Limbo Still In Limbo

According to the Times of London the Pope remained silent on the issue of getting rid of the old theologoumenon of limbo. I'm of mixed feelings about the whole thing; read my earlier comments on the topic here.

HT: EnglishEclectic.

Darwin on Darwinian Accounts of Religious Belief

There is a fine post up at DarwinCatholic discussing some of the issues raised by the materialist hypothesis that religious belief can be explained mechanistically in terms of selection forces. Darwin has articulated a very important point about such theses: they are instances of the genetic fallacy, the mistaken idea that by explaining the origins of some particular belief in terms of subjective interpretations of a complex and mysterious natural world we thereby disprove the objective truth of the belief. This is a very important point, since it vitiates every such materialist argument.

The materialist view is that religious belief is not what philosophers call an "inference to the best explanation", that is, it posits entities (such as God) that are unnecessary if we can explain the observable kosmos in terms of naturalistic entities and forces (matter and natural selection). This is a valuable strategy to use in scientific explanations, but it is important to remember that it is merely a strategy--that is, it carries no guarantee of truth. All the scientific evidence in the universe could suggest that there is no God, and there might still be one. It may, in fact, be "irrational" in a materialist sense to believe in God, and yet still a good idea, because still true. This is yet one more reason why it is better to be an anti-realist rather than a realist about scientific explanation.

There Will Be Gaps

Last Friday, Fr. Al Kimel completed his extended essay(s) on justification and predestination at Pontifications. Since that blog no longer supports user comments, and because Fr. Kimel has kindly brought his essays to my attention, I would like to make a few comments here, and I invite others who wish to comment on what Fr. Kimel has to say to contribute their comments here at this blog. My own comments are something of a meditation on something that appears to me to come very close to a solution to what I had always thought of as a problem rather than as an announcement, and in seeing this solution to my pseudo-problem I begin to understand the unpreachability of the announcement.

Fr. Kimel begins with what I think is an extraordinarily valuable insight: "in Scripture predestination is good news," and he quotes what I think is a particularly beautiful passage from Barth (Church Dogmatics II/2):

In itself, however, [the truth of the Gospel] is light and not darkness. In any case, even under this aspect, the final word is never that of warning, of judgment, of punishment, of a barrier erected, of a grave opened. We cannot speak of it without mentioning all these things. The Yes cannot be heard unless the No is also heard. But the No is said for the sake of the Yes and not for its own sake. In substance, therefore, the first and last word is Yes and not No.

Fr. Kimel nicely explicates this notion via the doctrine of the Incarnation:

Because predestination intends Jesus, it intends the Church, the body of Christ, the new Israel and elect company of the twice-born. And because predestination simultaneously intends Jesus, Israel, Mary, and the Church, it also intends the individual believer in Christ, who has been baptized into the death and resurrection of the Lord, incorporated into the eschatological community, and made an heir of the kingdom. The gospel of election proclaims to the baptized that through their sacramental incorporation into Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, they participate in the divine Sonship and are destined to be with Christ in his kingdom. Jesus is the elect One of God: united to him we share in his divine election. To be in the Church is to be in Christ; to be in Christ is to be in God; and to be in God is to enjoy eternal salvation in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This is salutary for the philosopher who, like me, pedantically persues God through logic as though God can be captured within the formal constraints of the human mind; Fr. Kimel rightly notes what I had been missing: to conceive of the problem of predestination in the way that philosophers usually do is to make a kind of category mistake, or to commit oneself to something that is not a well-formed formula:

At the moment one makes the Augustinian turn and seeks to explain human rejection of the gospel in terms of God’s eternal decrees, the preaching of election becomes impossible. The logic appears inescapable. If salvation is by grace alone, and if some reject Christ to their damnation, does this not mean that God reprobates, directly or indirectly, the damned? But the gospel itself disallows the question. The election of Christ Jesus is the reason why some are saved, but it is not the reason why some are not!

Fr. Kimel turns, with the writer Joseph P. Farrell (of "Tesla studies" fame--or infamy, depending on whom you ask), to the thought of St. Maximus the Confessor in the quest for an explanation of this situation. The Maximian solution lies in seeing Christ's redemptive act as saving human nature rather than individual human persons, and ascribing the natural will to that human nature, while the personal will belongs to the individual person. Every natural will, on this account, strives for the good, thanks to the redemptive healing of Christ's sacrifice, but individual persons are still quite capable of choosing something that falls far short of the good, since a healed nature does not guarantee a healed individual capable of using a particular will in the way the healed natural will is structured to be used.

