the Meaning of Marriage

This book is an excellent extended series of explorations in the Christian concept of marriage by Timothy and Kathy Keller. I've been meaning to read it for a while, because my liberal-to-begin-with views on gender have broadened considerably over the last year or so and are increasingly at odds with much of what most other christians seem to think. While aware that some attempts to present a 'christian' position on gender are abysmal, I'm realising that my views are starting to risk conflict with the actual biblical basis of it all, and so, having trusted and massively grown thanks to his expositional guidance on work and justice, I turned to Tim Keller's book on marriage. Kathy, his wife, had a significant collaborative role in writing it, and she herself wrote the chapter and appendix on gender roles, so even further seeming like a legitimate source of argument on untangling the matter. I've had to be quite careful reading this book, as I'm sure any young single christian will be able to empathise with; as if anyone saw me reading it I would undoubtedly suffer a brief and awkward inquisition as to "oooh are you planning to marry someone sometime soon Isaac?" [no]. I also might have to be quite careful having read this book, as I'm mildly concerned that someone, upon seeing this blog post (or any of my other posts that discuss gender), may subject me to a disciplinary explanation of the real biblical case for complementarianism and why 'overly' egalitarian demands contradict God's plan for men and women. It was only my deep, habitual respect for this blog that drove me to write this post at all - and, since if anyone who's going to read it is going to be exposed to my honest exposition of my own views on the matter, I may as well try my best to make and justify my points of thought on the matter in full. As such, this will be a very long post, and quite a lot of it won't be about the book. In fact, I may as well get that out of the way early on.
   Kathy and Tim Keller have here written an extremely well-presented, strongly grounded in scripture, and persuasive account of the biblical notion of marriage. Chapter one explores the symbolic nature of it, with human union a physical imitation of God's interpersonal trinitarian love, an image fulfilled and perfected in Christ's marriage to the church as he unites it to himself and brings all those 'in him' into God. Chapter two explores how dependence not on each other but as a twosome on God through his Holy Spirit drives and helps sustain an ideal marriage. Chapter three explores the problem of marriage as a covenant bond of love, given the changeable nature of romantic feelings that we think of as necessary to 'love'; and how in changing our concept of what love is and how we can enact it, this failure of passion can be overcome by willpower. Chapter four explores the point of marriage as a worldly institution, and how it functions best when grounded on firm friendship. Chapter five explores what is entailed in getting to know, to a very full and deep extent, one's spouse, and having seen their best and worst, being able to consistently love them. Chapter six (and the appendix which is relevant to this chapter) explores how spouses can overcome the division of gender, loving and serving one another across it while recognising the social and theological constraint that it poses (more on this later). Chapter seven explores how marriage is actually not necessary for a human life; and how single people are to think about it and act accordingly. Chapter eight explores the purpose of sex as an aspect of human life in God's intention, and how and why it fits in with marriage in the ways that christians conventionally argue. It's all very readable and reasonable, laying out marriage's theological background and how the implications of this can be best practiced, with much food for thought throughout. I'd strongly recommend this book to any Christian, single or married.
   Right (if you were only reading this to find out about the book, you can stop now; from here onwards this post will be my attempt to explain how I've reconciled what has felt like a major inner conflict within my expanded worldview).
   So.
   I have saved, paused, and returned to the published-but-unfinished draft of this post so many times that it's now over a fortnight [make that a month] since I actually finished the book - I just can't bring myself to commence this explanatory bit. Please accept this apologetic placeholder until my motivation to justify my position coincides with a suitably long time in which I can sit and write it all. These posts, especially this post, can take a while, and I do have to do other things like eat and work and talk to people sometimes. If you really are itching for some of my liberal-Christian-feminist perspectives on gender to be aired, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry.
   [Finally getting round to tackling this, even though it shouldn't take too long. I'm leaving the placeholder in so that posterity can laugh at what a haphazardly procrastinatory blogger I am.]
   Basically, I believe that gender should be largely abolished. This is because it is responsible for upholding, and therefore perpetuating, deep-rooted inequalities and injustices. Susan Moller Okin convinced me of the moral/political points to this effect; my only qualms were that Christianity traditionally holds a fairly conservative view of gender that would not take kindly to a suggestion like this, and also, I wasn't convinced that gender was entirely normative. Cordelia Fine later persuaded me of the latter; she puts forward a pretty robust case that psychological sex differences are broadly unsupported by actual scientific findings, and instead makes compelling arguments for how socially normative constructs, such as gender, affect individuals in such an insidious way as to seem real and propagate themselves.
   Following conversations with Christian friends who seem naturally suspicious of 'feminism', I was repeatedly brought back to the idea of complementarianism. This is the theological view that men and women are created equal, but with differing roles, that complement each other in a relational sense as a man and woman together emulate the marriage-as-God's-love image that Tim and Kathy discuss in this book. The central part of this view is the man's headship; much as the Father is the most active agent of the trinity, the husband is to be the most active agent of a married couple. I still feel uncomfortable about this idea but the biblical case for it is quite clear. However. Kathy and Tim also explain, at great length, that the within-marriage dynamics of love absolutely should not be a power dynamic comparable to any human relationship that we are used to observing. If emulating trinitarian love, then both the wife and the husband should be constantly seeking to serve the other's best interests as reasonably and humbly as they can. This detooths all proper interpretations of complementarianism from excusing exploitation; the man's headship isn't to be seen as a heavenly justification of male dominance (and anyone who says or implies that it is should be outright challenged) but a trump card bestowed almost arbitrarily by God upon one of the genders so that individuals within a marriage have something to turn to if they ever come to an immovable standstill between their working out conflicts of loving each other in the best possible way. Of course, real humans are sinful, so we need to take such allowance of headship with a large pinch of salt and a much larger pinch of feminism-inspired church accountability. But headship in this very minimal final sense, something not supportive of inequality but demanding Christlikeness and self-giving, ultimately something that has only a theological component and is not intrinsic to the moral worth of either gender, is something with too strong a biblical case to ignore, and that I think can be included into a workable model of Christian feminist social justice in promoting equal rights and opportunities.
   The other thing I think should be kept, as it were, is the physical component; i.e. the direct correlation between sex and gender. I realise that when expounded even slightly within the Christian framework of marriage, this is literally homophobic, biphobic and transphobic - and that makes me very uncomfortable. Scripture is very clear on these points, and while my views on social policy are strongly pro-LGBT+ rights, my theological/philosophical view on the matter can't ignore the full weight of scripture, no matter how much I wished it weren't so. But anyway, the binary distinction between men and women in sexual partnership is another aspect of gender's theological basis that I feel has too strong a biblical case to disregard. Note however - this distinction is purely physical; any psychological, socioeconomic, cultural or otherwise normal personal variation in what one can reliably assume about a person's preferences and capabilities should be completely emptied out (thanks Cordelia). It's crucial to stress that the Christian view on gender need not be pegged to traditional views on gender; in fact I think the inegalitarian tendencies of those conservative views demand that with justice in mind Christians should move toward a more 'gender neutral' (in the cultural sense) position. Women having the same level of autonomy, in all social spheres, as men, is not an affront to God.
   So I'm left with a very minimal form of complementarianism, in which the entirety of gender can roughly summated in two points (each with hefty caveats):

• Theological component: male headship (though its assignment to 'him' is arbitrary between the genders, and in the context of proper Christlike love, as those within any Christian relationship but especially between members of a marriage should already by emulating, will also be invoked rarely and prayerfully and solely for the couple's good as a tool of lovingly jumping impasses in collective decision-making)
• Physical component: male and female partnership ('complementarianism' then is more or less reducible to heterosexuality and basic sex-related physical differences [i.e. cis-genderedness], as all other aspects of gender that one may expect here are normative and should have been abolished, by which I mean should not exist as restrictive forces on any male or female individual)

   What would this look like in practice? Hopefully a thoroughly fair co-incidence of Christian theology of sex and feminist social criticism. I'm sure, dear reader, you'll excuse me if I don't feel the need to draw a detailed picture of such a world, and let me finally finish this post, which, fortunately, I can now direct people to via hyperlink if ever I need to explain my views on gender, and therefore avoid having to ever think much about it again. Good night.

the Lovely Bones

This book, a bestselling novel by Alice Sebold, was, in hindsight, a fairly compelling read but not overly memorable or thought-provoking. I ploughed through it during the eighteen-ish hour coach journey back to Sheffield from Holland, selecting this as I thought it would be a nice easy read, which it mostly was, but for the solid punch of the first chapter, which I should have expected given that the central premise is that its narrator, Susie Salmon, has been murdered by a paedophile called Mr Harvey.

