Last week's reads, on-time and condensed

It's probably unsustainable to write a little mini-essay on everything I read each week, so this is a more list-like collection.

First, some good conservative writers complain about Trump:
Tom Nichols, Washington Post, Trump's First Year: A Damage Assessment
David Frum, The Atlantic, An Exit from Trumpocracy
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, This is Your Brain on Trump TV

I really disliked this NYT review of Patrick Deneen's new book, but I liked Dreher's interview with him:
Jennifer Szalai, New York Times, If Liberalism is Dead, What Comes Next?
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, Classical Liberalism Strikes Out

Speaking of reviews, this one is better:
N T Wright, The Christian Century, The New Testament in the strange words of David Bentley Hart

Emma Green is a fantastic journalist. Here in The Atlantic, she writes a typically nuanced piece examining how Science is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost

Claudia Dreifus, The New York Review of Books, "Studies in Power": An Interview with Robert Caro "I don’t really regard my books as biographies. I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a book to tell the life of a great man. I started The Power Broker because I realized that there was this man, Robert Moses, who had all this power and he had shaped New York for forty-four years. And nobody knew where this power was coming from, and neither did I. I regarded the book as a study of power in cities.
After I finished that, I wanted to do national power. I felt I could learn about how power worked on a national level by studying Lyndon Johnson. Rightly or wrongly, I regard all these books as studies in political power, not biography."

Also on the subject of power in cities: Collette Shade, Splinter News, How to Build a Segregated City

From the "Modern Love" section of the NYT, on biking through the pain of divorce: Elaisha Stokes, New York Times, The Bike That Saved My Life

This piece was really interesting albeit problematic. The analysis of what colleges read what and how their selections may artificially inflate certain books is great; knocking on an author's TV appearances in a way that shows the authors can't really decide if he's too smart or too dumb for his success, not so much. Florence Dore, J. D. Connor, and Dan Sinykin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebel Yale: Reading and Feeling "Hillbilly Elegy"

Liz Bruenig always knocks it out of the park, whether she's discussing Augustine and historical Christian approaches to charity for the poor, or in her new WaPo column, discussing our modern ethics of sex and freedom, and how both are abused by celebrities, the President, and the rest of us.
Elizabeth Bruenig, The Point, Charitable Living
Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post, The sexual revolution isn’t going away. It never really happened.
Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post, President Trump is the freest man alive

More thoughts on the modern sex ethic, and a defense of the Victorian one:
Samuel James, First Things, Purity and Prejudice
David Sandifer, Touchstone, In Defense of Prudery

Some tech stuff, everything is terrible:
Sherry Turkle, Washington Post, Why these friendly robots can’t be good friends to our kids
Fred Vogelstein, Wired, Facebooks's Adam Mosseri on why you'll see less video, more from friends
Tony Reinke, Desiring God, Why We Should Escape Social Media (And Why We Don't)

Christ & Pop Culture is still putting out great stuff, like this review of "Lady Bird" and a plea for more honest repentance from church leaders:
Hal Koss, Christ & Pop Culture, Lady Bird Offers Us an Antidote for Our Cultural Homesickness
Abby Perry, Christ & Pop Culture, The Church Needs a Masterclass in How to Apologize for Sexual Assault

A few other miscellaneous things:
Andy Crouch, andycrouch.com, The Three Callings of a Christian
Chris Willman, Billboard, Why Are the Eagles So Hated? An Explainer on the Immensely Popular Yet Divisive Rock Band

Last week's reading

This week had a much wider range of reading material (hence this post being a day late, despite only being the second week of doing this). Offline, I went through the book of Colossians in my personal Bible reading, and in keeping with its instruction to act wisely toward those outside the faith, seasoning our words with salt, I'll start with some pieces that speak to Christian apologetics in different ways. First, in the NYT's "The Stone" column, Agnes Callard examines Pascal's Wager, aspirational faith, and The Breakfast Club, wondering Can We Learn to Believe in God? She writes: "The project is intellectual, involving a change in beliefs, but it is not only intellectual — and its intellectual character is inseparable from its affective and motivational character."

Probably my favorite thing I read this week was an essay by Francis Spufford at First Things, reviewing some Spiritual Literature for Atheists by Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich. The latter (and better) book was part of my reading in 2014 when I was spiritually searching, and though I couldn't articulate it at the time, I was disappointed for similar reasons to Spufford. However, his justified critique of the two books in question is redirected at the Church, who has made it virtually impossible for many searchers – even those as probing, honest, and erudite as Ehrenreich – to see God as the answer to their search, the Yes to all the promises they feel implicit in their wandering. This chastisement is crucial for our apologetic approach.

