Ten Great Christian Novels (and a few others you might to check out)

Here is the introduction to my list of great Christian novels at Memoria Press' site:

The following is a list, not of the ten greatest Christian novels, since I haven't read all the novels ever written, but at least ten of the greatest. Any one of these would make a great Christmas present for the reader in your family (hopefully there are more than one). These are not children's books, of course, but they are books that an adult or even a well-read, classically educated highschooler could read for profit and enjoyment. They are also books that warrant spending a little extra money on and getting a nice, hardback edition, maybe one with nice illustrations—one someone could hand down to his children or grandchildren. I have included in each case a comment on a good audio version of each book, where this is one, but I do not intend this as a substitute for reading the book. I find it helpful—with books that one should read more than once (and all these books meet that criterion)—to both read and listen to them. These are two quite different experiences and you will notice quite different things about the story. 

See the list here.

The 100 greatest novels of all time

The Guardian lists the 100 greatest novels of all time. My only quibbles are:

• It lists Dostoevsky's Brother's Karamazov, which is not as good a novel as Crime and Punishment, which it does not list; 
• To Kill a Mockingbird (assuming the list is in order of quality) is too low on the list; 
• I'm not sure the Pilgrim's Progress is really a "novel," as we think of it (the same goes for Alice in Wonderland); 
• Only one Tolstoy novel (Anna Karennina)?
• Only one Jane Austen novel (and it's Emma?)?
• And why is Catcher in the Rye on the list at all?

Other than that, it's a pretty darn good list.

Ten Best Blogs (and a few other good ones)

I suppose I should really call this simply, "The Blogs I Read the Most." That doesn't necessarily entail that they are the best things going, just that they are good and happen to appeal to what interests me most in life right now. I am interested in religion (mostly from a cultural perspective), literature (mostly of the classic type), philosophy (mostly of the Aristotelian-Thomistic variety), and politics (I'm of a traditionalist conservative bent, but just keeping up with the current controversies determines what I like here, and am particularly interested in the cultural implications of religion and science), in roughly that order:

Arts & Letters Daily: Just three short article summaries (from other websites) with links, having to do with literature and culture. I will click on at least one article link on about every other post, which is a pretty high percentage for me.

3 Quarks Daily: I'm still not sure what the principle of selection is for this blog, but it has an amazing number of interesting article selections from the web on literature, science, and culture generally.

Ed Feser's Blog: Feser is an Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher from California who is, for my money, among the top two or three most formidable apologists for historic Christianity writing today.

Carpe Diem: The proprietor of this blog is Mark Perry, a conservative economist at the University of Michigan. Maybe it's Perry's perpetual optimism that drives be to this blog again and again. Or maybe its the excellent graphs he uses to show current economic trends. In any case, his posts are short and informative, and always give you some great piece of information the left-wingers don't want you to know.

First Things: On the Square: Years ago, I read National Review cover to cover. That was back when it had as much of a cultural focus as a policy and political focus. These days it is First Things magazine, which covers religion and culture, that I read cover to cover. It is the best thing going. The blog is great too.

The Art of Manliness: This is a partly (but only partly) tongue-in-cheek blog that discusses the way men should behave. It alternately informs and entertains--sometimes both. I learned how to properly cut a Thanksgiving turkey from this site, discovered a great adventure author from a post about great books for boys, discovered several easy-to-fix man meals for when the little woman was away, and proper table etiquette for social occasions. Every article will have you chuckling because the funny take it has on some common issue you didn't realize before reading it that you really did need to know more about. Oh, and then there is the "Mustache Style Guide," and "How to Break Down a Door: An Illustrated Guide." You gotta love it.

Atlantic Wire: This is the blog of Atlantic Magazine. Atlantic has the best bead on cultural trends of any publication I have seen. Articles like "The End of Men," and the recent "What Me Marry?" don't always have the best prescriptions (in fact, they often have the wrong prescriptions), but they always have a great bead on the problem and include a wealth of interesting angles on cultural problems. This same nose for the latest thing characterizes the blog, which also has very comprehensive coverage of cultural and political events and trends.

