Summer reading

Although many of my recent posts have been about books, it’s been some time since I did an update on the books I’ve been reading (the list is eccentric, I know, but so are my reading habits).

The 5,000 Year Leap.  Rising in popularity due to being profiled by Glenn Beck, The 5,000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen attempts to boil down the success of the American founding to 28 principles.  While the principles themselves are largely uncontroversial, there is a definitive danger of oversimplification when one attempts to reduce the collective thoughts of the Founders to a simple checklist.  They themselves disagreed, often very heatedly, about the direction of the country both while establishing and later while guiding it.  The 5,000 Year Leap reads less like a serious engagement with the Founders and more like a current academically-isolated "conservative"/Republican (1960s anti-communist) attempting to project his political views back on the Founders, not realizing that the Founders themselves were deeply steeped in a history and tradition of their own.



We Still Hold These Truths.  Significantly better than 5,000 Year Leap is Matthew Spalding's new book from the Heritage Foundation.  Like Skousen, Spalding examines the unifying principles of our founding, and while there is some generalization involved (as there always will be), he is much better at capturing both the agreement and the disagreement of the Founders.  Unlike Skousen, Spalding discusses the importance of prudence in the Founders' thought patterns--the idea that there may not be a black or white answer to a particular political problem.  Skousen tends to want to to reduce politics to a pre-set formula (a science), while Spalding is much more willing to keep it in the realm of philosophy.


Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.  This could easily be called the God's Harvard of patriarchy.  Like Hanna Rosin, Katheryn Joyce is writing about a movement as an outsider, and while she can make observations that those within are often blind to, she ultimately doesn't quite understand her subject matter--she blurs the lines between the quiverfull movement, the patriarchy movement, the homeschooling movement, and complementarian theology, which may be related, but are most certainly not all the same thing.  The book is strongest not when she is pontificating, but when she is simply telling the stories of people who have come out of the patriarchy movement.  It is a movement that--however well intentioned--has seriously hurt many people.  Fortunately, even those within seem to be beginning to identify some of the problems. (Although I cannot link to the Pearl's without noting that they're involved in their own controversy right now).


The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This book, written in 1996 as an expansion of a 1992 Foreign Affairs article with the same name, is especially timely after 9/11.  Responding to Fukyama's End of History argument, Huntington argues that the end of the Cold War doesn't symbolize the end of conflict, but the transition of conflict from ideologies to civilizations.  The tension points in international affairs, he writes, are between the civilizations.  Of particular importance is his expansion and defense of the most controversial line of the original article: "Islam has bloody borders."


100 Cupboards trilogy.  Written by N.D. Wilson (son of Doug Wilson), the 100 Cupboards is a strange and sometimes dark, but ultimately well written, fantasy story.  The best comparison for the premise would be Lewis' "Wood between Worlds" developed into an entire trilogy.


God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades.  Rodney Stark attempts to set the record straight on the Crusades, and does so quite well in this book.  He goes through the motivation, tactics, technology, and even political and economic context of the Crusades, refuting the idea that they were either conducted for territorial gain or out of a Europeanized manifest destiny.  Rather, they were in many ways self-defensive and  cost Europe huge amounts of money (and a large portion of their ruling class).  Stark's most fascinating bits are when he examines the context of the Crusades, pointing out little details that otherwise would go unnoticed (such as the wheel and cart example).


Reading Scripture With The Church Fathers.  One of C's books from a PHC class, this book has been tempting me for some time.  Christopher Hall examines several of the prominent church fathers and explains how they approached Scripture; which in turn can lead us to see deeper meanings that cursory reading doesn't reveal.  The church fathers help the reader see the layers of both literal and allegorical meaning of Scripture (although Hall admits that some of them got rather carried away with this).  Of particular importance--and something that we can easily lose sight of today--was the universal belief by the church fathers surveyed that understanding of Scripture and belief of Scripture are inseparably linked.  It is too easy to approach Scripture like an academic text, seeking to understand what is being said without the mandate to actually believe it, but these fathers warn strongly that such an approach is misguided.


In addition to the above books, here are three more that I wanted to mention, since they're on my summer reading list.

Son of Hamas. C just finished it, and highly recommends it (although I already wanted to read it). It’s the autobiography of Mosab Hassan Yousef, who has already made an appearance on our blog.  Briefly, he is the son of a Hamas leader (and Muslim Imam) who first became an agent for Israeli intelligence and then converted to Christianity and fled to the Untied States.

A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Highely recommended by Dr. B., this book has been sitting on my reading list for years (I have recently begun to finally read it). The team that drafted the Universal Declaration (which was ultimately approved by the United Nations without a single opposition vote) was, like the authors of our own Declaration and Constitution, a diverse group looking for common ground.  Eleanor Roosevelt was the chairwoman, Lebanon and China supplied two of the strongest philosophical minds, and the US and USSR were both represented--although they tended to try to each use it for their own ends.  Whether one likes the UDHR or not, it is important to know the origin story--just as one cannot fully understand our own government without knowing the circumstances surrounding the Declaration of Independence.

  

Operation Mincemeat: how a dead man and a bizarre plan fooled the Nazis and assured an allied victory. I’ve heard summaries of this story, but a book-length treatment sounds fascinating. Unfortunately there are over 20 people ahead of me on the library wait-list, so we’ll see if I get it before we move.