literature

Brigham Young: A Lecture by John G. Turner

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

In her review of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet by GMU historian John G. Turner, Julie Smith writes,

I suspect that John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet will be the definitive biography of Brigham Young for the next few decades.  Overall, this is a good thing.

But it may also be a troubling thing, at least for some people. I wholeheartedly recommended the recent Joseph Smith, David O. McKay, and Spencer W. Kimball biographies to all members of the Church.  Sure, they are a little less sanitized than we are used to, but the picture in each one of those works is of a prophet of God who had some flaws, with far more emphasis on the “prophet” part than on the “flawed” part.

This book?  Not so much.  I have serious reservations about recommending it to the average church member; if you need your prophet to be larger than life, or even just better than the average bear, this book is not for you.  I think there is a substantial risk that people raised on hagiographic, presentist images of prophets would have their testimonies rocked, if not shattered, by this book.

…So, here’s the Readers’ Digest version of my review:  this book is a real treat, but it might completely destroy your testimony if you can’t handle a fallible, bawdy, often mistaken, sometimes mean, and generally weird prophet.

The book truly is incredible, doing for Brigham Young what Richard Bushman did for Joseph Smith. However, I agree with Julie that “the main weakness of this book” is the fact that “you are not left with any reason as to why people would have made the enormous sacrifices that were part of believing that Brigham Young was a prophet.” To fill in these gaps, here are the reported words of Turner from my friend Carl Cranney on Young’s appeal:

Why did people follow Brigham? He admitted to me and the others in the study group a few weeks ago that he felt he could have handled this question better. He pointed out three things, specifically, that Brigham had done before he became the de facto church president, and later actual church president, that garnered him a lot of good will from the members. First, many of the church members were from the British Isles, and Brigham had led the British mission. So many members of the church had fond memories of him as the leader of the missionaries that brought them into the church. Second, he finished the Nauvoo temple and endowed thousands of Mormons before they abandoned the city. The sheer amount of man-hours this took would have staggered anybody but the firmest believer. Brigham Young was a believer, and it showed to the people that he worked tirelessly for in the temple. Third, he was the “American Moses” who dragged a despondent group of church members from their Nauvoo the Beautiful to the middle of nowheresville, Mexico, to create a civilization literally out nothing in a sparsely-populated desert wilderness. He worked hard to preserve the church and to get its members to safety. So, after doing these three things he had garnered a lot of support and a lot of good will from the members.

Despite this oversight, the book is fantastic and the go-to biography of Brigham Young.

Check out John Turner’s lecture on the bio at Benchmark Books below:

I Dissent

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Asch Experiment Cover 800x400

I just finished listening to a bunch of science fiction stories in rapid succession so that I could cast informed votes for the annual Hugo awards and post the reviews to my new blog.[ref]The Loose Canon is where I will do most of my future blogging about science fiction.[/ref] That done, I returned to some of the non-fiction audiobooks I’ve been waiting to get into, especially Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. It’s been a fantastic spring day, and there was an exquisite, gentle evening breeze as I walked the dog. Meanwhile, Professor Steven Gimbel explained the impact of World War II on the field of social psychology:

In the first half of the 20th century, psychology had the luxury of debating whether a subconscious mind existed and whether scientific methodology required limiting the field of study to stimulus and response, but after the horrors of World War II, psychology changed… The specter of the Holocaust raised deep and troubling question about the human mind and its relation to authority… The reaction to Nazi atrocities in the scientific world is shaped by what are perhaps the three most famous psychological experiments: Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, Solomon Asch’s group think study, and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison study. [ref]The quote is my own transcription, and I added the hyperlinks.[/ref]

I think Millgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments are the most famous. At least, those are the ones that I’ve read about and seen the most. I was familiar with Asch’s study as well, but I haven’t seen it come up as often, and I was unprepared for how deeply a simple remark made by Gimbel would strike me. It hit so forcefully that I hit pause on the audiobook (to keep that thought forefront on my mind), came home, opened my laptop, and began this blog post.

In Asch’s study, participants were given a simple task. They had a reference image that showed a vertical line, and then another image that showed three vertical lines. One of the three matched the vertical line in the reference image, and all they had to do was pick out the correct match. They were asked to do this 18 times. The trick is that the participants were seated at a table with seven other people who were secretly in on the experiment. On the first two rounds, these seven individuals all gave the same answer, and it was the correct one. But on the third trial, these individuals all gave the same incorrect answer. Over the course of the next 15 trials, the seven plants gave the wrong answer 11 times, and in each case all seven of them gave the same incorrect answer.

