The Core

In a week’s time I move into my new apartment and begin the newest semester of college, this being my junior year. It seems as good a time as any to reflect on the education I received my first two years at the University of Dallas, and the defining characteristic of that education: the Core. Prepare for a mild degree of ranting.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ll briefly describe the courses UD’s Core (the list of those required of all students) includes (for a total of 21 classes):

• Four Literature classes, starting with the ancient epics, then doing the Christian epics and lyric poetry, then “Tragedy and Comedy” (but mostly tragedy), then the modern novel
• Four History classes, two on “American Civilization” and two on “Western Civilization”
• Three philosophy classes, “and the Ethical Life”, “of Man”, and “of Being”
• Two theology classes, “Understanding the Bible” and “Western Theological Tradition”
• “Fundamentals of Economics”
• “Principles of American Politics”
• Two science classes, one “life science” and one “physical science”
• A math class and a fine arts class (for whatever reason these are listed together)
• Classes in a foreign language going up to the “intermediate II” level

This is a fairly large list of courses; they’re usually finished by the end of a student’s sophomore year. I’m done with all of it except the foreign language, due to taking German Elementary I & II my freshman year and then not taking any languages last year (I blame Rome).

In general I think it’s a good program, but I have a number of complaints with it. For the most part, they boil down to, “either force students to take this subject seriously, or take it out of the Core”.

Complaint #1: The math and science classes in the Core are, for the non-math-or-science major, a joke. The problem is that, while the courses in English, Philosophy, Theology, and History all serve as a good introduction to the subject for someone wanting to major in those subjects, no math major will ever take “Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometries” (the course non-math-and-science majors always take), instead they’ll take Calculus I&II (if they haven’t already), then Linear Point Set Theory, and go from there. No biology major will ever take the class known colloquially as “baby bio”, instead they’ll take Gen Bio I, and then Gen Bio II. Et cetera.

This results in the majors not taking the core courses, but jumping right into the actual subject matter, while the core courses are taught be people who don’t want to teach them to classes composed of people who don’t want to take them and study the subject to so little depth that it might as well not be studied at all. My solution? Sadly, unless the school could bring itself to start demanding that its entire student body learn calculus (which I don’t expect to happen, though I don’t see why it shouldn’t; for some reason calculus is seen as too difficult for fine arts majors), I think the best thing to do would be to cut out the math and science requirements altogether. These are subjects that (ought to) have been taught to the students in high school already to at least the same level they’re learning about it at college. Why duplicate that effort?

Similarly, though Economics and Politics majors do take Fundamental of Economics and Principles of American Politics alongside non-major classmates, the politics core course seems to me to duplicate what’s taught in high school politics classes and the history classes that are part of the core, and the economics one is just as bad. I doubt there was any need for the majors to take the class before taking higher-level classes, and the non-majors in the class learned little from them.

Then there’s the Fine Arts course inexplicably lumped in with the math requirement. I’m honestly not sure what the point of this requirement is. To get any kind of decent grasp of art or music or in the Western tradition would require a multi-course sequence (and indeed, the core requirement is satisfied, when not by “Art and Architecture in Rome”, by a single course picked from these sequences). The requirement can also be satisfied by a single “History of Drama” course. This major requirement just seems bizarre to me, especially given how it can be satisfied by studying visual art OR music OR drama, a somewhat random collection unified only by not being purely language-based.

Is the goal to convey a history of “aesthetics” in general, and visual art, music, and drama, are all seen as equally good vehicles at doing this? If so, then just put more emphasis on views of aesthetics in the English classes, which already serve as a history of artistic development, but are currently restricted to language arts only, or in the History classes, which are already essentially history of intellectual thought and incorporate a good deal of aesthetic history. But why have a separate core requirement that can be fulfilled by any of a large number of courses that each give you only a snapshot of the history of the arts?

So if I made these changes to the Core, what we we be left with? It would look something like the following:

• Four Literature classes, starting with the ancient epics, then doing the Christian epics and lyric poetry, then “Tragedy and Comedy” (but mostly tragedy), then the modern novel, and also talking about how the works of literature fit into broader aesthetic categories (“Romantic”, “Renaissance”, “Medieval”, etc)
• Four History classes, two on “American Civilization” and two on “Western Civilization”, talking about not only political but also intellectual and aesthetic history
• Three philosophy classes, “and the Ethical Life”, “of Man”, and “of Being”
• Two theology classes, “Understanding the Bible” and “Western Theological Tradition”
• Classes in a foreign language going up to the “intermediate II” level

Total: 14 classes. Which is essentially a student’s freshman year, plus the semester they spend in Rome if they go. A reduced core, but one that still fulfills its purpose.

