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.

Oscar Wilde on Jesus

Have just finished reading De Profundis, written by Wilde in Reading Goal and an enlightening, if predictably unorthox meditation on Christ. Like all Wilde's works, it's available free.


Wilde does say that:

I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology

and

... there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.


So he's unlikely to be asked to share his story in a Billy Graham crusade. But having got that out of the way, Wilde's genius and brokenness is worth a read. Such a beautiful writer.

On his own ruin

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand ... Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I became the spendthrift of my own genius.

Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop.

I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and I did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.

On suffering    

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.  

If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man,  for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. 

On Christ

There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered ... and not merely imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his personality, even though they neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow revealed to them. 

His miracles seems to be as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as natural. 

He was the first person who ever said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives' ... He took children as the type of what people should try to become. 

The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement

Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history. People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or ranked him as an altruist with the scientific
and sentimental. But he was really neither one or the other. Pity he has, of course, for the poor ... but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves to things ... Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. 

Out of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth or legend.

On the gospels

Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold a Greek Testament, and every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Everyone, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the same ... When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lillies out of some narrow and dark house.

With a width and wonder of imagination that fill one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece.

On the power of love

When I was brought from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, ___ waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things that that.

Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.

What novels are for

I'm not so wedded to physical books as this, but it's a lovely quote:
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book Julian Barnes in his pamphlet My life as a biobliophile

The city hen weekend is back in

'Bridal magazines,' said my daughter, dumping a stack of them in my living room. 'I bet you read them because you read everything.'

The city hen weekend is back in. I didn't know it had gone out, or where it had gone, or what had replaced it, or who said it had gone out and what authority they had over its going out and in. Fortunately the all-knowing writers and editors of the bridal magazine did know and could say and now it was back.

Serve your canapes in personalized wooden seed-trays.  Must write that essential tip down for the big day in a year's time.

You too can lose 20lbs in 6 weeks. This was accompanied by a photo of two grim-faced brides running across a beach in a strong wind with a parachute tied to their backs.

Social scientists and religion, not a good brew

Have been enjoying sociologist Rodney Stark's book on the rise of Christianity. Something of a pioneer in his field, he applies social science theory to how the church grew in its first few centuries and it's enlightening stuff, even if you think, as I do, that a display of maths is only as good as its underlying assumptions and often social science's underlying assumptions aren't very good.

But Rodney Stark also has the insight to say about his fellow practitioners what many of us have often thought (or possibly hoped):

... until recently, the social scientific study of religion was nothing of the sort. The field was far more concerned with discrediting religion that with understanding it. This is clear when it is realized that only in the area of religious belief and behavior have social scientists not based their theories on a rational choice premise. Indeed my colleagues and I recently showed that antagonism toward all forms of religion and the conviction that it must soon disappear in an enlightened world were articles of faith among the earliest social scientists, and that today social scientists are far less likely to be religious than are scholars in other areas, especially those in the physical and natural sciences (Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke, 1995).

The difference between literature and life

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around. (David Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down).

(This is from Uncommon Sense by Joseph Telushkin, from which  you can see some fantastic further quotes on Google Books.)

Lovely science/religion blog

I just found this lovely science/religion blog which is worth bookmarking somewhere:

http://www.elliotnelson.net/