Adam Shields

Summary: A classic book by one of the originators of the Critical Race Theory movement. 

A few weeks ago, I presented an intro to Critical Race Theory to my Be the Bridge group. The presentation is available here. While I created it with the intention of it having many links to articles and podcasts for further investigation, it was designed to be in addition to my audible presentation. It is of only mixed value without any audio. One of the group's co-leaders suggested that I read Faces at the Bottom of the Well because I had not read any longer works by Derrick Bell, only a couple of articles.

I must say that this is unlike any other book on Critical Race Theory I have read. Faces at the Bottom of the Well is a mix of fictional dialogue, like Plato's dialogues, and parable-like short stories. The short stories ran from simple discussion or working out of policy ideas to the final short story Space Traders, a sci-fi exploration of how much the country values its Black citizens (and why).

One of the common critiques of Critical Race Theory is that it is oriented toward viewing humanity as depraved. I always find this an odd critique from Christians. Traditional reformed perspectives of Christianity view all people as depraved. But the misunderstanding, I think, comes at how the depravity works. In CRT, the main point is that racism is not centered around individual animus against people of a different racial group, but systems that lock the disparity in. Those systems and how racial hierarchy is locked into those give Faces at the Bottom of the Well the subtitle, The Permanence of Racism.

My seminary systematic theology professor was a Black Liberation theologian, and I am eternally grateful for that early introduction to theology. One of the early books we read was Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society. (It is cheap on kindle because it is in the public domain, and I keep meaning to re-read it because my original reading was more than 25 years ago.) Niebuhr's book's main point is that while people are sinful, people are more likely to sin as members of groups than solely as individuals. Niebuhr wrote this before becoming a professor at Union Seminary and from his experience as an urban pastor in Detroit in the early years of the Great Depression.

Niebuhr was critiquing progressive liberal theological systems that thought we could bring about utopian or increasingly better societies through social gospel types of advocacy and policy change. There is a whole chapter on Niebuhr in James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. As much as Niebuhr helps critique aspects of liberalism and the push toward ever-increasing progressivism, his own racial blindspots are exactly the type of issues that CRT arose to address.

There can be a nihilism to traditional CRT, but there is also an accuracy that opponents to CRT do not seem to want to address directly. The current move to make CRT incompatible with Christianity simply by declaring it so, without actually addressing the problems it raises, is accurately predicted by Derrick Bell and others. I mostly want to say to those who find CRT the most dangerous threat to Christianity is what are you going to do about racism to prove CRT's nihilism wrong?

I think that Bradly Mason is right to explain CRT by addressing the historical reasons for its development. He has a six-part series at the Front Porch blog, but I do not believe he is done. His long, but helpful look at how the pushback against Civil Rights Era reforms starting in the 1960s but increasing in the 1980s, shows that even mild legal reforms to voting rights, housing, and other economic reforms, and within the church, the Promise Keepers ‘find a black friend' strategies were not enough to overcome the culture of racial hierarchy, but were too much not to have a backlash against.

I have finished but not yet reviewed Daniel Hill's White Lies. It is about the church's importance, particularly White Christians, in naming white supremacy, or white superiority or racial hierarchy as the sin, not just opposing individualized racial animus that we can only see in others. I am not a whole-hearted proponent of CRT because I do not believe that its orientation is about solutions but about identifying the problem. But CRT does help identify the problem of systemic racism and its intractability. And as Christians, we need to be reminded that, at root, CRT identifies racism as a type of cosmic reality and a sin, albeit in secular terms and modes.

Faces at the Bottom of the Well is engaging. Its method of stories and dialogue remove the academic and legal language that other authors use. Bell is engaging the heart and imagination, not just the intellect, which is part of the need. The problem with many is that racism is abstract; there is no relational skin in the game. Even without relational skin in the game, books like this can help create empathy and imaginative understanding to help people see differently.

I read this for class and there is some very helpful things here. Most of it I read twice, but I have not read the privy counseling section yet. I want to do that eventually, but I don't have time right now.

this is a book on contemplative prayer. And it is not a quick read. It was written in the 14th century, but there are aspects that are very current and aspects that are quite dated. But the advice to read old books still holds true. They may not be ‘better' but they are from a different perspective and that has real value.

Summary: A semi-autobiographical look at the book of Esther from the lens of US racial justice.

I have long looked up to Brenda Salter McNeil. She doesn't know me at all. But when I was in college, more than 25 years ago, I participate in the college's urban summer program, working with homeless families in a long-term shelter in Houston for a summer. In part, that experience led me to pursue a master's in Social Service Administration a few years later, and my entire work career has been non-profit consulting and management. Several of my friends also participated in the summer program in later years. One of those friends worked with Brenda Salter McNeil in Chicago. My friend could not speak more highly about the now Rev Dr Brenda Salter McNeil. But also, as a young White woman working in a Black community in Chicago under Dr McNeil, she felt clearly impatience around racial issues and a strong prodding to ‘get it'.

About the same time, I was attending an intentionally interracial church in Chicago, Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church. Raleigh Washington led the church, and Glenn Kehrein led the slightly older Christian Community Development Corporation. Together they wrote the book Breaking Down Walls about racial reconciliation. Not too long after I left the church because I moved to a different part of the city for grad school, Raliegh Washington left the church to work for Promise Keepers as their VP of reconciliation. I kept in touch with several from the church and for my master's thesis, I looked at the different ways that church-based community development work understood the relationship of the non-profit ministry to the work of the church. The Rock of Our Salvation/Circle Urban model was one of the three models I profiled and I interviewed Glenn Kehrein for that thesis a couple of years after Raleigh Washington had left. The Promise Keepers' model of reconciliation, which I talked about with Glenn, and which has been written about frequently as a step, albeit a limited one, toward racial reconciliation, was incomplete.

I say this as an introduction because while I have very positive feelings toward Brenda Salter McNeil, and I have heard her speak multiple times, I do not think I have read any of her books prior to this. As was pointed out in the book, I had classified her as generally in the model of Promise Keepers reconciliation. In other words, make friends, study the bible together, do church-based ministry together, serve the community, but make the reconciliation palatable to white people, and do not enter into political issues or other issues that get sensitive too often. I both think I had misclassified her, and in some ways gotten it right.

That's why I will no longer focus on simply coming together as diverse ethnic groups. Instead, my goal is to activate reconcilers to repair broken systems that are rooted in the evil of racism and resist the kingdom of God. I will not hide behind the mask of niceness or pretend not to be angry in an effort to make White people feel more comfortable with my ministry of reconciliation. I will speak my truth. I will stand in truth, and I will no longer dumb down the truth to help White people feel less guilty. To do so is to be complicit in sanitizing the truth, and I refuse to be complicit in that any longer. Reconciliation happens by repairing broken systems and engaging power, not just by focusing on relationships and feelings.

Or as she said in the early part of the book:

Up until this point, my reconciliation work has been deeply concerned with how my message will be received by white people. I have tried to ensure that offense did not interfere with my message of diversity and harmony. I made my message easy for them to hear. But no more. I have come to realize that over the years, I was used by white-dominant culture, probably not maliciously or intentionally, but unconsciously, to make the conversation about racial reconciliation more palatable, understandable, and acceptable to them.

Esau McCaulley said in an interview (my paraphrase) that the difference between tone in a lot of racial reconciliation discussions is 20 years. You can start trying to be palatable and make people understand what you are trying to say, but after a while, you recognize that regardless of how politely or gently you say something, some White people are still going to take offense and you might as well stop exerting the emotional energy and just say it clearly the first time.

