2024-11-06
I’ve spent most of this fall with the Swiss reformers John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli.
Sometimes when I read a biography of a thinker, I get a new appreciation for their ideas. Situating them in the actual life and time they were born in gives them a vitality you can’t get from Wikipedia.
That did not happen with these two. I’m not sure how much of that is the author, who doesn’t seem particularly interested in the theological minutiae of the early reformation, and how much is the sources, who mostly kick in when the men have already developed their ideas rather than as they were forming them, but I didn’t come away with an appreciation for why they felt so strongly about the theological issues that seem so remote to us now. Imagine having a fight over how much art is in a church!
What I did take away from the books is an understanding for why Switzerland and the US feel so culturally similar.
Here is Gordon describing Zwingli:
His calls for religious freedom were coupled with demands for liberty from tyranny, both religious and political.
This then gets exported to England through Jean Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich. The English and Scottish reformed communities become very influential in the culture of the thirteen colonies. In a very real way, the cultural DNA of the US comes from the Swiss Alps.
One other thing that stood out: there was clearly a warmth and a charisma to the two men at the time that doesn’t translate. Both had large followings and deep relationships that inspired people to follow them through hardship. Calvin, as an example, taught lectures that were well attended and created many acolytes. They aren’t the austere caricatures that are passed down to us.
2024-07-22
Link to the book is here.
The first 10 chapters of this book are among my favorite reading experiences ever; terrifying, mysterious, creative. I wondered how the author was going to keep up that pace for the rest of the book.
Ultimately, he didn't. I'm not sure if it was possible for him to. Part of what made the beginning part of the book so enticing was wondering if miracles were actually happening or if they were just coincidences. At some point, the author had to make a choice and from that point forward everything got less interesting.
2023-09-20
I did my best with this book, but I couldn't make it through.
A Slave's Cause by Manisha Sinha is a history of the abolition movement.
I picked it because I was interested in understanding how slavery came to be abolished.. I am still interested in this topic, but one of my goals for the year is to be more willing to put away books that aren't holding my interest, so that's what I'm doing for now. This says more about me as a reader than it does about the author and the book. I'm sure I was not her target reader!
The book is fantastically researched. It seems like the author found every single person in the historical record that opposed slavery and told their story. There are so many people who gave so much to the cause.
My biggest takeaways from the portion of the book I read are:
- The sheer number of people across races that saw slavery as evil basically from the beginning. While viewing slavery as immoral was a minority position, it wasn't entirely uncommon.. People knew it was a bad idea.
- The tremendous dilemma slavery posed to people who did believe it was wrong and wanted to do something about it. A modern day challenge with some similarity might be trying to avoid anything with greenhouse gas emissions (obviously not a parallel on a moral level). I'm grateful to be born into an era where I don't have to confront this.
- The years of work, arguments, and missteps that went into abolition coming to be.
Perhaps I'll revisit this one in the future and if there is book written for more of a general audience that you know of, let me know as I'd happily start there.