Adam Shields

Summary: Young Adult fantasy series that is well-plotted, character-driven, and relatable. 

I first read the Gateway Chronicles series about four years ago. That is long enough ago that I have forgotten a lot of the specific plot details and twists, but I still remember the broad strokes. As I re-read the series, it felt like a sweet spot of enjoying some of the story’s nuances that I might have missed on a first read, but also still regularly be surprised at plot twists that I had forgotten.

Young adult fantasy is comfort reading for me. Earlier this year, I read the first three books of the Harry Potter series aloud to my kids. But that was as far as I felt comfortable reading based on their ages and response to scary parts. But that did not fully satiate my need for story. Part of what I love about young adult fantasy is its focus on the hero. Heroes have a clear purpose and goal. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of a person or a group of people. There is beauty in the understanding of right and wrong. Adult fantasy often feels the need to nuance the idea of right and wrong so that everyone is so tainted that it can be hard to see any sense of goodness (similar to many modern spy stories.) I am not looking for wooden stories that have no development or struggle, just action, but I am looking for inspiration to press into the more challenging aspects of life because there is a sense of purpose.

Darcy Pennington feels detached from life. She is 13, and her family makes her go to a family camp. She wants to be popular and liked, but not by the two kids who will be there that she knows from her middle school, Samantha and Lewis. Sam and Lewis, along with three others, have been at the camp for years. They have a strong relationship, and Darcy feels both on the outside and a bit claustrophobic from the warm acceptance that Sam has for her. Those relational dynamics change when Darcy stumbles on a gateway into another world and has to bring the rest of the group back to the world to complete a prophecy. And that starts the series of six books. Each book details the group as they start the week of camp by magically entering the fantasy world. And once inside that world, they live for a year, grow and change and then return to the world of the camp at the same point in time. For six years, they essentially live two years, and by the end, their bodies are physically 18/19, but they have the life experience of 22/23

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Summary: An 18-year-old Sherlock helps his older brother Mycroft. 

Mycroft and Sherlock is the second in a trilogy of books that started with Mycroft Holmes. That first book followed Mycroft as a young employee of the British War Department seeking to understand why children were dying in the Caribbean. I won’t give away any spoilers from that first book, but this second book is several years after the first. Mycroft was able to gain wealth and access to the Queen after his success. And his best friend Douglas was able to start a home for boys (Nicholas House) in memory of the loss of his family.

It is that home for boys that this book begins. Mycroft is frustrated by the young Sherlock’s detachment from the world. Mycroft is obsessed with world affairs, economics, and global concerns. Sherlock has no interested in significant world issues; he wants to understand small-level crimes. Mycroft forces Sherlock to spend several days at Douglas’ Nicholas House to help him understand his privilege and how the day-to-day concerns of the poor should matter to him. At the same time, Douglas tries to retrieve his goods from a ship that has run aground in suspicious circumstances. Meanwhile, Mycroft has to run an “errand” for the Queen.

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Summary: A reminder that the church is (or should be) a radically inclusive gathering. 

God Gets Everything God Wants is a book I would never have picked up if I had not recieved a free copy via a Twitter giveaway. First, I am pretty strongly not in the deterministic stream of the Calvinist tradition, and the title hints at that. It is not that I am an open theist, but that I get very uncomfortable with relying on God’s will or election being the answer to complex questions. Second, this is a very theologically progressive book. I lean toward progressive theology, but I am also increasingly wary of white progressivism interested in its own freedom, but not aware of the weaknesses of white progressivism’s lack of grappling with the way it has fallen short of being inclusive for all. And so, while I grew up in a denomination that was in the mainline progressive tradition, I was mainly in a small evangelical wing of that denomination and have mostly found spiritual insight in the Black church tradition or Catholic tradition because my overly broad perception is that the progressive mainline tradition has not been oriented enough toward constructive theology.

