On “The United States and Britain in Prophecy” by Herbert W. Armstrong ****

I have not read this book since I was a teenager, and I was expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed, as I was with Armstrong's book on the millennium, but this one turned out to have a lot more heft than I anticipated. I remember, at the time I first read it, feeling like the author did an incredible job with the biblical material but that it wasn't too detailed when it came to the historical basis for the theory; that was my impression this time as well. But the book this time left me with a desire to go read up more on the subject historically to see the degree to which the biblical interpretation is accurate—and that's a good thing.

Having grown up being taught the these two countries forge the heart of ancient Israelite migrants, I find that my worldview, even today, to a large degree still falls back on that, even if I've had a few doubts through the years. I would say “it seems to be true,” but it's not a salvation issue. If the understanding is wrong, then in the end, it doesn't take away from the most important truths of scripture. (After all, I've heard other claims, that, for example, Japan is ancient Israel. I haven't looked into such with any seriousness, but I didn't grow up with such a theory either, so it's not where my mind first goes.) Rereading this book, however, made me see, as I noted, that there's a lot more reason to believe such might be the case biblically than perhaps I've recently thought much about.

The issue is, of course, that most modern scholars disagree with the historical thesis and that there are some good reasons for that. The number one reason is that the theory seemed to have found its greatest popularity during the height of British colonialism—that is, it was a way to justify certain racist views. It was, in other words, propaganda for Manifest Destiny and the like. So it is fair to be skeptical. At the same time, it is perhaps unfair to dismiss such ideas out of hand just because of their misuse. What one really has to do is go look at what really happened, insofar as that is possible. Most contemporary scholars are wary to do that in part because of the associated tropes. And so much of the history I've read through the years that ties the lost tribes of Israel to modern nations has been quite sketchy, based on similarities of names and the like—a possible coordinating fact but hardly strong proof around which to base an entire thesis–rather than really tracing the movements of peoples. More reading on the subject would go far in helping me see how such conclusions can be reached. But few serious scholars give the theory much time.

The last chapter of the book, alas, made me uneasy. It's the chapter where the author really lets readers know the troubles that are coming for these nations and pushes readers to join the church the author is associated with in order to escape. I suppose I can't argue with a sincere call to repentance, assuming that's what's going on, and as I see my country literally falling apart now, I can't help but think the author was right in that regard. But the chapter reminded me of many of the nightmares from my childhood, and the appeal to fear and to join one particular group is not something I am completely comfortable with now; it suggests to me these days a kind of insincerity. Repent, yes, but if it's just to save one's own skin and the key is joining one particular organization, something seems a bit off. I don't think a bunch of people just looking to save themselves is what God is after. I'm reminded of what someone said to me shortly after 9/11, namely that they were thinking of returning to church because they were scared of what was going to happen to them. I suppose fear can be a motivating factor for getting one back to doing the right thing, but if that's the whole motive and remains the motive, it's hardly a life of joy and such a choice is not likely to stick. And indeed, that person did not.

On “Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen ***

I took a step back fifty years or so to add this text to my economics list, given that it shows up on so many lists of classic econ works. Veblen wrote at the height of the Gilded Age—and also at a time when evolutionary theory was making its way into social theory as well. The influence of evolutionary thought is all over this work, and in a way I think it rather harms much of Veblen's theory, which seems very focused on materialism, even though there are aspects of the theory that potentially enlightening.

The gist of the argument is that power and prestige is assigned within communities by the ability one has to live a leisurely life. This leisure is largely shown through one's ability to consume time and money conspicuously—indeed, wastefully. Only the lower classes, the less powerful, have to use their time and money to meet their basic needs. So far so good, but I have difficulty with who Veblen puts into this leisure class category, which is essentially anything having to do with government work or religion. In his view, it seems that unless you're actually making things or growing things, you are conspicuously consuming in terms of the work that you are doing. There is no value to helping to keep society on a moral keel. I guess in Veblen's view, such would take care of itself.

Chapter 1 begins with primitive humanity. Primitive society is more peaceful because people have no time to fight (right here, already, Veblen throws me—people fight over resources all the time; it's not like the poor are immune from such). As one moves toward barbarism, which is a step up from primitive life, one introduces social classes. The higher leisure class is made up of warriors, priests, government, and sport, and it is based around the idea of doing exploits, which give you esteem and power. Intellectual work also places one into this leisure class.

In chapter 2, Veblen notes how the importance of exploits is replaced by an importance in property ownership, as a society advances. Slaves and women are the first property, along with land and eventually goods. The more you own, the more respect you have. Interestingly, Veblen notes, this is why no amount of property is ever enough. I find this latter idea to make some sense. Even contemporary studies show that people tend to be satisfied with less as long as they have more than others around them. Since there is always someone with more somewhere, even the very rich compete to acquire more and stay on top.

The leisure class, that is, the upper class, chiefly engages in nonproductive activity, which can include studies of the occult, dead languages, and grammar, and upholding good manners. As one advances in class, conspicuous consumption is abedded by moving not only one's self into the nonproductivity but also one's spouse and even one's servants (becoming butlers, and so on).

Also as society advances, leisure time is replaced by consumption of goods, especially goods with less use and more expense (think, in modern parlance, brand-name goods). Even lower classes can get in on this action in an attempt to prove a higher status.

In chapter 5, Veblen discusses how hard people will work to remain in a higher class. It is harder, psychologically, to move down classes than up. Because everyone is trying to be like the higher classes, eventually upper-class standards move down into the lower—thus, manners and the like get transferred downward. Veblen especially criticizes scholars, who although usually poor like the lower classes, put on airs to attempt to fit in with the upper class.

Conspicuous consumption goes to the heart of such attempts. One will buy stuff to make one's self seem sophisticated—often stuff that is actually less useful than another option. Thus, handmade stuff is preferred to machine made. We like special editions of books rather than books that are just as good (in terms of info inside and quality of the production) but less expensive.

In chapter 7, Veblen looks at dress in light of this and at the way fashions change just so that we'll seem up to date and sophisticated.

In chapter 8, Veblen returns to evolution, arguing that the leisure class is actually more conservative. Because it does not depend on the society at large, it can be aloof to changes going on and thus doesn't evolve with society. (This seems somewhat counter to the chapters previously, as consumption would suggest actually sticking with trends. I think Veblen is more focused on political and environmental trends here, however. But one has to wonder where the political trends come from? Do they not derive from laborers/producers, who supposedly don't have time to think or to do anything but work?)

