History of the churches and changes and how change can happen to change dogma that has no place in the modern world. The earth is not only 6,000 years old. People did not live with dinosaurs. The earth is not flat and it revolves around the sun. Why separation of church and state is the fundamental requirement of freedom.
Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (1994)
I found this while looking up another book on Goodreads and thought it looked interesting. Checking the library for availability. But since published 1994 might not be available. Nope not at local, may check inter-library loan.
The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream by Chris Lehmann (2016)
BUY THIS BOOK! I am taking my library copy back and buying it myself.
I am posting this now without further commentary just in case someone needs an idea for a Christmas present (ironically since “Christianity” is part of the problem!) for a progressive friend or family member.
Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right-Wing Myths about Our Constitution by Garrett Epps (2012)
This slim volume is a fun read (the touches of sarcasm are a delight) about what the Constitution actually says and directly refutes right-wing claims to the contrary. Excellent notes and list of books for further reading by categories like “the Bill of Rights” and an appendix that provides the actual text of the Constitution plus the first version that failed to meet the needs of the nation due to lack of sufficient federal authority over states’ rights. Personally, I long for the day that the entire concept of “states’ rights” is abolished. My rights as a citizen should not depend on geography. States’ rights is a vestigial concept leftover from the fear of a central “kingdom” type of government.
I may write the author and suggest he dedicate another volume to the Fourteenth Amendment, and social justice issues related to it that have had Supreme Court (bad or good) rulings, especially in the area of racism and sexism.
The War on Science: Who’s waging it, Why it matters, What we can do about it by Shawn Otto (2016). Some of the people who wrote blurbs for the book are listed below and links to books where appropriate are included. Fabulous book, and if I hadn’t got Tuesday and wednesday mixed up on my phone calendar, I could have heard in speak. I was so very disappointed in myself for that. Buy the book; 500 pages is a long library read.
The following books are posted just to illustrate how big of a deal this book is showing writers who wrote the foreword and blurbs. Keep going past this for the actual blog content.
foreword by Lawrence M. Krauss (he’s the guy that wrote the great The Physics of Star Trek)
Writers of blurbs for the book include:Bill Nye (The Science Guy)
Bill McKibben, Michael E. Mann, Walter Mondale
Maria Konnikova (author of Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes)
Ben Bova — award-winning author of the Grand Tour se
ries and former editorial director of Omni
David Byrne, scientist and award-winning author of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom?
[I don’t think we’ll be getting a vote.]
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World by Marilyn French (2008) Volume 1: Origins. Foreword by Margaret Atwood.
Marilyn French has a smooth writing style that is easy to read but still packs a punch by her coherence and context for absorbing new information.
The b
ook is divided into 3 basic parts: 1. Parents, 2. The Rise of the State, 3. Gods, Glory, and Delusions of Grandeur. Under the States part it is a treat to go back all the way to Peru, Egypt, and Sumner. Other nations include a chapter on China, India, Mexico and a concluding analysis on the State in the abstract. She adds descriptors to identify the nature of the respective states: Secular=China, Religious = India, Militaristic = Mexico.
Under the Gods portion she covers Judaism, Greece, Rome, Christianity, Islam. There are number of supplemental notes, a glossary, a bibliography, and and index as well as some maps.
Here’s a bit from Margaret Atwood’s foreword:
Women who read this book will do so with horror and growing anger: From Eve to Dawn is to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as won is to poodle. Men who read it might be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal
psychopath, or puzzled by French’s idea that men should “take responsibility for what their sex has done.” . . . However, no one will be able to avoid the relentless piling up of detail and event — the bizarre customs, the woman-hating legal structure, the gynecological absurdities, the child abuse, the sanctioned violence, the sexual outrageous — millennium after millennium. How to explain them? Are all men twisted? Are all women doomed? Is there hope? French is ambivalent about the twisted part, but, being a peculiarly American kind of activist, she insists on hope. (p.x)
Her intention was to put together a narrative answer to a question that had bothered her for a long time: how had men under up with ALL THE POWER — specifically, with all the power over women? Had it always been like that? If not, how was such power grasped and then enforced? Nothing she had read had addressed this issue directly. In most conventional histories, women simply aren’t there. Or they’re there as footnotes. (p.xi)
Continue reading From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World by Marilyn French
