A decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, Murphy gives a history of the Inquisition, or rather, the various phases and incarnations of the Inquisition, with an idea of how the records of that process survived the ages. He also focuses on the intense bureaucratic nature of the Inquisition, which produced results that could vary from the bizarre to the slapstick. So far, so good. Where I think Murphy fails is his efforts to relate the Inquisition to the modern world. He makes much of the 2001-2012 period, for things like waterboarding and such, but doesn't note the obvious distinction between the secular powers aiding the Inquisition, and the secular powers outright opposing the inquisition (lower case i) in modern times. This, to me, would seem to be an important differential factor. I found it astonishing that aside from one very brief reference to Lenin, and a later page on the KGB (also brief), Murphy spent no time in discussing the inquisition (again, lower case i) in the USSR. And there, you had a number of remarkable parallels, including attempts to stamp out heresy (think Trotsky) and effects on science a la Galileo (think Lysenko versus those supporting gene theory). No mention of Bulgakov, either, with his phrase "manuscripts do not burn" (though Jacabo Timmerman gets a reference). Coverage of Nazi Germany is slightly better, but not by much, and Murphy doesn't omit to taking swipes -- twice -- at IBM. Obviously, he wants to show off that he's read his Edwin Black. It would seem to me incomprehensible to omit a detailed analysis of the NKVD/KGB and the RHSA/SS, where the secular forces and the inquisitions were one and the same. Rather disappointing book, one that could have been better. (EDIT: by coincidence, I was reading an account of Eisenstein's aborted film "Bezhin Meadow," and the account notes that Ivor Montagu has drawn a parallel between Eisenstein's battle with the censors, and Galileo's battle with the Inquisition, described in the book.) ( )

God's Jury is an interesting, if rather too thinly detailed, history of the Inquisition, combined with an extensive contextualization of Inquisitorial institutions in history, from the Church to England, Germany, the Soviet Union and right down to the present day US government and Guantanamo Bay. I enjoyed it for its historical presentation of the Inquisition, and for the historical contextualization. Murphy reminds us that there were really three Inquisitions, the Medieval, the Spanish and the Roman, each with its own orrery of horrors. We get some good detail about inquisitorial practices and the social and political historical context of their enactment, and learn a great deal about modern scholarly and theological debates about what the Inquisition really was and meant.

That said, I found this to be a flawed book, in a moral sense. Murphy seems determined to not only describe the Inquisition but to normalize it. By lengthy descriptions of other despotic regimes, ancient and modern, which practiced horrible tortures, relished bureaucratic cataloging of heresy, deviance and political subversion, and obsessed over the private lives of each and every citizen, we are given an impression that the Inquisition's greatest significance is merely perhaps that it was among the first in a long line of modern tortuous bureaucratic pursuers of deviance. This seems, on balance, far too kind, far too understanding. It gets worse as we come to understand that, while the Inquisition no longer exists in name, there exists in the modern day Roman Catholic Church a direct institutional descendant of the Office of the Inquisition, and that in some sense the contemporary Catholic Church and its offices are in a line of direct continuity with the Inquisition. Understanding this, the effort to say "but of course everybody does it" begins to sound suspiciously close to an effort to justify, and not merely to understand.

I don't know what I would do if I were a Catholic, as Murphy seems to be, but I don't think I would be able to live in a relationship to an institution that is unable to separate itself more fundamentally from its evil past, or to feel a part of an institution that is so intimately connected to this history. Germany after all went through a flawed but real de-Nazification, but it is not clear to me that the Catholic church has de-Inquisitioned itself in the same sense.

There is a fine line between historically contextualizing evil, and making peace with it, and I'm not comfortable that Murphy stands on what I consider to be the right side of that line.

In the end Murphy presents a history that is plausible in its details, but misguiding. For someone truly interested in Inquisition history, there must surely be better books (and I'll seek one now, and am grateful for Murphy's reintroduction to this is topic.) As an effort to understand what the Inquisition was, and is, in a deeper historical and theoretical sense, God's Jury is not satisfying to me, nor do I think it would be satisfying to anyone who does not, at a basic level, see the Catholic Church as a fundamentally sound and reasonable institution. This book is ultimately about being Catholic when the Catholic Church has this history. It's a solution to a special problem that Catholics must have, but it is not my problem and may not be your problem either. Non-Catholics have the freedom to see the modern Church for what it is, an organization that is theologically contiguous with the men and institutions who burned Jews and other heretics at the stake, who sought out deviance and discovered it, whether it was there or not, and which has never, really, fully renounced its intolerance for divergent beliefs, but instead merely altered, perforce, its methods and strategies. The modern Catholic Church is the still the very same Church of the Inquisition, and this reality is something that God's Jury does us a favor in acknowledging, even highlighting, but frustratingly seems to avoid confronting or challenging. It is well worth reading, but it may leave you disturbed less for the horrors that it presents than by the author's presentation of the modern Catholic Church, an institution that attributes those horrors not to itself, but merely to its misguided followers. This position, ultimately, is unacceptable to me, and I don't really feel confident that the author finds it as unacceptable as I do.
( )

Supposedly about the Inquisition and its influence today, this book is peppered with inane references to American pop culture and weak travelogue descriptions, and it manages to be less informative than the Wikipedia entries on the subject. ( )

I picked up Cullen Murphy's God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) before bed last night, intending to just read a bit and then set it aside this morning while I turned to the newly-arrived Robert Caro doorstop. That didn't work, and I spent most of the day with Murphy's book instead (I've waited ten years for the Caro, it can wait another day, I decided). Once I started reading this one I knew there was going to be no putting it down.

From the Cathars to Galileo to Graham Greene, Murphy explores the origins, methods, processes and legacies of the Inquisition in all its various incarnations over the centuries, and then uses a series of unnervingly apt comparisons to show how the ideas and techniques first deployed during the Inquisition have gone far beyond theological investigation.

I'm not entirely sure how readers who aren't in agreement with Murphy on such questions as whether waterboarding is torture will respond to this book, but I had no problem with it, and found the section where he compares description of Inquisition-era interrogation techniques with modern manuals fairly remarkable (I suppose they oughtn't have surprised me as much as they did).

Murphy doesn't just argue his case, though; he also does quite a good job of describing the different archival repositories he visited in researching the book, and explores at some depth the records themselves (and the various uses to which they've been put by scholars), which makes for very interesting reading indeed. He is able to inject a certain amount of whimsical digression and witty humor into the subject as well; given the topic, this is most welcome.

Recommended without reservation.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/05/book-review-gods-jury.html ( )

This is a fascinating book about the history of the various Inquisitions of the Catholic Church - the Medieval (against the Catharsis in France), the Spaish & the Roman - and how these persecutions affected the people in each country where they were pursued, but also how the process developed by the Inquisition has moved into our

The author, of course, has a point to make and a political ax to grind, but the book is written in such an accessible writing style, that it makes for fascinating & somewhat chilling reading. ( )