The readings of JDHomrighausen, aka "the reader formerly known as lilbrattyteen," part 2.

Because the last thread was created by lilbrattyteen, not JDHomrighausen (I changed my username), I couldn't continue it.... so here I am.

I am changing my reading habits substantially. For one, I have fallen into the habit of reading light books so I can give them away. This is great for my TBR dent and my books-read quotient, but then I end up reading nothing but fluff. So I am scratching that idea.

I also have fallen into the habit of reading books and waiting a while to review them. This leads to bland reviews because the book is not fresh in my mind. Ho hum.

The list:

January 2013:
1. The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Essential Guides) by Warren Carter
2. The World is Charged: The Transcendent with Us by Francis R. Smith
3. The Critical Meaning of the Bible by Raymond E. Brown
4. The Anome by Jack Vance
5. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert Louis Wilken
6. An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective by Stephen B. Bevans
7. The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

February 2013:
8. The Giver by Lois Lowry
9. The Book of Daniel (Cambridge Bible Commentaries on the Old Testament) by Raymond Hammer
10. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
11. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
12. Megillat Esther by JT Waldman
13. Space Opera by Jack Vance

March 2013:
14. The British Discovery of Buddhism by Philip C. Almond
15. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism by Miranda Shaw
16. King David by Kyle Baker
17. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
18. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 by Donald Weinstein
19. Autobiography of Charles Darwin

April 2013
20. My Life with the Saints by James Martin, S.J.
21. On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: The Essence of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
22. The Clouds by Aristophanes
23. Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts by Reb Anderson
24. The Unconscious Christian: Images of God in Dreams (Jung and Spirituality) by James A. Hall
25. The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton
26. The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
27. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
28. The Life of Blessed Francis by Thomas of Celano
29. The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure
30. Lives of Roman Christian Women (Penguin Classics) by Carolinne White
31. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
32. Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences by Gregory R. Peterson
33. Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained? by Aku Visala
34. The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin (read parts)

May 2013:
35. How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment by Eihei Dogen
36. Lilith, A Romance by George MacDonald
37. On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century by Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka
38. Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine by Bart D. Ehrman
39. Daring to Cross the Threshold: Francis of Assisi Encounters Sultan Malek al-Kamil by Kathleen A. Warren
40. Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter by John V. Tolan (partially read)
41. Collected Public Domain Works of H. P. Lovecraft by H. P. Lovecraft
42. Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
43. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
44. The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy by Fern Elsdon-Baker (partially read)
45. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
46. Welcome to the Episcopal Church: An Introduction to Its History, Faith, and Worship by Christopher L. Webber
47. How Biblical Languages Work: A Student's Guide to Learning Hebrew and Greek by Peter James Silzer
48. Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean
49. The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alister McGrath
50. Turning Suffering Inside Out by Darlene Cohen
51. The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

June 2013
52. When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet by Hildegard Diemberger
53. The Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion by J. David Pleins
54. Charles Darwin: A Memorial Poem by George John Romanes
55. Islam & Franciscanism: A Dialogue (Spirit and Life Series Volume 9)
56. Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice by Thich Nhat Hanh
57. Introduction to Greek, 2/e by Cynthia W. Shelmerdine
58. Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek & Latin by Donald Fairbairn
59. Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island by Peter Rudiak-Gould
60. Animal Guides: In Life, Myth and Dreams by Neil Russack
61. PSYCH 107: Buddhist Psychology (iTunes U course) by Eleanor Rosch
62. The Ancient Library of Qumran by Frank Moore Cross
63. Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism by Dalai Lama

July 2013
64. Geography of World Cultures iTunes U course by Martin W. Lewis
65. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
66. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
67. Daring to Embrace the Other: Franciscans and Muslims in Dialogue, ed. Daria Mitchell O.S.F.
68. Francis and Islam by J. Hoeberichts
69. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman
70. Telling Tales by Neil Gaiman
71. The Beginner's Guide to Wicca: How to Practice Earth-Centered Spirituality by Starhawk
72. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich
73. Josephus and the New Testament by Steve Mason
74. The Planets by Dava Sobel
75. Francis & His Brothers: A Popular History of the Franciscan Friars by Dominic V. Monti OFM
76. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
77. Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz
78. Jonah: A Psycho-Religious Approach to the Prophet by Andre Lacocque

August 2013
79. Experience And Education by John Dewey
80. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
81. What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith
82. Eucharist (Catholic Spirituality for Adults) by Robert Barron
83. Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism by Rita M. Gross
84. The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Henri J. M. Nouwen
85. Arguing the Just War in Islam by John Kelsay
86. The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan
87. The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America by James M. O'Toole
88. The New Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden
89. Experiments in Ethics by Kwame Anthony Appiah
90. Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self by Todd E. Feinberg
91. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
92. Francis of Assisi (The Great Courses) by William R. Cook
93. Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India by Parimal G. Patil
94. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
95. Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road by Johan Elverskog
96. The Era of the Crusades (Great Courses lectures) by Kenneth W. Harl
97. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
98. Islam by Ismail R. Al-Faruqi
99. The Great Courses: World Philosophy by Kathleen Higgins
100. Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages, ed. by John Kaltner and Steven L McKenzie
101. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
102. Christian Hermit in an Islamic World: A Muslim's View of Charles De Foucauld by Ali Merad

September 2013
103. Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America by Gustav Niebuhr
104. The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000 (Open Yale Courses) by Paul H. Freedman
105. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
106. Dharma Punx by Noah Levine
107. Beowulf, trans. Benedict Flynn
108. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
109. All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
110. The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness by Martha Stout
111. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight
112. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
113. Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman
114. A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation by Diana L. Eck
115. Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line by Jason Rosenhouse

I'm here for the ride.

Robert

Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

Though this is probably best known as a movie, it was based on the true story of one nun's advocacy for Louisiana's death row inmates. Prejean, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, was working in urban ministry in a poor section of New Orleans when a friend suggested her as a spiritual advisor for death row inmate Patrick Sonnier. Though she was repulsed by his crime and sometimes his character, her loving listening to his pain was enough to lead her into a greater awareness of the injustices of the death penalty.

For me, the death penalty is such an obvious bad idea that it hardly merits discussion. This makes it tough for me to explain to others why I think so. (Saying "Catholic social teaching" doesn't usually cut it.) Often I ask whether or not they would be willing to have the executioner's job. That usually gets less enthusiasm. This is essentially what Prejean finds. It's easy to be pro-death penalty when it's discussed in terms of deterrence arguments and financial convenience. Much harder when you are in a room watching someone be killed, or when you are with them in their last panicked hours.

Prejean didn't just face enemies in the political realm. She faced them in her own church. The book is riddled with descriptions of hypocrites in her own cloth: a bishop who advocates for the death penalty, death row chaplains who refer to the inmates as "scum," lay Catholics who write her letters castigating her for seeing Christ in murderers and rapists. She patiently points out that the death penalty is against Church teaching and flatly contradicts the pro-life agenda. To me the most horrifying part is the sexism: people telling her that nuns should be doing menial service work for the Church, meek and mild, not pursuing their own calls from God even if it means knocking some heads and ruffling some feathers to combat injustice. I really admire her for her ability to stand up to (and in this book, name) those who do not speak the truth.

The only downside of this tightly-written book is that some of the statistics are out of date or specific to Louisiana. But I doubt the realities have changed: the death row is still given to poor male racial minorities, it costs an exorbitant amount of money, etc. And after observing victims' families, Prejean argues that it fails to bring the closure many hope it will. (Another thing that seems obvious to me: vengeance won't bring healing.)

When this book came out, Prejean was roundly criticized from every angle. One journalist even alleged she had a romantic affair with one of the men she ministered to. Others alleged she co-opted the victims' families' stories for her own political advocacy, or that she failed to care about the families altogether. Yet in the book Prejean herself admits her biggest regret was not visiting the families of the victims sooner. She became close friends with two families of victims, one against the death penalty and the other a forceful advocate. Ultimately, her work is to bring about reconciliation and healing for everyone. Whether or not others understand that is not up to her.

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

It's been too long since I read any good sci-fi. Thankfully a friend loaned me a big pile of it. I read 2001: A Space Odyssey a billion years ago (okay, 5-6) in high school. This collection of Clarke's favorite of his short stories did not disappoint.

The first thing that struck me about these is how different they were. Some were short vignettes conveying an emotion. Others were bizarre plot lines with unexpected or comedic endings. Many were set in space, but some were purely terrestrial.

Clarke conveys a sense of awe at the possible workings of the universe. The stories are plausible. One, "Encounter at Dawn," depicts a prehistorical meeting between humans and space aliens. It's certainly plausible, and that is enough to get my imagination going. The wide extremes of space and time his characters confront remind me of the little-ness of myself and my species. Clarke, like many science fiction writers, is great at showing people confronted with the utmost of their abilities and imagination.

Another thought that came up during the course of this book: not only are we limited by body and time, but excepting luminaries like Clarke, we are too culturally and species-ly narcissistic to truly accept and live in harmony with another race. If aliens truly did land on earth, we would probably never agree on how to interact with them as a species, and if we did it would probably be to kill and dissect them. Perhaps the aliens have already seen us and know we are not ready.

Anyway, enough randomness. My favorite stories in here were "Before Eden," "Encounter at Dawn," "Transience," and "The Star."

How Biblical Languages Work: A Student's Guide to Learning Hebrew and Greek by Peter James Silzer

I was hoping this book would help me tie together what I've learned in Hebrew and Greek, but it was at a much more basic level than I thought it would be. Having gone past the basic morphology and syntax of each language, this was not so helpful. But it was very readable and there were some good tidbits:

The possessive construction "the color of the car" in English actually comes from the Tyndale and KJV Bibles in the sixteenth century. Greek and especially Hebrew have possessive noun phrase construction that puts the possessor after the possessed. In English it's still more idiomatic to say "the car's color" but we have more options thanks to literal bible translations!
The authors discuss some universal principles of language that helped put things in context. For example, the universal polarity between fluid word order and rich morphology/inflections and strict word order with few inflections. Greek is very inflected, Hebrew less so, and English even less so. That's why both languages seem to have very loose and fuzzy syntax to my mind.
Some tips on how to look for Hebrew poetry. Hint: it's less about rhyme and meter (the sine qua nons of English poetry) and more about parallelism and use of figurative language.

Overall, I would give this to a friend just starting or in the first semester of Greek/Hebrew, but it lacks the depth for my level. Only one note: the transliteration of Greek and Hebrew into the English alphabet drove me nuts!

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

Since my Darwin and God class recently finished reading The God Delusion, it seemed reasonable to tackle Sam Harris' short exhortation to post-9/11 America. Since I've also ready Breaking the Spell, I can now say I've read three of the Four Horsemen!

Harris' book is thankfully not as sarcastic and mean as Dawkins'. His basic point is that fundamentalist/conservative Christians are blind to how much unjust violence their religion causes, and how selective and ridiculous it is to pretend to base our morality on an ancient text written by far more ethnocentric and tribalistic cultures. As an atheist, he is of course an advocate of secularism in the public and private sphere.

But what about those who are not his intended audience? What about liberal or progressive Christians? Harris writes that they are also guilty because they provide a cover of respectability for the crazy fundamentalists. That's frankly the worst argument I have ever heard. As a more liberal Christian, I am not responsible for what others of my creed think or believe. It's a shame Harris has this one very bad argument, because it eclipses some of the very good points Harris makes elsewhere about how Christians can be intolerant, bigoted, and bloodthirsty, despite Jesus' teaching.

As a side note, Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and I would love it if he took a different science-religion angle and participated in one of the Mind-Life dialogues with the Dalai Lama.

Glad to see your new thread with your new (real) name. By the way, for the future, you can edit the name of a continuation thread so you could have changed your name in it if you had done a continuation thread (that's how people can add Part II or whatever, but you can actually edit the title, but only when you start your new thread). However, you couldn't' start a continuation threadbecause LT doesn't give you that option until you reach 200 posts. Clear as mud?

Very interesting to read about Prejean. I have long been against the death penalty, although obviously not because of Catholic teaching! And interesting to read about the Greek and Hebrew language book: do you think it makes sense to combine them in one book? Are they sufficiently similar?

I really liked your review of Dead Man Walking. How many times have we heard about someone released from jail after x number of years, because new evidence has shown they could not have committed the crime. For me, that is a big reason to be against the death penalty.

That was all very interesting.
"species-ly narcissistic" HA!

vengeance won't bring healing
So true.

Excellent review of Dead Man Walking. The barbarity of the death penalty is something that beggars belief in the so-called civilized West and so I think I would enjoy this book. I will also get into those Arthur C Clarke short stories soon,

Funny I should read that review the same day I ran across this: Forgiving Dead Man Walking by Debbie Morris. I know nothing about it, just thought I'd toss it in here.

> 4

200 messages! Eeee gad! That's too many. I wouldn't want my page to get so muddled.

Greek and Hebrew are not much alike. They are from different language families entirely. That's a blessing and a boon: they are often studied together (seminary), and they won't be confused, but that also means one won't help you learn the other much like Greek and Latin do with each other.

> 8

I saw that book! Morris was critical of Prejean, in fact very hurt by her. Until this:

""This time though, I wasn't angry at Robert Lee Willie and Joseph Jesse Vaccaro," Morris said. "I was angry with Sister Helen Prejean. I was angry with Tim Robbins. I was angry with Susan Sarandon. I was angry with Sean Penn."

This time, the quiet victim broke her silence to confront Willie's spiritual adviser.

"When she answered the phone, I said 'Sister Helen, I don't know if you will recognize my name, but you will know me as the 16-year-old-girl from Madisonville,' and there was this silence," Morris said. "She said 'I've prayed for you so many times' and I knew then instantly, this is going to be ok.""

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=105968

Morris has become a big supporter of Prejean.

Charles Darwin: A Memorial Poem by George John Romanes
The Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion by J. David Pleins

Perhaps the most intellectually engaging class I have taken this quarter is my "Darwin and God" course. We've dived into both theology, science, the evolution of morals, Darwin's personal religious beliefs, and a myriad of other fascinating beliefs. One enduring conclusion from the class is that the Victorian conflict between science and religion was hardly as sharp as simple caricatures such as Dawkins' would have us believe now. Both of these books examine the complexities of religion in the life of Darwin and his inner circle.

Romanes was a friend of Darwin's for the last decade of the latter's life and a fellow naturalist and scientific protege of the elderly and famous man. This poem was written over the period of a year or so after Darwin's death. Romanes evokes the grief of losing a great friend, chronicling his piercing grief during Darwin's funeral at Westminster Abbey. He hopes for an afterlife, juxtaposing his scientific reason with his deeper intimations of something beyond. He cries out to God for all the evil in the world of human and animal affairs, resolving his conflict in seeing how good comes out of the world's evil. Only someone truly sensitive to poetic language and scientific rationalism could have written such a deep poem.

Romanes' public persona was that of a skeptic, so it's little surprise that this lengthy cycle of 127 poems has been left unexamined and unpublished until now. Romanes was known as a poet. Bits of this have appeared in print before. But my professor, J. David Pleins, is editing this lengthy memorial poem for publication. Romanes has been overlooked in favor of other members of Darwin's circle such as Huxley and Wallace. After 100 years, perhaps Romanes will get his moment in the sun.

Pleins continues to examine Darwin's ideas of religion in his concise and even-handed look at Darwin's religious quest. Far from being a tortured soul caught in the crossfire of the 'eternal warfare of science and religion,' Darwin seemed to be at peace with his agnosticism in religious matters. Nor were his views easily categorized. Darwin was an evolving thinker too. He lost belief in the Bible as revelation at a young age. He explicitly challenged religion in his scientific works, especially traditional Christianity's deep split between humanity and the other creatures. But he also admitted privately that he had a hard time believing that the complexity of the world came about through chance and natural selection alone. Unlike many nonbelievers today, Darwin also appreciated religion's ability to effect peoples' greatest moral goodness. Darwin even began asking some of the first questions in evolutionary psychology of religion, over 100 years before that field existed in psychology.

Romanes and Darwin were both men who kept their spiritual leanings more private. Pro-religious ideas were sometimes could make one lose credibility in skeptical scientific circles. Anti-religious ideas could ruin one's moral - and intellectual - credibility in other groups. Keeping a sharp distinction between public and private thoughts enabled them to put up one public face while admitting their inclinations, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities in another. Hence Romanes' book of skeptical philosophy, A Candid Examination of Theism, was published under the name "Physicus." But nowadays, such anonymity is not plausible. It's harder to be a work-in-progress in the public eye, especially when one's reputation is at stake. I suspect this leads to much of the posturing that goes on in the science-religion debates. Dawkins is the posturer par excellence. He will not budge, and neither will his fundamentalist debaters.

Last but not least, it's consoling to see that Darwin himself addressed questions of religion with great depth and ability to change his mind. Those claiming Darwin for the banner of militant atheism would do well to read Pleins' book - when it comes out this summer!

#9 Most threads go at least 200 posts -- that doesn't seem that long to me! Thanks for the info about Greek and Hebrew; that's what I thought, but I wasn't thinking about the benefits of learning them together, or why people might.

9 - Thanks for posting that link. So amazing.

and - another wonderful review - 10 - that made me think.

Thoughtful post on Darwin. The memorial poem by Romanes sounds fascinating -- when does it go to print?

> 13

If all goes as planned, his edition will hit the press sometime next summer. Publishing takes forever!

When A Woman Becomes A Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagma of Tibet by Hildegard Diemberger

Diemberger's dense and well-researched book explores the life of Chokyi Dronma, the first and most important lineage of female lamas in Tibet. Some background: Tibetan Buddhism is unique in that its lineages - leaders of schools of Buddhism, abbots of monasteries, etc. - are not done by choosing a successor or by passing the power onto one's child, but by finding the reincarnation of the lama who has died. This centuries-old practice is how, for example, we got the Dalai Lama. According to Tibetan belief, he is the fourteenth reincarnation of the same bodhisattva, in this case an incarnation of the celestial bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Like any other mode of passing on authority, lineage by reincarnation is subject to manipulation. Diemberger, an anthropologist at Cambridge, focuses on how these politics - especially gender politics - play out in the biography of fifteenth-century lineage founder Chokyi Dronma.

Chokyi Dronma herself was a Tibetan princess who, after the death of her only child, left behind her husband and his despised family to pursue a life devoted to the dharma. At first her husband would not let her leave, but she shaved her head - some say she scalped herself - and her possibly-insane devotion persuaded him. In time she came to be recognized as an incarnation of Dorje Pagmo (aka Vajrayogini), one of the most important female deities in Mahayana Buddhism. She studied under lama Chogye Namgyal and used her great royal wealth to act as a great patrons of the arts and sciences during the time of what Diemberger calls a "Tibetan Renaissance."

Soon after her death, her disciple Thangtong Gyalpo wrote her biography. Diemberger argues that he wrote it to legitimate the search for her successor, as the biography is full of references to how Chokyi Dronma was like Vajrayogini and how her rebirth lineage was prophecied during her life. Most tantalizingly, the end of the book is lost. Dronma was about to ascend Tsari Mountain, a holy site forbidden to women, which leads Diemberger to suggest that the end was censored because it flouted religious convention.

This is the fourth in my category of books written by or about women. Somehow this category turned into "women and religion." I'm beginning to see some commonalities in how women are depicted in the three religious traditions I am reading around. I see the most affinities here with the contents of Lives of Roman Christian Women.

First - the theme of insanity. Dronma had to feign insanity to make others take her religious devotion seriously. This seems to be something women have to do in different religious traditions, perhaps because their agency would not be taken seriously otherwise. When St. Jerome writes about his patron Paula the Elder, he cites her abandonment of her children - surely insane - as proof of her great devotion to God. In early Christianity as in Tibet, women had more obstacles to renunciation, and had to be more drastic in proving their desire.

Like Paula the Elder, Chokyi Dronma was born into the elite, and her fame as a patroness would not have been possible had she not had a lot of money to give away. Elitism rears its ugly head. One of the projects she sponsored were a series of iron suspension bridges around Tibet, build by tantric master and civil engineer Thangthong Gyalpo. Some of these still stand, supposedly made of an alloy resistant to rust:



Last but not least, the problem of finding women's' voices in history. Chokyi Dronma's biography was written one of her male disciples. Most of the texts in Lives of Roman Christian Women were written by men. Even when they are esteemed, womens' own voices are often lost to history. I am suspicious of efforts to uncover these voices, such as Miranda Shaw's, as they often seem to be inventing just as much as uncovering. The Red Tent provided a much better model, a way of imagining women's' voices and roles in history using fiction. Thankfully, Diemberger has one way of overcoming this problem: the fact that the Dorje Phagmo lineage is still alive and well in Tibet, as is her famous Samding monastery, rebuilt after its destruction in the Cultural Revolution. Diemberger does a great job of bringing the book back to the present and the continuing enigma of Dorje Phagmo.

Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh

Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, currently living in France, and perhaps one of the most well-known writers on Buddhism in English. Hanh has been transmitting the dharma to the West for some decades now, and this was one of his first books for a Western audience.

This book is a tad eclectic. The first three chapters discuss basics of Zen practice including koans. The end of the book is a lengthy collection of koans for use. But in the middle of the book there is long, confusing chapter on Buddhist philosophy that I couldn't get through. The most interesting chapter for me was "The Regeneration of Humanity," where he discusses how Buddhism will go to the West:

"The East, although poor, has not suffered from the levels of fanaticism and violence that the West has. … But the majority of Westerners do not possess this virtue of modesty in their approach to the East. They are satisfied with their methodology and their principles, and they remain attached to criteria and values of their own civilization while desiring to know the East."

I'm not sure I would describe the East as having been less fanatic. Since this came out in 1974, I also think more Westerners practicing Buddhism really diving into its Asian roots, and in a way that goes beyond merely describing everything in Asia as "the East," as if it's all the same. But since this was written in 1974, at the start of his writing career, it's not as clear or interesting as some of his later stuff that I've read. An okay book, but not Hanh's best.

>9 JDHomrighausen: The link to the Morris interview gave me goosebumps for both bad and good reasons. Thanks for that.

>15 JDHomrighausen: All of that is fascinating! Thanks for including the picture of the bridge.

There's always so much to learn on your thread!!!!

I second that too Avid- I LOVE that bridge pic!

Jonathan, very interesting stuff on Darwin, who has always appeared to me as typical of his times, with his ability almost to compartmentalise his beliefs and his scientific research. I also enjoyed your thoughts on When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty

Thanks for all your comments!

