Book Reviews

Summary: Beautiful writing, made better by her distinctive and haunting narration.

There can be no criticism about a book like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, not just because it is the writing is so beautiful, but because it is distinctive and ground breaking.

Angelou was 41 when I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and she had already been a popular singer with albums, an actress and playwright, a director and producer of a documentary, worked directly for both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, lived outside the US for several years and much more. Writing was a later career for Angelou, and she is probably best known today as a poet and writer, but she won a Tony for her acting and three Grammies.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first book of Angelou’s that I have read. It is an autobiography of her early life (until she was 17.) It is not strictly chronological, but story oriented. The stories are mostly in chronological, but there is some jumping around to accommodate different threads of a story. According to Wikipedia, there are at least some who want to label Angelou’s autobiographies as Autobiographical Fiction. After having read Sarah Arthur’s biography of Madeleine L’Engle, I basically assume that many authors are fictionalizing at least parts of their biography both for literary values and to smooth out the story.

I am also not at all surprised that I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has both been widely assigned in high school and college literature classes and the subject of campaigns to ban it. Angelou, frankly and clearly, describes her rape at the age of 8 by her mother’s then boyfriend. And then later describes her own exploration of sex which resulted in pregnancy and the birth of a son, three weeks after she graduated from high school at 17.

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Summary: Tragic, often hard to read, but important reminders that the problem of evil is not easily solved.

The phrase, “˜Everything Happens for a Reason’ along with a dozen or so other “˜phrases of comfort’ need to be permanently removed from every Christians vocabulary. If this was what everyone took away from the reading of this book, that would be a great result. But there is more here. (There is an appendix that lists additional phrases that need to be removed from Christian vocabulary.)

Kate Bowler is a Christian History Professor at Duke. She has specialized in the study of the Prosperity Gospel movement. I am looking forward to reading her book Blessed on the prosperity gospel. But what has brought her to wide readership is this book, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. First it was difficulty with her arms as she was writing her dissertation, then difficulty getting pregnant and carrying to term, then a serious diagnosis of liver cancer.

Because I knew this going in, I have been reluctant to pick up Everything Happens for a Reason. No one really wants to deal with pain. As Bowler says toward the end of the book, ‘I want a world where there is no need for pediatric oncology, UNICEF, military budgets, or suicide rails on the top floors of tall buildings.’ (Kindle Location 1501) Pain, when possible, is ignored.

Fairness is one of the most compelling claims of the American Dream, a vision of success propelled by hard work, determination, and maybe the occasional pair of bootstraps. Wherever I have lived in North America, I have been sold a story about an unlimited horizon and the personal characteristics that are required to waltz toward it. It is the language of entitlements. It is the careful math of deserving, meted out as painstakingly as my sister and I used to inventory and trade our Halloween candy. In this world, I deserve what I get. I earn my keep and keep my share. In a world of fair, nothing clung to can ever slip away. (Kindle Location 160)

Part of what makes Bowler’s story and theological reflections so important is her work in prosperity gospel. Many Christians may explicitly reject prosperity gospel theologically, but practically and implicitly accept it.

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Summary: An introduction to the concepts, critique and future of Critical Race Theory.

Opposition to Critical Race Theory has moved into the forefront of the critique of modern racial justice movement. It was specifically mentioned in the Dallas Statement on Social Justice as one of the aspects of the social justice movement that is incompatible with the gospel. But I suspect that many that are most critical of Critical Race Theory have little familiarity with it.

The first problem is that it is a framework more than a specifically defined approach. The Wikipedia post isn’t a bad summary. Wikipedia cites UCLA School of Public Affairs definition:

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.

But then Wikipedia cites Critical Race Theory: An Introduction and gives twelve themes such as: A critique of liberalism, storytelling focus, revisionist interpretations of civil rights law, intersectionality, bias toward white supremacy, etc to flesh out that simple description from UCLA School of Public Affairs.

Honestly, while I did find Critical Race Theory: An introduction very helpful, I do wish there were a simpler and clearer definition. But what was clear is that universal arguments against Critical Race Theory probably do not understand it fully, or at least are over generalizing.

I actually think that Al Mohler’s argument against critical race theory as a whole, but affirming aspects of it in his discussion about the Dallas Statement was helpful, although I did not agree with Mohler’s overall approach. As I read Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, I can certainly see aspects that I disagree with. But I also see a number of areas that I find very helpful in approach and that support Christian concepts of sin and theology.

