A good comment on fundamentalism... "a very modern thing"
From The NewYorker
by Jane Kramer
The New Yorker, April 26, 2010
found on the St Matthews Westminster site:
http://www.stmw.org/4/post/2010/04/a-canterbury-tale-the-battle-within-the-church-of-england-to-allow-women-to-be-bishops.html
[Archbishop of Canterbury] Williams admits that the lessons of fourth-century Christian conflicts are cold comfort to women fighting for equality in their church in 2010. Most of the conflicts dividing the Anglican world today have settled directly on them and, if not on them, on the openly gay priests who are waiting in line behind them - the result, in part, of an epidemic of literalism that is hardly confined to Anglicans. ‘One of the odd things about fundamentalism in its American form, but not exclusively, is that it’s paradoxically a very modern thing,’ he told me. ‘A crude nineteenth-century reaction to a crude nineteenth-century scientism - a kind of mirror image of that positivist yes-or-no knowledge that you can pin down.’ He described it, in England, as a wholesale rejection of intellectual engagement and intellectual depth in Scripture and compared it to what was happening in Islam. "I’ve sometimes argued with people on the other side of the river here, in Parliament, saying, Don’t talk about fundamentalist and modern Muslims, talk about primitivist and traditionalist Muslims - ones who only know the Koran and ones who actually know what it is like to have a thickly textured cultural and intellectual Islamic life."
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