Book Reviews

Summary: An introduction to ethics.

I have been on a slow exploration of discernment for several years now and I am at the point where I want to return to ethics as a contribution to how we think about discernment. One of the problems of some understandings of discernment is that it reduces discernment to purely divine intervention of information or understanding. And while I want to retain the divine as component of discernment, I also think that any true development of capacity around discernment also has to include development in areas of decision-making,  ethics, conflict resolution and listening. Those are all human skills that can be developed in addition to the necessary relational/mystical connection go God.

I have dabbled with two other ethics books in the last two years, After Virtue and A Very Short Introduction to Ethics. I thought After Virtue was very helpful to my project and I intend to pick up two other Alasdair MacIntyre books at some point over the next year or so. I thought the Introduction to Ethics was less helpful. Arthur Holmes’ book on Ethics was more helpful than the Very Short Intro edition, but it was still in that similar mode of introducing a very large idea and giving some illustrations and moving on. Introduction books serve a very real purpose but they have limits when you want a more thorough overview.

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Summary: “…the truth that God is love lies at the heart of all divine revelation.”

I am often reluctant to write about books where I know the authors. It is not because the books are not good, they often are very good. But sometimes it hard to separate the book from the larger lifework of the person that you know outside of just the book.

I didn’t meet John Armstrong until about 15 years ago. We had lots of mutual friends because we were both in the Chicago area and were connected to Wheaton College. But it wasn’t until I moved to suburban Atlanta that we actually met during an ecumenical meeting here that John hosted and then another conference on friendship in Chicago. We have kept in connect and I try to participate as much as possible in The Initiative, an ecumenical group that grew out of John’s earlier work.

I think in many ways The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is a natural outgrowth of John Armstrong’s story and his focus on Missional-Ecumenism. Part of what John Armstrong is doing in the The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is narrating his story of how his interaction with both God and other christians moved him from a more closed faith to a more open faith that both recognizes the contributions of other streams of Christianity and recognizes the importance of cooperation and understanding between those steams to become the whole Church.

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is not a memoir, but he does use his story to illustrate his point. I read Byron Borger‘s review in his column at Hearts and Minds books and I think that Borger gets it right that The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is interested in not just whether God is love is a true statement, but what we do with the reality of God’s love in understanding our theology and our view of the transformation of the Christian’s life. I also agree with Borger’s point that part of the value of Armstrong’s book is that it introduces the reader to the breadth of Christian theology. This is quite quote from Borger:

Love is the key, and he uses everyone from the most dense Orthodox thinkers to dear Max Lucado to sophisticated solid writers like Fleming Rutledge to flesh this out, to underscore its centrality to our faith. He draws on so many great writers that this book actually serves as an introduction to some of the finest thinkers in church history — from the ancient fathers to Kallistos Ware to Frederick Buechner to Karl Rahner to Brad Jersak.

(I have picked up three books that were mentioned or cited so far.)

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Summary: An exploration of Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court in 1967 as way to both give a biography and context to Marshall’s work and to explore the ways that that hearing was a preview of later Supreme Court nomination fights.

I picked Showdown up because (it was on sale and) I have not previously read anything specifically about either Thurgood Marshall or Brown v Board. I have read many civil rights era histories that mention both, but none that were explicitly about just those subjects. I have been reminded several times recently about how our story of the civil rights movement is framed as Brown v Board, Emmitt Till, Rosa Parks, Birmingham, March on Washington, 1964 Civil Rights Bill, assignation of MLK Jr and the 1968 civil rights bills as if they were all self contained.

Thurgood Marshall graduated from law school in 1933 in just a few years he was working for NAACP and then also joined the board of directors of the ACLU in 1939. It is Brown v Board that he is most well known for, but as Showdown explains, there was a significant number of cases that Marshall and others argued that laid the groundwork for Brown. The work to end white-only primary systems across the country took 20 years and three Supreme Court decisions. Each one widen the crack just a bit more. The ending of the white only primary system and then the various one person, one vote decisions that ended Georgia’s county unit system and requiring both regular redistricting and relatively equal size districts as well as the 1965 Voting Rights acts were decades in the making and none of those brought about a perfect democracy, but each slowly changed political realities.

Showdown is quite meandering, but that is part of the point because the context of Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court has wide context. Marshall was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1961, but that took 8 months from nomination until approval. In 1965 he was nominated and quickly approved as the US Solicitor General. But it was the nearly 4 months to approve Marshall to the Supreme Court that is the main focus of the book.

As Solicitar General Marshall argued to end the poll tax, Miranda, and several cases defending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as other cases. It was more these cases than his earlier civil rights work that he was questioned about in his nomination. Marshall was not directly involved with the Loving case, but the decision was handed down during the nomination process. Marshall himself married a Filipino woman in 1955, Cecilia Suyat Marshall, after the death of his first wife. Being questioned about the constitutionality of interracial marriage, while being in an interracial marriage with his wife sitting right behind him was a detail that really does matter to the context of that nomination process. As much as I read civil rights history and know that we have not moved as far could be hoped, I also know that there have been changes.

