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Kendall Jenner Shut Down a Comment About Her Dating History
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Welcome to the Stage, the Star Horse of 'Witcher'
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Significant donation to State Library Victoria puts kids in charge
January 30, 2019 - Creative Industries, Latest News
Young Victorians keen to read and learn will be the main beneficiaries of the most recent $2 million donation to State Library Victoria from John and Pauline Gandel, through Gandel Philanthropy, which will deliver free dedicated literacy programs created for kids, by kids.
The donation will also support the development of the Pauline Gandel Children’s Quarter, a dedicated space for children up to 12 years old, six times larger than the Library’s previous space used for children’s programming, along with a new children’s book collection.
Celebrated Australian children’s authors Andy Griffiths, Leigh Hobbs, Gabrielle Wang and Ailsa Wild participated in the first of a number of co-design workshops with 5 – 12 year-olds to develop a suite of innovative programs enabled by the donation.
The workshops form part of a broader programming framework developed jointly with Gandel Philanthropy, the family’s foundation, which incorporates Auslan, languages other than English and livestreaming to enable greater access to children across Victoria.
Minister for Youth, Gabrielle Williams, said the generous donation will help Victorian children develop the skills they need for a successful future. “With the vision and generosity of Gandel Philanthropy, State Library Victoria is putting kids in the driver’s seat to help shape a new era of creative and exciting literacy programs,” she said.
“When this amazing new Children’s Quarter opens at our State Library later this year, it will offer a range of kid-designed programs that will boost literacy skills, build confidence and spark imaginations.”
State Library Victoria CEO, Kate Torney, said Gandel Philanthropy is taking a leading role in nurturing a love of reading in young Victorians. “Reading and storytelling are essential for children’s development and their transition into adulthood,” she said.
“The Pauline Gandel Children’s Quarter and the programming it will deliver will help children’s literacy and creative skills grow and will set the benchmark for other libraries in Australia and around the world.”
John Gandel AC and Pauline Gandel AC, Chair and Trustee of Gandel Philanthropy, said State Library Victoria was a natural partner. “We are committed to creating a positive and lasting difference in the lives of children. Research shows 39% of Australian students don’t meet the National Proficient Standard in reading literacy and 44% of adults lack the literacy skills required to cope with the complex demands of modern life,” they said.
“Literacy is truly a key building block of future academic success. Global trends show that we need to encourage children to read from the earliest age. We are particularly pleased that these programs will also reach children and families from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.”
“Partnering with the State Library to deliver a dedicated space and a number of innovative children’s programs means we can reach more young people and their families and have a lasting, positive impact on their lives, and on this country as a whole,” they added.
The Pauline Gandel Children’s Quarter is part of the Library’s $88.1 million Vision 2020 redevelopment, and is due to open in late spring 2019. For more information, visit: www.slv.vic.gov.au for details.
Image: Pauline Gandel Children’s Quarter Design Render (supplied)
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Arts Review takes a look at the best of Australia's professional and independent performing and visual arts including ballet, books, cabaret, circus, comedy, dance, exhibitions, film, music, music theatre, and theatre. © 2013 - 2019 Arts Review is published by Byte Media - ABN: 14 580 855 683
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"Growth, Inequality, and Nationalism", Journal of Democracy, July 2017
"Does Citizenship Abate Class? Evidence and Reflections from a South Indian City" (with Ebony Bertorelli, Patrick Heller and Siddharth Swaminathan), Economic and Political Weekly, August 12, 2017.
“Caste and Entrepreneurship in India” (with Lakshmi Iyer and Tarun Khanna), Economic and Political Weekly, February 9, 2013.
"Battles Half Won: Political Economy of India’s Growth and Economic Policy Since Independence" (with Sadiq Ahmed), in Chetan Ghate, ed, The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy, Oxford University Press, 2012.
"Two Banks of the Same River? Social Order and Entrepreneurialism in India" in Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson, eds, Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States, Oxford University Press, 2012.
"Comment on ‘The Political Economy of Public Service Provision in South Asia,’ by Lakshmi Iyer" in Justin Yifu Lin and Boris Pleskovik, eds, Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics—Global 2009, Washington DC: World Bank Publications, 2010.
"Who Benefits from Conflict? Some Evidence from Assam" (with Deepa Narayan and Binayak Sen), in Deepa Narayan, ed, Moving Out of Poverty, Volume 3: The Promise of Empowerment and Democracy in India, Washington DC: World Bank Publications, 2009.
"Poverty and Famines: An Extension" in Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur, eds, Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Volume II: Society, Institutions, and Development, Oxford University Press, 2009.
"China and India: A New Asian Drama", Perspectives on Politics, September 2005.
"Democracy and Poverty" in Deepa Narayan, ed, Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Washington DC: World Bank Publications, 2005.
"Violent Conflict and the Millennium Development Goals: Diagnosis and Recommendations" (with Macartan Humphreys), background paper for the UN Millennium Development Goals Poverty Task Force Workshop, set up by Kofi Annan, on poverty alleviation in developing countries, Working Paper, August 2004.
"Why have Poor Democracies not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion", Asian Survey, September-October 2000.
"Preface" (with Jeffrey D. Sachs and Nirupam Bajpai), in Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ashutosh Varshney, and Nirupam Bajpai, eds, India in the Era of Economic Reforms, paperback edition, Oxford University Press, 2000.
The Politics and Economics of India's Reforms: An Introduction" (with Jeffrey D. Sachs and Nirupam Bajpai), India in the Era of Economic Reforms, Oxford University Press, 1999.
"Mass Politics or Elite Politics?: India’s Economic Reforms in Comparative Perspective", Journal of Policy Reform, November 1998. Reprinted in Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ashutosh Varshney, and Nirupam Bajpai, eds, India in the Era of Economic Reforms, Oxford University Press, 1999. Also published as “Mass Politics or Elite Politics?: Understanding the Politics of India’s Economic Reforms” in Rahul Mukherji, ed, India’s Economic Transition: The Politics of Reforms, Oxford University Press, 2007.
"Cultures and Modes of Rationality", APSA-CP—Newsletter of the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association, Summer 1997. Translated in French and published as “‘Choix Rationnels,’ Conflit Ethnique et Culture”, Critique Internationale, Autumn 1999.
"Classes, like Ethnic Groups, are Imagined Communities", Economic and Political Weekly, July 12, 1997.
"Strategy in Industrial Development: India and South Korea", India International Centre Quarterly, Winter 1993.
"Self-Limited Empowerment: Democracy, Economic Development and Rural India", The Journal of Development Studies, July 1993.
"Urban Bias in Perspective", Journal of Development Studies, July 1993.
"Ideas, Interest and Institutions in Policy Change: Transformation of India's Agricultural Strategy in the Mid-1960s", Policy Sciences, August 1989.
"India's Political Economy: Issues, Non-Issues and Puzzles", Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, November 1988.
"Political Economy of Slow Industrial Growth in India", Economic and Political Weekly, September 1, 1984.
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Chiefs to start Patrick Mahomes this week
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'Sendong' victims in Region X to get 4Ps grant
MANILA, Dec. 31 – Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Corazon "Dinky" Juliano-Soliman said that "Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program" (4Ps) beneficiaries who were affected by typhoon Sendong and were unable to comply with the health and education conditionalities will still receive their cash grants for November and December.
She added that beneficiaries would receive their cash grants this January.
We have waived the non-compliance of the co-responsibilities of the beneficiaries such as going to the health center and school attendance because we understand the ordeal that they are going through, Soliman said.
The DSWD-Field Office X is currently validating the 4Ps beneficiaries who were affected by tropical storm Sendong.
The latter is the conditional cash transfer program of the Philippine government implemented by the DSWD, which provides poor families cash assistance for the health and education needs of their children 0-14 years old.
A qualified beneficiary receives as much as P1,400 provided that they comply to the conditionalities of sending their children to school and health centers for regular check-ups. (PNA) RMA/PFN
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Alaskans Against the Death Penalty
Dedicated to keeping Alaska free from Capital Punishment.
Alaskans Against the Death Penalty (AADP) is a coalition of individuals and organizations who educate the community and policy makers about the facts and myths of the death penalty. Our mission is to keep Alaska free from the death penalty. Click here to contact us!
AADP Photo Gallery
Click Here to view the AADP Photo Gallery!
Alaskans Against the Dealth Penalty Event
Alaskans Against the Dealth Penalty Chili Feed
Hugh Fleischer Memorial Chili Feed
Sunday, March 10th, 2019 @ 5:00 pm
Featured Speaker: Reverend Dr. Jack Sullivan, Jr, National Public Speaker
A nationally known public speaker, social justice advocate and death penalty abolitionist, Dr. Sullivan is a member of many community and civic organizations including the murder victims families organization Journey of Hope…From Violence to Healing, and the National Action Network. In addition, he is a life member of both the NAACP and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Dr. Sullivan has published an array of writings including a chapter in, “Black Religion after the Million Man March,” edited by Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, Orbis Books, 1998.
At the home of Lanie Fleischer
1401 W 11th Ave Anchorage
We always provide exceptional chili and refreshments and side dishes are welcome!
Mark your calendar and bring friends! Donations encouraged!
IF YOU REQUIRE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION OR WANT TO DONATE, PLEASE CONTACT
Reece Robert at Akreece1@icloud.com or call 907.350.2332
Click here to download the flyer.
Annual FISH FRY
Friday, July 27th, 2018 @ 5:30pm
At the home of NANCY GROSZEK
2512 Saint Elias Drive
Featured Speaker: Derrick Jamison
Derrick Jamison was exonerated from death row in Ohio on October 25,2005,20 years to the day after he was sentenced to death in Hamilton County (Cincinnati). Derrick now spends his time educating people about the risks of wrongful conviction. Derrick (pictured in front of Chillicothe Correctional Institution, the home of Ohio's death row) was sentenced to death during the period in which Ohio capital prosecutions were at their peak. Jamison faced six execution dates, and on one occasion came within 90 minutes of execution before being granted a stay.
We always provide exceptional food, fun and fellowship and we welcome side dishes Mark your calendar and bring friends! Donations encouraged.
Lost? 248-5802
Note: please park on the side of the street of the event
Check us out (and like us) on our AADP FaceBook page. Email Reece for more information at AKreece1@icloud.com or call 907.350.2332.
Chili Feed 2018 Photos
Thank you for joining us for the annual AADP CHILI FEED. Great food, fun and education. We are looking forward to seeing everyone next year!
Sunday, March 4th, 2018 @ 4:30 pm
Featured Speaker: Will Francome, Film Director/Camera Operator
Will Francome has been involved in film-making and anti-death penalty work since he wrote and presented his authored feature-length documentary, In Prison My Whole Life which is about the case of death-row inmate, Mumia Abu-Jamal. His latest film, The Penalty, will be shown at the Bear Tooth at 5:30 on Monday, March 5th.
The Penalty is a feature documentary film following three people with extraordinary experiences of America's modern death penalty and goes behind the scenes of capital punishment's most recent headlines. The Penalty will screen throughout the world in 2018. Click here to see more about the movie.
We always provide exceptional food and refreshments and side dishes welcome.
IF YOU REQUIRE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT
Reece Robert at Akreece1@icloud.com OR Sue Johnson for information at scjohnson@gci.net
Friday, July 28th, 2017 @ 5:30 - 8:00 pm
Celebrity Judges and Chefs - Silent Auction
Featured Speaker: Rev. Neil Kookoothe & Joe D’Ambrosio
Rev. Kookoothe is a native Toledoan and Catholic Priest ordained in the Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio. He is currently pastor of Saint Clarence Church in North Olmsted and has always passionately advocated for the abolition of the death penalty. Complementing his Master’s degree in Theology and Masters of Divinity, Rev. Kookoothe also holds degrees in law and nursing. Rev. Kookoothe met Mr. D'Ambrosio in 1998 while serving as spiritual advisor to several men on Ohio's Death Row. His experience in theology, nursing and law drew his interest to the case and aided Joe in bringing attention to unresolved issues that were never addressed by the legal system or the courts.
Mr. D’Ambrosio served in the US Army and at the young age of 26, he was convicted and sentenced to death (1989). Always maintaining his innocence, his pleas for assistance fell upon deaf ears. Mr. D’Ambrosio said being innocent on death row was the “loneliest, heart-wrenching thing that will haunt him the rest of his life.” Finally, in 1998, he asked Rev. Kookoothe to read his trial transcript and assist him in bringing his case to the attention of the public and the courts. He was released in 2009 after a Federal Judge ruled that key evidence was withheld that would have refuted the States witnesses and pointed to other individuals as perpetrators of the crime. After a lengthy and prolonged appellate process, Mr. D’Ambrosio was exonerated on January 23, 2012 when the Supreme Court of the United States denied the States appeal of the Sixth Circuit opinion upholding the bar to his re-prosecution. Mr. D’Ambrosio is the 140th Exoneree from death row in the United States and the sixth in Ohio.
Check us out (and like us) on our AADP FaceBook page. Email Reece for more information at AKreece1@icloud.com or call 907.350.2332. Or you can e-mail Sue at scjohnson@gci.net or call 907.301.5005.
Alaskans Against the Dealth Penalty Annual Chili Feed
Sunday, February 26th, 2016 @ 5:00 pm
Sides & Refreshments welcomed (chili will be provided)
Featured Speaker: George White
Wrongly Convicted Speaks Against The Death Penalty
On February 27, 1985 in Enterprise, Alabama, George was living his little piece of the American Dream. Husband of Charlene and father of Tom and Christie, he was a successful, business-degreed executive, Sunday school teacher, little league coach and PTA president -- a yuppie in southeast Alabama. That evening everything changed everything!
When George, vice-president of Townsend Building Supply, Inc., and his wife, Char, stopped at his store after business hours, they thought they were doing a favor for a man who urgently needed an item for an emergency home repair. Instead, they experienced firsthand the insanity and horror of murder. A masked gunman entered the building and shot the pair repeatedly during an armed robbery. George suffered gunshot wounds to his left arm, thigh and abdomen during a struggle with the gunman. Following emergency surgery, George survived. His wife was not so lucky. Char was pronounced dead at the hospital after sustaining two gunshot wounds to the head. Tom and Christie were only twelve and five at the time of their mother's death. The nightmare had only just begun.
Sixteen months later George was charged with the murder of his wife. The State sought the death penalty, and, following a trial that was later characterized as a mockery and a sham, George was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Incarcerated for a total of two years, one hundred and three days, the conviction was overturned in 1989. George remained in legal limbo for nearly three more years. On April 10, 1992, the prosecution asked that the charge be forevermore dismissed when the proof of George's innocence finally surfaced. The trial court so ruled. The ordeal had lasted for more than seven years.
Mark your calendar and bring friends!
A SUGGESTED DONATION OF $25.00 or more is ENCOURAGED.
REECE DRINGLE-ROBERT Akreece1@icloud.com OR
Featured Speaker: Billy Neal Moore
Billy Neal Moore spent almost 17 years on Death Row and was scheduled for execution 13 times. Once he came within 7 hours of being electrocuted. Moore is a deeply committed Christian and Pentecostal minister and speaking out against the Death Penalty has been almost a full time job for him. He was finally released from prison in 1992.
The message that Moore delivers, is particularly salient because unlike Death Row survivors who have been released after being found to be innocent, Moore acknowledges his guilt. "Oh, I did it," he says pensively. "I did it, and I pleaded guilty." Moore is the only prisoner who entered a guilty plea to murder to be released from Death Row and paroled. A number of former law students at Northeastern University School of Law assisted in Mr. Moore's representation (even some Alaskans) in the 1980s, because he was represented by professor Dan Givelber.
You won't want to miss hearing Mr. Moore's compelling story.
Check us out (and like us) on our AADP FaceBook page. Email Reece for more information at AKreece1@icloud.com or call 350-2332.