The most encouraging thing that I get out of this book is that Brenda Salter McNeil, a woman that has spent decades working in racial reconciliation work in one way or another has, in her 60s, made a significant change in her method and approach. That change is clear in the book, but also is clear in a number of podcasts like this one with David Swanson or this one on Colored Commentary. I know from their reports, that McNeil has spent years mentoring young White pastors like Daniel Hill and David Swanson. She has a role somewhat like Howard Thurman's that may not be super visible, but it is important toward a shift in the culture of the movement.

A few days ago I tweeted about John Walton saying that Daniel was not a model for how we should live in a post Christian world, but a descriptive (not prescriptive) model for how one person (Daniel) choose to live faithfully in the world. In Becoming Brave, I think that Brenda Salter McNeil follows that model to show descriptively how Ester ‘became brave' and descriptively applies those insights not as rigid model for how we all should also follow Ester, but as a method of teaching discernment that can be applied in different situations.

Dr McNeil explores the story of Ester, but also takes the story of her own life and allows herself to see the parallels as a ways of seeing where God is at work. Becoming Brave is a book of inspiration and encouragement. And it is a book that I recommend highly.

I may come back to this but I was frustrated with it frequently and I just stopped wanting to read it. You can read my note and see some of my dialogue with the book.

Summary: A young adult novel in verse about an 8th grader grappling with his parent's potential divorce, his own love interest, and is grappling with his father's expectations. 

I have grown to enjoy novels in verse. Kwame Alexander has been the author of most of them, but also the memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. I need to seek out some other authors. I mostly listen to these as audiobooks because hearing them read rightly feels like the most authentic choice. But I also try to read enough of them in print to get a sense of the poetic style. I likely should fully read them in print and fully listen to them because there are often hidden aspects of the verse in the print layout. And their audio often has a better orientation to the intention of the author's writing than what I would do for myself.

My wife is teaching a unit on figurative language to 5th graders right now, and she is using the lyrics of songs from Encanto. The students know all the songs, and they can analyze the lyrics differently than they would if they were coming at poetry without any history. At the same time, our understanding of the lyrics is influenced by the movie's visuals. She told me last night that there were multiple arguments about whether one line or another was figurative or literal or hyperbolic or some other characteristic. She would have to bracket the conversations by asking whether the line abstracted from the movie is an idiom or tends to be used in a hyperbolic way, and then ask, “Was there actually any clouds in the sky? Then he said there were no clouds in the sky?” The artists were often very literal in their representation of the lyrics, likely more literal than Lin Manuel Miranda may have intended.

I bring this up because one of the complaints I have heard is that either kids are not interested in poetry or cannot really understand the lyrical depth of poetry. Anyone that had been a teen pouring over lyrics trying to understand exactly what they were saying and what it means knows that this isn't true. Kids do get poetry, or at least they can get poetry if taught well, and it is interesting for them.

Like many of these novels in verse, there are a lot of pages, but the audio is pretty short. This one was 326 pages but only 2 hours and 36 minutes in audiobook. Which shows how much space is on the page. That sparseness is part of what I like. There is often a density to the lines that says more than one thing at a time. That being said, Kwame Alexander is writing this as a middle-grade book to get boys more interested in reading. So you must come into the book expecting a middle-grade novel.

Nick is an eighth-grader who loves soccer. He and his best friend Coby excel at soccer, but their whole lives are not consumed by it. Nick's father is a professor who has written a dictionary of unique words, and part of what Nick hates about the world is that he has to read a few pages every night. He learns despite himself, but he resents the obligation. Nick's mom is a horse trainer who has been unemployed since they moved into the city for his Dad's job. While his Dad may require him to read, his mom requires him to go to an etiquette class, which Nick also resents, but at least it has April, Nick's crush.

April thinks his father is cool because her book club read his dictionary. And eventually, she thinks his mother is cool because she is so good with horses. Nick (and April) come to find that their own families may be more interesting than what they had previously understood.

There is also a librarian who used to be a rap producer that all the kids love. And there are two bullies, a health crisis, and the potential of his parent's divorce. But, as an adult, my largest complaint about most middle-grade books is that they are not in-depth enough. I want more length and plot. But this is the right length for the target audience, and the plot doesn't feel too thin.

Summary: The faith-filled memoir of a woman who rose to fame as one of the Little Rock 9, but who continued throughout her life to work through the ways race has continued to play a role through systems and culture whether or not it was legally mandated. 

I have been a bit in a reading slump. There are many ‘important books' that I want to read, but I don't have a lot of motivation to actually read them. I don't want to blame the global pandemic overly, but over the past three months, my kids have been at home more than they have been at school, both because of school vacations, school closures, and quarantining because of covid exposure. My traditional method of resolving reading slumps is to change genres. Fiction or story-based history or biography often is the cure I need to re-invigorate my desire to read again.

I Will Not Fear is a book I picked up years ago when it was on sale but never read. Last fall, I noticed that it was part of Audible Plus (their program of including back catalog books for free as part of membership). But it wasn't until January that I actually picked the book as a follow-up to the John Lewis biography. Melba Beals is not a household name. But many of us have a rough understanding of the Little Rock Nine, the nine high schoolers that integrated Little Rock Central High School. Initially, the state national guard was deployed by the Governor to block the Black students from the school entrance on the first day. A mob gathered to protest the integration harassed the students. The description of the threatened rape and lynching of the students and Melba and her mother being literally chased through the streets is harrowing.

Summary: Racism harms not just racial minorities but the country as a whole. Thinking of race as a zero-sum game prevents changes that would help everyone.

The Sum of Us plays on the zero-sum game many think our modern racial reality is limited to. A few days ago on Twitter, I saw a comment on a review of the book Reparations by Kwon and Thompson. The comments said that expansion of minority students into high-quality colleges meant that he had not gotten into the school he wanted. I responded that very few White students had not gotten into a college solely because of racial preferences. The response back was a classic zero-sum game response, “There are a limited number of students in universities. If some of them are selected based on race, then someone was denied entry.” First, there is not a limited number of students in universities. If there is a greater demand for university admissions, more seats will be opened up. But second, even now, where many colleges and universities have pledged to work for more diversity in admissions, there are still influences that prioritize white students, like in the case of legacy admissions being the real reason that more Asians were not being accepted into Harvard, not policies to attempt to admit more underserved racial minorities (as is discussed here and here).

What most interested me about why Heather McGhee started researching this book how much it made sense of political gridlock. When she was on staff and then the head of a policy think tank in Washington DC, McGhee advocated policies that would help many people in the US. But she ran into opposition that was willing to vote against policies because of concerns that the policies would help minorities too much. Simply making intellectual policy arguments and financial return arguments on investment did not move the deep-seated bias that many are not aware are moving them. This type of idea comes up frequently in economic psychology (The Righteous Mind or Predictably Irrational). Still, I am also interested in this for issues around both race and spiritual direction. How do we help people see race more clearly, or how do we help people see deeper emotional issues instead of the surface-level intellectual issues around their faith and practice.

Heather McGhee has a central metaphor, the many municipal pools built in the 1920-40s across the country but then were closed and often removed rather than allow integration. Communities were worse off, not just because of the lack of a community pool, but because there was a willingness to destroy a part of a community infrastructure that harmed everyone rather than allowing Black community members to share in the pool. What McGhee is reporting matches what Kevin Kruse reported in White Flight about racial attitudes of White Atlantans. According to Kruse, when a space or activity was integrated, the common assumption of White people was not that this space is not an integrated park or school or public transportation or community, but that it became a Black-only park or school or public transportation or community. Kruse suggests that this is what gave rise to the rise of libertarian opposition to common good spending. McGhee is approaching from a different perspective.

