Monthly Archives: January 2024

‘Did Jesus Exist?’ by Bart D. Ehrman

Posted on January 31, 2024 | 1 comment
2012, 368 p.

It has never really occurred to me to question whether Jesus actually existed. There are many things that I doubt about him- miracles, resurrection, second coming for a start- but his actual existence, no. In fact, having spent a lot of the last three years or so catching up on the history of Rome that I missed out at school and university, it seems to me that the sparse references to Jesus himself and the response of Roman authorities to this small apocalyptic sect are just as you would imagine them to be.

However, as this book makes clear, there is a body of thought (albeit small) that asserts that Jesus never existed at all and was instead a myth that conflated Jesus with existing fertility gods and sun gods. According to this view, no textual evidence of Jesus emerged during the 1st century, having dispensed with the Jewish historian Josephus as a forgery. In his introduction Ehrman namechecks the major current proponents of these views: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Frank Zindler, Thomas L. Thompson and George A Wells. While acknowledging that several of these authors have academic qualifications in classics and the Hebrew bible, according to Ehrman only one of these- Robert Price- has the intellectual chops in New Testament studies to be a serious contender. Ehrman then launches into his own rebuttal to the ‘mythicist’ position by looking at non-Christian sources for the life of Jesus, the Gospels themselves as historical sources, and other Christian writings that did not make it into the biblical canon. He presents what he considers two key arguments for Jesus’ existence: first, Paul of Tarsus’ personal association with Jesus’ followers and brothers especially Peter and James; and second, the common knowledge that Jesus had been crucified. The crucifixion was an affront to any perception of Jesus as a ‘messiah’, not unlike us finding out that David Koresh at Waco was really the Messiah. He then moves to dismantling the mythicists’ claims through either weak or irrelevant argument, and grappling with the ‘pagan myth’ hypothesis for Jesus’ non-existence. In the last two chapters of the book he spells out his own view of the historical Jesus as a 1st century apocalyptic Jewish preacher- a view that I largely subscribe to as well.

Looking at the list of ‘mythicists’ that he is taking on, one thing stands out to me: they are all men. I rarely mentally link the words ‘testosterone’ and ‘biblical studies’, but the first part of the book reminded me of chest-bumping, shirt-fronting, put-up-your-dukes academic skirmishing. The argument, carefully laid out with centred headings and subheadings felt to me like an extended exercise in man-splaining, complete with the repetition and put-downs. All rather unedifying, I thought.

However, I enjoyed the last two chapters of the book, where he stopped attacking and began presenting his own considered and backed-up views of the historical Jesus. Here is where he and I concur:

The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes…When we create him anew we no longer have the Jesus of history, but the Jesus of our own imagination, a monstrous invention created to serve our own purposes. But Jesus is not so easily moved and changed. He is powerfully resistant. He remains always in his own time. As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past, the apocalyptic prophet who expected that a cataclysmic break would occur within his generation when God would destroy the forces of evil, bring in his kingdom, and install Jesus himself on the throne. This is the historical Jesus. And he is obviously too far historical for modern tastes.

Conclusion

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: in preparation for my now completed talk at Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

1 Comment

Posted in Book reviews

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 January 2024

Posted on January 30, 2024 | Leave a comment

The Global Story (BBC)I had heard of the Houthis before the current attacks on ships in the Red Sea, but certainly they have more prominence in recent days as the Middle East becomes even more combustible. Why are the US and UK attacking the Houthis in Yemen?, featuring the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner explains that the Houthis come from the north of Yemen, although they only constitute 15% of Yemenis. They are a Shia sect that overthrew the President in 2014 and teamed up with the Republican guard to take power. The Saudis bombed them for years because Saudi Arabia didn’t want an Iranian ally on their doorstep. When the Houthis withstood this bombing, they developed a sense of invincibility. As devout Muslims, they see themselves part of the Axis of Resistance, comprising Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi. They are attacking at a chokepoint in the Red Sea, where 15% of global shipping passes. Australia has given logistical support to the US/UK bombings as part of a twenty-country coalition. I think we did the right thing in refusing to send a ship there.

The Daily (NYT) What the Houthis Really Want. Continuing on about the Houthis, this podcast is from 18 January, after several bouts of bombing. Vivian Nereim, the Gulf bureau chief for The New York Times points out that the Houthis have a larger Western presence than might otherwise have been the case because of their internet presence through videos, songs and TikTok. They go back to the 1990s, but came to prominence after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. After the 2010-2011 Arab Spring they toppled the US-back Yemeni strongman, and seized the capital in 2014 and installed themselves as the government. Saudi Arabia was concerned at having an Iran-aligned country on their border, so with US support, the Saudis began bombing Yemen, causing huge damage and famine- although this US support has frayed since 2018. The Houthis, at their core, are anti-US and anti-Zionist, and although their stated aim in the recent attacks on shipping is to support Palestine, it is also in their interests to distract attention from their difficulties in being the government and doing government-y things, rather than being rebels. October 7 was a gift to them, and they have nothing to lose from their pro-Israel support, and the US/UK bombings just feed into the anti-US rhetoric. They will not stop.

Laudatio Turiae, Turia’s funeral monument. Wikipedia

Being Roman. Episode 2: The Vengeance of Turia. This was a fantastic episode. The assassination of Caesar was followed by ten years of civil war. It’s easy to forget the perils of picking a side in a brutal, vicious civil war, where there is no stable government and when the sides keep shifting. Turia’s parents were both killed by thugs, the day before her wedding, and she had to fend off the legal claims of her relatives for her inheritance. Her husband chose the wrong side, and was exiled by the junta that took over after Caesar’s death. Eventually Augustus agreed to him returning, but Lepidus blocked it. She challenged him, and was bashed for her trouble. She and her husband were not able to have children, so she offered to give him a divorce and live in a menage a trois with a woman who could provide him with an heir. He rejected her offer (perhaps because he feared that he was the infertile one?) Anyway, we learn all this from a long inscription on her funeral monument, which just happened to reflect well on him too.

