Ally Carter. See How They Run. New York: Scholastic, 2016. Print.

See How They Run is part two in the Embassy Row series. This is going to be at least a trilogy. If it imitates the author’s Gallagher Girl series, expect five or six volumes. Be patient.

See How They Run continues the adventures of Grace Blakely, granddaughter to the American ambassador to Adria. This appears to follow more closely the formula of the Gallagher Girls stories except that it is slightly more believable. This episode is an improvement over the first in the series, All Fall Down.

In this episode, Grace’s brother Jamie is visiting. He is on semester break from West Point. Grace and most of her acquaintances we have met in part one join her brother and his army friend, another cadet, at an outdoor party. Spence, Jamie’s friend, gets in a fight with Alexei, Jamie and Grace’s Russian friend. The next day Spence’s body is found with a broken neck. Alexei is immediately blamed as multiple cell phone videos of the fight at the party are posted on the Internet.

Much of the story this time involves the group of friends trying to prove Alexei’s innocence. In doing so, of course, they get involved in both international intrigue and Adrian politics. This is a better paced and overall more effective novel than the first. There are two things that help its execution: (1) We have a lot of the background history of Adria and its capital Valancia as well as of the various embassy brats from part one, so we do not have to re-hash those things; (2) Grace is beginning to deal with her past and happy to have her brother around, so she is learning to get along better with others. She is becoming a more sympathetic character.

Although both books so far get their titles from nursery rhymes, there does not appear to be much of a connection between the rhymes and the novels. In fact, in See How They Run there is an Adrian kids’ song that is repeated throughout the story because it is set during a two week festival similar to the French Bastille Day when the people of Adria celebrate the overthrow of the royal family that ruled in the 1700s—although the actual celebration sounds more like Guy Fawkes’ Day with bonfires, masks, costumes, and general mayhem. The song is sung during the celebration but has a connection with the drama at Embassy Row.

Do NOT spoil the book and read the last page until you have read it all. The last page nearly wrecks the book. I have written in the past that even though the lead characters are female in Ally Carter’s books, guys would probably like them because of the suspense and adventure. That is true of See How They Run until the last page. I suspect that boys reading it will come to the last page and groan, “Is it chick lit after all?”

Yevgeny Zamyatin. We. Trans. Natasha Randall. 1923; New York: Modern Library, 2006. Print.

I have seen We billed as the original dystopian novel. As best I can tell, it is. E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” was published in 1909, but this is the first novel with such a theme.

Orwell wrote a review of We in 1946 while he was working on 1984. He would later suggest, probably correctly, that Aldous Huxley had read We before writing Brave New World.

I recommend this edition of the book. Not only is it a lively translation, but the Foreword by Bruce Sterling and the translator’s Introduction are very helpful.

Prior to We, futuristic novels about planned societies and socialist utopias were propaganda novels like House’s Philip Dru: Administrator, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or even Jack London’s The Iron Heel. They all imagined a happy, peaceful future with superior minds and governments in charge. We was one of the first to suggest that such a society might operate as a well-oiled machine might, but true humanity would be stifled.

Zamyatin (spelled various ways in the Roman alphabet) had been a relatively early adopter of Russian Communism. He was imprisoned and exiled to the provinces in 1905. He sneaked back and was exiled again in 1911.

He went to England where, among other things, he studied the socialist writings of H. G. Wells. He returned to Russia to join the revolution, but it seemed that Lenin did not like him any more than the Tsar had. He was arrested in 1919 and 1922 in spite of his friendship with Maxim Gorky. He was allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. in 1931 and settled in France where he died in 1937. He wrote some short stories, but We is his only novel.

We takes place in the distant future where the world is ruled by the One State whose leader, the Benefactor, has been unanimously elected for each of the last 48 years. The story is told by D-503—the people are ciphers, literally—who is a scientist working on the Integral, a space ship whose ultimate goal is to bring the One State ideology to the rest of the universe, “to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours.” (61)

What is most striking about We is not the plot but narrative technique. Zamyatin was applying avant-garde art techniques to writing. It reads more like a contemporary postmodern piece out of Eastern Europe than something written nearly a century ago.

Each chapter presents itself as a short, hastily written diary entry of D-503. He discovers a lost humanity in his mind: He falls in love; he begins having dreams; he discovers a band of uncivilized people in the wilderness not unlike the Indian reservation of John the Savage in Brave New World. What he has been taught about humanity and happiness has been turned on its ear. How can he know what is really true?

D-503 is a mathematician, so there are many mathematical references. He describes faces and objects in nature as geometric figures. Since emotions are no longer accepted in the culture, he uses colors and shapes when he is trying to express an emotion. His chapters have keywords as though he were putting together a math text. If We draws from any previous work of literature, it is probably closer to Euclid’s Elements than anything.

Zamyatin clearly kept up with the science of his day, hinting at space travel as hypothesized by Einstein. Still, the telephones still have dials, and how much more could D-503 had rapturously meditated on shapes if he had known about fractals!

We is the grandfather of the dystopian novels. It is a challenge to read—but a delight as well.

As Lenin envisioned, children are immediately taken up by the state. We implies that a woman who has a child is then killed to insure that no emotional connection is maintained. “Pure reason,” as Kant would say. The One State culture admires Taylor and Ford who promoted efficiency. Thoreau wrote in “On Civil Disobedience” that the state is an expedient. Socialism turns his critique on its ear and claims a totally planned society is superior because it is the most expedient.

