Briefly Reviewed: January-February 2026

From Silence to Silence: A Benedictine Pilgrimage to God’s Sanctuary

By Fr. Francis Bethel, O.S.B.

Publisher: TAN Books

Pages: 312

Price: $29.95

Review Author: Clara Sarrocco

Silence is much more than just the absence of sound. The unspoken word tells a deeper story. It can convey deep emotion, as a moment of silence in memory of a lost one. It can convey wonder, as in the phrase “I’m at a loss for words.” Imagery can convey silence, as do the paintings of Edward Hopper. Likewise the poetry of Thomas Gray and William Wordsworth. In many cultures, silence suggests respect and understanding. In From Silence to Silence, Fr. Francis Bethel takes our need for silence to a new and deeper level. It is only in silence that we can hear the word of God.

Fr. Bethel is a Benedictine monk from Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma. He writes from the ancient monastic tradition of prayer and work, enveloped in silence during the day and in observance of the “great silence” usually from night prayers to the next morning — a tradition that started at the beginning of monasticism in the third century.

From Silence to Silence is a guide to help people find a clearer path to God. Fr. Bethel addresses the lay faithful and families, but he hopes his work will also help and be meaningful to priests and those in consecrated life. His message couldn’t timelier, with all the electronic bombardment intruding on our psyches, from email and text messages to social media and artificial intelligence. Fr. Bethel explains that “subjective silence, an attentive receptivity, is essential for a truly human life.” He continues, “Entering into objective silence is the main purpose of the subjective one. We need to recollect our faculties around more important thoughts in order to be attentive to what really counts in life.” His book is neither a history of the Benedictine tradition nor a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict. “I simply put forward my meditations, the fruit of almost half a century of Benedictine life. I have been formed in the great Solesmes tradition,” he writes. His hope is that the tradition will be meaningful to all his readers.

Fr. Bethel begins with the “first steps” of “Cultivating Receptive Silence.” He notes that interior silence requires mastery of the inner life, with the complementarity of both asceticism and grace, and the function of intellect and will. He does not ignore the importance of imagination. On this he writes, “The culture of silence in the imagination and the memory means rendering them useful, in harmony with our intellect and will — that is, with the true and the good.” He does not ignore the importance of the “Silence of the Lips,” using the words of the Lord in Matthew’s Gospel: “I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter.” It is God’s Transcendence, Beauty, and Love that should be on our lips.

Fr. Bethel then discusses, in “Finding the Path: Looking Toward God,” how we find our way to God. The path of silence should lead to God, in the contemplation of His Beauty and Love. It is through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and with humility, that we approach Him.

In the last step, “On the Threshold: Prayer,” Father takes the reader on the final pilgrimage. “With meditation and contemplative prayer, we can dimly perceive, at least from the outside, some of the beauty of the Sanctuary of Silence,” he writes. We place ourselves in the presence of God and follow the steps of prayer — lectio, meditatio, oratio, and, finally, contemplatio. “In this interior night, silence, and solitude, we expose ourselves to God’s fiery presence and offer ourselves to His vivifying action,” Fr. Bethel writes.

The psalmist tells us in Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” It is in that stillness that we shall see Him as He is.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

By John Ganz

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pages: 432

Price: $18.99

Review Author: Alex Pinelli

The United States is broken. Politicians have become corrupt, serving the interests of an elite liberal hegemony. Culturally, it has devolved into an atomized and materialistic society where community has vanished, and the values that once made this a great nation have withered on the vine. Even those who claim allegiance to conservative ideology have abandoned its principles for a seat at the table of illegitimate powerbrokers, where scraps are all that is offered. Working within the system to slow the onslaught of modernity and liberalism is no longer tenable. Radical change has become necessary to upend a crooked political system and an antagonistic culture.

These sentiments, according to John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, permeated right-wing circles during the early 1990s, steering the American political culture away from its traditional norms and toward the shallow waters of “nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism.” Ganz argues that the political tide of contempt that swept the nation after the optimism of the Reagan years was rooted in economic distress: de-industrialization, localized recessions, and wages that failed to keep pace with the cost of living. This economic malaise, Ganz contends, created fertile ground for figures like Murray Rothbard, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Samuel Francis, John Gotti, Rush Limbaugh, and Ross Perot to rise to cultural and political prominence, capitalizing on feelings of discontent. He identifies them as part of a dissident, right-leaning faction operating outside mainstream conservatism. According to Ganz, these figures dismantled social, cultural, and political norms, paving the way for a more authoritarian and populist resistance to what they perceived as liberal dominance. Ganz positions the years 1990-1992 as a critical gestation period for an oppositional ideology that weaponized racial and class resentments to realign American politics, planting the seeds for the later MAGA revolution.

