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Why a new consecration to St. Joseph is spreading like wildfire
March 8, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 8 Print
Denver, Colo., Mar 8, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- One of the most prominent people in the life of Jesus Christ, St. Joseph, his foster father, is also one of the quietest. And as such, he can be one of the most overlooked people in the Bible and in the Holy Family.
But Fr. Donald Calloway is hoping to change that, because he thinks the world needs St. Joseph now more than ever. Calloway told CNA that he thinks people today are confused about meaning.
People often approach the priest "so confused about the times we're living in when it comes to marriage and family, and you've got all this gender ideology stuff today. People are just really confused about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman."
Because he has personally had a devotion to St. Joseph for a long time, Calloway said he started wondering several years ago whether there was a consecration to the foster-father of Jesus, similar to the popular consecration to Mary by St. Louis de Montfort.
If such a consecration already existed, Calloway wanted to promote it – he thought St. Joseph's intercession and example were the antidotes to the confusion people were experiencing. But when he asked at the Vatican and various religious orders, he found that a consecration to St. Joseph did not yet exist in the Church.
"They said, no Father, that's a great idea. But they said, no, we've never heard of anything like that. And so I said, well, I'm going to do it then," Calloway said.
For the next three years, Calloway started researching, praying, and compiling a consecration to St. Joseph, the earthly husband of Mary and the foster-father of Jesus.
Because of the popularity of the Marian consecration, Calloway said he's had Catholics ask him whether the consecration to St. Joseph would somehow take away from their consecration to Mary.
"The word (consecration) technically means setting something aside for a holy purpose. We consecrate altars, for example, because we're going to use it for Mass. Or we consecrate people we have in religious communities and such," he said.
"So when we consecrate ourselves to Mary or Joseph, we're basically entrusting ourselves to their spiritual care because they're our spiritual parents. …and the answer is no, because we're not members of a one-parent spiritual family," he said.
In his book, Calloway writes that consecration to St. Joseph means "that you acknowledge that he is your spiritual father, and you want to be like him. To show it, you entrust yourself entirely to his paternal care so that he can lovingly help you acquire his virtues and become holy…St. Joseph, in turn, will give those consecrated to him his loving attention, protection and guidance."
The first person to entrust themself to the spiritual care of Joseph and Mary was actually Jesus, he added.
"And so we give ourselves to their care, just like Jesus did when he was growing up. He lived under their roof, he was under their care, and he didn't just go to his mom, you know, he went to his dad as well to St Joseph. So that's what it is, entrusting ourselves to St. Joseph's spiritual fatherhood to help us grow in virtue and closer to Christ."
The consecration to St. Joseph also shares some similarities to the consecration to Mary by Louis DeMonfort, Calloway added like the length (33 days) and the general format, which consists of daily reflections on the life and virtues of St. Joseph, as well as special prayers.
"In the 18th century, when (DeMonfort) came up with his method, he made it 33 days, which is really good (because) if it was only like five or nine days, it's not enough, you're not going to really be able to cover a lot of material," Calloway said.
On the other hand, "if it's like three months long, people are going to be like, yeah, this is too much. So one month is a good amount of time. On a daily basis you go through some readings, you unpack some of the titles, the honors, the privileges associated with St. Joseph… and then you end every day with some prayers. And by the end of that, you're like, wow, I really know this guy now. I really feel that I want him as part of my spiritual life."
Like the Marian consecration, the St. Joseph consecration can be done individually or within a small group.
John De Guzman, a seminarian for the diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, told CNA that he found out about the consecration to St. Joseph through Fr. Calloway's social media pages. He started doing the consecration by himself, and then was joined by one of his fellow seminarians.
When he spoke with CNA, he was on the 10th day of the consecration, and is set to finish on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph.
De Guzman said he was inspired to do the consecration because he felt that St. Joseph was the member of the Holy Family with whom he was the least familiar.
"They are the perfect model of a family, and why would I not want to get closer to the father? I'm getting closer to the mother. I'm getting closer to the son. Well, then why not get closer to the father, make this a perfect trinity?" he said.
De Guzman said he thinks the consecration has been so popular because the world is desperately looking for examples of manhood, fatherhood, and loving families.
Many of the issues that adults deal with today stem from some kind of instability in their own family of origin, he added.
"It can stem from tensions with the father, or a lack of a father, or the lack of some spiritual and emotional intimacy…the lack of human interaction and relationship with a father," he said.
The consecration, on the other hand, is bringing to light "that Saint Joseph is your human father that you can really develop a relationship with," he said.
"Saint Joseph was not immaculately conceived. Saint Joseph was not a perfect human being," he said.
"If anything, Saint Joseph probably was in one of the more difficult situations of his time, being married to the most beautiful woman out there, (his foster) son is the Lord. For me, that would probably be a playground for temptations where the devil can attack. But Saint Joseph triumphs. And the beautiful thing is he's not God, so there's that human relationship, the human aspect that you can connect to."
Robert Morgan and Sarah Kalonick, who are engaged to be married in June, told CNA that the consecration has helped them prepare for marriage and family life.
In their regular marriage prep, they are given a mentor couple with whom they can meet and ask questions about married life. Kalonick said they've started to look to Joseph and Mary as their "other mentor couple."
"(The consecration) really, in a very accessible and simple way, lets you focus on this hidden Saint," she said. "What are his qualities? What are his virtues? Who is he?" Like De Guzman, Morgan said he found it easier to relate to St. Joseph than to Mary when it came to the Holy Family.
"I think some of it is trying to reclaim a masculinity that's been lost over the years in our faith," he said. "And also as a man, it's a little easier for me to get the perspective of St. Joseph in Jesus's story, than it is for me to look from Mary's side of things."
On the other hand, Kalonick said that as a woman, growing closer to St. Joseph has been a "healing experience" for her in light of some of the hurt she experienced in past relationships with men.
"It helps heal and form my own perspective of (good relationships)," she said. "Here is a man who is pure-hearted, and virtuous, and loving the Lord, and loving this lady."
Kalonick said the point is not to "idealize" St. Joseph or to set "false expectations" of real men, but to "get to know the realness of Joseph and who a man can be, who he is, what man is, and to start looking for that in the relationships that you seek out."
As someone studying for the priesthood, De Guzman said the consecration has inspired him to learn more about the earthly father to whom Jesus himself was entrusted.
"Christ was consecrated to these two, Joseph and Mary were his father and his mother here on earth. Jesus grew through the fatherhood of St. Joseph. For me, I'm studying to be a priest (and) as a Christian, I want to be more like Christ. What better way to be more like Christ than to develop the same kind of love and relationship with his father?"
Like the Marian consecration, the consecration to St. Joseph is becoming very popular among Catholics – even though it was just published on January 1.
"So far people are loving it, and parishes and places that are doing it, they're loving it," Calloway said. "It's unbelievable…we almost can't keep up with the demand."
Calloway said he thinks part of the reason the consecration has been "flying off the shelves" is because the world is starving for good fathers. According to 2017 U.S. Census Bureau data, more than one in four children are growing up in a fatherless home.
"We've got a lot of people with a lot of father wounds and absent fathers," he said. "They don't know what a father is and they've never experienced their loving father or a father who's present in their lives."
Besides a crisis of fatherhood in families, the Church itself is also experiencing a crisis of spiritual fathers today, Calloway said, referring to the priests and bishops and cardinals who have been found guilty of both "sinful and criminal things" in recent sex abuse scandals.
"(They've) hurt a lot of people caused a lot of scandal," he said. "And so people right now are thirsting for a good father."
"Part of what I would like the fruit of this to be is the affirmation that we do have a loving father in St. Joseph, and he's never going to hurt us. He's there for us and a good father who wants his children to make it to heaven. And he's ultimately, like Our Lady, not going to point to himself, but point us to Jesus and help us to grow."
Another aspect of St. Joseph's sainthood that may not be well known are the various patronages and titles he holds, Calloway added, and each day of the consecration is dedicated to one of these.
Perhaps one of the only well-known St. Joseph traditions, that leans more superstitious than spiritual, is the burying a St. Joseph statue upside down in the yard, with the belief that he will then help one's house sell faster. "It's kind of spiritual bribery," Calloway said.
"They'll say, 'I'm not going to turn you right-side up until you sell my house. Well what kind of craziness is that?" Rather, there are much more profound things for which St. Joseph's intercession can be invoked, such as for a good death.
"He's the patron of the dying, because the tradition says that when he died, he died in the arms of Jesus and Mary. You won't get a better death than that, so when you pray to him for a happy death…we pray that we would be embraced by our Lord and our Lady," Calloway noted.
