Collected Miscellany

What do you do when you feel a little blah, a little out of focus? Why buy some books of course!

This time around I focused on theological and spritual issues. Here is what I bought:

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard:
Willard (The Divine Conspiracy), a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California who is also a Southern Baptist minister, here tackles the central Christian question of how to be more like Christ. He claims that the church’s failures throughout history are a result of Christians’ reading biblical passages that adjure them to Christ-like perfection and then trying to reach that perfection by behaving more perfectly. Instead, he argues that believers should allow God to transform them internally so that their actions, though never quite perfect, will at least be more aligned with God. Willard delineates six areas of such transformation thought, feeling, will, body, social context and soul and delineates a general process toward transforming each.
I have struggled recently with spritual growth and character building and this seems like a challenging and rewarding look at the subject. I need a jump start and I hoping this helps provide one.

Chosen But Free: A Balanced View of Divine Election by Norman Geisler. The reason I bought this book is that I was getting frustrated with the debate/discussion of Calvinism and Arminianism that often surfaces over at He Lives. I think Geisler is the closest to my position so I wanted to go back over the arguments and then read a strong book from the other positions. Also my wife has been wrestling with this issue in one of her classes.

Lastly I bought a new Bible for study and reading. I wanted a sturdy and yet easy to carry Bible with a accurate translation (I seem to have too many NIVs lying around). This one seemed to fit the bill.

Now, if I could just find more time to read . . .

And I thought I had a book addiction:

To be sure, bibliomania is not a comfortable addiction. To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income — more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed). Friends and family have felt obliged to shun me lest I drag them down with my sordid behaviour; my burblings of cracked hinges, crushed spines and discoloured front-end papers. I am abandoned to the company of quiet men in cardigans.

– David Lovibond

Here is a shocker: I actually enjoyed a Michael Kinsley column. Curse You, Robert Caro! By Michael Kinsley, in which the author details the travails of judging the National Book Awards, is actually rather entertaining and even interesting in parts.

I particularly found this paragraph fascinating:

Many years ago, I conducted an experiment of placing a note in copies of several briskly selling books in a local Washington bookstore. The notes had my phone number and offered $5 to anyone who saw them and called me up. No one called. Though hardly scientific, this tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them.

I would like to say this is not true but my bookcase mocks me at every turn. I love reading of course but not quite as much as searching for and buying them.

Why don’t you review books for a living? You ask. Well reading a book for pleasure is a different thing altogether than readin it in order to review it. If it was so simple to write book reviews after having casually read a book I would have published volumes of reviews. In fact I am three books behind in posting at Blog Critics – which doesn’t require an editors approval or have the pressure of pay. If I can’t post a review on a blog what makes you think I can write a published review?

Oh well, the reading versus buying battle will always be with us the point is to fight the good fight.

Ben Ausptizwas kind enough to send me the Ruyard Kipling classic Kim after he won the free book contest so I decided to bump it to the top of my list. In fact I am off to bed to read right now as I have an early soccer game in the AM.

There is nothing quite like snuggling into bed to read on a cold winter’s night . . .

In case you have a lot of time on your hands and you are up for some serious reading, a number of blogs have posted reading lists. These blogs tend to have an academic tilt and so the books are often far from light reading (no Ann Coulter here). But since I know my readers are intelligent I will link to them.

Josh Chafetz, over at OxBlog, started it all of with his massive list of the classics of political philosophy. He sums it all up this way:

Wow, that was long! Sorry. These are, I think, books to live with (with the exception of some of the post-World War II stuff, which may or may not turn out to be worth living with). They are, in my opinion, the greatest examples of political thought we have. They disagree with each other; they contradict each other; and they certainly won’t tell you who’s right in the stem cell debate. But they’ll teach you how to think; they’ll give you new prisms through which to view events; they’ll help you analyze everything from more angles. They’re amazing works, and they’re worth getting to before you die.

Matthew Yglesias (Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist) has an interesting, if rambling, discussion of political philosophy and its literature. It includes this interesting paragraph:

Once you’re done with all this, Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity will tell you it was all pointless, and you should go read novels if you want to become a better person. This is true, insofar as by “better person” you mean kinder, but assuming you want to not only mean well, but also do well, you’re going to need to read a lot of boring, non-philosophical, empirical literature. If you ask me, there is actually only one big question in political theory: Is there a God? I tend to think not, but you won’t find the question properly addressed in books of political philosophy. Besides that, the issues are all really empirical. Even the alleged theoretical issue of what we’re supposed to do about the whole God question given the fact that we disagree is really mostly an empirical one about how any given person can best go about brainwashing everyone into holding the correct opinion on this question without anyone noticing.

Not wanting to be Left out, Chris Bertram over at Junius added his thoughts and Kieran Healy add some caveats.

These guys are out of my league ( I have a degree from a lowly MAC school) but I will try to add my list of key conservative works soon.

*The review that follows is a result of my short lived free books for bloggers campaign. Ben A. won the contest and Berkowitz’s book. Being a gentleman and a scholar he completed the review and sent it on to me, thereby fulfilling the only requirement of the contest. Thanks Ben.

To function and thrive, states depend on the virtues of their citizens: A nation of cowards will be subjugated, a country of thieves corrupted, a city of dolts defrauded. Thus, it might be considered central for any regime to identify the particular qualities of character that support the goals of government, and to understand how best to cultivate them in its citizens. This, at least, was the view of Aristotle; and it is a position explored at length in Peter Berkowitz’s book Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism.

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