Over at Utne Reader, I came across an interesting title: “A Guide to Reusing, Swapping, or Giving Away Just About Everything.”  Now that’s an environmentally responsible article I’d like to read.  So I did.  I learned that I could trade unwanted books, music, movies, and video games at Swaptree, Zunafish, and BarterBee.  Trade books at BookMooch and PaperBackSwap.  Trade clothes at Swapstyle.com.  Trade kids’ stuff at Zwaggle.  Give your stuff to charities and nonprofits at Throwplace.  There are more charity giveaway sites, and sites for computers and electronics.  Check it out.

Clearly, there’s a theme to today’s posts, about literature, the West, the classics, and reading.  At City Journal, Bruce Thornton reviews Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, by George Weigel, where the author “gives Christian answers to the West’s most pressing questions.”  Weigel is also the author of The Cube and the Cathedral, which you may’ve heard of.

Weigel examines the implications that restoring Christian-and more specifically Catholic-philosophical and theological perspectives to our political discourse would have in a host of areas, including foreign policy, globalization, the problems of the Third World, the role of faith in politics, abortion, bioethics, the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad, and many others. Weigel’s analysis of political freedom is particularly valuable, for the starting point of all other political disputes is our understanding of liberty.

A contemporary idea had by any school child and sold by the media is that we have democracy in America simply because we’re smart, enlightened people who really, really want freedom.  It sounds like Weigel would disagree.  We have freedom because of the moral and philosophical systems that we have in the West.

In contrast to the materialist determinism or secularist scientism dominating our public discourse, Weigel himself exemplifies what he describes as the “Christian realist sensibility-an understanding of the inevitable irony, pathos, and tragedy of history; alertness to unintended consequences; a robust skepticism about schemes of human perfection (especially when politics is the instrument of salvation); [and] cherishing democracy without worshipping it.”

That’s a nice thought: a Christian realist.  Not a Christian Dominionist who wants a Senate full of deacons, and not a Christian Secularist who wants to build a wall of impenetrability between church and everything else.

A mostly self-published book by a new and undiscovered Christian author is selling like hotcakes.  It’s called The Shack, and its sales are impressive.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even [Eckhart] Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

I’d never heard of it before reading this article, but you may have.  Here’s a little of the plot:

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, [a happy black woman] who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

Al Mohler has called the book “deeply troubling” for its theological implications and other Evangelical leaders have said as much.  Oh, I don’t know about all this.  I think it’s great for an unknown author to publish a book that people are buying.  I think it’s great for that author to be Christian.  I think it’s great if that book discusses faith, or concerns itself with faith.  I think it’s bad if the book is The Purpose Driven Life With a Plot.  I think it’s bad if people are buying the book like hotcakes, not because it’s quality literature, but because it’s about Jesus and Christian Stuff.  A bad book about Jesus and Christian stuff is oh-so-more-dangerous than any number of good books about depraved people.  But maybe it’s quality literature.  Maybe it’s good stuff.  You can buy it here.

Academics are notoriously unhappy people, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.  I know, because I used to be one of them and am often called one now, and my darkest and most depressing days happened when I was employed as a teacher in a university.  And it’s ironic, too, because academics have what would appear to be pretty good lives: relative control of much their own schedules, with time dedicated solely to reading, writing, and discussion that can happen in the office, in the bookstore, in the coffee shop, and relative power over their own professional destinies, meaning they often are able to decide what they teach, when they teach, what they will write about, how they will write about it, and so on.  It’s a terrible load of freedom.  Perhaps this is why they are so unhappy. 

Another reason may be the fact that their work - again, in the social sciences and humanities - is often (not always, but often) irrelevant to contemporary culture and life.  Meaning that they are free to do what they want because nobody really cares what they do.  I have experienced this apathy first-hand, and it is a terrible thing.  Better to be trapped in an office, or meeting with clients, and working 9 to 5, so long as I can see that my services are appreciated and the world is a better place, relatively speaking, because of it.

