This month, from Doug Wilson:
Evening in the Palace of Reason is a striking book. In it, James Gaines wonderfully describes the background and setting for a brief encounter in 1757 between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great. Frederick was an Enlightenment king, and represented what was thought to be the very modern future. Bach was a representative of the legacy of the Reformation, and another set of values entirely. This is a gripping and satisfying read.

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This month, from Doug Jones:
“Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, to rob the needy of justice, and to take what is right from the poor of My people.” Scripture routinely denounces economic sins, yet for deep, modern reasons, we can no longer see them. This brief book offers an angle to start seeing the world through more biblical categories. The book isn’t explicitly Christian, and everyone will find things to disagree with, but use it to raise questions and challenge your assumptions. The prophets will make much more sense. As you read, though, remember that this is just the surface of modern economic sins. But it’s a great place to start.

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This month, from Doug Wilson:
When it comes to issues of modesty, a false dichotomy appears to have taken hold of most Christians. Either the biblical requirements of modesty are accepted, and nerdiness is layered on top of that, or the nerdiness “requirement” is rejected, and the responsibility for modesty is rejected along with it. In this important book, David and Diane Vaughan avoid both errors, and do a very fine job of showing us the teaching of Scripture on this issue. Their approach is not at all superficial—they are not urging us to depart from one sort of cultural captivity in order to take up residence in another kind of cultural captivity. A crucial part of their argument is to develop a biblical view of the body, and to have how we dress that body take its part in a well-formed biblical world and life view. It only stands to reason. This is a fine book and I recommend it highly.

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A new monthly feature from Canon Press.

From Doug Jones:
Never trust a book on aesthetics that lacks style. Sadly, that would wipe out most books on beauty. But not this one - Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. It’s been out for a while (1999), and it’s not written from a Christian perspective, but it can provoke Christians down all sorts of interesting and surprising paths. Scarry not only shows how beauty urges us on to truth and goodness, she also, unknowingly backs into something of a Trinitarian and covenantal angle on beauty: “Beauty is, then, a compact, a contract” of a reciprocal “gift of life.” Wonderful work, and she argues tightly but not in typical, stilted, Anglo-American ways. One of the best parts is that her prose is always human and sensuous. Great fun. And moving. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” Read this book slowly a few times.

A new monthly feature from Canon Press.

From Doug Wilson:
A book I am reading now, and would like to commend to the entire Christian population of North America, is Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. One of the many sobering lessons of this 2008 campaign season is that many activist Christians—the kind who vigorously support glib, populist candidates, say—are Christians who don’t understand economics at all. It is easy to imagine Christian “third way” alternatives to the common way of doing things, but the fact that God is triune and that Christ was incarnate at Bethlehem does not make water run uphill. One of the best things for the Christian world to do is a little basic study in what some have falsely called the “dismal science.”