“The Place of Tides by James Rebanks Review—Ducking Out of a Midlife Crisis.” Helen Davies praises Rebanks’s “quietly profound book. It is a story about a still-essential way of living in the modern world and finding a way to keep going. It is also a deft travelogue to one of the world’s wildest seascapes.”
“Gratitude, Sorrow, Suffering and Mercy: R.I.P. Greg Hillis.” James T. Keane remembers the life and vitality of a Thomas Merton scholar, baseball fan, Wendell Berry admirer, and friend to many: “It is an irony—though an appropriate one—that the final essay Greg wrote for America, was ostensibly not about theology at all, but about baseball. After the news of the retirement of Ángel Hernández, widely considered the worst umpire in baseball, Greg reflected on the value of showing one another mercy. ‘I think Ángel Hernández was not particularly good at being an umpire. But I know for a fact that I would perform even worse,’ he wrote. ‘Moreover, can we not think of times in our work or family lives—as well as in our spiritual lives—when we have made mistakes on a colossal scale? I can, and I thank God that my errors in judgment and action were not on display for the world to see. Instead, I thank God for the mercy shown to me by those affected by my errors.’”
“The Strenuous Life.” Adam Smith proposes limiting the our political engagement so that we can make that engagement more active: “Hyperpolitics is busywork politics. Apparently our job as citizens is to get excited about everything that doesn’t matter without getting excited enough about anything that does matter to actually do something about it. Our job is to look busy and politically ‘engaged.’ (David Graeber might call this kind of citizenship a ‘bullshit job.’)”
“Steve Bannon Has Called His “Army” to Do Battle—No Matter Who Wins in November.” James Pogue continues to be one of the writers who best articulates the populist debates. This long essay is just the latest example. In talking with Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy adviser to President Obama, Pogue summarizes much of the challenge NATO and the managers of American empire face: “Global leaders, he said, need to reckon with a world that can never truly be flat, as the optimistic liberal phrasing once envisioned it would be. ‘Otherwise we’re ultimately going to lose everything—because then Bannon is going to capture that pushback,’ he said. ‘We need to have a national identity that ties this all together,’ he said. ‘And everyone agrees that there is a problem here. We all see it.’ The divide is between people who want to try to bring things down to a soft landing and people who want to blow it up. ‘The challenge,’ he said, is that ‘nobody has shown me you can blow it up absent a war and a mass disruptive event.’”
“The End of the Age of Hitler.” In a remarkably wise essay, Alec Ryrie ponders what happens when a culture replaces a positive exemplar with a negative one: “As Tolkien could have told us, building our values around a war is unwise, since even a just war is, in itself, a very evil thing. More fundamentally, replacing a positive exemplar (Jesus) with a negative one (Hitler) comes at a heavy cost. It teaches us what to hate but not what to love. Our culture assures us that we are each free to pursue our own good, but—quite deliberately—gives us no resources to discern what that good might be. It assures us that we have rights and freedoms. But what are they for? Not, presumably, for triumphantly denouncing one another on social media. To get past that, however, we would need gentler virtues and sharper insights than the value-system the age of Hitler provides. We would need to recognize that evil is infinite in its varieties, and that Nazism is only one of its flavors; that evil is distributed, not personified; and that it is usually rooted inside ourselves. We cannot defeat it by jumping into a Spitfire and shooting at it.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“I Cheerfully Refuse . . . to Give Up Hope.” Ronni Kurtz praises Leif Enger’s new novel, I Cheerfully Refuse: “Perhaps no line in the book better summarizes the doom alongside the stubborn hopefulness embodied by the story’s main character, Rainy, than a comment from his book-loving wife, Lark, who is trying to open her own bookshop. After Lark makes her first purchase of books for the shop, Rainy asks her how she’s feeling about the endeavor. She replies, ‘probably doomed and perplexingly merry.’”
“The Wonderland Trail.” Morf Morford describes hiking around Mt. Rainer. I’ve done parts of this trail but would love to do the whole thing some day: “I have no interest in rushing through such an experience. I’d far rather, as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau both put it, ‘saunter’ through a terrain that, though I see it almost every day in the distance, fascinates me even though it holds little to no regard for human concerns or values. Or even survival.”
“Nadya Williams on her new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic.” Dixie Dillon Lane talks with Nadya Williams about her new book (which concludes with a thoughtful chapter on Wendell Berry). In Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, Williams responds to a couple of core questions: “What does it say about our society that people (including journalists and public analysts and other writers) keep talking in such disparaging ways about motherhood and about children? And what does it say about the church, if so many Christians are deferring marriage or privileging career over family?”
“Anarchism.” Bill Kauffman defines this tradition in the American context: “Systematic anarchists weaving their elaborate schemes have usually been bores, men just as trapped in webs of abstraction as the statists against whom they rail. Their influence within the broader culture has been nil. American anarchism has been more a tendency than a philosophy; the most appealing anarchists have been literary men deeply dyed in the American grain.”
“Perspective on Partisan Gridlock.” George Hawley reviews Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era by Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler: “The authors make a strong argument that our political institutions no longer work as intended, leading to our present dysfunction and, they fear, setting the stage for future right-wing authoritarianism. The book’s explanation for how we reached our current situation is genuinely insightful, which makes up for its less convincing final chapters. The good news is that the authors’ alarmist conclusions were not especially persuasive, and I finished the book less pessimistic about the future than I was before.”
