Bookwi.se

Summary:  A rhetorical question about what it means to be the church.

I do not remember when I first ran across Charlie Dates. I do not think I have ever met him, but I do know several people who know him. I know that I was well aware of him before 2018 because he was one of the reasons that I watched the MLK50 event that he describes in the book. So I think I have followed him from afar for at least 10 years. Charlie Dates is now the pastor of two Chicago churches, Progressive Baptist on the west side of Chicago and Salem Baptist on the south side of Chicago. I knew Rev Meeks who was the founder of Salem Baptist and Dates’ mentor because he was part of a group I worked with in the early 2000s. And I think it was in part because of Meeks that I paid attention to Dates initially.

I want to say that I both enjoyed What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness and I wanted a bit more from it. If you have followed my reading, you know that the Black Church is a special interest of mine and I have read widely about it. I think I would have more unqualified support if I had not read so widely. While I spent about 15 years living in Chicago, I have lived just outside of Atlanta for 20 years now. I picked up Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church because he is my Sentator.

I want to suggest The Divided Mind of the Black Church to people who read What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness. They are writing from different perspectives, but they have a complimentary message. Warnock is writing mostly from the perspective that the Black Church has always had a tension between the holiness tradition and the justice tradition, but he is advocating for a stronger connection to the justice tradition as a requirement for “black theology.” I have complaints about Warnock’s position for two main reasons. First, he has a narrow definition of Black Theology that only sees it as Liberation Theology since James Cone and that seems too restrictive. But second, his conclusion is that justice includes LBGTQ inclusion and I know that this is part of what Dates is opposing in this book.

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Summary: Spiritual formation that avoids formula or triteness. 

Writing about spiritual formation is hard for many reasons. Part of the difficulty is that it hard to write about something well that you have not experienced, and so a good writer on spiritual formation needs to be someone who has worked to develop their own spiritual life. But that introduces another problem with spiritual writing. Many spiritual writers turn their own experience into instructions and frame “the right way” to grow spiritually as an imitation of their own experience instead of one possible path. I think one of the biggest strengths of The Way of The Spirit is that Jeremy Sims is careful to not prescribe methods but rather open up opportunities. This is about the framing but it is an important part of good spiritual formation writing. A book that commands will naturally create a situation where the reader is arguing with the author about the details of the commands. Sims does a good job of framing the book as opening up the ideas of spiritual formation as an invitation.

As someone who has read a lot about spiritual formation, I want to say, in the best way possible, that there is little that is new here. The history of Christianity is all about seeking after God. It is not that we need new methods or paths to God. What we do need are new metaphors and emphases that address the particular needs of our current culture.

This quote from early in the book I think is exactly why The Way of The Spirit is a helpful book for spiritual formation today:

“We live in an age where attention has become our most endangered resource. Every sound, every scroll, every urgency competes for it. But what if the real threat to our spiritual lives isn’t disbelief, but distraction? What if the Spirit has not grown silent, but we have grown unable to hear? I’ve come to see that much of the Christian life is not about gaining more faith but giving better attention.” (p10)

Attention is particularly in short supply, but as is emphasized regularly, spiritual formation cannot happen if we do not pay attention to both the way that God is at work in and around us, but also that we need to have space for that awareness to seep into our souls.

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Summary: A dead body found near the village of Three Pines starts an investigation into botany, history, an IPO, and the family of a Three Pines resident.

I am a big fan of the Inspector Gamache series, but I have been pretty critical of the recent books being more political thriller than mystery. Miss Wolcott’s Ghost is a return to the mystery genre and I think it is one of the better books of the last 10 volumes. Most of the parts of what makes the series one that I love, are here. This is a book that revolves around the humanity of the characters. Gamache and his team are fallible, but good at their jobs. They have relationships with the others that cause them to care for one another, while also having strengths and weaknesses. And the characters of Three Pines are present in the story, even if it can be a bit thrown-in at times.

Gamache is the main character here. He is woken up in the middle of the night with a call that tells him about a dead body. There are two storytelling methods I didn’t love here, but are present throughout the book. The first is the way that a character that we do not know is introduced through flashbacks into their relationship with Gamache. I spent some time looking to see if I was supposed to know the character from prior books because it felt like it was presented as someone I should already know. And there is a bit of unreliable narrator to the flashbacks, which I don’t mind, but I there needed to be some indication that this was a new character in the series.

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Some Thoughts on books 2 to 5.

I really do not like giving away spoilers in the middle of a series. When a book series is out and popular, it is pretty much inevitable that to discuss them, is to give spoilers away to someone.

I have generally enjoyed this series. And I have enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. If I understand correctly, Matt Dinniman self published the first book in Sept 2020 and then the audiobook, narrated by Jeff Hays, was released about 18 months later. But somehow the 2nd to the 5th books were all released initially in print/ebook from January 2021 until February 2022. The publication pace slowed down, the 6th book released in June 2023. the 7th in Nov 2024, and the 8th in May 2026. Ace picked up the publication rights (but Dinniman kept the ebook rights) in 2024.

As a self published series, I think these are really good. But I also think the audiobook production and narration quality is part of what has made these so popular. The audiobooks are among the best I have heard.

