Ancient Greek Philosopher-Scientists Libravox

Ancient Greek Philosopher-Scientists

VARIOUS ( - ), translated by Various

The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, that is, the philosopher-scientists who lived before or contemporaneously to Socrates, were the first men in the Western world to establish a line of inquiry regarding the natural phenomena that rejected the traditional religious explanations and searched for rational explanations. Even though they do not form a school of thought, they can be considered the fathers of philosophy and many other sciences as we have them now. None of their works is extant, so, in this collection, we present the textual fragments, when existing, of ten Pre-Socratic philosopher-scientists, and quotations and testimonials about them left by later authors. (Summary by Leni)

Anaxagoras of Klazomenai (translated by John Burnet)	Anaxagoras of Klazomenai	Etext	Matt	00:11:13	en
Play02	Anaximander of Miletos (translated by John Burnet)	Various	Etext	Gitonga M'Mbijjewe	00:06:17	en
Play03	Anaximenes of Miletos (translated by Arthur Fairbanks)	Various	Etext	Gitonga M'Mbijjewe	00:09:42	en
Play04	Empedocles of Agrigentum (translated by William Ellery Leonard)	Empedocles	Etext	Gitonga M'Mbijjewe	00:30:43	en
Play05	Heraclitus of Ephesos (translated by G.T.W. Patrick)	Various	Etext	hefyd	00:27:21	en
Play06	Parmenides of Elea (translated by John Burnet)	Parmenides of Elea	Etext	Ernst Pattynama	00:13:14	en
Play07	Pythagoras of Samos and the pythagoreans (translated by Arthur Fairbanks)	Various	Etext	Enko	00:42:31	en
Play08	Thales of Miletos (translated by Arthur Fairbanks)	Various	Etext	Graham Redman	00:18:19	en
Play09	Xenophanes of Kolophon (translated by Arthur Fairbanks)	Various	Etext	Andrew Coleman	00:24:15	en
Play10	Zeno of Elea (translated by John Burnet)

The Stammtisch Podcast Lektion 16: Glücksspiel und Schinken

16

Ken decides it is time to give conversational German a try. He may not have the language under his belt but he will still come out swinging. Friedl coaches him in his corner while he prepares to face the Kellner. Deutsch has never been so darn interesting. Stay tuned and learn Super German jetzt! on this episode of The Stammtisch podcast.

Stammtisch Podcast: Episode 17

Lektion 18: Reiner Quatsch

German will never be the same. Phrases and phrases topple over in this episode. Friedl and Ken spend their last Stammtisch lesson in Brooklyn. Both of these two Deutsch explorers do their best to tie up the loose ends of Deutsch. Of course, they don’t.

Recolonization of the Academy Under a Trump Presidency

This panel analyzes the intensified colonization of academic spaces—both intellectual and physical—under the current presidency. How do we accurately map these changes and negotiate these spaces in an era of national “whitelash” from peripheral ideological and embodied spaces? How do we contend with the increasing marginalization and targeting of vulnerable populations? What strategies might scholars use to contribute to the ongoing process of decolonizing the academy? What are the potential ramifications of our non-action or complicity in this academic landscape?

Munir Jiwa, Graduate Theological Union, presiding

Panelists:
- Hatem Bazian, Zaytuna College and University of California, Berkeley
- Jasmin Zine, Wilfrid Laurier University
- Mel Chen, University of California, Berkeley
- Shanell T. Smith, Hartford Seminary

This session was recorded at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion on November 19 in Boston, MA.

Recolonizing the Academy Under a Trump Presidency by Religious Studies News is licensed under a  Creative Commons License.

HUM 111 Hannibal Patton Reincarnation

Reincarnation

Beacon: David Wragg

David

HUM 111 Choreutika: Performing and Theorising Dance in Ancient Greece

Greek Dance

HUM 111 Medieval Europe from the Breakup of the Western Roman Empire to the Reformation

This short book (its text is only 257 pages) is not a history of Medieval Europe but an interpretation with a focus on change and its causes. It is also intended to be accessible, and this is greatly assisted by a light and highly readable style. Wickham is a distinguished medievalist but here he wears his scholarship lightly, with no great thickets of footnotes or shrubberies of jargon. However, this is a learned work and in no sense "medieval-lite": this is a view of the medieval past that commands respect, though not necessarily agreement.