Cranach: The Blog of Veith: Gene Edward Veith is a Lutheran academic who is currently the Dean of Academics at Patrick Henry College. A prolific and insightful writer, he always seems to be onto some article or issue which you won't find anywhere else.

Insight Scoop & CatholicVote.org: The two best Catholic blogs on the net. Insight Scoop is the blog of Ignatius Press, the most significant (and traditional) Catholic publisher in the United States. Carl Olson does a great job informing readers of new books and cultural trends of interest to Catholics. CatholicVote.org is a great source of current events having to do with cultural and politics from a Catholic perspective. Well written too.

SPECIAL CATEGORIES:

Best Education Blog: CiRCE Institute: An organization devoted to promoting classical Christian education. Run by Andrew Kern and his son David, who also write for it, you will find insights on education that no one else is making.

Worst Philosophy Blog: Why Evolution is True: Atheist Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Minnesota is not a philosopher, a fact of which he seems entirely unaware, but which is evident to any moderately conscious reader from his numerous attempts to impugn theism. It has all the entertainment value of watching a guy fire a gun the barrel of which has been bent back to point at the person firing it (in a Bugs Bunny sort of way). Watch the intrepid Jerry as he confuses empiricism and rationality, misstates the cosmological argument for the existence of God, and mistakes ad hominem attacks for legitimate arguments. You can get an extra bonus whenever Ed Feser, tiring of the silliness, swats him down every couple months. It's sort of like watching somebody with good aim at the dunking booth at the fair.

Best Conservative Kentucky Political Blog (besides mine, of course): Bluegrass Bulletin: Marc Carey runs this blog which sports the best take on political events in Kentucky from a conservative perspective. He also runs great political cartoons.

Best Agrarian Blog: Front Porch Republic: Run (at least in part, I'm not sure) by Jeremy Beers, formerly the head of ISI Books, my favorite book publisher. Great articles from an agrarian, Distributist perspective on culture, economics, and politics.

Best Thomist Blog: Just Thomism: Okay, let's face it: There was not a lot to choose from here. But James Chastek's blog on Thomist philosophy is really excellent. You've got to pay attention here, though, this is heavy stuff. Thomists have the most complete and explanatory world view. Everything has a place. And Chastek talks about, well, just about anything. 

Best ... Well, I'm Not Sure, But I Wanted to Mention This Blog Anyway: Mere Comments: The blog of Touchstone magazine, which is up there with First Things, Modern Age, The Intercollegiate Review, and The New Criterion for best cultural journals, but written at a slightly more popular level. Anthony Esolen's articles are worth the price of the subscription. Esolen writes for the blog too and so do several Touchstone editors and authors.

Views on the rationality of God, man, and nature

Just thinking out loud here, but, as I was reading Michael Allen Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity on a trip out of town last week, it occurred to me that one could break down worldviews on the basis of their view of reason as it applies to God, man and nature:

• The Medieval Scholastics (e. g., Thomas Aquinas) emphasized belief in a rational God
• The Nominalists (e. g., William of Ockham) and some Protestant Reformers (e. g. Luther) emphasized belief in an irrational God
• The Renaissance Humanists (e. g., Erasmus) emphasized belief in a rational man
• The Existentialists (e. g. Nietszche) emphasized belief in an irrational man
• The Mechanistic Scientists (e. g. Newton) emphasized belief in a rational nature
• The Quantum Theorists (e. g. Neils Bohr) emphasized belief in an irrational nature.

It's not an exhaustive list, but it clarified a couple of things for me.

Go ahead, Maniacs, take it apart.

Twelve books that changed the modern world

The following is a list of books by modern thinkers that have had a long-lasting and deep impact on the way we act and think.

• Discourse on Method, by Rene Descartes. Descartes was the father of modern rationalism as Francis Bacon was the father of modern empiricism, the two branches emerging from the nominalism of William of Ockham. Descartes establishes the modern quantitative view of reality that, in conjunction with empiricism, dominates all later Western thinking. The quantitative view sees all reality as a sort of mechanism. His method of completely ignoring all previous thinkers in his philosophizing and relying entirely upon individual reason to the exclusion of tradition also provides the model for the method of most modern thinkers.
  
