Book Reviews

Summary: The story of two couples, a shared pastorate and their wives in mid 20th century NYC.

There are not many books that I stay up too late on multiple nights in a row to finish, but The Dearly Beloved is one of them. It has the feel of Gilead or the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch but it did not quite rise to that level. This is a book that I devoured in audio and I will come back and read again in print. But I wanted more.

The Dearly Beloved opens with the death of one of the four, but we don’t know until the epilogue when that death occurs. After the brief initial opening, we go back and the four characters are developed from their origin stories until about the midpoint of the book where the two men are jointly called to be co-pastors in the mid 1960s New York City. I could not help but think of Eugene Peterson as I read about their early years as pastors. Eugene Peterson was also Presbyterian and also was a young pastor in NYC as he worked on his PhD and tried to decide if he was going to be an academic or a pastor. Both of these pastors in the story had their PhDs, and one of the wives also had a PhD in Literature and in the opening years of their ministry she was a professor at The New School. Eugene Peterson planted his suburban Maryland church in 1962, right about the same time as these two were coming to their 100 year old church that had seen better days.

One of my favorite parts of the book was Jane, the church administrator/secretary who trained the two to be pastors together. She understood the church and the community and what it needed. She loved the church and loved the two pastors. She had her own weaknesses and biases, but she helped them find their way and kept them together as they knitted together “a call.”

The book is structured in three parts, the early years of the characters and how each of them met and married. The second part is the early years of ministry and the ways that their history and faith and personality came together (or didn’t). The third part is the crisis and resolution. The crisis and resolution makes sense internally, but I also felt like it was too simple for the first two parts, it ended the book too early. I don’t like complaining about what is not in a book, but the build up of character and background felt like it was too big for the main crisis and resolution to be only a four year period of the late 1960s. I think there needed to be at least two additional parts that followed the couples into middle age. It is not that people do not have significant life struggle in their 30s, but when there is significant life struggle, the resolution of their 30s or early 40s will not maintain equilibrium into their 50s and 60s or beyond.

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Summary: A graphic novel adaptation of a 1940s Superman radio drama. 

I don’t remember who recommended this, but when I saw the recommendation I reserved a copy at our library for my son and I to read. I picked it up at the library and my son finished it in a single sitting. I read it that night after he went to bed.

Part of why I wanted to get it was that my son, who is a big graphic novel fan, has no real connection to super hero stories. I keep trying to get him interested in super hero movies so that he would also add some super hero comics to his reading but the closest he gets is Duck Tales.

Another part of why I wanted him to read this is that I continually try to find ways to help him see the world around him. My 10 year old will be starting 5th grade in a couple weeks. My kids have gone to the school where my wife works since they started school. It is about 15 minutes from our house and not the school we are zoned for, but we choose it in particular because we want our kids in a diverse school. The school is about 10% non-Hispanic white students and about 70% low income. My kids have a diverse set of friends that I did not have when I was growing up.

My kids are sensitive and do not particularly like super hero stories because they tend to be too violent for them. I was concerned about this whether this would be too much, but he read it before I had a chance to. When he was about 2/3 of the way through the story he came up to me and asked if the Klan was a real thing or if it was just a super hero villain that was made up. It is a very real question and I stopped my work and we had a 15 minute history lesson about what the Klan was and the three eras of the KKK.

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Summary: Exploration of spiritual disciplines from 20th century mystic Howard Thurman.

At the end of June I did a 8 day silent retreat with Jesuit Antiracist Sodality (JARS) at Ignatius House. As I have described it to others, it was the least silent, silent retreat I have done. That is not to say it wasn’t a silent retreat, but that it had more “content” than a standard retreat because it was themed. Each day there were three times of worship, a Morning Prayer service where the “witness of the day” had a passage read by or about them and there was a sermon. And then on the way out of this service, we would be given a guiding sheet about the witness of the day that had links to an audio or video or a written passage. Usually there was also a couple of songs that matched the theme and some directing questions to prompt reflection. Unlike the previous two silent retreats I have done, there was full music at every service, mostly gospel or spirituals with sung psalms and mass elements. Then just before lunch there was a full mass and Eucharist with another sermon and more music. This service sometimes went for 90 minutes. And then there was an evening service that included music again, but was primarily focused around a prayer of examen.

