Review: 30-Second Religion

Title: 30-Second Religion: The 50 Most Thought-Provoking Religious Beliefs, Each Explained in Half a Minute

Editor: Russell Re Manning

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: None noticed

Back Cover:

Sikhism, Lutheranism, Islam, Judaism, and Spiritualism? Sure, you’ve certainly heard of them, but do you understand enough about these religious beliefs to quench your thirst for enlightenment or join a dinner party debate on the diversity of world religions?

30-Second Religion demystifies the key beliefs of the world’s major religions, denominations, and less widespread sects, and explains them to the general reader in half a minute, using nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and one picture. Whether you want to understand the key differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism or take in a brief overview of Buddhist philosophy, this book is the quickest way to walk the paths and recognize the key signposts of the world’s diverse and fascinating faiths. Travelling from Animism to Zoroastrianism, and including features on seven key religious texts, 30-Second Religion offers an engaging guide to 50 fascinating belief systems.

Review:

I want to preface this review by saying that I bought this book when my interests were slightly different. I still find religions fascinating and enjoy both learning about real-world religions and reading stories with rich fictional religions. However, my interest now is less general and academic and more about specific things about religion that I find neat (e.g. rituals). So I was already primed to like this book less than when I first bought it.

I do commend this book for the wide variety of religions it discusses. There were even some (like Shenism) that I had never heard of before. So if you’re looking for a general list of world religions to explore, the table of contents here would be a good resource.

You may notice that I said “the table of contents” and not “this book,” and there’s a reason for that. I’m not opposed to simplifying things for people with only a casual interest or who want to know about a religion not because they really care but because they met someone who practices it and don’t want to put their foot in their mouth or something. But this book simplifies things so far as to be practically useless. Let’s face it, there’s really no way to distill several millennia of religious writing, debate, and practice into a single paragraph without either ignoring the multiplicity of traditions or being so general as to say hardly anything. 30-Second Religion chose the incredibly general route. This is probably more fair to the religions being presented, but is definitely less helpful to the reader. There was also no real consistency of what information was covered. Some entries were about the religion’s founding and history with very little about beliefs, some purely theology, and some only about important people involved. It also does not even mention any of the current controversies around any of these religions (e.g. the Catholic child rape scandal, the Baptist Abuse of Faith crisis). If its goal is to make you dinner-party conversational like the back cover claims, these seem like glaring omissions.

To make matters worse, the highly-simplified information presented isn’t even always correct. Even judging only the sections I’m qualified to judge – the selection of Protestant Christian faiths presented – it’s full of inaccuracies. The book presents Calvinism as its own denomination/sect even though it’s really a set of “add-on” beliefs that are added in addition to other denominational beliefs. At one point it contrasts the Qur’an and the Bible by saying the Qur’an is believed to be the divine words of god and therefore perfect while the Bible is believed to be written by humans and therefore fallible – while if you know anything about Christians, you know there is a significant portion (possibly a majority) who believe the Bible is the divine and inerrant word of god. If entries for Christianity, the dominant religion in the places this book was marketed, are so full of errors, I can only imagine how many factual inaccuracies are to be found in entries for lesser-known religions.

This book also uses terms like “evangelical” and “cargo cult” without ever defining them, even in the glossary. The terms are used correctly, but the fact that it assumes a basic level of knowledge with the subject’s terminology demonstrates how despite its simplification, this book is not as accessible as it wants to be.

I’m really grasping at straws here, but I do give the book points for being pretty. Each entry’s facing page is a full-page collage of illustrations and photographs of important things to that religion, although some of the images included are strange (on the Christian Science entry, for example, they include a picture of the founder right next to the same picture with colors inverted). The cover has sparkly golden foil, the entries themselves are laid out nicely, and the paper is thick and glossy. And like I said earlier, the table of contents is useful because it’s a pretty comprehensive list of major world religions. But unfortunately, the content ranges from simplified-to-the-point-of-uselessness to just plain incorrect. I legitimately think you’d be better off just reading a Wikipedia article about whatever religion you want to learn. At least Wikipedia has links so you don’t have to Google so many things. It’s impossible to summarize any belief system in just thirty seconds, and if you really want to learn something, it’s best not to try.

