Years ago, on an episode of Focus on the Family, I heard the story of an experimental school for young children. The school’s founders wanted to challenge the students to tap into their natural curiosity and boldness, so they knocked down the playground fences to allow the kids to explore beyond their prescribed boundaries. Instead of free-ranging all over the neighborhood, however, the children hardly ventured beyond the schoolhouse door. Moral: Kids need boundaries so they can feel secure while tapping into their natural curiosity and boldness.  

The luxury liner was steaming through a calm, star-studded night when it happened. Fast asleep after days of rough weather and turbid fog, passengers were thrown from their beds by a violent shuddering and noise like an explosion. The prow of an iron-hulled sailing vessel had rammed them amidships and split the hull. Passengers who were not killed in the crash crowded the deck and swarmed the lifeboats. Many were crushed under the collapsing mainmast.

What could be more genteel than a meeting of academic classicists? Imagine scholars in tweed jackets subtly correcting each other’s Greek as they compare translations of Thucydides and debate the political implications of Sappho. The expectations of Mary Frances Williams, an independent (i.e., not attached to a university) classics scholar, were not so clichéd. Still, she had no idea when she registered for the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) what a wild ride it would be. 

Alienated America, by Tim Carney, is the latest book (following Bowling Alone in 2000 and Coming Apart in 2013) about our culture’s loss of community bonds. That loss could be the endgame of one of the great conflicts in human history. The conflict has taken many forms: the one and the many (philosophical), the pluribus and the unum (political), the id and the other (psychological).

“Don’t tell me a Christian should never need psychiatric treatment. In my opinion, a Christian may need treatment even more than an unbeliever, because the life Christ asks us to lead is so fundamentally opposed to the way the world works.”

In Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier (Amulet, ages 10-14), Nan Sparrow’s first memories are of the gentle, quiet man who adopted her as an abandoned infant and taught her his trade. The Sweep added love and imagination to a life that, for most 19th-century chimney climbers, was unrelievedly grim. But now he’s gone, his only legacy a lump of charcoal that Nan can’t bring herself to toss away. Maybe it’s good luck, and she needs all the luck she can get working for Wilkie Crudd, the most heartless master in London. 

Few “Christian heroes” attract the admiration of the modern age more than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His courage in standing up to an obvious evil like Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, his devotion to his family, and his musical and literary gifts are all virtues anyone, secular or religious, can appreciate. But our nonfiction winner presents a figure few secular readers can grasp: a man smitten by God from an early age. Perhaps the most sensitive treatment of this life can only come from an author or illustrator with similar leanings.