Book Reviews

Takeaway: Lots of classic Lewis here.

I went through a period when I was reading a ton of CS Lewis (either by or about). I looked today and if I counted correctly I have finished 19 of Lewis’ books, many of them multiple times and started but did not finish another 4. But it has been a little while since I read Lewis. Unless I missed something the last books I read about Lewis was the joint biography of the Inklings in Feb 2017. And the last books I read by Lewis was Screwtape Letters in Nov 2016.

I picked up the audiobook of Weight of Glory because it was super cheap and I needed something “˜light’ to off set a lot of other heavy things I have been reading/listening to. That is to say I was probably not as engaged as I should have been. Weight of Glory is the favorite Lewis book of several people I know. It is not that for me. Not because it is bad, but because it is near the end of Lewis’ library for me.

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Summary: The child of human and alien parents must find his own way.

One of my reading goals this year was to finished the final two fiction books that Octavia Butler wrote. In November I am just finishing the first of the two, so I am not sure I will get to the second.

Imago I think is a second tier Butler book. It is not bad. Butler is a good writer and creates intriguing worlds. This is not really complete series. It is set on earth, but an earth that an alien race has captured and rules. The alien world took over the Earth in the midst of a global war. The aliens capture the remaining humans in the world and for hundreds of years kept them in stasis while they were studied and the earth was restored after the war.

In the first book of the trilogy the first humans were awoken and that started a forced breeding program to create new species. The aliens are genetic manipulators that go from world to world collecting gene samples and creating new species, mining and using up the worlds until they are bare hunks of rock and then moving on. Butler at times could be a bit to on the nose with her imagery.

The conflict of the trilogy is about participation of humans in this breeding program and the ways that the new “˜constructs’ impact both the humans and the aliens. The three books are about three different characters, the human mother, her first construct child and then this one about another of her construct children, the first construct that is a genetic manipulator itself. (The genetic manipulators do not have sex or gender, they are the conduit through which the different genders connect for procreation.)

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Summary: Context to the why of Black Liberation Theology.

A few months ago I generally stopped referring to my posts as reviews. I am not really reviewing these books, I am trying to respond to them, give some thoughts and talk about what I have learned. That is especially true for a book like Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian by James H Cone. Almost exactly a year ago I read Cone’s 1985 memoir, My Soul Looks Back. That memoir was a mid-career memoir. And of course there are some overlapping memories and reflections, but it is interesting to me how different they are. The passing of more than 40 years does matter.

I could make this a post of just quotes from Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. I have 20 that you can read on my Goodreads review. But the important part of reading a memoir like this is that it gives context for his other writing. I read his The Cross and the Lynching Tree (which he says was his favorite book) this summer. And I have previously read a couple of his other books. Many reduce Cone to just a “˜liberal theologian’ as if he has nothing to say to most of us. But Cone has much to say to us and reading his story I think matters to how we receive the rest of his work.

Cone was an academic theologian. His dissertation was on Barth. He was strongly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr. As a Black theologian, he felt he had to respond to the civil rights movement, especially after the death of MLK and the rise of urban riots in the US. His question, “What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?”, mattered not just in 1967 but also today.

Where many will disagree with Cone is his adoption of Malcom X’s statement, “œWe are black first and everything else second” and that discussion has continue today. But Cone was not rejecting finding his identity in Christ or was he implicitly condemning Whites and others by embracing his created Blackness. He was, in a not dissimilar way, embracing the concept of Black Lives Matters 50 years early.

Cone was frustrated by his theological training (and I still hear this from many minority theology students today).

The real historical Jesus, whom scholars have been seeking since the eighteenth century, was not white. That much I knew. When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really was, I stopped trusting anything they said. It was ideologically tainted. I began to trust my own black experience as a better source for knowledge about God and Jesus. The black religious experience was less ideologically tainted because blacks were powerless and could not impose their view of Jesus on anybody. (Kindle Location 378)

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Summary: An imperfect prodigal returns home to an imperfect father.

