[The following is an interview with C. S. Lewis, held on the 7th May 1963 in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene College, Cambridge. The interviewer is Mr Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Ltd.]
Mr Wirt:
Professor Lewis, if you had a young friend with some interest in writing on Christian subjects, how would you advise him to prepare himself?
Lewis:
I would say if a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity. But to speak of the craft itself, I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer. Writing is like a ‘lust’, or like ‘scratching when you itch’. Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.
Mr Wirt:
Can you suggest an approach that would spark the creation of a body of Christian literature strong enough to influence our generation?
Lewis:
There is no formula in these matters. I have no recipe, no tablets. Writers are trained in so many individual ways that it is not for us to prescribe. Scripture itself is not systematic; the New Testament shows the greatest variety. God has shown us that he can use any instrument. Balaam’s ass, you remember, preached a very effective sermon in the midst of his ‘hee-haws’.
Mr Wirt:
A light touch has been characteristic of your writings, even when you are dealing with heavy theological themes. Would you say there is a key to the cultivation of such an attitude?
Lewis:
I believe this is a matter of temperament. However, I was helped in achieving this attitude by my studies of the literary men of the Middle Ages, and by the writings of G. K. Chesterton. Chesteron, for example, was not afraid to combine serious Christian themes with buffoonery. In the same way, the miracle plays of the Middle Ages would deal with a sacred subject such as the nativity of Christ, yet would combine it with a farce.
Mr Wirt:
Should Christian writers, then, in your opinion, attempt to be funny?
Lewis:
No. I think that forced jocularities on spiritual subjects are an abomination, and the attempts of some religious writers to be humorous are simply appalling. Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.
Mr Wirt:
But is not solemnity proper and conducive to a sacred atmosphere?
Lewis:
Yes and no. There is a difference between a private devotional life and a corporate one. Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
Mr Wirt:
What is your opinion of the kind of writing being done within the Christian church today?
Lewis:
A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible. I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.
Mr Wirt:
What do you think of the controversial new book, Honest to God, by John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich?
Lewis:
I prefer being honest to being ‘honest to God’.
Mr Wirt:
What Christian writers have helped you?
Lewis:
The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Others are Edwyn Bevan’s book, Symbolism and Belief, and Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, and the plays of Dorothy Sayers.
Mr Wirt:
I believe it was Chesterton who was asked why he became a member of the church, and he replied, ‘To get rid of my sins.’
Lewis:
It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins. We also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. Not only do we need to recognize that we are sinners; we need to believe in a Saviour who takes away sin. Matthew Arnold once wrote, ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ Because we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved.
Mr Wirt:
In your book Surprised by Joy you remark that you were brought into the Faith kicking and struggling and resentful, with eyes darting in every direction looking for an escape. You suggest that you were compelled, as it were, to become a Christian. Do you feel that you made a decision at the time of your conversion?
Lewis:
I would not put it that way. What I wrote in Surprised by Joy was that ‘before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice.’ But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. I was glad afterwards at the way it came out, but at the moment what I heard was God saying, ‘Put down your gun and we’ll talk.’
Mr Wirt:
That sounds to me as if you came to a very definite point of decision.
Lewis:
Well, I would say that the most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action. It is a paradox. I expressed it in Surprised by Joy by saying that I chose, yet it really did not seem possible to do the opposite.
Mr Wirt:
You wrote 20 years ago that ‘A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.’
Would you say your view of this matter has changed since then?
Lewis:
I would say there is no substantial change.
Mr Wirt:
Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?
Lewis:
That is not my language, yet it is the purpose I have in view. For example, I have just finished a book on prayer, an imaginary correspondence with someone who raises questions about difficulties in prayer.
Mr Wirt:
How can we foster the encounter of people with Jesus Christ?
Lewis:
You can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into His Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike! I have therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment.
But we can block it in many ways. As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the Faith. We give in too much. Now, I don’t mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times, but there comes a time when we must show that we disagree. We must show our Christian colours, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent or concede everything away.
There is a character in one of my children’s stories named Aslan, who says, ‘I never tell anyone any story except his own.’ I cannot speak for the way God deals with others; I only know how He deals with me personally. Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.9 As Charles Williams once said, ‘The altar must often be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.’
Mr Wirt:
Professor Lewis, your writings have an unusual quality not often found in discussions of Christian themes. You write as though you enjoyed it.
Lewis:
If I didn’t enjoy writing I wouldn’t continue to do it. Of all my books, there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing.
Mr Wirt:
Which one?
Lewis: The Screwtape Letters. They were dry and gritty going. At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life, and decided to put them into the form, ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.
Mr Wirt:
How would you suggest a young Christian writer go about developing a style?
Lewis:
The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.
Mr Wirt:
Do you believe that the Holy Spirit can speak to the world through Christian writers today?
Lewis:
I prefer to make no judgment concerning a writer’s direct ‘illumination’ by the Holy Spirit. I have no way of knowing whether what is written is from heaven or not. I do believe that God is the Father of lights—natural lights as well as spiritual lights (James 1:17). That is, God is not interested only in Christian writers as such. He is concerned with all kinds of writing. In the same way a sacred calling is not limited to ecclesiastical functions. The man who is weeding a field of turnips is also serving God.
Mr Wirt:
An American writer, Mr Dewey Beegle, has stated that in his opinion the Isaac Watts hymn, ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’, is more inspired by God than is the ‘Song of Solomon’ in the Old Testament. What would be your view?
Lewis:
The great saints and mystics of the church have felt just the opposite about it. They have found tremendous spiritual truth in the ‘Song of Solomon’. There is a difference of levels here. The question of the canon is involved. Also we must remember that what is meat for a grown person might be unsuited to the palate of a child.
Mr Wirt:
How would you evaluate modern literary trends as exemplified by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre?
Lewis:
I have read very little in this field. I am not a contemporary scholar. I am not even a scholar of the past, but I am a lover of the past.
Mr Wirt:
Do you believe that the use of filth and obscenity is necessary in order to establish a realistic atmosphere in contemporary literature?
Lewis:
I do not. I treat this development as a symptom, a sign of a culture that has lost its faith. Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse. I look upon the immediate future with great apprehension.
Mr Wirt:
Do you feel, then, that modern culture is being de-Christianized?
Lewis:
I cannot speak to the political aspects of the question, but I have some definite views about the de-Christianizing of the church. I believe that there are many accommodating preachers, and too many practitioners in the church who are not believers. Jesus Christ did not say ‘Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.’ The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.
The case against Christianity that is made out in the world is quite strong. Every war, every shipwreck, every cancer case, every calamity, contributes to making a prima facie case against Christianity. It is not easy to be a believer in the face of this surface evidence. It calls for a strong faith in Jesus Christ.
Mr Wirt:
Do you approve of men such as Bryan Green and Billy Graham asking people to come to a point of decision regarding the Christian life?
Lewis:
I had the pleasure of meeting Billy Graham once. We had dinner together during his visit to Cambridge University in 1955, while he was conducting a mission to students. I thought he was a very modest and a very sensible man, and I liked him very much indeed.
In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question. In the Soviet Union it is different. Many people living in Russia today have never had to consider the claims of Christ because they have never heard of those claims.
In the same way, we who live in English-speaking countries have never really been forced to consider the claims, let us say, of Hinduism. But in our Western civilization we are obligated both morally and intellectually to come to grips with Jesus Christ; if we refuse to do so we are guilty of being bad philosophers and bad thinkers.
Mr Wirt:
What is your view of the daily discipline of the Christian life—the need for taking time to be alone with God?
Lewis:
We have our New Testament regimental orders upon the subject. I would take it for granted that everyone who becomes a Christian would undertake this practice. It is enjoined upon us by Our Lord; and since they are His commands, I believe in following them. It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what He said when He told us to seek the secret place and to close the door.
Mr Wirt:
What do you think is going to happen in the next few years of history, Mr Lewis?
Lewis:
I have no way of knowing. My primary field is the past. I travel with my back to the engine, and that makes it difficult when you try to steer. The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years.
We have, of course, the assurance of the New Testament regarding events to come. I find it difficult to keep from laughing when I find people worrying about future destruction of some kind or other. Didn’t they know they were going to die anyway? Apparently not. My wife once asked a young woman friend whether she had ever thought of death, and she replied, ‘By the time I reach that age science will have done something about it!’
Mr Wirt:
Do you think there will be wide-spread travel in space?
Lewis:
I look forward with horror to contact with the other inhabited planets, if there are such. We would only transport to them all of our sin and our acquisitiveness, and establish a new colonialism. I can’t bear to think of it. But if we on earth were to get right with God, of course, all would be changed. Once we find ourselves spiritually awakened, we can go to outer space and take the good things with us. That is quite a different matter.”
Thank you so much for your lovely letter and pictures. I realised at once that the coloured one was not a particular scene but a sort of line-up like what you would have at the very end if it was a play instead of stories.
The Dawn Treader is not to be the last: There are to be 4 more, 7 in all. Didn’t you notice that Aslan said nothing about Eustace not going back? I thought the best of your pictures was the one of Mr. Tumnus at the bottom of the letter.
As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess. Has there never been anyone in this world who:
(1.) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas.
(2.) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor.
(3.) Gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people.
(4.) Came to life again.
(5.) Is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb (see the end of the Dawn Treader).
Don’t you really know His name in this world? Think it over and let me know your answer!
Reepicheep in your coloured picture has just the right perky, cheeky expression.
I love real mice. There are lots in my rooms in College but I have never set a trap.
When I sit up late working they poke their heads out from behind the curtains just as if they were saying, ‘Hi! Time for you to go to bed. We want to come out and play.’
What Aslan meant when he said he had died is, in one sense, plain enough. Read the earlier book in the series called The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and you will find the full story of how he was killed by the White Witch and came to life again. When you have read that, I think you will probably see that there is deeper meaning behind it.
The whole Narnian story is about Christ.
That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing there really were a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?’
The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a Man here.
I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) The lion is supposed to be the King of beasts: (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible (Genesis 49:9-10): (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books.
The whole series works out like this:
The Magician’s Nephew tells the creation and how evil entered Narnia.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe… the Crucifixion and Resurrection
Prince Caspian… restoration of the true religion after a corruption
The Horse and his Boy… the calling and conversion of a heathen.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader… the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep)
The Silver Chair… the continued war against the powers of darkness
The Last Battle… the coming of Antichrist (the Ape). The end of the world, and the Last Judgement
“I should rather like to attend your Greek class, for it is a perpetual puzzle to me how New Testament Greek got the reputation of being easy. St. Luke I find particularly difficult.
As regards matter— leaving the question of language— you will be glad to hear that I am at last beginning to get some small understanding of St. Paul: hitherto an author quite opaque to me.
I am speaking now, of course, of the general drift of whole epistles: short passages, treated devotionally, are of course another matter.
And yet the distinction is not, for me, quite a happy one.
Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience.
Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens.
Hammer your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and the heart will sometimes sing unbidden.”
The Lord has brought us once again by a way we did not know to the end of another year. 2022 was a year of transition for my family. We moved half-way across the nation this summer. We’re building a new home and I’m serving a new church. Most of my books remain in storage, so I was unable to read or post as much during this busy season. But, by God’s grace, here are 36 magnificent books I read this year. I enjoyed every last one of them.
C.S. Lewis is right. Doctrinal books are often the most devotional books.
“For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hands.” (205)
This doctrinal book, my favorite book of the year, is a profoundly deep book that explores how the revelation of God in Christ and Holy Scripture implies and is illumined by the theological claims of the early church fathers. I was so eager to read this book by theologian Steven Duby that I had it shipped directly to the rental home in North Carolina where we were staying during our family vacation at the beach. It didn’t disappoint. It requires rigorous reading, and it also caused my heart to sing unbidden. Here’s a taste where Duby is expounding God’s glorious self-existence:
“Divine aseity lies at the heart of this doctrine of God. It is an attribute that signifies that God is not dependent on anything or anyone else to be the God that He is but instead has life in and of Himself. This is a life eternally fulfilled in the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That God is not dependent on anything or anyone to be the God that He is can be seen in various places in the Old and New Testaments. Unlike other ancient Near Eastern origins accounts, the opening chapter of the Bible tellingly lacks a theogony, a divine becoming in which God might strive to obtain an identity of His own and an authority over the world.
Instead, the God of the Bible just is who He is: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). He creates the world not from a deficiency in Himself or a need to have others accomplish things for Him but from a generous will to communicate life, to provide for the human race, and to invite the human race into the cultivation of His world (1:26–30). Already in its creation account Holy Scripture begins to convey that God does not need us but has freely chosen to bring us into being. Moreover, as the Creator of all things, God is not a constituent part of a greater encompassing reality.
God’s independence and plenitude are displayed throughout the history of Israel. In Exodus, when God reveals His name, I am who I am, He is making it clear that Moses and the people of Israel do not determine who He is or what He will do, though they can count on His covenant faithfulness (Exod. 3:13–15). The name is characterized by God in terms of His freedom to be gracious to whom He will be gracious and to have mercy on whom He will have mercy (33:19). This note of divine prevenience comes through in the establishment of the covenant with Israel: “I am YHWH, your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (20:2). YHWH chose Israel to be hHis treasured people and delivered them from Egypt not for any benefit they could bestow upon Him but simply because He loved them and because He is faithful to His promises (Deut. 7:7–8). According to Psalm 50, God does not need the worship of His people. All things already belong to Him because all things are from Him: “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” (Psalm 50:12–13).
Isaiah’s prophecy likewise attests the underived life and prevenience of God. This takes place in a number of texts that echo the giving of the divine name in Exodus 3 by use of the nominal clause אֲנִי הוּא (“I am he”). Speaking of His sovereignty over all things, God declares, “I am YHWH, the first and with the last, I am He” (Isa. 41:4). In reaffirming His plan for Israel, God assures them that He is trustworthy, unlike the false gods, again emphasizing “I am he” and adding, “Before me no God was formed, and after me none will be.” He alone is the true God who can save: “Yes, from of old I am He, and there is none who can deliver from my hand. I act, and who will reverse it?” (43:10–13). “Even to your old age I am He, even in your gray hair I will sustain you” (46:4). YHWH distinguishes himself from the idols by pointing out that He foretold the fall of Babylon and will tell of things still to come. “I am He,” he says, “I am the first and I am the last. And my hand founded the earth, and my right hand stretched out the heavens” (48:12–13). The book of Isaiah presents God as the one who cares deeply about the future of Israel and as the one who can bring about Israel’s future hope precisely because He is the God who is a se and is not dependent on or limited by another.” (23-24)
Here are Duby’s closing words:
“In the end, it is Christian theology’s greatest privilege to confess and bear witness to the triune God, who both transcends the economy of salvation and, in the person of the Son, has partaken of flesh and blood to deliver us from our sin. If the claims of this study are accurate, then grasping that the triune God does indeed transcend the economy is precisely what is needed to understand the meaning and efficacy of the incarnate Son’s work. Because He always remains the Son who has life in Himself, He can give His flesh for the life of the world. Because He always remains rich even in the midst of His human lowliness, He can make us rich with the gift of salvation.” (377)
This is a stunningly spectacular meditation on the grace of God in the gospel. It has been a balm for my weary soul in 2022. It’s not to be rushed through but lingered in.
Christian, what has God done with your sin? He laid your sin upon His Son. He has forgiven you of your sins. He has cleansed you of your sin. He has covered your sin. He has cast all your sin behind His back. He has removed your sin as far as the east is from the west. He has passed over your sin. He has trampled your sin underfoot. He has cast your sin into the sea. He has blotted out your sin. He has turned His face away from your sin. He has forgotten your sin and refuses to remember it. He does not deal with you as your sins deserve. He does not repay you as your sins deserve. And He does not count your sins against you.
“If our sins are truly trampled underfoot, cast into the depths of the sea, and utterly blotted out of sight, never to rise up with shouts of condemnation, it is only because of what Jesus has done to secure our salvation. But we must never forget that the saving and preserving work of Christ on our behalf did not end with the cross and the empty tomb. Jesus was exalted to the right hand of the Father and there defends us and serves as our ‘advocate’ (1 John 2:1) and intercessor (Rom. 8:34).” (193)
Christian, resolved to be loved in God’s Beloved Son, because neither in heaven nor among all the creatures on earth is there anyone who loves you more than Jesus Christ does.
Exegesis fuels theology and theology helps exegesis. “Biblical reasoning,” according to Bobby and Tyler, “is that form of attention to Holy Scripture that is taught by God, teaches about God, and leads to God.” (xviii)
“Our goal in this book is to assemble a toolkit for biblical reasoning. The toolkit’s goal is to enable better exegesis. The goal of that exegesis is, ultimately, to see God. Hence, by ‘better exegesis’ we mean exegesis that is not only more adequate to the text itself but also, especially, more adequate to the ultimate reality to which the text bears witness and more adequate to the text’s ultimate goal. That reality is the triune God and that goal is the sight of God’s face that will eternally satisfy our souls.” (xvii)
Scripture is the curriculum, God is the teacher, and disciples are students. This wonderful book equips disciples of Jesus to humbly sit at His feet, to faithfully listen to Him, and to eagerly learn from Him about the glory He has with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Wow. What a book. Reinke wisely and winsomely shows from Scripture how disciples of Jesus ought to think Christianly about technology. Our tech tools are a gift from God to fuel gratitude, a wealth from God to steward, and a power from God to wield, all for the global glory of Christ.
“Tech intensifies our dexterity, augments our influence, and empowers our previously feeble intentions. And no innovation more potently amplifies us like the computer chip. By weight these little chips are the most powerful things in the continuous universe. Excluding cosmic explosions and nuclear bombs that exhaust their power in a hyperblink, of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power— the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second— lies at the core of your laptop. Yes, the tiny microprocessor conducts more energy per second per gram through its tiny corridors than animals, volcanoes, or the sun. The computer chip is the most energetically active thing in the known universe. As I write, Apple has just unveiled M1, the most powerful chip the company has ever made, packed with an astounding 16 billion transistors. With this much power in every iPhone and MacBook, we can do a lot with our tools—a lot of damage or a lot of good. So how will we wield this power?” (14-15)
“We abuse technology when we forget the Giver who gave us all these material blessings in the first place. Many Christians struggle here, failing to inventory the tens of thousands of innovations God has given us to use every day. Many Christians, like non-Christians, sever the technologies that surround them from the grand metanarrative of God’s generosity. But if God’s glory shines in untouched creation (in the sun, moon, and mountains), it also shines in the innovations that concentrate and refine creation into new forms. Sixty of the earth’s elements, compressed into our smartphones, give us a perspective of creation that no other generation has seen. None of our innovations are perfect. Every material gift in this life is tainted by the fall. Yet it seems that quite a lot of Christians are withholding their tech gratitude for some future innovation that will drop from the heavens, incorruptible by human misuse and without any possible side-effects.
If a tech violates your conscience, abstain from it. But if it doesn’t, and you embrace it into your life, thank God for it. Give him your worship and your gratitude. Refuse to be a tech-agnostic, someone who uses the gifts but ignores the Giver. The technologist may be deaf to the Creator, but God’s sheep hear his voice. We can hear the Creator’s extravagance in every technological gift we use—our cars, computers, smartphones, electrified homes, running water, appliances, books, magazines, plastics, Internet, Wikipedia, television, music, medicine, airliners, and Nike Air Jordans. It includes the 150,000 things you can buy in a Walmart and the 12 million things you can order from Amazon. Make a list of everything you have access to, thanks to innovation. Count up all your microprocessors, if you can. Every blessing is to be received with thanksgiving as a gift from our radically generous Giver.” (147-148)
Reinke helped me to marvel at the wonders of technology, and he pointed me afresh to greatest wonder of all: God’s gift of His Beloved Son to sinners in the gospel of His amazing grace. In the fall of 1888, Charles Haddon Spurgeon heard recorded music for the first time: “I sat yesterday with two tubes in my ears to listen to sounds that came from revolving cylinders of wax. I heard music, though I knew that no instrument was near… I sat and listened, and I felt lost in the mystery.” (MTPS, 34: 531) Spurgeon then makes this glorious application:
“To us, my dear hearers, who believe in Jesus, the gospel is the most wonderful thing that can ever be. The more we know of it, the more astounded we are at it. It is a compound of divine and infinite things. When we study it, we go from wonder to wonder. Here we behold the heart of God, and hear the voice of His infinite tenderness, His infallible wisdom, His stern justice, and His supreme beneficence… In the gospel of the Lord Jesus, God speaks into the ear of His child more music than all the harps of heaven can yield. I pray you, do not despise it.” (MTPS, 34: 532)
In our tech-saturated times, may we be ever increasingly lost in the mystery of Christ, lost in wonder, love, and praise.
J.I. Packer once said, “Without John Owen I might well have gone off my head or got bogged down in mystical fanaticism, and certainly my view of the Christian life would not be what it is today.” (12) My view of the Christian life has been greatly helped by Owen, particularly through the green hardback Banner of Truth set of his works. Over the years, I’ve read and reread them. I’ve underlined passages and written marginalia throughout. So, I’m delighted that Crossway aims to release a new edition of Owen’s complete works, beautifully published, freshly typeset, slightly edited (“Vile semicolon, begone!”), with helpful editorial introductions, and illuminating footnotes, all for a new generation of readers.
In this first of a planned 40-volume set, we find Owen’s “The Reason of Faith” and “The Causes, Ways, and Means of Understanding the Mind of God.” In the preface of the latter work, I was freshly affected by the following passage. What are Dr. Owen’s pastoral aims in wanting his readers to understand the mind of God in the Scriptures with a Holy Spirit-wrought certainty? Owen supplies a two-fold reason: so that we might obey the truth and suffer well for the truth, all for the glory of God.
