Book Reviews

Takeaway: Sometimes the best thing we can do in the face of tragedy is continue to face life.

I picked up The Comedians when it was on sale at Audible because it was by Graham Greene and I really liked The End of the Affair. I started reading it because Shusaku Endo was frequently compared to Graham Greene (and Greene’s endorsement of Silence is one of the more famous endorsement lines–“Endo, to my mind, is one of the finest living novelists”).

It was really my desire to understand Endo, more than my enjoyment of the book that kept me listening to the audiobook. The reader was intentionally dry. That matched the content, but did not enhance the listening. The book started and ended well, but there was some meandering in the middle that makes sense in the larger context of the books but I got a bored for a good 100 pages.

It really was not until about 1/3 of the way through the book that Greene references the reason for the title. In a public conversation with a woman that Brown (the main character) is having an affair with, he suggests that they are all really comedians. He is using an older meaning of comedian, the idea that Greek actors held different masks. But also (not mentioned, but I think understood) that Greek Comedies were usually poking fun at the powerful of the age. It is not really satire. But there is some hint of that idea.

The book opens with Brown, Smith and Jones all on a boat headed toward Haiti. Brown owns a hotel in Haiti during the oppressive government of Papa Doc Duvalier. Jones is an unknown, but suspected from fairly early on of being a con man. Smith (and his wife) are from the United States. He was a very minor presidential candidate that is a proponent of vegetarianism as a way of life and a method toward world wide peace.

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Summary: Many of the shifts of theology and practice makes sense in historical context.

My first quarter of Divinity School I had a history of Christian thought class. There were four or five courses in the series but we were only required to take one. The one I took covered approximately 600 to 1400 AD, which was an era that I knew almost nothing about. I learned a great deal in the class, but I was a bit frustrated by the teaching style. Mostly we were covering philosophical issues, but those philosophical and theological movements were abstracted from the broader history of the era. I need context to help frame the theological changes and give reasons for why the theological and philosophical shifts were occurring.

The History of Christian Theology course covers a much longer history (all of it) and necessarily went into less depth, but also gave much better context to the theological shifts. The lecturer assumed Christian faith and background, although explained the nuances of the theology well.

One of the features that I found most helpful was continually thinking about the implications to the average believer. As theology shifted, the questions that plagued the average believer, and the pastoral care needed also shifted. So simple returns to these basic questions and comparing different theological systems was very helpful.

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The new Marvel movie Captain America Civil War opens this weekend. The reviews are very good. I have been looking forward to it, but I still haven’t seen Winter Soldier or Age of Ultron. So I am probably not going to go see Civil War this weekend.

For the past two weeks I have been somewhat obsessively reading comic books, mostly the Marvel Civil War series. I started because the Ms Marvel books were on sale and I wanted to finish the series. Then I saw that the Civil War books were on sale, I picked those up.  (I do want to note that if you are not interested in keeping them, Marvel Unlimited has a month free trial right now, so you can read all of these during a free trial and cancel.)

I have read one review of the movie and heard from some people that the comic and the movie have the same themes and broad outlines, but are very different in the specifics.

So on to the review of the comic books. I am not sure I read comic books correctly. I want a good story. And I want art that is interesting and enhances the story. These collections have different artists although mostly the art is somewhat similar in style.

The central idea of the series is that Iron Man and Captain America react differently to the governmental response to an accident that kills hundreds of people. A reality TV Superhero show (COPS style) tries to take down some minor league super villains. This goes badly when it causes an explosion that destroys an elementary school and kills over 600 people, mostly children, while being filmed.

That accident turns public opinion against superheroes and a movement starts to requires registration of all heroes and requires all heroes to work for SHEILD if they are going to use their powers, making all heroes government employees. Anyone refusing to register will be arrested.

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Takeaway: We need to think theologically about the importance of elders and sharing wisdom.

A few days ago on Facebook, someone that I know was lamenting the lack of wise elders in their life. I was reminded (in part because I was reading Rohr) that because one has acquired age, does not mean that one has acquired wisdom. The two sometimes go together, but not always. And in some ways I think age and wisdom are probably less associated now than previously (unwise people I think had a decent chance of dying because of their lack of wisdom in previous ages.) We are in an odd cultural place. We need wisdom, we are living longer than ever and culturally we embrace youth culture more than ever.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and popular speaker and writer. I have read several things by him and generally found him helpful and wise. I originally read Falling Upward when it first came out just over five years ago. I think that was my first exposure to Rohr. When I first read it, I found the book a bit difficult and was not as clear about some of his language. I did not re-read my review until I finished the book for the second time. My original review was one of the earliest reviews on Bookwi.se and it feels very dated to me. It is a sign of the progress of time that many of the things I found difficult on the first reading I did not find difficult on the second. I have read a lot more Catholic writers in the past five years and am much more comfortable with the subtle differences in meaning in some of the language of Catholics and Protestants. And where there are more commonalities than I   understood five years ago.

