Don't Know Thomas Cahill? You Should

In a strange coincidence I pulled Thomas Cahill's Desire of the Everlasting Hills off my bookshelf over the weekend. He opens, "History has much to do with hills," and goes on to site the hill of Zion, Hamburger Hill, Bunker Hill, Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi. I added to that list in my mind - Capitol Hill. The book covers historical Jesus, what Palestine was like before and after Jesus' life and the life of the early Christian church.

My aunt loaned that book to me after I gobbled up Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages - The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe earlier this year. I LOVED it.
And then Bill Moyer's interviewed him on Friday. You can watch or read the interview here.

Here's what Moyer highlights:
Bill Moyers interviews best-selling author and historian Thomas Cahill in a far ranging interview that takes viewers from the Coliseum in Rome to death row in Texas and examines what our attitudes toward cruelty can tell us about who we are as Americans. “We are the only democracy that is still executing. We're it. There's nobody else,” says Cahill, who is best known for his THE HINGES OF HISTORY series of books, which includes the widely read HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION. Cahill says his books ask how we became the people we are: “It's human cruelty that is evil….We're not willing to acknowledge that this is inside of us. It's there,” he says. ”I'm really interested in…what's good about us.”