In 2021, I read a total of 79 books, including 74 distinct titles, 5 rereads within the year, and 5 rereads from prior years. Goodreads tells me that that exceeded my previous high of 72 books, but my page count was higher in 4 other years.
2021 was a very challenging year with the death of my brother Karl, corporate changes at my job, and many other things. But I believe it was the best year of my life in books.
I write this essay first for myself, to help consolidate what I read in the prior year. If others consider it of interest, that is a bonus. I apologize for this installment’s extreme length.
THEMES
Non-fiction books are my favorite means to feed my core fascination: the awesome complexity of all that is, how it works and came to be, what it means, and how people can best live and flourish on earth and reach fulfillment in heaven.
My 2021 reading was mostly intentionally thematic in several areas: lenses on history; science and technology; artificial intelligence; sustainability; culture and economics; health and wellbeing; and a variety of Catholic and spiritual topics.
I found several authors to be especially illuminating in their areas and read multiple titles from each:
· Father Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. Ph.D—Happiness, Transcendence, Revelation, Suffering, Evil and Morality
· Nick Lane—Geochemistry, biochemistry, bioenergetics, evolution of life
· David L. Montgomery—Soil, sustainability, earth and human micro-biomes
· Vaclav Smil—How the modern world works at the material and technical level
· Matthew Kelley—Contemporary, dynamic Catholicism
· Father Jacques Phillipe—Spiritual meditation
Robert Spitzer stands out in this list. His work brings tremendous contemporary breadth and depth to the most vitally important human and spiritual topics. I read six of his books, and that alone makes it hard for 2021 not to be my best reading year ever.
This essay proceeds in a rough and inconsistent way from presenting some information towards reflections on what I think it means and might do with it.
LENSES ON HISTORY
How our world and local civilizations came to be is a vast, varied, and endlessly fascinating area of study. I found several illuminating titles this year, offering a variety of mostly technically based perspectives.
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, by Christina Thompson (2019)—This excellent and wide-ranging exploration of how Polynesia came to be settled and developed kicked off my 2021 reading. How did this vast region of islands come to be settled without anything like our western technologies? Along the way Thompson, a Westerner married to a Maori man, looks at the puzzle from numerous angles, beginning with the encounter between European explorers and the island natives, moving on to Polynesian stories and myths, anthropology, and experimental attempts to recreate ancient navigational methods. I can’t do better than the book’s own summary: “A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.”
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, by David Abulafia (2019)
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, by David Abulafia (2011)
Sea People started my look at civilization and the oceans and led to this pair of books, which put the great bodies of water and the human interactions they facilitated at the center of the story. The Boundless Sea is global history on a grand scale told through the oceans, going back 176,000 years across ice ages and ocean levels fluctuating by hundreds of feet. But the real heart of the story is the explorers and traders who connected first the regions then increasingly the globe. The oceans have served as a point of connection, networking, and communication, and are the realm of adventurers, merchants, and middlemen. To this day, oceans provide the best pathway for the exchange of goods, as vast container ships carry the bulk of world exchange and virtually annihilate the cost of distance. For me, the story of the Indian ocean was perhaps the most illuminating, if only because least familiar. The Great Sea is similar, but on the much smaller Mediterranean Sea at the center of communication, exchange, and empire in the ancient and pre-modern western world.
The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization, by Roland Ennos (2020)—Like Sea People, this is a sharp, multi-disciplinary, technically informed take on history. The Age of Wood spans pre-history before humans existed to the present day and explores our use and exploitation of trees and wood, and their interaction with the planet. Fascinating and fun.
Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (2003)—A major synthesis written after the fall of the Soviet Union, with access to previously inaccessible archives. The horror and brute, stupid destructiveness of the total state is relentlessly portrayed. Since I read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s, much of this was familiar territory. But Applebaum makes clear that the Gulag was built on a corruption that pre-dated the Russian communist revolution. The Soviets adopted and scaled it up remorselessly, with blind ideological indifference to its cost and destructiveness. Some of the most shocking aspects are how long it persisted and how pervasively an entire people and geography were entangled in its corruption and destruction. How can a people recover from a trauma of this extent and duration? In my youth, these crimes were exposed, the Soviet state and system fell, and this fueled my optimism about the world. Most knew about the horrible example, and that it was to be avoided. Alas, we have forgotten and face multiple temptations to repeat the experience on both large and small scales. The next versions will build on different pre-existing corruptions in whatever contexts similar ideologies are attempted.
