Daily Archives: July 29, 2022

Philosophies on governance have always shaped and defined cultures throughout the history of mankind. Most, if not all, proclaimed the one or the few masters of all the rest. Our founding turned theses philosophies on their heads. The philosophy that shaped our founding was one never before articulated. The individual was viewed as an integer, an end in himself, with the reasoning power to make choices and have values to live as he sees fit. Our government was formulated to protect the individuals right to live as he saw fit. The philosophy? Enlightenment Rationalism.

This philosophy gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions that immeasurably improved the lives of mankind, in what eventually became the modern world as we know it today. The founding of America was an extraordinary step forward for mankind. However, some people dismissive of my alarms about Marxist-oriented philosophy overtaking our institutions demonstrate an ignorance of the pervasive onslaught currently underway, or theyre in agreement with the tenets of this pernicious ideology. The ideology is Critical Race Theory, aka, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Here is a primer on the genesis of Critical Race Theory and its objectives.

Early seeds of what is now called Critical Race Theory can be found in Critical Legal Theory, which itself grew out of the Marxist critical theory of the (in)famous Frankfurt School. In his book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, one of the founding intellectuals of the CRT movement, legal scholar Richard Delgado, notes several influences on the theory, including the work of Marxist Antonio Gramsci and Western-culture deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.

Because capitalism succeeded in making the working class richer, the socialist needed another oppression narrative to replace the class struggle in order to win power. Enter cultural hegemony. This idea is traceable to Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who wrote:

Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society. Aside from churches, they have succeeded spectacularly in all other institutions.

Given CRTs genesis, is it any wonder CRT is opposed to the core values of Western Civilization namely, reason, logic, individualism, freedom, equality, rights, free speech, race neutrality, meritocracy, capitalism, and judging people by the content of their character? Indeed, the successful spread of a set of ideas inimical to these Western values should cause us great concern.

Critical Race Theorists claim they seek to create and maintain a world that, in Delgados words, no longer merely affords everyone equality of opportunity for all races, but instead assures equality of results for all races. Discarding practically the entire structure of Western civilization is considered a necessary price to pay. Delgado again, describes, Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the (classical) liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. CRT advocates see all such systems as power structures that must be targeted for radical transformation or even eradication.

Think about the phrase, assures equality of results. Only returning to the types of philosophies of old can assure equality of results. Only masters at the top can make this happen; freedom and meritocracy will be no more. If I needed brain or heart surgery, an equality of results surgeon would not do. All of us would want a meritorious surgeon.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI, has been pushed by its advocates as a replacement vernacular for CRT. However, DEI certainly dovetails with the intended outcomes of CRT and is imbued and embedded with many of CRTs fundamental tenets.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs exploded into an $8 billion industry, establishing self-sustaining administrative structures throughout all branches of academia, government agencies, and the corporate world.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training and educational efforts spreading through major corporations, college campuses, and even primary schools are rooted in CRT concepts. The NYTs 1619 Project was profoundly influenced by CRT. At the heart of CRT are cries of systemic racism and white privilege.

A true understanding of the origin, nature, and content of Critical Race Theory makes clear its pernicious intent.

Manny Montes lives in Auburn

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Manny Montes: Origins of critical theory - The Union

Many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the Dravidian movements colonial origins

Many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the Dravidian movements colonial origins

The Governor of Tamil Nadu has been criticised by some for expressing his views on the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Some have gone to the extent of calling this political interference. This is unfair. Expressing ones views on a sensitive issue cannot be construed as political interference.

What the Governor has done through his comment, however, is disturb the popular view that former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C.N. Annadurais forsaking of the demand for a separate Dravidian state was only a practical compromise, and that Aryans and Dravidians continue to remain racially different people. The eminent historian, P.T. Srinivasa Iyengar, never subscribed to this view, even though he maintained that cultural differences existed between the Vedic and non-Vedic people. In Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture, he wrote, A careful study of the Vedas reveals the fact that Vedic culture is so redolent of the Indian soil and of the Indian atmosphere that the idea of the non-Indian origin of that culture is absurd.

