasutra by Mallanaga Vatsyayana; edited and translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar

“When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.”

There aren’t many people who haven’t heard of the third century CE manual of erotic love. But it’s about much more than just sexual positions. It covers the topics of finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, and using drugs. Composed in Sanskrit, the literary language of ancient India, it combines an encyclopaedic coverage of all imaginable aspects of sex with a closely observed sexual psychology and a dramatic, novelistic narrative of seduction, consummation, and disentanglement.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, and the OUPblog.

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Image credit: Statue of Laozi in Quanzhou, China. By Thanato [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons  

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Kenneth Holloway is Associate Professor of History and Levenson Professor of Asian Studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China.

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By Thomas Dixon

The story of Doubting Thomas is a wonderful philosophical parable about seeing and believing, but what exactly is the intended moral? And what light does it shed on the relationship between science and religion?

The standard view portrays Doubting Thomas as a scientific hero demanding evidence and refusing to succumb to blind faith. Richard Dawkins has popularised this version since the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. Last September he tweeted, “If there’s evidence, it isn’t faith. Doubting Thomas, patron saint of scientists, wanted evidence. Other disciples praised for not doing so.”

But this is not an entirely convincing interpretation either of the bible or of the nature of scientific knowledge.

In John’s gospel, the other disciples tell Thomas: “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas is not convinced: ”Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A week later Jesus appears to all the disciples, and addresses Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas now believes, and Jesus comments: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Now, remember that according to Dawkins the story is told so that we should admire not Thomas, but the other disciples, “whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence.” What is wrong with that? Well, first of all, the other disciples believed in the resurrection not through blind faith, but because they saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes.

Dawkins is right that we are not supposed to admire Thomas’s refusal to believe, but he is wrong about the reason. Thomas’s behaviour really is a little irrational. What better basis for belief could he have had than the testimony of his most trusted friends? We all have to rely on testimony rather than first-hand experience for the vast majority of our knowledge.

Thomas’s sin was the refusal to believe reliable testimony. The English natural philosopher and theologian John Wilkins wrote about the Doubting Thomas story in the seventeenth century. Jesus’s saying ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ signified, for Wilkins, that it was ‘a more excellent, commendable and blessed thing for a man to yield his assent, upon such evidence as is in itself sufficient, without insisting upon more.’ The testimony of the other disciples should have been in itself sufficient for Thomas; and yet he insisted upon more.

Communal observation and testimony are central to both religion and science. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (c. 1601-2) depicts a collective act of witnessing. Should we, perhaps, even think of Thomas’s finger here as a rudimentary scientific instrument? Is he making a digital measurement? Are the other disciples there to corroborate his observations? Rembrandt’s slightly later painting of an anatomy lesson (1632) can be seen as a transposition of this model to a scientific setting. In both cases, the body of an executed criminal is being probed — in the case of Rembrandt’s image, with forceps rather than just a finger — in front of a group of witnesses, and with the aim of producing knowledge.

The key point here is that these images depict acts of communal knowledge-production. Scientific knowledge, like religious belief, is produced by collaborative acts of observation which, in turn, rely on the observations, testimony and inferences of others.

Richard Dawkins suggests that Doubting Thomas should be the patron saint of scientists. In fact he is patron saint of the blind, which is perhaps more fitting. If Thomas does stand for the view that the true basis of knowledge is unaided individual sense perception, then his is indeed an unscientific world and a world of blindness — a world where, in a phrase of Galileo’s, “one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” Galileo admired those who believed in the sun-centred system before the advent of the telescope: “They have by sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sense experience plainly showed them to be the case.” Blessed, you might say, are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Returning to Caravaggio’s painting, we see Thomas, his hand being taken by Christ and placed in the wound in his side. Thomas’s eyes are dark, glazed, blank; he is gazing straight ahead, not at the wound. This is indeed a depiction of a blind man – a man being led by the hand towards something he cannot see. Caravaggio seems to say that the man who seeks to base all his knowledge on individual sense experience will see nothing. In both religion and science, the most important beliefs rest on a kind of seeing that cannot be done by an individual alone, that cannot be done with unaided human eyes, and that cannot be done without belief in an unseen realm.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, which won the BSHS Dingle Prize in 2009. You can find him on Twitter at @thomasdixon2013 .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Caravaggio [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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We’re planning to make several changes to the OUPblog this year to improve the site and your reading experience. Some of the first changes will be taking place over the next couple weeks.

We will change some of our navigation and categorization on the blog based on reader behavior: deleting, adding, shifting, and renaming several categories. For example, our current ‘dictionaries’ category will be renamed ‘language’ and sub-categories will better reflect the full range of our language publishing from lexicography to linguistics.

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I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

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Justin Welby recently used his first Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to warn of the dangers of investing too much faith in frail and fallible human leaders, be they politicians or priests. Blind belief in the power of any single individual to bring about true change in any sphere, he argued, was simplistic and wrong, and led inevitably to disillusionment and disappointment. Surely this was the point in the sermon when a member of his flock was duty-bound to heckle ‘But what about that bloke called Jesus!’ Unfortunately, good manners triumphed and the leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans was able to continue his sermon. ‘Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation’ he told the congregation at Canterbury cathedral. ‘They may well be good and necessary, but will to some degree fail. Human sin means pinning hopes on individuals is always a mistake, and assuming that any organisation is able to have such good systems that human failure will be eliminated is naïve’.

Bishop Welby’s sermon reminded me of Max Weber’s famous essay of 1919 ‘Politics as a Vocation’ with its warnings against ‘infantile’ understandings of politics and its emphasis on the complexities of governing and the need to hold realistic expectations of what politics – and therefore politicians – can deliver. ‘Politics is’ as Weber maintained ‘a strong and slow boring of hard woods’ and one might argue that almost a century later the challenges of governing have, if anything, become far greater and more complex. And yet there was a nagging part of Bishop Welby’s sermon that left me disheartened, frustrated, and possibly even angry. It was, for me, as if the new Bishop had accepted the advice of Bernard Baruch to ‘vote for the man [or woman] who promises the least as they’ll be least disappointing’. Surely one of the key social roles of politicians and priests is to inspire, to promote hope, to make their communities believe they can deliver positive social change. Might it therefore be that in warning against ‘the hero leader culture’, Bishop Welby revealed his own weakness? In the sense that he seemingly does not understand exactly why certain social groups seem so willing to grasp ‘quick, easy and gratifying solutions’ to even the most intractable problems.

