Posts about books that I’ve read.
The book is short (121 pages), and rather quirky. Taking the temple at Bassae (in the rural mountains of the Peloponnese) as the touchstone, the authors riff on the different ways the classics have influenced and are influencing us. It’s an enjoyable read, but nothing much here that’s directly bearing on Christianity.
This was a very informative book, and the point I found most interesting was that the Muslims accept the proposition that one verse of the Koran can abrogate another part of it (the author likens it to a constitutional amendment). The book is objective. It points out some problems with old texts and so forth, … [Read more…]
Some interesting echoes of Genesis: a worldwide flood, with one family and animals surviving in a big boat, and a raven sent out twice to find land; a snake who keeps man from having perpetual youth; and a woman who causes the loss of innocence in a noble savage. But there are many gods, of … [Read more…]
I made just a few Bible-related notes on these lectures: “Moses” means “birth” in Egyptian. “Watch the stones” refers to the Egyptian birth procedure (they sat on rocks). The place names fit in. The son of Rameses the Great dies at about the right time.
I picked this book just for the history, and it turns out the author is quite Christian-sympathetic and -oriented. Here are some notes: Augustus (27 B.C. to A.D. 14) pushed for returned devotion to the traditional gods, restored old temples, was named “Pontius Maximus” (high priest), and so forth. Caligula (A.D. 37-41) had many anti-Jewish, … [Read more…]
In deciding to read this book I recalled the author’s excellent Acts commentary (discussed elsewhere on this site), and learned that an admired polymath law professor had read the author’s history of Christian thought (five volumes or so) and endorsed it. There were some occasional insights in this book, and not a lot I actually … [Read more…]
This is an extremely well-written, measured, and intelligent book. As the title suggests, it has a relatively limited aim, but the book achieves it very well. The author also wrote Fermat’s Last Theorem and much else in science; he has a Ph.D. in mathematics and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard. The author is … [Read more…]
Great title, eh? The book is okay: The basic idea is an intriguing one, namely to be alert to how God is guiding your life to be a story, a coherent narrative with a theme. Cf. C.S. Lewis’s suggested analogy — albeit in the context of God’s being outside of time — between an … [Read more…]
I noted this important exchange (477): When asked, “What Christian writers have helped you?,” C.S. Lewis replied, The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Others are Edwyn Bevan’s book, Symbolism and Belief, and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, and the plays of Dorothy Sayers. [Footnote: “Such … [Read more…]
The author of this 80-page book, which is part of a series on myths, is a Cambridge professor. The myths recounted are bloody and irrational, entertaining but not edifying, and so it seemed to me very different from Bible stories or even classical myths. It’s also much harder to see how the Norse myths would … [Read more…]