Welcome to the Orthodox Church

Welcome to the Orthodox Church

© 2015 Fredrica Mathews-Green 

384 pages

What it means to be liturgical can't be encapsulated in a creed; liturgy has to be practiced,  experienced.  In Welcome to Orthodoxy,  FMG creates a fictional Orthodox parish and guides readers through it. She begins first with a tour of the church's physical structure -- an outward and visible sign of its theology -- before guiding her readers through Vespers, the Divine Liturgy, Pascha, and -- the holiest of holies -- coffee hour.   FMG isn't playing tour guide to a fictional landscape, as every step of the way she is sharing the theology and culture of the Orthodox tradition.  Particularly interesting for me is FMG’s statement that the Orthodox regard the Crucifixion differently; for them, Christ died to conquer Death – not to sacrifice himself as atonement for forgiveness of sin.  Kin to this is the Orthodox view of sin, which is regarded as deathly not because sin is like a law that carries the death penalty, but because sin is simply spiritual disease. Anger, lust and so on disrupt the soul’s connection to God, and make people vulnerable to worsened health - -both spiritual and physical. This view is echoed in Stoicism, or at least in the writings of Marcus Aurelius -- he urged himself to return to philosophy as a patient to the doctor.   Throughout the book, FMG explains the origin of Orthodox practices that seem strange to ‘modern’ Christians who are largely divorced from history. . Icons, for instance, are viewed as windows into heaven, and when they are kissed it is not the object that is being greeted, but the person who the icon is showing.  I've read similar books (The Way, on theology, and FMG's Facing East, on a year in the Orthodox church), so there weren't many surprises.  I could see recommending this to someone who was curious about the Orthodox tradition.

Blogger having some technical hiccup, so here are links which would otherwise be in-text:

The Way:
 http://thisweekatthelibrary.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-way.html
Facing East:
 http://thisweekatthelibrary.blogspot.com/2016/02/this-week-usual-suspects.html
The Orthodox Church
http://thisweekatthelibrary.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-orthodox-church.html

My Life with the Saints

My Life with the Saints
© 2007 James Martin, SJ
414 pages

The church I grew up in consistently referred to Rome as the whore of Babylon, so needless to say I didn't learn anything about saints. I knew Biblical personalities, sure, but was completely oblivious to the hundreds of men and women throughout the Christian era who served as outstanding examples, witnesses, or reproaches to the rest of us. I encountered a few in history books, like St. Augustine,  but they were more statuesque than human. The sole exception was Joan of Arc, who began as a figure from history but became (as I read various biographies) someone I felt an odd sense of affection for.  James Martin grew up Catholic, but his saintly education seems to have been almost as paltry as mine, discovering most of them as he attended seminary and trained to be a Jesuit. In the beginning, Martin notes that Catholics approach saints as both intercessors and companions; the latter approach inspiring most of this book.

My Life with the Saints mixes biography -- his, the saints, and others -- with spiritual reflection. In each chapter, Martin recounts his encounter with each personality, sharing how they shaped and informed his own spirituality while connecting their lives to people he has worked with through the years.  St. Francis,  "the fool for Christ", is revisited in the story of another 'fool', a priest who worked with gangs in Chicago and would try to disrupt fights by walking into the middle of the fracas, dressed in a blue-jean robe.  Martin mixes Biblical, medieval, and modern personalities, and includes a fair few people (notably Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day) who aren't "official" saints.   Although I purchased this hoping to meet a lot of obscure personalities, the mix meant only a handful were  completely new to me. Even so, I found Martin's meditations  refreshing, particularly the conclusion in which he remarked on the variety of the saints -- old, young, rural, urban, intellectual, hardy, mystical, rational -- and the hope that presents  to readers, that sainthood isn't limited to a superhero type.

Related:
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain

The Benedict Option

The Benedict Option
© 2017 Rob Dreher
269 pages

  Christendom has fallen; long live Christendom.   In The Benedict Option, Rob Dreher argues that the Christian church in the United States is at a crisis point and must now think seriously and act deliberately if it is to avoid the fate of European Christianity. The vestiges of America’s Christian past have evaporated away,  and what has replaced them?  A vague feel-good sentiment that is applied like lipstick on the pig that is self-worship.  One of Dreher’s earlier books, Crunchy Conservatives, introduced readers to the idea of a conservative ‘counterculture’ to resist the worst aspects of American consumerism.  With the Benedict Option, Dreher maintain that such a counterculture is no longer an option: it is a necessity if Christianity in America is to survive a culture now defined by corrosive materialism, violent and pornographic entertainment, and the disintegration of the family.

 Dreher begins with a visit to the cradle of western monasticism, the abbey of Nursia where St. Benedict began.  Benedict, too, lived in an age of decline – in the dusk of the western Roman empire, an age of corruption and decay. Born into privilege , he could have had a reasonably comfortable life, yet devoted himself instead to creating a monastery for the purposes of work and prayer.  Dreher uses the Benedictine rule – its  requirements for  being rooted in a place, living communally,  studying, praying, and physically laboring – to explore ways that people today are creating an authentic Christian counterculture; one which is vibrant  and self-contained, existing within but separately from the  mass culture. (Judaism is the stellar example, having sustained itself for thousands of years despite chronic marginalization and outright persecution –  and possibly because of that persecution, if Natan Sharansky’s case is typical:  his embrace of Judaism increased every time he was targeted because of it.)

 Up until the present day,  Christians in America have been able to combine their loyalties;  America was a place formed by Christian ideals,   from the Puritan townships of New England to the Catholic parishes of Louisiana. For most of its history it has been populated almost wholly by Christians, resulting in a culture where even non-Christians tended to conform to Christian norms of behavior by default.  The American devotion to individualism was thus moderated by some sense of religions conviction  The zeitgeist  has changed, however, and the prevailing religious attitude of most Americans (including its Christians) is what Dreher and others call “moralistic therapeutic deism”. Its  tenets are all mild and comfortable: God exists  and wants you to be happy, you should be nice, and if you  die without having murdered someone, you’ll probably go to heaven because God is nice, too.  It is the kind of religiosity that lends itself well to a consumer culture:  the idea of God is there when you need it, a quick prayer during distress, but doesn't intrude on one's life otherwise.   But this sort of vague belief is the useless security blanket that the anti-religious hold all religions to be. It  does not form the character, or steel it for real crises;  it does not compel people to work to create things good and beautiful, let alone prompt them to sacrifice themselves for someone else’s good.   The American polity is likewise bereft of virtue: the national government is marked by routine assassination, excessive surveillance, and casual coercion of the powerless.   If serious Christians wish to  preserve their faith, they  must realize that they are Christians first and foremost..   “Our citizenship is in heaven,” wrote Paul, and centuries later St. Augustine would repeat that in his City of God.  To be born into America is an accident of geography; to preserve oneself as a Christian in a materialistic,  selfish, and scorning society will require grace,  sheer will, and the support of other Christians.

To live inspired by the Benedictines, to preserve a culture amid collective chaos,  suggests a degree of asceticism.  A certain level of withdrawal is required from outside society. By no means does Dreher advocate Christians withdrawing into survival cells in the mountains,  but he does urge readers to reflect on the degree to which their characters and minds are being fragmented and disordered by popular television,  too-frequent use of wireless devices, etc.  It also means rethinking engagement with State politics, for beyond a few critical areas there is not much that can be done. Protecting basic liberties is possible within the cultural mainstream, sure, but to be most effective,  Christians should focus on local politics. A Benedictine works the soil he is given; he does not attempt to be a one-man agricultural lobby.

