Kevin's 12 Must Read Books of 2010-2011

#12. What at first seems like a remarkable waste of time upon finishing turns into material for which to make sense of 20^th century despair. Nothing happens, and indeed, “The Sun Also Rises.”












#11. This was my first taste of Faulkner. Though there is a sense of overall thematic banality, the rhetorical pressure cannot be denied. American English usually falls significantly short of British. But Faulkner breaks through the stereotype; truly a rare occasion in American Lit










#10. Both the opening and ending passages of this book make the whole thing worth reading. We love where we are going and where we end up. In its way, this novella succeeds, or so I think, unlike any other story in pure tragi-comedy. Usually these sorts of hybrids fail, but in Cannery Row the hybrid somehow manages to grant life to the whole story.









#9. Chesterton at his finest. His internal journalist and internal philosopher combine here to create what is undoubtedly his masterpiece. Unlike any other Christian literature, Chesterton offers an existential argument comparable in effect and antithetical in doctrine to Camus and Sartre. Although this is technically a book from the 2009-2010 season (and ranked #1), I could not help but include it here. I rarely write a word or read a book which does not in some way resonate with Orthodoxy.







#8. The ranking here will seem to some rather poor. But I stopped halfway through this book because I could not conceive of it getting better--I plan to finish it soon. The Grand Inquisitor chapter is probably the single greatest chapter in the history of the novel. It may very well be the finest passage in all of literature










#7. This was 450 pages of boredom which altered into 450 pages of existential satisfaction with one short, final paragraph. It is the best ending to a story I have ever encountered and I suspect ever will. I still read it with tears in my eyes












#6. One cannot consider himself educated unless he has read The Republic. This is the umpteenth time I’ve read it, and I’m still learning. Iris Murdoch says that Plato was our best philosopher. She may be right. His theory of education has never been surpassed, nor can we expect that our best and newest philosophers will ever escape the parameters set by his metaphysics.









#5. Percy’s connections between the philosophy of language and art cannot be ignored. His inclusion of Pierce’s dyadic and triadic distinction shall forever haunt my philosophy. It has been almost as influential to my thinking as Lewis/Hamilton’s distinction between the Contemplated and Enjoyed









#4. Wittgenstein, like Plato and Descartes, changed the world. It is conceivable that we will not have another thinker like him for millennia. One cannot do contemporary scholarship without at least a cursory knowledge of Wittgenstein. Reading The Blue Book was like learning the alphabet all over again. It’s one of those instances when you realize that you never knew what the world was like until now.









#3. American literature paled in comparison to Russian and British literature until I read “Call me Ishmael.” I can barely describe the relief of knowing that our American English does possess the inherent quality of poetry. Melville sweeps away a lifetime of skepticism toward even great Americans like O’Conner and Hamilton. Moby Dick is the premier American literature, and my favorite novel.












#2. I only wish that I had the taste for O’Conner’s short stories like I have a taste for her theory of art. She is the superlative Christian aesthete, and one cannot, and probably should not, attempt writing fiction or poetry without reading Mystery and Manners. Rarely does anyone read 200 pages of theory in less than two days. I could not put the book down, and still read sections once a week.












#1. I had never encountered a work which combined scientific inquiry and intellectual honesty so enchantingly until The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James places the incontrovertible facts in front of us, and offers a clear, satisfactory explanation, concluding with a kind of healthy agnosticism. It is a masterpiece, and influences my thought today more than any other work, particularly in the connections between psychology and spirituality.

Living In A Nerd-ish Paradise

I am beginning to feel the results of choosing a secular education over a theological one. Yesterday, I had coffee with a Christian friend in UPenn’s PhD Classics program. We both expressed the relational disjunct between ourselves and the church laity. His sentiments are summarized best in the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss,’ where mine were concerned more with the incongruity between my sentiments and those persons in my Sunday school class.

