Historical Context Quotes

We must go back to the firm discipline and simplicity of the one-room schoolhouse to find a better education for our children.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context.

What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?

Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.

I have therefore included in this book details of Muhammad’s life that I subjected to an extensive analytical process. In fact, cross-referencing sources and researching the historical record is insufficient without also developing expertise in the particular nuances of Muhammad’s cultural context. One cannot understand his world without appreciating the in- formation he himself was sifting through on his life journey.

It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.

Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.

We live in this bubble of ignorance. Most people know nothing about history, or the historical context of the traditions they still follow today. People do things without knowing why they're doing them.

Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender.

In the context of the English language, there were many more important words than “in.” There were fancy words, historic words, words that meant life or death. There were multi-syllabic tongue-twisters that required a sort out before speaking, and mission-critical pivotals that started wars or ended wars…and even poetic nonsensicals that were like a symphony as they left the lips. Generally speaking, “in” did not play with the big boys. In fact, it barely had much of a definition at all, and, in the course of its working life, was usually nothing but a bridge, a conduit for the heavy lifters in any given sentence. There was, however, one context in which that humble little two-letter, one-syllable jobbie was a BFD. Love. The difference between someone “loving” somebody versus being “in love” was a curb to the Grand Canyon. The head of a pin to the entire Midwest. An exhale to a hurricane.

To help inspire refined analysis of the Qur’an’s content, the second field was called Tafsir—literally, “separating strands of raw flax and weaving them into a garment.” Tafsir sought to become an oral tradition for preserving knowledge about how to understand and apply the Qur’an. The field covered the meaning of words (including their Semitic root concepts and the implication of grammatical structures); their context (when it was said, to whom, and why); and their application (initial purpose, lessons for other situations, and distilled wisdom). The field aimed to capture commentary by Muhammad, the historical insights of his companions, and knowledge of preexisting Abrahamic traditions.

Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

We cut a pack of cards called historical context- our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks and queens. Adrian's cut threes, fours, and fives. That's all.

Because whites are not socialized to see ourselves collectively, we don't see our group's history as relevant. Therefore, we expect people of color to trust us as soon as they meet us. We don't see ourselves as having to earn that trust.

But as adults, we have come to see that her autobiographical novels were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, in a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation. As unpublished manuscripts, letters, and documents have come to light, we have begun to apprehend the scope of her life, a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it. That tale is different from the one she wrote. It is an adult story of poverty, struggle, and reinvention—a great American drama in three acts.

Jesus Christ never went around grumbling and complaining

In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context. I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good.

I try not to think too much about those days now - let the past be past. The truth is, we're all prisoners of our historical context. Anybody who says morality is absolute, that right and wrong don't change over time, you know what? They just haven't lived long enough. (Page 33)

Lack of awareness or concern for the context and constraints of the times is only part of the problem of those today assessing such historic figures as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln - or the American nation as a whole.

When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed.

Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

Yes, I hate blown glass art and I happen to live in the blown glass art capital of the world, Seattle, Washington. Being a part of the Seattle artistic community, I often get invited to galleries that are displaying the latest glass sculptures by some amazing new/old/mid-career glass blower. I never go. Abstract art leaves me feeling stupid and bored. Perhaps it’s because I grew up inside a tribal culture, on a reservation where every song and dance had specific ownership, specific meaning, and specific historical context. Moreover, every work of art had use—art as tool: art to heal; art to honor, art to grieve. I think of the Spanish word carnal, defined as, ‘Of the appetites and passions of the body.’ And I think of Gertrude Stein’s line, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.’ When asked what that line meant, Stein said, ‘The poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.’ So when I say drum, the drum is really being pounded in this poem; when I say fancydancer, the fancydancer is really spinning inside this poem; when I say Indian singer, that singer is really wailing inside this poem. But when it comes to abstract art—when it comes to studying an organically shaped giant piece of multi-colored glass—I end up thinking, ‘That looks like my kidney. Anybody’s kidney, really. And frankly, there can be no kidney-shaped art more beautiful—more useful and closer to our Creator—than the kidney itself. And beyond that, this glass isn’t funny. There’s no wit here. An organic shape is not inherently artistic. It doesn’t change my mind about the world. It only exists to be admired. And, frankly, if I wanted to only be in admiration of an organic form, I’m going to watch beach volleyball. I’m always going to prefer the curve of a woman’s hip or a man’s shoulder to a piece of glass that has some curves.

