Adam Shields

Summary: The newly married Georgie and Darcy honeymoon in Kenya. 

I have been reading almost entirely non-fiction for most of the last 2 years. I am hitting a point where I know I need to rebalance my reading a bit. I just finished the whole Mysterious Benedict Society, and I will start the newest Inspector Gamache. And I picked up the latest Tourist novel this morning that I will probably start after that. So I am returning to old familiar authors, as I tend to do when I need to find some refreshment.

Cozy mysteries like Rhys Bowens seem particularly designed to comfort and not challenge. This long series (the 15th will be published in October) follows a cousin of King George in the 1930s. Her family is poor and has little more than their title, and as the younger daughter, she has less. But she is often in the right place at the right time and solves crimes or fixes problems for the Queen. Her now-husband, Darcy, is an Irish peer and has done much the same in a semi-official capacity for the British foreign office. They are newly married, and both tend to keep secrets from one another for various reasons that they are still working through. It comes out fairly early that while Darcy was trying to get them on an exotic honeymoon, they were also following the trail of a jewel thief. But even that isn’t quite the whole story, which again comes out a bit later.

Read more

Summary: The church has been complicit in the creation of a racial hierarchy.

Last night I finished up a discussion group for the Color of Compromise. I was not particularly interested in re-reading the book because I have read/listened to it two previous times and watched the video series twice. But the Color of Compromise is exactly the type of book that brings about a shared story of the history of the United States so that there can be a place for Christians of different racial groups to come together for real discussion and future work.

This discussion group was the fourth round of small groups that I have helped lead or participated in that explicitly focused on racial issues at my church. And one of the significant confirmations of participating in these groups is how important it is to have a shared understanding of history. That does not mean that everyone has to believe the same things on all policy or theology or historical understandings, but it does mean that a shared basic shape of the history of the US and the role that race has played in that history is important for moving forward. Color of Compromise is a basic introduction to the history of race in the US. I have read a lot of history around race, and there is very little that is controversial here.

That being said, one of the consistent critiques that I have heard about Color of Compromise is that its history is not very good. Generally, when I have asked for examples, there are two main threads that people are talking about. One is that there is a frustration that Tisby does not spend more time talking about the role of white abolitionists or those that opposed segregation. And generally, my response is that this is not a history of abolition or ending segregation. This is a history of the church’s complicity in racism, and their complaint isn’t with Tisby’s history but the book’s focus that he actually wrote. The second area where people have complained about the historical work is from people who want more clear heroes and villains in their history and who are offended that Tisby is pointing out that some of our heroes were not very heroic regarding race. So again, this tends to be a problem with people’s understanding of the methodology of history and their theological anthropology.

The current historical methodology is not designed to create heroes. If you go back two hundred years, some early historians were trying to develop heroes and a shared ‘mythology’ (using it in the sense of a shared creation/origin story). For example, the ‘myth’ of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree arose about 10 years after Washington’s death in the fifth edition of a biography of Washington by Locke Weems. Weemes was not trying to tell a historically accurate story that he got wrong; he was trying to illustrate the importance of virtue. By 1835, PT Barnum purchased an elderly slave woman and advertised her as Washington’s nanny, and she told the cherry tree story as one of her acts. By 1854, the story was adapted to one of McGuffey’s Readers to teach reading. But it was a ‘myth,’ not in the sense of false story (although there is no historical evidence of it actually happening), but in the sense of a shared story of the virtue of our founding father, which allows us as US citizens to point to the story for a sense of identity and meaning.

Read more

Summary: A follow-up to the March Trilogy, taking up John Lewis’ story from 1964 until 1967. 

I am a huge fan of the March Trilogy, a graphic novel trilogy that tells the early years of John Lewis’ life, framed as him remembering his early life at Obama’s Inauguration. The graphic novel format I think is particularly suited to the Civil Rights era history because the era’s evocativeness is part of its importance. It is one thing to read a narrative history about Civil Rights era marches; it is something else to see images of those marches with a mix of dialogue and narrative. There is a reason that the March Trilogy was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer.

