Briefly Noted

Gratitude
by dietrich von hildebrand, balduin v. schwarz, joseph ratzinger, and romano guardini
hilderbrand, 144 pages, $12.95

The raging culture war has become both tiresome and all-consuming. The one constant shouted at us from all directions is that things are dire, and all future happiness hangs in the balance of just this moment. The result is that we are both at peak anxiety and unnaturally tired, overstimulated from being on edge at every moment. The solution to this problem might just be gratitude, which forces us to see things as they really are. In seeing reality, we cannot help but be overthrown by joy. The world given to us is full of goods, and these goods are gifts that center our attention back on what’s true: We are loved, and things are ordered sweetly just for us. 

This sentiment is at the heart of von Hildebrand’s brief essay on gratitude, one of four included in this book. He says, “Clearly desolation marks the life of the person who neither understands the abundance and value of the gifts he has received, nor knows that they are unmerited gifts, nor recognizes that in them shines the goodness, mercy, and love of God!” This is good stuff.

Still, to be honest, I found Hildebrand’s style, like our current moment, to be a bit alienating. I fear that his full-blown phenomenological approach has become so particularized and personalized as to mean much to himself and little to the reader. 

And yet, this little volume is worth picking up for some of the other essays it contains. Romano Guardini considers how the transactional, consumeristic ethos of democratic consciousness makes personal giving and receiving more difficult. And the excerpt from ­Joseph Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology is the best Christian analysis of the modern concept of “love of self” ever written. At the very least, we should have gratitude toward the publishers for pointing us toward these pieces.

—Taylor Patrick O’Neill

Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War:
The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 B.C.
by paul a. rahe
encounter, 400 pages, $34.99

This is the fifth volume in a series by Paul A. Rahe on the tensions that led to the Peloponnesian War, covering five years of that saga—including some of the thorniest episodes in the history of warfare. Rahe is among a small number of scholars who ­successfully combine classics with foreign policy. 

When I was a classics graduate student, the international relations program had all the momentum. Classics was irrelevant and dusty in comparison. To my delight, there was an IR professor who was prolific, popular among students, and friendly with my advisor (an old-school classicist). These two scholars represent poles of a historiographic spectrum that is admittedly simplistic but not completely unreal. There are those who study ancient Greeks in an academic “ancient history” sense, and those who study the ancient Greeks because they have something to tell twenty-­first-century nation-states. There may or may not be a political angle here, but in my experience it is neither right nor left. Understandably, the latter approach—prioritizing “relevance”—emphasizes current foreign policy. This can be au courant to a fault. 

Rahe’s brilliance is staking out a position between these two extremes, combining classicist bona fides with perennial foreign policy issues. This is less armchair foreign policy than substantive engagement with infamously complicated ancient texts. Rahe gives Thucydides the last word: “There is nothing known” today that was not known by that Athenian veteran of the Peloponnesian War and those he admired. 

Like his teacher, Donald Kagan, Rahe knows the best history combines seemingly archaic details with current concerns. This volume is hard to categorize. There are almost as many modern quotes as ancient. But rarely are works of use to both liberal arts students and schools of foreign service. The word “proxy” in the title should interest all of us—most of whom know veterans of (American) proxy wars. This volume’s questions about the “realist” school of IR could not be more relevant. 

—Joshua Kinlaw

The Theology of Robert Barron
by matthew levering
word on fire, 344 pages, $34.95

Bishop Barron has won my heart several times. My first encounter with him was his learned presentation of the noncompetitive transcendence of the biblical God in his The Priority of Christ. Equally impressive were his public lectures at the offices of Google and Facebook (readily accessible on YouTube). How many bishops do you know who can advance a compelling portrait of Catholic tradition to such an audience? In this book, Matthew Levering presents the reader with a masterful account of Barron’s unique pedagogical charism. He treats both his contributions to the world of theological scholarship and his spirited and sensitive engagement with the concerns of ordinary laypersons.

