Tag: christianity

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life reviews

Three Books That Changed My Life

In 2007, I began tracking my reading habits on Goodreads. Over the past sixteen years, I read or listened to 581 books containing 210,880 pages. Suppose we use my averages over the past sixteen years to estimate my reading habits for the twenty-five years of my reading history before Goodreads existed. In that case, I’ve read 1,500 books containing nearly 524,000 pages.

I’d like to tell you about the three that most changed my life.

Skinny Legs & All

By Tom Robbins

My friend, Jess Tanen, found me in the hallway of our high school. The year was 1992, and we were in ninth grade. She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to her locker. She took a book from her backpack and handed it to me, saying, “Here. This is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. I didn’t like it, but I think you’ll love it.”

I opened it up and read the first sentence:

This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.

I don’t think I’ve come across a better combination of words in the English language than “wolfmother wallpaper.” Like a heroin addict, I’ve been chasing the high ever since.

Tom Robbins quickly became my role model as a writer, thinker, and philosopher. He luxuriated in extended metaphors, dazzled with whimsical, mind-expanding analogies, and wrote about the history of religion, politics, governments, and culture without forgetting the role of vaginal juices in the lives of his sexually progressive heroines.

I was already a wannabe writer by ninth grade. I didn’t have the size or talent to be a jock, the work ethic to be an honors student, the discipline to be a musician, or the skills to become a theater geek. But I did love books, and I could sit for hours in a room with a keyboard and a blank screen without getting lonely or bored.

Most importantly, pretty girls gave me positive feedback on my writing. If sports, good grades, guitars, or theatrical monologues weren’t going to do it, writing would have to be my thing.

Every high-school writer goes through an emo phase. They believe in big, heavy literature that plumbs the depth of the human soul. They imagine heroes who look out windows into the pouring rain, smoking a cigarette and thinking about the existential French woman who left them for a one-legged veteran of the Great War who struggles with nightmares and smells like boiled cabbage. Suicide figures prominently in the writing of high schoolers.

Tom Robbins saved me from that. He wrote outlandish books full of big ideas without forgetting to make his readers laugh with delight or get turned on by raw descriptions of human sexuality. He embraced the principles of the Enlightenment at the same time as he reveled in the darkness of our romantic, pagan inclinations. He wove together evolution and spirituality, commercialism and divinity, astronomy and astrology, utopia and reality.

He gave me a way to see the world, care for the world, and love the world without taking it too seriously to remember how ridiculous we all are.

Louis C.K. tells the story of his first memory. He is four years old, standing in front of his parent’s house, shitting in his pants — “a massive, terribly painful shit.” He doesn’t remember the first half of the shit — his memory begins halfway through shitting. “I came online as a result of the anal pain that I was experiencing. It actually awakened me — yeeeeeoooooow! — into the stream of consciousness I’m now living. That’s how my life started. That’s who I am.”

I have the same feelings about Skinny Legs & All and Tom Robbins. Reading that book awakened me into the stream of consciousness I’m now living in.

House of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

My wife had a boyfriend when we first met. She doesn’t remember this and denies it being accurate, but she told me that she and her boyfriend were engaged. I was attracted to her, sure, and over the next seven or eight months, that attraction would become the love and devotion it continues to be (no feelings were made known until long after she’d broken up with her boyfriend), but in our first months in each other’s lives, we were, more than anything else, great friends.

We were both freshmen in college. We met under a tree. I sat beneath it reading a book, and she had the nerve to approach me (a stranger) and initiate a conversation. One of her first questions was, “What are you reading?” It wasn’t long before it became clear how much we loved books.

We spent virtually all our time together over the next three months. Neither of us enjoyed our roommates, so we exiled ourselves from our dorm rooms and lived in the college library, “surrounded by stories surreal and sublime.”

We wrote papers sitting next to each other in the computer labs, suggested which books the other should read, and printed out short stories the other needed to experience. We ate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners together, made late-night runs to Denny’s, and grabbed ice coffees at Dunks.

At the end of the first semester, she was flying home to Chicago to spend the holidays with her family, and I was driving to Boston to spend the month with mine. I dropped her off at the airport, but before we left campus, she gave me a book to read.

I looked at the cover: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

“Look inside,” she said.

I began to flip through it, and the typography and layout were as much a work of art as the story itself.

The story has several layers to it. The main text is a book-length, critical review of a non-existent documentary. The documentary is made Real World style, with mostly fixed cameras placed throughout a home. It follows a famous filmmaker (the director of the documentary) and his model wife as they buy, move into, and settle down in their new home. They quickly discover an impossible hallway on the house’s outer wall. After further investigation, the married couple uncovers an impossible maze built beneath their home, which they soon delve into.

Hundreds of footnotes comment on the critical study. The footnotes were written by an L.A. drifter named Johnny. Johnny discovered the study in the burned-out apartment of an old blind recluse who died violently under mysterious circumstances. His footnotes often run for pages and contain a novel’s worth of plot within them.

The layout and typography of House of Leaves mirror the maze in the story, requiring the reader to, for example, twist and turn the physical book as the characters climb a spiral staircase or skip dozens of pages when the characters go through a secret door. The spillover of the footnotes also causes the reader to flip through six or seven pages to follow Johnny’s story before flipping back to where the footnote started to return to the main thread.

The effect is that the reader gets as lost in the story as the characters. As Johnny begins to question reality and sense an ever-increasing dread at the unknown monster(s) that stalk the characters through the maze, the reader takes on the same emotions, making the book one of the most engaging I’ve ever read and one of the scariest.

