I wish we could be done with talking about AI, at least as it has to do with the world of books and publishing. But this week brought more disturbing stories. Booksellers, including antiquarian booksellers receiving requests from AI companies to purchase old books. What is driving it is that with all the AI-slop in publishing, AI companies are looking for “slop-free” books to train its AI. Also, because of some court rulings deciding that “bought books” used to train AI may fall under “fair use” rather than copyright provisions, going this route is more attractive to avoid litigation.
Book publicist Kathleen Schmidt highlighted another problem. Writers are running into problems with “false-positive” AI scans of their works. And because AI scrapes so many of these writers, it may become increasingly difficult to distinguish human versus AI authored works. It makes me wonder if publishers might give up at some time. Schmidt’s article is so important I’ve featured it below.
I don’t know how to put the genie back into the bottle. But here’s what I’d like to see. Publishers say a hard “no” to AI works. Amazon says a hard “no” and stops allowing people to upload ten “self-published” books a week to their site. All booksellers and libraries reserve their shelves for human generated works. And those who submit AI works dishonestly are banned from publishing for at least ten years. And put in place protections to prevent rare and important works from being destroyed.
Five Articles Worth Reading
“Who Is Emma M. Lion, and Why Can’t Readers Get Enough of Her?” is the title of a profile of Beth Brower. Her self-published “diaries” of Victorian Emma M. Lion have been a hit. I found this fascinating simply for the fact that it is off the beaten path of what I read.
People have argued for some time of the importance of The Bible simply for cultural literacy. In “The Bible Belongs in the Classroom,” Adam Kirsch is the latest to make this case. But I think he might be saying more than he even intends when he concludes, “But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.”
Kathleen Schmidt’s article on “AI Accusations and Book Publishing” underscored for me the growing distrust of author submissions that has resulted from AI generated text and the threat this is to both aspiring and established writers.
Then one of the more fascinating reviews I came across this week was of The Disease of Boredom: From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Psychology by Josefa Ros Velasco. In “The Noonday Devil,” Valerie Stivers discusses acedia and the centuries of Christian thought about this “deadly sin.”
“Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else” explores the life of Patrick O’Brian who wrote novels, particularly the Aubrey-Maturin sea stories that were better than he was. I loved these books, both for the descriptions of sailing tall ships and for the deep relationship between Aubrey and Maturin.
Quote of the Week
Emily Brontë, born July 24, 1818 gives this blunt definition of honesty:
“Honest people don’t hide their deeds.”
Miscellaneous Musings
I’m curious whether the Odyssey will result in any long-term interest in the classics. I suspect more will come from those in the home-school and classical education movements.
I’m a good way into Ann Patchett’s Whistler. I’ve read a number of her works and have felt that as she matures, so do her characters in their outlook and choices. I wonder if others have felt this.
Finally, I’ve been wondering what I was reading in 1976. The only book which immediately comes to mind is Os Guinness In Two Minds, a fascinating book about doubt, still one of the best in my mind. He wrote so many other significant books, including The Call.
Next Week’s Reviews
Monday: The Month in Reviews: July 2026
Tuesday: Don Everts, Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs
Wednesday: Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors
Thursday: Cherryl Hunt, Nicholas J. Moore, and Timothy J. Murray, New Testament Ethics
Friday: Ann Patchett, Whistler
So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 26-August 1.
Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.
A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (The Felse Investigations, 4) Ellis Peters. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504027090) 2015, first published in 1965.
Summary: When a poet’s tomb is opened, two newer bodies are found, the poet’s is missing and his wife’s buried alive.
The Felse family is vacationing in Cornwall when they are drawn into a mysteries that are like a matryoshka doll, one inside the other. It all begins when Dominic Felse, their athletic eighteen year old son is walking along the shores and spies a young boy struggling in dangerous tidal waters. Young Felse jumps in to rescue him. But the young boy, Paddy Rosall resists rescue. He’d seen someone floating in the water. Dominic doesn’t see a body and so “rescues” young Paddy. As they get to shore, Paddy’s uncle Simon Towne sees them. And he attempts to search the waters. In vain.
All this serves to introduce the Felses to a close knit circle of relations. We also learn that Simon returned to do research that involves opening the tomb of Jan Treverra. He even invites George and Dominic Felse to help in opening the tomb. But they don’t find what they’d expected. When they open Jan’s vault, they discover the still-sodden body of Zebedee Trethuen, the church verger who begged Simon not to open the vault. Paddy had seen a body! Then they find another surprise. When they open the Jan’s casket, Jan’s bones aren’t there but rather the body of a more recently buried man. Later, when they return, they find items of treasure by Morwenna’s vault. They decide to open that vault. Morwenna’s body was there, but in a pose that showed she was buried alive and struggled to get out.
