It Is Not Best For Man To Eat Alone

Christianity Today op-ed: It Is Not Best for Man to Eat Alone, by Anna Broadway (Author, Solo Planet: How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling (2024)):

When the waiter brought out my long-awaited high tea that day, I didn’t expect I’d still be grieving it decades later.

I was 21 and enjoying my first “real” spring break during a debt-building week away in London. After years of devouring chaste romances set in England, I’d learned that Harrods was the best place to experience the glories of scones, clotted cream, and tiny sandwiches, all served on tiers of gleaming china and, of course, washed down with hot tea. So on my inaugural trip across the sea, it seemed only right to indulge my credit card’s largesse on a high tea at Harrods. Alone.

As I looked around the room that day, I knew I’d made a grave mistake. Not even the tender scones and decadent clotted cream could balance the bitter taste of regret. They worsened it. With each new delight, I felt more keenly the lack of someone to share my enjoyment with.

When I was doing fieldwork for my book on singleness, someone told me it might be worse to eat alone than sleep alone. Eating alone is certainly a problem for people who live by themselves. But with 21st-century work schedules, sports practices, and other structural realities, even those with seemingly “built-in” meal companions in spouses or children or roommates often dine solo too. When we do share supper, allergies and dietary restrictions can create other divides. This shift has even changed apartment and home designs as dining rooms fall out of fashion.

Sometimes, the solitude of a meal alone feels welcome. Perhaps an introvert drained by a day of meetings wants nothing more than time alone to decompress. And for some harried parents, a quiet cup of coffee—a reward for getting up before the rest of the household—might feel like a rare and precious solace.

But for Christians, the question of how and with whom we eat involves more than our own preferences. What is God’s design for our meals?

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Should You Have Kids In Law School?

Update:  The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children

Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed: Should You Have Kids … In Grad School, by Anastasia Berg (UC-Irvine) & Rachel Wiseman (Managing Editor, The Point):

The role of children and family in private and public life has become a flashpoint in the public discourse. The musician Charli XCX mused about whether she should have a baby on her summer-defining album Brat. JD Vance’s comments on “childless cat ladies” dominated several news cycles and caused an unexpected public-relations crisis for the Trump campaign. The question has become so heated, and so unavoidable, that some have begun to wonder aloud: “Why is 2024 suddenly about kids?” Not content to leave such questions to the pundits, public intellectuals including Becca Rothfeld, Melinda Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Ross Douthat, and Tyler Harper Austin have entered the fray.

The topic has hit a nerve — perhaps above all among those in the progressive and liberal chattering classes, for whom the question of whether to have kids has always been fraught: How could people, especially women, reconcile children with intellectual and creative ambition? With feminist commitments? With the grueling professional demands of academe?

In our recent book, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, we discuss the forces animating this public anxiety. Recently we sat down to talk about how scholarly environments can exacerbate these tensions and whether academics can move beyond ambivalence when it comes to children.

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Jesus And The Powers: Christian Political Witness In 2024

Christianity Today Book Review:  T. Wright: What Jesus Would Say to the ‘Empire’ Today (reviewing N.T. Wright (University of St Andrews) & Michael F. Bird (Ridley College), Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024):

In a year seeing over 50 countries at the polls—half of which could shift geopolitical dynamics—the timing of Jesus and the Powers’ release was no accident.

A few years ago, N. T. Wright (author of Surprised by Hope) and Michael F. Bird (Jesus Among the Gods)—who had collaborated on The New Testament in Its World—realized there was a lack of biblical guidance on how Christians should engage with politics, and they decided to do something about it.

“We both had the sense that most Christians today have not really been taught very much about a Christian view of politics,” Wright said. “Until the 18th century, there was a lot of Christian political thought, which we’ve kind of ignored the last 200–300 years—and it’s time to get back to it.”

The “gateway” to political theology, Wright believes, is the idea that, until Christ’s return, “God wants humans to be in charge.” And while all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God” according to Scripture, he says, Christians are called to “take the lead” in holding them accountable.

“The church is designed to be the small working model of new creation, to hold up before the world a symbol—an effective sign of what God has promised to do for the world. Hence, to encourage the rest of the world to say, ‘Oh, that’s what human community ought to look like. That’s how it’s done.’”

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The Making Of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality And Opportunity In The American Legal Profession

Robert L. Nelson (Northwestern), Ronit Dinovitzer (Toronto), Bryant G. Garth (UC-Irvine), Joyce S. Sterling (Denver), David B. Wilkins (Harvard), Meghan Dawe (Harvard) & Ethan Michelson (Indiana), The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press 2023) (reviewed by Eli Wald (Denver) here):

An unprecedented account of social stratification within the United States' legal profession.

How do race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do professionals then navigate these parameters?

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers provides an unprecedented account of the last two decades of the legal profession in the United States, offering a data-backed look at the structure of the profession and the inequalities that early-career lawyers face across race, gender, and class distinctions. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also interviewed more than two hundred lawyers and drew insights from their individual stories, contextualizing data with theory and close attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession.

Their findings show that lawyers’ careers both reflect and reproduce inequalities within society writ large. They also reveal how individuals exercise agency despite these constraints.

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Taxation, Citizenship And Democracy In The 21st Century

Yvette Lind (BI Norwegian Business School; Google Scholar) & Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), Taxation, Citizenship and Democracy in the 21st Century (Edward Elgar Publishing 2024): 

Proposing innovative ideas on the links between taxation, citizenship and democracy, this multidisciplinary book contributes to ongoing research and scholarship by emphasizing the importance of taxation to the functioning of modern democracy.

This book provides methodological and theoretical research tools from various disciplines such as law, economics and sociology. It considers, among other research questions, the disciplinary boundaries surrounding taxation, citizenship and democracy; the taxation of migrants in an era of globalization; and the role of procedural safeguards in legitimizing the use of automated risk management systems. Featuring contemporary case studies from the perspectives of taxpayers, legislators and tax administrations, it presents new perspectives on capital migration, social security and noncitizen farmworkers, as well as cooperative compliance policies in Nordic countries.

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Christian Faith Was Jackie Robinson’s Haven In A Heartless World

Christianity Today Book Review:  Christian Faith Was Jackie Robinson’s Haven in a Heartless World, by Clayton Trutor (Norwich University) (reviewing Gary Scott Smith (Grove City College), Strength for the Fight: The Life and Faith of Jackie Robinson (2022)):

Historian Gary Scott Smith has built onto the wing of the Jackie Robinson library that Henry, Long, and Lamb started to erect a few short years ago. In Strength for the Fight, part of Eerdmans’s Library of Religious Biography series, Smith offers a more intimate account of Robinson’s spiritual life than was previously known. Rooted in previous books on his subject, Smith’s book is both a work of synthesis and a triumph of original research that casts a distinct analytical eye on Robinson’s religious life.

While Robinson hardly hid his faith under a bushel basket, he shared his views publicly in a more restrained fashion than many charismatic Christian athletes have in recent decades. Smith illustrates this sensibility by calling upon his subject’s frequent and typically sedate speeches to congregations and church groups, reflecting his mainline Protestant roots in the Methodist church. Robinson spoke calmly about the viciousness he often faced as baseball’s first modern African American player, frequently comparing his experiences to those of Job. Many African Americans who heard Robinson speak could relate to such indignities as they went about their own everyday lives.

Smith places Robinson’s Christianity firmly within the ecumenical sensibilities of 1950s and 1960s mainline Protestantism. In this cultural space, a consensus developed around the need for what Smith terms “social amelioration.” Robinson exemplified the spirit of the time, showing great comfort in both Black and white churches. The straight and narrow of the Christian life was Robinson’s haven in an often-heartless world.

