Conversations About Religion
eBook - ePub

Conversations About Religion

Howard Burton

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Conversations About Religion

Howard Burton

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: 1.Rabbi With A Cause: Israel and Identity - A Conversation with David J. Goldberg (1939-2019), former Senior Rabbi Emeritus of London's Liberal Jewish Synagogue and author and columnist. This wide-ranging conversation is based on Goldberg's book, This Is Not The Way: Jews, Judaism and Israel, which boldly explores a number of themes that interweave religion, politics, culture and identity in a way that is relevant to all of us, regardless of our cultural background or religious orientation. For many of us, caught as we are between love of tradition and the allure of contemporary liberal values, maintaining a coherent sense of personal identity is a highly delicate task indeed but Rabbi Goldberg has consistently been willing to meet the challenge head-on as explored in this thought-provoking discussion. 2.Religious Entrepreneurs? - A Conversation with Nile Green who holds the Ibn Khaldn Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. Nile Green is an expert on Islamic History and religion in the world. He has traveled extensively in India, Turkey, Pakistan, China, Myanmar, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Morocco and many more countries, to get a deep sense of the reality of situations on the ground. The basis of this detailed conversation is Nile Green's book Terrains of Exchange which is not only an account of how the Christian missionary movement affected the development of Islam in the 19th and 20th centuries, but also offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the expansion of Islam in the modern world through the model of religious economy.3.Battling Protestants - A Conversation with intellectual historian David Hollinger, UC Berkeley, and examines the unique role that different strands of religion have played in 20th-century American culture. This thought-provoking conversation examines intriguing aspects of the distinction between Ecumenical and Evangelical Protestantism, the often overlooked role of Ecumenical Protestantism in the history of the USA, secularization theory, the development of the two-party system, the role of missionaries, and more. 4.Exploring the Sikh Tradition - A Conversation with Eleanor Nesbitt who is Professor Emeritus of Education Studies at University of Warwick and a poet. Eleanor Nesbitt is an expert on Hindu and Sikh culture and her interdisciplinary approach straddles religious studies, educational theory, ethnography and poetry. After inspiring insights about the time Eleanor Nesbitt spent in India and her academic path, this extensive conversation provides a detailed exploration of the Sikh tradition: the history, religious tenets, other people's misconceptions about it and more.5.Religion and Culture: A Historian's Tale - A Conversation with Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. After behind-the-scenes insights into Miri Rubin's career path which led her from chemistry to working in an orthopaedic hospital to studying medieval history with a 'cultural anthropologist" persuasion to the subject of medieval Christianity, this comprehensive conversation covers several books that Miri Rubin has written, including The Life and Passion of William of Norwich; Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary; Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures.Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Conversations About Religion an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Conversations About Religion by Howard Burton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Théologie et religion & Religion. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9781771701723
Religion and Culture
A Historian’s Tale
A conversation with Miri Rubin