• Emile, by Jean Jacques Rousseau. The Ur-text for modern public education objectives and methodologies. It is this book, a tract on philosophic romanticism, that influences modern ideas on education more than any other except possibly Democracy and Education, by John Dewey. His book The Social Contract performed an almost as influentual role in modern political philosophy.
• Phenomenology of Spirit, by Friedrich Hegel. Famous for its explication of the "Hegelian dialectic," this book established idealism as a major school of philosophy and served later to provide on of the excuse for Marxism, Fascism, and modern atheistic existentialism.
• Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Established the theory of evolution as a biological theory, and used later to under gird a broader philosophical evolutionism that is now taken as dogma (and defended as such) by many thinkers in various disciplines.
• Utilitarianism, by John Stuart Mill. Explication of the ethical and political theory of utilitarianism, the idea that action should be judged the best which results in the greatest good for the greatest number. The theory is broadly assumed in modern political discussions.
• Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. A manifesto of social and political theory that is the basis for much of modernist and postmodernist thought. Although Marxism, a materialist dialectic ("turning Hegel on his head" was how Marx put it) applied to society and political systems, has not had the success in the West as a practical political theory that it has had in the East, it has at times dominated in Western academic institutions and still survives either as a positive principle or, in the case of postmodernism, a foil against which much of its theory is a reaction.
  
• The Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche. The book thought to constitute the "end of philosophy" (although some would attribute that honor to Heidegger's Being and Time) explicates Nietzsche's repudiation of traditional premodernist notions of truth and morality as well, ironically, as modern scientism and issues a call for a transvaluation of values. This is where atheism eventually leads--for those intellectually honest enough to take their beliefs to their logical conclusion.
• Democracy and Education, by John Dewey. Despite Dewey's sometimes incomprehensible prose (which William James termed "damnable; you might even say, God-damnable"), his instrumentalist ideas were hugely influential on American thought in general and on the public education establishment in particular. Considered the father of the progressive movement in education--the idea that schools should be used as a means to change society, he later repudiated the movement when it was taken over by the pragmatist faction, which saw schools not as a means to change society, but as a way to adjust children to society as it existed. The perennial contest between the progressivists and pragmatists still largely dictates what happens in the nation's schools.
  
• The Ego and the Id, by Sigmund Freud. In which Freud inverts the traditional privileging of the conscious over the subconscious, resulting in the idea that the subconscious has the major influence over our thoughts and actions. This book, among others, helped to establish the most influential of the three great modern schools of psychology, along with with Carl Roger's humanist psychology and Jungianism. Freud's views are now broadly assumed and applied well beyond the sphere of human psychology, and, along with Marxism, are the touchstone for post modernism.
  
• Pragmatism, William James. James' explication of his pragmatist philosophy that the value of a truth depends on its usefulness to the individual. Another philosophical speculation taken now as dogma.
  
• Principia Mathematica, by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. A book which every competent logician was expected to read for close to 100 years which sets forth the ultimate scientific language first proposed by Gottfried Leibniz. Made up in large part of a sort of logical calculus, Russell and Whitehead proposed that rational thought could be captured in a formal system. This quantitative idea of logic conflicted with the classical view of logic held since Aristotle that it was a descriptive, not a prescriptive discipline. One of the step children, one might say, of Descartes quantificationism.
  
• Being and Time, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, building on and reacting to Nietzsche and others, such as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, tried to bring philosophy back to the question of being as such, rather than just beings. His view of truth--as aletheia, the Greek idea of truth as an "unveiling," was set forth as a response to the modern view of truth as a "correspondence with reality." Heidegger's active support of National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930's and 40's, although reprehensible, seems to have been more a function of practical politics than of the ideas which constituted his academic writings. Heidegger's philosophy provides a contrast to the positivism of Russell and Whitehead (as well as A. J. Ayer and the earlier Ludwig Wittgenstein) and is the basis of much of modern existentialism and post modernism.
  

10 Modern Wise Men

A list of men who order things rightly and judge them well:

Leon Kass
Neil Postman
Ken Myers
Wendell Berry
Thomas Howard
George Steiner
William Barrett
Anthony Esolen
Jacques Barzun
Harold Bloom

These are people I don't even necessarily agree with, they they are people whose books anyone would do well to read and ponder.