Love and the Dignity of Human Life, by Robert Spaemann

This is an interesting trio of essays by philosopher Robert Spaemann.  The first is on the many meanings and paradoxes of love, especially the tension between desirous love and beneficent love.  The second is on human dignity, particularly its inalienability when the person does not consent to its loss. The third on the modern concept of “brain death”—is it the same as the traditional concept of death, and can a “brain dead” person properly be considered dead?   

Since I have no philosophy training, I thought the book would probably be over my head, but Spaemann explains things very clearly.  Highly recommended to clear out the fog that results from the intentionally deceptive wording we are accustomed to using these days to lie to ourselves about reality in order to justify ethical shortcuts.

How the West Really Lost God, by Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt presents a convincing theory that family formation and family life help to pass on and enforce religious belief from one generation to the next rather than just being an effect of religious belief. She points out how marriage, family formation, and birth rates tend to rise and fall in tandem with religious practice among populations, and how this correlation tends to hold more consistently through history than other explanations of why belief in God rises and falls, such as political or economic changes, wars, industrialization, etc. The book can be a dry read at times, because it does deal with statistics, but very worthwhile for those who are interested in the subject. 

One Word of Truth- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture

This speech is just as good as A World Split Apart, and that's really saying something.  He describes the existential gulf between people living under oppressive governments and those in free countries.  There is a disconnect between the two, and the latter group very often cannot understand where the former is coming from.  As a representative of the former group transplanted into the world of the latter, Solzhenitsyn cites art as the means by which the gap can be bridged.
It is the means by which one can enter into another person's experience.

He also talks about the "spirit of Munich" and how it has dominated the 20th century (inclination of the free world to appease and tolerate unjust violence elsewhere provided it left the West alone) and how violence inevitably requires lies to maintain its position of power-- to deceive people about its true nature and give itself legitimacy.

The task of the artist above all is to remain honest in the face of violence and lies.

"Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me."

The Solzhenitsyn Center has released a video made with an excellent (English) reading of this speech, which is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ITbFdTaB_E.

Understanding Europe, by Christopher Dawson

This is an outstanding analysis of Europe and Western civilization.  The book is divided in two parts.

In the first part, Dawson describes what Europe is: a society of peoples whose culture was shaped both by Christianity and the Greco-Roman heritage.  Through comparisons, he explains what differentiates it from Asia, describes the special case of Russia, and discusses the regional differences among the different peoples.  These were produced by the splintering of Christianity during the Reformation and the different styles of government in the different regions, contrasting the parliamentary governments that sprung up in Western Europe with the large military empires that developed in Central and Eastern Europe.  He also devotes two chapters to Europe's overseas colonies: the dual nature of European colonialism and how each nation's colonial effort differed in character from one another.

The second part of the book is about the decline of Western culture and the revolt, starting in the eighteenth century, against the ideas and norms that used to unify Europe.  He describes the rise of the large totalitarian and authoritarian states, how the ideas behind this style of government originated in Hegelian philosophy, and how the two world wars came about.

For a relatively short (230 page) book, he covers a lot of ground, and it's definitely a book that you have to read more than once in order to properly digest the material.  It's best to have a reasonably good general knowledge of the history of the various European countries in order to appreciate this book properly.

A World Split Apart- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

I think this is one of the best speeches ever written. On anything. Alexander Solzhenitsyn turns his keen powers of observation and understanding, sharpened by long years of oppression under a totalitarian regime, on the West and diagnoses the cause of its ills: a decline in moral courage. Despite having been written 40 years ago, it's even more relevant now than it was then.

Even better than reading this is hearing the man himself deliver it at Harvard in 1978-- the video of the complete speech, with a simultaneous translator translating it into English is available on Youtube. Awesome stuff.

And if you can, listen also to Dr. Peter Kreeft's excellent commentary on it and the impression it made on him as a member of that audience in 1978--also available on Youtube.

Nos pluralistes, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn criticizes the moral emptiness of pluralism and its impotence when faced with the evils of socialism. He also criticizes the work of some of his fellow Soviet exiles, who blame the failures of socialism on the defects of the Russian people and their culture, rather than on the nature of socialism itself. 

This book is an excerpt from a longer work, The Oak and the Calf, and I did find parts of it difficult to follow because I am not familiar with the work of the people Solzhenitsyn cites, but it was a worthwhile read nonetheless.  Maybe reading it as part of The Oak and the Calf would provide more context.

Plato's Republic

Any freedom loving person will hate this book if he reads it as a straightforward exposition of how to achieve the ideal state, because the ideal state Socrates describes in the book (the "Republic" of the title) is a terribly tyrannical place.  But it doesn't seem to me that Plato intended it to be read that way.  It is more like a thought exercise, where Socrates poses questions, and depending on the answers of the person he is speaking with, takes ideas further, step by step.  Some of his dialogue partners have real input; others seem more like yes-men--sometimes reluctant yes-men--and Socrates's exchanges with them read like cautionary tales showing the crazy places where lazy thinking or gullibility can take you.  And of course, nowhere is lazy thinking more dangerous than in politics, where a lot of harm can result.  There is a part where Socrates describes the three different kinds of acceptable government, the three evil kinds (which are the three acceptable ones taken to extremes), and the three different personalities that tend to be produced by each type of government, and also this is the book where Plato describes his famous "Cave" analogy.