Education is crucial for renewing Christian civilization, for state schools are where children’s souls go to die.   A child raised in a morally-inclined home will, at school, be exposed to children who were raised in sewers – children who believe that violence and verbal abuse are normal, and that watching naked ladies on their cellphones is harmless fun.  Dreher encourages Christians to consider  the growing movement of classical Christian education, which grounds the cultivation of children in a tradition with deep roots.  Homeschooling is another option,  though it requires immense patience and more sacrifice on the part of the parents.

What we must realize, says Dreher, is that the Christian way must become part of every aspect of life:  the home and Christian school should be ordered like a monastery, towards God.    At home, Dreher recommends regular family prayer regimens, and suggests that single people living alone might do well to look for fellow Christians to live with --  relying on them not just as roommates but as spiritual brothers-in-arms who provide sources of accountability and advice for one another, as well as  opportunities for helping one another in charity.   Fellowship is crucial:  the essential horror of the modern post-west is that people are so atomized and separated from one another.  The iPhone, promising connectivity to others but in reality allowing people to live more and more inside their heads, is a fitting icon of the age.    Not only does  Christian fellowship help people grow in their faith and flourish emotionally, but if the State becomes overtly hostile towards its new minority, Christians will need to rely on networks to find employment and resources. The time to build those networks is now.  Benedictine Christians can create a counter polis,  creating anew civic structures that will attract the materially and spiritually destitute.

While the Benedict Option addresses itself to the Christian future, I do not believe the advice is merely applicable towards surviving and thriving in the future. Even learning a little of the classical tradition is edifying and eye-opening, whether one is reading the moral philosophy of the Stoics or contemplating the beauteous order in medieval architecture.  There is no shortage of books written today about the effects of television and constant computer usage on the brain -- I personally haven't watched television since 2009,  after I realized it was addictive, distracting, and idiotic.    Much of the problem with American politics today is that the polis is gone:  we feel its absence, we desire its order and meaning, but the national State is too large, too distant, too complicated to be the polis. This is why Dreher advocated localist politics, but if we created in his words a counter polis,  a membership within society,  we would be aiding contemporary life immeasurably.   Not only materially, of course, but socially.  Membership is one of the most fundamental cravings of the human soul.   Christianity has always been a social religion, an other-oriented religion: it exists, G.K. Chesterton maintained, for the purpose of people who are not its members.  To create a vibrant, stable, and humane society within the absurd chaos of modernity would establish sanctuaries for those outside Christendom, who feel the alienation and look for answers.   Thus, the Benedict option is not simply one of self-survival, but one which serves as a witness and a stronghold of charity.

Related

• Out of the Ashes, Anthony Esolen.  Similar, but not focused on spirituality to the degree of Dreher. 
• Blue Like Jazz/Through Painted Deserts. In one of these books, the author lives in a Christian commune for a while. They may have been linked with The New Monasticism, which was an Emergent Christianity movement I read into a little back in 2009 when I was reading about simple living in the Buddhist, Gandhian, and Christian traditions.  Dreher writes about New Monasticism and its possible connection to the Benedict option here. 
• Dreher's corpus of work at The American Conservative, where he's been discussing the "BenOp" with readers for at least two years now. 
• Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher.  One of the first 'conservative' books I ever read, back when the only conservatives I knew of were Republican warhawks.  Imagine my delight to find in Dreher a man who writes about new urbanism, public transit,  locavorism, a non-imperial foreign policy, etc!  It's fun to read this review in part because I've changed over the years, and now share Dreher's "sinister" contempt for the state  and media. 

Surprised by Joy

Surprised by Joy
© 1955 C.S. Lewis
252 pages

"When I first read Chesterton, I did not know what I was in for. God is, if I may say it,  quite unscrupulous."

Mention the name C.S. Lewis and the image of a prolific author comes to mind, secure in reputation as a scholar of medieval literature and author of Christian apologetics.  Surprised by Joy reveals a Lewis far removed from the pedestal of memory. A brief autobiography, it tells the story of how he came of age, losing and refinding faith as the world destroyed itself around him. Here is a Lewis outside the university, unguarded by coats of tweed; he is a man, struggling with  fear and doubts, spurred on by hope and far more entertaining than I would have ever expected.

The Lewis of expectations is here; an introverted, bookish, and supremely thoughtful boy with a rich imagination fed by a love for classic and mythic literature.  Lewis’ gift for storytelling is not limited to fiction, evidenced by the side-splitting account in which he recounts his father  -- an orator who could be intoxicated by verbosity once he’d gotten started --  subjecting five year old boys to momentous speeches full of pomp and storied prose, all for ordinary  errors like getting one’s shoes wet in the grass. Beyond the story of an early-20th century English childhood, however, this is the coming of age of a profound   man, who sees his life as driven on by a search for "Joy", which he experienced in brief stabs of ecstasy at various points in his young life. Such joy was not to be found in his childhood religion, which as as badly taught as everything else. He experienced shades of ecstasy when stumbling upon the Nordic myths, and despite his later materialism had a strong interest in the occult.  Later, he would come to see these experiences as momentary glimpses of something greater, and the book ends with his return to theism.  He doesn't make arguments to the reader, only outlines of the philosophical questions and themes he grappled with in his youth.  This can tend toward the heady, as Lewis' tipping point is the moment when he begins to understand the universe as some sort of cosmic mind, an Absolute, and another author (Chesterton) forces him to call a spade a spade. When Lewis is being philosophical about the writing can get heady -- 'thinking about thinking' always does, and Lewis' attempt to understand consciousness appears to have been a major factor in his rejection of a purely material universe. Here the difficulty is further complicated by frequent mentions of intellectual movements that Lewis was arguing with and flirting with that have since faded not only from the intellectual scene, but from memory altogether.

I've read this book several times in the last two years, partially out of affection for the author and partially to understand his experience.  The latter still eludes me in part, but epiphanies aren't a mental commodity that can be packaged up and transferred from brain to brain. However much some of his experience may elude me, there's still so much about him to appreciate: his contempt for authority, his imaginative passion and curiosity, his dogged efforts to wrest understanding from old books and new friend,  and his utter delight in simple things like country walks and stolen mornings spent with a pipe in the library.  He's one of those authors who I spot on a bookstore display  and have  a sudden burst of affection for, as though I'd spotted a friend out of the window. (Wendell Berry  has a similar effect, but Lewis has that old-fashioned  Oxford don aura about him.)

China: An Introduction

China: An Introduction
© 1984 Lucian W. Pye
400 pages

Lucien Pye was born in China and later returned there to advise the US government. China: An Introduction is written in that spirit, being a review of the making of Communist China and its attempts to find policies to modernize China from the inside out.

The volume opens with a hundred pages covering Chinese history,  with an emphasis on the  philosophical schools which contended for preeminence in the old Empire: Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. That drama is applicable to the more extensive coverage of the evolving Communist party in China, for  Confucianism so under-girded China that it continued to influence the expression of communism in China even after every aspect of the old civilization was set ablaze.  For instance, Chinese communism did not view itself as supremely scientific and inevitable; instead,  Mao and others believed that a cyclical model would continue, and China would ever be tugged between communism and capitalism.  The Confucian emphasis on perfectibility and self-sacrifice in pursuit of social virtue also lent themselves to early propaganda, in which people were expected to labor in hardship and poverty not for themselves, but for the good of the communist experiment in China.

