In 2022, I read the most books I ever have in one year: 81, including 73 distinct titles, 8 rereads within the year, and 8 rereads from prior years.
After a tough 2021, 2022 was on the whole a very blessed and rewarding year in my faith, relationships, and work. Last year’s essay helped define a long-term project built on my reading, and I started it early in 2022.
therearemorethings.com
My website https://therearemorethings.com is live but currently just lays out a framework. I am happy with the frame but have not yet created any real content. But my reading was thematic in laying foundations for the work I want to do.
Professionally, I had a major, positive role change. After 30 years in technical management, I took an individual contributor role as Senior Staff Scientist, still at FlightSafety Simulation. The work I am now doing has many similarities to what I intend for my book-based projects, but the content is in my professional field. That consumed the type of mental energy required for therearemorethings.com, but bolstered my confidence in the quality of work I can do. My new role continues to enrich my experience in technology and science and appears to have scope for several years of substantial contribution. I am grateful for how blessed my career has been and hope its experiences and perspectives will help my site have a unique and constructive voice.
Last year’s year in books essay was part of my process of thinking through the therearemorethings.com project. Now that it is live with a starter definition, I hope this year’s can help me get going with the real work.
LIVING WELL LATER IN LIFE
By the actuarial tables and personalized longevity assessments, my baseline expectation is that I am at about the 2/3 point in my journey through this life. You never know; I could go a bit longer, or maybe a lot less. But in any case, the end is much closer than the beginning, and thoughts about doing well with what I have left are increasingly prominent.
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, by Arthur C. Brooks (2022). One of my favorites of the year and a multiple reread. I read this initially during the week in which my role change from Director of Engineering to Senior Staff Scientist was announced to my company. Brooks is a very simpatico voice to me and I am part of his intended audience. Pretty successful in my work and career, a striver, but facing the inevitable changes of the later years. Some things get better, some decline, and what is truly important can become crystal clear. There is nothing in this book that is particularly novel except maybe a bit of social science, but it is a fresh, warm, personal, and thorough meditation that does a solid job of identifying the challenges and opportunities ahead. And he made my cry when he revealed his guru, to whom he dedicated the book. I have mine too.
The Bucket Plan: Protecting and Growing Your Assets for a Worry-Free Retirement, by Jason Smith (2017). This lays out a simple and common-sensical approach to managing finances prior to and in retirement. Laurie and I found it compelling—so compelling that we worked with a holistic financial planner to implement the system, ending up with something superior to anything I could have done on my own. In a rough (and IMO healthily corrective) year in the markets, we were certainly not unscathed, but I feel very good about where we ended up. If you have any interest, I can connect you to people who know how to do this.
A Landowner’s Guide to Managing Your Woods: How to Maintain a Small Acreage for Long-Term Health, Biodiversity, and High-Quality Timber Production, by Anne Larkin Hansen, Mike Severson, Dennis L. Waterman (2011). One of my goals is to make my own micro contribution to restoration of the environment, native habitats, and carbon sequestration via optimal management of my acre in the woods. I have a large knowledge and skill deficit; this book nicely lays out the field. It is primarily aimed at bigger landholdings than mine but provided the information I needed to get unstuck.
STORIES REAL AND IMAGINED
Remember the Ramrods: My Army Brotherhood in War and Peace, by David Bellavia (2022). This is by far the most emotionally powerful book I read this year. Bellavia (author of House to House: An Epic Memoir of War (2007)) was awarded the Medal of Honor in in 2019 for his actions in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. Remember the Ramrods tells the story of his war, life afterwards, and receiving the Medal of Honor. With no hyperbole, this instantly ascends to the top ranks of all-time great memoirs of war and its aftermath in the lives of those who fought and survived. I highly recommend the audio version—Bellavia narrates his own book with matchless authenticity, plus there are several live audio clips of some of the key events. After a dozen years, this supplants the Vietnam war novel Matterhorn as the most emotionally powerful and best narrated audiobook I have ever listened to—and this one is true.
NOVELS
I read a couple of novels this year. Maybe I am not just a dullard who reads only “books of information”. Or maybe these exceptions prove that is what I am!