Wickham's middle ages are traditional in circumscription--roughly AD 500 to 1500. He is well aware that this periodization is artificial, but as he says, at least that artificiality gets away from the teleological approach which sees its study as justified only by its "relevance" to modern development. Having avoided these elephant traps, Wickham delineates key moments of change in a largely conventional way: the "fall" of Rome, the crisis of the Eastern Empire, the Carolingian experiment, the expansion of Christianity, the decentralisation of power in the eleventh century (avoiding the term "feudal revolution" but accepting its substance), economic and demographic expansion in the high middle ages accompanied by a rebuilding of the state, though also the end of the Byzantine form, the Black Death and the development of intensive state structures in the late middle ages. There is an admirable geographic balance with Germany, Central and Eastern Europe dealt with at length and Italy given its real due: an important corrective to the Anglo-French perspective which dominates so many general studies. Although he is at pains to disown any attempt to make a moral judgement on historical developments, there is no mistaking the emphasis on state development, and the key factor here is the ability of government to tax and to exert control directly and not through intermediaries with wills of their own. It is very refreshing that Wickham strongly asserts the value of late medieval governmental development with the exercise of royal power through competent (if corrupt) officers rather than obstructive aristocrats. But for the earlier part of the middle ages the book runs into the question of the influence of Rome--the old debate about continuity. Wickham is not in any way seduced by the "late antique" brigade, and indeed here refers more than once to the "fall" of Rome, but there is no doubt that, as he showed in his The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe from 400-1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), he believes that the empire had enormous influence despite the lack of substantial institutional continuity. The question really is how much influence?

In this book he argues that the incoming peoples inherited a sense of the res publica from Rome and sought to preserve that. In particular he suggests very strongly that the assemblies placita, which were so important in early medieval Europe (and indeed later), were a key expression of the inheritance from Rome of this sense of the public good. Now the peoples who invaded the western empire have been scrutinised very thoroughly and it seems clear that they were assemblages of ambitious individuals and groups gathered around "kings" who offered them the best chance of doing well. How could kings, even powerful ones, not consult and consider their wishes and especially those of the more prominent? Surely, it could be argued, this is not Roman consciousness but political prudence. The elite remained in the orbit of the royal courts because it suited them, but Wickham interprets their presence as subordination, although it was only that in the presence of a strong and able king. Weakness produced a quite different pattern. The bloody emergence of the Carolingians (not emphasised here) is a tribute to localised power gathering others into its wake and imposing a new central control--essentially a change of personnel which was later glossed over very nicely by tame intellectuals who even portrayed it as divinely inspired. Charlemagne here emerges dressed up in the bright glow of the "Carolingian experiment." It is interesting that Wickham's bibliography notes H. Fichtenau, Living in the tenth century but makes no mention of that author's Carolingian Empire which is really the only truly critical treatment of Charlemagne's reign. It is certainly true that Charlemagne did draw on and encourage fine ideas of sacral monarchy, but he was also a bloodthirsty warlord whose successors were really not able to copy his methods in dealing with their most important subjects. Charlemagne was able to manipulate his elite, though not without great efforts, but his successors were less able and their line failed. As a result, as Wickham argues, highly localised elite landed power emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, one might ask was it so very different from what had gone before, or simply much more overt? The "feudal revolution," it could be argued, was only the naked manifestation of local power which had always existed and which could be tamed and mastered at particular moments according to the chances of personality and circumstances. Rather than a notion of the "public good," the leaders of the new barbarian peoples inherited a sense of sovereignty which was so visible in the Roman empire and they copied its manifestations. However, to translate this inheritance into reality was difficult given their dependence upon the leaders of their military followings, and this problem was compounded because very quickly these important followers acquired land and, in effect, shared sovereignty. Landowning is extremely difficult to distinguish from sovereignty and what we see by the twelfth century--earlier in a few places, later in others, never in some--is sovereignty emerging as distinctive, riding on a wave of what Wickham rightly calls, "The Long Economic Boom 950-1300" (121-140). But even then, most successful kings had to consult with their elites: this was a pragmatic imperative. No medieval king was absolute, though some were more nearly absolute than others, and consultation and consent did not everywhere become institutionalised--and that was the result of the interaction of circumstance, personality and chance. The sharp distinction which is drawn in this book between early medieval consultation and late medieval representative bodies seems a false one arising from the premise of the "public good" which ignores pragmatic dealing with the reality of local and sometimes supra-local power. This is stimulating stuff which will provide a great deal for historians to argue about, but some aspects of this work are more controversial.

