Adam Shields

Summary: MLK's last book. One frequently quoted, but I wonder how much it is read.

It is probably trite to comment about how Martin Luther King Jr is commonly sanitized and made safe. Books like Radical King were designed to break him out of the confines of his dream. Books like  Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought are trying to make King useful for our current time by looking at him more holistically and comparing him to Bonhoeffer and others to make him more intelligible. But it is still helpful to read King directly.

The Radical King reprinted a whole chapter from Where Do We Go From Here, so I had previously read that chapter. And there is an enormous number of quotes here that are commonly shared. But there is much here that also is not widely shared. King had a unique vision. He was anti-war, radically anti-violence, for massive social changes, not just around race, but around economics and social cohesion as well. His radicalness was not despite his faith and prior experience, but because of it. He became more radical not because of his earlier successes, but because of what many perceived as a massive success, he saw as scratching the surface.

It is not that the Birmingham bus boycott or the Selma marches or the March on Washington were unimportant; those brought about the ability for people to have integrated transportation, voting rights, and national attention on segregation. But they did not bring about an end to the cultural belief in the superiority of white skin and culture. They did not solve the problems of massive poverty and inequality. They did not address the issues of empire and colonialism.

Where Do We Go From Here is worth reading because King is worth taking seriously. But so much of his critique is both radical and now assumed. You can see all kinds of places where others have developed some of these ideas. And areas were his insights have been abandoned. King was not a bad writer, but he was an incredible speaker. The audiobook was fine, but again it wasn't his voice. And for someone who is known primarily for his speaking, the loss of his voice I think is a detriment. The audiobook of this makes me wonder how long it will be until we have computerized versions of his voice that can narrate his own book based on other recordings. After audiobooks of Where Do We Go From Here and The Radical King, I think I will read any future work by King in print, not on audiobook. When I read in print, his voice is in my head. When I listen to audio, I can't get his voice correctly in my head.

Second reading:
Summary: To understand Cone's theology, you need to understand Cone and his context.

James H Cone has been a frequent concern in many conservative white Christian circles over the past year. There are several causes for that, but one of the threads that has given rise to the discussion is that Walter Strickland, one of only a handful of Black professors at a Southern Baptist seminary, was quoted by Molly Worthen in an NYT article saying that he assigned James H Cone and found value in interacting with him. That gave rise to calls for Strickland to resign, which prompted this statement.

The controversy continued with the president of the seminary where Strickland works both defending Strickland and calling Cone a heretic and ‘almost certainly not a Christian' on twitter.  Andre Henry wrote an article about the controversy. It was this background that a friend of a friend asked to discuss Cone. Over this past weekend, I picked up the audiobook and listened to it (having previously read it when it first came out.)

I am not a Cone scholar. I have not read all of his books, although I will probably read all of them eventually (there are not that many). In my lay opinion, I think that people tend to approach Cone wrong. Many people want to jump into early constructive theology, God of the Oppressed or A Black Theology of Liberation. I think that because of his theological method, heavily drawing on his personal and cultural experience, that you need to start with one or both of his memoirs.

Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody was posthumously published. The book was completed and ready for publication when Cone passed away in 2018. His earlier My Soul Looks Back was a mid-career memoir. There is a lot over overlapping material, but they are both worth reading. If you are looking for an order, I would recommend, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Spirituals and the Blues, My Soul Looks Back, Martin & Malcolm & American and then you can move his earlier constructive theology.

I say all of this because Cone developed his theology in response to the culture of the US during the late civil rights era.

When the Detroit rebellion, also known as the “12th Street Riot,” broke out in July of 1967, the turmoil woke me out of my academic world. I could no longer continue quietly teaching white students at Adrian College (Michigan) about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and other European theologians when black people were dying in the streets of Detroit, Newark, and the back roads of Mississippi and Alabama. I had to do something. But I wasn't a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King Jr., or an artist, like James Baldwin, who was spurred in his writing when he saw the searing image of a black girl, Dorothy Counts, surrounded by hateful whites as she attempted to integrate a white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina (September 1957). I was a theologian, asking: What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?

white supremacy is America's original sin and liberation is the Bible's central message. Any theology in America that fails to engage white supremacy and God's liberation of black people from that evil is not Christian theology but a theology of the Antichrist.

When I spoke of loving blackness and embracing Black Power, they heard hate toward white people. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and James Baldwin confronted similar reactions. Any talk about the love and beauty of blackness seemed to arouse fear and hostility in whites.

“How can I, a white [person] become black?” was the most frequent question whites asked me. “Being black in America has very little to do with skin color,” I wrote. “To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.”6 To become black is like what Jesus told Nicodemus, that he must be “born again,” that is, “born of water and Spirit” (John 3), the Black Spirit of liberation. Black religion scholars would push back hard on this theological claim. Among my fiercest critics, and at the same time a devoted friend, was Gayraud Wilmore, author of the important text Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1973). But I held firm to my claim, despite his objections, because I was speaking primarily symbolically, while Wilmore was speaking primarily historically. History significantly informs what theologians say, but it's not the final arbiter in theological matters. The Word of God, Jesus the Christ, as revealed in scripture and black experience, is the final judge. I didn't see how anyone could be a Christian and not understand that.

Theology is not philosophy; it is not primarily rational language and thus cannot answer the question of theodicy, which philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. Theology is symbolic language, language about the imagination, which seeks to comprehend what is beyond comprehension. Theology is not antirational but it is nonrational, transcending the world of rational discourse and pointing to a realm of reality that can only be grasped by means of the imagination. That was why Reinhold Niebuhr said, “One should not talk about ultimate reality without imagination,” and why the poet Wallace Stevens said, “God and the imagination are one.” Black liberation theology strives to open a world in which black people's dignity is recognized.

I wasn't writing for rational reasons based on library research; I was writing out of my experience, speaking for the dignity of black people in a white supremacist world. I was on a mission to transform self-loathing Negro Christians into black-loving revolutionary disciples of the Black Christ.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world's value system, proclaiming that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last. Secular intellectuals find this idea absurd, but it is profoundly real in the spiritual life of black folk.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, Nobody knows my sorrow, Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, Glory Hallelujah! As I heard it, the “trouble” is white folks, and the “Hallelujah” is a faith expression that white folks don't have the last word about life's ultimate meaning.

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Summary: A good man is shot in his home and there does not seem to be any suspects.

I was first turned on to Georges Simeon's Inspector Maigret by John Wilson during a not that long-lived Books and Culture Podcast episode. Simeon is a French mystery novelist that wrote around 500 books, short stories, or novellas. Nearly 150 of them involve Inspector Maigret. Penguin has commissioned new English translations of the whole set and they have been coming out at a very nice clip. I have read several, mostly in order from the start. I have been picking them up as they come on sale for kindle. I decided last week when I picked one up (it is still on sale as I write this) that I would go ahead and read it even if it is theoretically 58th in the series.

There is nothing about the book that really requires you to know the Inspector. And I do not think I missed too much by jumping to the middle of the series. It is brief, I read it in three not too long sittings. This is more of a psychological mystery (think Inspector Gamache rather than a whodunit like Agatha Christy or Sherlock Holmes.)

There is no point in giving the story away, but what I like about Maigret is that his gift is not being intellectually superior to everyone, but that he learns to know people, and he keeps doing the next thing. It was refreshing to read a quick mystery and a reminder that I need to be reading more fiction.

Summary: Story filled book on the reimagining of what it means to serve a community. 

I have read many books on ‘urban ministry' or community development.  I have a master's degree in social service administration, and my job is non-profit consulting. Having Nothing, Possessing Everything is not a unique take, but it is well told. In an overly simplified form, this is a church that has taken the Asset Based Community Development model (look to develop the strengths of the community more than bringing in resources to address the weaknesses.) I broadly support the ABCD model, but it is not simple to implement well (or easily replicable), and some use the model as an excuse not to address systemic issues or immediate needs.

I think the story focus of Having Nothing, Possessing Everything does an excellent job of exploring what is and is not meant here. Mather takes on traditional social ministry, unconstrained capitalism, consumerism, and the lack of resources in a helpful way. I wish he dealt more directly with race, although it is in the background throughout the book.

At the end of the book, there is an exploration of a set of six principles that I think are helpful. They are the principle that guides both how partnerships work and the ideals of the church

1. Our neighbors are God's people. Act like it


2. Everything begins with and builds on the gifts of our neighbors.


3. Parents and guardians are the first and best teachers. Respect this.


4. We invest first and foremost in the good the people of the neighborhood seek.


5. Money must flow into the neighborhood.


6. Practice neighbor love.

As part of fulfilling the six principles, the church stopped tracking standard goals and started ‘gamifying' their targets. (You can read more about this in the quote toward the bottom of this page). The following quote is an example of how the team received points:

Count the number of times you ate with someone and reminded them during the meal of the communion that Jesus shared with his friends on Maundy Thursday and of Christ's presence at their table. Count the number of times you went and offered forgiveness to someone who was laboring under guilt and shame. Count the number of times you threw a party to celebrate the presence and power of God's love in the people and parish around you. Count the number of times you took your Bible and read a story to someone whose life you see in that particular story. Count the number of times you posted on Facebook celebrating in concrete and joyful ways the discipleship/vocation of the people in your parish.

