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Here is an important article about the American Protestant Evangelical Missionaries in the Middle East.
Hegel and Islam
Chapter taken from my book HISTORY OF ISLAM IN GERMAN THOUGHT (Routledge 2010).
2010, Modern Intellectual History
2006, Journal of Historical Sociology
Abstract The comparative studies of world religions have been a distinctive part of Western thought. Hegel's contribution to the philosophy of history is most clearly seen where he introduces a theory of historical development based on the secularisation of Christian cosmology. With Hegel, the Spirit (Geist), previously theologically understood, gradually becomes the embodiment of historical development. In the Hegelian vocabulary, the phenomenology of religion is formulated along with the theory of historical progress. In this article, I will argue that the question of historical development has been continuously elaborated in a culturalist fashion in works of Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber and Samuel Huntington as those scholars, through different intellectual traditions, essentialises the spiritual backgrounds of world religions and ties the phenomenology of religion with the philosophy of history in their historical analyses. This paper will argue that these scholars, by relying on the idealised images of religions and particularly of the Occidental Spirit, subtly elaborate the historical culturalist notion of development within Western thought. By arguing for an inherent link between religion and development, these scholars implicitly institutionalize a Eurocentric understanding of Western Christianity and the Occidental path of development within mainstream social theory. Be they philosophical (Hegel), sociological (Weber) or political (Huntington), the historical culturalism of these approaches shape our understanding of historical change, and ironically, instead of countering the excesses of crude materialism, they lead social theory into a form of Eurocentic historical culturalism.
From 'Mahometan Tyranny' to 'Oriental Despotism': The Secularization of Islam in French Political Thought
Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars have analysed Western representations of the Orient as a window into Western contexts, identities, and ideas. Drawing on Said’s insights, recent literature has sought to complicate Said’s vision of Orientalism as an imperialist tradition that expressed and legitimised Western colonial interests. Although a growing number of works, particularly in the field of literary studies, have proposed to re-evaluate the relationship between Orientalism and Western contexts, the history of Islam’s significance to European political thought has yet to receive substantial scholarly attention. This thesis seeks to revisit representations of Islam in light of their interactions with, and contributions to, the political dynamics of early modern France, from 1610 to 1798. It analyses the ways in which images of Islam, over the course of more than a century, both reflected and helped to shape processes of political secularisation in France.
In this article I explore how philosophical thinking about God, reason, humanity and history has shaped ideas of Europe, focusing on Hegel. For Hegel, Europe is the civilisation that, by way of Christianity, has advanced the spirit of freedom which originated in Greece. Hegel is a Eurocentrist, whose work indicates how Eurocentrism as a broader discourse has shaped received conceptions of Europe. I then distinguish 'external' and 'internal' ways of approaching ideas of Europe and defend the former approach, on which Europe's self-understanding is not a phenomenon purely internal to Europe but has always been shaped by Europe's relations with non-European cultures. I note Egypt's influence on the ancient Greeks and the role of Europe's colonisation of America, and suggest that European civilisation could be rejuvenated by more open acknowledgement of these relations with others.
Since Jesus was a Jew born in Judea, the best of contemporary studies of Jesus rely heavily on knowledge of first-century Judaism. In contrast, most of the nineteenth-century pioneers of “the search for the historical Jesus” did not recognize the need to have first hand knowledge of Jewish sources. The few who tried to skimmed over biased translations and commentaries or were biased and had limited skills themselves. The latter describes David Friedrich Strauss whose book, the Life of Jesus, was a catalyst for the “search for the historical Jesus”. There were, however, several Jewish writers learned in rabbinics who wrote about Jesus in his Jewish context and who took issue with the antagonism and ignorance of Judaism apparent in much of New Testament scholarship. Eminent among these were Abraham Geiger and Heinrich Graetz, nineteenth century German Wissenschaft des Judentums historians. These two men did not come to identical conclusions about Jesus and possessed antagonistic ideologies—Geiger, a leader of the Reform Movement and Graetz, a traditionalist fighting against the Reform Movement. Yet they both illuminated Jesus within his Jewish context and, in that sense, they used the proper methodology for discovering the Jewish historical Jesus that the most reputable contemporary scholars rely on today. This paper examines the debate between these scholars and the historical background surrounding it, especially the influence of Hegelian philosophy. My background and approach to these scholars is as a student of early Judaism, Hebrew, and Jesus.
2012, Australian Religion Studies Review
(draft for) Mitchell Hart and Tony Michels, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism. Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press. Volume 8: The Modern Period (c. 1815-2000).
This essay is a critique of the neo-Hindu movement in India and how the neo-Hindu is unable to understand my book: THE SEDUCTIONS OF KARL MARX
2011
This book conceives of" religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions.
This essay is on the critique of ideology claiming that ideology is akin to psychosis, which involves a complete withdrawal from reality.