That being said, I intentionally went to the University of Chicago Divinity School for my seminary program because I needed to get out of Evangelical institutions and experience a broader sense of Christianity. And one of the most important aspects of my mainline Protestant-oriented seminary program was experiencing the seriousness that so many of my classmates and professors gave to their faith. I believe that many in the Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions dismiss mainline faith expressions because they have not sought out mainline Christians to understand the expression of mainline faith in its own context. Over the past couple of months, I have been increasingly dismissive of Christians unwilling to acknowledge the Christianity of those who accept women as pastors. The fights over Jesus and John Wayne and the Making of Biblical Womanhood are just not my fights. I have always believed that women should be ordained to all roles in the church. And this doubling down on people pointing to 1 Tim 2:12 as the end of the discussion without acknowledging Roms 16 (Pheobe being the one that Paul sent to read and teach the book of Romans, the acknowledgment of Priscilla as the more important of the teaching team, Junia being described as an apostle, etc.). I am not here to argue about women as clergy but to give context to my reading of God Gets Everything God Wants.

Katie Hays is the pastor of Galileo Church in Texas. The church attempts to love the marginalized people of their community as Jesus would. Its first missional priority is to support the LGBTQ+ community. And that priority is communicated throughout God Gets Everything God Wants. And many Christians will never pick up this book because of that. But I want to communicate here more than anything that if people do not pick up this book solely for that reason, they are missing a call for the church to love radically. The very best parts of this book are the grappling with what it means to love well (and the honest grappling with how Galileo and all churches will end up being inadequate to loving as they should because of sin.)

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Summary: A brief biography of the compiler of the original Book of Common Prayer and the first Protestant head of the Church of England.

I am a low church evangelical by history, but very few things have been as important in my faith development over the past 15 years as the Book of Common Prayer. As I have said before, my theology has become more in line with traditional Episcopal/Anglican theology and away from my Baptist heritage (episcopal ecclesiology, openness to infant baptism, more sacramental in theological orientation, etc.), even though I think I will likely remain non-denominational in my actual church membership.

While I am a fan of the Eerdman’s Library of Religious Biography series and picked Emblem of Faith Untouched in part because of that, I started reading because I am trying to work through ideas of how we should think of flawed Christian “heroes.” Thomas Cranmer was certainly flawed while being a very devoted Christian. He was a younger son of a minor noble and, as was common, went into the church and academy. He was very slow in school, taking roughly twice as long to get his bachelor’s degree as usual. But he continued and became the rough equivalent of a professor before dropping out of the academy (which required celibacy and singleness) to get married. But his wife died, and he returned to the academy, albeit with some controversy.

While staying with some friends during a period of plague when people were avoiding larger cities, he walked through how he would approach Henry VIII’s desire for a divorce theologically instead of through the ecclesiastical courts. In other words, Cranmer thought what was more important was whether the divorce was right according to scripture rather than whether the ecclesiastical courts agreed. Based on recounting that conversation, Cranmer was summoned to Henry and led a committee to investigate the marriage and reasons for divorce theologically and build support for divorce politically and geopolitically.

One part of Henry’s divorce from Catherine that I had not understood with my previous reading was that Henry was betrothed to Cathrine when he was 13. Cathrine had already been married to Henry’s brother, but Arthur died just a couple of months after the wedding, while Arthur was only 15. The marriage between Catherine,  the youngest child of the Spanish king and queen Ferdinand and Isabella, and Arthur, and then Henry was for geopolitical reasons, not love. According to Emblem of Faith Untouched, Henry’s confessor was convinced, and convinced Henry very early in their marriage, that Henry marrying Catherine was violating Christian ethics and that their marriage would be cursed because she had been married to his brother first. The first four pregnancies of Catherine and Henry ended in either miscarriage, stillbirth, or early death of the child. Only the fifth resulted in Mary, who was the only child of that marriage, to live to adulthood.

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Summary: A new story about Sherlock Holmes’ older brother Mycroft.

I have known about this series for a few years but I was reluctant to pick up a book from a celebrity who was known for things other than writing when there was a clearly marked co-author. There are more than several examples of people with big names that “collaborate” on books when in reality the book is wholly written by the other author with a few ideas thrown in from the celebrity. This is a well-known reality with Tim LaHaye’s contribution to the Left Behind series. He had a rough idea of the broad storyline, but all of the actual writing was by Jenkins.

I changed my mind about picking up the series after reading a long essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar last year. I thought he was a compelling writer and decided to give this a chance because the first book in the series is on sale for Kindle and then the second book in the series was on sale for audiobook. (My quick glance at reviews suggest that many people think the second book is better so I wanted to read both before I make too strong of a conclusion.)

