What We’ve Been Reading
Fall 2024 Edition
Editor’s note: Quarterly, we like to remind our readers that we too are readers. We hope you enjoy our fall recommendations.
Timon Cline, Editor-in-Chief
Over the past few months, I’ve been stuck in my favorite place, the seventeenth and eighteenth century—partly pleasure, partly research. First up is Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 (1979) which is a series of lectures so needn’t be read straight through. His chapter, “Magistracy and Ministry,” is particularly good and includes a lot of social history from Suffolk as a sort of case study. One thing I’ll note here from that chapter for those Puritan haters out there is that the practice of whipping adulterers wasn’t a product of New England cruelty. It was an Elizabethan statue. As I have said before and reiterate again in a forthcoming essay for Religion & Liberty, most of what people find distasteful about the Puritans is simply a feature of seventeenth century Christian morality and norms.
Ruth Spalding’s biography of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1675), The Improbable Puritan, is beautifully written history. Spalding, like Antonia Fraser (Cromwell: The Lord Protector (1973)), represents the last of a now seemingly extinct breed: the generalist historical biographer who occupied no full-time faculty position. Fraser, of Scottish aristocrat blood, wrote on Mary Queen of Scots and Cromwell while also churning out detective novels (which became TV shows), and her biography of Marie Antoinette was the basis for the Kirsten Dunst movie. This is Niall Ferguson stuff; the kind of stuff most academic crave (i.e., popular attention) but rarely get. But Ferguson is a career academic, whereas Fraser wasn’t. Maybe there’s something about people literally or metaphorically on the outside of the quad that enables them to tell stories better than their counterparts locked in the proverbial tower. Spalding (d. 2009) was a theater actor and director who moonlighted as an historian of the seventeenth century, or at least Whitelocke’s place in it, publishing his diary later. The point is, the book is exceedingly readable and well researched if prone to some caricatures, like the Presbyterians often cast in the role of baddies to the protagonist’s liberality. In any case, I can’t recommend the book enough as a window into the period, which is often best achieved through the study of one figure living in it. Whitelocke’s career as a parliamentarian, lawyer, and diplomat during a tumultuous period is fascinating and instructive.
Next is Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (2000) by Kevin Sharpe which examines the literary habits and uses of early moderns through the life of Sir William Drake (1606-1669). I’m about halfway through; it’s a unique genre. Not for everyone, I’m sure, but three takeaways for everyone are 1) we are all poorly read compared to our ancestors; 2) how one reads and applies texts is never insulated from their times; and 3) we really should renew the practice of keeping commonplace books. I recently acquired Louis Sarkozy’s Napoleon’s Library which is on deck and mentioned here because of its complimentary subject matter. Reading about reading is something of a palate cleanser.
Last in this category is Brendan McConville’s The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006) which had been recommended to me by several people. It belongs in the category of Eric Nelson’s Royalist Revolution. Which is to say, the school of thought established by Charles McIllwain, Randolph Adams, and other proprietors of the narrative of eighteenth-century imperial crisis—a needed but insufficiently headed corrective to typical histories of the period. Let’s just say, the Revolution was not anti-monarchical or anti-imperial, at least not in the way that you’ve been taught. Don’t let Thomas Paine stand in for the founding.
Ben Dunson, Founding and Contributing Editor
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition
I love reading biographies. However, no matter how well-researched and well-written I nearly always find myself feeling slightly disconcerted that what I am reading is merely an imposition of the author onto his subject. I don’t say this for postmodernist reasons (we can’t know anything objectively), but simply because biographies so often can’t help but make even the greatest of men from the past seem grander and greater than they actually were. When I look around at men today I can’t possibly imagine them being described in such grandiose terms, and yet I know that one day that is exactly what will happen. I suspect that most men, even the great men of history, lived lives that to themselves felt significantly more mundane than the dramatic, narrative form of modern biographies might lead us to believe. That is why I also really enjoy reading the letters of such men. In their letters, though of course these were sometimes written with an eye toward future publication, we often get a more authentic glimpse into the inner life of the real man. This is especially the case when a portion of his letters are written prior to him becoming famous.
