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 5th – Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House – by Michael Wolff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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 – The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism – by Bruce Katz & Jeremy Nowak

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jan 9th – Fire Sermon – by Jamie Quatro

From Heller McAlpin at SFGate:
“Jamie Quatro made a splash with her 2013 debut, I Want to Show You More, a collection of stories intensely focused on two major threats to family: adultery and mortality. At once boldly carnal, spiritual, cerebral and literary, Quatro was hailed as a Flannery O’Connor for our era. With her first novel, Fire Sermon, about two academic poets whose strong attraction threatens their marriages and challenges their faith, she’s showing us more, all right — more of the same bracing stuff, though somewhat diffused by length and repetition.

Adultery may be a tale as old as time, but Quatro’s take is freshly urgent, as she grapples with themes of desire, sin, commitment, guilt and renunciation while writing frankly about both marital and extramarital sex. Thorny theological issues and literary allusions to writers ranging from John Updike and Lydia Davis to Sharon Olds and Linda Gregg underpin the novel …

Quatro’s fiery metaphors rage through the pages, as hard to contain as the recent California conflagrations, beginning with epigrams from Buddha’s Fire Sermon and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Maggie’s head warns her heart: ‘You will watch fire consume everything you care about. You will be left with ash — the proper and only end of any burning.’

As she debates coming clean to her husband she realizes that she is ‘every cliché in the book.’ She imagines ‘writing all this down’ and being told by her agent, ‘This has been done to death … I won’t be able to sell this.’ Not so, obviously. Fire Sermon burns with emotional honesty. Unlike the great adulteresses of fiction, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, Quatro’s conflicted heroine is not miserably married; nor is her lover an unworthy boor. The result is an impassioned, deeply moral exploration of devotion and ‘what’s waiting on the far side of fidelity.’”

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Jan 16th – Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic – by David Frum

From Adrian Wooldridge at The New York Times:
“Trump grasped that America is suffering from an epistemological weakness as well as economic ones: The line between truth and falsehood is becoming dangerously blurred. Again, America’s knowledge elite is partly responsible for this: Armies of postmodern academics had prepared the way for Trump by arguing that truth is a construct of the power elite. But the biggest culprit is technological progress. Digitalization is not only creating a deafening cacophony of voices. It is also making it harder to finance real journalism while simultaneously making it easier to distribute tripe.

A Manhattan-based playboy who has had life handed to him on a silver platter might look like a strange vehicle for the pain of the American heartland. But Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser: He is consumed by imagined slights to his fragile ego, hypersensitive to the pretensions of smarty-pants liberals, a man who spends many hours a day watching cable news and seething with anger. He is also an anti-intellectual with the soul of a postmodernist: He believes that reality is something that can be bent into any shape you choose provided that you have enough power.

What does Trump want to do with all his power? The answer, Frum argues, certainly does not lie in helping the white working class that put him in the White House. His tax cuts will widen America’s already high levels of inequality. It lies instead in ‘the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.’ The essence of Trumponomics is running the country just as you run your family business: appointing people with whom you have strong personal ties, ideally ties of DNA, directing business to your properties, using public resources to avenge private grudges. Trump’s appointments to the White House staff included his former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and a former contestant on ‘The Apprentice.’ Perhaps the most telling moment in his first year was when he asked his daughter Ivanka to sit in his seat at a G-7 meeting, thereby reducing a great republic to the level of a family property.

Frum thinks the combination of Trump’s drive for self-aggrandizement and America’s current weaknesses is nothing less than a threat to the democratic order. ‘The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.’ Any supposed solutions to Trump’s behavior, however, may be worse than the disease: American liberals have found themselves investing extraordinary hopes in the generals who now surround the president …

The immediate task facing the American republic is the limit the damage that Trump can cause: Here the checks and balances are already playing the role that the founders intended. But the bigger task is to eliminate the weaknesses that have produced Trumpism. Frum rightly points out that these are broad as well as deep. The travails of the white working class are symptoms of a bigger problem: the concentration of wealth in a narrow range of industries and companies. Likewise, the corruption embodied in Trump Inc. is the product of a broader corruption of America’s governing class, which has allowed Bill and Hillary Clinton to transform themselves into public-service millionaire and Barack and Michelle Obama to negotiate a reported $65 million book deal for their autobiographies. Getting tough on Trump is going to be a picnick compared with getting though on the causes of Trumpism.”

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Jan 16th – Where We Are: The State of Britain Now – by Roger Scruton

From Greg Jameson at Entertainment Focus:
“Writer and academic Sir Roger Scruton’s latest book, Where We Are – The State of Britain Now, takes a thoughtful and erudite look at why Britain is the country it is, what unites us as a nation and why seismic political events such as Brexit have occurred.

Where We Are is a book about identity, and such titles are needed at the moment, with the UK becoming more bitterly divided than ever. As the UK leaves behind its Christian history and becomes increasingly multicultural, Scruton assesses what this means for our traditions and the implications it has for our shared future …

Current British Prime Minister Theresa May (and who know how quickly that text will become dated?) famously stated, ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’ While that statement isn’t explicitly extrapolated upon, and May isn’t attributed to it, Scruton traces it back to David Goodhart’s dichotomy between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘nowheres’ when it comes to the question of citizenship. Scruton’s term, which reoccurs in the book, is ‘oikophobia’ – an aversion to one’s home surroundings. He uses it to explain those who seek to portray patriotism and a sense of national belonging negatively.

The most ire that will be directed towards the book will undoubtedly be in the final chapters, when Scruton tackles Islam and how it fits within what can be defined, however loosely, as British society. It is a sensible look at how scrutinising a set of religious ideas that lead to certain beliefs and behaviours has nothing to do with racism, but may ultimately simply be about a clash between irreconcilable value systems. Stating such ideas has become as toxic as declaring that sovereignty – deciding our laws and values for ourselves and valuing freedom – matter.

Ultimately, books like Where We Are are long overdue, and have arrived now that the horse has not only bolted but died of old age in the knacker’s yard. There isn’t a sense of futility from Scruton, but it’s hard to find too many positives from his assessment. Having said that, there is succour to be sought in the most dire prognoses, especially when it’s so beautifully argued. Scruton is charming and considered company, whether or not you agree with him.”

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Feb 6th – Feel Free: Essays – by Zadie Smith

From Hermione Hoby at The New Republic:
“‘If I have any gift at all,’ Zadie Smith admits in one of the essays in Feel Free, ‘it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.’ Smith does voices. Sometimes literally: an audio recording of her reading her story ‘Escape from New York,’ includes the treat that is impressions of its three characters, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her fiction, of course, is full of voices, but the rendering of this familiar trio and their escape occupies that fertile gray area somewhere between entirely real and entirely fabricated. It isn’t mimicry, which leads nowhere, but a curious sort of imaginary impersonation, which leads everywhere.

