Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays

By Charles Taylor, 405 pages, hup.harvard.edu.

McGill philosophy professor Taylor shows how western Christianity became too moralistic and legalistic at the expense of the transcendent dimension. 

He points to the French village priest's strong opposition to Brazilian-like carnival Catholicism, whereby dancing, drinking, and certain other excesses took place on saints days and other Catholic celebrations. In their zeal to take the dancing out of the Catholic holy day, they ended up taking Catholicism out of the village. 

Nineteenth-century Protestants did the same: They shamed young men for their rowdy lifestyles of drinking, gambling, and womanizing, rather than inspiring them with the transcendent view of Christ's resurrection. Men, put off, turned away en masse from the churches. Catholic priests did the same shaming act on young men, and turned the confessional into the most feared or avoided place, with men increasingly shunning it.

The more Christianity moralized in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, the more it feminized and left little place for men. Rather than preaching and inspiring the fear of God, a most masculine spiritual practice, Christian leaders, Taylor argues convincingly, established "polite" Christianity. To be a Christian was to be a part of polite society, especially in the English version of religion. This was when Christ began to be taken out of Christianity, replaced by "proper behavior."

Readers get a clear sense of how secularism developed out of this. Incensed by the meddling of the parish priest in France, the French eventually went from a strong religious revival in the mid-nineteenth-century to severely restricting the Church in education and the rest of the public arena, something they call laicite, a bedrock of modern French political life to this day.

A second kind of secularism developed, mostly in America and other western countries when people turned the excessive moralism of the churches against the churches themselves. They condemned the crusades and every other real or imagined sin of the church. They portrayed religious people as zealous, violent idiots. Ironically, these secularists followed the churches' habit of restricting the vertical, or transcendent, dimensions, but did so even more eagerly than the churches themselves.

Despite the failings of the churches, Taylor refuses to let atheist moralists off the hook. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and countless other utopian tyrants put their ideals into humanity, rather than finding them from a higher revelation. When humans could not measure up to their ideals, these politicians slaughtered millions.

Taylor cautions against the current liberal and conservative tendency in politics to "cultivate" anger. Anger has become a kind of spirituality, whereby the angered, righteous person feels resentment and entitlement. 

Feminism and a host of other ideologies use this to motivate their members. Yet, given the tendency of anger to cause violence, Taylor warns that a return to a higher, transcendent source is more important than ever.

Taylor is optimistic. Secularism has freed the churches to return to their roots, something that he regards as essential. Now that churches have had their hold on the public arena greatly weakened, they can return to cultivating the transcendent within each of its members.

Johan Sebastian Bach

By Rick Marschall, www.thomasnelson.com, 192 pages.

Marschall shows how deep Christian belief builds culture. In Bach's day (died 1750) northern Germany around Berlin was deeply Lutheran, which meant that it was deeply musical. The liturgy was much more intense than it is now. This meant much music and a lengthy, even hour-long sermon.

Bach came from a long line of musicians who served the church and Christianity. The author shows how Bach's deep faith made him a great evangelist. Bach took this evangelism through music seriously. He believed that his musical gifts, obvious at a young age, were from God and were to be used in the proclamation of the gospel.

We can only understand Bach when we're aware of his Christian spirituality, Marschall observes: "He sought to praise God by making his church music to be sermons in song."

Yet Marschall goes a bit far when he argues, "what Newton was to science and physics, Bach was to music." Most people today would be unable to identify a song by Bach, and the author himself admits that the Baroque genius lived at the very end of that age, when Italian operas were sweeping Europe and Baroque was rapidly becoming outmoded.

Importantly, this book parallels the observations of Pope John Paul II on the importance of culture. Bach's genius was amplified and set free by his faith. Unlike countless artists today who claim that God would trap their talents, Bach's greatest freedom came at the service of God. The musician saw himself in his various church music roles as a minister.

