Light in the East.

WHY not welcome the holiday season with a truly hope-inspiring book? In Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Regnery, 344 pp., $27.95), David Aikman tells a surprising and important story. A former Time magazine Beijing bureau chief, Aikman describes how Christianity--despite ongoing persecution by the Communist government--has quietly become a major force in the life of the Chinese people. The Chinese police admit, privately, that there are some 25 million Christians in the country; but Aikman points out that "both Chinese within China and visiting outside observers generally believe that the numbers of Christians who attend churches not approved by the government--unofficial, so-called 'house churches'--may exceed by a factor of three or four those under the various Chinese government-approved umbrellas. In effect, the number ... may be closer to 80 million."

Aikman interviewed many Christians, in various parts of China and from many walks of life. He is impressed by their evangelistic commitment in the face of repression, the erratic but brutal government measures that make Christianity's burgeoning--"especially within China's political and cultural establishment"--all the more remarkable. "It is possible," he writes, that "Christians will constitute 20 to 30 percent of China's population within three decades." The situation of Christians in China today is similar to that of the early Church in the Roman Empire: A passionate and rapidly growing core of believers is offering answers--and hope--in a faltering but still powerful geopolitical colossus in search of a new identity now that its old gods (Jupiter, Marx) have failed. The grassroots "house churches" are fervent in their profession of what we would recognize as Protestant Christianity. But Aikman notes that even most of the state-approved "Three Self" (Protestant) churches "teach a Christianity that is orthodox [and] evangelical," and also that the great majority of bishops in the state-approved "Catholic Patriotic Association" have "formally--albeit privately--sworn allegiance to Rome."

In 2002, Jiang Zemin, at that time Communist party chief, was asked by a dinner guest: "If, before leaving office, you could make one decree that you knew would be obeyed in China, what would it be?" Jiang, smiling, replied: "I would make Christianity the official religion of China." It is not known to what extent, precisely, he was joking. But it is notable in itself that the chief Communist in the world's largest Communist country would have Christians on his mental radar screen. Their presence is quiet, but significant--and will only become more so.

* David Horowitz is a splendid provocateur and a fascinating character. Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence, 497 pp., $29.95) tells his story in his own words--through 43 selections edited by Jamie Glazov. Explicitly autobiographical chapters from Horowitz's memoir, Radical Son, are supplemented by polemics from four decades of participation in the political wars. On the Cold War, race, education, and countless other issues, Horowitz's voice has been bracing; Camille Paglia was correct when she praised him for having "the true 1960s spirit--audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to social change." Horowitz has observed that in our time, "the Left controls the culture, and with it the political language. Therefore, in America, reactionaries will continue to be called 'progressives,' and reformers, conservative." This is changing, thanks in no small measure to the intellectual pyrotechnics of David Horowitz, on sizzling display in this book.

He is the kind of principled thinker who is genuinely devoted to his "side," but even more devoted to telling the truth as he sees it. He recounts that he once accepted a speaking invitation from conservative students at a college in Oregon; he subsequently learned that his student sponsors had received funding from the backers of an antigay ballot proposition. Horowitz didn't soft-pedal his disagreement with them. "In an interview prior to my speech for the student paper ... I said that conservatives who supported [the antigay ballot measure] were abandoning their own core principles, including the commitment to individual liberty and limited government. If the initiative passed, what principle, I asked, would prevent a future government from declaring conservatives themselves 'abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse'?" His speech was then heckled by ... no, not the conservatives, but by gay-activist fanatics who "would leap from their chairs to rant at the podium." The irony was not lost on Horowitz, who challenged the hecklers: "What's the matter with you? ... I'm a conservative and I've come all the way to Portland to defend your rights to be who you are. Why are you trying to prevent me from speaking? Are you nuts?"

That is the voice of a truth-teller, exasperated that people can have agendas other than truth-seeking; it is the voice of an experienced man who nonetheless retains his innocence. David Horowitz is a good man, and we--not just conservatives, but Americans generally--are lucky to have him.

