Father Elijah by Michael D. O'Brien

Father Elijah is a book I read back in the 90's and, for some reason, had a hankering to read again. I'm glad I did. It's an apocalyptic thriller, but very different from what you might expect given that description. There are no car chases or explosions, and the pacing is far more measured than is typical in contemporary fiction. It is apocalyptic in the authentic Biblical sense, an icon of the final battle between good and evil.

O'Brien's religious understanding is orthodox and profound. Since Christ has already won the battle for us in his Life, Death and Resurrection, the apocalypse is not really about defeating evil but saving souls. Thus the Father Elijah of the book's title is not sent by the Pope to destroy the Antichrist but rather to attempt to save the soul of the man who might be the Antichrist (the President of Europe), since as long as a man is alive his salvation is always possible. On the other hand, the forces of evil would like nothing better than to corrupt Father Elijah and claim him as a casualty; the drama of the book is then Father Elijah's journey into the heart of darkness on a quest to save the President while maintaining his own faith in the face of temptation and horror.

The measure of this book is that reading it is itself a spiritual experience and an education in the true nature of the war we are fighting.

The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

I haven't been keeping up with this reading log for some time now, but I'm getting back into it.

The Great Good Thing is a sort of "spiritual autobiography", telling the story of Klavan's conversion from secular Jew to Christian. Key to his conversion is what can be called the education of the imagination through literature, something Chesterton wrote about - and GKC does get a mention in this work. A worthwhile read.

Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

Theodore Dalrymple is a British psychiatrist who has spent a lot of time counseling people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. He's also a penetrating author with a terrific prose style. He's worth reading for the style alone.

In this book Dalrymple asserts the strong thesis that modern psychiatry is not only largely a waste of time, but actually counterproductive. He's not talking about the cases of obvious pathology, where he is fully willing to concede that psychiatry has made genuine and valuable contributions. He is talking more about psychiatry as it tends to expand into a general philosophy or comprehensive view of human nature in the form of Freudian psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.  Dalrymple holds that in these forms psychology either teaches things that are trivially true and well-known, or novel ideas that are inherently destructive. Chief among the latter is the idea that some controlling force - be it childhood trauma, our genes, or our conditioning, etc. - dictates our behavior.

Dalyrmple is a master of the pithy phrase. Opening the book at random: "Psychoanalysis, like death, is a bourn from which no traveler returns."

Highly recommended.

Double Fault by Lionel Shriver

I haven't been keeping up with this reading log, although I've been reading. I'll post on the books I can remember I've read over the last few months.

This one is a novel by the same author as We Need To Talk About Kevin. And like that book, it explores a sort of Nietzschean theme of the will to power as fundamental to human relations. Shriver likes to take the most intimate of human relations - in the case of Kevin, that between mother and son - and tell a story of two people attempting to overcome the will to power to know each other. And if you are at all familiar with her work, she's not too optimistic about the outcome.

Double Fault does to marriage what Kevin did to motherhood. Shriver ups the ante by making the marriage partners both struggling professional tennis players. Since competition is at the heart of what they do, there is the danger that the marriage will become a contest as well - and it does.

This book isn't quite as compelling as Kevin, but still a good read.

Badlands by C.J. Box

CJ Box has a new hero in Cassie Dewell, a sheriff's deputy who moves to North Dakota to take a position as chief investigator in the expanding shale oil country. This looks like the beginning of a new series just as good as his Joe Pickett series.

Re-read of An Intellectual History of Liberalism by Pierre Manent

This book, along with Manent's The City of Man, is indispensable for understanding what it means to be modern. And we are all inevitably modern.

Adios America by Ann Coulter

I generally don't read these types of contemporary political books, but my library had this and I gave it a shot. A very easy read and Coulter is actually pretty funny and, unfortunately, right about immigration.