God's Jury
The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
From Cullen Murphy, editor at large of Vanity Fair, God's Jury is a chilling and powerful account of how the techniques used by the Spanish Inquisition created our modern world.
For centuries states have used their power to censor, watch, manipulate and punish. God's Jury argues that the Inquisition - the Catholic body that existed for over 700 years - is not a medieval oddity, but is intrinsically bound up with modernity. From Vatican archives to Guantánamo Bay and the Third Reich, Cullen Murphy shows how the Inquisition's techniques - record-keeping, bureaucracy and a terrifying sense of certainty - are now standard operating procedure, and that the battle between private conscience and outside forces is the central contest of the modern era.
Cullen Murphy is Vanity Fair's editor at large and the author of Are We Rome? and The Word According to Eve. He was previously the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly.
'Lucid and provocative, blistering, cogent and powerful ... A persuasive argument that we still live in the world the inquisition made - a world of us and them, of moral self-righteousness and intellectual intolerance' Sunday Times
'Beguiling and horrifying ... a book rich in stories and imaginative connections' John Cornwell, author of Hitler's Pope
'A grand and scary tour of inquisitorial moments, racing back and forth in history from Torquemada to Dick Cheney' Adam Gopnik, New Yorker
'A dark but riveting tale, told with luminous grace' Michael Sandel, author of Justice and What Money Can't Buy
'God's Jury is a reminder, and we need to be constantly reminded, that the most dangerous people in the world are the righteous' Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Guest of the Ayatollah
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1998, the Vatican opened the Archivio della Congregazione per Dottrina della Fede, the Inquisition archive, thereby unveiling to the world the secrets of censorship and persecution that the Catholic Church had hidden since the Middle Ages. Journalist Murphy (The Word According to Eve) visits the archives several times and in his typically compelling style leads readers on a journey through the many inquisitions conducted by the Church over time, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Roman Inquisition of the 16th century. Murphy convincingly demonstrates that while the inquisitions most often are associated with the Church, they arise anytime an organization, state, or institution possesses and uses tools such as censorship and torture to stoke and manage suspicion, intolerance, and hatred of the other. Inquisitions require a system of law that can be administered with uniformity, the power to conduct interrogations and extract information, a bureaucracy with a large staff of individuals to administer it, a capacity to restrict the communications of others, and a source of power to ensure enforcement. Murphy powerfully shows that the impulse to inquisition can quietly take root in any system civil or religious that orders our lives.