   Its opening scene then throws a lot at you quite heavily - the depiction of sexual threat and violence is gut-wrenchingly brutal, as are its echoes throughout. The rest of the novel then follows two plot threads: Susie's thoughts, reflections and memories, while she's looking down from her vantage point in heaven; and the continuing developments in the lives of her parents, siblings, schoolfriends, and murderer. The second of these dominates the bulk of the content, which I'm grateful for, as the first, though a nice concept for providing a stand for the narrator, I feel went too far in the posthumous world it tried to build, and risked toppling over the line between sentimental fiction and hashed-out fantasy. Sebold has woven an excellent cast of characters in the main story though; Susie's father and mother, sister Lindsey, brother Buckley, Ray and Ruana Singh, Sam and Hal Heckler, Ruth Connors, Len Fenerman; the people are believable and different, and as we follow them throughout the years after Susie's murder, it is the present of their lives that dominates, not the tragedy at the novel's beginning, and though even when at the close they have all fully moved past grief Susie is not forgotten - but the focus on the living is special, I think, as the life of the novel is held there. The emotional threads binding these characters are described extremely well, and the depth of sadness and relief in places is palpable. Even Mr Harvey is not sketched merely as a classic two-bit villain, but has his youth fleshed out enough for us to begin to see how someone might possibly become so irreparably immorally twisted - his deceptive encounters with the police also reflect a much more well-rounded side to evil men than I was expecting. One negative comment would be that some scenes (I'm thinking of the whole Susie's-adventures-in-heaven thread, but also in particular Mr Harvey's final appearance and a frankly weird encounter between Susie, Ray and Ruth toward the end) simply feel a bit silly; if the book was more determinedly supernatural in tone then fair enough, but it doesn't seem to make much effort to let these elements direct or influence the path of the story in any way, and just seem like an add-on that can justify what are otherwise blatant mushy cop-outs plot-wise. If this seems very specifically harsh, read chapter 22 (pfft, spoilers) and tell me it doesn't come across as daft.

   I'd recommend this book if you like prolonged emotional journeys filled with sparks of hope. The characters are well-drawn, the scenes and feelings elegantly crafted, the plot not particularly interesting and the themes not particularly deep but the people at the core of the novel make it somewhat compelling. An easy (although at more times upsetting than it is uplifting) read, with a rewarding finish despite what I felt were one or two major floppy aspects to the story.

Delusions of Gender

This book, a veritable bombshell by Cordelia Fine, deserves to (and probably will) go down as a classic of both iconoclastic feminism and popular (though highly academic) psychology. It was on the reading list for one of the topics in a philosophy module on feminism that I took last spring, so I borrowed it off a friend (thanks Charlotte) for a couple of references, and got quite taken in by how good it was, so, naturally, I acquired a cheap copy. It has been one of many that I've been breezing through during my current predicament (a family holiday - I've been in a hammock, drinking either tea or beer depending on the time of day, being slowly browned by the Dutch sunshine, working my way down the aforementioned stack of books, and occasionally accepting the prompts of my relatives to join them for some sort of 'compulsory fun', for pretty much the whole last week - absolutely ideal).
   Anyway, you're not here to read about my actual life (at least I don't think you are, like, I have no clue who reads this anyway as even on the best of days it's just my thoughts about random books, so you might well be a bit odd, no offence) - the book.
   It's a thorough, and I mean thorough, debunking of the gender difference psychology. Much popular 'knowledge' about gender differences is that they are innate, ingrained into the very being of men and women; their brains our wired differently which means they think, act, and react in very different ways, with men being more independent, aggressive, assertive, logical, and analytical, and women more empathetic, cooperative, interdependent, supportive, and emotionally savvy. Basically, men are great at being active agents doing whatever they want to do, and women are great at helping them by fulfilling roles of subservient femininity. This is an unavoidable situation based on how men's and women's brains fundamentally operate; it's unfortunate that it means a woman will be way less likely to ever become a president of something or that a man be an impeccable house-husband, but we can't really call this inequality - as it would be psychologically risky to try to encourage similar activity for men and women, given their basically different mental functions. It's better if culturally, we just accept that women are great at fulfilling their subordinate stereotype, and men can do whatever else they want (as long as it doesn't involve too much housework or feelings). This is a harshly straw-manned but not too inaccurate depiction of the position of most of those seeking to justify the status quo gender-wise. Lots of very depressingly well-selling books about gender difference (including this nugget of heretical pseudo-christian drivel), many hailing from the kind-of-reputable field of popular psychology (heard of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? my A-level English Language teacher said it was, I quote, "pure bollocks", and after reading this I'm inclined to believe him) seek to prop up and confirm pretty much this situation. Gender inequality? It's not as big a problem as feminists would have you think, because men and women's brains are WAY different.
   You can probably tell that I don't buy this, and neither does Cordelia Fine, who just also happens to be an extremely well-reputed neuroscientist. She names this position 'neurosexism', the perpetuation of patriarchy through pretend psychology. I won't be able to even get close to explaining her full arguments or body of evidence (there's 42-pages of highly-scrutinised academic references, so I trust the expanse her scholarship), but as a general gist, neurosexism is bunk and gender is almost entirely normative.
   Part one of the book examines how our minds, being extremely complex things when operating in social contexts, take on board our own and others' presumptions in subconscious and largely unnoticed ways - leading to inadvertent but powerful assumptions about things (i.e. implicit bias - if you've never heard of this take this test and prepare to be terrified at how racist and sexist your subconscious probably is) that may adversely affect our capacity to relate to them. This means that if we're aware of gender stereotypes, we unwittingly become conduits for making ourselves and other people fall into line with them - scary stuff.
   Part two is a blow by blow examination of the core arguments made by neurosexists, the key experiments and data they use to back up their claims, and, calmly, Cordelia rips it all to shreds. The academic procedures of those who propagate neurosexism are appalling, making claims without substantiated evidence; the studies they do cite lack statistical reliability, and even where experiments do seem to imply something significant, there was generally some hefty oversight in the scientific method of setting it up. There is little robust evidence for brain gender differences existing, and masses upon masses of  non-gender-related psychological experimentation that treated men and women in the same way and worked - because, shock - their brains are actually very similar.
   Part three is an examination of the sinister, subversive, subliminal process called socialisation. If gender isn't wired innately into our brains, then how and why do men and women grow up to be different? Very easily, because of the deep-rooted subconscious effects outlined in part one being prevalent throughout a person's childhood. The normative aspects of gender (i.e. ALL expectations or presumptions about someone based on their sex) are extremely widespread and significant in human societies, so children, as they develop and work out how to take their place in the world, learn how to participate in the grand game of gender. Disconcertingly, part of learning the rules entails forgetting that it's a game at all, and entering into a lifelong pretense that the rules one abides by are in fact an irremovable part of who the player is as a woman/man.
   Throughout the course of her book, Cordelia Fine has not only done a no-holds-barred takedown of neurosexism (part 2), she has also built up a convincing case for how gender, as a normative construct rather than an innate psychological reality, can affect people's behaviour so deeply (part 1) and retain its presence across generations (part 3). Let me now place this book into the wider context of my own reading life. A while ago I became convinced (by S. M. Okin's little depth-charge of political philosophy, Justice, Gender and the Family) that gender, as a normative construct, was responsible for perpetuating gross societal inequality and should therefore have steps taken to disarm it as a normative force. My main remaining area of curiousity here then was whether gender was primarily normative, as opposed to being partly innate - and Fine has convinced me of the former, so, I guess, onwards with Okin's abolition of gender!
   What else can I say? Around the general framework of the points I've tried to overview here, there is an abundance of insightful and interesting food for thought on the topic of gender difference, human minds and behaviour, how we operate in societies, and so on. It's a difficult read given the sheer density and intensity of her scientific analysis and discussion, but she has an incredibly easy writing style to follow, making even the very complex points quite accessible. She's also hilarious - her acerbic waspish remarks about neurosexists and their ilk, not to mention the dry absurdity of mock-anecdotes that she uses to illustrate occasional points - I don't think I've laughed out loud at a non-fiction book as much as this one in ages. (Also, the title is a pun on 'delusions of grandeur' - something that I entirely failed to notice until half an hour ago, when my dad laughed at it and said "ah that's a clever title", much to my bafflement. Dunno.) If you're a self-avowed feminist, you should definitely read this book to provide ammunition in arguments with those who accept neurosexism. Conversely, if you're keen on social psychology and aren't entirely convinced one way or the other about gendered brain difference, you should definitely read this book. This probably isn't one for a general reader though, unless you're really interested - I mean, if you are a general reader and you've read all the way to the end of this post, you probably get the gist anyway, but hey, knock yourself out if you like the sound of it.

