Origin

Origin  by Dan Brown   456 pages

Robert Langdon returns in another highly-charged escapade that follows what-has-become a customary script: The professor, thrown into a harrowing situation that requires intimate knowledge of codes, is partnered with a beautiful woman with troubles of her own, both of whom dash about a foreign city, running from the law in spite of being the good guys, and solving the science-versus-technology dilemma within the prescribed 24 hours. To say nothing of the Mickey Mouse watch. The plots may be predictable, and people poo-poo Brown’s writing style, but I enjoy his books.

The quest to find the answers to the two fundamental questions of human existence originates in Bilboa, Spain, and ends in Barcelona. This publisher’s synopsis…

Navigating the dark corridors of hidden history and extreme religion, Langdon and Vidal must evade a tormented enemy whose all-knowing power seems to emanate from Spain’s Royal Palace itself... and who will stop at nothing to silence Edmond Kirsch. On a trail marked by modern art and enigmatic symbols, Langdon and Vidal uncover clues that ultimately bring them face-to-face with Kirsch’s shocking discovery... and the breathtaking truth that has long eluded us.

… is more dramatic than the actual story. This book was different than the other Langdon stories in that there wasn’t the extensive background history or theoretical explanations to support the premise of the story; there was also a notable lack of symbolism and iconography compared to the character’s previous experiences. Not to say that the plot was dumbed down, but I figured out ‘who done it’ well before the book’s conclusion. Still a pleasure to read!

Posted By:   Regina C. 

Hitler's Religion

Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich by Richard Weikart, 286 pages

Identifying a person's religious beliefs can be difficult in the best of circumstances.  The very concept of religion is itself notoriously difficult to define, and the task of disentangling what a person actually believes from what they profess requires considerable insight even when it is one's own self.  The matter is further complicated when the subject is a public figure with a vested interest in dissimulation.  Then, too, a person's religious views do not often remain static and unchanging throughout their lives.  But when the subject is Adolf Hitler, the modern world's foremost icon of evil, the tangled question becomes a matter of considerable rhetorical weight.  Was he an example of the depths to which modern godlessness can sink or a fanatic whose antisemitism was rooted in an admittedly somewhat unorthodox Christianity?  Was he an occultist in league with diabolic forces or a neo-pagan anticipating a restoration of the old Norse religion?

Based on an analysis of Hitler's speeches, writings, and the testimony of those close to him, Richard Weikart concludes that Hitler was none of these things.  Hitler's religious beliefs were vague and inchoate, but certain beliefs remained consistent.  He definitively rejected Christianity, reimagining Jesus as a Gentile warrior killed for attacking "Jewish materialism".  He was not an atheist or an agnostic, as his constant faith that he was the chosen instrument of Providence endured even at the very end.  He was thoroughly dismissive of any form of occultism or pagan revivalism, mocking those in his entourage who involved themselves in such things.  Instead, Hitler was a believer in a form of "scientific pantheism" which imagined that the will of God was embodied in Darwinian "laws of eternal fight and upward struggle".

Despite the sensationalistic subtitle, the book is carefully reasoned, though not perfectly organized.  Weikart demonstrates both a clear command of the primary sources and a familiarity with a wide range of scholarship.

Survey of Hinduism

A Survey of Hinduism: Third Edition by Klaus K Klostermaier, 507 pages

As a religion practiced by hundreds of millions of people and the oldest of the great world religions, with roots in a time before human memory, Hinduism is unsurprisingly mind-bogglingly diverse - indeed, there are even those who claim that the very idea of a singular "Hinduism" is a colonialist imposition of Western categories on Asian reality.  Certainly, Hinduism is inseparable from Indian life and culture, and it is this aspect of the religion as a living experience that Klostermaier attempts to present.  To this end, he thankfully consciously rejects dissection and over-analysis, thus making it possible to "not only learn about Hinduism but also learn from Hinduism."  Unfortunately, this also results in his giving perhaps too much credence to the Hindu pseudo-science equivalents of creationism and the "Bible code".

A Survey of Hinduism is designed as a course textbook, and as such it is not ideal for solitary reading - much would benefit from expansion and elucidation.  Although there are many black and white photos and illustrations, these are pedestrian in the textbook tradition.  Klostermaier slips somewhat when referencing Western religion - there, he participates in the same kind of dead academicism he wisely avoids when the subject is Hinduism, a problem compounded by his evident animus towards Christianity - but this does not affect the bulk of the book.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, Jr, 334 pages

St Isaac Leibowitz was one of the scientists who made Armageddon possible, and hoped that it would never become actual.  When human folly unleashed unimaginable destruction, he took shelter from the aftermath in a secluded monastery, emerging to found a religious order dedicated to preserving whatever could be preserved.  Down through the centuries, the spiritual sons of Leibowitz dare to defy both bloodthirsty simpletons and amoral sophisticates, barbarians who believe that by erasing history they can prevent it from recurring and barbarians who believe that their command of science makes history irrelevant.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is an adaptation and expansion of a series of short stories following the history of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the millennia following a devastating nuclear war.  One of the classics of science fiction, the heavy use of irony conceals one of the most compassionate and genuinely humane novels of the twentieth century.

