Book Review

Greg and Jennifer Willits of the radio show “The Catholics Next Door” have a book out called not-suprisingly The Catholics Next Door: Adventures in Imperfect Living.

This book, much like their show, gives inner glimpses into a Catholic family living their faith. Sections in the various chapters are alternatively written by Greg and Jennifer and each section gives their view of the topic and chapter at hand.  This is not a book written predominately to tell their conversion/reconversion stories or the history of their various apostolates, but to write about those daily conversion involved in marriage and family.  As Greg mentions at one point you can’t learn parenthood from a book, and they don’t attempt to do it themselves — but provide their experience  in growing in faithfulness and struggling on the path of holiness.

Considering the HHS mandate their chapter discussing contraception is quite timely.  We constantly hear how contraception is never mentioned in homilies, yet it was a homily they heard on contraception from a Deacon that started them on the road to rejecting what is seen as wisdom by the culture of death.  They managed to persevere in seeing contraception as a sin despite being told by a priest who gave them the standard Jiminy Cricket response. They were also very open in regards the struggles in accepting what the Church teaches as both their hearts and intellects came to the truth.

What I enjoyed most about the book is its good humor and honesty about living the faith.  There are many fun and instructive stories along the way and I think the book is very good for both the audience of those who have come to accept Church teaching and for those also who are struggling in believing what the Church teaches.  Their writing style invokes the conversational tone they have on the show and you do feel as reading the book to be involved in a form of conversation. Recommended.

For this Lent I started out with the daily meditations from St. Thomas Aquinas named appropriately Meditations For Lent.  They are as good as you would expect them to be with many very interesting theological reflections.

Halfway through Lent I became aware of Amy Welborn’s  Reconciled to God – Daily Lenten Devotions. At .99 cents at Amazon for the Kindle version this is the best .99 cents I have ever spent and while these are short reflections for each day of lent they pack a lot.  I especially enjoyed how she tied everyday common events to the daily readings and unfolds things in such a way to cause a greater impact.  Written this way they seem to permeate into you better than so many pious devotionals that just don’t sink into your daily experience as these do.  Just brilliantly written.  So while it is very late in Lent now, do yourself a favor and get these for the next Lent.  I know I will be using them again alongside of Aquinas’ meditations.  The two go together quite synergistically despite being quite different.

Meditations for Lent @ Aquinas & More

I usually confine my non-Catholic book related reviews to Goodreads, but there is enough intersection here to make an exception.

Being a dutiful and loyal fanboy of John C. Wright when I read that his wife had her own published books I was suitably enough impressed by the reviews to add them to my wish list.  Being that my wish list is much like an infinite number set I finally just got around to reading the three books in the trilogy.  In fact only the first book was released when I added it.

The books I am referring to are by L. Jagi Lamplighter and include Prospero Lost, Prospero in Hell, and Prospero Regained .

The books take their cue from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and  include  the characters of the sorcerer Prospero, his daughter Miranda, the foul traitor Antonio along with some of the  airy spirits.  The events take place in more modern days and Prospero has gone on to have other children who because of the water of life live on to this day.  While the outline of the events in The Tempest provide a grounding for the plot it goes onto include the blending of other myths into an intriguing outline that gives it a lot of scope.  Some of these blending of myths was beautifully done and one intersection of this happening in the first book still makes me smile when I think of it.

As the titles suggest something has happened to their father the “dread magician” Prospero and Miranda must gather up the family forces to rescue him.  The family though over the last century had started to go their own ways with competing interests and various sibling rivalries. The brothers and sisters range as a cast of characters and includes one similar to Circe , one who had been Pope twice, and another one who is rather scatterbrain, but quite fun. So while you have your basic quest story nowhere along the way do you feel you are following an already well-traveled path.  There are plenty of mysteries and suppositions that get made throughout as the band of brothers and sisters and and characters discover they are not quite sure what their father was  up to. The airy spirit that looks remarkably like Sam Spade acts as a detective and helps Miranda to find her brothers and sisters and the various clues of what happened to her father.

