Religion

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

This is a book about rage, as Chrissie Foster says in her opening sentence. It is motivated and driven by rage and, if this is not an oxymoron, it is a panegyric to rage.

Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cynically use trendy tools to legitimise what are really very old preconceptions, it is as if the linguistic turn and those other movements that sought to ground scholarship in careful, close-read qualitative analysis of texts and contexts never happened. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading this somewhat surreal contribution to debate about the significance of the European Middle Ages from American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 

After Italian troops had invaded the Papal States to establish the nation’s capital in Rome in 1870, Italian Catholics were prohibited from voting in political elections. When this policy began to be relaxed in late 1918, a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959), founded the Partitio Popolare Italiano (PPI) which was to be aconfessional but ‘inspired by Catholic principles’. It was the precursor of the Christian Democratic party that has ruled Italy for the past thirty years.

The Bible is a collection of books with a long history. Not surprisingly, there is little agreement as to precisely which books it contains and what their collective importance might be. In The Making of the Bible, a distinguished Old Testament scholar, Konrad Schmid, and an equally prominent New Testament specialist, Jens Schröter, have combined forces to produce a volume (elegantly translated from the German by Peter Lewis) that outlines how different forms of the Bible came into being. Their focus is historical and philological rather than theological or literary. Yet the story they tell is engrossing: that of an unstable world needing to attend to the values of God’s kingdom. They help a non-specialist reader appreciate the fascinating diversity of ways in which the Bible’s message was regularly reinterpreted in a changing political situation.