St. Joseph is also the patron of virgins, Calloway said, because he never had marital relations with Mary.
"We live in a world that's just filled with lust and perversions of every kind, and we've got this pornographic plague right now. And I think that's something that we can look to him for as well. Not just for virgins, but also for marriages, for couples to be chaste within their marriage…and to have that dignity for each other and that respect for each other."
Some of Calloway's other favorite titles for St. Joseph include Pillar of Families and Glory of Domestic life, he said, but the "money title" is: Terror of Demons.
"Because you know, a lot of times you look at (artwork of St. Joseph) and it doesn't look too intimidating. He looks old with the cane," Calloway said. "But the reality is he wasn't some old man. And that's really not a cane – it's like a staff of a warrior."
"Satan knows the power that (St. Joseph) has because he has such familiarity and intimacy with Christ. Just like when our Lady asks Jesus to do something, she's asking as his mother, well when Joseph asks, he's asking Jesus as his father, and so there's power in that petition and Satan is terrified that."
Besides the 33 days of reflections, the Consecration to St. Joseph book contains reflections on the "wonders of St. Joseph," which include descriptions of miraculous places and events attributed to St. Joseph's intercession. The book also includes additional prayers, such as the Litany of St. Joseph, the Holy Cloak novena, and other prayers from saints and popes dedicated to St. Joseph, as well as guides for those leading small groups with the consecration.
The website for the consecration to St. Joseph also contains a chart which shows when one can begin the 33-day consecration in order for it to end on specific feast days or holy days related to St. Joseph.
Consecration books can be ordered through the website as well – but order quickly, they are going fast, Calloway noted. De Guzman said he would encourage anyone interested in growing closer to St. Joseph to do the consecration, or any other devotion that would bring them closer to the saint.
Even though the saint is known for his silence and humility "it seems like now is the time for his fatherhood to really shine in our lives, and so I would encourage people to really respond to that."
Cura corporis and cura animae: The Church and the Coronavirus Crisis
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Washington D.C., Jan 11, 2018 / 12:11 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Americans must recommit to the fight against racism through love and faith, said the head of the U.S. bishops' conference in the days leading up to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
American Solidarity Party candidate presses on to 2020 presidential election
Washington D.C., Jun 17, 2020 / 03:19 am (CNA).- Republicans and Democrats aren't the only political parties finding their 2020 campaigning efforts hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brian Carroll, an evangelical Christian, is the 2020 presidential nominee for the American Solidarity Party, a small-but-growing political party whose platform is based largely on Catholic social teaching.
Carroll told CNA June 15 that he hopes to be recognized as a write-in candidate for president in several states come November.
In most states, smaller parties depend on volunteers to circulate petitions in order to get on the general election ballot.
With many states still imposing restrictions related to the pandemic, volunteers have been hard to come by, Carroll said.
"Some states have recognized the problem and reduced or eliminated their requirements. For example, Vermont. We expect to be on the ballot in Vermont simply because Vermont changed the rules," he said.
Carroll's in-person campaigning has been on hold for several months. He said before the pandemic hit, he had planned a lot of travel, making campaign stops throughout the country. California, New York, Ohio and Texas already have fairly active ASP chapters.
Despite being stuck at home in California, he's been active on his campaign Facebook page, offering his thoughts on recent world events and dialoguing with people in the comment sections.
'Subsidiarity is well designed for a problem like this'
For Carroll, a retired history teacher, the pandemic and the recent protests for racial justice following the death of George Floyd are best viewed through the lens of ASP's pro-life ethic.
The party began in 2011 as the Christian Democracy Party USA, and Mike Maturen, a Catholic, ran for president on the party ticket in the 2016 election.
Though the American Solidarity Party of today is not explicitly religious, its platform rests on several principles which the Church has developed as part of Catholic social teaching.
Subsidiarity— the Catholic idea that local authorities are best suited to tackle local issues— is a tenet of the ASP's platform.
Carroll said he supports more local solutions rather than one-size-fits-all pandemic restrictions, because what is needed in places like Florida, where many seniors live, will be different than in a college town. Similarly, a greater emphasis on subsidiarity would allow urban and rural areas to impose whatever restrictions are appropriate for them.
"Giving the local people the ability to make some of the decisions, that's better than having one central decision. They could make the wrong decision, and then you've lost the chance to see what might work. So I think subsidiarity is a strength there," Carroll said.
"By giving local authorities more power to make the decisions, you're more likely to craft a policy that meets that particular local area. So, in that sense, subsidiarity is well designed for a problem like this."
As the virus spread earlier this year, politicians, including President Trump, were in uncharted territory in many ways, Carroll said.
"Once it got started, you can't fault [Trump] in a situation where even the doctors didn't know how this was going to behave. It was new, and it was the first time they'd seen it. And so there's going to be some errors expected. You have to give them a little bit of grace and mercy on that part of it."
That being said, Carroll criticized what he sees as "inconsistencies" in how COVID-19 restrictions have been applied in some places, and emphasized that government leaders "need to try and minimize the inconsistencies and then, by all means, live by their own rules."
Carroll also commented on the economic impact of the pandemic. Distributism, the favored economic theory for the party platform, is a model championed by notable Catholics such as G.K. Chesterton and Hillair Belloc. The model calls for a broader system of ownership to create a more "local, responsible, and sustainable" economy.
The ASP favors a rewrite of regulations and tax incentives to favor small businesses and family farms, rather than major corporations.
Carroll said the pandemic has exacerbated the divide between large corporations, such as Amazon, which have profited greatly since the start of the crisis, and small businesses which have struggled to stay afloat or have already had to close.
"If we had a Congress that was more sympathetic to distributism, the [relief] bills that they put together would have favored the little guy," he said.
The ASP's party platform is strongly anti-abortion and supports care for pregnant mothers, as well as a system of universal healthcare. It opposes capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research.
"We're pro-life, but pro-life, obviously, is more than just abortion. It's, 'Are we taking care of our elderly who are threatened by a virus?' That's a pro-life question," he said.
Advocating for greater racial equality also is a pro-life issue for the party, Carroll said. Victims of COVID-19 have been overwhelmingly poor, and disproportionately of minority races, such as African Americans and Native Americans.
Many minorities in the United States live in close quarters, do not have the freedom to work from home, rely on public transportation, and are more likely to have preexisting conditions, he said.
"All of those things make them more vulnerable, and that's a life issue," he said.
"The American Solidarity Party looks at so many different things as being intertwined, and they all feed back into the question of life and making our communities more friendly to quality of life, encouraging families. All of those kinds of things are where our party is."
Carroll said he suspects that the pandemic will lead people to the understanding that tying healthcare to employment is a "basic flaw."
"A lot of people had put faith in their healthcare through their employer, and suddenly realized that they had misplaced their faith, because it was very easy to lose their jobs," he said.
"And so from that point of view, I think this is going to make the country much more open to the kind of healthcare that we're looking for, where everybody gets covered."
In addition, the principle of subsidiarity also applies to policing, he said. Police ought to come from the communities they serve, and not be seen as outside threats.
"We need to demilitarize the police and do everything we can to lower the tensions between police and the communities that they serve in," Carroll said.
'A specifically pro-life vote'
Even before the pandemic, turnout at ASP meetings across the country was low, but growing.
Though Carroll and his running mate, Amar Patel, are not sanguine about their chances of actually winning the presidency, their goals remain the same as when they first set out: to build up their party, and raise awareness that there is an alternative for people of faith who do not want to vote Republican or Democrat.
Carroll said he hopes the party will be able to field candidates for local offices across the country, and possibly even congressional candidates, in 2022.
Even if they don't win offices, Carroll said, their party can affect policy by influencing the national conversation or drawing attention to specific issues.
Carroll pointed to Ross Perot, who ran for president as an independent in the 1990s, while pushing for a balanced federal budget. Though Perot did not come close to winning, the major parties discussed a balanced budget for years after that, Carroll contended.
In Carroll's mind, if enough pro-life Democrats switch to the ASP, then the Democratic Party may consider softening its position on abortion.
Also, he said, if enough Republicans who "don't like to see kids in cages at the border," or who support a more universalized healthcare system, switch to ASP, the Republican Party might also begin to rethink their positions.
"My personal goal is for everyone, whether they love us, they hate us, or are completely indifferent and think we're a joke, at least will have heard of us by November 3, and that the people who want to vote their conscience have at least that opportunity," Patel, a Catholic who serves as ASP's Chairman, told CNA in March.
