The Reading Life - A Review

For the publishing companies that hold the rights to the works of C. S. Lewis, his continued popularity has been a regular stream of income for decades. Whoever signed that contract with Lewis and, later, his literary estate, probably has a plaque somewhere in the building.

Over the years, revenue from Lewis’s work has been increased by repackaging some of his essays under different titles. The list of titles overlap across volumes published under his name, but to get access to a comprehensive set of Lewis’s shorter works has traditionally been very expensive, due to the sheer number of titles that one had to purchase. (There is actually a single volume collection of Lewis’s essays and short works, but it is out of print, expensive, and hard to come by.)

I am, as a result, a little skeptical when gift-sized books with excerpts of Lewis’s work are published. Some of those volumes add little value to Lewis’s legacy, but consist of quotes everyone knows or repackaged portions of his already popular works. They are cotton candy for those who like Lewis, but don’t want to go through the work to thoughtfully engage his lengthier works.

The recently published volume, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes, is a welcome surprise. It manages to present Lewis’s thoughts on a particular topic while increasing interest in Lewis as a whole. In short, this short book of Lewis excerpts is more than a marketing ploy, it is a quality contribution to Lewis studies.

Those that are only somewhat familiar with Lewis are often surprised by how much he wrote. Beyond his A-side books, like The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, there are a wide range of equally or more significant books—his B-side books--that many people never touch and are generally unaware of. The Reading Life includes a number of passages from Lewis’s more popular works, but also includes extended sections from some of his less well-known writings. There are also excerpts of letters in the back of the book, which illuminate Lewis’s thoughts on the subject from a less-formal context.

The result of the careful curation of Lewis’s writing on reading is that those interested in seeing what Lewis has to say about this particular topic now have what amounts to a curated index of passages to use for further research. Those that simply want to geek out reading something from their favorite author on their favorite topic will also find benefit, as the passages chosen are lengthy enough to be engaging and give a sense of Lewis’s style. In short, this book is valuable to the researcher and to fan, though for different reasons.

This is no work of stodgy, formal scholarship. But it was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours comfortably curled up in my armchair. It was fun to enjoy the curated volume without feeling like I had descended into a kitschy puddle of sentimentalism. I commend this book to those who enjoy C. S. Lewis and reading.

The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes

By C. S. Lewis

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis

According the Walter Hooper, the man who became the executor of C. S. Lewis’s literary estate, Lewis did not expect to have his books read for long after he died.

That is, of course, the way of it for even many good writers and careful thinkers. During their lives, when they are writing essays and giving lectures, their books sell because they are on trending topics and there are regular reminders that a certain book exists.

People continue to find C. S. Lewis helpful for several reasons. Unlike many academic writers and moralists, Lewis wrote children’s books that are enjoyed by a wide swath of people, both those inside and outside his ideological camp. This means that Lewis’s other works have a fighting chance of being picked up, even if someone wasn’t initially very interested in an essay entitled, “Religion and Rocketry.”

In his intellectual biography of Lewis, McGrath explains Lewis’s ongoing popularity by three reasons:

1.       The continued value of his apologetic work.

2.       His religious appeal.

3.       His use of imagination in defense of the faith.

I think these three are valid, but one needs to go a little further to get at the heart of the reason for the continued sales of the works of C. S. Lewis. Michael Travers noted another reason beyond those offered by McGrath:

In addition to these reasons, there is an underlying reason for Lewis’s ongoing important: he wrote about things of first importance, timeless truths that he thought we needed to hear. In his writings, Lewis taps into the essential human condition in such a way that we catch glimpses of truths we had forgotten or perhaps suppressed, especially in our modern, Post-Enlightenment culture. One of these truths is that everyone is on a journey, hoping for heaven, even when we do not know it or refuse to admit it.

Travers’s explanation gets at the concept of the Christian mind of C. S. Lewis.

Lewis remains fascinating to many Christians at varying levels of education and experience, and across denominational boundaries, primarily because he gets at the heart of what it means at piece to live with the Mind that imagined the universe, set its boundaries, and controls the course of history. The Christian mind provides evidence of the truth of reality and how to live within that truth.

Lewis is one of a number of Christian thinkers who had the Christian mind. In his own time Dorothy L. Sayers and Francis A. Schaeffer had a deep understanding of reality and were able to point people toward it. Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck overlapped with Lewis, but also had the Christian mind. As we look back in Church history, the number grows: Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo both thought and wrote with the Christian mind.

At a most basic level, the Christian mind is one that recognizes the enduring truth, goodness, and beauty of God. It is therefore drawn perpetually to asking questions about the true, the good, and the beautiful. This is a vision of reality that sees integrity in the universe because God himself, the eternal Three-in-One, is perfectly simple and without division. Comprehending this reality, even to the limited degree possible, entails looking at the wonder of reality outside of our own minds. Truth is discovered by observation, not introspection. The Christian mind is, therefore, one that is more interested in the world around than in itself.

I recently edited a collection of essays in honor of a friend and mentor, Michael Travers. In that volume, eleven authors from different fields of study consider the Christian mind of C. S. Lewis as it was presented in his work and as it applies to other significant topics of interest.

The book contains an essay by Michael Travers on Lewis’s apologetic of hope, which opens the book with a grand view of C. S. Lewis’s vision of the world. There is also a delightful chapter by Michael’s daughter, Elizabeth, on Desire and Love in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Aside from personal connections, there are several essays by well-known Lewis scholars in the book. James Como contributed an essay on C. S. Lewis as a master builder, demonstrating Lewis’s rhetorical genius. There is also a chapter from Leland Ryken who gets at one of Lewis’s sources: John Milton. Ryken’s chapter shows how the Christian mind understands all of life to be a stewardship before the Lord.

