This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.

Why does this site permit advertising?
Click here to discuss.

The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

AAR Conference Paper

11/16/2007 11:21:34

The reason I haven't written in a while is I've been working hard on some major projects, especially this, the paper I'll be presenting at the American Academy of Religion's Men's Studies Group tomorrow in San Diego.

The paper and accompanying slides have been posted on the Papers page.

re: AAR Conference Paper - 11/17/2007 13:00:52
Posted by BT

...What if bin Laden had been raised by a mother devoted to a Jain monk, as Gandhi was, rather than taught by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood exiles working in Saudi Arabian schools (Wright 2006: 78)?

I get the focus on local vs. global, but this last question strike me as a sort of truism -- in other words, if those reverse conditions *were* simply the case, then wouldn't you then just be using different proper names to refer to each person's different behavior and "struggle"? (In other words, the difference would still be the same, just x become y and y become x...)

...If we were alien ethologists looking at the two men in their daily lives, would there be any great difference? It is precisely because I personally prefer the strategy of one vastly more than the other that the fragility of the difference between them feels all the more disconcerting.

Couldn't one argue, though, that the difference only seems fragile when analyzing the "local" level, in your sense, removed from the more qualitative differences in moral or spiritual motivations? Apart from the surface similarities of certain everyday life parallels, it's the huge differences in theology between a G. & a B. L. that make the difference (*not* at all because of Hindu vs. Muslim factors per se, but because of how they each individually navigate their own stand within their respective traditions completely differently). I think the theological presuppositions (whatever the starting tradition) matter more, in the end, than whatever everyday life parallels might exist.

re: AAR Conference Paper - 11/18/2007 02:23:31
Posted by nathan

Thanks for these remarks! I think your last sentence is just the kind of answer I am interested in hearing. In one sense, this paper can be read as an argument for just how important received theological ideas can be!

Actually, BT, this paper was at one point supposed to go into some of the issues of scale (a la general systems theory) that we've talked about in the past.

Printer-friendly version

The Row Boat basks under a liberating Creative Commons license