Asch Experiment

So you’ve got eight people seated around a table answering a perfectly obvious question. Seven of them have just given the identical, incorrect answer. The point of the experiment was to find out what the eighth person–the only real subject of the study–would do. Given that this is considered one of the “three most famous psychological experiments” you can guess how it turned out even if you don’t already know: 75% of subjects went with the group consensus (even though it was obviously wrong) at least one out of the 12 times when the seven fake participants picked the wrong answer.

There are all kinds of interesting details to the study, especially when it comes to the rationales that the participants gave afterwards to explain why they had refused to go along with the group or why they had, at least some of the time, opted to go along with the group despite what was clearly true. But here’s what Gimbel said about the study that so arrested me:

Asch expanded the study to see what would happen. He showed that the bigger the majority, the stronger the pull to conform, but that if even one person dissented before the test subject, that the test subject was then more likely to voice his different view. Asch showed empirically that having someone else agree with you is a powerful tool in making people willing to take a contrary position. But, if that person [the test subject] were deserted by his fellow dissenter, conformity followed rapidly.[ref]I transcribed this quote from the audio and then added emphasis to the text version.[/ref]

Now, before I continue, I want to take a moment to explain that–contrary to popular opinion–I’m not interested in attacking conformity. Conformity gets a bad rap in movies like Dead Poet Society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAyr0kWRGE

The sentiment in that clip is hogswash. Unfortunately, so is most anti-non-conformity sentiment. There’s an entire guide to being a non-conformist, but–like all such ironic anti-non-conformity statements–the actual point is that non-conformity is bad because it’s a kind of conformity.

howtobeanonconformist_back

So, even the anti-non-conformists are trapped in an non-conformity mindset. Conformity can’t catch a break. Which is a shame, because conformity is actually pretty important in helping to form human society and–because we are social animals–to form who we are as well.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt introduces this concept in a chapter called “The Hive Switch.” He starts with an example of exactly the kind of military drill (e.g. marching) that Dead Poet Society maligns, citing Wiliam McNeill (a World War II veteran) describing drill this way:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 221[/ref]

After his service, McNeill studied this kind of conformity (which he called “muscular bonding”) and found that it “enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit.”[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 222[/ref] What works like Dead Poet Society miss[ref]And it is far from alone in this regard.[/ref] is that conformity is a path to collective consciousness. In the same chapter that begins with marches and drills, Jonathan Haidt goes on to discuss ecstatic mass dancing, awe in the presence of nature, hallucinogens, and raves. One of the roles of conformity, in other words, is to enable humans to access a “hive switch” that flips our identity from individualist to collective. The term “collective” often has negative connotations (like conformity itself), until one realizes that it also implies (as McNeill points out) selflessness and trust.

Writing in The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley emphasizes a similar point. One of the grand puzzles of human nature is that–alone of all animals in existence–we have the capability to come together in large groups to work for collective goals without close genetic ties.[ref]Ant colonies and bee hives work together, but they are also all (effectively) siblings, and so there is no mystery here, genetically speaking.[/ref] In his book, he surveys a lot of literature on evolutionary psychology and game theory trying to explain why it is that human beings, in practice, are able to escape the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is the most famous game theory scenario, and it proves that–if humans were strictly self-interested and rational–we would effectively never cooperate in large groups. And yet, we do cooperate in large groups. Is there any theoretically explanation for this? Yes, it turns out, there is. The only kind of society in which cooperative strategies can survive without being overwhelmed by cheating free-loaders is a conformist society.

There is one kind of cultural learning that makes cooperation more likely: conformism. If children learn not from their parents or by trial and error, but by copping whatever is the commonest tradition or fashion among adult role models, and if adults follow whatever happens to be the commonest pattern of behavior in the society—if in short we are cultural sheep–then cooperation can persist in very large groups.[ref]The Origins of Virtue, page 181[/ref]

So, instead of just making fun of non-conformists for also being conformists, it’s worth keeping in mind that conformity is a route to selflessness and, perhaps, the key to humanity’s unique ability to successfully cooperate in large, unrelated groups. But, if that’s not enough, keep in mind that things like language itself only work because of conformity. If we all tried to be non-conformists in our language, then communication would be literally impossible.

