100 Books Like Traces on the Rhodian Shore

This book has long been my go-to guide on all matters related to the relationship between science and religion. Its beauty is that it takes a cool, clear-headed look at the history of a subject that frequently stimulates more heat than light.

It’s now over thirty years old but has aged extremely well–certainly better than I have! I still find it illuminating on episode after episode. The connections are subtle and complex; Brooke never allows us to settle for comfortable simplicity. 

My admiration for this book knows no limits. Initially, I was put off by the title, but the subtitle says it all: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. I know of no other book that tells the remarkable story of the very idea that there’s something called ‘the humanities’ and how it emerged as a suite of disciplines in modern education.

In a book of this scope and scale, I find it stunning that the author seems to have included a witticism on every other page! 

What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.

What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?

What struck me about this book was its enigmatic subtitle: A Metabiography. Here, I encountered not a biography of the great Prussian scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt but a host of different Humboldts: Humboldt the liberal democrat, Humboldt the Aryan supremacist, Humboldt the anti-slavery Marxist, and Humboldt the pioneer of globalization.

What I discovered is that biographers construct their subjects in the image of their own time and place. This impressed me with two thoughts: that all scientific reputations are fundamentally unstable and that all of us are composed of multiple selfhoods.

So many Christian churches struggle over who ought to lead. Do female priests/pastors fulfill or discount God’s intentions? How does one know? Scripture? Tradition?

Macy digs into the long-term history and finds that women were clearly ordained in the early church, but evidence of that ordination has been erased or explained away. Women used to perform many duties that we associate with religious leadership today, including some sacraments.

Furthermore, some were ordained, receiving vestments, staffs, and mitres. Their gradual exclusion from their traditional roles happened over centuries and was virtually complete by the 13th century, as the Church redefined ordination in ways that excluded women and their ministries.

Then we rewrote the history to make it appear women had never been ordained. Again, no agenda here—just the history.

This is a wonderfully mind-expanding book which gently takes the history of philosophy that you think you know and turns it on its head. Most of the great critics of Christianity – Spinoza, Voltaire, Tom Paine, they’re all here – were not really, it turns out, atheists trying to tear it all up: they were idealistic, reforming believers who weren’t satisfied with churchy orthodoxies and wanted to purify religions that they thought had become corrupted. That made them maybe even fiercer in their criticisms, and it certainly meant they had unleashed forces they couldn’t control. But it means the moral force that drove anti-religious criticism during the Enlightenment was the desire, not to destroy religion, but to perfect it.

The study of angels became a natural outgrowth for me out of my study of Egypt. In the end, it is important to understand the consciousness of the metaphysical mind of the ancients as well as the moderns. This book offered me both.

I celebrate the way this book bridges the concepts of science and spirit. Quantum physics and quantum mechanics as ways I understand now as the building blocks of matter, mind, and creative imagination. I liked the way it challenged a materialistic and mechanical view of the world. To me, physics is applied magic. It had me thinking deeply about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the intersection of science and spirituality.

Although I adore both authors separately, this book went over the top in becoming a dialog between two seminal thinkers and philosophers.

Scholarly works that deal with the subject of near-death experiences in the history of religions are very rare.

This one also happens to be well-written, in a clear and accessible style. It contains a wealth of information about ideas of the afterlife in Late Antiquity that will be unfamiliar to even the most dedicated readers on the subject.

It’s also another great example of a rigorous, knowledgeable scholar concluding that visionary experiences such as NDEs contribute to the formation of afterlife beliefs.

By setting the context with chapters on “Journeys to paradise in the Jewish Apocalyptic tradition” and “Otherworld journeys in the Greco-Roman traditions,” Potthoff reminds us that Christianity did not develop in isolation but was one of various interlinked Mediterranean religions.

It also shows further how these kinds of beliefs and experiences are found around the world and throughout history. 

All who are convinced that the Middle Ages was a barbaric period in which emotions were on the whole angry and violent will quickly change their mind as soon as they pick up this book. It shows that, far from being a stagnant interlude between the richly emotional worlds of classical antiquity and our own age, the period we call the Middle Ages was in constant emotional ferment, drawing above all on the implications of Christ’s passion and what it meant for human sensibilities.

I was so surprised to learn from this book how little the Bible actually focuses on heaven and hell, given how much emphasis I heard about them growing up. This book is written by a historian and scholar of early Christianity, and I found his analysis of the history of thought on heaven and hell and modern ideas about the afterlife to be thoughtful and thorough.

This book really made me think about the Christian ideas of heaven and hell in a new way.