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).

We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context—in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready. But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division... Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: "relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.

the history of science cannot be written by pulling scientific ‘firsts’ out of their historical context, but only by seeing with eyes and minds of our historical characters.

If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take past for what it was. And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science. We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry.

I love the word 'fashion.' That's why I'm using it in the title of this book. Fashion is about change and about creating clothes within a historical context. To me, dismissing fashion as silly or unimportant seems like a denial of history and frequently a show of sexism—as if something that's traditionally a concern of women isn't valid as a field of academic inquiry. When the Parsons fashion department was founded in 1906, it was called 'costume design,' because fashion was then a verb: to fashion. But the word 'fashion' has evolved to mean something much more profound, and those who resist it seem to me to be on the wrong side of history.

The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn't so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.

For the answers make sense only in relation to the questions which they answer; the questions, furthermore, make sense only in relation to the concrete experiences of reality from which they have arisen; and the concrete experiences, together with their linguistic articulation, finally make sense only in the cultural context which sets limits to both the direction and range of intelligible differentiation. Only the complex of experience question answer as a whole is a constant of consciousness . . . No answer, thus, is the ultimate truth in whose possession mankind could live happily forever after, because no answer can abolish the historical process of consciousness from which it has emerged.

Historical context apart, Klemperer’s journals can be read for their own sake as a gnawing meditation on the disappointments of life and the irrevocability of choices. He is intensely aware at all moments, perhaps because of his consciousness of being a “survivor,” that death is only a breath away. He is one of the great kvetches of all time, endlessly recording aches and pains, bad dreams, shortages of food and medicine, snubs and humiliations. And, like everyone else, he wants everything both ways. In

My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.

Even in a realm as historically dogmatic as religion, I don’t believe one size fits all. Faith is a pathway to life, but not just any life. Your life. My life. And none of us lives the same life. To wrestle with belief is to apply it within the context of your own circumstances.

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

The purpose of such propaganda phrases as "war on terrorism" and attacking "those who hate freedom" is to paralyze individual thought as well as to condition people to act as one mass, as when President Bush attempted to end debate on Iraq by claiming that the American people were of one voice. The modern war president removes the individual nature of those who live in it by forcing us into a uniform state where the complexities of those we fight are erased. The enemy-terrorism, Iraq, Bin Laden, Hussein-becomes one threatening category, something to be defeated and destroyed, so that the public response will be one of reaction to fear and threat rather than creatively and independently thinking for oneself. Our best hope for overcoming perpetual thinking about war and perpetual fear about both real and imagined threats is to question our leaders and their use of empty slogans that offer little rationale, explanation or historical context.

The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: “What do you have to lose?” If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question.

Historically, shamans have always been part of the society where they lived, taking care of its problems, whenever they were allowed to operate. For centuries shamanic cultures have been persecuted in the western world until they were almost entirely exterminated. They have managed to survive in secrecy or through complex esoteric camouflage. Nowadays there seems to be more freedom and this ancient knowledge can re-emerge and be used in our own cultural context and not relegated somewhere else. The world needs shamans able to function on the roads, among the electronic equipment and engines, in the squares and markets of our contemporary society.

Not all historians of philosophy have the same goals and attitudes, and I for one see no good reason for disqualifying any of the contenders. Some insist on placing their thinkers in the historical context in which they wrote, which means, for instance, learning a lot of seventeenth-century science if you really want to understand Descartes, and a lot of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political history if you really want to understand Locke or Hume, and always, of course, a lot of the philosophy of their lesser contemporaries as well. Why bother with the also-rans? There’s a good reason. I found I never really appreciated many of the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until I visited European museums where I could see room after room full of second-rate paintings of the same genres. If all you ever see is the good stuff—which is all you see in the introductory survey courses, and in the top museums—it’s very hard to see just how wonderful the good stuff is. Do you know the difference between a good library and a great library? A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books. If you really want to understand a great philosopher, you have to spend some time looking at the less great contemporaries and predecessors that are left in the shadows of the masters.