Sadly, many of the bridges are gone, washed away by floods or destroyed to make room for newer bridges. It's amazing that bridges still stand after 500+ years. Still, I'm not sure I'd want to walk on them!!

I love the bridge too, and continue to enjoy learning about diverse topics on your thread.

Thank you for your kind comments.

Things over here are winding to an end. Being a humanities major, I have final papers instead of tests, and once those are well on the way to fruition I start relaxing well before the science majors cramming for their finals.

I'm especially glad that in less than a week, I will have finished my first year of Attic Greek. I'm looking forward to feeling like I can tackle anything, opening an actual text, then realizing how little I actually know. A good slap in the face.

Also, I know this sounds nuts, but I am looking forward to fall classes. :)

What will you do over the summer, Jonathan?

Rebecca - I am reading over the summer. And that's really it. Thank goodness. I am also going to be practicing the languages I am learning - including picking up a fourth, medieval Latin, which sounds hard but once you've gone Greek, Latin is a piece of cake. (The people in my Greek class who have done Latin are all going through the class like it's easy breezy.)

Medieval Latin a piece of cake?!?!

It has a lot of the same structures as Greek, so once you have learned to think in Greek, you can think in Latin. Also Medieval Latin is (I hear) easier than Classical. But we will see, maybe it will crush me...

Catching up with the new thread. So much here in these first two dozen posts. The Dead Man Walking and Morris info was really sad and moving. The Darwin stuff absolutely fascinating. I have a reflexive thought that it's curious that religious thought still spends so much time on Darwin since he is hardly cutting edge. But he was a fascinating character. I have a two volume biography sitting on my overwhelming TBR shelves. And the Buddhist stuff is always interesting.

Enjoy your summer!

Have you looked at your Islam and Franciscanism yet? Comments?

> 27

Dan, of course every movement needs a figurehead, even if they were neither entirely original nor developed all the insights we have now. So while Darwin didn't come up with the idea of species change over time, and he didn't know a thing about genetics, he is still the poster-boy of evolution and all that it represents. One of my professor's points is that we often project current science vs. religion conflict on Darwin, just as perhaps we project an entire scientific revolution onto him. While he is unique, he's not exactly a Nietzschean Ubermensch, making an entirely field from nothing!

> 28

It actually was not as exciting as I thought it would be. A few essays were worth reading, and I will post about them within a few days. I have three final papers yet to finish so book reviews will have to wait!

But - I have been reading about Francis and Islam for a month or so now - the best books I have found are Francis and Islam by J. Hoeberichts (a former Franciscan, now married theologian, taught for many years in Pakistan) and Saint Francis and the Sultan by John Tolan for a historian's portrait of how the event has been painted in the last ~800 years. Of course, the best place to start is with the first hagiography of Francis (Thomas of Celano) and the most important (Bonaventure).

Thanks - I look forward to your reviews (as always).

Greetings librarything inhabitants,

Well, the end has come. I finished my final final ... only to be told by next year's roommate that he doesn't want to live with me. (I am still not sure what he is thinking.) So I called some apartment complexes, visited one place, found it perfect, and within 24 hours of deciding I was going to live off-campus I had secured a place and had my credit approved.

The odds are in my favor.

Also, I have ~20-25 boxes of books total.

>31 JDHomrighausen: Oh! A space of one's own. Total awesomeness.
I remember living all by myself (well, not all by myself, I had a cat) in my first (and only) studio apartment.
Hope you have friends willing to help you move - boxes and all. :-)

Good news over in my world. So summer is officially underway. I have a job at the university library, but it's a job with a lot of downtime, so I have a lot of time to read and study. I'm not doing any summer courses, so it's great to be able to do what I want to do.

I recently finished listening to Eleanor Rosch's Buddhist Psychology course on iTunes U. It's titled "Buddhist Psychology" rather than "Psychology of Buddhism" because the course spends most of its time on Buddhist meditation and views of the mind. But the few lectures on Western research were fascinating too. I am reading Buddhist philosopher David Kalupahana's book Principles of Buddhist Psychology and the Mind-Life dialogues Consciousness at the Crossroads to go along with it.

Also listening to Martin W. Lewis' iTunes U course on Geography of World Cultures. It covers the main linguistic and religious regions of the world, giving more background information on various cultures than I have ever heard before. For example, on native North American languages: California has had eighteen native American languages, most of which (like most native American languages) are either extinct or moribund. One exception to this continent-wide trend is Navajo, which enjoys some 170-180k speakers and is in no danger of dying out.

(Language extinction makes me sad. Especially Aramaic, the language of Jesus.)

P.S. I have eight bookcases up in my new apartment....!!

>34 JDHomrighausen: LOL! Eight very big bookcases I hope :)

(Language extinction makes me sad. Especially Aramaic, the language of Jesus.)

That's the one thing I liked about the movie, the PTSD inducing "The Passion of the Christ" was hearing the Aramaic (or I guess as close to it as possible).

Language extinction is a very interesting topic. I once read a good book about it called Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages that might interest you. Did you know that during, World War II, the US military used Navajo speakers as "code talkers" because nobody else could understand their language? This is the home page for the Code Talker organization and this is a Wikipedia article about code talkers in general.

> 36

I have heard of that, but didn't know they had a website! I don't know if the code-talking is related to Navajo's survival in the face of mass extinction of native American languages. I imagine it has at least given the Navajo pride in their language and more incentive to pass it down.

Rebecca and Ms. Mom -

This is the article that got me interested in Aramaic. I will be learning it at some point so this is whetting my appetite!

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/How-to-Save-a-Dying-Language-187...

Congratulations on your new digs, bookcases and job -- sounds like a promising summer!

Thanks for the link, and congratulations on your new bookcases, which I forgot to mention before!

I have only recently returned to Club Read, so I'm slowly sampling threads and just came on yours. I enjoyed your review of Dead Man Walking. I saw the movie but haven't read the book and it sounds like an interesting read. About capital punishment it seems obvious to me that if you consider murder wring, and that killing someone is not something for humans to decide, then the death penalty is out, aside from all the other issues of how unfairly it is applied.

if you consider murder wring, and that killing someone is not something for humans to decide...

There are exceptions. What if you live in a hunter-gatherer society? There aren't any jails available. But in America, I see no motivation other than unhealthy vengeance.

The Ancient Library of Qumran by Frank Moore Cross

Cross' book, first published in 1959 when the Dead Sea Scrolls were a new discovery, has been rewritten in this 1990s edition. It provides an overview of the manuscript finds and how they impact biblical studies as a whole. Though it is too scholarly for the general reader, too jam packed with footnotes, it has some high points.

A professor told me to read this book as background for the research she is doing with one of the DSS manuscripts, the minor prophets scroll. While I read the chapter on Old Testament textual criticism, the most interesting section for me was that on Essenes and primitive Christianity. Though the Essenes were not Christian, there are a lot of parallels: both are apocalyptic communities, both believe they live in the last age, both see their religious movement as the fulfillment of past prophecy. Like Paul, the Essenes eschewed marriage. (Why bother marrying when the world will end soon?) Both were tightly-knit communities with little or no sense of private property.

Most interesting to me is Cross' theory of the origins of the Essenes. He argues that a dispute between priestly factions led to the losing side leaving society and founding the true priesthood in the wilderness. The "righteous teacher" spoken of frequently in Essene literature is that priest. Another frequently-mentioned but never-identified figure, the "Wicked One," is the head priest of the winning faction. A fascinating theory, though one with little support.

Cross' book was a good quick read, but far too bogged down in technical details to make a good introduction. It seems to have been written more for scholars than for the public.

Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island by Peter Rudiak-Gould

My girlfriend is Marshallese. Most people, upon hearing that, say "Huh?" The capitol of the Marshall Islands, Majuro, has only about 20k people. Yet these small Pacific islands played a key role for the Allies in WWII, most famously at bikini island, site of atom bomb testing. But there are very few books written about this collection of atolls. Rudiak-Gould's book chronicles his year teaching at a rural school in Ujae, one of the poorest, most remote atolls in the Marshall Islands.

Rudiak-Gould is an adept writer. One thing I love about this book is his honesty. He does not paint his time as a simple and gloved return to a simple or pure culture. It is tough. The cultural shock is tough, the language barrier is tough, trying to figure out the local etiquette is tough. He recounts some pretty nasty thoughts he had about the people of Ujae.

Yet this nastiness and difficulty was ultimately what transformed Rudiak-Gould. By the end of his time there he felt he had begun to understand a culture where nobody shows emotion and where deadlines and meetings are flexible at best. He peppers his book with fascinating stories about the language, the culture, and the history of the Marshallese that demonstrate that knowledge.

Since writing this book, Rudiak-Gould has gone on to earn a PhD at Oxford, using anthropological methods to study how the Marshallese conceptualize and act on the looming threat of climate change that could sink much of their nation. He has even written a textbook of the Marshallese language, one of two extant in English. As he writes:

"My mission here was self-contradictory. My duty was to help the community, but also to accept it as it is. As an international volunteer, I had been given these two incompatible goals and had never noticed that quandary until now. If I adopted my host community's apathy toward education, I would achieve greater cultural integration but fail at making a positive contribution. If I crusaded for education, I could make a positive contribution but fail at integrating into the culture. There was no way around the dilemma…"

It is these dilemmas and contradictions that he works through during his time at Ujae, never resolving them but finding ways to live in their tensions. As a reader, I enjoyed being along for the ride.

Very interesting comments that could be true for many visitors to foreign cultures. Of course, it is not necessarily irrational to be apathetic towards western education, if there is no evidence that western education provides any real benefits to them, or if it means that people with that education will leave the islands and their families and cultures behind. And then there is the colonial angle too. However, climate change provides a real existential threat to the low-lying islands of the Pacific and I'm sure it would be fascinating to investigate the different ways in which different nations are dealing with it!

" I'm sure it would be fascinating to investigate the different ways in which different nations are dealing with it!"

His book describes his time there with WorldTeach in 2003-2004, but he has a postscript about going back in 2007 as a master's student to do his fieldwork. Some islanders ignored the problem completely, others interpreted it apocalyptically, but all of them didn't seem to be doing anything about it. But then again, what can one do if one's country is sinking underwater?

The only solution seems to be to leave -- and it's one that many people around the world may be facing in this century, including those of us here in Florida.

PSYCH 107: Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch
Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism by Dalai Lama

I have been meaning to listen to Rosch's poetic and insightful lectures for about two years now. After hearing them once through, I want to listen to them again! Rosch unfolds the dharma as it progresses experientially and historically, from the Theravadins to the early Mahayana to Tibetan Vajrayana and into Western forms of Buddhism such as Shambhala. I really like how she connected philosophy and experience, theory and practice.

The book I read to go along with the course is the transcript of a series of discussions held in 1989 between the Dalai Lama and a group of neuroscientists and Buddhist scholars, including Patricia Churchland, B. Alan Wallace, and Antonio Damasio. These dialogues were among the first hosted by the then-new Mind-Life Foundation, devoted to exploring the intersection of science and meditative traditions.

The "Darwin and God" course I took this last quarter made me question the way in which we do science and religion dialogues. It seems there is always a debate, always a sectarian position, always a pre-established doctrine to stick to. Not so in these discussions. We find the Dalai Lama stumping and stymying the scientists, as when he explains traditional Tibetan views on reincarnation. But the scientists also stump the Dalai Lama, and he is always eager to engage with them. They differ - the neuroscientists subscribe to materialism - but they can discuss issues across the divide. I found it refreshing that these kind of discussions can even take place, though they get less airtime than the Dawkinses and the Henry Morrises of the world.

"Which people are deemed to be authorities on consciousness due to their privileged, direct knowledge? Modern Westerners may look with deep skepticism upon anyone claiming to be an authority who is not a distinguished neuroscientist. Traditional Tibetan Buddhists, on the other hand, may look with equal skepticism upon anyone claiming to be an authority on consciousness who has not accomplished advanced degrees of meditative concentration by which to explore the nature of the mind introspectively. By what criteria does one judge who is and who is not an authority who can provide reliable testimony?" (172)

Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis

Lewis, a geographer at Stanford, graciously allowed lectures for his course on the linguistic and religious geography of the world to be put on iTunes for said world. Listening to these lectures was a great way to begin to understand some of the cultural divides and commonalities of the world.

The downsides: as the course progressed, he got behind schedule and cut stuff out. But the labels stayed the same as if they were pre-written at the start. So lectures would not match their titles. Also, this was originally podcaster with the map slides he discusses as album art for the podcast, but when academic podcasts moved over to iTunes U these maps were lost. So I cannot see the maps he is discussing! Overall, I really liked the linguistic geography section, but the religious geography section felt rather rushed. (He did the geography and brief histories of Christianity and Judaism in two hours!) Still, worth listening to.

The discussions between the Dalai Lama and the scientist sound fascinating; I will have to look for them!

I love Dalai Lama's appreciation for science. Thanks for the usual great reviews!

Just passing by to wave hello. Great reviews, as usual, and unusual reviews, as usual.

How are the new digs?

The new digs are great. Eight bookcases. (No longer in a dorm room so no more piles on the floor.)

MK, I am about ten pages from finishing Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Look for a joint review of that and A Brief History of Time coming up! Then I am going back to a bunch of St. Francis-related books for this article I'm working on.

Book reviews

Cosmos by Carl Sagan
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Both Sagan and Hawking made a reputation as ambassadors of the wonder and beauty of astronomy, physics, and cosmology to a public unable to understand technical scientific literature. In Sagan's case, the book did that for me. I could not stop reading it. By contrast, Hawking's book was dense, loosely connected, hard to understand.

First, Sagan's book. Cosmos was published in the late 70s as a companion to the famous TV show Sagan hosted. Sagan felt the public would be impressed by what scientists were doing - at that time the first American land rover on Mars, laughably primitive by our standards. This book is a blend of three things: the hard science, stories of the scientists who made the discoveries and the historical contexts they wrote in, and Sagan's thoughts on how science fits into human life.

The hard science Sagan covers is nothing surprising. In fact, it's embarrassingly out of date in places. But he invites the reader to ask fun questions. What would an intelligent being from another planet look like? How would its biology function?(Hint: we don't know.) How do we date the universe? I especially liked his description of primordial soup in the second chapter.

Many scientists write popular books. Sagan goes beyond merely describing science. From tantalizing hints of what we lost at the library of Alexandria, to explaining how Kepler changed his mind about the perfect Pythagorean paths of the planets, to pining over the plight of whales unable to hear each other over our submarines and ships, Sagan situates science in the context of all humanistic inquiry. One page he will be talking about hard science, the next creation myths about the start of the world. I especially like how he discussed non-Western scientific achievement, such as the Chinese printing press (far before Europe's) and the Mayan system of astronomy.

"The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. it fecundated the Earth. it is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy… Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to worship the sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the research himself is unaware of its presence, is a kernel of awe.

Mostly, Sagan wants to expand peoples' minds away from the parochial and petty human conflicts of the Cold War and into the thrill of contacting life on other planets. For him, the possibility of life on other planets takes on a salvific tone. If we could find - join, even - a network of extraterrestrial life lightyears away, we would be ultimately validated as a species. We would shed our arrogance, our belief that we are unique. As he writes: "we must be the most backward technical society in the Galaxy."

By contrast, Hawking's book just didn't grab me the same way. Yes, he had some very interesting explanations of how black holes work, and I really liked his summation of Einstein's theory of general relativity, but I was hoping for a thread to tie the book together. But Sagan is sadly passed, his book remaining un-updated. I would read Sagan for the wonder but read an astronomy textbook alongside it for the facts.

"I think that the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries." (233)

I remember watching "Cosmos" as a kid - not that I remember anything about it now, except what Carl Sagan sounded like!

Love that last quote!!!!

I thought that quote would be a big hit on LT. :)

As my culminating paper for the directed reading course I did last term on St. Francis and his hagiographic tradition, I looked at how the story of Francis of Assisi and the sultan is being employed as a model for contemporary interreligious dialogue. But Francis' supposedly peaceful and respectful - even loving - encounter with a man his society dubbed as an enemy may not be as one-sided or historically credible as some Franciscan authors like to think. How do we find models in the past when the past is unclear or even dangerous to emulate?

I am currently working to expand and revise this paper, hopefully for publication. These three books are for that end. The first is a book-length study by a Dutch theologian. The latter two, both volumes in the "Spirit and Life: A Journal of Contemporary Franciscanism" series, collect talks given at interfaith encounters in 2000 and 2007.

For background, look at my review of Kathleen Warren's book on Francis and the sultan above.

Francis and Islam by Jan Hoeberichts

Hoeberichts, a missionary to Pakistan, seminary professor, and former Franciscan, examines chapter 16 of the "Regula non Bullata" (the "Earlier Rule"), the first text from the Francis corpus dealing with Muslims. The Earlier Rule was written by Francis as a guide to the spirituality of his rapidly-growing and poorly-organized order. It was later replaced by the Later Rule, the official governing document of the order, which was far more legalistic and precise but reduced chapter 16 to almost nothing. Hoeberichts argues that in the midst of the Crusades, Francis shifted from a violent, crusader mentality in regard to the Franciscans to an ethos of being subject to them and ministering to them not as demons to be slaughtered, but as humans worthy of Christ's love and baptism. He contextualizes this in Innocent III's Fifth Crusade and the crusade preaching of James of Vitry.

Chapter 16 reads:

"CHAPTER XVI

Those who are going among Saracens and other non-believers

1. The Lord says: Behold, I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves. 2. Therefore, be prudent as serpents and simple as doves (Mt 10:16). 3. Therefore, any brother who, by divine inspiration, desires to go among the Saracens and other nonbelievers should go with the per¬mission of his minister and servant. 4. And the minister should give these brothers permission and not oppose them, if he shall see that they are fit to be sent; for he shall be bound to give an account to the Lord (cf. Lk 16:2) if he has proceeded without discretion in this or in other matters. 5. As for the brothers who go, they can live spiritually among the Saracens and nonbelievers in two ways. 6. One way is not to engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every hu¬man creature for God's sake (1 Pet 2:13) and to acknowledge that they are Christians. 7. Another way is to proclaim the word of God when they see that it pleases the Lord, so that they believe in the all-powerful God—Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit—the Creator of all, in the Son Who is the Redeemer and Savior, and that they be baptized and become Christians; because whoever has not been born again of water and the Holy Spirit cannot enter into the kingdom of God (cf. Jn 3:5).

8. They can say to the Saracens and to others these and other things which will have pleased the Lord, for the Lord says in the Gos¬pel: Everyone who acknowledges me before men I will also acknowledge be¬fore my Father Who is in heaven (Mt 10:32). 9. And: Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in His majesty and that of the Father and the angels (Lk 9:26).

10. And all the brothers, wherever they may be, should remem¬ber that they gave themselves and abandoned their bodies to the Lord Jesus Christ. 11. And for love of Him, they must make themselves vulnerable to their enemies, both visible and invisible, because the Lord says: Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it (cf. Lk 9:24) in eternal life (Mt 25:46). 12. Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs (Mt 5:10). 13. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (Jn 15:20). 14. And: If they perse¬cute you in one city, flee to another (cf. Mt 10:23). 15. Blessed are you (Mt 5:11) when people shall hate you (Lk 6:22) and malign (Mt 5:11) and perse¬cute you and drive you out, abuse you, denounce your name as evil (Lk 6:22) and utter every kind of slander against you because of me (Mt 5:11). 16. Rejoice on that day and be glad (Lk 6:23) because your reward is very great in heaven (cf. Mt 5:12). 17. And I say to you, my friends, do not be frightened by these things (Lk 12:4) 18. and do not fear those who kill the body (Mt 10:28) and after that can do no more (Lk 12:4). 19. Take care not to be disturbed (Mt 24:6). 20. For through your patience, you will possess your souls (Lk 21:19); 21. and whoever perseveres to the end will be saved (Mt 10:22; 24:13)."

The key part here is bolded. Though it is unclear how these two ways Francis articulates are related, it is clear that the practice of being "subject to" the "Saracens" was unusual for its time. Hoeberichts relates this phrase to the broader framework of Francis' spirituality: absolute humility, universal fraternity, and a desire to live as maiores. These fratres maiores, clumsily translated into English as "Friars Minor" or "Lesser Brothers," did not seek to dominate others, but to live in relationship and submission to them. In Italy they worked to create an alternative economy, one based not on Assisi's growing wealth and status concerns but on living and working together in harmony and equality. In Damietta Francis extended this practice, intentionally getting himself captured by the enemy camp so he could meet sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. Francis, whose spirituality came from experience, wrote this chapter after his brush with the Fifth Crusade.

On this last point I think Hoeberichts is correct. I also agree with his contention that being subject to the Muslims was a radical idea for the time. But this pacifism may not be bourne out of respect for Muslims, but out of a desire to be martyred. This is the interpretation that even the earliest hagiography puts on Francis' encounter with the sultan, an interpretation Hoeberichts dismisses as a later clerical imposition. But given the slew of scripture citations here warning the brothers that they will be hated by the Muslims, the glory of martyrdom does not seem like an unrealistic option. Same with Francis' respect for the sultan. Yes, he came to the sultan with words and prayer rather than blades, but there is no indication he had the kind of respect for Islam and urge to dialogue that we have in the twenty-first century Church. He may have hated Islam, even if he liked the Sultan. As Hoeberichts notes, this was not an uncommon position for medieval authors to take.

Hoeberichts is perhaps the best-informed of the "Francis as ecumenist" school of interpretation of the Francis-Sultan encounter. He is convincing that Francis was original in some ways. But he still glosses over some tough facts. As I noted with Kathleen Warren's book, he has a motive to make Francis fit modern standards. He is a Franciscan using 13th-century Francis as a model for 21st-century action. In his case, that action is the work of the Asian bishops, who are also obstructed by a traditionalist hierarchy unwelcome to change. But history cannot tell us everything we need to learn for today. At some point, living the spirituality is the best example, even if that spirituality's founder suffered from Islamophobia.

Islam & Franciscanism: A Dialogue (Spirit and Life Series Volume 9)

Based on a series of a talks given at a dialogue conference in 2000, this book has too much fizzle. Of the five chapters - three by Franciscans, two by Muslims - two were very basic, even rote explorations of broad and bland subjects. Two more were interesting, if written in a scattered fashion: "The Exodus Motif in Christianity and Islam" and "The Arrogance of Ownership." Fareed Munir, a Muslim who teaches at Siena College (a Franciscan school), wrote "Prophet Mohammad of Arabia and St. Francis of Assisi in the Spirituality of Mission." Munir argues that Francis and Mohammad both favored conversion by choice rather than force. They both favored mission over slaughter. Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil was a tolerant, peaceful man who brokered peace treaties with the Christians - peace treaties the Christians ignored because of their moronic absolutism and need to kill the infidels. Francis was a pacifist who did not fight Islam with weapons but with preaching. Interesting highlights.