Meanwhile, Paddy has gone missing. They fear he saw the murderer and is in danger. But he was exploring a tunnel in which he found a gold piece after running off from chores. A relative just had told him of his adoption. Tim and Phil were not his biological parents. He had just needed to get away and think.
Mysteries within mysteries. Felse and local Detective Sergeant Hewitt investigate but it is Dominic who inadvertently comes up with a key clue. It’s in Jan and Morwenna’s epitaph.
And as for Paddy? I’ll leave you to discover how things resolve, but if you’ve read other Peter’s stories, you should know you won’t be unhappy with the end.
I loved the mysteries within mysteries stretching back to Jan and Morwenna, a fascinating plot. In addition, Peters offers fantastic bit of description of the deadly tide and the struggle of Paddy and Dominic that draws you into the story. I wasn’t quite sure of the reason for Tamsin Holt in the story, other than the electricity between her and Dominic. But then, it wouldn’t be a Peters story without a bit of romance!
Summary: A scientific and social history of this deadly disease seen up close in the struggle of one young man to live.
One of John Green’s passion is global health and particularly access to treatment for those with the least resources around the world. This took him to Sierra Leone and the Lakka Government Hospital where he met Henry Reider. He thought Henry was a young boy who volunteered by encouraging the patients. Then he learned that Henry was one of the patients. Also, he discovered that Henry was seventeen and that he had been ill with tuberculosis from childhood.
Through telling Henry’s story, Green helps us understand why tuberculosis, presently a curable disease, results in the death of over a million people a year. We learn of the delayed diagnosis, allowing the infection to be more deeply established in Henry’s lungs. Henry’s course of treatment was interrupted by a father who wanted to try religious healing practices. By then Henry’s infection was more drug resistant. And it was hard to get the second- and third-line drugs.
The infection stunted his growth by taking away his appetite. When patients respond to treatment, they get hungry. And in the poverty conditions Henry lived in, food was scarce. Nevertheless, Henry was ambitious to get an education, and go to college. But would he live when friends at the hospital were dying and his own conditioning worsening? John follows that story and the efforts of his doctor to get the drugs that would offer hope of a cure. Would he succeed and would it be in time?
For John Green, the story of one boy is illustrative of millions. While part of the book traces the history of the disease and attempts to treat it, the most significant message is the injustice evident in the lack of equitable access to the best treatments in an early manner: X-rays rather than sputum tests, access to and full compliance with treatment, prophylactic treatment of those with close exposures, and reduced costs for the newer drugs to treat drug resistant strains.
Behind all of this is the truth that of the million who will die of the disease this year, none need to. The problem isn’t the bacteria, it is the inequitable systems of health care delivery as well as poverty and crowding that increase exposures and undermine immunity.
But we don’t see so much of that in the West. Yet even in the U.S., 10,000 will die this year. And if we perpetuate the conditions to allow drug-resistant strains to develop further, we run the risk of an untreatable super-tuberculosis. But it is not just the possible consequences down the road. Rather, it is all the promising youth like Henry. Throughout history, tuberculosis has cut short promising lives in their prime.
John Green humanizes tuberculosis. We meet a young man not unlike our own children. And Green helps us understand that if we remain indifferent, it could be our child, our grand-child. And it doesn’t need to be…
Falling Into a Good Life (Literary Scholar), Laurel Richardson. Paper Stars Press (ISBN: 9781737862451) 2026.
Summary: Laurel Richardson miraculously recovered from a serious fall leading to a reinventing of her life in a new place.
One night, while ill with COVID, Laurel Richardson attempted to walk down her steps when she suffered COVID paralysis and fell down thirteen steps. She suffered a broken neck, back, arm, ribs, eye socket. She had a severe concussion. Her aide, Fatu called for help the next afternoon when Laurel didn’t answer her phone. The EMTs brought her to Ohio State’s Trauma Center. Her very life was on the line.
Family gathered around her. Even Suzanne, her son Josh’s ex-wife was there, massaging her feet. She would stay with Laurel and do this often. Suzanne asks Laurel to stay with them until her birthday, six weeks off. Laurel promises. She writes, “My sons know I have never ever broken a promise to them.” And she promises.