“Unless believers have a full assurance of understanding in themselves, unless they hold their persuasion of the sense of Scripture revelations from God alone, if their spiritual judgment of truth and falsehood depend on the authority of men, they will never be able to undergo any suffering for the truth or to perform any duty unto God in a right manner.” (222)
Martin Luther once said, “Nothing is easier than sinning.” As sinners, sinning comes naturally to us. We are more familiar with sin than we are with grace. And yet, while we know much of the practice of sin, and the presence of sin, how much do we truly know of the doctrine of sin? It’s always wise to know one’s enemy. “Other than knowing God, your greatest advocate, nothing else in this world is more important than knowing sin, your greatest enemy. A proper understanding of grace requires a thorough grasp of sin.” (13) In Knowing Sin, Mark Jones helps us see hamartiology, the doctrine of sin, through the eyes of the Puritans, those ministers of God’s grace who knew the deceitfulness of sin meticulously, forthrightly, and extensively.
“Even a cursory glance at sins of omission should cause a number of reactions from Christians. First, if we are able to have words with God before our death, we probably ought to confess as Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) did on his deathbed, ‘O Lord forgive me, especially my sins of omission.’
Second, we should marvel at the obedience of Jesus Christ on our behalf. He not only refrained from sinning during the course of His life on earth, but He was positively obedient to the precepts of Gods law. He did not lack in love to God or His neighbor. His righteousness is imputed to us simply by embracing Him in faith. God cannot reject us because we have, through imputation, fulfilled the law as Christ did. His righteousness really is our righteousness. That anyone could think that they can stand before God and enter eternal life on the basis of their own obedience, even in the slightest way, testifies to the marvel of human madness. Our sins are as numerous as the sand on the sea, but Christ’s perfect, complete righteousness answers to this predicament. No one else can or will offer you what Christ alone can. Whether you are a Christian or non-Christian, your greatest need is the One who came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15).” (191-192)
Thomas Watson was right: “The more bitterness we taste in sin, the more sweetness we shall taste in Christ.” (30)
One of my favorite Scottish Presbyterian pastors gave this wise counsel:
“The four Gospels are a narrative of the heart of Christ. They show His compassion to sinners, and His glorious work in their stead. If you only knew that heart as it is, you would lay your weary head with John on His bosom. Do not take up your time so much with studying your own heart as with studying Christ’s heart. For one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ!” (279)
This book that will help you do just that. It contains the expository thoughts of another one of my favorite Scottish Presbyterians, Sinclair Ferguson, covering the 155 verses of John 13-17, Christ’s Upper Room Discourse, a passage that is indeed “a window into Christ’s heart.” (4: 96) It’s vintage Ferguson. He helps you to behold the heart of the Savior. Here’s a taste from John 15:21:
“Opposition and intimidation make me feel small, marginalized, lonely. But I have a great privilege: I am a child of the heavenly Father. Sparrows sell for next to nothing, but not one of them is forgotten by God. I am much more valuable to Him than many sparrows (Luke 12:6-7)! I need not fear. He has a tender care for me and watches over me.
As the Heidelberg Catechism affirms, this is my “comfort in life and death”:
I am not my own, but belong- body and soul, in life and in death-to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has delivered me from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to Him, Christ, by His Holy Spirit, also assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for Him. (Q&A 1)
I could not be more secure! Now I see those who are antagonistic to my faith no longer as giants but as people to be pitied, who know nothing of the grace of God in the gospel. By comparison with my heavenly Father, they are small and insignificant. They are powerless to do anything to me that He is not able to use for my ultimate good.
A memory from childhood comes back to me in this context. As young boys, we used to play football (soccer!) in our street. The father of one of my friends had played for a Scottish professional soccer team. Sometimes he came home early from work while we were still playing and joined the losing team! If he joined your side, you knew no matter how many goals behind you might be that you would win the game! No team could hold out against my friend’s father!
So it is with the friends of Jesus Christ the Son of the Father of infinite majesty. He is our Father and we are now His children– we have not been left orphans! This gives peace and poise. Those who seek to destroy the faith and fruit of His children do not realize that everything they do to harm them will be transformed by the heavenly Father into an instrument to do good:
‘No weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed, And you shall refute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD and their vindication from me, declares the Lord.’ (Isa. 54:17)” (131-132)
God does not communicate all of His glorious perfections to His creatures. Some of His divine attributes are incommunicable. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. But oftentimes, I sin because I live as if I shared God’s incommunicable attributes. I don’t sleep enough because I think I’m omnipotent. I live distractedly and fail to be all there wherever I am because I’m trying in vain to be omnipresent. I worry and get overwhelmed with what tomorrow holds because I act like I’m omniscient and know what’s best. Can you relate at all to this struggle? The root problem of this sinful perspective is a failure to understand the good news that our creaturely limits reflect our Creator’s good and wise design. Our limitations as finite image bearers perpetually remind us that we are not God and that, my friend, is gloriously good news! No book helped me to explore this train of thought more fruitfully in 2022 than You’re Only Human.
“Many of us fail to understand that our limitations are a gift from God, and therefore good. This produces in us the burden of trying to be something we are not and cannot be. Creaturely finitude is less an idea we discover than a reality we run into.” (3)
Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.” Kapic’s book will help you to slow down, ponder your own God-given limits, face your finitude, and, by God’s Spirit, cultivate a heart of worship.
In the summer of 2016, an evangelical donnybrook erupted online over the doctrine of the Trinity, particularly relating to what is called “eternal functional subordination” (EFS) or “eternal relational authority-submission” (ERAS) or “eternal subordination of the Son” (ESS). Before, during, and after this discussion began, Dr. Butner proved to be a gift from the Lord in helping his readers grow in understanding and delighting in our Triune God. His newest work is a wonderful introductory grammar of the Christian doctrine of God. He covers dogmatic topics like consubstantiality, processions and personal properties, divine simplicity, divine persons and relations, perichoresis, inseparable operations, and communion, grounding these truths in God’s Word and drawing upon the breadth of the Christian tradition.
“My hope is that the readers will find what follows to be a robust, biblical, and precise dogmatic account of the one God who is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I remain convinced that this hope may be fulfilled only through the Father’s gracious gift, through the Son, of the illuminating Holy Spirit, so I pray that that gift may be found in author and reader alike.” (12)
Also the glossary in the back of the book is 🔥. Chances are you’ll need it.
This is one of greatest books I’ve ever read on the greatest letter ever written. Naselli serves as a wise exegetical escort, briskly but insightfully, tracing Paul’s argument and guiding the reader verse by verse through the Apostle’s glorious letter to the Romans. D.A. Carson often says, “The aim of thoughtful Christians, after all, is not so much to become masters of Scripture, but to be mastered by it, both for God’s glory and His people’s good.” (12)
Christians believe that we know God by two means, by “reading” God off the pages of “two books,” the book of nature and the book of Scripture:
“First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity (Romans 1:20). All these things are enough to convict humans and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes Himself known to us more clearly by His holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for God’s glory and for our salvation.” (Belgic Confession, Article 2, 1561)
Haines has written a superb exegetical, theological, and historical primer on the natural knowledge of God, on what we can know about God from the “book of nature.”
“The God who is the majestic Creator is also our loving Father who forgives our sins, overlooks our faults, and loves us through His Church. God reveals Himself to us in His world (in each of its elements: the natural world, human history, and even the individual human being), in His Word, and in His Church (in each of its elements: His people, the preaching of the Word, and the sacraments).
Through His world He reveals Himself as great and majestic, distinct, beyond our imagination and even our words, ineffable, immutable, eternal, omnipotent, eternal, Good, True, and Beautiful; but also as worthy of worship and as the judge of those who turn from Him to idolatry and evil. We are all prone to turn from God. To those who will listen, this world calls us back. We are all prone to what Stephen Charnock called ‘practical atheism.’ Natural theology, or even a nice brisk walk in the woods, is a great remedy for this spiritual sickness.
Through His Word and His Church, God reveals Himself as all of this, but especially as the loving, compassionate, merciful, longsuffering, patient, gracious Redeemer, Savior, and Lord. Divine truth, preached in Word and in sacrament, reminds us that we are ‘miserable offenders’ in need of daily repentance.” (v)
Theology is concerned with God and all things in relation to God. This delicious little volume by Dr. Swain provides a theological introduction to the Bible and its interpretation.
“Just as the Spirit laid the foundation for the church in the writings of prophets and apostles, so He builds upon that foundation through, among other things, the reading of the saints.
The same Spirit who publishes God’s Word through inspiration and writing creates an understanding of God’s Word through illumination and interpretation (1 Cor. 2:14–16). The reading of Holy Scripture is a creaturely activity that corresponds to, and is also sustained and governed by, the Spirit’s work of regeneration and renewal.
The Christian life begins with regeneration (John 3:3, 5; Eph. 2:5; James 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:3, 23–25). When the Spirit brings the gospel effectually to bear upon the sinner’s heart, He breaks our relation to the Old Man and creates a relation to the New Man (Rom. 6:1–7; Gal. 5:24).
In so doing, He also implants a new principle of life (1 John 3:9). This new principle of life enables a new vision. Apart from this new vision, the gospel of Jesus Christ—and therefore the ultimate meaning of Scripture—remains hidden from us (2 Cor. 3:14–18).
However, being born again, we are enabled to “see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). This new principle of life not only enables new vision, it also issues forth in new desires, new thirsts, and new hungers.
Chief among these is a longing for the word of truth (see 1 Pet. 1:22–2:3). God’s word is “sweeter than honey” to the regenerate taste (Ps. 19:10; 119:103).
The awakening of spiritual organs of perception and taste is essential to a profitable reading of Scripture.” (96-97)
“The duty of reading, memorizing, and familiarizing oneself with the Bible is incumbent upon everyone who would gain proficiency as an interpreter. In On Christian Doctrine, perhaps the most influential text on biblical interpretation ever written, Augustine provides an instructive discussion of some of the ways in which we may attain a greater proficiency as readers of the scriptures.
According to Augustine, the “first rule” for becoming a skilled reader of the Bible is “to know these books” and “to read them so as to commit them to memory.” Though scriptural memorization ultimately serves a number of sanctifying ends (cf. Ps. 119:11), it also serves the process of reading.
Scripture is characterized by a rich intertextuality. On almost every page, the Bible either quotes or alludes to other biblical passages. Closely related to this phenomenon, the Bible projects an internally coherent symbolic world. Accordingly, symbols in one text shape the way we interpret symbols in another text. Given this fact, much of the biblical message will be lost on us if we are not intimately familiar with the symbolic and allusive features of its textual reality. Memorization is one of the best ways of establishing such intimate knowledge.” (123–124)
In 2023, take up and read and memorize God’s Word.
Honorable Mentions:
I am blessed to have several wonderful friends who also happen to be gifted writers. The following friends published these outstanding books this year. Be sure to check them out.
Imagine retaining the beauty and vigor of youth, traveling the globe, living hundreds of years in this world, and meeting countless people, yet never being remembered by anyone. Adeline LaRue, a French woman from the early eighteenth-century, lives a cursed life, an unacknowledged life, an invisible life. No one even remembers her name. She is eternally anonymous because she once made a grave mistake, a Faustian bargain to the gods that answer after dark.
“There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable. Addie thinks of her father and his carvings, the way he peeled away the bark, whittled down the wood beneath to find the shapes that lived inside. Michelangelo called it the angel in the marble—though she’d not known that as a child. Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands. Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without. And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad. What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.” (35)
There are many things I don’t like about this book but I am quite grateful for Addie’s heart-rending reminder that some of the most loving words you can ever say or hear are three words large enough to tip one’s whole world: “I see you. I know you. I remember you.” What a comfort it is to know that in Christ even if we are among the number who live faithfully a hidden life, an invisible life, and rest in unvisited tombs, one day we will know fully even as we are fully known. (1 Cor. 13:12)
I happened to finish Crouch’s latest just as I began reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. They will be for me forever joined at the hip. I read Addie’s story of being alone, unknown, and unremembered in this world through the illuminating lens of Crouch’s poignant, searching, and hopeful book. Relationship– true abiding relationship– may be reclaimed even in an impersonal technological world. Crouch inspires his readers to not retreat in fear, but to walk forward by faith in a courageous pursuit of what could be.
“If there is one word that sums up the crisis of personhood in our time, for the powerful and powerless alike, it is loneliness.” (11)
“We have never been so connected—and never so lonely. And indeed, those of us who eagerly joined Facebook and other platforms during the social media explosion of the 2000s could hardly have imagined that we were actually going to feel more alienated, not less, all these years later. Is it coincidence, or just a kind of grand irony, that loneliness has spiked just as our media became ‘social,’ our technology became ‘personal,’ and our machines learned to recognized our faces? In fact, this is no coincidence.
Our relational bankruptcy has been unfolding through the five-hundred-year story of technology, from its earliest stirrings in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first. There is a consistent shadow side of the bright promises and genuine achievements of the technological world: It has been based all along on a false understanding of what human beings really are and what we most need.
We thought we were looking for impersonal power, the kind that doesn’t need persons to be effective. And now we have it, with everything we want delivered straight to our doorstep by processes and systems we scarcely understand employing persons we never see—or who may actually not exist.
If you picked up this book, chances are you feel it too: that this dream that began so pleasantly is, like so many dreams, beginning to spin out of control. There must be a different and better life to seek, a different and better way to be persons, a different and better way to deploy all the knowledge, wealth, and power that we have spent on our shallow, mirrored selves.
And in fact, alongside the gradual and sudden development of our personalized impersonal world, another story has been playing itself out, a story not of bankruptcy but of redemption, in which, rather than persons dwindling into anonymity, the anonymous and neglected have found recognition and been recalled to life.
This book is about how we can rejoin that story—about how, in an impersonal world, it is still possible to become persons again.” (12-13)
“We flatter ourselves that we live in a ‘developed world’—but it is an adapted world, a lopsided world. And it is a lonely world because the one thing that you cannot enhance, supercharge, or outsource in human life is the one thing we most need: the patient process of search and recognition, absence and return, rupture and repair that adds up to being known.
Over time, the active verbs of the Shema—recite, walk, talk, lie down, rise, bind, fix, write, all in the service of love—become too much for us to imagine, let alone perform. Our search for superpowers has created many of the most pressing problems of our time.
The defining mental activity of our time is scrolling. Our capacities of attention, memory, and concentration are diminishing; to compensate, we toggle back and forth between infinite feeds of news, posts, images, episodes—taking shallow hits of trivia, humor, and outrage to make up for the depths of learning, joy, and genuine lament that now feel beyond our reach.
The defining illness of our time is metabolic syndrome, the chronic combination of high weight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar that is the hallmark of an inactive life. Our strength is atrophying and our waistline expanding, and to compensate, we turn to the superpowers of the supermarket, with the aisles of salt and fat convincing our bodies’ reward systems, one bite at a time, that we have never been better in our life.
The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be. Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone. And, of course, the soul is the plane of human existence that our technological age neglects most of all.
Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one’s soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls—we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves.
We have lost our souls without even gaining the world. So it is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation. For if human flourishing requires us to love with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens when nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?” (57-59)
“How many generations can be shaped by one household who gather together around a table, recognize one another, and send one another out into the world?” (213)
No one writes better true stories about grifters, killers, rebels, gangsters, and crooks than Patrick Madden Keefe. His mesmerizing history of the Sackler family and the opioid crisis was one of my favorite reads from 2021. Rogues is collection of Keefe’s long-form profiles written for The New Yorker and it’s just as unputdownable as Empire of Pain. The sordid lineup includes a wine fraudster, a Dutch gangster, a Swiss bank heister, a real estate swindler, and an arms broker.
My favorite piece, “The Hunt for El Chapo,” details the rise and fall of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the man who ran Mexico’s multi-billion dollar Sinaloa cartel, the biggest drug-trafficking organization in world history. The profile was so well-researched and written, do you know who contacted Keefe after its publication? The attorney representing the imprisoned El Chapo. The lawyer asked on behalf of “El Señor” if Keefe might consider ghost-writing his boss’s memoirs. “This was, to put it mildly, alarming.” (xi) Keefe declined. And he made sure to place that phone call to the attorney from his office phone, not from his home.
Robert Caro is a national treasure. He’s an 87-year-old investigative reporter who types his tomes on an ancient Smith-Corona. I loved his 1,300-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses. And I’ve found his award-winning series on Lyndon Baines Johnson, totalling 3,000 pages so far, to be utterly astonishing. I devoured volumes 1 and 2, I’m almost done with volume 3, and I’m eager to dive into volume 4 as I await volume 5. In Means of Ascent, Caro tells the unbelievable tale of how LBJ used his freshly-acquired political power in Texas to build highways and dams, to get electricity to the Hill country, to get rich, and to steal an election to the United States Senate. The election in question is the 1948 Johnson-Stevenson race. If you only read one part of Means of Ascent, read Chapter 13, “The Stealing.” It’s worth the price of the book and it’s absolutely gobsmacking. In many ways, the chapter reveals how present-day politics was born.
“The 1948 campaign was not only the new politics against the old, it was political morality made vivid, as political techniques were made vivid, by the sharpness in the contrast between the two principals. The pattern of pragmatism, cynicism and ruthlessness that pervaded Lyndon Johnson’s entire early political career was marked by a lack of any discernible limits. Pragmatism shaded into the morality of the ballot box, a morality in which any maneuver is justified by the end of victory—into a morality that is amorality. In the 1948 campaign, this pattern came clearer than ever before, in part because of the lengths to which Lyndon Johnson went in order to win—and in part because of the contrast between his extreme pragmatism and Coke Stevenson’s extreme idealism, which makes Johnson’s methods stand out in the clearest possible relief.
The Johnson-Stevenson campaign was merely an election in a single state for a single Senate seat—one of hundreds of senatorial elections that have been held in the United States. But if, upon close study, elections seem to blur together and to have only meager larger significance, this election is an exception to that tendency, because of the sharpness in contrast between the philosophy, principles, strategy and tactics of the two candidates. The clash of such mighty—and violently contrasting—opposites illuminates not only Lyndon Johnson’s path to power but some of the most fundamental ethical, moral and philosophical issues of American politics and government in the twentieth century.
That campaign raises, in fact, one of the greatest issues invoked by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson: the relationship between means and ends. Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson’s life—civil rights in particular, perhaps, but others, too—were noble: heroic advances in the cause of social justice. Although those ends are not a part of this volume, those ends are a part of that life: many liberal dreams might not be reality even today were it not for Lyndon Johnson. Those noble ends, however, would not have been possible were it not for the means, far from noble, which brought Lyndon Johnson to power. Their attainment would not have been possible without that 1948 campaign.
And what are the implications of that fact? To what extent are ends inseparable from means? Of all the questions raised by the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, no question is more important than that.” (xii)
Cormac McCarthy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He’s certainly an acquired taste. I’ve read every one of his books because he affords one the opportunity of pondering a world with a Creator, a fall, but no redemption. Living in that fictional world helps me to better appreciate the real world. The Passenger isn’t his best novel, but it’s certainly his most mature and thought-provoking. Unforgettable characters. Vintage, punctuation-less dialogue. Esoteric, doom-laden rants about God, nuclear fusion, quantum mechanics, the meaning or lack of meaning of life, the certainty of death, the mysterious nature of time, along with a plot featuring deep sea diving and salvage.
“He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Don’t close your eyes.” (71)
“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.” (140)
“You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you don’t. Not in your heart you don’t. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.” (128)
“Certainly there are mornings when I awake and see a grayness to the world I think was not in evidence before. The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.” (142-143)
“You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin’ to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you don’t believe that then you will not have a life. You may call it one. But it won’t be one.” (174)
“Beauty makes promises that beauty can’t keep.” (180)
“I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.” (376)
“So how bad is the world? How bad. The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the Earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?” (377)
“Mercy is in the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.” (381)
The narrative is split into interwoven chapters fluctuating between sanity and madness. Coupled with its companion volume, Stella Maris, McCarthy’s vision of the world is profoundly sad. But as a native of East Tennessee (as is McCarthy), reared on Rocky Top, and a lifelong fan of the Tennessee Volunteers, this line did make me smile:
“Does Knoxville produce crazy people or does it just attract them? Interesting question. Nature nurture. Actually the more deranged of them seem to hail from the neighboring hinterlands. Good question though. Let me get back to you on that.” (32)
Rembrandt van Rijn, the great 17th-century Dutch artist, is an enigma. He left behind a slew of masterful paintings and self-portraits, but when he died in poverty his personal effects were sold off and dispersed, leaving historians only fragmentary records with which to build a biography. In Rembrandt’s Eyes Simon Schama does the impossible. He recreated Rembrandt’s personal history by scouring surviving biographical fragments of archival information, and crafted a stunningly written narrative of Rembrandt’s life as well as a lucid commentary on all of his paintings. This book is a world of wonders. I read it slowly over the course of three years. And the last page made me weep. I wholeheartedly commend it to you.
“No painter would ever understand the theatricality of social life as well as Rembrandt. He saw the actors in men and the men in the actors. Western art’s first images of stage life– the dressing room and the wardrobe– came from his hand. But Rembrandt’s drama did not stop at the stage door. He also painted historical figures and his own contemporaries in their chosen personae, rehearsing their allotted manners as if before an audience. And he cast himself in telling bit parts– the executioners of St. Stephen and Christ; a scared sailor on the churning Sea of Galilee and just occasionally in a significant lead: the Prodigal Son, whoring in a tavern. For Rembrandt as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing; the wardrobe and the face paint; the full repertoire of gesture and grimace; the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes; the belly laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle, and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon; to shake a fist or uncover a breast; how to sin and how to atone; how to commit murder and how to commit suicide. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.” (8)
“From the beginning, Rembrandt was powerfully drawn to ruin; the poetry of imperfection. He enjoyed tracing the marks left by the bite of worldly experience: the pits and pocks, the red-rimmed eyes and scabby skin which gave the human countenance a mottled rich-ness. The piebald, the scrofulous, the stained, and the encrusted were matters for close and loving inspection; irregularities to run through his fingering gaze.