The idea here is a very interesting one. The metaphysics is broadly Neoplatonic, with a natural kind functioning as a kind of singular in which multiple particulars can participate by means of a kind of hypostasis. Just as in Neoplatonism, the singular is unqualifiedly what it is, while the particulars are capable of falling short of it. In the present case, the singular is unqualifiedly redeemed by the sacrificial act of Christ, and particulars may approach ever closer to that state individually by becoming as like to the singular as possible. Since the particulars have a share of the singular, they have a share of the salvation enjoyed by the singular due to Christ's sacrifice; but as particulars they are quite capable of having other properties as well, including a kind of falling short of perfection that, due to our limited free will, can have the effect of turning us away from God rather than towards him.

This sort of "both/and" metaphysics is characteristic of our Trinitarian theology. God is also a singular, and has certain properties, including "being from God/being the God from whom", a sort of bi-valent property that captures the essence of the relations among the three Persons. God the Father is the "God from whom", while God the Son is "God from God". The "both/and" aspect of this kind of metaphysics can be seen most clearly in the debate over the Filioque: since this bi-valent property must always be present in God considered as such, it must also be fully present (that is, both aspects of its valency must be present) in any given Person-pair. Obviously when you consider Father and Son it is present, as it is when you consider Father and Holy Spirit. But what if the pair is Son and Holy Spirit? The Greeks had argued that the Holy Spirit was not really "from the Son", but if, with the Latins, you accept that he is, then in that pairing also you have one Person who is "god from God" (the Holy Spirit) and one Person who is "god from whom" (the Son). The Latin formulation has the advantage of making perfect sense out of the properties that we must ascribe to God as such while at the same time making sense out of the properties that are ascribed to the separate Persons.

Trinitarian metaphysics is necessarily mysterious, because what it attempts to explain is a mystery. But being mysterious is not the same thing as being unintelligible; it means only that intelligibility will require cognitive leaps of the sort that ordinary logic does not sufficiently account for. The human mind is finite and limited, but God is not. We are like the poor folks in the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions: we are squares contemplating spheres, plane figures tyring to understand three-dimensional space, human beings trying to comprehend God. There will be gaps.

Catholic Friends of Israel

Catholic Friends of Israel is a blog that I have only just discovered today, although it has been around since September of last year. Christopher Blosser of Ratzinger Fan Club fame is one of the contributors, along with Don Kenner, and Sally Rogow. I haven't had time to read everything there, but from what I have seen the content looks good, and I will follow the blog closely

Finally, Some Practical Advice We Can All Use

Iran's Khameini explains the rules for masturbating during Ramadan.

Also, be sure to stand up when you're drinking water and don't bet on horses unless you're a jockey. You don't want to cause rioting in the streets, do you? That would be haram.

Torture

Christopher Blosser has gathered together an interesting and informative compendium of sources On Torture, "Aggressive Interrogation" and The Military Commissions Act of 2006 at the Ratzinger Fan Club blog, Against the Grain. There is a lot of important information and discussion cited in the text of the post itself, and there is already a lively discussion going on in the combox.

My own meagre first attempt to say something on this issue can be found here (kindly cited by Christopher in his post). In that post I argued that the standard arguments in favor of torture these days are all of them utilitarian in nature and, as such, are not arguments that a Catholic could appeal to in justifying torture. (This does not stop some of them from appealing to them anyway, but that is a separate issue.) In this post I am interested in addressing two separate, but related, issues: first, what I will call the Demarcation Problem, that is, what are the boundary conditions that separate acts of torture from acts that are merely "aggressive"? Second, a problem raised in Christopher's post: what to make of the use of torture by agents of the Church during certain periods of history? Does this in any way imply that the Church accepts the moral licitness of torture in defense of the common good?

The Demarcation Problem

The boundary conditions for torture are not as straightforward as they might seem, because torture can be either physical or psychological, and society accepts certain forms of both physical and psychological discomfort as morally licit. This might seem to beg the question, since putting it this way makes it sound almost as though torture is per se morally illicit, and and whether that is true or not is precisely the point at issue. So in order to be more careful in this minefield, let us say that every society recognizes some form of either physical or psychological discomfort that is morally licit and that does not qualify as an instance of torture. This is still problematic, since another point at issue is the definition of torture; you begin to see how complex this issue is.

