Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"All the world’s great religions have spawned great literature, and it seems to me that it is incumbent upon Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and so on, to recover the riches of their own traditions and transmute them into modern classics. The great danger, I believe, is to settle for ersatz or cafeteria spirituality. Traditional religions have had centuries or millennia to deepen and refine their gold (Lewis, who recognized this, had considerable admiration for the liturgical and artistic beauty of Greek and Roman paganism, even though he was hardly a devotee of pagan belief); whereas the latest spiritual fad or a subjective practice of cafeteria religion is very unlikely to give birth to great literature."

"We don’t know what the earliest religion was like, but certainly it involved some sort of ritual. As far as we know, ritual never exists without prayer of some kind, so we can assume they came about simultaneously, and both seem immensely old."

"We should allow the undercurrent of anxiety to surface long enough to awaken humility, repentance, and awe in the face of the divine mystery. In this sense, the opposite of anxiety is not peace but dullness, stagnation, complacency, estrangement."

"Prayer has this wonderful quality of conveying a sense of security in the mystery, in the face of mystery: “I don’t need to see everything in the future. I just need enough light to take the next step.”"

""When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left," he [ Trump ] told me."

"Every life has moments that change us forever and make us who we are"

"Mass killing permeates history in multiple ways. It resides in our consciousness, just as we are products of this history. Not only that, we are all capable of participating in genocide. It’s very important to understand, I think, that we are not immune to genocidal behavior. It is part of living in human society, and it is especially an available mode of human action when times are economically bad and peoples are at war."

"It’s great to read the Bible. What we need to do as parents and grandparents is we need to build a culture of Scripture for our children, evangelicals and fundamentalists and non-denominational Christians all do that intuitively because that’s all they have in terms of the sacramental, is the Scripture. We do have the living word of God, Jesus and the Eucharist. I think that building a culture of Bible reading and Bible study and meditation, lectio divina, is something that is critically important."

"We are a consumer society, and the danger of being a consumer society is that we begin to define our walk with God, or our Christianity, in terms of what we consume rather than what we do. The danger is that we can get to a place where our faith is made up of consuming faith (not living it). If someone asks you, “Are you Catholic,” and you respond, “Yes. I go to Bible study. I watch EWTN, I listen to Catholic radio, I’m always on the Catholic news sites …” that has nothing to do with being a disciple. It can be part of it, but I think right now there’s a need to go from theory and understanding to action, and to relationship. If we busy ourselves so much with the consumption of the Faith, we can trick ourselves and our faith becomes a hobby."

"There are some who want to erect a wall between people of faith and public service. I want to tear down that wall! There are problems government can never solve unless we speak to the hearts of the people. It’s true that the role of a pastor is different from someone in public service, but the two roles should work hand in glove for the benefit of the community."

"I believe that as the wife and mom I have a greater opportunity than most of the other family members. Even though everyone contributes to it, mothers and wives can be the thermostat of the home, not just taking the temperature but the thermostat, which sort of sets the tone at home. For the overall well-being of our families, I think it is important that our homes are the place where our families gather, and that we can make it a place of peace and beauty."

"The first phase of the Muslim conquest of North India was a splendid ghazi adventure of looting, shooting, and smashing up the gods of Hindu idolators. The new kings of Dehli, however, imposed civil order on the conquered areas and created a structure of despotism designed to tax rather than slaughter the native peasantry."

"It is always important to know who you friends are and aren't. And the communists were never the liberals' friends. The fact is that the joke is on liberals, except that none of this is really very funny."

"I prefer the image of a blessed Shining City over the view of an America that is deservedly damned."

"We should not be misled by this into thinking that these scholars were anti-racist. They did not have to rely on a theory of race as such, for they had their own global theory that was fully able to inferiorize the languages (and by implication the cultures) of the other purely on linguistic grounds. Max Müller's linguistic taxonomy was a Hegelian hierarchy in which . . . cultural geography [becomes] the same as world history."

