Adam Shields

Summary: We are all addicted to something; only grace can set us free.

Addition and Grace is not a book I would have picked up on my own. It was assigned for my Spiritual Direction and Psychology class, and it was a book I argued with the whole way through. I have 43 highlights and several comments that you can peruse on my Goodreads page to get a sense of what I was arguing with.

My main argument is with Mays’ shifting understanding of addition. At times he means what we traditionally think of as addiction, a psychological and/or physical need that negatively impacts the people around us or our ability to interact in the world. At times he used addiction as a metaphor for sin. His most explicit definition is:

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction. As I have indicated, attachment of desire is the underlying process that results in addictive behavior.

But he does not seem to limit himself to just that definition. Quite often, these flexible definitions do help give insight into our human lives.

…no addiction is good; no attachment is beneficial. To be sure, some are more destructive than others; alcoholism cannot be compared with chocolate addiction in degrees of destructiveness, and fear of spiders pales in comparison to racial bigotry. But if we accept that there are differences in the degree of tragedy imposed upon us by our addictions, we must also recognize what they have in common: they impede human freedom and diminish the human spirit.

But at other times addition seems to mean everything in a way that becomes unhelpful. For instance, there appears to be no room for obligation. (I do not think it is accurate to describe responsibility or obligation as slavery or addition.)

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Summary: To understand Cone’s theology, you need to understand Cone and his context.

James H Cone has been a frequent concern in many conservative white Christian circles over the past year. There are several causes for that, but one of the threads that has given rise to the discussion is that Walter Strickland, one of only a handful of Black professors at a Southern Baptist seminary, was quoted by Molly Worthen in an NYT article saying that he assigned James H Cone and found value in interacting with him. That gave rise to calls for Strickland to resign, which prompted this statement.

The controversy continued with the president of the seminary where Strickland works both defending Strickland and calling Cone a heretic and ‘almost certainly not a Christian’ on twitter.  Andre Henry wrote an article about the controversy. It was this background that a friend of a friend asked to discuss Cone. Over this past weekend, I picked up the audiobook and listened to it (having previously read it when it first came out.)

I am not a Cone scholar. I have not read all of his books, although I will probably read all of them eventually (there are not that many). In my lay opinion, I think that people tend to approach Cone wrong. Many people want to jump into early constructive theology, God of the Oppressed or A Black Theology of Liberation. I think that because of his theological method, heavily drawing on his personal and cultural experience, that you need to start with one or both of his memoirs.

Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody was posthumously published. The book was completed and ready for publication when Cone passed away in 2018. His earlier My Soul Looks Back was a mid-career memoir. There is a lot over overlapping material, but they are both worth reading. If you are looking for an order, I would recommend, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Spirituals and the Blues, My Soul Looks Back, Martin & Malcolm & American and then you can move his earlier constructive theology.

I say all of this because Cone developed his theology in response to the culture of the US during the late civil rights era.

When the Detroit rebellion, also known as the “12th Street Riot,” broke out in July of 1967, the turmoil woke me out of my academic world. I could no longer continue quietly teaching white students at Adrian College (Michigan) about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and other European theologians when black people were dying in the streets of Detroit, Newark, and the back roads of Mississippi and Alabama. I had to do something. But I wasn’t a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King Jr., or an artist, like James Baldwin, who was spurred in his writing when he saw the searing image of a black girl, Dorothy Counts, surrounded by hateful whites as she attempted to integrate a white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina (September 1957). I was a theologian, asking: What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?

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Summary: Much of the early church was African. The west has largely forgotten its African character and misremembered the importance and reach of the African church. 

One of the important points here is very similar to the one made in this article about the rise of the Nation of Islam that it has been the misuse of Christianity that has led to African (or African American) rejections of Christianity as a White religion. European Christians, especially post Hegalian, viewed the early church fathers as necessarily being European in character because they were essential to the development of Christianity. This ignores the reality that most of the early church fathers were ethnically and culturally African. Most of them spoke Greek and/or Latin, but that is because those were common trade languages. Today we would not say that Bishop Desmond Tutu was European in character because he speaks and writes in English. And that also ignores those that were not writing in Latin or Gre,ek such as St Anthony, who was illiterate, but the only surviving letters we have from him (that were dictated) were in Coptic.

A point which I had not heard before was that the consular format of the early church councils, which are today the basis of what is and is not considered orthodoxy and heresy, were developed by African Christians for use in Africa before they were used in the broader ecumenical councils.

Where I think that Oden gets into a problem is evaluating modern movements. He is a good theologian and historian but tends to paint modern movements too broadly to be helpful. In his section on ecumenicism, there are people that fit into his critique, but many that do not. And because he is not nuanced enough in that critique (and I want to be clear that this would be very difficult), I suspect there are people that will dismiss the clearer theological and historical work as also suspect.

