F(rancis) E(dward) Peters' Personal Page

Some high school stuff, some Jesuit stuff, some Near East stuff and some academic stuff from a New York University professor.

Suprisingly, or better, rarely, I am a native of this terrible and inevitable place called New York City, though when I was spawned, it was almost unrecognizably different, from straw seats on the subways to a homicide rate of a mere 64 stiffs a year. No matter, my defining experience occurred in a more confined place than NYC: it happened at Regis, a Jesuit high school, which was, and is, located on E.84th St. in Manhattan.

That was then and this, obviously, is now. And what I do now is profess Near Eastern Studies and History and Religious Studies at New York University. I've been doing that for a long time, after I got myself straightened out from a nine-year, interesting false start during which I learned to speak Latin and reached an almost professional status in softball and celibacy. If you're interested in exploring the combination, you can find the details in my Ours. The Making and Unmaking of a Jesuit, now unhappily out of print, though a small taste is available here. There was some lively talk of making it into a movie, but when my wife suggested that Mickey Rooney would be perfect to play me, that was a deal-killer. Cruel woman, she.

But, not to complain. The current work is light, and it does get me out of the house on a fairly regular basis

The dunes near Burayda in Saudi Arabia are nice looking but fairly harmless, especially when there's a Mercedes standing just out of camera range, air-conditioning going full-blast. Somewhat more curious and interesting is the Christmas in Bethlehem and Jerusalem that I experienced a couple of years back.

There are other attractively jacketed books besides Ours, the kind that academics write for a living. These are some of them:

• Children of Abraham, Princeton University Press pb.
• Jerusalem. The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims..., Princeton University Press pb.
• Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 3 vols. Princeton University Press pb.
• Muhammad and the Origins of Islam, Albany: SUNY Press pb.
• Mecca. A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land, Princeton University Press.
• The Hajj. The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, Princeton University Press.
• A Reader on Classical Islam, Princeton University Press pb.

Life is not measured only in books. Andy Warhol once famously promised that every person on the planet would have fifteen minutes of celebrity. I recently totted up my account and could find only three. Which raises the question of where are my other twelve minutes?

Oh, yeah, and there was this other close brush with fame in Tunis in 1990.

This page, like my life, is under slow (de)construction. The Creator is not responsible for sudden changes.