* Kudos to Encounter Books for publishing an English translation of Jean-Francois Revel's Anti-Americanism (176 pp., $25.95), in which the author exposes the ill-informed and intellectually shabby assertions that form the core of anti-American sentiment abroad. He quotes, for example, Japanese philosopher Yujiro Nakamura: "American culture has always glorified physical and mental health and disdained what hides amid the shadows of human nature: the weaknesses and shortcomings. ... Such a civilization is the vehicle for a unidimensional vision of the world." To which Revel replies: "Evidently, Nakamura has never read Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, or the Scott Fitzgerald of The Crack Up, to mention only a few explorers of the depths." This book reached the top of the bestseller list in France last year: a harbinger of European spring?

* University of Virginia historian Robert Louis Wilken takes pains to point out that his latest book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale, 368 pp., $29.95), is not a history of the thought of the patristic period. But it is something arguably more important: a sensitive, essayistic overview of how pre-medieval Christians engaged in the life of the mind, and the role that intellect played in their work and worship.

What comes through most clearly in this lucid book is the centrality of the Bible for the early Christians; their thought, Wilken points out, was distinguished by "the interplay between biblical text, the spiritual reality discerned in the text, and theological reasoning.... [The goal] was to provide a unified interpretation of the Scriptures, one that was comprehensive, centered on the triune God, and definitive." A key example of their exegesis comes from Augustine. Psalm 105 says of God, "Seek his face always"; but if God has revealed His face to us, we have found it--so how can we continue to seek it? Augustine comments that we should "seek as those who are going to find, and find as those who are going to go on seeking." Wilken sees in Augustine's analysis a commitment to remember, with ever-deepening understanding, God's self-revelation; in this, it is representative of the thought-world of the Church fathers. This excellent book is a window into a very rich intellectual world.

* With the retirement of Georgia Democrat Zell Miller, the U.S. Senate loses one of its most impressive members. He has just published a memoir, A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat (Stroud & Hall, 237 pp., $26), which offers an unsparing indictment of the direction of today's Democrats--and some sound advice and analysis: "There is always a lesson to be learned from studying the British. Remember how the Conservative party with towering figures like Margaret Thatcher dominated that country's politics for 18 years until the Labour party led by Tony Blair was able to reclaim power? It happened because Blair took his party kicking and screaming toward the middle of the political spectrum. The extreme left wing of the party was obliterated ... If Clinton had followed through and governed as he had campaigned, it would have happened here for the Democrats." Clinton appears once again as the Democrats' Nixon--the gifted leader who used all his political skills for personal short-term victories, and left his party worse off than he had found it. Someday, though, just as Republicans found their Reagan, the Democrats might find their Miller ...

* Crisis magazine publisher Deal Hudson is one of America's leading Catholic journalists. In his new memoir, An American Conversion: One Man's Discovery of Beauty and Truth in Times of Crisis (Crossroad, 189 pp., $22.95), he describes his journey from Southern Baptist to Catholic--a trajectory that was marked by his overarching desire to unite theology with the pursuit of beauty. Hudson describes a key moment, when he is reading Aquinas on a spring afternoon: "I was sitting beneath a tree and a bird feeder. A redbird had arrived for a feeding ... As I turned that phrase over and over in my mind, 'everything that exists is good,' the redbird began to sing and somehow that phrase was taken up into the bird's song, and for a moment ... the bird was singing the saint's words, the words and the song were one and the same thing."

Central to Hudson's theology is gratitude for God's creation. He quotes the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: "Whoever sneers at her [beauty's] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past--whether he admits it or not--can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love." The story of Hudson's quest for truth, as well as beauty, is a vivid account of one man's journey to the only destination at which human hearts may truly rest.

* In England, the period between John Henry Newman's conversion in 1845 and the beginning of Vatican II in 1962 was a golden age for Catholic writing. A good introduction to the central figures in this story is provided by Ian Ker in The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, 231 pp., $25). As Ker's analysis makes clear, the six authors he examines were not writers who happened to be Catholic, but Catholic writers in the most intimate sense: Their literary work was shaped and informed by their religious faith.

The genius of Catholicism is to be incarnational, "at home" with the sacred. Newman complained that the Protestants of his day "condemn Catholics, because, however religious they may be, they are natural, unaffected, easy, and cheerful, in their mention of sacred things; and [the Protestants] think themselves never so real as when they are especially solemn." One need not accept Newman's generalization outright to see the kernel of truth in it: Catholicism is a sacramental life, in which the things of God are handled matter-of-factly, as part of life in the world. This is the key to Ker's understanding of his subject; and even readers who are already very familiar with the work of the six writers will find this book highly rewarding.