“In Due Season.” Chris Gregorio reviews and praises Matt Miller’s Leaves of Healing: “As he reflects on each slice of liturgical time and the period of garden time in which it occurs, some themes naturally emerge: yearnings for a sense of place, rootedness, and community; the mysteries of life, death, Incarnation, and Resurrection; the world’s brokenness and the great and blessed hope for its renewal in God; the ascetic cultivation of Christian virtue; structures of justice and injustice, and so much more.”
“America and Its Universities Need a New Social Contract.” I’m not enamored of all her solutions, but Danielle Allen takes a perceptive and critical look at how the relationship between elite universities and the public has failed: “The Vannevar Bush era thus set three major forces in motion: technologically powered and ultimately globalizing economic growth, increased university dependence on the federal government, and a deepening habit among universities of refusing to accept responsibility for the social impact of the choices made by scientists and other professors. This was a recipe for remarkable growth and success on the metrics that Bush had set out: advances in health and life expectancy, improved STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education, and conversion of innovation into economic productivity, consumer satisfaction, and national security. But this social contract between universities and society concealed within it the seeds of its own undoing.”
“Briefly Noted.” Among other reviews in this section of the latest First Things, John Murdock reflects on The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement by Neall Pogue: “Pogue also chronicles the changes in Christian educational materials. Until 1986, fundamentalist fifth-grade reading classes included the story of John Muir, complete with an illustration of young Muir hugging an ancient oak. Eventually, nuanced calls for stewardship succumbed to capitalist cheerleading.”
“The Anarchist and the Republican.” Jesse Walker relates the winding tale of two decentralist politicians, John McClaughry and Karl Hess: “each had arrived at a similar distrust of the state and other centralized institutions. Both had been involved with the black power and neighborhood power movements, and both liked it when workers owned and managed their own workplaces. And both loved technologies that transfer power from institutions to individuals. It’s just that one worked within the system and the other ever further from it—two paths that offer lessons not just in libertarian and decentralist ideas but in the ways people pursue them.” (Recommended by Bill Kauffman.)
“What I Learned about ‘America First’ in a Pennsylvania Steel Mill.” Salena Zito tells a complicated story about steel, tariffs, and factory communities: “I wanted to hear from the employees themselves, many of whom have multigenerational ties to the facility, about their hopes and fears and what the often bloodless business headlines mean to communities whose identities are wrapped in steel, who consider their work part of the fabric of the nation itself. What I found was a nuanced conversation, one that has divided workers, unions, politicians and investors over the future of American steel. And a debate in which the “America First” position, according to the workers whose gloved hands actually touch the steel, might mean welcoming Japanese cash and leadership rather than shutting the company off from the world.”
“China and America Agree: Apple Is Too Big to Fail.” Patrick McGee looks at another complicated story where two huge nations (or empires) are entangled in a huge company: “What’s certain is that the U.S. and China both need Apple to succeed, albeit for very different reasons. The world’s most valuable company now finds itself caught in a cold war between two superpowers that want a divorce but need to make it work for their kid. For Washington, Apple is a symbol of tech might. It is the world’s most valuable company, and one that generates great wealth for its (largely American) stockholders. . . . In China, Apple is the Great Teacher. For a quarter-century, the tech giant has made massive investments in equipment and sent thousands of its top engineers to hundreds of factories across the country, training China’s workers how to meet near-impossible engineering standards and then scale production to enormous volumes.”
“A Story of Tariffs, Work, Family, and the Good Life.” Tim Carney gets at the deeper issues animating current debates on tariffs and manufacturing: “the economic argument reaches too far, stretching beyond its competency. Experts always do this. Consider how the epidemiologists overreached during the pandemic, believing they could not only tell us about reducing infections, but could weigh the risks of infection against the value of family, community, and connection. Economists can tell us how trade policies correlate with GDP. They cannot tell us which trade policies will make the good life more attainable. And it’s on this larger, more important question that the skeptics and opponents of free trade have a more interesting story to tell. It’s a story, not a formula or a law of economics. Stories are often dismissed by those with doctorate degrees, but stories are what motivate most human action.”
“Meet Usha Vance: MAGA’s Enigmatic Second Lady.” Peter Savodnik has an interesting conversation with Usha Vance: “She seemed aware of our reverberating politics—how ugly or stupid things that are said on one side led, with an almost Newtonian inevitability, to ugly and stupid things being said on the other. Usha was hesitant to expose her children to that.”
“Keep American Meat out of Britain.” James Rebanks worries about the consequences of a new trade deal between the UK and US: “The trouble is that, if we allow American food into Britain that has been produced with banned pesticides, or in unhygienic factory farms, or from pigs in farrowing crates, then we have to let British farmers use those same methods to compete on price, or else we lose our farms because of the unfair competition. An unfavourable deal could see British farming become a “race to the bottom” to compete on price with the American Midwest.”
“Homestand Makes Compelling Case for Small Town Baseball.” John Miller commends the communal goods of America’s pastime: “In American towns, before air conditioning and television turned suburban homes into social coffins, minor league baseball anchored the evenings of summer. For most of the 20th century, the best place to be on a hot July night was the local ballyard. There was a cool breeze there, and at home no baseball to see on TV. The biggest news in town, it was said, was if the bank was robbed, or the local nine won the pennant.”
“What Profit Hath a Man of All His Labor?” Nadya Williams reviews Bobby Jamieson’s Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness and warns of the dangers of limitless striving for more: “Only a love for God—and an awareness of how loved we are, too—makes it possible for us to accept the gifts that come into our lives, because we understand that these gifts come from God. As Jamieson puts it, ‘Every gift bears a trace of its giver.’ Few things are as difficult for us today as accepting a gift freely given—or the gifts that are in our lives already. We’d rather try to earn something else and never enjoy it.”
