(15) PHILIP JENKINS –

THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM: THE RISE OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY (2002)

This book was – dare I say it? – a revelation.

That is not to say it was positive or negative, given the word revelation is often used to imply the former, but it was a dramatic paradigm shift for me. Previously, I had assumed that the world was slowly but steadily becoming more secular, with religion inexorably on the wane – perhaps with Islam as something of an outlier but particularly for Christianity, such that the world might be seen as increasingly post-Christian.

As I like to quip, I live in a Nietzschean world with a Freudian mind, so it was all too easy for my own assumption to follow the influence of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God is dead, with increasingly fewer people showing up to the wake.

So did the revelation of this book prove that assumption to be true or false? Well…yes and no, but mostly yes.

The assumption is by and large true for the West, with some outliers – notably the United States, where there is substantial resistance to the more advanced secularization in Europe.

However, it is not true elsewhere and this book’s essential thesis is that, due to demography, the West is an increasingly smaller part of the world as a whole – waning in population in proportion to the so-called global South, certainly in relative terms and potentially even in absolute terms. And the assumption definitely does not hold for the South, where religion is booming – which looks to remain the case for the foreseeable future, until at least later in this century.

Not all religion mind you, as the book identifies three predominant religious currents booming in the global South – conservative Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism and Islam. The first two of course are currents within the religion of Christianity, which is the book’s primary focus. To sum up the book’s thesis in a nutshell, while Christianity West is waning, Christianity South is booming. (One was tempted to say Christianity East as well as Christianity South, particularly to connote Christianity in Asia as well as the symmetry in opposition with Christianity West, but that risked confusion with Orthodoxy).

Two interesting points stick most in my mind from this book. The first and more substantial point was that this was not some radical redirection of history, but in many ways history turning full circle to Christianity’s origin – where, for the first centuries of its existence, Christianity was predominantly an Asian and African religion, not a European one.

The second point, less substantial but more amusing as irony, is its reference to a work of SF satire, in which a future Christian Africa sends missionaries to a non-Christian Europe – a work that, as the book points out, may resemble satire less and less in the foreseeable future.

The book’s author Philip Jenkins is an American historian of religion with a focus on Christianity and has written a number of books on it, both for its future (as here) and its past. This is the only book of his that I have read so far, but hope to read more in the expectation that they prove to be as engaging as this one.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(14) JONATHAN KIRSCH

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of some of my favorite studies of the Bible. Not of the whole Bible, mind you – for one thing, he tends towards a Jewish focus on the Old Testament (with one notable exception), and for another, he has a particular focus on points of interest there as well.

The Harlot by the Side of the Road was his first such book and its subtitle says it all – Forbidden Tales of the Bible. As does the usual expression of shock he quotes in his introduction – do you mean THAT’S in the Bible?!

“The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder”

We’re talking Lot and his daughters in Genesis, then echoed by the Levite and his concubine in Judges, only worse. Much like Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis is echoed, only worse, as Jephthah actually sacrificing his daughter in Judges. Which pretty much sums up those two bloody books of the Bible, which would do Quentin Tarantino or Game of Thrones proud.

Indeed, most of the book is from either Genesis or Judges. There is a couple of exceptions, including the one where God tries to kill Moses, until Moses’ quick-thinking wife Zipporah does a spontaneous circumcision of their infant son and smears Moses’ forehead with the bloody foreskin. Which is just odd, akin to of those weird variants of vampire that can be held at bay by some bizarre obsessive-compulsive ritual.

Which perhaps brings us to his book on Moses, although I just don’t find Moses as intriguing a character as the subject of his similar book on King David. After all, Exodus and its related books might easily have been summed up with the subtitle Are We There Yet?

I do like how he compares God and Moses to a constantly bickering old married couple. I mean, I’m only paraphrasing slightly with this exchange:

GOD: “I have had it with these Israelites! I’ll kill all of them and start over with you and your descendants!”
MOSES: “And what would the Egyptians say? That you saved the Israelites from slavery only to kill them in the desert?”
GOD: “Hmmm. Okay – I’ll just kill some of them.”

I’ve always imagined one Israelite turning to another as the God in a box starts yelling again from the Ark of the Covenant – “I preferred the calf”.

As I said, I prefer King David to Moses, because despite the former’s many flaws – and David could be a monumental ass at times – he’s just such a charming rogue, so much so that even God was charmed by him as God’s golden boy. Or at least, he charmed the original author of the Bible – I particularly like the theory Kirsch references that the nucleus of the Bible started as a court biography of David, to which preceding events were added almost as a legendary Hebrew Dreamtime.

