I first began the study of the history or religion and of theology in 1990 and have been including the subjects in my ongoing pursuit of knowledge and wisdom ever since, and in this one brief passage, Pliny, in this one aside in his “Natural History” that briefly interrupts the topic about which he was writing, has sliced straight through myriad Gordian knots tied by countless theologians down through the ages.
Published in 2019 by Fordham University Press, this book caught my attention for it’s remarkably daring central proposition, that “[r]eligion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. […] And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the ‘animal God,’ as it were, of historic Christian witness.”
I will be perfectly honest; when I first opened the envelope containing the review copy of Tom Gallant’s The Lord God Bird and saw the title of the book, I may have and likely in fact did utter something along the lines of “Oh no, not another Ivory-billed Woodpecker book.”