Marschall reminds the readers repeatedly that Bach never felt constrained. He personified the Baroque Christian culture of the day. Through him also came the highest expression of Lutheran piety and adherence to tradition.

Bach's Christianity was broader than simply Lutheran, the author shows. Bach's Mass in B Minor, perhaps a strange composition for a Lutheran, took many years, which was uncharacteristic for him. Marschall observes that it includes many medieval and renaissance elements. In other words, though a Protestant, Bach appreciated and respected the Catholic and medieval artistic achievements, and made them part of his own work.

Readers get a good sense of the historical and cultural surroundings in which Bach lived. Marschall notes for instance that the Mass in B Minor was something of an oddity because Calvinism, with its rejection of the flowery and the artistic, was making quick inroads into the northern Germany of Bach. This was completely at odds with the great composer's style. Yet, just as opera hardly influenced Bach, neither did this new religious direction.

Readers also get a good sense of the Lutheran liturgical and church culture of the day. Such notes as the following give readers a sense of Bach as an individual, of what his daily life and ministry were like: "Bach played the organ during the Communion with plenty of spontaneity for improvisation, suggested by his many chorale preludes upon Communion hymns."

Marschall makes a good case that Bach the artist was so free and wonderfully creative because he was inspired by the Holy Spirit and faithful to his Christian tradition, even respectful of the older Roman Catholic roots.

The Book of Man

By William J. Bennett, thomasnelson.com.

The Book of Man is a great book insofar as the collator and commenter keeps out the way and lets Plato, Milton, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and other great men speak. Essentially a selection from the western canon, The Book of Man shows that the canon is the work of male genius.

That should be the main scope of the book: To show men that they have something to be proud of - themselves. Men are great achievers, and have philosophized about the great mysteries of life. Musings selected from the original wordsmiths deal with war, work, sports, and politics. They call men to the excellence that for eons defined male actions and male-female behavior.

Nowadays, these virtues are laughed at by feminists and their matriarchy, which encourages men to act boorishly, then complains when men act boorishly. Behind Bennett's selections is his call to men to act in the old way, to be responsible family leaders and members. Yet he is doing a disservice to males because the culture has clearly rejected men, masculinity, and fatherhood. Marriage is dangerous for men, as a taste in family court will show any sucker. Bennett, as with his other writings, is behind the times and woefully indifferent to the lot of men today, who are blamed for all the world's ills even while they are accused of taking advantage of women.

What would truly benefit readers would be authors who understood that men are in deep trouble today because of the mass neurosis, feminism.

Tyndale: The Man Who Gave God an English Voice

David Teems, Thomas Nelson.

More hagiography than biography, the constant stream of pro-Tyndale soundbites tends to confuse the reader. The author offers pieces of the life of Tyndale, but his constant unsubstantiated rambling into the Bible translator's greatness - as a writer, translator, Christian - overwhelm the reader.

Teems' sweeping comments about Tyndale, the Reformation, the medieval era, and religious history - usually without corresponding footnotes, examples, or details - likewise tend to lose the reader. He speaks of the personality of Tyndale as if he knows him first hand, but with reference to only a minimal of letters, government documents, observations of contemporaries, and so forth. Readers have no reason to believe him. Teems tends to skip over proving any of his musings, turning his book into the mushy sentimentalism so characteristic of evangelicals.

Particularly annoying are Teems' simplistic viewpoints. The Middle Ages: bad, full of scary monsters such as bishops and priests, and all sorts of witch-burnings (feminists have greatly exaggerated the number of these, but Teems is content to avoid modern historical research). The Reformation: good, full of light and truth and democracy. The Catholic Church: Teems' biggest monster of all. Readers get a sense that the Middle Ages and the Catholic Church were synonymous with totalitarianism, violence, intellectual and spiritual failure. Protestants, the great liberators of Europe according to this view, represent the opposite.

We get a Manichean - cowboys and Indians, light versus dark - version of history that just confuses and loses the readers.

December 1941

By Craig Shirley. www.thomasnelson.

