This article investigates the genesis of a linguistic model occasioned by a mistranslation that was taken up in the Renaissance, and had an enduring global impact. I call this model the “black but…” formulation, and it is to be found in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout written texts and reported speech, in historical as well as literary works. It was modeled grammatically and ideologically on the statement “I am black but beautiful” often attributed to the Queen of Sheba in 1:5 of the “Song of Songs”, and had a detrimental effect on how members of the early African forced diaspora were viewed by Renaissance Europeans. I argue that the newly adversarial nature of the phrase was adopted as a linguistic and cultural formulation, and introduced into Western European cultures a whole way of approaching and perceiving blackness or looking at black African people. Full article

This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish émigrés to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The émigrés form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish émigrés. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended. Full article

In recent years there has been a steadily growing interest of religious/spiritual issues in several areas of psychology; a variety of reliable and valid means of assessing the different facets of religiosity/spirituality have been developed. However, there is still some need for multidimensional approaches. With respect to the positive experience with the German version of the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being, we developed an English version of this scale (MI-RSWB-E) in order to facilitate research in this budding field. The MI-RSWB-E was tested and validated on a sample of British college-students (n = 400). First, the factor structure and psychometric properties of the MI-RSWB-E were analysed. As a second step, MI-RSWB-E dimensions were related to a variety of indicators of personality and mental health. An in-depth analysis provided evidence in support of the psychometric quality of the MI-RSWB-E, and the ability of its proposed six-factor structure. The MI-RSWB-E dimensions were also found to be substantially related to personality factors as well as with indicators of subjective well-being and mental illness. In light of these findings the MI-RSWB-E could be considered as a suitable tool in the assessment of different facets of religiosity/spirituality. Full article

In response to Nazi exclusion of the Jews from German society on racial grounds, Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), a secular Jewish intellectual inspired by cultural Protestantism and Catholicism, formed a vision of a cosmopolitan Judeo-Christian civilization that reintegrated the Jews as biblical founders and cultural mediators. But the integration expunged any mark of traditional Jewishness. Focusing on Christian figurative thinking (typology), Auerbach viewed the binding of Isaac through the crucifixion, and contemporary Jews as civilization’s (unwilling and undeserving) martyrs. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, his cosmopolitanism reached a crisis, reflected in his postwar vision of Western decline. The progressive mandarin who had begun his intellectual life elevating Dante’s care for everyday life and sympathizing with French realist social critique ended endorsing Hugh of St. Victor’s alienation from reality and Pascal’s acquiescence in totalitarian rule. Full article

This article argues that depictions of penance and confession in late medieval "Sisterbooks," which were written by women religious for communal use, show that medieval women understood religious authority to be enhanced through submission and service to community members. These collections of the lives and reminiscences of deceased sisters and father confessors construct idealized piety and religious authority through public acts of obedience and submission which built a reputation for sanctity, not just for the individual penitent, but for her entire community. Thus in the Sisterbooks, obedience to a confessor or spiritual director for both male and female penitents shifts the locus of spiritual authority from the confessor to the penitent and her community through communal observation and evaluation. These medieval Christian women understood the relationships between confessors and confessants as one which conferred power and authority to the penitent, complicating Foucault's influential claim that the sacrament of confession granted all power to the confessor who heard sins in secret. In the Sisterbooks, interactions between women religious and their confessors are depicted as relational, complex, and constantly in flux. Full article

Renaissance and Reformation used to serve historians as the main terms with which to refer to European history from roughly 1300–1600. Today those terms are commonly replaced with early modern history, and the periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods itself is looking increasingly suspect. There are good reasons for those changes. But they obscure both the significance of disagreements dividing the living from the dead and the significance of grammar, in the fundamental sense of grammar advanced by Wittgenstein, for treating such disagreements. Renaissance and Reformation have the advantage of doing just the opposite: they confront us with both those disagreements and the significance of grammar. That makes them very much worth keeping. Full article

