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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

Its encounter with lesbian/gay america.

by Bruce Stores ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2004

A meticulously researched educational tool, particularly for readers with a casual interest in Christian Science and LGBT...

A lifelong gay Christian Scientist explores his religion’s history and its largely uncharted, turbulent relationship with sexual minorities.

Mexico-based American journalist Stores ( The Isthmus , 2009) looks at the controversial Church of Christ, Scientist, from the 1950s to the present day. Specifically, he tells of how the church, once devoted to outdated, exclusionary practices regarding gays, has come around to adopting a policy of leniency. Stores includes numerous profiles of intrepid, trailblazing gay activists who advocated changes within the church, such as defrocked Pentecostal Rev. Troy Perry Jr., who established the Metropolitan Community Church in the 1960s, and Chris Madsen, an outspoken lesbian cub reporter who was terminated from her position at the Christian Science Monitor in the 1980s due to her sexual orientation. Madsen’s story ignited a momentous scandal and lawsuit, which would rock the church’s steely foundation. Stores also presents profiles of several other people who wished to exclude sexual minorities from church membership, such as the staunchly anti-gay letter-writer Reginald Kerry and singer and LGBT rights opponent Anita Bryant. By offering such divergent viewpoints, Stores’ intelligent, thought-provoking narrative strives to “provide new frameworks in defining the place of sexual minorities in ecclesiastical institutions.” The author’s closing notes reflect the latest positive inroads, including pro–gay-equality activism by the author’s own son on the Christian Scientist Principia College campus. Ultimately, Stores’ narrative coalesces into a fair-minded look at the evolution of Christian Science’s stance on gay rights, the responses of its leadership and followers, and the hope for change.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2004

ISBN: 978-0595666584

Page Count: 274

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | GENERAL NONFICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Bruce Stores

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

And other essays.

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955

ISBN: 0679733736

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

More by Albert Camus

by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith

by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien

by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan

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Christian Science?

If Aristotle is to have “revenge” in metaphysics it will come from a re-characterization that illustrates the relevance of his thought to modern humanity.

Books  Reviewed

Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science

The word “revenge” comes from the old French revencher , which in turn comes from the Latin revindicare , meaning to assert or demonstrate ( dicare ) power or supremacy ( vis ) in return ( re -) for some perceived injustice. In both origin and present usage, then, “revenge” is a political word. Edward Feser’s Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science is a dense work of scholarship about physical and biological science. But it is also, albeit inadvertently, a political book.

Feser is not by any stretch the first for whom politics and science have proven interrelated. In his Discourses on Livy , Niccolò Machiavelli drew a connection between physical and social science when he lamented that readers of history seemed uninterested in applying lessons from the past to the problems of the present day. Such readers, Machiavelli wrote, behave “as though heaven, the sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and were different from what they were in ancient times.” Machiavelli sought to reclaim for the politics of his time an ancient way of thinking in which there were no wholly impermissible political actions any more than there were impossible observable phenomena in physical science.

Four and a half centuries later, Leo Strauss also wished to reclaim for his own time an ancient political rationalism. Strauss wrote in Natural Right and History (1953) of the tensions among revelation, natural right, and modern science:

Looking around us, we see two hostile camps, heavily fortified and strictly guarded. One is occupied by the liberals of various description, the other by the Catholic and non-Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas. But…[t]hey all are modern men. We all are in the grip of the same difficulty. Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe…. The teleological view of the universe, of which the teleological view of man forms a part, would seem to have been destroyed by modern natural science.

Strauss intimated that the problem of natural right could not be resolved without adequate reconciliation between two seemingly incompatible cosmological visions: that of modern science and that of classical antiquity, particularly Aristotle’s. Man could not have objective ends or purposes, knowable by human inquiry, in a universe purely mechanical and arbitrary in origin.

Although Strauss’s teaching appears differently (often radically so) to different students, a rudimentary assessment of Strauss’s work may categorize his “reconciliation” between these two visions as Platonic. Averting direct confrontation with the cosmological perspective of modern science, Strauss, like Plato, did not himself assert a definitive cosmology. Rather, Strauss’s work may be seen as a dialectical inquiry only. He questioned the opinions—exoteric and, especially, esoteric—of antiquity’s great philosophers to find what permanent political wisdom, if any, might be revealed. Strauss’s agora is the library of great books, his interlocutors the most sophisticated thinkers on political philosophy of the ancient and modern world. On the point of cosmology and metaphysics, however, one can fairly say that Strauss claimed to know only that he knew nothing.

A Straussian reading of Aristotle thus emphasizes the divide between practical and theoretical wisdom described in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics . This divide makes possible the evaluation of Aristotle’s political teaching, without a definitive view of Aristotle’s physics or metaphysics. Noetic heterogeneity—the accessibility of different phenomena to different capacities of reason—suggests the possibility of an adequate understanding of politics, or social science, coexisting with an uncertain or indefinite understanding of physical and metaphysical science. In this sense Strauss sought to restore, not classical rationalism tout court , but only classical political rationalism. To paraphrase Martin Heidegger, Strauss sanctioned the continued neglect of the study of Being.

A renowned contemporary writer on philosophy and Christianity, Feser is no Straussian—I believe he will freely admit this. But Feser, in my view, is not a consistent Aristotelian, either—and this I believe he will vigorously contest.

I suspect that Feser will take umbrage at my assertion that he is not a consistent Aristotelian because he will maintain that Aristotle’s thought is enlarged by its integration with Christianity. Where Aquinas and the later schoolmen apprehend Aristotle differently from the way the ancient Lyceum did, I presume Feser will say the differences are not fundamental, but mostly represent clarifications and corrections of Aristotle’s errors, omissions, and ambiguities. The essential core of Aristotelian doctrine is unchanged, Feser will say, by the advances of Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics.