Like it or not, philosophy or intellectual activity in ancient China was distinguished from manual labor, and thus philosophical texts were not only political in nature (because they normally addressed the issue of good government and social order) but also “esoteric.” They were not meant to contribute to general education, but to be studied only by a small fraction of the population, i.e., by those who had access to learning and power. If we want to understand the Laozi historically, we have to accept this context and thus also the fact that, as a philosophical treatise, it did not attempt to be generally accessible. It was originally a text for the few—and it clearly shows.

Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I’ve never read Moby-Dick and it’s probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I’ve learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don’t have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don’t have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don’t feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don’t feel like an outsider—to fall in love I only need eyes.

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission.

laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.

The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.

I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. ... The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The subject is far more interesting than that. ... When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight.... ...(T)he assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument's soundness isn't accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life (pp. 160-161).

The great British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood maintained in The Idea of History that to write well about a historical figure, you need both empathy and imagination. By this he did not mean spinning tales out of thin air, but taking what is known and examining it in the full context of time and place, following the strands of the story until they begin to intertwine and establish a thick braid of reality.

The pieces of who I am, beginning, though, not ending, with my name have complicated the way that I see the simplistic act of checking “White” on census forms or questionnaires. Without ignoring the privileged position that comes with being White in our current society, Whiteness never fully embraced me and for that reason, as well as the historical context, the act of checking that box is uncomfortable and further, marginalizing.

General (non-narrow) intelligence of the sort we all display daily is not an algorithm running in our heads, but calls on the entire cultural, historical, and social context within which we think and act in the world.

But don't you think that Nietzsche believed that it is important to try to feel the will that you have within yourself as a person?' 'No, I don't think Nietzsche was saying that. Nietzsche was using the power of the individual as an instrument to combat the moral order that had been established, but he does not belong in any way to the tradition of individualism, which establishes the individual man as the important one in the historical context.

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.

The Bacchae left behind a thick trail of clues that we will begin exploring later in this book. Clues that lead to a magical version of Jesus: equal parts natural healer, initiator of mysteries, and concoctor of drugged wine. Unknown to many faithful today, it’s a version that places the founder of Christianity in the kind of detailed historical context that would have been self-evident to the earliest generations of Greek-speaking paleo-Christians.

A crucial point here is that understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience. Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being - our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. I short, our understanding is our mode of "being in the world." It is the way we are meaningfully situated in our world through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions , our linguistic tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract reflective acts of understanding (which may involve grasping of finitary propositions) are simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of "having a world.

What was going on at the time? What were the circumstances that the author addressed? What did the author’s words and allusions mean in their ancient historical and literary setting? Without context, one can imagine that a text means almost anything.

There is absolutely nothing divine about the Shariah and in no way can it possibly be considered fixed and infallible. The argument that the Shariah derives its divine nature from its first and primary source, the Quran, falls flat when one recognizes that the Quran, unlike the Torah, is not a book of laws. The Quran is God’s direct self-revelation to humanity. Certainly, it contains the moral framework for living a holy and righteous life as a Muslim. But it was never meant to function as a legal code, which is precisely why scholars had to rely so heavily on extra-Quranic sources like ijma (consensus), qiyas (analogy), istislah (which refers to the common good of the people), and ijtihad (independent juristic reasoning)—all of them, by definition, reliant on human judgment and historical context—in order to construct the Shariah in the first place. To say the Shariah is divine because the Quran is divine is akin to arguing that water and wine are the same, since water is a primary ingredient in wine.

The point of this chapter’s unflattering précis of nascent American medicine is not to castigate it for its primitivism, but to put blacks’ historical aversion to medical care into context, for most antebellum blacks were subjected to southern medicine. The

Serious, critical history tends to be hard on the living. It challenges us to see distortions embedded in the heroic national origin myths we have been taught since childhood. It takes enemies demonized by previous generations and treats them as worthy of understanding in their particular contexts. Ideological absolutes—civility and savagery, liberty and tyranny, and especially us and them—begin to blur. People from our own society who are not supposed to matter, and whose historical experiences show how the injustices of the past have shaped the injustices of the present, move from the shadows into the light. Because critical history challenges assumptions and authority, it often leaves us feeling uncomfortable. Yet it also has the capacity to help us become more humble and humane.

