Category: Books

India is the world’s largest democracy and home to a multitude of faiths. British journalist William Dalrymple, who has lived in India on and off for the last 25 years, surveys the subcontinent’s rich religious topography in his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.

The religious journeys Dalrymple describes in Nine Lives are incredibly personal. The book itself, though, is “emphatically not” about Dalrymple’s own religious search — (he comes from a Catholic background.) Instead, he says the real lesson of both Nine Lives and India itself “is pluralism.”

The nation’s incredible diversity “makes it very difficult to believe in only your own faith — that the faith you happen to have been born into is the only possible way of reaching God,” he says. India inspires the idea “that there are many ways up the mountain.” But is that true?

Are the major religions fundamentally similar or fundamentally different? On Monday, Stephen Colbert discussed this question with Stephen Prothero, author of the new book God Is Not One: Eight Rival Religions that Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter.

Americans have long prided themselves on being “positive” and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline!

By the mid-’00s optimism wasn’t just a psycho-spiritual lifestyle option; it had become increasingly mandatory.

Two years into the Great Recession, it’s time to face the truth…

How do we read R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis Illustrated“? It seems a contradiction: a sober reconstruction by a man who admits he ” not believe that the Bible is ‘the word of God.’ ” And yet, the further we get into this electrifying adaptation, the more it all makes sense.

If you remove divinity from the equation, “Genesis” becomes a human creation — “a powerful text,” in Crumb’s words, “with layers of meaning that reach deep into our collective consciousness, our historical consciousness, if you will.” These stories are sacred, then, not because they were handed down by any deity but because they speak to the elemental conflicts that drive us as women and men.

While the fictional story lines about conspiracy and the Catholic Church in “The Da Vinci Code” caused an uproar among some Catholics and drew censure from the Vatican, a senior representative of the Freemasons in Australia called “The Lost Symbol” the work of a “terrific novelist.”

“We are very pleased, there is nothing in this book that will offend my organization. It does give us the opportunity to open it up a bit,” said Greg Levenston, Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory for the Freemasons.

With Dan Brown’s newest novel, The Lost Symbol, hitting bookstores Sept. 15 — much of it rumored to revolve around Masonic myths — the Masons are in pre-emptive damage-control mode, Religion News Service reports.

Small wonder, since The Da Vinci Code — which Brown claimed to be historically accurate — was full of errors.

Philip Pullman, the children’s author, is set to cause controversy with a new book – called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ – denying that Jesus was the son of God.

Publisher Jamie Byng said that Pullman’s book, which will be published next Easter, “strips Christianity bare and exposes the gospels to a new light”.