Also unusual for a silent retreat, there was an optional hour before dinner where people could come to debrief. And five of the nights had some type of video that we watched together, mostly documentaries. It was still a silent retreat, but there was more directed content than a usual silent retreat and there was both a good bit of singing and time for discussion in addition to a normal daily meeting with a spiritual direction (which we still had.)

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Summary: Introduction to what the Book of Common Prayer is, the different parts and uses of the book as well as some of the more technical structure and history of prayer books more generally. 

This is designed to go along with Intervarsity Press’ 1662 International Version. That version of the Book of Common Prayer tried to maintain the language, but make changes when the older language no longer means the same as it originally did. And it changed some of the language of the prayers to make them appropriate for use in other locations than the UK.

The authors of How to Use the Book of Common Prayer also were the main editors of that version of the Book of Common Prayer. Personally, I am not particularly attached to the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer and my protestant bias is that while I appreciate beautiful prayers and historic liturgies, I prioritize understanding over history. I don’t want to compromise on liturgical beauty, but I also don’t have a particular cultural attachment to that edition. I have used the US 1928 version, the 1979 version and the ANCA 2019 version. I don’t love the 2019 ANCA’s use of the ESV for the Bible readings, but otherwise generally like the feel of both the 2019 and 1979. I listen to a podcast of Morning and Evening prayer from the UK and that one uses the Common Worship liturgical resources that were published between 2000 and 2008 in the UK.

While I picked this up so that I can follow along and understand what is going on better, I don’t really want to start using a paper book of common prayer for personal worship. I prefer podcasts or video so that I feel like I am doing it in cooperation with others instead of individually. I did spend several years using a Kindle version of the 1928 BCP that had all the scripture and prayers in line so that there was no flipping. (But the editor who produced those stopped releasing them.) I got used to not needing to do any flipping and while I like not using an app on a phone or iPad, the kindle version didn’t have ads or notifications and was practically the same as using a paper version without the flipping.

Despite this How to Use the Book of Common Prayer being oriented toward the 1662 International Version, the basic structure should be the same for all of the versions.

Chapter one is a short introduction to the concept of liturgy followed by a short history of the book of common prayer. (I have previously read Alan Jacob’s biography of the Book of Common Prayer which is cited several times in this chapter.)

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Summary: Another reading with my 11 year old daughter.

This is my third reading of Son of the Deep. I read it in 2020 when it was only released digitally. And then I read it again in 2022 after it was released again by Owl’s Nest Publishers. And this summer I read it a third time with my 11 year old daughter. I don’t read as much out loud to my kids as I would like to. But over the summer I try to read to them at least a couple times a week. For the first time, my kids have chosen to read separate books (both by KB Hoyle.) I think they both would like both books, but they are together almost all the time and only 15 months apart, so letting them have something that is just for me and each of them individually has also been a nice part of this summer’s reading.

My daughter likes to read before bed to try to avoid having to go to sleep. So the longer the chapters, the better for her. The chapters seem to increase in length as the book goes on. I am not going to write as much about the story here as I am going to comment about my daughter’s reaction to the book. (You can read more thoughts on the book here.) My daughter had never read the older Hans Christian Anderson version of the Little Mermaid, only the two Disney adaptations. She is a fan of the movies and dressed up as Ariel on one of our trips to Disney World when she was almost 4.

It has been a little while since I have read out loud to her so I think she was a bit reluctant to let me read. I talked about how I both really do like reading out loud and sharing stories with her and giving us something to talk about. But also practically, reading out loud is a good way to expand vocabulary and to learn to understand texts. My daughter struggles with reading and while she really enjoyed reading graphic novels, she does not pick up books on her own that are only text.

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Summary: A memoir of Union Seminary professor, ethicist, community organizer and theologian Gary Dorrien.

I picked up Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel at some point when it was on sale, but I never started it (in part because it is over 900 pages.) I knew that it was the second in a trilogy of the theology of the Black church and social gospel and so I wondered if I should start with the first book so I just never started it. I needed something different and I tend to like to read near end of life memoirs of theologians because I am interested in how they appraise their life and work. Because I do not really know Gary Dorrien’s work, this was a bit of a a blind pick. But it is currently on sale for kindle and hardcover and it was a low barrier to entry.