I found it so scary that I couldn’t put it down. I read the book in one marathon sitting because the moment I turned out the light, I could hear Johnny’s monster breathing at my bedside, threatening my sleep.

The next day, I called my friend and told her how incredible it was. That’s when she admitted that she hadn’t finished it.

“It was too weird for me,” she said, “But I knew you’d love it.”

We’d read many of the same books that semester. Some were assigned by our shared professors. Others were the result of recommendations from friends.

But when I finished House of Leaves and discovered that she gave it to me because it was too weird and she knew I would love it, I felt more seen than I ever had before.

We wouldn’t confess our love for each other for another four months, but after reading House of Leaves on her recommendation, I knew I was hooked.

James, the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and The Dead Sea Scrolls

By Robert Eisenman

Jesus was not an only child. He had at least two brothers and probably multiple sisters. After Jesus’ crucifixion, his brother, James, became the arch-leader of the movement. James, the Brother of Jesus, attempts to uncover who James was and how understanding him will bring us closer to the historical Jesus.

In my own life, it served as the final break between me and the faith in which I was raised.

James, the Brother of Jesus, is not a great book. At 1,156 pages, it is 700-800 pages too long and incredibly repetitive. It strays for scores of pages at a time, making it difficult to follow the author’s thread.

It also contains (though not by the author’s fault) a cast of historical personages with similar or identical names, requiring the reader to do too much detective work to determine which person the author is referring to at any given moment. True, this confusion of names lies at the heart of the author’s scholarly investigation (he maintains that the chaos of names was intended to obscure the reality of the Church’s history). Still, he could have made it easier for the reader to untangle the relationships and identities of the individuals involved.

Despite its flaws, James, the Brother of Jesus serves as the foundation of everything I understand about Christianity — namely, that it has very little to do with the historical personage of Jesus and everything to do with the words and acts of a man who never met Jesus, a man we now call St. Paul.

This is not a new understanding of Christianity. Scholars have long understood, and the New Testament makes it clear (Acts 15:2), that the Jerusalem community of Christians that arose after Jesus’ crucifixion had issues with Paul’s work among the Gentiles.

But by focusing on “James the Lord’s Brother” (Gal. 1:19), whom Eisenman shows was the “actual, physical successor” to Jesus, the book provides “a historically accurate semblance of what Jesus himself, in so far as he actually existed, might have been like.”

I first read the book when it made its debut in 1998. I was twenty-one years old at the time. Despite having served as an altar boy for three years, despite working as a receptionist for the priests in the rectory, and despite the nuns who led my Catholic education in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) telling me since the first grade that I would become “the first American Pope,” I had already ventured beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church thanks, primarily, to the journey Tom Robbins had sent me on (see above).

I retained a deep connection to the Church, however. I may no longer have been a Catholic, but I was still, in many ways, a Christian. James, the Brother of Jesus, shattered my perception of Christianity.

The book highlights the biases of “historians” such as Eusebius, as well as the authors of the New Testament and its Apocrypha, in the creation of Christianity, demanding that believers reckon with the political realities of the early Christian writers and the way Roman and Jewish power structures required so much to be hidden away from plain-reading eyes.

While the orthodox-upending nature of the book is not revolutionary, its subject most definitely was. If we accept Eisenman’s conclusion that “who or whatever James was, so was Jesus,” then we have to admit that the all-loving Christ presented by modern Christianity is fake. Jesus was actually a militant Jewish zealot, a member of an oppositional alliance against the establishment of Rome and the Herodian-controlled Second Temple, whose followers went about armed for battle (Matt. 26:51).

Jesus came not to save the souls of the world but to free Jerusalem from foreign invaders, a political messiah more than a spiritual one. The historical Jesus has more in common with today’s militant Muslims who seek to drive the forces of the infidel American Empire out of Saudia Arabia than with the all-loving Christ preached about in our churches. To get closer to Jesus, one must look to the lost traditions that were driven out of the Roman Church in the fourth century.

With that as the basis for my understanding of the reality of Jesus, my approach to received histories was changed forever.

This perception-shattering work has been followed by dozens of others, all of which could be categorized under the grand title of another essential book, Lies My Teachers Told Me.

As a result, James, the Brother of Jesus, caused me to not only break with my faith; it formed my philosophy as an educator. My goal as a teacher has been, first and foremost, to destroy whatever misunderstandings have been delivered to my students by the myths of our time. For twenty-one years, I was beholden to the myth of Christianity, the complex reality of world history hidden from me and (I imagine) from my teachers. I refuse to let my students suffer the same fate.

Skinny Legs & All opened me up to a universe where humor, sexuality, and profound philosophical inquiry harmoniously coexist. Tom Robbins disarmed me from the stereotypical broody, angst-ridden teenage writer phase and liberated me to become an audacious explorer of thought.

House of Leaves, with its labyrinthine narrative structure, not only tested the limits of my reading comfort but also marked the inception of a deep and understanding relationship with the woman who would become my wife.

Lastly, James, the Brother of Jesus, shook the foundations of my religious faith, transforming my worldview and shaping my pedagogical philosophy. This book, despite its flaws, helped me confront the discrepancies between received histories and the more intricate, often concealed narratives of reality.

These three books have undoubtedly catalyzed significant shifts in my life, and their effect on my personal evolution stands as a testimony to the transformative power of books.

Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward
Categories
religion & atheism

50,000 Killed Over 300 Years

From The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism:

The history of witchcraft can be quite grim. From the 1400s through the 1700s, authorities in Western Europe executed around 50,000 people, mostly women, for witchcraft. The worst witch hunts could claim hundreds of victims at a time. With 20 dead, colonial America’s largest hunt at Salem was moderate by comparison.

Categories
religion & atheism

Greet Death

I wonder if I think about death more than other people. I have an anxiety disorder, and I would suspect that all anxieties, if pursued to their origin, would eventually lead to an ultimate anxiousness about death, so yes, I suspect, with my disorder, I think about death more than other people.

Part of it is because I am a writer, and every story, eventually, must end — my own not least of all. Part of it is because I’ve now entered my forties, and what might once have gone away on its own is now more apt to linger. Part of it is because I have a family of my own now, and I worry about them in my absence. Part of it is because I spend much of my days and nights examining my relationship to the concept of God, and that examination naturally includes a lot of blindness when it comes to one’s death. Part of it is because I feel like at any moment I could receive news of my students’ deaths, self-inflicted, accidental, or victimized, two of which have occured during my current tenure as a teacher. Part of it is because I am the son of two 70+-year-old parents, and there’s no telling what might happen.

So yes, I think about death…perhaps a lot…but do I think about it more than the next person? Isn’t the next person’s life just as touched by death as my own?

Here’s the thing though: when I think about death, I’m not “worried” about it (not on a conscious level, anyway). It’ll be what it’ll be, after all, and nothing I say or do will change that.

Christianity would beg to differ, arguing that my faith and my works here on Earth will determine my placement in the Kingdom of Heaven. Though “the Kingdom of Heaven” can be interpreted to mean the current world — the *herenow* — it also means a world that exists *beyond* death and a judgement rendered as to whether those who live in the *herenow* will be able to immigrate into the land of *hereafter* — with specific criteria determining whether an applicant has merit, and if not, then to hell with ’em.

Like some interpretations of the Kingdom of Heaven, I also value the *herenow*, but I add to that, the *herethen*. In my attempt to live as a good Taoist, I seek to find the flow of the herenow, to recognize the difference between the various channels of possibility, and “work when it is time.” But I also value the herethen, the possibility that humanity will continue to exist long after I am gone.

The Christian concept of the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be squared with my values because, in the end, Christianity does not value the continued evolution of human existence. Its ultimate goal is to drive/draw the spirit *away* from the abundance of the Earth. It does not seek to recycle the spirit back into the ultimate good of *life*.

I, however, do seek life, and because of that, I do not worry (consciously) about death. I see it, ultimately, as a good thing (not dying, per se, but death) because I see it as nothing more or less than a transfer of energy, once concentrated, now dissipate, never to reform in the same concentration again. Just as I don’t worry about the loss of energy taking place in my brain right now — it leaps from synapse to synapse, splashing energy and information like a frog leaping from one lily pad to the next — I don’t worry about death.

There is a difference between worrying about it and thinking about it. I think about it, but I think about it in terms of the *herenow* and *herethen*. Is death herenow? No? Okay. Then what can I do to make the world better in the herethen? Because let’s do that.

Some day I will greet death. But until then, I want to keep working on the world I’ll leave behind.

Categories
education life politics

An Argument About Guns

I argue on Facebook a lot. I’m *that* guy. You got an opinion on something? Let’s start arguing, see where it takes us.

I have principles and values that I attempt to defend, but I don’t get angry if someone attacks them. After all, if they can’t stand up to an attack, then maybe they’re not worth defending.

One of my principles is that guns create deadly violence. They are not the only weapons to do so, but they are — in fact and deed — manufactured to create deadly violence. It may not be violence to a human being, but it is violence to a target, whatever that target may be.

The absence of guns, however, does not mean the absence of violence. Violence is a by-product of nature, and nature is everywhere and for all time, therefore, the potential for violence can never reach absolute zero.

I accept this.

What I do not accept is the idea that adding a weapon to any situation will actually reduce *the potential* for deadly violence. The presence of a weapon *threatens* violence, regardless of whether the weapon is used. It increases, in every instance, the potential for deadly violence.

This is not an opinion. I understand it as a statement of fact, one hardly worth defending, since it seems so rock steady and impervious.

I do, however, note potential cracks, areas where, while suffering a direct attack, my pillar of an argument may — in fact and deed — require my direct support.

The constructing of an argument is the concentration of diverse forces upon a central point, and just as in the construction of a bridge, where the best way to channel forces is through a series of triangles, the best way to construct an argument is to triangulate a central point. That means one side of the argument must address the forces marshaled in favor of a counterargument.

The central point of my argument is that guns create deadly violence, but the counterargument I addressed defends the thesis that guns do not create *the potential* for violence.

I have committed the fallacy of a straw-man argument. Not even the biggest gun proponent would defend the position that guns do not create *the potential* for violence; instead, and more reasonably, they argue that guns are the best answer to *actual* violence.

And in that, we differ.

There will be another school shooting and dozens of children and teachers will die. We live in a violent world, and school shootings are one manifestation of that violence. I accept that.

But gun proponents do not think I ought to accept that. They believe that they truly cherish every *innocent* life, and they want to defend that *innocent* life with everything they’ve got. I respect that.

But I do not think it is possible to defend every innocent life.

We live in nature, and nature is a violent place that we can never escape. It *creates* in us the potential for violence in the same way that it *creates* in us the oxygen that keeps our bodies alive. The potential for violence is a condition of our *being*, the ground state of our existence.