Sunday, April 10th, 2016 @ 4:30 pm
(1401 W 11th Ave Anchorage 274-2453)
Food & Refreshments welcomed (some will be provided)
According to an article in The Guardian, Billy Neal Moore spent almost 17 years on Death Row and was scheduled for execution 13 times. Once he came within 7 hours of being electrocuted. Moore is a deeply committed Christian and Pentecostal minister and speaking out against the Death Penalty has been almost a full time job for him. He was finally released from prison in 1992.
Mark your calendar and bring friends! Donations encouraged
Call Sue for information at 301-5005 or 276-5753
Annual Fish Fry Fundraiser
Friday - July 29th, 2016 @ 5:30 - 8:00
(Nancy's Backyard)
Guests: TBA
Celebrity Judges and Chefs
Note: please park on the side of the street of the event and side dishes are welcome. Mark your calendar and bring friends!
Lost? 248-5802 Info: Call Sue Johnson for information at 276-5753 or scjohnson@gci.net
Click here to download the event flyer.
The Annual Fish Fry was a great success! Thanks to everyone for their support!
Sunday, March 1st, 2015 @ 4:30 pm
Featured Speaker: Dr. Allen Ault
Dr. Allen Ault was corrections commissioner for Georgia until 1995. He told the BBC the executions he supervised were 'state-sanctioned murder' and 'It stays in your psyche forever.' He goes on to say "it is by every definition premeditated murder...It's the most premeditated murder you can possibly imagine."
Dr. Ault is a trained psychologist who began working in the prison system in order to help and rehabilitate people, but a promotion to the position of corrections commissioner meant the responsibility for overseeing the state’s executions fell to him. During his time at the prison in the early 1990s, Dr. Ault supervised five executions. Dr. Allen Ault is currently Dean at Eastern Kentucky University.
13th Annual World Day of Faith in Action
Sunday, October 5th, 2014 @ 1pm - 3pm
St. Mary's Episcopal Church (Lake Otis and Tudor)
Featured Speakers: Bill Pelke and Averil Lerman
Amnesty International and Alaskans Against the Death Penalty will sponsor an interfaith vigil; a gathering of faith leaders from a broad spectrum of faith communities and human rights activists to examine the death penalty from faith perspectives and to speak out against the death penalty. We will gather afterward for food and fellowship.
Bill will speak on forgiveness and Averil will speak on the history of the death penalty in Alaska.
For info, please call 333-0431 or 441-4725. You may also email kathyh@gci.net.
Coming soon in March 2015!
August 1, 2014 @ 5:30 - 8:00
Featured Speaker: SueZann Bosler
On December 22, 1986, SueZann Bosler and her father, Rev. Billy Bosler, were attacked in the church parsonage by an intruder. Rev. Bosler was stabbed 24 times. SueZann, in an effort to help him, was herself stabbed in the back and head and left for dead. While lying on the floor pretending to be dead, she heard the intruder ransack the house as she watched her father take his last breath. As a Brethren minister, Rev. Bosler had been an opponent of capital punishment, and had once told SueZann that if he was ever murdered he would not want his killer to receive the death penalty. Click here to read more.
Note: please park on the side of the street of the event side dishes are welcome. Mark your calendar and bring friends!
Call Sue Johnson for information at 276-5753
Thanks to everyone who attended the Fish Fry! View pictures in the AADP Photo Gallery!
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014 @ 4:30 pm
Featured Speaker: Therese Bartholomew
A former high school dropout and teen mother, Therese is now an inspirational speaker, social justice activist, author and filmmaker. Her writing has been published in Emrys Journal, Iodine, Main Street Rag, The Charlotte Observer, Raising Our Voices, Sun Journal, and Compassion. Her 2009 collection of essays, Coffee Shop God , offers a glimpse into the profound grief that arose when her younger brother was murdered. As a continuation of her journey to heal, she embarked on a mission to meet her brother’s killer behind bars. The Final Gift , documentary, directed by Bartholomew, follows her path to that meeting. This compelling story has garnered the support of universities, faith-based groups, departments of correction, and victims’ advocacy organizations and is fast becoming a catalyst for a national dialogue on restorative justice.
TUNE IN AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION!
Mark Osler is scheduled for Talk of Alaska on Tuesday (tomorrow) at 10:00 a.m. KSKA 91.1 FM, with Steve Heimel.
Professor Osler is the author of “Jesus on Death Row,” and will be the featured speaker for the Caroline Penniman Wohlforth Lectures October 11-13th.
He writes regularly on religion, the law, and related issues for numerous national publications, including Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR’s Morning Edition, and ABC. Much of his current work relates directly to reform of the criminal justice system, an issue which is very relevant to our Alaska context.
Friday, October 11, 7:00 pm
Public Lecture: “Jesus Christ, Defendant”
Held at: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, 2901 Huffman Rd, Anchorage AK
Saturday, October 12th, 11:00- Noon
Presentation: “Effective Social Advocacy”
1:00 – 2:30 pm Workshop: “Effective Social Advocacy”
Held at: St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, , 2222 E Tudor Rd, Anchorage
12th Annual Day of Faith In Action!
Please join us for the annual Day of Faith in Action
Everyone is welcome!
Sunday, October 20th at 2 pm at the
725 W. 9th Avenue
across from the Park Strip
Click here to download the flyer
A Journey of Hope!
20 Years of Journeying - From Violence to Healing. Real comfort with real comfort food. Join us for A Fundraiser for Journey of Hope...From Violence to Healing
At the Home of Dirk Sisson & Barbara Hood
10161 Middlerock Road, Anchorage
Click Here to view the flyer.
AADP Annual Fish Fry
To Be Held Friday, July 26th 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Nancy Groszek's lovely garden
2512 St. Elias Drive
Special Guest: Kirk Bloodsworth
Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted in March of 1985 for the brutal killing and sexual assault of a nine year old girl. The victim was found dead in July of 1984. She had been strangled, raped, and beaten with a rock. Bloodsworth was arrested based on an anonymous call telling police that he was seen with the victim that day and an identification made by a witness from a police sketch that was based on the recollections of five eyewitnesses. Bloodsworth also became the first person to be exonerated from death row through post conviction DNA testing.
Kirk appearance on Colbert Nation: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/427309/june-19-2013/remembering-lorna-colbert
2013 AADP Annual Chili Feed!
Chili provided! Side-dishes and beverages welcome!
March 17th at 5:00 PM
Cost: Donations encouraged
Our special guest speaker will be Terry Steinberg. It is our hope that her son, Justin Wolfe, will be released from Virginia's death row after his recent exoneration, and will join his mother in Alaska.
At the age of 20, Justin Wolfe, ex-high school football player and normal, average, all American, suburban kid was sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. He has been on Virginia 's death row since 2002 and has had two stays of execution.
Location: 1401 West 11th Avenue, Anchorage, Alaska
FREE JUSTIN WOLFE!
Justin Wolfe was wrongfully convicted and was denied the right to due process pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment during his trial. View the facebook page here
Big News in Maryland!
There is big news in Maryland today! Governor O'Malley pledged his support for death penalty repeal in Maryland in a meeting with NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous and Maryland NAACP State Conference President Gerald Stansbury!
Contact Governor O'Malley to show your support for death penalty repeal legislation in Maryland, Thank him for his leadership on this issue, and urge him to sponsor the death penalty repeal bill.
Call Governor O'Malley now at 410-974-3901 or 800-811-8336.
Day of faith in action!
Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in the "Day of Faith in Action" on Sept 29, 2012
Thanks to Everyone who attended!
Thanks to everyone who attended the "Save California Event! Watch our calendar page for future events.
"Crime Victims' Bill of Rights" Signed into Law!
Hours ago Governor Christie signed the enhanced "Crime Victims' Bill of Rights" legislation into law. NJADP advocated for this proposal for two years. It was part of our objective to affect substantive public policy change to benefit surviving relatives of homicide victims and exonorees. The goal is to create a more just and compassionate community in which executions are no longer desired nor acceptable. The proposal signed today will ensure:
Victims are notified about the progress of their case, including any changes in the court schedule, and status of plea bargain negotiations earlier in the process.
Protection from harassment or abuse by defendants or their supporters.
Medical assistance that is related to the crime.
Thank you to those who worked on the passage of this bill!
Another "even in Texas" moment!
Here's another "even in Texas" moment for you: This afternoon, the Texas Democratic Party endorsed repeal of the death penalty in its 2012 Platform!! Here's a rough transcription of the platform language:
Despite 41 DNA exonerations in Texas in the last 9 years, Rick Perry says he never loses sleep over executing the innocent. Perry has overseen 235 executions in Texas. Detailed research shows that the Texas death penalty system cannot insure that innocent and undeserving defendants are not sentenced to death. Death penalty exonerations have already revealed deep flaws in our State's criminal justice system.
Evidence - including scientific evidence, extensive studies by the Innocence Project, major newspaper and university research strongly suggests that Texas has already executed innocent defendants including Carlos DeLuna, Ruben Cantu, and Cameron Todd Willingham. Former Governor Mark White has stated we must take every step to ensure there is never another innocent man executed.
The application of the death penalty in Texas is disproportionately applied to the poor and minorities. The system has allowed in the past the execution of juveniles, the mentally ill and poor defendants who had such inadequate counsel that their lawyers literally slept through their trials. Other states are increasingly rejecting the death penalty as evidenced by the legislatures in New Jersey (2007), New Mexico (2009), and Illinois (2011).
In order to promote public confidence and fairness in the Texas Criminal Justice system, Texas Democrats call for the passage of legislation that would repeal the death penalty in Texas and replace it with the punishment of life in prison without parole.
Connecticut Repeals death penalty!
(Huffington Post) - Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) signed a bill into law on Wednesday that repeals the death penalty, making Connecticut the 17th state to do so...read more
Thomas Arthur is convicted of a crime that another man has confessed to!
Thomas Arthur is on Alabama's death row, convicted of a crime that another man has since confessed to committing.
Despite this confession and many other irregularities that have surfaced, the state has set his execution date for March 29, just weeks away.
Write Governor Robert Bentley and urge him to allow Thomas Arthur's legal team to conduct the DNA testing that could spare his life.
After the confession, the Alabama Supreme Court stayed Mr. Arthur's execution and remanded his case to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing. The court ordered limited DNA testing of the wig that all parties agree was worn by the perpetrator. Although DNA was found on the wig, the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences lacks the technology to develop a profile. Thomas Arthur and his attorneys want to re-test the wig, using more advanced DNA technology. But the state of Alabama won't allow it, even though the defense is willing to pay for the testing!
It is unacceptable that the state of Alabama is prepared to put a potentially innocent man to death rather than let him conduct a simple test that could prove his innocence.
David Kaczynski, Linda Patrik, Bill Babbitt
Click Here for pictures and a special thanks from AADP for all of your support.
Photo of David Kaczynski, Linda Patrik, Bill Babbitt Iditirod 2012 Anchorage Alaska
AADP Newsletters and Highlights
2013 Summer Newsletter
2013 is AADP's 20th Anniversary! Don't miss the Annual Fish Fry in July with Special Guest Kirk Bloodsworth...
View the 2013 Summer Newsletter
Journey of Hope Update
Bill Pelke told the story last week of the brutal killing of his sweet, white haired grandmother and how her death made a life change for him...
Struck by Lightning
The Continuing Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty
Thirty-Five Years After Its Re-instatement in 1976...
Click here to read the entire article
Equal Justice USA
Equal Justice USA is a national, grassroots organization working to build a criminal justice system that is fair, effective, and humane, starting with repeal of the death penalty and increased services to families of homicide victims...
Click here to visit their website.
The Abolition Times
Later this month, NCADP's Alaska Affiliate, Alaskans Against the Death Penalty will celebrate the defeat earlier this year of HB 9, a bill that would have introduced the death penalty to Alaska for the first time since the territory became a U.S. state in 1953...
Providing information about the application of the death penalty in the United States. This site has eye opening information regarding the death penalty in the U.S. Complete with a searchable Execution Database.
Death Penalty Information Center Home Page
DCIP State by State Death Penalty Information
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) was founded in 1976 in response to the Supreme Court decision in Gregg v. Georgia which permitted executions to resume in the United States. Our mission: abolish the death penalty in the U.S. and support efforts to abolish the death penalty world wide.
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Home Page
NCADP State Affiliate Web Site
Click the banner below to learn how you help support NCADP by
Shouting from the Rooftops!
Did Texas execute an innocent man?
The New Yorker has put together this group of articles that accurately portray real situations in which hind sight tells us that the Death Penalty was obviously not the right solution.
The New Yorker - Did Texas execute and innocent man?
Ohio's Lethal Injection Fiascos!
The LA Times gives us a brief history of botched lethal injections in Ohio...
AADP Update
Maryland Death Penalty Repeal Legislation
The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty applauds Governor O’Malley and the Maryland General Assembly for introducing and considering Senate Bill 276 and House Bill 295: Death Penalty Repeal and Appropriation from Savings to Aid Survivors of Homicide Victims and urges its passage...
Read Governor O’Malley’s testimony
View NCADP's Website for the full article
Video Update
View the AADP Video Archive…
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, Who Came to Oppose the Death Penalty, Dies at 99
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who described his deciding vote to uphold the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976 as the one court vote he most regretted, has died. He was 99 years old. A media advisory released by the Supreme Court on July 16, 2019, said that Stevens died of complications from a stroke he suffered the day before. “He brought to our bench an inimitable blend of kindness, humility, wisdom, and independence,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in the media advisory. “His unrelenting commitment to justice has left us a better nation.”
Appointed in 1975 by Republican President Gerald R. Ford, Stevens was a classic judicial conservative whom court watchers later regarded as a leading progressive voice on the Court. After his retirement from the bench in 2010, he repeatedly stated that his approach to cases had not changed during his three-decades tenure on the Court and that he had not become a liberal. Rather, he said, the Court had moved to the political right.
Shortly after Justice Stevens’ appointment, the Court accepted for review five cases that challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty itself and the various capital-sentencing schemes states adopted in response to the Court’s 1972 decision that struck down all existing death-penalty statutes. Justice Stevens voted in the majority in all five cases, providing a fifth vote upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia and of Georgia’s, Florida’s, and Texas’s death-penalty statutes and voting with the majority in declaring North Carolina’s and Louisiana’s mandatory death sentencing statutes unconstitutional.
In Gregg, Stevens wrote that “[t]he decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community’s belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death.” Yet while supporting the constitutionality of capital punishment, he consistently voted to limit its use, voting in 1988 to bar its application to offenders aged 15 or younger and casting one of the five votes in 2005 to extend that proscription through age 17. In 2002, he wrote the opinion for the Court declaring that the use of the death penalty against persons with intellectual disability constituted cruel and unusual punishment. By 2008, after three decades of exposure to capital cases, Justice Stevens had concluded “that the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State,” he wrote, is “patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”
Facing Prison-Conditions Court Challenge, South Carolina Moves Its Death Row to a New Facility
Amidst an ongoing lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of South Carolina’s death-row conditions, the state has moved its death-row prisoners to a different prison. On July 11, 2019, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) moved the state’s 38 death-row prisoners from Kirkland Correctional Institution to the nearby Broad River Correctional Institution (pictured), into a facility that had originally been built to house death-row prisoners in 1988. In a press release, SCDOC said the move “will address some of the concerns raised in a recent lawsuit filed on behalf of the Death Row inmates.”
One of the major issues raised in the prison-conditions lawsuit was the unnecessary harshness of the near-constant solitary confinement to which death-row prisoners were subjected. Those on death row were kept in small, windowless cells about the size of a parking space as much as 23 hours a day. The lawsuit charged that South Carolina’s death-row prisoners “are subjected to indefinite extreme isolation, devoid of mental stimulation, and have only sporadic human interaction.” At the new location, SCDOC said, prisoners will be given more opportunities to interact with one another, but will still be separated from the general prison population.
