Before the rite begins, the tribal elders dunk the ants into an herbal brew. Not to agitate them, but to anesthetize them. The agitating part comes later, after the sleeping ants are handwoven into a pair of gloves made from leaves and palm fronds. When the ants wake up, they’re angry and ready to attack whoever is wearing those gloves—a fact the young boys know all too well. During waumat, each boy must put on these gloves and face the pain as their first step to adulthood.
A straightforward book looking at the psychological benefits of and anthropological rationale for religious rites, particularly rites of passage, and arguing, contra the New Atheists, that people who practice a religious faith often end up mentally healthier for it. This is pretty much where my own prejudices are as well, so I found little to argue with.
DeSteno should for completeness have looked a bit more at how and why religious beliefs go wrong. There are plenty of sectarian conflicts around the world where the protagonists themselves believe that religion is a strong factor, whatever the underlying roots may be. And we see the poisonous effect of extreme religious views in the USA today.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next up on that list is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar.
Yet just as the books of the Tanakh reveal the process of creative responses to disappointment when they refocus prophecy, rethink the afterlife and steadily enrich their meditation on God’s purposes, there is much to recover from the history of second-century Christianity. It is a period in which Christian communities recovered from their trauma and reshaped themselves for new circumstances. We can gather enough fragments of evidence to show how radically diffetent from the first-century Christian groups the later Christian Church came to look: it created a canon of Scripture, credal statements and an institutional clerical ministry for its community life. The closing of the canon involved the exclusion of much of the apocalyptic literature which had formed the matrix of Judaism in the time of Jesus and his first followers; but the process was slow, and Christians never quite forgot this body of texts, or the climate of thought that it had created.
I enjoyed two previous books by Diarmaid MacCulloch, his magisterial History of Christianity and his collection of essays on the Reformation, All Things Made New. I’m sorry to say that this left me rather cold and I abandoned it after fifty pages. The problem is that the Bible itself is not about silence as such, and delving for what is said and meant about silence seems to me to be looking for something that isn’t really there; still more so when we get to the early Christian church and many patristic and earlier writings that I am unfamiliar with. MacCulloch is entitled to write the book that he wants to write and that his core readership wants to read. You can get Silence: A Christian History here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine.
I am at home today, and gave a lecture on global politics at the Irish College in Leuven this morning. I do that kind of thing fairly often, but today I had to change my usual script to take account of yesterday’s events.
Pope Leo XIV comes to power at a moment when the right wing of the Catholic church in the USA is being instrumentalised as part of the Trump MAGA movement, and some are choosing to interpret the papal election in that light. Cardinal Prevost was probably the least American of the American cardinals, and his social media record is one of clapping back at J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. But that really isn’t the place to start, and it probably isn’t even the important part.
What struck me, the moment that the new Pope opened his mouth, is that his Italian is fluent and (as far as I could tell) without an American accent. A little digging and I found that his paternal grandfather, Jean/John Prevost (1876-1960) was born in Turin, Italy, and ran a language school in Chicago; his grandson was only four when he died, but the Pope’s father Louis Marius Prevost (1920-1997) was also a teacher and school administrator. Perhaps in the multicultural neighbourhood of Denton, there was an opportunity for a bright kid to pick up on languages.
The Pope’s paternal grandmother Suzanne Louise Marie Fontaine (1894-1979) was from Le Havre in France. She and Jean were already married at the point that Suzanne moved to the United States in 1917, and moved to Chicago before the Pope’s father was born in 1920. Some sources suggest that Suzanne’s mother’s maiden name was also Prevost, which suggests that she and her husband Jean/John were related (and the fact that he was known as “Jean” suggests close French ties) but the evidence is circumstantial and ambiguous.
The Pope’s mother, Mildred Agnes Martinez (1911-1990) is described in press reports as of Spanish descent. This is not the whole truth. Her father, Joseph Norval Martinez (1864–1926), was born in Haiti shortly before his family moved to New Orleans, and her mother Louise Baquie (1868–1945) was a Seventh Ward Creole; both are recorded as “mulatto” along with the rest of their families in the 1870 census, but as “white” in the 1880 census, which demonstrates the social construction of race. “Martinez” is obviously a Spanish name, so describing Mildred’s ancestry as Spanish is convenient shorthand.
