Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024), updates Camus this way: “He fornicated and checked his phone.” But actually, if Rosen is correct, she should have gone one step further in her revision: “(Post)Modern man rarely fornicated, but instead used his phone to look at porn.”

We’re experiencing an epidemic of “excarnation”, says Rosen, which is an estrangement from our real, fleshy bodies and the real, fleshy bodies of other people as we increasingly embrace “mediated” forms of disembodied, technological existence. No more sex with a real human being, which can be clumsy and awkward and require practice, communication, and compromise. Instead, we have a smorgasbord of pixelated pornstars ready to cater to our most idiosyncratic kinks or pliant Chatbot girlfriends who send us AI-generated NSFW pictures directly to the phone in our palms, which leaves one hand free for—well, you know what.

We’ve accepted the premise of technology that everything “frictionless,” “seamless,” and more convenient is better. What we’ve discovered is that the source of much “friction” in social life is other people in their messy, awkward, unpredictable quirkiness. Almost overnight, we came to accept the idea that people should deliver our food to our doorstep, send us a photo of our bagged burritos, and disappear back into their cars before we are assaulted by their presence or inconvenienced by the pleasantries of small talk. And it’s not just DoorDash. A dozen innovations in recent decades, like AirPod headphones or self-checkout in grocery stores, serve the many of us who feel it should be an inalienable right to be insulated from face-to-face interaction with other people.

People are spending enormous amounts of time in virtual spaces. Some people, finding their own (real) lives lacking, pour their energies into creating an ersatz one on platforms like Second Life. But if you find this disconcerting, you’re liable to be shot down as a naive and backward-looking Luddite. Some have even gone so far as to argue that any preference for the real, flesh-and-blood material reality over virtual ones is mere prejudice. In a hilarious co-opting of the language of DEI, some technocrats have even claimed that such prejudice is merely “Reality Privilege.” Only some very privileged realities are rich and varied enough to compete with the abundance of virtual worlds, the argument goes. For most people, reality is dull, beige, and boring. And so, as one technocrat Rosen quotes puts it,  “Who is to say that a virtual life that is better than one’s physical life is a bad thing?” 

This mass “excarnation” of society—this estrangement from our own and others’ real, physical bodies—has serious consequences. We’re losing specific skills that make us human: the skills of reading others’ facial cues, of inferring others’ emotions, of understanding our own emotions, of navigating or orienting ourselves in a physical landscape, of appreciating the slow pleasures of art, of handwriting, of physical play, of daydreaming, of having sex. Almost all of these skills are being outsourced to technology, including those skills that seem most personal and most immune to technological encroachment. Consider, for example, the understanding of one’s own emotions. Certainly, nobody can understand our emotions better than ourselves! But some wearable technology companies promise to interpret your biometric data for you, such that your own messy interior emotional lives become simple and legible. No more difficult self-reflection necessary! 

Before Rosen, Yuval Harari predicted in his 2018 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow that algorithms will become so powerful and knowledgeable that we will consult them in making all of our decisions. In one of my favorite hypothetical examples, Harari imagines a woman consulting algorithms to help her decide between two suitors. She asks Google, do I marry John or Jerry? Google says something like, “Well, I’ve read all of your e-mails and text messages you’ve sent to John and Jerry and the messages they sent to you. I’ve analyzed their syntax and diction and have determined that you have better communication and romantic connection with John. A cross-reference of your wearable technologies confirms this—your heart rate and perspiration are greater when in John’s company than Jerry’s. Considering the relationships in your past, your family history, and John’s past and family history, I give you an 85% chance of a successful relationship with John. I know this upsets you—because Jerry is more handsome, and you value the social capital his handsomeness provides. But trust me. Your biological evolution puts too high a premium on good looks—but good looks have low correlation to long-term relationship success.” To Harari, this is a good thing. Algorithms will eliminate the biases and prejudices of human beings so that they can cut through the psychic smog and make the decisions that would actually result in the greatest happiness.

To hear Rosen tell it, the encroachment of technology into these most intimate parts of our lives has happened because we’ve uncritically accepted the myth of progress: the idea that human history is defined by a steady, linear improvement in knowledge, technology, morality, and overall quality of life. This myth, which assumes that change is inherently good and that modernity is intrinsically superior to the past, has blinded us to the costs and consequences of our innovations. In Rosen’s account, the myth lulls us into a kind of passivity, leaving us unaware and uncritical as technology encroaches upon our lives.

While this is surely part of the story, I think Rosen misses a deeper, more personal dimension of our uncritical embrace of technological “solutions.” One of the most valuable insights of existentialists like Camus, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky is that most human beings experience freedom as a kind of burden and, in fact, one they are often anxious to give away. The staggering array of choices available to us today and the accompanying realization that we are wholly responsible for those choices produces what Kierkegaard called “angst.” Dostoyevsky observed that people are willing to relinquish their freedom to paternalistic authority figures in exchange for security and simplicity. And he was right; we are not merely passive victims of the myth of progress. Rather, we have actively sought out technological “solutions” to outsource the existential risk of making choices for ourselves, even in matters as profound as love and marriage. Today’s Grand Inquisitor isn’t a religious figure, it’s Mark Zuckerberg.

But even if you are someone who would never consult Google about such questions of the heart, we must concede that, to some extent, we’ve all become accustomed to the “frictionless” experience. But we also have a sneaking suspicion despite all of this convenience we’re losing something valuable. For one, Rosen says, the experience of “serendipity” is on the brink of extinction. Serendipitous experiences like stumbling into a new restaurant, following only the cues of your nose, are increasingly unlikely because algorithms relentlessly nudge us in particular directions. We research Yelp reviews before trying a restaurant, scouring hundreds of photos of dishes and scrutinizing hundreds of customer reviews. In this way, we allow the aggregate mass of people to determine which restaurants we try, with no allowance that our own idiosyncratic tastes might differ from those of the many. When we go to a new city, there’s little chance we “lose ourselves” in the city’s nooks and crannies, alleys, or stores. Our GPS-enabled phones mean that we know exactly where we are at all times, and algorithms will send you personally tailored “push” notifications when you’re nearing your favorite, familiar haunts. The music and movies we enjoy are also algorithmically determined; no longer can we stumble into a record store or Blockbuster and have the coincidental experience of taking home something truly novel, something completely outside our usual patterns of consumption. The “Recommended For You” features on Netflix and Amazon narrow the scope of our possible experiences and make serendipitous surprises less likely.

According to Rosen, we need to be more skeptical about technology. More than a century ago, Thoreau wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” We need to think more like Thoreau: when we use technology, how does it use us in turn? 

We need to remember that, despite all of our technological sophistication, we are human beings with human bodies. As Ecclesiastes put it, “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.” Or, as Montaigne put it more humorously: “And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still about our arses.”

We need to take account of the qualitative losses suffered on account of our uncritical adoption of technological “solutions” to human “problems”.  As Rosen writes at the close of her book, 

Accounting for what we have lost is also the beginning of the process of reclaiming it. Despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old. If we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction, we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our techno-enthusiasts, not as a means of stifling innovation but as a commitment to our shared humanity. Only then can we live freely as the embodied, quirky, contradictory, resilient, creative human beings we are.

During the Renaissance, humanists like Pico della Mirandola celebrated the unique place of human beings on the Great Chain of Being. Unlike animals, whose natures were fixed, human beings possessed a malleable nature: they could choose to rise to the divine heights of the angels or degrade themselves to the level of beasts. For Renaissance humanists, this capacity for transformation was a glorious privilege. But today, rather than becoming angels or beasts, as Pico Della Mirandola imagined, human beings are becoming machines. Or, more accurately, we are outsourcing our experiences of being human—thinking, feeling, connecting—to our machines, as if they could live for us. Rosen’s book is a call for a new humanism—one that rejects this abdication and embraces the messy, wondrous glory of embodiment, emotion, and connection.

The post The Epidemic of Excarnation: What We Lose When We Forget Our Flesh appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Ernest Hemingway is one of the more enigmatic historical figures. He loved a great fight and a great cigar.

But what would he be like after he dies?

Scott Hales’ new book “Hemingway in Paradise” is a collection of poems about historical figures and what their lives now look like in the Latter-day Saint conception of the Spirit World.

In Hales’ take, Hemingway tries to change and gives it his best go—he even attends Elders Quorum. But ultimately, Hemingway is drawn in by the romance of his vices and his love of the flawed.

Change isn’t easy—and is sometimes downright hard. And it is this reality that motivates much of Hales’ latest book. “Progress, not stasis,” he writes in a poem about Dale Carnegie, “was the object and design of existence in heaven.”

Change is also at the heart of most of our cultural conversation. The self-help boon of the nineties has started to fade. In its place, a therapeutic worldview has become explicit and nearly universal.

This worldview and its associated language of disorder, self-esteem, trauma, addiction, validation, vulnerability, and the like have been ascendant in the United States over the last sixty years. And with this psychological worldview firmly in place, this generation has seen a destigmatization of all things therapeutic—reflected and resulting in people attending therapy more often, discussing it with others, and even seeing heroes appreciating it in our pop culture.