McGhee is looking at the harms to White communities as a result of racism. The model that McGhee is using works in a similar way across many social spheres. Racism exists; it harms racial minorities, especially Black citizens. That harm is impossible to limit only to racial minorities because of ‘color blind' policies. So those policies which originally harmed Black and other communities by explicit or implicit intent, not also start harming White communities, usually the lowest economic groups first and then working up the economic ladder.

The recent changes to voting laws in Flordia are an example. Changes that are described as being for “election security” disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic communities. But because of racial demographics, those changes do not only impact racial minorities. In Flordia, restrictions on mail-in ballots and early voting will also significantly impact elderly populations, which are disproportionally  White voters. In the chapter on housing and the 2007-08 financial crisis centered around sub-prime loans, mortgage brokers and housing refinancing groups targeted low-income and minority populations for loans, often unethically stripping value from the homeowners through hidden fees or outright fraud. As McGhee illustrates, targeting minority communities first, communities that overwhelmingly White executives and staff rationalize as less than, which allows those staff and executives to get used to dehumanizing their clients and then to expand those activities beyond the originally targeted minorities communities. Yet, the examples of outright fraud by mortgage lenders and staff are rarely prosecuted criminally, even though the financial losses to the community and the country are significant, larger by magnitudes than traditional robbery and theft.

McGhee walks through many policy areas, housing, unions, and other types of organizing, voting and other political issues, healthcare, criminal justice, and more. The pattern is largely the same; the continued existence of racism separates communities, allowing for the exploitation of the poor and resistance to common good spending and policy proposals. The early chapters are incredibly depressing. The history of exploration and abuse of the poor and racially discriminated is a history that we need to understand. But the end of the book is largely upbeat and hopeful. Heather McGhee thinks that there is potential for working not only to end the impacts of racism, but for cross-racial organizing and policy proposals to bring about common good outcomes that would make the world better for everyone.

The question really comes down to, “can we stop approaching the world as a zero-sum game and work for ends that are better for everyone?”

I did not know how to fit this quote directly, but I think it is a perfect example of how political and economic systems in the US work. “Dog Whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale. Stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”

I am going to post a review of this on my blog later in the same blog post with my review of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Blog is at http://MrShields.com

Summary: A lenten devotional based on the testimony of people that escaped slavery. 

There has been a slow recovery of the practice of Lent in parts of the Protestant world that has not traditionally celebrated the liturgical year over the past couple of decades. I want to commend three devotionals that I have used, although I have not read all of any of them yet. Each of them is a 40-day devotional.

Lent is a season of reflection and preparation for Easter. Traditionally, it is a period that includes fasting, repentance, prayer, and penance. Each of these devotionals is focused on knowing the history of the US, particularly the history of Black oppression, slavery, and the cultural embrace of racial hierarchy, which posits that those with lighter colors of skin are inherently superior to those with darker colors of skin. The purpose of these is not guilt, but awareness of. history for the purpose of repair and reconciliation. Without a shared historical story, there cannot be a shared future story. Each of these has slightly different focuses.

The newest is the Lent of Liberation, which was released a couple of weeks ago. The Lent of Liberation has a basic format of a quotation from slave narrative, usually about 3/4 of a page, a related biblical quotation, and then about 1-2 pages of reflection on the biblical passage and the historical reality of slavery and oppression. The focus of Lent of Liberation is to draw attention to the African Decendents of Slavery (ADOS) and the continued impact of slavery on the present world as well as the ways that Christianity is oriented toward reconciliation and the Imago Dei (image of God) within all people and how historic Christianity has not practiced that fully. The author Cheri Mills is a church administrator, founder of the 1 Voice Prayer Movement, and prayer director at Simmons College of Kentucky, an HBCU.

Last year I read most of Were You There?: Lenten Reflections on the Spirituals. Luke Powery is the chaplain of Duke Divinity School and has several similar books of devotionals based on African American church experience. Each devotional revolves around a spiritual, although many of them are less well known. I frequently, although not every time, was able to look up on youtube or other places to get audio or video performance of the spiritual which did help to place the spiritual in context. Some of the devotionals were more about the content, some were more about a memory of the spiritual in the life of Rev Dr. Powery.

The third devotional is the Repentance Project. The Repentance Project was created three or four years ago, “to encourage racial healing by communicating the systemic legacies of slavery, building relationships, and creating opportunities—through formation, repentance, and repair—for a just future.” There are two Lenten devotionals that are offered through the Repentance Project, An American Lament and An American Lent. These are written by a variety of people, from a mix of racial, ethnic and denominational backgrounds. But with an explicit focus on lamenting the history of racism and oppression in the US and trying to raise awareness for the long term hope of change and reconciliation in the church.

I am posting this a week in advance of the start of Lent to give you time to order one of these and to make a plan for lent.

Lent of Liberation: Confronting the Legacy of American Slavery by Cheri Mills Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

Were You There?: Lenten Reflections on the Spirituals by Luke Powery Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

Summary: An exploration of the relationship between relational, emotional, and spiritual health and being Black in America.

It has been a week or so since I finished Permission to be Black. I have been trying to figure out how to write this review in a helpful way. I am a white guy in my late 40s; I did not grow up listening to Jay-Z; this book wasn't written to or for me. I did, however, really enjoy the book, and I think it is constructive.

Part of the reality of grappling with a racialized existence from the majority culture is that as I strive to diversify my reading, there can be a difference between reading widely and ‘the white gaze.' In reading widely, sometimes I can perpetuate my own prior biases instead of confronting them. (As I wrote about in this article at Christ and Pop Culture magazine.) I have been intentionally diversifying my reading for years. While I do not claim perfection, I think I am doing better and understanding what is for me, what is not, and how to figure out how to read something for benefit when it is not centered on my white experience. In writing this post, I struggle with talking about a book that can feed into white superiority if read wrongly.

A reason that is frequently cited for not liking the current direction of discussing race Ibham Kendi and others start with the assumption that racial disparities are wholly the result of racial discrimination. That assertion on its face seems fairly uncontraversial. But it was the central point of a recent review on the Gospel Coalition website of Kendi's book How to be Antiracist. The reviewer and many commenters disputed the possibility that all racial disparities could or should be thought of as the result of racial discrimination. Their claim seems to be that the assumption that racial disparity is the result of racial discrimination disallows data that contradicts that point and removes responsibility for how to respond to discrimination from racially discriminated communities.

I think both parts of that are easy to respond to. What is required is pushing the view of the data further back. For instance, a commenter on a friend's Facebook page blamed the higher average property tax rates Black homeowners in the US pay on the local governments and the Black and other minority cultures that allow those local governments to charge those higher tax rates. I would counter that this blames the victim of the higher tax rates (and the local government) instead of looking at the US's history of housing. The history of housing includes white flight, creating new municipalities without the historic debt of the older central cities and suburbs, which are often strapped with pension and other debt that cities incurred before white flight. That is one small example of not going back to the root causes of disparity, which I believe is what Kendi is advocating in saying that racial disparity is the result of racial discrimination. The second part of the claim is that discriminated communities have a moral and ethical responsibility to respond well to discrimination. And while I do not want to dispute that we all have a responsibility for our own behavior, there is often no similar request for oppressing communities to respond well with appropriate reparations for the oppression.

I have all of this too-long introduction because Permission to be Black is a call to seek healing from the pain and trauma of generational discrimination. Thomason is not citing a deficient Black culture, as some who believe in white superiority would posit, but racial discrimination and its widespread impact. But I want to affirm that I do not believe that there is a moral, ethical, cultural, or social deficiency within the Black community. Still, there is a greater level of trauma, including generational trauma, because racial discrimination has been perpetuated for generations.

