The Episcopal Divinity School has responded to a number of requests for reading recommendations by developing a summer reading list. “Throughout the course of the year the EDS faculty receive many requests to make recommendations about books to read in their areas of study,” said the Rev. Dr. Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, academic dean. “We regularly receive requests for reading recommendations from persons interested in attending a continuing education class or enrolling in seminary. Other groups who request faculty recommended reading lists are adult education committees, parish discernment
committees, and diocesan commissions on ministry, all of whom are charged with adult formation within the church.”

The 2007 reading list covers a variety of topics including the Millennium Development Goals, reconciliation, the Anglican Communion, classism, racism, sexism, as well as publications that explore the interpretation of the Bible from a feminist or “GenX” perspective.

Selected readings include:

• Alkire, Sabina and Edmund Newell, What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World, New York, Church Publishing, 2005.
• Campolo, Tony and Michael Battle, The Church Enslaved: A Spirituality For Racial Reconciliation (Prisms), Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005.
• Crossan, John Dominic, Amy-Jill Levine, Dale Allison, The Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton Readings in Religions), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• Dawson, Lorne L. and Douglas E. Cowan, Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, New York: Routledge, 2004.
• Guest, Deryn et al. Eds, The Queer Bible Commentary, Norwich, SCM Press, 2006.
• Hassett, Miranda K., Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Allies Are Reshaping Anglicanism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Horsley, Richard, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002.
• Meacham, Jon, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, Fortress Press, 2007.
• Newsom, Carol A., and Sharon H. Ringe, eds, The Women's Bible
  Commentary, Expanded ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998.


• Thompsett, Fredrica Harris and Cynthia L. Shattuck, Confronted by God: The Essential Verna Dozier, New York. Church Publishing, 2006.
• Townes, Emilie M., Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice), Palgrave, MacMillan Books, 2006.
• Ward, Kevin, A History of Global Anglicanism (Introduction to Religion), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Westerhoff, John W., Will Our Children Have Faith? Rev. Ed. Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2000.

The full list, complete with links to purchase the books through the EDS Amazon Associates store, is here.

According to the Church Times, the online bookseller Amazon reports sales of religious books whether for or against God have increased dramatically:

Religious books are a salvation to the book trade, even when they set out to disprove the existence of God, says the online bookseller, Amazon.

Statistics published by the company suggest that the number of people buying books from it about religion or spirituality has soared in three years by 50 per cent. The increase has outshone all other categories, including history, which has grown by 38 per cent, and politics, which has grown by 30 per cent.

As well as the other religious titles, sales of the Bible through Amazon increased by 120 per cent last year.

Read it all here

Thanks to Anglicans Online.

In American Scientist, Robert V. Levine tells the story of the Stanford prison experiments:

In the summer of 1971, a young social psychologist named Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University's psychology building. The 24 subjects he had selected for the two-week experiment he was planning were mostly middle-class, educated, college-age men who happened to be in Palo Alto for the summer. At the outset all were deemed to be "normal" on the basis of personality tests and their conduct in clinical interviews. They were to be paid $15 a day for their participation.

Zimbardo assigned each subject to be a prisoner or guard by flipping a coin. There were no measurable personality differences between the two groups when the experiment began. Zimbardo played the role of warden himself. The researchers were initially concerned that subjects wouldn't take the experiment seriously enough.

They needn't have been. To everyone's astonishment, the two groups quickly came to act like their real-life counterparts. The prisoners became despondent; some broke down. In less than 36 hours, one had to be released because of extreme depression, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying and fits of rage. Over the next three days, three more prisoners were let go because they exhibited similar symptoms of anxiety. A fifth prisoner was discharged when he developed a psychosomatic rash over his entire body, an apparent reaction to the rejection of his parole appeal by the mock parole board.

The guards' behavior was even more disturbing. All flexed their power to one degree or another. They made the prisoners obey trivial, often inconsistent rules and forced them to perform tedious, pointless work, such as moving cartons from one closet to another or continuously picking thorns out of blankets (an unpleasant task the guards created by dragging the blankets through thorny bushes). The inmates were made to sing songs or laugh or stop smiling on command; to curse and malign one another publicly; to clean out toilets with their bare hands. They were required to sound off their numbers repeatedly and to do endless push-ups, occasionally with a guard's foot or that of another prisoner on their backs.

He continues:

Zimbardo's remarkable experiment is at the center of his equally remarkable book, The Lucifer Effect. Why a new book about a 35-year-old study? Zimbardo presents the research in greater detail and texture than ever before. He provides a wealth of new interpretations and new material—anecdotes, entries from the diaries of prisoners and guards, updates on the lives of the participants, and documentation of the consequences his findings have had for real-world prison policy.

Perhaps more important, the passage of time offers him a larger canvas—disturbingly large—on which to apply the lessons of the experiment. In the second half of the book, he delves into a profusion of contemporary small- and large-scale evils. He investigates, for example, the fraudulence of executives at Enron and WorldCom, the sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, systematic programs of police and military torture in a number of countries, the mass suicides at Jonestown, and the genocides in Rwanda and elsewhere. Zimbardo convincingly explains how each of these evils mirrors the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment and might to some extent have been avoided had those lessons been learned more successfully.

