Book Reviews

Summary: An evangelical historian approaches why so many Evangelicals voted for Trump.

I am a fan of the John Fea’s history podcast, The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I do not remember how I ran across it, but I have listened to it almost from the very beginning. Some of the ideas of Believe Me (title is from Trump’s often used phrase) trickled out over the past months. And the most recent podcast episode was directly about the book Believe Me. On Saturday, when I had a six hour drive by myself, I listened to the audiobook of Believe Me basically in one sitting.

After demonstrating that he is in fact an Evangelical, Fea starts with the common ‘81% of White Evangelicals voted for Trump’ and his wondering if 81% of his Evangelical megachurch voted for Trump the next Sunday after the election. This is not unlike many Evangelicals that I know that have been against Trump all along. They felt the election personally.

The main explanation of the Believe Me is that Evangelicals voted for Trump out of fear, a desire for a Christian nation and the power to construct it that way, and nostalgia. I think that Fea is best when he is attempting to be generous in understanding the reluctant Trump voter and his historical explanations. Fea’s other books include books about whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation, why we should study history and a history of the American Bible Society, all of which make their ways into the book at one point or another.

Fea places all three factors, fear, nostalgia, and power (Christian nationalism) in historical context, asserting that it is not just in this one instance that these three factors have come into play, but that there is a history of Evangelicals choosing these over their Christian ideals. There are places where I think that Believe Me may have been rush to print just a bit too quickly. He explains the DACA program incorrectly. He could be clearer about what the 81% number really was. The definition of what an Evangelical is I think should have been developed more clearly from a historical perspective. In many ways Evangelical, which means something pretty specific in the second half of the 20th century, is mixed up with conservative Protestantism or Fundamentalism or any Protestantism of earlier generations. I think that weakens his historical argument in a few places because some of the historical parallels he is drawing may not be quit as clear for some that want to haggle about what Evangelicalism has meant historically or today.

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Summary: A book on physical and spiritual healing, published in 1947 by a Episcopal Priest’s wife. Anges Sanford mentored and impacted many, included Dallas Willard. 

Way back in March, over three months ago I started reading The Healing Light because both the book and author were mentioned in the very good biography of Dallas Willard. The Healing Light was available and cheap so I picked it up and started reading. It has taken me three months to get through it because it is both fascinating and frustrating.

Part of what I have appreciated about it is that it is written in a different era. Published in 1947, it has been out for more than 70 years and still in print. CS Lewis’ point about reading books of different ages was not that different ages were better, but they had different blind spots and different emphases and different strengths.

There are three primary issue that I think are negatives and significant ones. First, there is an attempt to scientifically analyze prayer and healing. There is some aspect of that that is appropriate. But it felt very dated and a dead end because prayer is not scientific. It is using a tool of analysis that is inappropriate to the task it is being used for. The type of approach to prayer as science is summed up in the quote, “Some day we will understand the scientific principles that underlie the miracle-working powers of God, and we will accept His intervention as simply and naturally as we do the radio.”

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Summary: The best book I have read so far explaining issues of racism to White people.

If you are are a regular reader of Bookwi.se, you cannot have missed the fact that I have been reading a lot about racism, history around race and related materials over the past several years. It has not been one thing, it has been a huge number of things together that have really forced me to pay attention to both my own racist blindspots and the broader issues of culture, racism, and history. But there are really two distinct parts of the racial world that I keep running up against. One part is the hurt and history of racial minorities in the US. I have read histories about slavery and reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights Era, and contemporary racial problems. There is frankly, no end to learning about a previously unknown problems in historical or contemporary treatment of racial minorities.

The second part I think is more subtle, but also quite important, the understanding of what it is that a White person should be doing in light of the significant history of injustice that continues to be perpetrated today. I have read two books in this area that I think are both helpful, White Awake and Raising White Kids. Both I very much think are worth reading, but both are slightly different than White Fragility. Robin DiAngelo has a PhD in multicultural education and specialized in Whiteness Studies and coined the term White Fragility in 2011. Her best known book previous to this one (which I have not read) is What Does It Mean to Be White: Developing a White Racial Identity. While she has been a full time professor and still is a part time lecturer, her main job is as a consultant to business, non-profit and governmental groups in areas of race and communications.

