What We’ve Been Reading (& Listening To)

Matthew Schmitz

The 9/11 Memorial Museum is conceived as a narrative device, leading visitors minute by minute through the ugly day. Voice, text, image, and relic—a million cathedrals and martyrologies of relics—are the methods of teaching. We not only see pictures of the dead and what they wore but hear the voicemails they left their loved ones.

I am skeptical of memorials which work harder to bring their subject to life than mark its death, which is why I found respite in the book shop. There I picked up a copy of Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. It is an engrossing (the word used for enjoyment when enjoyment is a word one can’t use) read, detailing how Al Qaeada rose unnoticed except by a few unheard men before seizing everyone’s attention. The history feels like a warning. 

J. David Nolan

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1968 book, Introduction to Christianity, an erudite exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, moves without difficulty from close textual analysis of the biblical and philosophical texts to sweeping comments about Western thought. Popes-to-be are allowed to do both, and Ratzinger does both well.

The first one hundred pages of the book struck me as very Taylorian. Ratzinger’s description of the believer and the unbeliever standing side-by-side whispering “perhaps” into each other’s ears sounds not unlike Charles Taylor’s suggestion that we can’t help but live our faith “in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” But given that Taylor recently received a severe scolding for being a “theologian of the secular status quo,” I wouldn’t want to accuse Ratzinger of imagining faith and doubt in the same way as the Canadian philosopher.

I’m not the first to worry, though, about the pope-emeritus’s formulation. In an essay for First Things, the late Edward T. Oakes placed Ratzinger next to Newman, who wrote: “I may love by halves, I may obey by halves; I cannot believe by halves: either I have faith, or I have it not.” But Oakes thinks it possible to doubt as Ratzinger does and believe as Newman does without contradiction. One can completely submit one’s intellect and will to God—the classic definition of faith—while realizing that those around you might find your faith unintelligible, unattractive, and not compelling. In other words, conditions may have changed, but content has not.

R. R. Reno

I’ve been reading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West.

Bianca Czaderna

As I haven’t made as much headway in von Balthasar’s A Theology of History as I would have liked this week (read: I’ve made no headway), I can only offer a meager sampling of music that I’ve been listening to recently.

First, Anais Mitchell, whom I first heard when browsing episodes of NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts” on Youtube (which, by the way, are worth perusing; they are very intimate little performances, and the NPR people invite largely experimental musicians of various genres, both well-known and relatively un-known). Her voice has a dulcet, childlike quality which was a little off-putting at first, but it grew on me in a big way. She is clearly a deft guitarist, but most striking are her poetic, story-telling lyrics (maybe it runs in the family? Her father is a novelist and college professor) which are sophisticated and homespun at the same time. She’s been described as the “queen of modern folk music.” Two favorites are “Tailor” and “Shepherd.”

And also, remember Feist? The Canadian indie pop singer-songwriter who had that catchy, quirky song, “1234”, that was in that commercial for the iPod nano in 2007, and hit #8 in the US? A rather rare feat for an indie rock musician. Well, it turns out that she has quite a few really entrancing songs. Particularly, I love the soft, layered movement of “Homage,” which is a duet with Timber Timbre, and is part of a compilation album released in 2013 called “Arts & Crafts X.” Also cool is her collaboration with Kings of Convenience, “Know-How.” And finally, I can’t help it: this remix of her song, “Mushaboom.”