Bishop Welby suggests that people could only escape ‘cynical despair’ by acknowledging God and trusting in his power but if you’re living in poverty, and face a multitude of social challenges that conspire to limit your life chances from birth, then I can understand why individuals fall for the cheap tricks and empty promises of rogue politicians. Put slightly differently, instead of arguing that too many people look to politicians for simple and pain free solutions to complex and painful problems that simply do not exist, might it not be equally true to suggest that encouraging people to accept human fallibility and to trust on God is just a different form of expectation inflation that is almost guaranteed to fail – a ‘mere cruelty’ of a different kind?

Canterbury Cathedral, and the Portal Nave Cross-spire

I for one am actually quite glad that Barack Obama did not turn out to be Superman and Bishop Welby is surely correct that we should not set people or institutions up to the heights where they cannot do anything but fail. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that individuals cannot make a positive difference, or to deny that some politicians have in fact delivered on their promises, or that – when all is said and done – democratic politics generally delivers far more than most people seem to recognise. Welby concluded his sermon by quoting the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, from his poem Threshold, on the human need for communication with God,

‘I am alone on the surface / of a turning planet. What / to do but, like Michelangelo’s / Adam, put my hand / out into unknown space, / hoping for the reciprocating touch?

And yet once again my moral soul was irked by such platitudes; I could not help but think that what most humans crave is not so much communication with God but communication with each other. It is the increased social fragmentation that threatens humanity not some form of existential angst or theological breakdown. My concern is therefore not so much that the public demands too much of politics and politicians but that at many levels the public’s expectations are actually too low. Local elections, for example, are due to take place in the UK in a matter of days but have so far been met with a deafening silence in terms of public debate or interest. There seems little evidence of the blind faith or hero leader culture that Bishop Welby warns against in any of the 36 English and Welsh Councils that will be contested on 2 May. I’m not suggesting that one sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury has single-handedly dampened expectations that would otherwise have had the local election campaign buzzing across the country, but I am suggesting that the Bishop’s position is too simplistic. We actually need more trust in political leaders and more active community engagement at the local level alongside a measured dose of healthy scepticism about what our local political leaders can realistically deliver.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was educated at a succession of Catholic schools and is still recovering from this experience. Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts here.

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Image credit: Canterbury Cathedral and the Portal Nave Cross-spire. Photo by Hans Musil. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?

Kierkegaard did not doubt his mission: ‘I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be . . . to every person’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not’. Christianity, he contended, entailed belief in an interruptive event (an Incarnation of God) which does not fit the normal flow of history. The Enlightenment had been a blow to the Christian claim. Politely suggesting that any such ‘historical’ religion was the business of theologians, Kant treated the biblical saga of Fall and redemption as but a mythical expression of human self-understanding. In his wake, Hegel reduced Christianity simply to ‘concepts’ and thought these concepts a mere stage in human development, while Feuerbach pronounced Christian doctrine a projection. As a student, Kierkegaard witnessed the advance of scholarship that sought to explain biblical texts in terms of their setting of origin.

Cognisant that the notion of an Incarnation, a God/man, is to reason paradoxical (a contradiction in terms), Kierkegaard advocated relating to it out of the passion of subjective inwardness that is ‘faith’. We should recognise, however, that he held to pre-modern suppositions that made such a notion, if not rational, at least conceivable. Living a century and a half after Newton, Kierkegaard had little sense that nature and history form an inter-related causal nexus; that events are one of a kind, predictable and repeatable, there being no one-off occurrences. He was, in the parlance of the day, a ‘supernaturalist’ not a ‘naturalist’, believing in miracles. God is conceived to be directly behind each and every happening, such that just about anything can transpire.

For Kierkegaard, pressing directly on our world, the eternal is bound into each moment in time. It is within such a context that the human being is held to be a synthesis of body and spirit, through his very nature made for divinity. Thus Kierkegaard commented that, while it is true that (as Aristotle had said) a plant gives rise to a plant, a man to a man, ‘by this nothing is explained, thought is not satisfied … for an eternal being cannot be born’. Within such a context, once more the idea of Incarnation acquires plausibility. Was it the subsequent Darwinian revolution that led humanity to conceive of their nature otherwise?

Kierkegaard’s outlook had social implications. Far from uncaring, his former professor remarked: ‘It was typical of him to want to look after precisely those people whom the public did not value’. Nevertheless, in view of eternity, our present existence becomes for him a ‘meanwhile’. Thus he considered it of more importance that a beggar behave beautifully, mindful that, disturbed by his presence, others may be led to question God’s goodness, than whether the man live or die. He advises that a charwoman should not aspire to be called ‘Madame’, given that the world is but a stage on which we act our roles, while before God she is anyone’s equal. No wonder Hegel had averred that ‘the eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world’. His disciple Marx was five years Kierkegaard’s junior.

In his Works of Love, a spiritual classic, Kierkegaard entreats us to love and respect each ‘other’ as God loves us, never assimilating that other person to self. Horrified by the advent of democracy, ‘government by the numerical’ as he quips derisively, he was nonetheless quick to take advantage of freedom of the press to attack a complacent establishment in both church and state. He writes sarcastically of the ‘distinguished corruption’ of those who flee from one distinguished circle to another, taking care lest in the poor they should meet another human being. If today in celebration of their famous son the Queen of Denmark will parade from church to university, it was not ever thus. Rather, it was a motley crew of students and the poor who accompanied his funeral cortège from that same church to grave. These things are far from simple.

