Book Reviews

I am reposting this review from earlier this year because the Kindle Edition has dropped to $6.99. I am planning on re-reading this in December in prepreation for the movie, which will be released in limited release in December and wide release in January. If you have not read about the movie this is a good article from New York Magazine.
Summary: Silence and Beauty is a profound reflection on the book Silence by Shusaku Endo, the role of art and beauty in Christianity, and a reflection of the impact of Christianity on the culture of Japan.

Silence by Shusaku Endo is one of those books that is not easily forgotten. I read it a couple years ago and I rarely go more than a couple weeks without referencing it.

Makoto Fujimura is a very well known artist, famous in many Evangelical circles for being a famous artist that is well known outside of Christian circles. Fujimura grew up in the US, but after college was accepted into a Japanese graduate program to study art. The first student to ever be accepted into this graduate program that did not grow up through the Japanese national art system. Fujimura became a Christian while studying art in Japan, a country with a very few Christians.

Silence and Beauty is fascinating. It opens with a bit is spiritual memoir. Fujimura details how  Shusaku Endo and his book Silence impacted his early faith. And unsurprisingly there is a long exploration of both Endo and his book Silence (as well as some of Endo’s other books.) That is done in the context of a rich sociological and historical study of Japan. And all of that is wrapped up in a defense of beauty and art as essential to Christianity. (I was reminded at times of of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic and Brian Zhand’s Beauty Will Save the World.)

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Summary: A young woman in a dystopian world strives to build a life, a community, and a faith, in the midst of chaos.

I have been slowly working my way through Octavia Bulter’s book since I first read her nearly a decade ago. I have two full length novels and her short story collections yet to read.

Parable of the Sower, like most of her books, is a dystopian novel. Butler published from 1976 until her untimely death in 2006 (she was 58.) Her dystopian was not part of the recent trend. Parable of the Sower was published in 1995. It feels closest to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), but while just as bleak in description, Parable of the Sower is the story of a young woman, Lauren Olamina, that actually is trying to build something.

The story starts when Lauren is 15, living in a walled community in the remnants of Los Angeles. The novel develops her character and generates the setting while giving us a glimpse of the religious system that she is developing. Lauren is a writer. What she is writing is the philosophy of her religion, Earthseed. Which, when told she is creating a religion, she responds that a person that describes something they found, such as a rock, did not create the wrong, but merely describes it. Earthseed is humanist. It is a philosophy, a way of living. God may exist in it, but that god is distant and not present in the reality of the dystopian world she is living in.

The main story is a travel story. The climate has shifted and drought it perpetual. Water is one of the most lucrative commodities and homelessness, slavery, and drugs are prevalent. The government and police exist in name, but not in ability to maintain structure or order. They are simply another gang that will rob you if you let them. Similarly to Walker Percy’s Love in Ruins (which was written about a decade before Parable of the Sower), this dystopian world is divided by race. And like most of Butler’s books, the main character is an African American woman.

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Summary: A brilliant physicist leaves his insular utopian community to study in the world that his world rebelled against. And he learns the weaknesses of both political systems. 

Anarres is a desert moon to Urras. Several hundred years ago, miners rebelled against their home world and created their own anarchist utopia, a ‘non-authoritarian communism’ where there is no property, but there is a shared sense of cooperation against the harsh world. Urras, is a rich and beautiful world, but where virtual slavery controls the vast majority of the population and where women are restricted to the home.

Except for minor trading and some scientific conversations, there is no contact between the worlds. Shevek, a brilliant physicist seeking to understand the connection between time and space, is given a physics prize by Urras and becomes the first person to travel between the worlds since the separation.

This is largely a book of political ideas. It is a critique of both communism and capitalism unchecked. It is a critique of feminism and anti-feminist ideas. It is a critique of the split between individualism and the forced common good. There is a plot and some action at the end of the book. But primarily this is the story of Shevek, starting with his travel to Urras and proceeding to the future with flashback to his early life.

Published in 1974, this is a cold war book. Both worlds are unrealized utopias. The Anarrians have taught shared responsibility, every 10 days they have to contribute a day of work to the common good, a computer matches each person to the type of work they want to do, or they can choose to do no work at all. From their childhood they are taught shared responsibility and the evils of property. They are raised in kibbutz like dormitories. Adults, usually live in adult dormitories. Sex is free, but consensual. Marriage is possible but rare (it is thought of as a sort of privatized relationship, as is parents directly raising children).

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Summary: A somewhat repetitive, although important call, to focus on the important things in life, and not get overwhelmed attempting to do everything or make everything perfect.

I like Shuana Niequist’s writing. Yes, it is very female focused, but men should read more things focused on women. Yes, there are a lot of similar themes of change and finding yourself from book to book, but we are continually changing and finding ourselves throughout life. Yes, I can’t completely comprehend her life of food and family and vacations and friends, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get the points. In the end, Shauna Niequist’s voice is an important voice that continually reminds us of the need for spiritual, emotional and physical health in a world that wants to push us toward giving everything for a goal.

