Through the years, it’s been a privilege to hold library cards in states where I didn’t live. I got one on a visit to the New York Public Library and another in Louisville, when I was teaching at SBTS (while living in Chicago and then Nashville). Recently, I’ve enjoyed my second Kentucky card, this one from Henderson, Kentucky, where I served FBC as interim pastor. One day, I was particular taken by a display of new acquisitions, and I grabbed a handful: 

The Islam Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained—(This is a DK book with multiple contributors.) Christianity and Islam was this year’s theme for the Evangelical Theological Society. My paper was “Epistemological Victories in the Wake of 9/11,” an overview of the unattractive things we’ve learned about that faith as it’s come under close scrutiny in the decades following the destruction of the WTC towers. Though President Bush diplomatically (and naively) declared it a “religion of peace,” it’s proven to be more jihadish than that. (For instance, I discovered when writing, for Baptist Press, a tenth anniversary piece on the attack, that in the previous three months, there was at least one Islamic terrorist incident to go with virtually each letter of the alphabet, from Abujah, Nigeria, to Zarqa, Jordan. 

While working on my ETS paper, I came across this DK book and gave it a look. Not surprisingly, it was more of a “happy talk” overview of the faith and its history, with a lot of the rough edges sanded down. For instance, their glossary says that ‘Dhimmi’ refers to a “Protected person,” one is who is living in a non-Muslim state and is “given legal protections.” Well, yes. But it doesn’t say from whom they are being protected, and what the criteria for inclusion in that group might be. Turns out, dhimmitude is available, when it is available at all, only to “people of the Book” (namely Christians and Jews, and not to Hindus, animists, Baha’is, etc.) under certain conditions. Traditionally, conquered peoples (and there were many, from India to Iberia, from Nubia to the Balkans) were given three choices: 1. convert; 2. die (or flee); or 3. pay an annual tax and submit to various social strictures on their faith. So yes, dhimmis were protected, but it was purchased protection from the state itself, not unlike the protection money one pays to the mob. Learning that has been one of the “epistemological victories” many have enjoyed since September 11, 2001. 

Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome—I didn’t know that Alaric I—later called a Visigoth, or “Western Goth,” in contrast with the Ostrogoth, or “Eastern Goth”—served under the (at least nominally) Christian emperor Theodosius before leading a breakoff group who sacked Rome in 410 AD. Since the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in 327, the strength and power of the church had grown dramatically throughout Italy, so much so that, in 380, it became the only legal option in Rome . . . and so much so that, in 390, Bishop Ambrose of Milan successfully barred Theodosius from access to the Lord’s Table on account of his horrendous behavior in war. (He had ordered the massacre of thousands of Thessalonian residents.) The emperor was required to make a public confession of his sin and issue the order than no such slaughter would be tolerated in the future. (It’s a story we covered through “Church Discipline for the Emperor” at kairosjournal.org.) Boin’s book features a dramatic Rubens painting of this church-door confrontation. 

Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British Did To India—The author, who is proudly Hindu, takes great pains to defame the British while only grudgingly noting their positive contributions, such as the introduction of newspapers and a free press. To be sure, he brings up many serious offenses, including the betrayal of India’s expectations that their massive involvement in World War (with over a million serving alongside British troops and over 70,000 being killed), would open the way to self-rule. But I was struck by how little credit he gave to reforms when they might prove an embarrassment to his own faith. He says that “the caste system became more rigid under the British,” and that while sati (the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) and the thuggees (ritual robbers and murderers who did their evil deeds in honor of the goddess Kali) were suppressed, the “British interfered with social customs only when it suited them to do so.” (Tell that to missionary William Carey, who played a prominent role in the fight against widow-burning.) How unfortunate that those thuggish Brits interjected their selfish selves into such a Hindu wonderland.

Ellis Cose’s Color-Blind (Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World)—The title is misleading, for Cose dismisses those who cling to the ideal of “color-blindness,” which they thought they heard in MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Cose argues that the character-not-color trope was just a first step and that we must fight “the tendency by jurists, politicians, and others to confuse color blindness with blindness to discrimination (and the continuing effect of past discrimination). . .” Though Cose poses as one above the fray, as an arbiter between two types of error— between devotees of "race relations hell and race relations utopia,” as the book jacket has it—he basically serves up his version of the proper race obsession.

Crystal M. Fleming’s How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide—This is a terrible book, full of vile, contemptuous, and really stupid takes on stupidity. Of course, it’s precisely what we’ve come to expect from the practitioners of critical race theory and relentless identity politics, but with a special sauce, unaffected and gratuitous deployment of F and S bombs. It’s funny to see her hack on Obama for throwing Jeremiah Wright under the bus and on Biden for his racially scandalous remarks. But the total effect is depressing, not only for Crystal’s sweeping and relentless hauteur, snarkiness, eye-rolling exasperation, and hysteria, but also for the less-than-surprising confirmation that folks like this can find a legacy publisher (Beacon, run by increasingly “liberated” Unitarians since 1825) and a tenured university position (at SUNY/Stony Brook, where she is “associate professor sociology and Africana studies”). In the end, by her lights, you’re pretty much a waste of DNA if you don’t dance to her hateful tune. Shame on Beacon. Shame on SUNY.

Sam Harris’s Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity—Sam Harris is one of “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheism, along with Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. But he’s a voice worth hearing. This particular book features transcripts of eleven podcasts, one of which engages Brown University economics professor, Glenn Loury, a black man who’s not buying the deliverances of the liberal darling, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Loury calls a “pornographer of race, a person who mistakes his own psychological problems for the state of the world.” It’s a thoughtful exchange, with consideration of “laissez-faire racism,” the citation of good reads (e.g., Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside), and the foolishness in thinking that respectful passivity when stopped by the police is tantamount to servility.