Intimacy

The Weekly Wrap: March 15-21

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The Weekly Wrap: March 15-21

Retiring a Saying

A saying that has become nearly a mantra among bibliophiles is “So many books; so little time.” For example, my family even bought me a t-shirt with this saying. Yet the longer I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to conclusion that it might be healthy to retire this slogan.

It’s not that both parts of the statement are not true. I just read that four million books were published this past year. And, if I live as long as my parents did, I have twenty years or less of reading left. But I think the statement can foster a kind of frenzied compulsiveness to try to read as many as one can. Don Quixote, move over!

That’s a temptation to which I am prone. But I think its time for a new saying. Maybe something like, “So little time; so savor your books.” Whether I’m enjoying the twists of a good mystery, the suspense of a thriller, the wonder of a life chronicled or an exposition seeking to unravel the majesty of God, I want to savor.

Somehow, I don’t think the One Who has written the greatest story will mind.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Those of a certain age will remember The Baby-Sitters Club novels, published by Scholastic. In all 213 were published and it led to a TV series and film. And apparently they are still popular. Jennifer Hubert Swan offers ten recommendations of other books like these in “My Kids Love the Baby-Sitters Club Books. What Should They Read Next?“

I learned a new word today–“looksmaxxing.” It is the practice of maximizing one’s physical attractiveness, one’s “sexual market value” on social media. Anna Louie Sussman, in a review of The Intimate Animal explores “The Basic Drive That Humans Might Be Losing.”

Needless to say, AI is one aspect of looksmaxxing, as well as many other emerging developments in our relationship with machines. However, that interaction is not new and Peter Wolfendale explores some of that history and the recurring question of machine souls in “Geist in the machine.”

Do you ever find yourself in a conversation grappling with so many global issues, all of which have moral implications, that you wrestle to find moral language to respond? Ann Frances Margolies suggests we might find help in the work of Simone Weil in “Speaking After the Noise.”

And lastly, it’s time for a little fun. With St. Patrick’s Day celebrations this week,  J. D. Biersdorfer asks “Do You Recognize These Lines From Great Irish Poets?” Just five questions. I got four out of five, but a couple were guesses!

Quote of the Week

I do think the breakdown of our collective sanity may be attributable to our loss of neighboring and other forms of community. John Updike, born March 18, 1932, thought so as well:

“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Standard Ebooks describes itself as “a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.” They have quite a library and their renderings surpass other versions of Public Domain works.

Yesterday was delivery day–five books from four different publishers. I’ll be highlighting them over the next weeks on my social media platforms (Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram). You might find it worthwhile to follow me on one or more of those platforms.

I’m about 80 pages into On Fire For God by Josiah Hesse. He explores the evangelicalism of the Seventies and Eighties that formed his parents, its influence on him, and how so much of it morphed into what we know as “The Religious Right.” It’s fascinating as I consider the different way my life went while being shaped by similar influences. I also find myself observing, as does Amy Grant in her recent “The Sixth of January (Yasgur’s Farm),” that “we’ve lost our way.” This is one of those instances of hoping to understand in retrospect to discern the way forward.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Elaine Howard Ecklund and Denise Daniels, Working for Better

Tuesday: Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Well That Washes What it Shows

Wednesday: William Kent Krueger, Sulfur Springs

Thursday: Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

Friday: Daniel G. Hummel, The University of Wisconsin and the Ideal of Nonsectarianism

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for March 15-21.

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

Review: Knowing and Being Known

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Cover image of "Knowing and Being Known" by Erin F. Moniz

Knowing and Being Known, Erin F. Moniz. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514010037) 2025.

Summary: Explores elements of healthy relationships. the complexities of intimacy, and how the gospel relates to intimacy.

“I can live without sex, but I can’t live without intimacy.”

This statement from Erin F. Moniz’s new book on intimacy comes like a splash of fresh, cold water on the face. A wake up. Provocative. Surprising. And after all that, refreshing. Moniz proposes that intimacy is not confined to sex but has to do with relationships with friends, family, and ultimately, God. But she contends that the intimacy narrative has been co-opted by secular culture. While many young Christians think Christianity ought to enrich one’s understanding of intimacy, few have any idea of how this is so. Cultural narratives, and sexual essentialism reign. In this book, Moniz explores how secularism took over the intimacy narrative, how healthy relationships form and flourish, and how the gospel offers hope for intimacy.

The first part of the book lays groundwork in several ways. Moniz offers a framework for intimate relationships, noting that not all intimate relationships are sexual. Nor are all sexual relationships intimate. Healthy relationships, she contends, are marked by self-giving love, attention and curiosity, and commitment. Two other components undergird these: communication and trust-building behaviors. She then takes a deep dive into cultural analysis, showing how secular culture has coopted our understanding of intimacy. She calls out hook-up culture, romance idolatry, and hypersexualization that threatens to make all relationships sexual. Sadly, Christianity bought into this, confining sexual essentialism to marriage and creating a sexually-charged purity culture. In so doing, we hand youth broken compasses rather than a distinctive relationship ethic centered in the gospel.

