Philosophy

Review: The World Beyond Your Head

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "The World Beyond your Head" by Matthew B. Crawford

The World Beyond Your Head

The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (ISBN: 9780374535919) 2016.

Summary: Argues that becoming an individual involves engaging with real physical environments and shared human practices.

Crawford, like many others, writes in this book of how we live distracted lives. However, he argues that the fault lies not in our screens but in ourselves. In particular, his contention that the rise of the autonomous self has made us vulnerable to distraction. The idea that we live “inside our heads” makes us vulnerable to all kinds of consumerist ploys, intensified through our digital economy. He offers one of the most chilling portrayals of this in how gambling has sought to be so frictionless that people will spend hours at a machine, urinating and defecating themselves rather than break away. He observes the irony that our quest for autonomy in the end results in a “mass solipsism” of “autistic monads.” We lose any real individuality.

Crawford believes to be human is to truly engage with our physical environment as well as other beings. He offers the examples of how the stick of a hockey player becomes an extension of one’s body, how the motorcycle an extension of the rider. He reminds us that the Latin root of “education” means “to lead out.” We are led out of our heads when we give focused attention to any skilled practice. Crawford offers examples of glass-blowing, learning Russian, playing music together with others. Drawing on Michael Polanyi, he observes the personal aspect of any form of true knowing, the relationship between knower and the object known.

Real individuality emerges in communities of practice in which we both perfect a skill and use it in a social context. Crawford uses his own trade as a motorcycle mechanic, showing how skilled work is recognized in the acceptance and payment of a labor bill. Likewise, real human relationships constantly bring us up against those not like us. This is so even in marriage. Knowing and bonding involves the practice of attention, the skill of negotiating those differences. Digital relationships seem easier, and more frictionless. And yet all this leads to boredom and the flattening of self.

Throughout, Crawford has held up the idea of skilled and embodied communities of practice. The final part of his book consists of just one chapter, “The Organ Makers Shop.” He introduces us to the pipe organ makers George Taylor and John Boody. He explores the lineage of organ-making from which they’ve come, the apprenticeships each underwent. The account walks through the renaissance in mechanical organs and the physicality of the workshop. For example, we learn how leather is a superior material for bellows rather than space age materials. Then there is the fine art of voicing organ pipes.

What most struck me in this account is how employees became master craftsmen. John Boody was asked out motivating employees to care about quality:

“They are absolutely the most vicious and greatest proponents of that,” he said. “The way to get people most disturbed here is to give them any sense that you are trying to cheapen things, or push them ahead. You think when you start out something like this that the hardest thing is going to be to teach people to care and value that aesthetic. But it happens, and you cannot convince them to do less.”

Behind the stories, there is some denser philosophy. By arguing that we need to get out of our heads, Crawford is not arguing that we stop thinking and just do. Rather, he invites us to use our minds to understand the ideas and practices that have misled and distracted us. Likewise, skillful work of any kind is mindful, attentive. But somehow, it must take us into the world of things and people.

The book led me to reflect on my own practice of reviewing. Reading books and writing about them can be a pretty “in your head” sort of thing. But I’m approaching the ten thousand hours of developing a skilled practice. I’ve written something like three thousand reviews. I’ve studied other reviewers. There is copyright law to observe. One needs to understand the vagaries of each platform. Then there is the back end technologies of websites, SEO, and more that go into every post. I also relate to a network of authors, publicists, publishing houses, booksellers, and devoted readers. My “hardware” includes reading glasses, pencils, computers, tablets, and smartphones.

And here I’d like to press Crawford. His examples focus on embodied practices, which I would certainly honor. But I think there is also skillful work one does as a “knowledge worker.” Crawford is his own best example of this. No doubt, doing other things besides “knowledge work” is good. My life has been enriched by everything from choral singing to painting, to maintaining and repairing my seventeen year old mower.

But the skillful practice of reviewing has changed me from simply being a reader to one who cares about what makes books good, who appreciates the labors of authors and wants to protect that from the intrusion and theft of AI. It has made me passionate about intellectual freedom and free speech and a free press. In sum, it has made me more fully who I am, even into my seventies. In Crawford’s terms, I think this is what it means to become an individual.

Review: The Mother’s Smile

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "The Mother's Smile" by Esther Lightcap Meek

The Mother’s Smile

The Mother’s Smile, Esther Lightcap Meek, foreword by D.C. Schindler. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9798385236473) 2025.

Summary: How philosophically formative is a mother’s smile and the delighted regard of others.