The thrust of Permission to be Black is simple. AD Thomason tells the story of his own life, one that has personal and generational trauma, and his own work toward healing and wholeness. The overwhelming message is that he wants to be the one that does the work to move toward healing and wholeness because he wants to break generational cycles so that his current relationships and his children and community's future relationships will not perpetuate the harm inflicted upon them by earlier generations of brutal white supremacy.

I generally am not a fan of self-help books, but Permission to be Black is the type of self-help book that I gratefully embrace because it does not pretend that five simple steps will solve everyone's problems. Thomason uses Cheat Codes, which are pointers or shortcuts that Thomason points out as visions of how to accomplish healing or what healthy relationships can look like. He is not suggesting that the reader, myself included, can skip steps to healing, but that he is hoping that he can inspire the reader to put in the work to enjoy the fruit of the healing.

Permission to be Black is primarily oriented toward men, and some of that is just pointing out toxic masculinity and patriarchy that cuts across racial lines. The idea that men should repress emotion is widespread and harmful regardless of their racial background. Still, there is an additional layer of emotional repression coupled with discriminatory tropes like the angry black man. The adage ‘hurt people, hurt people' is true. As I have seen processing of people around me talk about Kirk Franklin's call with his son and other examples of generational harm, I am really encouraged by Thomason and others I know personally striving to break those generational cycles.

A good self-help book inspires and gives tools to work toward becoming a better self. A Christian chooses to do work to become a better self, not just because that moves us toward becoming the person that God wants us to be, but because we love those around us, and being a better self, is part of what it means to love those around us well. I am far from where I want to be as a man, husband, and father. But I want to be better, and I think that I can see the fruit of the work that I have been doing over the past 6-8 years. But there is still more work to be done, and I was really encouraged by reading Permission to be Black, and I think it has helped give me both inspiration and direction on how to proceed.

strong>Summary: A exploration of John Lewis' life, focusing primarily on his time in SNCC and before. 

I know Jon Meacham is a well-known biographer, but as someone that really likes biography, I have not read any of Meacham's other books. This made me a bit reluctant to pick up this book on John Lewis. Because I was interested in John Lewis, and because the only books I have read are the excellent March graphic novel biographies and because my library had this on audiobook, I picked it up anyway. Because His Truth is Marching On is primarily about John Lewis' early years, I still want to find a more full-length biography and read some of Lewis' own books.

The biography feature that I most appreciate is the focus on Lewis' Christian faith as a factor in his civil rights work. Obviously, it is not the only factor, but I think it is an under-appreciated factor in many civil rights leaders. It is also striking to realize how young John Lewis and Stokley Carmichael, and many other civil rights leaders were. John Lewis was 26 when he was voted out as the chair of SNCC. He obviously had a long career after that point, but he was so young to have accomplished as much as he did by that time.

When I completed the book, I watched the documentary on John Lewis, Good Trouble. The documentary was more about his recent years and reflection, and so was a perfect supplement to His Truth is Marching On. And I think that the documentary's visuals (and the graphic novel trilogy March) are crucial to understanding the civil rights era. It is easy to read about the violence and not fully understand the violence. That is particularly important when understanding Lewis' commitment to non-violence, not just as a strategic method but also as a philosophical and religious method.

The narration in the audiobook was excellent. I generally do not like narrators that ‘do voice' of historical characters, but this was so well done and accurate to the accents and voices that it really added to the narration instead of distracting from it.

this is a book for class and I am not sure if I am going to write a full post on it or not. I will do that after the class if I do. This is a light biography, one designed for inspiration. I like reading biographies like that because I want to be inspired and not everything has to be heavy. That being said, Thea Bowman is a fascinating character and I would like to read a more thorough biography. It is not that this left details out, but that it wasn't as much depth to her thought as I would have liked.

I do find it interesting that as a nun, she was a professor of preaching and designed a pastoral preparation program that was particularly designed for training priests (mostly white) to work in black Catholic parishes. And she did this in the 1980s.

I am also fascinated that she is approximately the same age as John Perkins and that they grew up less than an hour apart and both came back to Mississippi after time away (in Wisconson and Washington DC for Bowman and California for Perkins) to work in very practical ways with the Black community and against the racism of MS in the 1960-70s. Perkins was in Mendenhall and Jackson and Bowman was in Canton and Jackson. And I can't imagine that they didn't have some interaction at some point. John Perkins is still living, although in his 90s now and Thea Bowman died of cancer in 1990.

Summary: A brief exploration of Jesuit spirituality 

No regular readers of my reviews will likely miss the fact that I have spent the past couple of years studying to become a spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition. I intentionally choose a Catholic program because I have come to understand that I tend to learn in a dialectical approach. I want to have traditions in dialogue. My undergrad was an evangelical college, my seminary was predominately a mainline protestant school and my spiritual direction program was at a Jesuit college. Part of what is helpful about this approach is that I bring resources from outside of the tradition for conversation with the tradition. What can be difficult is getting enough of an understanding of the new to understand it on its own terms and not as a caricature from previous experience.

This dialectical approach fits well with the focus on Contemplatives In Action. Barry and Doherty focus on the tensions that they suggest form Jesuit spirituality, the both/and that inherently leads to tensions that some always will want to calm. The title takes on the first tension, the tradition of Catholic orders to be either contemplative or action-oriented. Ignatius and later Jesuits strongly resisted the call to pray through the hours as almost all other orders did. Ignatius thought that long hours of prayer, while helpful, would keep the Jesuits from their work with the people, the primary focus. But the tension with that action orientation is that Jesuits are most known for giving the Spiritual Exercises (a highly contemplative approach to spiritual direction) and Christian education.

Other tensions include attention to personal experience and emotion with what Ignatius calls dispassion. In Ignatius' use, this is not dispassion as in uncaring or negligence, but dispassion as in getting to the point where you are willing to accept any of multiple options that God may be calling you toward. Jesuits have a reputation for being overly analytic and dispassionate in the first, negative sense, but that is contrary to Ignatius' intent. “Jesuit spirituality is distinguished from other spiritualities by this personal attention to feelings, desires, dreams, hopes, and thoughts.” It is only through that attention that the “defining characteristic of Jesuit spirituality,” Ignatius' Discernment of the Spirits, can really be practiced.

Although Contemplatives in Action is very brief, it gives a lot of background on the controversial aspects of Jesuit history. I wish I had read it toward the beginning of my program instead of nearly at the end. It provided a helpful counterpoint to an article I had assigned for class. Parmananda Divakar argues that Ignatius' primary focus was loyalty to Christ (as an individual) while later Jesuits oriented toward obedience of the group. Barry and Doherty agree that the tension between obedience and sole loyalty to Christ is a hallmark of Jesuit history, but point out that Ignatius was largely responsible, not later Jesuits.

Rule 13 [of the Society of Jesus Constitution] states: “To maintain a right mind in all things we must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black, if the hierarchical Church so stipulates”

 Doherty and Barry continually grapple with how Ignatius could on the one hand teach discernment of the spirits, which relies significantly on individual awareness of feelings and emotion while requiring absolute obedience even to the extent of denying the experiential reality that was right before them. “What is surprising is that Ignatius should also place such emphasis on individual discernment, and on learning from experience, and then engage in actions that seem to run counter to his own thinking on obedience.”

Summary: Some lessons need to be experientially learned. 

It would be wonderful if there were some curriculum, or better yet, some magic trick, where everyone would completely learn wisdom. But that is not how wisdom or life work. Many lessons, as frustrating as it is to many parents, have to be experienced.

Carl McColman has had a lot of experiences. And with himself as the primary subject, he recounts how even when he theoretically could see the wisdom in the distance, he still often had to experientially learn before he was able to start to put these lessons into practice.

