Adam Shields

Summary: A biography of Augustine focusing on him being from Africa.

It has been about 10 years since I have read a introduction to Augustine and then a few years ago I read Oden’s How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind. Augustine the African is similar to Oden’s book in that it is particularly working to show how the Augustine culture rooted in Africa impacted his thinking.

This was not a traditional biography, but there was plenty of biographical background for those who might not have much background on Augustine. Augustine was born in African as the son of a low level official. His family not well off, but they did have enough resources that Augustine was able to get an education locally before going to further education in Carthage and then eventually in Rome and Milan. (The family was not well off enough to educate his siblings.)

What I found most interesting about the book was how human Augustine was portrayed. He was very human, brilliant, but human. Like many who grew up outside of the main cultural center without much money, he had a chip on his shoulder. He also had a passion to succeed. Between those two, much of the bad decisions in Augustine’s life was connected to one of the other. He also had a good bit of disappointment and tragedy. His mother did a lot to get him where he was, but she also got rid of the mother of his son to try to him to make an adventitious marriage. That marriage didn’t happen, but his relationship with (the never named women) ended. Over a few years his mother, and then several of his close friends, and eventually his son, died. Those tragedies impacted his in many ways.

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Summary: Well written biography of a man that was interested in character and service to country. 

Earlier this year, I read a biography of Jimmy Carter and I was struck by how much that I learned, even though I had read multiple books by or about Carter. A good biography, even if it appreciates the person (as Alter did appreciate Carter) still should complicate the presentation of the person. I have read Meacham’s book on John Lewis and knew he was a good writer. I also, because of that book and some interviews, knew that Meacham was not going to write a fluffy biography.

Personally, George Herbert Walker Bush is on the edge of my memory. I remember the 1980 election, but I was 7 and only just remember it. I was in high school in 1988 and remember Bush very soundly defeating Michael Dukakis. And after having some memory of the 1984 blowout of Reagan over Mondale, I think I had the assumption that presidential elections would always have a very clear winner. I graduated from high school in 1991. I very much remember the first Gulf war because while it ended just before I turned 18, I remember discussion about the draft and registering for selective service with that in the background. I was a skeptic about the first Gulf War, not because I thought that Iraq should not be prevented from invading other countries, but because I didn’t think that the US had the willingness to not counter invade Iraq in response. George HW Bush (in 1992) was the only presidential election that I have ever voted for a Republican. I thought that his willingness to change his mind and raise taxes, when he said he would not, was an act of character. He thought that taxes were bad, but that deficits were worse and that increased taxes were for the greater good, even if it was bad for him politically with his base. And I thought that not deposing Saddam Hussein, was at the time the right decision and showed restraint, that again, countered his base.

There was far more that I didn’t know about Bush than I did know going into this biography. I, obviously, knew he was Vice President and President and the father of a President. I knew that he had been the head of the CIA. But I didn’t realize he had been a Congressman or the Ambassador to the UN and China. He had far more political experience than I realized. I knew he came from an old family, but didn’t realize his father was a Senator. I knew he made money in oil, but I didn’t realize that he really started with very low skilled jobs to learn the business and he and Barbara were living very modestly in the early years.

One of the themes of the book is that Bush had connections that gave him a significant leg up, but his orientation toward service meant that while he did make money and live comfortably, he still worked hard both for his family but also for the common good. He made his money in oil in large part because he was the person responsible for getting investment and financing for his company, a job made significantly easier because of his family connections. His turn toward politics in his early 40s was also made much easier by the fact that his father was a sitting senator at the time and that he was by this time personally wealthy enough to invest the time and resources into politics. His later work in government service from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s rested on personal wealth.

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Summary: An advanced (but young adult) book about the constitution. 

I am fairly familiar with the constitution. I have previously read America’s Constitution: A Biography and two books on the reconstitution amendments, as well as a variety of more general history books that included discussion of the constitution. I am an avid listener to Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast that regularly dives into constitutional issues. I did not realize when I bought Fault Lines in the Constitution was a young adult book. I listened to a podcast interview with the authors and I thought the idea of looking at the constitution as being a document that could have been constructed in other ways (every chapter has a discussion of either other country or state constitution that handled that topic in different ways) and a look at the ways that current debates are in large part a result of the way that the founders wrote the constitution was an interesting perspective.

In general, this didn’t really feel like a “young adult” book in the sense of it being dumbed down or simplistic. The book feels like it is pitched to a high school advanced government or early college class with a few exceptions. The exceptions were times when it felt like the authors were trying to engage what they thought were young adult issues, primarily related to age for voting, minimum ages for office and military service. While I think there was good content in those sections, it felt pandering to me. I am in my mid 50s, so maybe those areas would not feel pandering to actual people in their late teens or early 20s, but I would have pitched those differently.

This is a legal history, part of discussing history is to contextualize why choices were made, to consider what other options could have happened, to make the ideas more complex (not to over simplify but to really understand the nuance.) I am simplifying the Five Cs of historical thinking, which this book does really well. The authors, as all authors do, have a perspective. But they do try to explore different perspectives and point out especially the perspectives that are more foreign to modern people. Culture, assumptions and language has changed since the constitution was written. The constitution was not a perfect document. It was changed, and changed almost from the very beginning. Part of the focus of the book is pointing out not just that the change occurred, but where it needed to be changed because of unintended consequences (the rise of political parties and the way that impacted the relationship between the president and vice president) or because of compromise (3/5 clause and other slavery related issues) or because they just didn’t want to deal with the issue explicitly.

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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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