(Untitled)

[vantc]

Last friday Half and me visited the medieval Hanze town Zutphen. It's a great town where parts of the old citywalls and towers are still standing. The ruins of a great watergate span the river Berkel and is largely intact :-). Inside the town a large 13th century cathedral with one of only two surviving original monastic libraries (the other one is

Comments

[jenmarya]

Way back when I was a young whippersnapper, prior to writing a paper, we were told to tailor the scope of the topic to the length of paper being written. Not here? Is this paper preparatory to a longer paper/book on the same subject?

[vantc]

*lol*

well yes I should be tailoring, but tailoring is not one of my strengths ;-)
I can be very lengthy, especially when a subject intrigues me... thorough, but lengthy.

Whether this is going to be more than just this paper depends on how many interesting subjects I meet in the future. At this moment religious history is the direction I'd like to specialize in. Topics like moving from polytheism to monotheism (the "massive"(?) conversion of people to both christianity and islam), monotheistic faiths in polytheistic societies, evolution of the catholic church to 'absolutism', religious relations between islam and christianity around the crusades, effects of the black death on people's faith and the birth of the reformation are stuff that really really interest me.

[jenmarya]

Interesting stuff. I hope you post your theories.

Two unrelated thoughts:

I was just remarking on how ironic it is that America was founded on the idea of religious tolerance, but for the most part has evolved to have less of it than Europe. Do you have an explanation handy?

Do you think we've moved back toward polytheism? Between religious tolerance and individualism, seven people at a dinner party can each have a disparate notion of who god is, or several separate gods, the incarnation of each differing depending on why they are invoked, like a wrathful old testament style god (vengeance), loving god (presumably orgasms), Mother of God (healing), all the saints for various things, etc. etc.. Is that polytheistic enough to count as such? Are we moving back that way or have we always been?

[vantc]

Hmm.. I don't think I agree on the founding of america on the idea of religious tolerance in the first place. Like France and the UK the idea of enlightened freedom in the 18th century was in general largely limited to white male christians. The french went a bit overboard and expanded this to white women too during the latter part of the french revolution. Islam has always been seen as backward no matter what the documents say on 'liberté, egalité and fraternité' or 'all man created equal