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor [and other stories]

This book, a collection of nine short stories by the late, lovable and enigmatic recluse of 20th-century American literature, J.D. Salinger, is just as (if not more) rewarding on this, my third reading of it. I decided to reread it because a particular adult cartoon, in its typical straddling of the fine line between genius and madness, decided to feature J. D. Salinger as a 'hahaha-I'm-not-dead-after-all-but-work-in-a-bike-shop-and-aspire-to-make-reality-TV' kind of character, and, with my having reread another of his amazing works earlier this year, the reminder stuck.
   Note - many of my overall reflections on the essense, spirit, and specialness of Salinger's writings are much the same, and I already went over a fair few of them in the post on Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction, and also, having now begun to indulge my biblio-nostalgic cravings in this general direction and finding myself halfway through his published works again, so with only another two more to reread I will probably do so in the near future, and thus further extents of my thoughts on what makes Salinger's books so damn beautiful will have plenty opportunity to be aired. In light of this, I'll keep things to a rudimentary description of the stories here and fit my reflections surrounding them in later posts (despite my reasonable intention to keep this post shortish, any familiar reader will know this to be a farce).
   Anyway, these nine short stories. To outline their content as I will vaguely do so here is effectually pointless; for Salinger, style and substance are inseparable, and describing what are the actually-not-that-interesting events comprising these (and most of his) writings absurd, as the whole point of reading them at all is not to observe the events plotwise, like some cheap written-down Hollywood, but to glimpse the insights of human character and transcendent meaning in the way the explanations of these events unfold. Nonetheless, given the format and conventions of this blog, I feel you are owed at least a perfunctory synopsis of each:

• A Perfect Day for Bananafish: a woman reassures her mother over the phone from her hotel suite that the impromptu 'second honeymoon' her husband had taken them on was going well, and that despite her parents' continued concerns as to his mental stability, her husband was indeed functioning well and enjoying life. Meanwhile, on the nearby beach, her husband, none other than Seymour Glass (this is the family's first appearance), has a playful conversation with a child, returns to the suite, and ends the short story in an entirely unexpected manner.
• Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: two old college roommates reconnect in a haphazard visit that becomes prolonged due to bad weather; amidst pleasant and witty conversation, the host's daughter has a bizarre crisis with imaginary friends, and the host is upset by discussing her light-hearted old flame (Walt Glass) who died in the war.
• Just Before the War with the Eskimos: a teenage girl follows her friend home to conclude a dispute over owed taxi-fares accrued following their tennis lessons. While the debtor goes to find her mother to get the money, the temporary guest is startled by the shambolic emergence of her eccentric elder brother, with whom she is subjected to a rather baffling but horizon-broadening (in the "well that was weird" sense) conversation.
• The Laughing Man: our narrator reminisces on his childhood baseball teacher, 'Chief', particularly stories he used to tell about a super-powerful Chinese criminal called the Laughing Man who could talk to animals. Despite both Chief and Laughing Man being pillars of inspiration to the young boys, circumstances that the listeners don't understand dampen the Chief's spirits, and he ends the stories quite unwholesomely.
• Down at the Dinghy: after a short conversation with her housekeeper and a visiting acquaintance reassuring them of her son's wellbeing and known whereabouts, Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass) ventures down to a small jetty on a nearby lake, where her young son is trying to escape home (again) in a rubber boat of which he has declared himself captain, and she tries to negotiate his return.
• For Esmé - with Love and Squalor: our narrator, who remains anonymous, wanders into a British town near where he is stationed during the war; he visits a local choir, then retreats to a café, where later one of the choirgirls and her family enter. Recognising him as an American soldier, she approaches, introduces herself as Esmé (and her recalcitrant younger brother as Charles) and tries to make intelligent conversation, including requesting he someday write something about squalor when she learns he's also a writer. They part ways. In the second part of the story, our narrator, in the wake of the war ending around him, struggles with post-traumatic stress and the squalor of victory in Bavaria; he then receives a many-times-lost-in-the-post letter from Esmé, which in its delicate sincerity is enough to propel this broken man back into recovery of all his faculties.
• Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes: late at night, a man is subjected to a lengthy phonecall from a friend who has worked himself into a drunken panic about his wife (who is late home again), whose subtle shades of disrespect for him have prompted suspicions as to her fidelity; in an impeccable work of mollifying, the phonecall-receiver calms down his friend enough for the whole thing to blow over nicely.
• De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period: a pretentious but skilled aspiring artist blags his way into a tutorship at an independent Toronto art academy, where he quickly finds himself growing bored and pessimistic about the point of such a job when all of the students whose art he is to provide critical feedback on seem to be incorrigibly awful - all but for one young nun, whose paintings strike him with a beauty self-evident enough that he seeks to himself contact her and urge her on, though his efforts are hindered and he grows only further dispirited.
• Teddy: the eponymous child, on a cruise liner with his aggressively leisure-oriented family returning from Europe (where he has been meeting with philosophers and professors to discuss religion and truth), wanders briefly around the ship, updates his journal, then is talked to by a young man, who is rightly baffled, as most readers probably are, by Teddy's decisive obfuscations of most clear ideas about life and death and such.

