Adam Shields

most recent reading: Summary: The (mostly) satisfying conclusion of the Chronicles of Prydain series.

As I said in my post on Taran Wanderer, it has been over a decade since I read The High King. I still like it, but the more I read it as an adult, the less I think it holds up. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy less than a year ago, and especially The High King feels like it borrowed from that mythology. However, I suspect they both borrowed from older mythology more than Alexander borrowed from Tolkien.

I appreciate that Taran is older and moving into manhood and leadership. But at most, he is early 20s here, and the single leader in their early 20s doesn't seem to make sense. There needed to be more of a council that led the group. And other than a few sections, I wish Eliowayn was more present. She was “there” almost the entire book but didn't play much of a role.

The action is fine, but I am less interested in glorifying war these days. I want more boring stuff about maturing.
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Short review: I don't know how many times I have read this. It is one of the best young adult classic fantasy books. In the best way possible, this is Lord of the Rings for younger teens (meant as a compliment, not a slight).

It has been a while since I last read this. Much more action-oriented than the rest of the series, I still highly recommend it.

My longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/high-king/

Summary: Time Traveling “historians” are sent back to block a couple falling in love because it will distort all of history. 

This is the second of Connie Willis' books that I have read. The first in this series, Doomsday Book, is also centered on time travel, but it is a very different book. Doomsday Book is about going to a medieval community near Oxford, and it deals with the programs of a global pandemic (the Black Death) and the problems of observing evil that you cannot change.

In that first book, time travel was relatively new, and the thinking was that it was impossible to change history. However, history may have changed in the second book, and they are trying to figure out how to put it back again. And that involved going to Victorian England, playing matchmaker, and blocking a romance.

Connie Willis has a lot of humor in her writing. It is a good change of pace. But I think, like Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a bit long. I think the various threads and the false turns she brings the reader on as a means to get to the end are fun. But it could be cut a bit.

The book opens with a narration that doesn't make sense. As you get into the book a little bit, you discover that the narrator has a “Time Lag.” Time Lag is a condition brought about by too many time travel jumps too quickly together, causing the person to be confused, have a problem hearing, be sentimental, and fall in love (and declare it.)

One of the fun aspects of the book is that it looks at a different era through the eyes of the potential future. To Say Nothing of the Dog was written in 1997 and set in 2057, 2018, 1940, and 1888. As I said in my review of the Doomsday Book, the projections of what may be are always interesting, even if the author made projections only 25 years ago.

According to reviews, the 3rd and 4th books of this series, Blackout and All Clear, are a single book split into two parts, and together they are about 1200 pages. So I am not sure I will get to them soon.

Summary: A helpful, somewhat personal look at how Christian Nationalism is a type of idolatry that distorts Christianity. 

I am very much on board with the idea that Christian Nationalism is one of the more significant problems facing both the US political reality and the US church. But I also think that some critics of the idea of Christian Nationalism have a point when they suggest that some presentations are vague and unclear. Part of the problem is that many critics are not sociologists, and so are resistant to the reality of social science working in tendencies toward behavior. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and understand that sociology and other similar social sciences work with correlations that are often only partially explanatory. Other factors are always at play. And even two people with the same history, culture, and even biology (twins) may not believe or behave the same way. Social science broadly works in tendencies. All things being equal, if these factors apply, this result is more likely than if these factors do not apply.

As an example from Christian Nationalism, those that rank higher on the Christian Nationalism scale tend to view the world through a lens of racial hierarchy. But if a person who ranks higher on the Christian Nationalism scale has a significant relationship with others of a different race (maybe through adoption or marriage or in a church setting), that individual may agree with many tenants of Christian Nationalism but not view the world through a lens of racial hierarchy. That individual does not mean that the correlation between Christian Nationalism and belief in the racial hierarchy is false more broadly; it just means that they have other factors in their life that combat that aspect of Christian Nationalism. This year, Justice Jackson wrote in a concurrence (highlighted by Sarah Isgur), “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions.” Jackson's phrase is precisely the point here, while tendencies remain, individual cases may not be the same because no two cases are perfectly identical; however, there is value in exploring the ways that the tendencies work.

I am also reading American Idolatry in light of two books and a podcast. I read American Idolatry in print and overlapped it with the audiobook of Mark Noll's history of the bible in the US from 1794 to 1911. Many of the uses of the bible in history would lend themselves to Christian Nationalist uses today. Some of those should be considered Christian Nationalism, and some should not. What is helpful about reading American Idolatry in light of America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911, is that longer trends both support and give pause to how we think of Christian Nationalism in this particular political moment. There have been points in US history that have had concerning Christian behavior. And the bible has long been used for political purposes (that is the point of Noll's book).

Andrew Whitehead is careful throughout the book not to label those that tend toward Christian Nationalism as something other than Christian. He wants to say that there may be “an idolatry” that is a problem in the use of Christian Nationalism for control and power, but that these people are still Christian. And I largely applaud him for that and think that “othering people” can dismiss the problem or our role in the problem. That is where the podcast I referenced comes in. I have long followed Michael Emerson and listened to his interview on the Know It, Own It, Change It podcast. Emerson has repeatedly said in several interviews and articles that his research indicates that many White Christians have ceased to be Christians and have begun following a Religion of Whiteness. And having read much from Emerson on this point, I agree that his evidence is persuasive (similar to Robert Jones.) Still, while I want to take seriously Emerson's (and Jones') points that there does seem to be a line across which you cease to be practicing Christianity and instead are practicing a different religion, the bias should be to consider these differences within Christianity.

Whitehead does not draw a parallel with how Kendi speaks about racism, but I think it is helpful. Kendi suggests we should not consider ‘racism' like a tattoo we are permanently labeled with. But instead, we should consider racism a sticky name tag that we can take on and off. Sometimes we communicate an idea that is racist, and sometimes we communicate an idea that opposes racism. One is not evidence that the other does not exist. Coming back to Christian Nationalism, we can communicate Christian Nationalism ideas at one point and at another point speak against Christian Nationalist ideas and still be a single person. People are complex.

Noll also makes a distinction between sectarian and custodial Protestants. In Noll's conception, Custodial Protestants are those that “took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests–as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors.”(p54). There is an overlap here with the idea of Christian Nationalism. But Noll argues that there was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church's role within the community fell apart, as did the bible's role (the point of Noll's book). Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. And he personally is a Presbyterian which tends toward a custodial view. But Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness. Noll is not discussing modern Christian Nationalism, but in this distinction, we can see the origins of what Whitehead calls a type of idolatry or syncretism.

The second book I also read in conversation with American Ideology is Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. Prior is exploring how the evangelical imagination tends to work. Emerson uses the phrase “Evangelical toolkit” to talk about how the Evangelicals tend to have a narrow range of tools to handle racial ideas. Prior uses Charles Taylor's idea of the “Social Imaginary,” similar to Emerson's idea of the toolkit. She walks through a list of “tools” that shape how Evangelicals view the world.

Andrew Whitehead similarly walks through the toolkit or social imaginary of a Christian Nationalist worldview. It is easy to see how people can shift between the evangelical and Christian Nationalist toolkits because of overlapping ideas. In the more memoir-like sections, Whitehead hints at a similar social imaginary idea in discussing his exposure to many Christian Nationalist ideas as a child or young adult. But expanding his worldview, or imagination, allowed him to see how others viewed the world differently.

“In short, white Christian nationalism is a cultural framework asserting that civil life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity. Beyond any theological or religious beliefs associated with Christianity, white Christian nationalism brings with it a host of cultural assumptions, particularly a moral traditionalism predicated on maintaining social hierarchies, a comfort with (the “right kind” of) authoritarian social control that includes the threat and use of violence, and a desire for strict ethno-racial boundaries designating who can fully particulate in American civil life. As we'll explore later, it centers and privileges the white Christian experience because it essentially teaches that this country was founded by white, conservative Christian men for the benefit of white, conservative Christian citizens.”

“...the doxastic aspect that focuses on individual salvation alone–that hinders many American Christians from seeing how Christian nationalism betrays the life and teaching of Jesus in two important areas: racial inequality and xenophobia. In these two areas, white American Christians tend to ignore the practical aspect of the gospel, including justice for the oppressed, thinking that as long as we believe the correct theological claims and encourage others to embrace those theological claims as well that we are doing all we need to do.”

“...the Christianity of American Christan nationalism conveys particular forms of cultural baggage. Chief among these is how it privileges and centers the white experience. Christianity in the United States is inextricably tied to race.”

and later

“...the idol of power in Christian natonalism is a power employed for selfish reasons to behefit the in-group. To pursue justice, Chrsitians will have to see and use power. This employment of power should rather benefit all people, especially our neighbors who have been harmed or overlooked. Christian nationalism's vision and use of power, however, is focused solely on extending and protecting a particular subset of largely white Christians' cultural and economic interests. It is important to distinguish between the two uses of power to faithfully confront white Christain nationalism in our society and religious traditions.”

“...multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.”

Summary: Picking up after the honeymoon, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane learn to live together as a married couple while solving a mystery.

Dorothy Sayers published the last full novel of her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series in 1937, Busman's Holiday. Roughly 60 years later, an early draft of this novel was found in a lawyer's safe, and Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to finish the novel. Three additional novels entirely by Walsh continue to tell the story of the now-married couple, and I look forward to reading those eventually.

One of my complaints about Busman's Holiday was that it was too much about Peter and not enough about Harriet. Thrones, Dominations balances the characters better without placing modern sensibilities on a couple from the mid-1930s. Harriet is trying to figure out how to be “Lady Peter”, as she is referred to throughout the novel. She wants to continue to write, and Peter really wants her to continue to write, but she has new duties as an aristocratic lady, and she has less pressure to write because she no longer needs to write to eat.