This explains several features of Aristotle’s Revenge . For one, Feser tends to use the terms “Aristotelian,” “Aristotelian tradition,” and “Aristotelian-Thomistic” somewhat interchangeably, suggesting that any differences among them are minimal. His impressive bibliography—a resource in itself for the curious—includes only one book of Aristotle, the R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye translation of Physics . Yet it includes five books of Aquinas, including the massive Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles . It is not merely the bibliographic paucity of Aristotle compared to Aquinas; it is the scope of the cited works. The two Summae set out a comprehensive account of the whole of creation and being. Aristotle’s Physics is only a part of Aristotle’s larger thought.

In citing Physics alone of Aristotle’s work, Feser has chosen the text of Aristotle that has suffered the greatest derogation by modern critics of classical thought. Aristotle’s physics contains a number of conclusions about physics that have been widely mocked. Bodies fall to the earth through the air because of gravity, not because they have a “natural place” towards which they are impelled to return. The material universe is made up of many, many more than four elemental kinds of particle. The fact that Aristotle, using the rudimentary instruments of his age, could not experience these things has so affected thought about him that even devotees of his teaching have dismissed his physics. Indeed, one of the foremost interpreters of Aristotle of the last century wrote:

One can hardly imagine an enterprising astronomer investing serious effort on Aristotle’s treatise On the Heavens , when he knew that a glance through the telescope would disprove the major conclusions of that work.

It would, of course, be absurd for someone to study those parts of Aristotle’s physical theories that have been disproven by the empirical data of modern physical science because he was dissatisfied by the empirical data of modern physical science.

Harry V. Jaffa wrote these words in Thomism and Aristotelianism (1952) with the rehabilitative intention of distancing Aristotle the political scientist from Aristotle the physical scientist. Feser too renounces certain of Aristotle’s conclusions in physical science, such as the doctrine of natural place, with a similar intention. So as not to destroy Aristotle the “philosopher of nature,” Feser distances himself from Aristotle the physicist.

It is, however, not necessary to treat Aristotle the physicist so roughly. Carlo Rovelli, in an ingenious essay from 2013 entitled “Aristotle’s Physics: A Physicist’s Look,” makes the astounding case that “Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton’s theory is an approximation of Einstein’s theory.” Given that Aristotle’s observations were limited to solid objects moving through air or liquids exhibiting the effects of drag, lift, and buoyancy, Rovelli shows that many of Aristotle’s conclusions were provisionally correct. To do this, Rovelli reduces Aristotle’s account of motion to mathematical expressions, illustrating the proximity of Aristotle’s physics to Isaac Newton’s. Indulge, for a moment, an argument from authority: Rovelli is no hobbyist in the field of science. He is a senior statesman of theoretical physics and a savant of loop quantum gravity theory, which aims to harmonize Albert Einstein’s equations of special and general relativity with quantum physics.

In attempting to reconcile Aristotle and Newton, Rovelli explicitly rejects as a “ vulgata ” the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s thesis of scientific structural revolution. Kuhn argued that major intellectual developments—such as the Copernican change from geocentric to heliocentric astronomy—fundamentally overturn rather than amend the ground rules of scientific thought. By calling this view a vulgata , I understand Rovelli to mean that it has become a widely (and unthinkingly) accepted doctrine which is nevertheless at odds with experience. “Science,” Rovelli writes, “generates discontinuities and constantly critically reevaluates received ideas, but it builds on past knowledge and its cumulative aspects by very far outnumber its discontinuities.” Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein can each be correct in a certain way. This idea of continuity and cumulative science is similar to a concept in Book IV of Aristotle’s Metaphysics :

[W]e should not say that two and three alike are both even, nor that both he who regards four to be five and he who regards one thousand to be five are alike mistaken. And if they are not alike mistaken, it is clear that the first man is less mistaken and so thinks more truly.

Aristotle deploys this argument in rebuttal of ancient doctrines that denied the possibility of a thing being made objectively definite by thinking.

Aristotle’s account of truth allowed, against these doctrines, for each of two or more accounts of experience to be partly true and for one to be nearer to the truth. The truth about a thing may be understood adequately without being understood exactly.

Einstein popularized his new and truer physics in 1916 with Relativity: The Special and the General Theory . This highly readable book questioned whether space has a real existence, or whether all space consists simply of relationships between different material bodies. This is a very important question for Aristotle. In Metaphysics , especially Books III and VII, the concept of location requires space to have a real existence or substance: there must be an actual thing called “space,” consisting of points within an absolute frame of reference. Aristotle is explicit that if space has no real existence or substance, then no thing has being. The issue is also important for Aquinas and for Feser. Feser devotes considerable ink to discussing and criticizing “relationalist” interpretations of space.

In Aristotle’s Revenge , however, Feser does not discuss an important development pertaining to this problem. In 1952, less than three years before his death, Einstein changed his mind about space. To the 15th edition of Relativity Einstein added an Appendix V . There he conceded, in the course of an examination of pre-scientific experience as it relates to time and space, that the field-equations of relativity are consistent with the notion of space having a real existence.

Appendix V subsequently became the ground of loop quantum gravity, which maintains that space has a real existence. In fact, it is “quantal”: the theory posits that there is a smallest quantity of space, from which there is no linear decrease to zero. Space in loop quantum gravity can overlap, like loops of chainmail, with each loop overlaying another to a greater or lesser degree. One implication of the theory is that there exists a limit to the expansion, compression, and distortion of space. A second implication is that singularities—the compression of space and matter to a single point having a spatial value of zero—do not occur in the way the generally accepted model of a black hole would predict. A third implication, which follows from the first and second, is that the cosmos may be undergoing a cyclical motion, so that it will eventually reverse its current expansion and return to its pre-big-bang state of compression in what is termed the “big crunch.” This would be followed by another expansion (a “big bounce”), followed by another big crunch, and so on for eternity. Such a series of circular motions might remind one of the recursive, circular motion that Aristotle identifies in Metaphysics as the prime motion.

Here is where all this butts up against Aristotle’s Revenge : the scholastic view of prime motion is different from Aristotle’s. The Christian revelation holds that the cosmos has a beginning and an end. The genesis of the whole is a creative act of God; the terminus of the whole is described in a revealed eschatology. Aristotle’s eternally cyclical prime motion and the prime mover (pure actuality or thought thinking about thinking) are incompatible with this description, and in scholastic treatment the prime mover becomes a “first” mover. The divine is defined not by the most simple continuous motion, but (and only partly) by the initial motion which imparts motion to all the rest.

