When we visit our daughter and her family in Maryland, I feel compelled to check out the Little Free Library™ in a park down the hill from her home. And I feel compelled to select a handful of books (many of them contrary to my perspectives and convictions) to browse, to help sharpen my thinking and extend my grasp of what’s going on out there. And now I feel compelled to riff on what I read in this latest batch (plus one I found in a nearby thrift shop). So here goes.

The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin (Public Affairs, 2004)

I’ve just finished writing a journal piece on CRT and DEI, and I’m starting to work on a book I call, I Heard a Dream (a defense of “color blindness,” playing off MLK’s speech). As I’ve gathered materials for these projects, I’ve been overwhelmed by the ginormous black-grievance industry, apparently an obsession (whether for profit, conviction, or fear) of most major publishers. Yesterday, I was in Busboys & Poets café and bookstore in College Park, where the University of Maryland stands. The place was crowded, so I decided to eat across the street at Elevation Burger, but, first, I had to check out their books. I should have known there would be a big Juneteenth display, but I was surprised at the host of as-yet-unfamiliar black tribulation narratives. I bought one, Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America, an adaptation of the deplorable Ibram X Kendi’s unillustrated book of the same name. And I picked up a copy of the selected writings on the “new Negro aesthetic,” by Alain Locke of the Harlem Renaissance.

On the way back to Cheverly, I found this Sheryll Cashin book at a thrift store, and bought it as well, more grist for my mill. As I read the cover notes and introduction, I found an interesting twist. While she said the predictable things about unrealized dreams and lack of equity and such, she said that blacks had contributed to the failure of actual integration. Yes, Brown v. Board of Education had been a major force in the destruction of Jim Crow restrictions, and yes, whites (economic “winners”) continue to play a big role in keeping blacks (economic “losers”) in their woeful place, but she highlighted a phenomenon not typically discussed—that blacks are more comfortable with their own people, so they self-segregate when they should be seeking more diversity in their lives. And then I noticed that she’d devoted a chapter to the county in which I bought the book, Prince George’s. So I’ve set it aside to read.

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Penguin, 2006)

Dennett was called one the “Four Horsemen” of the “New Atheism,” along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Peter Hitchens. He died in April of 2024, and I’m reminded of a remark made in a discussion of eschatology for SBC LIFE, back when I was editor in the early 1990s. Several of us were gathered in Paige Patterson’s office at SEBTS, when he was the president there. Millard Erickson and David Dockery completed the group.

Conversation homed in on millennialism, whether pre-, post-, or a-. Someone recounted a conversation where the case of George Truett was raised. Truett, who pastored FBC Dallas for nearly 50 years, was a post-millennialist, and his example was used to bolster a disputant’s case against pre-millennialism. The rejoined came, “Well, he’s a pre-millennialist now” (the point being that Truett, who died in 1944, had found the truth of the matter once he’d passed on to heaven.) And in that spirit, I suggest that Dennett, who was proudly atheist on earth, is not an atheist now.

The book looks to be a fascinating read, catnip for an apologist. It’s full of bite-sized arguments, drawing heavily on popular culture, historic quotes, and such. Yes, it covers a lot of old ground, and it can be tedious in its brazen use of perennially lame arguments, but I’ll dig in. In this, I feel a bit like the Scotsman who said, “I have to go to Glasgow this weekend to get drunk, and, boy, do I dread it.” (I first heard this illustration from a “moderate” messenger to the 1985 SBC meeting in Dallas, where he anticipated, correctly, that his man, Richard Jackson, would lose to Charles Stanley.)

Liner Notes: On Parents & Children, Exes & Excess, Death & Decay, & A Few of My Other Favorite Things, by Loudon Wainwright III (Blue Rider, 2017)

When I was in junior and senior high, I would devour LIFE magazine cover to cover, including the essays by the likes of Shana Alexander and Loudon Wainwright. The magazine ceased weekly print publication in 1972, moving to intermittent, special-topic issues. (Incidentally, when we started SBC LIFE magazine through the Executive Committee in 1993, our attorney, James Guenther ran a copyright check on our logo, and we had to make adjustments in font and color.)

From time to time, I’d heard mention of Wainwright’s son, Loudon III, and now I’d come across a collection of fifty short pieces. The cover comments celebrate his self-deprecating candor. (Rosanne Cash calls him “horrifyingly honest.”) The prose is engaging, but his personal charm eludes me. He’s quite a jackass, and he seems to savor both his jackassery and the songs he’s written to chronicle it.

