Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. But first I should note that this section was compiled during recovery from major surgery, when I’d been warned I could read like crazy but just wouldn’t remember much, thanks to the morphine. Thus, this was an exercise to help me recall what I’d completed – 43 volumes in all.
- Rick Warren: The Purpose Driven Life. This is really set up as a sports COACH set of game plan instructions. Sports jargon is full of motivating, directing maxims, focusing concepts, directions. It’s also legalistic: these are the rules, this is what you do: behavior-oriented.
- Paul Ormerod: Butterfuly Economics. A challenge to orthodox economics. Curiously, ants, not butterflies, are the basis of the reconsideration of public policy options.
- J. Brent Bill: Mind the Light. Pleasurable approach to faith by a Friends pastor, with good exercises for experiencing the Light.
- Vanity Fair, February 2009. (I’ve subscribed to this magazine for years, so I could have included every issue.) On fundamentalism, Christopher Hitchens, “Assassins of the Mind”: “For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.” Also, a great, lengthy oral history of the George W. Bush presidency and a piece on how his administration killed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- Indiana Alumni Magazine, January/February 2009. Includes a touching piece on a Vietnam veteran who had been one of the top newspaper editors but died in isolation in Florida.
- Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage, January 2009. (Another magazine, quarterly, where I could have noted every edition.) Includes an excellent overview of early Anabaptist history, resulting in four branches: the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and Munster uprising.
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume 1: I had expected more description of his travels and insights in America. Instead, his focus in on how to avoid the tyranny of the majority as a consequence of democracy. An aristocrat himself, his interest is as much on ways democracy might be better constrained in its applications in France as it is on the American experience. His look at local and state politics is unduly weighted on the New England model, ignoring, for instance, the mid-Atlantic states in his contradistinction with the Southern states. His understanding of religion, especially his apologetics for Roman Catholic faith fitting well into democratic systems, fails to appreciate the Puritan connection of personal salvation and covenant or the Quaker sense of walking in the Light as foundations of democratic decision-making. On the other hand, he also perceives the states at this time as essentially sovereign, the resulting weakness of the national government (including a prediction of weak executives, which was in fact the case up to Lincoln), and foresees the possibility of the slave issue leading to the dissolution of the Union.
- Volume 2: Here, the discussion turns to more of general findings from his travels in America and abroad. Still, his findings are vague impressions than specifics. Many of his conclusions must be seen in the time-frame of 1830, before American arts and letters really began to take shape. He does have an interesting theory about the tensions between an army in a democratic society and a democratic people itself.
Jnana's Red Barn 