Pretty much any time I hear someone answer the question, who is the best Christian author writing fiction that is not marketed as “˜Christian Fiction’, Marilynne Robinson is usually listed in the top 10. I am glad we have a category called “˜Christian Fiction’. But I mostly do not read it. Not because all of it is bad, but because so much of it is formulaic.

I first read Gilead, the first of this loose trilogy in 2012 and again in 2015. Lila, the third book in the trilogy, I read twice in the space of three months at the end of 2014 and then again in early 2015, just before reading Gilead a second time. I have been reluctant to read Home for a couple reasons. First, it means that I have read all four of Robinson’s books of fiction. And I wanted to have something to look forward to. Second, there were a lot of negative reviews of Home in Audible for the quality of the audiobook. And I have liked Robinson’s books in audio.

But Robinson has hinted that she will publish another book of fiction. And I eventually just borrowed the audiobook from the library so I didn’t have to be disappointed in the audio. In the end I was not disappointed in the audiobook. The narrator was Maggi-Meg Reed, who seems quite familiar.

The three books of the trilogy are told from the perspective of three different people with overlapping timelines and shared events told from different perspectives. I was predisposed to dislike Jack, the subject (but not the narrator) of Home because of the negative impression of John Ames, the subject and narrator of Gilead. Jack is a more sympathetic character in Home, although certainly not innocent.

I am not sure whether this was really the intention, but this felt like a broken retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Rev Boughton, John Ames’ best friend is the father of eight children and near the end of his life. His prodigal son and oldest child, Jack, has been gone for 20 years, but comes back home. Glory, the baby, after a failed relationship has returned to the town of Gilead to care for her father and heal her own wounds.

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Summary: Brief graphic novel about Bonhoeffer with a very good understanding of the German context and Hitler’s rise to power. 

Bonhoeffer is one of those subjects that I am continually fascinated by. I have read a number of books by and about Bonhoeffer including two others this year. I did not walk into The Faithful Spy blind.

Even though I know it isn’t necessarily true, I tend to think of graphic novels as oriented toward young adult readers. In other words, a simplified perspective. But like Hendrix’s book on John Brown, the presentation of Bonhoeffer is complex.

Despite my long reading list about Bonhoeffer, I honestly, think that The Faithful Spy may have more clearly laid out how Hitler rose to power than any other book on Bonhoeffer that I have read. (Or at the least, I actually understood it this time.) Because Hitler has been talked about a lot lately I was paying attention to how The Faithful Spy told the story of Hitler’s rise. A meme on Facebook recently was talking about Hitler being voted into power, but as Faithful Spy makes clear, that is a partial truth. Hitler was elected, but only after he had stolen power and circumvented the democratic process that was in place.

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Summary: The child of a violent rape in a post-apocalyptic future Africa is named Onyesonwu, or Who Fears Death.

Who Fears Death seems to be Nnedi Okorafor’s best-known book. But that may be surpassed with her recent Binti trilogy. This is the fifth of Okorafor’s books I have read in the last 18 months or so. The books are not the same story, but there are elements where I can see her style and perspective carried through. I cannot help but compare her to Octavia Butler because I am two books away from reading all of Butler’s fiction. Both Butler and Okorafor write strong Black women as their protagonists. All of Okorafor’s settings are future Africa, but there is a mix of fantasy and science fiction elements as well as Magical Realism.

I am not sure how I fully feel about Magical Realism. There are times when it appears that magical realism is a science that can be controlled. But other times, it is magic that is based on cultic beings or maybe elemental structures that are not quite scientific. Still, at other times, magical realism feels more like a method of describing religious beliefs or beings.

Who Fears Death is not my favorite of the Okorafor novels, but it is a solid novel that was worth reading. One of the reasons I have continued to try to be intentional about reading diverse authors is that the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds means that I am exposed to different storytelling methods and assumptions. I cannot really describe Who Fears Death as Dystopian YA because Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, or Maze Runner are Dystopian YA. I am not even sure if it is really YA, although it is the story of Onye, focusing primarily on her life from 16 to 21.

The culture and assumptions are foreign to me. Veils, ritual genital mutilation, caste systems, and different senses of shame and independence from the community help me to see how much my own Western cultural assumptions are a lens that I make normative and how much I need to decenter my own perspectives to work on empowering others.

