Book Reviews

Summary: An evaluation of Christian parenting advice books from the past fifty years.

As with many books that I end up recommending, I was initially going to skip this book until I heard an interview with the authors. I grew up on the edge of Evangelicalism. I knew people who were big into Gothard, but my family always thought it was a cult-like group. I am too old for the main purity culture movement. I did grow up listening to Dobson and MacArthur on the radio, but my parents were not big parenting advice readers. Generally, while I know many people who did suffer as children from bad parenting advice that their parents received, I did not think I really needed to read this book personally. But then I listened to the authors talk about parenting advice in a way that felt to me like anti-discernment and how it was primarily an authoritarian approach and I realized that I did need to read the book. It was on sale for less than $2 on Audible and I finished the book in just over two days.

I also overlapped Good Christian Parenting with Why I am a Protestant which had a very good discussion about the importance of affirming diversity within Christianity as part of the book. And that emphasis really made me want to lean into thinking about The Myth of Good Christian Parenting as an exploration of the range of Christian beliefs within orthodox Christianity as part of my frame of reading evaluation.

I just need to name up front that almost all of the really bad parenting advice described in this book was rooted in a theological commitment to hierarchy. While there is a range of understanding of that hierarchy, virtually all of the teaching framed parenting as a means of control of children by parents for the sake of teaching children about submission to God. That framing placed parents as a God-figure in the parent/child relationship. An additional wrinkle is that most of the parenting advice also emphasized the sinful nature of the child from either birth or conception, so that there were a number of examples of authors condemning the sin of newborn to toddler children. Voddie Bauchman’s “vipers in diapers” is just one example of framing children as intentionally attempting to manipulate adults. Or even in some cases children intentionally attempting to sexually arouse the adults around them.

That isn’t to say that bad parenting advice only comes from one corner of the Christian world, but that the loudest voices about parenting were from those who tended to lean toward a high authoritarian perspective that also tended to lean into strongly reformed theological perspective and a strongly patriarchal cultural perspective. That combination worked in partnership with the Young, Restless and Reformed movement of the 1990s-2000s to catapult a narrow slice of Christians to be nearly the only parenting advice being given to Christians.

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Summary: A short defense of Protestant belief amid a larger ecumenical emphasis. 

I picked up Why I am Protestant in part because I have previously read a systematic theology textbook by Beth Felker Jones and I knew I could trust the book to be worth reading. I do not really need help understanding Protestant theology or an apologetic for being a Protestant, so I was really out of curiosity about what the book was about more than a particular need. This is part of a series by InterVarsity Press about ecclesiology and ecumenism. The series is assuming that Catholic, Orthodox and Protestants are all Christians and that rightly understanding both your own background and the backgrounds of others will help you to be a better Christian.

I cannot think of anything about the structure that I would change. The book opens with a defense of Christianity as a whole, before moving on to the particularity of Protestantism. And I think that is the right framing. We are all Christian, and some of us are Protestants. She then moves to a discussion of ecclesiology (the theology of the church and church structure) which frames the next two chapters on the strengths and weaknesses of the larger Protestant movement. I think looking at both the strengths and weaknesses is important to rightly defending a perspective. One of the problems of the modern apologetics movement (of which this isn’t really a part), is that the movement has largely focused on “winning” not exploring or persuading. This book is about exploring the reality of the Protestant world and to do so, we have to include weaknesses as well as strengths.

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Summary: A historical fiction book about Marie de France, a nun and author in the late 12th century.

To say that we don’t know much about Marie de France is an understatement. There are four writings that are probably from her, but other than that, there is basically no documentation. Even her name is only taken from one of her writings that is basically, I am Marie and I was born in France. Contextually it is assumed that she was born in France but spent most of her life in England as a nun. She was highly educated and there is speculation that she is the half sister of King Henry II, but that is in part trying to make sense of how she was educated.

Matrix is the third historical fiction book about medieval nuns I have read recently. The first two were Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt and Revelations: A Novel by Mary Sharratt about Margery Kempe. But both of those were about women that there was much more historical data. Margery Kempe wrote what is probably the first autobiography of a woman in English. And Hildegard had much more contemporary writing and writing about her. And even so the fiction part of the historical fiction required a lot of creative imagination to create a readable story. But with Matrix the historical is almost nonexistent and it is all fiction because even what we know about Marie de France is mostly speculative.

One of the potential problem of historical fiction is writing the main character as a modern person who happens to be more advanced socially or culturally than those around them. In some cases that may be historically accurate because there was an “advance” that the person was responsible for innovating. But generally, most people are people “of their time” in the sense that they were culturally similar to those around them. I am not completely new to the era. Beth Allison Barr is a historian of the era and included good discussion of the role of women in that era as part of her evidence about how the modern gender role discussion is a modern invention. And a lot of discussion about mysticism is about the medieval era. So I have some context of women in the mediaeval era, although I am far from an expert.

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Summary: An exploration of how the United States slowly became a country where additional people were increasingly more likely to be “born equal.”

Born Free is the third of Akhil Reed Amar’s books which I have read. (The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen’s Guidebook by Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams and America’s Constitution: A Biography). Both of those books are  long and as he said on Advisory Opinions when he was asked about the length of Born Equal, he said, well it was shorter than some of my previous books.

Born Equal is worth reading even if it is quite long. It is the second of a trilogy about the Constitution. I have not read the first, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, but I will get to it before the third comes out. I think it should be compared to Mark Noll’s trilogy about the use of the bible in American public life. Noll’s has published two of the three, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 and America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911. Noll’s book about the roughly same period was about 150 pages longer than Amar’s already long 753 page tome.