The book opens with his introduction to a 7-year-old girl that would become his stepdaughter. She was significantly disabled from a stroke and other congenital disabilities. McColman had to learn how to be a husband and father experientially. Some mistakenly suggest that things like marriage or parenting are the only ways to learn maturity. McColman doesn't do that, but he does show how those roles did force him to think differently about his life and how to reorient his priorities.

The lessons of this book all concern issues that McColman had to learn, but they are not tightly connected. They are more oriented around his life than a strict structure. Some of the lessons are about spiritual practices like silence, or how emotional and intellectual development works, or on Christian relationships with other Christians or with other faiths completely. If I have a complaint, it is that I didn't think the chapters tied together all that well. But that is a pretty minor complaint because that isn't really what the book is about. The book is about the fact that many lessons that we need to learn are not easily taught in a book. We need to be open to learning through experience. And what we learn through our experiences may not be exactly what others are learning through their experiences. (That is part of why as Christians, we need the whole body of Christ.)

Right now, the book is on sale for $2.99 on kindle. That is probably only through the end of this month, a couple of days from now. But if you like reading about spiritual practices and reflecting on your faith by reflecting on your life events' shape, I think this is a beneficial book.

Summary: An exploration of theological education as spiritual formation emphasizing its need to create belonging and explore how it has historically promoted white male normativity and individualism.

I have read several articles and a couple of books by Dr. Willie James Jennings, but I was not sure this book was really for me. On its face, it is a book about theological education. I am not in theological education, and I do not anticipate ever being a professor or teacher. I decided to finally pick it up after someone on Twitter talked about it as a discussion of spiritual formation, whether in or outside the academy. I am interested in spiritual formation. I commend listening to Dr. Jennings' interview with Tyler Burns on Pass the Mic podcast or Wabash Center's Dialogue on Teaching Podcast, which have very different interviews but are helpful to get at what the book is doing.

Jennings posits that Western education in general, but theological education has a model that emphasizes three virtue: possession, control, and mastery. These three virtues are generally assumed to be ‘masculine' virtues, and as Jennings discussed in his previous book, Christian Imagination, these virtues are also identified with the colonization project. Because we are an individualized culture, these values are about asserting the individual as the one who is master and self-sufficient. To counter this image of the self-sufficient master of educational knowledge, Jennings takes the image of Jesus, who gathers together many who would not choose to be together if it were not for the desire of all of them to be near Jesus. Jennings' corrected imagination rooted in Jesus' ability to gather people together suggests that the point of theological education in particular, but western education in general, should be rooted in belonging, not exclusion, hence his subtitle, An Education in Belonging.

Part of what Jennings is addressing here is that the soul is not formed primarily through information. We are not, as James KA Smith suggests, ‘Brains on a stick'. Theological education, while it does include information, must have as a primary focus spiritual formation. And that spiritual formation, because it is a significant aspect of theological educators' work must be concerned not only with the theological education of its students but also of its faculty and staff and the institutional aspects of its community.

Like many, this is a book that I should read again.  Spiritual formation matters. But so do the institutions that help form the pastors that lead the congregations that spiritually form the future generations. What keeps being emphasized in my reading on racial issues is how long these issues stick around. Again, my grandfather was born a year before Harriet Tubman died.  She escaped slavery in 1849 but lived until 1913. My grandfather, born in 1912 lived until 2005. If I, not yet 50, have a grandparent that overlapped with people that were adults in slavery, it is likely that there are ongoing implications for historic racial realities. My mother was born three weeks after Ruby Bridges. The school my mother would have gone to for kindergarten did not integrate until the year before I was born. Ruby Bridges and others of her generation that were the first to go to integrated schools are just now starting to retire. Our senior seminary professors, who are teaching the new generation of pastors were likely early in the integration process and some probably did not go to integrated schools. It would be odd to think that all theological education has been ‘fixed' to solve the historical issues within those that are currently teaching.

My seminary education included a systemic theology professor that was a liberation theologian. But there are not a few seminaries that have not done much if any work to addresses their curriculum. It is only a couple of years ago that Masters Seminary made news because it was possible to have gone the whole way through without having a book assigned by any authors that were not White. And I think that is more common than many believe. I am in a 2.5-year part-time graduate-level certificate program. Up until this point the only book I have been assigned that by a non-White author is a Brazilian theologian writing about the Lord's Prayer in an elective class. I am planning on taking a class about Mary Shawn Copeland, again an elective, and presumably, we will read at least part of one of her books. But that is probably 2-3 books out of all of the books I have been assigned over the past 2 years. The problem of theological formation orienting toward white experience as normative is still a very present problem.

Summary: A wonderful memoir of a philosopher that has attempted to live his Christian life well. 

My reading often goes in trends; I have gone back to reading biographies and memoirs right now. I have often complained about the distortions of hagiography, the old saint stories that were often stripped of the real humanity of the subjects to create an exemplar that we can follow. Of course, there is value in seeing the stories of our elders and the saints who have come before us. But I also think there is real value in seeing the person's full humanity because the life of the Christian is not perfection. Memoirs are notorious for only presenting part of the story in ways that serve the author. That will always be a danger, but memoirs also can reveal internal realities that are difficult for biographies to handle. That is why I want to read Eugene Peterson's memoir, the Pastor, and his biography, A Burning in My Bones, because of the distance of the biography and the intimateness of the memoir complement one another. But most people will not have biographers.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is not a household name. He is a philosopher who taught for 30 years at Calvin before moving to Yale and various other part-time positions before retiring. He is well enough known and important enough in the philosophy world to justify a Wikipedia page, but as a non-philosopher, I probably would not know of him except through his book on grief, Lament for a Son. Lament for a Son is a classic book on grief, written in the wake of the death of his son Eric in a climbing accident when he was 25. Eric lived in Europe and near the end of his Ph.D. work, with his younger brother on his way to stay with him for the summer when he passed away. The section of In This World of Wonders about Eric's death and the book Lament for a Son was such a good example of the memoir's strength. Wolterstorff admits errors and shortcomings and his blindness, because of grief, to the needs of those around him. But he also reflects well from a distance on how that time has impacted him and his work from that time.

Much of the value of In This World of Wonders is the story of how Wolterstorff's academic work was related to his life story. The repeated discussion of the interaction of art and craft is related to his father's art (pen drawing) and the craft of his woodworking. The role of justice and love is related to his work's real-world experience of Apartheid, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other areas of injustice. Wolterstorff's work on the liturgy was related to his work in the local church. His work on the philosophy of education is related to his own work at the college level in understanding the curriculum of the liberal arts and his work in private Christian schooling for younger students. Throughout the book,

Wolterstorff's explanations of his work and the why behind the books, articles, and lectures have made me want to read a significant amount of his writing. It is unlikely that I will ever really read most of it, but memoirists that make me want to read their work are doing their job. I have started his Justice and Love, and it is a bit slow going. I do not have a very good background in philosophy. It is one of the areas of weakness I have tried to work on, but it is also an area where I have some real blocks in understanding.  I alternated between the audiobook and kindle book for In This World of Wonders. Both were well done. This is a book that I may read again in a few years because I really do love the integration of Christian faith and broader life, and I think that the modeling of that here was very encouraging.

Summary: Karen Swallow Prior writes a helpful introduction and footnotes throughout the book to assist the modern reader. 

One of the things that I have learned in reading old books is that culture and styles change, and modern readers often need assistance to understand the nuances of old art. It is not that we can't get something out of old art on our own, but having a guide helps increase art appreciation. I read Frankenstein first about 10 years ago. I was completely unprepared for the actual story because of how far the movie adaptations have come from the original. One of the podcasts that I enjoy, Persuasion, did a book club reading of Frankenstein using the edition of the book that has the introduction from Karen Swallow Prior. I have enjoyed Prior's writing and have followed her on Twitter for years, so I decided to go ahead and pick up the new edition and read it along with them. (The podcast ends with an episode with Karen Swallow Prior.)