I frequently detect a hint of satisfaction in the accounts that manage to excavate moral and individual responsibility from the historical debris. Perhaps it is because of the unspoken belief that changing the people will change the outcome. 'No Hitler, no Holocaust.' If only a few individuals had resolved that it was unconscionable to be a bystander, then perhaps thousands would have been saved. I suppose there is some solace in recovering a history in which altering an isolated event transforms all that follows. But personalizing the story in this way can obscure how these were not isolated individuals operating on their own but rather were people situated in an organizational and historical context that profoundly shaped how they looked upon the world, what they believed they could do, and what they wanted to do. The UN staff and diplomats in New York, in the main, were highly decent, hard-working, and honorable individuals who believed that they were acting properly when they decided not to try to put an end to genocide. It is this history that stays with me.

Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.3

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?' But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.

How could a cultivated nation like Germany unleash a murderous frenzy against the Jewish people? Many authors have described the killings. A few authors have warned that explaining is in itself a profanation. But Dan McMillan takes a different course. With eloquence and clarity he sets the Shoah in a broad historical context. McMillan shows how step by step, ideas and institutions came into place in western nations, especially in Germany, that made the killings conceivable, then possible, and even likely, but never inevitable. This book is an impressive achievement.

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism. "Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to pose questions such as whether the mind is socially determined, as though the mind and society each posses a substance of their own' [citing Pressler and Dasilva's Sociology]. The profound implications of the individual's embeddedness in the national community is that the community's ethos is prior and therefore historically determinative of all socioepistemic phenomena. And if thought structures are predetermined by intellectual history, by society's inheritance of historical forms of knowledge, then those structures are also a priori predetermined by the linguistic structures in which this history is enveloped, cast, and framed. Like law, nationalism is everywhere: it creates the community and shapes world history even before nationalism comes into it.

A knowledge and appreciation of history is difficult for a culture so enthralled by the moment, a culture that shuns the discipline of a larger context in any study. Unfortunately this loss of historical interest has made the present difficult to address because the context of the past is imperative if we are to salvage the future.

The entire future of Israel depends, in each generation, on the capacity and resolve of YHWH to make a way out of no way. This reiterated miracle of new life in a context of hopelessness evokes in Israel a due sense of awe that issues in doxology. Well, it issues in laughter: “Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me’ ” (Gen. 21:6). In subsequent Christian tradition, that laugh has become an “Easter laugh,” a deep sweep of elation that looks death and despair in the face and mocks them. The ancestral narratives attest to the power of YHWH to create new historical possibilities where there is no ground for expectation. IV

our translation into English is not always the best, but a deep study of any commandment, especially in context with the writings of the prophets, historical context, and the teachings of Jesus – we see that the spirit of the law was always supposed to be kept.  Jesus said Himself, and the rabbis questioning Him were in full agreement,[54] that the highest laws of all were Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18 – all other laws were to be followed according to the principles of these two --  Love God with all your heart, mind and being, and love your neighbor as yourself.  When the other laws are viewed through those divine filters, the spirit will always guide our judgment – it has always been the case. 

Liberal agnosticism about the good life has some compelling historical reasons behind it. It is a mind-set that was consciously cultivated as an antidote to the religious wars of centuries ago, when people slaughtered one another over ultimate differences. After World War II, revulsion with totalitarian regimes of the right and left made us redouble our liberal commitment to neutrality. But this stance is maladaptive in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism because, if you live in the West and aren’t caught up in battles between Sunnis and Shiites, for example, and if we also put aside the risk of extraordinary lethal events like terrorist attacks in Western countries, then the everyday threats to your well-being no longer come from an ideological rival or a theological threat to the liberal secular order. They are native to that order.

The reason for the difference between the architectural and engineering 'climate', so to speak, is very complex. It is partly a matter of terminology, partly a matter of historical accident, and the consequent training of architects and engineers, and mostly a matter of what is commonly supposed to be the difference in content or context - architecture being concerned with producing works of art; engineering with utility structures.