None of us remembers the first moments of our lives. But Esther Lightcap Meek proposes that they are the foundationally formative events of our lives. This is so not only physically and emotionally, but also philosophically. Specifically, she has in mind the loving embrace of a weary mother, gazing on her child with a loving smile. And throughout our lives, Meek contends, we are formed by the delighted regard of others. Moreover, our delighted regard is central to the knowing of others, including the non-human. And over all is the loving, delighted regard of God upon our lives. In succeeding chapters, Meek develops all the ways the mother’s delighted regard is philosophically formative.

First of all the mother’s smile shapes our awareness of our own existence as the infant “I” faces the “You” lovingly regarding me. I understand myself to be in relationship to another, pre-figuring every I-You relationship in life. I know I exist because I see my mother seeing me. Meek contrasts this with the Cartesian reductivist vision of self detached from a fragmented external reality. For Meek, this loving regard ushers us into a world of wonder in which we are intimately connected with all.

This makes a difference in how we know, the idea of epistemology. Here, Meek elaborates her ideas of covenant epistemology through the mother’s smile. It forms us in the reality that all knowing is personal, that we don’t know objects but others. We are involved and yet non-possessive. We commune and delight. And we know wholes rather than fragmented parts.

This in turn shapes our metaphysics. In place of a Cartesian vision that doubts the reality of anything but ourselves, we embrace childhood’s vision of real others. And we encounter other things as “personlike others.” Instead of mastery of “objects,” we engage in loving regard of even inanimate “others” as well as other non-human living things. I was excited to see her connect with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work of honoring and valuing all that we encounter in the world.

Mothers are not the only ones from whom we experience this delighted regard. This offers hope for those lacking experiences of a mother’s regard. Meek writes of the wonder when another regards us with delight, using the examples of her sister and a faculty colleague. She writes movingly of how her colleague Bob’s delighted regard formed her:

“But I want to tell you about Bob’s face! I don’t mean any particular expression, but rather the frank, unqualified regard and particular delight that it always registered as he looked at me. I saw him seeing me. Over the years I grew to see myself as Bob sees me; I chose this visage, holding to his seeing me as more objective than my own subjective view. As a person, and also professionally, I have come to be who I am in his unwavering regard” (p. 76).

She then encourages us in the seeing of others, that “[w]e make friends by being friends.”

Ultimately, for Meek, this points toward “a face that will not go away.” Acknowledging the discomfort this evokes, she encourages us with the idea that God’s gaze upon us is one of infinite delight. One of the most amazing things about Jesus as God with us is how he saw people–the Samaritan woman, Zacchaeus, and so many more.

As she concludes, she sums up the work of philosophical service with the word “delight.” We do this as parents. We receive this as children. Then we extend delighted regard wherever our calling leads us, and into all parts of our quotidian existence. Thus, we re-embrace the wonder of a child toward our world, a wonder it was a mistake to abandon.

I read and reviewed Meek’s Loving to Know last fall. It is a long book elaborating her ideas of covenant epistemology, and one of the best I’ve read in recent years. What a “delight,” if I may use that word, to see her bring all these insights together in the simplicity and beauty of the mother’s smile. This is a book to savor as it reminds us of the primal love of our mothers, of the friends who “noticed” us with delight, and of the “face that will not go away.”

_________________

My review of Loving to Know: https://bobonbooks.com/2025/12/09/review-loving-to-know/

Review: Athens and Jerusalem

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
Cover image of "Athens & Jerusalem" by Gerald Bray

Athens and Jerusalem, Gerald Bray. Lexham Press (ISBN: 9781683597728) 2025.

Summary: An in-depth survey of the parallel histories of philosophical tradition and Christian theology and their interactions.

I should lead off by saying that this book turned out to be something different than I’d expected. Instead of a critical analysis of the influences of philosophy on Christianity, this turn out to be more of a historical survey of both traditions, their differing perspectives, and interactions. That said, the survey offered by Bray is a highly readable one spanning the time from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle down to the present.

Bray accomplishes that by a chronological history that begins first in Athens and the rise of the Greek philosophers followed by a history of Jerusalem and the Abrahamic faith of the Jews. Then Bray traces the intersection of both Jews and Christians with the Greek philosophers, first in Alexandria, and then with Origin. Following this, Bray describes the period from 313 to late medieval times as Jerusalem triumphant. Theological controversy demanded the systematic rigor of philosophy to clarify matters of doctrine. The high point of harmonizing philosophy and theology came with Thomas Aquinas.

