What We’ve Been Reading—February

R. R. Reno

As a teenager, I was an aspiring rock climber. At eighteen, I found myself in Yosemite Valley, having gone there during a gap year before college to become a “real climber.” Half Dome, El Capitan, and the other tower granite walls beckoned. Routes had been pioneered on these daunting rock faces in the decades after World War II, many of them by Royal Robbins. So I naturally secured a copy of Royal Robbins: The American Climber, written by David Smart and published in 2023. In my year of youthful adventure in Yosemite, I repeated a number of routes first done by Robbins, which made reading the biography especially delightful.

The uninitiated may be surprised to know that mountain climbers and rock climbers engage in heated debates about climbing “ethics.” The way in which one ascends a route can be as important as its length and difficulty. Royal Robbins was famous as a proponent of a pure style of climbing. This led one of his less rigorous adversaries to dub him the Carrie Nation of “Valley Christians.” I was also fascinated to learn of Robbins’s childhood. He grew up fatherless in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I better understood how he and other postwar climbers from hardscrabble backgrounds could live in tents for months on end, pursuing their vertical dreams as what became known as “climbing bums.” Also, Robbins wrote notable reports of his climbing exploits that have a literary flair, an impressive accomplishment for someone who dropped out of high school.

I met Royal Robbins in the 1980s. He had established a company that produced outdoor clothing, not nearly as successful as Patagonia, which was founded by his friend and climbing partner, Yvon Chouinard. But it was prosperous enough to have a well-appointed booth at the outdoor industry’s annual trade show. At that time, I was a sales representative for Five Ten, a rock-climbing shoe company founded by one of my Yosemite buddies. I made a point of going to the Royal Robbins booth to shake the great man’s hand. I told him that I admired his famous routes, compliments he graciously accepted. 

Julia Yost

This month I had the pleasure of reading Michael R. Tobin’s new translation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, forthcoming from Ignatius Press. Tobin’s translation is full and uncensored, unlike Pamela Morris’s bowdlerized version, which since 1937 was the only translation available to Anglophones. The novel is less masochistic than the 1951 Robert Bresson film, which I saw screened on a dreary evening in Chinatown before the pandemic. Bernanos delineates a style of saintliness for moderns, who are, in his account, afflicted by the more or less literal cancers of mediocrity and boredom. His “insignificant little priest” is part Charlie Brown, part Thérèse of Lisieux. I can also commend the excellent introduction by Joy Williams.

Mark Bauerlein

As more Catholic classical schools open and expand, leaders might want to consult this handy little volume, The Catholic School Playbook. Authors Michael Ortner and Kimberly Begg include practical guidance on pedagogy, curriculum, finances, the diocese, parents, and reading lists. The advice throughout is confident and forward-looking. “The hundreds of Catholic schools across the country that have fully embraced their rich Catholic heritage are providing renewed hope for the Catholic Church,” Ortner and Begg write. The movement is growing, and the Playbook will help organizers avoid missteps.

There is a series of books issued by Lexham Press that may be of use to theology instructors at Christian high schools. It’s called the Christian Essentials Series. The latest one is The Lord’s Supper: A Guide to the Heavenly Feast, by John W. Kleinig. Six titles have preceded it, covering the Apostles’ Creed (by Ben Myers), the Lord’s Prayer (Wesley Hill), the Ten Commandments and Baptism (both by Peter J. Leithart), God’s word (also by Kleinig), and the Church (Brad East). Each one is short and sweet, fully accessible to late teens while not dumbing down the theology. The textbook my son was assigned at his Catholic high school three years ago was awful. Consider these volumes as an alternative.

Francis X. Maier 

In 2024, Muhammad was the most popular name for newborn males in England and Wales. It’s ranked in the top ten names since 2016. Demography is destiny, so the fear of Islamic “lesser jihad”—the outward (and when needed, violent) struggle against “unbelievers”—may one day disappear in much of Europe. Population and culture replacement is simply a matter of birthrate. The old Europe is increasingly childless. It’s dying from a loss of memory and purpose.