Review: The Cloister Walk

Title: The Cloister Walk

Author: Kathleen Norris

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), sexual assault (mentions), mental illness (mentions), murder (mentions)

Back Cover:

Why would a married woman with a thoroughly Protestant background and often more doubt than faith be drawn to the ancient practice of monasticism, to a community of celibate men whose days are centered on a rigid schedule of prayer, work, and scripture? This is the question that poet Kathleen Norris asks us as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.

Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world– its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community– can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. In this stirring and lyrical work, the monastery, often considered archaic or otherworldly, becomes immediate, accessible, and relevant to us, no matter what our faith may be.

Review:

This is another recommendation from my mother-in-law. It sounded somewhat interesting, but wasn’t high on my priority list until she actually gave me a copy. I haven’t read a physical book in a long time, but I am trying to work through my unread shelf, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

This is not at all what I was expecting. I was expecting something solidly memoir about the author’s experience of being a Protestant-raised nonreligious person spending time in Catholic monastery. I expected a series of events presented in chronological order, along with what she learned about religion and monasticism and some reflections on monastic life. I was not expecting … whatever this is.

Kathleen is a poet, and this book reads like a poem in prose form. I know that’s an oxymoron, but I don’t have a better way to describe it. It reads like poetry – reflective and metaphorical and not limited to a particular place, time, or sequence of events – but it’s written in proper sentences and paragraphs and such like prose. It was an interesting and unique reading experience, and I rather enjoyed the slow, reflective pace.

I also found a lot to relate to in Kathleen. She was raised Protestant but rejected the religion of her youth. Although when the book opened she considered herself generally nonreligious, she still was a sort of spiritual seeker, looking for some kind of religious or spiritual transcendence. The main difference between us in this regard is that she is willing to go back to Christianity to search for it.

I’m glad she did, though, because the result was this book, which is fascinating. I have never been Catholic, so it was interesting learning about little details of Catholicism, and especially about monastic life and the Benedictine monks that she spent time with. She reflects on a lot of different topics in regards to religion and monasticism – everything from saints she particularly likes to the experience of singing psalms every day to more controversial aspects like mandatory celibacy. All of it was fascinating, and some of it was even inspiring.

Even though I have no intention of looking to Christianity for my spiritual seeking journey, I’m glad Kathleen could find positive things. And I’m very glad she decided to write about them in this book. It’s more an invitation to reflection than any sort of memoir, but I found it engaging, poetic, and surprisingly resonant in many places. It feels especially crafted for the spiritual seeker.

Review: Pure

Title: Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

Author: Linda Kay Klein

Genre: Memoir/Sociology/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Sexual content, sexual assault, rape, pedophilia, child sexual abuse, incest, religious trauma, religious bigotry, homophobia, body shaming, medical content

Back Cover:

From a woman who has been there and back, the first inside look at the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s purity culture has had on a generation of young women—in a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir.

In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame.

This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.

Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question the purity-based sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.

Review:

I went into this book going, “I had no guilt or shame having premarital sex after I left Christianity, so it will be interesting to read about other people’s experiences but I’m not going to get swamped with feelings like I did with other similar books.” And if you want to take a moment to chuckle at the naïveté, go ahead, because somehow I had entirely forgotten that purity culture was about so much more than “premarital sex is bad.”

This book is a combination of sociology and memoir. Linda starts each section with an extended story from her own life, but continues with interviews she did with other people who grew up in purity culture (some of whom are still Christian, some of whom aren’t) and ties it all together with a narrative of the problems purity culture causes. If you’re familiar with autoethnography, it feels like one that’s just written for a general readership instead of an academic one.