Imaginary impersonation sounds like a purely fictional mode, yet it’s the way she approaches all writing, which brings together ‘three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.’ It is these three, she tells us in her introduction, that constitute writing ‘(for me)’. The parentheses are important because it’s the final category that’s the real kicker. Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity. So it is that instead of a straight ‘introductory essay for a book of Billie Holiday photos,’ Smith writes a bravura monologue, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Tellingly, it’s in the second person: Zadie-as-Billie-as-‘you’.

‘In fact—though many aren’t hip to this yet—not only is there no more Eleanora, there isn’t any Billie either. There is only Lady Day. Alligator bag, three rows of diamonds nice and thick on your wrist—never mind that it’s three o’ clock in the afternoon. You boil an egg in twinset and pearls.’

‘I did try to write an essay about Billie,’ Smith admits in a glum little shrug of a footnote, ‘but every angle seemed too formal or cold.’ When your subject presents herself to you with the intimacy of a first name, and when that ‘you’ identifies as a ‘sentimental humanist’ it would only be a travesty to respond with the detachment of cool appraisal.

Smith’s great fascination with selfhood rests in its contingency. In an essay on the artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who paints anonymous, elegant black figures, Smith quotes the painter Chris Ofili. Responding to the intimacy of the paintings, Ofili had marveled at, ‘the tightness of her bun. The size of his ear. She knew so much about so little about him. She said so little he heard so much.’ ‘Exactly,’ Smith enthuses, taking up where Ofili left off. ‘Here are some paintings of he and she, him and her. They say little, explicitly, but you hear so much.’ Ofili, in these elliptical sentences, leaps from small, specific and personal details, to some felt, relational truth, and this is very much Smith’s mode as both fiction writer and critic …

In her celebrated essay ‘Joy’, Smith writes that one source of daily pleasure for her is ‘other people’s faces’—their specificity, the irreducibly human individuality therein, nobody’s but their own. The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both. After the bracing dynamics of so much thought, the essays in Feel Free leave the reader not with a succinct theory of metaphysical dialogue between a global pop phenomenon and twentieth-century philosopher, but rather an image: the endearing, enduring image of one of our finest public intellectuals bickering with her husband, in a car, as she hankers for a sausage roll.”

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Feb 7th – On First Principles by Origen, Volumes I and II – translated by John Behr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Feb 9th – America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class – by Leslie G. Rubin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Feb 13th – All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire – by Jonathan Abrams

From Jeremy Gordon at The Outline:
“Beyond the particulars of its craft, The Wire is the most developed critique of American decline that has ever aired for mainstream consumption. To go through its five seasons was to receive primers on the problem of the war on drugs, industrialization, politics, education, and the media, all issues that remain part of the national conversation in 2018. To watch it signalled you not only as an aesthete, but an intellectual — someone who watched television because it was meaningful and instructive, not because it was entertaining. In the race to legitimize television as a serious art form over the last 20 years, no show has been a more effective tool for teaching you about the world, not just the dark heart of man. (Though there is plenty of that, too.)

And moreover, the show knew this; you were not supposed to watch because you wanted to see Omar spout one-liners. It was not supposed to be just another television show. ‘To be clear: I don’t think the Wire has all the right answers,’ show creator David Simon once wrote in a blog criticizing Grantland for publishing a semi-serious bracket of the best Wire characters ever. ‘It may not even ask the right questions. It is certainly not some flawless piece of narrative, and as many good arguments about real stuff can be made criticizing the drama as praising it. But yes, the people who made The Wire did so to stir actual shit. We thought some prolonged arguments about what kind of country we’ve built might be a good thing, and if such arguments and discussions ever happen, we will feel more vindicated in purpose than if someone makes an argument for why The Wire is the best show in years.’

Perhaps fittingly, then, Grantland alum Jonathan Abrams has written All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, a new book that’s the most serious attempt to contextualize the show as a Great One since its series finale. (It opens at a 2016 Columbia University panel about the show’s importance.) All the Pieces Matter takes its title from an episode in the first season, when the wise detective Lester Freamon is explaining to the oafish Roland Pryzbylewski why a seemingly innocent call they’ve picked up on the titular wire is related to the drug case they’re making. It is an oral history, for which Abrams talked to all of the show’s key participants, save for those who have died. It’s best consumed as a companion piece to the show, rather than a play-by-play …

Abrams’ framing is not particularly revelatory. The show’s quality is presented as self-evident, recognized by every potential reader. The Wire was more of a Grecian drama than episodic entertainment; it did not quite fit with other character-driven HBO shows of its era like The Sopranos or Sex and the City; every season was devised as an exploration of a single premise. All of this is obvious enough, if you watch the show. Where he succeeds is the access, which he achieved thanks to the help of casting director Alexa L. Fogel, who convinced most of the principals of the book’s validity. Some of the actors haven’t held any prominent roles since The Wire, and presumably had nothing better to do, but Abrams got time with Michael B. Jordan, Idris Elba, Michael K. Williams, and several other legitimate celebrities. And because the show imbued so many of its characters with specific humanity that’s surprisingly difficult to find in dramatic television, it is simply nice to hear from so many personalities, all of whom have taken the time to think about why this show was so worthwhile …

Then again, there is some small sadness to a book whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate the show’s quality. ‘I’m more interested in the arguments,’ Simon says at one point near the end. ‘I wish that were the legacy of the show.’ But wrapping one’s head around the variables affecting the crisis in education, media, industrialization, and so on is much more complicated than appreciating a well-sketched character or cutting one-liner. And if it is easier to talk about how The Wire was unique for addressing these problems than actually addressing the problems — well, at the end of the day we’re talking about a television show.”

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Feb 14th – Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts: Bearing Witness to the Triune God – by Jeremy Begbie

From Wm. B. Erdmans Publishing:
“How can the arts witness to the transcendence of the Christian God?

Many people believe that there is something transcendent about the arts, that they can awaken a profound sense of awe, wonder, and mystery, of something ‘beyond’ this world — even for those who may have no use for conventional forms of Christianity. In this book Jeremy Begbie—a leading voice on theology and the arts — employs a biblical, Trinitarian imagination to show how Christian involvement in the arts can be shaped by the distinctive vision of God’s transcendence opened up in and through Jesus Christ.

