I hope you and yours had a blessed Christmas season and a Happy New Year. I closed out the year tipping the scales at just over 100 books read. Many of the books I finished this year are relatively short, which helps boost that number, and many of them are books I’m required to teach and thus re-read regularly and fairly quickly, but still, I’m happy with this year’s results.
As a quick reminder, in this new year, I will be producing some content exclusively for paid subscribers. Keep an eye out for recorded podcast versions of articles published here and elsewhere, some behind the scenes looks at some ongoing research projects, and more. If you like what I write here, please consider a paid subscription, and thank you for reading.
Without further ado, my final four books for the year 2023 A.D.:
The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior
I have admired Karen Swallow Prior and her writing for some time. Her book On Reading Well is one I intend to revisit this year, and one I hope to assign in courses in the future. Her own experience as a conservative evangelical Christian and scholar obviously informs this deep dive on the historical and literary formation of the evangelical imagination. If you have ever been discouraged by Christian art, didactic and cheesy movies, apocalyptic rapture novels, and kitschy Christian décor, this book provides the background necessary to understand how the water evangelicals swim in gained its character. I can’t recommend this highly enough to anyone attempting to understand the evangelical mind and imagination, including those in the tradition, outside of it, questioning it, leaving it, entering it, and everything in between.
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry
This was a slightly more disappointing read (well, listen), for me. Gorski and Perry are sociologists, and have performed some very interesting original survey research that pins down some differences in thought between evangelicals that fall not along economic lines, not along lines of conservatism or fidelity to scripture, but instead along lines of race. In other words, the authors use their original research to show that two people who score similarly on measures of “evangelicalism” on a survey, who come from similar economic and cultural backgrounds, may differ vastly on questions of nationalism and religion in public life if one of them is white and one of them is non-white. This is interesting, worthy of note and study in its own right. Where the book fell flat for me was when the authors moved beyond their original research into the interpretation of history and politics. Frankly, I don’t think they grapple well with the presence of religion in America long before “White Christian Nationalism” in its current form took root, and when they attempt to, they back-interpret some current phenomena into past events. I would need to sit down with this in hard copy and write a review at length to get at the details of what precisely bothered me, which I just might do in the near future.
Old House of Fear by Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is well-known for his conservative political thought. His Conservative Mind From Burke to Eliot is a landmark text, just recently turned 70, and his praise as a thinker and an essayist is well deserved, in my estimation. But Kirk is also well-known in certain circles for his fiction writing. He shared a literary agent with Stephen King, and published widely in magazines of speculative fiction. Go search “Russell Kirk” on Abe Books, and you will find his name published in storied quarterlies and story magazines alongside such greats as Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, and more. This, his first novel, is a veritable classic of the gothic genre. A capable, relatively stoic lawyer embarks to a mysterious Scottish isle on an errand from his employer to buy an old ancestral estate from its current owner. Instead of an old remnant of a bygone era living peacefully in her manor, our hero finds a tale of intrigue, espionage, commies, and IRA members, oh my. As one reviewer on Goodreads pointed out, at times the novel feels cliched, but perhaps this is because we are this side of its publication. It certainly merits a notable place in a fun thriller genre. It helps the nostalgic effect that my personal copy is a first edition, inscribed by Russell Kirk himself.
Digital Liturgies: Recovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel James
I ended the year with perhaps one of the best books I have read on the topic of technology in some time. James captures much of my own thoughts about the nature or essence of technology in this book, ably weaving the critical work of Mashall McLuhan, Neil Postman and others into an argument that our technology is not a mere neutral tool, ready at hand to be put to use how we choose. Instead, our technology compels certain uses and behaviors, or as James calls them, certain “liturgies.” These baked-in tendencies must be recognized and noted if they are to be overcome, and must especially, James argued, be recognized by Christians who are commanded to not be taken captive, to not be conformed to this world, to be transformed not by our technologies but by the renewing of our minds. At once critical and practical, this is a must-read if you are in James’s intended Christian audience. My only critique is that I wish James dealt with some other thinkers that I think would only bolster his case: his argument is consonant with and would be made stronger by leaning on thinkers like George Parkin Grant and Werner Heisenberg, among others, but one can hardly fault an author for not writing a different book than the one they wrote.