Thomas McElwain

Thomas McElwain was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, but never lived there. Most of his family remains in West Virginia. He has made his home in Finland for most of his adult life. He finished high school in Puerto Rico in 1968, and received the diplome d'etudes biblique from Seminaire Adventiste in Collonges-sous-Saleve, France, in 1972. He studied general and comparative ethnography in Sweden and finally defended a doctoral dissertation in comparative religion at the university of Stockholm in 1979. In 1982 the same institution awarded him the degree of oavlönad docent or associate professor, a largely honorary position with few or no teaching duties.
McElwain has pursued an academic career as an assistant and lecturer over the period of 1979 to 2000 at the University of Turku in Finland first in the department of Comparative Religion and later in Social Polity. He has also taught English, French, Spanish, and New Testament Greek in various colleges in Finland. He served the Seventh Day Baptist Missionary Society in the Nordic area from 1986 to 1990, largely doing aid and social outreach in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He served as director of interfaith dialogue at the Islamic Centre of England in 2001-2002. He has also carried on his own translation business, translating mostly academic works between 1980 and 2000. He has also taken an interest in the preservation of an Iroquoian language he had contact with from childhood, West Virginian Mingo, which led to his activity as language consultant to the Seneca Nation Education Program in 1974 and later academic research.
He has published both academic and apologetical works, among the latter Islam in the Bible, Invitation to Islam, The Secret Treasures of Salaat, Hello, I'm God, and Makkah at Dawn, the diary of his pilgrimage to Mecca in 2005 as a guest of the Shirazi Foundation. His greatest interest is writing poetry and he has produced The Beloved and I, the New Jubilees Version of Sacred Scripture in Verse with Verse Commentary. This work is a translation of the Bible, the Qur'an and other ancient texts with commentaries in sonnet-form.
Bibliography
*Mythological Tales and the Allegany Seneca: A Study of the Socio-Religious Context of Traditional Oral Phenomena in an Iroquois Community. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 17. Stockholm: Almqvists & Wiksell International, 1978. ISBN 91-22-00181-6
*Toward an ethnography of faith: Dair Abu Maqar (1979)
*Semantic variation and change in Seneca language and religion (1979)
*Methods in Mask Morphology: Iroquois False Faces in the Ethnographical Museum of Stockholm (1980)
*Our Kind of People: Identity, Community and Religion on Chestnut Ridge. A Study of Native Americans in Appalachia. Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 20. Stockholm: Almqvists & Wiksell International, 1981. ISBN 91-20-04726-6
*The archaic roots of eastern woodland eschatology (1986)
*A comparison of some gigantic characters in Iroquois and Saami traditions (1987)
*Seneca Iroquois concepts of time (1987)
*The language of Seneca Christianity as reflected in hymns (1990)
*Asking the stars: Seneca hunting ceremonial (1992)
*Technology and the supernatural in native explanations of Seneca narrative (1992)
*Rites of sacrifice in a Turkish Alevi village (1993)
*A structural approach to the Biblical Psalms (1994)
*Hello, I'm God: A Bektashi Rosary. London: Minerva, 1998. ISBN 0754101487.
*Islam in the Bible. London: Minerva, 1998. ISBN 0-7541-0217-3. Available here from Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project (2002).
*Shi'i beliefs in the Bible (London Lectures)
*'
*"Sufism Bridging East and West: the Case of the Bektashis" in Sufism in Europe and North America ed. David Westerlund (2004)
*Makkah at Dawn: Diary of a Pilgrimage (2006)
*The Beloved and I (2006)

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