Faith and History: A Different Crusade

Published on March 1, 2019

https://www.samford.edu/departments/oral-history/projects/samwav/a-different-crusade-faith-and-history.mp3

"That’s the biggest challenge to education, to knowledge, and the idea that my worldview somehow disqualifies my understanding of the world, or worse, my worldview tells me that your understanding of the world is disqualified, that’s where we get into trouble. But having a worldview is not automatically a bad thing."

Chapters

Introduction: Identity in Faith, Identity in History

Claire Davis and Michelle Little introduce Dr. Anthony Minnema's Faith and History course, and Dr. Minnema explains his goals for the class.

Play Segment

Religious and Academic Approaches to Faith and History

Mia Owens and Shawny Tucker discuss the differing approaches to faith and history, presented by Rabbi Yossi Friedman and Professor Tim Smith.

Play Segment

The Challenges of Faith and History

Rabbi Yossi Friedman and Dr. Tim Smith discuss the challenges of incorporating between faith and history.

Play Segment

Transcript

[HARWELL GOODWIN DAVIS: He stated that he had been appointed to suggest a
president for Howard College.

EUNICE ROGERS: And so there was a lot of industry in Bessemer when I grew up, a
lot of progressiveness. However, it was still a typical, small, Southern town.

OLIVER BARREAU: To be perfectly honest with you, um, I didn't know what Alabama
was until I set foot in Alabama.

ELIZABETH SLOAN RAGLAND: I was not greeted by hecklers. I was greeted by Martha
Ann Cox.]

MICHELLE LITTLE: Welcome back to Sam.wav. We are your hosts, Michelle Little...

CLAIRE DAVIS: And Claire Davis. And today, we're introducing a topic that will
last us for most of the semester: the relationship between faith and history.

ANTHONY MINNEMA: I think most people would tell you, if you're going to study
history, study what you know, and I didn't do that. Um, what I did was I just
found things that I, I, I pursued exactly what I didn't know.

MICHELLE LITTLE: If you were listening along last spring, then you know that we
had a series on the connections between food and history, which showcased work
by Dr. Erin Mauldin's class. This year, we get the chance to play student
interviews and podcasts from Dr. Anthony Minnema's class, which looked at the
relationship between faith and history. Dr. Minnema is a history professor here
at Samford University who teaches Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages,
specifically involving the translation of information between Arabic texts and
European schools, an exchange which eventually influenced the Renaissance. As a
result, much of his work involves reconciling differing accounts of division and
understanding deep, cultural motivators at work behind the scenes.

ANTHONY MINNEMA: ...but at the same time I think it's one of the pressing
questions that, coming out of college, coming from a fairly homogenous
background, um, how are we going to live with religious minorities, racial
minorities, um, together as people if we don't know each other's history, the
kind of ideas that underpin what we do what we do, and so I think that that
motivated me in no small way that, to understand that the world and its history
was so much bigger than what I'd grown up with, um, and these kind of pressing
questions of living together, and what's the history of that? And this couldn't
have been a better kind of example that I could find in the Middle Ages of
Christians, Muslims, Jews living in Spain together, and for good or for ill,
what came of that? Why do people fall into conflict? Why do things ever go
right? And those kind of questions always motivated me and the kind of research
that I've done.

CLAIRE DAVIS: It was this research that inspired his idea for a course in Faith
and History. Last fall, Dr. Minnema taught an elective that examined the
intersection between those two fields, both in past generations and in current
research, that begged the students not only to consider the biases in historical
accounts that they might encounter but also their own.