This argument sets up chapter 9, where Veblen notes that there are basically two kinds of people: peaceful primitives and barbaric predatory. The leisure class is largely the latter. It is selfish and indvidualistic, while the primitive is community oriented. I'm getting a kind of communist anarchist vibe from this argument, which again I think just misunderstand human nature.

Chapter 10 discusses sports as a leisure activity that shows off exploits while doing nothing of actualy consequence.

Chapter 11 focuses on gambling, which Veblen sees as more conspicuous consumption. The issue I have here, however, is that this is not an activity confined to the upper class. Indeed, the poor often have more reason to gamble, which again goes against his argument. Veblen then notes that those involved in sports and gambling also tend to be more religious, which again I take issue with. He halfway had me through the first seven chapters of the book, but as his argument continues on, the more absurd it seems.

Chapter 12 discusses religion as conspicuous consumption, as it renders no material product. Instead, it uses up resources for valueless items: church buildings, special clothes, and so on. In the mechanical age, the middle classes fall away (especially men), as it is a waste of time. The poor stick to it because they lack resources to change in response to modern circumstances. Meanwhile, the richest take on religion as a means of showing off their wealth—religion becomes bound up in spectacle (as in ancient Rome, I suppose: I sponsor some grand thing and put my name on it). But again, these ideas seem contradictory. If the higher classes are what everyone is aiming for, why would the middle class give up religion while the upper class continues in it? Wouldn't everyone be aspiring to be like the rich, as Veblen earlier argued?

In chapter 13, Veblen discusses the counterforces to the leisure class. As some grow tired of conspicuous consumption, they aim for a more substantive life, one that involves actually producing things. Women especially grow tired of being simply a conduit through which men show off their wealth.

Finally, chapter 14 ends the book with a discussion of how higher education is a form of conspicuous consumption, as it produces nothing but knowledge for knowledge sake. Veblen is especially critical of humanities. Science, based in the practical arts, has invaded this realm, bringing the laborng class into the colleges. Science advances society and moves away from the social order established among the leisure class, while humanities is inherently selfish because it produces nothing of value.

On "Wealth in Ancient Ephesus" by Gary G. Hoag *****

I found this scholarly volume immensely interesting. Hoag does a close reading for select passages from the first letter to Timothy alongside a review of Xenophon of Ephesus's Ephesiaca. By doing so, he provides a new way of interpreting many of the passages in the biblical letter. Some readings seem more convincing than others, but no matter, one comes away feeling as if one knows Timothy much better in its context.

Xenophon's work has historically been placed a century or two after Timothy, but as Hoag notes, more recent scholars now see it as being written at about the same time, which allows for the parallel reading. Hoag examples specifically attitudes toward wealth in Timothy and how those attitudes compare with those of the Ephesians and others who would have read Xenophon's tale.

The tale involves a young couple who meet at a festival for Artemis. Because they don't properly respect the goddess, the goddess banishes them to some hard times before they are allowed to return, more humbly, to Ephesus as the loving couple that they are.

In the most convincing of his arguments, Hoag examines how the work links up ideas about femininity in comparison to what the author of Timothy writes about women. Some odd statements are made in Timothy, but they fit very well when one reads them in light of the mythology surrounding Artemis. There seem to be very good reasons that the author of Timothy discusses childbirth and the creation, beyond just these being biblical stories.

Hoag's arguments regarding false teachers, benefactors, and wealth are a bit less convincing, but they are still intriguing ways to read the letter. I say they're less convincing not because they aren't good arguments but because the standard reading of the letter--that the author is dealing with some kind of proto-gnostic set of teachers--still makes sense. In other words, although Hoag makes a strong case that the enemies of the writer could be wealthy Ephesian worshipers of Artemis, he doesn't quite convince me that the other possibility doesn't make sense. So really, he simply adds to the way that one could read such passages. But this is by no means a bad thing.

On “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek ****

This author was recommended to me by someone who found out I was doing an economics reading list. I was not really looking forward to this work, as it Hayek was someone I'd never heard of and he seemed more of a minor figure such that reading him would take from others I would otherwise read as part of this list. When I read a bit about him, I was even more put out; he sounded like a huge right-wing, free-market capitalism fan, for which I already had a few such books on my list. I figured Smith and Marx to be enough in terms of older classics, Keynes and Galbraith for moderns, and then the rest would be applied and contemporary.

And indeed, as I started out on this book, Hayek's hit me in a lot of wrong ways. He seemed just too big a fan of the free market without any sort of government oversight. But as I read further, he made more and more sense—and he also seemed at times to contradict himself. That is, he seemed very heavy on avoiding government intervention in the economy, but then would backtrack and say that some intervention was okay. In some ways, it reminded me of the way Elizabeth Warren claims to be a friend of capitalism—but only capitalism done the right way.

What Hayek's book is really doing is arguing against socialism—whether on the right or the left. He was writing near the end of World War II, when the troubles that had risen to the fore in Germany with the National Socialists were very apparent. And he was fearful, he notes, that too many other nations, such as the United States and Britain, were drifting toward the same sort of socialist frenzy under the inane idea that socialism solves problems and creates a more equitable society. (He notes that this is actually more a book on politics than on economics, which seems true, save the economics has much to do with his political views.)

Here's where Hayek's big critique of such thinking really gives one much to ponder. He notes that when the government imposes its will on the forces of the market in the name of providing equity, it denies freedom to the people it rules. A planned economy essentially means that certain people will not be able to do as they wish, be it start a particular type of business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. In that sense, socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism. In this way of thinking, I would have to agree. The problem, of course, is that simply letting the market dictate things doesn't necessarily lead to a greater amount of freedom; that's because when a private corporation corners a market, now it's just the private corporation that dictates one's ability to start a new business, sell a particular item, or do a particular job. Which are you going to ask to control your fate? Hayek doesn't spend much time on this latter possibility—except he does at some point note the problems with monopolies. In that sense, he seems to imply that ultimate economic freedom for people can only exist when we are talking about small-time capitalists, not multinationals that control the fate of millions. And in that, too, I would agree, save that some industries require such an outlay of capital that they are impossible to run with such a small footprint. The guy down the street cannot decide that he's going to start building commercial airplanes with a small savings or a small loan; there are reasons there are really only a couple of viable commercial airplane manufacturers. In those sort of endeavours, it seems we really do have to fall back on either government involvement or a near monopoly.