   Each story has an imponderable mysterious character of its own, and yet each have the same indefinable mingled tinges of awestruck sadness, shrewd curiousity, love and loneliness, sarcastic wit. Generally neurotic but pure at heart. I will try to discuss these elements of Salinger's writing in upcoming posts, whenever I get round to rereading Franny & Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, which will hopefully be soon. In the meantime, I exhort you to follow me in reading these stories, and with them the other three books published by J. D. Salinger in his lifetime.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

This book, by Swedish columnist Katrine Marçal, actually took me quite by surprise - first in a bad way, but turning into a good way the further along I read. I was introduced to the book by a seminar on feminist economics that my friend Olivia ran for our campaigning group (I've definitely mentioned this before in other posts I think), which was extremely interesting and important, well attended, and had a brilliant title - the latter she admitted to having borrowed from this book.
   We are brought by this book to question everything that conventional economic wisdom tell us, and fails to tell us. Maybe there are a few theoretical kinks that could be ironed out, maybe there are a few presumptions that need reassessing in the face of actual data, maybe there are a few differences between schools of thought that could, in critical conversation, learn from each others' overlaps. But the main problem of economics is this: its central unshakeable dependence on Economic Man (let's call him Johnson), a hyper-rational utility-maximising agent who knows exactly what to want and do and how. All neoclassical theory is derived from the application of Johnson's character to aggregated decision-making throughout micro and macro systems. The problem? Oh, there are several. Johnson is not trustworthy (because why would he be? there is no room for normative fields like trust, moral obligation, social loyalty, and such, if one's core drive is utility maximisation), and he also, ostensibly, is not female. This second point may sound trivial but listen: our presumptions of economic possibility depend on individual agents being able to conduct their optimal lives with complete autonomy, but in real human history and society, the brute fact is that we don't - people do unpaid work for huge amounts of unseen unrecorded time just to help keep our daily functions ticking over. Hordes of invisible women support the 'autonomous' agency of their Johnsons by keeping their houses and families in order. Even the 'first economist' Adam Smith, who despite being a world-eminent moral philosopher for his theories of sentimental empathy and the importance of helping and caring, was waited on by his mother for his whole life before her death (if you were only reading this out of intrigue at the title, sorry for the spoiler).
   The book lays out pictures of Johnson (note: it does not call him this), and the implications for society and economics on presuming his presence in all persons, and then begins attacking both the unrealistic picture of humanity that Johnson is, both in terms of psychological behaviour and binding to social norms, roles, expectations, and relationships. I came to the book expecting a rigorous blow-by-blow exposé of where economics lacked feminism and how it could be patched up, hence my puzzled disappointment with the first few chapters - but then I realised what Marçal was doing, and it's a work far broader, deeper, more punchy and great. She has got right to the heart of what's wrong with neoclassical economics and in turn its apologism for neoliberal politics; they lack recognition of real human nature, which is not pure utility-maximisation but has many aspects including the need for love, care, and people; and they lack recognition of real human society, which is not composed of autonomous agents (with necessarily invisible women) but is complex and interdependent, with people relying on each other in relationships and bonds that arise from far more than an agreed you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours. I believe in this book, Marçal has shown us the ugliness of presumed selfishness, and how poorly this results in economic theory and policy. She has not written a book about feminist economics, rather it is a feminist means of crawling to the heart of economics so as to plant a bomb that destroys all our conventional understanding of the dismal science; feminism is a crucial part of the wider normative struggle for socioeconomic justice, and she does a superlative job in showing us why these aspects of human reality (especially including, given ongoing inequality, gender) matter to it.
   Her writing style I found it hard to adjust to liking. Though it is very lively and talkative, being aimed at quite a general readership, it seems very clunky and weirdly mismatched in tone - though I think, given how similar this complaint is to another that I had a while ago, maybe it's just hard to translate informal Swedish into comparably-nice English. Like I said, it is written accessibly, with her central narrative of deconstructing Johnson rendering all economic concepts easily intelligible (although don't make the same mistake I did; you should know that this is what she's doing, as a result she writes in ongoing metaphors quite extensively so some academic readers may have to step back a bit from how typical-non-fiction-ish this is).
   If you're looking for a book on feminist economics, this isn't it. But if you're interested in social justice generally, whether from a gender angle or an economic angle, or wherever, this book will help you develop a much closer understanding of the relationship between those issues, and how it all hinges on Johnson; that imaginary friend of economists and policymakers who has, without ever existing, bent their ideas to suit his ends - which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be those of the rich, the well-educated, the heterosexual, the healthy, the white, the unscrupulous, the male. We need to make the world run better for those who are not Johnson, which is in fact basically all of us, and a big part of starting to do this is changing economics by demonstrating that he, unlike Adam Smith's mum, is a fiction.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This book by Hunter S. Thompson, self-described as 'a savage journey to the heart of the American dream', and gilded with cult status by the film of the same name starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, is one that undergoes much-hyped controversy as a novel. It is also one that I will try not talk about at too great a length, for having only yesterday departed from a festival outside Amsterdam to be picked up by my family and driven to a quiet farmhouse in the rural southeastern Netherlands, I am quite tired, and have done almost nothing today but lounge in a hammock with a sequence of beverages and read this novel in effectively one sitting (or hammocking).

   Firstly I will say that if you happen to come across the illustrated version of the novel, be wary as they are quite horrifying, though their ink-spattered sketchy grotesqueness does perfectly fit the tone of the prose, which in Thompson's true gonzo-journalistic style, is frank, bizarre, meandering, relatively transparent, amusing and discomforting in roughly equal measure.

   In the book, the narrator (a quasi-autobiographical Hunter S. Thompson thinly disguised in the anonymity of fiction) who is a journalist, and his Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo, have a series of increasingly reckless and ruinous drug-related misadventures, while trying to (and to some extent succeeding to) proceed with their normal actual responsibilities, such as reporting on a dirtbike race, mingling in casinos, and even infiltrating a police narcotics conference. There is kidnap, theft, fraud, hotel-trashing, threatening strangers, scaring a young hitchhiker senseless, botched attempts at interacting with a range of entertainment industries, all spun wilder and darker from the book's driving force: powerful psychoactive drugs. It's hilarious in a deranged kind of way; one will laugh, but to mask fearful apprehension at the sheer outrageous madness of the events depicted and the edge-of-sane-reality teeterings of its two main characters.

