Reza Aslan's Missed Opportunity

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/7225/reza_aslan_s_missed_opportunity/

August 8, 2013Reza Aslan's Missed Opportunity By MICHA'EL ROSENBERG


Reza Aslan on The Daily Show, the news parody program where they read the guest’s book.

When my wife and I first started dating 11 years ago, I was prepared for some interesting conversations with my mother about my future mother-in-law's career. My wife and I are both religiously-observant Jews who, among other things, keep kosher, observe the Sabbath, and pray regularly.

My mother-in-law, also a religiously-observant Jew, is a professor whose expertise lies primarily in...early Christianity. And in particular, a renowned scholar of the Gospel of John. My mother-in-law's career of course makes for interesting conversation, and with good reason, so I was prepared for my mother's surprise. What I wasn't expecting was the precise nature of her surprise: “Is she taken seriously? Don't other scholars all assume that she's biased against the texts that she's studying?”

In retrospect, I realize that that's the obvious question for someone who doesn’t make her living in academia to ask, but at the time, it caught me totally off-guard. I had just begun graduate studies—an M.A., followed by a PhD—in Jewish literature of the 2nd to 7th centuries CE, and was quickly becoming initiated into the professional insecurity of being an “academic” researcher of a canon that has shaped so fundamentally the religious culture of which I’m a proud and active participant.

How can I be an unbiased researcher into the Babylonian Talmud, when interpretations of that text determine my community's (and my) practice regarding prayer, gender relations, attitudes towards surrounding cultures, and every other area of my existence? I had become so self-conscious about my participation in the religious tradition that I study and the ways in which that calls into question my “objectivity” that I had forgotten how, to many, someone studying the texts and history of another religious community would appear suspect.

more at link

[okasha]

1. Talk about synchronicity--

While you were posting this, I was posting a brief review of the book in the Interfaith group.

As a former academic, I can testify that it's not easy to set aside one's own assumptions and biases. It is, however, possible to set those assumptions and biases aside for the duration of the writing process. There is nothing in Aslan's book that would lead a reader to identify the author as a Muslim--no bias against Christianity, no bias in favor of Jesus' status in Islam as one of the three Messengers of the Abrahamic God. (The other two are Moses and Muhammad.) What is evident is that he has looked specifically to Christian writers such as Dominic Crossan for much of his background material.

[cbayer]

2. I will take a look at your review.

The Fox interview really catapulted a number of subjects that might have been otherwise ignored. The issue of scholarly bias is always a good one.