Heath Thomas contributed a chapter correcting C. S. Lewis’s writings on the Psalms of Lament and demonstrating that Lewis appears to have grown in his understanding of lament later in life, particularly in his Letters to Malcolm. Daniel Estes explains the significance of the integration of faith with all of life, something at which Lewis excelled. There are also essays in Lewis’s ethics in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, his concept of the “Inner Ring,” disinterested love in Screwtape and The Great Divorce, and an essay that puts Lewis and Schaeffer in dialogue on apologetics and epistemology.

In each of the diverse essays attempts to show readers where Lewis was pointing, since Lewis himself viewed his work as less significant than the one to whom he was pointing. This is a book with a heart attuned to both evangelism and doxology, concepts that are deeply intertwined and vitally important to the Christian life.

If you are fan of C. S. Lewis, or looking for an introduction to the wide range of work he did, this volume would be a good place to start.

The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis: Essays in Honor of Michael Travers

Wipf and Stock

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I edited this volume. If you buy a copy, I might get a tiny fragment of the money, which might eventually bring the hourly rate of my efforts up from deeply negative to zero dollars lost per hour. My more significant motivation is that Michael Travers was a dear friend and some of the essays in this volume are just plain good.

Socialism Sucks - A Review

I requested a review copy of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World on a whim. The title is provocative and the subtitle sounds intriguing (if not a model of virtue). Given the title, I expected the book to be somewhere beyond polemical into the range of bellicose. Thankfully, the coauthors, Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, are not mean drunks.

Lawson is a professor at SMU and, perhaps more significantly, is one of the co-creators of the Economic Freedom of the World index. Powell is executive director of the Free Market Institute and a professor at Texas Tech. There are men who are convinced that a free market it the best economic system. They are libertarians. And, apparently, they enjoy good beer.

The premise of the book, which was proposed via a slightly tipsy text, is that these two economists would travel to various countries impacted by socialism and sample the local beverages while they examine the health of the economy. Their journey takes them from Sweden through China and all the way back to the United States. The chapters are a mix of reporting from ground level and discussion of economic principles. Who would have expected that when going on a pub crawl with these men, readers would learn something about economics?

After an introduction that begins with salty language and breezy prose, the authors go to Sweden. The beer in Sweden is good, though expensive. Of course, Sweden is not a socialist country, so the quality of the beer is not surprising, given Lawson and Powell’s thesis of the deficiencies of socialism. However, the beer is also notably expensive because of the high taxes needed to support Sweden’s bulky welfare system. Sweden is, in fact, able to support their generous welfare system because they have one of the freest economies in the world.

Next stop on the journey is Venezuela. The authors actually spend more time in Colombia along the Venezuelan border, because it isn’t safe to enter Venezuela. But what they see is tragic. The once-prosperous nation of Venezuela has residents streaming across the border to Colombia on a regular basis to get goods (like diapers and sugar) that are simply unavailable in their home country. Inflation is so bad that the authors exchanged a US $20 for a foot-high stack of large denomination Venezuelan currency (and they likely got the short end of the stick). The collapse of the economy in Venezuela is, as Powell and Lawson explain, largely due to attempts at price control, seizure of private property by the government, and strict controls on imports and exports. Oh, and beer is generally unavailable in Venezuela because the government won’t allow them to import hops.

After that dreary visit, they go to Cuba. It is, according to some, a paradise of free medical care. What tourists find when they venture off the beaten path is a dreary socialism that is barely making ends meet. There are some restaurants, but their menus are nearly identical and bland. The hotels run by the government are mediocre at best. The beer is bland and low quality. Cars are exorbitantly expensive, even for moderately functional units.

The third stop on the journey is North Korea. This time the authors do not actually go into the country because they have a friend who spent over a year in a labor camp for his visit. What they see from a neighboring Chinese city is a radical difference between the extreme poverty of North Korea’s socialist economy and the pseudo-capitalism of China. These libertarian professors even choose to forgo a strip club with North Korean girls, not because of any sexual virtue, but because they realize that many of the staff at the club are trafficking victims who were merely looking for a way out of North Korea. The misery of North Korea is even more striking when the prosperity in South Korea is considered in comparison. In this chapter, Powell and Lawson drink Swedish beer again, because there is no North Korean beer. In China, however, the beer is cheaper than in Sweden because the taxes are lower.

Although China is governed by the Communist party, there have been significant market reforms in the past few decades. Thus, the authors call it “fake socialism.” There are, to be sure, still significant aspects of the Chinese economy that are not free. What China has is crony capitalism, which is an advance on socialism, but still effective in keeping many Chinese people from prospering.

In Chapter Five, Lawson and Powell’s excellent adventure takes them to Russia and Ukraine, which are hungover from the socialism of the Soviet empire. Their visit to the epicenter of communism serves as a reminder of the millions of people enslaved and slaughtered to make socialism work. One of the most striking vignettes in this chapter is the prevalence of abortion, particularly when the Soviets were in power. It was not something that was particularly good for women, contrary to recent attempts to whitewash abortion and the Soviet regime. According to an estimate by Soviet gynecologist Archil Khomassuridze, “women in the Soviet Union had between five and eight abortions for each birth.” (pg 97) It was done in an assembly line manner, as this quote from a feminist magazine outlines:

“You go into a hall splattered with blood where to doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they’re usually very rough and rude, shouting at you about keeping your legs wide open et cetera….if you’re lucky they give you a little sedative, mostly Valium. Then it’s your turn to stagger out to the resting room, where you’re not allowed to spend more than two hours because the production line, you see, is always very busy.”

The libertarian authors are not opposed to abortion, but they still find this outcome of socialism horrid. The prevalence of abortion was largely driven by the unavailability of birth control and resistance to large families due to economic difficulties. The medical conditions were representative of the socialist approach.

On a more positive note, the next destination is the Balkan nation of Georgia. Since they have become free from Soviet rule, markets have begun to flourish thanks to the work of several of their leaders and laws intentionally written to encourage development. The result is an economy that is beginning to grow and recovery from the misery of socialism. It takes times to recover and the ugly Soviet-era buildings remind visitors of the joylessness of socialism. Since the fall of the Soviets the local wine industry has flourished. It was an age-old craft that the Soviets sought to eliminate, but local grapes fermented by local methods have made Georgia a stop for wine tasters in Europe as the country opens up to free markets.

