Divine interjection

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/11/2016 (3324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You should read this book.

Richard Holloway, erstwhile Episcopal bishop of Edinburgh and now public, agnostic gadfly, has written a truly remarkable book. It is at once pithy, funny, learned, informative, erudite and arresting.

The book is a short 200-ish pages, divided into no less than 40 chapters, each dutifully about five to seven pages long. It is the sort of book one can dip in and out of on the bus, but while one bides the stops, one quietly craves traffic for time to turn just one more page.

In a silly nutshell, it is a book about the entire history of the world’s religions. Most uncommonly, it does not at all fall into the tired habit of such books; that is, it does not imagine that “religion” means a bit of Judaism, a dash of Islam and a whole lot of Christianity, all thrown into a swamp of jargon, dates, names and mire. Instead, it grapples somehow both lightly and hugely with the Big Three even as it still evenly and happily covers Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taosim, Jainism, indigenous religions and new religious movements — you name it.

To do so, Holloway charmingly declares he shall “have to zigzag our way through history.” So, he frenetically dashes hither and thither through time and place, marching steadily more or less straight through human history, never lingering on one region or continent, always cognizant of what is going on elsewhere at the same time on our little, pale blue dot.

Early on, we are engaging Moses in the Sinai, next thing we are dipping into the Upanishads and Vedas, then the Buddha steps forward, now Mahavira, then back to Abraham, next Zoroaster takes the stage, then Confucius is weighing in. Jesus and Paul show up, but a bit late to the party. It is exhausting and exhilarating all in one go.

Holloway is, it seems, a kind of bookish, mature critic of “religion” in the sense he is not advocating nor promoting any one of them, but rather deploying criticism with great élan and dignifying respect. He takes no potshots, even as he is clearly thinking that a good deal — if not the entire package — of all things religious is human manufacture.

Holloway is definitely not a monotheist nor even a theist; he loudly doesn’t feel that a divine power has mysteriously, powerfully interacted with us consistently throughout global history (especially that unfathomably productive period of the 7th to 5th centuries BC). Instead he is gleefully, awe-fully certain that religions spring from below, not from above. For Holloway, religion is a human sociological phenomenon that can be read, can be studied, can be described and can be explained.

Yet he is not Christopher Hitchens nor Richard Dawkins, bitterly railing against the apparently muddled who don’t think as they themselves do. Holloway looks, he listens, he contemplates, and then he pushes that all through a mind that is able to unfurl complex history by telling a good story, and telling it well.

Endearing historical anecdote after anecdote fill his wee chapters, and the reader is prodded again and again to rethink intensely or vaguely familiar stories in entirely fresh, human, ordinary ways.

In the end, for Holloway, religion is not cosmically true, but is a human, cultural artifact to be pondered, to be quizzed, to be marvelled at. And it needs to be understood.

In a time when our best leaders are apparently lying to us only 25 per cent of the time, a little book that earnestly lays things out compactly, evenly and plainly is, as it were, a godsend.

You must read this book.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and historyat St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg.