It is that time again, when the larder overflows with books on subjects so various, so resistant to any tidy ideological formulation, so exceeding any personal predilection or “demographic,” as to suggest the inexhaustible plentitude of Creation. What’s a poor editor—poor and rich at once—to do?
Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition
University of Illinois Press
176 pages
$39.00
Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition
University of Illinois Press
176 pages
$39.00
There’s Cars for Comrades, for instance, by Lewis Siegelbaum, a history of the Soviet automobile industry coming from Cornell University Press. An improbable story worth savoring for the sheer incongruity of it, instructive too. I have already sent the galley to Andy Morriss, an economist who moved recently to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (You may recall his piece “Too Much Choice?” in the July/August 2005 issue of Books & Culture. That wasn’t a problem confronting comrades who were shopping for a car.)
What about Holy Dogs & Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster, just published by the University of Illinois Press? The flap-copy begins thus: “Analysis of animals in the history of the Christian tradition has been exclusively symbolic, but Laura Hobgood-Oster utilizes the feminist perspective in her examination of animal presence. In challenging the metaphoric reading of animals that reinforces human superiority and dominance, Holy Dogs & Asses underscores animal agency.” This is rather offputting, beginning with the opening clause, which is manifestly untrue, and the whole paragraph reads a bit like a parody of fashionable academic trends. And yet the subject is compelling (think for instance of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Rational Dependent Animals, a book that is also in conversation with feminist thinkers, and one which is missing from Hobgood-Oster’s bibliography). Might Stephen Webb be interested? Hobgood-Oster spends several pages dismissing Webb’s On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals; with Aquinas, Barth, and Calvin (not bad company to keep!), he’s found guilty of “defining other animals by humanity’s unique relationship to God.”
Mention of MacIntyre and Rational Dependent Animals reminds me of several related books that have recently arrived or are coming soon: for example, Body and Character in Luke and Acts: The Subversion of Physiognomy in Early Christianity, by Mikeal C. Parsons, from BakerAcademic; Theology and Down Syndrome, by Amos Yong, from Baylor University Press; and Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality, by Thomas E. Reynolds, coming in April from Brazos. It would be good to have someone read these books and assess what’s happening.
From Yale University Press comes Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (with six sermons added), edited and annotated by Frank Turner, whose massive biography of Newman was reviewed in these pages several years ago. I’m sending it for review in Books & Culture to Josh Hochschild at Mt. St. Mary’s University. And that reminds me of a stack of Catholic books I have close at hand, which I’d like to see treated in a round-up. No pretense to comprehensiveness, but here are books worth reading, all embodying Catholicity: what do we gain by seeing them together? And I need to ask Jody Bottum at First Things if he can recommend a reviewer for Peter Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, which I have just received from Encounter Books.
Also from Yale is Michael Reid’s Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul. Alongside that we could have a review of John Michael Chasteen’s Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, just out from Oxford (and perhaps that piece could also touch on John Lynch’s biography of Bolivar, now out in paper from Yale). Separately I need to assign Christianity in Latin America, by Ondina Gonzalez and Justo Gonzalez, from Cambridge University Press; I haven’t seen the book yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ll want to cover it. Joel Carpenter at Calvin College is already at work on an essay-review that would complement such a piece.
Did I hear some restless shuffling? Are you feeling a trifle weary of this recitation? I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. There are whole categories of books—each loaded with promising titles—that I haven’t even mentioned yet, many of which I won’t be able to so much as gesture at. (To all authors whose splendid new books are not highlighted here: sorry! That doesn’t mean they are being ignored.) Fiction, for instance. David Maine, who has done three striking novels with Old Testament settings, has a new novel that looks like something different: Monster 1959, arriving this very day from St. Martin’s. I’ve sent galleys of Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, due in April from Knopf, to Elissa Elliott, who will review it as a Book of the Week. Coming soon are BoW reviews of Sue Miller’s novel The Senator’s Wife and Anne Rice’s The Road to Cana, the second book in her Christ The Lord sequence (both also from Knopf). Ron Hansen has a new book coming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Exiles, an unconventional historical novel based on the story of the nuns lost in the wreck of the Deutschland, which inspired Hopkins’ great poem. That’s due in May, and—with the galley in hand—I need to find the right reviewer now. (Rudy Nelson mentioned that Paul Mariani is at work on a biography of Hopkins, which will be something to look out for—I need to find out when that’s expected.)
Steve Moshier of Wheaton College has already sent in his review of Ted Nield’s Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet, from Harvard University Press, adding that he’s going to be using the book in class. We are able to contemplate such long views even as we attend to Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri, published by Columbia University Press, informed by a “long view” on a very different historical scale. Marain Marais is playing in the background (look for a review of Bruce Haynes’ The End of Early Music, from Oxford); the sports page says that spring training is about to begin (keep an eye out for Michael Stevens’ annual baseball preview/review on the web near Opening Day). Many little worlds in the great big world.
Books call out to other books. In this issue (p. 46), Lauren Winner reviews Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf). And here comes a galley of a book by Mark Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death, due from Cornell in May, a strangely ahistorical essay in cultural history that I’ll be reviewing in due course. “Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent,” the publisher’s account summarizes, “Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.” Chilling, you understand, because underwritten by the notion that “a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited” the fallen “beyond the grave,” evidence—Schantz says—of “a sensibility with which we have, for the most part, lost touch.”
A word about that sensibility. In 1864, a prison camp for Confederate soldiers was established near Elmira, New York. A total of more than 12,000 prisoners were interned in the camp (“Hellmira,” the Confederates called it), of whom almost 3,000 died in captivity. Woodlawn Cemetery, where they were buried, was designated as a National Cemetery in 1877. According to the website for the city of Elmira, “the sexton for Woodlawn Cemetery, John W. Jones, a former slave who arrived in Elmira via the Underground Railroad, buried each Confederate soldier that died in the Elmira Prison Camp. Of the 2,963 prisoners who Jones buried, only seven are listed as unknown.” Two of the photographs at the top of this page were taken at the cemetery; the figures they show are from a ring of Union graves encircling the Confederate dead.
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