What We’ve Been Reading

Mark Bauerlein

A new book by William Bowen and Eugene Tobin sounds like a dry bureaucratic tome: Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education.  In truth, however, it gets to an issue central to the changing nature of the university, a deeper one, in fact, than the usual topics of tuition costs, state funding, online instruction, access and retention, and “academically adrift” learning outcomes. Faculty governance is the basis of professional standards, peer review, and academic freedom—the things that define higher education as scientific, humanistic, and liberal (small “l”). Only when professors control curriculum and hiring can the university claim the pursuit of knowledge. But, Bowen and Tobin argue, faculty governance is increasingly a problem for administrators trying to adjust to current forces and pressures such as shifting student interests, new technologies of instruction, and, of course, financial shortfalls. The book recounts the history of faculty governance in America and recommends tactics for professors and administrators both.

R. R. Reno

Roger Scruton’s Gentle Regrets. Scruton is a formidable thinker, but this memoir shows him to be a gifted and moving writer. He can be funny, very funny, especially when describing Finns and recounting lunches with Iris Murdoch. But there’s a melancholy quality to Gentle Regrets that provides insight into Scruton’s conservatism. His is a conservatism that seeks to find its way home, knowing the way long and the destination elusive.

Lauren Wilson

I’ve just finished this beautiful little book, The Mother of the Little Flower: Zelie Martin, written by Céline Martin (Sister Genevieve of the Holy Face), the sister of Thérèse of Lisieux. Though quite short, this biography gives a full portrait of an exceptional woman whose greatest desire was to glorify God, even in times of extreme suffering. It includes personal anecdotes of her charity and devotion and also supplies excerpts from her letters, in which she never fails to express her gratitude for and trust in God’s unfailing love. Yesterday I began reading Jacques Philippe’s The Way of Trust and Love, which is based on a retreat he gave on Thérèse of Lisieux. He closely examines her writings, explaining her “completely new little way” of spirituality and how one can apply it everyday life. Philippe recommends reading the book “one chapter a day and then taking time to meditate on it, re-reading the quotations in the context of your personal prayer, and asking yourself what light they throw on your own life, what invitations our Lord is making to you through them.”

J. David Nolan

Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” was greeted with adulation from some quarters, and with disdain from others. But in a volume of essays titled after the lecture, two other short pieces caught my eye: “A Man of Courage Constant to the End” and “About Civil Disobedience.” The first essay speaks of Harry Caudill, a man dedicated to the fighting of the 

widespread strip mining in Letcher County, Kentucky; the second chronicles Berry’s own dalliances with civil disobedience, none of which amounted to much of anything, either in tangible results or in personal repercussions. Both essays offer insight in to how to think about pushing against worldly forces seemingly to big to budge: That one stands for what is the right, regardless of that stand’s effectiveness, should be “the one reason that will always be enough” to continue the work.

Bianca Czaderna

I just finished Henri de Lubac’s The Motherhood of the Church.  Through a deft mining of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and other theologians, de Lubac is able to weave together an apology for why the words “Our Holy Mother the Church” do not simply form an outdated, sentimental expression. “Church” is not merely a spiritual movement, nor a pure brotherhood, nor a learned society, nor an organization. She is a “living organism”—“the source of her life and her unity does not arise from the desire to live in common on the part of the individuals she gathers together; it is she who communicates it to them.” And further, for the Fathers, “she is in their eyes the reality at once historical and mystical that embodies everything.” De Lubac retrieves a vision of the Church that is at once expansive and mystifying and warm and inviting, and which we have largely forgotten.