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery (2007)—This book tells the story of the rise and fall of civilizations through their soil, specifically agricultural soils. Here, Montgomery plays the part of the hedgehog in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one big, important thing, and he lays out his story very compellingly. Agricultural practices almost everywhere and almost always spend and erode the soil on which life and civilization depend, to the point where the soil’s exhaustion drives collapse, which then starts a long cycle of regeneration. This is probably the most compelling hedgehog/monocausal thesis of long-run history that I know of, and it is indeed a sobering and cautionary tale. See below in the sustainability section for more.
Water: A Biography, by Giulio Boccaletti (2021)—Dirt naturally led me to Water. We have similarly elemental relationship with both, and they are deeply interconnected. I was a little disappointed at the start when Boccaletti made clear he was telling a tale that was more political than technical. But he makes his case. The management and distribution of water has always shaped civilization, and he tells the story of global history through this lens. Water’s management is indeed a political act, and more so in the modern era where rivers are dammed, watersheds flooded, and natural annual cycles are suppressed. All such decisions have large scale impacts on ecosystems and populations, forcibly create winners and losers, and are necessarily rough decisions with many unforeseen consequences. Politics in a nutshell, as applied to geography.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Science and technology are, IMO, the most powerful forces shaping the modern world and societies—and they are far more powerful than the technologists creating them imagine, mostly in unintended ways. As a computer scientist and engineer, this is my professional field, and after a nearly four-decade career (so far), it is my natural core perspective on the workings of the world. This view encompasses understanding the components of the world and how they work, their interaction in systems, potentially at multiple levels, and the social-technical and societal contexts inclusive of discovery, creation, utilization, effect, and more.
Einstein’s Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe,by Paul Sen (2021)—This is a fascinating book that actually lives up to its subtitle. The topic is thermodynamics—energy, entropy, and temperature—and the method is to present the leading discoverers and the edge of knowledge and understanding as it existed in their time. Their efforts and advances are thus presented in context. It is a great method and employed quite deftly, resulting in a vivid story that brings its field to life both technically and humanly. And who knew that thermodynamics was the core of all science and engineering? It is also an excellent illustration of how science is a process of exploration and advancement, not a settled state.
Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, by Rob Dunn (2018)—A really fun book exploring the astonishing landscape of life in our homes and the harms of excessive hygiene. By far most microbes and living things interact positively with each other and us, and we are harmed by their absence.
Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson (2021)—Engaging scientific biography of one of the central players in the development of gene editing technology who won a Nobel Prize for her work. A trip through a life, development of a scientific field, academic cooperation and competition, complex ethics, and a global role in the pandemic.
Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, by Nick Lane (2002)
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane (2005)
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, by Nick Lane (2009)
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane (2015)
I had read Nick Lane’s 3rd and 4th books around the time they came out and regarded him as possibly the best mainstream author in the fields of biochemistry and origin of life science for non-specialists.
This year I was doing some interesting reading in big history[1] and earth history[2] that led me to his first book: Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. What I found was two books in one: a dense and fascinating synthesis of a tremendous range of information about the history and evolution of earth and life on earth, and then a theory of aging. It showed a remarkable mind at work that is rigorous, analytic, synthetic, and creatively speculative across a set of fields that typically demand extreme specialization. It launched me on a back-to-back-to-back-to-back Nick Lane binge in both audio and Kindle formats through all his books that I am still working on.
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life has the same characteristics as Oxygen but focuses on the origin and evolution of life at the cellular level. Life Ascending identifies ten key characteristics of life such as DNA, photosynthesis, and consciousness, and presents theories as to how they came to be. And The Vital Question is a bit more in line with Oxygen and Power, Sex, Suicide, putting the question of energy at the center of life.
