My Review of Christopher Beha's The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

The American Interest has published my review of Christopher Beha's most recent novel. As readers of this blog might remember, I wrote about Beha's first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, a long while back. Beha occupies an interesting space in the current conversation surrounding Catholic fiction. He seems to be a practicing Catholic, and his cast of characters (which are somewhat continguous throughout his three novels), attended a Catholic prep school in Manhattan and occupy a variety of spots on the practicing/fallen-away spectrum. In my review, I attempt to make the argument that The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a kind of existentialist-Catholic novel, and to do so I draw upon Beha's recent essay on Soren Kierkegaard in Harper's (which he edits).

On Susan Wise Bauer's Rethinking School

Plough Quarterly has quickly become one of my favorite publications, and I’m honored that they have featured my review of Susan Wise Bauer’s Rethinking School in their Winter 2019 issue. In general, I think Wise Bauer raises important questions about the efficacy of public education, but her critique misses the mark, and I’d like to talk a little bit more about that in this post. Do read my review first, as I won't rehash it here.

More thoughts on Nicholson Baker's Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

Commonweal Magazine’s latest issue contains my review of Nicholson Baker’s Substitute, in which the best-selling novelist observes classroom life in your everyday American public school. You can read the piece here. I found the book to be a painfully accurate depiction of life on the ground in our educational technocracy. In this post I'd like to include some observations that I didn’t have the space or time for in the review itself, not the least of which is the book’s relevance to Catholic educators.

Technocrat or Storyteller? On Hillbilly Elegy, Public Schools, and Trump

During weeks leading up to and after the presidential election, I read J.D. Vance’s much-talked-about memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book had shot to the top of the bestseller lists before the election, and in the wake of Trump’s victory, Vance has been a go-to commentator for an East Coast media desperately searching for someone who understands what makes the rest of the country tick.

Further Thoughts on David Denby's Lit Up

In America Magazine's most recent issue you'll find my review of David Denby's Lit Up.  Some additional thoughts—on Denby's project, and teaching while Catholic—that I didn't have room to fit in the piece:

What is Education for? William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep and the Religious Tradition

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Catholic school’s role in perpetuating our American meritocracy. It’s been an underlying theme of this whole blog, and I wrote about it most directly last year in a post on F.Scott Fitzgerald’s experience in a Catholic prep school. That post has since developed into a more polished article that should run in the near future in a Catholic periodical.

Townie and The Confessions

The year after he became Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine set out to write The Confessions, an account of his sinful past and conversion to Christianity. His story is familiar to many and chronicles behavior that we would not typically associate with a saint. By his telling, he passed his adolescence in a fog of lust, eventually fathering a child and taking up with various concubines well into adulthood. For a while he was a member of the heretical Manichean sect. Only after a long and gradual conversion did Augustine turn from his ways, and he was officially received into the Church at age 32. Soon he became a priest, then bishop, and, thanks to his great influence and spiritual writing, a Doctor of the Church.

Clearly, Augustine’s journey was one that passed from bad to good, from sin to redemption, from darkness to light. Why, then, after his conversion, would he look backwards to his waywardness in writing The Confessions? Now that he had put on new garments, so to speak, in his conversion, why would he want to focus on the soiled ones? What was to gain?

Crawford Article at Aleteia

Yesterday Aleteia ran an article I wrote on Matthew Crawford. I've written about Crawford at greater length on this blog, here and here. In the article I try to make the case that Crawford's emphasis on getting outside of our heads in order to be genuinely human is really a Catholic one too. Thanks to Aleteia for publishing it, and Merry Christmas to all!

Marilynne Robinson's Religious Imagination, Part 3: Lila

My posts on Marilynne Robinson’s spiritual vision have focused, primarily, on the relationship of human love and divine love in her stories. In other words, I’ve been interested in how nature interacts with grace in the lives of the Ames and Boughton families. More so than Gilead and Home, Lila deals directly with the differences between the natural and supernatural, between the ebb and flow of the physical world and the formulas of organized religion.

Marilynne Robinson's Religious Imagination, Part 2: Home

At the end of my post on Gilead, I wondered if Marilynne Robinson, in focusing on the human aspects of divine love in her fiction—tenderness, compassion, etc.—somehow diminishes grace by equating it with human emotion or feeling. The second book in her trilogy, Home, told from the perspective of Glory, the daughter of Rev. Boughton and sister of the prodigal son Jack, draws us closer to an answer.

Marilynne Robinson's Religious Imagination, Part 1: Gilead

After hearing so many good things about Marilynne Robinson’s work, both from media outlets and from literary friends, I’ve decided to complete her trilogy, which includes Gilead, Home, and the recently published Lila. Almost universally lauded with breathless reviews that draw attention to her lucid, beautiful prose, Robinson is the only living fiction writer I can think of who writes from an admittedly religious perspective and who is on the receiving end of gushing adulation from the MFA-cum-New York literati.

The Limits of Modern Poetry and the Spiritual Search: On Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss

America is not a land brimming with prominent Christian spiritual autobiographers. Thomas Merton comes to mind, as does Dorothy Day and, more recently, Kathleen Norris. But we don’t have our Lewis and Chesterton, our Teresa of Avila or Augustine of Hippo. And so it was with great anticipation that I read My Bright Abyss, the much-lauded meditation on faith and suffering by Christian Wiman, former editor of Poetry magazine and one of America’s most respected poets. Published two years ago, Wiman’s book is a collection of his reflections written in the years since his diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, a time period during which Wiman has also returned to Christianity. Critics compared it favorably to A Grief Observed and Seven Storey Mountain, and hailed it as an instant classic.

The Year in Reading #3: Mariette in Ecstasy

           

           The third and last book in my 2014 reading I’ll talk about is Mariette in Ecstasy, a 1991 novel written by Ron Hansen, professor, author, essayist, and R.C. deacon. Hansen is perhaps best known for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and his collection of essays A Stay Against Confusion is among my favorite writing on literature and religion. I’d been meaning to read his short novel for a long time, and I finally got the chance over the summer.

This Year in Reading #2: Hold the Dark

Midway through his “Wreck of the Deutschland,” a long meditation on the death of five Franciscan nuns in an 1875 shipwreck off the English coast, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins pauses from the narrative and turns his thoughts inward, reflecting on his role as storyteller:

This Year in Reading #1: What Happened to Sophie Wilder

It is the time of year for best-of and top-ten lists, so I thought I’d add my own version and  discuss, in the next few posts, some of the books I’ve read over the past year. I’ll begin with What Happened to Sophie Wilder, the 2012 debut novel of Christopher Beha.

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible: Jacques Lusseyran's Literature of Light

     

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Book Review at Crux

Crux, the Boston Globe's new website covering Catholic news and issues, is running my book review of Why We Walked Away, a collection of essays by priests who left the ministry in the wake of Vatican II. I will be doing more reviewing for Crux in the next few months, and will post all links here.

The first quarter is wrapping up for us here at school, and I hope to have another post up here as soon I can get my head above the sea of papers and recommendations on my desk!