A 2023 in books

Some highlights and lowlights of my readings this year, delectable excerpts, and requests for recommendations

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.” — C.S. Lewis

¹This is for my fellow bookworms! Feel free to chime in with some of your favorite reads from 2023 (or whenever, no need for rules), or to provide your two cents on any of the books I mention—laudatory or critical! I’ll take recommendations, too.

I recently posted “The state of the Layman,” which functions well enough as a year-in-review for the Substack and there’s no need to double up, so this will be my 2023 wrap-up. So without further ado, here are some of the most impactful monographs I encountered this year and a smattering of the beautiful prose found within them.

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Culture & agriculture

These two categories are inseparable. I know no better way of putting it than how poet, writer, and farmer Wendell Berry does in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977), which was one of the most thought-provoking books I read all year. I had been avoiding Berry for a year or two because I was afraid I would agree with him too much; I thought it prudent to develop my convictions a little more to avoid just copying his.

Wendell Berry (source)

Turns out I was right to be concerned! It has occupied my thoughts since. Here on Substack, a number of writers interact with his work in beautiful ways: Nathaniel Marshall recently wrote about the cognitive dissonance he experienced reading The Unsettling of America while eating a Wendy’s 4 for $4, and Hadden Turner even hosts a Wendell Berry reading group.² I’ve quoted him regularly here since reading the book, such as in The Gardener God.

Some books with a similar pathos I’ve found equally invigorating this year are The Technological Society (1954) and Presence in the Modern World (1948) by Jacques Ellul, who has rapidly become one of my favorite Christian authors since I started exploring Christian anarchist thinkers a couple years ago.³ Tough reads, but very rewarding. I'm looking for more authors in this vein to explore and will gladly hear your input—Ivan Illich seems like a good stepping stone from here, though I've not read anything of his.

Jacques Ellul in 1990

I tried my best to read some opposing views as well, notably A County of Two Agricultures: The Disparities, the Challenges, the Solutions by Wandile Sihlobo (2023), which I discuss here.

“At some point we began to assume that the life of the body would be the business of grocers and medical doctors, who need taking no interest in the spirit, whereas the life of spirit would be the business of churches, which would have at best only a negative interest in the body.” — The Unsettling of America

“The world today is reaping what Christians have sown. In the face of spiritual peril, Christians called ‘to arms!’ and fought materially. Materially triumphant, we are spiritually vanquished. Only Christians could have waged spiritual battle, but they did not do so. They did not fulfill their role in the preservation of the world.” — Presence in the Modern World

“The tool enables man to conquer. But, man, dost thou not know there is no more victory which is thy victory? The victory of our days belongs to the tool. The tool alone has the power and carries off the victory. Man bestows on himself the laurel crown…In writing this, I have, of course, omitted innumerable facets of our world. There are still artisans, petty tradesmen, butchers, domestics, and small agricultural landowners. But theirs are the faces of yesterday, the more or less hardy survivors of our past. Our world is not made of these static residues of history, and I have attempted to consider only moving forces. In the complexity of the present world, residues do exist, but they have no future and are consequently disappearing.” — The Technological Society

Non-violence and political theology

I’ve been wrestling with these topics for a while now. Ellul’s work can certainly be placed here, since his pacifism and anarchism were important characteristics of his work. Some of the most helpful books, though I by no means find them altogether agreeable, have been Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw (2007), The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium by Walter Wink (1998), and Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession (1882) and The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894). Walter Wink is a bit too theologically liberal and far too optimistic for cranky ol’ me, but it was clearly written so laypeople like myself could easily understand. And if I think Wink is too theologically liberal, then you probably already know what I think of Tolstoy—but also I can’t name many examples of people who radically committed their lives to Jesus’ teaching to the extent he did. If anyone has suggestions for non-violence theologians or ethicists with a more theologically conservative bent, I'm all ears. One book that's really been making me think has been Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ by Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh (1991).

I read a good handful of opposing perspectives here, including Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by Peter Leithart (2010), and Between Pacifism and Jihad: Just War and Christian Tradition by J. Daryl Charles (2005). They didn’t win me over, but I found them helpful in some ways.⁴ Notable toxic wastes I exposed to my eyes included Machiavelli’s incredibly misogynistic (among other things) The Prince (1513) and Mikhail Bakunin’s mildly egotistical God and the State (1882), which I discuss here. Oh, and I’ve been getting into Noam Chomsky recently and read Because We Say So (2015)—if you have recommendations for where to dig in further, I’d appreciate it!