I cracked open a paperback review copy of White Fragility (which hate reading, so I tend to never pick up) because I was interested and screen shot the fifth page to a private facebook groups I participate in. The main quote from that page that struck me was:

“This book is intended for us, for white progressives who so often””despite our conscious intentions””make life so difficult for people of color. I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “œchoir,” or already “œgets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”

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Summary: A 14 year old boy tries to escape his destiny. 

One of my reading goals this year is to read all of Flannery O’Connor fiction, which is completely possible because there are only two novels and two short story collections. The Violent Bear It Away is the second novel. On the whole I liked it more than Wise Blood, but I am not completely sure why. My most clear impression of the book is that I have missed a lot of it because I am sure I have not understood some of the references and subtler meanings. It will be going on the “˜to read again’ pile.

Tarwater, a 14 year old boy, who has been raised by his great uncle after his mother died in a car accident, is suddenly alone in the world. After his great uncle dies, he leaves his cabin in the woods and goes to town with his secular Uncle Rayber and his son Bishop.

One of the Goodreads reviews I read commented that none of the characters are likable, but I disagree with that assessment. It is hard to like the characters, but I did not dislike any of them. Instead, it was easy to see the hurt in all of the characters. I could not think of the surly 14 year old, or Rayber, who had been abandoned by his wife with a disabled (probably Downs Syndrome) boy, without having sympathy for their hurt. They make bad decisions and harm one another, but the harm is harm borne by trauma and from generational sin.

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Summary: Roughly based on an actual meeting between Robert F Kennedy and a number of African Americans including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Jerome Smith, Harry Belafonte and others, Dyson explores what it means to bring truth about race in America.

This is the fourth book I have read by Michael Eric Dyson in just over a year. Dyson is a cultural critic, essayist, theologian, and professor. What Truth Sounds Like is a follow up from his earlier Tears We Cannot Stop. That earlier book was a direct theological argument toward White Christians about the importance of racial justice.

What Truth Sounds Like is a different approach roughly based on an actual meeting with Robert Kennedy in 1963 that was arranged by James Baldwin. James Baldwin was asked to pull together a group of African Americans, not political leaders, but others that would truthfully talk to Kennedy about the Black experience. Kennedy wanted to share his urban political program, but Kennedy was unprepared for the truth telling that went on in that room. He initially left frustrated but later understood, at least in part, that the frustration shared that day was honest and necessary for Kennedy to hear.

Dyson uses the meeting as a jumping off point to express how politicians, artists, intellectuals, celebrities, and activists have historically, and today, shared the truths of the world. Dyson is not making an explicitly Christian claim here as he does in some of his other books. But the claim is no less honest or important.

One note that is important to the reading of What Truth Sounds Like. Dyson, as is common among many minorities that write and speak about race, uses the word Whiteness or White in two broad ways. Occasionally Dyson is merely being descriptive about the skin color of a person. But more often Dyson is using the words White or Whiteness as a descriptor of the cultural understanding of Whites as superior to people of other racial groups, not completely unlike the concept of White Supremacy. White readers often hear minority writers and speakers complaining about Whiteness and understand them to be complaining about White people as individuals or a group. But what people that use White or Whiteness in this way are actually decrying, is a cultural understanding that physically or psychologically or socially harms non-White people because they are valued as either less than or “˜other’.

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Summary: Based on a series of lecture about how our understanding of our personal testimonies impacts the way we understand Christian Faith.

If I had any advice for a young Christian reader, it would be find people that are smarter than you, with different perspectives than you have, and listen to them. The great value in the written word is that the words of people of different perspective, ages ,and backgrounds are available without needing to actually sit at the physical feet of others.

Throughout history we have looked toward the wise to teach us. And today we have the accumulated wisdom, not just of the wise people today but much of the wisdom of history. We are frankly drowning in words, but there is a tendency to not think of words as the means of transmission of wisdom but as a transmission of an argument.

Alan Jacobs is participating in a discussion about the role of the individual within narrative theology. But that discussion is subtle, too subtle I think for most readers that do not have a pretty good history in narrative theology. Narrative theology is trying to push modern Christianity to pay more attention to the communal and broad historical sweep of Christianity and less attention to the individual and the personal issues of Christianity. Jacobs is trying to remind narrative theologians that while the communal and historical issues of Christianity are real, that you still need to pay attention to the individual.