And:

Most notably, Zimbardo analyzes the infamous sadistic acts carried out by U.S. military personnel in Abu Ghraib prison. This section alone is worth the price of the book. Not only is it extraordinarily detailed, both psychologically and otherwise, it also offers the chilling perspective of an insider, Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick, a supervisor on the night shift at Abu Ghraib and one of the primary villains in the abuse scandal. Zimbardo was an expert witness at Frederick's court-martial and came to know the defendant and his family well. By the time Zimbardo has finished describing Frederick's transformation from idealistic soldier to abuser, Abu Ghraib feels eerily indistinguishable from the Stanford Prison Experiment. It is as if the Iraqi prison had been designed by twisted social psychologists who wanted to replicate Zimbardo's experiment using real guards and prisoners.

The book, however, is not simply a catalog of horrors:

What, Zimbardo asks, leads ordinary people to do bad things, things they never would have imagined doing? Most evildoing, it becomes depressingly clear, is driven by rather ordinary social-psychological reactions. Zimbardo offers an extensive list and discussion of the toxic situational forces and normal psychological reactions to them that tend to activate the Lucifer effect. He provides a detailed, intelligent and workable program for resisting unwanted social influence, highlighting dangers and offering tangible prescriptions for neutralizing negative effects. There are, for example, mini-tutorials on how to distinguish between just and unjust authorities, on being careful not to sacrifice one's freedom for the illusion of security, and on learning to recognize when, where and how to stand up to unjust systems.

The final chapter is a gem. Here Zimbardo seamlessly demonstrates how the same social psychology that may exploit our worst instincts can be reconstrued to cultivate the best in ourselves. Altruism, like evil, is readily responsive to situational forces, and Zimbardo suggests strategies for tapping into these potentialities. He also presents a provocative, multidimensional taxonomy of heroism that I hope will stimulate long-overdue research and education in this area.

Read it all. And have a look at this excerpt as well.

The New York Times has news today that the noted children's author and active episcopal layperson and speaker had died at the age of 88. All of us here at the Café give thanks for her life and ministry

"Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians."

Read the full two page article here.

The AP story is here.

The Telegraph has published an edited extract from from Peter Conrad's new book, Creation: Artists Gods and Origins. Here's a passage,

The very idea that art purports to be a creative activity can offend a man of faith. In 1880, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins defined creation as "the making out of nothing", which was accomplished by God "in no time with a word".

Hopkins denied that human beings shared this capacity; we can only play with matter that already exists. We know how to use grain to make bread or clay to make bricks, but cannot create the seed or the soil. "Man," Hopkins emphasised, "cannot create a single speck, God creates all that is not himself".

But is it really nonsensical to praise a man of genius for creating a painting, a poem or a tune, just because he did not invent the canvas and the colours, the words or the notes? Art is a magical activity....

Some reviews are available here.

In the Washington Post this morning there is an article (with images), "Putting His Brush in God's Hand," about the American artist Asher B. Durand with a similar theme:

He adhered to his principles: It is God who made the universe. Nature is a Scripture. The pious landscape painter who learns to read it rightly is thus a kind of priest.

Mark Edmundson, author of The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days writes,

In “The Future of an Illusion,” he described belief in God as a collective neurosis: he called it “longing for a father.” But in his last completed book, “Moses and Monotheism,” something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion....He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.

How did Freud know [Moses was not a Jew]? First of all, he claimed that Moses is not a Jewish name but an Egyptian one; second, Freud’s study of dreams and fairy tales convinced him that the Bible had inverted things. In the Exodus story, Moses’ mother, fearing Pharaoh’s order to kill all Jewish boys, leaves the infant Moses in a basket on the river’s edge, where he is discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. But Freud maintained that the Jews were the ones who had found him by the river. (In fairy tales and dreams, the child always begins with rich parents and is adopted by poor ones, yet his noble nature wins out — or so Freud insisted.) Freud also said that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aton.

Find Edmundson's book here.

Today's New York Times Book Review includes a review of a fascinating book by Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, that examines the persistence of faith in the Western world after the enlightenment. Here are highlights from the review:

Some of us have been taking the European Enlightenment a little bit for granted. We’ve assumed that, just as natural philosophers like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler ultimately prevailed in overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemaic cosmology, so, too, moral philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke ultimately prevailed in removing ideas of divine revelation and redemption from politics. Progress in both spheres, the scientific and the political, was not only analogous and linked, but also, in some sense, inevitable, at least once rigorous standards of clear thinking were adopted. Let people freely and rationally pursue physics, and eventually they’d draw the conclusion that the Earth moves. Let people freely and rationally think about how best to organize human society — with a view toward diminishing turmoil and augmenting the realization of individual potential — and eventually they’d separate church and state. We’ve assumed the matter has been thankfully settled, at least in the Western intellectual tradition. No wonder, then, that recent years have brought a spate of incredulous “neo-Enlightenment” books — along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” — all of them barely able to contain their dismay that they even have to be arguing what it is they are arguing.

The sophisticated story that Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, presents in “The Stillborn God” adds nuance and complexity to the intellectual account we tell about the West’s thinking on religion and politics, and how it managed to separate (sort of) the one from the other. Lilla wants to challenge the view that the “Great Separation” — the prying apart of political theories from theology — was analogous to, say, the Copernican Revolution, that it constituted a discovery at which those thinking well would eventually arrive and that, once discovered, was secured in intellectual history’s linear progress.