The most helpful is the concept of intersectionality. This is often mischaracterized by opponents as trying to add up victimhood points. But as I understand it, intersectionality is simply the concept that different types of oppression work differently, and that when you layer oppressions together, the result is different in kind not just quantity. The classic origin is the intersection of race and gender. Black women working in an office or factory are discriminated against because they are black women. But traditional solutions that address their race or their gender separately may not be effective because the racial solution may be targeted toward Black men and the gender solution may be targeted toward White women and therefore neither address the particular concerns of Black women.

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Summary: A Church that is asleep to injustice and racism is blind to the heart of God. 

Honestly, I do not understand the current movement today within the church that suggests that justice is peripheral and actually against the gospel. The Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel has united many  against it, from Al Mohler to the more traditionally justice oriented progressive Evangelicals.

I did not need to be persuaded that seeking justice is an important of what it means to be the church. There is, certainly, differences in method and strategy. What types of justice that an individual or church seeks after will matter based on calling, geography, demographics, etc. And, of course, the church should not be partisan in its approach to justice (although it will likely be political).

Eric Mason did not need to convince me of the biblical calling toward justice, or of the history of the church being on the wrong side of justice. But I am still glad that I read Woke Church. Woke Church is organized around four themes, ‘Be Aware. Be Willing to Acknowledge. Be Accountable. Be Active.’

Mason walks through awareness and acknowledgement. Blind spots are real. If we are blind to both injustice and how it works, and has work historically, we cannot even start to right injustice. The early historical and biographical sections of the book were strong.

The strongest section of the book for me was the discussion of the prophetic. Mason charges the church with being properly prophetic. He walks through the Old Testament prophets, both how they called the people toward justice and how they were received. Prophetic does not mean unaccountable and it does not separate the concept of prophetic from the proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Done rightly, we are proclaiming the gospel and Lordship of Jesus Christ as part of a prophetic call.

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Summary: Gamache, Myrna and a guy neither of them knows, are called to be executors of a will for someone that none of them knows. 

I am a huge fan of Louise Penny’s Gamache novels. Not all of them are perfect, but 14 books in, three of the five best books in the series are the most recent three books. That is impressive.

Part of what I like about the Gamache books is that they are about things. There is a mystery, The plot revolves around the mystery. But there is more to the books than just the mystery. There are ongoing characters. Those characters are smart, thoughtful, morally complex, flawed and generally likable.

The main theme moral question for the past several books has been around the idea of when it is acceptable to do morally and ethically questionable things, for a greater good. This is spoiler-y if you have not read the previous books, but in the last book, Gamache let drugs into the country so that he could lure in the higher up in the drug organizations and shut them down. He wanted to deal a fatal blow to the whole drug infrastructure. But in the process more drugs came into the country and some communities were harmed. Because of his unauthorized operation (because he was at the same time still smoking out dirty cops and politicians), he was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

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Summary: Classic children’s fantasy. I think probably the best children’s epic fantasy series.

Reading the excellent Gateway Chronicles this year has made me a little nostalgic for the fantasy that I read in my youth, mostly Prydain Chronicles and L’Engle’s Time Quintet. (There is much fantasy that I read in my youth that I have no desire to revisit.)

First I picked up Black Cauldron when it was on sale for Kindle, then I saw that the audiobook for Book of Three was available at my library.

Revisiting Lloyd Alexander I am always struck by how short these books are. When I was reading them as a teen/pre-teen, they did not feel nearly as short.

Taran is a young sheltered early teen. He lives with two men that are the only family he can remember. Dallben, a very old wizard who teaches him and a blacksmith/farmer, Coll, who cares for the the farm he lives on and teaches Taran all of the practical things of life. Because he knows nothing else, he assumes the rest of the world is glorious. He wants to have adventures and glory.

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Takeaway: Lots of classic Lewis here.

I went through a period when I was reading a ton of CS Lewis (either by or about). I looked today and if I counted correctly I have finished 19 of Lewis’ books, many of them multiple times and started but did not finish another 4. But it has been a little while since I read Lewis. Unless I missed something the last books I read about Lewis was the joint biography of the Inklings in Feb 2017. And the last books I read by Lewis was Screwtape Letters in Nov 2016.

I picked up the audiobook of Weight of Glory because it was super cheap and I needed something “˜light’ to off set a lot of other heavy things I have been reading/listening to. That is to say I was probably not as engaged as I should have been. Weight of Glory is the favorite Lewis book of several people I know. It is not that for me. Not because it is bad, but because it is near the end of Lewis’ library for me.

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Summary: The child of human and alien parents must find his own way.

One of my reading goals this year was to finished the final two fiction books that Octavia Butler wrote. In November I am just finishing the first of the two, so I am not sure I will get to the second.

