Book Reviews

Summary: A theological exploration of the culture led to Stand Your Ground laws. 

Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas is on several lists for best book of theology for the 2010s. In addition, it is regularly cited in books I have read that were published since Stand Your Ground came out in 2015. As many contemporary theology books do, part one is a historical and cultural framing of the issue, with part two concentrating on the constructive theological response.

Part one is much more straightforward to discuss. Kelly Brown Douglas charts the development of the Anglo-Saxon myth of exceptionalism from the 1st century Roman Historian Tacitus’s book Germania. The book was not cited much until the Renaissance, when it was common to root ideology in older Roman or Greek ideas. Germany did not solidify into a single ideological, cultural or political identity until fairly late, but Germania was used in the myth-making (as well as with Nazi ideals.) But Germania was also important to the development of Anglo-Saxon identity because early Anglo-Saxons pointed to Germania as the ideal of what Anglo-Saxons came from and could become. The narrative of Anglo-Saxon identity was important to the American founders. This extended quote of Benjamin Franklin that Kelly Brown Douglas quotes is representative of other over Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians,   French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

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Summary: A legal and historical look at the development of slavery in the US written and oriented toward theonomist leaning Christians. 

I honestly am not sure how to talk about The Problem of Slavery in Christian America.  The history is very good and helpful. But the political and theological bias of the author, primarily coming out in later sections makes it hard to completely recommend the book.

Part One is focused on the judicial and legal history of the development of slavery in the US, and it is excellent. I learned a ton, and I have over a hundred highlights to show how helpful I found this part. The most helpful is the close reading of the legal development of slavery and how that development undercuts some of the Lost Cause historical revisionism about the reality of slavery.

There has been a very long history of Christians opposing slavery, from very early, out of broad concerns about the love of neighbor and the golden rule reasoning and opposition to the cruelty of slave systems. Even though the British Common Law system did allow for slavery, there was a reasonably strict understanding that other Christians could not be enslaved and that limitations to slavery. The American (and Caribbean) development of slavery rejected British laws to be freer to enslave people.

In part, this desire to enslave was a counter to the system of indentured servitude (which was time-limited but still a form of slavery). Indentured servitude was, in many cases (but not all) a voluntary system where a person agreed to enter service for an agreed period in exchange for payment of the passage to America and room and board during the time of service. But indentured service was not producing enough workers at the rates that tobacco planters were willing to pay. Also, once free, indentured servants could become planters and compete with other planters. Indentured service was a type of apprenticeship at its best where a person would learn a trade and be set up for a future career. (Many indentured servants were very much abused, but there was legal recourse in the system even if it was still often a brutal system.)

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Summary: A retelling of civil rights era history noting ways in which traditional framing distorts the history. 

I am very interested in how framing and bias can distort history. Some books I have read that have informed my perspective on this are Battle for Bonhoeffer (about how this works with an individual, not just more extensive history), and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction by John Fea (which looks at a historical topic and the ways that Christian nationalism, in particular, distorts historical analysis) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (which looks at how there was an intentional misremembering at the end of the Civil War to reunify the United States by orienting the US toward a vision of white racial superiority instead of orienting the country toward the rights of newly freed Black citizens.) I have heard about A More Beautiful and Terrible several times, but some quotes from Jamar Tisby in one of his newsletters caused me to pick it up finally.

Once I read for a little while, I looked up some background on the author. Jeanne Theoharis is a political science professor at Brooklyn College. She is the daughter of Athan Theoharis, a historian who specialized in the history of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, and other US intelligence agencies, which is a fascinating background for a father when Jeanne specializes in civil rights history. Liz Theoharis is Jeanne’s sister, a professor at Union Seminary, an ordained minister in the PCUSA, and co-chair of the modern Poor People’s Campaign, along with William Barber. Again, it is essential background to know that Jeanne Theoharis is writing about the use and misuse of civil rights history while her sister is helping to lead one of the most important civil rights organizations that is actively organizing for civil and economic rights. (I also know locally active people in the Poor People’s Campaign.)

Each chapter is about one aspect of the civil rights story and how the traditional framing can distort the way we remember and think about civil rights history. I think this is a reasonable organizational method, but it also leads to some repetition because the chapters have overlapping content.