Fearing in his blacker moods that his authorship, penned in a minor European tongue, might lie undiscovered, Kierkegaard remarked of his fellow countrymen: ‘I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric; my literary activity… a sort of hobby [like] fishing and such’. Would he could but know of the affection and respect in which in our day he is held by those who will gather to celebrate his bicentennial. His work is translated into languages from Korean to Hungarian. An eclectic and imaginative author, Kierkegaard is considered the Ur-father of existentialism, the originator of dialectical theology and (on account of his style) the progenitor of post-modernism. Regarded by many Danes as the greatest prose writer of their language, his provocative authorship in equal measure engages and delights.

Confronted with one who in terms of the span of history lived so recently yet whose thought-world is so foreign, we are brought to recognise the remarkable revolutions that we in Europe have undergone. Fascinated by steam engines and hot air balloons, Kierkegaard (inconsistently) did not much like the march of history, thinking scientific progress to distract man from his true ends. To step into his shoes is a startling revelation as to differences in presuppositions. What, however, would seem to make little sense is to contend that Christians have always proclaimed ‘faith’ in the face of ‘reason’, failing to consider the context that made the object of such a faith thinkable. From this it does not follow that we should not think out how today we had best conceive of that dimension of reality that is ‘God’.

Daphne Hampson holds doctorates in history from Oxford, in theology from Harvard, and a master’s in Continental Philosophy from Warwick. The author of Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought, she has for many years engaged with the Lutheran tradition, in particular the work of Kierkegaard. Author of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique, you can find more about Daphne Hampson by visiting her website.

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Image credit: Kierkegaard statue. Photo by Arne List. Creative commons license via Wikimedia Commons.

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If I have learned anything as a lifelong student of the world’s multitude of religious traditions, it is that reality for humans is malleable and quite varied — nothing is essential in human experience. Almost everything gets filtered through and shaped by a particular cultural lens. Something as simple as a tree is not so simple after all. From a biological perspective trees have much in common worldwide, but from a cultural perspective there exists an immense difference between them. Human perception and understanding of any aspect of the world seems to be determined largely by the particular interpretive lens through which it is viewed. Importantly, different cultural perspectives result in different experiences and behavior. What is a tree when seen from another cultural viewpoint? What range of interactive experiences is possible with it?

Historically tree worship has been a vital feature of much religious activity worldwide, and trees are still commonly found at the center of religious shrines in India. In this context they are typically regarded as powerful sentient divine beings with whom humans can have mutually beneficial relationships.

A religious shrine in India.

The personhood of trees is taken seriously as people interact with them in a variety of ways. The pipal or bodhi tree is often considered to be the most sacred tree in India. Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under this tree and many Hindus consider it to be an embodied form of the mighty god Vishnu.

The bodhi tree

Because of its highly beneficial medicinal qualities, the neem tree is frequently called the village pharmacy. It is commonly regarded as the body of the goddess Shitala. In some parts of India this tree is dressed with colorful cloth and a metal facemask is attached to the trunk of the tree as a way of honoring it and facilitating a more intimate connection with it.

The neem tree with a metal facemask attached

Banyan trees are often identified with the god Shiva and are associated with longevity and immortality, since they have the ability to live indefinitely. They send down aerial roots, which over the course of time become massive trunks that in turn send out aerial roots of their own, creating an ever-expanding and self-perpetuating forest. They too are the recipients of a wide range of religious offerings and worship.

A banyan tree

Trees are clearly amazing forms of life that have captured the human imagination in a number of ways. A question we might ask on this Arbor Day is: what possibilities would be available to us in our relationships with trees if we were to expand our understanding of them, inspired by the perceptions of our own ancestors or those of people living in different cultures today, such as the many tree worshipers of India?

David Haberman is Professor of  Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India.

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In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources by advancing the view that humans exist apart from and above all the rest of creation, whose sole purpose it is to meet the needs of humanity.

As a scholar of the emergence of science and technology in medieval Europe, White’s primary interest was to show how Christian views of humanity’s relation to nature gave rise to Baconian science and technology, which treated nature as an object to be investigated and mastered for human benefit. With a quick dig at Ronald Reagan’s alleged anti-environmentalist quip, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all,” White wrote:

To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

At a time when many assumed that technological solutions could be found for the mounting problems caused by industrialization, White argued that more technology would not solve anything. What was needed was a fundamental shift in worldview and values.

Sacred grove near Sikupati, courtesy of author.

White’s controversial essay inspired a flurry of response. Some scholars argued against his damning critique of Christianity and described the many expressions of Christianity that foster a less exploitative approach to the environment. Others pursued the hints scattered throughout his essay that non-Western religions might promote more sustainable values in relation to natural resource use.  My own research on the sacred groves of India was initially inspired by the hope that these diminutive islands of biodiversity might teach us something about how Hindu values put deliberate limits on consumption, even in a context of enormously pressing material need.

In the forty years since White’s essay was first published, we have learned that the deep values undergirding our actions are remarkably impervious to change. It’s even doubtful that our minds harbor any single, coherent foundation for our actions. Rather, our deeds are more likely motivated by a welter of thoughts, needs, desires, and impulses, many of which are not even under our conscious control.

Consider the discouraging fact that even those of us who espouse values of sustainability live lives of flagrant contradiction. We jet off to far flung lands, wearing clothes from China and eating food from Mexico, quietly oblivious of our carbon footprints ballooning out like the shoes of some perverse circus clown. Once made aware of the effects of our choices, we are able to rationalize them away with ease. If White argued that greater scientific understanding and more sophisticated technological fixes would not reverse the damage of industrialization, our inability to change even the most egregiously destructive behaviors—transcontinental airline travel, eating strawberries in January—suggests that consciousness-raising exercises alone aren’t going to do much either.

Yet, with it’s punchy prose and sweeping argument, White’s article not only inspired the creation of an academic subfield—religion and environmentalism—it also inspired the religious environmentalism movement, a more pragmatic if equally fragmented effort to enlist religion in the service of ecology. Organizations of people of faith such as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation based in the UK, Eco-Friends in India, and the US-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), among many others, bring people together to educate, advocate, and implement concrete changes in their communities.

