Book Reviews

Summary: James Baldwin’s chosen biographer, his friend and sometimes secretary and translator David Leeming.

After reading my last Baldwin book, I knew I needed to read a complete biography before reading more of Baldwin’s writing. Previously, I have read three novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk) and three essay collections (The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and No Name on the Street). In addition to those, I have read three books about Baldwin that had biographical aspects but were not primarily a biography, Begin Again by Eddie Glaude, What Truth Sounds Like by Michael Eric Dyson, and James Baldwin and the 1980s by Joseph Vogel.

David Leeming was James Baldwin’s friend and his hand-chosen biographer. This biography was originally published in 1995, nine years after Baldwin’s death. Leeming first met Baldwin in Instanbul, where Leeming was a professor and Baldwin was staying with a friend trying to write. One of the constant refrains of this biography is that Baldwin needed people around him, but he couldn’t write with people around him. So there was a tension between his ability to draw people to him and his need to get away from those people so that he could write, in part because of the costs of having those people around him.

Leeming started working for Baldwin as a secretary and continued working for him in various capacities for years. The close friendship and historical memory that Leeming brings to the biography is a real strength because Leeming was actually in the room for many events of the book, including his last days. At the same time, there is always a bit of a mistrust about biographers that are too close to their subject. The concern is about how that relationship distorts their perceptions. Leeming does not seem to have a problem allowing Baldwin to be a flawed individual. Baldwin for all of his brilliance was flawed. And Leeming had access to all of Balwin’s papers, as well as many personal conversations. The intimacy of the narrative and genuine affection make for a very compelling read.

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Summary: The 15 years of friendship between Dorothy Sayers and CS Lewis, primarily via letter, helped shape and encourage them.

History is always a balance between the 30,000-foot overviews and the small, close looks at seemingly little things that allow us to understand the people, not just the large movements of history.  I routinely move back and forth between the large and small, often in waves. Right now, I am mostly at a point of wanting the smaller textured history, memoirs, and close connections with people. Dorothy and Jack is precisely a close reading of a small slice of history that is important to give context to the larger historical sweep.

A few years ago, I was trying to read a book a month by or about CS Lewis. He strongly influenced post-WWII American Christianity, and it felt important to understand Lewis to understand my Christian context better. (And Lewis is just a fascinating figure and an excellent writer.) I am far less familiar with Dorothy Sayers. I have read nine or ten of the books from her mystery series. Still, I have not read her influential essay that shaped the American Classical School movement, her apologetics, any of her plays, or her translations of Dante. I have not read a full biography of Sayers, although I have read at least five full biographies of Lewis. So, while I know of Sayers, my connection with the two does have a disparity between the backgrounds.

Gina Dalfonzo, in part, because so much of their relationship was epistolary, can quote and build the picture of their friendship from their own words. Both were established writers by the time they struck up their friendship, and they admired one another’s work, although Lewis was not a fan of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series. The friendship was mainly about their writing and being the type of friend who can share their work.

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Summary: A history of the White Evangelical orientation toward colorblind approaches to race in the post-Civil Rights era. 

Routinely, usually on Twitter or Facebook, but sometimes in person, I will get someone who will ask me how some particular thing is about race. Often it will be self-evident to me, but it is much less clear for the person asking. Race is often something that people resist openly acknowledging because the very nature of seeing race for those who subscribe to colorblindness is a racialized act that we should avoid.

This book feels very personal to me. I will turn 49 soon, and much of the history here, I have very close connections to. I have met several people in the book. I attended Wheaton College as an undergrad, and I attended Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church (a church that started of the wreckage of Circle Church and Clarence Hilliard leaving.) I worked for a local association within SBC and interacted with the Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board). I spent several years working with Mission America, the United States arm of the Lausanne Conference on World Evangelism. The Myth of Colorblind Christians gave me context, and a lot of new information, about the world that I experienced in the 1990-2000s.