Deep River, by Karl Marlantes (2019). This is the most recent novel by the author of the aforementioned Matterhorn. This is my kind of novel—historical, multi-layered. It tells the story of a Finnish family escaping the brutality of Russian repression in their homeland at the beginning of the 20th century. They end up settling in the Pacific Northwest along the Columbia River. Deep River tracks the family, their migration, their lives in new world and the echoes of the old across decades. The difficulties, depredations, injustices, and tragedies of their lives play out in a majestic true-to-life setting portraying the rough way that region developed. Life back then was much harder and far more constrained for everybody in elemental ways. The top review on Goodreads is pretty nasty and says: “Reasons to read: if you’re a white cis male boomer who enjoys long, family-oriented historical tomes that could probably stand to be heavily edited.” Well, I guess I’m guilty of most of that. Laurie and I vacationed in this region in July and it helped set some context.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab (2020). This is a novel with a ridiculous premise (a young woman makes a deal with the devil in France in 1714 to live forever but be forgotten by everybody she meets). But the author makes it work across 300 years. The tale is mesmerizing, and the meditation on identity and legacy and the enduring power of things we create, notably art and words, makes you think. It is not hard to see why this is the most shelved on Goodreads of any book I read this year. I read it at my wife’s recommendation. Thanks Laurie!
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ECONOMY
The largest theme in my reading this year was science and technology. In science, I continued my deep dive into bioscience, but also found some great new paths into earth science—which is intimately related to bioscience. My earth science reading revealed to me subfields that have been fascinatingly dynamic in recent decades.
In technology, I largely focused on the material basis of modern civilization, how it works, and the sustainability problem—which I expect to be one of my main themes. I view all that as “real” economics.
A healthy financial system is absolutely necessary for a functioning modern society but financial economics is also subject to non-productive exploitation, abuse, and unreasonable enrichment of parasitic manipulators. I dipped into that realm a bit as well.
BIOSCIENCE
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong (2022). This explores the senses of animals—land, sea, and air, revealing a truly immense world, as the title promises. Pretty much every animal or insect senses things that we cannot, with exquisite tuning to its niche in the world. The textbook five senses that I was taught (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) are quite simplistic even for humans, and grossly so when considering the whole animal kingdom. For humans, we can start by adding equilibrioception (balance) proprioception (orientation and movement relative to our surroundings), and many nuances within the five, especially touch. But across life, the variations are astonishing, many more than five, with most greatly exceeding anything humans possess. Restricting to the chapter headings, Yong discusses chemical (smells and tastes), almost endless ways of seeing light and color, pain, heat, contact and flow, surface vibrations, sound, echoes, electric fields, and magnetic fields. Every page sparkles with fresh marvels of nature.
To arbitrarily pick a handful of examples. Our sense of sight is near the pinnacle, but other animals are tuned in various ways to see things we can’t, such as seeing faster (think flies), more sensitively in dim conditions, or detecting wavelengths and colors we can’t. The section on bat echolocation works through 11 challenges that it must solve to work as it does. The discussion of the most mysterious sense, magneto-reception, illustrates the technical and human challenges of doing science alongside the growing but elusive understanding of its mysteries. The section on multi sensory integration lays out the incredible subtlety of mosquitoes seeking their prey. And the necessity of distinguishing self from other is a pervasive challenge for all sensing beings. Throughout, Yong visits the scientists in the field and in their labs, showing the human work of understanding these phenomena.
Yong opens with the concept of umwelt, the experience of the creature based on how it can sense the world, and that thread runs through the book. Of course, it is impossible to know the experience even of another human being, much less an animal responding to stimuli we cannot detect. But we have minds and imagination. We can learn what animals sense and respond to and speculate from that evidence. A contemporary attempt to wrestle with the difference between humans and animals must consider these facts. Yong closes with a beautiful and appropriately restrained meditation on this difference. He brilliantly brings to life the realm of the senses and the phenomena they detect, which together manifest a truly immense world.
Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, by Peter M. Hoffman (2012)—Hoffman, a physicist turned biologist, provides a beautiful and awe-inspiring description of a few of the nanomachines at the heart of cellular life, and how they interact with and exploit the storm of nanoscale forces and random interactions in their tiny fluid environment. This is great science and science writing. Unfortunately, he also overreaches into claims that randomness and chaos explain everything, and seriously mischaracterizes and/or misunderstands the arguments of advocates of intelligent design in this arena. I think he is too smart to misunderstand. Like many, he doesn’t want to. Which leads to…
The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries Revealing the Mind Behind the Universe, by Stephen C. Meyer (2021)—Meyer is a forceful expositor of intelligent design and an excellent scientist. The Return of the God Hypothesis synthesizes key work in the field. Meyer’s explanations are thorough and represent the history, facts, and hypotheses accurately (unlike, e.g., Hoffman). I am all in on both science and theism, so I am ultimately in this camp. I am 100% for pushing conventional science as far as it can go within its methods, but also for understanding its limitations of explanatory power and methodology. ID’s place is at these limits.
Meyer’s three things are 1) the origin of the universe/big bang, 2) cosmological fine tuning, and 3) the information complexity of life.
1) and 2) are well trod ground, and Meyer does a good of job covering it. The evidence for a beginning of the universe 13.8 billion years ago is strong, and suggests creation and a creator. The fundamental constants describing the physical forces by which nature operates must be mind bogglingly accurate and precise to enable what is. Does this evidence a random accident, or a supremely intelligent creator/designer? I think the question answers itself, but not everybody does. Some very smart people work very hard to devise abstruse answers to avoid the obvious one.
3) Life and bioscience are proving, I believe, to be even more amazing and improbable than the cosmos, and increasingly so the more deeply we inquire. Meyer homes in on the information complexity of DNA, proteins, and structures at the heart of life and its diversity. The improbability of randomly arriving at even one of these sequences even given the size and age of the universe is extreme. But life uses thousands of them, each with a beautifully precise role, such as those Hoffman describes.
Information complexity doesn’t even begin to get at the awesomeness of the perfect dualism between the digital sequences encoded in DNA and the amino acids which make up proteins. Or the translation mechanisms that build proteins from nucleic acid codes. Or the physics and chemistry which allows the encoded proteins to do the amazing and precise things they do. (Hoffman actually writes that this discredits ID!!!) Or the supersystems of the cell that make them work together in the intricate dance of life, including incredibly subtle signaling and regulation mechanisms. All of these together give rise to the awe-inspiring phenomena that Hoffman and Yong describe, and so much more.
Evolution is the ground of ideological battles. Evolution is certainly real, but does it have limits? What might they be? What can evolution explain about origins—especially of the information system, its encoding mechanisms, and the genesis of cells? These are legitimate open questions. Conventional science is actively seeking answers, not without fruit but also not close to adequate answers either. I believe the necessity of a supremely intelligent creator is abundantly clear, but the line between creation and its unfolding almost certainly provides for endless exploration and fascination this side of eternity. I will never take a rigid position as to where the line is.
But random accident? God delusion? I think you must be blind and/or desirous of the latter position to take it given the awesomeness of what is.
EARTH SCIENCE
Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science, by Robert Kunzig (1999). By science standards, this is an old book. Completely fascinating, it conveys an amazing sense of discovery about the oceans, the dominant surface feature of our planet that is little understood, vs. say, space—which is where the book starts. Where did earth’s water come from? What does the topography of the sea floor look like? How is the Atlantic Ocean expanding? (It is.) How were undersea volcanic vents and the amazing lifeforms that grow in these seemingly impossible-for-life environments discovered? What do those lifeforms mean for the development of life on earth? What are just a few of the unique creatures of the ocean? Trace iron modulates the growth of phytoplankton, which can absorb vast amounts of CO2, but the systematic effects of alteration are poorly understood. What to do with that knowledge? Over-fishing and the crash of cod populations. Circulation patterns within the ocean and their controlling effect on global and regional weather and climate. Those patterns don’t have to be the way they are and haven’t always been. Mapping the Deep is an awesome journey of discovery. I do not know what aspects might be outdated or if there are more current volumes on these topics. I am looking. Mapping the Deep will be tough to beat.
How the Mountains Grew: A New Geological History of North America, by John Dvorak (2021). Though centered on North America, this is a comprehensive update on the whole field of geo-science that goes way beyond plate tectonics. A combination of advances in technical measurement, macro-observation, and interpretation have greatly increased the detail of our understanding of how the earth and life has developed over 4.6 billion years.
