Book Reviews

Summary: A relevant history of a theological reform movement that became political.

Every once in a while, I come across history revealing areas where I did not realize I had a big hole, but once identified, many connections get made. I have read a number of English history books, but once I read Hot Protestants, I realized that they all seemed to stop around Elizabeth or James and not pick up again until George III. I had never read a book on the English Revolution and did not realize where that was in the timeline.

Hot Protestants is a history of Puritanism, a revival movement within the Church of England. Part of what struck me was how explicitly Puritans understood England to have a similar covenant as ancient Israel had with God and how that theological commitment led to many of their social and political commitments.

“Fasting was a public responsibility as well as a private one. It was widely accepted that a Christian country like England was a successor to ancient Israel. Just as Israel had the true church before the Jews rejected Jesus, England had God’s true church, thanks to the Reformation. Like Israel, England was in a covenant with God, and like Israel, it would be blessed or punished to the extent that it followed or defied God’s law. Therefore, when it strayed, it needed to collectively implore God’s forgiveness, just as the ancient Jews had done. The Church of England ordered public fasts when faced with signs of God’s wrath—plague, famine, war, and the like.34 Church of England fasts, however, were called too infrequently to satisfy puritans, and unless undertaken in a puritan manner, they were too formal and short to generate and express the humiliation and repentance that a jealous God expected. Puritan ministers asserted the dubiously legal right to call public fasts on their own. Zealous Protestants would travel 10 or 20 miles for a puritan fast, which could easily last an entire day between the many long prayers and sermons from the ministers present.” (p35)

Part of what kept coming up in my mind as I read Hot Protestants is that current advocates of Christian Nationalism seem to have a very similar theology and practice. Puritans understood their role as not only revivalists but also social reformers. Those social reforms were not simply to improve society but to enforce social norms to fulfill the covenant with God. Magistrates had wide latitude to enforce religious laws that either had not existed or had not been legally enforced. The Church of England restricted ordination and the role of revival preaching, but those restrictions chafed against people (both men and women) who felt the call of God. England did not have legal freedom or religious consciousness as the United States does, and because of covenantal thinking, religious and civil legal violations became intertwined.

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Summary: Essays exploring the role of hermeneutics and theology for the Christian life.

I am the kind of person who picks up an audiobook of theology because I have a full day of work to do in my yard, and I need something to keep me motivated. Theologizin’ Bigger is exactly what I needed to keep me going.

There are a lot of books that I will listen to while working and then I will get the broad overview and decide if they are worth coming back to more slowly in print later. This is a book that I think is worth revisiting in print later, not because it is hard to understand but because it is well-written and deserves careful reading.

There are 17 chapters split into four sections, and I don’t know which is my favorite. I spent a lot of time grappling with hermeneutics (how we understand the role and message of the Bible) about 10 or so years ago. I went to seminary in my early 20s. I am glad I did because it was easier to do grad school when I was young, but there are questions that I didn’t have in my early 20s because I did not have the life experience yet. For me the role of scripture was a question for my late 30s. I was aware of a number of technical issues around the Bible and biblical interpretation, but it took me longer to see more bad uses to really start grappling with the ways that the methods of our bible reading were a real part of the problem of Christianity. The chapters of on the bible may seem simple, but they are not simplistic.

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Summary: An exploration of how Whiteness (the belief in white racial superiority) functions as a type of religion in the Durkheimian sense. 

I have been waiting to read this book for about four years now, ever since I heard that Michael Emerson was working on follow-up research to his Divided by Faith book. I read the Beyond Diversity report by Barna about some of the early research. And I have widely recommended this video where Michael Emerson introduces his Religion of Whiteness concept. And while it is now dated, I still very much recommend his book, co-authored with Christian Smith, Divided by Faith, because its use of the White Evangelical toolkit as a model to describe the cultural tools of handling race as White Evangelicals has been so influential to how many have spoken about Evangelicals and Race in the 25 years since the research for that book was done.

To understand the book, you need to understand both what is meant by Whiteness and what is meant by Religion. This is a good summary of what they mean by Whiteness:

And for religion, Emerson and Bracey are using Emile Durkheim’s understanding of religion. They quote Durkheim’s definition of religion:

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Summary: A series of essays exploring what it means to be Christian, White, and Southern in the context of the racial realities as they are.