The practice of “tolerance,” in the sense of allowing people to dissent, did not of course exist in any part of Christian Europe in the 1500s. It came into being only centuries later, when some states conceded legal rights to religious minorities. But frontier societies having contact with other cultures, as in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe, were in a special category. Spain, like them, was a plural (and therefore in some sense forbearing) society long before toleration became a philosophical issue. The same was true of Transylvania and Poland. “There is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland,” a Polish Lutheran stated in 1592. “In addition to the Greek Christians among us, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time, and faiths other than Roman Catholic have existed for centuries.”46 It was therefore commonplace, within that plural context, to have toleration without a theory of toleration, because there were legal guarantees for each faith.47 The protection given to the aljamas by Christian lords was by nature contractual: in return for protection, the Muslims and Jews paid taxes. Because there was no unitary political authority in Spain, the nobles felt free to allow their Muslims to observe their own cultural customs long after the Spanish crown had officially abolished the legal existence of Islam (in 1500 in Castile, in 1526 in the crown of Aragon). The development can be seen as inherent in the nature of pre-modern political systems in Europe. Before the advent of the modern (“nation”) state, small autonomous cultural groups could exist without being subjected to persecution, thanks to the protection of local authorities. The coming of the centralizing state, in post-Reformation Europe, removed that protection and aggravated intolerance.

Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.

Withdrawal from the world or accepting simplistic answers reveals human effort or human problem solving, while lament acknowledges who is ultimately in control. In the midst of a crisis, Lamentations points toward God and acknowledges his sovereignty regardless of the circumstances. Lamentations 1:1-3 reminds us of Jerusalem’s story by contrasting the past glory with the anguish of the present crisis. A dramatic change of fortune is demonstrated. The reality of this destruction presents the challenge of the book of Lamentations. How will God’s people respond? Will they only look for the answers they want to hear? Will they run and hide, or will they enter into the place of lament and embrace the reality of their situation? The historical context of the fall of Jerusalem as revealed in Lamentations 1:1-3 and Jeremiah 29:4-9 points to the necessity of Lamentations. By challenging the two primary temptations facing the exiles, Scripture now points the people of God toward the proper response to a broken world: lament.

Those who would argue for the infallibility or the inerrancy of scripture logically should also claim the same infallibility for the churches in the fourth and fifth centuries, whose decisions and historical circumstances left us with our present canon. This is apparently what would be required if we were to only acknowledge the twenty-seven NT books that were set forth by the church in that context. Was the church in the Nicene and post-Nicene eras infallible in its decisions or not? (Formation of Christian Biblical Canon)

But racial allegiance doesn’t entirely explain black attitudes toward Obama, according to David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who specializes in black issues. “You have to put the choice that African Americans are making in context,” he told the Huffington Post in 2011. “Certainly there may be some residual good feelings from that historic moment in 2008. But support for the president remains strong because there is no real menu of political options for African Americans.”11

In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work published between 1776 and 1788, precisely between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The context is important, as the author Edward Gibbon was examining not only the greatness of Rome, but the forces which brought about its decay. ...... Gibbon's interpretation of history was controversial, especially in its examination of the growth of Christianity, but his accurate scholarship and engaging prose style have made The Decline and Fall the most enduring work of history in English. In the eighteenth century, history is seen as a branch of belles-lettres, and it subsumes within it scriptural authority on the one hand, and fictional narrative on the other. History is, in effect, the new secular authority of the Enlightenment, and comes to be a very wide-ranging category of writing.

Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.

A biography of civilization does not consist exclusively of wars, politics, and acts of villainy, but also consist of the culture, art, religion, and communication methods of a society. The written word outlasts human life. We can understand how other civilizations lived by reviewing the account of great philosopher’s lives and ideas. We also acquire valuable knowledge of the cultural context of prior eras by reviewing the historical narrative left by ordinary people including their letters and journals describing everyday life and living conditions.

