aurelise

One of these books took me nine months to finish. It was for a class, but it might have taken me that long anyway, for reasons that shall perhaps become clear.

A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I started reading this last year as part of a class on the same topic. Class wraps up tomorrow, and I finished reading the book last week, and I can’t remember the last time I thought at the end of a book, “Man, I’m glad that’s over!” Which is not to say it’s a bad book. It’s just a lot to take in. Diarmaid MacCulloch essentially compresses 3,000 years of history into a little over a thousand pages, which – even with his accessible writing style (compared to academic textbooks, anyway) – makes for very dense reading.

While Christianity as a religion started almost 2,000 years ago, MacCulloch starts a thousand years earlier with the Greek and Roman empires to provide the context in which Christianity emerged from Israel (which was occupied by Rome when Jesus arrived, while Greek language and philosophy were well known in the Levant). From there, he goes back and forth through time in order to cover parallel developments in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and Russia as Christianity spread all over the world, and ends with the “culture wars” that have engulfed the Catholic and Protestant churches from 1960 up to the book’s publication in 2011.

I’m not sure how much I learned – as I say, it’s a dense infodump of a book, and even then, MacCulloch necessarily oversimplifies a lot of details with passing references (the Avignon papacy comes to mind). I will say MacCulloch is good at pointing out specific turning points in history where the Church could have gone in a different direction or wiped out completely if not by happy accidents of history, which is interesting. Probably the biggest takeaway for me is that the book makes very clear that the Church (and its underpinning theology) has never been a static thing – it has always evolved and adapted with the times along with the rest of the world. And given much of the bigoted, bloody horrors of its history, that can only be a good thing. As bad as some people think the Church is now, it used to be a lot worse.

It’s also something to keep in mind as people still argue about LGBTIA issues and theology evolves outside of the Western Heterosexual Man box to include feminist theology, queer theology, trans theology, anti-colonialist theology, etc, while certain conservative Evangelicals are panicking over this and advocating Christian nationalism as an antidote. Point being: it’s the latest stage of Christianity’s evolution, which shows that it’s still evolving. Just as we look back today at the Church’s involvement in the Crusades and slavery and say, “That’s not what Jesus preached – how could they get that so wrong?”, in a couple hundred years, history students may be looking at the current Church arguing over gay marriage, gender fluidity and ordaining women and asking similar questions about us.


Terror Out Of Space by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this is a 1944 novelette in which Lundy, an officer of the Tri-Worlds Police (Special Branch!), is flying over Venus, tasked with delivering an alien lifeform to scientists for analysis. This is dangerous work – not least because the alien is telepathic and can make men worship her, and anyone who has ever looked in its eyes has gone insane.

That includes Farrell, who is tied up on the ship with Lundy and his partner Jackie Smith. Almost right away, Farrell breaks free, Smith is controlled by the alien, and the ship crashes into the Venusian ocean. Only Lundy survives, but the alien escapes in the crash. As he makes his way across the ocean floor, he’s almost eaten by flesh-eating monster flowers before being rescued by telepathic Venusians who are sort of like sentient kelp. The alien has hypnotised all their males, and ask him to help.

And, well. I like a lot of Brackett’s Golden Age stuff, but this one didn’t really work for me overall. I appreciate her vivid imagination of different types of alien races, and the fact that she actually presents the alien’s point of view, turning a standard hunt-the-alien tale into something a little richer that also makes for a more interesting ending. But getting there is a slog, with the opening action a bit jumbly, and the middle section hallucinatory to the point of being hard to follow – at least for me.

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