The Governor called the Aryan-Dravidian divide a handiwork of the British, which has been criticised as toeing the Hindutva line on the issue. This criticism is also unfair because many eminent scholars, both local and international, have written about the Dravidian movements colonial origins. The linguistic theory, unscientific histories of racial origins, the politics of the non-Brahmin movement and the modern rationalism of the self-respect movement all have deep roots in colonial thought.

One of the key early proponents of the idea of Dravidian language family as a scientific entity was Robert Caldwell, in 1856. Many may not know that 40 years before Caldwell, Francis Whyte Ellis, the Collector of Madras, had already laid the foundation for Caldwells theories through his writings. The American historian Thomas Trautmann writes, Elliss Dravidian proof is a dissertation... [in which] we see more clearly the relation between the languages-and-nations project and the properly Orientalist scholarship of the British in India. This languages-and-nations project, or tendency to link languages to nations, is, according to Trautmann, not a matter of pure science freeing itself from the shackles of religion, as it has often been represented[but] its deep roots are in the Bible, in the genealogy of the nations that descended from Noah and his three sons. Even more problematic is the languages-and-race project. Trautmann says about this, European view of race as a fundamental force of history had a deep effect on the interpretation of Indian history, and what I have called the racial theory of Indian civilization how much text torturing is necessary to sustain the idea of the encounter of Indo-European and Dravidian languages in India as racial in character, and how false is its racially essentializing identification of civilization with whiteness and savagery with dark complexion.

How far politics has overtaken science and history is clear from the fact the one can hardly find mainstream criticism of Caldwells philology today. Just a decade after Caldwells work was published, Charles E. Grover of the Royal Asiatic Society wrote in his famous work on Tamil folk songs, [about] the true character of the language and linguistic progress made since the publication of Dr. Caldwells book, it may be noted that the learned Doctor gives an appendix containing a considerable number of Dravidian words which he asserts to be Scythian It is now known that every word in this list is distinctly Aryan.

It was works of missionaries like Caldwell and G.U. Pope that British authorities exploited for political needs. As Director of The Hindu Publishing Group, N. Ram notes in a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1979, influenced by these works, the brutally repressive Governor, Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, looked at the non-Brahmins during his 1868 address to the graduates of the University of Madras and said, you are of pure Dravidian race and I should like to see the pre-Sanskrit element amongst you asserting itself more.

The eminent Cambridge historian, David Washbrook, identified the roots of Dravidian or non-Brahmin politics not in historic fault lines that were supposedly plaguing Tamil society but in the novel types of government and politics which developed under the British in the early years of the present century. According to Washbrook, it was the centralisation of bureaucracy in late 19th century Madras that led to fear among British civilians of caste cliques which could now control not only the districts but the entire province. So, the policy had to be divide and rule. That important leaders of the non-Brahmin movement were influenced either by colonial inheritance or narrow interests is best illustrated by Rajmohan Gandhis description of one of its founders, T.M. Nair, entering politics as a congressmanholding brahmins responsible for an electoral reverse he left the congress and became one of SILFs founders always found in western attire, a practice yet to spread among south Indian men. In a series of articleshe argued that British authority had kept India united and tried to convince Montagu that the Home Rule league was financed by German money.

Scholars like Ashis Nandy have for long highlighted the importance of unclear and overlapping identities in pre-modern India as sources of tolerance. Washbrook gave concrete examples and concluded as follows: In his manual on Coimbatore district F. A. Nicholson freely admitted his inability to separate true Gounder Vellalas from the hosts of rich peasants who had adopted or were adopting Gounder ceremonies, dress and customs. In the census of 1891, Sir Harold Stuart noted the ability of the Nairs of Malabar to absorb immigrants in a single generation without apparent friction Similarly, Thurston recorded a famous Tamil proverb which describes the regular generational flow between the Maravar, Aghumudayar and Vellala castes. In more recent work, S. A. Barnett has suggested the diverse origins of those presently filling the category of Thondamandala Vellala In these conditions, in which sub-regional varnas were so amorphous, the politics of caste confrontation were rare and circumscribed. In fact, in his famous Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Edgar Thurston said, admissions to the Paraiyan caste from higher castes sometimes occur.

