2018’s Top Books
There are two kinds of people in the world.
There are some people who, rather than merely “entertaining” themselves, read the most important, the most beautiful, the most challenging, and the most thought-provoking books published each year; and there are some people who don’t.
The list below was created to assist the former.
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Jan 2nd – Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality – by Nancy R. Pearcey
From Abigail Rine Favale at First Things:
“In seven chapters, Pearcey takes on the most contentious issues of our time—abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, marriage, transgenderism—and exposes the dualistic framework behind them, a fractured view of reality that splits personhood from embodiment, intimacy from sex, the body from the self, gender from biological sex, the moral order from the natural order. These ideologies, she argues, depend upon a “devastatingly reductive view of the body,” a body with only instrumental value and no intrinsic dignity or meaning.
Pearcey is evangelical in her outlook but ecumenical in her tastes. She draws on scripture, tradition, and a breadth of contemporary Christian leaders—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—to present the possibility of a unified Christian understanding of human anthropology and dignity.
This book is meant not to persuade secularists but to galvanize and catechize believers. The audience seems to be young evangelicals and the adults responsible for their formation, so Pearcey keeps her ideas accessible, her prose brisk, and her arguments rooted in scriptural authority …
Pearcey gives a brief tour of the history of these ideas and responds to major secular thinkers, without getting bogged down in specialist jargon or the murk of critical theory. She is conversant, for example, with queer theory and its tensions with feminism, as well as with trickier concepts such as intersexuality, the complexities of which are too often ignored in Christian discussions of sex and gender.
To readers familiar with the dizzying terrain of gender studies, her treatment may seem simplistic at times, but Pearcey engages effectively with the superficial versions of these theories that trickle down into popular culture. Few young people, after all, actually curl up with Judith Butler’s latest book, but many see the memes—like the Gender Unicorn, which Pearcey discusses—that present the human person as a cluster of disparate desires.
Pearcey’s analysis has a constructive mode, as well: articulating a positive, holistic Christian vision of the created order and the human person’s place within it. She reclaims some of liberalism’s hallowed ground, making the case that Christian morality is more revolutionary, pro-body, and pro-woman than are its secular antitheses.”
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Jan 9th – Why Liberalism Failed – by Patrick J. Deneen
From Anthony B. Robinson at The Christian Century:
“Despite the apparent dissimilarity between the political parties, Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that today’s liberals and conservatives aren’t really so different. Both are guided by an ideological liberalism ‘premised upon the fiction of radically autonomous individuals.’ These individuals consent to a social contract and government whose sole purpose is to secure individual rights. In other words, there is no such thing, inherently, as society or social bonds. There are only individuals.
In this liberalism, liberty means license to do as you please. ‘The resulting liberal polity,’ Deneen writes, ‘fosters a liberal society—one that commends self-interest, the un-leashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to maintain psychic distance from any other humans, including to reconsider any relationships that constitute a fundamental limitation on our personal liberty.’
Republicans and Democrats operate from the same ideological playbook. The difference is that Republicans (‘classical liberals’) are content to let the invisible hand of the market impose whatever direction is to be had as self-interested individuals fight it out, while Democrats (‘progressive liberals’) want to use the government to level the playing field so that self-interested individuals might compete more fairly. Both assume that freeing individuals of constraint to pursue their own self-interest is the name of the game. In this sense, Deneen writes, liberalism acts ‘as a solvent upon all social bonds’ and leaves us with a fractured, unsustainable society. Liberalism has failed because it has succeeded.
It offers freedom but without giving people a larger goal or purpose; this is the liberalism that gave us the recession of 2008, climate change, and an epidemic of gun violence, as Deneen sees it.
… Deneen’s argument might give a needed jolt to religious leaders, educators, and politicians. It might embolden them to make a stronger case for the importance of community, civic bonds, and en-during relationships as well as the practices and values upon which these bonds depend. We are up against something real in ideological liberalism’s social solvent. To engage in serious cultural critique and to offer compelling alternatives will require more intentionality than many religious congregations have exhibited.
Deneen’s work also raises the possibility of moving beyond the current blue-versus-red framing of America, which seems to have us locked in a dysfunctional polarization. Although Deneen doubts the capacity of the market to order our lives, he is no more sanguine about big government’s capacity to do so. In showing that radical individualism is in the water we drink and the air we breathe, Deneen may spur us to imagine a third way, an alternative that is neither ‘liberal’ nor ‘conservative,’ but more than either.”
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Jan 9th – Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education – by Susan Wise Bauer
From Amazon:
“Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all―or even most―students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps ‘disability’ labels over differences in learning style.
Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into ‘fixing’ their children rather than questioning the system.
With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child.
In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to flex the K–12 system, rather than the child. She closely analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from giftedness (not as much of a ‘gift’ as you might think!).
As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work. Her advice here is comprehensive and anecdotal, including material drawn from experience with her own four children and more than twenty years of educational consulting and university teaching.
Rethinking School is a guide to one aspect of sane, humane parenting: negotiating the twelve-grade school system in a way that nurtures and protects your child’s mind, emotions, and spirit.”