Wickham lays great emphasis on the diversity of Europe and this is certainly a valuable theme. He is quite right to stress the fluidity of the very term "Europe" but surely overeggs the cake in dismissing it as a serious indicator of identity, especially as he admits "people did talk about Europe in the middle ages" (6). This is very much a Brexit interpretation, not at all sympathetic to the Euro-Vision of the medieval past. But this perspective is surely carried rather too far. What is never discussed is the use of Christianity (meaning the Roman version) as essentially a synonym for Europe. The same aversion to any suggestion of unity produces another oddity, which is the reluctance to concede the importance of catholic and Roman Christianity in shaping structures and attitudes.  The chapter "The Expansion of Christian Europe 500-1100" (80-98) is largely about other things than religion, and throughout the book the influence of the papacy is seriously downplayed. The overall impression is to minimise the impact of religion upon Europe and to tell a story of its development which is based much more upon other economic, social and political factors. Nobody can deny that these were important, but the immense contribution of the papacy and the church to European development is surely unmistakable.

Related to this is the scant attention paid to the crusades. They tend to be seen in a very old-fashioned way as early examples of imperialism and covers for greed. More seriously, Wickham ignores the central role they played in European development through the link with the papacy, and treats them as a kind of exotic and deplorable bolt-on, mere excursions with no relevance to his main themes. But they are excursions into a different world for which the author has a great deal of admiration. Tax collecting and its accompanying bureaucratic structures are portrayed here as signs of true stability, and time and time again Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman state-building is favourably contrasted with the European powers. Now this is a defendable case, though the Ottomans took some time to come around to it: after about 1386 the Sultans decided to rid themselves of dependence on tribal warlords by establishing the core of a regular army which needed a strong financial structure to support it. What eventuated was certainly based on Byzantine and Persian models. But the tone of admiration is odd and it often feels as if Wickham is in thrall to "Orientalism" which he mentions (53) only in passing. This curious dogma, so publicised by Edward Said, perhaps explains Wickham's hostility to the crusades and fuses with his scepticism about the influence of the church and papacy.

This is a very stimulating and enjoyable book. Wickham is not much interested in intellectual and cultural history which are so in vogue nowadays. Instead he portrays European development based on political and socio-economic factors. His Europe is vibrant and dynamic, even at times almost anarchic, an untidy mass of competing peoples, states, and cities whose variety is difficult to encompass. This book sketches the changing structures of medieval Europe with great clarity. Much of it is fairly conventional, but the author's emphases and omissions will act as a valuable stimulus to historical debate.

What Makes Training Great

what-makes-training-great

HUM 111 Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad

Iliad

The Next Generation of Higher Education Leaders

The%20Next%20Generation%20of%20Higher%20Education%20Leaders

HUM 111 Dance in Antiquity

Tanz

HUM 111 112 REL 205 Western Civilization Bible

/eye-eye-one-greatest-ideas-history

HUM 111 Stones, Bones and the Sacred: Essays on Material Culture and Religion in Honor of Dennis E. Smith. Early Christianity and its literature

Early Christianity

6 Video Tools

6-tools-to-bring-video-to-your-classroom

20 College Alternatives

college-alternatives

ATD Joe Urbanski

Urbanski

PHI 101 PHI 210 Fallacies

This is a clear example of a bandwagon commercial/advertisement. Just because Puff Daddy showed up in a  Diet Pepsi Truck everyone decided to go out and buy the truck to be just like him. I would've probably shown him enjoying a Diet Pepsi when he got into the truck. This is would show that he really enjoyed the drink. I feel like the advertisers were smart. They used the biggest celebrity at that time to influence others to buy their product.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPBs5_ZYTrg&t=0s&list=PL2Rf1R6EcGZQt1pYA4_T7MUh2zGhVlqDY&index=1

This commercial is false authority at its finest. The advertisers used Blake Griffin to tell people how to be amazing, as if he is "amazing". If you buy through GameFly you are automatically amazing. This is not true and will not make you amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOAPMjsHLDM

AAR Panel Podcast: Recolonization of the Academy Under a Trump Presidency

This panel analyzes the intensified colonization of academic spaces—both intellectual and physical—under the current presidency. How do we accurately map these changes and negotiate these spaces in an era of national “whitelash” from peripheral ideological and embodied spaces? How do we contend with the increasing marginalization and targeting of vulnerable populations? What strategies might scholars use to contribute to the ongoing process of decolonizing the academy? What are the potential ramifications of our non-action or complicity in this academic landscape?