   And yet this is not just a mad hallucinogenic romp; this is a truly significant work of American literature. Howandwhy? Oh, many reasons which I'm not enough of an English Literature student to answer, nor do I wish to spend long enough on this post to even begin to elucidate, but there is one of the deeper points from it (that I drew anyway) that I found a compelling provocation to thought - and that is Hunter's damning appraisal of the West's hopes and dreams that had come to a fore in the decade previous. Through the 1960s, strong economies, powerful democratic movements toward ideals of peace and equality, the emergence of popular culture in new forms of publicly accessible music, and yes, the increasing prevalence of and interest in psychoactive substances, all coalesced together to form what I as a child-of-1993 would be dimly aware of only as some kind of glorious hippy revolution. Having been born thirty-three years late, I glean only leftover snippets of its fullness: Volkswagen campervans, the Beatles, LSD, women getting men's jobs, Martin Luther King, protesting the Vietnam war, the Kinks, realising the need for global ecological protection, sandals, weed, tie-die shirts and bandanas, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, free love, a non-ironic and not-yet-nerdy obsession with science fiction, eastern spiritualism and western existentialism smudged together in a wonderfully blurry mess of simple comfort for those who indulged themselves in this kind of Woodstock lifestyle: basically, for fun-loving social-justice-loving friendly folks, it was a superb decade, full of spunk and purpose and hope.
   But despite the zeitgeist momentum of this wondrous counterculture, it did not prevail; inequality, distrust and war won out. Why? I don't know exactly; nor does Hunter's narrator give a scintillating analysis (as one would expect from a gonzo-style stream-of-consciousness in the head of a perpetually-tripping amoral wonk), nor would I care to explain my thoughts on each minor possible hint. A major part is the co-opting by consumer mentality of hallucinogenic drugs, which in counterculture were part of expanding one's empathetic spirituality, connecting with the universe and such - but by the 1971 events of the novel, these now-illegal substances are, being illegal so one may as well abandon all other scruples along with respect for the law in taking them anyway, mere fuel for reckless hedonism. Mad selfish individuals now guzzle these 'heinous chemicals' as part of their wider rejection of anyone's attempt to limit their getting exactly what they want, rather than the hippy notion of seeing one's humbler part in a cohesive vibrant world. At the heart of the 1960s counterculture was the desire to see peace and happiness (embodied in the hippies themselves) drive forth and help establish the American Dream: but established powers have always had other plans, and the American Dream promulgated within the capitalist increasingly-isolationist West instead of this has been one of hedonism, of personal gain with only secondary regard to others and the world. The two main characters fulfil these anti-hippy characteristics ideally, and Las Vegas, with its unapologetic over-commodification of everything, fulfils as a city the culture that most directly dissolves any hippy-esque mindfulness. That drugs therefore are such a prominent part of the novel maybe to show how easy such tools of introspective positivity can be corrupted if used by people who just want to trip balls and steal cars and scare hotel clerks. I rarely include quotes from books in these posts, but at one point, there is a brilliant passage alluding to what I've been trying to lay out my thoughts about.

"...the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

   

   Anyway. This blog is called Thoughts on Books, so you have to expect dense paragraphs of near-nonsense thoughts like that sometimes, I'm sorry. I notice that my posts often begin with a grumpy promise that "this post will not be a long one because I'm tired and/or in a rush dammit" but then, ah, look, oh yes, oops, again. But yes, I would recommend this novel to anyone who has a stomach for the grotesquely funny-but-not-funny, and if you want to read deeper into the book than simply two nasty idiots having weird adventures on drugs, then, as I hope I've shown, it's the kind of book whereby you absolutely can.

Bad Samaritans

This book, by distinguished Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang (also author of this and this), is a superb exposition of how various aspects of the global economy are basically rigged in the favour of the rich, and covered up with a wide variety of pseudo-economic lies. I started reading it last week, powered through most of the rest of it on the far-too-long Megabus journey from Sheffield to London to Amsterdam, and have just now finished the last chapter while sat atop my suitcase in the train station while I wait for my friends to get here from the airport. I am very sleep deprived, it is busy here, I am writing this on my phone on borrowed Dutch wifi, and me and my housemates are about to go to a techno festival in the nearby forest this afternoon, so I am quite distracted - I don't even know when they're arriving here, but the general gist is that I don't have an awful lot of time to write things about this book, even though it was great.

   Chang's style is friendly, accessible and readable - see my other posts about his other books for further discussion of that. His academic approach of demystifying economics to the general reader deserves applause, especially since he does so with such calm aplomb, and splits apart 'common knowledge' assertions about the way international economic systems work, then showing us in detail how and why certain presumptions aren't warranted, or how some things can't be properly understood yet, and how better explanations may lie just round the corner, if only we can be convinced to drop our unrelenting trust in the innate beneficent tendencies of rich people, large multinational corporations, rich countries' governments, and the hosts of apologists and aides to these three. Basically, we should drop our trust in these, because they're making life extremely hard for developing countries and the poor generally.

   Throughout the course of the book, Ha-Joon dissects myths about globalisation, especially from a developmental perspective (looking at how rich countries became so, and are now depriving poor countries from using the same means as they did in order to develop), whether free trade is always the best option in a globalised world of varyingly-developed players, likewise whether foreign investment should be regulated, why public sector initiatives are demonised comparative to private sector ones and whether these suspicions are warranted, the complexities of copyright law and ownership on an international stage, likewise for financial prudence and how far we should consider regulation of monetary systems to be sensible, where corrupt and undemocratic countries stand in all of this, and whether some poor countries are simply that way because of an economically unhelpful culture.

   Every chapter is rigorously researched and argued, but made clear for the non-economists who I hope will read this: we are shown a glimpse of a world which is truly unfair, where the orthodox preconceptions about these issues of justice from the science which is meant to impartially discern socioeconomic problems has been co-opted into perpetuating fictions about how people and countries develop so that the rich can stay rich and the poor can get poorer as the rich increasingly exploit them. We need more economists like Ha-Joon Chang; not an ideological leftist, but a common-sense whistleblower on the nonsenses and deceptions of his own subject. The book opens and closes with fictional near-future accounts of global business activity (I found these far too exciting, I love potted economic histories and these were basically one utopian and one dystopian track along the possibilities for our current world); these show just as clearly as the implications of his core chapters the sheer range of possibilities that exist for our world, if only we can properly adopt, nationally and internationally, policies conducive to equitable sustainable development.

   Ha-Joon Chang's other two books (thus far blogged about), I would recommend to literally everyone - Economics: The User's Guide is an indispensable tool for general public education in the most important subject that they know probably not much about, and 23 Thing they don't tell you about Capitalism is a good book to flesh out that framework with a few added extra mythbusters to undo what may have been misled by the plutocratic media. Bad Samaritans is a bit more specialist but still a general readers' book; anyone with a broad interest in international economic justice, globalisation, and development; especially students studying something similar to this; should absolutely read it.

That was good timing, I can see my housemates meandering through the station. It is time for me to go have my eardrums burst by waves of raw delight amid happy Europeans and beautiful trees. I'm on a family holiday in rural Holland straight afterwards, on which I'll be doing a lot of reading, so (if there's wifi), see you soon.

the Economy of the Word

This book, by Keith Tribe, explores themes and topics in the linguistic history of economics. I'm barely gonna write anything here as I already wrote a full review of it for the Rethinking Economics opinion blog (link below). It was a pretty sloggish read, but interesting in an academic sort of way; if you like economics, historical methodology, and the complexities of changeable language use in century-spanning contexts, then this book is right up your street.

HERE'S THE FULL REVIEW I DID

[Edit November 2016: it appears that during a recent re-vamp of Rethinking Economics' website, the entire blog has been lost into the Error 404 ether - so pasted below is my review's text.]

History is the art of constructing causal narratives between past events and holding them up for analysis. The history of economics – how it has been gradually built up and developed as a field of study over centuries – follows the same rule: historians studying the history of economics have to throw themselves fully into the heads of long-dead economists to try to perceive who or what influenced them, how, why, and to what effect on other deceased thinkers.

   Unfortunately, since both normal historical events and the economists studied by one studying the history of economics are, by definition, history – we run into the usual gamut of difficulties ascertaining exactly how a particular event happened, or exactly what a particular economist thought and why. The historiographical issues of correctly sourcing and interpreting texts are predictably smaller for tracing the history of an academic discipline than they are for tracing actual history, but by no means has this seen historians of economics refrain entirely from making unwarranted leaps of assertion.

   Keith Tribe’s book has this complex criticism running throughout. He takes a philological approach; closely scrutinising the language used in canonical texts of economic history to determine exactly what they originally meant. With immensely wide scholarship, he lays out the academic biographies, cultural contexts, and influencing factors on each writer he tackles, to lay the outputs of his philological analysis in an intelligible framework.

