by Peter Ackroyd Copyright (c) 1998 Thomas More is one of the few beatified English lay-persons in history. He was beheaded for resisting the coming Protestant Reformation. What comes around, goes around, however; More, in the years before King Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, oversaw the exercise of the death penalty to several Protestant heretics. He stood, as Ackroyd tells it, for the old way of medieval Christendom. He was unwilling to accommodate the…
by Walter IsaacsonCopyright (c) 2007. This book, based upon recent public releases of Einstein’s private letters, provides a more intimate portrait of Einstein than has been possible before recent years. Einstein’s prowess as an intellectual and a scholar is well-known. His closest relationships – with his sons, both of his wives, and his daughters – has not been well-known. What do we discover from this in-depth look at the man who helped set the course…
by Maxwell KingAudiobook Fred Rogers, a.k.a. Mr Rogers, grew up the son of a rich businessman, majored in music at college, got into television in the early years of NBC, studied at seminary to become a Presbyterian minister, started children’s television at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, and extended children’s television into education with PBS. He is fondly remembered as being extraordinarily patient with children just by being himself. A generation of children –…
Translated by Charles H. WrightFifth century C.E. Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was a British heathen-turned-missionary who spent his life “civilizing” or “Christianizing” the Irish. Though affiliated with the Roman church, Patrick was remarkably free of scholastic learning. As such, he represents a distinct wing of the church’s intellectual tradition. While the Western church was becoming other-worldly (and overbearing), Patrick and his Irish converts emphasized the worldly usefulness of faith. This confession was…
by Eric MetaxasCopyright (c) 2017.AudiobookMartin Luther’s life is controversial any way you cut it. Fundamentalists (with whom Metaxas is sympathetic) like to claim Luther as one of their own because of his insistence on Scriptural primacy. (They like to call it Scriptural authority, but such concepts were not present within Luther’s writings.) Liberals like to claim him because he broke free from institutional chains to usher in the freedom which founded to modern world. Unfortunately,…
by Mario BiagioliCopyright (c) 1993. This work, now considered the definitive treatment on the Galileo saga where he was silenced for arguing for the Copernican view that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, argues that the setting of Galileo’s story has never been well-considered. He was a courtier. He lived under the patronage of various rulers of his day and had to produce great wonders for them. As such,…
by Eric MetaxasCopyright (c) 2011.Audiobook. This book has been on my to-read list for a while, and it feels good to finally cross it off. Bonhoeffer’s story is worth sharing. Educated as a theologian, raised as a scientist under a German psychiatrist, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived his life in rejection of the German state-church which was coopted under Adolf Hitler. He is a reminder of what living a life in the Resistance is like. Along the…
by James GleickCopyright 2003 Sir Isaac Newton ranks among history’s greatest geniuses. For inventing modern physics. For overturning Aristotle’s hegemony upon thought. For co-inventing calculus (as an introduction to physics). For being more into theology and alchemy than physics. His treasure-trove of personal writings – kept hidden until near the middle of the twentieth century – show this man to be, like Luther before him, the last of the great medievalists who birthed the movement…
by Bertolt BrechtCopyright 1966 This book, as the introduction delineates, was originally written in Fascist Germany whose attitude towards science and knowledge in general paralleled the ignorance of the Papacy in Galileo’s era. Then in a post-atomic-bomb world with two superpowers on the brink, Brecht adapted this play into a new set of concerns about the “fruit” of knowledge. As such, in our era of Trumpian ignorance and North Korean nuclear ambition (two parties who…