Daring to Embrace the Other: Franciscans and Muslims in Dialogue

Fast forward to 2007. This is a totally different time for Muslim-Christian dialogue. 9/11 changed everything. The dialogue is deeper, as the essays seem to be more thought-out. The two essays by Michael F. Cusato OFM and the one by Robert Lentz OFM were best. Only one Muslim essay this time, but it's a good one by Irfan Omar.

Cusato, a Franciscan and historian of the medieval period of his own order, sets out the praxis Francis represented and how it can heal our broken world. Like Hoeberichts, he believes Francis was not seeking martyrdom but a universal fraternity. This was later hidden by the clerics who wrote the hagiographies. I wish he had gotten a little more complexity out of this. These authors tend to repeat themselves.

Robert Lentz's essay was by far my favorite. Lentz is not a scholar, but a modern iconographer. He created the above triptych of Francis embracing the sultan. His essay describes the loving communion he has had with Muslims over the years, at first a deep curiosity and wide reading about their religion and later with a mosque in Texas. He describes the symbolism of his icon: the flame representing passion for God, the hawk representing restrained violence. For me, this icon represents a great effort to bring a somewhat mythologized version of Francis and the sultan out of the historians' jargon and into artistic expression. Somehow the latter is more able to connect with the public.

I enjoyed these essays, although admittedly a niche topic.

Robert Lentz's icon

Fascinating!

There's a large and long place-time of Franciscan-Muslim encounter between St. Francis and 2007--Bosnia. I wonder how much is known in the English-speaking West about this 400+ year history?

The first Franciscans were sent to Bosnia in the 13th century to help combat the surge of Christian heresy (native Bosnian church, more or less erroneously identified with the bogumils) and Orthodoxy pushing from the east. The vanguard must have been extraordinarily competent--by the time the Ottomans invaded, the Franciscans had built a network of more than sixty monasteries (about half survived the Ottoman rule), on the territory known as the province "Silver Bosnia" (Bosna Argentina).

What strikes me is the parallelism between the meeting of St. Francis and the sultan and that between Fra Angjel Zvizdovic and Mehmet II "the Conqueror", as the latter had just executed the last Bosnian king (in 1463). The Franciscan rushed to the victor's side to beg for free expression of faith of the Franciscans. Mehmet graciously agreed and the document issued to the Franciscans became the foundation of every subsequent plea for Catholic "human rights" addressed to the Turks.

A special sort of relationship seems to had been established, with Bosnian Franciscans commanding unique liberty of movement and property rights (which would contribute to Orthodox animosity, reaching to this day).

(I chanced on this story as I came across the tidbit that the Franciscan monastery in Fojnica has a collection of 10000 books, beginning with incunabula... still looking for a possible catalogue or inventory online.)

P.S.

The monastery's in the upper right, above the town... what a view.

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on St Francis and Islam.

The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman

In 2004, less than a decade into the new century, Friedman had the gall to write its history. And not just idle speculation: 571 pages of data, interviews, and anecdotes. Friedman has identified what is one of the dominant trends of global history, a trend rapidly accelerating: the forces globalizing the world, converging its societies' economic, political, and cultural differences into global collaboration and cooperation. Friedman is an unapologetic advocate of globalization, and sees in it much hope for the future of humankind.

Friedman is a fan of lists. He has lists of global flatteners, lists of ways business should cope, lists of ways governments can ride the wave of global wealth, etc. I really like that about his book. He took a global phenomenon that I was frustrated at not understanding and wrote a monster size book to integrate all those ideas. Now I have a framework to look at outsourcing, the war in Iraq, energy resource wars, and other big-issue topics in the news.

Another thing I like about this book is Friedman's balanced approach. He is honest about the limits of globalization. It will be scary for many people - people in developed nations whose factory jobs go to China, people in developing nations who lack the infrastructure to open a business and grow their wealth, people who find traditional cultural patterns disrupted by capitalism. American workers who find that their services are being outsourced (e.g. tax returns) will have to creatively find ways to rethink their skill set and market themselves differently.
Friedman argues that out multiple identities and motives will come into sharper conflict in a flat world. So the consumer in us likes cheap electronics, but the laborer in us doesn't want American jobs going overseas, doesn't want the subpar working standards that often produce our iDevices. (My grandpa lived in Oakdale, California, where Hershey's used to have a chocolate factory. After they moved the factory to Modesto, he would check the labels of every Hershey's he ever bought to make it sure it came from their remaining American plant in Pennsylvania.)

Friedman is an advocate of "compassionate flatism." He sees globalization as a way to bring out every nation's potential, citing the fact that even untouchables in India can be brought out of their shameful discrimination. Also, he invents the "Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention," the idea that complex supply chains coordinated across many countries will prevent peace better than any treaties and protests. So China may want to invade Taiwan, but if they do so their trade will be cut off and China's factories and firms will suffer greatly. But because of the speed of globalization, Friedman also wants governments to ensure people are trained with the skills to be competitive in this new world. He slams Americans for being complacent, assuming they will always be successful, being lazy in school: "In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. That's the problem." There is a wake up call here, but it can be made more compassionate if we train people and we ensure that no matter where factories are, working standards will be safe and adequate.

There's a lot of hope in this book. I enjoyed that. But at 571 pages, it's a bit long winded. (I listened to it on audiobook - it was 19.5 hours.) Friedman revised and expanded the book twice. After winning two Pulitzer Prizes, he may feel less need to work to get an audience, so he can distress, include more quotes, more vignettes. So while I loved this book, it felt repetitive in places, and Friedman eels to attribute everything under the sun to his theory of the flat world. Still, I wish someone had laid this on me when I started college at 18, and if I were a college president now I would make this required reading for all freshmen.

Skills drawing from:
http://www.loosetooth.com/Viscom/gf/worldisflat.htm

>60 JDHomrighausen: In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. That's the problem."
Ain't it the truth!

That was quite fascinating stuff. Love the graphic, even if it did make me see funny for a while. ;)

LOL I love your grandfather! I do the same thing! No Chinese Hershey's for me. Last time I got some Hershey's at a candy counter it lead to a big discussion with the clerk. Of course she was unaware of the issue. Most people in this country work too hard to have time to realize what is happening. Keep em busy working two minimum wage jobs and they'll not notice their CEO is paid 400 times their pay and has 6 homes.

By the way, I initially read your nickname as libraryteen, just realized it says you are a brat. Is that true?

Well, I'll start checking my Hershey bars from now on too!

You have been doing some very thought provoking reading. St. Francis and Islam - to quote a song "what a wonderful world it would be" if everyone could embrace differences. I also like the graphic of the flat world.

> 63, 64

I agree with the issue of CEO wage discrepancies, but I really thought it was archaic the way my grandpa refused to see the Hershey's plant any other way. Are people in Mexico somehow less worthy of a job? He wanted to blame Hershey's for outsourcing, but often it's not the company's choice, it's the only way they can keep prices competitive.

That said, a couple hundred people in Oakdale worked in the Hershey's plant, and I am very proud to say I went on a field trip there when I was a kid. The plant has been taken over by another candy company, but a much smaller one that employs fewer people. I think this is where Friedman's point about government providing training for people in a changing economy comes in. Oakdale is not a highly educated place.

Great review of The World is Flat

Thanks!

Telling Tales by Neil Gaiman

I stumbled upon this CD of Gaiman reading his own work at a music store in the Haight. What a find! Gaiman's delightful British accent intones two stories about love. These stories resemble short myths, pithy stories that get to a deep element of human experience, in this case through the genre of urban fantasy. These are older stories from the 90s, not Gaiman's best works, but hearing them read in his own voice more than makes up for it.

However, in the past few months I have seen Gaiman from a new angle. Although I loved Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, and the entire Sandman series, a friend of mine who read American Gods said she saw no good female characters. I was aghast. Gaiman fails the Bechdel Test, the criterion for gender bias in fiction decreeing that a work of art must have two women in it who have a conversation with each other about something other than men. Coraline with its female protagonist aside, Gaiman is not very good at this.

But hey, even the idols have blind spots. Gaiman is always worth reading in my book.

Have you read Neverwhere? The character Door might change your thoughts about his female characters. I listened to that one and thought it was very well done. Gaiman reads it. I haven't read American Gods or Anansi Boys but have them on my Kindle and audio. Not sure whether I will listen or read them.

And all the most powerful characters in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I just finished reading and loved, are female. Not necessarily human, mind you. But female. So if he hasn't been very good at that in the past, I'd say he's getting better. (Also, the young boy protagonist of that one reads a lot of girls' adventure stories and unselfconsciously takes their female heroes as role models, which pleased me a lot in light of the widespread perception that boys just don't read stories about girls.)

> 69, 70

I'm so glad to hear he has gotten better. The book that occasioned my friend's complaint was American Gods. I can still remember her saying: "every woman in this story is a mostly sexual being!" That said - still worth reading.

Are you aware of Feminism in the worlds of Neil Gaiman? I'm wanting to read that even thought I have read nothing of Gaiman. I checked out Sandman but couldn't get into it.

Merrikay, that book looks very interesting! Thank you! I hadn't heard of it because it came out fairly recently. What didn't you like about Sandman?

The inventory is in. I officially have 1,404 books. My goal is to eventually cut it down to 1,000. Starting today I will impose a rule on myself that I will buy one book for every two I discard. We'll see how that lasts...

Recently got an account at Audible. First listen: The Beginner's Guide to Wicca by famed Wicca practitioner Starhawk. I know next to nothing about Wicca I entered into this as a blank slate. I learned that Wiccan practices of "magic" are deeply symbolic, connected to the earth. Starhawk grew up Jewish and found herself wishing for a divine feminine and a path that was connected to the earth. I wish I had read one of her bigger, more famous works, because this one left me unsatisfied. It was only an hour long.

Then went onto The Planets by Dava Sobel. Years ago I read Sobel's fabulous story of the relationship between Galileo and his two daughters, both nuns. (Ironic, I know.) Sobel's book, like Carl Sagan's, combines mythology, astrology, poetry, and science to tell fascinating stories of each planet. We learn of their personalities, and of how poetry and science can conflict. For example, Mars, the "red planet," Holst's "bringer of war," is in fact more of an icicle than a fireball. I enjoyed hearing her dancing prose and her love for the planets, but unlike Cosmos there was no overarching point or theme other than wonder. But maybe that misses the point.

Look for an upcoming positive review of Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

Oh, I'll be interested in your review of Bright-Sided as I'm a big Ehrenreich fan and I'm really negative about positive thinking!

A counterpoint in album covers for Holst's "The Planets":



Ummm.... I really hope for that girl's sake that those are skorts.



I think I know which is my favorite.

Jonathan, I've been using Audible for several years now. I am very stingy with my credits though, and might not buy a one hour book. I do take long car trips, and love being able to listen to some really great books. Have you previously listened to audio books?

73 - The pictures! :)

This has been a good few weeks for reading - just not reading that goes fast and goes into my "finished" tag. So the good news: progress on my languages is up. By "languages" I don't mean "I'm going to France someday to speak on the street." I mean "I am learning reading languages for classical texts and graduate school preparation." Ah, the life of a classics major… (Zoe, you know what I am talking about.)

I finished my first entire book in Hebrew. I have read excerpts from 2 Kings, Exodus, Genesis, Ezekiel, , etc., but now I have read the entire book of Jonah, also the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible. Watch for a review.

Francis & His Brothers: A Popular History of the Franciscan Friars by Dominic Monti, O.F.M.

Franciscan literature is hard to come by. It's not that the Franciscans lack intellectuals: Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, contemporaries like Ilia Delio, Michael Cusato, and my mentor Keith Douglass Warner. But they lack the Jesuits' history of university-founding and rubbing elbows with the elite. In China, they evangelized the poor while Jesuit Matteo Ricci was rubbing elbows with nobles in Beijing. Francis, hardly an educated cleric, referred to himself as "simplex et idiota" and disdained higher studies for his clerics. So while the Jesuits have dozens of histories written, the Franciscans remain more obscure. Thankfully Monti has written a book filling the gap of a solid history written for someone unlettered in medieval history.

It's impossible to impose one theme on the 800-year history of the friars, but one obvious trend stands out. How did this movement go from being Francis' populist movement vowed to absolute poverty to an order with power, property, and Ph.D.s? Francis, who lost control - even moral authority - over his order even before his death, might roll in his grave to hear that his men had become inquisitors and popes. But the ecclesiastical authorities of Francis' day saw in this explosive new order a means of reforming the church. Francis was not the only one with a stake in the friars.

Still, the friars have done much to be celebrated. Monti describes their opposition to the slave trade in the seventeenth century, their missions to China, Japan, and Sri Lanka, and the many reform movements and reforms of reform movements in Franciscan history. He also describes the circumstances behind the many different hagiographies we get of Francis, from Thomas of Celano to Bonaventure to Perugia to the now-famous and (to me) dull "Little Flowers." This book doesn't present strong conclusions, but it is a guide to further exploration that everyone interested in the Franciscan charism can benefit from.

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Positive thinking, far from being a support for happy and healthy life, is a delusional way of thinking. Journalist and biology Ph.D. Barbara Ehrenreich first came to this conclusion while fighting the deluge of joy and positivity among her fellow breast cancer patients. Her book examines the history of positive thinking as a doctrine of ever-similing America and its current manifestations in the corporate world, megachurches, positive psychology, and the 2008 financial meltdown.

The good parts of her book: Ehrenreich's long career as a journalist and past career as a scientist came together in this book. She is best known for her experience living poverty in Nickled and Dimed, and she resurrects that when writing about how the motivational speaker market indirectly shames the poor and unemployed for simply not trying hard enough. Her background as a scientist strengthens her critique of positive psychology as a science and a pseudoscience.

I too feel some of her pain. I disdain self-help books and self-proclaimed gurus . So much of it seems like narcissism and magical thinking. Take The Secret, which flew off the shelves yet was not worth the paper it was printed on. It seems like an easy target for ridicule, but if so, why did millions of Americans buy this book? Same goes for the bestsellers of plastic-smiled Joel Osteen. Ehrenreich does not mention this, but I suspect much of the mantra of positive thinking comes from a desire to avoid confronting the suffering of oneself or others. If a friend is feeling down, don't listen to their problems: just tell them to cheer up! Positive thinking can be quite hardass.

Despite this points, Ehrenreich's book fails to deliver. It was hard to draw the line between her anger and lucid logic. Joel Osteen is an easy target, but her attacks on Martin Seligman and positive psychology seemed too ad hominem and not well-balanced. My mom pointed out to me that if she were to get breast cancer, she would not want to wallow in negativity and anger as Ehrenreich seems to want to do. She (the author) has fallen into the trap of overstating her good points, so much that they become bad points.

This is too bad. Perhaps Ehrenreich should have written a book about "delusional thinking" rather than "positive thinking." Delusions of grandeur and perfection are the shadow, the evil twin, of positive thinking. These delusions were certainly one of the fuels of the 2008 meltdown. These delusions turn into the kind of positive thinking dogma and ideology - shun the nonbeliever! - that so frustrates this author. But these are not positive thinking per se. Ehrenreich's book would have been stronger had she made this point.

As soon as I read "megachurches" and "positive psychology", Joel Osteen immediately came to mind.

Excellent review of Bright-sided. I am with you in disdaining those positive thinking gurus.

Me too, about positive thinking. It gives me the creeps. But that's a good point about delusional thinking, Jonathan.

Admittedly, I'm unwilling to spend enough time with Osteen to know what he's actually saying, but I get these vibes and I wonder that they don't simply codify self-centeredness into a religious attribute...

Anyway, too bad Ehrenreich can't quite pull it off. It's topic that needs some healthy criticism.

Such a receptive audience! Thanks for the feedback!

Add me to that receptive audience. I would say just deal with reality for pete's sake. I want to smack some of those positive thinkers.

Have never heard of Joel Osteen, which probably tells you where I stand on positive thinking. It has always seemed an odd guiding concept for an entire nation and I childish one at that. I think it is a form of delusional thinking and leaves people completely unprepared when bad things happen, which they always will. The only course open then seems to be complete over reaction, and a sense of "How could this happen to good people like me/us?" Better stop here, this could go on awhile!.

ETA I got so carried away I forgot to mention that I really enjoyed your review.

Thanks everyone! I agree about delusional thinking. If Ehrenreich had qualified her definitions better then her book would have been spot-on. As it stands it seemed she was throwing punches in too many directions.

Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz

Though I had heard of Elizabeth Peters the mystery writer, I never knew that Peters was only the pen name for a woman whose first vocation was as an academic Egyptologist. In fact, this was her first published book. Mertz's fascinating introduction to Egypt and the people who study it, first written in 1964 and revised 2007, was like reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Yes, it may be somewhat dated in terms of current finds, but the basic info is there, and presented so appealingly that I want to read more.

Mertz is a joy to listen to, whether she is describing ancient Egyptian science and architecture, the imposing Queen Hapshetsut, the religious fanaticism of Akenahten, the grandiose monuments of Ramses, the ubiquitous tomb pots, or the villainous and rage-inducing tomb robbers of centuries ago. But more humorously, she is not afraid to take cheap shots at her fellow Egyptologists, poking fun at the inanity of certain scholarly debates. I only wish she had discussed more Egyptian myth and religion in addition to history and archaeology. I also wish I had read the book instead of listened to the audio because I missed out on images and maps I hear are in the real thing!

Still, I really enjoyed this book, and now I want to read more.

Sounds like fun, and I didn't know that about Elizabeth Peters either.

Experience and Education by John Dewey

The popularity of John Dewey, American pragmatist philosopher and education reformer, has largely waned. But during his 90+ years of life, he was one of the most famous public intellectuals alive, teaching at Columbia University. But now he is mostly cited in education circles, perhaps more than he is read, and apart from the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, is largely ignored by the academic philosophy establishment. You won’t find his books at Barnes and Noble very often.

What happened?

I first encountered Dewey after William James, that other famous American pragmatist. Dewey’s book The Quest for Certainty, his review of the history of philosophy, was not the most lively book but it made good points. Pragmatism, the only truly Yankee school of philosophy, stresses the import of thought for action, the practical consequences of philosophical concepts. Rather than the abstract debates over a priori knowledge of metaphysical entities that characterizes Western philosophy, pragmatists called for philosophy to be more like science: more oriented on process, on action. Dewey, who began his career as a Hegelian, extended Peirce’s and James’ thought further. For Dewey, there is no such thing as certainty about entities that exist prior to all experience. Concepts arise from experience and are meaningless unless they bear fruit for experience. This radically recasts or destroys traditional philosophical debates such as free will, the existence of God, and the mind-body problem.

Which brings me to this book. I really enjoyed this book, because Dewey’s points about education are so applicable to my life. Dewey contrasts two modes of education. One, the traditional mode, is based on transmitting static cultural knowledge to largely passive pupils. The “progressive” mode instead seeks to teach not content, but critical thinking; not the knowledge of the past, but the ability to think critically on experiences in the present and future; not information in books but information gained from communities of inquiry and practice. One mode pictures the teacher as a godlike authority, leading the ignorant students to truth, while the other sees the teacher as more of a facilitator. Dewey does not provide examples, but one from my experience will suffice. I spent one year in a high school where science was taught in this “progressive” way. We did lots of fun experiments, but I still can’t tell you some of the basic scientific facts I should have learned, and my preparation for later science courses was subpar.

What’s the rub? Despite his identification with the progressive school of thought, Dewey argues that some moderation is needed. For him, the goal of education is “self-control,” which requires a certain amount of external (teacher) control to inculcate the ability to discipline one’s thoughts and think critically. One of education’s other main goals, the ability to think critically about experience, requires that we at least learn something about the wisdom of the past, insofar as it applies to experiences we will have in the future. So history is not entirely out the window. So education needs to find a middle way between student caprice and teacher control, with a teacher who is not given strict templates of what to teach (standardized testing!) but an ability to adapt content and methods to the students at hand.

One of Dewey’s other main points is that knowledge is not really book-learning, confined to the domain of school then forgotten once the student has moved on from that domain. Knowledge takes place in communities of inquiry. For example, rather than read about archaeological artifacts from the past, students should see the digs, go to the museums, see archaeology at work rather than fossilizing learning. In education systems where learning is done via books and exams – solitary activities – the learning becomes fossilized. One wonders whether online education has made this better or worse.

Dewey died in the 1940s, but his urge to rethink education in a rapidly changing world is more true than ever. For example, he makes the point that those who teach children are older. The knowledge they have needed to make sense of experience may not apply to their students. At my university, the computer science majors aren’t taught Fortran and Pascal; hell, they aren’t taught many software programs at all. Instead they learn theoretical computer science, the principles behind software problem-solving and program design. This ensures that their degree will still be useful in decades to come when even C++ and Java are no longer in vogue.

So I would read this short book. It may be somewhat dated on the debates, but it’s written by a master, the man whom the New York Times deemed “America’s philosopher” on his 90th birthday. It lays out some commonsense but often unrealized or polarized terms for analyzing one’s own schooling. Although philosophy of education gets little attention in philosophy departments now, it is a problem that concerned Plato himself.

(Note: I listened to the audio version on audible. I enjoyed this book, but it was very dense for an audiobook, perhaps too much so.)

Enjoyed your thoughts on John Dewey and education. I was taught physics in a progressive way and so ended up with no theory behind the practice. There must be a middle way or the progressive teaching just stays hanging in the air.

I also had no idea about Peters - so interesting!

I have to agree with you baswood. I know I need both pieces - theory and practice. Both my grad and undergrad courses in abnormal psych were very progressive and I loved them, and am grateful for them, but I could never have passed the licensing exam without some supplemental work in that area.

I really enjoyed your review on Dewey. In my high school American History course in the 60's we were taught Dewey as we were Emerson and Thoreau, and he was given so much emphasis that I've always wondered why now I rarely see his name mentioned.

My education was mostly traditional--lectures and memorization--at high school and undergraduate. Somewhat less so in grad school, but that was much later. I guess we are returning to that approach now with the mania for standardized testing. With my grandchildren it's "teach to the test" all year long until they have the tests in the spring, then it's just play time for the rest of the school year because the teachers have no incentive to teach anything else.

> 92, 93

I agree as well! I found that my "progressive" science courses gave me bad preparation for college-level and Advanced Placement science classes. Knowing how to think critically is important, but you have to have something to think critically about. MerriKay, your experience with the psychology classes hits especially close to home. My girlfriend, when she was at Sac State, considered going into psychology, but found the lower-level courses so content-filled and lacking in critical thinking and expression that she couldn't do them. She switched to history. My therapist also remembered his frustration at the way psychology was taught to him as an undergrad.

