Theology That Bites Back
So I like to read, and consequently I have continued to do so. The list of books I read in 2017 is now posted here. I also like to let people know when I have read a hot one, and so that is why I have a monthly feature informatively called The Book of the …
I really enjoyed Taleb’s book The Black Swan, and picked up his Antifragile shortly after it came out. I started it, and was enjoying it, but stalled out for some reason. I don’t remember. It was dark. They were big. His book found itself in my lamentably large and scattered collection of partly read books. …
The Grace of Shame: 7 Ways the Church Has Failed to Love Homosexuals Tim Bayly, Joseph Bayly, and Jürgen von Hagen This is a book about repentance, and it is also—fittingly—a book of repentance. In it, Tim Bayly tells the story of a man under his ministry years ago, struggling with homosexual temptations. He was …
Princeton University Press has a series of “biographies” of great religious books, which is in itself a great idea. I had only read one of them before—Alan Jacobs’ bio of the Book of Common Prayer—and so I came with enthusiasm to George Marsden’s “life” of Mere Christianity. The book did not disappoint, and was really …
Reading a book with as many charts and graphs as this one had shouldn’t have been so much fun, but it really was. This month’s selection for the book-of-the-month is The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein. This book was a blast. Some of the points made here are commonplaces for conservatives—e.g. the …
For those who—unlike myself—function with tidy minds, I must begin by acknowledging that there was no Book of the Month/July 2017. This is because it was dark, they were big. It won’t happen again. Those responsible have been sacked. And for this round, I want to do something a little different. I read this book …
Rod Dreher is to be commended for many aspects of The Benedict Option. But at the end of the day, it reminds me of a fistful of pearls, with no thread available to make the necklace. I am glad I read it, and I am glad for the stand that Dreher is taking against various …
I will not have a lot to say about this next chapter of The Benedict Option, the chapter on “Eros and the New Christian Counterculture.” I do have some cavils here and there about how much monastics have to teach us about human sexuality, but in the main this is a really solid chapter. Dreher …
Out of the Ashes really is a marvelous book, and Anthony Esolen is a baller. He tackles the same problem that Rod Dreher is addressing in The Benedict Option—which is the apostasy and resultant deterioration of a formerly Christian culture—but he does it with a lot more verve. In fact, any more verve and it …
In his next chapter, Rod Dreher spends a good bit of time singing a song I am very familiar with, and he says many good things. The cultural key is education, and what Dreher urges is, from one standpoint, very heartening. “This is why we have to focus tightly and without hesitation on education” (Loc. …