As I glanced around the reviews I also saw people that complained that this was not a “canon” perspective on Mycroft. I have read a couple of books on the original Sherlock Holmes, but not widely within that canon and I have been more influenced by recent TV and movie portrayals and there definitely not canon, so I was not particularly concerned about that complaint.

Mycroft is a young man. He works as a secretary/assistant to the Secretary of State for War. He has all of the talents you would expect. He can read and recall instantly, he can estimate and do math in his head with the type of ability that is often shown on the screen with lots of math symbols going on around the head. He is trying to make a name for himself and earn some money because he is in love and planning to get married. His younger brother Sherlock only appears briefly in the book. Mycroft stops by to see him at school before going on a trip. Which was a good reminder that travel used to be considered pretty dangerous and Mycroft wanted to say goodbye before leaving.

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Summary: The second edition of an introduction to making reconciliation a real and tangible reality to Christian communities. 

Generally, my approach to reading is to find areas I can agree and learn from. It is not that I am not ever critical in my reading, but that I tend to work to be charitable. I say that because the reading of this book was much more critical than I tend to because it was read in a small group discussion. The group is all committed to racial reconciliation within my church, and they are not brand new to the conversation. So our critical reading was not based in opposition to the real need for racial reconciliation but in trying to test this roadmap to our experience and context. We were often challenged about being too critical, but the criticism was not about diminishing Dr. Salter McNeil’s work or thought but about challenging ourselves to think more deeply. I think that part of what I take out of this book is that there needs to be more theoretical work put into reconciliation.

Dr. Salter McNeil has a lifetime of work in racial reconciliation. And similar to my concerns of critiquing John Perkins, I am not at all critiquing the reality that they have given their lives to the service of Christ. But because they have served well does not mean that we can take their history as prescriptive to the future. In her book Becoming Brave, Dr. Salter McNeil notes that she has changed over time. Going forward, racial reconciliation within the evangelical protestant world must change to be more focused on reparations and repair and less focused on reparations and repair relational and visible diversity. That critique has become widespread and has been made for more than 20 years, from Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith to I Bring the Voice of My People to Elusive Dream and more. In her book Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, Jennifer Harvey specifically called out Brenda Salter McNeil for her coddling white Christians. And it is to Dr. Salter McNeil’s credit that she not only took that critique seriously but has noted it in both Becoming Brave and Road to Reconciliation.

In the context of my group discussion, there was quite a bit of discussion about basics, definitions, theoretical approaches, and the relationship between Christianity and reconciliation. Not every book can, or needs to, have a fully developed theoretical framework, but I think Road to Reconciliation needed more. For instance, the not so simple concept of race was not explored enough. Race is not a concept in scripture because it is a modern idea. But that does not stop many Christians from taking concepts that were in biblical ideas, like ethnicity and cultures, and transporting them to the modern idea of race. The modern idea of race is a socially constructed reality that inherently assumes a heirarchy and rankings. That does not mean that I don’t think that the modern idea of race cannot be redeemed, but I do think that if we are going to attempt that, we have to be aware of the pitfalls and point them out.

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Summary: A young adult novel in verse about an 8th grader grappling with his parent’s potential divorce, his own love interest, and is grappling with his father’s expectations. 

I have grown to enjoy novels in verse. Kwame Alexander has been the author of most of them, but also the memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. I need to seek out some other authors. I mostly listen to these as audiobooks because hearing them read rightly feels like the most authentic choice. But I also try to read enough of them in print to get a sense of the poetic style. I likely should fully read them in print and fully listen to them because there are often hidden aspects of the verse in the print layout. And their audio often has a better orientation to the intention of the author’s writing than what I would do for myself.

My wife is teaching a unit on figurative language to 5th graders right now, and she is using the lyrics of songs from Encanto. The students know all the songs, and they can analyze the lyrics differently than they would if they were coming at poetry without any history. At the same time, our understanding of the lyrics is influenced by the movie’s visuals. She told me last night that there were multiple arguments about whether one line or another was figurative or literal or hyperbolic or some other characteristic. She would have to bracket the conversations by asking whether the line abstracted from the movie is an idiom or tends to be used in a hyperbolic way, and then ask, “Was there actually any clouds in the sky? Then he said there were no clouds in the sky?” The artists were often very literal in their representation of the lyrics, likely more literal than Lin Manuel Miranda may have intended.