Bringing it down to 14 courses also gives some room for additional courses, if desired; for example, since “history” is now explicitly burdened with talking about intellectual and aesthetic history, rather than just political and economic history, a fifth history course might be desired. (“Explicitly” is in place of “implicitly” – history classes at UD already focus on intellectual and aesthetic history more so than anywhere else, this would just make it official.)

It is also a Core that is unapologetically unscientific. This is not ideal, I believe, but it better than being apologetically unscientific – better than pretending to include math and science, but actually not leading to any real study of those subjects except by those who are majoring in them. It would be possible to still include math and science in the Core, of course, but it would require a radical perspective shift; if you believe they ought to learn more than they already did in high school, then forcing them to learn calculus is the logical next step. If you’re not willing to do that, it’s pointless to force them to continue taking math classes.

So that’s my grand theory of what I would do to the Core if ever I were in charge of UD. I never will be, of course, which is why even if this plan is actually more harm than good, we’ll never know about it. But that’s the fun of wishful thinking, isn’t it – that there’s no consequences to poorly thought out wishes?

The New Encyclical

I haven’t read Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical Caritas in Veritate yet (and I’m not sure I will; I’m not a big encyclical reader, though perhaps I should be). But it doesn’t matter. I now know what the main lesson to be gleaned from it is, and rejoice, my friends, for it is a joyous one:

THE POPE SUPPORTS COPYRIGHT REFORM.

(Admittedly, based on that quotation the Pope is more interested in the health-care-related issues (e.g. drug companies charging popor Africans lots of money for AIDS medicine they have exclusive patents on), and he implicitly assumes there is an actual, though limited, “right to intellectual property”, but he’s certainly more reasonable on the issue than most music-and-movie-industry spokesmen.)

The Problem with Heaven

I have a minor gripe with the way Christian theology is laid out. It’s not that I think it’s wrong – I’m a faithful Catholic, if perhaps not a good one, and tend to believe what the Church says to believe – it’s that the emphasis often seems misplaced.

The issue is with the concept of “Heaven”. Philosophically, I’m not sure exactly what it will be, or what a “resurrected body” is, etc. I do think it’s pretty clearly not going to be what we expect (sitting around on clouds for the rest of eternity – which most people use to mean aeviternality, but that’s a different story), but that’s not that big a deal. But it is a big deal that the idea of a Heaven than you either get into or don’t, and if you don’t you go to hell, encourages a really flawed way of looking at morality.

How this happens is pretty clear. With a Heaven-Hell strict duality, you end up trying to do just the bare minimum to get into Heaven, and not try to be as good as you can for the sake of being good, you end up not being very good at all. You just end up not very bad. That’s not what Christianity is about.

Of course, this is a commonly recognized problem. Look at the text of the traditional Act of Contrition: “I detest all my sins because of your just punishment, but most of all because they offend you, my God”, etc. We’re not supposed to avoid sin because it’ll stop us from getting into Heaven; we avoid sin because it offends God, because it is wrong.

But casting things in terms of getting into Heaven or not predisposes us to look for the bare minimum, because, well, if you’re either in or out, what’s the least you have to do to get in? Find out, do exactly that, and you’ll have a fun, easy life and end up in Heaven. The Catholic Church gets around this somewhat with the concept of Purgatory – putting the emphasis on sanctification, rather than justification, and making clear that just doing the bare minimum might get you into Purgatory, but that you’d be a lot better off doing more than that – but even this leaves the basic Heaven-Hell duality there.

It’s not like I have a solution to this, of course. And I’m not saying we should emend the Bible to not talk so much about Heaven and Hell. But we do need to realize that the point of life is not get-in-or-get-left-out-of-Heaven; the point is to become a good person, and you are who you are when you die, and that not only determines your fate, that is your fate. If you were a bad person, you live with that and that is Hell; if you were a mediocre person, you might get to Heaven, but it won’t be a very big Heaven for you.

