Abstract: Hopi agriculture and the Hopi farmers who have farmed in the semi-arid Southwest for millennia have faced constant environmental and personal challenges. However, many of us are still fulfilling our obligations and honoring our covenant. We are reminded of this when we look at a small ear of Hopi blue corn, as it represents humility, patience, and endurance. All of these qualities are needed to ensure the prosperity of the next generation of Hopi people—if not humanity.

Anointed Mindy Misener (bio) For years, Mary would lie awake at night tallying her memories of her mother, making sure none were slipping away. Martha, Mary's older sister, cared more for their mother's things—her shawl, the sandals imprinted with the shadows of her heels and toes. Martha disdained Mary's obsession with memories as much as Mary disdained Martha's obsession with objects, but even at eight and ten years old they each knew to allow the other her grief, and so their relationship, which could have turned into a permanent battleground, was mostly a place of peace. Their mother had been capable of great joy, but sadness could also steal her away, for she longed for more children, but did not conceive. Then, finally, she was pregnant again, and her pregnancy proceeded until she was large with child. As the birthing time approached, Mary found herself in strange, impulsive moods. One morning, in a moment of carelessness, she knocked their mother's best jar off a shelf. It broke with a dull crunch, as if stepped on. Martha rushed to pick up the pieces, but their mother said, "Wait," and bent awkwardly in front of the fragments. "I've had this jar for years and never seen the inside," she explained. "Well," Martha said, "it's useless now." "Useless," their mother agreed. She added, "But not hopeless." Three days later, she was dead. Mary was supposed to help prepare the body, but she felt choked by the anointing perfume and used her baby brother, Lazarus, as an excuse to flee whenever possible. Someone had found him a wet nurse, but the woman was shared with another family, so Mary took charge of him when the nurse was away. Not that she felt a bit of tenderness for the boy who brought her mother's death. Her plan was to drop him down a well, say a dog dragged him off. But there were too many people around for her to dispose of him just yet, so she gave him a pinky to suck and bided her time. Days passed, then weeks. She couldn't help learning which tones he liked murmured in the tiny whorls [End Page 328] of his ears, the exact pace of walking and bouncing that soothed him. Eventually, when she remembered her plan to drown him, she shuddered and held him so tightly he squawked in protest. _______ Their father had had some success as a trader of minerals from the mountains, but after their mother's death, his standing slipped until he was earning only a fraction of what he once had. Martha and Mary sold weavings to supplement the household income. Lazarus became their intermediary, but he worked as secretly as possible, because though their father had to know the extra money came from somewhere, the charade of his success was all that mattered to him. Over the years, the siblings' business grew to the point that they even sold to some wealthy customers in Jerusalem. They wove and sold more openly now because their father's vision and hearing were faltering. He was wracked with headaches and mostly remained in bed. He didn't like to be helped, though, which is how he ended up under the wheels of a Roman chariot. Bystanders said that when the driver's commands to move went unheeded, he'd urged his horses straight for their father, then glanced back only once at the insolent obstacle. Mary helped Martha and Lazarus prepare the body until the anointing oil was brought out. It had been years since she'd counted up her memories of her mother—she'd realized that the more she handled them, the duller they became—but the nard did something altogether different and more powerful than call to mind a picture or event. It bewitched past into present. Again, she was eight years old, her mother was freshly dead, and the light in the world had been snuffed. Again, it seemed that if only one simple thing could be changed—maybe if the jar could be perfectly restored—her mother would live again. Again, Mary was not up to the...