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Townsend: Federal Tax Procedure 2024

Jack Townsend, formerly an adjunct tax professor at the University of Houston Law School, has posted to SSRN his annual editions of the Federal Tax Procedure Book:

• Student 2024 Edition (782 pages)
• Practitioner 2024 Edition (1,125 pages)

The text is the same in both editions; the Student Edition has no footnotes; the Practitioner Edition has footnotes (numbering 4,932) fleshing out the text with information beyond that needed for students.

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One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search For Salvation

Daniel Silliman (News Editor, Christianity Today), One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation (2024):

Impious and amoral, petty and vindictive, Richard Nixon is not the typical protagonist of a religious biography. But spiritual drama is at the heart of this former president’s tragic story.

The night before his resignation, Richard Nixon wept—and prayed. Though his demanding parents had raised him Quaker, he wasn’t a regular churchgoer, nor was he quick to express vulnerability. As Henry Kissinger witnessed Nixon’s loneliness and humiliation that night, he remarked, “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?”

In this provocative and riveting biography, Daniel Silliman cuts to the heart of Nixon’s tragedy: Nixon wanted to be loved by God but couldn’t figure out how. This profound theological struggle underlay his successes and scandals, his turbulent political career, his history-changing victories, and his ultimate disgrace. As Silliman narrates the arc of his subject’s life and career, he connects Nixon’s character to religious influences in twentieth-century America—from Cold War Christianity to Chick tracts.

Silliman paints a nuanced spiritual portrait of the thirty-seventh president, just as he offers fresh insight into US political and religious history. Readers who lived through Watergate will discover a new perspective on an infamous controversy. A historical page-turner, One Lost Soul will surprise and absorb students, scholars, and anyone who likes a good story.

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In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face To Face With The Idea Of An Afterlife

New York Times Book Review, Sebastian Junger Is Reporting Live From the Brink of Death (reviewing Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (2024)):

Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. ... In the introduction to his memoir, “In My Time of Dying,” ... he describes his own near-drowning while surfing — the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.

“I was young,” Junger writes, “and had no idea the world killed people so casually.”

On June 16, 2020, Junger found himself face-to-face with mortality in a way he’d never been. One minute he was enjoying quiet time with his wife at a remote cabin on Cape Cod in Massachusetts; the next, he was in excruciating pain from a ruptured aneurysm. Hours later, as a doctor inserted a large-gauge transfusion line into his jugular vein, Junger sensed his father’s presence in the room.

His father had been dead for eight years — and he’d been a scientist and a rationalist — but there he was, trying to comfort his son. It didn’t work.

Junger writes, “I became aware of a dark pit below me and to my left.” It was “the purest black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all.” He was horrified, knowing that “if I went into that hole I was never coming back.”

Junger survived. Later, he had questions — lots of them. His memoir braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable. ...

How would you describe your relationship with spirituality and religion?
I was raised to be skeptical of organized religion. So I just cruised through life without any particular thought of spirituality — and no particular need for it. I didn’t have a child, thank God, who died of cancer; nothing happened to me that was so unbearable that I had a need to reach out to a higher power. I was blessed. I’ve had a lucky life. Not easy, but lucky. ...

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Law Moms: Juggling Motherhood, Ambition, And Personal Fulfillment

Law Moms: Juggling Motherhood, Ambition and Personal Fulfillment (2024):

What does it really take to balance the scales of justice—and family life? Step inside the gritty and gripping reality of the women who juggle the dual demands of motherhood and the legal profession.

Law Moms celebrates the indomitable spirit of eight women who navigate the complexities of law careers alongside the joys and challenges of motherhood. These narratives shine a light on the resilience, determination, and grace it takes to navigate both worlds with success and satisfaction. From the courtroom to the living room, these women demonstrate that with passion, perseverance, and the right support, balancing the scales of justice and family life is not only possible but deeply rewarding.

In these pages, you’ll discover:

• A second-generation lawyer confronting her relationship with alcohol and its pervasive influence in legal culture.
• A mother of two who embraces imperfection as she opts to join her kids' summer musical instead of pursuing her own summer internship.
• A woman who takes refuge in a law career as she tirelessly advocates for an adopted son with severe behavioral issues while trying to protect her younger daughter.
• A trailblazer challenging cultural stigmas surrounding mental health and therapy while battling depression.
• A personal injury lawyer finding solace amid her demanding schedule, cherishing precious moments with her children while helping her clients seek justice.

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The Bible And The Bard: The Gospel According To Shakespeare

F. LaGard Smith (Pepperdine) & John H. Parker (Lipscomb), The Gospel According to Shakespeare: 40 Inspiring Devotionals from the Bible and the Bard (2023):

Daily Devotionals Inspired by Shakespeare

For those who love Shakespeare and Scripture, this is the best of both.
Shakespeare’s writings are filled with classic biblical themes, such as guilt, redemption, sacrifice, forgiveness, and grace. Each chapter in the book is followed by a topical scripture reading and responsive prayer.

For those who seek spiritual insight, this is a mirror to the soul.
The Gospel According to Shakespeare moves the reader from the sheer enjoyment of a good play or sonnet to a personal spiritual journey that allows each of us to take an honest inventory of our moral selves and be called higher.

The Bible and the Bard.

Getting to the Moral of the Story!

F. LaGard Smith was born in 1944 in Houston, Texas, thereafter living in Shawnee and Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lancaster, Texas, and Birmingham, Alabama, before heading off to college at Florida College, graduating from Willamette University with both an undergraduate and law degree. 

Smith was a District Attorney for Malheur County, Oregon for three years, served as an administrator for the Oregon State Bar in Portland for a year, then spent 27 years teaching at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California, focusing on Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Trial Practice, and Law and Morality.

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WaPo Op-Ed: The Meaning Of Hagar

Washington Post Op-Ed: The Meaning of Hagar, by Marilynne Robinson (Author, Reading Genesis (2024)) (reviewed here):

The Bible’s human authors put characters in play for a reason. What were they trying to tell us with the servant girl cast in the wilderness?

The book of Genesis evokes the vernal moment, the very spring of Being, when new light awakens fecundity, and futurity, in anything it touches. When every niche of the good and possible is filled, mists rise from the primal garden and there they are, our glorious human progenitors, already complicating everything. Genesis introduces a very distinctive understanding of God and humankind and their history with one another. Within the terms of its vision, it establishes fundamental premises — that there is one God, Creator of heaven and Earth, that human beings are made in His image and likeness; that they are estranged from Him nevertheless; that in response to their estrangement, He offers a covenant bond with humankind in the person of a wandering herdsman named Abraham, and with his wife, Sarah, and their descendants. ... [T]he God and protagonist of Genesis has intentions through and beyond Abraham and his offspring that will, over vast reaches of time, embrace all the families of Earth. ...

Abraham, a hero of faith and patience, dies leaving one son who, despite his miraculous birth, is the slightest possible assurance that God’s promises to Abraham, notably a multitude of descendants, will be fulfilled. The moral of Abraham’s story would seem to be that, though he is the Lord’s familiar and confidant, this does not alter the fact that history unfolds on a scale human hope or dread or foresight cannot accommodate. At the scale of history, Providence can seem so attenuated that it becomes invisible in the stream of events. In Abrahamic terms, the faithfulness of God must be, and may be, taken on faith. No one can gauge the importance or success of his or her life or the life of anyone else, or imagine its further consequences. Nevertheless, because of the interest of Genesis in the origins of things — being, the sidereal heavens, nations, languages, the harshnesses of life — seeing persons or actions as existing in historic time, as having been seminal, with ongoing significance, is pervasive in Genesis.

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Were Christian Colonists Justified In Fighting In The Revolutionary War?

