We’ve never suffered from a dearth of books on Christianity. Even leaving aside the Bible, books on all things Christian–apologetics, fiction, inspirational tracts, and even books that take on Christianity from an atheistic viewpoint–have never been in short supply. The Christian publishing industry takes in revenues in excess of billions of dollars per year, much of it spent preaching to the converted, and much of the rest attempting to convert the rest.
What we don’t see nearly as often are books that unearth the other Christianities, those that have existed side-by-side with orthodox Christianity, or that show us the Christianities that might have been. Sure, The DaVinci Code created a flurry of interest in all things Gnostic, but there are a plethora of other possibilities that blossomed in the early years of the religion, many of them never to come to full flower. One such “alternate” Christianity is outlined in Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras.
As we’re still reminded on a nearly daily basis, cultures and religions seem more likely to clash than collaborate. Palmer’s great gift in this book is to show us that it wasn’t always, and need not always, be so. Continue reading “Martin Palmer: The Jesus Sutras”
I’ve been told by a handful of people that I have to read Michael Chabon. Given the sources–thankfully not the same people who told me I had to read Dan Brown–I kept it in the back of my mind. I still haven’t gotten to the book generally regarded to be Chabon’s masterwork (thus far), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Klay, but my gut tells me that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union would likely give its predecessor a run for the money. I mean, this is a book you’d get for the title alone, if you’re of a certain cast of mind. If you’re a browser of other cultures, if you’re inexplicably drawn to things Yiddish to begin with, and you generally like the better class of detective fiction (the kind that doesn’t prominently feature crime-solving cats), it’s a bit of a no-brainer.
Reading Simon Winchester is a bit like listening to a well-traveled friend at a cocktail party who’s always just come back from somewhere, brimming with interesting stories about people you would otherwise never have heard of. His previous books, among them the bestsellers The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, A Crack at the Edge of the World, and The Meaning of Everything, have shown the author’s unerring knack of unearthing subjects you would never have thought to explore and making page-turners of them. Before I discovered Winchester (courtesy of Professor some years back), I would never have given much thought to the Oxford English Dictionary, and Krakatoa would only have been a footnote in life that brought no small amount of amusement to my fifth-grade teachers.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Neil Gaiman’s latest offering, The Graveyard Book, is as good as it is. Many moons ago, when he and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens (which I’d also suggest you read), they captured the kids to a “T.” These weren’t a bunch of adults trapped in little bodies, nor were they a bunch of one-dimensional hellions. Nearly twenty years later, Gaiman delivers a book that’s properly “for” kids, though it’d be short-sighted to dismiss it as “just” kiddie lit. Adam Young, meet Nobody (“Bod”) Owens.