Parts of Ganz’s book are enjoyable as he works characteristics of the early 1990s ethos into each chapter. Yet, two issues loom. First, Ganz parses conservative intellectual history and shifts in the movement with little acknowledgment of recent scholarship on these topics. Works like George Hawley’s Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (2016), Marcus M. Witcher’s Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016 (2019), and Paul Gottfried’s The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement (2021) offer far more depth and rigor than Ganz’s more general reading. Each of these other works delves into the ideological debates, schisms, and evolutions within conservatism with a level of nuance and scholarly engagement that Ganz’s book fails to achieve. For instance, Hawley carefully delineates the intellectual foundations and critiques that dissident voices — both within and outside the mainstream conservative movement — offered in response to post-war conservatism. His meticulous approach underscores the heterogeneity of the Right and the ideological tensions that have shaped its trajectory. Also, Ganz’s conclusions were already drawn two years prior in Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (2022), which provides a superior account of the same themes, albeit with its own faults (reviewed by me in the April 2023 NOR).

Ganz’s failure to engage these essential works not only weakens his credibility but also limits his book’s contribution to the ongoing discourse about the evolution of conservatism and right-wing populism. In short, reducing a rich and multifaceted movement to an incomplete caricature leaves readers with a superficial understanding of the period under review. A complex interplay of ideas and personalities have defined the Right, both in the 1990s and beyond.

The second problem with Ganz’s book is that its analysis of the era’s ethos is undermined by his ideological blind spots. Like many left-leaning scholars, he overemphasizes economic factors that stem from what he perceives as Reagan-era excesses while failing to grapple seriously with deeper cultural and spiritual shifts. Ganz briefly acknowledges cultural alienation and the importance of community, but he largely overlooks the profound impact of the erosion of Judeo-Christian values on American society. Loss of religious cohesion, which once provided a unifying moral framework for multi-ethnic and heterogeneous communities, is ignored as a factor contributing to nihilism and loneliness. This omission weakens his understanding of the discontent he seeks to explain, as it neglects a central pillar of American cultural identity and its historical role in offering meaning and purpose.

Two recent works that highlight faith (Christianity, in particular) as societal glue and a shaper of American values are Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (2019) and Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020) by Tara Isabella Burton. Eberstadt shows how the erosion of religious and familial structures — key components of a Christian moral framework — has left individuals feeling isolated and unmoored. These cultural shifts have contributed significantly to the alienation and identity crises Ganz describes, yet he does not draw the connection. Likewise, Burton explores how, in the absence of traditional faith, Americans have turned to new, often fragmented spiritual practices to fill an inner void. Ganz does not need to affirm Judeo-Christian values to write convincingly about their decline, but his failure even to engage this aspect of American culture leaves his analysis incomplete and less compelling.

Omission of religion as a unifying force is not just a gap in Ganz’s scholarship but a missed opportunity to address the broader question of what happens when a society loses its shared moral and spiritual foundation. Christianity provided the ethical underpinning of American civil society, shaping ideas about justice, community, and the common good. Its decline has left a vacuum, one often filled with consumerism, tribalism, and ideological extremism. Ganz writes convincingly about alienation, but his ignoring the spiritual dimensions of society-wide crises makes for only a partial diagnosis. When the Clock Broke offers a sometimes engaging but ultimately incomplete account of the early 1990s as a turning point in American political and cultural life.

All Ye That Pass By. Book 1: Gone for a Soldier

By Avellina Balestri

Publisher: Independently published

Pages: 499

Price: $19.50

Review Author: Piers Shepherd

Gone for a Soldier is the first part of a projected trilogy on the American Revolution. It tells the story of Edmund Southworth, a young man from a Catholic recusant family in northern England, and his friendship with John Burgoyne, the British general and politician probably best known for his defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. Edmund is alienated from his family, enlists in the army, and ends up a soldier in the Revolutionary War.

The novel’s author, Avellina Balestri, is an American but with a strong sympathy for Britain and the loyalist side in the war. In her introduction she states that there is “something sadly lacking in most fiction dealing with the American Revolution, which reduces the Mother Country to a cartoonish landscape generated by revolutionary propaganda as opposed to our very womb, where we gained our first understanding of liberty.”