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  Were Christian Colonists Justified in Fighting in the Revolutionary War?, by  Mark A. Noll (Regent; Author, Christians in the American Revolution):

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.
Rom. 13:1 (NIV)

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority,  or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right.
1 Peter 2:13-14 (NIV)

Only one population in the colonies clearly was justified by classical Christian reasoning in taking up arms to defend itself—the half-million or so enslaved African Americans who were held in bondage as the result of armed attacks upon peaceful noncombatants.

When it comes to the British actions toward the colonies in the decade before 1776, almost all historians concede those actions were insensitive, based on lamentable misconceptions of colonial life, and often simply stupid. ... [C]olonial leaders complaining about mistreatment from Britain were not making things up.

But were the admitted abuses serious enough to warrant an armed revolution? Patriot leaders thought so, but there is a problem with why they thought so. They were troubled less by actual evils. ... Rather, they interpreted the bumbling British actions as a conspiracy to exterminate liberty in the colonies. ...

To the extent that colonists really thought that Britain intended systematic despotism, their going to war could perhaps be justified in classical Christian terms. Armed action to preempt an enemy's destructive intentions had long been considered moral. But if the problem in Britain was not primarily a malicious conspiracy but insensitive bungling, war would not have been justified. ...

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Tax After The American War Of Independence

Hans Gribnau (Tilburg) & Jane Frecknall Hughes (Nottingham; Google Scholar), Tax after the American War of Independence: A Consideration of The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist Papers in Studies in the History of Tax Law, Vol. 11 (Peter Harris (Cambridge) & Dominic de Cogan (Cambridge) eds.  2023):

The American War of Independence ended formally with the Versailles peace treaty of 1783 —– leaving 13 independent states needing a constitution. Tax played a key role in the lead-up to and during the War and in subsequent years, notably in the debate about the newly-developed Constitution. That debate is captured in The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.

The Federalist Papers comprise articles written by Founding Fathers James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, aimed at promoting acceptance of the new Constitution, and explaining and justifying the political principles it embodied. Key — and highly controversial — issues were the separation of powers between the judiciary, the legislature and the executive, and the concept of federalism. Numbers 30–36 of The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, concern taxation. Although not opposed to individual state taxation, Hamilton aimed to persuade readers that federal taxation was required to provide public necessities. Particularly contentious was the relationship between state tax law and any federal imposition and their respective standing.

The views of the Federalists were countered by The Anti-Federalist Papers. The Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution, though they too favoured federalism: they wanted a ‘small republic’ (a weak central government), as opposed to a ‘big republic’, fearing that a national government would be too powerful and threaten individual liberties and state government. The Anti-Federalist Papers are liberally peppered with detailed arguments about taxation, with numbers 30–36 being devoted entirely to tax. Of concern was the federal power to tax, which they wanted limited to taxing overseas imports.

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WSJ Book Review: ‘Middle-Aged Tax Attorney’ At Center Of Treasury Department Team Using Financial Weapons To Bring Down Hitler

Wall Street Journal Book Review:  Tom Nolan, Hitting Hitler in the Wallet (reviewing Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows: A Novel (2024)):

The star of Graham Moore’s historical thriller “The Wealth of Shadows” has no illusions about where he stands in 1939. Ansel Luxford is a “middle-aged tax attorney in a neatly knotted bow tie” who has placed his own accomplishments in “the great, yawning expanse of the middle that slowly, inexorably, devours the best and worst alike.” Yet something Ansel sees one morning on his trolley ride to work in Minneapolis stirs his long-buried youthful idealism: a hundred-some uniformed American Nazis marching down from a St. Paul bridge. He imagines himself confronting “the biggest, blondest Nazi of the bunch” and declaring: “Not here. You can have Germany, you can have Italy, but not here.”

Ansel—who has a family to think of—stifles that urge. But a few days later, he’s in a hotel bar in Washington, D.C., angling for a job at the Treasury Department, where he once worked. He’s sought out a driven curmudgeon, a Treasury economist named Harry Dexter White, and Ansel makes the pitch for his employment with a prediction of upcoming international events pegged to the price and availability of Scotch whisky and German schnapps. “You can tell the future of the world in those bottles,” Ansel claims to White, “if you only know how to read them.” When asked what he sees in the spirits market, Ansel replies: “Germany is going to invade Poland.” ...

White makes the tax attorney a member of his super-secret Treasury unit: a cabal of economists with the urgent goal of wrecking Hitler’s plans.

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Chasing Hope: Courage In A Hurting World

Christianity Today Book Review:  After Covering Global Disasters for Decades, Nicholas Kristof Is More Hopeful Than Ever, by Gary Haugen (Founder & CEO, International Justice Mission; Author, Good News About Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World (2021)) (reviewing Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life (2024)):

This is a memoir from someone who has led one of the most dramatically interesting lives of the last half-century, as an acclaimed foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times.

If you make a list of the world’s most shattering and consequential conflicts, catastrophes, and convulsions over the last 40 years, the odds are very high that Kristof was present to witness them. So too are the odds that someone was threatening to shoot him. ...

The book’s narrative would be implausible as a movie script, but it’s irresistible as personal storytelling because there is no hint of bravado, attention seeking, or adrenaline addiction. We simply find ourselves following a very sincere human who, over a lifetime, keeps taking small steps to go see what is happening to other humans who are suffering unspeakable brutality in the hidden corners of our world. As he goes, he finds himself sharing the unseen terror borne by millions of ordinary people when history’s great catastrophes unfold. And once among them, Kristof becomes the steward of their stories. ...

This is not only a book about an exceedingly interesting and thoughtful life. It also poses interesting questions. How ought humans to live with eyes wide open in a fallen world of so much suffering, violence, injustice, and death—yet so much courage, love, undeniable beauty, and pulsating life? ...

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The Bible And Same-Sex Marriage

Christianity Today Book Review:  What Believers Can and Can’t Affirm in Those Who Affirm Same-Sex Marriage, by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek (Ohio Northern; Google Scholar; Author, Marriage, Scripture, and the Church: Theological Discernment on the Question of Same-Sex Union (2021) (reviewing Rebecca McLaughlin, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scripture and Sexuality (2024)):

Maybe you believe that the Bible opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to explain your view? Maybe you doubt that the Bible opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to build an argument for affirmation? Or maybe you are unsure whether the Bible affirms or opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to inquire about the matter?

Whichever position you might find yourself in, Rebecca McLaughlin’s new book will point you to precisely the place in the Bible where you should begin—with the gospel and Jesus. ...

The book, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scripture and Sexuality (2024), brings together two recent trends of books by evangelical writers.

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Taxing Artificial Intelligence

Xavier Oberson (University of Geneva), Taxing Artificial Intelligence (2d ed. 2024):

In this insightful book, a fully updated edition of the author’s Taxing Robots, Xavier Oberson explores taxing Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a potential response to rising workplace disruption and inequality as the use of AI across the economy continues to grow.

Drawing on key legal and economic principles, Xavier Oberson, who may be regarded as a pioneer of the idea of taxing robots, examines diverse tax models that could be applied to either the use of AI, such as a usage or automation tax, or to AI systems directly, and presents a novel argument in favour of taxing AI. Oberson highlights critical issues including definitions of AI and robots, the complexity of granting a tax capacity to AI, and the compatibility of AI taxes with international tax rules. In particular, this cutting-edge new edition analyses how VAT can be applied to enterprises using AI and autonomous AI systems, and reflects on the legal and technological limits facing lawmakers.

Taxing Artificial Intelligence will be essential reading for scholars, policy makers and students across law and economics. It will also be invaluable for law and tax professionals seeking to understand the latest developments in AI, automation, and the future of work.