In this connection I have recently been reading the letters of the English novelist Evelyn Waugh and of the English philologist, and eventual epic novelist, J.R.R. Tolkien (recently updated in a new edition). Both provide fascinating glimpses into these lives of these men. Many of Tolkien’s letters, for example, recount his struggles to balance family and academic life as a professor at Oxford with his desire to create a written mythological world of vast scale, what would eventually make its way in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and many other of his writings. I have found his letters to be riveting reading, as enjoyable as a good novel. Tolkien was constantly annoyed at his publishers, perpetually complaining about his health, his poor financial state, traffic, academic duties and colleagues, and more. He also exhibits great tenderness toward his children, and much wisdom in the advice he gives them (there is a particularly wise, yet unsentimental, discussion of marriage in a long letter to one of his sons on pages 66-74). There are many letters in the collection in which Tolkien explains the process of writing his famous books. Evelyn Waugh was as sarcastic as a young child as he became notorious for being later in life. He is also routinely hilarious, even in his (very) precocious youth. His observations of those around him from childhood onward show the signs of one with a gift for describing human absurdities and banalities, qualities that would become especially evident in his mature writing. I have read multiple biographies of both men, but feel I know them much better by reading their letters. I would like to do the same with many more of my favorite authors and historical figures.
Mike Sabo, Contributing Editor
My hobbyhorse lately has been diving into classical Anglicanism. Specifically, I’ve been reading up on the Anglican view of the Lord’s Supper, the term used in Article 28 of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. (The North American Anglican recently published an excellent overview of this topic by Jeremy Goodwin.)
On the subject of the Lord’s Supper, I finished the recently released volume, The Word Made Flesh for Us, in the Davenant’s Institute’s ongoing project to translate Richard Hooker’s massive Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity for a modern audience. Hooker rightly begins with laying out proper Christology and then gives a full-orbed description of the sacraments of baptism and (especially) the Lord’s Supper. Rejecting the common view today of the sacraments as bare symbols, Hooker carefully lays out his view of the sacraments as moral instruments which God uses to bestow grace on faithful recipients. Hooker demonstrates the Reformed bona fides of the teachings of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer on the Lord’s Supper, distinguishing it from the Lutheran view of real presence—and especially the Roman Catholic notion of transubstantiation.
To buttress Hooker, I’m slowly reading through A Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, a key 18th century text by Daniel Waterland, a Cambridge theologian and an Archdeacon of Middlesex, that dives deep into the historical and doctrinal views of the Eucharist. This is a lost classic that needs to be reprinted posthaste.
And to get a more capacious overview of classical Anglicanism as a whole, I’m reading Bishop John Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England, a seminal work in Anglican history that was once mandated to be in every church in England. Jewel walks readers through the orthodox faith, and also takes on various idiosyncrasies of Roman Catholicism in especially unirenic ways.
I’m also making my way through John Davenant’s commentary on Colossians (my pastor is currently preaching through that epistle). I’ll leave it to Michael Lynch to comment on the quality of Josiah Allport’s translation, but so far the commentary is very good and very much unlike some modern commentaries that tend to get overly technical and bogged down due to unreadable prose.
Davenant walks readers through St. Paul’s lessons and admonitions to the saints in the church in Colossae, peppering his commentary with citations from the Church Fathers and the medievals (even Aquinas, the horror!). Of course, he regularly condemns “Papists” for errors such as indulgences, storing up treasure houses of merit, and the pope’s universal jurisdiction (interestingly, Davenant says that this makes him a king, not a priest), among others.
