THREE

I am currently reading THREE books (well, actually five but that doesn't fit in with my theme for today):

• The Book of Revelation (aka The Apocolypse of John) [you know, the last book in the christian Bible].
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
• The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans.

I do my reading in the morning, when I get up, and before going to work.  If something is really good, I might even continue reading it at night before bed (but reading at the end of the day typically puts me to sleep very quickly).
 

Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Saint John on Patmos the Musée Condé, Chantilly.

Revelation I am reading the New American Bible translation in preparation for doing this book in the St. Mark's Men's Bible Study group starting in late January.  Realizing this is a challenging (i.e., bizarre) book, I wanted to orient myself ahead of time.  I have read this book several times over the years but it has been a while.

For supplementary material, I am using The Collegeville Bible Commentary (NT #11) by Pheme Perkins (1983); I am pacing my readings to the December 2005 issue of God's Word Today (focused on The Book of Revelation) by Steven J. Binz. GWT is set up to read a book in one month.  That is a bit quick I think, but at least it is an exposure.

I started December 3rd and it looks like I will finish it in a day or two.  This will give me time to review and look at some other sources before our group starts its study (using the Little Rock Scripture Study Series).



The Crucible
I started reading this because my son, Richard, had to read it for school. They recently finished it but I still have Act Four to go.

I never read this when I went to school, so this is a first for me.

Before starting to read this, I read the Wikipedia entry on it. I also found an audio version at my library.  I listened to this in order to get a feel for the basic story. I knew that I could finish the audio version in a few days during my commute.

The Penguin edition is very good. It has a nice essay at the beginning (which only makes sense if you know what the story/play is about) which has interesting background to how the play was written.

The Crucible is pretty somber and has a depressing ending. Sort of like A Tale of Two Cities (I prefer The Scarlet Pimpernal for the same time period).

Coincidently (I think), Richard's school put on a performance of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour.  This is a more contemporary version of similar subject matter, also based on a true story. Thus, there are a lot of parallels between the two plays.  But both share a common thread of being somberly depressing (and much too adult for high school students in my opinion).  I'm not surprised that there are so many depressed high school students; perhaps schools should lighten up the reading by sprinkling in some comedy (e.g., The Mouse That Roared).



The Third Reich In Power

This is the 2nd of a trilogy about the history of the Third Reich.  The copy I am borrowing from the library has 941 pages.  I started this book August 9th and have renewed it 6 times (I think). I have about 100 pages to go. This is not light reading.

The 1st book of the trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich) is 622 pages and took my THREE months to read. The 3rd book of the Trilogy covers WWII.

Both books have tons of footnotes (which I look at-kind of a challenge to decipher what a title in German might mean in English).

I started reading this series because I wanted to read a reputable account of how the Nazis rose to power and led a people down the road to perdition. The conventional wisdom is that the Nazis were evil devils that took over the country and fooled the people who had no idea what was being done to their neighbors.

Another impetus for reading this book was another book:  Miracles Through Our Lady (True Stories of Everyday People That Can Change Your Life Forever), translated from the original German by Renate Mross.  It is a collection of true stories that demonstrate how the Blessed Mother was able to assist peiople in distress in extraordinary ways.  There were several stories of German soldiers during WWI and WWII that prayed to Mary for help during the war.  I was intrigued by this because this portrayal of faith goes against the picture of evil Huns that we have been taught. So I wanted to find out more about what the German people were really like during this time.

In a post 9-11 state where our freedoms are being sold for safety from terrorism, I wanted to see if there were any similarities with pre-WWII Germany. My conclusion thus far is that there are and if things continue, we are in for big trouble.

Conclusion:  Surprisingly, these THREE books seem to have a confluence around the concept of fear. 

Revelation has the fear of eternal damnation in the Pool of Fire if you don't meet the requirements. I would bet that most Christians who read this book assume that their name is written in the book of life. If so, a closer reading may be in order. The advice of the book is to Repent (that might be a good New Year's resolution).

The Crucible also revolves around the fear of the devil and eternal damnation. Why, all the folks were trying to do was to keep the devil out of their community. Just a bit of pruning to get rid of some weeds.

Finally, the Third Reich used fear to gain power and control the people. Similar to the folks in the Crucible, they were trying to get rid of what they considered a corrupting influence to their race/country. While the Nazis were not religious, they apparently thought they were fulfilling providence.

The authors of The Crucible and The Third Reich in Power wrote their material in order to try to warn people about the dangers that lead society to destroy people who don't conform to some group's ideal.  Revelation promises that God will destroy all those devils via eternal suffering and torment when it's the right time.

THREE interesting and challenging books. I need a light, humorous book. Fortunately, I recieved a fine book for a Christmas present about the Cleveland Indians.