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How Property Taxes Drive Racism And Inequality

New York Times Op-Ed:  It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes, by Andrew W. Kahrl (Virginia; Author,  The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (University of Chicago Press 2024)):

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

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NY Times & WSJ Book Reviews: Enslaved Christians And The Making Of The Bible

Wall Street Journal Book Review: The Bible’s Hidden Contributors, by Peter Thonemann (Oxford) (reviewing Candida Ross (University of Birmingham), God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (2024)):

“The stupid, the lowborn, the gullible; slaves, women, and children.” For the second-century pagan writer Celsus, it was easy to sneer at the adherents of the new Christian faith as a basket of deplorables. Still, insults often contain a grain of truth. In his point-by-point rebuttal of Celsus’ anti-Christian polemic a century or so later, the theologian Origen doesn’t dispute this particular charge. Yes, the lowborn, the uneducated, the marginalized were indeed at the core of the Christian mission: That was the point. Today, most theologians would accept that Celsus was right to foreground the crucial role of women in shaping the early church. In “God’s Ghostwriters,” Candida Moss attempts to make a similar case for the role of enslaved people. It is hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t find this a thrilling, if at times infuriating, book.

Ms. Moss, a professor of theology at the University of Birmingham, is the author of several spiky and provocative revisionist studies of the early church. ... In “God’s Ghostwriters,” she sets out to recover the contributions made by enslaved men and women to the development of the church in (roughly) the first two centuries after Christ.

In fact, “God’s Ghostwriters” is by far the best account we have of the roles played by enslaved people in supporting the high literary culture of the ancient world more broadly. ... Throughout antiquity, every stage of literary composition, dissemination and reception was facilitated by enslaved letter-carriers, copyists and readers. As Ms. Moss reminds us, even reading a book generally meant listening to an enslaved person, who was himself reading from a scroll copied out by another enslaved person.

“God’s Ghostwriters” makes a more radical and specific claim: that enslaved people were integral to the formation of the New Testament.

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Sullivan Review Of Graetz's The Antitax Movement

Martin A. Sullivan, New Graetz Book Chronicles and Critiques the Antitax Movement, 182 Tax Notes Fed. 1715 (Mar. 4, 2024) (reviewing Michael J. Graetz (Columbia), The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton University Press 2024):

Micheal J. Graetz writes fact-filled books about topics that demand more attention. In The Power to Destroy — How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America, the professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School masterfully describes how a cast of prominent conservative politicians and pundits over the past 50 years has galvanized the American public’s deep-seated but scattershot dislike for taxation into a resilient political movement that has moved the political center of gravity to the right and the level of the national debt skyward. ...

the book is more than a detail-laden, yet mercifully compact narrative of the past half-century of tax politics. Throughout, Graetz forcefully argues that the antitax movement has been harmful — that it has “hijacked America” — implying that the United States has veered off course from what ultimately would be a better outcome. Making that case won’t win Graetz any popularity contests, if only because most of the public naturally dislikes the financial burden of tax, fears the IRS, and loathes the complexity of complying with laws they can barely understand. Moreover, Graetz can expect that antitax movement thought leaders will respond to his critique with various policy arguments. Let’s play the role of devil’s advocate and briefly explore whether the book adequately addresses those arguments. ...

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Purpose: What Evolution And Human Nature Imply About The Meaning Of Our Existence

Publisher's Weekly, Samuel T. Wilkinson: Humans are Meaningful by Design:

Imagine a book about God with no pronouns for the deity. No mention of Jesus, heaven, hell, or salvation. Is it an atheist's dream? Not really. It's a debut trade book by a psychiatrist who embraces the science of evolution with an asterisk*. The * is that evolution is actually God in action—creating humans right down to their very DNA to know and love God and each other—says Samuel T. Wilkinson [Yale], the author of Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence (Pegasus Books, Mar. 5, 2024).

Wilkinson is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, where he also serves as associate director of the Yale Depression Research Program and has won awards for academic writings in his field. His viewpoint in the book, however, was shaped by his medical studies, his own struggle to reconcile science, the faith instilled in him as a follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and his life as the married father of five children. Yet no specific religious denomination or philosophy, East or West, and no theological stance gets mentioned in his book. Everyone fits in.

"I didn't want to leave anyone out," he tells PW. "The primary audience for the book is people who think there is something more in life — whether that is a specific belief in the New Testament God or a sense that we are not here by accident." He expresses in the book that he has observed a pervading climate of distrust, fear, cynicism, and disconnection among people, which he attributes to "a loss of faith in a benevolent God. A loss of faith in the goodness of humanity. A loss of faith in an absolute purpose and meaning to our existence," he writes.

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NY Times: Biblical Beauty, Human Evil, And The Idea Of Israel

New York Times: Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Beauty, Human Evil and the Idea of Israel, by Ezra Klein:

Marilynne Robinson is one of the great living novelists. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal, and Barack Obama took time out of his presidency to interview her at length. Her fiction is suffused with a sense of holiness: Mundane images like laundry drying on a line seem to be illuminated by a divine force. Whether she’s telling the story of a pastor confronting his mortality in “Gilead” or two sisters coming of age in small-town Idaho in “Housekeeping,” her novels wrestle with theological questions of what it means to be human, to see the world more deeply, to seek meaning in life.

In recent years, Robinson has tightened the links between her literary pursuits and her Christianity, writing essays about Calvinism and other theological traditions. Her forthcoming work of nonfiction is Reading Genesis [Mar. 12, 2024]  a close reading of the first book of the Old Testament (or the Torah, as I grew up knowing it). It’s a countercultural reading in many respects — one that understands the God in Genesis as merciful rather than vengeful and humans as flawed but capable of astounding acts of grace. No matter one’s faith, Robinson unearths wisdom in this core text that applies to many questions we wrestle with today.

We discuss the virtues evoked in Genesis — beauty, forgiveness and hospitality — and how to cultivate what Robinson calls “a mind that’s schooled toward good attention.” And we end on her reading of the story of Israel, which I found to be challenging, moving and evocative at a time when that nation has been front and center in the news.

New York Times:  No One Has Ever Read Genesis Like This, by Francis Spufford:

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Jordan Peterson, God, And Christianity

Religion News Service, Jordan Peterson Wrestles With God:

In a new lecture tour to support a forthcoming book, the psychologist and public intellectual hews ever closer to Christianity, tantalizing fans who take their cues on converting from his secular but religiously curious thought.

Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian psychologist, bestselling author and champion of manhood, strode back and forth across the stage at the historic Providence Performing Arts Center in early February, matching the theater’s ornate decoration with one of his characteristically flamboyant suits — a color-blocked navy, white and orange number with yellow lining.

As he paced, his speech sometimes resembled an altar call, other times borrowed the intellectual heft of a Catholic college lecture, and at one point offered a secular, pop psychological argument for the existence of God:

Nonbelievers, he told the crowd in Providence, wrestle with God as believers do: when they’re morally outraged at suffering in the world. “That’s an emotional argument,” he said. “And it’s the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you are in relationship with.”

Peterson was in town to kick off his 51-city “We Who Wrestle With God” tour, in advance of his new book of the same name. The “we” in the tour’s title is the closest the former University of Toronto psychology professor and YouTube star has come to admitting his own belief in the God of the Bible.

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NY Times Op-Ed: Finding God Through The Divine Language Of Mathematics

New York Times Op-Ed: Math Is the Answer to More Than One Question, by Alec Wilkinson (Author, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age) (2023):

I am surprised at this late stage, in my 70s, to be thinking about God. In my defense, I might say that I did not arrive at these thoughts by reflecting on my own inevitable end or from a religion or a Scripture or the example of a holy figure. I arrived by means of mathematics, specifically simple mathematics — algebra, geometry and calculus, the kind of mathematics that adolescents do.

