Book Review: The Undiscovered Jesus by Tim Crosby

The Undiscovered Jesus: Hidden Truths from the Book of Luke by Timothy E Crosby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Gospel of Luke is written by a Greek convert doctor who joined Paul on his several of his missionary journeys but given his outsider background is unique in all the Bible. The Undiscovered Jesus: Hidden Truths from the Book of Luke is the supplement book for the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide (2nd Quarter 2015) by Tim Crosby who brings out interesting facets from the pages of the Gospel, explains the context of the actual Greek to give new insight to familiar passages, and writes in an engaging style. For nearly the 157 pages Crosby is a wonderful read, but unfortunately his diatribe on modern Communism in Chapter 10 “The Kingdom of Darkness” is quite simply one of the worst things I’ve read in one of these supplemental books as what facts he gets right are equaled by what he gets wrong. Unfortunately, due to Crosby alluding to what was coming in the previous chapter and contrasting his “Kingdom of Darkness” with the “Kingdom of Light” in the next chapter it spread this taint further than just the 14 pages that chapter contained. This is a hard book to rate and review as so much of it was very good, but the part that was bad is just something I can’t believe the same person wrote.

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Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Around the world there are abandoned buildings and monuments of long-gone or greatly diminished human societies that evoke questions of what happened and why they aren’t around anymore. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the follow up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as he looks at how those societies rose and fell while also how they didn’t realize they were in trouble then how those lessons could help us today.

Diamond begins by defining collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time” then brings forth five significant factors—environmental changes, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners, and the society's response to the foregoing four challenges—to look at how they played into the demise historical civilizations. From the beginning it was obvious that Diamond was using Easter Island, the Classical Maya, the Greenland Norse, and many others as small-scale stand-ins for our globalized society that is facing the same challenges they did. However, Diamond is not all doom and gloom as he included various examples of societies—Norse Iceland, Tokugawa Japan, and Tikopia—that did make changes to save themselves. After all this Diamond looks at 12 challenges we face as today and “one-line objections” that are encountered when trying to solve them. Throughout the book Diamond can appear like a downer, but he ends on cautious optimism as he thinks we have the agility and the capacity to adopt practices favorable to our own survival while avoiding unfavorable ones. Overall, this book is an interesting read as a study of how historical civilizations dealt with changing conditions whether because of their own actions or of environmental factors beyond their control. While I appreciate Diamond’s look at historical civilizations to support his thesis, he isn’t a historian and as I’m not familiar with all the historical societies he cited I had to keep that in mind as he examined our globalized society.

Collapse is a book that looks towards historical societies’ relation with their environments and how it compares to our modern society. Jared Diamond’s cautious optimism is a high point, but there felt a lot of doom and gloom early on.

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Book Review: The Age of Reason Begins by Will & Ariel Durant

The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The near century between the death of John Calvin and the Council to Trent to the end of the Thirty Years War saw first religious intolerance and religious wars range across the continent until in the end politics trumped everything like it always does. The Age of Reason Begins is the seventh volume of The Story of Civilization series by Will & Ariel Durant as Protestants fight one another and both fight Catholics before eventually politics overrules everything and people begin to ignore religion.

This volume continues a trend of transitions that defined Early Modern Era highlighting a single nation, then the continent, and finally beginning of the return of “reason” over “religion”. The Durants began the rise of Great Britain from the reign of Elizabeth I to the death of Charles I as it transitioned from warring individual nations to nations united political though with significant differences that still needed to be worked out. Next, they followed the transition across the continent of various religious wars that saw either the rise or follow of great powers from prominence that ultimately went from how God was worshiped but what was politically more important. Then they completed the volume with the rise of science and slow return of now religious inspired philosophy. Even though the Durants focused on philosophy and scientific advances in the last 100 pages of the book, they did not neglect cultural developments in literature to theater to music to the development of scientific thought, it was in this area that one could tell Will Durant was enjoying writing. After three volumes in which Will Durant had to focus on religion more than he liked this volume a reader of the series could tell change in Will’s writing that could by a result of Ariel or Will love of philosophy and science.

The Age of Reason Begins is a transitional volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization not only in the transition into the Early Modern Era but also the involvement of his wife Ariel as a cowriter.

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