Book Reviews

Summary: A brilliant physicist leaves his insular utopian community to study in the world that his world rebelled against. And he learns the weaknesses of both political systems. 

Anarres is a desert moon to Urras. Several hundred years ago, miners rebelled against their home world and created their own anarchist utopia, a ‘non-authoritarian communism’ where there is no property, but there is a shared sense of cooperation against the harsh world. Urras, is a rich and beautiful world, but where virtual slavery controls the vast majority of the population and where women are restricted to the home.

Except for minor trading and some scientific conversations, there is no contact between the worlds. Shevek, a brilliant physicist seeking to understand the connection between time and space, is given a physics prize by Urras and becomes the first person to travel between the worlds since the separation.

This is largely a book of political ideas. It is a critique of both communism and capitalism unchecked. It is a critique of feminism and anti-feminist ideas. It is a critique of the split between individualism and the forced common good. There is a plot and some action at the end of the book. But primarily this is the story of Shevek, starting with his travel to Urras and proceeding to the future with flashback to his early life.

Published in 1974, this is a cold war book. Both worlds are unrealized utopias. The Anarrians have taught shared responsibility, every 10 days they have to contribute a day of work to the common good, a computer matches each person to the type of work they want to do, or they can choose to do no work at all. From their childhood they are taught shared responsibility and the evils of property. They are raised in kibbutz like dormitories. Adults, usually live in adult dormitories. Sex is free, but consensual. Marriage is possible but rare (it is thought of as a sort of privatized relationship, as is parents directly raising children).

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Summary: A somewhat repetitive, although important call, to focus on the important things in life, and not get overwhelmed attempting to do everything or make everything perfect.

I like Shuana Niequist’s writing. Yes, it is very female focused, but men should read more things focused on women. Yes, there are a lot of similar themes of change and finding yourself from book to book, but we are continually changing and finding ourselves throughout life. Yes, I can’t completely comprehend her life of food and family and vacations and friends, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get the points. In the end, Shauna Niequist’s voice is an important voice that continually reminds us of the need for spiritual, emotional and physical health in a world that wants to push us toward giving everything for a goal.

Niequist has a clear heart to follow Jesus. She thinks about the normal stuff of life as an example of the harder things of life. She is a good illustration that simply growing up in the church does not make one comfortable with faith. She is also a good illustration of the problem of telling people, not only can you do anything you put your mind to, but you should do everything that  you can put your mind to.

One of the important trends in evangelical theology that seems to keep being brought out is a real worked out theology of human limitations. It may be one of the most important things that the church needs to be illustrating through out discipleship and evangelism. I think people naturally come to understand limitations as they age. But it is amazing to me how often I read or hear something like, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ be spoken about as if the second phrase were not the primarily emphasis.

Present over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living is pretty similar to both Bread and Wine and Savor but she seems to feel like there was something fundamentally different about the life that she was living when she wrote those books. As a reader, the calls to slow down and focus on family and the important things seem to be much the same, or at least very similar.

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Summary: Jesus’ time on earth was more than just preparation for his death and resurrection.

I originally bought How God Became King when it was on sale for Kindle nearly three years ago. At the time I was at the end of a long NT Wright kick and picked it up. Last week it was released as an  audiobook and I decided to re-purchase it in that format (not whisper synced unfortunately).

Part of what drove me to pick it up again is the recent public discussions of the Benedict Option and several private discussions about poorly catechized Christians. I vaguely knew that How God Became King was at least in part about how Wright viewed the creeds (even though I wasn’t sure what that meant.)

The problem Wright is addressing in How God Became King is that we usually tell the story of Jesus, especially when we use the creeds, by saying that Jesus was born (became incarnated) and then died and was raised again. The incarnation becomes important only for the ability for Jesus to die and be raised again.

Wright’s concern is that we have used the creeds to interpret the gospels, or just as problematically, used the creeds as our sole syllabus for determining what should be taught about Jesus and the Christian faith. Section one of the book is mostly introduction to the problem (and if you have read much Wright, a lot of repetition.)

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Summary: An attempt to use scripture to defend same sex relationships.