2006, Marx, critical theory, and religion: a critique of …
2018, PhD Dissertation
Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and methodological lacuna in western metaphysics with regards to betrayal. Following Levinas’ call for an ‘Ethics as first philosophy,’ my research question is: ‘How can I think of betrayal responsibly?’ I offer to approach betrayal as an accusation, one that comports an excessive hatred towards the identified ‘traitor.’ Suspending its moral vilification, I construct a broadly phenomenological method – which I call ‘antipathology’ – that proposes to take this hatred seriously; not as the sign of a lack to be filled or purloined with shame, but of a communication to respond-to. Tracking western thought’s metaphysical engagements – mainly via Kant, Hegel and Heidegger – my antipathology witnesses an exceedingly systematic muting of this hatred. Such a principled effacement of hatred’s signs is the very mechanism by which western thought “de-problematizes” betrayal, appropriating its otherness for its own metaphysical ends. To those ends, betrayal ceases to be an event and becomes its ‘prefiguration,’ a twist on an assumed temporal and causal progression. I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’ I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road. The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.
2015, Is there a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective
2017, The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Christian Thought
Much nineteenth-century political theory was preoccupied with relations between state and Church. This chapter examines some of the leading European theories of Church and state, many of which influenced and reflected broader public debates and institutional developments. In response to the French Revolution and to a series of liberal and democratic reforms various attempts were made to renew the Church by emphasizing its role as the spiritual embodiment of the nation. While in some contexts, such as France, this would provoke a secular reaction and ultimately a separation of Church and state, elsewhere increasing religious pluralization would generate pluralist state forms and corresponding theories of the plural state. The central themes addressed here include: Ultramontanism to liberal Catholicism in France; the Hegelian theory of the state; liberal Anglicanism and the broad church movement; and theories of the plural state from the 1890s to the First World War.
In full disclosure, this thesis is not intended to be a dogmatic or pedantic endorsement of any one religion, ethic, or culture. To the contrary, it is my intent to examine a number of competing ideas, philosophies, and belief systems in order to extrapolate their geopolitical implications and to pursue them to their logical (albeit sometimes inevitable) conclusions. Too often, any number of presuppositions at work within a given situation go overlooked and subsequently skew geopolitical analysis and resulting policy decisions. This thesis seeks to transcend mere opinion or speculation and achieve instead a framework for pragmatic comprehension and understanding. In short, this thesis seeks to defend the notion that ideas matter in geopolitics and that sound analysis must account for the ideas esteemed by both the entities being observed (e.g. states, peoples, etc.) and the analyst(s) themselves.
The concept of freedom in nineteenth-century Russian thought The uploaded file is merely a preliminary draft; the final version is published in: Daniel Whistler (ed.): The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology. Edinburgh 2018, 85–104. ISBN 9781474405867 https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-critical-history-of-nineteenth-century-christian-theology.html
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Martin Luther
The concept of modernity has emerged as a major philosophical, theological and sociological category of interpretation in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was meant to embrace fundamental changes to the fabric of Western culture including the rise of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, and secularity. From its inception, references to Luther and the Reformation have been a frequent element of this kind of theory. The first major theorist of modernity in this sense was arguably Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel who set the tone of subsequent contributions by aligning modernity with subjectivity. For him, the religious dimension of this development was crucial, and he was explicit in his claim that it was the Reformation that brought the turn to subjectivity in the realm of religion. A side-effect of the turn to subjectivity was the alienation of the subject from the world. Modernity is thus deeply ambivalent and so is Protestantism. Later thinkers developed further these insights, but also criticised the identification of Luther with the origin of modernity pointing to continuities between his theology and earlier, medieval thought. The article discusses the following thinkers: Hegel, Ritschl, Troeltsch, Weber, de Maistre, and Maritain.
2015, Journal of Classical Sociology
This article identifies two different patterns in how Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, portrayed the relationship between the Jews and modern capitalism. The early Marx described modern economic life as domination by a Jewish spirit that is internalized by non-Jews and objectified in economic institutions. The Jews did not drop out of Marx’s mature work, as is sometimes supposed, but there was a major shift in how he linked European Jewry to capitalist development. The mature Marx, it is argued, substituted a new narrative in which the Jews, after contributing to the creation of modern capitalism, were then superseded. In addition, the article seeks to explain these patterns: it argues that assumptions about the Jews originally derived from Christian theology but subsequently secularized and transposed to economic life formed part of the cultural toolkit with which Marx and other classical German social thinkers constructed their understanding of modern capitalism.