Balestri proves to be thoroughly evenhanded in the way she treats her various protagonists. Considerable conversation in the book deals with the issues that both sides believed to be at stake in the conflict. From such dialogue the reader is prompted to ponder complex questions, such as whether taxation without representation was a form of tyranny or if the Americans had a responsibility to pay for their protection; whether representation in the British Parliament would have helped the colonists or if they would have been outvoted constantly; and whether the Americans, joined by blood ties to the British, were therefore entitled to the same rights and privileges.

As for Edmund, he has good reason for opposing the American position: As a Catholic recusant, even one whose ancestry stretched back to the very birth of England, tax upon tithe had been his family’s lot, with no representation in parliament to be had. Furthermore, the very same Americans claiming victimhood had been among the first to protest when Papists were allowed to hear Mass unmolested in Quebec. Why should he be moved by their demand for greater liberties when they already possessed more than he did and would deny his fellow Catholics across the empire any relief?

The lot of Catholic recusants in England is a major theme of the novel. Balestri realistically captures the precarious existence of these Catholic families who kept the faith after the Reformation but suffered ongoing persecution.

Edmund, at the center of this narrative, wants to be a soldier but cannot because Catholics are barred from serving in the army. Everyone in the army, as well as in Parliament, was required to take the Test Act, declaring that they recognize the monarch as head of the church and deny transubstantiation, and must be witnessed receiving communion according to the rite of the Church of England. Consider the heavy restrictions on Catholics, as revealed in Edmund’s story: “Most of his Protestant friends were off attending prestigious English universities and choosing respectable careers for themselves as lawyers or politicians or clerics or military officers. They were being introduced into gentlemen’s clubs and taking the grand tour of Europe.” Edmund was shut out from all this. “He could not even go fencing, hunting, or racing with them, for all but a few Catholics in the country were prevented from owning swords, guns, or horses.”

In addition, financial rewards were given to those who denounced Catholic priests. Balestri vividly conveys the sense of fear involved in being a Catholic in 18th-century England. The Southworths, in order to hear Mass, must give all their Protestant servants the day off lest they report the family to authorities. Once, when the local constable heard they were harboring a priest, the family “only just managed to shove him into a priest hole when they were raided.” As the constable and his men tore apart another priest hole, “the priest fled his hiding place and escaped the house through a secret passage in the cellar.” The vestments of the priests are made from dress material belonging to Edmund’s sister, Teresa: “Almost all her best dresses had gone towards the adornment of priests and altars, while she kept only the plainest fare for herself.”

Edmund’s mother, Perpetua, tells the story of how her brother and sister were taken away on the orders of a magistrate to be raised as Protestants, their names changed. When Gen. Burgoyne takes Edmund on a trip to London and discovers that Edmund has a Latin prayer book, he promptly throws the book into the fire, warning Edmund that it is dangerous to have such a possession on his person. In depicting these incidents, Balestri reminds readers how complete was the attempt to wipe out Catholicism in England. A question is raised whether this persecution dampened the patriotism of English Catholics. When Edmund expresses a desire to serve in the army and fight for his country, his mother tells him that their recusant home is their only real country. “It offers sanctuary to our fellow recusants,” she explains. “That’s why we hold on for as long as we can. We remain to serve God’s persecuted people.”

The complex character of Burgoyne looms large. He is portrayed as neither hero nor villain, and he is shown warts and all. Though he doesn’t appear to question the strictures of the Test Act and other restrictions on Catholics, he becomes a good friend to Edmund and his family, having first met Edmund’s father at a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Burgoyne is loyal and generous to his friends. He succeeds in securing Teresa’s release from prison after she is arrested for giving a brown scapular to a sick Protestant child. He also buys her a new harpsichord when hers goes out of tune. Yet Burgoyne is also a heavy drinker, a gambler, and a serial womanizer. He appears to care deeply for his wife, yet he is unfaithful to her. They lost their only child to typhoid, a fact that pushes Burgoyne toward his worst habits. He continues the same following his wife’s death. Yet Burgoyne is also a cultured man who loves poetry and patronizes the theatre. On winning a substantial amount of money from gambling, he spends it on gifts for his friends in the theatre. Burgoyne calls the army “my own family” and uses his money to help military families suffering hardship. He dislikes slavery and seeks clemency for the American rebels. In the privacy of his tent, while on campaign, Burgoyne reads his prayer book when he thinks nobody can see him.

Gone for a Soldier is an engaging and interesting novel. It will appeal to those interested in the history of 18th-century England, the American Revolution, and English Catholicism. Balestri provides a vivid account of the era, packed with fascinating historical details. She also convincingly portrays the intricacies of sinful human nature.

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