In Lilla’s telling there was, first of all, nothing inevitable about the Great Separation. In fact, it is political theology that comes most naturally to us: “When looking to explain the conditions of political life and political judgment, the unconstrained mind seems compelled to travel up and out: up toward those things that transcend human existence, and outward to encompass the whole of that existence. ... The urge to connect is not an atavism.”

Indeed, this urge is so irresistible, Lilla argues, that only highly unusual circumstances can compel us to give it up. Those unusual circumstances were provided by Christian theology — but not, as some recent religious apologists have argued, because the Judeo-Christian framework itself promotes rationality and tolerance. Rather, it is Christianity’s own fundamental ambiguities — torn between a picture of God as both present and absent from the temporal realm, an ambivalence powerfully represented by the paradoxes of the Trinity — that made it “uniquely unstable,” subject to a plurality of interpretations that became institutionalized in sectarianism, and hence to several centuries’ worth of devastating upheaval.

. . .

And what was the Enlightenment’s proffered cure? It was to translate questions about religion into psychological and anthropological questions. The problem was changed from “What does God want from us?” to “Why is man constantly asking what it is that God wants from us?” The thinker most centrally responsible for this interrogative substitution was the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the answer he gives is: because man is a frightened ignoramus. Knowing enough to be terrified of his own mortality but knowing little else about objective nature and thus understandably alarmed, man creates an omnipotent being who can be supplicated and obeyed, a conception that then ends up tormenting him with new fear. Religion, Hobbes thought, comes from a dark place in the psyche.

Lilla makes it clear that he believes Hobbes’s thinking on the religious impulse to be both historically pivotal and psychologically simplistic. More important, he argues that influential thinkers like Rousseau, Kant and Hegel agree with him. The religious impulse isn’t merely a matter of man’s cringing self-protective fear; it can also be an expansive response toward the universe, morality and freedom, and a strain of post-Enlightenment thinking, featuring thinkers of the caliber of Kant, struggled to do justice to religion’s expansive aspects.

Read it all here (subscription may be required).

The most recent issue of Atlantic includes a book review of Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours, which describes how the inner life of men and women in medieval times (mostly women) is disclosed in their scratchings in the margins of "the Book of Hours—a devotional assemblage for the laity, first compiled in the 13th century."

Duffy largely eschews such speculation and instead concentrates on the nitty-gritty. The Book of Hours was in many cases its owner’s most expensive and most intimate possession, carried about tucked in a sleeve or belt. Although a deeply personal artifact, the book, soon grubby and well thumbed, was also shared—known as “the primer” in England, it was the primary volume children used in learning to read. Both the way the books were handled and the scribbles that filled them signified the permeability of the secular and religious life, especially among women (a point Mary Erler stresses in her Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England), and also the intermingling of the quotidian and the eternal, the individual and the communal, even the Christian and the pagan. One woman, in her marginalia, laments the destruction of a shrine and details the contents of her linen closet. The books are crammed with pressed flowers, recipes, notes on debts and rents due, charms and incantations, souvenirs of pilgrimages, affectionate messages from family members (the young Catherine Parr, the future queen, playfully jotted to her uncle, “Wen you do on thys loke / Pray you remember wo wrote thys in your boke”; it’s the equivalent of every bad yearbook rhyme), dates of marriages and deaths (“my moder departed to God”), and often very precise information about the times of births, to aid the casting of horoscopes. Moreover, these prayer books, a means to converse with God, testify to the vicissitudes of temporal power. Richard III’s book was taken at Bosworth Field; the victor, Henry VII, gave it to his mother, who scratched off Richard’s name and wrote her own on the flyleaf. A onetime devoted court friend of Catherine of Aragon blotted out the queen’s autograph after Henry VIII repudiated her.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Duffy;s book is his examination of the margin scriblings of Thomas More's Book of the Hours:

Occasionally the books offer far more than a trace of that elusive quarry Duffy calls “the innermost thoughts and most sacred privacies of late medieval people.” While imprisoned in the Tower, awaiting his trial and eventual execution, Thomas More pored over and annotated his Book of Hours. Its remarkable survival (it was in private hands until 1929) allows us, as Duffy writes with forgivable hyperbole, to watch More “in the very act of praying.” Duffy’s scrupulous exegesis of More’s poignant notes about the verses in the psalms that captured his attention and of the prayer More wrote in the margins (“Gyve me thy grace good lord / To sett the world at nought …”) clearly shows a devout and isolated man using his Book of Hours in his struggle “to come to terms with a frightening fate.”

Read the entire review here.

What aspect of your interior life would be revealed if a future historian were to look at you margin notes?

According to Bookseller.com;

"Canterbury Press has bought the memoir of Bishop Gene Robinson from US Episcopal publisher Morehouse. The book, In the Eye of the Storm, will be published in April 2008.

In 2003, Robinson was elected Bishop of New Hampshire, the first openly gay man to be appointed to such a position. The election sparked a storm of controversy which, according to Canterbury Press, is changing the face of Anglicanism worldwide.