With modern rationalism came the need to enumerate and categorise. And with Western-style nationalism came the need to identify enemies. When one of the movements great literary figures wrote in praise of Tamil, he also had to include a death wish for the Aryan language. Many neutral observers have noticed parallels between Dravidian politics and other chauvinistic ideologies. Yet one does not see the same criticism of its ideology in mainstream intellectual circles as is normally reserved for other nationalist ideologies.

Adithya Reddy is an Advocate at the Madras High Court

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Overcoming the Aryan-Dravidian divide - The Hindu

REFLECTING ON HIS EVOLUTION as an artist, Pablo Picasso is reported to have said that he spent a lifetime trying to learn to paint like a child. Though an obvious exaggeration, the quote gets to the heart of modernisms admiration of childrens art. As art historians like Jonathan Fineberg have observed, Picasso was not alone in seeking to emulate childrens creativity. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a host of European artists in search of new modes of expression looked to childrens drawings for inspiration and guidance, believing that art made by the young was purer and more primitive than images mediated through adult perception and dulled by social convention and artifice.

In childrens looping scrawls and lopsided figuration, in their dreamlike colors and disorderly narration, painters like Picasso, as well as Natalia Goncharova, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Jean Dubuffet, and Joan Mir found a fundamentally different way of envisioning and depicting the world around them. Seeing with the eyes of a childrediscovering childlike imagination and factureprovided such artists with an antidote to the mechanization and rationalism of everyday life, offering what Fineberg describes as a purgative for Western cultures materialism and the rigor mortis of its cultural hierarchies.

Avant-garde interest in the child as artist also led to an interest in the child as spectator. Affinities between the visual language of childhood and that of modern art, paired with the childs supposed innocence and impressionability, made the young an attractive target audience for artists attempting to disseminate new ideas about art and politics. In addition to influencing the development of European modernism, children were some of its first consumers: The Soviet painters Aleksandr Deineka, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Lebedev all made picture books for Soviet children as part of a broader effort to revolutionize mass communication, and with it, mass politics, in the wake of 1917. Artists associated with other reform-minded movements of the early 1900sfor example, the Vienna Secession and Bauhausalso paid attention to childrens books, using them as venues to explore radical typography, layout, and pictorial representation. Such experiments had a lasting impact on the picture book, a genre that continues to entice visual artists and remains a forum for innovative graphic design.

A number of artists working today have extended their practice into the realm of childrens publishing by creating illustrations for books. Perhaps the best-known artist-illustrated childrens books of the past decade are by Yayoi Kusama, who put her spin on two classic works: The Little Mermaid, in 2016, and Alices Adventures in Wonderland, in 2012 (the latter a text on which Salvador Dal himself could not resist leaving his mark, in a 1969 edition). Kusama has famously experienced hallucinations since she was a girl, and has sourced many of her signature motifs, like her polka dots and nets, from patterns she saw in her first childhood episodes.

Kusamas black ink drawings for The Little Mermaid, made between 2004 and 2007 as part of her Love Forever series, translate Hans Christian Andersens tale of love, heartbreak, and transformation into the artists own formal vocabulary, rendering the sea from which the Little Mermaid makes her ill-fated rise a dark patchwork of jet-black circles and writhing lines. Kusama likewise inserts herself into Lewis Carrolls story, this time directly, assuming Alices place as protagonist and depicting the journey initiated by her fall down the rabbit hole as a tour through major shapes and themes of her own youthful cosmology. Kusama claims the story, originally inspired by ten-year-old Alice Liddell in the 1860s, as her own, putting the artist in the position of the daydreaming child: I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland, one page announces.

Faith Ringgolds 1991 Tar Beach, the best known of her more than twenty childrens books, also merges biography and fantasy, drawing similar webs of connection between the figure of the artist, the child, and the dreamer. Both written and illustrated by Ringgold, Tar Beach takes inspiration from her story quilt Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988), itself based on elements of Ringgolds childhood. Like the quilt, the book follows Cassie Lou Lightfoot, a Black third-grader living in 1930s Harlem, as she takes flight one steamy summer night, lifting off her asphalt roof and soaring high above the twinkling George Washington Bridge.