‘Jeremy Begbie has been a central and seminal figure in the recent revolution in theology and the arts. Begbie’s argument here, both learned and lucid, is that only when we allow for a more explicitly biblical and Trinitarian vision of God will the vague claims for transcendence in the arts begin to make sense. This book will challenge and illuminate the whole field.’
– N.T. Wright, University of St. Andrews

‘This book is a revelation. Jeremy Begbie has distilled much of modern theological aesthetics—and has done so with a sensitivity that is alert to the realities of a practicing artist. I feel both chastened and emboldened by his thoughts.’
– Christian Wiman, poet, editor, essayist

‘Jeremy Begbie has consistently been an essential guide for me as an artist who thinks theologically. Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts finds Jeremy at his best—full of theological wisdom and aspiration, with abundant artistic inspiration. A stellar guidebook for our complex journey of art, faith, and theology.’
– Makoto Fujimura, award-winning artist, writer, speaker

‘This book is a must-read for those at the intersection of art and theology.’
– Sandra Bowden, artist, painter, printmaker

‘A fruitful ambiguity resides in the title of Jeremy Begbie’s splendid new book, Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts. Who is the agent of the ‘redeeming’ promised on the cover? On the one hand, it is Begbie himself, whose incisive analysis redeems the category of ‘transcendence’ from the wispy, dualistic, conceptual fog where it has, in late modernity, been stranded. But on the other hand—and more profoundly—the implied agent of the redeeming is the Creator God, whose otherness and uncontainability are disclosed precisely in and through the specific acts of overflowing, self-giving love narrated in Scripture. Begbie contends that God’s transcendence is not a matter of distance from the world; instead, it is precisely a ‘redeeming transcendence’ that acts to restore the creation. Human works of art participate in that redeeming work through ‘sympathetic resonance,’ being taken up into the triune God’s action to bring ‘the integrity of creation to its fulfillment.’ This is brilliant theological writing that illumines our cultural setting and challenges readers to receive the arts with newly opened eyes and ears.’
– Richard B. Hays, Duke Divinity School”

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Feb 20th – Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations – by Amy Chua

From Gillian Tett at the Financial Times:
“During most of their country’s existence, she writes, American leaders have ignored the idea of ‘tribalism’, or intense local and ethnic identities. That is because the dominant rhetoric — or founding mythology — about American identity was that tribalism did not exist, since America was a modern nation. ‘Alone among the major powers, America is what I will call a super-group,’ says Chua, who defines a ‘super-group’ as ‘a distinctive kind of group … in which membership is open to individuals from all different backgrounds — ethnic, religious, racial, cultural.’

But Chua argues that this vision of the American nation has always been riddled with self-deception, since ethnic, racial and class loyalties have never truly disappeared in America, let alone anywhere else. And she argues that this has two important implications.

First, Americans need to recognise that tribalism — in the sense of group identities — exists inside America and is becoming stronger today under President Donald Trump. Second, drawing on the example of McMaster, Chua argues that American leaders need to ponder the issue of tribalism on the world stage. ‘If we want to get our foreign policy right … the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism,’ she concludes, after presenting a series of narratives about America’s misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — three places where ethnic and tribal loyalties matter deeply, and have been ignored by Washington.

Is this correct? As somebody who once studied anthropology — a discipline that delights in grappling with the nature of cultural identity — I am tempted to shout ‘amen’. Or perhaps not shout: there are a few places in Political Tribes where the analysis feels a little weak, and Chua uses the word ‘tribalism’ in a rather loose way. And she does not always recognise a point that anthropologists often stress, namely that identities are never entirely rigid and one-dimensional. On the contrary, everybody has a hierarchy of potential overlapping identities that they can invoke (such as being a member of a family, village, region, profession, religion or nation), and the level of identity that is stressed depends on the context.

Leaving aside that caveat, this is an important book since Chua’s key argument is entirely correct: America’s leaders need to recognise that tribalism exists, and to think more clearly about the implications. I spent several years in Central Asia, and saw at first hand how a failure to grapple with Afghan history or tribal culture contributed to the ineffectiveness of policy. I also strongly agree with Chua’s argument that America’s liberal elite has contributed to Trump’s rise by failing to acknowledge its own sense of tribalism.

However, perhaps the more intriguing — and unresolved — issue that Chua raises is what (if anything) can be done about this.”

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Feb 20th – When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment – by Ryan T. Anderson

From Micah Meadowcroft at The Washington Free Beacon:
“Anderson’s research leads him to conclude, and shows, that there has been insufficient study of gender dysphoria and the effectiveness of what has rapidly become the standard treatment for it: social, then chemical, then surgical transition. That is, as a consequence of activists’ desire to normalize and promote transgenderism, gender dysphoria has not received the same kind of careful scrutiny as other forms of psychiatric dysphoria or dysmorphia. This first point, that transition and transgender identity may not be the medically straightforward response to gender dysphoria we’re told it is, leads Anderson to his second main point. His primary policy takeaway is that children experiencing gender dysphoria should be treated differently than adults are. A religious conservative, sure, Anderson is still a political liberal in the larger sense, and believes the circumstances of adults transitioning, bathroom accommodation for such adults, and other legal and social questions should be settled by normal democratic and market means—voting, with ballots or wallets, not by judicial fiat or bureaucratic regulation.

These two points are inverted in contemporary activism. A conversation, and voting of any kind, is precisely what is not allowed. In order to promote transition as a healthy response to gender dysphoria, leading activist organizations ignore dissenting voices in the medical and even transgender communities, especially those who have detransitioned, and advocate and enable the social, chemical, and surgical transition of children. Because of socialization and neuroplasticity, as well as irreversible chemical or surgical alterations, children who transition are less likely to find an alternate response to their dysphoria and reconcile with their biology. As Anderson observes, ‘The course of treatment promoted by transgender activists is, in short, self-reinforcing.’ But it is not just the course of treatment: a strategy of self-reinforcement is pursued on all fronts here, medical, legal, and social.

The puzzling thing about this blitz for manufactured consensus is why people buy it. Not why hurting dysphoric people look to chemical and surgical rebirth, or why activists are pushing it, of a piece as it is with their larger vision for the world. Nor why civil rights organizations and health care institutions and pharmaceutical companies are so enthusiastic despite the lack of standard scientific due process or caution, having as they do vested interests in the lawsuits and artificial hormones and procedures involved. (Resisting nature is expensive.) The goods pursued in promoting transgenderism and all transgenderism’s implications as normal and healthy are obvious for all of those parties. Perplexing is why, with the exception of people such as Anderson, objections to the new dogma have been so muted.

There is the obvious first factor, which is that it is profoundly uncool to question any of this, and very angry social media accounts will make sure you know it is, and that your employer and anyone else with power knows it is, if you do not shut up and go along with the grand experiment. I confess this review is the first time I’ve publicly touched the topic for this very reason; cautious reader, let me assure you, I understand your silence. Even were he wrong, Anderson would be a courageous man. As we all head through the looking glass, the second reason people unconnected to transgender activism are willing to nod along to six impossible things before breakfast is less obvious and more interesting. Transgenderism’s use of technology as solution to dysphoria is eminently modern, and the rhetoric around it has, if not explanatory, reassuring power for one of life’s most distressing tensions.

