Making our history one step at a time
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.
I now know more about the UK higher education system than I do about my own. Greak book, considering it was written by a politician-- although I don't think Betsy DeVos could pull off a similar tome on education in the U.S.
A book with a simple premise, but potentially controversial: Not all of the early apostles and gospel writers viewed Christ the same way. *Gasp!* Don't tell me there were differences of opinion! Say it isn't so!
I served in the very same Germany Hamburg mission as Roger Terry 33 years later, and this mission memoir was a walk down memory Strasse.
At the height of anti-Muslim sentiment during the Crusades, Saint Francis discovered the divine mystery of universal brotherhood: Islam too was part of God's pleasure. In our post 9/11 world, Saint Francis is an example of inter-religious dialogue that I hope we can all rediscover.
What if the faith of others isn't a challenge to the legitimacy of your own, but an invitation for you to be a better Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc? In this wonderful book, Barbara Brown outlines how her faith has changed since stepping down from being an Episcopal priest to teach a world religions course.
