The history of democracy starts this book off.  It is dry at first.  When Mrs. Roosevelt then goes into her idea of democracy and Christianity it gets much better.  I like how she corresponds how if we are living a truly Christian life we will think of the greater good of the community instead of the individual then democracy will happen because democracy is for the greater good of the community.  Democracy is where equality exists or at least a level playing field exists.  Differences in lifestyles will still exist because of people's skills, talents, and abilities but everyone has an equal chance in a democracy.  I also liked how she states that we have a way to go still (and it is just as true today as in 1940) because we think more of the individual than the community.  This is a book we all need.  It is a timely today as it was 70+ years ago.

 

A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction—but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

For many years, when people would ask me about my favorite book I would promptly say that it was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Recently, I started to wonder if my love for the novel had stood the test of time so I picked up the 4 book series entitled the Time Quartet (I have the box set that I got years ago) from my shelf and dove in headfirst. Reading the first book in the series, A Wrinkle in Time, completely transported me back to middle school when I first discovered the delightful writing of L'Engle. The book was just as fantastic as I remembered but with the passing of time I see more clearly the overt references to Christianity which were lost on me as a child. (She's a bit like C.S. Lewis in the way that she writes for children about Christianity but instead of fantasy devices she uses science fiction and fantasy.) This literary device would increase as the series continued and in a lot of ways it took away some of the enjoyment of the books for me. One of the bonuses of L'Engle's writing is that it is never 'dumbed down' for her child audience. She uses technical terminology and speaks of scientific endeavors as if the reader should already be aware of them. When I first read that book, this was a foreign concept to me as I didn't think I was any good at the sciences when I was in school. (Now look at how many scientific books I've read and reviewed!)

 

The main character in the first book is Meg, eldest sister of the Murry clan, and we see everything from her point of view. A large portion of why I loved this book was that Meg wasn't a typical girl of her age and I strongly identified with her (and I had a crush on Calvin).  A Wrinkle in Time focuses on Meg's relationship with herself, her family, and her peers (especially Calvin). She sees herself as 'other' except when she's with Charles Wallace or her mother (or Calvin...yes, I'm enjoying myself). It doesn't help that their father has been missing for so long that the postman in town has started asking impertinent questions. (The whole town is gossiping or so it seems.) While Meg plays a large role in A Wind in the Door, the main part of the plot is written with Charles Wallace (youngest Murry son) as the main character. Both books are full of adventure and self-discovery. Both Murry children come into their own and use their unique strengths to help them accomplish their goals. The stakes are always set extremely high and the pace is alternately rushed no-holds-barred action and so lackadaisical as to seem stagnant. (Note: If you don't enjoy books with a lot of descriptions and copious amounts of symbolism then I'm afraid this isn't the series for you.) By A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I felt almost overwhelmed by the underlying religious messages and the conclusion, Many Waters, which focuses on the twins, Sandy and Dennis, was so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. (Books 3 and 4 are so convoluted that I don't feel like I can talk about them in detail other than to say they are out there.) Part of me wishes that I had stopped reading at A Wrinkle in Time (as I had done for so many years) so as to not shatter the illusion of what this series meant to me but part of the reason I started this blog was to explore new books and to give as honest a review as possible. The hope is that even if I don't enjoy a book it might interest someone else. With that being said, A Wrinkle in Time remains in my top 50 all-time faves but the others...not so much. 9/10 for book 1 and a 3/10 for the series overall.

 

A/N: I just did a little Google search and discovered that although I have the box set which is called the Time Quartet there was actually a fifth book written called An Acceptable Time and which called for a new set to be created, the Time Quintet. I feel like I've been hoodwinked! Does this mean I need to find a copy of this book to complete the experience?! (Spoiler alert: I am probably not going to do this.)

 

 

What I'm Currently Reading: Scythe by Neal Shusterman (been reading it for weeks because I've reached the end-of-year reading slowdown)

 

Christendom, the social-political-religious definition of Europe for nearly millennium was shaken at the right moment and the right place to rend it asunder for all time.  In Hans J. Hillerbrand’s revision of his own work, The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century, the Reformation started by Martin Luther in Germany is seen first and foremost as a religious dispute that was not inevitable but due to political and societal factors as able to evolve until it became irreversible.

 

Hillerbrand began by setting the stage upon which Luther would burst onto the scene focusing not only on the condition of the Church, but also the political situation in Germany.  Then Hillerbrand goes into what he calls “the first phase” of the Reformation in which Luther was the primary focus from 1517 to 1521, then after Luther’s stand at Worms the focus of the Reformation changes from a primarily religious controversy into one that politics begins to dominate in Germany.  Yet, Hillerbrand doesn’t stop with Luther and Germany, as he begins describing the reactions to the German events in other territories before they lead to their own Reformation events.  The Catholic Church’s response to the spread of Protestantism across Europe, the different forms of Protestantism besides Lutheranism, and the theological debates between all of them were all covered.  And at the end of the book Hillerbrand compared the beginning of the 16^th-century to the end and how each was different and the same after over 80 years of debate.