The sociologist Eva Illouz observed that a “therapeutic ethos” can now be found across national and regional differences. She says that no other worldview has had as much of an influence on the way we view the individual today (other than, perhaps, political and market liberalism).

I Am Who I Am

Not all of the characters in Scott Hales’ conception of the afterlife are doing their best to change. “The King,” a poem about the Marvel comic artist and writer Jack Kirby, tells a story about a man who may be intrigued by growth but ultimately has a self-assured identity. “He is not keen on changing” because he feels “content.”

But the how of Kirby’s feelings is much less interesting than the why. 

As Hales sets to creating a character uninterested in change, he relies on identity and circumstance. Kirby does not want to change in this telling because “he’s a Jewish kid from NYC” and served in wars both literal and literary. If that’s who he is, why would he ever need to be anything else? 

Kirby’s position is at home within the therapeutic ethos. One of the key “simplifying assumptions” in social science research is “determinism”—the theory that what we do is the result of our circumstances and that we don’t truly have free choice. Many have long assumed that without invoking determinism in one way or another, social scientific research would be impossible, despite many having convincingly argued this is not the case. As a result, the research and discourse mental health clinicians are educated in are steeped in this assumption. It’s natural to wonder how much of this assumption gets carried into the therapy room.

As part of my research for my upcoming book on the intersection of faith and mental health, I sat down with Bonnie (name changed). Bonnie’s family has deep ties in a mainline protestant denomination, though her beliefs have started to shift more toward evangelicalism. 

Bonnie had four children in their teens and early twenties. Three of them still live at home. And she described to me starting to observe them make choices that frustrated her. Her youngest, a freshman in high school, had recently been caught drunk—while her college-aged son had just failed several classes.

Bonnie admitted that her temper had begun to rage. She would shout and guilt her kids. At one point, she even broke a plate. And while she felt bad for doing that, she couldn’t help but feel even worse about the lower-level temper she had when her children were younger. 

If her temper hadn’t been quite so quick when her children were younger, would she be dealing with the same difficulties today? 

These questions began to cause her some deal of anxiety and depression, so she visited a Christian therapist.

There is, of course, no way to know what Bonnie’s therapist told her exactly, but when she spoke to me, she described the process as one of discovery. “I used to think that I was the one hurting my children,” she said—“That it was my fault. But I didn’t realize that it was because my dad had abused me. My friends were never there for me. And my husband was too busy with other things.” 

She paused to clarify, “My husband is a good man, but when it’s come to parenting, he’s always left me on a limb.” Bonnie recounted how session after session, she discovered more of the presumed causes of her behavior.

“I thought I was sinning,” she told me over a zoom call, quilts hanging on her wall in the background, but in her estimation, “that was only because I didn’t have enough faith.”

I asked her to tell me more, and she began to get choked up, her already rosy cheeks spilling over. “Jesus overcame sin. He did it. He did it all. It’s not my sin. It’s the circumstances of the world. And Jesus overcame the world. I literally can’t sin.”

Just like Hales’ fictional Jack Kirby, Bonnie had arrived at the point where personal change was no longer so relevant or crucial because, after all, her own behavior was largely arising from her unchosen identity and circumstances.

My own interest in the topic was first piqued by failings of my own—including times when I lost my own temper at home. And when I sought out other advice about these issues, both my own therapist and therapeutically aligned online communities focused on the circumstances that precipitated my failings. Instead of considering my own actions, I found it all too easy to get caught up in focusing on actions and choices my former spouse was making. I was able to console myself that my responses were warranted by her behavior. And thus, through this rationalization, I could place the fault for my own behavior outside of myself.

My therapeutically-minded support network, including professionals and friends, was all too happy to apply clinical language to my circumstances—positioning me as a victim of painful circumstance that explained everything I was feeling and doing.

This narrative seduced me. Blame shifting brought definite relief to my psychic pain, especially with the authoritative imprimatur of the therapeutic community. 

Trauma Made Me Do It

At one point, Scott Hales turns his attention to Christopher Columbus’ after-life fate. In this retelling, Columbus has been condemned to spirit prison and is rather upset about it. He spends most of the poem rationalizing. He had been inspired by God. His travels aided in the spread of Christianity. Nobody he knew would have done anything differently. At one point, he goes so far as to ask himself, “What were rape, slavery, conquest, and genocide when … life in this round world was cheaper than accountability?”

But all of Columbus’ rationalizing not only failed to save him from spirit prison but prevented him from finding peace, “why was he still tormented, racked with the anguish of the damned?” As a result of Columbus rationalizing his past, he demonstrates no change or forward momentum. He doesn’t even consider it. 

Rationalizing our pasts can have the effect of preventing us from changing, or using the religious vernacular, “repenting.”

I asked Bonnie if she still yelled at her kids, “Of course,” she said, “but only like everyone else.”

One common tool that contemporary therapists use to help understand their clients’ behavior is looking at someone’s past and examining potential trauma. The assent of such careful attention to trauma began in trying to explain the response of soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. In so many instances, such awareness of the past has undoubtedly benefited someone’s healing process.  

But over the last twenty years, there has been a push in psychology to expand and dilute this definition. Today more than 80% of therapy clients are said to have experienced trauma. The sociologist Frank Furedi has written that “today, trauma means little more than people’s response to an unpleasant situation.” The trend has resulted in a popular meme of the fictional next volume of therapists’ diagnostic tool subtitled “Oops all Trauma.”

In the deterministic model, this kind of trauma—especially its diluted definition—acts as the causal circumstance that clients can use to justify present behavior. In doing so, they are applying this therapeutic ethos that more deeply understanding our psychological mechanisms is enough to be liberated from them. This can create a legion of Columbuses complaining that they only did what anyone else would have done in their circumstance.

Validation No Matter What

To Latter-day Saints and many other people of faith, this rationalization butts up against the conception of sin or that certain behaviors are wrong regardless of the circumstances.

The therapeutic worldview not only provides the ballast for this kind of circumstantial rationalization but validates the rationalization as well. Validation is a key component of contemporary therapy—wherein clinicians not only understand their clients’ behaviors and feelings but recognize them as “valid.”

When clients present rationalizations to their therapists, who are then professionally compelled to validate them, we end up with a situation where people may feel supremely justified in their rationalizations—thanks to this authoritative stamp of approval. To resolve client issues, therapists are then left with two paths. First, they can help the person remove any doubts about their rationalizations—making them less psychologically distressed since they’d be more confident in their own lack of guilt. Second, they can help their client address the circumstances which are producing this behavior.

So Diane’s therapist also helped her along the second path—coming to be trained in a process where she was more assertive in telling her husband how she wanted him to act. That kind of confrontation may eventually result in some of her behavior changing as well, but only as part of changing the circumstances that created it.

Not all theorists have moved entirely away from an accountability model. C. Terry Warner and James L. Ferrell, for example, have written extensively on the subject. But notably, their work often gets adopted in business and religious studies more often than therapeutic ones.  And these trends hold up when looking at the therapeutic field as a whole. 

Rediscovering the Whole Soul

Perhaps the apex of Hales’ book comes in an exploration of Joseph Merrick. After death, his circumstances dramatically change now that he no longer has the body that caused so many to mock him as the “elephant man.”

But when he meets Michael Jackson at the grocery store, we learn how long he had resented him (the late pop star had purchased Merrick’s remains and used them distastefully in a music video).  

But Merrick is able to change at this moment, not because his circumstances had changed, but by extending to Jackson the same grace he wished others had extended to him, recognizing that they had both spent mortality behind a mask.

For Latter-day Saints, peace comes from positive change, which change is catalyzed by accountability. 

I met Tasha in her home in southern Utah. She smiled and then sighed. “I haven’t talked about counseling in a long, long time.”

She told me a story of totally destroying her life. As a teenager, she hated her parents for enforcing what she saw as backward and needlessly strict rules. So she broke them out of spite. By the time she was twenty, she was struggling. She still lived at home, but her parents were ready to kick her out. And they gave her an ultimatum: meet with the bishop or get out.

She no longer considered herself religious and negotiated a compromise to see a counselor instead. During her first session, Tasha says that she was defiant and dismissive of the process. She enjoyed her vices and saw the professional meeting as something of a con to keep her parents supporting her as long as possible.

It was after only a few sessions that Tasha says she discovered how much her counselor enjoyed her complaining about her parents. She told me that while her counselor never said she liked it, she always perked up, asked more questions, and ended by saying they had done good work.

“In some ways, you could even say it worked. I was relieved. It was wonderful to think that everything I did that my parents didn’t like was actually their fault. It didn’t change anything I did, but my parents stopped asking me about it as much because every time they did, I just told them how it was really all their fault.”

After going to therapy for a little over a year, Tasha’s behavior hadn’t changed. And while drunk driving, she hit a light pole. She tells me that, in retrospect, it wasn’t all that serious. She only spent a week in the hospital. But at the time, it changed everything. “None of the work figuring out why I did the things changed that I did them. The only thing that worked was realizing that I was the one doing them, so I would have to be the one to stop them.”