Several years ago, I decided that I needed to know something of mathematics, a subject that had roughed me up cruelly as a boy. I believed that not knowing mathematics had limited my ability to think and solve problems and to see the world in complex ways, and I thought that if I understood even a little of it, I would be smarter. My acquaintance with mathematics is still slight. I am only a mathematical tourist, but my experience has led me to believe that mathematics is rife with intimations of a divine presence.

This is no observation of my own. Mathematicians have been finding suggestions of divinity in mathematics at least since Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C. For many mathematicians, there is no question that God is somehow involved. Newton, for example, believed that mathematics exemplified thoughts in the mind of God. ...

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Graetz: The Power to Destroy: How The Antitax Movement Hijacked America

Michael J. Graetz (Columbia), The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Feb. 13, 2024 Princeton University Press):

The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards—and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as a “second American Revolution,” setting off an antitax, antigovernment wave that has transformed American politics and economic policy. In The Power to Destroy, Michael Graetz tells the story of the antitax movement and how it holds America hostage—undermining the nation’s ability to meet basic needs and fix critical problems.

In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” But The Power to Destroy argues that tax opponents now wield this destructive power. Attacking the IRS, protecting tax loopholes, and pushing tax cuts from Reagan to Donald Trump, the antitax movement is threatening the nation’s social safety net, increasing inequality, ballooning the national debt, and sapping America’s financial strength. The book chronicles how the movement originated as a fringe enterprise promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric, and how—abetted by conservative media and Grover Norquist’s “taxpayer protection pledge”—it evolved into a mainstream political force.

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WSJ: Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  Abraham Lincoln’s Unchurched Faith, by Allen C. Guelzo (Princeton; Author, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024)):

The First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, Ill., opened in 1876, but its most famous congregant never crossed the church’s threshold. Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with First Presbyterian dates to an earlier location, across town, and it was by no means an easy connection. ...

John G. Bergen, a Presbyterian missionary, arrived in 1828 and two years later had built his first church.

Bergen led the congregation until 1848, when it had grown to some 500 members. By then it had also suffered its first division. Presbyterians are the heirs of the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin, who organized churches around the leadership of presbyters, or elders. The most prominent feature of Calvinist Presbyterians is their belief in God’s providential control of all human affairs and, concomitantly, the “predestination” of saints to salvation. They were also known for their resistance to royal authority in England. John Witherspoon, the only active clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, was Presbyterian. ...

Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837. He admitted he’d “never been to church” there and “probably shall not be soon.” He had been raised in a devout Baptist family and even imbibed a strong dose of Calvinist teaching on predestination, but rebelled nevertheless. By the time he arrived to town, Lincoln had a reputation as an “infidel” and “was skeptical as to the great truths of the Christian religion.” Even after he married Mary Todd—a niece of one of First Presbyterian’s founders—neither he nor she made any motion to join a Springfield church.

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WSJ: You Don’t Have To Be A Jerk To Succeed In Law And Life

Following up on my previous post, A No-Jerks Rule Can Make Your Business (And Law School) Thrive:  Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay, You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed, by Yascha Mounk (Johns Hopkins; Google Scholar; Author, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (2023)):

The message sent by popular culture is clear: If you want to get ahead, you’d better be a jerk.

Take one of the most celebrated shows of the moment: “Succession,” which just won the Emmy for best television drama for the third year in a row. In the series, everyone is a jerk to everyone else all of the time. ...

Everyone who has ever worked in an office knows the type: The go-getter who is desperate to rise through the ranks and is perfectly willing to act like a complete jerk to do so. He—and, yes, it usually is a he—constantly talks up his own accomplishments. He belittles his colleagues. Perhaps he even refuses certain tasks that are assigned to him because he considers them to be below his true level of talent or seniority or qualification.

The office jerk’s core assumption—whether conscious or unconscious—is very simple: A lot of powerful people are jerks. I want to be powerful. So I should act like a jerk. But is the assumption that being a jerk will make you successful actually true? ...

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WSJ: Lessons In Leadership From The Hebrew Bible

Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, Lessons in Leadership From the Hebrew Bible:

America’s political class isn’t at its best. Public life lately seems to consist mainly of self-generated disasters, easily preventable crises and media-driven hysteria. Political leaders behave like spoiled children, outrage the public to no purpose, and loudly champion ideas they know to be infeasible. Worst of all are the decisions apparently calculated to achieve the opposite of their stated goals: pandemic measures that didn’t mitigate the virus and shredded the social fabric and inflicted lasting damage on children; climate regulations that punish the poor and working class but don’t affect the climate; a military withdrawal so poorly planned that it provokes a new war; billions sent to a regime that funds genocidal attacks on an American ally; ill-advised, sometimes cockamamie prosecutions of a former president that make him more likely to regain the presidency.

Do our educated VIPs and powerbrokers have the slightest idea what they’re doing? Do they care?

So aggressively counterproductive has the country’s political leadership become that one feels the need of a metaphysical explanation to make sense of it all. That was my thought when I read Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik’s Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship. ... The book doesn’t address today’s political controversies, but it suggests ways to think about the deeply perverse unwisdom into which so many American political leaders appear to have fallen. ...

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NY Times & WSJ Book Reviews: Zero At The Bone — 50 Entries On Faith, Death, And Suffering

Hamilton Cain (Author, This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing), ‘Zero at the Bone’ Review: Writing Against Darkness (reviewing Christian Wiman (Yale Divinity School), Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair (2023)):

The challenge of measuring the commands of religious belief against the unavoidable state of mortality and suffering goes back at least as far as Job. For years the Yale theologian and poet Christian Wiman has grappled with a cancer diagnosis and a difficult prognosis, white-knuckling through a rollercoaster of chemotherapy and pneumonias, turning to faith and family for anchorage, his notebook for emotional ballast. His medical travails are the backdrop to “Zero at the Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair,” an ardent if pious and uneven pastiche of personal anecdote, criticism, his own poetry and (many) quotes from other luminaries.

Mr. Wiman’s despair is existential, but writing, he hopes, may be the antidote. As he notes in a prologue, “I want to write a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be.” And there’s the rub: The writer peers into a glass darkly, searching for God, but his own reflection stares back.

The zero in the title is oblivion, or, as Mr. Wiman describes it in one aside, “the death of all human endeavor . . . the Great No that nibbles at consciousness.” It’s this dread of death and the obliteration of consciousness that binds religions and ancestor worship across millennia. The subtitle underscores the book’s structure while also evoking Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” suggesting that Mr. Wiman’s literary pedigree will loom large. ...

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Keep Complaining to God. Just Don’t Ignore Him.

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  Keep Complaining to God. Just Don’t Ignore Him., by Drew Dyck (adapted from Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (2023):

If you’re a Christian for long enough, you’ll notice that something sad starts to happen. A lot of the people who started the journey with you end up walking away.

They leave for various reasons and go out different doors. Some leave loudly, announcing that they no longer believe in God. Others drift away without so much as a whisper.

I wrote my first book on 20-somethings who shed their Christian identity. They had lots of reasons for leaving. Many were hurt by other Christians. Some were drawn to behaviors that were incompatible with Christian beliefs. Others were plagued by doubt. The interesting thing to me is that some of the most faithful Christians I know have experienced identical challenges.

What explains why some leave while others stay? Sometimes the only difference I could see is what they did with their trials. The first group ran away from God while the second ran toward him. Instead of letting doubt and disappointment fester in darkness, they dragged it into the light. They joined the great biblical tradition of prophets who expressed their grievances to God, often in harsh and accusatory language.

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Inazu: GenXers And Evangelical Culture

John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar), GenXers and Evangelical Culture:

Today’s post is a Q&A with Jon Ward, the chief national correspondent at Yahoo! News, and the author of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation (2023).

