"We Remember": “Antisemitism had Its Roots Outside of Christianity” – Really? A Reflection on Early Modern Europe

Critical reflection. What do we really mean?

Do we really know what critical reflection means in the context of work-integrated learning, more specifically cooperative education? Critical reflection, in some form, is located within many higher education programmes, including cooperative education and many educators would say this is important for in-depth student learning. It is a form of reflection that is complicated as well as challeng...

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe

an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to afocus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, po...

Antisemitism: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern Part I

In 1996 I wrote an essay on Jewish-Christian relations entitled “What Has 2000 to Do with 5760?,” in which I expressed concern over the possible effect that the passage of 2000 might have on the exceptional period of philo-Judaism that has marked Western society from the end of the Holocaust until the present. Indeed, the last 60 years may well mark the most exceptional and sustained period of ...

Christianity: A Cause of Modern Science?

When we think of Christianity's role in the rise of science, what do we think of? How it hindered it, such as the conflict between Galileo (1564-1642) and the Inquisition in the seventeenth century? Or, perhaps, do we think of Thomas Huxley debating evolution with Bishop Wilberforce in the nineteenth century? What we need to do now is take a deep breath, and take a step out of today's overwhelm...