Discussion of the role of gay Christians within the church is fraught with difficulty. Any position is the wrong one with a significant group of Christians. But this is not something that can really be ignored. As pointed out in the very helpful book The End of White Christian America, culture has broadly moved on from gay marriage as a debatable topic. But within the conservative Evangelical world where a sizable minority supports same sex relationships, explicitly admitting it out loud can create a significant debate (as Jen Hatmaker’s recent interview and its fallout has shown.)

I picked up God and the Gay Christian reluctantly. I do not particularly want to wade into current hot button issues. But I thought it was something that I personally needed to explore more directly. And even though I seriously considered not blogging about it, I decided Bookwi.se had little left to lose (traffic is already down more than 90% from its high of a few years ago.) My one real concern is unintentional harm to those that I know personally that are on one side or another of the issue. That was a real concern before writing. But I decided that the potential for help is worth the potential for harm. But also please remember that I process through reading and writing. So all comments are about processing, not really a final position. So in the end I picked up God and the Gay Christian at the library on audiobook because it was there.

One of the weaknesses of this debate is the state of Protestantism as a whole. Christianity has always had placed a very strong value on individual affirmation of theological truth. Especially after the Reformation, and then with the decline of the state church and the rise of the free church, individual affirmation became the dominant form of decision making within the church. Catholic theology has a formal magisterium system with defined Catholic teaching. And other episcopal or presbyterian systems have a system of affirming the theology of the denomination. But those systems still operate within the broader culture of individualism that pervades Christianity in the United States.

Because of our theological free agency system of church membership, if we disagree we can simply move to another congregation, or stop attending church all together. So at this point, a 24 year old (the age he was when this book came out 2 years ago) without formal theological training, ordination or church position, can write a book about his theological ideas, and it can influence those who are willing to be influenced. That is not fundamentally different from many others that came before him. But it is different from the system of councils that was in place in the early church.

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Summary: Marvel heroes reimagined in 1602 Elizabethan England.

I love a good reimagined work. I like cover songs. I like re-told fairy tales. I like alternate history. So even though it took me nearly a year to get around to it after a friend gave me the book, I was interested to read Marvel 1602.

Dr Strange is the court physician. Fury is the head spy. Some characters are a bit more vague than others. But the X-men are here as are the Fantastic Four, Dr Doom, Black Widow, Peter Parker, Daredevil and a few others. Something is messing with the weather, there is a plot on the Queen’s life and a great treasure (weapon?) is being smuggled from the Holy Land to England.

Gaiman is known for his Sandman comics series and his novels. He is one of my favorite novelists. But this didn’t quite do it for me. Mutants were considered witches and hunted by the inquisition (that part makes sense.) Political intrigues are hinted at but never really fully embraced as a story line. So much of the book was just establishing the characters in their new setting that the story felt rushed and thin.

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Summary: The era of White (Protestant) Christian cultural, political, and demographic dominance of the United States is over.

The starkness of the message of The End of White Christian America is as clear as its cover. Demographically (and this is shared in detail), the United States is no longer dominantly White Protestant. The more controversial suggestion that the political and cultural dominance of White (Protestant) Christians is also over is also hard to argue with based on the evidence presented, but many Christians have not yet accepted that.

Whether you accept the two of these suggestions will probably depend on your geographic and cultural place in the US. The demographics are clear. However, many White Protestants continue to live in communities that are racially isolated. Especially those that are in rural or suburban communities. Culturally, shifts toward acceptance of gay marriage, the aging of second-generation immigrant communities, and the significant increase in White Americans who do not identify as Christian (nones) have, at the very least, limited the cultural dominance of White Christians.

Robert Jones is the head of the Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI is a well-regarded polling company. Much of the research cited in The End of White Christian America is from PRRI polls. I generally trust PRRI to do decent work, but I can understand the complaint that there is not more outside research cited in the book (although there is some.) Despite the heavy number focus, The End of White Christian America is quite readable. It is essentially public polling and demographic data combined with recent (mostly 20th and 21st century) cultural and religious history. The cultural and religious history is mostly done fairly well, but as with any historical accounting, there is room to quibble with the conclusions.