Careening over New York, Cassie takes possession of the citys landmarks: the bridge is her gleaming diamond necklace, an ice cream factory, her personal dessert source. In one scene, as she approaches a towering union headquarters that her father is helping construct, she vows to fly directly over it so that she can seize it for her dad, barred from joining said union because of his race. Once her family owns the building, she explains, it wont matter if hes in their old union, or whether hes colored, or half-breed, or Indian as they say. At the books close, Cassie helps her little brother, Be Be, learn to fly. Its easy, she instructs, all you need is somewhere to go that you cant get to any other way. It is the child, like the artist, who has the ability to see beyond the accepted order of the adult world, to imagine new pathways, to unravel old hierarchies.

THE NOTION OF THE ARTIST as a visionary and rebel is the subtext of many artist biographies geared to school-age childrena genre that has exploded in the 2000s, as the stock list of any major museum gift shop will confirm. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has produced several such titles about artists in its collection, among them Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, An Artist in Harlem (2015); Sonia Delaunay: A Life of Color (2017); and Roots and Wings: How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist (2021). These are joined by other biographiesincluding A Life Made by Hand: The Story of Ruth Asawa (2019); Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas (2022); A Boy Named Isamu: The Story of Isamu Noguchi (2021); and Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois (2016)released by a mix of mainstream presses and art book publishers. Amazon, the unfortunate yardstick of publishing trends, has its own category for Childrens Art Biographies.

Taking the form of embellished or fantastical anecdotes from the childhoods of famous artists, the books go beyond the suggestion that the artist and the child are bonded in their shared sense of imagination. In their characterization and plot, they propose that the professional artist has an inborn sense of creativity that exceeds the quality and scope of the normal childs. In Barb Rosenstock and Mary GrandPrs The Noisy Paintbox: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinskys Abstract Art (2014), for example, the boy Kandinsky is endowed with a synesthetic ability to hear and feel the throb of colors. When he opens his first paint box, strands of color pour out from it in a magical sympathy of light and noise that Vasya harnesses into an abstract composition. Shown his array of ecstatic shapes, his parents bristle, shipping him straight to art lessons so that he can learn to draw houses and flowers just like everyone else.

The artist is set apart not only from adults but also from other children in Elizabeth Brown and Aime Sicuros Dancing Through Fields of Color: The Story of Helen Frankenthaler (2019), which depicts the young Frankenthaler as similarly ostracized for her lack of interest in basic figuration. Unlike the other students in her elementary school class, who sit in uniform rows and quietly execute tidy pictures of flowers, Frankenthaler swirls around her desk in a frenzy of activity. Watercolors drip from her table, and cover her hands and face; littered in a circle are sheets of paper she has covered with fluid, radiant blossoms. At a time when girls were taught to sit still, learn their manners, and color inside the lines, the accompanying text explains, Helen Frankenthaler colored her reds, blues, and yellows any which way she chose. Helen never wanted to follow the rules.

The elegiac quality of child artist biographies is particularly striking in the case of Kandinsky. In contrast to the imagined Vasya, the real Kandinsky spent years collecting the art of children and worked fastidiously to reach his signature abstract style. As he wrote in the 1913 autobiographical essay Reminiscences, experiencing painterly forms purely and abstractly required years of patient work, of strenuous thinking, of numerous careful efforts. Notably absent from the Kandinsky biography is a vision of mutual exchange between the child and the artist. Once imagined as potential teachers of artists, childrens books about famous artists now primarily cast the young as their students, compelled to aspire to the artists superior inborn sense of creativity.

Even more ironically, other books in the museum retail-scape use works of modern art made in imperfect emulation of juvenile sketches as training materials in visual literacy. In Phaidons First Concepts with Fine Artists series of board books, children aged one to three are given instruction in basic subjects by some of modern arts luminaries. In Blue & Other Colors with Henri Matisse (2016), babies and toddlers can learn to identify hues from a painter who, as the final page notes, had little interest in verisimilitudeonce daring to make a portrait of a woman with blue hair and a pink, yellow, and green face! Birds & Other Animals with Pablo Picasso (2017) aims to help children of the same ages begin identifying creatures through a series of Picassos highly abbreviated and simplified sketches. Small birds reduced to ovals with beaks and stick legs look more like marshmallow peeps than living birds; a flamingo, similarly, bears a closer resemblance to the lawn variety than the real thing.