In Chapter Seven the authors return to the United States to visit a conference of American socialists in Chicago. They attended multiple sessions to hear about socialism from those who are advocating for it. Then, they proceeded to the privately owned bar down from the convention to casually interview conference attendees over glasses of beers with socialist brands. What Lawson and Powell discover is that there was almost no discussion of actual socialism at the convention and, when asked, conference goers thought that socialism was about support for abortion, queer ideologies, and freeing the oppressed, immigrant rights, and Black Lives Matter. The two economists were politely confused by the failure of the supposed socialists to understand the ideology they were advocating for. Their theory is that, like many cults, the real economic socialists are allowing the conversation to stay on the popular topics instead of revealing the black center of the ideology.

Each of the chapters is a mix of stories about their travels, with a heavy emphasis on the quality of the booze, the food, and the hotels, and economic principles written at an accessible level. Though its title is splashy and some of the language salty, this is an ingenious way to get some people to understand why socialism really isn’t a good thing for anyone except those at the center of power. This is an example of winsomely explaining a topic so that an unusual audience might listen. This might be the only way to get some college sophomores to actually move beyond the memes into some meaningful economic theory.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

By Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Who Killed Civil Society? - A Review

We often take it for granted that the bulk of social issues have a government funded solution with a complex bureaucracy behind it. Is someone out of work? To the unemployment office they go to fill out forms, search for jobs in the database, and collect a check. Are they short of funds for food? There is a program to issue a card with funds that can be spent at certain retail outlets to fill the pantry. Privately funded soup kitchens, shelters, and other programs exist, but they often serve as contractors for the government, subject to the rules laid down by the centralized bureaucrats. Or, such charities exist on the margins to fill in gaps until the real help from the government can get there.

Many of these social issues used to be dealt within civil society rather than through governmental policies and programs.

The rise of the government as the primary welfare agency is an artifact of the late industrial era. Prior to around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the majority of civil welfare was funded and conducted on a private basis. There are certainly cases where those organizations fell short of excellence, but one thing they were able to do was help transmit norms and values that might help people adapt to the system and succeed within it.

One of the more significant misconceptions about poverty is that it is primarily material. There are certainly material aspects to poverty, but simply writing a check, giving a credit card for food, and subsidizing rent are insufficient to overcome poverty. Those who live in poverty often see it as a spiritual and emotional condition, as much as it is a lack of material resources.

Government programs can be very efficient at proving material relief, but by their very nature, they often discourage helping solve non-material problems. While the government may have better resources to meet physical needs, civil society might be more efficient at helping change values and behaviors that contribute to material poverty.

Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms tells the story of the shift from civil society functioning to alleviate poverty to the dominance of government programs. Simultaneously, this also accompanied the shift from the transmission of “bourgeois” values to supposedly value-free providence of material aid. The author, Howard Husock, tells the story through the biography of six significant figures who were engaged in seeking to improve the lot of the poor.

This short book has six content chapters with a brief introduction and conclusion. The introduction tells the story of the author’s father who passed through civil society as an orphan and came out as a success case. The biographies include significant historical figures within the poverty alleviation movement such as Charles Loring Brace, Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, Grace Abbott, Wilbur Cohen, and Geoffrey Canada. From Loring Brace to Cohen, the biographies chart an arc from concern for imparting values while helping the poor to primary focus on alleviating the physical symptoms of poverty. The final example is of an African American who was exceptionally successful in changing the trajectory of the lives of poor African Americans living in rough neighborhoods.

The author’s affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, which favors free markets and limited government, as well as the subtitle of the book make it fairly obvious that Husock begins with the assumption that government as the primary solution to poverty is not the best option. However, the book is an even-handed discussion of the historical facts. This is not a diatribe against big government, but a call to recognize that even if government is a large part of the solution to poverty, we cannot rely on that.

There is a segment of the population who view bourgeois norms like thrift, hard work, and aspiration, as a form of oppression. For those that believe that the system is irredeemably gamed, this book will likely be of little interest. However, for readers trying to figure out why poverty seems to be increasingly generational, Husock has some possible answers. It may be that teaching people they are victims of the system is less effective in alleviating poverty than helping them to succeed within the system. That is the essential argument of Husock’s book.

This historical account shows how and why the transition from civil society to government programs happened. It was well intentioned advocates seeking to alleviate the physical symptoms of poverty, which they believed to be the cause of social ills. However, the data seems to support Husock’s thesis that this was not necessarily a good thing and that the lack of appropriate values tends to encourage and exacerbate the physical symptoms of poverty.

Marvin Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, traces a similar trajectory from civil society to government programs as the solution to poverty. Who Killed Civil Society? and Olasky’s book complement each other well and could be paired to good effect in a course on poverty alleviation. Their agreement, however, could be explained by the fact that both are right-leaning thinkers.

However, more recent books by left-leaning authors tend to make similar cases about some of the issues with government programs for poverty alleviation and the need for civil society. Daniel Hatcher’s book, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens, outlines many of the abuses by government programs that entrap and victimize those they are intended to help. Hilary Cottam’s book, Radical Help, details her efforts to create programs in the UK’s expansive welfare state that rebuild the fabric of civil society.

If we are serious about poverty alleviation, we need to talk about what the actual causes of poverty are. Then we need to ask how to eliminate those causes. Even as the fabric civil society continues to fray at an increasing rate, it is becoming clear to the left and the right that whatever the funding model, civil society is necessary to prevent and eliminate the symptoms of poverty.

