Book Reviews

Summary: Part memoir, part encouragement for emotionally healthy activism, part grace for the journey.

I have been blogging through my reading for about fifteen years now. One of the things I still am uncomfortable doing is writing about books where I have more than a passing acquaintance with the author. I do not want to oversell my relationship with Ally Henny, but I volunteered on a project she led for years. I am part of a group chat that, while it was well established before Covid, became part of my covid lifeline. I read some early portions of I Won’t Shut Up, and I am mentioned in the acknowledgments. But we have never met in person (like many social media acquaintances), and I don’t want to pretend we are best buds. It is this type of relationship that makes it hard to write, not because I don’t like the book (I really do like and recommend the book), but because I am trying to figure out how to write about a book I like while acknowledging the reality of my bias is just a tricky balance to do well.

The best I can do is describe why I Won’t Shut Up adds to and differs from the many memoir-ish books about racial issues in the US. First, I think that her writing as a Black woman who grew up and has primarily lived in the rural Midwest is something that no other books I have read has centered. Setting and context matter, and different backgrounds lead to different insights.

Second, there is a thread of grace throughout the book that is helpful for books like this. She has grace for herself and the ways she has grown over time. She has grace for those who have harmed her and those around her. And she has grace for the readers she is trying to encourage to grow. That doesn’t mean that she ignores the harm, but that she has grace for the potential for change. She stayed with a church for a long time, which was harmful. She gave the benefit of the doubt and kept trying to help that church, and particularly the pastor of that church, see areas of weakness. But as she concludes, leaving sometimes is necessary. And when she eventually leaves that church, she has grace for the grief that she and her family feels.

Read more

Summary: An attempt at devising a non-religious ethical system.

Beyond Religion is a book I would not have picked up on my own. But it was the next book chosen for a book club I am in, and the group thought it was worthwhile when it was chosen. As I have said before, book clubs are helpful to push your boundaries and to give you alternative perspectives. However, book clubs moderate interest in books, and I am not always thrilled by that result. Generally (and this may be my personality more than a universal reality), I like books I love less after a book club discussion. This seems to be because those other perspectives give me insight into why others do not like the book as much as I did. I do want that perspective because I learn about my blind spots. Sometimes, I am reluctant to encourage groups to read books I love.

At the same time, I also like books more that would otherwise hate because people’s perspectives do the inverse to show me how my biases against a book may not have taken other perspectives into account.

Read more

Summary: Well-constructed argument that the purpose of the church has been lost, but can be regained again.

I was somewhat reluctant to pick up The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory because I was unsure what more I could learn about Christian Nationalism and extremism, and because I have read so widely in the recent literature. But I saw a copy at my library, and several people I trust have recommended it. I related to his opening because I am a pastor’s child who often does not understand the faith of many people who call themselves Christians.  While it was well-written and expertly crafted, I did not find the book’s first half all that engaging because I knew the stories already. There is value in compiling all of it together in a single book for those who have not been paying attention. But it is tough for me to trust that people who haven’t been paying attention will be interested in this.

One of the book’s strengths is that Alberta spends a lot of time interviewing people and allowing them to speak in their own words about their motivations and strategies. Several people commented in reviews or podcasts with Alberta about how surprised they were that so many people spoke on the record. I agree that allowing people to speak for themselves has real value. Quite often, Alberta gives context to those interviews because the subjects rarely explore their complicity in creating extremism within the church. At the same time, this is one of my biggest frustrations with the book because, as much context as Alberta gives, he often frames the conversation sympathetically.

For instance, when he interviews Stephen Strang in Branson, MI, at a Rewaken American event, Alberta talks about how uncomfortable Strang was with his surroundings. However, Alberta had previously discussed Charisma media and the magazine’s role in spreading misleading information. Strang is the owner and publisher of Charisma, not someone incidental to the world. Strang signed up Mark Driscoll to a book contract and speaking tour after he was fired from Mars Hill. Strang wrote a book in 2020 defending Trump (God, Trump, and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What’s at Stake for Christians if He Loses) and a previous spiritual biography of Trump and four other books that were directly or indirectly about Trump. (Those books had introductions from Eric Metaxas, Jerry Falwell Jr, Mike Lindell, Benny Hinn, Mike Huckabee, and Lori Bakker.)

Read more

Summary: Tracing the ways that creation (including humans) is the image of God. 

I have known of Carmen Joy Imes through social media for a few years but this is the first book of hers that I have read. I have been interested in the imago dei for a while. I picked up both this and Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters and I did not really read more than the titles. I probably should have started with Bearing God’s Name since it was written first, but by my perceived understanding of the titles, I was more interested in Being God’s Image.

