Our List of Christmas Holiday Readings and Books of the Year for 2020
Voegelinview 2020 Christmas Reading List
Brought to you by the friends of and contributors to Voegelinview!
Tilo Schabert (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)
I propose two novels of the truly great German novelist of the 19th century: Theodor Fontane.
The one novel I should recommend is entitled Before the Storm. It`s the story that takes place in the Eastern parts of Prussia, in the years 1812-13, when Prussia is beginning its resistance against the occupation by Napoleon`s troops. This is delicate, because officially Prussia, being under the sway of Napoleon`s power, is an ally of France. The novel, in Fontane`s typical fashion, unravels within a noble family, its milieu and the population around at large. Much drama, many discussions on politics, a thirst for liberation from the unloved occupant.
The other novel is entitled The Stechlin. It is the story of an elderly nobleman residing on the shore of a small lake called “The Stechlin” in the countryside of Brandenburg. The protagonist is a highly educated person, with a great interest in historical and public affairs (and a wine cellar with excellent French wine). He receives many guests and hence the novel mostly consists of conversations. As his death approaches Mr. Stechlin more and more reveals himself as a wise person. It`s Fontane`s last novel.
Needless to say, Fontane`s art of writing is of the highest quality. I can only hope that the English translations available have met this standard.
Martin Sattler (Heidelberg)
Walter Pater, Marius The Epicurean, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1885)
I gave the novel (or treaties on philosophy) to Eric Voegelin in the year 1975. He wrote to me in 1976, that he had not known the book before. He read it and appreciated it as a novel (in fiction) on the subject he was trying to discuss in Order and History.
George Santayana, The Last Puritan (1935)
Voegelin read the book during his first stay in the USA with great admiration, as it shows the intertwining of the sacred and the profane in american philosophical or political thought.
Robert S. Seiler, Jr. (Independent Scholar)
Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Traumatic stress is the world’s most important public health problem. This volume presents the understanding of trauma that has emerged in recent decades, many of the important new non-drug therapies, and the challenges these developments pose to the medical model of mainstream psychiatry. An excellent overview of the mental health field today.
Jessica M. Smith and Stuart Higginbotham, eds. Contemplation and Community: A Gathering of Fresh Voices for a Living Tradition
A global resurgence of contemplative living is an important part of contemporary Christianity. The essays in this volume, which emerged from a gathering at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Colorado in August 2017, explore the spiritual and communal dimensions of this reform movement.
Martin Laird Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
Father Laird, a scholar of the early church at Villanova University, is an eloquent voice in the recent literature on Christian contemplative practice. This is the first of three volumes.
Wendell Berry That Distant Land: The Collected Stories
Perhaps the best introduction to Berry’s fiction. The title story beautifully evokes the balance of consciousness.
Joe Knippenberg (Oglethorpe University)
First, two books about liberal learning:
- Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought
- Jonathan Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable
With liberal education and the life of the mind under assault from all quarters, it is time for us to think again about how we understand and how we should defend what we do as thinkers, teachers, and scholars. These two books, both written by dedicated teachers, are immensely helpful in that connection.
The next four books on my list are attempts to describe and understand the threats to liberty and liberal learning:
- Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
- Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity
- Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity
- Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
As some have argued, the narrow ideological vision we’re seeing now in newsrooms and board rooms started on college campuses. I haven’t yet given up on the possibility that the source of the problem can also be the source of its solution, but those of us whose lives are devoted to or consumed by higher education have to understand the challenge before we can effectively and winsomely address it.
Michael Buhler (Independent Scholar)
Heinrich Schipperges, The World of Hildegard of Bingen, translated by John Cumming. The book includes wonderful prints, and reminds the reader what an enchanted world feels like.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask. It might be burdensome to read the entire book over Christmas. The first essay, Odysseus’ Scar, is quite evocative, comparing the style of Homer to that of the Torah.