The rediscovery of philosophical works in the Renaissance resulted in the rise of Neoplatonism and an increasing focus on human reason. For Protestants, Hobbes and Locke offered a kind of creed for civil society that opened the way for the secular, separated state. The longest chapter in the work treats the thinkers of the Enlightenment with its focus on rationalism. Often, this resulted in challenging Christian theological conviction. Some of examples of this are found in the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin. In addition, philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and john Stuart Mill promoted a pragmatic secularism.

So, we finally arrive at the present. Both biological and cosmological discoveries have led to a renewed openness of some to theism. In addition, Bray notes metaphysical premises that parallel theological convictions including an orderly and rational universe and the human ability to understand it, contingency, and more. However Bray seems more cautious than some when it comes to reconciling the two. He notes a basic difference of perspective. Theology begins with and focuses on God. Philosophy begins with human reason and lacks a fixed point of reference. He’s not without hope however and notes the work of Christians in philosophy.

What Bray offers is a highly readable yet in-depth survey of the history of the interaction of Christianity and philosophy. Summaries at the end of each chapter distill the main points of his survey yet further. We don’t get an in-depth critical analysis of the church councils and how philosophical considerations played into the debates and formulations. Nor do we study the synthesis of philosophy and theology in Aquinas and subsequent Catholic tradition. Some may also object to his summary treatment of philosophers.

What I would suggest is that this is a great first work to read, overviewing the landscape of the history. Of course, the interested student will want to zoom in on particular periods and people. It would have been helpful to have more in-depth bibliographies for each chapter rather than the brief “For Further Reading” at the conclusion. However, any student who has learned basic research methods can figure this out. This also makes a good reference work for pastors who need historical context if discussing a particular philosopher.

_______________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

The Weekly Wrap: May 11-17

/ rtrube54 / Leave a comment
woman in white crew neck t shirt in a bookstore wrapping books
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

The Weekly Wrap: May 11-17

Story Keeping

We have always loved storytellers, from the stories told in oral cultures, to writers who spin stories, to historians who research and tell the stories of our past. Less glamorous, but just as important, I would contend, are those who are story keepers. Without story keepers, our stories may die within a generation or less, whether from neglect or deliberate action.

Who are the story keepers? They are the publishers who keep important stories in print. They are the librarians who keep the stories on their shelves and connect readers and books. Booksellers, who take financial risks to make books available to readers are story keeping heroes.

I believe we are entering a season where story keeping is taking on greater importance. For example, books are being removed from libraries in service academies and schools. Others have pressed for the removals of books from public libraries. It may be subjects labeled “DEI,” which may include many works of Black, or other ethnic histories. Or it may include books portraying non-traditional gender identity or sexual orientation. If it has been politicized, it has probably been challenged or removed.

I don’t necessarily agree with all the stories or how they ought to be told. It is messy because of the rich mosaic of people who make up our society. Some just think it is simpler to erase the stories that differ from our favorite rendering of the story. But when we do this, we only hear the versions of a story from those who hold power. Then dissenting stories that give a fuller perspective are silenced. Simpler but smaller is what we get.

We are all important to the work of story keeping. We can support publishers, librarians, and booksellers. Whenever we buy and read and talk about books, we are story keepers. And when we read diverse books, we help keep alive the stories of those on the margins whose stories are under attack. We should aggressively resist any effort to ban or destroy books. I hope we don’t come to the day of Fahrenheit 451, where it becomes the task of those who want to save the stories to memorize them. Ultimately, they understood that this is what it meant to save civilization.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Summer is coming and the reading is easy. The Atlantic “The Summer Reading Guide” offers recommendations of great books for the beach or those hot summer afternoons where we dive into a book while sipping our sweet tea.

Were there books that made you challenge the conventions, that opened your mind to new ways of thinking about life, relationships, society? Timothy Aubry explores this topic in “Gateway Books.” What were your gateway books?

Then, perhaps you would study philosophy to explore the meaning of life. However, Pranay Sanklecha describes how this is not what he found in his philosophy studies in “Philosophy was once alive.”

What is “close reading”? In a review of On Close Reading by John Guillory, Dan Sinykin explores how one defines “close reading” and its place in literary studies. The article is “Pay Attention!” His own argument for close reading in the penultimate paragraph made reading this one worth it for me.

Finally, Mrs. Dalloway is one hundred years old! “A Hundred Years of Mrs. Dalloway” explores how Virginia Woolf’s novel was so revolutionary both in its day and in its long-term impact.

