Author Philip Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. “They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It’s very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”
As any parent who has shopped for religious books for a child can tell you, the theological divides that rock the adult world also affect the choice of an appropriate Bible storybook for a child. USA Today had a very interesting story on the issue earlier this week.
The editors of Christian Century have announced their selections for the best books (and music) of 2007 in several categories, including theology, spirituality, fiction, children’s lterature, classical music and pop Christmas music.
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Benjamin Kaplan points out in his new history of religious tolerance, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.
For several years, Shakespeare scholars have speculated on whether William Shakespeare had been a closeted Catholic. The Rev. David Beauregard, a Roman Catholic priest who teaches Shakespeare at the seminary of St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine in Boston, has published a new book that makes the case that Shakespeare was indeed Catholic.
The December 2, 2007 New York Times Sunday Book Review will feature its lists of the editors’ call on the 100 most notable books of the year. While the print version of the list is a week away, the list is now available online, and a remarkably large number of the books have religious themes.
Is toleration and inclision the secret to a successful empire or hegemony? Yale Law Professor Amy Chau argues that all of the world-dominant powers in history — among them, Achaemenid Persia, imperial Rome, Tang Dynasty China, the Mongol empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and hegemonic America — prospered by a strategy of tolerance and inclusion, the embrace (and exploitation) of diversity and difference.
The movie of Philip Pullman’s book, The Golden Compass, will be released in December. Beliefnet’s entertainment blog Idol Chatter has created a Golden Compass category.
Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University, is causing quite a stir with his new book A Secular Age. Among his more interesting arguments is that Christianity itself is responsible for the rise of secularism. Robert Bellah writes of this new book that “A Secular Age is his breakthrough book—one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime. Taylor succeeds in no less than recasting the entire debate about secularism.”
J.K. Rowling, the author of the best selling series of books about Harry Potter, “the boy who lived” has revealed in an interview with MTV