Chapter one is about desegregation, but instead of telling the story of a Southern Brown v Board, it tells of a failed story of integration in Boston. The Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Integration Act in 1965, eleven years after Brown. But school boards refused to acknowledge school segregation. Nearly 25 years after the NAACP chapter in Boston created an Education committee and organized around desegregation, there was a federal lawsuit and an order to use bussing to integrate Boston schools and federal supervision of the plan until the late 1980s. Resistance to busing was strong, and White flight reduced the city’s White population. The 1974 Supreme Court case limited the desegregation busing to municipalities, effectively limiting busing and allowing residential segregation and white flight to continue school segregation. Primarily, we think of school desegregation as a success story in the US.

The year 1989 was the high point of school integration, and like in Boston, federal oversight largely had stopped by the late 1980s. Schools have been segregating again so that the likelihood of a Black or Hispanic student going to an 80% or more Black or Hispanic school was roughly the same as in the late 1960s to early 1970s when many districts were only starting their desegregation efforts. As I have said before, the Louisville school district, where my mother spent part of her elementary years (she is a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges), did not desegregate until the school year I was born. School segregation today is different from school segregation in the past. It is not overtly legal for one reason. It is also not complete in the same way. Historically, school segregation was universal; no Black students were in a White segregated school. Today’s schools are technically integrated, but most white students attend majority-white schools, and most minority students attend majority-minority schools. Part of this is that schools are economically isolated and that class and economics have a racial dimension. It is also that neighborhoods are still largely racially segregated because of historic housing patterns. But all of that is background, which gives context to how we tell the story of school desegregation efforts as a hero story.

The second chapter is about how the view of race riots of the 1960s tends to ignore resistance to community organizing that had often gone on for decades before riots. Primarily focusing on LA and Detroit, I learned about the Detroit Great March in 1963, several months before the March on Washington, which had at least 125,000 in attendance (using Wikipedia’s numbers) and maybe as many as 200,000 (using the book’s estimate). When riots are framed as starting out of the blue, instead of contextualizing them within a larger civil rights movement, often a failed one, it further diminishes how civil rights history is a history of many local movements, not just a few big players. The other part of this is that most racial riots in the civil rights and post-civil rights era are in northern or western cities, where civil rights gains were much less tangible. One of the book’s central themes is that while southern racism was more overt, the more subtle racism of the North and West was more likely to be sustained and unchanged.

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Summary: A trio of high school students make their way through growing up, romance, jazz, and racism. 

As I have been reading the Harry Potter books to my kids, I have been reminded that one of the things I do not like about young adult literature is the poor decision-making of real young adults. It is not that only teens make poor decisions, but that part of being a teen is that the consequences of our decisions are opaque to us. What seems like a good idea often isn’t. Still, with less experience of the world, and less capacity for communication and emotion processing, there is also less understanding of how our decisions impact others.

Swing (not a follow-up to Solo as I thought it was) is about three teens. It is primarily told through the voice of Noah, the only child of a couple who also manages a hotel. Noah’s best friend is Walt, who wants to be called Swing. Swing is both obsessed with baseball and jazz. He is not very good at baseball, but he works hard and keeps practicing, trying to get onto the team as a junior. The third member of the trio is Sam, and Noah has been in love with her since the third grade but cannot tell her. Much of the book is about Noah’s attempt to find a way to talk to Sam about his affection for her. Meanwhile, she is dating Cruz, the star baseball player at their high school, who is trying to pressure Sam into sex.

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Summary: An American ex-pat in Berlin becomes an English-speaking guide at Bonhoeffer’s family home. As she encounters the physical spaces of Bonheoffer, she explores the world around her through that lens.

I have no idea who coined the term “Usable History,” and there is likely nuance to the history of that term that I do not know. But as I have spent more time reading biography and memoir the last year, part of what has drawn me is finding “usable history” to help me understand my life.

