Essential Short Reads:
When people are asked about things they have read which have "stuck with them" or influenced their worldview, they are typically asked about Books. However, short pieces of writing can also be highly influential in our lives. What follows is a list of some of the speeches, editorials, essays, or other short pieces of writing that have either deeply affected my worldview on a variety of religious, political, or philosophical questions, or that I just find generally fascinating. Agree or disagree, they are also all examples of great writing:
1. Screwtape Proposes a Toast. C.S. Lewis.
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/screwtape-proposes-a-toast-SEP.pdf
I could add just about anything C.S. Lewis has ever written to this list of my personal favorite short pieces of writing: Each separate chapter (except the incomprehensible one about the trinity) of Mere Christianity, many of the sermons found in the Weight of Glory, each chapter of the Screwtape Letters. But this particular piece of his writing is perhaps more quintessential than any of them. Written many years after the original publication of the Screwtape Letters, but now almost always added as a final chapter to modern editions, this is C.S. Lewis's masterful and essential take-down of the worst features of the modern world, including especially the way in which it exalts "equality" by making sure no one is allowed to excel.
2. Fundamental Premises of Our Faith (Harvard Law School Mormonism 101 Lecture).
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/fundamental-premises-of-our-faith-talk-given-by-elder-dallin-h-oaks-at-harvard-law-school
Dallin H. Oaks, February 2010. A few years ago, Harvard Law School’s LDS students began a tradition of hosting a Mormonism 101 seminar each year, in which they would ask a prominent Latter-day Saint (typically a legal professional) to give a brief overview of Latter-day Saint beliefs to the student body. Oaks used the occasion to do something more important than simply explain the basics of Mormonism. He eloquently advocated for a worldview which admits of more than one type of truth, explaining that just as there are material truths which we can glean through scientific reason and observation, there are also equally valid spiritual and metaphysical truths we can obtain through revelation, thus reconciling the best ideals and traditions of both Christianity and the Enlightenment, and challenging the modern notion that those worldviews are necessarily mutually incompatible.
3. The Handwriting on the Wall. George Weigel. Essay. Spring 2012.
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-handwriting-on-the-wall
Like a modern-day G.K. Chesterton, Catholic political and religious thinker George Weigel reminds us that the political liberties enjoyed in the west are only sustainable if biblical Judeo-Christian religion remains at the center of our cultural heritage. Absolutely essential reading in so many ways, but worth the price of admission primarily for its incredibly useful explanation of Western Civilization as an amalgam of the ideals of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. Lose any leg of that stool, and the West will fall.
4. The Challenge to Become. Dallin H. Oaks. Conference Address. General Conference October 2000.
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2000/10/the-challenge-to-become?lang=eng
This is a talk that I feel should be an annual lesson in Latter-day Saint congregations. What we do matters, not only in and of itself, but because of what it makes us.
See also:
"Knowing, Doing, Being" by Arthur Bassett: https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/049-59-63.pdf ,
"Created in the Image of God" by David Seeley: http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=2093
5. Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died. Forbes ASAP 1996. Magazine Article. Tom Wolfe (Reprinted, with some revisions, in Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up, Picador 2001.)
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php
Tom Wolfe describes the modern neuroscientists’ new version of Calvinism, the theory that everything we think, say, and do, is genetically predetermined by millions of years of evolutionary psychology, and involves no free will. Then, he describes the truly frightening social consequences likely to ensue from the societal adoption of this view. I refuse to believe, as a matter of common sense and experience, the scientific theories he describes. But I definitely believe his predictions for what will become of our society (Nietzsche’s phrase, “the total eclipse of all values” cubed) as its intellectual elites all come to believe that we are programmed and predestined to behave in certain ways, and that humans have no free will, thereby undermining the foundation and underpinnings for a criminal justice system (or, indeed, any laws), moral judgment, right and wrong, or a goal-driven life.
As a Latter-day Saint, I believe, passionately, in agency, and I also passionately believe that Satan wants to take it away from us, or, failing that, make us stop believing in it. That religious ages found a reason to believe in “predestination” and now a scientific age is finding a reason to believe in the same thing, seems to me to verify my supposition.
6. The Human Beast. Tom Wolfe. National Endowment for the Humanities, 2006 Jefferson Lecture.
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/tom-wolfe-lecture
Wolfe explains how language differentiates us from animals and grounds our religious nature, and how human pride and status envy are keys to understanding everything.
7. Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments. Jeffrey R. Holland. BYU Devotional Address. January 12 1988.
http://www.familylifeeducation.org/gilliland/procgroup/Souls.htm
Someday, when the Prophet Mormon of our dispensation gathers and abridges the history of the Latter-day Saints into the Book of Joseph Smith, or whatever they will call it, there are certain sermons which are so vital that they will simply have to be included, for the same reason that Jacob or King Benjamin’s sermons to their people were included in Mormon’s abridgement of Nephite history in the Book of Mormon. This talk, delivered when Jeffrey R. Holland was President of BYU, will be one of those sermons. A beautiful explanation of the reasons for the law of chastity.
8. Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn on the Lights? Orson Scott Card. Editorial. Rhinoceros Times, October 20, 2008.
http://www.linearpublishing.com/orsonscottcard.html
In the 1700s and 1800s most newspapers had a distinctive political ideology. During the administrations of George Washington and John Adams, there were Federalist papers sponsored by Alexander Hamilton, and Republican papers sponsored by Thomas Jefferson. In the 1850s, everyone knew which papers were abolitionist, which were more moderately conservative Republican, and which were pro-slavery Democratic. In the 20th Century, Manhattan-D.C. Beltway elites began to dominate the entire media narrative, as broadcasting made nationwide newscasts available, and the newscasts took their cues for the leading stories of the day from the New York Times and a handful of other papers. In lieu of open partisanship, 20th Century media purported to be providing "objective" news. But, in fact, the mainstream media's attitudes and politics were decidedly one-sided and narrow, originally based on the viewpoints of a small group of leading newspaper writers for a handful of major Eastern papers, whose views were watered down and regurgitated on the network news broadcasts. The culture of what those reporters believed soon became the uniform newsroom culture, with a uniform political belief system to which everyone who wanted to get ahead in a newsroom needed to hew. Everything from story selection to story spin took a decidedly left-wing course, but all in the guise of supposedly accurate and fair and objective reporting. We may be getting back to an age where everyone will, again, know the political views of a diverse number of journalism providers (MSNBC vs. Fox, for example). But in the meantime, the mainstream news media continues to fail miserably in its fourth estate mission as truthteller to the American public, instead playing the role of a referee with money on the game who will make sure the calls all go "the right" team's way (which is to say, the left team's way). Card's editorial is just one example of a howl of protest against the mainstream media's corruption, targeting just one major example of that corruption. But it serves as an example of any number of editorials which could have been written as to hundreds of thousands of such examples over the course of the past 100 years, as the mainstream media continues to print all the news that's fit to advance its own agenda, and that of the most leftward leaning members of the Democratic Party.
9. Carbon Chastity. Charles Krauthammer. Washington Post Op-ed. May 30, 2008.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/29/AR2008052903266.html
Charles Krauthammer, a self-described “Global-warming agnostic”, explains how environmentalism saved the left just as all of its former raison d’etre was being discarded on the ash heap of history’s failed ideas. No longer will the left try to regulate every aspect of our lives in the name of social justice. Now they will regulate, tax, control, ration our access to sustenance and otherwise save us from ourselves, while simultaneously impoverishing us with sky-high power prices, in the name of saving the planet. Knowing the rule that tyrants who are ruling over us for our own good are the most despotic and unrelenting tyrants of all, God help us.
Key takeaways: “For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism). Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history. Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect.”
10. The Curious Appeal of Roman Catholicism for Certain Latter-day Saint Intellectuals. Valerie M. Hudson, Square Two, Volume 4 No. 2, 2011.
http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHudsonAppeal.html
Valerie Hudson was one of my favorite undergraduate professors when I majored in International Relations at BYU. As I am myself a devoted fan of many Catholic writers, such as Robert George and G. K. Chesterton, I recognize the temptation she observes here, and so this article was a helpful corrective. But its true importance has very little to do with Catholicism. Indeed, the article is poorly titled, for its true purpose and its true importance do not lie in its critique of Catholicism, but in its very feminist defense of Mormonism, and in its celebration of the true appreciation for womanhood which can be found within Mormonism.
11. The Course of Human Events. David McCullough. National Endowment for the Humanities, 2003 Jefferson Lecture.
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/david-mccullough-lecture
McCullough uses the founders’ lives and ideals as a springboard for a passionate defense of the importance and intrinsic value of education.
12. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Commencement Address.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html
Solzhenitsyn understands what's wrong with communism. But he understands what's wrong with the post-modern West as well. A society that lacks moral values will always fail. Probably not what Harvard was hoping to hear when they invited him to speak. But certainly what they needed to hear.
13. Reason, Faith, and the Things of Eternity. Bruce C. Hafen.
This is an excellent address on balancing a life of the mind with a life of faith.
http://publications.maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/20/2/S00003-5176a39643f053Hafen.pdf
Another useful, but more ambiguous, Hafen classic, which I hesitate to link to, given the strong and sometimes adverse reactions I have seen to it can be found here, in Hafen's speech on dealing with ambiguity in life and the law:
http://www.jrcls.org/publications/clark_memo/sections/s11/CM_S11_Hafen.pdf
This 2010 address to Law Students at BYU is an update on a 1979 BYU Devotional address (Love is Not Blind) and Ensign Article (On Dealing with Uncertainty) by the same author. I have a love-hate relationship with this piece of writing. I have learned not to share it with others, as it easily offends. And there are parts of it that really bother me. Nevertheless, I have found it to be essential in understanding some of the different personalities in the Church, and the methods by which different Church members respond to information or events which discomfit their testimony or loyalty. Hafen discusses the three levels of response to ambiguity: (level 1) optimistic, naíve, and wearing rose-colored glasses, their faith is likely to be shaken by any unpleasant information beyond their ability to filter and screen; (level 2) profoundly aware of the gap between what is real and what is ideal, they are too likely to shake their own faith with their deep and abiding skepticism; (level 3) aware of the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be, but nevertheless able to retain a faith in the ideal and to reach for the same without giving way to cynicism. An extremely handy but itself sometimes ambiguous tool for those trying to navigate through a life of faith.
14. Can the Ruler Truly Be a Servant. Robert George 2012 Sir John Graham Lecture. One of the most essential and important things I've ever read about the U.S. Constitution, containing volumes of wisdom in a few vital pages, is the second chapter in Robert George's book, Conscience and Its Enemies, entitled "The Limits of Constitutional Limits." This whole volume has become more and more important to me, as I keep returning to it, again and again, since I first completed it. A variation on this chapter was given by George in this speech, which can be found here, and which is one of the best things I've ever read on its subject:
http://www.maxim.org.nz/site/DefaultSite/filesystem/documents/events/JGL%20Monograph%202012%20Robert_George_web.pdf
And as long as we're discussing the Constitution, Rex E. Lee's Devotional address on "The Constitution and the Restoration" is also a hard-to-beat must read for Latter-day Saints:
http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=687&view=1
15. A Long Obedience, by David Brooks:
Being an Aristotelian in nature, I reject extremes, having learned Aristotle's maxims on the virtues consisting of the mean between an excess and a deficiency. So, despite my conservative political beliefs, I occasionally find myself railing against libertarianism. This moving editorial is a good piece of artillery in such moments:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/opinion/a-long-obedience.html?_r=0
Although I often disagree with Brooks' brand of conservatism, I find that when he hits it (mainly on nonpolitical, human nature, topics) he hits it out of the park. Here's another by Brooks that I really enjoyed, on the nature of genius, and the 10,000 hour rule also mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html
(I don't know that I completely buy into all of the implications which some have drawn from the 10,000 hour rule, but I do believe in its most fundamental premise: that if you want to get good at something, few things are more important than spending lots and lots of time doing that something.)
16. Orson Scott Card's Film Review of Pleasantville.
One of the reasons America lost the culture war, and we must all now live our lives surrounded by filth, obscenity, vulgarity, criminal activity, thuggery, zombie-countenanced teenagers addled by hours of screentime, and the other signs of the swiftly flushing toilet which is modern American society, is that not enough people learned the critical thinking skills necessary to argue against modern day liberal visual propaganda. Here's an example of what such critical thinking could have looked like, had my generation been given the ability to learn it and exercise it:
http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/print_friendly.cgi?page=/osc/reviews/reviews98/movies_worst.shtml
17. Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
How totalitarian societies, and other groups based on ideological purity, enforce conformity by conscripting their own members as cogs in the system. Absolutely fascinating. And the Greengrocer's story has so many, many, parallels, in 21st Century America, which like 20th Century Poland, is increasingly a left-wing society which brooks no dissent.
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_eseje.html&typ=HTML
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
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