The book will see Robinson reflecting on his faith, his life and the controversy. Christine Smith, publishing director of Canterbury Press, said:'Gene Robinson has an incredible story to tell and a depth of humanity and humility to reveal to all who are willing to listen.'"

Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern, Ltd, an publishing house that has a long history of service to the Church of England

Read the rest: theBookseller.com

J.K. Rowling, the author of the best selling series of books about Harry Potter, "the boy who lived" has revealed in an interview with MTV that she intentionally included a great deal of Christian thought and imagery in her books.

She says specifically of the scripture quotes found in the final volume of the series that "They almost epitomize the whole series."

The interview begins:

'It deals extensively with souls — about keeping them whole and the evil required to split them in two. After one hero falls beyond the veil of life, his whispers are still heard. It starts with the premise that love can save you from death and ends with a proclamation that a sacrifice in the name of love can bring you back from it.

Harry Potter is followed by house-elves and goblins — not disciples — but for the sharp-eyed reader, the biblical parallels are striking. Author J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books have always, in fact, dealt explicitly with religious themes and questions, but until 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' they had never quoted any specific religion.

That was the plan from the start, Rowling told reporters during a press conference at the beginning of her Open Book Tour on Monday. It wasn't because she was afraid of inserting religion into a children's story. Rather, she was afraid that introducing religion (specifically Christianity) would give too much away to fans who might then see the parallels.

"To me [the religious parallels have] always been obvious," she said. "But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going.

Later in the interview she talks more specifically about the Christian parallels, but that section contains spoilers and so it may never be said that the Episcopal Café ever ruined the reading a good book, we'll let you read that for yourself.

You can read the rest here.

Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University, is causing quite a stir with his new book A Secular Age. Among his more interesting arguments is that Christianity itself is responsible for the rise of secularism. Robert Bellah has written a glowing review:

I have long admired Charles Taylor and have read most of what he has written and always found him helpful. Yet for me, A Secular Age is his breakthrough book—one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime. Taylor succeeds in no less than recasting the entire debate about secularism.

From the very first pages it is clear that Taylor is doing something different from what others writing about secularization have achieved, because he distinguishes three senses of secularity. Almost all the literature on secularization with which I am familiar falls under Taylor’s first two categories of secularity:

• Secularity 1: the expulsion of religion from sphere after sphere of public life.

• Secularity 2: the decline of religious belief and practice.

Many excellent books have been written on these two aspects of secularization.

But Taylor’s focus in this book is on what he calls

• Secularity 3: “the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual” that make it possible to speak of ours as a “secular age.”

I doubt that many people have even perceived this third dimension, and Taylor’s book should be as much a revelation to them as it has been to me.

. . .

Taylor argues that the Reformation—with its radical rejection of the monastic life and the demand of a kind of monastic discipline for everyone—is just the preliminary culmination of a thousand years of pressure of Christianity toward Reform. He then shows how, even when Protestantism itself comes in question, long-term pressure toward Reform continues, first in 18th-century Deism and its attendant strong emphasis on Benevolence, and then in the 19th-century emergence of unqualified (secular) humanism with its emphasis on progress.

According to Taylor, it is not “science” or “Darwinism” that accounts for these developments, but the continuation of a moral narrative that was already long present in Christianity. Even the emergence in the late 19th century of anti-humanism (Nietzsche) cannot be understood except in terms of the particular features of what was being rejected: namely, both Christian and secular social ameliorism. By seeing the emergence of the secular age in narrative form primarily, rather than as a theoretical discovery, I think he makes the whole thing far more intelligible and explains our present quandaries far better than any competing accounts.

Read it all here. And read other commentaries by other (including Taylor himself) on the themes of his book here.

The movie of Philip Pullman's book, The Golden Compass, will be released in December. Beliefnet's entertainment blog Idol Chatter has created a Golden Compass category. Go here to see the series of posts. They are studded with links. This recent post includes videos of an interview with the author.

In the latest post Kris Rasmussen writes,

I suggest you read fantasy author Jeffrey Overstreet's anaylsis, in which he describes in detail his respect for Pullman's writing while pointing out that with Pullman's anti-religion bias, he still never has the courage to deal with the true nature of Christ himself.

You could also check out critic Peter Chattaway's take on the movie, where he discusses how there have been complaints that movie has been dumbed down so that it wouldn't be so anti-religious--and that has inflamed the secularist group Pullman belongs to.

Today's New York Times Book Review includes a review of Amy Chau's Day of Empire, which makes some very interesting observations about the role of toleration and inclusion to the success of several empires, including Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and the United States. Lance Morrow, a longtime essayist for TIME magazine wrote the review:

The emperor Claudius thought about the dynamics of imperial ingestion. He reminded the Roman Senate that the founder Romulus would “both fight against and naturalize a people on the same day.” Claudius argued that the Gauls, by logical extension, could be accepted into the Senate because “they no longer wear trousers” — that is, they could be counted on to come to work wearing the Roman toga and thus to have effectively become Romans.

The great Mughal emperor Akbar flourished by practicing a similar “strategic tolerance” — which included what Amy Chua in “Day of Empire” calls “multicultural copulation.” A Muslim himself, the emperor intermarried widely: “By the time of Akbar’s death, he had more than 300 wives, including Rajputs, Afghans, princesses from South Indian kingdoms, Turks, Persians and even two Christian women of Portuguese descent.”

