Book Reviews

Summary: Based on a series of lecture about how our understanding of our personal testimonies impacts the way we understand Christian Faith.

If I had any advice for a young Christian reader, it would be find people that are smarter than you, with different perspectives than you have, and listen to them. The great value in the written word is that the words of people of different perspective, ages ,and backgrounds are available without needing to actually sit at the physical feet of others.

Throughout history we have looked toward the wise to teach us. And today we have the accumulated wisdom, not just of the wise people today but much of the wisdom of history. We are frankly drowning in words, but there is a tendency to not think of words as the means of transmission of wisdom but as a transmission of an argument.

Alan Jacobs is participating in a discussion about the role of the individual within narrative theology. But that discussion is subtle, too subtle I think for most readers that do not have a pretty good history in narrative theology. Narrative theology is trying to push modern Christianity to pay more attention to the communal and broad historical sweep of Christianity and less attention to the individual and the personal issues of Christianity. Jacobs is trying to remind narrative theologians that while the communal and historical issues of Christianity are real, that you still need to pay attention to the individual.

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Summary: The first two women on the Supreme Court changed it dramatically, but also had different perspectives.

I have been long fascinated with the Supreme Court. I have read several books on the court, including O’Connor’s reflection on the court, The Majesty of the Law, and a light biography of Ginsberg, The Notorious RBG and a more technical book on the role of court by Stephen Breyer, The Court and the World.

Sisters In Law is a dual biography of the two first women as Supreme Court Justices. They were fairly close in age, but widely different in background, political perspective, and legal background.

Sandra O’Connor grew up in rural Arizona and went to college and law school in California. After following her husband in the military for three years, she was unable to find a law firm that would hire her as a lawyer. So she started her own. She then took five years off full time work to raise her children (but spent significant time working with the Republican party and volunteer organizations during that time.) And when she went back to work she initially volunteered to work for a local prosecutor to prove herself capable. She eventually worked her way up to became Assistant Attorney General of Arizona. Eventually, in part because of her work with the local Republican party in Arizona, she was appointed to a vacant state legislature seat and eventually rose to become first woman to be a State Senate Majority leader. After eight years as a legislator she ran for judge. She served as a county judge for four years and then nearly two years as a judge of the Arizona State Court of Appeals before being appointed to the Supreme Court.

O’Connor has a fascinating history, two different tracks of elections, and time as Assistant Attorney General, not to mention the work in political and other volunteer associations. Ginsberg has a much different history. She had a more traditional path to the Supreme Court. Ginsberg went to the traditional Ivy League law schools and became a professor and the the head of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, where she guided policy and argued six cases before the Supreme Court before being appointed to the US Court of Appeals by Jimmy Carter.

Both women are fascinating, but because Ginsberg’s history prior to the court includes so much work on women’s issues, it feels like O’Connor was short changed in Sisters in Law. Being the first woman to be a party leader of a state Senate, in her early 40s and then restarting her career again as an elected judge and being appointed to the Supreme Court at 51 should have had more time than it got.

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Summary: Part two of the story of a Jesuit mission to the planet of Rakhat. 

There is no way to discuss Children of God fully without spoilers, so this review is not really going to discuss the plot. The first book in the series, The Sparrow, was a devastating book. The Sparrow starts at the end, knowing that Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the first mission to Rakhat. But it takes that whole book to really understand Sandoz’s role in the trip and why he is so devastated.

Children of God starts soon after the end and the two books really need to be thought of as a whole. I spent nearly two years between the two books because I was so impacted by the first that I was not sure I was ready to read the second. I should have read them closer together because, apart from length, they probably should have been published together. (And there are a ton of characters and reading them together would have helped in keeping the characters in order in my head.)

It was not until the end of the book that I realized that in many ways, this is a meditation on the Book of Job. Mary Doria Russell is Jewish. Although most of the characters of the books are Jesuit priests, there is one Jewish woman in the original mission to Rakhat. Regardless, both faiths include the Book of Job and theologically grapple with the problems of evil.

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Summary: Enneagram as a method of spiritual growth.

More than anything, reading about the Enneagram makes me realize that I probably discount other people entirely too much. Or at the very least do not take into account the different ways that people process the world around them.

I am still a bit skeptical about the Enneagram. This is my second book and I think I both understood more about the basic ideas of the Enneagram and that I understood more about how it works as a system. I am not sure I will every become a devotee. But I do see some value in the descriptions. And like any personality system, the help is in the revelation, not in the proscription. In other words, to the extent that the ideas of the Enneagram are helpful to helping you understand yourself or others and give voice to your own understanding of yourself, it is helpful. But the Enneagram is not helpful if it is used to proscribe how others (or yourself) will act.

