Adam Shields

Summary: A pollster and social science researcher looks at the relationship between Christianity and white supremacy in the US. (White supremacy in the sense of a belief in racial hierarchy and superiority). 

The title of the book comes from a quote from James Baldwin. Baldwin is particularly relevant to our current age, which has been noted by many.

“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long . . . .” —James Baldwin

“A Summary of the Statistical Findings

We've covered a lot of statistical ground in this chapter. Below is a summary of the main findings:

• White Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans while simultaneously embracing a host of racist and racially resentful attitudes inconsistent with those warm feelings. The Racism Index provides a more accurate reading of white Christians' views toward African Americans.


• Harboring more racist views is a positive independent predictor of white Christian identity overall and for each of the three white Christian subgroups individually: white evangelical Protestant, white mainline Protestant, and white Catholic. By contrast, holding more racist views has only a very weak effect on white religiously unaffiliated identity, and that effect is in the negative direction.


• Attending church more frequently does not make white Christians less racist. On the contrary, there is a positive relationship between holding racist attitudes and white Christian identity among both frequent (weekly or more) and infrequent (seldom or never) church attenders. And for white evangelical Protestants, holding racist views has nearly four times the power to predict the likelihood of identification among frequent church attenders than among infrequent church attenders.


• The relationship between racist attitudes and white Christian identity is even stronger for each white Christian subgroup within the region in which they are culturally dominant: white evangelical Protestants primarily in the South and white Catholics in the Northeast; for the more geographically diffuse white mainline Protestants, the strongest relationship is in the Northeast, but the relationship is also significant in the South and Midwest.


• When we reverse the analysis to predict racist attitudes, being affiliated with each white Christian identity is independently associated with an approximately 10 percent increase in racist attitudes. By contrast, there is no significant relationship between white religiously unaffiliated identity and holding racist attitudes.


• Looking at the analysis in this reverse direction, church attendance has no significant impact on the relationship between white Christian identities and holding racist views. Frequently attending white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, and white Catholics are as likely as their counterparts who attend less frequently to hold racist attitudes.

This analysis leaves us with some remarkable conclusions. If you want to predict whether an average person is likely to identify as a white Christian, and you could know only one attribute about that person, you would be better off knowing how racist he or she is than how often he or she attends church. Or, to put it even more bluntly, if you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you'd likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot of an average white Christian church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic—than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop.” (p183-184)

“I stand here today as a representative of [my great-grandfather's] legacy, and I willingly place that responsibility on my shoulders.” Read continued, “As a family, we have used the discovery of this as a tool for continued discovery of ourselves. This means our past, present, and future selves, and a lesson that true shame is not in the discovery of a terrible event such as this, but in the refusal to acknowledge and learn from that event.”

What few whites perceive, and this is a truth that has come late to me, is that we have far more at stake than our black fellow citizens in setting things right. As Baldwin provocatively put it, the civil rights movement began when an oppressed and despised people began to wake up collectively to what had happened to them.19 The question today is whether we white Christians will also awaken to see what has happened to us, and to grasp once and for all how white supremacy has robbed us of our own heritage and of our ability to be in right relationships with our fellow citizens, with ourselves, and even with God. Reckoning with white supremacy, for us, is now an unavoidable moral choice.

Summary:  A discussion of the history and role of the Bill of Rights.

I have previously read Akhil Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography. One of my complaints about that book was that I thought it did not have enough focus on the Bill of Rights. I didn't realize when I read it that Akhil Amar had already written a long book on the Bill of Rights. This book, The Bill of Rights Primer, is designed to be a more popular level book covering the same rough content.

This oversimplifies, but the rough thesis of the book is to give a history of how the Bill of Rights was developed and understood by the original writers. And then a discussion of how the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Era changed how the Bill of Rights was understood and used. I decided to pick up this book after I listened to a podcast with Amar on Advisory Opinions. Primarily they discussed constitutional interpretation. Amar is a liberal originalist and one of the early members of the Federalist Society, which is generally a conservative legal group. That podcast helped me understand Amar's approach to America's Constitution and The Bill of Rights Primer. While I think that Amar raises legitimate points to critique constitutional interpretative theory, especially of liberals, I still found weaknesses of originalism's approach to be under-discussed.

That being said, it is very helpful to understand how the Bill of Rights has changed because of the 14th Amendment. I think one of the weaknesses of the modern originalist framework is that it seems to prioritize the original writer's understanding, not the Reconstruction Era revision. The original authors of the Constitution were primarily slaveholders, did not believe that women should vote, and mostly did not believe in direct democracy. I tend to think we should prioritize interpreting the earlier amendments through the later amendments.

Immediately after reading The Bill of Rights Primer, I started reading At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire. In the Bill of Rights Primer, Amar and Adams discuss how the grand jury was originally viewed as a check on governmental authority because grand juries could refuse to prosecute crimes that they viewed as unconstitutional or not crimes. But as At The Dark End of the Street detailed, the refusal of grand juries to call rape or murder or lynching a crime and releasing white perpetrators when the victims were black is acceptable in the originalist reading of the 7th Amendment but it seems to violate the 14th Amendment by creating a system where crimes against black citizens were not prosecuted and where governmental officials (primarily police and officials that administrated voting) were able to use their authority to enforce segregation in violation of the spirit of the 14th Amendment.

Amar and Adams do discuss this problem, but I think without more history like what is discussed in At the Dark End of the Street, it is easy to think about originalism as an abstract theory of reading the constitution and not a theory that has historically been used to violate the rights of minority citizens within the US. Overall, I think that if you are interested in understanding the constitution, I would start with listening to the Advisory Opinion's podcast (the sound is not great.) And then read America's Consitution which has a good broad overview and history of the US. And then I would read Eric Foner's history of the Reconstuction Amendments. And if you are still interested at this point, The Bill of Rights Primer does add to that conversation.

As a Christian who has read pretty widely in biblical hermenutics, I think that the background there does have some relevance to other areas of literary or constitutional interpretation. It is interesting to me that generally, the courts do read the 1st Amendment through the lens of post-14th Amendment theory even if they do not always read other amendments that way. The early interpreters of the 1st Amendment did not believe that it really gave a free speech and religious rights to individuals. There are many examples of this, but one blatant one is that “In 1859 North Carolina sentenced the elderly Reverend Daniel Worth to a year in prison for circulating an anti-slavery tract. Then the state rewrote its laws to make “incendiary” antislavery expression punishable by death for the first offense.” The fact that there could be a death sentence for speech that was inspired by religious belief is a very different understanding of the 1st Amendment than what is generally understood today. Originalist readings of the 1st Amendment are not reading that history without another interpretive theory overlaying it. 

Summary: Polly, Charles, and Dr. O'Keefe travel to Venezuela by ship and meet 13-year-old Simon Renier (the main character) and his uncle, also traveling to Venezuela. 

At some point, I will have read most of L'Engle's novels. I believe that I have twelve of her novels and six of her memoir or other non-fiction books. But I find them wildly uneven. Dragon in the Water is in the O'Keefe series but is mostly about Simon Renier, not Charles and Polly. Simon is a 13-year-old being raised by his great-aunt, who is in her late 80s. They are from a family with a long history in the Southern US, but it has been influenced by their ancestor's work with Simon Bolivar in freeing South and Central America from Spanish rule.

One of the minor themes of the book is that Simon's ancestors returned from South America and ended slavery on their plantation and the former slaves worked together with the family in a type of commune. While that is unlikely to have been based on any real events, L'Engle still presents Simon and his Aunt as denying any good from slavery but being against members of their family that worked with northern agents during the reconstruction era. And it appears that even if L'Engle was trying to not engage in Lost Cause thinking, she still falls into it, even as she says directly in the book that she denies Lost Cause ideology.

This is sort of a mystery. A prominent character is murdered, and the rest of the book is oriented toward finding the murderer and seeking out the truth about the historical characters that have influenced the story. Overall, the book was okay. It was not great, but not awful. L'Engle does try to take ideas seriously, just as she did with House Like a Locus, but those ideas end up not translating all that well in the more than 40 years since it was published.

But the bigger problem than the ideas of freedom and southern pride is the plot is a bit of a mess, and L'Engle again tries to romantically pair the teen girl with someone about 7 years her senior and does not have a romantic orientation with the teen that is very close to her age. This is an ongoing issue for L'Engle. There is a type of Native American spirituality that comes up in several of her books. I think she tries to handle it well, but I am not sure she has done the requisite work.

In the end, novels have to work well as stories, not just as a means to discuss ideas. In this case, I think the weaknesses of the story are larger than the problems with the ideas. However, Dragons in the Waters was quick, and I bought it cheap, so I was fine reading it.

Summary: A nuanced and detailed biography of a woman that has primarily been reduced to a single act.

I have read Jeanne Theoharis' books out of order. Her more recent book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, has many themes hinted at in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks but more fully fleshed out in the second book. Both books are well worth reading, although there is some overlap. There is a running joke among Civil Rights historians that quite often, the history of the civil rights moment is presented as that one day the Supreme Court announced the end of school segregation, and then the next day Rosa Parks sat down. A day later, MLK stood up to give his I Have a Dream Speech. Then the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were passed, and MLK was assassinated. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement is much more complicated and much longer.

In some ways, it is hard to categorize the boundaries of the movement because, as with all history, events influence other events. Both The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power emphasize that by 1955, Rosa Parks had been participating or leading on civil rights issues for nearly 20 years. The December 1, 1955 events may not have been explicitly planned as an NAACP action, but it was not a random event that did not have a larger context. Several events had to work together. Rosa Parks tended to avoid James Blake's bus because she had had run-ins with the bus driver before. Other events around the country like the lynching of Emmett Till, the Interstate Commerce Commission's ruling banning “separate but equal” regarding interstate bus travel, and Rosa Parks' recent participation in the Highlander Folk School training all likely had some effect. In the end, Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat. City policy should have meant that she did not have to move because no other seats were available. Instead, the bus driver called the police, and she was arrested. Because this is such an essential part of Rosa Parks' legacy,  the event and the bus boycott are significant parts of the biography. But the biography also clarifies that Rosa Parks was far more important than just her single act, even if that act is what she is known for.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and many other books about less well-known figures of the Civil Rights movement show the considerable cost that everyday people suffered. Money is not everything, but it is one illustration. According to tax records, it took ten years for the couple to recover their income from before the bus boycott, and they were not a wealthy family. At the low point, their income was cut by 80%. Even so, during this time, they were forced to move to Detroit to escape the harassment and job discrimination once the boycott was completed. Rosa Parks spent nearly two years working as a receptionist at the Hampton Institute in Virginia (a historically black college) away from her husband and mother because it was the only job she could find (and the Hampton Institute did not provide housing for the whole family). It was not until a year after the newly elected congressman John Conyers hired her as a congressional staffer in 1965 that their income reached above the pre-1956 income.