 Pye devotes the bulk of the book to covering the rise of the Communist party, and its internal politics through to the end of the 1970s.  The book indicates to me that Mao was a singular figure, not simply for his role in the revolution but for his conceits in office: intriguingly, Pye writes that Mao scorned cities,  viewing them as hotbeds of capitalism. I also didn't realize how quickly the Chinese learned from Russian mistakes: as early as 1959, they reintroduced privatization in agriculture,  creating private plots that remained unmolested even amid the nightmare of the cultural revolution.

While I am not particularly interested in Communist party politics, I found the discussion of China's early philosophical debates fascinating -- especially because while Confucianism was not a religion, it permeated every level of society and shaped China in the manner that a religion would.  Pye has engendered in me an excitement for reading about Confucianism proper a little later on.

Real Music

Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church
267 pages
© 2016 Anthony Esolen

In his book Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture,  Anthony Esolen devoted an entire chapter solely to music. Here he does one better! To sing is to pray twice, wrote St. Augustine, and Real Music demonstrates that emphatically. There is nothing quite like the musical tradition in Christian liturgy; a newcomer to an Anglican or Catholic church may first appreciate the mere sound of the organ or harp, but when time is invested in these services -- when one attends throughout the year, for several years -- the real beauty and power of its hymns, offertories, anthems, etc. reveal themselves. These hymns are not merely pretty lyrics put to pretty music, but are themselves poetic articulations of the Church's theology and scripture. The Christian music tradition can do much more than make a listener feel "nice"; hymns can fill the soul with beauty and the mind with poetry. Esolen attempts to convey this experience not over a course of years, but into one book, devoting different chapters to distinct areas of the tradition. He here covers Eucharistic hymns, hymns of glory and penitence, hymns celebrating life and challenging death. Esolen does not merely present hymns to the reader and comment on their theology; he guides the reader through how the hymns' very meter and grammar strengthen the meaning. This book is a treasure for Christians who love traditional hymnody, or who have heard it on the wind before and yearn to know more about it.

Heretics and Heroes

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World
© 2013 Thomas Cahill
368 pages

It seems the more I read of Cahill, the less I enjoy his cavalier histories, which at this point border on gossipy. Part of Cahill's hinges of history series, covering pivotal moments in western history where there was a sea change, the crucial shift here is the emergence of the Individual -- demonstrated in art, and shown at work in disintegrating Christendom into a multitude of violently passionate sects, all supremely secure in their 'truthiness'. In attempting to tell this story, though, Cahill covers everything from the Reconquista and Columbus to the Counter-Reformation. Perhaps as a consequence of the Renaissance and Reformation occurring concurrently, Cahill isn't nearly as well-organized here as he usually is, and readers go back and fort from art to history to theology in a higgedly-piggedly fashion.

I enjoyed the sections on art, since Cahill provides readers with a bounty of colorful plates to aide his commentary, but viewed the theological bits suspiciously. It's hard to take seriously an author who dismisses the Great Schism as a mere ethnic division, especially since that schism's key issue, papal authority, had a massive potential connection to his chief subject, the reformation. Cahill seems fairly oblivious about Orthodoxy altogether, referring to it as the 'Greek church' and apparently not realizing that ecumenical councils to weigh orthodoxy are not some Protestant invention, but have been part of the Orthodox-Catholic church from its inception. Cahill constantly editorializes, often on things that have nothing at all to do with the subject -- complaining about his grammar school, or reminding readers of how terribly racist the Greeks were, and how evil certain modern people are. The more I read Cahill, the more trivial and whiggishly narrow-minded he seems. (There are occasional glimpses of nuance, though, as when he defends the much-abused Mary Tudor despite a pronounced contempt for her cause.)

In the end, if you want a taste of Renaissance art, try Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation". There you shall find erudition and glorious music -- and Cahill keeps referring to Clark, anyway, so why not save the step? As far as the Reformation goes, Will Durant's volume is much more intelligent, and daunting only in its size. I'm sure there also better histories of how the individual burst on the western scene as well.

Related:
The Renaissance, Will Durant; The Reformation, Will Durant

The Orthodox Church

The Orthodox Church
© 1963, 1993 Kallistos (Timothy) Ware
368 pages

Who are the Orthodox? To the extent Americans have heard of them, it is through eastern European immigrant communities. Those who paid marginal attention in western civ might remember something called the Great Schism, in which the western and eastern halves of Christendom declared one another excommunicate. While the Catholic west and Orthodox east have continued to drift their separate ways throughout the centuries, they share the same core tradition. In The Orthodox Church, Kalistos Ware delivers a history of the eastern Orthodox, followed by an introduction to its liturgy and devotional practices. He ends by musing on the possibilities and obstacles to communion between the Orthodox and their closest brethren, the Catholics and Anglicans. Although the history is very much dated now, the book having been written shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed and the suppressed church started to reemerge, Ware’s account of the centuries prior is handled attractively and efficiently.

Although Rome initially persecuted the Christian church, by the third century A.D.it had attracted the attention of the emperor Constantine, who declared it legal.Constantine courted the church himself, though (famously) he would not submit to baptism until he lay on his deathbed. Christianity soon became the state religion of the Roman empire, circling the Med, but as Rome aged and withered, division ensued. Barbarian activity in the Balkans and the eruption of Islam made communication increasingly difficult, and soon a purely administrative division between the empire’s western and eastern halves became a cultural one. The western empire and its church became more enmeshed with the fate of the Franks, crowning their king as Emperor,  Frankish influence would extend to theology, as an addition to the Nicene Creed intended as a rebuttal to a local heresy found favor in the west, eventually being adopted by the pope.

That proved to be a problem, as did the pope's authority in general, for his claimed jurisdiction over not merely the Roman see, but the whole of Christendom.  The Nicene Creed was adopted by an ecumenical council at Nicea, representing the entire church; it was pounded out in collaborative labor.  One bishop by himself couldn't alter it simply at will. Ware is remarkably fair-minded about the popes, attributing their beliefs not to villainy or ambition, but to the mere fact that Rome had no western peer.  The pope was the closest thing the west had to a unitive authority, as Charlemagne left behind a mess of warring states.  Secondly, the See of Rome was the only western church with Apostolic credentials, the only one believed to be founded by one of the original followers of Christ. In the east, there were three -- Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – and none were able to claim precedence over the other. The great schism  was thus made possible by the actual divide between the western and eastern parts of the Empire, begun in earnest by the  arguments over how far papal authority extended, and completed when the western Franks sacked Constantinople on the way to yet another crusade.  No forgiveness for this fratricide would follow.

Subsequent chapters cover the conquest of Eastern Rome by the Arabs and later the Turks. The Orthodox church muddled through, largely – it wasn’t until the rise of ISIS that Christians were wholly driven out of places like Iraq and Syria. The most grievous persecutions had a nationalist rather than religious focus – the Armenian genocide, for instance, followed Turkey’s defeat in the Great War.  Following the withering and defeat of Constantinople, Orthodoxy developed new life in eastern Europe, especially in Russia, which wanted to claim itself as the Third Rome. The Russian church would endure its own repression during the Communist years, aside from a brief detente during World War 2.   Turkish  and Russian brutality both drove Orthodox emigrants out of Europe and into the United States, where today it flourishes.

The second half of the book covers Orthodox theology and praxis, both of which more difficult to summarize than politics.   It bears comment on, though, and the Nicene creed is again an example. While the Orthodox objected to the pope single-handedly changing a creed that was created by a congress of the church,  Ware argues that the change itself  also subtly shifted and confused theology.  The change in question was to declare that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son,  which dilutes the role of the Father and makes things more vague. In the essential approach to worship (communal prayer, reading of scriptures, and the Eucharist) the Orthodox and Catholics are very similar,  but there are notable differences. The Orthodox, for instance, worship standing, and most do not employ musical instruments. Icons play a much larger role, being seen as literal windows into heaven ,and used to focus the mind. Mysticism has played a larger role in Orthodox development, as well, though Ware doesn't comment on the tension between it and western scholasticism.