 

While Hillerbrand’s survey of the Reformation is intended for both general audiences and scholars, which he successes in doing, the epilogue of the book is what I believe is the best part of the text.  Entitled “Historiography”, Hillerbrand discusses the various ways the Reformation has been covered by historians over the past 500 years and the trends in history as well.  But in reviewing his own text, Hillerbrand emphasized the religious aspect that sparked as well as influenced the Reformation and the importance of the events in Germany which determined not only Luther’s but the Reformation’s fate in Europe.  By ending the book on this note, Hillerbrand gives his readers much to think about on either to agree or disagree with his conclusion which is one of the many reasons to study history.

 

The Division of Christendom is a relatively, for 500 pages, compact survey of 16^th-century Europe in which things both changed dramatically and yet stayed the same during a transformative time in Western history.  As one of the foremost historians of the Reformation, Hans J. Hillerbrand knows this period of history as no one else and just adds to my recommendation to read this book for those interested in the Reformation.

This is such a damned reasonable survey of heresy in the Christian religion, from ancient to modern times, that it would be impolite and perhaps self defeating to express irritation. It has an awful lot of ground to cover and, in closing, it addresses and acknowledges the extent of the material it has had to neglect, which is huge. At the close it has successfully name checked diverse major and lesser heresies and examined their impact on the unfolding history of Western Christianity, incorporating an interesting chapter on religious intolerance in the USA. It does so without anger or even much in the way of passion.

For the most part, the attitude taken is that heretics have played a constructive role, obliging religious leaders to define orthodoxy in the teeth of attack, and in at least a proportion of cases it is arguable that the choice might reasonably have gone either way, so long as a decision was taken. This quality of Christian thinking might invite more critical attention. The author himself notes how opponents of Christianity have, from the earliest times, seen its plasticity, its fecundity, its lack of clarity, as an obvious indicator that it is a human invention. It is worryingly easy to suggest alternative interpretations at too many points of its teachings, which is why Christians have invested so much in the construction and the violent defence of “orthodoxy.” The author notes this and dismisses it rather too lightly. He implies instead that this flexibility has enabled Christianity to remain relevant as circumstances changed – which is certainly the case but not a direct answer to the challenge. [Perhaps he is just too well aware of the catch all defence – that revelation unfolds over time, that the Christians have worked slowly and painfully towards understanding the truth. You can’t argue with that so why bother?]

He recognises that, after a period of being persecuted by state authorities (and the author agrees without exploring the topic that this has been greatly exaggerated), the alliance of Church and state (or altar and throne) placed the Church itself in the position of persecuting its rivals, a role adopted with enthusiasm. He notices (another aside) the thesis that persecution itself played a big part in the politics of Western Europe and he points out periods in which the active seeking out of heretics served a useful function in the way power was exercised. He finally explores the emergence of the concepts of tolerance (which is in itself provisional and retains the implication of a power relationship) and then religious freedom, primarily in the American context, though his suggestion that this was a miracle seems is, of course, just plain unsatisfactory.

All this is good and useful history, well worth reading, but I have the impression that it is a mill without sufficient grist, a blade without a sharp enough edge. To take a single example, I suggest that both the extreme barbarity of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the resolution in the Treaty of Westphalia, at its conclusion, to avoid any future wars of religion was a major landmark – not the overnight conversion of Europeans to religious toleration at all, but a major, tangible step in that direction which should be given due weight. In other words, the emergence of tolerance was not a miracle, but rather a product of history and available for study. The book mentions these things, but it deals with too many serious issues in the same way, by name checking it without paying due attention.

Part of the point of heresy is certainly that people died and were killed – typically in horrible ways - for their opinions. Part of the point about tolerance and freedom of worship, from which too many modern day extremists wish to distract us, is not merely that it is bad to kill people over opinions in a world without certainty, but that the attack on heresy very often served a disreputable part in the corrupt exercise of power. Heresy does have its own internal dynamics but it also serves a political role. When the attention of the crowd is [mis]directed towards heresy, there is something more material from which they are being distracted.

After all, when we read ...
Even without Christianity, people would have found things to fight about, and even without Christianity, the convenient (perhaps even necessary) concepts of heresy and orthodoxy would have carved out an existence. [p300]
.. then surely we are entitled to ask if heresy really ever was entirely a matter of Christian theology in the first place, rather than human politics. After all, the author does remind us several times that heresy only becomes a problem when someone decides to make it one. Other sources have mentioned that most Christians today continue to hold at least some and often many beliefs that have been ruled heretical in the past. So we need to give more time to examining its context and sometimes give more weight to that rather than the obscurity of the theological debate itself.

One conclusion the book does reach is worth preserving; there is always a place for strong opinions. Yet this author does not seem to suffer from strong opinions – he is fanatically moderate. It’s difficult to be offended by anything in particular [especially when it closes with a coy reference to a song “Bring in the Clowns” which my mother loved] but even he concedes that some people will decide to be offended anyway. I am an example. I am even irritated by the calm acceptance that there can be no “stable truth in a moral universe”. Some things are certainly wrong and burning heretics is high on that list.

Heresy and orthodoxy ... are flawed concepts, because they orbit around the notion of stable truth in a moral universe that is often defined by flux. They are however also very useful ideas ... We might accept that most of our choices and assumptions are dictated by accidents of time and place, and we might feel a little hard done by because of all the determinism in our lives, but we still have to live them as if they were the best possible reflection of our chosen beliefs. That’s far less choice than we’d like ... but even if there’s a little intellectual dishonesty and sleight of hand involved, we have to be able to say “I’m right” and “you’re wrong”, even if neither of us is really sure. Else what’s the point?” [p301]