“Our poets don’t soar in the empyrean any more; they came down to earth; they keep step with us…” (61)

Here is something the United States Supreme Court should take to heart. The court seems to be granting “rights” because it can, it is supreme after all. But is that what the true meaning of a right is? This dystopian definition sounds a lot like the Court’s definition in recent years:

Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power [rex lex anyone?]. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On the one side is the “I,” on the other is the “WE,” the one state. Isn’t that clear? Assuming that “I” has the same “rights” compared to the State is exactly the same thing as assuming a gram can counterbalance a ton.(103)

Pure Hume or Hegel! Definitely not Locke or Jefferson!

The reader can recognize some of the above as elements of Brave New World. But the temptations of the subversive I-330 are precursors to those of Winston’s girlfriend Julia in 1984. And the ending? Well, you will have to see for yourselves.

We is well worth reading! When we take a look at the world today, it is probably closer to We than any of the other novels be they utopian or dystopian. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Gordon Korman. Masterminds: Criminal Destiny. New York: Harper, 2016. Print.

This is part two of Gordon Korman’s Masterminds series. While it could be read on its own, Criminal Minds is meant to be read in order. The title suggests the main psychological conflict.

Four young teens have escaped the treacly-nice pseudo-Utopia of Serenity. They discovered that they were cloned from four different notorious criminals. The question is simple—are they genetically programmed to be bad or does it depend on their upbringing? As they say, Nature or Nurture? (The humorous answer is simply, “Either way, it’s your parents’ fault!”)

In this volume of the story, the question is somewhat moot. Technically, they are runaways. Yes, they are the subjects of a cruel science experiment, but to escape they have to steal cars and do other things to evade the Purple People Eaters—a.k.a. the Serenity Security Force.

Gordon Korman’s humorous adventure stories often involve break-ins or break-outs. Most of his Swindle stories had one or the other or both: break into the store of a crooked sports card dealer, break out of a cabin in the woods while being held hostage.

A lot of Korman’s humor comes from fish out of water situations his characters find themselves in such as Born to Rock or the hilarious Gifted. Here is one example.

Remember that our four escapees have been misled so much about the real world that they really do not know a lot about how things work or how they are perceived. For example, the Serenity school taught them that the Boston Tea Party was a literal British tea time where American and English officials cordially negotiated American independence.

When the kids get to a big city, they discover that cloning humans is illegal worldwide. So Amber walks up to a policeman and tells him that she and three of her friends are clones that have recently escaped from a cloning experiment in the New Mexico desert. The next thing she knows, she is being taken in for psychiatric observation.

What does that mean? Another breakout , of course!

The biggest breakout is yet to come. That will involve one of the criminal master minds whom one of the kids is cloned from. There will be no spoilers here!

Criminal Minds is wild and entertaining. One could argue that the novel is not only raising a question about nature vs. nurture but also questions about just government and even just war. The characters themselves are all twelve and thirteen, right around the age that most of us discover that the world can be a pretty unfair and unforgiving place.

Ally Carter. All Fall Down. New York: Scholastic, 2015. Print. An Embassy Row Novel.

All Fall Down is the first in what looks like will be another Young Adult series by Gallagher Girls author Ally Carter. This resembles the books in that first series because All Fall Down also involves international intrigue. Only, this time instead of straight espionage like the Gallagher Girls who attended a school for spies, this novel is set in an embassy.

Sixteen year old Grace (I do not believe her last name is given) witnessed her mother’s death three years ago. She saw the man whom she is certain killed her mother. However, everyone tells her that her mother died when a fire burned her antique shop down. Grace spent nearly a year under mental observation complete with drugs and cuffs because she insisted she saw her mother die at the hands of a man with a distinctive scar on his face.

When her Army major father gets sent into a battle zone, she is sent to the American Embassy in the nation of Adria (think Croatia or Slovenia) where her grandfather has been the American ambassador for twenty-five years. This is where her mother grew up and, because she was an Army brat, the closest place she has to a home. The problem is that her grandfather and others at the embassy treat her like damaged goods. “I am not crazy,” she says to virtually everyone she talks to.

When she discovers the man with the scar in Adria and overhears him talking about an assassination, she gets very scared. This story is a teen thriller and keeps the pages turning.

Grace is not necessarily a terribly likeable character, but we do understand her paranoia. She is still recovering from watching her mother die the way she did, especially when no one believes her. The story is told in the first person, so we do understand what Grace is thinking, and we certainly can sympathize with her situation.

She does make some friends on the Adria Embassy Row including Rosie, a tiny German ex-gymnast; Noah, son of a Brazilian soccer star and an Israeli diplomat; Megan, another girl who has lived at the American Embassy most of her life; and Alexi, a Russian friend of her older brother who is at West Point. Together they do have an array of skills and contacts, but Grace’s defensive personality tends to push everyone away.

The conflict is not just due to the mystery and the accusations about Grace, but also those teen interpersonal conflicts aggravated by serious trauma. Like Cold Fury, this is not teen chick lit. It is an easy thriller on a number of levels. Not only is there the sinister man with the scar, but catacombs from Roman times and strange happenings at the abandoned Iranian Embassy. There is a lot going on.