I really enjoyed the first book which had my full attention throughout and was happy to find that the following books got even better.  I just so enjoyed the interplay of the characters and there was just so much to keep you guessing as to how everything is going to resolve.  The world building with Elves, Fairies, Angels and Demons is quite consistent and much attention is also given to the moral quality of acts along with a theological worldview partly Christian with a Pagan tint to it.   Like many books that as part of them involve the rescuing of someone in Hell their is a view that those in Hell can be redeemed.  That view was involved here, but not in the ham-handed way it is usually done and involves an interesting solution reminiscent of Hans Urs von Balthasar with its own twist.  I certainly don’t expect fantasy novels to be theologically perfect, but this one within the confines of the plot has some Christian theological sensitivity.  There are certainly some Catholic elements involved.

A very satisfying  story from beginning to end and when she comes out with another book I am not going to add it to my wish list limbo, but acquire it right away.

Having greatly enjoyed The Loser Letters by Mary Eberstadt I looked forward to her new book Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution. Talk about a timely subject considering the HHS mandate.

This book does not just cover the effects of contraception on the culture, but also related problems such as pornography and what she calls Toxic U. She draws out many very interesting paradoxes concerning the so-called sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is a real revolution in that it revolved around a individualistic and selfish view of self and maximizing pleasure. While some of those paradoxes are ones that have been noted before she also brings out some new insights and some rather surprising one.  The chapter on how sex and food were once regarded and their switch places attitude-wise is very interesting especially how the moral weight of what food you eat has increased while the moral weight of casual sex has decreased.

When Humanae Vitae was released it was roundly mocked and ignored.  The same year The Population Bomb was released and it sold millions of copies.  One made many predictions which all turned out to be false and the other projected four things that all came to pass.  It was Pope Paul VI who was able to project into the future what would happen with the use of widespread contraception and like most prophets he was ignored.  This book explains exactly how he got it right demonstrates the consequences that flowed.  This is backed up by plenty of research and the book contains a plethora of references at the end.

One of the parallels she uses is the comparison between those who were actively denying the evil effects of Communism and those that deny the evil effects of the sexual revolution.  She references an article by ardent anti-Communist Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “The Will to Disbelieve” on the subject.  There certainly is a will to disbelieve to ignore or simply laugh at the toxic effects the sexual revolution has had.  This is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” of the first order where everybody seems to pretend that what they can see with their own eyes is mistaken.  The talk of effects on women and children is often brought up by liberals, but strangely never in regard to the massive damage that has occurred especially in the last fifty years. When the pill was being pushed it was promised  as a panacea to cure social ills and to create stronger marriages and families.  Even the pills strongest defenders don’t really push that line anymore.  But just as how the facts of life in Communist countries was largely ignored, the facts of the sexual revolution are also inconvenient.

The topic of pornography is another one of those areas that gets so soft-pedaled.  Talk about strange-bedfellows with radical feminism.  The ideas concerning pornography have largely fallen into a libertarian attitude and when referenced it is usually with a wink-wink attitude.  The destructive nature  of pornography on families and specifically with men in families has a lot of growing evidence and it is just another area that the culture has turned it’s back on. I know first hand (not an intentional masturbation pun) the danger of pornography and it was sheer grace that turned me totally away from it.

Mary Eberstadt takes all of these subjects and just writes brilliantly on them.  Her uses of explaining these paradoxes by backed-up examples illustrates the points in an entertaining manner.

I recently received Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late for review.

INDIVISIBLE can be a turning point in the moral, cultural, and economic decline of the United States-if its readers make it so. The authors-a leading Evangelical and a prominent Catholic-fairly and thoroughly lay out the fundamental principles without which family, freedom, and prosperity will virtually disappear in this country. If men and women of good will, aware of the historic challenges we face, cannot unite behind these principles-indivisibly social, moral, and economic-and elect leaders who will implement them, future generations will only know of the greatness of this nation as the fading story of a lost treasure.” (Father Joseph Fessio, S.J., Founder and Editor, Ignatius Press )

The book is written jointly by James Robison, the founder and president of LIFE Outreach International, and Jay Richards, Ph.D a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute.  This is a rather ambitious book in laying out a bunch of issues along with various responses from a Christian perspective.  This is written for a general audience and they cover a lot of information in a very accessible way and there is much I like about it.

