Adam Shields

Summary: An escaped slave dreams of the future while trying to survive.

Song Yet Sung is my third book by James McBride and the first book of fiction. McBride is an interesting author. He is a journalist and jazz musician by background, but has written several novels including a National Book Award winner, The Good Lord Bird.

Song Yet Sung follows a young Black slave not long before the Civil War as she escapes her owner (who wants her as his in-house sex slave) and attempts to leave Maryland for the North.

There is a hint of magical realism to this book like the more recent Underground Railroad. Liz, the protagonist, has dreams that are a result of being shot in the head, which compounded an earlier head injury. The dreams of the future give her a reputation, but the dreams are not of a wonderful future, but of a scary-to-her future. The book opens with these lines:

On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant.

She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards-every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.

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Summary: Story can help us envision God as beautiful, good and true in ways that proposition cannot fully show.

I have read five previous books by James Bryan Smith so I was initially not going to pick this up assuming that there was not much here that I had not absorbed previously. But I found it on sale for audiobook when I was out of audiobooks and I realized that one of my reading goals for the year is to read more about beauty and three months into the year I have not read anything about beauty.

James Bryan Smith is a professor focusing on spiritual formation and is in the line of Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. Immediately after finishing this I picked up a review copy of a new biography of Dallas Willard (Becoming Dallas Willard which I am loving.)

Smith’s focus in his earlier Good and Beautiful trilogy was to help refocus our attention on God, the God who loves us, wants good for us, and forgives us. He does that in part by identifying “˜false narratives’ about God that we absorb, God as magician or angry God or judgmental God.

The slightly different focus of The Magnificent Story is to think about story as more important than analysis. Much, but not all, of the book is focused on scripture as story about God. This isn’t a book on hermeneutics, but a book on how to understand the power of story to impact the way we understand God.

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Summary: More essays to explore history, science and politics from a serious Christian.

I am a fan of Marilynne Robinson. I have read all but one of her novels, and to be honest the reason I haven’t read the last is that I don’t want to have read all of her novels. But I have read Gilead twice and the most recent, and my favorite, Lila, three times. I have also read two of her previous collections of essays. I am more mixed on her essays. I had decided not to read Robinson’s most recent until I read James KA Smith’s review in Comment. His review is such a good example of what a review is supposed to be, and such an interesting comparison between Ta’Nehisi Coates and Robinson that I picked up the audiobook the same day.

But regardless of the praise from Smith, the problems I have with Robinson’s What We Are Doing Here is still the same basic problems I have with Robinson’s other essays. She is an incredible writer. Although the essays here, which were mostly talks given over the past two years edited together into a book, have an odd sort of repetition. She literally quotes the same quotes and cites the same ideas multiple times. Individually, I think most of them are great. But put together, they are somehow less than the individual parts.

Robinson is known as a writer. But her interests mean that she is writing about things that are outside of her academic background. She is fascinated by Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and how we talk and think about science and politics. She is clearly much smarter than I am and so I love being able to listen to her musings about things that I would not have ever considered apart from her. I really do love how wide ranging of a thinker she is. At one point she is talking about another author writing outside of their main field and quips that she isn’t going to complain about that since she frequently does the same thing.

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Summary: Series of 15 essays that range from personal (death of his son and his early teaching experience) to approaches toward racism (a break with Booker T Washington) to historical and sociological exploration.

As far as I can remember I have not read a full book by WEB DuBois previously, although I know I have read a couple of essays. He is a fascinating character. He was born during reconstruction and earned a PhD from Harvard in 1895. He helped to found the NAACP and became the director of Publicity and Research, which included being the publisher and editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, which hit a circulation of 100,000 in 1920. In the 1920s DuBois became involved in the Pan African movement and promoted Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement before breaking with Garvey over political issues (DuBois disagreed with Garvey’s position that African Americans should move to Africa to become the new leadership of Africa.)

His life really is complicated and there is far too much that is important. But at 93 he moved to Africa and after the US suspended his passport in 1963 he officially became a citizen of Ghana where he died at the age of 95. I want to read a good biography of him, if anyone has a suggestion I would like to hear it.

The Souls of Black Folks is a fairly early work. It was published in 1903, just 7 years after finishing his PhD. It is far more wide ranging than I would have guessed. And without making this a 2000 word post, there isn’t really any way to cover all of it.

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Summary: Freedom in Christ is found through calling him Master.

