What We've Been Reading

Matthew Schmitz

Last week I read Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the kind of fun space romp that the Guardians of the Galaxy film tried to be without quite succeeding (the parodies of bureaucratic-speak and jokes about Guardian readers are enough to make a sad puppy smile). I also read King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi, a very useful book on Hong Kong's Quixote, though I'm not persuaded that what he did is properly called “art.” I also reached the end of the Decameron and have started on it again, this time armed with notes.

J. David Nolan

Though he could pontificate grandiloquently when called upon, Samuel Johnson was a twitchy, nervous man with a nearly debilitating awareness of his own mortality. His life, he believed, was marked by lethargy, sloth, and despondency, and his diaries note with consternation the wounds these vices wrought on his soul. Like so many great men, he was his own harshest critic.

I’ve enjoyed reading and revisiting his strange novella Rasselas and his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. In both, Johnson examines the insufficiencies and disappointments of all earthly endeavors and concludes that “Life protracted is protracted Woe.” For Johnson, earth without the prospect of heaven would be hell.

He spares no worldly ambition from his criticisms as he points out the disappointment attendant to all “Human Wishes.” His words to young scholars are just one example of the perennial nature of his warnings:

Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Nor think the Doom of Man revers’d for thee:
Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes,
And pause awhile from Learning to be wise.

R. R. Reno

After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestantism Liberalism in Modern American History, by David Hollinger, is a collection of essays I've been reading. First Things was founded by Richard John Neuhaus to fill the void created by the decline of what used to be called “mainline Protestantism,” which meant the influential WASP churches that long dominated American society (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, and a few others). This decline corresponded to the rise of secular elite that saw no reason for religion to enter into public affairs. Neuhaus rarely let an opportunity pass to needle mainline decline—he liked to call it old line and sideline. As a young reader I cheered him on. Hollinger corrects this too simple view of mainline decline. In the title essay, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire,” he charts the ways in which liberal Protestantism theorized its own eclipse—an eclipse the most articulate spokesmen championed as the key to a broader cultural triumph. Which has come to pass. Gay unions? It was promoted by progressive Methodists as early as 1972. Multiculturalism? The term may have been coined by the liberal Protestant academic, Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Post-Christian spirituality? That was envisioned by Harvey Cox in his 1965 blockbuster, The Secular City. Hollinger is helping me formulate an interesting question. Is the increasing pressure to conform to the secular moral consensus coming from “secularism,” or is it the same old progressive “mainline” Christianity (now transformed into a post-Christian form) that for more than a hundred years anathematized Fundamentalists and Catholics as ignoramuses and anti-American aliens?

Bianca Czaderna

I recently read Thomas Merton: Faithful Visionary by Michael Higgins. I've never actually read any full work by Merton, so this was my introduction to the man who has been described as “the consummate post-modern holy one: flawed, anti-institutional, a voice for the voiceless.” There is certainly some mystique about him—seemingly unfit for any kind of biographical box; he is seen by many as a kind of living paradox. Poet-monk, public-hermit, radical-traditionalist, Merton was a complex figure who allowed himself to be led by his restlessness. Here is a biography which (while arguably veering on the side of being too laudatory) serves as a reminds of Augustine's assertion that “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.”