Making the Dean’s List: Literary Recommendations from Baylor’s Well-Read Faculty

In the coming issues of BaylorNews, we will highlight books recommended by Baylor’s school/college deans. Challenging, compelling and thought provoking, these literary selections are meant to inspire new ideas and encourage the Baylor community to invest in the habit of reading.

Winter 2016 featured dean: Thomas Hibbs
Dean of the Honors College

Plato’s Bedroom: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love
David O’Connor

A master teacher at the University of Notre Dame, David O’Connor, who delivered the Drumwright Family Lecture at Baylor this year, has taught a popular course on love for years. In his new book, O’Connor weaves reflections on philosophy, literature and film into a series of practical discussions of love, discussions in which readers will discover eloquent articulations of their deepest passions and aversions, attractions and fears.

About the topic of the book, he writes:
“Is what you want a kind of intimacy with another person, an intimacy that creates within us a fearfulness, a fearfulness because we’re being taken somewhere we don’t control, and whose end we do not see, an end for better, for worse, till death? The question of how we can open our heart enough …to live that path becomes a central question for us. It’s not just a philosophical question.”

O’Connor dissects the reductionist and unimaginative discourse of love in the contemporary world. Drawing upon various resources, from Plato and Shakespeare to Genesis, O’Connor strives to recover a language of love as a sublime and transforming experience.

The Republic of Imagination: American in Three Books
Azar Nafisi

In her best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran, a memoir of her time in Iran as an underground teacher of a group of young Iranian women with a curriculum consisting of forbidden western literary texts, Azar Nafisi, who gave the Beall-Russell Lecture at Baylor in 2006, makes a compelling case for the power of these texts to keep human longing alive and thus to subvert the aspirations of a totalitarian regime.

In her latest book, The Republic of Imagination, Nafisi, now a professor in America, wonders at the indifference of Americans to their own literary heritage, an indifference that she fears will endanger the democratic ideal. In totalitarian countries, liberal education is a “basic need,” as it enables readers to reclaim an identity always under assault. What about ordinary Americans? Do they even “know what they are missing?” Is it possible to “rekindle the hunger?”

If we ignore this literature, we deprive ourselves of the stories that help us understand and articulate what it means to be human. Nafisi’s books are a great place to start.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
René Girard, translated, with a foreword, by James G. Williams

After hearing of the death of René Girard on Nov. 4, I have been re-reading his work, which with the escalation of violence both at home and abroad seems as pertinent as ever. With work spanning anthropology, psychology, literature and theology, Girard had two big ideas. His first insight was that human desire is largely imitative; it is based, not so much on our private, individual wishes but on wanting what others want – everything from consumer goods such as cars and iPhones, to our desire for honor, respect, and recognition.

Girard’s second idea, the role of the scapegoat in human society, arises out of mimetic desire. Imitative desire leads to competition and envy and can easily escalate into violence. Society becomes unified and avoids debilitating conflict by identifying a scapegoat, a sacrificial object.

What is most interesting about Girard is that he detected in Christianity, especially in the trial and crucifixion of Christ, an acknowledgment that the victim is often innocent and that sacrificial love is the only alternative to the violence that mimetic desire fosters.