Sometimes people ask me: What makes a Unicorn? I suppose I just know one when I see one. But a story about monkeys on the loose most definitely is it.
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43 Rhesus macaques escaped from an SC lab last week. A taste from this story:
The Rhesus macaques made a break for it [last] Wednesday after an employee at the Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee didn’t fully lock a door as she fed and checked on them, officials said.
The monkeys on Friday were exploring the outer fence of the Alpha Genesis compound and were cooing at the monkeys inside. The primates continued to interact with their companions inside the facility on Saturday, which is a positive sign, the police statement said.
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Michael J. Gilmour reflects on “What Inkling Charles Williams Taught Me about Loving Others.” A taste:
The only thing better than reading good books is sharing the experience with others. In the summer of 2022, my colleague Nicholas Greco and I each purchased and read a lovely set of Charles Williams’ seven novels, published by the society that bears his name. This wasn’t an academic exercise. The rigor of our two-person book club consisted entirely of text messages traded back and forth with random observations about the latest pages read. I had no expectation these strange books would connect like they did.
His is a wild imagination. Strange stuff. Entertaining stuff. Williams, I mean. Though I suppose it’s true of said colleague as well…
Williams was not a formally trained or full-time academic by profession, but he was very much a scholar, often lecturing in London and Oxford in addition to his editorial duties. He was a poet, playwright, and novelist; an expert on the Arthurian legends, Dante, and Milton; and an amateur — but nonetheless for that a complex and insightful — theologian. He was also “a swirling mass of contradictions,” as one biography has it, and with respect to his religious views, “he was orthodox but heretical, a devout Anglican who practiced magic.” This may account for Williams’ declining popularity after his death, at least among Christian readers. Perhaps more significant is the strangeness of his books. His works defy simple genre classification; they jumble fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror. They often involve a gothic mingling of “the Probable and the Marvellous,” as Lewis observes.
Maybe this is the encouragement I needed to finally read the collection of Williams’ novels sitting on our shelves.
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Current’s Senior Editor Jay Green reviews Michael W. Austin’s new book, American Christian Nationalism: Neither American nor Christian. A taste:
Lots of ink has been spilled in recent years trying to defend, critique, and explain Christian nationalism. While a serious topic like this demands serious study, too much writing on the subject dives too deeply into the dense thickets of political theory and American constitutional history. For those looking for a basic introduction and an accessible point of entry, I am pleased to recommend a new book by Michael W. Austin, “American Christian Nationalism: Neither American nor Christian” (Eerdmans, 2024).
Austin is a professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University and a ruling elder at Covenant Community Church (PCA) in Richmond, Kentucky. The book combines his immense skills as a trained ethicist with his shepherd’s heart for Christ’s church. The result is a concise (78 pages), clearly-written overview of the subject that instructs, clarifies, and rebukes. Austin doesn’t attempt a full-blown Christian theory of government, but instead addresses the broad principles espoused by the movement, evaluating each on their merits.
He gladly concedes that many of the opinions and actions commonly filed under “Christian nationalism” neither warrant the label nor fall under his critique. He recognizes that some critics have drawn the circle of Christian nationalism too widely, encompassing every faith-informed challenge to the secular left. Being openly—even vocally—Christian in American public life and cultural engagement does not automatically make someone a Christian nationalist.
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The talented Chris Gehrz continues serializing his new book—College for Christians—on Substack. Chapter two just dropped this week, and considers timing—When should you go to college? In you missed it earlier, we celebrated with this interview with Chris last week.
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Miles Smith wrote about my 9yo’s favorite renegade: “The Political Example of Davy Crockett.” A taste:
No figure loomed larger as an exemplar of conservative opposition to Jackson within his own coalition than Tennessee congressman and frontier hero David Crockett. While Crockett agreed with much of Jackson’s agenda, he nonetheless defied the seventh president when he acted autocratically or unconstitutionally. Perhaps the nearest approximation of this in our time was former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, whose principled conservatism never slipped into pining for the affirmation of the American Left. Sasse, like Crockett, left Congress—but in both cases, their constitutionalism and willingness to defy popular presidents remain vitally important for the maintenance of a constitutional republic.