One warning, like Carter’s Gallagher Girls books, it is clear that Grace’s story is meant to continue. I am sure a part two is in the works. Indeed it is already labeled as An Embassy Row Novel. While one of the main mysteries is solved, there are a lot of dangling loose ends. I suspect that it may take a few volumes to tie them all up.

John Taylor Gatto. An Underground History of American Education. Rev. Ed. Michael H. Keehn, 2003. E-book.

I had a friend who would share articles he copied with others. Many times he would highlight passages with a yellow highlighter. Occasionally he’d say, “This one is so good, I just wanted to dip the whole page in a bucket of yellow ink.” An Underground History of American Education is a book that ought to be soaked in yellow highlighter ink. This is one powerful book.

Gatto’s thesis, which he exhaustively documents, is that American education in the twentieth century has accomplished precisely what people a hundred years ago were hoping to accomplish. Yes, that includes a dumbing-down and increasing dependency. Here is Woodrow Wilson:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. (1280) [All references are Kindle locations, not page numbers].

The author was for many years a middle school teacher in Harlem. He was recognized twice as a teacher of the year for New York City and once for the whole State of New York. He eventually resigned out of frustration. His resignation letter was published in The Wall Street Journal. As much as he would do things to improve his students’ abilities, the powers that be would ultimately thwart his plans and ideas. Why? he would ask. His conclusion was that the problem was systemic.

He began researching the origins of the modern public school system, starting with Horace Mann and focusing on the first four or five decades of the Twentieth Century. Things were pretty much in place by World War II and have not changed that much since.

Interestingly, part of his thesis is reminiscent of complaints we are hearing during the 2016 election cycle. Big business and big government have scratched each other’s backs for so long, and the ordinary citizen loses his rights and is forgotten. A National Education Association (NEA) director said government and business together would “accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.” (1325) This was not a complaint. This was an announcement made by the NEA in 1933 about what it hoped to do.

Gatto goes into great detail that this planning was understood to be “scientific.” As he puts it, “The entire academic community here and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time [1930] and to this contingent [the NEA] school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny.” (1431) This included “selective breeding” and outright racism like Darwin’s Descent of Man. We are reminded this was not only a time of eugenics, but even forced sterilization, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927.

I recall being told by David Bradshaw, Oxford don and expert on Aldous Huxley, that Brave New World was not originally meant as a dystopia, but to give an idea of what a planned society might look like. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s, Huxley was an advocate of central planning and at the time was sympathetic to both Germany and the Soviet Union. (In fairness to Huxley, he would change, as we know both from the 1946 introduction he wrote for Brave New World as well as his 1958 Brave New World Revisited.)

One quotation from Arnold Gesell, who as early as 1909 was calling for schools to advance racial purity, was so blatantly racist that he would have been kicked off the Yale faculty if he were still there today. Yet many schools still use his techniques for screening and tracking students. Gatto puts it this way:

What gradually began to emerge form this was a Darwinian caste-based American version of institutional schooling remote-controlled at long distance, administered through a growing army of hired hands, layered into intricate pedagogical hierarchies on the old Roman principle of divide and conquer. (1500,1501)

Even since 1960, the number of elected local school boards had shrunk from over 40,000 to about 15,000 in 1998. (1688) He notes that in 1991 the New York City school system had more school administrators than the entire continent of Europe. (9037) In most places today, parents have little input or connection to their children’s education.

By 1944, a repudiation of Jefferson’s idea that mankind had natural rights was resonating in every corner of academic life. Any professor who expected free money from foundations, corporations, or government agencies had to play the scientific management string on his lute. (1506)

By 1996 Time magazine would editorialize that democracy was outmoded: “The modern world is too complex to allow the man or woman in the street to interfere in its management.” (1512)

Despite the century-long harangue that school was the cure for unevenly spread wealth, exactly the reverse occurred—wealth was 250 percent more concentrated at century’s end than at its beginning…it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. (1522-28)

Gatto is an English teacher, and what he shares about literature, it sounds like he was exciting in the classroom. “I always knew school books and real books were different. Most kids do.” (1535) “Real books demand that people actively participate by asking their own questions. Books that show you best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it.” (1570)

Preach it, brother!

There is so much more. This book helped me understand things that have happened in my teaching experience. Now, all except for one year, I taught in private schools, so the students were generally treated with more respect than Gatto’s Harlem experience. Still, nearly everyone had to go through some teacher education program, and some teachers and administrators and most education professors have partaken of the elitist Kool-Aid to some degree.

An Underground History of American Education is not a conspiracy theory text. The author cites hundreds of sources. Yes, including Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and many others. He lets the founders of the system speak for themselves. The one problem with the book is that the author often does not give the references. Many times when he does, they are only partial. I recognized a few because I had read them before and knew his attribution was correct. That is a technical problem that will turn off some readers.

Gatto suggests that teachers who really motivate their students and get their students to advance are going against the grain. They may have to be subversive—in a word, the true underground. Indeed, among other recommendations that he makes, he encourages parents to try home schooling. His last chapter is worth reading to get an idea of what can work. Social engineers are not going to like it, but do we want a Brave New World or a one that respects life, liberty, and property?