Daniel Mahoney (Assumption College)
The year 2020 saw the death of Roger Scruton, one of the greatest conservative-minded thinkers and men of letters the Anglo-American world has seen in a very long time. For those wishing to explore his thought at its most rich and penetrating, I recommend Scruton’s Philosopher on Dover Beach: Essays, still available in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press. Scruton’s theme is nothing less than the ‘care of the soul,’ taking aim with immense eloquence and learning against both the totalitarian negation of man and the scientistic denial of the sacred and the self-consciousness and moral agency that define the human person.
For two distinct but challenging explorations of personhood in all its manifestations, I recommend the meditative reflections in David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries, and the exploration of the soul and the transcendent in John Cottingham’s In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay.
2020 saw the republication of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics in a handsome new edition introduced by John F. Crosby. Originally published in English in 1953, the book is nothing less a philosophical and phenomenological effort to do justice to moral data in all their richness and amplitude. Only after exploring moral phenomena in their full bearing and significance does Hildebrand turn to an examination of the “relations existing between the moral sphere and God.” A book that is at once penetrating and wonderfully accessible.
From time to time, a book at the intersection of history and political and social theory appears that speaks to the moment with wisdom and lucidity. Such is the case with Daniel Chirot’s recently published work, You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences. Chirot’s book will provide a sobering education for those still in the grip of ideological illusions and what Raymond Aron famously called “the myth of Revolution.” The lesson: Ideological revolutions are uniformly tragic and give rise to violence, tyranny, and implacable extremism. A reasoned plea for liberty and moderation.
In Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul and the West, out from the University of Notre Dame Press this fall, David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson have put together a stellar collection illuminating the thought, art, and political reflection of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as well the larger theme of the Russian soul and its relation to American culture and the broader Western inheritance. The book is dedicated to the late Edward E. Ericson, Jr., a sure and steady guide to all things related to Solzhenitsyn. I was honored to contribute an essay on The Gulag Archipelago and the superb abridgement of that work that Ed Ericson produced in collaboration with the great Russian writer.
Harry J.Cancelmi (Waynesburg, PA)
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Forever Flowing
Today, we hear people shouted down by the mob as nazis and fascists — words used by speakers who have no idea what the terms mean. Interestingly they never shout “communists”. — a term that they also do not understand. Grossman can teach us about these ideologies and remind us about the forgotten Gulag.
The vocal “anti-fascists” in the media today have no clue.
“Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.”
Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. (Uniwersytet Warszawski)
For my entry into the 2020 Christmas Holiday Readings, I am generally going to eschew any recommendation directly regarding Trump or the elections. As I am writing this list of recommendations, America is stuck in a twilight moment where Biden is not yet President-Elect because the State Legislatures have yet to do their duty and the Courts and the State Legislature have yet to act. Until that happens, we are in this no-man’s land of uncertainty. Yet in I would be negligent if I did not recommend David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. It offers a picture of the “moment” that the white working classes started to turn against the direction that the Post-1968 Democrats party was heading. The story of this event of the Construction Crews that were building the World Trade Center starting a riot against the Anti-War Protestors rallying and gaining moment after the Kent State Shooting in Manhattan. Most of the political machines, including Mayor Lindsay (a liberal Republican) showed support for the Anti-War Protestors in their anger over Kent State, but their waving the NVA flag and cursing at the police and demanding the US Flag be lowered or removed, led to the reaction by the workers whose natural love of country and patriotism was set off by the actions of the Anti-War protestors. Kuhn’s account is riveting and gives a vivid account of the events as they played out and the way the Nixon administration sought to take advantage of them. Out of this violent confrontation between the Anti-War College youths and the Blue-Collar Hardhats arose an opportunity for a more popularist version of Conservativism taking root in the Republican party. Nixon jumped on board to take advantage even if he and those around him were more of the old school of the GOP of middle-class professional elites not of the working classes.
My next recommendation is Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora’s Egalitarian Envy: The Political Foundations of Social Justice, translated by Antonio De Nicolas. This book was originally published in 1987 and was helped to Print by the late M. E. Bradford (who introduces the book as a kind of preface/introduction), is still being published as a paperback by IUniverse. This book which looks at envy as the engine that motivates leftwing demands for social justice is a relevant now as it was when it was written in the mid-1980s The first part of the book offers a rather comprehensive summary of the treatment of envy by the major thinkers from Antiquity to early 20th Century (albeit missing the major voices of the Reformation, something a book written for a conservative Spanish audience would understandable omit), which is a treasure for anyone which an overview of the issue of envy as a political and social concept.
