Book Reviews

Summary: We as humans do not change simply through new information, but we are shaped by “˜liturgy’, the habits and community rituals that surround us.

I am quite late to actually reading Desiring the Kingdom. It was first published 9 years ago. I purchased it 4 years ago, but I didn’t actually read Desiring the Kingdom until this week when I realized that there was a new audiobook out.

The basic ideas in Desiring the Kingdom are not new to me. I have read six of Smith’s other books including You Are What You Love twice. (You Are What You Love is intended to be a more popular level introduction to similar ideas.) Several of the illustrations, going to the mall and ball park as an alien anthropologist trying to understand what it is that we as humans are doing is familiar from other books and talks I have heard. But it is worth reading this full book as both a reminder of the ideas and a more full expression.

Desiring the Kingdom is attempting to refocus our Christian discipleship away from information sharing toward worship in a broad sense. We are not simply “˜Brains on a stick’ but we are “˜thinking things’. It is not that information and thinking are unimportant, they are very important. But we are not changed simply by being introduced to information. We are changed through the power of worship and by refocusing on what we love.

Part of what is difficult for me is that I am a part of a megachurch, which I love, but which does not really take the ideas of Smith’s understanding of worship into account. My church wants to be a church that unchurched people like attending. And I love that. Our church is full of people that hated church as children, teens, or adults and because they hated church they never understood the gospel (or in some cases the actual gospel wasn’t presented.)

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Summary: A 22 year old veteran,comes to the city since his only remaining relative (his mother) died and the country home is falling apart.

One of my reading projects for the year is to read all of O’Connor’s fiction. I have read A Good Man is Hard to Find several years ago. But I knew I wasn’t really getting all of the meaning of the short stories. One of the reasons I want to read O’Connor is because I am looking for books that require a bit of struggle. Not because difficult books are ‘better’ because they are difficult. But because books that require something of the reader use different intellectual muscles than those that are laid out more clearly. I tend to read a lot of non-fiction. Books that while they may be academically difficult, are not intended to have layered shades of meaning. Fiction and poetry does often have layers and I am trying to work on some of those intellectual muscles.

Last year I picked up the short biography, The Terrible Speed of Mercy and I am currently reading A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Previously I also read O’Connor’s graduate school Prayer Journal.

A Subversive Gospel is one of those books that I want to read more of, an interpretive guide. It is not a biography, although it has biographical details, it is about O’Connor’s writing, theology and philosophy. (It is also a reworked dissertation.) A Subversive Gospel has been very helpful at understanding O’Connor and their vision of writing so that I can understand the books later. But I was nearly 75% of the way through A Subversive Gospel and I have not read one of the novels, so I quickly listened to Wise Blood, not so much for the story, but to get a sense of what her novels felt like before I finished A Subversive Gospel.

One of O’Connor’s most quoted phrases about her writing is, “œ”¦to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” This is very similar to what James KA Smith says he is doing in his attempts at being an alien anthropologist that is exploring the mall and the ball park to understand what cultural liturgies are driving those spaces.

“œ”¦my goal is to try to make strange what is so familiar to us precisely in order to help us see what is at stake in formative practices that are part of the mall experience.(p23 of Desiring the Kingdom)

Wise Blood is not a standard country boy comes to the big city story with standard middle of the 20th century characters. First of all, I listened to the audiobook, but it was one I did not leave running when litter ears were around like I often do. This is full of crude ugly language, swearing and derogatory comments. But lots of books that are not classics have bad language. (And there is a real beauty to the language even when it is crude.)

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Summary: Binti returned home to try to find stability; she found more confusion, realizing that the home she thought she understood was not what she understood. And now she also brought war to her home.

Part of what is important about alien stories is that they are alien. Part of what is important about reading an African author writing alien stories is that she points out that sometimes those of different human cultures are actually just as alien as the actual aliens. And sometimes those from our own culture or family are less close than those aliens that are adopted into our family.

The Night Masquerade is the third part of what is really a single-long novel. I assume that these will be packaged together in a single volume at some point. Together, they are less than 500 pages. There are three distinct parts here, but the story is a single story.

In part one, Binti secretly leaves her traditional African village home to enter an alien university against her family’s wishes. During the space travel, everyone on board except for her is massacred as part of a long feud. As a harmonizer, Binti helps solve the immediate problem and bring about a peace, but at great personal cost to herself.

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Summary: When New York City was young, a mysterious stranger comes to town with money.

Francis Spufford is an author that authors that I love, love. Alan Jacobs yet again yesterday expressed his admiration for Spufford. And this novel in particular has been talked about for a couple of years. (It was published in the UK in 2016 and Jacobs had an advanced copy of it.) Wesley Hill, John Wilson and others I follow on twitter have also lavished praise on it. It was also on a number of best of 2017 lists (NPR, WSJ, Washington Post, Kurkus, Library Journal, etc).

Golden Hill is set in 1746 New York City. A mysterious young man comes to New York with a letter of credit (as would be common at the time so that a traveler would not have to carry a lot of cash) for an extraordinarily large amount of money but a resistance to telling anyone what he was interested in doing with the money. The book follows his story for several months. I won’t really give much more detail about the plot other than that.

It has been several days since I finished Golden Hill because I was not sure how to write a review. The longer I wait the more I like it. Spufford has a way with words. One of the things that is most impressive is that the book, especially the letters within the book, are written to mimic the 18th century, but it is still quite readable for a modern reader.

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Summary: Approximately 70 years of slavery from the 1870s to the 1940s have largely been unknown or ignored.

