Recent Reads

I finished reading The Year of Living Biblically and really enjoyed it. I thought the author, A. J. Jacobs, did a good job of taking a fair and unbiased approach to his subject. One thing he pointed out, and it's something I've thought about before, is that even people who say they take the Bible literally don’t really do so. There are many things in the Bible that everyone pretty much agrees should be taken metaphorically. For example, “Ye are the salt of the earth,” clearly doesn’t mean that people are literally salt. Almost every person who looks at the Bible religiously will follow some rules and not others. How many moderns always wear white, for example, which is an injunction in Ecclesiastes?

Another book I’ve started reading is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is what I call an anti-theist and really doesn’t want folks to believe in God. It’s an interesting read so far, although far from a convincing one. Most of his arguments are statistical in nature, although the statistics could be used just as easily to counter his points. I’ll say much more about this eventually in a longer piece.

I also just finished Phillip Ellis’s poetry collection called The Flayed Man and Other Poems. Ellis is an Australian poet and this is the first collection of his I’ve read. It’s really tremendous, particularly “Deep in Darkness” and “Deep in the Midnight,” which are almost companion pieces. I highly recommend it, from Gothic Press.

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