In this memoir, Laurel describes how she not only survived to celebrate her 87th birthday in 2023 but went through a hard fought but miraculous recovery with the support of family and friends and the skilled and compassionate help of medical and rehab specialists at Ohio State’s Brain and Spine Hospital. And as amazing as this was, considering many don’t survive such injuries or are seriously disabled, she went on to transition into a new and rich life situation, reinventing her life as she did so.
The first several chapters are prefaced with “Here’s what happened. Or didn’t. I don’t know.” It captures the experience of someone heavily medicated who finds herself in a strange place with all these injuries. She hallucinates. Her son Josh challenges her pain management and they reduce her medication to Tylenol. She slowly recovers. takes her first steps. Then she transitions to a re-hab facility, followed by an assisted living facility. As she feels better, she enters into the community. She also thinks about survival, the meaning of her life, and talks with a trusted rabbi about prayer. Friends visit including her writing group. Then the time comes when she can go home.
However, this comes with mixed feelings. Her family sets up the house for her to live on the first floor while grandson Akiva lives upstairs and helps her out. But she misses the people at her assisted living community. She sets up a group with friend to read Jewish texts on Sabbath. She’s doing well. Akiva is in a deepening relationship. But she doesn’t want to live alone in her home.
Through a friend, she learns of The Hartford, an over-55 community. She likes what she sees, and so do her family and friends. But the decision involves downsizing. She describes working with downsizing consultants who help with the process and manage the move–tremendously exhausting but they worked through the house determining what to keep, sell, give to family.
The last part of the memoir describes life in the new community. An emeritus sociology professor, Richardson recognizes all the things the facility does to make this a welcoming community–places for residents to talk any time of the day, groups, celebrations. She describes celebrating New Years Eve for the first time in twelve years. She walks us through her days and the changing seasons. The memoir concludes with a show of Richardson’s quilts in the entrance foyer, an expression of her life and a gift to her new-found community.
She sums up her fall and the new life it led to like this:
“The fall awakened my life source, kindled a resilience I didn’t know I had, and led me to accept both my gifts and my shadow side–I have found the right place for the embodied me to be me.”
Richardson narrates a journey of not only physical rehabilitation but also of spiritual transformation. Her narrative offers vivid descriptions of the healing process, transitioning out of and downsizing from a home, and the dynamics of a community that honors the uniqueness of seniors. Her narrative offers an example of the powerful influence of a loving circle of family and friends. and the gift of sensitive spiritual advisors, both Jewish and Christian in her case.
As a younger senior, I find myself wondering how I will navigate the final part of my life’s journey. The memoir was a tremendous encouragement that growth is possible through all the transitions, even health challenges. A good life needn’t be simply what I had in the past. Richardson describes a life of growing generosity, deepening community, and richer spirituality on the other side of her fall. Her story is one of hope and meaning from which we all may learn.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author for review.
Summary: A methodology for New Testament ethics centered on community, the cross, and the new creation.
When I was in seminary in the 1980’s, I took a course on ethics that used a text titled Can Ethics Be Christian? by James M. Gustafson. While making the useful point that one did not need to be Christian to be ethical, it also cast doubt on whether there was such a thing as a Christian ethic and how one might arrive at that. We had no books from Richard B. Hays back then. Later, around the time of the publication of The Moral Vision of the New Testament in 1996, I acquired a copy. And perhaps because of its daunting size, it remained on a stack of unread books.
Recently, Eerdmans sent me a copy of New Testament Ethics for review, re-visiting Hays book thirty years later. I thought before I read that book, I ought read this one. I will be reviewing the new book in the near future.
What Hays does in this book is establish a methodology of moving from the texts of the New Testament to applications to contemporary issues. He follows a four step process. He begins with describing the moral witness of the New Testament texts. Then, he synthesizes that material into three focal images he argues are foundational to New Testament ethics. From here, he engages the hermeneutical or interpretive task, drawing upon text as the “norming norm” but also weighing church tradition, reason, and experience. Finally, he addresses the pragmatic task of using this framework to address five “test cases” which vary in terms of the amount of textual material available. I’ll elaborate each step in greater detail:
Part One: The Descriptive Task
Hays begins with Paul. He notes the theological grounding of Paul in the eschatology of new creation, the centrality of the cross as the basis of Christian faithfulness, and the life of the redeemed community as Christ’s body. Hays separately deals with the deutero-Pauline letters, focus on the cosmic ecclesiology of Ephesians and the idea of the household of God in 1 Timothy. Then Hays turns to the synoptic gospels, noting a distinctive ethical focus for each: Mark on taking up the cross, Matthew on training for the kingdom, and Luke on liberation through the Spirit’s power. John’s gospel and epistles focus on love for each other. Finally Revelation focuses on resisting the Beast in light of the victory of the lamb and the new creation.