Husock’s book is an interesting read, especially for those wondering how the contemporary welfare state in the U.S. evolved. The book handles a contentious issue fairly, though the author clearly has a point of view. At the same time, the biographies are handled so sympathetically that it is possible for readers who strongly favor limited government to see why these individuals sought to alleviate poverty primarily through the growth of government programs. This book makes a solid argument that a return to encouraging hard work, thrift, and planning deserves more attention and care than the contemporary system tends to allow. Whatever the funding model is, Husock makes a strong case that teaching norms would do a great deal to improve society.

Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms

By Howard A. Husock

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Ten Significant Books from 2019

As a reading year, this year was somewhat slower than many other years because I was editing a book for publication. That required me to spend a lot of time staring at sentences, looking up words, checking quotations, and reading them in context. As a result, my tally of recent books was somewhat lower.

Of course, as I learned from Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, the point in reading is not maximum consumption. However, as a serial reviewer of books, my lower productivity was, at times, weird, even when it did not rise to the level of distressing.

From among the books that I read that were published in the past year or so, here is a list of ten that I found especially helpful. The list is in no particular order.

Reformed Ethics, vol. 1, by Herman Bavinck.

The first volume of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Ethics provides an example of an ethical system with its roots in an unchanging greatest good. Although the contents of the volume are more than a century old, they appear to have aged very little; indeed, this initial volume of Bavinck’s ethics is remarkably fresh and invigorating. This is because, for Bavinck, ethics is about loving God by living rightly through the power of the Holy Spirit. More than that, the center of Christian ethics is the character of God. As such, Bavinck’s ethics are explicitly theological in the deepest meaning of the term. That is, right living must begin by understanding who God is.

Your Future Self Will Thank You, Drew Dyck.

The basic formula laid out in Your Future Self Will Thank You is that we need to incrementally build new habits. Dyck sifts through research that shows that the problem with most of our self-improvement attempts is that we try to change too much too quickly and without the appropriate incentive structures. Dyck uses recent scientific research to show that will power is a finite resource. It can be developed over time. However, our self-control is subject to fatigue. When we are tired, stressed, or distracted we are much more likely to fail in our attempts at self-control. Not coincidentally, this happens to match what Scripture teaches. This is why Sabbath is built into the pattern of Scripture. This is why Proverbs focuses so much on patterns of life.

Scientism and Secularism, J. P. Moreland

In popular culture, scientism has overtaken other religious systems as a dominant plausibility structure. In other words, it is how many people make sense of the world around them. Not only does this often displace belief in God, but it undermines the ability of those who hold to scientism to accurately evaluate competing, non-scientistic perspectives that might provide better access to truth.

Scientism has influenced several of the shifts our culture has witnessed in recent decades. The first is that it has taught people that science sums up the totality of accessible knowledge, while religion is blind faith divorced from reality. This myth may help people coexist, but it does much less to encourage the pursuit of truths that cannot be known empirically, much less fairly evaluate those that haven’t adopted the current orthodoxy of scientism.

Transhumanism and the Image of God, Jacob Shatzer.

Our smartphones are changing the way that we focus, constantly dragging our attention away from more significant things to the trivial. Social media is functionally altering the way that we socialize with one another. We tend to focus on documentable events rather than companionable experiences. The internet and the availability of search engines are modifying how we value knowledge of facts.

In his recent book, Transhumanism and the Image of God, Jacob Shatzer shows that transhumanism is with us now and, to some degree, inescapable. At the same time, it is our responsibility as Christians to begin to ask questions about to what degree we can accept the changes demanded by technology and to what degree we ought to resist them.

Between Life and Death, Kathryn Butler

Kathryn Butler’s book, Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centered Guide to End-Of-Life Medical Care, is an extremely helpful volume in learning about various critical medical treatments, which can help make the cost/benefit analysis for choosing to continue with interventions. She also carefully sorts through the biblical data to consider whether an ethic of life, which is demanded by Scripture, entails pursuing every medical treatment possible no matter the cost, the low likelihood of success, or the trauma to the patient. Butler, a trauma and critical-care surgeon, has worked at several significant medical facilities and brings her experience and expertise to bear in a compassionate manner in this book.

Radical Help, Hilary Cottam

In her recent book, Radical Help, Hilary Cottam challenges the expansion of centrally planned model of government poverty alleviation. Writing from progressive perspective, Cottam makes an argument that will sound familiar and welcome to conservative ears: The most effective means of poverty alleviation is the development of community.

Determined to do something practical about the problem of poverty, Cottam set to work redesigning portions of the welfare system in the United Kingdom. She challenged the status quo by asking a profound question of workers within a number of social programs: Who has been helped by your social program so that they are no longer enmeshed in the welfare system?

The Power of Christian Contentment, Andrew M. Davis

One of the central elements of The Power of Christian Contentment is that our satisfaction in Christ is a primary tool for evangelism. Everyone is unhappy about something. Our political climate is entirely structured on creating unhappiness that only abolishing the other party can possibly fix. Economically, no matter how much we have, one side reminds us that someone else has more (which is unfair, they say) and the other side reminds us that some people are keeping us from getting more (also inherently unjust, in the eyes of some). Davis’s argument is that when we have Christ, we have everything we need. When we are satisfied in Christ’s provision, that shows and that satisfaction is attractive to the harried masses around us who are convinced that fewer social restrictions or a larger bank balance are the keys to eternal satisfaction.

Becoming Whole, Brian Fikkert and Kelly M. Kapic

Becoming Whole is an excellent tool to get people inside the local church to rethink poverty alleviation and, en route to that reconsideration, to think about the value structures in their own lives. I have read dozens of books on poverty and the American dream in my studies of wealth and poverty, environmental ethics, and the like. I did not want to put this book down. Each page offered new ways of explaining Christian theology in a way that is relevant to people in a dominant culture that is both gnostic and excessively materialistic.

This is volume that, along with When Helping Hearts and Practicing the King’s Economy, ministry leaders should read as they seek to form people and outline a vision for human flourishing among their own congregants and in the world around them.

The Gospel of Our King, Bruce Ashford and Heath Thomas

The Gospel of Our King affirms the reality that we were not made for ourselves, but to serve the King of the Universe.

