This week's book is a non-fiction book I have had on my shelves for quite some time; Darwin's Sacred Cause, Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. I have not yet read it, but it is an interesting subject in more ways than one.
Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader
"No 'evil more monstrous has ever existed upon earth'. So said the leading anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson on celebrating the end of the slave trade. Clarkson was supported and part-financed by Charles Darwin's grandfather, the master potter Josiah Wedgwood. But the words could equally have been Darwin's - or those of his other grandfather, the libertine, poet and Enlightenment evolutionist Erasmus Darwin. For all of them slavery was a depravity to make one's 'blood boil', in Charles Darwin's words, a sin requiring expiation: 'to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants ... have been and are so guilty'."
The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice
"Hadn't Jesus himself come to preach 'deliverance to the captives' and to herald history's climax in 'the acceptable year of the Lord'? Evangelicals in Britain living by those words believed the acceptable year of liberation was nigh. Millennial signs were everywhere. Freeing the slaves, extending religious liberty, reforming Parliament and above all preaching the gospel 'to every creature' were harbingers of Christ's Kingdom. Britain's evangelicals were leading the way. When the gospel 'shall be preached in all the world... then shall the end come.'"
This might be too sophisticated for me. :-) Happy weekend!
ReplyDeleteI don't think so. I saw a film about Darwin, and one can imagine his anguish in publishing his finds. Imagine, in those days, to say that God was not the creator of things. It will be interesting to read about his research, his thoughts and his trips.
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