The Rest is History Episode 402 The Mystery of the Pregnant Pope was believed by the Catholic Church for about three hundred years, although in 1601 Pope Clement VIII declared the legend untrue. Later historians have christened the 9th century papacy “pornocracy”, and this is when the Englishwoman Joan was supposed to have lived, and ascended the ladder to become “John VIII”. Tom Holland (who wrote the book Dominion) goes on at length about the Gregorian Revolution which replaced the power of kings over the church with cardinals instead, with the church was conceptualized as the Bride of Christ. Even though most people acknowledge that the legend of Pope Joan is untrue, Saint (Abbess?) Guglielma had many echoes of the Pope Joan legend. When she died around 1280, her burial site became a shrine for the Guglielmites, who believed that she would be resurrected and lead a new church headed by women. The Inquisition charged 30 of her followers with heresy and dug up Guglielma herself, and burned her along with several of her followers. Fascinating.

Things Fell Apart (BBC) This is the second season of this podcast. Presented by Jon Ronson, it looks particularly at conspiracy theories that arose in May 2020, about six weeks into the COVID pandemic. In the first episode, Ep. 1 The Most Mysterious Deaths Ronson looks at the concept of “excited delirium” to explain the death of George Floyd which occurred on May 25, 2020 (I’d forgotten that it occurred during COVID). This spurious medical concept, developed and promulgated by a Dr Wetley, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Miami, arose in the 1980s when 32 black sex workers were found dead. Instead of going for the serial killer explanation, which seeme the most likely, Wetley said that it was the result of a mixture of cocaine and sex that led to “excited delirium” which manifested as sudden death in women, but psychosis and superhuman strength in men. The term was eventually debunked, but Wetley continued to publicize it up to 2020, sponsored by the manufacturers of Tasers who argued that deaths during Taser use were the result of “excited delirium”. It continued to be circulated amongst police officers, and indeed during George Floyd’s arrest, one of the arresting officer suggested putting him onto his side because he was suffering from “excited delirium”.

History in the Bible Although I have admitted to a secret enjoyment of ‘what-if’ history, I don’t know if my enthusiasm extends to the Bible. Speculations I looks at the years 35CE to 60CE and asks What If John the Baptist had been bigger than Jesus? His answer: John the Baptist was very popular and both were apocalyptic preachers but John the Baptist wouldn’t have spoken to Gentiles, and he would have been one among many sects in Judaism. Second question: What if Paul had split to form his own independent movement? His answer: perhaps the Jews who were left might have had more influence on Temple worship, and Jesus might have been seen as one of the great rabbis. If Paul had gone his own way, the Jewish part would have faded away, and what was left would probably have got on better with the Christians. Paul might have been able to downplay Jesus completely as the Marcions did later.

Expanding Eyes Episode 56 Book 24 The Meeting of Priam and Achilles is the final podcast about the Iliad. He concentrates mainly on Book 24, which is not a coda (even though it could have finished at Book 22) but instead one of the most important books in Western literature. Book 23, where Homer describes the games (rather boring) shows Achilles being re-integrated back into his society. The gods get involved again, and Achilles is ordered to give up Hector’s body and Priam is told to go and retrieve it. FINALLY we learn why it is called ‘The Iliad’: Priam and his manservant stop at the tomb of his ancestor Ilios, indicating that the whole thing has been about fathers and sons. When Achilles is transformed by the recognition of his grief for his own father, and extends this empathy to Priam, he shows his true greatness. In his speech about the 2 jars of life, that the Gods can dispense at will, Achilles emphasizes that fate is random. The play has a slow and dignified closure, with three speeches by women: Hector’s wife, mother, and rather surprisingly, Helen, whose actions had prompted the whole thing. Although there was a bit of a dip in the middle, I really enjoyed this series and found it really worthwhile. But do I want to launch into Milton’s Paradise Lost? Nah, I don’t think so.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

‘An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family’ by Alison Bashford

Posted on January 28, 2024 | 2 comments
2022, 419 P & 60 pages of notes

Sometimes you just have to shut a book when you reach the end and say “Wow!” That’s what I did when I finished reading Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution, a dual biography of Thomas Henry (T. H.) Huxley and his grandson Julian Huxley that also drew in all the ‘little’ Huxleys as well. Not that there was anything ‘little’ about this family: it lay at the heart of 19th and 20th century British intellectual life, with links that extended to other illustrious families of science and letters like the Arnolds, Darwins, Galton and Wells.