Niequist has a clear heart to follow Jesus. She thinks about the normal stuff of life as an example of the harder things of life. She is a good illustration that simply growing up in the church does not make one comfortable with faith. She is also a good illustration of the problem of telling people, not only can you do anything you put your mind to, but you should do everything that  you can put your mind to.

One of the important trends in evangelical theology that seems to keep being brought out is a real worked out theology of human limitations. It may be one of the most important things that the church needs to be illustrating through out discipleship and evangelism. I think people naturally come to understand limitations as they age. But it is amazing to me how often I read or hear something like, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ be spoken about as if the second phrase were not the primarily emphasis.

Present over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living is pretty similar to both Bread and Wine and Savor but she seems to feel like there was something fundamentally different about the life that she was living when she wrote those books. As a reader, the calls to slow down and focus on family and the important things seem to be much the same, or at least very similar.

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Summary: Jesus’ time on earth was more than just preparation for his death and resurrection.

I originally bought How God Became King when it was on sale for Kindle nearly three years ago. At the time I was at the end of a long NT Wright kick and picked it up. Last week it was released as an  audiobook and I decided to re-purchase it in that format (not whisper synced unfortunately).

Part of what drove me to pick it up again is the recent public discussions of the Benedict Option and several private discussions about poorly catechized Christians. I vaguely knew that How God Became King was at least in part about how Wright viewed the creeds (even though I wasn’t sure what that meant.)

The problem Wright is addressing in How God Became King is that we usually tell the story of Jesus, especially when we use the creeds, by saying that Jesus was born (became incarnated) and then died and was raised again. The incarnation becomes important only for the ability for Jesus to die and be raised again.

Wright’s concern is that we have used the creeds to interpret the gospels, or just as problematically, used the creeds as our sole syllabus for determining what should be taught about Jesus and the Christian faith. Section one of the book is mostly introduction to the problem (and if you have read much Wright, a lot of repetition.)

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Summary: An attempt to use scripture to defend same sex relationships.

Discussion of the role of gay Christians within the church is fraught with difficulty. Any position is the wrong one with a significant group of Christians. But this is not something that can really be ignored. As pointed out in the very helpful book The End of White Christian America, culture has broadly moved on from gay marriage as a debatable topic. But within the conservative Evangelical world where a sizable minority supports same sex relationships, explicitly admitting it out loud can create a significant debate (as Jen Hatmaker’s recent interview and its fallout has shown.)

I picked up God and the Gay Christian reluctantly. I do not particularly want to wade into current hot button issues. But I thought it was something that I personally needed to explore more directly. And even though I seriously considered not blogging about it, I decided Bookwi.se had little left to lose (traffic is already down more than 90% from its high of a few years ago.) My one real concern is unintentional harm to those that I know personally that are on one side or another of the issue. That was a real concern before writing. But I decided that the potential for help is worth the potential for harm. But also please remember that I process through reading and writing. So all comments are about processing, not really a final position. So in the end I picked up God and the Gay Christian at the library on audiobook because it was there.

One of the weaknesses of this debate is the state of Protestantism as a whole. Christianity has always had placed a very strong value on individual affirmation of theological truth. Especially after the Reformation, and then with the decline of the state church and the rise of the free church, individual affirmation became the dominant form of decision making within the church. Catholic theology has a formal magisterium system with defined Catholic teaching. And other episcopal or presbyterian systems have a system of affirming the theology of the denomination. But those systems still operate within the broader culture of individualism that pervades Christianity in the United States.

Because of our theological free agency system of church membership, if we disagree we can simply move to another congregation, or stop attending church all together. So at this point, a 24 year old (the age he was when this book came out 2 years ago) without formal theological training, ordination or church position, can write a book about his theological ideas, and it can influence those who are willing to be influenced. That is not fundamentally different from many others that came before him. But it is different from the system of councils that was in place in the early church.

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Summary: Marvel heroes reimagined in 1602 Elizabethan England.

I love a good reimagined work. I like cover songs. I like re-told fairy tales. I like alternate history. So even though it took me nearly a year to get around to it after a friend gave me the book, I was interested to read Marvel 1602.

Dr Strange is the court physician. Fury is the head spy. Some characters are a bit more vague than others. But the X-men are here as are the Fantastic Four, Dr Doom, Black Widow, Peter Parker, Daredevil and a few others. Something is messing with the weather, there is a plot on the Queen’s life and a great treasure (weapon?) is being smuggled from the Holy Land to England.

Gaiman is known for his Sandman comics series and his novels. He is one of my favorite novelists. But this didn’t quite do it for me. Mutants were considered witches and hunted by the inquisition (that part makes sense.) Political intrigues are hinted at but never really fully embraced as a story line. So much of the book was just establishing the characters in their new setting that the story felt rushed and thin.

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