One place to begin, if one is a Catholic, is with the infallible teaching of the Church, which holds that violence in itself is an artifact of sin and not something that can be intentionally sought as an end by the Christian (see, for example, CCC 1869, 2302-6, 2534). All recourse to violence in the Christian tradition must be as a last recourse in the defense of one's own life or the common good, and even then it is recognized that the use of violence, as such, is a sad fact of our fallen state and not something that is in itself justifiably good. Just war theory states that even in defense of the common good against an unjust aggressor the uses of violence are to be strictly curtailed by higher motivations, including justice, mercy, and compassion. We shoot back at our enemy not because we hate him, or want him to die, but because it is the only way to prevent him from shooting at us. Indeed, if there should exist some other way to prevent him from shooting at us, we are required to have recourse to that method prior to resorting to violence. In punishing criminals, we do not inflict pain on them for the sake of causing them to suffer, as "payback", as it were, for what they may have done, but in order to rehabilitate them, in precisely the same way that an unpleasant medicine might cause discomfort to a patient who needs that medicine in order to survive. Even when we defend our own persons against an unjust attack, we may use deadly force if our life is threatened, but we may not intend to kill with that force, or even harm; our only licit intention is self-preservation.

As a starting point this is not very helpful, because unpacking intentions usually only leads to greater difficulties, especially when folks find the so-called Principle of Double Effect so tempting to evoke in situations like this. "But your honor, my intention was to extract information; those cigarette burns are only regrettable though foreseeable secondary effects of my primary intention!" Furthermore, in real life we all use "force" of one sort or another every day. To rule out all forms of coercion and compulsion seems too strict. We, as a nation, threaten everyone on the planet, at least indirectly, simply by maintaining an army and stockpiling nuclear weapons. As individuals, we punish our children and constrain our fellows with laws and prisons.

So, while it may be salutary for a Christian to keep the prohibition from violence in mind while thinking about torture, as a philosophical starting point it is not going to be of much help. Nor may we begin to search for necessary and sufficient conditions by presupposing that what we are looking for are levels of violence that are "too great" or "morally unacceptable" since that again begs the question. George Bush made this same point in his notoriously colloquial way the other day, drawing derision from the likes of Jon Stewart and Mark Shea, but it is worth noting that the expression used in the Geneva Conventions--"outrages on human dignity"--is not a univocal expression. The Geneva Conventions do not bother to stipulate what an "outrage" is nor what "human dignity" is. As Christians, we believe we have some inkling as to what we mean by the latter, but we have no grounds for assuming that what we mean by "human dignity" is what everyone else means by it, or even that it is what the authors of the Geneva Convention meant by it. Mark Shea does a disservice to those who point this out in good faith by portraying them as making an obvious and outrageously stupid error. The implication is that George Bush is either a cynical sophist or an ignorant moron (or perhaps both); although he may be, his asking what an "outrage against human dignity" means is not evidence for the claim--it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask when one is trying to decide whether what one is doing is morally justifiable or not and folks are sticking Geneva Conventions under your nose in answer to your question. In short, pointing to the Geneva Conventions is not merely vague, it also begs the question, since the very point at issue is whether these actions are morally licit.

So how do we approach the Demarcation Problem (not to be confused with the Demarkshean Problem)? We want to know what torture is, and we find that it will not do to say that it is "too much" pain and suffering or that it is an "inapproriate" amount or form of pain and suffering, since these definitions beg the question. It is tempting to say that among the necessary conditions for torture is "very great pain or suffering, either physical or psychological". That does not fully dodge the normativity problem, but it is perhaps a little better than saying "too much" or "inappropriate". The difficulty, however, is that whatever any one person, or culture, might judge to be "very great" may not be so judged by another. Personally, I would not be the least bit affected if someone were to defecate on a Bible in front of me, but we are told that for non-believers even to touch a copy of the Qur'an in front of Islamic prisoners constitutes abuse; I do not like it, but I am not particularly harmed, when people make fun of Our Lord or put crucifixes into jars of urine or make portraits of Our Lady out of elephant dung, but simply draw a picture of the Prophet and there is rioting in the streets. To hear my son tell it, falling off of a skateboard might constitute torture in some circles. So to say that torture is "very great pain or suffering" is still rather vague and bound up with subjectivity, perhaps hopelessly so.

