One of the things I look forward to each December is the Harvard University Press book sale. I appreciate all sales from book publishers who publish high quality works, but the Harvard sale helps me to continue a completely barking mad project I began a few years ago…
As the date on which this brief essay will be published marks the three-hundred-and-fourth anniversary of the Rev. Gilbert White’s birth in 1720 at the very same location as the parish he so lovingly chronicled, it seems only appropriate to bring you news of the most recently published edition of his natural history classic epistolary book “The Natural History of Selborne.”
Writing in the second book of his “Natural History” (Naturalis Historia), Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), whilst recounting the many interesting facts he has learned and collected about the Moon, suddenly breaks from his explanations to wax critical upon a “disease of the human mind” he has observed.
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.