Continuum Religious Studies

Continuum book named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2011

Wonderful news! Secularization and Its Discontents was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2011. Congratulations to author Rob Warner on this prestigious recognition. The full list of Outstanding Academic Titles can be found in the January 2012 issue of Choice. We are so pleased that this title was honored by Choice and the academic library community.

Christopher Craig Brittain on BBC Radio Wales "All Things Considered"

Christopher Craig Brittain, author of Religion at Ground Zero, will be part of a panel discussion about the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 on the BBC Radio Wales programme "All Things Considered". Tune in to hear Dr. Brittain and other panel guests on Sunday, September 11. The show is also available as a podcast -- see details here.

Religion at Ground Zero: A guest post by Continuum author Christopher Craig Brittain

Christopher Craig Brittain will be part of a panel discussion about the 9/11 attacks on the BBC Radio Wales programme 'All Things Considered'. We'll post more infomation closer to the air date.

'It is at times like these that I really hate religious people.' This is what one of my Professors said to me, as we sat in shock in his university office, moments after his secretary had interrupted our meeting to inform us that a passenger plane had just been flown into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. This outburst startled me, but it was the next conversation I had that morning, that really left an impact on me.

After leaving the university office, I met a theology student outside, a kind and gentle man training to be a minister. He was fuming with anger. He had just heard the news from New York, and burst out:

'For too many years we have been naïve, and our bleeding hearts have let people take advantage of us. We have tried to be liberal and tolerant, but now we've had to learn the hard way. Maybe now we won't be afraid to punish terrorism and Iraq. Maybe now we can finally bomb those bastards back into the dark ages!'

I was shocked to hear this man – who up to now I had found to be a calm and compassionate Christian – say such things. I attempted to calm him down, but also couldn't resist commenting on his desire for revenge. When I expressed the concern that the kind of military action he wanted might kill innocent people – including women and children – he quickly interrupted: 'I don't care! Let's bomb them all. I don't care how many we need to kill! I'm tired of all this wishy-washy open-mindedness. The Muslims don't like us and never will! It's time that we faced reality.'

Experiences such as these are the origin of the thoughts that led to my book Religion at Ground Zero (Continuum, 2011). For beyond the question of how it is possible for men to fly airplanes into office towers, I now had another troubling question confronting me: How can ordinary and gentle Christians like this man so quickly and utterly be transformed into a ball of rage demanding violent attacks on defenceless children? How do events like September 11, 2001 cause average people to transform into a hateful desire for violent revenge? This, along with the angry statement by my Professor, led me to ask some difficult questions about my own religious faith: How can a religious tradition that teaches peace and respect be do easily deployed to justify murder? Why is it that people of religious faith seem no less prone to panic and desire for revenge? If religion is capable of causing such violence, can it even hope to be part of the solution to such tragedies?

The most common theological response to disasters and tragedies in human history is to ask why a loving God would allow such terrible things to happen. People raise this question in a number of ways: 'Where was God when I needed him?' 'What did I do to deserve this?' Trying to find answers to these questions – an exercise known as 'theodicy' – has been the concern of philosophers and theologians for generations. But as I thought about the events of 9/11, and then stepped back to examine how people have responded to other shocking events in history – the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the First World War, the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina – two things in particular struck me. The first observation is that many (if not most) people who are caught up in a disaster tend not to find the answers provided by theodicy to be very helpful. Second, the temptation to engage in the sort of calculus modelled by theodicy appears to remain very powerful, even among people who have no overt religious beliefs. In the wake of the shock of a terrible tragedy, many of those caught up in it lament that 'The world will never be the same!' This is quickly followed by a drive to identify who is to blame for causing the tragedy, and to articulate the 'meaning' of what is being experienced.

My interest in this dynamic, which is explored in my book, has only been deepened since I finished writing it, for very recent events have continued to exhibit this general pattern of human behaviour.

Many of the survivors, as well as the family and friends of the victims of the recent massacre in Norway, are currently wrestling with these feelings as they seek to make sense of attacks, while asking the terrible question, 'Why?' The same painful thoughts were no doubt experienced by mourners commemorating the first anniversary of the Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg, Germany. In the wake of such terrible events, many people find themselves struggling to achieve some sense of the meaning of their experiences.

As the victims and their friends wrestle with these painful issues, the media and the general public engage in a similar process, but in a way that is frequently saturated with political controversy. The aftermath of the Love Parade disaster became a spectacle of public officials passing the blame on to others. The events in Norway have been followed by a variety of politically motivated declarations: some assuming the attacks were by Muslim extremists, while an American radio commentator compared the young Labour Party victims to the Nazi Youth. Not long after the terrible earthquakes and tsunamis that shook Japan in March, the mayor of Tokyo publically stated that, because 'Japanese politics is tainted with egoism', a tsunami was needed 'to wipe out egoism'. He thus described the disaster as 'divine punishment.' Examples such as this demonstrate how, in the wake of a disaster, many people use the intensity of the situation as an opportunity to advance their agendas and interests.

For those who are members of religious traditions, this dynamic is disturbing and humbling. Religion at Ground Zero explores the tension that exists between religion's capacity to both cause and enhance the suffering and destruction surrounding historical tragedies, but also its potential to serve as a resource for responding to such disasters. Thus, while my book challenges simplistic accusations that suggest that religion is inherently violent and dangerous, I also argue that theology needs to operate with greater humility and honesty about its own limitations.

