{"id":448,"date":"2008-02-24T15:57:03","date_gmt":"2008-02-24T15:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/yes-im-reading.html"},"modified":"2008-02-24T15:57:03","modified_gmt":"2008-02-24T15:57:03","slug":"yes-im-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/yes-im-reading.html","title":{"rendered":"Yes, I’m reading…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…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<\/em>\u00a0 and Sacrilege <\/em>together, but I’ve not finished Podles’ book yet.\u00a0I’d like to get the new Russ Shaw book in there – Nothing to Hide: Secrecy, Communication and Communion in the Catholic Church <\/a>– <\/em>as well. Strikes me that’s a powerful springtime trifecta to consider.
\nThis might puzzle you, but I’m thinking Bad Medicine <\/em>and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents<\/em> would be interesting paired together, since they both involve considering whether or not what you always knew was true was, well…true.
\nBut I’ve not finished the latter yet. Just about 30 pages to go.
\nMy husband puzzles over my reading selections – for example, The Worst of Evils<\/em> – 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.
\nBut, 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.\u00a0
\nSo, 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.
\n(Which is, in part, the theme of Bad Medicine<\/em>– that much of the strongest resistance to medical advances through history has, in fact, come from doctors.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…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\u00a0 and Sacrilege together, but I’ve not finished…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nYes, I'm reading... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/yes-im-reading.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yes, I'm reading... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"…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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}