Other than the Holy Scripture, he cared for no book as well as the book of decay, its truths written in the furrows scored on the brows of old men and women; in the sagging timbers of decrepit barns; in the lichenous masonry of derelict buildings; in the mangy fur of a valetudinarian lion. And he was a compulsive peeler, itching to open the casing of things and people, to winkle out the content packed within. He liked to toy with the poignant discrepancies between outsides and insides, the brittle husk and the vulnerable core.
In the corner of his room, Rembrandt’s eye ran over the fishtail triangle of decomposing wall, coming apart in discrete layers, each with its own pleasingly distinct texture: the risen, curling skin of the limewash; the broken crust of the chalky plaster, and the dusty brick beneath; the minute crevices gathering dark ridges of grunge. All these materials, in their different states of deterioration, he translated faithfully into paint, and did so with such intense scrutiny and devotion that the patch of crumbling fabric begins to take on a necrotic quality like damaged flesh. Above the door another veinous crack is making swift progress through the plaster.
To give his gash in the wall physical immediacy and visual credibility, Rembrandt would have used the most precisely pointed of his brushes: a soft-bristled instrument made from the pelt of some silky little rodent, the kind the miniaturists favored, a brush capable of making the finest pencil line or, turned and lightly flattened against the surface of the panel, a more swelling stroke.
Slick with pigment red lake, ocher, and lead white for the brick; lead white with faint touches of black for the grimy plaster-the squirrel-hair brush deposited perfect traces of paint over a scant few millimeters of space on the panel, one set of earthy materials (the painter’s) translating itself into another (the builder’s). It seems like alchemy. But the transmutation happens not in the philosopher’s alembic but in our beguiled eye.
Was the description of the patch of crumbled wall achieved in a matter of minutes or a matter of hours? Was it the result of painstakingly calculated design or imaginative impulse? Rembrandt’s critics, especially once he was dead, disagreed on whether the problem with him had been that he worked too impetuously or too laboriously. Either way, he is generally, and not incorrectly, remembered as the greatest master of the broad brush there ever was.” (13-14)
This exquisite book explains and illustrates how brilliant writers of the past chose to answer questions of literary style: the selection of words, the arrangement of a sentence, the creation of a cadence. Farnsworth shows how their choices made their writings come alive. In other words, becoming a better writer requires breaking bread with the dead:
“Abraham Lincoln wrote more beautifully and memorably than anyone in public life does now. So did Winston Churchill; so did Edmund Burke; so did many others, none of whom sound quite alike but all of whom achieved an eloquence that seems foreign to our times. What did they know that we don’t? It might seem strange to seek instruction from writers who lived so long ago. It certainly would sound odd to imitate their styles directly. But writers of lasting stature still make the best teachers. They understood principles of style that are powerful and enduring, even if the principles have to be adapted to our era, or to any other, before they become useful. That is the premise of this book, at any rate. It is a set of lessons on style drawn from writers whose words have stood the test of time.” (vii)
“Most books on style offer advice: write this way, not that way. This book does not offer advice of that kind, let alone formulas; it certainly doesn’t say that if you do this or that, you will sound like Lincoln or anyone else. Rhetorical magic is not so easily bottled. But the book does offer some more ideas (to go with the ones from earlier entries in this series) about the elements of style that have made the writings of Lincoln – and Churchill, and Holmes, and others – so compelling. The approach of this book resembles the indirect tradition from which Lincoln himself learned. He spent long hours reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible – writings from 200 years before he was born. He didn’t try to copy them or write as though he were living in the 17th century. He wrote, as everyone must, in a manner acceptable to his own times. Yet his reading still affected him in ways that we hear in his words. Now we can read Lincoln (and Churchill, and others) in something like the way that Lincoln read Shakespeare and the Bible: not to mimic but to listen, learn, and adapt.” (ix)
“I came into this book with two big ideas for the plot. The first was that of a heist story, like Sneakers or Ocean’s Eleven involving a gang of gentlemen thieves who each had a distinctive magic power. I wanted to tell the story of how their different magics and abilities worked together for them to pull an incredible caper.
The second idea was to write a story about a world where the good guys lost. I wanted to take the standard fantasy story I’d read a dozen times, that of a young peasant hero who went on a quest to defeat a Dark Lord, and turn it on its head. What if the Dark Lord won? What if, in the final climactic moments, he killed the hero and took over the world?
Hence, Mistborn. A thousand years ago, the prophesied hero from lore rose up to overthrow a great and terrible evil. Only, he lost, and the Dark Lord took over and has been ruling with an iron fist for a thousand years. Ash falls from the sky in this barren land, and mists come every night, deep and mysterious. In this setting, a gang of thieves decides that the prophecies were all lies and that they can’t trust in some fabled hero to save them. They decide to take matters into their own hands, and plan a daring heist of the dark lord himself, planning to use the emperor’s own wealth to bribe his armies away from him and take over the empire.
The book has a little of everything for everyone. Romance, lots of action, a wiz-bang cool magic system, dark lords running amok, great visuals, and character tension. And that’s just Book One.”
After visiting Pearl Harbor in 2021, I wanted to learn more about the war in the Pacific. A dear friend recommended Ian Toll’s magisterial trilogy: Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944, and Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945. The narrative begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor and concludes 2,240 pages later with the Japanese surrender following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It took the author three times longer to produce this three-volume history of the Pacific War than it took the combatant nations to fight it. It’s filled with tons of details but it’s also wonderfully written.
“The Pacific War was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and most logistically complex amphibious war in history. To roll back the tide of Japanese conquests, the Allies would be required to seize one island after another, advancing across thousands of miles of ocean in two huge parallel offensives on either side of the equator. The army, navy, and marines were compelled to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation.” (The Conquering Tide, 8)
Toll’s description of the deadly aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack reminded me of the conclusion of Herman Wouk’s novel, The Winds of War:
“The darkness was merciful to Pearl Harbor. The smashed battleships were invisible. Overhead a clear starry black sky arched, with Orion setting in the west, and Venus sparkling in the east, high above a narrow streak of red. Only the faintest smell of smoke on the sea breeze hinted at the gigantic scene of disaster below. But the dawn brightened, light stole over the harbor, and soon the destruction and the shame were unveiled once more. At first the battleships were merely vague shapes; but even before all the stars were gone, one could see the Pacific Battle Force, a crazy dim double line of sunken hulks along Ford Island—and first in the line, the U.S.S. California. Victor Henry turned his face from the hideous sight to the indigo arch of the sky, where Venus and the brightest stars still burned: Sirius, Capella, Procyon, the old navigation aids. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. In a world so rich and lovely, could God’s children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world. He had given all his working years to it. Now he was about to risk his very life at it. Why? Because the others did it, he thought. Because Abel’s next-door neighbor was Cain.” (884)
At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first man-made nuclear explosion occurred in the skies over New Mexico. The test, code-named ‘Trinity,’ successfully detonated an implosion-design plutonium device. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team worked nonstop clandestinely for 27 months at the Los Alamos Lab to build a bomb big enough to end WWII. The blast produced on that day is equivalent to the explosion of 18,600 tons of T.N.T. This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the making of the atomic bomb is superb. Rhodes tells the fascinating and frightening story of how the vast energy locked inside the atom was unleashed into the world. A nuclear bomb is a total-death machine, compact and efficient, a weapon of mass slaughter. Here are some of the descriptions of what was witnessed at the Trinity test:
“Men saw what theoretical physics cannot notice and what cameras cannot record: pity and terror and menace. We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. Those ten seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced. Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds. Finally it was over, diminishing, and we looked toward the place where the bomb had been; there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one. A new thing had just been born; a new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature. The burst was like opening the heavy curtains of a darkened room to a flood of sunlight. Had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine.” (979-980)
Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank, said:
“There was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactive glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever. Of course it didn’t. It must have been just a very short time until it went up. It was very terrifying. And the thunder from the blast. It bounced on the rocks, and then it went—I don’t know where else it bounced. But it never seemed to stop. Not like an ordinary echo with thunder. It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Muerto. It was a very scary time when it went off. And I wish I would remember what my brother said, but I can’t—but I think we just said, ‘It worked.’ I think that’s what we said, both of us. ‘It worked.’ No one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display.” (983-984)
The reaction of Oppenheimer remains chilling, even seventy-seven years later:
“We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multiarmed form and says:
‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” (985)
I began rereading this WWI masterpiece after learning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The radical simplicity of Remarque’s prose describing life and death in the trenches of the Great War remains raw and visceral and utterly heartbreaking:
“The evening benediction begins. Night comes, out of the craters rise the mists. It looks as though the holes were full of ghostly secrets. The white vapour creeps painfully round before it ventures to steal away over the edge. Then long streaks stretch from crater to crater.
It is chilly. I am on sentry and stare into the darkness. My strength is exhausted as always after an attack, and so it is hard for me to be alone with my thoughts. They are not properly thoughts; they are memories which in my weakness haunt me and strangely move me.
The parachute-lights soar upwards—and I see a picture, a summer evening, I am in the cathedral cloister and look at the tall rose trees that bloom in the middle of the little cloister garden where the monks lie buried. Around the walls are the stone carvings of the Stations of the Cross. No one is there. A great quietness rules in this blossoming quadrangle, the sun lies warm on the heavy grey stones, I place my hand upon them and feel the warmth. At the right-hand corner the green cathedral spire ascends into the pale blue sky of the evening. Between the glowing columns of the cloister is the cool darkness that only churches have, and I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.
The image is alarmingly near; it touches me before it dissolves in the light of the next starshell.
I lay hold of my rifle to see that it is in trim. The barrel is wet, I take it in my hands and rub off the moisture with my fingers.
Between the meadows behind our town there stands a line of old poplars by a stream. They were visible from a great distance, and although they grew on one bank only, we called them the poplar avenue. Even as children we had a great love for them, they drew us vaguely thither, we played truant the whole day by them and listened to their rustling. We sat beneath them on the bank of the stream and let our feet hang in the bright, swift waters. The pure fragrance of the water and the melody of the wind in the poplars held our fancies. We loved them dearly, and the image of those days still makes my heart pause in its beating.
It is strange that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, without any word—and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the liberation and allurement in which my body would dilate and gently pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things.
They are quiet in this way, because quietness is so unattainable for us now. At the front there is no quietness and the curse of the front reaches so far that we never pass beyond it. Even in the remote depots and rest-areas the droning and the muffled noise of shelling is always in our ears. We are never so far off that it is no more to be heard. But these last few days it has been unbearable.
Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers’ songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and came from us. But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us.
They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it.
And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.
We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us—for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity. Perhaps it was only the privilege of our youth, but as yet we recognized no limits and saw nowhere an end. We had that thrill of expectation in the blood which united us with the course of our days.
Today we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there?
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.” (65-67)
Two of my favorite friends are Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. The twenty volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin series tell the story of life and war and adventure on the high seas in the Royal Navy during the the Napoleonic Wars. I believe they are the best historical novels ever written. This stories have everything. A lifetime of friendship, marriage, children, fallings-out, reconciliation, international intrigue, the death of a spouse, war, peace, feasting, laughter, and music. And adventure, lots of adventure, ranging from ship groundings, chases, collisions, dismastings, fires, lightning strikes, plagues, near-drownings, and imprisonment. Here’s a scene from Desolation Island, in which Aubrey’s ship, The Leopard, is preparing to fight to the death on a raging sea with the Dutch ship Waakzaamheid:
“The Leopard brought the wind a little abaft the larboard beam in a fine fierce curve– white water sweeping over her waist– and began to run northwards under courses and reefed topsails, her deck sloping like a moderately pitched roof and her lee chains buried in the foam that came racing from her bows. She was heading for dirty weather, for a low bank of cloud with rain-squalls drifting across its face and hidden lightning within the mass; it was precious cold, and spray, whipping across the deck in the eddy of the mainsail, kept wetting the Captain’s face.
But he was warm within: not only had he a comfortable coat of blubber as well as his pilot-jacket, but he also had a glow of satisfaction. He continued his pacing, counting the number of turns on the fingers clasped behind his back. One thousand he would take before he went below. At each turn he glanced up at the sky and out over the sea: a mottled sky, blue and white to the south with a steely gleam on the farthest rim, grey, high-piled storm-breeders in the west, darkness north and east; and of course a mottled sea, though in quite different tones, running from middle blue through every shade of glaucous grey to black, and the whole streaked with a white that owed nothing to the sky but all to the broken water and the spindrift of former storms.
The long, even fairly heavy swell lifted him and set him down at a measured pace, so that sometimes his horizon was no more than three miles away, and sometimes he saw an enormous disk of ocean, a cold, uneasy sea, endless miles of desolation, the comfortless element in which he was at home.” (236-237)
These twenty stories are really one story, a single 6,443-page novel, a tale as addicting as your favorite dessert. O’Brian’s themes– friendship, courage, honor, loyalty, duty, love of country, and gentlemanliness– are oceanic. I don’t read these novels. I ration them. And by the time I finish the series, reading only one a year, my memory won’t be what it is now, and I’ll return and begin the journey with my dear friends all over again.
C.S. Lewis was an Oxford (and Cambridge) scholar, a Christian apologist, a story teller, a myth maker, an essayist, and a poet. But, chiefly, Lewis was a medievalist. He thought of himself as a medieval man living in the 20th Century, a living dinosaur of a lost age. Baxter notes:
“This was the man who read fourteenth-century medieval texts for his spiritual reading, carefully annotating them with pencil; who summed himself up as ‘chiefly a medievalist’; the philologist, who wrote essays on semantics, metaphors, etymologies, and textual reception; the schoolmaster who fussed at students for not looking up treacherous words in their lexicons; the polyglot pedant who did not translate his quotations from medieval French, German, Italian, or ancient Latin and Greek in his scholarly books; the man who wrote letters to children recommending that they study Latin until they reached the point they could read it fluently without a dictionary; the critic who, single-handedly, saved bizarre, lengthy, untranslated ancient books from obscurity. Before he was famous as a Christian and writer of fantasy, he was famous among his students for his academic lectures, which bore such scintillating titles as ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Literature’ and ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Literature.” This was Lewis the antiquarian, who devoted much—indeed, most—of his life to breathing in the thoughts and feelings of distant ages, and reconstructing them in his teaching and writing. We find him recommending to general audiences that they read one old book for every modern one, and advising those seeking spiritual advice to old books. In sum, this was C. S. Lewis the medievalist.” (2-4)
Baxter does a fabulous job showing how the great books of the Middle Ages shaped the great mind of C.S. Lewis. Those great books of the past kindled a holy longing and a bright hope for the future, a future-oriented nostalgia.
“Nostalgia for this world of wild and disorienting joy was probably the chief sentiment of Lewis and his friends the Inklings throughout their lives. They repeatedly confessed to experiencing such nostalgia while reading ancient texts. But what they always insisted on was that the nostalgia they experienced was not just sentimentality for a past age. Lewis echoes Tolkien’s words, in describing a longing ‘almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country.’ But this desire for this distant country should not be conflated with what is merely old; that ‘Other Time’ merely uses the literature of the past as a medium. The past cannot be the object of nostalgia itself. In other words, nostalgia—viewed rightly—metamorphosizes into hope.” (160-161)
Lewis puts it like this:
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things– the beauty, the memory of our own past– are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 31)
Lewis, the medievalist, the living dinosaur, still has much to teach us. “Where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.” (17)
Confession is good for the soul. Here’s my confession: somehow I made it this far in life without ever reading any of le Carré’s Smiley novels. I remedied that epic fail of a mistake this year and I’m excited to tackle the next two stories in the Karla trilogy in 2023. Le Carré is not a great genre writer. He’s a great writer.
“Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.” (27)
“One calls it politeness whereas in fact it is nothing but weakness.” (28)
“Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness.” (35)
“It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?” (84)
“After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting.” (86)
“Reason as motive, or reason as logic, or reason as a way of life?” (91)
“As a good Socialist, I’m going for the money.” (172)
“He has a saying: he’ll only believe what can be written on a postcard.” (145)
“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” (234)
“Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they’re making a fantasy about themselves.” (234)
“That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery?” (239)
“Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.” (342)
“A committee is an animal with four back legs.” (357)
“Survival, as Jim Prideaux liked to recall, is an infinite capacity for suspicion.” (370)
“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.” (394)
“Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end. Until that happened, there was no future; there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present.” (389)
“Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.” (416)
Paul Holes is a living legend in the world of murder. He hunted serial killers and closed cold cases. He’s the dude who unmasked the Golden State Killer and he has written a absorbing memoir revealing the realistic and painstaking process of solving unsolvable cold cases and the emotional cost on the families of the victims and the detectives. If you enjoy true crime, check out this book.
In this lovely readers edition, you’ll find several glorious patterns of sound words. For nearly 2,000 years, believers have been taught, edified, and comforted by the teachings of Scripture contained in these historic creeds, confessions of faith, and catechisms. These treasures have been passed down to us. Will we read them, learn from them, hold fast to them, and pass them on to the next generation? One of my favorite passages is from the 2LCF, article 12, on the believer’s adoption in Christ:
All those that are justified, God conferred, in and for the sake of his only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption,1 by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God,2 have his name put on them,3 receive the spirit of adoption,4 have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry Abba, Father,5 are pitied,6 protected,7 provided for,8 and chastened by him as by a Father,9 yet never cast off,10 but sealed to the day of redemption,11 and inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation.12
You always know what you’re gonna get from GKC in his Father Brown mysteries: lyrical prose, clever plotting, wholesome wisdom, hearty common sense, sanctified reason, insights from Thomas Aquinas, persistent paradoxes, subtle humor, classical apologetics, and yes, frequent jabs at Calvinists. No one is perfect. But Chesterton never wrote a boring sentence. His gift of gab is wondrous:
“The street they threaded was so narrow and shut in by shadows that when they came out unexpectedly into the void common and vast sky they were startled to find the evening still so light and clear. A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark violet distances. The glowing green tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crystal one or two stars. All that was left of the daylight lay in a golden glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that popular hollow which is called the Vale of Health. The holiday makers who roam this region had not wholly dispersed; a few couples sat shapelessly on benches; and here and there a distant girl still shrieked in one of the swings. The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man.” (12-13)
“The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses.” (53)
“There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible. He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire. But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has unmistakably called up to him.” (61)
“They were cresting a corner of London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats they sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by the level sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the crescent known as Himylaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a window; for they found that pile of flats sitting above London as above a green sea of slate. Opposite to the mansions, on the other side of the gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure more like a steep hedge or dyke than a garden, and some way below that ran a strip of artificial water, a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered fortress. As the car swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve, Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London.” (70-71)
“A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.” (78)
“The path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under that stress of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.” (84)
“Pretty and unique as it was, the place had about it a curious luminous sadness. Hours passed in it like days. The long, well-windowed rooms were full of daylight, but it seemed a dead daylight. And through all other incidental noises, the sound of talk, the clink of glasses, or the passing feet of servants, they could hear on all sides of the house the melancholy noise of the river.” (109)
“The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.” (149)
Bo Jackson was excitement incarnate. He is the type of mythological multi-sport superstar athlete you expect to find only in the pages of fiction. Even Nintendo video game programmers recognized this. Bo performed his impossible-to-conceive feats without the benefit or curse of a thousand camera angles and a 24-hour news cycle. His exploits on the diamond and the field forced you to ask, “Did I just see that? Did that actually happen?” In this splendid definitive biography (the author interviewed 700 people!), Jeff Pearlman beautifully describes the living mythology of Bo Jackson: “The mythology is a paradox—by not quite believing what you witnessed, you remember what you witnessed. It’s permanence via dumbfoundedness.” (5) If you aren’t a child of the 1980s and you don’t know Bo, watch this 30 for 30 trailer to get the vibe of this book:
Here is one of my favorite Bo stories from his baseball career from the pen of one of our greatest baseball writers:
July 17, 1990: Bo Jackson was complaining in the dugout to a bunch of reporters before a game against the Yankees. It was one year after the debut of the famous “Bo Knows” Nike ad campaign, that celebrated Bo Jackson as the first modern athlete to play both professional baseball and football in the same year. But Bo was never impressed with himself. “Everything I do, people tend to exaggerate it,” he moaned. “With me, they want to make things bigger than they are. I’m just another player, you know?”
Then the game began, Royals vs. Yankees at Yankee Stadium.
First time up, Bo hit a 412-foot homer to center field.
Second time up, Bo smashed a 464-foot opposite-field home run. The ball landed more than halfway up the bleacher section, a place that longtime Yankees fans said only home runs by Ruth, Gehrig and Mantle from the left side ever reached. “Colossal,” teammate George Brett would say. “I had to stop and watch.”
Third time up, Yankees manager Stump Merrill walked out to the mound to ask pitcher Andy Hawkins how he intended to get Bo out this time. “I’ll pitch it outside,” Hawkins said. “It better be way outside,” Merrill replied. Hawkins threw it way outside. Jackson poked the ball over the right-field fence for his third homer. The New York crowd went bananas.
Bo never got a fourth time up that day. Instead, Bo separated his shoulder while diving and almost making one of the great catches in baseball history. New Yorkers stood and cheered Bo as he walked off the field. It’s possible that no opposing player ever heard those sorts of cheers at Yankee Stadium.
A month later, Bo returned from the injured list and faced the Mariners at home in Kansas City. His first at bat came in the second inning. The pitcher was Randy Johnson. First pitch, Bo crushed a long fly ball to center field. The ball splashed in the waterfall to the left of the scoreboard. The Royals estimated the homer flew 450 feet.
“You know what?” Royals Hall of Famer Frank White would say almost 20 years later. “I really did play baseball with Superman.”
I’m obsessed with all things ecclesiological. So, I was thoroughly enamored with this engrossing historical study of church life in England in the Middle Ages. Orme details the origins of the parish system, drops factoids about medieval church buildings, church staffs, congregational life, the structure of the Lord’s Day, the weekly liturgy, the annual liturgical seasons, and concludes with a chapter on the Protestant Reformation.