The Princeton philosopher Robert George, notes Anderson, ‘detects the scent of ancient Gnosticism’ in transgender ideology. The Gnostic mystery cults of the early Roman empire saw an essential schism between humanity’s spirit and the material cosmos; the world is corrupt, flesh is wrong, but knowledge and the will can free us from our imprisonment in it. The comparison is a good one, but as Anderson observes, only up to a point. There’s a tension to it: ‘On the one hand, they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body, in a new form of Gnostic dualism, yet at the same time they embrace a materialist philosophy in which only the material world exists. They say that gender is purely a social construct, while asserting that a person can be ‘trapped’ in the wrong body.’ So, in our creatorless and spiritless cosmos we find a comparison of transgenderism to ancient Gnosticism is inexact. But gnosticism has other forms, and transgender rhetoric’s power comes from its participation in a less doctrinal gnosticism, technological modernity’s response to nihilism …

The paradox and tension inherent to transgender ideology is the paradox and tension inherent to life in liberal modernity. The desire for perfect freedom and autonomy will always come into conflict with nature, and it is nature’s laws, far more than the laws of the land, that transgender activists are at war with. But there is nothing liberal about allowing children to be caught up in this combat, too young as they are beneath the age of majority to make decisions for themselves. No amount of enthusiasm for chemical and surgical alteration by such a child can be considered consent. In When Harry Became Sally, Anderson asks society to have a conversation before continuing the fight, to stop the flag-waving and pause for a moment to think. He does this in charity, without acrimony. We must do the same.”

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Feb 20th – What Are We Doing Here?: Essays – by Marilynne Robinson

From Marilynne Robinson at The New York Review of Books:
“We have thought we were being cynical when we insisted that people universally are motivated by self-interest. Would God it were true! Hamlet’s rumination on the twenty thousand men going off to fight over a territory not large enough for them all to be buried in, going to their graves as if to their beds, shows a much sounder grasp of human behavior than this. It acknowledges a part of it that shows how absurdly optimistic our “cynicism” actually is. President Obama not long ago set off a kerfuffle among the press by saying that these firestorms of large-scale violence and destruction are not unique to Islamic culture or to the present time. This is simple fact, and it is also fair warning, if we hope to keep our own actions and reactions within something like civilized bounds. This would be one use of history.

And here’s another. We might stop persuading ourselves of the truth of notions that are flatly implausible in light of all we know, or could know if we cared to. Then we would be less confident in imposing our assumptions on behavior, including our own, that they cannot help us interpret. The aversion to history shelters some very important errors, and sometimes does so aggressively. A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?

In the realm of contemporary politics, someone who has a certain awareness of history, the president, for example, is expected to speak as if he did not. He is expected to have mastery of an artificial language, a language made up arbitrarily of the terms and references of a nonexistent world that is conjured out of prejudice and nostalgia and mis- and disinformation, as well as of fashion and slovenliness among the opinion makers. Any dialect becomes second nature to those who live among its speakers, and this one is pervasive in ordinary educated life. Anyone who has wandered now and then into the vast arcana of what we have been and done is prone to violating the dialect’s strict and narrow usage, and will be corrected.

I am not speaking here of the usual and obvious malefactors, the blowhards on the radio and on cable television. I am speaking of the mainstream media, therefore of the institutions that educate most people of influence in America, including journalists. Our great universities, with their vast resources, their exhaustive libraries, look like a humanist’s dream. Certainly, with the collecting and archiving that has taken place in them over centuries, they could tell us much that we need to know. But there is pressure on them now to change fundamentally, to equip our young to be what the Fabians used to call “brain workers.” They are to be skilled laborers in the new economy, intellectually nimble enough to meet its needs, which we know will change constantly and unpredictably. I may simply have described the robots that will be better suited to this kind of existence, and with whom our optimized workers will no doubt be forced to compete, poor complex and distractible creatures that they will be still …

A great irony is at work in our historical moment. We are being encouraged to abandon our most distinctive heritage—in the name of self-preservation. The logic seems to go like this: To be as strong as we need to be we must have a highly efficient economy. Society must be disciplined, stripped down, to achieve this efficiency and to make us all better foot soldiers. The alternative is decadence, the eclipse of our civilization by one with more fire in its belly. We are to be prepared to think very badly of our antagonist, whichever one seems to loom at a given moment. It is a convention of modern literature, and of the going-on of talking heads and public intellectuals, to project what are said to be emerging trends into a future in which cultural, intellectual, moral, and economic decline will have hit bottom, more or less.

Somehow this kind of talk always seems brave and deep. The specifics concerning this abysmal future are vague—Britain will cease to be Britain, America will cease to be America, France will cease to be France, and so on, depending on which country happens to be the focus of Spenglerian gloom. The oldest literature of radical pessimism can be read as prophecy. Of course these three societies have changed profoundly in the last hundred years, the last fifty years, and few with any knowledge of history would admit to regretting the change. What is being invoked is the notion of a precious and unnamable essence, second nature to some, in the marrow of their bones, in effect. By this view others, whether they will or no, cannot understand or value it, and therefore they are a threat.

The definitions of “some” and “others” are unclear and shifting. In America, since we are an immigrant country, our “nativists” may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds. It is almost as interesting as it is disheartening to learn that nativist rhetoric can have impact in a country where precious few can claim to be native in any ordinary sense. Our great experiment has yielded some valuable results—here a striking demonstration of the emptiness of such rhetoric, which is nevertheless loudly persistent in certain quarters in America, and which obviously continues to be influential in Britain and Europe …

What is at stake now, in this rather inchoate cluster of anxieties that animates so many of us, is the body of learning and thought we call the humanities. Their transformative emergence has historically specifiable origins in the English and European Renaissance, greatly expedited by the emergence of the printing press. At the time and for centuries afterward it amounted to very much more than the spread of knowledge, because it was understood as a powerful testimony to human capacities, human grandeur, the divine in the human. And it had the effect of awakening human capacities that would not otherwise have been imagined …

Neo-Benthamism stands or falls with our unquestioning subservience to the notion of competition, which really comes down to our dealing with the constant threat on the part of these generals to abandon their armies, and, of course, with their demonstrated willingness to act on the threat. Does anyone who cares for such things owe them those great and ancient pleasures of life—poetry, eloquence, memory, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought? Do the pressures to compete with China or Russia deprive us and the world of gifts the Chinese or the Russians would bring to it? We know these cultures have been rich and brilliant in ways that are no longer visible to us, at least. If we do have this effect, is there one thing good about it, for us or for them? If the vastness of the Russian imagination, the elegance of the Chinese eye and hand, were present to us to admire without invidious comparison, of them to us, or us to them, wouldn’t the world be richer for us all?

If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse. I take it to be a merely transient gloom, because the work of those old scholars and translators and printers, the poets and philosophers they recovered and the poets and philosophers who came after them, the habit of literacy and the profound interest in the actual world and the present time, have all taken hold, more profoundly than we know. We have not lost them. We have only forgotten what they mean.”

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Feb 27th – Paul: A Biography – by N.T. Wright

From Andrew Wilson at The Gospel Coalition:
“Whenever N. T. Wright releases a new book, you can be prepared for four things. (1) There will be some superb popularizing: complex theological and historical issues expressed with enviable clarity in light, sparkly, readable prose. (2) There will be some quirks—some themes that Wright thinks are central and obvious that many other scholars do not—and you have to decide whether you agree with him. (3) A few dead horses will be flogged; and depending on the subject matter, the dead horses may be ridden by straw men. (4) And there will be moments of sheer brilliance that make you think about things in completely new ways, and ensure that you will both recommend this book and also determine to read his next one.