The next book is Trevor Shelly’s Globalization and Liberalism: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent (Notre Dame University Press), which uses these three French thinkers as a lens to understand the problem that Globalization and Liberalism has for the human condition, and especially for the human political condition. Shelly shows himself an excellent student of all three thinkers. For those who are interested in Manent and wishing to get a good grasp of his key thought, Shelly’s treatment is as solid as those of Dan Mahoney, Paul Seaton, or even Ralph C. Hancock, and this book would be a rather good entry point as well.
Another book that I would recommend is one of remembering of life as it was pre-COVID, pre-Social Distancing when one could go to a ballpark and enjoy our national pastime. This summer I rediscovered A. Bartlett Giamatti’s Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games. This book was published shortly after Giamatti’s untimely death is a wonderful pastoral reflecting on Baseball and its role in American life and identity. Giamatti a well-known Professor of Renaissance Literature, Former President of Yale University at the time of his death the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball. This book is very much an Aristotelian reflection on the game as a metaphor of American social life.
And Last but not least I would recommend Plutarch’s How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership, translated and an introduction by Jeffrey Beneker. This volume is part of Princeton’s Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. It offers to today’s reader a fresh and accurate of three essays (Ad principem ineruditum, Praecepta gerendae reipublicae, and An sent respublica gerenda sit) from Plutarch’s Moralia dealing with what it takes to be a politician. The format of this book echoes that of the Loeb editions of classical text, with the Ancient Greek text on the Right page and the English translation on the Left. The text is geared to be used as a teaching tool, with its extensive glossary of terms and persons at the end of the book. Benaker’s translation makes this very interesting text about statecraft and statesmanship not only accessible to today’s readers by its offering accurate translation of the Greek text avoiding many of the mistakes in translation that marked earlier translation of these three very important essays by Plutarch. These three texts would be well used for any course on statecraft and statesmanship, as well as politics in general, as they offer good lessons about what is truly necessary in order to be both an effective and good leader.
Steve Conlin (Independent Scholar)
William Desmond: Being and the Between
William Desmond: Ethics and the Between
William Desmond: God and the Between
The above is Desmond’s seminal ‘metaxological’ or ‘between’ trilogy; the very words themselves would probably strike a chord with anyone familiar with Voegelin’s work, and indeed Desmond’s works in general do resonate with Voegelin’s whilst adding elements specific to Desmond. They are rich and, I would venture to suggest, highly rewarding – especially perhaps for those familiar with Voegelin.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Idiot
For those, like me, who must read Dostoevsky in translation, the new(ish) version by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is very readable and makes this “lightest” of “heavy” books a diverting and – somehow – suitable for Christmas read (I think!).
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Behaviour
Not a book of course but a cd/lp. Dylan’s first release of new songs for several years and well worth listening to (one could perhaps use this as an “excuse” to dig out his Christmas in the Heart record for that extra seasonal touch (I will be!).
Alfred Tennyson: Song (A spirit haunts the year’s last hours)
The perfect poem for New Year’s Eve.
Lee Cheek (East George State College)
1-James Monroe: A Life (Penguin, 2020).
Tim McGrath’s new work on America’s fifth president attempts to convey the central role of Monroe in the development of the American regime. The tome may not be the last word, or even the most insightful study of the great patriot, but it is a lively and accessible book and will help acquaint many students of social and political thought with a seminal figure who has suffered from neglect.
2-The American Right after Reagan, (E. Elgar, 2019).