“From at least about AD 597, when St. Augustine started his mission to the English at Canterbury, Christianity reached the people of England through churches. The earliest were those known as minsters, staffed by groups of dlergy. These were joined and to a large extent superseded from the tenth century by much greater numbers of local parish churches, run by single clergy. By about the year 1200 England possessed some 9,500 churches of both kinds, forming a network that covered the whole of the country. Until the Toleration Act of 1689 they were places which every adult was expected to attend for baptism, marriage, and burial, to visit for worship on Sundays and festivals, and to support by helping to maintain the buildings and their furnishings. Many thousands of medieval parish churches still survive in their original or altered forms, as do most of their territories or parishes, albeit often with modified boundaries. The following book sets out to tell their story and that of their clergy and congregations from Augustine’s arrival to the final establishment of a Reformed Church of England under Elizabeth I in 1559.” (1)
The subtitle says it all: “Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy.” That might not be your bag, but answer me this: what book has a chapter on the end of the world as well as a section featuring a stern parental warning on the dangers of adolescent coffee consumption?
“I have tried among many other methods to make coffee in a high-pressure pot; but the result was a drink bursting with oils and bitterness, good at its best for scraping out the gullet of a Cossack. Coffee is a much more powerful stimulant than is believed. It is a sacred duty for all the fathers and mothers of the world to forbid coffee to their children with great severity, if they do not wish to produce dried-up little monsters, stunted and old before they are twenty.” (115-116)
I reread The Lord of the Rings every year. I’m never not reading it. I just finish and start over at the beginning. I hardly ever read books aboutLOTR because I’d rather just read LOTR. But this outstanding book by David Rowe is a worthy exception. Rowe gathers up all the proverbial sayings of Middle-earth and meditates on them. It’s genius. It’s delightful. It’s wise. I cannot put it better than the great Peter Kreeft, who wrote the foreword:
“A foreword to a book has two purposes: to tell the prospective reader what the book is about, and to persuade him or her to read it. But let me tell you a secret. Most authors who write forewords to other writers’ books don’t usually read the whole book, only enough of it to know what it’s about and why it’s good enough for them to put their name to. I’ve now been asked to write a foreword or introduction to about 50 books, but have done it for only 5 or 6, because I will do it only out of love, not duty—duty is a desperate fallback when love fails. (This is why the Judaeo-Christian ethic of love is better and stronger than the Kantian ethic of duty, by the way.) If I don’t love the book enough to read the whole thing through for myself, for pleasure, then I won’t try to persuade other people to read it either. The Proverbs of Middle-earth is worth reading, for fun as well as for (mental) profit. Those two are the twin purposes of books: literary critics used to say that a book should ‘please and instruct,’ while an old Arabic proverb says the same thing: ‘Before you shoot the arrow of truth, dip it in honey.’ This book is both a quiver-full of well-pointed arrows, and a large jar of honey. It is a romp, as well as a thorough and deeply penetrating exploration of its subject. Its subject is not only the proverbs of the numerous species and civilizations in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (as its title advertises), but also of the cultures these proverbs express. The short and simple proverbs are the humble little gates into the big, wide, and complex cities of these various cultures. So this book is really an act of anthropology. And while we may think of Tolkien’s inventions as fantastical, this is not fantasy but realism. The cultures Tolkien invented are real—even the non-human species are real. In reading about elves and ents, Gondor and Gimli, we are reading about ourselves. If you want pleasure and profit, arrows of truth dipped in honey, read on and ‘Know thyself!’”
Proverbs are the ships in which wisdom sails. The proverbs of Middle-earth are some of the loveliest leaves on Tolkien’s tree: beautiful and intricate. If you love Tolkien, heed my counsel: “Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.” (LOTR, 365)
I’ve lived for 2,285 weeks. If I make to 80 years old, the average human lifespan, I only have 1,715 weeks left to live. James reminds us: “Come now, you who say, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” (James 4:14) Burkeman is not a Christian and he is not writing for Christians. He doesn’t believe in an afterlife. “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.” (45) But the strength of the book is found in the humbling and helpful reminder that life is short, death is fast approaching, and the “outrageous brevity” of life ought to cause us to focus less on getting everything done on our to-do lists (a mirage!), and more on reveling in the astonishing gift of life in this world of wonders.
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s rare the productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. At the very least, you might have assumed there’d be a handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the shortness of life, instead of pretending that we can just ignore the subject. But you’d be wrong. So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.” (5)
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the ‘six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.’ The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control— when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.” (13-14)
“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:10-12)
If you want a glorious alternative to Four Thousand Weeks, then look no further than this excellent book by Jordan Raynor. He offers, as a follower of Jesus, seven biblical principles for being purposeful present and wildly productive:
Start with the Word
Let Your Yes Be Yes
Dissent from the Kingdom of Noise
Prioritize Your Yeses
Accept Your ‘Unipresence’
Embrace Productive Rest
Eliminate All Hurry
“The solution to our perennial struggle with time management is found in Jesus Christ. How? In two ways. First Jesus offers you peace before you do anything. Nearly every time-management expert says that the path to peace and productivity is found in implementing his or her system. This is what we might call ‘works-based productivity,’ which claims that if you do exercises X, Y, and Z, then you will find peace. This book begins with the opposite premise, in what we might call ‘grace-based productivity,’ which says that through Jesus Christ, we already have peace (Romans 5:1), and we do time-management exercises X, Y, and Z as a response of worship. As Christians, our ultimate source of peace– our ultimate solution to being swamped– is found in the God-man sleeping through the storm. As the apostle Paul said in Ephesians 2:14, ‘[Jesus] Himself is our peace.’
Here’s the second way that Jesus is the solution to our time-management problems: He shows us how God would manage His time. This book accounts for how the Author of time managed His time.” (xviii-xx)
This book is thoroughly Biblical, super practical, and extremely helpful. Pick up a copy, read it carefully and prayerfully, and redeem the time the Lord lends you in 2023.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.” (159)
Now may the God of peace grant you perfect peace, and living hope, and glorious grace, and steadfast love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
I hunt for fabulous books, reads that leave me reeling. Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for before I read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less. By God’s grace, I found 36 fabulous books this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed every last one of them.
All of creation is the theater of God’s glory because “the earth is the LORD’s and everything in it.” (Psalm 24:1) In this wonderful new book, Wilson helps his readers delight in the knowledge that “everything in creation tells us something about our Creator.” (201) The world is theomorphic, that is, all things “take the form they do because they are created to reveal God.” (4) Along the way, Wilson shows the scriptural significance of dust, earthquakes, pigs, livestock, stones, galaxies, honey, mountains, rainbows, gardens, donkeys, salt, rain, water, bread, trees, viruses, clothes, light, and more. (Check out these delicious excerpts here, here, here, and here.)
“For now, the created order is filled with signposts. One of my dreams in writing this book has been that you might look around you and see reasons to worship that you hadn’t noticed before. But the day is coming when the signposts will not be needed, because the reality is here. We will know fully, even as we are fully known. And on that day the things of God will stop pointing and start praising. ‘The mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands’ (Isa. 55:12). ‘Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together’ (Ps. 98:8). ‘The stones will cry out’ (Luke 19:40). The things of God will sing to the King of Kings and the God of things, for whom and through whom and to whom they exist. So will we.” (201-202)
Charles Simeon once said: “There are but two lessons for the Christian to learn: the one is, to enjoy God in everything; the other is, to enjoy everything in God.” This book, my favorite book of the year, can help you do both.
When Dr. Morales writes a book about the Bible, I read it. His volume on Leviticus is one of my all-time favorites. This new biblical-theological feast traces the exodus theme in Scripture around three movements: the historical exodus out of Egypt, the prophesied second exodus, and the new exodus of Jesus the Messiah. Exegetical insights abound. The section on the Servant Songs in Isaiah is worth the price of the entire book.
“All the streams of heavenly blessings converge through the one unifying sieve of this servant, the Messiah. He is the Rock through whom every divine promise pours out as a rushing river, transforming the wilderness of this age into the paradise of a new creation.” (145)
Morales helped me see more fully how “the cross on which Jesus shed His blood has become the doorpost of the world (John 19:29; Exodus 12:22).” (164)
How might pastors learn to shepherd well through a global pandemic? One way is by gleaning heavenly wisdom from godly pastors who faced the worst of plagues in the past. Coleman and Rester have translated and edited an enriching volume of treatises, letters, hymns, and prayers, from the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, that help us to think theologically and pastorally about living and shepherding during times of great crisis.
“Plague and disease deeply shaped the ministries of pastors and the congregational life of the early modern churches. A faithful pastor in this context needed a solid theology of God’s providence and the dignity of every human being, especially of the sick and the infirm; a deep love of neighbor; a strong commitment to the duties of pastoral vocation; and a robust Christian prudence to navigate the physical and spiritual needs of his family, congregation, and community. As we can all attest, pandemics tend to reveal the seams and tensions within a society. It was no different in the sixteenth century.” (xxvi)
You will find thoughtful reflections on Philippians 2, Psalm 91, Exodus 9, 1 Samuel 24, 1 Chronicles 21, and Ezekiel 5 and 14, as well as pearls of wisdom like this one from Theodore Beza:
“This especially must be agreed upon, that as our sins are the chief and true cause of the plague, so this is the only proper remedy against the same: that if the ministers would not dispute about infectiousness (which belongs to physicians) but, by their life and doctrine stir up the people to earnest repentance, love, and charity one towards another, then the sheep themselves would hear clearly and heed the voice of their pastors.” (29)
George Swinnock is one of the easiest Puritan authors to read. He’s also one of the most edifying. This little volume is a God-enthralled meditation on Psalm 89:6: “For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD?” Here’s a taste:
“Who could have imagined that God should become man, infinite become finite, the Creator a creature; the Father of spirits become flesh, and the Lord of life be put to death? Who could conceive, that He who made all things of nothing, should be made Himself of a woman, made by Him? That He whom the heavens, and heaven of heavens cannot contain, should be contained in the narrow womb of a woman? That the only bread of life should be hungry, the only water of life be thirsty; the only rest be weary, the only ease be pained, and the only joy and consolation be sorrowful, exceeding sorrowful unto death? Who could have imagined that one, yea, millions, should be rich by another’s poverty, filled by another’s emptiness, be exalted by another’s disgrace, healed by another’s wounds, eased by another’s pains, be absolved by another’s condemnation, and live eternally by another’s temporal death? Who could have imagined that infinite justice and infinite mercy should be made fast friends, and fully satisfied by one and the same action; that the greatest fury and the greatest favour, the greatest hatred and the greatest love, should concur in, and be manifested by one and the same thing? Could men or angels speak such mysteries? Surely no.” (106)
If you find yourself wayward and wandering, distracted and distressed, during your times of daily worship with the Lord, you might find help from this simple but incredibly rich devotional guide. Here’s a sample of what’s inside. Praying the daily offices and the rhythms of a fixed liturgy can be an oasis for the soul. Also, especially if you’re a pastor, avail yourself of Gibson’s Reformation Worship. It’s a liturgical goldmine.
Robert Murray M’Cheyne once gave this priceless wisdom: “Do not take up your time so much with studying your own heart as with studying Christ’s heart. For one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ!” I was reminded of this quote while reading this earnest, humble, and Scripture-saturated book by a pastor and friend I deeply love and respect. Garrett wisely helps us see the deceitfulness of sin and the deception of the devil:
“Satan is a historian. He is the master of replaying old sins to the tune of accusation. He digs up past failures and then blackmails us with reminders of why God is disappointed with us. Before sin, Satan is the tempter who whispers, ‘You should do this!’ After sin, Satan is the accuser who whispers, ‘How could you have done this!’ Satan kills through temptation and then buries with guilt. But whether he allures with sugar on the tongue or accuses with salt in a wound, the devil is always working. His aim is to turn your gaze from God, because seeing him with sober eyes strengthens your fight for faith in the one greater than all your foes.” (64)
But more than anything, Kell helps us long to see God. “When the hope of seeing God fills our hearts, it has a purifying effect on our lives.” (94) “We know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure.” (1 John 3:2-3)
I spent much of 2021 pondering and preaching the Gospel according to Luke. No commentary was more helpful to me than this one. This new series of NT handbooks focuses on the content of the biblical books, rather than historical-critical questions. Gladd faithfully summarizes the passage, makes textual connections to other passages, paying careful attention to OT allusions and quotations. Check out this insight on the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:
“The father’s treatment of his prodigal son is remarkable in its similarities to the Joseph narrative. He clothes the son in his ‘best robe’ and puts a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet (Luke 15:22). The language is close to Genesis 41:42, when Pharaoh gives Joseph a ring and dresses ‘him in robes of fine linen.’ A few verses earlier, the prodigal son is forced to work with pigs because ‘there was a severe famine in that whole country’ (Luke 15:14). According to Genesis 41, Pharaoh dreams that seven years of famine would descend upon Egypt after seven years of prosperity (Gen. 41:25-32). The combination of these plot points refers Luke’s audience back to the Joseph narrative. The donning of clothes in the OT symbolizes the right to inherit and rule (Gen. 3:21; 37; Num. 20:24-28; 1 Kings 11:30-31; 19:19-21; Isa. 22:21). The prodigal son, after recognizing his sin, comes and receives a great deal of inheritance and rule over the estate, just as Joseph is given the right to rule over Egypt. The father elevates his prodigal son to the status of ruler. The restoration of the prodigal son, the sinner, symbolizes all the outsiders within Luke’s narrative and their new identity as the true Israel of God. They are all identified with the great patriarch Joseph. The father twice announces that the son ‘was dead’ but is now ‘alive again’ (Luke 15:24, 32). Life here should be understood as resurrection life, the new creational act of God whereby He spiritually resurrects those who trust in Jesus (see John 5:25; Rom. 6:11, 13; 1 Pet. 1:3; Rev. 1:18; 2:8; 20:5).” (267-268)
I read Spurgeon for admiration, not imitation. I don’t try to imitate him. But I admire God for what He did in and through His faithful servant. This sobering collection of pastoral addresses is full of wisdom, encouragement, and testimonies of God’s amazing grace. Even in the darkness of his depression, Spurgeon was used by the Lord to minister the gospel of Christ to others who, like him, found themselves in the silent shades of sorrow.
“When you and I become weak, and are depressed in spirit, and our soul passes through the valley of the shadow of death, it is often on account of others. One Sabbath morning, I preached from the text, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ (Matthew 27:46) and though I did not say so, yet I preached my own experience. I heard my own chains clank while I tried to preach to my fellow-prisoners in the dark; but I could not tell why I was brought into such an awful horror of darkness, for which I condemned myself. On the following Monday evening, a man came to see me who bore all the marks of despair upon his countenance. His hair seemed to stand upright, and his eyes were ready to start from their sockets. He said to me, after a little parleying, ‘I never before, in my life, heard any man speak who seemed to know my heart. Mine is a terrible case; but on Sunday morning you painted me to the life, and preached as if you had been inside my soul.’
By God’s grace, I saved that man from suicide, and led him into gospel light and liberty; but I know I could not have done it if I had not myself been confined in the dungeon in which he lay. I tell the story, brethren, because you sometimes may not understand your own experience, and the perfect people may condemn you for having it; but what know they of God’s servants? You and I have to suffer much for the sake of the people of our charge. God’s sheep ramble very far, and we have to go after them; and sometimes the shepherds go where they themselves would never roam if they were not in pursuit of lost sheep. You may be in Egyptian darkness, and you may wonder why such a horror chills your marrow; but you may be altogether in the pursuit of your calling, and be led of the Spirit to a position of sympathy with desponding minds. Expect to grow weaker, brethren, that you may comfort the weak, and so may become masters in Israel in the judgment of others; while, in your own opinion, you are less than the least of all saints.” (172-173)
This is an outstanding book about growing in Christ. Sanctification is about growing “in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Peter 3:18) How does this growth happen? Here’s Ortlund’s answer: “The basic point of this book is that change is a matter of going deeper… Growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening. Implicit in the notion of deepening is that you already have what you need.” (16) We already have Christ, the One in whom are hidden unsearchable riches of love and all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
“Let me suggest that you consider the possibility that your current mental idea of Jesus is the tip of the iceberg. That there are wondrous depths to Him, realities about Him, still awaiting your discovery. I’m not disregarding the real discipleship already at play in your life and the true discoveries of the depths of Jesus Christ you have already made. But let me ask you to open yourself up to the possibility that one reason you see modest growth and ongoing sin in your life– if that is indeed the case– is that the Jesus you are following is a junior varsity Jesus, an unwittingly reduced Jesus, an unsurprising and predictable Jesus. I’m not assuming that’s the case. I’m just asking you to test yourself, with honesty. When Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, he named the natives “Indians,” thinking he had reached what Europeans of the time referred to as “the Indies” (China, Japan, and India). In fact he was nowhere close to South or East Asia. In his path were vast regions of land, unexplored and uncharted, of which Columbus knew nothing. He assumed the world was smaller than it was. Have we made a similar mistake with regard to Jesus Christ? Are there vast tracts of who He is, according to biblical revelation, that are unexplored? Have we unintentionally reduced Him to manageable, predictable proportions? Have we been looking at a junior varsity, decaffeinated, one-dimensional Jesus of our own making, thinking we’re looking at the real Jesus? Have we snorkeled in the shallows, thinking we’ve now hit bottom on the Pacific?” (22-23)
I love this intermediate-level introduction to the glorious world of biblical theology, which the authors define as “the study of the whole Bible on its own terms.” (16) The categories of canon, covenants, and Christ structure their approach. After sketching the Bible’s grand storyline, they trace several of the Bible’s significant themes (God’s glory, Kingdom, Covenant, Temple and Priesthood, Worship, Messiah and Atonement, Salvation and Judgment, Holy Spirit, and Mission).
“One of the main purposes of Scripture is to display Jesus Christ.” (81)
“At the heart of the story of the biblical covenants is the bedrock conviction that the God of creation is the God of the covenants.” (82)
“The gospel is still a story that takes two Testaments to tell.” (83)
“Two hermeneutical statements can begin to capture the conviction of the New Testament authors. For them, Jesus both fulfills and fills out the Scriptures.” (94)
“For the biblical theologian, the role of the reader is never to make a path to Christ, but always to follow the path to Christ that the biblical authors have laid down. Taking a canonical line to the cross may not be straight or fast, but it’s true.” (101)
“The Pentateuch was meant to be read as a whole, with each of its five parts connected to and building upon the others. The five books of Moses are really five narrative components of the one Book of Moses.” (121)
“The biblical authors were also biblical readers. The task of biblical theology requires reading and rereading.” (453)
Ortlund offers a winsome, rigorous, and engaging abductive argument for God’s existence. (The sections in Chapter 2 on math and music are phenomenal.) He carefully considers the cause, the meaning, the conflict, and the hope of the world. He then works backwards from a present set of conditions to the most likely explanation, an inference to the best explanation, by showing the beautiful reasonableness of Christian theism. This approach says, “If God doesn’t exist, so much of life– so much of what we already assume in the way we function– becomes inexplicable.” (13) Imagine this volume as a book-length expansion of what good old Puddleglum declared to the Witch in The Silver Chair:
“One word, Ma’am… One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.” (159)
This book is a masterclass in how to treat those with whom you disagree. Ortlund engages the best atheistic arguments with charity, clarity, and grace. And he keeps the promise he makes in the preface:
“I tell you that I’ve given you my best effort as a writer so that I may invite you to give the book your best effort as a reader. We live in an age of distraction and sound bites. The careful reader of books is not our defining strength. But if you will give me your attention from cover to cover, I will do everything I can to make it worth your effort.” (xi)
I plodded my way through Volume 1 of Turretin’s Institutes. Like other scholastics, his writings are lectures not sermons. The goal of an elenctic theology is to demonstrate and assert the truth of sound doctrine by refuting false doctrines. So expect an apologetic feel throughout. His reputation for doctrinal precision is well founded. (His section on the Trinity is wonderful!) But I also found some amusing surprises. For example, Turretin has an entire section devoted to the argument that the world was created in autumn rather than in spring, making his case, in part, from the timing of Israel’s feasts in Exodus and Leviticus. (1: 441–444) Most surprising of all was his warm-hearted devotion:
“These four things in the highest manner commend the love of God towards us:
(1) the majesty of the Lover;
(2) the poverty and unworthiness of the loved;
(3) the worth of Him in whom we are loved;
(4) the multitude and excellence of the gifts which flow out from that love to us.”
He in whom we are beloved is Christ, the delight of His heavenly Father and the ‘express image of His person.’ He could have given us nothing more excellent, nothing dearer, even if He had given the whole universe.” (242) (3.20.6)
The London Review of Books called this recently translated Hugo Award-winning trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.” I found this to be a gross understatement. These novels are mind-blowing, no matter the genre. The scale of the tale is staggering. Three volumes, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, tallying over 1,600 pages. A narrative timeline spanning 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future. One entire scene is told from the perspective of an ant. (An ant!) The first book is set on Earth, but many of its scenes take place in virtual reality, inside a video game. By the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across multiple dimensions.
Liu’s prose is plain. He writes like a computer engineer. This isn’t Dickens. This is hard science fiction (‘hard sci-fi’ has a lot of science in it, ‘soft sci-fi’ doesn’t). So expect lots of astronomy, cosmology, math, particle physics, molecular biology, all shot through with the Fermi Paradox. The Three-Body Problem takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull.
This might not be your bag, but I’m telling you the plot pops. Just stick with it. I almost gave up, but everything picks up 300 pages into the second book. Think contact with alien life cranked up to beyond sinister levels. Think H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” (1898) but on a cosmic scale. The trilogy concerns the catastrophic consequences of humanity’s attempt to make contact with extraterrestrials. According to Liu, the reason we haven’t heard from aliens yet is that we’re the only species dumb enough to reveal our own location in the universe:
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
Shi Qiang lit another cigarette, if only to have a bit of light.