Why show children photographs of a bird or drawings layered with details beyond their grasp when you can turn to avian creations by Picasso that convey the birds essence instead? The First Concepts series essentializes the special relationship between modern art and childhood, implying that the deliberately simple and irrational vocabulary of the former is legible to early learners. At the same time, it reinforces a hierarchy that prioritizes the artist as a more practiced and knowledgeable version of the child.

OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, childrens drawings have made several notable appearances in major United States modern and contemporary art institutions. In 2006 Fineberg curated a show at the Phillips Collection and Krannert Art Museum that paired the childhood work of famous modern artists with examples of childrens art pulled from private collections. In 2020-21, artist Ulrike Mller and curator Amy Zion organized The Conference of the Animals, a two-part exhibition at the Queens Museum that featured a display of artwork made by children from 1900 to the present, in conjunction with a mural that takes its title from an eponymous 1940s German picture book. On the whole, though, art institutions appear reluctant to show work made by the young as, or alongside, fine artthe art of the child a genre that, as Fineberg has noted, receives far more attention from psychologists than art historians.

Childrens art helped make modern art, but it has also historically cast a shadow over its mainstream legitimacy. The aesthetic similarities between nonobjective art and the art of the child have long been exploited to justify skeptical and reactionary responses to works of abstraction, and later, conceptualism. Indeed, my kid could make that is by now such a hackneyed indictment of the Abstract Expressionist canvas or found-object artwork that it has spawned its own cottage industry of explainer books, articles, and online commentary.

To uphold the value of modern art in broader popular culture, it has been necessary to emphasize the humblebragging quality of the Picasso lifetime quoteto point out that, for truly talented artists, stooping to paint at the level of the child required decades of practice and patience. It has also been necessary to call into question just how close artists accused of immaturity actually came to embodying the child. There is no doubt that Duchamps urinal is pretty puerile, but as writer Susie Hodge responds in her 2012 book Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained, its potty humor is too clever and effective to be mistaken for a middle-school prank. No novice could have judged the right moment to intervene and chosen the best means to scandalize the public, Hodge writes.

Similarly, that Cy Twomblys canvases look like the meandering scribbles of a toddler belies the restraint and composure of a mature artist working according to a complex and rigorous system, as the late MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe argued in a 1994 essay titled Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly. One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly, Varnedoe writes, only in the same sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock.

As one of the closing pages of the 2004 picture book Action Jackson notes, describing Pollocks Lavender Mist (1950), there should be no question as to Pollocks singular talent: Some people will be shocked when they see what he has created. Some angry. Some confused. Some excited. Some filled with a happiness they cannot contain. But everyone will agreeJackson Pollock is doing something original, painting in a way no one has ever seen before.

This article appears under the title Kid Stuff in the June/July 2022 issue, pp. 5661.

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Kid Stuff: Why Have Artists Been So Drawn to Childrens Books? - ARTnews

The story of religion in Americas original 13 colonies often focuses on Puritans, Quakers and other Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, looking to build a community of like-minded believers. Protestants were indeed in the majority, but the reality was far more diverse. Colonial America attracted true believers from a wide array of backgrounds and beliefs, include Judaism, Catholicism and more.

And thats just the European migrs. Myriad groups of Indigenous Americans who already lived along the Eastern seaboard had their own beliefs, many of which forged connections between the living, the departed and the natural world, according to Yale emeritus professor Jon Butler in his book New World Faiths: Religion in Colonial America. And African people transported to the colonies as part of the transatlantic slave trade brought their own multiplicity of spiritual practices, which included polytheistic, animist and Islamic beliefs, before merging into new variants of Protestantism.

In 1630, English Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, invoked the phrase the city on the hill to describe the new Christian religious community he and his fellow colonists should aspire to build in service to God Almighty." But the various believers drawn to, or brought to, the colonies built many proverbial cities, on many hills. Five generations later, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence without mentioning the word Christ, and neither the word God nor Christ appears in the U.S. Constitution, written and ratified a decade later. Both documents have come to enshrine the ideals of a new nation that had a religious foundationbut developed a secular soul.

Public worship at Plymouth by the Pilgrims, print by artist Albert Bobbett, c. 1870

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North Americas English colonies were founded as distinct Protestant societies, with their own charters and, with a few exceptions, an emphasis on religious uniformity.