Laura Fabrychy is the wife of a US diplomat. As a stay-at-home parent in an overseas posting, she has to learn how to manage the responsibilities of a family in a new culture and with a language that she does not understand well. Fabrychy and her family moved to Berlin in the summer of 2016 and spent three years living not far from Bonhoeffer’s family’s home. She had been interested in Bonhoeffer before moving to Berlin. (She has a Master’s in political theology and is working on her Ph.D. in Systematic Theology.) However, after visiting the home several times for herself or bringing visitors, she was asked if she wanted to become a guide for English speakers.

Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus is part memoir of her time in Berlin and exploration of culture and what it means to be an ex-pat. It is also an exploration of who Bonhoeffer was and how we can learn from others that can influence our own lives. This is not hagiography or utilitarian “five things we can learn from Bonhoeffer to make our life better,” but an honest grappling of a very human Bonhoeffer. As she attempts to balance family life and the strains of a new culture and language with her interest in Bonhoeffer, she reads several books by and about Bonhoeffer.

One of them, The Battle for Bonhoeffer by Stephen Haynes, explores the use and misuse of Bonhoeffer, a particular problem since Bonhoeffer died so young and interest in his work has so often appropriated part of his life and abandoned other parts. (I am reading A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History right now, which is attempting a similar thing for Civil Rights history.) I am fascinated by how we shape our understanding of the past for current use (also well explored in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ). Of course, simply repeating history is the first step in understanding. But it is higher-order understanding to interact to bring a fundamental understanding of both history and current reality and to engage the two meaningfully. Part of the reason that books like Battle for Bonhoeffer and A More Beautiful and Terrible history exist is that so often, there is a flat appropriation of history in a way that distorts instead of illuminates. Haynes has a particular disdain for the ways that Eric Metaxes distorts Bonhoeffer for his own purposes, and it is easy to do the same.

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Summary: My least favorite of the books, but with some new reasons when I read it to my kids.

I have been reading the Harry Potter books to my kids. We will do the third one and then wait a while before we tackle the second part of the series, which I think moves from middle grade to YA.

I have long thought that Chamber of Secrets is the weakest book of the series. (spoilers are coming)

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Summary: 49 sermons on Advent from one of the best preachers alive today. 

I have spent a lot of time watching Fleming Rutledge preach on youtube since I discovered her about 5-8 years ago. I am completely serious that I think she is one of the best preachers alive today, and I think many should read her sermon collections or watch her preaching on video.

I started Advent in 2019 as a semi-devotional reading for the Advent season. And it is so worth reading to get the historically accurate vision for what Advent is about. As a low church baptist, my perception was that Advent was a time of preparation for Christmas similar to Lent, where we remember that Christ came to earth 2000 years ago. So there is an aspect of that in Advent, but it is more accurate to say that Advent is a time of preparation for the second coming, not just the first. In other words, it isn’t that Advent is ignoring Christmas, but that part of what we are doing is remembering the first coming as a way of looking forward to the second coming.

the truly radical nature of the Advent promise, which sweeps away cheap comforts and superficial reassurances and, in the midst of the most world-overturning circumstances, still testifies that “Behold, I am coming soon! . . . I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:12, 13).

And because of the focus on the second coming, there is a lot of emphasis in this collection of sermons on judgment. Judgment is not a common theme for Advent or Christmas among my low church evangelical pastors, but it makes sense in the context of what Rutledge is preaching about. She points out the injustice around us and how we can rest in the fact that the second coming will make right the injustice around us, not as a way to gloss over the injustice, but as empowerment for our own work to right injustice. This quote highlights that balance well,

The church is not called to be a “change agent”—God is the agent of change. The Lord of the kosmos has already wrought the Great Exchange in his cross and resurrection, and the life of the people of God is sustained by that mighty enterprise.26 The calling of the church is to place itself where God is already at work. The church lives, therefore, without fear, in faith that the cosmic change of regime has already been accomplished.

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Summary: A religious biography of Jimmy Carter focused on his progressive Evangelicalism and the rise of the religious right.