Throughout the book, Mather mostly told stories of other people. He illustrated how he learned, but the success stories mainly were of others. This isn't only an excellent method, it appears to be essential to actually how the church has had success. Michael Mather was the pastor, but without a partner who primarily worked in the community and made personal connections and listened to people's stories and helped discern gifts and skills around the church, Mather's ability to pastor and get funding, and tell stories would have been worthless. Because it is in hearing stories and building relationships where this type of work matters. And where the church ministry understands most deeply was in how they did not orient the relationships around them (you relate to me, and I relate to this other person), they sought ways to facilitate involvement and connection outside of themselves.

Where I do lament a bit is that many people are doing similar work, but the stories told publicly, and the books published are still mostly done by old White guys. Mather certainly has put in his time and faithfully done ministry. But as he points out, most of that ministry wasn't done by him or thought up by him. Mather was slower to learn than many of those around him that were teaching him. But he still was the one that published the book and told the stories. He is undoubtedly skilled at telling them, but the reality of the world is market forces and a lot of unstated assumptions impact who tells stories. And we do not hear all of the stories that should be told, and in many cases, some of the good stories like this may point to others, or they may inoculate readers from hearing better, more representative stories.

I am not going to write up a full post on this. I listened to it on audio and the last time I wrote up a book of Volf's that I listened to on audio he complained about it not only directly but on twitter as well latter.

I have read four of his book and I continue to find him very helpful.

Part of the irony for me here is that the book talks about the need to make theology more accessible and useful out of the academy and then spends what I think was way too much time exploring that (which is likely not particularly interesting outside of the academy).

The main point is that Volf thinks that the focus of theology needs to be human flourishing, which I think makes a lot of sense. And the constructive part of the book at the end was very helpful and I wish was a bigger part of the book.

I would like to re-read the last half of the book again later in print when I find it on sale at some point.

Summary: A practical, story filled guide on how to have spiritual conversations with children.

I am approaching this with a definite perspective. I am in training to become a spiritual director (for adults), but I also have spent much of my life doing administrative and evaluative work for ministries for children. I am also am the stay-at-home/work-at-home parent, and my wife is an elementary teacher. I spend a lot of time thinking about children and how to serve them well.

I am reading this directly because I want to be a spiritual director. Still, parents, teachers, pastor, and many others that are interested in the spiritual life of children would also benefit. There are good theoretical discussions about children and spiritual matters that are approachable for almost everyone. And lots of practical examples.

Lacy Finn Borgo in Spiritual Conversations With Children is not adapting adult spiritual direction for children, but starting with children's needs and their own developmentally appropriate modes of communication and building a practice of spiritual direction that is oriented around them. It is very much focused on a listening mode of spiritual direction. (She says at one point, children already have parents and other authority figures, the adult spiritual listener is there to listen to the children not correct them, or teach them.)

She illustrated several methods of helping children to talk about spiritual matters, developing trust over time, and creating helpful rituals of blessing and specialness to the conversations that allow the children (and adults) to know their purpose. Because what works with one child will not work with another,  or even the same child on a different day, having a literal bag of options for children to make choices about what is helpful for them on that day makes a lot of sense. These include several prayer methods, sometimes toys or blocks, or art, or stories, or food that can help create openness to seeking after God.

One of the real strengths of the book is that there is a significant amount of recounting of actual conversations. Spiritual direction, I believe, is both Holy Spirit led and an art that is developed over time, more than a structured science. Practical, real examples of what she means by spiritual conversations with children make this far more helpful than many books on spiritual direction I have read.

One of the differences between adults and children is that children tend to be much more aware of and engaged in their embodied lives. For spiritual conversation, that means that the discussion will be more body-focused than many adult spiritual direction activities. Kids will often talk as they are doing something. Having physical prompts, like a kid-sized labyrinth (or a finger labyrinth) or sand to draw in and wipe away are activities that would probably benefit many adults, but are essential for kids.

If I have a complaint, it is that at times there can be a bit too much focus on what benefit can come to the adult in these spiritual conversations with children. Lacy Finn Borgo is careful to note fairly frequently that while there are benefits to the adult, that the point isn't for adult spiritual development. However, I can see many readers taking in the parts about spiritual benefits for adults while ignoring the cautions.

Summary: Exploring early Christianity's history, beliefs, and geography.

Christianity has always been a global religion, despite many believing that it is only recently that the universal nature of Christianity has learn.  A Multitude of All Peoples is not the first book of this type, but of the couple that I have read, I think it is the most helpful. Philip Jenkins' Lost History of Christianity looked at the demographic history of Christianity. Still, it did not engage the theological content of Christianity as well as A Multitude of All Peoples does. Thomas Oden's How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind is a narrower type of book, not just only looking at Africa, but also trying to justify more research into early Christianity in Africa.

The book opens with a discussion of the importance of understanding that Christianity has always been a global religion instead of the misplaced understanding that Christianity only came to Africa and Asia from European missionaries. Christianity misconstrued as only a western religion, is a severe stumbling block to formally colonialized or oppressed people. Also, the long history of Christianity's relationship to culture needs the history of local adaptation and enculturation, both in positive and negative ways, to give insight into how Christianity works in culture. Bantu ends the book with some of this discussion, and while I read more to understand his result better, his interaction with other perspectives is helpful.

Bantu has a couple of significant strengths. One is that he is concentrating not just on those Christians that spoke Greek or Latin or interacted with European Christians like Augustine or Athanasius, but also those that spoke languages that are relatively new to western study. There was a far more detailed history here than what was in either of the two other books.

Second, A Multitude of All Peoples looks at the theological disagreements, not just as religious, but also linguistic, cultural, and political. This plays out too often when Christians moved into roles of power within a state and then used the power of the state to persecute their political or theological opponents with the same tools of oppression used against them. Egyptian, Shenoute of Atripe, justified violence against non-Christians and even against other Christians as the will of God. (He killed one of his fellow monks during a physical punishment.) Part of this is how Christians viewed the state. Bantu shows that Eusebius identified the Roman Empire, “an eikon of the Kingdom of God.”

The view of the state and the church becomes so entwined that it is difficult to separate one from the other. This happened not just within but also outside, as political enemies saw Christianity (or particular expressions of Christianity) as so connected with the state that it caused  (or justified) Christian persecutions. For instance, the Persian Empire persecuted Christians because of the Christian connection to Rome, or Mongol protection of Christianity resulted in Christianity being wiped out in China after the fall of the Mongol Empire. (Constantine sent a letter to the Persian emperor suggesting that Christians in Persia would be more loyal to Rome than to Persia and suggested at the same time to Christians that it was God's will that they are politically loyal to him because Rome was a Christian empire.)

It wasn't only political issues but also linguistic ones. It is not a new idea that the Filioque (the theological point that separated Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox were likely as much linguistic as theological because Catholics were speaking Latin and Eastern Orthodox were speaking Greek. When even more languages got involved, along with their cultural biases, theological splits were not solely about the theology but also about the linguistic and cultural divide as well.

Because Western Christianity has told a theological history from its own ‘winning' perspective, it is easy to see how the ‘losers' of some of these arguments were misconstrued. Bantu spends a good bit of time showing that the Miaphysites (single nature of Christ) were not arguing for Christ being only fully divine or fully human but were resistant to describing how Christ was both human and divine with extra-biblical (platonic) philosophy. This pattern repeats throughout the book with Bantu exploring non-theological issues that influenced the theological result.

Another linguistic issue is that Syriac and other eastern Christians appear to have the Old Testament translated directly from Hebrew and not through Greek. In other areas, some issues are still current. The earliest Christian work in Arabic, On the Triune Nature of God, explains the trinity without the use of sonship language, as do some modern missionaries and apologists that work with Muslims. In other cases, Syriac was considered the more holy language, and there was ethnic discrimination against those that did not speak Syriac as a first language, which resulted in an ethnic/religious caste system within Christianity.

Throughout later Christian history, there are many instances of Christians that are from separate Christian communities who mistrust one another for cultural reasons more than theological ones but frame it in theological terms. For instance, an Arabian Christian visiting India to be a missionary finds Christians there, but objects to listening to the gospel readings while seated ‘and other things not permitted by divine law'. An Egyptian monk in the 6th century went to India and wrote eyewitness accounts of Christians in Ethiopia, Arabia, India, and Sri Lanka (a millennium before Marco Polo).