While family biographies are nothing new, Bashford shapes her approach through two particular Huxley family members: T. H. Huxley (often known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’) born 1825, and his grandson Julian, born 1887. This jump between generations, largely skipping the intervening generation, breaks up the linear progression of the narrative:

The younger man constantly fashioned himself after his Victorian grandfather, pursuing those signature Huxley knowledge-quests, some profound, others simply grandiose. They were both remarkable and both, on occasion, tortured. Writing these natural scientists together permits a kind of time-lapse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, precisely because they were so similar. We might even think of them as one very long-lived man, 1825-1975, whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the space age; from colonial wars to world wars to the Cold War; from a time when the Earth was 6,000 years old according to Genesis, to a time when it was 4.5 billion years old, according to rock samples returned from the Apollo missions.

p. xxiii

T. H. Huxley was born into an “educated but struggling and socially declining” family (p.xxx) and had only two years of formal education before being thrown on his own resources as an autodidact. He was apprenticed to anatomists in the family, but did not complete his medical degree. He joined the navy and was made Assistant Surgeon on H.M.S. Rattlesnake, which embarked on a voyage of discovery and collection in Australia and New Zealand. (Actually, there are several references to Australia in this very English biography- perhaps reflecting Alison Bashford’s current position at UNSW). His work on jellyfish and other marine creatures gained him admission to the Royal Society but despite the acclaim he received for this work, he still had to fight for his position as professor of paleontology and natural history at the Royal School of Mines. His grandson, Julian, had a much easier path. His father, Leonard, had benefitted from the upward social and financial mobility of his father, and so Julian attended Eton and then Baillol College at Oxford from 1906. He, too, studied marine life, but he made his scientific name in his study of grebes (birds). He was invited to set up a Department of Biology at Rice University before World War I intervened, and he later moved to Kings College London as Professor of Zoology. He resigned this position to work with H.G. Wells and his son on a book The Science of Life before travelling to East Africa to continue his ornithological work . He returned to London to take up a position running the London Zoo in 1935, followed by a role in the creation of UNESCO and the WWF. He was a fore-runner to David Attenborough in popularizing the natural sciences and conservation through radio and television broadcasts and documentaries.

But both men’s work was broader than this. Their shared interest in evolution, albeit separated by the discoveries in the decades between their work, involved them in the intense debates of their times. Darwin’s theory of evolution (which T. H. Huxley was not initially convinced by, despite later becoming one of its major exponents) led to explorations and assertions about Homo Sapiens, anthropology, political biology and finally led to eugenics, of which Julian was a leading figure although distancing himself from its use in Nazism. Julian looked forward to transhumanism: a landscape that we have yet to traverse.

Both men were interested in the psychic and spiritual realm, particularly in later life. T. H. Huxley coined the religious term ‘agnostic’, meaning a humble ignorance and openness to further knowledge rather than its more hard-edged nature today. He approached the Bible as a historical document, and during his life wrote as much on Biblical themes (albeit critically) as he did on some of his natural science interests. He enjoyed jousting on religious matters with his sister-in-law, Mary Augusta Ward nee Arnold, who as well as writing rather dire ‘improving’ literature and being active in the anti-suffrage movement, was also a strong supporter of women’s education and settlement houses as part of the social reformist movement. His grandson Julian also developed an interest in neo-romanticism and was attracted to the ideas of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin with whom he shared a quest towards cosmic unification.

But both men shared the family inheritance of mental illness, in particular an immobilizing depression which saw Julian committed to psychiatric hospitals at various times during his life. This combination of family brilliance and family mental illness is perhaps what gives the title – An Intimate History of Evolution its unusual adjective. Here the theory of inheritance becomes personal.

The structure of the book reflects Bashford’s rejection of a single line of chronological narrative. The book is divided into four parts thematically: Genealogies; Animals; Humans and Spirits, and although dealing first with T.H. and then Julian in each of these themes, the timeline and focus does jump from one man to the other. Nor does the book focus on them alone: the women of the family, particularly T. H.’s wife Henrietta, Mary Augusta Ward, Julia Arnold are also referenced throughout. Other Huxleys especially Julian’s brother Aldous, and the religious writer Francis Huxley are also present. Bashford captures well the network of knowledge and intellectual influence which shaped, and in which the whole family moved.

Bashford’s own grasp of T. H. and Julian Huxley’s work is impressive. As a historian of science, she traces the contours of their scientific work, making it intelligible – and even, when you’re reading about jellyfish, interesting. She is just as comfortable teasing out their philosophical and religious work, which does become rather esoteric at its edges. It is not a particularly easy read, although I made it harder for myself by stopping for about a fortnight to read other things. But she is talking about big ideas – indeed, the biggest of ideas- and as a reader you have to work as well. She is writing about a family who were a tour de force in their intellectual milieu, and this book is Bashford’s own tour de force of biography, science, philosophy and history as well. Brilliant

My rating: 10/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I heard a podcast on it.

2 Comments

Posted in Book reviews

Tagged , ,

‘From the Beast to the Blonde’ by Marina Warner

Posted on January 24, 2024 | Leave a comment

1994, 458 p.

I was rather startled to see that my CAE bookgroup had chosen Marina Warner’s book for our December 2023 read. We’re a rather cosy bookgroup, once condescendingly designated ‘middlebrow’ readers, more drawn to fiction than non-fiction, and I was familiar with Warner’s rather erudite contributions to the London and New York Review of Books magazines. From the Beast to the Blonde is a hefty tome, both physically, and intellectually. I raised an eyebrow at the notewriter’s opening paragraph in the CAE notes that accompanied the book:

Perhaps the book should be approached by reading the lucid and interesting introduction and conclusion, which summarize all the themes developed at length in the main text, then glancing through the text’s handsome and liberal illustrations, which will give a visual impression of the contents.

CAE notes p. 1

Once I felt that I had ‘permission’ to skip bits, I actually ended up reading most of the book, even though I only started reading it about four days before the meeting, as is my usual practice. It was very dense, with long sentences and a forbidding vocabulary (autochthonous? peripeteia?). It was very digressive, as if Warner couldn’t allow a possible association to go unremarked. Most of her material was focussed on European fairy stories. Some Islamic stories do get a look in, but few Asian or indigenous stories are mentioned. In fact, I’m not sure that she ever really defined what a fairy story is, and the distinction between a folk tale and a fairy story.

