Summer book contest 2

Here’s a second opportunity for all you bibliophiles to get a free book for your summer reading. Our contest prize is Sacred Schisms: How Religions Divide, by James R. and Sarah M. Lewis (Cambridge 2009). The book claims to be the “first book-length study or religious schisms as a general phenomenon.”

As a lifelong Baptist, schism is a way of life for me. My faith tradition and denominational affiliations looks like a genogram, a geneology, full of reactivity and cutoffs. You know the joke: put three Baptists in a room and you wind up with five opinions. I’ve just discovered that there’s a Second Baptist Church in my native Santiago—my family was a member of the First Baptist Church. It seems that Baptist church splits have no cultural or geographic boundaries.

Lewis and Lewis’ book provides a fascinating theoretical overview of schisms and a survey of schisms in selected traditions: Christian (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unification Movement, Catholic Christianity in the Roman Empire); Western (Church Universal and Triumphant, theosophical movement, Satanists, Pagans, and nuts); Non-Western/post-colonial traditions (Hare Krishna, Hindu groups, Afro-Christianity). This a great read.

To win the contest, be the first to correctly answer the following:

Identify the religious bodies whose schisms took place in:
A: 1917
B: 1054
C: 1845.

Creepy art for today