2010, Historical Materialism
2018, History
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-229X.12618
2019
This "text" discusses how capitalism, colonialism, and trauma are linked to various present-day crises, including issues related to civic engagement, environmental collapse, addiction, and collective trauma. The work argues for the inevitability of universalism by going through a history of how neoliberalism colonized the world and our minds. After surveying these various crossroads of contemporary precariousness, the crises of strategic intimacies, and the paralysis of endless reductionist calculi, in this work we will come to acknowledge how between the nightmares of history and a technologically overdetermined and ecologically devastated future, an examination of civic life must start from within the throngs of devotees so mesmerized by the circulations of global finance. Out of a mélange of conflicting paradigms, I look to two prevailing belief systems that underpin the most populous language-cultures of the internet; which both locate each other from the utmost periphery of one another; both have underlying religious ideologies that may aid in the acculturation of inclusive institutions which work to affirm differences among their respective congregations. Encountering a convergence from the utmost periphery from the other, gives each perspective the potential to see how they are in a “constitutive relationship with (their) own outside,” to question their own universality, as well as realizing the inadequacies that come from within" (Balibar, 36). After analyzing the political implications of the philosophies of Hegel and Spinoza, in relation to Christian and Confucian theologies, I end by admonishing "us" to take responsibility as inscribers of ritual to heal ghosts of collective trauma.
Christianity’s political voice in US society is often situated within a simplistic binary of social justice versus faithfulness. Gary Dorrien and Stanley Hauerwas, respectively, represent the two sides of the binary in their work. Although the justice-faithfulness narrative is an important point of disagreement, it has also created a categorical impasse that does not reflect the full depth and complexity of either Dorrien’s or Hauerwas’s work. Their concerns for both justice and faithfulness differ only in part because of their different responses to liberalism and liberal theology. Under all those issues are rival accounts of relational truth that indicate divergent understandings of reality. At the heart of Dorrien’s and Hauerwas’s theologies and differences are the issues of God’s sovereign agency and humanity’s subjectivity and agency. Dorrien emphasizes love, divine Spirit, human spirit, and freedom for flourishing. Hauerwas stresses gift, triune creator, human creaturehood, and flourishing in friendship. Those divergent positions issue forth in rival responses to political sovereignty. Dorrien’s panentheistic monism is integrated with the modern nation-state’s sovereignty. Hauerwas rejects the state’s hegemonic sovereignty as an attempt at autonomy that rejects God’s gifts and aspires to rival God’s sovereignty. While Dorrien’s and Hauerwas’s discussion might then appear at an impasse, it can be opened and developed in reference to Rowan Williams’s horizon. Although his political work overlaps with much in Dorrien’s and Hauerwas’s positions, Williams goes beyond them by calling for the transformation of the modern nation-state’s sovereignty and by supplying a vision of it transformed. Williams’s advance opens Dorrien’s and Hauerwas’s disagreement by freeing them from their common assumption, the permanence of state sovereignty. Williams’s political horizon is underwritten by his theological horizon, which fuses love and gift within triune mutuality and plenitude. This account offers critical help to issues that Dorrien and Hauerwas find problematic in each other’s position. Such development thereby opens the possibility of a fresh and fruitful discussion. Therefore, Williams’s work offers important help for Dorrien and Hauerwas to address the heart of their disagreement over divine and political sovereignty, and human subjectivity and agency.
Animus 11 (2006): 1-26.
Philosophy which excludes reason united with religion as irrational determines that secular societies where such philosophy is normative must be at war with Islamic societies
The Yijing has been persistently approached in the west through conflicting interpretive strategies. While Leibniz saw in it an expression of and source for genuine philosophy and the new logic and mathematics, Hegel rejected it as a work of abstract picture thinking that was simultaneously too formal and empirical. Neither Leibniz nor Hegel understood the Yijing’s earlier history as the Zhouyi or its complex transformations in Chinese traditions from the early Confucian interpretation emphasizing its ethical character to the metaphysical systematizations of late Neo-Confucianism. Yet their discussions indicate two distinct ways of addressing how to interpret others and other cultures in relation to epistemic issues. The question of interpretation, and hermeneutics as its art, involves issues of how to interpret others through signs and artifacts and how to interpret the natural world. This raises the question of philosophy itself, whether it is exclusively European as Hegel and his critic Derrida concur or whether it has a more universal import as suggested by Leibniz’s approach to the Yijing and Chinese thought.
2021, in: Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 82, no. 2
In 1876, the French philosopher Charles Renouvier published “Uchronie”, an obscure philosophical novel narrating an alternate history where Christianity fails to take root in the West. Far from being a literary divertissement, the novel rests on an articulated philosophy of history, which emphasizes the role of contingency and human freedom in opposition to the organicist and deterministic historical narratives of the time. My purpose is to provide the theoretical outlook of Renouvier’s “philosophie analytique de l’histoire” and to place it within its original historical context, in light of Renouvier’s reactions to the political and intellectual vicissitudes of the Third Republic
2007, "Studia Religiologica"
"Many religious scholars critical of the Enlightenment are also critical of the notion of human rights because their warrants are over-generalised and insufficiently tied to any particular history of ethical discourse. This paper considers how the process associated with 'A Common Word' (www.acommonword.com) might encourage such scholars to consider human rights not as the product of Enlightenment claims about reason, but as attempts to establish minimal rules to enable different traditions to coexist side-by-side. Because different traditions are in play, appeals to minimal rules cannot appeal to just one tradition; but this does not mean they need be appeals that bypass all traditions in the name of reason. http://us.macmillan.com/muslimandchristianunderstanding"