Part of what has been vital for me to recognize as I read history is earlier examples of current problems. There may not be a direct connection with those similar issues, but we need to acknowledge that there may be a connection. For example, one of the issues brought up in this book is local control of school funding. Many small government advocates today advocate local school control, which is not bad. However, local control was used to get around rules for disproportionate funding of White and Black schools during the Jim Crow era and beyond. And today, local control is the root of school funding and quality disparities.

Another example is the different sentencing levels of Whites and Blacks (including a higher likelihood of being arrested and charged, more severe charges when charged, and more severe sentences for the exact charges when sentenced). Then, there is the example of Ferguson, Missouri, using fees, primarily enforced against Black residents, to fund city services to lower tax rates.

It is not that there are direct connections between today and earlier in the three examples above, but when there are similar examples, we should investigate whether the issues that gave rise to those similar examples are really similar.

Slavery By Another Name is primarily about the system of convict leasing. Convict leasing was the practice of leasing convicts to private businesses or individuals as laborers. The local or state government then was relieved of the requirements for housing and feeding convicts, made money from those convicts, and could privately fund much of the salaries of law enforcement and the courts through fees instead of taxes.

Much of the work done by convict leasing was dangerous or excessive work. Records were often poor, but in some cases, there was as much as a 30% annual death rate among convicts. Convicts were purchased for $30 to $75, roughly $1000 today, compared to the approximately $1000 purchase cost of slaves a generation earlier (what would be roughly $30,000 today). There was little interest in moderating the effects of work or punishment because of the low investment cost. Working convicts for 20 hours a day, seven days a week, with low rations and high rates of punishment with lash, waterboarding, or hanging by thumbs was common.

The crimes were often minor: swearing in front of a woman, disrespecting someone, leaving an employer without permission, selling goods at night, etc. It was commonly thought at the time that African Americans would only work with the threat and reality of lash and other beating. (The idea of the lazy Black worker continues today but is a derivative of this earlier era.) The descriptions of beatings throughout the book are one of the most complex parts of reading/listening to the book.

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Summary: Graphic adaptation of the best of Octavia Butler’s books.

Over the past couple years I have begun to appreciate the art and promise of the graphic novel. Not as a “˜children’s version’ but as something that can be a true art form to itself. I do not think that John Lewis’ memoir in the March Trilogy would be as good in narrative text. The graphics of the March trilogy were essential to making it so good. But I am not sure that the graphic novel of Kindred is up to that standard.

It is not that Kindred is a bad adaptation or a bad graphic novel. It stayed pretty close to the original in story and I liked the art. But the novel was, in my opinion, the best novel of a very good novelist. Octavia Butler captured not just the horror of slavery for the slave, but the horror of slavery for everyone involved. I think some of the nuance of the novel was (necessarily) lost in the graphic novel adaptation. A graphic novel, even one that is over 200 pages, can’t really tell the same story as a 300 page novel.

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Summary: Several long and short stories that serve as background and a bridge between books 4 and 6 of the Earthsea cycle.

I have not read the later books of Earthsea properly. The first three books I read as a teen multiple times. Then five years ago I picked up Wizard of Earthsea, the first in the series. Which lead me to read the sixth book (The Other Wind) of the series. I thought I had read the fourth book (Tehanu), but I have no record of reading it.

So I am all wrong about reading this series. I have picked up the threads of the story and I think I mostly know what is going on. But if I were recommending it, I would tell you to read the series in order and not spread out by 30 years. (Although it was over 30 year spread from the start to the completion of the series.)

There are six stories here and a description of Earthsea. The stories range from 130 to 25 pages. Not unusually, I liked the longer ones more than the shorter ones. The first two and last I think were the best. Throughout the book there was an exploration of why the wizards were only celibate men. A history that shows that the founding of the school at Roke was not by only celibate men. And the final story is about a woman that comes to the school to learn to be a wizard.

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Summary: How do we understand the relationship of culture to scripture and what in scripture is cultural and what is transcultural?

Several years ago I spent a few months reading widely on hermeneutics, the concept of what it means to read and understand scripture. It wasn’t until I was burned out on hermeneutics that I heard about William Webb’s book Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. I did read his more introductory book on Corporal Punishment and Parenting that was well worth reading about four years ago.

I finally picked up Slaves, Women, & Homosexuals as part of my reading about how different people are approaching homosexuality in the church. I have been roughly alternating books on different positions up until this point, I think the two books that are the best I have read on each side is People to be Loved by Preston Sprinkle and Changing Our Mind by David Gushee, although I think both are far from perfect and neither will change many minds.

Slaves, Women, & Homosexuals is more about culture and hermeneutics than the particular issues of homosexuality and women in the church. The basic project is for Webb to chart out 18 points to evaluate how the church should understand scripture and theology in regard to a cultural issue. He takes these three areas to give illustration to the idea.

First, he assumes that most Christians now agree that slavery is sinful. He charts out this change briefly (Mark Noll’s The Civil War as Theological Crisis does this is greater detail.) But the general assumption is that most readers agree with him on this and he is using slavery as a “neutral” example. Then the other two examples are Women (pro) and Homosexuality (against). For women, Webb is trying to show why egalitarian (men and women are equal in position and calling within the church) or “ultra soft patriarchy” (there is difference in calling, but women and men have equal worth before God) is how we should read scripture now because the patriarchy of scripture was culturally bound. And then he uses homosexuality as his negative example because he believes that celibacy is the only option for Gay Christians and that the proscriptions against homosexuality are transcultural.

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