And just as one thinks Hayek is espousing total free markets, he pulls back, admitting in places that the government does have a role to play. It is there to keep markets fair (this is where I thought of Warren), so that fraud and monopoly don't twist the market in ways that remove opportunity for everyone. He even at some point notes that the government should be involved in health care, which seems very much more of a socialist kind of argument in many people's views. Once the government starts getting involved in such things, it seems, it warps the market—that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's really a matter of the tradeoff one is willing to make, where one is willing to cede authority and freedom in the hope that a central-planning bureaucrat will be able to do better. I wouldn't want to live completely at the whim of the free market, nor would I want to live totally under the thumb of a government decision maker. Where that balance is is hard to say.

A late chapter in the book discusses a kind of world government. There, he argues against a socialist world government, noting that were we to have such, certain nation-states would insist on cornering the market in certain areas. There would not be the sharing of resources as one would hope. Instead, there would be resentment, the keeping down of certain nations and of the development of their own industries. Instead, he advocates a kind of world government that instead of mandating things would simply prohibit certain things—what sounds to me in some ways what would become the United Nations. One nation, for example, cannot invade another, lest all the other nations then unite to keep such an invasion from happening. Thus, we would have peace. Of course, the issue with this is apparent from the lack of success the UN has had. I mean, it requires other nations to be willing to sacrifice to stop another nation from taking advantage of others. But beyond that, what's the difference between a prohibition and a mandate? On some level, are they not similar things? If we refrain from mandating that a nation provides a living wage to its citizens, but prohibit a nation from starving its people, what's the difference?

Anyway, in the end, I'm glad Hayek was recommended to me. I found it particularly interesting reading in our current times.

On “Cold-Case Christianity” by J. Warner Wallace *****

After hearing an interview with the author, I'd been looking forward to reading this for probably a few years and finally got ahold of a copy. It was worth the wait. Granted, the early going portions of the text were a bit disappointing, but as Wallace moves deeper into his arguments, the case gets more and more compelling. There isn't much that is necessarily suprising; it's all basic Christian apologist argument, but Wallace is pretty thorough.

What the author does here is essentially discuss how the manner in which one goes about solving a criminal case based on evidence and testimony actually fits well with what evidence has been left for us in the Bible about Jesus's life and work. He starts early on by discussing the basic argument that skeptics have against the Bible: namely, that miraculous/supernatural events do not compute with what we understand about the known world. Indeed, if one is a materialist, that is the end of the conversation right there. But Wallace claims that witness testimony of the supernatural can't be disregarded, especially when there are so many witnesses. For my own self, I've been somewhat skeptical of the idea that our five senses explain everything about the world around us; it seems a bit bold to try to claim that all knowledge can be gathered from the “physical” world; there might well be things that we can't see/hear/touch/smell/feel that are real and existent. As such, one can't necessarily dismiss all things that don't fit with our material limitations, even if there is nothing we can glean about things outside of them without some sort of revelation. But we can see, as Warner himself notes in one chapter, the material results of such supernatural power—that is, one chapter is devoted to the creation, wherein Wallace essentially runs down the various well-trodden arguments for creation versus some other less than satisfactory argument for the origin of life and the universe. But in that sense, the book, in its earliest chapters, where it's running through these well-rehearsed arguments alongside his police life, the book seems a little predictable.

The deeper in Wallace gets, however, the more intriguing the work becomes. That's because he begins to summarize some ideas that are somewhat less explored in standard apologetics and theological works, and he does it in a way that is very much easy for a lay reader to understand. I recognized some of the scholarly work that I've seen others write in Wallace's text, but made much more accessible. Some of that work is in books I've managed to check out of the college library, but said books are at such high academic prices I'll never likely purchase a copy; now, I have those arguments, scriptures, and quotes in Wallace's book, and it's nice to have those summations put into such easy to access form. I especially enjoyed section 2 of the book, where he is as much talking about being a detective as he is about examining the evidence. His main point in this section is that, yes, one can still argue other things about the evidence presented, but are those arguments the most logical? the simplest? I think Wallace presents a good point here. We can accept the evidence handed down to us; that is in fact the simplest explanation for all that we know about Jesus. Or we can, by contrast, settle on something that is much harder to defend, some sort of conspiracy theory. It doesn't fit the evidence as well or as simply, but if one is a materialist, such an argument fits with the world one knows. It's really a matter of which one you're going to choose.

On “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” by John Maynard Keynes ***

I was looking for a book by Keynes for my economics reading list and chose this one. It wasn't quite what I was looking for insofar as it didn't really seem focused on what folks call “Keynesian economics.” Then again, I didn't really want some really scholarly text, and that was one main reason I settled on this one: because it was, I read, intended for a popular audience. By that, however, the “popular” audience was very much that of its day. There wasn't much in here that I felt invested in in our day.

That said, the book is an interesting snapshot of one of the concerns of its day, and in it, one can see that Keynes had some foresight. The text largely criticizes the conditions of the peace treaty coming out of World War I, one that was very draconian in the manner in which it treated Germany and that was not in keeping with the assurances Germany had been given when it surrended. He shows how the punishment, the payment forced on Germany by the winners of the war, was unsustainable. It took away chunks of land that Germany had had, some indeed of the most productive land. It asked Germany to repay based on a degree of production that it was incapable of, especially without that land. And it rewarded nations that were not as damaged by the war as certain others and that could have likely sustained the losses—namely Britain and in turn the United States (which Britain was indebted to and thus was repaying), as opposed to nations like France, which suffered much more substantial losses and whose payment was likely more justified.

The result, Keynes hints, is one that is actually not going to resolve issues that it hopes to resolve and instead is likely to lead to the renewal of hostilities, because the German population is not going to be willing to be taxed into poverty for war debt with no end in sight. Such are the arguments, and such, of course, is what came to be.

On “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx ***

Das Kapital isn't available in English on Project Gutenberg and is actually a three-volume work that I was kind of dreading reading on my economics reading list, given its length. I've read that it is actually at points enjoyable, with humor and anecdotes, but my guess is that it's similar to Smith's Wealth of Nations, insofar as the anecdotes were obviously of their time and so not necessarily easily referenced to things occurring in our day and also full of responses to economic writing of the day. So I settled on this shorter work, which is available for free at Project Gutenberg and is, in some ways, apparently, a kind of distillation of Marx's economic thinking. My fear that on some level its density would prove daunting proved to be somewhat true. I'd have had to spend a lot more time with it to really comprehend what Marx was saying, and I likely would have had to review Smith's work as well as read up on the work of a few other theorists.