He said he suspects that many Christians and Catholics end up voting for a candidate who they believe will defend one specific aspect of Christian morality, rather than looking for "ideal candidates who will actually defend the Christian message in total."
"They can actually put in 'Brian Carroll' if they want a write-in vote that is significant, is meaningful, and counts specifically FOR something, as opposed to against something, which I think a lot of people are ending up doing."
Patel said he hears a lot about "wasted votes" when it comes to third parties. But he has a different view.
In states where a Republican or Democratic victory is all but assured, such as California, even if millions of voters switched to a third party, it would be unlikely to change the outcome of the race, he said. However, the "entire face of American politics would have changed," because people would be talking about the third-party candidate who garnered millions of votes.
"If you're strongly pro-life and you vote for Trump in a state he's going to lose, THAT'S a throwaway vote, because not everyone who votes for Trump is pro-life," Patel argued.
"But if you change your pro-life vote to Brian Carroll, that will be a specifically pro-life vote that will be counted as such," he added.
Pompeo: China is world's 'gravest threat' to religious freedom
October 29, 2020 CNA Daily News 0
CNA Staff, Oct 29, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- The U.S. Secretary of State on Thursday called out the Chinese Communist Party as the world's most serious threat to religious freedom.
In a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, Oct. 29, Mike Pompeo said that … […]
Gilberta from Ontario
And St. Joseph is the patron saint of Canada. And the patron of the dying. Should be a busy guy these days.
Diane McHenry
I am doing this Consecration and have the book. It is amazing.Many quotes by Doctors of the Church and Popes. I feel much closer to St. Joseph and consoled and calmer in these troubling times. He is a wonderworker!
J.P.G.
We are also blessed to have our Holy Father who too is devoted to St.Joseph and has shown us same from the very beginning of his ministry , in the Consecration to St.Joseph at the Vatican and words of exhortation encouraging same devotion –
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2018-03/pope-francis-st-joseph-5-anniversary-pontificate.html
May same be part of the remedy for the yearning in hearts , to see The Father , to undo the enemy lies and accusations as well ..
Fr. Louis Bouyer wrote on how devotion to the Holy Family had replaced the Holy Trinity. How true this remains, as our supernatural adoption by God the Father in Christ has been forgotten.
I read an article online on how "bridal mysticism" took over the Western Church in the Middle ages and how this contributed toward the femininization of the Latin Rite. I am a convert to Catholicism (from a kind of agnostic-ism, I guess) and have had great trouble developing any kind of devotional practice. They all seem very "felt Jesus" to me-warm and fuzzy.
When I think of the Holy Family–family is all warm and fuzzy and welcoming. That would be appealing to women especially. The Holy Trinity, especially The Father-not so much. Rules, commands, order, justice. I am guessing that would appeal to men more than women–but men have fled the Church.
Podles' book? I think the genealogy is wrong thought he is probably right to point to the development of bridal mysticism as a symptom. Bouyer would critique more the separation of liturgy and popular devotion–popular devotion became more prominent in the lives of the faithful because the liturgy (and liturgical spirituality) was mostly inaccessible to them. It is not surprising that after 50 years of the Pauline reform, vernacular liturgies, a "better" lectionary and so on that one of the core elements of Christian spirituality, our supernatural adoption by God the Father, remains unknown or without practical effect for most Roman Catholics. One does not tinker with the liturgy in order to catechize "better."
Dr.Cajetan Coelho
Jesus, Mary and Joe – Pray for us.
Why a new consecration to St. Joseph is spreading like wildfire - Catholic Mass Search
San Francisco Catholics speak out for—and against—Abp. Cordileone
Catherine Harmon April 16, 2015 0
The latest installment of the drama currently unfolding in the Archdiocese of San Francisco saw two groups of local Catholics make known their very different opinions of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone's leadership, and in no uncertain […]


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Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies
In a Muslim context, Islamic studies can be an umbrella term for all virtually all of academia, both originally researched and as defined by the Islamization of knowledge...
. It is the continuous search for Hekma (Wisdom) in the light of Islamic view of life, universe, ethics, society, and so on. Islamic philosophy, understood as a "project of independent philosophical inquiry" began in Baghdad in the middle of the eighth century.
Islamic philosophy refers to philosophy produced in an Islamic society. It is not necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor exclusively produced by Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
s. [Oliver Leaman, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Formative influences
Islamic philosophy as the name implies refers to philosophical activity within the Islamic milieu. The main sources of classical or early Islamic philosophy are the religion of Islam itself (especially ideas derived and interpreted from the Quran), Greek philosophy
Greek philosophy
Ancient Greek philosophy arose in the 6th century BCE and continued through the Hellenistic period, at which point Ancient Greece was incorporated in the Roman Empire...
which the early Muslims inherited as a result of conquests when Alexandria, Syria and Jundishapur
Academy of Gundishapur
The Academy of Gondishapur , also Jondishapur , was a renowned academy of learning in the city of Gundeshapur during late antiquity, the intellectual center of the Sassanid empire. It offered training in medicine, philosophy, theology and science. The faculty were versed in the Zoroastrian and...
came under Muslim rule, along with pre-Islamic Indian philosophy
India has a rich and diverse philosophical tradition dating back to ancient times. According to Radhakrishnan, the earlier Upanisads constitute "...the earliest philosophical compositions of the world."...
and Iranian philosophy
Iranian philosophy
Iranian philosophy or Persian philosophy can be traced back as far as to Old Iranian philosophical traditions and thoughts which originated in ancient Indo-Iranian roots and were considerably influenced by Zarathustra's teachings...
. Many of the early philosophical debates centered around reconciling religion and reason, the latter exemplified by Greek philosophy. One aspect which stands out in Islamic philosophy is that, the philosophy in Islam travels wide but comes back to conform it with the Quran and Sunna.
Early Islamic philosophy
In early Islamic thought, which refers to philosophy during the "Islamic Golden Age
During the Islamic Golden Age philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations...
", traditionally dated between the 8th and 12th centuries, two main currents may be distinguished. The first is Kalam
ʿIlm al-Kalām is the Islamic philosophical discipline of seeking theological principles through dialectic. Kalām in Islamic practice relates to the discipline of seeking theological knowledge through debate and argument. A scholar of kalām is referred to as a mutakallim...
, that mainly dealt with Islamic theological
Islamic theology is a branch of Islamic studies regarding the beliefs associated with the Islamic faith. Any religious belief system, or creed, can be considered an example of aqidah. However, this term has taken a significant technical usage in Islamic history and theology, denoting those...
questions, and the other is Falsafa, that was founded on interpretations of Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism is a tradition of philosophy that takes its defining inspiration from the work of Aristotle. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school, and, later on, by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings...
and Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...
. There were attempts by later philosopher-theologians at harmonizing both trends, notably by Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā , commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived...
who founded the school of Avicennism, Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
Averroes
' , better known just as Ibn Rushd , and in European literature as Averroes , was a Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy,...
who founded the school of Averroism
Averroism
Averroism is the term applied to either of two philosophical trends among scholastics in the late 13th century: the Arab philosopher Averroës or Ibn Rushd's interpretations of Aristotle and his reconciliation of Aristotelianism with Islamic faith; and the application of these ideas in the Latin...
, and others such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) and Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī,
Kalām is the philosophy that seeks Islamic theological
principles through dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
. In Arabic
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
the word literally means "speech".
One of first debates was that between partisan of the Qadar , who affirmed free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
, and the Jabarites (jabar, force, constraint), who believed in fatalism
Fatalism
Fatalism is a philosophical doctrine emphasizing the subjugation of all events or actions to fate.Fatalism generally refers to several of the following ideas:...
At the second century of the Hijra
Hijri year
The Hijri year is year numbering system used in the Islamic calendar. It commemorates the Hijra , or emigration of Muhammad and his followers to the city of Medina in 622 CE. In Arabic, AH is symbolized by the letter هـ...
, a new movement arose in the theological school of Basra
Basra is the capital of Basra Governorate, in southern Iraq near Kuwait and Iran. It had an estimated population of two million as of 2009...
, Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
. A pupil, Wasil ibn Ata
Wasil ibn Ata
Wasil ibn Ata was an important Muslim theologian and jurist of his time, and by many accounts is considered to be the founder of the Mutazilite school of Islamic thought....
, who was expelled from the school because his answers were contrary to then sunni tradition and became leader of a new school, and systematized the radical opinions of preceding sects, particularly those of the Qadarites and Jabarites. This new school was called Mutazilite (from i'tazala, to separate oneself).