Karen Swallow Prior has a series of classics, including Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Sense and Sensibility, and several more books that will be released next year. I read this on kindle as I tend to do, and I picked it up when it was on sale. But I have heard that the print editions are nice cloth-bound editions that are well designed. The introduction was helpful. I had no idea that Shelley was so young, 17, when she wrote the book. Nor that she had already been pregnant and lost a child or traveled all over Europe with her scoundrel of an (eventual) husband Percy Shelley already.

The biography of Shelley does help understand the novel. Her mother died soon after childbirth, but her mother was a well known proto-feminist and her father a very well known anarchist. Mary and her step-sister left with Percy Shelley on a European tour when Mary was about 16. Percy was married but openly flouted sexual mores and Mary was pregnant when she returned. Although Mary's father had written against marriage and Percy seemed to be the embodiment of her father's anarchist ideals, her father disapproved of the relationship. Percy was the father of Mary's first child in 1815, but also the father of a son by his wife (1814) and apparently sleeping with Mary's step sister, Claire Clairmont, only 8 months younger than Mary, the daughter of her father's wife from a previous marriage. Claire also became pregnant in 1816, although the father is presumed to be Lord Byron. Percy's wife committed suicide and the Mary and Percy married in late 1816 in an attempt to become respectable enough that Percy would be given custody of his two children. He was deemed unfit and the children were placed with a local clergy family.

It was on another Europen tour earlier in 1816 with Percy and Lord Byron where they spent time in Geneva Switzerland that Mary conceived of the story and started writing Frankenstein. It was published in 1818, initially anonymously. Percy continued to be both controlling and open and about his affairs. From 1815 until 1818 all three of the couple's children died in infancy and the frequent moving and lack of care and stability of Percy likely contributed (although that era had a very high infant mortality rate.) In 1819, Mary's only surviving child was born. A fifth pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in 1822, not long before Percy died in a drowning accident. Mary never remarried. The couple had moved so frequently in part because they were always short of money and trying to stay away from creditors and to keep anyone from taking away their children because they were deemed immoral and unfit parents.

There were multiple editions of Frankenstein and Mary wrote other less well-known books and worked to edit and publish Percy's writing. Mary was broke and depended on her writing for income. Percy's father offered to adopt the surviving child, but only if Mary cut off contact, which she refused to do. Eventually, Percy's father did agree to support Mary and his grandson, but the income was inadequate and the relationship was tense. Eventually, her son, also named Percy, married and Mary lived with them until her death at the young age of 53.

All of that biographical detail is tragic, but the themes of Frankenstein are reflected in her life story, even though the story was written while she was very young. Frankenstein, who is the creator of the monster, not the monster, was engaged to his cousin Elizabeth. They had grown up together because she was an orphan. But throughout the book even though she is in the story, she is on the side of the story and Frankenstein never seems to pay any attention to her own needs. Elizabeth is killed on their wedding night by the monster in revenge for Frankenstein not creating a wife for the monster, but like much of the rest of the book, Frankenstein is primarily concerned with his own thoughts and feelings and not anyone else. I understand people that are frustrated with the book for how much Frankenstein mopes around and hides his role in the creation of the monster and the death of all of those around him. And I understand how people come to the book assuming it is going to be a different type of book. But I do think that Mary Shelley wrote a masterful story. Its structure is fascinating. And I think she keeps all of the characters from being either too perfect or solely victims or monsters.

There is clear sexism to the Romantic free love ethos of Percy and Lord Byron and others. Mary was very young and below the age of consent when they first met. They stayed together, but that was only because Mary did not leave when Percy primarily focused on other women. As much as there is brilliance in Frankenstein, the behavior and attitude of the protagonist is offputting. But the book is still worth reading.

Frankenstein: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition

This was assigned for class. This is not a book you read through. It is designed as an instruction manual for people that are giving the exercises. I mostly think I missed a lot because I am not experiencing it.

I am going to try do to a modified version of the exercises sometime in the next year.

Summary: Most extensive biography of Howard Thurman to date. 

I have been on a project to understand Howard Thurman over the past several years. I have read two collections of his sermons, his autobiography, a shorter religious biography, and his Jesus and the Disinherited twice. Peter Eisenstadt is well qualified to write this biography. He has an earlier book on Thurman's trip to India and meeting Gandhi and, with Walter Fluker, is the editor of the Papers of Howard Thruman project. They have released five volumes of Thurman's papers, and the second volume of his sermons will release next month. I am slowly working through the first book of his sermons from that collection.

Howard Thurman is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Black history that many people have not heard of. Thurman was born in 1899. His grandmother, who played an important role in raising Thurman, had been enslaved. Thurman was extraordinary, a mystic, called one of the best preachers of the 20th century by Time Magazine in the 1950s, an academic, a popularizer of non-violence, and a mentor and spiritual director to many. One of the reasons that many do not know of Thurman is that he resisted public leadership within the civil rights movement. Thurman was at Morehouse with MLK Sr, and his wife Sue Bailey Thurman was roommates at Spellman with Alberta Williams King. Similar to his role as mentor to MLK, much of his most influential work was private mentoring and spiritual direction to students or friends.

Part of what Eisenstadt, and Paul Harvey in the earlier biography, made clear is that Thurman did not believe he was successful in any of his major projects. Thurman co-started one of the first intentionally interracial churches in the US in San Francisco in 1944. After nine years, he hit a frustration point and went to Boston University as the Dean of the Chapel and a professor. At Boston University, he was able to develop a course in mysticism that was influential but was frustrated by the bureaucracy of the university and his inability to turn the chapel into the interracial and interreligious fellowship he desired to. The 15 years after Thurman's retirement continued his writing and allowed him to mentor many, including Jessie Jackson and Derrick Bell, and many others.

Against the Hounds of Hell gave much more nuance and detail to Thurman's life than any of the previous books on Thurman I have read. While I think it is the best biography of Thurman I have read, it is also long, so I am not sure I would use it as a starting point. But the discussion of Thurman's books and the progression of his thinking over time was constructive in contextualizing Thruman over time.

I am a Christian fiction skeptic. It is not that I don't think there are good Christian fiction novels, but experience suggests that those Christian novels that are good, are likely not being published, or not being published by Christian publishers. But I know I have a bias. When I first heard of the concept of Reading Evangelicals, I was hopeful for a guide that might help me be less cynical about an area of the Christian world that I had almost entirely stopped reading ten years or so ago.

Daniel Sillman is very ambitious with Reading Evangelicals. He uses these five books, Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack, to provide not just an exploration of the novels but of Evangelicalism. The meaning of Evangelicalism is hotly debated. There have been dozens of books debating the meaning and value of the term over the past ten years. Broadly, there are three main ways that Evangelical is defined. One way is a theological definition like the National Association of Evangelicals version or Bebbington's Quadrangle. The main objection to these is that this is not how many people use the term. The second way that Evangelical is used is as a political identity that roughly means conservative, White republican who cares about abortion, gay marriage, and who was likely to have voted for Trump twice. The objection to this usage is that there is a significant subgroup that does not fall into this category, either because roughly 1/3 of theological Evangelicals in the US are non-White, or that even those that are White, approximately 20-25% do not identify through political means or regularly vote democrat. In addition, this is a very US-centric definition, and many self-identified Evangelicals (using the political definition) rarely, if ever, attend church. The third primary definition of Evangelical is as a consumer definition. This is primarily the definition that Kristen Du Mez uses in Jesus and John Wayne. Even though it isn't the primary definition here, a significant thread of Reading Evangelicals is about the rise and fall of the Christian books store and publishing industry, contributing to the consumeristic definition of Evangelical.

