“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”
Wordsworth's sonnet says most of whatever explanation best describes why readers read, and go on reading throughout their lives. Every year a list of what has been read is in effect an aide memoir to all those hours spent in another world of fiction, or looking at the world differently through poetry, or stretching the range of understanding on some of life's intricate puzzles, whether philosophical, or theological, or learning how the world works in politics, economics, environmental studies, and taking time to understand history, which amongst other benefits, helps us understand how we got here, and whether 'here' is a good place to be.
My own reading in 2019 was constrained by the work, and it is arduous work, of readjusting our lives around the passing of our daughter Aileen. Grief relativises much that previously seemed important, and displaces and occasionally makes impossible for a time, many of the normal activities of life. But reading has been one of the ways I have negotiated a way forward. That movement has been slow, at times uncertain, sometimes having to double back because the road ahead seemed cut off for now. Diversions abound on the road of sorrow, but sometimes the detours open up landscapes we would otherwise miss.
As Wordsworth said, 'books are each a world'. Our world is less stable than it has been for a long time. Trying to understand hard right populism, and the threats it poses to peace and human welfare, I read quite widely around ideology and public discourse. Three books expanded my awareness of the sheer scale and threat of the problem. Madeleine Albright's Fascism. A Warning, delivers exactly what the title says. Her historical analysis of Germany and Italy in the 1930's, and of Venezuela, Turkey and Russia, prepare the way for trying to understand what is happening in the United States, and more recently still, here in the United Kingdom. The book is a spelling out of the moves that undermine democracy, pave the way for authoritarian government, and threaten human and civil rights.
Alongside Albright's stark warnings, I read Believe Me. The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump by the social and Constitutional historian John Fea. Trump didn't land like a meteorite in the back garden of Washington. The way was prepared by a whole lot of cultural shifts, social dislocations and disillusions, amongst them the co-opting of the white evangelical constituency. Fea's book asks and tries to answer three questions:
What would it take to replace fear with Christian hope?
What would it take to replace the pursuit of power with humility?
What would it take to replace nostalgia with history.
Fea sets out to examine fear, pursuit of power and nostalgia as the cultural drivers that led to the Trump presidency. As an historian, and an evangelical scholar, he deconstructs the rationalisations, compromises and damaging inconsistencies that underpin evangelical support for Trump. The consequences for the integrity and future of evangelicalism as a movement, are morally perilous and theologically untenable.
My research interests include the history of biblical criticism and how the Bible has been understood and received down the centuries. An older classic is by W B Glover, Nonconformity and Higher Criticism in the 19th Century. Scarce as a used book, I tracked one down and read it with admiration for the scholarly discipline and industry of those who spent their lives digging into ancient texts, and the cultures and contexts from which they emerged.
One of the most moving and enlightening books this year was James Edwards,Between the Swastika and the Sickle, about the life, disappearance and execution of Ernst Lohmeyer, a brilliant German New Testament scholar murdered by Russian forces in 1946. I have also been using Lohmeyer's magisterial study of The Lord's Prayer; now out of print it can still be picked up as a used book, reasonably priced, and well worth having. My review of Between the Swastika and the Sickle was published in June in an earlier post here.
Related to the story of Lohmeyer, a German who struggled with great courage to resist Nazi policies intended to hijack the intellectual integrity of the Universities, is another book published 25 years ago. Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust by David Gushee (first published 1994 based on his Thesis, revised 2003) was the first detailed account of the role of Righteous Gentiles in saving Jewish lives, often at the cost of their own lives and those of their family. The book remains utterly relevant in today's political climate of hostile environments, immigration scapegoating, and minimising the dangers of nationalism stripped of humility and any sense of the community of nations. The cry to make our nation great again assumes that the much trumpeted greatness, if it ever existed, was morally secure in its foundations. That is a highly questionable assumption; nor is the seeking of national greatness a goal beyond moral critique.
So some of the 2019 reading highlights took me into serious territory, brimming with ethical dilemmas, or were attempts to understand our current political anxieties, and in the background much reading around how to interpret the Bible responsibly in a politically volatile climate. These weren't the only ones read, but in different ways they clarified issues and made historical comparisons by way of either warning or encouragement.
