Why Men Hate Going to Church

By David Murrow, thomasnelson.com.

This revised version of the original book offers churchgoers a reality check. Church emasculates men, and offers an environment rich in feminine thinking and visual cues. It therefore repels men. Yet without the risk-taking, energy, and skills that men possess, churches decline.

Through observation, case studies, anecdotes, and common sense, author David Murrow tries to shake things up. He outlines the deep historical roots of feminine Christianity, going all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Everything about the way churches function, the big things and the little things, pleases women and ignores men. This means that men just don't have the skills that match churchgoing. Churches need soft and cuddly Sunday school teachers and musical people who like to sing for 30 minutes. They ask for people good at establishing and maintaining networks of relationships. The hug, weep, pray for 10 minutes, hold each other, and share their feelings. All terrible things for men.

This analysis is most powerful when Murrow suggests activities churches could do that would utilize men's skills.

The language of the churches is also feminine. Intimacy, including passionate intimacy, with God is highlighted. Homoerotic images are often evoked, such as resting in the arms of Jesus. What man wants to hear this?

What man says to another man, "Let's have a personal relationship." Why would having "a personal relationship" with Jesus be appealing for a man?

Murrow keeps things real, often showing how men simply do not fit into the churches. To borrow from Ronald Reagan, "Men didn't leave the church. The church left men." Murrow shows how this has happened, and offers ideas on a better way.

Islam and the Men's Movement

Islam will do for the men's movement in the next 25 years what Marxism has done to the feminist movement in the past 40. The next 25 years will be as transformational as the last 40, and in the end men will be respected once again. This will happen first in Europe.

Christianity has so deeply feminized, that it stands little chance. Too many doilies at churches, ladies. The men are emasculated. An emasculated man might as well be 100 years old. Henri Nouwen was the final nail in the coffin, fully articulating the vision of a therapeutic, sentimental, moralizing church with no vigor whatsoever. He is possibly the most popular writer across the Protestant-Catholic, liberal-traditional-conservative divides.

Western men have forgotten what it means to be a man, and churches are largely to blame for this. A "good" Christian man is a useful idiot for a woman. He serves her. Does she ever serve him? Hell no. She's supposed to be "empowered." Empowered to do what? In any case, feminism and feminization destroy everything they touch. Churches need to become places where men can be men, or it's over. Perhaps we can learn from African Christians, where the pastors have some testosterone. Still, anyways.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and How It Died

By Philip Jenkins, $32.95, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 314 pages hardcover.

“Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth century.” Thus Jenkins repeatedly challenges Anglo-American Christian Eurocentrism. He shows that Middle Eastern and Asian Christianity, largely Nestorian or Syriac, thrived culturally, theologically, and materially for centuries. The European believers were in the spiritual and intellectual backwater.

The Oriental Christians were much more orthodox than we have taken them to be. They rejected the gnosticism and apocryphal writings just as solidly as the Orthodox and Latins did, despite Elaine Pagels' claims to the contrary. The entire Christian family for centuries, in fact, was largely in sync.

The Middle Eastern and Asian landscape up to the fourteenth century in many areas was a spiritual landscape of monasteries, Christian shrines and pilgrimage routes, great learning centers, and ancient metropolitan sees. “Before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, Samarkand and Patna all achieved metropolitan status,” the author notes. One drawback to The Lost History of Christianity is the total lack of photos of once-Christian buildings, such as in Syria, and artwork from Cappadocia and other now-Muslim areas.

Oriental Christians used their spiritual wealth to spread the faith as far as China and perhaps even to Korea and Tibet. Throughout many lands, Christian and Buddhist monasteries stood side by side, while Christians read Buddhist scriptures and even helped translate some Buddhist writings into Chinese and other languages.

Countless such examples testify to a Christian culture much more advanced than the one in Europe until the Renaissance. Islam did not simply take over this deeply entrenched religious civilization. Instead, Jenkins points out that we have misread history by stressing difference and conflict over peace, tolerance, and influence.

The two religions theologically, spiritually, and culturally blended into each other to a surprising degree according to The Lost History of Christianity. Sufism was a way for Christian converts to more easily identify with the new religion, as this Islamic path emphasized saints and pilgrimage, and personal mystical spiritual experiences, much as Christianity did. In fact, many aspects of Islamic practice originated in Eastern Christianity, and Muslim converts from the older religion reinforced Christianity's influence on the new religion by continuing many of their previous practices.

As was also the case with Asian Christianity's relationship to Buddhism from time to time, religions were not as exclusionary as now. The old church buildings often became mosques, much as pre-Christian European pagan temples had become churches. Jenkins argues convincingly that Islam was in countless respects a continuation of previous, Christian practices; Syriac and Nestorian ghosts haunted the new religion for centuries.

Ironically, Oriental Christianity nourished Islam more than it did Greek or Latin Christianity. These latter two Christian groups all but ignored their brother Christian's existence. This has been a heavy loss to this day: “For a thousand years, Syriac Christians produced scholars and thinkers who could be set beside the best of their Greek and Latin contemporaries, and who shaped the emerging world of Islamic science and philosophy.”

