Where Dan Models True Scholarship

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues by Daniel McClellan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such a great book. Highly recommended. And not just for people interested in the Bible or the history of religion--but definitely for those guys, as well.

Dan is one of the best things to happen to the world during COVID. He has a wide web presence, but I know him from TikTok, and he's amazing over there. Everything he brings to this wide discussion on social media is present in this book, which is why I love it.

First of all, the topics here--whether god lies in the Bible, whether he had a wife in the Bible, what the Bible "says" about abortion or rape or Satan, and so on--are interesting to many of us. Even non-religious people are affected by the beliefs people hold on these topics, by the arguments they make about them, by the policies they support or oppose based on these beliefs. And for someone raised in a religious tradition, discovering that many things I thought were so were not so, actually--well, that's like finding a secret room in your attic or something. Surprising. Exciting. Strange. And Dan nails these topics, presenting amazing evidence from a wide variety of sources to support his positions.

But when you get down to it, the central theme of his writing is always "Data over Dogma," and that controls everything he puts out. It's not just "prove your point with better examples than the other guy;" it's more like "amend your belief to correspond to what is demonstrated by scholarship, whether or not it matches what you were raised to believe." Combined with that, he shows great restraint in his rhetoric, very rarely employing sarcasm or negativity even when *ahem* we all feel like he could. That is because, I think, he deeply believes in the worth of persons--even people he absolutely disagrees with. And in all his videos and writing, at every step, he demonstrates the way we might move forward in our divided culture if we agreed to interact in a more elevated, careful way. Showing respect to people he disagrees with is a powerful example. Standing with the disenfranchised and marginalized instead of the entrenched powers when the data is ambiguous is another. Taking care in his language to avoid offense is another. Dan doesn't want the conversation derailed by unkindness or anger. People come after him, but he doesn't take the bait emotionally.

Instead, he writes a great book.

There are surprising, fun things in this book. There is a ton of amazing research (from many people) and the best modern scholarship, all centered on exciting questions that I wanted answers to. All of that makes it worth reading, without doubt. The content is fantastic. But the example he sets here (and in regular life) is probably the bigger reason to look at this book. This is how academics should work. This is how we should talk to each other. This is how we incorporate new information into our lives, even if it contradicts things we always believed.

Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

Historical Action Romance

Omar Khayyam by Harold Lamb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Lamb is not an obscure ancient writer; he wrote mostly between the world wars and was well received at the time, here and in the Middle East where many of his novels were set. But I had never heard of him and only discovered him by accident.

Now I read his writing with keen interest.

He is primarily a historian and translator, but he's one of those uncommon scholarly men who can write an engaging novel based on all the history he knows. His characters are complex, his language is a nice mix of direct and figurative, his story moves along quickly, and even though he wrote 80 or 90 years ago, there's little sign of chauvinism or intolerance. He knows his settings and is clearly sympathetic to his subjects.

I thought Khayyam was a poet, and he is, but as I learned here he really was a brilliant scientist and mathematician. (Those who don't know should google him.) His polymath achievements remind me of Galileo and Copernicus other such geniuses who saw beyond the limits of their culture and religion, glimpsing deep truths that they couldn't safely show the rest of the world. Or they paid for it if they did. The book made me curious about the real man behind the story, and then it made me a fan. A thousand years too late, perhaps, but a fan still.

The story told here is a fictionalized imagining of Khayyam's life, as the records are too few to really know enough about him, but it's great multicultural story of adventure and love and courage, with war and Assassins (capital intended) and kings and fortunes. One could change a few names and imagine it to be pure historical fiction about an imaginary character and enjoy it that way, but the broad strokes of the story are true and the reality impressive. Details and action are invented, but the man was real. And so was his poetry, apparently.

The author demonstrates a soft spot for iconoclasts and pot-stirrers, but he also shows sympathy for the common man and is sensitive to believers in a way that is surprisingly modern. Omar Khayyam might mock the blindness of faith; the author does not. With the perspective of the historian, he describes and demonstrates without offering judgment. That's how it felt to me, anyway.

Recommended for readers of history as well as those who favor romantic adventure stories. The historical notes at the end are helpful for those like me who are interested.

View all my reviews

A Well-Known Religious Person (WKRP) Blows My Mind

God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you want to find an engaging book about religion written with clarity, objectivity, and audacity, find this book (or any other) by Reza Aslan. He does not disappoint.

God: A Human History is fairly short book, with almost half of its pages given to notes, but it is filled with big ideas, and it tells a story about religion in a way I've never seen before. I don't think anything here is original scholarship (thus the lengthy notes) but the book does a wonderful job of imposing narrative order on the chaos of the story of human religion. It explains the universal tendency toward certain spiritual beliefs, and the trajectory from seeing gods in all of nature to gods representing qualities or realms to, eventually, a single god--from animism to polytheism to monolatry to monotheism, by stages. It shows how pantheons are created, how gods rise and fall, how one god or another becomes preeminent among a people and even eliminates all others, and it all seems so obvious after he as explains it.

The description of the way gods are humbled when the people who worship them are defeated by another people worshipping another god was instructive; seeing how the Israelites, defeated and carried away into Babylonian captivity, overcame that setback by seeing their god a different way, a bigger way, was revelatory. (I remember learning about the Deuteronomic history of Israel way back in college, with punishment and reward for the nation depending on its righteousness, but this finally lets me take a step back so that idea makes sense to me historically, not just theologically.)

Though the author is a well-known religious person (WKRP), he writes with an academic's objectivity. His summaries of the stages of development in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so direct and clear and unflinching, unhampered by hand-wringing or apologies, that they not only answer questions I didn't realize I had, but they do so in a deeply satisfying way. Stories out of the Old Testament (for example) that I always understood in a poetic or metaphorical way now make sense in a literal way; Aslan shows how they can represent an earlier stage of thought, one superseded by later teachings (from monolatry to monotheism, or the blending of Yahweh and El, for example), and once they are seen that way it all adds up. Religion, like politics and economics and every other aspect of society, is understood then to exist in a historical context, telling a story of change over time.

There is a lot here that is new to me, new information which I found interesting and entertaining, but what I like most is the way he has made the history of religion into a coherent story. There is a clear trajectory (I removed "progression," because of its connotations) in the religious thought of humans, one that is driven by our makeup, and having it analyzed and spelled out is very illuminating and very satisfying.

Recommended for eye-opening clarity.

View all my reviews