This was a long digression, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while anyway. To get things back on track: I don’t think non-conformity is a laudable goal in itself, but I do think that diversity matters a lot. I worry about echo chambers and I worry about group think and I worry about bubbles. And I worry about that eighth person, sitting at the table, staring at the line, wondering what on Earth could be happening that everyone else is reporting a reality that is the opposite to what he feels. I’m not really worried about whether or not this person gives the correct answer (more on that at the end), but I am very worried that this person feel empowered to give their honest answer.

This is what I had in mind when I recently read an older Slate Star Codex piece: All Debates Are Bravery Debates. In the piece, Scott Alexander argues for being charitable about extreme positions as follows:

Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish…

There are some people who need to hear both sides of the issue. Some people really need to hear the advice “It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” Other people really need to hear the advice “You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.”

It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. You can’t even write really complicated books on how to tell whether you need more or less selfishness in your life – they’re not going to be as buyable, as readable, or as memorable as Atlas Shrugged. To a first approximation, all you can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages, and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.

In terms of explanation, Scott Alexander is right on the money. He says, for example:

This happens a lot among, once again, atheists. One guy is like “WE NEED TO DESTROY RELIGION IT CORRUPTS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES ANYONE WHO MAKES ANY COMPROMISES WITH IT IS A TRAITOR KILL KILL KILL.” And the other guy is like “Hello? Religion may not be literally true, but it usually just makes people feel more comfortable and inspires them to do nice things and we don’t want to look like huge jerks here.” Usually the first guy was raised Jehovah’s Witness and the second guy was raised Moralistic Therapeutic Deist.

That sounds familiar, and I think we all have friends who used to be really extreme in one direction, and now they’ve gone overboard in the other extreme.[ref]In The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans de Waal pokes fun at New Atheists in general and Christopher Hitchens in particular: “Some people crave dogma, yet have trouble deciding on its contents. They become serial dogmatists.” (page 89)[/ref] Where I disagree with Scott Alexander, however, is in accepting that this kind of overreaction is basically acceptable. In my experience, both Ayn Rand (who says greed is good) and Peter Singer (who argued against any special concern for family members[ref]Frans de Waal, also in The Bonobo and the Atheist, points out that when Singer’s mother actually did become gravely ill he used his money to hire private care for her in direct contradiction of his own dogmatic utilitarian ideology. Singer said “perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it’s different when it’s your mother.” De Waal commented: “The world’s best-known utilitarian thus let personal loyalty trump aggregate well-being, which in my book was the right thing to do.” (page 184-185)[/ref]) are just plain bad. I don’t care how selfish you are, Peter Singer is still overkill. I don’t care how selfless[ref]In a pathological sense.[/ref] you are, Ayn Rand is still crazy.

So this is the world I find myself in. When I look around, I feel like the eighth guy at the table on several issues. To pick just one that we talk about a lot here at Difficult Run, go with minimum wage. I’m looking at the discussions around me,[ref]I don’t mean our commenters here at Difficult Run. I think you guys are pretty great. I mean the debates as I see them unfolding on my Facebook feed, etc.[/ref] and I just can’t really believe what I’m hearing.

But when I look around for people who will stand up with me and dissent, what I see is a lot of what Scott Alexander is describing. Take “socialism.” The term, in almost all debates you will see today, has no solid meaning. It’s just a flag. And on one side you’ll see these “taxation is theft” ultra-libertarians charging against the flag of socialism and on the other side you’ll see all these people who seem to have forgotten the second half of the twentieth century rallying around the flag of socialism. Maybe some of the “taxation is theft” folks escaped Soviet oppression (as Ayn Rand did, not by coincidence) and a lot of the “Mao? Stalin? Who were they?” socialists do come from elite backgrounds in the world’s leading capitalist economy, so “to a first approximation” their points are valid. That doesn’t mean they are actually helping matters when they add their extreme, absolutist viewpoints to the discussion. Technically, the “taxation is theft” guys are going to side with me to oppose minimum wage hikes, but I really wish they wouldn’t.

Too often it seems like your choices are either (1) conform to the political fad of the day or (2) engage in extreme, overreactions. Pick your poison.

But I don’t want to pick my poison.