"When coordinated acts of violence are justified as the inevitable result of hurt feelings, legal precautions against violent displays of religious passion may be said to have backfired."

"In India, the notion that to be truly tolerant in religion is to refrain from criticism of religion is a widespread secularist ideal. But this ideal has long been conjoined with the assumption that the party criticized will be unable to contain violent reaction. One result has been to give strategic value to violence as a way of proving the point."

"In 1927, section 295A was enacted to extend the ease with which “wounding religious feelings” by verbal acts could be prosecuted. The purpose was to curb religious violence by curbing provocative speech. But the strategic field the law put into place worked differently: it extended the strategic value of demonstrating that passions had been aroused that threatened the public peace, in order to induce the government to take legal action against one’s opponents. Section 295A thus gave a fillip to the politics of religious sentiment."

"By 1915, this attitude was changing. I refer to a legal ruling against Arya Samaj preacher Dharm Bir,who was found guilty under Section 298 of “using offensive phrases and gestures... with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings” of the Muslims present in his audience, and under Section 153, for “wantonly provoking the riot which subsequently occurred.”.. Dharm Bir had delivered a public lecture critical of Islam, following which a group of Muslims beat up several Arya Samaj lecturers. Ten Muslims were convicted for rioting, but it was felt that something must be done to punish Dharm Bir and the Arya Samaj. The Arya Samaj was charged, and a judge was brought in who could assure conviction... Winning the case against Dharm Bir required a new position on religious controversy. The judge found it by condemning not only the tone of Dharm Bir’s language, but religious debate itself, when he declared, “logic has never been known to convert any one”; Dharm Bir “does not know that logic has never saved a soul and that religion is rooted in the emotions and sentiments”. Because religion is “rooted in the sentiments,” the judge concluded, religious debate is likely to provoke a riot, and that is all it can do. Religious debate is pointless and therefore unjustifiable; the right publicly to controvert arguments therefore does not properly extend to religion. To enter into religious debate is nothing but a provocation, an act calculated to arouse hatred. Therefore, it is intolerable."

"This amendment to the Indian Penal Code was coupled with an emerging understanding of religion as rooted exclusively in sentiment."

"The association of sentiment and violence enshrined in section 295A was not only a product of concerns with law and order; it was also the result of a critical view of religious proselytizing. Section 295A was intended to provide a legal tool to restrain the religious criticism associated with proselytizing by the Arya Samaj."

"If institutional indeterminacy pervaded the post-nomadic empires of Hind, the peripatetic exercise of power was another feature which they all seem to have shared. Muhammad bin Tughluq spent the greater part of his life in military camps. Most other rulers were often on campaign, sometimes for one or two years, or more, particularly in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when com munications could be broken off with the capital for months or a whole year. Firuz Shah Tughluq stayed away on a campaign to Bengal and Orissa for two years and seven months, losing his way on the return journey through jungles and mountains, when for six months there was no news from him and the viceregent had great difficulty keeping things under control. The same Sultan got lost in the Rann of Cutch, and was again cut off from Delhi for six months, altogether spending two-and-a-half years on the trip, while the viceregent pretended he had good news."

"We have argued that, in contrast to Iran and China, in al-Hind such a merger of the frontier world of nomadic mobility and long- distance trade on the one hand and settled agriculture on the other did occur in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Secondly, that this merger brought about a new productive and mercantile dynamism (without any serious deleterious impact on population density), the effects of which deepened and broadened in the subsequent centuries. This is not to deny that the Muslim- Turkish conquest of Hind was quite violent at times, and could be disruptive in some areas as well. It has not been our intention to 'sanitize' the narrative of Hindu-Muslim encounter in these centuries of invasion and extensive raiding. Nor has it been our intention to deny that in many respects the Muslim conquest was a major challenge to the integrity of Indian culture. But the Turkish-led Muslim armies that conquered North India in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were generally small compared to those of the Mongols operating elsewhere in Eurasia; nor did a vast influx of nomads follow in their wake, unlike in Iran or parts of China."