Peter has to learn to have someone in the house, and I think Walsh gets at his weaknesses (more than just his shell shock) better than Sayers. While the playboy was a bit of an act, there was a reality to his lack of attention to those around him. He has servants, especially Bunter, to care for everything he did not want to bother with. Harriet isn't a servant nor a girlfriend to pine after. She is a real-life woman in his bed who expects to be fully inside his life and not just peering at the same facade everyone else sees.

The murder is one member of a couple that is compared with the Wimseys from the beginning of the book. As I regularly comment, I don't read mysteries to figure out who did it. I read them to understand people. And this is a good book for understanding people.

When I was nearly done with Thrones, Dominations, I picked up the audiobook of Peril in Paris by Rhys Bowen (I read Thrones, Dominations on kindle). Rhys Bowen is a modern cozy mystery novelist that I enjoy. The Her Royal Spyness series is fluffy, and I have occasionally gotten bored with it, but I have continued with it (mostly on audiobook). The first book of Her Royal Spyness seems to pay homage to the first book of Lord Peter Wimsey, Whose Body, when both have bodies in the bathtub as the mystery. And I can't help but feel Perel in Paris also basing some of the characters on Sayer's work.

Both books are set in almost exactly the same time period. (Thrones, Dominations has the death of King George, while King George dies in the previous book for Royal Spyness, but it is within a couple of months of each other.) Both have a recently married couple whose wife doesn't realize she is pregnant and thinks she is just sick. Both have the husbands run off to France to solve diplomatic issues with the new King, and the wives realize that dangerous work for a boyfriend is different than dangerous work for a husband. Harriet is more down-to-earth and aware than Georgie is, but there are some similarities.

What is different is that Sayers/Walsh can't seem to help but have depth, and Bowen can't seem to be more than fluff. There is a section in Thrones, Dominations, where Harriet struggles with whether she should keep writing. This is a condensed part of the dialogue opening with Peter:

“You seem not to appreciate the importance of your special form,” he said. “Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted, and villains are betrayed by clues that they did not know they were leaving. A world in which murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged, and future murder is deterred...Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun, for diversion, as they do crossword puzzles. But underneath they feed a hunger for justice, and heaven help us if ordinary people cease to feel that.”

“You mean perhaps they work as fairy tales work, to caution stepmothers against being wicked, and to comfort Cinderellas everywhere?”

...

“I suppose very clever people can get their visions of justice from Dostoyevsky,” he said. “But there aren't enough of them to make a climate of opinion. Ordinary people in large numbers read what you write.”

“But not for enlightenment. They are at their slackest. They only want a good story with a few thrills and reversals along the way.”

“You get under their guard,” he said. “If they thought they were being preached at they would stop their ears. If they thought you were bent on improving their minds they would probably never pick up the book. But you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.”

Summary: A rhetorical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, I think, has had a minor renaissance in the public's imagination over the past few years. Kate Clifford Larson (who also has a biography of Harriet Tubman), Keisha Blain, and Maegan Parker Brooks all have new biographies of her in the last three years. There is also a children's picture book only a couple of years older. And PBS documentary of Hamer in 2022. Maybe it is more about who I am listening to and the era I tend to read about. (Jemar Tisby, who lives in the Mississippi Delta area and is a historian of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, talks about Hamer as one of his heroes).

I read Keisha Blain's short biography of Fannie Lou Hamer just over a year ago. Hamer was also a significant player in the biography of Stokley Carmichael. And many of the broader histories of the civil rights movement include discussions of Hamer's work and influence. But A Voice That Could Stir an Army is the most detailed look at her life, especially the rhetoric I have read so far. Blain's biography was intended to be a short, accessible introduction to Hamer at only 135 pages of the main text. Brooks' biography is just over 100 pages longer, and while much of the difference is a close analysis of Hamer's speeches, many details here help to round out Hamer's legacy.

I have not read a biography like A Voice That Could Stir an Army. It has traditional biographical details, but the main focus of the biography is understanding Hamer's rhetoric and how that rhetoric fits within the broader Black Freedom Movement. Hamer's participation in the civil rights movement came later than Rosa Parks or Ella Baker, although Hamer was only 3 and 14 years younger than they were.

Fannie Lou Hamer was tricked into signing an employment contract as a sharecropper at the age of six. She attended school between picking seasons; Black schools had a short school year to encourage children to work in cotton fields. At 12, she dropped out of school to help support her parents (although there was little access to high school for Black students then.) In 1944, she became the time and record keeper and soon after married her husband, Perry (Pap) Hamer. Fannie Lou was sterilized without her permission while being treated for a tumor, but they eventually adopted four children and partially raised a child from Pap's first marriage.

Hamer first heard a speech by Bob Moses of SNCC in 1962 at her local church. Moses was recruiting people to register to vote. This was Hamer's first understanding that voting was possible for her as a Black woman in Mississippi. She soon attempted to register to vote and was immediately fired from her job as a sharecropper. She attempted to register again and was forced to temporarily leave the county because of threats of violence against her and her family. It was her third attempt when she was allowed to register.

One of the details that I think many modern readers of that history will be surprised to learn is that the names of those attempting to register and who actually registered to vote were printed in local newspapers. This was very clearly intended as an intimidation tactic. Those that registered would lose their jobs and their future potential for jobs. Hamer's employer was called when she left the county courthouse on that first attempt. Her husband, who knew about the attempt, was notified of her firing and their eviction from their house before she could return from the county courthouse. Fannie Lou Hamer never again had a regular job in Sunflower County. She was hired by SNCC as a field organizer in part because there was no other work available to her.

Part of what is helpful about this biography is that Brooks traces some of the rhetorical shifts of the later civil rights era. Economics was always a part of the reality of racism. And the 1963 March on Washington was for “Jobs and Freedom.” But as legal segregation was dismantled, economic issues became more salient. It was not just that you could be individually economically retaliated against for attempting to vote but also that systems existed to maintain economic control. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer was initially able to get a contract for Head Start, and that program was managed and controlled by the black community. But while the Head Start continued, local and state officials worked to make the Head Start organization a contractor that worked under a white-controlled agency instead of being an independent nonprofit. It exactly points like this that eventually gave rise to Critical Race Theory, which looked explicitly at systems, not just individual actions. (And why Christians should understand Critical Race Theory well.)

Fannie Lou Hamer is somewhat of a tragic figure, not unlike Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks spent years in desperate poverty and in fear of violent retaliation after the bus boycott. Fannie Lou Hamer died at 59 of cancer, 15 years after starting to work on voting rights. She and her husband struggled to make ends meet. She did not seek care for her cancer earlier enough because of their poverty. One of her daughters died; she was denied treatment for internal bleeding because she was Fannie Lou Hamer's daughter. Fannie and Pap then raised their children as their adopted children because their father was disabled from injuries in the Vietnam War. Fannie Lou Hamer's last remaining (grand) child died of cancer just a few weeks ago at 56 years old. The other children died at 47, 53, and 64. (You can see family pictures here.)

Brooks paints a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer that is complex and nuanced. Hamer never wanted to be called a feminist. But as Brooks shows, her work paid attention to issues of gender and race in ways that could be considered an early version of intersectionality. She sought to help people with jobs by creating the Freedom Farm and Head Start program, but some of the management decisions (and the systems of the community as a whole) did not lead to long-term viability. Hamer pointed out issues of class both inside and outside of the Black community and was able to change national elections systems, but was not able to win any of the elections where she ran. He fought for health care for others but did not seek health care for herself early enough. As illustrated in At The Dark End of the Street, Hamer's life was an example of how sexism and sexual violence were part of the reality of Jim Crow-styled segregation and the civil rights movement.

Maegan Parker Brooks raises good questions about how Fannie Lou Hamer is often flattened in our memory of her. She is made into both a hero and an everyman persona. She is remembered for her speeches at the Democratic National Convention but less remembered for her lawsuits trying to force recognition of Black elected officials. She is remembered as a gifted speaker but is often portrayed as only speaking extemporaneously instead of working to develop her speaking skills and hone her speeches over time.

I look forward to reading another biography or two of Hamer in the future because the different retellings of her story do matter. But I strongly recommend this biography because it so clearly presents her as a figure with agency.

Summary: An autobiography from Sojourner Truth as told to Olive Gilbert.

This year's final book for the Renovaré Book Club was Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Because I did not really have any background with Sojourner Truth, I read the new We Will be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth by Nacy Koester as background before starting the autobiography.

One of the parts of the Renovare Book Club that I most appreciate is the podcast/video interviews and weekly emails with links to information and background. In the first podcast, in preparation for reading Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the host suggested that we come at the Narrative without other background materiaial, so as to understand her words on their own terms. This is common advice and not entirely wrong. But at the same time, this advice is influenced by the “plain reading of the text.” And as much as I appreciate that advice, it needs to be tempered because there is real value in expertise, and experts can give you far more information and background than what is possible when reading without the assistance of experts.

In this case, I do not think reading the Narrative without any background would have been helpful for me. Sojourner Truth was a complex figure outside the standard Southern slave narrative. She spoke only Dutch until the age of 9 and spoke with a Dutch accent her whole life. Her most famous speech, Aint' I A Woman, was transcribed with a Southern slave dialect and likely was significantly distorted in form because of that.

And I think that there are nuances about the cultural movements around her that I would not have understood without Koester's biography, especially the influence of utopian religious communities and groups like the Seventh Day Adventists and Millerenites. At the same time, I understand the impulse to encourage direct access to historical documents. Older texts are more challenging to understand than current books and biographies. But without direct access to historical documents, we lose out because our understanding of history is always mediated through interpreters. I do not want to discount the importance of those interpreters because they provide value. But as we gain access to historical tools, we can better understand those historical documents in context and in ways that give regard to what they meant at the time without distorting them.

