Reviews for In Peter's Footsteps A Papal History

The average rating for In Peter's Footsteps A Papal History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-20 00:00:00 Guy Smith This is a small, odd, unscholarly, and deceptive book whose only significance is what it reveals about western Christian fundamentalist (and other right wing) reactions to Islam after September 11, 2001, which they perceive as a dire and existential threat. Note well that Islam at the Crossroads was *not* principally written by Paul Marshall, as Marshall himself admits in the preface. It was written largely by his longtime friends and patrons, Roberta Green *Ahmanson* with Lela Gilbert and Roberta’s husband Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, who is also credited in the preface and acknowledgments. The Ahmanson name is actually never used in the book, no doubt due to Howard Ahmanson's notoriety as the theocratic billionaire disciple and financier of R. J. Rushdoony from the late 1960s to early 1990s. Ahmanson is probably best known as the primary supporter of Creationism ("Intelligent Design") through the Discovery Institute and numerous legislative initiatives against LGBT rights in California and elsewhere. Both Ahmansons have long had their hands in many culture-warring projects around the world, typically through political and religious conservative organizations. In the US they have long been associated with the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities, and in Canada with Cardus, a Christian conservative think tank. As an alumna of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Roberta Ahmanson's connections there have long overlapped with the Dutch Calvinist networks of Trump administration education secretary Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince of Blackwater mercenary fame. Howard Ahmanson took a role as the major backer of The American Conservative around 2008-09 as its founders Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell, and Taki Theodoracopoulos stepped aside along with alt-right influencers Steve Sailer, Peter Brimelow, Paul Gottfried, and Richard Spencer. This marked a shift from an explicit white nationalism to a more religious conservatism that would take on a more markedly Christian nationalist cast in the era of candidate and then president Trump. What would not change is a deep antipathy toward Muslims. Produced in the wake of 9/11, Islam at the Crossroads aimed to alert readers to the global threat of radical Islam as an almost entirely *theological* or spiritual phenomenon whose economic and geopolitical causes are deemed largely irrelevant. Ideologically this book is a fusion of Bernard Lewis’s “clash of civilizations” and extremely right wing Zionist, counter-Jihad sources (Bat Y’eor, Daniel Pipes) repackaged for a conservative Christian audience. Islam at the Crossroad's retelling of history imagines the hand of (the Christian) God in many events since Islam's origins, such as the crusades and other Christian-Islamic warfaring that ended in apparent Muslim defeat. At one point the book seems to hope for a future where moderate pluralism can prevail against Muslim extremists. There is no suggestion of how this might happen, however. Any positive message is subverted throughout the book by constant drumbeating about the violent history and looming threat posed by radical Islam. Citing Pipes, “radical Islamists” are estimated at 10-14% of all Muslims, a radically inflated figure. Contemporary experts put the figure at far less than 1%. I doubt this book itself has been widely read, but the counter-Jihad discourse it participated in has become a potent and international propaganda narrative that targets western secularism and liberalism (or "cultural Marxism") as having initiated a "genocide" against the culture, identity, and existence of white Christians. Islam at the Crossroads, Paul Marshall, and others involved or cited in the book frequently have been quoted, promoted, and otherwise used by conspiracy theorists on the far right like Frank Gaffney and his Center for Security Policy as well as mainstream media. Sources and contributors cited in Islam at the Crossroads: * Nena Shea -- a Hudson Institute fellow. At the time this book was published or not long after Marshall and Gilbert also became Hudson Fellows. * Mark Drurie -- an Anglican pastor connected with more extreme anti-Jihadists who has spoken at Calvin College Seminary. * Steve Ferguson -- the Ahmansons' Director of Special Projects, Senior Fellow at Fieldstead and Company. * Habib Malik -- a Hoover Institute fellow and founding member of the Foundation for Human and Humanitarian Rights in Lebanon. (Hoover, like Hudson, is a right wing think tank.) * Attila Yayla -- a Turkish political thinker and dissident in exile. * Saad Eddin Ibrahim -- an Egyptian democratic activist and critic of Mubarak. * Father Justo Lacunza Balda -- Missionaries of Africa and Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies of Rome (PISAI). He helped shape Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's position on Christian-Jewish-Islamic relations later and the significant, controversial Regensburg Address. * Murat Ertug, Sina Danyal, and Bat Ye'or are thanked "for their gracious hospitality and invaluable insights." Ye'or is quite famous as one of the original voices of Eurabianism and other Islamophobic apocalyptic narratives about the west. At the time Islam at the Crossroads was published, Marshall was a fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom (part of the Hudson Institute) and a fellow at the Claremont Institute where the Ahmansons are (and long have been) board members. After 2002 Marshall served with the Ahmansons on the executive board of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which has long been led by Mark Tooley, who worked in the CIA during the second Bush administration. Marshall does not appear to have ever held academic posts in the US; he has been a fellow at various conservative think tanks. The IRD is