Before Marco Polo, there was a Chinese Mongol Christian that led a pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 1280. In part, because he found his trip to Jerusalem dangerous and Muslim persecution was increasing, in 1284, he went to Rome as an official emissary to try to recruit Papal support to make Jerusalem safe for pilgrims from all Christian areas and make partnerships against Muslim aggression. Similar to St Francis, Rabban Sawma disappointed his parents and sold all of his possessions and gave them to the poor, broke off an engagement, and began a monastic life. After being investegated by Cardinals before being allowed to see the Pope he recounted a statement that was orthodox but not centered in Western theological concerns. “Rabban Sawma respectfully pushes back against the idea that the Father and the Son are the cause of the Spirit because it is incongruous with the East Syriac doctrine of their fundamental unity...”. Eventually, Sawma visits England and France and secures support for an alliance against Muslims.

Within 200 years, the Christian community in China largely disappears in reaction to persecution, which is related to the Mongol relationship to Christianity and the later East Syriac and Franciscan and then later Jesuit missionaries to China can not regain the Christian foothold that had existed there for at least 500 years, probably longer. China persecuted not just Christianity, but Islam as well as culturally incompatible with the new Chinese empire.

The story of A Multitude of All Peoples is that all theology is contextual. History, politics, culture, and current events matter to the spread and depth of Christian penetration in a culture. Christianity was not a Jewish then Greek then Roman religion that spread through Europe and then through the rest of the world. Christianity from the beginning was multicultural, multiethnic, and global. Recovering an understanding of early Asian and African Christian expressions can help discover a Christianity that is not rootest in Western colonialism.

I need to read more to fully understand the nuanced discussion that Bantu was trying to navigate between himself, Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Willie James Jennings, and others at the end of the book. There were portions that I seem to agree with multiple sides at the same time and I am sure I am missing more than I understood of that short section at the end.

I do highly recommend A Multitude for all People because we do need to Engage Ancient Christianity's Global Identity. The history here is readable and engaging. I read the whole book in a couple of days and want to read more.

Summary: Beth and David Booram present spiritual direction as a method of discipleship to an Evangelical audience. 

I am halfway through a program to become a spiritual director. It is a program rooted in Ignatian theory, as is the Boorams. As I have been in my program I have been intentionally seeking out Protestant or Evangelical books with similar content to the (Catholic) Ignatian perspectives to help me often understand subtle differences in language or approach that I am blind to. When Faith Becomes Sight, I think it is the best overview of Ignatian spiritual direction for an Evangelical audience that I have read.

The rough structure of When Faith Becomes Sight is to start first by recognizing the signs of God that are already around us. This approach begins with the assumption that God is seeking to communicate with you personally (not individually, but personally.) Signs of God are often subtle, and in a loud world with little silence, we need to develop skills to see and listen. Once we start being able to see the signs of God around us, then we need to develop skills of discernment, which requires that we examine our conscious and unconscious understanding of God. The final section of the book is more directly about the tools of spiritual direction and the lifelong process of discipleship.
When Faith Becomes Sight uses their work as spiritual directors (and their personal history) as examples of what discipleship looks like. I saw as I glanced through some reviews that some people objected to their retelling of scripture. Retelling or immersion in scripture is part of the Ignatian practice of absorbing scripture and then retelling it in ways that the scripture speaks to you. That does not mean that the retellings are the same as scripture, we are always limited in our perspective, and often in trying to make a point, we can distort a passage. That is not a reason to not deeply explore scripture, but instead, it is a reason to develop discernment about how we read scripture and theologically approach the world. And for those that are still skeptical, sermons explicate scripture, not merely read the scripture and sit down. Retelling scripture in your own words is very similar in purpose.
Part of the assumption of Ignatian spiritual direction is that a God will speak and we can understand. Not necessarily in vocal words, but maybe it will be vocal. The point is that Ignatius and many other streams of spiritual direction assume that the Holy Spirit can and will communicate his direction to us. And while we may not be perfect in understanding, with help, we can make a good attempt at discerning God from our own desires, our sin, and satanic interruption.

There is a stream of Christianity that is overtly resistant to this type of hearing from God and I honestly do not know what to do with this type of resistance. Throughout Christian history, the stories of saints and leaders have been a story of God's direction. My one complaint, and it is a complaint about much of the Evangelical world as well as some within spiritual direction world, is that we are never Chrsitians on our own. Spiritual Direction can, at times, be thought of as equipping the individual for spiritual growth. In my post on All That's Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson, I noted that the Catholic book, Weeds Among the Wheat (also about discernment) is more oriented toward learning discernment in community and having a “Co-discerner...of the call of the Holy Spirit speaking within them.” Similarly, The Examen Prayer by Timothy Gallagher talks about the importance of not just doing the examen as an individual, but having a spiritual director or another person to help work through the results and process of the examen so that you are in a community, not just an invidiual. And all of this assumes that we are in some way connected to a church body.

Summary: A dystopian trilogy (with a prequel) that is both an enjoyable read and prescient. 

I have not been reading much fiction lately. But with my brain distracted by real life and less time since my kids are not in school right now, it felt like a perfect time to pick up KB Hoyle's Dystopian series. About 18 months ago I read Hoyle's fantasy series that started with The Six. I read the series quickly and loved the books. They were certainly in my list of favorite fiction books that I read in 2018.

Once I have a feel for fiction authors, I tend to try to read them completely blind. I had not read any of the descriptions of the series before picking it up. And as I finished each one, I just picked up the next without writing a post. At this point, I do not think it makes sense to write individual responses because this is a single story, told over four books.

I am not going to give away plot details but a couple of notes. KB Hoyle has great plots. Hints are given, but I did not know where the story was going to end up as I was going along. I can also guess that a few people will be disappointed in how some of the first two books end, but remember, this is a single large story arc, keep reading.

Also, this is a young adult dystopian book. Hoyle does not tell childish stories, but they are pitched to a teen or advanced pre-teen audience. There is some romance and hinting at sexual situations (the title of the first book is breeder and the evil government plot involves young women serving as baby factories so some of this is set up in the concept.) However, there is nothing on the page more than insinuation and teen appropriate discussion. (Spoiler–there is an attempted rape at one point, but the victim does not fully understand what is going on apart from the violence until later. )
Having read both series that KB Hoyle has written, the plotting and engagement is high. This series will not appeal to everyone. And while I picked up a dystopian series because we are on pandemic lockdown, that will not be helpful for everyone. But for me, the chapters were short enough that I could pick up a book here and there and make real progress. The book was engaging and had a clear good vs evil structure that even as it dealt with hard things at times, it was comforting to read a story about people that were trying to save humanity and willing to risk it all.

Second Reading:
I have a class on the Lord's Prayer in two weeks and this is one of the suggested but optional texts. It was super short and I had a copy of it already. So I quickly listened to the audiobook again to refresh my memory. And then I listened to the last chapter of Simply Good News by Wright which is about the Lord's Prayer as a summary of the message of Christ.

He starts at the end of the prayer and works backwards to think of how we tend to frame prayer and then reverses and goes from the front to the end to illustrate how the framing of the prayer rightly impacts how we pray and understand Christ as king.

I think that if I were his publisher, I would try to get the last chapter of Simply Good News added into the Lord and His Prayer because it would fit very well.

This is from my post on Simply Good News:

“The end of the book looks practically at the Lord's Prayer to illustrate how moving from a focus on individual sin to a corporate submission to Christ's kingship changes our understanding of Christianity. Wright suggests that individual sin focus leads us to do the Lord's Prayer backwards, help me, forgive me my sins, give me what I need and because you have done those things you are great. But instead the Lord's Prayer has a particular order that Wright thinks better illustrates the point of the Gospel, Lord you are Hallowed, we ask that your kingdom come now on earth as it is in heaven so that all things may be reconciled to you and submit to you, and so that your will as King be done both on earth as it is in heaven. And as King, give us our needs, forgive us our sin and help us to forgive (and act rightly toward) those around us. And keep us from temptations and evil that we cannot endure.”
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Short Review: this is a helpful short book on the Lord's prayer. I appreciate Wright's pastoral tone and focus, without talking down to lay readers. I have read several books on the Lord's Prayer and I think this is a good one for teaching the Lord's Prayer as theology and discipleship while still being practical about praying it.

Another that I liked was Living Prayer: The Lord's Prayer Alive in You, which was more practical and less theological. Wright also has a very good chapter on the Lord's Prayer in Simply Good News: Why the gospel is good news and what makes it good news. But there is little overlap in material between that chapter (which focuses on how the order of the prayer orients us to understanding what the gospel is really about) and this book which is a line by line exploration of the prayer. But both are well worth reading because both are oriented around right theology and right practice of discipleship.

This isn't as easy to get as I would like. The Kindle version isn't available right now and has been expensive for less than 100 pages. The audiobook is reasonably priced and cheaper than the paperback. But for a book less than 100 pages, I would like it to be cheaper.

