University of Chicago

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Thinking about Ukraine: Mearsheimer talks secular power, but religion ghosts loom nearby

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Thinking about Ukraine: Mearsheimer talks secular power, but religion ghosts loom nearby

Reporters collect quotes. Often we hear people say things that are so haunting that the quotations stick in our minds and refuse to leave.

Let me share one of the quotes that has haunted me for more than a decade. It’s from an interview that I did with Victor Yelensky, a sociologist of religion from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, during a June 2009 forum in Kiev about religion and politics in Ukraine. I was one of the speakers, along with another colleague — the late Arne Fjeldstad — of the Oxford Centre for Religion & Public Life.

Here is that quotation, which I used to close this “On Religion” column: “Religion ghosts in Ukraine.” Yelensky said:

"For many Orthodox people in western Ukraine, it is simply unacceptable to live in any way under the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate. At the same time, for many Orthodox in eastern Ukraine, it is simply unacceptable to not to be associated and in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate. In the middle are places like Kiev. ...

"This is a division that is inside Ukrainian society. Is it based on religion? No. Is religion right there in the heart of it? Yes."

Again, that was 2009. There has been all kinds of speculation about the degree to which Orthodox tensions in Ukraine did or did not influence Vladimir Putin’s arrogant, egotistical, truly sinful decision to unleash hell on the citizens of Western and Eastern Ukraine.

If you want more background on that subject, may I recommend my earlier post (“Eastern Orthodox thinking on Ukraine? Reporters can't settle for the predictable voices”) and the massive Plug-In feature by Bobby Ross, Jr. (“Why some experts insist Vladimir Putin is motivated by history and religion”). No one needs to agree with all of the voices featured in Bobby’s round-up, because they are all part of cacophony we are hearing, right now. I offered my own take in this week’s “On Religion” column for the Universal syndicate: “Will Russia listen to Orthodox prayers for cease-fire?” Here is how that column ends:

… Inside Russia, numerous Orthodox priests and abbots -- 200-plus early this week, speaking "each on our own behalf" -- began signing an online petition calling for the "cessation of the fratricidal war in Ukraine" and negotiations. "We respect God-given human freedom, and we believe that the people of Ukraine should make their choice independently, not at gunpoint, without pressure from the West or the East," said the text.


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For newsroom source lists: A female Muslim lawyer to watch on religious-liberty issues

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A Pegasus Books release has this curious title: “When Islam Is Not a Religion.”

Huh? Say what?

Is the pope not Catholic? Don’t U.S. Democrats constitute a political party? (With Britain’s Conservatives and Labour that’s open to question lately.) The subtitle then explains what the book is about: “Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom.”

Author Asma Uddin’s title targets American right-wingers who are claiming Islam is not “really” a religion — but a dangerous political movement.

Islam is, in actuality, a variegated global religion that usually intermingles beliefs with politics in ways that can become problematic, just as with some variants of Christianity -- including some of those making that anti-Islam claim.

Uddin, a Pakistani-American lawyer in Washington, D.C., belongs on your prime source list (if she is not there already). Contact: asma.uddin@altmuslimah.com. For starters, this Muslim studied her civil rights specialization at the elite University of Chicago Law School.

She became the founding editor of a lively, decade-old online magazine that journalists should be monitoring, altmuslimah.com. It emphasizes hot-button gender issues in Islam (e.g. women’s rights, man-woman relationships, polygamy, harem, genital mutilation, honor killing, headscarves and burqas). You won’t want to miss articles on whether Islam, and also Christianity, can consistently be considered religions (!), like this one.

In an interview posted by her law school last year, Uddin says her altmuslimah colleagues felt “there were so many of us who wanted to be authentic to our faith, devoted to our faith, and who were struggling with issues that we didn’t always know how to fit with our lived realities. It turned out that these were conversations that people were desperate to have. The response has been overwhelming.”

Most important, Uddin is a principled defender of religious liberty across the board, naturally quick to defend the rights of fellow American Muslims but also concerned about believers in all other faiths, including those who suffer suppression in Muslim countries.


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For High Holy Days coverage, consider a look at major Jewish thinker -- Leon Kass

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For High Holy Days coverage, consider a look at major Jewish thinker -- Leon Kass

If you’re scouting for a feature pegged to Judaism’s High Holy Days that begin at sundown Sept. 9, consider a high-end piece profiling what they used to call a “public intellectual,” now often thought to be a dying breed.

