Best of 2021

2021, a year that began with a riot and then an inauguration, has at times felt momentous. But it has also been a year that felt interminable, an uncomfortable and tragic continuation of 2020. Who knows what the genealogists and historians of the future will make of 2021? What new beginnings will they find in this year marked by pandemic and unrest? We have asked some of our writers from this past year to select some of their favorite books from 2021. Perhaps some of these books will end up as source texts for future genealogists. So, if you are making reading resolutions for 2022, we have you covered!

Terence Sweeney (Editor)

Brenna Moore’s recent book Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism is a rich cultural and intellectual history of how friendship, mysticism, and an eclectic Catholicism can prepare the seedbed for a different modernity and a different Catholicism. I am probably to the ecclesiastical right of Moore, but I see in this book—and in figures like Claude McKay, Dorothy Day, and the Maritains—a guide for being Catholic in a Christ-forgetting world where fascism and leftism are rearing their heads again.

Kirsten Hall (Managing Editor)

This year I discovered the poetry of Elizabeth​ Jennings through an article Dana Gioia wrote for First Things in 2018. Elizabeth Jennings is the finest English Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins, although hardly anyone has heard of her now. How did this happen? Jennings’ work, Gioia argues, does not fit in neatly to the narrative of 20th century poetry. In an age of formal experimentation, Jennings wrote traditional verse. In an age​ when women were still excluded from the literary canon unless they were part of the “feminist vanguard,” Jennings has been dismissed as “the bag-lady of the sonnets” and an “emotional anchorite.” And “in a secular age,” Gioia writes, “she wrote persuasively about religious experience.” After teaching a few of her poems this semester, I agree the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings is deserving of renewed attention, study, and appreciation. Here is the only contemporary edition of her work: Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems.

Grace Aquilina (Copy Editor)

In Becoming Beauvoir, Dr. Kate Kirkpatrick takes on a figure who not only wrote prolifically about herself but is also the subject of numerous biographies. Coming with a deep understanding of both Simone de Beauvoir’s religious and philosophical influences, Kirkpatrick reexamines the way Beauvoir’s story has been told, celebrating an iconic woman without limiting her complexity or brushing aside her flaws. Kirkpatrick’s work is a meditation on the genealogies surrounding Beauvoir, a skillful untangling of the stories that accompany her celebrity and obscure her thought.

Zachary Davis

I loved The Master and Margarita because it reveals how mass deception can be imposed from the top and yet how truth and love always find a way to surface and transform those sensitive to them.

Manifesto Podcast. This episode on reactionary thought is wise, humane, and eminently revealing.

Tim Howles

My favorite book from 2021 is Bruce Clarke, Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics and the End of the Anthropocene.  It provides a re-examination of the construction and development of Gaia theory. It explores various political and cultural responses to the theory from the 1960s onwards, many of which seized on the mythological connotations of the name itself to dismiss its core observations as extra-scientific. By contrast, Clarke argues for the origin of Gaia Theory in biology, physics and systems thinking. In doing so, he defends its rigorous scientific basis, and advocates for its importance in mediating understanding of the global environmental and biodiversity crisis.

Anne Carpenter

Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night (Columbia University Press, 2021). This collection of essays is a thoughtful provocation around many of the ideas involved in African de-colonization. It serves—on the one hand—as a kind of introduction to such themes for new readers, and, on the other, as an expansion of major its notions. If there is a central problem of modernity, it is the problem of the colony and the world beyond the colony.

Fred Bauer

Written in a time of heightened controversies about the role of the nation, Samuel Goldman’s After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division presents a genealogical survey of accounts of nationhood in the United States. Over time, different narratives of belonging spoke to different challenges. The Puritan covenant emphasized a theological and communitarian glue for the early republic. The Civil War gave increased prominence to the notion of a crucible that would unite a divided nation and various immigrant groups. In the 20th century, global conflicts and the growing diversity of the United States caused many Americans to find new appeal in some liberal civic creed. Goldman highlights the changing conditions of American nationhood, but he also hints at the persistence of all three tropes of American nationhood (covenant, crucible, and creed) across time. After Nationalism documents the diverse ways that citizens of the United States experimented with narratives of national coherence and illustrates the varieties within a given historical moment.

Jonathan Tran

The 2021 Holberg Debate: "Identity Politics and Culture Wars." I found this conversation (thankfully, it wasn’t really a “debate”) really fascinating and invigorating. It features some of our leading lights having one of those conversations of a lifetime about identity politics and culture wars, regarding what we do and don’t mean by the terms and what we should and shouldn’t do with them. Powerfully clear, wonderfully insightful, and super sharp (in multiple senses of the word). And can one ever get enough of Councillor West?

Jonathan McGregor

One of the best books I read this year was White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones—published by Simon & Schuster in 2020, but out in paperback this year. In one of his best essays, Walker Percy named both “the failure and the hope” of the American church in regard to race—its miserable failure in facilitating white supremacy, and its possible hope in inspiring movements for justice and peace. Jones’ book is an unsparing record of that failure, but it also offers signposts of hope (see his account of the two First Baptist churches of Macon, GA). I admire Jones’ ability to weave together sociology, history, theology, and autobiography in his argument for the urgent necessity “to separate being white from being Christian.”

Andrew Latham

Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (Cambridge). This book covers China's history over the last five centuries, from the founding of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1644 to present-day China. Building on Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North's (1920-2015) theory that historical change occurs through adaptation and innovation within a nation’s distinctive historical tradition, it argues that institutions—social norms, economic practices, political systems, as well as religious and intellectual narratives—rather than “great leaders” are the motive force in history. The remarkable achievements and tragic failures of modern Chinese history are thus portrayed as the unfolding of preexisting Chinese institutional trends rather than the handiwork of the Great Helmsman, his predecessors or successors. Overall, Mühlhahn offers a fascinating narrative of China’s passage to and through modernity. Highly recommended.

Sharon Kuruvilla

I believe Gabriel Winant's The Next Shift is important as it serves into a socioeconomic genealogy of how the modern underclass in America has dealt with the neoliberal turn in American politics. Winant talks about how race, class, and gender dynamics have been reshaped as a result of socioeconomic transformation of the past affects the social and political dynamics of America social order today.