Also in talking with Rachel last night, we decided that since Christian missionaries seem to always be standing outside/around lib'ral arts schools and handing out copies of the Bible (and telling the homosexuals that they were going to hell, as happened at my alma mater) it would be fun to stand outside Catholic schools and hand out Gore Vidal's Live From Golgotha. (That's not the best summary of it, but it'll do. There is also what sounds like a horrible, horrible essay about it here.) We especially liked the part about Paul inventing certain New Testament bits because he was panicking about the fact that it had been 40 years since the crucifixion and it sure looked like Jesus wasn't coming back. Sure, it wouldn't be the most effective book for "conversion," but I'm not really sure that's what the evangelicals are trying to do, either.

Still, what would be better? I guess we aren't really interested in changing their faith (we could care less, frankly), just in toning down some of the more crazy fundamentalist beliefs. Richard Dawkins? G.K. Chesterton? C.S. Lewis? Mark Twain? (That Chesterton essay I linked to, by the way, looks really good, although I don't know if it would "convert" anyone.)

On that track, what books should we hand out in front of activist meetings to tone down some of their crazy fundamentalist beliefs? Calabresi & Bobbitt's Tragic Choices? Steven M. Gillon's That’s Not What We Meant To Do: Reform and its unintended consequences in twentieth-century America? Some Todd Gitlin book or other? I think Hitchens might be too blunt a weapon to be effective, but I kind of think that about Hitch in general. Rawls? J.S. Mill? Hmm. Arendt? No, she'd give them a seizure...
posted by Mike B. at 11:28 AM 0 comments