Hello! If you’re new here, thanks for signing up. If you’re a holdover from my old email newsletter—maybe you’ve even been following my writing from waaaaay back in the Tumblr days—hello again. I hope my new book project (more on that in a sec) will intrigue you and that you’ll stick around.
For the next four to five months, as I work on the manuscript, this newsletter will mostly be a space to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what I’m writing, often via reading recommendations based on my research. There’s so much fascinating stuff that can’t go into the book, but this email lets me send it your way.
My new book doesn’t have a title yet, but its topic is the knowledge crisis in American faith and politics, and it will publish in the fall of 2022. It's about how we increasingly don’t know what is true, what is knowable, or who we can trust—how our whole information environment is chaotic and overwhelming, how it's breaking our brains, polluting our politics, and harming our Christian discipleship and community. (Here’s a Twitter thread with a handful of links to articles of mine at Christianity Today and The Week which will give you further sense of where I’m going here.)
For this inaugural email, then, I’ve got three books and four articles to share, mostly from my research for a chapter on traditional and social media.
Books
Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, by Matt Taibbi (whom you can also find on Substack these days). Hate Inc. is, uh, polemical, to say the least. This new edition (and maybe also the original from a few years ago, I don’t know) has some typos which contribute to its sometime feel of a furiously written blog post. For all that, Taibbi has written a useful work of media criticism. It’s pragmatic and specific about industry pressures and problems in a way the standard-issue accusation of willful ideological slant is not.
Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro. This book just came out a month ago (that’s an advance copy in the photo, thus the weird cover), and I’ll be joining the author for an online panel conversation this Tuesday night. (It’s free, and you can join too! The topic is very much resonant with my book.) Reading the Times examines our attention, time, and community in light of media consumption and the modern public square. I found the first section and final chapter especially worthwhile.
Letters to a Diminished Church, by Dorothy Sayers. An extremely not new release—Letters is an essay collection with content from the 1930s-1950s. I’m engaging with just one essay in my book. It’s called “Creative mind,” and it’s about truth and propaganda. (I previously wrote a bit about this essay here.) The rest of the book is also great, and I most recommend the essays on dogma and the seven deadly sins.
Articles
“I failed the Covington Catholic test,” by Julie Irwin Zimmerman, The Atlantic. This controversy is a couple years old now, but Zimmerman’s piece is still worth your time as a model of media self-scrutiny and public examination of one’s own intellectual error. It’s also an insightful look at how public reactions to viral moments function: “The story is a Rorschach test,” she writes, “tell me how you first reacted, and I can probably tell where you live, who you voted for in 2016, and your general take on a list of other issues.”
“Why the media is melting down,” by Jesse Singal, The Spectator World. Singal rightly diagnoses a problem with the American press that is legitimately new in the past two decades or so: the “fight over where the line between journalism and activism should lie—or if there should be one at all.” This is an internal industry controversy, but obviously it’s one that has long since come to broader attention. His sketch here is a fair picture of the internal roiling at many outlets (happily not mine).
“The New York Times’ Jane Coaston on whether legacy media is “left, left, left—an extension of the Democratic Party,” an interview with Coaston by Hugh Hewitt. That’s a link to the transcript, which I prefer, but you can listen to it here if you prefer. I'm sharing this much more for Coaston’s words than Hewitt’s, but also because it’s a thoughtful conversation amid deep disagreement. As a more general recommendation, I’ve consistently found Coaston a careful, nuanced writer about the American right who never adopts the “let us bravely peek at these strange creatures!” vibe you sometimes get in coastal media reports written from diners in flyover states.
“I’m beginning to think I’ve been duped,” by Samuel James at his blog, Letter & Liturgy. Casting an eye back on the COVID-19 pandemic, “it’s becoming clearer that important people with their hands on important levers have been getting important questions wrong,” James writes. But: “This should not be a particularly scandalous thing to say,” because experts are humans, and humans make errors. Yet what if “we’re losing, as a culture, the category of error, and we are replacing it by greatly expanding the category of malevolence”?
That’s it from me today! I’ll end with a graphic and final plug for the “Faith in the news?” panel I’m on with Bilbro on Tuesday. You can sign up here.
Best,
Bonnie