Introducing BOOKS AND LETTERS
Happy New Year! And what to expect from me in 2025
Happy New Year!
Thank you for reading and supporting Rumbling Toward Heaven in 2024.
As outlined in the subscription options, readers who financially supported Rumbling Toward Heaven with a Founders Subscription in 2024 will receive a signed physical copy of my forthcoming book with the working title of Rumbling Toward Heaven: Recovering Christian Humanism for the 21st Century. Paid Subscribers will get a steep discount on the same. The final title is yet to be etched in stone, but I did recently meet with the publisher to discuss the project and received verbal confirmation that they are interested in publishing the book with that title—or very similar. I’ll be working diligently over the next several weeks to prepare the manuscript for delivery.
I want to express my deep and heartfelt thanks to each of you who have helped make this venture possible so far. Whatever this means to the publishing world—and I understand this is an important metric for publishers—there are now nearly 1,400 subscribers to this publication. I still have a ways to go to achieve the reach I want this work to have, but as was the case for nearly two decades, I would continue to write even if I never got paid and no one ever read my work.
But since my long-term goal is to eventually write full-time, I want to say thank you for your support and let you know I’ll be cranking things up in 2025. And, as anyone who has attempted to make a living at writing knows, the work is not for the faint of heart. Flannery O’Connor even suggested, “Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.” Thus, your prayers and support are very much appreciated.
As I mentioned in previous posts, here and here, Rumbling Toward Heaven now BOOKS AND LETTERS. You can read my explanation for the name change there.
In short, BOOKS AND LETTERS is my attempt to expand my writing tent and participate in the noble tradition of the great conversation while exploring what it means to live as a steward of words in this modern world.
Whether it is grappling with the works of G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, or Josef Pieper, reflecting on the enduring relevance of Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers, or simply savoring the tactile joy of a well-loved book, my constant endeavor will be to lead my readers to think deeply, communicate clearly, and live wisely.
Publishing Schedule for 2025
While I am still carving out the particulars, I have moved my entire writing enterprise to Substack, and the new publishing schedule for 2025 will focus on a distinct theme or topic each day, and look something like the following:
Crumbs From Our Master’s Table: On Sundays, I’ll post some Scriptural soul food.
Crumbs are weekly morsels from God’s Word. These are not sermons; they are only beggar’s food. They are not what the deserving eat; they are niblets for the desperate and humble. Snobs abhor crumbs. They do not suffer paupers’ vittles. Their palates crave the richer, moist cuisine. But those who are truly hungry will happily find satisfaction in the crumbs. When the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21–28 said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” she wasn’t asking Jesus for the center of the cinnamon roll. She was content with the discarded crusty edges. She knew they were more than she deserved; yet, they were more than enough to meet her need because they were crumbs from the Master’s table.
To be sure Crumbs are not meant sustain a person long term. They’re no substitute for Word and Sacrament. To grow strong and live a spiritually healthy life, one must have water, then bread and wine, and grow from drinking milk to eating meat—and then more bread and wine. But crumbs can offer sustenance for the in-between times. Even though they’re often just scraps, mere leftovers from the table, there is nourishment in every morsel when they come from the Master’s table.
Paideia and Piety: On Mondays, I’ll post thoughtful reflections on education that challenge the status quo. Although I’m not using precise definitions here, paideia can be understood as the right manner of education—enculturation. Piety, on the other hand, is the right mark of education—ordered loves.
While this might not sound much like the 3 R’s of education you were used to hearing about growing up—reading writing, and ‘rithmetic—that’s because true education is not job training. It is the cultivation of wisdom and the preparation of a human being to be virtuous through the long task of transferring the knowledge, traditions, and mores of one generation to the next. Traditionally, this view has been referred to as a liberal arts education.
Such an education is important for at least three reasons. First, a liberally educated person is skilled in humane thinking. He doesn’t just ask, “Can we do this?” It’s inherent in him to ask, “Should we do this?”
Second, a liberally educated person can typically learn nearly any skill auto-didactically because he has learned how to think well: how to dissimulate information, cultivate understanding, and apply wisdom—all as a way of being rather than as a way of doing. He asks, “What kind of person should I be?,” instead of merely asking, “What kind of job should I do?”
Finally, a liberally educated person sees the world as an integrated whole rather than a collection of random and unrelated parts. For this reason, he naturally maintains his wonder and curiosity; and, his desire to continually pursue that which is true, good, and beautiful is resistant to decline. On the other hand, the person who is merely trained to do a job often takes a utilitarian view of both his work and the world. Put another way, one shouldn’t be surprised to find a liberally educated person trying to write a poem about the quadratic equation.
