Category Archives: Buy This
Review: Bad Religion
In the 1950′s and early 60′s, the three greatest English-speaking poets were all Christian converts (Auden, Eliot, and Robert Lowell). Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Day were all writing high-brow literature. Tolkien and Lewis were both writing some of the 20th century’s most enduring works of fantasy. Reinhold Niebuhr, [...]
Reading: A Memory of Light
Can you grow old with friends you’ve only met in books? Do you grow apart from your book friends as time passes like you do from real friends? I just finished the last book in a series 23 years in the making. It’s called The Wheel of Time and it’s a massive fourteen-book (plus prequel) [...]
Book Review: Afterlives of the Saints
A couple years ago I hosted a small group at my house with some friends. We decided to study a classic Christian text called The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks which has organized short stories and sayings from monks by topic such as Greed, Pride, Lust, etc. At the beginning of each group we’d struggle to articulate how utterly backwards we found these holy desert fathers. Their stories seem to advocate extreme, dangerous even, forms of Christian asceticism that no good pastor would recommend. So should we treat this book which is treasured by the church? Were we being exposed to how weak and pathetic our American Christianity had become? Or was there another purpose in reading these stories?
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Story of Abraham and Isaac
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ormac McCarthy’s The Road tells the story of a father and son journeying through a wilderness in search of a land in which they can find provision and shelter. The are daily in danger of death or worse. The father carries a pistol with two rounds left. He knows that if he and his son are captured by others that they will be tortured, violated, and cannibalized. The better option would be to kill the boy himself. He knows that. But he does not trust his ability to follow through when the time comes. McCarthy’s writing is like a Rorschach test. He doesn’t use apostrophes; he certainly isn’t going to spell the moral out for you. When I look at the inkblot of this story I see a modern retelling of the Akida (a term used to describe Abraham’s binding Isaac). To review, Abraham journeyed through the wilderness with his son in search of a promised land. They were beset on all sides by enemies. Abraham, in order to prove his faith, is asked by God to sacrifice his son.
How Should We Then Read?
I recently purchased and read Alan Jacobs‘ book titled The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I was immediately rewarded when in the first section of the book Jacobs took canonical reading lists to task for turning reading into a task to be completed a certain way, with certain rules and certain materials. Read for whim, Jacobs advised. [...]
Charles Taylor and Sources of the Self
In Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Charles Taylor has tried to revive an understanding of the good that can bring clarity to our modern moral dilemma. The dilemma is that we generally agree on what is good but we have a variety of sources for these goods. For example, the dignity [...]
The truth will set you free…
The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is…that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living. – Neitzsche David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (IJ) is a prolix investigation of the difficult but ultimately possible task of [...]