This article explores the forgotten manifesto The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, which was composed in 1940 by a group of prominent American and European anti-isolationist intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hermann Broch. Written in response to the victories of Nazi Germany, the manifesto declared that the United States had a new global responsibility not only to lead the war against fascism and Marxism, but also to establish a global order of peace and democracy under U.S. hegemony. Moreover, the authors of the manifesto claimed that such an order would have to be based on the rejuvenation of conservative values; in their view, the collapse of Western democracies under the weight of totalitarian aggression was the consequence of inner moral and intellectual degeneration. The City of Man therefore called on the United States to lead the spiritual transformation of democracy into a modern political religion, which would bring about the intellectual and political unity of humanity under one state and one creed. This article analyzes the manifesto as a rare window into the difficulty intellectuals faced as they tried to conceptualize the totalitarian challenge prior to the United States’ entry into the war. Moreover, it claims that The City of Man expressed the emergence of postwar conservatism and Cold War ideology, as well as the unique role played by European émigrés in this process. Full article

Although scholars in the first two generations of humanism wrote the histories drawing heavily on ancient Roman sources, Petrarca was the first humanist historian to focuses on the history of ancient Roma. Because he was also the earliest to approach ancient Romans as historically conditioned human beings, he was able to see the achievements of the Romans in historical perspective. At the same time he was unable to separate mythology from history and acknowledged the effect of divine and diabolical forces on the course of human events. Full article

The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions of religiosity. The dimensions of public practice, private practice, religious experience, ideology and the intellectual dimensions can together be considered as representative for the total of religious live. From a psychological perspective, the five core-dimensions can be seen as channels or modes in which personal religious constructs are shaped and activated. The activation of religious constructs in personality can be regarded as a valid measure of the degree of religiosity of an individual. The CRS thus derives from the five dimensional measures a combined measure of the centrality of religiosity which is suitable also for interreligious studies. The paper presents the theoretical basis and rationale of its construction with different versions of the CRS in 20 languages with norm values for 21 countries. Furthermore, the paper presents versions of different extension and describes specific modifications that were developed for studies with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. Full article

Judaism considers the duty of preserving life as a paramount injunction. Specific injunctions against suicide appear in the Bible, Talmud, and thereafter. Nevertheless, Jewish tradition emphasizes that one should let himself be killed rather than violate cardinal rules of Jewish law. Mitigating circumstances are found for the six deaths by suicide mentioned in the Bible, for example to account for one's sins, or avoid shameful death. Heroic suicide is praised throughout the Jewish history, from the suicide of Samson and the collective suicide in Masada, to the collective readiness of Jews in Medieval times and during the Holocaust to kill themselves rather than succumb to their enemies. Suicide rates for Jews are lower than those of Protestants and Catholics. Similarly, suicide rates in Israel are lower in comparison to Europe and North America, although being higher than those in most Moslem Asian and North African countries. This low rate of suicide is found in Jewish Israelis of all ages, including in adolescents. Elevated suicidal risk may be found in specific sub-populations, including male Israeli soldiers, immigrants from the former USSR and Ethiopia, in particular adolescent immigrants from the former USSR, elderly Holocaust survivors, and young Israel-Arab women. The meaning of these findings is discussed according to different socio-cultural perspectives. Full article

This paper investigates the extent to which a term like “globalization”, especially in its sense of implying the existence of a system, or of dominant features favouring development towards some system, is adaptable to a theory of a world economy which is to take due notice of the structure of the exchange value of commodities on the world market. A leading idea is that religious outlooks, in the way they were conceptualized by Karl Marx, have a strong bearing upon the difference in labour intensities in countries contributing to the world market, and thereby upon the differences in international values and prices. These differences are expressed in a scale-based, rigid structure on the world market itself—a structure which gives us the fundamental reason why certain specific countries or areas may get steadily poorer in relative terms, while others may constantly get relatively richer through the same mechanism. Consequently, when (as it is done here) religion is taken to express the quintessence of the cultural level of societies, it can be said that the comparative study of religions gives us a key to the understanding of crucial economic differences between nations. The differences in question are primarily those prevailing between capitalist societies on the one hand, and non-capitalist, or what is here called patrimonial societies, on the other. Full article

Popularized by the mass media, Max Weber’s sociological concept of charisma now has a demotic meaning far from what Weber had in mind. Weberian charismatic leaders have followers, not fans, although, exceptionally, fans mutate into followers. This essay aims to trace some of the dimensions of Weberian charismatic religious leadership in comparative perspective, medieval and modern. Examples include: preachers, “double charisma,” professors, “collective charisma,” religious radicals, the economy of charisma, transgressive sexuality, demagogues, living saints.¹ Full article