In some ways, the history of the early years of the Civil Rights movement, Brown v Board in 1954 until Selma in 1965, is a simpler narrative. There was a righteous cause, and while there was no universal agreement (civil disobedience was very controversial), once it was completed, the history has a clear narrative story of right and wrong. Post-1965, the narrative is much more nuanced and complicated. Pre-1965, the Civil Rights movement was largely focused on legal segregation and voting rights. Post-1965, the Civil Rights movement had less clear objectives. The Vietnam War and its disparate impact on minority communities, especially poor minority communities, and global solidarity with colonized communities around the world became the focus of some activists. Other activists tried to focus on poverty across racial lines. Other activists, especially women, began to focus on what we now call intersectionality and how different forms of discrimination overlap and act differently, and how the early Civil Rights era leadership had largely had a public male face with women doing significant parts of the organizing but were excluded from leadership.

This post-1965 era requires a much more nuanced story that we are still grappling with as a society. The current discussions over Critical Race Theory are not discussed in the book, but CRT arose because the legal changes due to pre-1965 work did not result in significant cultural changes. In a 1981 interview, political consultant Lee Atwater famously discussed the rise of less overt appeals to race as a motivating factor for engaging white voters. Derrick Bell and other lawyers who contributed to the rise of Critical Race Theory knew that a law simply saying that discrimination on the basis of race was illegal did not mean that discrimination did not occur. And once there was a shift as a result of the 1976 Washington vs Davis case, which required proof of intent to discriminate, a very high bar, more covert discrimination became not only normal but more insidious because it worked with the cultural concept of color blindness to prevent race from being openly discussed. The concept of a colorblind constitution or colorblind legal theory was used to oppose efforts to address historic racial discrimination.

Read more

Summary: A talented quartet of children have to go to a boarding school to save the world from The Emergency. 

I have been looking for shows to watch with my kids that we all enjoy besides Bluey (the best cartoon out there right now). I saw a recommendation for the Mysterious Benedict Society on Disney+ and so we watched it together. I liked it more than my kids did. They watched, but I think it was a little bit old for them (they are 6 and 7). I enjoyed the show and by the 3rd or 4th episode (of 7), I picked up the first book in the series. The first book covers the main content of the show, although there are differences and a couple of details from later books come out in the show. (A few spoilers below.)

Mister Benedict is an eccentric genius who has recruited the four children to become students at a boarding school. The school is  run by Benedict’s equally brilliant twin brother. One of the details that is different between the book and the show is that in the book both are unaware of the existence of one another until midway through the book, but in the show they grow up in an orphanage until Benedict is adopted at about the same age as the kids in the book. Benedict has a loving family and is nurtured and he then becomes a nurturing caring adult. But his brother Mister Curtain, becomes power hungry and attempts to control everyone around him. In the show, Benedict feels guilty for not doing more for his brother.

These books feels a little like a British fiction, with the boarding schools and abstracted technology that is both modern and without cell phones or the internet. Maybe it is just that the books can feel a little like a non-fantasy version of Harry Potter. Brilliant, gifted children are nothing new to children’s literature. But one of the ongoing themes of the books is that these children need one another to be successful. They don’t always agree, or even like one another, but their skills fit together and as they learn to trust, not only themselves, but one another, they are more successful. There is a goodness to the children. They believe in truth and so ‘The Emergency’ which is concerning for everyone else hits them differently. There is a mind control device, which requires children for its use. Those that are not worried about truth are more susceptible to mind control. The children receive the mind control signals as discomfort, but it also makes them grumpy and snappish.

Read more

Summary: An expansion of his 2014 Politico article.

This is a very short book that is an expansion of a well-known and controversial article. I listened to the book, and it was less than 2 hours. In paper, it is 128 pages, but those cannot be dense pages.