I have begun to pay more attention to Jimmy Carter since I moved to Georgia 15 years ago. I was able to go to one of the quarterly report meetings of the Carter Center about seven years ago and was duly impressed, not just with the ongoing work of the Carter Center, but with Carter’s sharp takes on current events. The event was a breakfast meeting at 7 AM. It followed an evening conference that Carter had hosted, which did not conclude until 10 PM the previous night. Carter has a murphy bed in his office at the Carter Center, so he would have slept in his office. As part of the question and answer time, Carter cited four different articles from several newspapers that he had read that morning before the breakfast meeting. He had compelling thoughts on questions as diverse as North Korean proliferation, Black Lives Matter organization, protests of police brutality,  environmental issues, and personal practices as a leader.

Part of what is fascinating to me isn’t just Carter’s post Presidental career, but how much of a transitional figure he has been to American politics. As I learned in the book, Carter was the first president born in a hospital. But his family home did not have running water until he was 11 and didn’t have electricity until he was 14. Carter was on the local school board during the integration era after Brown v Board. And he was pressured to join the local White Citizen’s Council, but resisted. He attempted to get his church to accept Black members in the 1960s, but there were only three votes in favor, including his and his wife’s. His church was still segregated when he became President, and the pastor was fired in 1977 for attempting to integrate it. That led to a church split, and for the remaining two years, he alternated between the two churches when attending church at home. He joined the new, integrated church the week after leaving the White House. It is incredible to think that a sitting president, known for his racial activism, was still attending an overtly segregated church.

Jimmy Carter was born in 1924. Which made him was younger than Reagan (1911), who was older than Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon (both born in 1913). George Bush and Jimmy Carter were born the same year, but then George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump were all born in 1946, a generation younger.  The changes in the US since Carter’s birth are significant.

Randall Balmer’s primary thesis in Redeemer is well summarized in this quote from early in the book:

In the simplest terms, the brief recrudescence of progressive evangelicalism in the early to mid-1970s gave way to a conservative backlash, a movement known generically as the Religious Right, a loose coalition of politically conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. The leaders of the Religious Right faulted Carter and his administration for enforcing the antidiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act in evangelical institutions. They criticized his support for human rights abroad and equal rights for women and for gays and lesbians at home. Having joined the ranks of abortion opponents in 1979, the Religious Right castigated Carter for his refusal to outlaw abortion, despite Carter’s long-standing opposition to abortion and his efforts to limit its incidence. By the time of the 1980 presidential election, evangelical voters overwhelmingly abandoned Carter and threw their support to Reagan, the candidate who, with his faltering grasp of the essentials of evangelical theology and his episodic church attendance, had perhaps the most tenuous claim on the label evangelical.

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Summary: An ethnographic study of an interracial church with context from national church research. 

A friend of mine recommended The Elusive Dream a year or so ago, and since then, I have listened to several interviews with Dr. Korie Edwards as well as most of her podcasts from this year. This allowed me to be familiar with the rough outline and look forward to reading the book. The Elusive Dream is an adaptation of Dr. Edwards’ dissertation. A second edition of the book came out in Oct 2021, but the copy I read was the first edition from 2008.

The Elusive Dream is an ethnographic study of an interracial church at its heart. Most interracial churches are white-led (70% according to recent research by Michael Emerson), and most multiethnic churches (where no racial/ethnic group has more than 80% of the congregation) are still majority white. Dr. Edwards chose a church to study that was Black-led, not a recent church plant, and when she started her research, was still majority white. This means that even among multiethnic/interracial churches (which are 16% of congregations according to Emerson’s research above), Edwards chose a church that was unusual. But during the years of her study, the congregation shifted from majority white to majority Black. That shift is central to the reality of interracial churches. Even with Black leadership, and especially with white leadership, interracial churches tend to center white cultural expressions of church.

