What I’ve Been Up To

A roundup of my latest book reviews

Dear readers,

It’s been quite a while since I had a chance to write an essay here or update you on the projects I’ve been working on. That’s mostly because it’s been a busier than usual year in a number of ways. One major project on my plate: we’ve spent much of 2023 wrapped up in house-hunting and making a move to the Fredericksburg, Va., area. It’s been a wonderful change for us but also a demanding one! Since my work has been published all over the place this year, rather than neatly collected at National Review like it used to be, I thought I’d take a moment to share some of my few book reviews from the past few months in case you missed them. Later this month, I’ll have another newsletter recapping some of my other essays published recently, along with a look ahead at a big project or two I’ll be finishing later this year.

I’ve been writing a lot of longer articles this year, but I’ve also been trying to focus on reading more books and, relatedly, on writing more book reviews. My most recent review is of a new book by Jessica Hooten Wilson called Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice. The book was a chance to reflect not only on my reading habits but also on some of the bigger questions about why reading matters to our society and what it means to read well. From my review:

One of [Wilson’s] central ideas is that reading well can improve one’s character — and that whether it actually does so depends far more on the disposition of the reader than on the material being read. “Bad people have read good books,” she writes. And: “Reading books will not save your soul. It will not transform a bad person into a good one.” In short, reading in itself isn’t the goal; learning to read well is what makes reading most worthwhile and transformative. . . .

In a lifetime of reading, I’ve experienced the truth of what Wilson writes. . . . [My] love of reading did not necessarily shape me into a virtuous person — more of a lifelong journey than a destination, in any event — but it gave me the gift of a lively moral imagination, and I credit my love of writing in part to all those years buried in books. In college, it wasn’t until my senior year that I made time for free reading, alongside my heavy load of reading for classes. When I did, I could feel my mind broaden and shift; it made the rest of my intellectual work easier and more interesting.

My husband and I talk often about how different we feel mentally when we’re more in the habit of reading regularly; we both love to read, but we don’t always prioritize making time to do so in a focused way every day. This book helped me to think through why that might be and whether it might be true for everyone. One of my favorite of Wilson’s observations is that human beings are “word creatures” because of the very nature of the Logos who created us:

God creates the world by word. . . . He converses with human beings in Genesis through words. When God enters creation in the incarnation, John describes him as the Word that ‘became flesh.’ . . . Human beings are word creatures, and Christians especially should be bookish creatures.

I love that notion of being a creature of the word. But I have more thinking to do as to what that means for our society given that declining numbers of Americans report spending time reading. And the rising generation appears to be faring poorly in this regard, too; apparently less than a third of eighth-grade students are at or above proficiency levels in reading, according to the 2023 scorecard from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Perhaps a topic for a future essay.

I was also in the Acton Institute’s quarterly journal Religion & Liberty earlier this year with a review of The Story of Abortion in America, co-written by Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas. Their book is full of far more details than I had room to explore in my review, so I focused primarily on how their rigorous research undermines the claim that abortion is good for women. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:

One of the chief pro-abortion arguments in the debate leading up to Roe was that legalization would put an end to so-called back-alley abortions, which often led to maternal harm.

The Story of Abortion in America exposes the falsehoods in this narrative. In one later chapter, the authors explore the maternal-mortality argument explicitly, poking holes in the data that abortion supporters present to make their case for “safe” abortion and explaining why it’s unrealistic to claim that huge numbers of women will die in the presence of pro-life laws. Both before and after abortion was legalized, abortionists left a bloody trail through American history, taking the lives not only of countless millions of unborn children but also of countless pregnant mothers. The modern decline in maternal deaths due to abortion has far less to do with changes wrought by Roe than it does with the advent of medical technologies such as antiseptics and antibiotics. Even so, there is plenty of evidence that abortionists have continued to physically harm pregnant mothers, including during the nearly five decades during which abortion was legal across the nation.

I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the abortion debate or who is involved in the pro-life movement, particularly if you want to know more about how abortion has actually taken place throughout American history. It can be difficult to find trustworthy information on that score. The authors are pro-life and the book paints a pretty grisly picture of the practice of abortion, but it isn’t a polemic. It’s a compilation of facts and stories surveying the history of abortion in the U.S. starting in the mid 17th century up through the present day, and it’s very well-researched.

Finally, I’ve written a few times now about a new book by Mary Harrington, a sharp and interesting writer who’s thinking through issues of feminism and gender from a really unique angle. I reviewed her book Feminism against Progress for the National Review magazine earlier this year, and she and I were later on a panel about her book sponsored by Public Discourse and the Catholic Information Center in D.C. Public Discourse published a symposium of all the panel remarks; here are mine. Mary’s opening comments can be found here, along with those of our co-panelists Christine Emba here and Leah Libresco Sargeant here. If these ongoing discussions about gender politics and the fallout of the Sexual Revolution are of interest, I recommend not only perusing that symposium but also checking out Mary’s book and her Substack “Reactionary Feminist,” along with Leah’s Substack “Other Feminisms.”

In both my review of Feminism against Progress and my panel remarks, I focused quite a bit on this emerging common ground between traditionally minded social conservatives and formerly progressive thinkers such as Harrington when it comes to critiques of the world unleashed by the Sexual Revolution. But I also attempted to push the conversation further in the direction of what a responsive, positive vision for a way forward might look like. There are at least a few left-leaning or heterdox thinkers these days willing to say that consent, for example, isn’t a good enough metric for whether any given sexual encounter is acceptable. More and more of these thinkers are willing to say that our present sexual landscape and the sudden push for radical gender ideology has been harmful to women—and, indeed, that human beings might actually have a fixed nature of some kind. But few seem to be considering what that nature is, how we ought to know what it means to be a man or a woman, or how we can determine the way we ought to live given the kind of creatures we are.

I give Harringotn a lot of credit for being willing to push her thinking much further than most; she even, for example, insists that we should reject oral contraception, and it’s worth reading her book for that section alone in my opinion. But I do think we need to go further still and consider a positive case for what it means to be human, a full alternative worldview, rather than focusing primarily on how to solve to the Sexual Revolution’s discrete harms. I’ll be presenting a paper at a conference in November on this topic—how we might offer a compelling positive vision of the human person that both rejects and replaces the Sexual Revolution worldview—and I plan to share some more thoughts on that here as I work on that project.