60 min listen
Brendan McNamara, "The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West" (Brill, 2020)
Brendan McNamara, "The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West" (Brill, 2020)
ratings:
Length:
49 minutes
Released:
Mar 25, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Brendan McNamara, who teaches religion at University College Cork, Ireland, has published an excellent new book on the expansion of the Bahá’í faith into western Europe. In the late nineteenth century, religious scholars and clergy in Britain became aware of a movement of reform in Persia that they framed as a revitalisation project within Islam, and which attracted converts including the former Oriel Professor for the Interpretation of Scripture at the University of Oxford. As the teachings of the Bahá’í faith came into better focus, in the early twentieth century, they attracted the attention of an extremely diverse group of spiritualists, Celticists, and liberal protestants, who, for various reasons, saw in the life and work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá an opportunity to advance the brotherhood of humanity and its religious possibilities.
In The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West (Brill, 2020), McNamara describes the sometimes adulatory, sometimes rather colonial, appreciation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his two visits to Britain in the early 1910s. But McNamara also suggests reasons why this extraordinary wave of interest in the Bahá’í faith was not sustained – not least because the crisis to all religions that was represented by the First World War.
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In The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West (Brill, 2020), McNamara describes the sometimes adulatory, sometimes rather colonial, appreciation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his two visits to Britain in the early 1910s. But McNamara also suggests reasons why this extraordinary wave of interest in the Bahá’í faith was not sustained – not least because the crisis to all religions that was represented by the First World War.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion
Released:
Mar 25, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008): Today on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). by New Books in Religion