Similarly, this short post from Thomas Kidd at TGC looks at Alan Jacobs' book on Original Sin, and he sees an apologetic insight here as well: "Too often, pop Christian apologetics proceeds with the assumption that Christianity is so self-evidently true that you’d have to be stupid or dishonest to reject it. This is a bad approach for a number of reasons, not least that it implies that believers saw the light because they were smart enough to see it. For those of us with a high view of grace, such a smug view will not do.
Jacobs follows in a much healthier and theologically sound tradition of those such as C. S. Lewis who say to the non-Christian world, as it were, 'I know that Christianity’s claims may sound crazy at first. But what if they actually make sense of life’s most besetting problems?'"Alan Jacobs and Augustinian Anthropology

I coincidentally stumbled across this several-years-old post for Cabinet Magazine from Alan Jacobs that's related to the same Original Sin book; he writes here about Adam & Eve, the exposure of our nakedness, and our shame in the sight of God when separated from Him by sin: In The Garden

Another Alan Jacobs post is up at The New Atlantis, in which he digs deep into the mindset of campus protests and the ineffectual discourse on either opinionated side of the issue. A great look at the mythical/quasi-religious views that fuel the passion of many for social justice, and the need for ideological purity that fuels its more performative instances: Wokeness and Myth on Campus

Speaking of moral sources, Yuval Levin argues at First Things that our secular, liberal order (both on the Right and the Left) is trying to bypass the intermediary institutions that shape us into the sort of Good-oriented citizens said order requires for stability. It's hard not to see the mythologized thinking mentioned above as a sort of secularized search for deeper meaning (a meaning fueled, indeed, by views of human dignity and benevolence whose roots are more spiritual than the protestors might care to admit). Levin argues that if we are not shaped by institutions (specifically, he mentions families, liberal education, and religion) that give us these deeper meanings and their associated moral formation, liberalism (again, broadly conceived) is likely to overdraw the account that these now-declining institutions had paid into:  Taking The Long Way

The recent issue of Fare Forward also deals quite a bit with this broad liberal order, as did their launch party/discussion at the Catholic Information Center. Eve Tushnet is in the issue and was at the launch, and she has some thoughts on her Patheos blog about the challenges facing the postliberal project: Off-Key in the Canticle: Some scattered notes on “post-liberal” order

And since there's never enough writing about Augustinian approaches to the intersection of religion and politics, here's Jonathan Leeman review of James K A Smith's Awaiting The King for TGC: Doing Political Theology, Waiting for King Jesus

Meanwhile, the workplace is experiencing a different sort of intersection with spirituality, as employers encourage "mindfulness" practices to improve workers' quality of life (i.e., distract them from their unfulfilling work while reaping the rewards of their higher productivity), as Laura Marsh explores in Dissent: The Coping Economy

A bit of a change of pace: this old Mockingbird article from David Zahl sings the praises of Jeff Lynne (of ELO & Travelling Wilburys fame): Lifting Up Jeff Lynne, ELO and the Wilbury Sound

Also on the arty side of things, Christian Wiman (who must have Joy on the mind) eulogizes Richard Wilbur in the NYT Book Review, showing how his joy puts the lie to the myth that says art can only be made through deep suffering: The Poet of Light

Another writer, Min Jin Lee, discusses her love of the Bible and how the story of Joseph informs her authorship in The Atlantic's "By Heart" series": What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible

Ironically, I have to click on every article about smartphone addiction, even this little snippet from Crossway to promote Tony Reinke's 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. Will Your Phone Dominate Your Life in 2018?

In that same vein, Haley Bodine admonishes Christians to be Christlike online in CT: We Are the Light of the (Cyber) World: Let’s Act Like It

The other contender for best read of the week is Marilyn McEntyre's Comment piece In Praise of Forbearance, which has just about too many great passages to pick from: "'We are one in the Spirit,' we sing—not 'May we one day become one in the Spirit,' though that prayer has its place. The fact of unity and the hope of unity are both real experiences of Christians in community; like so many other truths about the life of faith, they coexist in paradox. But it may be that at this historical moment, we need to be called back to the fact in order to sustain the hope. What unites us is God's own infinitely merciful will. What divides us are digressions and misunderstandings, competing alliances, and political and theological arguments that can be resolved rightly only by a generous, patient, humble, wise, deliberative commitment to continue living with the quarrelsome, myopic lot who are our brothers and sisters, and among whom we must count ourselves.
...Forbearance requires and teaches humility; it fosters authentic hope rather than self-interested expectations; in practicing it we develop discernment, which 'sees disagreement not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity for maturation in the faith'; it encourages faithfulness not primarily to tenets or doctrinal specifics but to the pilgrim path we travel in relationship to those members of Christ's body among whom we happen to find ourselves. In that body—the beloved community we know as church—we find friendships that don't arise solely from our predilections and affections, but from deep recognition of what we hold closest and dearest, and in common."