In Virginia, the oldest of the original 13 colonies, religion was a major topic in the first meeting of the first colonial assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1619. The representatives passed laws requiring citizens to do Gods Service, including mandatory attendance in the Church of England (a.k.a. the Anglican church, Britains state-established Protestant denomination that had pulled away from Europes long-dominant Roman Catholicism).

After the Pilgrims arrived in New England in 1620, Puritans followed in the 1630s. Both had splintered from Anglicanism, believing in the strict Protestant teachings of John Calvin, who criticized Englands church as still tainted by Catholicism. Once in the New World, Puritans gave their version of Protestantism a new name: Congregationalism.

Anglicans and Congregationalists became the two dominant forces in American religious life for much of the 17th century, with nearly all the new colonies having one or the other as their established faiths. By the early 18th century, American colonies were a place where religion was basically the culture, says Alan Taylor, professor of history at the University of Virginia. In spite of geographic and linguistic diversity, he says, the colonies were dominated by the near uniform conviction that there will be more social peace and a better moral order if everyone goes to the same church.

WATCH: 'Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower' on HISTORY Vault.

Father Andrew White celebrating the landing of the first settlers in Maryland, the only American colony founded as a refuge for English Catholics, March 25, 1634.

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There were notable exceptions to this attitude among the colonies.

One was in Rhode Island, where a breakaway Puritan named Roger Williams, whod been expelled from Massachusetts in 1635, imagined his new colony on Narragansett Bay as a shelter for persons distressed of conscience. He promoted the idea of a society where religion should not be regulated by the state.

The other took root in 1680, when King Charles II paid off a debt by granting 45,000 square miles on the west side of the Delaware River to William Penn, son of an English admiral Penn. A follower of Quakerism, the radical and reviled Protestant sect that rejected nearly all the trappings of church ritual and hierarchy, Penn went on to found Pennsylvania, a new, tolerant colony that attracted not only Anglicans, but a variety of German Protestants, from Lutherans to Pietists, and even some Catholics.

For its part, Maryland was founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics fleeing religious wars in Europe.

WATCH: The Religion Collection on HISTORY Vault.

George Whitefield, key figure in an evangelical movement known as the Great Awakening, preaching in the open air.

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Then, in the mid-18th century, came the most important religious event of pre-Revolutionary America: the 'Great Awakening.' Thats when an evangelical style of preaching upended religious traditions and helped reinvigorate Americas religious culture, making it more energetic, more diverse and more independentespecially outside New England. The movements key figure, an Anglican minister named George Whitefield, made several tours through the colonies between 1739 and his death in 1770. With an actors voice and a vivid stage manner, writes Butler, he attracted huge crowds, addressing the greatest concern among all Protestant believers: eternal salvation.

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Whitefield and other inspired preachers helped establish new communities of Protestants, including Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians.

The Great Awakening led to greater participation of women in the new Baptist movement, and the first significant attempts to convert enslaved Africans.

It also enshrined the act of choice in American life. Before the Great Awakening, says Taylor, what was normal in the colonies was everyone in a community going to the same church. What was normal after the Great Awakening, he says, is the individual making choices.

Enslaved people being baptized in a Moravian congregation, as depicted in a German history of the Moravians in Pennsylvania, 1757.

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As the transatlantic slave trade dramatically grew, nearly 1 in 5 of the 1.1 million people living in the 13 colonies was Black by the mid-18th century.

Enslaved Africans brought with them a range of religious beliefs. Some practiced Christianity, which had found converts on the western African coast starting in the 16th century. Some were Muslim. Most practiced animist beliefs, worshipping spirits that infuse people, animals and inanimate objects. They kept those beliefs alive through music, dance, healing arts and other types of cultural expression.

Relatively little is known about the religious life of the enslaved during early colonial America, says James Sidbury, a professor of history at Rice University. North American slave owners didnt care about their slaves beliefs, he says, and a deeply paternalistic interest in slaves religious development didnt take hold until the 19th century.

Following the Great Awakening, Black church membership, including enslaved and the freed, increased dramatically, says Sidbury, as Baptists, Methodists and some Presbyterians sought out converts of all races.

