Adam Shields

Summary: A comprehensive biography from an admiring, but critical author.

I picked up His Very Best on audiobook a few days before President Carter passed away. I had wanted to read one of the recent biographies for a while, and the sale price, and then his death moved it to the top of my list.

It is very clear that Jonathan Alter wanted to reassess Carter’s presidency and his place in history. Alter frames the book with Carter’s attempt to do his “very best.” The line is from a question that Carter was asked when he was applying to work with Hyman G. Rickover in the Navy’s nuclear program. Rickover asked Carter if he had done his best while at the Naval Academy. And Carter told him that he had not always done his best. But that question haunted Carter and much of his life, he did attempt to his best all the time.

Carter had the mind and personality of an engineer. He expected that when people were presented with the facts they would come to the same conclusions he did. One of Carter’s real strengths as the president was that he often thought about the long term in ways that many politicians do not. Carter was far from perfect, but many of the most important results of Carter’s legacy took years and in some cases decades, to start to be seen.

Carter was split. He is known for his ability to talk with people do the long term work to bring people together. But he also was known by Congress at the time as not particularly caring about their opinion and at times being outright offensive. The Panama Canal deal happened in large part because his people did cut deals and drew people into supporting a project that was important for the long term. He spent weeks meeting in small groups with not just congress, but with local and state officials who would provide cover for Congressional members who he needed to take a hard vote. But Carter’s health care plan, which he knew was of significant importance to Ted Kennedy, was announced without telling Kennedy or consulting him in its development. Carter often offended his own party even more than the GOP because Carter opposed local initiatives as unhelpful pork projects.

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Summary: Part biography, part spiritual direction guidebook, part instruction in wisdom.

I have known of Evelyn Underhill for a long time, but she was one of those characters of Christian history who I have never read or read about and only had vague impressions of. One of the people I meet with for spiritual direction was talking about her and that prompted me to pickup The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill by Robyn Wrigley-Carr.

This is a recent book, it came out in 2020, but I am somewhat surprised I haven’t heard more about it. As someone who is a spiritual director, I think this would be a great book to use in a training program. It is not directly a spiritual direction training book, but the book is framed by looking at the influence of her own spiritual director, Baron Frederick von Hügel, and how they both were shaped and how that shaping impacted their work as spiritual directors. My own training was very helpful and it included a number of the old books that shaped Underhill and von Hügel, but with the exception of reading Ignatius of Loyola’s autobiography, there was very little discussion of how biography and social position impacts your work as a spiritual director.

This is not a full biography, and I would like to read a full biography of Underhill, but it contains enough biographical content to make sense of Underhill’s life. At times, spiritual formation can be overly oriented around ideas and practices and not pay attention enough to other areas. Underhill was fascinated with mysticism. Both her and von Hügel wrote books about mysticism before they met. But part of what the book points out about their spiritual direction relationship is that von Hügel was concerned that Underhill was too focused on mysticism and the intellect. His guidance drew her first to see the church as a necessary component, not because we need the church to be saved but because it grounds us in a community of people. There was a theological component to von Hügel’s guidance, as one of the more well known Catholic thinkers in England at the time, he believed in the sacramental nature of the Eucharist. Underhill was Anglican, but also came to believe that the Eucharist was an important mystical reality. Together they came up with a minimum and maximum approach to spiritual practices for Underhill. Because she was a writer as a profession and primarily worked as a spiritual director in retreat settings, she had a lot of seasons of extreme busyness. When she was busy, she had a minimum of 2 Eucharist services a week that she attended. But she also had a maximum of 4 so that she was also encouraged to have a wide variety of experiences.

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Summary: After the inital win against the Magicians from Nod, Wren, Simon, Jack and others go to Nod to try to bring the Magicians and the Alchemists back together. 

I tried to be pretty vague about my discriptions of A Sliver of Stardust because I do not like spoiling fiction books. But it is pretty hard to discuss a series without at least some spoilers for earlier books. In A Sliver of Stardust, teenager Wren discovers that not only is stardust capable of being used to perform magic, but that she is both able to do the magic and gifted in a rare type of magic that hasn’t been seen since there was a civil war among those who use the stardust. Users of stardust split into Magicians and Alchemists and the Magicians traveled to another planet (Nod).

The Magicians were led by a man that was defeated at the end of the first book and presumed dead. Wren at the start of the second book is still recovering from injuries and Jack, a spy from Nod whom she had saved is even worse. It appears that he is no longer able to do magic, but he is also now on the side of the Alchemists and wants to bring those who used and manipulated him to a type of justice.

Wren is called by the Ashes (magical beings) to come to Nod and work to fix the tainted stardust before it harms Earth. That starts the main story of A Legend of Starfire.

I know of Marissa Burt because of her work on a book about Christian Parenting that I found out about via twitter. I know her as a Christian pastor’s wife who is outspoken about abuse and who is theolgoically informed and who regularly writes about church politics and theology. A Sliver of Stardust and A Legend of Starfire are young adult fantasy books without any explicit faith themes. They were published by a secular press (HarperCollins) and her bio on the books doesn’t mention her faith or being a pastor’s wife. But there are subtle nods to faith here and there.

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Summary: Wren Matthews discovers that magic is real, and that not only can she perform magic (and that not everyone can) but that her magical gifts are quite unusual. 

I am a fan of good young adult or middle grade fantasy, but I do not pick up new authors randomly very often. I found Marissa Burt on twitter and after following her for several months and being aware of her work on a book about Christian parenting, I notice her comment about her earlier books. I put them on my kindle watch list and then picked up A Sliver of Stardust when it was on sale for audible. And then the kindle edition about a month later when it was also on sale.

I decided that I needed a bit of light fiction at the end of Christmas break and started to read A Sliver of Stardust. Within less than 24 hours, I had finished the book, alternating between reading on kindle and listening to the audiobook. I immediately purchased the second book in the series and a few days later starting reading it as well.

One of the complaints about middle grade and young adult fantasy is that it follows some traditional themes. The main protagonist is often a bit isolated. They often have a history of “clumsiness” or things happening which they can’t quite explain. They are “chosen” and welcomed into a world of magic that those around them (often their parents) cannot see or participate in for one reason or another. There is often a mentor or teacher who instructs the in the magical arts. And there is often an evil person who wants power, or wants to use the power they have, for wrong purposes.

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Summary: A look at Roman religious practices and the how the early church was different from the religious practices of their surrounding culture.

It took me a decade or so, but eventually I came to see that the work of NT Wright and others were bringing attention to the Roman and Jewish cultural practices of the several centuries around Jesus. The good of that work continues in many others like Nijay Gupta’s recent books. Strange Religion and Tell Her Story are interrelated. Tell Her Story is an investigation into the role of women in the early church. The main insights was Gupta’s investigation into the role of women in broader Roman society. Women were marginalized in Roman society, but wealth and class meant that women could still participate in the patronage system even if there were only some women who had the privileges of wealth and class that allowed them that role.

Strange Religion is using similar tools and methods to explore Roman religious practices and with that base understanding explore how early Christian practices were similar or different from the culture of the time. Strange Religion is very readable, but some background knowledge in anthropology, culture, concept of honor/shame versus guilt/innocence will help you get the most out of the book. If you have read Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes or Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, I think you will get more out of Strange Religion. That isn’t required pre-reading, but at least for me, getting my head wrapped around how the early church was significantly different in its thinking needed multiple angles and multiple books and I am sure I do not have it all.

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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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