I bring this up because one of the complaints I have heard is that either kids are not interested in poetry or cannot really understand the lyrical depth of poetry. Anyone that had been a teen pouring over lyrics trying to understand exactly what they were saying and what it means knows that this isn’t true. Kids do get poetry, or at least they can get poetry if taught well, and it is interesting for them.

Like many of these novels in verse, there are a lot of pages, but the audio is pretty short. This one was 326 pages but only 2 hours and 36 minutes in audiobook. Which shows how much space is on the page. That sparseness is part of what I like. There is often a density to the lines that says more than one thing at a time. That being said, Kwame Alexander is writing this as a middle-grade book to get boys more interested in reading. So you must come into the book expecting a middle-grade novel.

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Takeaway: Part of the importance of Black History Month is focusing on the less well-known figures because so much has been repressed or forgotten. 

So many historical figures have made so many small contributions to our world that it is hard to believe anyone could have done so much. And at the same time, the fact that they are not more well-known is a testament to how our memories are fickle. I was unaware of Dovey Johnson Roundtree, and I honestly do not remember why or when the book ended up on my to-read list. But I picked it up this month because it is on sale.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree was born in 1914 and lived until 2018 at 104 years old. This autobiography was written with the help of Katie McCabe and published in 2009 under the title Justice Older than the Law. It was then reissued in 2019 with the new title Mighty Justice. Unfortunately, by the time she started working on her autobiography, she had lost her sight due to complications from diabetes. But ten videos of her were recorded by the VisionaryProject , giving a good sense of who she was and what she was like in her early 90s.

When she was four, her father died in the flu epidemic of 1918, and her mother and sisters moved in with her grandparents. Her grandfather was a pastor and well-educated. Her grandmother was a guiding force that is frequently mentioned in her autobiography but was disabled due to injuries from fighting off an attempted rape by a white field overseer when she was a young teen. Dovey Johnson Roundtree came of age during the Great Depression but attended Spellman College by working three jobs. Through the kindness of people around her, she graduated when even those three jobs were insufficient to keep her in school. She taught middle school for two years to earn enough money to support her family but then moved to Washington, DC, and began working as a researcher for Mary McCloud Bethune, whom she met because of her grandmother. Mary McCloud Bethune was one of the most influential women in Washington as the head of the National Council for Negro Women and one of FDR’s informal Black Cabinet. Bethune ensured that during WWII, the Woman’s Army Corp, Black women would be included in officer training. Dovey Johnson was included in the first class and was one of the first women to be made an Army officer. Due to her push against military segregation, she was blackballed but was not court marshaled, unlike several others. She spent all of WWII working to recruit Black women into the military and working on policy groups for desegregation and women’s rights issues in the military.

In 1947, after working in the military, she entered Howard Law School after catching a vision for using the law in civil rights in her brief work with A. Philip Randolph and labor organizing. Because of its location in DC, Howard Law School was the site of many preparations for the civil rights legal cases at the Supreme Court.

Roundtree and Julius Robertson, one of her law school classmates, started a small law firm in 1952 after they graduated. During that first year of their new law firm, they took on Sarah Keys, who sued the Carolina Coach bus company after being thrown off the bus for refusing to move to the back of the bus. Keys was in military uniform, and this was after the 1946 Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, where the Supreme Court ruled that segregated bus travel was unconstitutional. But there was no enforcement of the 1946 ruling. Roundtree and Robertson sued the bus companies for violating the contract and for having Sarah Keys arrested for refusing to move seats. They lost the case in state court and appealed it to the Interstate Commerce Commission administrative judges. For Dovey Johnson Roundtree, this was not just an important case but mirrored her experience of being ejected from a bus in the same type of incident when she was a military recruiter in 1943. After three years of hearings, legal maneuvers, and appeals (in 1955), the full ICC ruled that

“We conclude that the assignment of seats on interstate buses, so designated as to imply the inherent inferiority of a traveler solely because of race or color, must be regarded as subjecting the traveler to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage…We find that the practice of defendant requiring that Negro interstate passengers occupy space or seats in specified portions of its buses, subjects such passengers to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage, in violation of Section 216 (d) of the Interstate Commerce Act and is therefore unlawful.”

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Summary: Dr. Thomas More has recently been released from two years of prison for selling prescription drugs and returns to his Louisiana community to discover that all is not right. 