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Minutes of the One Hundredth Annual Convention
REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON
STEWARDSHIP EDUCATION
DR. Leonard Kendall, President of the Lutheran Minnesota Conference:
The Commission on Stewardship Education continued through the past year
with the same organization as the previous year-Mr. Edmund Lienke, chairman,
and Rev. G. Adolph Johns, secretary. Mr. Rodney 0. Davis continued to render
assistance on a part time basis until October 15, 1957, when the new Minnesota
Conference Director of Stewardship Education and Finance, Rev. Thomas Wersell,
assumed his duties.
The Commission conducted a workshop, April 26 to 28, 1957, just prior to
the last Conference meeting. Forty-three District and Area Counsellors attended
the meetings which were concerned primarily w'ith planning for a year around
stewardship program at the congregational level.
In place of a Conference workshop in the fall, the Commission voted that
workshops should be encouraged on the District level. The following Districts
participated in such workshops: Sioux Falls, Big Stone, St. James, Willmar,
Cokato, Mille Lacs, Apple River, and Iron Range.
At its October meeting, the Commission voted to sponsor three regional workshops
in the spring of 1958, with the details to be arranged by the new Director.
The final report on the Stewardship Evaluation Forms showed one hundred
and sixty-four responses. Of those responding, forty-five had used Augustana's
Revised E. M. V. Plan in 1956 with an average increase of 37.7 per cent. The
average increase for the remainder was 6.2 per cent.
The Commission has also gone on record recognizing the desirability of
congregations making a corporate pledge on a proportionate basis to parish
extension, thereby eliminating the need of allocations. Such a step will require
more extensive education of all who are involved, but it will also, the Commission
believes, bring all of the individuals who make up the congregations of the Minnesota
Conference into a more direct relationship with the benevolence work of
the Conference and the Church.
The Commission noted with gratitude the assumption of his duties by the
new Director of Stewardship Education and Finance. It joins with what it knows
to be the prayers of all-that through the grace of God and the efforts of this new
servant of the Conference, we may all be enabled to do more fully the work of our
Master.
RODNEY 0. DAVIS for The Commission on Stewardship Education
Title Minutes of the One Hundredth Annual Convention
Transcript REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON STEWARDSHIP EDUCATION DR. Leonard Kendall, President of the Lutheran Minnesota Conference: 67 The Commission on Stewardship Education continued through the past year with the same organization as the previous year-Mr. Edmund Lienke, chairman, and Rev. G. Adolph Johns, secretary. Mr. Rodney 0. Davis continued to render assistance on a part time basis until October 15, 1957, when the new Minnesota Conference Director of Stewardship Education and Finance, Rev. Thomas Wersell, assumed his duties. The Commission conducted a workshop, April 26 to 28, 1957, just prior to the last Conference meeting. Forty-three District and Area Counsellors attended the meetings which were concerned primarily w'ith planning for a year around stewardship program at the congregational level. In place of a Conference workshop in the fall, the Commission voted that workshops should be encouraged on the District level. The following Districts participated in such workshops: Sioux Falls, Big Stone, St. James, Willmar, Cokato, Mille Lacs, Apple River, and Iron Range. At its October meeting, the Commission voted to sponsor three regional workshops in the spring of 1958, with the details to be arranged by the new Director. The final report on the Stewardship Evaluation Forms showed one hundred and sixty-four responses. Of those responding, forty-five had used Augustana's Revised E. M. V. Plan in 1956 with an average increase of 37.7 per cent. The average increase for the remainder was 6.2 per cent. The Commission has also gone on record recognizing the desirability of congregations making a corporate pledge on a proportionate basis to parish extension, thereby eliminating the need of allocations. Such a step will require more extensive education of all who are involved, but it will also, the Commission believes, bring all of the individuals who make up the congregations of the Minnesota Conference into a more direct relationship with the benevolence work of the Conference and the Church. The Commission noted with gratitude the assumption of his duties by the new Director of Stewardship Education and Finance. It joins with what it knows to be the prayers of all-that through the grace of God and the efforts of this new servant of the Conference, we may all be enabled to do more fully the work of our Master. RODNEY 0. DAVIS for The Commission on Stewardship Education
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Nene Nwoko is the President and CEO of Bufine Productions. Nene began her career in the entertainment industry as an actress and a model. She is known for films and TV shows like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, A Man Called Jon, Day 5, Your Worst Nightmare, The Sky Princess and many more.
Prior to getting into acting and modeling, she worked in the retail eCommerce sector. With a combined 17 years experience in both industries, she decided to get behind the scenes and start producing films that speak to the heart.
We are dedicated to bringing you films based on people’s lives. People you otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. People’s stories that will inspire and change your lives. And we want you to laugh, cry and jubilate with them just like we did when we FIRST heard their stories.
Latest Projects:
An Untitled Film in progress….
We are very excited to announce that we have acquired the rights to a book that will be turned into a feature length film. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and we will keep you updated on the progress.
Bufine Productions
2830 S. Hulen St. #385 Fort Worth, TX 76109
info@bufineproductions.com
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Home / News / Local News / President Akufo-Addo Swerves Socrate Sarfo
President Akufo-Addo Swerves Socrate Sarfo
This has gotten some section of the entertainment industry and showbiz enthusiasts disappointed. Socrate Sarfo has being in the new since January, with a campaign to get him appointed as the deputy minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture.
However, President Nana Akufo-Addo has appointed Dr Ziblim Barri Iddi to the Tourism, Culture and Arts Ministry as Deputy Minister.
Dr. Iddi, a lecturer at the Political Science Department of the University of Ghana, was among a list of Deputy Ministerial nominees released on Wednesday, March 15, 2017. President Akufo-Addo nominated Catherine Ablema Afeku as the minister for Tourism and Creative Arts.
The race for who becomes her deputy became a matter of public debate, when the likes of Socrate Sarfo, Kojo Antwi, Mark Okraku Mantey, Juliet Asante and others were all mentioned as possible names to be considered for the position.
Movie producer Socrate Safo had mentioned that he will accept to serve as deputy minister in Nana Akufo-Addo’s administration if the offer was made to him.
Members of the Creative Arts for Change were rooting for him to be named as Deputy Min. for Tourism, Culture & Creative Arts.
According to him, they were championing for him to be deputy minister of Tourism, Culture & Creative Arts because they wanted someone who understands their challenges.
People criticized Socrate sarfo, insisting he does not qualify for the position.
Socrate Sarfo declared support and campaigned for the New Patriotic Party and Mr. Akufo-Addo in the 2012 and 2016 polls and the portfolio is seen by many as a reward for his efforts towards the party’s success at winning back power.
Tags Akufo-Addo President Socrate Sarfo
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Amazon announced to debut the Amazon 4-star in New York, Soho neighborhood Spring Street between Crosby and Lafayette on 27 September 2018. The store carries the 4-star and above rated products from around New York.[64] The amazon website searches for the most rated, highly demanded, frequently bought and most wished for products which are then sold in the new amazon store under separate categories. Along with the paper price tags, the online-review cards will also be available for the customers to read before buying the product.[65][66]
Vince Offer is a famous director, comedian, and commercial pitchman who made his name promoting the ShamWow. Using his natural charisma and his ability to add double entendres to his pitches, Vince turned the commercial into a major career move. The ShamWow itself is one of the most successful cleaning products on the market today, and Vince himself has gone on to pitch several other As Seen on TV products.
Audible.com is a seller and producer of spoken audio entertainment, information and educational programming on the Internet. Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs and audio versions of magazines and newspapers. Through its production arm, Audible Studios, Audible has also become the world's largest producer of downloadable audiobooks. On January 31, 2008, Amazon announced it would buy Audible for about $300 million. The deal closed in March 2008 and Audible became a subsidiary of Amazon.[90]
Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. A new affiliate product, aStore, allows Associates to embed a subset of Amazon products within another website, or linked to another website. In June 2010, Amazon Seller Product Suggestions was launched (rumored to be internally called "Project Genesis") to provide more transparency to sellers by recommending specific products to third-party sellers to sell on Amazon. Products suggested are based on customers' browsing history.[133]
Use apps to check prices in real-time. “The app ShopSavvy is really useful when you’re out shopping in stores because you can scan the barcode on items and see if there is a better deal elsewhere,” says Palmer of Nerdwallet. Woroch is also a fan of ShopSavvy, as well as Flipp, which provides circulars all in one place so you can quickly compare to plan your shopping trip strategically.
Save money without compromising quality when you shop Amazon Renewed! Products on Amazon Renewed are tested and certified by qualified suppliers to work and look like new and come with a minimum 90-day supplier warranty. Get great deals, like up to 33% off smartphones, computers, laptops, tablets, home and kitchen appliances, game consoles, office products, and more.
Summer break may be over, but you can still sign up for Amazon Prime Student! When you start an Amazon Prime subscription for Students, you'll get a 6-month free trial and then 50% off your Amazon Prime membership (just $6.49/mo!). There are a lot of other perks of having Prime Student, too: watch Amazon Prime streaming exclusives like "Alpha House," and other TV & movies, get free 2-day shipping on textbooks, and more. Plus, get exclusive coupons for Prime members only.
Amazon, with its unfettered access to troves of valuable consumer and seller data, came upon a rather interesting business model around 2009, when it launched a private label division under the name AmazonBasics. It started first with the items the company noticed people most often purchased without thinking too hard about the brand name, like batteries and HDMI cables. But as The New York Times reported this past summer, this proved to be a way to fast track a fledgling product category into a massive money-making top seller — AmazonBasics’ AA batteries now outsell Duracell and Energizer on Amazon.com after just a few years.
After the introduction of the September 5, 2018 'Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act', Amazon announced to its workers on October 2, 2018, that the minimum wage paid to salaried workers be increased to $15 per hour.[153] The wage increase applies to about 350,000 workers. It does not apply to the majority of Amazon's employees who are contract workers. Furthermore, Amazon has also removed some grants and stock options.
I do not like the security of this apps. By default any one in my home can just open it up and start buying things on my account. I would like it to just add things to my cart on the TV and them buy on "My" Computer or "My" phone. I know you can setup a PIN for "videos, purchasing and certain types of content".But, you then need to enter the PIN for $0 videos. Also, anybody with access to the Fire TV remote can just install the apps and start buying things, no pin, no password, just because you have a Fire TV setup on your account. Amazon you need to have a separate PIN for Buying videos, parental control (ratings), Apps and Shopping. And by default the app should setup a PIN.
Amazon beauty and health coupons can bring instant discounts and free shipping on your favorite skin care, hair care, makeup, and styling tools & accessories right to your front door! Follow this link to grab an Amazon coupon and get up to $20 off your necessities like toothpaste, facial treatments, body care, blow dryers, deodorant, razors, electric toothbrushes, lotion, makeup, and more!
Make sure there are enough funds in the account. Amazon tends to cancel orders until all funds can be paid out of your account. Contact Amazon for full details of what you can do to help them create the order, so you can get it to ship. Amazon doesn't take any money from you until the item ships. For those that are not "fulfillment by Amazon," you'll have to wait at least 30 minutes for the item to complete the transaction - These Marketplace sellers don't see any of your order until that window is clear.
AWS started way back in 2000 as a way to help other retailers manage e-commerce operations, but it soon expanded into much more when key project members managed to convince Bezos that improving and evolving Amazon’s own infrastructure may hold the key to a new business model. In 2006, the product as we know it today launched into public availability and proved to be a pioneer for the entire cloud computing industry, offering cloud storage, hosting, and a suite of other tools for managing entire digital infrastructures in remote data centers. The division now pulls in roughly $6 billion every quarter and continues to grow at breakneck pace. It earned $17.5 billion in revenue in all of 2017 and regularly outperforms the company’s entire North American retail division in terms of profit.
Amazon’s transformation into the world’s more pervasive retail operation wouldn’t be complete unless the company began a seemingly counterintuitive push from online to offline. Starting with its brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015 — first in Seattle and now in Chicago and New York City — Amazon established its intent to compete on all fronts with its retail competitors.
As you come across items you want, click "Add to Cart" to save them. If you're undecided, add it anyway and you can always take it out of the cart later. When you're done, click the "Cart" button at the top of any Amazon page and select "Proceed to Checkout." Your first purchase includes creating an account. When Amazon prompts you to log in, enter your email address, choose "I Am a New Customer" and fill in your personal info. You'll also need to enter a credit card to complete your purchase. If you haven't shopped online before, the prospect of giving out your card number might seem intimidating, but online stores use encryption to prevent hackers from stealing your information. To stay safe on Amazon, just as with any other site, never give out your password, keep up-to-date anti-virus software on your computer and watch your bill for unexpected charges. Some credit card companies also provide one-time use numbers for shopping online -- check your card company's website to see if it offers this feature.
Amazon derives many of its sales (around 40% in 2008) from third-party sellers who sell products on Amazon.[129] Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links to Amazon on their websites if the referral results in a sale. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.[130] In the middle of 2014, the Amazon Affiliate Program is used by 1.2% of all websites and it is the second most popular advertising network after Google Ads.[131] It is frequently used by websites and non-profits to provide a way for supporters to earn them a commission.[132] Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's websites in 2007. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments are handled by Amazon.[citation needed]
Amazon is known today not just as the everything store, but as the creator of Alexa, one of the most pervasive digital voice assistants on the market today. As an extension of Alexa, Amazon has become more than just a seller of other people’s products. It’s now a hardware maker (Fire Phone aside), having embarked on its boldest product play since the original Kindle when it decided to develop its own line of smart speakers to house its artificial intelligence software. Once again, the division responsible for this piece of hardware was Lab126, Amazon’s hardware arm that gave it the tools to dominate the e-reader market nearly a decade prior.
Sign up for Amazon Family and a Prime account to get special offers, coupons and discounts on family-oriented items. If you aren't a Prime member, you'll get a 5% discount on baby food and diaper subscriptions. Prime members get an additional 15% off with five or more active subscriptions. Get a 15% discount code and a free Welcome Box when you sign up for the Baby Registry.
In the course of a single generation, Amazon has grown from fledgling online bookseller to one of the most valuable and powerful corporations in modern history. The empire of CEO Jeff Bezos has grown so vast that critics, overseas regulators, and Washington politicians are all now wondering whether the company has become an unstoppable force, and what, if anything, is capable of reining in its reach. A recent spat with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) resulted in a minimum wage hike for tens of thousands of employees, but Amazon still operates largely without any meaningful checks on its power even as it aggressively expands into physical retail, the smart home, and warehouse and aviation robotics.
Alex Ikonn and his wife Mimi launched Luxyhair.com after they realized how hard it was to find great hair extensions in the marketplace. This hair extensions ecommerce retailer has built their business on the fan audience they’ve attracted through YouTube tutorial videos. They have a serious following, which is exactly what has enabled them to grow their business to seven figures since 2010!
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You are here: Home / Interviews / Interview Gert Kruithof
– Research and Development
Gert Kruithof
“The forefront of radio astronomy instrumentation development”
Accelerate science
The research and end-to-end design capabilities of the ASTRON R&D department are at the forefront of radio astronomy instrumentation development world-wide. The mission of the R&D department is to research, develop and realize innovative world class radio telescopes. Since the completion of the single pixel feeds for the WSRT, the focus of the department has shifted towards phased array technology. LOFAR was the first truly large scale instrument worldwide that was based on that concept and is still the largest of its kind today. The phased array expertise built up in LOFAR has also opened new opportunities for WSRT. The research and development program APERTIF (APERture Tile In Focus) for phased array feeds (PAFs) that was carried out in the department has resulted in the roll out of an upgrade of WSRT in 2016. The uncooled PAFs of APERTIF have a system temperature of only 70K, an increase in survey speed of a factor of 20, allowing a revolutionary approach to survey science.
The department also has a leading role in the preconstruction phase of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). It leads two consortia for Low and Mid Frequency Aperture Arrays and has a substantial role in the Science Data Processor (SDP) and in the Central Signal Processor (CSP) consortium.
