Catholic Church - Bookwi.se

Takeaway: If you don’t know what good satire is all about, you have not read anything by Christopher Buckley.

Purchase Links: Hardcover, Paperback, Audible.com Audiobook

I hate abridged audiobooks. You never know what you really are missing, you just know something is missing. Is it a good part, a lousy part. Is it five minutes or three-quarters of the book?

But I also love Christopher Buckley. And I am running out of his books. I reserve them for reading emergencies, but that comes along about every 3 to 4 months. I am not sure what I will do when I run out. I have listened to all of the unabridged Christopher Buckley books. Now I am going to have to work through the abridged. I picked God is My Broker, both because it looked hilarious, and because it looks like it is out of print, so it is unlikely to ever get an unabridged audiobook. And it is not available on kindle.

The set up is that Brother Ty is a monk. He was an alcoholic Wall Street trader, but he got fired and ended up in a monastery. Now sober for a couple years, his monastery is facing financial problems when God starts giving him stock tips. His abbot is convinced it is the power of positive thinking from Deepak Chopra that is providing the money. But Brother Ty knows it is actually God.

As with all of Buckley’s humor, nothing is safe. This book targets self help books, Wall Street, the Catholic Church and a host of other likely targets.

In the end, what I like about Buckley, is that he know that ideas are nothing without a story. Buckley knows how to write a story with people that you care about, even those that are not the heroes.

If you care, this is one of the cleaner stories by Buckley, no sex, barely any language. A rated PG book.

Takeaway: All theology is really a responsive theology to the conditions around us.

Purchase Links: Hardback, Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook (If purchasing, you want to think about paperback or audiobook. Kindle is the most expensive option at $29.99)

The next section of this book switches back to the rise of the western church as it separates from the East. A good section is devoted to the work and writings of Augustine. Much of what we in the west think of as traditional theology really was originated or strongly developed by Augustine. Augustine, like most theologians was a pastor first and was responding to the needs of those around him. A significant need was a theological understanding of how a good God could allow Rome to be sacked. After all, Rome was the head of a Christian empire and it was being defeated by pagans (or in some cases Arian Christians). Other areas where Augustine significantly influenced theology were in the concept of the Trinity (he had the first definitive western work), the relationship of the church and the world in his City of God, but probably most important was his concept of grace and election in the context of depravity of humanity. For Augustine, sin transfer (depravity) was the result of the sexual transmission and birth process. It is not too strong to suggest that for Augustine, sin was a sexually transmitted disease in our modern understanding of the term. Tying sex, birth and sin together has had long term consequences for the western church.

This book has made Wikipedia my friend. I am frequently listening as I doing data entry or some other intellectually light tasks. And while I have a decent grasp of historical theology, I have made use of Wikipedia a number of times to get brief backgrounds on different heresies or theological trends being discussed. I had a class in grad school called, “Introduction to Christian Thought, 500-1300 AD”. In general I liked the class, but it was oriented to the thought, not the history that gave rise to the thought. This book might be too much the other way. In his attempt to cover an enormous amount of ground very quickly, this book focuses on the history and occasionally gives too cursory a look at the background of the thought as it is speeding through the history.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4