There are many other features of scholastic Aristotle that are different from unalloyed Aristotle. For example, a doctrine of angels must be accommodated, elevating Aristotle’s notions of the incorporeal to a plane that simply cannot be found in Aristotle’s system of thought. Indeed, Feser, in a sidebar, briefly discusses the knowledge of angels as the instantaneous and incorruptible knowledge of incorporeal beings. He doesn’t digress into these more theistic concepts, but the serious secular reader is bound to react allergically to supernatural data in the science of Aristotle’s Revenge . As another example, the scholastics added the notion of prime matter, which they thought Aristotle’s hylemorphism implied (i.e., his theory that every being is a compound consisting of some form and the matter out of which that form is made). Feser deploys prime matter throughout Aristotle’s Revenge as a plank against reductionism. Prime matter is the universal stuff of things, or matter with no substantial form of its own out of which all other matter is composed. Aristotle has no such concept of prime matter. A concept of prime matter would confine the examination of things to an ultimate, single, speculative, and unobservable category of matter, and Aristotle’s science is rooted in observable experience, which lends it great flexibility to examine new experiences.

There are, in addition, scholastic modifications to Aristotle’s psychē , the form of a living thing which gives it life—imperfectly translated as “soul.” Unalloyed Aristotle’s psychē is eternal for human beings only in the very limited respect of the isomorphism—the structural or formal similarity—of humanity’s active intellect and the eternal prime motion: all humans participate in a kind of motion called contemplation, which is the same as the prime motion. But though this motion goes on eternally, our personal participation in it does not: each particular intellect, the individual form of a human being, ceases to exist upon that human being’s death. Scholastic Aristotle’s human soul (rendered in Latin and freighted with new meaning as anima ) is immortal and retains its particular knowledge for eternity—an essential feature of eternal punishments and rewards for bad and good particulars. Scholastic Aristotle sees all human purpose—indeed all creation—as organized toward this end of immortality and happiness in the next life.

The coming into being of man thus requires a doctrine of providence, because a specific intervention—a miracle—is needed to create a human being with a particularized immortal soul. Feser expressly discusses this concept of Aristotelian theistic evolutionism, writing: “special divine action would be required to introduce a distinctively human substantial form.” But there is no basis for this in Aristotle’s system of thought, nor in any system of thought parallel to Aristotle’s absent revelation. In the final analysis, the schoolmen’s Aristotelianism is changed from a flexible account of the whole consistent with common sense and empirical fact (“with a true view the data harmonize”— Nicomachean Ethics , Book I) to a highly doctrinal system that derives its truth from divine authority.

Feser opens his book by setting out what he calls the “philosophy of nature.” Although Aristotle does not write of a philosophy of nature, Feser finds this category useful because it isolates discrete concepts of metaphysics, and to a lesser extent physics, into a single category. Feser’s philosophy of nature advises as to “what any possible empirical and material world must be like. What must be true of any possible material and empirical world in order for us to be able to acquire scientific knowledge of it?” This branch of metaphysics (as Feser identifies it) thus forecloses thought of some phenomena (some undiscovered and some observed) as impossible. Such a foreclosure is, however, not Aristotelian. Aristotle is open to reflection on new observations in a way that Feser’s account, which invites the development of doctrine, is not. How else could the truth and data harmonize in a world aflood with new data? This foreclosure thus makes the Aristotle of Aristotle’s Revenge a weak competitor with modern science, which has no such limitations. A less rigid approach would, in fact, be more Aristotelian, more consistent with the notion of cumulative scientific knowledge, and make a superior challenge to the reigning scientific vulgata .

In book I of the Metaphysics , Aristotle describes metaphysics as a distillation of the desire to know—a science that examines the first principles of things, their being, in a way that is “not instrumental to something else” but rather an object of pure study as an end in itself. Aristotle accordingly saw physics as a science which could competently assume the correctness of commonsense experience in the study of nature, without investigation of first principles . Such investigation was simply not necessary to physics. If it had been, Aristotle’s metaphysics would have been instrumental to something else, advising on what could and could not be considered in physics.

Feser frequently asserts that proponents of various modern scientific theories “owe” a response to his arguments about the philosophy of nature. But this is not a business they consider themselves to be in: natural scientists are not concerned with what should not or may not be. They are concerned with what is, according to their best efforts at observation. Aristotle’s metaphysics establishes no debtor and creditor relationship in thought. Metaphysics, for Aristotle, has the fewest dependencies, because it is undertaken for its own sake.

This brings us full circle to Machiavelli and his critique of the thought of his time. The social science of the early 16th century grounded itself on interwoven doctrines of Aristotle and Christianity which deemed certain political actions to be impermissible. The natural science of the era similarly grounded itself on blended doctrines which deemed certain phenomena—even those actually observed, like the earth’s revolutions around the sun—to be impossible. In the eruption of Enlightenment thought that began with Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Francis Bacon, Aristotle was attacked, often viciously.

Feser sees Enlightenment hostility toward Aristotle as motivated by the desire to undermine the Church. But he might consider whether such attacks were less against the Church and Christianity per se and more against falsely pious doctrines that inhibited both political prudence and the desire to know, frustrating the actualization of human potential in both reflection and choice.

One may admire Aquinas’s philosophic thought and yet ask these questions without impiety. Perhaps what began with Aquinas as disputed questions intended partly to moderate Church doctrine had become a drumbeat of “I answer that,” lending a patina of rationality to what was no longer reasoned. The value of Aristotle’s thought, as well as of Christian piety, might have been obscured by their transubstantiation through three centuries of schoolmen’s alchemy.

