Rapturous times, neh?

May 21st, 2011 by Charles Cameron

Now back to the Center for Millennial Studies.

While it existed, it was quite simply the world center of apocalyptic, messianic and millenarian studies. CMS conferences brought together a wide range of scholars of different eras and areas, who could together begin to fathom the commonalities and differences — anthropological, theological, psychological, political, local, global, historical, and contemporary — of movements such as the Essenes, the Falun Gong, the Quakers, Nazism, the Muenster Anabaptists, al-Qaida, the Taiping Rebellion, Branch Davidians, the Y2K scare, classic Marxism, Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven’s Gate.

And then the year 2000 came and went, and those who hadn’t followed the work of the CMS and its associates thought it’s all over, no more millennial expectation, we’ve entered the new millennium with barely a hiccup.

Well, guess what. It was at the CMS that David Cook presented early insights from his definitive work on contemporary millennial movements in Islam — and now we have millennial stirrings both on the Shia side (President Ahmadinejad et al) and among the Sunni (AQ theorist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri devotes the last hundred pages of his treatise on jihad to “signs of the end times”)…

Apocalyptic expectation continues. But Richard Landes’ and Stephen O’Leary’s fine project, the CMS, is no longer with us to bring scholars together to discuss what remains one of the key topics of our times. When Richard’s book comes out, buy it and read it — and see if you don’t see what I mean.

Or read Jean-Pierre Filiu‘s Apocalypse in Islam.  Please. Or Tim Furnish‘s recent paper.

*

And while it may not see Judgment Day or the beginning of the end of the world as predicted, what this week has seen is the end of funding of Fulbright scholarships for doctoral dissertation research abroad.  But then as Abu Muqawama points out:

hey, it’s probably safe to cut funding for these languages. It’s hard to see Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world causing issues in terms of U.S. national security interests anytime soon.

Right?

So the CMS isn’t the only significant scholarly venue we’ve lost to terminal lack of vision.

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  1. historyguy99:

    May 22nd, 2011 at 1:01 am

    The lasting result is that Harold Camping has garnered, 5.2 million entries on Google,
    http://www.google.com/search?q=%22harold+camping%22&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADRA_enUS368&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=
     and has gained a measure of imortality. More troubling, his pronouncments have blackened the eye of Christianity for non-believers and doubters, and buttressed the secular argument to discount the impact of spiritual influence on Western society.

  2. Charles Cameron:

    May 22nd, 2011 at 7:03 am

    Hi, HGuy:
    .
    I agree that failed predictions can give a negative impression of Christianity as a whole to those who don’t use critical thinking — a segment of the same (admittedly sizeable) market that belief in such predictions also preys upon. 
    .
    My hope is that the failure of this very public prediction ($100 million in advertising!) will make people more skeptical of the 2012 idea.
    .
    _____
    .
    BTW: Google’s way of counting search hits is very, very approximate, see How does Google calculate the number of results?
    .
    Their estimate, when you searched, was 5.2 million entries — when I searched, I was told "About 1,730,000 results".  I then clicked through to the end of the Google pages as Google suggests, clicked again to include all duplicates in the search, and wound up with 88 pages of 10 results each.
    .
    We can’t rely on any of these figures, I’m afraid —  with a range of options from 5.2 mill, via 1.7 mill, to 880 — the whole exercise becomes ridiculous.
    .
    And yet scholars are liable to trust (and quote, and requote, and make inferences from) such figures, unless shown how haphazard they actually are.

  3. david ronfeldt:

    May 23rd, 2011 at 6:54 pm

    also worth recommending is michael barkun’s new book titled "Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11"
    .
    http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Phantoms-Imagination-Homeland-Security/dp/080783470X/
    .
    he makes valuable points about "disaster obsessions" and "landscapes of fear" that affect current trends in "security theater".
    .