For being as short as it is (the audiobook is only 9 hours), it packs a lot into its pages, and yet still feels like there is tons more to say on the topic. Which there probably is – purity culture is a broad topic that’s hurt a lot of people and there’s no way anyone could cover all the nuances in one book, even if that book was twice as long as Pure. Though an insider like me can point out all the nuances Linda missed, she did a really good job portraying the major factors and making the ideas accessible to people outside purity culture.

There are a lot of intense feelings and traumas in these pages, but also a lot of revelations for me as someone who grew up in purity culture. Linda’s example of her struggle with Crohn’s disease was especially revelatory in how her physical suffering redeemed her evil body (which had developed undeniable hips and breasts and therefore was unquestionably Sexual and therefore Evil) and made her good in the eyes of her church.

This book is a lot. It’s intense and full of trauma, body shaming, and little girls being sexualized so they can be shamed for that sexualization. But it is very well-written and the stories contained well-told, and it strikes a good balance between being relatable and helpful to the purity culture survivor and accessible to the purity culture outsider. This is a very worthwhile book.

Review: The Darkening Age

Title: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Author: Catherine Nixey

Genre: History/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Death, torture, oppression, misogyny, religious bigotry, homophobia

Back Cover:

The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to ‘one true faith’.

Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyr’s deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the 1st century to the 6th, those who didn’t fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces and their priests killed. It was an annihilation.

Authoritative, vividly written and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.

Review:

In the version of fundamentalist Christianity I grew up in, we idolized the Early Church and Original Christianity. Somewhere between Jesus’ resurrection and the formation of the evil polytheistic Catholic Church, there was a time where the Early Church did Christianity perfectly and modern Christians’ goal is to get back to that right way of Christian-ing that got lost when the Catholics got in charge. Despite this obsession with how Christianity was in this time period, though, we were never taught or encouraged to learn about actual church history. Probably to keep us from learning about this stuff, because Christians are not the good guys here.

Y’all, I am not joking when I tell you I grieved.

This book is a chronicle of how Christian attempts to eradicate “paganism” (a term that didn’t exist until they started using it to describe non-Christians) destroyed the classical world. Most of the Greek and Roman philosophy we know existed but have no copies of were lost to Christian book burnings. Some of the most beautiful specimens of statuary were smashed and defaced because they depicted “pagan gods” and were actually vessels of demons. Christians destroyed gorgeous architecture, killed prominent non-Christians, and were the ones to actually finish off the Library of Alexandria (which actually survived the famous burning, though much smaller).

Many proud traditions of modern Christians were evident even back then – anti-intellectualism, lust for temporal power, main goal of forcing everyone into conformity while claiming they’re just caring about their immortal souls. They destroyed so much history and literature and even an entire religious system. Hellenistic polytheism was completely eradicated, along with most documentation (if it existed in the first place) of how the religious system worked. We know the pantheon and many of the myths, but we know very little about how the actual day-to-day practice of the religion worked.

There’s so much more in this book – about martyrdom, the origins of monasticism, famous early church fathers – that I could mention in this review, but it would be easier to just read it. It’s worth it. Christians are very much not the good guys here, and that’s a narrative Christianity doesn’t want you to hear.

Review: Here All Along

Title: Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life – in Judaism (after Finally Choosing to Look There)

Author: Sarah Hurwitz

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: Antisemitism (mentions), antisemetic hate crimes (mentions), xenophobia (mentions), death, death of children, grief

Back Cover:

After a decade as a political speechwriter—serving as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama, a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, and chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign—Sarah Hurwitz decided to apply her skills as a communicator to writing a book . . . about Judaism. And no one is more surprised than she is.