“But in this dark forest, there’s a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing beside it shouting, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’” Luo Ji said.
“Has anyone heard it?”
“That’s guaranteed.”
It goes without saying, the author’s darkly pessimistic secularism permeates the story. Which is what makes the glimmers of hope and beauty and love in the face of death all the more strange. It’s like he can’t force himself to go gentle into that good night.
It’s been said that behind every great fortune there is a crime. For years, the name “Sackler” has been synonymous with art and philanthropy. But instead of their donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the British Museum, Harvard, and Yale, the Sackler legacy now includes $10 billion in profits from OxyContin, millions of opioid addicts, a half million dead Americans, and an ever-growing tsunami of civil lawsuits. Keefe chronicles the fascinating, devastating, and infuriating history of the family who founded Purdue Pharma, the company which made a painkiller stronger than morphine in 1996. Here’s what happened next:
“In 1996, Purdue introduced a groundbreaking drug, a powerful opioid painkiller called OxyContin, which Americans from every corner of the country found themselves addicted to these powerful drugs. Many people who started abusing OxyContin ended up transitioning to street drugs, like heroin or fentanyl. The numbers are staggering. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the quarter century following the introduction of OxyContin, some 450,000 Americans have died of opioid-related overdoses. Such overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death in America, accounting for more deaths than car accidents– more deaths, even, than than most quintessentially American of metrics, gunshot wounds. In fact, more Americans have lost their lives from opioid overdoses than died in all of the wars the country has fought since World War II. (4-5)
Ursula Le Guin once noted, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” (34) Anthony Doerr tells a beautiful story that will resonate most in the hearts of βιβλιοφάγοι, book worms, those who love and live in books. The story is really several interlocking stories, Swiss-watchery in its construction, dizzyingly told from the perspective of five characters in the ancient past, the present, and the distant future. In my favorite passage, Doerr perfectly describes the transportive power of reading as a frightened orphan named Anna is stranded in a Constantinople under siege. Anna finds consolation in a mysterious tale told on a Greek codex:
“The quiet moments frighten her more: when the work pauses and she can hear the songs of the Saracens out beyond the walls, the creaking of their siege machines, the nickering of their horses and bleats of their camels. When the wind is right, she can smell the food they’re cooking. To be so close to men who want her dead. To know that only a partition of masonry prevents them from doing their will.
She works until she cannot see her hands in front of her face, then trudges home to the house of Kalaphates, takes a candle from the scullery, and climbs onto the pallet beside Maria, her fingernails broken, her hands veined with dirt, and pulls the blanket around them and opens the little brown goatskin codex.
The reading goes slowly. Some leaves are partially obscured by mold, and the scribe who copied the story did not separate the words with spaces, and the tallow candles give off a weak and sputtery light, and she is often so tired that the lines seem to ripple and dance in front of her eyes.
The shepherd in the story accidentally turns himself into an ass, then a fish, and now he swims through the innards of an enormous leviathan, touring the continents while dodging beasts who try to eat him: it’s silly, absurd; this cannot possibly be the sort of compendium of marvels the Italians sought, can it?
And yet. When the stream of the old Greek picks up, and she climbs into the story, as though climbing the wall of the priory on the rock– handhold here, foothold there– the damp chill of the cell dissipates, and the bright, ridiculous world of Aethon takes its place.
Our sea monster battled with another, bigger and more monstrous even than he was, and the waters around us quaked, and ships with a hundred sailors on each sank in front of me, and whole uprooted islands were carried past. I closed my eyes in terror, and fixed my thoughts on the golden city in the clouds…
Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.” (314-315)
Doerr reminded me to be ever thankful for the written word, for books, for libraries, for stories. “A text– a book– is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” (51)
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, Steve Coll details the C.I.A.’s operations in Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, including the rise of the Taliban, the secret efforts of the CIA to capture or kill Osama bin Laden beginning in 1998, and the intelligence failures that led to September 11th. In Directorate S, Coll “seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.” (5) Contemplating the myriad catastrophic and unforced errors is incredibly painful. But if you want to know what happened, and especially what went wrong in Afghanistan, read these books. And continue to pray for the Afghan people.
No living writer helps me marvel at the manifold splendor of God reflected in His creation more than Robert Macfarlane, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His prose is perfect. And his point is often the same: go outside, pay attention, find beauty, be still, and be amazed. In this volume, he records his search for the wild places in Britain and Ireland. Here is the lyrical description of his exploration of a sea cave hidden among the jagged cliffs along the shoreline of Ynys Enlli, a small island off the westernmost tip of the Lleyn Peninsula in Wales:
“I dove in. Blue shock. The cold running into me like dye. I surfaced, gasping, and began to swim towards the cliffs at the eastern side of the bay. I could feel the insistent draw of the current, sliding me out to the west, back towards Enlli. I swam at a diagonal to it, to keep my course. Nearing the cliffs, I moved through different ribbons and bands of temperature, warm, then suddenly cold again. A large lustrous wave surged me between two big rocks, and as I put a hand out to stop myself from being barged against them, I felt barnacles tear at my fingers. I swam to the biggest of the caves. Holding on to an edge of rock, and letting the swell lift me gently up and down, I looked inside. Though I could not see the back of the cave, it seemed to run thirty or forty feet into the cliffs: cone-shaped, tightening into the earth from its mouth. I released the rock, and drifted slowly into the opening. As I crossed the shadow cast by the cave’s roof, the water grew cold. There was a big hollow sucking and slapping sound. I shouted, and heard my call come back at me from all sides. As I got deeper in, the water shallowed. I swam breast-stroke, to keep myself as flat as possible. I was passing over dark red and purple rocks: the voodoo colours of basalt, dolerite. The lower sides of the cave were lined with frizzy green seaweed, which was slick and shiny where the water reached it, like wet hair. Further back into the cave, the light was diffused and the air appeared powdery. The temperature had dropped, and I sensed the whole gathered coldness of the unsunned rock around and above me, pushing out into the air and water. I glanced back over my shoulder. The big semicircular mouth of the cave had by now shrunk to a cuticle of light. I could only just see out to the horizon of the sea, and I felt sudden involuntary lurch of fear. I swam on, moving slowly now, trying to sense the sharp rocks over which I was moving. Then I reached the end of the cave, and there, at its very back, and in its very centre, lifted almost entirely out of the water, sat a single vast white boulder, made of smooth creamy rock, shaped roughly like a throne or seat. It must have weighed five or six tons. I climbed awkwardly out of the water, slipping on weed, and sat on the rock, while the water slopped around its base, and looked back down the cave to the curved rim of light, all that remained of the world beyond. Remembering the white rock now, it seems like a hallucination. I cannot explain what it really looked like, certainly not what it was doing there, among the red and purple basalts. Nor could I conceive of the might of the storm waves that, over the centuries, must have brought that boulder to the cave, and then shifted it deeper and deeper in, until finally they had heaved it into that position, placed perfectly at the centre and the back of the cave.” (37-38)
Mark Twain defined a classic as a book which people praise and don’t read. In my experience, classics are those books I read in high school and didn’t quite grasp. I’ve now read Crime and Punishment three times and it gets better every time. After my re-reading this year, what lingered with me the most was Raskolnikov’s feverish, haunting, and prescient dream at the novel’s end:
“He lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week. As he began to recover, he remembered his dreams from when he was still lying in feverish delirium. In his illness he had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate. People killed each other in some sort of meaningless spite. They gathered into whole armies against each other, but, already on the march, the armies would suddenly begin destroying themselves, the ranks would break up, the soldiers would fall upon one another, stabbing and cutting, biting and eating one another. In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why, and everyone felt anxious. The most ordinary trades ceased, because everyone offered his own ideas, his own corrections, and no one could agree. Agriculture ceased. Here and there people would band together, agree among themselves to do something, swear never to part– but immediately begin something completely different from what they themselves had just suggested, begin accusing one another, fighting, stabbing. Fires broke out; famine broke out. Everyone and everything was perishing. The pestilence grew and spread further and further. Only a few people in the whole world could be saved; they were pure and chosen, destined to begin a new generation of people and a new life, to renew and purify the earth; but no one had seen these people anywhere, no one had heard their words or voices.” (547-548)
Wow. Here’s a helpful guide to the classics just in case you want to visit (or revisit) that daunting work of literature you’ve never quite finished and was never quite finished with you.
It’s easy to think that slavery in America is, thankfully, a thing of the past. But in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Blackmon, senior national correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, documents with devastating detail the re-enslavement of black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. In an effort to give a voice to the voiceless, Blackmon introduces his readers to Green Cottenham. In many ways, this book is his story:
“On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with ‘vagrancy.’ Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness. After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses— Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor. The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them. A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily ‘task’ was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined… Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name… This slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.” (1-2, 4)
“The commercial sectors of U.S. society have never been asked to fully account for their roles as the primary enforcers of Jim Crow segregation, and not at all for engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War. The civil rights movement focused on forcing government and individual citizens to integrate public schools, reinstate full voting rights, and end offensive behavior. But it was business that policed adherence to America’s racial customs more than any other actor in U.S. society. American banks maintained ubiquitous discriminatory lending practices throughout the country that until the 1960s prevented millions of working-class African Americans from obtaining the lines of credit that millions of white families used to accumulate wealth and move from lower- to middle-class status. Indeed, the opportunity for blacks to pursue the most basic American formula for achieving middle-class status—buying a home in desirable neighborhoods where real estate values were likely to appreciate over time—was openly barred by legions of real estate agents in every city and region. Until the 1950s, rules of the National Association of Realtors made it a violation of the organization’s code of ethics for an agent to sell a home in a white neighborhood to an African American, or vice versa. It was hundreds of thousands of individual businesses that refused to give blacks jobs, equal pay, or promotions. It was wealthy men on Wall Street and in the executive suites of southern banks that financed the organized opposition to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” (383)
“In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our ‘fault.’ But it is undeniably our inheritance.”(383)
Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (73)
In September, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I began reading Zuckoff’s definitive account of the tragedy, because I never want to forget. The great WWII historian, Ian Toll, once said this about Pearl Harbor: “The passage of time strips away the searing immediacy of the surprise attack and envelops it in layers of exposition and retrospective judgment. Hindsight furnishes us with perspective on the crisis, but it also undercuts our ability to empathize with the immediate concerns of those who suffered through it.” Already an entire generation has no direct memory of 9/11, despite its daily effects on their lives. Zuckoff helps us all remember so that we’ll never forget.
“Torn open, aflame, weakening from within, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center spewed paper like blood from an arterial wound. Legal documents and employee reviews. Pay stubs, birthday cards, takeout menus. Timesheets and blueprints, photographs and calendars, crayon drawings and love notes. Some in full, some in tatters, some in flames. A single scrap from the South Tower, tossed like a bottled message from a sinking ship, captured the day’s horror. In a scrawled hand, next to a bloody fingerprint, the note read:
84th floor
west office
12 People trapped
After the paper came the people. After the people came the buildings. After the buildings came the wars. The ashes cooled, but not the anguish.” (xviii)
The best baseball writer in the world gives his best shot at listing the 100 best players of all time. I devoured this book. Each chapter profiles a different player for 4-5 pages, delivering stats and anecdotes galore. And Posnanski is a gem of a writer. This is how he describes Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing: “Junior’s swing was majestic, gorgeous, the Grand Canyon of swings, the Machu Picchu of swings, the ‘Here Comes the Sun’ of swings. It tilted upward, and when bat met ball, you could feel the breath rush out of you.” (366)
I experience shortness of breath every time I watch this home-run swing. And just in case you haven’t heard, the Atlanta Braves finally won the World Series again and it was glorious. Go Braves! That is all.
I try to read at least one Bertie and Jeeves novel every year because Wodehouse never misses:
“Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that after two months of my company, what the normal person feels is that that will about do for the present.” (34-35)
“She cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.” (40)
“I have had occasion, I fancy, to speak before now of these pick-me-up drinks of Jeeves’s and their effect on a fellow who is hanging to life by a thread on the morning after. What they consist of, I couldn’t tell you. He says some kind of sauce, the yolk of a raw egg and a dash of red pepper, but nothing will convince me that the thing doesn’t go much deeper than that. Be that as it may, however, the results of swallowing one are amazing. For perhaps the split part of a second nothing happens. It is as though all Nature waited breathless. Then, suddenly, it is as if the Last Trump had sounded and Judgement Day set in with unusual severity. Bonfires burst out in all parts of the frame. The abdomen becomes heavily charged with molten lava. A great wind seems to blow through the world, and the subject is aware of something resembling a steam hammer striking the back of the head. During this phase, the ears ring loudly, the eyeballs rotate and there is a tingling about the brow. And then, just as you are feeling that you ought to ring up your lawyer and see that your affairs are in order before it is too late, the whole situation seems to clarify. The wind drops. The ears cease to ring. Birds twitter. Brass bands start playing. The sun comes up over the horizon with a jerk. And a moment later all you are conscious of is a great peace. As I drained the glass now, new life seemed to burgeon within me.” (48)
“He sat listening like a lump of dough.” (71)
“A man’s brain whizzes along for years exceeding the speed limit, and then something suddenly goes wrong with the steering-gear and it skids and comes a smeller in the ditch.” (90)
“His brow cleared, his eyes brightened, he lost that fishy look, and he gazed at the slug, which was still on the long, long trail, with something approaching bonhomie.” (104)
“My guardian angel had not been asleep at the switch.” (115)
“A tankard of their special home-brewed was in my hand, and the ecstasy of that first Gallup is still green in my memory.” (118)
“He rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won’t forget him in the general distribution.” (123)
“There is a time for studying beetles and a time for not studying beetles.” (166)
“One thing I have never failed to hand the man. Jeeves is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.” (267)
Parker is a professional super-thief, the brilliant invention of Richard Stark, the prince of noir. Butcher’s Moon is a continuation of a robbery caper Parker began in Slayground, and serves as a culmination of the best of the series. The Parker novels all follow a four-part structure, with prose as orderly as a classical symphony, and most of them begin in medias res with a sentence that starts with the word “when.” For me and Parker, it was love at first line:
The Man With the Getaway Face (1963): “When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.” The Mourner (1963): “When the guy with the asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.” The Jugger (1965): “When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page.” The Seventh (1966): “When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in.” Slayground (1971): “Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and the packet of explosive in the other.” Butcher’s Moon (1974): “Running toward the light, Parker fired twice over his left shoulder, not caring whether he hit anything or not.” Backflash (1998): “When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the windshield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood, Glock first.” Firebreak (2001): “When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.” Ask the Parrot(2006): “When the helicopter swept northward and lifted out of sight over the top of the hill, Parker stepped away from the tree he’d waited beside and continued his climb.”
One of most accomplished astronauts in the world, who graduated as the top U.S. Air Force test pilot, and was CAPCOM for twenty-five Shuttle missions, and NASA’s Director of Operations in Russia, and served as Commander of the International Space Station, wrote a ripping murder mystery that takes place on a fictional Apollo Mission 18 during the space race and the Cold War in the early 1970s. This book is like Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October but set on the moon. Some readers don’t care for all the technical jargon but I dig it:
“Starting the world’s most powerful engine wasn’t easy. It took about nine seconds to crank one up—the time an Olympic sprinter could run 100 yards. The time it takes to tie one shoe. The most dangerous nine seconds of the whole flight. The amount of fuel needed to push the Saturn V off the pad was staggering: 3,400 gallons every second. That required fuel pumps with their own jet engines, just to spin them fast enough.
The rocketship had five of these jets pumping the kerosene and oxygen into the rocket chambers, where it would mix, explode and storm out the 12-foot-tall exhaust nozzles in a 5,800-degree, 160-million-horsepower inferno. The crew’s eyes were glued to the engine instruments as the clock counted down into single digits.
‘T minus ten, nine, and we have ignition sequence start.’
Four fireworks ignited inside each engine: two to spin up the fuel pump, and two to burn any flammable gases lurking in the exhaust nozzle.
‘Six, five, four…’
Two big valves opened, and liquid oxygen poured from its high tank down through the spinning pump and into the rocket, gushing out the huge nozzle under its own weight like a frothy white waterfall. Two smaller valves clicked open, feeding oxygen and kerosene to fuel the jet engines, spinning the pumps up to high speed. The pressure in the main fuel lines suddenly jumped to 380 psi. Conditions were set, with everything ready to ignite the rockets. Just needed some lighter fluid.
Two small discs burst under the high fuel pressure, and a slug of triethylboron/aluminum was pushed into the oxygen-rich rocket chambers. Like the ultimate spark plug, the fluids exploded on contact.
‘Three, two…’
The middle engine lit first, followed quickly by the outer four; if all five had started at once, they would have torn the rocketship and launch pad apart. Two more big valves opened, and high-pressure kerosene poured into the growing maelstrom.
‘One, zero, and liftoff, we have liftoff, at 7:32 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.’
Hell, unleashed, creating 700 tons of thrust in each of the five engines—enough total power to lift more than 7 million pounds straight up. The ultimate deadlift. The last of the ground umbilicals feeding the rocket disconnected and snapped back. The four heavy hold-down arms that had been clamping the base to the pad hissed in pneumatic relief and pivoted away. The Saturn V was free.” (141-142)
I’ve given away dozens of copies of this devotional classic over the years and I’m thrilled the good folks at the Banner of Truth have reprinted it in a new edition. Alleine uses his encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture to string together the “exceeding great and precious promises” (2 Peter 1:4) of God with the goal of comforting the struggling believer:
“And in that day you shall know that I am a rewarder of them that diligently seek me (Heb. 11:6); and that I did record your words (Mal. 3:16), and bottle your tears, and tell your wanderings (Psa. 56:8), and keep an account, even to a cup of cold water, of whatever you said or did for my name (Matt. 10:42). You shall surely find that nothing is lost (1 Cor. 15:58); but you shall have full measure, pressed down and running over, thousands of years in paradise, for the least good thought, and thousand thousands for the least good word; and then the reckoning shall begin again, till all arithmetic be at a loss. For you shall be swallowed up in a blessed eternity, and the doors of heaven shall be shut upon you, and there shall be no more going out (Dan. 12:2, 3; Rev. 3:12; Luke 16:26).
The glorious choir of my holy angels, the goodly fellowship of my blessed prophets, the happy society of triumphant apostles, the royal hosts of victorious martyrs, these shall be your companions for ever (Matt. 8:1, 12; Heb. 12:22, 23). And you shall come in white robes, with palms in your hands, everyone having the harps of God, and golden bowls full of sweet-smelling aromas, and shall cast your crowns before me, and strike in with the multitude of the heavenly hosts, glorifying God, and saying, Hallelujah! The Lord God omnipotent reigns (Rev. 7:9-12; 19:5, 6). Blessing, honour, glory, and power be to him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb for ever and ever (Rev. 5:13).
In short, I will make you equal to the angels of God (Luke 20:36), and you shall be the everlasting trumpets of my praise (Rev. 7:10-12, 15). You shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of my house, and I I will make you drink of the rivers of my pleasures (Psa. 36:8). You shall be an eternal excellency (Isa. 60:15), and if God can die, and eternity run out, then and only then, shall your joys expire. For you shall see me as I am (1 John 3:2), and know me as you are known (1 Cor. 13:12); and shall behold my face in righteousness, and be satisfied with my likeness (Psa. 17:15). And you shall be the vessels of my glory, whose blessed use shall be to receive the overflowings of my goodness, and to have mine infinite love and glory poured out into you brimful, and running over for evermore (Rom. 9:23; 2 2 Tim 2:20; Rev. 22:1).
And blessed is he who has believed, for there shall be a performance of the things that have been told him (Luke 1:45). I the Lord has spoken it, you shall see my face, and my name shall be written in your foreheads; and you shall no more need the sun, nor the moon, for the Lord God shall give you light, and you shall reign for ever and ever (Rev. 22:3-5).” (39-40)
“Next to praying there is nothing so important in practical religion as Bible-reading. God has mercifully given us a book which is “able to make us wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim. 3:15.) By reading that book we may learn what to believe, what to be, and what to do; how to live with comfort, and how to die in peace. Happy is that man who possesses a Bible! Happier still is he who reads it! Happiest of all is he who not only reads it, but obeys it, and makes it the rule of his faith and practice!” (91)
I love books that point me to the Book. Nate Pickowicz’s brief and superb new book does just that. The subtitle says it all: “A Simple Approach to Learning and Loving the Word of God.” I can give this book to any member of my congregation knowing it will help both new and seasoned believers read and study their Bible more faithfully and more fruitfully. Buy several copies and give them away to those you’re discipling as a New Year’s gift.
Imagine suffering excruciating and bewildering pain for five years due to a devastating disease that doesn’t officially exist. That’s Douthat’s story, struggling day-by-day with Lyme disease. This poignant memoir helped me grow in sympathy for those who suffer with chronic illness. Chronic sufferers often feel all alone in their pain, surrounded by others who still feel “at home” in their own bodies.
“A friend could listen, another friend could visit, a family member could watch our kids or make us dinner, but there was a gulf fixed between my world and theirs, between my morning-to-evening experience of pain’s variety and novelty and their inability to comprehend what it would mean to be sick every day, the same thing waiting every morning upon waking, without recourse or relief. I could understand their bafflement, because I remembered what the term “chronic illness” had meant to me in the before times. Even with my mother’s struggles as an example, I still associated it with the fatigue that comes after you’ve stayed up with a newborn baby, or the aches and pains you feel after exercising for the first time in monthssuffering that was challenging but manageable, with recourse, in the worst case, to an exhausted sleep. Whereas the reality was pain that didn’t let you relax, let alone sleep; pain that made your body feel like a cage around your consciousness; tension, always tension, the opposite of a Victorian lady picturesquely swooning on a couch. All this was an education, an experience of what it meant to be an embodied human being that could be endured but not really explained to someone whose body was still a home, a cooperator, a friend.” (90)
Douthat has done a great service for the chronic-Lyme community and for those, like me, who don’t live on that “prairie of pain.” He beautifully lays bare both his struggle and his striving for life.