This is something that’s been talked about throughout history, but I think it could bear reiteration. Mainly because it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize, or if they do, they don’t have a good understanding of; I know several people who will do things of questionable morality and say, “well, it’s not going to stop me from getting into Heaven, so why not?” That’s exactly what we need to avoid – not because that attitude will stop us from getting into Heaven (it might, or it might not), but because it completely misses the point.

Paschal Triduum

Tomorrow begins the Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. These are the days leading up to Easter Sunday, and they’re pretty much the most important days of the year to Catholics – on Thursday you remember the Last Supper, on Friday the Crucifixion, and at Easter Vigil on Saturday night, the Resurrection.

What I find interesting is how you don’t have mass on Friday. You have Mass on Thursday – and it’s the one where you get to do the Gospel-reading-as-play, with the congregation taking the part of all the groups of people in the narrative – and on Saturday night you have Easter Vigil Mass, with its candle-lighting, several readings from all sorts of Old Testament books, baptisms, etc. But on Friday there’s no Mass celebrated, anywhere. It’s the day Jesus died, I guess, and so it would be inappropriate to celebrate his resurrection.

Or something like that. I confess I don’t understand it completely myself. But these are three of my favorite days of the year, because even if I don’t fully understand everything Catholicism has to say, I understand enough of it, and besides, the liturgies for these days are simply awe-inspiring. I wouldn’t like to have a four-hour-long mass every Sunday, but the Easter Vigil mass can be as long as it likes and I really won’t mind. It ought to be a marathon. It just seems appropriate.

Tricky Questions

Today is the 26th anniversary of the Roe v.  Wade Supreme Court decision in the United States, which, for all intents and purposes, legalized abortion-on-demand up until birth (though later court decisions were required to make clear that this is what it did). It is seen as a day of mourning and penance in the Catholic Church. In honor of it, I’m going to write a post about abortion.

Recently, I’ve more and more seen pro-choice advocates use this following rhetorical strategy. Pro-choicer: “So, if abortion was outlawed, what would be the punishment for it? Would you try the mother for murder?”
Pro-lifer: “Um…” Pro-choicer: “Aha! See, you realize it would be absurd to try the mother for murder; doesn’t that mean abortion is in fact no such thing?”

A tricky question, this one… it takes advantage of the fact that abortion is currently legalized, and many women have had them. If the pro-lifers say “yes, we would try the mothers for murder”, it sounds as if they are condemning every woman who has ever had a legal abortion as an illegal murderer. Obviously this wouldn’t go over very well. And many pro-lifers are simply too focused on getting abortion illegalized to think about what would happen once it was; they themselves perhaps haven’t thought through the distinction between women who have abortions today and hypothetical women would have hypothetical abortions once it were illegal. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a coherent, reasonable, and just pro-life explanation for what would happen to a mother who had an abortion after it was outlawed.

Firstly, if abortion were outlawed, all the abortion clinics would be closed and easy access to abortion would be cut off. At this point no one could say they did not know abortion was illegal, and it would be just to punish them for it – while it would not be just to punish anyone who has had an abortion under the current state of affairs. This is something that would need to be made clear. It’s a similar situation to how slavery was abolished in the US; current slave-owners were not punished except by the loss of all the property they held in slave form, but if anyone tried to hold slaves in the US today, they would be punished, and severely. I wonder, did anyone in the pre-Civil War era use the argument, “so how would you punish slave-owners?”

So the abortion clinics are gone. But there would probably still be doctors performing abortions. In these cases,  the doctor, not the mother, would be the murderer. The main focus would be on shutting down the doctors who perform the abortions. They would be tried for murder. As for the mother, well, she would probably have to be somehow punished… but to what extent? To the same extent, no more but not less, than if they had committed infanticide. I’ve read that if a mother commits infanticide it is not seen as the same as murder; it’s treated as manslaughter. Abortion would have to be punished in the same way.

Is this unduly harsh? I don’t know. Is punishing maternal infanticide with trial for manslaughter unduly harsh? I hope no one thinks so. But if infanticide had been legalized and people were trying to re-legalize it, people might still use the argument “so how would you punish the mother?” The answer would be the same as with abortion, but people would have the same aversion to saying so – because if infanticide were legal, the mother who killed her infant legally would be just as much a victim of the process as the child himself.

Back from Babylon

Well, Avignon. Over Thanksgiving Break I traveled there, to the site of the medieval “Babylonian Captivity” – when the popes lived in Avignon rather than Rome.

