Adam Shields

Takeaway: Commentaries are under-appreciated forms of devotional literature.

In general, I do not read the Bible straight through in a reading plan. I generally read the bible either with the Book of Common Prayer or with a Liturgy of the Hours (this is the one I use right now mostly). I prefer dated versions where I read that day and that day only. If I get behind, I get behind.

But almost two months ago now I went on a silent five-day retreat. And I brought Willie James Jennings’ commentary on Acts, along with the Liturgy of the Hours and Reggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus as my reading content. I had wanted to read Jennings’ commentary on Acts, and I had just finished (really the first day I finished) Jennings’ Christian Imagination. So I wanted more from Jennings.

Reading his commentary on Acts alongside his constructive theology in The Christian Imagination was exactly what I needed for that retreat. Being able to read slowly, and have lots of time to stop and pray through the commentary was perfect. Jennings is upending many White Evangelical readings of Acts. This was not my first book that approached Acts in a similar way, Amos Yong prepared me to read Jennings.

We often read Acts as a hero tale. We have hero Peter and then hero Paul that follow God and bring the good news of Jesus Christ to the gentiles. And that is undoubtedly part of the story. But Acts was not oriented toward individual hero stories. Acts was primarily about a community, one that was grappling with a God that had upended their concept of what it meant to be a follower of God.

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Summary: A personal, memoir informed, look at the difference between being ‘not racist’ and an antiracist.

I picked up How to Be an Antiracist almost immediately after I finished Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. They are very different in approach. Stamped from the beginning is more academic, much longer, and more historical. How to be an Antiracist is much shorter, more personal and, in a helpful way, not academic.

Despite it being shorter and less academic, I think this is a book I am going to need to read again, while I doubt I will re-read Stamped from the Beginning. How to be an Antiracist is making subtle changes to the recent Critical Race Theory informed definitions of racism. And while I think I mostly agree with Kendi’s critiques, I also think I need to both re-read this book to be sure I understand what he is doing, and read some others responding to him to make sure I am not missing some of the implications of his critiques.

At the most basic, Kendi is rejecting the prejudice plus power definition of racism. At the same time, he is rejecting racist as a descriptor of a person. He wants racist to be the descriptor of the idea or action. “œA racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” Similarly, “œA racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.”  In another place, “What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities”¦Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.”

Kendi uses the metaphor of racism not as an identity (or tattoo), you either are or are not racist, but a sticky name tag that you put on and take off. He is unequivocal that anyone can express racist ideas or perform racist actions. And he is not at all rejecting the concept of racism as a systemic reality. He does not like the term systemic racism (because it is too vague). He wants to concentrate on “˜racist policies.’

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

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Summary: A short book detailing how and why you should never talk to the police beyond identification and asking to speak with a lawyer.

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent is one of those books whose title jumped out at me. I saw it as one of Amazon’s daily deals, and when I realized that it was free on both audio and kindle as part of Kindle Unlimited, I picked it up.

The book has a simple argument. Each with a chapter, do not talk to the police, do not plead the fifth (right to remain silent), do plead the sixth (right to counsel). That is it. Simple and easy to remember.

The reason to read the book is the detail. The legal system in the US is a mess. I am far from libertarian, but the legal system is an area where there needs to be significant reform and where less is likely much more. US criminal law is scattered, and there are criminal penalties mixed in with other statues, and much of criminal law is vague and unknown to most people. There is an estimate in the book based on another study that the average person commits three felonies a day. Not because of criminal intent, or even sheer ignorance, but because of vague drafting. If you have household cleaners, you have probably committed a felony. The possession of any part of a potential bomb is a felony. You do not have to have all of the pieces, you do not have to have intent, merely having one part is enough. So if you have Drano or fertilizer or many other legal everyday items, you are committing a felony. There are several other examples as well.

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent also details police and prosecutorial misconduct. James Duane affirms that most police and most prosecutors are just attempting to do their job. But their job is to arrest or convict people, not keep the peace or seek justice. Police ability to flat out lie to you and encourage you to violate your rights has been strongly supported by the courts. The police are not there to ensure that you are innocent. Prosecutors are virtually never held accountable for violating the law or your rights.

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Summary: Conclusion of the trilogy of related stories loosely connected to downtown London parish healing center. 

Susan Howatch is one of my favorite authors. She is not well known. Her books tend to be a bit melodramatic. And she has two distinct writing periods. Her early period was as a literary fiction author, based in NYC, working on books of historical fiction, usually long family dramas. I have read some, but not all of the books of this period.

The second writing period is after a divorce and after she moved back to England and eventually rediscovered faith. There are nine books in this period that are all narratively linked and should probably be read in order. They play out over about 65 years and involve many characters, but with a similar style and focus on living out or finding Christian faith. The first of the books in this period is Glittering Images.

Because this is really the last in a loosely connected series of nine, I am not going to try to relate all of the books together. But in the 7th book, the main character, Carter or Carta, is now the supporting character for the Heartbreaker. As is common in this series, the focus on the ongoing nature of Christian growth and maturity means that there is always more growth that is required. So part of the growth that Carta now needs is to be able to help the main character, Gavin.

Part of what I like about Howatch is that while she is writing about Christianity, she could never be published in the US evangelical world. Gavin is a high-end male prostitute. The sex here is not graphic, but there is sex. And there is a decent amount of language. Howatch is not glossing over the reality of prostitution and pornography. It is not really possible to have a fiction book about a prostitute without getting a bit gritty at times.

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Summary: Letters to his granddaughter with a mix of family history and life advice.

Of course, I am aware of Sidney Poitier’s acting. But I had no understanding of his life story. I picked this up blind from the library.