Usually by the time they turn 40, they discover the students aren’t sufficiently appreciative; the books don’t get written; the teaching begins to feel repetitive; the collegiality is seldom anywhere near what one hoped for it; there isn’t any good use for the leisure. Meanwhile, people who got lots of B’s in school seem to be driving around in Mercedes, buying million-dollar apartments, enjoying freedom and prosperity in a manner that strikes the former good students, now professors, as not only unseemly but of a kind a just society surely would never permit.

Now that politics has trumped literature in English departments the situation is even worse. Beset by political correctness, self-imposed diversity, without leadership from above, university teachers, at least on the humanities and social-science sides, knowing the work they produce couldn’t be of the least possible interest to anyone but the hacks of the [Modern Language Association] and similar academic organizations, have more reason than ever to be unhappy.

And so let us leave them, overpaid and underworked, surly with alienation and unable to find any way out of the sweet racket into which they once so ardently longed to get.

The rest of this essay by Joseph Epstein is a discussion of the academic novel - i.e., novels about academic life - and how they seem well-suited to explaining why academics are so unhappy.  It is a sad thing, to be sure.  I spent ten years in college just so I could stay there forever and teach, and I found it as unsatisfying as the above passage suggests.  Perhaps this is just another death knell for the ways most American humanities and social science departments, colleges, and schools are pathologically corrupt and need to change.  When it’s a depressing place for those who actually want to be there, you know something’s wrong.

John Milton endures, despite the hopes and prayers of young students of the classics. That’s because his Satan is the archetype of the modern terrorist, as suggested by Jonathan Rosen in this nice piece from The New Yorker.

In America, where God and the Devil live alongside Western rationalism, Milton seems right at home.

Rosen continues: “After the attacks of September 11th, it was possible to find Milton invoked to remind us of the nature of absolute evil-his Satan really is a model terrorist, who, having abandoned hope of a happy home, devotes his energy to destroying the lives of others-and at the same time quoted to uphold the rights of individuals whose distasteful views might be curtailed during a time of war.”  He was a Puritan and a great inspiration to the Enlightenment, “combining an urge for Biblical fulfillment with an urge for radical new beginnings.”

If you’re looking to teach Milton, or read it, or study it, or be made more human by it, try reading the Ballard Matthews Lectures on Paradise Lost, by C.S. Lewis, published in book form while Lewis was writing The Screwtape Letters.  Not a coincidence, methinks.

Ten years ago, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath wrote Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, lamenting “for the decline of classical learning in the university.”  A decade later (surprise!) they are still lamenting.  The themes of that book were that study of the Classical world is good, that it’s not happening anymore, and that it should be happening.  Hanson blames the current state of the university, and really the dilapidated state of Western Civilization, on this refusal of ours to study Antiquity, and his current piece in The New Criterion is an excellent, and by now unsurprising, picture of what the modern university looks like, with crosses being removed from the oldest college chapel in the country and Queer Studies scholars barnstorming through the souls of our nation’s children.

Now, I’d have to do a couple of things to Hanson’s thesis.  You’re probably not surprised that I’d have to add “Judeo” and “Christian” to his “Greco” and “Roman.”  After all, Western Civilization is a chariot with four wheels, not two.  The Renaissance may have given us a rebirth of classical learning, but a lot happened between 500AD and 1500AD, like the formation of the first universities and the marriage of the Christian ethic with Roman law.  Studying Antiquity is far better than studying postmodern theory, but neither can be fully understood or appreciated without the light of revelation and the moral vision of what it means to be human, as laid out in scripture.

Yet, Hanson writes a good and powerful defense of liberal learning, and one that I’m sure he’ll need to make again in another decade.

HT: Arts and Letters Daily

Just under two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI delivered what’s called “the Regensburg lecture” at the university of that name, where spoke at length about the modern university, and how it’s lost its soul.  His own title for the lecture was “Faith, Reason, and the University.”  It was a personal and philosophical lecture, and worth reading. 