Short Review: This is a book for people that have been hurt by the church (which is probably everyone.) More importantly it is a book about letting go of the pain and finding healing by being a part of the church again. It is not a gentle book, but I think it is probably helpful for many.


Full review at http://bookwi.se/rechurch-healing-your-way-back-to-the-people-of-god-by-stephen-mansfield/

Summary: A short history of the feminist movement, primarily focusing on first and second-wave feminism within England, with a follow-up chapter on feminism in other geographical areas.

Because women's role in the church has been an active conversation lately, I have been thinking about feminism. A tweet (there were several in the same vein) suggested that part of the issue with the discussion today is that feminism has changed the discussion. Today all except a few want to assert that women are equal, but roles are different. Historically the church fathers, until recently, were influenced by Greek thought that understood women as flawed men or lesser creations. Feminism has changed the terms so that even though hard patriarchalists continue to exist and have influence, most will at least say women are equal in value and Imago Dei.

The book opens with a chapter on the religious roots of feminism starting in the middle ages. And then following is a chapter on secular approaches to feminism. This is followed by a chapter on 18th-century women writers. And then two chapters on the 19th century.

Because voting rights were so central to the women's rights movement, there were two chapters on voting rights. The last three chapters are about first-wave feminism in the 20th century. Then second-wave feminism in the late 20th century. And then, a chapter on feminists worldwide lightly touches on the critiques of first and second-wave feminism. The afterward lightly touches on continued changes to feminism. Kaitlyn Schiess has a good video on her Getting Schooled series, Feminism 101, that covers similar material in about 40 minutes.

One of the problems of the early feminist movement is that it also agreed to hierarchy as a default cultural assumption. Sojourner Truth's famous Aint I a Woman speech raised concerns about how White women sought to make suffrage (voting rights) a competition between White women and Black men. In the book, which is primarily about English feminism, there are examples of educated White English women being offended that lower-class men, immigrants, and criminals were allowed to vote but educated, land-owning women were not allowed to vote. This is a hierarchical argument that voting is based on the worth of the voter, not on inherent dignity.

At least part of the movement toward universal suffrage of men is that part of what drove women's suffrage. But the suffrage movement started being taken more seriously as photography became more widely used. The sexism of women being the “weaker sex” was part of what suffragettes used to raise awareness. Images of privileged women being carried by police due to women's demonstrations raised objections. But even that gave way to violence and vandalism to express frustration when non-violent demonstrations did not work. At least three castles, several churches, a significant library, and many homes were destroyed by arson as part of the protests in England.

One of the aspects that I did not know is that consciousness-raising was coined by feminist groups in the late 1960s. I was aware of the other origin because, at the same time, Critical consciousness, conscientization or consciousness-raising was coined by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written in 1967 and translated into English in 1970).

Overall this is a helpful, quick introduction to feminism. But because it was published in 2006, it is limited because the 3rd and 4th wave of feminists were too new or after its publication. And I think that the critique I saw in several reviews about the early parts of the book being too oriented on mini-biographies is true. I think there is value in learning about early feminists, but the format of such reliance on those biographical sketches feels a bit like “great man” history.

I also think that the focus on England as a geographical source of the story (a reasonable limitation given the size of the book) makes it harder to discuss the critiques of CRT about intersectionality, which isn't even mentioned in the book. Every Very Short Introduction has to make difficult choices about what to include, and the focus on England, first and second-wave feminism, and then a short global survey was a reasonable choice. Still, I want a follow-up book to expand the focus.

Summary: A very Lutheran perspective on spiritual disciplines, which is helpful for non-Lutherans to read as a different perspective.

When I picked up Ragged, I knew nothing about the book or author other than several people I know recommended it.  I have been trying to prioritize reading women authors this year. And I have been trying to work through different language around spiritual disciplines because so much of the Evangelical orientation toward spiritual disciplines uses pragmatic self-improvement as a motivation.

The introduction was my favorite part of the book, not that I didn't like the rest of the book, just that her framing of spiritual disciplines was precisely what I was looking for. Ronnevik is a homeschooling mother of six, wife of a farmer, and survivor of a severe car crash that has left her with chronic pain. She directly takes on the type of perfectionistic, strongly ordered approach to spiritual disciplines that deters too many from even attempting regular disciplines. Disciplines are to draw us toward God, not to prove ourselves worthy of God.

After the helpful introduction, each chapter is a different discipline. I understand that approach, but it was not the best move. The positive of that approach is that you can go to disciplines that you are more interested in. The negative of that approach is that it is a type of list of disciplines that we are all familiar with. In many cases, Ronnevik reframes the discipline to make them more approachable, but I still feel like a knowledge presentation of disciplines. Each of those chapters are filled with stories to draw the reader in and be relatable. And I think this is a book that will be particularly helpful for people that struggle with disciplines as a competition to make themselves better.

One of the people I meet with for spiritual direction is a Lutheran pastor, and I do not know if I would have understood the discussions of Law and Grace as much as I did without some of the discussions I have had. Law and Grace are central to Lutheran theology and spirituality. It has been a few years since I tried to read outside of my theological tradition as a regular discipline, but this book is an excellent example of why that is important. I am not Lutheran, but the different framing helps me to see my tradition through a different theological facet and helps me better understand another Christian tradition.

Part of what I love about this book is that it is a book that imparts hard-won wisdom from an experienced Christian. More important than specific disciplines is the orientation to the Christian life that pays attention to wisdom and experience. I alternated between reading this in print and listening to the audiobook. The narration was fine, and I could always understand what was said. But the choice of narrators was wrong for the book. The narrator was a young woman. Because the book drew so clearly from Ronnevik's life as a woman and mother, it needed to be a woman, but it would have been better for the voice to have more age to communicate the book's wisdom.

Summary: A contextual and narrative history of the Plessey V Ferguson Supreme Court Ruling.

Part of what I appreciate about the framing of Separate is that Luxenberg takes great pains to point out segregation's national history, not just its Southern history. It is undoubtedly true that Plessy was arrested in Louisiana, and the movement in the 1880s and 90s for southern segregation was a response to the political realities and white supremacy of the post-reconstruction era. But segregated rail cars were first established in the 1840s in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Robert Small, and many other abolitions were removed (often forcefully and with significant harm) either from the train or to segregated cars. There is a good discussion of this history in the biographies linked above, but also a good part of Until Justice Be Done, about the movement for civil rights before the Civil War, is about the role of civil rights in transportation. Before the mid-20th century, virtually everyone that traveled used some paid transportation. Individual vehicles or even private horses or carriages were incapable of long-distance travel either because of cost or effort.

Like Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration by Ronnie Greene, also a book on a civil rights Supreme Court case written by a journalist, most of the book is about the context and facts of the case, not the legal decision. In fact, the discussion of the actual case and ruling doesn't happen until the final section, about 90 percent of the way through the book. This feature is both the best and worst part of the book. The extensive context is framed primarily around the biographies of Justice John Harlan (who wrote the dissent), Albion Tourgee, lead counsel for Plessy, and Henry Billings Brown, the author of the majority opinion. There were also biographical portions for Louis Martinet (who conceived of the suit as a test case) and Homer Plessy (the man who was arrested as part of the test case). And, of course, the history of segregated transportation and the New Orleans Creole community, which drove the case.

At the end of the book, I appreciate why Steve Luxenberg gave us all of the context, but the moving back and forth between the three main characters was sometimes confusing. (This is probably because I mostly listened to this on audiobook). And I very much appreciate the reality that Luxenberg points out that what killed reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and caused the result of Plessy was the actions of moderate Republicans as much as pro-segregationist southern Democrats. John Marshall Harlan's dissent in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 case was a preview of Plessy and is discussed in light of that. But in both cases, the only dissenter was Harlan, who was also the only Southerner on the court at the time.

Prior to reading Separate, I was not aware of most of the characters. I knew of Plessy by name and of the legacy of John Marshall Harlan, but I could not have named Henry Johnson as the author of the majority opinion, nor had I even heard of Albion Tourgee or Louis Martinet. The view that the federal government does not have the right to uphold the rights of Black citizens against state law with the power of the 13th, 14th or 15th Amendments I was familiar with because of Foner's exploration of the Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments in The Second Founding, but I think many alive today would not recognize the change in legal opinion since that time. That being said, the discussion is increasingly on the table again.

Anti-DEI laws, like what has recently been passed in Florida and what was passed last year in Georgia in a weaker form, places the rights of black and white students in conflict. It is not usually framed this way, but in Georgia (where I live and I am more familiar), state teacher certification rules have recently changed, removing the obligation of teachers to learn about diversity issues in education. Nationally approximately 80% of teachers are white, but only 45% of students are white. Removing the requirements of teachers to learn about teaching diverse student bodies would seem to violate the equal protection of students potentially. But the framing of the anti-DEI rules is that are protecting the rights of white students.

These issues will not be easy to solve going forward. But understanding the history of how we have gotten here, is important to understanding how we will move forward.

Summary: A brief exploration of a complicated topic.

I am not adequately trained to discuss poststructuralism (or any philosophical idea.) But that is one reason that I like these Very Short Introduction books. They give an introduction to the concept so that you have a broad idea of the concept, which allows you to pursue it more fully later (or not.)

Like most of these books, the main content is about 150 pages. I listened to this on audiobook, which may not have been the best choice, but it is what I had. I did not realize when I picked it up that a new edition had been published. In something as recent as Poststructuralism, the 20-year-old 1st edition was likely dated in ways I do not understand.