The book begins with a basic premise, which is that at base all compensation/money/production is based on labor. When we swap goods, we are swapping man hours. It takes person X 6 hours to buld a book shelf; it takes person Y 3 hours to put a new fuel injector system into a vehicle. I swap two fuel injector system installations for one book shelf. Of course, this sort of direct swap isn't really workable, so money gets involved as an intermediary. Most often this has been gold or silver, because these are stable production units, as opposed to, say, a bag of flour, which eventually goes bad. So then the commodity is swapped for money, which is then swapped for another commodity (C > M > C). As silver or gold become more rare or abundant, the amount needed to swap also goes up and down, just as with commodities, creating changes in prices. In time, rather than carrying gold or silver, paper began to be used as a stand-in for the gold or silver (after all, even gold and silver wears down with time, so it's safer to lock away an ounce of gold than to carry it around). (Interestingly, I hadn't thought of it before, but British money has terms like pound and sterling, which likely refer to the weight of the metal originally serving as money.) Theoretically, the paper can be turned in for the gold and silver. But of course, sometimes, with the rise or fall of the value of that gold or silver, the paper might end up being worth more than the actual gold or silver as a commodity (or even the coin); when that happens, it woud be tempting to melt down the silver dime, for example, and recoup the value of the silver rather than use the coin itself. Paper, as such, Marx seems to kind of frown on as essentially useless/pointless. (Another book, which I'll read later but which I have read a few chapters of previously, called Debt makes the point that there never really was a barter economy, that we've always had money of a sort, and that money is really a form of IOU. In that case, paper with a number on it is as workable as a monetary unit as anything else. You pay me 6 hours for the book shelf; I pay you 3 hours for the fuel injector installation, and I pay Jay, down the street, 3 hours for trimming my trees.)

Near the end of the work, Marx shows how commodities, distribution, exchange, and production are actually all just forms of production. I'm not quite sure I buy this argument. It's true, insofar as to produce something one has to distribute it and exchange it, and also as Marx notes, any given commodity is also often the source of production. That is, the book shelf is made from other commodities—the tree one planted and then cut down, the lumber that was manufactured from that tree, as well as the nails, paint, etc., that went into the shelf. But I could as easily say that production is just a form of commodity. In fact, as far as public economy goes, I'd be more inclined to say the latter. Why? Marx, of course, wants to come back to labor, which is production. But that puts the emphasis on the amount of time spent making something. Whereas, all that labor, to me, seems pointless if in the end no one wants the commodity. If we produce six book shelves but can only sell two, then we have excess production. We might as well just burn the extra book shelves, which means there as good as never existing. If we fail to distribute the shelves, we have production without commodification. Really, the labor is only worth something outside of the home if/when that labor is distributed and commodified via exchange. I can produce a lot of spittle, but I can't commodify it. As such, does the time spent producing spittle amount to any kind of applicable labor unit?

In a final appendix, Marx argues that the greatest artistic works come from baser societies—that is, ones in which production is more rooted in humans than in the machines they have created. He uses Greek literature as his example, saying that those were the greatest works of all, better than Shakespeare or anything since. In an age in which labor rests within a steam engine, it is harder to write about the real essence of life, than, say, when one is wrestling against so-called gods of the elements. It's another argument I don't buy.

On “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas R. Malthus ***

This famous work essentially espoused the idea that there was an upper limit to the degree to which the earth could sustain human population, one that Malthus felt was, even in his life around 1800, substantially already at the brink of being reached. That's the popular understanding of it, at least, that I'd always gleaned. And to some extent, the book is about that sort of thing, but to me it seemed really the musings of a consumant pessimist.

The basic theory/idea that starts off and informs everything else in the work is one in which Malthus claims that population increases at a faster than the ability of humans to find ways to supply food for that population. If we were to graph the two items, one could imagine the food supply increasing as a constant rate—a straight line going slowly upward; meanwhile, the population line would go up at an accelerating rate—a line like the right half of a parabola. This is because, essentially, people love sex. We just can't help ourselves. So whether there's food or not, we're going to keep making more people. (The issue, of course, is that when the two lines meet, that parabola will come to an end: population wouldn't keep going up; rather, a lot of folks will die of hunger. In a sense, overpopulation takes care of itself. Malthus never really addresses this.)

Beyond that, Malthus argues against various other writers who espouse various rosy ideas about humanity. We won't ever put off our reproductive desire or our wish to have more. We will continue toward greed and avarice. Society is ever headed toward a bad end. If and when things do improve (temporarily), that will just encourage more population and more desire. That is, even as we increase our resources, it's inevitable that our desires and our population will always outstrip capacity. Efforts to alleviate suffering of less fortunate only further the problem by encouraging more population among the less fortunate and thus more suffering. Is there a solution? Malthus doesn't really propose much that's workable. The essay seemed more a head exercise and set of opinions than anything substantiated in statistical anaysis.

On “The Antichrist” by Ernest Renan ***

I came across mention of this old book in Paul Trebilco's history of the church in Ephesus. He noted Renan as one of the few who heavily prognasticated the eventual move of much of the first-century Jerusalem church to Ephesus. Since that was a subject of interest to me, I figured I should read it. The connection between churches was something of a disappointment; Renan sort of asserts that, but there isn't a lot of concrete evidence, as really all there is anyway are implications (otherwise, there'd be more written about this subject).

This is actually volume 4 of 7 of Renan's huge work on the early history of Christianity. This is the one that focuses most on the time period I figured would be more applicable: the destruction of the Jersusalem and the work of John in Ephesus. There's good info here, but alas, one often doesn't know where Renan pulls it from, given that there are no notes attached. Furthermore, this work is old, and it shows, insofar as Renan wrote at a time when it was considered good form to wax poetic on subjects. As such, he often takes thirty words to say what could be said in ten, which can be irritating. There are quite a few comparisons to Europeans dynamics at the time he was writing in the nineteenth century, which can be interesting but usually aren't, and while no doubt such comparisons probably were of value to his contemporaries, they didn't serve much use to this reader more than a hundred years later.

Renan's work is apparently somewhat controversial. He was a proponent of Jesus being just a man, not divine. (And Wikipedia notes various antisemetic tropes and racism in his larger work.) But surprisingly, as this volume brings out, he did mostly accept the traditional authorship of the New Testament. He was a big proponent of the idea that the Apostle John wrote Revelation—and likely the other items attributed to him. He didn't stand much for the John the Presbyter idea. All this makes for an interesting contrast, since so many modern critics espouse ideas that much of the New Testament (sometimes as little as seven letters of Paul) was written decades after its supposed authorship by pseudonymous authors. Such makes it much easier to dismiss the facts of the New Testament and make whatever claims one wishes with regard to early Christianity and Jesus. Renan doesn't do so much of that, and yet still managed to reach the conclusions he did regarding Jesus.

