Book Reviews

Summary: A memoir about a man who became a pastor because of calling. 

I do not really know Will Willimon except through his book with Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens, and I read that nearly 30 years ago as a freshman in college. I really did not know what I was getting into, but I needed a change in pace and I tend to appreciate memoirs or elder preachers.

Willimon is funny. He knows he is funny and he likes to use self-depreciation humor, not just for effect, but also theologically. At the start of the book he has these two quotes

My story is a comedy, as opposed to a tragedy, not because my life is funny but because my life is having a happy ending due to God’s gracious choice to be God for us and choosing even the likes of me to be for God.

and

You can tell that Kathleen Norris is a Christian. As she wrote her memoir, she repeatedly reminded herself, “œYou’re not that big of a deal. The call is the big deal.” If my memoir makes me my life’s chief protagonist, me, the big deal, I’m the most miserable of writers. More interesting than my life are the hijinks of a vocative God who explains my life.

There is some real similarity between Hauerwas and Willimon in tone and history. Both seem to like to be cantankerous, getting riled up about things that both are really important and over things that seem odd to be riled up about to me. But because they are so serious about both their faith and their understanding of human and divine grace, there is a lot of inbuilt willingness on my part to allow for a bit of ‘grumpy old man’-ing.

Willimon was a pastor, the chaplain at Duke for 20 years and then a United Methodist Bishop. He seems to live as he preaches. And hold himself to even higher standards than he holds others. Willimon does keep others the center of the story. He grew up with an absent father (often in jail) and was seeking father figures. When he was young and in a confirmation class at church, he was supposed to get a picture taken with the other kids and the pastor. A woman organizing the picture chastised him for not having a tie. But the pastor gave a sense of grace.

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Summary: MLK’s last book. It is frequently quoted, but I wonder how much it is read.

It is probably trite to comment about how Martin Luther King Jr is commonly sanitized and made safe. Books like Radical King were designed to break him out of the confines of his dream. Books like  Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought are trying to make King useful for our current time by looking at him more holistically and comparing him to Bonhoeffer and others to make him more intelligible. But it is still helpful to read King directly.

The Radical King reprinted a whole chapter from Where Do We Go From Here, which I had previously read. And there is an enormous number of quotes here that are commonly shared. But there is much here that also is not widely shared. King had a unique vision. He was anti-war, radically anti-violence, for massive social changes, not just around race, economics, and social cohesion. His radicalness was not despite his faith and prior experience but because of it. He became more radical not because of his earlier successes but because of what many perceived as a massive success he saw as scratching the surface.

It is not that the Birmingham bus boycott, the Selma marches, or the March on Washington were unimportant; those brought about the ability for people to have integrated transportation, voting rights, and national attention on segregation. But they did not end the cultural belief in the superiority of white skin and culture. They did not solve the problems of massive poverty and inequality. They did not address the issues of empire and colonialism.

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Summary: Helpful, practical look at what the prayer of examen is, and its structure. 

I think I was first introduced to the idea of the Prayer of Examen by Richard Foster about 12 or so years ago in his book Prayer. Foster’s chapter on the Examen is about five pages and cannot go into the detail that an entire book does. I have attempted to do the prayer of examen over the years, but at least in Gallagher’s presentation, I have always been missing part of the prayer.

Early in the book Gallagher has a summary of the prayer:

Transition: I become aware of the love with which God looks upon me as I begin this examen.

Step One: Gratitude. I note the gifts that God’s love has given me this day, and I give thanks to God for them.

Step Two: Petition. I ask God for an insight and a strength that will make this examen a work of grace, fruitful beyond my human capacity alone.

Step Three: Review. With my God, I review the day. I look for the stirrings in my heart and the thoughts that God has given me this day. I look also for those that have not been of God. I review my choices in response to both, and throughout the day in general.

Step Four: Forgiveness. I ask for the healing touch of the forgiving God who, with love and respect for me, removes my heart’s burdens.