The second edition has an additional chapter, and chapter 2 is expanded and chapter 3 is restructured or retitled. Overall I feel like I have a helpful introduction to the subject, but I would not attempt to try to really write about my understanding or evaluate how well the author did in the presentation. The content seemed to be clear, and there was some good humor, but that is as far as I feel like I can go.

[caption id=”attachment_60367” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”] 1st Edition[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_60368” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”] 2nd Edition[/caption]

Summary: Historians take on mostly conservative talking points. 

Historians have been having an internal battle about their public role in current events. Much of the discussion is framed around Presentism, which is “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences.” Part of the reality of history as a social science is that interpretation is a necessary part of what it means to “do history.” I am not a historian, although I do read a lot of history and respect historians that are on different sides of this debate.

I think Myth America has two problems, and presentism is one of them. Kevin Kruze and Julian Zelizer are Myth America's editors, both historians of recent American history. The last book I read from them was Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, which was worth reading, but the problem with recent history is that it is harder to have a broad perspective on that history because it is so recent. Most of the essays are framed around current myths about history that impact current politics, which is precisely the concern over presentism.

Carol Anderson's chapter on voter fraud takes the concerns around the 2020 election and frames them historically about why we have a current concern about election fraud. That historical framing is helpful to see why we have a current obsession with voter fraud without any evidence of it actually being a problem in most elections. But the book's very nature is mostly to address current political concerns, leaving the book open to critique of political bias.

The reality is that this is a left-leaning book because the editors are activist historians who believe that there is a role for historians to address politics. Not every chapter is overtly left-leaning, but discussing immigration, America First, American Exceptionalism, The New Deal, The Reagan Revolution, White Backlash to Civil Rights, Police Violence, The Southern Strategy, etc., are overwhelmingly left-leaning takes on history.

I am not calling for a both-sided type of book; I think this is a book worth reading as it is. But as a book trying to persuade, it falls short in drawing in moderate to conservative voters who believe many of the myths being discussed. There is a role for books that educate the left-leaning, but that isn't primarily persuasion.

At the same time, I do think that part of the politicization of history also shows that some of these topics are now seen as highly political in ways that they would not have been 10 or 20 years ago.

Short Review: I am glad that Christians are more carefully thinking about space and geography in relationship to our faith. We are Christians in a space, not just abstractly. Evangelicals started thinking more about being Christians in cities in 1990s and 2000s and people like Wendell Berry have been long writing about being Christians in rural areas, although that has had a resurgence as well.

It has been easy to bash the suburbs as Christians. The suburbs are about ease and wealth and hiding from your neighbors. But more importantly the Suburbs are not as cool as being Christian in the city and don't have the pastoral settings of rural areas and are not foreign lands. But Ashley Hales is thinking clearly about what the suburbs mean to how we are Christians, both positively and negatively.

In some ways this is an introduction to the concept of being Christian in a space. Because I have read pretty extensively about these sorts of ideas from an urban perspective this did feel fairly introductory to me in many areas. But not all. Hales handles that balance between the positives and negatives better than many space oriented books I have read.

For me the spiritual disciplines that are included in each chapter to minimize the negatives and encourage the positives was something that was missing in most other explorations of Christianity and space that I have read.

My full review, about 1000 words is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/finding-holy-in-the-suburbs/

short review: This is a book of wisdom about living the Christian life. Williams is making an argument in this and his previous book Being Christian that Christianity is a relationship with God and that primarily we are Christian through practice of becoming like Christ. That is not to minimize theology and knowledge, but to say that the primary issue is the practice and relationship not the knowledge.

These are two very short books. Less than 100 pages each. And they were originally based on lectures. They are pithy and tight. Very readable and would make very good small group discussions. Both because of content and length and readability.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/being-disciples/

Summary: A history of Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina arguing for the continuation of segregation for theological reasons. 

I have read a lot of Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow history. And some of that history, like Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, is trying to be comprehensive, but much of it is telling the history from the side of the abolitionists or the opponents to segregation. The Bible Told Them So is telling an essential part of this history from the side of the segregationists and why they were arguing for the continuation of segregation and how they made that argument. The arguments are so explicit and clear here that it becomes hard to avoid the reality of how in the 1950-70s there was a real fight to “preserve white supremacy.”

The book is structured in five chapters. The first focuses on congregational response to Brown v Board and how many pastors were fired for supporting the ruling. The second chapter looks in more detail at the theological reasoning for the defense of segregation. The third chapter looks at how Baptists and Methodists responded to proposals to integrate their denominational colleges (and pairs nicely with the chapter on college from The Myth of Colorblind Christianity). The fourth chapter is about the rise of colorblind language and justifications for segregation in the face of the larger culture's rejection of segregationist rhetoric. And the final chapter is about the rise of private schools and how those schools were framed, primarily using colorblind rhetoric but for segregationists reasons.

I think the arc of this history is essential. There is a movement from overt segregationist language, theologically informed and undergirded, to alternate public rhetoric while maintaining the private communication, to a colorblind public and private rhetoric without a change in practice, to a denial that the earlier segregationist language was ever used. In many ways, I think this builds on the work on the history of memory from David Blight and others about how there is an intentional misremembering. One of the parts of this story that was new to me was how early colorblind language was drawn directly from the Plessy v Ferguson decision.

“The phrases “natural affinities,” “mutual appreciation of merits,” and “voluntary association of individuals” were not Workman's. They were the words of Henry Brown Billings, words the Supreme Court in 1896 used to deny Homer Plessy–and all who shared his skin color–ful equity as American citizens...At first blush, Workman's letter seemed to gesture at a new era of white Christians' acceptance of racial integration. But by appropriating word for word a line from the Supreme Court case that gave Jim Crow legal sanction in the South for nearly seven decades, Workman's letter also reveals ways in which the new language of colorblindness had its roots in the desire of segregation. Understanding the historical links between colorblindness and segregationist theology reveals a continuity of segregationist Christianity from the 1950s to the 1970s and a perpetuation of racial separatism by white Christians–even unwittingly so–into the decades beyond.”

As expected, I have a lot of highlights, primarily of quotes that need to be read to be believed. You can see my 12 notes and 76 highlights on my Goodreads page.

One of the interesting realities is that arguments, primarily those in the 1950s and early 1960s, included the positive use of the phrase “white supremacy.”

During the afternoon session, H. K. Whetsall was one of the first to speak, declaring that, while the state convention and committees might be nudging Baptists toward integration, the Bible did not. “There is scriptural basis for White supremacy,” Whetsall asserted, and he reminded those in attendance that the Bible “condemns racial intermarriage.”46 Robert Head followed Whetsall at the microphone and scolded the state convention “for ‘brainwashing us' about integration.” Head's comment drew agreeable laughter and applause from those in attendance.

The focus of the book is on the theological undergirding of segregationist defenses. These theological defenses were not used just against secular forces seeking integration like the courts. They were in many ways more explicit in countering religious groups advocating integration. In response to an SBC national convention resolution in 1956 affirming integration, many local churches passed their own resolutions denouncing integration.

“...the white parishioners of Clarendon Baptist included additional rationale that revealed the theological convictions from which such resolutions emerged: We believe that integration is contrary to God's purposes for the races, because: (1) God made men different races and ordained the basic differences between races; (2) Race has a purpose in the Divine plan, each race having a unique purpose and distinctive mission in God's plan; (3) God meant for people of different races to maintain their race purity and racial indentity [sic] and seek the highest development of their racial group. God has determined “the bounds of their habitation” (Last part of Acts 17:26). This resolution explicitly stated what Camden First Baptist's had only implied: God had segregated the races for his own purposes, given this arrangement divine sanction, and instructed the faithful through scripture not to pursue racial integration. What began as a voluntary separation between Christians of different races in the nineteenth century had, by the midpoint of the twentieth, become a holy command in the minds of many white southerners.”

One of the reasons I am unconvinced by natural theology arguments is that they have been used so often to justify injustice, as happened here and so frequently throughout this era.

As a theological principle, general revelation suggests that humanity can learn about God through observation of the natural world; for many white southerners in the mid-twentieth century, nature revealed God to be a segregationist. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handywork,” a segregationist minister quoted from the nineteenth Psalm. “The corollary of the above passage,” continued Pastor W. C. George, “is that since nature is God's handywork, it reveals his laws to those who have the diligence and the insight to discover them.” Following George's line of thought, white Christians found in nature divine justification for Jim Crow. While employing both scripture and general revelation in their defense of Jim Crow, Christian segregationists such as Festus F. Windham challenged anyone to prove that segregation was sinful. “I am referring to voluntary segregation,” Windham clarified, the kind he believed existed between southern whites and their black neighbors. “We find much voluntary segregation even in nature,” the Alabama Sunday School teacher continued. “Hordes of black ants several times larger than the little red ants do not integrate with any other ants, though they may live not too far apart in their ground tunnels.”

David French has recently used a phrase regularly in talking about racism that I think is relevant, “Systems and structures designed by racists for racist reasons are often maintained by nonracists for nonracist reasons.” Part of what is important about how the arc that I have described above works is that by the time the kids are in the segregated schools, they deny that their parents put them in those schools for racial reasons. Hawkins cites a researcher who interviewed parents and students at a conference for private school students in the early 1970s.

For some Christian parents, these justifications dovetailed nicely with an emerging theological emphasis on familial responsibility and values. “Parents' rights come from God by way of the natural law,” wrote one parent referring to private schools.73 Whereas segregationist Christians viewed public schools as attempting to strip away parental rights, the private schools existed to reinforce them. And whereas segregationist Christians saw public schools as a threat to their children's safety and quality education, private schools enhanced both. What was at stake for these Christian parents who sent their children to all-white private schools was nothing less than parental rights and obligations. In their assessment, race was not a factor. Denying that race was the cause for enrolling children in private schools did not make it so. But it did begin the process of allowing southern white Christians—intentionally or otherwise—to elide the connection between their school choices and race. A researcher who attended a convention in the early 1970s for private school students noted this lack of awareness in the students themselves.