We also have a leading role in the global research agenda towards a space based facility for the lowest radio frequencies (100 kHz to 30 MHz) which can’t be observed with a ground based telescope. The R&D department is now collaborating with Radboud University and the SME ISIS with Chinese organizations to deploy an instrument on the Chang’E4 mission to the moon in 2018. This is considered to be a milestone for radio astronomy since it is the first step towards a facility that will disclose the last unexplored part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
An overview of some of the projects the R&D department has been involved with in 2016:
At the beginning of 2016 the APERTIF-6 hardware was in place at Westerbork according to schedule. About a month later the APERTIF-6 software was also ready and technical commissioning with APERTIF-6 software was started. Whilst continuing with technical commissioning and attempt to also start some of the science commissioning the remaining hardware (APERTIF-12) was installed as well. The last parts were the Uniboard due to longer deliver time, but during the summer, all hardware was installed including the correlator. During commissioning various issues issues were encountered and at the end of 2016 the first fringes, the first real image, the image of Leo T and the first full APERTIF mosaic of 37 beams were produced. 2017 offers a lot of challenges for delivery of software and firmware in order to continue with commissioning and start surveys.
“First APERTIF fringes for baselines formed by 9 dishes“
The DOME project is aimed at creating technologies for energy efficient massive computing and efficient data transport. In support of this, the project developed a series of microserver cards as part of the hot water cooled DOME microDataCentre concept (see figure). The company Variass produced 24+ of these cards for system development and for use in the Users Platform. The start-up company ILA Microservers is currently focusing on bringing the microserver to the market. In addition, together with industry, DOME supported development of radio over fibre links for transporting antenna radio signals at the SKA telescope station. Following the successful test results, these links have actually been ordered by ICRAR for the Murchison Widefield Array. Other highlights include the support of the SKA designs. The project contributed to roughly twenty SKA (SRR and PDR) design documents. Also nearly fifty scientific papers were written in all fields in which DOME is active. This includes the development of a flexible beamformer, and a novel way to create images using radio-interferemetric data. And last but not east, the DOME project celebrated its first PhD defense.
Hot water cooled microserver unit
I-LOFAR
After a long period of preparation, finally in the early start of 2016 while the winter pushes the temperature around zero, ASTRON carried out the site survey at the proposed LOFAR location at Birr Castle in Ireland. This 13th International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) station will be the most west located station, about 1000 km from the LOFAR core. With the “Great Telescope”, built in 1845 at the background, measurements were carried out assess the RFI situation at this new LOFAR location. In addition, the environment was checked for practical roll-out issues. A major problem at this location was the river which flooded the station area during winter time. Several options to make the site suitable for building the LOFAR station were investigated. A solution was found in raising the station area with ground from the surroundings. Groundworks for the station has been finalised during this year. All the electronic modules that are required for this station have been ordered and available for installation now. Construction of the 13th ILT station in Birr Castle is scheduled in early 2017 and will be operational in the second half of that year.
Preparing for RFI test
The “Great Telescope”will soon be taken over by LOFAR
I-LOFAR groundwork
SKA – LFAA / AAVS1
The Low-Frequency Aperture Array (LFAA) element of SKA1-Low is the most visible and in scale the largest component of the telescope: the full realization will consist of 130.000 antennas forming 512 stations. LFAA deals with the design of the antennas, signal transport and the station signal processing. LFAA completed the detailed design of all the component and first prototypes have been tested both in laboratories in Europe but also at the Murchison Radio Observatory, in Western Australia. The ultimate test for the consortium is construction and evaluation of the Aperture Array Verification System 1 (AAVS1), a 400 antenna element system. Late 2016 all components of AAVS1 have been produced and shipped to Western Australia. Early 2017 deployment and test will start.
Besides the realization of AAVS1, the consortium has been busy with the LFAA cost model; what will be needed for the construction of the full SKA1-Low, in terms of hardware expenses but also manpower. Production cost of AAVS1 parts and MWA and LOFAR experience led to a mature cost model, with low contingency and good confidence from the team.
“Initial installation of 96 SKA1-Low antennas”
SKA-CSP
ASTRON, CSIRO and the Auckland University of Technology are working together on the design of the Central Correlator and Beamformer for SKA Low (called Perentie). The collaboration has proven to be highly successful with all parties learning a lot from each other in the process. In 2016, the team presented the system design and the system engineering artefacts to the Delta PDR review panel and successfully achieved the milestone (see picture).
Delta PDR review panel
The first signal processing board prototype has also been completed (see picture below) and the initial tests are highly positive.
The first signal processing board prototype
In the run-up to CDR (to be held in mid-2017) and as a preparation for the construction phase, the team is prototyping the full Gemini line replaceable unit (LRU), which includes a second iteration of the signal processing board, packaging, cooling, as well as firmware and software elements.
ASTRON provides a wide range of resources to the collaboration in the areas of system design, system engineering, firmware, mechanical and thermal engineering, as well as project management.
SKA – SDP
The SKA Science Data Processor (SDP) consortium passed its Delta – Preliminary Design Review (PDR) in May 2016. A relatively mature architecture was reached and discussions with the SKAO led to decisions about SKA Regional Science Centers, clarifying the scope of the SDP. After Delta-PDR the consortium way of working was restructured and moved away from a Waterfall style of working towards a Risk driven, Agile, Sprint based way of working. The SDP Costing was iteratively refined and the Architecture of the SDP further detailed. ASTRON has a broad contribution to SDP and is leading some of the major work areas.
The SDP Consortium at their yearly face-to-face meeting in Malta, 2016.
SKA – MFAA
ASTRON is leading the consortium that develops Mid-Frequency Aperture Arrays (MFAA) for the second phase of the Square Kilometre Array. ASTRON is involved in the system design, the antennas and analog electronics. All this in close cooperation with international partners, industry and the DOME project.
In 2016, the consortium delivered the science requirements and the associated system requirements for a MFAA based on SKA2 telescope, and successfully passed the System Requirements Review. The next step towards SKA2 is the realization of a demonstrator. Such demonstrator is necessary to demonstrate the MFAA technology at station level, but will also be capable of conducting science. To support the ambition to build such a demonstrator in South Africa, together with a group of leading scientists a white paper has been published (https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07917).
In 2016 ASTRON further refined the design several aspects of the MFAA antenna tiles. As a result, the cost of the antenna tile decreased by more than 25% compared to the previous design, the energy consumption decreased by 50%, while the sensitivity of the receivers increased. At the same time the simulation models of the tiles have been improved, resulting in a nearly perfect match between the designed and measured characteristics of the antennas.
Details of the new MFAA antenna design
(Part of the) MFAA team at the design review, with in the background thee 76m Lovell Telescope.
NCLE
The Netherlands China Low frequency Explorer (NCLE), is a radio receiver aimed to be launched mid 2018 as a scientific payload on-board the Chang’e 4 relay satellite (see figure). It will comprise of three monopole antennas of 5 m length connected to a digital receiver, supporting dedicated science modes, implemented in a flexible software-defined radio system. These modes for instance perform fast Fourier transforms to create average radio spectra, allow triggering on transient radio events, or allow to retrieve direction of arrival information using beam-forming or goniopolarimetry techniques. Raw time traces can be stored for ground-based post processing and VLBI. The ASTRON team, responsible for the RF part of the antenna and for the low noise amplifier have made and tested initial designs, and are preparing for the PDR/CDR phase mid 2017. The NCLE scientific payload is developed by Radboud University (PI), ASTRON, and ISIS Innovations in Space, and is supported by ESA PRODEX, the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), and by partners from LESIA, TUDelft, UTwente, and JIVE ERIC.
Impression NCLE antennas on Chang’e 4 relay spacecraft
UAV aided LOFAR antenna measurement campaign
An antenna measurement campaign was conducted in April 2016 at LOFAR station CS302 in collaboration with Italian partners from the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) and the Politecnico di Torino (PT). These measurements support the development of an improved LOFAR beam model and help to develop strategies to support the roll-out, commissioning and characterization of the Low Frequency Aperture Array (LFAA) of the SKA. These measurements were done using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a radio frequency (RF) transmitter developed by our Italian partners for antenna characterization below 500 MHz in the context of the SKA.
During this campaign, the team shown in Figure 1 performed measurements on all three antenna arrays of LOFAR station CS302, i.e., the Low Band Antenna (LBA) inner array, the LBA outer array and the High Band Antenna (HBA) array with several different flight strategies. In one of these flight strategies, the socalled spin flight, the UAV is hovering in a fixed position above the array while spinning around its vertical axis. Figure 2 shows the ouput of the central antenna in the array, which was right below the UAV. The plot clearly shows that the probe antenna on the UAV alternatingly aligns with each of the two dipoles that make a LBA. With such measurements, we can very accurately measure the orientation of the antennas and verify that the antenna can discriminate the two polarizations very well.
In the meantime, we have made significant progress on improving the electromagnetic (EM) model for the LBA, whose predictions are now in good agreement with the measured response. Efforts to make a similar improvement to EM model for the HBA will start in 2017. We also successfully demonstrated our ability to derive the antenna positions from the RF measurements. This could lead to significant cost savings in LFAA as this pre-empts the need to physically determine the position of each antenna one-by-one.
The team that conducted the campaign(front row, then rear row): Fabio Paonessa (CNR), Paolo Maschio (PT), Andrea Lingua (PT), Giuseppe Pupillo (INAF), Menno Norden (ASTRON), Stefan Wijnholds (ASTRON), Giuseppe Virone (CNR), Pietro Bolli (INAF) and Irene Aicardi (PT).
Output of the central LBA during a spin flight.
The UAV in action
Close-up of the UAV
Interview Jasper Annyas & Roberto Pizzo Interview Marco de Vos
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Blogs | Contact Us | Join Our Mailing List | Home
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BLOG: DOJ Wins First FARA Civil Enforcement Case Since 1991
May 8, 2019, www.FARA.us
To view a PDF of this Article, please click here »
On May 6, 2019, the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida ruled in favor of the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) in a proceeding that involved a Florida broadcasting company named RM Broadcasting, which contended it should not be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) as a result of its involvement in the U.S. distribution of the Russian radio channel Sputnik. The Sputnik radio channel is owned and produced by the Russian state-owned media corporation Rossiya Segodnya.
This case is the first civil enforcement case that DOJ has pursued since 1991.
In June 2018, DOJ advised RM Broadcasting that it was required to register under FARA as a foreign agent by virtue of its services for Rossiya Segodnya. RM Broadcasting filed suit, seeking declaratory judgment that it was not required to register under FARA. DOJ, in turn, filed a counterclaim for injunctive relief to require RM Broadcasting to register, laying out its case that Rossiya Segodnya maintained “complete control over the content” of RM Broadcasting’s station through its contract and worked “to advance Russian interests” in the U.S.
The District Court granted DOJ’s motion for judgment on the pleadings, holding that RM Broadcasting was indeed an “agent of a foreign principal” required to register under FARA. In doing so, the Court rejected RM Broadcasting’s claim that it “simply buys and resells radio airtime” and that it did not “broadcast[ ] any radio programs” because that representation conflicted with terms of the company’s Services Agreement, which obligated it to broadcast radio programs without edits and subjected the company to Rossiya Segodnya’s control. As the Court put it, under the contract between the parties, “RM broadcasting is required to do much more than resell radio airtime to Rossiya Segodnya.”
Finally, the Court noted that even if RM Broadcasting had no knowledge of or input in the content of Rossiya Segodnya’s programs, and no intent to advance the interests of Russia, FARA lacks any requirement of such knowledge or intent.
As a result of the court’s ruling, RM Broadcasting will now be required to register under FARA.
In total, the Court’s opinion endorses an exceedingly broad interpretation of FARA that could be useful to DOJ as it begins a new era of stepped-up FARA enforcement.
For more information, please contact Olivia N. Marshall at omarshall@capdale.com or 202.862.5076, or another member of Caplin & Drysdale’s Political Law team or visit our blogsite http://www.fara.us/.
Olivia N. Marshall
Related Practice Area(s)
Political Law
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Islamist Terrorism Remains the World’s Greatest Threat to Peace
After the horrific mass murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was widespread coverage and a torrent of mainstream news networks contemplating the threat of white supremacy.
These conversations, completely reasonable and necessary in the face of violent attacks from a racist gunman, soon began deteriorating into politically motivated and specious claims contending that “white supremacy” had become the predominate terror threat in the world.
Well, the coordinated bomb blasts aimed at Christian worshippers on Easter Sunday, which killed at least 290 people and injured hundreds more, demonstrates the kind of meticulous planning, funding, resources, and support that is still exclusively the domain of radical Islamic terrorism.
It’s not merely that the act was planned to maximize the death toll, but that it is a continuation of long-standing efforts by Islamists to destroy the Christian communities left in Asia.
Those who kill in the name of Islam are part of a worldwide, historic, ideological, and political movement that includes, to various degrees and various reasons, radicalized men and women from both great factions of the faith.
Then again, terrorist groups—as well as their recruitment and propaganda outfits—are often functioning in Islamic regimes, which either actively sustain terror, tolerate these groups, or pay them off to engage in terrorism elsewhere.
The Christians who remain in the Islamic world are often oppressed in other ways. In a number of these nations, publicly praying in any faith but Islam is forbidden and, in many, converting to Christianity is still punishable by death.
“Islamic extremism remains the global, dominant driver of persecution, responsible for initiating oppression and conflict in 35 of the 50 countries on the list,” according to Open Doors, a worldwide Christian group.
The idea that a similar threat exists in the West is risible. There’s not a single Western country that doesn’t afford Muslim citizens the same rights it does as all other citizens. No government on Earth supports white supremacy.
There is no funding infrastructure for those who support white power. There is no Christian or Jewish denomination, or any notable political factions, in those nations that imbue white supremacy with any theological or ideological legitimacy. There is no white supremacist government trying to obtain nuclear weapons, and none sending its terrorists to other countries. In the world’s free nations, where any political party can participate in the process, the power of racist groups is minimal.
Yet the American left continues to downplay the danger, first by arguing that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, and then by lumping every white-skinned person who commits a terrorist act into one imaginary coherent political movement to contrast against it.
It’s true that Americans have been spared much Islamic terror since 2002—a year that, curiously, nearly every graph media uses to measure domestic terrorism starts—but only because we’ve spent billions of dollars each year and immense resources, both in lives and treasure, keeping it out of the country and fighting it abroad.
Another reason the majority of Americans might not comprehend Islamic radicalism’s reach is the skewed intensity of the media coverage. Political correctness and a chilling fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” makes it difficult to honestly report on terrorism around the world.
In addition to the massacre this Easter in Sri Lanka, at least 200 Christian civilians have been murdered in Africa by Islamic militants thus far in 2019—many of them killed by machete, some by bombings. Many more Christians have been murdered during the past calendar year.
In November 2018, for example, 42 people were slaughtered in an attack on a Catholic mission in the Central African Republic. In October, 55 Christians were murdered by a group of Islamists in Nigeria. Another 29 were killed when 10 churches were burned down in Ethiopia last summer. Another seven Coptic Christians were gunned down in Egypt—and others spared only because of the good work of police.