As always, there are details that I learn from every book. One of the things that was made evident in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, in the context of voting rights, is that not only were potential Black voters given personalized “literacy tests” that were not given to potential White voters (because of grandfather clauses), but when a Black person was attempting to register, they had to pay not just a poll tax for the year that they were registering, but back taxes for every year that they had been theoretically eligible to vote. And again, in many cases, White voters were exempted from the poll taxes in the authorizing legislation. Rosa Parks attempted to register to vote three times. The first time she failed the literacy test. The second time she passed the literacy test but was never mailed a voting card (white voters were given the card at the time of registration, but black voters were mailed their cards.) The third time she again passed the literacy test but had to pay the annual poll tax of $1.50, but for all eleven years that she was technically old enough to vote. This would be the equivalent of nearly $300 in 2022 dollars, not an insurmountable amount, but when she and her husband's combined income would have been about $60-75 a week, it was still a significant sum. Rosa Parks' husband could never register to vote until they moved to Detroit in 1956.

One of the book's themes is the tension between respectability politics and the very real backlash against civil rights organizing. Rosa Parks was known for her conservative dress and proper manners. She was also a woman of deep faith and humility who did not like to promote herself or her needs. That conservative dress did not mean that she was politically conservative. In her later years, she spoke at the Million Men March organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. She regularly attended meetings for the local chapter of the Black Panthers in Detroit. But Parks was aware of respectability's role in the civil rights movement.

The paradox was this: Parks's refusal to get up from her seat and the community outrage around her arrest were rooted in her long history of political involvement and their trust in her. However, this same political history got pushed to the background to further the public image of the boycott. Parks had a more extensive and progressive political background than many of the boycott leaders; many people probably didn't know she had been to Highlander, and some would have been uncomfortable with her ties to leftist organizers. Rosa Parks proved an ideal person around which a boycott could coalesce, but it demanded publicizing a strategic image of her. Describing Parks as “not a disturbing factor,” Dr. King would note her stellar character at the first mass meeting in Montgomery, referring to the “boundless outreach of her integrity, the height of her character.”

The foregrounding of Parks's respectability–of her being a good Christian woman and tired seamstress–proved pivotal to the success of the boycott because it helped to deflect Cold War suspicions about grassroots militancy. Rumors immediately arose within white Montgomery circles that Parks was an NCAAP plant. Indeed, if the myth of Parks put forth by many in the black community was that she was a simple Christian seamstress, the myth most commonly put forth by Montgomery's white community was that the NAACP (in league with the Communist Party) had orchestrated the whole thing.” (p83)

Summary: Using the life and work of GK Chesterton to grapple with North American Indigenous art, history, and Christianity. 

Every review of The Everlasting People is required to say how unique of a project this is. Unfortunately, I am not equipped to evaluate the project because I am not deeply familiar with either Native American history and art or GK Chesterton. I have some familiarity with both, but not enough to know if Milliner is distorting the record, only enough to be able to follow along with the argument of the book. This is one of the weaknesses of truly original conceptions. That isn't to say I think this is distorting, only that I do not have the background to evaluate it.

I like books based on lecture series. They are often short, usually based on 3 or 4 lectures, sometimes with a response. But they are often thoughtful about unique topics and designed for a general readership.

If I had to summarize what The Everlasting People, a book that is hard to categorize, is about, I would say it is attempting to give people, generally categorized as white, tools to grapple with their personal and communal cultural history so that there can be a way to move forward in more than just guilt. White guilt, when it is limited to just guilt, does no one any good. The way forward needs to be centered on some process of restoration of relationships (personally and communally). This isn't “forgive and forget”; this is “remember, process, and work to restore.”

Dr. Matthew Milliner is using his tools as an art historian to tell not just the story of the way that we have forgotten (intentionally) our history in the US around Native American subjugation using art, cultural icons, geography, and local history but also using the theological and cultural thinking of GK Chesterton.

There are two themes that I want to highlight that I think are helpful here. One, while Milliner is clear that the tools of Christianity were used to enslave and subjugate Native Americans, many Native Americans became Christian. They subverted those Christians who were misusing Christianity to persecute. There are multiple examples of this, but as an art historian, Milliner notes how frequently Christian imagery is used in Native American art and how Native American Christians bring native art and practices into their liturgy of Christianity, some of which spread beyond Native American Christian expression. While I am progressive politically and socially, MIlliner is rightly critiquing progressives who want to flatten the story to only tell of the ways Christianity oppresses without allowing the oppressed to tell their own faith stories as stories of empowerment. There is a fine line there because this can also be a tokenism story of only telling the empowerment story and resisting the ways Christianity was oppressive. Both parts of that story need to be told.

Second, Milliner is focused on local history and how we must grapple with our history differently from region to region. In the south, it is known that there is a history of slavery and segregation. But other regions can hide their own regional history by pointing to other regions. Milliner has a long section on Chicago and Native American history as a way to tell that midwestern story of oppression toward Native Americans, with examples of monuments to the oppression that function in ways not unlike the civil war monuments that tend to be more present in the south. As a current southerner who was a midwesterner (primarily in Chicago) until my mid-30s, this was a very helpful section of the book.

The Everlasting People is an example of a book that tries to grapple with what it means to escape from whiteness (in the sense of a belief in the cultural superiority of a white racial hierarchy). I am not sure I would agree with all aspects, partly because I am not sure I have the background to understand some of the nuances, but the importance is an example of Milliner trying to grapple with his area.

Summary: An investigation of how White women drove policy around segregation and worked to uphold it in their daily lives.

In studying history, there are always different facets to explore. As I study the history of the civil rights movement, I have tended toward big picture history and then the history of significant figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Stokley Carmichael, and Ella Baker. And then I read about less well-known figures like Charles Person and the Atlanta Five. These are worthwhile subjects for studying and important facets of understanding history. But another part of studying history is to study “the villains,” not just those we consider heroes from our vantage point. In the case of the Civil Rights Era, it is vital to study not just those that worked to end segregation but those that worked to uphold segregation. Several months ago, I read the very helpful book, The Bible Told Them So, about the theological defense of segregation in North Carolina. The Mothers of Massive Resistance is in that same category of history.

Massive Resistance was a term coined by Senator Harry Byrd in response to Brown v Board of Education. It was a strategy to disrupt integration through vocal and broad resistance to all aspects of integration. Massive Resistance was centered primarily around educational integration but expanded to other areas. The Mothers of Massive Resistance has a simple thesis that white supremacy (the belief in a racial hierarchy with those classified as white at the top) required active participation by white women. It traces the 50-year history of the Civil Rights Era (the 1920s-1970s) and how white women, in their more restrictive and gendered roles, were both drivers and upholders of that white supremacy.

In simple terms, this is easy to understand. White women, in gendered work and home roles, were the front line of the enforcement of the color line. Nurses classified babies into racial categories (categories that were fluid and changed over time.) Women office workers in government upheld segregated rules and identified violaters of the segregated cultural or legal norms. Teachers taught in ways that maintained racial hierarchies before and after official segregation ended, including passing on the mythology of racial hierarchy through history and cultural transmission.

Too often, older histories of the Civil Rights Era were oriented toward telling a solely southern story. Recent histories like A More Beautiful and Terrible History give a more full history of the era by including the more subtle but often more long-lasting ways that northern segregation resisted integration. In many ways, the northern resistance was the most successful front of Massive Resistance. School integration efforts ultimately failed in many northern school districts that tended to be smaller. Changing district boundaries following residential segregation boundaries was an effective method to prevent school integration, especially for those schools that resisted integration until the mid-1970s when federal integration efforts were largely abandoned, and the courts overturned bussing plans, especially those plans that crossed district boundaries.

What is more important to me about books exploring the segregationist sides of the civil rights era is understanding the origins of rhetoric and how overt segregationist and white supremacist rhetorics subtlely changed to colorblind but still segregationist-oriented language. For example, in the 1950s, there was overt use of the good of “White Supremacy” using that term. By the 1970s, the rhetoric had shifted to safety, school quality, and the character of neighborhoods. Since the 1970s, the rhetoric has not changed much, and with historical context, it is easy to see how very similar phrases track over time.

In the 1990s, Democrats reached out to “soccer mom” to expand their coalition. But after 2001, those soccer moms became “security moms” and shifted their voting to republican national candidates. (I am drawing on a podcast and article by Melissa Wear for some of these ideas.) This parallels thoughts in Mothers of Massive Resistance about how many women were upholding white supremacy in response to fears of communism. The rise of communism and the cold war and the ways that the civil rights movement was labeled as communist by segregationists as a means of stoking fear is very much similar to both the CRT debates today and the post-9/11 anti-immigration rhetoric of the early 2000s. Knowing the history makes it easy to assess how these fears are stoked. But the pressures of motherhood and the fears of not being a “good-enough” mother (or father) continue. Even today, many white parents express support theoretically for school and community racial integration but only on limited terms.

I regularly talk about how my kids go to the school where my wife teaches, not the one they are zoned for. The school is about 12-15 minutes from our home, depending on traffic, but it is in the same school district. The school my children attend is 90% minority (primarily Black and Hispanic, but some Asian as well) and about 70% low-income. About a half mile away, there is another elementary school in the same school district. That school has 11% Black or Hispanic students and 7% low-income students. The boundaries have been stable for decades and are primarily upheld by residential zoning. My kids' school boundaries are almost entirely multifamily units, mostly apartments, while the other school is almost entirely detached single-family housing. Even today, it is primarily the role of women that upholds school and housing policies. While overt racial concerns rarely maintain those boundaries, other issues like property values and school quality continue to dominate the rhetoric around the maintenance of boundaries that have their roots in the segregated era.

It is less ‘encouraging' to read books about segregationists. Still, it is helpful to unmask the origins of our current problems to look back to history and see the forces that shaped the current context.

Summary: An excellent biography of a woman who is underappreciated but vitally important to the Civil Rights Movement. 

I want to mention Alissa Wilkerson's book Salty, which finally got me to reading Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Salty was framed as mini-biographies of women that Wilkerson would like to have around a dinner table for the most fabulous dinner party ever. I was vaguely aware of Ella Baker but did not know the extent of her involvement in all aspects of the civil rights era.

One of the points of The Dark End of the Street was that organizers started the work of what we think of as the civil rights era in the 1930s, which were motivated by organizational movements at the turn of the 20th century, which was a response to the end of the Reconstruction Era, and so on. All movements have historical antecedents that tend to be forgotten as we tell their story. Ella Baker is a generation older than most well-known figures in the Civil Rights era. She is in the same generation as Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Sr.

