What I’ve been reading

1. Owen Hopkins, Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain.  Covers the “great” British brutalist buildings of the postwar era, the debates surrounding their demolition, and their eventual demolition.  Photos too, excellent to dip into.

2. Anna Grzymala-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.  A good and original book about how European state-building grew out of earlier church traditions.  For instance, by the time of the Reformation about half the land in Germany was in the hands of the church.  “Church-building” often came first, and then state-building copied and improved on some of the methods.

3. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What it Means for Our Country is a good look at what it promises.  Most of all, I like how it stresses that these individuals are more apolitical than often is realized.

4. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th Century Europe.  The best book on the Normans?  And what an opening set of sentences: “In the eleventh century the climate was improving, population was growing, and people were on the move, west from central Asia, and south from north-western Europe.  In 1054 the unity of Christianity between east and west was broken, a rift which lasted for centuries.  In 1096 the idea of recovering Jerusalem from Muslims was translated into action.  Existing empires and principalities were challenged and new polities were founded.  War was at the centre of these events, waged by small armies led by men who achieved lasting fame, men such as William the Conqueror, Robert Guiscard, and Bohemond.  That these men were of Norman extraction seemed to their chroniclers to be no coincidence.”

And just arrived in my pile is Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions.

I’ve also started (and put down) a bunch of books somewhere between GPT 3.3 and 3.8…and read a bunch of books on Pauline political theology (reading in clusters!), and Jonathan Swift on church-state relations and on religious politics more generally.  And yes, Spare is in my reading pile.