The book is divided into two parts: The Teller and the Tale. In the first part of the book, she highlights that most fairy stories originated in women’s talk, especially in women-only places like child-bed, washing, kitchens etc, even though they were generally published under men’s names (e.g. Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang). Wrested into the male realm, they often display a disparagement of the original women tellers, drawing on the imagery of the old crone, or a bird to declare them “Mother Goose’s” tales or a grandmother’s stories.

In the second part of the book she moves on to specific stories, particularly Cinderella and the rather disturbing Donkeyskin fairytale (where a young girl has to disguise herself in a donkey skin to avoid her father’s incestuous designs on her) among others. She discusses the Disneyfication of fairy stories, especially ‘The Little Mermaid’, and the cultural stereotypes of blondness and step-mothers that are conveyed through them. But this division between the two sections is not clear cut. For example, although name-checking Marie-Jeanne L’Heritier, Henrirette-Julie de Murat, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy as women writers of fairy stories prior to their absorption into the male-author canon in Part One, it is only in Part Two that she actually gives biographical details about the women and their part in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century French circles. She reveals her indebtedness to Angela Carter, whose adult fairy stories have extended and subverted the genre.

To her credit, she does give a good plot summary of the various stories and their variations, as few readers would be familiar with them, and she does the English reader the courtesy of translating French quotations from them. But it is still a very dense, difficult text. In the conclusion, she embarks on a discussion about a historical as distinct from psychoanalytic reading of fairy stories, arguing that they need to be read within their historical context in both their authorship and allusions, rather than as representatives of archetypes (at least, I think that’s what she was arguing).

The proliferation of anti-fairy stories, even more so in the decades after this was written, have picked up on the feminist emphasis on this book which no longer seems particularly radical or new. They certainly do not call on the same intellectual fortitude and commitment that this book requires of its reader. And it did remind me to one day introduce the original versions of the stories to my grandchildren (yes, it will probably only be my granddaughters) from my own mother’s ‘The Children’s Treasure House”, which will test their attention spans with its dark themes and its black and white art-deco line drawings. Just like my attention span was tested with this book. I recognize its contribution and I admire its breadth and erudition, but it was hard work.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: CAE for my CAE Book Group (AKA ‘The Ladies Who Say Ooooh’)

Leave a comment

Posted in Book reviews, CAE Bookgroup 2023, The ladies who say ooooh

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 January 2024

Posted on January 22, 2024 | Leave a comment

History Hit. Continuing on with Episode 3 Napoleon: The Lover, this episode features Kate Lister from the Betwixt the Sheets podcast – she seems to be everywhere recently. I was critical of how the recent film depicted Napoleon as a sex-crazed emotional wreck and I expected Lister to share my criticisms, but she did not. She did, however, question the depiction of Napoleon as ‘the last chopper out of Saigon’ (her words, not mine) for Josephine, arguing that Napoleon needed her just as much for her connections and popularity. Josephine’s real name was ‘Maria’, but she went by ‘Rose’, and it was Napoleon who called her ‘Josephine’. She had had a rough revolution, and her first husband had been guillotined. She thinks that they really did love each other. Napoleon could have walked away after her affair but he didn’t. Our view of Napoleon as a lover is shaped by his letters to her, although she has never been able to find the famous “don’t wash” letter, only historians’ references to other historians.

Expanding Eyes I have been a bit disappointed in the recent episodes 53 and 54 about The Iliad, but Michael Dolzani returns to form with Episode 55: The Final Showdown. We have just sat through four books of procrastination- “Why?” he asks. In Book 21 Achilles fights with a river, and the gods start betting and fighting among themselves – it’s almost satiric. He suggests that we think of it like Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers who would interpose a comedic scene before a dramatic episode e.g. the drunk scene before Duncan’s murder in Macbeth. We see through Hector’s soliloquy that it is he, rather than Achilles, who has imbibed the Heroic Code despite his father begging him to return to safety. But his nerve breaks, and he runs. So what do we think of Hector now? Is this showing us that Hector is still a great, if flawed man? Or is it cutting him down to size? Then the gods intervene and cheat, with Athena impersonating Hector’s brother. Hector falls and has a long conversation with Achilles, which strains credulity somewhat.

Full Story (The Guardian) has a series at the moment called ‘The Tale I Dine Out On’. Comedian Wendy Harmer talks about going to the Oscars in 1998, just weeks after an emergency caesarean, with a moth-eaten dress, a hacked fringe, and post-natally hormonal. William McInnes, who I could listen to forever takes us back to Redcliffe in 1975 when he was a 15 year old in love with the local hairdressing apprentice, who gave him a terrible perm.

Emperors of Rome Podcast Episode CI The Last Will and Testament of Caesar. OK, so JC has died at the Forum- what happens next? Brutus and Cassius claimed the assassination as a victory and Brutus gave a speech about the murder which was received silently, but with respect. Mark Antony wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to be next, so he went into hiding. Nobody really knew what was about to come next. The assassins all had provinces that they could go to, and Caesar’s wife spirited away his personal fortune, which was about $60 million worth in today’s money. Mark Antony read Caesar’s will which left 3/4 of his fortune to Octavius (his great nephew and adopted son) and the title Caesar. Caesar provided 300 sesterces per person for Roman citizens, which was equivalent to 4 months of a soldier’s salary. Some money was left to Decimus, one of the assassins, which was not a good look and the people turned against the assassins so they left before the funeral, leaving Mark Antony to organize the funeral. Octavian was only 19.

