Wandering Holy Men and their Conflicts

For those who, as I noted on Monday, have begun their time in the Lenten desert, the themes of conflict, battle, and asceticism will be foremost in mind. Those also happen to be the focus of a recent book: The Wandering Holy Man: The Life of Barsauma, Christian Asceticism, and Religious Conflict in Late Antique Palestine, eds. Johannes Hahn and Volker Menze (University of California Press, 2020), 324pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Barsauma was a fifth-century Syrian ascetic, archimandrite, and leader of monks, notorious for his extreme asceticism and violent anti-Jewish campaigns across the Holy Land. Although Barsauma was a powerful and revered figure in the Eastern church, modern scholarship has widely dismissed him as a thug of peripheral interest. Until now, only the most salacious bits of the Life of Barsauma—a fascinating collection of miracles that Barsauma undertook across the Near East—had been translated. This pioneering study includes the first full translation of the Life and a series of studies by scholars employing a range of methods to illuminate the text from different angles and contexts. This is the authoritative source on this influential figure in the history of the church and his life, travels, and relations with other religious groups.

Jewish Philosophers and the Jewish Jesus

Sometimes it's the books one picks up casually, with initially only very moderate interest, that end up staying with one, shaping one's thinking in a permanent manner, and being so often returned to in one's mind and quoted over and over again.

So it was with me when, at a used bookstore in Ottawa in the mid-1990s, when I was an undergraduate student, I picked up The Levinas Reader. It seemed only moderately interesting at the time, but it was wonderfully discounted so that was sufficient to tempt me to buy it. That was my introduction to the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, some of whose other works I would later attempt to read.

One in particular is Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, where he writes so memorably about the "ethics of the face" and the face-to-face encounter, noting that the dangers of abstraction and reduction, by which a person is dehumanized, are much harder to sustain when I am confronted by the ethical obligation posed by the mere existence of the person facing me.

From him I have ever after returned to, and lectured about, the "ethics of the face." I thought of him again in writing this piece at Our Sunday Visitor. And in particular in my mind's eye as I was writing, my friend mentioned in the piece was front and centre. As we approach the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is astonishing to me that anti-Semitic attacks continue and seem to be increasing in one of the last places on earth one would expect them. Kyrie eleison.

The Romanian Church and the Holocaust

Just released last month is a book that is sure to revive controversy over questions of collusion and assistance on the part of the Romanian Orthodox Church during World War II: Ion Popa, The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), 226pp.

About this book we are told:

In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, have details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania come to light. Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that concealed the Church's role in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the Church's relationship with the Jewish community in Romania and Judaism in general, as well as with the state of Israel, and discusses the extent to which the Church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa's highly original analysis illuminates how the Church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust memory has been shaped in Romania today.

Russian-Jewish Encounters

I just received a long review-essay that will run in a forthcoming issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. Authored by Robert Slesinski, the essay very carefully discusses a recent and very important, if difficult and controversial, collection by Dominic Rubin treating the explosive questions of Judaism, anti-Semitism, and Russian Orthodox theology: Holy Russia, Sacred Israel: Jewish-Christian Encounters in Russian Religious Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2010, 400pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Holy Russia, Sacred Israel examines how Russian religious thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, conceived of Judaism, Jewry and the 'Old Testament' philosophically, theologically and personally at a time when the Messianic element in Russian consciousness was being stimulated by events ranging from the pogroms of the 1880s, through two Revolutions and World Wars, to exile in Western Europe. An attempt is made to locate the boundaries between the Jewish and Christian, Russian and Western, Gnostic-pagan and Orthodox elements in Russian thought in this period. The author reflects personally on how the heritage of these thinkers little analyzed or translated in the West can help Orthodox (and other) Christians respond to Judaism (including 'Messianic Judaism'), Zionism, and Christian anti-Semitism today.