Upstairs in our house, I have a number of reading “stations,” where I sample and work through books. Here are notes from a recent handful.

My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers—I’ve heard of this devotional book for years, but never got around to working through it. I wish I’d done it earlier. And I wish I’d started marking this one up sooner. I ordinarily read with pencil in hand, ready for underlines and marginalia, but, for some reason I was keeping this one in near-mint condition. But then I accidentally damaged it, so I got out the pencil. And now I can go back to refresh my takes.

Chambers is not above eisegesis; sometimes his observations outrun the text. But he often exegetes authentically and insightfully, and with pointed expression: e.g., for March 18 (2 Cor. 7:1) “God educates us down to the scruple”; for March 23 (1 Cor. 3:3), “Is there a truth in the Bible that instantly awakens petulance in you? That is a proof that you are yet carnal”; for March 24 ( John 3:30), “Over and over again, we become amateur providences, we come in and prevent God; and say—“This and that must not be.” Instead of proving friends of the Bridegroom, we put our sympathy in the way, and the soul will one day say—“That one was a thief, he stole my affections from Jesus, and I lost my vision of Him.”

The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher—Our church, Redemption City (SBC) in Franklin, Tennessee fields a host of small groups gathering in homes, one of them meeting in our house. We usually work through a book of the Bible, but this time we decided to tackle Dreher’s widely acclaimed observations on the proper relationship between the church and society. It’s both maddening and rewarding—a great conversation starter on many accounts, with substantial difference of opinion over the soundness of this or that chapter.

A never-Trumper, Dreher argues that we’ve lost the culture war and that we’re fools if we put our trust in politics to save us. Rather, we should focus on family and church, building strong communities of mutual support and splendid witness. In this connection, he uses the “Cajun Navy” volunteers who helped their neighbors in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And playing off the standards that St. Benedict prescribed for his monastery when Rome was going down the tubes, he urges discipline/accountability, self-denial, and grounding in the Church Fathers. Unfortunately, regarding political engagement, he overdoes the either/or perspective to the detriment of both/and. And, from his Catholic-to-Orthodox standpoint, he disparages the Reformation and Evangelicalism and argues that the keys to church vitality and evangelism are robust liturgy and the witness of beauty. So much for “low church” worship and Four Spiritual Laws witness to strangers, both of which have proven mightily effectual through the years.   

Tina Fey’s Bossypants—I didn’t want to like this book, but I thought I should have a look it since Fey and the book itself had made such a cultural splash. I figured she’d serve up the usual liberal fare, taking shots at “deplorables” and parading her liberated notions and behaviors. After all, she was tight with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock and the SNL crew, whose politics are skewed left. But then I came across this as she spoke admiringly of her father:

[H]e would tell us things like “If you see two black kids riding around on one bike, put your bike in the garage.” This wasn’t racism; it was experience. Those kids were coming from West Philly to steal bikes. The social factors that caused their behavior were irrelevant to a Depression baby. When you grow up getting an orange for Christmas, you’re going to make sure the twenty-five dollar bike you bought your kid doesn’t get ripped off. 

What in the world!? You can’t say that. But she did, and though she distanced herself in ways from his “Goldwater Republican” perspectives, she treated him with respect, and it was endearing. Also endearing was her familiarity with our old haunts, when I was church planter/pastor of Evanston Baptist Church. She’d board the El at Morse (just down from the Morseland club, where several of our EBC members performed in the Blind Anabaptist Blues Band) on the Purple Line (running a half block from our house) and get off at Davis Street (a block from where EBC met, a stop for which I have a ball cap, with a white D on a purple background) near the Evanston YMCA (to which I once belonged and for which my grandfather, Allen Benjamin Crow, was the director during WWI). 

The book’s informative, giving us an insider’s look at the “bidness.” And Fey is unfailingly self-effacing as she dishes out her unblinking but hilarious (and I use that word very sparingly) take on things. From her answers to FAQ’s: “Q: Is 30 Rock the most racist show on television? A: No, in my opinion, it’s NFL football. Why do they portray all those guys as murderers and rapists?” And from “The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter: “First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither the Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh hold the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.”