(I’ve probably read 30 books of his now, and something like this has happened virtually every time.)

His latest, Paul: A Biography, is no exception. In some ways it’s an unusual book for Wright: a biography rather than a theological or exegetical study, and it’s stylistically located halfway between the heavyweight academic texts in his Christian Origins series and his popular For Everyone commentaries. Yet the popularizing, the quirks, the dead horses, and (most strikingly) the brilliance are all there, with the good comfortably outweighing the bad. Among the handful of Paul biographies I have read—F. F. Bruce, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, and John Barclay’s much shorter recent introduction—this is the one I will be recommending from now on.

Wright has a clear gift for popularizing complex ideas. Ancient history, Greco-Roman philosophy and politics, Jewish theology, Mediterranean geography, New Testament studies, and biblical chronology: all are summarized and illustrated in ways that make them clear to the non-specialist, without dumbing down to the point of distorting them.

As he describes events in the first century, you feel like you are there, watching, listening, and at times (in the leather shop, for instance) even smelling the environment. You also see things that should be obvious but somehow aren’t: the fact that being in prison was not a sentence but a place of waiting for a decision about your fate, or the probability that Paul could only demonstrate his Roman citizenship by carrying the small wooden badge, the diploma, that confirmed it …

See what happens if you read Paul’s Areopagus speech (Acts 17) in parallel with the trial of Socrates—who was eventually sentenced to death for introducing foreign divinities, as Paul was accused of doing—and remember that Paul is in the highest court in Athens, not a philosophical debating society. And so on.

Most insightful of all, at least for me: Consider the explanatory power of an imprisonment in Ephesus, not mentioned by Luke, after the riot of Acts 19, during which Paul was on trial for his life. Let’s say that this is the Asian incident he reflects on at the start of 2 Corinthians, in which he hit emotional and spiritual rock bottom and came face to face with the powers of darkness, and that it is also the imprisonment during which he wrote Philemon, Colossians, Philippians, and Ephesians.

Might that shed light not just on little things (his joy at the gift of the Philippians, the time when Priscilla and Aquila risked their lives for him), but also big things (the hymns in these letters about the lordship and victory of Christ, and his overthrow of the cosmic powers)? Might it help us make sense of Paul’s emotional and theological development in the mid-50s, not just his timeline?

Perhaps the most winsome feature of the book is the way Wright paints Paul as a person: a real individual with ups and downs, agendas and complexities, hopes and fears, a passion for mission and a passion for prayer.

Wright’s Paul isn’t a theologian in an ivory tower, or an evangelist on steroids, or even the greatest letter-writer who ever lived; he’s a three-dimensional, many-sided, complicated human being, who feels crushed at times, yet remains the kind of person who ‘will say ‘Boo’ to every goose within earshot and to all the swans as well.’”

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Mar 1st – Stunned by Scripture: How the Bible Made Me Catholic – by John S. Bergsma

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mar 6th – Registers of Illuminated Villages – by Tarfia Fuizullah

From Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions:
“A few years ago, I read ‘Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine’s School for Girls’ in an issue of The Missouri Review, and reading it again feels like discovering a lost prayer. The narrator thinks of her teenage years at a school where girls, ‘headbands bright green or bangles / yellow, glints that fill the silence like / falling snow,’ pray before a hanging cross. The girls ‘recite poems they // have carried in their mouths for days, / and my desire to go back, to be one / among those slender, long-haired girls // is a thistle, sharp and twisting at my / side.’ Their words—‘psalm, blessing, lord’—bring her back to that chapel where the priest spoke of an eternal world not possible for her: ‘the girl I was, heavy and slow in her / thick glasses, knew she would never / enter heaven.’ The narrator calms her memory with a final note: ‘Help me, Lord. / There are so many bodies inside this one.’

Tucked nearly halfway through Registers of Illuminated Villages, the poem reverberates elsewhere in the book, as in “Acolyte,” where she again feels ‘an infidel / in this classroom / church.’ There, beneath the white cross and the ‘window-light’ that moves across their bodies, ‘My mouth is avid; it // sings fidelis, fidelis.’ But her mind travels to home, where ‘maa is in her / kitchen crooning / black-and-white film,’ and ‘baba leans forward / in his chair, the Qur’an / open to the last page.’ At school, she bows her head and whispers her own prayer—an affirmation. Faizullah’s entire collection—powerful, wide-ranging—is an affirmation, an accomplished second book. ‘This elegy is trying / hard to understand how we all become // corpses,’ she writes, ‘but I’m trying to understand permanence.’ This book gets us there.”

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Mar 23rd – Telling the Stories Right: Wendell Berry’s Imagination of Port William – edited by Jeffrey Bilbro & Jack R. Baker

From Jeffrey Bilbro at Front Porch Republic:
“Front Porch Republic Books has just published a new book, Telling the Stories Right: Wendell Berry’s Imagination of Port William. This volume includes twelve essays that consider Berry’s work as a storyteller (you can see the table of contents below). Though he may be better known as an essayist or poet, Berry calls himself a storyteller, and the best introduction to his agrarian vision is his fiction. This is why when the Library of America issued its first volume of Berry’s writings earlier this year — Port William Novels and Stories: The Civil War to World War II — they chose to publish some of his stories.

In good Porcher fashion, these essays aren’t jargony or boring; they avoid what Hannah Coulter calls ‘the Unknown Tongue’ of academic-ese. And the collection is endorsed by Scott Russell Sanders and Stanley Hauerwas, two of Berry’s most prominent admirers. But don’t take their word for it—get a copy for yourself (and tell your libraries to buy a copy or two as well). Wipf and Stock is running a 20% off sale on the collection, so it’s actually cheaper to avoid the online behemoth and buy it directly from the publisher. Our hope is that this gathering of essays will encourage readers to spend more time with Berry’s fiction. You can enjoy the first part of the introduction and the table of contents below.

One of Wendell Berry’s most delightful fictional voices is that of Hannah Coulter, a woman who has endured great suffering and loss in her life, but whose memoir is marked by the deep sense of gratitude she feels for this only life she’s lived. ‘This is the story of my life,’ she recounts, ‘that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.’ Despite her lonely upbringing, despite the disappearance of her young husband into the mists of war, despite giving birth to their child in the emptiness of his loss, despite all of her children moving away from her and Nathan’s home — despite all her expectations that never came to fruition, Hannah finds a way to narrate the goodness of her life. Her story, then, is the story of a life and a place she has found deeply good: ‘This is my story, my giving of thanks.’

Yet while Hannah gives thanks for her life, she does not pretend it has all been easy. And this tension between gratitude for its goodness and honesty about its sorrows troubles Hannah. In fact, one of the greatest doubts she harbors is whether she and Nathan, her second husband and the father of two of her children, failed to narrate their story in such a way that compelled their children to recognize and care for the good possibilities of life in Port William. Hannah fears the stories she’s told her children have been marked by an edge of discontent. As she mourns over their departures for better opportunities in better places, she confides to Nathan, ‘I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had,’ to which Nathan replies, ‘Don’t complain about the chance you had.’ Hannah is struck by the wisdom of Nathan’s terse words, and she is changed by them: ‘Was I sorry that I had known my parents and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and come to live in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s death to marry Nathan and come to our place to raise our family and live among the Coulters and the rest of the membership?’ The echoes of her question resound throughout her narrative, and she comes to a conclusion that ‘passed through everything [she] kn[e]w and changed it all’:

‘The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.’

Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks. These are the instructions for telling our stories right, and stories told in this way compel us to tend the splintered light of goodness that shines through the cracks of our wounded world. But even as Hannah so beautifully comes to terms with the limits of her only life, she yet worries. She is unsettled by the thought that she and Nathan may have narrated their seemingly simple lives in a way that encouraged their children to leave: ‘But did we tell the stories right? It was lovely, the telling and the listening, usually the last thing before bedtime. But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?’ Hannah is unwilling to answer her own question, though she must ask it of herself — she must live in her uncertainty. She ponders what would happen if someone, ‘instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, [said] that everything should have been different.’ In the end, she knows that such a line of thinking is the ‘loose thread that unravels the whole garment.’ And so Hannah resists a reductive story; she refuses to tug at the loose thread. Instead, despite the imperfect nature of her life’s garment, Hannah learns to weave her narrative in gratitude.

The essays that follow are our giving of thanks, our collective attempt at telling the right stories about life and its fictional representations; they are our efforts to trace some of the narrative threads that hold together Berry’s Port William stories. We have written in hope that our words can elucidate the workings of Berry’s fiction, which makes goodness compelling to so many of his readers. What does it mean to ‘tell the stories right?’ This is a question that haunts not only Hannah and the authors in this collection, but Berry himself.”

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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

From Jasper Oorthuys at Ancient Warfare Magazine:
“Adrian Goldsworthy has been on the radar of anyone involved in ancient military history since the trade edition of his PhD thesis was published as The Roman Army at War 100 BC – AD 200 in 1998. Since then he’s published very accessible books on Roman (military) history at an almost alarming rate. In 2011 he ventured into historical fiction with a series about a British regiment in the Napoleonic Peninsular War. Now he’s turned his hand to ancient history.

Ancient (military) fiction isn’t exactly an empty field. Over the last decade quite a few new authors have come on the scene who all do go much further to give an authentic feel to their stories than what might irreverently be called an ‘ancient veneer’. Ben Kane, Anthony Riches, Christian Cameron, and Russ Whitfield quickly spring to mind, and the readership certainly seems to be there too. Yet there is, as far as I know, only one other like Goldsworthy in that he also comes from an academic background and has turned to fiction, and that is Harry Sidebottom. Both he and Goldsworthy use their extensive knowledge of the period to pick a setting where we know roughly what happened in the empire and provinces, and where archaeology gives tantalising glimpses of details that the novelist can spin together into a great adventure story. Sidebottom writes about the Roman empire in crisis in the middle third century AD, while Goldsworthy has chosen the late first century AD in northern Britain around the fort of Vindolanda.

The setting is well-chosen, and not just because the general idea about a quiet north is wrong. The extensive archaeological digs, to which Goldsworthy refers at the end of the book in the historical notes, provide sufficient details to give some flesh and bones to the story. We know the names of various Roman officers and some of their social environment. Add in the presence of the famous Batavian auxiliaries, Goldsworthy’s deep knowledge of the way the Roman army worked – there’s no transplanted modern army to be found here – and you’ve got a great adventure story with an excellent ancient feel. Are there no niggles? Sure, Ancient Warfare readers may notice the bracer on the cavalry trooper’s arm on the front cover, may wonder about uniformity, Roman salutes, or whether the optio always had feathers on the sides of his helmet to indicate his rank. But that is looking for points that might be debated. A novelist has to make choices to fill in the blanks and keep the story going, and Goldsworthy does so very well.”

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Apr 2nd – The Fragility of Order: Catholic Reflections on Turbulent Times – by George Weigel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apr 2nd – The First Society: The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order – by Scott Hahn

From Scott Hahn at The Josias:
“As the present age of secular liberalism grinds along falteringly, we are presented with a historic opportunity to rediscover and to reanimate the truth about Christ and society. The Church is more than just a salve for the alienation and ruination wrought by modern politics. She is even more than the central institution or organization principle of a good society. Under the lordship of Jesus Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit, constituted by the members of the Body of Christ on earth and in heaven, the Church is the perfect society.

Our duty, therefore, as the universal family of God, is to advance the liberty of the Catholic Church to fulfill its fully catholic mission in all areas of life.

It should feel strange–and maybe a bit thrilling – to read these words. They don’t just challenge secularism; they challenge the classical foundations of liberal democracy and much of the postmodern West. But this shouldn’t dissuade us from speaking up on behalf of this truth about Christ and the Church. In fact, it is precisely the radicalism of this claim that will make it appealing to more people than we think.

The questions we must ask ourselves are these: Do we really believe that human beings have a natural desire for truth, and that the Catholic Church and her Magisterium, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, preserve the truth? And do we really believe that secular liberalism cannot fulfill the deepest longings of the human person?

If we answer ‘yes’ to these questions, as we should, then we should proceed with confidence in asserting not just that the Church should influence politics, but that politics simply is the community living for and in Christ. If we really believe what we say we believe about the incoherence and inhumaneness of secular liberalism, then of course we shouldn’t worry about accommodating Church teaching and authority to the status quo. Rather, we should be trying to fill the void left by sterile secularism in the hearts of every person.

Around the Western world, people are looking for something with substance and rigor to believe in. The cosmopolitanism of our elite only works for the elite – those with power and privilege who can access the benefits of the apex of the social hierarchy. (But even there, of course, unease and emptiness dominate.) Some have latched onto national and ethnic identities as a source of transcendent meaning. Other have found community and structure in fringe-but-growing cults, such as Scientology and Neopaganism. Still others have found in political Islam a feeling of certainty and security that eluded them in the always-skeptical but never-committal West. (A significant number of Islamic State recruits were European young men.)

So we shouldn’t be trying to piggyback on the dying liberal order. If there was ever a time when accommodating secular liberalism might come with some benefits–and there probably wasn’t–that time is long past. Secularism and liberalism and relativism and postmodernism and all the other inhumane -isms of our age have left an entire civilization dazed and confused. Now is the time to speak Catholic truth with clarity and boldness. It’s what the people want, and more importantly, it’s what they need.”

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Apr 3rd – The Overstory – by Richard Powers

From John Domini at The Sewanee Review:
“Powers’s heftiest tome since Goldbug, it features his biggest canvas, with nine major characters from all over the US. We follow these men and women from childhood to old age—excepting one, who dies young, and shockingly—and into a wide variety of careers, romances, and more. Breadth like this is a departure for Powers, though roving among different points of view is his usual MO. Still, he’s never been so Tolstoyan, plucking dreams from so many heads. A reviewer faces a steep challenge trying to show how things come together.

