Joel Mathis

A funny thing happened while reading Tim Alberta's new book. I thought about becoming a Christian again. That's maybe not the reaction you would expect to have to "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," a deeply reported look at how (mostly white) evangelical Christians have deeply compromised their supposed values to embrace the corrupt and vulgar Donald Trump — not just lending him their votes transactionally, but enthusiastically embracing his slash-and-burn style of authoritarian politics. The corruption, grifting and thirst for power on display is all pretty well-documented by now, but it's still galling (again) to read it all in one place. Is *this* what Jesus would do? Alberta doesn't think so.  Jesus "talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life," Alberta writes. "Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek ... Blessed are

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me feel so defensive. Even now, having completed Samuel Moyn's "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," I can't decide if the problem is me or Moyn. Moyn's central idea here is that the United States has made its wars more palatable for public consumption -- particularly with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but also by focusing ever more on the international laws of war -- and in so doing has made it easier for the country to find endless wars with little or no public restraint. "American concern with war has become focused on ensuring it is humane -- not whether it drags on and on, or even should be fought in the first place," he writes. I agree with part of Moyn's assertion. We're a country that goes to war pretty easily. Sometimes there's a debate, as when t

The central tale of this short book involves a long hiking trip -- a series of trips, actually, as we find out in the afterword -- that Junger took with some combat friends, along the railroad tracks of Pennsylvania, camping along the way, darting into towns for quick meals at diners. Along the way, some ruminations about freedom, which in some cases literally means "unencumbered": Junger has a lot to say how mobile hunter-gatherer tribes are more free -- and freer from hierarchies of wealth and rank -- than the place-bound farmer-city society that we call society. (He also notes that such freedom has its limits: Even the "most free man in the world" ultimately needed to connect to society.) There are detours into the relationship between testosterone and dominance, the similarities between the Taliban, the Irish of the Easter Uprising and the steel mill strikes of the Industrial Era. A short book with an even simpler message: "If you can't run a mile with

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley Amanda Ripley's book focuses on people who get trapped into endless conflict with each other, the difficulty of getting out and how it's sometimes possible. It's aimed at a readership exhausted by America's political polarization, it's clear, but mostly only nods at that Very High Conflict while focusing on smaller-scale stories. I was reminded of a few things. About my Mennonite congregation's process to become a church that welcomed LGBT members, nearly 20 years ago. About the NYT's much-mocked reports about Trump supporters in Ohio diners. About how much conflict can embed itself into whatever culture or subculture we call home, so that the act of trying to honestly understand people with other viewpoints is very much a countercultural act. (And, frankly, even a spiritual act -- even for somebody somewhere between Mennonite-and-agnostic like myself.) About how I might unwittingly be

 Lists like this make me panic about how much I'm not reading.

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos My rating: 4 of 5 stars The past decade or so has brought readers a fresh round of what's probably an old genre -- the literature of American decline. Books like George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Alec MacGillis' "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America" have documented the forces tearing our society apart -- a financial system that delivers disproportionate wealth to a select few who hide themselves in walled-off supermansions; governments that neuter themselves and their ability to serve their citizens' well-being in order to make the rich richer; the left-behind places in rural America and in the Black parts of our big cities; the hollowed-out newspapers whose meager pages leave the electorate ill-informed and vulnerable to the conspiracy swamps of social media. "Wildland" is another one of these books, and it's a very good book, but it is also -- on top of tho

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper "In the aftershocks of 9/11,a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males." I was alive, sentient and angry during the Bush Administration's buildup to the invasion of Iraq, so I'm not sure exactly why I read this book: It just made me angry all over again. Read a certain way, though, it's almost darkly comedic -- like an episode of The Office, only one where hundreds of thousands of people end up dead unnecessarily. Above all, one of the key errors highlighted in this narrative is a sort of neediness -- the CIA needing to be relevant to the "First Customer" or be left behind, and so furnishing Bush with the (as it turns out) intelligence he (and they) wanted to see; Tony Blair's need in his faded empire to be relevant to an American-led world order; Colin Powell's need to not lose his standing in the administration and thus selling himsel

