A N Wilson, C S Lewis and conversion

On the day that C S Lewis gets his own stone in Westminster Abbey, fifty years to the day since he died, it was interesting to read of A N Wilson's conversion back to the Christian faith, which he wrote about in 2009.

Wilson wrote a biography of Lewis when Wilson was converting the other way. I have not read this biography but according to Amazon reviews, it seems to have been spoilt by Wilson's dislike of Lewis, his desire to undo the hagiographical accounts, and his enthusiastic conversion  to Atheism.

But in an engaging article, Wilson confesses he didn't make a good swivel-eyed atheist and offers this suggestion as to why he turned back to Christianity:

The existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

Worth remembering

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people

can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

-- Margaret Mead.

Tom Wright: Virtue Reborn

How to be good?
How to live a good life?

Tom Wright's book interrogates both the New Testament and the classical Greek understanding of virtue to come up with what he presents as the Christian vision of virtue. Roughly it's this (I think). Being good means 'developing character traits whose radical novelty is generated from within the life, vision, achievement, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself.' (p222) We develop these traits not by our own efforts only, but renewed and guided by the Holy Spirit as we freely choose to build new habits.

This gives us all this:
- We become truly human and fruitful
- The classical virtues are taken through a kind of death and resurrection, and reborn. So there's both a discontinuiy and a continuity with them.
- Goodness is not attained through rule-keeping, or through just following your (new) instinct, but by repeated decisions to build new habits

Wright suggests that the way we nourish this practice of building good habits which slowly coalesce into virtue, into 'second nature', is through scripture, stories (which can teach us wisdom), examples, community, and action or practices. In other words, stuff we do corporately and individually as Christians.

This is a good book, the sort that stirs all kinds of prayerful and devotional impulses as you read it.

If you were being critical, you might say that, in his keenness to dialogue with the classical tradition, and with other ethicists, he makes his subject a little more complex than it actually is. And us ordinary joes who just want to be good, and, sad to say, have gone through life without being troubled what dead Greeks thought about the matter (just as Wright has gone through life unworried evidently about what dead Chinese like Confucius, say, thought about the matter) -- possibly find a bit more detail than we really need. Maybe. But Wright's thinking is stimulating throughout the book.

The book is better edited than some others of his, though he repeats the large error that he's also documented elsewhere, that there are more people alive than those who have already lived. It does't matter all that much, but look it up, Tom, you're wrong. The dead outnumber the living by by about 11 to 1, half of them were children, and I have yet to find a serious theologian who has thought about that. But I'm nitpicking.

I like having a thoughtful, stretching, devotional book on the go and this latest Tom Wright outing was excellent.

'An undevout astronomer is mad'

'An undevout astronomer is mad.' Edward Young, Night Thoughts, line 771. He also wrote the more famous line, 'procrastination is the thief of time' (Night Thoughts I)

Why we should give up our nuclear weapons

We should scrap our Trident submarine defences. It's easy to see why. Using them in any circumstances is immoral.

Suppose Bad Country A has done the dreaded thing and left Britain flat, black and glow-in-the-dark. What would our sign-off as a nation be? With what act would we close our day on the stage? Launch Trident from a secret submarine. Turn the children in a thousand playgrounds in Bad Country A into overdone french fries. The senseless evil done to us, we would do back.  To the fried children of either country we would look just the same as Bad Country A. We would have become Bad Country B.

I suppose there are many other arguments.

Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the Scandanavian lands: none of these have nuclear weapons and yet they seem to manage without having to spend their days cowering in a bunker. We, like Canada say, have plenty of ways of defending ourselves and even projecting power abroad without these cursed weapons.

Who are we frightened of anyway? Is Russia going to bomb the people it sells its gas to? North Korea's nuke is apparently so small that you could let if off in Hyde Park and no windows would be broken. Pakistan's mighty army can't even protect its own cricket team: perhaps we can be forgiven for thinking that no nuclear missile launched from Pakistan would land anywhere other than, well, Pakistan. And I would love to see the faces of the Ayatollahs when we told them how immoral and decadcant and un-Islamic they were to build a weapon of mass destruction. How medieval. The truly righteous nations have got rid of them, just as they did with chemical weapons and landmines. O ye of little faith, come join the civilised world.

