Suzannah Rowntree > Recent Status Updates

this was so refreshing to listen to whilst hoeing thistles on my walk today! I loved the meditations on virtue as its own reward, something you practise not to to earn brownie points but because it's right, and because it's worthwhile being a person who is brave, just, humble, or loyal.

Maybe I do think "the victim was already condemned to death for crimes against humanity" ought to be a legal defence in murder trials lol

"The [child abuse] crisis places a question-mark against the imposition of compulsory celibacy on the Church's ministry as formidable as any posed by Protestants in the four decades of the Reformation" the HELL did you just say???????? No, MacCulloch, I can assure you that one can either succeed or fail at celibacy equally well without PREYING ON CHILDREN

Fascinated by the fact that Tehlirian lied like a bedspread throughout his trial, pulling off the PR stunt of the century, and one can't help wishing he'd been more successful still.

MacCulloch argues that it was inadvertent and unwilling, but the Reformation produced greater religious tolerance in western Europe as a byproduct of its greater religious diversity. He also gives medieval Islam credit for being more tolerant, but imo that's giving them a bit too much: Even the Latins were forced to be more tolerant by the greater religious diversity in the East.

Into the final chapter, "Outcomes", and it's fascinating to me that one of the effects of the confrontation between Protestant and Catholic in the 1500s-1700s was a strengthening of state power, which stemmed obviously from a desire to have the state enforce a unified religion on all its subjects. Areas with religious diversity and toleration were also areas where decentralised secular power structures survived.

Shrieking because growing up I heard so much handwringing about how church attendance is demographically skewed towards women, unlike the good old days of muscular Christianity, and isn't that terrible but IT STARTED ALL THE WAY BACK IN THE REFORMATION??? SPECIFICALLY IN THE AREAS WHICH ENJOYED FREEDOM OF WORSHIP??? IT DESTROYED WITHIN A FREE DECADES THE STEREOTYPE OF WOMEN AS CHAOTIC AND MORALLY INFERIOR??? SHUT UP

Biting my fist and squeaking at this scene where Lucy is composing a protest song about a hanging and Coriolanus thinks she's just making an assignation with him

Hold the line folks Coriolanus Snow just did an unselfish deed and is having a crisis over it because it involved breaking a rule so now he's over at Sejanus' house to cadge baked goods and cash, swearing never to repeat his sin and I'm dying. Yes this is the precise sort of intention that paves the road to Hell

Not only was Anne Askew, burned as a Protestant by Henry VIII during his Catholic era, a fugitive from an abusive marriage, but MacCulloch points out that this did not prevent her being virtually canonised in English Protestantism. The reformation exalted marriage but also permitted divorce more easily.

Fascinating that MacCulloch claims that during the medieval period, convents for female religious were often built to be less cloistered and enclosed than monasteries for men. It was in the wake of the Counter Reformation that convents became so enclosed.

Cecil is not a man to be set aside lightly. He ought to be hurled with great force.

askfadgh...I bounced off the first trilogy but this. This is SO GOOD. Suzanne Collins is brilliant and finally, she wrote a book for ME (featuring: a garbage man I can't look away from, snobs failing at ethical dilemmas, and a villain romance I'll cheer to watch fall apart). I loved the movie, but the book is so much richer and so skillful it's a JOY to read.

Not the Scottish Presbyterian official book of discipline directing ministers to marry a couple against their parents' wishes if need be??? and calling romantic love a "work of God"???? "For the work of God ought not to be hindered by the corrupt affections of worldly men" clutching my heart

Well the Armenian genocide definitely joins the Holodomor and the First Afghan War as one of the most gutwrenchingly horrifying episodes in history

"Calvinism is a Eucharist-centred and therefore community-minded faith" - fascinating pushback here against the notion that Protestantism is uncomplicatedly linked with capitalism and/or radical individualism.

Must say I was not expecting this enthusiastically positive review of Scottish Presbyterian church discipline and communal penitence.

"It would nevertheless be only a matter of time before the idea of “nation” served as a catalyst to war. Nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are related: they all share mythic notions of a pure and common origin, and they all serve material ambitions."

I'm not going to be normal about this one, I can tell.

Ok but I'm shocked they attribute the "not another effing Elf!" complaint to CS Lewis when it was actually Hugh Dyson. It would be funny if true, but Jack would never.

A POND????????? I see what you did there

high pitched tea kettle noises

While this book is not as historically in depth as I'd hoped (especially compared to the podcast) it's worth the price of admission just for the utterly bonkers "Historical Love Island" episode which pairs up Empress Theodora of Byzantium with Stanley Baldwin, crossword-loving WWI Prime Minister

"The Ancient Greeks thought the Persians hilariously effeminate because they refused to wear skirts"

"The best pigeons have a range of over 600 miles, which is twice as far as most Teslas (and twenty-five times further than Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket)"

oh this is NOT a book for the gym. no way I can do deadlifts under these conditions

"For Christians, a good way to understand toxic masculinity is, simply, the distinct way that sin has broken and fractured the expression of male embodiment."

Never before heard an analysis of 9/11 from an intelligence perspective before. Andrew is pretty scathing of US interdepartmental rivalry and hubris here.

On the global Catholic missions of the 16th & 17th centuries: "The perpetual trouble in all these mission-fields was the European reluctance to accept on equal terms the peoples whom they encountered... It was not surprising that when a Church infrastructure which remained European fell into decay in any area of the world, the Church as a whole soon began to fade away."

Every time I read about the Germans shipping Lenin to Russia and funding the extreme Bolsheviks during WWI I'm freshly horrified but after reading Figes' A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY a couple of years back on the actual effects of the Russian Revolution...it's about ten times worse

"In fact England judicially murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in Europe, which puts English pride in national tolerance in an interesting perspective" history is always more chequered than propaganda will admit