"The first conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing analysis is that ecology was a major factor determining the progress and character of the Islamic conquest of al-Hind. For one thing, the subcontinent was unsuitable for Mongol-style nomadism on account of the absence of sufficient good pasture land. With the Mongols failing to penetrate beyond its western periphery, the Indian subcontinent cannot really be said to have experienced a 'nomadic conquest' at all. In this respect the thirteenth-century situation in the north was unlike the Iranian plateau, where Mongol conquest was followed by extensive nomadization and destruction of agriculture."

"By the time that the Turko-Islamic conquerors arrived in North India, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Buddhism was no longer a religion of a floating population of itinerant monks but had become institutionalized in monasteries, which, supported by royal endowments of land as well as by donations from the mercantile communities, tended to become large academically oriented centres with permanent residents, vulnerable to outside attack, but still aloof from the rural masses (which only adopted random cultic elements from the religion). What happened, then, during the Islamic conquest, is that the academic (and soteriological / philosophical) tradition of Buddhism was uprooted in India itself, but replaced, outside the orbit of Muslim rule, by a variety of regional forms of Buddhism."

"It is in this direction, probably, that we have to look for an answer to the question why Buddhism disappeared, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, from its homeland in the South-Asian subcontinent, while being successfully disseminated to the peasant societies of mainland Southeast Asia. When one turns to the secondary literature on Buddhism one finds mere hints of an explanation of this issue. If it is addressed somewhat more systematically, it usually amounts to one or another version of the theory that since Buddhism at one time prevailed only in those areas which later converted to Islam, and since there are no Buddhists left in these areas, we must deduce that the Buddhists converted to Islam. Thus it is most often observed that Buddhism disappeared from those parts of South and Southeast Asia which were overrun by Muslim armies in the medieval period and hence-forward became subject to Islamic rule. Mass conversion of Buddhists to Islam in Sind and Bengal, it is then alleged, occurred due to political pressure or because Buddhists saw in Islam a means to escape from the Hindu caste system and brahmanical oppression. This, we are told, is also the reason why Buddhism survived in areas which did not suffer the largely 'destructive' Islamic impact: the Himalayas and beyond, Sri Lanka, mainland Southeast Asia (but not Indonesia, which was conquered by indigenous Islamic rulers)."

"But in the delta region of Sind people were actively engaged in agri­culture. Hiuen Tsang and Ibn Khordadbhih recorded that wheat and millet were produced here, apart from salt."

"In summary, we find an interrelated set of significant changes occurr­ing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on a global scale. With the rise of Europe, the expansion of Islam into North India, and the upsurge of China, the economic supremacy of the Middle-Eastern caliphate was gradually reduced."

"It is a fact of immense significance that whereas in the making of Europe the conquests of Islam played the role of a powerfully effective but mostly external factor, in the East the expansion of Islam went on for more than a millennium and here, in South and large parts of Southeast Asia the association with Islam became so intimate that, as a result, we find an Indo-Islamic pattern of society and culture. (Introduction)"

". . . Euro-American Selves and Indian Others have not simply interacted as entities that remain fundamentally the same. They have dialectically constituted one another. Once one realizes the truth of this, he or she will begin to see that India has played a part in the making of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe (and America) much greater than the "we" of scholarship, journalism, and officialdom would normally wish to allow. The subcontinent was not simply a source of colonial riches or a stage-setting in which Western hunters could stalk tigers, the sons of British merchants and aristocrats could make a financial killing, or the spiritualist find his or her innermost soul (or its Buddhist absence). More than that, India was (and to some extent still is) the object of thoughts and acts with which this "we" has constituted itself."

"Independence governments implemented secularism mostly by refusing to recognize the religious pasts of Indian nationalism, whether Hindu or Muslim, and at the same time (inconsistently) by retaining Muslim 'personal law' ."