I have read dozens of books on worldview, the gospel, and mission. I found The Gospel of Our King to be a refreshing presentation of this topic. This is a book that I am glad to recommend. Above all, this is a volume that helped to remind me of the central purpose of the Christian life: To glorify God and enjoy Him forever

God and Galileo, David Block and Kenneth Freeman.

It’s hard to characterize this book simply, to put it into a clear category. Usually that is a criticism, but in the case of God and Galileo it is because the book does a great deal well. Are you seeking a resource to disrupt a materialist’s view that faith and science are mutually exclusive? This book can help do that. Are you interested in the contours of the faith and science debate as a Christian? This book will inform you. Are you looking for an enjoyable read for a quiet evening? This book offers it. Are you longing for a volume that encourages you to enjoy God through both his special and general revelation? This book calls you into a sense of wonder at both.

And, as a bonus, because I found this book so paradigm shaping. I am linking to my review of a book that is a a couple of decades old, but likely belongs in the camp of classics.

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, Cornelius Plantinga

The tragedy of much contemporary and theologically orthodox Christianity, particular among evangelical Protestants, is that a faulty definition of sin has led to thin ethics. Sin is sometimes popularly perceived of as something that is paid for by the cross and then entirely behind the Christian. To a degree this is true, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross provided a path for the elect to be redeemed. Forgiveness for sin is now available for those that repent and put their faith in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection as the hope for eternal life. All of this is true, but it neglects some of the ongoing effects of sin in even the lives of Christians and especially in the world around us.

Cornelius Plantinga’s book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, is an important book for understanding the nature and effects of sin. The book was originally published in 1995, and won multiple awards. It is both excellently written and exceedingly positive. This is the sort of book that should remain in print because of its enduring value as an accessible and theologically precise systematization of the doctrine of sin.

Who is an Evangelical? - A Review

The term “evangelical” has drastically different meaning to many people. In popular discourse in the United States, the talking heads have a very particular definition in mind when they speak of evangelicals. They think they are speaking of white, middle and lower class, Republican-bloc voting, misogynistic, bigots who tend to fall into the “basket of deplorables” that “cling to their guns and religion” as several politicians on the left have argued. When exit polls showed that 81% of “white evangelicals” voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, this merely confirmed the popular opinion (bolstered by any sniff of resistance to the Obergefell decision) that evangelicals were in the tank for any rightwing idea, were politically irredeemable, and worthy of scorn.

For several decades, there has been a strong emphasis among many people who identify as evangelical on political engagement. In 1973, when the Supreme Court of the United States wrote their Roe v. Wade decision connecting the destruction of children in the womb to the United States Constitution, this began to mobilize many of those who value human life to seek political solutions to a significant moral crisis.

Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, politics makes for strange bedfellows. Therefore, the Moral Majority, comprised largely of white evangelicals and fundamentalists, became entangled in politics on the right, finding more sympathy among Republicans than Democrats. It would take a careful discussion to determine whether the bundling together of issues into left and right became more pronounced to facilitate this shift, as a result of the increased political engagement, or for other, unrelated causes.

Whatever the cause, the result has been that many of those evangelical Christians tend to vote for Republicans. The central cause of that loyalty has been concern about abortion. This loyalty has also led to many of those evangelical-Republican voters holding unrelated, morally ambiguous positions supported by the Republican party with roughly the same vigor as their concern for the lives of innocent children.

It is this bloc of the voters who identify as “born again” and typically oppose abortion that are cited as the 81% of white evangelicals who voted for Trump in the last election. This statistic is used as a cudgel in public to argue that the vast majority of doctrinal evangelicals a) voted for Trump out of racial fear (and are thus irredeemably racist), b) have abandoned the gospel because no faithful Christian could vote for Trump, and c) should be hounded out of the public square because of their beliefs, all of which represent heresies against the political orthodoxy of this moment.

Kidd’s book, Who is an Evangelical?, helps to counter some of the careless accusations that have been recently hurled at evangelicals as a result of this sloppy thinking.

For example, the 81% number is not nearly accurate, since a large plurality of evangelicals did not vote in the 2016 election. Only about 42% of white evangelicals voted. This seems somewhat surprising for a group that is often characterized as being mainly political (and thus not primarily religious) in nature, allegedly functioning as a voting bloc for right wing causes. As political movements go, only getting 42% to get to the polls is pretty depressing.

Additionally, a number of those who did vote did not vote for either major party candidate, based on my anecdotal experience. And, the exit polls do not provide a definition for the term evangelical. This has allowed people who last entered a church when they were 8 to claim to be evangelical, with the same confidence as the weekly attender. The voting patterns of those two groups are demonstrably different.

Summary

Thomas Kidd’s book, Who is an Evangelical?, was written to provide a history of the evangelical movement in the United States and to divorce the present assumed reality of evangelicals as a racially motivated, rightwing voting bloc from the historical reality of a gospel-centric, doctrinally oriented religious movement.

Kidd is an excellent historian and has spent a great deal of time thinking about the evangelical movement in the United States. His careful analysis in this volume helps to recall the social engagement of evangelicals in history, consider the doctrinal core of evangelical identity, and attempts to reclaim space for evangelicals to speak under the flag of the gospel rather than the banner of a particular political party.

In his introduction, Kidd offers a definition of his tribe: “Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.” (pg 4) This is a helpful definition, because it is a trinitarian confession that recognizes the authority of Scripture and the nature of the gospel as it is outlined in the Bible.

Kidd outlines the rise of evangelicalism in the United States, beginning with the various revivals in early American history. Kidd draws on his extensive research on George Whitefield and others of that era to write an engaging and even-handed chapter. He then moves in chapter two to discuss the nature of evangelicalism in the American Civil War. They were characterized by proselytizing, deeply interested in religious liberty, and very divided on vital political issues like slavery. Many in the South defended the practice of chattel slavery, while many in the North were deeply engaged in the abolitionist movement.