Flat Earth

Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood, 362 pages

Once upon a time, every American schoolchild knew that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and proved, despite the obscurantism of swarthy Inquisitors, that the earth was round.  Many are still taught this, if not as pure history, at least as part of the mythical war between Science and Faith.  Of course, by the time of Columbus the fact of the sphericity of the earth had been virtually unchallenged for two thousand years and was firmly embedded in medieval culture, as witness The Divine Comedy and the emblem of the globus cruciger, the orb topped with a cross, used as a symbol of Christ's dominion over the world.

As Christine Garwood explains, the legend of Columbus as the conqueror of flat earth superstition had its origins in the early nineteenth century and the desire to cast Science as the liberator of mankind from the slavery of religion.  Ironically, it was this same narrative that helped to generate the first genuine flat earth theorists in a millennium, as a few extreme fundamentalists, believing that science was the inveterate enemy of what they were convinced was the Biblical view of the universe, declared that the supposed roundness of the earth was, in fact, a massive deception.  Turning the tables on their opponents, they claimed that their "zetetic" mode of inquiry, which relied entirely on personal observation and experience, was more objective than conventional science.  Indeed, they even attacked the round earth "theory" as an ancient superstition with no place in a more enlightened age.

Garwood traces the history of flat earth belief from the debating societies of Victorian England to the desert of twentieth century California.  Along the way, she includes a colorful assortment of cranks and charlatans, from aristocratic dilettantes to fire-breathing faith healers to playful Canadian academics, all of whom Garwood treats with admirable sympathy.  In addition to being consistently interesting, Flat Earth reveals that, far from being a survival of "medieval superstition", flat earth belief is a form of modern pseudo-science, which not only helps to explain the fringe appeal of a flat earth, but more popular forms of pseudo-science such as "creation science".

Catholic Enlightenment

The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement by Ulrich L Lehner, 218 pages

"Ecrasez l'infame," Voltaire famously declared, over and over again, "Crush the infamy!" - "the infamy" being the Catholic Church.  In the decades following his death, Voltaire's "enlightened" admirers attempted to do just that, to wash away the Church with the blood of hundreds of thousands of her faithful.  These facts have dominated the understanding of the relationship between Church and Enlightenment ever since, "enlighteners" denouncing the Church as the chief enemy of human progress, traditional Catholics seeing in the Enlightenment little but persecution and genocide.  It is Lehner's argument that it need not be so, and was not always so.  In The Catholic Enlightenment he attempts to trace an "enlightened" movement within the Catholic Church itself which emerged organically out of the Tridentine reform. 

The central problem presents itself at the outset, when Lehner reminds the reader that the Enlightenment was not a single, unitary phenomenon, but that there existed "multiple Enlightenments."  This difficulty in definition produces considerable confusion - the Jesuits were enemies of the Enlightenment insofar as they supported the Papacy against the State, but the Jesuits were supporters of the Enlightenment insofar as they pushed for the adaptation of Catholic practices to Asian cultures against the will of the Papacy, and the Papacy supported the Enlightenment insofar as it pushed for the ordination of native priests against the will of the State.  Likewise, without clearly explicating the nature of the dispute between the Jesuits and the Jansenists ("Jansenists taught that... one must be truly sorry to receive absolution" while the Jesuits "argued that the minimum requirement for receiving absolution was sorrow for one's sins"), Lehner claims both sides for the Enlightenment.  Nor is "Enlightenment" the only vague term Lehner treats cavalierly - while he acknowledges that "superstition" could refer to anything from the evil eye to the Incarnation, he still frequently attributes "opposition to superstition" to his subjects as a sign of their Enlightenment without further definition.

For the most part, Lehner attempts to weave a distinctly Catholic Enlightenment out of two separate threads - the continuators of the Tridentine reforms, whose goals sometimes harmonized with and sometimes opposed those of the Enlightenment, and the "enlighteners" who sought to make the Church conform to the world and their "enlightened" ideas.  Unfortunately, these threads clash - while the former were invariably orthodox, the latter often spiraled into heresy and schism.  Then, too, Lehner's claims to objectivity are undermined by his consistent use of morally loaded terms such as "progress" and "reform" - even excusing the inevitable "Enlightenment" and its offspring "enlightened" and "enlighteners".  This works in both directions - it is difficult to describe St Alphonsus Ligouri as an Enlightenment figure, as Lehner does, unless "enlightened" is being used as a bare synonym for "good".  Finally, Lehner sometimes stretches too far to align Enlightenment figures with twentieth century concerns - he uses the beggar saint Benedict Labre to illustrate differences between the enlightened and Catholic attitudes towards poverty, but then attempts to connect this to a "preferential option for the poor" which resembles the former more than the latter.

There is a great deal of excellent detail in The Catholic Enlightenment, with its retrieval of the work of a host of neglected intellectuals.  Lehner's stated goal, demonstrating that Catholicism and Enlightenment should not be imagined as entirely irreconcilable, is laudable.  His attempted demonstration, however, is fundamentally misguided, absurdly suggesting that the quisling French state church was somehow superior to the "dark age" Church of Vianney and Therese, Newman and Chesterton, Seton and Brownson, Damien and Lwanga, Bosco and Leo XIII.  He seems not to have grasped the difference between engagement and surrender.