At CIU, the advantage lay in surrounding myself with thinkers with common intuitive affections. The classroom consisted in an overall effort for honoring and understanding God. At UPenn, my classroom method takes a more surreptitious form, and following a train of thought (as an inchoate intuition) requires manipulating the classroom milieu toward value claims, objectivity, and even the gospel. My friend and I sit in the same class, and our Christian attempts often find mutual support from each other coming at least in the form of head-nods and smiles. But we are dealing with men and women who are at least and usually more psychologically clairvoyant than ourselves, and desirous of situating the discussion around other value sets—the most popular being ideological provocation and novelty, regardless of counter-convention.

We concluded, while sipping our coffee, that our exposure to this atmosphere has placed us in both a precarious and burdensome situation. It is precarious because not one class or books goes by which does not place our Christianity on the slab and hand us the butchering knife. Presently, my friend is feeling the despair that results from this more than myself. Having had occupied this valley of death for some years, I have no intention of returning soon--not to mention that I have crossed the threshold of anti-Christian beliefs so many times now that I’m kind of used to the feeling.

As an example, the question of Jesus’ sacrifice as a historical fact, and not a contrived legend no longer seems as implausible, in the logical sense, as it once did. People have been constructing mythologies for millennia, and it does not take a genius to do it. To point to parallels in the Synoptics, and mark them as a reformulation of the Osiris myth—or the myth of Balder—thus creating a mythology that both explains and infuses meaning into the world to the satisfaction of the masses, is not a wild stretch of logic. Christianity on this model would not be an anomaly, it would be a recapitulation of mythological history. Myths are indeed remarkably identical, so identical, in fact, that hundreds of theories try to explain why.

This is not to say that I don’t believe there are answers to these difficulties. The point is that the number of Christians dealing with these difficulties is very limited. It might not be a wild statement to say that I sit in a category of under 100 Christian students in the world dealing with this sort of material—that is to say, dealing solely with secular mythological theory. (I still look daily for Christian mythological theorists, and have found only traces of them. If anyone knows of anything toss it my way)

As I said, there is also a burdensome factor to it. If my friend and I are Christians, and we are, it follows that we must come to its defense, either by fighting against its opponents or nurturing the Christian mythos. I have chosen the latter road, one which will require a vast knowledge of mythological theory, not to mention a decisive theory of education. Thank God my other class in moral psychology has helped me identify exactly the sort of Platonic/Aristotelian paideia I intend to employ for the rest of my life.

I am not, and never expect to be, a scholar. I have neither the background nor the talent. And for that matter, a hunched back and kidney problems from too much coffee seems comparatively barren to living a normal life with wife and child. But the true burdensome part lies in that discontinuity between my sentiments toward the scripture and most Protestant Christians. The burdensome part is the loneliness. The burdensome part comes, in other words, when I realize that I may never have a wife who can empathize with the psychological repercussions which results from constant exposure to atheistic and agnostic literature of this caliber. The burdensome part comes when it’s time to teach my children the stories of the O.T., and I don’t know what to tell them. I claim agnosticism where many Christians claim certainty. The effects are a difference in sentiment. And when my coffee friend and I walk into a Sunday service expected to feel exactly the same way about Elijah going up into the clouds as everyone else, that embarrassing outsider emotions piques. We only wish that we felt the same. Every day we look for that shooting star of Christian literature which will indefinitely resolve our problem. For all we know, it might be part of our burden to provide such a literature.

As a Christian student of myth, psychology, and philosophy, I am bound to take note of the truth, to notice the obvious and multifarious parallels between narratives, and insofar as my Christian duties are concerned, provide psychological evidence—not to mention assert metaphysical reasons—why Christianity says these repetitions occur. I plan very much to focus my study exactly to this end in regards to story, to call upon all my imaginative and rational powers to make sense of O.T. miracle and narrative. But unlike the normal Protestant Christian, I would not be that bothered over finding out that Elijah didn’t really ascend into heaven via a chariot of fire. I cannot cut off vestigial ( to use Lewis' term in Myth Became Fact) Christianity altogether i.e. i refuse to cut off the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, nor do i want to remove all the miracles of the O.T. I merely want to decipher if all of the miraculous claims in the O.T. are, in fact, miracles. Who but God knows what I will find? But it is this need to find, and not simply to believe what I was told, this difference in dogma, which can result in relational disparity; it can weigh on a man, much as it presently weighs on my coffee friend. Our brothers and sisters can seem far away, and were we to openly confess our troubles, the level of intimacy would deteriorate, resulting, or so we fear, in our demarcation as black sheep.