Racism isn’t solely a Southern phenomenon, but there are some aspects to the White Southern Christian culture, and it makes sense to look at it from that perspective. I have read a lot of history and theology regarding racial realities in the United States. I have not grown up in the South, but I have lived just outside Atlanta for nearly 20 years. Because I have been here for a while, but I have not grown up here, I am both an outsider and an inside observer. I very much have witnessed quite overt racism, and the racial innocence that is well described in Know Your Place.

I am going to have three brief illustrations about racial innocence that influenced my reading of Know Your Place. About 5-6 years ago, the church I was a member of had a series of midweek meetings about race and Christianity. The meetings had a large group and small group component. My small group was facilitated by a Black pastor (not from our church). The small group was about 15 people, and as we opened the first session, we went around and introduced ourselves. One of the men introduced himself and concluded, “I was born and grew up and spent my whole life in the Atlanta area, and I do not believe that I have ever witnessed something I would call racist.” I believe that he was roughly the same age as my mother-in-law, who also grew up here; her education was segregated until her senior year of high school.

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Summary: A brief introduction to Orthodox Christianity.

I have said many times that as much as the Very Short Introduction series is uneven, I keep returning to it because it serves a helpful niche. These are books that are about 100-125 pages, usually with good bibliographies, that give someone without much background an introduction to the important aspects of a topic. I read at least 3 or 4 a year, especially when I can find them at my library on Audible’s lending library (Premium Plus catalog). This one was free for me to listen to with my Audible membership.

The book was divided into three main parts. The first was Christian history, focusing on Nicaea to the spread of Orthodoxy into Russia. The second was about Orthodoxy’s theological and liturgical development. The third focused on what made Orthodoxy different from Roman Catholicism. There was a concluding section about modern challenges and developments within Orthodoxy.

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Summary: A troubled childhood recounted. (A retelling of David Copperfield)

One of my habits (sometimes bad and sometimes good) is to avoid reading about fiction books before I read them. Once I know an author, I would rather experience a book without any background. There are times when this is a great strategy. And there are times when I somewhat regret the strategy. In this case, I was utterly unaware that Demon Copperhead was a loose retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Because I have not read David Copperfield, I don’t know what would have been different had I known, but I did not know. I later read the Wikipedia summary of David Copperfield and can see the many parallels, and I think that made sense of a few threads of the story that I was confused about.

I have read most of Barbara Kingsolvers’ books at least once. I enjoy her writing and appreciate its incisive social commentary. And because of my history with her work, it was unsurprising that Demon Copperfield was set in southwestern Virginia. Several of her books are set in rural Appalachia, and many of them grapple with the social realities of that area.

I read several reviews afterward, and one reviewer said the social commentary at the end of many chapters was a feature of Dickens’ writing, not just Kingsolvers’. Many chapters in Demon Copperhead tell an aspect of the main character’s life (his real name is Damon, but everyone calls him Demon from a very young age), but will conclude the chapter with a reflection on one social reality or another. For instance, there is a discussion about the underfunding of Child Services and how even those who want to do good by working there are often so underfunded and overworked that their efforts are largely futile. The adult Demon who is narrating, reflects on how that underfunding reflects on the values of our society.

I listened to this on audiobook from the library but carefully copied out the following quote because the social commentary is clear-eyed, even if a bit cynical. Demon is talking about the ways that we believe a false narrative about people’s ability to work their way out of bad situations. So he refers to himself in the third person about why things did not go better for him.

“This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich, or smart, or Christian, non-using kind of mother.”

The reality is that Demon was born to a teenage single mother who had grown up (and been abused in) foster care. His father died in an accident a few months before he was born that his mother would never talk about. Demon’s mom tried to be a good mom, but was poor and did not grow up with the skills to raise a child well. She was a high school dropout in a poor rural community with few options. (Some spoilers are below, but I will try to limit them as much as I can.)

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Summary: A classic coming-of-age novel about two Jewish teens (one Orthodox, one Hasidic) who meet while playing against one another in baseball and become friends.

There are so many classic novels that I have not read. So many times I read one and wonder why I have not read it previously. No one can read everything, so I have to keep slowly working through the many classic novels I have picked up over time.

There is a reason this is such a beloved novel. It is well-written, and like I mentioned with Esau McCaulley’s memoir, its particularity makes it universal. Most readers are not either Hasidic or Orthodox Jews. And readers today did not grow up in WWII, or the immediate postwar era where the Holocaust was discussed and the potential nation of Israel was debated.

But while the details are different, the potential to follow our own path or follow the expectations of those around us is common. The cultural differences between two different types of Jewish experiences can help illustrate how different experiences between seemingly similar groups work. The closer you are to the inside, the more those differences seem to matter.

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