The formerly absolute distinction between time and eternity in Christian thought--between nunc movens with its beginning and end, and nunc stans, the perfect possession of endless life--acquired a third intermediate order based on this peculiar betwixt-and-between position of angels. But like the Principle of Complementarity, this concord-fiction soon proved that it had uses outside its immediate context, angelology. Because it served as a means of talking about certain aspects of human experience, it was humanized. It helped one to think about the sense, men sometimes have of participating in some order of duration other than that of the nunc movens--of being able, as it were, to do all that angels can. Such are those moments which Augustine calls the moments of the soul's attentiveness; less grandly, they are moments of what psychologists call 'temporal integration.' When Augustine recited his psalm he found in it a figure for the integration of past, present, and future which defies successive time. He discovered what is now erroneously referred to as 'spatial form.' He was anticipating what we know of the relation between books and St. Thomas's third order of duration--for in the kind of time known by books a moment has endless perspectives of reality. We feel, in Thomas Mann's words, that 'in their beginning exists their middle and their end, their past invades the present, and even the most extreme attention to the present is invaded by concern for the future.' The concept of aevum provides a way of talking about this unusual variety of duration-neither temporal nor eternal, but, as Aquinas said, participating in both the temporal and the eternal. It does not abolish time or spatialize it; it co-exists with time, and is a mode in which things can be perpetual without being eternal. We've seen that the concept of aevum grew out of a need to answer certain specific Averroistic doctrines concerning origins. But it appeared quite soon that this medium inter aeternitatem et tempus had human uses. It contains beings (angels) with freedom of choice and immutable substance, in a creation which is in other respects determined. Although these beings are out of time, their acts have a before and an after. Aevum, you might say, is the time-order of novels. Characters in novels are independent of time and succession, but may and usually do seem to operate in time and succession; the aevum co-exists with temporal events at the moment of occurrence, being, it was said, like a stick in a river. Brabant believed that Bergson inherited the notion through Spinoza's duratio, and if this is so there is an historical link between the aevum and Proust; furthermore this durée réelle is, I think, the real sense of modern 'spatial form,' which is a figure for the aevum.

The backlash against feminism in the 1990's is the historical and cultural context in which I now perceive Carolyn's story. Women who spoke up about workplace inequality or domestic abuse were dismissed as histronic troublemakers. The new twenty-four-hour tabloid media - which skewered Anita Hill, reduced Marcia Clark to a "lawyerette," and blamed Monica Lewinsky for her affair with President Clinton - leveled unprecedented vitriol at Carolyn. It was all too easy to cast this unknown figure, who had no public profile until she met John, as a wild banshee, a vapid fashionista, or an undeserving harpy.

John F. Kennedy "is, in reality, a deeply serious man, reflective in his mental habits, historically minded, and given to seeing men and nations and events in the sobering context that history provides. As a human being, he is often humorous, easily bored by total routine but open to all fresh experiences, careless of the superficialities of life, warmly loyal to his friends, and oddly detached about himself. His most curious trait, in fact, is his way of discussing his most vital affairs with the dry humor and cool analytical remoteness that most people reserve for the affairs of others. – Joseph Alsop

I. Getting the Text in View A. Select the text B. Reconsider where the text begins and ends C. Establish a reliable translation of the text  II. Getting Introduced to the Text D. Read the text for basic understanding E. Place the text in its larger context III. Attending to the Text F. Listen attentively to the text IV. Testing What Is Heard in the Text G. Explore the text historically H. Explore the literary character of the text  I. Explore the text theologically  J. Check the text in the commentaries  V. Moving toward the Sermon K. State the claim of the text upon the hearers (including the preacher) A

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came. That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

Recounting the narrative of our personal story in a methodical and chronological manner helps us see our life in a historical perspective. Telling our personal stories allows us to bring hibernated memories out of seclusion. Reexamination of our historical existence under the light of growing conscious awareness assist us make psychological breakthroughs. Analyzing the elemental substance of our personal story from a sundry of viewpoints employing techniques of literature, philosophy, logical reasoning, and abstract thinking assist us perceive our discrete chronicle in symbolic terms and in mythological context.

If observing Trump’s schoolboy act in relationship to North Korea felt like watching a disaster movie, then witnessing his Greenland bid and subsequent tantrum was more like seeing a guest at a fancy dinner party blow his nose in an embroidered napkin and proceed to use a silver fork to scratch his foot under the table. But not only did most journalists cover the debacle with restraint—many also provided historical and political context. Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable. It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.

The top centile is a particularly interesting group to study in the context of my historical investigation. Although it constitutes (by definition) a very small minority of the population, it is nevertheless far larger than the superelites of a few dozen or hundred individuals on whom attention is sometimes focused (such as the “200 families” of France, to use the designation widely applied in the interwar years to the 200 largest stockholders of the Banque de France, or the “400 richest Americans” or similar rankings established by magazines like Forbes). In a country of almost 65 million people such as France in 2013, of whom some 50 million are adults, the top centile comprises some 500,000 people.

