The February book club meeting was a smashing success, due in no small part to the skilled discussion leadership of Peggy McLaughlin.  Eighteen interested participants, some of whom had professional medical, scientific and/or related teaching background to offer us, contributed to a fascinating, enlightening and fully engrossing conversation on genes, heredity, evolution and ancillary fields and their enormous and varied impacts on the lives of all organisms, especially humans. Scientists are learning so much – and yet still know relatively little – that it boggles the mind and makes this such a rich, riveting subject.

Our book for March offers a dramatic change of subject.  We are all familiar with the obliteration of much material evidence of  past civilizations by the no-holds-barred forces that conquered them, but relatively little has been said of the particular ravages wrought by the victorious armies of the early Christians on the Classical World . . . until now.  According to one reference, “Today, we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a ‘triumph.’ But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline. Just one percent of Latin literature would survive the purge; countless antiquities, artworks, and ancient traditions were lost forever.”

In The Darkening Age, author Christine Nixey addresses what some deem to be a long-existing historical omission: Christian efforts to destroy the great achievements of the Roman and Greek civilizations wherever they flourished.  Supporters call this book a long-overdue reckoning; detractors fault it as exaggerations.  Nonetheless, it is a noteworthy attempt to bring some critical balance to how we think of and relate to the past, particularly as it concerns an incomparable heritage on which we base so many of the fundamental ideas of Western culture.