The rough thesis is that the rise of the religious right was not originally because of concern over abortion or gay rights as the story is sometimes told, but because of the IRS investigation or religious schools’ segregation stances. On the narrow thesis, I think that it is hard to argue against race playing a role. Segregation academies, as they are sometimes called, were a response to public school integration requirements, and these Christian schools, which just happened to usually be all white, just happened to appear in the years following Brown v Board. By 1970 (following an IRS rule change), the IRS started to research the rise of these schools and sent requests to the school to ask about their integration policies. Many schools obfuscated or allowed in a small group of minority students to avoid IRS investigation. But Bob Jones and a few others schools were vocal in their segregation. After several initial court cases, the IRS revoked Bob Jones’ tax exemption in 1976. Eventually, there was a Supreme Court case in 1983. (Ronald Reagan had a campaign stop at Bob Jones in 1980. George W Bush had a campaign stop in 2000. Also in 2000, Bob Jones University revoked its ban on interracial dating. In 2017, Bob Jones University regained its tax exemption.)

Up until the early 1970s, there was not a strong political movement within the religious right. Some Evangelicals were trying to raise concerns about abortion, but it was not a significant issue. The SBC had a weak resolution in support of allowing limited abortion in 1971. It was not until 1980 that the SBC had a resolution clearly opposing abortion.  The Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern in the fall of 1973 did not mention abortion at all.

Balmer is broadly right in the basic thesis that racial concerns were one of the contributing factors that gave rise to the religious right. I think there was a bit more nuance and detail in Bad Faith than in the Politico article, but I think there should still have been more nuance and detail. This is a concise book, but if he was clearer about how limited his claims are, I think this would be a better book. I know that many understood the Politico article to have a more expansive thesis, something like, “abortion was never really a concern of the religious right, it was always just covert racism all along.” That more expansive thesis would be too strong, but I think that the more expansive thesis is a misreading of the article facilitated in part by Balmer not limiting his claims more clearly.

Read more

Summary: Reckoning with history through its landmarks and locations.

It is no surprise to anyone that I like to read history. History gives us insight into our current realities by exposing the forces that shaped our reality. But history is also narrative, the stories that we tell ourselves about how the world came to be. Many historians are incredible writers. Clint Smith’s background as a poet is evident. His language is personal, evocative, and at times searing. I am not brand new to Clint Smith; he hosts the YouTube CrashCourse series on Black American History. During a road trip to visit my parents, my wife and I listened to podcasts and a 90-minute discussion between Clint Smith and Brené Brown. When the podcast was over, I immediately purchased the audiobook of How the World is Passed, and we only listened to this audiobook for the rest of the trip.

About 15 years ago, I listened to the audiobook of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation. With her trademark voice and humor, Vowell traveled through the country to visit sites of political violence. If you have read that book, How The Word is Passed is a more serious similar idea. Clint Smith starts in his hometown of New Orleans and explores monuments’ role in understanding the history of slavery. Then he visits Monticello and the Whitney Plantations and explores how plantations handle the story of slavery and the mythology of the plantation. That history of plantations naturally leads to Angola Prison, one of the country’s largest and most infamous prisons built on a plantation.

Blandford Cemetery has been a cemetery since 1702 but was significantly expanded after the Civil War battle of Petersburg and is now mostly a Confederate Cemetery. I will expand on this description a bit more because this chapter is a perfect illustration of what Clint Smith is attempting to do with the book. He initially goes on a tour of the cemetery and the church that was on site. Then, referencing the earlier discussions of how plantations told their story, he details the discussion with the tour guide and the cemetery director. During the discussion, he discovers a Confederate Memorial Day commemoration at the cemetery that the Sons of Confederate Veterans put on. Along with the narrative of the visit, Smith recounts the history of the Lost Cause, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their roles in shaping education, the memory of the Civil War, and southern identity. Finally, during the discussion of the program and recounting of interviews with participants in the program and attendees, Smith discusses how various forms of white nationalism and confederacy remembrance are often interlinked. All of this gives context and depth but feels natural; a visit leads to another visit, and talking to one person leads to an exploration of the person’s ideas.