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Summary: Very brief thoughts by Rosa Parks about her life. 

I noticed this book was on sale for Black History month and realized that I had never read the copy that I purchased last year when it was on sale. Reflections by Rosa Parks is a book you want to buy when it is on sale. It is not that it is a bad book, but it is a very short book. The physical book is the 6 by 7 gift-book size. The audiobook is 80 minutes long.

Despite its short length, it is worth reading. Rosa Parks was in her 80s when she wrote Reflections. It feels like she dictated the book because its prose sounds spoken. There are 12 short chapters. The first several are about her early life and the bus boycott. From the sixth chapter on, the chapters are either about the people in her life or her thoughts on life. Her faith exudes in the pages. She has no interest in being a prominent focus, and humbly shifts the focus to the people around her or her faith.

It is precisely that humility that I think makes this book work. It is not a masterwork. It is a simple story and thoughts of an important, but a mostly unknown woman. She talks about the fact that her refusal to get up has been construed as her being tired after work. She says she did not get up because she was physically tired, but because she was tired of racism.

What I had not realized was how quickly she moved to Detroit. She was fired from her job as a seamstress at a department store weeks after the boycott started. And while it doesn’t say this, it seems likely that her husband probably was threatened as well. They moved to Detroit in 1957. Despite living in Detroit, she participates in the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Mongomery march and other Civil Rights work.

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Summary: A collection of short thoughts on prayer.

Doors into Prayer is not a book I would have picked up on my own. It is well worth reading, but I would not have picked it up except that it was part of the Renovaré Book Club. (The next book is Interior Castles.)

I do not participate much in the online discussion, and I do not attend a local in-person discussion (although those are available for interested people). But I do read the supplementary articles and listen to the podcasts. Most of that is paywalled and only for those that participate in the group, but this is a free talk that Emilie Griffin gave at a Renovare conference that is worth listening to (Dallas Willard joins her for some Q&A at the end).

In a paywalled podcast, Griffin says that she wanted to write a book on prayer that was good for standing in line or other short reads. Something that can be read in a few minutes and not tightly connected to the material around it. And that is what this is.

I think of it kind of like those readers digest humor stories. Most topics (chapters) are less than two pages. And while I often read two or three at a sitting, I rarely wanted to read more than that. These are things you want to read and then step away and think and/or pray about.

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Summary: The memoir of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

It was not until last year that I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, the best known of Zora Neale Hurston.  Last week, The Zora Canon, a list of the 100 best books by Black women, named in her honor, was released. It took me a little while to get into the memoir, and there are several essays at the end that I am not sure really improved the memoir, but her storytelling really shown through. Somewhat similar to Julie Andrew’s first memoir Home, the story stops at the point where her career starts to take off. Unlike Julie Andrew’s who recently released a second memoir, Zora Neale Hurston never did. She still died in poverty and largely forgotten until she was ‘rediscovered’ again by a new generation of writers that have brought her back into public consciousness.

The memoir opens with her family history and her early life. The shadows of her life on Their Eyes Were Watching God, either in her own life or in the lives of those around her, was transparent. I don’t know if she was trying to highlight parallels or not, but it is hard not to see them. I would recommend reading Their Eyes Were Watching God before Dust on the Tracks.

I am only going to highlight two points. She talks about how she devoured any books that she could get to. At one point she talks about a box of books she received:

In that box was Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did.

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Summary: A look at how five Christians have used rhetoric to impact the church.

One of my goals over the next couple of years is to think more clearly about how people’s minds are changed. I purposely say that in the passive voice, because while you can influence the changing of minds, you cannot as an outsider change someone else’s mind. What can be done is to build a relationship, listen, and speak. The how of all three of those does matter.

Seasoned Speech is mainly about the concept of rhetoric, something that I am not sure I have particularly looked into previously. I have had public speaking and preaching classes, but those have been about structure and form more generally than rhetoric.

James Beitler in Seasoned Speech took CS Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Desmond Tutu, and Marilynne Robinson and looked at how they rhetorically communicate their faith. I have read something of all of these authors, although never a full-length book by Tutu and only Sayers’ fiction. Beitler’s chapters on each of these authors focused relatively narrowly. Lewis’ chapter was mostly on speaking in vernacular and knowing the audience and the speaker’s limits. Sayers’ was mostly about using fiction and getting into the story. Bonhoeffer’s chapter was mostly on being prophetic in a way that readers may not want to hear, especially in thining about communicating through sermons. Tutu was using positions and life to communicate (with the illustration of his anti-apartheid work and then later his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). This is true of several of the authors being discussed, but especially in the Tutu chapter, the ‘being with’ someone is essential to communicating to them. Robinson challenges the concept of using an argument to compel belief. (It is somewhat ironic that Robinson does use argument in her non-fiction works, but those non-fiction works are far less compelling than her fiction.)