Born in 1903, Baker grew up in Norfolk, VA, until 7. In 1910, there was a white race riot in Norfolk, and Baker's mother moved herself and the children back to her parent's home in Littleton, NC. Her father continued to work out of Norfolk on steamships. In addition, her grandfather had died, and her mother moved home to help care for her mother and the land. Both sets of Ella Baker's grandparents were born into slavery. Baker's father's parents were sharecroppers, but her mother's parents were literate landowners. And her grandfather was a pastor as well as a farmer. Ella Baker's parents completed high school, and her mother worked as a teacher before she was married and then again as a teacher after her husband died.

Ella Baker started Shaw's high school boarding school at 15 and continued until she graduated college in 1927. That college education was a sign of her middle-class background. Although it was also a sign of her educational aptitude. Her sister did not complete high school, and her brother did not enter college. After college, she moved to New York City, where she started a series of short-term jobs that would characterize her work for the rest of her life. She worked as a journalist and then for the Young Negroes Cooperative League as an organizer of buying cooperatives for local black-owned stores around the country. The funding for many of the organizing jobs that she would have for the rest of her life was tenuous, and she often worked without pay as an organizer and supplemented her income through other jobs. Over the next several years, she worked for the New York Public library, organizing lectures and adult education, the YWCA, and a worker's education project for the Works Progress Administration.

In 1938 she started volunteering for the NAACP. Hired as a secretary in 1940, she quickly moved to work as a field secretary. By 1943 she was the national coordinator for organizing and had the title of Director of Branches. This was the highest ranking job by a woman up until this point in the NAACP. In 1946 she resigned partly due to conflicts with the autocratic Executive Director of the NAACP, Walter White, and her need to stop traveling as frequently because she effectively adopted her niece. Baker then took on the volunteer role of president of the NYC chapter of the NAACP and took on school desegregation and police brutality as a local organizer. She ran for city council in 1953 but was unsuccessful.

From NYC, she was connected to many radical movements and well connected within the Harlem Renaissance arts and political scene. Because of her work with the NAACP, she was well connected through the south and maintained many of those relationships after leaving her national role. She helped to form an organization to funnel money to Montgomery, and other nascent civil rights protest movements and was involved in the conference that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Pastors primarily led the SCLC, and there was a level of sexism within the group. Ella Baker became the Assistant Executive Director; it's only full-time staff. Her organizing abilities were the root of much of the early success of the SCLC. She worked for over a year as the interim executive director but was never given the title. After Wyatt Walker was officially named the new Executive Director of the SCLC, Baker started to move out of her work with the SCLC and helped to organize SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Campaign.

By 1960, Baker was in her late 50s and had decades of community organizing experience, contacts around the nation, and had held senior-level positions in many high-profile organizations. But she was frequently frustrated with sexism and the authoritarian methodology of organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC. As she helped organize SNCC and mentored its leadership, she instilled a much more egalitarian and grassroots style into the organization's culture. SNCC focused less on high-profile leaders and more on local organizing over time instead of short-term projects. SNCC concentrated on voting rights and direct action for public access (the sit-in movement). Baker also was significantly involved in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the alternative to the Mississippi Democratic Party. Before MFDP, the Mississippi Democratic Party held segregated primaries that only allowed white voters to choose candidates. The MFDP went to the national Democratic convention in 1964 to protest its segregation and sought to deny recognition of the Mississippi Democratic Party delegates until it desegregated. The MFDP was not successful at unseating the Mississippi delegates but did result in a rule change that eventually was effective and was a significant contributor to party realignment.

By 1967, Ella Baker mainly had moved back to NYC and organized from there. Her health slowed her, but she was still an activist, maybe even more radical than earlier. She was involved in the Free Angela Davis movement, the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. She never traveled outside the US, but she was involved in many global movements in her later years.

Ella Baker is arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century. She was involved in the senior leadership of most prominent civil rights organizations at one point or another and pushed them toward more egalitarian (both in gender and class) positions. Her vision for local organizing as the root for national change was less successful than she hoped, but much of the strength of the civil rights era was built on her work of empowering local movements. Rosa Parks' first trip outside of the Montgomery area was to a training conference in Atlanta organized by Ella Baker. Many of the relatively unknown leaders that work to build local movements were identified, trained, and supported by Ella Baker. Baker's decentralized approach has influenced the ideological rooting of the modern civil rights movement.

This is not a short book. The main text is nearly 400 pages, and the audiobook is almost 22 hours. But in many ways, I wanted more detail and more context. You can see about fifty highlights and notes here.

Summary: Emotional and spiritual abuse matters. 

I am not new to the concept of emotional and spiritual abuse, but Something's Not Right is a good introductory book on abuse. It is not only about abuse within the church, but many of the examples are within a church or broadly Christian context.

I think Something's Not Right has a dual focus of validating those that have been abused and who are trying to understand their abuse and to seek healing. And at the same time, it is written toward Christian leaders who are seeking to prevent and/or be a healing place for those who have been abused. That dual focus mostly works because in the direct talk toward the abused, leaders can listen in to that discussion so that they can understand abuse better. But there are differences in how that discussion might be better focused to those two groups.

This is intended to be an introductory book. There are other places to go for more depth and nuance. Anne Marie Miller's book on how churches help those that have been sexually abused Healing Together: A Guide to Supporting Sexual Abuse Survivors is one of several books about that paraticular issue. Trauma in the Pews is about how trauma and abuse (especially developmental trauma and abuse) impact spiritual formation. The Body Keeps Score is a classic book on trauma from a secular viewpoint.

Summary: An adopted 12-year-old boy suddenly discovers he is not who he thought he was.

Middle-grade books regularly have the concept that the main character is not who they thought they were, especially if they are orphans. This is a classic literary feature because it fits into middle-grade development. Of course, most readers will not be orphans who may secretly be important, but readers can still think about what it would mean to be someone else.

Orion Kim is 12 years old. He is handy with tools and can fix many things, but he is not very coordinated or popular. Very early in the book, he finds out that his grandmother is not his grandmother due to someone attempting to kill him and someone else defending him. Not long after, he finds out that he is not from Earth, but he is “starborn,” and he is taken away from the only home he has known (on Earth) and hides from his attacker on an alien world.

There are classic literary devices that work because they are classic. For example, middle-grade readers may already be familiar with characters attending a new special school to learn about their new powers. Or a group of characters working together to discover the things the adults around them won't tell them. This is not to say that Orion and the Starborn is cliche; I don't think it is. But as a nearly 50-year-old who has been reading middle-grade books for decades, I can see the literary references beneath the story.

I read Orion and the Starborn because I am a fan of KB Hoyle's writing. I have read her Dystopian series (Breeder Cycle) and her fantasy series (Gateway Chronicles) twice and the stand-alone retelling of the fairytale Little Mermaid (Son of the Deep). The books stand up to re-reading. And they have a depth to the story. My kids are a little young for the books, but I think this is probably the series I would start with because it is pitched just slightly younger than the other two series. Depending on how advanced a child is and whether an adult is reading the book with the child or the child is reading independently, I think this is probably a series that I would start around age 10 to 14. My kids are pretty sensitive to scary things, even minor tension they do not like. But I think by the time the next book or two in the series comes out, I will be able to read it to them.

Second Reading: I started re-reading the series at the end of August so I am done with 14 books by the start of Nov. I continue to really love the characters and reading them back to back I am seeing themes and connections that I missed when I read them at a rate of one book per year. I appreciate the fact that this is a series that grapples with going outside of the law to solve problems and the next book addresses where Gamache has gone too far outside of the law and has to reign in his officers on smaller crimes because Gamache has gone outside of the lines on the big crimes. But I also think that one of the issues with this line of thought is that it is ending well because he is the good guy going against the bad guys. In A Brutal Telling, Gamache got the wrong guy, but it was a mistake, and Gamache was forgiven. Gamache is not someone that is going to target someone that he knows isn't guilty. But what about people that he thinks it is justified to target? The next book does approach this question, but I still am uncomfortable with the series approaching the line of being cop-propaganda in some ways. Yes, Gamache is a good cop and believes in limits. But what happens when people don't believe in the limits but are not going as far as complete corruption? And what happens when the type of bias that we all have impacts our ability to rightly perceive? This is a series told from the point of view of the police. But the police are not always right. And this more than most of the books in the series is open to the problems of point of view contributing to being part of the problem.

Short Review: I continue to really like this series. I think the last three books are among the top 5 of the series, which is great for 14 books into the series. The problem of the series is that several of the books have gotten to ridiculously large mystery problem, making each crime bigger and bigger. That problem is moderated here. The main mystery is smaller, although action on the drugs from earlier books is still going on.

This is a 4.5 star books but I am rounding down because of the strengths of the series as a whole. I really do like the nuanced ethical discussions of the book. The main ethical question of the last couple books has been when to undertake morally questionably actions ‘for the greater good'.


my longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/kingdom-of-the-blind/

Summary: Two academics with pastoral experience process the potential help that Critical Race Theory can bring to the church.

If you are “very online” and active on social media, you likely have encountered discussions about Critical Race Theory. Similarly, if you are active in local school board meetings, you have likely seen community comments about the dangers of critical race theory in education. If this is true for you, you likely already know Christopher Rufo's work opposing CRT, which seems to have prompted Trump's executive order on CRT. And it is even more likely that you are aware of Rufo's tweets where he is explicit about rebranding CRT. One of those tweets says, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Rufo was late to the concern about CRT. Christians like Neil Shenvi started raising concerns about the related but different Critical Theory more than two years earlier, which resulted in a resolution from the SBC around Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in 2019. And all of this was following the backlash to the increasing interest in addressing racism within the Evangelical Christian world. In 2018, The Gospel Coalition and the SBC public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, jointly hosted the MLK50 Conference on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This was closely followed by the Together for the Gospel Conference (T4G) giving significant time on the program to addressing racism, like this talk by Ligon Duncan.

Looking back, it appears that 2018 was the high point of the Evangelical church's willingness to speak publicly about race, and since that time, race has become a more complex topic to address publicly. However, even the 2018 conferences were too late because a month before the MLK50, the New York Times had an influential article about the Black exodus from predominately white Evangelical churches and institutions following the overwhelming support of Donald Trump by White Evangelicals.

This is probably too long of an introduction, but I think the context is essential to how I am reading Christianity and Critical Race Theory. I am no one important, but I have been involved in discussions around racial issues and the evangelical church for a long time. And I was active in those early online discussions about Critical Race Theory. I watched MLK50 and took my (then) three and four-year-old kids to the 50th anniversary of MLK's funeral in Atlanta. I spent years trying to get my predominately white church to more directly address racial issues more and have small groups and training on race. (I have been leading a small group that started as a Be the Bridge Group and continued for several years.) I have read books and articles by Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Crenshaw, and others.