Munir Jiwa, Graduate Theological Union, presiding

Panelists:

- Hatem Bazian, Zaytuna College and University of California, Berkeley

- Jasmin Zine, Wilfrid Laurier University

- Mel Chen, University of California, Berkeley

- Shanell T. Smith, Hartford Seminary

This session was recorded at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion on November 19 in Boston, MA.

In Our Time Religion Podcast: Malta 1565

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the event of which Voltaire, two hundred years later, said 'nothing was more well known'. In 1565, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman leader, sent a great fleet west to lay siege to Malta and capture it for his empire. Victory would mean control of trade across the Mediterranean and a base for attacks on Spain, Sicily and southern Italy, even Rome. It would also mean elimination of Malta's defenders, the Knights Hospitaller, driven by the Ottomans from their base in Rhodes in 1522 and whose raids on his shipping had long been a thorn in his side. News of the Great Siege of Malta spread fear throughout Europe, though that turned to elation when, after four months of horrific fighting, the Ottomans withdrew, undermined by infighting between their leaders and the death of the highly-valued admiral, Dragut. The Knights Hospitaller had shown that Suleiman's forces could be contained, and their own order was reinvigorated. 

The image above is the Death of Dragut at the Siege of Malta (1867), after a painting by Giuseppe Cali. Dragut (1485 – 1565) was an Ottoman Admiral and privateer, known as The Drawn Sword of Islam and as one of the finest generals of the time.

With 

Helen Nicholson

Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford

and

Kate Fleet

Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

In Our Time Religion Podcast: Augustine The Confessions

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss St Augustine of Hippo's account of his conversion to Christianity and his life up to that point. Written c397AD, it has many elements of autobiography with his scrutiny of his earlier life, his long relationship with a concubine, his theft of pears as a child, his work as an orator and his embrace of other philosophies and Manichaeism. Significantly for the development of Christianity, he explores the idea of original sin in the context of his own experience. The work is often seen as an argument for his Roman Catholicism, a less powerful force where he was living in North Africa where another form of Christianity was dominant, Donatism. While Augustine retells many episodes from his own life, the greater strength of his Confessions has come to be seen as his examination of his own emotional development, and the growth of his soul.

With

Kate Cooper

Professor of History at the University of London and Head of History at Royal Holloway

Morwenna Ludlow

Professor of Christian History and Theology at the University of Exeter

and 

Martin Palmer

Visiting Professor in Religion, History and Nature at the University of Winchester

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

HUM 111 Brill's Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond

Herodotus

Vortex Gay Mind

vortex-the-gay-mind

PHI 101 210 HIS 105 Hillary Fallacies

Fallacies

HUM 111 Faust, Deals With the Devil

Devil

HIS 205 Prairie Fire, 1974, Lesbianism as Radical Politics

Lesbianism has been an affirmation of unity and a challenge to the partnership of sexuality and domination. Women have opposed the dominant culture's treatment of homosexuals -people who are harassed and assaulted, denied employment and housing, raped and even murdered because they don't conform to standard sexual roles and morality. Not all gay culture transcends the sexism of US life, but the independence of lesbian sisters and the attempts of gay people to live according to their own definitions represent an attack on sexist ideology which subjugates women. We support the right of all people to live according to their sexual preferences without discrimination or fear of reprisals.

HUM 111 A Short History of the Phoenicians

Phoenicians

History of Germany Podcast 029: Allemand, Teutonic, German, Dutch, Why?

029-allemand-teutonic-german-dutch-why

A little clarity on the etymology of the all the things referring to Germans and their language.

History of Germany Podcast 031: Franks II: Clovis to Charles

A quick run-through of the Merovingians until we get to the Carolinian Dynasty and up to Charles the Great.

031-franksii-clovistocharles

The History of Rome Podcast: The Storm Before The Storm: Chapter 1- The Beasts of Italy Audio excerpt from The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

thehistoryofrome

REL 205 REL 212 Perpetua's Journey: Faith, Gender, and Power in the Roman Empire

Early Christianity

PHI 205 PHI 101 Enthymeme Obama

Most Senators, typically, didn't so much ask questions as make statements.  Obama did both at the same time as he executed an enthymeme -- a categorical syllogism with an unstated premise. No one seemed to notice at the time that it was also an invalid syllogism. 

Here's how Obama's Enthymeme played out.