“The gift of chronic illness is the space and opportunity to strive and seek. The purpose of the illness in your life has to involve finding something– finding strength in learning how to endure, finding virtue in how to live for others, finding some hidden truth in unraveling the mystery of what actually ails you. And not to yield is often the hardest task of all.
I can’t claim to have gained all the things I should have gained from the past six years. Who will I be when this is over? my mind would sometimes ask in the depths, since it was hard to imagine the same self that went into this illness coming out the other side. But now that I’m closer, God willing, to the end than the beginning, I can still recognize the person beneath the peeling dragon scales– maybe a little wiser, a little more patient, a little less consumed by the political, little more open-minded, but still carrying many of the same habits and vices and temptations as the me I knew before.
But I have learned, at least, something about what it means not to yield, to go on searching and fighting and simply living in the shadow of despair, to do what must be done even when it seems like your body is incapable of the task and your mind is brutally imprisoned.
What doesn’t kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. But what doesn’t kill you doesn’t kill you, and sometimes that alone supplies the thin reed of hope, the solid thing to cling to when every other help and possibility goes through your fingers like sand.
That first sickened summer in Maine, sixteen months into the illness, when nothing was working and my body blazed with pain, I forced myself to do what I would do as a child, to run along the packed brown surface of the sandbar, splashing through the inch of water rippling beneath my feet, and then suddenly pivot and stagger out deeper and fling myself up and out and down, belly-whopping into the freezing water of the bay.
For an instant or more, the shock to my system would be more pressing than the pain, and I would come up spluttering, every nerve jangling, and think: I am still alive.
I am still alive.
That’s where this not-yet-finished story ends. I have lived for six years with invaders in my flesh, I have seen the world from way down underneath, I have done things I couldn’t have imagined, I have fought and fought and fought.
In 2019, Matthew Emerson wrote an incredible book on Christ’s descent to the dead. Christ experienced the fullness of human death; He also defeated it. He entered the realm of death itself, our mighty enemy, and came away with his keys. The keys of Death and Hades are now held in our Savior’s nail-pierced hands. (Rev. 1:18) The good news of Good Friday, and the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, is infused with the hope of Holy Saturday. In Samuel Renihan’s new book, he builds upon Emerson’s solid foundation, provides some more exegetical footing, and does significant theological retrieval of his own by including over 100 pages of historical excerpts on the descent from Reformation and Post-Reformation theologians. Hilary of Poitiers is right: “Virgo, partus, et corpus; postque crux, mors, inferi, salus nostra est. The Virgin, birth, and body, then the cross, death, and lower world; this is our salvation.”
This is a biographical meditation about trees, gardens, and the importance of place. But it’s really all about trees.
“It’s winter. I hear a gusty wind in the night beyond the window, low and groaning like a distant jet plane, and it occurs to me that the trees are speaking. Their limbs are shaken and bent by the cold front tearing across Tennessee. The Chapter House is warm, with the embers of a tired fire crackling like morse code in the hearth beside me—again, the voice of trees. The temperature has been dropping all day, so the wooden bones of this little building are contracting, causing the wood-paneled ceiling to creak now and then. When I came in just now, shoulders up to my ears from the chill, I slammed the arch-top door a friend made out of reclaimed barn wood, rattling the wooden picture frames on the wall—one of them containing that eighteenth-century print of the Castle Kalmar (printed on wood-pulp, of course). I stomped my feet on the hardwood floor, and the trees spoke again. The wooden shelves I built out of pine planks hold hundreds of books: Sayers, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wilbur, Merton, and Berry. Trees made the pulp that made the pages (also known as leaves) where the words were preserved and printed and bound, each book the fruit of a life’s labor. There are journals full of songwriting ideas: bad lines scratched out and reworked, furious scribblings, prayers preserved on paper. The walls around the drafting desk are covered with drawings made by wooden pencils (there’s no smell quite like the aroma of pencil shavings dumped from the sharpener to the bin). Those drawings are mostly of trees, on sketch paper—again, made from trees. On the wooden mantel over the hearth there’s a collection of old smoking pipes made from briar wood, one of which I bought in a busy tree-lined market in Bordighera, Italy, just across the street from George MacDonald’s house, and it whispers a tale of Scotland and the North Wind and my family’s journey south to Italy from the forested Swiss Alps. To my right, on the little wooden table beside my chair, sits a black, leather-bound Bible with my name embossed on the lower right of the cover. The many pages within carry a translation of the Word of God, the Word that told trees to exist in the first place, and those words are made alive by a holy wind blowing through the book’s leaves. That living Word planted a seed in my parents, a seed that fell on good soil, and they in turn planted in me and my siblings an imagination-grounding story about a tree in a garden, a tree on a hill of death, and a tree in a heavenly city. Those trees fill my heart and my head, and they keep my compass trained on the Kingdom. Here in the Chapter House, at the dark edge of Warren Wood, the trees keep me company, and they keep me warm. I am kept by trees.” (191-192)
I particularly loved the book’s final chapter, where Peterson describes his visit to Israel, culminating with his journey to the Temple Mount at the heart of Jerusalem:
“This was Mount Moriah, where Abraham was spared from sacrificing Isaac by the ram caught in the brambly tree. This was where Solomon completed the temple whose pillars were pomegranate trees, where the Ark of the Covenant rested—the same ark that contained the ten commandments, the manna, and, yes, a tree: Aaron’s staff that had budded with new leaves. Not far away was the site where the crucifixion tree was planted atop Skull Hill, and not far away from that the Root of David, Abraham’s seed, was planted and reborn in a garden. This was where, at Jesus’ triumphant “It is finished!” the curtain was torn in two and he opened for us the gate of glory, which leads his children to a New Jerusalem where a Tree of Life will straddle the holy river. I was overwhelmed with love, and by love. I stood in the eye of a storm made up of living stories. Stories were the wind and the rain and the rolling thunder, and Jesus is king of it all.” (177-178)
Allison and I also visited Israel this year, and we met some new friends, and we saw an old friend, and even though we didn’t see enough trees, we did make some wonderful memories (and friends) that I pray will last a lifetime.
I was a latecomer to the “Dark is Rising” series. Apparently they’ve been hugely popular for decades, especially in the UK. The opening tale, Over Sea, Under Stone, is wonderful. English children, on holiday in Cornwall, discover an ancient treasure map in a secret room hidden behind a wardrobe. Mysterious enemies lurk about, waiting to steal what the three Drew children are seeking: clues from the map that could lead them to King Arthur’s grail. The second book in the series, The Dark is Rising, is, well, darker. It’s not a horror story, but a story of ever-present dread. A “shadowy awareness of evil” pervades the tale. It’s Midwinter Eve in a small English village, four days before Christmas and one day before Will Stanton’s eleventh birthday. A snowstorm is brewing in the north, animals are fidgeting in the fields, and rooks are swirling in the grey sky. An old farmer sees these signs and warns Will, “This night will be bad and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.” The Dark is rising. But there’s hope:
‘When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back; Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; Five will return, and one go alone.’ (63)
Michael Reeves wrote a book on the fear of the LORD. Seriously, what else do you need to know?
“The filial fear of God is the soul of godliness and the essence of the new life implanted by the Spirit. It is the ultimate affection and the very aroma of heaven. It is the affection that expels our sinful fears and our anxieties. It is the affection that expels spiritual lethargy. To grow in this sweet and quaking wonder at God is to taste heaven now.” (168)
This book is the basis of Martin Scorsese’s film, The Irishman, and Brandt tells the true story of Frank Sheeran. (Maybe.)
“The thread of this story is Frank Sheeran’s unique and fascinating life. The witty Irishman was raised a devout Catholic and was a tough child of the Great Depression; a combat-hardened hero of World War II; a high-ranking official in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; a man alleged by Rudy Giuliani in a Civil RICO suit to be “acting in concert with” La Cosa Nostra’s ruling commission — one of only two non-Italians on Guiliani’s list of twenty-six top mob figures, which included the sitting bosses of the Bonnano, Genovese, Colombo, Luchese, Chicago, and Milwaukee families as well as various underbosses; a convicted felon, mob enforcer, and legendary stand-up guy; and a father of four daughters and a beloved grandfather.” (5)
Sheeran was not only the right-hand man and mob enforcer for Russell Bufalino, he was also a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa.
“The first words Jimmy ever spoke to me were, ‘I heard you paint houses.’ The paint is the blood that supposedly gets on the wall or the floor when you shoot somebody. I told Jimmy, ‘I do my own carpentry work, too.’ That refers to making coffins and means you get rid of the bodies yourself.” (11)
Before he died, Brandt interviewed Sheeran one last time and he confessed to killing Hoffa. Some doubt the veracity of Sheeran’s claims. (See here and here and if you’re ready to go down the rabbit hole, read the “Hoffex” FBI memo). I don’t know what to believe, but I do know I Heard You Paint Houses is an engrossing glimpse inside La Cosa Nostra. (I think.)
This book does a good job introducing the experience, the history, and the treatment of trauma from a secular perspective. The strength of the book lies in awakening an awareness of what survivors of trauma fear and feel. Two quotes stuck with me:
“One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors… Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims, combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds, trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.” (1-2)
“At the opening session for a group of former Marines, the first man to speak flatly declared, “I do not want to talk about the war.” I replied that the members could discuss anything they wanted. After half an hour of excruciating silence, one veteran finally started to talk about his helicopter crash. To my amazement the rest immediately came to life, speaking with great intensity about their traumatic experiences. All of them returned the following week and the week after. In the group they found resonance and meaning in what had previously been only sensations of terror and emptiness. They felt a renewed sense of the comradeship that had been so vital to their war experience. They insisted that I had to be part of their newfound unit and gave me a Marine captain’s uniform for my birthday. In retrospect that gesture revealed part of the problem: You were either in or out—you either belonged to the unit or you were nobody. After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can’t understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers.” (17-18)
As I reflected on this book, I was reminded of the importance of what Bonhoeffer called “the ministry of listening” in the local church:
“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking. Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either.” (97-98)
It doesn’t mean we don’t speak. We must speak. But we must first be quick to listen and slow to speak.
I’m an avid notetaker. My children often make fun of my ever-present notebook and pen. I was immediately drawn to this book when I learned of it from an episode of the Reformed Forum podcast. A German sociologist, Niklaus Luhmann, developed an idiosyncratic form of note-taking that’s organized in an interconnected card catalog-type system called a Zettelkasten (‘notes box’). All of the note-taking is directed toward atomic writing. In the book, Ahrens explains and expands Luhmann’s system. He proposes dividing your note-taking into three types:
Ephemeral notes (these eventually get thrown out)
Literature notes (write these as you read a book, but keep them separate from the next type)
Zettel (process your literature notes and write permanent notes—one note per idea)
“Once written, you must then link a note to the other notes in your existing network of note-ideas. In my conceptualization, Luhmann’s method is a form of atomic writing. You must force yourself to formulate your thoughts and write them as if writing them for someone else. This can be difficult, and you may find much personal inertia to this approach. That’s because you think you know the subject matter better than you do. Writing is the thinking process. By using this method, Luhmann was able to write more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles before he died at the age of 70. That is impressive. But perhaps even more impressive than his scholarly output is the nature of his scholarship. He was able to approach subjects in fresh ways, finding surprising connections among disparate disciplines. This was due in part to the unexpected connections made within his Zettelkasten.”
I’ll admit we’ve now reached peak levels of nerdishness. But if you’ve made it this far then you have to be… intrigued. You don’t have to build an old-school wooden card catalog. After all, there are lots of digital options for creating a Zettelkasten. I’m gonna give this approach a try in 2022. Have any of y’all ever used the “Smart Notes” method? Let me know.
Michael Connelly is a storyteller extraordinaire. You probably already know his beloved police detective, Harry Bosch. But you might be less familiar with Bosch’s half-brother, LA defense attorney Mickey Haller, also known as “The Lincoln Lawyer.” Here’s his legal philosophy:
“A murder case is like a tree. A tall tree. An oak tree. It has been carefully planted and cared for by the state. Watered and trimmed when needed, examined for disease and parasites of any kind. Its root system is constantly monitored as it flourishes underground and clings tightly to the earth. No money is spared in guarding the tree. Its caretakers are granted immense powers to protect and serve it. The tree’s branches eventually grow and spread wide in splendor. They provide deep shade for those who seek true justice. The branches spring from a thick and sturdy trunk. Direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, forensic science, motive, and opportunity. The tree must stand strong against the winds that challenge it. And that’s where I come in. I’m the man with the ax. My job is to cut the tree down to the ground and burn its wood to ashes.” (4)
This latest story is the sixth (and best) in the series and we find Mickey in the trial of his life, but this time he’s the one on trial.
“A trial often comes down to who is a better storyteller, the prosecution or the defense. There is evidence, of course, but physical evidence is at first interpreted for the jury by the storyteller. The physical evidence fits both stories. One might be more believable than the other when writ small. But a skilled storyteller can even the scales of justice or maybe even tip them the other way.” (190-191)
Kathleen Nielson has done a great service for parents who long to pray without ceasing for their children. She’s penned Scriptural prayers for young children, for teens, for young adults, and for adult children, covering requests for saving faith, delight in God’s Word, love for the church, friendships, generosity, humility, hope, strength for suffering, and even one for a good night’s rest.
For Nighttime Rest
My son, do not lose sight of these– keep sound wisdom and discretion, and they will be life for your soul and adornment for your neck. Then you will walk on your way securely, and your foot will not stumble. If you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. (Prov. 3:21-24)
How good to pray for our children’s rest! (We can’t help but be praying for our own rest as well.) And how important– not just that their bodies would be healthy and refreshed by regular, deep, peaceful sleep, but also that their souls would be at rest, at peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ and the ministry of the Spirit. Our grown children do not go alone into their days and nights. What a comfort to commit them to the Lord who does not slumber or sleep (Ps. 121:4).
May he know the rest of one who labors well and wisely,
having aimed in hours of light to please you, Lord,
then resting in the hours of night as one who knows his way
along the path you put before him,
going before him night and day
and by your Spirit showing him the way.
I pray he would embrace the rhythm of dark and light,
of sleep renewing and of morning zest.
When he lies down, would you make his sleep sweet?
May evening prayers seep into dreams
that would not haunt or frighten–
comfort, rather; gladden; or pass harmless by.
And if he wakes, Lord,
may he know You with him,
there to lighten the dark watches of the night
with echoing sustenance of the Word
and comfort from the saving love of Christ
and songs that sweeten all the shadows
’til the morning sends the dark away.
Now, Lord, I do admit,
I’m praying for my rest as well–
so let me rest
in offering this prayer to you. (56-57)
Now may the God of peace grant you perfect peace, and living hope, and glorious grace, and steadfast love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
E.B. White is right: “Books are good company, in sad times and happy times.” I kept company with many good books in 2020, but these were my favorites. There are 36 selections and I thoroughly enjoyed every last one of them.
I lingered in this palace of a book for most of 2020 because I didn’t want it to end. Think of it as a more accessible and less footnotey alternative to the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics. The fear of God is evident on every page. To read Bavinck is to be reminded afresh that theology must lead us to rest in the arms of our gracious God:
“To know God does not consist of knowing a great deal about Him, but of this, rather, that we have seen Him in the person Christ, that we have encountered Him on our life’s way, and that in the experience of our soul we have come to know His virtues, His righteousness and holiness, His compassion and His grace. That is why this knowledge, in distinction from all other knowledge, bears the name of the knowledge of faith. It is the product not of scientific study and reflection but of a childlike and simple faith. This faith is not only a sure knowledge but also a firm confidence that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. Only those who become as little children shall enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3). Only the pure of heart shall see the face of God (Matt. 5:8). Only those born of water and of the Spirit can enter the kingdom (John 3:5). Those who know His name will put their trust in Him (Ps. 9:10). God is known in proportion to the extent that He is loved.” (13)
The “Sweet Dropper,” the heavenly Doctor Sibbes, once asked: “What will we do for Christ, if we will not feast with Him?” (Works, 2: 34) Few books helped me feast more with Christ this year than this meditation on the Savior’s beautiful heart towards sinners. Most books are cul-de-sacs; few are express lanes. This book is the latter. Packer’s Knowing God steered me to Spurgeon, Sproul’s The Holiness of God led me to Luther, and Piper’s The Pleasures of God plunged me into Edwards. I hope Gentle and Lowly serves others as an express lane to the glories of Christ in the writings of Thomas Goodwin, John Bunyan, and Richard Sibbes.
“Meek. Humble. Gentle. Jesus is not trigger-happy. Not harsh, reactionary, easily exasperated. He is the most understanding person in the universe. The posture most natural to Him is not a pointed finger but open arms.” (19)
“We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off His heart to His own sheep. No such reason exists. Every human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resumé items that qualify us to approach Him. Nothing but coming to Him is required.” (64)
“For those united to Him, the heart of Jesus is not a rental; it is your new permanent residence. You are not a tenant; you are a child. His heart is not a ticking time bomb; His heart is the green pastures and still waters of endless reassurances of His presence and comfort, whatever our present spiritual accomplishments. It is who He is.” (66)
“The sins of those who belong to God open the floodgates of his heart of compassion for us. The dam breaks. It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.” (75)
“Repent of your small thoughts of God’s heart.” (170)
“Jesus does not love like us. We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness. We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.” (198)
Chances are Joel Beeke published another book while you were reading this post. He’s at over 100 books now! This introductory volume of his systematic theology lectures is his best project yet. It’s exegetical, theological, confessional, doxological, pastoral, practical, and full of spicy quotes from the Fathers, the Reformers, and the Puritans. I’m eager to dive into Volume 2 on the doctrines of anthropology and Christology in 2021.
“God’s call for men to repent of idolatry is not the death knell of human happiness, but the beginning of real life. God commands us to turn from broken cisterns and drink from the Fountain of living waters. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit say, ‘Come, eat and drink.’ The feast to which they summon us is nothing less than fellowship with the One true and living God.” (1: 602-603)
Trueman discerns our own errors and those of this evil age. The subtitle says it all: “Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.” He explains how so many have come to understand sexual difference as a matter of psychological choice. This brilliant volume serves as a faithful guide to understanding our confusing times, and as a clarion call for the church to be courageous:
“This book is not a lament for a lost golden age or even for the parlous state of culture as we now face it… As for the notion of some lost golden age, it is truly very hard for any competent historian to be nostalgic. What past times were better than the present? An era before antibiotics when childbirth or even minor cuts might lead to septicemia and death? The great days of the nineteenth century when the church was culturally powerful and marriage was between one man and one woman for life but little children worked in factories and swept chimneys? Perhaps the Great Depression? The Second World War? The era of Vietnam? Every age has had its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.” (29-30)
I judge books by their covers. “The book cover functions simultaneously as an invitation to potential readers,” Peter Mendelsund notes. “Come, it says, join the party– or at least save the date.” (2) I love the cover of Craig Carter’s book on the glories of the Great Tradition and premodern exegesis, and I’m glad I accepted his invitation to join the rip-roaring party found inside. The picture on the cover is “Simeon’s Song of Praise,” painted by Rembrandt in 1631:
“It depicts an aged Simeon quoting Isaiah 52:10 as he prophesies that this baby Jesus is ‘the Lord’s Christ’ (Luke 2:26). A faithful and skilled reader of Scripture, Simeon sees the messianic thrust of the Old Testament as pointing toward the coming of the Suffering Servant. The text stresses that he understood this by the Holy Spirit. My book is about how to read like Simeon, Anna, and other faithful people of God, who discerned the Christological meaning of the Holy Scriptures by the illumination of the Spirit, symbolized in the painting by the bright light shining down on the child and Simeon’s face.” (xx-xxi)
The doctrine of Christ’s descent is a derelict doctrine. Emerson remedies this deficiency by clearing away many misunderstandings, and by retrieving this comforting truth: “He descended to the dead.” Christ experienced the fullness of human death; He also defeated it. He entered the realm of death itself, our mighty enemy, and came away with his keys. The keys of Death and Hades are now held in our Savior’s nail-pierced hands. (Rev. 1:18) Emerson illuminates the good news of Good Friday, and the ecstasy of Easter Sunday, with the hope of Holy Saturday.
“There is something more immediate than Christ’s second coming and believers’ resurrection to eternal life that we can preach to those grieving but not without hope. The hope that is more immediate, and one that is descriptive of our departed love ones’ eternal state right now, not just some distant day, is that Christ, too, has experienced death. He did not just experience dying only to rise again moments later, but He actually remained dead in the grave. He did not simply have his breath expire and then immediately rise to glory, but His body was buried and His soul departed to the place of the dead. And because He is God in the flesh, He defeated the place of the dead and the grave by descending into them and then rising again on the third day. In the Christian tradition, this hope is known as the the doctrine of Christ’s descensus— His descent to the dead.” (xi)
This is the best concise introduction to the doctrine of the Trinity I’ve ever read. The Bible is central. The writing is clear. The chapter on divine simplicity is pure gold. The critique of ERAS/EFS is correct. The tone is worshipful. Even the glossary led me to praise.
