Adam Shields

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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Summary: Nesta has to grapple with her demons. 

In some ways I think I liked this more than the rest of the series. It is more contained. Nesta isn’t an easy character to like. And Cassian, the other main character at times feels a bit too idealized as a man.

This is a series that I initially picked up because my local school district banned it from the school libraries. It is an adult series with a lot of sex. But at the same time, there are a lot of other books that I think have a lot more problematic views of sex than this one does. Generally the series is sex positive in the sense that the people like having sex. It is mutual and consent oriented. But it is also very idealized and the super human people have super human sex.

This is a romantasy (romance and fantasy) series. But this book is less about the magic and fantasy battles than some of the others. All of that stuff is in the background, but not centered in the story.

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Summary: “…the truth that God is love lies at the heart of all divine revelation.”

I am often reluctant to write about books where I know the authors. It is not because the books are not good, they often are very good. But sometimes it hard to separate the book from the larger lifework of the person that you know outside of just the book.

I didn’t meet John Armstrong until about 15 years ago. We had lots of mutual friends because we were both in the Chicago area and were connected to Wheaton College. But it wasn’t until I moved to suburban Atlanta that we actually met during an ecumenical meeting here that John hosted and then another conference on friendship in Chicago. We have kept in connect and I try to participate as much as possible in The Initiative, an ecumenical group that grew out of John’s earlier work.

I think in many ways The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is a natural outgrowth of John Armstrong’s story and his focus on Missional-Ecumenism. Part of what John Armstrong is doing in the The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is narrating his story of how his interaction with both God and other christians moved him from a more closed faith to a more open faith that both recognizes the contributions of other streams of Christianity and recognizes the importance of cooperation and understanding between those steams to become the whole Church.

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is not a memoir, but he does use his story to illustrate his point. I read Byron Borger‘s review in his column at Hearts and Minds books and I think that Borger gets it right that The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is interested in not just whether God is love is a true statement, but what we do with the reality of God’s love in understanding our theology and our view of the transformation of the Christian’s life. I also agree with Borger’s point that part of the value of Armstrong’s book is that it introduces the reader to the breadth of Christian theology. This is quite quote from Borger:

Love is the key, and he uses everyone from the most dense Orthodox thinkers to dear Max Lucado to sophisticated solid writers like Fleming Rutledge to flesh this out, to underscore its centrality to our faith. He draws on so many great writers that this book actually serves as an introduction to some of the finest thinkers in church history — from the ancient fathers to Kallistos Ware to Frederick Buechner to Karl Rahner to Brad Jersak.

(I have picked up three books that were mentioned or cited so far.)

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Summary: An exploration of Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court in 1967 as way to both give a biography and context to Marshall’s work and to explore the ways that that hearing was a preview of later Supreme Court nomination fights.

I picked Showdown up because (it was on sale and) I have not previously read anything specifically about either Thurgood Marshall or Brown v Board. I have read many civil rights era histories that mention both, but none that were explicitly about just those subjects. I have been reminded several times recently about how our story of the civil rights movement is framed as Brown v Board, Emmitt Till, Rosa Parks, Birmingham, March on Washington, 1964 Civil Rights Bill, assignation of MLK Jr and the 1968 civil rights bills as if they were all self contained.

Thurgood Marshall graduated from law school in 1933 in just a few years he was working for NAACP and then also joined the board of directors of the ACLU in 1939. It is Brown v Board that he is most well known for, but as Showdown explains, there was a significant number of cases that Marshall and others argued that laid the groundwork for Brown. The work to end white-only primary systems across the country took 20 years and three Supreme Court decisions. Each one widen the crack just a bit more. The ending of the white only primary system and then the various one person, one vote decisions that ended Georgia’s county unit system and requiring both regular redistricting and relatively equal size districts as well as the 1965 Voting Rights acts were decades in the making and none of those brought about a perfect democracy, but each slowly changed political realities.

Showdown is quite meandering, but that is part of the point because the context of Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court has wide context. Marshall was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1961, but that took 8 months from nomination until approval. In 1965 he was nominated and quickly approved as the US Solicitor General. But it was the nearly 4 months to approve Marshall to the Supreme Court that is the main focus of the book.

As Solicitar General Marshall argued to end the poll tax, Miranda, and several cases defending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as other cases. It was more these cases than his earlier civil rights work that he was questioned about in his nomination. Marshall was not directly involved with the Loving case, but the decision was handed down during the nomination process. Marshall himself married a Filipino woman in 1955, Cecilia Suyat Marshall, after the death of his first wife. Being questioned about the constitutionality of interracial marriage, while being in an interracial marriage with his wife sitting right behind him was a detail that really does matter to the context of that nomination process. As much as I read civil rights history and know that we have not moved as far could be hoped, I also know that there have been changes.

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Summary: The story of four women and their search for God and community. 

Good Christian fiction is hard. I am a very skeptical Christian fiction reader. I don’t like books that are too preachy, or that are not realistic, or that wrap things up too nicely at the end. I don’t like books like that because as much as fiction can be fantasy, good Christian fiction should be presenting a realistic picture of faith.

Generally I like my fiction to be much more subtle than this series is. But I honestly don’t know how you would write a subtle story of spiritual formation. And so I really do recommend this series because I think it presents a fairly realistic view of spiritual formation. As I have said before, the main problem of the book is that the growth is too compressed. It is not that people do not have breakthroughs and do a significant amount of growth in a short period of time. But those breakthroughs are the result of a much longer period of preparation for growth.

This series of four books covers roughly a year of time. Four different women, a young newly married PhD student, a stay at home mom in a bad marriage, a widow in her 50s and a (single) pastor in her 40s on a sabbatical, met at a class about spiritual formation in the early fall. This fourth book covers spring through early summer. A lot has happened and even mentioning the plot points will be spoilers for the early books.

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