Major Premise: The stability of two key factors -- Iranian influence on Iraq and the threat from al Qaeda in Iraq -- will determine when U.S. combat troops can be withdrawn from Iraq.

Minor Premise:  Both factors are now stabilized. (Part of this unstated premise was implied when Crocker characterized the cheek-kissing reception given Iranian President Ahmadinejad by President Maliki in Iraq as "normal relations."  And, the premise was completed when Gen. David Petraeus told Sen. Boxer that al Qaeda operatives in Iraq now number about 2,000.)  

Obama's Conclusion: The achieved stability of those key factors means that U.S. combat troop levels in Iraq can now be dramatically decreased.

Let's break it down and highlight some of the moves in Obama's Enthymeme. He began by setting the first half of his Major Premise.

"I want to just start off with a couple of quick questions [he disarms by minimizing importance] because, in the parade of horribles that I think both of you have outlined should we leave too quickly, at the center is al Qaeda in Iraq and Iran.  So I just [more disarming] want to focus on those two things for a moment."

Because Petraeus and Crocker were there to testify and, most definitely, not to debate, Obama's "at the center" assertion went unchallenged.  Petraeus and Crocker sat mute. 

An exchange between Obama and Petraeus ended with their agreement that, according to Obama,

"Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace, but rather to create a manageable situation where they're [al Qaeda] not posing a threat to Iraq or using it as a base to launch attacks outside of Iraq."   

Then the conversation seemed to meander off into a tangential discussion of the integration of Sunni Arabs "into Iraqi security forces or other government positions" (Petraeus).  But Obama may have intended it to establish another indicator of emerging stability -- this one relevant to Iraqi fighting capabilities. At the time, though, where Obama was headed was unclear.

Obama turned to Crocker to establish a case for stability in the Iran-Iraq relationship asking Crocker, 

"Just as it's fair to say that we're not going to completely eliminate all traces of al Qaeda in Iraq, but we want to create a manageable situation, it's also true to say that we're not going to eliminate all influence of Iran in Iraq, correct?"   

Crocker pointed out the destabilizing influence caused by an "Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces."  That led to a brief exchange as to whether the Iraqi government is aware of Iran's involvement. Then Obama asked,

"If, in fact, it is known...that Iran's government has assisted in arming special groups that are doing harm to Iraqi security forces and undermining the Iraqi government, why is it that they're being welcomed the way they were?" [So we're back to Middle Eastern politicians cheek-kissing that Senator Boxer brought up.  Was this part of the trap coordinated between the two senators?]

In his response, Crocker used the wrong words.

"In terms of the Ahmadinejad visit, you know, Iran and Iraq are neighbors.  A visit like that should be in the category of a normal relationship." 

"Normal relationship?"  Oops.  Those words, along with Petraeus' estimation of al Qaeda in Iraq at 2,000, completed the unstated Minor Premise of Obama's Enthymeme: The key factors determining U.S. combat troop withdrawal are normal and manageable.

After yet again reminding us that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, Obama aimed to drive his syllogism home with this convoluted, rhetorical [by Obama's own admission] question to Crocker.

"And so my final -- and I'll even pose this as a question and I won't -- you don't necessarily have to answer it -- maybe it's a rhetorical question -- if we were able to have the status quo [i.e. stability ref. the two determining factors in the Major Premise of his syllogism] right now without U.S. troops, would that be a sufficient definition of success?"   

This was the denouement to his line of questioning -- one that impressed some commentators, like Fred Barnes speaking on FOX News.

Looking somewhat confused and perhaps realizing that he'd stepped into a trap, Crocker nevertheless gave a reasonable answer.

"Senator, I can't imagine the current status quo being sustainable with that kind of precipitous drawdown."

Immediately, Biden came to Obama's defense interrupting with,

"That wasn't the question."

Obama quickly piled-on with,

"No, no, that wasn't the question."

But that was the question!  Crocker gave the best answer to an invalid syllogism that concluded with a hypothetical assertion: "...if we were able to have the status quo right now without U.S. troops."  Essentially, Crocker answered: Your question is based on what I take to be an invalid assertion, namely that the status quo today would continue in the absence of U.S. combat troops. 

Unfortunately for Crocker, he had no articulate defenders on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and he seemed confused by the question.  Looking tired after a full day of testifying before two Senate committees and three presidential candidates, he summarized, "This is hard and this is complicated."  Understandable, but not explanatory.  

