Book Reviews

Summary: A rhetorical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, I think, has had a minor renaissance in the public’s imagination over the past few years. Kate Clifford Larson (who also has a biography of Harriet Tubman), Keisha Blain, and Maegan Parker Brooks all have new biographies of her in the last three years. There is also a children’s picture book only a couple of years older. And PBS documentary of Hamer in 2022. Maybe it is more about who I am listening to and the era I tend to read about. (Jemar Tisby, who lives in the Mississippi Delta area and is a historian of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, talks about Hamer as one of his heroes).

I read Keisha Blain’s short biography of Fannie Lou Hamer just over a year ago. Hamer was also a significant player in the biography of Stokley Carmichael. And many of the broader histories of the civil rights movement include discussions of Hamer’s work and influence. But A Voice That Could Stir an Army is the most detailed look at her life, especially the rhetoric I have read so far. Blain’s biography was intended to be a short, accessible introduction to Hamer at only 135 pages of the main text. Brooks’ biography is just over 100 pages longer, and while much of the difference is a close analysis of Hamer’s speeches, many details here help to round out Hamer’s legacy.

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Summary: A posthumously edited collection of sermons on Revelation, most from 1984. 

I am a big fan of Eugene Peterson. By my count, this is the 14th of Peterson’s books I have read. And many of those I have read more than once. I will probably continue to pick up his books. This Halleluah Banquet was published in 2021. And four books are being published this year in his name (two devotionals that are edited from his writing and sermons, a sermon collection, and a new edition along with the audiobook of his book on David, Leap Over a Wall.)

I am not opposed to books being posthumously edited and released. I really enjoyed reading the novel Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy Sayers. It was not finished and lost until about 60 years after she died. It was found in some files of her lawyer and finished by Jill Paton Walsh. Similarly, I have picked up several books that the students of Henri Nouwen compiled from a mix of his notes, class lectures, and other materials. But at the same time, these edited works often lack the vitality of books written directly by the author.

Parts of This Hallelujah Banquet are worth reading (or listening to as I did). I largely agree with the interpretation of Revelation that is being taught here. It is far more common to be hearing about Revelation as guidance for living in oppression today than it would have been in 1984. Earlier generations of teaching about Revelation would have been oriented toward dispensationalism and seeking to “break the code” of the future prophecy. I remember attending “Prophecy Conferences” at a friend’s church when I was a teen. Those conferences were full-on dispensational teaching with charts and images trying to show listeners how our current events fulfilled a 2000-year-old prophecy.

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Summary: A history of race and politics since the civil rights era.

I am a big fan of Great Courses-styled audiobooks. They often are helpful in summarizing complex issues, but one of the weaknesses, which is present here, is that they can be oriented more toward summary than laying out detailed evidence for those new to a subject. My main complaint about the course/audiobook is that it is too short.

The negative reviews on Audible are overwhelmingly calling this book “woke” or “leftist propaganda.” Only one of the negative reviews had any specifics about what they thought was wrong, which was a misunderstanding of Candis Smith’s point. Many negative reviews complained that it was only talking to people who already agreed with her, and I am unsure how to evaluate this point; in some sense, the complaint is valid. If the course were designed primarily to convince people who deny that racism continues to play a role in politics, it would be a very different course. The course focuses on an overview of how race and politics have shifted since the end of the civil rights era, not on convincing white people of the changes.

The course opens with a discussion of the Kerner Commission. I am going to quote from Wikipedia about the report, but these points were in the course:

The report’s best-known passage warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report was a strong indictment of white America: “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”^[11]

Its results suggested that one main cause of urban violence was white racism and suggested that white America bore much of the responsibility for black rioting and rebellion.

The Kerner Commission report was released in February 1968 and sold over 2 million copies. It was widely read. But the main focus of the report’s conclusions was largely ignored. The Kerner Commission, King’s assassination, and the 1968 Civil Rights Act are largely seen as the end of the main civil rights era and a shift to the post-civil rights era. The civil rights era was predominantly focused on changing the laws around segregation. Once those laws were changed, many thought cultural changes would naturally result. But as Smith points out, the legal changes were a prerequisite but did not change the systemic realities.

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Summary: Framed around an oft-repeated but inaccurate quote, McKinzie points out that the theological and political anthropology of the founders changed within a generation and how that change impacts our politics today.

As McKenzie opens the book, he traces how many politicians over the past decades have wrongly quoted Tocqueville to say a variation of, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” The quote has publicly and regularly been pointed out as wrong, but it continues to be used.

After establishing the quote as wrong, McKenzie lays out how he believes the founders understood human nature and how they established the constitution concerning their understanding of human nature. McKenzie believes that the founders believed in Original Sin (Wikipedia link), which in his conception, means that they designed the constitution to prevent populism from overtaking the country. In McKenzie’s account, human depravity and sin would mean that populism would lead to demagogues and other corruptions of power.

