In a special issue of The Claremont Review of Books dozens of noteworthy individuals offer suggested reading for the holidays. Best of all, mini-reviews and explanations accompany almost all of the suggestions. I find the list stretching (to put it mildly) and an enjoyable read in itself! Below, to offer one example, I've posted Mary Eberstadt's suggestions. (She has penned, by the way, an essay in the current "First Things" journal, "The Zealous Faith of Secularism: How the Sexual Revolution Became a Dogma.")
Once upon a time, as CRB readers know, soi-disant enlightened progressivism merely disdained religious believers and other traditionalists. Nowadays, it goes after them with spite and glee. Yet the force that to the slammer would drive the cake-baker—and others—now bears paradoxical fruit: it’s inadvertently inspiring some of the finest writing of the time. 2017 has been a banner year for books about faith, by writers of faith and otherwise.
For literary as well as spiritual pleasure, one new offering of interest to anyone who luxuriates in reading is George Weigel’s Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II. With settings as panoramic as those of a thriller, and anecdotes about some of the most fascinating figures and scenes of the twentieth century, it’s a moving, personal, melodically rendered memoir of the biographer’s times with the late great saint.
As others have noted in 2017, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation is the religious book of the year. It’s also a modern pilgrim’s progress whose passion and sincerity stand as a tacit rebuke to secularist prejudice. Dreher’s truth-telling has achieved something rare these days: a respectful hearing outside the flock for a moral traditionalist.
Another essential new volume is Anthony Esolen’s Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture—an often plangent, and always crystalline, homage to civilization as it should be, unplugged from the distractions and delusions that diminish us.
Also vital is Archbishop Charles J. Chaput’s Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World, an erudite tour-de-force whose graceful writing makes it one more must-read among the believers—the believers in secularism itself emphatically included. It should be read in tandem with Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, last year’s potent book by First Things editor R.R. Reno. He makes the case that religious renewal requires solidarity with society’s poorest and weakest—the human collateral damage, he argues, of laissez-faire politics and economics.
In addition to Strangers, 2017 also saw publication of two other books by leading intellectuals within the Catholic clergy. Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s The Light of Christ—which rose immediately to the top of the Catholic University of America Press bestseller list, and sold out its first printing in weeks—is an uncannily clear, must-have tour of Church teaching, for apprentices and masters alike. Fr. Paul D. Scalia’s That Nothing May Be Lost: Reflections on Catholic Doctrine and Devotion is inspirational in another way: as a serene and absorbing series of reflections on the Church’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual patrimony.
Yet another compelling 2017 book, Rodney Stark’s Why God? Explaining Religious Phenomena, joins the rest of the sociologist’s oeuvre illuminating religion and religiosity. Like the other works recommended here, his should be read not only by the faithful, but by anyone who wants to understand the wider pushback and conversation now emerging thanks to all of these recent offerings, and others.
Also invigorating this year are two bold new books shedding light on everybody’s old favorite subject: sex.
Ashley McGuire’s Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female, maps out just how much the effort to erase sexual difference is distorting society—and harming women, especially. It’s a perfect gift for feminists, and for anyone else who cares about what used to be called the fair sex (hitherto, maybe, “the sex whose members are badly underrepresented as culprits in today’s harassment scandals”).
One more indispensable book is sociologist Mark Regnerus’s Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage and Monogamy. Riveting from the title onward, this volume and its extensive new data are quintessential reading for anyone wondering why so many women can now be found on Tinder, and why so many men are down in the basement.
Finally, and in a different key, one recommendation for an enduring classic that’s an antidote to today’s toxic identity politics: Taylor Branch’s magnificent trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, beginning with the volume Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. It’s an enduring literary monument against the identitarian rock-throwing out there, and it reminds us of the inimitable cadences and ineradicably religious purpose of one of the twentieth century’s greatest men.