Hurwitz was the quintessential lapsed Jew—until, at age thirty-six, after a tough breakup, she happened upon an advertisement for an introductory class on Judaism. She attended on a whim, but was blown away by what she found: beautiful rituals, helpful guidance on living an ethical life, conceptions of God beyond the judgy bearded man in the sky—none of which she had learned in Hebrew school or during the two synagogue services she grudgingly attended each year. That class led to a years-long journey during which Hurwitz visited the offices of rabbis, attended Jewish meditation retreats, sat at the Shabbat tables of Orthodox families, and read hundreds of books about Judaism—all in dogged pursuit of answers to her biggest questions. What she found transformed her life, and she wondered: How could there be such a gap between the richness of what Judaism offers and the way so many Jews like her understand and experience it?

Sarah Hurwitz is on a mission to close this gap by sharing the profound insights she discovered on everything from Jewish holidays, ethics, and prayer to Jewish conceptions of God, death, and social justice. In this entertaining and accessible book, she shows us why Judaism matters and how its message is more relevant than ever, and she inspires Jews to do the learning, questioning, and debating required to make this religion their own.

Review:

I knew this book was about Judaism, but I thought it was going to be a lot more memoir than it is. Sarah Hurwitz doesn’t talk much about her personal journey out of Judaism and back after the very beginning (introduction or first chapter, I don’t remember which). She tells the story of how she didn’t vibe with the idea of a big man in the sky as a kid, didn’t bother at all with religion for a long time, joined an Intro to Judaism class to keep herself busy after a breakup, and found a version of Judaism that actually held meaning to her.

The whole rest of the book is basically a summary of what she learned. She describes Jewish holidays and rituals (often illustrating with her own experiences taking part in them), the Jewish holy texts and the Jewish understanding of them, conceptualizations of God and the divine (it is completely possible to be Jewish and also be what a Christian would consider atheist), ethics, rules, right actions, prayer, death, and community. It’s basically an Intro to Judaism book, mostly covering generalities across the religion and specific doctrines that Sarah herself believes, but also touching on different sects where they differ from Sarah’s personal beliefs.

I did actually find a lot of things about Judaism that resonated with me personally. Nondualism is a conception of the divine that I could absolutely get behind. The concept of the weekly shabbat is one I really like, even though some of the rules seem unnecessarily restrictive. The Jewish rituals around death are especially poignant and almost make me wish I belonged to a Jewish community so I could have that kind of support when someone I care for dies. I teared up a couple times.

Growing up Christian, I was taught that Judaism was Christianity Lite – basically the same, but with a bunch more rules because they didn’t have Jesus to set them free from rules. I was pretty sure that was incorrect, but it wasn’t until reading this book that I finally grasped the full richness and meaningfulness of the Jewish tradition. If I was sure I could commit to a religion (I’ve been Christian, pagan witch, Helenistic polytheist, and Shinto by turns and abandoned all of them), I would consider converting to Judaism. There are things in the religion I don’t like (as is true for every religion I’ve looked at), but Judaism has thousands of years of both tradition and reinterpretation and many parts that I find very appealing. If you’re at all curious about Judaism, and especially if you grew up being told Judaism was a less-good version of Christianity, this is a fantastic introduction to the heart and the essence of Judaism.

Review: Heaven and Hell

Title: Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

Author: Bart D. Ehrman

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: Death, existential anxiety, discussions of torture and Hell

Back Cover:

What happens when we die? A recent Pew Research poll showed that 72% of Americans believe in a literal heaven, 58% in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught.

So where did the ideas come from?

In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today.

One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today.

Review:

I’m not really sure what I expected out of this book. I picked it up mainly because of the author, as I’ve enjoyed the previous books of his that I’ve read and he always teaches me something new about historical Christianity. This book definitely taught me a lot about historical beliefs about the afterlife, but I didn’t find it nearly as engaging as Bart’s previous books.