Much of it reminded me of  Baptist theologian Timothy George reference to the “the ecumenism of the trenches,” which they quote.  The growing cooperation, both ecumenical and inter-religion, started to coalesce with the Civil Rights movement and solidified in the pro-life movement.  The solidarity was also quite evident with the reaction of many non-Catholic groups reacting to the free exercise of religion stamping of the HHS mandate.  In the foreword of the book reference is made that some might thing the book to Catholic and some too Protestant.  I found it more of a common-cause intersection for a general audience.

I also found that much that was said I was in agreement with and so for me it was not really anything groundbreaking.  I had already come to many of the conclusions they made over my life, but I certainly would have liked to read a book of this type much earlier in my life. Some of the areas that I though were not adequately covered I found were better addressed later in the book.  For example a chapter on government really did not address subsidiarity where I thought it would have fit right in, but in a later chapter this was described. I think I have become somewhat spoiled by a deeper Catholic understanding considering many of the topics covered, so a book of this type left me wanting at times.

This is also not a polemical book and it really tries to avoid the political divides as far as possible.  I enjoyed the variety of quotes and examples they used and the book is up-to-date as far as current events go and they really try to lay the groundwork before addressing the solutions.  It’s nice to see the natural law laid out fairly well along with relating scriptural verses.  There are quite a lot of quotes from Catholics contained within.

There were some things I did not like such as a “good men can disagree” attitude in regards to torture, which they pretty much just passed by.  One chapter that addresses pacifism spends a good amount of time on the error of this, but then gave short shrift to the opposite error of what they called the error “realism” and they a short discussion of just war theory.  More could have been said here even for a general audience.  The attack on the marriage in the family covers a couple of chapters and this of course is fundamental to the problems we are experiencing along with the attack on life.  Reading this it also got me wondering about when and if Protestants will start to really pick up on how destructive the contraceptive mindset is and how it sets up the culture of death they also deplore. The authors did not bring up this subject.

As a book that does a good job in covering so many of the obstacles and problems we face along with some good solutions, I would have liked to see more about personal reform.  The call to holiness where each and everyone of us must repent and reform ourselves so that we can also see more clearly and to help in the reform of the nation.  There is certainly some undercurrent of this in the book and the call to prayer, I just thought it deserved coverage in it’s own chapter other than saying “We’re all sinners”.

Overall though I found much to like about this book in both the tone and the content.

I had recently read Roots of the Reformation by Fr. Karl Adam who was a German Catholic theologian.  I had heard many good things about this book and found it very insightful and an excellent read.  Thus I moved on to another book of his The Spirit Of Catholicism.

This was unbelievably good with a unique viewpoint.  As a general canvas of the Church and her doctrines while it has some apologetic tone to it, mostly it has a theological viewpoint that looks at the Church on a deeper level.  It was one of those books I was tempted to highlight every page.  If I hadn’t read the ebook version I could have saved myself time by just dipping the book in highlighter yellow.  I just so enjoyed how he wrote on the papacy and it’s connection to love or how the Church is permeated with Christ and united to him.  Just such a rich book with much to reflect on.

I found this book on EWTN’s document library.

Since I created an eBook from the text on EWTN’s site I provide it here:

ePub

Kindle

Update: Due to a request here is a copy of “Roots of the Reformation” which was also available in EWTN’s document library.

ePub

Kindle

With Lent approaching it is of course time to get prepared for Lent to help us to live Lent and prepare for the greatest feast Easter.

I received a copy of Rediscover Lent written by Matthew Kelly for review.  This is one of the Catholic authors I had somewhat heard of, but have never read any of.  The format of Rediscover Lent is the common devotional one of providing a scripture verse, reflection, meditation and prayer for each day of Lent.  These follow the Lectionary readings for Lent.

The author follows what he calls the  seven pillars of Catholic spirituality which include Confession, Daily Prayer, The Mass, The Bible, Fasting, and Spiritual reading.  A book that starts with and emphasizes Confession starts on the right track and the book mainly continues on the right track.  It provides solid nourishment for Lent and I mostly like the way it was covered.  The section relating to the Bible did not skimp by ignoring Apostolic Tradition and the general presentation of the faith was nicely done.