When I first started Jonathan Rauch's "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," I was preparing to arm myself with information and thinking to battle with Trump-style con artists and their followers, the kind of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly. I got a tiny bit of that. But I also came away with a bit more sympathy for the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly. It's not that I think they might be right. They're emphatically not. But as Rauch tells us in this book, there is a lot of research telling us that human beings -- not just conservatives -- have a tendency to filter knowledge through the lens of their tribes. And once a view is adopted by the tribe, it's hard to make its members accommodate contrary facts. "Once a belief becomes important to the way we think about ourselves or important to the group we identify with, changing it becomes v

I have finished my 19th book of the year, "T wilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism " by Anne Applebaum -- a closeup survey of the rise of nationalist movements in the U.S. (Trumpism), Poland, Hungary and Spain, and the cultural and technological developments that hasten their rise. When I say "close up," I mean to say that Applebaum is former friends and colleagues with many of the people involved. No longer. Key quote: "Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age." We have to keep fighting, in other words, to make the world we want.

"The history of the United States is the history of empire." Many American readers will recoil from that conclusion -- we think of ourselves as Luke Skywalker, not the Death Star --  but Daniel Immerwahr makes a fair case. His book as a easy-reading primer on America's territorial expansionism, ranging from Daniel Boone through the occupation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, all the way up to the military bases in Saudi Arabia that were a source of anger leading to the 9/11 attacks. (For me, reading about America's war against rebels in the Philippines during the early 20th century is always a source of shame and rage.) Even today, some four million people occupy territories governed or possessed by the U.S. At one point, that number was 19 million. One of those territories is Guam. Immerwahr quotes a military analyst discussing how the Guam's people have no say in how the United States uses their territory as a military base: People on Guam were forgetting th

(Spoilers ahead). Faith is something we cobble together out of our own needs, observations, coincidences and hope. And yet it also helps us create the story of ourselves for ourselves -- it might be not entirely rational or correct, but that doesn't mean it can't be meaningful .  A lot of reviewers have talked about Kashuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" as a love story, and it's sort of that, but it's Klara's faith journey that sits with me most. Our protagonist is an "artificial friend," a living doll of sorts chosen to be a companion for a young, sick girl. Klara, we see from the beginning, is endowed with a consciousness, but is treated by humans around her either as an object of sorts -- one unkind character likens Klara to a vacuum cleaner -- or as a potential vessel for something of more value than she intrinsically possesses. We see from the beginning that Klara sees the world in patterns, observing objects and vistas as something less

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis This book feels like a companion and sequel -- an epilogue, even -- to George Packer's "The Great Unwinding," which told the stories of the Great Recession and how we got there through the stories of individuals across America. Macgillis goes just as deep, describing the evolution of America's economy from manufacturing and local retailers to the dominance of Amazon today. He focuses on the changes Amazon's hometown, Seattle, and witnesses Baltimore's evolution from a steelmaking colossus to logistics hub. It's not a happy story. But this book is highly recommended. Masterfully reported and briskly written.

The writing of Alan Jacobs has proven useful to me over time. In 2011, when I was recovering from multiple surgeries -- and the brain fog that made sustained reading nearly impossible for me -- "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" was both the kind of encouragement I needed, and the first book of any real substance that I was able to complete. A few years ago, when I'd just about abandoned any hope or motivations of bridging ideological divides, his more recent book "How to Think" caused me to reconsider. It's a book, in fact, that I need to revisit -- but his latest, " Breaking Bread With the Dead " is a fine companion to both those earlier books, a guide not on how to think but how to ground your thinking by careful consideration of words written in the far-ago past. One of Jacobs' central beliefs here is that reading old books -- not just books, but old books -- can remove us from the constant flow of information that washes o

Just under the wire, I have finished my last book of 2020: " Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, " by Eddie Glaude Jr. One of the central themes is one I have long felt -- that the triumphalist narrative of American history is a lie, that we fail to truly grapple with the sins of the real history in favor of a myth that comforts us even as it works to cement the results of those sins in place. This is a passage I have highlighted in my own copy of Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," and Glaude excerpts it in this book: "To accept one's past--one's history--is not the same as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro's past be used? The unprecedented price demanded--and at this embattled hour of the world's history--is the transcendence of the realities of