Step Five: Renewal. I look to the following day and, with God, plan concretely how to live it in accord with God’s loving desire for my life.

Transition: Aware of God’s presence with me, I prayerfully conclude the examen.

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Summary: A 12 part video study based on the original book.

I continue to think that The Color of Compromise is an excellent short introduction to the role of the church in historic racism in the US. I read the book originally last year.

I am not going to address the content here but only talk about the format. There are now several options. The book has paper, kindle (ebook) and audiobook versions. There is also an audio-only version of the video study and the video study on either DVD or digital format.

The video study is excellent. There are 12 sessions of approximately 20 minutes each. That is a large number of sessions for a normal small group (I think that 4 to 6 is usually ideal if meeting weekly or else people get distracted.) Because the sessions are about 20 minutes, you can watch more than one in a session. But to give adequate discussion time, you will probably want to schedule at least an equal amount of discussion as watching.

I have not gone back to re-read the book, but it felt to me like there were a few sections of the video study were explanations were tightened up just a bit or were a little clearer than in the book. That may have been the nature of watching a video, or just part of the editing process. There is detail that is not explored in the video that is in the book, but I do think that you can watch the video without reading the book and get the main points without any difficulty.

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Summary: Second, in what is probably a trilogy of memoirs, roughly covering 1963 to 1986. 

It has been almost exactly nine years since I read, and loved, Julie Andrews’ first memoir Home. That memoir of her early years in vaudeville and her time in the theater and the breakout roles on Broadway was well told and extremely well narrated. This memoir, Home Work, picks up with the filming of Mary Poppins, right where the first memoir left off.

I mostly listened to Home Work, with some occasional reading on kindle (I bought both on sale). The production of this audiobook did not use any music as the first one did, but that makes sense because the period is covering an era when Julie Andrews was mostly acting in film and then singing in variety shows or specials on TV.

The weakness of Home Work is an expanded version of the problems of Home, the detail. I am not sure how to avoid the issue as a writer. As a reader, especially as a reader that has not seen any of her movies between Sound of Music and Princess Diaries, the details about shooting and costars was not why I picked up the book. I am sure others are more interested in that portion of the book.

What was engaging about Home and was also present here is her introspection. Mostly she is opening herself up to the world and sharing what her life has been like. The level of drug abuse and alcoholism around her is tragic, with children, siblings, parents, her husband. She shares freely about her struggles of depression as well as the depression of her husband and many others. There are more than a few suicide attempts by those around her.

Home Work is a story of ‘more money, more problems’. Her first marriage ended essentially because both she and her husband were never together. After all, they were pursuing separate careers in the film world. She had long stints filming around the world, and he had long jobs designing films (so that even when they were working on the same movies, they were not working at the same time). Later, when she married her second husband, Blake Edwards, a director, and mostly working together on movies, they bought houses and boats and spent money taking care of dependent relatives so that they felt compelled to keep working. It was a bitter cycle; they had to work to pay for their lifestyle, but also had to pay for assistants and nannies and people to take care of their homes because they were working all the time.

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Summary: We are all addicted to something; only grace can set us free.

Addition and Grace is not a book I would have picked up on my own. It was assigned for my Spiritual Direction and Psychology class, and it was a book I argued with the whole way through. I have 43 highlights and several comments that you can peruse on my Goodreads page to get a sense of what I was arguing with.

My main argument is with Mays’ shifting understanding of addition. At times he means what we traditionally think of as addiction, a psychological and/or physical need that negatively impacts the people around us or our ability to interact in the world. At times he used addiction as a metaphor for sin. His most explicit definition is:

Addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing, of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction. As I have indicated, attachment of desire is the underlying process that results in addictive behavior.

But he does not seem to limit himself to just that definition. Quite often, these flexible definitions do help give insight into our human lives.

