11.21.09
Booknotes: Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
In “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” readers are introduced to Charles Darwin not as a man whose very name has become a stand-in for replacing religion with science, but as the husband of Emma Darwin, a woman of deep faith who spent her adult life worrying that her husband was going to burn in hell for eternity. The book begins with a young Darwin making a list on a scrap of paper. “Marry,” he wrote in one column. “Not Marry,” he wrote in the other. Under “Not Marry,” he included things like, “Freedom to go where one liked,” and, “Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.” Under “Marry” was the entry “Children — (if it please God).”