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The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
Houghton Mifflin Company
January 2012
On Sale: January 17, 2012
320 pages
ISBN: 0618091564
EAN: 9780618091560
Kindle: B005LVR66E
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Religion
We think of the Inquisition as a holy war fought in the Middle Ages. But, as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new book, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of GuantΓ‘namo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, he traces the Inquisition and its legacy. Godβs Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jewsβand with burning at the stakeβits targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and βscientificβ interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. With vivid immediacy and authority, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - January 23, 2012
All Things Considered - January 15, 2012
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