It should be noted that Hays does not address the contribution of Hebrews and the non-Johannine general epistles. He also offers his own assessment of “historical Jesus research” notably asserting that the burden of proof lies with those claiming inauthenticity. He argues against dismissing John’s gospel, particularly in light of its claim to be eyewitness testimony. And he argues for the resurrection as a historical event–not a popular position in 1996.
Part Two: The Synthetic Task
Hays begins by establishing three procedural guidelines. First, any synthesis must confront the full range of canonical witnesses. Then, allow tensions to stand. Finally, give attention to literary genre. With these in mind, Hays argues for three focal images arising from his descriptive work.
The first of these is community. “The church is a countercultural community of discipleship, and this community is the primary addressee of God’s imperatives.” When asking questions of God’s will, we ought ask, not “what should I do” but “what shoud we do?”
The second is the cross. “Jesus death on the cross is the paradigm for faithfulness to God in this world.” Walking in the way of the cross is not just for some individuals but for the whole community.
And lastly, the third is new creation. “The church embodies the power of the resurrection in the midst of a not-yet-redeemed world.
Hays addresses why he does not include love as a focal image. He argues that the full range of canonical material does not incorporate it. Love can also mean a variety of things. Finally, for Hays, love is subsumed in the theme of the cross.
Part Three: The Hermeneutical Task
Hays lays the groundwork for his proposals by asking how ethicists use scripture. In ethical discussion, ethicists will appeal to rules, principles, paradigms, and symbolic worlds, each of which is in scripture. He also notes the role tradition, reason, and experience play in interpretation. He then surveys five models of New Testament ethicists and how they apply (or fail to apply) these criteria: Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza.
Hays then offers ten guidelines that build on his work to this point:
Serious exegesis is a basic requirement. Texts used in ethical arguments should be understood as fully as possible in their historical and literary context.
New Testament texts must be read with careful attention to their Old Testament subtexts.
We must seek to listen to the full range of canonical witnesses.
Substantive tensions within the canon should be openly acknowledged.
Our synthetic reading of the New Testament canon must be kept in balance by the sustained use of three focal images: community, cross, and new creation.
New Testament texts must be granted authority (or not) in the mode in which they speak (i.e., rule, principle, paradigm, symbolic world).
All four modes are valid and necessary.
We should not override the witness of the New Testament in one mode by appealing to another mode.
The New Testament is fundamentally the story of God’s redemptive action; thus, the paradigmatic mode has theological primacy, and narrative texts are fundamental resources for normative ethics.
Extra-biblical sources (i.e. tradition, reason and experience) stand in a hermeneutical relation to the New Testament; they are not independent, counterbalancing sources of authority.
It is impossible to distinguish “timeless truth” from “culturally conditioned elements” in the New Testament.
The use of the New Testament in normative ethics requires an integrative act of the imagination; thus, whenever we appeal to the authority of the New Testament, we are necessarily engaged in metaphor-making.
Right reading of the New Testament occurs only where the Word is embodied.
Part Four: The Pragmatic Task
In this last part of the book, Hays offers five “test cases” of reaching ethical conclusions on the basis of the methodology he has outlined. He states:
“As I take a stand on these five issues, some of which are bitterly controversial, it is impoirtant to emphasize that I do not presume to speak ex cathedra. Rather, I offer a series of discernments to the church in prayerful humility.”
The five issues he addresses are violence, divorce, homosexuality, anti-Judaism, and abortion. He notes at the outset the different ways the New Testament speaks to each. In the case of violence, the witness is both pervasive and univocal against it. On divorce, the passages share a common perspective, but differing casuistic developments that lead to diverse applications. The texts on homosexuality are univocal but few and not central to the gospel story. However, with anti-Judaism, the textual evidence is in tension, and the interpreter has to prioritize what will be the controlling texts. Finally, the New Testament does not directly address abortion.
While peoples discuss Hays on homosexuality the most (particularly in light of his changing views in a book he co-authored with his son Chris shortly before his death), the most challenging material in many ways is that on violence. He argues for pacifism as the only biblically defensible ethic, arguing Jesus epitomizes it in his own paradigmatic death.
