Bookwi.se

Summary: A look at Roman religious practices and the how the early church was different from the religious practices of their surrounding culture.

It took me a decade or so, but eventually I came to see that the work of NT Wright and others were bringing attention to the Roman and Jewish cultural practices of the several centuries around Jesus. The good of that work continues in many others like Nijay Gupta’s recent books. Strange Religion and Tell Her Story are interrelated. Tell Her Story is an investigation into the role of women in the early church. The main insights was Gupta’s investigation into the role of women in broader Roman society. Women were marginalized in Roman society, but wealth and class meant that women could still participate in the patronage system even if there were only some women who had the privileges of wealth and class that allowed them that role.

Strange Religion is using similar tools and methods to explore Roman religious practices and with that base understanding explore how early Christian practices were similar or different from the culture of the time. Strange Religion is very readable, but some background knowledge in anthropology, culture, concept of honor/shame versus guilt/innocence will help you get the most out of the book. If you have read Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes or Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, I think you will get more out of Strange Religion. That isn’t required pre-reading, but at least for me, getting my head wrapped around how the early church was significantly different in its thinking needed multiple angles and multiple books and I am sure I do not have it all.

I think the negative of this type of project is that it can make those who are new to the investigation of the early church mistrust their own ability to read scripture. That isn’t the point, but there is some value in giving us humility as we approach scripture and our faith. Christianity is complex. The early church culture was significantly different from our own. The various cultures presented throughout scripture were significantly different from each other, not just from then to now. It is not that reading scripture is impossible, but there are many ways to misread it.

I am not going to summarize the whole book but instead just offer a few take aways and commend the book. Strange Religion is really offering two types of strange. Early Christianity is strange to our eyes because it was in a completely different culture and used an entirely different social imaginary. But early Christianity was also strange to the culture it was in. Roman culture was “religious” in the sense that everyone participated. Almost all meat had been used in some sort of sacrifice or offering. Everyone wanted to appease the gods because it was the gods who controlled weather and luck and all of the things that were outside of the normal human areas of control.

What made Judaism and then Christianity different was their resistance to participate in those communal practices that would bring good to the community. This is not completely different from some versions of Christian nationalism or early Puritanism which believes in a covenant with God by a culture or state. In order to fulfill that covenant, everyone needs to participate in the religious practices that appease the god(s). Judaism did not believe in “the gods” but A God. To appease “the gods” was to deny the supremacy of their god. That was dangerous and different enough. But Christianity added to this by crossing ethnic and cultural boundaries.

Strange Religion fits well with NT Wright’s recent book on Acts. Wright suggests that part of what Paul was doing in going to the local synagogues before reaching out the local gentiles was to identify with Judaism’s exemption from communal sacrifices. The Roman government had allowed Jews to opt out of communal sacrifices as long as Jews would pray for Roman and community good. But Jews were physically marked with circumcision in addition to being primarily an ethnic group. Paul wanted to use that Jewish exemption but also wanted gentile Christians to not get physically marked in circumcision. That appeared to be dangerous both to Jews who wanted to maintain their exemption and to Romans who wanted to be able to identify who Jews were.

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Summary: A meandering novel set in Kansas City with BBQ  as a central setting. 

In 2012 my favorite novel was Thin Blue Smoke. I ran across Doug Worgul on Bluesky and decided I needed to revisit the novel. I very much remembered the three main characters, LaVerne Williams, AB Clayton, and Ferguson Glen. There are a host of other supporting characters and part of the joy of the novel is getting to go back in time to give context to why those characters are who they are. I have previously written about Thin Blue Smoke in a way that was pretty vague and without spoilers. But I am going to give away more of the story this time. If you don’t want spoilers, read this version. If you are okay with spoilers, then you can keep reading.

LaVerne Williams is a Texas-born former baseball player. After a serious sholder injury in 1967, he is let go by the Kansas City Athletics. He is young, married with an infant and without a job or any prospects. The novel is set in the 1990s and by this time LaVerne has become established with a small BBQ resturant with a number of regulars, but little recognition.

