Matthew Schmitz
My recent reading has included Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and a volume of P. G. Wodehouse that has pleased me less and annoyed me more than I expected.
Mark Bauerlein
A favorite here in the office is Robert Wilken’s The First Thousand Years, and for this aspiring Christian it is accessible, useful, edifying, and entertaining. My wife is reading it, too, and every chapter she completes prompts her to call and ask, “Did you know that . . . ?”
Here is one historical surprise from Chapter 11, “A Christian Jerusalem”:
After the defeat of Bar Kochba, the leader of the final Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 135, the Jewish city was plowed under by the Romans. Emperor Hadrian founded a new city in its place and named it Aelia Capitolina after the emperor’s family, Aelius, and Jupiter the god of the capitol mount in Rome. So thoroughly had the Romans expunged Jerusalem from memory that in the early fourth century a Roman magistrate in Caesarea did not recognize the name Jerusalem when a Christian identified it as his home.
Bianca Czaderna
I’m reading a lovely novel by Rumer Godden called In This House of Brede. It’s very British, written in quietly intelligent prose. Godden respectfully narrates the inner-workings of a Benedictine abbey—the nuns’ working out their salvation together, emotion, temptation, mystery, and all.
David Nolan
Kathleen Norris’s reflections on liturgy and life, collected in The Cloister Walk, wind their way through the Church’s Calendar, through Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter. Interspersed with her musings on the Liturgy of the Hours and the mass are essays and stories about her marriage, her struggles with depression, her friendships with monks, her loves and hopes and desires and sorrows. Because it ranges so broadly across various themes, Cloister Walk is a bit ungainly. But most fundamentally, it tells the story of a heart being converted and refreshed: “My faith was non-existent, or at least deeply submerged, for so long a time, but liturgy pulled me back.”