The first handful of Black Protestant churches were Baptist, founded in the 1770s in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. But most enslaved people would have been worshiping alongside whites, or carving out spiritual spaces on their own.

Religious life on southern plantations, says Sidbury, must have been a very complicated mix of true Christian converts and a lot of curious folk and others who were holding onto more traditional ways of living. Tolerance in this world was important, he adds, because the deep oppression and violent reality of chattel slavery meant cooperation among the enslaved was a matter of survival.

Print showing the feast of Purim, a Jewish holiday commemorating the deliverance of the Jews in the Persian empire, as celebrated in the Touro Synagogue, Rhode Island, 1712.

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Islam was the dominant religion in the upper reaches of sub-Saharan Africa, and there is evidence of Muslim believers among North Americas enslaved Africans in particular, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Runaway slave ads from the region sometimes made reference to Muslim origins.

Jews became a permanent part of colonial life starting in the second half of the 17thcentury, when Sephardic Jews with origins in Spain and Portugal arrived in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York). Jews also settled in Philadelphia, Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia and Newport, Rhode Island, where the Touro Synagogue, dedicated in 1763, survives as the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States.

On the eve of the American Revolution, no single Protestant denomination could claim more than one-fifth of the colonies religious adherents, according to Butler. The Church of Englandonce dominant, and gradually reconvened as Episcopalianism following the break with Englandwas down to about 15 percent.

The leading Foundersincluding George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and James Madisonwere all nominal Christians, but scholars have noted that they tended to eschew doctrinal beliefs. And the American Revolution itself is regarded as a profoundly secular event, writes Butler.

Many Founders were followers of Deism, a set of Enlightenment ideas, vaguely grounded in opposition to religious orthodoxies, that was marked by skepticism, rationalism and the close observation of nature. Some Deists, such as Thomas Paine, rejected Christianity outright.

The former colonies, now new states, typically still had established religions. (The Congregationalist Church remained the Massachusetts state religion until the 1830s.) But the founding documents of the Revolutionary period recalibrated the role of religion away from governmentstarting at the national level, with the states following.

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The Surprising Religious Diversity of America's 13 Colonies - History

Tom Mutch is reporting near where much of the fighting is happening on the Ukraine-Russia border. Video / Tom Mutch

The faces of destroyed refugee mothers and stories of little lives lost haunt Yuriy Ackermann, a Ukrainian-born New Zealander on a cyber security mission in war-torn Kyiv.

Over the past three weeks, Ackermann has documented trips to Bucha and Irpin - two regional towns where atrocities were uncovered after the withdrawal of Russian forces - and war-ravaged Borodyanka.

An empty playground and lone sunflower in the shadow of bombed-out buildings, piles of torched cars and a blown-up bridge point to the madness of it all, but the human misery consumes Ackermann the most.

"What destroys me is the individual stories, you read the stories and it's horrifying," he said.

He cannot shake the story of Liza, a four-year-old girl with Down syndrome who was killed in a Russian missile strike on her way to an appointment with her mother in Vinnytsia last week.

"The photo of this dead girl, her mother's foot blown off, it's just heartbreaking. It just destroys your soul," he said.

Ackermann hails from Chernivsti, near Ukraine's border with Romania and Moldova, but moved to Tauranga at the age of 14.

He travelled to Kyiv at the invitation of the Ukrainian government to help defend the country from sustained Russian cyber attacks.

On the way he met many distressed refugees in Sweden, Belgium and Germany - all women and children because most men have been banned from leaving the country.

"Some of them have run away from Donetsk in 2014 to Mariupol, now they have to run from Mariupol. It's heartbreaking to meet those people, you see in their face, they're just destroyed," he said.

"It's not about the war, it's not about militaries, it's about common people who have done absolutely nothing wrong."

Air raid sirens sound two to three times a day in Kyiv, but Ackermann prefers rationalism over fear.

"It's hard to think, in the next moment, it could be you. Nowhere in Ukraine is safe," he said.

"You could be hiding in a bunker, but if one of those 500kg bombs or one of those Russian cruise missiles hit you, the only thing that would be left is ashes."

Even so, months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine signs of normality have emerged in Kyiv.

