Heresy

This book by Catherine Nixey declares in its subtitle to be a critical survey of "Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God" - so I naturally presumed it would be a pull-no-punches walkthrough of other claimants to Israel's Messiahship and the means by which these wannabes were variably venerated, ignored, followed, killed, arguably successful, forgotten or deliberately buried, etc. and to what extent this groupage of persons' lives undermine the uniqueness or legitimacy of the Christian claim.

   However - though it still pulls no punches, this book does virtually nothing to destabilise the historical or theological tenets of Christianity, and instead, in a manner wholly unsurprising* resorts to exploring the moral and sociopolitical muddiness of Christianity in its earliest centuries. As with the birth of any new religion, those earliest centuries of Christianity, between the floodgate-opening of Pentecost and the diversity-drawbridge-raising of the Council of Nicaea, saw an immense flourishing of diverse and often contradictory flavours of Christian life and doctrine.** This is great for growth but not so good for coherence. With the writings of the Church Fathers in the first centuries CE forming a loose but authoritative foundation for theology, alongside the formation of the New Testament canon, Christianity as a unified body of people and thought began to shave off its rougher, weirder, more questionable or esoteric edges; and once Christianity was established as the official religion of the Roman Empire any remaining hints of those edges were quietly airbrushed out of history by deliberate ignorance or overt suppression (burning of books, excommunication or in rarer cases execution of heretics, etc) and the proto-Catholic Church was born in full shape. Certain chapters of this book are incredibly interesting - I for one had no idea that there was so much early Christian literature about the magical powers of Mary's vagina, or that part of the reason extra-biblical historical sources about Jesus are so scant is that most of the documents that mention him mention him not as a robust historical figure but as a magician of rumoured great power (and thus such sources aren't taken seriously by historians) - but I feel a little undersold on the promised premise. This book did literally nothing to shake or even slightly perturb my faith; it has no clear arguments or evidence against the historical claims and theological doctrines of Christianity. Instead it sits back and points at the authoritarianism of the faith in its earliest centuries, with the faithful expected to buy into full dogmatic conformity with Only The Right Kind of Apostle and allow everything else to be gently forgotten or violently destroyed and never spoken of again: it is not a critique of Christian faith or the person of Jesus, it is a critique of the historical and sociopolitical relationship between truth and power, and as such says nothing remotely damaging to the believer who is broadly smart enough to be able to tell the difference between saying "the Church in the past did dodgy stuff!" and "the Church is wrong about serious things!"

   Worth a read I suppose if you're interested in the historical and sociopolitical influences on the development of religion, but if you're a Christian considering reading this looking to be challenged you won't be, and if you're an atheist considering reading this to bolster your arsenal of tools to undermine Christian faith - unless all the Christians you know are remarkably spiritually immature and bad at critical thinking, this probably will be a disappointing resource.

* To people who have read about it in any significant detail, or who follow YouTube channels like Let's Talk Religion or Religion for Breakfast.

** As I noted in my post about Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, interestingly the rate of denominational proliferation since the onset of the Protestant Reformation is pushing up the internal diversity of Christianity to levels that may be starting to come close to those of the earliest centuries before the Cohesion Enforcement - certainly there are groups of people who consider themselves Christian that a mainstream Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant wouldn't consider Christian, but the Church being divided as it is to what authority do we turn to decide who "counts"? Is it time for another ecumenical council?

the Glass Hotel

This book is Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel - the first of hers that I've read, but I was pleasantly rewarded with being introduced to her as a new talented author who kept me entertained throughout. She is a precise and unshowy writer, her prose not particularly poetic but well-suited to detailing events and feelings with nuance, mystery and character.

   In the story, we follow a number of different threads across numerous locations, skipping around between the years 1994 and 2018 (apart from one chapter set in 2029, but that's only three pages and doesn't add much to the plot). Paul Smith is an addict struggling to make it as a composer. Vincent is his half-sister working as bartender in Canada's remote Hotel Caiette. Jonathan Alkaitis, a New York financier, owns the hotel. Leon Prevant is an executive of the Neptune-Avramidis shipping company. In spring of 2005, a hooded figure writes in acid marker the message "why don't you swallow broken glass" on the glass wall of the Hotel Caiette; in December 2008, a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan implodes; and in 2018, Vincent, now working as a cook onboard a Neptune-Avramidis ship, disappears off the coast of Mauritania. These people and events are all woven together in a nebulous but gripping tale of moral compromise, thwarted hope, the impacts of crossed paths, and how one never quite escapes the bits and pieces of their past.

   This is the first non-sci-fi/fantasy novel I've read in a while, and it was a great reminder that a good story well-told doesn't need all the bells and whistles of genre to make it so. I'd recommend this to pretty much any enjoyer of fiction.

Carbon Black Cicada

This book (available as a free download from that link) by David Brookes is a remarkably diverse and powerful collection of short stories. He was an extremely talented writer, with a knack for delicate phrases that lend surgical accuracy to his descriptions of situations and feelings, and a keen eye for human nature in all its variety, from the odd and unique to the universal and predictable.

   I will give a potted summary of each story in the book. We open with Sugar Cube, in which a father & daughter acclimatise to life in a new, strange, remote place. Next we have the titular Carbon Black Cicada - a snapshot biography of an aging sailor told through his tattoos. Head Under Water sees a man trying to set the world record for holding one's breath while wrestling with unrequited love, In Hellas is an exploration of the little frictions between a newlywed couple after the wife suffers an injury, and Vanilla is a close dissection of a guy's protective jealousy over his girlfriend's "friend". In Follow the Sun Underground a wealthy Mexican emigré returns home to quarrel with nature and spirituality, in Identifier a fisherman reminisces about his friend Jack after his trawler dredges up Jack's corpse from the Channel seafloor, and A Good Match is Hard to Find gives an account of a weird experience in the tricky modern dating scene. A Dictionary of Our Time in the Wild, probably my favourite piece from the whole book, is an alphabetical collection of memories of a spiky but deeply meaningful relationship with a nature lover. The Destination Before Next sees a film location scout investigate an Istanbul dockyard, then in Silverfish we remember the story told by a boy's sister about her three-day disappearance when they were seven. Precious Targets tells the story of a wildlife officer who gets roped into security detail for a rare orchid discovered in a park, in Pass, Pass an insomniac struggles to fully engage with a normal social life, and In Your Arms is an anecdote in which a diver off the Cornish coast gets detained by an octopus. Finally in The Only Lasting Beauty we are treated to reflections on the lessons about love taught by a deceased alcoholic mother.

   I don't read many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I reckon anyone with a healthy appreciation of humanly sensitive and invigoratingly originally-voiced fiction will too. You may also be interested to check out David's poetry, which is also of a superlative quality.

the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.