Arlington is a book lover's heaven. There are excellent and easily accessible libraries. Or may be, you can buy books in a yard sale for next to nothing. Where else will you be able to get Plato's Symposium for 25 cents!
The best book I have read here so far is Christ, A Crisis in the Life of God by Jack Miles, borrowed from Arlington Public Library.
It is the sequel to the author's Pulitzer price winning book, God: A Biography which I bought and read in India. The Biography is a study of the character of God of the Hebrew Bible(Old Testament). It shows the development of His personality through various stages of Jewish history. To begin with, He was a childish God given to pranks - a God possessing enourmous power without knowing what to do with it. He does His creation in an impulse and regret it soon enough when his crown creature disobeyed his diktat. Later, God destroys a great part of His work in the flood of his rage. He came to regret this destruction also and enters into a covenent with Noah to bind Himself to more responsible behaviour in future. Eventually God matures into youth and shows normal inclinations of that stage of life by becoming a lover. One of the most disucssed books of the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs, a passionate and erotic love song, represents this stage of God's growth. Gradually, this too passes and by the end of the prophetic books, God develops into the loving father of His chosen people who may punish and chastise them for disloyalty but will always redeem them when they regret and return to Him.
The sequel, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, a study of the New Testament, deals with a problem faced by God at a later stage. He has been promising unparalled prosperity and power to His people provided they stay loyal to Him. The promise was always of material prosperity in this life, not in the life to come. (There is hardly anything in the Hebrew Bible about a life after death.) But the Jewish nation's historical experience was contrary to this promise. All through the Herbew Bible, disasters faced by God's chosen people were justifed rather unconvincingly by citing their alleged disloyalty. First the northern half of the nation, Israel, was conquered and enslaved and practically obliterated by the Assyrians. Later Judeans of the southern half were taken to exile and their temple destroyed by the Babylonians. More calamities followed under new masters and persecutors, the Persians and Greeks. Last of all came the worst humiliation and eventual destruction and banishment under the Romans. With all these tragedies falling on His people, it was difficult for God to keep his credibility and people to keep their faith. Which nation can keep its faith in such a situation? This was a grave crisis in the life of God.
This desperate situation was resolved using a desperate remedy - the idea of a suffering God, a God who dies for his people, a God whose kingdom is not of this world. The New Testament, a revisionist epilogue to the Hebrew Bible, written in Greek by a group of radical Jews presents the scheme of this resolution of the Crisis in the Life of God.
Taken together, these are two breath-taking books.
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