The London Review of Books Podcast Proust in English features Michael Wood, prolific contributor to the LRB. There have been six translations of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and we need to ask Do we need another translation? And is it correct? The translator of any work has two options: first, to make it sound like English; or second, to emphasize the strangeness of the language so that you are always aware that you are reading a translation. As far as the book is concerned, is the narrator Marcel Proust? The name ‘Marcel’ appears twice- were the other mentions removed, or is he playing with the question. In fact, when you get to the end of the seven volumes, did the narrator even write the book anyway? Is the book you are reading the final product? Questions, questions…

Sydney Writers Festival The Arc of Racism in Australia I always get a little frisson of pleasure when I see one of my fellow students from the PhD program at La Trobe in the media. In this case, it’s Andonis Piperoglou who leads a panel discussion with Anthropologist and social critic Ghassan Hage, Palestinian-Egyptian author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, The Sydney Morning Herald culture editor Osman Faruqi, and Gomeroi academic and author Amy Thunig. It’s all a bit sad, listening to a podcast recorded before the Referendum.

Leave a comment

Posted in Podcasts 2024

‘Lessons in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus

Posted on January 19, 2024 | 1 comment
2023, 386 p.

If I were better versed in chemistry, I would start off with drawing parallels between this book and some sort of chemical reaction where there’s a big confident beginning, petering off into a spluttering little anti-climax. Alas, although I can think of parallels in other spheres (political movements? relationships?), I don’t have the chemical knowledge to think of a chemical metaphor. But that’s how I felt about this book: it started off well, then just sagged into a gloopy sentimental mess.

Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist working at the Hastings Research Institute in the early 1960s, the only woman in an all-male working environment (except, of course, for the admin). We now know enough about the side-lining of women in science through Rosalind Franklin and movies like ‘Hidden Figures‘ to recognize the institutionalized injustices that see Elizabeth’s work appropriated and assumed to be the work of the men surrounding her. Almost against her own better judgement, she falls in love with her co-worker Calvin Evans and when her life suddenly falls apart, she finds herself unemployed, unmarried and with a fractious baby. Fiercely independent, she has to learn to accept help from an older neighbour and the father of her daughter’s school friend when he offers her a job to host a TV cooking show. She makes this job her own by introducing the chemistry that she is shut away from professionally to her viewers, housewives at home watching afternoon television. She does not talk down to her viewers and she attains a cult following.

And at this point, my own chemical reaction starts to fizzle out. Yes, we had our professor Julius Sumner Miller in the 1960s, but it stretches credulity to think about a cooking show veering into academic territory like Elizabeth’s ‘Supper at Six’ does. Then there’s the dog (yes, the dog) Six Thirty who is anthropomorphized to the point of having his own dialogue. And the precocious child. And the angelic neighbour. And the mysterious benefactor. Oh stop.

I liked the tone of this book at the start, but it seemed to get lost by the end. The narrative voice was one of those ‘Voices of God’ commentaries, slightly ironic and comforting and imbuing the book with the sense of being a morality tale, or a fairy-tale. There were many one-liners which were sharp and pointed, and certainly coming from a 21st century feminist-ish perspective. But the ending was just a sentimental ‘everything-works-out-in-the-end’ hash. Elizabeth deserved more.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: purchased (!) Only because there were too many holds on it at the library

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection.

1 Comment

Posted in Book reviews, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

Tagged , ,

‘The Power Worshippers’ by Katherine Stewart

Posted on January 15, 2024 | 1 comment
2020, 352 p.

A few months back, I spoke at a service at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship based on Elle Hardy’s book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking over the World. As part of that, I spoke about the Seven Mountains Mandate which calls upon Christians to influence the ‘seven mountains’ of education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts and entertainment and media as a way of ‘taking back’ society and bringing on the ‘end times’. Elle Hardy only really mentioned the Seven Mountains by name in one chapter, as she travelled from congregation to congregation looking at the influence of Pentecostalism. In this book, however, Katherine Stewart looks beyond faith communities to examine broader society and how it is being influenced, often unwittingly by ‘Christian nationalism’ (her preferred term).

Christian Nationalism is not a social or cultural movement, but a political movement and its goal is power.

It is not organized around any single, central institution. It consists rather of a dense ecosystem of nonprofit, for-profit, religious, and nonreligious media and legal advocacy groups, some relatively permanent, others fleeting. Its leadership cadre includes a number of personally interconnected activists and politicians who often jump from one organization to the next. It derives much of its power and directions from an informal club of funders, a number of them belonging to extended hyper-wealthy families.

Introduction

She cautions that we need to distinguish between the leaders of the movement, and its followers. Its followers, she says are

…the many millions of churchgoers who dutifully cast their votes for the movement’s favored politicians, who populate its marches and flood its coffers with small-dollar donations are the root source of its political strength. But they are not the source of its ideas….The leaders of the movement have quite consciously reframed the Christian religion itself to suit their political objectives and then promoted this new reactionary religion as widely as possible, thus turning citizens into congregants and congregants into voters.

Introduction

She starts off at the Unionville Baptist Church, 45 minutes out of Charlotte, North Carolina, at a meeting sponsored by an affiliate of the Family Research Council, “one of the most powerful and politically connected lobbying organizations of the Christian right”, where pastors are being encouraged to use their pulpits for the upcoming half-term elections. Speakers rail against the Johnson Amendment that bars houses of worship and charitable non-profits from endorsing political candidates, they commend the use of NGOs internationally to spread the word of God, and urge the need to bring Latino and Black Americans onto the “right” side of history through their churches.