The audience for this book I think is largely for those Catholics that really need to be introduced to the liturgical season of Lent as a daily practice and is written for a general audience.  It is hard to fully evaluate a daily prayer/reflection book when you read the whole thing over a day or two, still I liked it and found some food for thought.

Though one aspect of it annoyed me in that it employed a bit of  motivation-speaker-jargon such as continually using variants of “both-version-of-yourself”.   The call to holiness as  the “both-version-of-yourself” just did not do it for me – your mileage may vary.  The section regarding the Mass had good points, but the idea of the Mass as the central act of worship of God was lacking and the emphasis was like describing the Mass “It’s about gathering as a community to give thanks to God for all the blessings he fills our lives with.”  I find that statement to be rather lacking on several levels since the Mass can be said with no gathering of community other than of course the Body of Christ. Though to be fair worship is mentioned in the context of the Mass.

For myself I am going to go through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Meditations for Lent this year which are also daily reflections.

I was recently sent a new book called Speed Bump (Tales of the Short Bow)

This book consists of five short interlocking stories which have their inspiration mostly from G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. The Chesterton novel was about about a tradition-loving suburban London community of the 1880s at war with its modernizing neighbors. This book takes that idea into modern times as a neighborhood works to stop cars speeding through neighborhood. The first story “Speed Bump” sets this up and the plot is escalated through the remaining five stories.

These stories were originally printed in the American Chesterton Society’s Gilbert Magazine

I found the stories reflected the Chesterton wit quite nicely and I was very amused by the stories. The last stories I also see as a commentary on government power and it’s abuse “for the common good”.

Chesterton’s original novel and these stories are quite funny, but they really involve a serious take on subsidiarity and the comic aspects of a neighborhood defending itself should not be as comic if we did not have such a warped sense of government.

Plus being just $0.99 it is a steal at the price, but Kindle format only.

I recently read New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy by Fr. Robert J. Spitzer S.J.  This was on my “to read” list and I bumped it up up after reading “Paul Cat”‘s review of it on his blog Alive and Young.  He provide a good in depth review and after reading the book myself I would concur totally with his review.

I must admit the book made my brain hurt at times, made it hurt in a good way.  As a lifetime lover of the sciences especially physics it was a very intriguing read as he discussed Big Bang cosmology, Universal constants, etc as these realities also intersect theology and philosophy.  His explanations were very thorough and areas I was already aware of were made clearer by what he had to write.  Philosophical concepts in regards to God were also made much clearer to me as the book progressed and I really learned a lot from this book. His teaching method includes repeating phrases over and over and I found that what he had to write really stuck with me.  A week after reading the book so much of it remains remains accessible to me.  Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one.

Regardless, just read Paul’s review.

Three years ago I received the first novel by David Athey, Danny Gospel a novel I thoroughly enjoyed.  His new novel Christopher
explores some similar themes, but not a repeat in any way.

The story follows Christopher starting at the age of eleven.  Christopher is a lover of nature and does more than to stop to smell the roses, but to really look at a rose.  His parents are a sort of hold out from the sixties with his mother being into alternative therapies and vegetarianism.  Christopher comes to meet a young girl from a Catholic family whose Catholicism is quite fervent.

This basic plot sounds like  a setup of sort with a critique of the sixties and what will obviously happen with Christopher contact with this Catholic family.  Though this is not how this story really plays out at all and transcends a setup plot to be something much more fulfilling.  The story really kept me guessing and invested into it. Christopher is sort of haunted by contact with a series of Catholic girls in his young adult life and struggles between seeing the theological reality of something and seeing himself in that theological reality himself.  His introduction to stories on Grail Knights spark his imagination, and while the novel refers to him as a young knight, he is not a young knight without struggles or temptations.  The novel is very frank about these struggles which go beyond silly teenage angst but speak more of the human condition and specifically the struggle towards manhood.

I enjoyed the characters throughout the novel and Christopher’s parents are not simple stereotypes, but fully fleshed characters that contribute to the story.  A well told novel that while having a good amount of Catholic red meat in it is enjoyable on several levels.