I think part of that was he spent so much time on context. On one hand, it makes perfect sense to clarify what the ancient Jewish people and the Romans thought about the afterlife so we can trace how the Jewish thought that Jesus knew and the Roman context that Christianity grew out of affected Christian beliefs about what happens when you die. On the other hand, I already knew most of the Jewish thought that Bart discusses and I was really uninterested in the Greco-Roman philosophy about souls, so that whole section was really uninteresting to me.

It did get more interesting later, and I did learn a lot about beliefs about afterlives and resurrection in the very early stages of Christianity – apparently a lot of the early afterlife debates were less about Heaven and Hell and more about if a physical body actually get resurrected when Jesus returns or not. It also traced the idea of Hell as a place of eternal punishment through first- and second-century Christian writers.

There really is a lot of fascinating information here. But for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, it’s less engaging than previous books by Bart Ehrman. Some of that could be me, though, as I was reading it as an audiobook at work while recovering from a nasty sinus infection and wasn’t in the best headspace to engage with a book. Regardless, if you’re at all curious about how the ideas of Heaven and Hell developed, I definitely recommend this book.

Review: Going Clear

Title: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Author: Lawrence Wright

Genre: Journalism/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, abuse of children, neglect of children, unreality, homophobia, imprisonment/confinement, starvation, emotional manipulation, death, suicide, suicidal ideation, rape (mention), torture, infidelity, mental illness

Back Cover:

Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with both current and former Scientologists and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative skills to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology: its origins in the imagination of science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard; its struggles to find acceptance as a legitimate (and legally acknowledged) religion; its vast, secret campaign to infiltrate the U.S. government; and its dramatic efforts to grow and prevail after the death of Hubbard.

We learn about Scientology’s esoteric cosmology; about the auditing process that determines an inductee’s state of being; about the Bridge to Total Freedom, through which members gain eternal life. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how young idealists who joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, whose members often enter as children, signing up with a billion-year contract and working with little pay in poor conditions. We meet men and women “disconnected” from friends and family by the church’s policy of shunning critical voices. And we discover, through many firsthand stories, the violence that has long permeated the inner sanctum of the church.

In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of the constitutional protections achieved in its victory over the IRS. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observations, understanding, and synthesis, and his ability to shape a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that goes far beyond an immediate exposé and uncovers the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.

Review:

I didn’t know a whole lot about Scientology going into this book. I knew it targeted the rich and famous because it wanted money, it liked solving its problems with lawsuits, a little bit about its attempts to infiltrate the government, and that its belief system involved some completely ridiculous stuff about aliens. That’s about it. This book is thorough and very intense. Anything you want to know about Scientology is here.

It starts with an extremely deep dive into L. Ron Hubbard himself – his family, his military service, and the contrast between what he and Scientology say about him and what non-church sources say – and give a well-researched portrait of the man himself. He may have just been a really good con man whose con got bigger than he planned, but Lawrence Wright shows a man who may very well have been a paranoid schizophrenic who truly believed everything he was teaching through Scientology.

This book is hard to read in many places. It doesn’t shy away from the many awful things done by the church. Anything you told any church member could and would be reported to superiors and held against you. Thought crimes could earn you years in the Rehabilitation Project Force, a program of abuses and forced labor that differed from literal slavery only in that it technically wasn’t against your will. Children taken away from their parents and working ten- or twelve-hour days. A method of treating mental breakdowns involving complete and total isolation that led to at least one death. It’s hard to read straight through due to all the many ways Scientology has hurt so many people.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was learning about Scientology’s cosmology, what the aliens are actually about, and why Scientology needs so much of your money to advance through the ranks. There was some of that in this book, but not as much as I’d expected. Lawrence focuses less on the “woo” bits of belief and cosmology and more on facts – people who actually existed, what they did and what was done to them, discrepancies between the church’s official story and what outside records show. I would have liked to know a little more about Scientology beliefs, but that’s not really what this book is trying to be about. It’s trying to be more of a history.