For a fairly simple main storyline, the books have developed well. But by the time I hit the middle of book five I was getting a bit bored. This is a series where the whole premise is that the earth was captured and mostly destroyed and almost all of those who survived the initial destruction have been force to pay in a game to their death. This isn’t quite Hunger Games where the last human alive wins, but rather the humans have to complete against fantasy monsters or aliens in a world filled with Non Playable Characters (NPCs) that also get killed at a pretty high rate.

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Summary:  A series of essays and one short story, published in 1903.

I have been a part of a book group that has met on and off, with slightly different membership since 2019. The group had read about 4-5 books a year over the last 6 to 7 years. Over the past year it has mostly been about racial history. We read James by Percival Everett (fictional retelling of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective). We read a book about James Baldwin and then The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. WEB Du Bois came up a number of times as we read about Baldwin, and so our last book was The Souls of Black Folk. I was interested in rereading this in part because I recently read The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary J. Dorrien and as we started Souls of Black Folk I read the first half of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race, which brought me up to a few years past when Du Bois published this.

I previously listened to an audiobook of this Souls of Black Folk, so I picked up the Norton Annotated edition for background. I read three different introductions to the book to get some other perspectives, but this introduction by Jesse McCarthy was a solid introduction. Du Bois’ biography and the context of the world he was writing in really do help illuminate this book. I have a hard time recommending David Levering Lewis’ two-volume biography because few people will want to read nearly 2000 pages and even the single-volume consolidated biography by Lewis is over 900 pages. (Although Lewis is a good writer and it is worth reading, most people just won’t want to read that much.)

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Summary: Aliens destroy the Earth and put millions of people who managed to survive into a live action role playing game where they have to survive lots of monsters (and some people) trying to kill them. 

I have known about Dungeon Crawler Carl for about a year. It started showing up in recommendations for great audiobooks and what to read if you like Project Hail Mary or the Murderbot series. I have been reading a lot of fiction lately, in part because my paying job has been so busy that I have not had the brain power for other types of books. I finally decided to pick them up when a good friend and his wife said they were listening to them as an audiobook on a long drive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl knows it is not great and important literature. It is funny, crass, way too violent, but engaging. At this point I am in the middle of the third book in a bit over a week. The kindle books are in the Kindle unlimited library so I have borrowed them and then had the kindle discount to get the audiobook for under $5 each.

This is a book describing a live action role playing game. It is inspired by first person shooters and Dungeons and Dragons and the wide variety of other games. In some ways I think this is like a more adult oriented version of Ready Player One, except Ready Player One was an immersive video game who was on a quest to solve problems using cultural history. Dungeon Crawler Carl is supposed to be more D&D inspired fantasy where the “real” person dies and there is (from my perspective) entirely too much description of blood and guts from the fights.

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Summary: Ten years after five chosen teens work together to defeat a magical enemy, they come back together to face a new enemy.

A last year, I stumbled on When Among Crows by Veronica Roth and then I read the second of that series To Clutch a Razor. I had not read any of Roth’s books in a decade, but she has been writing, so I decided I would pick up some of her books when I ran across them on sale.

The Chosen Ones has a premise that I was interested in. A group of “chosen ones” was found as early teens after magic started happening and an enemy arose. That story is the backstory to this book but flashbacks do tell us part of that story.

This book is about those heroes as the most famous people on earth and how they have adapted to that, or not. The story primarily focuses on Sloane. She is dating Matt, the team’s leader, but she has not recovered from the trauma of that original fight. It is this part of the book that I liked the most. I wanted to understand what it was like to grapple with regret for what you had done, while the world treats you as a hero. I didn’t really want the book to only stay there, but that was where I liked the book most.

I am not going to spoil the story, but I can understand why a number of people didn’t like the book, or at least thought it was mediocre. The story was a little slow and it meandered around a bit. I liked the book and I have appreciated the grappling with the emotional and other costs of being a hero. It felt to me like While the World Watched, which was the memoir of the last girl to leave the bathroom before the bomb went off that killed the four girls in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. She grappled with the cost that she and those around her paid for participating in the civil rights movement. Her brother clearly had PTSD and died young. She grappled with alcoholism and nearly divorced before moving back to Birmingham and working with the museum before she retired.

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Summary: A retelling of part of the Arthurian legends in verse.

I have known of Malcolm Guite for quite a while, but I do not tend to read a lot of poetry and have not previously read any of his books. I have listened to a number of interviews on various podcasts. Guite is a priest, poet, and public intellectual. Galahad and the Grail pulls together all three.

I thought I had read TH White’s Once and Future King when I was a teen, but after reading Galahad and the Grail, I think I have only seen the Sorcerer and the Stone and other movie and TV adaptations. So while I had a rough idea of the characters, most of the story that Guite is adapting and putting to verse was new to me. I did not know anything about who Galahad was or how he was conceived.

It is obvious that Guite is using his skill as a poet to put this story to verse. But he is also thinking theologically about how imagination shapes our formation as humans. I am a bit resistant to the role of Christendom in this story. Arthur and others are clearly Christians working to culturally shape England into a Christ-following country. But the point here isn’t that this is history, or an example of England being particularly chosen by God for a particular purpose of colonialism or power, but that this is a story about how myth and imagination shape shared identity.

I picked up Galahad and the Grail not long after I finished Wilson’s version of the Odyssey. Both were written in verse and I read each of them a bit in verse to understand the structure, but then I mostly listened to them as audiobooks. My perception is that narrative verse was meant to be heard. And while I want to read enough to become familiar with the structure, I want to hear it because narrative verse is an aural medium.

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