Olasky Books: Gnawing Senses of Conscience

Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller (Yale University Press, 2025) is a valentine to Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), whose life could have been co-designed by the novelist’s bipolar Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson, best known for Treasure Island, combined a strict Scottish Presbyterian upbringing with a love of South Seas sensuousness.

Damrosch describes how Stevenson rebelled against Christianity but “a gnawing sense of conscience never left him.” At age 22, Stevenson read Herbert Spencer (coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest”) and became a Darwinian evolutionist, signing one letter “your affectionate and horrible Atheist. R. L. Stevenson. C.I., H.A., S.B.,” decoded by a biographer as “Careless Infidel, Horrible Atheist, and Son of Belial.”

Artistic temperaments work in mysterious ways: The rest of Stevenson’s short life (he had chronic respiratory problems) showed a battle of impulses that led to dramatic storytelling in line with his view of novels: “We should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.”

Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024) is provocatively gloating. He asks, “How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?” Al-Gharbi wonders how “symbolic capitalists” live with the “dissonance [of] their lifestyles, their behaviors, and their expressed beliefs.”

“Symbolic capitalists” include writers, professors, and others who gain influence and often wealth by wielding words as aggressively as the wolves of Wall Street leverage valuations. The difference is that symbolic capitalists profit by trying to appear better than others—more committed to equality, justice, wonderfulness than their purportedly-crass colleagues who have made peace with bourgeois life.

Al-Gharbi shows how those who profess egalitarian commitments gain advantages, often at the expense of the marginalized: Their antiracism leads to more racism, their feminism to a worse position for women. They often disparage traditional families but have benefited from growing up in them and are among the most likely to have their own.

Chris Pavone’s The Doorman (MCD, 2025) is a novelistic equivalent of al-Gharbi’s disquieting thesis. Pavone lays out in page-turning suspense the generational equivalent of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), with villains including a zillionaire arms-dealing capitalist along with mobs both left and right. Two of the three major characters find moments of grace only in adultery.

The New York Times in 1987 gave a mixed blessing to Wolfe’s bonfire-building: “a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book [that leaves] an odd aftertaste, not entirely pleasant.” Pavone’s work struck me exactly that way, but the NYT review of it leaves out the nuance and gains eyeballs with this headline, “Murder, Lust and Obscene Wealth in a City on Edge.”

Reviewer Sarah Lyell crooned: If The Doorman “suffers from anything, it’s a surfeit of riches—details add digressions.” Maybe true, but it really suffers from hopelessness. One character summarizes the theme by calling life “a series of foregone decisions… inescapable, inevitable… here’s how you’ll grow old and here’s how you’ll die, each of us the hero of our own inconsequential little story.”

There’s more to life than defeat and death. Philippa Gander’s Life in Sync (Princeton, 2025) examines the science of internal clocks from a materialist perspective, but in the process reveals God’s intelligent design: Before typical wakeup time “the ability of our blood to clot increases, ahead of the increased likelihood of accidental cuts after we wake up and become active.” And news you can use: Evening light levels in the typical home suppress melatonin on average by nearly 50 percent.

Briefly noted

Nadya Williams provides in Christians Reading Classics (Zondervan, 2025) a primer for teachers in classical Christian schools, and homeschooling parents as well. Christian schools looking for a brief introduction to journalism could make use of Reporting from the Tree (Probook [The Netherlands], 2025) by Christian Network Europe editor Evert van Vlastuin.

Michiko Ishimure’s Spring Castle (Tuttle, 2025), translated by Bruce Allen, is a novelistic treatment of a Japanese Christian-led rebellion in 1638 that ended when the shogun’s army slaughtered 37,000 men, women, and children. 

Jamin Goggin’s Pastoral Confessions: The Healing Path to Faithful Ministry (Baker, 2025) and Jonathon Seidl’s Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic (Revell, 2025) could be useful to other strugglers.