Bookwi.se

Summary: A sweeping history of Black Social Gospel movement from the end of the Reconstruction through the 1930s.

This is the first of Gary Dorrien’s long books that I have read. I have read his memoir, which I think is one of his shortest books. And I took Homebrewed Christianity’s class on Gary Dorrien, Theology for Troublemakers. I have the second book in this trilogy as well as The Spirit of American Liberal Theology. But that is just scratching the surface of his writing. A friend I talked with last week recommended his The Remaking of Evangelical Theology and I want to many more including his book on Anglicanism. 

I think that The New Abolition is going to be too long and detailed for many readers, but this is a nuanced history. There are a lot of players to the story, some that are fairly familiar like Booker T Washington, Walter White or Ida B Wells, but many are lesser known like Bishop Reverdy Ransom or educator Richard Wright.

Raphael Warnock’s book tells a shorter history of the tension in the Black church between personal piety and social activism, but this is a much thicker history that grapples with ways that often the same people changed over time. WEB DuBois argued against Washington’s accommodationist tendencies but at other times used very similar rhetoric. Washington preached accommodation, but also quietly supported more active community organizing. Many arguing against the white supremacy of the time still accepted some level of racial hierarchy. Similarly much of the Black Social Gospel movement was either patriarchal in its assumptions, or was in favor of women’s suffrage, but still assumed a gender hierarchy or opposed gender hierarchy had regular affairs. There was a number of the social gospel proponents who were holiness absolutists who had very high standards of morality that seem to suggest a type of politics of respectability which also assume hierarchical class assumptions. And it was fairly common in this history to see alcoholism, which I think is in part a trauma response to the reality of this history.

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Summary: An intro to Process Philosophy.

As I have said a number of times, I don’t feel like I have a great philosophy background, especially modern philosophy. I picked up Process-Relational Philosophy after reading Thomas Oord’s A Systematic Theology of Love. Oord is a Process Theologian and as much as I thought his book was clearly written, I thought that I needed more understanding of process philosophy to better understand Oord’s positions.

Process-Relational Philosophy was the most recommended intro that I came across and I can see why. It was helpful and relatively short. And even thought it avoided the technical aspects of Whitehead in the main text (there is an appendix that attempts to get much more technical after the main text), I think that a good number of concepts were related well. My only complaint is that I think I wanted about 50% more book because I felt like it may have been too introductory. I think that after the descriptions of Oord and then the descriptions of Mesle, I think I can go back to Oord and reread it with better understand.

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Summary:  A quest style adventure with a bit of satire.

Last year I read James by Percival Everett. This year my book group chose to read it and I decided that I needed to read Huck Finn as well. I have not previously read Huck Finn, and while a number of the group had read Huck Finn in school, no one had read it recently when we started. (Although two others read it as we read James, just like I did.)

I HATED Huck Finn. I like the book James. But I honestly can’t figure out why so many people love Huck Finn. Maybe it is simply that it was a young adult adventure book when that was fairly new and so people have fond memories of books that they read as children. I have reread a number of books as an adult that I remember fondly from my childhood. Some of them still work, but some do not.

Tom Sawyer is an awful character. I can’t read the end of Huck Finn with Tom Sawyer’s foolishness without wanting to throw the book across the room. There is no sense of Tom having thought for Jim as a person. While at times Huck has naive wisdom and plays like he knows the Duke and King were bad men, his continued desire to save them or go back to them did not make any sense. Huck at times treats Jim as human, but much of the time Jim is a pet.

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Summary: A sentient security robot who would rather watch soap operas than interact with humans, has to save the humans who are on his job from both the planet they are surveying, and those who are trying to keep the secrets of the planet.

I am in a season where I have too much data entry work to do, and I have been reading long heavy books recently. With the interest in Project Hail Mary and the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I have been seeing a lot of social media posts asking for suggestions for science fiction books recently. A series that I have seen frequently recommended is the Murderbot series. All Systems Red is the first book and it was novella length and available from my library and I finished it in one morning.

The robot refers to themself as “murderbot” but doesn’t have a name. The narrator is male, but the book says they are not gendered as a security robot (only sexbots are gendered, the rest are not.)

After an accident where murderbot, I think accidentally, killed a bunch of people on a previous job, the robot figured out how to hack its security system so that it would not be required to follow orders from “the company”.

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Summary: After the death of his grandmother and the revelation that his mother (who he thought was dead) is behind a number of murders, Malik tries to settle into college and figure out how to try to have a normal life. 

Blood at the Root was a bit of a surprise hit. I read it about 9 months after it released and a number of friends or acquaintances had been recommending it. Blood at the Root was a very good opening fantasy book. There was good world building and character development. I alternated between ebook and audiobook for that first book and then I just listened to the audiobook for this second book.

This series is clearly producing audiobooks with the intent of drawing in the YA audience that is used to TV and movies. I don’t traditionally love sound effects and music in audiobooks because I think it often sounds cheesy. And there are definitely some aspects of the audiobook production that I think lean in (intentionally I think) to the cheese, especially during fight scenes where magic duels sounds like star wars blasters being shot back and forth.