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Summary: The story of four women and their search for God and community. 

Good Christian fiction is hard. I am a very skeptical Christian fiction reader. I don’t like books that are too preachy, or that are not realistic, or that wrap things up too nicely at the end. I don’t like books like that because as much as fiction can be fantasy, good Christian fiction should be presenting a realistic picture of faith.

Generally I like my fiction to be much more subtle than this series is. But I honestly don’t know how you would write a subtle story of spiritual formation. And so I really do recommend this series because I think it presents a fairly realistic view of spiritual formation. As I have said before, the main problem of the book is that the growth is too compressed. It is not that people do not have breakthroughs and do a significant amount of growth in a short period of time. But those breakthroughs are the result of a much longer period of preparation for growth.

This series of four books covers roughly a year of time. Four different women, a young newly married PhD student, a stay at home mom in a bad marriage, a widow in her 50s and a (single) pastor in her 40s on a sabbatical, met at a class about spiritual formation in the early fall. This fourth book covers spring through early summer. A lot has happened and even mentioning the plot points will be spoilers for the early books.

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Summary: An alternate history of the midwest in the 1920s.

This is the third novel of Francis Spufford that I have read. They have all been historical fiction of one sort or another. Golden Hill was set in 1746 New York City and has a plot twist at the very end that really made the book. It was well written and tightly plotted, but that main twist and some other minor plots twists moved the book from good to excellent. Light Perpetual is also an alternative history that follows a group of children who were killed by a German rocket in WWII as if they had not died. My only real complaint about the book is that the book could have been written as a straight novel without the alternate history. I bring that up because Cahokia Jazz does not have that problem.

Cahokia Jazz is set in the 1920s. The alternative history is not really explained well, but as I explored other reviews, I discovered that the central change is that a less virulent form of small pox was introduced by early Spanish explorers and that instead of approximately 90% of Native Americans at the time dying from European diseases, a much smaller percentage died. The result is that by the 1920s, instead of a minuscule Native American population, there is really three cultural groupings in this midwestern city that is in roughly the same area as St Louis. The book opens with a note telling the reader that there are three racial/ethnic groups in the book and the book uses the local terms to describe them. They are, takouma (Native Americans), takata (European Americans), and taklousa (African Americans). I knew in my head the terms and I knew by the story which group was which in terms of cultural power and significance, but I think his renaming these racial/ethnic terms was a savvy way to disguise some of the plot points.

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Summary: Despite its age, this is still one of the best biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bethge was one of Bonhoeffer’s students at Finkenwalde, and became his closest friend and he was the one responsible for compiling Letters and Papers from Prison, the book that made Bonhoeffer a widely known theologian. 

It took me almost two months to finish, but Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, despite being over 50 years old, is still well worth reading. I read the first edition, published in English in 1970 because that was the edition my library had. But I would recommend picking up the 2000 edition from Fortress Press because the first edition was slightly abridged at only 867 pages, compared to 1068 pages in the revised edition.

If you are new to Bonhoeffer, I think Charles Marsh’s biography is the best introduction, but Bethge’s is the most complete. That makes sense because it is the longest by quite a bit. Marsh’s biography is 528 pages, Metaxes biography (which I do not recommend) is 640 pages, Schlingensiepen’s biography is 470. It isn’t just that this biography is longer, although that is part of it, but this biography is just more comprehensive of areas that the others just do not get to.

Bethge was friend and student of Bonhoeffer’s. He was conscripted into the German army for a time, and later was also imprisoned because of his connection to the Bonhoeffer family. (He married Bonhoeffer’s niece and her father was part of the resistance movement that Bonhoeffer was also connected to.) I think that Marsh handles Bonhoeffer’s childhood and early development better than Bethge, but especially from 1932 on, Bethge is much more detailed, and much more focused on the way that German church’s response to Hitler influenced Bonhoeffer’s life. Other biographies hit the major developments and life events, but Bethge talks about ways church politics and especially the politics of the global ecumenical movement worked in a level of detail and nuance that was helpful to me to understand the particulars. But I also think that level of detail is probably too much for those who are new to Bonhoeffer.

My rough evaluation of a biography is that if a biography makes me want to read more by or about a figure, then it is doing its job. After finishing Bethge’s biography, I am going to read a biography of Bethge and a biography of Bishop Bell that I have. I also want to read the complete Letters and Papers from Prison. I have read portions, but not all. And the edition that I have is 614 pages compared to the earlier editions that were around 400 pages. There is the Bonhoeffer’s Works edition that is 776 pages (but I think that is supplementary material not additional main content.)