Tasha told me that she tried to tell her therapist about her change of heart. But her therapist was hesitant and discouraged her from trying to do too much too fast. So she quit therapy. By the end of that year, she was sober and going to school.

My experience in counseling was similar. None of the work interrogating and blaming my circumstances brought me peace. But simply recognizing that I was the one who made my choices and taking proactive steps of repentance to make different ones changed how I felt substantially.  

Repentance brings peace because we can be totally honest with ourselves, not worry about indicting anyone else, and can still move on forgiven.

It is not always easy. The most heart-wrenching poem in Hales’ book comes in an exploration of the afterlife of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a Confederate army general in the American Civil War and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

He is also in spirit prison. At first, he lies about his past, thinking that there was no point in trying to improve because had always believed that people didn’t change. But he discovers that “heaven was all about changing.” And so he does. At first, he finds other things to do with his curtains and bed sheets, then he begins to volunteer, to listen, and to open up about “the terrors he inflicted.” Forrest spends “centuries trying to make amends” but still feels like he’s wearing cement slippers at the poem’s end.

Yet in Hales’ telling, there remains more hope for Forrest than for other characters who refuse to improve. Yes, he may still be in the middle of complete sorrow at the poem’s end, but it’s only because in learning to listen, he’s developed a conscience, and it’s that forward momentum that gives the poem its unexpected hope.

We may be losing that hope as a therapeutic circumstance explanation for sin replaces a model of accountability and repentance. None of that, once again, is to suggest that there aren’t tragic adverse circumstances that deserve the “trauma” label—or the fact that real burdens sometimes do indeed predispose certain people to negative behaviors.

But all too often, we continue to see situations where those who seek out therapeutic help leave feeling that their circumstances create emotions that can’t be changed and are, therefore, necessarily valid—reflecting behaviors that are contextually determined. And this therapy ends up helping clients feel increasingly justified in their choices and more powerless to make positive changes. And it’s this recipe that, left unchecked, could ultimately prevent so many suffering souls from finding the peace that can only be found through repentance.

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Leo Tolstoy

More interesting than the arc of Anna’s tragic downfall is the spiritual journey of Konstantin Levin. He is the novel’s conservative, monogamous opposite to the freewheeling, belly-worshipping Anna and her paramour Vronsky. 

Levin struggles to understand and embrace faith. His wrestle with things divine torments him. His wife, Kitty, sees his soul through the softening filter of love. Knowing of his kind nature, she can say, “Well, so what if he does not believe? Better to let him always be [kind].” And a few paragraphs later: “How can anyone say he does not believe? With that heart of his, and that fear of upsetting anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself.” Amid these thoughts, she looks at their newborn son and says, “Yes, you be just like your father, just like him.”

Levin’s crisis—which reflects Tolstoy’s own real-life difficulty—is existential. It is “about what he was and what he was living for.” The more he reads and the more he thinks, “the further he felt from the goal he was pursuing.” At one point, as he considers the work he is doing and making others do on his estate, the crisis is encapsulated in a question: “What is the point?”

It is one of Levin’s peasants, Fyodor, who helps him see the light. Fyodor speaks of a righteous man they both know who “lives for his soul” and “remembers God” by “obeying the truth, obeying God’s will.” Levin abruptly cuts off his conversation with Fyodor, feeling at once the blossoming of something new and beautiful within him. In an extended interior monologue, Levin tells us interesting things about the source of his newfound knowledge.

“I haven’t discovered anything,” he says. “I have just found out what I know. … I looked for an answer to my question. But rational thought could not give me an answer to my question, as it is incommensurate with the question. The answer has been given to me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. But there was no way that I could acquire this knowledge; it was given to me as it is to all people—given, because there was nowhere that I could have taken it from. 

“Where did I get it from ? Was it through reason that I came to know one must love one’s neighbor and not strangle him? They told me that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, because they told me what was in my soul. But who discovered that? It was not reason. What reason discovered was the struggle for existence, and the law demanding that I strangle all those who obstruct the satisfactions of my desires. That is the conclusion of reason. But reason could never discover loving one’s neighbor, because that is something unreasonable.”

Levin emerges from this revelatory reverie certain that he will now be good and kind to everyone around him. His first interaction with another person displays his naivete—and also a beautiful streak of humanity that makes him such a relatable, endearing character. Maybe a minute later, his servant Ivan approaches in a coach. Levin wants to display his newly acquired saintliness and engage his servant in a pleasant conversation. But Levin can’t help himself. He can only notice the mistakes Ivan has made in saddling the horse.

As they drive along, with Levin holding the reins, Ivan gently corrects his master. “Best keep to the right, sir, there’s a stump.”

“Please let go and don’t teach me!” Levin responds, shattering his hopes of unimpeachably charitable living.

And so the narrator tells us, “It was with sadness that [Levin] immediately recognized how mistaken he had been in presuming that his spiritual state of mind could instantly change him when he came back into contact with reality.”

The Road to Character

David Brooks

Much of the Western world is oriented around the gods of achievement and consumption. We focus more on acing job interviews and surrounding ourselves with material delights than we do on building a moral life. In this important book from 2015, New York Times columnist David Brooks points to résumés and eulogies to help illustrate why the latter will always outweigh the former.

“The résumé virtues are the ones you list on your résumé, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success,” Brooks writes. “The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.”

He continues: “Most of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé virtues, but I confess that for long stretches of my life I’ve spent more time thinking about the latter than the former. Our education system is certainly oriented around the résumé virtues more than the eulogy ones. Public conversation is, too—the self-help tips in magazines, the nonfiction bestsellers. Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.”

There are surely better books than this one to help us build character. The Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament are two of them. Yet Brooks’ text is valuable because it can speak to those for whom scripture is a foreign language. He shares examples from those of recent memory—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, and others—whose exemplary lives can be models for moderns.

Brooks’ analysis ends with a Humility Code to help disoriented souls lay a lasting moral foundation that will yield joy. He encourages us to “live for holiness.” He reminds us that “we are flawed creatures” but “we have the capacity to recognize sin, to feel ashamed of sin, and to overcome sin.” He tells us that the road to character is a social path. “Everybody needs redemptive assistance from the outside—from God, family, friends, ancestors, rules, traditions, institutions, and exemplars.” He warns us that we do not know enough. “Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty. The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small. … The humble person understands that experience is a better teacher than pure reason.” He counsels us to seek our individual calling. “No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. … A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?”

A life spent in the pursuit of character is a life of joy. Brooks describes such joy as “those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve. You may not feel giddy at those moments, you may not hear the orchestra’s delirious swell or see flashes of crimson and gold, but you will feel a satisfaction, a silence, a peace—a hush. Those moments are the blessings and the signs of a beautiful life.”

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Alec Ryrie

In the winding-up pages of this important study of doubt, Ryrie makes this claim: “Once the most potent moral figure in Western culture was Jesus Christ. Believer or unbeliever, you took your ethical bearings from Him, or professed to. To question His morals was to expose yourself as a monster. Now, the most potent moral figure in Western culture is Adolf Hitler.”

Ryrie’s case is convincing. “[Hitler] has become the fixed reference point by which we define evil. … In our own times … the final, absolute, and conversation-ending insult is to call someone a Nazi. This is neither an accident nor a marker of mental laziness. It reflects the fact that Nazism, almost alone in our relativistic culture, is an absolute standard: a point where argument ends, because whether it is good or evil is not up for debate. Or again, while Christian imagery, crosses, and crucifixes have lost much of their potency in our culture, there is no visual image which now packs as visceral an emotional punch as a swastika.”

Evil, as portrayed in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is, Ryrie says, “the plainest evidence that Nazism has crossed the barrier separating historical events from timeless truths.” Tolkien was a vigorous opponent of Nazism and his famous series of books is at least a refraction of World War II. Himself a participant in the Battle of the Somme, he once wrote his son that “we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring.” Culture in the West, Ryrie notes, “has been breeding new Saurons ever since, ” including Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, and others. “And while the Christian ethical sensibility which Tolkien embodied still underpins these myths, they have, like the culture in which they have thrived, left that original taproot behind them. And this is where the emotional history of unbelief currently stands in what used to be Christendom. Perhaps we still believe that God is good, but we believe with more fervor and conviction that Nazism is evil.”

“If we are going to choose a historical reference point for absolute evil, then Nazism is certainly hard to beat,” Ryrie continues. “But as the Second World War falls off the edge of living memory, will the old stories and convictions retain their power? Are the moral myths we have distilled from them heady as they are capable of nourishing an enduring ethical sensibility? Will the lessons we have learned from them continue to seem intuitively and self-evidently true? The stirrings of authoritarian nationalism around the world suggest not. … If the common coin of our shared morals comes into increasing question, with contested histories and myths being reduced to scraps of paper, we will have little to underpin our collective ethics except intuition—unless another shared experience, with luck one less terrible than the Second World War, provides renewed values against which our currency can be rebased.”