These movements demonstrate several crucial aspects about religion that make it a potent force for catalyzing the kind of radical changes that White anticipated, and that we so desperately need today. First, religion is more than just beliefs or ideas. Beyond equipping people with cosmologies that orient them to each other, to the divine, and to the non-human world, religions offer a way for people to act in groups. Privatized responses to the dire environmental threats we face today are largely ineffective. But when they are multiplied by thousands, and by millions, they can have a profound effect.  Love it or hate it, religion has an excellent track-record for motivating this kind of collective action.

Second, religious people are motivated by many things besides what we might define as religion. Rural residents of India who preserve (and sometimes cut down) sacred groves are driven by many things: needs for agricultural land, fodder and fuel-wood, aspirations for a better life, desires to conform to new or transformed identities. The same could be said for religious urban dwellers in the United States faced with competing interests, like whether to expand the church’s parking lot or preserve 75-year old maple trees that give shade to a picnic area.

This is not to say that religion acts as a mere ideological cover for materialistic motivations, as when the felling of a sacred grove to build a modern concrete temple, or a maple tree to build a parking lot, is seen as a way to bring in more people and more revenue. Or that people are being simply pious when they enforce the sanctions that protect sacred groves from overuse, or put solar panels on the roof of their churches. Rather, more truthful understandings of how faith, religious practice, community, and natural resource use are intertwined are only possible when we recognize that religious people are also workers, family members, citizens, and residents of places that are precious in manifold ways.

Eliza F. Kent is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University and the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India and Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.

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Cleora Emily Bainbridge was born 8 November 1868, and passed away on 14 April 1870. Her father was a clergyman, and her mother, Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, was director of the Woman’s Branch of the New York City Mission Society. In 1883, her father, William Folwell Bainbridge, imagined what her life might have been like by casting her as the heroine of his novel Self-Giving, where she became a Christian missionary and died a martyr.

Cleora’s brother, William Seaman Bainbridge, born 17 February 1870, became an internationally prominent surgeon and medical scientist, living a full life until 22 September 1947. Had Cleora lived, she would have accompanied her brother and parents as they toured American Baptist missions around the world, 1879-1880, which prepared her brother for many more such voyages. He co-founded the International Committee of Military Medicine in Belgium in 1921, and two years later, he had the equivalent of an email address, Bridgebain, receiving telegrams sent to it from anywhere in the world.

Long dead, a sister and brother have now returned to life inside virtual worlds, as avatars: Cleora in fantasy role-playing game EverQuest II, and William in two science fiction virtual worlds where medical science advanced to frightening levels, Fallen Earth and Tabula Rasa.

• Cleora Emily Bainbridge (1868-1870)

   

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  The only surviving photograph

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• Cleora's Avatar, a Half-Elf Conjuror Mage in EverQuest II

   

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• William Seaman Bainbridge (1870-1947)

   

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  At his most idealistic and ambitious, playing the role of Columbus at festivities marking the 400th anniversary of his discovery of the New World in 1892 at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, a remarkable educational resort founded in 1874.

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• Bridgebain in His Crude Chemtown Laboratory in Fallen Earth

   

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• Bridgebain and the Clone He Made of Himself, after a Battle in Tabula Rasa

   

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Long ago, the gods abandoned Norrath, the world of EverQuest II. The game imagines the gods as creeping back to regain their lost status as lords of all the lands; it presents a cynical view of religion. Given Cleora’s history, I cast her avatar as ambivalent about deities. Her perspective made her an excellent vantage point for research.

The post-apocalyptic gameworld of Fallen Earth depicts conflict between numerous small gangs and cults in a chaotic corner of the United States, some years after the fall of civilization caused by a plague that may have resulted from unconstrained genetic engineering. Set in and around the Grand Canyon in Arizona, including simplified versions of many real locations, the game requires avatars to scavenge materials from the environment so they can craft weapons and medicines in order to survive the new Dark Ages. Bridgebain joined the Tech faction—scientists and engineers who believe only technology can restore civilization—and set up his headquarters in an advanced Tech base named Chemtown.

Tabula Rasa imagined that the Earth was invaded by a vicious extraterrestrial army called the Bane, but a few humans were able to escape to the planets Foreas and Arieki, where they formed alliances with the indigenous civilizations against the invaders. In addition to exploring these alien worlds and battling the Bane, Bridgebain collected Logos symbols from widely dispersed and often hidden shrines, where they were left by an ancient civilization named called the Eloh. Assembled into sentences, these Logos elements are like scientific theories or engineering designs that give the user advanced powers. Bridgebain collected all the Logos symbols, learned new medical skills like cloning himself, and eventually battled back from the stars to a point in New York City only a few blocks from Gramercy Park where the real doctor had lived.

Cleora and the two Bridgebains are Ancestor Veneration Avatars (AVAs), a new way of memorializing, enjoying, and learning from deceased family members, especially for a secular society in which traditional ways of dealing emotionally with death have lost plausibility. When operating an AVA inside a virtual world, the user can draw upon personal knowledge of the dearly departed (many written records as in the case of Bridgebain), and a hopeful sense of what a life might have been like in a particular social context (as in the case of Cleora). The goal is as much to enrich the life of the user as to fulfill a duty to the deceased. Indeed, the user gains a richer sense of human life by experiencing a challenging virtual world from the perspective of another person.

William Sims Bainbridge is a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science, and popular culture. He serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation. His books include eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming, Leadership in Science and Technology, The Warcraft Civilization, Online Multiplayer Games, Across the Secular Abyss, and The Virtual Future. He is the grandnephew of Cleora Bainbridge and grandson of William Seaman Bainbridge.

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The history of American witchcraft is indelibly associated with Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1692 nineteen people were executed as witches after the accusations of two young girls sparked a wave of fear. The village of Salem, the centre of the events of 1692, is now the town of Danvers, with the focus of today’s witchcraft industry centred on Salem city. But there are numerous other Salems in America, born of the country’s religious heritage – Salem in Hebraic means “peace”. But forget colonial Salem for a moment, as on two occasions in America’s more recent past Salem was the scene of trials related to witchcraft.

Salem 1878. In May 1878 the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, Massachusetts, considered:

That the said Daniel H. Spofford of Newburyport is a mesmerist, and practices the art of mesmerism, and that by his power and influence he is capable of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others, and does by said means so injure them. That the said Daniel H. Spofford has at divers times and places since the year 1875 wrongfully, maliciously and with the intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body, severe spinal pains and neuralgia, and temporary suspension of mind.