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

This is the fifth book of the year for the Vanderbilt alum book-discussion group. Judging from the feedback from the group, this one was not as engaging as some of the others. I only made it through the first 80 pages. Alas, my graduate school alma mater is obsessed with race, and this one sits smack in the middle of that preoccupation. It’s a novel, tracing the lives of two sisters, one who “passes for white,” the other who doesn’t. Along the way, the latter imagines the former moving comfortably through a fancy department store without discomfort (unlike Oprah who complains of being denied access to a $38,000 handbag in a Swiss store in 2013). She muses, “All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

If you stick with it, you’ll get a good tour of racial sensitives among blacks, with a litany of discriminating terms (e.g., ‘blueblack’), demeaning labels (e.g., ‘Mudpie’), and jokes (e.g., “Bet lightning bugs follow in in the daytime”). All of this is nested in a narrative of “fear and loathing,” the literature of horrors and complaint. I may well come back to it when I have more time, but I’ve had my elegant sufficiency for now. 

Clyde Wilson’s The War Between the States: 60 Essential Books, A Southern Reader’s Guide—

Wilson is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History of the University of South Carolina. Dubbed a “paleoconservative” by Wikipedia, he gained accolades as editor of the Papers of John Calhoun. He has the nerve to suggest that the Civil War was not a strictly night & day affair, with virtue consistently resplendent in the North and wickedness the only notable character mark of the South. The book is a short (60-page) annotated bibliography, which includes introductions to William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished; Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative (3 volumes); Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; Robert Lewis Dabney’s Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson; Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War; and Edgar Lee Masters’ Lincoln—The Man. Yes, it’s tendentious, as chapter titles indicate—“Not ‘About Slavery’” and “Lincoln Worship: The Cure.” And yes, a number of the books have a “lost cause” cast to them, with many of them paying tribute to heroes of the Confederacy while demonizing heroes of the Union. But some of these titles can provide a useful corrective to the madness that has beset our take on the past, particularly evident in the specious and slanderous 1619 curriculum produced by the New York Times. For what it’s worth, I pitched in a bit on the drive to topple Confederate statues throughout the South, including one in the town where I go to church, Franklin, Tennessee (“Optic Cleansing,” published by American Spectator at https://spectator.org/optic-cleansing/).

Prayers from the Desert: Living Out the Pastoral Call as a Hostage in Kuwait, by Maurice Graham—I got this book as a Christmas gift from a missionary, and, as I read it, I found myself even more thankful for the SBC/IMB/LMCO, for the family of faith beyond our denomination, and for the good ole US of A. It’s the story of the Grahams’ captivity in Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion in August of 1990. Maurice’s family was able to fly out in September, but he was stuck in the US embassy compound until he gained his exit visa in December (about ten weeks before Kuwait was liberated under direction of President Bush #1). 

The book is full of prayers (hence the title), and understandably so, for conditions were pretty awful, thanks not only to the menace and thuggery of the Iraqis (engaged in comprehensive looting and firing squads heard in the distance) but also to the critters who tormented Graham and his colleagues (including mice in the bed and swarming flies in the outhouse). Food was monotonous (with endless meals of tuna and rice), water was brackish, and communications were sketchy. And as one trained in counseling and hospital chaplaincy, Graham was much attuned to feelings, his and others, and speaks frequently of dealing “upset,” “depression,” and such.

The cast of characters is engaging, from Jesse Jackson (who brought back some of the hostages early on) to Voice of America (over which they were able to get short messages from family members) to a Maltese Catholic bishop who worked hard and dangerously to gain Maurice’s release. Through it all, the Christians had church of one sort or another in one place or another, bolstered by the prayers of Christians back home, including a massive campaign of prayer by Southern Baptists. Indeed, the week after Graham was highlighted during the prayer emphasis for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, he was in the air back to Nashville (via Baghdad, Frankfurt, and DC). 