   The book’s content is in three parts. Firstly, a discussion of the word ‘economy’. It does not mean the same thing to us as it would have meant to an Ancient Greek or Adam Smith, and thus any historian of economics peering at older uses must revise what they understand the writer to mean. In this opening chapter, he draws out the evolution of the word’s definition from Aristotle to the 20th century, followed by an overview of how rough measures for this final concept of ‘economy’ (i.e. national income, or GDP) came to be numerically constructed. Secondly, he turns to Adam Smith, dissecting with indefatigable precision the historical influences and writings of the Scottish original economist, to show an internal consistency in Smithian arguments about trade in The Wealth of Nations; he also tackles ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the disjoint between selfishness-driven markets apparently espoused by Smith in his economic work, and the altruism-driven social harmonies at the heart of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his prior treatise in moral philosophy. In the third section, he analyses the work of Karl Marx and Léon Walras, economists whose ideas seem almost wildly opposing given that aspects of their influence have led on the one hand to Communism and on the other to neoclassical apologists for free-market capitalism; but under close historical scrutiny, both of them derive their core understanding of society in a very similar way, from French political economists in an emergent industrial context.

   This content, separated from the main motor of the book which is the philological approach discussed above, would be exceedingly dry and there probably wouldn’t be much point reading it. But because Tribe has so effectively cracked open our awareness of how texts, economists, and language, are situated in historical circumstance, each section proves thoroughly insightful. As a book more about the historiography of economics than about its history, it serves as a refreshing and probably-much-needed rebuke to lazy modern historians who might see the word ‘labour’ in an 1848 article and read into it all their own 2015 assumptions and connotations about what that word implies and derives from. We need instead, when reading old texts, to make the effort of learning historical contexts, following linguistic usage roots back far enough to see where they split, understanding the processes of individual thought enough to recognise and respect them in a figure who we can only access by reading their writings. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and the dozens of other significant economists discussed in this book, did not produce their ideas in a vacuum alone with only a rough sketch of modern economic theories. That’s not how intellectual progress works. Thinkers’ contemporary settings, things that they read and people they spoke to and socio-political events that befell them, are of enormous importance and it is crucial that we have an acute sensitivity to these when attempting to do history of any kind, including economics. Likewise, the ability to properly grapple with words as historical entities is vital; and this entails sometimes making the imaginative leap into obsolete definitions so that we and whoever we’re reading are on the same page. Language is not constant, nor is economic theory, and the failure to appreciate this pair of stark facts will make a bad historian embarrass himself. Keith Tribe has done great work here in showing how essential to understanding the history of economics a philological approach is. He sheds small patches of light on several topics, but more importantly, demonstrates how hard it actually is to pin down definite knowledge if one is being sloppy. It is truly masterful scholarship.

   The book’s point is also, I think, an important one for the Rethinking Economics movement. Philological analysis of texts yields dense crossovers of influence and discipline – if there is solid historical evidence that Marxian and Walrasian economics derive from the same set of sources, then no conflicting theories should be beyond critical discussion of where they may both be overlappingly right. Also, the methodological approach to language and texts would be a useful one for economics students to learn; admittedly, it’s one that ends up with us being less easily able to know things, but much surer that we’re right when we do. Economics degrees seldom encourage strong verbal reasoning or perceptive reading, but these are skills we do need.

   For any reader interested in the history of economics, I would recommend this; compared to most other texts in the field it treats less of theoretical developments and individual economists’ projects, but for its overall point, widening the scope of how we do (or should do) history, it is an indispensable addition.

the Radical Disciple

This book, the last written by John Stott before he passed away in 2011, is a distillation of some of his key realised wisdoms. His life was one of relentless ministry, having a profound influence on global evangelical movements through his writing and speaking, and always noted by those who met him* as having cultivated a set of characteristics that made him arrestingly Christian. Here was a man who truly understood the gospel's power and what it should mean for the way we are as persons, and this book is an explanation of how some of those characteristics should work themselves out, from their roots in the Bible to practice in our lives.

   These characteristics are: non-conformity (we should eschew worldly socio-cultural pressures to be like other people), Christlikeness (we should instead create and realise a spiritual pressure to be like Jesus), maturity (being individually secure in our living faith so we can grow, plant and spread it better), creation care (concern for environmental justice should be a big part of Christian thinking and lifestyles), simplicity (we should reject consumerist drives for more and better and be content with lifestyles that look comparatively spartan, for our joy is in Christ; this is not puritanical but allows us to free up resources to better serve the poor and the lost), balance (there are many facets to a Christian identity and we should seek to emulate them all in a way that doesn't unhealthily prioritise or neglect some aspects), dependence (we should be fully trusting ourselves and the world to Christ's good will), and death (and how the gospel completely upends our perspective on it in our own lives, hopes and service).

   Stott's decades of wisdom and trust in God show through in his elucidation of each of these, as do a strong moral compass that I think is wholly complementary, if not indispensable, to the consistency of a Christian life such as espoused by these. His points about lifestyle particularly I find very powerful; they strike right to the heart of contemporary western materialism, which has deep footholds even in the church, and he makes excellent points in rooting out and rejecting it. I strongly admire his perspective on creation care as well; humanity's rampant abuse of the biosphere has left us teetering on the brink of various social and ecological catastrophes, and it is depressing that more Christians are being strongly outspoken about this - because if one believes that according to the Bible, humans were put on earth to work and keep it well - we are not doing that, and so creation care is a vital part of returning to a clearer vision of God's intent.

   As the title suggests, this is an outline of Christian lifestyle and character that cuts right to the bone, but it does so with the full weight of the Bible behind it, and in a consistently readable and humble tone, never smacking of superiority or moralism but of brotherly recommendations given in love. 'Radical' means rejecting huge swathes of status quo norms because of one's convictions; 'disciple' means a loyal follower learning from their leader; this combination of things a Christian should be, called to walk in the way of Jesus, a way that fundamentally challenged the expectations of his contemporary world and of ours too. A challenging but encouraging book that I would recommend anyone read to lay out some guidelines on your Christian life.

* The following mild anecdote from my church leader Tim Chester serves to show Stott's automatic inclusive humility. At an evangelical conference several decades ago, where Stott was the main speaker and Tim but a self-describedly nerdy young Christian excited to finally see in the flesh this legend of Christendom of whom he had read so many books and articles. While waiting for a friend outside the toilets, Tim was approached by an elderly gentleman who engaged him in conversation - a wholesome, encouraging, interesting conversation that was largely about Tim and his faith and his enjoyment of the conference - at no point did the gentleman make any claims about himself, until eventually apologetically looking at his watch, thanking Tim for the chat, and saying that he needed to head off as he was speaking shortly, at which point a starstruck and embarassed Tim realised that he'd been talking to John Stott.

The Way We Are

This book, one I picked up out of vague random interest from the bargain bin at a charity shop, was, I'm sorry to say, Margaret Visser, the least memorable reading experience I've had in years. It wasn't quite boring but it was by no means interesting either. It was like reading an enormous compilation of those inane little thinkpieces written by contributors to the Readers' Digest. It's the kind of book that retired accountants probably keep in the toilet for a colourful treat - albeit under the book of crossword puzzles, which they do prefer as at least then they get to engage their brain somewhat.