Much of this volume is given over to Renan's explication of Revelation, which he sees as being written in response to events in the Roman Empire, and especially with regard to Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome. Reading Revelation “historically” rather than as prophecy gives it quite a different spin.

On "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith ***

I won't bother so much with a summary of this work, which can be gleaned from many a website, as with my own observations about the text and its readability many centuries hence. It starts off well enough, but I think reading select passages in small doses is likely to be more enjoyable than reading the entire text. I mean, I actually enjoyed the first few chapters, but at some point, the arguments, the older language, the statistics, all began to get to me and made for a tedious slog, with moments of illumination. One is dealing, after all, with a text whose economic insights go back to the height of the slave and colonial eras, so that stats are, um, out of date.

As a foundational work of economics, of course, the value of the book can't be denied. One might say the work is the foundation for theories of capitalism. I'd long heard about how there were moral arguments to be had in the text, ones that argued against simple greed of one's enterprises, but I don't think I saw that here (that argument might be in Smith's other great work, which is less often referenced). Here, Smith seems mostly focused on what his title denotes--how nations build and can build wealth. In a sense, that is the moral argument, because the more wealth the nation has, the better off its people--or so one could claim.

Some econimic ideas that are explored and how they relate to some things even in the present include Smith's arguments for the division of labor (namely, how we gain more wealth by specializing and then trading than by trying to do everything ourselves). Later in the book, he critiques an argument that others had made regarding how nations that focused entirely on trade or manufacturing actually create no wealth, because new wealth can only be created by new materials--namely by gains made in agriculture. Smith shows how a manufactured good is more than the sum of its parts.

Smith is very much a proponent of free trade and shows quite well why it is actually to people's benefit for a nation to engage in such. Essentially, just think of the specialization of labor but on a macro level rather than a micro. It simply makes more sense for a given nation to excell in what it does and then trade for things it does not excel at or have ready resources for. The exception to the rule, Smith would argue, are those things that are strategically important for a nation to produce for its self--something that clearly has meaning even today. We don't want another nation crippling the economy because a certain good or product that is essential can no longer be produced in state. When a nation has extra of something, it benefits it to sell that excess to others; when it is in need, it benefits to be able to glean that need from others. This keeps prices reasonable for all.

Landowners, I gleaned, don't come out too well in Smith's analysis--not so much in his opinion, but in my own, as gleaned from Smith's theories--since it's the job of landowners to extract as much wealth from that ownership as possible, leaving only enough for those who labor on the land to subsist. Makes me think of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, where owning land is everything. But seriously, what exactly does the landowner do if the only job is to extract wealth from the person who actually uses the land? This definitely sets up a class system that is hard to pull oneself out of.

On taxes, Smith argues that they should be set at just the right amount--not so low as to not glean as much benefit as could be gleaned and not so high as to discourage production. Finding that balance is of course key. He also argues that it is best to tax non-necessities, that is, luxuries. Why? Because a tax on necessities is essentially in the end a tax on the rich anyway. Why? Because, say, you tax basic food or housing. The laborer must have those things, which means that wages have to increase to pay said tax. If wages increase, the one paying the wages is short a given amount, so though the lower class may be paying the tax, the upper class ultimately pays it anyway in the form of higher wages. By contrast, a tax on a luxury--say, tobacco or alcohol--comes from the person who pays for the good. There is no essential need to raise the cost of labor, because purchasing such is the laborer's choice (or the rich man's choice).

On debt, Smith argues for the value of it to larger economies, since it is a stable form of investment. He also argues regarding how public debt is rarely ever paid off in full, in part because war tends to be a time when such debt is accumulated faster than in time of peace. New taxation to pay for war rarely ends up being used to pay off (war) debt in the end. He denotes how if nations were to refuse to accumulate extra debt to wage war we would have fewer wars; what he doesn't note, however, is that wars are usually "total" in a sense. The cost of a nation saying, I won't accumulate extra to defend myself, would likely end in a war loss rather than simply put an end to war. Would that things were different in that regard.

On “The Rise of Christianity” by Rodney Stark *****

Another fine book by Stark. I much enjoyed reading this prequel to his Cities of God. Although the books cover much of the same ground, they are different enough to both warrant reading. Cities of God focuses on why and how Christianity spread where it did; this one focuses on why Christianity found popularity.

The subject is one that has been addressed numerous times. I'm reminded of Gibbons's own list of reasons, having to do with the differing culture of Christianity, but Stark really brings the arguments home from a sociological view. He focuses on such subjects as kinship networks and migration. But he also looks at exactly what appealed. Take, for example, the spread of disease. Christians were more likely to nurse one another (and others); this meant that more survived and that that caring also appealed to those people, Christian or not, who did survive. Christianity gave a better home to women in terms of how it saw women as more equal to men. Christianity gave a home to people in cities who otherwise were often lonely by providing networks previously unavailable. Add to such items as that the more often cited sacrifices of Christians—their willingness to die for the cause, their higher sense of virtue, and one begins to sense that Christianity's conquering of paganism was almost inevitable.

On “Plato's Shadow” by Gary Petty ****

 

This book traces the changeover in Christianity from the first century into the fourth, as it moved from being chiefly a Jewish sect to being a new version of Greco-Roman religion, adopting many beliefs and practices from the latter along the way. There wasn't much new here to me, but Petty writes in a very simple manner that would make for easy reading and understanding among the most general of readers looking for an introduction (I wish I'd come across the book ten years ago, when I first started heavily reading in the subject). The period covered is a very long one, including not just the first four centuries of the Christian era but also the basics of Greek philosophy and the Jewish faith going back to their founding (and constituting almost half the book). As such, one can glean a clear sense of where Christianity comes in, but the history of the four centuries that are the book's focus is even more compacted as a result. The Bible is used heavily as a source, as are Bible helps; other sources include various classics on classical, Jewish, and Christian history, and there is a general smattering of quotes from various primary sources outside scripture. The most cogent argument Petty makes comes near the end of the book, when he notes how Paul could not be the source of so many of the changes to the faith established by Jesus and the original twelve apostles, but rather such changes were really the influence of later incorporation into classical Greek thinking. The argument is laid out succinctly and clearly, as with so much of the rest of the book; however, such would be unlikely to satisfy most diehard critics, who have laid out whole books on small aspects of the subject (usually, showing just the opposite of what Petty does but in more recent times increasingly appreciating Paul in his Jewish setting and beginning to understand that he was not the antinomian or anti-Petrine figure many earlier scholars have made him out to be).

