Category Archive: RELIGION
The Life of Thomas More
(by Peter Ackroyd) Highly readable and balanced life (and death) of the contentious, hair-shirted and many faceted ‘man for all seasons’ (omnium horarum). Beatified but no saint, an intolerant believer and a survivor who sacrificed himself on principle, he remains an enigma and a controversial one. This book comes close to doing justice to all sides and all sides of the man and one can’t do much better than that.
Continue Reading →Wise Blood
(by Flannery O’Connor) You can almost hear Father Ted saying, “Those Protestants; up to no good as usual.”. A slight but hysterical piece of southern Grand-Guignol in which O’Connor, in stark muscular prose, shows us why warmer climes tend to grow lusher fruit (viz., the evangelists in northern Queensland, the Spanish Inquisition, etc.). O’Connor presents her freak show without explanation, comment or censure and you close the book as if you’ve just escaped the weird tent, gasping for air.
Continue Reading →Sweet Dreams
(by Michael Frayn) Highly original and amusing satire of a bespoke heaven for boyish, middle management men of early middle age and their moral crises as the right hands of god. You can see the influence cast by this book on, for example, Douglas Adams. The chaps, all from Cambridge naturally, are no longer scholars but creators, and they have an easy, breezy, Ian Fleming style way with women and imagine themselves to be radicals, even the lukewarm Head Man, in that smug, cosy, implacable bourgeois way, a la J. P. Sartre. The heavenly staples – taramasalata, gigot aux haricots…
Continue Reading →The Screwtape Letters
(by C.S. Lewis) Lewis was unsurpassed in winkling out a small dark corner of the soul and blowing it into toxic glasswork. Here we have one-way correspondence from a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood: a how-to manual for those who would catch our souls. Exquisite, even for those without the gift of faith. My favourite lesson concerns the lady who quails at that offered, wheedling for “all I want…”. Screwtape’s comment: “Because what she wants is…less…than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.” This…
Continue Reading →The Problem of Knowledge
(by A.J. Ayer) Ayer is a blind alley, albeit a convincing one. Yet logic and semantics will take us only so far and reading him, one thinks, “you’re too clever by half…..too clever for our good.” We recently had a comment (by someone with the nom de plume “Butt Books”, has commented fit for posterity: “True – logic and semantics will take us only so far. The analytic tradition won’t venture into the realm of speculative metaphysics, obscurantism, and autofellatio. One must turn to the continental tradition for that.“
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