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Takeaway: As Christians who believe in embodiment, we are Christians in a place, not just abstractly.

When I was in college I thought I was called to the city. I had a mentor prophesy over me that I was called to the city and pray that I would fulfill that calling. That mentor was later found in significant sin and left (quietly) in disgrace. I loved Chicago, where I spent more than than any other place in my life and where I still work. But in 2006 I moved to suburban Atlanta and now have lived in this house longer than any other home I have lived in. I honestly doubt that I will ever live inside a city like Chicago again. In large part because I have family. It isn’t that I would not take my children to a city, but that extended family structures matter and I am in an extended family structure that is suburban.

Over the past few years I have been changing in my attitude toward suburbs. In part DL Mayfield has given voice to some of why I have changed. She lives in community with recent immigrants and those in poverty in suburban Portland OR. In Portland, and much of the rest of the country, the suburbs are increasingly where the poor live. Nationally, more poor people live in the suburbs than either urban or rural areas. In addition, suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse. My county school district is now predominately minority. And while that is not reflected in the population as a whole, the population as a whole in my county is also booming more diverse. As DL Mayfield has said, she is in the suburbs because that is where the poor, the immigrant and the needy are likely to be found.

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Takeaway: “Discipleship is about how we live; not just the decisions we make, not just the things we believe, but a state of being.”

I am a big fan of Rowan Williams’ little books. There are a lot of them. Most of them grew out of lectures and so are short (around 80-100 pages) and pack a lot of punch. Several of them would make excellent small-group discussion books because they could be covered in 4 to 6 sessions (what I think is an optimal length for small-group discussions).

Being Disciples is a follow-up to Being Christian. Being Christian focuses on four practices central to being Christian: baptism, bible, eucharist, and prayer. Being Disciples about attitudes or virtues or approaches to how we live. The chapter titles are Faith, Hope and Love, Forgiveness, Holiness, Faith in Society, and Life in the Spirit.

Williams is a real scholar and theologian, and I have had some difficulty with some of his longer, more academic books. But these shorter ones have a simple presentation without being simplistic. One of the reviewers of Being Disciples on Amazon said, “the simple presentations was made on the basis of deep understanding of theology and the human condition.”

Williams is a theologian, but a theologian who centers practice. He does not minimize theology but suggests that how we live as Christians really matters to becoming more like Christ. The knowledge of theology is not unimportant. But we do not become like Christ through our knowledge, we become like Christ through our practice. (I read this right after finishing the Dangers of Christian Practice, so that was on my mind, but I still think that Rowan Williams is right here.)

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Takeaway: Spiritual practices are not magic bullets. 

Over the past few years, I have become a disciple of spiritual practices. I have a spiritual director. I regularly use the Book of Common Prayer. I do think that the eucharist and baptism should be central to worship. This makes me the target audience of Lauren Winner’s new book, the Dangers of Christian Practice.

The rough thesis is that spiritual practices, while good, have weaknesses that need to be paid attention to. Just like the church is made up of human beings that are sinful and make every church community less than perfect, good practices that are commanded by God and advocated throughout history also have some weaknesses.

The easiest illustration and the best chapters is about prayer. Keziah Goodwin Hopkins Brevard is the main illustration. She is a 57 year old widowed owner of two plantations and over 200 slaves. She left extensive journals both of her thoughts and of her prayers as fodder for Winner’s discussion.

As Winner recounts, Brevard prays for pliant slaves, she prays for the death of slaves that lie to her, she prays that Heaven will have a separate location for abolitionists and slaves away from her. (Note the political and rhetorical implications of a separate heaven.) She prays to be a good master and for a heart open to God.

Winner notes that the subjects of our prayers have long been a concern for Christians. Aquinas and others cited have thought and written about praying for things that are sinful or out of distorted desires. But the very nature of prayer is part of the problem. It is not just intercessory prayer but teaching prayer to others and how public prayer is often not solely directed at God. Prayer can quickly become gossip, self-justification, or deception. But even out of lousy prayer, there can be good aspects.

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