The Oxford conference 11 Jun 2010 … audio podcasts are here. This is the Religion, tolerance and intolerance conference I recently attended. I particularly was wowed and provoked into thinking – a rare occurrence these days – by Ben Kaplan’s talk ‘A tale of two churches’, in which he noted that religions in Europe tolerated each other but still tended to hate each other; tolerance was not a virtue. Despite this, they found all kinds of mutual accommodations, like Catholics and Lutherans sharing village churches. History Religion History
Censorship The great accommodationism debate 26 Jun 2009 I’ve stayed away from the current round of accusations and counteraccusations about accomodationism between religion and science. This is because I am a wishy washy Chamberlainist fencesitting Laodicean. But I am impressed by a few bloggers’ posts on the matter. First, what’s the background? Read More
Evolution Arseholes! Systematics, phylogenetics and HPS 10 Feb 2011 There’s been some developments this day. First of all a defunct blog on history and philosophy of science has revived with a new skin and as a group blog: AmericanScience: A Team Blog. I keep wanting to say “F&*k yeah!” It used to be the Forum for the History of… Read More
Politics On civil disagreement 21 Mar 2009 I am rather old fashioned, which is unsurprising since most of what I read dates from before the invention of the transistor. But I think that one can disagree with someone else without needing to call him an idiot: This is exactly why idiots like Matthew Nisbet, who continually call… Read More
This “fire and sword” belief not just with regard to religion but with culture and ethnicity in particular is so written in to popular notions of history and for so long was used by historians with regard to what are viewed as the ‘dark age’ ethnic origins of many modern European societies. Warfare and violence was always viewed as the cause of major shifts in culture and language. Its a view that held from the 8th cen. until nearly the end of the 20th cen with regard to British history. It’s just not that simple. As society was on a much smaller scale at this time you can find for example in the U.K. in the 6th century Celts and Saxons not just sharing the same village but living and sleeping in the same one room hut. But a Briton remained a Briton even if he wore a gold hilted sword, as a legal code put it. Not a popular period to study these days but a crucial one as it puts some rather old beliefs to bed.