I don’t, for example, want to have to pick and choose between conformity and diversity. I value both. Conformity is essential for language, is vital for social cohesion, and is–in short–the glue that holds the fabric of our society together. Anyone who says they are a nonconformist is lying or a sociopath, just like anyone who says that they don’t care what other people think about them is lying or a sociopath. Everyone is a social animal, everyone cares what (some) other people think, and everyone conforms (to some group). But if you overemphasize conformity, then you get group-think. You stifle creativity, restrict free inquiry, stifle scientific curiosity, and hamstring debate and compromise. We need diversity, too. We need both.

Here’s the reason I wrote this post. Here’s the thing that Gimbel said, about the Asch experiments, that really stood out. What did it take to empower that eighth person to answer honestly? They didn’t need anything extreme. They didn’t need any theatrics. They didn’t need Ayn Rand and they didn’t need Peter Singer. All it took was one person just calmly, quietly validating what they saw.

In Asch’s experiment, the truth was obvious. In the real world, on most issues where there is a lot of debate, the truth isn’t obvious. What’s more, I’m going to be publishing a post (hopefully soon) called “Nobody Gets It All Right” that will say just that: based on my understanding of history and various biographies, everybody is wrong about most of what they believe. And I take that to heart. I have a lot of opinions. Most of them are probably wrong, at least in the sens that–two decades or two centuries from now–the things I think are true will be either discredited or (more likely) irrelevant.[ref]Don’t get too excited. The same is true for you, too.[/ref]

So I do want to dissent. I do want to raise my voice–calmly, politely, modestly–and say that the emperor’s got no clothes on when it appears to me that the emperor, in fact, does not have clothes on. But the basis of my dissent is not “I am confident that I am right.” At this point in my life, that conviction alone is not enough to stir me to publish a post. Instead, my motivation is something like, “I am dedicated to living in the kind of world where people speak their minds honestly.” Because, if I have to pick just a few areas where I want to place a very high degree of confidence–like only two or three–that’s going to be one of them.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Internet debating. The point of the debate is never to persuade the other guy. The debate is always for the sake of the audience. There’s truth to that, but it can be taken too far, and made into a philosophy where arguing online is a gladiatorial spectator sport with both sides essentially playing to their respective fan bases with no interest in sincere, honest interaction with each other’s points. That’s not what I want to do.

Instead, I just want to be the one guy at the table who says, “I see things differently” that thereby enables the eighth guy to have an easier time in saying the same thing.

That, in a nutshell, is one of the fundamental reasons Difficult Run exists.

The Last Week: A Lecture by Marcus Borg

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

In honor of the Easter season, I read through The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. As I mentioned at Borg’s recent passing, I don’t always share his and Crossan’s interpretations. However, their strong emphasis on the political nature of Jesus’ ministry is a much-needed breath of fresh air in the midst of today’s hyper-individualized, over-spiritualized Christianity. One cannot and should not separate the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus from his life and ministry. Christ’s actions that resulted in his death are what discipleship is all about. And one has to understand the historical and political context of Jesus’ last week to fully understand what discipleship looks like.

However, my friend and co-editor here at Difficult Run Allen Hansen recently captured my thoughts beautifully on Facebook on the need to combine the political nature of Christ’s ministry with the reality of his resurrection:

The late Marcus Borg was a purveyor of a liberal Christian popular theology. By all accounts a generally thoughtful and considerate individual, Borg was oddly and dogmatically insistent upon a dichotomy between things literal and things spiritual/symbolic/meaningful. There was, according to him, no material, bodily resurrection. The tomb was not empty, but remained full. Instead, we should see it as a parable on meaning, Christ living again is as a dynamic experience, ascribing anything beyond that, say, an actual, divine being with a material body who is as alive now as he ever was before his death, is to trivialise the story. Nevermind that any 1st century apocalyptic and pharisaic Jews would have been bewildered by such an incomprehensible sentiment regarding resurrection. We’ll cut Borg some slack for theological rather than historical musings on earliest Christian theology. To my mind, reducing the atonement, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ to a parable on meaning is to trivialise it. I don’t yet have a fully articulated or consistent model for how the atonement worked and I may never have one, but a God willing to let his son suffer and die for us is no trivial god. Likewise a god freely choosing such suffering and humiliation for himself for our sakes. A god who can intervene on our behalf in history and nature, who can shatter the bonds of death and sin keeping us captive. A god who is able to lift us to his level, unlocking our eternal potential, thus making us everything that we should be rather than just another crappy metaphor reminding us of what we are not now, and never will be. The reality and power of the atonement is something that I have personally experienced. Because I have had that spiritual witness is why I am Christian rather than Jewish despite often feeling closer to the latter. To deny the possibility of bodily resurrection is to trivialise the new possibility which is Christ. It is almost a sneer at the hope of millions for a time in which everything that is wrong, unfair, imperfect, and evil is made right. It is affirming that life is nasty, brutish and short, but we can make it a little less depressing by telling stories that are true even though they are not nor ever will be actually, literally true. If you believe in that you are welcome to it, but I cannot agree that holding to a belief in a material, bodily resurrection is a trivial interpretation. Still, Borg got quite a bit right. It is just that what he got right is more powerful when considered as aspects of a bodily resurrection of the son of God.

