Book Reviews

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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Summary: An overview of the book of Acts, paying particular attention to the temple and how the early church integrated gentiles into it while maintaining integration with its Jewish background.

I may not have picked up The Challenge of Acts if I had not watched the last 15 minutes of an episode of the Holy Post where Skye Jehani was interviewing NT Wright about The Challenge of Acts. Skye asked about what NT Wright would say in response to churches who pragmatically say that you should narrow-cast to a narrow cultural group and not seek to be more inclusive because churches grow more quickly that way. (This has been the argument from the church growth movement who advocated for the Homogenous Unit Principle, which I have written about before here.)

NT Wright suggests in that video that part of the message of Acts is that the church is not really the church if it isn’t grappling with the integration of the entire body of Christ. To narrow cast to a homogeneous cultural group is to distort the idea of the church so much that it ceases to be the church.

Other commentaries on Acts like Amos Yong’s have suggested that much of the action of the book of Acts is the expansion of the church to a larger and larger group of people and each expansion had a sense of conflict that had to be dealt with. And Willie James Jenning’s commentary on Acts spent a lot of time grappling with the role of empire, violence and prison.

NT Wright has several main points he is communicating with his book on Acts. First, he raises attention to temple motifs in Acts. That attention to temple motifs is part of what Wright’s larger project with the New Perspectives on Paul movement is doing in trying to pay attention to Paul’s Jewishness and not make Paul into an antisemite as some commenters on Paul have done historically. Wright instead suggests that Paul is trying to integrate Jew and gentile into the body of Christ, not as s replacement of the Jewish religious practice (supersessionism) but as an integrated reality.

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Summary: An exploration of what could have been had evangelical history gone other ways.

I have always enjoyed history. But it has mostly been a reading hobby, not something I studied. Over the past decade, I have been more intentional about reading history to fill in gaps in my knowledge, but I have also read more about the study of history. I think it was John Fea’s podcast where I first heard about the 5 Cs of the study of history. Those five Cs are: change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency. All five are important to understanding history.

Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals does approach all five Cs in his exploration of five groups of people who have been marginalized in evangelical history, but in many ways I read this as a book primarily thinking about contingency, the “what could have been” had evangelical history gone other ways.

As with any recent history, my own story influences how I read. I grew up American Baptist. Traditionally American Baptists are considered a mainline denomination and would be included in the “liberal” part of Christianity. I didn’t really understand how liberal the denomination was as I was growing up in part because I was in an evangelical wing of the denomination. I do very much remember going to the only national youth gathering I attended as an American Baptist and one day of the youth conference primarily used feminine references for God. There was no explanation for it and it raised all kinds of questions for other students I was with. I spend a good bit of time that day talking to others about how there were feminine images of God in scripture and how God is not gendered as we traditionally consider gender in humans. I was mostly irritated by the poor presentation, but not at all bothered by the presentation of somewhat liberal theology.

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Summary: Discussion of how understanding the Medieval world and its books help to understand CS Lewis. 

Over the years, I have read an enormous amount by or about CS Lewis. I am not Lewis scholar, I have not been systemically enough and I certainly haven’t read enough to know what the academy thinks of Lewis, but I have read read about 25-30 books by or about Lewis since starting this blog.

One of my complaints about the biographies of Lewis is that they say very little about Lewis’ discipleship, including Devin Brown’s which is about the spiritual life of Lewis. Part of what Baxter is doing in The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis is suggesting that a significant part of Lewis’ discipleship was the result of reading old books. That makes sense to me, although I do think that Lewis’ work with a spiritual director likely mattered to making that real.

What is helpful about The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis is the explanations of the references that are missed when we don’t know about them. I have read a bit of Dante, but I don’t know Dante well. I have never read Boethius and many others referenced here. What I love about reading young adult writer, KB Hoyle, is that she always has references and hints in her books. You can read her books without knowing any of the references and you get a good story. But as an adult reading her books, I get a lot more because I get the references. There is depth to the stories and the depth encourages rereading. That just isn’t the case for a lot of current pop fiction. A lot of pop fiction assumes that the reader isn’t paying attention, doesn’t care about reference and is simply looking for an escape. Reading for escape isn’t bad, I read for escape all the time. But I don’t want to always read for escape. (It is not surprising that KB Hoyle taught at a Classical school before becoming a full time writer and publisher.)

I found The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis very helpful and if you like CS Lewis and want to understand more, you likely will like it as well. But I do have a concern, not about the book as much as the way that classical education is sometimes used. Recently a number of atheist or agnostics have been calling themselves cultural Christians, this trend seems to not be about Christianity as much as it is about shared culture. I get very wary of arguments for shared culture. I think there is real value in retelling fairy tales and old stories and finding traditional archetypes in those stories. That is part of what a good education should include.

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