Whatever degree of national cohesion there was among evangelicals before the Civil War was shattered by the division when major denominations split into regional factions over the issue of slavery. And yet, both groups retained their central theological identity. In the Jim Crow era, the term evangelical took on more racially differentiating meaning because the “fundamentalists,” who were trying to resist the doctrinal encroachments of revisionist Christianity, often shamefully neglected important social engagement. This meant that many African Americans, though doctrinally aligned with the core beliefs of evangelicals, would not accept the label because those who identified as evangelical seemed ambivalent to their valid social concerns. The Scopes Trial would shift the definition of evangelical toward opposing the public teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools, in part due to the work of the political progressive, William Jennings Bryan.

The Neo-evangelical movement began after the Scopes Trial, it was characterized by attempts to work together for evangelism and some social action, though the emphasis was strongly on the religious characteristics of the group. The contemporary popular understanding of the term evangelical as a political category was not the primary meaning of the term at any point in history. However, it was during the cultural shifts of the 60s and 70s that Republicans began to court the support of evangelicals. In part, this was accomplished because Republicans positioned themselves as being hard on communism, which was a common enemy to the gospel and to democracy. Despite the alliances that were formed, there was still a great deal of ethnic diversity among evangelicals. It was, by no means, a collection of old white men with political interests. The Moral Majority sprung out of this time, which became closely aligned with Republicanism and very vocal in the public square. Their rise helped propel the current vision of evangelicals as a certain brand of right-wing political organizers. Sometimes the line between acceptable political engagement and “excessive” political engagement was drawn along racial lines and over the types of issues being discussed. Those divisions have largely continued to this day.

Analysis

Kidd’s book, Who is an Evangelical?, is a balanced, critical look at the history of the evangelical movement from someone inside it. Unlike the caricatures that are common in popular media, Kidd provides a nuanced portrait of the gospel movement in the U.S. Notably, he does not shy away from criticizing evangelicals for their failures on issues like slavery, Civil Rights, and racial reconciliation. This is not a white wash of the record, but it does undermine the common trope that all evangelicals are racist and the entire movement was founded to preserve patriarchy, protect white power, and whatever other moral evils contemporary pundits want to heap on the group.

The portrait that emerges is that people who were engaged in the common cause of furthering the gospel united together for that purpose. Some have taken that unity as an opportunity to try to create a voting bloc on issues not directly tied (and sometimes contrary) to the gospel. Kidd’s book clarifies the history, but it also provides a nudge for contemporary gospel believers to be more careful about distinguishing justice that stems from the gospel (e.g., abolition of abortion) from prudential issues (e.g., the role of the government in establishing regulations over the economy), which are not central to evangelical belief. Evangelical has historically been a doctrinal label. We should work to make it so again.

Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis

By Thomas S. Kidd

Buy on Amazon

NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life - A Review

Francis Schaeffer is one of the more significant intellectual figures for twentieth century evangelicalism and he is in danger of being forgotten. While interest in C. S. Lewis continues apace, many in rising generations of Christians do not know who Schaeffer is. Given that Schaeffer was a significant contributor to something of an evangelical awakening of the mind, forgetting Schaeffer would be a tragedy.

One of the causes of the diminution of interest in Schaeffer is that the generation that knew him best is moving out of the centers of evangelical thought into retirement. Additionally, unlike Lewis, Schaeffer did not leave by winsome fiction that captures the imagination causing younger readers to wonder what else he wrote. Schaeffer must be encountered by someone trying to make sense of Christianity and its coherence with reality.

As more of the generation that met Schaeffer and were intellectually awakened by his ministry pass away, I am thankful that Colin Duriez did the work to conduct interviews and compose a critical biography with first-person discussions of the impact Schaeffer had on many. The result, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life, is an excellent and encouraging biography that captures an important moment in evangelical history.

Colin Duriez has written biographies of the Inklings, has a forthcoming biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, has written on various forms of fantasy. He seems the sort of fellow that would be interesting to engage in conversation at parties. He was also influenced by Francis Schaeffer, through the L’Abri ministries. Thus, his 2008 volume is both a continuation of the strain of his writing on Christian mind and imagination and a return to his intellectual roots.

The volume is, like most biographies, organized chronologically. It begins with Schaeffer’s family and early years, moves through his pastoral ministry, and into the various stages of his public ministry. Much of the content is derived from Edith Schaeffer’s books, L’Abri (Tyndale, 1969) and The Tapestry (Word, 1981). This biography benefits from those works, but also is enhanced because those accounts tend to cover over some of Schaeffer’s flaws.

Duriez’s account of Schaeffer’s life is realistic. It depicts a man who was exhausted by his busy schedule, had limitations due to apparent dyslexia, and was sometimes short tempered. And yet, unlike the biographical patricide committed by Franky Schaeffer, Duriez reveals a man that was hotly pursuing holiness and fell short despite his best attempts. He was, after all, simply a sinner saved by grace. The portrait Duriez paints shows Schaeffer to be a flawed hero, but still a hero.

One of the strengths of this volume is the number of personal interviews Duriez conducted. In the appendix, Duriez includes a previously published interview he conducted with Schaeffer in 1980. However, much of the biographical data in this volume is provided by discussions with his children and others that lived and worked at L’Abri for an extended period of time.

For those interested in Schaeffer, this is an essential biography. For those seeking to understand how the Christian life can be lived out in a roughly contemporary setting, Duriez’s biography is exceedingly helpful.

Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life

By Colin Duriez

Buy on Amazon

We Have Been Harmonised - A Review

Our capacity to forget is pretty astounding, when you think about it. A few months ago the internet was blazing over the violence against freedom protesters in Hong Kong. National attention was drawn to the issue, in part, because of backlash against the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morely. The NBA quickly came down on Morely and dozens of significant figures within the NBA (including Lebron James) stepped forward to call Morely ignorant and essentially denounce his assertion that the Chinese government might not be entirely fair to Hong Kong.