In the woods would be the simple answer: everyone in the novel winds up trying to save the planet’s dwindling forests. This time, the science Powers works with often proves gloomy; all that’s left of Earth’s original wilderness, we learn, is ‘no more than two or three percent.’ Such data take a toll on the characters: the statistic about lost woodland, for instance, emerges in the trial deposition of the book’s tree expert, a woman whose studies leave her on the verge of suicide. The trial’s outcome puts other players at risk, as they seek to protect the old growth in the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, the struggle over those forests provides, among the many storylines, the novel’s defining trajectory.

For a cadre of protesters, five of the novel’s principals, their work escalates into eco-terrorism. Halfway into the book, they begin blowing up the loggers’ equipment depots. The violence—in its extremity unlike anything the author has done—makes the skin crawl. The tragic consequences linger for years, affecting even the peaceable figures. Powers keeps the connections subtle, as in a teeming woodland, where interaction takes place ‘always as much belowground as above.’ Two Midwestern stay-at-homes find themselves drawn into the bombers’ legal defense, and a Silicon Valley whiz, though wheelchair-bound, gives the tree scientist reason to live. In their own ways, every character confronts the question raised by a tree-sitter: ‘Do you believe human beings are using up resources faster than the world can replace them?’ The answer, for everyone, comes ‘like an unblinding: ‘Yes.’’

This then is the main action, the forest that emerges from the trees. Amid the many lines of development, the many paths to protest, one of the miracles is how intensely we root for these people. Perhaps the most sympathetic is the Vietnam veteran Douglas Pavlicek. A kind of Holy Fool, squeaking through one deadly scrape after another, Pavlicek stands apart from the author’s usual protagonists, polymaths and high achievers not unlike himself. As for the tree-sitting sequence, in which a young couple risk their lives repeatedly, I believe even James Wood would find it gripping. More moving still is the worst of the violence, the bungled bombing of another equipment depot …

Along the way, there are glimpses of the world before humanity, and at times the trees themselves function as dramatic personae. The first of the ‘Roots,’ tracing the rise and fall of an Iowa farm family, gains dramatic momentum from a devastating blight of the early 1900s: ‘A country watches dumbstruck as New England’s priceless chestnuts melt away.’ Another early passage notes that ‘everything a human being might call the story happens outside’ a tree’s lifecycle.

To put it another way, this is a novel founded on the notion of our lives as short stories. The author’s experiments in that form clearly helped him develop the skills for this drama. Each section of ‘Roots’ is itself a contained narrative. Each introduces a person in some way marooned, and identified with a tree: a mulberry for the out-of-touch immigrant, a maple for the boy too smart for his own good. Such material takes us back to myth—the primordial short story. Not surprisingly, Ovid’s Metamorphoses emerges as another central text …

Taken as a whole, the language establishes The Overstory as Powers’s new high-water mark. Plainspoken yet heartbreaking, the author renders even turns of thought sinewy: ‘It occurs to [him] where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant’s, the planet’s, brain.’”

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Apr 3rd – The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath – by Leslie Jamison

From Sam Lansky at Time Magazine:
“Addiction memoir is a genre with so many tropes–sordid tales of excess and despair tidily resolved by a redemptive ending–that it’s difficult to imagine how a writer could do anything fresh with it. Yet that’s the remarkable feat Leslie Jamison manages in her book The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, which seamlessly blends the story of her own alcoholism and subsequent recovery with something like a social, cultural and literary history of addiction.

Jamison, whose 2014 collection of essays The Empathy Exams showed her prodigious gifts as a writer, works in a form that’s both sprawling and dense as she toggles between her own story and the stories of others–both the luminaries whose books she studied as a student, like Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, and the ordinary people she encountered in her recovery. It’s a neat trick: she satisfies readers who want the grisly details that addiction memoirs promise while dismantling that same genre, interrogating why tales of addiction prove so resonant. At the same time, she wrestles with her own obsessive introspection: ‘I was so self-absorbed, there should have been a different word for what I was,’ she writes. ‘Of course I would have loved that, if there had been a different word for what I was.’

Jamison is a bracingly smart writer; her sentences wind and snake, at turns breathless and tense. She charts the seductive pleasures of liquor like nobody since Caroline Knapp in her extraordinary memoir Drinking: A Love Story (1996). When Jamison recounts the ‘velvet apathy’ of being drunk, it’s shot through with real yearning. ‘Booze let me live inside moments without the endless chatter of my own self-conscious annotation,’ she writes. ‘It was like finally going on vacation somewhere beautiful without having to pose for photographs the whole time.’

The title is no mistake; Jamison, now eight years sober, writes candidly and specifically about recovery and sobriety, both the surprising pleasures and white-knuckle miseries, which further differentiates her from so many other writers who have documented their addictions. It’s likely that the genre continues to flourish, even in its least compelling forms, because addiction is so confounding: Why would anyone behave so self-destructively? Addiction resists causality; so does Jamison. ‘All these tales of why are true and also insufficient,’ she writes of the factors that contributed to her drinking. Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.”

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Apr 3rd – Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution – by Todd S. Purdum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apr 3rd – Look Alive Out There: Essays – by Sloane Crosley

From Alana Massey at The New York Times:
“In the decade since Sloane Crosley entered the literary mainstream with a best-selling debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, reviews of her writing – from the most gushing endorsements to the unnecessarily cruel pans – have had the rare distinction of sharing at least one point of consensus: Crosley is an absolute master of the one-liner. And while her third book of personal insights, Look Alive Out There, is poised to continue this legacy, its one-liners do far heavier existential lifting than their predecessors. Where Crosley’s first collections were dense with zingers made to deliver laughs, the most memorable lines in this one are built to break hearts. That reflects a similar shift in the author’s storytelling priorities: Crosley has changed focus from the mild absurdities of day-to-day existence to quiet but universal devastations.

In ‘Outside Voices,’ Crosley recalls the turmoil caused by the endless noise of an adolescent neighbor’s 24/7 party. Crosley’s self-deprecation is evident in clever but exaggerated metaphors that case her as the beleaguered victim of teenage tyrants. When the neighbor, Jared, leaves the music on even while away, she casually notes it as ‘a tactic generally employed by war criminals.’ She compares Jared’s friends to ‘cicadas without the bonus years of dormancy’ who were ‘multiplying like gremlins.’ This flippant incredulity in the story’s setup only renders its true significance all the more gut-wrenching. While the teenagers go miraculously silent (‘Had my dreams of their alien abduction come true?’), Crosley investigates from her window to find more than a handful of them dancing and laughing in the kitchen, Jared swooping in and, in seemingly one fluid motion, delighting one female friend by spinning and dipping her. ‘And for a full minute, I was so in love with all of them, I almost couldn’t stand it,’ Crosley writes to close the scene – conceding with genuine admiration that the actual terror inflicted by the young is evidence that they offer how pure and big joy can be …

Crosley remains inexorably funny, even as she uses life and the lives she encounters to take on the heavier issues of aging, loneliness and mortality. Fans of Crosley’s signature humor – a blend of upbeat and offbeat self-effacement – will not be disappointed. Her aforementioned one-liners remain as astute as they are austere, the wisdom she shares just as relatable. Look Alive Out There preserves Crosley’s instinct to observe minutiae and uncover answers to universal questions, while introducing a new willingness to acknowledge that sometimes stories don’t end with such neat answers. This realization is most apparent in ‘Relative Stranger,’ wherein Crosley recounts a visit to her ‘uncle’ Johnny, a distant cousin and retired adult film start whose singular focus on finding love never paid off. In a moment of heartbreaking clarity, he senses that Crosley might be on a similar path. He tells her: ‘You don’t just stop being who you are when you reach a certain age. You know that, right? You don’t magically outgrow yourself. The life you’re living now is your actual life.’ Crosley determines that his cautionary wisdom is both totally generic and entirely true; it just often takes longer than we intend for us to accept the advice we’re given.”