Covering as it does two thousand years  of history and most of Eurasia, The Orthodox Church is impressively ambitious, yet fairly concise. The church's fate under Turkish and Soviet domination are dispatched in single chapters, as is the church's role in the developing civilization of Russia.  It is most helpful in the area of general religious literacy, with a lot of content wrapped up in these 300-odd pages.

The Promise

The Promise
© 1969 Chaim Potok
336 pages

Growing up is never easy, but for Orthodox boys in the mid-20th century, it's especially hard. The Jewish people are in turmoil after the horrors of the Holocaust, some pinning their hopes on Israel and others recoiling from it as anathema. The latter is true of Hasidic communities from Eastern Europe, fleeing both European and Soviet persecution, finding safe haven in the United States. The welcome American Jews might have given to their kin, however, is worn thin by the Hasids' swelling number and their fervent defense of rigid Orthodoxy.   In this setting Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter, two Orthodox boys introduced in the gripping tale of The Chosen, complete their coming of age, united in the treatment of a young boy whose genius is matched by his inexplicable rage.

In The Chosen, Danny chose to depart from his father's legacy as a Hasidic rabbi, a leader of his community. He chose instead to pursue psychology, while his more mainstream rival-turned-friend Reuven realized a call to the rabbinate.  The Promise opens with both young men engaged in their graduate studies, and both faced with shared difficulties that force them to reconsider the paths they have taken. The first challenge is a boy with a passion for astronomy, the son of a humanistic Jewish scholar who is the object of scorn to the traditionalists governing Hirsch University.  Michael is very sick, possessed by fantasies and given to episodes of rage; he exhausts therapists and seemed doomed to be institutionalized.  Both Danny and Reuven have a personal connection to the stargazer Michael, in being companions of his older cousin Rachel. Danny has an idea for how to treat Michael, but it's risky: if it fails, it may destroy the boy's psyche altogether.  Meanwhile, Reuven's position as a graduate student who must soon defend his grasp and attitude of Talmud study to a panel of elders forces him between more liberal scholars like his father and Michael's, and the traditionalist Hasids. He recoils against the 'mental ghetto' of fundamentalist Talmud studies, but is not satisfied with  answers that reduce Judaism to empty family traditions.

In The Chosen, Potok impressed me by having Danny and Reuven both embroiled in an intense and challenging relationship with Danny's father, Reb Saunders, who despaired both of Danny's interest in the outside world, and of Reuven's own father's modernist approach to Talmudic study. Although they began as antagonists, however, ultimately they arrived at mutual understanding. No one is defeated,  their differences do not cease, but they break through the arguments to re-embrace the people making them. Potok accomplishes something very like that here, in the person of Rev Kalman. Kalman survived the death camps of the Nazi state, but lost nearly everyone he knew, and when confronted with American Jews he sees challengers that threaten to complete by sophistry what Hitler began with direct industrial  murder.    Kalman stands between Reuven and ordination, and is an especially difficult antagonist given that he rails against Reuven's father in the press.  Yet Potok does not resolve the tension by having Reuven choose a prescripted side. Instead, he makes his own choice, and Kalman proves to be much like Reb Saunders:  the enmity is defeated, but not his person.

Though initially appealing for being the further story of Danny and Reuven, Potok's skill at rendering intense debate that results in mutual understanding rather than one-sided triumphs impressed me. I imagine as a rabbi himself, Potok has spent long hours having similar heated conversations with his colleagues and academics, attempting to reconcile an ancient faith with modernity without losing the power of those values and practices to endue lives with direction and meaning.
----

I know this is English Literature month, so er...consider this a salute to Benjamin Disraeli, former Jewish prime minister of Great Britain. (It's also Passover, so..chag sameach!)

The Scotch-Irish

The Scotch-Irish: A Social History
© 1989 James Leyburn
397 pages

        Though they have long ceased to be a distinct ethnic group outside of Appalachia, for years the greatest non-English minority in the United States were the Scotch-Irish.   Theirs is a history riven with politics, for they were created by it and became the shapers of it once they moved to America.  The Scotch-Irish appraises not only their political history, however, but the evolution of their character, distinct culture, and social institutions. It is a triptych, the story of a people told across three lands.   The story begins in Scotland, a place slow to join the Renaissance, but quick to grasp the Reformation. Scotland indeed became a  hotbed of diehard Presbyterianism, and as the  Crown began supporting the established Anglican church more firmly, it drove Puritans into the Netherlands and Presbys into Scotland.   Of course, the Crown wanted more Protestants in Ireland; a good strong community of them could withstand Gaelic wiles and serve to consolidate the Crown's position. The Ulster plantation soon developed a culture distinct from Scotland's, despite constant emigration from it, and Leyburn devotes particular attention to the social power of the Presbyterian church as it branched out.  Ultimately, rent hikes would drive many of the "Ulster Scots" to America, where their loathing for the crown and aggressive westward rambling would spur on the Revolution.  Leyburn  offers state-by-state tracking of the Scotch-Irish as they grew in number began filling the interior, making this social history of immense value to students of colonial history, complete with deep background in Irish and Scottish history.



Related:

• Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Jim Webb
• The English People on the Eve of Colonization, Wallace Notestein
• The Americans: the Colonial Experience, Daniel Boorstin

The Lost History of Christianity

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- And How It Died
© 2008 Philip Jenkins
315 pages

For the first millennium of the church's history, Europe was less Christendom than a dismissed backwater. The heart of the faith was its fount in the middle east, where it saturated the landscape and spread through two empires across the vast expanse of Eurasia. Within five hundred years of Christianity's millennial birthday, however, its reach had vanished, lost in political upheaval and newly arrived competition. Though advertising itself as a history of the global church,   Lost History is principally about religious transformation  in the middle east, with Christianity as its case model. 

There is immediate intrigue in Jenkins' history merely for the fact that his primary subjects are unrecognizable to most as Christian.  Around the Mediterranean,  Rome -- in the person of the emperor -- maintained a faith common to all.  Achieving and enforcing orthodoxy was the reason Constantine urged on the Council of Nicaea. Outside the empire, however,  Christianity grew wild, running bramble-like clear to Asia.  Aside from stray missionaries from the Latin and Greek church,  most of the Christians covered here belonged to the Nestorian church,  which retained an orthodox-like hierarchy outside the authority of  the Greco-Roman sphere, with hundreds of metropolitans and bishops. How much of "Christianity" really survives the trek to Asia is a question Jenkins does not pursue, though the mention of a "second Jesus" buried in India allows a lot of room for doubt.   The Nestrian branch found a particularly cozy home in the Persian realm, safe from Orthodux rebuke, but the African church would vanish almost overnight, save for the impressively resilient Copts. 