Why were they in Avignon? Basically, in 1309 a French pope was elected and, rather than traveling to Rome, which was dangerous at the time (Roman aristocrats constantly feuded over who was pope, with various intrigue, etc), he elected to stay in Avignon. The Curia and supporting cast moved to Avignon to accommodate him, and the popes stayed there until 1377. This resulted in the French king having a lot of influence over the Church – obviously, if the pope is in France, the pope can’t do anything the French king dislikes without fearing repercussions.

Now, I’d say the Babylonian Captivity was not a particularly bright spot in Catholic history. The seat of the papacy is Rome – they’re not really allowed to move just because the king of France will protect them (provided they do what he tells them to).

But, that didn’t stop me enjoying the fruits of that Captivity – there is a very cool Gothic papal palace in Avignon, and a city wall built by the popes that is somehow still intact. I guess there’s nothing wrong with appreciating the fruits of what we do not approve of… or is there? If there is, there are some issues with ever studying art, literature, music, etc, since any work not by an orthodox Catholic would be suspect. I don’t think we want to say that.

The Land of the Ice and Snow

This last weekend, I went to Stockholm, in Sweden, leaving on Friday and returning early Sunday morning.

Now, I went to Stockholm just because it’s in Scandinavia, and I wanted to go somewhere in Scandinavia before the semester ended. I bought the tickets back in September, but didn’t do any research whatsoever before going, and so had no idea what to expect. I was prepared to be disappointed.

It turns out, though, that Stockholm is simply a stunning city visually. The mood of the city was set by its beautiful blondes in somber black clothing walking amidst multi-colored ancient apartment buildings as if the two went naturally together. This fit perfectly with the weather, which was chilly but not cold, and very slightly overcast). There was also natural beauty; walking along the harbor was amazing, and some of the islands (like Kastellholmen) were a mix of rocky and grassy parkland and quaint-looking 18th-/19th-century “castles” and churches.

So it was a lot of fun to just walk around the city, and I did that a decent amount. This is one of my favorite things to do in new cities, after all; when I was alone in Cologne for eight hours over ten-day I just wandered around aimlessly for at least two or three of them. I think Stockholm is one of the best cities I’ve been in for simply wandering around for aesthetic pleasure.

But my other favorite thing to do is to go into random churches, and at this, Stockholm failed. There were very few churches – well, fewer than in, say, Rome or Munich – and those that there were, were Lutheran. Going into Lutheran churches does not particularly interest me.

This was, of course, expected. I knew Scandinavia was mostly agnostic, and nominally Lutheran not Catholic. But it was still disappointing, in a sense; I could not help but imagine how awesome Stockholm would have been if it had had this going for it as well. If Stockholm had been Catholic, I think it might have been my favorite city in Europe so far.

But that is just wishful thinking. Obviously Stockholm is not going to turn Catholic any time soon. That leaves me seeing Stockholm, and thus all of Scandinavia, in a wishful light; it was amazing, but it could have been more, so much more.

Cafeterias

I’ve mentioned before that I believe organized religion is superior to some kind of spiritual free-for-all, and promised to write a post on that subject. I’ve been planning the post for a while, and today, after listening to a lecture by Brother Guy Consolmagno (a Jesuit) about “how scientists and engineers view religion”, I finally have the inspiration to do it.First of all, I’ll say something about the bad reasons for organized religion. I was somewhat disturbed, actually, by some of what Br. Guy said about “techies” (as he called them) and religion, specifically why the ones that are religious are religious (note that Br. Guy didn’t endorse their reasons, just said that this was what they believed).

Many people (not just techies) are religious not so much because they think their religion is true as because they like the sense of community they get from it, or they want to instill virtues in their children, or some nonsense like that. Those are horrible reasons to belong to an organized religion. If you want a community, join a book club or something. If you want to instill virtues in your children, then first think about why you believe one ought to be virtuous, then instill virtues in your children using those reasons – and if you can’t, perhaps your reasons aren’t very good any you should rethink them. But don’t try to convince your children of something you yourself don’t believe is true just to make them good people.

And people who don’t believe in any organized religion often have decent reasons. Br. Guy gave several common (techie) responses to the question of, how do you decide between the myriad possible religions out there, many of which have compelling arguments for them? I think they boil down to essentially three different ways of looking at religion.