As I skimmed through reviews on goodreads, there is a clear split between people who are five stars (“it was great”) and those who thought it dragged. I both really enjoyed it as a whole and thought that the middle dragged and that the book as a whole was trying to do too much. This is a second book and they need to develop differently from first books. I get the point of why it was slow in the middle. It was oriented toward character development and complicating the story by exploring the motivations for a variety of characters to keep them from becoming too cardboard. But I think this is where Ladarrion Williams shows that he is a fairly new writer. He is skilled in plotting and I think he has great intentions with writing a complex story, which I appreciate; but that complexity needs to be shown without as much explicit explication. I agree that the middle of the book drags. (The second book is about 1/3 longer than the first book and I think with some better editing it would have been better if it had kept to the length of the first book.)

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Summary: Not really a devotional, but more of a Christian version of On Tyranny. 

I listened to this as an audiobook. I put it on in my car and listened when I had short drives by myself. It wasn’t a “one chapter a day listening”, but it was roughly about a month of occasional listening.

My initial impression is that this is a book about discernment more than anything else. There are definitely chapters that are explicitly about discernment, but most chapters have some aspect of understanding the world how it is.

Hanna Reichel is a German academic and theologian with a history of studying the theological response to WWII. There is one other book she has in english about theological method, but otherwise her books and articles are in German. She most recently is a systematic theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. That matters to the context of this book because she is writing particularly to United States Christians from her background. She is widely familiar with Bonhoeffer and Barth and other Christians within Germany who responded to Hitler. I know that the comparisons between pre-WWII Germany and current US can be over played, but there are a number of academics who study Germany who think that the parallels are worth drawing, as this Bonhoeffer scholar does.

I saw that one reviewer on Goodreads suggested that this was a Christian version of On Tyranny and I thought the same as I was reading it. I thought On Tyranny was worth reading and I think this is worth reading. So that is not a complaint, but I think you need to know that going in, it is not a devotional in the traditional sense. Although the chapters are very short and devotional in length, each was about 5 to 7 minutes in audio.

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Summary: A first person narrative of growing up in a boarding school and moving into adulthood under the cloud of, sort of, knowing their fate.

I continue to have mixed feelings about Kazuo Ishiguro. I really like Remains of the Day and re-reading again recently made me want to pick up another of Ishiguro’s books. I have previously finished When We Were Orphans and I gave up on The Buried Giant.

Part of the issue I think is that Ishiguro very much uses unreliable narrators and understatement in his writing. While unreliable narrators works in Remains of the Day, it tends to make the reader not like the unreliable narrator. And I think that the understatement, at least today, tends to go over the head of people who are not fairly sophisticated readers.

I have not previously read this book or watched the movie. (I didn’t know there was a movie until after I finished the book.) But I was had figured out what was going on pretty early on in the narrative. The understatement of the horror of the concept and the orientation of the narrative to focus on the daily struggles of teens in a boarding school and transitioning to adulthood means that I am pretty sure many readers missed the horror. That stylistic choice, which I appreciate from an artistic perspective, clearly went over people’s heads, at least if I take the Goodreads reviews as exemplary of the general reading public.

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Summary: A systematic theology that is attempting to make love as the center.

I have heard Thomas Jay Oord interviewed on several podcasts, including Gravity Commons and Homebrewed Christianity, which is why I picked up A Systematic Theology of Love in the first place. I had not realized it came out in February until I saw that a friend was reading it. It took me the whole month of April to read it.

I have a mixed relationship to systematic theology. I both appreciate that it is trying to be comprehensive because it is clear that theology is interrelated and choices in one area do impact choices in another areas. But I also am wary of systematic theology because of its attempt to categorize everything and I am just not sure that we can know it all. Many of my complaints here are about the fact that this is only volume one, and I have questions that are not answered yet (because they are going to be in the next two volumes, which Oord is going to try to get out in the next couple of years).

I am pretty persuaded by A Systematic Theology of Love. I think the orientation toward God as love and a God who is loving in a way that we traditionally think of love, is easy to get on board with. John Armstrong’s The Transforming Fire of Divine Love: My Long, Slow Journey into the Love of God I think is a good introduction to God’s love and has a number of overlaps with the early chapters of Oord’s book.

In particular I think it is easy to see that the influence of greek philosophy on the early church makes it hard for the early church to conceive of a God that loves in a way that we think of as loving.

“Although biblical writers mostly use “love” to describe actions that promote abundant life, blessedness, or well-being, Augustine defines love as desire. Countless theologians adopt his mistaken approach. In Teaching Christianity, Augustine poses a question: “How does [God] love us?” Because Augustine defines love as desire, he thinks God desires by either enjoying or using us. If God “enjoys us,” says Augustine, “it means he is in need of some good of ours, which nobody in his right mind could possibly say.” We have nothing of value, according to Augustine, because God already has all values eternally. So, God can’t love/desire us in the sense of needing us. Because he defines love as desire, Augustine says God loves by desiring what’s valuable. Being wise, God desires only the most valuable. This means, says Augustine, God only desires/loves Godself…In short, God only loves Godself. By defining love as desire, therefore, Augustine is forced to conclude God doesn’t love the world.” (p12)

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