Insofar as Aristotle’s Revenge is an attempt to cause modern science to acknowledge or embrace Aristotelian thinking, I do not judge the book to exact much in the way of vengeance. Modern science is—and modern scientists are—mostly materialist. Modern science does informally employ, and indeed, as Feser observes, depends upon, many concepts borrowed from the four causes which Aristotle examined. Indeed, one will find that small pockets of modern science are deep into some variations on incorporeal substances. String theory, for example, has a notion of branes (short for membranes), conjured from the mathematical demands of the theory but never observed, which are imagined to propagate through space-time. Branes would be in good company with the angels of the 13th century. But most of today’s physicists and biologists will not examine or acknowledge their debt to the philosopher if they are scolded with medieval arguments about the impossibility of phenomena. Only a few of Feser’s arguments, Aristotelian or otherwise, are likely to be compelling for anyone not already committed to an orthodox appreciation of Christian revelation. If Aristotle is to have “revenge” in metaphysics—if that is even desirable—I suspect it will come not from reiterations of the positions of the schoolmen, but from the re-characterization of Aristotle in ways that illustrate, in terms modern science understands (e.g., in math and symbolic logic and the like), the relevance of his thought to modern humanity.

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15 Great Christian Sci-Fi Books for Kids and Adults

• G. Connor Salter SEO Editor
• Updated Jul 19, 2022

You may not know what makes a book science fiction (short name: sci-fi), or that there is such a thing as Christian sci-fi books. Here's what you need to know if you're interested in checking out the genre, and some great Christian sci-fi books to try.

What Is Sci-Fi?

Before we get into Christian Science Fiction, we need an idea what sets it apart from fantasy. In a 2006 speech about sci-fi, Simon Morden quoted a popular definition: “A good science fiction story is a story about human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content.”

In The Science Fiction Makers , Derek White explained how many people separate sci-fi into two categories: hard sci-fi (example: Star Trek) and soft sci-fi (example: Star Wars).

Hard Sci-Fi

Hard sci-fi technology seems plausible, its ideas are grounded in scientific theories. Star Trek talks about space travel laws and shows inventions (touchpads, wireless phones) based on 1960s predictions. In his essay “ On Science Fiction ,” C.S. Lewis called this “the fiction of engineers.” In fact, the famous Big Three of Hard Sci-Fi all had engineering or math degrees: Robert Heinlein (engineer), Isaac Asimov (biochemist), and Arthur C. Clarke (mathematician and physicist). Clarke co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey , which emphasized realistic spaceships and astronaut tools.

Soft Sci-Fi

Soft sci-fi gets close to fantasy but doesn’t work without science content. Star Wars requires space travel and emphasizes how machines often break down at the worst times (something George Lucas learned from building cars).

Is Sci-Fi Always Anti-Religion?

H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, who popularized early science fiction, reference religion more ambivalently. Wells took an atheistic approach, describing a world where humanity has no God to call on. Verne became a deist (“God exists, doesn’t interact with creation”), and his fiction references God without any sense one could seek God’s help.

As secular Darwinism became more popular, and creationism versus evolution debates more vocal, more sci-fi depicted religion as backward. A lot of sci-fi also became interested in what C.S. Lewis called “scientism,” idolizing scientific progress. In the early 1940s, Arthur C. Clarke wrote various letters to C.S. Lewis where they debated whether scientism was a problem.

Can Christians Write Sci-Fi?

Many would argue sci-fi will always have something religious to it. Christian writers like Stephen Kotowych have argued that sci-fi stories are “wonder tales” in modern language. However, sci-fi often attracts writers who like to subvert orthodox religious ideas. So, even though religious ideas may be inherent to sci-fi, it’s not often associated with Christian writers.

Despite this, there is a tradition of science fiction by Christian writers. After Christian Fiction became a publishing category in the 1970s, Christian sci-fi grew alongside Christian fantasy as a marketable genre.

The following list of books, like Crosswalk’s recent list of Christian fantasy books , contains several kinds of Christian books. Some are marketed as Christian Fiction, others not. Each entry lists the recommended age group.

5 Classic Christian Sci-Fi Books

In one way or another, these books predate Christian Fiction’s creation in the 1970s.

1. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis (Recommended for Adult Readers)

Many Christian kids who grew up reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia may be surprised to hear that he wrote sci-fi. Part one in The Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet emulates H.G. Wells’ space travel stories while asking theological questions about alien life.

Readers who enjoy this story may also enjoy Lewis’ sci-fi short stories collected in The Dark Tower and Other Stories . 

2. Night Operation by Owen Barfield (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

C.S. Lewis’ Oxford classmate Owen Barfield had an eclectic spiritual life and wrote many things from philosophy to fairytales. Night Operation is one of Barfield’s several novels, a dystopian story about a secular society that only sees people as functions.

In the future, terrorism has forced humans to live beneath the surface. Jon, Jak, and Peet live in a sewer and are raised like everyone else: an education system with only the brutal basics. When Jon gets permission to use the restricted library, he finds his mind grows in odd ways as he learns new words. Slowly, he starts thinking in “subversive ways” which may not be tolerated.

3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

Sometimes classified as sci-fi, sometimes as fantasy , A Wrinkle in Time fits between the two labels. The story has space travel and references to astrophysics, but also a lot of magical imagery.

Kids see Meg Murray as “the dumb one” at school – her parents are scientists, and she can’t do math. The truth is that Meg’s astrophysicist father taught her too many math shortcuts. Meg’s father disappeared during a secret project, her family discovers an odd clue when a stranger mentions tesseracts. Meg, her brother Charles, and their new friend Calvin try to learn what a tesseract is, and find themselves on an intergalactic quest to find Dr. Murray.

4. The Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rosseau (Recommended for Adult Readers)

Victor Rosseau Emanuel died unknown but has been rediscovered as an important early sci-fi writer with a Christian perspective. The Messiah of the Cylinder responds to H.G. Well’s The Sleeper Awakes , placing religion’s value at the center of discussions about what a future society could look like.

Lazaroff is a materialistic scientist who promotes eugenics and doesn't believe in souls. When he places his colleague Pennel in a cryogenic chamber, his friend wakes up 100 years later in a society built on science alone. Family structures have been destroyed, religion has been banned. Pennel must be careful to evade the authorities, who tolerate no insubordination.

5. The Ball and the Cross by G.K. Chesterton (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

Most people know G.K. Chesterton for his Father Brown mysteries or his lay theology books. The Ball and the Cross combines road trip comedy with sci-fi while discussing atheism's limits.