The Myth of Colorblind Christians has six main chapters. The first chapter grounds the book in the Civil Rights era history and rise of modern (Billy Graham style) evangelicalism. The primary orientation of White Evangelicals toward race was either support of segregation (either overtly as God-ordained, or more subtly, as not causing offense and submitting to the cultural mores) or to oppose segregation but to do so through individual conversion and regeneration. The Evangelical orientation toward evangelism and conversion meant that Billy Graham and others did want to evangelize African Americans, and there was some effort in attracting Black Christians that would agree with them about racial problems being primarily spiritual problems. (It’s a sin problem, not a skin problem). Billy Graham went as far as to preach against the March on Washington during his Los Angeles crusade that was happening at the same time. “I am convinced that some extremists are going too far too fast,” he declared. “Forced integration will never work.” The racial crisis would “not be settled in the streets but it could be settled in the hearts of man” (p35). Despite Graham’s concerns about the March on Washington, “King articulated the ur-text of colorblind America” in his I Have a Dream speech.

Although there were Black Evangelicals, like Howard Jones, the first Black evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the relationship was more as a ‘Black sidekick’ than a full partner. Jones was asked to spend much of his time preaching in Africa, and even when he specifically asked, he was occasionally denied access to evangelistic rallies in the US. In 1965, Billy Graham had an evangelistic rally in Montogmery in direct response to the protest in Selma. Graham told Jones, “I am not sure that it would be wise for you to come to Mongomery just now” (p47). Graham was concerned about a Black evangelist on the stage raising tensions.

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Summary: Exploration of modern Evangelical history and culture through the discussion of five novels. 

I am a Christian fiction skeptic. It is not that I don’t think there are good Christian fiction novels, but experience suggests that those Christian novels that are good, are likely not being published, or not being published by Christian publishers. But I know I have a bias. When I first heard of the concept of Reading Evangelicals, I was hopeful for a guide that might help me be less cynical about an area of the Christian world that I had almost entirely stopped reading ten years or so ago.

Daniel Sillman is very ambitious with Reading Evangelicals. He uses these five books, Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack, to provide not just an exploration of the novels but of Evangelicalism. The meaning of Evangelicalism is hotly debated. There have been dozens of books debating the meaning and value of the term over the past ten years. Broadly, there are three main ways that Evangelical is defined. One way is a theological definition like the National Association of Evangelicals version or Bebbington’s Quadrangle. The main objection to these is that this is not how many people use the term. The second way that Evangelical is used is as a political identity that roughly means conservative, White republican who cares about abortion, gay marriage, and who was likely to have voted for Trump twice. The objection to this usage is that there is a significant subgroup that does not fall into this category, either because roughly 1/3 of theological Evangelicals in the US are non-White, or that even those that are White, approximately 20-25% do not identify through political means or regularly vote democrat. In addition, this is a very US-centric definition, and many self-identified Evangelicals (using the political definition) rarely, if ever, attend church. The third primary definition of Evangelical is as a consumer definition. This is primarily the definition that Kristen Du Mez uses in Jesus and John Wayne. Even though it isn’t the primary definition here, a significant thread of Reading Evangelicals is about the rise and fall of the Christian books store and publishing industry, contributing to the consumeristic definition of Evangelical.

Love Comes Softly was the first novel that could be called a Christian Romance novel. It was published in 1979 at the start of the growth of local Christian books stores. It was one of the first novels written directly for an Evangelical audience and published by Evangelical presses. I read Love Comes Softly early. Probably as a pre-teen or early teen. As one of the quotes from the book said, I read it because my mom owned them all, and the church library stocked them. There were not a lot of Christian novels that I had access to in the mid-1980s. While Stillman does read the novels closely and discuss themes and the books themselves, the context is to the novels is what I find most helpful. Janet Oke was responding to a turn toward not just explicit sex but sexualized violence in the secular romance novel market in the late 1970s. A common trope at the time was that the protagonist would be kidnapped and/or raped, often more than once, and then she would eventually fall in love with her rapist. Before Love Comes Softly, Christian publishers almost entirely published non-fiction, often academic-leaning books targeted toward pastors and bibles. The rise of local Christian books stores needed products to sell, and novels filled a niche. In addition, the rise of the local Christian book store was necessarily ecumenical in orientation. Many Christian publishers were denominationally rooted, and they needed ways to sell outside of their narrow constituencies without alienating them. Love Comes Softly was a successful proof of concept that Christians would buy novels and that fiction could sell.

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Summary: Karen Swallow Prior writes a helpful introduction and footnotes throughout the book to assist the modern reader. 