The charge reads remarkably like the indictments for witchcraft two centuries earlier, and the trial’s location further underscored the association in the minds of commentators.

Profoundly influenced by both mesmerism and spiritualism in her early adult life, the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), conceived a source of spiritual harm that came to be known as “malicious animal magnetism” or “MAM”. This was the malign use of willpower, the projection of harmful thoughts to cause physical damage. MAM become something of a preoccupation amongst early members of the movement.

In 1870 Daniel Spofford and his wife had entered into an agreement with Eddy that she would teach them the healing art for the sum of $100 cash and ten per cent of the commercial income from their future Christian Science healing practice. The Spoffords fell out with Eddy over other matters and declined to pay the tithe. So in 1878 Eddy launched a lawsuit against them. It was one of several legal actions that the litigious Eddy instigated against former followers at the time.

Things got worse for Spofford when, as this case was pending, Lucretia Brown, a 48-year-old spinster who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, lodged a suit against Spofford that Lucretia had suffered a spinal injury as a child, but while an invalid she was able to run a crocheting agency, employing local women working for pin money. An erstwhile Congregationalist, she was converted to Christian Science in 1876 after successful treatment by a female Christian Science healer from the town of Lynn named Dr Dorcas Rawson, herself a former Methodist. Lucretia was rejuvenated and was able to walk for miles for the first time since childhood, but she had a relapse following several visits by Spofford. She consulted Dorcas again who diagnosed that Spofford had been using mesmerism against her. And so Lucretia decided to take legal action, with some subsequently suggesting that Eddy put her up to it. The case was dismissed.

“The Long Lost Friend” was one of the most widely consulted books on how to deal with witches and witchcraft in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

Salem 1893. The town of Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio, was a thriving settlement founded by the Quakers. Its inhabitants numbered over 6,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, at which time it was described by one observer as displaying “order, prosperity, thrift, and comfort”. But in 1893 the peace after which the town was named was shattered by a virulent witchcraft dispute.

A few miles south of Salem, at a place known as McCracken Corner, lived a farmer named Jacob Culp. Born in Germany around 1839, he and his family emigrated to America when he was a boy. By 1860 the young man had taken up farming and married Hannah Loop, a Pennsylvanian woman fifteen years his senior, becoming step father to two children from her previous marriage. Culp worked hard and became one of the most prosperous members of the community. Sometime during the 1870s Hannah’s mother Mary Loop and her disabled brother Ephraim moved in to the Culp’s home for a few years. When Mary died, some neighbours, including a couple of the Loop sisters, cast accusing glances at Jacob. When Hannah also died sometime around 1887 and Jacob married Hattie, a woman twenty-five years younger, rumour had it he had bumped Hannah off too by his witchcraft.

The principal rumour-monger was Culp’s sister-in-law, Sadie Loop. Sadie was a key member of Hart Methodist Church, having served it as a Sunday School teacher and sexton. In November 1892, following further family misfortunes and illnesses, which no doctor could help, Sadie decided to call upon a herb doctress named Louise Burns. She told Sadie that she had a very bad brother-in-law, and when she was asked which one, Burns replied “the one that came across the ocean.” This could only be Jacob.

Sadie told a farmer and church Class Leader named Homer B. Shelton of her suspicions. He subsequently made a formal complaint about Sadie:

The undersigned a member of the Methodist Episcopal church, complains to you that Sadie Loop, a member of the same church, has been guilty of immoral conduct, and she is hereby charged therewith as follows: Charge, falsehood.

Specification 1. The said Sadie Loop on or about the 27^th day of April, 1893, did utter and publish, contrary to the word of God and the discipline, the following false and evil matter of and concerning Jacob Culp, to wit that he, meaning the said Jacob Culp was a wizard and practiced witchcraft.

H.B. Shelton

A church trial was held in the classroom of Salem Methodist Church. The presiding Judge, Rev. Smith, concluded after hearing all the evidence that he had no alternative but to expel Sadie Loop from the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Hart Church never recovered from these traumatic events. Today it is marked only by a small graveyard along Route 45 a few miles south of Salem.

These nineteenth-century Salem witch trials are a reminder that, two hundred years after the last legal executions for witchcraft in the USA, accusations of witchcraft and malign occult influence could still shake communities to their core, revealing that fear of witchery was as much a part of modern American life as it was in the colonial days.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and has written extensively on the subject of magic. His new book America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem is the first full history of witchcraft in modern America.

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Image credit: From John George Hohman’s The Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts & Remedies (Harrisburg, 1856). Image provided by Dr Owen Davies. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Holocaust Remembrance Day was originally declared a state holiday in Israel in 1951. The date, the 27^th of the month of Nissan, was chosen in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the United States, a week-long series of “Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust” was ratified by US Congress in 1979 to coincide with Yom HaShoah, which falls sometime during April or May. This year, it is held on 8 April 2013. In Israel, the United States, and Canada (which followed suit in 2000), Yom HaShoah remembrances are built on the sacred obligation to commemorate the martyrs and victims, to honor the survivors, and to pay respects to the liberators.

In Europe, on the other hand, Holocaust memory is inevitably bound up with troubling questions about perpetration and collaboration. For every life that was taken, someone pulled the trigger, someone watched, someone profited, and someone processed the paperwork. Wherever the Holocaust is commemorated in the European community, multiple layers of individual and corporate guilt are evoked. The presence of this guilt, even in the third and fourth generation, makes Holocaust remembrance awkward. The inability to come to terms with guilt for the Jewish genocide may explain why it took the European Union until 2013 to put the “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” on its official calendar.