Though undoubtedly 21st century scholarship has made some significant gains since the 17th century, Davenant’s commentary is still very much worth reading for many reasons, with the chief one for our age being its catholicity. Davenant is clearly at ease with interacting with saints throughout church history, a stark contrast to much of modern evangelicalism. As Charles Spurgeon quoted Charles Bridges on Davenant’s volume, “I know no exposition upon a detached portion of Scripture (with the single exception of Owen on the Hebrews) that will compare with it in all parts…in depth, accuracy, and discursiveness.”
Ben R. Crenshaw, Visiting Fellow
In teaching a course on religion and politics in the Western and American tradition this semester, I have relied upon a number of key texts. First, every student and scholar should have Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institution of Greece and Rome (Johns Hopkins, 1980) on their shelf. Despite the fact that Coulanges’ book was publish in France in the mid-nineteenth-century, it is still unparalleled for its incisive analysis of the ancient Greek family and city state. Coulanges’ central argument is that the family and then every association that developed thereafter (tribe, religious societies, the city) were all centered around domestic religion and the sacred hearth. This religious piety was not the dogma of a transcultural Christian faith, but particular and exclusive. It revolved around the worship of one’s ancestors and resembled other ancient religions in its transactional nature (dead ancestors provided protection in exchange for sacrifice and libations that ensured them a blessed afterlife). Despite the eventual development of the Olympic pantheon as an alternative religious tradition (as recorded by Hesiod in his Theogony) that introduced elements of universality and superhuman qualities to the deities, the religions of the ancient Greeks were patriarchal, hierarchical, exclusive, and all-encompassing. This is why each Greek city-state has its own set of gods, why warfare was literally a clash between rival deities who demanded blood and conquest, and why there was little religious liberty or tolerance as we understand it. Coulanges includes a final section that anticipates and contrasts ancient Greek religion and politics to the coming Christian advent, but a full exploration of that requires an exposition of St. Augustine, Constantine the Great, and Pope Gelasius.
The second text I would highly recommend is James Hutson’s Church and State in America: The First Two Centuries (Cambridge, 2009). Hutson’s working is a sweeping, yet readable, narrative of seventeenth and eighteenth-century American religious history and polity. He begins with the status of religion in the English Civil War and the default beliefs that the civil magistrate ought to be concerned for true religion (per the doctrine of exclusive salvation) for the sake of his subjects, but also mindful of the utility of religion to affect good morals and obedient citizens. Hutson aptly comments on Calvin’s understanding of the “nursing fathers” metaphor from Isaiah 49:23 and its role in Protestant political theology, before turning to a careful examination of the seventeenth-century British colonies: Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, the Carolinas, New York, New Jersey, and the Quakers in William Penn’s Pennsylvania. Along the way, Hutson appropriately relativizes the myth of Maryland as a Catholic colony (Protestants dominated, and the 1632 charter, despite naming the Catholic Calverts as proprietors, required an establishment of the Church of England) and demotes Roger Williams as being any kind of important historical figure (he was basically unknown until the 20th century).
In the rest of the book, Hutson traces the development of religious tolerance and liberty up to the American Revolution, through the Confederation period, and then finally in the writing of the Constitution. Some of the major highlights is that there was less religious development after the 1689 Toleration Act then most Americans realize. Religious dissenters of all types considered the Toleration Act to be a revolutionary act of religious liberty and privilege, despite the fact that it still included many stipulations and requirements (oaths of allegiance, declaration against Popery, etc.). The Confederation period witnessed a continuation of Puritan covenantal theology by the Continental Congress (1774-1789) that continuously issued days of thanksgiving, fasting, and prayer during and after the war, and took unprecedented steps such as sponsoring America’s first Bible translation, the Aitken’s Bible. Hutson has a helpful discussion of the supposedly “godless Constitution,” properly situating the debate about religion during the ratifying conventions in the context of the confederate nature of the American system (religion being left to the states). In general, a Protestant pluralism predominated in the 1770s and 1780s that still believed in the civil magistrate as a nursing father, and sought state support for religion through general tax assessment for the public worship of God and financial support for ministers and churches. Hutson’s book is an easy read, yet he manages to defy expectations by relying on primary sources, by deflating modern secular readings of the founding, and by highlighting religious continuity throughout America’s first two centuries.