I want to start by saying that. I am not a historian, a theologian, or a political scientist. I read and respond to books here, and quite often, I think I am likely wrong because of my educational limitations and ideological biases. I have read many of these posts that I would disagree with later as I acquired new information or saw through some of my blind spots. We the Fallen People is a book that I both really do recommend because I think it is overall helpful in thinking through the issues of the partisan divide and how the country should be politically oriented. But I also think that there are two related concepts that I think McKenzie has either gotten wrong or wrongly described.

Much of the evidence that McKenzie is citing is about how President Andrew Jackson’s version of populism (and his authoritarian tendencies) was contrary to the founder’s intentions and then how the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who was skeptical of democracy and populism, rightly understood the strengths and weaknesses of the United States more similarly to the founders than his contemporary Jackson. Underneath this historical analysis is a concern about the ways that the recent President Trump, who regularly drew inspiration from Jackson, is accelerating the problems within the United States because the founder’s vision was for a country that rejects strong central leadership and populist leaders because they distrusted centralized power because of sinful humanity.

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Summary: A helpful, constructive theology of the Holy Spirit written from an Evangelical perspective. 

I first ran across Flame of Love when Christian Century asked several theologians and biblical scholars for their lists of the Essential books of Theology of the last 25 years (in 2010). I compiled an Amazon wishlist of the books I wanted (and accidentally made it public), and a friend bought me a couple. I started with Flame of Love because Clark Pinnock wrote one of the preaching textbooks I read in seminary, and I remembered it as the best book I had read for that class.

I have been meaning to re-read Flame of Love nearly since I first read it, but it has taken me almost 13 years to get around to it. First, I was waiting until I could pick it up on kindle. And then, once I picked it up on Kindle, it sat on my bookshelf until I saw that a new edition was coming out. But again, the audiobook and some driving led me to pick it up.

Rereading that old review, I am struck by the fact that I compared Flame of Love to Francis Chan’s Forgotten God, a book I had completely forgotten. I have done a lot of reading since 2010, and I am aware of new connections in this second read. I was fairly new to atonement theories, and Pinnock and NT Wright were my limited introductions. Richard Beck and many others have expanded my understanding of the atonement, but I recommend The Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge. She is a pastor, not an academic theologian (and I have read most but not all of the book), but as long as it is (and it is super long), it is very readable.

I find Flame of Love helpful because Pinnock highlights how the Holy Spirit is present in ways that Evangelicals tend to miss. There are seven chapters. The Spirit and Trinity, the Spirit in Creation, the Spirit and Christology, the Spirit and Church, the Spirit and Union, the Spirit and Universality, and the Spirit and Truth. Each chapter examines where the Spirt, who Pinnock sometimes talks about as “The Hidden God” instead of Chan’s “Forgotten God,” plays a prominent role.

Amos Yong’s commentary on the book of Acts is framed as the church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, doing the work that Christ had done in the book of Luke. And that framing, I think, makes a lot of sense of the type of work Pinnock suggests is common to the Spirit. It is not that the church does the work on its own in Acts. The church is being acted on by the Spirit and becomes the public face of God, but only because of the empowerment of the Spirit.

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Summary: Georgie is now out of morning sickness and decides to go to Paris to visit her best friend Belinda while Darcy is there “on business.” Trouble ensues. 

As I said in my post about Thrones, Dominations, I picked up Peril in Paris on audiobook as I was finishing reading Thrones, Dominations on kindle. I have long thought that Rhys Bowen was drawing some inspiration from Dorothy Sayers, and these two books, more than any except the first books in the series, contributed to that suspicion.

I really like the Her Royal Spyness series as fluffy fun. I often read them when I need a change of pace and some humor. I do get tired of some of the lack of confidence that Georgie has in herself. But generally, I like the series. I wouldn’t still be reading the 16th book if I didn’t.

It took forever for Georgie and Darcy to finally get married. But now that they are, there are still some adjustments that need to take place. Darcy has a job that no one will quite say, but it is a spy/fixer role for the British Foreign Office. Going off for long periods was not a big deal when he was single. Now that he is married, it is a bigger deal. He likes his work, but it is not particularly stable, it doesn’t pay well, and it is dangerous. And Georgie is also increasingly aware, especially of the danger. But she knows he loves the work, and she wants him to do it, but she doesn’t particularly want to think about the danger.

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Summary: Picking up after the honeymoon, Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane learn to live together as a married couple while solving a mystery.

Dorothy Sayers published the last full novel of her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series in 1937, Busman’s Holiday. Roughly 60 years later, an early draft of this novel was found in a lawyer’s safe, and Jill Paton Walsh was commissioned to finish the novel. Three additional novels entirely by Walsh continue to tell the story of the now-married couple, and I look forward to reading those eventually.