AB Clayton wandered lost into the restaurant, commonly known as Smoke Meat, when he was 15.   LaVerne offered him a job on the spot and by the main timeline of the book he has been working at Smoke Meat for about 20 years and his whole life is wrapped up in the work and the people of the resturant.

Father Freguson Glen is a theology professor and Episcopal priest. In the 1960s he wrote a pulitzer prize nominated novel but nothing else of note since. He is an alcoholic and lost in many ways, but he has come to find the people of Smoke Meat are a type of family.

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Summary: A book biography of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.

I have been aware of Miriam Dixon (Mimi) for a while. I assume it was a Renovare podcast that I first became aware of her. She was a pastor for 40 years, retiring in 2019, 34 of those years as the pastor of a single church in Colorado. She has been on the board of director for Renovare for quite awhile.

And I have been aware of Celebration of Discipline for decades. I think I read it while I was in college or seminary for the first time. And I think I read it again about 15-20 years ago. And I have read portions of it when I needed to refer to a spiritual discipline since then. But it wasn’t until Worth Celebrating and Celebration of Discipline where choosen for the Renovare Book Club that I picked it up again.

As is clear from Worth Celebrating, Celebration of Disciple was a very influential book. Many evangelicals and other conservative protestants were resistant to spiritual disciplines because they felt “too Catholic” or thought they were a repudiation of the concept of grace. Foster as an outsider to the evangelical world, but with enough awareness of the evangelical world was able to frame spiritual disciplines in a way that was attractive and helpful.

I have listened to a number of interviews with both Richard Foster and Mimi Dixon. Foster did not want an academic to write the book biography of Celebration of Discipline, he wanted a pastor who had worked to form people spiritually to write it. I think there is some wisdom to that, but I also think that I have appreciated book biographies by people like Alan Jacobs, George Marsden and Martin Marty. I am less reluctant to have academic who are familiar with the subject write book biographies than Foster is and I am not sure at the end if I think Dixon was the right choice. She is enthusiastic, she was personally formed by Celebration of Discipline. She already had a relationship with Foster being on the Renovare board of directors.

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Summary: The backstory on the Wicket Witch of the West in Oz.

I do not remember when I read Wicked the first time. My guess is that I read it after I saw the stage adaptation in 2007 or so. I have not previously written about it so it was likely before 2009 when I started blogging. After watching the recent movie, I decided to reread the book again because I really have no specific memory of the book other than the broadest strokes of the story and I suspected most of what I remembered was from the stage production not the book.

To the best of my memory, I think have seen the stage production either two or three times between 2006 and 2013 and now have read the book twice and watched the movie once. (My wife and I saw it together to see if our kids were ready for it and we will probably take them to see it over Christmas break.)

Part of what prompted me to read it again was all of the “don’t let your kids read this” posts. I remember the book being for adults, but I didn’t have any specific memories of it being overly crude or sexual or violent. One of my current pet peeves is classifying books with sex as “adult” instead of thinking about a wide variety of reasons why a book is written for an adult audience.

Yes, I don’t think that Wicked was written for a pre-teen audience. I think putting the movie images on the cover is a bad idea because the stage musical and the movie are very different stories from the book. I hope that after the second movie is out, that there will be a movie novelization book. I think most pre-teen readers will be bored because the book is primarily concerned with adult issues, not adult as in sex (although there is sex in it) but adult as in questions of meaning, purpose and the role of naturalism and faith. Wicked is a slow story that that covers about 40 years of time.

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Summary: An ethnographic study of an antiracism program in a Cincinnati evangelical megachurch.

Undivided was not a book on my radar. I had not planned on listening to the Holy Post Podcast which interviewed the author Hahrie Han. But then I got an email about a bonus segment which discussed the 2018 meeting at Wheaton College about what to do in response to Trump. I was well aware of that meeting and listened to that segment and then went back and listened to the whole podcast. If you are interested in just the interview, you can watch the YouTube video and skip to the 54 minute mark to get to the start of the interview.