Thankfully my experience has been different, and the few psychology courses I have taken were engaging (neuroscience) and full of Dewey's beloved connections to experience (developmental psych).

> 94

When I was in high school doing AP courses, there was always that awkward month after the test when there was nothing to do. Some teachers did literally nothing. My US history teacher showed historical films about America and assigned students to give presentations on the historical accuracy of each film. The most inaccurate was some Disney movie, while the best was the Pearl Harbor film Tora! Tora! Tora! My group had that film and it was so accurate all we could find were details about model years of airplanes. But of everything we did that year, it involved the most independent and critical thinking, and I remember it much more than that turgid paperweight we called a textbook. It was doubly fun because there was no exam awaiting us at the end - just the fun of our own discoveries. Clearly I have reservations about the AP system.

Well, these book reviews have been piling up. Audible has been making it worse. Only one more week until my monthly credits come in. Coming in I've got two short reviews and one long review. Tomorrow look out for my reviews of Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism by Rita M. Gross, which completes by "books by/about women" category for the 13 in 13 challenge, and W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk.

What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith

Riley-Smith's book gives a short overview of the who, what, why, where, and when of the crusades. Although the term "crusades" evokes a horde of wild Christians seizing the Holy Land, in reality it was much more than that. Crusades went on not only in Syria, but also Egypt, Northern Europe, and Moorish Spain. Crusades and missions echoing them continued even into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since the Crusades cannot be defined easily by time or place, they must be looked at in terms of their motive: a war to ostensibly defend Christendom or re-conquer some of its rightful territory. Crusaders were technically pilgrims, pilgrims who happened to be armed, and because of their crusader vow were subject to church law rather than secular law. The rub: behind every "holy war" lies a power grab or some other baser motive. Go figure.

Riley-Smith's book was very short, but consequently did not fill in all the blanks on the basics of the "pilgrimages." Right now I'm reading Thomas Madden's The New Concise History of the Crusades, which does a much better job at telling the narrative of each crusade.

Jonah: A Psycho-Religious Approach to the Prophet by Andre Lacocque and Pierre-Emmanuel Lacocque

The Lacocques, a father-son team of a biblical scholar and a psychologist, have written a splendid book. Using the lens of historically-informed psychological criticism, they examine the book of Jonah. Using this book, they segue into some broader psychological issues, such as the "Jonah Complex" and the need to listen to the Outer Voice.

They start by positing that Jonah is a Hellenistic satire, akin to the satires of the Cynics. Hellenistic Judaism was forced to encounter a broader, universalistic culture, and Jonah was written to make fun of those who would only see God at work in the people of Israel. They point to elements of the story, such as the setting on a ship, that resemble a typical Greek romance. Most importantly, they see all in the story as deep symbol.

Then, in four chapters, they comment on the four-chapter book. Jonah 1, which the Lacocques title "Anonymity and Vocation," defines the "Jonah Syndrome," Abraham Maslow's term for those who are afraid of their own greatness and do not wish to stand out from the crowd. In being called to his greatness on his divine mission, Jonah is also being called to contemplate his life work, and hence his mortality. Instead, Jonah wants to be coddled, to retreat to the symbolic womb, the bottom of a ship where he can ignore his calling.

But of course, he cannot ignore his calling. So in chapter two, "From Nothingness to Being," Jonah hits rock bottom, finding that in fact his whole purpose in life is God. He must move from narcissism to self-oblation, from a running to death to an embracing life, embracing God. The fish's belly is a womb in which Jonah is reborn into God, who brings order even out of the chaos of a drowning prophet in the stinking, acidic, dark innards of a fish.

But when Jonah actualizes his call in chapter three, "Faith and Doubt: the Ambiguity of Commitment," he finds that he objects to God Himself. Jonah is mad that God wishes to forgive the Ninevites. He wants God to wreak vengeance on them. Typically this inability on Jonah's part to accept God's forgiveness is seen as a weakness, but in fact his is a normal human response. He simply thinks God's honor is too great, His mercy too special, to be cheaply given out. His logic is: that which is special must be protected and scarce. God's logic is: what I am, my mercy and love, are for everyone. Jonah's inability to accept this mirrors those in our own world who value orthodoxy over human life. Jonah's desire to cling to particularism when all the non-Israelite characters in the story are devout to the gods - the sailors and the Ninevites- makes Jonah look even sillier.

In chapter four, "A Matter of Justice," this conflict comes to a head. Is there any meaning to life, Jonah asks himself, once his righteous anger at Ninevah's sin and excitement about its destruction have been thwarted? This upsets Jonah so much that he leaves the city, leaves all human contact, a sign of either prophetic solitude (a la Elijah and Jesus) or psychotic disconnect with reality. Not only is he unable to deal with this new reality, not only is he suicidal, but he doesn't even get the last word. God does, leaving us unsure what happens to Jonah. Does he repent and realize God's mercy, His "compassion beyond justice and anger" (Heschel)? Or does he continue to curse God and wish for his own death?

Lacocque see Jonah as a story of the call to human authenticity. And in the Hebrew tradition, that call is always a call in tandem with God:

"The Hebrew Scripture posits that human vocation involves a certain quality of life, a becoming that brings humans to be themselves by means of an ongoing dialogue with the source of life, namely God." (74)

Jonah's story is a warning that we need to be careful, careful not to let the internal dialogue between the self and God devolve into a narcissistic monologue that prevents us from understanding the true God. Yes, we should be critical of our spiritual insights and blunders, but trusting as well. This includes the "Jonah complex" that "fear of greatness" that might say more about Maslow's humanistic psychology than about Jonah. For Jonah's ultimate pitfall was not fearing his own greatness, but God's. His true need was not to follow his internal voice, but the external voice.

Psychological biblical criticism is still a small subfield, and Lacocque and his son have written a neat volume in the area. Although their methodology was somewhat undefined - they never made it clear which psychologists or paradigms they were working with - their results are so insightful that it is worth the effort.

Eucharist (Catholic Spirituality for Adults) by Robert Barron

Barron's short little book covers the nature of the Eucharist: as meal, sacrifice, and real presence. I enjoyed Barron's Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, and this book did not disappoint. I knew I was in for something good when Barron referenced Babette's Feast in the introduction. As meal, the Eucharist is inclusive and inviting, bringing all to the table to enjoy the banquet of God's love and grace. As sacrifice, the Eucharist is Christ's body, broken for us as a sign of that overflowing grace. As real presence, the Eucharist is transubstantiation, not only bringing the presence of Christ to us in a very real way but making us into the real presence of Christ in the world. I like how Barron included many different approaches, including film, literature, Scripture, and historical debates in the book. I would recommend this for any Catholic seeking some motivation or anyone curious about Catholicism.

I read a fascinating book about the first crusade a year ago or so. Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse by Jay Rubinstein uses contemporary sources I would never have imagined existed. The author has a particular point of view, embodied in the subtitle, about apocalyptic thinking; not being a scholar of the crusades, I have no idea how valid it is. Inspired by my enthusiasm for this book, I read another, The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan, which I ended up skimming as it was much less thoughtful and thought-provoking. It seems overwhelming to write a book about all the crusades!

Wow the Jonah book sounds fascinating. Wonderful and excellent review as always. I like the Maslow ideas but was thinking of his hierarchy of needs.

Have to agree with your friend's assessment of the psych dept at CSUS by the way. I'm an alumna. It was pretty outdated, at least a couple of decades ago. Many of us who wanted therapy training moved over to the Education Dept for grad school as they had a more systems based program. Years later I taught in the Family and Consumer Sciences Dept because THEY had the best family studies program of all. Still, I do appreciate my psych background.

Rebecca, I'm glad you enjoyed Rubinstein's book. I was planning on buying that when my next audible credits come in, and you've cemented my decision. I mostly find reading about the Crusades depressing: "We did THAT?"

Merrikay, I'm glad to hear it was just her school. When I was at Modesto Junior College I had fantastic psych courses in neuroscience and developmental psych, taught by people who had clinical backgrounds so connected the theories with stories of people they had treated and worked with. My developmental psych prof had worked as a school psychologist for 30+ years and was very blunt about what schools do wrong! OTOH, my girlfriend took history of psych at CSUS, and the course was a bland memorization of textbook facts with no primary sources. I kept her textbook, because it is a useful encyclopedia, but not fun to read.

Maslow seems to have largely faded into the background. Outside of his hierarchy of needs (an idea he later backed away from somewhat) he was nowhere in my PSYCH 101 textbook. I read his two works on humanistic psychology and appreciated that he opened up questions of the "farther reaches of human nature" at a time when psychology was dominated by behaviorism and Freud. But his portrait of human growth seems hopelessly rosy - all is on the up and up.

I am curious - who are your favorite psychologists?

My favorite "psychologist" probably isn't a psychologist, probably why I moved over to the Education Dept. and got a Marriage and Family Therapist license. I was most focused on systems and psychodynamics and am still a big fan of Harriet Lerner. Also like Monica McGoldrick's work on ethnicity and family development theory. I suppose developmental theories are out now with many if not most, but I like the way they normalize life issues rather than pathology. I also liked multi-modal and think different approaches work with each client so you figure out what will be best for that individual. I have been retired for five years and if I were to work again, which I don't plan on doing at all, I would get certified in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Training. I'm so pitifully and thoroughly enamored of it now that I think it is the answer to everything. I realize that sounds naive and ridiculous, but as I have run different diagnoses through my mind, I can't come up with any that don't benefit from mindfulness training. I started studying it about 10 years or so ago as continuing education units and still am hooked. What about you? Who do you like? Oh I also like Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky lots.

What Were the Crusades? sounds like a good starting point for yours truly since I have a giant blank in my brain regarding it. Thought-provoking stuff about Jonah.

I'm a little stunned that Maslow wasn't in your Psych 101 course!

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

This was an Audible impulse buy, but I'm glad I got it. DuBois, an African-American university professor in the early 1900s, wrote this book as a response to Booker T. Washington's plan for the post-slavery black community, and as a documentation of the kind of demoralization, fragmentation, and hopelessness of black America post-Civil War.

Washington's approach was pragmatic. African-Americans should stop lobbying for political rights. (Perhaps he felt it would incite too much backlash?) They should not dream of going to college, but of attending technical schools and going into the trades. Black America will succeed by putting their heads down and working hard for economic prosperity, with healthy doses of thrift and sacrifice.

DuBois' response was that a culture needs more than bread to live on. African-Americans needed to gain the ability to think about the world they live in, to articulate their experience and what they have to offer to our country. This could only come about through liberal education, not trade school alone. DuBois points out that the teachers at Washington's trade schools were not trained at trade schools, but at black colleges. These colleges also produced needed moral, spiritual, and intellectual leaders of the black community: professors, preachers, doctors, and other professionals.

Besides, Du Bois points out, Washington's ethic of "buckle down, work hard" doesn't even work. Du Bois documents the very real economic plight of the supposedly freed men and women. Though they are legally free, they are trapped in a cycle of indebted tenant farming. The few who, through ingenuity and the luck of a few good harvests, save up the money to buy their own land, are often cheated by whites who take their money and run. This and other structural inequalities, such as poor education funding and unstable families due to the heritage of slavery, expose Washington's philosophy for the canard it is - so says Du Bois. This book has made me curious to read Washington and hear his side of the story.

Formerly, said Du Bois, the 'best' blacks (the house slaves) and the 'best' whites were intimate, living together and having bonds of quasi-family ties; now they are segregated. How then can we understand one another? What's so sad is that most of this book can still apply today. In some ways, not much has changed for African-Americans living with the legacy of slavery and subsequent political and economic disenfranchisement. As a historical work, Du Bois' book is important to read 113 years later; his bristling literary style, full of high-brow literary allusions, only adds pleasure.

Enjoyed your excellent review of Jonah: A Psycho-Religious Approach to the Prophet by Andre Lacocque and Pierre-Emmanuel Lacocque Lots of interesting stuff in your review.

DuBois was a fascinating man who was one of the founders of the NAACP and became involved in the pan-African movement. I have a two-volume biography of him by David Levering Lewis and I have the feeling I read them, or at least skimmed them many years ago (both volumes won the Pulitzer).

Excellent review of The Souls of Black Folks. It reminds us that the civil rights movement was about much more than just legal equality.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan

I was taken by Sagan when I read Cosmos, and I am taken with him in this book, the record of his 1985 Gifford Lectures. Sagan tackles questions of religion and the future of humanity using the mixture of incisive thought and open humility that he does in his other books. His main idea is that religion, like so much human activity, is tainted by a thorough parochialism. We join the religion of our culture, not noticing the thousands of alternative true faiths. For some reason, apparitions of the Virgin Mary only show up in Catholic lands. The Abrahamic faiths progress as if humans are the only creatures in the galaxy of godlike intelligence.

Sagan is an unabashed religious skeptic. He spends one chapter picking apart arguments for God's existence. He spends another chapter looking at "extraterrestrial lore" and the mind's ability to fool itself. One alleged "flying saucer" sighting, but a highway patrolman, turned out to be a farmer's wheat silo. The fantastic detail of alien sightings and abductions and the total lack of evidence associated with them form an interesting contrast. Same with early twentieth century amateur astronomer Percival Lowell's belief that he could see canals on Mars - and the total lack of evidence from telescope photos. The human mind is very good at making itself believe whatever it wants. Thought is frail.

Instead of wishful thinking and parochial views on the cosmos, Sagan calls for a scientific approach to life in the broadest sense:

We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? "Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out." There's nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world.

Reading Sagan and other religious skeptics is good for a believer like me. It's like an enema: painful but makes me examine my beliefs.

What I like about Sagan is that although he is an atheist or agnostic, he recognizes religion's power to change the world. These lectures, given in 1985 at the end of the Cold War (not that he knew that!), are concerned with the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. We forget how vast human history is, how expansive the universe is, and get caught up in petty conflicts that can have eons of repercussions. Sagan, ever the astronomer concerned with the big picture of life, calls us to think about the progress of not American, not Chinese, not Islamic, but human civilization as a whole. Would another, more advanced race be impressed by us? Or would it pity our stupidity, our efforts to play at grand civilization with stone age minds? Were Sagan alive I suspect he would be an activist for the Long Now foundation. As it is he recognizes the powerful ability of religion to change the world for the better. And as a scientific prophet, he calls for that change:

Christianity also says that redemption is possible. So an anti-Christian would be someone who argues to hate your enemy and that redemption is impossible, that bad people remain forever bad. So I ask you, which position is better suited to an age of apocalyptic weapons? What do you do if one side does not profess those views and you claim to be Christian? … You can also ask, which position is uniformly embraced by the nation-states? The answers to those questions are very clear. There is no nation that adopts the Christian position on this issue. Not one. (209)

Amen.

P.S. This is the my first read in the "Gifford Lectures" category. In case you are curious:

The Gifford Lectures are an annual series of lectures which were established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford (died 1887). They were established to "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God."

The list of Gifford Lectures in the last century reads like a who's who of great English-language intellectuals, and have been given by biblical scholars, historians, theologians, physicists, anthropologists, and a number of other great intellectual traditions.

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Merrikay, I can't say I blame you. I read one of Kabat-Zinn's books and I was also taken by his wonderful writing ability and profound teaching. He has been a very successful agent of enculturating the dharma for Western audiences in a way that we can access. Have you read any of Mark Epstein's books? He also writes on Buddhism and psychology, and I have heard of him but haven't read anything.

Reading Sagan and other religious skeptics is good for a believer like me. It's like an enema: painful but makes me examine my beliefs.

LOL!!!!!

Great review on the Du Bois' book too.

Great review of the Sagan book. I became a huge fan of his when the "Cosmos" series was first broadcast and read all of his early books and collaborations.

p.s. - check the review you posted; it looks like some extraneous text got included.

Thanks for pointing that out, Steven!

Arguing the Just War in Islam by John Kelsay

It is well-known that Christianity has a just war theory, most famously articulated by Augustine. But fewer people know that shariah, the Islamic tradition of jurisprudence and ethical norms, also has a just war theory embedded in it. Kelsay, a scholar of Islam at Florida State University, has written a book about this just war theory, detailing its sources, history, and current interpretations.

We often hear the phrase “Sariah law” in news reports. Kelsay rightly terms this “shariah reasoning” to convey its fluidity. Shariah draws from, firstly, the Qur’an, Allah’s revelation. But it also draws on stories about the prophet Muhammad and how he behaved as a political and military leaders. As the centuries wore on, scholars of shariah reasoning, the ulama, drew on kalam (logic, or philosophy) and changing historical circumstances such as the Crusades and more recent colonialism. Shariah reasoning norms about just war were formulated at a time of Islamic power, when Muslim empires such as the Ottoman were in full force.

Some of these moral norms seem obvious. For example, it is prohibited to directly and intentionally harm non-combatants. If you are laying siege to a city and have to burn it to the ground, killing women and children, then that is not direct harm. But if you have taken the city and women, children, and elderly are surviving, one cannot execute them for fun as so many victors did (e.g. Israel in Canaan). The category of “non-combatants” is fluid; traditionally women did not fight, but they do in the modern Israeli army. There were also norms against killing Muslims. When conquering a city, for example, a siege could be ended if the city converted to the faith. If a fellow Muslim city was attacked, it was often considered the duty of other Muslims to come to their aid. This made Islamic a unifying factor in the Middle East, bringing together many groups who were separate tribes with separate gods at Muhammad’s birth. In general, shariah reasoning was very conservative, relying far more on historical precedent than historical present. Shariah reasoning was the expertise of a small group of authoritative scholars, the ulama, and their interpretations reigned supreme.

But times have changed. Norms formulated at the height of empire are now supposed to apply to Islamic disempowerment and colonialism. With the loss of Islamic empires came the loss of the ulama, and with rising literacy came the ability of many Muslims to render their own verdicts. When Muslims are now living all over the world, in some countries where the government could care less about Islamic law, how are they to interpret their tradition?

One group, Islamic militants, seeks to bring back the glory days of Islamic empires. People like bin Laden argue that shariah reasoning permits holy wars. The ends justify the means. Critics point out that attacks such as 9/11 violated norms about killing non-combatants, but bin Laden points out that all Americans are guilty of shedding the blood of innocent Muslims by voting in politicians who support exploitative policies in the Middle East. They evoke principles of reciprocity: they have killed us, so we have the right to kill them. An eye for an eye. Worse, they refuse to tolerate Muslims who seek compromise and peace with the West. Their historical precedent for today might be the Crusades.

The other group are Muslims, often in American and Europle, who look not back to ‘glory days,’ but forward to a global world. Scholars such as Indian-American Abdulaziz Sachedina argue that Islam can provide the basis for democratic pluralism. They argue that it is the only way to move forward to create a peaceful and just society. They point to Muhammad’s practice of “protected peoples” in which Christians and Jews were kept exempt from persecution as long as they paid a special tax. They also point to the very beginnings of Muhammad’s movement, when Islam was a peaceful minority group. Militants and fundamentalists dissent, crying out that this relativizes Islam and makes it one voice among many, when in fact it is the one true voice. They also point out that democracy has hardly worked. One of the best parts of this book was the end section where Kelsay reads from Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush slamming him for ignoring both Christian just war theory and democratic principles. A dramatic about-face.

Given that I am taking classes on Islam and the Crusades this fall, this book was a great way to prepare for my courses. Still, I am unsold on the idea of “just war.” Just war theories still have to be practical, so some amount of “collateral damage” must be permitted. At the end of the day, just war theories that impact a conquered group are made with no input from that group. And in the heat of battle, with testosterone flowing and blood pumping, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect that these norms will be followed. Still, that is not a criticism of Kelsay. I only wish he had explored how much these norms were followed throughout Islamic history and how they compare with Christian theories of just war. In some ways Muslims have political theology easier, since their founder was a political leader. Christians took centuries to go from persecution to power, whereas Muslims did it in one generation. I am recommending this book to a Muslim friend interested in interfaith issues and pluralism.

The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Henri J. M. Nouwen

It’s hard to give anything but a five star rating to Nouwen. Sometimes I suspect the man had God ghost write his books. This one, a short introduction to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Abbas and Ammas, meditates on silence and contemplation. Ministers, he writes, tend to be doers, caught up in parish committees and ministries of caring. (I found his constant reference to ministers puzzling. Is this written for clerics? But then again, all Christians are called to be ministers.) We forget the need for silence, alone time with God. The Desert Fathers spent years in silence with God. But that did not make them alone or apart from the world. It made them more open and compassionate with those who came to visit them. Silence and contemplation, while they are fostered by spiritual practices of prayer and meditation, are less a state of mind to engage in at times and more a state of being to live at all times. Nouwen is always an inspiration.

The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America by James M. O'Toole



One of the perks of studying history is looking at the past to imagine who we can be in the future. This book is great proof of that utility of history. O’Toole, a historian at Boston College, chronicles the changes in Catholic America from the days of the first colonials to today’s post-Vatican II era. He marks its history in six stages:

1. The Priestless Church: 1-2% of Americans Catholic, few priests, lay organization and reliance on private and family devotionals with visiting priests 1-3 times a year
2. The Church in the Democratic Republic: growth and stamping-out of ‘trusteeism’, a movement of lay power, more priests led to ‘churchifying’ process of vestries, choirs, weekly mass, diocesan conventions, more passivity of laity, beginnings of montanism and cult of the Pope
3. The Immigrant Church: explosion of European Catholics led to 18% of America being Catholic by 1900, immigrant churches both keeping ethnic traditions alive and dividing parishes on ethnic grounds, populist private devotions alongside passive and bored liturgy, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements led to more patriotism
4. The Church of Catholic Action: Catholic Worker movement, St. Vincent de Paul Society, work for social justice, labor living standards in 1910s and 1920s, but later move to affluence and suburbs in settled 1950s. Beginnings of ecumenism and popular media figures such as Fulton Sheen.
5. The Church of Vatican II: Shocking changes, increased lay participation in many areas, leading to polarized church: conservatives such as “JP II priests,” Humanae Vitae opposers, versus liberals calling for more change, womens’ ordination.
6. The Church of the 21st Century: Loss of white Catholics, growth of Hispanic Catholics, sex abuse scandals, and …?

What can we learn from this?

