Book Reviews

I am reposting this 2015 review because Thomas Oden passed away yesterday at the age of 85.
Summary: A memoir of a theologican’s movement from classic liberalism to historic Christianity.

I have been vaguely aware of Thomas Oden but I have not previously read anything by him.

I was first aware of his books on early African Christianity such as The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing the Early Church Tradition. I was not really aware that he was also the driving force behind the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.

People I know of kept mentioning how good this memoir was and when I had some Amazon promotional credit I bought it (it is the most expensive memoir I have ever purchased, which is why I have not read it previously.)

Oden is similar in age to Eugene Peterson, Kalistos Ware, Pope Benedict, Martin Marty and Richard John Neuhaus. All of these theologians lived through a strange time. They were born between the wold wars in a global recession. The first wave of progressive modernity had passed with the world wars and a new death of god liberalism came to the fore with their adulthood.

Oden fully embraced liberal theology as an academic theologian (and unusual for then, but not today, also a working pastor). In his late 30s he started to struggle with the weaknesses of the liberal movement, ecumenism (as illustrated by the World Council of Churches) and his own faith.

A major turning point was his first sabbatical, which he spent in Europe interacting with many of his theological heroes and as an observer with Vatican II. Over the next decade he started promoting “classical Christianity” through “paleo-orthodoxy,” a theological method that rejected innovation but instead relied on early church (Patristic) sources.

Once committed to paleo-orthodoxy (he was differentiating from neo-orthodoxy), he pledged to not intentionally write anything new. For Oden, the way forward was by fully understanding those that were closest to the time of Jesus. These early writers were following in the steps of Paul in 2 Cor 2:2 by saying nothing new about Jesus.  Oden is also committed to the consensus teaching. One of his other projects was to determine exactly what is agreed upon by different groups.  So one book project was taking over 100 evangelical statements of faith and determining what was affirmed by all of them. (And this was really what at the heart of the Ancient Christian Commentary series as well.)

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Summary: A WWII soldier tells his story.

As I have said with most of the graphic novels I have read this year, Alan’s War was a recommendation from Seth Hahne (check out his blog Good Ok Bad). I picked it up based on my enjoyment of graphic novel as history book in the March trilogy.

Alan’s War is the story of Alan Cope. The artist Emmanuel Guibert met him by accident on a beach in France and they struck up a five year friendship until Cope’s death in 1999. Alan Cope fought in Europe in WWII, and after a brief return to the US, he spent the rest of his life in Europe. Originally written in French and translated into English, Alan’s War was released in the US in 2008.

Alan Cope was young. He didn’t turn 18 until the middle of the war. Right at the end of the war, just as he turned 20, he was transferred to Europe. Cope did not see any real battles, but the horrors of the war were still all around him.

Roughly the first half of the book is about World War II. But the rest of the book about his life after the war. He did see battle, so I do not think a PTSD like armchair diagnosis is appropriate. But war does not just effect soldiers through PTSD.

Part of the benefit, and I think part of the problem for Cope is the exposure to the world in a way that broke many of his preconceptions. He seems to have been a gregarious and outgoing person. Most of the stories are about people. Those people introduced him to new ways of thinking, new ideas and new things things. In the army, in Europe, and  in US after the war, he met both good and not so good people. Many of those good people rejected Christianity and eventually so did Cope (who was studying to become a pastor after the war.)

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Summary: A Christian Ethicist makes a case for full inclusion of LGBT Christians within the church.

This is the second of my books trying to explore the arguments for and against full acceptance of LBGT Christians within the church. I finished this over a week ago and I am not sure how to write the review.

As a book I think this is overall better than Matthew Vine’s God and the Gay Christian, although the one thing I thought that Vine’s book did better was trace the cultural category of ‘gay’ over time.

Gushee is an ethicist and an Evangelical historically. The second edition of Changing Our Mind, which is what I read, ends with the text of a speech where he traces the history of how Christians changed their views about the status of non-Christian Jews theologically after the Holocaust. That brief description (it was Gushee’s dissertation project) is a good summary of the book as a whole.

Gushee, in the main book, has 20 short chapters (in 149 pages) that lay out his biblical, cultural, ethical and historic case for why the church should reject its historical teaching about homosexuality as a categorical sin and instead fully welcome gay Christians that are committed to monogamous covenanted (married) relationships or celibacy outside of marriage.

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Summary: A Fictionalized history of the real Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish prayer book for the Passover Seder that is now around 500 years old.