Reviewed by: Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent by Emily Dumler-Winckler Elizabeth Ursic (bio) Dumler-Winckler, Emily. 2022. Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent. New York: Oxford University Press. 392 Pp. $74.00 The eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft is well known today in many fields, including literary studies, political science, women and gender studies, history, and feminist philosophy. Lesser known are Wollstonecraft’s contributions to theology, religious studies, and religious ethics, particularly Christian ethics. Emily Dumler-Winckler seeks to correct this omission with her book Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent. Using current debates about modernity and the virtues, Dumler-Winckler proposes that Wollstonecraft is a needed voice from the modern era who improvised but did not discount the virtues in what she terms a “tradition of dissent.” Born in London in 1759, Wollstonecraft was a recognized and successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction during her lifetime. She was also recognized as an abolitionist for her writings denouncing the slave trade and as an activist for women’s rights. When the French Revolution’s ideal of equality for women was not being realized, she penned her most famous work, Vindication of the Rights of Women, in 1792. This work is considered one of the first political treatises to defend women’s rights. Current debates about modernity and virtues have created ideological camps in which Wollstonecraft’s contributions do not neatly fit. According to Dumler-Winckler, the theological and religious influences in her writings have been discounted or ignored as a result. Not only does Dumler-Winckler disagree with this assessment, but she asserts that, as a thinker from the modern era, Wollstonecraft’s writings about the virtues provide a way to help resolve current anxieties these debates have produced: “Drawing on Wollstonecraft, my book provides an account of modern virtues, at once distinctly Christian, Protestant, feminist, and democratic. The central argument is that the cultivation of the virtues and contestation about them—their names, numbers, and exemplars—are, now as ever, indispensable to Christian communities and [End Page 241] democratic societies. Virtues and contestation, when wed, are among the goods shared in common.” To help us understand these current debates about modernity and the virtues, Dumler-Winckler names three groups: virtue defenders, virtue despisers, and virtue designers. Virtue defenders are worried about the demise of the virtues in the face of moral relativism, pluralism, and skepticism. These virtue defenders seek a standard of moral excellence and advocate for a return to premodern traditions and virtues. Virtue despisers have concerns about reverting to the virtues on these absolutist terms. Many postcolonial, feminist and womanist philosophers, theologians, and ethicists are in this group. Some virtue despisers reject all virtue discourse, both modern and premodern. Other virtue despisers hold a contempt for modernity that is shared with virtue defenders, but they see the problem as domination and colonization rather than pluralism. Virtue designers share the despisers’ critique of the virtue tradition, but they also construct a new set of virtue proposals. Dumler-Winckler names Katie Cannon’s landmark 1988 text, Black Womanist Ethics, as an example of this tradition. Dumler-Winckler connects Cannon’s approach as a virtue designer to that of premodern philosophers including Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Hildegard of Bingen: “Designers are right to assess virtues and exemplars from the perspectives of their own experiences, their own religious or philosophical traditions and communities.” This connection between personal experience and intellectual perspective is how Dumler-Winckler introduces Wollstonecraft’s modern virtues. Like the premoderns before her, Wollstonecraft accepts an ultimate establishment of virtues. Dumler-Winckler shows that Wollstonecraft was inspired by eighteenth-century religious dissenters in Britain and that she follows a tradition of dissent to refashion the ancient traditions of the virtues for modern feminist and abolitionist objectives. Using the wardrobe metaphor of moral imagination first introduced by Edmund Burke, she asserts that every generation dons garments of what have been passed down. They stitch together something new, however, when the garment no longer fits based on their contexts and experiences. The book is organized into five chapters, each dedicated to investigating the theological underpinnings of Wollstonecraft...

Little Syria, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Aya Nimer (bio) Omar Offendum's musical show Little Syria nods to the rich history of Brooklyn's Syrian community and is part of a vibrant tradition of Syrian performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.1 Offendum highlights this history by centering the rich visual language of shammi (Levantine) design, using mother-of-pearl chairs and gold decor to amplify the narrative style of the show and create a bridge between the audience and the historical titular neighborhood where the show is set. Little Syria, a collaboration with musicians Ronnie Malley, Thanks Joey, and Nano Raies, tells a story of Arabs in American life. By interweaving different narrative and musical techniques, Offendum shines a light on a historic Syrian neighborhood in Manhattan, New York and creates a space for communal healing. Offendum uses multiple cultural touchstones to encapsulate the broader and more intimate histories of Little Syria, creating continuity in the historical narrative of Arabs in the United States. Offendum builds this historical narrative through two concurrent processes. The first is by telling the broader history of Little Syria and Arab immigration in tandem with the intimate histories of people in Little Syria. The second is the use of hakawati, an Arab storytelling tradition that relies on motifs such as allegory, music, and spectacle to tell a story. Offendum uses hakawati as a storytelling practice to interweave our own daily emotional experiences with those of Offendum's historical figures, giving us a parallax view of racism, finding a job, and making money.2 The show begins with a track that outlines the experience of migrating to America through the lyrics "It's time for a new chapter/in this land of opportunity/the promises of rapture and happily ever after/lay behind these golden doors … allow me to explain before you butcher my name/label me unhireable or worse yet undesirable/I'm a man with a heart and a soul on a mission/here to build a better life …" Starting the show with a broad picture of the [End Page 90] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A snapshot of the stage and setup of Little Syria at the Brooklyn Academy of Music anxieties and emotions associated with immigration creates an aperture for Offendum to take us into the lived experience of a street salesman in Little Syria. The salesman sells his wares near an American soap factory that uses pig lard as a main ingredient. The owner of the factory often ridicules the Syrian salesman by calling him "dirty" and "unhygienic." The salesman thinks the ridicule is ironic considering Syrian soap's reputation as a valuable and potent cleansing agent. This segment animates the daily exchanges that comprised the lives of those living in Little Syria as they encountered racist institutions in their new neighborhood. This intimate history, which visualizes the emotional lives of historical figures, creates a space for us as viewers to reflect on our own experiences with racism. The interweaving of broad and intimate histories through hakawati shows how our emotional lives are intertwined with larger political histories. The musical structure is similarly comprised of two elements interwoven into a distinct style. Thanks Joey began the process of creating the musical soundscape of the show by sampling Arabic songs from the mid-twentieth century, which were then overlaid with Offendum's lyrics and complemented by Ronnie Malley's oud performance. Offendum's [End Page 91] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. A backstage shot of Omar Offendum, Thanks Joey, and Ronnie Malley at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 92] lyrics, combined with Thanks Joey's beats, create a moment that fuses the historic Arab soundscape of the 1900s with Offendum's contemporary hip hop style. This is further developed in Ronnie's live oud performance. The oud is an instrument with strong cultural associations and memories for many Arab listeners. The nostalgic nature of the oud evokes a soundscape reminiscent of home, another way that Little Syria engages with intimate histories. This soundscape simultaneously feels historic and contemporary, transporting listeners into a liminal world that acknowledges and draws...

