Capping Off 2023

Favorite books list, Christmas devotionals, and regulatory burdens on family formation

Favorite Books

I finally made time in 2023 for a couple books that had been recommended to me for a very long while. Some, I had put off because they were massively long (A Secular Age); others, because the title gave me the false impression that I wouldn’t be interested (Radical Hope; The Women Are Up To Something; The Toxic War on Masculinity). But for almost all of these, I figured that I had probably already gotten everything that I needed from these books in other ways: podcasts, reviews and articles, classes or cocktail party conversations. While that is true for many books (they should have been an essay, or remained an essay), I didn’t find it true for any of these five. The fine details were rich, important, and evaded distillation into a singular thesis.

Begotten or Made?: Human Procreation and Medical Technique by Oliver O’Donovan (1984)

• I studied some bioethics in graduate school, which gave me the false sense that I had somehow already absorbed all I could from this OOD title by interaction with later books. It turns out that was an extraordinarily prideful assumption.

• Matthew Lee Anderson—who wrote a fantastic introduction to the recent republication of BoM that you should try to get your hands on —described the book more elegantly than I ever could in his contribution to Mere Orthodoxy’s “23 Books for 2023”:

  “Protestants keep complaining about their need for a ‘theology of the body.’ Developing one starts with reading the resources we already have. [This book] remains one of the most substantive, serious treatments of bioethical questions Protestant moral theology has produced in the past thirty years.”

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear (2006)

• The title sounded extraordinarily cheesy to this born-and-bred Evangelical’s ears, so even though people I respect have been pointing to this book for a very long time, I resisted their suggestions.

• Radical Hope is a fantastic follow-up to books like Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue about sustaining a tradition. What do we do amidst massive societal transformations (Industrial Revolution, liberalism, digital age) that frustrate our efforts to map traditional scripts about virtue and the good life onto the world? Lear offers up the example of Plenty Coups: the last great chief of the Crow Nation. The analogies are ripe and the lessons potent for those of us trying to navigate the Brave New World of the 21st century.

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (2007)

• It was less presumptuous of me to assume I had gotten what I need from A Secular Age without reading it. I had heard Taylor lecture on the book’s themes in grad school, after all. But again, I was wrong to put this book on the backburner.

• I’m still thinking through specifics of the transformations that Taylor outlines: e.g., the Protestant Reformation’s underappreciated crusades against prostitution and sexual immorality that Christians had all-too-often come to accept as an ineradicable evil. Taylor’s book suffers some for uneven-handed treatment of Protestants (finding us at fault for much of the worst of modernity), but it is an important ironic truth that the road to hell is paved by good intentions.

The Women Are Up To Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb (2021)

• The study of history is often too sequential, at least at the popular level. Giving a proper account of simultaneity requires nuance and page count that can drag down a book or textbook, but there’s something incredibly rewarding to see the movement of history in not just Great Men and Women but groups and cohorts. Books treating the Inklings (the literary group made up of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, among others) do so much to help us understand each of those men in a way that a singular focus on their lives would not.

• Lipscomb has given us a treatment very similar in scope to Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings for a cohort very close in time and place to the authors of Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. To understand the friendships existing between Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch is to come to a much greater understanding of how virtue ethics was repopularized in the 20th century.

The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes by Nancy Pearcey (2023)

• I don’t know that I would have picked up this book if I hadn’t been asked to write a review of it by The Gospel Coalition (you can read that review, “Jesus and John Winthrop,” here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/toxic-war-masculinity/). Many of Pearcey’s books suffer from titles that fail to do justice to the exquisite content within (Love Thy Body, a fantastic theological treatment of the body, is another example of this problem).

• Pearcey’s book pairs perfectly with everything listed above: how did we get here? Where do our ideas about masculinity come from and how have they been upended by cultural transformations? What does it mean to be a “good man”?

Christmas Devotionals

If you’re like me and didn’t grow up in a church tradition that closely follows the liturgical calendar, you are in for a wild treat. Christmas only starts on December 25th; it doesn’t end until Epiphany on January 6th (how I didn’t figure this out from songs about the “twelve days of Christmas” is beyond me). What this means is that, in addition to Christmas, we also get to celebrate feast days for Stephen, John, Holy Innocents, and Holy Name. And you don’t have to feel bad about failing to take down your tree before Epiphany (you’re not lazy, you’re liturgical)!

Anyway, four years ago, members of my church put together a set of devotionals for the Twelve Days of Christmas. I offer them up to you here in case you are in want of an easy way to celebrate the Christmas season.

LINK: 12 Days of Christmas, Rez Devotionals

PS: If you have a way of doing so easily, I'd recommend printing it as a booklet!

Prioritizing the Family in Policy

Once upon a time, some lawmakers had the very good idea of requiring regulatory agencies to consider how their rules would impact family stability before forcing those rules upon us. Unfortunately, that requirement has largely been ignored in the decades since it came into existence.

I wrote a piece for WORLD warning that a recently circulated rule from the Environmental Protection Agency could have serious adverse consequences on family formation, stability, and (at least in my own case) sanity. Policies always have trade-offs. It’s been encouraging to see recognition of this happening more and more in housing conversations (YIMBYs are rightly concerned about cumbersome and poorly designed environmental regulations making it impossible to build homes and thereby making housing unaffordable). And yet, there’s been less recognition of this problem when it comes to vehicle safety and emissions policy.

If I haven’t already lost you, feel free to check out the full column here: “Putting the family back in the driver’s seat”

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!