She visits the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, where agribusiness leaders elevate politicians who espouse low regulation, foreign trade, water access and minimal workers’ rights. They gain direct access to the White House (and specifically Trump’s White House) through pastors who hold weekly bible studies there amongst the politicians. She ventures into the March for Life anti-abortion movement, where during the 1970s abortion was packaged and sold as the unifying issue of the global conservative movement drawing together conservative evangelicals and catholics in a way that could not have been imagined decades earlier. She talks about the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby stores and their Museum of the Bible and the push towards charter schools with sectarian agendas and the insistence that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles with the intention of being a Christian nation. She emphasizes the interconnection between various groups with innocuous-sounding names, and their affinities with religious nationalist groups in other countries. Throughout, she stresses the connection between seriously-wealthy backerswith their own political agendas, government, and charismatic church leaders who are bringing their congregations and their votes along with them.

This is a wide-ranging, accessible book which has far more local American detail than an Australian reader is likely to appreciate. She makes her argument that Christian Nationalism is a political ideology in the introduction, and spends the rest of the book prosecuting it. It is sobering reading. I might have dismissed it as a conspiracy theory if I didn’t see it playing out in front of my eyes in our own local politics. There’s the influence of U.S. lobbying and advertising firms bringing their ‘expertise’ from sectarian US politics to advise the ‘No’ campaign at our recent referendum. There’s the rise of far-right and populist politics in Argentina and the Netherlands and although these new leaders might not be believers themselves, Christian nationalist believers support them. And most disturbing of all, the seeming untouchability of Donald Trump and his unwavering support among Christian nationalists should make us all pause.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

You can read more about Christian Dominionism and its links to Australian politics at Chrys Stevenson’s article Christian Dominionism: Follow the Money which can be found on her Gladly The Cross-Eyed Bear blog.

.

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2024, Uncategorized

Tagged

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 January 2024

Posted on January 14, 2024 | 2 comments

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: War to the Death Part 7. It’s time that I finished this 8-parter off, before I forget how it started. This episode deals with the Siege of Tenochtitlan – the last stand of the Aztec warriors. As they point out, Meso America was so divided that it was easy to colonize. Conquest by the Spanish wasn’t inevitable- after all, the Chinese and Ottomans had empires too- but they were unlikely to colonize Meso-America, and given the competitiveness and entrepreneurship in Europe at the time, the Europeans were always going to come. The Spanish Conquest established a template for other conquests, transforming Meso-America into a Spanish place. They talk about Matthew Restall’s approach towards the conquest (I must seek him out) which depicts Cortez as a mediocrity, and which seeks to take out the glamour of the Conquistadors, leaving the horror and drama. Sandbrook and Holland (the presenters) don’t go that far: they claim that there was courage on both sides. 

The Fall of the Aztecs: The Last Emperor Part 8 As Tenochtitlan falls in August 1521, the story of sacking of a city repeats, as it has through Western stories (think Troy, think Jerusalem). Is the Spanish Conquest to be condemned? Certainly, Protestants dined out of its barbarity, and there is a strong progressive argument against it. Cortez was still desperate to find gold, and he was prepared to torture the Mexica to find it. Meanwhile, Charles V in Europe gave his approval of the expedition, and Cortez’s wife Catalina (a forced marriage) turned up in Tenochtitlan, only to die suddenly (how convenient). How much changed after the conquest? The Mexica were not slaves and they continued to work as peasant labourers, much as they had under the Aztecs. The Spanish were deferential towards rank and hierarchy amongst the people they conquered, as long as their opponents converted. The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared, speaking Nahuatl, at a place that was already a pilgrimate site to fertility goddesses. Cortez was not good at governing. He married Malinche and gave her her own estates, remarried and started another family, then sailed off to Spain to fight innumerable lawsuits- the fate of most of the Conquistadors- and he died there.

Return Ticket (ABC) I wanted something light to fill in about 20 minutes, and this travel series is certainly light. Hosted by Jonathan Green, of whom I am not particularly enamoured, these are short travel segments taking a somewhat quirky view of popular travel spots. I’m not particularly interested in hearing about places that I haven’t seen (and am unlikely to do so now), but I was attracted to the episodes where he talks about places that I have been to. Order and chaos in Mumbai juxtaposes the sheer crush of so many people against the unseen networks that somehow make this place work. He visits the dhobiwalas in the huge open air laundry near Maha Laxmi Railway Station ( I wrote about them in my travel blog here), then Churchgate Station, where the dabbawalas collect and distribute tiffin boxes throughout the city. He finishes off in a national park in Mumbai where he sees a leopard. 

The very first episode of this program (S1E1) is London Underground- Literally starts off in the Underground but then excavates deeper into the other services laid below the Tube like British Telecom, bolt-rooms for politicians and passageways for police. He then discusses the Iceberg Houses in Kensington, where a standard Regency exterior hides multiple basement levels with pools, gymasiums, theatres etc.- in effect, inconspicuous consumption in houses that are largely unlived-in, and merely an investment product. The juxtapositon between extreme wealth and poverty is jarring, with the Grenfell Towers nearby.

But this program is too flippant for me: too many ‘stingers’ breaking up the program, too much silliness.

Expanding Eyes. I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of episodes as much- there’s a bit too much re-telling of the Iliad, with not much more added. Episode 53 deals with the turning point of Book 16, where Patroclus dresses in Achille’s armour and goes and gets himself killed. In Episode 54 the Achaeans get Patroclus’s body back, minus the armour, and Achille’s mother Thetis goes to the workshop of Hephaestus on Mt. Olympus to get a replacement. Breisis speaks of her sorrow at the death of Patroclus, and finally Achilles goes into battle himself.