Love Comes Softly was the first novel that could be called a Christian Romance novel. It was published in 1979 at the start of the growth of local Christian books stores. It was one of the first novels written directly for an Evangelical audience and published by Evangelical presses. I read Love Comes Softly early. Probably as a pre-teen or early teen. As one of the quotes from the book said, I read it because my mom owned them all, and the church library stocked them. There were not a lot of Christian novels that I had access to in the mid-1980s. While Stillman does read the novels closely and discuss themes and the books themselves, the context is to the novels is what I find most helpful. Janet Oke was responding to a turn toward not just explicit sex but sexualized violence in the secular romance novel market in the late 1970s. A common trope at the time was that the protagonist would be kidnapped and/or raped, often more than once, and then she would eventually fall in love with her rapist. Before Love Comes Softly, Christian publishers almost entirely published non-fiction, often academic-leaning books targeted toward pastors and bibles. The rise of local Christian books stores needed products to sell, and novels filled a niche. In addition, the rise of the local Christian book store was necessarily ecumenical in orientation. Many Christian publishers were denominationally rooted, and they needed ways to sell outside of their narrow constituencies without alienating them. Love Comes Softly was a successful proof of concept that Christians would buy novels and that fiction could sell.

This Present Darkness is where politics and fear start to enter the picture. Frank Peretti started as an assistant pastor in an Assembly of God church that his father pastored, but by 1983 he quit the pastorate and started working at a factory. Peretti was influenced both by the storytelling of Stephen King and the cultural commentary and theology of Francis Schaeffer. Crossway Books was looking for a novel that would put into practice the theology of Francis Schaeffer, who Crossway had published. Two years after Shaeffer's death, in 1986, Crossway published This Present Darkness. It hardly sold until Amy Grant was sent a copy, and she started talking about it in her concerts. After selling 4200 books the first year, it sold approximately 750,000 copies in the first two years after Amy Grant's promotion. The sequel had 400,000 preorders in 1989. This Present Darkness was built on the early culture war ethos of the Moral Majority and the concerns about ritual child abuse, secular humanism, and the New Age that was throughout the culture at the time.

Part of the value of Reading Evangelicals is that Stillman is not interested in easy complaints about the quality or purpose of the books but interested in understanding the context, the deeper reasons that the books resonated, and the cultural shifts within evangelicalism that marked the rise and fall of the publishing industry. I remember reading This Present Darkness in the middle of high school and the increase in attention to spiritual warfare. Even in my conservative mainline Christian experience, I remember engagement after This Present Darkness with people concerned about attacks by demons and possession. It is easy to be cynical about the ways that white Evangelical culture was presented as under attack in books like This Present Darkness, or about the disbelief of sexual abuse or the casual racist references there, but this history is helpful in reading our recent history in books like Jesus and John Wayne or The Myth of Colorblind Christians.

I am not going to detail the discussion of the last three books in the same way, but each book played a role in the rise and then the downfall of Christian publishing and local Christian book stores. Each book has earned a place in helping to define what it means to be an Evangelical, both by contributing to the theological understanding of the term and by creating a culture that allowed for a communal experience of Christianity that many understand as Evangelical. Daniel Stillman is the news director at Christianity Today. He is intimately familiar with the culture and history, and reality of Evangelicalism. And Reading Evangelicals was both expertly written and deeply informative with a type of care that is difficult to do. I want to read or re-read all of these books again. But I also have a renewed sense of the nuance of the Evangelical story that, even though I experienced it, requires a guide to see into that experience well.

This is not a cheap book on kindle or hardcover. I listened to the audiobook, which for me as a member of Audible was the cheapest method. Trevor Thompson, who narrates many Christian books and who I often think of as Eugene Peterson, CS Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, James KA Smith, Mark Noll, John Fea, and more, did a fine job. There were a couple of mispronounced words as is not uncommon, but the narration was well done.

I read this for class. There is some real good here, but also it is a bit dated.

These are pieces of discussion posts I wrote for class instead of a review

The Art of Christian Listening starts with exploring the concept of the sacrament and the helper as a sacrament. I wonder at using the word sacrament when Hart, on page 6, suggests that incarnation and sacrament are roughly equivalent ideas. Hart develops the idea of helper as sacrament over a couple of chapters, but he does it as I would typically think the word incarnation/incarnational. When, on page 11, Hart references the helper as “embody[ing] the presence of Christ,” I understand there is likely a distinction there in Catholic theology that I may be ill equipped to understand the nuance of.

However, my Baptist background frequently has taught that we are, as the church, the incarnational reality of Christ on earth today, roughly similar to how I understand Hart to be using sacramental language. However, the continuation of that quote on page 11 is “yet may lack many of the virtues of Christ.” That tension of being a representative of Christ but not having the virtues of Christ captures the responsibility and trepidation that I feel like I need to keep ever in front of me, especially as we talk about discernment.

This does raise one more issue in these chapters. Helper tends to mean ‘assistant' and lower status or unskilled laborer in English. In some sense, that gets at our servant status in relationship to God (although the Hebrew term is translated into English as helper frequently references God.) The question I have of the helper concept is whether this is solidarity in the sense of equality and a lack of hierarchy, as is referenced in chapter 4. Or if it is a helper, as in helping professions like medicine, education, or social work where the ‘helper' is the skilled person in the relationship, as the ‘director' portion of Spiritual Direction suggests. The Camus quote on page 17 suggests solidarity in the sense that Shawn Copeland's book Enfleshing Freedom advocates for Christians standing in solidarity with the oppressed.

Chapter 4, in its discussion of Vatican II and Jesus as a model, resists the tendency to create a hierarchy between the spiritual director/helper and the person they are listening to. But I think our sinful nature, and the world, tend to want to push us in the direction of seeing ourselves as the ones with the skill and doing the imparting of that skill. It is a challenge to think in other ways.
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In this section's readings for Hart, he speaks about the misuse of discernment as a form of divination, which I think is related to my discomfort with discernment as decision-making. While Hart uses imagery around literal divination, I think this applies to several different ways that we attempt to manipulate God, including the section on page 68 that details how we tend to create systems of law as a protective barrier. This barrier, designed to keep us from sin, I think, also inoculates from the ability to have a real relationship with God.

Hart continues in chapter eight to illustrate the Ignatian process as pray for freedom and guidance, assess the data, and seek confirmation from God. But he calls it “discerning God's will, or making choices in the Lord.” (p79)

I know I am getting bogged down on this point. But we are in a pragmatic culture. If we value discernment because of what it can do for us to get us to right decisions and to be “better used by God” and not to bring us into a deeper relationship with God and to become more like Christ in our actions and perceptions of the world, then I think we are just putting Christian language on the coaching movement to make people more productive and valuable (marketable). I am not opposed to people improving themselves, but we are limited, created beings, and part of what I find so encouraging and helpful in Christianity and the way of Christ is a grace to be limited.

Summary: A religious biography of Mister Rogers. 

It has been two months since I have posted a review on my blog. I have been on a vacation but mostly working on finishing up my certificate program in Spiritual Direction with six units of classes. I have read many books for class, but little for fun.

In the midst of books for class, I squeezed in the short audiobook of Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers. I am very familiar with Mister Rogers. In addition to the recent documentary and biopic, I have read Kindness and Wonder, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers, and the full biography The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. None of these books are perfect, but each has value in rounding out a human Fred Rogers.

