Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam By Karen Armstrong (non-fiction published in 2000)   “Fundamentalism in all three faiths has no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state.” n From the introduction   Karen Armstong’s first best-seller was 1993’s “A History of God” which traced the evolution of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In 2000 she released a much slimmer volume, the sorta-sequel but really stand-alone, “The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ” concerning how Extremist threads arose in these three large and diverse Religious identities. A bit more than a year later came the horrific 9/11 attacks and Anderson was moved into the spotlight as never before as the USA and England (the Nations representing her largest audiences) struggled to understand what could have driven such a...

Commonwealth (novel by Ann Patchett , published in 2016)   Ann Pratchett has a warning to the world, “I'm the old author who is saying, ‘I'm going to sell you out and take your story.’"   Those of us that have ambitions as writers read more than the average person because beyond the obvious pleasure of reading, which drove us to write in the first place, we also read to learn the how-to. We generally read a large variety of books, because if we focused only on authors who attack the same themes we tackle, we do nothing but ape our processors, we can’t see the power of language beyond its most familiar application, we bring nothing new in, we become mere “borrowers” and as Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”   But fully drinking the richness of our literature can be intimidating because many of our predecessors and our contemporaries, are also our betters. I am prone to be jealous of these betters and so far, this decade, no o...