John Inazu: Testimony is a very personal book that also enlists your journalistic gifts and training. Can you describe how you approached this kind of writing? What were the biggest surprises and the biggest challenges along the way?

Jon Ward: I’d wanted to write about my upbringing for a long time, for many years. I’d always been analyzing it, even as I lived it. I knew there was something that felt deeply, fundamentally wrong with the way I was taught to think and live. Perhaps the better way to say it was that I was taught how to not think and not live. But I also knew that there was something fiercely real that had happened to my parents and their generation in the 1970s. And I experienced good things growing up in church, of course, too. Most of the people there were good people. Or at least many were. ...

JI: Much of this book is about your own upbringing. One theme that emerges from your account of the church of your youth is how much the people your parents age wanted to build and cultivate an environment in which their kids could be deeply—and perhaps I should add, safely—formed into Christian faith. As a parent myself, I have some empathy for that desire. At the same time, I’ve been around a lot of Christian institutions that channel these concerns into fears and anxieties. Is there a way to be intentionally formational without being fearful or controlling?

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NY Times Op-Ed: The Power Of Faith At 1:00 A.M.

New York Times Op-Ed:  The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse, by Christopher Beha:

I came to the work of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse — who receives the Nobel Prize in Literature this week — by way of “,” a novel cycle that began appearing in English just a few years ago.

I’d been told by more than one person I trust that “Septology” was Fosse’s masterpiece, but I will admit to a personal reason for finally picking up a writer I’d been meaning to read for many years. In quick succession about a decade ago, Fosse married (for the third time), quit drinking, and converted to Catholicism. “Septology” was the first thing he wrote after these life-altering events, and they are all reflected in its pages. So “Septology” was recommended to me not just as a great literary novel but as a great Catholic literary novel, and I have a special interest in the genre.

As it happens, I also married (for the first time), quit drinking, and converted to Catholicism in quick succession about a decade ago. (In my case, this “conversion” was a return to the faith in which I’d been raised.) I’m a novelist myself, though not nearly so prolific or distinguished as Fosse, and my writing life is linked to my religious life in ways that remain fairly mysterious to me. Given all this, it may seem overdetermined that “Septology” would feel from its very first pages as if it were written especially for me, but many readers who do not share these autobiographical affinities have reported the same reaction. ...

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Schizer Presents How To Save The World In Six Steps — Bringing Out The Best In Nonprofits Today At San Diego

David M. Schizer (Columbia) will be discussing How to Save the World in Six (Not So Easy) Steps: Bringing Out the Best in Nonprofits (2023) at a book event today at San Diego (RSVP here): 

The U.S. has over 1.5 million nonprofits, which touch our lives in countless ways. The finest are inspiring, but unfortunately, too many let us down. Luckily, there’s a solution. How to Save the World in Six (Not So Easy) Steps by expert scholar and nonprofit leader David M. Schizer is the ultimate management book for nonprofit professionals, board members, and donors.

Since the goal of nonprofits is to advance their mission—not to make money—performance can be difficult to assess. Schizer explains how this fundamental challenge makes it harder to expose unwise and self-interested choices, resolve conflicts, and evolve with the times.

In response, nonprofits need to do two challenging things really well: figure out the best way to advance the mission, and then build support for it. With entertaining anecdotes from his many years leading Columbia Law School and international humanitarian organization JDC, as well as interviews with an all-star cast of nonprofit leaders, Schizer explains how to accomplish these twin goals with the “six Ps”:

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Was Abraham Lincoln A Christian?

Following up on my previous post, Abraham Lincoln’s Use Of The Bible In His Second Inaugural Address:  Christianity Today Book Review:  America’s ‘First Evangelical President’ Might Not Have Been a Christian at All, by Robert Tracy McKenzie (Wheaton College), (reviewing Gordon Leidner, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible (2023) & Joshua Zeitz, Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation (2023)):

Two new books probe the mysteries of Abraham Lincoln’s public and private relationship to religion.

If Abraham Lincoln still matters to Americans in the 21st century—and he does—a major reason is that there’s much at stake politically in how we remember him. This is as true of Lincoln’s religious beliefs as for any other part of his life. In a nation deeply divided over the proper role of religion in the public square, it makes a difference whether our greatest president was a religious skeptic or an orthodox Christian, a devotee of Thomas Paine or a disciple of Jesus.

The debate began almost immediately upon his death. Although Lincoln had never joined a church, Christians typically insisted on his devout faith. Although the late president had quoted extensively from the Bible, non-Christians protested that he doubted much of what it said.

Professional historians joined the debate in the first half of the last century, but they haven’t resolved it. There are outliers, but most agree that by the time of his presidency, Lincoln was not an atheist, if he ever had been. Most agree, as well, that he was almost certainly not an orthodox Christian, if by that we mean someone able to assent wholly to one of the major Christian confessions. It’s been difficult to determine beyond this, thanks to limitations in the surviving evidence.

After his death, countless acquaintances claimed intimate knowledge of the state of Lincoln’s soul, but these testimonies are hopelessly contradictory and their objectivity is doubtful. In addition, Lincoln’s voluminous personal papers are characterized by a pervasive, seemingly intentional ambiguity. Lincoln scholars all acknowledge that he used biblical language, but the questions of why he alluded to the Bible and how much of it he believed remain unanswered—and are probably unanswerable. 

And yet we persist in asking these questions, as two major new studies of Lincoln’s religion attest.

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Shaviro: The Rise (And Fall?) Of Neoliberalism In Tax

Daniel Shaviro (NYU; Google Scholar), The Rise (and Fall?) Of Neoliberalism in Tax (JOTWELL) (reviewing J. Bradford DeLong (UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar), Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022).

Bradford DeLong’s career opus, Slouching Towards Utopia, is a very long — although, in my view, consistently illuminating and entertaining — work of economic history that only very briefly, for a few pages here and there, touches on the history of taxation. Why, then, do I regard it as offering a highly suitable subject for a Jotwell Tax column?

The broader answer to this question is that historical context is vital to understanding tax (like other) institutions and ideas and yet often is ignored, other than by tax historians. The narrower answer, illustrating this broad proposition, pertains to the particular context of the great intellectual shifts that have occurred over the last thirty-plus years, not just in legal academic thinking, including in tax, but in American intellectual and political life more generally.

Slouching Towards Utopia concerns what DeLong calls the “long twentieth century,” which he views as having run from roughly 1870 to 2010. He argues that these 140 years were “the most consequential of all humanity’s centuries” (P. 1), above all because — despite disasters along the way, such as two world wars and the Great Depression — they featured startlingly high rates of annual per capita economic growth. During this period, he estimates that annual growth averaged 2.1 percent per year, as opposed to 0.45 percent over previous centuries (P. 3), and perhaps 0.6 percent in the years since 2010 (P. 516). This rapid growth rate triggered a more than an eightfold increase in world income per capita from the beginning to the end of the “long century” — despite an immense concomitant rate of population increase — transforming everyday life around the world for the (at least materially) better, by reducing dire poverty and allowing luxury goods to be widely available, rather than being limited to people at the top of the income distribution.

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The Surprising Rebirth Of Belief In God: Why New Atheism Grew Old And Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again

Following up on last Sunday's post, America Doesn’t Need More God. It Needs More Atheists.: Christianity Today, Secular Figures Are Giving Faith a Second Look (reviewing Justin Brierley, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again (Foreword by N. T. Wright) (2023)):

On one recent weekday evening, I was sitting in a circle in a concrete garage praying Compline, a traditional nighttime liturgy, by candlelight. Within our small intentional community in London, we often recite these strange, rhythmic old sentences stitched together from the Psalms.

Our visitors, though, likely found them unfamiliar. Around the flickering flames, I could see a philosopher, a Marxist (and polyamorous) political theorist, a prominent feminist, a historian of ideas, and a columnist for a major magazine. None of them would call themselves Christians, but all had willingly chosen to join this nightly ritual.