The rise of Islam set the stage for the middle-eastern church's downfall, but it was not strictly a matter of religious competition.  Jenkins records Islam and Christianity meshing at first; considering the  power of Arian-like sects which effectively denied the divinity of Jesus,  they shared much more common ground than not. (So much so that medieval personalities denounced Muhammad not as a false prophet, but as a schismatic!) The golden age of  Islam was built on such ground,  flourishing through  the communities of Christian Syrian scribes and researchers.As Islam grew in self-confidence, however, and especially after it began brawling with outside powers, the  Christians within its midst were viewed as suspect. When the Black Death reared its head for the first time, a wave of persecution followed --  Christians playing the part of scapegoat that was assigned to Jews in Europe. When new powers arrived on the scene, like the Mongols and Turks, they frequently inaugurated a new era of religious oppression; the Crusades were a response  to Turkish abuses, not the nigh half-century old occupation of Jerusalem by Islamic forces.  (Interestingly, the Mongols who destroyed the high water mark of golden-age Islam, Baghdad, first persecuted  Islam and then became its champions, persecuting Christians.) Political stress turned into religious persecution again and again, a theme that runs  clear to the 20th century, when an on-the-ropes Turkey decided to rid itself of minorities with suspect loyalties. The Armenian genocide was the result.  Early Christian activity in China and Japan perished after upsurges in nationalism, as well.

This history of religious transformation in the middle east is then used by Jenkins to examine the life of religions in general, their 'struggle to survive'.  Though Christianity and Islam were rivals, they wore off on one another:  the Eastern Orthodox church's iconclastic period (that ghastly preview of Puritanism) marks Islamic influence, and mosques modeled themselves on the architecture of churches. Such architectural borrowing went the other way in Spain, where rebuilding churches incorporated elements of Islamic design  into their structure.  Even after Christianity vanished from an area, it left its mark: in rural Turkey, for instance, parents continued to have their children baptized to ensure the blessing of God.  Jenkins  speculates on various reasons regions thrive or perish amid competition; he notes that the church in Egypt became part of the culture, while in other parts of Africa it merely existed as outposts, like Roman military encampments that disappeared when the Romans left. Those churches were sustained from without, rather than from within. Faiths can also hedge their bets by expanding;  when Christianity virtually perished in the middle east, it continued to flourish in Europe; even as it fades in Europe, it grows again in Africa.

All this fairly interesting, though the book has certain frustrations. Belief, for Jenkins, is a moot point;  Nestorian doctrine or what Jacobites practiced, none of this matters. All the reader is really given is politics and labels; there were people here, they called themselves Christians, and then they were killed.  Jenkins has a peculiar understanding of Christianity, announcing to the reader that understanding the early church is impossible because Christianity was driven from its home region.  Since when is Christianity like Temple Judaism or Islam, fixated on a certain patch of earth?  What is revealed is how unimaginative humans are at creating ways to persecute one another:  Just as Christians were made to wear patches identifying them as an underclass and forced to dismount at the approach of a Muslim, so in the 20th century German Jews were made to wear patches and blacks had to vacate the sidewalk at the approach of a white.  One wonders how ubiquitous these shaming behaviors are -- did the Japanese practice them in China, for instance? The Lost History of Christianity is certainly relevant, given the ongoing slaughter of innocents at the hands of ISIS. It is a fascinating history of the middle east's religious evolution,  though of limited use for truly learning about the ancient church outside of Rome and Constantinople.

The Way

The Way: What Every Protestant Needs to Know About Orthodoxy
© 2007 Clark Carlton
222 pages

  If Protestantism is a willful child of the Catholic church, what is it to the Orthodox?  What is the Orthodox faith for that matter, Catholicism with more beards and fewer popes?  The Way  begins with the  unexpected conversion story of its author from a Southern Baptist seminary to a faith thought to be the sole province of Greek and Russian immigrants  before articulating the core aspects of the ancient faith – the Trinity, the Church, and the Eucharist which brings them together – as they stand in relation to the doctrines of most American Christians. Although Protestants defined themselves against the authority of Rome, their doctrinal stands nonetheless render them separate from Orthodoxy – so separate, in fact, that Clarkson believes Protestantism constitutes a separate religion.  In The Way,  readers of all stripes will find an introduction the Orthodox  theology, and Protestants will find a particular challenge to their views on sola scripture and the role of tradition.

After easing readers into the book with his conversion story, which unfolded amid a fundamentalist takeover of a southern baptist college in the 1980s, Carlson shifts to theology.  The Trinity is a crucial concept to Orthodox theology, as it establishes God's nature as rooted in relationship.  "God is love" does not  simply mean that person called God happens to be loving; His very nature is bound up in the act of the Incarnation, just as the Church's nature is contained within the Eucharist. The Church, Clarkton writes, is not a body of people who believe the same thing, but a community which shares in the living body of Christ.   In less heady chapters, Carlton argues against sola scripture from various grounds, namely that no one interprets scripture without a tradition; Calvinists read the bible through Calvinism, Lutherans through Lutheranism, Arians Arianism, etc. The Catholic-Orthodox tradition at least has the merit of being the source of the scriptural compilation, as it took several hundred years for a definitive collection to be established by the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox church has no qualms regarding protestant rebellion of papal authority, for they too reject it;  but in Carlton's view the protestants have erred seriously in rejecting all authority. Scripture alone is insufficient; every heresy has come armed with its chosen scriptural arguments, and the massive variety of commentaries on the scriptures demonstrate how subjective readings can be.  The leadership of the Church resolves heresies not simply by finding scripture, but interpreting them in the light of the Church's nature. Arianism was a heresy not because it chose the "wrong verses", but because it effectively denies the Incarnation,  and with it the church's very life.  If the Bible were so important to Protestantism, why then did they modify it -- dropping books as desired?  Christ left a Church, not a book, writes Carlton, and  sola scriptura reduces the Bible to a rule book and Christianity an ideology, while the  Orthodox faith is a life lived in Jesus, through the Eucharist.

Carlton has a talent for making theology comprehensible, though he is an author who frequently bares his teeth, with a contempt borne of familiarity for aspects of modern Protestantism.  Sola scriptura no doubt dies hard, just as strict Constitutionalism dies hard: how easy it is to endue an object with objectivity, in the hopes of satisfying our need for something that is wholly True. But the Bible is not God; it is merely inspired by him, writes Carlton, and to worship it is to commit idolatry. In a finishing touch, Carlton scrutinizes the creeds of Protestant sects to point out what they truly worship, comparing the opening lines of the Nicene Creed ("I believe in One God") with articles of faith like the Westminister Confession, which open placing scripture at the forefront and then address God.  If nothing else, The Way does much to  demonstrate that the Eucharist was far more important to the early church than a once-a-year knocking back of grape juice does credit.

The Seven Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins: A Tomistic Guide to Vanquishing Vice and Sin
© 2015 Kevin Vost
224 pages

In the first centuries of the Christian epoch, devotees retreated into the desert wastes to flee temptation. Even away from the cry of the maddening crowd, however, they found themselves struggling with the everyday vices of mankind -- tendencies toward pride, apathy, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth, and so on. In an attempt to organize a campaign against them, the monk-progenitors first had  to identify the enemy, creating a list of the chief frailties that all others stemmed from.   These seven enemies of the soul are not uniquely Christian sins;  they are universal problems of the human condition, and Vost draws on classical sources (Aristotle and the Roman Stoics --  Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius) for both insight and remedy.  The remedy is only partially philosophical, however, as Vost also counsels readers to seek help in the sacraments of  the Church, especially Confession and the Eucharist.   Written in three stages, Vost first reviews how these seven in particular were singled out,  shares patristic thought on the progression of vice from initial impulses to behavioral habit, and then offers a "Jacob's ladder"  route away from downfall.  These include practices useful against every vice, while some are sin-specific.  A few of the 'rungs' -- an examination of conscience, mental awareness of drifting into vicious habit,  and the deliberate cultivation of each vice's counter-virtue, could easily be found in a book like A Guide to the Good Life.The master here, however, is not Epictetus, but Thomas Aquinas. It is Aquinas'  study of the desert fathers that produces a list of seven sins, and not eight -- and Aquinas who offers advice for remedy, himself bringing together both the Hebrew and Greek wisdom traditions --  harnessing both mindfulness and prayer, contemplation and action, philosophical principle and sacrament.  The Seven Deadly Sins is thus true to its name in being a 'Tomistic' guide to vice and virtue, in effect offering laymen a guide into the  theological expanse of Aquinas.  Few people commit great evils,  but we all hindered by the same seemingly minor snares.  It is those small seed which can produce horror if left unchecked, however, and so this tidy little volume seems most valuable in the pursuit of spirituality, especially Christian.