ANTHONY MINNEMA: The Faith and History course is directly about that. It's come
from a course that I took in undergrad, but there was two wrinkles that I wanted
to add. Looking at these kind of questions of where's the, what's the role of a
historian and that historian's identity? Is there anything that we take from
ourselves into the classroom, into our research? Is there a limit to that? . . .
And so with our current kind of political moment, where we're talking about
intersectionality, when we're talking about, um, identity politics, I think that
we tend to think of it in terms of race, class, and gender, but with religion,
we tend to see that as a choice, we tend to think of that as something wholly
different. And I think to have this kind of discussion with students,
particularly those who see this as part of their identity, I think students want
to know how to articulate that in a way that isn't, um, flippant, that doesn't
have a really easy answer, one that they could articulate and really, uh,
examine deeply. So, one half of the question was just really what does our
identity do in our work, and then the second half of that would be how do we
articulate that. And that's where the podcast element really came into play.

MICHELE LITTLE: Dr. Minnema wanted to push his class towards researching in a
more personal, involved method, which led him to contact our office about the
use of oral history as a teaching tool.

ANTHONY MINNEMA: I thought that a really neat and compelling way to do this
course would be for them to interview professional historians, and this is
broadly understood, we looked at archivists as well as people who teach history,
um, an art curator from the Birmingham Museum of Art, but also professional
religious, also broadly understood, when it comes to a variety of faiths. We've
got Catholic, Protestant, but also Muslim, Jewish . . . And so having the
students interview people who are involved in this on a day-to-day, I thought,
would take them out of the ivory tower, that kind of thirty-thousand-foot view
that is so bound up in perhaps philosophical and theological underpinnings, that
if they could ask people, "How do you do this? How do you tell the story of a
particular group's history that has a faith component, how much do you talk
about that?" Um, and then from the other side of the aisle, if you are a
professional religious individual, how much does history help? Is it something
you can check at the door, or is it something that you feel is deeply integral
to understanding a faith and its traditions? And so, where are the limits to
either side of those things?

CLAIRE DAVIS: The responses the class got were just as varied as the
participants, as students gathered interviews from rabbis, imams, art curators,
museum docents, and archivists. Each had their own fascinating, unique story
about their daily interactions with faith and history, but we can only share so
many. The first of the student podcasts that we're playing for you comes from
seniors Mia Owens and Shawny Tucker. Partly inspired by their own interests,
they interviewed Dr. Tim Smith and Rabbi Yossi Friedman for their project, two
men from very different contexts but with similar ideas about religious bias in history.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Hi! My name is Shawny Tucker.

MIA OWENS: And I'm Mia Owens. And this is our podcast for our Faith and
History class with Dr. Anthony Minnema.

SHAWNY TUCKER: For our project, we interviewed Rabbi Yossi Friedman, Rabbi at
the Chabad of Alabama and Dr. Tim Smith at Birmingham Southern College. Shalom!

MIA OWENS: And let's get rollin'!

[musical transition]

SHAWNY TUCKER: As we prepared for the project, we wanted to see how people
working with faith and history in different professions interacted with the two
disciplines. Because of my interest in Judaism, I chose to interview Rabbi Yossi
Friedman. We met at the Chabad house, a place filled with Jewish families
spending time together. The Chabad is a learning center, and Rabbi Friedman is a
teacher--just like his father was before him.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Early on did you kind of decide that you wanted to be a rabbi and
you were being led in that direction?

YOSSI FRIEDMAN: Um, I, my father is a, is a well-known teacher and rabbi and has
had an impact on so many thousands of people that I think, I, I knew what I
wanted to do since I was old enough to realize what was going on. Um, my father
makes it look easy and it's not that easy, so I've learned, uh,
I've learned that but, yeah, I think I've always wanted to be a teacher.

MIA OWENS: While Shawny interviewed Rabbi Friedman, I interviewed a teacher of a
different discipline: an art history professor by the name of Tim Smith. Dr.
Smith is currently the Interim Provost at Birmingham Southern College. When
he's not engaged in administrative duties, he teaches a variety of art
history courses and conducts research on Italian Renaissance art as well as
Catholic relics and reliquaries. At the beginning of the interview, we discussed
the reasons why he wanted to become an art historian.

