…or have read all the books on the sidebar. Plus a couple of Ratzinger books which I suppose I should put up there. A few of them I want to review together, so the finished have to wait for the unfinished. I want to talk about Faithful Departed  and Sacrilege together, but I’ve not finished Podles’ book yet. I’d like to get the new Russ Shaw book in there – Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication and Communion in the Catholic Church – as well. Strikes me that’s a powerful springtime trifecta to consider.

This might puzzle you, but I’m thinking Bad Medicine and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents would be interesting paired together, since they both involve considering whether or not what you always knew was true was, well…true.
But I’ve not finished the latter yet. Just about 30 pages to go.
My husband puzzles over my reading selections – for example, The Worst of Evils – which is about the battle against pain in medicine. Well, I’m pretty interested in health and medicine from an historical perspective (and moderately so in my own life, I guess), first of all. I tend to read things that I think are good for me – that is jolt me out of any temptation to self-pity – and reading about surgery before anaesthesia…that’ll do it.
But, in puzzling over his puzzlement, I decided that one of the things I’m looking for when I read all of this cultural and social history is, not surprisingly, the role of Christianity in it all. I am always struggling to figure out the relationship between Christianity and culture – how much one forms the other – and books that are religion-centric only tend to give you half of the story, and sometimes, I’d say, even less than half since some reflections on that relationship than come from the explicitly Christian side find it hard to stay away from apologetics and glossing over shadows. 
So, for example, I read a history of the treatment of pain partly because I’m just interested but also because I want to know what the Christian angle on physical pain was, was there, in fact, any resistance from Christian bodies or leaders to anaesthesia or other medicinal ways of alleviating pain? I’ve not got that far, but I’d say that the strongest resistance to anaesthesia I’ve read at this point comes from hot shot surgeons whose claim to fame and fortune involved the speed at which they could chop off limbs.
(Which is, in part, the theme of Bad Medicine– that much of the strongest resistance to medical advances through history has, in fact, come from doctors.)