Cafes are open, supermarket shelves stocked and Ackermann can even buy a bottle of New Zealand wine.

His desperately worried Tauranga-based parents have pleaded with him to come home, but he is committed to the cause.

As military war rages on, Ackermann is on the frontline of the cyber war, helping the Ukrainian Government fend off Russian forces online.

He said Russian hackers were trying to take down Ukraine's critical infrastructure and steal sensitive data.

An infrastructure corporation that recorded 21,000 security incidents in 2021 was bombarded with 768,000 in the first month of the war alone, Ackermann noted.

"This is a very, very serious threat to Ukraine," he said.

New Zealand has provided more than $33 million in diplomatic, humanitarian, legal and military assistance to Ukraine, along with trade and economic sanctions designed to limit Russia's ability to finance and equip the war.

Ackermann urged New Zealanders not to forget about Ukraine by donating anything they could.

"For the price of two cups of coffee you can feed someone for a week," he said.

"We cannot just be sitting aside on the bench and ignoring this war. If you would like your gas prices to go down, you should care about it. This has a direct impact on our economy and our lives.

"We need to be on the right side of history. We need to make sure that when the war is over we are on the list of countries that did our part."

Read more from the original source:

'It destroys your soul' - the human toll of war - New Zealand Herald

David Hume Tower in Edinburgh was always an insult to the philosopher. The great man of the Scottish Enlightenment would have been horrified to have seen the concrete monstrosity erected and named after him in the 1960s. Looking at the building you do not think of the Enlightenment. More common impressions left are the stench of urine and despair. Thus had the authorities of the University of Edinburgh already insulted one of their finest sons.

Then in 2020, all dead white males came into the crossfires of a cultural revolutionary wave. Politicians, tradesmen, philosophers and others were all found guilty of the crimes of being dead, white and male. Unforgivable crimes, naturally. As a result statues were torn down, plaques removed and more. All because people from the past were found guilty of not thinking exactly as we do in the 2020s.

What made it worse was that the adults kept giving in. And nowhere did they give in faster than at the University of Edinburgh. David Humes work was crucial in moving our society out of the realm of superstition and into that of reason and rationalism. But in one fatal footnote to one fatal essay Hume said something that is certainly by modern standards racist.

I doubt any of his critics had ever read any of Humes works. Or at least, my strong suspicion is that they did not stumble upon this footnote during a routine read-through of Humes collected works. Outrage culture does not work like that.

But soon, searching for victims, the mob was after Hume, deemed him a racist and insisted his name be removed from the University of Edinburgh building. So it came to pass that the university authorities changed the building name to 40 George Square. A name which is still far more poetic than the building in question.

And there it lay. Another victim of the latter-day culture war I described in my most recent book, The War on the West. But as I also pointed out there, these things can have unintended consequences. Weak, pusillanimous and ignorant officials, like those who lead most of our universities, thought it would be the easiest thing imaginable to spit on the memory of David Hume. Yet, as the Telegraph reported this week, there has in fact been a downside for them.

It turns out that in the wake of their auto-cancellation the University of Edinburgh saw a slump in donations. Indeed, the university lost almost 2million, including 24 donations and 12 legacy donations that have either been cancelled, amended or withdrawn since the cancellation of Hume.

Personally, I am delighted to see this. David Hume is a figure that the university should take immense pride in. Naturally, working 250 years ago, he held some views that we do not hold today. Just as we doubtless hold views today that our successors will not hold in another 250 years.

But the point of institutions is not to judge the past and act as judge, jury and executioner over it. Nor is it to erase the past. The job of institutions is to preserve the past, educate the young about it and then pass that education along. In that process continuity is vital, so that a student today might realise that they could achieve even a portion of the heights of those who went before them. Judge a man on one footnote and who should scape whipping (as Hamlet put it)?

So I am glad that the University of Edinburgh is getting a beating of its own because of its cowardly and ignorant cancellation. I hope other donors at other universities follow suit. Giving in to mobs, to mob pressure, or the insistences of the most ignorant in society are the precise things that universities should never do. Now at least another institution has learnt that the hard way.

If you are an institution and do not stand up for the past then there is no reason why anyone in the present should stand up for you.

Read the original post:

Edinburgh University is learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going woke - The Telegraph