One way to escape this problem might be to say that pain or suffering is "very great" at the very least when it causes physical damage to the body of the person experiencing it. This would preclude, for example, the use of sterilized needles under the fingernails, or the rack. Sadly, "very great" pain can be inflicted without causing physical damage (electrodes on testicles, for example), and psychological pain can certainly be "very great" without causing any physical damage. So even an appeal to something empirically verifiable will not do the job fully.

This situation is an instance of what philosophers sometimes call a Sorites Paradox. "Sorites" is the Greek word for a "heap", and the paradox involves the question of how we manage certain kinds of boundary conditions. For example, a single grain of sand is not a heap of sand; if you add one more grain of sand to something that is not a heap, it seems fair to say that you still do not have a heap; but clearly, if you repeat this a sufficient number of times, you will eventually have a heap. Or: a man with a full head of hair is not bald; if you pluck one hair from the head of a man who is not bald, he does not become bald; but clearly, if you repeat this a sufficient number of times, you will eventually have a bald head. In the present case: some forms of coercion seem not to be instances of torture; wratcheting up just a bit on something that is not torture seems not to make that thing an instance of torture, but clearly if you wratchet things up enough you wind up with something that is clearly torture. Where is that line located and how do we know where it is located?

The difficulty in the Demarcation Problem lies not so much in thinking of things that we ourselves would prefer not to undergo. That would be relatively easy to do, and we could then compile a list of those things and say "This is what torture is--stuff like this." This is a notoriously bad way to define things, however. For one thing, once you have your list, you have your definition, and all one needs to do in order to torture someone licitly is think of something that's not on the list but that is very painful and effective. More importantly, lists of items cannot constitute definitions because they do not get at the essence of anything, they do not identify those necessary and sufficient conditions that must be present in order for something to count as an instance of torture.

Torture is usually employed to extract information. It is fair to say that prisoners never want to give their interrogators information, so any form of questioning is, in some sense, hostile and aggressive, since it is asking people to do things that they do not want to do. In the age-old "good cop/bad cop" scenario, one interrogator is mean and the other relatively friendly; but tricking a person into telling things to the friendly guy is still a form of coercion. Yet nobody would describe this kind of thing as tantamount to torture--it's only when the rubber hoses and toilet plungers come out that we begin to think that things are getting out of hand. It may very well be that Alan Dershowitz is right--we will have to decide, as a culture, precisely which acts of interrogation we are going to count as torture and which we aren't, and then heavily regulate the use of the former. This is, of course, entirely arbitrary, and just as culturally bound as anything else, but it is no more arbitrary than any other method, and it at least has the salutary effect of bringing this sort of thing under a limited amount of scrutiny. But the difficulty we still remain: how do we decide, as a culture, which acts we will accept as morally licit and which we will not? Is waterboarding morally licit? Is sleep deprivation morally licit? How do we decide? It is a complex and difficult question for a secular society. I think, however, that it is crystal clear to the Christian, and I cannot do better than to quote the words of Fr. Richard Neuhaus, but let me refer you here to the set of quotations that Christopher Blosser has put together--this is from his blog post:

Fr. Neuhaus has spoken on this topic several times. In Drawing the Line Against Torture, by Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus (First Things 146. October 2004):

Torture as defined in international agreements to which the U.S. is party—outrages against human dignity, humiliation, degradation, mutilation, the threat of death—is never morally permissible. Admittedly, a measure of coercion, both physical and mental, is inevitably involved in most interrogation. The very fact of being in custody and under threat of punishment is a form of coercion. The task is to draw as bright a line as possible between such coercion and torture, and to forbid the latter absolutely. The uncompromisable principle is that it is always wrong to do evil in order that good may result. This principle is taught in numerous foundational texts of our civilization and is magisterially elaborated in the 1993 encyclical of John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor. We cannot ask God’s blessing upon a course of action that entails the deliberate doing of evil. When something like Abu Ghraib happens, the appropriate response of patriotic Americans is one of deep sorrow, clear condemnation, and a firm resolution that it not happen again.

In The Truth About Torture: A Christian Ethics Symposium, Neuhaus engaged in a discussion of Charles Krauthaummer's "The Truth about Torture" (Weekly Standard Dec. 5, 2005) with Darrell Cole, Robert Vischer, and many others.

