holy terror

It's been a full couple of weeks - writing, teaching, avoiding the Commonwealth Games and visiting our families up north for a wedding. All good stuff, but not very conducive to blogging. One interesting little kerfuffle I would have liked to comment on, was the debate over the Crusades that blew up in The Australian newspaper. Particularly interesting to me at present, as I've just been discussing the Crusades in the church history tutorial I run. The newspaper reported that a history text being used in some Australian schools draws a comparison between the Islamic terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers and the twelfth century Crusaders. Now that comparison may be useful in exploring us-and-them assumptions in high schoolers, but it is entirely weak from a historical viewpoint - it ignores the development of strategies of terror as a means of waging war over the past hundred years or so. I was fascinated, however, by the response to this article, which was to debate the merits of the Crusades. A number of senior scholars came out to defend the Crusaders (see the article linked above) and The Australian also published an editorial defending them. I'm amazed at the extent to which this twelfth-century European Catholic escapade is still clearly part of 'our' conscious history, with all these emotive connotations!