One of my complaints about Busman’s Holiday was that it was too much about Peter and not enough about Harriet. Thrones, Dominations balances the characters better without placing modern sensibilities on a couple from the mid-1930s. Harriet is trying to figure out how to be “Lady Peter”, as she is referred to throughout the novel. She wants to continue to write, and Peter really wants her to continue to write, but she has new duties as an aristocratic lady, and she has less pressure to write because she no longer needs to write to eat.

Peter has to learn to have someone in the house, and I think Walsh gets at his weaknesses (more than just his shell shock) better than Sayers. While the playboy was a bit of an act, there was a reality to his lack of attention to those around him. He has servants, especially Bunter, to care for everything he did not want to bother with. Harriet isn’t a servant nor a girlfriend to pine after. She is a real-life woman in his bed who expects to be fully inside his life and not just peering at the same facade everyone else sees.

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Summary: The history of the Black Power movement is the lesser-known story of the end of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. 

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is the third book I have read by Peniel Joseph, but it was Joseph’s first book, published in 2006. And as you would expect from an academic historian, his books tend to concentrate on overlapping characters and eras. He is a historian of the mid-20th century civil rights era, concentrating on the Black Power movement. I recommend his biography of Stokley Carmichael and the joint biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

I purchased the kindle book Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour about four years ago but did not get around to reading it until I picked up the audiobook for free as part of the Audible member Plus catalog. The audiobook was not well edited. The narration was fine, but it felt like the editing was not complete. There were many places with long pauses where it appears that the narrator was intentionally putting in a pause for editing purposes that the editor did not remove. And one where the narrator took seven or eight attempts at a name before saying it correctly and naturally in context, and obviously, the editing should have removed that. There were other places where the audio had short repetitions.

Those editing errors (except for the pauses) were all in the book’s first half. So I wonder if the audiobook editing influenced my complaints about the disjointedness of the book’s first part. And that may be the case. But the book felt like it took a while to really come together. The earlier portions of the book were more context of the development of the Black Power movement, which was also the part of the story I was most familiar with. So again, I may have been influenced by being more interested in the later sections of the book, where I was mostly hearing history that I was less familiar with.

I had three main takeaways from the book. First, I think the development of the Black Power movement was significantly influenced by white backlash to the civil rights movement. Stokley Carmichael’s use of Black Power during the 1966 march in Mississippi in response to the James Meredith shooting was not the term’s first use. (Richard Wright had a book in 1954 titled Black Power, and others used the phrase before Carmichael, but it was Carmichael’s use that popularized it.) By 1966, Brown v Board of Ed had been decided 12 years earlier, and much of the country was still segregated. The 1964 Civil Rights act (making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in restaurants or hotels, or other public settings) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had both passed, but the march in Mississippi proved that the federal government was still reluctant to enforce the law. MLK Jr’s assassination less than two years later gave further power to the frustrations of how civil rights were increasingly being thwarted through less overt means.

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Summary: Based on journal entries, Richard Foster explores the concept of humility in the Christian life.

Yesterday I recommended Learning Humility to someone that I meet with for spiritual direction. He was familiar with Richard Foster and his other books, but the first comment to my talking about Learning Humility as a new book was that he didn’t know that Richard Foster was still alive. He is still alive, and he and his wife live independently in rural Colorado. But Richard Foster is in his early 80s and has not published a new book in over a decade.

I have read most of Richard Foster’s books, and Learning Humility is quite different. Generally, the other books are exploring spiritual formation concepts and are in a teaching mode. Learning Humility was very much an edited journal. Many sections ended with a variation of “I will have to think about that for a while.”

I listened to this as an audiobook, and while I think that Foster narrated it well and that his voice really helped bring out the emotion and thought of the book, this is probably a book that either needs to be read a few times or it would be better to be read in print. Again, that isn’t because the narration is bad (a different narrator would be worse) but because the prose is written in a way that invites the reader to sit with his words and go back and reread. Audiobooks just keep going. That is one reason I like them for some types of books. But other books, books that are more poetic in style or that are meant to be meditated on, need print.

Richard Foster discovered, around 20 years ago, that his paternal grandmother, who died before he was born, was Ojibwa. Since that time, he has been exploring Native American history and thought. To continue that exploration, he frames his journal using the Lakota calendar. This gives him 13 moons to explore the Lakota values corresponding to the calendar.

I think Foster handles this well. He is not claiming to be a member of a Native American tribe or that he has special insight into Native American culture. He is describing what he is learning and cites where he is learning it from. There is a fine line between positively honoring a culture that is not your own and humbly using the cross-cultural differences to inform your own culture and negatively appropriating another culture for your own purposes. I think he mostly stays on the right side of that line. Cross-cultural exploration is one of the best methods to help understand our culture. The way we understand the water we are swimming in is to grapple with other cultures and their similarities and differences.

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