There are pockets of racists in the world, and individuals who engage in terrible acts of violence against innocent people. These are dangerous men, capable of doing tremendous damage. But no group threatens global peace the same way that political Islam does. None has its reach or material and theological support. None has created more mayhem and death in the world since the end of the Cold War. The Sri Lankan massacre is just another harrowing reminder.
source: dailysignal, copyright creators.com
Socialism destroyed oil rich Venezuela in just two decades
Obama administration most 'corrupt' since Nixon
US VP Pence meets in Colombia to deal with Venezuela crisis
Red Cross aid to Venezuela to triple as Maduro stance softens
Live violent clashes at Venezuela border as standoff over humanitarian aid intensifies
What makes a Conservative
Democrats took $60,000 junket to attend Beyonce concert in South Africa
Venezuela unveils anti-US coalition at UN
Trump has more women as top advisers than Obama, Bush, or Clinton
A woman's burden in war-torn South Sudan
Trump deserves our thanks for migrant agreement with Mexico
Maduro mocks Trump, opposition leader Guaido; vows to never surrender
Taxpayer-Funded PBS Promotes Far-Left Agenda to Kids
Jair Bolsonaro is sometimes called "the Trump of the tropics"
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Harley wins College of LAS Undergraduate Teaching Award
Congratulations to Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering professor Brendan Harley for winning a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 2017-2018 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Harley earned the award for his enthusiasm and clarity in the classroom, including his unique “journal club lectures,” a style of teaching that involves the use of current journal articles to build fundamental understanding of research techniques and current research in the field.
Prof. Brendan Harley
“As a professor I take a lot of pride in not only the research that my laboratory pursues, but also in my role as a teacher,” Harley said. “We strive to create an instructional program on this campus that inspires and trains future generations of thinkers and leaders across a wide range of disciplines. So I am very honored to be recognized with this group of exceptional teachers.”
Harley is a Robert W. Schaefer Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He also is a research theme leader in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Illinois in 2008. He received his SB from Harvard University in 2000 and SM/ScD from MIT in 2002 and 2006.
Harley, along with other recipients of the college’s annual teaching and advising awards will be recognized at a ceremony on April 18.
“We’re extremely proud to honor this outstanding group of educators and advisors,” said Feng Sheng Hu, Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of LAS. “There is no higher calling in the college than the enlightenment of our students, and this year’s awardees have carried out that principle in remarkable ways.”
In addition to Harley, the LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching is being awarded to Robert Rushing, professor of French and Italian and comparative and world literature; Gisela Sin, professor of political science; and Renée Trilling, professor of English. The LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Instructional Staff is being awarded to Jeffrey Frame, teaching assistant professor in atmospheric sciences. The LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Graduate Teaching Assistants is being awarded to Bryan Abendschein, Department of Communication; Kylee Britzman, Department of Political Science; Valerie O’Brien, Department of English; Michael Perino, Department of Psychology; Nima Rasekh, Department of Mathematics; and Daniel Storage, Department of Psychology. The LAS and Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising is being awarded to Pamela Greer, associate director of the LAS Student Academic Affairs Office.
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You are here: Home / Archives for Social Sciences / Religion
Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro on The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging
May 7, 2019 by PUP Author
Which countries grow faster economically—those with strong beliefs in heaven and hell or those with weak beliefs in them? Does religious participation matter? Why do some countries experience secularization while others are religiously vibrant? In The Wealth of Religions, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro draw on their long record of pioneering research to examine these and many other aspects of the economics of religion. Places with firm beliefs in heaven and hell measured relative to the time spent in religious activities tend to be more productive and experience faster growth. Going further, there are two directions of causation: religiosity influences economic performance and economic development affects religiosity. Dimensions of economic development—such as urbanization, education, health, and fertility—matter too, interacting differently with religiosity. State regulation and subsidization of religion also play a role. Timely and incisive, The Wealth of Religions provides fresh insights into the vital interplay between religion, markets, and economic development.
How did you come to write the book?
Robert is an economist and Rachel is a moral philosopher. In thinking about religion, we took as our starting point the work of Adam Smith, the founder of economics, who believed that moral values and organized religion were key forces in political economy and society. Nevertheless, social scientists—particularly economists and political scientists—have tended to underestimate the importance of religion, particularly the role of beliefs and values. We think that Adam Smith was right. Beliefs and religiosity are central determinants of which societies prosper and which deteriorate.
What does your book bring to the conversation on the economics of religion that hasn’t been discussed before?
Another contribution to the study of religion is bringing together the ideas of Adam Smith with those of the German sociologist Max Weber. Religious beliefs and values motivate people to behave in certain ways. This view, as we discuss in our book, is integral to forms of Protestantism with its emphasis on unmediated, individual responsibility for one’s salvation. We bring a quantitative approach to the relationship between beliefs, values, and economic behavior. In so doing, we examine the role of religious beliefs across world religions and countries. Our research has an international perspective with a focus on believing and belonging in the major religions of the world.
We focus on the role of religious beliefs and belonging to organized religions in the economic, political, and social development of nations and individuals. We are filling an important gap in the literature on religion by providing an international perspective. Much of the work in the sociology of religion is focused on local or regional patterns of religiosity. The sociology of religion has a strong focus on the United States, centering research around assumptions about religious patterns and organizations in the United States. In our research, we apply economic analysis to world religions and across countries.
How does religion fit into the story of developing nations? Does religious fervor help or hinder efforts to increase economic development?
To better understand the relationship between religion and economic growth, we need to look at a two-way causation. Religiosity has a two-way interaction with political economy. With religion viewed as the dependent variable, a central question is how economic development and political institutions affect religious participation and beliefs. There is a clear overall pattern whereby economic development associates with decreasing religiosity. However, there is no evidence that greater education diminishes religious beliefs.
Looking at the other direction of causation with religion as the independent variable, we study the effects of religion on economic, social, and political behavior. A key issue is how religiousness affects individual traits such as diligence, honesty, thrift, and integrity, thereby influencing productivity and economic performance. Another channel involves religion’s effects on literacy and education (human capital) more broadly. For example, there is evidence that Protestantism is more favorable than Catholicism as an influence on education and work ethic.
We find that social capital and cultural aspects of religion—communal services, rituals, religious schools—are significant mainly to the extent that they influence beliefs and, hence, behavior. For given beliefs, more time spent on communal activities would tend to be an economic drag for the believer as well as the entire community. Moreover, the costs of formal religion include the time spent by adherents and religious officials on religious activities. In addition, time and money are expended on buildings, sacred objects, and so on. Our general view, based on empirical evidence, is that believing relative to belonging (attending) is the main channel through which religion matters for economic and other social outcomes.
Can religion help to explain why some nations develop faster than others?
We found evidence that economic growth was stimulated when religious beliefs were high compared to religious participation. This pattern applied, for example, to Japan and parts of Western Europe. An overall expansion of religiousness—greater beliefs accompanied by the typically associated attendance at formal religious services—was not strongly related to growth. Religiously sponsored laws and regulations hindered economic growth in some places, notably in Muslim countries, which typically did not have favorable institutions with respect to corporations, credit markets and insurance, and inheritance.
How did the conflict between Protestantism and the Catholic Church affect economic development in early modern Europe? Do we still see the impact of that today?
As Max Weber argued, the rise of Protestantism beginning with the Reformation in the 1500s enhanced work ethic and the accumulation of human capital and, thereby, contributed to the industrial revolution. We found evidence that this mechanism still operated in Western Europe in the modern era.
Competition increases the quality of services provided by different religions. The introduction of Protestantism into Western Europe challenged the monopolistic status of the Roman Catholic Church, pressuring that organization to respond in two ways. First, by lowering the nature and pricing of religious goods, the Catholic Church sought to retain believers. Second, the Catholic Church promoted those aspects of its theology that distinguished it from other religions.
We discuss in our book how the beatification of saints is a unique mechanism of the Catholic Church. With the rise of Evangelical faiths, religious competition became particularly strong in Latin America, vernacularly referred to as “The Catholic continent,” where Catholicism had enjoyed a monopoly since the region was colonized by Spain in the 1400s. Today, in regions of the world where competition with types of Protestantism is increasing, the beatification of local saints revives religious fervor and deters adherents from converting to types of Protestantism.
Is religious fervor impacted by fluctuations in the economy? If so, how?
There is evidence that adverse economic shocks and natural disasters tend to increase the demand for religion. This pattern has been observed, for example, for earthquakes in Italy, flood-related declines in agricultural harvests in Egypt, declines in incomes during the Asian Financial crisis, and adverse effects from a poorly designed land reform in Indonesia. In the other direction, increased economic development—particularly movements away from agriculture and toward urbanization—tend to lower the demand for religion. However, it is wrong to conclude that sustained economic growth causes religion to disappear.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book?
We hope our readers will appreciate the possibilities of interdisciplinary research on a variety of religion topics. The application of economic ideas to religion broadens our understanding of ways in which beliefs and practices influence individual and group behavior.
We find that social capital and cultural aspects of religion—communal services, rituals, religious schools—are significant mainly to the extent that they influence beliefs and, hence, behavior. For given beliefs, more time spent on communal activities tend to be an economic drag for the believer as well as the entire community. The costs of formal religion include the time spent by adherents and religious officials on religious activities and the time and money expended on buildings, sacred objects, and so on. Our general view, based on empirical evidence, is that believing relative to belonging (attending) is the main channel through which religion matters for economic and other social outcomes.
Rachel M. McCleary is lecturer in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. Her books include The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion. Robert J. Barro is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard. His books include Education Matters: Global Schooling Gains from the 19th to the 21st Century and Economic Growth. They both live in Massachusetts.
Filed Under: Author Interviews, Economics, Religion Tagged With: economics, religion
James J. O’Donnell on The War for Gaul
April 25, 2019 by PUP Author
Imagine a book about an unnecessary war written by the ruthless general of an occupying army—a vivid and dramatic propaganda piece that forces the reader to identify with the conquerors and that is designed, like the war itself, to fuel the limitless political ambitions of the author. Could such a campaign autobiography ever be a great work of literature—perhaps even one of the greatest? It would be easy to think not, but such a book exists—and it helped transform Julius Caesar from a politician on the make into the Caesar of legend. This remarkable new translation of Caesar’s famous but underappreciated War for Gaul captures, like never before in English, the gripping and powerfully concise style of the future emperor’s dispatches from the front lines in what are today France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.
Why did you want to translate Caesar?
Caesar’s War on Gaul is the very best book ever written by a truly bad man who sets out to tell us with absolutely no remorse just how bad he’s been. So first we get the cognitive dissonance of this utterly self-assured voice telling us horrible things. (Best estimate is that about a million people died in that war, a war that didn’t need to happen.) But it’s also just a great book— a gripping yarn with thrills, chills, and adventure, written in a taut, vivid style. Hemingway only wished he could write this way. So I wanted to see how I could capture both the atrocity and the elegance at the same time.
Is there anything else like Caesar in our “canons” of literature?
I can’t think of anything—perhaps the steamy epistolary fiction of Dangerous Liaisons, that needed Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer to cast the film. No room for women in Caesar’s cast, but there’s got to be a part for John Malkovich in here somewhere—and maybe Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel and John Goodman. When Hollywood calls, I’m ready to pitch a great movie!
Your translation comes with year-by-year introductions for each part of the story. How do those work?
If you just read Caesar’s words, you get a story of soldiers marching around clobbering people. Really good soldiers, clobbering a lot of people with plenty of panache, no question. But what was really going on? Caesar spent those nine years up in Gaul because he was a politician on the make. He needed to be a great conqueror, he needed people to know he was a great conqueror—so he wrote the book. But he also needed money, lots and lots of money, so plundering and enslaving masses of people were big on his mind—but he plays that side of things down. And he also needed to stay in touch with politics back in Rome and needed the reports of what he was doing to land in Rome just when he needed them to spin his narrative and to keep his name and fame alive. My introductions and notes tell you all the things Caesar didn’t tell you but that everybody around him and everybody back at Rome knew. What was he really up to? I spill the beans.
So what’s in it for you? Most people don’t think of translating Latin as a job they’d want!
Different strokes for different folks. From some time in college, I’ve just known that reading Latin makes my head feel good in ways I can’t describe. If you see me in the window seat of a plane muttering to myself, I’m probably subvocalizing whatever Latin book I have with me, just because it feels so good to do that. And Caesar has been one of the half dozen or so Latin books that have always done that for me the best.
Ah, so what other Latin writers do you find yourself returning to over and over again?
It’s a very mixed bag. Nobody in the ancient world hated Caesar so much as the poet Lucan a hundred years later, who wrote an astonishingly gory epic about Caesar’s civil war, then committed suicide when he got caught in a plot against Nero. It’s a real leap from there to Augustine’s Confessions or Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but in ways I can’t really explain those books always work for me as well, over and over again for decades. They work the way the last page of Joyce’s “The Dead” can work—still brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. Some books are just magical for some readers and we should cherish that. If I can make Caesar a little big magical for readers of this book, I’m happy.
So, which book would you most like to have written yourself? Caesar’s?
No! I’m actually a nice guy. And I wouldn’t last a week in Caesar’s army. A book I go back to over and over is called Beyond a Boundary by the Trinidad-born cricket journalist, professional rabble-rouser, and historian C.L.R. James, who died at great age in 1989. He was an Afro-Trinidadian brought up to be a citizen of the British empire, acutely aware of both his British-ness by virtue of his culture and education and of his exclusion from British-ness by virtue of his race and colonial subjection. So he wrote a book about the ultimate imperialist game, cricket — and it was a combination of memoir, social history, love song (for his love of cricket in spite of everything), and literary triumph. Think of a skinny little black kid growing up in Trinidad before the first world war, dividing his time passionately between the English game and the Englishman’s literature. Vanity Fair was the book he read over and over and over again, the way I remember reading Life on the Mississippi in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Anyway, it’s a book that brings together things intensely personal for him, but in a way that opens up the whole set of cultures he grew up and lived in and leaves the reader thinking about the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion, of loyalty and exclusion. He’s somebody able to love the past and cherish an inheritance and at the same time give himself fiercely to the struggle to transcend that past for a more just and inclusive way of seeing and living. That one makes my head feel pretty good too.
James J. O’Donnell is professor of history, philosophy, and religious studies and University Librarian at Arizona State University. His books include Pagans, The Ruin of the Roman Empire, and Augustine: A New Biogr
Filed Under: Author Interviews, History, Religion Tagged With: history, Latin writers, Philosophy, religion
Christian Sahner: Islam spread through the Christian world via the bedroom
March 7, 2019 by PUP Author
There are few transformations in world history more profound than the conversion of the peoples of the Middle East to Islam. Starting in the early Middle Ages, the process stretched across centuries and was influenced by factors as varied as conquest, diplomacy, conviction, self-interest and coercion. There is one factor, however, that is largely forgotten but which played a fundamental role in the emergence of a distinctively Islamic society: mixed unions between Muslims and non-Muslims.
For much of the early Islamic period, the mingling of Muslims and non-Muslims was largely predicated on a basic imbalance of power: Muslims formed an elite ruling minority, which tended to exploit the resources of the conquered peoples – reproductive and otherwise – to grow in size and put down roots within local populations. Seen in this light, forced conversion was far less a factor in long-term religious change than practices such as intermarriage and concubinage.
The rules governing religiously mixed families crystallised fairly early, at least on the Muslim side. The Quran allows Muslim men to marry up to four women, including ‘People of the Book’, that is, Jews and Christians. Muslim women, however, were not permitted to marry non-Muslim men and, judging from the historical evidence, this prohibition seems to have stuck. Underlying the injunction was the understanding that marriage was a form of female enslavement: if a woman was bound to her husband as a slave is to her master, she could not be subordinate to an infidel.
Outside of marriage, the conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries saw massive numbers of slaves captured across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Female slaves of non-Muslim origin, at least, were often pressed into the sexual service of their Muslim masters, and many of these relationships produced children.
Since Muslim men were free to keep as many slaves as they wished, sex with Jewish and Christian women was considered licit, while sex with Zoroastrians and others outside the ‘People of the Book’ was technically forbidden. After all, they were regarded as pagans, lacking a valid divine scripture that was equivalent to the Torah or the Gospel. But since so many slaves in the early period came from these ‘forbidden’ communities, Muslim jurists developed convenient workarounds. Some writers of the ninth century, for example, argued that Zoroastrian women could be induced or even forced to convert, and thus become available for sex.