Since 1945, European governments had developed various memorial strategies that gingerly sidestepped the problem of personal, institutional, and communal complicity and collusion in Nazi killing programs. Many constructed narratives of victimization and/or heroic resistance that were designed to alleviate moral qualms. The most infamous examples involved the governments of Austria, East Germany, and Poland, all of whom claimed victim status at the hands of (fascist) Nazi Germany. Such claims to victimization allowed individuals and institutions to deny responsibility for collaboration in the Holocaust. West Germany was the least successful in claiming the victim mantel—though not for lack of trying. Naturally, these victim narratives of oppression and powerlessness were not entirely wrong. But they obscured and falsified local histories of betrayal and persecution of Jews at the hand their Gentile Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, French, Austrian neighbors. No matter how much a country or particular persons suffered at the hands of the German Nazi regime, they could still be active in the brutalization of their Jewish neighbors.

The European Union declared 27 January its day of remembrance, following the 2005 resolution by the United Nations that also designated 27 January as “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” Notably, this day does not follow the Jewish calendar, but marks the day of liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army in 1945.

One million people were killed in the extermination camp of Auschwitz; its name has become synonymous with the Nazi achievement of turning mass murder into an industrialized process using innovative technologies, such as gas chambers and crematories. At no other extermination site were so many people killed at the hands of so few. In Auschwitz, the inmates themselves were forced to become cogs in the machinery of death and recruited to perform the grueling labor of extermination. This death camp was explicitly designed to shield SS-personnel from the human costs of killing—although there was still unspeakable brutality committed by individuals. But the focus on Auschwitz allows European officials, once again, to sidestep local histories of collusion and complicity. In its extremity, Auschwitz allows disassociation and distancing from the human ordinariness of those who plan, administrate, and commit mass murder. Surely, the brutes in charge of that camp could not have been Ordinary Men, to quote Christopher Browning’s book, and could not have lived as ordinary businessmen, doctors, teachers, and policemen in the post-war world (which they did).

The Holocaust was not committed by an alien species of evil Nazis, who invaded, hijacked, and occupied various countries and forced their populations to stand by and watch the unfolding of genocide. On the contrary, the systematic murder of six million required the active participation of many people across Europe, who were convinced that discriminating, humiliating, disowning, ghettoizing, enslaving, deporting, and killing Jews was the proper and profitable thing to do. Unless their perspective and precise nature of culpable wrongdoing can be openly articulated, the memory of the Holocaust will continue to be affected and infected by denial and evasion. It is not possible to honor the victims without acknowledging the perpetrators. Their guilt manifests in the compulsive drive toward exculpation which seeps into and distorts national memorial strategies.

It may not be a bad thing that the world now observes two separate dates in remembrance of the Holocaust, one anchored in the Jewish calendar, the other rooted in the Western calendar of the liberation of Auschwitz. But unless we strive to connect the histories of victimization and perpetration and join in commemoration as descendants of Jewish victims and Gentile perpetrators, we will not be able to repair this rift or build a reconciled future.

Katharina von Kellenbach is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and author of Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings and the forthcoming The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators.

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Image credit: A lit Yom Hashoah candle in a dark room on Yom Hashoah. Photo by Valley2city, Wikimedia Commons.

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In this interview on Today, Riley discusses the rise of interfaith marriages and what that means for America.

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Naomi Schaefer Riley is a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. She is the author of ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, God on the Quad, and The Faculty Lounges.

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Christians today owe a tremendous debt to the Roman emperor Constantine. He changed the place of the Church in the Roman World, moving it through his own conversion from the persecuted fringe of the empire’s religious landscape to the center of the empire’s system of belief. He also tackled huge problems with the way Christians understood their community. The three most important things the church owed to Constantine were a roadmap for reuniting communities split by persecution, a universal definition of the Church’s teaching, and a fixed date for the celebration of Easter. His solutions to the second and third issues remain in place to this day.

Constantine dealt with all three of the Church’s major issues at the conference he summoned at the ancient city of Nicaea (modern Iznik in Turkey) in June of 325 AD. The issue of persecution stemmed from a period of bitter conflict with the imperial government that had ended just over ten years before the council convened, while the debate over the Church’s teaching had exploded a few years before Nicaea (the issue was Jesus’ humanity). The Easter question had been festering for centuries, and the problems were inextricably tied up with the fact that no one recorded the actual day of the Crucifixion.

All that people could know on the basis of Christian Scripture was that the crucifixion was linked to the celebration of Passover, which meant that it should come at some point in the spring. But when? Since the date of Passover, then as now, is celebrated in accordance with the Jewish calendar, the correlation with the Julian calendar used by Christians and most other inhabitants of the Roman Empire was always inexact. Some Christians believed that the best way to solve the problem was to celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover according to the Jewish calendar, another group held that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the opening of Passover, while yet another group felt that the timing of the Christian festival should not be determined by the timing of Passover and should instead be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox.

Emperor Constantine I, presenting a model of the city to Virgin Pary. Detail of the southwestern entrance mosaic in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey). Photo by Myrabella. Creative Commons License.

The Easter story was extremely important to Constantine. Conscious as he was that he had been raised as a pagan, and that he had done things in his earlier life of which he was not proud (he never tells us what those things were), he felt that he had experienced a sort of moral resurrection when he became a Christian. He credited his extraordinary military career to God’s willingness to forgive his past sins and he wanted to make sure that he ruled in a way that would repay the benefits he believed his God had given him. In a sense there was nothing more obvious to Constantine than that Easter shouldn’t be connected with the festival of another faith. It should stand on its own in connection with the natural world. Hence he ordained that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first New Moon of Spring.

The solution to the Easter issue had the added advantage of allowing him to make an important concession to the group whose definition of the Faith he was rejecting outright at Nicaea, the so-called Arian faction, named for the Egyptian priest who had aggressively preached a doctrine asserting the human aspect of Christ. Constantine liked his God, like his empire, to be completely united, which is what we see today in the Nicene Creed in the phrase “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” That desire for unity also enabled him to arrive at an acceptable solution to the divisions that had arisen out of the period of persecution as he essentially argued that the two sides should bury the hatchet and recognize each other as Christians first. That approach has not had nearly so much influence as his approach to Easter or to the Trinity.

Constantine was a complex and at times difficult man, a passionate one with a ferocious temper. But he was also a man who was able to recognize his own weaknesses. It may have been that self-knowledge which enabled him to come to the new faith he hoped would make him a better ruler, and gave him the ability to find and forge compromises to build a better and more unified society.

