Book Reviews

Summary: Clear eyed history of both pre and post-prohibition history of Bourbon.

I grew up in a non-drinking stream of Christianity. And then I went to Wheaton for college, which included a pledge not to drink. And from there to University of Chicago Divinity School, which was nearly the opposite (although I worked for a Drug and Alcohol rehab program through part of my grad school years so I mostly didn’t drink there either.) I was not particularly comfortable with alcohol personally, although I did not have any theological issues with it.

Slowly I become more comfortable with alcohol over time and tend toward the snobbish side of drinking, because it is more about the taste than the nostalgia. I have never acquired a taste for the non-craft beer. It seem natural that wine and bourbon, as well as some other spirits have been added to my repertoire.

Midtenbuler tells a fascinating story about Bourbon. And I use the ‘story’ language intentionally. There is a line in the book where he says, “˜Even though reality is often less romantic”¦’. That is much of the story of the book. Bourbon likes to bill itself as an old drink and it’s naming and labeling is mostly trying to point to how old the recipes are or at least how old the name is.

But Bourbon is really a pre-prohibition and post-prohibition story. Prior to prohibition there were few brand names. Bourbon (and presumably most other alcohol) was a commodity. Brands were not particularly well known and in many cases there simply was no way of knowing what you were getting because individual bottling only started a bit before prohibition. Before that you brought your own containers to the store and filled them up with what the store had.

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Takeaway: The history of the Tudors is in large part a history of the English Reformation.

When I was a student, history was always one of my favorite subjects. But European history, other than the very broadest of strokes, was something that I never formally studied. As an adult, my lack of European history keeps coming up as a lack of understanding of current European events.

My one advantage has been a decent Christian history background. I have read a number of books on the Reformation and some on other parts of early Christian history. This history of the Tudors is in large part a history of the English Reformation. From Henry VIII’s movement away from the Roman Catholic church to the backlash against the English Reformation under Mary to the re-assertion of the Anglican church under Elizabeth, the English Reformation is inseparable from the Tudors.

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Summary: On the anniversary of the worst disaster in the moon’s history, a terrorist plot may be even more devastating.

A Facebook friend of mine loves this series. On his recommendation I picked up the first book in the series, The Disappeared, about a year ago. The Disappeared was a well written police procedural with a scifi setting. But I haven’t picked up any more of the series until Anniversary Day went on sale.

I do not traditionally like reading books out of order, even if they do stand alone. Anniversary Day is the start of an 8 book sub-series within the larger 15 book series. I did feel like I was jumping into something that I did not fully understand. The main characters from the first book were still here, but a lot of additional characters had also been added.

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Summary: A current events focused commentary on the book of Lamentations.

I veer wildly between an honest concern about too much focus on the bad in the world (there is far more good than what is often credited) and a frustration about the lack of concern about the harm that is being ignored by many. I think many more people need to read Bradley Wright’s book Upside about how much about the world has drastically improved recently.
But at the same time I am concerned that many have far too little concern about systemic issues of oppression. Black Lives Matters (whether the broader movement or the organization), systemic problems of the criminal justice system, a rise of nativism or xenophobia, continuing revelations about ongoing racism, sexism, and other bias that impacts real people on a regular and ongoing basis, matters.

And so I picked up Prophetic Lament when I was frustrated with the inability for the Evangelical church in particular (but the larger church as well) to actually embrace lament. Christian Music that is ‘safe for the whole family’ and Christian fiction that seems to only be able to tell happy tales with tidy endings is not particularly faithful example of historic Christian artistry. It is not that we cannot be happy or that we should not consume tidy books or safe music. It is that we should not only consume safe music and tidy books.

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Summary: Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey back together again.

I have been slowly working my way through the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers. Sayers is known both for her detective novels and her non-fiction works on faith and education, and her translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. She was active writer from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Lord Peter Wimsey, the subject of the series, is a rich, seemingly carefree aristocrat with nothing better to do than solve difficult crimes. In Strong Poison (#6 and the best of the books to that point), Harriet Vane was introduced. She is single detective novelist that was on trial for murder. Wimsey proved her innocent and has been trying to convince her to marry him since then. (She was absent in the 7th book and it was weaker for it.)

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Summary: An elderly man (former newspaper man, former military courier, current newspaper reader) gets roped into transporting an orphaned girl that was kidnapped 4 years previous by Indians to her extended family.

I picked News of the World up when it was on sale because it was on John Wilson’s list of best books of the year. It is short, just over 200 pages, but a complete story.

I do not read a lot of westerns because there are not that many being written these days. But my teen years were full of Louis L’Amour and other western authors. The rugged individualist that lives by their code of honor and saves those that are weak against the evil powerful is not necessarily a bad theme for a teen boy. That theme today does not really interest me.

This will have to be inevitably compared to True Grit, which I really liked. Both have the old man that doesn’t really want to help. Both have the young girl in need of help, but surprisingly capable for their age. Both have the reluctant affection that develops between them.

But News of the World is a different story. There is no revenge here. There is just a struggle to survive in a land that is fairly lawless and where “˜the law’ is as dangerous as the blatant thieves. The Civil War is over, but its ramifications are still widespread. The Mexican rule over Texas is over, but the integration into the US is far from complete.

Johanna, the girl, has spent the last four years living with the Kiowa Indians after they kidnapped her and killed her immediate family. She knows nothing else. She has forgotten her language (which was German, not English). And she has adopted the Kiowa culture. As the story makes clear, she was ripped from her family, not once, but twice. And the family she is being brought to is completely unknown.

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Takeaway: A better book than I really want it to be, but fundamentally flawed as conceived.

There have been so many good reviews and helpful critiques of The Benedict Option that I know I am not going to bring anything new to the discussion. But this is the internet and so I am going to critique it anyway.

Andy Crouch has a post about the problem of the reaction to the Benedict Option is that 90% of the complaints are about 20% of the book (increasing social and cultural hostility to the church). While 80% of the book is devoted to the problems of a lack of meaningful discipleship and how that is causing a collapse of Christian belief and practice and only 10% of the buzz about the book is reacting to that much bigger claim. This is largely true. The problem is that the 20% that is getting the strongly negative reaction fundamentally sets the stage for the 80% of the book that I think is more important. Because the assumptions are wrong, I believe the answers given are then wrong, or at least fundamentally flawed.

It is hard to completely describe what the Benedict Option is. Because after 10 years of Dreher writing about it, he still seems to say that the project as described by almost anyone else other than himself misses his point. At the very least, the Benedict Option is a means of refocusing the church on discipling the young (in both age and Christian maturity) so that they can better stand up to the cultural currents of the age that seek to unmoor Christians from true (small o) orthodox faith.

There is much to agree with in that minimal description of the purpose of the book. Every age needs to pay attention to the particular problems of the age that pulls at the church and attempts to harm the soul of the church. The problem with the Benedict Option as conceived is that he both thinks that our current age has more particular problems to unmoor the church from Christ and that he identifies threats posed by same sex marriage and acceptance as the central part of that threat (as opposed to what I think are probably more important threats like consumerism, individualism, racism and dismissal of the other, etc.).

James KA Smith particularly has called out Dreher for his alarmism. And after initially complaining about the attack, Dreher embraced the label during his book release panel discussion (which is worth watching if you have 2 hours.) The problem is that the alarmism is overblown, even if Dreher thinks he is a voice shouting into the void, I am completely turned off by quotes like this,

“The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. By God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South and China, but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely from Europe and North America.”

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Summary: A first run take of the role of Obama’s race in how he acted as President and was received as President. With lots of critique of his Presidency. 

After reading Michael Eric Dyson’s latest book, Tears We Cannot Stop, I immediately picked up The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (released Feb 2016.) This is a bit of an odd book. It has biography, political commentary, social/cultural history, leadership analysis, long commentary on speeches and policy and some politics of the modern African American political and civil rights leadership. More than anything else, this uses Obama as a lens to see what being Black in America means.

So much of The Black Presidency was fascinating, but introduction of the idea of black leadership as either politician or prophet was a new idea for me. Dyson contrasted the traditional two roles, placing Obama squarely in the politician side and much of the frustration with Obama by African Americans as a frustration that he was not in the prophet mold of African American leadership. Obama has gained much from the rhetorical flair of the African American church, and many of his speeches have taken on the cadence of a pastor. But in the end, he has chosen politician, and the corresponding policy work, as his main focus.

The Black Presidency opens with the recounting of a gathering of friends and leaders that were gathered together before the speech in Selma celebrating the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma. Dyson, Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young, Al Sharpton sat together in the church office prior to Obama’s speech at Brown Chapel AME Church, three generations of African American Civil Rights leaders. Dyson quotes Young, “œLook, there’s a lot on his plate. And he’s got to deal with these crazy forces against him from the right. I think that Obama has done the best he could under the circumstances.” While that might be seen as a thesis statement of sorts for the book, Dyson goes far beyond looking at what is politically possible. Some of Dyson’s critiques are of things that were clearly not politically possible. Or at least, not politically possible along with some of the other political decisions. In the end, I think Dyson is balanced, if not in every critique and praise, at least in the book as a whole, on both the possibility of a Black President and the reality of Obama as a Black President.

There are three other areas that I think particularly White readers will find insight into both Obama and the African American experience. Respectability politics is a phrase that I have increasingly heard used condescendingly from younger African Americans. Dyson works through both the necessity, historically, of respectability politics (the internal policing of African Americans, but also other marginalized groups, to show that their values are mainstream and compatible with the majority values) and the limitations of respectability politics in modern civil rights movement. Dyson talks about Obama as a scold, particularly toward African American men, in ways that he was not with other minority groups. That discussion, particularly for White readers that are unaware of the frustration with Obama by the African American community, it helpful.

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Summary: Loosely structured as a sermon which calls White Christian America to repentance and change.

After reading James Baldwin’s Notes on a Native Son I decided to look for a modern author’s take and found Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. I was so impressed that I immediately picked up The Black Presidency (which I think may be even better than this one.)

Dyson rose to prominence as a cultural critic when I was in grad school. He was friends with my Systematic Theology Professor, Dwight Hopkins, so I had a positive impression of him. But in the 20 years of being aware of him, I have not actually read anything that he has written. Part of that was that Dyson became well known for his cultural criticism of hip hop and rap music. Something that I have only recently started to listen to.

Over the past year or so, I have been a regular listener to the podcast, Pass the Mic, from the Reformed African American Network and more recently their second podcast, Truth’s Table, that highlights three African American Women. Those two podcasts, and the private Facebook groups associated with RAAN, has been helpful places to hear perspectives about the world from theologically conservative (more theologically conservative than I am most of the time) African Americans. I already lean socially fairly liberal. However, their voices help me to see how much my theology and politics is informed by the lack of diverse voices in my life. (And my own racist attitudes and sin.)

Dyson structures this Tears We Cannot Stop as an extended sermon. The structure is fine, but probably makes more sense in audiobook form (with Dyson narrating) than in print. Initially, this felt like a Christian version of Ta’Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. It had a similar critique of White America and had some of Dyson’s personal history as well.

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