   I'm being harsh. (I think part of my not-entirely-warranted disparagement of this book stems from the absurd foreword, in which John Fraser coins the term 'visserism'*.) Margaret Visser's collection of sixty four(ish)-page mini-essays on a range of topics did actually make me say "hmm" in a passively interested way at least two dozen times, but then, it did also make me say "this book is so dull oh my goodness" in an amusedly stupefied way at least seven times. She claims to be an 'anthropologist of everyday life', taking relatively benign topics (of a some-horribly-vague yet some-horribly-specific width of variety) and dissecting them, historically, sociologically, psychologically, economically, through culture and tradition and observation and mostly just facts that she's read about something somewhere, to reveal something unusual or interesting about their origin and practice. Apart from she largely doesn't. To be fair to her it looks like a lot of thought and reading went into each one, but in the way that it goes into a year 8 assignment for which one is aiming for a B at best. There are no overarching themes, no profoundly interesting or insightful points (she comes tantalisingly close to making some, then leaves off to spew out another random nugget of thought or information on topic X), and although there are plenty, a great deal in fact, of moments where she strikes upon something in such a way or with such a fact as to mildly realign one's perspective on it, she does so with so little aplomb, and the topics are so random anyway, as to have little effect on the reader. I still quite enjoyed reading it, and will be keeping it for a future next-to-lavatory-bookcase. It amused me in much the same way that watching Qi occasionally amuses me, through sheer persistent banality.

   With basically nothing left to say about this book, I will proceed to list the topics of her short essays; after an introduction (on the general unnoticed interestingness of everyday objects, practices, or concepts, which she promises to explore), Margaret Visser discusses:

• air hostesses
• initiations
• offal
• sunbathing
• conspicuous competence
• Thanksgiving turkey
• Santa
• high heels
• baked beans
• lobster blushing
• Spoonerisms
• greetings
• beards
• avocados
• tipping
• vacations
• English spelling
• umbrellas
• street parades
• physical reactions to embarassment
• bells
• Valentines
• caviar
• professionals
• the left hand
• wedding cake
• showering
• crossword puzzles
• sitting down on things
• gloves
• fireplaces
• spitting
• wigs
• knitting
• the unpopularity of wine in America
• swimsuits
• menus
• wearing blue
• pumpkins
• Christmas trees
• stripes
• the Easter Bunny
• filler words
• vinegar
• mahogany
• jelly
• synaesthesia
• stockings
• Christmas pudding
• hearts
• fasting
• looking emotionless
• eating squirrels
• tap-dancing
• broad beans
• chewing gum
• forgetting people's names
• uses of the colour red
• Eskimo words for snow
• soup

* I jest not. "n. 1. a concise socio-anthropological insight arrived at by comparing current human behaviour with various alternative models... 2. an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities. 3. any observation, esp. on contemporary manners, that provokes shocked laughter; a sly dig. 4. Archaic or literary. the doctrine that all scholarship, e.g., food chemistry, etymology, particle physics, etc., exists to prove that life is rich, funny, and meaningful." Like, making up a verb to describe the decidedly not unique activities of a writer is bad enough, but four!? I don't know. Having now finished the book I remember it quite fondly. I gained several partially-interesting vaguely-insightful tidbits from it, and didn't actually die of boredom, so maybe it's an alright book after all.

3-2-1: The Story of God, the World, and You

This book by Glen Scrivener is a fantastic introductory exposition of Christianity; my church runs a video series using the same material as a seeker event series every so often and I thought it was worth checking out. It was. On a personal note, I'm extremely glad I ended up reading it alongside this other book, as the bubbling refreshers of truth in this considerably offset the misguided downers of the other.

   It's not a full-throttle attempt to provide an inarguable rational basis for Christianity, nor is it a vague doctrinal overview; Glen introduces it as if Christian beliefs were a house and this book the tour, organised into a superbly helpful framework of 3-2-1 (I'll explain what this is shortly), which he expounds with thorough biblical referencing, explanation of doctrinal, and sound philosophical reasoning. He writes with an easy charm, presenting enormous ideas without reducing their magnitude or complexity but making them generally comprehensible as he goes along, partly because of the brilliant simplicity of the 3-2-1 framework for explanation.

   After introducing the book, he gives us an overview of the life, claims, character, deeds, significance, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the central figure and absolute core of Christianity. Glen then leads us through: 3 - the three persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how they together exist as love and how this conception of God is resoundingly different to any other faith and gives us a sturdy and beautiful foundation for our understanding of big questions; 2 - the division in the world between fallen humanity and God's original perfection, and what this means for us, especially in light of Jesus's entry into and triumph over the brokenness of creation; 1 - our individual decisions to live for self (remaining subject to fallenness and death) or to accept Christ's substitution as what we actually need and to be united to God through him. I have not done justice at all to the devastatingly lucid power with which Glen works through Jesus, the Trinity, the fall, and union with Christ as a progressive cogent whole explanation for Christian beliefs. He consistently grounds his points well in scripture, arguing them compellingly (well, he did study philosophy) but not with cold intellect, a style well-matched by his warm and conversational tone. It's extremely easy to read and extremely enlightening as to the coherency and plausibility of Christian truth as a standalone worldview.

   Having laid out Christianity's blueprints for itself, he then turns to consider some of the main external objections to it. How can we validate its truth? Can we actually trust the bible? Why select this above all the other multitudes of religions and worldviews? What about the problem of suffering and evil? And if God is love then what's the deal with hell? And why has Christianity and the church had so much hypocrisy and evil in its past, for that matter? Particularly, regarding sex and sexuality - why is Christianity so weird about that? Finally, hasn't science pretty much undone faith anyway? Glen tackles these questions using the understanding of the universe from Christianity that he's built up using Jesus and 3-2-1, perhaps not giving a completely satisfactory explanation regarding each, but there are literally thousands of other books on apologetics to do that; here he examines the general gist of why these objections may not actually pose much of a threat to the actual truth of Christian belief. He does this with the same punchy calmness and poignant vivacity that permeates the rest of the book.

   As far as general-readership introductions to Christianity go, this is probably the best I have ever read; it's rare to find one that might actually be accessible to non-christians and therefore effective as the give-away kind of book, but this is. If you're not a christian, I recommend you acquire a copy as it will better acquaint you with the contents of a worldview which you are probably dismissing without properly understanding. And if you are a christian, then I urge you to read this, digest it as an easily-communicable philosophically-fresh means of presenting our shared truth, and then buy like thirty of them and give copies to every non-christian friend you have.

Praying Drunk

This book by Kyle Minor is probably the most tragic and beautiful work of fiction I've read since last summer. I can't actually remember where I heard of it, but it's been sat on my shelf since February waiting for me to plough through it, which is exactly what I did in the last four days. Buckle yourself in for a long post, as I have a lot to say about this book.

   It's by no means an easy read. Apparently it's partly autobiographical, but the disparate patches of story and question and conversation and sorrow that comprise the book work so powerfully as a whole collection that that almost doesn't matter; it's written so well that be it based-on-truth or not Kyle Minor leaves the reader emotionally wrecked and ponderously adrift, not in a cruel cheap way but in a deep, thoughtful, and ultimately sad way. He prefaces the book with a note reminding the reader that though the book is not a novel and is composed of shorter parts, he has put these into a particular order for a very good reason, and therefore one should read straight through rather than skipping around. The rationale behind this order is, at least on my interpretation, a rough meta-narrative tracing the trajectory of some of the stories' shared themes - which I'll discuss later. His fragments of story are revealed in a variety of mediums; some collections of letters, some memoirs, some dialogue, some Q & A with an anonymous despondent quasi-angelic figure, a fifty-page novella, and several more typical-style short stories. They all seem to take place on the same broad stage as well, sometimes touching on the same events or characters or memories, from different angles and in different tones, connected by loose-stitched threads that show either an incredibly deep commitment to leaving parts of pictures unshown or that they are in fact biographical. It matters little to me.
   So, to the contents themselves.