That is why I argue about reducing the *potential* for violence; because we can never get *actual* violence to zero. Gun proponents, to their credit, argue about reducing *actual* violence, and they refuse to accept their failure.

I would like to respect and support both positions, but I cannot accept a reality in which there is never any failure.

I do not believe in utopia. I do not believe in perfection. This is a byproduct of my not believing in God. Because I do not believe in God, I am not required to defend any *one* position as perfect.

Christians believe in a triangular God because they believe that talking about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit best allows them to concentrate the weight of their wisdom on one central and holy principle: a single, perfect God. They believe that God’s righteous anger, as well as His infinite mercy, reveals the way we ought to live in moments small and large, and that this revelation is experienced through the grace of His Holy Spirit.

I don’t very much disagree with them; but in the end, I only accept their argument as wisdom, and not as fact.

Because I do not accept the existence of a single, perfect God, I do not have to accept any idea of perfection as a possible fact. I do not believe in nor feel I ought not to strive for the creation of perfection.

Instead, I believe in and feel I ought to strive for the best way to improve the potential for love and/or reduce the potential for violence.

That means, in this instance, I strive to reduce, while knowing we can never eliminate, the *threat of violence* to our school children.

Any positive argument I make from this position is therefore unacceptable to gun proponents, and perhaps it ought to be. With them, I am not willing to accept *actual* violence befalling my own child, or the children I teach each day, or my own wife, or the children she teaches each day. With them, I want our schools to be *free* from actual violence, and with them, I don’t deny that guns are perhaps the best way to confront *actual* violence.

But we can never free every child from *the potential* for violence, and so that’s where I choose to put my effort — to reduce *the potential* rather than to stop *the actual* (which, in all instances, we will *never* be able to do).

I do not believe that putting guns in our schools will actually reduce the potential for violence.

I can imagine, because we see it happen every day, armed authority figures killing *actually* innocent men and boys. It will be a single story on the news, perhaps lasting a month at most (depending on the circumstances), and then the authority figure(s) will be suspended, fired, and perhaps even convicted, and the story will go away.

And then, maybe a month or two later, an armed authority figure will kill a single armed shooter, preventing the body count in one attack from rising any higher (though almost definitely not reducing it to zero). The story will be incredible for its real and actual heroism, and the number of proponents for removing the guns from our schools will reduce.

And then another *actually* innocent man or boy will be killed, and the authority figure will be suspended, fire, or convicted. And then another, and then another, and then perhaps another school shooter will be stopped by an official’s gun.

And that will just become our reality.

The number of school shootings by armed and angry boys will eventually reduce, but never equal zero, and yet still, unencumbered, the number of dead *actually* innocent kids gunned down by armed authority figures will go on and on, and because the school shooters keep coming, even if in drastically reduced numbers, no positive argument will be heard that suggests removing the armed authority figures from the school will actually make every school shooter stop.

And actually innocent children will continue to die.

That cannot be helped. I don’t care how many guns you throw at the problem.

Gun proponents envision a future where every child accepts the presence of guns in both their personal and their public lives, but in that instance, the child becomes *conditioned* to a reality where there exists a drastically high potential for violence — violence in self-defense, perhaps, but still, and always, violence.

But I’m trying to envision a future where every child and every adult thinks of schools as sacrosanct. Shooters won’t stay away because they are afraid. They will stay away because of respect.

I teach in a school for students who have been diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders. Many of them have been expelled from other schools because their presence increased the potential for violence. The state does not know what to do with these kids, and so they send them to us.

Our entire school is based on the concept of respect. We respect the students, and in return, we expect them to respect us. They often don’t. But our response never changes. In this one place, they are not required to earn or maintain our respect. We simply give it to them. Every day. All day. Regardless of what they do. And through that experience, the students *witness*, every day, all day, what it means for one person to respect another, and we hope, through that experience, they learn to respect the place that we’ve built, and maybe, if we’re lucky, the people who continue to build it.

I don’t worry about any of my students coming to my school to shoot us up, and mine are the students virtually every other school is worried about.

I don’t worry about them because I trust they know I respect them.

Most gun proponents I have spoken with make a big deal out of respect, and rightfully so. But one does not earn respect by threatening someone with violence; a threat can only earn their fear.

The worst thing that could happen at my school is for an armed authority figure to show up. The state has sent these kids, over the course of their short lifetimes, to residential facilities that, in the minds of these kids, are little better than jails. They’ve been thrown to the ground and forcibly restrained by adults. Many of them have been handcuffed and taken to an actual jail.

To these kids, authority figures are, for very valid reasons, just triggers to a post-traumatic episode — sources of anxiety, anger, and fear.

We work to socialize our students to authority figures, but we also respect the experiences that they’ve gone through, not seeing in them any reason for blame or judgement, just respecting them for who they are and what they’re experiencing now.

We are able to do this because the discussions we have in our professional-development workshops value therapy above academic achievement. While it is true that we are a school, we believe that teaching them about respect, acceptance, anger, and coping will do them more good than teaching them to do their sums. We strive to provide them with skills for communications, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and social reasoning, but the primary focus is on the development of their personal qualities.

The students we traditionally receive have been so disobedient that they’ve, in almost all cases, been literally beat down by their families and society. Many of them have never known, since the moment they were born, a moment free from anxiety, fear, and pain.

They do not need to be *further conditioned* to a reality with a high potential for violence. They do not need to worry *more* that their disobedience may result in their death. That is already the only existence they’ve ever known.