Gary Dorrien grew up in a poor rural Michigan family. He was the grandchild of a mixed Native American and White couple, but did not have much contact with his Native American heritage, but did feel some of the impact of the discrimination of his family. Dorrien’s mother started college but only completed a year before deciding to get married. So Gary Dorrien was the first of his family to complete college. And going on to graduate school and a PhD was very new to the family.

I am sympathetic to Dorrien’s work as an organizer and a Democratic Socialist and his long work as a college chaplain before going to Union. But it is honestly quite amazing to me the number of mammoth tomes that he completed in a relatively short period after starting at Union. He had written several books before that point, but when he started at Union, his wife had passed away, his daughter had started college and he wasn’t working without a break year-round running multiple programs at his college.

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Summary: The son of a judge investigates his death.

Very often during the summer I get way behind on writing about the books I read. My kids are home, I do stuff with them, I still have to get some work done, we travel, etc. I finished The Emperor of Ocean Park about a month ago but I have just not made time to write about it. I have known of the book for years but I have never made time to read it. This year I have been trying to keep more fiction in my reading diet and trying to read books that I already owned and decided now was the time to actually start reading this one.

I alternated between audio and kindle versions, but mostly read the book. The audio was well done, but it felt like it was just too slow to listen instead of read. This is not a fast book and it is quite long, so I think that also contributed to me mostly reading it.

The rough story is that Talcott Garland, a law professor at a fictional ivy league school, has to investigate his father’s death. His father was a famous judge in conservative circles. He was nominated to the Supreme Court, but had to resign from the nomination as a result of a connection with his friend. That left him embittered and more connected to the conspiracy theory aspects of the conservative world.

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Summary: Local history matters.

I am not going to repeat my previous review. I reread this after about six years with my book group. It is always interesting rereading something with a group because different people are impacted by different aspects of the book. Different areas strike them because they have a different connection to the history. My book group is made up of people who have all lived in the Atlanta areas for 10 or more years, but none of us were born here. We all came here as adults, mostly 20 to 30 years ago.

That connection that we have to spaces and institutions matters. All of us had connections to this book because organizations that we were in, or spaces that we commonly use, or jobs that we have had were discussed in the book. Knowing that a school that our kids went to or a club that we belong to or an employer that we have has a relationship to has a history of upholding segregation in a way that we were unfamiliar with, means that we did not know the fuller picture that we probably should have.

I continue to be a bit frustrated with how Kruse ended the book. He has nine solid chapters on history drawing an argument that he then summarizes in a nine page epilogue. I would like to see him do a second edition of the book where he adds a new chapter at the end that very clearly shows the mid 90s to 2020s. I live in Cobb County, one of the areas that grew because of White Flight. In the early 1970s, the population was 95% white. In the 2020 census, the population was 50.1% white and the main county school district has been predominately minority for nearly 15 years. Part of the reality of white flight is that as Cobb has become more racially diverse, some people have continued to move further away from Atlanta continuing the process in slightly different ways from the original white flight.

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Resisting The Bonhoeffer Brand is a short book that is mostly a response to criticisms of Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory by Schlingensiepen, who also has a recent biography of Bonhoeffer. 

Earlier this year I read Discipleship in an Age of Nazis which included a discussion about some of the weaknesses of each biography of Bonhoeffer. That discussion is what prompted me to pickup this book because it pointed out backgrounds and biases that as a general reader and not a scholar of Bonhoeffer I missed. This type of meta discussion about the methods and aims of biography that is at the opening of Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand and was the main focus of Haynes’ The Battle for Bonhoeffer and was a smaller discussion in Discipleship in the Age of Nazis is very helpful to a lay person interested in the minutia but not educated in it. But even as a lay person I can see weaknesses in all of the biographies of Bonhoeffer. 

I am not sure if Marsh should have responded to criticisms or not. I can’t judge the seriousness of the critiques and the method of response. I do know that as a reader, Marsh appears pretty defensive. But in spite of his clear defensiveness, he also appears to be broadly right. This quote I think gets that his point that a biography has to consider the forest, not just individual trees.

“The pedantry of his assertations—“ X gets mentioned only once or twice”; “there is no mention of”; “what Marsh ought to have written”; “Marsh didn’t really understand”—obscures the more important point at hand. Selectivity is biography’s principal virtue—and necessity.” (p29)

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