Called to Serve

Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America
© 2013 Margaret McGuinness
277 pages

Long before the suffrage and feminist movements allowed women to assume a more publicly active role within society,  women religious were taking an active role in shaping the American landscape.  Although predominately a Protestant country, the United States was never without Catholic citizens,  whether through acquiring land originally settled by France and Spain, or by developing its own through immigration from Italy, Poland, and other parts of Catholic Europe.  The American landscape was for all a great mission, a place to build civilization anew, and  nuns were there nearly from the beginning.

Though some orders restricted themselves to prayer,  more active communities bounded, providing teachers and nurses to areas just being settled, which would have otherwise gone without. The sisters provided religious instruction, naturally, but also taught reading, mathematics, and other educational fundamentals. They also trained people for work, giving the margins of society -- impoverished freedmen and immigrants. especially their women --  the resources to begin building a life for themselves. America's religious sisters were not simply Europeans transplanted to the frontier; their rules of life had to be altered to take the harshness of the wilderness into consideration, though some adaptations were perverse. In the early 19th century,  religious orders owned slaves, for instance, even orders which were filled only with African-American nuns The nuns were far more conscious of the evil nature of slavery, however, ameliorating it as best they could and agitating for abolition much earlier than society at large, or even the Church proper.

Nurturing the margins -- the least of these -- was truly the prevailing mark of American nunneries.  When contagious disease swept American communities, women religious were often the only people willing to nurse the afflicted, sometimes at the cost of their own lines.  The rapidly urbanizing eastern seaboard provided plenty of diseases to battle, and nuns were at the forefront,   managing Catholic hospitals at every level and developing new methods to prevent infection.  As waves of courageous or dispossessed people from Europe swept America, nuns provided settlement houses that welcomed newcomers and helped them find a place for themselves in a new country. Nuns were strangers themselves, often ridiculed and sometimes even attacked by nativists who feared their papish influence.  Ultimately, though, their extraordinary compassion  and proven talent won respect -- and sometimes, even converts.   Despite these accomplishments, however, as the 20th century continued the ranks and influence of religious women fell precipitously, possibly because the gap they served was filled in: religious orders were no longer the sole means of a meaningful career for women, for instance. America's rising  secularization -- both in the sense of diminished religiosity and  the growth of medical, educational, and immigrant-handling government programs -- also diminished their attraction. They continue to serve America,  but frequently have been reduced to the rule of mere social activists, instead of the very creators of civil society as they once were.

Ornament of the World

Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
© 2002 Maria Rose Menocal
315 pages

        

  Ornament of the World is the story of a unique civilization in medieval Europe, one which ultimately disintegrated but left a hopeful legacy. For hundreds of years, Europe hosted a distinctly Islamic polity: Andalusia, the last stand of the Umayyads. The inheritors of Muhammad’s empire, they were driven out by a palace coup and reestablished themselves across the Mediterranean, building a glorious realm of their own.  They brought the best of an ascendant civilization and combined it with the remnants of the classical world; theirs was a world of fusion which allowed not only Muslims, but Christians and Jews to flourish and contribute as well. Ornament covers a thousand years of Spanish history, mixing literature, art, and politics to deliver with flourish the story of a lost but golden age.  Though heavily romanticized, the author’s  lovestruck tone makes it an enticing introduction to medieval Spain.

 In subject and intent, Ornament is quite similar to A Vanished World, but much tidier. It begins, for instance,  with the rise of Islam, and from there moves forward in the time-honored chronological fashion. Following the death of Muhammad, leadership of the Islamic polity fell to a series of caliphs, one of whom – Ali – was especially consequential. Under his reign, the Umayyad caliphate,  Islam expanded in leaps and bounds. Success ever breeds resentment, however and Ali found himself murdered along with much of his family. A minor relation fled to Spain and there begins the story of Andalusia. Amid the first Muslim civil war, however, the princeling didn't come alone. He and his followers found Iberia ripe for the picking,  and in a matter of time had conquered most of the peninsula.  "Woe to the vanquished!" was not the case, however, as the resident Christian and Jewish populations found themselves officially protected by the new state- - for a small consideration, of course.  Al-andalusia and its capital of Cordoba would go so resplendent that a later successor would presume to claim himself the Caliph, the princeps of Islam..  Islamic politics would be their undoing however; another faction would rebel against the reigning Abassids and make their stronghold in Tunis, just a stone’s throw from Iberia.  When the Umayyads later sought help from the north African Muslims against the resurgent Christians, their allies found their Spanish brethren much too decadent and proceeded to wreck and take over the place, Fourth Crusade style.

The loss of unity following the Umayyads did not destroy the creative culture they established, however; instead, leading city-states competed to out-do the other to restore that glory, just as after the fall of Rome states like Venice, Genoa, and Florence competed against the other. While the Italians engaged in petty wars and magnificent frescoes, the Moors engaged in petty wars and mesmerizing poetry.  Menocal has done prior work on Arabic literature, so not surprisingly language, prose, and verse receive a lot of attention.  The emphasis on literature extends to the Christians and Jews;  Hebrew adopted elements of Arabic verse and flourished in its own right. This was a period of intercultural collaboration;  in Toledo, for instance, Arabic and Jewish scholars worked on translating Aristotelian texts, which then drifted into Europe, replete with commentaries. Just as Muslim mosques and fortresses in Iberia began with Roman bones -- so did resurgent Christian powers adopt elements of Arabic architecture, even in areas where the Umayyads and their successors never reigned.  Eventually the Castille-Aragon alliance would overwhelm the predominately Moorish south, effecting the Reconquest

Ornament compares well to its sister-rival, Vanished World;  for instance, the Muslim sack of Compostela,  which appeared rather randomly in Vanished, features here as part of the Umayyads’s  Iberian downfall.The same general who leads a military coup against them also attacked the Christian shrine. This same episode also accounts for the contrasting versions of St. James – one meek and mild, the other the Muslim-slayer.  After his shrine was desecrated and his pilgrims murdered, the peaceful James returned to have his revenge. Hell hath no fury like a saint scorned!  This covers nearly a thousand years of history in a mere three hundred pages, though, and a lot of that is taken up with swooning over literature and poetry;  this is utterly enjoyable, of course, but it does meant that the political sketch is an outline at best, so this is by no means a complete story. It is a loving tribute to the life of art and philosophy that found a home in Islamic Spain, however.

Vanished World

A Vanished World: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval Spain
© 2005 Chris Lowney
320 pages

Vanished World sets medieval  Spain before the reader with the warning; we may be blessed or cursed by emulating its example. The Iberian peninsula is the very perimeter of western Europe, within a stone's throw of both the vast continent of Africa and the looming expanse of the Atlantic. Despite its apparent remoteness, Iberia was throughout the ages in the very thick of the action --  the pitch wherin civilizations clashed. In an earlier age, Rome and Carthage sparred; a thousand years later,  Visigoths and Muslims fought.  The invasion of Spain in 711 by the Umayyad caliphate made the former province of the Romans, then yet another ruin ruled by nominally Christian barbarians, into an outpost of a far larger, far more sophisticated civilization, where it enjoyed a golden age that was for Europe a preview of the Renaissance and enlightenment.  Here the gifts of the Greeks were preserved and built on; here  both Islam and Rabbinic Judaism grew in new directions.  Vanished World is a brief  and romantic history of medieval Spain, one brimming with hope that we can all just get along.