History Hit The WW2 Witch Trial of Hellish Nell features Kate Lister, who presents the Between the Sheets podcast about sex- her specialty. It’s a very noisy podcast and I find her accent rather grating. She interviews Jess Marlton, manager of Bodmin Jail, which markets itself as a site of paranormal activity. Hellish Nell was actually Helen Duncan (she gained the nickname from a brattish childhood) and she was the last woman to be tried under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, more than 200 years later, during WW2. The concept of ‘ghost’ changed over time, and after World War I, at a time when communication technologies were coming into their own, people wanted to communicate with the dead. Women in particular were seen to cross over between the real and the mystical, and being a medium was a way of women having spiritual authority that they otherwise did not have. Helen began her career in the 1920s. She specialized in manifesting the dead through ectoplasm, or spiritual energy, which ended up being exposed as a mixture of cheesecloth and egg white that she regurgitated- metres and metres of the stuff.. She was brought undone by a naval officer who attended one of her seances where she ‘spoke’ with a sailor who supposedly died in a sinking that the British Government had not publicized. Although she had been charged under the vagrancy act previously, the government wanted to make an example of her. She was sentenced to nine months jail. The 1735 Act focussed on fakery, rather than earlier Witchcraft Acts which tacitly recognized the reality of witches. The act was changed again in 1951 to the Fraudulent Medicine Act, and was later incorporated into Consumer legislation.

The Partial Historians I’ve been aware of this podcast, featuring Australian historians Dr Fiona Radford and Dr Peta Greenfield but I hadn’t listened to it. Ye Gods, one of them has the most annoying braying laugh (I think that it’s Dr Rad, but I may be wrong). I was particularly interested in this episode on Roman Naming Conventions, because I find Roman names really confusing. There are four naming conventions: the praenomen (the first name), the nomen (a reference to the clan or gens that the person came from), the cognomen (this name could have a variety of meanings!), and the agnomen (nickname). It’s comical that some of the names that we know Romans by were actually quite abusive: Galba meant ‘fat belly’; Crassus meant ‘fat’; Blazus meant ‘stutterer’. Adoption was taken very seriously by the Romans, and the suffix ‘-anus’ was added to their name to denote that they had been adopted. There was change over time in women’s status vis-a-vis their family, when instead of becoming part of their husband’s family, they remained part of their gens (i.e. birth family). Slaves were often given a cute name, and freedmen often had to keep their former owner’s name, although later generations dropped it.

2 Comments

Posted in Podcasts 2024

‘The Living Sea of Waking Dreams’ by Richard Flanagan

Posted on January 13, 2024 | 3 comments
2020, 304 p.

I’m old enough now to have sat beside two dying parents- and who knows if life holds further deathbed vigils for me- and one of the things that struck me even in the midst of it was what a strange time it was. Outside that room, life teemed on oblivious; inside that room, each breath was watched and counted. This strangeness pervades Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, starting right from the opening pages. It’s summer, and the city is shrouded in smoke, just as we remembered January 2020 to be (although I had forgotten that smoke when we were then catapaulted into COVID lockdowns by March that year). Anna looks down at her hand, and notices that her ring-finger is missing, blurred out, gone. Her mother is in hospital after a “bad turn” following the dreaded “fall”, having five years earlier been diagnosed and treated for hydrocephalus, and then diagnosed with low-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Now she has had a cerebral hemorrhage, which will be followed by liver problems, and the family is asked what their mother’s wishes were.

Not that the siblings – Anna, Tommy and Terzo- are going to respect them, even when their mother Francie, painstakingly spells out ‘GOMELET’ on an alphabet board. “Let me go?” asks Anna, feigning astonishment, “But where are you going to go to?” Because, led by the forceful Terzo, the family has decided that their mother Francie must live, irrespective of cost, irrespective of doctors’ opinions. Strings are pulled, favours are called in, and Francie, becoming increasingly less human by the day, is kept alive by machines, because we can.

Meanwhile, those disappearances… first Anna’s finger, then her knee, then her breast, then parts of her face. No-one else seems to notice. Then her son, the unresponsive gamer locking himself in his bedroom and stealing from his mother, starts disappearing as well.

And at a broader level, there are disappearances too.

The ladybirds gone soldier beetles blue bottles gone earwigs you never saw now gone beautifully coloured Christmas beetles whose gaudy metallic shells they collected as kids gone flying ant swarms gone frog call in spring cicada drone in summer gone gone.

Gradually we learn the history of this family, and come to understand the dynamics between the adult children, starkly drawn in all its steely aggression and wilful blindness. This is a painfully honest book at the human level, and a grimly pessimistic book at the broader environmental level. It juxtaposes the desire to hold on at all costs to some lives and the blithe dispensing of others, power and powerlessness. It is a little heavy handed with the politics – I felt rather bashed over the head by it- but I was won over by his skill in interweaving his up-close personal story with a broader world-level story. Some readers will bridle against the magic realism, but for me it just highlighted the paradox of his argument. In many ways, this book touched on nearly all his previous books – the magic realism of Gould’s Book of Fish, the love for wilderness of Death of a River Guide and the horror of genocide and disappearance in Wanting. He is such an assured, deft writer.

Excellent.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups for my Ladies Who Say Oooh bookgroup. It was my choice.