Even now, who is aware of the eleventh-century “Syriac Renaissance,” and even what that means? In fact, Jenkins notes, “virtually all these works [from the period] are now lost,” sometimes due to Islamic belligerence, but also because of European and Byzantine indifference to aiding and learning from the Syriac Christians. This is doubly ironic because many Christian dissenters, persecuted in the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, had often left for the relative freedom of more eastern lands, including the various Islamic states.

The great strength of The Lost History of Christianity is Jenkin's refusal to whitewash the Islamic persecutions of the Oriental Christians, which reached high points in the globally miserable fourteenth and the European-expansionist nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the first instance, climate change led to crop failures throughout the known world. Coupled with the conversion to Islam of the warrior Mongols, the Christian communities stood little chance of surviving the pogroms despite being so deeply-entrenched. Jenkins could have offered more information on this sad piece of history.

While the Christian powers France, Britain, and Russia spent the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carving out the Ottoman Empire, Muslim Turks and Arabs in that empire committed genocide against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians, leaving very little of a once far-reaching culture.

The Theology of Tariq Ramadan: A Catholic Perspective

By Gregory Baum, 178 pages, $21.95, Novalis, ISBN 978-2896-460-793.

“Because the Catholic Church first rejected modernity and then wrestled to find a theological approach that allowed a critical openness to modernity, I have great sympathy for a similar wrestling in Islam.... There is a certain family likeness between the Catholic and the Muslim theological effort to react creatively to the challenge of modernity.”

Baum's above words reflect his attempt to reduce the estrangement or sense of mystery that many Catholics feel towards Islam. The mainstream media caricatures of the religion and the sense of a clash of civilizations have been accepted uncritically by most people, almost subconsciously.

The Theology of Tariq Ramadan relates Catholicism to Islam, and shows how the latter can become a more stable, authentic part of Western Civilization. Many Anglo-American multiculturalists have already imagined how this integration can come about, but they do so with a healthy dose of condescension and belief that the only good Islam is a neutered Islam. This echoes their understanding of Christianity and religion in general – which naturally angers or scares Muslims and invites antagonism.

Baum, a Canadian Catholic theologian, writes as a friend of Islam, paralleling John Paul II's outreach to the Jews. He clearly respects what he believes Ramadan to be saying about European Muslims. When Baum disagrees with the Muslim scholar, he does so in a careful, discrete, and humble manner, showing that the point in hand is his interpretation of Ramadan's thinking.

Ramadan wishes to establish an Islamic theology that distinguishes between the universal and the particular. The universal injunctions of Islam usually revolve around God and human duties to God, whereas cultural issues relate more to the particular, and can change. Baum explains Ramadan's belief that individual Muslims not be allowed to interpret the Quran themselves, in contrast to Protestants, who have always been invited to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.

The Islamic theologian, now based partly at Oxford University, believes that Islamic scholars alone must interpret the Quran, as he follows the footsteps of the nineteenth-century Islamic reformer al-Afghani. Baum is equally clear and patient in explaining how and why Ramadan desires to respect and keep sharia law as the basis of Islamic society. This is not the harsh law the media portrays; Ramadan calls for an Islamic law that reflects God's desire to help people live good, holy lives.

Baum unearths the basic reading that Ramadan and similar Islamic reformers do of the Quran, showing how it parallels the reading of the Bible by some Christian Churches, including Catholics: “The reformist approach, he [Ramadan] explains, reads the Quran by taking into account the context of the verses and the intention implicit in them.”

Ramadan and the reform tradition he follows is actually a conservative movement because it demands that Muslims follow the interpretations of Islamic scholars. Again, Baum walks a theological tightrope to show that it is not fundamentalist interpretation because it seeks the living force of God that created the Quran and the human quest for God. It does not take a fundamentalist legal view of the Quran, in the style of the Taliban or Saudi Wahabi theologians, but believes that Muslims must follow the divine spirit of the Quran and Islam. Baum notes: “Ramadan as a Salafi reformist wants Muslims to transcend the regulations of the Islamic schools of law 'to rediscover the pristine energy of an unmediated reading of the Quran.'”

Muslims must closely follow the core inspiration of Islam, but because it is a universal religion for people of all times and places, cultural and other aspects of the religion can and sometimes must change, including shariah's calls for corporal and capital punishment. This allows his co-religionists to remain fully Muslim yet fully Western; in Ramadan's view, Western Muslims must be full citizens who participate in the political and cultural life of their societies. Rather than isolating themselves, they must use their civic participation as a means to witness their faith to the non-Muslim cultures.

Throughout these discussions, according to Baum, Ramadan remains steadfast in his desire that people follow the Quran. Muslims can reach out to secular, Western societies because Muhammad had relations “of trust and competence” with polytheists and other non-Muslims. Western Muslims should, like Catholics and Jews in these societies, have a dialogical relationship with these societies, avoiding assimilation while participating in civic and cultural life.

