The Gifts of the Jews

Cahill's book is fascinating! It's the second in a seven volume series, The Hinges of History. He offers an important perspective to anyone interested in why we --westerners living at the end of the 20th and beginning of 21st centuries--think the way we do. Got to love a series that has the following as its premise:

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage -- almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.