As discussed in Myth of Colorblind Christians, many churches in the US have focused on church growth through the Homononous Unit Principle, a concept that advocates churches orient around a single cultural expression for the purpose of better evangelizing people of that culture.  That principle still has some influence in interracial and multiethnic churches because many of these churches tend to not have diverse representations of class, education, or culture, even if they are racially or ethnically diverse. This is how Dr. Edwards describes it early in the book:

However, as I continued to visit interracial churches across the country, I noticed a pattern. Nearly all of the churches, regardless of their specific racial compositions, reminded me of the predominantly white churches I had visited. Generally, the churches were racially diverse at all levels. Whites and racial minorities were in the pews and in leadership. There were sometimes cultural practices and markers that represented racial minorities in these congregations, such as a gospel music selection, a display of flags from various countries around the world, or services translated into Spanish. Yet the diversity did not seem to affect the core culture and practices of the religious organizations. That is, the style of preaching, music, length of services, structure of services, dress codes, political and community activities, missionary interests, and theological emphases tended to be more consistent with those of the predominantly white churches I had observed. These churches exhibited many of the practices and beliefs common to white churches within their same religious affiliation, only with a few additional “ethnic” practices or markers. It was like adding rainbow sprinkles to a dish of ice cream. In the end, you still have a dish of ice cream, only with a little extra color and sweetness.

One of the most important things to state clearly is that segregation of churches was the result historically of white racism. Churches were generally integrated prior to the Civil War, although they were white-controlled. After the Civil War, Black congregants were no longer required to submit to white leadership and began to form new Black-led congregations to fully express their Christian faith. According to Edwards by 1890, it is estimated that 90 percent of Black Christians attended a Black-led congregation. Again, this is not because Black Christians were resistant to worshiping with Christians of other races, but because they were segregated within other churches or excluded from churches completely.

Elusive Dream refers to the dream that Martin Luther King Jr spoke about in his famous speech. That dream remains elusive not just because of differences in worship styles, although there are differences in aggregate between racial groups as a result of historic segregation of worship. That dream remains elusive because culturally, white Christians as the demographically and culturally dominant group within the US leave congregations when the worship and church activities as a whole do not center white comfort.

As part of the ethnography, there is a detail of two white pastors leaving the church relatively close together and the controversy over hiring new associates. Several white families left when the two white pastors left. Additional families left when there was an attempt to hire a Black associate pastor. But most importantly, it appears that white families tended to leave the church when their children hit teen or pre-teen ages. Some white families that were interviewed after leaving left the church preemptively because so many other families left when their children became teens.

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Summary: A follow-up memoir-ish book about what it is like to shift from dealing with the active grief of a cancer diagnosis to an ongoing chronic illness that may at any time be fatal. 

Kate Bowler’s earlier book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I Loved, deserves all the praise it has recieved. I had followed her podcast and story and was aware of her earlier academic book on the history of the American prosperity gospel (I bought it nearly four years ago, but I still haven’t read it yet). I read Everything Happens for a Reason in December 2018. It is such a helpful book for those of us that are around grief and death and illness but are not the one who is the immediate subject of the illness or grief. It details the cliché unhelpful advice that we are so often tempted to give. Or as Adam McHugh says in The Listening Life,

“When we try to help someone in pain, we often end up saying or doing things, subconsciously, to assuage our own anxiety. Let’s be honest: we often want others to be okay so we can feel okay. We want them to feel better and move on so our lives can return to normal. We try to control the conversation as a way of compensating for our anxiety. Our approach to people in pain can amount to self-therapy.”

In the midst of a global pandemic where many people have died, and many others have ongoing illness or harm from the economic or other ramifications of the pandemic, it is important to remember the main message of trying to put a neat Christian bow on suffering and pain. No Cure for Being Human is a follow-up to that. At some point, if you do not die, you have to go back to living life again, albeit often differently. Life feels differently because of the trauma or illness or whatever it is, but others have not had the same experience, and their world has not shifted.

I know I have had experiences when I wanted the whole world to stop because my world changed, 9/11, my father-in-law passing away, the start of covid, even minor things like being on vacation. But we are not the center of the world, and other people’s worlds continue, even if ours has shifted.

Our world is not really designed for human weakness and imperfection. Just-in-time scheduling ensures that if you stop, your work keeps going. If you get sick, bills still have to be paid, kids still have to get fed, and trash still has to be taken out. Kate Bowler may have had stage four cancer that almost no one survives from with debilitating treatments and huge bills and impacts to her life and the lives of those around her, but how does she keep going? Does she keep writing, not just these books, but her academic work as well (spoiler, she did keep writing and published this academic history of Christian Women celebrities in the midst of her cancer.)

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