The Mutazilites, compelled to defend their principles against the sunni Islam of their day, looked for support in philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, and are one of the first to pursue a rational theology called Ilm-al-Kalam
(Scholastic theology
Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
); those professing it were called Mutakallamin. This appellation became the common name for all seeking philosophical demonstration in confirmation of religious principles. But subsequent generations were to large extent critical towards the Mutazilite school, especially after formation of the Asharite concepts.
More simply put Kalam means duties of the heart as opposed to (or in conjunction with) fikh duties of the body. Theology verses jurisprudence.
Falsafa
Falsafa is a Greek
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
meaning "philosophy". "Science" is the Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
word for "philosophy".
Divisions of the Philosophic Sciences
These sciences, in relation to the aim we have set before us, may be divided into six, sections:
(1) Mathematics
(2) Logic
(3) Physics (The object of this science is the study of the bodies which compose the universe: the sky and the stars, and, here below, simple elements such as air, earth, water, fire, and compound bodies animals, plants, and minerals; the reasons of their changes, developments, and intermixture.) also includes medicine.
(4) Metaphysics
(5) Politics
(6) Moral Philosophy (ethics)
From the ninth century onward, owing to Caliph
The Caliph is the head of state in a Caliphate, and the title for the ruler of the Islamic Ummah, an Islamic community ruled by the Shari'ah. It is a transcribed version of the Arabic word which means "successor" or "representative"...
al-Ma'mun
Abū Jaʿfar Abdullāh al-Māʾmūn ibn Harūn was an Abbasid caliph who reigned from 813 until his death in 833...
and his successor, Greek philosophy was introduced among the Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
s, and the Peripatetic school began to find able representatives among them; such were Al-Kindi
' , known as "the Philosopher of the Arabs", was a Muslim Arab philosopher, mathematician, physician, and musician. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers, and is unanimously hailed as the "father of Islamic or Arabic philosophy" for his synthesis, adaptation and promotion...
, Al-Farabi
Al-Farabi
' known in the West as Alpharabius , was a scientist and philosopher of the Islamic world...
, Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
, and Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
, all of whose fundamental principles were considered as criticized by the Mutakallamin. Another trend, represented by the Brethren of Purity
Brethren of Purity
The Brethren of Purity were a secret society of Muslim philosophers in Basra, Iraq, in the 10th century CE....
, used Aristotelian language to expound a fundamentally Neoplatonic
and Neopythagorean
Neopythagoreanism
Neopythagoreanism was a Graeco-Alexandrian school of philosophy, reviving Pythagorean doctrines, which became prominent in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE...
world view.
During the Abbasid caliphate a number of thinkers and scientists, some of them heterodox
Heterodoxy is generally defined as "any opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position". As an adjective, heterodox is commonly used to describe a subject as "characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards"...
Muslims or non-Muslims, played a role in transmitting Greek, Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
, and other pre-Islamic knowledge to the Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
. They contributed to making Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
known in Christian Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. Three speculative thinkers, al-Farabi
and al-Kindi
, combined Aristotelianism
with other ideas introduced through Islam.
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
and Latin
, contributing to the development of modern European philosophy.
Some differences between Kalam and Falsafa
Aristotle attempted to demonstrate the unity of God; but from the view which he maintained, that matter was eternal, it followed that God could not be the Creator of the world. According to Aristotelianism, the human soul is simply man's substantial form
Substantial form
A theory of substantial forms asserts that forms organize matter and make it intelligible. Substantial forms are the source of properties, order, unity, identity, and information about objects....
, the set of properties that make matter into a living human body. This seems to imply that the human soul cannot exist apart from the body. Indeed, Aristotle writes, "It is clear that the soul, or at least some parts of it (if it is divisible), cannot be separated from the body. [...] And thus, those have the right idea who think that the soul does not exist without the body." In Aristotelianism, at least one psychological force, the active intellect
Active intellect
The active intellect is a concept in classical and medieval philosophy...
, can exist apart from the body. However, according to many interpretations, the active intellect is a superhuman entity emanating from God and enlightening the human mind, not a part of any individual human soul. Thus, Aristotle's theories seem to deny the immortality of the individual human soul.
Wherefore the Mutakallamin had, before anything else, to establish a system of philosophy to demonstrate the creation of matter, and they adopted to that end the theory of atoms as enunciated by Democritus. They taught that atoms possess neither quantity nor extension. Originally atoms were created by God, and are created now as occasion seems to require. Bodies come into existence or die, through the aggregation or the sunderance of these atoms. But this theory did not remove the objections of philosophy to a creation of matter.
For, indeed, if it be supposed that God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
commenced His work at a certain definite time by His "will," and for a certain definite object, it must be admitted that He was imperfect before accomplishing His will, or before attaining His object. In order to obviate this difficulty, the Motekallamin extended their theory of the atoms to Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
, and claimed that just as Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
is constituted of atoms and vacuum, Time, likewise, is constituted of small indivisible moments. The creation of the world once established, it was an easy matter for them to demonstrate the existence of a Creator, and that God is unique, omnipotent
Omnipotence
Omnipotence is unlimited power. Monotheistic religions generally attribute omnipotence to only the deity of whichever faith is being addressed...
, and omniscient
Omniscience omniscient point-of-view in writing) is the capacity to know everything infinitely, or at least everything that can be known about a character including thoughts, feelings, life and the universe, etc. In Latin, omnis means "all" and sciens means "knowing"...
Main protagonists of Falsafa and their critics
The twelfth century saw the apotheosis of pure philosophy and the decline of the Kalam, which latter, being attacked by both the philosophers and the orthodox, perished for lack of champions. This supreme exaltation of philosophy may be attributed, in great measure, to Al-Ghazali (1005–1111) among the Persians, and to Judah ha-Levi (1140) among the Jews. It can be argued that the attacks directed against the philosophers by Ghazali in his work, "Tahafut al-Falasifa" (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), not only produced, by reaction, a current favorable to philosophy, but induced the philosophers themselves to profit by his criticism. They thereafter made their theories clearer and their logic closer. The influence of this reaction brought forth the two greatest philosophers that the Islamic Peripatetic school ever produced, namely, Ibn Bajjah
Ibn Bajjah
Abū-Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn al-Sāyigh , known as Ibn Bājjah , was an Andalusian polymath: an astronomer, logician, musician, philosopher, physician, physicist, psychologist, botanist, poet and scientist. He was known in the West by his Latinized name, Avempace...
(Avempace) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
Since no idea and no literary or philosophical movement ever germinated on Persian or Arabian soil without leaving its impress on the Jews, the Persian Ghazali found an imitator in the person of Judah ha-Levi. This poet also took upon himself to free his religion from what he saw as the shackles of speculative philosophy, and to this end wrote the "Kuzari," in which he sought to discredit all schools of philosophy alike. He passes severe censure upon the Mutakallamin for seeking to support religion by philosophy. He says, "I consider him to have attained the highest degree of perfection who is convinced of religious truths without having scrutinized them and reasoned over them" ("Kuzari," v.). Then he reduced the chief propositions of the Mutakallamin, to prove the unity of God, to ten in number, describing them at length, and concluding in these terms: "Does the Kalam give us more information concerning God and His attributes than the prophet did?" (Ib. iii. and iv.) Aristotelianism finds no favor in Judah ha-Levi's eyes, for it is no less given to details and criticism; Neoplatonism alone suited him somewhat, owing to its appeal to his poetic temperament.
Ibn Rushd or Ibn Roshd (Averroës)
, the contemporary of Maimonides
Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn in Arabic, or Rambam , was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages...
, was one of the last of the Islamic Peripatetics. The theories of Ibn Rushd do not differ fundamentally from those of Ibn Bajjah
and Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail
Ibn Tufail was an Andalusian Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, vizier,...
, who only follow the teachings of Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
and Al-Farabi
. Like all Islamic Peripatetics, Ibn Rushd admits the hypothesis of the intelligence of the spheres and the hypothesis of universal emanation, through which motion is communicated from place to place to all parts of the universe as far as the supreme world—hypotheses which, in the mind of the Arabic philosophers, did away with the dualism involved in Aristotle's doctrine of pure energy and eternal matter.
But while Al-Farabi
, and other Persian and Muslim philosophers hurried, so to speak, over subjects that trenched on traditional beliefs, Ibn Rushd delighted in dwelling upon them with full particularity and stress. Thus he says, "Not only is matter eternal, but form is potentially inherent in matter; otherwise, it were a creation ex nihilo" (Munk, "Mélanges," p. 444). According to this theory, therefore, the existence of this world is not only a possibility, as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) declared, but also a necessity.