Ambition: The Secret Passion by Joseph Epstein—Epstein was a long-time professor at Northwestern University, one with whom I enjoyed a few brief contacts and conversations when I was a church planter in Evanston and Baptist Collegiate Ministry director on that campus. In this volume, he tackles another one of the cultural phenomena (having also dealt in book length form with snobbery, friendship, gossip, charm, envy, and victimhood). Granting that “there can be no blinking the fact that ambition is increasingly associated in the public mind chiefly with human characteristics held to be despicable,” he treats it neutrally as “the fuel of achievement,” and then launches into cases in which the aims and the means serving those interests are good or bad. 

On his walk through the subject, we meet a range of characters, from P. T. Barnum to Horatio Alger to Pierre du Pont to Huckleberry Finn to the Wright brothers. And he notes class strata regarding business elites:

Among Protestant denominations, Methodists and Baptists were greatly underrepresented, Episcopalians and Presbyterians greatly overrepresented. (Recall the old single sentence sociology of American Protestantism, which runs: A Methodist is a Baptist with shoes; a Presbyterian is a Methodist who has gone to college; and an Episcopalian is a Presbyterian who now lives off his investments.”)

Indeed, the quotes are great, e.g., “By the goodness of God, we have those three precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either” (Mark Twain); “It is more desirable to be the handsomest than the wisest man in his Majesty’s dominions, for there are more people who have eyes than understandings” (Henry Hazlitt); “I cheat my boys every time I get a chance. I want to make ‘em sharp. I trade with the boys and skin ‘em. I just beat ‘em every chance I get” (John D. Rockefeller). In short, Epstein is always a good read.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris—Matthew Parris has intrigued me, starting from the time I discovered he was an atheist who said that Africa needed more Christian missionaries. (I quoted his Times of London remarks on this observation in my book, Moral Apologetics.) So when I came across his autobiography, with an intriguing caricature of Margaret Thatcher and him on the cover, I had to get it. It’s one of the best reads ever, one in which I found that he also was avowedly homosexual, that he’d worked for Thatcher, and that he’d served as an MP from a rural district in central England.

The son of a British engineer, whose work took him Africa, Matthew made this observation, consonant with the Times column that blessed me:

I began to understand why eyes looked brighter and steps lighter in those areas where a missionary was at work. Because Christianity teaches a direct personal relationship, bypassing hierarchy and tribe, with God, it can represent a release to those oppressed by their tribe and its panoply of brooding and often vengeful spirits. I do not myself believe in God but can still see how Christian monotheism can act to liberate. I think we sometimes sentimentalize tribe. In my experience it was bound up with conformity and with fear, crushing the individual. Tribe flattens.

Roy Blount, Junior’s Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story—I’ve followed Blount (not to be confused with Missouri Senator Roy Blunt) through the years and have appreciated his wry, down-home-yet-sophisticated take on things. Whether I first met him through his book on Jimmy Carter (Crackers) or his sports writing, I can’t say. But whether he’s offering up a collection of others’ writings (his Book of Southern Humor) or delivering his own takes, I usually appreciate the read. This one’s a curiosity, a stream of conscious reflection on his life and culture, with riffs on being a “junior”; the difficulties of being a husband, given the maddening differences between men and women (and no, this won’t be a favorite book of the trans crowd); the absurdity of appreciation for the decadent art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano; tourism in China; and, above all, the mixed blessing (including torment) of being the son of Louise Blount, whose upbringing did her little favor. And along the way, the reader picks up all sorts of goodies, e.g., that the word ‘nice’ originated as “stupid,” the merger of the negative ‘n’ and the root for the knowledge aspect of ‘science’; that Mark Twain said there would be no jokes in heaven since we wouldn’t need them there; that a somewhat titillating African dance team performing in his Georgia town (there in connection with the Atlanta Olympics and sister-city status) would cause his father to “turn over in his grave,” but “maybe people in the grave like to turn over.”

He loves language, with its twists and turns. For instance, he enjoys identifying pronunciation curiosities, as in the difference between ‘baseline’ and ‘vaseline.’ And he relishes the dozens of expressions his mom used for walking, such as ‘hotfooting,’ ‘moseying,’ and ‘flouncing.’

