Book #2 is Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church by H.W. Crocker III.
Two thumbs up on this one, especially if you're not much of a history type. This is a fast, sometimes snarky, trip through 2000 years of Catholic history. I'd say it's a good START to learning about Church history. I mean, anything that tries to cover 2000 years in 427 pages is only going to be hitting the high points. Contrasted with Warren Carroll's Christendom series, this is the Cliff Note version.
But it's good. And funny. PapaC got really tired of me elbowing him so I could read him a paragraph or 12....
How can you not like a book that describes Rousseau as follows:
Jean Jacques Rousseau was quite obviously insane. His life and works are those of a hypocritical, intellectually perfervid, and emotionally unstable actor. He is a precursor of New Age religion, and a smoother of that yellow brick road that leads from giving every man the vote to having every man's national and emotional aspirations embodied in a Fuhrer. His idea that man was born good but made bad by society was the revolutionists' charter.
And then later, writing about Humanae Vitae:
It is modern, liberal secularists who are "opposed to sex" in that they attempt to blur the distinctions between male and female, ignore the objective meaning of sexual activity, and who think that its natural result should be freely and inconsequentially aborted if it cannot otherwise be prevented. To a logician of an Aristotelian or Thomistic kind--in other words, a Catholic theologian, one of the few defenders of logical, objective reason in modern society--this is simply ludicrous. It is also, needless to say, majority opinion in the Western world.
Gotta add this to my amazon wishlist...sounds like history for someone who doesn't like history (like me, for example).
This is one of my favorite books of 2004. Crocker is hilarious and I liked the fact that he made no attempt to hide his partisanship ... especially obvious when talking about Martin Luther ... maybe because I agreed with him. It was refreshing to find a history that didn't stop and back up every few steps to apologize for the non-correctness of our forebears (sp?).
sounds like my kinda guy.
One of my favorite parts of Swimming to Cambodia is Gray's description of the Khmer Rouge. Hits the nail on the head as to where Rousseau's ideas lead.
My favorite opening line to a chapter: "She was popularly known as the “goggle-eyed whore,” but her given name was Anne Boleyn."
ick! I've heard this man speak and was not impressed, and those little sections you quoted confirms it... sounds like pride run rampant. It may be funny but it's not very intelligent, and seems less concerned with the truth than with poking fun.
Well, Sara, I suppose it is because I have never claimed to be intelligent that I find his work attractive.
While I would not propose it to be the ONLY book on Christendom that anyone reads, I think it has a place as a corrective to the widely held spoken and written histories that hold the Church to be at fault in each and every instance of history. It gets old, old, old.
I have never heard the man speak. Perhaps I would find him as repulsive as you did. I suspect, though, that I would find him funny.
Low-brow, me.
Yep, add that to his hilarious but true article about NFP and I'm hopelessly low-brow too .. but at least I'm laughing! :-)