In the current climate, Ryrie says, the religions that will thrive are those “that work with the grain of humanist ethics, while finding ways to offer something that humanism cannot. … Our culture’s moral frameworks have shifted before and they will do so again. Our beliefs will, inevitably, follow. Believers and unbelievers alike share an interest in where that story goes next.”

Augustine of Hippo

Peter Brown

Peter Brown’s delightful 1967 biography of St. Augustine (a fourth-century bishop in Algeria) describes Cicero’s profound influence on the young Augustine. “[Cicero’s book Hortensius] indeed changed all my way of feeling. It changed my prayers to Thee, O Lord; it gave me entirely different plans and aspirations. Suddenly, all empty hope for my career lost its appeal; and I was left with an unbelievable fire in my heart, desiring the deathless qualities of Wisdom, and I made a start to rise up and return to Thee. … I was on fire, my God, on fire to fly away from earthly things to Thee.”

In “Hortensius,” Cicero writes, “If the souls which we have are eternal and divine, we must conclude that the more we let them have their head in their natural activity, that is, in reasoning and in the quest for knowledge, and the less they are caught up in the vices and errors of mankind, the easier it will be for them to ascend and return to Heaven.”

Can we say enough about the wingspan of the wisdom of great books? There is no gap of time wide enough to outstretch its octopus-like tentacles. Decades, centuries, millennia—they are long but they come to pass. Wisdom distilled into words on a page and lodged in the seeking heart outlasts them all.

Among the many other gems Brown points us to is St. Augustine’s maturation toward scripture—a model for any disciple of Jesus Christ. “We must search the more closely and not despair. For now the things in the Scriptures which used to seem absurd are no longer so. … I must appoint set times, set aside certain hours for the health of my soul. A great hope has dawned: the Catholic faith does not teach things I thought and vainly accused it of. … Do I hesitate to knock, that other truths may be opened?”

Jeremiah

The book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible is a text for our time. He was unceasing in preaching against the many sins of his society. He was a deeply unpopular figure and endured terrible physical abuse. His lamentations, even these many centuries later, push us to resist the temptation to gloss over the evils and injustices of our day—a certain temptation for the privileged among us. (All excerpts below come from the Robert Alter translation; all italics are mine.)

Jeremiah called out leaders who sowed division: “Woe, negligent shepherds, who scatter the sheep of My flock … I am about to reckon with you for the evil of your acts.”

Jeremiah pled repeatedly for the protection of the most vulnerable: “Do justice and righteousness and release the robbed from oppression, and the sojourner, the orphan, and the widow do not wrong and do no violence to them, and do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place. … And if you do not heed these words … I swear, said the Lord, this house shall become a ruin.”

Jeremiah taught us to rightly order our loves and worship only the things that deserve to be worshiped: “In this may he who boasts boast: understanding and knowing Me, for I am the LORD, doing kindness, justice and righteousness in the land, for in these I delight, said the LORD.”

Jeremiah gave us unforgettable imagery of the power of God’s word: “Is not My word like fire, said the LORD, and like a hammer splitting rock?”

And to Israelites exiled to Babylon in 2,600 years ago, Jeremiah sent forth a gem of wisdom that is rife with meaning for people of faith in the 21st -century: “Build houses and dwell in them and plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands and let them bear sons and daughters, and multiply there and do not dwindle. And seek the welfare of the city to which I exiled you and pray for it to the Lord, for through its welfare you shall have welfare.”

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The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader

Jonathan Edwards

In 1739, Edwards, one of America’s foremost thinkers and preachers, delivered a delicious sermon called “The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth.” In it, he reminds Christians of their rich intellectual heritage.

Spending too much of one’s time in “diversion,” as Edwards calls it, “is a sinful way of spending time, and tends to poverty of soul.” (What would he think of our diversion-saturated culture?)

Christians should be cautious with their time. “The name by which Christians are commonly called in the New Testament is disciples, the signification of which word is scholars or learners. All Christians are put into the school of Christ, where their business is to learn or receive knowledge from Christ, their common master and teacher, and from those inferior teachers appointed by Him to instruct in His name.”

When it comes to knowledge of the divine, Edwards says the follower of Jesus should never think he knows enough.

“Christians ought not to content themselves with such degrees of knowledge in divinity as they have already obtained. It should not satisfy them that they know as much as is absolutely necessary to salvation, but should seek to make progress.” And this should be “a part of their daily business, and no small part of it either. It should be attended to as a considerable part of the work of their high calling. … Men are never too old to learn.” 

He concludes with a request that his listeners “improve conversation with others” with the purpose of growing in knowledge. “How much might persons promote each other’s knowledge in divine things if they would improve conversation as they might; if men that are ignorant were not ashamed to show their ignorance and were willing to learn of others; if those that have knowledge would communicate it without pride and ostentation; and if all were more disposed to enter on such conversations as would be for their mutual edification and instruction.”

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Novels like this are good for the soul because they help you contextualize your problems. Yes, your life is hard, full of onerous burdens to bear. But few people can help you see with proper perspective as well as those, such as Solzhenitsyn, who survived the raging injustices of the Soviet Gulag. With a broader vision, we are better equipped to live more resilient lives. 

Near the beginning of this brief book, a doctor in the camp rejects the fictional Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s request to rest that day. Shukhov is ill and feverish. His body hurts. But his temperature is only 99.2 degrees—not high enough for this doctor, who gets to spend all day inside, to exempt Shukhov from hard labor in air that is 17 degrees below zero. The narrator’s commentary here speaks to the depths of any soul who has felt misunderstood: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?”

The book concludes with a sobering exchange between Shukhov and “Alyosha the Baptist,” a fellow prisoner who displays the beautiful potential resilience of Christian faith in the worst of circumstances. As they prepare to close their eyes at the end of another back-breaking day, Alyosha notices the less religiously inclined Shukhov whisper a prayer of gratitude to God that another day is finally done.

“There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is begging to pray. Why don’t you give it its freedom?” Alyosha says in an encouragement for his bunkmate to pray more often.

“Well, Alyosha, it’s this way,” Shukhov says with a sigh. “Prayers are like those appeals of ours [to government leaders]. Either they don’t get through or they’re returned with ‘rejected’ scrawled across ‘em.’”

“But, Ivan Denisovich, it’s because you pray too rarely, and badly at that. Without really trying. That’s why your prayers stay unanswered,” says Alyosha. In such circumstances, one would be forgiven to think such words bite more than the frosty outside air.  Even so, Alyosha marches forward to warm Shukhov with the fire of faith. “One must never stop praying. … Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels or for extra stew, not for that. Things that man puts a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit—that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from our hearts.”

“Well,” Shukhov rejoins, “however much you pray it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyhow.”

“Oh, you mustn’t pray for that,” Alyosha says. “Why do you want freedom? In freedom, your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you are in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘Why all these tears? Why are you trying to weaken my resolution? For my part, I am ready not merely to be bound but even to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.’”

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Men and women have borne and wrestled with the burdens of pride and prejudice since the dawn of time. So it is not surprising that two exchanges in the drawn-out and agonizing romantic clash between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy speak well to the partisan divides of 2021. 

At a dance at Netherfield, Bennet is bothered that Darcy does not invite George Wickham, a man who has previously drawn her in with his superficial charm. After agreeing to an unexpected dance with the seemingly cold Darcy, Bennet frets with her cousin Charlotte Lucas over this strange thing that just happened. Elizabeth already knows—or thinks she knows—everything she needs to know about Mr. Darcy.

“I dare say you will find [Darcy] very agreeable,” Charlotte tells her.

“Heaven forbid!” Bennet responds. “That would be the greatest misfortune of all!— to find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate!—do not wish me such an evil.” 

Later, in conversation with her sister Jane who has recently experienced romantic misfortune but bears it well, Elizabeth says:

“You wish to think all the world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of anybody. I only want to think you perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not be afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your privilege of universal goodwill. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.” 

Jane responds, “we must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. … It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.” 

As the novel unfolds, Jane is proven right. We could do much worse (and we often do!) than make such charitable thinking the default in our relationships with others.

The post Bites of the Best Books: February 2021 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Symposium

Plato

The excerpt below (given in the voice of the woman Diotima, in conversation with Socrates) is a fitting thought for a new year and fresh beginnings.

“Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns into an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul, too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him well others are passing away. And what is still far stranger than that is that not only does one branch of knowledge come to be in us while another passes away and that we are never the same even in respect of our knowledge, but that each single piece of knowledge has the same fate. For what we call studying exists because knowledge is leaving us, because forgetting is the departure of knowledge, while studying puts back a fresh memory in place of what went away, thereby preserving a piece of knowledge, so that it seems to be the same. And in that way everything mortal is preserved … because what is departing and aging leaves behind something new, something such as it had been. By this device, Socrates, what is mortal shares in immortality, whether it is a body or anything else, while the immortal has another way. So don’t be surprised if everything naturally values its own offspring, because it is for the sake of immortality that everything shows this zeal, which is Love.”

Mother

Maxim Gorky

This 1906 novel is about the Russian working class’s struggle to overcome tsarist oppression. The English translation from Isidor Schneider is full of arresting and elegant prose. No surprise—Gorky was a five-time candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.