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Summary: Third in the series, Barefoot starts immediately after Two Steps Forward.

The four friends continue to discover more about themselves and their relationship with others and God as the series progresses.

I accidentally found out a significant plot point of Barefoot as I was trying to figure out the right order of the books, so I knew going in what was going to happen. I am not going to reveal that here, but I will say, don’t read about book four (An Extra Mile) before you finish Barefoot or you will find that spoiler as well.

I stayed up way past my bedtime finishing Barefoot up. I am not completely sure why I did that because I knew what was going to happen. But I wanted the story to get there.

In many ways, Barefoot moved the broader story along, but did not resolve any of the storylines so it is hard to talk about anything new happening in the series. Each of the characters continued along the path that they were going. Each of the characters discovered things about themselves that the reader was well aware of, but the characters hadn’t quite put together on their own. (One of the reasons that I am such a fan of spiritual direction is that it is easy for you as an individual to be blind to a situation that an outside observer can see clearly. And this series illustrates how that works well.)

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Summary: A stand alone sci-fi novel set in the same universe as the Ancillary series, multiple people come together by change to grapple with belonging. 

As I have said many times, I like sci-fi because it is “about something.” The ideas don’t have to hit you over the head, it is often better if they don’t, but sci-fi is particularly helpful at looking at the ways that culture and perspective shape our world.

Translation State is set in the same world as the Ancillary series, but it is completely stand alone. You don’t have to have read the other books, but you will have insight into the cultures of the different groups and the politics of the universe if you have read the earlier series.

This is a book that can be thought to be about several things simultaneously in a way that makes it not clearly about any one thing in particular. One language does not have gender, so our conception of gender is not present in that language. Other alien species have different ways of procreation which has implications for how their society is set up. There are also different perspectives on what it means to be an individual. In the case of AI machines that have ancillaries, there is not “an individual” but a part of a whole.

I don’t want to give away plot point more than necessary because this is one of those books where the reader isn’t supposed to understand what is going on until midway through the book then the different threads start to come together. There are a mix of human and non-human characters who for one reason or another do not fit in with expectations. It is pretty easy to read rugged individualism into this framing, and that isn’t entire wrong, but there is also a reading about sexual or other minorities who are pressed into behavior as if they were part of the majority group. In the end, it is the difference that saves the day, as I not surprising.

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Summary: Picking up right where Sensible Shoes left off, the four friends continue to find their way in the world and to find God more clearly. 

Sensible Shoes is one of those series that is really one long story broken up into different books because no one would buy a 1500 or so odd page book. The second book starts right after the first book. There is a clear conclusion, but it also was clear that the story would keep moving at the end of the first book.

As I said in my post on Sensible Shoes, one of the problems of writing about spiritual formation is that it is incredibly slow and the problem of writing about it is that it either seems magically fast or boringly slow. Part of what Brown is doing here is to make sure that the reader understands that this is not a one way path toward growth.

But I do think that one of the other problems here is that spiritual growth is inherently dependent upon discernment because discernment is part of how we understand the work of the spirit in our lives. And in my estimation, discernment can bring us to different conclusion because we are different people. And I think at least some of the discernment that happens in these books is discernment I would question. It may be that one particular case of discernment that I question was a red herring where the characters didn’t act as well as she should have in the situation but over time did come to a place of forgiveness toward another character.

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Summary: An exploration of the Catholic Church and its history and future around racial justice. 

Some books on Catholic thought are about the universal (catholic) church but written from the perspective of a Catholic thinking. While other books on Catholic thought are particularly about what it means to be Catholic in particular. This is the latter not the former. As a non-Catholic reading it, there are still helpful ideas and considerations that can be used outside of the Catholic Church. The chapter on culture is particularly helpful in part because the Catholic Church is so universal that it (or at least parts of it) have thought deeply about how culture and faith work together.

Other parts of the book, history and the discussion of what it means to be a Black Catholic theologian in the US, are more particular and those parts are not as immediately applicable for those who are not Catholic (or Black). But there is still value in understanding particularity. Particularity, when you can understand it allow you to see how to think and act, or at least how others have attempted to think and act, and then to see if those process of thinking and acting can be helpful for you in a different context.

This is also a book written at a particular time, 2010. That time was very particular. Obama had been elected president. And the very public deaths of Black people (mostly men) that eventually gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement had not started. Massingale was writing with tempered hope. He was well aware that the idealism of many who thought we were in a “post-racial” world was not true. But he also was aware that there had been improvements within his lifetime both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Fifteen years later, and not only Benedict, and Francis, have passed away, but the American Catholic Church is in an even deeper sense of division as a result of the continued fall out of the abuse crisis, the politics of Trump, the strain theologically between reformers and traditionalists and other issues. However, I am not sure that much of the discussion in the book is really significantly different.

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