Until the triumph of Ferdinand and Isabella, who united their kingdoms and created a state commanding the peninsula, Iberia was home to a multitude of peoples and minor states. While many were drawn by commercial cross-traffic, others came to carve out kingdoms, like the Visigoths and their successors from Africa, the Umayyads. Iberia was fractured and destitute, lingering in a winter of civilization that was chased away by an eastern wind. Unlike the barely literate Goths,  the Muslim invaders were part of a vibrant, culturally rich civilization on the ascendant. Sweeping over the peninsula, they infused it with new life, creating a social order that allowed their new subjects to participate in it.  Although the calpihate would falter after the death of its leader, breaking into squabbling branches that were brushed aside by a Castillian comeback,  it reigned for several hundred years and created an environment that brought the best of human passion, creativity, and intelligence to the surface.  After an introduction which establishes an outline of Spain's political history.  most of the book is given over to sections which explore different aspects of the civilization that prevailed between the fall of the Goths and the rise of Castille.  These include chapters on the growth of science, as Muslim and Jewish scholars built upon Greek knowledge and advanced it considerably, as well as some on religious revolution; the Judeo-Muslim mystical traditions both flourished in the Iberian setting. Downey's vision for the book is made apparent in contrasting several pairs of legends. The patron saint of Spain. St. James, was remembered alternatively as either a humble and kind apostle who spread the Gospel to the furthest reaches of the continent, or as Santiago the Muslim-Slayer, who was said to have appeared and led a Christian army to victory. A similar contrast is offered by the Song of Roland, depicting Charlemagne as a Christian warrior fighting the fiendish Muslims, and the story of El Cid, who found honor and friendship among the ranks of both.   Christian and Muslim need not spar, Downey writes, offering various examples of cross-cultural pollination and episodes of historical cooperation, as when Christian and Muslim powers joined together to fight...other Muslim powers. 

Although the subject is fascinating and I wanted badly to like it, in truth the book is limited. Downey is a very casual historian,  chatty and informal.  That can work to a degree, but sometimes retards a reader's ability to take the text seriously. Assuming one is completely oblivious to intellectual life in the medieval epoch, Vanished World will be quite exciting. Personally, Spangenburg and Moser's history of science covered this ground too well for me to take much here, though I did find the bits about Sufism and Kabbalah of interest.  The history is also heavily sanitized in view of Downey's objection. It's a laudable goal, of course, and he does mention a few trifling incidents of unpleasantness, but haranguing Christians for the Crusades is hardly fair when no mention of the Battle of Tours is made.   Sixty years after the conquest of Spain by Moorish armies, the Umayyads advanced on France itself, meeting defeat scarcely 150 miles from Paris.  Humans will never cease to war with one another, though, regardless of religion; Christians may fight Muslims, but as this and countless other books demonstrate, they will happily dig into one another as well. We're a hot-blooded species given to destruction.  That considering, it's nice to review the many ways we are capable of working together, as Downey does here,  touching on science, art, medicine, and even the invention of cowboys.                

Look for a future comparison to Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. 

  

                                               

A Year of Living Prayerfully

A Year of Living Prayerfully
© 2015 Jared Brock
352 pages

Emotionally weary from his fight against human trafficking, Jared Brock and his wife sought refreshment in prayer. A yearlong traveling retreat would immerse them in the prayer traditions of Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Protestant sects. Although a passionate Christian for most of his life, Brock's status as a thoroughly modern evangelical allows him to discover these traditions for the first time, and take lessons from them even as he retains his own convictions. Alternately reverent and cheeky, Brock is a comic but earnest guide to man's intense desire to touch the divine.  For the devout Christian, his thoughtful analysis of what he gleans from this yearlong study will no doubt be fruitful;  for instance, the importance of "kingdom-minded prayer" in which the seeker prays not for God to simply rescue him or do something for him, but attempts to surrender himself before the will of God in his own life, to abide in the presence of God and act not for reasons of self-will, but out of genuine love for one another. There are some dodgy moments, though -- Brock's wife jumping into a cold pond au naturale after saying various Jewish prayers, because they wanted to experience the ritual baptism and surprisingly no Orthodox Jews were open to having some evangelical woman "playing temple".  Brock purposely seeks out the bizarre -- the Westboro cult, Christian nudists, people walks on coals --  and these are included more for entertainment value than anything else. The early parts of the book, however, in  which Brock visits Israel and walks a pilgrimage route in Spain, even meeting Pope Francis, offer far more substance, like Brock's thoughtful dismay at the crass commercialization of Jerusalem.  The bizaare aspects make the work somewhat attractive to secular audiences, however.

Related:
And then There Were Nuns, Jane Christmas. One woman's exploration of the contemplative life.
A Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs, of which this is a fairly transparent imitation

The Ashes of Waco

The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation
© 1995 Dick Reavis
320 pages

What happened at Waco?  Dick Reavis had an itch to find out, and since no one else at his alternative newspaper was curious, he volunteered as man on the ground to investigate. Getting close wasn’t easy: during the fifty-one day siege, the ATF and FBI kept journalists at a distance, and their scissor job with the phone lines restricted communication in and out of the surrounded center.  Inside the center were nearly a hundred members of the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of the Seventh-Day Adventists, expecting the apocalypse and living in the belief that their leader David Koresh was chosen as the next messiah, meant to  reveal God’s word to the world.   What Reavis found was a gung-ho mob of bureaucrats and gunmen, constantly getting in one another’s way and approaching a situation that demanded delicacy with all the tact of a bull in a china shop.

The Ashes of Waco is a more comprehensive text on the Waco disaster, which started off with the deaths of ten people – six civilians, four agents --  and ended in an inferno that killed eighty more, including children. Reavis covers the sect's religious background in a series of introductory chapters, covering their revolution from an Adventist group to one increasingly dominated by Koresh's interpretative of the Book of Revelation, then moves on to the ATF investigation and the bloodshed that followed.  If Reavis seems at all partial in his sharp criticism of the government which follows, this owes more to their half-cocked Rambo tactics than overt  sympathy for the Davidians.  He doesn't dwell on the child marriages, but at the time of writing Koresh was still being lynched by the media as a deranged pedophile with a private arsenal.  Reavis doesn't shy away from their kookiness, covering aspects that Tabor missed altogether, like a belief in biblical UFOs that transported people from Earth into Heaven.  In Reavis' eyes, however, a government which uses extreme force recklessly is far more dangerous than a religious group that had lived peaceably in Texas for decades.  From moment one, Waco was a catastrophe for civil, competent law enforcement. From the raid's opening, with a helicopter strafing the building, to its closing fifty-one days later with tanks used to batter down walls and shoot in tear gas grenades banned from war and known to be incendiary in enclosed situations, the operative word was Fiasco.

The Ashes of Waco is well-done, drawing on extensive interviews with Federal agents,  Waco residents (the centers' neighbors), and Davidian survivors. Reavis conveys a good sense of what life was like inside the community, including maps of the connected buildings. He also looks beyond the front lines to consider how neighbors reacted to the showdown, including one radio host who -- after realizing the center's residents were listening to his show -- had them move a dish mounted on their roof in response to questions, a la Christopher Pike in "The Menagerie", in Star Trek.   Although obviously appalled by the actions of the ATF and FBI, they are not villainized, All told, this is as even-handed and thorough an account one could hope for, written so soon after the debacle.