Most intriguing and disturbing is his perspective on “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” He was raised Methodist, a group he distinguishes thus: “I used to be a Southern Methodist. Not Baptist. That’s knuckle-dragging Christian. Methodist is just fingertip-dragging.” You might say he’s Methodist-haunted, but he makes it clear he’s outgrown Sunday School. He says he was helped into “irreligion” by the way he was led to sing “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight” in the midst of a Jim Crow society. And he manages to call the Apostle Paul an “a*****e” for hustling him into an unfortunate early marriage lest he “burn.” For this reason and others, this is sad book, indeed an avowedly sad book, since he associates the humor impulse with sadness.

Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore Dalrymple—Like Joseph Epstein, Theodore Dalrymple is a non-Christian who is always worth reading and, in my case, worth assigning. (My doctoral seminar, Methods and Cases in Social Ethics, worked through Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass). Dalrymple (whose real name is Anthony Michael Daniels) worked for years as a prison physician and psychiatrist in London, where he had a good spot from which to view what he calls “the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain.” Picking up on and pushing back against these sad developments, he offers this collection of essays, written from 1996 to 2004, covering topics from “Why Shakespeare Is for All Time” to “The Goddess of Domestic Tribulations” (Lady Di) to “Who Killed Childhood?” 

Every page features lapidary observations by a conservative who speaks truth to wrongheaded cultural elites and to the toxic foolishness they both indulge and generate, e.g., “Princess Diana was useful both alive and dead to British liberals, who habitually measure their own moral standing and worth by their degree of theoretical hatred for and opposition to whatever exists”; “One of the most striking characteristics of drug-takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are generally forays into inner vacuums.”

Lives of the Necromancers by William Godwin—In January of 2020, I was slated by the American Philosophical Association as a commentator for a paper in ethics read by a USC grad student. The meeting was in Philadelphia, where I enjoyed visits to two of its wonderful art collections, the Barnes (in new digs) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (one of my favorites from a previous visit, and this time I got a blue ball cap with red PAFA lettering). I ran out of time before I could revisit the main museum (with the Rocky statue out front), but I had my hands full doing justice to the APA gathering. And it was a handful from the get go, as we were given preferred-gender-pronoun stickers for our badges at registration.

In the exhibit hall, it was fun (and sometimes appalling) to see what the publishers were offering. The regulars, such as Oxford, Hackett, and Princeton, were there, but so was the surprising display of material from libertarianism.org at a table manned by a rep from the Cato Institute. And they were offering freebies, one of which I couldn’t resist, what with a title including ‘Necromancers.’ I remembered that the name was connected with sorcery (and it was, indeed, a conjunction of root words for “the dead” and “prophecy,” the stuff of diviners), but I wasn’t sure how they were going to connect things to such libertarians as John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. Turns out, the book was a nineteenth-century classic designed to debunk folks who raised up magical or occult thinking against reason, whether alchemists or witch hunters. And though Christianity is often portrayed as opposed to reason, Godwin gives it some credit for breaking the spell of ancient oracles, including Zoroastrian Magi.

With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1930 by LeRoy Ashby—You might think that university presses are backwaters of pedantry, but some of the most readable and engaging work out there comes through these channels. Too often, the popular presses (including religious imprints) are so anxious to ride what’s hot (“celtic” stuff; environmentalism; race) or who’s hot (I won’t mention any names, but their initials might include TGC) that you get quick takes designed to gratify the base, serve the Zeitgeist, or stimulate textbook orders. There’s good place for this, but I’m grateful for books that take a decade of careful research to line out their stories. And here’s one, with five hundred pages of very accessible treatment of everything from the Marx Brothers to Elvis to the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. 

I was struck by Ashby’s treatment of a song Frank Sinatra sang in 1945, The House I Live In. It asks, “What is America to me?” and answers with a list of samplings, focused on the people of “all races and religions.” The second stanza reads:

The place I work in, the worker by my side

The little town or city where my people lived and died

The “howdy” and the handshake, the air of feeling free

And the right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me.

Those words make me wistful for an America we seem to be losing, what with the COVID hysteria which has virtually eliminated the handshake, the cancel culture and big-tech deplatforming which has undermined free speech, and the ideologies of envy and resentment that make warm greetings rarer.