These are intricate works of scientific exposition and argumentation from a selectionist evolutionary perspective. That is, Lane presents elaborately complex systems of nature and explains their operation and development according to function and purpose and how they could have developed/evolved. While he professes great allegiance to evolutionary theory, I see much more than a little teleology in his arguments. For the most part, the mechanisms necessary for the selected functions he discusses are left unexplained and can be understood only by future work. They are certainly vastly complex and subtle. In my field, we would call this omission hand waving. But I suspect in Lane’s it sets out a web of hypotheses that could drive decades of research.
I have no formal training in this field. But it is where most of the action is in science. I feel that Lane is grounding me enough that I can more fully appreciate related work (e.g., David Montgomery’s work on soil microbiome discussed elsewhere in this essay) and more competently and critically approach other works in these fields, including those that are explicitly intelligent design focused.
We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. I am a man of science, technology, and faith, and I think science lights up faith and the Creator in truly awesome ways. However, the zeitgeist in the field of life science runs towards our being material accidents without any real meaning. In the field of cosmology, many (notably Robert Spitzer) have done an excellent job showing how science and faith are deeply harmonious. I do not think commensurate work has been done in the life sciences. I am keeping my eye on it and think the microscopic and the mechanisms of life are even more amazing and awesome than the cosmological, so there is important work to be done showing how they illuminate the Creator. Nick Lane is my best teacher in this field, for now.
Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, by Douglas Axe (2016)—Axe is a highly credentialed molecular biologist (Caltech, Cambridge) and heretic. This book takes on the dogmatic hostility of the scientific establishment to non-accidental material explanations of life. The core of Undeniable is an accessible demonstration of the awesome vastness of the search space for coherent amino acid and DNA sequences vs. the vanishingly small and irreducibly complex set of mechanisms at the heart of life. The incredible unlikelihood of random discovery of these code sequences—to say nothing of their molecular interactions—even given the vastness and age of the universe—is a serious fact that needs to be explained. Is the unlikelihood defeated by an infinite number of universes (multiverse hypothesis)? Some deeper order we don’t understand (perhaps Nick Lane is poking at this???)? A creator-designer of vast intelligence who collapsed the search space? (Not mutually exclusive with a deeper order.) What do you think?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)—According to Goodreads, this is the most popular book I read this year (by number of people who have it on their shelf)! Hmmm….
This is a true classic that has been ranked as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century, and rightly so in my estimation. It provides a framework and vocabulary for understanding how science develops. I will probably use this framework elsewhere as part of some of my personal projects. Just one point here: most people’s view of science is textbook, that of distilled and received fact and knowledge. That is not what science is at all. It is a dynamic process of exploration, hypothesis, test, and revision that seeks anomalies and the unknown.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
I took a bit of a run at the field of artificial intelligence this year. AI is hot and is part of my field of computer science. I have been professionally exposed to a number of quite unreasonably effective, but very narrow, applications of AI in recent years. It is also a field where there is a lot of nonsense and a recurring cycle of hype and disillusion that I have seen a few times.
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do, by Eric Larson (2021)
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, by Stuart Russell (2019)
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence is an excellent exposition of its subtitle: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do. General AI and superintelligence are subspecies of our materialist superstitions—nonsensical myths that will never happen. But particular applications of AI to narrow but deep problems are not.
Human Compatible deeply disagrees with my perspective. The basic hypothesis is that vast computation plus computational models mimicking the brain, applied to vast data will yield super intelligence. Russell attempts to lay out an approach to manage superior AI that I find disconnected from the reality of its possibilities.
What AI is freakishly good at is tasks such as observing our behaviors, interpreting them as our preferences, and spitting them back at us from a sea of data, doing a variety of amazing transforms of images, or deep mimicry of observed patterns. An example: YouTube pushed a 50-minute infomercial at me shortly after I read Dirt that tried to sell me on a nutritional supplement making up for the poor quality of our food due to the impoverishment of the soil in which it is grown. Astonishingly precise targeting of that message. Advertising and images. I am sure I am being a bit dismissive here, but I am trying to illustrate the narrowness of what AI can achieve. I am not really immersed in the field, so I may lack an appreciation for the range and number of problems to which it can be applied. But I am confident in my assertion that however numerous its applications, AI’s competence will always be narrow.