The most moving passages show a bitterly oppressed working class in pursuit of a Zion-like society, where poverty is eradicated and love and unity reign.

A Ukrainian character explains this vision early in the book:

“You know, sometimes you have a wonderful feeling living in your heart. It seems to you that wherever you go, all men are comrades; all burn with one and the same fire; all are merry; all are good. Without words they all understand one another; and no one wants to hinder or insult the other. No one feels the need of it. All live in unison, but each heart sings its own song. And the songs flow like brooks into one stream, welling into a huge river of bright joys, rolling free and wide down its course. And when you think that this will be—that it cannot help being if we so wish it—then the wonderstruck heart melts with joy. You feel like weeping—you feel so happy.”

The unfortunate irony is that these revolutionaries think their end (an appropriate one) justifies any means. They thirst for the blood and suffering of their oppressors. The Mother, the protagonist for whom the novel is named, seems to understand at the end of the book (and of her life) that such vengeance will not bring peace. As she is being choked to death by the police for her efforts to call out corruption, she says to those whose hands are at her throat, “You will not drown the truth in seas of blood. You poor, sorry creatures—”

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

In this fictional letter from a dying Congregationalist minister (the Rev. John Ames) to his 7-year-old son, one encounters meaningful and memorable theological asides.

On doubt and using one’s mind: “I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and the walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.”

On visions and revelation: “Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.” 

On honoring parents and the fifth commandment: “There is a pattern in these Commandments setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy-laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. In the particular instance of your mother, I know that if you are attentive to her in this way, you will find a very great loveliness in her. When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of being itself. That is why the Fifth Commandment belongs on the first tablet. I have persuaded myself of it.”

The Reason for God

Timothy Keller

What are the dangers of not taking scripture seriously? Of seeing it as culturally obsolete or rejecting its claims? 

“If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking,” Keller writes, “how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won’t have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives?  The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal. 

“Now,” Keller continues, “what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.”

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis

The introduction to this Christian classic contains a most profound statement on interfaith solidarity. The world is like a house, with many rooms of religion. Some of us remain in the halls, unsure of which door to open. We yearn to enter the rooms, where we find fires and chairs and meals. 

“It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference,” Lewis writes, “but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’

“When you have reached your own room,” he says of Christians, “be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

The post Bites of the Best Books: January 2021 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Brian Stanley

Stanley, studying the complicity of the Christian Church in the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide,
draws this important conclusion about Christians and proximity to political power:

“Christians often look for inspiration for their guidance in political behavior to the Hebrew prophets, who fearlessly declared the word of the Lord to king and nation, often at risk to their own lives. The hopeful expectation is that the churches should display similar theological fidelity and moral courage, but it tends to be forgotten that the Old Testament prophets were often isolated and deeply unpopular figures. Effective prophetic speech depends on a paradoxical balance between maintaining access to the sources of political power and preserving sufficient distance from those sources to enable moral independence to be safeguarded. Both the cases discussed in this chapter [the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and the genocide in Rwanda] suggest that wherever churches have become large and influential human institutions, they tend to prioritize the maintenance of political access over the safeguarding of moral independence. … [An] awareness of sinfulness ought to lead Christians, not in the first instance to censure the behavior of others, but to continual self-criticism and repentance… Christianity proclaims a gospel of redemption from sin, but what Christians find hardest of all is to recognize the extent to which evil can infect even the company of the redeemed.”

Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin

Two gems from the prose of Alexander Pushkin are as relevant now as they were 200 years ago.

First, in “The History of the Village of Goryukhino,” we read a caution against seeing the past through a hagiographic lens: “We should not be seduced by … charming picture[s] [of the past]. The notion of a golden age is inherent in all people and proves only that they are never pleased with the present and,
experience giving them little hope for the future, adorn the irretrievable past with all the flowers of their imagination.”

And in “Roslavlev,” we encounter an insight relevant to today’s multitudes who are in a constant state of frenzy by keeping too close to 24-7 news coverage. “Surrounded by people whose notions were limited, constantly hearing absurd opinions and ill-founded news, she fell into deep despondency; languor took possession of her soul. She despaired of the salvation of the fatherland, it seemed to her that Russia was quickly approaching its fall, each report redoubled her hopelessness.”

The present has always been messy. But it’s never so bad that hope is lost. A focus on ultimate things—the stuff that stands above the smog and shifting terrain of everyday life—keeps our souls on solid ground.

Celebration of Discipline

Richard J. Foster

“Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Richard J. Foster’s classic 1978 work on spiritual
growth via the disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.

“The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primarily spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people,” he writes.

How does one attain such depth if, as Foster says, the work of inner transformation is uniquely God’s to bring to pass? Foster’s take on the grace-works debate is smart and inspired. “The analysis is correct—human striving is insufficient and righteousness is a gift from God—but the conclusion [that no effort on our part is required] is faulty. Happily there is something we can do. We do not need to be hung on the horns of the dilemma of either human works or idleness. God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us. … If we ever expect to grow in grace, we must pay the price of a consciously chosen course of action which involves both individual and group life. … We must always remember that the path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur. This is the path of disciplined grace.”

Persuasion

Jane Austen

This novel moves slowly, but such is the price we pay to discover enduring wisdom. And that is precisely what we get from the main character, Anne Elliot.

While among others who ask her questions as a way to talk about themselves instead of hear her speak, she senses the need of “knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle.” After extending a listening ear to Captain James Benwick in his time of sorrow, she comes away with a humbling epiphany. “When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”

Later, reflecting on a difficult moment endured in the beautiful coastal town of Lyme, Anne shares a
thought that we would want to be said of our time here on earth. Yes, we experience pain and misery. But in the end, we hope to look back and see growth and joy.

“The last few hours [in Lyme] were certainly very painful, but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering, which was by no means the case at Lyme. We were only in anxiety and distress during the last two hours, and previously there had been a great deal of enjoyment. So much novelty and beauty! I have traveled so little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me; but there is real beauty at Lyme, and in short, altogether my impressions of that place are very agreeable.”

The Storm-Tossed Family

Russell Moore

Dr. Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote this book to help people understand how family—a potential source of both transcendent joy and excruciating pain— is an echo of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“Your family might bring you pain,” he writes. “What of it? To love is to suffer. But you have learned
that suffering is not a sign of God’s absence but his presence. You learned that at the Place of the Skull. … Your family will lead you where you never expected to go. But this is no reason for fear. The path before you is the way of the cross. … The way of the cross leads Home. … Whatever storms you may face now, you can survive. If you listen carefully enough, even in the scariest, most howling moments, you can hear a Galilean voice saying, ‘Peace. Be Still.’ If you give attention to more than just the wind and the waves, you might see some hands reaching out for you. In fact, you may notice that those hands already have you, holding you safely above the waters below. You are not as tossed about as you think you are. If you stop to recognize it, you just might notice that those hands holding on to you have spike- holes. Do not be afraid. The scars remain, but the storm has passed.”

The post Bites of the Best Books: December 2020 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Our politics are fractured and our ability to agree is on life support. Even so, Rabbi Sacks is a prophet of cautious hope for what lies ahead. Societal division, fragmentation, extremism, unequal economics, and anger are not, he argues, inevitable. “They have been the legacy of the misplaced belief that societies can function without a moral bond. They cannot, or at least not for long. That is why we are where we are.”

The quest to restore morality is simple, he says, compared to solving other complex global challenges, such as climate change. 

“It begins with us,” Rabbi Sacks writes. “We do not need to wait for a great political leader, or an upturn in the economy, or a new mood in society, or an unexpected technological breakthrough to begin to change the moral climate within which we live and move and have our being.” He adds that morality “cannot be outsourced. It is about taking responsibility, not handing it away. All it needs is for us to think about the ‘We,’ not just the ‘I,’ and immediately we change the tenor of our relationships.”

The Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius

This brilliant work of the sixth century A.D. has many things to say to the inhabitants of 2020. A prisoner, penning lines of lament over his unjust incarceration, is visited by Lady Philosophy. In verse, she shares time-tested wisdom to help him endure his trial with more resilience.

He who keeps composure in a life well-ordered,
Who thrusts underfoot fate’s arrogant incursions,
Confronts with integrity both good and evil fortune,
Succeeds in maintaining an undefeated outlook—
He will not be moved by the wild threats of ocean
Spilling out and churning up waves from deep recesses.

She helps the prisoner see through the mirage of political power.

Why … do wretched men stand awe-struck at tyrants?
Savage though they be, their mad rage has no real power.
If we renounce all fear and expectation,
Intemperate anger will be stripped of all its weapons.
But he who all atremble is fearful or desirous,
Through lack of inward staunchness or self-mastery,
Has thrown away his shield, and deserted his station.
He forges the chains which confine his shackled progress.

Later, in dialogue with the prisoner, she helps him rise high enough above his wretchedness to recognize the good things in his life.

