As most of you probably know by now, there were two terrible attacks on peaceful Americans at prayer this weekend.

On Sunday morning, at the West Freeway Church of Christ near Fort Worth, Texas, a gunman shot two church members during worship service. Texas being Texas, the church had volunteer armed security and the head of security killed the attacker in seconds with a single shot.

It seems to have become fashionable — even de rigeur — to observe the end of every year with “Good riddance!” It’s a trend I’ve noticed for the last several years, but it has doubtless been going on longer than that. Every December 31, we’re all inundated with online commentary insisting that the year now ending has been a terrible one, and we’re glad to finally see the back of it. Often it’s just a throwaway comment in a story about something else, repeated as if it goes without saying (“It was an awful year, but there were some interesting phones released!”). It’s predictable, and it’s tiresome.

I’m not claiming that every year is a good one. But it’s no less reasonable to say that every year is a bad one, and that’s the impression one would get by surveying the online chatter from each December. My bet is that most of these comments come from people whose lives are actually going fine, but it’s a knee-jerk reflex to sound disgruntled all the time. I suppose the reasoning must be that contentment results only from ignorance, so griping and complaining are a badge of intelligence and awareness. But words have an effect, and I find it depressing to be surrounded by so many people who are so determined to be unhappy (or at least to portray themselves as unhappy).

I went to a bookstore in Portland as part of a short vacation trip with my Dad. It was Powell’s Books which is truly a great bookstore. Three or four stories of anything you could want but Limbaughs’ latest book. The new-age shamanistic ritual section was especially fun and expansive.

By far my favorite was the Northwest section; they really did have lots of hard-to-find books about the local history, architecture, and sheer uniqueness of the Pacific Northwest. It was refreshing to find a selection of books that wouldn’t be readily available in any other part of the world. I hope a visitor to Chengdu Sichuan can visit a bookstore filled with odd books about Sichuanese stuff that she has never heard about before.

What I found peculiar was that every section of the bookstore had a section that highlighted books by LGBTQ and people of color. You would think that Portland was filled with nothing but black and brown same-sex couples hugging in a sentimental fashion. Also, I seem to recall that people of color didn’t include Asian people for some reason. This is odd because from what I saw, Asians were a significant minority of people in Portland. According to Google, 8.06% of Portland’s citizens are Asian and 5.51% are mixed race. (Asians have a high rate of intermarriage.)

I have a new book on Reason, Authority, and the Healing of Desire in the Writings of Augustine. What exactly are reason and authority? Let’s talk about that. Ok, not really. Let’s just overview what Augustine thinks.

We might define reason as rational belief and trust in authority as irrational belief—perhaps as having nothing to do with rationality, or maybe as in tension or conflict with it. But this is way off. Augustine explains that it’s rational to trust the testimony of authority. It is necessary for life, and even those who most protest against trust-based systems of belief readily trust their parents’ claim to being their parents, the claims of geographers about distant cities, and the claims of historians about ancient people.

We might even go so far as to suggest that reason is merely the operating of our minds in a rational manner in order to know the truth; we could further define trust in authority as one of reason’s necessary operations. This is closer to Augustine, but still not quite right. He emphasizes the distinction between reason and authority, not their sameness.