Reviews for Simple Blessings for Sacred Moments

The average rating for Simple Blessings for Sacred Moments based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-24 00:00:00 John Wilcut Karen Armstrong is a silly person who writes books about religion. She also appears to be a kindly soul, in a tea-and-crumpets sort of way, but she's still, I repeat, a silly person. In a recent Salon interview, she bemoaned the atheistic impertinencies of Bill Maher and Sam Harris, comparing the two men to Nazis for their criticism of Islam. 'It fills me with despair,' she said. 'This is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps.' Now, you don't have to be a fan of either Maher or Harris to see how insane that is. Never mind that a supposedly respectable writer has so airily breached Godwin's Law. Never mind that both men in question'a Hollywood liberal and a neuroscientist'are Jewish. And never mind that, unlike real Nazis, they're not inciting violence or threatening anyone. The question here is simple: are we allowed to mock and criticize religious dogma, or are we not? Are we allowed to say things like 'Islam [or Wicca or Scientology] is the mother lode of bad ideas,' or are we not? Armstrong's answer is a curt no. And if you do, you're obviously a Nazi. Armstrong's potshot represents an inconsequential skirmish in the culture wars, but it shows how imperfectly the whole Enlightenment thing has been assimilated by certain minds. If even a writer as sweetly reasonable as Armstrong claims to be can say such things, it means we've still got a ways to go before we beat down the old infâme. It's still out there, snarling and slavering and pulling at its chain. It's enough to fill you with despair, or some less melodramatic emotion. But what the hell does any of this have to do with a book about 19th-century France? Quite a bit, actually. Many of our ideological squabbles today, like the one described above, are faint and distant echoes of a much nastier brawl that roiled French society from about 1870 onwards. Reading For the Soul of France, you see some familiar conflicts being rehearsed'left versus right, secularism versus religion and so on'but with way more drama, bomb-throwing and duels. Although the political groupings were shifting and complex, Frederick Brown maps out the frontline thus: on one side, you had liberals and socialists fighting for a democratic and above all secular republic; on the other side, you had a lot of reactionary assholes. (That's a bit simplistic, obviously. To be more precise, the reactionary assholes included Catholics, royalists, and blood-and-soil nutjobs with a collective hard-on for Joan of Arc. Plus, of course, there were the inevitable drooling anti-Semites, but they didn't make up a group so much as trail their slime over all the other ones - including those on the left.) Summarized in this way, the book sounds like a bedtime story for liberals, with a Whiggish moral about the ultimate triumph of progressive ideas. And in fact, the narrative ends with the exoneration of Dreyfus and the official separation of church and state, lending a certain credibility to this reading. But as we know, history's not that tidy. The crazed nationalists and Jew-haters never went away; they bided their time, churned out their pamphlets, and gradually swelled the muddy little tributaries that fed fascism, finally getting their revenge in 1940. But that's another story - and one that Brown himself has recently told in a sequel. And in case you're feeling all Whiggish and bien pensant yourself, you should know that the French left also went completely insane for a few decades - but that's another story too, and I can only hope Brown is busy working on it. The blood feud that is French political history cries out for a trilogy, at the very least.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-18 00:00:00 P M S Dawson What surprised me about Frederick Brown's For the Soul of France was its relevance to the culture wars at the beginning of the 21st century in the United States. Both fin-de-siècle France and post-9/11 America shared a static view of their respective nations. In France's case, it was Judaism that was seen as the interloper, as symbolized in the Dreyfus affair. In the United States, large segments of the population look back to an Anglo-Saxon golden age in which Evangelical religion and conservative politics presumably held sway. Brown quotes one typical instance of Antisemitism:When in the spring of 1898, Joseph Valabrègue, a Provençal Jew tarred by the brush used against his brother-in-law Alfred Dreyfus, indignantly sent professions of patriotism to La Croix, the paper's official mouthpiece replied: "I am French, the son of a Frenchman; I shall live and die as such. But you, you are a Jew, the son of a Jew and you will die a Jew.... You know full well that all through history -- from Judas, who sold his God, to Dreyfus, who sold France -- your race has bred so much treason, iniquity, and rapacity that you must at all costs hide your name, as the escaped convict hides his red bonnet." In this ontological court, rules of evidence did not apply. Charles Maurras praised Roman Catholicism as a "temple of definitions" offering people blessed asylum from that bane of human consciousness -- "uncertainty."[Italics mine]One could imagine the same type of illogic being applied in political arguments at Tea Party gatherings. This is an excellent book about a period of European history that is largely unknown to most Americans. We may have heard of the Dreyfus affair, the Eiffel Tower, and the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal; but we don't have a real grasp about the decades-long war between Catholicism and liberalism, symbolized by scientists and Jews. Today, as the French are facing a much more substantive invasion of Muslims from Algeria and other parts of North Africa, much of the conflicts of that period have become moot.