By 1973, despite or possibly due to having had a hit song [“Dead Skunk” . . . in the middle of the road], I was miserable. Married and the father of two small children, I was never home, drunk a good deal of the time, and apparently felt it necessary to sleep with every waitress in North American and the United Kingdom. These beans have been spilt in song: “Mr. Guilty,” “Drinking Song,” and “The Waitress Song,” to name three of dozens.

In the book, he took less than a page to talk about his religious upbringing, or lack thereof. His parents took him to church now and then, and less so when he became a teenager: “When we got to be teens, they mostly left us alone, though my mother, raised a Southern Baptist, could never resist her cheerful, gently sarcastic parting shot as she walked out the door alone: ‘Well, I’m off now to save your souls.’” His spiritually-lame dad did send him off to the same Episcopal boarding school he’d attended. He says that four years of evening vespers and Sunday services “pretty much finished [him] off as far as church attendance goes.” And he can’t remember the last time he took Communion.

Turning through this book, I found nothing to persuade me he wasn’t a terrible, albeit charming, person. But that doesn’t matter if you’re a creative wordsmith ready to make other more or less terrible people feel better about themselves because of your shameless, clever, even cheerful self-expression. You’re the sort of person who gains record contracts, awards, television appearances, and such from our cultural elites.

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart (Bloomsbury, 2019)

This book is a nasty piece of work. Talk about “hate speech”: It’s a model of left-wing paranoia (illusions of grandeur with a persecution complex), the sort of thing that issues from Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and their ilk. And, you can tell from the title, she hates, literally hates, conservative Evangelicals, whom she is sure are out to crush nation’s freedoms. And, though Bloomsbury (the publisher) has turned out some better material, Katherine Stewart’s book fits nicely with the values of the early-twentieth-century Bloomsbury Group they honor. I think, for instance, of the homosexual Lytton Strachey whose book, Eminent Victorians, defamed a range of British heroes, including the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale and General Charles Gordon (for whom Gordon’s Calvary is named).  

You know you’re in for an irritating ride when you read, in the introduction that “Christian nationalism” is guilty of promoting “the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation.” No qualifiers. No tip of the hat to the sort of special honor that the nation has paid to Christianity from the beginning, things I touched on in this piece I did for American Spectator on the Baphomet statue in the Iowa statehouse. And this: “The roots of the present crisis in the American political system lie at the juncture of money and religion.” So, it’s not at the juncture of Soros (or NEA or Hollywood) money and irreligion? Or lawfare and The Swamp? Or DEI and CRT? Or Obama’s “Hope and Change” machinations and a hand-puppet, senile president Biden?  Or a mendacious, traitorous Secretary Mayorkas and an open-borders policy?

Thanks to the previous owner’s highlighter, I read on page 27, that “conservative white evangelical religion and racism often reinforce each other.” I’m encouraged to see that the highlighting stops at page 70 in this 277-page book. I hope that the reader had enough of this dreck. Or maybe they got so fired up that they went out, armed with a taser, to take down an Evangelical they might meet along the way.

American Deaf Culture: An Anthology, edited by Sherman Wilcox (Linstock, 1989)

In April of 2019, I testified on behalf of the Southern Baptist Convention before the US Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, convened at Gallaudet University in Washington. C-SPAN 2 covered the event. I’d never been on the campus of this famous school for the deaf, and it piqued my interest in the plight, culture, and prospects of the deaf. I use the word ‘deaf’ cautiously since I was once counseled to not talk that way. (It was 1991, and I was co-manager of the SBC annual meeting in Atlanta. My “co’” (Bucky Rosenbaum) and I flew down for a familiarization tour of the Georgia World Congress Center, and we spent time with a “disabilities counselor” who made sure we knew how to accommodate those needing special help.

For one thing, we learned to not say “blind” or “crippled” or “deaf,” since those were harsh expressions; much better to use “visually (or “mobility” or “hearing”) impaired.” For another, we learned that the tables we’d set up for the Braille versions of the program material needed to be sited near a door with access to grass. Turns out, seeing-eye dogs won’t do their business on concrete. Who knew?

With this slim background, I was pleased to see this book in the “Little Library” in my daughter’s neighborhood. And turning through it, I found that the “deaf community” can also include people without a hearing impairment, folks who identify with the concerns and practices of the deaf (I’m thinking, for instance, of relatives with perfectly good hearing who have learned to sign, live in proximity, and take up the causes of the deaf.); that, even though people typically give only their first names in introductions, the deaf often give full names, plus the city and state from which they hail, and their schooling background—all this being a community builder;  there are even deaf jokes, as the one where a man told the operator that the train-crossing gates were stuck in the down position. (The sign for ‘but’ looks like the raising of crossing gates.)

