Schlepping the Shelf: December 2025

 

As we hook 2025 up to life support and gather quietly (or not so quietly) round its bedside, waiting for the phoenix of '26 to rise from the ashes, it's good to ponder what really made an impact this year. 

Of course, if you have any right to call yourself an educated man, some of that impact will be books. Books were the first long-distance communication, and they still remain one of the few that can allow you to commune with the dead, at least without involving the Witch of Endor and a few sleazy devils. So here are some of my favorite semi-seances of the last six months, with both the living and the dead.

Finished

Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the KJV Bible by Mark Ward. A good overall look at why the KJV can no longer be the only (and he would say, even primary) Bible translation. While I agree with his overall point, I would locate the cause not in inevitable “language change” where he does, but in the massive dumbing-down of our education--somehow ploughboys in 1885 didn’t have any trouble with the KJV. When I posted this as a tweet, Canon Press reposted it (since I listened to it on Canon+) and got me into my first, and only, Twitter spat. Mostly it proved that X users can't read.

Writing Exercises on Beauty and Predestination

 Every year, I let my HUM II classes give me a question to write a 45-minute in-class essay on--sort of a fair turnabout for all the writing I assign them! They give me four possible topics, and I pick one to answer. This year's two topics were "What is beauty?" and "What do you think of the doctrine of predestination?" Both pieces are severely limited by lack of time and space, but here they are, just the same.

What is Beauty?

We have discussed many important questions in this class, but “what is beauty?” struck a nerve of its own. This might simply be because of its eternal relevance. If we don’t know what beauty is, can we appreciate a painting in a museum? The face of a movie actor? Who’s to say, really, whether one room is more attractive in a house than another? Perhaps your friend might like lots of ferns and exposed steel in a room, so that is “beautiful,” while the other guy likes low-lit, open-concept Spanish ranch houses. Can we actually find a standard to judge between them, or must we throw up our hands and give way to a whirlpool of relative ugliness?

In our age, “beauty” is often relegated merely to the natural form—the sort of word we use about pictures of Rocky Mountain landscapes unspoilt by the hand of man, or a particularly fine bone structure in the body of a Hollywood star. This is fine as far as it goes, but all too often this degenerates into mere taste: one guy likes the Shenandoah Valley in the early morning and the other likes LA sunsets (the smog really sets off the clouds). But if beauty is merely personal taste, then we’ve reduced it to the perception level of each person. No one can say what beauty is, the same way no one can force me to like pineapple on pizza or the color combination of orange and maroon. In short, we destroy the very concept of beauty by drowning it in a sea of mere preference.