"Throughout this book I have argued· that. the problem with orientalism is not just one of bias or o( bad motives and hence, confined to itself. The problem lies in my view, with the way in which the human sciences have displaced human agency on to essences in the first place. Taking up some leads of Collingwood, I have tried to show how an alternative approach that focuses on human agency might be constructed, and how it might be used, as a vantage­ point from which both to criticize previous scholarship and to reconstruct our knowledges of the human world. (264)"

"The most important shift, especially in South Asia, has been the rise to prominence of scholarship that returns not to Hegel but to Marx. (154-5)"

"From our snow-capped mountains to our nearly endless prairies, Montana is an awe-inspiring place of tremendous beauty. We call it Big Sky Country, the Treasure State, the Last Best Place. And we call it home, but there’s something even more special than the beauty of an eastern Montana sunset or being knee deep in a crystal clear mountain stream -- it’s the people of Montana, Montanans are a kind, warm, generous, and hard-working people."

"I have no doubt that many of you here are fathers and mothers, and have boys and girls in Missionary schools even now. Frankly, do you not think that it is your duty to have them educated as Hindus? For the sake of Government jobs. Are you prepared to sacrifice the interest of your own blood, your own ancestral cultural inheritance, and your own religion? If your boys become doctors, or lawyers and cease to be Hindus, what is the benefit? Is that the ideal transmitted to you by the great Rishis?"

"My friends, the Missionaries have already corrupted and denationalised a large proportion of the boys and girls of the Kendyan chiefs. I could give you names of boys and girls who are at this moment ashamed of their own Singhalese parents; and these boys and girls were educated in Missionary school. And so, from this point of view, the Missionaries have done much positive harm to Ceylon. Let us now sum up- (1) The Missionaries have taught false doctrines. (2) They have misrepresented Christianity. (3) They have divorced you from your ancestral culture. (4) The have made you worldly. (5) They have made your boys and girls ashamed of their own parents."

"One intriguing thing about Eaton is that his own research of the medieval literatures on Indian Sufis for his Ph.D. thesis, published in Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700, failed to find any trace of peace in the views and actions of Sufis and in their method of conversion. He found that all the revered Sufis, particularly the earlier ones to arrive at Bijapur, were fierce Jihadis and persecutor of Hindus.."

"Regardless of this change in emphasis, it is important to note that not all Western Sufi scholarship of the last half century avoids discussing Sufi support of and active involvement in the martial jihad; in fact, there are some notable exceptions. In particular, Richard Eaton’s study of Sufi s in the Deccan region of India, The Sufi s of Bijapur: 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufi s in Medieval India (Princeton, 1978) stands out in Western Sufi scholarship, in that it argues convincingly in the chapter “Sufi s as Warriors” that Sufi s were at the forefront of the conquest that brought Islam to the Deccan region of India. Eaton makes an important point in his book with regard to the methodology necessary for studying the social roles of Sufi s in that he critiques the “classical approach to Sufi studies.”... Eaton also points out the error of most Western scholarship in assum- ing that mysticism necessarily precludes martial endeavors. 10 Eaton’s book was the first significant Western study of Sufis to discuss at length the phenomenon of Sufis as warriors and to make use of sources from the popular tradition, such as vernacular hagiography; however, it concentrates solely on Sufi s in India and does not pretend to be a monograph on the history of Sufi jihad. Though Eaton’s book was well received, it was not without its critics."

"According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect."

"I’m here tonight appearing before you as a well individual, free of the street poison that put me into the kind of position where I brutalized and exploited our Black queens. You have to have a realization that when you exploit your own kind … you are, in effect, counterrevolutionary; that you are hobbling and crippling the struggle of Black people for freedom and dignity."

"Chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth."

"It’s hard to square an emotional debt."

