Making our history one step at a time
A double book review: "Not in God's Name" by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and "The Book of Lemuel" by Mette Harrison. Both challenge dualistic interpretations of scripture that separate a righteous Us and a wicked Them.
11th century Christian from England disguises himself as a Jew so he can train as a physician in a Persian hospital. Historical fiction at its best! It captures an era that I wish we engaged with more.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
My wife is getting close to publishing her first book, and I'm honored to be one of the first to read it all the way through! It's kind of scary releasing your book into the world, and I'm glad she trusted me with it! It's YA fiction, y'all should try it out when it comes out next year.
My first book by Richard Rohr "Eager to Love" just happened to be about my favorite saint too, Saint Francis. I am drawn to Francis because he critiqued the Church while remaining a part of it, and he exemplified holy envy when encountering the Sultan. Rohr gets to Francis's central message: the centrality of love.
Brought back memories of filling out the Preach My Gospel Christlike attributes assessment and reaching the humility section. If I rank myself highly, I'm like the guy who says "I am the humblest person I know." But-- if I give myself all zeros, then I'm just doing it to prove I'm humble!
My review is READ THIS BOOK. While the book is trying to address a contemporary question, Does Trump pose a threat to democracy?, it helps put the question into context, looking at history of American democracy as well as democracies of other countries that have lapsed into authoritarianism.
"I was just following orders." "I personally don't hate Jews." "What was I supposed to do?" All of these were justifications put forth by Adolf Eichmann for his role in the death of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany. The moral of the story: each individual is responsible for their own actions.
This one was one of those epiphany books for me, an absolute masterpiece on American foreign policy in the 20th century. It's essentially America's version of the pride cycle. We get fixated on one good idea, become extremely over-confident, and then crash and burn.