...collective memory is unevenly distributed: some people have a rich and deep resource, for others it is minimal. A matter of education, and also of inclination. But however minimal, however threadbare, it is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came. That is why history should be taught in school, to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

There is no formula or doctrine of the church’s role in society. The church lives out its witness in concrete historical situations, waiting for God to lead. There is a role for thinking about what to do next, but this thinking should be always done in the context of waiting on God. Prayer is evidence of dependency on God. In prayer we envisage a new future, and we protest the world order as it is. We stand against darkness and invoke God’s light. Using weapons of the Spirit, we pull down strongholds and join the uprising against the present disorder. Prayer shows that we belong to a different order of reality which defies the powers of evil and anticipates the kingdoms of this world becoming the kingdom of Christ (Rev 11:15). History belongs to intercessors, because history belongs to God.70 Mission is

If, then, we wish to make large-scale reforms which will not stultify themselves in the process of application, we must choose our measures in such a way that no violence or, at the worst, very little violence will be needed to enforce them. (It is worth noting in this context that reforms carried out under the stimulus of the fear of violence from foreign neighbours and with the aim of using violence more efficiently in future international wars are just as likely to be self-stultifying in the long run as reforms which cannot be enforced except by a domestic terror. The dictators have made many large-scale changes in the structure of societies they govern without having had to resort to terrorism. The population gave consent to these changes because it had been persuaded by means of intensive propaganda that they were necessary to make the country safe against "foreign aggression." Some of these changes have been in the nature of desirable reforms; but in so far as they were calculated to make the country more efficient as a war-machine, they tended to provoke other countries to increase their military efficiency and so to make the coming of war more profitable. But the nature of modern was is such that it is unlikely that any desirable reform will survive the catastrophe. Thus it will be seen that intrinsically desirable reforms, accepted without opposition, may yet be self-stultifying if the community is persuaded to accept them by means of propaganda that plays upon its fear of future violence on the part of others, or stresses the glory of future violence on the part of others, or stresses the glory of future violence when successfully used by itself.) Returning to our main theme, which is the need for avoiding domestic violence during the application of reforms, we see that a reform may be intrinsically desirable, but so irrelevant to the existing historical circumstances as to be practically useless. This does not mean that we should make the enormous mistake committed by Hegel and gleefully repeated by every modern tyrant with crimes to justify and follies to rationalize-the mistake that consists in affirming that the real is the rational, that the historical is the same as the ideal. The real is not the rational; and whatever is, is not right. At any given moment of history, the real, as we know it, contains certain elements of the rational, laboriously incorporated into its structure by patient human effort; among the things that are, some are righter than others.

Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,

JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”: “Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.

Muslim acknowledgement of the positive aspects of female sexuality has historically coexisted with two views that challenge it in different ways. First, certain elements of the classical Muslim tradition treat female sexuality as dangerous, with potentially disruptive and chaotic effects on society. Historians have demonstrated how anxieties about temptation and female sexuality translated into insistence (never fully achieved in reality) on restricting the appearance of women in public spaces. Muslim worry over fitna – chaos and disorder – has often focused on the sexual temptation caused both by women’s unregulated desires and the troublesome desire that women provoke in men. Second, and in a paradoxical relationship to this view of women as sexually insatiable and thus prone to create social chaos, Muslim authorities have stressed the importance of the fulfillment of male sexual needs, especially in the context of marriage. Drawing particularly on several hadith delineating dire consequences for women who refuse their husbands’ sexual overtures, the insistence on men’s sexual needs and wives’ responsibility to fulfill them has competed for prominence in modern intra-Muslim discourses on sex with the recognition of female sexual needs.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

The term satipaṭṭhāna can be explained as a compound of sati, "mindfulness" or "awareness", and upaṭṭhāna, with the u of the latter term dropped by vowel elision. The Pāli term upaṭṭhāna literally means "placing near", and in the present context refers to a particular way of "being present" and "attending" to something with mindfulness. In the discourses [of the Buddha], the corresponding verb upaṭṭhahati often denotes various nuances of "being present", or else "attending". Understood in this way, "satipaṭṭhāna" means that sati "stands by", in the sense of being present; sati is "ready at hand", in the sense of attending to the current situation. Satipaṭṭhāna can then be translated as "presence of mindfulness" or as "attending with mindfulness." The commentaries, however, derive satipaṭṭhāna from the word "foundation" or "cause" (paṭṭhāna). This seems unlikely, since in the discourses contained in the Pāli canon the corresponding verb paṭṭhahati never occurs together with sati. Moreover, the noun paṭṭhāna is not found at all in the early discourses, but comes into use only in the historically later Abhidhamma and the commentaries. In contrast, the discourses frequently relate sati to the verb upaṭṭhahati, indicating that "presence" (upaṭṭhāna) is the etymologically correct derivation. In fact, the equivalent Sanskrit term is smṛtyupasthāna, which shows that upasthāna, or its Pāli equivalent upaṭṭhāna, is the correct choice for the compound.

