The Year of Our Lord 2024
My favorite reading and writing from the past year.
Reading
Given all that we had going on this year with a move and a newborn (#4!), it’s unsurprising that my reading and audiobook-listening pace would be slower than years past, averaging one book a week (about one-third of my all-time high: 141 books in 2018). Still, at least for me, there are diminishing returns for reading more books, as I usually end up cutting out other useful exercises like reading articles and listening to podcasts in order to maximize books logged.
I’ve found that the quality of books is more important than the number of them (e.g., Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I read last year, is something I still think about a lot, but at nearly a thousand pages it only counts as a single book and is hard to justify reading if your main goal is hitting a raw number). Still, even quality books still require quality engagement or they’ll slip through your mind like a sieve. All my favorite books this year are favorites in part because of the active reflection I did with them, whether by writing, participating in discussion groups, or reading other related books (typically involving the same topic, author, or secondary literature).
This year, three books stood out above all the rest, one new and two old:
Democracy and Solidarity by James Davison Hunter
“The largest part of this book is the historical narrative… with a sketch of the contours of the hybrid-Enlightenment. Drawing as much from Calvinism as it did from classical Republicanism and Lockean individualism… it was also deeply contradictory. It would fuel a century of nation-building, but it also deepened the contradictions by doubling down on the boundaries of exclusion… There are clear signs, however, that we are now in a period of exhaustion. The endlessly worked-through sources of the hybrid-Enlightenment are depleted and no longer have traction.”
Tim Keller died before this book was published, but he was already endorsing it in draft form (probably because it pairs so well with his own Decline and Renewal of the American Church) and is acknowledged by Hunter in the book. Sadly, this characterization might discourage some people from reading Hunter’s magnus opus, thinking that they have evolved past Keller (and with him, Hunter).
However, as I argue in a piece for a forthcoming Mere Orthodoxy print edition symposium on the book, far from some namby-pamby thirdwayism, what a Hunterian approach to our cultural crisis requires is reconquista, that is, repaving the paths that allowed Christian intellectuals in the past to define and shape the symbolic universe.
Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography by Richard Wightman Fox
"Niebuhr's public career could get off the ground only after his mother's arrival in Detroit in January 1916. She immediately took over much of the day-to-day conduct of the parish, including the Sunday School and the Choir... They moved into an apartment at 1950 West Grant Boulevard, where he chained himself to his typewriter. Aside from writing his weekly sermon, and an occasional sick visit or council meeting, he could devote most of his week to devouring magazines and drafting letters and articles, which he began to produce in profusion. In part the barrage of prose was an effort to augment his minuscule income.”
Knowing is narrative. There is no better way to understand a deceased person than through a thorough account of of their life, and even forty years after its release, Fox’s biography of Niebuhr is still the definitive account of his life. Read it to learn how he became a public intellectual (and to better understand the impossibility of a Christian replicating the same feat today) and who were the contemporaries and friends he interacted with (Eliot, Auden, Maritain, Heschel, and many more), plus some lovely additional color, like how he once lectured through an ongoing Nazi air raid or performed in a Union Theological Seminary parody of Murder in the Cathedral.
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“The women watched the men, watched to see whether the break had come at last. The women stood silently and watched. And where a number of men gathered together, the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place. And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right - the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.”
I really didn’t want to like this one, which is not how I usually approach a book. I had constructed an overly neat narrative in my head as to why I despised Of Mice & Men (released in 1937, two years prior to Grapes) and loved East of Eden (possibly America’s greatest religious novel, published more than a decade later): in his early life, Steinbeck was obsessed with evolutionary processes and group dynamics to the point of effacing the individual and personal responsibility (an intellectual kinsman to Jack London). On my account, Steinbeck only overcame this collectivist fixation after an ugly divorce (his second) and a personal reckoning with the potential within every man and woman for great evil or goodness (that Eden’s antagonist, Cathy Trask, is based on his ex-wife seemd to fit this narrative aptly). But the truth is, Grapes of Wrath is an incredible book, and Steinbeck uses both the close-up of the Joad family and the zoom-out of the broader Dust Bowl migrations to masterly symphonic effect. I would have never guessed I could be made to care so much about this particular moment in history, but Grapes reads like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle meets classic American road narrative.
Even still, if you read Grapes of Wrath but never “got” Steinbeck, do try East of Eden. While the critics preferred Grapes, Steinbeck himself thought Eden was his masterwork, with everything else mere practice for the performance of his life. I might write about this down the road but it strikes me that Steinbeck was very much the 20th century’s Jordan Peterson, using Jungian readings of Scripture to provide his work with rich moral depths (especially in Eden).
Writing
I wrote a fair amount I was proud of this year, but I’ll spare you from anything more than my two absolute favorites (both receiving honorable mentions in the 2024 Eliot Awards). For most of the rest (other than “Christmas After The Nightmare,” which was published since my last update), you can trawl through the archives of this Substack.
“A Family-Focused Fusionism” (National Affairs)
In which I make the case that Reagan’s policy record was anything but “Zombie reaganism” or a “dead consensus” to be pitched out. His administration, especially in its second term, provides some of the most profitable tools to policymakers looking to advance family policy.
I spelled out the application potential of one of those tools, the Family Policymaking Assessment, under a Republican trifecta at the Institute for Family Studies.
“Getting Family Policy Wrong” (Civitas Outlook) is a thematic sequel to the National Affairs essay, using Tim Carney and Catherine Pakaluk’s work on family policy to engage with Kevin Roberts’ new book and a recent New Yorker essay by Emma Green.
“Reinhold Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, and The Year of Our Lord 1943” (Providence)
Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943 turns on a misleading distinction drawn by Jacobs between the book’s protagonists (T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil) and Reinhold Niebuhr. I correct the record, detailing how Eliot himself thought of Niebuhr, drawing from several sources, including private letters that were released to the public after Jacobs’ book was published. Eliot thought Niebuhr was “far and away the best theological thinker in America.” If we take Eliot seriously, we ought to take that judgement seriously as well.
If you liked this one, I’ve got more on Niebuhr in the forthcoming Democracy and Solidarity symposium I mentioned above . I also wrote a follow-up post on Substack going through Niebuhr’s relationships with Auden, Barth, Billy Graham, Lewis, Maritain, and Ellul.
Maybe some day I’ll turn this all into a book simply so I can title it Welcome to the Niebuhrhood (or perhaps Into the Niebuhr-Verse, since Miles Morales and Niebuhr both lived in Manhattan)…
Note: I’m experimenting with Amazon Affiliate links, in which I get a small kickback if you purchase any of the books listed in this post. It seems like a positive-sum affair, since I was already recommending these books and you were considering purchasing them at that same price anyway, but if there are reasons you think this is a bad idea, let me know!