Christ Church Book Club
Christ Church Book Club!
2010-2011
7:30pm, First Tuesday of the Month (with one exception – Monday, January 31st, 2011). An eclectic choice of various books, one main book or excerpt per evening along with reference to other books, for discussion and debate. Open to all and everyone! 1 hour. Where? Coronation Room, Christ Church Parish Hall, 7 Wentworth Street, Windsor, NS. Contact: David Curry 798-2454.
Dates: September 7th, 2010, October 5th, 2010, November 2nd, 2010,
January 31st, 2011, March 1st, 2011, May 3rd, 2011.
Tuesday, September 7h, 2010 “Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World” by Timothy Brook (available on-line from www.chapters.indigo.ca for $19.80 or from www.amazon.ca for $8.00). We begin where we had intended to end last spring with this intriguing book. Along with Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and “The Merchant of Venice”, and John Darwin’s “After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000”, “Vermeer’s Hat” provides a fascinating and interesting account of earlier “global” worlds.
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains” by Nicholas Carr & “The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future” by Robert Darnton (The Shallows is available on-line from www.chapters.indigo.ca for $33.50 or from www.amazon.ca for $21.11; The Case for Books is available on-line from www.amazon.ca for $19.12). Questions about the digital medium, its strengths and weaknesses are usefully explored in these two books. Along with Alberto Manguel’s “A Reader on Reading,” especially his essay entitled St. Augustine’s Computer, one may begin to appreciate the significance of deep reading as well as appreciate what happens if book or print reading is neglected and ignored.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010. “Three Day Road” by Joseph Boyden (available on-line from www.amazon.ca for $14.60). This compelling story looks at the experience of two aboriginal Canadians who fought in the First World War. Like Timothy Findley’s classic anti-war novel “The Wars”, from which this book partly derives, it raises important though disturbing questions about our humanity, and about the effects of technology and the institutional form of cultural interactions. A book for the grey month of remembering, perhaps even for All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2nd).
Monday, January 31st, 2011. “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies” by David Bentley Hart (available on-line from www.amazon.ca for $12.96). A thoughtful and well-written examination of popular atheism that provides a useful way to think about this present phenomena that complements and enlarges upon similar themes in a number of other works such as “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism & Its Scientific Pretensions” by David Berlinski, “God and the New Atheism” by John F. Haught, “The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion” by Marcel Gauchet.
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011. “Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality” by Theodore Dalyrmple (available on-line from www.amazon.ca for $24.49, paperback available after September 13th). Blessed with a gift for concision and insight, Theodore Dalyrmple is a prolific writer as well as a prison doctor. He has travelled widely and been in many of the world’s more troubled countries. He offers some challenging and trenchant criticisms of the contemporary culture and goes a long ways to providing a diagnosis for what the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, long ago described as the malaise of modernity. Dalyrmple focuses on the essential matter of moral principle and its absence or neglect. The cult of feeling, as he terms it, leaves out of the moral equation the doctrine of original sin.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011. “Nomad” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azir Nafisi (available on-line from www.amazon.ca for $16.00 and $13.83, respectively). Both these books reflect on the difficulties and the confusions (on all sides) of the encounter between some of the political and cultural forms of Islam and some of the forms of modernity in the secular culture of the democratic west. Nafisi’s Reading Lolita (2003) illustrates the power of literature which is capable of providing a powerful self-critique of cultures and individuals so necessary to civilized life. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Nomad, a sequel to her book Infidel, is both a deeply personal account of her rejection of Islam and a cri de coeur for compassion and respect that, paradoxically, hints at the place for religion in the shaping of political culture.