Part of why I compare them is that both are trying to contextualize their subject to a modern reader. Noll is trying to show how central the bible was rhetorically to public life. But Noll is also pointing out how much the view and use of the bible was shaped by people molding the bible to fit their point, not allowing scripture to shape them. I do not know if Amar is religious, but he is known for being a progressive originalist. While most legal originalists are ideologically conservative, Amar regularly points out that originalism is not about political conservatism but about paying attention to the words.

The theme that runs through Born Equal was that Abraham Lincoln was the foremost originalist legal theorist of his age and that after the founding generation passed away, and their children passed away, there needed to be a recovery of a legal theory of how to view the American governmental system. Amar contends that Lincoln had an originalist theory that took seriously the words of the constitution as the basis of the meaning and limitations and role of the government.

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Takeaway: I forgot how much I enjoyed the Scalzi/Wheaton author/narrator combo. 

I first read John Scalzi because of Old Man’s War, a book that reimagined Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers. That was a pretty standard sci-fi book that started a series that kept the main sci-fi conventions in place. It uses war and violence to critique war and violence. (Starship Troopers was originally published in 1959, after the Korean War and at the start of US involvement in Vietnam.) Heinlein is known now for his sexism and his embrace of eugenics and his rejection of traditional sexual morality in his books, so I have a hard time recommending Heinlein, even though I read a ton of him as a teen. But I do recommend Scalzi because he has learned from the classic scifi tropes and plays with them, but spins them on their head.

This is evident in Scalzi’s rewriting of H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy. When that Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation came out, the audiobook of Little Fuzzy was included with the purchase of Fuzzy Nation so that the reader could understand the book that Scalzi was reinterpreting. The longer I have read Scalzi, the more I appreciate the role of humor in his writing. It is not that I don’t like the traditional serious scifi like Old Man’s War series, but I think the humor is what draws me back to him. Scalzi’s first book was Agent to the Stars, a book about a Hollywood agent that is hired by aliens to coordinate the revelation of their species to humans. The premise was great and it was a good example of Scalzi taking his one central idea and allowing it to be the center of a book. In the case of Agent to the Stars, the aliens only communicate through smell and humans find the smells repulsive. But the aliens realize that they need a PR person to help them win over humans and what better PR person could be found than a Hollywood agent.

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Summary: Tenar (from Tombs) had a life after she left the Tombs. 

I was a teen in the late 80s and early 1990s and I thought of Earthsea as a trilogy. I didn’t know that there was a fourth book until I reread the series as an adult. There was more than 20 years between the publication dates of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. So unlike the first three books of the series, this is just my second reading of the book.

In the second book we are introduced to Tenar as a priestess of unknown Gods. Ged comes to retrieve an amulet that will reunite the kingdom and allow for a king to regain the throne again. But as he does that, he finds Tenar, a young teen girl who alone was allowed to serve these unknown God in the tombs. Together they help one another escape. Their ages are never discussed, but I think Tenar would have been about 14-16 years old when she meets Ged. And we know this is sometimes after the end of the first book, so Ged is in his mid 20s. There is never any question that she will not follow him after the escape, because the life of a mage is one of a wandering hermit and marriage was out of the question for wizards, even if there had not been an age gap.

Eventually Tenar settles on Gant, Ged’s home island with Ged’s first teacher. Tenar has skills for magic, but she wants a normal life. And because she is a woman, she cannot go to study magic at Roke, which is only for men. (The short story collection Tales of Earthsea, explore why mages have become only male and what has been lost from magic because the mages have rejected women’s magic.) So Tenar marries a farmer nearby and raises a family and lives a “normal” life. Eventually her children grow up and move away. And then her husband dies and she is alone at the farm with some tenants and she has to find her way again.

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Summary: Reflections on what Baldwin can teach us. 

I have been leading a zoom book group for about five years now. It started out of a Be the Bridge group at my church. Most of the people have changed, but we still meet about 35-40 Thursday a year doing about 4 books a year with good breaks between books. The group is mostly reading book by Christians about racial issues. The Gospel According to James Baldwin was our most recent book and honestly one of the best discussion books we have had in the last couple of years. People who didn’t often talk much found things to talk about here.

Most of the time, we read books that I have already read. I don’t choose every books, but generally I give about 5 suggestions of books I think are worth reading as a group and the group chooses what they are most interested in. I was a bit surprised when the group chose The Gospel According to James Baldwin because that was outside of our normal history, bible study, sociology types of books. (White Flight, The Anti-Greed Gospel by Malcolm Foley, If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority, Brown Faces, White Spaces: Confronting Systemic Racism to Bring Healing and Restoration are some recent books we have read.)

I had not read The Gospel According to James Baldwin yet and if I had, I am not sure I would have recommended it. That isn’t because it is a bad book, but I would have thought it was too literary, too dependent on knowing Baldwin and too much of a stretch for the group to see someone who didn’t identify as a Christian have something to teach us as Christians. At the first session I found out that none of the group had previously read James Baldwin and only two or three had seen I am Not Your Negro documentary. (I own the documentary, watched it at least four times and read at least eight of Baldwin’s books as well as David Leeming‘s biography and several others books that draw heavily on Baldwin like Coates, Clint Smith, Eddie Glaude and Dante Stewart.) Again, had I known the lack of familiarity I would have overruled the group and not let the book be chosen.

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