Geraldine Brooks is one of those authors I keep meaning to read, but had not.  I borrowed People of the Book from my library on audio.  As with many fiction books I read, I had not even read the summary before I started the book.

The People of The Book is a historical fiction that is based on what is actually known of the Sarajevo Haggadah with fictionalized history to fill in what is not known.  Brooks wrote an article in the New Yorker just before the book came out with some of the known history.

The real history sounds like fiction.  Two different times, during World War II and during the Bosnian War, muslim curators of the museum where it was kept hid the book away to keep it safe.  I will not detail the real history, but you can read it at the above link.

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Summary: A pop-culture infused brief biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I am fascinated by the Supreme Court. I have read a number of books about the history of the court and some biographies of individual justices that have been on the court. So I picked this up when it was on sale last week.

The Notorious RBG is a brief biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is currently the oldest member of the Supreme Court (83) and was the second woman appointed to the court.

This book started as a tumblr account. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a barely 5 ft and tiny Jewish grandmother being compared to the Notorious BIG, a large African American rapper who was shot and killed when he was 24 (in 1997), is sufficiently incongruent to generate attention. RBG, especially in the past few years, has stepped up her dissents and become more vocal as the court has shifted to the right.

RBG is on the left of the court, but as a lower court jurist, she was not known for her radical stances. In fact the biggest concern when she was nominated was that she was not left enough. She served for a number of years with Robert Bork in the US Appeals Court and she voted with him 85% of the time when they were on the same cases. She also had a very public friendship with Antonin Scalia one of the most conservative justices on the court prior to his death this past spring.

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I am reposting this review from earlier this year because the Kindle Edition has dropped to $6.99. I am planning on re-reading this in December in prepreation for the movie, which will be released in limited release in December and wide release in January. If you have not read about the movie this is a good article from New York Magazine.
Summary: Silence and Beauty is a profound reflection on the book Silence by Shusaku Endo, the role of art and beauty in Christianity, and a reflection of the impact of Christianity on the culture of Japan.

Silence by Shusaku Endo is one of those books that is not easily forgotten. I read it a couple years ago and I rarely go more than a couple weeks without referencing it.

Makoto Fujimura is a very well known artist, famous in many Evangelical circles for being a famous artist that is well known outside of Christian circles. Fujimura grew up in the US, but after college was accepted into a Japanese graduate program to study art. The first student to ever be accepted into this graduate program that did not grow up through the Japanese national art system. Fujimura became a Christian while studying art in Japan, a country with a very few Christians.

Silence and Beauty is fascinating. It opens with a bit is spiritual memoir. Fujimura details how  Shusaku Endo and his book Silence impacted his early faith. And unsurprisingly there is a long exploration of both Endo and his book Silence (as well as some of Endo’s other books.) That is done in the context of a rich sociological and historical study of Japan. And all of that is wrapped up in a defense of beauty and art as essential to Christianity. (I was reminded at times of of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic and Brian Zhand’s Beauty Will Save the World.)

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Summary: A young woman in a dystopian world strives to build a life, a community, and a faith, in the midst of chaos.

I have been slowly working my way through Octavia Bulter’s book since I first read her nearly a decade ago. I have two full length novels and her short story collections yet to read.

Parable of the Sower, like most of her books, is a dystopian novel. Butler published from 1976 until her untimely death in 2006 (she was 58.) Her dystopian was not part of the recent trend. Parable of the Sower was published in 1995. It feels closest to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), but while just as bleak in description, Parable of the Sower is the story of a young woman, Lauren Olamina, that actually is trying to build something.

The story starts when Lauren is 15, living in a walled community in the remnants of Los Angeles. The novel develops her character and generates the setting while giving us a glimpse of the religious system that she is developing. Lauren is a writer. What she is writing is the philosophy of her religion, Earthseed. Which, when told she is creating a religion, she responds that a person that describes something they found, such as a rock, did not create the wrong, but merely describes it. Earthseed is humanist. It is a philosophy, a way of living. God may exist in it, but that god is distant and not present in the reality of the dystopian world she is living in.

The main story is a travel story. The climate has shifted and drought it perpetual. Water is one of the most lucrative commodities and homelessness, slavery, and drugs are prevalent. The government and police exist in name, but not in ability to maintain structure or order. They are simply another gang that will rob you if you let them. Similarly to Walker Percy’s Love in Ruins (which was written about a decade before Parable of the Sower), this dystopian world is divided by race. And like most of Butler’s books, the main character is an African American woman.

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