I cannot help making a connection between An Underground History of American Education and C. S. Lewis’s lectures which became known as The Abolition of Man. Lewis was expressing a philosopher’s concern that many materialistic ideas rooted in speculative teachers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Carnegie, and others would result in the abolition of man. He did not mean an extinction of the human race; he meant people with no feelings or moral awareness—an awareness, for example, that they are made in the image of God, that hey have consciences, and that God has put eternity in their hearts. (See Ecclesiastes 3:11) Lewis was speaking philosophically and from history. Read Gatto and see how it is being done, how the powers that be are turning mankind into mere automata and how mankind is coming to be abolished.

O. S. Hawkins. The Jesus Code. Nashville: Nelson, 2014. Print.

A few years back there was a book called The Bible Code, which purported to find all kinds of prophetic historical facts embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Then, of course, there was The Da Vinci Code, which claimed to reveal a secret life of Jesus on earth after his ministry. Of course, there were numerous knock-offs of both books.

Well, The Jesus Code is nothing like either of those “code” books. To be honest, the title may be a bit misleading because of titles like those just mentioned. Having said that, this is a concept book worth reading.

There are numerous books out there asking questions about Christianity and the Bible—”If God is good, why is there evil” sort of thing. This is different. The Jesus Code asks fifty-two questions from the Bible for the reader to answer. The author then gives his answer to each—mostly based on other things the Bible says.

The reader is certainly free to disagree with Hawkins’ answers, but he picked some very good questions. Here are a few:

        Has God indeed said?
        Who am I?
        How long will you falter between two opinions?
        If a man dies, shall he live again?
        Who can find a virtuous wife?
        Is it right for you to be angry?
        Lord, what do you want me to do?
        What must I do to be saved?

Two questions and answers in this book are done especially well. They are both questions that Jesus asked His disciples:

        Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?
        Who do you say that I am?

Even when He walked the earth, people had a lot of theories about who Jesus was. They still do. Then, more important for the individual reader is to answer that question for him or herself: Who do you say Jesus is?

For the most part The Jesus Code does a direct and clear job answering those tough questions. God asks these questions in the Bible to challenge our thinking. Hawkins does a nice job for the reader of pointing them out and getting us to think.

One slight caveat—the author is a cessationist. He believes God seldom, if ever, performs miracles these days. That is too bad for him, I suppose, but most Bible-believing Christian in most parts of the world understand both the necessity and the power of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps there is one more question from the Bible to ask:

        Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?
        (Acts 19:2 KJV)

Even so, The Jesus Code is well worth reading. The chapters are short, so you can read them quickly or, perhaps, spend some time yourself meditating on each question.

Who do you say Jesus is?

Brandilyn Collins. Double Blind. Nashville TN: B and H, 2012. Print.

Double Blind is a curious thriller. It is marketed, as it should be, as a plot-driven suspense story like those of Danielle Steele. It even refers to Jason Bourne. However, its main plot element is straight out of science fiction—not outer space sci-fi, but high-tech sci-fi like Cory Doctorow. Like his Little Brother, it is even set in the San Francisco Bay area in the very near future.

Lisa Newberry has been battling depression since her husband died about a year ago. A tech startup called Cognoscenti has developed a microchip known as the Empowerment Chip that is implanted in the brain to cure depression. Lisa is looking for anything that will take her out of her melancholia, so she volunteers to be a beta tester for this procedure.

After some minimally invasive brain surgery, her chip kicks in. The depression is gone! It is a miracle for Lisa.

Then something weird happens. She starts remembering something that never happened to her. She replays in her mind over and over a murder that she commits. But it is not her memory. Indeed, she sees everything from the perspective of a tall man who strangles his girlfriend , hides the body in a zippered suitcase, drives to a body of water, and tosses the suitcase into the water.

It is as though the chip has planted the memory of someone else in her head.

With the help of a police sketch artist whom she hires, she is able to actually identify the victim. From the details of the house and the automobile in her memory, she identifies the man, too. He is Dr. Hilderbrand, the rich and powerful CEO of Cognoscenti.

Clearly, I do not want this review to be a spoiler, but Double Blind‘s plot is clever. There are numerous twists, and things are not as they seem. Frankly, it could make a decent film.

There are surprises right to the very end. Still, it is not too much to say that the first few chapters very effectively describe what it is like to be depressed. We understand why our protagonist would even consider such a procedure: anything to get rid of this hopelessness…

As I was talking about this book to another person who had read Double Blind, she thought it was a cautionary tale about the mark of the Beast from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Implanted chips could be used to keep track of financial transactions but also keep track of people. The name Cognoscenti does have Latin roots and similar meaning to—dare I say it—Illuminati. Beware and be wise. Enjoy the tale.

Steven R. Schirripa and Charles Fleming. Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family. Perf. Joe Grifasi. New York: Random, 2005. Audio CD.

Twelve-year-old Nicholas Borelli, Jr., was supposed to go to a posh summer camp for three weeks while his parents went on a cruise. A sudden health emergency closed the camp right before Nicholas’s session was to begin. His parents asked Nicholas Sr.’s widowed mother if she would be willing to take her only grandson for that time. Of course, she would.

What she did not tell Nicholas’s parents was that her other son Francis (Frankie) was living with her after his divorce. Frankie and Nicholas, Sr., had not spoken in years.

