Book Reviews

Summary: Fred Rogers was the person the person you saw on tv. 

It is surprising that it has taken 15 years since his death for an actual biography of Fred Rogers to be written. At the end of the book, the author Max King, says that the family took a good bit of convincing to participate in the biography because Mr Rogers had been resistant to a biography when he was alive. Max King convinced the family of the need for a biography, not because he wanted to be the one to write it, but because he understood the importance of a good biography to legacy of Mister Rogers. Once the family was convinced of the need, they wanted King to be the author.

The Good Neighbor is Max King’s first book. he was a journalist for 30 years culminating in being the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1990 to 1998. Then he became the President of the Heinz Endowments, which helped to fund of the Mr Rogers programming. When he retired from the Heinz Endowments in 2008 he was asked to lead The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at St Vincent College where he is still a fellow. From his position at the Fred Rogers Center he was able to see the importance of Mister Rogers legacy and be in a position to write with access to both documentary evidence and people that were around Fred Rogers.

The Good Neighbor was released on the same day that the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor was released to DVD/Blu-ray home sales. I did not see the documentary in the theater, but I have now watched it three times since the digital release. Max King is one of the figures that was interviewed on the documentary. These two projects, along with the Tom Hanks feature film on Mister Rogers that is scheduled for release in 2019, coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

The Good Neighbor is traditional in biographical form. It traces Fred Rogers’ family history, his childhood, teen and college years and early TV career in a fairly straight line. Once the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood starts its main production the straight line narrative breaks down and never really fully comes back together. As I was reading I kept thinking about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. In a somewhat similar way to Steve Jobs, Fred Rogers was so completely identified with his work that it is virtually impossible for a biographer to write without long discussions of that work. The Steve Jobs biography discussed the company and the products, the Good Neighbor discusses not just the production of the show and the structure of what became his non-profit production company, but also his work in childhood development, puppetry, the rise of PBS and many other topics that were informed by Fred Rogers but were more than just biography.

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Takeaway: I have no idea.

One of my reading projects this year has been to read all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction this year. I have previously read A Good Man is Hard to Find, but I will probably re-read it again. But I have no idea what to think about O’Connor now that I have finished all of her fiction.

She is a skilled writer. It is easy to see that she is writing not just for a surface meaning, but for the re-readings as well. There is depth there that many writers cannot pull off.

But there is also a twistedness that is hard to take. It is not just that many of these stories end in ironic tragedy, but that there is an intentional turning everything upside down. There is much to appreciate about the upside-down nature of the stories. A woman farmer that complains about a stray bull is, of course, gored by the bull. I saw that coming a mile away. But the path to the inevitable end seems to matter. And the upside-down nature of the stories I believe is representative of her understanding of Christianity.

Part of what I do not know how to process is what much of this means. As I was reading around after finishing, one blogger called the title story one of the most anti-racist short story ever written (which does seem to be more than a little hyperbolic), while many others concentrate on her refusal to meet James Baldwin when he was in Millegeville or her antipathy to the civil rights movements or her racist jokes that were not uncommon in her letters.

It just feels much more complicated than the either/or. Alice Walker, probably best known for her novel Color Purple has a chapter on O’Connor in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. For about a year, Alice Walker, when she was 8 and O’Connor would have been 28, lived just a few miles from O’Connor’s farm and remembers passing it, although she did not know anything about O’Connor at the time. In 1974, Walker and her mother went to visit their old home, a falling down shack in the middle of a pasture, and then the O’Connor farm.

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Summary: A mix of “˜read this instead of that’ guide to Great Books, with half of the time devoted to great book outside of the cannon.

I am a fan of the concept of Great Courses, lectures from good lecturers about interesting subjects. These are similar to repackaged college lectures, not TEDTalks. Most of the ones I have liked best are subjects that I have some familiarity with, but not too much. I have been somewhat reluctant to do the literature lectures because I either have read the books and I am not sure I want to read more, or because I haven’t read the books and felt like I would miss too much.

I very much appreciated How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which was more about how to think about reading and how literature works. Skeptics Guide to Great Books was not really like that. I had two literature courses in college, but only two and I always feel like I am missing something in my process of reading, especially when I am reading the great books.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Great Books was not really what I was looking for, but it was helpful in its own way. It gave me introductions to 7 books that I was unlikely to have picked up on my own. These were all books that were suggested as “˜read this instead of that’. The focus of these was lesser known great books that did much the same thing as other great books, but were shorter and/or more approachable.

