This book is getting a lot of attention these days. Though it was not written with the presidential election in mind, J. D. Vance reminds us of that forgotten population out there that rose up to elect a crass-talking, offensive, scary candidate who promised change for them. Vance is a proud Hillbilly from the Appalachian byways of our country, people from families and communities and regions devastated by dramatic, bewildering change. These are the ones left behind.

This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in a long time. Truly remarkable. Perhaps life-changing. We learn from biblical writers, poets throughout the ages, mystics, and so many others that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to use Gerard Manley Hopkins familiar words. Such a world is God’s gift to us. This is exactly the kind of world Ann Voskamp opens up for us from each page of this book.

Our world is saturated with the human ego these days. We are swamped. It can feel hard to breathe at times. The constant display of ego makes us feel cheap, degraded, diminished. After the circus of purported public discourse—the presidential debates, for example—we wince. It’s more about the ego than it is about ideas or dreams or solutions. The ego has always been that monster under our beds waiting to pounce at any moment. Once loose it damages leaders. It corrodes our world. It messes things up, destroys things that are  good and decent. Our nation is paying a price for letting the ego out of its cage.

I am looking for good news these days. Of course we need look no further than the dinner table of our own homes, the small gestures of goodness among our children and grandchildren, from a spouse or friend, within our churches or places of work. David Brooks tells one such story last week that is truly good news.

Somehow I am in the mode of rereading. I pulled this lovely book from my shelf and read it again, meditatively and reflectively as the title suggests. Walter Hooper has made delightful selections from Lewis’s broad range of writings. This is a great introduction to Lewis. It is also a way to sound his depths.

The bad news is relentless these days. I find myself skipping through the papers, turning off the news, avoiding Twitter. What more do I need to know about the last insult hurled across the public landscape? What more do I need to know about another distortion of the truth, another betrayed loyalty, another crass remark. What more do I need to know about the latest sensational, scandalous mistake someone made either yesterday or decades ago?

This book touched me deeply. I read it many years ago, close to its date of publication in 1992. Because we were traveling to Amsterdam this summer, to study and reflect on the works of Rembrandt, I pulled this book off my shelf to get closer at Rembrandt. This book is published with a magnificent print of Rembrandt’s great painting The Return Of The Prodigal Son on its cover. What Nouwen does is simply stunning. He reports the journey of how this painting changed his life. Of course it is not only the painting. Rembrandt drew Nouwen more deeply into the extraordinary story told by Jesus.

Maybe it’s time for some good news. On the morning when 100 million of us are likely to watch the presidential debates tonight—in this most bizarre of political seasons, in this most fractured nation of ours—here’s the kind of good news we long to hear. Yesterday, one humble, gracious man, Vin Scully, who after 67 years as the announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, at the age of 89, occupied the broadcast booth for the last time. “I will miss you,” he said, characteristically shifting the focus from himself.

Vincent Van Gogh painted his remarkable Wheatfields With Crows in the summer of 1890. This was his last painting before his untimely death in July of that year. At the time of the painting, life seemed to spiral further downward for him. He felt abandoned by his beloved brother Theo. He felt profoundly alone, sick, disturbed, surviving bursts of fresh expectations, only to sink once again into despondency. He turned to his familiar brushes to provide a semblance of balance for which he yearned.

We live in an age of shame. We are instructed endlessly to feel ashamed of almost everything. We are constantly afraid of a slip in how we say things--someone is sure to pounce. Those of us who are doomed to be male are supposed to be ashamed, even though we acknowledge the historical mistreatment of women, maybe even our own. Those of us who are white are condemned to shame, even though, once again, we ask forgiveness for the stain of slavery and the ongoing consequences of privilege. We are taught to be ashamed of our country, for the wars we have created, the displacement of native populations, for the destruction of the landscape. We are scolded these days to be embarrassed by patriotism.This word of shame comes down hard on Christians. We are told to be ashamed of all kinds of things, the dark chapters of the Crusades or the Inquisition, the way we have treated those who are different, the purported hypocrisy of changing our views. We are even told to be embarrassed that we claim our faith to be true: “Who’s to say what is true?”

I am looking for solutions these days, fresh angles on the daunting challenges of our day. So often fresh angles are the most controversial. This book offers such a new take, controversy and all.

Sharon and I just returned from a marvelous trip to several Northern European cities, Amsterdam chief among them. There of course we spent time in the incomparable Rijksmuseum, home to a glorious collection of its chief residents, Rembrandt and Vermeer. We then went next door to Van Gogh’s own museum. It was all a rich time, stimulating beyond belief.

Why write a blog? There must be a zillion of them out there. So many are motivated by some measure of self-indulgence, I suppose, some hankering toward self-promotion. That there are so many, coming from all different angles, surely speaks to the splintering of our society. We each tend to read what confirms our thinking in the first place. So why would I want to revamp and refresh and begin again writing my own blog? Why not just let things go? Can’t you just relax, I ask myself?

I read this marvelous book many years ago. For some reason I picked it up again for my early-morning reading. What an incredible book. This is the story of Lewis’s childhood and early adult years. It is the story of adult formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation.

I am shocked that I had not discovered Nikolai Berdyaev until recently. This book is fabulous. This writer speaks my language. Berdyaev is Russian, of course, writing about his beloved homeland and the fate of Europe in the smoldering aftermath of World War I. He also watched with dismay the emergence of Soviet power through the Bolsheviks. These were dark times.

This is a fabulous book. It is about believing in our age of unbelief. It is about saying what we believe in an age when the language of faith has grown thin, stale, inadequate. It is decidedly not, though, about nailing down our faith in some pat formula of theological statement. Wiman is a poet. Words matter to him. And so he demands authentic, honest language to talk about his encounter with the living God.

This is an important book. We’ve caught glimpses of this book shaping up over the last few years through Brooks’ New York Times columns and his various speeches, twice on my campus, many of them at other Christian universities. He has become intensely focused on the formation of moral and spiritual character. A life of self-giving and humility shine through.

This book is one of three essential reads, says David Brooks, if we hope to understand the daunting challenges facing our contemporary society. Putnam is ever the exceptional social scientist, marshaling all the statistics needed to support his main thesis: The American dream is in crisis.

David Brooks is a huge fan of Christian colleges and universities. Here is an amazing address he gave to the Council For Christian Colleges And Universities (CCCU) last winter in D.C. at the 40th Anniversary Celebration. He puts it all together in this speech.

Here’s an outstanding article from the inimitable Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things, consummate public intellectual. He is writing on one of my favorite topics: How the Christian University can continue to thrive up against enormous challenges.