In this thoughtful and timely volume, Edward Ashbee (Copenhagen Univ., Denmark), John Dumbrell (retired, Durham Univ., UK) and Alex Waddan (Univ. of Leicester, UK) trace the development of conservative thought and public policy in the US from the end of the Reagan presidency to the Trump presidency. The authors argue at length that in terms of US conservatism Reagan’s legacy was “mixed in character” (p. 7) and the “Reagan revolution was partial” (p. 9), and this complicates political analysis. The first four chapters are devoted to, respectively, critiques of the evolving nature of post-Reagan conservative responses to the Reagan legacy and economic, social, and foreign policies. The remaining three chapters assesses conservative responses to cultural issues and populism. The authors’ delineation of major conservative foreign policy approaches during the period constitutes a significant achievement. The authors generally assume a detached approach toward all elements of American conservatism, although bias against “paleo-conservatism” and Pat Buchanan appears at some junctures and distracts from an otherwise exemplary study. Trump is depicted as a “disjunctive” president (p. 25) whose ability and commitment to nurture the Reagan legacy is tenuous at best. The overarching theme of the book is the gradual unity of conservatism and Republicanism in the post-Reagan years.
3- Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
In this incisive and engaging work, Thomas Milan Konda (emer., political science, SUNY, Plattsburgh) analyzes the development of conspiracy theories from the origins of the American Republic to contemporary movements. Though he acknowledges the persistence of conspiracy theories, the author is specifically interested in what he calls conspiracism, i.e., a “mental framework, a belief system, a worldview that leads people to look for conspiracies, to anticipate them, to link them together into a grander overarching conspiracy” (p. 2). In chapter 1, Konda focuses on defining the meaning of conspiracy theories in an effort to advance scholarly and popular knowledge of the subject. He devotes the majority of the remaining 17 chapters to critiquing specific conspiracy theories and the movements that have arisen as a result of these theories. Though Konda offers valuable insight on all major movements, he concentrates on those of the right wing, a trajectory that deserves scrutiny, as does his questionable treatment of some vital religious movements (especially American Pentecostalism, discussed in chapter 3). That aside, Konda’s assessment of the “new dynamics” of conspiracy theories in contemporary US politics is a significant contribution. Written with a clarity of expression rare in academic writing, the book is accessible to a wide readership.
4- Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law (Harvard University Press, 2016)
The final work by my friend and mentor, the late and great George Carey, and also by one of the best scholars of traditionalist conservatism, Bruce Frohnen, who has many more books to compose in the years ahead. This book has become a modern political classic, especially among those who have had an opportunity to encounter it. The Kendall/Carey scholarly nexus has become the Carey/Frohnen nexus! The debates over the nature and purpose of the American Constitution have raged in recent years, and any thoughtful student of the American political tradition will want to read this book as soon as possible.
Claudia Franziska Brühwiler (Universität St.Gallen)
1. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow
I have shared my thoughts on Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows earlier this year in VoegelinView; So Long is a belated sequel and winner of the American Book Award. You need to read it for passages like this: “What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. … In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
2. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, March
Staffer Andrew Aydin persuaded the recently deceased Congressman and Civil Rights legend John Lewis to share his memories as a graphic novel. The project culminated in an award-winning three-volume graphic memoir that brings the movement alive, with its set-backs, triumphs, divisions, and the painful sacrifices its members made.
3. William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues
Compelling, necessary – now more than ever.
Richard Kuslan
I suggest David Pryce-Jones, Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime.
I found the novelty of this title as delightful as the (many) short sketches David Pryce-Jones writes of each author, each of whom gave Mr. Pryce-Jones an inscribed copy of his latest work, beginning in the 1950s. What a collection for a book dealer! Commercial thoughts aside, this is a book one can dip into for a refreshing few minutes without having to work left to right through to a conclusion, but the reader may end up reading one after the other with increasing pleasure and admiration, sort of like noshing on very high quality chocolate-covered potato chips. The longer pieces on V.S. Naipaul and Robert Graves reveal the author’s keen ability to sum up the essential nature of the character he knew — and he knew each of these authors, some more intimately than others — but I’ve not read any sketch not worth reading twice. In the course of this obliquely autobiographical work — Mr. Pryce-Jones’s focus is the author and his work, rather than himself — one comes to learn of his erudition and his development as a writer.
Lee Trepanier (Samford University)
James M. Rhodes’ Knowledge, Sophistry, & Scientific Politics: Plato’s Dialogues. Theaetetus, Sohpist, and Statesman.