I think many will not come with my background in Christianity and Critical Race Theory, and I can't read the book as if I did not have the background that I do. Christianity and Critical Race Theory's authors are particularly well positioned to write this book. Robert Chao Romero and Jeff Liou are both pastors. Both of them have an academic background that is relevant to the book. Romero has a Law degree and Ph.D. and is a Chicano/a and Central American Studies professor at UCLA. Jeff Liou is the director of theological formation for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and is a professor of Christian Ethics with a background in political theology, race, and justice. These authors are Christian Evangelical insiders with academic backgrounds involved in Critical Race Theory long before the recent interest. Romero has a good history of Latino Theology published by Intervarsity. And Liou's position with Intervarsity also shows his insider status.

The format of the book is a traditional reformed structure. The four main chapters examine how Critical Race Theory looks at Creation, Fall (sin), Redemption, and Consummation (Eschatology). There is a significant introduction and conclusion as well. But this is a brief book. As complicated as Critical Race Theory is, this is a good introduction in only 180 pages of the main text.

Like the authors, I think the real strength of Critical Race Theory, in its relationship to Christianity, is in identifying wrong (sin). Of course, CRT does not identify everything Christianity does as sin and vice versa. But that would be asking more than any one sociological approach could accomplish. But the fact that sin is identified, I think, is one of the most directly Christian things about CRT.

The first chapter (creation) is oriented toward diversity as a created reality of God, which will also be part of an eschatological reality. The main point of this first chapter is that all cultures and ethnicities have honor and, in some (limited) sense, reflect God's glory because they are made up of people who are created in the image of God. What is being pushed back against here is a hierarchy of culture as being part of the created order. CRT suggests that race is not a biological but a sociological reality. The creation of race was partly about creating cultural hierarchy, and the church largely embraced that understanding of culture. CRT can help see why that understanding is harmful and theologically wrong.

Chapter three, Redemption, is mainly about how as Christians, we need to see institutions as part of the created order. The authors do not phrase it this way, but Curtis Chang of the Good Faith Podcast regularly talks about institutions being made in the image of God, not just individuals. And I think CRT, because it is oriented toward institutions and systems, not individuals, fits in with Chang's description. This chapter mainly discusses Christian colleges and other Christian institutions and how they can help and harm. But, again, CRT is primarily a diagnostic tool and can help identify how our Christian institutions harm people of color, women, and other minority groups.

The final main chapter is about escatology and the Beloved Community. This is when the authors think CRT has the least to offer Christianity because they view it as lacking hope. This reminds me of Thabiti Anyabwile and Ta-Nehisi Coates's conversation about the role of hope back in 2015. I came away from that conversation thinking that while I theologically mostly agree with Thabiti, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates won the day because he suggests that he does not think that race relations in the US will fundamentally change in either his or his son's lifetime. However, he still works toward change even though he does not think the change will happen. Working toward change that you think will not happen in a hundred years is a type of hope that I think is undervalued. I believe theoretically in the eschatological end where Christ makes everything right. But similar to how I came away from the linked conversation, this chapter feels like it places too much value on the expectation of a future as being a particularly Christian ideal. In many ways, secular and religious people that are not Christians also have hope, even if it is not expressed in the same eschatological language.

I was on board before I started reading Christianity and Critical Race Theory. This book primarily reflects what I believe. I think the message should be read widely, especially by those who are overtly for a Christian view of social justice but have been influenced by the anti-CRT discussion. I have quibbles, but I think this is a book that does well reflecting orthodox Christian belief and an excellent academic understanding of Critical Race Theory.

The publisher provided me with an advance (PDF) copy of the book for purposes of review.

Summary: The movement for Civil Rights prior to the Civil War is an under-told story and one which is important to the context of both the Reconstruction Era and the later Civil Rights movement of the 20th century. 

Until Justice Be Done provided historical context for an era in which I did not have a lot of background. I have studied the Revolutionary War period and the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Still, my understanding of the history between the Revolution and the Civil War has primarily been through individual biographies, and Until Justice Be Done was helpful. (It was also on the shortlist for finalists for the Pulitizer as well as several other book awards which both confirms what I thought about the writing and verified the quality of the historical work.)

There were five big takeaways for me from the book.

First, the English poor laws were intended to require the care of the poor but were used both in England and the US as a way to keep the poor out of local communities, which turned the original purpose of those laws on its head. I could not help but think of Jesus' comments about technically following the law but missing the point of the law (Matt 15:4-10, Mark 7: 1-23) when the religious leaders were claiming that they did not have resources help the poor because they had pledged money to God.

“But race was not the only kind of difference that was significant in this society, and many of the racist laws in Ohio and elsewhere were built atop laws designed to address challenges of poverty and dependency. These legal structures dated back to the sixteenth century and the English tradition of managing the poor. Local governments in England had responded to a rising population of mobile poor people and their demands for aid by establishing regulations designed to distinguish between those who belonged in the community and those who did not. The core idea in the English poor-law tradition was that families and communities were obliged to provide for their own dependent poor, but not for transients and strangers.” (p4)

Summary: Beatrice tries to understand this kingdom that she has awoken to. 

I am a fan of KB Hoyle's work. I have read everything she has written (at least the book-length work). I read or re-read eight of her books last year. I trust her to write books that I am going to enjoy.

Almost two months ago, she announced a surprise book. Around two years ago, she cofounded a small publishing house to focus on middle-grade books. I guess being a publisher and an author, you can quietly release a book without any advance notice if you want to. Because it was a surprise and I have been busy, it has taken me almost two months to read it.

I don't know how to write about The Queen of Ebenezer. In the description, The Queen of Ebenezer is compared to Piranesi, which is an accurate comparison. In both books, the main character does not know what is going on, so the reader is also lost because they rely on the main character's perspective. I have no issues with that style of book, but it makes it hard to write about because this is a book that spoilers will spoil.

There are two subtle things I want to note that are precisely what I like about Hoyle's writing. Plots are always well done with Hoyle; they are tight, there is always movement, and the plots are going somewhere. A good middle-grade or YA book must go somewhere to keep the reader engaged. The title uses a somewhat obscure word Ebenezer to name the land where Beatrice finds herself. Ebenezer is derived from Hebrew, and it is probably unknown among modern readers that are not Jewish or Christian. An Ebenezer is a mark of memory, especially a mark of divine help that you want to remember. In a book where the main character starts without a memory, the land of Ebenezer is a clue.

The second subtle nod is the name Beatrice as the main character. Beatrice is the name of the real woman to whom Dante dedicated the Divine Comedy to; and is the name of the fictional guide in the Paradiso portion of the poem. As a guide, she is showing the character of Dante in the poem divine grace as she shows him paradise or heaven. Most middle-grade or young adult readers will miss these two references, but Hoyle writes with depth that adult readers will find enticing. I have re-read most of Hoyles' books and always notice more in the books the second or third time.

I am only going to hint at the story. Beatrice awakens on an island and does not understand what is going on. It is a magical world that she knows is magical. But she does not remember a life previous to where she is now. But because she knows that the world is different from her expectations, she assumes she has lived elsewhere. Time doesn't work normally. And the boy she finds eventually does not seem to know how strange Ebenezer is. Beatrice has a role; when danger comes, she has to figure out what that role is.

The Queen of Ebenezer is a novella-length book that is relatively standard for the intended age range. I read it in three short sessions before bed. As always, I am looking forward to reading more by Hoyle.

I alternated between reading on kindle and audiobook. I had access to more than one audiobook with my Audible membership and I couldn't get the right kindle book edition that would sync with the audiobook narrator I preferred. I preferred the narration by Thandie Newton. But the narration by Susan Ericksen was not bad. I just preferred the more animated voices from Thandie Newton. I do wish Amazon/Audible would make their system work better. I can always find the match if I go from Kindle to Audiobook, but going from Audiobook to kindle is more difficult, especially for old books where there are so many kindle editions.

I did not expect the ending. I really thought it was going to end with a moralized Christian ending. I was glad that it didn't.

I also was amused that there was a line by a man who was trying to convince Jane that God had told him that she was going to be his wife and that was what God had ordained.

I went back and reread the chapter in Karen Swallow Prior's book about great literature Booked on Jane Eyre after I was done. Prior has an introductory essay on Jane Eyre in her series of classics that I want to pick up at some point.

I do need to keep reading old books.

Summary: Spiritual formation is about encountering God, not gaining knowledge. 

It has been about 18 months since I finished my spiritual direction training. That training was an Ignatian program, although we were not trained to give the whole exercises as Trevor Hudson has done. Ignatius' exercises have plenty of depth for a wide variety of introductions, and I think Hudson's choice to use Ignatius and Dallas Willard as conversation partners was a good choice.

Good spiritual writing is hard. Not just because it is hard to use human language to describe both mystical realities and an indescribable God but because it is hard to say something “new.” I put new in parenthesis because very little is actually new in spiritual writing. Culture is always changing, and the situations and emphasis are changing. But the rough concepts do not change much. Dallas Willard is helpful but can be a bit dense and hard to understand. Ignatius is distant in time and requires help with translation to a modern context. Trevor Hudson has written a fairly short and readable book about what it means to seek after God and how to do that.

I have not read many spiritual formation books this year because I needed a break after spending a couple of years in my spiritual direction program. But I have no problem saying that this was the best spiritual formation book I read in 2022, even if there was not a lot of competition this year.

I listened to this as an audiobook because that was the cheapest method of purchase, and I was reading this as part of Renovaré's book club. I always appreciate the resources that the book club includes. There are in-person or online discussion groups if you want to participate. There are weekly podcasts, often with the author. And there is a good variety of new and old books. This year the books are Seeking God, GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, the newest book from Richard Foster, Learning Humility, and The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. The audiobook was fine, but this book is better read slowly. And I think probably better in print. It is a book that would benefit from rereading as well.

Summary: A series of twelve radio plays that ran on BBC radio from Dec 1941 until Oct 1942. 

Any attempt to portray Jesus artistically has to make artistic and theological choices. Those choices will be debated, but at the same time, if the story of Jesus cannot be shared, then people cannot hear. On the other hand, the natural choices are to make Jesus more understandable to a culture. That is not inherently bad, but those choices to make Jesus understandable will reduce Jesus in ways that make him less of a challenge to the culture. And so there is a catch-22, where to be so concerned about misportraying Jesus means that we keep the story of Jesus hidden, but to not be concerned enough about misportraying Jesus means that we can distort who Jesus is and make him into someone he was not.