Finally, in Speaking about the Unspeakable (First Things 151 March 2005), Neuhaus, "struck by the paucity of serious discussions by Christian moral theologians and ethicists" about torture, calls for Jewish and Christian theologians to remedy the issue:

The instance of hijacked planes is relatively rare; the instance of torture is common, and, it would seem, becoming more common. Christian ethicists have in recent years moved away from “quandary ethics” to “virtue ethics,” and that is in many ways a good thing. But quandaries persist. Casuistry has a bad reputation, but the careful study of cases and the moral rules that apply to them is inevitably part of serious moral reflection. I, too, earnestly wish that we could not talk about torture. But the reality and the discussion of the reality will not go away. One cannot help but think that the discussion would benefit from the contributions of Christian and Jewish thinkers informed by the wisdom of biblical sources and their own traditions.

Torture and the Church

My second issue is, at least in my own opinion, much less complicated than the first. Christopher quotes the Catechism, section 2298, as rather definitive proof that the Church does not herself condone the use of torture and never has. But I think that it is worth adding that even the rabidly anti-Catholic historian, Henry Charles Lea, in his mammoth, three-volume slander against the Church called A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (New York, 1955), points out that throughout history the Church has always handed prisoners over to secular authorities to be tortured. This is precisely the sort of thing that will make some folks smile knowingly and say "Oh, sure, the Church is against torture like Ted Kennedy is against abortion."

As the Catechism makes clear, however, it is a mistake to make a moral judgment about the Church as a whole and her teachings on the basis of certain mistaken prudential judgments made by members of the Church at certain times in history. The teaching has always been clear; men's minds are often less so, and what seems prudent in one situation may not seem very prudent in retrospect. Whatever we may make of the decisions made by certain individuals to hand prisoners over to secular authorities for torture, it remains a fact that the Church herself has always forbidden it of her own representatives.

BBC Picks Miss India

In case you were wondering what sort of photo to use to accompany a story about two Turkish hijackers taking over a passenger jet in protest over the Pope's remarks about Islam, you can always follow the lead when it comes to journalistic professionalism, the BBC, and print a publicity shot of Miss India, who happened to be on the same plane.

Guns 'n' Logic

I've never really understood the whole Second Amendment obsession. It seems to me that one can cover the whole "well-maintained militia" thing--if anybody really takes that seriously anymore--by issuing every military-age person a non-automatic rifle and then banning literally everything else. Because, as my friend Paul Halsall of English Eclectic points out in a recent post, while it is true that not all gun possessors are criminals, it is true that all those who commit crimes with guns are gun possessors. As someone who teaches a fair amount of logic, I have to say I'm rather impressed with that little bit of it, though the issue is much more complex than this. On a day like today, however, when we are hearing reports of the third school-shooting in the course of a week, it's tempting to look for ways to simplify.

The standard lines on the pro-gun side are fairly well drawn. If you make gun possession illegal, they say, all you do is take guns out of the hands of otherwise law-abiding citizens--there will be no effect on the criminal element because they don't obey the law anyway. Or else you make criminals out of otherwise law-abiding folk by forcing them to hide their guns. Of course, when an otherwise law-abiding citizen decides to actually use his gun for self-defense, he stands a good chance of making a criminal out of himself anyway, if he should happen to kill someone, since that would be to make an illicit private decision about the proper course of action to take in the defense of the common good.

The use of a firearm to kill in self-defense cannot properly be described as a defense of the common good--it is sheer self-preservation, and while we have a limited right to self-preservation, we do not have an inalienable right to self-preservation at literally any cost, in particular, we may not intentionally kill another in self-defense. We may apply deadly force, and the use of that force that results in unintentional death is licit, but this is rarely--if ever--what defenders of the Second Amendment have in mind. But those who construe the Second Amendment as having to do with individual rights of this kind are mistaken from the get-go: the Second Amendment does not so much guarantee a right to own firearms as it establishes a civic guarantee that citizens will be prepared to fulfill their duty to their fellow citizens in times of need. That is, the right to keep and bear arms is merely an instrumental right that is valid only in pursuit of the greater duty to maintain a militia for the defense of the common good. It is not at all clear that the unrestricted stockpiling of weapons of all types is in any way consistent with what the Second Amendment demands of us as citizens.