3 Comments

Posted in Book reviews, CAE Bookgroup 2023

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 25- 31 December 2023

Posted on January 8, 2024 | 1 comment

Expanding Eyes Episode 51 The Embassy to Achilles deals with Books 9-11. The three men sent to encourage Achilles out of his man-cave all used different approaches: self-interest, guilt and just bewilderment. Achilles responded as if he had been holed up an reading existentialism: that nothing mattered anyway. The Achilles Heel story does not appear in the Iliad, although there is a prophesy of a double fate facing Achilles- either dying in glory or having a long and unremarkable life. Note that Agamennon’s list of gifts to encourage him back does not include an apology for running off with Achilles’ wife (probably the one thing Achilles wanted). Although it seems very to-and-fro, there is a pattern to the interminable fighting in Book 10. Book 11 reveals the aristeia (i.e. high point) of Agamennon’s role in the battle. By now the main people in the Achaean army had received injuries which take them out of the battle. It’s in fact Nestor who first suggests that Patroclus take Achilles’ place on the battlefield.

Episode 52 The Horrors of War and the Value of the Heroic Code There’s a speech about the Heroic Code in Book 12, but it’s hard for me to find anything to admire in it. Michael Dolzani suggests that perhaps one good thing that comes out of it is a sense of competition, but it also spurred countless thousands of British men into the meat grinder of the WWI trenches. William James once suggested that we need a moral equivalent to war. Zeus decides to “look away” and the gods intervene, helping out their favourites, but the battle is going the Trojans’ Way. Meanwhile, Hera, who favoured the Greeks, distracts Zeus with sex.

The Rest is History The Fall of the Aztecs: The Night of Tears (Part 6) This episode focuses on the night of 30th June 1520, La Noche Triste, when the Spanish tried to break out of Tenochtitlan. Montezuma had been killed and they were surrounded by angry Mexica. They made their escape at night and were successful, but it was a bloody event. The Tlaxcalans rejected the Mexica’s pleas to join forces with them to get rid of the Spanish, and instead they joined forces with the Spanish. But another enemy was stalking: smallpox which had already wiped out the Taino people in the Caribbean (necessitating the importation of Africans as a replacement labour force- but that’s another story). It was probably introduced by Narváez, rather than Cortez. The harvest collapsed because there were insufficient workers, so when more Spaniards arrived, the place was deserted. Cortez was determined to wage a European style War, but the Tlaxcalan’s sacrificed and cannibalized their Mexica captives- but Cortez was powerless to stop them. In late 1520 ships were arriving all the time. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charles V was showing off the gold that Cortez had sent to him. A shipbuilder, who had survived La Noche Triste arrived with 12 ships that he had built and had carried overland, and so Cortez was set….

Roger Kidd Georgian House, Lewes, East Sussex https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1111791

History Extra Georgian Grand Houses: the forgotten women who built them. Featuring Amy Boyington, the author of Hidden Patrons: Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain, this episode highlights the autonomy of heiresses, mistresses and widows in directing the design and construction of houses. Although the men in their families usually paid the accounts, a different picture of women’s involvement emerges from their correspondence (often with other women) where they display their practical concerns over, for example, where the sun would be shining in a dining room on a summer’s night, or how cold a room might be in winter etc. She gives many examples of women and houses, many of which were unfamiliar to me, but would probably be well known among British listeners.

The Philosopher’s Zone (ABC). Richard Rorty and America. I don’t often listen to this program, because it’s often too heavy for me, but I was attracted to the episode on Richard Rorty. I didn’t (don’t) know much about Richard Rorty, but I had heard of him because Inga Clendinnen responded to one of his books where he omitted history from his list of genres which could encourage the growth of our imaginative capabilities. (Inga’s essay Fellow Sufferers is available here). This episode features Chris Voparil who has co-edited a recent collection of the late Rorty’s essays (he died in 2007) called What Can we Hope For: Essays on Politics. In an essay that Rorty wrote in 1996 called ‘Looking Back from 2096’, he predicted the rise of a Trumpesque strongman. He was critical of identity politics, and especially compulsory college courses to raise awareness of Black, Women’s and LGBT identities, pointing out that ‘Trailer Trash’ was never seen as a marginalized group to be championed. Nonetheless, he argued that we get our moral stance from the group that we identify with- literally a form of ‘identity politics’.

Literature and History Episode 11 Who Was Homer? looks at Books 17-24 before then addressing the question of who Homer was and if he even existed. Aeneas pops up in the battle before being whisked away by Poseidon, which went down a treat with the Romans who were to later claim Aeneas as their own. We need to remember that Hector didn’t kill Patrocalus (instead the minor character Euphorbus did), but he did steal Achilles’ armour from him and disrespected his body. The funeral games, which seem to us to be completely incongruous and which take ages are part of a set piece to break up the narrative, and such a device appears in other similar epic poems. The ending is very inconclusive, but that’s because what we know as The Iliad is part of an 8-book poetic cycle, of which we have only Books 2 and 7. From flashbacks in these two books, we know that in Book 3 Achilles is killed, in Book 4 the Trojan Horse appears, in Book 6 Agamennon and Menelaus return, Book 7 is the Odyssey and Book 8 deals with Odysseus’ later adventures. He then moves on to the question of Homer’s identity, something you might have thought he would have done at the start. He suggests that Homer was probably not one man, but the works instead spring from a collective oral tradition. There are many narratives where a band of mates sack a wealthy trading city (Cortez and Tenochitlan spring to my mind) and it is in effect the story of the collapse of the Bronze Age in miniature. Troy was probably part of the Hittite empire. There have been many attempts to date The Iliad, using archeology of weapons mentioned in the narrative; linguistic patterns and the meter of poetry. Although there might not be one Homer the writer, it’s possible that there was one Homer to reciter. Milman Parry (the so-called Darwin of Homeric studies) basing his approach on Yugoslav oral folk songs, looked to the use of formulaic descriptions, rhythm and repetition as a mnemonic aids to remember such a long oral poem.

1 Comment

Posted in Podcasts 2023

Tagged , , , ,