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Michael Fitzpatrick, With All Wisdom (2021).

This Week's Essay

For Sunday January 5, 2025

Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C)

 

Jeremiah 31:7–14 or Sirach 24:1–2
Psalm 147:12–20 or Wisdom 10:15–21
Ephesians 1:3–14
John 1:1–18

It's that time of year for the most subjective of exercises and JWJ tradition, after Christmas and before the New Year — my favorite books of 2024. Please note that you can search JWJ's Comprehensive Index of 969 book reviews alphabetically by 783 authors, or by fifteen different subject categories like history, art, economics, etc. Just click the "Books" link on our home page in the module Archives 2001 to Present. And if you ever get stuck, just use the "search" button in the top right corner of every JWJ page. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and happy reading!

Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (2022). The poet, farmer, and public intellectual Wendell Berry (born 1934) is reliably inspirational and infuriating. In that regard, this book about race and racism does not disappoint. As he does in most of his eighty (!) books, he views his subject matter through the lens of his family's five generations of farming in rural Kentucky. Berry is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (2023). The historian Peter Brown (born 1935) of Princeton is credited with founding the field of "Late Antiquity," that period from around the late 3rd century up to the 7th or 8th century. In this memoir he reflects on his life and work, beginning as an Irish Protestant in Dublin. If you went to seminary, you probably read his classic biography Augustine of Hippo, which he wrote in his late twenties and that is still a gold standard today. It helps when you know twenty-six languages.

Adoration of the Magi. Panel from a Roman sarcophagus, 4th century CE. From the cemetery of St. Agnes in Rome.
Adoration of the Magi. Panel from a Roman sarcophagus,
4th century CE. From the cemetery of St. Agnes in Rome.

Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (2022). This award-winning volume is a classic example of historical revision. Howard French rewrites the history of modernism by centering Africa and Africans, and by challenging many of the myths about European exploration, the Industrial Revolution, and American exceptionalism. French is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, editors, A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (2012). Kaminsky and Towler have gathered nineteen poets who in individual chapters explain their intellectual understanding and personal experiences of the intersection of spirituality and writing. Every writer was thoughtful and honest about this polarizing subject. The authors represent a wide variety of perspective — Christian, post-Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, secular, and unaffiliated. The book hopes to "set aside irony for a direct engagement with beauty, hope, doubt, and fear."

Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (2023). Jamie Kreiner, Professor and Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval History at UCLA, wrote her dissertation under Peter Brown (above) at Princeton. This book is a reliable and readable exploration of a question that troubled the famous monk Cassian in the 5th century: "Why is it that superfluous thoughts insinuate themselves into us so subtly and hiddenly when we do not even want them, and indeed do not even know of them, that it is very difficult not only to cast them out but even to understand them and to catch hold of them?" 

Fei Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (2023). The computer scientist Fei Fei Li is on a short list as one of the founders of artificial intelligence. She is co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, which is just one indication of a major theme in her memoir — her insistent optimism that we can and must control the impact of AI. Li was born in Beijing. Her father emigrated to New Jersey when she was twelve, then she and her mother joined him when she was sixteen. As a college student at Princeton, she helped to run the family dry cleaning business. In September of 2024, Li raised $230 million for an AI startup called World Labs. For a more worrisome perspective on AI, see the book by Mustafa Suleyman below. 

Adoration of the Magi, 15th century.
Adoration of the Magi,
15th century.

Fintan O'Toole, We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (2023). I read this book twice — once because it was on many "best book" lists of 2022, and then again in preparation for hiking in Ireland this past September. O'Toole was born into a working-class family, and today is a leading public intellectual in the English-speaking world. This book is a combination of history, memoir, political analysis, and cultural critique from 1958 (the year O'Toole was born) to 2018. Two major themes of the book are Ireland's struggle to reconcile its traditional cultural history with secular modernity, and its efforts to transcend the terrible corruption of both the church and state. But historic change can happen — who would have bet that one of the most intensely Catholic countries in the world would legalize abortion in 2018, or that such a horribly poor country would become a Celtic Tiger?

Tom Phelan, We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It: A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood (2020). I also read this memoir twice, mainly because I found it so powerfully evocative. Phelan didn't publish his first book until he was fifty, but since then he has authored another six volumes. This slender memoir describes Phelan's boyhood growing up on a muddy farm in rural Ireland during the 1940's, long before there was rural electrification, the telephone, or indoor plumbing. It was a time when you traveled by bike or animal cart, and when turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard. Phelan's book has drawn comparisons to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. My daughter's book club also read Phelan's memoir.

Hampton Sides, The Wide, Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook (2024). Captain James Cook was already famous as the greatest explorer in British history when on July 12, 1776 he embarked on his third journey around the world. At the center of the story is a complicated question — how and why Cook was killed in Hawaii after a well-deserved reputation as a navigator, humane captain, and person who had a deep respect for indigenous people and cultures. "Something was different" about Cook on his final voyage, according to Sides.

Adoration of the Magi (detail) by Nicola Pisano, c. 1259–60; part of the marble pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa.
Adoration of the Magi (detail) by Nicola Pisano,
c. 1259–60; part of the marble pulpit in the
Baptistery at Pisa.

Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma (2023). In contrast to the insistent optimism of Fei Fei Li, Mustafa Suleyman's book is an urgent warning about the unprecedented risks that are posed by artificial intelligence. And this is no cheap shot by an outsider, but rather the careful argument of a consummate insider — Suleyman is a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind (acquired by Google) and current CEO of Microsoft AI. And none other than Fei Fei Li writes one of the dust jacket promo blurbs for Suleyman.

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path: A Memoir (2019). After her husband received a terminal medical diagnosis, and their family farm was taken from them in a bitter legal dispute with a close friend, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth were homeless and penniless. So, they did what any sensible person would do in that situation. They made an impulsive decision to hike the 631-mile South West Coastal Path in their home country of England. This inspirational bestseller won numerous awards. In 2023, filming started on a movie version of the book.

And for 2025?  I'm starting off with Jonathan Blitzer's Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (2024), a study of US foreign policy and the migrant crisis.

Weekly Prayer

Reginald Heber (1783–1826)

Epiphany

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.

Cold on His cradle the dewdrops are shining;
Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore Him in slumber reclining,
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all!

Say, shall we yield Him, in costly devotion,
Odors of Edom and offerings divine?
Gems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest, or gold from the mine?

Vainly we offer each ample oblation,
Vainly with gifts would His favor secure;
Richer by far is the heart’s adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) was an English bishop in the Anglican Church and well-known hymn writer. After sixteen years as a country cleric, he served for three years as the Bishop of Calcutta until his death at the age of 42. 

Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Wikimedia.org; (2) Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and (3) Encyclopaedia Britannica.



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