"'Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores'"

     "While it is not a straightforward matter whether the transatlantic slave trade was 'the gravest crime against humanity,' surely it was a crime. It was a crime and a monumental tragedy from the perspective of tens of millions of black human lives that were sacrificed on the twin altars of greed and human stupidity. That said—and this is a crucial point—there is scant historical support for the tacit assumption that it was an organized and systematic assault against hapless Africans who, but for lack of military wherewithal, would have risen up against and repelled their enslavers. The historical evidence is more sobering. As John Thornton wrote in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 ([2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, ]1998[, 125]): '[In conclusion, then, we must accept that] African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.[ . . .  Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores.]' This conclusion is not controversial among serious historians of the transatlantic slave trade. It also helps explain the historical absurdity of those newfangled European abolitionists who, as it were, had suddenly started seeing the trade through a different moral lens and began struggling to convince African traffickers, until a minute ago their trading partners, of the wrongfulness of the enterprise.
     "If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, 'The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.' In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.
     "Indeed, not only was trade in human beings par for the course, many believed that it was God’s will. After Britain declared all slave trading illegal in 1807, the King of Bonny (now part of Nigeria) doubled down in a tone not all that different from that of King Gezo: 'We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.' Nigerian historian P.A. Igbafe observed about the pre-colonial Benin Kingdom that the institution of slavery was 'one of its main props.' This could well have been said about every single pre-colonial African kingdom. The Asante Empire, with its capital in Kumasi—located in present-day Ghana—was a slave-owning one.
     "Rather than a 'definitive break in world history,' therefore, the transatlantic slave trade was coextensive with it. That it was egregious in its brutality is without question, but it was a trade involving two sides and, crucially, seems to have unfolded within a moral and social calculus in which you were either traded or trader. It is one thing to recognize its sheer ugliness and another thing entirely to misrepresent it, which the campaigners for reparatory justice flagrantly do.
     "The transatlantic slave trade, moreover, is just one of three momentous episodes of human trafficking in African history, the other two being the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Consider this: The transatlantic slave trade lasted roughly 400 years. The trans-Saharan lasted for 1,300 years, and it preceded, overlapped with, and continued long [(a century or so?)] after the transatlantic slave trade had ceased."

     Ebenezer Obadare, "A Dubious Quest for 'Reparatory Justice':  The case for compensating Africa for slavery rests on bad history, questionable morality, and false promises," Commentary, September 2026.  I have not yet verified these claims, only that Obadare holds a BA in history and an MSc in international relations from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and a Ph.D. in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  On the other hand, and am currently reading J. C. Sharman, Ties that bound:  slavery and power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2026), and there Sharman follows up his own quotation of Thornton ("Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves") with "This was the case ['for the first century and a half of [Portuguese] contact' and] during and after the era of the company states until the end of European involvement in the slave trade.  Such a perspective runs completely against popular stereotypes of European masters and African victims.  It also contradicts an earlier generation of scholarship holding that Europe dominated and exploited Africans right from the beginning of relations between them—a view epitomized in the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. . . . the Europeans were consistently in an inferior position" (65, supplemented by 59).  Though Sharman is here making, in context, a point about the (nevertheless African-dominated) ramp-up effected by European demand in the later 17th century, this one still stands:  ". . . Africans had centuries of experience with slavery and long-distance slave trades before contact with Europeans . . ." (75).
     For but one alternative perspective of which I happen to be aware, with equally recent citations, often in French, see Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, "Soul-destroyers tore me from my mother's arms : West African resistance to the slave trade," in Awakening to justice:  faithful voices from the abolitionist past, ed. Dialogue on Race and Faith Project (Seattle, Wash.) (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2024).

"the end can contain the beginning only because the beginning contained the end."

      Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

"So called 'social trinitarianism' was not an option in the early church. Nor should it be today."

     Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

"command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high" (the Supplices te rogamus)

"with the pronouncement of the words of institution, the Sacrifice of the Mass is established [(acquis)], holy, approved; but this acceptation is only manifest for us at the moment in which the offering of our oblation appears transfigured in the fires of the Holy Spirit, transferred by the ministry of the angel onto the altar in heaven, fully conformed to the vivifying Body and Blood of Christ.  It is only then that, perfectly consecrated—Saint Gelasius and Saint Gregory said even simply consecrated—it can be divided [(rompue)] among all of those invited to the royal banquet of the Lamb."

     A. Sage, "Saint Augustin et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  265 (252-265).

"command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high" (the Supplices te rogamus)

"we do not call Paul's tongue or his paper and ink the body and blood of Christ, nor the significant sounds made by his tongue, nor the meaningful signs written on the pages of his letters, but only that which is taken from the fruits of the earth, and consecrated by mystic prayers, and taken by us for our spiritual salvation in memory of what the Lord suffered for us. The hands of men give this its visible appearance, but it can only be consecrated into being such a great sacrament by the invisible working of the spirit of God. For all the physical movements involved in the whole action are worked by God acting in the first place on what is invisible in the ministers, namely on the souls of men or on the services of the occult spirits who are subject to him."