With a full night's sleep, what could Crocker have said? Perhaps this:

"Senator, first of all, today's status quo is not acceptable for the long term, but we are making measurable progress toward one that will be.  It's like this, sir. Most of us have, at some time in our lives, been prescribed an antibiotic by a physician to fight off bacteria. The doctor always reminds us that, even when we start feeling better after a couple of days of taking the medicine, we need to keep taking it until it's all gone.  If we stop now, we risk a relapse where the bacteria come back even stronger than before. And that, sir, is the situation we face in Iraq.  Too soon to stop now."

Petraeus, the War Fighter, said it best,

"We have the forces that we need right now, I believe. We've got to continue. We have our teeth into their jugular, and we need to keep it there."  

Meanwhile, Obama, the Linguistic Gymnast, proves that he's as skilled at twisting words as William Jefferson Clinton. 

PHI 101 Quantum Computing

/quantum-computing-explained

Comey Memos

-read-comeys-memos-on-conversations-with-Trump

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

thus-spoke-zarathustra-by-friedrich-nietzsche

Paganism Podcast: JR. Forasteros

What is Paganism? What do Christians and Pagans have in common? What are some important differences?

Michigan Removed 177,000 Voters from Voter Rolls in January After Certifying Biden Won Michigan by 154,000 Votes in November

Michigan Removed 177,000 Voters from Voter Rolls in January After Certifying Biden Won Michigan by 154,000 Votes in November

Ian Hunter, 2016, Backstage with the Hollywood Vampires

2016

AI Admissions

There are companies that already use AI to help students with the admissions process. Take ConnecPath; it’s an AI-based Q&A platform that seeks to answer students’ questions about colleges. Then there’s Delphia, a company that recently presented at Y Combinator Demo Day, which aims to use surveys to help people make life choices, including where to attend college.

HUM 111 REL 205 Why Didn’t Moses Enter the Promised Land?

Moses-promised-land

HUM 111 Arch of Titus: Rome and the Menorah

The Arch of Titus: Rome and the Menorah explores one of the most significant Roman monuments to survive from antiquity, from the perspectives of Roman, Jewish and later Christian history and art. The Arch of Titus commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem by the emperor Titus in 70 CE, an event of pivotal importance for the history of the Roman Empire, of Judaism, of Christianity and of modern nationalism.

Beacon Networking Minute

Networking

Pat Schaeffer, Principal of Talent Strategy Partners, is this week's featured presenter on the Beacon Leaders' Minute video series. Pat discusses some tips on networking introductions that work, as outlined by Beacon's Alliance partner, Contacts Count. Beacon is the premier executive networking organization serving the mid-Atlantic region.

https://youtu.be/na8rMPdrk7s

Alumni Relationships

Fidelum_UDayton-Alumni-Giving

New Books in Religion Podcast

In a meticulously researched study The Specter of the Indian: Race, Gender and Ghosts in American Seances, 1848-1890 (SUNY Press, 2017), Kathryn Troy investigates the many examples of Indian ghosts appearing to Spiritualists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book explores non-judgmentally the ways in which these ghosts motivated their mediums and other Spiritualists to engage with the rights of living Native Americans.James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at  [j.mackay@euc.ac.cy](mailto:j.mackay@euc.ac.cy) .

New Books in Religion Podcast: Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018)  and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here  and here. She may be reached at  [mxavier@ithaca.edu](mailto:mxavier@ithaca.edu) .

HUM 111 Constantine: Religious Faith and Imperial Policy

Constantine

Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

subterranean-homesick-blues

Follow Your Bliss, Joseph Campbell

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”

― Joseph Campbell

Joseph_Campbell

HUM 111 Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century

Elliott, Andrew B. R. Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century. Medievalism. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. Pp. 223. $39.95. ISBN: 978-1-84384-463-1.

  Reviewed by Richard Utz
       Georgia Institute of Technology
       richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu


While researched, written, and published before most of last year's momentous discussions about the role of race, gender, politics, and ideology in medieval studies and medievalism, Andrew Elliott's study is a timely and relevant contribution to the field. It continues the work begun by Louise D'Arcens and Andrew Lynch (eds., International Medievalism and Popular Culture, 2014), Tommaso Carpegna di Falconieri (Medioevo militante: La politica di oggi alle prese con barbari e crociati, 2011), David M. Marshall (ed., Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture, 2007), and Bruce Holsinger (Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, 2007), but deepens their insights with a focus on the roles of contemporary media and communication, specifically online medievalisms. It also offers an original theoretical framework for future investigations.