Islamic philosophy found an audience with the Jews, to whom belongs the honor of having transmitted it to the Christian world. A series of eminent men—such as the Ibn Tibbon
Ibn Tibbon
Ibn Tibbon , is a family of Jewish rabbis and translators that lived principally in Provence in the 12th and 13th centuries.- Prominent family members :Prominent members of the family include:...
s, Narboni, Gersonides
Gersonides
Levi ben Gershon, better known by his Latinised name as Gersonides or the abbreviation of first letters as RaLBaG , philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, astronomer/astrologer. He was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, France...
—joined in translating the Arabic philosophical works into Hebrew and commenting upon them. The works of Ibn Rushd especially became the subject of their study, due in great measure to Maimonides, who, in a letter addressed to his pupil Joseph ben Judah, spoke in the highest terms of Ibn Rushd's commentary.
It should be mentioned that this depiction of intellectual tradition in Islamic Lands is mainly dependent upon what West could understand and received (or was willing to understand) from this long era. In contrast, there are some historians and philosophers who do not agree with this account and describe this era in a completely different way. Their main point of dispute is on the influence of different philosophers on Islamic Philosophy, especially the comparative importance of eastern intellectuals such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and of western thinkers such as Ibn Rushd. (For more discussion, refer to the History of Islamic Philosophy by Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.Corbin was born in Paris in April 1903. As a boy he revealed the profound sensitivity to music so evident in his work...
Judeo-Islamic philosophies
The oldest Jewish religio-philosophical work preserved in Arabic is that of Saadia Gaon
Saadia Gaon
Saʻadiah ben Yosef Gaon was a prominent rabbi, Jewish philosopher, and exegete of the Geonic period.The first important rabbinic figure to write extensively in Arabic, he is considered the founder of Judeo-Arabic literature...
(892-942), Emunot ve-Deot
Emunoth ve-Deoth
Emunoth ve-Deoth or Emunoth w'D'oth written by Rabbi Saadia Gaon - originally Kitāb ul-ʾamānāt wal-iʿtiqādāt - was the first systematic presentation and philosophic foundation of the dogmas of Judaism. The work is prefaced by an introduction and has ten chapters; it was completed in 933...
, "The Book of Beliefs and Opinions". In this work Saadia treats the questions that interested the Mutakallamin, such as the creation of matter, the unity of God, the divine attributes, the soul, etc. Saadia criticizes other philosophers severely. For Saadia there was no problem as to creation: God created the world ex nihilo
Ex nihilo is a Latin phrase meaning "out of nothing". It often appears in conjunction with the concept of creation, as in creatio ex nihilo, meaning "creation out of nothing"—chiefly in philosophical or theological contexts, but also occurs in other fields.In theology, the common phrase creatio ex...
, just as the Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
attests; and he contests the theory of the Mutakallamin in reference to atoms, which theory, he declares, is just as contrary to reason and religion as the theory of the philosophers professing the eternity of matter.
To prove the unity of God, Saadia uses the demonstrations of the Mutakallamin. Only the attributes of essence (sifat al-dhatia) can be ascribed to God, but not the attributes of action (sifat-al-fi'aliya). The soul is a substance more delicate even than that of the celestial spheres
Celestial spheres
The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others...
. Here Saadia controverts the Mutakallamin, who considered the soul an "accident" arad (compare Guide for the Perplexed
Guide for the Perplexed
The Guide for the Perplexed is one of the major works of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or "the Rambam"...
i. 74), and employs the following one of their premises to justify his position: "Only a substance can be the substratum of an accident" (that is, of a non-essential property of things). Saadia argues: "If the soul be an accident only, it can itself have no such accidents as wisdom, joy, love," etc. Saadia was thus in every way a supporter of the Kalam; and if at times he deviated from its doctrines, it was owing to his religious views.
and his successor, Greek philosophy was introduced among the Persians
Persian people
The Persian people are part of the Iranian peoples who speak the modern Persian language and closely akin Iranian dialects and languages. The origin of the ethnic Iranian/Persian peoples are traced to the Ancient Iranian peoples, who were part of the ancient Indo-Iranians and themselves part of...
and Arab
, Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Later Islamic philosophy
The death of Ibn Rushd (Averroës)
effectively marks the end of a particular discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Peripatetic Arabic School, and philosophical activity declined significantly in western Islamic countries, namely in Islamic Spain
Al-Andalus was the Arabic name given to a nation and territorial region also commonly referred to as Moorish Iberia. The name describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania governed by Muslims , at various times in the period between 711 and 1492, although the territorial boundaries...
and North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
, though it persisted for much longer in the Eastern countries, in particular Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
and India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. Contrary to the traditional view, Dimitri Gutas and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a freely-accessible online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from over 65 academic institutions worldwide...
consider the period between the 11th and 14th centuries to be the true "Golden Age
The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
" of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, initiated by Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali
Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī , known as Algazel to the western medieval world, born and died in Tus, in the Khorasan province of Persia was a Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic....
's successful integration of logic
Logic in Islamic philosophy
Logic played an important role in Islamic philosophy .Islamic Logic or mantiq is similar science to what is called Traditional Logic in Western Sciences.- External links :*Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: , Routledge, 1998...
into the Madrasah
Madrasah is the Arabic word for any type of educational institution, whether secular or religious...
curriculum and the subsequent rise of Avicennism.
Since the political power shift in Western Europe (Spain
and Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
) from Muslim to Christian control, the Muslims naturally did not practice philosophy in Western Europe. This also led to some loss of contact between the 'west' and the 'east' of the Islamic world. Muslims in the 'east' continued to do philosophy, as is evident from the works of Ottoman
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
scholars and especially those living in Muslim kingdoms within the territories of present day Iran and India, such as Shah Waliullah
Shah Waliullah
Shah Waliullah Muhaddith Dehlvi was an Islamic scholar and reformer. He was born during the reign of Aurangzeb. He worked for the revival of Muslim rule and intellectual learning in South Asia, during a time of waning Muslim power...
and Ahmad Sirhindi
Ahmad Sirhindi
Imām Rabbānī Shaykh Ahmad al-Farūqī al-Sirhindī was an Indian Islamic scholar from Punjab, a Hanafi jurist, and a prominent member of the Naqshbandī Sufi order. He is described as Mujaddid Alf Thānī, meaning the "reviver of the second millennium", for his work in rejuvenating Islam and opposing...
. This fact has escaped most pre-modern historians of Islamic (or Arabic) philosophy. In addition, logic has continued to be taught in religious seminaries up to modern times.
After Ibn Rushd, there arose many later schools of Islamic Philosophy. We can mention just a few, such as the those founded by Ibn Arabi
Ibn Arabi
Ibn ʿArabī was an Andalusian Moorish Sufi mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdillāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn `Arabī .-Biography:...
and Mulla Sadra
Mulla Sadra
Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī also called Mulla Sadrā was a Persian Shia Islamic philosopher, theologian and 'Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century...
. These new schools are of particular importance, as they are still active in the Islamic world. The most important among them are:
School of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq)
Transcendent Theosophy
Transcendent theosophy or al-hikmat al-muta'li , the doctrine and philosophy developed by Persian philosopher, Mulla Sadra, is one of two main disciplines of Islamic philosophy that is currently live and active....
(Hikmat Muta'aliah)
Sufi philosophy
Sufi philosophy includes the schools of thought unique to Sufism, a mystical branch within Islam. Sufism and its philosophical traditions may be associated with Sunni Islam or Shia Islam. It has been suggested that Sufi thought emerged from the Middle East in the eighth century, but adherents are...
Traditionalist School
The term Traditionalist School is used by Mark Sedgwick and other authors to denote a school of thought, also known as Integral Traditionalism or Perennialism to denote an esoteric movement developed by authors such as French metaphysician René Guénon, German-Swiss...
Illuminationist school
Illuminationist philosophy was a school of Islamic philosophy founded by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
Other important Muslim mystics carry the name Suhrawardi, particularly Abu 'l-Najib al-Suhrawardi and his paternal nephew Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi."Shahāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash as-Suhrawardī was a Persian...
in the 12th century. This school is a combination of Avicenna
's philosophy and ancient Iranian philosophy
, with many new innovative ideas of Suhrawardi. It is often described as having been influenced by Neoplatonism
In logic in Islamic philosophy
, systematic refutations of Greek logic
The Organon is the name given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics, to the standard collection of his six works on logic:* Categories* On Interpretation* Prior Analytics* Posterior Analytics...
were written by the Illuminationist school, founded by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
(1155-1191), who developed the idea of "decisive necessity
In U.S. criminal law, necessity may be either a possible justification or an exculpation for breaking the law. Defendants seeking to rely on this defense argue that they should not be held liable for their actions as a crime because their conduct was necessary to prevent some greater harm and when...