The Stuff of Stones: On Tuesdays, I’ll post some meditations on philosophy and culture. C. S. Lewis wrote that "Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." I’m taking the title of this column from Richard Wilbur’s clever and charming little poem titled, “Epistemology.” It goes,
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, 'You are not true.'
Wilbur’s poem draws from a famous story about Samuel Johnson, "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history," in which he kicked a stone as a way of refuting Bishop George Berkeley's claim that “material reality doesn't exist independently of perception.” Injuring his toe, Johnson’s painful stunt affirmed, at least for him, that the physical world was very much real.
However, Wilbur’s poem goes on to suggest that “the stuff of stones” are “cloudy, cloudy,” hinting at the fact that even incontrovertible facts are sometimes more complex than they seem prima facie, and certainty about what we think we know is often more elusive than we’d like to admit. The second stanza concludes with the notion that even though we daily depend on the world for our sustenance, we all struggle with skepticism to some degree or another. So, on Tuesdays, we’ll wrestle with reality and its implications on culture.
Literary Leaf-mould: Wednesdays will be for literary critique. J. R. R. Tolkien famously stated that “story…grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” In other words, stories and ideas don’t exist in isolation. The imagination draws its nourishment, most often unwittingly, from the "compost" of ideas, memories, myths, and experiences we have accumulated. Literary criticism, then, has the particular purpose of enhancing the reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the story. Drawing wisdom from Tolkien’s notable essay, On Fairy-Stories, my approach to literary criticism here will be to not only strive toward my previously stated purpose, but also to honor the author’s intentions as much as possible, seek to re-enchant the reader’s world with wonder and meaning, and by all means avoid over-analysis or the deconstructive annihilation of the text.
Write to Think: On Thursdays, I’ll tackle the craft of writing. It's been said that, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” Attributed to George Orwell, this quote emphasizes the indispensable relationship between writing and thinking. Ambrose Bierce observed a similar connection when he asserted that good writing is little more than clear thinking made visible. In essence, these men of letters understood that writing is ultimately thinking; either we learn to do it well, or someone else will do it for us. Said another way, learning to write well is correlative to thinking well, and good thinking is fundamental to human flourishing.
Inspired by the Christian humanist imagination, I am deeply interested in the connection between our ability to write and our ability to think, between the written word and human flourishing, and between the human condition and transcendent mystery. So, Thursdays posts will be all about writing—and thinking.
Cathedrals and Corkscrews: On Fridays you can expect some helpful book reviews. I’ll be leaning on C. S. Lewis quite a bit when assessing a book’s content, style, and quality, since his approach to reviewing Milton’s Paradise Lost is soundly instructive to that end. Lewis wrote,
The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is—what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them.
Since there will never be enough time to read all the books we want to read, I hope my work here will be helpful toward the goal of curating your own reading list.
Rumbling Toward Heaven: I definitely found a way of holding on to the expression, ‘Rumbling Toward Heaven,’ as a reminder of our place on the vast swinging bridge. Each Saturday, I’ll be posting a personal letter or essay on a subject that is wrestling for my attention at the time.
I’ve already explained my use of ‘Rumbling Toward Heaven’ and how it relates to Christian humanism, so I won’t bother expounding further except to say, modern Christian humanists, like Flannery O’Connor—as well as C. S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Jacque Maritain, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and even Simone Weil—possessed a supernatural view of reality that opposed modernism: the fragmented, meaningless, and naturalist view of the world.
It shouldn’t surprise you, then, when on Saturdays I muse about all things related to, or springing forth from Christian humanism—human flourishing, transcendent mystery, and humane letters: literature, philosophy, history, theology, and poetry; not to mention numerous ordinary topics I intend to address—my writing may tend to “lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.”
Disclaimer
I am throwing in a disclaimer, here. Because real life happens, there may be some uncharacteristic days where I miss a post or recycle something from the archives. We’re humans after all. And while I have every intention of being faithful to my task—this is essential for me—one of things I don’t want to become is a mindless automaton or a soulless workaholic if an emergency arises. And, I don’t want to be saddled with guilt because I had to miss a post. I hope that will be a fair and acceptable approach.
Your plan for daily posts is exciting! I will be happy if life allows for even just one per week. Also, I love the rebrand.
Look forward to it.