After having finished Mirror for the Soul and thought more about the Enneagram, mostly positively, I do think that part of my issue with the it as a concept is wondering how much the the individualism, which is part of our current world and culture, is being encouraged here. We are individuals. We experience the world individually. But at different points in time, cultural emphasized the responsibility to the whole more than it does now. And I wonder how much of our current fascination with personality is unhealthy. It isn’t that I reject that individual personality is real. Or that I don’t think that trauma, abuse, or flourishing as an individual impacts us as an individual to impact the world around us. But I wonder about how much, at least for some of us, self awareness becomes an idol itself. To Alice Fryling’s credit, there is a discussion about the Enneagram as idolatry (by which she means self absorption as idolatry).

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Summary: A discussion of spiritual attacks, sin, prevention of sin, forgiveness, repentance and restoration.

I have been aware of Beth Moore for a long time but other than one book that I started as an audiobook, and stopped because the content was inappropriate for audio, I have not read any of her books or done any of her bible studies. But over the past year or so, I have been increasingly impressed with her on Twitter. She is kind, but forceful. She interacts with a lot of people that I know or know of on twitter. And she has been increasingly important to conversations around race, gender, sexism, and sexual assault within the Evangelical world.

I decided I needed to actually read one of her books. A few years ago she temporarily made most of her books available for free on kindle. As I scanned through titles and descriptions to pick one, When Godly People Do Ungodly Things stood out because of my interest in the topic. I have written a bit on this and one of the few pieces I have been asked to repost on another blog was a piece I wrote about how we should approach John Yoder and others that have significantly tainted reputations because of their sin. Recent discussions about Karl Barth and his long term affair with Charlotte von Kirshbaum, his secretary and co-author of some of his work, brought this back up to me again.

As I got into When Godly People Do Ungodly Things, I think it is valuable, but not quite what I thought it would be. Beth Moore is talking about spiritual attack and what we can do to guard ourselves against it. In some ways I think this is similar to Richard Beck’s book Reviving Old Scratch. Both are trying to bring renewed attention to Satan as an actual figure of importance to Christian theology, but from very different theological perspectives. Beck is trying to remind a more progressive/mainline group of Christians that are fine thinking about Satan as an abstract idea or someone that is behind systemic evil that Satan is important theologically and actually to understanding both individual and systemic sin.

Beth Moore is trying to remind conservative Evangelicals that Satan does not just tempt non-Christians, but is Christians as well. She describes how what starts as a spiritual dryness or a lack of spiritual disciplines or a seemingly innocent exploration can become a full blown crisis of sin. I read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory right before I started this book and Greene’s main character there is an alcoholic priest. The Priest does not blame the alcohol for his sin, but his pride. His pride led him to stop focusing on his spiritual disciplines and care for others and to think about himself. Eventually he became lazy in other areas as well. As things snowballed, he became a alcoholic, he also fathered a child. Greene’s description of the unnamed priest’s decent seems very similar to Moore’s concerns.

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Summary: What it means to be a Black Woman in middle-class White America, even within the church.

A little over a week ago I sat down with a list of the books I had read since the start of 2017 and analyzed the authors. I looked at how many were White, how many were women, how many were fiction versus non-fiction. What I discovered when I completed this quick exercise was that I read just over 60% non-fiction. Although the authors of the fiction I read was was roughly evenly split between men and women authors, my non-fiction was five times more likely to be male authors as female. And my non-fiction was three times more likely to be White than non-White authors. Because of my bias toward non-fiction, I read mostly White males.

This exercise was not about meeting a quota, but about exploring what as a reader I am consuming. How much do I, when not paying attention, default to reading the voices of White males (a lot). What do I need to do to make sure I am not internalizing the bias of my reading choices? With that information, I know that I need to make sure I am intentionally picking up more books written by minorities, especially women.

I picked up I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness yesterday, when it came out, in part because of my exercise not hearing minority, especially female minority authors. I’m Still Here is brief, just over 3 hours in audiobook. It is mostly memoir. Austin Channing Brown opens with a story about how her name (one that is associated mostly with White Males) was chosen intentionally to get her in the door for interviews. She grew up in mostly White neighborhoods and going to mostly White schools. It wasn’t until college that she had her first Black teacher. But the saturation in White culture did not change her skin color or how she was perceived by those that were going to judge her because of her gender or skin.

It appears to me that I’m Still Here is written primarily for Black women, but with the intention to be overheard by others. She celebrates her blackness because that is how God created her. And she celebrates the comfort of the Black church in the reality of the difficulties of the world. It tells about the emotional baggage that has been heaped upon her as a professional woman working mostly in Christian non-profits to do the work of making Whites feel good about how much progress has been made in racial issues or to spoon feed them history about racism in the US.

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Summary: Neuroscience and psychology can be helpful to understanding our spiritual life. 