Barry Cooper’s Consciousness and Politics. From Antiquity to Meditations in the Late Work of Eric Voegelin.
Tilo Schabert’s The Figures of Modernity: On the Irregularity of an Epoch.
D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality. The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty.
David Leopold’s and Marc Stears’ Political Theory: Methods and Approaches.
Yeun Yeun Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.
Martin Shuster’s New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre.
Jonathan Foltz’s Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy.
Brickey LeQuire (Northwestern University)
Aaron Tugendhaft’s The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
This is a short interdisciplinary study of the role that images–including, especially, images of image destruction–play in the constitution of political order. It is informed by the author’s academic background in art history and professional training as an ancient Near Eastern philologist, as well as personal identity as an American from an Iraqi Jewish family. A timely meditation on the precarity of pluralism in large-scale political societies, it traces the origins of present-day extremism through 19th- and 20th-century colonialism and back to iconoclastic elements inherent in the Abrahamic religions, and raises fundamental questions about how to understand the constitution of new political orders and identities as social media continues to transform public life in the 21st century. An important contribution to political theory, in a vein that students of Eric Voegelin are in a unique position to appreciate.
Stephen Satkiewicz (Independent Scholar)
Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War
A historical examination of the importance of Medieval chivalric symbolism during the First World War, reconceptualizing the concept to suit modern circumstances.
Bradley J. Birzer’s Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson
A biography of the English historian Christopher Dawson (1889 – 1970), whose scholarship documented the critical link between the history of culture and that of religion.
Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Idea
An examination of the Russian philosophical tradition from one of its most prominent figures. A sufficient introduction to a philosophical tradition too often neglected in the West.
Michael I. Handel’s Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought
A comparative analysis of the great military strategic thinkers (most notably Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz) and demonstrating the common underlining logic behind their theories on the art of war.
David Deavel (University of St. Thomas)
The American experiment has been under fire from both the left and the right of late. Robert R. Reilly’s America on Trial (Ignatius) provides a response to critics such as Patrick Deneen and Michael Hanby, who have accused the Founders of a nakedly Lockean experiment in self-will. Reilly has the receipts from 30 centuries to show that whatever weaknesses the Founders had, their main ideas had their roots in the classical and Christian heritage (especially the scholastics)—and the bits of Locke they were citing were those that could be rooted in that longer tradition.
Reilly doesn’t deny there are problems in America today, but he finds them in the nihilism preached by the Progressive movement and its educational and governmental heirs. Mark T. Mitchell gives a complementary analysis of our modern problems as stemming from a strange blend of Nietzschean thought and the Puritanism that gave other, more positive traits to the American character in Purity and Power (Regnery). A short, readable analysis, it is both accessible and provocative.
Chesterton was himself opposed to what he saw as the negative legacy of the Puritans and Nietzsche, among other problems in the early twentieth century. Scott Randall Paine’s new edition of The Universe and Mr. Chesterton (Angelico), a guide to Chesterton’s philosophical views as seen through his 1908 classic Orthodoxy, analyzes the way modern philosophy went wrong in the 18th century and shows how the man with “an Augustinian imagination, a Thomistic intellect, and a Franciscan heart” went behind the moderns to the older tradition with the book he called a “slovenly autobiography.”
Going back behind the moderns to our roots often involves Augustine. Richard Dougherty’s Augustine’s Political Thought (Rochester) gathers essays from a number of experienced and whipsmart young scholars who are looking at The City of God from different angles than usual. Many of them focus on how Augustine looks at the differences between pagan and Christian dispensations to deliver thoughts about the difficulties and the promise found even within the city of man.
James Matthew Wilson is a poet and critic of serious power whose work often focuses on looking at life and America from his Burkean and Catholic perspective. His two collections of poems, the older Some Permanent Things and The Hanging God, reflect lighter and darker poetic visions that inspire and challenge the reader to wonder, rejoicing, and also authentic suffering—with rhymes and meters that click along in a fashion that makes most free verse seem enslaving. The River of the Immaculate Conception (available, like the others, from Wiseblood Books), his short volume of poems written to accompany Frank LaRocca’s Mass of the Americas, takes its name from Jacques Marquette’s designation of the river we know as Mississippi. The poems look at America with a Catholic vision that matches the roots of the country uncovered by Robert Reilly.