The Theology of Tariq Ramadan offers an important step forwards in inter-religious dialogue, an imperative because of the loud voices describing a clash of civilization. Baum hardly sees such a clash, and finds much in common between Ramadan's style of conservative, traditionalist Muslim reform, and the Catholic Church's long, often contentious and painful dialogue with modern, secular liberal societies.

Baum writes from the left-wing, feminist side of the Church that came out swinging from Vatican II, calling for revolutionary sexual moral change, married priests, female ordination, and liberation- and feminist-theology. In The Theology of Tariq Ramadan, at times he risks turning Ramadan into a Muslim version of himself and the Vatican II left-wing. Even with this weakness, the wide-ranging discussion, which refers to many other important Muslim thinkers such as Fethullah Gulen, is well worth the read, and can serve as a Catholic introduction to some currents of contemporary Islamic theology, and their relationship to Catholic thinking.

The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens

By Vox Day, 305 pages hardcover, Benbella Books, $19.96, ISBN 1-933771-36-4.
 
Vox Day's book succeeds because he locates the split between science-based atheism and Judeo-Christian belief in meaning. Atheists and believers are ultimately fighting over the meaning of scientific and technological advancement and its proper use.
 
Rather than getting swallowed up in the endless debates around biotechnology, cloning, and evolution, Day takes a wider view and looks at the basic presuppositions of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and other atheists.
 
Avoiding a proof for God's existence or some other worn-out way of ending the atheist-believer debate, Day goes on the offensive and plays the game of these atheists, accusing them of being the irrational ones, despite their pride in being rationalist heirs of the Enlightenment.
 
Rather than building his own theological argument, then, Day deconstructs many atheist arguments, eventually concluding late in the book: “Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist [rationalism], rejecting the foundation of Man's most successful civilization, ... and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one.”
 
In his painstaking criticism, he characterizes atheists as irrational because of their major inconsistencies and wrong assumptions on which their entire arguments stand.
 
He saves most of his acid for Sam Harris and the latter's Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. Harris, Day notes, has the most basic facts wrong about the religions he disdains: “Harris repeatedly demonstrates an inability to distinguish between the relative significance of the Old Testament to Christians, while raising issues that have been debated by theologians and philosophers for nearly 2,000 years as if they were new and no one had ever thought of them before.”
 
He derides Harris for an ignorant, amateurish reflection on the Christian understanding of theodicy, which is the attempt to understand how evil and a good God can exist at the same time.
 
Day highlights the cracked foundations of the atheist house. He goes so far as to question “St. Darwin” himself, focusing, as he repeatedly does, on the irrational and even emotional origins of basic anti-Christian beliefs. He points out that Darwin came to believe that God had nothing to do with “the operations of the natural laws” of evolution after the death of the scientist's young daughter.
 
The Irrational Atheist shows that the House of Atheism collapses fairly easily, but not by aggressive evangelism or pious-emotionalism. The book applies to atheists the same standards of consistency and intellectual integrity that atheists pretend they are applying to Christianity.
 
Day also in a sense protects Christianity against atheist abuse by claiming that we are all irrational: “But the ultimate atheist irrationality us the idea that Man himself is rational.”
 
The author, an evangelical, briefly develops the wonderful Christian anthropology that mainline churches turned away away from in their socialist-feminist rush to create God's kingdom on earth. Day notes that none of us make sense because of our sinfulness, passions, and mystery: “you are not a robot, you are a human being. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing one who uses his intellect to construct reasons in post facto defense of his irrational desires.”
 
Day opens the way to a deeper sense of mystery and, as importantly, to the unavoidable fact that humans as fallen creatures inevitably slip up. He never loses sight of the Christian view of why atheists have gotten so many things wrong.

As a Protestant, Day does not take advantage of the enormous intellectual tradition available at the hands of faithful, practicing Catholics. While many Protestants endeavor to fight back against secularism, without this Catholic strength they often fall somewhat short. The Irrational Atheist would have been enriched with this fuller perspective.

The Peculiar Life of Sundays

By Stephen Miller, 284 pages, $27.95, Harvard University Press.

Miller sweeps through countries, epochs, and theological debates to give a sense of the dialogue between Christianity and the wider culture over the proper place of Sunday in people's lives. Christian leaders' anxiety over not offending God competed against the wishes of people who wanted to do their own thing and who weren't particularly concerned about divine wrath.

Most people in the Christian civilizations of late antiquity, and of early modern Scotland, England, and America compromised, and thought of Sunday as both a holy day, where they performed some Christian duties, and as a holiday, where they drank wine, ate big breakfasts, went to dinner parties, or hiked in the woods all day.

The theologians protecting the sabbath from the holiday-makers feared paganism. St. Augustine in the early fifth century opposed Christians going to the ancient Roman spectacles such as chariot racing on Sundays because he feared a pagan relapse of individuals in a society which was only beginning to lay the foundations of Christendom.