Despite these criticisms, I highly recommend the book.[ref]My disagreements were largely found in their assessment of the resurrection itself, not the analyses of the days leading up to it.[/ref] You can see Borg lecture on Holy Week below.

Our Kids: An AEI Discussion with Robert Putnam

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Regular readers of Difficult Run know that research on marriage and family structure is a hobby horse of mine. It’s something I try to keep up with, which is why I was excited when political scientist Robert Putnam’s book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis was released. Putnam explores the growing inequalities within America by focusing on children and their family and social backgrounds. The book provides a useful narrative by fleshing out empirical evidence with interviews and anecdotes.[ref]He relies a little too heavily on anecdotes for my taste. More attention to the details within the data would have been preferable.[/ref] It joins an increasing number of impressive books that demonstrate the powerful influence of family structure on the outcomes of children’s lives.

See Putnam discuss his book on an AEI panel with Charles Murray and William Wilson below.

Reading Fiction Enhances Social Skills

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The Wall Street Journal reports on a brand new study in Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience:

People who read a lot of fiction are known to have stronger social skills than nonfiction readers or nonreaders. A new study suggests that reading fictional works, especially stories that take readers inside people’s lives and minds, may enhance social skills by exercising a part of the brain involved in empathy and imagination.

…[R]eading fictional excerpts about individuals and groups of people heightened activity in a brain system known as the default network. This system is active when people are imagining hypothetical situations, such as the past or the future, or thinking about another person’s perspective, the researchers said.

I’ve written on this topic before. The evidence continues to pile up.

 

The DR Book Collection

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“There was time now…”

We’re a group of heavy readers here at Difficult Run, but we’ve mainly expressed our love of books over the last couple years through sporadic lists.[ref]For example, see the “Top 10 Most Influential Books” lists by Nathaniel and Walker. And of course, there is the annual Best Books of the Year list.[/ref] As bibliophiles, we take an interest in what others are reading. We often buy or rent books based on the suggestions of others. However, we also research the books under consideration to determine whether or not we want to invest our limited time and energy into reading them. We consult reviews, interviews, and lectures based on the book. Even when the decision is made to not read the book, the research is often informative and enlightening.

Given that many DR readers are fellow book fiends, we will be posting video clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books we read throughout the year. Think of it as our video Goodreads list. You can find the list of books along with the post date below:

Feb. 26, 2016: Thomas Sowell, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

March 5, 2016: Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

March 9, 2016: Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).

March 11, 2016: J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

March 18, 2016: Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

March 28, 2016: Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

April 13, 2016: John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).

April 21, 2016: Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).

April 29, 2016: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

May 19, 2016: A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016).

May 19, 2016: Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

May 22, 2016: W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

May 26, 2016: Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter Enns, Daniel J. Harrington, The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

May 27, 2016: Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

May 28, 2016: James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016).

June 6, 2016: Adam S. Miller, Future Mormon: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

June 15, 2016: John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You: Expanded and Updated Edition (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 2005).

June 20, 2016: Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (New York: Free Press, 2011).

July 10, 2016: James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).

July 21, 2016: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York City: Harper, 2015)

July 30, 2016: Harry Markopolos, No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Hopoken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Aug. 7, 2016: Jack Harrell, Writing Ourselves: Essays on Creativity, Craft, and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Aug. 12, 2016: Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst (New York: Business Plus, 2010).

Sept. 13, 2016: The Economics of Immigration: Market-Based Approaches, Social Science, and Public Policy, ed. Benjamin Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Sept. 17, 2016: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012)

Sept. 29, 2016: Peter F. Drucker, Rick Wartzman (ed.), The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).

Oct. 18, 2016: Joseph M. Spencer, The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Oct. 28, 2016: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

Nov. 12, 2016: N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperOne, 2016).