1. Clearly, since they can’t all be right, they’re all wrong. This is not a logical argument, but it resonates emotionally, even with me, a committed Catholic. And unfortunately logic isn’t really applicable when trying to decide between axiom systems. This way lies atheism.
2. Clearly, since they all seem to be right, or at least make sense, they are all in some sense right. So just pick one, it doesn’t really matter which one. If you disagree with some aspect of that religion, no big deal. You don’t actually have to agree with the beliefs of the religion you supposedly profess. This way lies what is often called cafeteria religion – just try to find a religion community you can fit in well with, that you mostly agree with, and don’t worry about what you disagree with them about.
3. Clearly, there is one truth, and every religion is an attempt to approximate this truth. They may all seem equally true, but they cannot be – after all, they contradict. So one ought to find the religion that converges most closely with the truth. This leads to a more sophisticated form of cafeteria religion – you pick the religion you find most true, but if you think you know better than it in some way, you follow your variant rather than the standard.

The first two I find it hard to argue with. To one who rejects religion out of hand, the only response, I think, is to point out the rather illogical nature of the claim that because it is impossible to determine which religion is actually true, no religion is true – but this really doesn’t get anywhere. I think with these people you have to abandon reasoned discourse – you cannot change someone’s axioms with logic unless you prove them inconsistent. The second I simply cannot respect. If you do not care about truth, what can I say to you to convince you to change your mind?

But the third is actually interesting. Why shouldn’t one be allowed to be Catholic but disagree with the Church over contraception, or women priests, or papal infallibility, or whatever your particular complaint is?

My answer: because organized religions are not simply collections of like-minded people. The Catholic Church sees itself as a Church. The organization itself exists, and you’re either in, or you’re out. You can’t disagree with the Church about something it has definitively settled (like any of the things I mentioned above) – if you do, you’re not actually in the Church. Perhaps you are in name, but I would say that you’re really already excommunicated – you excommunicated yourself, by deciding not to actually be in the community of Catholics by believing what the Catholic Church teaches. This applies to a lesser degree to other religions. It doesn’t make any sense to be Jewish and reject the Torah, or to be Muslim and disagree with parts of the Qur’an.

So what do you do if you like many of the teachings of a religion, but disagree with others? This is where many people say that it’s OK to believe what you want to believe. Just don’t be a member of any church or synagogue or mosque.

But I think doing so is hubris. You claim, essentially, that you yourself have found the truth while no one else ever has. You might say that you think religion X was close to the truth, and you’re just trying to get closer to the truth – religions evolve to converge closer and closer to the actual truth, which no religion has. But this strikes me an nonsense. Religions don’t just offer a set of unconnected beliefs, some one which you can take and some of which you can throw out as outdated – they offer comprehensive systems of belief. Systems like that don’t “evolve” or “converge”.

That is my essential point. If you disagree with one part, you basically have to either be humble and say that perhaps the combined weight of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of tradition just might have gotten this right and you wrong, or you have to throw out the entire system and build a new one with different premises – or prove conclusively that your religion’s original axioms do not lead to the conclusion you disagree with. Which is damn hard to do.

[Note: As I was writing this post, I realized that "spiritual free-for-all" can really mean two things - cafeteria religion, on the one hand, and gnosticism, meaning here not the Manichean spirit-body dualism but the idea of hidden knowledge, on the other. These two are really different, and require radically different arguments against them. This is an argument against cafeteria religion. I'll hopefully write something about gnosticism in the near future. But I think this is an adequate, if not extraordinary, response to the question of, why organized religion?]

War of the Gods

In ancient times, or so I’ve read, when each different tribe had a different god, the conquest of one tribe by another was thought to prove that one god was somehow stronger than the other. This can be seen at times in the Old Testament; the Israelites conquering the Canaanite tribes was seen as proving that YHWH existed while Baal, et al, did not.

A lot of people, I think, see examples like this as somewhat absurd. How does defeating the religious followers of another god prove that your god exists and theirs does not? The basic concept, however, seems to me to be more deeply rooted in our psyche than most people realize. The idea than an ideology is somehow proven false because it loses followers is commonplace.

Take the Nazis. The idea that Jews were sub-human died, for the most part, with the fall of the 3rd Reich. I’m not saying that the destruction of the Jewish race was not an abominable evil, far from it – but I am saying that it is only considered evil now because the Nazis lost the war. In a sense, then, their military defeat proved they were wrong to commit genocide.