The most controversial part of The End of White Christian America, in my mind, is about the shift in attitudes toward gay marriage in particular and the theological understanding of homosexuality in general. The polling on this is clear. The shift toward acceptance is complete. Even within Evangelicalism, there is a large minority that either politically or theologically accepts gay marriage as a good. Outside of Evangelicalism, it is not a large minority but an actual majority. Jones makes the argument that the Evangelical church needs to both accept they have lost this battle and to accept the full integration of gay Christians into the church formally. I hope that won’t keep people from reading the book. Regardless of your theological convictions here, Jones is making a case that many others are also making, but primarily, Jones is making a demographic case, not a theological one.

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Summary: NT Wright, using his traditional tools of biblical narrative theology and 1st-century Jewish/Christian cultural understanding, assesses some of the areas where our understanding of the atonement differs from early Christian understanding of the atonement.

The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion is most connected to Wright’s earlier Surprised by Hope. It is not quite a sequel to Surprised by Hope, but it is in the same thread of Wright’s work. Surprised by Hope pointed out the way that the theology of the afterlife (eschatology), especially dispensational theology, distorts not just our understanding of our Christianity but how we practice our Christianity.

The Day the Revolution began is attempting to do the same type of analysis with our theology of the atonement. Many of NT Wright’s traditional critics will also disapprove of this book. Wright’s minimization of Penal Substitution (which has been evident in much of Wright’s writing) is explicit here. Wright is not saying that Penal Substitution is wrong. He says that the focus on Penal Substitution as the primary or only way to look at the atonement distorts our understanding of what Jesus did on the Cross.

My traditional approach to Wright is to listen to the book on audiobook once, then re-read it again later in print. This allows me to get an overview of the argument and then to focus more clearly on the parts of the argument on the re-read. This is certainly a book I will need to re-read to understand, maybe twice fully.

One of the reasons that many get irritated with Wright is that he keeps presenting his ideas as either new or the first return to ‘correct’ understanding in hundreds of years. If you are irritated about that, you will be irritated here. Wright’s strength is connecting the broad narrative sweep of scripture and the 1st-century era culture. I think if he started working with a historical theologian who helped him connect his ideas explicitly to the historical theological work of theologians after the first century, it would help tone down that irritating tic and help readers connect his thought to its historical roots.

Wright wants to help people think clearly about how their theology connects to daily life. That is one of his strengths. But part of what the church today needs is a connection of its theology to the historical church. But his description of his work as either new or a rediscovery of what is lost minimizes the connection to the church’s historical teaching. This is particularly true for low-church fans of his who do not already have a solid connection to the traditional church. Maybe this is a blind spot that Wright has because of his British Anglican setting. Wright has a strong sense of history and the worldwide range of the church, but many of his readers (and biggest fans) do not. (My reading of Thomas Oden, in particular, has convinced me of the importance of viewing the theology of the church as a continuum with historical teaching and not new.)

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Summary: The continued story of John Lewis and the broader Civil Rights movement from the Freedom Riders, to the March on Washington, to the voting rights movement Mississippi and Selma. 

The March trilogy is really one story broken into three books because of length. So it is hard to review them as separate books. The first book is clearly an introduction and its main focus is the lunch counter protests in Nashville.

Books two and three of the March Trilogy are longer, give a broader historical picture and also are darker. The movement as a whole, the longer into the Civil Rights era you get, the more controversy and frustration that is part of the history. A memorable line, when talking about the March on Washington, is Lewis’ noting that, of all of the speakers that day, only Lewis is still alive to talk about it.

John Lewis was committed, ideologically and strategically to non-violence. He was the leader of the younger, and somewhat more radical SNCC as opposed to the more moderate leaders that were under the NAACP or  SCLC. But the commitment to non-violence in the face of continued violence of police and others helped to divide the civil rights movement.

The graphic novel format I think is particularly helpful in telling the Civil Rights story. Not just because the story keeps moving and the action can be visualized so easily. But also because there is something more real about violence when it is visualized. Even though Nate Powell’s art is not particularly graphic, adults armed with clubs or fire hoses racing at children or adults that are not fighting back carries an impact.

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