TIM SMITH: I was someone who was always quite enamored by history, but the idea
of simply looking at documents, um, didn't quite grab my attention, it
wasn't quite exciting, and I find I'm someone who's more
interested kind of objects, places, spaces, um, so, the best fit for me really,
with a strong historical emphasis was also something like art history because of
the ability, or the focus I should say rather, on objects.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Rabbi Friedman and Dr. Smith have very different motivations when
it comes to their reasons for becoming a teacher. Because of this, we wanted to
see how their perspectives on history and faith were similar or different.

MIA OWENS: By placing their interviews in conversation with each other, we have
found that the intersection between faith and history requires careful
consideration of various religions.

MIA OWENS: The study of history and the study of religious faith often create
disparate perspectives on how to view the past. Since Rabbi Friedman is a
teacher of the Jewish faith and lifestyle, his perspective on history is
directly linked to his faith.

YOSSI FRIEDMAN: I remember, uh, reading Max Dimont's, um, God, Jews, and
History [Jews, God, and History], uh, and then sort of a companion book to that
written by the same author, uh, the Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People, so
one of them sounds like a history book and one of them sounds like a novel or an
exciting book but it's really, uh, a very, a very interesting, uh,
combination, but in one of those two, uh, three or four times, in, during the
course of Jewish history, he writes, um, the Jews got very lucky and somebody
came along and saved the day, uh, really by changing the direction of the Jewish
community or the, uh, or the direction of Jewish history. You know, once is
lucky, twice is lucky, three times, I'm beginning to see a pattern here,
four times this, this, this is almost orchestrated, right? That's how I
think the difference between seeing history as a series of fortunate
coincidences or the unfolding of God's plan. So where Max writes, um, you
know, the, the next fortuitous, uh, change in Jewish history came about with the
rise of Rabbi Akiva, with the rise of whoever it was, um, you know this happens
every time we need it, it happens. I see that as the unfolding of God's
plan for the Jewish people.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Throughout the interview, Rabbi Friedman continued to describe
history as the unfolding of God's plan. His repetition of the phrase seems
to imply that he has a more providentialist view of history because of his
faith. On the other hand, Dr. Smith tries to interact with history through the
perspective of the people who experienced it.

TIM SMITH: Um, one of the things I'm really interested in my own research,
in terms of how you might categorize my research, I'm interested in
reception, which means I'm interested in the way people in the past
actually understood works of art when they looked at them. And one way I try to
explain that to students is you're still involved in reception today. It
may not be the same reception that they had in the fifteenth century, but what
you think, what you feel, what you're thinking about when you look at a
work of art is conditioned so much by who you are, where you came from,
what's your education, uh, social status, I mean, economic social status, a
million different aspects that's kind of endemic to you as a person and
your journey. That all impacts the way you understand that work of art. What I
try to do in my own research is try to reconstruct that for someone who's
been dead for a very long time.

MIA OWENS: Despite their varying approaches to doing history, both Rabbi
Friedman and Dr. Smith acknowledge that people with different faith traditions
approach the study of historical events differently. They also emphasize
understanding other religious traditions to gain an appreciation of unfamiliar perspectives.

SHAWNY TUCKER: When, uh, you look at people writing Jewish history or people
writing Christian history or Islamic history or, um, the history of Hinduism, do
you look at their religious views?

YOSSI FRIEDMAN: Yes. Simply to know what vantage point they're coming from.
Um, I think very simply, the Jewish view, not the religious Jewish view but the
Jewish community view and the Christian community view and the Muslim community
view of what happened during the Crusades are very different. Even if they all
have the same facts, we understand what was happening at that time differently.
Maybe because I understand, at least I think I understand what the Jews of that
era were thinking. The Christian understands what the Christians of that era
were thinking. And the Muslim understands what the Muslims of that era were, at
least we think we understand. So, how I see history is how I understand the
people the best. So a Christian writes about the heroics of the crusaders is
obviously writing from a certain vantage point. The Jewish historian who writes
about the horrors of the Crusades is writing from a certain vantage point. So, I
don't think, how that, how you can possibly get away from that if you want
to understand, not just what happened, but why and what was the human component
and how did people allow this or how did...if you tried to understand humans,
you understand humans know the best.