On “The First Urban Christians” by Wayne A. Meeks ****

This book reminds me a bit of watching The Godfather. The two works, of course, have nothing to do with one another. But the comparison is the experience of reading Meeks's book and watching that movie. When I saw The Godfather, this classic of cinema, I was in my thirties, and the film was about the same age as I was. I'd heard for a long time about how important the film was and how great it was. Seeing it, however, I found to be underwhelming. I could see how the film was likely a great film in its time, but watching it thirty-years on, the picture seemed a cliché. All the gangster movie stereotypes were present. However, not having seen the film in the 1970s, when it first came out, I could not say whether in its time the film might have been extremely original. The problem, of course, is that so many (better) films and TV shows since then had used the same plot devices and characters. Arguably, those films were all drawing on The Godfather. So when I went back to watch this older movie, it seemed stale, when in fact as the origin of so much since, it might well be as important as I'd always heard.

Such is the care for Meeks's The First Urban Christians. This book is a classic, one of the first, apparently, to draw sociology so heavily into conversation with the first century of Christianity, and specifically with reading Paul's letters. The subject is covered better in many other works I've read, including by Rodney Stark. But the thing is, as I read, I realized the degree to which these other authors were likely drawing on Meeks. They just wrote better and added to the findings that he made, which made of course the original, coming to it after the more recent works, all that much less intriguing. And so, I'm left in the same position as I am with The Godfather. Was this a great book in its time? Almost certainly, but because I came to it later, after reading other stuff, it doesn't seem as revolutionary as it likely was in its time or as it would have been had I read it before those other works.

By looking closely at Paul's letters and at the social nature of Roman society, Meeks notes that most early Christians were likely from cities. That's because that's where most diaspora Jews were, which is among whom most Christian teaching began. Christians drew from a range of classes (though the idea of low, middle, and upper class is not a terribly effective way at looking at Roman society, which wasn't really based around the same sort of concepts as modern society): a slave might be richer or even have more power, for example, than a free man; a person of noble birth might be looked upon better than free man but not be as well off, and so on. The most prominent members were those with just such social inconsistencies in status: rich women, freed men with special skills, wealthy Jewish people. A particularly interesting chapter focuses on names, as they show up in the letters. Meeks then goes on to examing worship practices and governance in the church, using similar means, though the observations don't seem like anything beyond what I've read elsewhere. Meeks largely accepts the mainstream critical position that only seven of Paul's letters are genuine and that Paul was largely opposed to James and Peter in his views of the new faith, which to a degree colors his observations.

On “After Acts” by Bryan Litfin ****

Liftin reviews the various legends that have accrued around the apostles and a few other important New Testament figures and provides an evaluation of their likelihood. Liftin is a conservative scholar, which means he more typically accepts biblical accounts for what they are, rather than arguing against their accuracy, though he does sometimes note what secular and liberal scholars believe on such subjects. The book is written at a basic level, such that someone with only a little biblical knowledge and very little knowledge of postbiblical Christian history should have no difficulty with understanding it. For me, the work was a bit more basic than I anticipated and so proved mostly a useful review rather than a work that provided new insight. (Sean McDowell's Fate of the Apostles does similar work, though he focuses solely on the apostles, whereas Liftin looks more at prominent people, giving just one chapter over to the lesser known apostles. McDowell's work is more thorough, however, and as such more informative, but Litfin's book is a reasonable price whereas McDowell's is inordinately expensive given its length.) Like William McBirnie's classic The Search for the Twelve Apostles, Litfin spends quite of a bit of ink on relics and gravesites, often less with written documents, many of which are of such later dating that they're unreliable anyway. Litfin's work is not as detailed at McBirnie's either, but it's easier to follow. I'll come back to it, likely, as a reference.

On “Treasure Island!!!” by Sara Levine ****

This one came recommended to me from various websites that listed great recent novels. In addition, I was familiar with Levine's name—likely through various stories I've read of hers—and the premise sounded cool, so I decided, why not? I don't read much fiction anymore, so this would be a good break, and it was.

The premise? A woman reads Robert Lewis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a “boys' book,” and decides to change her life accordingly, living by its various morals and standards. It's been forty-plus years since I read Treasure Island, though I do remember somewhat enjoying it as a kid, insomuch as I could enjoy a “long” book back in those days (I wasn't much of a reader before my teen years), but I remember liking the live-action Disney technicolor movie from the fifties or sixties. I mean, pirates, after all (the subject still seems of great interest to people, but as a kid, I realized after trying to read some nonfiction about them, they were hardly as intriguing as theme park rides).

As I knew going in, the book was supposed to be funny, and the narrator and central character an incredibly awful woman. These turned out to be true. Turns out modeling one's life after pirates isn't so great an idea. That said, one gets the feeling that the narrator wasn't terribly stable to begin with—a decent-looking woman who uses those looks to hold down jobs and boyfriends, neither of which she appreciates, as she believes herself to be above them. Living by the dictates of a 150-year-old novel means not letting manners get in the way of how highly you think of yourself, which means taking advantage of other people at every turn.

My wife found the book reminiscent of Don Quixote, but shorter and easier to read. It's not entirely predictable, but the narrator's brain seems similarly addled by fiction such that she makes dreadful decisions for all around her. One of the blurbs makes note of its memoir-esque features and, indeed, one can read the book as a sort of parody of self-help memoirs, where someone makes some sort of decision to live by some new standard and change one's life accordingly. This narrator doesn't really change much; she's awful to start, and the book simply gives her an excuse to continue on the same path. Some might question, as such, whether the book is even really a novel, as the main character does not develop. But it's a fun read no matter.

On “The Edge of Marriage” by Hester Kaplan *****

I was blown away by this collection when I read it about twenty years age, which is why it resides so much in my memory as a great work. This time around, I could see the skill involved—Kaplan is a remarkable writer—but at the same time, I felt more manipulated. I'm not as much of a fan of fiction as I once was. What made me like fiction was that I felt like I was getting a deeper glimpse into the society and the people in it than one could get from nonfiction; these days, though, I tend to feel all the more the writer's use of puppet strings, the artistry of the fiction itself, which rather undoes the mistique of genuiness I used to find in such works.