On the other hand, if you think of these applications as power tools to probe and control In deeply specific and personal ways in the hands of immoral or amoral overlords (think our tech giants, the Chinese government, or any other agency with the power to deploy them at scale), then I do not think it is paranoid to view them as potentially quite menacing.
As I was reading these books, I conceived of an essay that I wanted to write. The working title: “On the superiority of my mentally handicapped brother’s intelligence to that of all machines”. Alas, I lost it in the events of the year, but I may come back to it someday.
SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability is arguably the overarching public issue of our time. Despite clamor about the “climate crisis” and related activism and regulation, I think our public debate does not take the problem nearly seriously enough. Taking it seriously starts with accurately understanding the facts and dimensions of the problem, being realistic about commensurate mitigations, and then allocating finite resources accordingly—and not wasting them on well-connected boondoggles with negative, ambiguous, or at best marginal benefit.
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven E. Koonin (2021)—Public discourse on sustainability is dominated by concern over climate change, which is primarily driven by the impact of humans releasing large amounts of previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This is the best book on that aspect of the problem, and it delivers exactly what the title promises. Koonin is a top-level scientist—Caltech and MIT degrees, Caltech physics professor, author of a fundamental textbook on computational modeling of complex physical systems, and a science adviser to President Obama. But I am not impressed by his credentials. I am impressed by his thinking. He lays out the methodologies and data; their complexities, limitations, and ambiguities; and separates the anecdotes and hype from the science. The section on computer models is, as one would expect, sharp and informed. He makes clear that our public discussion in this issue is corrupt and simplistic and does not realistically deal with the scale of the problem or commensurate mitigations. He sketches what those look like at the end.
Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, by Vaclav Smil (2021)
Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization, by Vaclav Smil (2013)
Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World, by Vaclav Smil (2020)
I have been reading Vaclav Smil for a few years, and regard him as the premier expositor of the material substrate of modern civilization and how it works. In previous years his books Energy and Civilization, Growth, and Power Density appeared in in this little essay.
Grand Transitions takes on 5 fundamental transitions that made the modern world: population, agriculture, energy, economics, and environment, and considers them in all their complexity, “trajectories, interactions, and consequences”. Smil’s perspectives include the scientific, technological, economic, environmental, and historic. No one else does anything quite like it, or with similar comprehensive, quantitative rigor, detail, and depth.
Making the Modern World is a more specialized study and concludes that we have become almost optimally efficient in each particular use of materials in our lives and economies, but we have become so efficient that we enable a scale of use and consumption that would have been hitherto inconceivable.
Numbers Don’t Lie is bite sized Smil with pictures. I hope it greatly expands his audience vs. the tomes that I prefer.
To develop an accurate idea of the scope, scale, and implications of the systems that are in place to sustain modern life at the physical level, you probably can’t do better than Smil. If you are seriously looking at large scale transitions for sustainability or any other reason, you need to know what you are trying to replace and the realistic prospects for alternatives to avoid dangerous and/or wasteful courses of action.
The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming, by Kristin Ohlson (2014)—I want to give a brief shout out to this book, which I do not recommend, for opening to me the field of soil, soil restoration, and its connection to sustainability. Its approach is too anecdotal for my taste, and the author reveals that she was a Maoist. Sorry, but anybody who ever fell for that has fundamentally defective judgment IMO. But she inspired me to find others in the field. David Montgomery is my best discovery so far.
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery (2007)—Second appearance for this one. Soil health may be the most underappreciated aspect of the sustainability problem facing modern civilization. In terms of climate change and CO2, soil presents an interesting opportunity. A couple of quotes from Dirt (recall it was published in 2007): “A third of the total carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has come not from fossil fuels but from degradation of soil organic matter.” And regarding agricultural methods that preserve and increase soil health and capture carbon: “While this would not solve the problem of global warming—the soil can hold only so much carbon—increasing soil carbon would help buy time to deal with the root of the problem. Adoption of no-till practices on the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of cultivated land has been estimated to be capable of absorbing more than 90 percent of global carbon emissions for the several decades it would take to rebuild soil organic matter. A more realistic scenario estimates the total carbon sequestration potential for the world’s cropland as roughly 25 percent of current carbon emissions. Moreover, more carbon in the soil would help reduce demand for fertilizers and would lead to less erosion, and therefore further slow carbon emissions, all while increasing soil fertility.” Two birds, one stone.
