What I’ve been reading

One again I rely on Tyler Cowen for book recomendation and this time I read Domination: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It seems like a crazy project to write a one volume book about the 2 000 year long history of Christianity, and clearly one have to make some tough decisions on what to include and not.

In this book the authors do a series of discrete leaps forward as they progress through history which is a way of allowing some depths without having to thread together a completely coherent linear narrative.

All in all I liked the book, it did teach me a few things, but perhaps not as much as I had hoped. My two main critiques however are: 1) It was very western Christianity centered, it did not talk enough about the eastern and African christian traditions in my opinion. Perhaps because the authors are pushing the narative that Christiany really did revolutionized the world, and did so multiple times, which of course it did not do in the east. So perhaps I will read some book about that, a subject which I find fascinating. 2) The second problem I have is with the end of the book, in paricular the last chapter when the authors stop being historians and instead do a kind of zeitgeist commentary. All the walk about The Beatles seemed quite out of place to be honest…

I think the major takeaway was how they emphasized how very protestant the modern secular western democratic societal order really is, and how hard it is for us to see it. Its the water we swim in etc. A point I guess many have made before, but still interesting to hear their take on it.