Every student at the convention “said they were attending the private school because their parents did not want them in integrated schools.” But none of the students described this decision as race based. One of the students' comments captured it perfectly: “N***** are dumb, can't learn; and when you have a majority of low standard in a school, they will pull all the rest down. It's not really a race issue, just a matter of lowering standards.”

This matters because many of those private, often Christian, schools still exist. And they continue to have a legacy of segregation even if they are not segregated for explicitly racist reasons today. For instance a number of cases of Christian schools that have dress codes that do not take into account Black hairstyles. Those policies may or may not have been put into place with explicit racist intent. It could just be that because the schools were segregated, they did not need to take into account Black hairstyles and it is not until there are Black students in the schools that the policies are examined and found to be a hindrance. But the point of David French's quote is important because the result is that there is still a discriminatory result. And without understanding that there was in fact a real discriminatory purpose at the creation of these schools, then there will continue to be resistance to the idea that anything needs to change in response. It becomes a, “well my family didn't own slaves” when in fact the systems that were put into place did invoke white supremacy as an explicit reason in the creation of that private school or that overwhelmingly white congregation, or there is a benefit to that white college student because their grandparent was a student when the school was segregated.

Summary: A brief biography of Charles Johnson, a pastor in Meridian, Mississippi, and one of the witnesses in the Mississippi Burning Trial. 

I picked this up because it was free in the Audible Plus catalog. I am satisfied with the time I spent on the book because I was not aware of the story of Charles Johnson previously. But once I was about an hour into the book, I looked around for reviews to decide if I wanted to finish the book. This review discussed how this biography was framed as an old-fashioned missionary biography, giving me the language to accept the style. (I encourage you to read that link if you haven't.)

The book opens with Charles Johnson as a young child. A white salesman worked in his Black community of Orlando. In his spare time, that salesman encouraged youth, occasionally hired them, and eventually opened a community center. Through his work, Charles Johnson became a Christian. When Johnson felt the call to ministry, that salesman helped him attend a Nazarene seminary in West Virginia. As the review notes, the Nazarenes were segregated, including their seminaries. So the only seminary Johnson could have gone to within the Nazarene movement was the one in West Virginia. Bush notes denominational racism several times in the book. Still, the book's framing, even as it attempts to show how Johnson moved beyond the holiness pietism of the Nazarenes more generally, has that pietism in the background. He shows that Johnson kept to Nazarene pietism through the emphasis on evangelism toward the end of his life and in his rejection of acceptance of the invitation to the Carter inaugural ball because it served alcohol.

I have read many missionary biographies, and many of the genre's tropes are here. They tend to be short; this was less than four hours in audiobook. They emphasize supernatural calling and intervention. They focus on the action, not the interior life or mundane everyday work. And they always talk about what was given up to serve God, including losing family or spouse. And the story of one of the KKK members who was convicted for the killings became Christian in jail and personally came to ask for forgiveness from Charles Johnson after leaving jail fits the genre's tropes as well. I think of these types of books as hagiography. I can see how Chet Bush is attempting to subvert some of the genre by making Johnson the subject (he is Black in a predominately white denomination, and the story's location is the US, not the international mission field).

The problem with the genre is that it makes the Christian life into a hero story. This is a distortion of what it means to be a Christian. There is the additional problem of the limited view of the gospel, even though there was an attempt to subvert that in this book by emphasizing the work of addressing racism and poverty and the refrain of Charles Johnson about the gospel being for the “whole person.” But that refrain is not enough to counter the individualism and pietism that runs throughout the book.

Again, I do not think this is a bad book, and the review I linked above talks about how this was written when Chet Bush was a pastor in Mississippi and how he later went back to get his Ph.D. in history. I would pick up newly written books, even if Called to the Fire has weaknesses. I have not previously read anything written mainly about the Mississippi Burning case, so I wonder whether this book adds to other books about that story by emphasizing Charles Johnson. I categorize this as a book I am glad I have read, but I am hesitant to recommend it if you read it for biography or civil rights history. Many other books are better, especially if you are not well-read in either area.

Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/called-to-the-fire/

Summary: One mysterious death, and then another, among nurses-in-training, brings Adam Dalgliesh to the John Carpenter Hospital and the Nightingale House, where the nurses live and train.

I am continuing to work through the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series slowly. I am not sure how long PD James wrote the series, but the books I am working on how were written in the late 1960s. So far the books have been fairly out of time. You know they are in the 20th century, but no cell phones or computers exist. It is only at the very end that there is a cultural reference that dates the book. It matters to the story, so I will not reveal the reference, but I have appreciated the writing being somewhat out of time.

The series is less physiological than my current favorite mystery series, Inspector Gamache, but I am enjoying the very slow development of Dalgliesh as a character. Part of what I thought about with this book is that Dalgliesh's moral and ethical character is essential. Moral and ethical character matter in almost every role in life, but particularly with positions of authority and justice, the person filling those roles matters. One of the officers working for Dalgliesh is a prominent character in this book, and that officer does not have exemplary character for the job. The comparison between them is being set up for what I assume with be a plot point in a later book.

I have just started Karen Swallow Prior's new book, The Evangelical Imagination. As a literature professor, she is approaching the role of the imagination in helping to define the social imaginary (Charles Taylor's term) of what is possible. Simple fiction books like this series give the reader a sense of what is possible. Murder mysteries, in particular, may raise fears about how prevalent murder is or how easy it is to catch murderers. But they also build connections of how people come to big crimes through smaller inactions. How we think about the world is shaped by the type and quality of books we read (or TV, movies, web videos, video games, etc.)

I think there is a reason that PD James is such a well-known author and that this series has been recommended by so many and I think the Evangelical Imagination is giving some hints as to why this more than 50-year-old series has stayed in print.

Summary: Many people know about Francois Clemmons because of his relationship with Mister Rogers, but this is Francois Clemmons' story.

I picked up a hardcover of Officer Clemmons when it came out several years ago, but I just never got around to reading it. I was looking for a change of pace and picked up the audiobook a couple of days ago, and the audiobook is the right choice for this book. I am highly in favor of authors reading their nonfiction books in most cases. And this is an excellent example of why. Francois Clemmons knows his own story, and he can narrate it with the right emotion and inflection. He occasionally (not as much as I would prefer) sings when discussing one of the songs in the book. The story comes alive in a way that I do not think would have happened for me in print.

I have read many books by or about Mister Rogers, as did Clemmons. He says in the opening that when he decided to tell his own story of Mister Rogers, he read every book he could find and determined that his contribution could be telling the story as a Black Gay man because none of the other books had that perspective. Officer Clemmons is primarily a book about Francois Clemmons, not Mister Rogers—several reviews I have seen complained about that point. Francois and Fred Rogers met when Francois was in graduate school in Pittsburg and had a job as a singer at the Rogers' church. It was Fred Rogers wife Joanne that Francois came to know first. And she and the music director at the church made sure that he met Fred. But that part of the story does not come until more than halfway through the book.

I am glad that there are many memoirs of people that were of the age to be in the civil rights era. People of that era are passing away quickly, and we must pay attention to their stories. Francois was born to a sharecropper family. The early violence, both racial and domestic violence, matters to his story. Early in the book, he tells the story of how the local landowners pressured his grandmother for sex for years. She complied because the threat of violence and repercussion were real. She was protecting her family and doing what the culture expected. At one point, her husband said she was not there when the landowner came to get her, and the landowners just shot him in cold blood. There was no legal intervention. No police came, and no inquiry was made. And this was not counted in any of the counts of lynching. At this point, Francois' grandmother had never lived anywhere other than that home, a home that had not been painted in her memory. There is more to the story that is also tragic and important, but the proximate cause of Clemmons' family to move from the south to Youngstown, OH, was ongoing domestic violence from his father. His grandmother tried to protect Francois' mother and siblings from the violence, including shooting and wounding his father when his father attempted to force them to move back home.

In many ways, Youngstown was better, but it was not perfect. Racism was still prevalent even though the schools had been desegregated. And domestic violence was still a factor in his life. Eventually, after his stepfather beat him quite severely for going to a concert, he moved out into a friend's home, a local pastor's family. His parents attempted to go to the school to force Francois to move back home about a month after that last beating, but Francois resisted. In front of the principal and his parents and the pastor, and his wife, that was allowing him to stay with him, he took off his shirt to show the scars and bruises of the beatings. The (white) principal negotiated for Francois to continue to live with the pastor and his wife and for his parents not to interfere with the threat of reporting the violence to the police.

There are too many stories to tell here about racism, poverty, and grappling with his sexuality. But I want to talk about the discussion of sexuality in the book. The book opens with the ongoing sexual assault of his grandmother. That story matters, even though it is a harrowing story to hear. And throughout the book, Clemmons' sexuality matters. It was not just that he was a black man coming of age in the 1960s; he was a black gay man coming of age in the 1960s. Discussion of his grappling with the desire for men and not women, and how his conservative Christian church influenced that understanding of sexuality matters. He discusses his sexual awakening, love for other men, and the need to hide that from the public. And he discusses how Fred Rogers told him he could not be openly gay if he were going to remain on the show. Sex is not discussed to titillate, but culturally some find the discussion that gay sex occurred to be inappropriate. And if that is you, you do not want to pick this book up.