The 1828 electorate that voted Andrew Jackson into the presidency featured the widest franchise yet in a general election. Jackson earned 55 percent of the vote and carried a healthy majority of states. Perhaps more important than even the vote was the general perception that Jackson was a man of the people, protecting them from the wiles of a corrupt elite. That this supposedly corrupt elite included pious and almost pedantically moral outgoing president John Quincy Adams seems not to have occurred to the Jacksonian coalition. Jackson scholar Daniel Feller notes that Jackson’s followers felt a personal connection to him, and he used that dexterously to his political advantage. Jackson “melded the amorphous coalition of personal followers who had elected him into the country’s most durable and successful political party, an electoral machine whose organization and discipline would serve as a model for all others.”
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While there has been much buzz around Rod Dreher’s new book as a pushback to secularization, it seems that one must be Eastern Orthodox to like this book and related to its premises. Joseph Holmes’s review: “Living in Wonder Enchants the Heart but Leaves the Mind Confused.” A taste from the intro, explaining the intellectual backdrop to this project:
It’s commonly noted that the Western world is showing signs of decline. With historically high rates of depression and anxiety, low trust in institutions, and rapid population decline, many fear the consequences if nothing changes. Amid the ever-growing list of books and podcasts diagnosing and offering solutions to the problems, one idea seems to be gaining steam: “enchantment.”
Popularized by the German philosopher Max Weber, “disenchantment” describes how the West stopped seeing the world as sacred and magical in light of the Scientific Revolution. (In other words, we no longer see lightning as a display of God’s wrath.) Philosopher Charles Taylor further developed this idea in his seminal book A Secular Age, and now there’s a growing movement for “re-enchantment” as a cure for what ails us. Think Justin Brierly leaving the apologetics podcast Unbelievable? to host the Re-Enchanting podcast and author Aaron Renn’s call for “Protestant Re-enchantment.” Even authors who don’t use the word engage with those ideas, such as Spencer Klavan in his Light of the Mind, Light of the World and Jordan Peterson in We Who Wrestle with God.
So Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Meaning and Mystery in a Secular Age has been hotly anticipated by those following this conversation. Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, is well-versed in enchantment as a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose traditions are far more mystical than those of most other Western churches.Â
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Last week, I had the incredible privilege of hearing Catherine Pakaluk speak about Edith Stein. So it was a delight a couple of days after to read this essay about Edith Stein and another martyr from Siobhan Heekin-Canedy. A taste from the conclusion:
Sr. Teresa Benedicta and Sr. Olympia remind us that the ultimate Christian response to injustice and totalitarianism is not political activity, but Christ-like self-sacrifice. It can be tempting to think that the solution to bad politics is simply good politics, and this is true to a certain extent. As both Teresa Benedicta and Olympia knew from harsh experience, politics matters, and Christians are called to be part of building a just political order. Yet, Christ taught that His Kingdom is not of this world. By His Passion and death on the Cross, He demonstrated that the Christian mission is not primarily political (much to the chagrin of those hoping for a Messiah who would be a military leader or earthly king). Teresa Benedicta perfectly articulated this truth when she said: “Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.” Both Olympia and Teresa Benedicta responded to the evils of totalitarianism by sharing in the suffering of Christ, reminding us that the Cross is the only true solution to the world’s problems and that all Christians are called to embrace that Cross.
In a world that feels like it is spinning out of control, it is worth telling these stories together, for doing so reminds us that “the cross is steady while the world is turning.” God does not expect all Christians to become literal martyrs, but He does ask all of us to embrace suffering for His sake and place our faith not in human ideologies or endeavors, but in the Cross. Only by clinging to the Cross, as Olympia and Teresa Benedicta did, can we remain steady – both in our political activities and in our faith.
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Finally, would you like to be responsible this year and get your holiday shopping done early? Theologian Beth Felker Jones heard you, so here is her holiday gift guide! It includes quite a few wonderful books, but also a candle that “smells like Jesus’s folded grave clothes.” True, this last may be more Easter than Christmas gifting appropriate.