It would make a good small group discussion with six chapters of about 12-15 pages each.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/the-lord-and-his-prayer-by-nt-wright/

Summary: A memoir about a man who became a pastor because of calling. 

My story is a comedy, as opposed to a tragedy, not because my life is funny but because my life is having a happy ending due to God's gracious choice to be God for us and choosing even the likes of me to be for God.

You can tell that Kathleen Norris is a Christian. As she wrote her memoir, she repeatedly reminded herself, “You're not that big of a deal. The call is the big deal.” If my memoir makes me my life's chief protagonist, me, the big deal, I'm the most miserable of writers. More interesting than my life are the hijinks of a vocative God who explains my life.

“What a beautiful group!” exclaimed Dr. Herbert. “I have one request before we go out and take our place on the church steps. Boys, please, no ties on a Thursday. Only I can wear a tie in church on a weekday. Such are the rules of our Connection. You may wear them if you must on Sunday. Please remove your ties. Let's take that picture.” God is like Dr. Herbert, without the Plymouth.

Jesus's directives seem extreme for most church squabbles. I've found that when someone offends, if I count to ten and seethe for a year or two, I usually get over it. If, on the other hand, I offend them and they refuse to suppress their anger at me, I dismiss them as touchy, overly sensitive. I would like you to think that I'm such a nice person that I would never obey Jesus and confront you. Truth is, Jesus has a considerably higher view of friendship than that practiced in most churches, which amounts to: I promise never to hold you accountable if you'll do the same for me. Church as a gentile conspiracy of niceness, as a civil compatibility club rather than a community of truth.

Summary: Stop emphasizing visual diversity and focus on solidarity. 

Among those interested in racial justice, there is significant interest in how to help people become interested in racial justice. I frequently have used the metaphor of evangelism both because there is a sense of a message being that is necessary, and there is some sense of the Holy Spirit awakening the person to be open to that message.

David Swanson's main focus in Rediscipling the White Church is discipleship, not evangelism. Somewhat similar to my own interested in racial justice and spiritual direction (a method of discipleship) evolving in parallel, Swanson is emphasizing that the way to correct a distorted church is an emphasis on correct discipleship.

Dallas Willard claims that a disciple is, most basically, an apprentice “who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.” While there is more that could be said about what a disciple is, for our purposes a Christian disciple follows Jesus to become like him and to do what he does.

Building on Augustine's understanding of people as desiring creatures, philosopher James K. A. Smith writes that it's our habits that “incline us to act in certain ways without having to kick into a mode of reflection.”7 Remember my implicit bias at the beginning of the chapter? Because we are not first and foremost thinking beings who rationally engage with every encounter, it is our habits which shape our imaginations or, in Augustine's vocabulary, our loves. My unconscious assumption about who wrecked my cement was inculcated in me through a set of racially oriented habits. We aren't usually aware of our habits.

Of all the ways we have been damaged by whiteness, I believe the most significant is the chasm we have opened between ourselves and people of color, other image-bearers of the living God. Rather than listening to our neighbors' stories of the harm inflicted on their communities by race, we often explain away their experiences. We appeal to our own racial enlightenment as proof that we are not racists and thus bear no responsibility for the harm done to our neighbors by a racialized society. Worse, sometimes we don't even believe our neighbors and friends of color when they explain what it's like to live beyond the boundaries of whiteness. “There is a long history,” writes Drew G. I. Hart, “going all the way back to slavery, of white Americans not trusting black perspectives as truthful.” The regularity with which white conversation partners dismiss what I share about the experiences of my friends of color is one indication of the distrust sown by whiteness.

Summary: A dystopian trilogy (with a prequel) that is both an enjoyable read and prescient. 

I have not been reading much fiction lately. But with my brain distracted by real life and less time since my kids are not in school right now, it felt like a perfect time to pick up KB Hoyle's Dystopian series. About 18 months ago I read Hoyle's fantasy series that started with The Six. I read the series quickly and loved the books. They were certainly in my list of favorite fiction books that I read in 2018.

Once I have a feel for fiction authors, I tend to try to read them completely blind. I had not read any of the descriptions of the series before picking it up. And as I finished each one, I just picked up the next without writing a post. At this point, I do not think it makes sense to write individual responses because this is a single story, told over four books.

I am not going to give away plot details but a couple of notes. KB Hoyle has great plots. Hints are given, but I did not know where the story was going to end up as I was going along. I can also guess that a few people will be disappointed in how some of the first two books end, but remember, this is a single large story arc, keep reading.

Also, this is a young adult dystopian book. Hoyle does not tell childish stories, but they are pitched to a teen or advanced pre-teen audience. There is some romance and hinting at sexual situations (the title of the first book is breeder and the evil government plot involves young women serving as baby factories so some of this is set up in the concept.) However, there is nothing on the page more than insinuation and teen appropriate discussion. (Spoiler–there is an attempted rape at one point, but the victim does not fully understand what is going on apart from the violence until later. )
Having read both series that KB Hoyle has written, the plotting and engagement is high. This series will not appeal to everyone. And while I picked up a dystopian series because we are on pandemic lockdown, that will not be helpful for everyone. But for me, the chapters were short enough that I could pick up a book here and there and make real progress. The book was engaging and had a clear good vs evil structure that even as it dealt with hard things at times, it was comforting to read a story about people that were trying to save humanity and willing to risk it all.

Short review: very good book on communication in marriage. This would make for a good small group discussion book. A lot of this is basic and in other books, but this is a very good overview book.

A longer review on my blog at http://bookwi.se/language-chapman/

A second review, more about using the books as a discussion book is at http://bookwi.se/chapman-read-again/

Summary: The how and why of intersectional theology.

There is lots of conversation right now about Critical Theory especially as it is related to the more recent development of Critical Race Theory.  I am far from a scholar about either, but I have done long form reading and a lot of short-form, podcast, and video learning, and to my untrained eye, Intersectionality is the most helpful and arguably the most misunderstood aspect of Critical Race Theory (CRT).

I am not going to fully explicate this book. I would need to read it again to do a better job at that. But I do have 50 highlights or notes that are public from the book.  One of the aspects of discussing Intersectionality that is difficult is that there is a lot of particular languages that have different uses depending on the section. The implication of that is that it is rare for there to be pithy quotes, not just because of the jargon or technical language, but because internally to many quotes, there has to be the nuanced explication of what is and is not being said at any point. I found myself often highlighting not just whole paragraphs, but often whole pages to make sure I had enough to make sense of the idea later when I want to look back.

For most of Christian history, written theology has been the purview of educated, heterosexual, white, Western men. Challenges to the homogeneity of Christian theology arose in the mid-twentieth century through theologies of liberation that gave historical and social context to those doing the theologizing. Latin American, feminist, minjung, womanist, mujerista, and queer theologies emerged to contest the assumed neutrality and objectivity of white, male theologies. Recognizing the importance of social location for how theology is done and its contents, these theologies centered the marginalized and articulated theologies from below. While the center shifted to diverse identities, these theologies still tended to be mono-focused, or what feminist scholar Vivian May calls “gender-first” or “race-first,” an approach that gives priority to one facet of identity as explanatory for experiences of oppression. And so, white feminists often wrote about gender as if it were a monolithic category, overlooking or minimizing the ways race and sexuality shape individuals' experiences of gender. Latin American liberationists wrote within a context of struggle in Central and South America but did not address the role of gender in the ethnic and class struggles of Latin America...Rather than applying “single-axis” thinking, intersectional analysis relies on “both/and,” an analytical lens that allows for the complexities and contradictions of holding positions of dominance and subordination at the same time and having those concurrent locations mold and fashion experiences that are not race or gender or race plus gender but are rather the confluence of race and gender into something that is both and neither.

We propose an Intersectional Theology, a theology that begins in the intersections and moves toward liberation and justice for all people inclusive of all their differences. We propose an intersectional hermeneutic that begins with examinations of the biblical text's imperial history and highlights the intersectional lives of biblical characters—Jesus, a Jewish man of the working class living under a colonial power; Paul, a character full of challenges and contradictions as a Jewish man and Christian convert with Roman citizenship; the Samaritan woman; the hemorrhaging woman; the Canaanite women; the Ethiopian eunuch; Peter; and Cornelius. We propose an intersectional theology that leaves no one out, that leaves no one's experience unconsidered in exploring and expanding our ideas of God, sin, redemption, and the church, and that leaves no one's oppression unchallenged and no system of oppression intact

...intersectionality is a lens for understanding how gender, race, social class, sexual identity, and other forms of difference work concurrently to shape people and social institutions within multiple relationships of power. It is kaleidoscopic, constantly rendering shifting patterns of power visible. It is confluent, a juncture point where identities, locations, institutions, and power flow together creating something new. It is a praxis—an ongoing loop of action-reflection-action—that integrates social justice–oriented theory with activism toward social justice on the ground so that theory informs practice and practice informs theory.

