More on Voegelinians and Islam

 

-- Eric Voegelin, photographed by his biographer, Prof. Eugene Webb

For some thoughts on one of the luminaries of the Voegelinian movement, Professor Emeritus Eugene Webb (an otherwise brilliant scholar who had been chairman of the department of comparative religions at the University of Washington for years, until his retirement not too long ago), see my essay, An intelligent professor of comparative religions (for which I wryly chose the picture of a man in a dunce cap cringing on a stool facing into a corner).

I continue to hold out hope -- based upon my own readings of Voegelin for years (e.g., I read all four volumes of his monumental study of the history of philosophy Order and History -- volume one titled Israel and Revelation, volume two The World of the Polis, volume three Plato and Aristotle, and volume four The Ecumenic Age -- three times over, the third time underlining numerous passages throughout and then painstakingly copying them by hand onto ruled paper for future reference) -- that these starry-eyed academics like Prof. Webb, or Prof. Fritz Wagner, or Prof. Barry Cooper, deformed by politically correct multi-culturalism, are grievously misunderstanding their mentor with regard only to one issue, curiously enough: the problem of Islam.