On homosexuality, while arguing against same-sex intimacy for believers, he states that “insofar as the church fails to teach clearly about heterosexuality outside of marriage, its disapproval of homosexual coupling will appear arbitrary and biased.” He argues for inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church. I found the position both forthright and gracious and want to see how he has changed his view in The Widening of God’s Mercy. While not having read the book yet, I sense from other reviews that Hays has not changed his reading of the passages. Rather, he has changed in how he reads them in the light of the whole of scripture and in light of experience.
One striking observation is how Hays approaches abortion through the lens of community. He observes how often the church puts the burden of decision and responsibility on young women. Rather, what would happen if the community shared the burden and responsibility of raising a child?
Conclusion and Appraisal
In his conclusion Hays briefly but inadequately discusses the sharing of possessions in the church. I wish this had been one of the test cases, as it is especially an important issue among wealthy Western churches. I also wonder about his conclusions about love as a focal image. A stronger case could be made for this on a canonical basis.
Overall, I appreciated his careful elaboration of a methodology for arriving at ethical judgments on the basis of the New Testament. His three focal images offer a substantive foundation. The test cases model thorough application coupled with humility. While this work is the subject of much critique, that fact argues for its significance. Hays offers a thoroughgoing methodology that takes scripture seriously as the “norming norm.” At the same time, he also recognizes the tensions in that material and avoids reductive judgments. No wonder this book continues to be the subject of scholarly discussion thirty years later.
The Way of Dante (Hansen Lectureship Series), Richard Hughes Gibson, afterword by Nicole Mazzarella. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514013380) 2025.
Summary: Lectures exploring how C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams read Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”
This book is not a work of literary criticism of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. At least not directly. Rather, it is a study of how three literary friends interacted over their mutual love for Dante. In this book, Richard Hughes Gibson retraces the conversations, correspondence, and scholarship of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams about Dante. And that fits the purpose of the Hansen Lectureship Series of the Marion E. Wade Center, at which these lectures were first given. The Center houses a collection of the papers of these three authors as well as those of J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and Owen Barfield. Each year, the Hansen Lectureship features scholars highlighting some aspect of the thought and work of these writers.
Hughes introduces this study by describing what he found in his study of the papers. What he found was “a cohort of Dante readers whose invocation of Dante–public and private, conspicuous and covert–comprise a network of allusions, quotations, and citations” (p. xxiv, italics in the original). Each picked up on different things–Sayers his narrative and humor, Lewis, his cosmology and the language he used to describe it, and Williams, the portrayal of romantic love and Dante’s use of allegory.
Hughes then gives a prehistory of each author’s encounter with Dante. This is followed by a brief summary of the genesis of how the three came together around their shared love of Dante. It can be summarized in the six subtitles of the chapter:
Williams reads Lewis (or the Allegory of Love affair)
Lewis reads Williams and recommends his book (The Figure of Beatrice)
Sayers reads Williams (and then Dante)
Williams reads Sayers (reading and rendering Dante)
Lewis reads Sayers’ Dante criticism and translation
Sayers reads Lewis (and writes him and Williams into her translation)
Besides the fact that these people did a lot of reading, it was particularly illuminating to learn of the role Williams played in encouraging Sayers to read Dante, and then his (and Lewis’s) warm response to her critical essays and translation of Inferno. He even agreed to write an Introduction to her work. However, Williams died in 1944, unable to fulfill that commitment. Hughes then follows their interactions through the three parts of The Divine Comedy.
Firstly, with Hell, we see the perception of all three that this is more than political commentary. Rather, it is a serious reflection on evil in all its forms. Secondly, Hughes focuses on how all three saw in Purgatory an ascent of increasing love. Finally, in Paradiso, we see the three wrestle with the nature of glory in the encounter with Beatrice. Hughes spends two chapters on this in “The Problem of Glory” and “The Patterns of Glory.” In between the chapters on Hell and Purgatory, Hughes inserts a lengthy chapter on allegory. In this case, the three understood allegory and symbol in different ways and Hughes teases out the nuances of difference between them.
The work left me regretting that I never got beyond Inferno in my reading of Dante. It also underscored what a rich experience might be found in reading (and re-reading) Dante with “a cohort of readers.” However, even if we are unable to do so, we are able to listen in on the discussions of these three Dante readers. Hughes work of mining their papers reveals another facet of our indebtedness to these three beyond the considerable gift of their published works. They also shined a spotlight on one of the greatest works of literature and its abiding significance.
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
