The Weekly
Hi everyone,
I've received a number of new email signups since my piece in The Atlantic so I thought now might be a good time to try, once again, to reboot this thing.
Briefly, I'm going to use this newsletter to send out some short notes on what I'm reading, both books and online, and share some initial observations on it all that may turn into something more in the future. (That is actually how The Atlantic essay happened, except I was sharing the initial observations on Twitter rather than an email.)
Books
I always have more books going at once than is good for me, but it's also not a habit I've ever had much success breaking, so I've reconciled myself to it at this point. The seven I'm working my way through currently are:
Losing Our Religion by Russell Moore
Regime Change by Patrick Deneen
Naming Neoliberalism by Rodney Clapp
The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior
The Need to be Whole by Wendell Berry
To Heaven's Rim, a new poetry collection edited by Burl Horniachek
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The Cather is a re-read. No one describes the landscapes of the Great Plains like her. I just spent a month on the road driving through the southeast, up the coast to New York, and then back home to Nebraska so reading something that makes my home landscape as arresting and captivating as the landscapes in our nation more commonly recognized as beautiful has been a joy.
Berry is the master and his powers aren't fading, even as he nears 90. Read it.
The Horniachek collection is a volume of collected poetry by Christian authors from the early patristics up through 1800. You'll find poems from Ambrose of Milan, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther, but also works from lesser known figures from Africa, Asia, and across Europe. My personal favorite so far has been a poem about nightingales written by Alcuin of York, a now-forgotten early medieval theologian educated in England before being called to the court of Charlemagne to serve there as its leading scholar. It's quite interesting to set that next to Keats's more famous Ode. I may be writing on that for Mere Orthodoxy.
Essays, Columns, and Reviews
It Could Be Worse: Two Cheers for the Faith and Work Movement by Charlie Clark.
The Medium Is the Mania: Anxiety as a Feature, Not a Bug, of Digital Media by Caleb Wait.
The Great Malformation by Talbot Brewer.
What I Saw When I Looked Inside My Own Body by BD McClay.
Remembering David L. Schindler's Radical Vision by Thomas Gourlay
Living with Religious Scrupulosity or Moral OCD by Alan Noble
Elsewhere
It's nearly apple picking season here in southeast Nebraska. Our family makes a trip or two to some local orchards every fall, ideally to pick our own apples, and we usually come home with more than we know what to do with. (They often end up in oatmeal or in homemade apple cider with the solids strained out from the cider then being blended into apple butter.) Fall is probably my favorite season in this part of the world—orchards, football, campfires, and the heat finally breaking and beginning to suggest the cold that will soon be here and which I love dearly. (Read Jason Peters' "Meditation on the Cold" if you haven't.)
Thank you for reading. I'm going to try to make this a weekly thing, but it may take a few goes for the habit to stick.
Until next time,
~Jake