I know this point may be a bit controversial. Still, generally, the more culturally and socially dominant an artist is, the more likely the distortions will accommodate Jesus to culture, which will tend to draw Jesus to bless hierarchy and culture. While generally, those that are less culturally or socially dominant will tend to portray Jesus in a way that rebukes culture. This is not a hard and fast rule but a tendency. In reality, no one is whole dominant or oppressed. Sayers was a woman in a sexist society that was very interested in maintaining class structures. It was unknown to most during her life, but after her death, it was revealed that she had a child out of wedlock, who was raised as her nephew. So she also had an acquaintance with social shame. She also was part of a culture and country that was militarily powerful, where racial hierarchy was practiced, and which thought of itself as a powerful world-leading country. There are places where I think that Sayers had blind spots and distorted Jesus and places where I think she did a good job showing a facet of Jesus that people may have missed.

For context to know how I approached the radio dramas, I read every word of this annotated printed edition (I recieved a digital copy of the book from the publisher for review). And I listened to all the radio plays from a copy I purchased from Audible, originally recorded in 1975. The audio and this print edition are not exactly the, but the differences are fairly minor. One of the common annotation points is to note some of the changes from the earlier edition of the play to the original broadcast version, but it does not compare to later versions.

The annotation includes introductions to each play by the editor, the cast of the original 1940s radio play, and the original notes that Sayers wrote to the director and performers. When the plays were first published, Sayers wrote an introduction and a second introduction by the BBC producer. And the annotation itself has an introduction. By the time I had read all three introductions, I was bored with the introductions, and I was impatient to start the play.

Overall I think the plays are worth listening to and/or reading. The distance in culture is enough that annotations are helpful for added context, but most things are fairly clear. But the culture is different enough that, in some ways, it may be better to listen to or read these plays than something closer to our current culture like the TV series The Chosen. About halfway through reading/listening, I realized that the distance between today and the original broadcast is just a bit longer than the distance between the original broadcast and the end of the American Civil War. In one of the notes to the cast and director, Sayers uses the N-word. The annotation discusses it a bit, and this edition doesn't print out the word, but it does point out cultural biases within the plays.

I do not want to do a simple list of positives and negatives, but I think there are two main negatives to the presentation and one main positive that I want to note. The first area of concern is how Jesus is portrayed. Jesus is voiced by an actor that sounds like a standard BBC voice. Sayers says in her comments that she wants a variety of regional accents in the different disciples. Her point that it is easier to distinguish various clear accents or voices is true. And she also says that she wants it clear that the disciples and Jesus were not all upper-class aristocrats. I think that, like many children's bibles that have started using a variety of skin tones, Jesus tends to be lighter-skinned than others on the page. So Jesus here is made a bit “better” than the regional accents of many of the other disciples. Also, Jesus is mentioned as being blond several times in the text. Sayers knows that Jesus was not blond in reality, but she wanted to distinguish him (again, like her voice comments.) But in a society where white racial superiority exists, making Jesus blond doesn't simply make him identifiable to British people. Still, it makes him part of their caste in opposition to people of other ethnicities, races, and castes.

Jesus is portrayed as human in many cases. But there are places where I think the British objections to emotion were used to make Jesus less human. For example, there are no tears when Jesus comes to Mary and Martha after Lazurus' death. This is one of the few places where Sayers deviates from scripture. There are some other examples as well, but at the same time, so many more places, Jesus is portrayed well as a human.

This leads me to where what I liked most about the plays, the background motivations. This is most easily seen in the portrayal of Judas. Sayers' version of Judas is smart, self-assured, and a serious follower of God and Jesus. But in some ways, he thinks that he is more capable than Jesus. There are a few lines where Judas says (my paraphrase) if only Jesus had followed my directions, he would not be in this political mess. There is also good background that makes Caiphas, Pilate, and other characters make sense. For Peter, who cut the ear of one of the guards that were arresting Jesus, it was that guard that first confronts Peter in the courtyard where Peter denies Jesus.

With any artistic work, there are interpretative decisions that have to be made. And I obviously do not agree with all of the ones Sayers made here. But I think work like this should be taken seriously as a theological work, not just an artistic one.

I do want to make a comment about the actual audio. This is a recording from the 1970s and is pretty good. But I would like it to have been remastered to reduce some of the audio range. I tend to listen to audiobooks as I walk my dog. And I was constantly adjusting the volume up or down on this one because the volume range was too wide. There were places where the audio was not as clear as I would have liked, and reading really helped. There were other places where the emotion of the voices really mattered to my understanding, and I am not sure that the text, apart from the narration, would have given me the whole story.

Third Reading Summary: Venetia Flaxton attempts to find meaning in her life and instead finds a disastrous romance. 

One of the significant complaints I have with the Starbridge series is that it is oriented primarily toward clergy healing and restoration without as much attention to the harm that clergy can often cause. Scandalous Risks is both an illustration of that complaint and an exemption to that idea. As I said with my post on Ultimate Prizes, this is part of a single story arc that starts with the earlier book and then mostly plays out to a conclusion in Scandalous Risks, but has threads that continue into Mystical Paths, Absolute Truths, and the spinoff trilogy that starts with Wonder Worker.

In writing about the first three books, I largely stayed away from the details of the plot, but this is a book I think I have to write about the plot. If you do not want to know anything about the plot, you should stop reading here.

Venetia Flaxton is the youngest daughter of Lord Flaxton, one of the local aristocrats in the Starbridge disease. Lord Flaxton is an atheist, but he strongly supports the Church of England as a cultural institution for its support of English culture. He is also one of Stephen Aysgarth's closest friends, the Ultimate Prizes' main character. Stephen is old enough to be Venetia's father. He first meets her when Venetia is nine and Stephen is the Archdeacon of Starbridge. At the point of their meeting, Stephen is a widower with five children.

The book is framed as Venetia retelling the story from 1988, but the story she is telling is of 1963 when she was 23, unmarried, and without direction. Stephen is six years into being the Dean (head pastor) of the Starbridge Cathedral. The story is told as a type of romantic tragedy. It is clear from the start that Venetia and Stephen will eventually have a covert affair and that it will destroy Venetia and harm Stephen.

All the series' books have a theoretical thread and usually a specific book or author that runs through the book. In this case, it is Honest to God by Bishop John Robinson. That book criticizes traditional Christian theology and introduces moral and ethical relativism to a popular English-speaking audience. Aysgarth, as the series' liberal character, is all for Honest to God. As they move closer toward an affair, Stephen attempts to justify it using the “Love Ethic” of Honest to God to make the affair more palatable. Stephen and Venetia are attracted to one another. Still, as the story plays out, they are attracted not just to each other as individuals but because the other can fulfill a need within themselves. Stephen does not know of the sexual relationship between his mentor, Alex Jardine, and Lyle Christie (she eventually marries Charles Ashworth at the end of the first book). There is a parallelism in this Venetia and Stephen's relationship that carries out as Lyle attempts to mentor Venetia.

Part of my frustration with the character of Stephen, as presented in the series, is that it is the liberals that attempt to justify their illicit affairs theologically. In contrast, the other characters tend to have short-term affairs. All affairs are problematic for clergy and their roles as clergy. Still, as much as Howatch attempts to illustrate the three-part thread of the Church of England (low church, broad church, Anglo-Catholic or conservative, liberal and mystical, depending on your frame), I think Howatch fails to keep those threads running evenly.

As a reader, Venetia is harmed more than almost any other main character in the series. And it isn't just short-term harm, but a level of harm that runs through decades of the series. In my mind, one of the issues is historical. In the book, if she had been born about three decades later, she may have been called to ordination. There is certainly a hint in that direction. (Women were first ordained in 1994 in the Church of England.) As with the other books, this book helps to set up both the fifth and sixth book because Nick, in book five, continues to tell the story as he becomes Venetia's “Talisman,” and Lyle's attempt to help Venetia leads her to a prayer ministry that is a center of the story of book six.

I want to affirm the orientation toward grace in the series. Howatch illustrates how we are all imperfect and how God can redeem our imperfections. But I think it sometimes goes too far and minimizes harm, especially to women. There are places where the series identifies that God is not the cause of sin and doesn't condone or desire people to do evil. But there are also times when that seems to be less clear. In Mystical Paths, toward the end of the book, there is this dialogue:

“You'll be a much better priest now than you would have been if all this hadn't happened. You'll be a real priest, not a replica-priest, a man experienced in horror and suffering, not a mere boy who's spent his life wrapped in cotton wool.”

“So you're saying that out of all that tragedy and death—”

“—will come life and truth. Your life, Nicholas, and your truth. And in your life and in your truth, Christian's tragedy will be redeemed.”

__

Summary: A series of twelve radio plays that ran on BBC radio from Dec 1941 until Oct 1942. 

Any attempt to portray Jesus artistically has to make artistic and theological choices. Those choices will be debated, but at the same time, if the story of Jesus cannot be shared, then people cannot hear. On the other hand, the natural choices are to make Jesus more understandable to a culture. That is not inherently bad, but those choices to make Jesus understandable will reduce Jesus in ways that make him less of a challenge to the culture. And so there is a catch-22, where to be so concerned about misportraying Jesus means that we keep the story of Jesus hidden, but to not be concerned enough about misportraying Jesus means that we can distort who Jesus is and make him into someone he was not.

I know this point may be a bit controversial. Still, generally, the more culturally and socially dominant an artist is, the more likely the distortions will accommodate Jesus to culture, which will tend to draw Jesus to bless hierarchy and culture. While generally, those that are less culturally or socially dominant will tend to portray Jesus in a way that rebukes culture. This is not a hard and fast rule but a tendency. In reality, no one is whole dominant or oppressed. Sayers was a woman in a sexist society that was very interested in maintaining class structures. It was unknown to most during her life, but after her death, it was revealed that she had a child out of wedlock, who was raised as her nephew. So she also had an acquaintance with social shame. She also was part of a culture and country that was militarily powerful, where racial hierarchy was practiced, and which thought of itself as a powerful world-leading country. There are places where I think that Sayers had blind spots and distorted Jesus and places where I think she did a good job showing a facet of Jesus that people may have missed.

For context to know how I approached the radio dramas, I read every word of this annotated printed edition (I recieved a digital copy of the book from the publisher for review). And I listened to all the radio plays from a copy I purchased from Audible, originally recorded in 1975. The audio and this print edition are not exactly the, but the differences are fairly minor. One of the common annotation points is to note some of the changes from the earlier edition of the play to the original broadcast version, but it does not compare to later versions.

The annotation includes introductions to each play by the editor, the cast of the original 1940s radio play, and the original notes that Sayers wrote to the director and performers. When the plays were first published, Sayers wrote an introduction and a second introduction by the BBC producer. And the annotation itself has an introduction. By the time I had read all three introductions, I was bored with the introductions, and I was impatient to start the play.