It is also worth noting that while Clemmons accepts Christianity as a whole, he did move toward the Unitarian/Universalist community as an adult. I would have liked more about that, but all the reader gets is the acknowledgments where he thanks his church community. The Christianity of his childhood, while loved for its support of him and giving him the spirituals, does deserve the critique he gives. His stepfather and mother are prime examples. They oppose his coming out as gay and push him into marriage with a woman because of their understanding of Christian sexual ethics. But his stepfather literally forces him to go to a prostitute to try to “change” him straight, and Clemmons has to escape out of a bathroom window and run away. His mother again is concerned about his sexuality, but not about enough about his personhood to stop the violence against him. There are many Christians in the book that show Francois love and care. But there are also many people who rejected Christianity that also showed him love and care.

The book is heavily oriented toward Clemmons early years. About 2/3 of the book covers his first 25 years or so. There is very little about what it was like to be on the show. The portions about Fred Rogers were about Fred Rogers as a person and mentor, not really Fred Rogers as a tv personality. I would have liked more about his later years, but I also hate to complain about what authors focus on; it is their story to tell.

This review was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/officer-clemmons/

Because I mentioned them above, here are a few memoirs of people who lived through the civil rights era that are worth reading (links are to my reviews)

• Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person with Richard Rooker


• I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire by Melba Pattillo Beals (later memoir)


• March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine by Melba Pattillo Beals (YA memoir)


• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (YA memoir in verse)


• With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman


• While the World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry with Denise George


• Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian by James H Cone (later memoir)


• My Soul Looks Back by James H Cone (earlier memoir)


• Where the Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancey


• My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King with Barbara Reynolds


• No Name in the Street by James Baldwin


• Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March


• Black Cop's Kid: An Essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar


• They Called Us Enemy by George Takei


• Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston


• Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter by Sidney Poitier

Takeaway: Spiritual practices are not magic bullets.

Over the past few years I have become a disciple of spiritual practices. I have a spiritual director. I regularly use the Book of Common Prayer. I really do think that the eucharist and baptism should be central to worship. This makes me the target audience of Lauren Winner's new book, the Dangers of Christian Practice.

The rough thesis is that spiritual practices, while good, have weaknesses that need to be paid attention to. Just like the church is made up of human beings that are sinful and make every church community less than perfect, good practices that are commanded by God and advocated throughout history also have some weaknesses.

The easiest illustration and the best chapters is about prayer. Keziah Goodwin Hopkins Brevard is the main illustration. She is a 57 year old widowed owner of two plantations and over 200 slaves. She left extensive journals both of her thoughts and of her prayers as fodder for Winner's discussion.

As Winner recounts, Brevard prays for pliant slaves, she prays for the death of slaves that lie to her, she prays that Heaven will have a separate location for abolitionists and slaves away from her. (Note the political and rhetorical implications of a separate heaven.) She prays to be a good master and for a heart open to God.

Winner notes that the subjects of our prayers have long been a concern for Christians. Aquinas and others cited have thought and written about praying for things that are sinful or out of distorted desires. But the very nature of prayer is part of the problem. It is not just intercessory prayer, but teaching prayer to others and how public prayer is often not solely directed at God. Prayer can easily become gossip, self justifying or deluded. But even out of bad prayer there can often be good aspects.

Winner gives illustrations of the anthologies of prayer that line her shelves. None of them are anthologies of bad or self seeking prayers that could help us understand how our own prayers may be come bad or self seeking. Instead prayer is presented and taught as an almost universal good.

The other two practices discussed in the Dangers of Christian Practice are the problems of the eucharist being held in too high of a value (the illustration is riots caused by accused desecration of the host) and the problems of antisemitism and supersessionism, and baptism and the problems of the privatization of baptism through private christening ceremonies that were held in the home in the 19th and early 20th century as well as the way that baptism can alienate the subject from their family or community as well as drawing them into the family of Christ.

This is a very brief overview. There are lots of side tracks as well as a good introduction to the concept and a concluding chapter that challenges the ideas of spiritual practices especially as it has arisen out of post-liberal theology.

The ideas behind Dangers of Christian Practice are very helpful. One that in someways could be an article or a much larger book and still be helpful. I was very skeptical about the concept of the book and probably would not have picked it up without reading James KA Smith's very positive review at Christian Century. However, despite my skepticism, I this was well worth reading and a good reminder to not place too much weight or responsibility on any aspect of discipleship, moral formation, or model of church.

All models of church and modes of discipleship have weaknesses. All can be corrupted and tainted. But as Winner rightly notes in the last chapter, they are what we have. Because they are not perfect does not mean that we should abandon them completely. Winner is not advocating that. Instead she is advocating more humility and understanding of the practices so that we can minimize the harm that misusing spiritual practices can bring.

I listened to the Dangers of Christian Practice on audiobook. It was not my favorite narration, but it was acceptable. I kept checking my player because it felt like it was running slightly too fast. Like maybe the narrator read it too slow, and the editor sped the narration up slightly digitally by cutting some of the pauses and space between the words. But for me, it was far cheaper on audiobook than on kindle or hardcover.

I edited and expanded this review slightly on my blog based on discussion in the comments below at http://bookwi.se/dangers-of-christian-practice/

Summary: Anne, an orphan, is adopted and becomes a beloved family member. But there are SOOOOO many long descriptive passages that make it a less-than-great read-aloud.

I am not great about reading to my kids, but we do tend always to have a book that we are slowly working through. And this one was very slow. I picked it primarily because I knew there were several TV and film adaptations, and that has previously been a motivator to keep reading.

I read at least this first book of the series as a teen, but I really did not remember it beyond the broad outline of the story. I think I probably remember more from the TV adaptations than the book. I wanted to read an old book in part because I knew the vocabulary would be more of a challenge, and I wanted to introduce my kids to vocabulary they would not get with more recent books. And I got the vocabulary. The annotated edition is helpful both because I was reading on Kindle, which has a built-in dictionary, but also because the annotations helped beyond the dictionary.

If it were just unfamiliar words, that would have been fine. But what I did not remember was the pages of descriptions and the super long run-on sentences within those pages of descriptions. There were many examples of sentences that were several lines long. And paragraphs that were more than a page long. This is something that when I am reading myself, I do not notice, but when reading out loud, it is very noticeable.

I think my kids may have been a hair on the young side (8 and 9), but they did not want to give up on the story even when I was tired of it. We have not started the Netflix series yet because we are almost done with the current series we watch as a family. But that will be the next thing we pick up. I do not think we read any more books in the series, but I may read them myself; I am pretty sure I did not read them previously.

My plan is to pick up A Wrinkle in Time for our next read-aloud.

Short Thoughts: How we remember matters. A friend asked me for my five quick takeaways on Twitter, so these are my takeaways:

1) There was a conscious choice, that was spoken out against at the time, to ignore white supremacy and oppression of Blacks after the war.
2) lack of care for former slaves mattered today and then.
3) WEB DuBois satirical short story that I mention at the end of my post is still the way many think of race relations.
4) Throughout history, Whites have tended to choose the option that is better for their pocketbooks, not better for justice
5) how we remember matters

This is a beautifully written book. The subject matter is far from beautiful quite often, but Blight knows how to write.

My longer thoughts (because this is a book not easily summarized) are on my blog at http://bookwi.se/race-and-reunion/

Summary: An exploration of the role of the Bible in American public life from the rise of the new country until just before WW1.

I have read Noll's work widely. And have had three classes with him in undergrad and graduate school. I am familiar with his work, and I respect him greatly. So it is not lightly that I think that America's Book I think is my favorite of his books. Part of this is that it is just masterfully done. I can't think of many books of this size that I read as voraciously. I have always appreciated Noll's writing, but this book felt more incisive, important, and better written. But as I was thinking about it as I was finishing the book, I realized that part of it was the framing of the story concerning race. Noll is not new to examining how race has impacted American religious history. He has written two books that were particularly about the role of race, God and Race and American Politics and The Civil War as Theological Crisis, but with In the Beginning Was The Word and now in America's Book, the history of American Christianity is much more intentionally the multicultural and multi-religious history of the US. The main focus of America's book is looking at the different ways over time that the Bible (primarily the KJV for most of this time) was used by different communities within the United States. So minority communities (whether it is minority religious communities or minority racial communities) are central to telling the story of the differences in how the Bible was used.

America's Book is the second in a planned trilogy. In the Beginning Was the Word looked at the public use of the Bible in North America before the American Revolution. Diversity of use was important to that story, but part of the thesis of this book is that after the revolution, there was an attempt to come together as a Bible culture. The American Bible Society (ABS) was founded early in the 19th century and became the dominant publisher, not just of Bibles, but of all books and pamphlets. (America's Book makes me want to read John Fea's history of the American Bible Society) There was a somewhat successful (depending on the region) push to get a bible in every home in the United States. The ABS was committed to publishing the KJV without notes or commentary, which prioritized the KJV (against the Catholic Douay Rheims and other translations) and was an attempt to avoid sectarian debate.

Noll sets up the main initial debate over the use of the Bible not between Catholics and Protestants (Catholics were a tiny minority initially) but between the “Custodial Protestants and the Sectarian Protestants”. In Noll's conception, Custodial Protestants are those that “took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests–as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors.”(p54). There was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church's role within the community fell apart, as did the bible's role. Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness.

That chosenness (my term) was part of the problem that arose as the discussion over slavery became more prominent. Slavery was the largest but not the only cause of the fracturing of how the Bible was used. As he points out in The Civil War as Theological Crisis, the Civil War broke more than just the legal entity of the United States, it was a theological fight as well. The other main fractures around the use of the Bible were its use in public schools and how Americans understood their self-conception. Early Americans saw themselves broadly as Christian and centered around a Protestant identity, which used the KJV as a rhetorical, literary, and cultural touchstone, but there was always more diversity than what that identity could hold. Noll has three successive chapters in the middle, all titled “Whose Bible?” that look at how Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Native Americans, Women, and other naysayers were not content with the status quo identity as a Protestant KJV-only social identity.