For the first time in his life, Nicholas discovers his father’s roots—roots his father never mentioned and seems to want to avoid. His grandmother still lives in the same Brooklyn apartment where she and Nicholas’s grandfather raised his father and his uncle.

When Nicholas pulls up in a chauffeured Lincoln and kids in the neighborhood start pounding on the car, he knows it is going to be a lot different from the tony New Jersey suburb where he lives. “Open up!” “Hey, Richie Rich!”

Immediately, Nicholas’s Uncle Frankie tries to educate him in the ways of urban Italian-Americans. No one is going to respect an Italian who goes by the name of Nicholas. He’s got to be Nick or Nicky. His father was already Nicky, so he’ll be Nicky the Second or, better yet, Nicky Deuce.

So that is how Nicky (formerly Nicholas) is introduced to the goombas at Frankie’s social club. The guys all have nicknames like Sallie the Butcher, Jimmy the Iceman, and Oscar the Undertaker. When Nicky sneaks a look into the gym bag Frankie always carries to work, he finds a Kevlar vest and some pistols. As they say, welcome to the family.

It seems that Nicky’s parents still want his life structured, so they tell his grandmother to send him to summer school. Nicky is an A student at an exclusive prep school. He does not need summer school. That is for kids who flunk. But he goes.

Yes, he does get picked on some, but he also learns to hold his own. He bails out a classmate named Tommy on what is to Tommy a tricky math question. Still, Nicky learns that while Tommy claims that he cannot do math formulas, he has discovered cheats for the great Dark Planet video game on his own. In other words, he is not stupid.

Nicky also develops a crush on a girl in that math class. He thinks Donna is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. Tommy warns him, though, that her ex-boyfriend Conrad is a bully whom Nicky has already met. He just might be looking for an excuse to cause “Richie Rich” more pain.

He goes to the movies with Tommy (short for Tomasino), and Tommy includes Nicky in on a deal to make some easy money. A man who has a makeshift office in the back of a dry cleaner’s gives the boys $100 in twenties and tells them to spend as much as they want and bring back $50.00 to him in tens or smaller bills. Is this counterfeit? Traceable serial numbers from a robbery? Who makes money in such an easy way? It reminded this reader of the way Jay Gatsby may have made money off stolen bonds.

The bully Conrad becomes the least of Nicky’s worries when another of Tommy’s contacts—Frankie would call him a real wiseguy or goodfella—offers the boys $80.00 each to deliver two small packages wrapped like shirts from a cleaner. Nicky can’t sleep that night. Why hasn’t Frankie returned in three days? Why can’t the guy deliver the packages himself? Why was his uncle’s name in a newspaper article about a building blown up in a gang war that is on the same block as the warehouse where they are to deliver the packages?

Two men are missing and presumed dead from that explosion. Is Frankie one of them? Or is he responsible for their deaths? None of the other men in the social club have been around either. How did those guys get nicknames like Butcher and Undertaker anyhow?

Welcome to the family, Nicky. And keep smiling.

P.S. The recorded audio version of this story is great. Mr. Grifasi is an effective story teller and does the voices in authentic Brooklynese. He must be a goomba himself.

Gordon Mursell. English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville KY: Westminster, 2001. Print.

English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day is a history of Christian teaching and experience in England in the last 300 years. It focuses on various movements and individuals to come up with a fascinating and well-researched overview. It is very helpful to anyone interested in English literature and history as well as the theology. Paul Jehle calls literature the handmaid to history. If that is so, then religion is the mistress of both.

Mursell devotes chapters the people and movements emphasizing their beliefs and how they fit in with what was going on in Christianity as a whole, not just the Anglican Church.

The first of three major divisions describes the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It tells of reform movements like the Great Awakening and Methodism. The author pulls out important writings and sermons by Whitefield and the Wesleys as well as opponents to Christianity like Gibbon. He notes the mainline Anglican and Catholic approaches as well. He includes Dissenters like Defoe and a number of other well-known writers.

He does a direct and honest study of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. He puts William Blake among the orthodox believers, something I was surprised at since Blake seems to known for his syncretism. After all, one of his collections is called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Mursell makes a case that Blake, while taking artistic license, was at his core still a Christian.

William Law is still read and cited in some circles today. Perhaps it was the author’s choice of selections, but most the quotations from Law made him sound legalistic and even angry. The contrast with Isaac Watts could not have been stronger. If one were to read just the dozen or so pages on Watts, he would be edified. That was the most uplifting chapter of the entire book. Although best known for his hymns, Watts wrote other things as well, and love of God and the joy of salvation in Jesus shines through all his works cited here.

The section on the Victorian era may be most helpful for the student of literature. Many of the issues and controversies in the church and the culture are reflected in the literature of the time. The treatment of Dickens and George Eliot are especially helpful for literary study and to illustrate the cultural changes of the period.

Although I have read little of Cardinal Newman, I recall being taught that he was a mighty force for orthodoxy in nineteenth-century England: that without him England would have fallen away entirely. I was therefore disappointed in the chapter on Newman. He seemed pretty ordinary and not especially inspiring. However, the chapter on his disciple Gerard Manley Hopkins provided a lot of understanding into that poet’s life and works.