Quote of the Week

Feminist poet Adrienne Rich was born on May 16, 1929. She observed:

“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”

It seems to me that this is a corollary to Edmund Burke’s famous statement, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain arrived at my doorstep today. It is another massive biography, coming in at over a thousand pages of text. I’ll literally be reading that all summer. But if it is like his previous works, it should be a great ride.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. If anything, I have enjoyed The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry even more. And its main character is a somewhat cranky bookseller!

As an addendum to my thoughts on story keeping. I consider reviewing as a form of story keeping. I try to review a variety of diverse and important books and it is one of my ways to be a story keeper, making sure others know of these important stories.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Wesley Vander Lugt, ed. A Prophet in Darkness

Tuesday: Agatha Christie, Third Girl

Wednesday: Jeffrey W. Barbeau, The Last Romantic

Thursday: Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Abundance

Friday: Michael J. Gilmour, Reading the Margins

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for May 11-17, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Beyond the Wager

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment
Cover image of "Beyond the Wager" by Douglas Groothuis

Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal, Douglas Groothuis. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514001783) 2024.

Summary: Argues that Pascal’s brilliance extends beyond his famous “wager” to his scientific, philosophic, and Christian insights.

Justly or unjustly, Blaise Pascal is often most known for his “Wager.” He argues that faith in God is in one’s best interest. If indeed God exists and rewards belief in him, this is of infinite gain while unbelief entails infinite loss. By contrast if one believes and God does not exist, the losses are relatively minimal. In Beyond the Wager, Douglas Groothuis not only defends the Wager but argues for the brilliance of Pascal, particularly as a Christian thinker, as revealed in Pensees.

Groothuis, a noted Christian apologist, has been reading Pensees since 1977. This work is a revision and expansion on an earlier work, On Pascal, published in 2003. Specifically, he adds chapters on miracles and prophecy pertaining to Christ, the excellence of Christ, “Christianity, Muhammad, and the Jews,” and on Pascals critique of politics. In addition, he includes a delightful imagined dialogue between Pascal and Descartes.

In introducing his subject, Groothuis proposes that Pascal is both well-known and unknown. He made contributions in math and science (as well as inventing the first prototype of mass transit, the omnibus). What is less understood is his brilliance as a Christian thinker. Pascal, without jettisoning reason, recognized that belief “involved submitting the core of one’s being to a supernatural being who calls one into a transformational encounter and ongoing engagement” in response to the heart’s perception of God. This is what is behind his statement that “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” He understands Pascal as one who lived between the Medieval Age and the Enlightenment, both a devout Catholic and yet reformer in sympathy with the Jansenists. And he was both a philosopher who endorsed much of the Cartesian world, yet never separated science from God.

After a brief biography of Pascal, who died at 39, he explores how Pascal developed our understanding of both the nature and limits of science. Then he turns to the theological controversy he engaged on behalf of the Jansenists against the Jesuits. The Jesuits argued that divine choice and human freedom were incompatible and emphasized human choice. Pascal, anticipating the Protestant Reformers, argued for compatibilism, that external determination and personal choice were compatible.

Following this discussion, Groothuis turns to the Pensees, which will occupy the remainder of the book. Noting its fragmentary and incomplete nature, Groothuis calls attention to Pascal’s basic plan for the work. Pascal divided it in two parts: the wretchedness of man without God and the happiness of man with God. He defends it as an apologetic and delineates Pascal’s three orders of being: the body, the mind, and the heart. Each are essential to knowledge of God.

Subsequently, Groothuis deals first with Pascal’s arguments for God, including his sense of the limits of natural theology. Instead he shows how our human condition as “magnificent wretches” points us not only toward God but toward our need. He explores Pascal’s ideas in the light of skepticism about the hiddenness of God and how this relates to our fallenness. Groothuis show how Pascal argues from the human condition to our need for divine revelation and redemption. He then discusses Pascal’s treatment of miracles and prophecy to attest to the uniqueness of Christ as the Savior who atoned through the cross, addressing the human condition. All of this culminates in a chapter on the excellence of Christ, captured in Pascal’s description of Christ’s “offices” in 106 words. Groothuis discusses what this means for our spiritual life, our experience of suffering and for a thinking body of Christ.

Given the contemporary challenge of Islam, Groothuis shows how Pascal argued for the superiority of Christ and the Bible. Interestingly, he outlines Pascal’s argument for Christianity from Judaism and against Islam, that Jesus, not Muhammad, is the prophet foreseen by Moses. Then, Groothuis comes to the Wager, expositing Pascal’s framing of the Wager, showing how one must wager and addressing objections to the Wager. This is followed by a chapter summarizing Pascal’s critiques of culture and politics. Pascal had a penetrating view of the pomps and pretenses of politics and culture. He argues that Christ offers the only sane point in an insane world.

