This was the topic of a marital conversation yesterday: which books of the Bible would pass the famous Bechdel test? The test itself originates from a conversation between two characters in Alison Bechdel's famous comic Dykes to Watch Out For, about films:

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Third paragraph of fourth chapter:Of course, Nagin was only reinventing the well-treaded fire-and-brimstone wheel in suggesting that our God is a testy and vengeful one. Just a year before he made his political gaffe, other reflective people from all corners of the globe borrowed from the same barrel of explanation and offered commentary on the “ ( Read more... )

Apart from War and Peace, my other reading project for 2012 was to read the entire Bible, a few chapters a day (or an entire book if it is short). I therefore finished Revelation, and the whole thing, this morning. I have already written up my thoughts on the Old Testament; I would just repeat from there my strong recommendation against reading it ( Read more... )

Of my father's four books, this was much the least successful; rather than addressing a concrete issue in Irish history or politics, he attempted a wide survey of the extent to which Catholics were organised as such, in a rather small set of countries - those European or European-descended states that had enjoyed democracy since the second world ( Read more... )

Having been reading various books by Karen Armstrong over the last couple of years, I feel like I have finally found the real thing. This magisterial and thorough book goes through Chrstianity's roots in Judaism and Greek philosophy, the life of Jesus and the immediate aftermath, and then the historical development of the movement that his ( Read more... )

My two annual reading projects this year have been War and Peace, which conveniently has 366 chapters, and the Bible, for which I generated a reading scheme of my own, based on reading roughly the same amount of it each day (though giving short books a day of their own).

This morning I finished the Old Testament (full Catholic version, thus ( Read more... )

A pretty short history of the Russian Orthodox Church from 988 to 1988, written of course just before the world changed; it's fasinating to remember the context of the Cold War and of those who attempted what we would now call Track Two diplomacy across the Iron Curtain ( Read more... )

Karen Armstrong's books about religion have not always worked for me, but this one did the trick - a fairly intense account of how we think the books of the Bible came to be written, and how they have then been used by Jewish and Christian believers over the centuries. Most of it was material with which I was already familiar, but presented in ( Read more... )

One of my reading challenges at present is to get through the entire Bible in a year. (This is not actually all that tough as an assignment - yer average Bible has around 1400 pages, so we're talking 4 pages a day.) I have to say that some of it has been a bit of a slog, even at that pace, particularly the one-sided propaganda of the history books ( Read more... )

I've had mixed luck with Karen Armstrong's books, but this is pretty readable; it's a potted history of theology in the three major monotheistic religions from early Old Testament times to the present day. I'm not an expert in the field, so didn't spot any inaccuracies, but basically she is able to convey fairly succinctly what key figures and ( Read more... )