Denver Catholic

23 DENVER CATHOLIC | DECEMBER 10-23, 2016 Books for Christmas T ake a stand against the elec- trifi cation of reading and con- sider the following, in properly bound form, as gifts for those on your Christmas – not "Holiday" – list: Exodus, by Thomas Joseph White, OP, is a recent addition to the multi-vol- ume Brazos Theological Commen- tary on the Bible. Father White's brilliant reading of one of the foun- dational texts of Western civilization is well-introduced by series editor R.R. Reno, in a preface that should be required reading for anyone doing serious study of the Bible. Russia promises to loom large on the foreign policy agenda in the year ahead. Simon Sebag Montefi ore's The Romanovs 1613-1918 (Knopf ) sketches the historical background in fascinating, if often chilling, detail, while Peter Pomerantsev takes us to what he calls (accurately) "the surreal heart of the New Russia" in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Public A˜ airs). The election cycle happily fading into the rear-view mirror brought the sorry condition of many white work- ing-class communities to national attention; no one tells the story of one part of that world, its strengths and its pathologies, better than J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper) – a tough and occasionally hilarious book that also suggests, inadvertently, an enormous evangelical failure on the part of both Protestants and Catholics. Then there is Roger Simon's I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn't Already (Encounter). It's an apt gift for friends at any point along the political spectrum, because the disjunction between intentions and results that is crippling our political culture by destroying accountability knows no partisan label. The nation of Chicken-à-la-King and Swanson's TV dinners has now become a nation of foodies. In Ten Restaurants That Changed America (Liveright), Paul Freedman aims high with portraits of Le Pavillon, Chez Panisse, and Antoine's, but doesn't neglect things a bit more down-mar- ket with the often-surprising stories of Howard Johnson's (where many of us learned to love fried clams), Schra˜ t's, and Mama Leone's. The book also includes classic recipes from each of the ten eateries portrayed. In The Black Widow (Harper), Daniel Silva takes his readers inside ISIS, its ideology, and the horrifying plans it has for the future in a grip- ping novel as contemporary as tomor- row's headlines. Part of Silva's genius is his recognition of the moral ambi- guities of even good guy counter-ter- rorism, even as he never loses sight of the fact that there are, in fact, good guys and bad guys in this world.šš Want to repel the black myths constantly fl ung at Catholics by sec- ularists? Then arm yourself and your friends with Rodney Stark's Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (Templeton). Professor Stark, it should be noted, is not a Catholic, and as he makes clear in his introduction, "I did not write this book in defense of the Church. I wrote it in defense of history." Aurora Gri" n's How I Stayed Cath- olic at Harvard: 40 Tips for Faithful College Students (Ignatius) is slightly mis-named, in that Miss Gri" n not only stayed Catholic at Harvard, she became more Catholic at Harvard while winning a Rhodes Scholarship. Her advice is well-suited to any high school senior on your list, no matter the college or university they're contemplating. In recent years, William E. Simon, Jr. shifted his professional focus from investment management to the Church, and a fi rst result of that voca- tional redeployment is Great Catholic Parishes: How Four Essential Prac- tices Make Them Thrive (Ave Maria) – a portrait of the rich diversity of Catholic life in the United States, especially in those local churches that have taken the New Evangelization seriously. Garrett Mattingly's The Armada (Houghton Mi· in) was fi rst pub- lished when I was in the third grade (1959, if you must ask) and sits com- fortably within the conventional Whig narrative of England's "Good Queen Bess" of England vs. authori- tarian King Philip II of Spain. It's also the fi nest classic historical writing I've read in a long time, a penetrating study of character, and a meditation on the unexpected and its role in era-defi ning events. Finally, and for teenagers looking for heroes and a proper understand- ing of the heroic: A Distant Trumpet (Nonpareil Books), by Paul Horgan, the nonpareil U.S. Catholic man of letters of the 1950s, now sadly neglected today. The Catholic Di£ erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL a trust fund in the fi rst place makes sense as a kind of good-faith sign of their love and care for their own o˜ spring, and if so, for how long to maintain the arrangement. If they make provisions for a more extended period, say several decades, there is a greater likelihood that their embry- onic children might be "rescued" if new scientifi c technologies for grow- ing embryos outside the body end up being developed in the future. This may indeed become possible one day, even though there are real questions about whether such an "artifi cial womb" or "baby in a bottle" approach to gestation would be ethi- cal, even with the praiseworthy inten- tions of saving lives and releasing orphaned embryos from their perpet- ual hibernation. Others hope that one day "embryo adoption" — the transfer of "spare" embryos to another woman who implants, gestates, and raises them as her own — might end up being recognized as morally allowable by the Church. This unusual form of adoption is still morally debated, and Dignitas Personae, the most recent Church document addressing the matter, raises serious concerns about the idea, as have a number of philosophers and bioethicists, myself included. When confronted with the absurd fate of having embryos trapped in a state of suspended animation indefi nitely, few or no alternatives really seem to exist. The future Pope Benedict XVI, in another important Church document called Donum Vitae, referenced this "absurd fate" when he summarized how there was "no possibility of their being o˜ ered safe means of survival that can be licitly pursued." Certain sinful acts like IVF, sadly, can pro- voke irrevocable and irresolvable consequences. A few years ago, I had a conversation with a divorced woman who had seven frozen children in storage. She described how she ago- nized daily over the plight of her babies, and how it felt like an open wound that could never quite heal. She shared how each year, on the anniversary of the embryos' creation — their "birthday" of sorts — she would place a call to the fertility clinic and inquire about their status. She would ask the sta˜ to look up and verify how many were stored at the facility. Fearful that something might have happened to her children, or that they might end up being aban- doned or forgotten, her annual call served as a reminder to herself and to those at the clinic that they were still there, that somebody still cared, despite the callousness of a world that seemed only too ready to ignore this ongoing humanitarian tragedy... An embry- ologist freezing embryos for stor- age. STOCK PHOTO

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