Approaching he proper functioning of Christian community from a different angle is Thabiti Anyabwile's reaction to the President's recent vulgar comments (and consistently vulgar attitude) on immigration from countries he deems less desirable at TGC: My Immigrant Family

On my mind recently has been how to practice the forbearance mentioned above, how best to love the harder to love members of the Christian community, and one barrier I've encountered in myself is a certain intellectual pride. I'm not yet sure how I should leverage the mental gifts and education privileges I've received in service of others, but I appreciated this 2016 Atlantic piece from David H Freedman about our societal fetishization of IQ: The War on Stupid People

Finally, to close out this week's post, Dave Eggers closed out last year with this long Medium post, ranging wide from an immigrant's trial in California to the recent Senate race in Alabama. This piece ultimately left me wanting more threads to tie it together – it seemed like he was hoping the uniqueness of the situations he was examining would provide their own interesting connections and make up for his not really saying very much about them, despite the word count – but I did like his focusing on A Few Crucial Instances of Grace

Things I read in the first week of 2018

I'm going to try to post everything I read worth reading this year. January 1 was a Monday, so perhaps this roundup will be a Monday ritual - we'll see. I still might post separately if I have something I specifically want to comment on, but I think this is a good start.

This first week, I read less online than usual (probably as a result of being on social media less), but the first thing I read was (very appropriately) Andy Crouch at The Gospel Coalition: Keep Technology in Its Proper Place in 2018

Also at TGC, Hannah Anderson had a great piece on her theology of place, rootedness, and community to start off their new series of longform writing: Finding Our Place: Our Family’s Long Quest for Calling and Home

Alan Jacobs explored how writers describe place (namely the New York City of the distant past and distant future), and the similarities between historical and speculative fiction for (the now sadly defunct) Education & Culture: Narrating the City (Past and Present)

On the city beat, this NYT piece criticizes NIMBY homeowners who seek to control an area much larger than what they own, looking at the history of community-based resistance from racial restrictive covenants up through opposition to everything from landfills to funeral homes. I generally enjoy Emily Badger's writing, but this piece fell short to me. Hasn't the implication of NIMBYism always functionally meant "Not In My Neighborhood"? Furthermore, setting aside that this can often be used for terrible purposes (e.g., the aforementioned race restrictions), should homeowners (and later renters) banding together and getting involved to positively (from their perspective, at least) influence their community's future really be where we direct our anger? It seems to me this article should have sussed out the nuance between good and bad collective action, or perhaps made an argument towards accepting the NIMBYs' resilience and initiative while seeking ways to help them find better desires. How ‘Not in My Backyard’ Became ‘Not in My Neighborhood’

In National Affairs, Brian Dijkema argues that conservatives should support unions under the principle of subsidiarity, but that unions should also stop being a variant force of technocratic legibility and operate on a more human scale, using the resources of religion to recognize human dignity: Reviving Solidarity

I've been really impressed with everything I've read at The Point, and their new issue looking at the Church is no exception. In A Serious House, James Chappel goes looking for the decline of religion and is surprised by all the vibrant life (not to mention untrumpeted care for others) he finds. "Maritain began to ask how the church could lend its weight toward reforming modernity, as opposed to overcoming it. His change in focus was in part a product of his interest in the Christianity of the catacombs: the dusty and small meeting spaces that resemble the storefront churches of our own suburbs. The earliest and purest Christians had no inkling of the yawning granite structures that would one day symbolize the faith. For them, the church was ambulatory, representing the spirit of Christian assembly operating within social structures, like yeast in dough, rather than confronting them from without. Instead of viewing the church as a 'fortified castle,' Maritain urged, 'we must think of an army of stars thrown across the sky.'"

On the subject of great writing on Christianity from outside it, David Ramsey explores the "lined-out hymnody" in the Old Baptist churches of the Christ-haunted South for Oxford American, and ends up Tuned Up in the Spirit. "The thing is, the secular knowledge of my secular life seems to me inadequate to the experience of being alive. For now we see through a glass, darkly. Yes, precisely. Let’s say that my wife made noises I had never heard before, and our daughter was born. Let’s say that light traveled ninety-three million miles from a dying star and fell at a certain angle in the window the first time I looked at her face. I do not claim to understand the specific joy that true believers feel. But these lives we are gifted—I am thankful."

Changing gears entirely, Michael Sacasas evaluates the application of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to our modern world of technology and the perils of rendering people superfluous at his blog, The Frailest Thing:  Superfluous People, the Ideology of Silicon Valley, and The Origins of Totalitarianism

Cited in the piece above is this excerpt adapted in Vanity Fair from Emily Chang's new book, Brotopia, chronicling the rise of rampant sex-and-drug parties among the Silicon Valley elite. Not a light read, and sadly, not particularly surprising, but illuminating nonetheless. “OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO F---ED UP”: INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S SECRETIVE, ORGIASTIC DARK SIDE

It seems appropriate to follow that up with Christine Rosen's The Reckoning in Commentary, in which she argues the post-Weinstein sexual-ethics fallout has been a long time coming. The above piece, though, reveals how much there is that's still left to fall.

Matthew Loftus argues at Mere Orthodoxy that If Anything Is Pro-Life, Nothing Is; while we certainly need a consistent ethic and anthropology to make pro-life arguments, and a wide variety of policies may ultimately reduce demand for abortion, linking everything imaginable - from immigration to zoning - with the movement to ban abortion merely muddies the waters.