TV Guide Book of Lists (Running Press, 2007)

Among the goodies I didn’t know: Alan Alda’s real name is Alphonso D’Abruzzo; David Letterman was once a weatherman; Bob Hope first appeared on TV in 1932 on CBS’s experimental station in NYC, W2XAB; among Cosmo Kramer’s harebrained schemes was beach-scented cologne and a smoking lounge in his apartment; Adam Sandler first appeared on TV in 1987 on the Cosby Show as Smitty, a dopey friend of Theo Huxtable; Richard Burton was nominated for seven Oscars, but never won one; SNL ran a spoof ad for cheapkids.net, featuring “semi-flame retardant pajamas” and “pre-owned pacifiers,” with the slogan, “When it comes to your children, why pay more?”

It's a good book for trivia contests around the table, e.g., asking folks who said, “Yada, yada, yada,” “Come on down!” “Homey don’t play that,” and “Who loves ya, baby?”

Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, by Isaac Adams (Zondervan, 2022)

A nice, young seminarian approached me with this book awhile back, and he wanted to know what I made of it. I could tell he was keen to hear my praise for it, but I wasn’t quite ready to do that. For one thing, the title signaled wokeness. Talk of “hard conversations” is au courant, but specious, in that it doesn’t signal a fair exchange, but rather a lectureship with supine note taking. The last thing they want here is a conversation on race where Amy Wax, Heather MacDonald, Voddie Baucham, or Thomas Sowell brings their hard words to bear on the exchange. Instead, Adams draws on Jemar Tisby, Thabiti Anyabwile, Jarvis Williams, and David French to frame his counsel. (And yes, I expected Zondervan to jump on his bandwagon, as have a variety of once-solid Evangelical publishers, including InterVarsity. Of course, they do good stuff, but “social justice” dross is showing up in their catalogues.)  As for the “hard conversation,” this crew can’t or habitually refuses to handle a truly hard conversation.

When I was a kid in the Jim Crow South, I was thrilled by the theme MLK sounded in his “I Have a Dream” speech—that there would come a time when a black person would be judged by the content of his character instead of the color of his skin. This was the “color blindness” we espoused, the kind that tracks with the classic image of Justice, scales in hand, blindfold in place. People who championed that standard in the early sixties faced firehoses in Birmingham. Alas, today, they get hosed down by the cultural elites, including much of the Evangelical Industrial Complex.

Adams does his part by running down color blindness in a section where he explains that neither history, nor the world your neighbor lives in, nor Scripture is colorblind. Neither are we. So, he commends “a more excellent way,” one that attacks “structural racism,” which is “so insidious because it can operate regardless of one’s individual intentions” and is not amenable to changes in law. So, he commends “color consciousness,” which means “celebrating how all people are fearfully and wonderfully made and showing no partiality while compassionately honoring different experiences.” It stands as the “golden mean” between “Color-consumed” (“Seeing everything through the lenses of race/ethnicity”) and Color-blind (“Ostensibly ignoring race/ethnicity”). Not sure why he adds the hedge word, ‘ostensibly’ (meaning “apparently” or “purportedly”). Maybe it’s because we may be using an operating principle that we know is bogus. Of course, the ringer in this proposal comes through the expression, “while compassionately honoring different experiences.” And so, he opens the door to a range of “fixes” that rip the mask off Lady Justice and put weights on her scales.

He works with a false dichotomy. A color-blindness advocate may well engage in all sorts of efforts to help the disadvantaged, whatever the race. But not at the expense of impartiality in our public policy, the sort of thing you see in toxic DEI initiatives and bureaucracies.  

Not Forsaken: Find Freedom as Sons & Daughters of a Perfect Father, by Louis Giglio (B&H, 2019)

I’ve heard fine things about Giglio through the years, and I was glad this little book was available for the taking. This one’s a devotional book about the wonderful character God. Early on, he lists a “Motley Crew of Gods,” mental images of the Lord that could undermine your best and most blessed understanding of him—Grandpa God (who “walks around heaven with a twinkle in his eye and a handful of candy,” with a “white flowing beard and a soothing Morgan Freeman-esque voice”); Scorekeeper God (“all about do’s and don’ts,” a “rule-making, tally-keeping umpire in the sky”); Cosmic Force God (“a nebulous force” who which is “distant, abstract, and elusive”); Angry God (“a reckless brawler who’s looking to pick a fight . . . [and] who loves to push people around, make them pay”); Concierge God (“akin to Alexa or Siri . . . a personal butler in the sky”); Stained-Glass God(“high-browed and stoic,” a deity who “uses complex theological words and prefers things buttoned up and proper”); Hipster God (“super relevant—part Barista, part Bible scholar”); Buddy God (whom we greet “with a casual, ‘What’s up, bro?’”); Me God (“We call the shots.”); Buffet God (“a smorgasbord of all the above versions . . . conveniently displayed so it’s easy for you to pick and choose as you desire”).