In short, I do not know what to tell you about facts, but I can certainly express the sentiment of not knowing the facts. I do not have the answers; I am a repository of questions. But during the coffee break, I mentioned in a rather spasmodic episode that maybe this is part of our calling. Maybe my friend and I are supposed to grapple with these questions so that others don’t have to. Maybe we’re not supposed to sleep as comfortably at night so that the souls of our intercessors may have rest enough to bend their knees without falling asleep, so our pastors can spend their hours awake, ready to ward off the wolves, our priests vigilant in administering the sacraments, the layman alert so he can perform whatever service God requires of him with a clear conscience and a ready faith. It was only an ebullient expression, and it appears more poignantly here than it did at the time, but I think there must be something about being part of the educated body of Christ. I cannot believe it makes me much more than a fingernail, or perhaps I may rise to the dignity of a pinky toe, but I consider the burden easy and the yoke light so long as it is in His service. After all, I get to learn for fun. It’s a nerd paradise if ever there was one.

I ask for your prayers, as I am weak, and insufficient for the task. And I ask, moreover, for my friend, who at present deals more readily with the emotions accompanying our temporary vocation.

the K.H.

Sunday School Answers

When my Sunday school teacher started class, it hadn’t occurred to me that part of my experience would entail a moment of nostalgia. The teacher asked if any one had prayer requests, and the first person to answer was a man replying, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.” At that, what at first felt like an ordinary class beginning shifted for me into a memory flashback.

You have to step into my shoes to understand how odd this seemed. I hadn’t attended Sunday school since childhood, and hearing “praise” used in that sense brought back images of restless children raising their hands, ready to divulge all the kindnesses God had bestowed upon the family cat.

I want to talk about what this man said. But first, it’s important to make a tedious distinction between what someone says and what they mean. When someone says they wish to offer a praise, very rarely do they mean praise as such. They mean more to give thanks, or to be specific, they mean to combine thanks and praise, to be grateful toward the acts of a powerful and benevolent God. Strictly, praise is an act of adoration absent from any provocation other than cognitive recognition of who someone is. When a husband tells his wife she is beautiful, he is praising a property, not an action. On the other hand, gratitude, strictly speaking, is a stimulus/response act toward someone specifically as a result of receiving something.

I make this tedious distinction only to establish more clearly the possibility for the communication of its contraposition, the combination of meanings, or what might be called vagueness.

I want to talk of praise like the man in Sunday school talked of praise. I am not, in other words, concerned with praise strictly speaking, or thankfulness strictly speaking. Philosophers are always nitpicky about saying exactly what they mean, and you will find me sympathetic to them even here. Our only difference at present lies in that where they usually prefer to narrow words I prefer to broaden them. Mark that I still obey my philosophers by saying exactly what I mean, only notice that what I mean tends toward being vague. As will be clear momentarily, this is not a contradiction in terms. For the moment, I merely want to point out that there is value (it is the poets value) to being vague. And this value, insofar as I speak to it, exists within the psychological sphere.

For in truth, half-meanings and immature formulations constitute the majority of our day to day conversation. To use praise in the broader sense is to include all that psychology which partakes of time and events. The prayer of praise in that classroom did not originally have the same meaning it does now. Words gain or lose meaning from the time they are spoken until they are extinguished from the memories of speaker and audience. As it happens, the more potent the word, the longer it’s tenure in our memories, and more importantly, the more time that word has to mature within our minds. This, by the way, is why the gospel must come primarily through the foolishness of preaching. If a word hooks into the psyche, it evolves with veracity, eventually attaching itself to every thought.

The subject of praise often strikes a nerve in me, and I suspect that my distant, abstract treatment of it thus far somewhat demonstrates my feelings toward it. I care nothing for platitudinous gratitude or praise, in their strict sense, and cringe when I find someone inserting one liners into their prayers in attempts to enrich a conspicuously barren spiritual life. I speak of those moments when men and women pray to an audience and not to a Creator.