“Christians praise God the Trinity because He is supremely worthy of our praise. The blessed Trinity is supreme in being, beauty, and beatitude.” (15)
“No topic of study is more rewarding, or more challenging, than the doctrine of the Trinity. Nor is any topic of study fraught with greater possibility of error. Nevertheless, we may enter our study with confidence because the triune God has revealed Himself in His Word. It is God’s good pleasure that we would know Him, that we would receive Him, and that our souls would find rest in Him (Matt. 11:25–30).” (22)
“Christians praise the triune God because that is how God presents Himself to us in Holy Scripture: as one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the primary discourse of Trinitarian theology. Fluently, almost effortlessly, the prophets and apostles narrate, bless, pray, and sing the name of the triune God.” (25)
“The God who is Father, Son, and Spirit has reached out through the Son and by the Spirit to embrace us as sons and daughters to the end that we may call God our Father in the Spirit of the Son.” (26)
“God is not composed of parts. God is pure God, and nothing but God is God.” (54)
“The Bible’s basic Trinitarian grammar affirms the oneness of God, identifies the three persons of the Trinity with the one God, and distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity by their relations of origin.” (59)
“God plus the world is not more sufficient, more glorious, or more blessed than God minus the world.” (127)
“The heart of the blessed Trinity is to benefit us by giving Himself to us. This is the love of the Father. This is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14).” (127-128)
“The triune God alone is the ultimate end of all His works, the supreme benefit He gives, the supreme benefit that can be received.” (132)
This book helped me read my Bible better. Renihan explains typology, expounds the mystery of Christ, and exegetes the biblical covenants from a 1689 Federalist perspective. If you want a solid primer on covenant theology from a confessional Baptist, start here.
“Studying the covenant theology of the Bible magnifies the majesty of the triune God’s plan of redemption.” (7)
“All of Scripture, and thus all redemptive history, is driving towards the arrival of the promised Seed of the woman.” (31)
“The purpose of the Old Covenant was to produce the New Covenant because the purpose of the Old Covenant was to provide the Messiah, the Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant.” (135)
“The New Covenant of grace, established in the blood of Christ, founded in the Covenant of Redemption, and preached to the world in the gospel, is God’s master plan.” (178)
“The study of the mystery of Christ, His covenant, and His kingdom is a devotional experience. It is a way of wonderment, a path of praise. It is a balm, a salve, a nepenthe, a panacea, a cordial, a precious remedy, a sweet medicine, ‘a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul’ (Hebrews 6:19). The mystery is free everlasting salvation in Christ, and it is for everyone. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in Him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ (Rom. 10:11-13)” (209)
I’ve imbibed a lot of Bavinck’s writings, but I knew little of his life. I didn’t know about his lonely years as a pastor. I didn’t know he was a Bible translator. I didn’t know he wrote a book on raising teenagers. I didn’t know about his political career. I didn’t know his children and grandchildren were heroes and martyrs in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. I didn’t know about his trips to America. I didn’t know he hung out with Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. This is the best biography I’ve read about one of my theological heroes since Marsden’s life of Jonathan Edwards.
“Why does Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), a prolific theologian who worked within the Dutch neo-Calvinist movement, deserve a biography? In his own era, the answer to that question would have been fairly obvious: in the early twentieth-century Netherlands, Herman Bavinck was a household name. To his contemporaries, he was known not only as a brilliant theologian. To them, he was also—among other things—a pioneer in psychology, a pedagogical reformer, a champion for girls’ education and advocate of women’s voting rights, a parliamentarian, and a journalist. He was, and in some circles today remains, a person of international signifi- cance. In 1908, for example, Bavinck gave the prestigious Stone Lectures in Princeton, before which President Theodore Roosevelt received him and his wife at the White House. Bavinck was the kind of Dutchman whose foreign travels were chronicled in the national press and who would then return to give sold-out lectures across the country on his impressions and experiences overseas. A century later, a growing international audience reads his works in a host of languages.” (xvii)
More people would read dissertations if they were this well-written. Treat unites what should never have been torn apart: the cross of Christ and the kingdom of God (Rev. 5:9-10). God’s reign and redemption both arise from the cross of our crucified Lord. “His main message was the kingdom and His main mission was to go to Golgotha.” (17) Treat helped grow my love for the King who came into the world to be the propitiation for our sins (penal substitution), and to destroy the works of the devil (Christus Victor). (1 John 4:10; 3:8)
“The thief on the cross looked at the man from Nazareth being crucified next to him and said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Luke 23:42). Somehow this man conceived of the crucified Jesus as ruling over a kingdom. While the title on Christ’s cross—’The King of the Jews’—makes explicit that there is a connection between the kingdom and the cross, perhaps the crown of thorns provides the best image for explaining how they relate. This is not, after all, the first time that thorns have shown up in the story. Adam was to be a servant-king in the garden, but because he did not exercise dominion over the ground and the animals, the serpent ruled over him and the ground was cursed by God. Thorns first appear as a direct result and manifestation of the curse (Gen 3:17–18). Jesus comes as the last Adam, the faithful servant-king who not only fulfills Adam’s commission of ruling over the earth but removes the curse by taking it onto Himself. As Jesus wore the crown of thorns, He bore the curse of God. He is the ‘[seed] of a woman’ who crushed Satan with a bruised heel (Gen 3:15). He is the seed of Abraham who ‘redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us… so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles’ (Gal 3:13–14). The thorns, which were a sign of the curse and defeat of Adam, are paradoxically transformed into a sign of the kingship and victory of Jesus. Jesus is the king who reigns by bearing the curse of the people whom He so loves. The connection between the cross and the curse, however, does reveal that the title given to Jesus during his crucifixion—’The King of the Jews’—was only partially correct. Inasmuch as the task of the Jews was to bring God’s blessing to all the earth (Gen 12:3) and thereby reverse the curse of sin in Genesis 3–11, Jesus—the Jewish Messiah—was claiming His throne not only over Israel but over all the earth. God accomplished His mission of restoring His creation through Jesus as He was enthroned as king on the cross. The kingdom of God comes in power, but the power of the gospel is Christ crucified.” (252-253)
What a wondrous privilege it is to belong to the family of God! In a year when so many have been distanced from the local church, this is a winsome and worthy read. “If push comes to shove, Christ and His people come first.” (5) The chapters on the centrality of the Bible and the priority of prayer in the life of the local church are worth the price of the book.
“In some countries the Bible is a banned book. Government agents hunt Bibles down and confiscate them. Imagine for a moment that this happened to your favourite Bible—and in order to prosecute you your Bible was handed over to a CSI Unit (‘Crime Scene Investigation’)—the kind of law enforcement unit you have probably seen on TV–Would there be enough recent fingerprint and DNA evidence on your Bible to bring charges against you of being a Christian? And would there be enough evidence of a transformed life to secure a conviction against you?” (98)
Most pastors serve in relative obscurity. Unknown beyond their own flock, they labor in the vineyard of the Lord for a season, and then are soon forgotten. I’d never heard of William Hamilton Burns (1779-1859). He was an ordinary pastor of a small rural congregation in Scotland for over 60 years. He held no prestigious pulpit, founded no institution, and published no books. But he was a faithful shepherd who ministered God’s Word to God’s people for decades. I wept while reading this memoir written by a son who described his father as a man of God, unnoticed by the world, who sought to live under the eye and smile of the Lord all his days.
“The simple annals of a country pastor’s daily life are uniform and uneventful, and afford little scope for the biographer’s pencil. Interesting and precious as any work done on earth in Heaven’s eyes, it is the obscurest possible in the world’s regard. Angels look down upon it; busy, eager, bustling men heed it not. A calm routine of lowly, though sacred duties, a constant unvaried ministry of love, it flows on in a still and quiet stream, arresting no attention by its noise, and known alone to the lowly homes it visits on its way, and the flowers and the fields it waters. The young pastor of Dun was no exception to this.
He preached the Word. He dispensed the sacred Supper. He warned the careless. He comforted the sorrowing. He baptized little children. He blessed the union of young and loving hearts. He visited the sick and the dying. He buried the dead. He pressed the hand, and whispered words of peace into the ear of mourners. He carried to the poor widow and friendless orphan the charity of the Church and his own. He slipped in softly into some happy home and gently broke the sad news of the sudden disaster far away. He lifted up the fallen one from the ground. And he pointed to Him who receiveth the publicans and the sinners. These things and such as these, he did in that little home-walk for twenty successive years day by day; but that was all.
There is much here for the records of the sky, but nothing, or next to nothing, for the noisy annals of time. Such as the work was, however, he did it, as all who knew him witnessed, faithfully and well, with a calm, serious, conscientious, cheerful, loving diligence that was the fruit of faith and prayer; always at his work, and always happy in it, and desiring nothing better or higher on earth.” (43-44)
There is nothing flashy here; only faithfulness over the long haul. I thank God for faithful, ordinary pastors, who lead ordinary lives, and minister God’s ordinary means of grace. Your labors in the Lord are not in vain.
Honorable Mentions:
Best New Edition of a Classic: Let Slavery Die / Henry H. Garnet
The best novel I read in 2020 was this Pulitzer Prize-winning Odyssey of the Wild West. There’s plenty of action, along with a bunch of cowboys, cattle, sagebrush, horse stealing, Comanche raids, kidnapping, murders, boredom, loneliness, gambling, whiskey-drinking, bar fights, prostitutes, river crossings, water moccasins, coarse humor, broken hearts, shootouts, and homesickness. But what makes this book so captivating are the many great scenes in which nothing happens except that W. F. Call and Gus McCrae talk. And these two former Texas Rangers talk so well you never want them to stop:
“My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,” Augustus said. “And getting drunk on the porch. I’ve probably slipped a little on the biscuits in the last few days, and I’ve lost the porch, but I can still talk with the best of them.” (405)
“Captain, what’ll we do?” he asked. “Live through it,” Call said. “That’s all we can do.” (566)
“Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.” (505)
“I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live,” Augustus said. (389)
“It’s like I told you last night, son,” Captain Call said. “The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.” (628)
McMurtry also knows how to paint a scene:
“Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day— and most of the months of the year— the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices— if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices— of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.” (3-4)
“The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. Then the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dust dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air. It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors.” (50)
During this difficult year, I relished the company of Gus and Call. “It’s a fine world,” Augustus said, “though rich in hardships at times.” (873) At the end of their long trek north to Montana, no riches await these old Rangers. But their journey and friendship are riches enough.
Between 2016 and 2017, the number of adolescent girls seeking gender transition surgery quadrupled in the United States. In Great Britain, the increase for the last decade was an astounding 4,400%. In this valiant, humane, well-written, and well-researched book, Wall Street Journal reporter Abigail Shrier investigates why.
“Gender dysphoria– formerly known as ‘gender identity disorder’– is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood– ages two to four– though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases– nearly 70 percent– childhood gender dysphoria resolves. Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.
In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as ‘transgender.’ For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying– they constitute the majority.
Why? What happened? How did an age group that had always been the minority of those afflicted (adolescents) come to form the majority? Perhaps more significantly– why did the sex ratio flip: from overwhelmingly boys, to majority girls?” (xxi)
Most of the mainstream media have boycotted this book, labeling it as transphobic. That’s a real shame because Shrier makes her aim crystal clear throughout the book: she wants to protect the vulnerable.
“I have nothing but respect for the transgender adults I’ve interviewed. They were among the most sober, thoughtful, and decent people I had come to know in the course of writing this book. But I was concerned about another population, too, one I considered more vulnerable. A population we seem to have abandoned in pursuit of identity politics and progressive bona fides. A group that should, by right, be making us awfully proud, but instead seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster, the brink of despair– teenage girls. They hold the very possibility for our future. If only they weren’t tearing themselves apart.” (219)
Shrier concludes with some practical instructions to parents of young girls:
Don’t get your kid a smartphone.
Don’t relinquish your authority as the parent.
Don’t support gender ideology in your child’s education.
Reintroduce privacy into the home.
Consider big steps to separate your daughter from harm.
Stop pathologizing girlhood.
Don’t be afraid to admit: it’s wonderful to be a girl.
“Remember to tell your daughter that a woman’s most unique capacity– childbirth– is perhaps life’s greatest blessing. But whatever else you teach your daughter, remember to include something more. Tell her because the culture so often denies it. Tell her because people will try to make a victim of her. Tell her because it’s natural to doubt. Most of all, tell her because it’s true. She’s lucky. She’s special. She was born a girl. And being a woman is a gift, containing far too many joys to pass up.” (218)
This novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Clarke asks the reader to ponder many astonishing what ifs: What if there were a house so large it contained an entire ocean? What if the house was so vast it made it impossible to say how large it was because no one had ever seen all of it? What if one person set out to explore it? That one person is called Piranesi. “It is my belief,” he assures us, “that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.” (11-12)
The House is quite beautiful. It’s a three-story labyrinth, a limitless white marble temple. Its colossal halls are linked by unending staircases, doorways, and vestibules. Each room is adorned with classical columns and filled with spectacular statues. The bottom floor encompasses an ocean. Waves come crashing up the stairs of the Drowned Halls, causing sudden floods when the tides converge. The top floor contains the clouds and their rainfall. Above the House, Piranesi can see a boundless sky with sun, moon, and stars. Only the ground floor is habitable. That’s where Piranesi lives, explores, and journals what he sees.
This story is weird, haunting, and mesmerizing. It’s the stuff of half-remembered dreams. I read it in one sitting. Clarke loves the Inklings, especially Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis. Narnian allusions abound. (A faun adorns the cover!) Saying anything more about the plot risks spoiling the tale. When I look back on this year, and the feelings of prolonged isolation, this is the story I’ll call to mind. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable,” Piranesi says, “its Kindness infinite.” (245)
The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western World. This book tells the origin and secret history of Israel’s targeted assassinations.
“Of all the means that democracies use to protect their security, there is none more fraught and controversial than ‘killing the driver’– assassination. Some, euphemistically, call it ‘liquidation.’ The American intelligence community calls it, for legal reasons, ‘targeted killings.’ In practice, these terms amount to the same thing: killing a specific individual in order to achieve a specific goal– saving the lives of people the target intends to kill, averting a dangerous act that he is about to perpetrate, and sometimes removing a leader in order to change the course of history. The use of assassinations by a state touches two very different dilemmas. First, is it effective? Can the elimination of an individual, or a number of individuals, make the world a safer place? Second, it is morally and legally justifiable? Is it legitimate, both ethically and judicially, for a country to employ the gravest of all crimes in any code of ethics or law– the premeditated taking of a human life– in order to protect its own citizens? This book deals mainly with the assassinations and targeted killings carried out by the Mossad and by the other arms of the Israeli government, in both peacetime and wartime– as well as, in the early chapters, by the underground militias in the pre-state era, organizations that were to become the army and intelligence services of the state, once it was established… The Mossad and Israel’s other intelligence arms have down away with individuals who were identified as direct threats to national security, and killing them also sent a bigger message: If you are an enemy of Israel, we will find and kill you, wherever you are. This message has indeed been heard around the world.” (xxi-xxiii)
After watching the HBO Miniseries Chernobyl, I read this riveting reconstruction of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the world. On the night of April 26, 1986, what began as a standard safety test plunged into a full-scale meltdown of Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4. The radioactive release from the giant explosion was 400 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
“Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it’s yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the tissues of living organisms. This high-energy radiance is ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation takes three principal forms: alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays… Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without slowing down, smashing through cells like a fusillade of microscopic bullets. Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, and hair loss, followed by a collapse of the immune system, exhaustion of bone marrow, disintegration of internal organs, and, finally, death.” (27-28)
In The Right Stuff, the late Tom Wolfe answered this question: What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? Charles Murray and Catherine Cox answer a different, but no less fascinating, set of questions:
Who were the brilliant engineers and designers and programmers who made the Apollo space program happen? Who built the five F-1 engines on the Saturn V that generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust? Who got our astronauts all the way to the moon and back in a command and lunar module that used far less computing capacity than what’s in a single iPhone? Who were the 45 people in the Space Task Group who began the US space program from scratch on November 5, 1958, with no launch vehicle, no spacecraft, no launch facilities, no experience with manned space flight— and landed the first human on the moon on July 20, 1969, only 10 years and 9 months later?
I found their answers enthralling. If you enjoy engineering and design, if you’re intrigued by Elon Musk’s Space-X efforts, if you like books about Skunk Works, if you’ve ever wondered what happens when rocket boosters ignite, then you’ll love this epic story of the Apollo space program.
“As soon as the sensors within the combustion chambers of the F-1s determined that the igniters were lit, the main LOX valves opened, releasing liquid oxygen into each combustion chamber where it combined with a fuel-rich combustion gas, an exhaust product from the turbine. The gas was comparatively cool—only 800 degrees Fahrenheit—and would help cool the nozzle during flight; now, it prepared the interior of the chamber for the thermal shock to come. This process took three seconds. The combustion of the exhaust gas produced a thick orange smoke. At T–5.3 seconds, as sensors within each combustion chamber determined that the pressure at the face of the injector had reached 20 pounds per square inch, the main fuel valves opened and a torrent of kerosene burst through the painstakingly sized and angled orifices of the injection plate, past and through the copper baffles that had been redesigned so often. The streams of kerosene (a ton per second per engine) and liquid oxygen (two tons per second per engine) then impinged, formed their fans, and, mingling, ignited. At T–8.9 seconds, the people in the bleachers could see an eruption of orange smoke pushing down and bouncing off the flame deflector under the launcher, then bursting out at either side. Then, a few seconds later, the flame directly under the engines turned to an incandescent white as the orange smoke billowed outward and upward, beginning to envelop the rocket. Still 501 didn’t move. The noise of the preparatory burn that had created the orange cloud was inaudible across the four miles separating the viewers from the launch site. Even as the engines went to mainstage and they saw the incandescent white flame, the sound had yet to reach them. As the Saturn V moved off the pad, the sound finally reached across the marsh and slammed into the viewing area. It came first through the ground, tremors that shook the viewing stand and rattled its corrugated iron roof. Then came the noise, 120 decibels of it, in staccato bursts. People who were there would recall it not as a sound, but as a physical force. In the C.B.S. broadcast booth, the plate-glass window began to shake so violently that Walter Cronkite had to hold it in place with his hands as he tried to continue his commentary. At the beginning, it seemed more a levitation than a liftoff—the Saturn rose so ponderously that it took more than ten seconds for it to clear the top of the umbilical tower. Then, as the Saturn got farther from the ground, the scale of the F-1’s inferno became more fully apparent. And then the rocket climbed.” (199-202)
This second volume of a magisterial biography of Adolph Hitler begins at the height of his power in the summer of 1939. Ulrich records the Führer’s fatal descent, showing how one man terrorized a whole continent, fueled the murder of over 6 million Jews, and challenged the entire civilized world. By early January 1945, a depressed Hitler admitted, “I know the war is lost. Our enemies’ superiority is too great. We will not surrender, never ever. We may go down, but we will take a world with us.” (535)
“Hitler’s tyranny lasted only twelve years, but it fundamentally changed the face of the world– albeit in a way completely different from what the dictator had intended. Hitler had wanted to lead the Third Reich from hegemony in Europe to global domination. In the end, the Reich lay in ruins, and the German national state Bismarck had forged in three wars in the nineteenth century perished in an orgy of violence and criminal atrocities. The moral trauma Hitler left behind lasted far longer than Germany’s temporal loss of its status as a sovereign nation… We are not and we cannot be done with confronting Adolf Hitler. In a certain sense, we will be bound to him for all eternity. Hitler will remain a cautionary example for all time. If his life and career teaches us anything, it is how quickly democracy can be priced from its hinges when political institutions fail and civilizing forces in society are too weak to combat the lure of authoritarianism; how thin the mantle separating civilization and barbarism actually is; and what human beings are capable of when the rule of law and ethical norms are suspended and some people are granted unlimited power over the lives of others.” (630, 632)
In a few short lines, a poet can cleave your heart. I spent the year revisiting the Great War Poets: Brooke, Owen, Graves, and Rosenberg. But I found Sassoon’s piercing words on war, “the hell where youth and laughter go,” to be unforgettable.
Aftermath (1919)
Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game… Have you forgotten yet?… Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?… Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
Tolkien lamented in one of his letters, “Many reviewers seem to assume that Middle-Earth is another planet!” (283) In this gorgeous book, Garth explores the earthly places that inspired Middle-Earth. I knew Tolkien’s visit to the Swiss valley of Lauterbrunnen became the imaginative foundation for Rivendell. But I didn’t grasp how much his battle-zone experiences in the Great War shaped his writings. Tolkien’s life in the trenches at the brutal Battle of the Somme shaped many locales in The Lord of the Rings, from Hobbit holes to the Dead Marshes.
“Tolkien knew personally how a hole can mean comfort and security, a place to try and shut out all dangers. Officers’ dugouts were meticulously positioned, engineered for safety, built and maintained by each unit’s dedicated carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers and miners. An amazingly efficient supply network supplied their needs, from food to post. The Somme chalk made them both solid and bright. A British officers’ dugout could be an enviable snug, as well furnished as a student room at Oxford– a place of camaraderie, humour, civilized conversation.
It hardly needs saying that this cosiness is only part of the picture. The world of the trenches was also a place of suffocating squalor, exhaustion, boredom and terror. To reflect this dichotomy, Tolkien used a favourite technique– creating contrasting opposites. The plucky, home-loving Hobbits are ranged against the even more subterranean Orcs, who have no life except soldiering. These goblins know their way through the labyrinthine tunnels of the Misty Mountains as well as soldiers knew the maze of trenches.