When you've got stuff in the attic that you realize you are never going to use, you throw it out, especially if it's going to cost you £20 billion to keep for another few years.

We are the country that unilaterally abolished slavery, shaming the world into doing the same. Even the US caught on eventually, fifty years late. Let's do it again with Trident.

Hacking through the rainforest -- beautifully

This book manages to be both a beautiful coffee-table book and an insightful, well-written exploration of the rainforest, taking a machete to the simplistic diagnoses we find in the popular press. Fred Pearce, environment correspondent for New Scientist, has done some proper science writing here. 

So the book is full of surprises. 

1. Wind back the clock a thousand years, and jungles were the home of sophisticated civilisations. This is not just true of modern-day tourist honeypots like Ankor Wat or the Mayans. Nigeria's jungles hosted cities and empires; so did the Amazon. Fred Pearce cites linguistic studies, the beginnings of jungle archeology, and the nature of the soil and the  trees planted, to show that people were working this land, despite the Western world not knowing about them. 

2. These civilisations  collapsed, perhaps because of the encounter with Europeans and their diseases. Remnants went off into the forest. So the standard Western model of the jungle -- 'pristine' rainforest and 'stone-age tribes untouched since the dawn of civilisation' -- is wrong. People have gardened, or farmed, or still better, stewarded, the jungle for centuries, and with rather more success than we managed in the 20th century.

3. Much of what is going on today thanks to the chain-saw and the hunt for ever-more-scarce bush-meat is economically rational for the people doing it.

4. Many of the suggested solutions to deforestation haven't worked. Selling traditional remedies to drug corporations is good, even vital for the future of humanity, but has tended not to benefit indigenous people, or stop rainforest destruction. National parks are hard to enforce. Even when jungle products are found that can only be produced on site, they have been victims to sudden boom and bust: everyone starts growing them, the price drops, everyone loses. 

5. Fred Pearce does find some case studies that encourage optimism. He reports on Cameroonian cocoa farmers who plant their trees in the jungle, rather than clearing it. They also plant other fruit trees. In another model, a Central African government, I forget which, supports agriculture on the edges of a national park, to relieve the economic pressures. He even suggests that under some circumstances, drilling for oil in the rainforest can save the rainforest by improving the economy for everyone. 

All these case studies point to a somewhat heretical conclusion, which Pearce doesn't quite enforce in the book. One way of saying it is that you have to consider people as well as chainsaws or bushmeat. Concentrate on a single issue, bushmeat for example, and you're doomed, as many well-meaning charities have discovered.  The other way of saying it is this: rainforests need people to manage them. Remember the old joke of the vicar talking to a gardener: 'What a wonderful thing you and God have created,' says the vicar. The gardener thinks for a moment and then replies, 'Yes, and you should see what a mess it was when God had it to himself.' Humans are destroying the rainforest, bad people and good people together, but in the end we are also its only hope. 

This book is slightly dated, published 2006, and a little too affected by the economic crash in Indonesia in the early 2000s: you wonder what has happened since. It's also repetitious in places; you will be often told there are only 15,000 Orang Utangs in the wild, living in Borneo and Sumatra. But you can pick it up for a penny on Amazon and it will adorn any naked coffee-tables you have about the place and help us all think through this major issue of our times. Super book.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell: one of the best bits of SF writing in the past 30 years

This is a gem.

It's a novel first, a science-fiction novel second: in other words, it has rich characters, a compelling plot, and leaves you with much to think about. The SF element is done seamlessly well with good hard science and coherent thinking about another world and how it might work.

The plot is all about a Jesuit mission to another culture, what happened there, and how it affected the hero, a Jesuit priest and translator. I suspect Mary Doria Russell gave her story an SF context only because on earth, most of the strange tribes have already been encountered, if not by Jesuits then by their Protestant missionary cousins, or by Western pagan neo-colonialists (aka loggers and drillers).

