Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
How can we distinguish between christian people and other Romans at first sight in the Later Roman Empire ? According to Peter Brown, it was impossible to differentiate clerics from the rest of the Roman Society. Most of primary sources highlights informations about outward appearance of converted to asceticism. Does it mean that christian converted to asceticism can only be recognized as christians at a glance? It is not so sure since we can assert that christian people were advised by Church Fathers not to wear expensive clothes. In fact, the Fathers encouraged christians to limit the consumption of luxury items, sharing lex Oppia’s Republican views. Roman laws prevented women going outside without their veil from reporting assaults and from pursuing criminal charges against their aggressors. What is at stake is to find out whether Christian people respect these prescriptions or if most of them ignore them. What is sure is that we possess many informations about the outward look of christians converted to asceticism. Following Christian Literature, we will try to reconstruct the outward appearance of lay christian people in Italy and Africa.
" The English word paradise derives from the Avestan word for a walled garden, pairi-daēza. In the Book of Revelation the heavenly Jerusalem is surrounded by a wall marking its exclusivity, mimicking the walls that surrounded the earthly Jerusalem in the late first century CE. This etymology is apropos to our presentations this afternoon, because if there is one theological specialization that is built upon a walled conception of its subject matter, eschatology is that concentration. My remarks today for this Theology Without Walls panel will provide an alternative dialogical framework for thinking about eschatology across religious traditions, and I will do so with the help of imaginative literature, alternately called fiction or belles lettres. I turn to literature for three reasons. Those reasons are first, the value of acknowledging subjectivity; second, freedom from the burden of canonicity; and third, the hope for a future world that imaginative literature can represent."
Turns and Returns: Conversions to and away from Eastern Orthodoxy, A Panel by the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit (Co-sponsored with the Religious Conversions Unit), American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, November 23-26, 2019 (Lecture).
In October 2010, the French TV channel Canal + aired an episode on the “halal” market in France. Based on various visits to abattoirs, restaurants and interviews with butchers and customers, the investigators argued that the “halal” market in France is flooded with “faux-halal” products. In this paper, I explore how debates on "faux-halal" are experienced among members of the Turkish immigrant community in Strasbourg. Based on interviews with owners of butcher shops, supermarkets and restaurants, as well as imams and the congregation at mosque associations, I argue that the question of “faux-halal” does not constitute as big of a problem for the Turkish immigrants in Strasbourg as the Canal + episode portrays. Focusing on the local level, the paper shows how individuals have devised alternative ways of negotiating halal, which enables them to rely less on certification, and more on interpersonal relations.
2012 •
In the study of religion, the ‘insider/ outsider’ distinction remains an important and much debated issue. While some argue that religious traditions are best presented and approached by ‘insiders’ – who have lived and experienced the faith in discussion – others insist that there is a definite advantage to being an ‘outsider’ – because s/he is not influenced and conditioned by certain religious forces and configurations. I will problematize the idea of this clear distinction by connecting the recent establishment of Islamic Studies in Germany – and its emphasis on presenting an ‘insider’s’ view of Islam – with the broader socio-political context of Germany. By doing so, I am not just intending to contest the clear distinction between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, but also trying to show how the concept of an ‘insider’s’ view is developed within a secular and modern framing; constructing and shaping a secular-, state-, and democracy-friendly understanding of the Islamic tradition through an ‘insider’s perspective which accommodates itself neatly in configuration of modern power.
Update: Published paper available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050303219874366. This paper examines how “love” as an affective concept was brought into the Chinese vocabulary where previously such meaning was absent, and the ways in which it has been adapted as a political discourse and a social force in Republican (1911-1949) and Communist China (1949-) in different ways. Although the making of love as an affect for the project of Chinese modernity has been noted by certain scholars, the source of such affect is primarily attributed to Christianity and Christian humanism (Lee, Goossaert, Wielander, Wickeri). My project will show 1) a typology of Christian influence as missionaries helped to reconfigure Asia through love when overt political and military power had begun to prove difficult or impossible to execute effectively, and as legacies of sentimentalism drawn into the age of modern nation-state nationalism: imperialism registered in the language of love; 2) alternative impact from revolutionary radicalism (e.g. October Revolution in Russia and socialism in France) and folk religions that has been decisive to the formation of the discourse of universal love, equality, and ‘harmonious society’ in state propaganda and everyday politics. This project will carefully take a top-down and from-below approach, to explore sources from media, contextual theology, and state propaganda. Ultimately, I wish this project could elucidate the expression of feeling as the means by which institutions and cultural authenticity are created and renewed, a means that has so far been neglected in the study of religion and politics in China.
In Germany, religious education at state schools and theological teachers’ training are to be given “in accordance with the tenets of the religious community”. In the last 15 years, Islamic religious education and Islamic Theology have been established at school and university level. Faculties at the Islamic theological departments and the future Islam teachers are expected to be reformers of Islam and prototypes of the “good Muslim”. Critics, however, consider these steps an attempt for social control of Muslims. In my paper, I will look at the way German Islamic Theology designs its curricula between the requirements to teach Islam in accordance to the tenets of Muslim organizations and the public interest of having an Islam compatible to Western society. I will examine in which sense Islam as a subject in public education presents a litmus test to the relation between state, society, and the religious (Muslim) community in Germany.
2018 •
Courtesy of the research project A03 on Talmudic and Byzantine Medical Knowledge in Late Antiquity at the Collaborative Research Center SFB 980 “Episteme in Motion” at Free University Berlin. http://www.sfb-episteme.de/en/teilprojekte/sagen/A03/index.html
2009 •
The paper focuses on the terms dmwt and ṣlm as we find them in Standard Biblical Hebrew. According to the method that I used to describe the already mentioned lexemes, the language of the Bible has to be subdivided in functional languages. For each of these languages the semantic range of each lexeme might slightly change, I will therefore try to account for these changes and to delineate the semantic composition of the lexemes.
Quran and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspective / Biblical Characters in Three Traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) Panel, The SBL International Meeting, July 1st-5th, 2019
Quranic Intertextuality with Jewish-Rabbinic Tradition: The Case of ‘the Cow’ in Q 2:67-742019 •
Religious Studies News
Plays Well With Others: Does Doctoral Training Prepare Us for Interdisciplinary Collaboration?2001 •
Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society 38, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 14-20.
God as Still Living: An Analysis of Paul Tillich’s Concept of the Divine Life in Light of Mark Taylor’s Infinitization of the Finite2017 •
2018 •
Journal of Biblical Literature 121/3 (2002): 441-57.
A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch's "Babel und Bibel" LecturesBulletin of North American Paul Tillich Society
Paul Tillich and Paul Ricoeur on the Meaning of 'Philosophical Theology'2013 •
Teaching Christian Mission in an Age of Global Christianity
Teaching Christian Mission in an Age of World Christianity2017 •