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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 10th – Circe – by Madeline Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apr 10th – Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer – by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apr 13th – In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir – by Paul Quenon

From Danny Heitman at The Weekly Standard:
“‘In an age of distraction and forgetfulness and speed,” says journalist, essayist, and travel writer Pico Iyer, “it’s no surprise, perhaps, that more and more of us are going on retreat, or trying to bring even a little bit of a monk’s discipline and clarity into our overcrowded days.’

Iyer, who writes the foreword to Quenon’s new memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, is one of many Merton enthusiasts who have made their way to Merton’s monastery, hosted by Quenon when they arrive. Among the other pilgrims we learn about in Quenon’s book are poets Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz, along with Sister Helen Prejean, whose bestselling Dead Man Walking, adapted into the movie of that name, made her a global voice against capital punishment.

Quenon seems mildly surprised that people keep showing up at Merton’s old stomping grounds. Though their arrival has by now become routine, he calls these faithful “unexpected visitors” and wonders “why they would come here, of all places.” As the title of In Praise of the Useless Life implies, nothing much happens at Gethsemani—at least little that easily can be measured by the market, the media, or modern culture at large.

When properly conducted, life at Gethsemani—and, Quenon hints, an ideal life lived anywhere—“serves no apparent purpose, other than the hidden marvel of being in God.”

This doesn’t mean a passive existence, nor has Quenon led one. Since coming to Gethsemani in 1958, he’s done electrical chores, handled office work, helped with building projects, nurtured the music ministry, published several books of poetry, and taken studio-quality photographs. That, and tending to Merton’s hermitage, keeps him busy.

The challenge—one that followed Merton and to a lesser degree dogs Quenon—is to venerate work as a window into grace while not idolizing the accomplishments of mind and hand …

The daily rituals of Gethsemani suggest a world without change, though even a monastery is touched at the margins by the march of modernity. Quenon hears a biblical reading at mass about the tower of Babel, a confusing mess, and thinks about ‘the especially bewildering political atmosphere of today.’ Meanwhile, one of Gethsemani’s loveliest views ‘has been punctured by a blinking cell-phone tower facing me. That surely would have made Fr. Louis storm off to Alaska in indignation, but the rest of us have to live with it.’”

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Apr 17th – Noir: A Novel – by Christopher Moore

From Allen Adams at The Main Edge:
“If you were to put together a short list of the consistently funniest authors currently working, Christopher Moore would be on it. Probably near the top. His books are smart and absurd, packed with dynamic characters and engaging storytelling. He has tackled the Bible and Shakespeare. He’s taken on the worlds of both art and science. Vampires and demons and Death, oh my.

With his latest book Noir (William Morrow, $27.99), Moore ventures into some new territory. Well, new in a chronological sense anyway. It’s the story of a guy tending bar in San Francisco during the post-WWII years. He’s just trying to get by when he’s swept up into a weird, wild, wide-ranging plot involving secret societies and flying saucers and mysterious government operatives and poisonous snakes and all sorts of strangeness. Oh, and there’s a dame.

There’s always a dame.

Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin is a man with a past. He came to San Francisco in an effort to leave that past behind him … and there may be some folks who are looking to find him. He works at a dive bar called Sal’s, so named after the owner Sal Gabelli. Sal’s a less than savory character who uses his knowledge of Sammy’s situation to take advantage.

But Sammy’s world is sent spinning when a lovely lady shows up at Sal’s one day. Her name is Stilton (like the cheese) and she is everything that Sammy could ever have dreamed of in one sweet, sharp-witted package. He falls hard and fast, even if he’s not sure when or how he’s going to make it work …

There’s a wonderful flexibility to Moore’s writing style that makes his work a joy to read. Noir is a perfect example of that; he captures the cadences and rhythms of hard-boiled tough-guy writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler while still staying totally committed to his own unique comedic voice. The book exists somewhere in the realm between parody and homage – in a good way. That fluidity captures the attention and imagination far more thoroughly than a more rigid take (in either direction) ever could.

Moore’s knack for seamlessly melding highbrow and lowbrow sensibilities is also on full display here. He has a blade-sharp literary mind, but he’s unafraid to be broad or coarse. He can alternate between biting wit, crass humor and utter absurdity with ease – often in the space of just a few sentences. His fearlessness is just one more reason to celebrate him.

And of course, he’s funny. Really funny. And it’s not just about jokes (although there are plenty of good ones). No, Moore builds his comedic constructions situationally and through deft characterization. Sammy is a classic Moore protagonist, a more or less regular guy thrust into circumstances far outside his purview and forced to deal with a world that he doesn’t necessarily understand. And when that character is wedded to the genre conventions and tropes of noir fiction, well … you’ve got something special.”

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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 2nd – World War II at Sea: A Global History – by Craig L. Symonds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 8th – Tropic of Squalor: Poems – by Mary Karr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 10th – Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto – edited by Mark T. Mitchell & Jason Peters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 24th – Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk – by Russell Kirk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 25th – The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom – by Thomas G. West

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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May 31st – The Encircling Sea – by Adrian Goldsworthy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 6th – Confessions by St. Augustine – translated by Sarah Ruden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 7th – Water Ways: A Thousand Miles Along Britain’s Canals – by Jasper Winn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 12th – Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore – by Elizabeth Rush

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 15th – The Platonic Tradition – by Peter Kreeft

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jun 15th – Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings – by Tom Shippey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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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Jun 28th – Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump – by John Fea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jul 15th – Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth – by Catherine McIlwaine

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug 1st – The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis – by Alan Jacobs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug 7th – Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name – by Leah Libresco

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug 7th – A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time – by Sarah Arthur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aug 27th – Philosophy: A Theological Critique – by John Milbank

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Aug 30th – The Fall of Gondolin – by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 4th – Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ – by Fleming Rutledge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 4th – On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books – by Karen Swallow Prior

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 4th – Lake Success – by Gary Shteyngart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Oct 30th – Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World – by Anthony Esolen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nov 6th – Music as an Art – by Roger Scruton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nov 13th – Becoming – by Michelle Obama

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nov 13th – The End of the End of the Earth: Essays – by Jonathan Franzen