The Peculiar Life of Sundays shows how the strength or weakness of Sunday observance was one strong indicator of the depth and breadth of the Christianization of a given society. One hundred years after Augustine this Christianization was still incomplete, as Caesarius, the bishop of Arles, strongly opposed the practice of conducting business on Sundays. Along with other church leaders, Caesarius fretted over whether he was too tolerant of lingering pre-Christian practices.

The lack of Sunday piety was an ecclesiastical concern for centuries. As late as the ninth century, one sermon preached against “practicing divinization” on the Lord's Day, as well as hunting, shopping, and – on any day of the week – swearing “by the sun and the moon.”

In other words, the Church needed more fully to Christianize Sundays if it was to eliminate all vestiges of paganism.

Miller does an excellent job of sketching, through his study of Sundays, paganism's decline and the onset of Christendom. Sunday was an important part of the church's ability to give order and unity to a Western Europe wracked by post-Roman division, invasion, and socio-cultural chaos.

The Peculiar Life of Sundays quickly moves ahead to the sixteenth century and Queen Elizabeth I, who had her own unity problems with which to deal, including Puritans pulling her country in one theological direction and vestiges of Catholicism pulling it in another.

She succeeded because the majority of her subjects wanted as moderate a settlement as she did. Regarding Sundays, ground zero for the battle over the religious soul of the nation, her Act of Uniformity required people to attend the established church on Sunday for both morning and evening services, on pain of fine. Many Catholics, known as recusants, decided to pay the money, but many Puritans were not any happier than their Catholic countryfolk, complaining about lax enforcement of the law and people's habit of attending Sunday theater.

While the notion of a “gloomy Sunday” appears now and again in The Peculiar Life of Sundays, Miller shows that the Puritans, especially in Scotland and parts of America, were the only really gloomy people. As sabbatarians (people who wanted to keep Sunday for God), they demanded that on that day people limit their activities to singing psalms and religious hymns, reading the Bible and other religious books, and attending church. For centuries, they loudly opposed anything approaching fun or recreation.

The latter chapters of the book analyze America and writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau was particularly anti-Christian, and like Nietzsche believed that the religion “breeds sickly consciences.” Turning things around, he called church-goers pagans because they didn't worship the sun. He spent his Sundays communing with nature.

Walt Whitman and many other American writers echoed Thoreau's emphasis on love of nature, indifference to or downright dislike for Christianity, and hyper-individualism. They saw Sunday as a day for cultivating a kind of nature-spirituality, and helped push their country towards secularism.

Miller's last chapter reflects on the current commercialization of Sunday and marginalization of Christians and anyone else trying to slow the day down.

The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World

By Billy Graham, 312 pages.

“On which road are you traveling? Is it the right road—the road God has set out for you? Or are you still on the broad road of which Jesus spoke—a road that looks deceptively inviting and easy, but in the end leads only to emptiness and sorrow and death?”

This extraordinarily straightforward book assumes that sainthood is simple, though not easy. Billy Graham hatches no new theologies, but offers instead the traditional beliefs of American born-again evangelicals.

Pastoral rather than philosophical or academically-theological, The Journey focuses on the trials of people living in a materialistic, socially unstable world. Graham does not tinker with his successful evangelical formula. The Journey reads like the advice of a very loving, thoughtful grandfather with an urgent message he has learned from all his years of living.

In particular, Graham focuses on the sinful nature of humans. In order to truly accept Christ, we have to accept our sinful nature. This is something that liberal Christians from every church have rejected. This sense of sin—or lack thereof--is one of the greatest differences between traditional / conservative and liberal Christians.

“Sin is serious—it is, in fact, the most basic problem of the human race. It is my basic problem and yours as well. Don't ever think sin is only a minor misdeed or an occasional outburst of wrongdoing. Sin is far deeper than that. It is a spiritual disease that leaves us weak and powerless. Its hold over us is so strong that only God can overcome it.”

This strong sense of sin and of human powerlessness grounds this theology of redemption, and explains the deep contrast this book has with liberal theology, where sin is social or psychological, but never, as with Graham, in the deepest part of each individual: “Remember:” he writes, “This world is not the way God meant it to be, and neither are we. Something devastating has happened—and that 'something' is sin.”

Graham rejects post-Christian values, linking it to “human dignity”: s“If we think we are only sophisticated animals, we will begin to act like sophisticated animals...Our souls make us uniquely human, and they give dignity and value to every human life.”

Lastly, Graham delicately touches on “the mystery of evil” with wisdom and maturity, simultaneously respecting and being sensitive to the terrible suffering of people, and the hope in God's response of grace and love to this suffering, even when we don't feel this divine work.

The Journey deals with temptation, Satan, the church, pride, grief and adversity, and countless other concerns we all have. Graham thoughtfully and sparingly touches on his own life, though not to beat the drums of his own achievements or holiness.

Why Have You Come Here: The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America

By Nicholas P. Cushner, 254 pages, Oxford University Press.