First, there seems to be a constant tension between Catholics as an ethnic culture and Catholics as more inclusively or theologically defined. The ethnic identity of the immigrant church brought together tightly-knit communities, but led to division, with parishes catering to Italians, to Poles, to Anglos, and to slaves. (As a friend who converted to Greek Orthodoxy complained, sometimes they are more interested in being Greek than Orthodox.) And as those immigrants’ children and grandchildren lost their ties to the Old World and blended into that bland thing we call “white,” they lost their Catholic identity too. One of Vatican II’s aims was to remove the “ghettoizing” of Catholicism and bring it in dialogue with the modern world. But then we have to find new ways to identify ourselves, not just outside narrow ideas of ethnic divisions but also opening ourselves to ecumenism, interfaith, and other broadening movements.

A second contimuum of American Catholic life has been a tension between lay and clerical power. On the one hand, clerical power has been used to ignore the realities of the laity (e.g. birth control) and hide real problems (e.g. transferring sex offenders from parish to parish). But too much lay power diminishes the priest’s ability to be a prophetic role model for his flock. When Catholic priests pushed for racial integration and equality in the 1960s, their parishioners, empowered by ‘Vatican II theology,’ ignored and sometimes yelled at them. This is a tension hardly solveable by a single papal encyclical or bishops’ decree. But having a historical lens for it will help us see it when it pops up next.

Lastly, many of the so-called post-conciliar “changes” are nothing new. They’re just revivals of old trends. Current lay outspokenness has precedent in the nineteenth century. Priest shortages were a problem in the eighteenth century. Concern for social justice dates back a century ago. History rhymes.

O’Toole’s book had to gloss over a lot of fascinating things, particularly regional and ethnic diversity. He barely covered Hispanic or African-American Catholicism. But for what it does cover, I enjoyed this audiobook.

Great reviews, and a lot to think about, as always.

Thank you Rebecca. I think I'm overdue for a good novel by now!

The New Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden

This book was not terribly analytical, but it does what it's supposed to: gives a broad narrative overview of the Crusades, to be used as a textbook. It was quite depressing to see how stupid we (Christians) could be, believing that God would deliver the Muslim enemy into our hands with little to no planning or training. Madden makes the point that the most obvious modern solution - not taking Jerusalem, but finding a way for all Abrahamic faiths to share it - was simply blasphemous to the medieval absolutist mind. What a great reminder of the narcissistic dangers of identifying any one group of people as God's chosen.

The best part of this book was the chapter on the legacy of the Crusades. Madden argues that despite decades of historical research on them, popular presentations of the Crusades ignore it. Contemporary Western ones, influenced heavily by Sir Steven Runciman, see it as no more than a foolish war, motivated by misguided piety and pure evil. Muslim views exaggerate its importance, casting it as a massive devastation of the Islamic world. They forget that Islam was already powerful and these groups of crusading Europeans hardly constituted a threat to Islamic civilization. Both views are wrong. And despite public interest, post-9/11 comparisons between then and now are mostly unuseful.

Madden makes the point that the most obvious modern solution - not taking Jerusalem, but finding a way for all Abrahamic faiths to share it - was simply blasphemous to the medieval absolutist mind. -- it seems to be blasphemous to contemporary absolutist minds as well.

Sadly, yes.

Aquarian Evangelist: The Age of Aquarius as It Dawned in the Mind of Levi Dowling by John Benedict Buescher

Having written a paper on Dowling and Notovitch’s “Jesus in Tibet” theories for a course this spring, I was delighted to find Buescher’s book and disappointed to find it so late. Though a mere 49 pages, Buescher’s book does a clear, concise job of chronicling Levi Dowling’s elusive life and digging up sources and genres for his famous Aquarian Gospel, including spirituality, Theosophy, and the popular genre of “psychically transmitted” lives of Jesus. Dowling died at the peak of his fame, and the Aquarian empire he had built up in Southern California and beyond fell apart with his powerful personality. He had applied the same industriousness and organized vigor to his New Age propaganda as he had to evangelizing for the Disciples of Christ in his younger years.

The Aquarian Gospel is largely ignored today, though it was resurrected and republished by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. But New Agey literature still uses the term “Aquarian” all the time, and the concept of spiritual evolution of humankind, so popular in Theosophy, still persists. Buescher’s commentary on Levi’s gospel, supposedly discovered in higher realms of consciousness in the Akashic plane, applies to today’s New Agers just as much as it did 100 years ago:

“Levi Dowling, who thought, perhaps, that his Aquarian Gospel would provide a basis for a unifying, inclusive form of Christianity, beyond dogmas and creeds, would undoubtedly have been surprised at the uses to which his scripture has been put. But the unity that he envisioned required the acceptance of a conspiracy theory in which all orthodox forms of Christianity had to be subverted in favor of an esoteric form. And conspiracy theorists are hardly known for their ecumenism or tolerance …

“They should not have been surprised. To achieve a unity of culture and religion, the New Age downplays or denies the distinctive truth claims of each culture and religion it uses. Each is welcomed into a multicultural universal brotherhood as long as it appears dressed as a simplified, disembodied, and spiritualized version of itself – that is, as long as it accepts being made merely relative. Impervious particularity of form is a scandal and an affront. “ (46)

I think I understand what the Aquarian Gospel is - but I've never heard of it. Your thread's always an education.

Experiments in Ethics by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Appiah, Ghanian-born philosopher at Princeton, has written a dense but insightful book on the connections between moral philosophy and the moral sciences. He examines key notions underlying Western moral theories – character, intuition, and moral modules – and complicated them with findings from the current moral sciences. The term “moral sciences” reflects an old usage, a remnant of a time when disciplines studying human behavior were studied in philosophy departments. Appiah wants to bring back that unity.

Character, the underlying concept of virtue ethics, is the idea that certain habits or tendencies can be cultivated to make for a good moral life. For Aristotle, happiness requires virtue, so living virtuously is a component of one’s own flourishing. Appiah complicates this concept by pointing to current research on the situational changes in human behavior. Things as petty as finding a dime or being in a hurry affect whether or not one will be generous to others. This situationalism contrasts with the globalism of Aristotle’s approach, in which character is stable in all situations. It’s not comforting to think how many faces we present to the world.

Intuition, that other great bulwark of moral philosophy, is also up for grabs. Every moral theory, no matter how logic, involves a certain amount of “it just seems this way!” Hence the intractability of philosophy. But ‘experimental philosophy’ surveys examining laypeoples’ moral intuitions show that layfolk are just as divided on their intuitions as philosophers are, and philosophical debates reflect differences in moral intuition in the broader population. For example, take the famous trolley problem where an out-of-control trolley is heading toward a group of four people. If you flip the switch, it will go on another track and kill only one person. Most people agree flipping the switch is okay. But if you can only stop the trolley by pushing a fat man onto the tracks, killing him but stopping the trolley, people are more divided on their intuitions. The underlying intuition is that “directly” harming someone is wrong, but indirectly doing it is kosher. But the outcome is the same. Is this intuition something we should heed, or is it a moral illusion, akin to a visual illusion? How could we know?

The same goes for the alleged moral modules. Far from being cross-cultural, Appiah demonstrates that cultures vary widely in how concepts like purity and cleanliness, honor and shame approached. Cultures with strong purity codes, such as ancient Israel, see things such as menstruation and homosexual acts as unclean. Modern American society is more likely to see this concern with purity as silliness, as “impurity” does not actually harm anyone. (Young boys consider cooties unclean, but there is no real harm in touching a girl.) How do we deal with the empirical diversity of moral behavior and intuition?

Appiah ends with a call for moral sciences that encapsulate the complexity of human life, neither reducing moral philosophy to a series of algorithms (utilitarianism) nor a series of moral conundrums (intuition pumps).

I agree with much of what Appiah says. However, at heart I am still a virtue ethicist. Studies showing the variability of character only point to a problem for virtue ethics, not a defeater. Spiritual practices such as Buddhist mindfulness and Ignatian self-reflection serve to unify the self and make us aware of little ways, unseen ways, in which we act. Appiah didn’t address this, but I suspect empirical findings would show that people who engage in systematic practices of self-reflection are less fickle in their behaviors.

The narration was good too.

Enjoyed your review of Experiments in ethics.

but I suspect empirical findings would show that people who engage in systematic practices of self-reflection are less fickle in their behaviors Wow! that is a bit of a leap, but I see where you are coming from.

Wow! that is a bit of a leap

Systematic practices of self-reflection need not be religious though. Secularized mindfulness practices like John Kabat-Zinn's or even daily journaling would do it.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

In a way I am obligated to like this book, because I attend Hosseini’s alma mater and we have his portrait on our library walls. But Hosseini, though a great novelist, was a biology major, later getting a medical degree. He was also an Afghan refugee. All these experiences have made him write a great novel. I listened to this on audio (11 discs) and got through it in about two days.

My favorite part of this book was the beginning with the tense stories of Assef’s childhood. The tension between his commitment to his friend and the pull to satisfy his dad and fit into society’s inequalities was compelling. As the book wore on, however, it became more predictable, less compelling. Without revealing the end, I will say that the book’s main theme is redemption. Just when it felt that the plot was tied up, that the redemption had happened and the book could end, Hosseini added some odd extra scenes. Still, this was his first novel. I am going to read more of this guy!



Francis of Assisi (The Great Courses) by William R. Cook and Ronald Herzman

I have been curious about the Great Courses for a few years now, but they have always been too expensive! Now that they are in the Audible store, however, I was willing to try one. This course, co-taught by two medievalists, was amazing. I did a directed reading last quarter on the life and hagiographies of St. Francis, but I still learned so much from Cook and Herzman.

One strong point of this course was the contextualization of Francis. They show what the moral and social issues of Francis’ day were and how Francis responded to them. In a developing market economy where money was being used more, Francis stressed absolute poverty. In an age where universities were beginning in Europe and theology went out of the prayerful world of cloisters and into the rational world of the classroom, Francis was an uneducated preacher with a simple message, a man who taught by dramatic gesture and stressed deed over act. He may look like a foolishly happy simpleton, but Francis was a man who saw the problems of his age and made himself the antidote.

Cook and Herzman’s discussion of the “Canticle of Creatures” was amazing. They show how he draws on the Psalms, on Genesis’ creation stories, and even on classical natural philosophy. They argue that this poem is not just an example of Christian nature mysticism, but the first piece of Italian literature.

Last, I thought they did a great job showing how Francis’ message was disseminated in the Church and in his orders. Their re-enactment of the dialogue between Francis and Innocent II approving the order really showed how radical his path was. They also guide the reader through the complicated thicket of post-Francis controversy between the spirituals and the progressives, between those who wanted the letter of Francis’ example and those who desired its spirit. Both sides exist to this day. They also spend a lecture on St. Clare, emphasizing that she was not just a passive vehicle for Francis’ teaching but a great mystic and teacher in her own right.

That said, I wish Cook and Herzman had discussed the hagiographic tradition. Though they discussed Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, they didn’t talk about less official writings like the Legend of Perugia, or later ones like the Little Flowers. Though they talked about the Canticle, the two Rules, and the Testament, they didn’t talk about the various exhortations and letters he wrote. Giving a roadmap to the different types of literature and hagiography in the Franciscan canon would have been a good way to get people into Regis Armstrong’s scholarly edition of the early documents by and about Francis.

Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self by Todd E. Feinberg

Feinberg, a neuropsychiatrist, draws on his expertise to dive into the problem of the self. He explores various neurological disorders that blur the self-world boundary and gives a theory for how the self is constructed in the mind.

In the first part of the book, he defines four types of disorders. The first are those that make us block a part of ourselves off as not being part of the self. Stroke victims who disidentify with an arm are one example. They think the arm belongs to someone else, or give it a name and treat it like an annoying friend. Other disorders affect the way we recognize extensions of the self, such as friends or belongings. For example, sufferers of Capgras syndrome, which effects the emotions of recognition, can still see that those around them look like their loved ones. But now feeling the jolt of recognition, they believe that their spouse and children have been replaced by imposters. The third type of disorder, personal confabulation, makes people invent stories about themselves. They may have forgotten their real identity or are in denial of psychological trauma, so they externalize it (“my brother just had a stroke”). The last type of disorder involves people not recognizing themselves in the mirror. These people will even stand in front of the mirror and yell at this mocking person who copies one’s own actions.

Then Feinberg presents his theory of how the self is constructed. He’s an emergentist: from smaller systems, larger ones emerge that cannot be reduced to their parts. So just as atoms form parts of the cell, which in turn for the cell, so brain cells which form parts of the brain also construct the self. The “self” is not to be identified with one part of the brain, as Descartes thought, but is a dynamic construct emerging from many lower-level functions of the brain. Feinberg postulates two emergentism: that it is unpredictable how lower-level systems create higher-level ones, and that the lower levels are constrained by the activity of the higher levels. So the “self” constrains its parts by ordering them, but the parts constrain the self, as in these neurological disorders. Finally, the “self” as Feinberg describes it is defined by purpose. Rather than some static notion of the soul, the self can be defined as whatever function, purpose, or meaning all the parts of the mind are working in concert toward. It’s a telenomic system.

Feinberg’s clinical examples are interesting, but I don’t see how they connect to the second half of his book. If the self-world boundary as is malleable as he demonstrates, would this not defeat any notion of the self and lead us into Humean non-self? And while I think emergentism is the right direction for philosophers of mind to go in, by no means is it a complete theory. We still don’t have a clear idea of how higher levels or organization are formed from lower. Why do certain cells elicit consciousness and not others? Feinberg is better with clinical experience than with philosophy. I would read this book for the first half, but read someone else for the philosophical reflections.

I must have missed the redemption point in Kite Runner. I didn't like the guy.

So did you ever read Gross Buddhism After Patriarchy? I'm anxious to hear your thoughts because I'm thinking about purchasing it.

Glad you enjoyed and benefited from the great courses lecture. Francis of Assisi is such a fascinating topic.

oh let me make that Buddhism After Patriarchy by Gross!

and did i already tell you that my grad school abnormal psych teacher used St. F. movie brother Son Sister moon to illustrate post traumatic stress?

Great reviews. When do you find the time to listen to these books and courses and read so voluminously?? Or do you multi-task -- can't imagine reading one thing and listening to another.

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Since discovering audiobooks I have found that I can listen to them just about anywhere. Walking (I walk 20 mins to work everyday and my job involves a lot of package delivery), driving, grocery shopping, doing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, etc. Actually it's made my house cleaner because when I'm listening to a really good audiobook I don't want to stop, I'll start cleaning while listening to legitimate my listening.

Given life, the school year will start and I'll drop to one book a month. LOL.

Merrikay -

I DID finish Buddhism After Patriarchy. I've been procrastinating on the review since it was such an insightful book. Gross is an amazing scholar, and her practice is deep as well. Of the three books on Buddhism and feminism I have read this year, it is the best. So yes, buy the book, and read it when your brain is at full functioning. But now that I have an audience, I will write the review as well!

As for Francis' PTSD - does the PTSD stem from being a prisoner of war? His religious vocation did start soon after that. Mental illness and Francis seem to fit hand-in-glove. I suspect that were Francis alive today he's be one of the homeless on Market St in San Francisco.

Re: The Kite Runner, I completely get it. He was a very entitled kid and didn't understand his mixture of cowardice and arrogance until he was an adult.

Very funny about cleaning more while you listen to a book -- maybe I'll have to try it!

You have made St. Francis fascinating. Before your thread he is not someone I would have put much thought into.

Too bad about Feinberg. As for Hosseini, I suspect you have already read his best stuff.

I just read a number of your reviews posted over the last two weeks or so. Too much to comment on, but enjoyed reading them.

Against A Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India by Parimal Patil

Patil, a Harvard professor of religious studies, documents the philosophical debates between Buddhist thinker Ratnakirti and his Hindu adversaries, the Nyaya school, over the existence of a Creator deity named Isvara. Patil expands this issue into a broader discussion of Buddhist epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Much of this book was highly inaccessible and technical, and I skimmed much of it. But what I skimmed was illuminating.

The Nyayas' argument for the existence of a Creator should be familiar to anyone read in Western religion. In effect, it is a blending of the argument from design and the cosmological argument. Every effect has a cause, and for a complex object/effect, that cause must be intelligent. Just as a pot (a la William Paley's watch) has a cause, so must the earth, and that cause must be intelligent. Just as the argument parallels Western critiques, so do the objections. The design argument only proves a deity who is a creator, not an all-knowing or all-powerful one. Its analogy between a universe and a pot fails; we have seen pots created so we can infer that any pot we encounter is created, but we have not seen a universe created. This analogy - the inference from "universe" to "creator" - leads into broader issues of mind, language, and knowledge, the debate Patil spends his book reconstructing.

The final chapter was the most interesting. Here Patil reflects on the value of philosophy for Buddhism. Many Buddhists eschew philosophy, citing a story from the Pali Canon (the earliest Buddhist scriptures) in which the Buddha compares abstract metaphysical questions to a man shot by a poisoned arrow (suffering/dukkha). This man refuses to have the arrow removed and poison remedy applied until he finds the name and clan of the man who shot the arrow, the type of poison on the arrow, the manufacturer of the arrow, etc. While this story is often used to demonstrate the priority of practice over detached rational reflection, Buddhists have not always seen it so. Ratnakirti sees philosophy not as an end in itself, but as a foundation for the dharma. If one is afflicted with wrong views on the nature of mind and reality, such as the view that we have eternal souls, the dharma cannot be heard. Philosophical argument can convince us of the reality of agelessness, a reality which we can then internalize and embody through practice. Philosophy leads us to the dharma but does not replace it. This is similar to the traditional Thomistic conception of philosophy, or natural theology. Once we become aware of the truth of God's existence, revealed theology or faith can step in.

Still, from a historical perspective, I can't help but think that Buddhist philosophy emerged as a form of competition. Hindus had elaborate schools of philosophy. Perhaps Buddhists looked unintelligent without any. Hence Buddhist philosophy. Patil is immensely learned, but skimming the first and last chapter of this book gave me all I need. But then again, I'm not versed in Sanskrit or Indian philosophy.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

I listened to this because it was short and I needed something to listen to. I can't say I was that impressed. Perhaps the story has lots its originality. It has worked its way into pop culture so much that I already knew the ending. I get the feeling that there are supposed to be some deep reflections on the shadow side of human nature, but I did not catch them.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde



Wilde's novel confronts many of the same issues as Stevenson's. But it does so so much more artfully. I first read Dorian Grey as a senior in high school, and five years later have forgotten so much of it that it was a rather new experience to me. For those of you living under a rock, this sole novel of Oscar Wilde's focuses on the intertwined lives of three high society British men and the aftermath of a fated portrait sitting.

I still enjoy the poised banter of Wilde's characters and his ability to create tension and suspense in a scene. But in high school I did not catch the deep philosophical reflection in the book. Wilde provoked me to ponder Dorian Grey's moral logic throughout the book, good and bad. Grey is one of those characters you want to change, but his sin makes for such good reading that you are glad you can't change him. And let's not even mention the homoerotic overtones - didn't catch those in high school either.

I loved Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey and I agree with you it is not a book to read when you are still in high school.

I'm embarrassed to say I've never read either of these, even though I've been happily alluding to both for decades!

> 138

There was one good result. I did some mock photoshoots of female friends (and the school librarian) reading Wilde. I titled it "Girls Gone Wilde," which is far more captivating than what it makes fun of.

You remind me of another classic I would like to but haven't read - A Picture of Dorian Gray (I can like without ready Jekyll and Hyde).

Going back to Against a Hindu God, the topic sounds interesting. I don't know much about Hinduism or Budhism, but I'm assuming there is some relationship and curious about it.

> 141

It's like Christianity and Judaism - one grew out of and in opposition to the other, while appropriating some of its central terms and concepts and redefining them in terms of its own system.

Islam by Ismail al Faruqi

I had to read this because it was assigned for my Islam class this fall. I can understand why. It is a perfect example of how not to do religious studies. Al Faruqi, late professor of Islamic Studies at Temple University, purports to write a description of Islam from the Muslim point of view. But he mixes his own Wahhabi point of view with descriptions of "what Islam is really like," such as when he slams the Sufis for basically ruining Islamic civilization. I also had a hard time telling if the book was supposed to be a scholarly description or an advertisement for Islam. All too often he sings the praises of Islam and doesn't touch on any of its history of violence, empire, and sexism. I just can't recommend this as a decent scholarly source.

I hope you are right in your contention that it is an example of how not to do religious studies.

You are covering many religions lately.

#142 - I'm intrigued by this post.

> 145

I am too, Daniel. I wish I knew more about Judaism so I could really look at the parallel development of the two. Sadly biblical scholars tend to lose awareness of Judaism after about the first or second century! lol!

Great Courses: World Philosophy by Kathleen Higgins

In these lectures on world philosophy, Higgins seeks to cover the major bodies of thought of various world cultures. From Kenya to Korea, from the Aztecs to Asia, she covers vast ranges of geography and time. I really enjoyed the way she brought together many different traditions we often do not hear even exist. She begins the course with Western philosophy and the categories and questions laid down by Greek thinkers, then moves into African thought, pre- and post-colonial Latin American thought, and ends in Asia where she covers the philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Her hope is that philosophy broadens out of being just a Western affair, that we can learn from the wisdom of other world traditions.

My favorite part of this course was her discussion of African and Latin American thought. She spends one lecture on the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Their traditional, pre-Christian thought goes in directions very foreign to the West: a cyclical notion of time, an emphasis on change over stasis, and the worship of God's intermediaries (polytheism) rather than God directly. Unlike Christian notions of time, which tend to be linear culminating in an apocalypse, Yoruba - and Mayan - concepts of time are cyclical. For the Mayans, there is an apocalyptic end, but it only marks a new beginning, and there have been several of them. And the Yoruba's emphasis on change gives them an affinity with the Taoists, who also see change as more fundamental to reality than Platonic stasis. All of these vastly different notions can help the Platonic or Aristotelian Western thinker to see how different frameworks of philosophy play out. Higgins does a good job with these.

I also enjoyed her discussion of what philosophy is. However, this is also where her discussion was incomplete. She discussed the problem of philosophy in premodern societies. Are a culture's oral traditions or folk/religious beliefs to be considered philosophy? Must philosophy be oral? On the one hand, some argue that oral folk beliefs constitute a form of philosophy, and the idea that philosophy must be written is ethnocentric. Others argue that philosophy requires critical reflection and a level of precision that can only be reached with written thought. I tend to agree with the latter. So the Yoruba 'philosophy' described above is no such thing. Philosophy, to be differentiated from myth and religion, must also involve rational criticism apart from appeals to revelation or tradition. There must also be differing opinions or schools of thought.