Levering opens each chapter with a presentation either of ­Barron’s direct influences or a contemporary theologian or two who have shaped the tone of contemporary discourse. The chapters then provide Barron’s critical and productive contributions to the same. Levering’s chapter on ­Barron’s theocentrism, for example, takes its point of departure from his dissertation on Thomas Aquinas and his indebtedness to and correction of his teacher in Paris, Michel Corbin, S.J. Levering follows this with a chapter on Barron’s approach to biblical exegesis. Here the dialogue partners are Edward Schillebeeckx, Raymond Brown, and John Meier. When the subject turns to areas of more concern to the layperson, the conversation partners include ­Andrew Greeley and Richard Rohr. In the case of Greeley, Levering highlights their longstanding friendship and mutual concern for presenting the riches of the Catholic tradition in an endearing and captivating manner. The discussion of Rohr is more in the way of contrast: Though both men address the concerns of ordinary laypersons, Barron emphasizes the riches of Catholic particularism. A delightful book in every regard!

—Gary Anderson

Hide Your Children:
Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids
by liz wheeler
regnery, 416 pages, $29.99

For many Americans, the 1996 publication of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village was the first time it became clear that the far left did not regard the raising of children as the exclusive provenance of parents. In the years since, the emergence of critical race theory and gender ideology in public and private education has underscored the risks parents take when they cede ground to bureaucrats and ideologues, a group that, sadly, includes many schoolteachers and administrators. 

In her bracing new book, Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids, TV personality and podcaster Liz Wheeler not only scrutinizes the noxious doctrines being foisted on America’s children, but attempts to trace their origins. In firm, direct prose, she­ ­unearths the Marxist wellspring of so many of the creeds that have crept into classrooms. “The new Marxists understand that in order to topple capitalism and limited government, they first must destroy the cultural institutions on which people rely,” Wheeler writes, and that means religious faith and the family. 

Wheeler surgically dissects the views of Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci to demonstrate how their work colors mainstream settings today. In her telling, Marxist critical theory begat critical race theory and queer theory, and all are “a rejection of objective reality.” She identifies “critical pedagogy” as the source of contemporary “social justice” teaching, and is unsparing in describing the appalling racism of Planned Parenthood’s founder, ­Margaret Sanger. We should be grateful that Wheeler has read all this background ­material so we don’t have to.

Many readers will be familiar with the state of affairs she describes, but to her credit, Wheeler is not playing defense. She includes an agenda that can be adopted by concerned parents, including switching to home­schooling. Appendices include “resources for the fight,” including the Declaration of Independence and assorted papal encyclicals—the inclusion of which demonstrates just how ­many resources are available to parents who opt to pull their children out of school and avail themselves and their kids of the riches of Western civilization.

—Peter Tonguette

City Nave:
Poems
by betsy k. brown
resource publications, 78 pages, $25

Winding between the waves of wailing walls,” Betsy Brown’s first published collection of poetry, City Nave, showcases a contemporary encounter with traditional ­poetic forms. Navigating through four components of sacred ­architecture—stairs, narthex, nave, and altar—our poet, a high-school humanities teacher, captains readers through centuries, across ­continents, and into their own inner universes.

Accompanied by saints and troubled teens, from Paris to New York, through Dark Age quests and sweet, simple moments of satisfaction, Brown’s poems offer experiences that serve as the building blocks of a cathedral of catharsis. At times, intricate details provide a microscopic lens; at others, the reader is elevated, in “massive ascension,” to a “storm-torn sky-road on which we somehow safely roar.”

Brown asks questions that we have all posed, with words and metaphors that enlighten and simultaneously allude to mysteries beyond intellectual resolution. Her skillfully constructed lines and verses engage the reader in both vertical and forward motion; those masted with rhythm and rhyme billow ­unpretentiously. The poet’s personal faith experiences reinforce the collection’s structure, but never with a moralizing hue. Readers will look and loiter, paradoxically ­guided to sight by blindness.

The scaffolding within City Nave ­offers vision to those well-versed in poetic appreciation as well as those intimidated by poetry’s layered ­elements, whether they are reading the poems in order or opening to a random page.

“Will all that’s broken be made new?” Brown asks. Answering with a “white turbulence of prayers towards bigger gods,” her words swell and sink deep, fly away and sing low—all of them unveiling ­promised lands.

—Jenny Lark Snarski