32 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Sustainability in Comparative Religious Perspective
This course explores how various cultures through time and space have interacted with the natural environment in an effort to achieve material, spiritual, and medical wellbeing. We will closely examine sustainability as reflected in a variety of spiritual traditions (from “animism” to Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and in societies or in social phenomena not necessarily driven by any “religious” system (such as hunter-gatherers, nomads, socialist and communist kibbutzim or Sirius, an intentional community and eco-village in Shutesbury, Massachusetts). The current “greening” philosophy spreading across the U.S.A. and globally has created a campus-wide (and 5-College-wide) thirst for courses related to sustainability, permaculture, organic gardening, and environmentalism. None of these wonderful initiatives or courses, however, examines the idea of Sustainability in a comparative historical and religious context. This course helps to fill an intellectual gap in the curriculum and also offers students an opportunity to consider Sustainability as an age-old human preoccupation. Among the questions we will explore are: What is human wellbeing and how has its definition changed according to time and place? How was the concern for human wellbeing connected to concern for other entities, such as animals or the earth as a whole? Was there a gap between law and actual practice? How successful or detrimental were sustainability efforts? How did these efforts differently 2 impact the various sectors of a given society? To what extent does the modern Sustainability movement show awareness of religious traditions and history? Does the movement’s principle preoccupation with techniques and science make room for the historic orientation of religious traditions to the natural environment? In other words, is the modern Sustainability movement compatible with today’s spiritual traditions? For each theme we will ask: What is the role of “religion” and is religion” a useful category of analysis for the topic under consideration? The motto of this course is: “One foot in the past, one foot in the present.” Most Sustainability concerns have to do with the present day. A significant portion of the course, therefore, invites students to bring contemporary themes into the classroom, discuss them, and endeavor to place them in historical context. For example, in the week spent discussing deserts in historical context, we will also consider the significance of today’s deserts for Sustainability, e.g. the potential of the desert as a model for biomimicry
Recommended from our members
“The Exceptional and the Mundane: A Biographical Portrait of Rebecca Machado Phillips, 1746-1831”
Recommended from our members
Ben-Ur and Hammerman, What Did Sephardic Jews Eat? (first page only).pdf
This article questions whether “Sephardic” is a useful category of analysis for Food Studies, and whether the best-known literature about Sephardic food is historically reliable. The authors look to two bookends in so-called Sephardic history—the Iberian persecutions and exiles of Jewish communities in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and the postcolonial exile of Jews from Algeria in the second half of the twentieth century. The authors consider the legacy of olive oil and fish and chips as presumed Jewish foods and the cuisine of Algerian Jews both before and after their exile to France. Instead of assuming natural correlations between ingredients or recipes and Sephardic cultural groups, they argue, historians should examine historically-contingent “associations” between various groups and their cuisine—associations that change over time, overlap with other populations, and vary according to class and region
Recommended from our members
Identity Imperative: Ottoman Jews in Wartime and Interwar Britain
By the onset of World War I, hundreds of Ottoman immigrants, including a significant proportion of Jews, were living and trading in Britain. During wartime and through much of the interwar period, these multi-ethnic Ottomans were automatically classified as enemy aliens, subject at times to internment and deportation, stripped of their freedom of movement, and uniformly barred from citizenship. Drawing on nearly sixty recently declassified naturalization applications of Ottoman Jews, this article discusses the prosopography of Middle Eastern newcomers, nativism and xenophobia, and the role of the state in shaping national and ethnic identities, focusing on the British government’s invention of an ‘Ottoman (Spanish Jew)’ designation that legally Hispanicised Ottoman Jewish applicants, allowing them to be considered for citizenship
Recommended from our members
‘Distingués des autres Juifs:’ les Séfarades des Caraïbes (\u27Distinguished from Other Jews:\u27 Sephardim in the Caribbean)
Recommended from our members
“A Bridge of Communication: Spaniards and Ottoman Sephardic Jews in the City of New York (1880-1950)
Recommended from our members
“Peripheral Inclusion: Communal Belonging in Suriname’s Sephardic Community”
This article compares the membership status of Eurafricans in the Portuguese Jewish communities of Curaçao and Suriname. In the former colony, free people of African origin were almost entirely barred from admission, whereas in Suriname manumitted Africans and their descendants were included as members, albeit sidelined to the margins, a phenomenon I term peripheral inclusion
Recommended from our members