I learned a lot about Scientology, the people behind it, and the people affected by it from this book. It’s a lot more thorough than is probably necessary for a casual interest (at over 400 pages, it’s highly engaging but definitely more in-depth than passing curiosity would warrant), but if you need a deep dive into Scientology’s history for any reason, this is a fantasic place to start.

Review: Unorthodox

Title: Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Author: Deborah Feldman

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Religious trauma, childhood sexual assault, misogyny/sexism, heterosexual sex, reluctant marital sex, child physical abuse (mentions), Holocaust (mentions), emotional abuse, vomit (mentions)

Back Cover:

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape.

Review:

This is a story of living a strictly-regimented life in a strict religious sect, and the story of a girl growing up and realizing she didn’t have to accept other people deciding she was lesser because she was female.

Like Girl at the End of the World, the other leaving-a-strict-conservative-religion memoir I’ve read, I saw a lot of myself in this story. A large factor in me leaving religion I was raised in was also a slow realization that I deserved to be treated better than a baby-making bang mommy for my husband. There were enough differences between Deborah’s experience of Satmar Hasidic Judaism and my experience of fundamentalist Christianity that I didn’t relive my trauma with her, but I definitely related to many of her feelings and experiences.

Since I know very little about Judaism, I don’t know how many of the expectations, rules, and traditions Deborah details in this book are universal to Judaism, how many are Hasidic, and how many are specific to the Satmar sect, but I still found it all fascinating. Despite disagreeing with many of the rules and ultimately leaving the sect, this book doesn’t disparage the practices and traditions detailed. She makes it clear that she wanted more than what the Satmar rules would allow her to do and to be happy she and her son needed to leave, but she doesn’t claim that Judaism or even the Satmar sect is bad. She doesn’t pass judgement on them at all, simply states them as factual happenings without moral or ethical judgement. Her follow-up memoir talks about her struggle for a personal Jewish identity, so she obviously isn’t against being Jewish.

This is a very good memoir. Personal, raw, and real, with information about a particular Jewish sect and Deborah’s life within in. There’s religious trauma, the struggles of marital sex when you learned you had a vagina one week before your wedding, the effects of surviving the Holocaust on the generations that came after, and a really compelling personal story.

Deborah Feldman’s memoirs:

1. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
2. Exodus: A Memoir

Review: Jesus, Interrupted

Title: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible and Why We Don’t Know About Them

Author: Bart D. Ehrman

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), torture (mentions)

Back cover:

Picking up where Bible expert Bart Ehrman’s New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus left off, Jesus, Interrupted addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches—and it’s not what most people think. Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed:

• The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was & how salvation works
• The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later
• Jesus, Paul, Matthew and John all represented fundamentally different religions
• Established Christian doctrines—such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus and the trinity—were the inventions of still later theologians

These aren’t idiosyncratic perspectives of just one scholar. They’ve been the standard widespread views of scholars across a full spectrum of denominations and traditions. Why is it most people have never heard such things? This is the book that pastors, educators and anyone interested in the Bible have been waiting for—a compelling account of the central challenges faced when attempting to reconstruct Jesus’ life and message.

Review:

This is sort-of-not-really a sequel to Misquoting Jesus. Though Bart Ehrman occasionally skips explaining a tangent in depth in favor of saying “it’s in Misquoting Jesus” (although I only recall two distinct times he does so), the two books are fundamentally about different topics. Misquoting Jesus is about the historicity of the New Testament manuscripts, how they were changed, and how historians get an idea of which versions are closest to the original. Jesus, Interrupted is about the historicity of Christianity and how differences between New Testament documents, especially the gospels, give us an idea of how early Christianity evolved.