5 Christian Sci-fi Books that are Christian Fiction

Most of these books were released by Christian publishers and marketed as Christian fiction.

1. Firebird by Kathy Tyers (Recommended for Adult Readers)

Part 1 of the Firebird series, Kathy Tryers first published this book in 1986 before rewriting it to emphasize questions about destiny and faith. It also involves an alternate future where a certain person hasn’t been born yet.

Lady Firebird is a Queen’s third child in a society that sees younger royal siblings as disposable. When enemies catch her on a military mission, she meets telepath Brennen Caldwell. Caldwell ignores advice to be careful with his prisoner, learning as much as he can about Firebird’s people and their plans. Firebird begins to wonder herself what side she should follow.

2. Shadow and Night by Chris Walley (Recommended for Adult Readers)

This first book in the Lamb Among the Stars series, Shadow and Night plays with End Times questions in an interplanetary context.

Farholme is one of the farthest plants that humanity has colonized, and a peaceful one. War hasn’t occurred in centuries. Slowly but surely, that peace starts to crack. Farholme native Merral D'Avanos and Earth warrior Verofaza Laertes Enand must consider what to do in a pending conflict that may have eternal consequences.

3. The Oxygen series by John B. Olson and Randy Ingermanson (Recommended for Adult Readers)

A two-book series by writers with PhDs in biochemistry and theoretical physics, Oxygen and The Fifth Man combines romantic suspense with hard sci-fi. Originally published in 2001, both books consider the creationism-evolution debate.

Dr. Valerie Jensen didn’t expect her NASA application to get accepted, certainly not right before NASA preps a Mars mission. Ares 10 will take two years to reach the planet, with four or five astronauts. Bob Kaganovski is wary of this new teammate, or any change this late in the game. When suspicious events force an astronaut to drop out, Ares 10 has to take Jensen along. Once they’ve left orbit, Jensen starts to wonder if someone doesn’t want her to return in one piece.

4. The Paradise Protocol by Anna Zogg (Recommended for Adult Readers)

The first book in the Intergalaxia trilogy, The Paradise Protocol is a combination of space travel and romance and questions about humanity’s attitude to space exploration.

Aric Lindquist didn’t expect her research mission on an unknown planet to go this badly. Her teammates have died or disappeared, the last one going five months. Her sending organization hasn’t contacted her or sent anyone new… until Sean Reese shows up. Sean was informed that Aric Lindquist was deranged and to preserve the project’s goals at any cost. Once they meet, he starts to reconsider that plan.

5. Heaven Came Down from Bryan Davis (Recommended for Adult Readers)

After a war ravaged the earth, strange beings appeared. Some called them angels, and the beings demanded worship. Anyone who refused died. Ben, Jack, and Trudy Garrison have joined rebels fighting the beings before all humanity is enslaved. When intelligence discovers a plan to infect rebels with a contagion, the Garrisons get special orders: infiltrate the enemy, replace the contagion, and return with a vaccine. The Garrisons don’t know whether they will get out alive – or whether to trust the spies, bounty hunters and others they meet on the way.

5 Christian Sci-Fi Books that Aren’t Christian Fiction

These books are written by Christians but don’t fit into the Christian Fiction marketing category. Sometimes this means mainstream publishers published the books, sometimes it means the books were published outside the United States – Christian Fiction is basically an American market.

1. The Overlord War/Tales of Solomon Star series by Charlie W. Starr (Recommended for Youn Adult Readers)

A C.S. Lewis scholar with an interesting specialty , Starr’s books play on spiritual themes like Lewis’ Space Trilogy does, but are also fun adventure stories. The Tales of Solomon Star begins with The Heart of Light , those adventures lead into the Overlord War in The Darkening Time . Solomon Star’s adventures and the Overlord War both come to a head in the latest book, The Aurora Gambit .

Solomon Star was once a bodyguard for the Galactic Empress. Now he lives on the run, a price on his head, and a chance to find out his past on an obscure planet. Unfortunately, with the kind of people hunting for him, Star may not have long to do it.

2. Brother Odd by Dean Koontz (Recommended for Adult Readers)

Dean Koontz has spoken various times about his spiritual journey , and his works have been cited as highlighting life’s value even in dark places. Koontz has written several pure sci-fi novels ( Star Quest, Demon Seed ) and often weaves sci-fi concepts into his suspense thrillers. Brother Odd is a good introduction to how he combines sci-fi with suspense.

Odd Thomas was born with that name. He also has an odd ability he can’t control: he can see the dead. After losing the woman he loved, Thomas retreats to St. Bartholomew’s Monastary, privately funded by physicist John Heineman. Thomas hopes to forget his troubles. Unfortunately, something not entirely human lurks around the monastery, targeting residents who can’t defend themselves.

3. Cinder by Marissa Meyer (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

It has been decades since humans colonized the moon and reorganized Earth’s nations into new empires. In New Beijing, people can augment lost bodyparts with prosthetics but are shunned by everyone else. Cinder has been a cyborg since she was 11 years old and remembers nothing before that. When she’s hired to fix Prince Kai’s android, she becomes a pawn in a larger plan to ally Earth with the Moon colony. When Cinder discovers she’s one of the only people immune to “the Blue Fever” plague, she becomes even more important, and maybe even a threat to some.

4. Pandora’s Box by Nathan Marchand (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

A combination of sci-fi with post-apocalyptic themes, Pandora’s Box considers questions about invasive technology and finding hope amidst soul-crushing circumstances.

A soldier has been left underground with one set of orders: stay until reinforcements arrive. Protect the Pandora’s Box. She finds two books outlining the start of Pandora’s Box, when the world was a very different place. Brewer was just a soldier’s son when the virus hit and the war started but quickly rose through the ranks. Pandora’s Box was his only assignment.

Readers who enjoy this book may also like the connected short story included in The Day After .

5. Empyrion Saga by Stephen R. Lawhead (Recommended for Young Adult Readers)

Many readers know Stephen R. Lawhead’s Christian fantasy ( the Dragon King trilogy ) or his historical fiction ( the King Raven Trilogy ). The Empyrion Saga was first published as one book but is also available as Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra and Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome .

Orion Treet has done a few things in his life, few of them successful. So, when he gets a chance to document life on a space colony, he doesn’t think twice. Once he arrives, it turns out the promised paradise has become something else. Two highly advanced civilizations have been competing for this planet for a very long time. Things are coming to a head, and no one can claim neutrality.

How to Find Christian Sci-Fi Books

As with finding Christian fantasy books, there are several places you can look for new, interesting Christian sci-fi books.

Second, see what has won awards from Christian publishers or groups. The Christy Awards gives a prize for Visionary or Futuristic book every year. Realm Makers, an annual writers conference for Christian fantasy and sci-fi writers, also gives out awards .

Third, look for online communities that can help. There are readers’ groups on social media and websites like Lorehaven where Christian sci-fi fans recommend books. You may have to work your way through several groups to find one that is current, reputable, and fits your interests. Once you do, you’ll be glad you kept looking.

Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/sakkmesterke 

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Who are we?

Considering our nature as God’s children can lift us to new heights of inspiration and bring healing.

• By Lynn G. Jackson

January 16, 2024

Years ago, a famous actor and his family went out to dinner with their young son. As they walked into the restaurant, the actor was quickly recognized. The boy asked, “Why is everyone staring at us?” His dad leaned over and quietly answered, “Maybe it’s because they know who we are.” The son thought about it and then asked, “Well, who are we?”

That’s a great question. Who are we? In thinking about identity, I like to consider, “Who are we in relation to God?” and “How do we identify ourselves?”

Through the teachings of the Bible as illuminated in Christian Science , I’ve learned that we are each the image and likeness of God, the child of the one Father-Mother God. This understanding has helped me during difficult times. And I’ve found that recognizing my spiritual identity not only answers the question “Who am I?” but also brings healing.

God and His creation can never be thought of separately. They are one – or, to be grammatically incorrect but spiritually correct, they is one! This indicates the complete inseparability of cause and effect – of divine Mind and its idea.

Identifying ourselves as God’s creation – His child, or image and likeness – reveals that God’s thoughts are our thoughts. This helps us overcome the false concept that there’s something wrong with us or that we’re incapable of understanding God.

Identifying ourselves spiritually lifts thought to what is real and permanent. We begin to see that as Spirit’s expression, our true being – our only being – has nothing to do with mortality and everything to do with God, with Spirit. This immortal view shows us to be entirely spiritual; the idea of God, divine Mind; the image of Truth; the reflection of Love; the expression of Soul; the manifestation of Principle; the embodiment of Spirit; the likeness of Life. Each of these capitalized words is a name for our all-encompassing God.

We can apply these spiritual truths in practical ways. For example, if we need more courage to stand up to a difficult colleague at work, we can pray to see this individual as God’s image, reflecting only spiritual qualities given to him by God. If we need healing of a frightening disease, we can identify ourselves as wholly spiritual, a child of God, forever reflecting health and harmony.

Every healing thought we need is present here and now. Mary Baker Eddy , who discovered Christian Science, writes, “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously” ( “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 392 ).

Identifying ourselves spiritually through prayer requires that we stand porter at the door of our consciousness, allowing in only thoughts from God – thoughts that reinforce our true nature as spiritual and whole, with nothing added or omitted. It means understanding that in God “we live, and move, and have our being; ... For we are also his offspring,” as the Apostle Paul, a follower of Jesus, put it ( Acts 17:28 ).

Paul also said, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” ( I Corinthians 3:16 ). We are all God’s children, unlimited and eternal. So, are we identifying this God-given nature in ourselves and others? Christ, God’s saving message of truth and love for all, shows us our true, Godlike identity.

Once, after I had spent many weeks in deep study and prayer – learning more of my relation to God – an area of my skin broke out. It was alarming. At first, I questioned how something like this could appear after so much spiritual growth.

Then I realized that this effect of a false concept of my identity had no place or space in my thought, since I am a child of God. It was without real cause, without origin, without place. I reaffirmed my identity as God’s immediate reflection, expressing the purity of Soul, the holiness of Spirit, the law of divine Mind, the perfection of Life, the correctness of Truth, and the beauty of Love. It wasn’t long before the condition dissolved and there was no evidence of any blemish.

As Mrs. Eddy writes, “Mortals may climb the smooth glaciers, leap the dark fissures, scale the treacherous ice, and stand on the summit of Mont Blanc; but they can never turn back what Deity knoweth, nor escape from identification with what dwelleth in the eternal Mind” ( “Unity of Good,” p. 64 ).

Adapted from an article published in the Jan. 1, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel .

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Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album. Beth Garrabrant /Courtesy of the artist hide caption

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album.

For all of its fetishization of new sounds and stances, pop music was born and still thrives by asking fundamental questions. For example, what do you do with a broken heart? That's an awfully familiar one. Yet romantic failure does feel different every time. Its isolating sting produces a kind of obliterating possessiveness: my pain, my broken delusions, my hope for healing. A broken heart is a screaming baby demanding to be held and coddled and nurtured until it grows up and learns how to function properly. This is as true in the era of the one-percent glitz goddess as it was when blues queens and torch singers organized society's crying sessions. It's true of Taylor Swift , who's equated songwriting with the heart's recovery since she released " Teardrops on my Guitar " 18 years ago, and whose 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , is as messy and confrontational as a good girl's work can get, blood on her pages in a classic shade of red.

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and 50 more albums coming out this spring

Turning the Tables

Taylor swift is the 21st century's most disorienting pop star.

Back in her Lemonade days, when her broken heart turned her into a bearer of revolutionary spirit, Swift's counterpart and friendly rival, Beyoncé , got practical, advising her listeners that while feelings do need tending, a secured bank account is what counts. "Your best revenge is your paper," she sang .