Whether issued via marriage or slavery, the children of religiously mixed unions were automatically considered Muslims. Sometimes Jewish or Christian men converted after already having started families: if their conversions occurred before their children attained the age of legal majority – seven or 10, depending on the school of Islamic law – they had to follow their fathers’ faith. If the conversions occurred after, the children were free to choose. Even as fathers and children changed religion, mothers could continue as Jews and Christians, as was their right under Sharia law.
Mixed marriage and concubinage allowed Muslims – who constituted a tiny percentage of the population at the start of Islamic history – to quickly integrate with their subjects, legitimising their rule over newly conquered territories, and helping them grow in number. It also ensured that non-Muslim religions would quickly disappear from family trees. Indeed, given the rules governing the religious identity of children, mixed kinship groups probably lasted no longer than a generation or two. It was precisely this prospect of disappearing that prompted non-Muslim leaders – Jewish rabbis, Christian bishops and Zoroastrian priests – to inveigh against mixed marriage and codify laws aimed at discouraging it. Because Muslims were members of the elite, who enjoyed greater access to economic resources than non-Muslims, their fertility rates were probably higher.
Of course, theory and reality did not always line up, and religiously mixed families sometimes flouted the rules set by jurists. One of the richest bodies of evidence for such families are the biographies of Christian martyrs from the early Islamic period, a little-known group who constitute the subject of my book, Christian Martyrs under Islam (2018). Many of these martyrs were executed for crimes such as apostasy and blasphemy, and not a small number of them came from religiously mixed unions.
A good example is Bacchus, a martyr killed in Palestine in 786 – about 150 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Bacchus, whose biography was recorded in Greek, was born into a Christian family, but his father at some point converted to Islam, thereby changing his children’s status, too. This greatly distressed Bacchus’s mother, who prayed for her husband’s return, and in the meantime, seems to have exposed her Muslim children to Christian practices. Eventually, the father died, freeing Bacchus to become a Christian. He was then baptised and tonsured as a monk, enraging certain Muslim relatives who had him arrested and killed.
Similar examples come from Córdoba, the capital of Islamic Spain, where a group of 48 Christians were martyred between 850 and 859, and commemorated in a corpus of Latin texts. Several of the Córdoba martyrs were born into religiously mixed families, but with an interesting twist: a number of them lived publicly as Muslims but practised Christianity in secret. In most instances, this seems to have been done without the knowledge of their Muslim fathers, but in one unique case of two sisters, it allegedly occurred with the father’s consent. The idea that one would have a public legal identity as a Muslim but a private spiritual identity as a Christian produced a unique subculture of ‘crypto-Christianity’ in Córdoba. This seems to have spanned generations, fuelled by the tendency of some ‘crypto-Christians’ to seek out and marry others like them.
In the modern Middle East, intermarriage has become uncommon. One reason for this is the long-term success of Islamisation, such that there are simply fewer Jews and Christians around to marry. Another reason is that those Jewish and Christian communities that do exist today have survived partly by living in homogeneous environments without Muslims, or by establishing communal norms that strongly penalise marrying out. In contrast to today’s world, where the frontiers between communities can be sealed, the medieval Middle East was a world of surprisingly porous borders, especially when it came to the bedroom.
Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World by Christian C Sahner is published via Princeton University Press.
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Filed Under: Aeon Magazine, Middle Eastern Studies, Religion Tagged With: Christianity, Islam, middle eastern studies, religion
Margaret C. Jacob on The Secular Enlightenment
February 19, 2019 by PUP Author
The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, this book demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.
What accounts for the fact that ordinary people began to see the world on its own terms, rather than through the prism of religion, during the 18th century?
So many factors were present but I would highlight a few: the realization that there existed whole continents where the Christian God was unknown; the growing realization that Europeans had persecuted and enslaved non-Europeans often in the service of religion. The behavior of the clergy at home was one of the main themes in the new pornography; and of course religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants played into skepticism about all the claims of religion. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the ensuing persecution of French Protestants put the issue of religion, and how its representatives treated others, on the European wide agenda. This was compounded by the thousands of Protestant refugees to be found by 1700 in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, etc. They were articulate and took to the printing presses to alert the world of the injustices perpetrated by the French king and clergy.
What does your book bring to the conversation of secularization during the Enlightenment that hasn’t appeared before?
The book draws upon new sources, many of them found only in manuscript form. Such sources often reveal private thoughts and struggles about the veracity of religion or expressions of doubt and clerical hostility. It also crosses national boundaries, and focuses on the main urban centers in Germany, Italy and of course France, the Dutch Republic and Britain.
How common was it for ordinary people to read the works of Enlightenment thinkers during the 18thcentury?
It depends upon what we mean by ordinary. Anyone fully literate had access to the ideas found in the new journals or the writings of the philosophes. Note also that in France, for example, local clergy were advised in detail what heretical books contained so as better to refute them. From the pulpits of London (and the Boyle Lectures) to the French provinces any listener could hear about the details of the latest heresy.
Why have the voices of people you shed light on in the book been largely silent up to now?
So much attention has been given to the major thinkers from Locke and Newton to Adam Smith and Rousseau that lesser folk, often their followers, do not receive attention. Also digging in archives means a lot of travel to places often off the beaten track. How many books access archives in Leiden or Strasbourg or Birmingham? However, I do not neglect the major thinkers.
How did the religious establishment of the 18th century react to this shift?
Not as many people were burned at the stake or tortured as in previous centuries but there are big exceptions: the wife of a Dutch pastor and school teacher, a heretic, who went mad while locked away in prison; the book seller from Strasbourg who went to Paris in search of bad or forbidden books and spent over two years in the Bastille; the Italian heretic forced to flee to London where, impoverished, he continued to publish.
Do we see any attempts at justification on the part of groups or individuals for their decreasing attention to religious matters?
The literature of heresy consistently mocked the pretensions of the clergy and courts; their perceived hypocrisy was one good reason to avoid religion altogether. Others, like the busy industrialists in northern England, could plea the pressure of work or family obligations, so too could travelers and itinerants.
Was there anything that surprised you when you were researching for this book?
Yes, how many people had been left out of Enlightenment history; how incredibly thorough the French police were at spying and reporting on heretical behavior—or what they thought was heretical. Similarly, how coteries could remain relatively underground and then circulate some of the most virulent heresies of the age, for example, the group that brought out the Treatise on the Three Impostors. It argued that Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed had been the three. All involved managed to die in their beds.
Antidotes to the claims made by biased contemporary clergy; the role of deism and freethinking for American philosophes like Jefferson and Franklin; and finally, how widespread enlightened ideas were by 1750.
Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. She lives in Los Angeles.
Filed Under: Author Interviews, European History, History, Philosophy, Religion Tagged With: enlightenment, religion, secularization
Browse our Jewish Studies 2019 Catalog
December 13, 2018 by Nathalie Levine
Our new Jewish Studies catalog includes a new exploration of the ancient story of Masada, an engaging firsthand portrait of American Judaism today, and a gripping revisionist history that shows how ordinary Italians played a central role in the genocide of Italian Jews during the Second World War.
If you’re attending the Association for Jewish Studies meeting in Boston this weekend, you can stop by Booth 206 to check out our Jewish studies titles!
Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children—the last holdouts of the revolt against Rome following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple—reportedly took their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman army. This dramatic event, which took place on top of Masada, a barren and windswept mountain overlooking the Dead Sea, spawned a powerful story of Jewish resistance that came to symbolize the embattled modern State of Israel. In Masada, archaeologist Jodi Magness explains what happened there, how we know it, and how recent developments might change understandings of the story.
American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. Like other religions in the United States, it has witnessed a decline in the number of participants over the past forty years, and many who remain active struggle to reconcile their hallowed traditions with new perspectives—from feminism and the LGBTQ movement to “do-it-yourself religion” and personally defined spirituality. Taking a fresh look at American Judaism today, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. The New American Judaism is a quintessentially American story of rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation.
In this gripping revisionist history of Italy’s role in the Holocaust, Simon Levis Sullam presents an unforgettable account of how ordinary Italians actively participated in the deportation of Italy’s Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Mussolini’s collaborationist republic was under German occupation. While most historians have long described Italians as relatively protective of Jews during this time, The Italian Executioners tells a very different story, recounting in vivid detail the shocking events of a period in which Italians set in motion almost half the arrests that sent their Jewish compatriots to Auschwitz.
Filed Under: Jewish Studies, New Catalog, Religion Tagged With: catalog, Italian Executioners, jewish studies, Masada, New American Judaism
Ethan Shagan on The Birth of Modern Belief
December 11, 2018 by PUP Author
This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. Brilliantly illuminating, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.
What led you to write this book?
Good works of history often begin with a chance discovery that sticks like a splinter in the historian’s mind: something weird or surprising in the historical record that demands an explanation. In this case, that oddity was something I found in Martin Luther’s collected writings: his claim that most people do not believe that God exists. This struck me as utterly outlandish. Besides the fact that more or less everyone in sixteenth-century Europe believed in God, Luther also wrote elsewhere that atheism was virtually impossible because knowledge of God is imprinted on all human souls. So what on earth was going on? Upon further research, I found other versions of this same bizarre claim popping up elsewhere in the sixteenth century. John Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion that anyone who follows their own passions in defiance of heavenly judgment “denies that there is a God”—the translator of the modern English edition changed this passage to “virtually denies that there is a God,” presumably because he thought the original must have been some sort of mistake. The radical spiritualist Sebastian Franck claimed, far more drastically, that “there is not a single believer on earth!” These remarkable and unexpected ideas were not written in obscure places, nor were they written by unknown people. So why had no historian ever written about them before?
These discoveries set me on a journey that has lasted seven years. I started with the intuition that “belief” itself had changed its meaning over time. Thus, for instance, Luther could say that everyone knows God exists, but he could still argue that most people do not believe God exists, because he took “belief” to be a more difficult condition. But from there I had to figure out what preexisting, medieval understandings of belief Luther was rejecting. Then I had to figure out how the different factions in the Reformation interpreted belief. And then, most importantly, I set myself the task of figuring out how a modern understanding of “belief” emerged. Hence this became a book about the birth of modern belief: a whole new way of imagining the relationship between religion and other kinds of knowledge, which we take to be absolutely timeless and natural but was in fact an invention of the seventeenth century and a touchstone of the Enlightenment.
Can you explain a bit about the book’s argument? What do you mean by a modern category of belief?
Belief has a history; the concept changes over time. We take it for granted that “belief” means private judgment or opinion. From that assumption, which we assume is timeless but is in fact profoundly modern, lots of other conclusions follow which seem equally unquestionable. For example, if belief is private judgment, then our beliefs might change over time in light of new evidence or further reflection. Likewise, if belief is opinion, then our belief on any particular issue might be probable rather than absolute: we might reasonably say we believe something if we think it’s likely, even if we’re uncertain. Most importantly, if belief is private judgment, then I might believe a religious doctrine in more or less the same sense that I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or that our sun is part of the Milky Way galaxy.
None of this would have been taken for granted in the Western tradition before the seventeenth century, and indeed a great deal of intellectual energy was poured into denying that any of it was true. Of course, people sometimes used the verb “believe” (credo in Latin, glauben in German, etc.) in a colloquial way—“I believe this peach is ripe,” or “I believe my husband loves me”—but a vast range of theology and philosophy was devoted to the proposition that this was totally different from belief in its proper, religious sense. To believe required an absolute, certain conviction, guaranteed to be true by reliable authority. Anything lesser or different could easily be denounced as unbelief, a failure of the mind and soul; anyone who believed wrongly, or insufficiently, or for the wrong reasons, or in the wrong way, might be taken not to believe at all. So my book is a history of how belief was freed from these constraints, creating the conditions in which religion could flourish in a secular age, but only at the cost of relinquishing the special status religion had previously enjoyed.
It seems intuitive that modern belief formed as a reaction against the Church, but how was it also a reaction against Luther and Calvinism?
Lots of people think that the Reformation produced religious liberty, because in the Reformation individuals—like Luther purportedly saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other”—insisted upon their own conscientious right to believe differently from the Roman Catholic Church. But this is quite wrong. Luther and his allies did indeed insist that their own beliefs were genuine, and that their own consciences were inviolable. But in the very act of making this claim for themselves, they insisted that all other beliefs were not simply false, they were not even beliefs at all. When early modern Protestants claimed the right to believe as they would, they were creating a new and exclusive category of belief to which others did not have access. So the Reformation did not inaugurate modern belief. Instead it produced a new kind of authoritarianism: whereas Catholics disciplined people to believe, Protestants accepted that belief was rare, and instead disciplined unbelievers. The reaction against these twin pillars of orthodoxy thus came from dissidents within both traditions. Modern belief emerged in fits and starts, not as a revolution against Christianity, but as a revolution from within Christianity by mutineers whose strained relationship to orthodoxy necessitated a more porous understand of belief.
How does the modern idea of belief travel through later intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment? Did it undergo changes there as well?
This is really a book about the Enlightenment, as much or more than it’s a book about the Reformation, because it was in the Enlightenment that modern belief truly emerged as a powerful force in the world. But the Enlightenment you’ll find in these pages may not be the one you expect.
First, it is an Enlightenment that is inclusive of religion rather than against religion. I do not deny, of course, that there was a “radical Enlightenment” which attempted, often quite explicitly, to undermine the claims of organized Christianity. But by far the more significant project of the Enlightenment was to reestablish religion on a new basis, to render it not only compatible with reason but a partner in the task of criticism which was at the heart of eighteenth-century ideas. The Enlightenment thus pioneered a question which we take for granted today, but which had received remarkably little attention previously: on what grounds should I believe? There were many different answers in the Enlightenment—as there remain today—but the task of Enlightenment religion was to tear down the medieval architecture of the mind which had strictly separated belief, knowledge, and opinion, and had thus made the question itself virtually meaningless. Enlightenment Christianity established what the Reformation had not: the sovereignty of the believing subject.
Second, my Enlightenment is not about the triumph of reason, but rather the triumph of opinion. Modern critics of the Enlightenment, on both the Left and the Right, often denigrate Enlightenment reason—and not without reason, if you’ll pardon the pun—as a false universal which allowed a new orthodoxy to establish itself as the natural frame of all argument rather than a peculiar argument in its own right. But this understanding of the Enlightenment, which takes Immanuel Kant as its avatar, misses huge swathes of late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century thought which instead privileged opinion, a kind of judgment that was particular rather than universal. In this book, I want to resuscitate an Enlightenment that privileged autonomous judgment rather than judgment constrained by someone else’s reason, and thus led to new kinds of spiritualism as much as it led to new kinds of scientism. At its worst, this modern spirit of autonomy produces the world of “alternative facts” and “fake news;” but at its best, it produces the conditions of freedom that allow for peace in a diverse society.
What is the relationship between the history of belief and secularization?
Every page of this book is engaged at least obliquely with the secularization question, but one of my key points is that secularization is the wrong question.
Secularization assumes that the crucial development in modernity is the creation of spaces outside or apart from religion; in modernity, this argument goes, religion has been relegated to a separate, private sphere. But by contrast, what I find is that modernity’s encounter with religion is not about segregating belief from the world, but rather about the promiscuous opening of belief to the world. Belief becomes, in modernity, not the boundary separating religious claims from other kinds of knowledge, but rather the least common denominator of all knowledge. Here my favorite example is the claim of many modern Christians that scientific knowledge—like the theory of evolution, for instance—is just another form of belief. This claim would have been literally nonsensical before the seventeenth century, because the whole point of belief was to preserve a special prestige for Christianity: science was a different beast altogether, belonging to different mental faculties and defended in different ways. The fact that scientific theories can now be understood as beliefs suggests that instead of thinking about the rise of a modern secular, we instead need to think about what happened when the walls separating religious belief from other kinds of knowledge-claims were breached.