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. His books include Constantine the Emperor, The Victor’s Crown, Emperors of Rome, and Ancient Rome: A New History.

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By Owen Davies

Magic in the modern world
The recent battle between religion and science conducted in the media, spearheaded by Professor Richard Dawkins and other high-profile figures, has garnered much international attention. The debate is not new of course; it stretches back several centuries. One aspect of the debate that receives less attention today is the issue of magic: a concept which is inextricably linked to the history of science and religion. The notion of both science and religion as magic is as relevant today as it ever was.

Magic: what’s in a word?
Magic continues to pervade popular imagination and language. Today the term ‘magic’ can be used to describe the supernatural, superstition, simple illusion, religious miracles, and fantasies of the imagination.  It can also be applied to the ‘wonders’ of science, or used as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as ‘magical realism’ has considerable appeal, as demonstrated by the success of Life of Pi. Modern scientists have even incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their ‘magic acid’ (a super acid developed in the 1960s) and ‘magic angles’ (an angle of 54.7356°) .

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Magic and primitivism
Since the Enlightenment – which the study of magic reveals as a problematic historical concept in itself – magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development, and yet across the modern globalised world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic  and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. While in the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalism decries the continued public threat posed by magic, and in our pluralistic spiritual democracy some have redefined magical practices as a form of religion.

Global magic
The debate over religion, magic, and science in the modern world is also too often conceived within a Judaeo-Christian western framework of intellectual development, with the magical and religious beliefs of much of the rest of the world ignored in general histories and debates. The magic of the literary cultures of China, India, and Asia are as rich and ancient as those of the Mediterranean world and are equally important to understanding what influenced developments in western magic. Understanding how different cultures have negotiated the relationship between science, religion and magic over the centuries and millennia also help us put Western developments in context. The influence of the Bible and Koran on magical traditions in Africa, the Americas and the Middle East are equally illuminating. The vast resource of oral traditions regarding magic, science, and religion in non-literary cultures also needs to be considered on an equal footing in our consideration of past and present human understanding. It is only by studying and comparing oral and literary magic cultures of the world that we can breakdown notions of primitiveness based on western assumptions.

Magic in your car
Twentieth-century technology is not immune from magical interference. Across the globe today talismans are placed in cars to protect them as much as the occupants. Ethnographers working in the bocage region of Normandy during the 1970s and 1980s found that car accidents or breakdowns were sometimes blamed on witchcraft. This notion is merely a technological version of the frequent accusations in earlier European sources that witches caused cart wheels to break or wagons to get stuck in the mud. In parts of Africa the introduction of tractors added a new dimension to agricultural witchcraft disputes. A study of road travel in Ghana found that the wrecks of cars and lorries at accident black spots on otherwise good, new road surfaces attracted suspicions of witchcraft.

Wishful thinking: magic?
We all have our magic moments. Have you ever urged your car to go faster as it struggles up a slope? Have you ever made a wish or believed that an event was more than coincidence? A desire for something to happen – ‘I hope she loses her job’ – may be expressed rationally, but if it comes true it may be interpreted magically. These are phenomena of our waking hours. In our dreams our minds lead us into magical worlds and activities. Far from espousing a rational view of the world, parents from cultures across the globe actively encourage magical thinking in pre-school children. It provides explanations to satisfy children in their early stages of inquisitiveness about why things work or happen. Children’s books feed magical fantasies, and early-years children’s television present magical worlds that bear no relationship to the real world. Why do we nourish magical thinking? It shields our ignorance, helps parents avoid uncomfortable questions, and provides a satisfying shared realm of adult and infant imagination and escapism.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, and ghosts, including Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (OUP, 2009), The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave, 2007), Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011), and Magic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012).

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What can the reader expect of the Chronicles of Narnia series to reveal about Christianity? According to Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Narnia series serves as a refreshing take on what it means to experience the divine in daily life. Christianity is portrayed in a more humanizing light through C.S. Lewis’s imaginative interpretation of Christian doctrine. In the following excerpt from The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Williams examines the portrayal of female characters in the Narnia series.

The charges of sexism or misogyny, though, are harder to counter. Even a very sympathetic commentator like Stella Gibbons (author of Cold Comfort Farm and a rather unexpected admirer of Lewis) complains that Lewis disliked “women who have entered rather boldly into the world that men have reserved for themselves. The domesticated, fussy, kind woman gets an occasional pat on her little head — (Mrs Beaver in The Lion, Ivy Maggs in That Hideous Strength).” Much feeling has been generated by the banishment of Susan from Last Battle because “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up” (Last Battle Ch. 12 , p. 741). Susan has forgotten Narnia apparently with the onset of puberty, and this has led some to conclude that she is “damned” for reaching sexual maturity.

This is unfair. We have already met (in The Horse) a mature Narnian Susan, courted by the heir to the Calormene throne. Her failure is not growing up. It is the denial of what she has known, rooted in her “keenness” not to grow up but to be grown-up, a very different matter. “It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grownups who are most grown-up,” we are told in Chapter 16 of The Silver Chair (p. 661). Susan is guilty of what Edmund in The Lion is initially guilty of, no more and no less, which is the refusal to admit the reality of Narnia when you have actually lived there. In The Lion this denial is one of the things that open the door to Edmund’s more serious treachery (so it is hardly a gender-specific matter); the issue is precisely that truthfulness which again and again — as we shall see — emerges as the central moral focus of the Narnia stories. And of course Susan’s longer-term future as an adult in “our” world is left entirely open. Lewis himself wrote in 1960 to a young reader distressed by Susan’s defection that he was reluctant to write the story of Susan’s rediscovery of Narnia.

Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?