I listened to America's Book on audiobook as I read Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. The main point of her book is that Evangelicals have a social imaginary. Although many Evangelicals have not explored the social imaginary, their conception of how the world works matters to how they perceive the world around them. Prior suggests that Victorian Age culture has impacted the social imaginary of Evangelicals because that was the era when Evangelicalism originally arose. Prior is primarily pointing to British Victorian culture as she explores the social imaginary of modern Evangelicals, but Noll is exploring American Christians, and it is easy to see her point in the history that Noll is laying out. One easy example is that proslavery Christians largely could not conceive of a valid biblical argument for abolition. In my post about Evangelical Imagination, I shared a quote from America's Book where Noll points out that proslavery Christians could only conceive of abolitionist biblical arguments as either heretical readings or as abolitionists reading into the scripture that did not exist. While I do not love this article because of the way it centers Russell Moore as if he is saying something new (or even as if this were new for him), Christians rejecting Jesus' own words because of the way they are interpreting them politically, is a good modern example of the social imaginary that Prior is pointing out.

In discussing the changes in how the Bible was used in the post-Civil War era, we must talk about figures like Robert Dabney. This is because he is a good exemplar of the role that overtly Christian call for white supremacy played, but also he is an example of the turn to biblicist reading against the modernist turn in the understanding of the Bible. Noll does not note this, but Dabney is still recommended by John Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and other conservative evangelicals because of his commitment to the Bible. But Dabney's commitment to the Bible was a commitment to a type of bible reading that upheld overt white supremacy. (Again, this is a place where the social imaginary impacts biblical use and understanding.) Joel McDurmon has a good section in his book about the role of Christianity in slavery, discussing Dabney's post-Civil War support of white supremacy.

Returning again to reading America's Book in light of Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination and Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry, and while Noll does not make judgments about whether people like Dabney have distorted Christianity to the extent that they have ceased to be Christian, Dabney is an example of why Michael Emerson speaks about the need to distinguish between Christianity and a “Religion of Whiteness.” I do not know where the line should be drawn exactly, but the evidence throughout America's Book is that Christianity is not perfectly malleable; at some point, cultural influences on Christianity have changed it so much that it ceases to be Christianity. That is part of what the discussion around Christian Nationalism is about. Andrew Whitehead leans toward identifying Christian Nationalists as Christian (I think in part as a rhetorical tool to draw people toward a better Christianity.) And Michael Emerson leans toward rejecting the Christianity of those he thinks have started following a different religion. Both make good cases for their own choices.

The value of reading America's Book is to give historical grounding to the discussion of what it means to be a Christian in the US now. We can see that people have regularly used and misused Christianity and the Bible for political purposes, to enforce cultural purity, and for power in the past. Those more culturally distant uses may be easier to see than current examples. But when your social imaginary includes the type of history that Noll shares here, you are better prepared to follow Jesus.

This was originally posted on my blog at http://bookwi.se/americas-book/

Link to other reviews mentioned here: American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church by Andrew L. Whitehead https://bookwi.se/american-idolatry/

The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior https://bookwi.se/evangelical-imagination/

Summary: Controversial radical, but an important figure both in political and legislative history, and in the history of emancipation and reconstruction. 

Many important people are less well-known than they should be. Thaddeus Stevens is one of them. I think the way that many people to do know who he is and have heard of him is because Tommy Lee Jones played him in the movie Lincoln.

Hans Trefousse's 2005 biography was the first real reevaluation of Stevens in a couple of generations. (Bruce Levine has a new biography published in 2021 that I have not read.) I picked this up on sale at Audible, which may not have been the best format.

One of the problems with the biography of Stevens is that he is a lawyer and legislator. He was known for being effective with parliamentary rules and procedures. And rules and procedures are not scintillating reading. But they are essential to the work of legislating.

Thaddeus Stevens is best known for leading the House during the Civil War and being the leader of what is commonly known as the Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction Era. He strongly favored public education, emancipation before the Civil War, and civil and voting rights after the Civil War. Radical Republicans were both organized to oppose Johnson and to push for stronger federal actions to protect Black citizens across the country and to more strongly punish former Confederate officials.

Stevens believed former Confederates were not US citizens (and therefore not subject to the bill of rights and other protections) but fell under international rules of war as a conquered territory and should be handled with military law, not civil law. This means that he did not think that the legislature should seat anyone from those territories until there were new votes by the legislature to adopt them as states. (Incidentally, Johnson was a senator from Tennessee that remained with the Union and continued to be seated in the Senate after Tennessee joined the Confederacy until Lincoln appointed him as military governor in 1862 before he was elected Vice president. So under Stevens' understanding, Johnson should have been removed from the Senate when Tennesse withdrew from the Union.) The implication of Stevens' understanding of citizenship means that the legislature would have been a smaller body with only Northern legislators, which would have changed the requirements for approving legislation, passing the constitutional amendments, vetoes, and impeachment.

Stevens was for strong federal power not just after the Civil War but as the head of the Ways and Means Committee, he advocated for increased federal taxation and script currency and more centralized federal control. The Civil War fundamentally changed the balance of state and federal power, and that is in no small part because of Stevens.

But as strong as Stevens was as a legislative leader, he was far more radical than many others he served with. While he moved people in the general egalitarian direction, the failure of Reconstruction was in part because many others were not as radical in opposition to an understanding of white racial superiority as Stevens was. Stevens believed in a strong view of reparations and, tied with that, believed that because the former Confederate territory were not US citizens, the US federal government and military had the right to confiscate property. There were various plans, but at least one of his plans included the confiscation of the land of all former Confederate citizens who owned at least $20,000 of property. That property would then be redistributed to the formerly enslaved (using a type of homestead system that Andrew Johnson used in writing the Homestead Act, which was limited to White Americans). The remaining property would be sold to pay down federal debt from the Civil War. Obviously, this did not pass, and no reparations were ever paid to the formerly enslaved, and property was largely returned to former Confederates.

Stevens was against the death penalty for former Confederate officials, but he was for punishment. But because he died in 1868 and was quite sick the last couple of years of his life, he could not see his plans for Reconstruction carried out. Those plans were unpopular, and even if he had been younger and in better health, it would have been difficult to move the country toward his egalitarian understanding of drawing Black Americans into the country as full and equal citizens.

Stevens was controversial in many ways. He rose to political prominence as an Anti-Masonic crusader. Stevens was born with a club foot, and one of the requirements of Masonic admission was rejecting anyone with a disability. Whether this was part of why Stevens was so strongly anti-Masonic was part of the discussion in the book. But in his anti-Masonic crusade, he briefly partnered with the xenophobic Know Nothing party in violation of his broader support for immigrant rights. Stevens was strongly in favor of high tariffs as a way to both fund the federal government and as a way to protect US business interests.

Stevens was also a strong supporter of US expansionism and supported Native American suppression and the expansion of US territory, including the purchase of Alaska and the attempts to purchase or conquer Caribbean land.

Stevens also was pragmatic, not convictional constitutionalist. He had no problem violating constitutional limits when it served his interests. And the focus on impeaching Johnson throughout the end of his life was questionable, even as Johnson was violating the Congressional will.

There is no question that Lincoln and Stevens had different approaches. Stevens pushed emancipation far earlier and much more racially than Lincoln did. But Lincoln likely would not have been able to write the Emancipation Proclamation without it being more moderate than Steven's plans. Stevens was cantancerous and that did not win him friends. Part of the problem with this book and any biography of Stevens is that there were so many stories about him from his opponents. Many of these stories do not seem to be based on fact but on trying to smear his reputation. The Lincoln movie shows him having a sexual relationship with his Black housekeeper. And that is a possibility, but as with many biographical details, it is very difficult to prove one way or another. Stevens never married, and he left his housekeeper a significant inheritance. But he was quite rich, and left a lot of money to many people because he did not have any biological heirs.

The book was a bit dry, and spent a lot of time exploring the historicity of various stories about Stevens. And so much of what is important about Stevens is in legislative history and speeches, which are not particularly interesting reading. I am glad to know more about Stevens, but it is hard to recommend this as an exciting book.

Merged review:

Summary: Controversial radical, but an important figure both in political and legislative history, and in the history of emancipation and reconstruction. 

Many important people are less well-known than they should be. Thaddeus Stevens is one of them. I think the way that many people to do know who he is and have heard of him is because Tommy Lee Jones played him in the movie Lincoln.

Hans Trefousse's 2005 biography was the first real reevaluation of Stevens in a couple of generations. (Bruce Levine has a new biography published in 2021 that I have not read.) I picked this up on sale at Audible, which may not have been the best format.

One of the problems with the biography of Stevens is that he is a lawyer and legislator. He was known for being effective with parliamentary rules and procedures. And rules and procedures are not scintillating reading. But they are essential to the work of legislating.

Thaddeus Stevens is best known for leading the House during the Civil War and being the leader of what is commonly known as the Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction Era. He strongly favored public education, emancipation before the Civil War, and civil and voting rights after the Civil War. Radical Republicans were both organized to oppose Johnson and to push for stronger federal actions to protect Black citizens across the country and to more strongly punish former Confederate officials.