E pluribus unum.

Chua argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history — among them, Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and hegemonic America — prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion, the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.

. . .

The death of empire, in Chua’s thesis — the Kryptonite that vitiates a superpower — is intolerance and exclusivity, an insistence on racial “purity” or religious orthodoxy. Chua wonders how different 20th-century history might have been if Hitler had been a tolerant and accommodating conqueror. “By murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of thousands of German citizens,” she observes, “the Nazis deprived themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. ... Germany lost an array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Lise Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction of the world’s first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the war.” It was history’s most spectacular example of shooting oneself in the foot.

Further unintended consequences of doctrinaire malice: In 1478, the Inquisition, decreed by papal bull, ended an era of relative tolerance in Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella gave Jews the choice of either converting to Catholism or leaving. Ten years later, the Muslims of Castile were ordered to convert or emigrate. “The Spanish monarchy had officially embraced intolerance,” Chua writes, “and for an empire hoping to rise in global pre-eminence, this was a staggeringly bad move.”

Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School, unfolds an agreeably plausible case with clarity and insistent simplification, like a lawyer pacing before the jury box, hitting the same points (tolerance, diversity, inclusion) for emphasis as she clicks off centuries and civilizations. Always in the back of her mind is the drama of America.

. . .

Few would quarrel with Chua’s absorbing PowerPoint presentation, her shrewd and happy argument that a generous policy of tolerance and inclusion leads on to success and prosperity. Or with her somewhat more intricate (or circular?) case that even the most embracingly inclusive empires eventually disintegrate because they lack “glue” — an overarching political identity to give coherence to the whole.

But in the 21st century, “empire” and “superpower” and “hyperpower” are terms that may require rethinking. They suggest boundaries, borders — even as they connote the expansion of territory and influence. But most of the powerful forces, good and evil, of our new century are borderless, globalized — the almost unimpeded global flow of information (images, ideas, news, music, movies, emotions, hatreds), products, commodities, capital, environmental pollution, climate change and terrorism. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear terrorism. In such a world, an idea (a rage, a grievance, a difference of cultural perspective) may create a superpower without borders, using a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan as its Pentagon.

Read it all here.

The December 2, 2007 New York Times Sunday Book Review will feature its lists of the editors' call on the 100 most notable books of the year. While the print version of the list is a week away, the list is now available online here.

A remarkably large number if these books have religious themes, including the following:

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.

CIRCLING MY MOTHER. By Mary Gordon. (Pantheon, $24.) Gordon’s deeply personal memoir focuses on the engaged and lively Catholicism of her mother, a glamorous career woman who was also an alcoholic with a body afflicted by polio.

EASTER EVERYWHERE: A Memoir. By Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) A minister’s daughter confronts her own spiritual rootlessness.

FORESKIN’S LAMENT: A Memoir. By Shalom Auslander. (Riverhead, $24.95.) With scathing humor and bitter irony, Auslander wrestles with his Jewish Orthodox roots.

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. By James L. Kugel. (Free Press, $35.) In this tour through the Jewish scriptures (i.e., the Old Testament, more or less), a former professor of Hebrew seeks to reclaim the Bible from the literalists and the skeptics.

PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Princeton University, $39.50.) A scholar finds that religion meant power for Greek women.

THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (Knopf, $26.) With nuance and complexity, Lilla examines how we managed to separate, in a fashion, church and state.

The online list includes links to the New York Times review of each listed book.

For several years, Shakespeare scholars have speculated on whether William Shakespeare had been a closeted Catholic. The Rev. David Beauregard, a Roman Catholic priest who teaches Shakespeare at the seminary of St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine in Boston, has published a new book, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays", that makes the case that Shakespeare was indeed Catholic:

"My case isn't based on documentary evidence," Beauregard acknowledged in a recent interview. Religion back then was a matter of don't ask don't tell. The Church of England was the state denomination; what devout Catholics thought and did privately was their business, but Elizabeth I demanded public fealty to the church she headed and was prepared to punish, even brutalize dissidents. In 1581, she made a martyr out of Jesuit priest Edmund Campion.

Biographical detail of any kind about Shakespeare is scant, but a now-lost Catholic document found in the 18th century suggested that Shakespeare's father, John, was a loyal Catholic, and an Anglican clergyman, the 17th-century cleric Richard Davies, wrote that the great playwright "died a Papist."

With Shakespeare's life shrouded in murkiness, scholars must probe the sprawling thicket of his writing for evidence of his religious views. A chat with Beauregard to sample a few bits of his research is to beam back to high school or college English classes.

He'll remind you that in "Hamlet," the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father tells his son that he is in purgatory, a Catholic concept. Or that an earlier play, "King John," portrays its titular character, who feuded with the pope and, said Beauregard, was a hero to Protestants, as an evil tyrant who dies violently. True, there are antipapal lines in the play, one of several examples in Shakespearean works in which he mocks Catholic figures. But Beauregard said the diatribes are in keeping with John's character, as a rebel against Rome.