The second half of the course was on books that are outside of the cannon of great books because of their genre, but are still worth reading. Of these last five, I have read three was was broadly familiar with the content of the remaining two. In many ways the discussion of the books that I was familiar with was more enjoyable than the discussion of the books I did not know. Part of it might have been the subject matter. Hearing about how Le Carré “˜The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or PD James’ Cover Her Face changed the face of spy and detective novels gave me context outside of those novels for why what was in the novels matters.

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Summary: A father’s lament after his son’s death.

There is no way I can really “˜review’ a book about a father’s lament for his son’s death in a rock climbing accident. This is one of those classic books that people give someone that has just experience a death.

Americans in general and I think Evangelicals in particular do not grieve and lament well. Part of what Wolterstorff talks about how the bad advice or bad theological wisdom that people give to grieving people, like, “˜they are in a better place now’ or “˜God called them back home.’ I very much appreciated Wolterstorff calling BS on that type of false piety. Death is an evil that in part Christ’s coming is here to overcome.

I do not think that we can really prepare for the future tragedies in our life. But I do think that we should read about and listen to grief. Whether it is the lament over the death of a spouse like CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, or the death of a child like Lament for a Son or the combination of multiple griefs in Still by Lauren Winner, grief is particular but has some elements that are shared.

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Summary: An exercise in what it means to encourage the life of the mind, bounded by the creed, with the example of history and with illustrations of how that can work out in practice.

I deeply respect Mark Noll, not just for his history and the quality of his teaching (I had an undergrad class with him at Wheaton and a graduate class with him at the University of Chicago) but also for his broad encouragement of intellectual life outside of his field of history. His Scandal of the Evangelical Mind continues to have ramifications in the Evangelical world.

Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind is, in many ways, a follow-up to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The extended postscript on the edition I read gave a direct update on where Noll has been encouraged since Scandal and areas of continued need. But the rest of the book was a guide to how Noll thinks we should encourage the life of the mind in the Evangelical world.

Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind was published in 2011, and I wonder how it would be different had Noll written it in 2018. Part of the weakness of Noll’s project has been that he has mostly encouraged the life of the minds of academics and theological leaders within the Evangelical church. It is not that he is unaware of the average layperson or that he does not think that the development of the life of the mind of the laity is important. However, the pitch of Noll’s work catches the interest of those who are already intellectually active.

Someone else may have originally said it, but I remember Alan Noble commenting on Twitter about the split in Evangelical leaders in their support of Trump. Noble suggested that broadly, the academic and theological leadership, as well as much of the ministry-focused leadership, has been against Trump from the start. But much of the political leadership and culture war leadership has supported Trump. Others have made a different point about the split in between the clergy that have been more likely not to support Trump than the laity of the Evangelical world.

Noll is encouraged that the life of the mind is trickling down, but he did agree in his postscript that his original charges in Scandal did not acknowledge enough the general anti-intellectualism of American culture more broadly. So as much as I appreciate Noll’s work on the intellectual life of the Evangelical world, his impact has been limited, and while the Trump phenomenon is not a result of that limitation, it likely is an illustration of the phenomena.

As a whole, I alternate between being really appreciative of the concept of this book and the fact that Noll is attempting to work out on paper how we encourage intellectual life within the bounds of Christianity and being frustrated with how he does it.

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Summary: An unlikable maid is found dead and there are too many people that could have killed her.

PD James is one of those authors that I feel like I should have read by now. I picked up a collection of the first six books in the series on kindle for cheap a bit ago and ended up checking out the audiobook from the library last week.

I read some Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes as a teen and was not particularly interested in the “˜who dun it’ aspects of mysteries. But I have been turned on to mysteries over the past several year with the more character based mysteries of Louise Penny, Martin Walker, J Mark Bertrand, Rhys Bowen, Dorothy Sayers and Georges Simenon. The mystery is still present, but the focus is more psychological and about the people around the crime than the particulars of the crime.