Yet the discipline of remembering, as the Hebrew word zakhor captures so well, is key to a believing community’s survival. So I try to read accordingly. In the sixth century, two Christian monks made a walking pilgrimage of religious sites across the Byzantine empire and recorded their experiences. At the time, the Mediterranean basin had a large and thriving Christian presence. Over the next two centuries, that Christian presence was wiped by armed Muslim conquest, persecution, and systematic smothering by various forms of Islamic discrimination. In the early 1990s, the British author William Dalrymple retraced the steps of those sixth-century monks and captured the struggle of Middle Eastern Christian communities to survive in From the Holy Mountain. It’s a vivid portrait of pathos and stubborn courage made even more powerful thirty years later by the return of jihadist violence and anti-Christian hatred.

A thoughtful reading of Dalrymple can—and should—lead to the work of Jonathan Riley-Smith, the late Cambridge scholar of the Crusades. The modern contempt for the Crusades as mobs of psychotic Christian semi-barbarians descending without provocation on the peace-loving Muslim East is, to put it kindly, prejudicial. There’s no better source of accurate information on the crusading spirit, its times and motives, and the men who carried it out than Riley-Smith’s marvelous body of work: The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading; The First Crusaders, 1095–1131; Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land; The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam; and others.

Jacob Akey

I recently took a Humanities at Hertog course on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (The Hertog Institute is excellent—college students and recent graduates, bookmark this link for future offerings.) Eliot was a secular humanist, and her book is a bit evil. There are vicars and vicarages, Christians and Christian marriages, but not one character has a relationship with God. The reader is told that Dorothea, the protagonist, is methodistic and nigh-unmarriageable due to her religiosity; she ends up being a Manichean spiritualist. The sympathetic vicar is in the wrong vocation (he should be an entomologist), and the layman interested in church politics is actually only self-interested. We know this because the narrator is supernaturally insightful—every character’s motivations are explicit and no one and nothing is Christ-haunted in Middlemarch.

I argued this to a friend who had not read Middlemarch. She asked whether an irreligious author can write a religiously infused book. I said, “Yes, there is Joyce.”

Claire Giuntini

My success with Our Mutual Friend, as chronicled last month, has sent me on a Dickens binge. I usually despise the word “binge,” but I’m afraid it is more than sufficiently descriptive of the literary life choices I’ve made recently. I sprinted through the delightful and yet sobering Bleak House, and am now reading Little Dorrit, which, unlike its eponymous heroine, is not at all little. I hesitate to make any judgments yet, though if this novel follows the same trajectory as the others, I’m sure everything will resolve well and I will laugh, sigh, and endure many pangs of sorrow along the way. 

Ellie Hancock

Imagine Alcott’s Little Women but set in Africa. Amy March would have a conniption, and at times, the four daughters of the Price family in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible get very close themselves. The novel is rich with religious imagery, reminiscent of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, setting a tone of holiness in a story about survival and grit.

The evangelical Baptist Price family packs what they think will be the most necessary belongings for their move to Kilanga, Africa—a few pills, band-aids, box cake mix, some cans of ham, a handheld mirror, and a Baptist hymnal. They find themselves plagued by various animals, unfamiliar cultural traditions, cumbersome illness, and grueling chores that come with not having electricity or running water. The people of Kilanga aid them by sneaking eggs under their chickens, sheltering them from ant invasions, and teaching them how to garden and cook. They help the Prices more than the Prices help them, the opposite of what the missionaries had intended.

The book is narrated through alternating perspectives of the women of the Price family, who through a series of devastating experiences become increasingly wiser and more bitter. Regardless of how difficult life gets or how much sway his conversion attempts have on the people of the Congo, Nathan, the father of the family, believes his duty is to stay along with his wife and daughters, who want to go back to the U.S.

Nathan cannot understand why the people are not receptive to the God of righteousness, but the shrewd reader may see that what they crave is the God who controls nature and delivers them from unjust rulers. Kingsolver’s critical stance on traditional religion is somewhat irritating. However, she rightly points out that we and Nathan Price ought to be cognizant of how we present the message of the gospel to others, and especially how we represent God to those closest to us. 

Image by Mariia Zakatiura. Image Cropped.