Academic Work
His work focuses on the role of religion in shaping and transforming the relationships between elites and commoners in various cultures. He has coined the expression "demotic religiosity," an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts and divinity for all believers, and 4) a prizing of moral integrity over social honor. Trained as a medievalist, his early work focused on the period around 1000 CE, a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West), and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations.
From 1995-2004, he directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University which held annual conferences and published an online journal, Journal of Millennial Studies. This involvement refocused his work on millennialism the world over and in different time periods, and has resulted in the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000); Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford U. Press, 2011), and The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011).
His work on the apocalyptic currents that built up during the approach to 2000 has led him to focus on Global Jihad as a) an apocalyptic millennial movement; and b) a new religious movement whose relationship to the internet may parallel that of Protestantism to printing. At the same time, studying the dynamics of millennialism has turned his attention to the role of communications technology in shaping a culture, and on the controversial issue of “honor-shame” cultures and their relationship to modernity.
In addition to his courses on medieval history, he offers courses on Europe and the Millennium Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace Honor-shame culture Middle Ages, Modern World Biblical origins of the Democracy
In 2011, he was a fellow at the International Consortium on Research in the Humanities at Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany. There he returned to the study with which his medieval work first began, the history of the “sabbatical millennium” with its expectation of the messianic kingdom in the year 6000 from the creation of the world. The year 6000 came twice in early medieval Europe, once in 500 CE and once in 801 CE. At the approach of each millennial date the clerical elite - to whom we owe all our documentation, dropped the increasingly "hot" chronology for a more tepid one in which the apocalyptic date was postponed by centuries: in 500 the Latin chronographers used a new system whereby it was 5700, and in 801, they had switched to AD, with an implied apocalyptic date of 1000 or 1033. When those dates arrived, there was no alternative, and they had to deal with the advent of an apocalyptic date openly. The result was a profound demotic ferment in Latin Christendom, including mass pilgrimage, heresy, peace assemblies. The book is tentatively titled: While God Tarried: Disappointed Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033.
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