Things I've been reading, Jan 2025
Books and articles
I don’t quite know how I want to implement this, this year, but I want to take some newsletters/posts simply to share interesting things I’ve been reading. So, in that spirit:
Books:
Here are the range of books I’m currently (and con-currently) reading:
Augustine, Confessions - a re-read, but a good one! Might get some posts out of me.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War - I had a class reading selections from Book 1 last year, and I have decided to keep on going (in English, lest I be here forever)
Assorted Greek plays - I just finished Aeschylus’ The Persians.
Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power - reading about fascism is depressing but also very interesting. The more I read about historical fascism and the first half of the 20th century, the more struck I am by (a) how different their political and cultural context is, so that fascism then is difficult to conceive of in contemporary political frames; (b) just how utterly evil people can be, and how little it takes to get them there.
Stanley Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition - what it says on the cover.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism - Arendt is a philosopher/thinker I’ve never really spent any time on, and so these two are me broadening my reading.
Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue - because in a previous life I was a philosophy major with an interest in ethics, and in some ways I still am.
Articles:
Here are a sample of articles I’ve read in the last month or so, with just a note about what it’s about and why I found it interesting enough to share. Enjoy!
“Wario Jesus” - I thought this was a very sharp, and funny, way of describing the contortions that MAGA proponents apply to Jesus’ ethical teachings.
“How to be a friend” - A poignant article from an older woman, about friendship and its demands (and rewards)
“The marriage advice every couple needs, but no one gets” - The first thing that was interesting about this was its critique of Gottman. But more than that, the exploration of gender dynamics and societal scripts was provocative and insightful.
“In praise of guilt and shame” - I found this to be an insightful way of considering the modern avoidance of any negative emotions, especially guilt and shame, and mindfulness as our ‘aspirin’, so that we don’t let guilt and shame “do their work” of moving us to (repentance and) social repair.
“‘Biblical Masculinity’ does not exist” - sadly this article is now behind a paywall so you can’t read it. I alternately love and hate Anthony Bradley’s writing. This one struck a chord because I continually find most attempts to construct an idea of “biblical masculinity” to fall into a trap of taking an incidental or statistical feature of males, and then essentialising it into “masculinity”. Bradley argues that frankly there’s no real “biblical masculinity” but a continual call for “maturity” as the operative category.
“When religion loses its moral power, people default to their self-interest” - mostly interesting because Gushee talks about a book by John Compton, which studies how mainline Protestantism in the USA, up until the 1960s, functioned as a moral force which shifted many of its adherents to vote for positions that weren’t for their immediate benefit. This is so worth thinking about given that white evangelicalism in America is almost perfectly mapped to a political ideology which I would now label profoundly unchristian.