That’s a somewhat weak example; here’s a better one. Take Zoroastrianism. That religion has a lot going for it. I’ve even seen several people argue that Zoroastrianism was more logical than Christianity. But today the religion has only a few hundred thousand adherents, it will be extinct in a few centuries, and no one takes it seriously any more. This seems for the most part to be just a consequence of having few followers. The fact that no one believes in Zoroastrianism is taken as evidence that it must be false.

I’ve even seen atheists use the fact that religions come and go as evidence that no religion can be true. The problem with this, of course, is that it then means that if a religion stays around for a while (say, Catholicism), it must be true. I doubt they want to imply that. My question is – do Catholics want to imply that?

Perhaps there is some value to discarding belief systems on that basis, perhaps not. I don’t know. But I do think it would be somewhat amusing – depressing and irrational, yes, but it would have a dark humor to it – if the one true faith, which everyone had to believe in order to be saved, was that of Baal.

Book Review: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

I recently read the book St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. It is a sequel, of sorts, to A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Canticle came out in the 60’s; this book was published in 1997, posthumously – Miller committed suicide in 1996 – and finished by a ghost-writer.  Canticle is one of my favorite books, but I was hesitant to read the sequel. I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be as good as the original – and I was right. Still, it was interesting.

The basic premise of Canticle was that, sometime in the 20th century, there was a nuclear war. Civilization self-destructed. What was not destroyed by the nukes was destroyed by the survivors of the war, who decided that the intelligentsia was to blame for the war and thus all books must be destroyed. A certain Isaac Leibowitz, however, founded an order of Catholic monks to preserve the Memorabilia, as it was called, and eventually civilization restarted itself (and fell again, and will eventually restart and fall once more – Miller’s view of history is cyclic). The work is divided into three parts, one taking place in the 26th century (Fiat Homo), one in the 32nd (Fiat Lux), and one in the 38th (Fiat Voluntas Tua). I would say more, but this isn’t a review of Canticle, but of its sequel.

Wild Horse Woman is a much different kind of book. It is set around a hundred years after the events of Fiat Lux. Instead of presenting a grand view of History through a series of vignettes, it focuses on one man (Brother Blacktooth St. George) and how he influences the conflict between Church and State. The ‘State’ here is the Empire of Texarkana, and the ‘Church’ is, of course, the Catholic Church, transplanted to New Rome (i.e. St. Louis, Missouri) after Rome was destroyed and now in exile in Valana (somewhere in Wyoming, I think).

The political situation is interesting, but more interesting, I think, is the relationship of the title – Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. The Wild Horse Woman is the Nomad goddess, and the book is really in many ways about the relationship between the pagan and the Christian. Specifically, Miller seems to be drawing an identity – not just a similarity – between the Wild Horse Woman and the Virgin Mary.

He also speculates about the divinity of the Virgin, and invents a “Northwest Heresy” that claims “her womb is the primordial void into which the eternal Word was spoken”. Clearly this is, well, a heresy – but in the book, it is endorsed by Blacktooth St. George, who becomes a sort of mystic. The book, then, is also about mysticism versus religion. Miller was a convert to Catholicism, but fell  away from the Church after Vatican II and embraced a sort of Buddhist spirituality probably similar to that of the character Wooshin. In the book, a pope (who turns out to be an anti-pope) is elected by the name of Amen Specklebird who endorses a Zen-like paradoxical spirituality founded in mysticism. I personally can’t understand the mindset of a mystic. With relation to mysticism, this book mainly convinced me that it very easily leads to heresy and ought to be avoided. Perhaps that was Miller’s view as well – perhaps he regretted being led away from Catholicism.

Overall, I think, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is not as good as A Canticle for Leibowitz primarily because much of the power of Canticle came from its power as a piece of speculative fiction. It gave us 1700 years of speculative history and in doing so made a persuasive case for a cyclical philosophy of history. The sequel deals only with one small time period in that history, and in doing so becomes less a piece of speculative fiction than a religious and political drama that just happens to be taking place in a post-nuclear-war world.

Still, it wasn’t a bad book. It was worth reading, I think. It didn’t ruin Canticle for me. So I would recommend it – with the caveat that it’s theology is very confused and you’ll need to put in some effort to figure out what exactly is going on.