Apostles of Reason

Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen, 265 pages

American Evangelicalism, an amorphous movement that is notoriously difficult to define, has long struggled with many tensions, few as deep-seated as that between the high value evangelicals place on education and their distrust of secular learning.  Apostles of Reason is an attempt to follow the intellectual and anti-intellectual currents in evangelicalism from its emergence out of the fundamentalist movement of the early 20th century.  Indeed, according to Worthen's account, the struggles over intellectualism are the direct product of the fundamentalist-modernist battles, which left evangelicalism with a lack of strong authority and a tradition of fragmentation over doctrinal issues, and as a result committed to an interpretation of sola scriptura which necessitated a strong defense of biblical inerrancy.

Unfortunately, Apostles of Reason is hopelessly muddled.  While there can be no doubt as to the breadth or depth of Worthen's knowledge on the subject, she is unable to bring the pieces together to form a coherent picture.  She jumps back and forth between decades in a manner which makes it very difficult to discern developments or patterns.  Long digressions into evangelical political activism on both the left and right, while serving the laudable purpose of demonstrating the diversity of evangelicalism, do not seem to contribute much to the primary theme of the book.  Although Worthen clearly makes an effort to be fair to all parties, problems repeatedly arise as she habitually slips into the cliches of elite journalism.  The opponents of conservatives are generally described as moderates rather than liberals or progressives, while conservative groups are tagged as "shadowy" and conservative activists as "infiltrators".  In the same vein, Worthen generally tends to conflate intellectualism and progressivism, a quirk that occasionally crosses over into silliness - at one point she seems to imply that intellectual seriousness is served by employing an art teacher whose work involves plaster casts of his wife's genitalia.

Therein lies the central paradox, which Worthen seems to at least suspect.  Evangelicals are upbraided for their rejection of reason due to their rejection of the elite intellectual consensus, a consensus which itself rejects reason.  They are faulted for their resistance to dialogue with opposing viewpoints by a modern mindset utterly uninterested in meaningful engagement with opposing viewpoints.  For evangelicalism, far from being a reactionary throwback to a premodern era, is itself a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

Book of Earth

The Book of Earth by Alfred Noyes, 328 pages

The Book of Earth is the middle book in Noyes' trilogy of epic poems celebrating scientific progress - where the first, Watchers of the Sky, followed the course of astronomical discoveries, the second trips through time following the advance of knowledge about the Earth and the life that teems upon it, from Pythagoras to Darwin.  The image of the naked geological strata within the Grand Canyon symbolize the book of the world, in which the Creator's mind is revealed to the ardent seeker after truth.  Noyes himself is committed to the words he puts in the mouth of Nichomachus, speaking to his son Aristotle - "...the living truth / Is here on earth if we could only see it."

Poetically, this work may be forgettable, but the story it tells is not, and that story simply could not be told in prose.

Unknown God

The Unknown God by Alfred Noyes, 383 pages

"You men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious.  For passing by, and seeing your idols, I found an altar on which was written: To the Unknown God.  What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you."  So spoke St Paul on the Areopagus in the first century.  In that tradition, poet Noyes wrote this book in the early twentieth century, attempting to lead his generation to the Unknown God of today (or, at least, of 1934).

Noyes proclaims the "greater agnostics of the nineteenth century", including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer "unconscious prophets".  He sees their attacks on theism as criticisms of pallid deism rather than robust, orthodox Christianity -  unable to remain contentedly in the dark, they were blindly groping towards transcendence.  Noyes' call is for poetic imagination and scholastic reason to compensate for the deficiencies of empiricism.

Alchemy's Daughter

 

Alchemy’s Daughter by Mary A. Osborne    268 pages

Santina Pietra is a seventeen-year-old living in 14^th-Century Italy; San Gimignano to be exact. There aren’t many alternatives for young adult women at this time. The two best options are marriage or the convent. She can stay at home as a spinster and take care of her father; her mother having died many years ago.

Santina’s father has his eye set on a much older man for her husband. But she doesn’t even like him, much less love him. She loves Calandrino, a scholar and friend of her father’s.

Santina is no ordinary woman. She wants to follow her love of knowledge and be something more than a brood mare. She spends her day studying, looking forward to her weekly lesson with Calandrino. However, when he seemingly abandons her for studies at a far-away university, she is devastated.

Instead of capitulating to her father’s wishes that she marry like her sisters, Santina leaves home to study with the local midwife Trotula. In the small cabin, she learns how to fend for herself, how to help deliver the villages babies, and cure the population’s sicknesses. Santina thrives in this role, no matter that both she and Tortula are considered witches.

This story may be set in the 1340s, but Santina resembles a 21^st –Century woman. She is fearless, modern, intelligent, and strong. I feel that the young adult women who read this will find not only inspiration, but role models in both women.

The story was rather slow in the beginning, but quickly moved into a can’t-put-it-down tale of strong women. That’s why I gave Alchemy’s Daughter four out of 5 stars.