The book is in three basic parts, tracing the image of God through scriptures. It starts in early Genesis, through the wisdom literature, and in the New Testament, ending in Revelation. There are many subthemes as the topic is traced through the bible. But the dominant one is that humans are not created to be God’s image but created as his image, which entails a vocational place within the physically created order.

Read more

Summary: An introductory, but probably too brief to be helpful, look at Ethics.

I have been working on a reading project to think through the concept of Christian Discernment. One aspect of discernment is ethical behavior. When I saw that Ethics: A Very Short Introduction was free to Audible members, I picked it up for a change in pace and to see what it might communicate about Christian Discernment.

Early in the first section, the author glibly dismissed religious influences on ethics and while I thought that it was poorly reasoned, I thought I might still get some value from the book, after all, it is not a very long book. I do not think I have a very good background in Philosophy or Ethics, although I keep trying to read and catch up. But this introduction, I think, was targeted toward people with less background than I have.

I have found the Very Short Introduction series quite uneven in quality. One of the problems is organization. Some want to primarily talk about the scholarship around an area, not the area itself. Some have a very idiosyncratic approach to the area. And some do a great job giving an overview. I think the problem here was that Ethics is a big area, and the author tried to introduce practical ethical dilemmas and a brief history of ethical thought. I think the practical ethical dilemmas section was broadly helpful in introducing the idea of different ethical approaches, but I think he did not give sufficient weight to various approaches and tended to place his views as the right ones without enough explanation of other views. And I think there probably could have been some explanation of why he chose these areas and others.

Read more

Summary: A retelling of the Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson.

Son of Bitter Glass is the second in KB Hoyle’s Fairytale series. This series is set in the same world, but the novels are stand-alone. The first in the series was a gender-switched retelling of The Little Mermaid. The Son of Bitter Glass is a retelling of The Snow Queen. I have never read The Snow Queen, although these are elements of the story that I can see that CS Lewis adapted into The White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, And the Wardrobe. Disney’s Frozen was very loosely adapted from The Snow Queen as well. About halfway through the book, I skimmed the Wikipedia summary to see if I missed any significant elements or references. I do not think I was, and if you haven’t read The Snow Queen, I do not think you need to know the story to enjoy this book.

The Son of Bitter Glass opens with Eira and Isbrand as children. Eira is the daughter of an ambassador who himself is a friend of the king. Her mother died before she remembered her, but her father remarried so that she would have a mother. The stepmother has her own children with Eira’s father, and Eira feels out of step with her family. Her best friend is the prince, Isbrand (Isa), and they spend as much time together as they can apart from her family.

On Isa’s 12th birthday, a hobgoblin brings a curse from the Snow Queen. The queen is murdered, and the king, Eira’s father, and many others get a piece of the “bitter glass” in their eyes. But Eira protects Isa and keeps him safe from the bitter glass. The king charges Eira with protecting the prince. Over time, the childhood friends come to love one another romantically. But Eira is duty-bound to protect Isa, and it looks like Isa needs to marry another to keep him safe from the Snow Queen’s curse. As the story develops, there is a quest, and the one overlapping character of the series, James, helps Eira on her quest.

Read more

Summary: Jane Eyre meets Sixth Sense, “I see dead people.”

I like the concept of remixes or retellings of classic stories. The very nature of a well known story means that you can retell it by changing the perspective or the gender of the characters and you can easily have a cultural commentary or additional humor, or simply get to hint at part of the story to reference ideas without fully developing them in ways that is not possible for a completely original story.

That being said, I came into My Plain Jane having just finished My Lady Jane and I had a set of expectations that were not met. I thought I knew what to expect and the books are just different. My unmet expectations created a hurtle that I would not have had, if I had started with Plain Jane. But I had to get over my expectations of what the book was going to be. My Lady Jane was a historical figure that was generally told accurately, but with the addition of shape shifting magic (into animals).

My Plain Jane is riffing off of Jane Eyre, which is a fictional story. I read Jane Eyre just over a year ago, the story is fairly fresh in my mind. This is a bit of a spoiler, but My Plain Jane alternates telling the story from several perspectives. Charlotte Bronte is a teen, almost finished with her boarding school. Her real life best friend is Jane Eyre, a barely older orphan who was also at the school but now is a teacher. Charlotte is always writing and Jane is always painting or drawing; they do not have a lot of friends at the school outside of one another.

The main story really starts when Jane sneaks off to a local pub because she hears that a somewhat secret organization, Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits will be there. That organization is an early Ghostbusters society. In this story, people who have briefly died and come back to life can see ghosts. The Society is mostly made up of people who can see ghosts and they go around the country helping to remove problem ghosts. Jane can see ghosts and one of her best friends, Helen, is a ghost. One of the tension points is that Jane wants to keep secret her ability to see ghosts because she is afraid of what people will think if they know she can see ghosts.

Read more