", an important innovation in the history of logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
al philosophical speculation.
Transcendent school
is the school of Islamic philosophy founded by Mulla Sadra
in the 17th century. His philosophy and ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
is considered to be just as important to Islamic philosophy as Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's philosophy later was to Western philosophy
Western philosophy is the philosophical thought and work of the Western or Occidental world, as distinct from Eastern or Oriental philosophies and the varieties of indigenous philosophies....
in the 20th century. Mulla Sadra bought "a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature of reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
" and created "a major transition from essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
to existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
" in Islamic philosophy, several centuries before this occurred in Western philosophy.
The idea of "essence precedes existence" is a concept which dates back to Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
and his school of Avicennism as well as Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
and his Illuminationist philosophy. The opposite idea of "Existence precedes essence
Existence precedes essence
The proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence...
" was thus developed in the works of Averroes
as a reaction to this idea and is a key foundational concept of existentialism
For Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and is thus principle since something has to exist first and then have an essence." This is primarily the argument that lies at the heart of Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Theosophy
. Sayyid Jalal Ashtiyani later summarized Mulla Sadra's concept as follows:
More careful approaches are needed in terms of thinking about philosophers (and theologians) in Islam in terms of phenomenological methods of investigation in ontology
(or onto-theology), or by way of comparisons that are made with Heidegger's thought and his critique of the history of metaphysics.
curriculum in the 11th century led to increased activity in logic, mainly focusing on Avicennian logic.
Ibn Hazm
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm ) was an Andalusian philosopher, litterateur, psychologist, historian, jurist and theologian born in Córdoba, present-day Spain...
(994-1064) wrote the Scope of Logic, in which he stressed on the importance of sense
Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception...
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
as a source of knowledge. Al-Ghazali
(Algazel) (1058–1111) had an important influence on the use of logic in theology, making use of Avicennian logic in Kalam
Fakhr al Din al Razi Amoli
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Umar ibn al-Husayn al-Taymi al-Bakri al-Tabaristani Fakhr al-Din al-Razi , most commonly known as Fakhruddin Razi was a well-known Persian Sunni Muslim theologian and philosopher....
(b. 1149) criticised Aristotle's "first figure
A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition is inferred from two or more others of a certain form...
" and developed a form of inductive logic
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
, foreshadowing the system of inductive logic developed by John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
(1806–1873). Systematic refutations of Greek logic were written by the Illuminationist school, founded by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi
(1155–1191), who developed the idea of "decisive necessity
", an important innovation in the history of logical philosophical speculation. Another systematic refutation of Greek logic was written by Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), the Ar-Radd 'ala al-Mantiqiyyin (Refutation of Greek Logicians), where he argued against the usefulness, though not the validity, of the syllogism
and in favour of inductive reasoning
Philosophy of history
The first detailed studies on the subject of historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
and the first critiques on historical method
Historical method
Historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write histories in the form of accounts of the past. The question of the nature, and even the possibility, of a sound historical method is raised in the...
s appeared in the works of the Arab
Ash'ari
The Ashʿari theology is a school of early Muslim speculative theology founded by the theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari...
polymath Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun was an Arab Tunisian historiographer and historian who is often viewed as one of the forerunners of modern historiography, sociology and economics...
(1332–1406), who is regarded as the father of historiography
, cultural history
The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...
, and the philosophy of history
The term philosophy of history refers to the theoretical aspect of history, in two senses. It is customary to distinguish critical philosophy of history from speculative philosophy of history...
, especially for his historiographical writings in the Muqaddimah
Muqaddimah
The Muqaddimah , also known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun or the Prolegomena , is a book written by the Maghrebian Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which records an early view of universal history...
(Latin
ized as Prolegomena) and Kitab al-Ibar (Book of Advice). His Muqaddimah also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...
, communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
, propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
and systematic bias in history, and he discussed the rise and fall of civilization
Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...
Franz Rosenthal
Franz Rosenthal was the Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic languages at Yale from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985....
wrote in the History of Muslim Historiography:
Social philosophy
The most famous social philosopher was the Ash'ari
(1332–1406), who was the last major Islamic philosopher from North Africa
. In his Muqaddimah
, he developed the earliest theories on social philosophy, in formulating theories of social cohesion
Structural cohesion
Structural cohesion is the sociological conception of cohesion in social groups. It is defined as the minimal number of actors in a social network that need to be removed to disconnect at least two actors in the remaining group. It is thus identical to the question of the node connectivity of a...
and social conflict
Social conflict
Social conflict is the struggle for agency or power in society.Social conflict or group conflict occurs when two or more actors oppose each other in social interaction,reciprocally exerting social power in an effort to attain scarce or incompatible goals and prevent the opponent from attaining them...
His Muqaddimah was also the introduction to a seven volume analysis of universal history
Universal history
Universal history is basic to the Western tradition of historiography, especially the Abrahamic wellspring of that tradition. Simply stated, universal history is the presentation of the history of humankind as a whole, as a coherent unit.-Ancient authors:...
. He is considered the "father of sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
", "father of historiography
", and "father of the philosophy of history
", for being the first to discuss the topics of sociology, historiography and the philosophy of history in detail.
Contemporary Islamic philosophy
The tradition of Islamic Philosophy is still very much alive today despite the belief in many Western circles that this tradition ceased after the golden ages of Suhrawardi
's Hikmat al-Ishraq (Illumination Philosophy) or, at the latest, Mulla Sadra
's Hikmat-e-Mota'aliye or Transcendent (Exalted) Philosophy. Another unavoidable name is Allama Muhammad Iqbal who reshaped and revitalized Islamic philosophy amongst the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent in the early 20th century http://www.allamaiqbal.com/. Beside his Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
and Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
poetical work, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam is a compilation of lectures delivered by Muhammad Iqbal on Islamic philosophy; it was published in 1930. These lectures were delivered by Iqbal in Madras, Hyderabad, and Aligarh...
http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/reconstruction/ is a milestone in the modern political philosophy of Islam.
In contemporary Islamic Lands, the teaching of hikmat or hikmah
Hikmah is an Arabic word meaning wisdom. Hikmah is important to Islamic philosophy.In Islam, Allah is viewed as All-Wise and messengers are given scripture and wisdom . Muslims believe that those who reject faith in God are rejecting wisdom...
has continued and flourished.
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini
Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was an Iranian religious leader and politician, and leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which saw the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran...
, founder of the Islamic Rebublic of Iran, was a famous teacher of the philosophical school of Hikmat-ul-Mutaliya. Before the victory of the Islamic Revolution, he was one of the few who formally taught philosophy at the Religious Seminary at Qum.
Abdollah Javadi-Amoli
Grand Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi-Amoli is an Iranian Twelver Shi'a Marja. He is a conservative Iranian politician and one of the prominent Islamic scholars of the Hawza in Qom.-Early life:He was born in 1933 in Amol, north of Iran...
, Grand Ayatollah is an Iranian Twelver Shi'a Marja. He is a conservative Iranian politician and one of the prominent Islamic scholars of the Hawza in Qom.Tasnim (Tafsir)
the Iranian علامه طباطبائى or Allameh Tabatabaei
Allameh Tabatabaei
Allameh Seyyed Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei was one of the most prominent thinkers of philosophy and contemporary Shia Islam...
, the author of numerous works including the twenty seven-volume Quranic commentary al-Mizan (الميزان),
Buya Hamka
Hamka
Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, known as Hamka was a prominent Indonesian author, ulema and politician. His father, syekh Abdul Karim Amrullah, known as Haji Rasul, led and inspired the reform movement in Sumatra upon his arrival from the holy land Mecca in 1906...
or Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amirullah was a prominent Indonesian author, ulema politician, philosophical thinker, and author of Tafir Al Azhar. He was head of Indonesian mufti council(MUI). He resigned when his fatwa for moslem to do not celebrate Christmas condemned by Suharto regime.Not just as a scholar and a writer in his country, but he was also highly appreciated in Malaysia and Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
Murtaza Motahhari, the best student of Allamah Tabatabai, a martyr of the Iran Islamic Revolution; and author of numerous books (an incomplete compilation of his works consists of 25 volumes). He, like his teachers Allama Tabatabai and Ayatullah Khomeini, belong to the philosophical schools of Hikmat-ul-Mutaliya
Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, who is credited with creating modern Islamist political thought in the 20th century, was the founder of "Jamaat e Islami" and spent his life in attempting to revive the Islamic Intellectual Tradition.