Justin Brierley’s new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, names this phenomenon, which I have experienced for several years: a new openness to spiritual matters among those we might have thought hostile. Brierley, until recently, hosted the long-standing apologetics radio program Unbelievable?, which has welcomed many serious public intellectuals. Having witnessed numerous debates between those inside and outside the church, he reports a dramatic “change in tone and substance.”

A century and a half after the poet Matthew Arnold heard the “long withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith, Brierley opens with a provocative observation: Seas don’t withdraw forever. The tides go out, and then they come back in. Brierley is betting the sea is on the turn.

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Book Review: Rumors Of The Death Of BigLaw Are Greatly Exaggerated

W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell; Google Scholar), Rumors of the Death of BigLaw Are Greatly Exaggerated (reviewing Mitt Regan (Georgetown) & Lisa H. Rohrer (Boston University), BigLaw: Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm (University of Chicago Press 2021)): 

Many legal profession scholars have predicted the decline, or even demise, of large law firms. But not only are they still with us, they are flourishing. Drawing from hundreds of interviews with firm partners, Mitt Regan and Lisa Rohrer offer a sophisticated explanation of the resilience of this form of organizing the delivery of legal services. Regan and Rohrer see firm managers as trying to solve a Prisoner’s Dilemma and Assurance Game in light of the risk that partners with a substantial book of business may exit the firm and take their clients to another firm. Financial and non-financial rewards, many of which are within the control of firm management, provide firm-specific capital that keep partners committed to their existing firms and prevent their defection on the lateral market. Regan and Rohrer argue that they have identified a distinctive ethical conception of lawyering associated with BigLaw that combines business logic and the logic of professionalism. This Review considers the relationship between large firm structure and compensation practices and some competing conceptions of ethical lawyering.

Conclusion
BigLaw is not for everyone. Regan and Rohrer do not say much about the perennial problem of work-life balance, but a few reported comments by lawyers show that families, relationships, hobbies, and even getting enough sleep are interests that must be subordinated to the firm and its clients:

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Leipold Reviews Hamilton's Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide To Meaningful Employment

James G. Leipold (Senior Advisor, Law School Admission Council), There Are No Shortcuts, But the Road Is Getting Shorter (reviewing Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar), Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide to Meaningful Employment (ABA Books 3d ed. 2023)):

Neil Hamilton continues to distill his roadmap for law students into ever more streamlined guidance on how to transform themselves from law students to fully fledged lawyers.

Hamilton’s third edition of his Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide to Meaningful Employment (ABA Books, summer 2023), is a complete revision of the second edition, wherein he has wisely condensed the work from 224 pages to fewer than 50 pages to make it even more accessible to busy law students.

This new work is more akin to a workbook, with short sections of text followed by templates that law students can readily use and adapt for their own purposes, and frankly, templates that law school career services professionals can readily use and adapt for their own purposes.

The central mission of the workbook is to guide students through four essential developmental practices that are indispensable steps on the successful journey from student to professional. ...

Roadmap is a generous contribution to both law students and the law student professional identity formation movement. Hamilton and his colleagues at the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, namely Jerry Organ and Louis Bilionis, have been generous in sharing their important work with the legal education community.

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McCaulley: The Streets Sent Me to the Pulpit

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  The Streets Sent Me to the Pulpit, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton; Author, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Sept. 2023):

My sophomore year of high school, I met a girl at a party. We talked on the phone for a few weeks before finally setting a date to meet up again. She lived in the Lincoln Park projects in Huntsville, Alabama. I relied on her directions when I drove to pick her up, but I couldn’t find her house. Before giving up, I decided to get out and walk, in case she spotted me.

That was a mistake. The locals noticed my car circling their block, and a group of young men came over. One of them asked, “Who are you?” His tone invited con­frontation: You have stepped into my territory. Why are you here? ...

At 16, I was a mix of compet­ing visions and possibilities, with nothing to tie them to­gether. What came next surprised even me.

“I am a Christian,” I responded.

If breath and sound could be chased down, I would have run after my words and dragged them back inside my mouth. But it was too late. I had spoken.

The boys were shocked. I could see it on their faces. They’d wanted me to say I wasn’t from there so they could be justified in resorting to violence. But to hear they were in the presence of a church kid must have thrown them off-balance. In response, they laughed and walked away.

My friends and I used to say, If you scared, go to church—meaning faith was for the weak and the cowardly who found street life too much for them. But it wasn’t fear of a violent outcome that had motivated my confession. I’d had a moment of God-given clarity. ...

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Wheaton College Releases Report On Its History Of Racism

Christianity Today, Wheaton College Releases Report on Its History of Racism:

Wheaton College embraced racist attitudes that “created an inhospitable and sometimes hostile campus environment for persons of color,” according to a a 122 page review of the school’s history released by trustees today.

Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the next century and a half it turned away from concerns about racial equality. Even when the school’s leadership knew what was right, they frequently lacked the courage to “take a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy,” the report says, and too often “chose to stay silent, equivocate, or do nothing” about racial injustice.

“We cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent,” the task force concluded at the end of an 18-month study. “These sins constituted a failure of Christian love; denied the dignity of people made in the image of God; created deep and painful barriers between Christian brothers and sisters; tarnished our witness to the gospel; and prevented us from displaying more fully the beautiful diversity of God’s kingdom.”

President Philip Ryken told CT he believes the report is important and he’s glad the college will be making it publicly available.

“The record of the people of God, in so many ways, is a record of their failures as well as their successes,” he said. “I think we can be more effective in living for Jesus Christ today if we’re aware of the challenges that our brothers and sisters have faced in the past and how they have responded to the challenges and opportunities of their day.”

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WSJ: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, And The Bible

Wall Street Journal, Tolkien’s Biblical Epic:

If, in the 1930s, someone had sought to predict the bestselling English author of the 20th century, they probably would not have selected the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who died 50 years ago on Sept. 2, 1973, spent his entire professional life in the academy, yet his impact on the world reached far beyond the ivory tower. His Lord of the Rings series of novels, which launched the modern genre of fantasy literature, have sold over 150 million copies and served as the source material for the wildly successful films of Peter Jackson.

Tolkien’s fame began with a much lighter work, The Hobbit, published in 1937. A book for children, it is the story of Bilbo Baggins, a lazy creature who is suddenly startled into alacrity by a visiting wizard and an entourage of dwarves that recruit him to join their invasion of a dragon’s den. Along the way, Bilbo acquires a useful ring that allows him to turn invisible, a magical device essential to the triumph of his quest. ...

To understand the enduring enchantment of Tolkien’s works, one must comprehend a central feature of his life that the 2019 biopic Tolkien largely chose to ignore: his Catholic faith.

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NY Times Op-Ed: America Is Losing Religious Faith

New York Times Op-Ed:  America Is Losing Religious Faith, by Nicholas Kristof:

While much of the rest of the industrialized world has become more secular over the last half-century, the United States has appeared to be an exception.

Politicians still end their speeches with “God bless America.” At least until recently, more Americans believed in the virgin birth of Jesus (66 percent) than in evolution (54 percent).

Yet evidence is growing that Americans are becoming significantly less religious. They are drifting away from churches, they are praying less and they are less likely to say religion is very important in their lives. For the first time in Gallup polling, only a minority of adults in the United States belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Most of the research is on Christians because they account for roughly 90 percent of believers in the United States.)

“We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” Jim Davis and Michael Graham write in a book published this week, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?.