Most of the stories in Kaplan's first collection, as one might expect from the title, revolve around marriages in some state of disrepair. “Would You Know It Wasn't Love?” subtly hints at a man's growing dimensia even as it revolves around a grown daughter who has come back to live with her parents after her marriage has proven to be somewhat less than satisfactory; the dad is not too keen on this, even while the mother seems perfectly fine with the situation.

“Dysaesthesia” is the most powerful story in the collection and the one that probably sold me most on the book when I first read it. An older first-time wife who married in part just to be able to have a marriage and family finds herself with a husband, an art professor, who is a prolific cheater, even as she attempts to raise their daughter, who idealizes both parents. The issue, however, is that one of those cheating sections goes disastrously awry, and now the wife finds herself the likely caretaker to a mostly disabled and unemployable husband. Were it not for the daughter, I would figure this marriage would be on its way to a quick divorce. As it is, however, one really ends up feeling just awful for this woman and the family in general—and even a bit of the husband's frustration.

“From Where We've Fallen” involves another couple with an adult child, this one a kid who can't hold down a job except as employed by his dad. Alas, even that is tenuous, as the son's actions put his father's business in jeopardy, and the father finds himself lying to protect his family but in the process hurting others.

“Cuckle Me” focuses on an old man and his youngish female caretaker, one who has come to love him almost as a husband, even as the man's son isn't particularly keen on the closeness that has arisen between the two.

The title story focuses on an older couple, the wife of whom has lost her best friend, leaving of course just her husband as her main social conduit. The story basically details how our relationships change with age. “Goodwill” walks a similar line, this time with a daughter grieving her mother's death, as she goes through her mother's things deciding what to keep and what to throw away (probably the weakest story in the collection, insofar as there are no real surprises here, and it seems mostly just a laundry list of items attached to memories).

“Claude Comes and Goes” focuses on a couple and their best friend—an ex-lover of the wife's, who lives a stereotypical bachelor life: different women all the time, never eating at home, and so on. In this case, Claude tries to establish a relationship with a grown daughter of his who had previously never met, but as with so many such storylines, the bachelor finds that his no-connections lifestyle is not conducive to suddenly having a relative care about him.

“The Spiral” focuses on a stairwell in a house's center, and a couple's relationship with it, with the older not-so-healthful husband confined to the downstairs and the wife with her own life upstairs, until of course life changes the way they use the different parts of the house.

“Live Life King-Sized” focuses on a grown son who takes care of a resort that his family owns. But really, it's about that son's relationship with a man and his wife, a man who has decided to live out the rest of his life, what little there is of it, at the resort, scaring away other patrons in the process.

On “On Killing” by Dave Grossman *****

I first heard of this text when Russia first invaded Ukraine and drafted a number of young men to serve in the army, pushing them to the front lines apparently with little training. The skeptical author of the article noted how it takes training not just to kill but even to be able to kill—and the author noted this text.

This book was amazing, insofar as it opened up a world of information about the U.S. military and about military service in general that I simply did not know. Through World War II, the author notes, only about 20 percent of combat soldiers even managed to shoot their guns at a person. Many simply didn't shoot, or if they shot, they would shoot into the sky or something like that. People don't want to kill people. It is disturbing. Huge numbers of rounds were expended to kill a single person, suggesting deliberate missing. How does the military get beyond that? By Korea, the number of combat soldiers actually shooting at the enemy had risen to 55 percent, and by Vietnam it was 90 to 95 percent. The key? Proper conditioning.

Grossman notes how the military has managed to do this, through, for example, exercises wherein people's first instincts kick in in battle—and those instincts become to kill. You practice shooting at the enemy, almost without thought. Target practice, for one.

Another key is to separate the soldiers from the enemy. There's a sliding scale, wherein the more distant one is from the enemy, the less disturbing it is to the soldier to kill. (Interestingly, even those whose lives are at stake find it somewhat less disturbing, because it's less personal, more like a natural disaster, something that can't be helped, or blamed on an individual person.) Place two soldiers in close proximity, however, Grossman notes, and they'll often just leave each other alone—they see the other person as a person. There are many such anecdotes he offers. (There is conditioning for this as well, though, such as training to kill people by using models with oranges for heads.) By contrast, a bomber often feels little for the people he kills—the people are never seen. Move in to snipers, then bayonets (almost never used anymore because they do require such close proximity), to swords and knives, and finally hands: each lowers the effective kill rate and raises the amount of anxiety a person feels in killing.

The problem with conditioning, however, getting people to kill even when they can see the enemy, is that it still doesn't deal with the psychological toll it takes on an individual after the deeds are done. If a community supports the soldier, and if the soldier is part of a unit wherein there is support (and peer pressure and commands as well), the soldier will be more able to handle the fallout (by essentially rationalizing the actions, as not entirely belonging to the self rather than a community), but such was not the case with the Vietnam War, where soldiers were with their units for only short periods rather than long ones and where the war was unpopular at home. The trauma for such veterans was unfathomably worse, as such.

Grossman closes with a study of how our video games and television have anesthetized our youths to violence and made killing easier. There are many people who will disagree with this, and no study, as even Grossman admits, can absolutely show the connection, because there are too many variables involved. However, there is a close corollary to the availability of such things and the rise in violence in society, suggesting that this is more than just a coincidence. As school shootings and mass shootings proliferate, I can't help but think part of the reason this is possible isn't just the availability of guns but also the fact that watching such things really has made younger generations more callous to this sort of thing.

On “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt ****

I was expecting more of an urban planning and studies work, but the first part of this text—and indeed, the last part also—is more about human psychology. Vanderbilt does get to urban planning eventually, as I would find, and once he does, the book became more interesting to me. But I can see why he started with psychology, because it is after all the psychology that affects so much of how and why we plan our roads the way that we do. That said, the book as a whole was fairly unsettling, insofar as it made me realize just how unsafe driving in general is. I wish I could get away without it, but even as I might wish that, if we deal with vehicular traffic at all, even as pedestrians, we're in danger (and perhaps even greater danger).

I might summarize this book as being a set of counterintuitive findings about roads and driving, which Vanderbilt seems to be set on presenting. That is, of course, what makes the text as interesting as it it. I'll note just a few of the odd facts that he runs down for us:

Should you merge early or late? That is one of the opening questions. I'd say I'm usually an early merger, as I don't want the stress of trying to get into the correct lane later. The issue with merging early, though, is that you're failing to use the full available space of the road. So the key would be to merge late? Vanderbilt eventually shows that the best thing to do is to simply move forward in whatever lane you're in, merging (if you must) when time arises. This isn't exactly late merging, because if you happen to be in the lane to which people are merging, you shouldn't shift to the other one to try to speed past other cars—that creates other dangers.