Maybe a bit too snarky, and I don’t know how Giglio’s theological counsel will hold up through the book, but he certainly hooked me with this opening.

What He Must Be . . . If He Wants To Marry My Daughter, by Voddie Baucham Jr. (Crossway, 2009).

I’m a big Voddie Baucham fan and have been since I first heard him in chapel at SBTS and then got to ride with him to the Louisville airport (returning to our churches in, respectively, Houston and Chicagoland). He was not only clear spoken and sensible in his address; he was a gracious conversationalist in the van. Years later, I was astonished to see he had broken ranks with a lot of folks seriously worked up over Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, telling them to cool their jets. That took a lot of courage, and it made him something of a pariah among the Evangelical elites. For one thing, he’s not typically platformed in places he’d once been an honored guest.

When I read the title of this book, I thought it might be something along the humorously intimidating lines of the  “Application for Permission to Date My Daughter.” Instead, it’s a very thoughtful, occasionally edgy, book on biblical manhood and womanhood. And it’s well seasoned with excellent quotes from the literature. One of Voddie’s big themes is “multigenerational legacy,” and he cites Jonathan Edwards’s strong example:

In 1900, A. E. Winship studied what happened to 1,400 descendants of Jonathan and Sarah by the year 1900. He found they included 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 100 lawyers and a dean of a law school, 30 judges, 66 physicians and a dean of a medical school, and 80 holders of public office, including three US Senators, mayors of three large cities, governors of three states, a Vice-President of the United States, and the controller of the United States Treasury. They had written over 135 books and edited eighteen journals and periodicals. Many had entered the ministry. Over 100 were missionaries and others were on mission boards.

The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany, by Jonathan R. Zatlin (Cambridge, 2007).

It’s fun to turn through books on topics you know little or nothing about. In this one, I learned that Communists are averse to currency since it’s the sort of thing that people can accumulate, with some becoming richer than others. Rather, barter, the exchange of goods and services, better suits their leveling program on the way to the “worker’s paradise.”

In my cultural apologetics classes, I draw a map of the world and invite the students to help me fill in car names associated with different countries. So, we write “Ford” on the US, “Peugeot” on France, “Volvo” on Sweden, “Audi” on Germany, “Maserati” on Italy, “Toyota” on Japan, “Hyundai” on S. Korea, Rolls-Royce on England, etc. But there are big gaps: No cars originating in animist, Muslim countries, or atheist countries. Nobody is shopping for a Burkinabé (from Burkina Faso), Egyptian, or North Korean brand.

My point is that the R&D and manufacturing savvy and determination necessary to such production is overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian in character. It’s not a matter of climate or natural resources or race. It’s religion. Yes, traditionally-Buddhist countries such as Japan and S. Korea give us cars, but these nations are heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian West. You won’t find cars originating in such pure Buddhist countries as Myanmar and Thailand. The same goes for Hinduism. Largely-Hindu Sri Lanka and Nepal have no native cars. Hindu-heavy India has managed to give us (or overwhelmingly themselves) Tata and Mahindra vehicles, which came on the scene after the World War II. But England controlled India for 300 years, long enough to abolish widow burning and establish a civil service system. In the 1950s, atheist China started producing its own cars, but you won’t find them in show rooms in the West. No Hongqi L5 or Voyah Dreamer on our roads.

The Orthodox countries are something of a puzzle. We have no Greek cars. There’s something about Orthodoxy that has a chilling effect on technological progress. Mix in generous helpings of state control and/or chumminess between atheist Marxism and Russian/Romanian/Bulgarian Orthodox culture, and you have a recipe for second rate cars at best.

The Eastern Bloc nations make for an interesting study in automotive mediocrity, with the Trabant a case in point. It had a plastic body, two cylinders, and 23 horsepower, and it honored the Bauhaus school of design, with its disdain for ornamentation and the commercialism of the West. The result was utterly uninspiring, and, in East German terms, virtually unaffordable. This didn’t trouble the leaders much since they were very uncomfortable with the growth of individual mobility within the populace. Better to see the people confined to public transportation, where you could better keep track of them.

The book features a lot of fairly arcane talk of economics and monetary policy (including a discussion of “labor notes”), material above my ken at this point. But I’ll keep this as a handy resource as I find occasion to dig deeper.