Adrian Hastings

Adrian Hastings (23 June 1929 – 30 May 2001) was an English Roman Catholic priest, historian, author, and Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Leeds. He wrote a book about the "Wiriyamu massacre" during the Mozambican War of Independence.

Quotes

• Nevertheless Kosovo is not the only indicator of a change of mood, of the sort of moral interventionist internationalism which has come to be associated particularly with Tony Blair. [...] in fact, after a quarter of a century of doing nothing, the 'international community' in precisely the same year as Kosovo did engineer the independence of East Timor.
  • Adrian Hastings (June 2001) "Chomsky and Kosova - book review" in Human Rights Review: About American benevolence

• Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective.
  • Adrian Hastings (June 2001) "Chomsky and Kosova - book review" in Human Rights Review.

The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997)

Adrian Hastings (1997). The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-62544-0. 

• For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.
  • p. 2; As cited in: nationalismproject.org by Eric G.E. Zuelow, 1999-2007.

• A nation is a far more self-conscious community than an ethnicity.
  • p. 3; cited in: Ciarán Benson (2001) The Cultural Psychology of the Self: Place, Morality, Art. p. 211.

• A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type.
  • p. 202; As cited in: Cristian Romocea (2011) Church and State: Religious Nationalism and State Identification in Post-Communist Romania . p. 90.