“Decades before the Jesuits arrived in Mexico, controversy raged over the character of the American Indian. Who was he? Was he man or beast? Was he a rational being? Could his lands be expropriated? Could he be made to work and pay taxes? If he were a beast, why should he not be enslaved? Could the Indian be forced to become a Christian?...These questions were never fully resolved.”

As reflected in the above words, Cushner describes the early part of the European intrusion into the New World as little more than disordered chaos, and the Jesuits marched eagerly, even passionately, into this hurricane. Why Have You Come Here introduces the reader to this religious work in Florida, Peru, New France, Brazil, and Maryland, as the Jesuits worked within the various European empires.

Unlike many accounts of this nature, the author's judgment of the intentions and prejudices of the religious authorities does not judge with an underlying anti-Catholic or anti-Western ideology on us. He highlights the subtle complexities of natives-Church interactions:

“The detail with which the Jesuits related the accounts of Indian religious beliefs indicates a degree of fascination that bordered on admiration. The missionary had come face to face not with primitive animism but with a complex of beliefs that were integrated with the daily life of the Indian. There was the glimmer of a recognition that something greater than Satan was at work, but the Jesuit did not come out and say precisely that. European society of the sixteenth century, however, was convinced that the devil was behind all forms of non-Christian religion.”

Cushner also does a good job of thinking from the native side without condescension or fictionalizing things:

“The Florida Indians resented the white men who demanded a share of their corn and suggested that they change their belief system and some of their most cherished social habits while threatening them with eternal punishment if they did not.”

Why Have You Come Here attempts to show how one faith replaces another faith, and whether this happens perfectly, or whether the old gods hang on, “underneath the altar.” The books succeeds in bringing out the slow, steady decline of the native religions and the determined growth of Christianity:

“When recovery occurred in Sinaloa, it was another proof of the effectiveness of the Christian God....The European stayed with the sick and for the most part because the missionary remained unscathed, he was thus able to confirm the power of his God.”

An important undercurrent to this change, as brought out by the author, is the close relationship between culture and religion: When the Jesuits were converting the natives, they were also changing the social structures and individual personalities of the natives regarding hair length, dress, family relationships, and the economy, so that all these things would become “Christian,” which is to say, “European.”

God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis

By Philip Jenkins, USD 28.00, hardcover 340 pages, Oxford University Press.

Bucking the trend, Philip Jenkins sees a positive future for Christian Europe: “Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands and that they urgently need to make up these losses farther afield, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at home.”

Jenkins places his optimism in the very core of Christianity's nature: “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion's structure and development.”

The opening chapters counter the media's announcements of the supposed death of European Christianity. Catholic vitality exists in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere through movements like Sant-Egidio and Focolore, which are lay-inspired, dynamic, and as intense as American-style Pentecostalism. According to Jenkins, these Catholic communities can potentially live out Pope Benedict XVI's call for the Church to become a “creative minority” in Europe.

God's Continent also chronicles how Christian immigrants to Europe parallel Muslim newcomers in tending to follow their practices just as intensely or more so in their new land than back in Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe. African charismatic Christians all over Europe are building a vast network of communities intent on maintaining the religious fervor of their own people in their new European milieu. Charismatic leaders are working hard, “day and night” in the words of one pastor, to return the missionary debt to Europe by resurrecting European Christianity.

Yet the author spends a great deal of time discussing Islam, and precisely why it is not on the verge of taking over Europe. He uses countless demographic charts and tables to show how, for instance, the birth rate of Muslims, famously exaggerated, is not only comparable to Western countries among European Muslims, but also in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and, most surprisingly, Iran. This drop has been very recent—since the turn of the millennium—and very precipitous. Even Egypt's birthrate is well under 3.0 per woman.

While Westerners only seem to take note of the youthful character of the population of Muslim countries, Jenkins argues here as elsewhere that this is due more to the fact that these populations are one or two generations behind Western peoples in terms of secularization than to an effort to out-birth the West. Aside from Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and a few other places, the Muslim baby boom has pretty much ended, especially as Muslim women become increasingly educated.

God's Continent also parallels the hysteria over Islam in Europe today with the hysteria one hundred years ago among American Protestants who feared that “backward” Catholics with their “superstitious beliefs,” high birth-rate, zealous community, and adherence to authority were threatening the very democracy and individualism of the country. The Protestant mainstream eventually judged Catholics to be as American as everyone else, and Catholics have tended to adopt individualism and the separation of church and state just as eagerly as the wider culture.

Jenkins' warnings, though, are well-grounded and reflect the need for action in somehow making young Muslims feel that they are a greater fabric of European society: “[I]n prosperous Europe, we find a cultish perversion of religion in which the bombings and beheadings almost become the central tenets of practice. In Europe too, unlike north Africa or south Asia, young enthusiasts are not subject to the very powerful constraints of traditional values and social structures, the iron laws of village and clan that mandate strict customary limits to the use of violence and disorder. Older Muslims complain of losing their children to militant recruiters.” (161)

The optimism of God's Continent comes, therefore, with a few warnings.