SHAWNY TUCKER: They also recognize the challenges of setting aside personal
beliefs to understand different perspectives. Dr. Smith emphasizes that his
students will be asked to learn about religious ideas and symbols that may be
very different from their own. Despite this, he encourages them to approach
these topics with an open mind.

TIM SMITH: But I, you know I do. Every time I teach particularly these upper
level classes on Italian art I start by saying, ok let's, let's be
clear about this. I'm not trying to dissuade anybody, I'm not trying
to convert anybody, I'm not trying to devalue anybody's religious
experience whether you're Protestant or you're, uh, Catholic, whether
you're Jewish, whether you're agnostic, whether you're, you know,
Buddhist, whatever, but you have got to understand something about Catholic
religious experience, Catholic dogma, Catholic ritual, if you're going to
understand these images the way that they were meant to be understood,
experienced...there's just no way around it, so I'm not, I make it
very clear at the beginning of these classes that we're going to dive
pretty deep, you got to understand what the Mass and how the Mass works, and
when they hold this, you know, they hold up the Consecrated Host and ring a bell
and, you've got to understand all that because there's images involved
in all of that. You're not going to understand this in the way you need to
on its own terms if we don't dive deep into that. But I try to make a
disclaimer at the beginning of class, this, you know, this is basically me
teaching you how to understand this work of art. It's nothing, I try my
best to kind of detach that from any kind of personal, uh, statement about
religion, uh, on my own part but also on terms of what I'm trying to teach
students. So, I'm never trying to convert somebody to Catholicism or
whatever, I'm simply trying to equip them with the knowledge they need to
understand the image the way it would have been understood originally. And I
haven't had a lot of problem with that. I guess I'm surprised that I
haven't had more issues with it.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Dr. Smith gave us an example of when one of his students had
difficulty reconciling with the faith traditions of a religion that she was
unfamiliar with.

TIM SMITH: Oh, I think I've had, honestly I think, and, and you know maybe
because, you know, for all the differences I just talked about between
Protestant and Catholicism, it's, uh, they're still pretty close,
they're still, they're still Christianity. I've had more problems when
I teach the ancient Maya and try to explain value systems to my students there,
like the whole sacrifice--I had one girl who just had, she said, "I gotta get
up, I gotta go out, I can't sit through," she had to leave class one day
because we were talking about, you know, why did they do the sacrifice to the
humans and all, and, you know, how do the images relate to what the
rituals--she just couldn't handle it, because she couldn't wrap her
brain around it. It was so foreign to her and it was so, I guess personally
distressing to her. I've seen more problems with teaching non-Western kind
of, if you want to talk about religious values or religious, um, content in
images, necessarily than I have had with this kind of material.

MIA OWENS: Rabbi Friedman and Dr. Smith also agree on the difficulties of
understanding the world through the perspective of others, especially when
studying other faiths in history. For Rabbi Friedman, he seems to support
approaching history with humility and encourages acknowledging the limitations
created by personal bias.

SHAWNY TUCKER: So, when looking at academics and religion together, faith and
history combined, do you see that as problematic or not so much?

YOSSI FRIEDMAN: No, it's not problematic at all, we need all the scholars
we can to gain as much knowledge as we can because all of humanity benefits the
more we know. I think that challenges will be when, when academics begin to, uh,
insist that their view is untainted because they're not religious, uh, as
opposed to the religious historian who is biased because he's religious. I
don't think there's anybody who is untainted. We all have a certain
worldview and a certain way of seeing the world and to pretend that my way of
seeing is the purist and your way of seeing is tainted because of your world
view, I think it's very, that's when we start getting into danger.
But, um, to, to say that somebody's contribution to the world of knowledge
is invalid is, that's where the problems start to lie, you know start to
crop up, where, where your opinion doesn't count because fill in the blank.
That's the biggest challenge to education, to knowledge, and the idea that
my worldview somehow disqualifies my understanding of the world, or worse, my
worldview tells me that your understanding of the world is disqualified,
that's where we get into trouble. But having a worldview is not
automatically a bad thing.

