Book Reviews

Summary: Time Traveling “historians” are sent back to block a couple falling in love because it will distort all of history. 

This is the second of Connie Willis’ books that I have read. The first in this series, Doomsday Book, is also centered on time travel, but it is a very different book. Doomsday Book is about going to a medieval community near Oxford, and it deals with the programs of a global pandemic (the Black Death) and the problems of observing evil that you cannot change.

In that first book, time travel was relatively new, and the thinking was that it was impossible to change history. However, history may have changed in the second book, and they are trying to figure out how to put it back again. And that involved going to Victorian England, playing matchmaker, and blocking a romance.

Connie Willis has a lot of humor in her writing. It is a good change of pace. But I think, like Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a bit long. I think the various threads and the false turns she brings the reader on as a means to get to the end are fun. But it could be cut a bit.

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Summary: An exploration of the ways that slavery as practices in the Caribbean and North America was “Christian.”

The rough thesis is that racial hierarchy developed not through an inherently racialized system but through a belief in Christian (and later Protestant) supremacy where Christianity was viewed as a type of ethnic identity, and only later was that Protestant (ethnic) identity slowly shifted over to white racial identity. Chapter four developed this idea most clearly:

“Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant slave owners gradually replaced the term “Christian” with the word “white” in their law books and in their vernacular speech. Scholars have long recognized that whiteness emerged from the protoethnic term “Christian.” Yet the intimate relationship between slave conversion and whiteness has not been fully appreciated. By pairing baptismal records with legal documents, it becomes clear that the development of “whiteness” on Barbados was a direct response to the small but growing population of free black Christians.” (p74)

In the 17th Century, the British began to colonize what became the United States and the Caribbean. The split of the Church of England from the broader Catholic church started in the 16th century. Still, it was not until the early 17th century that the Church of England was firmly established as a religious/cultural identity. And even then, in the mid-17th Century, the English Civil War shifted that identity. This Protestant identity developed concurrently with the rise of colonization, the development of capitalistic enterprises, and increased interaction with different cultures and geography. The weakness of the Church of England in the colonies (the churches were culturally important, but often there was a lack of clergy and no real supervision from the ecclesiastical structure) meant that the direction of church policy was more directed by concerns of lay people than theological or missiological concerns. Similar to the arguments of Joel McDermot’s The Problem of Slavery in Christian America, Gerbner illustrates how the development of slavery can be traced legally through changes in law, but also points out how Christian theology was explicitly or implicitly used to create a justification for that law because of economic concerns.

One of the helpful aspects of Christian Slavery is that she looks primarily at the English-speaking Caribbean and then compares that with the British colonies in what became the United States and the Catholic colonies in the Caribbean. This methodology uses other English-speaking and non-Protestant non-English speaking communities to explore similarities and differences in how those areas approached the relationship between Christianity and slavery. There was significant communication between these groups, and within the English-speaking colonies, you can see legal language moving from community to community as they all attempted to address similar issues.

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Summary: The final book returns to Charles Ashworth as narrator and revisits many of the themes and characters raised in the previous books.

With all of the series’ weaknesses, Absolute Truths is not only my favorite of the series but one of my favorite fiction books of all time. Again, like my post about Scandalous Risks, I cannot discuss the book without a few spoilers. I will try to keep it to a minimum, so I do not spoil the plot.

The narrator from the first book, Charles Ashworth, is now in the mid-1960s. At the end of the first book, he marries Lyle, pregnant with another man’s child. Ashworth, who had discovered in during the first book that the man who had raised him was not his biological father, but had married his mother to protect her when she had become pregnant, felt like God was calling him to do the same. As we return to Charles as the narrator, they had been married for almost 30 years. Quickly after getting married, they had another son. And then Charles had been a chaplain in World War II and spent most of the war as a Nazi prisoner, eventually ending up in a concentration camp. It was not until several years after the war that the couple settled into marriage reasonably happily. Lyle’s fear over Charles’ potential death had helped her to understand that she loved Charles for himself, not just for helping to save her from being a disgraced single mother. Charles also loved Lyle, but the distraction of his teaching and writing, his work as a bishop, and the seemingly effortless ways that Lyle solved all the problems around her allowed him to take her for granted. That changes early in the book; Lyle has a stroke and dies soon after. (Again, I disapprove of using wives’ deaths as a reoccurring plot device in almost every book.)

A nearly 700-page book about a Bishop’s grief may not be for everyone. But there are so many threads from the series that get raised and appropriately tied up. It is a big ask, but as much as I want to recommend Absolute Truths, it is a book where I think you do need to read the previous books to get the most out of it. And those previous five books are about 2500 pages on top of the 700 pages of Absolute Truths.