Rohr understands how to sound profound. That is not to say that many of the things that he writes about are not profound. His writing drips with significant insights. But Rohr is also obscure and opaque at time and I think that is sometimes seen as wisdom as well. Rohr is a mystic. And part of being a mystic is believing that the world is not completely understandable or describable. I agree with that, but I am also less satisfied with the esoteric descriptions of the world that Rohr gives in this reading. I think some of the book could have been tightened up and made less esoteric and more clear. And it would have been a better and more helpful book. But maybe viewed as a bit less wise.

The main organizing metaphor is the first and second halves of life. This is modeled in the difference between the Odyssey and the Iliad. The two voyages are examples which Rohr refers back to frequently of how in the first half of life we are interested in identity and personhood. Finding not only who we are, but also establishing ourselves, building families, creating careers, finding relationships (romantic and other). All of these are good and important. But in the second half of life we tend to be less dualistic, more about building up others and passing on wisdom. The first half of life is about understanding the rules and institutions of life and their importance. The second half of life is about understanding the role of grace in breaking rules and circumventing institutions for people.

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Takeaway: The big stuff matters to good stories.

I participate in a private Facebook group with Christ and Pop Culture Magazine subscribers. There was a discussion the other day about the quality of writing of a popular series. The important part of the discussion for this review is that good stories transcend a particular telling. Elements of good stories are often found in other stories. The major themes of life, finding and loosing love, purpose and meaning of life, etc. are almost always found in some form in any good story. Good stories can be told in an original manner, but are rarely completely original in theme.

Ms Marvel made new in 2014 when it first came out because the main character is a 16 year old Muslim immigrant living in New Jersey. She was a unique voice in the superhero world. I read and reviewed the first volume just over a year ago. But the rest of the series has not gone on sale until this week. I enjoy the occasional comic book, but I am cheap.  Amazon/ComiXology is having a sale on Marvel comics through today. So Vol 1 is $4.50, Vol 2 is $5.50, Vol 3 is $8.00 and Vol 4 is $9.00.

Comics are something that I should read more carefully. I tend to fly through them too quickly because I want the story and then not go back and read them more slowly to really enjoy the art. But the art is one of the complaints that I have with this series. There has not been a consistent art team and so the art has varied and I have definitely liked some of it better than others.

The first volume was interesting because it was introducing a new character. The second volume I think lacked the punch of the first because it attempted to make a point. Ms Marvel was confronted with some of her peers that were willing to give up when faced with difficult problems. That could have been handled better but ended up being a complaint against her whole generation instead of a motivation for working hard to do what you can.

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Takeaway: Life if not permanent.

I have had an odd reluctance to read Housekeeping (and Home) because Lila and Gilead have been some of the best fiction books I have read. I do not want to be disappointed. Marilyn Robinson has not written a lot of books. Authors that have written dozens of books I assume have a couple that are not all that good. Robinson has four fiction books and all of them are critically acclaimed, although not necessarily acclaimed by general readers. (All four books average four stars at Amazon and only have about 50% of the reviews as five stars.)

If you are looking for action or romance or really even much of a plot, you are probably not going to like Robinson as a novelist. Her strength is characters and description. The internal dialogue of the main character is always the focus.

In Housekeeping, Ruth is the youngest of two girls. They are growing up in their grandmother’s house. They were abandoned by their mother, who committed suicide in the nearby lake after she left them. They never knew their father. Their grandmother dies and two spinster great Aunts come to care for them before pawning them off on their odd Aunt.

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Summary: Story of four Japanese tourists on a trip to India and the Ganges River.

I picked up Deep River on sale from Audible a while ago but it did not listen to it up until Beauty and Silence by Makoto Fujimura was about to be released (reading Beauty and Silence now).