Underlying the whole tale all are deep questions about God, about faith, redemption, surrender and devotion.
It really is a wonderful book, and shows perhaps how hollow much of the rest of the SF universe really is. (Not that that stops me enjoying it: it's just that this book is so much richer.)

It rightly won prizes. This is the only SF book I would recommend my wife should ever read. It's a wonderful novel, not to be missed.

The story of Christianity (David Bentley-Hart)

The Story of Christianity: An Illustrated History of 2000 Years of the Christian Faith by David Bentley Hart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A happy mix between the church histories that overdo the lavish at the expense of the comprehensive, and those that overdo the comprehensive at the expense of your eyesight. David Bentley Hart appears to have read everyone, from all the Gnostics, through Nietzsche, to the Russian devotional mystics, and that, and his own Eastern Orthodox faith means that his church history isn't skewed just to the Western (heard of St Herman of Alaska? Me neither). I found hardly a misstep in the book. His hobby of unravelling the myths and fairy tales that New Atheists tell to their children at bedtime (for a fuller account of which, see his 'Atheist Delusions') informs some of his chapters, notably those about the early modern period. My favourite of all the church histories I have read. Get someone to give you this book for Christmas.

View all my reviews

Eglantyne Jebb

The founder of the Save the Children Fund was a single woman from a relatively privileged background, an early graduate of Oxford university. After spending many years in charitable work and looking after her elderly mother, she finally found her real galvanizing purpose towards the end of the First World War and shortly afterwards. First she campaigned against press censorship by publishing translated excerpts from the foreign press. After the war she started campaigning against the continuing blockade of Germany, and raising funds for starving German children, including getting herself arrested in the process. She is credited with helping shift British attitudes from one of vindictiveness after the first war to a humanitarian and internationalist one. Some quotes: 'Every generation of children... offers mankind anew the possibility of rebuilding his ruin of a world'Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save The Children Fund. (From her biography by Clare Mulley, The Woman Who Saved The Children, p249) 'Nobody can indeed be a real patriot at the present day unless his deepest wish for his country is that it should worthily play its part in the wider service of humanity.' p275 Her biorgrapher records stages in her life when Jebb may have overstepped a line in showing love to a dear female friend, and another when she was involved, somewhere between imagination and encounter involving letters with a dead male colleague. But more orthodox Anglicans recognized her faith and Jebb herself testified to a life-changing ecounter with Christ in 1900. Much later, around 1920 she wrote: 'In these tragic days so full of darkness and terror -- what happiness and peace can neverthless be ours if we can realize Christ in our midst. He, here with us now ... giving us directions day by day as to the ways in which we are to undertake practical service for his Kingdom.' (p 298)

Even Sherlock Holmes couldn't do it.

"It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.” Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking - A Theological ABC

Sources for church statistics

I recently compiled a short list of the best statistics on religion in the UK for a visiting scholar who was at our church. I put it here so I don't lose it.


1. British religion in numbers

 www.brin.ac.org
This site, run by academics at the University of Manchester, seeks to gather, analyse and publish statistics on religion from a large variety of sources.


2. Office for National Statistics is the government data office. They are still publishing fresh data from the 2011 Census. But here is some of what they have:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html

This blog is a summary of some of the religious data:

http://blog.echurchwebsites.org.uk/2011/09/18/uk-religion-final-tables-2011-census/


3. Peter Brierley is a highly respected church researcher, now in semi-retirement, but his website is full of interest.

http://brierleyconsultancy.com/index.html


4. Global statistics. There are many sources for these. One of the most recent, and most respected, and easiest accessed can be found at America’s Pew Research Centre:

http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-worlds-christian-population.aspx

Sources for church statistics

What the middle ages did for science

Here's a list of gifts that came down from the Middle Ages (or from 'the age of faith' in the language of those who like to contrast it with a 'age of reason' than followed it) - gifts on whose necessary foundations science is built: All these intellectual achievements were worked out in the so-called pre-Enlightenment times:

• There is a distinction between a primary cause (God did it) and a natural secondary cause (the machinery of the world has enough vitality and flexibility for things to happen naturally, as a consequence of laws of nature)
• Nature is intelligible because it has a rational and loving creator
• Natural philosophy is the study of the ordinary course of nature
• Nature can be understood through the language of mathematics
• God freely created the universe so we must observe his work to understand it. 