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Summary: Pop culture connections to the gospel and biography the way it is supposed to be done.

I have long been a subscriber to Christ and Pop Culture Magazine. Seeing glimpses of God in art is one of the best ways I know of to communicate about Christ to people who are not Christians. But what I am interested in the pop culture connection is the way that we can understand Christian imagery through art. Unfortunately, in my mind, books that have the subtitle “Gospel According to…” tend to be more focused on evangelism and twisting art to fit a message. Trains, Jesus and Murder is an exceptional example of the ‘Gospel According to…’ type of book.

There are a few that are similar: Rowan Williams’ book on CS Lewis’ Narnia, the recent book about Mister Rogers, and even, in a way, James KA Smith’s latest book on Augustine are all examples of seeking out God in a persons art or work without distorting the work. One of the aspects that is essential in doing this style of book well is being honest about weaknesses. Johnny Cash was far from perfect. His less-than-ideal image has made his legacy enduring; he made outlaw country a thing. His struggle with addiction is well known, and like Brennan Manning, it was a life long struggle.

Johnny Cash was also a saint, or at least he tried to be. He wrote multiple books on Christianity, made movies about his faith, and was generous to many around him. Part of what Beck is communicating is that Cash was impacted by his older brother’s death when Johnny was young. His older brother wanted to be a preacher, and Johnny Cash, despite his outlaw image, wanted to share the gospel widely in his way.

Beck’s central theme is that the gospel is about solidarity for the Man in Black.

The gospel according to the Man in Black is a gospel rooted in solidarity. The cross of Christ, in this view, is an act of divine identification with the oppressed. On the cross, God is found with and among the victims of the world. More, given that crucified persons were considered to be cursed by God “Cursed is anyone who is hung upon a tree (Deuteronomy 21:23).” God is found in Jesus among the cursed and godforsaken. Again, the first place to look for Jesus is in hell. By standing with the poor and beaten down, the music of Johnny Cash shows us how a gospel of solidarity begins as an interpretative activity: the cross is a way of seeing and reading the world. Specifically, the cross helps us answer this most important question: Where is God?

…That is the gospel according to the Man in Black: drawing near to and loving the lost, unnoticed, unremarkable, excluded, powerless, broken, condemned, and despicable. Solidarity is a love that grows warmest in the coldest places. That vision prompts us to take the second step in the dance of divine solidarity. After we read the world to locate God among the victims and the oppressed, we are called to action, to move ourselves to stand with those who are suffering. As Bonheoffer said, God “goes right into the middle of it.” God draws near.

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Summary: Seeking spiritual depth from ordinary life.

I have been reluctant to pick this up because so many have recommended it. I know I shouldn’t do that, but contrarianism is part of who I am. I also picked it up toward the end of the year when I was already way over my self imposed limit on reading more White authors. It seemed relevant at the time to the paper I was working on for my spiritual direction class. Although I ended up cutting the section of my paper that I referenced Liturgy of the Ordinary because it was too long, it did help me focus the essay.

The general focus of the book is to seek to find God in the mundane because the mundane is where we are most of the time. One of my objections to the book is also one of its strengths. Reflections like this are necessarily personal and encultured. We cannot make broad reflections that our outside of our culture and experience because they are then not ours. We are Christians, not abstractly but within our culture and experience.  So while I assumed going in that this book would be White, middle class, educated reflections, there was still some frustration with falling into stereotypes, and some pleasure when there were sections that I did not expect.

Even though Liturgy of the Ordinary is only three years old, it feels like so many people have previously read it that I can see its impact in other books and especially other articles. Part of that perception of widespread impact is that what is happening in the book is not actually new. I picked this up as a counterpoint to William Berry’s Finding God in All Things, which is an exploration of Ignatian spiritual practice and very similar in broad theme.

There is a lot of grace in the Liturgy of the Ordinary, and that grace is necessary and helpful; ordinary life can be hard. Rev Warren’s discussion about getting into arguments with her husband and needing to seek forgiveness, of having human limitations, of needing others, is part of what it means to be human. Humans are limited creatures and part of Christian discipleship is to embrace the limitations and live within them. Our culture wants us to perform and rise above our human limitations, but part of what Christ’s incarnation should show us is that even Christ, the true God made man, was human and had human limitations. Jesus needed sleep; he needed rest and time alone, he needed friends and community, and he could not have been born without a mother, and he could not have been a human without being a baby that had to be cared for.

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