DR. Israr Ahmed, ( April 26, 1932 – April 14, 2010) was a Pakistani Islamic theologian[1] followed particularly in South Asia and also among the South Asian diaspora in the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America.[2] Born in Hissar, (today's Haryana) in India, the second son of a government servant, he is the founder of the Tanzeem-e-islami, an off-shoot of the Jamaat-e-Islami.A great Scholar of Islam and Quran.
Muhammad Hamidullah
Muhammad Hamidullah or Muhammad Hameedullah, D. Phil., D. Litt., HI., was a Hyderabadi from Hyderabad State , Muhaddith, Faqih, scholar of Islam and International Law, and foremost a prolific academic author Muhammad Hamidullah or Muhammad Hameedullah, D. Phil., D. Litt., HI., (Urdu: محمد...
(February 9, 1908 - December 17, 2002) belonged to a family of scholars, jurist
A jurist or jurisconsult is a professional who studies, develops, applies, or otherwise deals with the law. The term is widely used in American English, but in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries it has only historical and specialist usage...
s, writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
s and sufis. He was a world-renowned scholar of Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
and International Law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
, who was known for contributions to the research of the history of Hadith
The term Hadīth is used to denote a saying or an act or tacit approval or criticism ascribed either validly or invalidly to the Islamic prophet Muhammad....
, translations of the Koran, the advancement of Islamic learning
, and to the dissemination of Islamic teachings in the Western world
Fazlur Rahman Malik was a well-known scholar of Islam; M. Yahya Birt of the Association of Islam Researchers described him as "probably the most learned of the major Muslim thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century, in terms of both classical Islam and Western philosophical and...
was professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
Wahid Hasyim
Abdul Wahid Hasyim was the first Minister of Religious Affairs in the government of President Sukarno of Indonesia, a post he held in 1945, and from 1949 to 1952....
first Indonesian minister of religious affairs. Former head of Indonesian Nahdwatul Ulema, and founder of Islamic state universities in Indonesia. His best known idea is reformation of the Madrasah
curriculum.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and a prominent Islamic philosopher...
Imran Nazar Hosein
Imran Nazar Hosein is an International Islamic Philosopher, Scholar and author, specialising in world politics, economy, eschatology , modern socio-economic/political issues and expert on international affairs...
.- Author of Jerusalem in the Quran
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi is a well-known Pakistani Islamic scholar, exegete, and educator. A former member of the Jamaat-e-Islami
Jamaat-e-Islami
This article is about Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. For other organizations of similar name see Jamaat-e-Islami The Jamaat-e-Islami , is a Pro-Muslim political party in Pakistan...
, who extended the work of his tutor, Amin Ahsan Islahi
Amin Ahsan Islahi
Amin Ahsan Islahi was a Pakistani Muslim scholar, famous for his Urdu exegeses of Qur'an, Tadabbur-i-Qur'an—an exegesis that he based on Hamiduddin Farahi's idea of thematic and structural coherence in the Qur'an.-Early life:...
In Malaysia, Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
Syed Muhammad al Naquib bin Ali al-Attas is a prominent contemporary Muslim philosopher and thinker from Malaysia. He is one of the few contemporary scholars who is thoroughly rooted in the traditional Islamic sciences and who is equally competent in theology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, and...
is a prominent metaphysical thinker.;
In Southern/South East Europe the teachings of the skeptic Al-Ibn Theodorakis have found considerable favour.
Philosophy as such has not been without criticism amongst Muslims, both contemporary and past. The imam Hanbali
Hanbali
The Hanbali school is one the schools of Fiqh or religious law within Sunni Islam. The jurisprudence school traces back to Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal but was institutionalized by his students. Hanbali jurisprudence is considered very strict and conservative, especially regarding questions of dogma...
, for whom the Hanbali
school of thought is named, rebuked philosophical discussion, once telling proponents of it that he was secure in his religion, but that they were "in doubt, so go to a doubter and argue with him (instead)." Today, Islamic philosophical thought has also been criticized by scholars of the modern Salafi
A Salafi come from Sunni Islam is a follower of an Islamic movement, Salafiyyah, that is supposed to take the Salaf who lived during the patristic period of early Islam as model examples...
movement.
There would be many Islamic thinkers who were not as enthusiastic about its potential. But it would be incorrect to assume that they opposed philosophy simply because it was a "foreign science". Oliver Leaman
Oliver Leaman
Oliver Leaman is a Professor of Philosophy and Zantker Professor of Judaic Studies. He has been teaching at the University of Kentucky since August 2000, and is particularly interested in Islamic, Jewish and Eastern philosophy.". He has got his Ph.D...
, an expert on Islamic philosophy, points out that the objections of notable theologians are rarely directed at philosophy itself, but rather at the conclusions the philosophers arrived at. Even al-Ghazali
, who is famous for his critique of the philosophers, was himself an expert in philosophy and logic
. And his criticism was that they arrived at theologically erroneous conclusions. The three most serious of these, in his view, were believing in the co-eternity of the universe with God, denying the bodily resurrection, and asserting that God only has knowledge of abstract universals, not of particular things (but it should be noted that not all philosophers subscribed to these same views).
In recent studies by Muslim contemporary thinkers that aim at 'renewing the impetus of philosophical thinking in Islam', Nader El-Bizri
Nader El-Bizri
Nader El-Bizri is a Lebanese philosopher, historian of science, and architect living in Britain.-Intellectual Profile:...
offers a critical analysis of the conventions of methodology and historiography that dominate the mainstream academic and epistemic approaches in studying 'Islamic philosophy' from 'archival' standpoints, within Oriental and Mediaevalist Studies, which fail to recognize the fact that 'philosophy in Islam' can still be a living intellectual tradition, and that its renewal requires a radical reform in ontology
and epistemology within Islamic thought.
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH...
Islamic ethics
Islamic ethics , defined as "good character," historically took shape gradually from the 7th century and was finally established by the 11th century...
Islamic metaphysics
List of Islamic studies scholars
Science in the medieval Islamic world, also known as Islamic science or Arabic science, is the science developed and practised in the Islamic world during the Islamic Golden Age . During this time, Indian, Iranian and especially Greek knowledge was translated into Arabic...
Islam and modernity is a topic of discussion in contemporary sociology of religion. Neither Islam nor modernity are simple or unified entities. They are abstract quantities which could not be reduced into simple categories. The history of Islam, like that of other religions, is a history of...
Philosophy in Oxford Islamic Studies Online
Islamic Ethics and Philosophy Dictionary
Islamic Philosophy Online
In the Footsteps of Averroes - The Reformist Islamic Thinker Muhammad Shahrur by Loay Mudhoon
History of Philosophy in Islam by T. J. De Boer(1903)
The Study of Islamic Philosophy
Islamic Philosophy From the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Can the Islamic Intellectual Heritage Be Recovered?
History of Islamic philosophy by Henry Corbin
, part one
, part two
The Parables of Sophism - Islam Redefined Through Western Philosophy

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Alvah T. Meyer (Nova York, 18 de juliol de 1888 – Tucson, Arizona, 19 de desembre de 1939) va ser un atleta estatunidenc que va competir a començaments del .

Meyer era jueu, membre de l'Irish American Athletic Club, en què també hi havia Abel Kiviat i Myer Prinstein. No superà els Trials de classificació pels Jocs Olímpics de 1912 i sols fou inclòs en l'equip perquè es pagà el viatge fins a Estocolm. Un cop allà guanyà la medalla de plata en la cursa dels 100 metres, mentre era eliminat en semifinals dels 200.

El 1914 establí el rècord del món en les 60 iardes, i el 1915 en les 330 iardes, en ambdós casos en pista coberta.

Referències

Enllaços externs

Medallistes estatunidencs als Jocs Olímpics d'estiu de 1912
Atletes novaiorquesos
Velocistes estatunidencs
Morts a Arizona

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Griot Girls
WOMXN
Sister Ciper
Vanguard Ensemble
FRESHH Inc Theatre Company
1231 Good Hope Road #105
Phone: 253-2FRESHH
infor@freshhinc.org
Web:www.freshhinc.org
Since 2013, FRESHH Inc Theatre Company set out with a mission to celebrate and cultivate the voices of Black womxn and girls in theatre. This was in response to a growing sentiment that white theatre companies "could not find" the diversity they were being charged to implement within their companies, their crews and the work they presented. More importantly, FRESHH was created as a space to fulfill a need that Black womxn and girls in the DC metropolitan area had expressed: a place where they could be seen and could work on developing their theatre careers. Over the past seven years, we have worked to do just that.
