BURNING QUESTIONS

To read a book by Cullen Murphy (Are We Rome?) is to take a journey to fascinating places you never thought to visit, some right around the corner, some in the remote past, all of them jumping-off points to the world of ideas. In his new book, God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), you discover, among other places, the brooding valleys north of the Pyrenees where the Cathar heretics were forced from their fortress; the second-floor room in a Roman cloister where Galileo faced a tribunal and recanted his scientific views; and the whitewashed Old Jewish Quarter of Cordoba where the "oddly Disneyfied" museum of torture is now only a tourist attraction. Along the way you also meet fascinating people, such as Peter Godman, one of the first modern historians to gain access to the Vatican's Inquisition archives, and Bernard Gui, a 14th-century papal inquisitor in Carcassonne whose meticulous records break down the cost of burning sinners at the stake. Murphy, V.F.'s editor-at-large, not only makes history come alive, but is unafraid to use the clarity gained by examining past mistakes to illuminate murky ethics of here and now. We think of ourselves as enlightened, but Murphy can write with confidence that waterboarding, dismissed by Dick Cheney as "a dunk in the water," meets "precisely the Inquisition's standard of performance," and that the notes taken by Guantanamo interrogators bear a "resemblance to Inquisition transcripts—'Oh, dear God!'—[that] is hard to miss."

DOUG STUMPF