• Social inequality: Intersectionality recognizes the simultaneous and multiple factors that contribute to social inequality.


• Power: Power is constructed, maintained, and distributed in the interactions of gender, race, nation, and other forms of difference within interlocking systems of oppression.


• Relationality: Relationality demands a both/and approach rather than an either/or approach.


• Social context: All power relations occur within a context, and so intersectional thinking requires we consider the historical, social, intellectual, political, and religious contexts that give shape to our analysis.


• Complexity: By refusing a single-axis analysis, intersectionality creates space for complexity, fluidity, and even contradiction in our understandings of power, privilege, inequality, and resistance.


• Social justice: Intersectionality, as May has argued, is biased toward social justice.

Intersectional analysis, then, functions with its bias toward justice to uncover and restructure power relations by dismantling oppressive ideologies, practices, and institutions.

One of the more common misconceptions of intersectionality is that it is a type of game where people add up all of their ‘oppression points' and whoever has the most gets to ‘win'.  But central to the concept of intersectionality is privilege, all people both have both aspects of their lives that privilege and oppression. The point is not who has the most oppression points, but that we pay attention to how different issues of power or social location act differently. That should not work toward dividing us, but, “intersectionality is also a coalitional politics; it challenges us to work together across differences to create change toward social justice in such a way that we do not fragment ourselves or deny any aspect of ourselves.”

“Honor and foster intersectionality's antisubordination orientation.” Because it is biased toward justice, intersectionality rejects the subordination of individuals or groups. For theology, this suggests focused attention toward constructing theologies that purposefully destabilize structures of power and facilitate inclusion and equity.

“Draw on intersectionality's matrix approach to meaningfully engage with heterogeneity, enmeshment, and divergence.” May encourages us to keep on center differences within categories so we don't negate in-group differences and ignore the impact of, for example, the intersection of race with gender.

“Take up intersectionality's invitation to follow opacities and to read against the grain.” Reading against the grain invites us to approach traditional theological notions with skepticism and to make visible the workings of power in our usual way of thinking about theological doctrines and practices. It encourages us to move the voices of the marginalized to the center of our theologizing and recognize theological sources outside the typical norms of traditional theologies.

“Set aside norm emulation as a philosophical/political/research/policy [and we would add ‘/theological'] strategy.” Intersectionality invites theology to challenge its own disciplinary norms and to embrace imaginative, challenging, and disruptive ways of doing theology that resist hierarchy and work toward justice. An intersectional approach demands that we rethink our ways of doing theology and formulate theological methods that embed an intersectional lens.

...intersectionality is a critical back-and-forth between individual persons and the collective political identities in which people find themselves within systems of domination and subordination. One's identity is not monolithic but rather multidimensional, complex, and intersectional, situated within interlocking structures of power. One's identity includes and is not limited to ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, gender, and ability, which all intersect and are interdependent. Our lives are complex and our multiple identities are not mutually exclusive. Therefore the axes of classism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and other issues play a role in characterizing ourselves and how we engage in the struggle for social justice. Audre Lorde states, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.”

Central to intersectional theology is a focused and humble cognizance of how one's own social location affects how one does theology. In other words, intersectional theology begins in a recognition that all theologies are contextualized and that contextualization matters.

In particular, intersectional theology investigates the roles of structures and power in theologizing and directs theologizing toward social justice. Intersectional theology recognizes that all people exist in different relations to social, economic, political, and religious power within the matrix of domination and that theologies from these various locations will offer us new, unexpected, and necessary viewpoints to move us toward a greater collective knowledge of God and work toward justice.

Summary: A dystopian trilogy (with a prequel) that is both an enjoyable read and prescient. 

I have not been reading much fiction lately. But with my brain distracted by real life and less time since my kids are not in school right now, it felt like a perfect time to pick up KB Hoyle's Dystopian series. About 18 months ago I read Hoyle's fantasy series that started with The Six. I read the series quickly and loved the books. They were certainly in my list of favorite fiction books that I read in 2018.

Once I have a feel for fiction authors, I tend to try to read them completely blind. I had not read any of the descriptions of the series before picking it up. And as I finished each one, I just picked up the next without writing a post. At this point, I do not think it makes sense to write individual responses because this is a single story, told over four books.

I am not going to give away plot details but a couple of notes. KB Hoyle has great plots. Hints are given, but I did not know where the story was going to end up as I was going along. I can also guess that a few people will be disappointed in how some of the first two books end, but remember, this is a single large story arc, keep reading.

Also, this is a young adult dystopian book. Hoyle does not tell childish stories, but they are pitched to a teen or advanced pre-teen audience. There is some romance and hinting at sexual situations (the title of the first book is breeder and the evil government plot involves young women serving as baby factories so some of this is set up in the concept.) However, there is nothing on the page more than insinuation and teen appropriate discussion. (Spoiler–there is an attempted rape at one point, but the victim does not fully understand what is going on apart from the violence until later. )
Having read both series that KB Hoyle has written, the plotting and engagement is high. This series will not appeal to everyone. And while I picked up a dystopian series because we are on pandemic lockdown, that will not be helpful for everyone. But for me, the chapters were short enough that I could pick up a book here and there and make real progress. The book was engaging and had a clear good vs evil structure that even as it dealt with hard things at times, it was comforting to read a story about people that were trying to save humanity and willing to risk it all.

Summary: A joint biography about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr and the way that they influenced one another.

The Civil Rights Era was made up of many more people than Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but they are two of the defining figures of the mid 20th century. This is the first joint book I have read about them since James Cone's Martin & Malcolm & American. It has been at least 20 years since I read that book, and throughout The Sword and the Shield, I tried (and failed) to remember how Cone handled the discussion. I need to go back and reread it.

I was glad that I have recently read a biography of Malcolm X as well as King's last book, Where Do We Go From Here, which had details about their lives front and center in my mind. I am far from a scholar of either, but I am also not unfamiliar with them. I still learned plenty, and the focus on them together does intentionally put their work on tension even if they only directly met one time.

As much as anything this is a reminder of what was lost with their deaths. No one like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr is only their flattened memories. Both were complex people that were significantly changing over time, as was the central theme of Marble's biography of Malcolm X and Cornell West's compiled Radical King. Kendi's three categories of racial relationships (segregationists, assimilationists, or antiracists) in How to be an Antiracist reminded me of how both King and Malcolm X were antiracists much of the time, but in quite different ways.

Another theme of the book that was striking was how Peniel pointed out how both frequently framed their work as helping African Americans to become citizens. It was still six months after Malcolm X was killed that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law and making a significant impact on the reality of Black citizenship. A citizen that cannot vote is not wholly a citizen. That was far from the last point of disparate realities between racial groups' citizenship. Still, it was a stark reminder of how many are citizens (then and now) that cannot act on their citizenship for a variety of reasons, many of them due to systems that intentionally want to minimize minority citizenship.

Summary: An exploration of Kenosis, voluntary self-emptying, a renunciation of my will in favor of God's.

Kenosis has a long history. Biblically it is rooted in Philippians 2 with Jesus ‘giving up' his divine being and ‘adopting' a human form. The language has always been challenging because it is inadequate to represent what is going on fully. Jesus did not cease to be divine when he became human. And the adoption metaphor has weaknesses because there is history with its use as a means of denying that Jesus was entirely God, or that he was created not eternal.  But despite the inadequacy of the language around Kenosis,  the concepts underneath it, are important. Jesus' prayer, ‘not my will, but yours be done' was not a denial of his divinity but the fulfillment of it. If Jesus could empty himself of his will in a biblically appropriate way, then we, as fully created, should also think about how we appropriately give up our own will.

Part of the problem of discussing Kenosis isn't just the inadequacy of the language, but the history of abuse. Kenosis has been used to justify abuse and oppression throughout Christian history. It has been used to tell slaves to submit to masters, or to perpetuate economic or cultural inequity. It has been used to support gnostic leaning beliefs around the sinfulness of the body or patriachal attitudes toward women. It has been used to deny people the rights of justice in regard to sexual and others forms of abuse inside the church.

It is in part because of this misuse of the concept that I am reluctant to read white males talk about Kenosis, and why despite a bit of reluctance to initially pick up The Way Up Is Down, it is important that this book is written by a Puerto Rican woman. As I have said frequently, I am midway through my training to become a Spiritual Director. The literature of spiritual direction and spiritual formation is overwhelmingly from a White male perspective. Most of my non-assigned reading has been an attempt to make up for the weaknesses of my assigned reading. Marlena Graves is a pastor and professor of spiritual formation. She is not a spiritual director as far as I am aware (it is not explicitly mentioned in the book that I remember), but the type of spiritual wisdom that is throughout the book is in that vein.