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Jan 9th – Fire Sermon – by Jamie Quatro
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Jan 16th – Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic – by David Frum
From HarperCollins:
“No conservative has been a more astute, unsparing or courageous critic of Trumpism than David Frum. Trumpocracy is a powerful summation of the case against Trump based on a close reading of his first year in office. Even those who have followed the Trump administration closely will find much to surprise and enrage them in Frum’s devastating analysis. A must-read to understand what we went through in 2017 — and where we are going next.”
— Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies, Council on Foreign Relations
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Jan 16th – Where We Are: The State of Britain Now – by Roger Scruton
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Feb 6th – Feel Free: Essays – by Zadie Smith
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Feb 13th – All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire – by Jonathan Abrams
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Feb 14th – Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts: Bearing Witness to the Triune God – by Jeremy Begbie
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Feb 20th – When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment – by Ryan T. Anderson
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Feb 20th – What Are We Doing Here?: Essays – by Marilynne Robinson
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Feb 27th – Paul: A Biography – by N.T. Wright
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Mar 27th – To Change The Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism – by Ross Douthat
From Wesley Hill at Mere Orthodoxy:
“Douthat’s new book-length treatment of these matters, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, doesn’t back away from what is (arguably!) a Scripture-resisting-the-magisterium line. “The church has broken in the past, not once but many times over tensions and issues that did not cut as deeply as the questions that undergird today’s Catholic debates,” he writes near the end of the book. “Other communions have divided very recently over precisely the issues that the pope has pressed to the front of Catholic debates”—chiefly, over the issue of whether New Testament teaching on sexuality morality (for instance, the prohibition of divorce and remarriage, the forbidding of same-sex intercourse) is cause for church discipline or else either permissible as a moral tragedy or even sanctifiable as an expression of holiness. (The worldwide Anglican Communion, Douthat points out numerous times in the book, has fractured over these very issues.) For Douthat, these divisions, while regrettable, are perfectly understandable: “Because these issues, while superficially ‘just’ about sexuality or church discipline, actually cut very deep—to the very bones of Christianity, the very words of Jesus Christ.”
Douthat doesn’t allow his lack of formal theological education or the possibility of a facile “I trust the magisterium, so I don’t need to figure out what the Bible says” appeal to deter him from lingering over Jesus’ words on sexual morality as recorded in the Gospels. In some of the book’s most memorable passages, he expounds the New Testament’s teaching in some detail, appealing to its (one is tempted to say “perspicuous”) force: “[I]n the case of marriage the [Catholic] church has cleaved to the plain text of Mark’s gospel (and the very similar passages in Matthew and Luke), while most other Christian communions have found reasons to soften the New Testament’s demands.”
For Douthat, this is a large part of the Church’s discomfiting appeal for those who realize the bankruptcy of laissez-faire morality: “[T]he teaching’s resilience, its striking continuity from the first century to the twentieth, is… a study in what makes Catholicism’s claim to a unique authority seem plausible to many people, even in a disenchanted age.”
For those who may be unaware, the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church that Douthat references differs from almost all current Protestant understandings of marriage. In the Catholic view, marriage is “indissoluble.” The “one flesh” union of husband and wife is, strictly speaking, not just forbidden but actually ontologically or metaphysically incapable of being undone. That’s why, if a Catholic enters a second marriage, the first one must be declared to have been not a true marriage to begin with (that is, “annulled”), otherwise the supposedly “married” couple are living in a state of adultery, theologically speaking. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists.”
But this teaching, Douthat argues, is precisely what Pope Francis is in danger of allowing to be undermined. In his 2016 exhortation Amoris laetitia, the pontiff wrote this: “Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is possible that in an objective situation of sin—which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such—a person can be living in God’s grace, can love and can also grow in the life of grace and charity, while receiving the Church’s help to this end”—even, as a footnote makes clear, the help of the Eucharist, “a powerful medicine.”
In other words, the Pope envisioned ad hoc situations in which certain cohabiting couples, operating perhaps under what Catholicism has sometimes referred to as “invincible [non-culpable] ignorance,” could be helped toward holiness better by the spiritual sustenance of the Eucharist than by being denied it until they regularize their union with a valid sacramental marriage.
To Douthat, however, this looks dangerously like Anglican wishy-washiness: “Why leave us to labor for two thousand years with the idea that taking up the cross requires accepting suffering, sometimes extraordinary suffering, if the truth is that there is no need to even abstain from communion when you break the moral law?” The Pope, Douthat fears, is in danger of altering not just pastoral practice but actually undermining the teaching of our Lord himself …
On the one hand, as I wrote to a friend upon finishing the book, I disagree with Douthat on the fundamental issue in question—namely, the indissolubility of marriage. I am persuaded instead by the exegesis of Richard Hays, David Instone-Brewer, and others who have argued that, in the New Testament, not all remarriage without an annulment (which the New Testament doesn’t envision as such, in any case) constitutes adultery. “Mark and Luke categorically prohibit divorce,” Hays, for instance, observes, in line with Douthat’s exegesis. But then, sounding more like Douthat’s ideological opponents, he adds, “[B]ut Matthew and Paul both entertain the necessity of exceptions to the rule, situations in which a pastoral discernment is required.” In this matter, I think Hays has the better of the exegetical dispute. Against Douthat, I would not view as a departure from the words of Jesus an even more drastic change to the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage than what Pope Francis, in the Catholic liberals’ wildest dreams, is proposing.
