Deal W. Hudson

Re: "Saving Those Damned Catholics"

Okay, so you guys have waved me off from reading the below-mentioned book while traveling all day on Wednesday. I have decided to download Brideshead Revisited onto my iPod instead.

In the Mail

I recently received a review copy of Judy Brown’s Saving Those Damned Catholics, which I will read, perhaps on my long day of travel on Wednesday, and review succinctly here.

From the Preface:

Far too many Catholic bishops and priests—perhaps even a majority—are doing a lousy job of shepherding their flocks and saving souls. These bishops and priests are in a state of rebellion against the church and her teaching. Some of these rebellious bishops and priests are consciously denying the doctrine and twisting the true teaching of the church. The rest of these bishops and priests are, more or less, just well-intentioned men who have no idea that they’re following a path of deception that is leading them—and inevitably members of their flock—straight to the gates of hell.

Yikes.

Deal, I suspect Archbishop Burke will find this book interesting.

The Secret River

Connie Marshner

 

Australia’s Kate Grenville was unknown to me before I picked up The Secret River, the dust jacket of which announces that it was the 2006 winner of the Commonwealth Prize.

 

Now, I will be the first to admit I know nothing of this prize, but I do assume that it’s the sort of thing that generally is awarded to politically correct writers.  For instance, years ago I learned not to trust the last couple decades of the Newberry Award as a standard for books for my children for precisely that reason. 

 
A Thames bargeman’s struggle against poverty and desperation in  London culminates in his transportation to Australia in 1805, but that is only the beginning of the tale.

 
Descendants of those early settlers don’t talk much about their ancestors, and The Secret River helps explain why. Grenville did extensive research on her own ancestors, and her crafting it as a novel sparked a controversy Down Under over whether fiction “is an untrustworthy vehicle by which to understand the past.”

 
Charlotte Mason might weigh in on that debate, but after reading the book, I dare to surmise that  the professional historians don’t like it because as a novel it remains true to art, i.e., true to human nature – and thus avoids the political correctness that fashionable historians no doubt would have preferred.

 
Once again, I had the delightful experience of expecting political correctness and being disappointed. In Australia the aborigines were not as numerous as American Indians, nor as advanced, but the settlers were terrified of them nonetheless, and there were no interpreters. The result, of course, was tragedy. But because it is a novel, it is the story of one man’s heartfelt struggle to make a future for his family, and the hard choices he had to make, instead of a screed against white males.

 
Speaking of the early settlement experience of  Australia:  Does anybody remember that wonderful early 80’s made-for-TV movie Against the Wind? I wish the Australian TV station that produced that would reissue it as a DVD.

 

Whistling Season

Connie Marshner

One of the consolations of being temporarily unable to walk or drive is that I have acquired a few hours a week to indulge in reading for pleasure.

At the beginning of this enforced immobility (brought upon by my own stupidity of not crossing at the crosswalk and stepping off a curb into a storm sewer), I retrieved a list I had copied from the Washington Post’s last book review magazine before Christmas.

I read between the lines of the reviews to pick the ones that sounded good even through what I assumed were Washington Post book reviewer prejudices, trusted to the good taste of my local librarian to have purchased some of them, and started reading.  I’m happy to report I have been pleased with the results so far.  I will share them with you on an occasional basis now.

Ivan Doig is probably well known to lots of readers, but he was a delightful discovery for me. The Whistling Season is, really, too good to be true. The main characters are ordinary-seeming folk, with the intrigues and peccadilloes of ordinary real people, living their lives at an ordinary pace. Among the other characters there are admirable ones and despicable ones, and a main one who is a mixture of both. 

But inside the ordinariness is the uniqueness that is the glory of human nature.

Best of all – the family has culture! Not pretentiously, not as motivation for some part of the plot, but just as part of who they are. They make allusions to history in their conversations, the father uses good vocabulary, and Latin is an integral part of the plot. All this on the

Montana frontier! It’s a work of fiction, but it graphically demonstrates how much integration into western civilization has been lost in American popular culture in the last century.

 But there’s more: The prose is beautiful. The setting is interesting (Montana, 1909). As I was reading, I kept expecting something to ruin it – some outbreak of political correctness, or some violent scene reminiscent of Hollywood.

But nothing ruined it --  except that it ended, and I was left with regret that I hadn’t discovered Ivan Doig while my children were still at home. This would have been a great read-aloud for the whole family. 

Two Americas, Indeed

A growing body of evidence substantiates the notion that there are indeed “two Americas.” 

But while a certain once- and future-presidential aspirant insists those two Americans are distinguished by wealth and poverty, the evidence says something else entirely: Americans are increasingly divided between the church and the unchurched. 

The 2004 election shone this line of demarcation clearly in the realm of politics; but by 2006, our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle had figured out they cannot become a strictly secular party lest they alienate millions of church-going Americans of faith.  As Steve Waldman from BeliefNet told me for an article I wrote for the American Spectator, “If the Democrats choose to be a secular party, they will have chosen to be a minority party.”  The Democrats wisely chose religion … and, it turns out, the majority. How long they hold to these decisions is a matter for another discussion.

The point is we don’t have national partisan politics to use as an easy scale to weigh the churched and the unchurched anymore.  But that doesn’t mean the evidence of a widening rift between the churched and unchurched isn’t available and, as I said, growing. 

For example, Jonathan Gruber conducted a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research last year in which he noted that "Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent, decreases welfare participation by 16 percent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 percent, and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 percent."

University of Virginia Sociologists Steven L. Nock and W. Bradford Wilcox observed recently that churchgoing Christians are happier and less prone to divorce than non-churchgoers of any faith.

And so on.

Basic Books has just released Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn’t and Why it Matters by Professor Arthur Brooks from Syracuse University.  If all the pre-publication hype around Who Really Cares is accurate, this book should take our discussion of the two Americas to a new level.  For Brooks “demonstrates conclusively that conservatives really are compassionate-far more compassionate than their liberal foes. Strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills-all of these factors determine how likely one is to give.”

I have yet to read Brooks’ book, but I am not terribly surprised by his thesis.  In poll after poll, higher percentages of churchgoers say they give to charities that help the poor than do non-churchgoers.  But there is a difference between telling a pollster you give to charity and having a third-party academic with no obvious vested interest saying you give.  And that is, apparently, what Brooks does. 

Two Americas, indeed.

Patrick Hynes