The history of Christianity is replete with language that invokes Kenosis. Christianity's spiritual writers are continually talking about “offering ourselves out of love for God, others and creation” and the tension of “[not wanting] to do what God calls us to do.” Marlena Graves' quote from Stephen Freeman, an Eastern Orthodox priest, gets at this as well:

If we are to be transformed ‘from one degree of glory to another' then it it is toward the ‘glory' of the crucified, self-emptying Christ that we are beign transformed...[F]or there is no other kind of life revealed to us in Christ.”

Kenosis 

“Christianity lived out in mental abstraction, in our heads alone, isn't Christianity. Douglass nailed it when he declared, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

Kenosis. 

Summary: A psychiatrist explores spiritual direction. 

This is another assigned book from my spiritual direction class. The focus of this semester's class was spiritual direction and psychology. So assigning Care of Mind/Care of Spirit makes a lot of sense. Gerald May was a psychiatrist who became disillusioned with psychology and became a spiritual director.

...all of life's experiences can appear legitimately in spiritual direction, but they need to be seen in the light of spiritual concern, and at all costs they should not be allowed to eclipse that light.

In spiritual direction however, the true healer, nurturer, sustainer, and liberator is the Lord, and the director and directee are seen as hopeful channels, beneficiaries, or expressions of grace for each other. This is a radical difference, and one that cannot be overemphasized.

“Discernment” (or the Greek diakrisis) refers to an act of separating apart. “Diagnosis” refers to distinguishing through knowledge...Diagnosis, in Greek, refers to “through knowledge” or even “thorough knowledge,” emphasizing knowledge or even authoritarian judgment (c.f. Acts 25:21, the diagnosis of the emperor). I have previously indicated that diagnosis looks to label disorder so that it can be corrected, but discernment seeks to discriminate among inclinations so that a proper direction can be followed....Discernment, however, is generally seen as more of a gifted process than diagnosis, a graced charism that happens through the relationship.

Ideally, there should be no need for extensive labeling of any kind in spiritual direction. Whether labeling assumes psychiatric or religious trappings, its overuse is likely to objectify the person and unnecessarily reduce the wonder of his or her reality. Somehow it always seems difficult to label an attribute without carrying it too far and labeling the person. Labeling is all too often a reductionistic process, causing us to focus on one or a few characteristics of a soul to the exclusion of others. Therefore, while it is very good to know something of how we come to be the way we are and the kinds of things that can go wrong with us, we must be vigilant not to let such knowledge get in the way of our wonder.

The temptation is to try to answer the person's questions from your own knowledge, but how can you answer such things? We have all had times of feeling like Job or Job's friends in the face of such questions, and no matter how much theological education you have, rational answers usually just don't work. Personally, I think I do have some appreciation of why there is such suffering and injustice in the world—and God's place in it—but I find I almost never try to express that when I am with an anguished person. In my own prayerfulness with the person, I usually sense an invitation to be lovingly, responsively present rather than to try to provide answers. What strikes me most clearly is that when a person in great pain is screaming Why? that person is really looking for God. She or he is really praying. These are holy moments, albeit very rough ones. I usually find myself encouraging people to express how they feel, and I hope there can be a little quiet listening on my part and theirs.

Summary: Discussion of the cultural and real privilege of being a White Christian (or at least conversant in Christianity) in America.

I recently read Taking America Back for God, a book about Christian Nationalism, and when I was writing up my review, one of the books recommended was White Christian Privilege. I did not know anything about the book or author, but it seemed to fit in my recent reading, and I picked it up.

The author is a second-generation immigrant from Southeast Asia. She grew up in Atlanta and now is a professor specializing in race and religion. The premise of the book is explained by the title well; religious liberty is illusionary in the US because it primarily is rooted in the freedom to be Christian. White (Protestant) Christians are the default state, and others tend to be religious in relation to Christianity. (Robert Jones' book The End of White Christian America tells the opposite side of this story.)

White Christian Privilege is not going to be received well by many that believe that Christianity is under attack or persecuted. And there is some small sense that demographic change is impacting the dominance of White Christians to some extent (the demographic trends are the primary focus of Jones' book). But demographics do not show the privilege that Christianity has baked into the United States culture and history.

There are legitimate arguments about whether the US was founded as a ‘Christian country,' but culturally, Christianity was normative (the default cultural expression.) While there have been Native Americans, Jews, and Muslims from very early in US history, Christianity has been dominant. So Christian assumptions about how religion works have also been normative. Christian holidays are national holidays (and Hindu holidays are not, and often not even known). A Hundi woman that wants to celebrate Diwali will have to request time off from work, but Christmas is a national holiday, and the workweek is oriented around the Christian calendar. These assumptions are not consciously chosen or intentionally discriminatory, but they do have an impact. (Similar to the way that crash test dummies were modeled initially after adult males and only later have changes been made to include women and children when it became clear that the single choice of crash test dummies negatively impacted women and children).

The narration of religious liberty cases from the Supreme Court was particularly striking because I heard several people recently talk about how the Supreme Court has ruled so clearly for religious liberty recently. But the choice of which cases to include as religious liberty cases in those recent articles has been biased toward Christian cases, and religious liberty cases for others were not counted as losses.

One of the striking points here is that recently there has been a string of complaints about how the courts have narrowed their understanding of what it means to practice faith to the explicit worship based practices, but that is similar to how the Protestant based Supreme Court of the mid-20th century understood non-Christian religious traditions. Religious obligations like wearing a headscarf (Islam) or not cutting your hair (Sikh) have been viewed as optional, like wearing a Christian cross necklace instead of a more central feature like taking communion would be for a Christian.

One of the crucial points here is that individual Sikh men would go through lengthy and costly legal battles to be permitted to wear turbans and beards, but there were no policy changes. This would then force other Sikh men to also go through individual lawsuits in the same way. From 1986 until 2017, the Army's official policy prevented wearing Turbans and beards despite winning repeated religious liberty cases. (Air Force did not change policy until 2019).

This is despite the 2015 Supreme Court case ruling about wearing a hijab, written by Antonin Scalia. “The rule for disparate-treatment claims based on a failure to accommodate a religious practice is straightforward: An employer may not make an applicant's religious practice, confirmed or otherwise, a factor in employment decisions.” The 20th-century court precedents, written largely by protestants, that narrowly defined religious expression as explicit worship for non-Christians are now coming to impact Christians.

Much of the value of the book is pointing out cultural assumptions that lean to Christian benefit but which many will complain that they are about culture, not Christianity. The hiddenness proves her larger point (because the religious roots of the example have been lost or because the examples are simply not seen). I found myself arguing with her on a number of occasions. Still, regardless of any particular example, the weight of the number and range of examples makes the case well that there is Christian privilege.

The White portion of White Christian Privilege does matter, and one of the critical points is the discussion of intersectionality. She uses the phrase ‘one up and one down' to talk about the difficulty in seeing privilege for those that have Christian privilege but are oppressed in other areas, for example, Black Christians, who want to work for culturally appropriate public Christmas displays but do not see that the public Christmas display has its own privilege.

This morning, right before I typed this up, I saw this graphic in a tweet by Samuel Perry, sociologist, and coauthor of Taking America Back for God.

The perception of oppression does have an impact on how we act in the world and how we treat others. While it is mostly overlapping, roughly similar percent of White Evangelicals believe that Christians are more persecuted in the US than other religious groups, and White people are now more racially discriminated against than Black people are in the US. Those distortions do matter, and I think books like this can help us Christians see otherwise invisible privilege.

The book presents a ‘social-justice' oriented model for addressing discrimination in the US. This is roughly similar to the type of antiracism that Ibham Kendi and others talk about regarding racial privilege and prejudice. I can see some reading this book and walking away dismissing not just Christian privilege but also racial and gender discrimination as well (several of the reviews on Amazon seemed to do just that). But at some point, we cannot orient ourselves primarily to those that are strongly resistant to issues of oppression but instead need to work understanding and to rectify those areas. I know that will just prove the anti-social justice point for some. And I do want to bring about some level of common ground. But the common ground cannot come about at the expense of the oppressed. (See Race and Reunion by David Blight  for an example of how that has gone badly in US history.)

Summary: Fascinating autobiography of a pathbreaking and important man.

I came to know about Howard Thurman, like many do, through hearing about him in relation to Martin Luther King (Jr and Sr). He was a classmate with MLK Sr at Morehouse College. And then, during Thurman's first year as Dean of the Boston College Chapel, Thurman overlapped with MLK Jr as he was finishing up his Ph.D. It is said that MLK Jr carried a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited with him during his Civil Rights years. Their relationship is probably not as formative to King as I had thought earlier, but there are many letters between them.