I beg you, as a man who spends virtually every waking hour thinking about how to help the broken children in our communities, do not put armed authority figures in our schools.

Help me teach these children that, before anything else, and just because they are alive, they deserve our respect.

Because that is the only thing that will ever bring us closer to actually reducing the violence.

(Which, I accept, we can never reduce to zero.)

Categories
reviews

The Books I Read in 2017

Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, which is where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books over the course of the year and then track your progress. Most years, I challenge myself to read either 25 or 30 books, and most years, I come close to achieving that goal, but for the last two years, I read 35 and 36 books respectively, so  I challenged myself to read 35 books in 2017.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t succeed. Instead, I read 21 (my lowest number since the annual challenge began in 2011). There’s no real reason for this, except maybe that some of the books I read were pretty damn long (my wife, who read Moby Dick and Gone with the Wind this year, thinks Goodreads should change it from number of books read to number of pages; she’s not wrong). But long books or not, I didn’t reach my goal. Thankfully, a new year’s begun.

Now, to the books!

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy (528 pages)
This non-fiction book attempts to capture nearly two-thousand years of papal history. The author, John Julius Norwich, skips a large percentage of the popes to focus on the more interesting ones, such as St. Peter (the first bishop of Rome), Innocent III (the first to put forward the principle of papal infallibility), Leo X (the first Medici pope and the man who excommunicated Martin Luther), Clement VII (the second Medici pope and Leo X’s cousin and best friend, not to mention the pope who wore the tiara when Protestantism became a separate religion, Rome was sacked by Charles V, and the Church of England broke away), Pope Joan (a legendary female pope who Norwich argues did not really exist), and others.

The subject of almost every chapter in this book could stand as a book on its own, and several chapters could have whole libraries dedicated to them. As a history of the papacy, it’s also a history of the political and economic life of the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and Europe in general.

Because of that, some of the book is a slog, and you need a machete to cut through all of the repetitive names followed by Roman numerals, but if you give up the idea that you’re going to remember the differences between all the Leopolds, Ferdinands, Clements, and Alfonsos, the book becomes a fascinating flood of corruption, intrigue, and empire.

If you have any interest in the actual history of the Roman Catholic Church (rather than the theology), Absolute Monarchs is a great place to start (the other, of course, is A History of Christianity: The First Three-Thousand Years).

Norse Mythology (304 pages)
Neil Gaiman wrote this collection of Norse mythology because, in a lot of ways, mythology comes not from the tales we tell, but from the retelling of them. Thor did not exist in Asgard, but in the magical space between the storyteller and the listener, each fireside tale in Scandinavia adding to the strength of his hammer.

Gaiman’s desire to share tales that have already been shared millions of times is to be commended,  and (as I wrote in my review on Goodreads), he “writes these familiar tales in an authentic feeling way, letting loose only in those moments when the narrative requires it, but never straying too far from his source.”

When I picked up the book, however, I was hoping for more Gaiman and less Snorri Sturluson. While I didn’t necessarily want a modern take on the tales (e.g., Gaiman’s novel American Gods), I had hoped for Gaiman to take me inside the stories to provide a new perspective. Instead, I got a remarkably faithful version of these well-told tales.

I don’t hold that against him. My desire as a reader and his desire as an author may not have matched up, but the end result was still an enjoyable read, making this book as good as any if you’re just hoping for an English version of traditional tales.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (414 pages)
I wrote a piece about this book when I read it back in March. I hadn’t finished the book when I’d written it, and so I left the question that motivated the piece unanswered at the end. The author, Yuval Noah Harari, essentially argues that Homo sapiens are no different than any other biological force on the planet in that we are subject to the same laws of physics, chemistry, and biology as ants, anteaters, and single-cell parameciums.

The story of our history, then, is the story of our attempt to universalize the powers of the human animal — whether through politics, economics, or beliefs — in order to overcome the laws the universe has subjected us to.

Harari ends his book with a chapter that presages his next book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. The chapter explores humanity’s attempt to overtake natural selection with intelligent design, discussing biological engineering, cyborg engineering, and the engineering of non-organic life (i.e., Artificial Intelligence).

The end result is not exactly pessimistic, but also not exactly hopeful. As he writes in the book’s Afterword, “Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals… We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea of what to do with all that power… Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one… Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (368 pages)
I gave this non-fiction book a rating of three stars when I finished it back in April, which is probably why I barely remember reading it. I started reading the book because I wanted to understand not only economics, but also the mindset that leads to insatiable greed.

I don’t think this book satisfied either of those desires, but if it did, it certainly didn’t make a lasting impression when on me. That’s why, when writing this post, I went back to the book to rejigger my memory, and in the book’s introduction, I found this great quote from John Maynard Keynes, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men…are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

That’s why I wanted to read this book. To better understand the ideas that essentially rule our world. Maybe this book helped me (because I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time this year thinking about economics), but if it did, I can’t say exactly how.

The one thing I do remember about this book is how much of a bad-ass John Maynard Keynes was. I mean, the dude made his personal fortune by only dedicating a half-hour a day, while still in bed, to his own financial doings. The rest of the time, he was writing books on mathematics that impressed even Bertrand Russell, doing public service in Britain’s treasury department, socializing with Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury group, editing the Economic Journal, participating in (and then critiquing) the Treaty of Versailles, running a theatre, becoming the Director of the Bank of England, and so much more. Keynesian economics may have its detractors, but Keynes himself was pretty damn cool.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (577 pages)
This non-fiction book tells not just the story of the famed Lawrence of Arabia, but also of the unheralded (and generally inexperienced) men and women who also played a huge role in the shaping of the Middle East.

