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I am jealous of the younger generation, not just for the obvious reasons (I don’t think I would get any further in those departments with a second chance than I did when I was twenty the first time around) but because some of the mostly historical questions I have spent a lifetime trying to answer are becoming the subjects of entire series of books. Twentysomethings can pick up the basics in a night or two of reading, and go from there.
I suppose Oxford’s Very Short Introductions would be one such series, but Princeton is inaugurating a series of what they call "biographies of religious books," meaning the history of the books since their first appearance—how the books have been interpreted and misinterpreted, what their historical impact has been in different time frames, how scholarship today interprets the books in question and their probable original meaning—and, in the case of such books as the Dead Sea Scrolls, their disappearance and subsequent rediscovery. (The Hermetic texts are not yet in the lineup of forthcoming titles in the series, but we can hope.)
In the first book in the series (if I’m reading the Princeton catalogue rightly) Donald Lopez expands upon his earlier remarks on how the Tibetan Book of the Dead is not Tibetan, not a book and not really about the dead, but has become the best-selling if not the best-known Buddhist text in the West. (Please, by the way, can we use “the West” and “the East” again? Folks in China and India back in the day thought of those countries over there as “the West” because they were not imaginatively projecting themselves right round the globe past an unknown America to “those folks over there in the Far East.” And globalists who write about today’s Turkey again “looking eastward” do not mean that the Ankara government is exploring opportunities on the coast of Oregon.)
Martin Marty follows up with a survey of the sixty-year impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, a book that was influencing nearly everyone in the boomer generation who wasn’t being influenced by the Evans-Wentz Tibetan Book of the Dead. (You can tell who they are initially marketing to.) Garry Wills matches this dynamic duo with his text on Augustine’s Confessions, with which he somehow manages to deal in a succinct 168 pages as against Lopez’s 192 and Marty’s 288. This is why Wills is sometimes considered one of the great stylists of our time (whether or not you agree with him) and Lopez and the rightly-honored Marty are not.
Princeton’s own Peter Schäfer writes, outside the series, on The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, summarizing a lifetime of research and arguing for the existence of overlooked mystical aspects of Jewish thought and experience between the Book of Ezekiel and the first manifestations of Merkabah (now apparently transliterated Merkavah) in late antiquity. This is the territory E. R. Goodenough was born a hundred years too early to deal with adequately, although his Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period will remain the most sumptuously designed and physically attractive discussion of the topic ever to be published. (I daresay most of the future discussions won’t even exist in offline media, much less be printed in large format with exquisite cloth bindings.)
I suppose Oxford’s Very Short Introductions would be one such series, but Princeton is inaugurating a series of what they call "biographies of religious books," meaning the history of the books since their first appearance—how the books have been interpreted and misinterpreted, what their historical impact has been in different time frames, how scholarship today interprets the books in question and their probable original meaning—and, in the case of such books as the Dead Sea Scrolls, their disappearance and subsequent rediscovery. (The Hermetic texts are not yet in the lineup of forthcoming titles in the series, but we can hope.)
In the first book in the series (if I’m reading the Princeton catalogue rightly) Donald Lopez expands upon his earlier remarks on how the Tibetan Book of the Dead is not Tibetan, not a book and not really about the dead, but has become the best-selling if not the best-known Buddhist text in the West. (Please, by the way, can we use “the West” and “the East” again? Folks in China and India back in the day thought of those countries over there as “the West” because they were not imaginatively projecting themselves right round the globe past an unknown America to “those folks over there in the Far East.” And globalists who write about today’s Turkey again “looking eastward” do not mean that the Ankara government is exploring opportunities on the coast of Oregon.)
Martin Marty follows up with a survey of the sixty-year impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, a book that was influencing nearly everyone in the boomer generation who wasn’t being influenced by the Evans-Wentz Tibetan Book of the Dead. (You can tell who they are initially marketing to.) Garry Wills matches this dynamic duo with his text on Augustine’s Confessions, with which he somehow manages to deal in a succinct 168 pages as against Lopez’s 192 and Marty’s 288. This is why Wills is sometimes considered one of the great stylists of our time (whether or not you agree with him) and Lopez and the rightly-honored Marty are not.
Princeton’s own Peter Schäfer writes, outside the series, on The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, summarizing a lifetime of research and arguing for the existence of overlooked mystical aspects of Jewish thought and experience between the Book of Ezekiel and the first manifestations of Merkabah (now apparently transliterated Merkavah) in late antiquity. This is the territory E. R. Goodenough was born a hundred years too early to deal with adequately, although his Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period will remain the most sumptuously designed and physically attractive discussion of the topic ever to be published. (I daresay most of the future discussions won’t even exist in offline media, much less be printed in large format with exquisite cloth bindings.)