     St. Augustin, De Trinitate III.4.10, trans. Edmund Hill, WSA I/5 (1991), 132-134.  Footnote at the end here:  "This strange little excursus into eucharistic theology throws an interesting light on Augustine's ideas on the subject, and must modify to some extent the impression we get of them, say from his commentary on John 6 (Homilies on the Gospel of John 26, 13-20). Augustine is customarily thought of, largely on the strength of that passage, as holding a 'symbolist' view of the sacrament as against the 'realist' view expressed for example by Ambrose in his De Mysteriis 9. On the whole this is true, as Augustine always lays great stress on the significance of the sacraments, which he classifies as signs, sacred signs, rather than as just things. In this he is firmly taken up by Thomas Aquinas, and again by the leading spirits in theology today, who are reacting, perhaps over-reacting, against a somewhat uncritical and mechanical 'realism' that has colored Catholic sacramental thought and piety for rather a long time.
     "But this passage of ours here shows that Augustine's 'symbolism' was not unqualified. He does indeed introduce the eucharist quite unequivocally in a 'signs' context here. But then he introduces this section, which is in reality a footnote, to explain that the eucharist is a quite unique sort of sign, in that it is to be identified with the thing signified (the body and blood of Christ) in a way that no other sign can be. Furthermore a real and unique spiritual, divine, causality needs to be brought into play to effect this unique sign. It is interesting to observe that he thinks angels might well be co-ministers of the eucharist. Are they thought of perhaps as playing the same kind of role as the mysterious angel in the Supplices te rogamus prayer of Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon)?"

     I was put onto this passage (though not this translation with this footnote) by A. Sage, "Saint Augustine et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  253 (252-265).  And Sage was very clearly thinking so back then.  The Supplices te rogamus, "so disconcerting for more than one theologian or liturgist" (Sage, 252), I was glad to read:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Supplices te rogamus, omnipotens Deus: iube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinae maiestatis tuae; ut, quotquot ex hac altaris participatione sacrosanctum Filii tui Corpus et Sanguinem sumpserimus, omni benedictione caelesti et gratia repleamur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Four theses on St. Hildegard of Bingen

If I am right about the importance of reading the visions of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the light of the early Vita of Gottfried of Disibodenberg and (after his death) Theoderich of Echternach, who imply that they were bestowed in order to ensure the orthodox (if imagistically allegorical) interpretation of both [1] Scripture and [2] Tradition; [3] set down in the form of an imagistic early scholasticism or [comprehensive] systematic theology; and [4] endorsed at the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, then "The prophetessa teutonica can be shoehorned [(fugt sich . . . ein)] only with difficulty into the history of [Christian] mysticism [in general], and so-called German [Christian] mysticism [in particular].  Hildegard is not to be placed at the head of a line [of descent] that would lead from her to a [St.] Gertrude of Helfta or [a] Mechthild of Magdegburg.  She turns out to be in hindsight a theologian of high rank who develops, via the power of image and symbol independently, [a] theology saturated by [the Christian] tradition."

     Jörg Ulrich, "Vision bei Hildegard von Bingen:  Beobachtungen zur Vita Gottfrieds und Theoderichs und zu den Visionsschriften Hildegards," Kerygma und Dogma 47 (2001):  27 (14-29).  Image:  Eibingen, Klosterbibliothek Abtei St. Hildegard, Cod. 1 (Pergamentfaksimile von Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1 (now lost)), fol. 1. 

"once, maybe twice. But. . . . not forever"

     "The conclusions I’ve drawn from reflecting on the question are simple. First, we never know what the effect of telling the truth will be. It’s always worth telling it once, maybe twice. But there may come a time when you’ve done that, and there’s nothing more you can do. The penny may drop in their minds over time. It’s always worth saying what you believe to be true and maybe repeating it, but not forever.
     "A second conclusion is, however, that ideologues again are not interested in a conversation; they’re interested in either persuading you or making you submit. If someone approaches you in a provocative, insulting manner from the get-go, you know they don’t want a conversation. If you engage with them, you’re likely to be reduced to an undignified scrap in which you lose your dignity and your temper. So if someone approaches you in that fashion, refuse to engage on those terms. Some exchanges are simply not worth having. They’re dangerous, and silence is the best response. And there is good dominical precedent for Christians to use silence in response to what other people say.
     "The third thing I’d say is that even ideologues and zealots may speak the truth. And that’s why I felt I ought to respond to the ten most hostile critics to my book on colonialism. I paid them the respect of taking what they said seriously and assessing how much sense it made. I conceded three or four minor points to my most obsessive and recalcitrant critic.
     "Finally, zealots are not the only ones we are speaking to. In a conference I held in Oxford in 2019, Bret Weinstein gave us the gnomic advice, “Always remember the room is not the room,” which means, when you’re faced with an aggressive zealot, you need to think about how you behave to the people who are watching. They are the more important audience. So for their sake it may be important to speak the truth as best you can without being drawn into an undignified scrap."

     Nigel Biggar in Matthew Lee Anderson and Nigel Biggar, "Liberalism in the U.S. and the UK: A Q&A with Lord Nigel Biggar," Public Discourse:  The JKournal of the Witherspoon Institute, August 13, 2026.