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Buchanan Reviews Stewart's Tax & Government In The 21st Century

Neil Buchanan (Florida; Google Scholar), Gender Issues in the Modern Tax State (JOTWELL) (reviewing Miranda Stewart (Melbourne), Tax & Government in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press 2022)):

Why are gender and unpaid work issues continually marginalized in tax policy analysis? After all, feminist legal theorists have spent at least two generations trying to address questions that should be at the center of any analysis of government policy, no matter one’s political priors. People who want to turn the clock back to a 1950’s-style gendered hierarchy, for example, surely would want to know that their version of utopia (which, to be clear, I find positively dystopian) cannot possibly be created without understanding how government taxation and spending policies change people’s decisions about marriage and divorce, child-bearing and -rearing, the challenges of poverty (both sudden and chronic), and so on. Progressives are typically more aware of those connections, but somehow the “tax is different” mantra prevents many people from seeing that gender justice and tax justice are inseparable.

Miranda Stewart, a professor of tax law at the University of Melbourne, has long carried on important work to bring these issues to the fore. Her latest book, Tax & Government in the 21st Century, is a masterwork that covers the full range of issues that confront us, from savings and wealth, to corporate and business taxation, to the global digital economy, and every important issue in between.

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Berg: Religious Liberty Doesn’t Have To Make Polarization Worse

Christianity Today Op-Ed:  Religious Liberty Doesn’t Have to Make Polarization Worse, by Thomas C. Berg (St. Thomas-MN; Author, Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion July 2023)):

Americans support religious liberty—in general. But they are deeply polarized about how far the natural and constitutional right of individuals to respond to their conceptions of the divine should extend. And unfortunately, Americans tend to be reluctant to extend religious liberty broadly to views they find unsympathetic.

I think that’s sad. Religious liberty is for everyone and should be cherished by all. It’s also ironic, as I argue in my new book, Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age, because historically, the central social purpose of religious liberty was to reduce the fear and anger people feel when they’re threatened with penalties for living according to their religious commitments.

Americans support religious liberty—in general. But they are deeply polarized about how far the natural and constitutional right of individuals to respond to their conceptions of the divine should extend. And unfortunately, Americans tend to be reluctant to extend religious liberty broadly to views they find unsympathetic.

I think that’s sad. Religious liberty is for everyone and should be cherished by all. It’s also ironic, as I argue in my new book, Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age, because historically, the central social purpose of religious liberty was to reduce the fear and anger people feel when they’re threatened with penalties for living according to their religious commitments.

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The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better

Abdi Aidid (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law; Specialist, Legal Innovation, Blue J Legal) & Benjamin Alarie (Osler Chair in Business Law, University of Toronto Faculty of Law; CEO, Blue J Legal), The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better (University of Toronto Press 2023):

Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology — and specifically the advent of legal prediction — is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the "technological singularity," The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional "completeness" of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions.

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The Awakened Brain: Faith Makes You Happier And Healthier

NPR, This Ivy League Researcher Says Spirituality Is Good For Our Mental Health:

[A]ccording to Lisa Miller, a professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, having a spiritual life is good for your mental health.

Miller is a psychologist and has dedicated most of her career to the study of neuroscience and spirituality. Her newest book is called The Awakened Brain, and in it she makes some really bold claims about how holding spiritual beliefs can decrease our rates of anxiety and depression and generally make us most likely to lead happier lives. I can hear your skepticism already! I get it. I'm a spiritually inclined kind of person but it's still hard for me to understand how, scientifically speaking, believing in something bigger than yourself can make you healthier and happier. ...

Lisa Miller:  I thought a mental health system minus spirituality made no sense, and that became my life's work, to understand the place of spirituality in renewal, in recovery, in resilience, and to put this in the language of science. ...

If I were to characterize the first five years of my investigation, I would say I used the data sets that everyone else knew and trusted. I only asked one new question, which was: "What's the impact of spirituality on the DSM diagnosis of addiction and depression?" The findings were jaw dropping.

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NY Times Op-Ed: Losing Our Religion — An Altar Call For Evangelical America

New York Times Op-Ed:  The State of Evangelical America, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):

There are few evangelical Christians who have gotten as much media coverage or criticism in the last decade as Russell Moore. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, and became a prominent evangelical voice opposing a Trump presidency. Moore is currently the editor in chief of Christianity Today, which The Times’s Jane Coaston called “arguably the most influential Christian publication” in the United States. I asked Moore if he would speak to me about the evangelical movement and his new book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tish Harrison Warren: The subtitle of your newest book is “An Altar Call for Evangelical America.” What do you mean by “evangelical America”?

Russell Moore: What I mean by “evangelical” is people who believe in the personal aspect of what it means to be a follower of Christ. That includes the way that we understand the Bible, the way that we understand the need to be born again.

In your book, you tell a story about how an evangelical person said to their pastor: “We’ve tried to turn the other cheek. It doesn’t work. We have to fight now.” Why do certain evangelicals feel so embattled now?

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The Bible Does Everything Critical Theory Does, But Better

Christianity Today, The Bible Does Everything Critical Theory Does, but Better:

Many people become suspicious at the mention of critical theory, especially as it applies to controversial matters of race, gender, law, and public policy. Some see the ideologies traveling under that banner as abstruse frameworks only minimally related to real-world affairs. Others see critical theory as a ruse meant to confer unearned scholarly legitimacy on highly debatable political and cultural opinions.

Christopher Watkin, an Australian scholar on religion and philosophy, wants to reorient discussions of critical theory around Scripture’s grand narrative of redemption. In Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, he shows how God’s Word furnishes the tools for a better, more compelling critical theory—one that harmonizes the fragmentary truths advanced by its secular alternatives. Mark Talbot, professor of philosophy at Wheaton College, spoke with Watkin about his book. ...

You mention critical race theory, which has become a flash point for some Christians and a big reason why critical theory has a bad name among them. Where do we tend to go wrong in our attitudes toward critical theory?

Critical theory does have a particularly bad name among certain groups of Christians. It also has an unusually good name among others. Both responses are problematic because Christians should not expect worldly ideology to represent either a perfect ideal for the church or the Devil incarnate.

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NY Times Op-Ed: My Church Was Part Of The Slave Trade. This Has Not Shaken My Faith.

New York Times Op-Ed:  My Church Was Part of the Slave Trade. This Has Not Shaken My Faith., by Rachel L. Swarns (Author, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (2023)):

For more than a century, Catholic priests in Maryland held Black people in bondage. They were among the largest slaveholders in the state, and they prayed for the souls of the people they held captive even as they enslaved and sold their bodies.

So after the Civil War, the emancipated Black families that had been torn apart in sales organized by the clergymen were confronted with a choice: Should they remain in the church that had betrayed them?

Over the past seven years, I’ve pieced together the harrowing origin story of the American Catholic Church, which relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain itself and to help finance its expansion. I am a professor and a journalist who writes about slavery and its legacies. I am also a Black woman and a practicing Catholic. As I’ve considered the choices those families faced in 1864, I have found myself pondering my faith and my church and my own place in it.

I stumbled across this story in 2016 when I got a tip about the prominent Jesuit priests who sold 272 people to raise money to save the college we now know as Georgetown University, the nation’s first Catholic institution of higher learning. Witnesses described the terrors of enslavement: children torn from their parents, brothers from their sisters and desperate people forced to board slave ships that sailed to Louisiana. It was one of the largest documented slave sales of the time, and it shattered entire families. ...

Catholic priests, who relied on slavery, did more than save Georgetown. They built the nation’s first Catholic college, the first archdiocese and the first Catholic cathedral and helped establish two of the earliest Catholic monasteries. Even the clergymen who established the first Catholic seminary relied on enslaved laborers. The inherent contradictions of praying for the souls of people held in captivity left few in leadership troubled. ... Most powerful leaders of the church supported slavery until the Union victory in the Civil War made its demise a foregone conclusion.

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