Imago I think is a second tier Butler book. It is not bad. Butler is a good writer and creates intriguing worlds. This is not really complete series. It is set on earth, but an earth that an alien race has captured and rules. The alien world took over the Earth in the midst of a global war. The aliens capture the remaining humans in the world and for hundreds of years kept them in stasis while they were studied and the earth was restored after the war.

In the first book of the trilogy the first humans were awoken and that started a forced breeding program to create new species. The aliens are genetic manipulators that go from world to world collecting gene samples and creating new species, mining and using up the worlds until they are bare hunks of rock and then moving on. Butler at times could be a bit to on the nose with her imagery.

The conflict of the trilogy is about participation of humans in this breeding program and the ways that the new “˜constructs’ impact both the humans and the aliens. The three books are about three different characters, the human mother, her first construct child and then this one about another of her construct children, the first construct that is a genetic manipulator itself. (The genetic manipulators do not have sex or gender, they are the conduit through which the different genders connect for procreation.)

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Summary: Context to the why of Black Liberation Theology.

A few months ago I generally stopped referring to my posts as reviews. I am not really reviewing these books, I am trying to respond to them, give some thoughts and talk about what I have learned. That is especially true for a book like Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian by James H Cone. Almost exactly a year ago I read Cone’s 1985 memoir, My Soul Looks Back. That memoir was a mid-career memoir. And of course there are some overlapping memories and reflections, but it is interesting to me how different they are. The passing of more than 40 years does matter.

I could make this a post of just quotes from Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. I have 20 that you can read on my Goodreads review. But the important part of reading a memoir like this is that it gives context for his other writing. I read his The Cross and the Lynching Tree (which he says was his favorite book) this summer. And I have previously read a couple of his other books. Many reduce Cone to just a “˜liberal theologian’ as if he has nothing to say to most of us. But Cone has much to say to us and reading his story I think matters to how we receive the rest of his work.

Cone was an academic theologian. His dissertation was on Barth. He was strongly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr. As a Black theologian, he felt he had to respond to the civil rights movement, especially after the death of MLK and the rise of urban riots in the US. His question, “What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?”, mattered not just in 1967 but also today.

Where many will disagree with Cone is his adoption of Malcom X’s statement, “œWe are black first and everything else second” and that discussion has continue today. But Cone was not rejecting finding his identity in Christ or was he implicitly condemning Whites and others by embracing his created Blackness. He was, in a not dissimilar way, embracing the concept of Black Lives Matters 50 years early.

Cone was frustrated by his theological training (and I still hear this from many minority theology students today).

The real historical Jesus, whom scholars have been seeking since the eighteenth century, was not white. That much I knew. When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really was, I stopped trusting anything they said. It was ideologically tainted. I began to trust my own black experience as a better source for knowledge about God and Jesus. The black religious experience was less ideologically tainted because blacks were powerless and could not impose their view of Jesus on anybody. (Kindle Location 378)

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Summary: An imperfect prodigal returns home to an imperfect father.

Pretty much any time I hear someone answer the question, who is the best Christian author writing fiction that is not marketed as “˜Christian Fiction’, Marilynne Robinson is usually listed in the top 10. I am glad we have a category called “˜Christian Fiction’. But I mostly do not read it. Not because all of it is bad, but because so much of it is formulaic.

I first read Gilead, the first of this loose trilogy in 2012 and again in 2015. Lila, the third book in the trilogy, I read twice in the space of three months at the end of 2014 and then again in early 2015, just before reading Gilead a second time. I have been reluctant to read Home for a couple reasons. First, it means that I have read all four of Robinson’s books of fiction. And I wanted to have something to look forward to. Second, there were a lot of negative reviews of Home in Audible for the quality of the audiobook. And I have liked Robinson’s books in audio.

But Robinson has hinted that she will publish another book of fiction. And I eventually just borrowed the audiobook from the library so I didn’t have to be disappointed in the audio. In the end I was not disappointed in the audiobook. The narrator was Maggi-Meg Reed, who seems quite familiar.

The three books of the trilogy are told from the perspective of three different people with overlapping timelines and shared events told from different perspectives. I was predisposed to dislike Jack, the subject (but not the narrator) of Home because of the negative impression of John Ames, the subject and narrator of Gilead. Jack is a more sympathetic character in Home, although certainly not innocent.

I am not sure whether this was really the intention, but this felt like a broken retelling of the story of the prodigal son. Rev Boughton, John Ames’ best friend is the father of eight children and near the end of his life. His prodigal son and oldest child, Jack, has been gone for 20 years, but comes back home. Glory, the baby, after a failed relationship has returned to the town of Gilead to care for her father and heal her own wounds.

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