Montgomery has another book, Growing A Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (2018) that is my first audiobook of 2022. It makes an eco-optimist case that farmer and environmental interests line up on this issue and that there are substantial practical possibilities for improvement of soil and mitigation of atmospheric CO2. Spoiler: cows and livestock are part of the solution.
CULTURE AND ECONOMICS
I dabbled a bit in the fields of culture and economics. Here are a few quick hits.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman (2020)—This is an excellent fundamental exploration of the sexual revolution as a symptom of deeper cultural currents towards self-determined identity.
The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, by Sohrab Ahmari (2021)—An unconventional young voice explores traditional wisdom. Ahmari was born an Iranian Muslim, became an American immigrant, is married to a Chinese American immigrant, has converted to Catholicism, and is now a father. An interesting and surprising mix of perspectives.
The Great Demographic Reversal: Aging Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival, by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan (2020)—The title says it all. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen these things coming. Feeding the first and third pro-cyclically does not make any sense to me.
Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, by David Goodhart (2020)—This book is from the UK. Again, the title says it. Adjustments are needed and will happen. Will interact in a good way with trends identified by The Great Demographic Reversal.
Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)—Things are shifting in America, and here is another bit of evidence. This book is by a young first generation Indian Hindu American immigrant, with one foot planted in each country, Jesuit and Harvard educations, and CEO level success in biotech startups. He passionately calls out our real elite.
Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers,by Robert L. Woodson Sr. (2021)—A collection of essays from African American authors dissenting from the idea that our country is irredeemable. Flawed, yes. But good, idealistic, and able to improve itself, and open specifically to African Americans.
The Rise of America: Remaking the World Order, by Martin Katusa (2021)—A cold eyed look at the world from a natural resources investor. A lot to think about regarding money, energy, resources, and sustainability. Offers a plausibly optimistic possible vision of the future.
HEALTH AND WELLBEING
Here is a potpourri of titles roughly around the idea of personal fitness.
Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, by Daniel E. Lieberman (2021)—A fun study about physical activity, sustenance, and exercise. As a practical matter, its conclusions are the same as an earlier favorite, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain: Supercharge Your Mental Circuits to Beat Stress, Sharpen Your Thinking, Boost Your Memory, and Much More. Spark’s motivatoris more practical: exercise produces all the best drugs, in just the right doses, with no side effects. Exercised offers a more theoretical anthropological and evolutionary perspective. Interesting, but probably won’t drive you the same way.
The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health, by David R. Montgomery and Anne Bikle (2015)—This is an excellent book about the microbiomes of earth and people. Montgomery (see Dirt above) and his wife Anne tell the story of a home garden, a cancer, getting to the deep roots of each, and their interconnections. It is personal, scientific, integrated, and practical all at once.
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson (2021)—Jordan Peterson was back this year with a somewhat more complex sequel to 12 Rules for Life that is informed by his and his wife’s suffering. I think this is excellent and practical dad type advice with multi-disciplinary depth and flair, but that he still doesn’t get God, despite his compelling Biblical exegesis.
Running With Sherman: the donkey with the heart of a hero, by Christopher McDougall (2019)—A fun little story by the author of Born to Run. I created a 10-best shelf on my Goodreads this year and Born to Run made it—it changed my life. Sherman makes an interesting point about our having a deep connection to animals, and the loss of that experience as one of the alienations of the modern world. Sherman has the same style as Born to Run but won’t change my life.
CATHOLICISM AND SPIRITUALITY
Here are a few titles that I found meaningful, sustaining, inspirational, or challenging.