• First, an account of an uncle's suicide, with questions of its causality leading further backwards into abstraction, a deterministic account of the narrator's uncle's life in universal perspective, the initial blame for the ultimately tragic end of his uncle's life, and by implication all of human suffering, lies at the feet of the supposedly benevolent omnipotent God.
• Second, a young boy endures torture at the hands of his high school bully only by clinging to the words of an old Jewish joyous song; later as a grown man, in times of great upset, he finds this victimisation internalised and that he cannot leave it behind, not even able to look beyond it to the Christian faith which he has long since lost.
• Third, a mother leaves her husband and child, who slip into a depressed and depraved lifestyle full of bitterness and anger, leading to horrific fallout, which even within vaguely miraculous elements of the story go to demonstrate how ultimately in control of our lives and our meaningless suffering we as human beings aren't.
• Fourth, several conversations occur between a passive but inquisitive young agnostic man and the charismatic enigmatic Christian woman he is trying to understand and to woo, revealing in many interesting angles the nature of faith as a mysterious crutch.
• Fifth, seven short anecdotes from a missionary in Haiti about a gregarious but untrustworthy acquaintance of his called Sebastian, which display the impotence of knowledge-based faith in inspiring works of love, and the emotional turmoil that results in actively persisting with such contradictions realised in oneself.
• Sixth, a hypothetical reader and an ethereal entity exchange Q & A about the uses of fiction and narrative in making our sensations of life somewhat more tolerable.
• Seventh, at the funeral of a young man who killed himself, the preacher tries to explain God's plan's involvement of suffering using the analogy of making sweet biscuits out of bitter ingredients.
• Eighth, the narrator accounts the disorderly trawl through life of his older brother, through rock bands and sweaty desk jobs and grudges and addictions and bereavements, and asks: how do we keep it together, how do we as people cope with this madness, what do we cling to in the face of our world's sheer insubstantial unreliable shifting sands of cause and effect?
• Ninth, we glimpse the inchoate misery of our bodily existence, especially as we age, as a young man ponders dependence and dignity while attempting to correct his dying grandfather's false teeth.
• Tenth, in the longest short story, comprised of a series of letters (all from different people and in different voices), we see criss-crossing lines across America and over to the distant country of Haiti of loneliness and desperation and selfish appropriations of relationships; a missionary in Haiti falls in love with a student visiting on a volunteer trip, and secretly arranges to marry her, much to the disapproval of her family and his fellow mission team; we see the pastoral and social consequences of this decision bloom all manner of emotional mess in the lives of the poor and beset-upon Christians on each side of this wreck, only accelerating once a violent uprising bursts out in Haiti, and friends and family back in America have their concerns reoriented by other developments. I think ultimately what we see from the story is the deep-rooted need for human companionship of some form, and that in the mess of a world of selfish people, even selfish Christians, this takes many surprising forms, but that all of them are something like clutching at straw; we can never keep or protect properly those we love or those whose love we adopt, and even within faith in a loving powerful God, we let ourselves slip away also.
• Eleventh, another Q & A, our ethereal answerer tells us how truly empty and meaningless and dull heaven is, therefore how faith as a crutch for the empty and meaningless and dull misery of earthly life is likewise but clutching at straw.
• Twelth, the ill-fated attempt of a boy to overcome his bully, and reflections on the hereditary misfortune of violent tendencies, a further meaningless inheritance to human suffering.
• Thirteenth and finally, a countryside-dwelling artist ponders his family and all the tragedy and darkness that has unfolded throughout his life, and how all he can do to keep his soul from crumpling under its weight is to focus on the people present, the work at hand, the pleasures available, the acceptance of misery as part of the way the universe is and a stoic dedication to living with and through it.

   Each component is immaculately written, with the pace and poise of Minor's prose flowing perfectly to suit the tone and point of each part, and with the varying voices of his narrators having their own life and weight. I've heard him described in some reviews as a 'writer's writer', given his inventive playfulness and abundant reflections on the purposes of his writings even within them themselves. In terms of telling a collection of stories well, and provoking a poignant series of thoughtful responses therein, I don't think Minor could have done better. Anyone who enjoys top-notch fiction, especially sad stuff, the weighty kind that every few pages makes you stop short and breathe in blinking back stunned eyewaters at the sheer distressing honesty of his words; read this book.

   However, in a much more personal (and yet much more objective) sense I found the book problematic and upsetting. Minor's characters are largely Christian, and of course, looming throughout the themes and tones and currents of his stories is God; though this god that he writes of is not good. He writes of a powerless, distant, uncaring, unknowable, even cruel god; the humans populating his stories struggle with and lose their faith in myriad sadnesses of circumstance and confusion precisely because this is the kind of god they believe in. I think this is indicative of the damage nominal faith can do; these people largely don't have living personal relationships with God, they are simply brought up into a conservative unquestioned set of doctrinal truths that have never endured trial or test, and so when these difficulties do arise, the grounding of what they think to be true dissolves, plunging them via their suffering into further misery and darkness. It's pretty bleak. The meta-narrative that I mentioned I thought spanned across his collection is one of an individual, who has grown up amid Christianity, seeking meaning and truth and goodness in a broken world. As you'll see by reading back through the descriptions of each piece, we start off by clinging to faith in hope of some abstract redemption, amid brutality and suffering, and unsettled by a vague awareness that God must know what's going on - why is he allowing this? This insecurity and mistrust and feeling of betrayal and absence is built up in leaps and spurts across the following stories, with layers of cynicism and loss further separating the narrator from the god they thought they could trust, before we reach the end, and question whether even if that god is really there and everything I believed about them were true, would it make a difference to me now? And the answer given is a plaintive "not really", leaving us with nothing to do but grin and bear it by ignoring the disjoints, like the artist in the closing story.

   This is, I think, sadly the reality of faith for many nominal christians, especially in America (which is where Praying Drunk's complaints and qualms occur), and it breaks my heart to think that many people may have had internal trajectories in their relationship with God similar to the ones expressed so accurately here. A proper understanding of God's character and the doctrine of the Fall would together remedy so much of these characters' inner turmoil, and could save the faith of many real persons whose lives bear resemblance to the stories. I'm lucky to have grown up in a church environment that is much more open to dealing with the hypocrisy and failure of Christians than in trying to deny or forget them, and also one with a far firmer grasp of the theology underpinning how we can stand in trusting God amid the wreck of this world. But worldwide, certain Christian socio-cultural tendencies will emerge, and so I do recognise with an uncomfortable familiarity a great deal of the internal ruins that seem particularly to plague those living in the Bible Belt, the more conservative types who can't quite reconcile their love-filled faith of fear and judgment against a broken world of human wrong and unanswered questions.

   Fortunately, I ended up reading this book alongside 3-2-1 (an excellent theologically and philosophically sound overview of Christianity), so was reminded persistently while I read onwards that the darkness and hopelessness of Minor's stories is not fully true to the God I know. Christian readers, I'd recommend doing something similar as an antidote to the pervasive persuasive negativity of the short stories. It reminded me of Gilead, the last fiction book I read narrated by a Christian, albeit one with much better-grounded reflective passages and thus a more substantial and encouraging output of its worldview and conclusions.

   Anyway, I've expended all my main points, if I were to start going into the smaller ones then this post may well be my first to exceed 2000 words. Ridiculous. I put so much time into writing these things, only to have no idea if there's a readership at all, but if there is, I hope you enjoy my ramblings, and I hope you enjoy Kyle Minor's stories - because there's no way you'll have read a post this long about a book that you're not planning on reading.