Book Reviews

Summary: A joint biography of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. 

I have been wanting to get around to The Life You Save May Be Your Own since it came out in the early 2000s. After having read a brief biography of Dorothy Day and a book of essays about Thomas Merton earlier this summer, I decided it was time. I have also read three books about O’Connor, a more academic look at her work, a short biography, and a collection of her early journals I felt like I had a pretty good handle on O’Connor. But I knew nothing about Walker Percy outside of his novels.

Elie mostly tells the story chronologically. Dorothy Day is almost 20 years older than Merton and Percy and nearly 30 years older than O’Connor. But she also lived longer than both Merton and O’Connor. And while Percy lived until 1990, and Day passed away in 1980, Day was 83 when she passed away, and Percy was only 73.

All four are well-known Catholic writers who were consciously Catholic in different ways. O’Connor was the only cradle Catholic, the other three were all adult converts to Catholicism. O’Connor and Percy were both also very much Southern Writers while Day was most identified with NYC and her non-fiction writing. Merton was the most clearly a “spiritual” writer and the only clergy member of the group.

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Summary: Stories of resistance.

This is a natural next book for Jemar Tisby. His first book was a survey of the ways that the church in the US has been complicit with racism. The second book was a response to the question, “What should we do now” that he kept getting from people who read the first book. And this third book is designed as inspiration for continuing to work for justice.

I am fairly well-read in civil rights history and there were both well-known figures and people I did not know here. The balance between the known and the unknown (or lesser known) was good. You can’t ignore major figures like Martin Luther King Jr, but in some ways, those figures are less inspiring because they have become “saints” of the movement. The lesser-known figures I think are more inspiring because they worked toward justice without becoming well-known.

That isn’t to say those lesser-known people are less important. Part of what Tisby is doing is bringing balance to the story. There is a whole chapter on women of the civil rights movement, not because they were completely unknown but because the sexism of the time impacted how we tell stories today. And many behind-the-scenes figures were essential to the organizational and movement-building work that allowed the well-known people to become well-known.

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Summary: In the early days of World War 2, Harriet is managing children while Peter and others are in the war effort. 

A normal for me, I keep getting caught up in information and forget about fiction. And then I return to it to remember again why fiction is a necessary part of a healthy reading diet. I have been reading a long joint biography of Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy. As much as the book has been worth reading, I remember why reading about fiction is not the same as reading fiction.

I read the Thrones, Dominations, the first book of the series where Jill Paton Walsh continues Dorothy Sayers’ mystery series last year. I saw A Presumption of Death on Kindle Unlimited and needed a fiction series to work on. It has been several years since the events of the first book. Peter and Harriet have several children, and she and her staff are watching several more children because of concerns about the bombing of London and so that their parents can work in the war effort.

There are many discussions about the refugees from London or other countries in this book. Harriet and the children are living at Tallboys, their country home. The limitations of the war, from the lack of food to the danger, are constantly constantly present. Peter is gone and there is also the worry for his safety.

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Summary: A variety of essays or talks about Merton and how his life and work can impact people today.

Engaging Thomas Merton is a book you can dip in and out of because while the book is thematically about Thomas Merton, you can easily skip around chapters based on your interest or read it slowly over time. I spent about six or so weeks slowly working through the book.

Because of my interests, I think the most engaging chapters were chapter 6 (using Merton’s work on the true and the false self to engage ideas of how we are embodied and digital selves) and then the three chapters about Merton’s engagement with the civil rights movement.

Overall, I think the digital self chapter is probably both the best chapter of the book and worth the price of the book for me. Horan makes the case that Merton would have seen that one of the realities of the digital age is that identity is “almost infinitely negotiable.” As a means of engaging with Merton in a situation that Merton didn’t experience, Horton takes Merton’s understanding of the false self and engages those insights. The clearest summary of Horton’s thesis here is, “The true self only appears elusive because we are too concerned with our false self (selves) to turn toward God.” (p93)

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Summary: An introduction to American Church history.

Mark Noll originally released his book Turning Points in Church History in 2001. (It is now in its 14th edition.) Elesha Coffman is writing a United States-focused version with the consent (and introduction) of Mark Noll. Noll is approaching 80 and still has the third in his history of the use of scripture series and several other books he is working on, and he says in the introduction that he didn’t have the time or interest to do an American-focused turning points book.

As with any type of book like this, the choices of what are the turning points matter and will be debated. I think that this choices were good. She started with the Spanish Armada, which she framed as a starting point for English colonialism and a shift in global power. I might have started with the rise of Puritanism or the English Reformation, but all three of those starting points are related and led toward the English colonies in North America.

Coffman did a very good job contextualizing the different turning points. In this type of book, the turning points are a frame for looking at an era of history not just the thing itself. So Azusa Street Revival was not just about that event, but about the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the US and how they rippled through not just those denominations but also impacted Catholic and Episcopal charismatic reform movements as well.

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Summary: A lecture that talks about the need to recover a mystical faith as a means to puch back against the problems of the age, particularly a lack of care for the enviroment.

I picked this up as part of a 2 for 1 sale at audible. When I picked it up there was not any reviews. I assumed it was a lecture but did not know anything about it other than the description. I don’t think the description is accurate to the content. The description suggests that it is about Hildegard and Echart. I read a historical fiction book about Hildegard earlier this year and I read about Eckhart in seminary. I would like to learn more about both.

The opening comments of the lecture suggest that it is primarily going to be about the environment, but I do not think that the intro was any more accurate than the Audible description. I do not think I have read anything by Matthew Fox previously. In that introduction, he talks about coming from Ireland and being with youth and the problem of youth hopelessness. He suggests that youth unemployment in Ireland was 90%. I have to assume that what he meant was that youth unemployment in the particular area, not the country, was high. There is not a date on the lecture, but it was published to Audible in 2021. In 2012, Irish youth unemployment was at a historic high of almost 31%, but it is about 10% now. From other context clues, particularly speaking about the Chernobl disaster as recent, I think this was likley recorded in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

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Summary: Exploring how our spiritual formation needs to be decoupled from western culture.

I am not sure I can describe Our Unforming better than an edited quote from the introduction.

“For all my life, I’ve read books on spiritual formation written by white authors and internalized their experiences of God as the norm and even as the authority. In recent centuries, our spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions. In that process, Western voices have generalized what spiritual formation is for all of us. The way we teach formation in the church is heavily influenced by Western values—such as individuality, dualism, and linear thinking—and Western history like colonialism, the Enlightenment, and industrialization. Even the African roots of early church fathers and mothers have often been ignored when interpreted through a white male lens…I want to untangle and de-westernize the ways my soul has been distorted by the disproportionate influence of Western authority in the church. This does not mean disregarding our long and rich history of Christian spiritual traditions. Rather, we need to recognize that our current understanding of spiritual formation is limited because it was developed under a dominant Western cultural tradition.

Our Unforming is largely written to racial minority Christians who are grappling with the ways that they have distorted themselves to fit into western or white molds. But Cindy Lee is also writing for people like me (a middle-aged, middle-class, white, male, heterosexual, seminary-trained spiritual director). She is pointing out areas where our language and practice of spiritual formation may be more culturally constrained than we understand. It complements books like Karen Swallow Prior’s Evangelical Imagination (about how many of our Evangelical norms are rooted in Victorian culture) or Barbara Holmes’Joy Unspeakable about the particular contemplative practices of the Black church. And if pastors or spiritual directors are going to work in diverse communities, they need to be aware of where their biases toward white or western normative ideas or practices are constraining their ability to serve the people they serve.

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