One of the things that I have learned in reading old books is that culture and styles change, and modern readers often need assistance to understand the nuances of old art. It is not that we can’t get something out of old art on our own, but having a guide helps increase art appreciation. I read Frankenstein first about 10 years ago. I was completely unprepared for the actual story because of how far the movie adaptations have come from the original. One of the podcasts that I enjoy, Persuasion, did a book club reading of Frankenstein using the edition of the book that has the introduction from Karen Swallow Prior. I have enjoyed Prior’s writing and have followed her on Twitter for years, so I decided to go ahead and pick up the new edition and read it along with them. (The podcast ends with an episode with Karen Swallow Prior.)

Karen Swallow Prior has a series of classics, including Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Sense and Sensibility, and several more books that will be released next year. I read this on kindle as I tend to do, and I picked it up when it was on sale. But I have heard that the print editions are nice cloth-bound editions that are well designed. The introduction was helpful. I had no idea that Shelley was so young, 17, when she wrote the book. Nor that she had already been pregnant and lost a child or traveled all over Europe with her scoundrel of an (eventual) husband Percy Shelley already.

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Summary: Historical questions are often much more complicated than we would like to present.

I have listened to John Fea’s podcast for years now. And I have read his book on the issues that lead to Evangelicals voting for Trump. But I have not read Was American Founded as a Christian Nation or his more traditional history books. Part of what moved me to pick this up and read it after having owned the book for a couple of years was a desire to understand the rhetoric that has come to be known as Christian Nationalism. Fea uses the language of Christian Nationalism, although he uses it slightly differently than the sociologists like Perry and Whitehead use it. Fea is using Christian Nationalism as a descriptor of people who sought to make the country into an explicitly Christian nation. These two subtly different meanings are compatible but they reflect the different fields of study. Fea is a historian who is grounding his work on the historical events, people, and writing or speeches, while Whitehead and Perry are working with survey data. Both are trying to get at the mythology (in the sense of origin story) of America.  (Although Fea wrote this originally in 2011 and revised the book in 2015, so his use of the language of Christian Nationalism is prior to the Trump-influenced investigation of it.)

John Fea is trying to complicate the historical story and counter all of the different myths of the origin of the US in regard to its relationship to Christianity. He traces the ways that there have been many that have sought to make the US into a Christian nation and how the type of rhetorical Christian Nationalism that we see today is very old. He also traces the ways that there has never been a solely Christian Nationalistic movement. The founders were not all pietistic Christians seeking after God, nor were they all Deists that tried to remove a more fundamentalist Christianity from the public role.

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Summary: A dated but well-written biography of Martin Luther King Jr. 

I don’t remember who suggested it, but someone, about four years ago, recommended Let the Trumpet Sounds as the best biography of Martin Luther King Jr. I picked up the Kindle edition back in early 2018 and just got around to listening to the audiobook, in part because it is free if you are an Audible member. Oates initially published this in 1982, roughly 15 years after MLK’s death. Three years ago was the 50th anniversary of King’s death.

Let the Trumpet Sound is my first full-length biography of King. It is not that I have not read about King. I have read two joint biographies of King and Malcolm X, including this one. I have read the autobiography of Coretta Scott King. I have read a narrow biography of just his seminary years. I have read his book Where do We Go From Here and collections of his writing and speeches. I have read a book about his social thought compared to Bonhoeffer and a book about Letter From a Birmingham Jail. And I read a book about the social impact his death had on the United States. And none of that includes books about general civil rights history or autobiographies, memoirs, or biographies of other civil rights figures.

But a single-volume biography of King still helps to orient the reader to the timeline and broad impact that his short 39 years had on the world. Oates is not writing a hagiography. King, while a great man, is not a perfect man here. He was able to inspire many, not the least of whom, his loyal staff. But he was not a perfect leader. There is a good discussion on several strategic missteps and areas where King pushed against the wishes of his staff and advisors. Some of those disagreements were likely good decisions, some bad. But no cultural-wide protest is going to be tactically or strategically perfect. Mistakes will be made.

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Summary: To have our faith impact our politics and not the other way around, we have to be intentional about our spiritual formation concerning our politics. 