"Against the false claim of that good-willed but misled pastor, Saint Thomas Aquinas can be easy, simple, and accessible to any Catholic who is able to read. I am so convinced of this that I earned my Ph.D on the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and I have made it is my life goal to make the world “a more Thomistic place.""

"All the saints say that you must have a deep devotion to Our Lady to be a saint. Medieval chivalry and medieval Marian devotion go hand in hand. A man must always live, work, and pray as if he were under the gaze of a Mother."

"Anyone who dies without enemies led a purposeless life, totally selfish, concentrating all their effort at never committing to anything sufficiently to earn them enemies — gliding through life concerned about nothing more than human respect. But all of this goes much further than that. It's not just getting enemies that matter, but that you acquire the correct enemies. And we recall, Our Blessed Lord had an extensive list of correct enemies — they crucified Him. If you don't have enemies owing to your faith and zeal and love of Our Lord, then you don’t have enough faith, zeal or love. In our go-along, never-give-offense-type culture, the most detestable thing in the judgment of men is to give offense — wrong. The most detestable, un-manly thing you can do is to never give offense."

"To all the rest of my fellow Catholics, stand up and fight for the truth. You want to know the will of God for your lives, you want to know how to get to Heaven in these monstrously evil times, this is how. You fight against this evil with every ounce of strength in your mind heart and soul. You stand in the breach and defend the glory of our Holy Mother, the Church. And you protect and shield the innocent, the weak. And whatever happens to you in the process doesn't matter. You were created for greatness. Live up to your calling. You were made for combat."

"One Western author who has become very popular among India's history-rewriters is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton. Unlike his colleagues, he has done some original research pertinent to the issue of Islamic iconoclasm, though not of the Ayodhya case specifically. A selective reading of his work. focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed “Hindutva”) account."

"Please do not let Judas drive you away from Jesus. Your pain is real, your hurt is tangible and it demands justice — which it will be granted. But don't be overcome by the waves."

"Thapar and Eaton also provide cases in which Hindu kings destroyed the temples of other Hindu rulers, rather than capturing them. As scholars of India in the late twentieth century, their aim in doing so is to counter the accusations by Hindu nationalists that Muslim rulers had uniquely violated the sensibilities and rights of Hindus by destroying temples, by showing that Hindu rulers had done much the same thing before Muslims reached India. From the perspective of the AT (Antagonistic Tolerance) project, of course, it would be surprising had Hindu rulers not done so. Tantalizingly, Eaton (2000a: 293) mentions that temples not identified with royal patrons were normally left unharmed. Eaton’s observations suggest that political patronage of cultic establishments was an important factor in defining the faith of the conquered temples."

"This passage was cited by Thomas W. Arnold in his Preaching of Islam to support his contention that the most important agents in the spread of Islam in the Deccan were peaceful Muslim saints. While Arnold's general argument may have a good deal of valid- an argument that will be explored in greater depth in the present study, it would seem that in the case of Pir Ma‘bari he ‘chose the wrong example to illustrate it. For the question arises: why did Arnold cite a tradition, the 1884 Bombay Gazetteer, which presented only one side, the “peaceful missionary” side, ‘of Pir Marais life? One possibility is that the hagiographic traditions such a the one quoted above were unknown to Arnold and that he had available to him only the Gazetteer version. Another possibility is that Arnold was aware of the Sufi’ militancy in the hagiographic traditions but chose to ignore it, an interpretation that would accord with the general effort in his books to revise the simplistic nineteenth-century image of Islam as religion of the sword. But it does not suffice to correct one distorted view by presenting an equally distorted, if opposite, view. If the Sufis peaceful character can be supported by both ‘written and oral traditions, so can his militancy. In view of the tendency of both oral and written traditions to extol or even fabricate the pious qualities of Sufis, it is most likely that Pir ‘Matbari like Sufi Sarmast, was in reality a militant Sufi and only acquired the reputation of peaceful missionary through generations of oral transmission of his life story."