The Religion Guy is thinking of Jewish philosopher Leon R. Kass and his recent book “Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times” (Encounter), certainly a timely Holy Days theme. These essays are lauded in National Review as “a crowning achievement” that caps this polymath’s decades of reflection. Topics include love and courtship, friendship, the Internet, biotechnology and scientific peril, death and mercy-killing, and of course religion.

The 72-year-old retiree long taught at the University of Chicago’s elite Committee on Social Thought, where he pursued the book’s title mostly through analyzing literary classics. Though he’s not a credentialed Bible scholar, he added  years of informal student seminars and then a not-for-credit course on the biblical Book of Genesis. His approach is unorthodox, indeed un-Orthodox.

The result was “The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis” (Free Press, 2003), praised by Kirkus Reviews as “wonderfully intelligent.” Rather than focusing on matters of faith that are central for Bible believers, Kass’s philosophical approach asks us to ponder what ancient Jewish tradition provides for modern-day justice, sanity and contentment. That feeds into his other writings that seek human happiness through recovery of the West’s old-fashioned values and verities.

Kass says he was raised in a Yiddish-speaking but “strictly secular home without contact with scripture.” There’s considerable unexplained turf an interviewer could pursue regarding Kass’s own personal belief and practice, and whether and how the specifically religious aspect of the Jewish heritage might remain relevant in the 21st Century. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) posts a good essay about Kass that can guide journalists. A bit of the basic bio: Kass earned bachelor’s and medical degrees at the University of Chicago, where he met his late wife and intellectual collaborator Amy, and then migrated to Harvard for a second doctorate in biochemistry.


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Who decided which books to include in the New Testament, when, and why?

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Who decided which books to include in the New Testament, when, and why?

The Religion Guy observes that with “fake news” all over the news it’s wise to be aware of fake history.

Consider Dan Brown’s influential pop novel “The DaVinci Code.” Though the plot is fiction, readers may assume the book provides reliable historical background. Experts say that’s misleading, and one example is Brown’s version of how the New Testament came to be.

That’s a timely question due to an important new technical work on the subject, “The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity” by Edmon Gallagher and John Meade. “Canon” refers to recognized scriptures. Oxford University Press published this collection of ancient texts and analysis in Britain this month, with U.S. release due in January.

(The following relies on “The Formation of the New Testament” (1965) by Robert M. Grant of the University of Chicago, and “The Canon of the New Testament” (1987) by Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, and covers only the New Testament, not the canon of the Hebrew Bible a.k.a. Old Testament.)

Brown is correct that many texts about Jesus were circulating during Christianity’s first few centuries, so decisions had to be made about which were authentic and recognized as scripture. Many Christian folk don’t realize how complex the process was.

By Brown’s account, the Roman Emperor Constantine was the power-broker who picked only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John out of some 80 Gospels in contention. Actually what Constantine did in A.D. 331 was commission Bishop Eusebius to have copyists produce 50 new copies of the Greek canon to replace Scriptures that had been destroyed during Rome’s previous anti-Christian purge. The 80 count is exaggerated, and most rejected writings did not resemble the genre of the favored four, which were not chosen by the emperor but church authorities.


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Are most religious kids really 'jerks'? Depends on how you read a survey

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Headline writers had a field day last week with a story about an international survey involving the attitudes of religious versus non-religious kids. They ranged from “Religious Kids are Jerks” from the Daily Beast to the Oregonian’s “Religious kids are harsher and less generous than atheist ones, study says.”

The survey came out of the University of Chicago, but involved scholars (and kids) from six countries: Turkey (Istanbul), South Africa (Cape Town), Canada (Toronto), Jordan (Amman), China (Guangzhou) and Chicago itself. It involved 1,170 5-to-12-year-olds.

Now for those of us whose experience of grade school was akin to "Lord of the Flies," the thought of interviewing first through sixth graders for proof of moral grounding is pretty laughable. Why not slightly older children who've had a few more years of formation in their family's religion?

Here is how the Oregonian report began:

When it comes to teaching kids the Golden Rule, Sunday school might not be the best bet.
A new study in the journal Current Biology found children in religious households are significantly less generous than their non-religious peers.
At the same time, religious parents were more likely than non-religious ones to consider their children empathetic and sensitive to the plight of others.

Now I took a graduate-level research methods class two years ago, which taught me a bit more about looking to see how studies are conducted. What I found wasn’t quite what certain media described the situation as being.


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The theology in all those Father Greeley sex scenes

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Much like his friend (historian, not theologian) Martin Marty, the prominent sociologist (not theologian) Father Andrew Greeley of Chicago lived a long and astonishingly productive career in which he had few unpublished thoughts.


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