East of Eden and Easter

Eight days from now comes the most controversial day of the year. Easter bunnies and eggs (if you can afford the latter) mask the debate, but Gary Habermas jumps into it in On the Resurrection: Refutations (B&H Academic, 2024). Unlike other books that merely assert what the Gospels say, Habermas painstakingly undermines one by one the arguments that Jesus was not resurrected.

This month on Olasky Books I’ll go two by two: Two biographies of my favorite singers show how to write about others—and how not to. Two stories about early American history remind us that political vice has always been with us, and that the antidote is not groaning but growing our minds and hearts. Two more books rightly elevate virtue over “choice,” two examine the medical mystery that gives sufferers no good choice, two provide political reminders, and two honor the ordinary and the extraordinary.

First, good news on music: Brian Fairbanks in Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever (Hachette, 2024) stays in the background and tells the stories of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson. Ironically, Kristofferson did not embrace the ultra-libertarian philosophy proposed in his most famous lyric, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose.” He learned that ultra-liberty is a loser.

Now, bad writing about good music: Ann Powers in Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (William Morrow, 2024) makes herself the center of attention. One paragraph with eleven “I”s tells how the author “evolved into a semivirtual version of myself… I longed for the mystical communion with strangers…. I could sometimes hit a level of deep listening.” Who cares?

Next, two books on political problems when the American republic was nearly new. The subtitle of Tyson Reeder’s Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America (Oxford University Press, 2024) shows that concern about other countries manipulating US voters has been present since the beginning. The subtitle of Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness (Simon & Schuster, 2024) shows How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

Can making “choice” a god ironically guillotine real choice? Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, translated by Michael Hofmann (Melville House, 2019), is a sadly moving story about an ordinary Berlin husband and wife who opposed Hitler when others were saying Germans chose him, let’s respect their choice. Scholarly Sophia Rosenfeld in The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025) urges us to rethink both the promises and limitations of choice in a culture becoming cancerous.

Medically, cancer is a physical horror but we’re making some progress in fighting it. Alzheimer’s is a psychological horror within which even small success eludes us. Neurobiologist Karl Herrup’s How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s (MIT Press, 2021) shows how the heavily-funded amyloid hypothesis seems close to worthless. Dr. Daniel Gibbs, a neurologist who has Alzheimer’s, writes in Dispatches from the Land of Alzheimer’s (Cambridge University Press, 2024) that an alternative focus, on “tau tangles,” seems equally inadequate.

Two useful reminders: Jared Wilson’s Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel (Zondervan, 2025) notes that good law “can tell us what to do, but it can’t give us the power to do it… the Bible says the way people change—at least deep down, at the heart level from which all true behavioral change comes—is by the Holy Spirit.” Many want to change others by force, and David Landrum’s SEISMOS: Christian Citizenship in a Post-Christian West (Staten House, 2025) reminds critics of Trumpism like me not to forget the tyrannies of the left.

And one more two-by-two as we enjoy Easter and a new baseball season. Tish Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (IVP, 2016) has great chapter titles: “Making a Bed,” “Brushing Teeth,” “Losing Keys,” and “Eating Leftovers.” We can make the whole day holy by feeling God’s pleasure as we move through it. As the new Major League Baseball season begins, we can also thank Him for what Paul Putz reveals in The Spirit of the Game (Oxford University Press, 2024), which looks at the role of Christians and Christianity in baseball and other major sports.