The second part of the book addresses the idea of a gospel-centered theology of intimacy. She roots our longing for intimacy in God’s good creation and the loving intimacy within the Trinity. She traces intimacy problems to shame, absent before the fall. We fear vulnerability, an essential to intimacy. Yet God hasn’t given up on us but pursues restorative relationships while preserving our agency and consent. Then Moniz explores the experience of loneliness, which we can assuage in unhealthy ways. Or we can choose to see loneliness as an invitation from God to show us both ourselves and Himself. Finally, the gospel involves a re-membering, both of who we are as the beloved of God and members with others in one body.

The final part of the book works out the implications of gospel centered intimacy in the church. She works out what this looks like for marriages, families, and friendships within the larger community. She envisions a place where everyone belongs to the family–eating together, sharing resources, and even fighting for each other in the face of injustice. Church becomes a place of forming healthy relationships rooted in the serving love of the gospel. In her epilogue, she gets real, describing a community that was so there for her family when thieves broke into their home. Yet that same community fell apart a few years later. Our hope is a messy hope because we are messy. Yet the hope of those seasons of gospel intimacy bids us to not give up.

The two strengths of this book for me are Moniz’s description of how the secular narrative of intimacy co-opted Christian communities and how she roots intimacy theologically in the gospel. Stories from both personal and campus ministry experience complement the sound theological framework she offers. She is someone who has walked the talk. For those longing for intimacy, she offers a much larger vision than just sex. Above all, she affirms the longing for intimacy as a good gift of God.

_______________________

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

The Weekly Wrap: March 30-April 5

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Destination Bookstores

Last Saturday, my son and I made the pilgrimage to John K. King’s Used and Rare Books near downtown Detroit. A banner outside the building boasts of it being “Named #2 Book Store in the World” in 2014 by Business Insider. Having wandered through the aisles of books packed into four floors of this former glove factory, I can believe it.

It is a destination bookstore, one of those unusual and incredible places booklovers put on their bucket list. The closest thing to it in my home town is The Book Loft, boasting 32 rooms of books. But whereas the books in the Book Loft are new, everything at John King’s was used. It had the feel of being the place where books from estate sales go to live. There were lots of old hardbacks without dustcovers, the titles barely readable on the spines, books that were the “thing to read” back in the Seventies, and lots of old paperbacks.

Three of my finds were among the paperbacks. I love the mystery novels of Michael Innes, that I just noted are back in print. I like to find the old Penguin paperbacks and I found three I’ve not read in great condition. Score! I never see these at my local Half Price. I picked up a few others as well.

In one sense, any bookstore is a “destination” bookstore. I rarely go looking for a particular book and delight when a book finds me! But if I could travel, I’d love to visit some of the great ones like Powell’s, The Strand, Book People, Parnassus Books (Anne Patchett’s bookstore), and many others.

Of course, part of the fun was the traveling company. I don’t often get to spend a whole day with my son, solving the world’s problems, enjoying good Lebanese food along the way, and comparing our finds. This is a day I will treasure, and not just because of the great bookstore we visited.

Five Articles Worth Reading

I still remember the first time I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Now, T. Bone Burnett, in “Beatlemania: A Penetrating New Book Celebrates Lennon and McCartney” offers a marvelous review of the new book, John & Paul, chronicling their genius and relationship.

Jordan Kisner asks “Who Needs Intimacy?,” exploring the trend in modern novels (perhaps paralleling modern life) where women are foregoing intimacy and child-bearing.

Another challenge of modern life, at least in the States, is the cost of housing. “Invisible Crisis” explores the “hidden phenomenon of working homelessness,” a review of There Is No Place for Us. The article notes “[i]n no state today can a minimum-wage worker afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

On a very different note, Open Culture features “The Only Illustrated Manuscript of Homer’s Iliad from Antiquity“. In addition to text and images, the article includes a video on the Ambrosian Iliad.

Finally, Matt Dinan’s “Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein” discusses the novel, twenty-five years after publication. This is a Saul Bellow I’ve not read but Dinan’s conclusion intrigued me:

“Ravelstein seems to speak to a problem that its author could not have known would be so acute a quarter century later. Reading a novel can’t solve the problem of the loss of the world to abstraction and distraction, but insofar as the problem is intellectual, an intellectual response is required.“

Quote of the Week

Sadly, one of the symptoms of the “loss of the world” described above is the erasing of the history of peoples and events that don’t fit the ideal of a national story. George MacDonald Fraser, born one hundred years ago April 2 observed:

“I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I noted above the re-publication of the mysteries of Michael Innes as a welcome event. Publisher’s Weekly announced that another of my favorite author’s works are being reissued: Picador to Reissue More than 100 Novels by Georges Simenon. Both men were marvelous writers, first introduced to us on those green-spined Penguins!

One cannot help but write from the perspective of one’s time. But I’ve wondered if several books I’ve read recently would have been written differently after January 20 of this year.

The one pleasant surprise of yesterday was three new books I ordered from Barnes & Noble, arrived five days earlier than promised. I also used up a generous gift card, a retirement gift I finally redeemed. That was fun.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Wesley Hill, Easter

Tuesday: Christine Marie Eberle, Finding God Along the Way

Wednesday: William Kent Krueger, Vermilion Drift

Thursday: James F. McGrath, John of History, Baptist of Faith

Friday, David T. Koyzis, Citizenship Without Illusions

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for March 30-April 5, 2025!

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