A Public Service Courtesy of the Transgressive Transcendentalists (a.k.a. God's Unruly Friends*)
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Whence Is Your Power?
From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal entry: see Richardson, The Mind On Fire, 4).
I have taken the term "God's Unruly Friends" from the title of Ahmet T. Karamustafa's eponymous book (subtitled: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200-1550), Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Professor Karamustafa, a man of formidable scholarship and consummate taste, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this blog. His book has a rather oblique and complicated relevance to my blog insofar as it has helped me to get in touch with my own inner Dervish--but that is neither the fault of the book nor its author.
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