Terry Gant, Managing Editor
I have been leading students through the Ransom Trilogy by C.S. Lewis. We are getting close to finishing the second book in the series, Perelandra. Perelandra is the story of a pre-lapsarian Venus visited by a Christian and a fallen and malevolent scientist who encounter the Eve of that world when she is separated from her husband. They fall into roles which are akin to the devil and angel on the shoulder of this “green lady.” This same group of students is also working their way through Paradise Lost with me and the two books together are excellent compliments as one is the epic poem version from Milton and one is Lewis’s sort of alternate history of the fall and imagines what Adam and Eve and Eden may have been like. Perelandra does an excellent job of laying out typical types of temptations from his very deep thoughts on how evil gains purchase in the human mind. If you are a fan of Screwtape Letters, you will want to make your way through Out of the Silent Planet, the first in the series, and get to Perelandra.
My students noticed a particular strain of temptation which Lewis is prescient about. Feminism. One of the villains approaches is to demonstrate the “liberty” of the women of Earth and offer that as an incentive to break from the submission to the divine law and her husband’s directives. The book was published originally in 1944, before most people would say that feminism rose to its current state of insanity. Lewis seems to be of the opinion that all waves of feminism were bad at their core because the impetus driving the movement has always been rebellion and pride. I won’t spoil the ending, but it is unexpected and derives a truly surprising conclusion from the protagonist, Ransom, about how to deal with evil in a universe on this side of the incarnation of Christ.
I have been slowly working my way through Bulletproof by Jack Posbiec and Joshua Lisec. This is a factual account of the events leading up to the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The thesis of the book is that Occam’s Razor, as well as significant evidence, points to the attempt being an inside job and that the assassin was aided or at least not impeded by a regime that knew he was planning it and stepped aside to allow him a chance to clean up the 2024 election mess proactively. Lisec was kind enough to send us a review copy, and I plan to finish this up as soon as possible and write a more detailed review for American Reformer as soon as I can. So far the book has been interesting and if you are a fan of contemporary history, political literature or procedural true-crime you will probably find it a good read.
I have also just finished the book Hatchet by Gary Paulson. This one I read with my kids, as it is the first book I can actually remember loving in school. I was not prone to enjoy mandatory reading, and only a small number of the school issued books made it onto my mental list of favorites. I came by a fancy 30th anniversary edition of the book and snagged it. It has a few extras in the back provided by Gary Paulson and a tougher and mostly water-resistant cover so it can be carried outdoors to be read without fear of it falling apart. A nice touch.
All young boys should read Hatchet as soon as they are old enough, and my older two kids (8 and 6) loved it. The book details the 54-day period after a young boy who survives the crash of his small aircraft after the pilot dies of a heart attack while en route to visit his father in the Canadian oil fields. The plane flies off it’s course and lands in a lake and sinks, making rescue less likely. The boy survives and the only tool he has is a hatchet which his mother buys for him to take on his trip and which he felt obligated and a little silly strapping to his belt. Paulson demonstrates impressively detailed knowledge of the Canadian wilderness, and the survival of the boy is a very believable account. It is not a true story, but it seems like it could be. Paulson is at this point a legendary children’s author and if you like Hatchet he has several sequels to it, including The River, where Brian has to take a journalist out to the woods and show him how he survived. The journalist incapacitated by a lightning strike, and Brian now has to get him back to civilization without any help. Another sequel is an alternate ending book called Brian’s Winter, in which Paulson imagines that Hatchet ended with Brian stuck in the Canadian wilderness from Hatchet through the winter months and how he survives it. There are other sequels, too, that I have not gotten to yet, but I look forward to reading them. C.S. Lewis once said that a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a very good story at all. Hatchet proves this right because even though the last time I read it I was 12, it holds up.
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