My favorite definition of spiritual formation is from M. Robert Mulholland Jr., “Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.” Kaitlyn Scheiss’ subtitle orients this book to think about spiritual formation in politics similarly. One of the most common complaints about “Evangelical” is that it has become a political descriptor instead of a theological one. Scheiss is also concerned about how Evangelical as a term has become oriented around politics, but her approach in this book is contrary to some who are also concerned about the overtaking of the church with politics. She believes that our problem is not overthinking about politics in the church but too little about politics.

Cornel West’s well-known quote, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public,” is related to how Scheiss is connecting politics to Christianity,

“In one way or another, almost any political or moral issue is about the honor and protection of human beings.  In reality, every piece of legislation is trying to legislate morality.  Every policy issue is based on moral principles and has moral implications.”

There is much in The Liturgy of Politics that references other books I have read on spiritual formation. James KA Smith’s work on cultural liturgies is hinted at in the title. Alexander Schmemann’s “For the Life of the World,” a phrase that has also been used widely by Miroslav Volf and others, is a chapter title. NT Wright’s thinking on eschatology is also crucial in Liturgy of Politics in orienting the reader away from inappropriate rejection of the importance of our work in this world. There is much here that I recognized from previous reading. Still, Kaitlyn Scheiss is rooting her work in political thought for the church in theological and spiritual formation thinking, not altering her theology based on her politics.

The two aspects of the book that I most appreciate are its orientation toward thinking about how spiritual practices, which we may do for other reasons, can, when we think of them regarding politics, also help form us to love others well politically. And I appreciate how she has worked through our theological and historical blindspots within evangelicalism that have made us susceptible to the abuse of power and politics.

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Summary: Privilege of all sorts is to be used to expand Jesus’ kingdom and for the good of others. 

Privilege has become a controversial word. Not so much for the rough meaning but because of the political implications and the tribalism that has arisen. In many ways, the main message of the book is what has commonly been understood as the Spiderman principle, ‘Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.’ (Which is a variation of Jesus’ statement in Luke 12:48, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” (NIV) Popular culture may attribute this concept to Spiderman instead of Jesus, but it is a deeply Christian concept.

Privilege also has, in many settings, come only to be thought of in racial terms. While Gilliard is not excluding racial privilege here, he is reducing all privilege to racial. The book’s focus is seeking out biblical stories of the right use of privilege and drawing principles for modern use. Along the way, there is social teaching, but primarily this is a book of bible study and implications to that study. I can’t help but be reminded of Andy Crouch’s book on power, Playing God. When it is common to deny that we have privilege (or power) or the limit the concept of privilege (or power) to particular narrow types, Gilliard reminds us that we all are privileged in some ways and that all of us should strive to use what God has given us for the sake of others.

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Summary: Cormoran and Robin are hired to look into a 40-year old cold case.

Cormoran Strike is a standard grumpy private eye, ex-military, ex-cop. He has had a number of high-profile cases, and his absent father is a famous rock star trying to get Cormoran to show up to an album release party for the 50th anniversary of the band’s first release. Robin, his younger partner, is still trying to process through her husband’s infidelity and divorce proceedings and her concern that Cormoran will see her as a real partner.

Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) has another book that has ballooned to an enormous size. Like the later Harry Potter books, Troubled blood has nearly doubled in size compared to earlier books and weighs in at over 900 pages. Considering the size, I read it quickly. I have listened to most of the previous books in the series, but I did not want to listen to 32 hours of audio. Also, this series pushes my boundaries with violence and sex. Troubled Blood is a thriller, and the series has always had violence and sex, but I read the series because I like the characters of Robin and Cormoran, not because I want to read about serial killers. In some ways, I am not sure I would start the series if I had known where the content would go. But I have started it, and I do like the leading characters.

Rowling writes engaging storylines, but there are a lot of traditional thriller/mystery tropes here. For example, the main characters are in love but won’t admit it to themselves or each other. They both have a history with previous relationships that makes them wary of entering new relationships. The tough guy Cormoran wants to protect Robin from danger, but that makes Robin more prone to risk-taking to prove herself, which is another reason besides their fear of intimacy with each other that keeps them from openly talking. So many things are hidden from each other that, if they would talk, would work out. I know that real people do this, but it is such an old trope in books that it can be annoying.

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