I picked up this book following The Worldly Philosophers because, in reading that book, I realized just how little I knew about World War I. The only book about the Great War I’d  read previously was The Guns of August (which is fantastic, by the way), but that mostly covered the European theatre, and focused mostly on the first month of the war. I wanted to know more.

I chose Lawrence in Arabia because of the anecdote the author, Scott Anderson, shares in the introduction to the novel. Basically, Lawrence is called to the palace for what he imagines will be a consultation about the postwar borders of the Middle East, but instead, King George surprises him with a knighthood ceremony. He’d once written that his greatest ambition was to become knighted before the age of 30, and now that ambition was about to be realized. As Anderson writes, “Except Lawrence didn’t kneel. Instead, just as the ceremony got under way, he quietly informed the king that he was refusing the honor [and] under the baleful gaze of a furious Queen Mary, Colonel Lawrence turned and walked away.”

I might not have known anything about World War I, but after reading that intro, I had to know more about the bad-ass mofo who turned his back on a king.

The book was fantastic, and it reads like a novel. I really can’t recommend it enough.

Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (570 pages)
Lawrence in Arabia did a great job of covering the Middle Eastern theatre of the war, but it didn’t do a great job of explaining what happened at the end of the war. Paris 1919 dedicates 570 pages to the subject.

I really enjoyed this book (four stars!), but I also had some issues with it. The author, Margaret MacMillan, organizes the book by geography, focusing on the story of each region. For example, the third part of the book tells how the Balkans were divided following World War I, while chapter six focuses on Russia.

This makes the individual stories of the regions easier to follow, but the jumping back and forth in linear time makes it difficult to understand all the moving parts and how they influence each other. I don’t begrudge MacMillan for the difficulties — her subject is extremely difficult to organize, and she had to make a choice somewhere — but by the end of the book, I felt she had lost some steam.

The New Testament: King James Version (~550 pages)
I started reading the New Testament in concert with Absolute Monarchs, but as anyone can see who looks through my Goodreads, I tend to read a lot about Church history. Last year, for example, I read Elaine Pagels’ research on Revelations and James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty. It had been several years since I’d last read the New Testament in its entirety, so I figured I’d get on that.

Mostly, I wanted to read the books that come after the four Gospels: the book of Acts, the various letters “written” by Paul, James, Peter, John, and Jude, and Revelations. Because I’d recently read an entire book on Revelations, I skipped that section in this year’s reading, but outside of that, I read them all.

And as always, I thoroughly enjoyed them. They don’t call it the Good Book for nothing.

Aftermath: Empire’s End (423 pages)
The final book in Chuck Wendig‘s Aftermath trilogy, Empire’s End provides the canonical explanation of what happened to the Empire following the death of Emperor Palpatine during the Battle of Endor. The trilogy takes place between the Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, clearing up some loose ends from the original film trilogy.

I enjoyed the overall plot of Wendig’s novels, but I got pretty annoyed with his habit of writing “Interludes” that had nothing to do with the main story. At first, I found them interesting — they’re like mini-stories that take place throughout the Star Wars galaxy, and they give readers an on-the-ground experience of what it is like to live through the death of a tyrannical empire — but after a while, they just got in the way of the story of Wendig’s main characters. This was an issue with the entire trilogy, but by the third book, it was even more of a problem. We’d been with these characters for two whole books now — it’s time to leave off the Interludes and simply cut to the chase.

With that being said, if you’re a Star Wars geek like I am, these canonical books are a must read.

Max (473 pages)
I came across this book in the children’s section of our local library. It’s a young-adult novel written from the perspective of a child created through the Nazis’ eugenics program.

I picked the book up because the opening chapter was written from the first-person perspective of a fetus, and frankly, I’d never come across something like that before.

The rest of the book played out well. The titular character is the epitome of Nazi eugenics, but even he comes to realize that tyranny is a malevolent force that cuts away at the sanctity of the individual. A well-done book that I’d recommend for both young and regular adults.

This Is Not A Novel (190 pages)
The late David Markson is one of my favorite authors. His books, while similar in style, expand the possibilities of literature, challenging reader expectations while also delivering on the emotional promises we require from literature.

This Is Not a Novel focuses on the birth, life, and death of various artists, including the narrator, who calls himself “Writer.” The text is essentially a 190-page collection of anecdotes about artists (again, including “Writer”), but the anecdotes build up and play off each other, allowing the reader to make the kinds of connections we desire in our reading.

I picked up the book during the week my family was in Chicago, and I read it in just a couple of hours. There are no chapters to the book, and each anecdote is very short — sometimes no longer than a few words — so it’s easy to tell yourself, just one more, just one more, and next thing you know, the book is over.

If you have any interest in art and artists, definitely pick it up.

The Communist Manifesto (288 pages)
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I taught a high-school course on Communism & Socialism in 2017. To prepare for that class, I read several books and essays from the original leaders, including the grand-daddy of the texts, Marx & Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

I’m a big fan of this book. A lot of it is Inside Baseball type-stuff, where Marx & Engels argue with other communists and socialists about the real aims and meaning of the international movement, but you can breeze over that stuff to get to the meat of the essay.