But praise in the sense of Sunday school dodges these sorts of criticism primarily because of its naivety. It does not know that it does not know what it means, and is, moreover, unconcerned with people’s opinion. It is too excited by the mere fact of God’s interaction, too enthusiastic to bother with details. I both agree with this sentiment and wish to ascribe myself to it. As an involuntary emotional response, it shows right orderedness within the soul. Properly, man ought to feel praise toward his God.

I only treat the details here because I have a need to make sense of the psychological process. I want to know why the Sunday school definition of praise seems intuitively valuable to Sunday schoolers, including myself. The reason, I take it, is quite simple, though hard to articulate simply. In the moment of praising, any number of mental processes ignite. Belief in an omnipotent God couples with gratitude over, say, a much needed car, and suddenly the happy impulse leaks through all our inhibitions, unfettered and reckless. The reciprocal smiles and head-nods accompanying the story which follow are likewise the result of the same mental process in others, the same coupling of the Divine and the material.

For these reasons and many more, I believe it a sin to stymie praise, to inhibit feeling wonder and gratitude, to whatever degree, at the kindnesses given us. I don’t merely mean that the problem lies with failing to communicate God’s goodness to others. As is my way, I mean something more intimately psychological. I have heard too many people say “I’m just waiting for things to fall apart.” The idea is one of resisting the enrapturing presence goodness in order to be prepared for the inevitable. Truly, if life seasons act at all like the harvest seasons, pleasantries are guaranteed to diminish. Winter is on the way. But it is the essential condition of happiness to be happy. I say this not to promote naivety on our part. To the contrary, I insist we think properly about praise. The rejection of complete happiness is, in the moments it comes, the rejection of a God given grace. I am of the opinion that our feelings are good things when they are employed properly. To adulterate the moment with fear or with anything negative is not to have the genuine moment. But man, or at least some men, I think, are meant to have such moments. Defense mechanisms of this sort halt the movement of grace, deprive of us a good, and thus keep us ignorant of the full nature of God’s kindness. The rejection of grace, in other words, is a rejection of knowing God’s interaction, and, by implication, His character. How, in those days of anguish, are we to combat the darkness of our thoughts when we have never fully seen what it is to be in the light?

But I did not write on praise with this level of detail to reprimand; I wrote all this as a segway for praising, indeed, as a formulation of praise.

A year ago this time, I had been suffering depression for near 2 years. A year ago this time, I was tossing cold, deformed bread in a basket. A year ago this time, I had no idea why I was alone, where I was going, or when things were going to change. Funny enough, all that jabber in my childhood Sunday school classes sustained me through the darkest days. “Remain faithful”, my teachers would say, “and in His right timing you will run and not be weary, walk and not faint.”

The foolishness of preaching, indeed. I cannot recount, mostly because I cannot count, the graces bestowed on me these past few months. I am indeed full of gratitude. I am likewise cognizant of God’s greatness. But what I prefer to say is the Sunday school thing, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.”

Philosophers Do the Tango and Happy Meals

I cannot figure who would be more fun to watch trying to dance, Nietzsche with his bouncing mustache or me with clumsy feet. Regardless, the two of us, no matter how hard we tried, could never do the tango. Freud and Nietzsche, however, might get along much better. I always imagine Freud as a tall, pretentious Austrian and Nietzsche as a short, pretentious German. The effeminate Nietzsche, overly sensitive and excitable, would swoon in the arms of a well-organized doctor of Psychiatry. Whether that’s a bit anachronistic I leave to the historians, so far as a read of their books go, implicit in Nietzsche’s words is a small man complex while implicit Freud’s confidence are signs of the next ubermench. (If you didn’t catch that last joke, don’t worry: on a 10 point dork scale that’s a 8.5.)

After rummaging through each gentlemen’s respective yard-sale, I find myself dissatisfied. Usually the post-shopping spree moments consist in sighs of relief and happiness at what one has acquired. Of course, part of the problem derives from not fully understanding their systems. And it might even be that I am projecting some criteria prior to reading their works, expecting what neither man intended to give. But there was a lack of rigor and clarity found, say, in William James that left me a bit miffed. Freud employs some pretty shoddy logic—or rather avoids it altogether, and Nietzsche rarely, if ever, achieves clarity.