Overall I think the plays are worth listening to and/or reading. The distance in culture is enough that annotations are helpful for added context, but most things are fairly clear. But the culture is different enough that, in some ways, it may be better to listen to or read these plays than something closer to our current culture like the TV series The Chosen. About halfway through reading/listening, I realized that the distance between today and the original broadcast is just a bit longer than the distance between the original broadcast and the end of the American Civil War. In one of the notes to the cast and director, Sayers uses the N-word. The annotation discusses it a bit, and this edition doesn't print out the word, but it does point out cultural biases within the plays.

I do not want to do a simple list of positives and negatives, but I think there are two main negatives to the presentation and one main positive that I want to note. The first area of concern is how Jesus is portrayed. Jesus is voiced by an actor that sounds like a standard BBC voice. Sayers says in her comments that she wants a variety of regional accents in the different disciples. Her point that it is easier to distinguish various clear accents or voices is true. And she also says that she wants it clear that the disciples and Jesus were not all upper-class aristocrats. I think that, like many children's bibles that have started using a variety of skin tones, Jesus tends to be lighter-skinned than others on the page. So Jesus here is made a bit “better” than the regional accents of many of the other disciples. Also, Jesus is mentioned as being blond several times in the text. Sayers knows that Jesus was not blond in reality, but she wanted to distinguish him (again, like her voice comments.) But in a society where white racial superiority exists, making Jesus blond doesn't simply make him identifiable to British people. Still, it makes him part of their caste in opposition to people of other ethnicities, races, and castes.

Jesus is portrayed as human in many cases. But there are places where I think the British objections to emotion were used to make Jesus less human. For example, there are no tears when Jesus comes to Mary and Martha after Lazurus' death. This is one of the few places where Sayers deviates from scripture. There are some other examples as well, but at the same time, so many more places, Jesus is portrayed well as a human.

This leads me to where what I liked most about the plays, the background motivations. This is most easily seen in the portrayal of Judas. Sayers' version of Judas is smart, self-assured, and a serious follower of God and Jesus. But in some ways, he thinks that he is more capable than Jesus. There are a few lines where Judas says (my paraphrase) if only Jesus had followed my directions, he would not be in this political mess. There is also good background that makes Caiphas, Pilate, and other characters make sense. For Peter, who cut the ear of one of the guards that were arresting Jesus, it was that guard that first confronts Peter in the courtyard where Peter denies Jesus.

With any artistic work, there are interpretative decisions that have to be made. And I obviously do not agree with all of the ones Sayers made here. But I think work like this should be taken seriously as a theological work, not just an artistic one.

I do want to make a comment about the actual audio. This is a recording from the 1970s and is pretty good. But I would like it to have been remastered to reduce some of the audio range. I tend to listen to audiobooks as I walk my dog. And I was constantly adjusting the volume up or down on this one because the volume range was too wide. There were places where the audio was not as clear as I would have liked, and reading really helped. There were other places where the emotion of the voices really mattered to my understanding, and I am not sure that the text, apart from the narration, would have given me the whole story.

Summary: A posthumously edited collection of sermons on Revelation, most from 1984. 

I am a big fan of Eugene Peterson. By my count, this is the 14th of Peterson's books I have read. And many of those I have read more than once. I will probably continue to pick up his books. This Halleluah Banquet was published in 2021. And four books are being published this year in his name (two devotionals that are edited from his writing and sermons, a sermon collection, and a new edition along with the audiobook of his book on David, Leap Over a Wall.)

I am not opposed to books being posthumously edited and released. I really enjoyed reading the novel Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy Sayers. It was not finished and lost until about 60 years after she died. It was found in some files of her lawyer and finished by Jill Paton Walsh. Similarly, I have picked up several books that the students of Henri Nouwen compiled from a mix of his notes, class lectures, and other materials. But at the same time, these edited works often lack the vitality of books written directly by the author.

Parts of This Hallelujah Banquet are worth reading (or listening to as I did). I largely agree with the interpretation of Revelation that is being taught here. It is far more common to be hearing about Revelation as guidance for living in oppression today than it would have been in 1984. Earlier generations of teaching about Revelation would have been oriented toward dispensationalism and seeking to “break the code” of the future prophecy. I remember attending “Prophecy Conferences” at a friend's church when I was a teen. Those conferences were full-on dispensational teaching with charts and images trying to show listeners how our current events fulfilled a 2000-year-old prophecy.

But at roughly the same time I was in those prophecy conferences, Eugene Peterson was teaching his church about Revelation not as a secret code for hidden spiritual knowledge but as insight on what it means to be human and Christian within an empire that was not oriented toward you. It took me years later to start hearing NT Wright and others reorient my approach to Revelation. If I had heard these sermons in 1984-91 when I was a pre-teen or high school student, they might have been new insights. But as a 50-year-old, these are no longer really particularly new insights.

I have not read Scot McKnight's new book on Revelation, but based on interviews I have read, I think I would probably recommend that book instead of this one. There is nothing wrong here. Even mediocre Eugene Peterson has some value. But it just didn't really carry the voice of Peterson's best works.

Summary: Framed around an oft-repeated but inaccurate quote, McKinzie points out that the theological and political anthropology of the founders changed within a generation and how that change impacts our politics today.

As McKenzie opens the book, he traces how many politicians over the past decades have wrongly quoted Tocqueville to say a variation of, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” The quote has publicly and regularly been pointed out as wrong, but it continues to be used.

After establishing the quote as wrong, McKenzie lays out how he believes the founders understood human nature and how they established the constitution concerning their understanding of human nature. McKenzie believes that the founders believed in Original Sin (Wikipedia link), which in his conception, means that they designed the constitution to prevent populism from overtaking the country. In McKenzie's account, human depravity and sin would mean that populism would lead to demagogues and other corruptions of power.

I want to start by saying that. I am not a historian, a theologian, or a political scientist. I read and respond to books here, and quite often, I think I am likely wrong because of my educational limitations and ideological biases. I have read many of these posts that I would disagree with later as I acquired new information or saw through some of my blind spots. We the Fallen People is a book that I both really do recommend because I think it is overall helpful in thinking through the issues of the partisan divide and how the country should be politically oriented. But I also think that there are two related concepts that I think McKenzie has either gotten wrong or wrongly described.

Much of the evidence that McKenzie is citing is about how President Andrew Jackson's version of populism (and his authoritarian tendencies) was contrary to the founder's intentions and then how the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who was skeptical of democracy and populism, rightly understood the strengths and weaknesses of the United States more similarly to the founders than his contemporary Jackson. Underneath this historical analysis is a concern about the ways that the recent President Trump, who regularly drew inspiration from Jackson, is accelerating the problems within the United States because the founder's vision was for a country that rejects strong central leadership and populist leaders because they distrusted centralized power because of sinful humanity.

Jackson has lots of evidence for authoritarian styles of leadership, from his rejection of the Supreme Court's attempts to curb his power to the vilification of minorities (the enslaved and Native Americans) to create a point of fear to draw people to him, to rejection of institutions not under his direct control because of their ability to resist his impulse toward power (The Bank of America).

And Tocqueville's skepticism of populism and individualism meant that in his exploration of democracy, he was particularly interested in how democracy could lead to tyranny.

McKinzie, about a third of the way in, uses Cherokee removal to illustrate that it was not a failure of democracy (as is often framed today) but an example of democracy's problems that Tocqueville identifies:

Modern scholars who condemn the removal of Native Americans typically describe it as a “contradiction of democracy” or a “betrayal of democracy.”73 This would have mystified Tocqueville. Remember, as Tocqueville understood it, the “output” of democracy is whatever the majority in a democratic society advocates, condones, or tolerates—good or bad, wise or unwise, just or unjust. By Tocqueville's reasoning, any act of government that commands the support of the majority is by definition “democratic.” To suggest otherwise would be illogical.

Don't misunderstand my point. To concede that we probably would have supported the removal of Native Americans had we been alive two centuries ago doesn't exonerate those who did so at the time. It implicates us. When we wrestle with this rightly, when we not only concede but confess this reality, our prayer shifts to that of the tax collector, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” And when this becomes our heart's cry, Native American removal becomes more than just a regrettable episode in the distant past. It becomes an urgent warning—to us, today. Although the circumstances would surely be different, we are just as capable of condoning injustice and rationalizing it as righteous, of depriving others of their liberty and calling ourselves good. In a democracy, the minority is never truly safe from the majority.

Summary: A coming-of-age novel set in a fantasy world.

I do not know when I first picked up the Chronicles of Prydain series. I do not remember why I picked it up or who may have recommended it. It was not my first fantasy series, I would have read the Chronicles of Narnia before this. But it was very early in my reading career, probably around the 4th or 5th grade. I have revisited the series many times, probably reading each book in the series six to ten times over the past forty years or so. One of the advantages of chronicling nearly all of my reading is that I can look back and see what I thought and when it was that I read the book. It has been 12 years. And I did not look at the previous post until drafting this, and I am not sure I can do better. So I am going to link to my post 12 years ago and say “Ditto.”

Yesterday, one of my favorite Twitter people had a thread that was really a subtweet. I won't get to the background, but the main point of her thread is that many people, especially white male theologians, like to argue about abstractions. But it is in the particulars that those discussions matter. One of the reasons that I love Taran Wander is that it is a book about gaining wisdom, not theory. Taran expresses the wisdom he gains in particular examples of his life and situation. I responded to the thread, maybe because I had recently read this book, asserting that Christianity is a wisdom tradition more than a tradition of principles and abstractions. To be a follower of Christ is to take what we have internalized about Christ and work out what that means to our situation daily.

As proof of the book's point about wisdom, here is the only line I have highlighted in my kindle edition, “I'd rather see a wise pig-keeper on my throne than a blood prince who's a fool!”

I am definitely over-promoting the series, but I do think that the series traces Taran being mentored or acting as an apprentice to Dalton and Coll, and the other characters of the book so that he could serve those around him as a mature human. This is what I want for young adult and middle-grade books more than anything else.

_____

Short review (2011) This is my favorite book of the series. While the whole series is about growing up, this is the book that is really about moving from teen to adult. Taran learns joy in work and about this own weaknesses. I wish more YA books talked about the fact that we are just not good at everything. Taran, like must YA protaganists, can get a bit whiney at times, but he is actually better in this book that the previous ones.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/taran-wanderer/

Summary: A memoir of how Tamice Spencer Helms came to faith in Jesus, but then how to disentangle white culture and Jesus. 