SHAWNY TUCKER: For Dr. Smith, understanding the difficulties of limiting bias is
a little different given his personal stance on religion.

MIA OWENS: I think the final question I have for you is kind of a departure from
your teaching--

TIM SMITH: Yeah.

MIA OWENS: --but, you mentioned a lot about how you experiences have kind of
shaped how you viewed art history or how you interact with it. Have your
personal beliefs ever come into play with that? Or has it strictly been
experience informing that?

TIM SMITH: Uh, I think it's, uh, its, I would have to say it's been
experience because I'm an, I'm agnostic. I don't, I, I really
don't subscribe to any particular religion, I think they're all kind
of fascinating honestly, uh, and I like studying about them particularly through
the visual side of things.

SHAWNY TUCKER: As an agnostic, Dr. Smith does not view history through a
specific religious lens like Rabbi Friedman. However, he does acknowledge that
his beliefs still impact the way he approaches religion, specifically Catholic history.

TIM SMITH: You know it's really interesting because you will read these
stories sometimes of particularly medieval art historians who weren't
particularly religious and spent thirty years studying cathedrals and that they
actually become more religious over time. We've heard these kinds of
stories but this has never been the case with me. To me it's much more of a
kind of objective, um, I'm interested in the past, I'll just be real
honest with you. That's what it is for me. I want to understand the past
much better through any means that I can and...I don't know if that kind
of, um, particularly when I work so much with religious art, I don't know,
it's a good question. For someone who is not very religious, does this in
some way, um, that kind of distance from a religious feeling or a religious need
or interest personally, does that, does that keep me from completely
understanding the way these works would have appealed to people at the time, or
does it make it better because I have a more objective kind of position? I
don't know, I think it's a really good question and I think people
could argue both sides of that.

[musical transition]

MIA OWENS: We interviewed two people from very different backgrounds, both
teachers who discuss religion in their professions.

SHAWNY TUCKER: While Rabbi Friedman's decision to become a teacher was
influenced by his faith commitments and his family legacy, Dr. Smith became an
art historian and professor based on his enthusiasm for learning.

MIA OWENS: Since our two interviewees decided to become teachers based on
different personal interests, we found the ways that they interact with history
and faith come from different goals. However, they share similar sentiments
concerning the study of history through perspective.

SHAWNY TUCKER: Despite coming from different traditions, both Rabbi Friedman and
Dr. Smith believe that personal faith should not stop people from studying
history as long as they appreciate the perspective of others.

[musical transition]

MIA OWENS: Thanks for listening to our podcast on the study of faith and
history! We would like to thank Dr. Smith and Rabbi Friedman for their time and
willingness to help with our project.

SHAWNY TUCKER: We would also like to thank J Punt for lending his fantastic
trumpeting skills to our podcast. Music for this podcast was composed by J Punt
and Mia Owens.

CLAIRE DAVIS: Our theme and background music was produced by Samford student
Kerry Joiner. Dr. Anthony Minnema was interviewed by Michelle Little. This
episode was introduced by Claire Davis and Michelle Little, and it was written
and produced by Mia Owens and Shawny Tucker. This is a Samford Traditions and
Oral History Recordings Initiative production. For more information on our
program, you can find our page on the Samford website or follow us on social
media at Facebook and Instagram at Samford_STORI and on Twitter at SU_STORI.

[music]

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Interviewer	Shawny Tucker
Interviewee	Dr. Tim Smith
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Accession	SUHist/STORI/012