Isabella, a novice nun in "Measure for Measure," is a model of virtue, a break with Protestant dramatists who depicted Catholic religious as sinners, said Beauregard. (It's telling, he adds, that Shakespeare made Isabella a novice; an earlier play on which "Measure for Measure" was partly based portrayed Isabella as a secular woman.) In "All's Well That Ends Well," Helena cures the sick king, attributing her success to "inspired merit" - "a very Catholic phrase," Beauregard said.

Not every scholar is persuaded:

They don't convince Stephen Greenblatt, professor of Renaissance literature at Harvard, a Shakespeare scholar, and an author of several books on the Bard. In an e-mail, Greenblatt notes Shakespeare's family and its Catholic ties, but said: "I think throughout his life, he drew upon this experience of the outlawed faith. He was, in this and in other ways, a specialist at recycling damaged or discarded institutional goods. But I do not myself believe that the adult Shakespeare was a pious Catholic or Protestant."

Read it all here.

Peter Steinfels has a very interesting column in yesterday's New York Times on a new perspective on the development of the concept of religious toleration. While the typical history is a story of intellectual history involving scholars and other elites, Benjamin Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, offers a history focused on the popular culture and every day believers in Divided by Faith, just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. With this perspective, the radical nature of religious tolerance becomes much clearer:

Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.

. . .

Without grasping the very different mentality prevailing in post-Reformation Europe, one cannot fully appreciate what the heroes of Mr. Zagorin’s more familiar account achieved. In that account, religious toleration comes across as obvious common sense. Resistance to it could only stem from irrationality or vice.

That impression is exactly what worries Mr. Kaplan. As usually told, the story of the rise of toleration becomes a myth, he writes, “a symbolic story, with heroes and villains and a moral” — the moral being that the precondition of toleration is the triumph of reason over faith.

Kaplan tells how toleration developed in small communities in a Europe ravished by religious conflict:

Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750.

This was the age of frightful religious wars, as rulers yoked religion to dynastic ambitions. But religious wars did not usually mean neighbor against neighbor. Religious violence among neighbors tended to be sporadic, often ignited when one religious group engaged in public rituals that a rival group felt contaminated communal space.

In response, believers devised intricate boundaries allowing them to live more or less peaceably with neighbors whose rival beliefs were anathema. Mr. Kaplan describes shared churches, where Protestants worshiped in the nave while Catholics used the choir space around the main altar, and what the Dutch called “schuilkerkerken,” supposedly clandestine churches that maintained their facades as houses but were in reality well known to officials and neighbors.

This new perspective on tolerance could be critical as we try to understand the persistence of religious intolerance in many areas of the world today:

“If toleration depends on the adoption of certain contemporary Western values,” Mr. Kaplan warns, “its fate in the rest of the world, and perhaps in our own future, is uncertain.”

Yet a fuller understanding of European history suggests that “even in communities that did not know our modern values, people of different faiths could live together peacefully.”

“Even in profoundly religious communities where antagonisms were sharp,” he writes, “religion was not a primitive, untameable force.”

“Divided by Faith” ends with five words that sum up its message and could serve as a motto for historical studies generally: “the possibility of other options.”

Read it all here.

The editors of Christian Century have announced their selections for the best books (and music) of 2007 in several categories, including theology, spirituality, fiction, children's literature, classical music and pop Christmas music.

Find them all here.

Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Harper's, and a creator of the Revealer, daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion, has his own list of the best religion books here.

As any parent who has shopped for religious books for a child can tell you, the theological divides that rock the adult world also affect the choice of an appropriate Bible storybook for a child. USA Today had a very interesting story on the issue earlier this week:

Christmas is peak season for sales of children's Bible storybooks.

The lavishly illustrated collections vary from literal booklets that don't hesitate to lay down the line against sin, to imaginative variations such as one where a butterfly hovers by Christ at the Crucifixion.

. . .

Each collection reflects the spiritual outlook of the parents and grandparents who do the writing — and the shopping, says Brenda Lugannani, head of merchandising for Family Christian Stores, the nation's largest Christian retail chain at 310 stores nationwide.

And every Bible storybook reflects a certain theology, says Ted Olsen, managing editor of Christianity Today. He and his wife, Alexis, searched carefully for the one they read to their 18-month-old son, Leif.

"Most Bible stories are told like Aesop's fables, refitted to a moral lesson that is almost always, 'Obey! Obey your parents! Obey God! Oh, look how good Noah is — he obeyed God!' " Olsen says.

"Sure, we want Leif to understand obedience, repentance and forgiveness. But we're more concerned that he get to know Jesus is the grand arc of the Bible story. We're like a lot of young parents who don't want to be talked down to. We're not afraid of encountering theology. We want to be intellectually and spiritually engaged when we read to Leif."

Their choice is one of the newest collections, The Jesus Storybook Bible:Every Story Whispers His Name. Author Sally Lloyd-Jones presents Bible stories back to Adam and Eve as foreshadowing the coming of Jesus Christ — the way many Christians read the Bible as adults.

Lloyd-Jones says her writing is shaped by "a strong Sunday school memory of the Bible as all about rules and coloring in the lines. There was no sense of the joy, freedom and wonder of the Bible story.

"Yes, there are rules in the Bible to show us how life works best. But rules don't change your heart. Stories change you. I'm in the business of telling stories."

Her book is highly popular, Lugannani says, but some parents turn away from it "because they think such symbolic language is confusing to young children."