The underground world often shows touches of the Somme. The battlefield was transformed by war and weather. When Tolkien said the Dead Marshes ‘owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,’ he meant the autumn rains had turned the chalky clay to claggy mud and slime. In the Marshes, we are in a world unlike anything else in Middle-Earth, but remarkably like the battlefield Tolkien knew, with its desolations, its smoke and gas barrages, and its deadly observers in the sky and to the east. Mists curl upward from the pools and the air is filled with a perpetual reek. The travelers cower from flying Ringwraiths and, for the first time, Frodo stoops to avoid the unseen Eye of Sauron. They tread with extreme caution lest they ‘go down to join the Dead ones’– a real hazard for Somme soldiers if they slipped criss-crossing the waste. Gollum explains that the Dead Marshes have grown and ‘swallowed up the graves’ from the ancient battle. So it was on the Somme, where the swollen Ancre inundated the makeshift cemeteries around it, and rain filled the hellholes where soldiers had crawled to die. In trench memoirs, it is the faces of the dead that horrify most. ” (163-166)
I revisit Middle-Earth every year. When I walk with Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes in 2021, it will be the Battle of the Somme, not Dagorlad, that’s fixed in my mind’s eye:
“Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.” (631-632)
Turgenev doesn’t disappoint. His lush descriptions of nineteenth-century Russia, the inhabitants of the steppe and the vast forests, are beautiful beyond all conveyance:
“I was sitting in a birch-wood one autumn, about the middle of September. Ever since morning a fine drizzle had been falling, giving way now and again to warm sunshine: it was fluky weather. One moment the sky would be all overcast with puffy white clouds, at another it would suddenly clear in places for a moment, and, through the rift, the azure would appear, clear and smiling, like the glance of a brilliant eye. I sat and looked about me and listened. The leaves were whispering faintly over my head: you could have told the time of year from their whisper alone. It was not the gay, laughing shiver of spring, nor the soft murmur, the long discourse of summer, nor the cold, frightened rustling of late autumn, but a scarcely perceptible, drowsy converse. A little breeze was just stirring among the treetops. The interior of the wood, drenched with rain, kept changing its appearance as the sun shone out or went in behind the clouds: sometimes it was all ablaze, as if everything there was smiling. The slender boles of the scattered birches suddenly took on the fresh brilliance of white silk, the tiny leaves on the ground gleamed and blazed with purple and gold, and the handsome stems of the tall, curly bracken, already tinged with their autumn hue, the hue of overripe grapes, stood out luminously before me in an infinite, criss-crossed maze. Then suddenly the whole scene took on a faint shade of blue: in an instant, the bright colors went out, the birches stood blankly white as new-fallen snow, not yet touched by the cold light of the winter sun; and furtively, slyly, the finest of drizzles began to spray and whisper through the wood. The leaves of birches were almost all of them still green, though of a marked pallor; only here and there stood a single young one, quite red or quite gold, and it was a sight to see how brightly it flared up when the sun’s rays suddenly found their way to it, slipping and dappling through the thick net of fine branches, all newly washed in sparkling rain. There was not a sound from the birds: they were all snuggled down and keeping quiet.” (261-262)
What do Robinson Crusoe, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men have in common? They’re all cancelled classics. Alan Jacobs tells why: “This neatly sums up a common current attitude: all history hitherto is at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peek at.” (11) Jacobs argues that paying attention to old books from strange times (even those with ideas we find loathsome!) can help us lead loving lives in the present.
“Ideas and ambitions aren’t worth much unless they are transformed into a settled disposition, a habit of mind. And what I’m talking about, and indeed have been talking about throughout this book, is a need for a disposition to love; to love the too-often-neglected voices from our past, from the world’s past. I counsel to give the dead the blood of our attention for our own sake, to enrich and strengthen our identities, to make ourselves more solid and less tenuous. There’s an important sense in which we cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors. We must see them not as others but as neighbors— and then, ultimately as kin, as members our (very) extended family. These writers who help us to encounter our ancestors not as anthropological curiosities whom we observe from a critical distance, but as those with whom we can, and should, break bread.
When we own our kinship to those people, they may come alive for us not just as exemplars of narrowness and wickedness that we have to overcome, but as neighbors and even as teachers. When we acknowledge that even when they go far astray they do so in ways that we surely would have, had we been formed as they were, we extend them not just attention but love, the very love that we hope our descendants will extend to us. The argument that I have made here for the cultivation of personal density is also an argument for serving as links in the living chain that extends into the distant past and also into the distant future. It is an argument for a genealogy of love.” (150-151)
“Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.” (80)
After my beloved Braves blew a 3-1 lead to the Dodgers in the NLCS, I sought solace in this spellbinding history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching. Kepner devotes each chapter to a different pitch. Each page brims with stats from archival research, saber-metrics (exit velo, spin rate, launch angle, etc.), and stories from over 300 interviews with Hall of Fame and superstar players.
“The pitches are the DNA of baseball, the fundamental coding of the game. The sport could easily be called ‘pitching,’ because the pitcher controls everything. He is the most influential player on the field, by far, but he can’t play every day. That factor, more than any other, makes baseball so interesting. A major league pitcher is part boxer and part magician; if he’s not punching you in the face, he’s swiping a quarter from behind your ear. If you ever square him up, you’d better savor it. Even in batting practice, the world’s best hitters tap harmless grounders and punch lazy fly balls. In the heat of competition, every hit is an exquisite anomaly.” (xiii)
Other books do a better job explaining the science of baseball. (See Off Speed by Terry McDermott). But no book I’ve ever read surpasses Kepner’s seamless narrative on the miracle of baseball. Walt Whitman wrote the truth in The Brooklyn Eagle on July 23, 1846:
“Let us enjoy life a little. Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, and taste some of the good things Providence has scattered around so liberally. The game of ball is glorious.”
There’s much to love in Peterson’s latest book. His rifts on the mystery of making are magical.
On making a stone wall and a Roman arch:
“You wouldn’t believe how much unwanted stone is just lying around in Tennessee. The next time I walked around our woods I noticed a ton (literally) of rocks scattered about the property, so I loaded them into a wheelbarrow and heaved them up to the front yard. The kids had a list of daily chores anyway, so I added the assignment of walking the woods each morning and bringing two rocks each day to the pile. Then, satisfied that I had enough to get started, I watched hours of YouTube videos about dry stack walls. During a warm snap in January I walked outside with a shovel and dug the first footer for the foundation. I figured we had enough rocks piled up to make some real progress, but after fussing with it for a few chilly hours I had gone through all our rocks and had completed about six feet of two-foot-high wall. Just 94 feet to go. I thought about Roy Scheider in Jaws and said to myself, “We’re gonna need more rocks.” My obsessive nature kicked in, and I spent weeks scouring the Nashville area for more stones. I pilfered construction sites, walked the woods around our house for hours, searched the shoulders of highways—and discovered treasure troves of discarded stones, which I surreptitiously hauled away in my old truck. Years later, I still can’t help but notice orphaned stones beside the road, and my kids still make fun of me. Slowly but surely, the wall took shape. My arms did, too, to Jamie’s delight. At some point I got it into my head that the wall needed an archway—as in, a bona fide Roman Arch, suspended by nothing but a keystone and this thing called gravity. Once again, YouTube provided all I really needed to know. I built up the sides of an opening, then measured and built a wooden frame with a round top. By now my older brother decided he needed to come over and inform me in classic older-brother fashion that it would never work—which, of course, was all the motivation I needed to carry through. I stacked the stones on top of the frame, set the keystone, and used a hammer to tighten it all with little shims of flinder. When all was ready, with the whole family watching, I nervously removed the legs from the frame. The round wooden support fell away, and—lo, and behold!—the thing held. My brother grunted something congratulatory and went home as I high-fived Jamie and the kids. It took another few weeks to complete the other arm of the wall, and before long the footpaths were dug, some plants were in the ground, and we had an actual enclosed cottage garden, complete with a stone archway, right here at The Warren.” (54-55)
On making a sonnet:
“I finished the wall that spring around Easter, and one morning I woke at dawn, just as the sun broke over the hill and shot a ray of new light across the property. Because the earth had been slowly tilting its way toward summer, that light landed in a new place, illuminating the stone arch. I peeked through the blinds and gasped, because the arch, suspended by gravity looked like the mouth of the empty tomb. Those rocks, repurposed and reborn, were crying out praise.
Lenten Sonnet March 8, 2017
This morning I woke and opened the shade,
Saw frost in the shadows, dew in the light,
Steam hovering up through each gleaming blade
Of grass. The stone arch caught the sun.
The sight Of it all, first thing in the morning, wakes
A contentment with the world. I feel young
Knowing the slow turn of the planet rakes
A bright edge of infant light, a tune sung
As long as the world has spun: new again,
New again, the mercies of God are new
Each morning, and morning moves with the spin
Of the old earth and greets each eye on cue—
Mercy, speeding west from here to the plain
To the peaks, to the sea, then back again.” (55)
On making a home:
“I love this place. I love it because I have loved it with my labor, with sweat and blood and a persistent longing to belong to it. My name is on the deed, which means I own it, inasmuch as a human can own a part of the earth. It belongs to me more than any place I’ve ever known—but in a deeper, truer way, I belong to it. In the honey from my bees and the bounty from the berry bushes I have literally tasted the fruit of my co-laboring with this corner of creation, and it is profoundly sweet. It speaks to me of its Maker. And my Maker speaks to me through it. I love to watch people taste my honey. They always close their eyes and breathe deep, and they always proclaim it better by far than whatever they buy at the grocery store. I’m not sure it tastes all that different, but their enjoyment is heightened by the knowledge that it came from the flowers underfoot and the long labor of the bees’ sweet alchemy. I think it reminds them of Eden. The world that is whispers of the world to come, just as Julie’s thirty-year plan invites me into the long struggle of begetting something new and beautiful made out of Tennessee stones as old as Everest. The Kingdom is coming, but the Kingdom is here. That’s why we’re homesick, and it’s also why we might as well get busy planting.” (56)
This brief book from the great Greek Father displays the whole content of the apostolic preaching. What’s so striking is how much this preaching is derived from the Old Testament. But this isn’t surprising. In his youth Irenaeus (A.D. 130-202) often heard the aged Polycarp preach. Polycarp was discipled by the Apostle John. So when you read Irenaeus, you’re reading a guy who was discipled by the guy, who was discipled by John, who was discipled by Jesus. And Jesus said, “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me.” (John 5:46) Irenaeus helped me to praise the Lord that “the transgression which occurred through the tree was undone by the obedience of the tree.” (33)
Does God experience emotional change? Is He subject to mood swings like His creatures? And does God suffer like we do? Throughout church history, most Christians have answered with an emphatic “No!” But much of 20th century theology has answered “Yes!” Weinandy spent his teaching career expounding the classical understanding of God’s immutabilty and impassibility. Since God is immutable, He must also be impassible. Weinandy responds to those who advocate a passible God by rooting impassibility in Scripture and in the Christological tradition inherited from the Fathers. As a Protestant, I don’t agree with all that Weinandy writes, but this book, and his book on divine immutability, Does God Change?, are both exceptional.
This is an excellent and accessible book on the incommunicable attributes of God. God is not like us. And that’s good news. “When we fear God rightly, we recognize Him for who He truly is: a God of no limits, and therefore, utterly unlike anyone or anything we know. This is the start of becoming wise.” (13) Wilkin makes this wise observation:
“Human beings created to bear the image of God instead aspire to become like God. Designed to reflect His glory, we choose instead to rival it. We do so by reaching for those attributes that are true only of God, those suited only to a limitless being. Rather than worship and trust in the omniscience of God, we desire to be all-knowing ourselves. Rather than celebrate and revere His omnipotence, we seek ultimate power in our own spheres of influence. Rather than rest in the immutability of God, we point to our own calcified sin patterns and declare ourselves unchanging and unchangeable. Like our father Adam and our mother Eve, we long for that which is intended only for God, rejecting our God-given limits and craving the limitlessness we foolishly believe we are capable of wielding and entitled to possess. Even as the redeemed, we crave the forbidden fruit of rivalry.” (23-24)
In June 793, a boat filled with warriors reached the island monastery of Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria. A brutal attack followed, the first recorded Viking raid in Britain. “Never before has such terror appeared in Britain,” wrote the English cleric Alcuin. “Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert was spattered with the blood of the priests of God, and despoiled of all its ornaments.” This was only the beginning.
In this brilliant new book, the leading expert on Vikings tells the history of a people notorious for violence, but who also ice-skated, skied, left beautiful runic inscriptions, and built some of the greatest seagoing vessels in history. Behind the bloodshed and pillaging was an allegiance to cruel gods, and a vision of the afterlife that held no link between how a life was lived and the dead person’s ultimate fate. Theology always fuels actions, and eschatology always shapes ethics.
Did you know the Vikings fought their way into Ireland and France? Did you know they populated Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and even reached continental America? Did you know that a Viking fleet sailed south into the Mediterranean, attacked Morocco, then went even further east and reached Egypt? Did you know that in 1013, the Vikings launched a full-scale invasion of Britain, conquered the city of London, and Svein Forkbeard became the first Viking king of England? If you’re as hooked as I am on Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series, then you’ll enjoy this fascinating deep-dive on the ruthless and renowned men of the North, the children of Ash and Elm.
Baroness James of Holland Park is best known for her superb Inspector Dalgliesh novels. I reread this dystopian story set in 2021, cherishing it more than ever before. It’s the most overtly Christian book James ever wrote. A mysterious disease causes global infertility. No child has been born anywhere in the world since 1995. Society unravels when it becomes clear no cure will be found. Nothing exposes idolatry like a pandemic.
“We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause. Western science and Western medicine haven’t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure. There have been many diseases which have been difficult to diagnose or cure and one which almost depopulated two continents before it spent itself. But we have always in the end been able to explain why. We have given names to the viruses and germs which, even today, take possession of us, much to our chagrin since it seems a personal affront that they should still assail us, like old enemies who keep up the skirmish and bring down the occasional victim when their victory is assured. Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why. Science was never a subject I was at home with. I understood little of it at school and I understand little more now that I’m fifty. Yet it has been my god too, even if its achievements are incomprehensible to me, and I share the universal disillusionment of those whose god has died. It is twenty-five years now since a human being was born and in our hearts few of us believe that the cry of a new-born child will ever be heard again on our planet. ” (5-7)
And yet in this bleakness, hope abounds. A child is born, a son is given, and the yoke of an oppressor is broken.
Not every Grisham novel is worth reading, but most are. Especially this one, his 33rd! It’s like a legal thriller version of Bryan Stevenson’s unforgettable Just Mercy. The main character, Cullen Post, is loosely based on James McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries. The wrongful convictions of 63 men and women on death row were overturned because of the efforts of McCloskey and his team. Grisham’s page-turner reminded me that to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice.
The most amusing book I read this year is an illustrated handbook for the aspiring felon. The owner and operator of @CrimeADay on Twitter documents the countless ways you can become a federal criminal. For example, removing a bald eagle from your home without a permit is a felony offense according to Title 50, Section 21.12(d). When you visit a National Park, please remember 36 C.F.R. § 2.1 (a)(3) prohibits “tossing, throwing or rolling rocks or other items inside caves or caverns, into valleys, canyons, or caverns, and down hillsides or mountainsides.” Keep in mind that (182) Title 18, Section 1716(c) of the U.S. Code permits the mailing of live scorpions provided the scorpions are packaged in a box clearly marked “Live Scorpions.” However, another statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1716D, makes it a federal crime to send a live mongoose in the mail. Mongoose mailers are subject to as much as one year in federal prison. “For the aspiring offender, Washington D.C. is Graceland. It’s a Mecca. It’s the only place where a person can become a three-time federal offender by abandoning a fish in the National Arboretum, taking a nap at the Smithsonian, and posting an unauthorized flyer on a bulletin board at the Government Accountability Office– all before lunch.” (208) What’s the main lesson of this book? Of the making of many laws, there is no end.
S.A. Cosby’s crime novel is Amazon’s #1 Mystery and Thriller of the Year. I imagine it’ll be made into a movie soon. Cosby grew up in Mathews County, Virginia, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, where he worked as a bouncer, a forklift driver, a retail manager, a landscaper, a construction worker, and a mortuary attendant, all while writing crime stories on the side. He can now add full-time writer to his résumé. This book isn’t for everyone. It’s a gritty tale, a kind of eclectic mashup of the classic “one last job” heist story, several Fast and Furious car-chase scenes, a huge dose of Southern rural noir, and a glimpse of what it’s like being a black father living below the Mason Dixon line. Here’s a sampling of when the main character drove his getaway car off an overpass:
“Beauregard slammed on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel to the left. The Buick did a 180 as a gray cloud of smoke engulfed them. Without a second of hesitation he slammed the car in reverse and stomped on the gas. The wooden pickets that had surrounded the median had been replaced with orange snow fencing. Ronnie was screaming in his ear. No words, just one long nonsensical wail. They were doing 60, hurtling toward an unfinished section of road. Backwards. The police were closing in like wolves chasing a deer. Then the deer sprouted wings. Beauregard didn’t say hold on. He didn’t say watch out. But in his mind, he heard his father’s voice. ‘She flying now, Bug!’ The Buick sailed off the overpass. It plummeted twenty-five feet like a stone. The trunk slammed into the pile of dirt, but the dirt helped to cushion their fall. The edge of the overpass rapidly receded from Beauregard’s vision as they fell. He braced himself by gripping the steering wheel and leaning back in his seat as hard as he could. The rear bumper took some of the force. The load-leveling shocks he had installed took the rest. He could feel every inch of the steel plating he welded to the chassis stretch to its tensile limit. The cop car that had been closest to them had slammed on the brakes. The cop car behind hadn’t. It crashed into the first one and sent it careening off the edge. It landed nose first into the asphalt. Steam and engine coolant burst from the crumpled hood even as the car fell forward on its roof. Beauregard jerked on the gearshift, dropped the car into drive and extricated himself from the dry dirt pile. Red clay flew fifty feet into the air as the rear tires strained for purchase. Finally, after what seemed like ten years Beauregard felt the rubber meet the road. He slipped by the upside-down cop car and crashed through the traffic cones. He took the road back to Route 314 and turned right.” (119-120)
Time is slippery. How you spend your days is how you spend your life. Every day matters. But Crowe understands true productivity is more than just getting things done. It’s about being a faithful steward in the sight of the Lord. “Being productive does not mean seeking first our own interests. Biblical productivity must be guided by two great commands: loving God and loving our neighbor (Matthew 22:37-39). Loving God and doing what He commands means we must be faithful stewards of what God has entrusted to us.” (5) Crowe grounds his approach in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, highlighting the benefits and limitations of diligent work. His chapter on Paul’s grace-driven effort is super. This is the perfect book to (re)read at the dawn of 2021.
“Each day is a gift from God, and those things you do on a daily basis add up. Aim to make small improvements each day. Strive to get a little bit closer to your goals each day. The ultimate goal is not personal promotion, but serving Christ and His kingdom. Remember, every day matters. If every day matters, then today must be the day to get started.” (129)
Back in 2007, I read an awe-inspiring book by Gerrit Scott Dawson entitled Jesus Ascended. (You can read a bunch of the best quotes here.) Dawson led me to contemplate Christ’s ascension and His continuing incarnation. But given its price ($60!) and academic style, it’s not a book I would ever give away to my flock. So I was thrilled to read Patrick Schreiner’s wonderful little book on this neglected doctrine. It balances deep theology and lucid brevity. Much what happened in 2020 tempted me to look down. But this book summoned me to look up. With uplifted head we look to our ascended Savior and King, who holds both the scepter of the universe and all of our concerns in His wise and gracious hands. Weary saint, look up and remember the Day is fast approaching when “all God’s people will ascend, follow their forerunner, and be with God forever.” (116)
This collection of prayers, blessings, liturgies, and laments was a close companion for the Roark family in 2020. We said goodbye to friends who moved away. We prayed for medical providers. We feasted together on the Lord’s Day. We pondered our consumption of media. We celebrated the winter’s first snowfall. We comforted one another during illness. We marked the first hearth-fire of the season. We did all these things together using the words of this book, giving voice to prayers we didn’t know we needed to pray. “There are no unsacred moments; there are only sacred moments and moments we have forgotten are sacred.” (xvii) Every Moment Holywill help you reclaim the sacredness of all of life.
Lament Upon the Finishing of a Beloved Book
“I am stirred and saddened, O Lord,
in coming to this tale’s end,
to bid farewell and return now
from my sojourn in that storied place
where longings for something
more than the life I lead
were wakened.
It is in the receding glow of that small,
bright sorrow that I now linger.
Let it do its work in me,
inviting me to dig beneath these
fresh-stirred longings, to see
that their roots are not at last a longing
for the places depicted in these pages;
but are, in truth,
profound and holy wounds,
yearnings for a lost garden and a more
perfect city, where justice and righteousness
are restored, and harms are healed, and losses
redeemed, and love proved true,
and earth and heaven reconciled.
What I feel is, at its heart, a homesick hope
for a place of unbroken communion
with my Creator, and with His people,
and with all of His creation.
What I most desire
is to open my eyes and find that,
for the first time in my life,
I am home and breathing
the wild winds of my native land.
So of course my heart aches
each time I receive these beautiful, distant
rumors of that far country!
Of course I do not want such a story to end,
for it has wedged open for me
a way like a window,
through which I have glimpsed
a vision of things more as they will one day be
than as they now are in these hard
and sorrowing lands of our exile.
Thank you, O my God,
for loving me enough
that you would rouse
my deepest desires again through story,
appointing these longings as true signposts
planted in a war-torn and cratered landscape,
reminding me that all of history
is leading at last
to a King and a kingdom,
and pointing me ever onward toward.
His righteous and eternal city.
May I return now
from the world of this book
to the daily details of my own life
with truer vision and fiercer hope,
trailing with me
remnants of that coming glory
I have glimpsed again
in story. Amen.” (95-98)
Now may the God of peace grant you perfect peace, and living hope, and glorious grace, and steadfast love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
“By way of chronology, Unink’s death occurred within weeks of Arie den Dekker’s most recent (wordless) rejection of Bavinck’s suitorship for his daughter.
These were lonely and difficult days for Bavinck: at twenty-nine years old he lived with his parents, saw no immediate prospect of marriage, and, following Unink’s untimely death, had few friends close at hand.
These circumstances set the scene for a comment made in a subsequent letter to the dying Johan van Haselen that typifies the phase into which his life was moving: ‘My books are my true company.’
Barred from pursuing Amelia, bereft of Unink, and with the likes of Snouck Hurgronje and Henry Dosker only accessible by letter, Bavinck surrounded himself with new conversation partners.
In the prime of life, his closest companions became a group of long-dead theologians.”