Reviewed by: Evaluating Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue: Methods and Frameworks ed. by Mohammed Abu-Nimer and Renáta Katalin Nelson Richard McCallum1 Abu-Nimer, Mohammed & Renáta Katalin Nelson, eds. 2021. Evaluating Interreligious Peacebuilding and Dialogue: Methods and Frameworks. Boston: De Gruyter. I wish this book had been available in 2012 when I was first invited to evaluate the Cambridge Interfaith Programme Summer School.2 When I looked for a framework to evaluate a simple interfaith encounter, I found virtually nothing. What I did find was in the field of non-religious conflict resolution and that in its infancy. The present volume with its focus on interreligious conflict resolution is one step closer to a serious consideration of interfaith evaluation more generally. It is a great contribution to the field bringing together as it does a wide range of experienced evaluators who discuss the theoretical underpinnings of evaluating interreligious peacebuilding, the tensions and politics between various stakeholders, as well as the practical methodology and tools available. The volume has been published as part of an open access series, Beyond Dialogue, produced by the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) which in 2021 moved from Vienna to Lisbon. Some in interfaith circles may be sceptical of an interfaith initiative launched by a Saudi king (d.2015) in a foreign land when the faiths cannot coexist in his own homeland. However that may be, this edited volume is a valuable publication and brings together some of the most experienced academics and practitioners in the field. Foremost amongst them is Professor Mohammed Abu-Nimer, now a senior advisor at KAICIID, who has been publishing on peacebuilding, non-violence in Islam and evaluation for over 20 years. This period covers the whole of the development of what this volume makes clear is a young, emerging field that has sprung up in the twenty-first century as a result of the pressing necessity to consider the role of religion and religious identity in conflicts around the world. The book paints a picture of a field rapidly professionalising, developing resources and competing for funding. Peacemakers, evaluators and donors, religious or secular, will all find much help, wisdom and [End Page 297] stimulation in its various chapters. Several of the authors discuss the lack of definitions and criteria for concepts such as “religious peace-building,” “good results” and even what constitutes “peace” itself in any given context. Reina Neufeldt suggests that religious peacebuilding is “actions taken by individuals motivated by their religion or representing religious institutions to constructively and non-violently prevent, reduce or transform inter-group conflict” (p. 55). She goes on to discuss some of the theory and philosophical ideas that underpin it. Hippolyt Pul, writing in the African context, makes a strong case for the importance of listening to “those who have lived through conflict” as they are best placed to define these things and “know what best to call peace” (p. 96). Many of the chapters include case studies, quotes from surveys and insights from interviews conducted with those in conflict situations. These helpfully ground the theoretical discussion, although maybe one could wish for more, as some of the chapters become a little repetitive, as is often the case with an edited volume of this nature. For instance, several of the chapters discuss the complex relationship between peace-making practitioners, programme evaluators and donors, each of whom may have different priorities in the evaluation process. Whilst evaluators often favour a longitudinal approach and focus on the importance of learning, donors tend to work to a much shorter time frame and are interested in results, efficiency and accountability. Abu-Nimr interestingly notes that recent advances in technology have only fuelled the push for quick evaluations with quantifiable data (p. 26). When it comes to methods and practical frameworks, there are maybe not as many as one might expect. There are no appendices with samples of surveys or interview schedules. There are few suggestions about how surveys should be constructed, interviews conducted, observations recorded or the role that journaling, video blogs and focus groups could play. The exception is the chapter by David Steele and the late Ricardo...

In a world polarized by politics, social injustice, identity issues, and gender-based violence, it is difficult to promote interreligious dialogue. While there has been a rise in attempts to promote dialogue, they typically still occur between a small group of religions, leaving others aside. Even though the fourteenth Dalai Lama was invited to take part in interreligious dialogue with the Holy See two decades ago, it seems that this now is only part of a fading memory, probably connected to political issues regarding Chinese backlash. This article proposes the use of discernment as a basis for an interreligious dialogue, starting with the discussion of discernment from Buddhist and Christian views, but not limiting the dialogue between these two. The scope of the article is to present universal responsibility (Tib. སྤྱི་སེམས་; Wyl. spyi sems) as a key concept to understanding and dialoguing with Mahāyāna Geluk Buddhism, and the reasons why it is important, not only from an interreligious perspective, but because of the importance of building bridges between religious and nonreligious sectors.

In an assessment of religion, mood is especially valuable, as Clifford Geertz noted. In this pragmatic essay, I suggest that adolescent mood is particularly valuable in understanding religion, as can be seen in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 movie In the Mood for Love, and in conversation with Geertz and William James.