Saturday, March 14, 2009

Six great works about justice and injustice

Thomas Cahill is the author of the best-selling books, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, and Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World.

His new book is A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green.

For The Week magazine, he named "six great works about justice and injustice."

One title on the list:
Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. (Tale Blazers, $3.50).

Inspired partly by Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent protests, partly by his own Judeo-Christian tradition, King restates for our time the classical articulation by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas of why we are under no obligation to obey unjust laws.
Read about the other five works on Cahill's list.

--Marshal Zeringue