Regardless of his relationship with King, Howard Thurman is a path-breaking man. His father died young, and as the story at the beginning of the book says, “I said, ‘One thing is sure. When I grow up and become a man, I will never have anything to do with the church.'” His father died when he was seven, and because his father was not a member of the church, the pastor initially refused to allow a funeral at the church. After being pressured to permit the burial, the pastor refused to participate. A traveling evangelist agreed to do the funeral but turned it into a spectacle for evangelism instead of a memorial.

Despite the early negative relationship to the church, Thurman had an early mystical experience calling him to be a minster. Throughout his life, he was a mystic in orientation. I am not going to cover his whole career; you can read his Wikipedia page for a summary, or the memoir for more detail. After becoming a pastor, teaching, and serving as chaplain at Morehouse and Spelman, serving as a Dean at Howard University Chapel and a faculty member, he left the academic world in 1944 to co-pastor an intentionally interracial church in San Francisco. It is one of the earliest intentionally interracial congregations with Howard Thurman as co-pastor, but the only paid pastor and primary lead for most of the time. After nine years, Thurman became the Dean of Boston College Chapel, the first Black man to have a similar position at a predominately White University. He remained there 12 years until 1965 when he officially retired and led the Howard Thurman Educational Trust until he died in 1981.

In addition to his work breaking down racial lines, preparing others for ministry and being writer, speaker, preacher, and mentor, he was important to interreligious dialogue, the international peace movement, and sociology of religion. He and his equally formidable wife, Sue Bailey Thurman and two others, spent nearly a year touring India in the 1930s to learn about the non-violent protests, share about the state of Black oppression in the US, and eventually meeting with Gandhi. That trip to India impacted the rest of his ministry, not just because of how it influenced his orientation toward non-violence, but also in how he thought about and interacted with non-Christians, especially as a Black man in Jim Crow-era United States.

I felt the heat in the question “If Christianity is not powerless, why is it not changing life in your country and the rest of the world? If it is powerless, why are you here representing it to us?” Hearing this, our party went from campus to campus, city to city, town to town, talking and lecturing and sharing. This question also presented a definite problem to the missionary, particularly the American missionary.

At the final leavetaking, I said, “Will you now, ending, answer just one question? What do you think is the greatest handicap to Jesus Christ in India?” It was apropos of something lie had said to me about Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. I wanted to know his real thought about the chief obstacle in his own country which prevented the spread of Christianity. He answered, “Christianity as it is practiced, as it has been identified with Western culture, with Western civilization and colonialism. This is the greatest enemy that Jesus Christ has in my country—not Hinduism, or Buddhism, or any of the indigenous religions—but Christianity itself.”

It is important in this accounting that at bottom all of this was a part of my meaning of God in the common life. God was everywhere and utterly identified with every single thing, incident, or person. The phrases “the God of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob,” or again, “the God of Jesus” were continuously luminous to me in my journey. I prayed to God, I talked to Jesus. He was a companion. There was no felt need in my spirit to explain this companionship. There never has been. God was a reality. Jesus was a fact. From my earliest memories, Jesus was religious subject rather than religious object. It was Jesus with whom I talked as I sat under my oak tree fingering the bruises and scars of my childhood. Such was the pretheological ground for me when both life and time spread out before me. The older I have grown, the more it is clear that what I needed to hold me to my path was the sure knowledge that I was committed to a single journey with but a single goal—a way toward life. In formal and religious terms this meant for me the disclosure of the Will of God. And from this flowed an inescapable necessity: to be totally involved. What I did with my life had to be secure in the inclusive sense that only the word “total” can signify. The ground of many of the boyhood experiences I have described stands out clearly as part of this single fabric.

Summary: Traditional Black denominations in the early 20th century were neither fundamentalist nor modernist. They were traditional Christians that upheld conservative theological values, but also believed in social justice, especially in regard to racism. 

I have never done this before. But I do not think I can really do better in posting about Doctrine and Race than to extensively quote the book itself. I made 28 highlights and a couple of notes and you can see all of them and the exact location of each on my goodreads page.

I limited my quotes to just 11. I did bold areas which I think are important.

Indeed, virtually all white Protestants, whether they supported fundamentalism, opposed it, or ignored it, assumed that white Protestant thought was normative and superior, so in that respect, fundamentalists were no different than non-fundamentalist whites.

Religious life in America was segregated and racially coded. Moreover, our understanding of the distribution of the formative books—The Fundamentals—needs an asterisk. While the current narrative holds that oil baron Lyman Stewart financed their distribution to all American ministers and missionaries, black Baptists and Methodists appear not to have received them. The adjective “white” should precede “American” in our telling of the Fundamentals creation story.

For white fundamentalists, and white Protestants in general in the United States, Protestant Christianity was the chief weapon available to civilize the various races. Such a trusting belief in the positive power of Protestantism was not confined to conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists. Josiah Strong's Our Country, published in 1886, lauded the civilizing effects of “true spiritual Christianity.” Indeed, for many white Protestants in the United States, the benefits of converting various immigrants and minorities to Protestant Christianity were myriad and far-reaching. Black, Jew, Roman Catholic—all could improve themselves through religion, and all required it to be considered “American.”

Not only was Christianity a means to civilize African Americans, it was also a way of alleviating racial tensions. Writing about the Reverend Eugene E. Smith's address to the annual gathering of Northern Baptists, Homer DeWilton Brookins explained that Baptists needed to help spread the Gospel to blacks to “help to Christianize the rising tide of race consciousness on the part of the negro.” Without the influence of Protestant Christianity, Brookins and Laws predicted a dire situation ahead for white and black Americans.

For him, as for other white fundamentalists who enjoyed black music, the music itself was a reinforcement of their views on blacks in general, especially in their belief that black religion was emotional. Because it came from black traditions, the music they produced was, in the eyes of whites, emotionally provocative, which allowed whites to continue their stereotype that blacks were caught in a religious childhood. The use of African American musicians reinforced whites' racially coded ideas of black inferiority rather than provoking them to engage in a religious dialogue with the musicians and their pastors.

The deeper question for these writers was one of ecclesiology: how could you define the Christian church and include segregationists, lynchers, and racists? The simple answer was that you could not. Any understanding of the Christian message had to include a steadfast belief in the equality of all people before God. Since many white Americans could not meet this simple test, they were not really a part of the church of Jesus. Much as white fundamentalists had labeled liberal Protestants as outside the fold, African American Baptist and Methodist writers defined the church as an organization of like-minded people, alike in that they believed in equality. There were, of course, more layers to the definition of “Christian church” than just equality, but the bottom line for these writers was that social justice had just as much of a role to play in defining the true Christian as did doctrines like the Virgin Birth, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the substitutionary atonement of Jesus. For African American Protestants, doctrinal matters were important, but as the twentieth century progressed, the most important test was one of the examples of Jesus. In this interpretation of “What Would Jesus Do?” they demanded that white Christians observe the basic precepts of equality found in the Bible.

The author then pointed out that churches in America already were segregated and that segregation everywhere was an affront to Christianity. He asked, “if it be unchristian to ‘refuse any Negro the privilege of enjoying any church privilege,' is it not just as unchristian to refuse any Negro the privilege of enjoying any social privilege? The church is God's house, but so also is the world.” He expanded on this line of reasoning to include discrimination in employment, theaters, hotels, railroad accommodations, and restaurants—“Should Christianity be practiced only on Sunday and in the confines of the four walls of a church or should it be practiced seven days a week and everywhere?” For the Courier's reporter, white Christians had lost the meaning of religion, and he compared them to residents of “pagan Rome” who “strut blindly and boastfully down the broad road to decay and oblivion.”

“There is something wrong somewhere,” he concluded, “this continued manifestation of the spirit of anti-Christ has its rootage in Pharasaical [sic] conceit and pride, and unless eradicated will find its fruitage in the alienation of the darker races of earth from Him whom we invoke as ‘Our Father.'” For Davenport, the continued hypocrisy of white Christians in the United States had global and eternal consequences. As long as Christ was presented as white and blacks as inferior, African Americans would turn away from the saving message of Christianity, as would “darker races” throughout the world. White Christians would inflict damage both in this world and the next with their continued insistence on segregation.

In 1927, Wright expanded and refined his call for equality under the banner of Christianity by employing the Hebrew prophet Amos and likening white Christians to “oppressors.” “Moral failure,” he declared, “proceeds with treading upon the poor all sorts of economic robbing,” including denial of crops, undercharging for labor, segregated and inferior school facilities, and the like. The “oppressors are morally decaying,” he continued, “whether they call themselves Israelites, Christians or what not. And God's justice will certain assert itself if there is not a change.” The case was simple: white America had become what Amos had warned against—excesses and injustice. Wright chose verses from Amos, including the passage that Martin Luther King Jr. would later make famous in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). “Amos does not mince words,” Wright aptly observed, “God wants Israel to repent, ‘to hate evil and love the good'—that is the only thing that will satisfy the justice of God.” But the United States was not engaged in such an effort. Instead, he argued that “it is wrong to mistreat your brother and think you can make it all right with God by giving Him a burnt offering. One of these days this American nation will wake up to understand the justice of God is not in the fine churches or great educational institutions, the wonderful choirs and eloquent sermons, it is in hating evil and loving good.”

