Hello again. The holidays were a bit overwhelming at work and home alike, but I’m finally getting back to a normal routine—and getting around to an update here.
The big book news I can finally reveal is that David French of The Dispatch and The Atlantic has kindly written the foreword for Untrustworthy.
Finding someone for the foreword wasn’t on my radar at all when I interviewed David in August for my chapter on the role of emotion in gaining knowledge and assessing truth. But when my publisher asked shortly after that conversation if I could figure out a way to contact him about writing the foreword, the suggestion made a lot of sense. And as we’d just been in touch, I could indeed figure it out. David sent over his draft last month, and it’s the perfect intro to Untrustworthy—I wish I could share it with you now!
I can’t, of course. But I can share these three recent columns of mine, one at The Week and two at Christianity Today.
‘Give us a king’: Lessons from the Capitol sedition
We can’t pass a law to stop Americans from being afraid of each other’s designs on power, but we could make the power far more limited, diffuse, and constrained. […]
We easily remember our political opponents are sinful and can’t be trusted with immense power, but we can’t seem to recall the same about ourselves, which we must in order to make restrictions that would apply to our side, too.
“Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God service, when it is violating all his laws,” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson. But if we’re honest, each of us may be thus “deceived as much as any of them,” as he added, and that is why “power must never be trusted without a check.”
2 decades of right turns
Over the past two decades, which correspond almost exactly to the post-9/11 era, the American right has changed remarkably. In 2001, Bush was president, the literal heir of the political heir of Ronald Reagan. He'd been elected talking about free markets and free trade, "compassionate conservatism," and a "humble" foreign policy. Coming off the sexual scandals of the Clinton era, Republicans cast themselves as the party of virtue. The party of artless patriotism and family values. The party of principle, of grown-ups, of Mayberry and small farmers and Wall Street capitalists and country clubs. The party seated squarely on Reagan's three-legged stool of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and defense hawks.
That is not the American right of 2021. Each leg of the stool has been thoroughly reshaped.
In 2022, let’s take T.S. Eliot’s advice
In 1934, Eliot penned The Rock to fundraise for 45 church buildings near London. Appropriately, his frequent theme was building—not only churches but also the church as a thick community, an institution, a people seeking knowledge of God, a sanctuary from alienation and futility.
“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building?
When we think of the church community and institutions the church has founded, our workmanship is mixed at best. In society at large, distraction, alienation, and futility seem to have only escalated since Eliot’s day, while the church in the West shows many signs of decay. Religious disaffiliation is rising rapidly, and even we who remain in the faith often can’t escape the inattentive, disintegrating tendencies of modern life.
That’s it for now! I know I’ve been saying this for months, but I really, truly, honestly think I’m close to writing more regularly again once we’re (almost) fully staffed at The Week within the next month or so.
My next book update will likely be a cover art reveal. I’ve seen one draft, given feedback, and am expecting to see new options Monday. Maybe it will be finalized by the end of January? I’m not sure, but hopeful!
Until then, as usual, feel free to reply, comment, tweet, etc.
Best,
Bonnie