That belief has proliferated rather than waned in modernity, but only because the definition of belief has changed in our society to make it compatible with diversity, democracy, and freedom of thought. The old world of belief—where it was structured by authority, and where it functioned as an axis of exclusion to preserve orthodoxy—is dead and buried, and we should be thankful for its demise rather than nostalgic for the oppressive unity it once provided.
Ethan H. Shagan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England and Popular Politics and the English Reformation. He lives in Orinda, California.
Filed Under: Author Interviews, European History, History, Humanities, Religion Tagged With: belief, catholic church, catholicism, faith, Protestant Reformation, religion
Browse our Religion 2019 Catalog
November 15, 2018 by Nathalie Levine
Our new Religion catalog includes a timely defense of religious diversity and its centrality to American identity; a biography of the New Testament’s most mystifying and incendiary book; and a comprehensive history of the changing, complex, and contradictory visions of Muhammad in Western history.
If you’re attending the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Denver this weekend, stop by Booth 630 to browse our full range of religion titles!
America is the most religiously devout country in the Western world and the most religiously diverse nation on the planet. In today’s volatile climate of religious conflict, prejudice, and distrust, how do we affirm the principle that the American promise is deeply intertwined with how each of us engages with people of different faiths and beliefs? In Out of Many Faiths, Eboo Patel, former faith adviser to Barack Obama, shows how America’s promise is the guarantee of equal rights and dignity for all, and how that promise is the foundation of America’s unrivaled strength as a nation.
Few biblical books have been as revered and reviled as Revelation. Many hail it as the pinnacle of prophetic vision, the cornerstone of the biblical canon, and, for those with eyes to see, the key to understanding the past, present, and future. Others denounce it as the work of a disturbed individual whose horrific dreams of inhumane violence should never have been allowed into the Bible. Timothy Beal provides a concise cultural history of Revelation and the apocalyptic imaginations it has fueled. The Book of Revelation traces how Revelation continues to inspire new diagrams of history, new fantasies of rapture, and new nightmares of being left behind.
In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.
Filed Under: New Catalog, Religion Tagged With: Book of Revelation, catalog, Faces of Muhammad, Out of Many Faiths, religion
Browse our Middle Eastern Studies 2019 Catalog
Our new Middle Eastern Studies catalog includes a groundbreaking history showing how Egyptian-Israeli peace ensured lasting Palestinian statelessness; a definitive political picture of the Islamic Republic of Iran; an exploration of frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality and politics; and a bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story.
If you’re attending the Middle East Studies Association meeting in San Antonio this week, visit the PUP table to see our full range of Middle Eastern studies titles.
How and why Palestinian statelessness persists are the central questions of Seth Anziska’s groundbreaking book, which explores the complex legacy of the Camp David Accords. Combining astute political analysis, extensive original research, and interviews with diplomats, military veterans, and communal leaders, Preventing Palestine offers a bold new interpretation of a highly charged struggle for self-determination.
When Iranians overthrew their monarchy, rejecting a pro-Western shah in favor of an Islamic regime, many observers predicted that revolutionary turmoil would paralyze the country for decades to come. Yet forty years after the 1978–79 revolution, Iran has emerged as a critical player in the Middle East and the wider world. In Iran Rising, renowned Iran specialist Amin Saikal describes how the country has managed to survive despite ongoing domestic struggles, Western sanctions, and countless other serious challenges.
Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail occult practices and appeals to saintly powers as “superstitious,” instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for experimental engagement with the immaterial realm. The Iranian Metaphysicals shows that metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran.
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. The Making of the Medieval Middle East recasts these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Filed Under: Anthropology, History, Middle Eastern Studies, New Catalog, Political Science, Politics, Religion Tagged With: catalog, Iran Rising, Iranian Metaphysicals, Making of the Medieval Middle East, middle eastern studies, Preventing Palestine
How Did the Ba’al Shem Tov Observe the Days of Awe?
September 17, 2018 by Nathalie Levine
Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, also called the Besht, is known as the legendary founder of the Jewish movement of Hasidism. During his lifetime, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Besht and his followers practiced a mystical, pietistic Judaism. Hasidism: A New History, by David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodziński, pieces together what is known about the Besht’s life and spiritual practices in order to examine his role in the development of what became Hasidism.
Like other holy men known as ba’alei shem, or masters of the name, the Besht was a shaman who used practical applications of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, to communicate with the divine, perform healing acts on earth. He tried to use his ability to communicate with heavenly powers to avert disaster for his community—not just the Jews in his own area, but the Jewish people everywhere. On rare occasions, he visited heaven in what was called an aliyat neshamah, or “ascent of the soul.” These events tended to occur during the High Holidays, also known as the Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
The Besht claimed that on Rosh Hashanah in two different years he ascended to heaven. During each ascent, he learned of an impending catastrophe that would befall the Jewish community, and attempted to avert it.
For on Rosh Hashanah 5507 [1746] I performed an adjuration for the ascent of the soul, as you know, and I saw wondrous things in a vision, for the evil side ascended to accuse with great, unparalleled joy and performed his acts—persecutions entailing forced conversion—on several souls so they would meet violent deaths. I was horrified and I literally put my life in jeopardy and asked my teacher and rabbi [Ahiah the Shilonite (I Kings 14:2)] to go with me because it is very dangerous to go and ascend to the upper worlds. For from the day I attained my position I did not ascend such lofty ascents. I went up step by step until I entered the palace of the Messiah where the Messiah studies Torah with all of the Tannaim [the rabbis of the Mishna] and the righteous and also with the seven shepherds. . . .
—cited in Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Portland, OR, 2013), 106-107
And on Rosh Hashanah 5510 [1749] I performed an ascent of the soul, as is known, and I saw a great accusation until the evil side almost received permission to completely destroy regions and communities. I put my life in jeopardy and I prayed: “Let us fall into the hand of God and not fall into the hands of man.”
—ibid., 107
These mystical experiences were sometimes precipitated by his entering a self-induced trance. One of these trances, which occurred on Yom Kippur, is described in the Shivhei ha-Besht, a book of hagiographical stories about the Besht published over fifty years after his death:
Before Ne’ilah [the final prayer of the Yom Kippur liturgy] he began to preach in harsh words and he cried. He put his head backward on the ark and he sighed and he wept. Afterward [when] he began to pray the silent eighteen benedictions, and then the voiced eighteen benedictions … the Besht began to make terrible gestures, and he bent back- ward until his head came close to his knees, and everyone feared that he would fall down. They wanted to support him but they were afraid to. They told it to Rabbi Ze’ev Kutses, God bless his memory, who came and looked at the Besht’s face and signaled that they were not to touch him. His eyes bulged and he sounded like a bull being slaughtered. He kept this up for about two hours. Suddenly he stirred and straightened up. He prayed in a great hurry and finished the prayer.
—Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz, In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov, The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism, (Lanham, MD, 2004), 55. Translation slightly modified.
Are you observing the Days of Awe this year? The gates of heaven are open, just as they were to the Ba’al Shem Tov two hundred and fifty years ago. You can learn more about how eighteenth-century Jewish mysticism developed into modern Hasidism in Hasidism: A New History. A sweet new year!
Filed Under: History, Jewish Studies, Religion Tagged With: Ba'al Shem Tov, hasidism, High Holidays, jewish studies, religion, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur
Jack Wertheimer on The New American Judaism
American Judaism has been buffeted by massive social upheavals in recent decades. In The New American Judaism, Jack Wertheimer, a leading authority on the subject, sets out to discover how Jews of various orientations practice their religion in this radically altered landscape. What emerges is a quintessentially American story of rash disruption and creative reinvention, religious illiteracy and dynamic experimentation. Here, Wertheimer provides insight on why and how he wrote the book, and what readers of all faiths can learn from it.
Twenty-five years ago, I published a book offering my take on contemporary Jewish religious life. When I revisited that book in recent years, I realized an entirely different approach, not merely an update, would be needed to do justice to today’s scene. I also was curious to learn more about the proliferation of new settings for Jewish religious expression and the remaking of existing places for congregating.
You interviewed 220 people for this book. How did you decide whom to interview and what questions to ask?
I mainly interviewed rabbis situated in different corners of Jewish life, and then turned to other observers to help me understand new developments. My overall questions were straightforward: What are you seeing among the Jews in your orbit when it comes to religion? And what are you doing to draw Jews into religious life? From there, the questions led us down fascinating byways. I learned about the re-appropriation of long-discarded Jewish religious traditions, and creative efforts to engage attendees at religious services; about the self-invented forms of Jewish practice taken for granted by some Jews and also the return to traditions by others. I heard about startling religious practices one would not have seen in synagogues even twenty years ago, and also learned of Jewish religious gatherings in unlikely places.
So what is new about the new American Judaism?
I could be flip and answer: “that’s why you have to read the book.” But to begin addressing the question, I’d say the environment in which American Jews find themselves is new. In some ways, it is remarkably open to all religious possibilities—or none; in other ways, American elite culture is highly dismissive of religion in ways that was not the case but a few decades ago. This has further eroded what Peter Berger called “the plausibility structure” for religion. Jews in our time are less likely than in the past to regard their religion as a package of behaviors and, as the old saw put it, “a way of life.” Now religious settings have to contend with Jews who wish to connect only episodically and only on their own terms. This has led both to religious participation as a “sometime thing” for many Jews, and simultaneously has spurred a great deal of experimentation to create enticing religious environments in the hope of drawing more participants. Congregations of all types are reimagining the use of space, the choreography of prayer service, the impact of music and visual cues, the ways they extend hospitality and mutual support to fellow congregants, and the messages they deliver about how Jewish religious practice enriches one’s life.
Is all of this unique to Judaism?
Not at all. One cannot really understand Jewish religious developments in a vacuum. Even the seemingly most insular of Jews who deliberately live in their own enclaves cannot escape the impact of the powerful culture all around us. (One of the rabbis I interviewed put this colloquially when he said: “culture eats mission for breakfast”—i.e. it overwhelms religious ideology.)
Many internal Jewish developments described in this book are quintessentially American (though some have parallels in other countries). New ways of thinking about religious experiences can be found in American churches, mosques and synagogues. Religious leaders across the spectrum recognize that they face common challenges, such as the well-documented retreat from institutional engagement, the quest for spirituality among some, the disenchantment with religious leadership, the DIY mindset when applied to religion and the desire for a more engaging worship experience. Experimentation is a hallmark of American religious life, as it is in many Jewish religious institutions.
Can you talk about one challenge you faced in your research?
There are a great many ways Jews practice their religion. One challenge facing anyone attempting to survey the scene is how to capture American Judaism in all its complexity and variety. To be clear, the term Judaism is used in many different ways. Some see it as synonymous with all of Jewish life. Others as the expression of a distinct theology and package of do’s and don’ts. The book endeavors to examine how “average” Jews incorporate Jewish religious practices into their lives, what they believe, what in their religion is important to them, and what is available to those who seek out Jewish religious settings.
A lot of people are pessimistic about the future of American Judaism. Do you agree with them?
A lot of people are pessimistic about the future health and vitality of Jewish life in this country. Some also worry about the long-term future of this or that denomination of American Judaism. There are good reasons to worry about both. But given the explosion of creativity in the Jewish religious sphere, I don’t worry about the future of Judaism. It’s the adherents, the Jews in the pews or those who rarely show up, that require our attention. I devote attention in the book to writing about some approaches to this challenge that I regard as short-sighted, if not wrong-headed. I also suggest some guidelines that might make for a stronger Jewish religious life.
What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
First, that like so much in life, American Judaism is complicated, anything but static, and replete with pluses and minuses. Second, by stepping back to behold the entire scene, there are some remarkably fascinating things to observe. And related to that, perhaps readers will join me in appreciating a bit more the enormous investment of energy, creativity and good-will that so many rabbis and other religious leader are pouring into efforts to revitalize Jewish religious life. We don’t have to find every effort personally congenial to appreciate the explosion of energy at precisely a time when religion is not held in the highest esteem.
Jack Wertheimer is professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. His many books include The New Jewish Leaders: Reshaping the American Jewish Landscape, Family Matters: Jewish Education in an Age of Choice, and A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America.
Filed Under: Author Interviews, Jewish Studies, Religion Tagged With: American religion, jewish studies, judaism, religion
Chaim Saiman on Halakhah
September 6, 2018 by PUP Author
Though typically translated as “Jewish law,” the term halakhah is not an easy match for what is usually thought of as law. In his panoramic book Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law, Chaim Saiman traces how generations of rabbis have used concepts forged in talmudic disputation to do the work that other societies assign not only to philosophy, political theory, theology, and ethics but also to art, drama, and literature. Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just “law,” but an entire way of thinking, being, and knowing.
What is halakhah and why did you decide to write a book about it?
Literally, halakhah means “the way” or “the path,” though it is typically translated as Jewish law.
I grew up in a home and community where I was expected not only to obey the law, but to study and master complex legal texts in Hebrew and Aramaic.
I was about eight years old when my father proceeded to pull out two massive tomes from the shelf and inform me that I had to learn with him before I could escape to the Nintendo console located in my friend’s basement. We began to study the section of Mishnah (the earliest code of Jewish law, from around the year 200 CE) detailing the responsibilities of different bailees—those who watch over the property belonging to someone else. This book is a grown-up attempt to answer why an eight-year-old should care about bailees and the ancient laws of lost cows.
Did you really start a book on Jewish law with Jesus?
Yes. I take Jesus and the Apostle Paul as some of the earliest in a long line of halakhah’s critics. Both lived before the tradition crystallized in the form of the Mishnah. Yet even at this early stage, Jesus pokes fun at the Mishnah’s forebears for obsessing over legal rules and formalities at the expense of true spiritual growth. Jesus would have most likely considered it a bad idea to initiate young children into religious life by analyzing the laws of bailments. But whereas Jesus saw the law as a set of regulations and restrictions, the Talmudic rabbis understood it as a domain of exploration and study, a process they called Talmud Torah.
What is Talmud Torah?
It is hard to translate, mainly because the idea does not exist in Western or American culture. Word-for-word it means the “study of Torah,” but its impact extends beyond what is usually thought of as “study.” Talmud Torah means that Torah is not studied merely for pre-professional reasons, and not (only) to know the rules relevant to living a Jewish life, but because it is a primary religious activity, an intimate spiritual act that brings the learner into God’s embrace.
The closest analogy in general culture is the idea once practiced at elite universities when the curriculum was focused on Greek, Latin, philosophy, ancient civilization, and classical literature. Unlike today, the goal was not to make students more attractive to employers, but to educate them into ennobled citizens who would fully realize their humanity. The rabbis had a similar idea, but rather than literature or philosophy, study was grounded in the divine word of the Torah, and especially the legal regulations set forth in the Mishnah and Talmud.
What does Talmud Torah have to do with law?
Though Talmud Torah arguably applies to any area of Jewish law and thought, longstanding tradition places special emphasis on the areas that correspond to contract, tort, property and business law—the very topics covered by secular legal systems. According to the Talmudic rabbis, the subjects taught in law schools across the country become a spiritual practice when learned in the halakhic setting. Lawyers get many adjectives thrown their way, but godly is rarely one of them. The book aims to understand what it means to hold that legal study is a path to the divine, and what are the implications of this idea for a legal system.
Is halakhah the law of any country?
Not really. One of the unusual aspects of halakhah is that it first becomes visible in the Mishnah several generations after the independent Jewish state was dismantled by the Romans. Further, the most fertile periods of halakhic development took place when Jews did not govern any territory but lived as a minority under non-Jewish rule. This is the opposite from how legal systems typically develop.
From at least the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, Jews tended to live in tight communities whose internal legal affairs were heavily influenced by rabbis and halakhah. But even here, close investigation shows that the civil laws that applied often deviated from Talmudic rules studied under the rubric of Talmud Torah. In the case of civil law there were effectively two systems of Jewish law. One used by tribunals when disputes arose in practice, and the other that lived mainly on the pages of the Talmud and realized though Torah study. The relationship between these two forms of halakhah is a central theme of the book.