The pope’s remarks […] were an admonition to the modern university that it must rediscover its soul and its purpose or risk irrelevance. In a world ever-more characterized by the struggle between rival religions-a struggle that has become open and in places violent-a university culture that upholds the positivism of the early 20th century is doomed, in the pope’s account, to be useless. Now, there is nothing more offensive to the modern university than to be called irrelevant, for its very charter is to be the vanguard of humanity’s progress. So when Benedict quotes Socrates at the end of his remarks, he courts his predecessor’s fate, for he suggests that the modern mind ought to be measured by the ancient.

The papal lecture is discussed at length in a new book by James V. Schall, S.J., called, rather unsurprisingly, The Regensburg Lecture.  Read this review of the lecture and the book about it at The University Bookman.  Read the full lecture here.

I’m blessed to be from Mississippi, an ironic state, at least in literary terms. We have the worst schools in the nation and one of the worst literacy rates, quite arguably, but have managed to produce the best writers. It’s the kind of irony that Eudora Welty wrote about with lyricism, and Walker Percy wrote about with his dour Catholic wit. But when you come to Mississippi, be careful about mentioning our writers. My kinsmen have passionate opinions about them, and they aren’t always nice. Ask a grandmother, or even a mother, or even your cousin, and you might hear effusive praise for Welty or Percy or Tennessee Williams or Shelby Foote or John Grisham or Alice Walker or Barry Hannah or William Faulkner. But you might not. I’ve never met a Mississippian who liked Faulkner, at least not one that was from here or born here. And most of my kin don’t like Tennessee Williams, either. Not because these fellows are turncoats, which they sometimes are. It’s just because they’re from here, and it’s hard to like them as much as other people like them.

I live in Savannah, Georgia, now: home to the best short story writer in the whole world, Flannery O’Connor. People here don’t speak ill of her, but neither do they laud her with praise. Weird.

Why is that, and do you have similar experiences with writers from where you are?

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting on summer reading and good and bad books.  First is Albert Mohler’s list of ten good histories to read this summer.  Here they are:

1. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Strugggle Between East and West
2. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
3. Walter Russell Mead, God the Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World
4. James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
5. Robert Service, Comrades!  A History of World Communism
6. Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana
7. Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era
8. James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe
9. Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800
10. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

Excerpts and Mohler’s thoughts on each book can be found here (1-5) and here (6-10).

Robert Darnton, a scholar on books and the director of the Harvard Library, delivers a defense of the traditional library in this New York Review of Books essay. I love libraries. They began transforming my life from elementary school and they kept doing it up through graduate school and my young career as a college teacher. So, I don’t really need to hear a defense of libraries. I love them and use them. But in the age of the internet, apparently, librarians and lovers of libraries are anxious to make their libraries relevant. The problem is, Darnton’s essay really isn’t that persuasive. His argument makes perfect sense to me, and it can be summed up as: Libraries are great because books are great and because they are places where scholars and students can go to use the internet.

That’s not very powerful. The argument “books are good” only works with people who usually already like libraries. And the internet argument is flaccid, too. This is his best paragraph, however:

In fact, the strongest argument for the old-fashioned book is its effectiveness for ordinary readers. Thanks to Google, scholars are able to search, navigate, harvest, mine, deep link, and crawl (the terms vary along with the technology) through millions of Web sites and electronic texts. At the same time, anyone in search of a good read can pick up a printed volume and thumb through it at ease, enjoying the magic of words as ink on paper. No computer screen gives satisfaction like the printed page. But the Internet delivers data that can be transformed into a classical codex. It already has made print-on-demand a thriving industry, and it promises to make books available from computers that will operate like ATM machines: log in, order electronically, and out comes a printed and bound volume. Perhaps someday a text on a hand-held screen will please the eye as thoroughly as a page of a codex produced two thousand years ago.

Here’s an idea: it’s never very effective to tell a younger generation that something old is important. They won’t believe you. You have to show them it’s important. So librarians need to do something to make their buildings important. Make them places where students must go. Make the information there more valuable than information somewhere else. Make them places where scholars must go, where they have to go. Make them places where knowledge is found. And if the internet won’t allow it, then we’ll simply be having far fewer libraries. But the ones we do have, I think, will be great places to visit. Nevertheless, Darnton’s history of the library is very informative and shows how the library changed history, and still might.