Aware of the often visceral reactions of medieval historians to the public (mis)use of the Middle Ages by non-academic voices, Elliott is careful to prepare a secure theoretical foundation for his subject matter in the first three chapters. He immediately demarcates medievalisms referring to medieval history from heavily mediated popular political medievalisms. For the latter, the Middle Ages is most often merely a "'surprise player' used throughout political discussion by the modern media in order to become a site of identity, a point of identification or an ideological weapon then reused across other media" (6). According to Elliott, these popular medievalisms tend to originate in a three-step process: First, they need to be expropriated from history, as when medieval objects, concepts, and symbols are invoked in a postmedieval context; second, this expropriation is repeated and retransmitted, allowing the meaning of the object, concept, and symbol to gradually stand for new meanings increasingly unrelated to any historical reality; and third, the object, concept, or symbols is assimilated, translated, and modified so that it is completely "divested [...] of its original meanings and context-dependent significance making it ripe to be grafted onto modern concerns" (6). In chapters 4 and 5 of his study, Elliott details this process for the use of the (medieval) crusades by both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden:
"In each case, though for very different purposes, the cultural symbolism of the Crusades was excised from its original meaning, transmitted through the mass media in a new form, and ultimately became the subject of a dispute not over their original meaning but over their new significance as an ideological weapon. So when bin Laden calls on his fellow Muslims to resist a Crusader invasion of the Holy Land, he is referring to an established tradition which has, through relentless repetition, assimilated the modern armed incursions into the Middle East with twentieth- and twenty-first-century "crusades." Likewise, it is precisely because the term was already in use that Bush's famous description of the War on Terror as a Crusade had such enormous political and ideological resonance"(6-7).

In chapter 6, Elliott shows a similar process at work for the events and media reception of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011 and justified his actions by stylizing himself as a Knight Templar defending western civilization against its allegedly impending Islamization. Chapters 7 and 8 move on to a discussion of the popular political medievalisms of the right-wing English Defense League (EDL) and the Islamic State (IS), respectively.

The central claim of Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media is that these various social media and other online mass medievalisms have little or nothing to do with the historical Middle Ages, but only and exclusively exist because of contemporary meme culture. In this culture, traditional models of authority and authenticity for communicating about medieval culture are pretty much irrelevant. Instead of the onerous identification of sources, causes, and paths of transmission, which would challenge ambiguity and inaccuracy, the modes of dissemination for medievalist memes in contemporary mass media are excellent examples of Jean Baudrillard's simulacra, presenting world-wide audiences with copies of copies without an original. However, even a Baudrillardian analysis of the vertical relationships between contemporary medievalisms and the Middle Ages will not do justice to the empty signifiers dominating current mass media. What is needed to understand these medievalist memes is an investigation into the horizontal relationships between various contemporary and multiply mediated mass medievalisms.

Elliott clearly has the background in communication and media theory necessary for dealing with these "elastic," "ludic," "pejorative," and "deliberately inappropriate" (all terms used in Elliott's study) mass medievalisms. In Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism (1995), which explores the uses of nationalism as when someone waves the flag not as part of a conscious and specific expression of national identity, but as a vague celebration of patriotic identity, Elliott has found a perfect model for his own study. He investigates "banal medievalisms," which he describes as bricolages of ideological redeployments of medievalist tropes or memes, or "the Middle Ages in the twenty-first century media landscape" as "unconscious sites of unchallenged heritage and, ultimately, unchallenged reference points in our collective imagination" (16). Like Billig's seemingly innocuous "banal nationalisms," Elliott reveals "banal medievalisms" as an "endemic condition made more powerful by the fact that [they] pass unobserved in most cases" (17). Behind these medievalisms' superficially harmless repetitions and unaware remediations, then, he recognizes the potential for the kind of banal evil Hannah Arendt diagnosed in the quotidian absence and failure of thinking, imagination, and self-awareness embodied by Hitler's Adolf Eichmann.

Many traditional medievalists will consider Elliott's book as external to medieval studies and therefore unrelated to their own work. After all, he is investigating medievalisms that are intentionally extirpated from the past events, texts, and artifacts they study. Moreover, these semantically "flattened" medievalisms are popular and political, two features most academics have learned to treat with disdain or at least caution. However, I would suggest that all medievalists should read his book because they will gain important insights into how their own published work and their teaching will increasingly be perceived by academic as well as non-academic audiences. Even if only to resist the alacrity with which these medievalisms can now spread at an electronic news cycle's notice, it serves medievalists well to comprehend the processes by which certain dominant (and often contradictory) ideas of the Middle Ages come about and are transmitted.