Sidney Poitier grew up on Cat Island. A small island in the Caribbean, without electricity, running water, or cars. When he was 10, his family moved to Nassau where he first tried ice cream and first saw a movie (both recounted in the book.) He also got into trouble and was sent to live with his older brother in Miami when he was 15.

Again he got into trouble and at 16 moved to NYC and worked a series of dishwashing jobs, before a brief stint in the Army and more dishwashing jobs. He was functionally illiterate at this point. A waiter at one of the restaurants he was working at taught him after work over a series of weeks until his reading improved enough that he could work at it on his own.

Poitier saw a newspaper for an actor when he was looking for a new dishwashing job and figured that acting would be less work than dishwashing. He failed on his first audition, but later convinced an acting teacher to take him on. His tenacity and talent eventually led to stage acting jobs, which led to a few movie roles. At 24, he was in Cry Beloved Country. He was first nominated for an Academy Award in 1958 for Defiant Ones but did not win an Academy Award until 1964 with Lillies of the Field.

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This is a short children/middle grade memoir of the Selma voting rights protests. Most of the focus is on the march which lasted a couple of days. But there is context that starts a few months prior.

The audiobook is just over an hour, so this is very short. I checked it out of my library when I was looking for something quick.

I think it is a good intro to Civil Rights history as a first person narrative by a young person. So would be worth reading out loud or with kids starting in about 3-4th grade and probably could be read independently with discussion for student older than that up to about 7th-8th graders.

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Summary: A broad overview of racism in American told from the perspective of Christianity and our call toward justice.

The preface to America’s Original Sin opens with a description of the shooting and Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. Just a few days before that I read that section, I watched the documentary Emmanuel that also recounted that shooting. Wallis hoped that in the aftermath of the shooting there would be a change in the way that we talk about race and racism within the church and country as a result. But four years after the shooting, there has not been a fundamental shift in the conversation. The Confederate Flag was removed from the South Carolina Capital grounds, the SBC condemned the flying of the Confederate Flag at its annual meeting that next year. But it is hard to point to any other fundamental changes in the conversation.

That lack of change is not particularly surprising given the history of Christianity in the US, but I do think that as we read books like America’s Original Sin, it is important that we pay attention not just to the theological affirmations of what we as Christians should be doing, but also the history of what we have done. The Emmanuel AME Church shooting should have been a wake up call to the church, but it wasn’t. There are hundreds of other points history, including the church kneel in rallies in the 1950s and 60s that should have been significant wake up calls, but they haven’t been.

I probably would not have picked America’s Original sin up if a group in my church had not been reading it, but I wanted to participate in the discussion, so I read it. I respect Jim Wallis and I thought the book was worth reading. In general, I try to primarily read minority voices when I am reading about racism. There are other books that also have introductions to Christianity and Racism that are similarly good. Every book has its own orientation and focus. And Wallis does have a real history working for racial justice within the church.

But at the same time I do not agree with how all of that shakes out in every point. I think that many that are resistant to discussing racism within the church or even acknowledging racism as a real problem either in or outside of the church are going to be turned off by Wallis’ politics. It is not that I disagree with all of Wallis’ politics or that I disagree with how this Christianity influences his politics, but like it or not, Jim Wallis is identified primarily with the Evangelical political left. So I think that limits who will pick up this book and how those that do, will respond. There is certainly need for the political left to deal with its own racism. And if Wallis had more directly targeted the racism of the political left (as Robin DiAngelo particularly focused her book, White Fragility, toward liberal Whites, I think this could have been a more helpful book.

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Summary: A reimagined Superman, played out as a Cold War story with Superman landing in the 1950s Soviet Union.

As I say in almost all of my posts about graphic novels, this is not my area. I read books that are recommended by people who it is there area, like Seth. It was not Seth that I heard this from first. I heard about it first on a podcast that I do not remember. And then it was in the Christ and Pop Culture best of 2018 series. And there have been others that have recommended it once it was on my radar screen.

I like remakes. I know many people do not, but I like the reimagining of stories. A shot by shot remake is not particularly interesting to me; but a different take, a new character perspective, an alternate timeline, etc., is often interesting.

Complete reimagining like this tends to focus on upsetting our assumptions. Superman in his original conception was the ultimate American, the image of the American Dream. Superman: Red Son imagines Superman as the ultimate communist. One that not only believed in the ideals but tried to enact them and oppose those that were working within communism only for their own power.

I thought the ending was well done and I think really the only option for this type of story. The art was good, but I read this more for the story than the art.

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Summary: When the sociological construct of race was developed, Christianity was the dominant intellectual force. Jennings traces how theology impacted and influenced the development of racism and how theology was used to justify racist acts. 
In the past eight years since The Christian Imagination was released, I have seen a diverse group of Christians say that this is the most influential theology book of the last decade. I am not going to disagree, although I do not have the depth of theology to make that type of statement.

I do not usually quote the book description when I write, but I will here because I cannot think of a better way to describe the book.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew to reveal how Christianity’s highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation “social, spatial, and racial” that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals.

Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race.

Before this book, I was aware of the concept of supersessionism (the idea that Christianity superseded Judaism and replaced God’s covenant with Israel with a new covenant with the church.) But it is just not something I have thought much about. Christianity has failed to reject supersessionism clearly, and there has always been a stain of supersessionism, from the overt Marcionism and Manichaeism that were both rejected as heresy to the much more subtle replacement theology that arose later. It has only been since World War II and the Holocaust that Christianity has widely started seeing supersessionism as a theological problem. Jennings makes the case that the ethnic prejudice against Jews that was rooted in supersessionism and was strongly present throughout the middle ages gave theological cover for a different type of ethnic superiority that gradually developed into the concept of race and the racial hierarchies that undergirded colonialism, race-based slavery, and White supremacy.

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