Robert Hutchinson: Author and Essayist

Veteran travel writer, author and award-winning essayist Robert Hutchinson enjoys exploring how ideas intersect with real life.  His latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery, $19.95), grew out of his world travels where he came into first-hand experience with, and developed great respect for, the world’s great religions.

His first paid article, he adds, written for an alternative newspaper in the late 1970s, was about the children of the Hare Krishnas. Hutchinson, 51, went on to write numerous articles about such diverse religious groups as Tibetan Buddhists, Zen, Zoroastrianism, Bahais, the Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, and the myriad branches of Christianity.

“I have the opposite view from the new crop of atheist polemicists, who display a kind of Cartesian solipicism,” Hutchinson says. “They seem to think that the only truth worth investigating is what you can discover on your own. While I see the attraction in that stance, I think in practice you miss out on the accumulated wisdom of mankind, passed on over the generations in the world’s great religions.”

He adds that atheist writers such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, in their insistence that all belief is illegitimate, in practice would dismiss “virtually all human knowledge” which is built up through a series of accumulated insights.

Hutchinson says his ecumenical orientation is reflected in his education. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at a Roman Catholic university, moved to Israel to study Modern Hebrew in a series of ulpanim – intensive six-month language courses for new Israeli immigrants – and then completed an M.A. degree at the evangelical Protestant Fuller Theological Seminary.  He also lived in Hawaii for several years where he studied Tibetan Buddhism and interviewed a number of high Tibetan lamas, such as the late Kalu Rinpoche, for magazines.

“What studying other religions taught me first hand is that all religions don’t teach the same thing,” he says. “I learned that very dramatically while living in Israel and visiting Arab countries like Morocco and Egypt. What I tried to do with The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible is to show just how unique the Bible really is. The ideas that permeate the Biblical stories and teachings differ in profound ways from what almost all other religions believe, and they shaped, in a unique way, the way western civilization developed.”

One of the central claims in Hutchinson’s book is that the philosophical and moral ideas found in the Bible gave birth to many of the “social realities” most cherished in the modern world, including experimental science, the abolition of slavery, the recognition of universal human rights, and a belief in limited government.

Hutchinson insists that his book is not a work of biblical apologetics as such – although he does defend the Bible against attacks that it is unhistorical – but an attempt to demonstrate how the Bible “shaped the world we live in.”

Hutchinson, who has won nearly a dozen journalism and writing awards, is the former managing editor of Hawaii Magazine and Hawaii Bureau Chief for The Hollywood Reporter. He is also the author of When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City, a travelogue about his family’s adventures in Rome while he wrote about the Vatican; and The Book of Vices: A Collection of Classic Immoral Tales, a light-hearted parody of William Bennett’s classic The Book of Virtues.

A long-time student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido, Hutchinson lives with his wife and five children in a small town on the ocean.