A few things were revelatory in that event: (1) The NBA, which is focused on “social justice” when convenient, completely backed down in the face of Chines pressure and silenced their players and employees of franchises. (2) Many of the players with sponsorships in China were quick to denounce as “ignorant” the comments, despite basic facts to the contrary. (3) People upset at the NBA have already forgotten (for the most part) and are back to watching the NBA, posting about it on social media, and pretending nothing ever happened.

All of this was orchestrated through financial coercion and propaganda by the Chinese government, which is really just a puppet of the Communist Party.

A recent book by German journalist, Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State, pulls back the curtain on the oppressive regime in China, how it has taken hold of many Chinese hearts and minds, and how China is working to expand its power throughout the world.

Summary

Strittmatter’s volume is particularly interesting because he spent roughly three decades as a correspondent in and about China. He has, therefore, seen many of the changes occur that have turned China into a house of technological horrors. Since the advent of the internet, smartphones, and face recognition technology in China, the state has begun to develop the ability to manage every aspect of the peoples’ lives.

At one level, this is a primary source on China’s shifting controls. On another level, it is a treatise that helps explain how totalitarian regimes rise, get control, and use their people to “voluntarily” enforce the will of the rulers.

Much of what Strittmatter writes marries up with dystopian fiction. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Animal Farm are all mashed together in the horror that is contemporary China. The frightening thing is that, because of our willingness to adopt new technologies, many aspects of it may be coming to the global West, too.

China uses a mixture of old-fashioned control techniques and modern technology to anesthetize some of their population, terrorize some of the people, and extinguish the remainder. The state invests heavily in propaganda, papering cities with pro-Party references. Even though the messages are often implausible, the message is clear that the Part controls the bandwidth.

Although there are still privately held corporations in China, despite the rise of President Xi’s new authoritarianism, but because of the power of the Communist Party, companies self-censor. Social media apps (like TikTok) have teams of censors, thousands of company employees, who read and delete posts. They also write algorithms to automatically delete phrases that might be sensitive. Even Western corporations (like the NBA) will self-censor to appease the Chinese leaders and so retain access to the lucrative markets.

The internet in China functions more like an intranet. This means that the Communist Party has installed firewalls to prevent the people from getting to Western websites. Facebook is off-limits. Even Wikipedia is forbidden. The Chinese replace these sites with their own, but always under the government’s control. For example, the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia has removed reference to the massacre in Tiananmen Square and has even removed the historical summary of the news in 1989 to erase that event from common memory.

Much of this is boiler plate totalitarianism, which is bad enough. However, the rise of AI, prevalence of closed-circuit cameras and other technologies like smart phones turns horror into hell.

Imagine a society where cash was being slowly restricted and all purchases were now being made by credit cards or apps on the smart phone. Every purchase would then be traceable and it would be impossible to step out of the system. Imagine that the government had access to the location on your phone at all times, could turn on the microphone or camera, and could study your behaviors. Imagine that your credit history was tied into the larger pool of information about you. Imagine if crosswalks had cameras with facial recognition software, which would document if you ever crossed on the wrong light.

All of this is occurring in China. And, people are cooperating, for the most part. There are obvious benefits to this. For example, it makes it easy to screen potential suitors. No need to even date a man who will not pay his debts. No need to check the credit on a person, because you can see their behavior is consistently responsible.

But all of the convenience has a dark side, too. Those that are deemed risky citizens can be monitored even more closely. They can be prevented from travelling or making purchases. Their family can be harassed when they do something that is considered untoward. In other words, the state gains the ability to coerce any behavior it deems appropriate.

That would be wonderful if the rulers were entirely benevolent. However, as the saying goes, power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is the growing legacy of China.

Analysis

Little of what Strittmatter reports has not been published before. Reports of the social credit system and state surveillance structures have made their way into Western media before this. However, We Have Been Harmonised puts the information together in one coherent volume.

This is not the easiest volume to read. At time the prose is a bit heavy, likely due to the fact it has been translated into English from the German. However, the work of reading the volume should not dissuade people from reading it.

We Have Been Harmonised is a critically important book. It is informative about the nature of the Communist regime in China. Many of these stories are not adequately discussed in Western culture. They should give us pause in what we purchase from China and how corporations deal with China.

More significantly, this book raises questions about the nature of community, the place of individuals within the community, the authority of the state, and the dangers of technology. Anyone thinking seriously about politics and technology in the contemporary age should read this volume. What China is doing by fiat, many of us are enabling voluntarily in the United States. This is a cautionary tale.

We have been harmonised

By Kai Strittmatter

Buy on Amazon

Note: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Shantung Compound - A Review

One of the biggest problems with political thought is that everyone is trying to argue for a solution to a given problem, but few of those speaking have truly taken time to understand the nature and complexity of the problem. They may have compiled statistics, done interviews, or taken pictures to represent the symptoms of the problem, but rarely have they taken the time to look beyond the symptoms to the source.

In general, those who have the most confidence in their solutions being the panacea for whatever ails society, whether in politics or in economics, have done the least consideration of what it is to be human. Drugs, violent crime, sexual perversions, racial hatred, and systemic inequity are all symptoms. The heart of the problem is humanity and the sin nature we all were born with.

Langdon Gilkey’s book, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure, is both a memoir and a well-considered assessment of humanity. Though Gilkey was a theologian, this book is much more interesting for its discussions of human nature regarding political and economic order.

The book contains fourteen chapters. There is a rough chronology to it, but its core is presented thematically. Gilkey covers adaptation to deprivation in an internment camp, establishment of political order, the rise and fall of the black market, the significance of the human desire for space, and the search for meaning in the narrowed confines of a prison camp.

Shantung Compound is, in part, an explanation of why Gilkey came to reject the anthropology of his liberal Protestant upbringing and take a much less idealistic view of what is politically possible. Gilkey is neither socialist nor capitalist. In fact, he offers significant questions for rigid adherents to both poles of economic order.