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I'll be carefully watching how individuals and communities commemorate and tell the stories of their experiences of that terrible experience. Most particularly, however, I'll be interested in analysing what sort of meaning people are making about the attacks ten years after the fact. What theodicies continue to subtly be constructed and retold? Does the impact of 9/11 continue to influence how people think about the place of religion in society, or in their personal lives?

There will be a great deal of editorials, official commemorations, television retrospectives, and even academic debates, surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11. As I witness this media spectacle (and admittedly participate in it), I will be wondering whether, for all this talking, we have yet achieved any deeper understanding of this event? Or will the media overage amount to a repetition of problematic patterns found in versions of Christian theodicy, only in more secular forms? How we commemorate this anniversary will tell us a great deal about how much we have, or have not, learned over the last ten years.

William Kolbrener has written his take on the recent attacks on Israel by militants in the Washington Post. His thoughts are that, though the uprisings that overthrew Mubarak were a positive thing for the Egyptian people, Mubarak was a firm guarantor of peace along the Israel-Egyptian border.

Please find his full article here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/letter-from-israel-israel-summer-gives-way-to-arab-spring/2011/08/19/gIQACICxPJ_blog.html

 

Hello all,

I thought I would let you know that author William Kolbrener has given an interesting podcast interview with Rabbi Jeffrey Saks about his new book published with us 'Open Minded Torah', which can be found on the following website:

http://blog.webyeshiva.org/podcast/open-minded-torah

Enjoy!

Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies

Hello!

I thought it was about time I introduced myself as the new Editorial Assistant for Continuum's Religious Studies list and let you know just how excited I am to get to work on the fantastic titles the Religious Studies list has to offer.

One such title, taken from the Continuum Companions series, is the brilliant and comprehensive reference guide- The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies. With specially commissioned essays written by an outstanding, international team of experts, Jessica Frazier offers the definitive guide to Hinduism and study in this area.

The book covers all the most pressing and important themes and categories in the field - not only covering the topics that have traditionally attracted great interest, but also those newer areas of research. The book reveals how the many topics intersect through detailed reading paths and where important work is still being done. The series of indispensible research tools, including a detailed list of resources, chronology and diagrams summarizing content, make this the essential reference tool for anyone working in Hindu Studies.

For more from the RS team and the latest news, check us out on Twitter .

-Rachel

William Kolbrener in the Washington Post

William Kolbrener, author of Open Minded Torah, has an excellent guest article in the Washington Post about telling stories on Passover.

An excerpt from the article:

Passover is not the time for cool objectivity and disengagement – what a contemporary psychologist calls our modern pathology – but a night for engaged story-telling, sharing in a chain of connections that goes back millennia. So I don’t care much when archaeologists, as they sometimes claim, unearth ‘finds’ either questioning or confirming the veracity of Biblical accounts. For me and those who tell – and re-tell – the Passover story heard from parents and grandparents to our children and grandchildren, it is the story, refined over generations, to adopt Hamlet’s words, that is the thing.

So after all the blow-torching, scrubbing and boiling are over, there remains the labor on Passover night of telling that complex story: ‘one who expands on the story,’ the hagada relates, ‘is to be praised.’ An active and vibrant story-telling meant to elicit a new kind of consciousness of past, present and future: a knowledge that makes the abstract real, in which spiritual and physical are joined, and the transcendental is brought down to earth – every year, around the dining room table.

BSA Religion Study Group

I'll be attending the BSA Religion Study Group next Thursday, 12th April at Woodbroke Conference Centre in Birmingham.  This will be my first Religious Studies conference since joining Continuum in August, so If you're attending, please pop by and say hello!

We'll have a selection of our latest and best selling Religious Studies titles on sale - 20% off paperbacks and 35% off hardbacks.

Hope to see you there.

Kayleigh
Marketing Executive

Continuum eBooks Now Available!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our ebook store Continuum eBooks.

The ebook store features a wide selection of titles from across our Religion list, available for download in Adobe PDF and ePub formats. The majority of Continuum’s frontlist titles will be released as ebooks on the store, simultaneously with the publication of print editions, and an extensive conversion project will see a vast number of our backlist made available for instant download. Around 2,000 titles will be available on the platform by the end of April; We expect this to climb to 3,500 titles by June. Initially the store will be open to individuals, but we expect to offer packages aimed at academic institutions from the end of June this year.

You can preview a selection of pages from all of our ebooks, and can build wish-lists and save searches. The store also features ebook widgets that can be embedded on websites such as authors’ blogs, allowing ebook previews and links back to the title’s page on the store for purchase.

For more information, please contact Rob Tebb, Digital Sales & Marketing Manager, 44 (0)20 7922 0912, rtebb@continuumbooks.com

Independent Publisher of the Year!

We are delighted to announce that at the 2011 UK IPG Independent Publishing Awards ceremony last week, Continuum were awarded Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year, and Independent Publisher of the Year. This is a great acheivement and we are all feeling very pleased with ourselves here at Continuum towers! Thanks to all our dedicated authors and customers who have helped us get to this point.

More info can be found on the Bookseller and the IPG website.

Kayleigh
Marketing Executive