“You are truly fortunate if only you would acknowledge your blessings; for while men are concerned above all to preserve their lives, no one doubts that the blessings which even now you enjoy are dearer than life itself. So come now, dry your tears. Fortune does not yet direct her hatred against all your household. The storm which has gathered over you is not too hard to endure, for your anchors still hold fast, and their grip is such that they do not allow present consolation or future hope to disappear. … Nothing is wretched unless you account it so, and conversely, the lot of all who bear it with tranquility is blessed.”

Solid counsel for all sides during a time of political hysteria and pandemic-induced paranoia.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

To read through the sufferings of Tom is to encounter one of the most profound symbols of the suffering and resilient Christ in all of literature outside of the New Testament. In one scene, Tom is stiff with the wounds and bruises suffered from a severe beating for his refusal to abuse other slaves. He is in conversation with Cassy, a fellow slave who has been sexually exploited for five years by their current master, Simon Legree. Cassy succors Tom with much-needed water in his hour of need. But she also tries to convince him that his refusal to obey Legree is futile, that Tom will not have the strength to endure such abuse for long. Why not give in? Why not make life easy for himself and obey Legree’s demands? 

“What are these miserable low dogs you work with, that you should suffer on their account?” Cassy asks. “Every one of them would turn against you the first time they got a chance. They are all of ‘em as low and cruel to each other as they can be; there’s not use in your suffering to keep from hurting them.”

But Tom, his mind always immersed in the truths of the Bible, treat’s Cassy’s taunts the same way Christ treated the devil’s temptations in Matthew 4—with a scripturally rooted, teeth-gritting, hope-filled endurance to the very end.

“I’ve lost everything in this world, and it’s clean gone, forever,” Tom tells Cassy. “And now I can’t lose Heaven, too; no, I can’t get to be wicked, besides all!” 

“But it can’t be that the Lord will lay sin to our account,” Cassy rejoins. “He’ll charge it to them that drove us to it.”

“Yes,” Tom says, “but that won’t keep us from growing wicked.”

“But why does He put us where we can’t help but sin?” Cassy asks. 

“I think we can help it,” Tom says.

The Problem of Pain

C.S. Lewis

In this brief book, C.S. Lewis helps us understand a little more of what Jesus may have meant when he described as “blessed” all those in various states of want.

“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us,” Lewis writes. “We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’ … What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise.”

From experience, many of us know “the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear,” Lewis continues. “God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulation cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

The real problem, Lewis later adds, is “not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

The Unwomanly Face of War

Svetlana Alexievich

This book is an oral history of the experiences of Soviet women who participated in World War II. They fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in occupied territories. Given the time and circumstances, the stories are full of pain and sorrow. But even in the illogical horror of war, we can see the gift of love spring through the rubble in startling ways.

“You never know your own heart,” says Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, a private and nurse-aid during the war. “In winter some captive German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked along all frozen, with torn blankets on their heads, holes burnt in their overcoats. It was so cold that birds dropped in flight. The birds froze. A soldier was marching in that column. … A young boy … There were tears frozen on his face … And I was taking bread to the mess in a wheelbarrow. He couldn’t take his eyes off that wheelbarrow; he didn’t see me, only the wheelbarrow. Bread … Bread … I broke a piece off a loaf and gave it to him. He took it … Took it and didn’t believe it … He didn’t believe it! I was happy … I was happy that I wasn’t able to hate. I was astonished at myself then.”

Albina Alexandrovna Gantimurova, a sergeant major and scout, describes a similar experience in Berlin with a boy who ran toward her near the end of the war. Both were armed with submachine guns.

“He looked at me, blinked, and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe it—I was in tears, too,” she says. “I felt so sorry for him; there was this kid standing with his stupid submachine gun. And I shoved him toward a wrecked building, under the gateway: ‘Hide,’ I said. He was afraid I was going to shoot him right then—I was wearing a hat, it wasn’t clear if I was a girl or a man. He took my hand. He cried! I patted his head. He was dumbstruck. It was war after all. … I was dumbstruck myself! I had hated them for the entire war! Fair or unfair, it’s still disgusting to kill, especially in the last days of the war.”

The post Bites of the Best Books: November 2020 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Apeirogon

Column McCann

You will not find the word “apeirogon” in the dictionary. In this novel (based on real events), we learn that it is a shape with an infinite number of sides—and thus a fitting symbol for a complicated story about two men (an Israeli and a Palestinian) who lost daughters in crushingly tragic ways.  Rami’s 13-year-old daughter Smadar is a victim of a suicide bomber. Bassam’s 10-year-old daughter Abir is killed by a rubber bullet. Since learning of each other’s stories, they use their shared grief “as a weapon for peace.”

“I refuse to be a victim,” Bassam says in an interview transcript halfway through the book. “I decided that a long time ago. There is one living victim and that is the man who killed my daughter. He was a teenager when he shot her. He had no idea why he killed her. He wasn’t some hero, some champion. Who shoots a girl in the back? I saw him in court. I said to him, ‘You are the victim, not me. You had no idea why you killed her, you were following orders, you did it without conscience. I want to wish you a long life because I hope your conscience will wake you up.’ … The hero makes a friend of his enemy. … I don’t have time for hate anymore. We need to learn how to use our pain. Invest in our peace, not in our blood, that’s what we say.”

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Lesslie Newbigin

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) was a British missionary and ecumenical ambassador. This book, penned in 1989, remains a source of deep wisdom about how to engage a world of widely varying belief systems.

“In our contact with people who do not acknowledge Jesus as Lord, our first business, our first privilege, is to seek out and to welcome all the reflections of that one true light in the lives of those we meet,” Newbigin writes. “There is something deeply repulsive in the attitude, sometimes found among Christians, which makes only grudging acknowledgment of the faith, the godliness, and the nobility to be found in the lives of non-Christians. Even more repulsive is the idea that in order to communicate the gospel to them one must, as it were, ferret out their hidden sins, show that their goodness is not so good after all, as a precondition for presenting the offer of grace in Christ.”

Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference

Timothy Keller and John Inazu 

This new volume, edited by Timothy Keller and John Inazu, brings together a series of important essays from Christian authors. One, from songwriter Sara Groves, explores the place of the candid questioner within one’s faith community or political party.

“I have to ask myself if I am stifling honest inquiry because I’m afraid to admit a flaw in the groups with which I most closely identify. I must consider whether I’m afraid that to speak honestly to issues within will be disloyal,” she writes. “If a pastor or a politician acts egregiously, there is a flurry of speech to defend and explain it away because of the damage it might do to the church or the party. I remember well how the denomination I grew up in weathered scandals with several notable personalities—I remember the secrecy, the protection, and denial. I also remember the day I realized with relief, I don’t have to defend indefensible things. My identity doesn’t come from these organizations, and while the body of Christ is essential to my faith, I don’t have to protect any particular organization at the expense of transparency and honest inquiry.”

Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom

Robert Louis Wilken

The earliest Christian apologists believed that faith, in its essence, is an inward conviction. Force and compulsion are anathema to nurturing the tender seeds of spirituality in one’s soul. In this important book, scholar Robert Louis Wilken walks us through the struggle for religious freedom, from the earliest days of the Christian movement through the 17th century. The following are only a few of the interesting insights Wilken brings to our attention:

“See that you do not end up fostering irreligion by taking away freedom of religion and forbid free choice with respect to divine matters, so that I am not allowed to worship what I wish, but am forced to worship what I do not wish. Not even a human being would like to be honored unwillingly.” —Tertullian, a convert to Christianity in second-century Roman Carthage

“Anyone brought to the font of Baptism, not by the sweetness of preaching but by compulsion, will return to his former superstition and die in a worse state because he had been reborn. My brother, may you stir up such men by frequent preaching so that they may desire to change their life more by the sweetness of their teacher.” —Pope Gregory the Great, who served from 590 to 604  

“Force may make a Hypocrite: ‘tis Faith grounded upon Knowledge and Consent that makes a Christian.” —William Penn, seventeenth-century Englishman and founder of the Pennsylvania Colony

Open Letters

Václav Havel

Can a person silently deal with incompetent supervisors and carry out their ridiculous demands without losing one’s sense of dignity? 

“Even if they never speak of it, people have a very acute appreciation of the price they have paid for outward peace and quiet: the permanent humiliation of their human dignity,” Havel says in a letter to Dr. Gustav Husák of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1975. “The less direct resistance they put up to it—comforting themselves by driving it from their mind and deceiving themselves with the thought that it is of no account, or else simply gritting their teeth—the deeper the experience etches itself into their emotional memory. The man who can resist humiliation can quickly forget it; but the man who can long tolerate it must long remember it. In actual fact, then nothing remains forgotten. All the fear one has endured … settles and accumulates somewhere in the bottom of our social consciousness, quietly fermenting.

If left untreated, Havel writes, this “abscess [can] … gradually [deform] into a sick cramp, into a toxic substance not unlike the carbon monoxide produced by incomplete combustion. No wonder, then, that when the crust cracks and the lava of life rolls out, there appear not only well-considered attempts to rectify old wrongs, not only searchings for truth and for reforms matching life’s needs, but also symptoms of bilious hatred, vengeful wrath, and a feverish desire for immediate compensation for all the degradation endured.”