However, my absolute favorite Kirsch book remains his study of the Book of Apocalypse or Revelations, not coincidentally my absolute favorite book of the Bible, in A History of the End of the World (and that one notable exception to his focus on the Old Testament I noted at the outset).

Again, the subtitle of the book sums it up – How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Civilization. Or for that matter, the scholarly quip he quotes in his introduction – “Revelations either finds a man mad, or leaves him so”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(13) HUSTON SMITH –
THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS (1958)

The classic work on the subject of its title, by leading scholar of religious studies Huston Smith – himself almost the literal embodiment of that title as raised in China as a child of a Christian missionary family and student of philosophy in the United States.

By necessity, it uses a broad-brush approach to the eight world religions it examines in their respective chapters – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and what it calls primal or tribal religions. It prompts to mind German philosopher Karl Jasper’s characterization of an Axial Age as the crucible of modern world religions, Jasper ended his Axial Age prior to Christianity or Islam – but it is striking that no major world religion has yet emerged since either.

As per its subtitle “Our Wisdom Traditions”, it seeks to put each religion’s best foot forward and look past caricatures or stereotypes – perhaps most memorably expressed by Smith when it comes to Islam as a common perception of a religion of sword and harem.

My personal favorite chapter, and unfortunately also its shortest, was that on the primal or tribal religions, which despite its brevity, impressed upon me the most the merits of the primal or tribal worldview – including the lost strengths and versatility of an oral culture as opposed to a literate one, despite the obvious advantages of literacy to our society.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(12) PAUL ROBICHAUD –
PAN: THE GREAT GOD’S MODERN RETURN (2021)

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!

Pan, the original horny god with the groin of a goat or as Bill Hicks styled him, randy Pan the Goat Boy. God of nature, mountains, shepherds and sexuality – also the source of our word panic, for the divine mad fear he could inspire in people, including as savior of Athens, the invading Persian army at Marathon.

As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I’ve long been a Pan fan. And so too is Paul Robichaud, a devotee of Pan. Well perhaps not the Capricorn part, but he has written a whole book as a paean to Pan.

Ironically, the only classical Greek god reported as dead – in a historical legend by Plutarch, with a sailor during the reign of Tiberius reporting a divine proclamation from an island that “the great god Pan is dead” – but reports of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated. Pan was the one god that endured more than all the others, even to the extent of embodying in horned and hooved form all classical paganism as a whole in modern romanticism and neo-paganism. Perhaps aptly enough, given the pun on Pan – as the word for “all” in Greek also being Pan.

Robichaud comes from a background as an English professor – it shows in his fluent prose style, but also a focus on literature as he explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. The chapter titles best demonstrate this odyssey of Pan from mythic Pan – through medieval and early modern Pan, Pan’s romantic rebirth, Pan in the twentieth century (and his Edwardian height of popularity) and Pan’s occult power – to contemporary Pan.

All the usual suspects are here as cultural or literary devotees of Pan, but most notably those from Edwardian children’s literature of all places – prompting Bill Hick’s joke about his Goat Boy being available for children’s parties (“Mommy, I want Goat Boy to come play at our house”). Kenneth Grahame’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Peter Pan’s namesake, as well as much of his persona – with the Lost Boys as his satyrs.

Sadly, no C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, despite its deliciously Dionysian portrayal, maenads and all. Pan did often pal around with Dionysus after all, but generally not so much the other gods – not to mention all those fauns in Narnia. Wait a minute…Mr Tumnus is Pan! Spread the word.

Of course, there are bound to be omissions – Bill Hicks’ Goat Boy for one, Rhys Darby’s fleeting Pan-like figure in Flight of The Conchords’ Prince of Parties song for another. There’s just too much Pan – or is that too many Pans? – out there.

Also sadly, Rochibaud does suggest one of my favorite historical legends of how Christianity embodied Pan as its devil – as being just that, a legend dating back only to the nineteenth century (following the hypothesis of Ronald Hutton to that effect).

I still prefer the legend. In one of my story ideas, a somewhat lost and forlorn Satan muses to the protagonist (with whom he has occasional chats) of his origin from Pan (as one of his multiple-choice origin stories). The protagonist calls him out on his conflicting origin stories, to which Satan replies “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am legion, I contain multitudes”. But then he becomes sadly wistful “I would give anything just to dance in the moonlight again, when I was not evil but only wild and free”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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