That said, what about the distinction between philosophy and religion? Higgins discusses the philosophical schools of Eastern religions, but ignores those in the Abrahamic faiths. This is too bad. For example, most philosophers agree Aquinas is in their field. What about Augustine? What about Ecclesiastes? In Jewish thought, Maimonides is clearly a philosopher, but is the Talmud a philosophical text? Since Jewish and Islamic thought are seldom taught in American philosophy departments, they seem like they should have been a part of this course.

Overall, I enjoyed this course, although her lectures on Indian thought were hard to follow. I'm especially curious to follow up on Mayan philosophy, which I had never heard of.



A statue of Confucius.



Shankara, great teacher of the Indian Advaita Vedanta school.

Catching up!

Altered Egos sounds really interesting. All those mental disorders are pretty intriguing. Scrubs did a show where they had a character with "Cotard's" - the guy thought he was dead.

My son wanted very badly to read Jekyll and Hyde but when he finally got around to it said it was boring.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray has been on my wishlist for a long time.

Am always interested in your religious/philosophical reads (or listens).
I should start taking notes!

Don't take too many notes - you might become pedantic like me! :P

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found Jekyll and Hyde dull.

Interesting about Yoruba and Mayan outlooks - whether they fall into a definition of philosophy or not.

Goodness, I don't sense anything pedantic on your thread. I sense a joy of learning.

A fascinating review and discussion on the nature of philosophy. I tend to agree with you that "philosophy" is used too broadly in this case. I think of philosophy as the application of the scientific method to the phenomena of ideas just as science is its application to the phenomena of nature. It can certainly include religious assumptions, but the methodology is based on logic, not faith or tradition. I think the various cultures' myths of origin are better described as cosmogony than philosophy. But I can understand why they wouldn't have wanted to title the course "World Cosmogony."

> 151

Definitely agree! I don't think it's ethnocentric to say that certain people don't do philosophy. To me it's the same as saying that some groups don't have writing, or don't have chairs.

I'm glad you enjoy what I write. I try to put images in to spice it up!

Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages, ed. by John Kaltner and Steven L McKenzie

I had seen this book for some time in the library, but never got around to reading it until now. Kaltner and McKenzie have edited a very useful little book about Hebrew and its cognate languages, giving overviews of their history, grammar, corpus, and use for Biblical scholars.


(A Hebrew text from the Dead Sea Scrolls.)

Semitic languages are most clearly known by their grammatical gender (with no neuters as in Latin and Greek), their verb-subject-object word order, and their verbal system of perfect-imperfect verbs. All of them have been tremendously useful for biblical scholars in identifying hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the Hebrew Bible. There are at least 1,000 of these, especially in texts like Isaiah and Job. By looking at cognate words in other Semitic languages, scholars can get clues to what these hapax mean.

A list of Semitic languages is a list of mighty empires: Akkadian, Ugaritic, Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and so on. Sadly, only the latter three are still living, and Aramaic will likely be a dead language within decades.


(Before there was Biblical Hebrew script, there was Paleo-Hebrew, known only in inscriptions.)

These languages are also a window into the forms of literature of the Hebrew Bible. For example, we have Akkadian and Egyptian wisdom literature. One Egyptian wisdom text appears to have been copied into the Book of Proverbs. In Akkadian and Ugaritic we have myths of a great flood and of the universe's creation. Studying these can tell us both how similar and how different the Hebrews were from their neighbors.


(Part of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Ugaritic cuneiform.)

I really enjoyed skimming through this book. It gives extensive bibliographies for each language should the reader want to start learning. Personally, having done Hebrew only, the next logical step is Aramaic. But Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Akkadian look pretty tempting too.


(A fragment from the Code of Hammurabi, written in Akkadian.)

Nice pics. translations please.

Completely fascinating about the languages, and love the pictures. (Very funny, Barry!) Also thought-provoking about philosophy, something that, as I've mentioned before, I wish I knew more about.

The Era of the Crusades (Great Courses lectures) by Kenneth W. Harl

Eighteen hours of lectures on the Crusades in all their glory and folly. I was halfway convinced before, but now that I have listened to these lectures I am positive that the Crusades were one of the stupidest periods in European history.

Harl is a highly detailed lecturer. It was very hard to follow along with all the names and battles and kingdoms, but if you let your mind skim over those you still get a useful overall framework of these holy wars, from the highly successful First Crusade to the total flop Fourth Crusade.

I tend to like cultural history more, so I especially enjoyed listening to how the Crusades gave impetus to literature in Europe such as the Song of Roland. There was even a certain amount of cultural exchange between the Bynzantines and the Latin Christian West. Sadly there was little exchange with the Muslims, who were too busy being attacked and vilified to share their intellectual or artistic traditions with Europe.

Of course, what do we do with the Crusades now? Harl describes how the Crusades laid foundations for later European colonialism. But he is a historian, not a theologian, so he ignores the more vexing question of how Christians and Muslims today can acknowledge their shared past of vilification and violence. What can we learn from the past centuries of Islamophobia to apply now? How does contemporary Islamophobia draw on its past just as twentieth-century anti-Semitism drew on centuries of Jew-hatred?

In an essay I read only yesterday, it was suggested that the international Jihadists, estimated at some 40,000 "rebels" ("warriors") who have congregated in Syria from all over Europe and several former Soviet states, are a kind of Muslim crusade.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Somehow I never was assigned this book in middle school or junior high. I stumbled across the audiobook of it at the library and thought I'd check it out. I'm glad I did. While much of what Anne Frank describes is what it's like to be a young teenager - I'm a little old for that - it was fascinating to get a glimpse into the suffering of being hidden from the Nazis.

Anne Frank chides herself for complaining. She tells her diary that she should be thankful she is not in a concentration camp. But her descriptions of daily life in cramped living quarters with several other people wore on me. Living with some of these people, such as the insufferable Mrs. van Daan, for a day or two would be enough. But living with them for two years, unable to get any personal space or go outside? It reminds me of Sartre's play No Exit, where hell is being confined with people you dislike for all eternity.


(The secret door to Anne Frank's quarters.)

But Frank buoys through it with her optimism and hope. At times she is silly, childish, but she is also wise beyond her years and sharp in her awareness of others' follies. I felt privileged to be let in on her private thoughts. Frank wrote that she wished to be a writer and publish something the world would read. She got her wish.

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road by Johan Elverskog

This fall I am doing a directed reading course on the history of Buddhist interactions with other religions. To get a head start on the reading, I got through this, the only book I could find on the history of Buddhist-Islam interaction. Elverskog starts with the 2001 destruction of the 175-foot Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan by the Taliban.



After all, the Qur'an does enjoin followers of Allah to destroy false idols, as do the Hebrew scriptures. But this site of two Buddha statues was not just a false idol. They were a key historical landmark, a testament to a time when Islam was not the only major religion in Afghanistan.



Yet since the sixth century, these Buddhas stood, undestroyed. If, as the standard Western narrative goes, Muslims are all primitive smashers of history, why were they not destroyed long ago? Elverskog seeks to unearth that history, the history that the Taliban in their absolutist craze wish to erase. He elucidates the connections between Islam and Buddhism in their foundations and in their interactions among the Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, and other groups from the last few centuries of the first millennium to the Qing dynasty in China (1644-1911). Because of the dearth of Buddhist sources, much of this story is told through Muslim eyes. And while those sources do at times promote jihad and cast Buddhists as wicked idolaters, Elverskog traces other time periods where Buddhists and Muslims coexisted and seemed to have strong awareness of the other's religion. Here I will not try to review everything, but I will trace a few interesting themes and ask some questions at the end.

Buddhism and Islam already share some common ground, Elverskog contends, because they were founded in much the same situation. Muhammad and Gotama Buddha were born into worlds of political fragmentation and economic change. New forms of trade were growing in their lifetimes, along with a shift to a more money-based economy. Buddhism and Islam responded to these realities with teachings that pragmatically allowed the use of money while providing directives on its right use. In the Islamic umma and in the Buddhist rejection of the caste system, both were egalitarian and universal rather than tribal, and both appealed more to urban dwellers, particularly merchants. Muhammad is traditionally considered a merchant.

Fast forward to the eighth century. One of the most influential families under the Abbasid califate in Baghdad, they had converted to Islam after a lengthy family history of Buddhist patronage. Most importantly, they sent a man named Yahya ibn Khalid to India to write a description of the land. Khalid's source is the first Muslim writing on Buddhism, and it is surprisingly very accurate in its chronicles of Buddhist pilgrimage, statues, and the beginnings of the tantric tradition. Despite his painting the Buddhists as idolaters, some elite Muslims found this religion of the East quite fascinating.

But once the Barmakids fell, a cultural split began between Buddhists and Muslims. There was more trade but less cultural interaction. It was in this climate that we have the first visual depictions of people in Islam. Traditionally, Islam is and was iconoclastic, spurning all representations of the human form in art. But once Buddhists were out of their daily life, the alluring Buddha statues became not idols to a false god but simply statues. Muslim artists imitated, taking the Buddhist practice of using art as a tool for teaching doctrine, especially under the Mongols. This is one real example of cultural exchange, even if it took place at a time when Buddhists were not in close contact with Muslims.

Despite the violent beliefs of the Taliban, under the Mongols Buddhists and Muslims came back together and coexisted quite well. The Mongols were wise, and patronized both religions. Not having to compete for patronage or power, they got along in the "pax Mongolica." A famous Persian historian, Rashid al-Din, included descriptions of Buddhism in his massive history ofd the world. Al-Din patterns Buddhism on Muslim terms, focusing on heaven and hell and describing the Buddha as a prophet with a book to make him credible to Muslims. Alas, this idyll ended once the Mongols began to favor Buddhism. Muslims moved back west, to the Middle East, while Buddhists moved east to the "Tantric bloc" of Tibet and north India. Unlike the Mongols, Muslims and Buddhists began forging theocracies in Afghanistan and Tibet.


(A statue of Rashid al-Din in Iran.)

For one last time, Buddhists and Muslims came together again in China under the Manchu Qing dynasty. It was a sad sight. Muslims were considered barbaric because their method of slaughtering meat was considered disgusting. Muslims, under halal dietary rules, cannot eat blood, and must slit the animal by the through and let the blood drain. Buddhists in China slaughtered the animal in a way that left the blood in. This was one factor that made Muslims a discriminated against people in China, and under increasingly harsh legislation they left. But one Mongolian scholar, Injannishi, thought differently. Injannishi wrote a treatise on ritual, explaining that the rituals of every culture have a purpose. So while the Muslim ritual may seem strange, it makes sense in their cultural context. He began with the Confucian premise of human nature being basically good, so any rituals that humans devise to make society function come from that basic goodness.

Injannishi's viewpoint survived. It now lives on in cultural relativism and cosmopolitanism. But the intolerant arm has survived too. Elverskog shows that both rhetorics, tolerance and intolerance, exist in Buddhism and Islam. Contrary to the Taliban, to Islamophobes, and to Westerners who idealize Buddhism, neither religion has always been one or the other.

History brings out those dual identities. What I see in Elverskog's book is a collection of contexts that made for different rhetorics to be employed. When you have equal treatment of religions, as under the Mongolians and as in the USA, you have little religious conflict. This situations allow for curiosity about the other, as shown by Yahya ibn Khalid and the Buddhist influence on Muslim art (with some caveats).

One of the barriers to religious understanding is each religion's rhetoric about others. Religions define themselves as unique in some way and pattern other religions on that basis. For example: Muslims are absolute monotheists, in contrast to Christians who are not because of the polytheistic Trinity. In this case, Muslims saw Buddhists as idolaters. Buddhists were disgusted by Islamic animal sacrifice. Buddhists developed forms of religious rhetoric that were hardly congenial to understanding the other, such as apocalyptic writings with their strong duality of good and evil.

So for me, Elverskog's main lesson is that history is one important determinant of what kind of theology is employed. The trick is creating conditions that foster peace.

I'm a little horrified by how long and rambling that review was. Oh well. It was hard to write given I know so little about Central Asia and the Middle East.

>156 JDHomrighausen: "... the Crusades were one of the stupidest periods in European history." LOL!

>158 JDHomrighausen: Hard to believe that you managed to get through junior high and high school without having to read the Ann Frank book! I recently read an article about all the legal wrangling that went on when the book was first published.

>159 JDHomrighausen: Not rambling, informative. That Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Thanks for sharing the pic. How sad that it is no more. :(

Thank you for that "long and rambling" review! It was most informative on a subject I previously knew nothing about. Just the idea of the Mongols as peacemakers is quite novel.

You could have kept going with that review, very interesting.

Interesting to read your response to Anne Frank. I also read her diary as an adult (in 2001, I was 28.) It had a strong affect on me.

Re 156 - I've been reading about the Albigensian Crusade, but haven't yet figured out if and how that fits in with the Middle East invasions.

#153 - love those pictures. Is it my imagination, or does the paleo-Hebrew look a bit like Greek.

Love your linguistic comparisons and the review of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road -- the interactions between East and West via the Silk Road are utterly fascinating. The 2nd c. Indian Emperor Asoka, who converted to Buddhism after the Battle of Kalinga, was a great proselytizer and sent Buddhist missionaries westward as far as Antioch. Of, this was before Islam was even born.


Central Asian and East Asian monk in Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezeklik

163> Dan -- the Albigensian Crusade was an internal European Crusade against the Cathars in Southern France, who practiced a kind of Gnostic Christianity. It didn't really have much to do with Middle East invasions except that it was a part of the RC Church's push to stamp out any kind of heresy or belief that varied from the strict Orthodoxy of the church. It was much more a part of the Inquisition than the Crusades. Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error is probably the best book in (translated) English on it.

> 164

Jane, always handy to have a medievalist around... I am taking a course on the Crusades this fall, so this is all good preparation. I hope to find out what (if any) cultural interaction between Islam and Christianity was spawned by those massive mistakes.

BTW, thank you for beautifying my thread!

As for everyone else, I am glad you enjoyed my review! It took me forever to write. After reading Anne Frank I am about 60 pages into Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, another memoir about the Dutch living under Nazi occupation. While Frank was hidden, ten Boom and her family were Christians who hid Jews. For their heroism they were captured and rewarded with a trip to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Ten Boom survived and spent the rest of her life helping Holocaust survivors and traveling the world preach about God's forgiveness.

>165 JDHomrighausen: There were some very brave people during that war, weren't there.

> 163

Dan, from what I understand in Joel Hoffman's In The Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, both Hebrew and Greek alphabets came from the Phoenician script. So your intuition is not groundless, although I must admit, I don't see it.

>165 JDHomrighausen: My grandmother put The Hiding Place into my hands when I was around 13 or so. It had a deep and very lasting impact on my faith.

> 166

That or the anonymous cowards aren't worth writing books on, lol.

> 168

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Now I'm more excited to read it!

Www.tenboom.com/en

Went to Haarlem and missed this because it was closed. Read her book at a rough time in my life (even if they were first world problems!). Found it inspiring at the ripe age of 24.

>169 JDHomrighausen: Good point. :)

>170 mkboylan: Thanks so much for sharing that link Merrikay! I had no idea the house had been turned into a museum and I certainly wasn't expecting it to be so beautiful. (And I just had to look for the "Jesus is Victor" plaque by the fireplace!)

>169 JDHomrighausen: Can't wait to see what you think of it, Jonathan!

If you're at all interested, here's that Anne Frank article I mentioned:
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/anne-frank-america
It's a pretty lengthy article.

#164 - that Montaillou is on the wishlist, thanks for the recommendation. I was aware of inquisition aspects (and the location, but did not fully grasp the gnostic links), which confused me because I associate the inquisition with 1492 (and Mel Brooks in History of the World Part I)

#167 - well, maybe too much imagination, but I see Phis and thetas and deltas (lowercase) and rhos...an upsidedown pi.

Fascinating stuff on Ten Boom.

> 172

That was a very good article. I especially liked this part:

If Anne and the others in hiding could not shut out the threat or banish the fear for a moment, and a careful reading of the diary shows they could not, the reader, thanks to Anne’s skillful rendering of mundane affairs and churning emotions, can. Otto Frank always claimed that “Anne’s book is not a war book. War is the background.”

Like the author, I too had the sense that things were more maddening and frustrating than Anne Frank wrote them out to be. I got the sense she sometimes put on a smile for her diary, if only to focus on the positive to preserve her own sanity. Several times when she starts to bemoan her state, she stops and tells herself to be thankful she is alive.

Also, perhaps this sounds uncharitable of me, but Charlotte Pfeffer suing for defamation over her husband is just silly. Anyone who has spent five minutes with adolescents knows that they can be highly critical of adults. Of course we should take Frank's biting criticism of Mr. Pfeffer and Mrs. van Daan with a grain of salt; she was at a stage of life when adult imperfections are particularly acute.

But Charlotte Pfeffer's grievance was multiplied by the fact that the book was made into a play, with all the attending interpretation required. Frankly (haha) I think they shouldn't have made the play. Usually, when a play is made of a recent book, the author is alive to ensure that the adaptation is true to the original. Much better, I think, to get Frank's voice herself. It's not like this is a lengthy or cognitively difficult (it is emotionally difficult!) book to read.

It is always a tragedy when one religious group or nation tries to destroy evidence of their history and the destruction of the Bamiyan statues certainly hit the news headlines in the West and perhaps that was the point.

I have seen the Bamiyan statues and in fact stood on the head of the larger of the two back in the 1970's and so it is sad to realise that they are no longer there.

Greatly enjoyed your review of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

I too enjoyed your review of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road; thought-provoking as always. Great illustrations too.

Christian Hermit in an Islamic World: A Muslim's View of Charles De Foucauld by Ali Merad



Charles de Foucauld was a French military officer and playboy who, in the 1880s, experienced a dramatic religious conversion while serving in Algeria. He went on to become a hermit in the desert, adopting a life of strict asceticism and serving as a peace-maker among the remote Tuareg people. Although many books have been written about him celebrating his Christian witness, Merad wanted to examine him from the more problematic viewpoint of Muslims in Algeria.

The Muslim problem with Foucauld is not that he is charitable. He lives the life any Christian should: a life of deep gentleness, humility, faith, and charity. Muslims have great respect for Jesus as a venerated prophet, and Merad respects Foucauld as a genuine follower of the Christ. Foucauld was also a different kind of holy man from the marabouts, wandering Islamic holy men who use their spiritual status and power to distance themselves from people and avoid physical labor. This "Christian marabout" did not see labor as beneath him, but labored just as the people he lived around did.

However, Foucauld was French in French-occupied Algeria. No matter how ascetic, how withdrawn from society Foucauld was, the fact remains that he was part of the colonizer. He was not interested in interreligious understanding. He saw Islam as a corrupt religion, and eagerly desired to convert the Muslims to Christ. This tension between his genuine human concern and the structures he was a part of forms Merad's book.

Foucauld supported colonialism, but wanted it to be human and compassionate. He writes in a letter to a friend, "It is necessary for the whole country to be covered with monks, nuns, and good Christians remaining in the world to make contact with these poor Muslims, to draw them in gently, to educate and civilize them, and finally, when they are men, to make them Christians." His condescension here is obvious. As Muslims they are neither civilized nor yet men. Yet in Foucauld's ethnocentric framework, he is taking a very compassionate stance: do not exploit the Algerians, do not harm them, but help them develop into a better people. Such a system of mass education was clearly not what the colonial authorities wanted to hear. They respected him but ignored his utopian vision of just human relations for Algeria.


Foucauld's hermitage in the desert.

But this ethnocentric view also made the Muslims keep their distance from him. If he was too sympathetic to the Muslims to be taken seriously by the colonizers, he was too French and too Christian to be trusted by the Muslims. Foucauld's quandary brings to mind Bartholome de las Casas, that Dominican priest in the Americas who supported colonialism but became a thorn in the side of Europe by chronicling colonial brutality. It also brings to mind my professor Gerald McKevitt's book Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West. Jesuits in the American West operated schools for Native Americans that both Christianized them and separated them from native ways of life and tried to preserve their culture's traditions of language and arts. Rather than being wholly good or wholly bad, Foucauld, de las Casas, and these nineteenth-century Jesuits were being compassionate toward people within a framework of disrespecting their culture and religion.

The book ends with a fascinating translator's afterward exploring what Merad's book can tell us about contemporary Christian-Muslim dialogue. The gist of it is that Christians should be more aware of the background to that dialogue. For example, there could have been no such thing as Christian-Muslim dialogue in colonial Algeria, because no dialogue can leave behind the power relations between Christians and Muslims at the time. Even now, he argues, interfaith dialogue is often cast in terms set by Christians. Certain presuppositions that the Christians come to the table with, such as the idea that one should completely set aside one's beliefs to understand another's, might be rejected by Muslims. Intellectual tools that Christians have become used to, such as historical-critical method, might also be rejected by Muslims. Rather than focusing on dialogue, we can do what Foucauld did best: focus on friendship.


Foucauld with an Algerian friend.

>176 baswood:

How did you get up there??

There were stairs cut into the rock leading up behind the statue.

Excellent review of Christian Hermit in an Islamic World

Thank you!

Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America by Gustav Niebuhr

"I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and go still further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the spirit with which to affirm it." - Thomas Merton

In his 200-page journalistic exploration of the interfaith movement in America, Niebuhr spurns the word "tolerance." Tolerance, he writes is a legal term enjoining citizens to merely not blow up the temples of their religious neighbors. Niebuhr's book, which has him interviewing scores of different religious leaders around the country, calls instead for a different set of virtues: hospitality, celebration, compassionate disagreement, education, respecting, commonalizing.


John Paul II embracing Rabbi Elio Toaff during his synagogue visit in 1986. JP II was the first pope to visit a synagogue. JP II, who went to seminary clandestinely in hiding from the Nazis, was a great role model in Christian-Jewish reconciliation and repentance from the anti-Semitism that led to the Shoah.

In my religious studies department, professors tell me that 9/11 caused a surge of majors for our department. After 9/11, people were just very curious about religion and its role in the world. It's easy to remember the Sikh temple bombings and the Islamophobia that took over slime Americans after 9/11. But Niebuhr finds that 9/11, rather than dividing religious groups in America, brought many of them together. Christian churches helped rebuild that Sikh temple, and non-Muslims also volunteered to stand watch at a Muslim elementary school to make the kids feel safe from any attacks.


Tibetan Buddhist monks inside a …. Catholic church?!? This is part of the annual Festival of Faiths hosted by the Catholic cathedral in Louisville, KY.

What makes this possible, Niebuhr writes, is that we share a common life. If the local synagogue is bombed, we don't just lose a building representing a part of American civic life. We are left with hurt and scared people - hurt and scared people who work with us, shop with us, live next door to us. We are interdependent with members of other religious traditions. Regardless of different dogmas, we all have a common interest in creating communities and cities we want to live in.