All in all, a very rich book--one that deserves to be read multiple times, because you won't get everything it has to offer in one reading.  It's definitely a book that is best read at leisure, because there are a lot times when you will have to stop and think about whether you agree with what you just read or how you would have answered Socrates differently from his dialogue partner.

Peter Kreeft did a great series of lectures that serve as an introduction to Plato and his work--very useful if you haven't read any Plato before.  I think I'd have gotten more out of this book if I'd heard the lectures before reading it.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

In this series of eight essays, Isaiah Berlin recounts the intellectual dispute that took place in the late 18th to early 19th century that gave rise to the Romantic movement, and how ideas from both sides of the debate combined and recombined in the heads of various thinkers over the years so as to produce the fascist and socialist movements of the twentieth century.

One side of the dispute consists of those who believed in universal, objective truth, scientific rationalism, a common human nature, the possibility of an earthly utopia, and the non-contradiction of values. On the other side were those who believed in various degrees of relativism, the value of local traditions, even those that could not be traced to any rational basis, the possibility of different hierarchies of value that could contradict each other, and that human societies are ultimately founded on an irrational factors.

The second essay, called Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century Thought is particularly valuable because it explains how pluralism is different from relativism, and how pluralist thinkers of the eighteenth century (like Vico and Herder) are sometimes mistaken for relativists.  I read that one twice.

Included among the essays is an exposition of the life and thought of Joseph de Maistre, who is often mistaken for a conservative Catholic reactionary, but whose ideas contradicted those of Church and those of other conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, on important points, and whose dark, illiberal, eerily modern outlook presages twentieth century totalitarian movements.  Berlin recaps much of the content of this essay in this lecture.

The last two essays in the series, The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will and The Bent Twig are about how in the Romantic movement, the will, particularly in art, began to displace objective truth and nature, and how appreciation for local customs, thought to be the least enduring part of the Romantic movement, morphed into the nationalist movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries, from the desires of small ethnic or linguistic minorities to become independent states, or the sense of entitlement of large states to take over regions in other states inhabited by people of the same race or language.

I learned a lot reading this.  Great read if you're interested in the art, literature, and thought of the Romantic era, how ways of thinking we now take for granted originated, and in the causes of some of the most important events in twentieth century history.

La cité antique / The Ancient City

This is a brilliant exposition of the religious beliefs of the ancient Greeks and Romans and how that shaped the way they lived, their ideas, their government, and the culture they developed.  When we think of Greek and Roman religion, we immediately think of gods like Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and Venus and such, but de Coulanges goes even further back than that, to the domestic gods that were the dead ancestors of each family, and that protected only that family and their property so long as the living members of the family faithfully carried out the proper rites and sacrifices and owned the property on which their tombs were located.  Apparently, this ancestor worship was a religion the ancient Greeks and Romans shared with the Hindus and dates back to their common roots before the different groups diverged and migrated out to India and to Europe.  As their beliefs and worldview changed, so did Greco-Roman culture change, giving rise to the Greek and Italian city states that later consolidated into the Roman Empire.  In the last chapter, de Coulanges provides a brief outline of how radically Christianity changed the culture and outlook of the Roman Empire and why it brought an end to the ancient conception of the city.

This book is invaluable for those with an interest in the history of ancient Greece and Rome, those who are planning to read the classics and want to understand the mindset of the authors better, and those who want to see how a religion can shape the culture and civilization of a people. De Coulanges's purpose in writing it was to show how different the worldview of the ancient Greeks and Romans was from our own, to prevent the common mistake of believing the ancients to be too much like ourselves.

The Hall of Uselessness, by Simon Leys

Great collection of essays from an author whom I think is one of the best essayists ever!  The topics in this collection are wide ranging, from literature to China to history to the sea.  My favorites were the ones on Chinese art and history (a subject I know little about, so I learned a lot reading them), and the ones on Cervantes, Victor Hugo, and Magellan.  Included in this collection is the one where he (rightfully, in my opinion) excoriates Christopher Hitchens's negative comments about Mother Teresa.

The World's Last Night, by C. S. Lewis

I enjoyed this little collection of essays by C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite essayists ever.  As always, they display his gift for clear, logical expositions in straightforward language and his way of bypassing currently popular ways of looking at things by showing how they can be considered differently.  Reading Lewis nearly always helps to broaden my mind and this collection is no exception.  My two favorite essays in this book are <i>Lilies That Fester</i> and <i>The Efficacy of Prayer</i>.

Europe: Today and Tomorrow, by Pope Benedict XVI

In this book, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) analyzes the source of the malaise that has affected the West through most of the 20th century: the currents of thought that brought it about, why it persists, and how it can be cured.  Very worthwhile read and gives a lot of food for thought. Given its short length, it took much longer than I thought to finish it because I often had to stop and think about what I had just read and how it related to popular ways of thinking and acting.

Le bonheur des petits poissons, by Simon Leys

Une très bonne collection par un essayiste cultivé et subtil. C'est le premier livre de Simon Leys que j'ai jamais lu et je vais définitivement lire plus. J'aurais préféré une collection un peu plus grande; le livre est beaucoup plus mince que j'attendais. J'aime bien L'empire du laid, Les mensonges qui disent la vérité, et Du goût.