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Religion

Still Standing by Chrissie Foster, with Paul Kennedy

by
May 2023, no. 453

This is a book about rage, as Chrissie Foster says in her opening sentence. It is motivated and driven by rage and, if this is not an oxymoron, it is a panegyric to rage.

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Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

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We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise what are really very old preconceptions, it is as if the linguistic turn and those other movements that sought to ground scholarship in careful, close-read qualitative analysis of texts and contexts never happened. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading this somewhat surreal contribution to debate about the significance of the European Middle Ages from American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

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Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 

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After Italian troops had invaded the Papal States to establish the nation’s capital in Rome in 1870, Italian Catholics were prohibited from voting in political elections. When this policy began to be relaxed in late 1918, a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), founded the Partitio Popolare Italiano (PPI) which was to be aconfessional but ‘inspired by Catholic principles’. It was the precursor of the Christian Democratic party that has ruled Italy for the past thirty years.

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On 15 August 2022, it will be seventy-five years since Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ had finally been ‘redeemed’. The rapturous crowds that gathered outside the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on that sultry summer night cheered as loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’

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Father Stu 

by
09 May 2022

What makes a man choose to be a Catholic priest? The cynical and snide these days might bring up an unhealthy interest in other people’s children. And yet, historically, the calling to the cloth has often been a noble one, as likely an impulse driven by spiritual yearning and zeal for social justice as mere careerism or a flight from normative sexuality. The Catholic Church, which faces a crisis of vocations across the Western world, would do well to look again at this story ...

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning 

by
28 March 2022

Not long into Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning a character brings out an acoustic guitar and is asked to play a song. He chooses Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Nothin’’, a melancholy ballad pulled from the annals of American folk music. When it was released in 1971, many assumed it represented Van Zandt’s struggle with drug addiction. In fact, as he explained two years before his death, the song was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a novel banned by the Catholic Church in 1955 for representing a Christ figure prone to human fallibilities.

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The Making of the Bible: From the first fragments to sacred scripture by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, translated by Peter Lewis

by
March 2022, no. 440

The Bible is a collection of books with a long history. Not surprisingly, there is little agreement as to precisely which books it contains and what their collective importance might be. In The Making of the Bible, a distinguished Old Testament scholar, Konrad Schmid, and an equally prominent New Testament specialist, Jens Schröter, have combined forces to produce a volume (elegantly translated from the German by Peter Lewis) that outlines how different forms of the Bible came into being. Their focus is historical and philological rather than theological or literary. Yet the story they tell is engrossing: that of an unstable world needing to attend to the values of God’s kingdom. They help a non-specialist reader appreciate the fascinating diversity of ways in which the Bible’s message was regularly reinterpreted in a changing political situation.

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Towards the end of Thoreau’s Religion, Alda Balthrop-Lewis, an academic at Australian Catholic University, evokes an experience each of us has likely had in some form. The sight of a rainbow or the sound of a bird amazes you so much that you simply have to share it. Delight inspires you to share with others, so that it may alter them as well as your relationship bringing you, collectively, into a more intimate and responsible accord with the freshly encountered world. In a book about Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), the explicit aim of such a passage is to convey that, contrary to the inherited belief that Thoreau was a dour ascetic, he actually embraced delight, and that, in this spirit of delight, his writing might be understood as a type of exhortation to ‘Look!’.

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