For Swift, the best revenge is her pen. One of the first Tortured Poets songs revealed back in February (one of the album's many bonus tracks, it turns out, but a crucial framing device) is called " The Manuscript "; in it, a woman re-reads her own scripted account of a "torrid love affair." Screenwriting is one of a few literary ambitions Swift aligns with this project. At The Grove mall in Los Angeles, Swift partnered with Spotify to create a mini-library where new lyrics were inscribed in weathered books and on sheets of parchment in the days leading up to its release. The scene was a fans' photo op invoking high art and even scripture. In the photographs of the installation that I saw, every bound volume in the library bears Swift's name. The message is clear: When Taylor Swift makes music, she authors everything around her.

For years, Swift has been pop's leading writer of autofiction , her work exploring new dimensions of confessional songwriting, making it the foundation of a highly mediated public-private life. The standard line about her teasing lyrical disclosures (and it's correct on one level) is that they're all about fueling fan interest. But on Tortured Poets , she taps into a much more established and respected tradition. Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard and literary stars like the Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. And, of course, Swift's reluctant spiritual mother, Joni Mitchell .

Even in today's blather-saturated cultural environment, a woman speaking out after silence can feel revolutionary; that this is an honorable act is a fundamental principle within many writers' circles. "I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have," Natalie Goldberg declares in Writing Down the Bones , the most popular writing manual of the 20th century. When on this album's title track, Swift sings, "I think some things I never say," she's making an offhand joke; but this is the album where she does say all the things she thinks, about love at least, going deeper into the personal zone that is her métier than ever before. Sharing her darkest impulses and most mortifying delusions, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of several much-mediated affairs and declares this an act of liberation that has changed and ultimately strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself; often in these songs, she considers her naiveté and wishfulness through a grown woman's lens and admits she's made a fool of herself. But she owns her heartbreak now. She alone will have the last word on its shape and its effects.

This includes other people's sides of her stories. The songs on Tortured Poets , most of which are mid- or up-tempo ballads spun out in the gossamer style that's defined Swift's confessional mode since Folklore , build a closed universe of private and even stolen moments, inhabited by only two people: Swift and a man. With a few illuminating exceptions that stray from the album's plot, she rarely looks beyond their interactions. The point is not to observe the world, but to disclose the details of one sometimes-shared life, to lay bare what others haven't seen. Tortured Poets is the culmination of a catalog full of songs in which Swift has taken us into the bedrooms where men pleasured or misled her, the bars where they charmed her, the empty playgrounds where they sat on swings with her and promised something they couldn't give. When she sings repeatedly that one of the most suspect characters on the album told her she was the love of her life, she's sharing something nobody else heard. That's the point. She's testifying under her own oath.

Swift's musical approach has always been enthusiastic and absorbent. She's created her own sounds by blending country's sturdy song structures with R&B's vibes, rap's cadences and pop's glitz; as a personality and a performer, she's all arms, hugging the world. The sound of Tortured Poets offers that familiar embrace, with pop tracks that sparkle with intelligence, and meditative ones that wrap tons of comforting aura around Swift's ruminations. Beyond a virtually undetectable Post Malone appearance and a Florence Welch duet that also serves as an homage to Swift's current exemplar/best friendly rival, Lana Del Rey , the album alternates between co-writes with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers who have helped Swift find her mature sound, which blends all of her previous approaches without favoring any prevailing trend. There are the rap-like, conversational verses, the reaching choruses, the delicate piano meditations, the swooning synth beats. Antonoff's songs come closest to her post- 1989 chart toppers; Dessner's fulfill her plans to remain an album artist. Swift has also written two songs on her own, a rarity for her; both come as close to ferocity as she gets. As a sustained listen, Tortured Poets harkens back to high points throughout Swift's career, creating a comforting environment that both supports and balances the intensity of her storytelling.

It's with her pen that Swift executes her battle plans. As always, especially when she dwells on the work and play of emotional intimacy, her lyrics are hyper-focused, spilling over with detail, editing the mess of desire, projection, communion and pain that constitutes romance into one sharp perspective: her own. She renders this view so intensely that it goes beyond confession and becomes a form of writing that can't be disputed. Remember that parchment and her quill pen; her songs are her new testaments. It's a power play, but for many fans, especially women, this ambition to be definitive feels like a necessary corrective to the misrepresentations or silence they face from ill-intentioned or cluelessly entitled men.

"A great writer can be a dangerous creature, however gentle and nice in person," the biographer Hermione Lee once wrote . Swift has occasionally taken this idea to heart before, especially on her once-scorned, now revered hip-hop experiment, Reputation . But now she's screaming from the hilltop, sparing no one, including herself as she tries to prop up one man's flagging interest and then falls for others' duplicity. "I know my pain is such an imposition," Swift sang in last year's " You're Losing Me ," a prequel to the explosive confessional mode of Tortured Poets , where that pain grows nearly suicidal, feeds romantic obsession, and drives her to become a "functional alcoholic" and a madwoman who finds strength in chaos in a way that recalls her friend Emma Stone's cathartic performance as Bella in Poor Things . (Bella, remember, comes into self-possession by learning to read and write.) " Who's afraid of little old me? " Swift wails in the album's window-smashing centerpiece bearing that title; in " But Daddy I Love Him ," she runs around screaming with her dress unbuttoned and threatens to burn down her whole world. These accounts of unhinged behavior reinforce the message that everybody had better be scared of this album — especially her exes, but also her business associates, the media and, yes, her fans, who are not spared in her dissection of just who's made her miserable over the past few years.

Listen to the album

I'm not getting into the dirty details; those who crave them can listen to Tortured Poets themselves and easily uncover them. They're laid out so clearly that anyone who's followed Swift's overly documented life will instantly comprehend who's who: the depressive on the heath, the tattooed golden retriever in her dressing room. Here's my reading of her album-as-novel — others' interpretations may vary: Swift's first-person protagonist (let's call her "Taylor") begins in a memory of a long-ago love affair that left her melancholy but on civil terms, then has an early meeting with a tempting rogue, who declares he's the Dylan Thomas to her Patti Smith; no, she says, though she's sorely tempted, we're "modern idiots," and she leaves him behind for a while. Then we get scenes from a stifling marriage to a despondent and distracted child-man. "So long, London," she declares, fleeing that dead end. From then on, it's the rogue on all cylinders. They connect, defy the daddy figures who think they're bad for each other, speak of rings and baby carriages. Those daddies continue to meddle in this newfound freedom.