I like David French. Oh, I don't much agree with David French. He has a more pro-gun sensibility than I do, and a more restrictive sense of what sexuality and orientation is proper. But he strikes me as being thoughtful and independent -- he doesn't just follow the crowd, even when it's "his" crowd -- and having integrity: He won't call an evil thing good even if his side is for it. That has cost him professional relationships on the right, and his family has endured fierce criticism and ugly threats for it. He remains who he is, a conservative Christian -- but not in the sense the phrase "conservative Christian" has come to mean during the Trump years. In those respects, French is a writer whose way of thinking I personally would do well to emulate. So I was interested to check out his new book, " Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, " in which he worries that United States is coming apart, driven

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson There's a question that pops up now and again. About whether, if you lived in the era of slavery, or as a German during the Third Reich, if you would be the kind of person to go against the grain-- to stand for human dignity and freedom. We like to think we'd be the exception. But most of us would be the rule. I think I shared this book's overall viewpoint, but I learned things new to me about the history of racism and slavery in America, some ugly and breath-taking details about the immense evils done to black people in this country. You can know it's bad and still get sucker-punched with a fresh realization of just how bad it is. And it is distressing to know how difficult, how dangerous it was for people of goodwill to step outside that system. I worry there are evils that I am now complicit with that I don't even recognize because I am immersed in them. All I can try to do is evaluate the day-to-day det

The Round House by Louise Erdrich This is the first Louise Erdrich novel I've read from beginning to end (I started "The Night Watchman" right when the pandemic started and got distracted) and I am utterly devastated. This novel plays like an update of "Stand By Me," only set on a reservation. But the indigenous setting aside, I was about the age of the protagonist, Joe, in the precise era of this story, and shared Joe's obsession with "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the time. I am stunned out how clearly and precisely Erdrich nails the interior life of an early teen nerdy boy -- I feel completely seen. But I don't just love this novel because it reminds me of, well, me, but for how well it transports me into a real but unfamiliar world, it's details so closely observed, its storytelling so readable. I learned things from "The Round House." But I was captured by it, too. Utterly absorbing. Heart-breaking. This is my favorit

A spoiler or two follows, but kids: The book is 170 years old. It's not my fault if you get spoiled. There are some works of art that I am slow to getting to because the weight of their reputation makes them seem -- forgive me, teachers -- like homework. I didn't watch "The Godfather" for years for precisely that reason: It just seemed like too much. Then I watched it and fell in an obsessive kind of love. "Moby Dick" turns out to be a similar experience. I didn't read it for a long time, because in addition to the weight of the book's reputation, there was the sheer damn size of the actual physical novel. It's not small! But the pandemic slowed my life down a little, and I have resolved to tackle some works of literature I'd skipped before. Things about "Moby Dick" that I didn't expect: * That it would be so gay.  

This has been, for many white Americans, the summer of anti-racism reading. I guess that my dive into David Blight's FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM counts in that category. I can't tell other people how to try and figure out how to do their own thinking about race -- but I don't have much patience for "how to" books like "White Fragility." I'd rather read histories and current books by and about people who have lived the struggle. I've re-read James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" this summer, as well as Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Next up on my reading list is Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste." In between all of these books, I'm getting in a chapter or two of "Moby Dick" now and again. Among the lessons to be learned from Blight's book is that discerning the One True Way to battle the evil of racism may not be so easy, or even possible. Douglass evolved over time from a "moral suas

  ...is to deactivate my Twitter account.  I don't mean log out. I mean deactivate it entirely. It's easy enough to reactivate, so the practical difference between logging out and deactivating probably isn't that great. But, psychologically, it slows down my tendency to check in and then keep scrolling, scrolling. This afternoon, I deactivated my account and read two chapters of David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, and a few chapters of MOBY DICK. My head feels better for slowing down.