If you had asked me before I read King David, how familiar I was with all the Biblical David stories, I would have told you I knew them all. After all, having been raised on daily bible study, as a fundamentalist christian, who read propaganda religious literature for entertainment, I'm certain I...
"[The Book of] Revelation has served as a "language arsenal" in a great many of the social, cultural, and political conflicts in Western history. Again and again, Revelation has stirred some dangerous men and women to act out their own private apocalypses. Above all, the moral calculus of Revelat...
One True God or Many?This is a study of the 2,000 year war between polytheism and monotheism, which ended in the victory of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.I wish I could say I appreciated the book more than I did. I'm intuitively sympathetic to the approach of the author. However,...
"The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder. . . ."Sex. Violence. Sc...
ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), 32.6 Quoted in Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar: Unveiling the Mystery of Human Sacrifice (New York: Penguin, n.d.), 441.7 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion , abridged ed. (1922; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1979) 406.8 Ibid., ...
HERMAN MELVILLE, White Jacket (1850) When the Arabella sailed from England in 1630, the little ship carried a contingent of Puritan families who were setting out to colonize the raw North American wilderness. The passengers gathered on deck to hear a sermon delivered by a fiery Puritan minister...
To ignore the question of human responsibility would make all history meaningless.G. G. COULTON, The Inquisition The Inquisition has always been a moving target. Indeed, its history was already being rewritten long before the friar-inquisitors burned their last heretic, and the revisionism sh...