a right wing culture warring organization that has helped promote schism in mainline Protestant denominations over same sex marriage and related issues. Gilbert has co-authored a number of books with the same collaborators, such as Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians with Nina Shea and Paul Marshall (Thomas Nelson, 2013) and Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008) with Paul Marshall and Roberta Green Ahmanson. Gilbert is a novelist, journalist, and fellow in American-Israeli Journalism at Hillsdale College, a highly conservative and libertarian school supported by the Ahmansons; their son (like Erik Prince) is a recent graduate. (Through the closely affiliated and nearby Acton Institute, Hillsdale seems to have a long working relation with the DeVos and Prince families who are long-time key financial backers of Acton.) Gilbert is also a fellow at the far right Hudson Institute and by her own description “writes about the common ground between Jews and Christians, the expulsion of Jews from Muslim lands in the mid-20th Century, the ever-increasing global persecution of Christians, and the ongoing European and Muslim efforts to de-Judaize and delegitimize Israel.” She is a frequent contributor to FOX News, National Review Online, The Weekly Standard Online, Lapidomedia (UK), The Jerusalem Post, The Huffington Post, Ricochet, and many other publications. Currently she is the lead blogger at the Philos Project, which is a "Christian Zionist" anti-Iran project funded by billionaire Paul Singer and staffed by many student interns drawn from conservative Christian colleges. The board is Richard Land (Evangelical/Southern Baptist leader), Mark Tooley (president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a former employee of the CIA, and author of Taking Back the United Methodist Church) and Dan Senor (Bush administration’s Pentagon liaison and advisor). Gilbert’s latest novel, Angel's Flight, co-written with LTC (ret.) W. Jack Buckner, stars a “Christian mercenary hero” who stops genocide in Nigeria by "privately funding" a "commando unit of Special Ops. They rush in where angels (and politicians) fear to tread and get the job done! ... Order it today and enjoy some warriors who aren’t bound by lame Rules of Engagement and ridiculous “ceasefire” demands." (Erik Prince fan fiction?) Both Gilbert and Marshall have been associated with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom which describes its mission today this way: “Religious freedom faces difficult new challenges. Recent decades have seen the rise of extreme interpretations of Islamist rule that are virulently intolerant of dissenting voices and other traditions within Islam, as well as other faiths. Many in the policy world still find religious freedom too “sensitive” to raise. But since 9/11, the link between America’s national interests and its ideals has never been clearer.” Gilbert and Ahmanson have both worked with Lapido Media in Europe to further their agenda of increasing conservative Christian access and standing in the mainstream media. (Lapido is Ahmanson's European counterpart to Gegrapha and GetReligion in the United States.) Notably the Ahmansons helped wrest their east and west coast churches away from their US Episcopal dioceses (ca. 2008) to bring them and many other parishes under the control of Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola. Akinola is notoriously hostile to Muslim and LGBT Africans. He seems to have sanctioned if not helped coordinate the murder of 700 Nigerian Muslims by men identified with a Christian group he presided over. This was covered in the Atlantic Monthly in 2008 as well as Anglican and Episcopalian media. Akinola is on record saying that sanctioned homosexuality will cause the church to die in majority Muslim countries. This is the sort of "Eurabian" rhetoric that has long been used by Bat Ye'or and the "anti-jihadist" movement worldwide. Late in the second Obama administration I noticed it appearing in populist conservative rhetoric, midwestern homeschool networks, the preaching of theonomist pastors, and even sitting congressmen. In 2015-16 some Republican presidential candidates have floated similar ideas. While Islam at the Crossroads does not explicitly support such thinking, the people behind it -- particularly those unwilling to disclose their full names -- very likely do. Increasingly, so do many people within the web of their influence. Islam at the Crossroads documents one small instance of how that web was extended through a respected, mainstream Evangelical publishing house.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-20 00:00:00 Cherilyn Burgan Could serve as a nice primer if you are looking for a brief history of islam over the ages. At a few places I felt that they are trying to push you into believing certain things. For example their claim that the radicalism in islam is due to the religion itself rather than socio economic factors. Now that may be true, but it would have been better had they at the same time explained what goes inside the heads of fundamentals of other Faiths. Time and again we see cruelty perpetrated by people of all Faiths. If we just compare the worst atrocities which people of different Faiths have done we will realize they all have demonstrated equal capacity to do bad. When British landed on the shores of Tasmania, they used to hunt people for recreation. Hitler was not a muslim. Bengal famine due to british in India killed far more people than 1947 partition. It's only when we compare fundamentalism in all religion that we get a proper understanding. I also felt that the book downplays or doesn't explore the role of US in destabilizing other nations in depth. However one of the authors is from centre for religious freedom, Washington. I have tremendous respect for such institutions for being flag bearers of secularism and freesom. un commission on human rights. US commission on International religious freedom. Equal justice initiative. To name some others I know.