English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day shares many perspectives from this time from the Nonconformists like Darby and the Irvingites to Unitarians. In all cases the book keeps a narrative thread but lets the people speak for themselves. Among all this variety, the treatment appears fair and evenhanded.

The section on the twentieth century is entitled “Losing our Absolute,” an appropriate choice of words. Here Mursell sometimes uses the term spirituality very loosely, but in a manner that many contemporaries do use it. Still, he discusses writers and speakers who point to the “older ways” like Chesterton, Lewis, and Sayers.

In England it appears that Pentecostalism was largely a phenomenon among Blacks. And the book points out the trends among the skeptics in the church—those who belong to and even ordained, especially Anglicans and Catholics, who really do not take the Scriptures seriously or, at best, choose the parts they like. So he notes feminists, anti-war activists, the effects of psychology, and the like.

While not light reading, this is a great book for background and for helping us understand England and, to a great degree, the English-speaking world. Of all the authors, speakers, and clergy represented, I was most familiar with Coleridge, having done my college thesis on him and having read him pretty widely. Mursell does a more than adequate study on Coleridge and presents his life and ideas fairly and accurately. That gave me confidence that his take on others would be fair and accurate.

He wraps us his chapters on Blake and Coleridge with a quotation from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection which brought back memories of my college studies and which I would learn a few years later is precise and true:

Christianity ‘is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life…TRY IT!’ (60, emphases in original)

Walker Percy. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, 1983. Print.

Carlo Rovelli. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

I read a Walker Percy novel years ago, got a little kick out of it, but never ready anything else by him until a friend gave me Lost in the Cosmos. It is actually listed as nonfiction, and I suppose it is, but there are so many entertaining hypothetical questions in the “questionnaire” portion of the “self-help” material, that it borders on fiction. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Percy wisely and cleverly deals with the contemporary Western identity crisis which, if anything, has gotten more pronounced since he wrote in 1983.

I am mostly going to let Percy speak for himself. He notes that the human being “is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos.” (2) Percy uses that word rather than universe or creation because he has fun at the expense of Carl Sagan who used that word in his television show and his books.

He notes many funny things about human behavior as he asks twenty “self-help” questions—many based on complicated scenarios, such as imagining you have just returned to earth after a 400-year near light-speed space voyage—in 260 pages. Like many others, he is aware that people want to learn about things, yet it seems that they feel like they do not belong anywhere. He notes that it appears people wonder “why the autonomous self feels so alone in the cosmos” and “want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak.” The feeling is, of course, if we could figure out how to converse with other animals (not that it truly is possible), then we would not feel so alone. We make great technical achievements, but also make great messes of the world and of our lives.

Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior—superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive—and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. (169)

He really points out how foolish materialistic thinking is, yet how so much of the so-called elite like politicians, scientists, and doctors of all kinds take it for granted.

The following incident occurred at Harvard University, presumably a citadel of objective knowledge. I quote from an article by Charles Krauthammer (The New Republic, July 25, 1981): “Several years ago the great Australian neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, ended a Harvard lecture on brain organization by admitting that although evolution could account for the brain, it could not, in his view, account for the mind, with its mysterious capacity for consciousness and thought: only something transcendent could account for that. The audience began hissing.”

The anomaly lies in the fact that Harvard audiences presumably endowed with mind, consciousness, and thought, and presumably with more intellectual curiosity than most, might have been expected to welcome the views of a famous neurobiologist on the subject—particularly in view of the failure of academic psychology to even address itself to these matters. (166)

A few of notes on this. First, of course, it does illustrate the desire for a merely material explanation for all existence especially among the elite. Why? No accountability. Second, it has been standard practice at Harvard, except among the real radicals who act ugly, to hiss when they dislike or disagree with a lecturer. Third, I can easily imagine Dr. Eben Alexander back in the late seventies or early eighties in such an audience and roundly hissing himself. However, now he knows there is more. He had all kinds of experiences with vivid consciousness for a week when his brain had flatlined.

Four, while there are some Harvard students who are interested in objective inquiry, it is remarkable how many want to use whatever education they acquire to confirm or justify what they already do or believe. As a Harvard graduate myself, I acknowledge the truth in the saying, “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.” (Originally attributed to a president of Yale, who else?)

While Percy apparently got more out of Carl Sagan than I did, he has a very cogent critique of his approach to life in the real world. Much of Lost in the Cosmos is a humorous send-off to materialistic philosophies (he uses the word scientism).

Sagan’s book [Cosmos] gave me much pleasure, a pleasure which was not diminished, (perhaps even increased) by Sagan’s unmalicious, even innocent scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the standard bull sessions of high school and college—up to but not past the sophomore year. (201n.)

I had to laugh at that. I think the last time I actually heard someone assert to me that our minds were merely electrical impulses and mere physical response to stimuli—no different from, say, a cue ball breaking up a rack of balls on a pool table—was in such a college bull session. There is no will, free or otherwise. I do not recall whether I was a freshman or sophomore, but it was no older than that. Percy nailed it.

Of course I have read such stuff from time to time since then like I. A. Richards’ interpretation of art or Dr. Alexander’s beliefs before his near death experience. Tom Stoppard has a lot of fun with this in his Arcadia when, among other things, one character asks, “Is God a Newtonian,” and another character goes mad trying to come up with the mathematical formula that will predict the future. Richard Feynman is reported to have said, “You can predict anything if you have enough facts.” But perhaps Samuel Johnson has the last word: “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.”