Have you ever wondered why insects don't get into traffic jams? I hadn't given it much thought, until Vanderbilt brought it up. Ants, I guess, have a whole system laid out where lines of traffic go more heavily in certain directions and so on. But the advantage is that they have a team goal. When we drive, it's usually each vehicle for itself. This encourages behavior that usually ends up hurting everyone. He comes back to this when talking about searching for car spaces, which I'll come back to as well. The other insect he discusses is the locust, which really is kind of every insect out for itself. The insects at the front of the pack eat up the food; at the back, the insects eat the insects that are in front of them, given that the food is gone. Wow! What a life.

So parking spaces. When they are scarce, do you sit and wait for a spot to open up or drive around looking for one? Women apparently are more likely to do the former, men the latter. Both add to congestion. Men are also more likely to park further away on the central aisle and just walk, while women are more likely to try to snag a closer spot, even though it might take more time. I am definitely a man in that regard, though I wouldn't say I just park on the central aisle as far back as needed. I usually park farther out so as not to have to deal with cars around me, but I'll often go to the side.

Congestion also results from out tendency to be in for ourselves, the way, say, that if one had a community pasture, there are few conditions to discourage overgrazing. What I mean is that if there is scarcity, the only way to avoid such is to cooperate. But if the system is set up as first-come first-serve, cooperation doesn't really pay off for the individual user. In such a system, even if the pasture is overgrazed, I'm better off sending my sheep there and at least getting some feed than not even bothering. And so it is with spots on a highway or in a parking lot. I could choose to drive a route that is an hour longer and twenty miles out of my way, but if I do that, I'm helping others more than myself. If I can squeeze onto the highway, even if I only save a half hour (and slow it down for everyone else), it's still a net gain for me. This is one reason that GPS tracking used to filter cars to less traveled routes in heavy traffic times probably won't work—the other being that travel times are very dynamic (so a route might slow or speed precipitously in a given short period of time). It's also why bigger roads usually don't result in less traffic, as people congregate toward that shared pasture.

An interesting chapter revolves around how more dangerous roads are actually, statistically, usually safer for driving. There are fewer fatal crashes, for example, in heavy traffic. After all, everyone is going slower! Here Vanderbilt gets deep into urban planning, discussing how some cities have actually created zones within the city where driving is actually more difficult, where cars are forced to slow, where there is more mixed use of streets. This restores the vitality of such zones of the city while also slowing cars down—all this without speed bumps and other awkward traffic inventions, because cars now can't treat the street like a thoroughfare to be simply passed through as quickly as possible.

Returning to psychology, Vanderbilt discusses how driving habits differ in different locales and how safer cars often lead to more dangerous driving. That's the whole counterintuitive aspect to virtually everything revolving around traffic. Bigger roads lead to more traffic, not less. Safer cars lead to people driving less safely. It seems there's a kind of equilibrium that we're set to return to, no matter how much we might try to compensate.

On “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23” by Phillip Keller ****

 

My wife was somewhat surprised to find me reading this. It seemed a bit too inspirational and touchy-feely. Indeed, the book is that. I would say that Keller probably could have written something that was about half or a quarter of its length and made his point. He fills the text out to book-length by giving readers nice-sounding discussions about faith and God and stuff like that.

But the meat of the book is extremely useful, which is why I decided to read it this second time (the first time being well more than a decade ago). Not having been a shepherd, I have no way of otherwise gleaning the various subtleties of this most famous of Psalms. Keller, with his extensive experience with sheep keeping, has much info to provide about what each line of the Psalm actually goes much deeper than we might otherwise expect. Indeed, I usually think of the last portions of the Psalm as moving away from the sheep metaphors, but Keller shows how even such acts as the spreading of oil on the head is a shepherding act—meant to keep male sheep from butting each other too hard, meant to keep insects and flies from alighting on the sheep and laying their eggs. I'll likely return to this book again at some point.

On "The Trial" by Franz Kafka ***

Reading this work had been a long time coming for me. I just never got around to it. It was not exactly what I was expecting. Oddly, I read The Castle years ago, even though this was the book I really always intended to read; that one, someone had suggested in terms of helping me with a story I was writing at the time. Maddeningly, of course, as with so much of Kafka's work, The Castle has no proper ending. The Trial, as it turns out, is missing pieces too, but it does have an end.

Having read both that other novel and his complete stories, I should have known that I would not find the work completely satisfying. True, some authors do manage to write one great piece that towers over everything else, and The Trial is apparently that for Kafka--but it did not seem so to me.

The story is about a man, Joseph K., who is accused of a crime. No one will tell him what the crime is. I guess I was expecting more of a courtroom and jail room novel, but oddly, the man accused is allowed to continue living his regular life, mostly. He does, toward the start, enter a courtroom one time, but never a jail cell, and as the book continues on, he never enters the court again, though his life becomes consumed in many ways by his case. I guess, really, this makes for more interesting reading than if he'd have been locked up in some cell for the whole novel.

Others hear of his being arrested and try to help. An uncle hires a lawyer for him. Various women spend time with him, talking about his case. Business clients set him up with others, including a painter, who gives Joseph K. some advice--namely that if he is innocent, he shouldn't worry, but then, contradictorily, notes that K. will never not be guilty in the eyes of the law and the best he can do is put off the verdict. Other people who have been accused offer advice, and at the end, even a priest, who tells a story about a man who is kept from advancing to another room by a gatekeeper but through persistence is eventually let past the door near the end of his life (when it no longer really matters). Much time is spent interpreting and reinterpreting this story in almost nonsensical fashion. Is the gatekeeper merciful? Cruel? The priest scene comes just before the end of the book, suggesting a kind of last rites being offered over Joseph K. In that sense, the book takes on the religious overtones I figured would make a greater part of the work, but Kafka doesn't make much of that tired trope. He skewers the legal system quite a bit, but not in a funny way. Mostly, it's just a sad theater of the absurd sort of book.

Perhaps, the best part of the work is the way that K. becomes, during the course of the events, more and more paranoid. He comes to think that others are looking to take his job, that some are spying on him, and so on. How could he not, after all, when so many know of his case and that he is awaiting trial. In that way, one gets a sense of how the court of public opinion works against a person even before being found guilty or not; in essence, it doesn't matter, which is the gist of K.'s experience.