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Summary: The first two women on the Supreme Court changed it dramatically, but also had different perspectives.

I have been long fascinated with the Supreme Court. I have read several books on the court, including O’Connor’s reflection on the court, The Majesty of the Law, and a light biography of Ginsberg, The Notorious RBG and a more technical book on the role of court by Stephen Breyer, The Court and the World.

Sisters In Law is a dual biography of the two first women as Supreme Court Justices. They were fairly close in age, but widely different in background, political perspective, and legal background.

Sandra O’Connor grew up in rural Arizona and went to college and law school in California. After following her husband in the military for three years, she was unable to find a law firm that would hire her as a lawyer. So she started her own. She then took five years off full time work to raise her children (but spent significant time working with the Republican party and volunteer organizations during that time.) And when she went back to work she initially volunteered to work for a local prosecutor to prove herself capable. She eventually worked her way up to became Assistant Attorney General of Arizona. Eventually, in part because of her work with the local Republican party in Arizona, she was appointed to a vacant state legislature seat and eventually rose to become first woman to be a State Senate Majority leader. After eight years as a legislator she ran for judge. She served as a county judge for four years and then nearly two years as a judge of the Arizona State Court of Appeals before being appointed to the Supreme Court.

O’Connor has a fascinating history, two different tracks of elections, and time as Assistant Attorney General, not to mention the work in political and other volunteer associations. Ginsberg has a much different history. She had a more traditional path to the Supreme Court. Ginsberg went to the traditional Ivy League law schools and became a professor and the the head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where she guided policy and argued six cases before the Supreme Court before being appointed to the US Court of Appeals by Jimmy Carter.

Both women are fascinating, but because Ginsberg’s history prior to the court includes so much work on women’s issues, it feels like O’Connor was short changed in Sisters in Law. Being the first woman to be a party leader of a state Senate, in her early 40s and then restarting her career again as an elected judge and being appointed to the Supreme Court at 51 should have had more time than it got.

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Summary: Part two of the story of a Jesuit mission to the planet of Rakhat. 

There is no way to discuss Children of God fully without spoilers, so this review is not really going to discuss the plot. The first book in the series, The Sparrow, was a devastating book. The Sparrow starts at the end, knowing that Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the first mission to Rakhat. But it takes that whole book to really understand Sandoz’s role in the trip and why he is so devastated.

Children of God starts soon after the end and the two books really need to be thought of as a whole. I spent nearly two years between the two books because I was so impacted by the first that I was not sure I was ready to read the second. I should have read them closer together because, apart from length, they probably should have been published together. (And there are a ton of characters and reading them together would have helped in keeping the characters in order in my head.)

It was not until the end of the book that I realized that in many ways, this is a meditation on the Book of Job. Mary Doria Russell is Jewish. Although most of the characters of the books are Jesuit priests, there is one Jewish woman in the original mission to Rakhat. Regardless, both faiths include the Book of Job and theologically grapple with the problems of evil.

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Summary: Enneagram as a method of spiritual growth.

More than anything, reading about the Enneagram makes me realize that I probably discount other people entirely too much. Or at the very least do not take into account the different ways that people process the world around them.

I am still a bit skeptical about the Enneagram. This is my second book and I think I both understood more about the basic ideas of the Enneagram and that I understood more about how it works as a system. I am not sure I will every become a devotee. But I do see some value in the descriptions. And like any personality system, the help is in the revelation, not in the proscription. In other words, to the extent that the ideas of the Enneagram are helpful to helping you understand yourself or others and give voice to your own understanding of yourself, it is helpful. But the Enneagram is not helpful if it is used to proscribe how others (or yourself) will act.

After having finished Mirror for the Soul and thought more about the Enneagram, mostly positively, I do think that part of my issue with the it as a concept is wondering how much the the individualism, which is part of our current world and culture, is being encouraged here. We are individuals. We experience the world individually. But at different points in time, cultural emphasized the responsibility to the whole more than it does now. And I wonder how much of our current fascination with personality is unhealthy. It isn’t that I reject that individual personality is real. Or that I don’t think that trauma, abuse, or flourishing as an individual impacts us as an individual to impact the world around us. But I wonder about how much, at least for some of us, self awareness becomes an idol itself. To Alice Fryling’s credit, there is a discussion about the Enneagram as idolatry (by which she means self absorption as idolatry).

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