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, David Levering Lewis

$29.95, hardcover 476 pages, W.W. Norton.


In God's Crucible, Professor David Lewis demonstrates the close relationship between Europe and the Islamic world. Europe in particular defines itself to an important degree through its feelings about Muslims and their cultures and beliefs.

Europeans, especially the emperors and popes, learned to work together in reference to the Muslim threat. The crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 exemplifies this. Popes and emperors also collaborated against wandering, violent Germanic tribes such as the Lombards. The papacy's continued relevance, if not its continued existence, was by no means always assured.

In outlining the details of countless battles between empires or civil wars, God's Crucible takes us on a Lord of the Rings view of history -- men playing the game of power where, as Lewis writes, “peace is war by other means.” Rarely did a year go by without major conflagration, and when peace did break out, it only assured that, with the stockpiling of weapons and food for the next one, that next one would be more terrifying than ever.

As is so often the case nowadays, Lewis adopts a Friedrich Nietzsche view of religion, characterizing it, like war, as simply a power game. He regards councils, popes, preachers, and other holy people as simply players in the grand game rather than speakers of the truth. Lewis is a man spellbound by the Enlightenment and its unending cynicism, with a non-believer's skepticism in everything religious or truthful.

Having said that, his skepticism and materialism push him to do us the service of correcting the historical record, such as regards the belief that Arab Muslims spread their religion with the sword and their overwhelming numbers: “Long the conventional explanation, the human tidal-wave theory was abandoned in the early years of the last century, however, as new scholarship revealed the first Arab armies to have been dismayingly small – a few thousand at most to conquer Graeco-Roman Syria and fewer than twelve thousand, probably, to occupy Iran.”

Lewis' next words give a warning to current inhabitants of Western civilization: We have been fighting unending culture wars just as the early medieval Christian majority in the soon-to-be Muslim world had engaged in exhausting, demoralizing theological infighting for centuries. They often squabbled over the understanding of the nature of Christ's divine and human natures. The upshot of that early medieval squabbling? “Muslims also won because their enemies had exhausted themselves.”

Lewis does a particularly good job at showing how Europe became, in reaction to Islamic jihad, united through a common mythology. The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French poem about a Christian military tragedy in Muslim Spain, was used by medieval Christendom as a template for thinking about the heroic valor of Christian knights – and Christian Europe – in their “epic struggle” against Muslims.

Though Catholic readers should be wary of Lewis' coldness towards his own Western heritage and towards Christianity, which he all-too-often assumes to be uniformly violent and degrading, the author's powerful, succinct, and poetic writing powerfully sums up his discussions, as in the following:

“Arab knowledge in politics, economics, and technology sharpened by the close of the seventh century to an edge as fine as tempered steel.”

The author replaces religion as the bottom line of history with economics, emphasizing the commerce and cultural wealth that empires and open trade routes generated for multiple nations existing together across thousands of miles of steppes or mountain ranges and vast seas:

“If the road to conversion had been well-trafficked from the beginning of the jihad, by the first decade of the eighth century the road to Islam had become a conveyor belt [of trade] at full throttle.”

Lewis' wide-ranging, intuitive understanding of Western and Islamic history make God's Crucible a great adventure for the patient reader. It is well worth the few annoyances of his academic ideology and his sometimes overly descriptive style.

Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071, by Andrew Louth

382 pages with b/w photos, SVS Press, $22.00.

Louth helps get to the bottom of the millenia-old estrangement between Latin and Greek Christianity in a way that avoids blaming or preaching. He is not interested in presenting either side as more correct.

Importantly, he shows that the basis of much theological dispute is in ethnic and linguistic differences rather than in theological difficulties per se. In other words, different nations or groupings of people didn't get along theologically because they had already developed long-standing cultural or linguistic differences.

But he first shows that especially after the Islamic invasions of large parts of the Byzantine Empire, Rome and other areas of Italy, especially Sicily, were full of Greek Christians, with their own language and customs. Such groups lived side by side with the Latins for centuries, with inevitable flare-ups. The pope would occasionally shut down some Greek churches in his area, and the patriarch in Constantinople would shut down Latin-rite churches under his jurisdiction.

On the whole, though, during this entire period, Greek and Latin Christians didn't see themselves as divided except on unimportant or cultural issues. Theologically, they saw themselves as one. Hierarchical divisions, usually more about the egos of powerful men, hardly filtered down to regular Christians.

Louth spends a great deal of time on the already well-known relationship between Charlemagne and the papacy, which was a vital turning point for Christianity. The pope went under the protection of the Frankish leaders in the West and distanced itself from the Byzantine emperor, who saw his empire as the continuation of Rome.

Greek East and Latin West also gets into the lesser-known “byzantine” politics of the Byzantine empire. These politics were about scheming generals, power-mad empresses, and sometimes weak, sometimes strong emperors. The names are unfamiliar to us, but Louth portrays well the decay and decadence of the imperial court. Though this empire enjoyed many periods of stability and power, these centuries saw the constant encroachment of the Arab and Turkish Muslims, who judged Constantinople as the greatest prize they had yet to win.