The association between "Middle East" and "Middle Ages" in the early 2000s is a case in point: Elliott documents how politicians, journalists, and others on instant messaging services and social media ceaselessly repeated and repurposed banal tropes and memes of the Middle Ages as regressive, violent, superstitious, primitive, anti-modern, and non-technological, until these tropes and memes ended up in support of political positions completely unrelated to anything we know about medieval culture. Elliott even documents how similar or the same memes of the "dark ages" were employed by the U.S. government as well as by Al Qaeda: If George W. Bush's famous post-9/11 gaffe about calling his "war on terrorism" a "crusade" was the beginning of a wholesale cultural clash between the "modern" west and the "medieval" East, Osama bin Laden employed Bush's neoconservative use of western orientalist/medievalist rhetoric and its elision of Islamism, Islam, and Arabic culture to mask Al Qaeda's own technological sophistication as well as to brand the western interference in the Middle East as a Crusader/Zionist alliance.

Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media would be a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of medievalism if only for the wealth of illustrative examples it provides. However, I predict that its real legacy will be in affording a solid theoretical framework within which we can unpack what otherwise might well remain a confusing maze of medievalist mass media references. As Elliott states: "[M]edievalisms are rich with meaning because they are used so often across the mass media that the meaning is made elastic. Thus the (seemingly circuitous) assertion of banal medievalism is that medievalisms have meaning because they surround us, and they surround us because they have meaning" (45). I am grateful to Andrew Elliott for providing us with sound scholarly tools with which to explain the proliferation of banal medievalisms in the last 15 years, and I expect similar guidance about the sociological processes motivating the cultural phenomenon of medievalism from Paul Sturtevant's forthcoming book, The Middle Ages in Popular Imagination: Memory, Film and Medievalism. How long these tools will be efficient may depend on the accelerating pace of new communication technologies and how users and societies negotiate them. And the scholarly monograph, which takes years to write and thus considerably lags behind the speed at which technological change drives communicative practice, may not be the most efficient genre for critically accompanying what the future holds for the study of mass media medievalisms.

Ian Hunter, Sunshine Eyes

Matt Nojonen: ‘Sunshine Eyes’ is actually one of the best things I ever wrote and it still gets me emotionally. It’s just me and a drum machine and a crappy organ playing in our NYC apartment over the East River. It’s about Jesse.

April 2018 Horses’s Mouth

REL 205 Satan, Zoroastrian, Job, Babylonian Captivity

A figure known as "the satan" first appears in the Tanakh as a heavenly prosecutor, a member of the sons of God subordinate to Yahweh, who prosecutes the nation of Judah in the heavenly court and tests the loyalty of Yahweh's followers by forcing them to suffer. During the intertestamental period, likely due to influence from the Zoroastrian figure of Angra Mainyu, the satan developed into a malevolent entity with abhorrent qualities in dualistic opposition to God. In the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, Yahweh grants the satan (referred to as Mastema) authority over a group of fallen angels to tempt humans to sin and punish them.

The original Hebrew term satan is a generic noun meaning "accuser" or "adversary",which is used throughout the Hebrew Bible to refer to ordinary human adversaries, as well as a specific supernatural entity. The word is derived from a verb meaning primarily "to obstruct, oppose".  When it is used without the definite article (simply satan), the word can refer to any accuser, but when it is used with the definite article (ha-satan), it usually refers specifically to the heavenly accuser: the satan.

The satan appears in the Book of Job, a poetic dialogue set within a prose framework, which may have been written around the time of the Babylonian captivity.


Jewish views of Satan are influenced by contact with Middle Eastern Zoroastrianism. The Hebrew simply means accuser and can refer to human, and not necessarily an evil Satanic figure. In Job, the heavenly accuser, the Satan, also appears after the Middle Eastern Babylonian captivity: thus, fairly late in the Hebrew Scriptures and only after contact with other cultures. 

HUM 111 Homeric Greek: Odyssey 1.149–155, with Gregory Nagy

Homer

HUM 111 Pax and the Politics of Peace: Republic to Principate

Peace

AI the New God

the-creator/ai-the-new-god

HUM 111 Public and Private in the Roman House and Society

Public and Private in the Roman House and Society

HUM 111 Pompeii

pompeiiperspectives

A Different Perspective