Groothuis concludes by commending Pascal as a guide. He is a mentor who exemplifies ardent love for Christ. Pascal’s grasp of the human condition helps us understand both ourselves and others. His literary gifts across multiple disciplines may motivate writers to excellence. As an innovative scientist, he models a philosophy of science reflecting a biblical worldview. His biting wit as he considers culture and politics challenges us to forsake worldly embraces of pomp and power for godliness. And Pensees is a goldmine of insight for apologists.

Douglas Groothuis makes a strong case for renewed attention to the life and writing of Blaise Pascal as a Christian thinker. He brings a framework to our reading of the fragmented and unfinished Pensees, helping us to recognize the intellectual as well as devotional brilliance of this work. He defends Pascal against his detractors, including the arguments against Pascal’s Wager. But beyond all this, his discussion of the thought of Pascal shows the far-reaching character of his brilliance. Now to find my copy of Pensees….

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Lost in Thought

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Summary: A defense of the love of learning for its own sake, for how it enriches our existence as human beings.

Zena Hitz grew up in a house full of books. Curiosity, lectures, exploration, family conversations. All of this prepared Zena for an academic career, with the stimulating years of graduate school followed by a faculty position. And then the let down:

In exchange for my comfortable salary, excellent benefits, and ample control over my work schedule, I delivered preprocessed nuggets of knowledge in front of a crowd and doled out above-average grades upon their absorption. The teaching that formed the central activity of my professional life seemed nothing like the lively and collaborative pursuit of ideas that had enchanted me as a student. (p, 17).

It led to three years in a Catholic retreat center, a process of discerning a vocation. She describes a journey of asking whether the love of learning may be defended for its own sake. She examines the things that may lure one away from this, as she was in her early faculty career: the love of money, social recognition, and spectacle. She takes a deep dive into the life of learning, the experience of refuge known to every bookworm, the inwardness it cultivates, in which she holds up Mary (thought in ancient times to be a reader), who understood that “a virgin must conceive” and so was prepared for the angel’s message. She is reminded of how learning gets at the core of what it means to be human–the common human experience that binds us together. She considers the uses of of the apparent uselessness of learning. Dorothy Day is a particular exemplar, whose service, advocacy, and imprisonments were sustained by her inner life of learning and prayer.

She wrestles with elitism. Is the quest for learning simply a preserve for the elite, those with enough time and money to do so? She recalls the workers libraries and the hunger for intellectual life of many who were not college educated. What she doesn’t address are those at the lowest rungs of poverty whose time and energy are devoted to surviving. As others have argued, there must be some time of leisure to pursue thought for its own sake. Perhaps this is as good an argument as any to pursue the eradication of poverty.

In the end, she comes to a renewed embrace of the intellectual life. She concludes:

I have argued that intellectual life properly understood cultivates a space of retreat within a human being, a place where real reflection takes place. We step back from concerns of practical benefit, personal or public. We withdraw into small rooms, literal or internal. In the space of retreat we consider fundamental questions: what human happiness consists in, the origins and nature of the universe, whether human beings are part of nature, and whether and how a truly just community is possible. From the space of retreat emerges poetry, mathematics, and distilled wisdom articulated in words or manifested silently in action (p. 185).

She longs that universities would become places once more where this would occur. I found myself wondering, though, whether this was ever the case en masse in colleges and universities or whether some gravitated more to this life than others. And for this to occur today amid the explosion of knowledge in every discipline, would this not require either extending the undergraduate degree to six years or more of full time studies, or making graduate education even more common? And this goes against the grain of our cultural imperatives of equating education with preparation for a job, and the pressures to shorten, not lengthen this time.

It makes me wonder whether the impetus must come from somewhere else in a soulless technological world. At one point, churches were the place where learning was preserved in Europe, learning not only of scripture but Aristotle and Plato. It is hard for me to see this arising from churches of the present day and it seems unclear, apart from the outposts like St John’s (where the author is a tutor) and a few others, mostly private institutions, where this might come from in the world of higher ed. Will our bookstores and libraries become the modern day athenaeums where those hungry for more than being instruments in our technological apparatuses seek refuge and insight? Will we find the resources to sustain these places and those who curate them? And who will teach the disciplines of careful thought? Will a title like Lost in Thought even make sense? I fear if it doesn’t we will have lost what makes us most human, what gives meaning and texture to life, that separates us from the automatons increasingly capable of learning but unable to derive any pleasure from it.