Book Reviews

Summary: 16 Letters to his Godson about virtues.

Maybe I am just getting old. But as I spend more time studying spiritual formation, both for my own benefit and to assist others in their own spiritual development, the more that I think the church as a whole has lost the thread of the development of character and virtue as an aspect of Christianity.

I know there are some good reasons for this loss of interest in virtue. Virtue and behavior management has been used to be socially and personally controlling. It has focused on cultural and encouraged a belief in white supremacy. It has been misused to prop up powerful people that lacked character for utilitarian reasons. But with the loss of authority around virtue and the loss of focus on virtue, individuals and communities have lost out on part of what is important about spiritual formation as both individuals and communities.

We are always christians within a culture. Our culture today is highly individualistic and while we as a Church should push back against that in many ways, we cannot pretend that the individualism of culture does not impact the church. Part of what this means is that we cannot assume that the older generation will automatically work toward the training of younger Christians. The older concept of godparent has been lost in part because of the mobility of our society.

In the fairly lengthy introduction to The Character of Virtue, Samuel Wells, the father of the godson being addressed by Hauerwas, gives a background not just on the letters to come, but the concept of godparent and how Hauerwas in particular came to be the godparent of a child in a different country. Because of the distance, Wells asked Hauerwas to write a letter a year on the anniversary of his godson’s baptism, about a different virtue.

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Summary: Short focused chapters on the meaning of the Apostles’ Creed.

I have been more focused on catechesis (the training and instruction about matters of Christian faith) over the past several years as I have both become more liturgical in  theological bias and more focused on spiritual formation.

Discipleship (which in some ways is another way of thinking of catechesis), means growing to be more like Christ. It is not about becoming a particular culture or look or personality or knowing certain things, but it is about growing to become more like Christ.

Part of what I have become convinced is that we should not be training people to avoid sin, although I am not denying the reality of sin or the harm that it does, but training them toward right desires. I think porn is one of the most simple ways of illustrating this, I have heard from many that their desire to consume porn could not be managed away. Knowing porn was bad for them and simply trying to be better was not what has worked for many that I have talked to. Understanding the subject of the porn as created in the image of God and distorting the goodness of sex and their bodies for the titillation of others, usually strangers, by my anecdotal evidence, seems to be more effective. The right understanding of good things and the right desire for those good things is more important than personal desire to not do wrong.

What does that have to do with the Apostles’ Creed? The Apostles’ Creed is one of the oldest distillations and positive affirmations of the Christian faith. The Creed was likely first used as a baptismal statement of faith. An affirmation of what we believe and who we believe in. The Apostles’ Creed is a positive statement. If you know some church history you can see where some of those statements are blocking false beliefs, but it is mostly about what we positively believe.

Ben Myers is setting out a straight forward, exploration, sometimes word by word, of what the Apostles’ Creed means. It is not super long. The chapters are short. It would make a very good small group study or personal devotional reading. Just in the past couple years I have read books on the creed by Hans von Balthasar, Derek Vreeland and JI Packer and attempted a video series on the Apostles’ Creed with a small group.

Of the books I have read on the Creed, none have been horrible, but Myers’ book on the Apostles’ Creed is the one I would recommend first. There are a couple of reasons,

1) it is ecumenical. The biggest problem with von Bathasar and Packer’s books on the creed where they were assuming either Catholic or Reformed understandings of Christianity. Meyers is a Protestant and probably has a few statements that are too Protestant for Catholic or Orthodox readers, but he does not, as Packer does, complain about other streams of Christian faith’s understanding of Christianity while explicating one of the most important ecumenical statements of faith.

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Summary: Detailed biography about a historical figure that most know very little about.

Harriet Tubman is a figure that almost everyone knows, but most know little about outside of her work helping slaves escape. The most striking to me initially is that Harriet Tubman lived until March 1913. Like many slaves Tubman was not sure when she was born, but most estimate that it was sometime in 1822. The length of her life was long, although her mother lived about the same length of time and her father not much less.

My grandfather, was born the year before Harriet Tubman died. I intellectually know that slavery legally ended in 1865, but the personal connection to my grandfather, who passed away in 2005, means that as someone in the middle of my life, I really only have to go back two lives to be connected to slavery.

Harriet Tubman is fascinating. A small woman, and one that suffered a serious head wound from abuse of a slave owner early in her life that caused life long problems, Tubman lived a life of service. Through her work with the Underground Railroad, she helped about 70 slaves to escape directly and assisted with the escape of another 50-60. This is not as many as her legend suggests, but her courage to return at least 13 times to assist slaves to escape is important. However, her story does not stop there.

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Summary: An American man in Paris has a hard time choosing between his fiancée and a beautiful Italian immigrant. 

One of my reading goals this year was to read some of James Baldwin’s fiction. Giovanni’s Room is my first of his fiction book. Baldwin is an incredible writer. I have appreciated his non-fiction writing for its clarity and intelligence and passion. Baldwin’s fiction writing is lyrically beautiful. I will definitely read more, but the actual characters and story in Giovanni’s Room were not my cup of tea.

The protagonist, David, is nearly 30. He is living in Paris without much direction or purpose. The book is told skipping around in time, so we know from nearly the beginning that Giovanni is to be executed, but the reader does not know why until near the end of the book.

David gives some back story with an early gay sexual experience and his family that he is escaping from to Paris. Soon we are introduced to Hella, David’s girlfriend. When the main story really starts, she is visiting Spain to decide if she wants to marry David. While she is gone, David runs short of money and while trying to borrow money from an older gay man, Jacque. During that meeting David meets Giovanni. Jacque tries to uses David to help him pick up Giovanni, but David and Giovanni hit it off and before long they are living together. David and Giovanni appear to be happy for a while. Giovanni has a decent job as a bartender and David for a while is happy to live with Giovanni.