"A conversation is not the coordination of actions of different individuals, but a common action in this strong, irreducible sense: it is out action. It is of a kind with - to take a more common example - the dance of a group or a couple … Opening a conversation is inaugurating a common action." - Charles Taylor

I really enjoyed Niebuhr's book. He has put his finger on something important, and he has helped to draw out some broad trends in the decentralized interfaith movement. He doesn't provide statistics, but he provides visits to churches and synagogues, interviews with imams, reports from large interfaith gatherings. I only wish that he, as a descendent of some of the most famous religious thinkers of the last century, would have described a little bit more of his own background going into this book.

"Dialogue is in art. It is not the choice of the fearful, of those who give way without fighting … Dialogue challenges all men and women to see the best in others and to be rooted in the best of themselves." - Imam Sayid Hassan al-Qazwini, leader of the large Muslim community of Dearborn, MI


The Reform synagogue in Falmouth, MA. Look odd? It should. This centuries-old building used to be a Congregationalist church. In the 1970s, unable to keep up old buildings with membership decline, they donated it to a local Jewish group looking to build a synagogue. Niebuhr argues that this kind of affirmation goes beyond mere "tolerance."

Love this review and this perspective -- so wonderful to see those of differing perspectives embrace each other.

That review was such a pleasure to read. Thanks.

Excellent review of Beyond Tolerance.
I'm going to have to go look up "Festival of Faiths" in Louisville.
Very cool.

By the way, I've started re-reading The Hiding Place.
How is your reading of it going?

Always interesting here but that is a particularly inspiring review. My sense is to see your own values within the ideas and quotes in your review.

I thoroughly enjoyed your review of Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith understanding in America

I agree with Dan that it was an inspiring review, of an inspiring book, especially because I recently heard a particularly depressing interview on my local public radio station with an author, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen who has just written a book, The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (which doesn't touchstone), about the global spread of anti-Semitism among millions of people who have never met anyone Jewish in their life. Here is a link to it.

Thank you for your commentary, everyone.

Rebecca, you're right that it is easy to despair. The genius of America is that we encounter far too many people of other religions on a daily basis to maintain nonsensical dogmas about them. This is especially true here in the SF Bay Area, where I count amount my friends and acquaintances a neo-pagan, a Muslim, a Jew, a few Buddhists, etc. It is much like homosexuality - it's easier to preach that they will rot in hell when you can't count any among family, friends, or co-workers (which is pretty hard where I live).

Unfortunately geography is a dividing factor. Since both of us live in highly diverse cosmopolitans, it's easy for us to see that daily contact. But Niebuhr writes about religious diversity in places we would not expect to see. I mean, a Festival of Faiths in Kentucky? Last time I was in Atlanta, the Hindu temple was under construction.



So Niebuhr and I remain optimistic. But I might think differently were I born and raised in small-town Iowa as was my great-grandfather. I also might think different were I from a part of the world where theocracy was the norm and everyone around me believed the same thing. In high school we watched a documentary in which israeli and Palestinian children were brought together to play. Over a span of some months, they forged close friendships amidst frightened parents and cameras. The children began to question some of the lies they had been told about each other's culture. But when the filmmakers followed up a few years later, the now-teens went back to the same hatred as before. The forces of evil are strong. :(

what a fabulous building.

The genius of America is that we encounter far too many people of other religions on a daily basis to maintain nonsensical dogmas about them.

I wish I could agree with you about that, and I live in New York City where estimates of the number of languages spoken run upwards of 200 and where it is common to see people from all over the world on the street. (When returning to NYC from an airport elsewhere in the country, I always feel more comfortable when I get to the gate for the NY flight because there's such a diversity of people.) But even here, there is discrimination, and there was a bitter fight over the idea of building an Islamic center downtown (incorrectly, but inflammatorily, described as "the mosque at the World Trade Center site"). The Center was not built.

I think we get a distorted view of the diversity of the US when we live in the cosmopolitan cities on the coasts.

The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000 (Open Yale Courses) by Paul H. Freedman

As a classics major, history pretty much ends after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 400s. Freedman's class fills in that gap. Freedman, a Yale historian, covers the cultural and dynastic history of the Byzantines, the early Islamic empire, the Frankish "barbarians" who conquered Rome, and some minor outbacks such as Britain and Ireland. I really enjoyed his lectures and would be happy to listen to this again.


The Church of St. Martin in Canterbury, England. Built in the sixth century, St. Martin's is the oldest parish church in England.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

"There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

Just as avidmom said it would be, this book was amazing. Corrie ten Boom was a Jew-hider in the occupied Netherlands in World War II. The secret compartment build into her third-story bedroom was so seamlessly constructed that Nazis who raided their house and arrested the entire family could not find it. Ten Boom, who by wartime was a middle-aged spinster daughter of a respected watchmaker, endured the depravities of Nazi prisons and the Ravensbruck concentration camp with her sister. Her sister died in the camp.

Ten Boom built a home after the war for survivors of concentration camps who needed space to recover from their trauma. She even opened her home to former Dutch Nazi-supporters who were shunned and berated after the war. She found that only those who could forgive the Nazis were able to find peace.

Until her death at age 91, ten Boom traveled the world preaching and writing about God's forgiveness. She may seem like an incredibly pious woman but in the book she constantly makes the point that her sister was her real role model in holiness. She could find God in anything. When the ten Booms got to Ravensbruck, the flea epidemic in the dorms disgusted Corrie. Her sister said to thank God for the fleas. Months later, they found that guards refused to go into the dorms because of the fleas, making it safe for Corrie and her sister to lead forbidden Bible studies and prayer groups without being caught.


Ravensbruck, the concentration camp only for women where the Ten Boom sisters stayed.

Dharma Punx by Noah Levine



At 17, Noah Levine was a mess. A drug addict and minor felon, he was in juvenile hall again. It was then that his father suggested he meditate to escape from his shame about his past and fear about his future. Levine's book is a memoir of how he went from an angry and rebellious punk rocker to founder of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. It's a quintessential American story, an example of how the Dharma looks in the context of Western phenomena like punk rocking. Levine sees the same thread in Buddhism and punk culture, both of which are dissatisfied by the mainstream and seek to change. But the punk culture of his youth wants to change it with anger and violence, while the Buddha wants to change it with mindful compassion. Levine is also an example of the frequent mixture of Buddhism and 12-Step, which was hard for him to accept because of its teachings on a Higher Power. It was a great read, and it was very sad to see how many of Noah's young punk friends died of drugs or suicide.

This book got several bad reviews here and on Amazon, largely because many reviewers felt the book was self-absorbed. What business did Levine have being an angry and disaffected youth when he grew up in financial stability and with a father who was one of the pre-eminent American Buddhist teachers of his generation? These criticisms are rather asinine. Levine bounced around between his divorced parents several times during his childhood, and he describes his mom's string of angry, violent boyfriends quite clearly. (I got the sense that there was more to his mom but he didn't want to shame her too much.) Middle class and even rich kids can have emotional trauma too. If Levine really was entitled, he would not have been in juvenile hall in the first place. Other reviewers say he talks about himself too much. Well, this is a memoir...

Beowulf, trans. Benedict Flynn

I first read Beowulf in 2012 and loved it. This translation, made specifically for the Naxos audiobook, captures beautiful assonance and alliteration. This time when I read it I noticed the interplay of Christian and pagan; it seems that Beowulf and the Gaets were Christianized while the kingdom infested by the beast was not. (This is something to look at more deeply when I read Beowulf for my early medieval literature class this fall.)

This is a question for those who have read the book. (SPOILER ALERT!) At the end of the story, is Beowulf supposed to look brave for attacking the dragon or foolish for doing so, emasculated for not being able to finish him off? I could not tell if this is a cautionary tale against being too courageous in old age or a valorizing account of the man.


There was a movie but it looked cheesy. This is illustrator John Howe for the Beowulf boardgame (I kid you not).

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens


Hitchens, with the cause of his esophageal cancer.

After reading Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, I had figured that I could pass over Hitchens, the fourth of the four horsemen of the "New Atheist" apocalypse. I'm glad I didn't. Mortality is a short and powerful chronicle of Hitchens' death by cancer. Hitchens does not have a deathbed conversion as some had hoped. He keeps up his bombastic indignance to the end, finding fault with the be-happy brigade of tumor land and the devout who both pray for his death and his conversion. He does not shy away from the million little pains of cancer, from losing his hair (tolerable) to losing his voice (terrible). He hoped he would finish the book, but instead the last chapter is merely a collection of notes.

A friend of mine died of cancer last November, and this book brought up some of the sadness I felt. But it gave me a window into some of her experience - although few (if any) cancer patients would have the Hitchens' personality, his lens to look at cancer through. And as much as I disagree with him on religion - he wrote God is Not Great and an expose of Mother Teresa - he is an excellent wordsmith.


A later photo.

193> re Beowulf -- skip the movie, it's dreadful. I think the ending of the epic is meant to be ambiguous. The Christian overlay in the epic is really post the era depicted in the poem, but certainly emphasizes the ubi sunt theme.

That was all very, very interesting and quite a mixture of different stuff!
Glad you liked The Hiding Place.

I'm with you on Dharma Punx. Perhaps we don't judge it so harshly because we are aware of his youth and now growth. It is a great entry into Buddhism for young Punks and I think he is doing good work. Have been to a couple of retreats led by one of his friends in the book. They are all maturing. Anyone doing that many drugs would have still been stuck in the narcissistic stage of development when he wrote that. Takes a while to grow up.

I love me some Hitchens and loved Mortality. Don't necessarily agree with him all the time, and therein lies the beauty. Hope I can die as well as he did.

I'm planning on reading Beowulf soon -- I've had the Seamus Heaney translation on my TBR for a few years, and sadly it's taken his death to make me think of reading it.

And, interesting reviews, as always.

> 197

MerriKay - it's a catch-22. If he fails to describe his self-clinging, he may look good but is not telling the truth about his own faults - a big flaw for any spiritual teacher. If he does describe his self-clinging, as an ongoing dynamic of Buddhist practice, he gets slammed for being egotistical. He was pretty honest about his own delusions, and he does seem to get great joy out of serving others, whether in meditation, counseling, 12-step, or the fellow punks he was attempting to lead away from an angry and substance-addicted lifestyle.

If I want to go further with Hitchens, what would you recommend?

Rebecca, thank you! I am very excited about this early medieval literature course this fall. The professor is (I hear) quite eccentric - actually a neo-pagan, I suspect a Rosicrucian. She is also rumored to be brilliant. I do know she dislikes Heaney's translation. Apparently Heaney's translation is a bit more "loose" - the same reason some don't like Robert Fagles' Homer - but even worse because Heaney doesn't actually know Old English and made his "translation" by working with other translations.

In short, I don't doubt the beauty of Heaney's translation, but I am now aware that its accuracy and fidelity are in question.

The Heaney translation is quite wonderful -- but it does have some weird celtic aspects to it.

Care to elaborate, Jane?

Or, do other medievalists share my professor's reservations, or is she idiosyncratic?

She has assigned two translations of Beowulf - those by Howell D. Chickering, Jr. and Constance B. Hieatt.

>

As it happens, I just finished reading Mortality yesterday. Very much like a modern memento mori.

Grown up at a mere 35 km from Haarlem (in the Netherlands), regularly visiting relatives in that city, and probably having walked by numerous times, still, as a Dutch university student in my Twenties, I had never heard of Corrie ten Boom or the history of her house and her activities during World War II until 1988, when German friends took me there, because they had heard about Corrie ten Boom and wanted to see the museum.

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward



In this fast-paced book, Bernstein and Woodward, at the time reporters for the Washington Post, describe the agonizingly slow process of breaking Watergate. Watergate happened four decades ago. But these journalists' taut writing made me feel as if it happened yesterday. As they trace the systematic campaign sabotage and illegal money-spending further up Nixon's chain of command, the effect of Watergate becomes clear. It ushered in an age of distrust between politicians and the American public. What a long way to come from the adored charisma and youth of JFK.

Watergate is easy for me to understand because I have learned much the same attitude toward political life. Coming of age during the Iraq War (I was 11 on 9/11) in a family that did not encourage awareness of public events, I have mostly learned that politics is too complicated to understand, and if you could understand you would only find that things have been hidden from you. I checked out this book in an effort to fix my ignorance of what goes on in America. I'm glad I did.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Rarely do I deliberately nix a book partway through. But this book was so ridiculous that I had to. Carr, a technology journalist, wrote a highly-shared polemic for The Atlantic entitled "Is Google Making us Stupid?" Carr alleges that the internet, while it brings us access to information, is an intoxicant. On the internet, little immersive reading is possible. Instead we scan a page rapidly and click on the next link, addicted to the constant flow of new information while neglecting to slow down and critically ponder what we half-read. A daily habit of this reshapes our brains and destroys our attention spans until we are unable to do the slow work of reading a book. In other words, the internet is making us stupid.

I agree with Carr's basic assumption, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, that any medium of communication shapes us even as we shape it. Carr spends a chapter reviewing the evidence on neuroplasticity to demonstrate how the shaping works. But ultimately Carr seems to me like those old men who scowl and use phrases like "kids these days." Carr contrasts his present state of book reading (nil) with the days in college before the internet. Then, he reminisces, we were still a book culture, still immersed in the long thought patterns of individual authors. We were smarter then.



Carr forgets that he was not raised in the book generation, but in the TV generation. If Carr is looking for a medium that is flashy, bright, and addictive, he should have started with the TV. Or the radio. Or the newspaper. For every person who laments in 2013 that they no longer read books because the internet has ruined their attention span, there would be another in 1963 who made that lament of television, in 1923 who made that remark of radio, in 1703 who made that lament of the snappy headlines of newspapers. (I can imagine some Renaissance noble remarking on the printing press: "We used to only have two books because they were so expensive to print. Now we might have dozens! How can we handle it? Information overload!!") Clearly Carr has never heard of LibraryThing, or Goodreads, or Shelfari. Books are still with us, and by some measures we read more now than when Carr was a child. Perhaps Carr should accept his lack of book-reading as a personal failure rather than write a polemic on it.

And a polemic it is. As a journalist, Carr is trained to cover both sides of the story. Here he does not. Jonah Lehrer provides balance by pointing to evidence that the internet is making us smarter. (Carr by contrast, does not provide direct evidence, preferring to rely on anecdote.) Many people of my generation, for example, don't watch TV. We might watch 1-2 shows deliberately, but I know few people who surf the channels out of boredom. Television is a passive medium; it is intoxicating and addicting but one-way. On the internet, we can criticize, debate, blog, critique, personalize. The internet gives us more information than we can handle, but it also gives us means of handling it, such as sites like this where I can easily find my thoughts (and others') on a particular book. In one way, the digital revolution has made me a more prolific reader, because I can put books on my iPhone. Somehow, despite the Rooney-esque rants of people like Carr, we still read. And for this I am grateful.

201, 202 Very interesting about the accuracy and fidelity of the Heaney translation, but I'll probably read it anyway and maybe it will inspire me to read another version.

So interesting about your response to All the President's Men since you didn't live through Watergate, which was a formative experience for me. You are right that it completely changed the mood and perspectives of the country.

Like Rebecca I lived through Watergate. While much has been made about the sense of disillusionment, it was also a period of optimism and reassurance that an aroused public could and did bring an end to an unjust war and force a corrupt president out of office. Unfortunately the optimism and activism of the 70s gave way to the selfish materialism of the 80s and today's complacency. I wonder what would have happened if something the scope of the NSA scandal had been uncovered in 1973. In some respects Watergate pales by comparison.

I agree with your comments on the Internet versus TV and enjoyed your review. It is television, if anything, that has dumbed down society and reduced our attention spans. There's a lot that can be said, however, about the mixed quality of the information on the Internet and the need for critical reading. On the other hand, the Internet gives us instant access to all sides of an issue, where fifty years ago we might have seen only one side, so our opportunities for critical thinking are certainly greater.

Complacency is a good word for it, Steven. But I see that changing. Political science is one of the most popular majors. My generation, graduating into menial jobs and a coming-of-age in which war has been continuous, wants to know what "you people" did wrong to mess things up.

I only own a TV for video games and movies - I bought it for $40 at Salvation Army. I resent that Comcast makes me pay for cable when I really only want internet.

A couple of trivial reactions:

Time Warner sells me internet without cable teevee.

I believe that Heaney has explained his translation either in an introduction or a separate essay. I don't think he obfuscated the work.

Robert

>205 JDHomrighausen: I caught the movie of "All the President's Men" with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman a few years ago. It was a good one. :)

>206 JDHomrighausen: Enjoyed your review of the Carr book. (Love that Dilbert cartoon!) IMO, the internet and/or TV can make you more informed and smarter or less informed and dumber depending on how you use it. I've read more in the last few years thanks to LT than in years past and I've learned so much from other LTers.

Political science is one of the most popular majors.
That's interesting. My 19-year-old son is very interested in politics, not enough to major in the subject, but enough to try and keep informed on what is going on in the world. I wasn't too interested in anything but my own little world back then. But then I didn't have the internet or "The Daily Show" either.

Sometimes I think we Americans are not as complacent (although, that certainly is a valid point) as we are overwhelmed at times. I think that's what made Roosevelt during WWII so brilliant - it would have been easy for the general population to get overwhelmed and give up giving the odds, but he gave the people small, concrete things to do. Now we have to beg people to vote because they think their votes don't count; most people don't even know who their Representative in Congress is. *sigh* You can't have government by and for the people without the people!

Sorry. I wasn't planning to climb on my soapbox! Ha!

211 Interesting comments though and you look good on that soapbox.

206 especially enjoyed your review of Shallows.

BTW the only other Hitchens i have read is the Mother Teresa one which I liked but made my head explode as I said in my review. I love to watch him on youtube. Lots of good stuff there, especially his debate with his brother.

One thing about TV, pre-cable TV, is that a huge percentage of the US watched one of three channels. (they also read the same two or so local newspapers) I think this focused Americans attention on the item of the moment. A lot of people had the same political things on their mind. Of course, I was young then, so surely I'm simplifying. Anyway, with the Internet, the sense of cultural focus is very diffuse. There is a sense that each individual follows their own (limited) interests, and what once might have been big stories are only of peripheral interest.

Dan, I think there is something to that. Even on LT it is overload to try to follow everything. I follow the threads I star of people whose reading tastes I like in the reading challenge groups I belong to. I have removed myself entirely from the dramas over at Let's Talk Religion.

Speaking of LT, I agree with you, avidmom (what is your real first name?), that LT has made me a better reader. I'm always amazed how many fellow LTers have read what I have read and have some commentary. I've resigned myself to the fact that I can never tell how you guys will react to my reviews. Some that I thought were on hot topics received very few comments, while my rather lengthy and pedantic review of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road incited much chatter.

MerriKay, I wish I had seen Hitchens live. I hear he is a modern-day G.K. Chesterton - at least in style if not in opinions.

Also, Avidmom, I agree that it's about how you use the medium. Carr alleges that is merely a convenient fantasy that lets us believe we are in control of the medium, when in fact the medium exerts some control over us. I still think he just won't admit that he's gotten lax in his reading. :P

Jonathan, Lots of very interesting stuff in your reviews, as always. You prompt great discussion.

I've seen some interesting articles that state that the internet is making kids smarter and there is evidence that it is helping them learn to read. As avidmom said, it is most likely the way we use the medium.

Thanks for the great reviews....

The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness by Martha Stout

We often think of people with multiple personality disorder as raving lunatics, dramatic shifters like Sibyl and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.



Stout, a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, identifies these kind of dramatic shifts between opposite named personae as only the extreme end of a spectrum of Dissociative Identity Disorders. These can range from people who blank out mentally at a triggering stimulus to Sibyl. Her point is that by stigmatizing DID, we often do not see it in our midst, instead labeling someone as "absent minded" or as a "space cadet." But DID is neither a joke nor a rare phenomenon. Stout identifies it as a protective reaction to extreme psychological trauma, especially in childhood. She tells stories of clients who were horribly abused, including a man who had childhood memories of watching his brother beaten to death by a sadistic uncle. By creating dissociative states and identities who take the blow of the shame and trauma of abuse, the primary ego is able to remain protected and insulated. Stout is most impressed with the way in which multiples can still retain a strong sense of responsibility for the reckless and suicidal behavior of their dissociative states and identities.

Like many psychology books this one got me thinking about my own experience. My brother and I, at 13 and 8 respectively, were in a horrible car crash in which we witnessed our parents' death. In the hospital afterwards he remembered the scene while I did not. Later I remembered and he did not. Now we both remember (not that we talk about it!). Of course there is also the possibility that one of us created the memory. Stout admits this is a possibility with "repressed" memories, especially when hypnosis is involved. But then again, aren't all of our memories (especially ones central to our self-narrative) created to some extent?

It can be a little discomforting to read how unstable our egos and memories really are, but this was a fascinating book full of great stories. I especially enjoyed reading about those who were able to heal.

216 -
"I've seen some interesting articles that state that the internet is making kids smarter and there is evidence that it is helping them learn to read. As avidmom said, it is most likely the way we use the medium."

Helping them read, perhaps, but in my opinion, it's making their spelling deteriorate at amazing speed.

Or as the internet would say: "its making they're spelling suck".

> 218

How do we no theyre speling didnt suk b4??

(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

>214 JDHomrighausen: My name is Susie.

>217 JDHomrighausen: Boy, I remember being traumatized as a little kid - probably because 8-year-olds shouldn't watch such stuff - by that movie! Good *gawd*! Interesting psych. phenomenon though. So sorry about your personal experience with your family's car accident and the loss of your parents. How truly awful! It's amazing what the human mind/body will do to protect itself. (Too much physical trauma and the body shuts down, faints, goes into a coma.)

>218 lilisin: Lilisin, I've seen a few teachers create threads here on LT for their students. But I agree with you about the spelling. Spelling used to be a subject when I was in grade school. I don't think it is any longer.

>219 JDHomrighausen: My youngest introduced me to this guy on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS_zQw61PQE
YouTube commenters, on the whole, are probably not the sharpest crayons in the box. Making fun of them is kind of fun though. ;)

Susie - sorry if I made you relive your trauma by posting that photo! Hope I didn't trigger a dissociative state. :)

When I was in junior high the English teachers had made a list of the 100 words students misspelled frequently. We got quizzed on these all of seventh grade. Having been a spelling bee champion in sixth grade, I was amazed that students wrote things like "alot."

For the record, I would have gone to the state spelling bee but I misheard "biennially" as "biannually."