"It's all part of the decision: Do they want a Bible storybook that's literally true to the text or are they willing to accept that a vegetable illustrates Moses or a butterfly appears in the Gospel?"

The butterfly is featured in one of Roberta Simpson's Nana's Bible Stories. It's another hot seller this season for publisher Thomas Nelson, where Bible stories are almost one-third of the children's books offered, says Troy Johnson, head of marketing.

Simpson tells stories "the way I told stories to my children and grandchildren."

Indeed, she has woven their names and ideas into the collection. Granddaughter Alexandra rebuffed an offer to be written in as "Queen Esther's best friend" because the 6-year-old said, " 'No, I want to be a butterfly at the Crucifixion.' I always listen to kids' crazy ideas," says Simpson, who has the endangered butterfly saved by the blood of Christ.

That innovative approach doesn't fly with the Rev. Paul McCain, publisher for Concordia Publishing House, established in 1869 by the deeply conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a 2.5-million-member denomination.

"The more seriously a church body regards the Bible, the more seriously they will present it, in a child-friendly way, but not water the content. We don't throw the King James Bible at them, but we don't turn it into Mother Goose, either. We don't avoid the s-word, for sin; the G-word, for God; or the J-word, for Jesus," McCain says.

Read it all here. What storybooks do you use?

The 12-year-old in our house thought the filmed version of The Golden Compass was a crime against the author of one of his favorite books, whereas his father thought it was a slightly better than average movie that rushed through necessary exposition, thereby decreasing viewers' understanding of what is at stake in the final showdown.

Meanwhile, Philip Pullman continues to be, in his own words "attended by crazy people." This profile in More Intelligent Life magazine doesn't add much to our understanding of the theological controversy Pullman's popularity has created, but it does an excellent job in tracing the roots of his understanding of adolescents.

Robert Baird, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago and the co-editor of Chicago Review has an interesting essay at Slate about the most ignored part of Dante's Divine Comedy--Paradiso. He argues that the book is ignored laregely because we find Hell far more interesting than Heaven:

Dante's Paradiso is the least read and least admired part of his Divine Comedy. The Inferno's nine circles of extravagant tortures have long captured the popular imagination, while Purgatorio is often the connoisseur's choice. But as Robert Hollander writes in his new edition of the Paradiso, "One finds few who will claim (or admit) that it is their favorite cantica." (A cantica, or canticle, is one of the three titled parts of the poem.) The time is ripe to reconsider Paradiso's neglect, however, since three major new translations of the poem we know as the Divine Comedy are coming to completion. . . .

When it comes down to it, though, the real problem modern readers have with the Paradiso is the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that "we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry." As the quote suggests, our trouble with heaven is less a problem of belief than it is a problem of imagination. From the opening lines of Anna Karenina on down, all our best literature teaches us that narrative thrives on adversity, and so heaven presents itself as little more than a blank screen of beatific blandness, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. (Consider, by contrast, how successfully hell has been deployed as a metaphor for modern life: Under the Volcano, The Invisible Man, The Descent of Alette, not to mention "The Waste Land.")

Baird goes on to argue, however, that Dante's Heaven is anything but boring:

In fact, one of the major achievements of the Paradiso is that Dante is able to create drama out of people getting along. Contrary to the individualist slant of many contemporary visions of the afterlife, Dante's heaven is insistently social, and the souls of the blessed take great pains to show what a happy society they have up there, even to the point of performing stunning audiovisual choreographies . . .

But the real drama of the canticle is literally cosmic: It develops out of the tension between a perfect heaven above and a very imperfect world here below. After more than 10 years in exile, Dante was an expert on human imperfection. And even though he'd seen one after another of his political hopes crushed under the steel toe of history, he never gave up on the ideal of earthly justice. (In the Monarchia, written around the same time as the Paradiso, he argued that "the world is ordered in the best possible way when justice is at its most potent.") This is why, despite all their professed camaraderie and contentment, the souls of the blessed can't stop talking about what's happening on earth. The folly of the living brings them repeatedly to rage, as when St. Peter says of Pope Boniface VIII: "He … has made my tomb a sewer of blood and filth." Dante himself is not shy about joining in the general indignation. Looking down from the eighth sphere of heaven, he sees only "the little patch of earth that makes us so fierce."

Read it all here. Hat tip to Thinking Christian.

Joel Osteen is the pastor of Houston's Lakewood Church, which may well be the largest congregation in the country. Even beyond his own congregation, he is well known for his positive message of the Gospel — a message that many call the Prosperity Gospel. Chris Lehmann reviews Osteen's latest book, Become a Better You, and is not at all impressed:

Joel, who succeeded to the Lakewood pulpit on his father's death, has pointedly refrained from pronouncing visions, performing wonders of the spirit such as speaking in tongues, or really doing much biblical preaching at all. He has the wardrobe and tirelessly dapper mien of an oil industry lobbyist; it's as a walking advertisement of the success creed, and not as any manner of prophet, that he's made his name. "I'm not called to explain every minute facet of Scripture or to expound on deep theological doctrines or disputes that don't touch where people live," he writes dismissively in Become a Better You. "My gift is to encourage, to challenge, and to inspire."

. . .

