More History - Recent and Otherwise

 There is a wide swath of irony in the following video from Robert Reich. Yes, I like Reich - he has integrity, intelligence, and a great sense of humor. Obviously, this was recorded before the last election. The great irony of the Biden Presidency is that he benefitted this country and tried to remedy Democratic errors.

Real wages - they have not gone up. In Indiana, there has been a staunch refusal to raise the minimum wage. Who refuses this increase? The Indiana Republican Party, which controls this state. Why do they continue their stranglehold on Indiana life?

One thing about Israel that seems to fly under the radar is the Christian population. We know they are there at Christmas time. We forget they were there before the Muslims. Dr. Michael Azar's Deir Mimas and Orthodox Christian-Jewish Relations (Public Orthodoxy) is an essay that does fill in some of the holes in the history of Israel and the local Christians.

As the postwar period unfolded into the 1960s and 70s, the general tone of Jewish-Christian dialogue remained faithful to Seelisberg and its form of Zionism. In fact, Western Christian and Jewish leaders deliberately sought to widen the dialogue to include “Orthodox and Third World Christians” (as they were then so often, and so tellingly, grouped) explicitly because of the lackluster reputation that Zionism and the State of Israel had among them. And while fruitful relationships soon grew between Jewish representatives and their counterparts within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the people within the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, if they were interested in such dialogue at all (which was not often the case), were regularly opposed or ignored. Indeed, only a few months before Marc Tannenbaum—a prominent American rabbi then at the forefront of Jewish-Christian relations—engaged Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in a remarkable and productive dialogue, he communicated with an investigator working on behalf of the American Jewish Committee both to defame and weaken the public reputation of Metropolitan Philip—primate of the Antiochian Archdiocese and fierce critic of Zionism and the State of Israel—and to support his episcopal rivals.

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About the uses of history, Public Orthodoxy also provides an example with Dr. Elaine Wilson's Writing Religious History:

Putin’s Russia sustains its revisionist history by blurring boundaries between distinct spheres of influence. As a political strategy, this is not new; political scientist Timothy Mitchell has written about the inevitable blurring of boundaries that occurs as a result of the extraction and deployment of resources; the oil industry relies upon “establishing connections and building alliances that do not respect any divide between material and ideal, economic and political, natural and social, human and nonhuman, or violence and representation. These connections make it possible to translate one form of power into another.” In the case of contemporary Russia, as Ilya Kalinin has argued, the “usable” past constitutes one of these extracted resources. Russian resource banks of oil and/or uranium as well as institutionalized religion reflect the very dynamic that Kalinin and Mitchell describe; specific extraction and deployment of national resources, imagery, or ideas curates a message of power that spans social and political divisions. The Moscow Patriarch lauds the development of nuclear weapons as divine providence, while the selective extraction and manipulation of saints’ symbolic power—a cultural capital in its own right—serves to justify a campaign of “righteous” warfare.

To this latter point, Russia’s renewed veneration of particular saints is terribly telling. Prince Vladimir the Great has been a central figure in religious and political posturing, particularly since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2016, Putin commemorated the erection of a statute to Saint Vladimir (‘Volodymyr’ in Ukrainian tradition) in Moscow. During the ceremony, Putin spoke of the saint’s centrality to Russian history and celebrated the monument as a novelty in complete disregard to the fact that one had already long existed in Kyiv. Six years later, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin undermined the separation and sovereignty of Ukraine in a televised speech, saying, “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us…. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.”

Vladimir is a useful reference point for both the Russian church and state because his story is both one of many military conquests as well as the imposition of Christianity upon Kyivan Rus’. Yet at the same time, mention of the strastoterptsy is suspiciously absent from Church messaging. Strastoterptsy is a distinct subset of martyr saints in the Eastern Slavic tradition. They are known in English as “passion-bearers,” and are remarkable for their peaceful acceptance of their fate.

Who Was the Real Henry III? - something I never knew about Henry II's sons.

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The Search for Szek: The Greatest Spy of the Great War Vanishes Without Trace, or Did He?

I also have been, and always will be, a sucker for these kind of stories.

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