So although the Pope’s parents were both born in Chicago, his four grandparents were born in four different countries. That in itself doesn’t guarantee anything of course (Donald Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, and his father’s family were all first or second generation German immigrants) but it’s an interesting start.
(Also I wonder who the last Pope with a degree in mathematics was.)
But even before the new Pope opened his mouth to speak fluent Italian (and Spanish), an important signal came from his choice of name. People have been having a lot of fun with the more dubious historical popes who took the name Leo, notably Leo IX who is generally regarded as responsible for the Great Schism of 1054, and Leo X whose sale of indulgences for the construction of St Peter’s was one of the triggers of the Reformation. (Add also Leo VIII, who was Pope twice, though is officially regarded as having been an antipope first time round.)
The new chap is too smart not to be aware of these, but for today’s Vatican the most recent Leo is the most important. Leo XIII became Pope just before his 68th birthday in 1878, and ruled for 25 years. Leo XIV is 69 and looks in good shape, and one message from his choice of name is that he expects to be around for a good while. I myself just turned 58; it’s weird to think that the next Pope will probably be younger than me. (And the one after certainly will be.)
Leo XIII pulled the church past the traumas of the unsuccessful conservatism of Pius IX, who had catastrophically lost the Papal States to the new Kingdom of Italy. He reopened the Vatican observatory and insisted that science and religion should coexist. But he is particularly remembered for Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical which commits the church to the amelioration of “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.”
Leo XIII was not a socialist – indeed Rerum novarum was very much an anti-socialist document. But it was a conscious effort to position the church on the progressive side of political discourse, and it’s the intellectual basis for the more centrist European tradition of Christian Democracy (which has been rather weaker of late). I think it’s fair to describe Leo XIII as the least right-wing Pope since the term “right-wing” acquired political meaning. The new guy’s choice of the same name is a strong indicator that he’s heading in a similar political direction.
These things are relative of course. Leo XIII criticised Irish Nationalism, which certainly puts him on the wrong side of history. Leo XIV is, to put it politely, on a personal journey with regard to LGBTQ+ issues; though better informed observers than me find the initial signs encouraging.
Incidentally the speed of the election shows that the media narrative of the strength of the hard-line right-wing factions among the College of Cardinals was overblown. There is no way that Leo XIV can be regarded as anything other than the continuity candidate for Francis, breaking the traditional cycle of alternation between moderates and conservatives. The cardinals would have been very aware that voting for the man who selected Francis’s bishops was not going to turn the clock back, and it took them roughly 24 hours of actual voting time to get there.
One other thing to mention is that a couple of years ago I connected with my second cousin once removed Christopher Lamb, whose great-grandmother was my grandfather’s sister. He is now CNN’s Vatican correspondent, so he’s had three of the most significant weeks of his career since Easter Monday.
For myself, having been brought up Catholic, I have very much drifted away from the church in recent years. However I did attend the 1 May service at our local chapel last week. This place of ancient devotion celebrates just four masses a year, on 2 February, 1 May, 15 August, 1 November and 25 December; the ancient quarter days (Lammas shifted by a fortnight) and Christmas. The May ritual is dedicated to the Mother of Christ, whose statue miraculously appeared on the site in the late middle ages (and was stolen in 1974). Its replacement presides over the open air Mass (in good weather, which we had last week). Devotional hymns are sung.
The chapel is located right beside a holy well, and across the valley from two once-grand Bronze Age burial mounds. 1 May is Beltane in the old Celtic calendar, or Walpurgis Night here, when fires were lit to ward off evil and greet the turning of the seasons. So the candles lit by the congregation last week, and the procession around the Zoete Waters (sadly drained dry for maintenance at the moment), were part of a cycle of annual commemoration on or near that spot that probably goes back well before Christianity. I enjoyed the feeling of connection to the history of this place and this time of year.