Ancient rocks, moon rocks, tiny fragments known as zircons, ice cores; crustal rocks, samples and cores; and tomographic images of earth’s interior provide substantial technical data that has been minutely studied with modern instrumentation to provide hard data to combine with macro-observation to yield a history of earth that is detailed and has substantial justification. This includes early life, the great oxygenation event following the development of photosynthetic ocean bacteria, widely fluctuating levels of CO2, snowball earth, multiple cycles of ice ages and warm lush periods, asteroids, super volcanoes, mass extinctions, super continents and drifting continents, the formation of hydrocarbons, the vast Permian Basin deposits, the rise of homo sapiens, and the growth of mountains. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Or was it the super-volcanoes that erupted very near in geologic time to that impact?
If you don’t think humans are responsible for a new era in geologic history, called the Anthropocene, Dvorak will convince you we are. The only question is where to draw the line and what markers to use. Agriculture? Fallout from atomic weapons? Concrete? Or one of many other options?
Pretty much every region of North America appears in this story. It has so many visual elements but a limited number of images. It would make a great movie. Fascinating.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (2018) and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us (2022), by Stephen Brusatte. These two volumes demonstrate that the field of paleontology is alive and well, full of new discovery. Time to update the pictures I have in my head from my childhood dinosaur books and models.
REAL ECONOMICS
How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, by Vaclav Smil (2022) Vaclav Smil is certainly the most authoritative global voice on the technical-material foundations of modern civilization. He has written 40+ books over the past 50 years on all aspects, with a central focus on energy. If you have never read Smil—this is the book to read.
A very small and astonishingly productive portion of the population is involved in producing and distributing the material necessities of our lives, so many (probably most) people are utterly ignorant of those realities and take them for granted. Smil sets out to correct that. He walks through the realities of energy, fuels, and electricity. Then a chapter on food provides specific detail showing the extent to which we essentially eat oil. Take fossil fuels out of the food production and distribution system, and food supplies would collapse, starving half the world’s human population to death. Next, he works through the fundamental materials we depend on, focusing on ammonia (food), plastics, steel, and concrete, and how they work. Then he takes on distribution technologies—transportation and communication—which drive globalization and specialization. Having established those facts, he moves to analysis, with chapters on risk, environment, and the future. He doesn’t do prediction but offers realistic assessments of the systems in place, their inertia, the magnitude of the challenge of adapting them, and the role of unforeseen inventions. You don’t understand the workings of the modern world or its sustainability problem if you don’t know this material.
I read 11 of Smil’s books this year as part of building up my knowledge base in this field. Smil, who will turn 80 in 2023, is now an elder statesman and has been writing summative books of his career since 2017. Of these, I reread Energy and Civilization: A History (2017), which covers a crucial, but oddly ignored factor in history and economics.
Among his older books, the companion volumes Creating the Twentieth Century: Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (2005) and Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (2006) document the technical developments that have made the modern world. Smil argues that the 1880s were the most innovative decade in human history. Electricity systems, cars, tires, aluminum, prestressed concrete, gramophone all got their start then, following the 1870s, which included the invention of telephony—the starting point for modern communication and information technologies that needed electricity to grow. Nothing in more recent times has been as fundamentally transformative what originated in the 1880s. Creating is more a story of invention while Transforming is more a tale of refining, rationalizing, and mass scaling. To be sure, Transforming documents inventions (such as better materials, nuclear power, jet engines, and microchips), but each of these can be seen as a secondary improvement within a primary, existing stream. Together, Creating and Transforming provide a unique picture of the technical factors that radically changed the conditions in which people live, conditions which have greatly expanded the possibilities for flourishing. But nothing is pure gain, and everything has downside. Smil is quite clear about that as well.
Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, by Alex Epstein (2022)—Epstein is a happy warrior who vigorously makes a very unfashionable case. Energy poverty is poverty. The benefits of fossil fuels for mastering a hostile environment and enabling human flourishing are massive. Those benefits are completely ignored by current discourse. Side effects are pervasively catastrophized. The philosophy driving the catastrophism is deeply anti-human. Our knowledge system is broken and prevents fair assessment of realities, trade-offs, and alternatives. Fossil fuels are uniquely capable and cost-effective. Available alternatives are massively oversold. Billions are still in serious poverty. This is a lively, passionate, well argued, and needed counter to the prevailing discourse of doom. It deserves to be taken seriously and can help develop more realism about paths to human flourishing and the energy transitions that are needed.