Louth does not neglect the development of Eastern Christian spirituality and theology, including the missionaries to the Slavic peoples.

Greek East and Latin West spends a great deal of time on the iconoclast controversy, which was the attempt by many church leaders and members to destroy the heritage of venerating icons. The West never had such a controversy, Louth points out, because the Latin Church saw art less as a door to heaven and more as a way to instruct the illiterate masses. Again, we see 2 different yet valid ways of following Christ.

Jesus of Israel: Finding Christ in the Old Testament, by Father Richard Veras

$11.99, 142 pages, American Catholic.

Father Veras has written an excellent account of the Old Testament foundations for Christian beliefs about Christ. The author, as a high school teacher, knows how to present difficult and long-winded facts and connections in a simple and clear way. In fact, Jesus of Israel would be an excellent first book for someone curious about basic theology.

One reason for this is obvious: Veras builds his theology on the Hebrew writings. Many Catholic writers often forget these most foundational writings. The entirety of our beliefs rest on the religious thinking of the Israelites. We take this for granted and fail to delve into this culture and its sacred writings.

Ancient Israel's most foundational insight about God revolves around the divinity's loving, prophetic presence in world history. Veras, as the high school teacher, offers an interesting, basic insight into this given:

“God plays favorites. There is no getting around it. God's method in entering history is always to choose a particular person in a particular way. Think of Abraham, Joseph and Moses. Jesus chose twelve apostles from among his disciples, and of those twelve, Peter, James and John were closer to him than the others.”

Veras unearths an ancient spirituality that demands much of us. In this section, he goes on to show that this favoritism leads to great things for many people and “is never to exclude others. Rather, his [God's] design is that through the chosen person others may also be chosen and experience God's preferential love.”

The author then recounts how chosen people, such as a certain Catholic priest, inspired him and helped mature his own vocation.

Unlike many theology books, the words of Jesus of Israel sometimes jump out at the reader. Because Veras, unlike many Catholic writers, gets back to the sources, he has a sense of urgency and directness that refresh the message of the gospel.

Recounting Jesus' meeting his first two disciples (from John 1:38), Veras offers the full meaning of Jesus' ministry and of the entire calling of Israel, something that he succeeds at again and again throughout the book:

“This encounter between two men and God was possible because God took the initiative to enter the world so that these men could bump into him. Jesus Christ is not the fruit of his disciples' ideas; he is a fact. Familiarity with Christ comes from knowledge of him, gained from time and life shared with this carpenter from Nazareth, this Son of God.”

Jesus of Israel offers just what the Church needs in this silly age of deconstruction and disrespect for everything.

God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, by John F. Haught

244 pages, Westviewpress.

After all the tension and sometime mud-slinging between certain Christians and certain scientists, finally someone has reflected more creatively about science and religion. John Haught is positively riveted theologically by the insights of science. While he does admit, though, that theology must change in order to deal with the vast and revolutionary storehouse of scientific knowledge, he also warns that the arrogance of many scientists is blocking science-religious dialogue:

“If we listen to Dawkins and Dennett [two extreme anti-religion scientists], we are led to believe that Darwin's scientific legacy provides so total an account of life that it removes any need for appeal to theological explanation at any level of understanding. Religious faith's intuition that a mysterious but infinitely intelligent creativity underlies biological process is now considered unacceptable, not so much because can prove it is not there, but because science has apparently shown it to be superfluous.”

Despite science's great challenge to traditional religious beliefs, the author requires a demanding theology that faithfully adheres to basic Christian teaching about God's intimate relationship to the world rather than one that bows down to science. He rejects the deist idea that God started the universe and then left the world to run on its own:

“Christian faith's image of a suffering God's eternal restraint, which allows for the world's self-creation, suggests to theology a notion of ultimate reality much more intimately involved with and powerfully effective in the world than a forcefully directive divine agency would be. God acts powerfully in the world by offering to it a virtually limitless range of new possibilities within which it can become something relatively autonomous and distinct from its creator.”

Interestingly, these above words have modern, cutting-edge science in mind while advancing humility, a very traditional Christian belief about God.

Haught takes an almost 'Don't worry, be happy' approach to science's challenge to theology because he avoids being overly ambitious with this one book, and decides instead to leave the biggest work to following generations:

“By collapsing the sacred hierarchy, modern evolutionary materialism gives every appearance of having pulverized the cultural, ethical, and religious formations around which human life on this planet has been organized for many thousands of years. It is impossible to exaggerate the enormity of this great drama of dissolutions.”

The author does not mince his words about the importance of theology's dialogue with science. He adopts the position of a Muslim scholar of religion and science, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believes that science's leveling of everything and atomizing of life has led to the ecological disaster that is now upon us. Contemporary science is nihilistic and indifferent to life because it denies the hierarchical outlook that roots all life in something mysterious and sacred. Nasr is calling for a science that is open to the sacred and therefore once again to some form of hierarchy.

