Posts in: Books

Finished reading: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton 📚

A very enjoyable read. I don’t often delve into the world of quantum anything, but when I do it’s usually fun. (George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance and Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland are two that always come to mind.)

I love not only how diverse Egginton’s subject is, seen through the distinctive lives of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg (literature, philosophy, and science, respectively), but also how incredibly old it is: the book opens with, and never fundamentally moves on from, Plato’s Parmenides dialogues.

Robert Alter said of the 2500-year-old book of Ecclesiastes and its questionably pious epilogue, which arguably sought to “domesticate Qohelet’s doctrinal wildness,” “It is surely attributing far too much naiveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text.”

He goes on:

What continues to engage the moral and philosophical imagination … is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness.

Far from triumph, there is a leveling effect to be found in the heights of human knowledge. Here’s Egginton:

Standing on the precipice of this very instant, we stare into the abyss of the eternal. Desire for that abyss fuels powerful human impulses: romantic ecstasy; religious fervor; artistic creation; compassion for others; even the courage and conviction to transcend our inclinations and do the right thing, no matter the cost to ourselves. But to believe we can exposit that abyss, that we can package it into the language and logic of space and time—to think we can visualize the impossibly small, the infinitely whole, describe the world before its beginning or after its end, know the fate written in our stars—such pretension leads us astray.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like Qohelet.

I mentioned before that it reminded me of Jonathan Pageau’s “Most of the time the earth is flat.” Pageau ends that (first) piece with this:

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

So much wisdom in life simply has not changed in human history. And the real place for it is always right in front of us.

Here’s Egginton again:

We see evidence for the existence of this moral law everywhere, [Kant] said; in the least impressive of our fellows, in the most abominable of men, we can at times glimpse an act of righteousness, a spark of goodness. And when we do, Kant wrote, we can feel our spirit bow down in respect, even if we wish to resist that feeling and remain aloof.

There is a line from Elizabeth Bowen that Christian Wiman has quoted many times and that I think would have made for a fitting end/direction for Egginton’s epilogue:

To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

(I mentioned somewhere else that Sarah Hendren (@ablerism) has two posts on the book — here and here — that are not only excellent reflections but that probably give a better idea of the book’s contents than I have.)

Currently Reading: The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton 📚

Splendid, so far! I’m not sure how well this will follow Egginton’s narrative, but at several points I’ve been reminded of Jonathan Pageau’s 2014 post “Most of the Time the Earth Is Flat,” which was such a great source of conversation once upon a time.

It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them.

Finished reading: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

So straight-forward and insightful. I figured before reading Cavanaugh’s new one I would read this little guy (100 pages), sitting on the shelf for who-knows-how-long. If I were a teacher and had students reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, I would have them follow it up with this one for two reasons:

  1. While I thoroughly endorse Zuboff’s book, I was disappointed by the scarcity of light, which Cavanaugh does not lack and which he points more convincingly and specifically toward.

  2. While Zuboff’s is something of a tour de force, the gist of her argument is old — we have known and been collectively inexcusable for way too much and for way too long. Cavanaugh’s contains, in far fewer pages and in much simpler terms, the essential diagnosis — and it was written a decade earlier.

As Zuboff is at pains to communicate, the “free market” — to say nothing about the surveilled, manipulated and manipulating one — relies on our ignorance. (And we should add, it relies on a large amount of acedia.) Cavanaugh is at pains to say that we are usually asking the wrong question, and by doing so we also avoid the correct answers. The question is not “Is the market free?” but when and to what end?

“The crucial question is: When is a market free? In other words, how can we judge when any particular transaction is free? I reject the idea that a transaction is free just because it is not subject to state intervention or any other form of external coercion. We must give a fuller, more positive, account of freedom.”

Ultimately, in the economy that we face every single day, we have a choice about how we will relate to the world, to the things and the people in it, both the ones we see and the ones that we do not see. “Things do not have personalities of there own,” Cavanaugh writes, “but they are embedded in relationships of production and distribution that bring us into contact, for better or worse, with other people’s lives.”

In a very important sense, then — and especially for those of us who believe that every single person is made in the image of God, that all bring not only to “the market” but to the table of life, the communio personarum, their own inviolable experience with God — it does not matter if that contact is made in person or made through the disguise of “the market.” Whether it is a cashier across the checkout counter or a mango lady in Haiti, in each case, we participate in a human communion that requires more of us than an empty, rationalizing slogan called “free.”

Finished reading: The Best of It by Kay Ryan 📚

I’ve been reading this without an ounce of haste for two years. Not once did I feel the need to hurry up and finish it.

Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚

Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now.

Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book:

It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

…He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful—the questioning faithful—to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture. Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it exists with faith—truth faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endō understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

📚Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly

Finished reading: Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination by Conrad L. Kanagy 📚

Not quite what I expected. I really enjoyed listening to the author talk about his book and about his admiration for Walter Brueggemann. And the book is peppered with good insights, both from Brueggemann and from Kanagy. But I don’t think it lived up to the genre of “theological biography.” Brueggemann’s fascinating family history in the Prussian Union and the German Pietist tradition, and especially his lifelong regard for his father’s ever-struggling but ever-genuine life as a pastor — these are mentioned repetitively throughout the book but I thought given little depth or storyline, and no real (narrative or theological) progression to follow. Neither is much insight given into Brueggemann’s actual theological writings.

Still, Kanagy presents a short, affectionate look at a prolific theologian who has shown great courage amid “ambivalence and ambiguity” — even, if not especially, amid his own. As Kanagy puts it, through his life Brueggemann has shown

the courage to tell the empire to be merciful, to show the empire its injustice, to remind the empire of its short-lived power, and to remind the empire that in front of it, [visible through the “prophetic imagination,"] lies an alternative reality that doesn’t have the empire’s name on it.

If you like, here’s a short clip where you can hear that straight from the horse’s mouth.