Also, have you seen "how is babby formed"? It makes fun of the near-illiteracy of Yahoo Answers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY

Martha Stout caught my attention with The Sociopath Next Door. She goes against the grain, though, with her estimate that four in a hundred of us are sociopaths when other estimators come up with one in a hundred. So I wonder whether she takes up in this book the notion that multiple personality disorder might be a scam (discussed here and here in the Wikipedia article).

Robert

Robert, she admits that there have been some scams but that it is not entirely so either. Indeed she worries that people with real psychological disorders may be unnoticed or misdiagnosed. She had one patient who was previously misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

So sorry to learn about your experience with the car accident and the deaths of your parents; what a terrible and sad thing to go through.

I am a very good speller but every time I try to spell "embarrassed" I get it wrong!

Jonathan -- I'm terribly sorry about your loss. Although it was a number of years ago, there is little worse than losing your parents in your childhood other than losing your children.

I recently heard an interview on NPR with a woman (whose name I don't remember) who has come to terms with listening to the various voices in her head and has found it healing to not ignore them or medicate them away.

I think she's written a book -- but I don't remember the title of that either. Actually my discussion here has become ridiculous because I can't come up with any concrete specifics -- ach!

Thanks, Rebecca and Jane. I have had many years to come to terms with it. I miss my parents but do not have panic attacks at the memory of the accident.

Jane, there is a difference between hearing voices and what Stout's clients experience. These people become the other voices, blanking out for some time until they come back to themselves. After years of feeling like they are losing their lives and memories - or years of flying into angry rampages or total sullen silences - they realize something is wrong and seek therapy. I would think that would be much worse than hearing voices.

Very interesting review of The Shallows. That one is on my wishlist, mainly because I read the original article, went, "Hmm, he may have a germ of a point there, but I'm really dubious" and figured it might be worthwhile to give him the chance to convince me at greater length. Don't know if I'll ever actually get around to it, though.

But I think your criticisms are well-put, especially the point that Carr is a member of the TV generation, not the book generation, and that people were saying exactly the same things about TV destroying the minds of a generation before the internet ever came along. And I think you're right about it going back even farther than that, too. In Proust and the Squid, which I read a while back, Maryanne Wolf talks about how Socrates supposedly condemned writing itself as the thing rotting the youngsters' brains, on the basis that reading involves simply a passive imbibing of others' ideas and doesn't allow for the back-and-forth dialog that provokes real thought. (So he might in fact have preferred the internet!)

And as for TV... I'd recommend Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You as an interesting counterpoint to these kinds of "everything today is rotting the kids' brains!" screeds, as he argues -- quite well, I think -- that pop culture in general and TV in particular are overall getting smarter and more challenging, not less, a trend that I think has only accelerated since the book was written.

I'm terribly sorry for your loss, Jonathan.

#228

I had a very different impression of Carr's book. It's been a couple years and my memory of it is not the freshest, but the salient thing I took from it concerned neurobiological research showing that absorbing information from printed material differs from getting it off a hyperlinked, "multi-tasking" screen, and the effect of web-based information grazing on memory and the brain. One mode of reading especially is endangered by the habits developed from interactions with screens--something Carr calls "deep reading".

I meant to pursue Carr's references, and it's recent enough that that may still be worthwhile; the topic is certain to remain interesting. For one thing, the book went some way to bringing confirmation to and (some) explanation of anecdotal observations, such as are now typical in my field. It's not just the fuddy-duddies who print out articles we want to read, our students do it too.

I'd quibble with the trivial criticism of "it was ever thus" (i.e. new tech supplanting old). Carr DOES discuss the changes introduced by the invention of script, phonograph, radio, TV--the way these were different from how the Web affects our brains is part of his point.

I'd also note that being born in a period with television isn't enough to make one a member of a "TV generation" in the sense in which the phrase would be meaningful. (I'm ten years younger than Carr and grew up on books, television being used a couple times a week--if that--for a movie on the VCR.)

> 229

Perhaps I didn't get as far as the qualitative differences between TV and Internet. Somewhere in chapter 3 or 4 I got too frustrated with the book and quit. I had read his essay so I do have a sense of the whole.

But even if the differences are qualitative, it's the polemic that got me. If he had written a balanced account of ways in which the internet changes our thinking, I would have enjoyed it more. He could say that some of the changes are bad (loss of deep reading) while others are good (ability to process more information faster). Both are necessary to a healthy information diet. I would look at Carr's pre-internet college days as being as much in the dark as his current state of reading no books.

A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight

In 2006 two families approached Civil War historian David Blight with old manuscripts. They had been passed down from grandfather to granddaughter, from granddaughter to best friend for decades. Now they were donating them to a local historical society, who encouraged them to get the stories published. When Blight saw them, he realized he had two never-published chronicles of the long, hard journey to freedom of two African-American slaves. This book consists of those chronicles along with Blight's introduction explaining and contextualizing these narratives.


Wallace Turnage

Slave narratives, writes Blight, are the foundational genre of African-American literature. Not a bad place to start. John Washington and Wallace Turnage are not artful or skilled storytellers, but through their to-the-pointness their amazing feats of escape show through. Both defected to Union soldiers during the war. Washington describes how popular he became in the Union camp after they discovered he had brought Confederate newspapers with him containing vital information. Turnage, a man of great luck and skill, ran away from his masters four times before finally succeeding. On his last try, he had to escape Mobile, Alabama to the camp of the Union soldiers surrounding the town. To get there he had to walk through snake-infested swamps and a Confederate camp, where they noticed him but didn't stop him, assuming he was a camp slave.

These mens' depictions of the brutality they witnessed as slaves was horrifying. Turnage spent his youth working at a slave dealer, where he would have witnessed daily the dividing of mother from daughter and husband from wife. Washington was separated from his mom at six, and spent most of his childhood as a house slave, taken from his family and separated from the company of other slaves. Both describe beatings, stripping of women, and vicious biting dogs. But these men were filled with great hope. To the chagrin of their overseers, their spirits had not been broken. When Washington came to the Union camp and was told that the Emancipation Proclamation had passed two days before, he knew it was the best day of his life. This strong spirit enabled him to survive during the hard days of establishing a post-slave life.


John M. Washington

Blight's introduction was helpful at putting things in perspective. Washington and Turnage were only one of many slaves who escaped to enemy lines, often known as "contraband" in the Union. Since Confederates used slaves to build trenches and fortifications, Union generals realized that accepting these men not only gave them moral high ground but deprived the enemy of labor. The Emancipation Proclamation, while inspired by lofty constitutional ideals, was a practical document as well.

While I enjoyed this book, it left me with a sadness when comparing it to W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk. Washington and Turnage end their narratives at their emancipation, but Blight's research was able to describe their post-war lives and descendants. Both men found that the dream of equality set before them became fainter and fainter in the midst of Jim Crow laws and Northern racism. And these men, in terms of education and opportunity, were the cream of the crop of African-American slaves. They were literate. I can only imagine how many hundreds of thousands of American slaves died with stories untold.

>231 JDHomrighausen: That sounds like a book I'll need to check out eventually. Your last paragraph made me wonder how things would have gone differently if Lincoln had not been assassinated. Would he have fought for equality? Maybe. Maybe not.

The separation of families, to me, is the absolute saddest part of the story.

I have jumped the gun and set up my Category Challenge 2014 thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/158882

I've had A Slave No More on the TBR Pile for ages now. I've just recently been thinking I really ought to get to it soon.

re 217 - Jonathan - I'm sorry about your personal loss. Every time I learn another aspect about it, it both makes me want to give you a hug and inspires me at how you have handled it.

Great review of A Slave No More.

#232 Susie - I will always wonder the same thing, ever since reading A Team of Rivals.

Jonathan, After your personal tragedy, your life could have taken so many different directions. It seems to me, after following your thread this year, that you have taken a path that your parents could be very proud of.

Thank you for the review of A Slave No More. I have added to my wish list.

Thank you Daniel and Colleen. I am pretty sure they'd be proud of me (and my brother) too. :) Ironically my mom didn't like school and didn't read much, so I'm pretty sure I got this side of me from my dad.

They were literate. I can only imagine how many hundreds of thousands of American slaves died with stories untold.

I am reading Douglass and Lincoln right now. When Frederick Douglass, who had educated himself, started giving his speeches, he was told basically that he needed to "dumb it down" (paraphrasing, of course) a bit because nobody would believe he had been a slave. He sounded too intelligent!!

Susie - when Washington crossed lines into the battle camp, the Union soldiers did not believe that he was actually an escaped slave. His mulatto skin was so light that he looked white to them.

Also reminds me of the Chinese servant in East of Eden who spoke perfect English but found that speaking anything but pidgin speech around whites unnerved them. So he would speak normal English at home and "speakee Chinee" in town.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

After reading 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, I'm pretty sure this was all I needed to round out my trio of English-language dystopian novels. Huxley's novel focuses on a man who realizes he is an individual in a society where that is prohibited. In Bernard Marx's world, no close social bonds are allowed, people are bred to be just smart enough (but not smarter than) their position in society, and the universal pleasure elixir "soma" covers all pain and discomfort. The root of the problem is a lack of individual thought. The men and women of his society prefer to live in complete communal mindlessness.

Huxley's book covers much of the same territory as Fahrenheit 451: the way bland media creep into our minds, the use of distraction to cover over the painful process of thinking about what it means to be human. Both portray a world where escapism and hedonistic pleasure has replaced the joy of contemplation.

Naturally, both dystopias lack true religion. But I think Huxley brought out the religious element much more strongly. In his world, all the Christian crosses had their tops chopped off to become T's, as in Model T, since Henry Ford is their new god. ("Cleanliness is next to Fordliness!" "Ford helps those who help themselves!") Christianity not only requires thought, but teaches the value and dignity of the individual, something antithetical to a world where relationships are throwaway and parents no longer exist. Huxley isn't too far off, what with the prosperity "theology" that passes as religion to many Americans. He was hardly an orthodox Christian himself, but he sees that Christianity promotes a kind of ethic that would not fit in Marx's world.

Still, Huxley's characterization was more flat than Bradbury's, and his mishmashed "primitives" - Native Americans who speak African tongues - would be considered offensive by today's standards. I preferred Bradbury's book.

Enjoyed reading your thoughts on Brave New World

Brave New World is another one of those books, like 1984, that I read many many years ago. I did reread 1984 in 1984, but I don't think I've ever reread Brave New World. It was interesting to read about it in your review. I would have to say that having "soma" to cover pain and preferring "to live in complete communal mindlessness" isn't far off in describing many people today!

Um... Henry Ford's world--a world of consumerism and ultimate alienation from the essence of humanity described as "Marx's" world? In a word--no.

As for religion, Huxley was deep into California-style eclectic mysticism and experimentation, down to and including drugs and every other mind-altering medium. I've never come across anything positive he had to say about Christianity, although perhaps he had never met a "true" Christian--one gathers from your criticism that there's a difference between Christianity such as commonly practiced in America and the--presumably--some "true" kind.

By the way, do you know his Grey eminence and The devils of Loudun? Might be interesting especially as the flavour of Christianity dissected in relation to politics and mass control is Catholicism. (Moreover, both books are based on real people and events and meticulous historical research.)

> 243

"Marx" refers to the protagonist of the novel, Bernard Marx. Of course, one could ask why Huxley chose that name. Perhaps the parallel lies in the fact that both Marxes purported to be liberators of men.

Prosperity theology is a movement, often within the evangelical world, focusing on God's desire to make us prosper - in very literal, financial terms. It's best seen in authors like Joel Osteen who blend Christian preaching and self-help/financial advice. Now, you can find strands in the Bible where prosperity theology is preached. Deuteronomy comes to mind. But Jesus negated any intrinsic connection between godliness and worldly power. Prosperity theology comes off to me as a lot of feel-good nonsense - God wants you to be rich! - much like the soma solidarity rituals.

Those other books look really good!

Bernard Marx--yeah, that was a swipe, obviously. On a par with sticking a red star on Hitler, but hey. It's not his best book.

both Marxes purported to be liberators of men.

Marx died in 1883, never able to liberate even himself from horrendous poverty and illness, but his side fought out the weekend, shorter work day, minimum wage and other labour rights--the other side still employs children and fights to take away the former tooth and nail.

I'd like to note also that his criticism of religion is properly understood as criticism of organized religion, which was melded to political power even more blatantly in the past than today. (Secularisation, after all, is a real process, at least in the West.) Marx wasn't hostile to individual religiosity--I don't know enough to say much more, but, as often happens, "it's more complicated than that".

but, as often happens, "it's more complicated than that".

I can't tell you how often I have to invoke this in a conversation. As a religious studies major, I often have to say it when I'm talking to a member of one religion who is spouting simplistic stereotypes about another. (This happens especially when my conversant is seeking to evangelize another religion.)

Glad to see your review of Brave New World. It has been on my wishlist for a long time but haven't read it yet. Fahrenheit 451 really impressed me; 1984 kind of bored me (my son couldn't get through it at all) but I'm glad I read it.

Prosperity theology is a movement
Yep. As for the "prosperity gospel" goes, I think I can speak a little to that since I was there in the 80s (about your age too) as a newbie Christian. At the beginning I think the movement among the evangelicals was to change people's long held beliefs in a God who actually wanted them sick and/or poor - because being sick and/or poor made you holy - to one who actually wanted just the opposite for them. It was a paradigm shift back then. Unfortunately, it devolved into this "Name It and Claim It" movement. It got to the point of extreme stupidity: if you were sick don't say it out loud (claim your healing!); anything bad that happened was the devil's fault (rebuke the devil!) or some "secret sin" or disobedience in your life. There was even a book called Pigs in the Parlor which was quite popular back then (not with me!) among some that claimed the root of any Christian's problem was an evil spirit possessing or oppressing them - so a lot of "exorcisms" were performed in the Pentecostal/non-denominational circles. It was an interesting time to be a Christian and a challenging one if you had any sense! Now I think what we have among people like Joel Osteen is a lighter version of the 80s "Name IT and Claim It" theology.

Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman

Stedman first heard the title for this book as an insult thrown at him. He was at a party for an atheist organization, listening to an angry man rant about how religion should be destroyed entirely. Stedman questioned him, wondering if that was the same absolutist mindset he had heard as an evangelical Christian. The angry atheist sneered at him, spouting, "Oh, you're a faitheist!"

Stedman does not believe that the angry atheist is a true stereotype. He does, however, believe that the small and angry subset have taken too much airtime. Stedman seeks to reclaim this space. This book chronicles his journey from religious none to gay-closeted evangelical Christian to out-gay liberal Lutheran back to religious none. He describes where he hopes to lead the secular humanist movement in his work at the humanist chaplaincy at Harvard: away from facile religion-bashing and into deep engagement with the religious.


Not only is Stedman a gay atheist, he is also a hipster.

Part of Stedman's story is painful. He spent most of eighth and ninth grade trying to earn God's love by denying himself any joy. At one point he curls up in the bathtub, holding a knife over his left wrist, afraid to dig it in. Why? He believed that his gayness was a sign of God's indifference. Had God loved him, he would have been cured of his affliction as his prayer group had told him. Stuck in this catch-22, his mom discovered his journal and immediately took him to an inclusive congregation.

Stedman does not speak with regret of his time in the Lutheran Church. In fact, he loved it. He went to a Lutheran college and majored in religion. While there he examined arguments for God and found they did not measure up. Back to square one - no religion.

Along the way Stedman learned something important. One night he and his friends were approached outside a gay bar by some Christians calling them to repent. Stedman stayed to listen to them while his friends laughed and went inside. After the street preachers had finished evangelizing, he asked if he could share his story. After hearing about the pain and agony he went through trying to reconcile his sexuality and his faith, they left with a new respect. their minds opened by the encounter. I love this story.

Having read all four of the New Atheists, I was ready for a change of pace in atheist writing. After the painful task of leaving religion, religion-bashing can only be the center of one's being for so long. Stedman does not pretend to be the only atheist who respects the religious and understands that religion is a broad spectrum rather than a singular entity. But it took him a while to meet another. I used to work with an angry atheist, a guy who had grown up evangelical and left it. If anyone brought up anything having to do with religion, he would make a snide joke and sneer. Worse, if anyone tried to engage him critically on the issue, he made it clear that the only true Christianity was a crude biblical literalism; if you did not believe that, you were only fudging the issues. People like him are the reason Stedman reports meeting so many atheists who fear identifying so publicly.

Still, there is a place for conversion. Stedman doesn't emphasize this enough. It's great that humanists like him are doing interfaith work (interbeing work?). But if he truly believes theism is false, then why not convince others? Stedman seems to have found that debates are possible when relationship has been formed. But he doesn't emphasize this enough. I was left curious to know if he had ever turned someone else to atheism.

Last, I wonder what kind of virtues and narratives humanists can draw on for negotiating pluralism. As Alasdair MacIntyre points out, the narrative we see ourselves in - socially, personally, cosmically - conditions the virtues we practice. Extremists who see the universe in cosmic warfare will live out virtues of destruction to achieve the end of good, regardless of the means. Open-minded Christians who see God as self-sacrificing love will employ caritas as their chief virtue. What chief virtue will the atheist/secular humanist movement employ, particularly in encounters with pluralism? Is it even possible to bring the coherence of a moral narrative to a subgroup that is exploring what it means to reject all the conventional moral stories?

Stedman's book provokes many thoughts in me. It's amazing to think he is only a few years older than me. I await his next book eagerly.

A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation by Diana L. Eck

"Through the years I have found my own faith not threatened, but broadened and deepened by the study of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Sikh traditions of faith. And I have found that only as a Christian pluralism could I be faithful to the mystery and the presence of the one I call God. Being a Christian pluralist means daring to encounter people of very different faith traditions and defining my faith not by its borders, but by its roots."



So states Diana Eck, professor of religious studies at Harvard. Eck, trained as a scholar of Hinduism, has recently been researching religious diversity and engaged pluralism in America. She leads a team of undergraduate researchers through the Pluralism Project. These undergrads go home for the summer to their respective cities and research various religious conflicts and cooperations, including debates over zoning for new temples, education free of bias, and employee recognition of religious holidays, food, and dress. The product of this collective research - and her own wide romps around the nation - is this 385-page whopper of a book.

Eck likes to focus on bridge builders.

"Pluralism is the dynamic process through which we engage with one another in and through our very deepest differences."

Echoing Gustav Niebuhr, she writes that pluralism must be engaged. Diversity is a fact, but pluralism is a choice. It is embedded in America's past since colonial times. It is ongoing, a major work in progress. It is incomplete, as neatly shown by the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" debacle.

Since I needed no convincing on her framework, I found Eck's examples most exciting. She spent three chapters on the histories of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims in America. In all three cases, the first major awareness white Americans had of these traditions was at the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. Admiring foreign teachers is one thing, but accepting the immigrants who come practicing that religion and seeking jobs is another. The ways in which each group was marginalized were sad, but Eck also focuses on their optimism in the face of fear, ignorance, and undisguised racism. When a suburban city council refused to let a mosque be built in their town, a Muslim group finds another town that is welcoming. When Sikh boys are barred from wearing the kirpan (a ceremonial dagger) at school, the courts uphold their rights. In many cases, stories of violence lead to broader community reconciliation. Even vandalism can lead to pluralism.

Eck's book is worth reading, especially for those afraid of and unfamiliar with "foreign" religions in America. It's a good reminder that much of my life, from my interreligious exploration to my interracial relationship, would have been unthinkable 100 years ago.

Is it even possible to bring the coherence of a moral narrative to a subgroup that is exploring what it means to reject all the conventional moral stories?

Huh. Not sure I understand that.

There are plenty of "conventional moral stories" that are not religious, in source or idiom, by which people abide, and most atheists are pretty "conventional", i.e. ordinary people not obviously, immediately different from anyone else. If anything, it would seem that atheists adhere to "conventional morals" better than believers. It seems most atheists HAVE moral codes, no more or less incoherent than that of any god-believers.

Ditto to what Lola said. Call me an angry atheist if you wish but Christian "morals" chiefly seem to apply to other people's sex lives, as Stedman's example demonstrates.

But if he truly believes theism is false, then why not convince others?

Should he run around the playground telling children there's no Santa Claus? There's no gratification or profit in trying to dispel the beliefs that people may take comfort in.

Excellent review of Faitheist:

Still, there is a place for conversion. Stedman doesn't emphasize this enough I think I am with Steadman on this point (although not entirely sure not having read his book). For me conversion has too many connotations of coercion and I would get annoyed at people who try to tell me that they are right and I am wrong in matters of faith or none faith.

Some interesting points raised.

First, about moral stories. Of course atheists and humanists are capable of moral behavior. I have met plenty of nonbelievers who are charitable, loving, and kind. My question was more about the stories we use to frame those virtues. Christians, for example, have a central story. We have a set of texts that contain the central stories of our tradition, which we see ourselves as living within, imitating characters in those stories (particularly Jesus).

What is the equivalent of this in the humanist community? People who identify as secular/atheist/humanist are all over the map. Some are secular Jews (or in the Humanistic Judaism movement) who may feel some attachment to the stories of Jewish tradition. Others such as Sam Harris may be Zen Buddhists or practitioners of another naturalistic strand of Buddhism. Some find sufficient wonder and awe in the natural world and the cosmic story to last a lifetime; I admire Carl Sagan as an example of this, perhaps Einstein is too. And all people have their own life stories and experiences, completely idiosyncratic, that exemplify the way they wish to walk in the world.

So what stories could unify a humanist community? (Or: why bother finding any?) What sorts of virtues would a humanist ethos emphasize? I'm curious about A.C. Grayling's The Good Book: A Humanist Bible as an example of this. One virtue I might think of is rationality, the dispelling of illusion. I admire the way many in this community take a hard-nosed, critical approach to even the most personal beliefs. I wish my religious community would adopt this a bit more.

As for conversion - not street preaching or door to door rationalist crusades, but conversations with friends, informal chatter. Stedman seemed to poo-poo atheists critically questioning the religious, but mentions having those debate-ful conversations with people in a respectful way. I wish he had gone into how those conversations went. That's all. :)

P.S. Neither of you sound like "angry atheists" to me. The ones I have met usually have been burned by religions they used to belong to and still carry that hurt. I find it more sad than offensive now. :)

Ahoy me mates, me librarything has changed o'er to piratespeak without me noticin'. Arrr. Be I the only one, ye scurvey scumbags?

No, it's turned on for everyone. Must be Talk Like a Pirate Day. You can turn it off on the top right of your browser above Zeitgeist.

ETA: .... ahoy mates. Arrr...

New thread!