For example, in 1917, the National Baptist Union-Review ran an Atlanta Independent article on Billy Sunday's upcoming visit to the South and the opportunity he had to make a statement for racial equality. “It will not suffice for Mr. Sunday to invade the Southland,” the secular black paper wrote and the traditionalist Union-Review reprinted, “and denounce adultery, fornication, liars, hypocrites, bums, hobos, rascals, scoundrels, crap shooters, tramps and loafers, and leave untouched the lynchers, the ballot box thief, the segregator, the discriminator, the Negro hater, the promoter of racial strife and the mob leader who burns human beings at the stake because they are black.” Instead Sunday needed to confront the fact that his audience in the South would be composed of such people. Rather than be “deathly silent” on the matter, he should speak out. “If Mr. Sunday is sincere and is a lover of God and humanity,” the paper continued, “he has a splendid opportunity to preach the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man,” and, further:   That the gospel of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ knows no color line and that Jesus Christ died to the saving of all men who would believe on Him; that the black man is a common brother of the white man, and that the white man owes him both Godly and humane treatment; that before the law, the Negro is entitled to every privilege, every benefit accruing to the white man; that the double sessions in the Negro schools are wrong and wicked; that the suppression of the Negro's vote at the ballot box is sin; that the counting him out on election day is stealing; that the unequal division of public school funds is legalized theft; that segregation is born of racial hatred and is sin; that the beating up and shooting down of Negroes on the street is sin; that the splendidly equipped school facilities for white children and death traps and dilapidated houses for Negroes is a misuse of trust funds and an act of base humanity.

As this book has shown, African American clergy in the interwar years navigated a treacherous course for their readers and parishioners as they sought to maintain traditional religious beliefs while also employing that same hermeneutic to advance racial progress. Challenged indirectly by fundamentalists to defend their orthodoxy, they could not call themselves fundamentalists. The white leaders of the fundamentalist movement shunned black religious leaders, demeaned their intellect, and prepared instead for a coming catastrophe. Black Baptists and Methodists, in turn, distanced themselves from the fundamentalist movement's millennialism and its indifference to resolving racial issues. But at the same time, modernism held no real appeal for these commentators, who labeled the movement a white heresy even as they embraced some of its methodologies.

Summary: A call to decolonize our faith.

This is my first book of Miquela de la Torre. It is unlikely to be my last. It has now been about three weeks since I fairly quickly read Burying White Privilege. The large movements of the books are not unfamiliar to my previous reading.

Dr de la Torre is not writing against people who have less melanin in their skin, instead (like most writers and thinkers working on issues of race in the church) he is more nuanced:

When I write white Christianity, you might think that I am generalizing and essentializing a broad Euro-American demographic group based solely on the pigment of their skin. However, ontological whiteness has nothing to do with skin pigmentation. This is important, so I will say it again: the word white in my usage has nothing to do with the color of one's skin. Instead, it has to do with worldview, a way of being, thinking, and reasoning morally. A white Christian can be black, Latinx, Muslim, or atheist. While it might be easier for those with whiter skin to embrace white Christianity, those of us who would never be considered white by our physical appearance have also had our minds so colonized that it is difficult to break free from this white, Christian milieu.

Most communities of color feel a chill running up their collective spine whenever white folk, ignorant of their own history, chant the need to “Make America Great Again” because those of us who carry the stigmata of United States' history know all too well how the grinding of our forebear's lives and the crushing of their bones into dust was the price paid for America's greatness.

The Eurocentric modernity project, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, of replacing God with science and reason, has succeeded in giving birth to a God created in its own image, a God who became foundational in the rationalization of necessary murderous and oppressive acts required for the establishment of the global empire of the United States. Such a God has been used to justify what Nietzsche called “master morality,” practiced today by nationalist Euro-American Christians because it encourages power, freedom, and strength. From this God followed an ethical discourse that might challenge humanity to be compassionate (recall George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism), yet seldom challenges the structures that caused inhumane conditions, for such a challenge would threaten the privileged space of those who embrace guts, guns, and God. We embrace patriotic sentiments of supporting our troops or ensuring no child is left behind even while passing massive tax cuts, which assure that the wealthiest segments of society are enriched at the expense of our moral rhetoric and proclamations. Yes, we have killed God, but obviously the wrong God.

The voice of the powerless is permitted to be heard only if it is expressed as a token squeak, in deference to the privileged. Although the white Christian's foot is on the neck of the marginalized, the oppressed must meekly ask, Good afternoon, Sir, sorry to bother you Sir. May I kindly bring it to your attention that our group is not advancing due to the foot you unintentionally placed upon our neck? Do you have a moment to discuss what we perceive to be an unfortunate situation? We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss your foot in a manner which provides you with a positive and uplifting self-understanding and enlightenment. If not, then perhaps we could schedule an appointment at your earliest convenience. White Christianity prefers to remain ignorant or silent rather than explore how their faith is but a political ideology detrimental to the vast majority of disenfranchised communities.

For Christianity to be liberating, to be badass, it must move beyond the decent Christianity of the empire. Why? Because the prevalent Christianity of the United States was established on providing justification for the prevailing structures of oppression detrimental to people of color. The failure of Euro-American Christianity to address oppressive structures means we are left with no other choice but to envision new paradigms for marginalized communities, paradigms rooted within their context. Those who benefit from the power and privilege accorded by the dominant culture are incapable of fashioning an objective faith-based response because their standing within society is protected by the prevailing social structures. Whites who chose to become liberated must also move away from their white Christianity and join in solidarity with marginalized communities in order to participate in liberating praxis—that is, they must take actions rooted in the social location of the marginalized.

Summary: Follow up to the earlier memoir, Suprised by Oxford.

I do not remember why I originally picked up Suprised by Oxford. It was probably a book I chose to review. But in the decade since it came out, I have read it three times, I believe. I have given away several copies, and I have recommended it to many. I think I will read pretty much anything that Carolyn Weber writes. She is a writer of both skill and insight.

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Summary: An exploration of contemplation in the Black church.

Part of the importance of reading widely is opening up our perspectives to correction. Joy Unspeakable is both discussing the contemplative practices of the Black church but redefining contemplation for those in and outside the Black church

I did not read Joy Unspeakable quickly. l slowly read the book over a couple of months. I probably read it a bit too slowly but I finished it as I was halfway through Armchair Mystic, a book assigned for my Spiritual Direction program. Armchair Mystic is attempting to teach the basics of contemplative prayer. On, the whole it is a helpful book but it is rooted in a white western concept of contemplation.

“Black people for far too long have been forced to refine our message according to what is comfortable for the mainstream. We have made a distinctive choice not to do it...Our goal is to be free and authentic, not to pacify others.” Joy Unspeakable redefines or explores aspects of contemplation that have been under-appreciated. There are more traditional ideas like music and traditional liturgy and prayer and historical legacy. But more important to me is the non-traditional, activism, the leadership of Obama, BLM, and the subversion of older activist models, modern music, hip hop, blues, jazz, etc.

When the word contemplation comes to my mind, I think of Thomas Merton and his lengthy and illuminating discourses about the practices that include complete dependence on God. But I also want to talk about Martin Luther King Jr. and his combination of interiority and activism, Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman and their inward journeys. I want to present Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, and the unknown black congregations that sustained whole communities without fanfare or notice.

Part of the importance of Joy Unspeakable and considering contemplation from a position that is beyond silence and individual prayer is that contemplation is fuel to an integrated life.

“...the human task is threefold. First, the human spirit must connect to the Eternal by turning toward God's immanence and ineffability with yearning. Second, each person must explore the inner reality of his or her humanity, facing unmet potential and catastrophic failure with unmitigated honesty and grace. Finally, each one of us must face the unlovable neighbor, the enemy outside of our embrace, and the shadow skulking in the recesses of our own hearts. Only then can we declare God's perplexing and unlikely peace on earth.”

A significant portion of what I found helpful is a focus on the communal aspects of contemplation.

The key to contemplation in the black church seems to be its emergence as a communal practice. Although European mystics and contemplatives often lived in community, they tended to focus on the individual experience of encountering the divine presence. African American contemplatives turned the “inward journey” into a communal experience. In this ethnic context, the word contemplation includes but does not require silence or solitude. Instead, contemplative practices can be identified in public prayers, meditative dance movements, and musical cues that move the entire congregation toward a communal listening and entry into communion with a living God.

I have 26 highlights on my Goodreads page. This is a good book and I probably need to re-read it again in a year or so.