“And I took note of all that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.” — A Confession

“We are all brothers—and yet every morning a brother or sister must empty the bedroom slops for me. We are all brothers, but every morning I must have a cigar, a sweetmeat, an ice, and such things, which my brothers and sisters have been wasting their health and manufacturing, and I enjoy these things and demand them. We are all brothers, yet I live by working in a bank, or mercantile house, or shop and making all goods dearer for my brothers. We are all brothers, but I live on a salary paid me for prosecuting, judging, and condemning the thief or the prostitute whose existence the whole tenor of my life tends to bring about, and who I know ought not to be punished but reformed.” — The Kingdom of God is Within You

“Nation-states are fetishes. They have power because people believe in the need for their security. They have power because people will kill and die — and sometimes torture — for them. Christians in modernity have often bought into a devil’s bargain in which the state is given control of our bodies while the church supposedly retains our souls. This arrangement would be bad enough if it stopped there.” — Torture and Eucharist

“If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience-unto-death. This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.” — The Powers that Be

“it seems the Bible’s criticism of civilization is more serious than we might be ready to see or accept…which has even more radical implications on how we live. We share a sneaking suspicion that the economic future of the church may have more in common with the Amish than with the activist's organic, fair trade latte.” — Jesus for President

“Mass public education is one of the great achievements of American society. It has had many dimensions. One purpose was to prepare independent farmers for life as wage laborers who would tolerate what they regarded as virtual slavery.” — Because We Say So

Philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (1849) and Simon Podmore’s Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: The Anatomy of the Abyss (2011) have been tearing into my consciousness, and my last couple posts were inspired by them. I also ended up spending a lot of time with Nietzsche on my plane trip to South Africa and back this year, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Twilight of the Idols: Or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer (1888), and The Antichrist (1888). I tell ya what—reading Nietzche for hours on end while sleep-deprived was a trip. Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) was a fun vacation read this summer. Now that I've read a good chunk of Nietzsche, I'm looking for a reasonably short book about his influence on literature if you know of a good one.

One of the highlights of 2023, a trip to the outer banks with my wife’s family

“it is overlooked that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue…No, the opposite of sin is faith, as it says in Romans 14:23: ‘whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.’ And this is one of the most decisive definitions for all Christianity—that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” — The Sickness Unto Death

“When your heart flows broad and full like a river, a blessing and a danger to those living near: there is the origin of your virtue.” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself about this—are antagonists: ‘Kultur-Staat’ is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political.” — Twilight of the Idols

“that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of the evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.” — The Myth of Sisyphus

One of the highlights of my 1-day layover in Addis Ababa

Heritage

One of my goals this year has been to get in touch with the roots of the church congregation and cultures I was born into, so I’ve been reading not just general church history but also the history of the American Restoration, or “Stone-Campbell,” Movement and its offshoots.⁵ Without a doubt, my two favorites this year have been Resisting Babel: Allegiance to God and the Problem of Government by John Mark Hicks (2020)⁶ and In Search of a City: An Autobiographical Perspective on a Remarkable but Controversial Movement by Thomas A. Jones (2007).

“Human governments are ordained as servants of God for the punishment of evildoers, just as Assyria and Babylon were ordained to punish Israel and Judah for their sins. Nebuchadnezzar and Nero were ‘servants of God’ in this sense” — Resisting Babel

“a faithful Christian community will often be looked at as an extremist sect” — In Search of a City

Fiction

I don’t read a ton of fiction, but I’ve fallen in love with Cormac McCarthy’s works. If you like books about the American West and South and its bloody borderlands of yore, and dark, unrelenting stories of violence told with haunting prose and accurate landscapes, and if you think that people today are wrestling with something called “modernity” whether they know it or not, then I highly recommend reading McCarthy. So far, I’ve only read Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road (2006), but I am excited to continue through his bibliography. Hopefully I can squeeze some Tolstoy fiction in there too—The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886) was a great read for my wife and I this year.

“It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“There was nothing to set a man's mind at ease like waking up in the morning and not having to decide who you were.” — No Country for Old Men

Other random stuff worth mentioning

If you’re interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Second Temple Literature is one of my hobby topics), then I highly recommend Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls by Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman (1994). It’s becoming a bit dated, but I have found it helpful in sorting the good scholarship on the topic from the less-so since reading it in January. Some other notable reads have been From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics by Louis Markos (2007) and Genesis: A Parsha Companion by Rabbi David Fohrman (2020), which I discussed a bit here.

“Unfortunately, the plow was man's answer to the increasing sadness—a technological solution to a spiritual problem.” — Genesis: A Parsha Companion

What were your favorite books this year?

Thanks for reading (or skimming), and Merry Christmas in advance! May you all have a blessed end of year.

Sincerely,

C. Wayne Bratcher

1. Opening quote is from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis (1940). Pg 145 in my copy (Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1962).

2. Other writers in this vein, or attempting to lead by example in a manner similar to Berry, are worth checking out too. For examples, see Around the Farm by Carly Wright and The 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval by Peco and Ruth Gaskovski.

3. Another book I read this year that was supremely helpful in this ongoing endeavor was Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel by Alexandre Christoyannopaulos (2010), although I was a bit disappointed that some of the proto-anarchist thinkers in my own tradition (Barton W. Stone, David Lipscomb) escaped mention.

4. I actually wrote reviews on these two books over on Goodreads, which provides a little more of my thoughts on them: Between Pacifism and Jihad & Defending Constantine.

5. I’ve been reading about various restoration and primitivism themes in other Christian movements as well. For example, check out this admittedly idealized post on Roger Williams, who planted the first Baptist church in America.

6. This one gets several mentions on my post on Rom 13 here and in a discussion on Christian radicalism here.