On the front end of this, I want to say that I have all kinds of tangential connections to TAmice Spencer-Helms, but I have never met her, and I am not sure that I have previously read anything by her. Faith Unleavened is the first book by the new KFT Press, which grew out of the Emotionally Healthy Activist project by Jonathan Walton at Intervarsity. An acquaintance also used to work with Tamice, so I was aware of the work of Sub:culture, which Tamice founded, and I started following her on Twitter because of her connection with my acquaintance. But I do not know Tamice, and while I am aware or were connected to many of the organizations and events mentioned in the book, again, there are no direct connections. I say this partially because of the fact that reviews and endorsements have been a topic of discussion lately, and I want to disclose my relationship at the front.

I am a big fan of memoirs because while one person's story is never exactly the same as another person's story, one of the advantages of our current world is that we can learn from people's stories and try not to make the exact same mistakes. We will make new mistakes, but when it is possible to learn from others, we should. I have been interested in the role of trauma, and disillusionment plays in spiritual formation because I am a spiritual director and need to grapple with my own disillusionment about Christianity.

I started reading Faith Unleavened immediately after finishing All My Knotted Up Life by Beth Moore. Both have trauma and disillusionment and working out who Jesus is for them over time. But the connections matter, as well as the differences. Tamice grew up in the Black church within a healthy family. Beth grew up in a White SBC church within a dysfunctional and abusive household. Tamice was convinced by white teenage friends that her faith and family were inadequate and that she had to reject the Black church and, in some sense, her family to find a deeper faith. In contrast, Beth found a church community that supported her and helped her find a way out of her abuse. In both cases, however, there was a limit, and they needed to discover a new faith expression because of the limitations of churches that were unwilling to allow them to be whole Christians in the ways that they felt called.

I wish either of these stories were new to me, but they are not. Abuse and cultish, authoritarian, culturally inappropriate expressions of faith are common. The ongoing discussion about the social realities of sin makes no sense to readers of either of these memoirs. Sin is rarely only harmful to an individual. And sin frequently impacts people even if there were good intentions.

Tamice, as a teen, went to a Hell House gospel presentation where she was confronted with images of hell and sin and manipulated into praying for salvation. The (white) youth pastor literally was dressed up as Jesus to save her at the end of the “play.” And for well over a decade after that night as a teen, she grappled with how white culture was confused with Christianity. She was all in following the White Jesus that she was told was necessary for her to be saved. In a podcast interview with KFT Press she summarized that the Hell House used fear to manipulate her. And then, once she was saved, fear became a driving force in manipulating her to do the next thing: drop out of college to work in a prayer ministry, vote in a particular way, live a particular lifestyle, etc.

I am paraphrasing here, but in the podcast, she said, “I was made to see that Jesus was a white man and that I was a Black woman. I could not be a white man, so there was no way to come to Jesus because I could not live up to the requirements.” This echoes the point of Willie James Jennings' book After Whiteness on theological education. If we theologically shape people to be white men, then we are distorting people into a shape that God did not create them to be. (This, again, is part of the reality of the problems of that article at The Gospel Coalition this week, where the gospel becomes distorted by creating hierarchies where some people are more like Christ than others.) When we create requirements for people first to change before they can come to Christ, we are fundamentally distorting the message of Christianity, which is that all may come to Christ.

I do not want to make this post more about other things and not about Faith Unleavened, but Faith Unleavened was clarifying for me because it so clearly lays out the reality of why it matters that we explore the cultural constraints of our faith. It is a requirement that Christians, especially Christian leaders, expose themselves to cross-cultural Christianity so that they can see at least some of the ways that our cultural expressions of Christianity distort Christianity and how that directly harms them. In the case of Tamice, part of white Jesus was also gender hierarchy, which directly impacted her because she thought that submitting to her husband included submitting to his abuse. It directly impacted her when she turned to alcohol and drugs to dull pain because she could not contort herself to become a white man.

Toward the front of the book, she tells the story of how she would regularly come to a church that left out the communion elements and take communion by herself after the service. She was often still hung over or sometimes took a drink to get up to courage to go to church for communion.

Sitting there alone on that creaky, wooden pew, my heart felt frozen as if I were witnessing a tragedy but I couldn't even tell which way was up, let alone save myself. I went back and forth between missing Jesus and resenting him. I loved him and I doubted his existence. I identified as an atheist at least twice a week and still resorted to certain worship musicians when days were particularly dark. I had no idea where I was when it came to Christianity, but for some reason I never stopped taking communion. It was special to me. It was what I remembered most from my earliest days in church. I was drawn and driven to the mystery and tenderness of it. It felt like home in a way. It held space for me. Every week was the same as I wept and whispered some variation of the phrases: I think I still believe. I don't know how. I don't know what to do. I don't know what happened. I still love you. I can't do this. Please don't make me go back.

Unleavened bread symbolized the delineation between the people of Yahweh and the Empires all around them. Jacob and his family went to Egypt in search of bread and ended up in bondage. It was the same for me. My experience in white evangelicalism started with a spiritual hunger that the yeast of whiteness almost ruined over time. As I began recognizing and extracting the poisonous and putrid ideologies and belief systems that animated the Jesus I met there, I got free. Freedom happened for me the same as it did for the Hebrews: with a call to unleaven the bread of life.

Third Reading Summary: A promising young theology professor is sent to investigate a bishop, leading to a romance, a breakdown, and a recovery. 

A few months short of a decade ago, I brought this book on vacation. It was my 40th birthday, and we had publicly announced that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So we went on our first cruise, and I devoured the first several books in the series. (I bought the following several books on kindle when in port.)

Before reading the series, I had not understood the concept of Spiritual Direction. I may have heard of the words (although, at this point, I am not sure), but it took the fictional portrayal in Glittering Images for the concept to sink in. Glittering Images is melodramatic fiction. There are fundamental weaknesses to this book and the series that are more visible to me now with some distance, but it was transformational. When I came home, I asked around for a spiritual director. I did not find anyone around me to give me a recommendation. So I looked up the directory on Spiritual Direction International (which has changed its name to Spiritual Companions International) and contacted the closest one to me geographically, just a few minutes from my home. (I would recommend this directory at this point.) I am still meeting with him nearly ten years later, although he has moved twice, and for the past five years, we have been doing video conference meetings. I started training to be a spiritual director about four years ago, and I have been working as a spiritual director for several years (very part-time.)

Back to the book, broadly, the series is historical fiction based on the 1930s to the 1960s focusing on Church of England clergy. Most books have a clergyperson in a spiritual and personal crisis, leading to some breakdown. And then the second part of the book is focused on a spiritual director helping to explore the roots of the crisis and work together toward healing. In this book, Charles Ashworth, a theology professor and Cathedral Canon, is sent on a secret investigative mission to preemptively avoid what might become a public disaster.

I am less of a fan of the first part of these books. I don't like watching people make bad decisions that cause problems for those around them. However, part two draws me to the series, where people explore the psychological and spiritual causes of their problems and seek to heal the relational connections that have been harmed through sin.

Over the past several years, I have investigated trauma and spiritual abuse more intentionally. Unfortunately, the series, written from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, are not as cognizant of trauma and spiritual abuse as I would like. That isn't to say there is no awareness, but there are problems.

I want to acknowledge some of the problems before moving on. Most of the books center around the sexual sin of the clergy. I think sexual sin, as described in the series, should be disqualifying, not just temporarily (as the books suggest), but permanently because of the harm it causes and the power abuses involved. The books, even as they often complain about too much Freudian pop psychology, have quite a bit of Freudian pop psychology. Third, most of the books have one of three different spiritual directors that have what is termed in the book as “psychic gifts.” These psychic gifts operate as near magic that distracts from how spiritual direction works outside the books in the real world. I think that Howatch is trying to take seriously charismatic and mystical gifts. But while it provides interest for the books, and I appreciate the mystical aspects, the near magic, which is usually presented as a power of the Holy Spirit, is separate from the role of traditional spiritual direction.

Howatch uses unreliable narrators to tell the story from their perspective throughout the series, often with many flashbacks to give context. This makes sense both from a literary and spiritual perspective because people always have limited perspectives on what is going on inside of others. But also, many people have a level of self-delusion about their own lives. Especially for people on the verge of a breakdown, self-delusion is common as they try to keep their lives together.

There are many positive aspects of the series, despite some frustrations. The series takes seriously generational sin, either the ways we as children rebel against our parents but move into different types of sin as a reaction, or the ways children (both knowingly and unknowingly) replicate the sin of their parents. It also takes seriously the ways that breaking generational patterns can benefit children. The series also promotes a holistic look at healing while showing how slowly that healing may come.

The series forms an arc with overlapping characters. Charles Ashworth is the main character in the first book. And then his spiritual director (Jon Darrow) is the main character in the second book. The third book is about an Archdeacon (Neville Aysgarth) that works in the diocese and was introduced in the second book. The following three books work backward. The fourth book is told from the perspective of a young woman but is mainly about the lack of healing in Aysgarth's life. And then the fifth book is about Jon Darrow's son Nicholas (again a psychic) before returning to Charles Ashworth at the end of his career in the final book. An offshoot trilogy about Nicholas' work in London in the 1980s as a spiritual director is separate from the main series.

Another strength of the series is that it accurately shows that God can use broken people. People in the series routinely give good advice to others, which they do not take themselves. The series also shows a diversity of theology, a fundamental feature of the Church of England as a denomination. Each of the facets of the denomination is presented as helpful, although I think the modernist liberal is given the least grace. Finally, the series arc that revisits each character helps keep the reader from idealizing short-term healing and focuses on longer-term spiritual formation throughout the characters' lives.

I will revisit this later with later books in the series, but I wish the spiritual and personal fallout as a result of sin was more present, even as it isn't absent. This is historical fiction; there is an actual distance between some of the conventions and attitudes around theology and social mores from today. The series' progress over time emphasizes those changes, but still, it can be hard to understand decisions appropriate to different eras in light of the reader's current era.

I will grapple with the ideas of the series without giving away too much of the storyline as I continue to write about future books. As I publish this post, I am in the series' fifth book. I keep delaying my writing because I want to give credit to Howatch, who handles some of my early objections in later books, but I also know that not everyone will read nearly 3000 pages and make it through the whole series.

__
Short Review: This is a second reading and review of Glittering Images. I read it first about 2 years ago and it gave me a new concept of what it means to live a Christian life. Since then I found a spiritual director and have been meeting with him for about 18 months and my theology has shifted a bit too to become more sacramental (and Anglican). The book itself can be a bit melodramatic at times and there may be a bit too much going on. The first half is about an Anglican priest and professor (Charles Ashworth) that is sent to investigate a bishop covertly. But Ashworth, has his own issues and in the midst of his investigation he falls for a woman that works for the Bishop and then has a full spiritual breakdown. The second half of the book is about Ashworth's recovery at the hands of Jon Darrow a spiritual director. The spiritual direction is highly fictionalized and really like actual spiritual direction, but it gave me a view of what spiritual direction could be.