Percy continues:

So much for the likes of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Grosseteste. So much for the science historian A. C. Crombie who wrote: “The natural philosophers of Latin Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created the experimental science characteristic of modern times.”

So much, indeed, for the relationship between Christianity and science and that fact that, as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the incarnation.

Yet one is not offended by Sagan. There is too little malice and too much ignorance. (201,202n.)

Percy notes that once priests were the spokesmen for understanding life, then it was the artists, now it is the scientists. Still, he would say that we need all three. Scientists understand things, artists understand people, and true priests understand God.

Amazingly, the very next book I read, Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, actually believes that sophomore bull session stuff! Is this a coincidence or what? Will Rovelli have a TV show on PBS?

First of all, while I really did appreciate what Rovelli was trying to do, in all honesty the book is not seven lessons on physics. There are five lessons on physics, one metaphysical speculation, and one sophomore bull session.

Lesson 1 summarizes relativity, especially as it relates to gravity. Like electromagnetic forces, gravity is a field, and its field is space. “Planets circle around the sun and things fall because space curves.” (8) Gravitational waves exist. Space bends around large objects like stars. The more gravity, the slower time passes. The closer to the speed of light, the slower time passes. A very nice summary for a poor layman like me.

Lesson 2 summarizes quantum theory, first by defining a quanta as “packets or lumps of energy.” Quanta like electrons can only take on certain values. When an electron jumps to another orbital (a “quantum leap”) it either releases or absorbs a photon.

Quantum theory also posits the idea that electrons and other quantum particles only exist when interacting with something else. “An electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another.” (17) Measuring quanta, then, is an exercise in probability. “It is not possible to predict where an electron will reappear but only to calculate that it will pop up here or there.” (18)

Rovelli says that Einstein accepted this concept for what it was but really did not like it. He wanted to believe “that there was an objective reality independent of whoever reacts with whatever.” (19) Rovelli notes that quantum theory says Einstein was wrong about that, yet, ironically, that is precisely what Rovelli asserts in his last “lesson.” Percy says that Sagan says science is self-correcting. Which Rovelli self should we accept?

Lesson 3 The big bang. The universe is made up of millions of galaxies each made up of millions of stars, and most stars have planets. Since the universe appears to be expanding in nearly all directions, Rovelli tells us “The universe began as a small ball and then expanded to its present cosmic dimensions.” (30) This, of course, is theory—and frankly different from what Sagan believed. Though it does present some nice pictures from the Hubble telescope, this is not so much a lesson as a metaphysical speculation. Rovelli gets even more speculative when he hypothesizes that the universe could have contracted like a black hole and then expanded again over and over. I am not sure how that jibes with entropy.

However, if we put lesson one and the less speculative part of lesson three together, we get the hypothesis presented in Starlight and Time. That is, the outer limits of the universe where there is little gravity may be millions of years old, but near the center where the gravity was intense, it may have only been a few days because of time’s relativity with respect to both gravity and light. Interesting.

And it seems that the believers in scientism want it both ways: relative time when it suits their theories but absolute time when they mock Genesis.

Lesson 4 is about quarks. These are even tinier particles that make up neutrons and protons which are held together by gluons. He notes that about 10 such particles make up all of our known reality, both matter and energy. The particles are not so much like small pebbles but quanta of corresponding fields or motion. They are “Miniscule moving wavelets” that “disappear and reappear” and are a “jump from one interaction to another.” (32,33)

Even in empty space with no matter, there is “a minute swarming of these particles.” (33) The mathematical model that appears to work using certain constants and symmetries require “nonsensical predictions where each calculated quantity turns out to be infinitely large.” (34) He does not mention it, but I suspect that is where the 11 dimensional mathematics of string theory first comes in.

Lesson 5 is about string theory, what the translators here call loop theory. Relativity and quantum mechanics both work but “the two theories cannot be right… because they contradict each other.” (40) Relativity tells us “the world is a curved space where everything is continuous” while quantum theory tells us “it is a flat space where quanta of energy leap.” I seem to recall Brian Greene calling these flat slices of space membranes, or branes for short.(40)

Scientists have searched for a theoretical set of equations that works for both. Einstein did this in relativity by resolving the apparent differences between electromagnetism and mechanics. Now they hope loop or string theory will do this for quantum and gravitational mechanics.

Loop theory states that space is not continuous, not infinitely divisible, but is a collection of minute grains of space “ a billion billion times smaller than the smallest atomic nuclei.” (41) They form the “texture of space.” They technically are nowhere because “they are themselves space.” (43)

It is interesting to note that equations describing space no longer contain a variable for time. The quantum relationships appear to be “the source of time.” (44)

Hypothetically, a star becomes a black hole but when it gets to a certain small size, it begins to expand again.

Lesson 6 notes that heat is motion. Heat moves from hot to cold and time is involved. In all but the most frictionless movements, the motion can only go one way. We actually determine time by loss of energy. This is not absolute, but based on probability like quantum mechanics. It is like predicting the weather (weather itself, I suppose, is heat exchange on a continental scale) or predicting the exact path of a blown up balloon that has been released to allow the air to escape quickly. We cannot predict what will happen exactly, but we can get an “optimum probability.”