Change is an inevitable aspect of life and evolution. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I began a reflective conversation about our work in the past and considerations for our future, and invited the directors of FRESHH's programs to do the same. I analyzed and discussed the success of our programs: The Griot Girls, The Sister Cipher playwriting group, and The Vanguard acting ensemble. I also made space to dive into our challenges and shortcomings. With this insight, and with the support of the program directors, I determined that after seven years, it was time for our change. And then the world stopped. Theatre--as an entire industry--was hit with a devastating blow and as a theatre company, we too were hit, but differently. At FRESHH Inc, we had to make the difficult decision to furlough contractors and cancel events, but there was another hit that we also had to address. The hit was answering the question: "is a recovery possible and, more importantly, necessary?"
My premise for my work with the womxn and girls we serve has always been assessing and answering the need first and then creating and producing from that call. In this time to pause and reflect, there is joy and pride in knowing that we have done what we have set out to do in so many ways. Close to all of the members of our "Tribe Called FRESHH", which is made up of playwrights from the Sister Cipher, actors in the Vanguard and teaching artists in the Griot Girls, have had their work produced (either at FRESHH or at an outside theatre company), have advanced their career in a significant way, and/or--in perhaps what is the most profound way--built a sisterhood and community of Black womxn in theatre that meets, supports, and creates with one another; and as of this May, we have seen every last Griot Girl in our program graduate from high school, and have a 94% college attendance rate. Needless to say, we are proud of the work we have done with them.
The data that crunches the numbers of how we have paid our Black womxn artists on scale or more than larger, white-run institutions is also part of the story. Or how we have intentionally hired all Black womxn technical crew members for all of our years of producing work. Or how inspiring the college retention rate of our Griot Girls was to many of our funders and supporters. And while this data helps to tell the story, it doesn't begin to compare to the stories of the bonds, partnerships, and theatre produced in our time operating. And even still, it is not enough to avoid the necessary change that must occur. It would be irresponsible for FRESHH to try to continue in the ways it has before now. The commitment I have to Black womxn and girls is one that requires integrity and sincerity and leaves little space, if none at all, for ego.
So, beginning June 1st we will be closing at FRESHH. Thank you tremendously to our program directors, Teshonne Powell (Sister Cipher), Fatima Quander (The Vanguard) and Ayana Patrick (Director of Youth Programs/The Griot Girls). These three women have been the backbone and heart of FRESHH for years, and the work we have been able to accomplish is a result of their work and leadership. Our plan of how we would close out involves partners and other factors that understandably are now up in the air. And so we wait. If we are able to, we will have a proper close out that will enable all of the folx who have helped to make FRESHH Inc Theatre Company all that it is and has been to be present and to celebrate with us, as we celebrate you all. We will do this, if possible, at our "Next to Kin One Act of Plays by Black Womxn," where we will be able to not only celebrate the journey but also produce our final production of theatre. If this isn't able to come to fruition, then we will work to determine how to close this work out at FRESHH in a way that can include all who might be interested.
We did it y'all. We had a wild imagination of what it would be like if brilliant Black womxn were given the space to create bold ideas of ourselves and our girls, on our stages, starring us in these resilient stories with mounds of us, old and young, watching, and listening, and receiving a powerful healing; and, we did just that. Until we do it again, thank you and ubuntu!!
Forever yours in service,
Goldie E. Patrick
Founder/Executive Director of FRESHH Inc Theatre Company
goldie@freshhinc.org


1FW returns to the 1FW Arena at Chip Smith's Performance Systems on Friday night April 12th!
After a huge pinfall victory by Tim Miller, the Kayote has earned himself a 1FW Heavyweight Championship opportunity against the inaugural 1FW Heavyweight Champion, Elijah Evans!
See the future stars of tomorrow, today!


text:
New Miracle of Sound Song Takes RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER To The Edge
Posted by Blair Marnell on March 6, 2016
Playstation 4 users may have to wait until the end of the year to play Rise of the Tomb Raider, but Xbox One and PC users have already had the chance to experience Square Enix's epic continuation of its Lara Croft reboot. Now, Rise of the Tomb Raider is the subject of "Edge of the World," the latest original song by Gavin Dunne a.k.a. Miracle of Sound.
Joining Dunne on "Edge of the World" is Lisa Foiles, who provides the lead vocals. You may recall that Foiles was a cast member of Nickelodeon's All That for four seasons, and she's currently the host of UFC Minute for Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Nerdist recently caught up with Dunne to talk about his collaboration with Foiles, the creation of his latest Tomb Raider song, and what he wants to see in future games in the series.
Nerdist: When playing this game, at what point did you know this was going to be your next song?
Gavin Dunne: I was 90% sure this would be a song the moment it was announced. I loved the first Tomb Raider reboot and had been looking forward to this one a lot.
N: It seems like you wrote this song from Lara's perspective. How did you put yourself in her head while creating it?
GD: Good question. I usually jot down key words while I play through games so that by the end I have a kind of rough 'cloud' full of words to trigger inspiration. For this game, Lara's determination and reckless motivation to do what she does despite the consequences was an interesting theme for me. That 'risk it all for your passion' is something I relate to on a smaller (and much less dangerous) scale as someone who dedicated their life to making music a career.
N: Tell us about your collaboration with Lisa Foiles on "Edge of the World."
GD: Lisa and I have wanted to collaborate for a long time, so she was a natural first choice for this one. Her vocal technique is great. She has a great mix of sweetness and vulnerability when needed, and raw power for the more intense parts.
I sent her the song, she learned it, sent me her vocal parts and I mixed them back in at my home studio.
N: How long have you been a fan of hers?
GD: Since we worked together at the Escapist and hung out at the Escapist expo. We clicked pretty instantly, Lisa's a really warm, kind person and I'm always drawn to people like that!
N: Will you two be collaborating on more songs in the near future?
GD: Very likely, yes.
N: What sound were going for in this song?
GD: I try not to think about genres too much as opposed to something that fits my experience of the story, but I'd be lying if I said Nightwish weren't a huge influence on this song. I love those guys. So, I guess symphonic metal/rock?
N: You almost always do musical callbacks, so how does this song reference your last Tomb Raider original?
GD: There are musical callbacks with the string patterns. In the lyrics there are 'Another savage story, another night turned blue' which reference 'The Savage Side Of Me."
N: What was your first Tomb Raider game? And which was the best?
GD: The first one was my first one. The best, I'm not sure. Of the old ones, Tomb Raider: Legend was my fave. Of the new ones I'd say the first reboot carried a little more 'wow' factor due to being the first time we meet the new Lara. But they were both awesome games.
N: Do you have a favorite moment from Rise of the Tomb Raider?
GD: Not one moment in particular, though the final level was pretty spectacular. I also really love the animations and movement in this game. It's so fluid and satisfying to play.
N: What do you want to see from future Tomb Raider games?
GD: Emotionally driven stories for Lara for me to write songs about! [laughs] I trust Rhianna Pratchett will do great again if she writes the next one too.
N: Dream casting: who would you choose to play Lara Croft in the inevitable reboot movie based on the last two games?
GD: That very much depends on what kind of Lara they're trying to depict. I would hope they would avoid the style of the Jolie movie; which was in my opinion, a giant piece of dogs**t. Maybe Emma Watson could do it? Or if Daisy Ridley can do a British accent, she might be great
N: Can you give us any hints about your next song?
GD: Let's just say I would be a naughty old dog if I gave you a hint.
N: Because we couldn't just leave you with one video, here's "The Savage Side of Me," Dunne's original song that was inspired by 2013's Tomb Raider reboot!
Dunne regularly releases new video game and movie inspired songs on his Miracle of Sound YouTube channel. You can also visit Dunne's Bandcamp page; which has six albums of his Miracle of Sound music, a Heavy Metal album, instrumental albums and other recordings. And you can find more information about Foiles and her projects at her website.
Tomb Raider fans, what did you think of "Edge of the World?" Ignite the fires, and share your thoughts in the comments below!
Image Credit: Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics
Gavin Dunne, lara croft, Lisa Foiles, Miracle of Sound, Rise of the Tomb Raider, tomb raider
New ASSASSIN'S CREED SYNDICATE Original Song by Miracle of Sound Heads Down To…
Miracle of Sound Unleashes Original Song Inspired by METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM…
Miracle of Sound Releases BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT Inspired Song