Stevens believed former Confederates were not US citizens (and therefore not subject to the bill of rights and other protections) but fell under international rules of war as a conquered territory and should be handled with military law, not civil law. This means that he did not think that the legislature should seat anyone from those territories until there were new votes by the legislature to adopt them as states. (Incidentally, Johnson was a senator from Tennessee that remained with the Union and continued to be seated in the Senate after Tennessee joined the Confederacy until Lincoln appointed him as military governor in 1862 before he was elected Vice president. So under Stevens' understanding, Johnson should have been removed from the Senate when Tennesse withdrew from the Union.) The implication of Stevens' understanding of citizenship means that the legislature would have been a smaller body with only Northern legislators, which would have changed the requirements for approving legislation, passing the constitutional amendments, vetoes, and impeachment.

Stevens was for strong federal power not just after the Civil War but as the head of the Ways and Means Committee, he advocated for increased federal taxation and script currency and more centralized federal control. The Civil War fundamentally changed the balance of state and federal power, and that is in no small part because of Stevens.

But as strong as Stevens was as a legislative leader, he was far more radical than many others he served with. While he moved people in the general egalitarian direction, the failure of Reconstruction was in part because many others were not as radical in opposition to an understanding of white racial superiority as Stevens was. Stevens believed in a strong view of reparations and, tied with that, believed that because the former Confederate territory were not US citizens, the US federal government and military had the right to confiscate property. There were various plans, but at least one of his plans included the confiscation of the land of all former Confederate citizens who owned at least $20,000 of property. That property would then be redistributed to the formerly enslaved (using a type of homestead system that Andrew Johnson used in writing the Homestead Act, which was limited to White Americans). The remaining property would be sold to pay down federal debt from the Civil War. Obviously, this did not pass, and no reparations were ever paid to the formerly enslaved, and property was largely returned to former Confederates.

Stevens was against the death penalty for former Confederate officials, but he was for punishment. But because he died in 1868 and was quite sick the last couple of years of his life, he could not see his plans for Reconstruction carried out. Those plans were unpopular, and even if he had been younger and in better health, it would have been difficult to move the country toward his egalitarian understanding of drawing Black Americans into the country as full and equal citizens.

Stevens was controversial in many ways. He rose to political prominence as an Anti-Masonic crusader. Stevens was born with a club foot, and one of the requirements of Masonic admission was rejecting anyone with a disability. Whether this was part of why Stevens was so strongly anti-Masonic was part of the discussion in the book. But in his anti-Masonic crusade, he briefly partnered with the xenophobic Know Nothing party in violation of his broader support for immigrant rights. Stevens was strongly in favor of high tariffs as a way to both fund the federal government and as a way to protect US business interests.

Stevens was also a strong supporter of US expansionism and supported Native American suppression and the expansion of US territory, including the purchase of Alaska and the attempts to purchase or conquer Caribbean land.

Stevens also was pragmatic, not convictional constitutionalist. He had no problem violating constitutional limits when it served his interests. And the focus on impeaching Johnson throughout the end of his life was questionable, even as Johnson was violating the Congressional will.

There is no question that Lincoln and Stevens had different approaches. Stevens pushed emancipation far earlier and much more racially than Lincoln did. But Lincoln likely would not have been able to write the Emancipation Proclamation without it being more moderate than Steven's plans. Stevens was cantancerous and that did not win him friends. Part of the problem with this book and any biography of Stevens is that there were so many stories about him from his opponents. Many of these stories do not seem to be based on fact but on trying to smear his reputation. The Lincoln movie shows him having a sexual relationship with his Black housekeeper. And that is a possibility, but as with many biographical details, it is very difficult to prove one way or another. Stevens never married, and he left his housekeeper a significant inheritance. But he was quite rich, and left a lot of money to many people because he did not have any biological heirs.

The book was a bit dry, and spent a lot of time exploring the historicity of various stories about Stevens. And so much of what is important about Stevens is in legislative history and speeches, which are not particularly interesting reading. I am glad to know more about Stevens, but it is hard to recommend this as an exciting book.

Summary: Mary matters, but the response to her is widely varied.

After finishing Jesus Wars, I wanted to pick up The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction because I was surprised at how large of a role Mary played in trinitarian debates of the early centuries of Christianity (the idea of Mary, not the actual person of Mary). I have always been Protestant, and while I have some understanding of Catholic theology, I often miss the nuances behind the differences. And I have even less understanding of Orthodox theology. This book, in combination with Jesus Wars (and my current reading of Medieval Christianity) have helped to understand some of the nuance I previously missed.

A significant part of the early trinitarian debates were those that wanted to emphasize Jesus' divinity, opposing those that wanted to emphasize his humanity. Almost everyone understood that Jesus was, in some sense, both human and divine. But the problem comes in figuring out how to talk about that. And when you add the culture of the era that was biased against women (some believed that women were malformed men) and that sexuality was inherently sinful (so how could God come from a sinful act, the Immaculate Conception is about Mary, not Jesus; to make Mary able to bear Jesus as a mother she needed to be conceived apart from sin) and that some of the philosophical conventions of the time also impacted these things could be talked about.

This book at least touches on these matters and how Mary's role changed over time with both Western and Eastern early Christianity and later post-reformation changes and her influence in Islam. There is also a necessary chapter on whether Mary is a goddess figure. My summary of that is that theologically, she is not a goddess; although there have been fringe movements that did want to move her into a more salvific or divine role, those have remained fringe. But throughout history, there were practices that kept placing her in a more divine role than what ecclesiological leaders would accept. This tension is, in part what has kept Mary prominent, but also kept Mary isolated out of the Protestant world.

Mary Joan Winn Leith is not Catholic, nor is she the first Protestant that makes the case that Protestants should have a higher view of Mary. Matthew Milliner's Mother of the Lamb more explicitly makes this case (according to interviews I have heard about it, it is still on my to-read list.) But there have been abuses of thinking and practice around Mary, and like in many other things, Mary has suffered an overcorrection. Amy Peeler, in Women and the Gender of God, speaks about the importance to our theology and anthropology in recovering a better understanding of Mary.

It is always hard in short books on big topics to cover it all. But The Virgin Mary touched on a wide range of topics, from theology and implications to trinitarian thought, to the role of Mary in art and church development and missionary work, and more. The Marian practices of the rosary make sense in light of congregational worship of the Middle Ages being largely clergy-focused and in a language that most did not even understand. And Mary, partly because of the Magnificant, is understood as being interested in the poor and dispossessed.

I was not completely new to the topic, but this was still helpful.

This is my full review, but it was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/virgin-mary/

Summary: An exploration of the season of Epiphany, a celebration of the glory of Christ's incarnation and revelation of himself to us.

I appreciate this book while also being a bit frustrated with it and I am not completely sure why. I started it last year during the Epiphany season and didn't finish it. So I started it again right at the end of Christmas season so that I would have it done by the start of Epiphany. But again I didn't finish and I really forced myself to finish. I have previously read Rutledge's book on Advent, which is mostly a collection of sermons. And I read about 75% of Rutledge's' Crucifixion and I have dipped into several other of her sermon collections, but again, never finished them.

Sermon collections are not something that really are intended to read straight through. So dipping into them but not finishing is I think to be expected for the genre. But there is something else that I think feels off here. I very much appreciate Rutledge's wisdom and attention to the tradition of the Episcopal church. She turns 87 later this year and we need to pay attention to elders who have seen changes in history. I also think that she is one of the best preachers I have ever heard. I have spent a lot of time watching her old sermons on youtube.

The third things I really appreciate about Rutledge that is in full force here is her attention to Jesus. Rutledge was part of the first generation of women to be ordained in the Episcopal church. That Episcopal church has not always centered Jesus and I think at times she is preaching to a sliver of the church that hasn't centered Jesus. But at the same time, I am not part of that part of the church. I do think there is a need to pay attention to Jesus and his humanity and his death and resurrection. But as much as I did appreciate learning about the season (she is pointing out that Epiphany is a season, not just a single day feast) that centers on Christ's incarnation and glory the attention felt more like retrieval of tradition instead of attention to the need for a season of epiphany.

Maybe I am just the wrong reader for this book, because part of the conception of the whole series is new attention to the liturgical calendar. I want to understand tradition and why the liturgical seasons are as they are, but I didn't feel connected to the great tradition for the purpose of the future. I don't remember where I read it, but somewhere in James KA Smith's work, he talks about the problems of participating in the liturgy while in a culture that doesn't either believe in Christianity or recognize the liturgy. Based on my memory, I think he was talking about the problems of fasting or participating in lent and other seasons that were intended to be communal, solely as an individual. Smith is pointing out that we are not Christians on our own, but in community even as that community is not reflected in broader culture.

Part of Smith's critique of The Benedict Option was that Dreher was advocating retreat from culture when Smith believes that Augustine and others were calling for engagement with culture. What we have seen from Dreher and a significant part of the American church is a reliance on a strongman to get his own way, instead of seeking creative ways to live out the life of Christ within a culture that is no longer designed for you.

I think both Lent and Christmas were writing consciously to help the reader understand how to celebrate the liturgical seasons within a culture that is not designed for us. And in particular how to celebrate when many cultural values are overtly opposed to the underlying values of the season we are celebrating. I don't want to be too strong here, because Rutledge is focusing on glory, in a way that is very cross cultural. I think she is right that the church doesn't understand glory in the way that earlier generations of the church did. But I also didn't feel like I was given much more than just the reality of that lack. Maybe part of the problem is that for Lent and Christmas the problem is that the culture isn't celebrating what the season is celebrating, but Rutlege is pointing out that the church isn't celebrating what the season is celebrating. Those are different problems.

It feels contradictory to both say that this book was too long and didn't do enough, but that is what I am left with. It is about 50 percent longer than Lent (although only about 10 pages longer than Christmas) and I think it either needed to cut 30-50 pages, or pivot to a different lens to look at Epiphany. It isn't that I think anything here is bad or heretical or wrong. It is that either it should have been shorter or covered more ground.

This originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/epiphany/