(From Dr James Hannam , Science and Christianity: An Historical Sketch. This is a Faraday Institute lecture, available from iTunes U.)

Faith and the dying: deathbed repentance is still popular

Am enjoying the British Religion in Numbers website (brin.org). One 2012 figure is at least amusing in the midst of the falling numbers of Christian affiliation elsewhere. Less than 60% of the living claim to be Christians in the UK but this rises to to 83% among the dying. (See Brin.org) Part of this is to do with the fact that the older a person is in the UK, the more likely they are to profess Christianity. But part of it...

David Bentley-Hart #2

A second set of quotes from David Bentley-Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies 2009 Yale University Press

Christianity, the only true revolution

'Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one—the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. 

On the New Atheists' use of Galileo 

Galileo's story is an embarrassment for the atheist critics because it's 'entirely anomalous within the larger history of the Catholic Church's relation to the natural sciences' and is 'the only noteworthy example of that truth they can adduce' and it has 'tended to obscure the rather significant reality that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics, and arrived at conclusions that would have been unimaginable within the confines of the Hellenistic scientific traditions.' (63)

Church fathers who denied historicity of the primaeval prologue (Gen 1-11) 

'When [Galileo] appealed to the church fathers, to Augustine in particular, in defense of his claim that the scriptures ought not to be regarded as a resource for scientific descriptions of reality, he was entirely in the right.' (63) 'Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—all denied that, for instance, the creation story in Genesis was an actual historical record of how the world was made

... And figures as distant from one another in time as Augustine and Aquinas cautioned against exposing scripture to ridicule by mistaking the Bible for a scientific treatise' (63)

Kepler, Galileo and Newton as Christian overthrowers of Hellenistic science 

'Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.' (68)
 (NB: Galileo's relationship with Kepler was odd: I believe he didn't like or accept what he taught.)

Christianity haunting, rather than dominating, the West 

Christianity's ...'extraordinary claims, it's peculiar understanding of love and service... down the centuries have not so much dominated Western civilisation as haunted it, at times like a particularly engrossing dream, at others like an especially forlorn spectre.' (p 222)

 

The relative claims to life of Down's Syndrome people and academic bioethicists

 Most of us who have known persons with Down syndrome also know that a great many of them seem more capable of cheer than the average run of mortal, and seem to have a spontaneous gift for gentleness, patience, and hope that is positively enviable. Their lives seem no more obviously impoverished or meaningless than those of academic bioethicists, nor any more burdensome than enriching for others. (p 235)

Shaw on the writer's task

'My business is to incarnate the Zeitgeist.' (G B Shaw, Let. Aug. (1965) I. 222 The OED defines the Zietgeist (a German compound from the words 'time' and 'spirit') as 'The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote, myster resolu

'If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.'

There is only one problem with this quote, stirring as it is and popular in business self-help books and others. It's very hard to source, which is a great pity.

Hunting around on the internet it seems:

It did appear (if one believes the discussion on Wikiquotes)in an American translation of his book Citadelle.

However in the published versions of Citadelle, the nearest appears to be this:

Et par contre, si je communique à mes hommes l’amour de la marche sur la mer, et que chacun d’eux soit ainsi en pente à cause d’un poids dans le cœur, alors tu les verras bientôt se diversifier selon leurs mille qualités particulières. Celui-là tissera des toiles, l’autre dans la forêt par l’éclair de sa hache couchera l’arbre. L’autre, encore, forgera des clous, et il en sera quelque part qui observeront les étoiles afin d’apprendre à gouverner. Et tous cependant ne seront qu’un. Créer le navire ce n’est point tisser les toiles, forger les clous, lire les astres, mais bien donner le goût de la mer qui est un, et à la lumière duquel il n’est plus rien qui soit contradictoire mais communauté dans l’amour.

