A Thinking Reed

Month: December 2014

  • Favorite books of 2014

    I should say, books I read in 2014. Most of these weren’t published this year.

    Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H. W. Brands

    A compelling and readable (indeed, almost novelistic) account of the life and times of our 32nd president. Brands doesn’t gloss over his flaws, but I came away even more impressed with FDR’s political genius and his sincere desire to make the United States a better, fairer country.

    Doctor Who: Harvest of Time, Alastair Reynolds

    A lovingly crafted story of the third Doctor and his arch-nemesis (and here temporary ally) the Master. Reynolds is a popular “hard” sci-fi writer, and he brings some of that ethos into this story, while remaining faithful to this particular era of Doctor Who (which also happens to be one of my favorites).

    Tokens of Trust, Rowan Williams

    This was a re-read, and I’m still convinced this is one of the best contemporary introductions to the Christian faith. Organizing the book around the theme of the “trustworthiness” of God beautifully illuminates how the various parts of the creed hang together.

    The Magicians trilogy (The Magicians, The Magician King, The Magician’s Land), Lev Grossman

    Grossman’s trilogy is a sort of mash-up of the Harry Potter and Narnia books filtered through the sensibility of a Brooklyn literary hipster. Which sounds kind of insufferable, come to think of it. But, despite the at-times aching self-awareness, Grossman manages to tell an original story about friendship and growing up infused with a genuine sense of wonder.

    Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel

    Heschel–refugee from European Naziism, mystic, rabbi, theologian, friend and comrade of both Martin Luther King and Reinhold Niebuhr–is a near-legendary figure. So I’m somewhat ashamed to admit this is the first time I read him. Even more, I’m sorry I waited so long. Heschel’s writing sits somewhere between poetic allusiveness and philosophical argument, but radiating at the core of this book is the insight that wonder–or what Heschel calls “radical amazement”–at the sheer contingency of being is our deepest clue to the existence of the transcendent–and to a worthwhile human life. I’m currently reading the companion volume, God in Search of Man, where Heschel lays out his vision more explicitly as a “philosophy of Judaism,” and am enjoying it even more. He is easily the religious writer I’ve been most excited to discover in years.

    1812: The War That Forged a Nation, Walter R. Borneman

    It seems inappropriate to call a book about a war “fun,” but Borneman’s history of the War of 1812 (meant for the general reader) is definitely written with a light touch. Borneman focuses mainly on the theaters of war (the Western frontier, the Great Lakes, the Eastern seaboard, and the Gulf Coast), and I for one would’ve liked to see a little more attention to the social and political context. But he brings to life the admirals and generals on both sides who executed the war, and deftly shows how the conflict helped put the “United” in “United States.” I knew very little about the particulars of the war going in, but after reading this, my appetite to learn more has been sufficiently whetted.

  • Heschel’s trilemma

    Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage:

    There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a fact, or the product of insanity, self-delusion, or a pedagogical invention, the product of a mental confusion, of wishful thinking, or a subconscious activity. (p. 223)

    This reminded me immediately of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” from Mere Christianity. Speaking of the claims the Jesus of the gospels makes for his own authority, Lewis writes that a man who did such things

    would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. (p. 56)

    What Lewis was criticizing was the view that Jesus of Nazareth was simply a “great moral teacher,” rather than God Incarnate. The claims Jesus makes for himself, Lewis argues, simply don’t allow us to place him in that category. His claims (e.g., the right to forgive sins) are much more radical than that.

    Somewhat similarly, Heschel argues that we aren’t really in a position to evaluate the prophets’ putative revelation by our own canons of rationality. He writes that “[i]n calling upon the prophets to stand before the bar of our critical judgment, we are like dwarfs undertaking to measure the height of giants” (p. 222). Prophets like Moses, Amos, or Isaiah weren’t offering moral wisdom for our dispassionate consideration; they were propounding a radical demand for holiness and justice that, they claimed, came from God himself.

    In both cases, we’re faced with a potentially life-changing challenge. Lewis and Heschel both want to bring us face-to-face with the unvarnished claim of God’s revelation. Categorizing Jesus or the prophets are purveyors of a vague and genial moral wisdom that we might choose to incorporate into our existing mental framework allows us to keep them at arm’s length. By denying this alternative and posing the remaining ones so starkly, both Lewis and Heschel are prodding us to decide whether we will accept their claims on us.

    (Oh, and yes, it looks like I’m blogging again, at least for the moment.)