(Spoiler alert for the rest of the discussion)  

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Takeaway: How we read scripture and understand God impacts how we live and share the gospel with others.

Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God is the fourth book by Brian Zahnd I have read. Zahnd is a pastor and has been helpful to me over the past decade as my theology and understanding of Christianity has shifted. His own shifts have been fairly similar to mine, although he is a generation older than I am. Zahnd is a popularizer and writes personally and pastorally, and I mean that as a complement. Academic theologians and biblical scholars are important, but in order for the academic work to impact the church, pastors and popularizers need to take the insights of the academics and put it into language and structure that are understandable to the rest of us.

In a somewhat similar way to how Rachel Held Evan’s book Inspired, was really about hermeneutics (how to read scripture), Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God is really about the theology of God with secondary theme of the problem of evil. The title, of course, is a play on Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon. Zahnd talks about how he wrote out and may a book of Edwards’ sermon because he wanted to learn how to evangelize like Edwards. Edwards was a central character in the Great Awakening, an early American revival that swept the US and the UK a generation before the American Revolution.

Edwards was trying to illustrated the importance of becoming a true follower of Christ through the sermon, but Zahnd starts by pointing out the problem with conceiving of God not as a loving father, but as a distant wrathful deity. This split in Christianity between God as Love and God as Wrath has a long history and is still current. Zahnd spends much of the book disassembling the perspective on God, the Father, as primarily wrathful. Much of that disassembly goes back to scripture and gives a new spin on how scripture is read. He works through the genocide texts of the Old Testament, the crucifixion of Christ, Hell and a long section on the book of Revelation.

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Summary: Young adult fantasy that knows the conventions of the genre, but isn’t reduced to them.

Thirteen year old Darcy Pennington doesn’t have any friends. Her real love in life is horses. For the past several years she has gone to a summer camp dedicated to riding horses. But this year, both because of financial constraints and to be together as a family, her family has decided to go on vacation together, to a family camp. Darcy is dreading it. She is dreading it in part because two other kids from her neighborhood that she knows, but does not really like will be there as well.

Darcy begins to like the camp despite herself. The area is beautiful and the kids are fairly friendly, although as an introvert, Darcy does have a problem finding space to just be alone. As she gets acquainted with the space and the people, there is a sense of magic, and not just in the figurative sense.

I do not want to give away too many details of the story, but this is a young adult fantasy that has some parallels to CS Lewis’ Narnia books. Eventually another world is involved, and a prophesy, and gifts and talents, and an evil ruler. Genre writing is difficult, good genre book follow enough conventions to be part of the genre without being reduced to conventions. Good books often drop subtle hints and references to earlier books that helped to define or illustrate those conventions. Bad genre books blindly follow the conventions without adding anything new to the conversations within the genre. One of the things that some people love about genre writing is the ability to “˜check out’ as you are reading because the book become so conventional that no real thought is required.

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Summary: The life and times of a 15th century healer. 

I do not often just say, go buy a book, but if you like the mix of books that I tend to review, just go and buy the book. Laurus is a modern Russian novel, wonderfully translated to English. Vodolazkin, the author, is a midevil scholar who has recreated the alien nature of the midevil Russian world wonderfully.

I really have a hard time trying to figure out how to describe Laurus. It is about an ancient Christian healer. So it is sort of Christian fiction. But it is by a Russian so it does not fit into any of the traditional modern christian novel categories. Laurus takes Christianity very seriously, but using what I can only describe as magical realism to give structure to the healing and mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Christianity that is illustrated so well here. In some ways Laurus reads more like a book of ancient Christian devotional literature as much as it read like a novel.

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Summary: A whole spy thriller reveal over dinner.

Olen Steinhauer is often compared, favorably, to John le Carré. It has been a few years since I picked up one of Steinhauer’s books, but this was on sale as an audiobook, it was relatively short and I needed a change of pace.

According to one of the reviews I read prior to purchasing it, Steinhauer was told by someone that modern spy novels are never quite as good as the old ones. And so he put that scene at the start of the book and then for nearly the whole book the action is reveal, in flashbacks or in current reality, while the two protagonists are having dinner. It was not until things were about to be revealed that I guessed correctly what was going on.

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Summary: A teen girl, born in the US, but living in Haiti since soon after her birth, returns to the US. Her mother is detained by ICE, but Fabiola continues on to live with her aunt and cousins in Detroit.

My goal of reading more fiction this year has not been going well. But it is summer, and summer is a time for Fiction. American Street was on sale as I was making plans for a six hour solo drive to the beach. I listened to all but the last 30 minutes of American Street on the way to the beach and the last 30 minutes and Believe Me on the way back.

This is a very good audiobook. Robin Miles, who I was not fond of when she narrated Binti, was excellent here. Her various accents, which felt fake in Binti, felt authentic here in part because she not only doing Haitian, but also Detroit street. The range of voices was what made the narration.

American Street is named after the street where the house that Fabiola come to live, the one where she was born. It is right on the corner of Joy and American streets, which is the reason that the house was purchased by new immigrants to the US. When her mother is detained by ICE as they go through customs in New York City (Fabiola’s mother overstayed her visa on the previous trip so that Fabiola would be born in the US), Fabiola is left to go on to Detroit and meet cousins and an aunt that she has talked to, but not met.

Fabiola’s life in Haiti, with her good English schools and her hard work, has not truly prepared her for Detroit. She is also not prepared for the realities of street life without the guidance of her mother.

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