Arpad Szakolczai (University College-Cork)
There are two books we published in Agnes Horvath in 2020 that could be considered as highly relevant for VoegelinView, especially given the current situation:
- A Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology (written with Agnes Horvath), Routledge,2020
- Modern Leaders: In between Charisma and Trickery (edited with Agnes Horvath and Manussos Marangudakis), Routledge, 2020
Barry Cooper (University of Calgary)
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Dick Bishirjian (American Academy of Distance Learning)
Dick Bishirjian, Coda: American Politics, Personal Loss, and Recovery
John von Heyking (University of Lethbridge)
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman et al. (eds.), The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate.
Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his human rights advocacy in China, and died in prison in 2017. Leedom-Ackerman and her colleagues invited numerous friends and colleagues of Liu to memorialize him and his contribution to the struggle for human rights in China. They grapple with the pain of their grief for him, and whether his sacrifice was worth it in the end. While many appeal to a hope that history will eventually bring democracy to China, the volume is haunted by a realization that somehow they must find hope even if history does not offer the solutions they wish. Many of the contributors confront the implications of the existential challenge of Liu’s dictum, “no enemies, no hatred.” Even so, deepest expression of that challenge was voiced by Liu himself in terms of the existential hope that does not disappoint:
“Humankind must have a dream, and this dream requires us to seek love and equality amid our difficult situation filled with hatred and discrimination. It is precisely because of desperation that there is hope for us. Even if the earth were set to be destroyed tomorrow morning, we nonetheless would plant a tree of hope tonight. In this sense, when faith is rooted in our souls, we have the courage and determination to fight for the impossible even though we know there is nothing that can be done.”
J. R. R. Tolkein, Lord of the Rings
Bedtime ritual for my nine-year old son these past few months has consisted in me reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to him. Both young and old can enjoy their sublime mythology of the good and the beautiful. Most moving about LOTR is its presentation of friendship, both of the fellowship, and of course of Frodo and Sam. The drama of the two protagonists consists in Frodo’s realization that he is responsible for bearing his burden alone, but also Sam’s pure devotion to his friend. When Frodo’s energy and will flags on the slope of Mt. Doom, Sam, knowing he cannot carry the burden for Frodo, ingeniously decides to bear Frodo bearing the ring. This juxtaposes with the work’s climax where Gollum jumps upon Frodo who in the last moments cannot dispossess himself of the ring. Those two images contain the entire humanity of LOTR.
David Walsh, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries
Pity the reader of David Walsh who is still digesting his phenomenal previous book, The Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being, and now has more profundity to digest. Fortunately, however, this new volume is a collection of essays and each can be taken in one bit at a time. The volume includes essays on Solzhenitsyn, Kierkegaard, Pope Benedict, Rawls, Maritain, Voegelin, dignity, freedom, existence, hope, subjectivity, and science. All stand on their own. One of my favorites is “Science is Not Scientific” which is provocative as it is a wonderful evocation of the act of science.
Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought
Hitz provides an update of sorts to Pieper’s Leisure as the Basis of Culture in her defence of liberal learning for its own sake. Of special note is that she provides a more “democratic defence” of liberal learning in the sense that a lot of her discussion centers on those who dedicate their lives to liberal learning outside the academia, with attention paid to the examples of the British working classes of the nineteenth-century, social activism of Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, and others. She inspires readers with her defence of liberal learning as a way of life, regardless of the life one leads.
Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
Holland provides a fascinating reading of mostly Western history in light of the impact of the crucifixion on culture, mores, and politics. “So the last shall be first, and the first last” remakes moral code of the societies it comes into contact with, both for better and for worse. Drawing more from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s concept of “reformatio” than from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “ressentiment”, Holland also traces key moments of Western revolutionary history to describe the transvaluation of values, from domination of the strong to the “least of these brothers and sisters of mine.” This is popular history writing at its most vivid and thoughtful.
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