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Summary: Attachment style has an impact on the way you approach and interact with God.

I primarily am approaching this book from my role as a Spiritual Director, but as with many books about spiritual practices, there is also personal relevance.

Krispin Mayfield is a counselor adapting his understanding of Attachment Theory from his counseling background to an understanding of spiritual formation. This adaptation of social sciences to bring insight into our understanding of spiritual formation is immensely helpful, even if not every instance of it is perfect. Some examples are Stages of Faith by James Fowler, Trauma in the Pews: The Impact on Faith and Spiritual Practices by Janyne McConnaughey, and Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse–and Freeing Yourself from Its Power by Wade Mullen.

Many within the Christian world are distrustful of the social sciences. And there is a long history of the misuse of social sciences. But Christians should have a commitment to All Truth is God’s Truth (a phrase coined by Augustine) and the idea of General Revelation while also understanding the role of discernment in discovering what truth is. The problem with many (but not all) critics of the use of social sciences in Christianity, and especially in understanding Christian formation, is that critics often do not have the background to understand what they oppose. That is where content area specialists like Mayfield can bring social sciences back to Christian practices more easily than theologians, pastors, or spritual directors can go out and learn the social science necessary to work out a similar idea.

The basic idea of Attachment Theory is not too difficult to communicate easily. Infants look to caregivers to understand the world around them. They form affectional bonds with those caregivers for needs like safety and protection. To maintain those bonds children learn responses to maintain those bonds. Mayfield clearly states that we should not draw too straight of a line between our attachment style and parents. Parents often do their best, but there can be reasons why different attachment styles develop other than bad parenting. But the theory also emphasizes why adoption, trauma, abuse, divorce, and other impacts on the parent/child relationship can significantly impact our lives.

One of the helpful threads on the fictional Starbridge series that I have been writing about is that almost all people have some issues with their relationship with their parents. And that often occurs even when parents try to do the best they can, and there is simple miscommunication or differences in temperament that create distance. Sometimes the very act of trying not to make the parents’ mistakes can create new problems in a different direction.

There are three basic Attachment patterns,

1. Secure Attachment (which is the largest group of people),
2. Anxious Attachment is where there is a continuous concern about whether the connection is a good one. A more passive variation is where a person tends to shutdown when an anxiety is expressed. Or the second type, the Anxious-Avoidant, is where there is an active avoidance of situations where they can feel like they will be rejected as a means to avoid anxiousness around attachment. This second type is most associated with children whose needs were unmet or where there was neglect as opposed to more traditional abuse in the first time of anxious attachment.
3. Disorganized Attachment is where the attachment seems contradictory. This style was most associated with major loss and unresolved trauma.

Again, a person may move between the categories even if there is a more dominant mode. And there may not be explicit abuse or neglect in people who do not have a secure attachment style.

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Third Reading Summary: Nicholas Darrow is coming of age, attempting to prepare to become a priest and live a normal life. But his life is anything but typical as the child of an elderly former monk. And he has never really learned to control his psychic powers. And with the death of his mother when he was 14, there is no longer anyone that can solve the problems between him and his father.

Magical Paths is the fifth book in the Starbridge series. As is standard for Susan Howatch’s books, she writes about multiple generations with interlocking storylines and perspectives. Nicholas Darrow is the son of Jon Darrow, the narrator from Glamourous Powers. Mystical Paths has the shortest time period of the series, with most of the story playing out over just over a week.

It is 1968, and Nicholas Darrow has quietly become engaged to a young woman he has known his whole life. He has graduated from seminary and will be ordained soon. In the previous book, set in 1963, we know that Nicholas is on the periphery of Venetia’s coturie, as she calls her set of friends. Christian Aysgarth, the oldest son of Stephen Aysgarth and his first wife, Grace. Christian is forty and married with two young children. He had a successful academic career with a professorship at Oxford and a beautiful wife, Katie, the daughter of a Duke. But in 1965, he died mysteriously in a boating accident.

Nicholas, like his father Jon, has psychic powers, and Venetia comes to him to see if he will perform a seance so that Katie can contact Christian to deal with her guilt over his death. Nicholas knows the danger of trying to contact the dead but thinks he can avoid an actual seance and solve Katie’s problems on his own. But, of course, it goes badly because, as a young man in the 1960s, he thinks he is more capable than he is. And he thinks that those older that could help him are all stuck in the past. Both Venetia in Scandalous Risks and Nicholas in Mystical Paths are 23, and that sense of naivete and confidence leads to problems.