Undivided in an ethnographic study of an antiracist training program in an evangelical megachurch. Hahrie Han became aware of it because of its involvement in passing a ballot initiative to provide free preK to Cincinnati students. She was told that the ballot initative was heavily influenced by a local megachurch. As she investigated she became intrigued because most DEI programs are not particularly effective at changing long term behavior. Han embedded herself in the church for nearly seven years to understand how the church and the program, which was eventually spun off to its organization, worked and what made it effective. Eventually the book discusses how it responded to the backlash to the program and the larger cultural backlash to antiracism programs within the US culture.

Undivided by Hahrie Han predominately traces four people while exploring the Undivided antiracism training program at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati. Han’s skill as a writer and researcher is evident throughout the book. Her four central characters are a Black male pastor (Chuck Mingo) who was the public face of the program. A white male participate in the initial program (Grant) who at the time worked for the Ohio Department of Corrections, eventually leading their social media team. Grant came to understand how much he didn’t understand about race, despite working in a racially diverse setting and having an adopted brother who was black. The third and fourth character are a Black woman (Sandra, a pseudonym) and a white woman (Jess). Undivided tells the story of these four characters of time and how they were changed by the program and by their relationships with one another. It is in large part the stickiness of the relationships with brought about the change within the characters.

I am a big fan of good ethnographic studies. Good ethnographic studies follow a group of individuals over a fairly long period of time to understand a context deeply. One of the best ethnographies I have read was Gang Leader for a Day, where a sociologist embedded himself in a Chicago housing project and local gang for years to understand how the culture and pressures of living in public housing and being within a gang worked. I was turned onto the model of ethnographic study after reading Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity by Mitchell Duneier. I think I picked it up in the late 90s (it was published in ‘92) in part because I lived about two blocks from the restaurant at the center of that ethnography. Ethnography is inherently controversial because the act of embedding yourself into a community well enough to be able to report on the community impacts not just the community being studied (the observer effect) but also the researchers themselves are often changed because of the long term impact of the relationships. (At the end of the book, Hahrie Han say that her work with Undivided program and the people profiled and Crossroads church where the program was set drew her back to faith.)

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Summary: A broad overview of the history of Black Christianity, with a second volume that is a collection of writing from Black Christianity.

Black Christianity in the United States is unquestionably tied to the (racial) history of the United States. That is a very basic statement but I think it is a good place to start when thinking about Walter Strickland’s new history of Black Christianity, Swing Low. Certainly good histories are contextually aware of the broader history while telling a narrower story. But it is not really possible to tell the story of Black Christianity without grappling with the racial history of the US because Black Christians in the US have always been subjected to that history.

I grappled with how to write that last line, because “subjected to” is a passive framing, and the Black Church has been anything but passive. At the same time, another incorrect framing would be to suggest that anti-Black racism in the US is a “Black problem”. James Baldwin was asked by Dick Cavett a variety of questions about that the “Black problem” in the United States. Baldwin answered Cavett’s questions about hope and frustration, but Baldwin also reframed the question to center racism as not a Black problem but a White problem. The problem of racism is not about the subject of the discrimination but the ones doing the discrimination. Part of what Strickland is doing in Swing Low is to show how Black Christians responded to racism by forming their own institutions and communities and theological beliefs and practices, but also that not everything in the Black church is a response to racism.

I have read several histories of the Black Church, most recently Anthony Pinn’s Black Church History, Henry Louis Gates’ companion book to his documentary This is Our Story, This is Our Song, Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered and Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church. These are four different approaches to telling the story of the black church. Of those four books Swing Low is most similar to Isaiah Robinson’s Black Church Empowered. Strickland is an academics historian and theologian, while Isaiah Robinson is a local church pastor. But they are telling the story as Black churchmen.

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