The Thanatos Syndrome is sort of a sequel to Love in the Ruins, but apart from the characters, much has changed. Thomas More is still a somewhat neurotic psychiatrist. He has ‘found himself’ after two years in jail and is no longer drinking to the extent that he was. He is now married to his former nurse/secretary/love interest from Love in the Ruins. But the world is very different. Love in the Ruins was in a sort of post-apocalyptic world where there was no real national government and many extremist groups that had created their own little fiefdoms. But Thanatos Syndrome is set in a late 1980s Louisiana (it was written about 15 years after Love in the Ruins) that is not too different from the real 1980s Louisiana.

Thomas More had one real significant research achievement the Lapseometer. In Love in the Ruins, it was designed to read the state of the soul with the ability to fix mental imbalances. In Thanatos Syndrome, it is a brain scanner that detects heavy salts in the brain that impact brain function. Soon after being released from prison, he is asked to consult with several patients. Most of these are people he has previously worked with and knows in this small community. They are changed. Over time Thomas More realizes that something is impacting a large area making people more docile, more computer-like in their ability to access information, and the women are more sexually aggressive. There is a crazy old catholic priest who was a boy during the early days of Nazi Germany that speaks up if the social commentary was not clear enough.

Walker Percy is writing a social commentary novel. The main theme of the book is social engineering. A group of rogue scientists and doctors are using the water system to nearly eliminate crime, teenage pregnancy, and other social ills, but also removing part of what it means to be human. Thomas More thinks that the human part is really important. Percy (and More) are Catholic and there is an underlying catholic social teaching that opposes abortion and euthanasia and eugenics as well as an obligation to care for AIDS patients and other ‘undesirables’. He critiques racism and sexism while illustrating it, so there are problems with me recommending it.

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Summary: A history of Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina arguing for the continuation of segregation for theological reasons. 

I have read a lot of Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow history. And some of that history, like Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, is trying to be comprehensive, but much of it is telling the history from the side of the abolitionists or the opponents to segregation. The Bible Told Them So is telling an essential part of this history from the side of the segregationists and why they were arguing for the continuation of segregation and how they made that argument. The arguments are so explicit and clear here that it becomes hard to avoid the reality of how in the 1950-70s there was a real fight to “preserve white supremacy.”

The book is structured in five chapters. The first focuses on congregational response to Brown v Board and how many pastors were fired for supporting the ruling. The second chapter looks in more detail at the theological reasoning for the defense of segregation. The third chapter looks at how Baptists and Methodists responded to proposals to integrate their denominational colleges (and pairs nicely with the chapter on college from The Myth of Colorblind Christianity). The fourth chapter is about the rise of colorblind language and justifications for segregation in the face of the larger culture’s rejection of segregationist rhetoric. And the final chapter is about the rise of private schools and how those schools were framed, primarily using colorblind rhetoric but for segregationists reasons.

I think the arc of this history is essential. There is a movement from overt segregationist language, theologically informed and undergirded, to alternate public rhetoric while maintaining the private communication, to a colorblind public and private rhetoric without a change in practice, to a denial that the earlier segregationist language was ever used. In many ways, I think this builds on the work on the history of memory from David Blight and others about how there is an intentional misremembering. One of the parts of this story that was new to me was how early colorblind language was drawn directly from the Plessy v Ferguson decision.

“The phrases “natural affinities,” “mutual appreciation of merits,” and “voluntary association of individuals” were not Workman’s. They were the words of Henry Brown Billings, words the Supreme Court in 1896 used to deny Homer Plessy–and all who shared his skin color–ful equity as American citizens…At first blush, Workman’s letter seemed to gesture at a new era of white Christians’ acceptance of racial integration. But by appropriating word for word a line from the Supreme Court case that gave Jim Crow legal sanction in the South for nearly seven decades, Workman’s letter also reveals ways in which the new language of colorblindness had its roots in the desire of segregation. Understanding the historical links between colorblindness and segregationist theology reveals a continuity of segregationist Christianity from the 1950s to the 1970s and a perpetuation of racial separatism by white Christians–even unwittingly so–into the decades beyond.”

As expected, I have a lot of highlights, primarily of quotes that need to be read to be believed. You can see my 12 notes and 76 highlights on my Goodreads page.

One of the interesting realities is that arguments, primarily those in the 1950s and early 1960s, included the positive use of the phrase “white supremacy.”

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