Read more

Summary: Historical exploration of the modern concept of Biblical Womanhood. 

Right off from the start, I was not planning on picking up The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I am an egalitarian concerning women in Church leadership. I am for full ordination and full participation of women in the church in all areas. I do not need to be convinced that the modern emphasis on gender roles is modern or problematic. I have read fairly widely in this area and don’t need to be convinced.

But there was a sale at audible and I needed to buy one more book, so I picked up the audiobook. I was frankly surprised by how much new information I learned. I think where The Making of Biblical Womanhood is the best is when Barr is pointing out the history of women serving in roles that today some consider inappropriate for women. By pointing out how there has been a constriction of role, or in the sections on the bible and theology, how earlier generations understood the bible or theology differently, Barr is rightly making the cases that while women have not previously been equally able to teach or preach or lead, the fact that some have means that it is not a universal proscription from various roles.

At the end of the book, I think it is unsurprising that many critiques are of what the book did not do. Barr is not primarily a biblical scholar and she does not primarily make the case for women in ministry from that background. There are plenty of other books that do that. It is a bit of a catch-22 situation. Many that are opposed to women in ministry cite the history of Christianity and a flat reading of a couple of passages as all that is necessary to make the case. To counter that case, there needs to be a much more nuanced reading of the scripture (which isn’t the main focus here) and a retelling of the history of Christianity to show that there has been a history of women playing a larger role in the public ministry of Christianity. Barr focuses on the latter and the critiques are often that she does not do the former. But the former has many other examples and when those authors point out alternative readings of scripture, they are met with charges that, “well that is not how the church has historically read those passages and women have never served in that way.”

Read more

Summary: Some lessons need to be experientially learned. 

It would be wonderful if there were some curriculum, or better yet, some magic trick, where everyone would completely learn wisdom. But that is not how wisdom or life work. Many lessons, as frustrating as it is to many parents, have to be experienced.

Carl McColman has had a lot of experiences. And with himself as the primary subject, he recounts how even when he theoretically could see the wisdom in the distance, he still often had to experientially learn before he was able to start to put these lessons into practice.

The book opens with his introduction to a 7-year-old girl that would become his stepdaughter. She was significantly disabled from a stroke and other congenital disabilities. McColman had to learn how to be a husband and father experientially. Some mistakenly suggest that things like marriage or parenting are the only ways to learn maturity. McColman doesn’t do that, but he does show how those roles did force him to think differently about his life and how to reorient his priorities.

Read more

Summary: Basic introduction to the concept of Spiritual Direction and what to expect before you get started as a spiritual director.

I am not completely sure how I picked up a copy of this. I think maybe it was a giveaway from the author. I don’t think I agreed to review it. But as I was glancing through my books and looking for something else, I found a copy of the PDF and quickly read through it last week. I am one three-page paper short of finishing my certification as a spiritual director, so I am interested in how different people present the concept.

Most protestants are not really familiar with the concept. Generally, I say it is a form of discipleship. Loosely connected to the early desert fathers and how older monks led younger monks into contemplative work once the monastic system was more established. Generally, most Catholic and Episcopal/Anglican priests must have a spiritual director. This is someone who helps pay attention to spiritual matters. Post-Vatican II, a new emphasis arose on spiritual direction and more attention to spiritual direction for laypeople.

I was trained in spiritual direction through an Ignatian stream of spiritual direction. Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises, designed initially as a 30-day retreat for people to grow closer to God, often as part of discerning a vocation. I think the best simple definition I have commonly heard is that spiritual direction is a regular relationship with someone who helps to serve as a second set of ears to hear God’s direction for your life.

Read more