Even though I read Endo’s more well known Silence over two years ago, it is a book I still frequently think about. I wanted another book to give more context to Endo’s work because Beauty and Silence is largely based on Fujimura’s interaction with Endo. There are only three of Endo’s books available as audiobooks and only 3 other books available on kindle. Late 20th century authors often did not negotiate digital book rights and their estates seem to be slow to re-negotiate. I am hoping that the Martin Scorsese movie of Silence (expected to release in Nov) will bring out new editions of all of Endo’s books.

Deep River is not an easy book to describe. There are four interconnected story lines. The reader gets a brief introduction to the India tour before the separate back stories. I was bogged down about a quarter of the way through the book and set it aside for about six weeks before returning to it. The initial background stories are full of hard to like people. This is part of the set up for what might be transition and growth later in the book, but I really do not like reading about unlikable people.

These are four very different stories. One disconnected ‘modern’ Japanese woman that is happy to take advantage of sex starved men. One man the other end of life who has missed much of his life until his wife dies and he realizes what is gone. One veteran of WWII that is still suffering the effects of war (this is set in the 1980s). And a final man who’s sickness has left him isolated and lonely.

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Takeaway: Trust in Christ and Love of other are not in opposition to right theological understanding.

A number of books have been written in the last decade or so that have embraced the acceptance of doubt or at least have normalized having periods of uncertainty as a regular part of the Christian life. It has progressed far enough that there are now books and article rejecting the over embrace of doubt.

Peter Enns has long been a part of this controversy because his own book Inspiration and Incarnation was controversial because some thought that it encouraged an unhealthy doubt. The Sin of Certainty concludes with a long, and very personal, section about Enns’ own doubts, which were exacerbated by the mishandling of the controversy around his earlier book. I will not get into the full story since it is detailed in the book, but Enns was forced out of his job as full professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008 after several years of controversy. (It took 4 years for Enns to get another full time teaching job and even now four years later he is not yet a full professor.)

Enns own story is driving the message of the book. I think it would have been more helpful for the story to have been pushed up in the book to give greater context for why Enns thinks that a focus on certainty is unhelpful. But placed at the end of the book, the story really allows for the book to end strongly.

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Summary:  An 8th grade boy discovers that his mother hasn’t abandoned the family, but been sucked into a wormhole.

My paying job involves program evaluation for an after school program. I am working on doing data entry for 3rd quarter grades (nearly 1000 students) right now. So I need something to help pass the time.

Audible started a new free feature for members last week, Audible Channels. This is basically curated podcasts. There are news, lectures, short stories, actual podcasts that you can get other places. One of the parts I am paying attention to are the ‘7 Days of…’ channels. These are short stories from famous authors. Right now Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and Philip K Dick all have seven short stories.

Space Boy is in the Sci-Fi section. There are several other about 1 hour short stories.

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Summary: Discipleship and spiritual formation are not primarily about gaining new information but being formed over time through habit and worship.

I have been influenced by James KA Smith over the past several years more than almost any other author. In the last three years I have read five books and a number of shorter articles, not to mention watching at least a dozen lectures. And I do not think I am alone. I was in a private Facebook theology discussion yesterday when in 110 comments, Smith was referenced at least 8 times with no less than four of his books directly mentioned or hinted at.

There is a reason Smith is becoming influential. He is speaking to several issues that are important and prominent. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit is the latest attempt both to deal with the issues and the first book to really attempt to speak to a lay audience about them.

There are three real points being made in the book. First, we are not solely intellectual beings. God created us with intellects and brains, but also emotions and unconscious bias. We are not, to use his common phrase, “Brains on a stick.” We are fully human, and we are intended to be that way by God. That may not seem like a big deal, but much of Christian culture has understood us to be Brains on a Stick. Our evangelism, discipleship and spiritual growth are often primarily oriented toward the intellect. There is also the anti-intellectual parts of Christianity. But they are in many ways just as oriented toward the Brain on a Stick idea, just using the insight in a different method.

The second point is that because we are not brains on a stick, we need to take into account the various ways that we are influenced and shaped. Jamie Smith uses the term ‘liturgies’ to describe the shaping activities that are all around us. Going to the mall is a consumerist liturgy. The bright airy buildings give us comfort and place. Our five senses are being engaged by Cinnabon and the skylights and the comfortable seating areas. We are being shaped by the feeding of our desires and absorbing our place in the world as consumer. Sports have a different liturgy. We feel a participant in something greater than ourself, we have the us vs them mentality encouraged.

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