On the other hand, however, my evangelical heart is warmed by Douthat’s way of prosecuting his case. His appeal to Scripture as the non-negotiable norm for discerning the validity of any purported “Holy Spirit-driven change” strikes me as nothing so much as an ecumenically promising approach. As an Episcopalian who is troubled by how my own co-religionists regularly seem to bypass Scriptural exegesis in favor of appealing to God’s doing a “new thing” that supposedly overturns old moral norms, I feel that Douthat is an ally is promoting a robustly biblical Christianity …
Yet, for all my sympathies with conservative worries over “progressive” excesses, it may be that my disagreements with Douthat’s book outweigh, in the end, my agreements. Is it really the case that Pope Francis’ desire for those living in “an objective situation of sin” not to be (necessarily, always) denied the sacrament of Holy Communion until they have fully repaired that situation constitutes a dangerous moral laxity that threatens to undermine the entire fabric of Catholic moral teaching? I do feel the force of Douthat’s “yes” answer; it is, according to St. Paul, a dangerous thing to receive the body and blood of Christ “in an unworthy manner” (1 Corinthians 11:27). But I also wonder whether, as Alan Jacobs has suggested, making the denial of Communion the first step of church discipline, as seems often to be done in conservative churches, is to jump too quickly to the “nuclear option.”
I find myself thinking, in this connection, of a story once told to me by a godly Episcopal priest who served a small parish in a depressed, drug-riddled town. There was a woman, formerly in an abusive marriage, who began to attend church with a man with whom she was now cohabiting. Their preteen son was an eager participant in the life of the parish, and my priest friend described to me his agony over whether to withhold the Eucharist from the couple, living in a state of sin as they were, and thereby risk pushing their son into the lifestyle he was almost certain to find outside the church’s walls. “It is very difficult to make a public defense for what should be the unadvertised options of pastoral discretion,” the priest told me, and I’ve pondered that line ever since.”
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Apr 1st – Vindolanda – by Adrian Goldsworthy
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Apr 2nd – The First Society: The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order – by Scott Hahn
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Apr 3rd – The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath – by Leslie Jamison
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Apr 3rd – Look Alive Out There: Essays – by Sloane Crosley
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Apr 3rd – Wade in the Water: Poems – by Tracy K. Smith
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Apr 3rd – Swimming Between Worlds – by Elaine Neil Orr
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Apr 13th – In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir – by Paul Quenon
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Apr 17th – Noir: A Novel – by Christopher Moore
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Apr 17th- A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership – by James Comey
From Matthew Yglesias at Vox:
“But to react to Comey’s charges against Trump with a comprehensive assessment of his entire career is to miss the point. James Comey is a critical figure of our time not because of any particular decision, right or wrong, that he made during his tenure in government. He’s important because he exemplifies values — most of all, the pursuit of institutional independence and autonomy — whose presence among career officials safeguards the United States against the threat of systemic corruption.
The greatest safeguard we have against the dangers of Trump’s highly personalized style of leadership and frequently expressed desire to reshape all institutions to serve his personal goal is that officials and bureaucrats have the power to say no. Comey, whatever else he did, said no to his boss and was fired for his trouble. America needs more government officials who are willing to take that stand. In many ways, Comey is not the hero the United States deserves. But in a critical moment, he may be the hero we need …
To Trump, the key question about everything is how it relates to him personally — friends should be rewarded, and enemies should be punished.
That’s how economic regulation works in many autocratic states, and it serves to entrench the autocrat in power and to impoverish their populations. But to impose that vision of America requires both political appointees and career civil servants to ignore not just the letter and the spirit of the law but also their own personal and institutional imperatives. In an ideal world, of course, people would do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do. But real-world governments and political institutions don’t function because they’re populated by angels — they need to function despite being populated by actual, flawed human beings.
Comey isn’t a storybook hero, and the real-world consequences of his pursuit of institutional autonomy have been decidedly mixed over the years. But it served as a decided virtue during the early months of the Trump administration, and the country’s best hope for the duration of his time in office is that a wide range of officials — not just FBI agents and federal prosecutors but also regulators and Cabinet secretaries and all the rest — more or less follow his example and insist on maintaining their prerogatives and autonomy.”
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Apr 19th – The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson – by Stanley Hauerwas
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Apr 24th – War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence – by Ronan Farrow
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May 1st – The Judge Hunter – by Christopher Buckley
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May 8th – Tropic of Squalor: Poems – by Mary Karr
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May 31st – The Encircling Sea – by Adrian Goldsworthy
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Jun 19th – Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition – by Roger Scruton
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Jun 28th – Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition – by Hans Boersma
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Aug 27th – Philosophy: A Theological Critique – by John Milbank
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Sep 4th – Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ – by Fleming Rutledge
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Sep 4th – Lake Success – by Gary Shteyngart