I do not say these things because I do not think they have important things to say. On the contrary, I have never read a book that gave me more insight into inert question within myself till last week in Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism.” Likewise, after reading Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” I finally have material to make sense of etiological (causal) questions surrounding mythology. A brief report of my last two weeks would be “Wow, really, awesome, huh, seriously, I like it, marry me, never mind, lame, false, where’d you pull that crap from? That’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.” My goal here is not to express what positive elements I took away from the two, nor really the negative.

In other words, I am not concerned with the parts but with the whole. And in particular the whole compared with the whole of individuals like Augustine, or to be more contemporary, Plantinga. Nietzsche as I would express it caused post-modernity. In effect, he demolished what remained of Western Christianity in one fell swoop of brilliant insanity. His influence cannot be denied; nor can Freud’s. Projection, repression, complex, unconscious, etc etc are words and concepts entirely absent from the world until this freak genius rose out of the shambles of the world wars to construct psychoanalysis, and in my readings, the pages of “Moses and Monotheism.”

But in an act of apologetics, I think it’s equally important to note the influence of others. Plantinga is singlehandedly, or so I think, responsible for the destruction of epistemological internalism. To put that in lay terms, the destruction of Descartes, Hume, and Kant—three equally important individuals. And Augustine, God bless him, dominated the entirety of the Medieval era, and still, to this day remains the founding church father.

I am not trying to make any argument other than this. In the same way that I would not go to the uneducated atheists to argue for the existence of God and the objectivity of values, it is unfair to treat uneducated Christians as if they are naïve because they have not studied and rejected Kierkegaardian fideism. God knows I have not studied him, though, I suspect I would probably not reject him.

Let me be clear that I am not talking about a moment of human contact and conversation. As usual, I am concerned with the psychological process. I am talking about a vague sense of ‘atheist’ or a vague sense of ‘Christian’ as present in someone’s particular psychology. The atheist in my mind is the compilation of actual people I’ve known and books I’ve read that are atheist. (And the atheist, in my experience, is much sillier, and less of a threat than the agnostic.) But that ‘atheist’ is not AN atheist: it is a projection of my accumulated experience. When I say ‘atheist’ I am never referring to someone. The same goes for Muslim, Hindu, or Christian. The label contains the meaning, and the meaning is dependent on my view.

And it’s that view that I want to repair in the mind of the Atheist as well as the Christian. Billy-Bob, my psychological atheist, as well as his brother Billy-Bud, my psychological Christian, posses an intellectually weak, incoherent, and sloppy philosophy. But we must not commit the uncharitable sin of treating Billy-Bob as if he represented Hume or Billy-Bud as if he represented Aquinas. Who they do represent, who these psychological ‘people’ represent most of all is most people. So if in an argumentative scenario played out in my head, my metaphysical construct of the sensus divinitatis rattles Billy-Bob’s atheistic construct, isn’t it because the poor man doesn’t have a construct? If from here I intuit that the majority of atheists have no constructs—which is true— therefore all atheists are unintelligent and atheism is false, haven’t I played a trick on myself? Yes, in logic it’s called a hasty generalization, and it turns out to be nonsense.

But why, dear sweet me, are atheists allowed to pull exactly this psychological bit of balderdash? For in effect, those external arguments they produce are the result of these internal sophistries. If most Christians don’t concern themselves with rigorous philosophical principles—which is true— it doesn’t follow that Christianity doesn’t have rigorous philosophical principles. God knows if a professional artist judged a child’s drawings by contemporary artistic standards, the giraffe/camel/animal/thing on the refrigerator door would get some rather harsh and inappropriate criticism. That artist would get a stern look and a stiff fist in the face—and not a one of us would protest.

The truth is that if one has intellectual questions, he must go to the specialist, the intellectual. If you want a happy meal, you don’t go to Burger King. Though you may be happier for it, you never got the real thing, and can never make a valid judgment concerning a happy meal. For all you know, you aren’t happier for it, and a happy meal claims to make you happy for a reason.