I have been drawn to biography and memoir lately. Maybe it is a recent class on the spirituality of aging, but I am looking for examples of how people attempt to follow God honestly over a lifetime. I think hagiography was originally designed to inspire people to live their lives devoted to God. Ignatius was converted to a life of devotion to God by reading a book about the saints and a book about Jesus. This year I have been inspired by the flawed humanity of Eugene Peterson, Tish Warren's struggle with depression, AD Tomason's advocacy of counseling and healing, and Nate Powell's struggle to parent well as his tries to be an activist. I am not looking for perfection; I am more comforted in the struggle than in the success.

However, Mister Rogers does have a level of “success” in his sainthood that is particularly worth emulating. There is no perfection here; he was a flawed parent and husband and boss. But Fred Rogers was also attempting to be a Christian in his whole life, not just on Sunday mornings. I listened to Exactly as You Are on audiobook as I was doing errands and working around the house, but this is a book that I plan on purchasing in text because there are passages to savor and more inspiration to be gained. Hagiography tried to show not just the qualities of sainthood, but the evidence, often miracles, that showed God was working in their lives. Tuttle isn't trying to whitewash Rogers, but some near-miraculous stories are shared. I do not think the point of this section is the near-miraculous stories as much as it is the inspiration to follow God when we feel nudged. Silence and prayer are important to attune ourselves to God. But the next step of being open to hearing from and then acting on God's direction matters just as much. Yes, we might be wrong. And yes, sometimes we might feel silly writing a note or making a phone call or knocking on a door because we think God is prompting us to, but sometimes those prompts are the Holy Spirit, and there is a person that really does need us.

Mister Rogers probably does verge on the maybe too saintly to be helpful. We cannot really get to Mister Rogers' actual reality if he did not have the wealth of his family and the small-town stability of his upbringing. Most of us do not have wealth that allows us not to worry about income or a grandmother who can buy a concert-quality piano for a 10th birthday.  But we do have our own gifts that we are asked to put into God's service. And I think that is really what Tuttle calls us to take away from Mister Roger's story.

If you are new to reading about Mister Rogers Exactly As You Are is where I would recommend starting. King's biography is an alternative starting point, but Tuttle has plenty of biographical details and I think a more human portrait that will be a good introduction to King's biography if you want to continue reading.

Vocabulary rich book for science lovers

As an educator, this book check all the boxes! It has a story with a lovable character in a authentic setting. The plot has lots of action, a climax, and a resolution. Beyond story structure, this book is FULL of scientific vocabulary, presented in authentic yet explanatory ways. There are even seek and find questions about the scientific principles with guidance at the end. This book is perfect for any parent or classroom teacher! (Particularly if your child/students are learning about life cycles)

Summary: Unity is important for Christians, but there are times when unity can mask issues of justice and legitimate disagreement.

I probably would not have picked this up if it has not been included in Audible Plus Catalog (which means it is free to listen to for audible members.) Generally, I am strongly in favor of ecumenical work and of the church as a whole recognizing itself. I am part of a group called The Initiative, designed to facilitate understanding and cooperation between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians.

I am a part of several groups trying to build a similar understanding and cooperation among Christians of different racial groups. But you cannot seriously participate in groups like this without thinking about lines you will not cross. One of the significant and accurate charges in White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler is that White Evangelicals often claim to be against racism but rarely are willing to make racism a line which they will break fellowship over. One example in that book is MLK Jr directly asking Billy Graham not to appear on the platform with a noted segregationist in 1957, a request that Graham refused.

Not all unity is a positive unity. Unity can be achieved through various means, and sometimes the means to unity actually subverts the cause of Christianity. If visible unity requires suppression of people or their personhood, then that unity is a false unity. But even that is not nearly nuanced enough. There are times when it seems appropriate for a person to choose to voluntarily not exert their own rights for the sake of unity. It becomes more difficult when a larger group, especially a group of historically marginalized people, is required to not exert their rights as a Christian for the sake of unity.

Layton Williams is an ordained Presbyterian pastor. This book is filled with examples of disunity within her own life as an openly bisexual pastor, ordained in a denomination that has recently begun to ordain LGBTQ+ pastors. The examples of her life, including her discussion of the fact that she and her mother are theologically on different sides of the ordination of LGBTQ+ pastors and the fact that her mother left the denomination after it allowed ordination, shows exactly how personal many of these issues are. The personal largely adds to the nuance and helpfulness of the book. But I know that some who object to LGBTQ+ marriage or ordination or other nuanced issues may not want to pick up this book, but I want to encourage you to pick it up if that is your position. Listening to others is part of how we gain understanding and empathy and how we confirm our positions.

Summary: An American ex-pat in Berlin becomes an English-speaking guide at Bonhoeffer's family home. As she encounters the physical spaces of Bonheoffer, she explores the world around her through that lens.

I have no idea who coined the term “Usable History,” and there is likely nuance to the history of that term that I do not know. But as I have spent more time reading biography and memoir the last year, part of what has drawn me is finding “usable history” to help me understand my life.

Laura Fabrychy is the wife of a US diplomat. As a stay-at-home parent in an overseas posting, she has to learn how to manage the responsibilities of a family in a new culture and with a language that she does not understand well. Fabrychy and her family moved to Berlin in the summer of 2016 and spent three years living not far from Bonhoeffer's family's home. She had been interested in Bonhoeffer before moving to Berlin. (She has a Master's in political theology and is working on her Ph.D. in Systematic Theology.) However, after visiting the home several times for herself or bringing visitors, she was asked if she wanted to become a guide for English speakers.

Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus is part memoir of her time in Berlin and exploration of culture and what it means to be an ex-pat. It is also an exploration of who Bonhoeffer was and how we can learn from others that can influence our own lives. This is not hagiography or utilitarian “five things we can learn from Bonhoeffer to make our life better,” but an honest grappling of a very human Bonhoeffer. As she attempts to balance family life and the strains of a new culture and language with her interest in Bonhoeffer, she reads several books by and about Bonhoeffer.

One of them, The Battle for Bonhoeffer by Stephen Haynes, explores the use and misuse of Bonhoeffer, a particular problem since Bonhoeffer died so young and interest in his work has so often appropriated part of his life and abandoned other parts. (I am reading A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History right now, which is attempting a similar thing for Civil Rights history.) I am fascinated by how we shape our understanding of the past for current use (also well explored in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ). Of course, simply repeating history is the first step in understanding. But it is higher-order understanding to interact to bring a fundamental understanding of both history and current reality and to engage the two meaningfully. Part of the reason that books like Battle for Bonhoeffer and A More Beautiful and Terrible history exist is that so often, there is a flat appropriation of history in a way that distorts instead of illuminates. Haynes has a particular disdain for the ways that Eric Metaxes distorts Bonhoeffer for his own purposes, and it is easy to do the same.

Laura Fabrychy recounts that after reading Battle for Bonhoeffer, she attempted to try out what she had learned in the book in one of her tours and how it had gone so poorly, in part because she had not processed the ideas well herself. As a reader, I do the same thing all the time. I read for spiritual insight and as a spiritual discipline, but the ways I use what I learn can be distorting. The Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus is an act of discernment; Fabrychy is grappling with Bonhoeffer's life while seeking keys to her own. Simple insights, like exploring Bonhoeffer's spiritual practice of reading Moravian watchwords or thinking about how looking at the neighborhood is different when riding a bike versus driving a car or exploring how thinking about death (and Ars Moriendi) impacted Bonhoeffer, give space to reflect on our world. And we can only rightly discern when we reflect deeply.

I have a lot of love for Bonhoeffer and have read books by and about him widely, but he is an excellent subject for a book like this. I am still not sure how to describe Keys to Bonhoeffer's Haus; it isn't quite biography or memoir or travelogue or spiritual formation, but a mix of all of them, and well worth reading.