There's, of course, nothing inherently suspect or dishonorable about seeking uplift and consolation in the Bible. But the point of those "deep theological doctrines" that Osteen seems to deride is to leaven that quest with the less agreeable features of life—pain and suffering, the persistence of evil, the fleeting quality of all endeavor, the cosmic insignificance of the human self, let alone that self's subordinate chosen modes of expression in body posture or a near-pathological penchant for smiling. After all, the same Bible that Lakewood's arena full of believers champion as a handbook for what they can do and be also contains these words, in Revelation 3:17: "Thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing: and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked."

Read it all here.

So what do you think? Is this a fair criticism of Joel Osteen's message?

Christianity Today reviews a new book on emerging church.

Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church explores the interface between the emerging church and traditional, liturgical churches. The book is a series of interviews — the author, Becky Garrison, describes it as a "salon." It's a helpful ... sampling of discussions about recovering authentic Christian witness in postmodern urban culture.

Becky Garrison, senior contributing editor for the Wittenburg Door, had in-person, phone, e-mail, blog, and IM interactions with 33 people, most of whom are involved in "emerging" groups, "alternative worship," or other innovative worship practices. About half of the contributors are of the Episcopal/Anglican tradition; nearly half are women.

They note eight themes in the book, one of these is the relationship between Episcopal traditions and emerging church:

A new partnership between traditional churches and emerging churches. Episcopal and Anglican leaders are building bridges from older liturgical forms of church worship to emergent forms. Jonny Baker works with the (Anglican) Church Mission Society to "reimagine worship, faith, and community in postmodern/emerging cultures." Karen Ward (abbess of Seattle's Church of the Apostles) is excited about "amazing 'convergence'" she finds "between Anglican ethos and practice and [that of] the emerging church."

Read it all here

Ward also created a social network for people interested in the Anglican emergent church here.

Washington Post blog contributor Alan Cooperman lists his five favorite "retellings" of Biblical stories, and is very effusive over the Jenkins/LaHaye books. But before listing his top five, he invites readers to share their favorites as well—or perhaps to just abuse him with their favorites; hard to say.

His list:

1. Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1944) by Thomas Mann. Four sublime volumes by the Nobel Prize winner, a great work of literature and learned Bible commentary, even if Mann did base Joseph's rescue of the Egyptian people from starvation on FDR's New Deal.

2. J.B. (1958) by Archibald MacLeish. The poet and librarian of Congress won a Pulitzer for this play, a re-telling of the Book of Job with some debt to Jean-Paul Sartre, too.

3. Song of Solomon (1977) by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison. OK, this isn't exactly a retelling, more a string of biblical themes and allusions, complete with a character memorably named "First Corinthians." It was an early Oprah Book Club pick and a bestseller.

4. The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant. A feminist retelling of the rape and avenging of Dinah, whose own voice is conspicuously missing from Genesis 34. Socko popular fiction, millions sold.

5. The Left Behind series and The Jesus Chronicles (1995-present). 65 million copies sold and counting, though I suspect that The Jesus Chronicles (retelling the four gospels) won't enrapture nearly as many readers as the apocalyptic books did.

So far in comments, readers have submitted The Last Temptation of Christ; East of Eden; and Lamb: The Gospel of Biff, Jesus' Childhood Pal. If you would like to put a few nominees up, you can read the post here.

Booktrust, the British reading charity, conducted a survey of 4000 in Great Britain, to determine the best children’s books of all time. Leading the list is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Princeby J.K. Rowling, placed sixth.

Here are the top ten:

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
Famous Five, Enid Blyton
Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
The Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson

The Booktrust press release makes the following observations:

The New Yorker has posted an interview with Honor Moore, daughter of the late Paul Moore, famed bishop of the Diocese of New York.

This week in the magazine, in an excerpt from her book “The Bishop’s Daughter,” Honor Moore writes about her father, the Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, his faith, and his secret. Here Moore talks about her father’s public service and private life.

Moore was a leader in moving the church to act on behalf of those without power in the world.

Mark Harris at his blog Preludium comments on Honor Moore's tender and compassionate interview.

The Paul Moore story will be out there and I wager that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in some parts of Anglican Land., but he will deserve better.

Perhaps there will be a time when we will finally give up on the idea that being heterosexual or homosexual is not an either/ or even a both / and sort of thing. It may be common to say a person is heterosexual or homosexual, but it may be more to the point to say that we are all sexual and sensual and that is about who we are, as a whole person, and being beat up about that or ostracized or shamed does not help anyone get a better grip on being a fully whole human being, saved or obedient to the Word of God.

There will be rending of garments and much wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth on both sides of the aisle about this book and her revelation.

Some will cry that many LGBT people could have been helped and the church's journey to greater social justice advanced years sooner "if only he had told the truth."

Others will cry that the church and his legacy is soiled by this truth that should have remained secret - that nothing good can come of any of this.

There will be those who will laugh and scorn the Body of Christ in its incarnation as The Episcopal Church and say this is but one more piece of evidence of its 'internal decay' which provides them with one more reason to leave 'this apostate church.'

Still others will say, "I told you so!" and smirk, "See, Gene Robinson is not the first gay bishop. He's the first honestly gay bishop."

Hear the interview here.

Article on The Rt. Rev. Paul Moore at the time of his death here.