Though commonly identified with the conservative politics of the Christian Right, over the past decade evangelicals in the United States have increasingly embraced a more politically progressive range of social concerns. Often treated as something wholly new, this trend actually has roots in Latin American evangelicalism from the 1970s. Latin American theologian/practitioners like C. René Padilla and Samuel Escobar of the Latin American Theological Fellowship, promoted a holistic vision of the church’s mission, what they called misión integral, seeking to integrate both evangelism and socio-political involvement on behalf of the poor and oppressed. These Latin American thinkers played a direct role in the rise of progressive evangelicalism in the United States in the 1970s. While overshadowed for a time by the Christian Right, the concept of misión integral and its Latin American exponents has continued to influence the resurgence of progressive social concerns among North American evangelicals in the first decade of the 21st century, and especially those associated with the emerging church movement. Full article

Augustine was suspicious of charismatics’ claims to superior righteousness, which supposedly authorized them to relay truths about creation and redemption. What follows finds the origins of that suspicion in his disenchantment with celebrities on whom Manichees relied, specialists whose impeccable behavior and intellectual virtuosity were taken as signs that they possessed insight into the meaning of Christianity’s sacred texts. Augustine’s struggles for self-identity and with his faith’s intelligibility during the late 370s, 380s, and early 390s led him to prefer that his intermediaries between God and humanity be dead (martyred), rather than alive and charismatic. Full article

In-depth interviews were conducted with 39 very religious people living with HIV (16 had ever and 23 had never discontinued antiretroviral therapy—ART) to assess the role of religion in these treatment decisions and in coping with HIV. Participants who had ever discontinued ART gave reasons such as: teachings and prophecies from religious leaders, and supporting Biblical scriptures all of which led them to feel that God and their faith, not ART, would help them; and testimonies by their “already healed” peers who had stopped ART. Participants who had never discontinued ART gave reasons such as continuous adherence counseling from multiple sources, improvement in physical health as a result of ART, and beliefs that God heals in different ways and that non-adherence is equal to putting God to a test. High religiosity was reported to help participants cope with HIV through engagement in personal and or community protective behaviours, “taking care of other illness”, and reducing worries. When high religiosity among people living with HIV (PHAs) becomes a barrier to ART adherence, the adherence counseling provided can draw on experiences of PHAs with high religiosity who have sustained good adherence to ART and achieved good health outcomes. Full article

In recent years, the government of the Philippines (adhering to the precepts of neoliberalism) has promoted large-scale mining as a method of stimulating economic development. Mining, an activity with substantial potential for environmental harm, is staunchly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, particularly on the island of Samar. The crux of the church’s opposition to mining are the adverse environmental consequences that mining may impose upon the rural poor who, engaging in subsistence agriculture and aquaculture, are vitally dependent upon access to natural resources. Should there be a mining-related environmental disruption, these people will be thrust from subsistence into destitution. The commitment of the church to act on behalf of the poor emanates from the conciliar documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the fertile ground for liberation theology in the Philippines provided by the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), and by the commitment of the church in its 1992 Second Plenary Council to become a church of the poor. Samar contains quality mineralization set amid a wealth of biodiversity, grinding poverty, a simmering Maoist insurgency, and a vulnerability to natural hazards such as typhoons and El Niño induced drought. The opposition of the church to mining on Samar demonstrates the commitment of the church to be a church of the poor and how this praxis stands in contradistinction to the intellectual hegemony of neoliberalism. Full article

The traditional mainline and evangelical churches in Canada, as in most western countries, are either in decline or static. Taken as a measure of the future, the prospects for Christianity in Canada, and more broadly the West, are bleak. Post-Christian Canada, however, contains thriving alternative and innovative forms of church, often called ‘emerging’ churches. They take many forms of expression, but share common theological convictions. Based on site research and personal interviews, this article describes the various types and contexts of these churches in Canada. It then highlights three of their central theological characteristics. First, rejecting the ‘culture wars’ social involvement of Christendom churches, they embrace practices and initiatives that transform their local communities. Second, they embrace an incarnational and contextual understanding of Christian life and ministry. Eschewing mega-church franchise models, they endeavor to shape their ministry to the their local communities. Third, they adopt a comprehensive rather than compartmental spirituality. Full article

Although Plato states that the perceptible god that he describes in Timaeus is visible to the human eye, the reflection of the Cosmic Soul in the heavens has largely been explained away or forgotten in the Western mind. But Roman texts, early Christian testimony, and Imperial coins illustrate that Plato’s intersection in the heavens played a major role in Hellenistic cosmology and soteriology. Full article