I had actually asked for some referrals of counselors before I read this because I was in a stuck place in life. But this book gave me a new concept of what I was looking for. It was not depression or midlife crisis, but need for an older Christian to formally come alongside me and help me concentrate on my spiritual life. I have a review next week of Eugene Peterson's Practice Resurrection which i re-read along with Glittering Images to help give some non-fiction context. Both books focus on the Christian life as a work in progress and I at least have found that important.

My first blog review of Glittering Images http://bookwi.se/glittering-images/

My second reading review of Glittering Images http://bookwi.se/glittering-images-2/

Third Reading Summary: Jon Darrow, Spiritual Director and mystic, feels called to leave his role as an Anglican monk and return to the world.

I am revisiting the Starbridge series ten years after I first read it. I have some notes about the series in the review of Glittering Images (the first book) that are relevant to Glamorous Powers. However, I am trying to avoid too much of the story as I revisit the series so that anyone that has not read the series can read these posts without significant spoilers.

Jon Darrow is present throughout the series, but it is Glamorous Powers, where he is the narrator and focus of the story. Darrow is the oldest reoccurring character in the series. He was born in 1880. He married fairly young as a Navy chaplain, but as happens throughout the series, his wife dies young. His mother-in-law helps raise the two children, and after WWI, Darrow becomes a prison chaplain, mostly on death row (he is opposed to the death penalty) until his children are raised. Once the children are out of the house, he becomes an Anglican Monk (there are celibate Anglican monks and nuns, many of Darrow's age were inspired by the Oxford movement's return to Anglo-Catholicism). Eventually, Darrow rose to become Abbot of the Granchester Abbey, which primarily offers spiritual direction and retreats for clergy and theology students from Cambridge.

From his role as abbot, Darrow has a vision, which he believes is calling him to leave the cloister and return to the world. This book breaks the pattern of crisis and then spiritual direction and instead starts early with spiritual direction. Part of what I appreciate about the series is that there are a variety of spiritual directors. In this case, the spiritual director is the Abbot General of the order, Francis Ingram. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Darrow. Darrow is mystical, aesthetic, and from a lower-class background. Ingram is upper-class, very rational, and enjoys the finer things in life. Ingram helps Darrow explore the vision and whether it is a call from God. It is not ever discussed in these terms, but this is a spiritual direction of discernment.

Darrow does leave the order, and following the path of the series, he gets himself into a mess because of his pride, his background and the false sense of trying to bring about God's will in the way that Darrow wants it to happen. God redeems his sin and graciously works all things together for good. But Darrow is broken, which allows him to confront his past, upbringing, early marriage, and children in ways he has been unable to do previously.

Each book in the series uses quotes from real theology books as epigraphs for the chapters as it explores a different theological topic. Glamorous Powers explores mysticism. Darrow is roughly based on a real person, just as Alex Jardine in the previous book was based on a real Bishop. While I am interested in the discussion of mysticism in Glamorous Powers, there is some unhelpful mixing of mysticism and miracles. It wasn't until I was into the fifth book of the series, about Jon Darrow's son Nicholas that I realized that the psychic gifting that both Darrows have in the book is a type of Continuationism. There are different senses of continuationism and cessationism, and terms need to be defined before I want to discuss them with people in real life. But at least some cessationists do not argue that all miracles have ceased, but that God no longer gifts people to perform miracles apart from the Holy Spirit. I think this understanding of cessationism is problematic and part of why I think the whole discussion is more about modernism than miracles, theology, or ecclesiology. But Darrow's use of psychic powers is a type of gifting that cessationists do not believe continues to exist.

Again, Darrow needs to seek healing for his past before living into the calling God has gifted him to serve. Again, there is an embrace of pop psychology and family systems theory with some value in spiritual direction. But it can go too far. In his memoir The Pastor, Eugene Peterson discusses his pastoral care training by a psychologist that tempted him to move out of his pastoral role into a counseling role. In the end, Peterson viewed his role as pastor as one that primarily calls people to worship, although he thought there was real value in using the tools of psychology as one aspect of pastoral counseling. (Thomas Oden also explores a similar idea in his memoir, but for the role of theologian.)

There is also value in the book in showing the characters as being healed enough to serve but not becoming unrealistically perfect. For example, in the later books, Darrow still has significant issues with pride. Even though confronted with the ways that his father has attempted to create Jon into his own image, and Jon did the same with his own son Martin, book five explores how Jon still did the same with his much younger son Nicholas.

There is also real value in the role of forgiveness in the series. For example, spouses are frequently shown to be oriented toward forgiveness, even if they do not fundamentally change their personalities.
___
Short review: I have now read this twice, about 2 years apart. I liked it much better this time. First time I enjoyed it, but it just didn't catch me as much as the other books in the series. This time I really appreciated the subtle critique of pietist christians (although without actually condemning those that are serious about their Christian work.)

Much of the main plot points are fairly similar to the first book, a bad previous marriage, father issues, etc. But this time it was not so much about how sin keeps us from God, but how our prideful following of what we think God's will is can keep us from properly caring for our family and others around us and violating some of the basic principle of loving those around us. The I Cor 13 passage comes to mind. The main character Jon Darrow and have ‘glamorous powers' to serve God, but if he can't love his wife and pay attention to those around time (and listen to their advice seriously) then his own powers are not worth much in the end.

First reading review on my blog http://bookwi.se/glamorous-powers/

Second reading review on my blog http://bookwi.se/glamorous-powers-2/

Summary: A biblical exploration of women's role in scripture. 

Again, as I have said before, I am approaching Tell Her Story as an egalitarian that supports women's ordination. I do not need to be convinced of the biblical record supporting women's ministry roles. But I picked up Tell Her Story for two reasons. One, I watched an interview on the Holy Post with Nijay Gupta, and I have wanted to read one of his books for a while (my father recommended a commentary he wrote, and I just have not gotten around to reading it yet.) Second, I want to understand what was different about this book so I can rightly recommend the right books to the right people. I am strongly oriented toward personalized book recommendations.

So I am writing here primarily about the purpose of Tell Her Story in the context of the other books I have read on overlapping themes. Tell Her Story is more focused on the broad biblical record of women. I had a class on women in the Bible a few years ago, and while the focus was different, there was not much new to me here. But I do think that many have not understood either the actual role of Deborah (where the book opens) or how many female names are part of Paul's letters or the broader New Testament.

I (I think like many evangelicals of my age) was largely taught formally and informally that Deborah held a place as the judge of Israel (ruler before kings were instituted) because men of Israel were in sin. Deborah was placed as a judge to shame men who were in sin for not leading. That is a common but harmful reading of the relevant passages. I do not remember ever hearing that Deborah was called the Mother of Israel before the class I took. The church I grew up in (where my father was a pastor) was egalitarian. Still, the youth group I attended with a friend and my college and general Christian media were dominated by complementarian views. So even as someone who grew up egalitarian and for women's ordination, I absorbed bad biblical teaching that undercut women in ministry.

Nijay Gupta (professor at Northern Seminary) opens the book with Deborah even though the book primarily focuses on the New Testament because she is an excellent example that while the cultures of the ancient near east where the Bible was set were predominately patriarchal, Deborah was a documented exception to that general trend.

If I summarize the broad argument of the book, it is that a reading of scripture that requires a universal ban on women in any formal ministerial roles has to ignore the women that scripture itself documents in formal ministry roles. Largely the women mentioned in scripture doing ministry work are not taught, and sometimes the literal gender of their names are hidden, as was familiar with Junia.

Gupta gives context to the New Testament culture, Jesus' connection to women, and what we know about women in the early church. But then, the last few chapters concentrate on telling the stories of women that are often ignored or forgotten in the biblical record.

One of the critical sections of Tell Her Story is about Romans 16. Romans 16 is unusual because there are so many names of people doing ministry that Paul is greeting or commending. Roughly 1/3 of the names mentioned are women. Not all of those have formal ministry roles, but some do. Junia appears to be an apostle. Phoebe was the one that was tasked with delivering the letter of Romans, which would have included reading and teaching the letter and answering questions about it to the church in Rome. And she was likely a church leader herself.

There are other examples, but I will not give away the whole book. The main point is that in context, reading 2 Tim 2 as a universal ban on all women in any ministry role has to ignore the rest of the Bible. If we assume that the Bible does not explicitly contradict itself, then we need to read the Bible in a way that makes sense of differences.

The main text of the book is about 150 pages. It is pitched to people familiar with the Bible, but it is not an academic book. It grapples with the text well, and while giving lots of context for the culture to give insight into the text, it is focused on the actual text of the Bible as its primary focus.

Two stand-alone essays as appendixes directly handle 2 Tim 2 and the Household Codes, the two most common methods of calling for women not to have any formal ministry role within the church. I understand why he does this, but because these are framed as stand-alone essays, there is a fair amount of repetition between the two essays and between the essays and the book's main text. It is a relatively minor complaint, but there is repetition there.

There are no other books I am familiar with that do what Gupta is doing here. Scot McKnight in Blue Parakeet teaches about hermeneutics and uses women in ministry as an example. In his book Surprised by Scripture, NT Wright has a chapter on women in ministry that is more pragmatic but has some overlapping themes. Intersectional Theology and Womanist Midrash both talk about how the questions we ask of theology and the biblical text matter to the answers we receive. Jesus Feminist again has some overlapping ideas, but it is more memoir oriented and more focused on Jesus' interactions with women. The late Rachel Held Evan's A Year of Biblical Womanhood attempts to take literal Biblical commands about being a woman.

The previous paragraph of books is mostly Biblical arguments. The next set of books are mostly theology, history, or memoir leaning pragmatic arguments. In Making Biblical Womanhood, Beth Allison Barr is primarily making a historical argument that the modern complementarian perspective is historically new by looking at earlier women in ministry (overlapping theme), and changes in Biblical translation changed how we understand women in ministry. How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals is the story of about 25 evangelical leaders who changed their minds about women in leadership. Still, those are primarily pragmatic and memoirs and only occasionally explicitly about the biblical text. (And frankly, several of those chapters are by now disgraced leaders.) Who's Tampering With the Trinity is a theology book about how the complementarian movement has been playing with trinitarian theology to justify gender hierarchy. Slaves, Women, and Homosexuality is a proposal for how we handle cultural shifts and progressive revelation to sometimes change theology and sometimes reject the change of theology. Webb is a soft complementarian who rejects full ordination in the book but also rejects stricter complementarian positions. Is the Bible Good for Women is a more conservative and complementarian-oriented book than I am but attempts to grapple with how the Bible has been mishandled to be bad for women. Jesus and John Wayne is a modern history of evangelicalism and gender, well worth reading, but almost no overlap between Tell Her Story and it.