What about the state of Israel?
One of the ironies of modern Jewish life is that while Judaism historically defined itself through devotion to law, when the state of Israel was established there was little consensus about the role of halakhah in the state. Israel’s Socialist Zionist founders saw halakhah as a relic of the outmoded European Judaism that had to be overcome before a modern, Zionist, and self-determined Judaism could take hold. Most observant Jews by contrast, viewed secular Zionism as religiously invalid, if not dangerous. Since their primary concern was maintaining halakhah’s integrity in a secularizing world, they had little interest in adapting it for use in the modern state. Hence with the exception of marriage and divorce law, halakhah was not reflected in early Israeli law.
But the ground has shifted in the intervening years. Though Israeli law remains distinct from halakhah, there is a much wider constituency today that looks to define Israel as a Jewish state where concepts and norms inspired by halakhah find expression in state law. The book’s final chapter discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of infusing state law with halakhah.
Chaim N. Saiman is professor in the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Filed Under: Author Interviews, Jewish Studies, Law, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: halakhah, jewish studies, Law, Mishnah, religion, talmud
The Historical Atlas of Hasidism as Seen by a Cartographer
July 31, 2018 by PUP Author
by Waldemar Spallek
The Historical Atlas of Hasidism, its title notwithstanding, is not a typical historical atlas. It does not illustrate the past glory of any state or nation by means of historical maps showing former borders, conquests, trade routes, or the strategies of great battles. It presents, unusually, the birth, development, and current status of an extraordinary mystical religious movement. This movement, Hasidism, originated in the eighteenth century in the lands of the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, from whence it was almost entirely erased due to a series of historical events.
The Atlas is, in part, an attempt to recreate this lost world. The maps are complemented by numerous illustrations and tables as well as commentary, which is an excellent introduction to the content presented on the maps. Unlike typical atlases of the world’s great religions, the Historical Atlas of Hasidism does not focus on the non-religious history of religion. It pinpoints political limits and demographic centers, but it discloses above all the spatial dimension of a religious experience.
The maps in the atlas were designed in GIS, or Geographic Information System (ArcGIS from ESRI), due to the massive amount of spatial data sets that needed to be processed and visualized. The largest of the databases used contains almost 130,000 records obtained from difficult-to-access sources. The map created on the basis of this database (using Dorling’s cartograms) clearly shows where contemporary Hasidic centers are located, but it also reveals how the place where Hasidism originated became an area bereft of Hasidim.
The Atlas is unique also because the co-author, Marcin Wodziński, reached for the impossible. As a person without a cartography background, he posed questions that cartography does not generally deal with. In order to meet his expectations, we plotted maps that are innovative not only because of the size of the source database used and the questions asked, but also because of the new forms of cartographic visualization that we perforce had to develop.
In preparing the Atlas, I had to recreate the historical space of places that no longer exist, and information regarding their historical appearance is scant. I reconstructed, for example, visualizations of Hasidic courts and Jewish towns in Eastern Europe primarily on the basis of recollections by former residents. Unlike many historical atlases, our atlas does not use a single anachronistic background map.
What did we achieve?
Maps as spatial perspectives allowed us to embed Hasidic history in a geographical context. This in turn allowed us to illuminate and understand a great variety of events and processes from the past.
Map 4.2. Petitions submitted to R. Eliyahu Guttmacher, c. 1874. Cartography by Waldemar Spallek.
One such example is map 4.2, which illustrates the relationship between the number and distribution of requests sent to a given rabbi (the map was based on an extant set of approximately 7,000 petitions sent to one tsadik alone) and various spatial factors: the distance between the tsadik’s court and the place from which supplicants traveled, the railway network utilized, the extent of the local renown of the tsadik, and so on.
Map 3.1.2. Major dynasties. Cartography by Waldemar Spallek.
Map 5.3.1. Dominant Hasidic groups c. 1900-1939. Cartography by Waldemar Spallek.
In turn, map 3.1.2 demonstrates more clearly than any previous research the regionalization of the main Hasidic groups’ areas of influence. Marking the Hasidic leaders’ place with different colors precisely demarcates the borders of the areas into which individual Hasidic dynasties expanded. Map 5.3.1, created on the basis of spatial analysis of data from nearly 3,000 Hasidic prayer halls, delineates the areas in which various Hasidic groups were dominant before World War II.
Map 7.4. The Holocaust, 1939-1945. Cartography by Waldemar Spallek.
The map of the Holocaust is the most moving, as it tracks the destruction of Eastern European Jews on the basis of the tragic fate of 80 Hasidic leaders. Fortunately, the atlas does not end with this bleak image. Successive maps reveal that Hasidism has since been reborn in America, Israel, and Western Europe, and it thrives today. With the maps extending from the earliest Hasidic leaders in the mid-eighteenth century to the cultural geography of Hasidism today, the atlas covers the whole history of Hasidism and surprisingly many of its aspects. I feel I was privileged to work on such an unusual, comprehensive, and innovative project.
Waldemar Spallek is assistant professor of geographic information systems and cartography at the University of Wrocław in Poland.
Filed Under: History, Jewish Studies, Religion Tagged With: atlas, cartography, geography, hasidism, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, history, jewish studies, maps, religion
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The “politics of the sinless” and the “superficiality of the everyday”: Michnik, Havel, and the post-communist world
Home » Uncategorized » The “politics of the sinless” and the “superficiality of the everyday”: Michnik, Havel, and the post-communist world
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Long friendship: Michnik and Havel in 2011
Marci Shore, acclaimed author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, has written an important article – indispensable writing, really – over at the Weekly Standard. It’s one that merits not only reading, but reading – so I’m printing out a version for slow reading when I get some more work done this weekend. The focus of her essay is a Adam Michnik‘s The Trouble with History, edited by Irena Grudzińska Gross and published last year by Yale University Press. The Book Haven has written about Polish journalist and Solidarity leader Michnik here and here, and about Marci here and here and here and about Irena here and here. Read Marci’s article in its entirety here. Fellow dissident Václav Havel, the playwright, essayist, and president of the post-communist Czech Republic, also plays a role in the piece – we’ve written about him here and here and here. A few excerpts from Marci’s article below:
The story of “living in truth” involves urban intellectuals hiking up a mountain. In August 1978, four Charter 77 signatories (including Havel, who was not ordinarily much of a hiker) met with their Polish counterparts (including Michnik) on Sněžka Mountain on the Czechoslovak-Polish border. Havel pulled a bottle of vodka from his backpack. A lifelong friendship was not all that resulted from that first encounter between the two men.
On Sněžka, they spoke about the political resonance of seemingly insignificant moral acts. Michnik asked Havel to write down his thoughts. Three months later, an underground courier appeared at Michnik’s Warsaw apartment with a manuscript entitled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel’s essay introduced an ordinary green-grocer who, every morning, displays in the shop window a sign stating: “Workers of the world unite!” Neither he nor his customers believe in the Communist slogan. Even the members of the regime no longer believe in it. All know it to be a lie.
Yet what else can the greengrocer do? If he were to refuse to display the sign, he could be questioned, detained, arrested—which suggests that displaying a slogan in which no one believes is of great importance. If, one day, all the greengrocers were to take down their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. And so the seemingly powerless greengrocer is not so powerless after all. He bears responsibility; by failing to “live in truth,” people like the green-grocer “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
This is a diagnosis of post-1968 communism as a descent into inauthenticity, and it comes not from the comfortable classics of Western liberal (or conservative) thought but, rather, from Martin Heidegger.
One lesson for the West was about responsibility in conditions of moral ambiguity. In Havel’s autobiographical one-act play Audience (1975), Havel’s alter ego Ferdinand Vaněk is a dissident playwright working at a brewery. The secret police have demanded that the brewmaster file weekly reports on Vaněk. The brewmaster becomes nervous: He finds it difficult to compose the reports. Could Vaněk, perhaps, write them? “You could do that much for me, couldn’t you?” he asks Vaněk. “It would be child’s play for you! You’re a writer, damn it, right?”
Vaněk appreciates the brew-master’s kind treatment of him; nonetheless, he refuses to write the reports about himself. For Vaněk, this is “a matter of principle.” The brewmaster breaks down:
And what about me? You’re just gonna let me sink, right? You’re just gonna say, fuck you! It’s okay if I end up being an asshole! Me, I can wallow in this shit, because I don’t count, I ain’t nothin’ but a regular brewery hick—but the VIP here can’t have any part of this! It’s okay if I get smeared with shit, so long the VIP here stays clean! . . . All I’m good for is to be the manure that your damn principles gonna grow out of . . .
Decries “official memory politics”
In Audience, everyone is implicated: the regime, the brewmaster, Vaněk himself. The brewmaster is a variation of the greengrocer; he is both victim and oppressor.
For Michnik, among the disappointments of post-communism has been the rise of right-wing nationalist populism, accompanied by an official memory politics known as “historical policy.” The essence of historical policy is a denial of moral ambiguity and a failure to take responsibility. It is an attempt to enforce a national historical narrative that presents “the thesis that all Polish disasters were the result of Polish benevolence, trust, and gentleness, and of the malice and cruelty of foreigners.”
For Michnik, historical policy is absurd: Communism had not simply been a Soviet occupation; everyone had taken part. In order to do something good, one had to participate in a system that was evil. Between heroes and villains there were many shades of gray. This was among the reasons why “lustration”—the purging from government and public life of those who had collaborated with the secret police—was not a straightforward matter. Many were put on secret police lists of potential informers without their knowledge. Others found themselves on those lists because they had once met with an agent at a restaurant or had succumbed to threats to their children.
Moreover, those placed most at risk by lustration were those who had been in the opposition—after all, it was their circles the secret police had tried to infiltrate. Those safest under lustration were the greengrocers. The post-Communist antipathy towards the dissidents, Havel believed, had its roots in the dissidents’ serving as people’s bad consciences. He and Michnik were among those who, under communism, had sat in prison the longest. They were also among those most willing to forgive. For Michnik, historical policy and lustration reflected a Jacobin-like impulse to impose a politics of the sinless. And the problem with revolutionary purity was that it led to the guillotine.
Read her article. Please.
The trouble with revolution, Michnik finds, is also its aftermath: the superficiality of the everyday. Once upon a time, East Europeans had stayed up all night copying censored poems by hand. Now, no one had time to read serious literature. The omnipresence of Communist propaganda had been replaced by the omnipresence of quasi-pornographic tabloids. The revolution had brought the end of censorship. Then, the market had taken over—and had proven to be tawdry. “Suddenly all great value systems are collapsing,” Michnik observed.
“[A]long with the development of this consumerist global civilization grows a mass of people who do not create any values,” Havel said during one of his last conversations with Michnik. For Michnik, this “axiological vacuum” was “a typical phenomenon of periods of restoration as described by Stendhal in The Red and the Black: this is a time of cynicism, intrigues, careerism.” Michnik grew preoccupied with Julien Sorel, Stendhal’s weak plebian hero who seeks authenticity in illicit love affairs: “Let everyone take care of himself in the desert of egoism called life,” Julien says.
In 1989, Michnik’s friend, the philosopher Marcin Król, was among those who had considered liberty to be the great priority. But individualism began to dominate all other values. “We were stupid,” Król said in an interview last year. No longer does anyone pose metaphysical questions like “Where does evil come from?” The dramas of characters like Julien Sorel resulted from their awareness of the weight of their actions. The lack of an answer to the question of whether they behaved well or badly was the source of great suffering. “Today,” Król said, “the lack of an answer does not hurt.” And that is the problem: It should hurt.
Tags: Adam Michnik, Irena Grudzińska Gross, Marci Shore, Marcin Król, Václav Havel
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2015 at 12:49 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Classic A Little Princess
BfK No. 189 - July 2011
This issue's cover illustration is from Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery by Keren David. Thanks to Frances Lincoln for their help with this July cover.
By clicking here you can view, print or download the fully artworked Digital Edition of BfK 189 July 2011.
Brian Alderson
What happened at Miss Minchin’s to…
My mum
was a late Victorian child. When I asked her what had been her favourite reading at that time she named a book by Frances Hodgson Burnett called Editha’s Burglar, pronouncing the name with a long ‘i’ as she must have done when first she read it.
But was it a book all on its own?
The story, about a little girl who persuades a burglar to do his work very quietly so as not to disturb Mama, is quite short and was first published in that peerless American children’s magazine, St Nicholas. There was hardly enough of it for an independent existence and when it did appear as a book it was joined by a longer Hodgson Burnett story, also from St Nicholas: Sara Crewe; or what happened at Miss Minchin’s.
This dramatic tale
(I’m surprised my mum didn’t prefer it to Editha) brings Sara Crewe from India to London with her widowed father, who places her in Miss M’s ‘Select Seminary for Young Ladies’ as a posh ‘parlour boarder’ before returning to the sub-continent where, alas, some time later, he is bilked by a friend and dies penniless. Thus Sara Crewe is removed from her comfortable suite and, from being star pupil, is reduced to maid-of-all-work, banished to the attic with its fireless grate and iron bedstead. Miss Minchin, who is perforce her guardian, for there is no one else, works her to the bone, although Sara, a child of much character, survives by persuading herself that she is a lost princess who will one day come into her own – and that indeed happens. An invalid, back in England from India, with his Lascar servant (and a monkey) takes the house next door and proves (of course) to be Papa’s old friend – recovered financially but racked by guilt over the latter’s death and the disappearance of his daughter.
Burnett was good at this sort of drama
as witness Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, the centenary of whose publication we are celebrating this year. It’s not surprising therefore to find that Sara Crewe came to be converted into a play, as The Little Princess, running with acclaim in both New York and London. Both the author and her publisher thought this an opportunity too good to miss, and Burnett – a pro if ever there was one – set about reconstructing Sara Crewe as a full-dress fiction. And it was published in superior style, begirt with colour plates, as A Little Princess in 1905.
‘The story tells itself so well,’
she wrote to her son, speaking of the ‘lightning rapidity’ of its composition, that it proved no hack job, no mere bulking out of a superannuated text. In a chummy preface to her readers she expressed one of the great thrills of fiction, that ‘between the lines of every story there is another story, and that is one that is never heard and can only be guessed at by those who are good at guessing’. With the conversion of Sara Crewe into a play she had discovered more about the goings-on in Miss M’s seminary than she had formerly known and she felt it very blameworthy of the new characters who had appeared on the scene, such as spoiled Lottie, and the half-starved scullery-maid, Becky, and grey-whiskered Mr Melchisedec (who lived behind the wainscot) for their ‘slouching idle ways’ in not presenting themselves to her earlier.
These narrative extensions
effect radical changes to the nature of the story. To begin with, Sara’s traumatic reduction from riches to rags occurs only after some ninety pages in which her privileged status and her relationship with her admiring or jealous classmates is dwelt on with a degree of detail impossible in the five introductory pages of Sara Crewe, The same applies to her life in the garret through whose skylight begins her friendship with her neighbour’s Lascar servant which will lead to her happy end. But this time, the gentleman’s illness and its cause are revealed long before the denouement so that the reader (who may well have guessed it in the shorter book) is now constrained to watch how the storyteller will bring the two together over a longer time-span.
Such changes,
to which may be added a rather less credible treatment of the transformation scene, where the Lascar secretly converts Sara’s attic into what she at first believes to be a room in Fairyland, give a depth to the story which has held readers continuously from the time of its first publication. (The Puffin edition, which dates back to 1961 is especially commendable for its sensitive line drawings by Margery Gill – or ‘Hill’ as a recent printing called this disgracefully forgotten illustrator.) Nevertheless, there remains much to be said for the earlier Sara Crewe, whose comparative brevity sharpens the intensity of the tale. Before long, it seems, you will be able to Google it up and do some comparative criticism on your own account.
The illustration by Margery Gill are taken from the 2009 Puffin Classics edition (978 0 1413 2112 7, £6.99 pbk).
Brian Alderson is founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times.
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