R. R. Reno

Over Labor Day weekend I sat down with two books by Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and Christian Human Rights. Both recount the emergence of human rights as a distinctive moral and political idea in the twentieth century. As it turns out, the important roles we now accord to human rights and the closely related notion of human dignity stem from largely Catholic reflection during the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s. The Christian Democratic parties that were led by Catholics wrote the language of human rights into national constitutions after the War. Compared to Malcolm Muggerridge, Moyn's prose can be viscous. But the insights his historical accounts provide make the effort worthwhile, at least for me.

Francesca Murphy

I am reading The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After. The guy who translated this book deserves a medal. His translation matches up to Bouyer's lyricism. There's no taste of wood on your mouth as there is when you know the translator struggled and didn't manage to turn French into real, spoken English. Bouyer writes so beautifully about his childhood in Fin de Siècle Paris it almost makes up for not having lived there. The early chapters are like a cross between All of a Kind Family and Proust. He has some wonderful remarks about comedy and why pie throwing is deeper and more satisfying than witticisms. I am about a quarter of the way through and Bouyer has moved from solipsism to Christian faith by his experience of the French countryside as real, external, and, ultimately, an irradiation of the mind of God. Who could actually disagree? So far, Bouyer is now at the Protestant seminary in Paris, and is annoying a short and touchy professor by skipping his lectures to go and hear Gilson lecture on Thomas Aquinas in a garret at the Sorbonne. Along with half my friends, I just wish I could spend the whole week at home reading this book and not have to write a book of my own. I don't want to finish it because it's too enjoyable ever to end.

Matthew Schmitz

I have had little time to read this week, occupied as I have been with building a national coalition in support of Marilynne's Law. Countless people have joined our sit-ins, walk-outs, petitions, potlucks, hashtag campaigns, poetry readings, guilt buskings (“Do you have a moment to spare for a safer America?”), and prayer rallies.  If you have not yet done so, please join us as we work to keep guns out of the hands of those most likely to hurt others and themselves. 

Were I not so occupied, I might have finished John Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle. It has the same soulfulness found in the best of the short stories—the melancholy rising to joy (or self-satisfaction suddenly turning to horror) as an inwardly turned character beholds the external. There are the same beautiful lines, too, some almost exactly the same  (“Oh, what can you do with a boy like that?”) some newer (“Father gone. . . . Missed father, brother. Father most. Lonely places. Bedroom hallway. Staircase turning. Looked for father in crowds. Straight back. Black coat. Walking home from work. Always looked for father in crowds. Looked in stations both north and south. Looked on waterfront. Watched disembarkations of all kinds. Passenger ships. Fishing boats. Ghosts rattle chains. Live in castles. Gauzy things with kindly voices mostly. Partial to blue light. Vanish at cock’s crow. God give me such a ghost I cried.”)