The post Bites of the Best Books: October 2020 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

These books answer in part the question, “Why don’t those people just work harder and then they would be more financially secure?” If there’s anything we can learn from a greater understanding of poverty in America, it is that hard work alone is not often enough to enable a person or family to make it, despite what we’ve been taught about the American dream and the overweening value of self-reliance. Even those who are eligible for every form of government help and who have the best jobs they can find are often unable to support themselves or their families in the degree of modest comfort and security they hope for. They are frequently caught up in webs of bureaucracy, racism, sexism, and scorn from people who don’t understand how difficult it is to get by when you start with very little or lose everything. People who are struggling to find employment may also be hindered by changes in the economy, lack of education, previous incarceration, language barriers, poor appearance, unreliable transportation, lack of proper clothing, homelessness, geographical distance from job opportunities, health problems and disability, and myriad other factors that those who are not poor may have trouble imagining. Against this backdrop, these people usually cannot simply choose to do better. We do others a terrible disservice when we assume that they have family or other resources that will come to their aid, or that they don’t want to work and are trying to get away with mooching off everyone else. Generally speaking, people don’t stop working or trying to work nor do they purposefully decrease their earned income because they get the assistance they need or even when they become rich.

I grew up in a single-mother household after my parents’ marriage ended when I was 7 years old. While I never feared we would go without basic food and shelter, I think my mother worried that we would. She needed to find a job—the court-ordered $100 per month total child support for my sister and me wasn’t going to go very far—and in 1964 she applied for work at a utility company in Amarillo, Texas, telling them she could type 100 words per minute. Fortunately, they didn’t give her a typing test, but she did have to ask a co-worker how to turn on the electric typewriter on her first day of work. She went on to manage the credit union of a large company in Dallas, but she never spent a day of her 53 years without wondering how we would get by financially. I had my own days of financial anxiety when I was putting myself through BYU—at best earning $100 a month as a part-time student secretary—and I have to credit the Lord with getting me through college, because there is no rational way to look back, count the cost, and see where the money came from. But I never came close to being as poor as some of the people in the books on the list below. I believe we would have a more Zion-like society if we stopped worrying about who is getting benefits they don’t deserve and started worrying about who needs help and is not getting it. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, more people have learned in the worst way that one bad day or diagnosis can send a person into poverty and desperation; even with temporary help from the government and private charities, the future can look very bleak, a home can be lost in a matter of days, and health insurance is a luxury enjoyed mostly by people who are dependably employed.

One solution to this problem is for the rest of us to be even more generous and compassionate now, in our personal, social, and political lives. For believers, we must not wait for someone else to aid the poor; we covenanted at baptism to “bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; … mourn with those that mourn; … and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:8–9). The Zion society described in Fourth Nephi in the Book of Mormon was an ideal situation that lasted for four generations after the resurrected Christ established His Church in the New World. One characteristic of this place where “there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God” was that “they had all things common among them, therefore they were not rich and poor …” (4 Nephi 1:3, 16).

Apostle D. Todd Christofferson taught:

It is supremely important to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. When He comes, oppression and injustice will not only diminish; they will cease … . Poverty and suffering will not only decline; they will vanish … . Even the pain and the sorrow of death will be done away … . So yes, let us do all we can to relieve suffering and sorrow now, and let us devote ourselves more diligently to the preparations needed for the day when pain and evil are ended altogether.

If, in the ideal society, there are no poor people; if, indeed, in the Lord’s way to provide for all His saints, “the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low” (D&C 104:16), we should look for ways to understand how bring the poor up and (although this idea will be painful to many) bring the rich down so that all share equally—ways consistent with the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Clearly, there are different ideas on how to do this—with thoughtful people not always agreeing on the best ways to support the poor or how to move towards more equitable prosperity. A beginning step is to understand our own and others’ lives by reading what has been written by those who have studied poverty, bias, and discrimination. The following is a list of books that have had a significant impact on me—and I leave after each one some commentary on my take-away thoughts.  Other important books remain to be written and read; these are just a beginning.

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City, 2017

This book is heartbreaking and angering—Americans are doing a terrible job of taking care of the poor, who face “housing insecurity” and very often can’t seem to get ahead without a miracle in the sometimes extortionate private rental market. Their poor choices and bad luck, as well as the shortage of public or subsidized housing, also keep them out of the inadequate public housing market. Everywhere they turn a new emergency can come up that results in eviction, constant moving, homelessness, job loss, terrible conditions—it just goes on. For example, if a tenant complains to a landlord that the heat doesn’t work or the plumbing is backed up, the landlord in some states can, without too much trouble, evict them and find a tenant who won’t complain about even the worst conditions. A lot of landlords are profiting from “grinding the faces of the poor,” as Isaiah called it. Other industrialized countries manage to deal with these problems, but here, as with healthcare, the United States falls short. The author, an ethnographer, lived in inner-city Milwaukee and paints a detailed portrait of the vicious downward spiral of poverty. He presents the facts and people’s stories and then his conclusions and recommendations. This is a brilliant book that is hard to read because the horrible circumstances are multiplied many times over in American cities and so little is being done.

Kathryn Edin & Martha J. Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, 2005

This important book answers the question, “Why don’t those poor women get married before they have babies?” The authors were embedded in six impoverished African American, Puerto Rican, and white neighborhoods in Philadelphia for two years and interviewed hundreds of mothers. While the answers differ slightly for each ethnic group, the conclusions are that motherhood is one of the only ways of establishing a woman’s identity as a responsible adult in these neighborhoods (where women’s opportunities are so limited). The pool of marriage-able men is breathtakingly shallow, and motherhood is essential to these women—a life without children is a tragedy to them—but marriage is an ideal and a luxury that many dare not embark on without testing a man’s worth as a potential husband and without her own financial security. The actual conclusions are more nuanced than my summary, and the research is well-supported from a social science standpoint. The authors’ contrasts between the approach that many impoverished young women in the inner city decide makes sense compared to the attitudes that seem obvious to people with some financial security are especially valuable.

Kathryn Edin & Timothy J. Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, 2013

This companion volume to Promises I Can Keep, which focused on inner-city single mothers, tells the story of inner-city single Philadelphia fathers, black and white, and their relationships to their children. These men are unable, due to economic and cultural restrictions and their own poor choices, to fulfill the traditional role of breadwinner for their children; therefore they “do the best they can” on the providing front while concentrating instead on having quality time and being a real father (as opposed to “just a paycheck”) for their children. That they sometimes aren’t good at this role does not mean that their attempts don’t have value for the children (and the men as well).  Many of these fathers strongly feel the absence of their own fathers and are trying to make up for that with their children. Tragically, there is a tendency in some cases, when the fathering role does not work out with one child, for a man to turn his attention to another child with a different mother. Many fathers also expect their children’s mothers to be able to provide financially even if they cannot help, while the mothers are still expected to achieve all that is expected of mothers in terms of nurturing and emotional support—a very tough gig for mothers that does not result in financial or family security for children. Like the companion study, this book takes up the question, “Why don’t they just get married?” These impoverished (in almost every sense) adults have not given up on marriage, but instead have such high expectations of marriage that they cannot meet them. And yet, the rewards of having children are so great that they do not see any reason to go without them, and they do not consider that they are doing the children any disservice by bringing them into this less-than-perfect situation. Thus the father–child relationship becomes paramount, while the children’s mothers become almost irrelevant and sometimes an adversary to these fathers who are trying to do their best by their own lights. These two books explain a lot about circumstances that have been the subject of inaccurate assumptions by more fortunate people. 

Robert E. Friedman, A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone, 2018

This book makes the case for working to decrease income inequality and giving everyone a chance to seek education, home ownership, and create a business. This would be funded through “Prosperity Accounts,” which every American would have the opportunity to create; their savings would be matched by the government in differing ratios depending on where they fall in the current range of asset holding (from a 3:1 match for those in the lowest quintile of assets to a 0:1 match for those with abundant assets). We already construct our economy to favor some groups over others (such as through tax laws that often benefit the wealthy); Friedman suggests we could restructure it to give more people an equal chance to survive and to build wealth. Previous such programs that effectively helped people create wealth, like the Homestead Act and the G.I. Bill, excluded people of color and women (in practice and often by law), and the differing ranges of matching funds would make up for some of that past discrimination, which has contributed to gross income inequality. We could pay for these Prosperity Accounts by taxing capital gains as income, increasing the inheritance tax, changing the way we treat capital gains at death, and other measures that the author outlines in detail. These types of economic policies have greatly benefited the top 1 percent of Americans in terms of wealth and have left many of the rest struggling. Pilot programs have already established that poor people will save and thrive when they have a meaningful chance to invest in themselves and their families. Friedman argues that all it takes is a chance—even just a few thousand dollars.

