Anthony Mansueto
Bio
I am social theorist, philosopher, political theologian and institutional organizer. I also write fiction which crosses the boundaries between magical realism and science fiction, mysteries and stories of espionage.
Stories (3/0)
An Alchemical Politics
An Alchemical Politics raises challenging questions, as much for the author as for the reader. This novel is a fictionalized exploration of my own heritage. My family is Sicilian on my father’s side, or at least on my father’s father’s side. My grandfather’s attitude towards religion was typical for Sicilian men of his generation: profoundly anticlerical, except for a devotion to the “friar what they are on the side of the poor,” deeply devoted to Mary, a very lightly Christianized form of the ancient Demeter, and understanding Jesus, when he came into view at all, as a socialist who was killed by the police. And as I began to explore the history of popular religion in Sicily, I discovered that this was not atypical. Peasants throughout Sicily and Italy had supported the mendicant orders generally and the Franciscan Spirituals in particular in their struggles with the papacy, not least because the mendicants often supported them in their struggles for land. And Sicily in particular was one of the the most stubborn refuges of the ancient cult of the Magna Mater. Indeed, this whole heritage formed the basis of my doctoral dissertation, Blessed are the Meek: Popular Religion and Political Consciousness in the Italian Immigrant Community (Mansueto 1985).
By Anthony Mansueto3 years ago in Humans
Convivencia
For nearly eight hundred years Jew and Christian and Muslim had lived together in Sicily in a dynamic tension that had made it one of the creative centers of Europe. Sicilian Civilization had reached its peak under the Fatimids, who joined to the universal Islamic concern for justice an openness to other wisdoms. But even after the Normans, whose kings were little more than raiders and rough warlords, had taken the island for the Bishop of Rome, they relied on Muslim and Jewish scholars to run their courts. Their Angevin and Aragonese successors had done the same.
By Anthony Mansueto3 years ago in Humans
Raza Cosmica
Eliana moved carefully through the narrow streets of San Francisco. This was the part of the city where, at the oldest layer, adobe buildings began to give way to wooden structures. Some were Japanese, others Russian, and still others fantastically carved with images that told the sacred stories of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tshimshian clans which had built them. Surprisingly many remained, but they now filled in the crevices between the grey factories and the even greyer housing projects which the state had built to house those who worked there. Even here, so far from Tenochtitlan, the hand of the tlaoni was omnipresent, working ever since the victory of Raza Cosmica fifty years ago in 1821 to match the strength of the United States and now the Confederacy.
By Anthony Mansueto3 years ago in Futurism