Which overtaxes my French but seems to be about people with various gifts (chopping down trees, forging nails, navigating by the stars?). Give them a taste of the sea (donner le goût de la mer?) and, vaguely, they'll be a community of love, not people pulling in contradictory directions. Or something.

The source for this is here. Google translate doesn't help: I tried.

The 'age of reason' and the 'age of faith'

David Bentley-Hart's merciless dismembering of the New Atheists is memorable. Here's a lengthy quote I couldn't resist saving. It talks about the happy, but entirely false, atheist fable that an 'age of reason' displaced a superstitious 'age of faith'.
Modernity’s first great attempt to define itself: as an “age of reason” emerging and overthrowing an “age of faith”
by David Bentley-Hart
For centuries now the story of humanity's emergence from what Gibbon called "the darkness and confusion of the middle ages" into a new and revolutionary age of enlightenment and reason has been the reigning historical narrative that most of us imbibe from school, the press, popular entertainment, even frequently our churches-in short, the entire fabric of our society. And along with this narrative, as an indispensable concomitant, comes an elaborate mythology of what it was that was overcome when modernity was born out of the turmoils of the waning centuries of the "age of faith."

What, after all, does it mean for a whole society to be truly “modern”? Completely modern, that is, as opposed to merely possessing modern technologies or obeying the axioms of modern economics. I have already offered a partial answer to this: it has a great deal to do with a society's understanding of freedom. But, in a more purely historical sense, if we take the word “modernity” to mean not simply whatever happens to be contemporary with us but rather the culture of the western world as it has evolved over the last four or five centuries, then it seems obvious that a society is truly modern to the extent that it is post-Christian. This is not to say, obviously, that modern society is predominantly inhabited by non-Christians or atheists; it is only to say that modernity is what comes “after Christendom," when Christianity has been displaced from the center of a culture and deprived of any power explicitly to shape laws and customs, and has ceased to be regarded as the source of a society's highest values or of a government's legitimacy, and has ceased even to hold preeminent sway over a people's collective imagination. And the term “post-Christian" must be given its full weight here: modernity is not simply a “postreligious” condition; it is the state of a society that has been specifically a Christian society but has "lost the faith”. The ethical presuppositions intrinsic to modernity, for instance, are palliated fragments and haunting echoes of Christian moral theology. Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things--they would never have occurred to us--had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren. That said, it is undeniable that—however much certain Christian moral presuppositions may continue to exercise their vestigial influence over us—the history of modernity is the history of secularization, of the retreat of Christian belief to the private sphere; and this, for many of us, is nothing less than the history of human freedom itself, the grand adventure of the adulthood of the race (so long delayed by priestcraft and superstition and intolerance), the great revolution that liberated society and the individual alike from the crushing weight of tradition and doctrine.

Hence modernity's first great attempt to define itself: an "age of reason" emerging from and overthrowing an "age of faith." Behind this definition lay a simple but thoroughly enchanting tale. Once upon a time, it went, Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state. Withering blasts of fanaticism and fideism had long since scorched away the last remnants of classical learning; inquiry was stifled; the literary remains of classical antiquity had long ago been consigned to the fires of faith, and even the great achievements of "Greek science" were forgotten till Islamic civilization restored them to the West. All was darkness. Then, in the wake of the "wars of religion" that had torn Christendom apart, came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity. The secular nation-state arose, reduced religion to an establishment of the state or, in the course of time, to something altogether separate from the state, and thereby rescued Western humanity from the blood-steeped intolerance of religion. Now, at last, Western humanity has left its nonage and attained to its majority in science, politics, and ethics. The story of the travails of Galileo almost invariably occupies an honored place in this narrative, as exemplary of the natural relation between "faith" and "reason" and as an exquisite epitome of scientific reason's mighty struggle during the early modern period to free itself from the tyranny of religion. This is, as I say, a simple and enchanting tale, easily followed and utterly captivating in its explanatory tidiness; its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail.