                                                               

The Colonial Experience

The Americans: The Colonial Experience
© 1967 Daniel Boorstin
528 pages

          

   Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans delivers a cultural history of the American colonies, beginning first with profiles on the disparate groups that settled on the eastern seaboard (Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers), and then following the growth of American religion, law, and education in the new world.  Though appearing weighty, being five hundred pages or so, the expanse flies by in a multitude of comparatively short chapters, divided (appropriately enough) into thirteen sections.  This is an inbetween America, neither raw nor finished.  For students of American history, this is deftly written, and gives a feel for how truly distinct the settling populations were, both in their origins and in their evolution.  While the Pennsylvania Quakers and New England Puritans set out to create utopias on a fresh plain, for instance,  Virginia’s settlers knew perfectly well that the utopian mark already existed in England, and their intention was to re-create its social institutions. Despite the wide variety of these cultures,  constant resettlement from one area to another in the pursue of fresh land ensured a mix of experience, and  prevented rabid clannishness.   Despite being mostly agrarian, agriculture would be the nascent American civilization’s weak point: flush with land,  no one had any interest in putting a great deal of imagination or work into improving their lot. Once tobacco or cotton had drained the soil, they could simply move on.  Otherwise,  the abounding energy and optimism of the Americas, so distant from the institutions of Europe, allowed for enthusiastic questioning that led to early triumphs in technological and scientific innovation. For Americans interested in the lives of the founders, this provides an enormous amount of  storied context.

Related:
Daily Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke

Why Waco?

Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America
© 1997 James Tabor
254 pages, including text of David Koresh's manifesto on the "Seven Seals"

  In February 1995, Federal forces arrived outside a large home owned by a religious sect living in expectation of the apocalypse and led by a man who claimed to be the Messiah. Alarmed by rumors of child marriage and the fact that members of the group were involved in the gun trade, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived to execute arrest warrants. An exchange of fire that killed six residents and four agents prompted them to back down and lay siege instead. After token efforts at communication, after fifty-one days tanks rolled in to batter holes in the walls and flood the massive complex with CS case, over the protests of some on the ground who were attempting to reach the group's leader.  One of those dissenting voices was James Tabor, who in Why Waco explains the religious background of the Davidians in an effort to humanize a group derided by the media as suicidal kooks.

This strangely sympathetic account of the group's downfall begins with another group in the 1840s, who, following their century's version of Harold Camping, believed earnestly that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22nd, 1844.   These Adventists survived their 'great disappointment' on the lack of the world ending; those who kept the faith eventually found other issues to coalescence around, including an insistence that Saturday, not Sunday, was the Sabbath.  Certain elements of this denomination grew progressively more estranged from the main current of Christianity, forming an intentional community on the Texas plains that survived for decades, through several successive leaders -- one of whom, a woman, would reveal that the Holy Spirit was in fact a woman, and the Catholic church was an insidious plot to subvert worship of the divine feminine by focusing it on Mary, the mother of Jesus.  The Branch David took its name from its expectation that when Revelation was fulfilled, the world would hail a new Messiah, descended from the biblical David.

Into this group came young Vernon Howell, later known as David Koresh. He came searching, to pit their claims against his studious knowledge of the Bible and its prophecies. Consumed by a desire to understand the secret truths of Isaiah and Revelation, he flourished and eventually inherited leadership of the community.  He was especially charismatic after a trip to Israel,  where he claimed an encounter with the Divine.  Koresh also became increasing messianic, changing his name to conform to a role he felt called to:   the sinful Messiah.  Although modern Christians regard messiah as Jesus' title alone, the word is used several times throughout the Bible, and at one time in connection with Cyrus of Persia, whose name is rendered Koresh.  Cyrus was used by God as messiah, called to wage war against the satanic power of Babylon and restore the Temple and the Jewish people to their rightful place. Vernon Howell, becoming David Koresh, believed he was the new messiah:  He wasn't Jesus, but he was called by God  to gather around him a chosen few and reveal the Final Revelation to the world.  When the Final Revelation came,  Koresh would be at one with the Word of God, comprehending the entire Bible as a mystical whole, and guide the world into a new era.  This greatness would not come without price; the powers of the world would rise against the chosen few, and even kill them just as they did Jesus, but God would prevail.

Against this figure, whose vocabulary was saturated with references to arcane prophecies, whose days were spent in intense discussions about theology, propagating increasingly esoteric doctrines and practices, rose the ATF.  While agents on the ground attempted to talk to Koresh and convince him to surrender, all they heard in response was "bible babble",not comprehending that just as they were trying to squeeze him into the criminal profile boxes that they understood, so to was he understanding them in the light of his own narrative. Their initial attack on the center, followed by their encirclement of it that cut all electricity and communication with the outside world, seemed to him the fulfillment of the "Fifth Seal", in which the forces of darkness rise against the righteous. They were playing the perfect villains, convincing him that he was right and that the end was night.  So they held out and perished in fire, almost eighty souls.

Tabor's goal in this is to humanize the Davidians, and it works for the most part. They obviously weren't too strange at first or on the whole, given how good their relations were with their neighbors: when the raid happened, the Davidians were expecting it, having received numerous tips.  Although the ATF and FBI referred to the siege as a prolonged "hostage situation", Davidians plainly were not under coercive force. They came and left the group as they pleased, drawn mainly by desire to  see what Koresh was teaching, attracted by his energy. The fly in the ointment is that by the time the center was attacked, Koresh was in a pecuilar spot, psychologically. He was the chief fixation of attention for scores of people, whose awe at his abilities at arguing scripture convinced him that he was the chosen one.   Unrestrained by the fear of social reprisal, his body followed its desires, carefully justified by seemingly rational arguments: bit by bit, he convinced himself that it was just and proper for him to be married to several women, including teenage girls, and father children by them. They were to be the new royal priesthood of the next epoch of human history.  The Davidians could have been quirky but harmless even living on a compound by themselves and earning money by selling guns, but once polygamous child-marriage enters the picture even the most sympathetic soul has to say, "...that boy's off his rocker."

However, Tabor's principle object may not be the Waco group themselves, but cults in general.  Tabor objects to their being demonized: what modern religion, he asks, does not match the attempts at quantifying what exactly a cult is?  He rightly criticizes the agents on the ground for not seriously attempting to understanding who they were dealing with, beyond wacky gun-cultists,  but even if the group had been able to send regular messages to the world through the siege,  but who is to say they could?  The group's entire bent was occultic, fixated on its elite status.  Tabor does a good job at comparing Waco to Jonestown, which was more domineering where its members were. David Koresh may have told his followers that that were called to be celibate (unless David felt a call to know another man's wife in the biblical sense), but if they insisted on remaining married to one another, they could leave.  Koresh's group was definitely weird, increasingly dominated by the man's sexual fetish, but from this account they seem more likely just to be a danger to themselves, and especially to their children.  Of  course, the government's brutal attempt to force the group to surrender only led to the deaths of most of the children at risk, so the entire episode is an utter tragedy.

Why Waco? has a jarring sympathy for its bizarre subjects, one that struggles to be professional and errs on the side of indulgence. It does make comprehensible the group's apocalyptic teachings, and can't help but entertain...but the author's lack of judgment, even when horror would be appropriate, is unsettling