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Third Reading Summary: Venetia Flaxton attempts to find meaning in her life and instead finds a disastrous romance. 

One of the significant complaints I have with the Starbridge series is that it is oriented primarily toward clergy healing and restoration without as much attention to the harm that clergy can often cause. Scandalous Risks is both an illustration of that complaint and an exemption to that idea. As I said with my post on Ultimate Prizes, this is part of a single story arc that starts with the earlier book and then mostly plays out to a conclusion in Scandalous Risks, but has threads that continue into Mystical Paths, Absolute Truths, and the spinoff trilogy that starts with Wonder Worker.

In writing about the first three books, I largely stayed away from the details of the plot, but this is a book I think I have to write about the plot. If you do not want to know anything about the plot, you should stop reading here.

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Summary: Controversial radical, but an important figure both in political and legislative history, and in the history of emancipation and reconstruction. 

Many important people are less well-known than they should be. Thaddeus Stevens is one of them. I think the way that many people to do know who he is and have heard of him is because Tommy Lee Jones played him in the movie Lincoln.

Hans Trefousse’s 2005 biography was the first real reevaluation of Stevens in a couple of generations. (Bruce Levine has a new biography published in 2021 that I have not read.) I picked this up on sale at Audible, which may not have been the best format.

One of the problems with the biography of Stevens is that he is a lawyer and legislator. He was known for being effective with parliamentary rules and procedures. And rules and procedures are not scintillating reading. But they are essential to the work of legislating.

Thaddeus Stevens is best known for leading the House during the Civil War and being the leader of what is commonly known as the Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction Era. He strongly favored public education, emancipation before the Civil War, and civil and voting rights after the Civil War. Radical Republicans were both organized to oppose Johnson and to push for stronger federal actions to protect Black citizens across the country and to punish former Confederate officials more strongly.

Stevens believed former Confederates were not US citizens (and therefore not subject to the bill of rights and other protections) but fell under international rules of war as a conquered territory and should be handled with military law, not civil law. This means that he did not think that the legislature should seat anyone from those territories until there were new votes by the legislature to adopt them as states. (Incidentally, Johnson was a senator from Tennessee that remained with the Union and continued to be seated in the Senate after Tennessee joined the Confederacy until Lincoln appointed him as military governor in 1862 before he was elected Vice president. So under Stevens’ understanding, Johnson should have been removed from the Senate when Tennesse withdrew from the Union.) The implication of Stevens’ understanding of citizenship means that the legislature would have been a smaller body with only Northern legislators, which would have changed the requirements for approving legislation, passing the constitutional amendments, vetoes, and impeachment.

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Summary: A working-class boy becomes a high-powered clergyman, but a tragedy brings about a crisis. 

There are three main reoccurring characters in the Starbridge series, Charles Ashworth (the conservative neo-orthodox), Jon Darrow (the mystical anglo-Catholic), and Stephen (Nevill) Aysgarth (the liberal modernist). Ultimate Prizes is the book where Neville, who is renamed in the book to Stephen) is the narrator.

I never really liked Stephen. His pugnacious personality, which Howatch tries to make a positive feature, annoys me. And while I am not an Anglo-Catholic nor a Neo-Orthodox leaning Christian, Aysgarth’s style of liberalism turns me off even more. Part of the problem is that as much as Aysgarth is shown to have real faith and pastoral skills, and no one in the series is portrayed as perfect, Aysgarth responds the least to spiritual direction and his crises.

In the first two books, Charles and Jon are far from perfect, but the changes they make due to their problems make them better at fulfilling their calling. While Stephen seems to get patched up enough to keep going, but just a few years later has another crisis, and then another, and another. In the last book of the series, which I am reading now, Charles, who eventually becomes a bishop, grapples with whether or not he should have worked to end Stephen’s career in the church because he keeps having problems. That last book is, in part, about the role of grace in the Christian life. But I think the series as a whole makes the case that there are reasons that clergy should be defrocked.

I am not going to give away the details, but in Ultimate Prizes, what is a significant crisis in his life moves toward a later, even more significant crisis in part because Stephen continues to drink heavily and take “Scanalous Risks” because his personality is oriented toward working for “Ultimate Prizes.”

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Summary: Jon Darrow, Spiritual Director and mystic, feels called to leave his role as an Anglican monk and return to the world.

I am revisiting the Starbridge series ten years after I first read it. I have some notes about the series in the review of Glittering Images (the first book) that are relevant to Glamorous Powers. However, I am trying to avoid too much of the story as I revisit the series so that anyone that has not read the series can read these posts without significant spoilers.