China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, by Frank Dikotter (2022)—Dikotter is a scholar of China who has written three volumes on the era of Mao. Relying on primary sources, this book traces the post-Mao development of China up to the point where they run out—2012. It makes a case that the Chinese transformation of the past several decades has always been in the Communist Party’s hands, has disproportionately benefited the state and withheld benefits from the people, has been subject to massive distortions, and is ruthless when the party deems it necessary to achieve its objectives and preserve its power. In the year where Vladimir Putin broke the Cold War and post-Cold War taboo on large scale military aggression in Europe, Xi Jinping consolidated Chinese power like no leader since Mao, and sidled up to Putin, this is a frightening book. The Chinese Communist party is serious. It is enforcing its will on Hong Kong. It believes Taiwan is an integral part of its domain. It just might take radical action.
SUSTAINABILITY
The Hydrogen Revolution: A Blueprint for the Future of Clean Energy, by Marco Alvera (2021). If this book’s vision is attainable, the world should be on a crash course to achieve it. The vision (very well presented) is of a future where electricity, heating, and most transportation are powered by hydrogen.
In principle, there is far more than enough solar flux to power everything if the energy can be captured, converted, stored, and distributed. But its intermittency and seasonality must be handled at scale. Alvera says: “We need a molecule…We need the right molecule.” That molecule is hydrogen. Hydrogen could provide limitless clean energy if it could be generated in sufficient quantity in a “green” way. The issue is: is the vision technically attainable? Alvera, whose pedigree includes Goldman Sachs and being the CEO of Europe’s largest natural gas company, certainly has the systems knowledge to map the problem accurately, many aspects of the solution, and how it could scale up based on a succession of early adopters.
I want him to be right, but he uses the wrong metric to assess where we are and lacks some of the necessary technical qualifications and analyses. His metric is financial, not physics, chemistry, and engineering based. Price signals in this whole field suffer from political corruption and current levels of use are tiny compared to the needed scale. Current political price says nothing about the technical feasibility of scaling these systems; that is the realm of physics, chemistry, and engineering. I think the technical problems involved in large scale generation of hydrogen are probably much more significant than he assumes or addresses. Storage and distribution of sufficient quantities of hydrogen is probably an even bigger problem, although as a natural gas executive, Alvera has a good handle on the distribution problem. Earth has a vast reservoir of hydrocarbons that has fueled the advance of civilization over the past 140 years. There is no reservoir for hydrogen in usable form. It must be created, and that problem is hand waved.
Those reservations aside, I hope this vision can be realized. I have not yet found any solid information on the points I raise above or any other technical critique, and I lack the expertise to answer my own questions. But I think hydrogen holds far more promise than batteries and windmills. We are likely massively misallocating our resources towards those diversions, rather than a real solution like this one.
Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, by Harry Sanderson (2022). This book reports on the realities of finding, mining, and processing the necessary materials for a battery powered future—lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, not to mention rare earths. Long story short—it is a very dirty, corrupt, polluting enterprise with a whole new set of costs spread around the world requiring massive mining increases. And everything goes through China, which uses lots of coal to get the job done. Almost none of today’s supply chain has USA type standards, environmental or otherwise. The whole specter of clean, battery powered transportation is a sham if these costs are not fully and accurately assessed and corrected.
Picking up something I read recently, we are making massive investments in a technology picked by politicians. What could go wrong?
Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, by David Montgomery (2017). This was the tail of one of my threads in 2021. A positive, anecdotal exploration of how sustainable/regenerative soil-agricultural practices meet the objectives of farmers and environmentalists to improve soils and biodiversity plus provide a way to absorb atmospheric CO2. Both the problem and the opportunity are underappreciated IMO.
FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, by Edward Chancellor (2022)—This is a fascinating history of interest, which is best described as the price of time. Chancellor has a particular focus on explaining the distortions caused by excessively low rates, and the power they provide to financial elites and manipulators. That is the regime we have been living under since the financial crisis of 2008. It explains a great deal about the distortions and tensions in our society in recent years. A bout of inflation (predictable and predicted by me) forced some correction of this regime in 2022 by the Federal Reserve. We will see how that plays out…
The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 5th Edition, by G. Edward Griffin (2010)—This is a lively and classic expose and explanation of the Federal Reserve and the monetary system. Its explanations of how money works and who benefits are spot on as far as I can see. Its tone is a bit conspiratorial for my taste. But substantively, my only issue is the strong advocacy of a gold standard at the end. I am agnostic as to whether that is a good idea, but it would likely involve traumatic systemic change and create a different set of problems. That said, highly engaging, educational, and recommended.
CATHOLICISM AND THE MODERN WORLD
In the West and the developed world, we live in post-Christian times, where belief is for many is neither possible nor credible. An ultimate purpose of therearemorethings.com is to try to help make it credible, possible, and compelling in completely modern terms.
To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II, by George Weigel (2022). Weigel has been a trusted chronicler and guide to things Catholic for many years, foremost though his biographies of John Paul II. To Sanctify the World is a solid and up-to-date assessment of the necessity and relevance of Vatican II and a survey of its documents. It convinced me that most aspects of the council’s motivation and achievements are beyond the purview of therearemorethings.com. So it provides boundaries. But it also provides focus. Most salient is Weigel’s argument that the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, has not aged well, that it is dated and naïve. That seems reasonable—the change in the culture since 1965 has been extensive and has accompanied a collapse of the faith in the West. Since evangelizing the modern world is the key point of the council, this aspect requires ongoing update. I hope to work on this problem.
CHRISTIAN HUMANISM
Rediscovering and rearticulating Christian Humanism is one of the key themes I want to work on. There is a great tradition that as a practical matter has been lost. I believe Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II was the greatest thinker in this tradition and remains highly relevant. I am exploring his works to educate myself and find a starting point. I have quite a bit of study in front of me before being ready to do anything with this.
Love & Responsibility, by Karol Wojtyla (1960). This is one of Karol Woytla’s two primary philosophical works before he was elevated to the papacy. It provides incredible density, range, depth, and rigor that is not achievable from the pastoral and administrative office of the Pope. His other major pre-papal work, Person and Act, is probably a project for 2023. My working hypothesis is that these are the best documents for recovering his humanism, above anything in his papacy.
Man & Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, by Pope John Paul II (2006). I have been exposed to the excellent work of popularizers of TOB, notably Christopher West, for many years. This year I went to the source. This is the best available critical edition of the TOB talks which were given in the form of 133 Wednesday Audiences over 5+ years and includes an outstanding in-depth introductory essay analyzing the context and structure of TOB. TOB is innovative, revolutionary, and highly relevant theology and biblical exegesis, but is also quite a bit narrower than Love & Responsibility. So probably secondary and downstream for my purposes.
The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, by Abigail Rine Favale (2022). This is an excellent treatment of a topic of high contemporary relevance by an ideal author. Favale (who is around 40 years old) was raised evangelical, became a gender studies PhD and professor, converted to Catholicism, and afterward gradually came to a full embrace of Catholic teachings. She is thus able to inhabit and explain all sides of this question both personally and with great knowledge. She is deep, compassionate, and original. Highly recommended. Truth and love and mercy all go together.
The publisher’s summary says it so well: “With substance, clarity, and compassion, Favale teases out the hidden assumptions of the gender paradigm and exposes its effects. Yet this book is not merely an exposé—it is also a powerful, moving articulation of a Christian understanding of reality: a holistic paradigm that proclaims the dignity of the body, the sacramental meaning of sexual difference, and the interconnectedness of all creation.”
BENEDICT XVI
Benedict XVI: A Life Volume One: Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927-1965, by Peter Seewald (2020)
Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus: 1966-Present, by Peter Seewald (2021)
I read an interview with Peter Seewald where he said: “The biography of Joseph Ratzinger is the biography of a century.” Amen. It is that. And Seewald is his ideal biographer. Ratzinger’s fellow countryman, he had a 25-year relationship with him that includes 4 excellent interview books with Seewald as provocative interlocuter. Through these encounters, Seewald grew from an agnostic secular journalist to Catholic convert. That personal history plus extensive, meticulous research and interviews yields a biography that is probably definitive except for his death. I hope that in due time Seewald publishes a coda to complete this work.