Craig Shirley gets readers as close to the cultural action as possible in this day-by-day account of what happened in December 1941. He offers many insights into the isolationist America that, even with storm clouds on all horizons, still believed, perhaps a little naively, that it could avoid participating in hostilities.

The author's love for FDR comes through clearly. The President was the right man for the right job, and had done everything in his power to help the British against Hitler, yet also maintain peace between America and Japan. Yet Shirley does repeatedly raise questions about how the White House and the military were so befuddled as to allow for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For instance, the Japanese trade office in Hawaii had a great vantage point of the harbor, and could do extensive spying.

Readers get bogged down in the author's repetition. Each day is recorded in the book through a perusal of the papers. This means that boring events that carried significance at the time but none now, such as various government and military hearings into why the Japanese were able to succeed at their sneak attack, are covered in more detail than is needed. Shirley also repeatedly reports on the same thing in each chapter - the dynamic changes to Washington; military capabilities; the war economy; and celebrity gossip. Readers are bogged down in meaningless trivia and insights, such as regarding D.C.'s exponential growth, that need mentioning only once.

On the whole, a rather boring, overly-detailed read of what is a very important part of American history.

The Maronites: The Origins of an Antiochene Church

By Abbot Paul Naaman, 199 pages, cistercianpublications.org.

Abbot Naaman shows how Christian the Eastern part of the Mediterranean was in ancient times, before Islam's expansion. Ancient Syria boasted Aramaic- and Syriac-speaking church fathers, and a monastery-dotted landscape. Along with the Greek Byzantines and the Egyptian Christians, these centers of theology were debating big questions, such as the nature of Christ in his human and divine natures, long before Europe had become Christendom.

The Second Council of Ephesus in 449 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 form the backdrop to the events in Syria at this time. Imperial intrigue meshed with church politics and theological issues. Theology, in fact, was a political issue.

Naaman excels at keeping things clear for his readers, who are probably unaware of much of the history and the contribution of the "Orientals, including the Syrians.

Syrians such as Theodoret, bishop of Cyr in northern Syria and founder of a monastery which would play a key role in the formation of the Maronite church, was a controversial figure censored at Second Ephesus but rehabilitated at Chalcedon, where in fact he worked closely with the legates from Rome in formulating key canons of the Council on Christology (the nature of Christ).

Theodoret was a gifted churchman who participated in politics, the church hierarchy, and theological debate. He was a church builder.

Theodoret was also a product of the Syrian church. At this time Christianity almost always expanded through the work of missionary monasteries. Monks did the chief evangelizing work by establishing themselves in under-Christianized areas, or in the case of ancient Syria, where the church was split due to theological controversy. Orthodox monks would establish a monastery where they could fight heresy.

Syria at the time of Theodoret had already long established a rich Christian heritage, like the other centers of ancient Christianity, Armenia, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Monasticism, including a more hermit, or eremetical, style, was a deep part of the culture.

Maron, a friend of John Chrysostom, was a fifth-century hermit priest who built a community known as the Maronites. An anchorite, or solitary, he lived on top of a mountain, and soon attracted followers, as was usual. These hermits were the spiritual guides of the larger Christian community, and though they tended to submit to the local bishop, they too had a parallel power in their counseling and prayer service to the community. "The lives of these ascetics made a tremendous impression on their contemporaries," Abbot Naaman notes.

Marcion was the other pillar of early Syrian Christianity. While he initially tried the solitary life, he eventually lived more closely to community than Maron did. Abbot Naaman gives us a clear sense of the importance of such leaders to ancient Syrian Christianity, which was a more masculine, demanding, and ascetic church than contemporary Christianity: "His reputation for saintliness was so great that people walked four days to come and visit him." Though Marcion was more moderate in his ascetic practices than Maron, he influenced Syrian Christianity deeply.

Syrian Christianity practiced asceticism rather than pop-psychology, so it is worth studying as a way for us to become more Christ-centered.