Category: Reading

The usually unusual rundown:

I failed to do one of these last week, and I am sure a number of you have had enough CST-related posts to last you awhile.

Alright, you know the drill.

Living in the great state of Michigan has many benefits, but also some costs. One such cost is that you have to prepare for Arctic-like conditions moving in before Advent. For those of you stuck inside today, along with everyone else, I present some productive ways to use your time:

I lied. In addition to the pieces on natura pura and textualism that I recommended in the previous post, I should stress — with a capital S — the importance of reading Joseph Pearce’s two recent pieces at The Imaginative Conservative: “Distributism in the Shire: The Political Kinship of Tolkien and Belloc” and “Tolkien and Belloc vs. Richards and Witt.” Pearce, who is well known for his books on Tolkien, Belloc, Chesterton, and Solzhenitsyn, takes issue with Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt’s questionable new book, The Hobbit Party. Both men are unabashed economic liberals aligned with the Acton Institute, and so it comes as no surprise that they have no shame hijacking Tolkien and his seminal creation to provide apologetic heft for their brand of free-market capitalism and limited government. Pearce, rightly, cries, “Foul!” From the second of Pearce’s articles:

In an effort to end on the cheerful note of finding something to cheer about in [The Hobbit Party], I can indeed find much that is good and insightful. The overarching problem, however, is that the authors’ ideological agenda reduces the whole book to a woeful and unconvincing effort to squeeze the square peg of Tolkien’s traditionalist genius into the round hole of the authors’ modernist ideology. It’s akin to trying to squeeze the majesty of the Church into the travesty of the factory chimney. It doesn’t work.

And for this week I only have two suggestions since both are time intensive:

I promise. There is nothing about the midterm elections below, though I’ve read very little online this week and thus have only a few suggestions on offer.

Better late (in the day) than never, perhaps.

A more eclectic version of the usual Friday offering.

I promise that there is nothing (directly) related to the “Extraordinary Synod” this week.