Nov. 17, 2016: Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

Dec. 7, 2016: Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Dec. 7, 2016: Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Dec. 11, 2016: Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Dec. 17, 2016: Scott Hales, The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part One (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2016).

Jan. 7, 2017: Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Jan. 7, 2017: Louis Cozolino, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016).

Jan. 8, 2017: Barry Schwartz, Why We Work (New York: TED Books/Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Jan. 19, 2017: Shūsaku Endō, Silence (New York: Picador, 2016 [1969]).

Feb. 4, 2017: Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution. (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

Feb. 9, 2017: Christine Porath, Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

Feb. 23, 2017: James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).

Feb. 23, 2017: Roger E.A. Farmer, How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

March 9, 2017: David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

March 15, 2017: Michael Austin, Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

March 16, 2017: Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

March 16, 2017: John L. Esposito, Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007).

March 17, 2017: Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

May 7, 2017: Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

Sept. 23, 2017: Catch-Up

Oct. 1, 2017: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

Dec. 13, 2017: Catch-Up #2

Dec. 16, 2017: Johan Norberg, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2017).

Jan. 16, 2018: Catch-Up #3

May 3, 2018: Catch-Up #4

June 8, 2018: Catch-Up #5

August 3, 2018: Catch-Up #6

Jan. 5, 2019: Catch-Up #7

“A Peculiar People”: An Interview with J. Spencer Fluhman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

I was lucky enough to meet BYU history professor J. Spencer Fluhman last year when he presented at the Miller Eccles Study Group here in Texas. The lecture was based on his book “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Anti-Mormonism took on a number of forms, from describing Joseph Smith as an impostor and his religion as “false” to seeing Mormonism as a kind delusion or madness to fearing the Mormons’ political power and fanaticism. The U.S. Constitution granted religious freedom, but these fears and accusations led Americans to question what was truly meant by religion.

A fascinating read.

The interview below features both Fluhman and Joanna Brooks.

Why Growth Matters: An Interview with Jagdish Bhagwati

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Yesterday, a friend’s Facebook wall was blowing up with debates over the merits of libertarianism. One commenter wrote, “Libertarians should spend time in India or Pakistan to see what weak, ineffective government ultimately accomplishes.” My response was, “Just finished this yesterday.” I linked him to Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries by Columbia economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. The book explains how the Indian pro-market reforms of the early 1990s have led to economic growth and consequently reduced poverty. Of course, the book does not argue in favor of a stateless utopia (there are a number of things listed in the book for the Indian government to do). But it does demonstrate how powerful and positive a force liberalization can be in the lives of the most destitute.

Definitely for those interested in developmental economics.

 

Lost Christianities: An Interview with Bart Ehrman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Last week, I posted an interview with economist Thomas Sowell on his brand new book Wealth, Politics, and Poverty. At the time I was reading through the book and have since finished it. The relative popularity of the post gave me an idea:[ref]I’m almost certain the popularity had more to do with Sowell than my reading list.[/ref] I will begin posting clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books I read throughout the year. Obviously, not all of these books will be published in 2016. In fact, most won’t be. Nonetheless, if you’re anything like me, you might like to know what others are reading. And if it peaks your interest, you might like to get a firm grasp of the book’s subject and potential quality prior to reading. So, I plan on making this a consistent thing.

Without further ado, here’s the next book.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has at times been the center of public controversy due to some of his more popular books (Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted), largely for introducing pretty standard New Testament scholarship to lay readers. His Oxford-published Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, however, is one of his earlier academic publications. The book covers the history of Christian diversity and contention in the first few centuries. The debates and controversies among the chaos of early Christianity ranged from the nature of Jesus to the contents of the scriptural canon. It’s a fascinating and important history. I’d merely piecemealed the book over the last few years since I was already familiar with the sects Ehrman describes,[ref]I started studying the Gnostics on my mission when I was given a book on the Nag Hammadi library.[/ref] but I finally buckled down and read through the entire thing. Well worth it.

You can listen to a Beliefnet interview with Ehrman below.

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An Interview with Thomas Sowell

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Economist Thomas Sowell was featured once again on the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge to promote his latest book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective. The interview is a nice, if somewhat simplified overview of his main arguments. Poverty, he says, is the norm. Wealth is what needs to be explained. And wealth largely comes by means of productivity. Yet, why are some groups across the globe more productive than others? He delves into a number of factors, ranging from geography to culture (human capital) to politics. Both the conversation and book are enlightening.

Check out the interview below.