The positive law does not always track the moral law, however. Interpretation of the Second Amendment takes place within the context of the former, not the latter, and it responds to political pressure from all sides. What we wind up with is often not merely far from what the Framers intended, but also far from what is morally licit. This is most evidently true in the case of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was manifestly intended to free the slaves but now serves to justify the slaughter of unborn children. What was originally intended as a defense of the morally licit--and necessary--obligation to take up arms against unjust aggressors in defense of the common good is now used to justify the collection of all manner of weaponry for such trifles as killing other animals or such outrages as shooting trespassers, as if the right to private property were somehow higher on the scale of proper values than the right to life. The use of our Constitution in the defense of such practices is not without its costs, however, as we are now seeing in our schools. Are we willing to pay this cost rather than sacrifice a non-existent right to keep and bear arms for whatever reason we happen to think justifies our ownership and use of such things?

Magisterium and Private Judgment

There is a fine metathread up at Pontifications: the Pontificator has collected together the comments--all of them, apparently--and other contributions to the blog by Mike Liccione, one of my favorite bloggers and Catholic philosophers, having to do with the relationship between magisterial teaching and private judgments. The resulting PDF file can be accessed here. I've downloaded a copy for permanent storage on my hard drive.

What they ought to do is make an audio file of it available so one could listen to it while driving--no dozing off under those conditions!

Kip Hawley Is An Idiot

Welcome to Amerika: CNN reports that a "combative" passenger was detained by airport security for carrying a toiletries bag bearing the slogan "Kip Hawley is an idiot". Kip Hawley is the director of the TSA, just in case you were wondering. The passenger was told that "You can't write things like that" and compared it to making jokes about bombs and stuff like that. Well, sure, some jokes are bombs, but this one's not bad if you ask me. It's interesting how not liking inane TSA procedures means you're "combative". The guy's probably just a libertarian--that's how the feds define "combative" anyway these days.

I'd like to think that I'll be spending a little more time at the airport now, but I doubt that the Big Kipper reads my blog.

So Many Books, So Little Time

If you're a massively bibliophilic person like me, you probably tend to buy a lot of books that you intend to read at some time but that have to be put on the back burner just because they aren't necessarily connected to what you do for a living and there are just so many books a person can expect to read in a lifetime. I'm a pretty slow reader, as it happens, slogging my way through one page of academic-level writing only once every other minute. Now, if I live to be 80, Deo volente (kind of a longshot, but one can always hope), I have about 16.5 million minutes left, or roughly 8 million pages. Most academic books are in the neighborhood of 250 pages these days, so I can still look forward to reading 32,000 books if I read constantly, day and night, 24/7, from now until the day I die. Not a bad way to live, if you ask me, but certainly it's not for everybody. I suppose the main worry, if one wanted to attempt such a thing, is that the process of trying to read so many books might in itself actually shorten one's lifespan.

If you add to this the fact that I am not merely massively bibliophilic but massively procrastinatory as well, it is unlikely that I will read 32 books before I die, let alone 32,000. If I could change this aspect of my personality, however, I would, and i suppose that if I were to succeed, I could probably pull off reading about one book per week. That will require a little over eight hours, which I can probably manage in a seven-day period. This will give me time to read roughly 1600 books between now and the time I reach 80 on 30 April 2038. (Geez, that's a lot closer than I thought it was....) I have way more than 1600 unread books between my house and office, however, so some of them will have to pass on unread either to my beneficiaries or the government, depending on how this whole death tax thing turns out.

In light of all this it will seem strange but unsurprising that I'm constantly on the lookout for more books to add to the pile. In pursuit of this I subscribe to a number of email notification services: the major academic presses all have them, and I subscribe to those offered by Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford. Then there's the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which not only tells you what the new books in Classics are, it also provides reviews of them the whet your appetite. And for medieval books I subscribe to The Medieval Review, which is much like BMCR. In today's email I received notification of what the next four books to join my pile of unlikely-to-be-read-in-my-lifetime but likely-to-join-my-library books:

Pentcheva, Bissera V. Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii, 302, 120 color and B&W illustrations. $60.00. ISBN: 0-271-02551-4.

Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B. Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe. Translated by Myra Heerspink Scholz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005. Pp. 312. $55.00. ISBN: 0-8122-3852-4

Mitchell, Piers D. Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+293, illus. £48.00 (hbk). ISBN 0 521 84455.

Roest, Bert. Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction Before the Council of Trent. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, vol. CXVII. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. xxi+673. $280.00. ISBN-10 90 04 14026 3, ISBN-13 978 9004140 26 4.

Joe Bob says check them out. To subscribe to the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, go here; to subscribe to The Medieval Review, send a "subscribe" message to the listserv at Western Michigan University: TMR-L@wmich.edu.