Throughout the book, Gilkey is exceedingly critical (and likely somewhat dishonest toward) religious adherents, particularly the Protestant missionaries that were incarcerated alongside him. However, he also raises significant questions about the way so many of the Protestant missionaries failed to live out their ideals of selflessness and sacrifice when their basic needs were encroached upon. Gilkey is adamantly non-exclusive in his understanding of salvation and morality, but at the same time he affirms the necessity of the existence of a god as the best explanation for the order that exists.

Those interested in accounts of World War II will find this another interesting perspective. It shares with Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning multiple significant traits: it deals with prisoners in an enemy camp, faced with physically trying conditions, and, more significantly, the strong potential for despair. Both the agnostic Frankl and Gilkey arrive at similar conclusions that humans must find meaning outside of themselves if they are to keep from despair and social anarchy when everything is stripped away. Intriguingly, both men argue there must be meaning behind work besides mere survival and economic reward.

Frankl’s classic book provides a deeper look at the individual human condition, because it was written based on his time in a Nazi concentration camp. Gilkey’s experience, though harsh, was much less horrid because he spent the war in a civilian run prison camp. Neither experience was pleasant, but Gilkey’s allowed him to observe the construction of a new, basically independent society within the prison camp.

The international collection of prisoners in the Shantung Compound had autonomy to set up their own councils, manage their own cooking, and distribute those resources provided according to whatever rules they could establish. This self-contained society, who resources were limited and provided by their captors (with the exception of limited black-market goods), had to establish order without recourse to force, encourage each other through entertainments, and maintain satisfaction with relatively equitable distribution of very limited goods. The accounts of how that was accomplished reveal a great deal about political theory.

At the same time, the artificial circumstances limit the applicability of some of its lessons. At the end, Gilkey attempts to argue for greater international aid as a way to establish lasting peace. Setting aside the rafts of evidence that have been published since 1966 by people from both sides of the political spectrum, which shows the dangers of long-term aid, his case is not proved by this account because of the involuntary isolation of this community. In other words, some of the lessons are very helpful, but it is dangerous to draw too many firm conclusions because the same fences and guards that created the experiment also create the artificiality that keeps the lessons of Shantung Compound from being universally applicable. We cannot check our reason on the basic even of a well-considered anecdote.

Gilkey’s Shantung Compound is an important book, I think, for those considering the nature of humanity. It is the record of an experiment that ran for quite long enough to draw some conclusions. There is some helpful reasoning in the volume about ethics, politics, and human nature. It is the sort of book that those thinking about political theory and economics would do well to consider, especially as Western societies wrestle with the excesses of affluence and the cultural rot that has resulted.

Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure

By Langdon Gilkey

Buy on Amazon

Something Needs to Change - A Review

David Platt wrote Radical in 2010. The subtitle of that book was Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. That compelling book was a call to resist the materialism and superfluous comforts of the idealized American existence and pursue a missional alternative that included frugal living, generous giving, and the willingness to go to all the nations with the gospel.

In the years since I’ve met many people who have read the book, who studied it in a small group or as a church, or who have heard its core message summarized. Most of them continue to live a typical American middle-class lifestyle, with a comfy house, fun vacations, and a great hope in retirement. Many of the accounts of studying the book include Christians meeting in the expansive homes of the American suburbs enjoying rich desserts. The irony is often lost on those who recount it.

For Platt, who spent four years at the helm of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, the irony still seems to be too much. He has recently published a volume, Something Needs to Change: A Call to Make Your Life Count in a World of Urgent Need, that reissues the call of Radical and seeks to make it more personal.

Something Needs to Change is a memoir or sorts that recounts a seven-day trip Platt took through the Himalayas just before he accepted the call to the International Mission Board. He outlines the devastating poverty he encountered, the horrific lostness, and the depths of human depravity that were evidenced in the communities Platt encountered.

This book is nuanced. It is not merely a 200-page guilt trip. It is an extended meditation about real needs by someone who does not have all of the answers. Platt seeks to uncover the desperate needs of the world, while still wrestling with our call to live in the place God has given us. By the end of the book, it should be clear to the reader that Platt is not proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather calling for an unfettered reconsideration of our priorities and actions.

Platt is likely to face criticism from both political poles about this volume. He recognizes the deep humanitarian needs of those living in abject poverty and sees that as humans we cannot ignore them. At the same time, he cannot fail to note the even deeper need to meet to alleviate the spiritual poverty of those living apart from Christ. His proposal is to develop a both-and solution, but by all means to do something.

To often good theory dies on the pages of the book and never makes it to the hands of the reader. In Western culture we talk about the needs of the poor, but try to pay off the government to deal with their problems while hoping to keep their hands (and lives) free of the concerns of the dirty poor. In the same way, some groups claim earnest concern for the environment, but continue to drive excessively large vehicles excessively long distances while consuming excessively large quantities of beverages shipped and excessively long distance and presented in excessively wasteful packaging.

As Platt notes, something has to change. His book is a call for people to consider what that change will look like in their lives. For the business person, it may be to expand their company into a lesser served area of the world to provide jobs and resources to those who need it. For some, it may be to take marketable skills they have acquired and apply them to humanitarian solutions for areas reached neither by the gospel nor the material abundance of Western culture. There are no firm prescriptions because for each of us the task is different and our ability to contribute is uniquely shaped by God’s gifts to us.

Above all, however, we need to stop doing nothing and do something.

Platt’s book in another reminder that many of us live lives of self-satisfaction, oblivious to the great needs of the world. We will be accountable for how we have used our time and resources one day when we stand before a holy God. On that day some of our accounts of purchased comforts and wasted days will be a source of sorrow. Something Needs to Change is a reminder that day is coming. We should live like we expect it.

Something Needs to Change: A Call to Make Your Life Count in a World of Urgent Need

By David Platt

Buy on Amazon

Note: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.