…no addiction is good; no attachment is beneficial. To be sure, some are more destructive than others; alcoholism cannot be compared with chocolate addiction in degrees of destructiveness, and fear of spiders pales in comparison to racial bigotry. But if we accept that there are differences in the degree of tragedy imposed upon us by our addictions, we must also recognize what they have in common: they impede human freedom and diminish the human spirit.

But at other times addition seems to mean everything in a way that becomes unhelpful. For instance, there appears to be no room for obligation. (I do not think it is accurate to describe responsibility or obligation as slavery or addition.)

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Summary: To understand Cone’s theology, you need to understand Cone and his context.

James H Cone has been a frequent concern in many conservative white Christian circles over the past year. There are several causes for that, but one of the threads that has given rise to the discussion is that Walter Strickland, one of only a handful of Black professors at a Southern Baptist seminary, was quoted by Molly Worthen in an NYT article saying that he assigned James H Cone and found value in interacting with him. That gave rise to calls for Strickland to resign, which prompted this statement.

The controversy continued with the president of the seminary where Strickland works both defending Strickland and calling Cone a heretic and ‘almost certainly not a Christian’ on twitter.  Andre Henry wrote an article about the controversy. It was this background that a friend of a friend asked to discuss Cone. Over this past weekend, I picked up the audiobook and listened to it (having previously read it when it first came out.)

I am not a Cone scholar. I have not read all of his books, although I will probably read all of them eventually (there are not that many). In my lay opinion, I think that people tend to approach Cone wrong. Many people want to jump into early constructive theology, God of the Oppressed or A Black Theology of Liberation. I think that because of his theological method, heavily drawing on his personal and cultural experience, that you need to start with one or both of his memoirs.

Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody was posthumously published. The book was completed and ready for publication when Cone passed away in 2018. His earlier My Soul Looks Back was a mid-career memoir. There is a lot over overlapping material, but they are both worth reading. If you are looking for an order, I would recommend, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Spirituals and the Blues, My Soul Looks Back, Martin & Malcolm & American and then you can move his earlier constructive theology.

I say all of this because Cone developed his theology in response to the culture of the US during the late civil rights era.

When the Detroit rebellion, also known as the “12th Street Riot,” broke out in July of 1967, the turmoil woke me out of my academic world. I could no longer continue quietly teaching white students at Adrian College (Michigan) about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and other European theologians when black people were dying in the streets of Detroit, Newark, and the back roads of Mississippi and Alabama. I had to do something. But I wasn’t a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King Jr., or an artist, like James Baldwin, who was spurred in his writing when he saw the searing image of a black girl, Dorothy Counts, surrounded by hateful whites as she attempted to integrate a white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina (September 1957). I was a theologian, asking: What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?

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Summary: Much of the early church was African. The west has largely forgotten its African character and misremembered the importance and reach of the African church. 

One of the important points here is very similar to the one made in this article about the rise of the Nation of Islam that it has been the misuse of Christianity that has led to African (or African American) rejections of Christianity as a White religion. European Christians, especially post Hegalian, viewed the early church fathers as necessarily being European in character because they were essential to the development of Christianity. This ignores the reality that most of the early church fathers were ethnically and culturally African. Most of them spoke Greek and/or Latin, but that is because those were common trade languages. Today we would not say that Bishop Desmond Tutu was European in character because he speaks and writes in English. And that also ignores those that were not writing in Latin or Gre,ek such as St Anthony, who was illiterate, but the only surviving letters we have from him (that were dictated) were in Coptic.

A point which I had not heard before was that the consular format of the early church councils, which are today the basis of what is and is not considered orthodoxy and heresy, were developed by African Christians for use in Africa before they were used in the broader ecumenical councils.

Where I think that Oden gets into a problem is evaluating modern movements. He is a good theologian and historian but tends to paint modern movements too broadly to be helpful. In his section on ecumenicism, there are people that fit into his critique, but many that do not. And because he is not nuanced enough in that critique (and I want to be clear that this would be very difficult), I suspect there are people that will dismiss the clearer theological and historical work as also suspect.

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