Gods Jury, Cullen Murphy
Gods Jury, Cullen Murphy
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God's Jury
The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

Author: Cullen Murphy

Narrator: Robertson Dean

Unabridged: 9 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/19/2012


Synopsis

The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826—the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.

God's 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 Jews—and with burning at the stake—its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and "scientific" interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.

With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, 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.


About Cullen Murphy

Cullen Murphy is the editor at large at Vanity Fair and the former managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, The Word According to Eve, and the essay collection Just Curious. He is also coauthor of Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. C. E. lives in Boston, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on December 07, 2019

Murray's book is a brief, impressionistic survey of the various Inquisitions pursued by the Catholic Church: the Medieval (mid-13th century to roughly the mid-14th)), the Spanish (late 15th Century to mid-19th), and the Roman (mid-sixteenth century to the present). The Medieval was waged against the......more

Goodreads review by Kimba on April 25, 2018

Persecution is old as man, but as Cullen Murphy notes what distinguishes Inquisitions are communications, bureaucracy, and singled-mindedness. With this as his guiding principle, Murphy weaves an entangled history of the Medieval, Spanish, and Roman Inquisition that demonstrates how the mindset and......more

Goodreads review by David on January 15, 2022

Excellent overview of the history of the Inquisition and the parallels to modern inquisitions and government security apparatus. An enlightening read for historical context on the development of bureaucracy, institutionalized torture, censorship, surveillance and the modern world. 4/5 stars.......more

Goodreads review by Dj on December 07, 2014

I went into the book expecting to read about the Spanish Inquisition. Like most people I don't know a great deal about the actual Inquisition, but I do have a great many references from popular sources. This book isn't about the Spanish Inquisition though, or more to the point it is about so much mo......more

Goodreads review by Whitley on January 22, 2012

This is an exceptional and important vision of the Inquisition that illustrates the relationship between the justifications being offered for torture in the modern United States. What is so appalling, is that the Spanish Inquisition, after its initial fury under Tomas Torquemada, became significantl......more