It is in this context, clearly dominated by a classist propaganda, chauvinist and persecutory, that the accusation of anti-Semitism and hidden negationism – despite being completely unfounded – tetanizes the majority of its victims. How should we explain this strange phenomenon? A first reason lies in the brutality of the accusation, very unusual in a society bathed in a polite consensus – at least among well-behaved people. Suddenly, in a procedure reminiscent of the logic of fascism in which insult overshadows argument, we are dealing with a genuine provocation: an accusation so serious and so incongruous that we can well imagine it leaves some people speechless. And then, it’s very difficult to defend yourself against such an accusation: ‘No, I’m not anti-Semitic’ being a double negation (‘I’m not one of those people who don’t like Jews’) with the fragility this implies. How, indeed, can one prove that one is not something? Say that one has Jewish friends? That’s the worst of all. (‘Ah! He’s got his good Jews.’) Remind people, in certain cases, that one is Jewish oneself? We have seen how that is an aggravating factor. Launch a legal action? Lost in advance, as the accusers are clever enough to use terms that shelter them from prosecution for defamation, which has its precise rules. They will never say that you’re anti-Semitic; they’ll even say that ‘of course, you’re not’, letting their argument, their tone, their comparisons and their historic references do the slandering work while they remain protected.

Of course, historical scholarship on the New Testament is open to all, whether Jewish or Christian, atheist or agnostic. But the present debate about Paul and justification is taking place between people most of whom declare their allegiance to Scripture in general, and perhaps to Paul in particular, as the place where and the means by which the living God has spoken, and still speaks, with life-changing authority. This ought to mean, but does not always mean, that exegesis-close attention to the actual flow of the text, to the questions that it raises in itself and the answers it gives in and of itself-should remain the beginning and the end of the process. Systematize all you want in between-we all do it; there is nothing wrong with it and much to be said for it, particularly when it involves careful comparing of different treatments of similar topics in different contexts. But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up "correct answers," but the sermon, or the shared pastoral reading, or the scriptural word to a Synod or other formal church gathering, or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture. Scripture, in other words, does not exist to give authoritative answers to questions other than those it addresses-not even to the questions which emerged from especially turbulent years such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is not to say that one cannot deduce from Scripture appropriate answers to such later questions, only that you have to be careful and recognize that that is indeed what you are doing.

The Christian life requires a form adequate to its content, a form that is at home in the Christian revelation and that respects each person's dignity and freedom with plenty of room for all our quirks and particularities. Story provides that form. The biblical story invites us in as participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, into something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions. We enter these stories and recognize ourselves as participants, whether willing or unwilling, in the life of God. Unfortunately, we live in an age in which story has been pushed from its biblical frontline prominence to a bench on the sidelines and then condescended to as "illustration" or "testimony" or "inspiration." Our contemporary unbiblical preference, both inside and outside the church, is for information over story. We typically gather impersonal (pretentiously called "scientific" or "theological") information, whether doctrinal or philosophical or historical, in order to take things into our own hands and take charge of how we will live our lives. And we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation. And we live them in an extensive community of men and women, each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire. Picking a text for living that is characterized by information-gathering and consultation with experts leaves out nearly everything that is uniquely us - our personal histories and relationships, our sins and guilt, our moral character and believing obedience to God. Telling and listening to a story is the primary verbal way of accounting for life the way we live it in actual day-by-day reality. There are no (or few) abstractions in a story. A story is immediate, concrete, plotted, relational, personal. And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls - our moral, spiritual, embodied God-personal lives - story is the best verbal way of getting us back in touch again. And that is why God's word is given for the most part in the form of story, this vast, overarching, all-encompassing story, this meta-story.

experience, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world around us. So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.2