Steven Pearlstein, Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity is Not Equal, and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor, 2018

This excellent book not only outlines problems with our economic system, but also suggests how we can fix things. The title is a bit of a teaser; the author is not opposed to capitalism but to the unfettered capitalism that increasing numbers argue has done and is doing so much damage. One of the author’s main points is that the American economy and society has been shaped by the idea that corporations are to be managed with the primary goal of maximizing profits for shareholders. That orientation is not legally required, and it exacerbates inequality and means that other stakeholders—the employees, the communities where the corporation is located, society in general—are not consistently considered in business decisions, with bad results. (And then, when circumstances lead to the failure of these corporations under the unfettered capitalism system, they often ask for government–that is, taxpayer-funded–bailouts!) This philosophy and others are matters of societal choice and could be changed to lead to a better and higher standard for public policy in the United States.

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Kathryn Edin, Laura Tach, & Jennifer Sykes, It’s Not Like I’m Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World, 2015

Another excellent book about how Americans are poor or barely getting by, researched and written by Kathryn Edin and her colleagues. All but the most difficult-to-obtain government cash welfare payments ended in 1996, despite the continuing stereotypes of lazy people taking advantage of taxpayers. Now people are trying to get by on low-wage jobs and the cobbled-together possibility of other government benefits, none of which add up to enough to live on in even modest comfort. This book is persuasive about the importance of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, and the policy suggestions that the authors make at the end of the book are worth considering. This is a great example of how to do research in the social sciences, while allowing the reader to share the experiences of the subjects, who are treated with respect and compassion.

Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaffer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, 2015

This wrenching book details the effects of the 1996 welfare reform on families who have subsequently struggled to find access to cash assistance and so are forced to go hungry, live in squalid conditions, and other circumstances that should never be the case. The story is told through the lives of families the authors interviewed in depth, as well as social science research. There are many expenses not covered by government assistance but necessary to survive and thrive: car repairs, laundromats, school supplies, clothing and shoes, bus fares, and the list goes on. People who want to work and are doing everything they can to feed, clothe, and house their families are unable to do so when the welfare program that is based on employment and jobs are unavailable or do not pay a living wage. Children are going hungry and suffering in many other ways. To alleviate these difficult situations, the authors propose that we should (1) raise the minimum wage; (2) require employers to post employee schedules at least three weeks in advance (because current on-demand scheduling prevents people from enrolling in school, obtaining a second job, and getting reliable childcare, among other problems); (3) require employers to guarantee a number of hours for their full- and part-time workers; (4) increase housing security and find ways to discourage predatory practices on the part of landlords (see the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond for more about these); and (5) advertise the availability of TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) while reversing state practices of low funding and discouraging application practices for this emergency cash fund. An increase in and broadening of the availability of the Earned Income Tax Credit would also be helpful. Many people are struggling and suffering in the current situation; there are many ways to make things better.  

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, 2018

The author takes a close look at private foundations and other organizations created by the “winners” who have gathered many assets and then seek to do good in the world—which they do. But the author and reader wonder if they have looked at how they earned the money they are now so generous with: Do they pay and treat their workers well? Do they exercise proper stewardship over the planet and its resources in the process of making money? Do they examine the inequality that frequently helped generate their wealth? Also, the author questions the pro-business orientation of so many of these philanthropic endeavors, to the point that they think market forces can solve all the problems of the world and that the best thing would be to minimize government almost to the point of non-existence and let unfettered capitalism fix everything. The problem with that unfettered capitalism is that democracy no longer has much of a place in determining priorities; at the same time, comparatively few wealthy people who can afford to lobby lawmakers are deciding the best way to alleviate many social problems. These well-off few also seem willing to look at approaches to problems only when those approaches don’t threaten the system that brought them so much wealth in the first place and helps them to keep it. This is a thought-provoking book that should sound the alarm about the obsession with making money that motivates so many individuals, corporate leaders, and government officials today. The idea that a corporation must be run for the primary benefit of its shareholders, without reference to the needs of the community of which is a part and the employees who work for it, is relatively recent and leads to dangerous distortions in the way society works—or doesn’t—for many people.

Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, 2019

This memoir checked every box on the list of how hard it is to get by even with government assistance, a minimum wage job, and a child to support. Land left her violent husband, who fought her for custody of their young daughter (even though he’d encouraged the author to have an abortion and was outrageously abusive toward her). She had no family that she could depend on for help or encouragement. So many people treated her with unkind judgments: as though she were too lazy to work (although she was working hard, cleaning houses under terrible conditions); as though she were invisible and worthless; as though their status as taxpayers gave them the right to look down on her because she was getting what passes for government help in this country (huffing and whispering about her in the checkout lane and then shouting “you’re welcome” after she pays with food stamps). The book illustrates the difficulty of finding cash for things that government help doesn’t cover (clothes, car repairs, etc.); the pain of dropping her daughter off at daycare so she could work as a maid for people who had so much more; paradoxical criticism because her daughter was in daycare and she was working too much—or not enough; the lack of a safety net of any kind, where a $50 unexpected charge meant some other bill must go unpaid or a sick child had to go to daycare because there was no other care available; earning an extra $50 and therefore losing hundreds of dollars in government benefits because of this small temporary change in income—it is all there, and more. The United States could do so much more to help people in need; individuals and institutions could do so much better at not judging others and having more kindness. The author found a way to hope; I worry about the people who have no hope, especially in this era where cuts to social services and similar programs seem to be the norm.

Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, 2020

The authors begin with all the kids on Nicholas’s elementary school bus who have been lost to drugs and other despair and use their stories to show how these Americans have been tossed aside by the economy and other factors that have led to huge problems in the United States. They also recommend solutions. Their central point is that, although individuals are responsible for their choices, society and communities also bear responsibility for the abandonment of children to poverty and the failure to provide jobs and social services in this country. We could be doing a lot better, and it would save money and lives in the short and long runs.

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Social Poverty: Low Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties, 2019

This excellent book demonstrates why thoughtlessly throwing money at people who are struggling with poverty and with troubled relationships is not enough (although the anti-poverty programs and the people in poverty could use much more funding). The author studied a program, “Family Expectations,” in Oklahoma City, which gives relationship education and other services to low-income couples who are expecting or have just had a child.  While many of these people are struggling financially, they are also suffering from relationship poverty, or social poverty—without a sufficient community of trustworthy parents, extended family, friends, or others to fall back on when they need help or good examples. As a result, these are people who have had few role models for adequate relationships, for marriage or couplehood, or for parenting.  The analysis of the program leads to a broader analysis of what people need and how these types of programs can help with the right mix of respect, education, practice, and models of kindness in a community of educators and learners. 

The post Deepening Empathy, Compassion, and Understanding Through Reading, Part 2 appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

G.K. Chesterton

In this classic work of Christian apologetics, the prince of paradox delivered an insight that illuminates what Jesus may have meant when he told his followers to become “like a little child.”  

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

You Are What You Love

James K. A. Smith

Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College, analyzed the formative power of the larger culture on our souls and the importance of weekly worship in the home and at church to combat its influence.

“An hour and a half on Sunday morning is not sufficient to re-habituate hearts that are daily immersed in rival liturgies. Yes, gathered, congregational worship is at the heart of discipleship, but this doesn’t mean that communal worship is the entirety of discipleship. While communal worship calibrates the heart in necessary, fundamental ways, we need to take the opportunity to cultivate kingdom-oriented liturgies throughout the week. The capital-L Liturgy of Sunday morning should generate lowercase-l liturgies that govern our existence the rest of the week. … Recognizing worship as the heart of discipleship doesn’t mean sequestering discipleship to Sunday; it means expanding worship to become a way of life. … We should be attentive to the rhythms and rituals that constitute the background hum of our families and should consider the telos toward which these activities are oriented. The frenetic pace of our lives means we often end up falling into routines without much reflection. We do what we think ‘good parents’ do. And we might think these are just ‘things that we do’ without recognizing that they may also be doing something to us.”

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer spent the last two years of his life imprisoned for his role in a plot to kill Hitler. In his final letter to his fiancé, some four months before his execution, he described how in the solitude of prison “the soul develops senses which we hardly know in everyday life.” Among these, he wrote in an earlier letter, is a hidden joy found only along the pathway of pain. 

“Stifter once said ‘pain is a holy angel, who shows treasures to men which otherwise remain forever hidden; through him men have become greater than through all joys of the world,’” he wrote. “It must be so and I tell this to myself in my present position over and over again—the pain of longing which often can be felt even physically, must be there, and we shall not and need not talk it away. But it needs to be overcome every time, and thus there is an even holier angel than the one of pain, that is the one of joy in God.”

A 20th Century Testimony

Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge, an English journalist and satirist who converted to Christianity later in his 60s, left this powerful witness of what Christ’s suffering wrought in his life:

“Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful… [and] I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo … the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross signifies. And it is the cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.”

Resurrection

Leo Tolstoy

In a passage from Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s novel, Resurrection, he described the charitable heart and soul of probably every woman I know. This is a reminder to both recognize and acknowledge the remarkable feminine gifts that surround us every day.

“[She] never thought of herself, her only concern being to find ways of helping other people, in matters great and small. … [H]er favorite sport was charity. Like a hunter on the look-out for game, she focused the whole interest of her life on finding ways of serving others. And the sport had become a habit, the sole concern of her life. And all of this came so naturally to her that those who knew her took it for granted and placed no value upon it.”

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