In this main story arc, Swift writes about erotic desire as she never has before: She's "fresh out the slammer" (ouch, the rhetoric) and her bedsheets are on fire. She cannot stop rhapsodizing about this new love object and her commitment to their outlaw hunger for each other. It's " Love Story ," updated and supersized, with a proper Romeo at its center — a forbidden, tragic soulmate, a perfect match who's also a disastrous one. Swift peppers this section of Tortured Poets with name-drops ("Jack" we know, " Lucy " might be a tricky slap at Romeo, hard to tell) and instantly searchable references; he sends her a song by The Blue Nile and traces hearts on her face but tells revolting jokes in the bar and eventually reveals himself as a cad, a liar, a coward. She recovers, but not really. In the end, she does move on but still dreams of him hearing one of their songs on a jukebox and dolefully realizing the young girl he's now with has never heard it before.

Insert the names yourself. They do matter, because her backstories are key to Swift's appeal; they both keep her human-sized and amplify her fame. Swift's artistry is tied up in her deployment of celebrity, a slippery state in which a real life becomes emblematic. Like no one before, she's turned her spotlit day-to-day into a conceptual project commenting on women's freedom, artistic ambition and the place of the personal in the public sphere. As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: her model and musician friends, her actor/musician/athlete consorts, brands, even (warily) political causes. And with her fans, the co-creators of her stardom.

Her songs stand apart, though. They remain the main vehicle through which, negotiating unimaginable levels of renown, Swift continually insists on speaking only for herself. A listener has to work to find the "we" in her soliloquies. There are plenty of songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of " Down Bad " to the click of recognition in " I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) ." But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak for and to anyone besides herself is audible throughout the album. It's the sound of her freedom.

Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk Concert

She also confronts the way fame has cost her, fully exploring questions she raised on Reputation and in " Anti-Hero ." There are hints, more than hints, that her romance with the rogue was derailed partly because her business associates found it problematic, a danger to her precious reputation. And when she steps away from the man-woman predicament, Swift ponders the ephemeral reality of the success that has made private decisions nearly impossible. A lovely minuet co-written with Dessner, " Clara Bow " stages a time-lapsed conversation between Swift and the power players who've helped orchestrate her rise even as she knows they won't be concerned with her eventual obsolescence. "You look like Clara Bow ," they say, and later, "You look like Stevie Nicks in '75." Then, a turn: "You look like Taylor Swift," the suits (or is it the public, the audience?) declare. "You've got edge she never did." The song ends abruptly — lights out. This scene, redolent of All About Eve , reveals anxieties that all of Swift's love songs rarely touch upon.

One reason Swift went from being a normal-level pop star to sharing space with Beyoncé as the era's defining spirit is because she is so good at making the personal huge, without fussing over its translation into universals. In two decades of talking back to heartbreakers, Swift has called out gaslighting, belittling, neglect, false promises — all the hidden injuries that lovers inflict on each other, and that a sexist society often overlooks or forgives more easily from men. In "The Manuscript," which calls back to a romantic trauma outside the Tortured Poets frame, she sings of being a young woman with an older man making "coffee in a French press" and then "only eating kids cereal" and sleeping in her mother's bed when he dumps her; any informed Swift fan's mind will race to songs and headlines about cads she's previously called out in fan favorites like "Dear John" and "All Too Well" — the beginnings of the mission Tortured Poets fulfills.

Reviews of more Taylor Swift albums on NPR

In the haze of 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

Let's Talk About Taylor Swift's 'Folklore'

Show And Tell: On 'Lover,' Taylor Swift Lets Listeners In On Her Own Terms

The Old Taylor's Not Dead

The Many New Voices Of Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift Leaps Into Pop With 'Red'

Swift's pop side (and perhaps her co-writers' influence) shows in the way she balances the claustrophobic referentiality of her writing with sparkly wordplay and well-crafted sentimental gestures. On Tortured Poets , she's less strategic than usual. She lets the details fall the way they would in a confession session among besties, not trying to change them from painful memories into points of connection. She's just sharing. Swift bares every crack in her broken heart as a way of challenging power structures, of arguing that emotional work that men can sidestep is still expected from women who seem to own the world.

Throughout Tortured Poets, Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs: how men inflict it on women and women cultivate it within themselves. It's worth asking how useful such a brutal evisceration of one privileged private life can be in a larger social or political sense; critics, including NPR's Leah Donnella in an excellent 2018 essay on the limits of the songwriter's reach, have posed that question about Swift's work for years. But we should ask why Swift's work feels so powerful to so many — why she has become, in the eyes of millions, a standard-bearer and a freedom fighter. Unlike Beyoncé, who loves a good emblem and is always thinking about history and serving the culture and communities she claims, Swift is making an ongoing argument about smaller stories still making a difference. Her callouts can be viewed as petty, reflecting entitlement or even narcissism. But they're also part of her wrestling with the very notion of significance and challenging hierarchies that have proven to be so stubborn they can feel intractable. That Swift has reached such a peak of influence in the wake of the #MeToo movement isn't an accident; even as that chapter in feminism's history can seem to be closing, she insists on saying, "believe me." That isn't the same as saying "believe all women," but by laying claim to disputed storylines and fighting against silence, she at the very least reminds listeners that such actions matter.

Listening to Tortured Poets , I often thought of "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance," a song that Sinéad O'Connor recorded when she was in her young prime, not yet banished from the mainstream for her insistence on speaking politically. Like Swift's best work, its lyrics are very specific — allegedly about a former manager and lover — yet her directness and conviction expand their reach. In 1990, that a woman in her mid-20s would address a belittling man in this way felt startling and new. Taylor Swift came to prominence in a culture already changing to make room for such testimonies, if not — still — fully able to honor them. She has made it more possible for them to be heard. "I talk and you won't listen to me," O'Connor wailed . "I know your answer already." Swift doesn't have to worry about whether people will listen. But she knows that this could change. That's why she is writing it all down.

• Taylor Swift