Years ago when I attended a small church in the years after I finished seminary, I used to occasionally preach. I do not think I was ever more than a mediocre preacher at best, but I did enjoy preparing sermons, if for no other reason than giving myself a place to process what I was thinking theologically.

A friend that I met with regularly was also a pastor and preaching professor at a local seminary. I remember asking him about how to talk about scriptural slavery as I was working on a sermon around one of New Testament passages about slavery (I don’t remember which one).  Roughly half of my congregation was African American and I was concerned about how to preach about slavery as a White Christian preaching to actual descendants of slaves. My concerns were pretty much dismissed initially but several weeks after I preached the sermon my friend came back and we had a good conversation about how he had dismissed my concerned largely because he had just not really thought through the implications of my question. My memory is that I did what many other White Christians have done and minimized the slavery and made the passage more about being a servant (the difference in interpretation being a slave does not have options while servants choose to work, which has real theological implications to the difference in approach and is a much more individualistic approach.)

A Better Freedom is a book I wish I had read before preaching that sermon. Michael Card works through the historical realities around slavery in the Roman world, the biblical context of Philemon and a few other passages around slavery, and race based slavery in the United States and his experience of the Black church (he attends a historically Black church.)

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Summary: A Reformed exploration of the Apostles Creed, designed for small group discussion.

I have an appreciation of the work that JI Packer did throughout his life. I have read a couple of his books, but in many ways I appreciate the influence that he had on people more than his writing directly. Most of what I have read by Packer, and I think it is just his famous Knowing God, Rediscovering Holiness, Taking God Seriously and Affirming the Apostles’ Creed, is theologically good, but somewhat grumpy in tone and much more Reformed than I am.

I knew that going in and that is in part why it has taken me 9 years after I picked this up free to actually finish it. I have started it twice before and never got past the first couple of chapters.

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Summary: Sociological look at why Evangelicals are still divided racially.

Divided by Faith is not a new book; it is nearly 20 years old at this point, and I have meant to read it for years. It is consistently the first book recommended to White Evangelicals seeking to explore racial issues, particularly within the Christian church. Having read it now, I can see why it is recommended and strongly commend it, but it is also dated and could be used with an updated version.

The preface and opening chapter lays out the problem of a racially divided church.

“We have taken it as our charge to tell as honest, accurate, rigorous, and enlightening a tale about our topic as possible. In so doing, we were led to move beyond the old idea that racial problems result from ignorant, prejudiced, mean people (and that evangelicals are such people). This is simply inaccurate, and does not get us far in trying to understand why racial division in the United States persists.” (page ix)

In Divided by Faith, Emerson and Smith tell the story of the United States as a “racialized society’. They use that term as a starting framework. Race is important, not only to discussions of slavery or Jim Crow or the Civil Rights era, but also today. Quoting another author, they note, “œwe are never unaware of the race of the person with whom we interact.” Categories of race may be socially constructed, as has become common to say, but socially constructed does not mean imaginary.

An important note in their presentation of a racialized society is that Smith and Emerson want to pay attention to the adaptation of racial practices. Racial practices are,

“(1) are increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites.” (p9)

Smith and Emerson want to neither suggest that racial practices are less important than at other points nor that there have not been significant improvements to the daily lives of minorities since earlier eras. Racial practices have changed, but the reality of racial practices has not diminished.

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Summary: The orientation of our faith matters a lot to the way we interact with the world.

Pietism has a negative connotation much of the time. But as I went through the book and heard the authors’ description of what they mean by pietism, I realized that I have some strong pietist leanings. And in some ways I think I am probably more accurately described as pietist than evangelical. Pietism is plagued, sometimes rightly, with a reputation for legalism. But pietism, like the term Methodist and Puritan and even Christian was a pejorative that was later adopted by the movement.

The Pietist Option’s title is riffing off of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, but the book is much more influenced by Philipp Spener’s 1675 book, Pia Desideria, than a response to Dreher. The themes of that book, which really defined the pietist movement, are worked out here in a modern context.

Pietism, for the authors is focused on:

• A more extensive listening to the Word of God
• The common priesthood for the common good
• Christianity as life
• The irenic spirit
• Whole-person, whole-life formation
• Proclaiming the good news

The authors, a historian of Pietism and a pastor from a pietist influenced denomination, are writing pastorally more than academically. Their orientation is that reform and renewal need to be constant, but the tone and orientation of our faith as well as the visibility of our love for other Christians and those outside the faith needs to take on a greater prominence.

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