God After Darwin does its intended job of setting a basic groundwork for future theologians.

The Mystery of Christian Faith: A Tangible Union with the Invisible God. An Apologetic on the Borderline of Theology, Medicine, and Philosophy

By Paul Ungar, University Press, 407 pages, $50.50.

Paul Ungar reflects as a psychiatrist, psychologist, and theologian on the condition of post-modern humans. By post-modern, we mean a stage of history in Western countries such as Canada where individualism, materialism, and skepticism have replaced traditional morality, social structures such as the family, and belief in God.

The Mystery of Christian Faith testifies to the spiritual, psychological, and emotional difficulties that such a loss to society and individuals have engendered. Modern Catholic leaders have been grappling with the following for decades:

“[U]nlike previous generations that were told by their religion and traditions exactly what was good and bad, or what the correct fundamental options in life were, many of our contemporaries have lost those traditional support systems and are consequently challenged by their own freedom of choice and their responsibility to find and fulfill their life meanings. This task causes enduring tension because there is a permanent gap between that which one is and that which one ought to be.”

Using the Doubting Thomas story as an archetype for modern, indecisive humans, Ungar examines the spiritual chaos of modern individuals from an orthodox theological basis. The first part of The Mystery of Christian Faith offers a basic introduction to Christian thought, starting with the ancient Israelites and, for instance, the moral as well as political centrality of their kings.

Ungar offers an erudite synthesis of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also much more. His psychological explanations for currents in history, such as the Reformation and increasing Christian disunity, dig deeper than the usual dogmatic and historical discussions:

“The real reasons for the fragmentation of Christianity are found not in historical, cultural, or even political events, but in the progressive mutual estrangement caused by the unloving, impatient, boastful, envious ... record-keeping attitude on the part of at least some of the key players in the process of fragmentation. These psychological reasons and attitudes were those essential causes of fragmentation, that were often expressed and became visible through unessential, visible, touchable, and measurable phenomena.”

The Mystery of Christian Faith delves into the deep currents of Christianity, and encompasses many elements because the author fearlessly examines the ancient Israelite prophets, the teachings of the New Testament, and Saints like Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm.

He also develops the idea of transempirical events as a way to reject the sense that any real chasm between science and Catholicism actually exists. These are events beyond the scientifically-measurable senses, such as the call of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Transmpiricism gets to the heart of Ungar's argument. Scientists who fail to “see” God in their research are looking with the eyes of pre-conversion Saul of Tarsus. They are failing to look with eyes of faith, and like countless people in post-modern Canada, are looking with cynicism and agnosticism instead.

The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being, edited by Richard M. Gamble

668 pages hardcover, ISI Books, $30.00.

An anthology of the Western world's great thinkers on the subject of education, this book offers the corpus of Western philosophy. The editor aims to protect this great tradition from the university professors, who nowadays in the name of political correctness tend to reject these thinkers.

Many of the great writers of our civilization were Christians of course, since the Church has been the patron of education and the arts, and helped to establish science. The collection includes a few church fathers, some medieval scholastics, and humanist scholars such as Petrarch, the fourteenth-century Italian writer, who defended the Church against

“[A] set of dialecticians, who are not only ignorant but demented. Like a black army of ants from some old rotten oak, they swarm forth from their hiding-places and devastate the fields of sound learning. They condemn Plato and Aristotle, and laugh at Socrates and Pythagoras. And, good God! Under what silly and incompetent leaders these opinions are put forth!”

Petrarch's words also describe the intellectual landscape of the modern university.

The Great Tradition defends a vigorous education system that instills honor and the sense of right from wrong in people. It is a tradition that, like Plato and Aristotle – not to mention Christianity – seeks the truth, believing that opinion is not enough. These thinkers therefore support the Church's view that we must strive for the truth, which is one reason that the Church has always demanded a philosophical education for its priests.

The editor notes that occasionally these writers seemingly share little in common, as in Catholic and Protestant thinkers from the Reformation. Yet they all developed something very deep, which is the belief that humans can and should strive after the truth and live accordingly.

Nowadays, education is more like training and about getting a good job. Yet the writers in this book agree with the Church that life is worth being thought about for its own sake. “Wisdom and virtue” rather than “power and vanity” are important to a real education.

Since many of the book's selections are cautions against the prevailing greed or otherwise negative direction of the society of the time, the book offers an interesting intellectual backdrop to many of the interesting events in Western history, such as the industrialization of the US. One writer opposed the increasingly fast pace, and wondered how people could find meaning and wisdom from such lifestyles.

The great twentieth-century German-American political-philosopher, Eric Voegelin, offers the most cutting criticism of the modern world from the eyes of traditional Western philosophy, which is based on the classical Greek age. He condemned the modern world's rejection of a search for a philosophical or religious truth and adoption of opinion-based diversity. He saw in this, as the Church does, a rejection of God and a turn to human self-preoccupation.

Voegelin went so far as to say that deculturation was happening in universities and society at large because of the “destruction” of philosophy.