Interior Freedom, by Jacques Phillipe (2002)
Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart, by Jacques Phillipe (1991)
In the School of the Holy Spirit, by Jacques Phillipe (1995)
Jacques Phillipe is a favorite spiritual author of mine, and Interior Freedom has been a particular favorite for a few years. It always reveals something new to me on a re-read. Each of these titles is excellent, and any could meet you where you are on your journey.
I Heard God Laugh: A Practical Guide to Life’s Essential Daily Habit, by Matthew Kelley
The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity: How the Modern Culture is Robbing Billions of People of Happiness, by Matthew Kelley (2018)
The Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic: How Engaging 1% of Catholics Could Change the World, by Matthew Kelley (2012)
Rediscover Catholicism, by Matthew Kelley (2011)
Rediscover Jesus: An Invitation, by Matthew Kelley (2015)
Matthew Kelley of Dynamic Catholic is a contemporary, accessible, common sensical, compassionate, and authentic voice for the Catholic faith and its place and relevance in our lives and the modern world. I enjoyed and was challenged by all of these; Rediscover Catholicism is my personal favorite.
The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, and Methods, by Antonin Sertillanges (1921)—This century old classic delivers a meditation on exactly what its title promises. Our circumstances and tools are quite different today, but the spirit of the Intellectual Life has not changed, and I think it is obvious that it is the life I prefer. Cal Newport, Georgetown University Computer Science Professor, and author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, among others, is a contemporary proponent of this book. I hope he has sparked a small revival of interest in Sertillanges.
FATHER ROBERT SPITZER, S.J. Ph.D
Best for last. Spitzer is a Jesuit priest about 10 years older than I am, who has suffered from a progressive retinal degeneration condition since he was 31 and is now completely blind. He is a first-class intellect and has written a set of books addressing the credibility of belief in the contemporary world. These volumes have an unmatched level of depth and rigor and great contemporary relevance.
The first installment is called “The Quartet” and addresses the intellectual and spiritual credibility of the transcendent and Christianity, with a whole volume devoted to the problem of suffering. It includes 4 books that were published from 2015-2017.
The second installment is called “The Trilogy”, and it is concerned with Evil, the Church, and the moral life. It is intended to complement and complete the Quartet and includes three volumes: the first two were published in 2020 and 2021; the third is finished and is scheduled to be published in February 2022.
The Quartet: Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence
Primary purpose: intellectual and spiritual conversion. My very poor summary follows.
Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D (2015)
The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason, by Robert J. Sptizer, S.J. Ph.D (2015)
God So Loved the World: Clues to our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. Ph.D (2016)
The Light Shines on in the Darkness: Transforming Suffering Through Faith, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. Ph.D (2017)
Volume 1, Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts, is the entry point to the Quartet. This should be fertile and open ground for meeting the culture. Everybody wants to be happy, and I don’t think many would argue that we live in a happy culture. Father Spitzer develops a 4-level model of happiness (External-Pleasure-Material; Ego-Comparative; Contributive-Empathetic; Transcendent) and explores each of the levels in depth, not least the transcendent. This model is used throughout the Quartet and Trilogy.
Volume 2, The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason, is my personal favorite and is the most intellectually challenging. Of all the volumes, it most directly addresses the presuppositions of the materialist consensus at the foundation of modern cultures. Volume 2 explores multiple converging lines of experience and reason that all point to the reality of a transcendent, trans-physical realm. These include individual numinous experience, cross cultural experiences of religious intuition and religious expression, conscience, and archetypal myths of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. It moves on to proofs of God, and then our desires for perfect truth, goodness, beauty, and love. Next it considers near death experiences and a trans-physical theory of consciousness. Finally, there are two strong appendices, the first summarizing evidence for an intelligent creator from contemporary science, and a second with another proof of God that addresses the “complexity error” of modern science (too much to go into here). A powerful and deep book with many references to allow you to go much farther.
Volume 3, God So Loved the World: Clues to Our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus, moves to more easily accessible ground. It begins with an extended meditation on Love, and the love of God and Jesus. It moves on to the historicity of the resurrection, Jesus’ miracles and identity, and what it means for our identity and destination. It includes an extensive appendix on the Shroud of Turin and offers correction for widespread misunderstanding that developed after the 1989 carbon dating test due to technical errors in the process. The attractiveness of Love and Jesus and the solid reasons to believe in him are all laid out very well in this volume.