I have been listening to a Great Courses lecture on The Great Books for Skeptics and it cites these books and PD James as the start of a shift from the more formulaic pulp mysteries to more literary mysteries that are more common today.

I did not realize until I listened to the lecture after finishing Cover Her Face that it was written in 1962. It does not feel particularly old, but more a historical mystery set a couple of generations ago.

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Summary: A set of books (one for parents and one for kids) to talk about race and racism in light of scripture and Christian faith.

The authors are attempting several difficult things at the same time: 1) to make the process of discussion race and racism simple for parents, 2) to introduce parents and children to a simple, but not simplistic, understanding of race, racism, and the sin of white superiority, 3) to communicate the hope of a Christian understanding of reconciliation in the context of a long history around racial sin. The fact that The Gospel in Color project was completed, and is well done is very encouraging.

There are a couple of aspects of The Gospel in Color that I think were especially very well done. First, the art is very good. It is engaging and there is space in it. The art is not crowded by text and it serves a purpose. It is not surprising that the art is appropriately multi-racial for this project, but I picked up yet another children’s bible a little over a week ago that had entirely White characters. There is no excuse in 2018 for any Christian children’s books to have entirely White characters.

The second aspect of the Gospel in Color that I really appreciate is that with the book was explicit and clear about definition of terms. I do not agree with every definition used, but there is a clarity that is important to this type of project.  Two aspects of the terms I think are very important. First, racism is clearly identified as sin. And second, racism is not reduced to only individual animus, but includes systemic aspects of racism and white superiority. It also addresses the belief of color blindness as a denial of God’s creation.

The Gospel in Color is rooted in the arc of scripture; this is a creation, fall, redemption story. The book opens with the affirmation that skin color was not accidental but part of God’s creation and all are created in God’s image. That may seem like a minor point, but is not. Historically, there have been many Christians that have denied one or both parts of that. There have been teachings about God intentionally creating some racial groups as servants or slaves to Whites. Others taught that non-White people did not actually have souls (and were not made in God’s image). Still others taught that through some sort of evolutionary process (either with God’s direction or not) Whites became the superior race. That history is not delved into deeply here, but it is real and not ancient history. This has been taught within the last generation, it is not difficult to find people my age or younger that have been taught one or more of these.

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Takeaway: Essential theological work not just about historic issues of lynching but the ongoing reality of the impacts of lynching and the modern permutations of lynching. 

When James H Cone passed away earlier this year, yet another of the intellectual leaders of the Civil Rights era was lost to us. Cone has pretty much always been controversial, and not just among White Christians. However, Black Liberation theology has been an important movement within modern theology impacting feminist and womanist theology as well as many areas of more traditional theology. Cone was certainly not the only theologian that pointed out the importance of not just Orthodoxy, but Orthodpraxy, but that is one of the important aspects of his work.

One of the significant themes of the Cross and the Lynching Tree is that Christians within the US context have often had orthodox beliefs, but not found it theologically important to address racism, slavery, Jim Crow, lynching or others aspects of justice.

The Newark and Detroit riots in July 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 were the events that shook me out of my theological complacency, forcing me to realize the bankruptcy of any theology in America that did not engage the religious meaning of the African American struggle for justice. What I studied in graduate school ignored white supremacy and black resistance against it, as if they had nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the discipline of theology. (Kindle Location 227)

The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr as an example of progressive White theology that was focused on justice, but fell short in matters of racial justice was very helpful both in how Cone critiqued Niebuhr but also how Cone still valued Niebuhr in areas. “When Niebuhr wrote against liberalism, pacifism, communism, and the easy conscience of American churches, he expressed outrage; but when it came to black victims of white supremacy, he expressed none.” (Kindle Location 1517). Cone certainly respects the work that Niebuhr did, Niebuhr and Barth were the foundation to his doctoral work and have been important throughout his career. Cone says, “What Niebuhr said about love, power, and justice helped me to understand that moral suasion alone would never convince whites to relinquish their supremacy over blacks.” (Kindle Location 1556) But”¦”What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America. His theology and ethics needed to be informed from critical reading and dialogue with radical black perspectives.” (Kindle Location 1574)

There is far more to The Cross and the Lynching Tree than I can easily summarize, but these three long quotes at the end of the book are the best summaries of the intent of the book.

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