Nor does Lewis in fact give us a series of weak or ill-defined female characters. Lucy’s courage and determination are a constant theme in the books where she appears. In Prince Caspian, when Edmund says “’to Peter and the Dwarf’ that girls ‘can never carry a map in their heads’”, it is Lucy who retorts “That’s because our heads have got something inside them” (Prince Caspian Ch. 9 , p. 370) and ends the conversation. In Dawn Treader Chapter 8, Lucy again castigates her male companions for being such “swaggering, bullying idiots” when Edmund and Caspian quarrel over who will be overlord of the island where water magically turns things to gold (p. 484). Aravis in The Horse is as forceful and intelligent a figure as any. It is true enough that Lewis seems to be all too ready to deal with the extremes of the spectrum where female characters are concerned — witch-queens and nannies. But in between there is rather more than some readers have noticed of ordinary female intelligence; and the depiction of male jostling for position among both boys and men, and the lethal consequences of this male pride, is none too flattering. It will not do to see Lewis as a simple misogynist. It is tempting to say that the further he gets away from theorizing about gender characteristics, the better he is in depicting women; the problem with the ill-starred Jane in That Hideous Strength is — as Stella Gibbons once again observes — that she has to carry an uncomfortable weight of theory in the very complex plot of that strange work.

Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. A poet and theologian, he is the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. He is the author of The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, published this month in the United States by Oxford University Press USA.

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Image credit: Skandar Keynes, Ben Barnes and Georgie Henley in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Copyright 20th Century Fox and Walden Media, LLC. Used for the purposes of illustration.

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We have a new Pope: Francis — a name honouring St. Francis of Assisi, who venerated poverty and recommended it to his followers.

In the build up to his election, a good deal of attention was naturally directed to the challenges facing the Catholic Church. Not least of these is the question of social justice and the plight of the global poor. As Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis had faced these with dignity, eschewing the trappings of office and choosing to live the example of a simple and humble lifestyle. The way he presented himself to the world on Wednesday night was no different. There was the same hint of an extempore independence of spirit.

But if these details seem to suggest a Catholic Church bringing itself up to speed with the world, they also offer a pause for reflection about continuity between the Pope Emeritus and this new Pope. And if poverty and a regard for the marginalized is the theme, then St. Augustine of Hippo might become the source of that reflection, as well as the link between the two men – Benedict, the Augustinian scholar and long time “doctrinal watchdog,” and Francis, the third world candidate of a modernizing Vatican.

Augustine was a sublime and prodigious scholar and a Defensor fidei. He wrote tirelessly against the major heresies and schisms of the early Church and promoted orthodoxy through that work. Yet he was also the Bishop of Hippo Regius in a declining province of Roman North Africa. The son of modest parents, he established a strict monastic discipline for himself and enforced it on his priests in the name of leadership and good example. It is often remarked upon by scholars how extraordinary it is that so much that remains foundational today in the Western Church – as indeed in the whole Western tradition of philosophy and ideas – flowed from so simple a pen in such a far-flung corner of the Empire. It does indeed make you think of Pope Francis’ words from the balcony on Wednesday night: “It seems that my brother cardinals went almost to the end of the world to choose a pope!”

But to Augustine at least, these two aspects of his life were always united in a single conception that he was anxious should not be separated. For of course one of the age-long challenges for Christianity and the Church has been to meet and overcome the world’s confidence when it claims that it understands realism best. This is not surprising: Christ proclaimed an otherworldly message on behalf of the spirituality of the human soul, and since then a critical purpose of the Church’s mission has been to preserve that otherworldly beauty in the integrity of its sacraments. At a time like now, when the world feels confident again to remind the Church that she should remain in touch with real problems, Augustine’s life and preaching offer a more nuanced perspective.

Poverty, injustice, and the general-case “problem of pain,” are not, he taught, proofs that the world should bring against the Church. The Church must of course move with the times and periodically reform herself, but the love and sympathy which alleviates suffering, one human reaching to another, is nobody’s possession but the God Who made all heaven and earth — and all men and women in His image. It is a subtle point of deep theology, threatened on either side by the ideologies that can just as quickly be made out of the cause of poverty as they can out of the cause of wealth. In Augustine’s teaching, both the rich man and the poor man prove a sacramental truth to each other before they join forces to make a better society.

Although a marbled house does contain you, although fretted ceilings cover you, you and the poor man together have for covering that roof of the universe, the sky… In the bowels of your mothers you were both naked. [En. in Ps., LXXII, 13]

On Thursday, in a Sistine Chapel Mass, Pope Francis urged:

If we do not confess to Christ, what would we be? We would end up a compassionate NGO. What would happen would be like when children make sand castles and then it all falls down.

And similarly, on 27 February, in his last General Audience, Pope Benedict called the faithful back to this reality of the barque of Saint Peter:

But I always knew that the Lord is in this barque; and I always knew that the barque of the Church is something that belongs neither to me, nor to us, but to Him alone. And the Lord will not let her sink: for it is He Himself Who leads her. This happens through the men he has chosen, certainly – but only because this is how He wants it.

This is a distinctly Augustinian call. When Augustine became a bishop and chose a monastic poverty he saw it in these terms. Human ingenuity has added to the sophistications of life and created through them the concept of progress through time — as well as the yardsticks of that progress in the rich and the poor, the developed and the undeveloped world. But if the Church is not merely to become a “compassionate NGO” she must remember that she has been appointed to remain, in the first instance, above these distinctions. It is only by continuing as the Lord’s possession (and no human’s) that she can credibly draw true seekers to her incorporeal vision of Beauty.

Beyond count are the things made by various crafts in garments, shoes, utensils, and so on – not to mention the visionary creations of artists! Men have taken this course and added all these to the allurements of the eyes, outwardly pursuing the things they make, but inwardly forsaking Him by Whom they were made; and therefore actually destroying what they were made to be… For the beautiful visions transmitted through the artists’ souls into their hands all come from that very Beauty which is above their souls, and for which my soul sighs by day and by night. [Confess., X, 34, 53]

Miles Hollingworth is Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at St. John’s College, Durham University, in the United Kingdom. His writing on Augustine has won awards from the Society of Authors (2009 Elizabeth Longford Grant for Historical Biography) and the Royal Society of Literature (2009 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction). He is the author of The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought, which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone History Book Prize, and St. Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography.

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Image credits: “Habemus Papam” – Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., has been elected Pope Francis I. Source: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk via CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. St. Augustine and four States of a fraternity. Source: WikiPaintings.

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