To be fair, serious historians do not for the most part speak in such terms. This tale of the birth of the modern world has largely disappeared from respectable academic literature and survives now principally at the level of folklore, "intellectual journalism," and vulgar legend. One continues, of course, to see the entire medieval period now and then vaguely described as the “Dark Ages” in popular histories; but scholars are generally loath to use that term even of the era to which it "properly" refers: the period between the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476 and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire in A.D. 8oo (or, more broadly, between the fifth and eleventh centuries); and they have abandoned the term not only because it sounds derogatory. The very idea of an unnaturally protracted period of general darkness after the fall of the Western Roman Empire began its life among the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, who liked to characterize the “new learning” they advocated as a reawakening of ancient wisdom from a millennium of inglorious slumber. But most good historians know that the intellectual and cultural revolution of the Renaissance was the flowering of innumerable high medieval developments, fecundated by a late infusion into Italy of scholarship and classical Greek texts from the dying Byzantine Empire of the Christian East.

Admittedly, the early Middle Ages were a surpassingly harsh period in Western European history. As the Western Roman world gradually dissolved— as a result of mercantile, military, cultural, and demographic decline, and as successive immigrations and occasional invasions of "barbarians" continued to alter the shape of Western European society, and as agrarian economies gradually replaced urban, and as successions of plagues and famines exacted their toll—there was a prolonged period when many of the achievements of classical antiquity were largely lost in the Christian Wcst (though not in the Christian East), and the monasteries became the sole repositories of what remained of ancient learning. But the Middle Ages as a whole, especially from the time of the Carolingian Renaissance of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, were marked by considerable dynamism, in the arts, scholarship, engineering, agronomy, architecture, law, philosophy, and natural science, despite economic and material adversity of a sort now hard even to imagine. Perhaps most importantly, few historians of science now endorse a "catastrophist" account of nascent modern science—even those who believe in a great scientific paradigm shift at the dawn of modernity—and instead tend to acknowledge the continuity of scientific inquiry from the High Middle Ages through the modern period, the technological advances made by medieval society, both early and late, and the first stirrings of a genuinely empirical scientific method in late medieval scholastic thought (but more of this below).

Sadly, however, it is not serious historians who, for the most part, form the historical consciousness of their times; it is bad popular historians, generally speaking, and the historical hearsay they repeat or invent, and the myths they perpetuate and simplifications they promote, that tend to determine how most of us view the past. However assiduously the diligent, painstakingly precise academical drudge may labor at his or her meticulously researched and exhaustively documented tomes, nothing he or she produces will enjoy a fraction of the currency of any of the casually composed (though sometimes lavishly illustrated) squibs heaped on the front tables of chain bookstores or clinging to the middle rungs of bestseller lists. For everyone whose picture of the Middle Ages is shaped by the dry exact, quietly illuminating books produced by those pale dutiful pedants who squander the golden meridians of their lives prowling in the shadows of library stacks or weakening their eyes by poring over pages of barely legible Carolingian minuscule, a few hundred will be convinced by what they read in, say, William Manchester's dreadful, vulgar, and almost systematically erroneous A World Lit Only by Fire. After all, few have the time or the need to sift through academic journals and monographs and tedious disquisitions on abstruse topics trying to separate the gold from the dross. And so, naturally, among the broadly educated and the broadly uneducated alike, it is the simple picture that tends to prevail, though in varying shades and intensities of color, as with any image often and cheaply reproduced; and the simple picture, in this case, is the story that Western society has been telling about itself for centuries now.

David Bentley-Hart Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies Yale University Press 2009, pp33-35.

London as you've never seen it

This blog is devoted to mapping London. Loved the map of London by most common surnames: an ark of Patels, interrupted by a large community of Begums, next to a Jones, and with a few Williams-- all in sea of Smiths.

Bernard Lovell on the limits of science

Sir Bernard Lovell, inspirational founder of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, was realistic about how far his subject did and didn't reach:

"I am no more surprised or distressed at the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation that I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing the radiance of a sunset or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue" (This was in one of his Reith Lectures)

He was a church organist for 40 years as well as a Physics prof, writer and scientific entrepreneur. I met him a few years ago, shook his hand and had the pleasure (for me anyway) of telling him how he'd inspired me as a boy.