Top books of the 21st century
Darald and Juliet Libby Millennium Professor of Theology and Law Cathleen Kaveny’s 2016 book Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square has been chosen by the online journal Current as one of the top 100 books of the 21st century.
Other books selected for the list include Gilead (Marilynne Robinson), Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (David W. Blight), Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling), Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now (Peter Bacon Hales), Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates), Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Michael Burlingame), and Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood).
Current describes itself as an online journal “of commentary and opinion providing daily reflections on contemporary ideas, culture, and politics.”
In Prophecy without Contempt, Kaveny—who holds a joint appointment in the Theology Department and Boston College Law School, and whose scholarship centers on relationships between the law, religion, and morality—seeks to reframe the debate about religion in the public square by focusing on a powerful stream of religious discourse in American political speech: the Biblical rhetoric of prophetic indictment, the jeremiad. (Read a full discussion of the book in BC Law Magazine.)
“It is all too tempting for practitioners of prophetic rhetoric to let their condemnation mutate into contempt,” writes Kaveny in the book’s preface. “They—we—must resist this temptation. In an increasingly pluralistic liberal democracy, prophetic condemnation of deep social evils can be justified on occasion, although such rhetoric never comes without ancillary costs.”
Treating one’s political interlocutors as “vile or worthless is to risk undermining their equal status as participants in our political community,” she explains. “It is to treat them as unworthy of citizenship, as people who must be ‘pruned’ from our common political endeavor.”
Kaveny, who has published four books and more than 100 articles and essays on topics in law, ethics, and medical ethics, said that, while she didn’t know about Current’s list, “I know—and respect very much—the panel of reviewers.
“The list includes a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, including books dealing with religion,” she said. “I was particularly honored to be included in the company of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, and Mark Noll's America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, because I continually teach from and learn from those books.
“In addition, many of the fiction books have taught me more about theological reality than academic treatises. I think of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, which is deeply humane and a model of compassion.”
What effect will her inclusion in the top 100 have on her?
“I think the biggest impact on me will be that it will help me summon up the courage to write my next book, which is on nostalgia,” she said.