Between the two blog posts I’ve linked to above, I’ve said pretty much all I want to say on the topic for now, but I will add that I truly believe every informed American ought to read The Communist Manifesto. Marx & Engels are both strong writers, and the ideas they present in this little book become more apropos with the growing power of the American oligarchy.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (170 pages)
I picked this book up while reading several books on Communism & Socialism. I needed a break from all of the political theory, and this meditation on the meaning of life fit the bill.

The author, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, was suddenly struck by a painful illness that prevented her from getting out of bed for close to a year. In her bedridden state, a friend gave her a wild snail that they picked up from outside of her apartment. While lying in bed doing absolutely nothing, Bailey begins to meditate on the lived experience of the snail, on humanity’s need for companionship, and on life’s ability to be resilient in the face adversity.

This short book did not quite live up to my hopes for it (it reads like a poor man’s version of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), but at 170 pages, it fulfilled my need to alleviate the political anger aroused in me by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Lenin: A Biography (561 pages)
Another book for the Communism & Socialism class, this one took me most of the summer. I started reading it in mid-July and finished it in late August.

As the bona-fide leader of the Communist revolution in Russia and the founding father of the Soviet Union, Lenin has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of scholarly books over the past 100 years. Choosing a single book to read can be daunting. I chose Robert Service‘s biography because he is a professor of Russian history at Oxford and the author of several others books on Russia, including a biography of Stalin and a history of 20th century Russia.

I also chose the book because it was one of the first biographies to be written after Mikhail Gorbachev “unsealed” the central party’s archives and various files and meeting minutes became declassified. It also contained research from more recently acquired correspondence from and memoirs of Lenin’s family, furthering our insight into Lenin’s motives and actions.

I was not disappointed. What results is a full and complex picture of a uniquely driven and highly focused individual. We see him playing with his neighbor’s children and feel his own loss at never having children himself. We see him raging in his deathbed as Stalin proves himself to be an unworthy successor. We see him foaming at his fellow intellectuals and inspiring the actions of crowds in a square. We follow him on nighttime walks and relax with him in the countryside. We see, in a word, a man.

Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (86 pages)
Like the Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific is less of a book and more of an extended essay. Written exclusively by Engels (rather than Marx & Engels), the essay breaks down the concept of socialism, looking at it through first a utopian lens and then a historical-material one, with a long section in the middle, “Dialectics,” establishing the primacy of the latter over the former.

For Engels, when Socialism evolved from Utopianism to Historical Materialism, its “task was no longer to manufacture a system of society as perfect as possible, but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes [the proletariat and the bourgeoisie] and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.”

In other words, Socialism is not an attempt to create the perfect society. It’s the attempt to end the original conflict between humans: economic oppression. Subsequently, the dominant mode of production (capitalism) manifests as the pure expression of that oppression, one in which the only goal is the creation of surplus value, which Marx demonstrated can only arise from the exploitation of another person’s labor.

In still other words, according to Engels (one of its founding fathers), Socialism is not a positive political program but an attempt to free the vast swath of humanity from capitalist oppression (which, it will be argued elsewhere also frees humanity from the tyranny of the State, itself a mode of capitalist defense).

For a relatively short introduction to Socialism, you could do a lot worse.

State & Revolution (116 pages)
Written by Lenin, The State & Revolution is Lenin’s attempt to clarify the language and ideas of Marx and Engels to better communicate what he saw as the revolutionary requirements of Communism and Socialism, especially as it relates to the proletariat, whom he defines as the spear tip of the working class, the leadership group that is most capable of directing the workers’ revolution through and into its ultimate phase, the withering away of the state and humanity’s first real taste of freedom.

If you’re interested, I put together for my students some notes on the first few chapters. It’s basically quotes from the text, but arranged so as to provide a clearer through-line for each chapter.

Lenin is not as good a writer as Marx or Engels, but his tone and his authority definitely come through. After reading the biography of Lenin I mentioned above, I found my first in-depth experience with his writing to be enriched by my understanding of him as a man. I definitely enjoyed the experience.

On Bullshit (67 pages)
A small treatise written by a Princeton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, On Bullshit has a funnier title than its content would suggest. The author attempts to analyze the difference between bullshit and lying, coming to the conclusion that while lying must have some relationship to the truth (since its function is to conceal the truth), bullshit‘s only goal is to get its audience to be impressed by the bullshitter.

Because it is generally apathetic in regards to the truth, bullshit is more dangerous than lying: lying at least acknowledges the value of the truth, but bullshit is nihilistic.

A Song of Ice & Fire (4,972 pages)
Following the conclusion of the latest season of Game of Thrones, I decided to re-read George R.R. Martin’s original books: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons.

I loved these books the first time I read them over a decade ago, and I loved them even more this time around. I had forgotten how many changes the HBO series had made, how many characters left out and how many subplots left unopened or unexplored. I forgot that the HBO series was not only erasing minor characters or changing the locations and timing of various scenes, but it was radically altering Martin’s novels, to the point where the events of the past two seasons of television simply can’t develop over the next two or three books.

In other words, I’d forgotten that what I was watching on television was so far from Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire that I’d essentially forgotten A Song of Ice & Fire. I couldn’t be happier to have Martin’s vision be the last one I’ve experienced.

Now if only he could publish the next book (The Winds of Winter) before the final season of Game of Thrones can be released.

—

And that’s it. Those are the twenty-one books I read in 2017. All told, we’re talking roughly 10,660 pages worth of fantasy, history, philosophy, experimental literature, mythology, religion, and politics.

Not to mention way too many articles about Donald Trump.

God damn it, 2017.

