Lessons From History Biographies

  Much is lost when we don't allow people to reach their full potential.     This write-up will be much shorter than my usual ones, not because Jean Wiesen and Rita Daniels' Harriet Tubman: Military Scout and Tenacious Visionary is a bad book, but it is a very short and light one. Indeed, it was actually a nice contrast to my prior book, the long and intense  Lower Than the Angels , as I always have so much going on in the early fall that short and sweet was nothing to complain about! Neither Wiesen or Daniels are professional historians, and the book feels much more aimed at general audiences, and indeed would be a good place to start on Tubman for my high school students. Nonetheless, I did appreciate the book's efforts to tie Tubman in with the larger story of the Ghana culture that her family had been ripped away from generations prior, as it tells the larger crime of how much the world might have lost by supporting and abiding by the slave trade for centuries. ...

  Human beings have never had one set "morality" when it comes to complicated matters of sex.      In our fractured political world of 2025, one of the most intense debates that has consumed American culture is that relating to sex and gender, and what exactly are the "proper" roles that people should be following. This is a part of a larger trend of conservative movements who have argued for decades that there is a set of "traditional family values" that America has moved away from, and that is the source of much of our national decline over the past few decades. As one who was largely raised outside of church culture, that made Diarmaid MacCulloch's new Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity  a fascinating read into a history of Christian attitudes toward those topics. It's a dense book that jumps around a lot (MacCulloch tries to include Christian-based cultures from all over the world), and that makes it hard for me to recomme...