This book does solve one major problem that I had with Misquoting Jesus, though – he establishes his education, expertise, and ability to speak authoritatively about these topics much better. Bart is a New Testament scholar and a historian, went to Princeton Seminary and teaches New Testament classes at multiple universities, and this book is based on reading the New Testament through a historical-critical lens. He not only talks about the contradictions in the New Testament, but he discusses why they’re significant, what they tell us about how Christianity evolved as a religion, and the conclusions historians have reached about various New Testament topics. And even though he is an agnostic, he’s careful to point out that you can accept these things and still be a Christian – not a Biblical Literalist, sure, but there are ways to be Christian that don’t involve you believing that the Bible is divinely dictated and contains zero mistakes, errors, or contradictions.

I found all of this fascinating. I grew up in a fundmentalist, Biblical-literalist Christian sect that was full of mental gymnastics and made-up “context” to explain away inconsistencies, when we noticed them at all. We were also very into the idea of “Original Christianity,” as in the mythical perfectly-unified version of Christianity we thought the first Christians followed. I knew “Original Christianity” never existed as a single unified thing, but it was fascinating to see historians use the evidence from the New Testament itself to trace the evolution of Christian theology. The thing I thought was funniest is that historical evidence points to Jesus just being the prophet of a Jewish apocalyptic sect that got way out of hand after his (ordinary and resurrection-less) death. Wouldn’t it be hilarious for my old fundamentalist sect to find out that’s what Original Christianity was!

Interestingly enough, Bart establishes early on that he believes Jesus was a real historical person. I didn’t really believe that, but reading this book actually convinced me. After discovering the evidence that historians have, I think the historical evidence does point to an actual historical Jesus existing–but as the founder of an unremarkable Jewish apocalyptic sect, not as messiah and son of god.

I want to say more, because this book is just so fascinating, but this review is getting long as it is. If you have even a passing interest in the Bible – whether you’re Christian, a Biblical Literalist, interested in the academic study of early Christianity, or just want to know more about the most influential book in Western culture – I can’t recommend Jesus, Interrupted highly enough.

Review: The Tao Te Ching

Title: The Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu’s Book of the Way and of Righteousness

Translator/Commentator: Charles Johnston

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: Outdated racial terminology

Back Cover:

From an older edition.

The Tao Teh King (Taoteching) forms the fundamental core of modern Taoist philosophy and has informed the beliefs and mode of life of the people of China for 2500 years. For all those who seek peace, contentment, harmony and balance in life, the Tao Teh King is an indispensable resource. Lao Tse’s words speak directly to the heart with simple, direct and profound wisdom addressing the core principles of the art of living well.

The translation and commentary presented here was completed between 1921 and 1923 and serialized in the periodical magazine The Theosophical Quarterly. The society responsible for the periodical was dissolved some fifteen years later, leaving this translation to lay dormant these many years. It is reproduced verbatim, but with an adjustment in formatting—providing the translation itself, in whole, prior to the commentary—the addition of a foreword, and of additional notes.

Review:

In retrospect, I should have done more research before picking a translation, and also I’m not sure how good of a version this was to read.

To start with, I didn’t realize this had commentary with it. (I honestly don’t know how I missed that, but I did.) Secondly, this translation and commentary was done by a white guy in the 1920s. Charles Johnston, according to his Wikipedia page, was really into the occult and “Oriental studies” despite his only experience with non-European people being assisting with the British colonization of India until he caught malaria. So despite the commentary being interesting, I don’t know how trustworthy or accurate it actually is.

To give Charles a little credit, he does cite several actual Chinese sources and quote Chinese commentators in a bunch of his commentary bits. But he also occasionally cites them and then says he thinks that’s wrong and here’s what he thinks, so take that with a grain of salt. He also draws a lot of comparisons between the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible, seemingly trying to make the point that “see? all this ancient wisdom stuff has the same ideas!” so that was a little weird.

The translation seemed pretty solid to me, from my extremely limited perspective. I’m not sure how much I trust the commentary, though. The actual text of the Tao Te Ching was interesting and I’m glad I read it, but I want to do some more research and maybe check out some other, less colonialist sources before I make a judgement on the commentary.