Some Recent Writing
One aspect of my post-editor life I’m enjoying is the opportunity, once again, to take on assignments writing for magazines and journals, including book reviews. I am deeply committed to the genre of the book review as its own form of thinking and an act of service in the “republic of letters,” so to speak.1
The Christian Century has just published my review essay of two books that have landed like bombshells in the world of Augustinian studies: Slaves of God by Toni Alimi (Princeton University Press, 2024) and Matthew Elia’s The Problem of the Christian Master (Yale University Press, 2024). Here’s a teaser:
What Augustine says (and doesn’t say) about the institution of slavery is only part of the story here. Drawing on sermons and letters, Alimi shows that Augustine did not challenge the institution of slavery. He saw it as a penal, postlapsarian reality that was not inherently morally wrong. We can’t write this off as merely contextual, since other ancient Christian writers like Lactantius, whom Augustine read, denounced the institution of chattel slavery. But Alimi’s more unsettling argument is about the way that slavery is at the conceptual center of Augustine’s theology—as a metaphor that governs the way Augustine pictures humanity’s relation to God as both Creator and Redeemer.
Both of these books demand a reckoning. I am still taking the measure of their impact. As I just told a friend, writing this review essay was a spiritual exercise for me. You can read it online or wait for the June issue to hit newsstands: “Is slavery integral to Augustine’s theology?”
Also this week: my Jesuit friends at America magazine asked me, as a Villanova alumnus and student of St. Augustine, to reflect on the prospects of Leo XIV’s Augustinian papacy. You can read my essay online: “What to expect from an Augustinian pope.”
This summer I’ll be working on a review of Phil Christman’s urgent new book, Why Christians Should be Leftists, also for the Christian Century. Stay tuned.
And watch this space in the next couple of months for details—and a cover reveal!—for my next book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Some Recent Reading
In the spirit of curation, let me highlight some off-the-beaten-path reading that has engaged me in the past few weeks:
“How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men” in Jacobin
This interview with Kristen Ghodsee is illuminating and persuasive. A money [sic!] quote:
In reality, puffing men up for being men is just throwing them a bone for depriving them of the fruits of their labor. This is a classic move when you have a massively disenfranchised population that poses a threat to social stability. You need to placate them.
“‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires” from New York Times
OK, maybe on the beaten path, but I thought Wesley Morris’s essay on Ryan Coogler’s astounding new movie was an exemplar, in the spirit of Oscar Wilde, of the critic as art. Make time to read it.
“Also a History of Philosophy” from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Encounter of two heavy-hitters: Martin Jay reviews Jürgen Habermas, specifically volume 2 of Habermas’ ambitious and uncanny history of the relationship between faith and philosophy in the West. Volume 1 has been sitting on my stack for a year now; hoping summer might be a time to get to it.
Enjoy!
I’ve long been percolated a book project that would gather a collection of my book reviews over the past couple of decades as a way of tracking both the development of my own thought as well as telling a story about various cultural waves and moments over the past 20 years—something like Bernard Williams’ Essays and Reviews 1959-2002. The only problem is: I’m no Bernard Williams.