Categories
religion & atheism

Reading Christ Without Faith

I am an atheist, but I read a lot about Christianity. I don’t read a lot of books about Islam (though I have read some), nor do I read about Judaism (though, again, I have read some); nor about Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or Shinto (though again, I have read some).

Christianity. That’s mostly what I read about.

The reason seems simple: I was raised as a Catholic in the suburbs of Boston. How Catholic? Well, not only was I baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, but I volunteered as an altar boy, and on Saturdays, I worked as a receptionist for my parish’s monsignor. I also played basketball for and went on overnight field trips with my local Catholic Youth Organization. Parish priests came to my house for dinner on more than one occasion, and I considered them (and still consider them) my friends.

A Hindu pandit, on the other hand, has never passed me the green beans, nor has a Buddhist monk. I wasn’t raised on the banks of the Ganges or at the base of Mt. Fuji. Yes, I did grow up in a town that felt at least half Jewish, and yes, I attended several Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and yes, I broke bread at least half a dozen times with a rabbi, and yes, I would argue that one can’t really read about Christianity without also taking in a fair share of Judaism, but even when I read about Judaism, I usually do so as one who is there to find Catholicism.

(Just as a side note: Maybe the best book I’ve ever read on religion and spirituality explores Judaism through a conversation with the Dalai Lama; it’s called The Jew in the Lotus, and I can’t recommend it enough.)

I guess what I’m wondering is, why? Why my fascination with Catholicism? Is it really as simple as, “Because that’s how I was raised?”

I hope not.

I mean, of course it is — it absolutely is — but I also want it to be more than that.

First, I’m fascinated by the politics of it all. Back in high school, I was introduced to the fact that after Jesus died, his brother James the Just became the leader of the apostles, sharing power with Peter and John (“James and Cephas [Peter] and John, who were acknowledged pillars [of the Jerusalem church]” {Galatians, 2:9}). Then along comes Paul, a former hunter of Christians who never met the living Jesus, proclaiming that he knows Christ’s message better than those men who walked beside Him during His ministry and witnessed Him in His resurrection (“And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me” {Galatians, 2:6}).

The difference between what Paul preached and what the Jerusalem church preached was wide. Paul preached what we now consider the Christian message: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians, 13:13). But the Jerusalem church must have preached something entirely different.

Remember, the Jerusalem church was a recognized band of fundamentalist revolutionaries whose politically assassinated leader called for a new definition of all that was held holy. James, himself, was enough of a nuisance to be stoned to death by Jerusalem’s high priest, an act that came not only from the early church’s ministry but also from the newly appointed high priest’s desire to make a big splash early in his career (he failed; his rash decision to murder a man whose epithet was “the Just” didn’t play well with the crowd, and the priest was quickly removed from office).

While we don’t know exactly what the Jerusalem church called for, the epistle of James differs from the epistles of Paul in that a) James does not refer to Jesus as the Son of God (he barely refers to Jesus at all), while most of what Paul writes ultimately finds its reasoning in the divine nature of Jesus Christ; and b) Paul writes that a person can be saved by faith alone, while James argues forcefully that “faith without works is…dead” (James 2:26).

These are two major differences. For Paul, Christianity’s validity comes from its revelation via the divine Lord, and its saving grace comes from the believer’s faith in that divinity. For James, however, Christianity is not a faith, per se, but a way of life, revealed by the prophets and embodied in the Lord Jesus Christ. For Paul, Christ is the law. For James, Jesus demonstrated the law.

The history of that argument is fascinating to me, especially since Paul’s argument was victorious and yet James’ argument feels more sound. Add on history’s iconoclastic takedown of all that the layman believes about Yeshua ben Yosef, and it’s easy to understand my fascination with the politics and the history.

Second, I’m fascinated by the theology. Christianity is the only major religion that declares God’s descension to the mortal realm (“And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” John 1:14). Judaism and Islam both declare their truths through the Word of God, as revealed by the prophet(s), but God remains fundamentally separated from the human, an abstract notion when He’s not communicating through a burning bush or an angel.

Hinduism’s concepts of the Atman and Brahman might allow an interpretation that comes close to Christianity’s God in the flesh, but Hinduism (like Shinto) is fundamentally polytheistic, so even if we stretched the metaphor in friendship, it would ultimately have to collapse in foolishness.

Both Taoism and Buddhism are godless religions (in the best sense of that phrase), so while the wisdom of the universe may be obtained there, that wisdom itself is never embodied the way John and Paul tell us that Jesus embodied God’s Word.

So that’s pretty ballsy, from a theological perspective.

Third, I’m fascinated by the message of it. I don’t know what Yeshua ben Yosef actually preached in the backwaters of Galilee in the first century CE, but I know over the next two thousand years, his disciples developed a rich and wise account of how a human ought to live: with faith in the future, hope for those among us, and love in our heart. I can get on board with that.

Fourth, I’m fascinated by the contradictions of its most avid devotees. I’m not talking about right-wing Christians who proclaim that Jesus wanted us all to get wealthy and to hate fags and communists and to arm ourselves against Islamic jihad. I’m talking about actual saints and Popes, the individuals who seem to believe with all of their heart and yet who also seem to stray from the path their Lord revealed to them  (I’m a fiction writer and reader, and thus a sucker for complex characters).

So yes, the reason I read so much about Christianity is because — without a doubt — I was born and raised a Catholic; but it’s also more than that. It’s a fascination with history, theology, morality, and humanity.

And those are topics in which my lack of faith still feels justified.