Volume 4, The Light Shines on in The Darkness: Transforming Suffering Through Faith, is an in-depth meditation and exploration on problem and difficulties of suffering, why a loving God would allow it, its internal and external opportunities, and its intimate connection to freedom and to love. As solid and satisfying a meditation on a truly hard problem as one could hope for.
The Trilogy: Called Out of Darkness: Contending with Evil through the Church, Virtue, and Prayer
Primary purpose: moral conversion. I am just getting started with this one.
Christ Versus Satan in Our Daily Lives: The Cosmic Struggle Between Good and Evil, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. Ph.D (2020)
Volume 1, Christ Versus Satan in Our Daily Lives: The Cosmic Struggle Between Good and Evil, demonstrates that evil is real and personal, it is not just an absence, and that there is a battle between Christ and evil spirits. It goes into the deadly sins and how they work, and stages of spiritual maturity and discernment.
I have just started Volume 2. It appears to be concerned with the Church and with moral transformation. I read an interview that said Volume 3 will be concerned with the Church’s moral teachings and draws heavily on the findings of contemporary secular social science.
Volumes 2 and 3 are top of my list for early 2022 and must be read deliberately.
Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life: A Practical Guide to Prayer for Active People, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. Ph.D (2008)
This is an older and simpler guide to the spiritual life, that like the Quartet and Trilogy, is Ignatian in spirituality and Christ centered. Strongly recommended.
CONCLUSION
So that’s a lot of stuff, what’s the point?
That is a question I asked a lot in 2021. I mentioned corporate changes at my job. They focused my mind on the looming end of my career, the fact that I have entered its endgame (which I expect to take years), and on identifying projects and purposes beyond my working life. My work position has solidified in significant ways, but I can’t unthink those thoughts.
My wife suggested early in the year that expanding my persona as a public reader would be a good long-term project. Thank you, Laurie, as always, you are insightful. This little essay is part of the process of working that out. I even reserved a domain name for my eventual project: therearemorethings.com, playing off the line in Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” However, I have not yet done anything with it.
I stated my driving interest at the top of this essay. What is that good for? The world and people and God are great and awesome and beautiful and fascinating. We live in amazing times with amazing possibilities. But great dissatisfaction, unhappiness, unease, and disunity are pervasive. Superficial image centeredness, mercilessness, and a virtualized and dehumanized lonely hopelessness rule the culture. Belief seems to be collapsing, especially among the young. All of this is directly facilitated by the technologies my professional field has created, and how people use them. The ultimate truths and realities of God and the spirit are quite literally incredible to so many in our culture.
I would like to help make them credible again. I think we need a new New Evangelization that deals with these realities and reveals God to man and modern man to himself in a way that he finds credible.
This essay is about my reading and intellectual interests, but 2021 helped me reflect upon and appreciate my very blessed and fortunate career as an engineer, technologist, and systems builder and thinker. My professional life has been rich in multiple dimensions and levels that I did not imagine at its outset and were not so obvious from the middle of the fight. It has formed me as 40 years of effort will. My role as a father and grandfather gives me a multi-generational stake in the future and motivation to help move beyond the present state; I want my grandchildren to be part of a happier world. My faith as a Catholic convinces me that the Church holds the keys to the true source of happiness, love, and meaning, and that the gospel is ever adaptable and ever new.
At the moment, I conceptualize my overall approach as something like multi-domain ecology. I think that unifies my intellectual, spiritual, and familial interests with the scientific, engineering, and systems approach built across my career.
Whether I can do anything significant with this, find/form community, or just create my own personal head game will determine whether this essay and my next phase is as insignificant as the latest viral video, or is something of more value.
[1] Origin Story: A Big History of Everything: From the big bang to the first stars, our solar system, life on Earth, dinosaurs, homo sapiens, agriculture, an ice age, empires, fossil fuels, a moon landing, and mass globalization. And what happens next., by David Christian (2018)
[2] Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of Almost Everything, by Robert M. Hazen (2019). Hazen’s earlier book, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (2012) is also relevant.