Introduction

Cultural Contact

How does an Israeli chemistry student wind up becoming one of the world’s foremost authorities on religious culture in the Middle Ages? Intriguingly, the answer has much more to do with pressures of the present than you might think.
Miri Rubin’s undergraduate studies were suddenly interrupted by the Yom Kippur War, so instead of continuing her scientific studies she found herself volunteering in the orthopaedic ward of a Jerusalem hospital. When it was finally time to return to university, her worldview had been irrevocably altered.
“I remember looking at the annual catalogue containing all the courses offered at Hebrew U, which is a great university. And I just fell on history, saying to myself, Actually, with wars, suffering, loss and all that makes you think about, I really want to understand. And I really want to understand in a way that only history can give me. So I enrolled in history.”
And then, as so often happens, a particularly influential teacher took over.
“I’d never studied the Middle Ages before. And amongst all the excellent teachers I had that year, one simply soared. He’s a totally amazing medievalist, still active. His name is Ron Barkai.
“We were studying the Crusades; and in addition to his deep knowledge of the Crusades he also had the advantage of knowing Islam culture very well because his family had come from North Africa and he had excellent Arabic.
“So the whole vantage point we had on the Crusades was not as had traditionally been taught—this sort of amazing medieval phenomenon, one of the great achievements and events of its time—but actually much more like what we might call today “a cultural encounter”, or perhaps even “a clash of civilizations”—something much, much more textured.
“And I remember that in the first class we looked at the attitude to war in Islam and Christianity. We read a bit of the Koran—nowadays, it’s par for the course, but at the time, in the seventies, it certainly wasn’t generally done. But he did it. That was my introduction to medieval history; and I was absolutely hooked.”
Now an internationally renowned professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary University of London with a wide range of deeply influential publications on topics ranging from the history of the Virgin Mary to the Eucharist to an analysis of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle Ages, Miri has consistently turned her attention to examining the unique impact that religious culture has on a wide variety of people in different times and places.
“I wanted to understand to what extent living within a religious culture makes people do or not do things, whether there is any type of structure to it and how it changes over time. I see religion as a sort of historical force that interacts with other things. It’s a cultural force. It’s not something that obeys other rules, as it were.”
And in order to best comprehend that force, Mary insists, it’s vital to develop the broadest possible perspective of our surrounding environment, regularly urging her students to twin detailed scholarly investigations with a deliberate appreciation of other cultural forces.
“When I was talking about the making of a historian, I alluded to the fact that going off to seminars, apparently not on your topic, is a good thing. I would say, even more. You have to read widely. You have to listen to music. You have to go to the theatre. You’ve got to talk to people. It’s really, really important.
“That extra hour of reading, yet another article in the evening, rather than watching a film or reading a book or even cooking a meal—I think it’s a false economy. You need to hear sounds and have thoughts that aren’t from the echo chamber of your scholarship.”
While Miri’s route to becoming an eminent medieval scholar might seem particularly unusual and serendipitous, a closer examination reveals a common theme throughout: a steadfast determination to increase her awareness of the world around her, both past and present.
These days, some might label such an approach as “interdisciplinary”. But for Miri, it’s simply the only way to achieve genuine cultural understanding.

The Conversation

Photo of Stefan Collini and Howard Burton in conversation

I. Historical Beginnings

From Jerusalem to Cambridge

HB: I would like to start with your background, trying to get a sense of the story of how you became a medievalist.
MR: I never meant to be a historian. I actually started studying chemistry at university.
HB: Oh, really?
MR: Yes. I had a brilliant chemistry teacher. I had wonderful teachers. I went to one of the best schools in, I would say, the Middle East? Maybe the world? It’s in Jerusalem—a highly selective, really brilliant high school. And we had wonderful teachers in all subjects.
I grew up in Israel, and from the age of 12 I was in Jerusalem. I went to a brilliant high school and had fantastic teachers literally in all subjects. I’m not exaggerating. They were incredible.
HB: But you had a particularly good chemistry teacher.
MR: I had a really charismatic chemistry teacher. And at the time—we’re talking the seventies—there weren’t so many girls doing science, definitely not at university. There was a special sort of cachet to it. The sentiment was: If you can do it, you ought to pursue it—lots of people can do other things, but since there were so few women in science you should consider that if you could do it well.
So I went to university and I studied chemistry in the first year.And then we had a great and devastating war, the Yom Kippur War, which started at the beginning of October, just before the academic year was about to begin.
I was going to enter my second year, but that wasn’t going to happen because everyone was at the front. A lot of the people I knew—young people, soldiers—were killed. So with the education not starting at university, I just went and presented myself in a hospital and worked. And I worked for about 10 months in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
HB: What sort of things did you do?
MR: I just helped out as best I could. It was in the orthopaedic ward, mostly a ward that dealt with amputees, really young men who’d lost a leg or more.
I suppose nowadays it would be called “physician’s assistant” or something, I did everything and anything—you just did what you could. And that experience made me rethink everything, really.
I remember a day in the hospital where one of the top professors in another ward, who was the father of a friend of mine and used to see me regularly in the corridors, said to me, “Look, Mary, that’s enough. Things are getting back to normal (it was now winter time), you’ve done your bit. Now you have to think about your future.”
A hospital can be a very captivating environment. It’s almost like an Erving Goffman-type of total institution. You could do everything there: sleep there, eat there, shower there. You could just live there and be totally engrossed by your surroundings.
So I remember looking at the annual catalogue containing all the courses offered at Hebrew U, which is a great university. And I just fell on history, saying to myself, Actually, with wars and suffering and loss and all that makes you think about, I really want to understand. And I really want to understand what only history can give me. So I enrolled in history.
HB: So, if I can just interject for a moment: before the war broke out when you were studying chemistry, were you basically happy with your courses?
MR: They were a little bit on the dry side, and the people I met with were terrifically earnest and I was sort of young and silly. So I did ...

Table of contents