Einstein wrote: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” (60)

This gets us back to entropy. That ultimately means, of course that the cosmos had a beginning and will have an end. Even if the universe came from a black hole-big bang cycle, it could not do that indefinitely. Rovelli comes close to the same trap that Percy caught Sagan in: If the cosmos is all there is and all there ever was, how did it begin? Since it is constantly losing heat, it must have had a beginning.

What happened before the beginning? How did it start? To Percy—and to many of the greatest minds in history—this sounds an awful lot like a Prime Mover.

This also get me thinking about time. If time is really a way of describing entropy, the running down of the universe, then what is eternity? Eternity is timeless (and presumably perfect) because there is no heat loss. Indeed one can look at Einstein’s famous E=mc² for support. The letter c in the equation stands for the speed of light. Speed is distance over time (in this case miles or kilometers per second). Eternity is timeless, so we can say that any rate in eternity is distance divided by zero, i.e. no time. Dividing by zero means two things: (1) nonsense or (2) infinity. So either eternity is nonsense, or eternity has infinite energy, hence, the power to create and without entropy.

Why did Percy put an emphasis on the Incarnation above? The eternal God became man. He entered time, but also proved the existence of eternity by reversing entropy through his miracles and demonstrating life after death by rising from the dead.

Alas, Rovelli suggests something very different and, ultimately, quite bleak. In Percy’s words, making us feel like the only aliens in the cosmos.

If Lesson 3 is just barely a physics lesson, then Lesson 7 is not a physics lesson at all. There is nothing about physics here. Indeed, it is exactly like the college sophomore (sophomoric?) bull session that Percy wrote about. I could not believe I read these two books in the same week!

The author, in spite of claiming to have gone beyond Newtonian physics, looks at the brain as a mere machine. He clearly has not contemplated Lost in the Cosmos, read testimony like Proof of Heaven, or ever listened to Sir John Eccles. No, he claims, “an individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.” (73) When we say human behavior is unpredictable, it is only because our neural networks “are too complex to be predicted.” (74)

I guess it is like chaos theory predicting tornadoes. We are pretty good at predicting the weather in general, but tornadoes are still too complicated, though we are getting better at it. It is not even a matter of free will. Just like that guy in the college bull session, Rovelli suggests there is no such thing as will at all.

There is nothing new under the sun with this. Roger Chillingworth, the evil scientist in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, believed in God in his younger days, but now just saw the world and even human beings as mere machines. Hawthorne says of such scientists:

In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. (Hawthorne ch. 9)

Like Roger Chillingworth, materialists such as Sagan and Rovelli appreciate the art or artistry of the universe, but fail to see how it points to eternity, and ultimately, to an artist.

Percy says we are “lost in the cosmos.” We know we belong somewhere else or someplace better. We know we have messed up. He believes the God of Judaism and Protestant and Catholic Christianity has the answer. To him Catholicism is the best interpretation of the answer. Ecclesiastes says that God “has put eternity into the hearts of men.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) There has got to be something more.

Rovelli notes that while we may have a desire for life, there is no afterlife. We are not lost. “We are home.” (79) It is his variation of Sagan’s “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever was.” If he were not personally so interested in discoveries about physics, it would be very depressing. If you skip lesson seven, you miss very little unless you like those college bull sessions.

The cosmos is a lovely home in many ways, but most of us would agree with Percy that we have made a mess of it. But these wonders that Rovelli describes so well in the five true physics lessons point to something more.

Newton wrote in his Principia:

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being…This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of His dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator, Universal Ruler… And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. (Newton III.504,505)

Like Percy, Gerard M. Hopkins would note that man now ignores God in creation to his own sense of alienation. Why?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil;

Like the primal curse, man has busily made things unnatural. Nevertheless, Hopkins goes on:

     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
     O, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
                    (“Pied Beauty” cf. Psalm 68:13 NIV)

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P.S. One possible quibble that some people would have with Rovelli is that he assumes dark matter exists. I am skeptical. Dark matter was first hypothesized to explain the anomaly with Mercury’s orbit. The other hypothesis, of course, was that there was another planet that always had its dark side towards earth and never transited the sun. The hypothetical planet was named Vulcan, most notable today for its use in Star Trek as the birthplace of Mr. Spock.

Einstein proved that neither hypothesis was necessary. He first proved it mathematically by assuming a fourth dimension, and then his theory of relativity was proven experientially when there was a solar eclipse. Rovelli discusses this confirmation of relativity briefly without mentioning dark matter in this context.

A better name for dark matter would be invisible matter. It supposedly makes up ninety percent of the mass of galaxies, yet it undetectable. At least the hypothesized amount of dark matter near the sun was no more than the mass of a small planet. Perhaps physicists should take a hint from mathematics. When mathematicians acknowledged that square roots of negative numbers do not exist but hypothesized their existence anyhow, they called them imaginary numbers. They should call it imaginary matter.

To me, it looks like we are simply waiting for another Einstein, and likely another dimension to solve the problem. Indeed, Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom has an alternative model that explains galactic rotation without any invisible dark matter. His hypothesis includes a fifth dimension and may be impossible to prove one way or the other with current technology, but the math works without any hypothetical (imaginary?) extra mass.