Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

By Jack Miles. Just as good as God: A biography. Even the epilogue and the appendices, on his process and the field of literary criticism of the Christian Bible itself, are good reading.

Repentance in the Greek of the Gospels is metanoia, a changing of the mind. The changing of the mind of God is the great subject, the epic argument, of the Christian Bible. Having blighted his own work and cursed his own image with misery and mortality, God faced an immense challenge. He had to restore his masterpiece. He had to redeem those whom he himself had exiled from paradise. For his own sake and not just for theirs, he had to recover the lost crown of his creation.

Sarah Mapps Douglass: Faithful Attender of Quaker Meeting: View from the Back Bench

By Margaret Hope Bacon. With a foreword by Vanessa Julye. It’s really good to have this story published. Bits of Sarah Mapps Douglass’s story have been told before, but this pamphlet places what Margaret Bacon has found about her life into the context of the times and of her family and friendships. It makes clear a shameful part of Quaker history.

Galileo’s Daughter

By Dava Sobel. An easy, informative read. I was most shocked by the incidental details of life in early 16th-century Italy. And some details of modern progress came home vis-a-vis the foundation of Quakerism just a few decades later: no gravitational theory; only recently invented pendulum clocks; and of course the Inquisition still at work in Italy declaring a heliocentric world heretical.