Jon Darrow is present throughout the series, but it is Glamorous Powers, where he is the narrator and focus of the story. Darrow is the oldest reoccurring character in the series. He was born in 1880. He married fairly young as a Navy chaplain, but as happens throughout the series, his wife dies young. His mother-in-law helps raise the two children, and after WWI, Darrow becomes a prison chaplain, mostly on death row (he is opposed to the death penalty) until his children are raised. Once the children are out of the house, he becomes an Anglican Monk (there are celibate Anglican monks and nuns, many of Darrow’s age were inspired by the Oxford movement’s return to Anglo-Catholicism). Eventually, Darrow rose to become Abbot of the Granchester Abbey, which primarily offers spiritual direction and retreats for clergy and theology students from Cambridge.

From his role as abbot, Darrow has a vision, which he believes is calling him to leave the cloister and return to the world. This book breaks the pattern of crisis and then spiritual direction and instead starts early with spiritual direction. Part of what I appreciate about the series is that there are a variety of spiritual directors. In this case, the spiritual director is the Abbot General of the order, Francis Ingram. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Darrow. Darrow is mystical, aesthetic, and from a lower-class background. Ingram is upper-class, very rational, and enjoys the finer things in life. Ingram helps Darrow explore the vision and whether it is a call from God. It is not ever discussed in these terms, but this is a spiritual direction of discernment.

Darrow does leave the order, and following the path of the series, he gets himself into a mess because of his pride, his background and the false sense of trying to bring about God’s will in the way that Darrow wants it to happen. God redeems his sin and graciously works all things together for good. But Darrow is broken, which allows him to confront his past, upbringing, early marriage, and children in ways he has been unable to do previously.

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Summary: A promising young theology professor is sent to investigate a bishop, leading to a romance, a breakdown, and a recovery. 

A few months short of a decade ago, I brought this book on vacation. It was my 40th birthday, and we had publicly announced that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So we went on our first cruise, and I devoured the first several books in the series. (I bought the following several books on kindle when in port.)

Before reading the series, I had not understood the concept of Spiritual Direction. I may have heard of the words (although, at this point, I am not sure), but it took the fictional portrayal in Glittering Images for the concept to sink in. Glittering Images is melodramatic fiction. There are fundamental weaknesses to this book and the series that are more visible to me now with some distance, but it was transformational. When I came home, I asked around for a spiritual director. I did not find anyone around me to give me a recommendation. So I looked up the directory on Spiritual Direction International (which has changed its name to Spiritual Companions International) and contacted the closest one to me geographically, just a few minutes from my home. (I would recommend this directory at this point.) I am still meeting with him nearly ten years later, although he has moved twice, and for the past five years, we have been doing video conference meetings. I started training to be a spiritual director about four years ago, and I have been working as a spiritual director for several years (very part-time.)

Back to the book, broadly, the series is historical fiction based on the 1930s to the 1960s focusing on Church of England clergy. Most books have a clergyperson in a spiritual and personal crisis, leading to some breakdown. And then the second part of the book is focused on a spiritual director helping to explore the roots of the crisis and work together toward healing. In this book, Charles Ashworth, a theology professor and Cathedral Canon, is sent on a secret investigative mission to preemptively avoid what might become a public disaster.

I am less of a fan of the first part of these books. I don’t like watching people make bad decisions that cause problems for those around them. However, part two draws me to the series, where people explore the psychological and spiritual causes of their problems and seek to heal the relational connections that have been harmed through sin.

Over the past several years, I have investigated trauma and spiritual abuse more intentionally. Unfortunately, the series, written from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s, are not as cognizant of trauma and spiritual abuse as I would like. That isn’t to say there is no awareness, but there are problems.

I want to acknowledge some of the problems before moving on. Most of the books center around the sexual sin of the clergy. I think sexual sin, as described in the series, should be disqualifying, not just temporarily (as the books suggest), but permanently because of the harm it causes and the power abuses involved. The books, even as they often complain about too much Freudian pop psychology, have quite a bit of Freudian pop psychology. Third, most of the books have one of three different spiritual directors that have what is termed in the book as “psychic gifts.” These psychic gifts operate as near magic that distracts from how spiritual direction works outside the books in the real world. I think that Howatch is trying to take seriously charismatic and mystical gifts. But while it provides interest for the books, and I appreciate the mystical aspects, the near magic, which is usually presented as a power of the Holy Spirit, is separate from the role of traditional spiritual direction.

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