Unexpectedly the service was a moment of geographical as well as historical connection. Under the late Pope Francis, the People’s Republic of China and the Church negotiated a reset of relations, though the process of appointing bishops is still a matter of dispute. (Hmm, and remind me who was staffing the Vatican side of that dispute until yesterday?) I know I keep saying this, but the rise of China is the central geopolitical fact in today’s world. Leuven has a long connection with China going back to Ferdinand Verbiest, and twenty visiting Chinese priests were in the congregation along with us locals. During the procession they belted out Chinese hymns.
The church’s central problems remain the same – falling numbers of worshippers, decreasing relevance, appalling failure to come to terms with the abuses of the past. I tend to think that if the answers can be found, it will be by looking forward and outward rather than backward and inward; and I am pleasantly surprised to find that the College of Cardinals (or at least two thirds of it) takes the same view.
It has long been traditional to group together certain books in the Bible under the heading ‘wisdom’: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, and in the Apocrypha, Sirach or the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon.¹ All these books contain many short sayings or aphorisms, summing up the fruits of experience or giving explicit advice on how to behave. Many seem to reflect life in a village or small community, and draw ‘morals’ from activities such as farming:
The field of the poor may yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice. (Proverbs 13:23)
Like vinegar to the teeth, and smoke to the eyes, so are the lazy to their employers. (Proverbs 10:26)
The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel. Those who till their land will have plenty of food, but those who follow worthless pursuits have no sense. (Proverbs 12:10-11)
Many of these proverbs are paralleled in other cultures, and could be seen as part of a popular understanding of the world, like our own ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ or ‘Look before you leap’.
¹ Excellent guides to biblical wisdom literature are J.L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, third edition 2010), and Katharine J. Dell, Get wisdom, Get Insight: An Introduction to Israel’s Wisdom Literature (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000).
A really fascinating, detailed book about the sacred text of Christianity and Judaism, starting at the very beginning with the compilation of the older parts of the Old Testament, and finishing with the most recent translations for today’s audience. Too much information to synthesis crispily, but it puts lots of things together that I had not really thought about, for instance:
There are lots of manuscripts for the New Testament, but the accepted version of the Hebrew Old Testament largely depends on a single eleventh-century manuscript, the Leningrad Codex.
Syriac, the first language into which the New Testament was translated, is the local version of Aramaic used in Edessa (now Şanlıurfa) – I had always been a bit confused about this. Aramaic was certainly Jesus’ native language, but he would have spoken the Galilean dialect.
The story of the woman taken in adultery is a very late addition to the Gospel of John. (Incidentally one of the few gospel passages that mentions writing.)
Leaping forward, translating the Bible can be a crucial step in codifying a language; alongside Luther’s impact on German you could add Jurij Dalmatin’s impact on Slovenian, for instance.
I think even non-Christians will find quite a lot of interesting stuff in this account of one of the world’s most important literary artefacts. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next in that list is Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi.
Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote it introduces):
There is great significance in having water at the entrance to this cathedral [Salisbury], for in Christian theology the water of baptism serves as the door through which every Christian enters not just the faith but the whole Christian community, past, present and future. For the Bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, the baptismal waters are the very ‘water of life’ itself:
“They purify us. It’s about the journey to the Promised Land, passing through the waters of the Red Sea. We come out the other side of the font, as it were, and into the nave of the cathedral, where the community gathers to celebrate the Eucharist. We’re called individually, but we gather together. And this is about the whole church, not just this cathedral. Becoming a Christian, you are baptised into the worldwide church so that, belonging here, you belong in all times and all places.”
A lovely book, based on a BBC Radio series of the same name, lavishly illustrated (as the radio cannot be) with photographs of art and architecture, and enriched by quotes from commentators who know what they are talking about. Some people like to simply dismiss religion as at best a distraction and at worst a force for conflict and division; MacGregor doesn’t shy away from that side of things, but he goes deep into what religious people are actually doing – symbolism, practice, history, politics. He draws some very interesting parallels between religions separated by continents and centuries.
I found it a very healthy perspective on what is and isn’t unique to each of the main strands of world belief. It’s also a surprisingly light read, despite its length and weight, perhaps because of its origin as radio scripts. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was top of my pile of books acquired in 2018. Next there is The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton.