Born in Weimar Germany, Ratzinger grew up in Nazi Germany and through the destruction of his homeland in World War II. His family was devoutly Catholic and profoundly opposed to Hitler and Nazism. He entered the seminary during World War II but was conscripted into the war machine until he could escape and reentered the seminary after the war. Gifted with a supreme and balanced mind, he rapidly rose in academic Catholicism and has been a leading figure in the Church since Vatican II. This biography makes the case that he made the decisive contribution to the council leading it to focus on addressing the modern world and the radical new situation of a predominantly post-Christian, unbelieving culture. He ascended the ranks of the church and was by far John Paul II’s closest collaborator for most of his papacy. Then of course he became pope himself and eventually took the radical step of resigning out of humble faithful obedience to God’s call.
This bare sketch is of a life that was always immersed in and engaged with the deepest and most significant events of this world and culture, and their relation to ultimate things.
With Ratzinger’s death, the last direct connection to Vatican II has passed. He and Wojtyla were major influences on the council when they were young, and as popes decisively shaped its interpretation and longer run implementation. Absorbing a church council is a long and messy process and Vatican II marked a fundamental shift to a dynamic process of adaptation and development to a new cultural reality where faith is not central. Hard to know for sure, but it appears Wojtyla had a major influence on Gaudium et Spes, noted above. If Wojtyla was the greater evangelist, perhaps Ratzinger was the more penetrating and far-seeing analyst of the extent of the challenge to faith posed by contemporary culture and its dynamics. If so, he may be the surer guide to the continual updating that is needed, and Vatican II prophetically initiated.
Ratzinger was the smartest and most balanced mind in the church for decades. A gentle, devout, and scholarly soul, he rose to high places against his personal wishes but faithful to his calling and the needs of the Church. For decades, he faced mischaracterizations that were absurd and malicious to anyone who had any clue about the man and his actual thoughts and words. We were blessed to have him and now he is home.
BIBLE IN A YEAR
The Great Adventure Catholic Bible (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition). I listened to the entire Bible via the Bible in a Year podcast, with Fr. Mike Schmitz. Fr. Mike recorded the podcast in 2021 and I listened first thing pretty much every day in 2022. I had never read the whole Bible before. This starts to fill my Old Testament gap—I have read the New Testament several times, but never got past Exodus in the OT. I had high level awareness primarily via Catholic liturgical readings, but now I have been through the whole thing in a well-organized chronological reading and commentary that puts all the books in context.
The Bible is composed of 73 widely varying books in multiple genres. Many are not easy, particularly in the Old Testament, and are in language alien or obscure to our contemporary sensibilities. But much, foremost the Gospels, is transparently rich and luminous and transcends time far beyond all other world literature, as befits the unique inspired Word of God.
I started with the hypothesis that the Old Testament is a book for our time—but in an off-putting guise that requires special understanding to appreciate and apply. I feel confirmed in that hypothesis—people and civilization have always been deeply flawed, and yet God speaks to and through those flaws. But I have a lot of work in front of me to assimilate and appreciate the Old Testament especially and will use multiple methods. Listening to the Bible in a Year provided a great start, even though I certainly missed far more than I absorbed. I expect I will revisit BIY in future years, but for 2023 Fr. Mike is doing the Catechism in a Year and I plan to journey with him real-time through the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
I can’t not include the Bible, but everybody whether believer or not must acknowledge it as the most important book in history. So obvious.
Benedict XVI: A Life is not just the biography of a great man of the Church but “the biography of a century”. In the realms of biography, history, culture, intellectual, and spiritual life—it is a profound journey. It may be the finest biography I have ever read. It is the most personally relevant.
An Immense World is a stunning, subtly spectacular and beautiful achievement. It delivers sparkling insight into the hidden richness of life and our world on every page. Revelatory.
CONCLUSION
I wrote this year’s essay after defining a long-term project based on the raw material it surveys. The articulation of that project in last year’s essay and therearemorethings.com stands. But doing the work and doing it with real quality requires more. This year’s exercise taught me that my methodology for capturing and developing content is inadequate. Improving those practices and systems will be a focus in 2023.