After having read The Body Keeps Score on the science and psychology of Trauma, I wanted to read something similar from an explicitly Christian perspective and Anatomy of the Soul was recommended to me. (I also picked up This is Your Brain on Joy to read later.)

Part of the message of The Body Keeps Score is that our mental, spiritual, and emotional states impact our body and vice versa. The wholeness of our physical, emotional, and spiritual states matters. As Christians, especially as a Christian that is interested in the spiritual development of others, we need to think about how we can incorporate the knowledge of the physical into the practice of spiritual direction without attempting to be a psychologist or neurologist.

Anatomy of the Soul is broadly divided into two parts. The science and background about neurology, trauma, attachment, emotions, the prefrontal cortex, etc. and the shorter spiritual implications to our understanding of sin, repentance and forgiveness, and community.

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Summary: Spiritual Direction from a book.

As I have mentioned a number of times in these reviews, I have been meeting with a spiritual director for more than five years now. I also am considering seeking formal training to become a spiritual director in the future. My current commitment is to read at least one book broadly related to spiritual direction a month. In February, three books “˜by Henri Nouwen’ were on sale and Spiritual Direction was the first of the three that I have read.

Henri Nouwen passend away in 1996. In addition to the many books that he directly wrote, several of his students compiled additional books based on his lectures, unpublished essays, and notes. Nouwen is worth reading for his spiritual insight, even if this book is not directly written by him for publication. There are hint here of things that I have read before, especially the chapter on solitude, community and service that feels like a shortened form of Out of Solitude.

A book cannot replace spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is personal and more about the individual receiving the direction than just wisdom from the director. But there is a sense of how this book does hint at what spiritual direction is like because of Nouwen’s self disclosure and focus on his own spiritual growth.

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Summary: A bad priest suffers persecution in Mexico in the 1920-30s.

I can’t really review or even comment on a book that is on almost every best of the 20th century list. The Power and the Glory is not long and I spend a week pretty much only reading it. I can not help but compare it to ShÅ«saku Endo’s Silence. Endo’s book was written later, but I read it first and I have read it twice. Greene has one of the most famous endorsements ever included in the book Silence, “Endo, to my mind, is one of the finest living novelists.”

Both books are about persecution, but the level of persecution did not rise to the same level in The Power and the Glory as it did in Silence. The real story that Silence is based on, there were likely around 300,000 Christians killed. The Mexican persecution, while serious, was much more limited and as mentioned in the book was also much more regional. The church, alcohol, and jazz were all banned.

The strength of the book I think hinges on the discussion about what motivates the self-admitted bad priest (he has fathered a child, is an alcoholic, and a coward, facing a crisis of faith), in spite of it all, to stay in the area of the persecution and continue to minister to the Catholics there. I find the discussion both realistic to faith and fascinating. But I can also see how apart from faith, the motivation is ridiculous.

The story is fairly simple. There are a number of characters for a simple story and the movement is not quite wrapped up in all of the threads. The priest is being sought by the police. He is considered much more dangerous than an American serial killer, who is also being pursued, because the priest is a traitor to the state, while the killer is just killing people. The police eventually start taking captives and killing them in order to motivate someone to turn the Priest in. But as much as the priest would like to escape, someone’s spiritual need keeps pulling him back.

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Summary: A man who appears to have had his brain completely erased is found in the woods in a future post-apocalyptic Earth.

I have been very slowly working through Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. These are a series of science fiction books that are only very loosely related. Most within the series have almost no connection to any other book in the series. But they all are set in a future where hundreds of worlds have been settled by humanity. But due to genetic manipulation and isolation due to war or other reasons there have been evolutionary shifts that have altered humanity to be a number of different species. This has allowed Le Guin to explore a number of features of what it means to be human or in society. Although they are considered a series, Le Guin says they are not intended to have internal cohesion and form a single story or even have a suggested reading order.

The Disposessed explored how societies organize politically and socially as a scientist moved from an anarchist utopia (described as non-authoritarian communism’ to a repressive capitalist system that permits a type of slavery. The Left Hand of Darkness is a more physical exploration of what gender means. An outsider comes to a isolated world to attempt to bring them into an intergalactic United Nations style system. But this isolated world does not have fixed gender. Everyone is genderless except once a month when they create gender to mate, each person sometimes becoming male and sometimes becoming female. Most people will be both fathers and mothers at different times and in general mating is temporary and not a permanent marriage arrangement. Children after infancy are raised communally.

The City of Illusions was the third published book in 1967. The Earth has been reduced to a small fraction of its population, most of whom live in small villages or in nomadic tribal system. There is very little trust of outsiders, but a man is found without memory and with the bodily control of an newborn. He is nursed to health and taught so that after about 5 years he has developed the skills and understanding of an adult, but without any knowledge of where he came from or how he came to be in the woods near the community that found him.

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