Blogger Review Books

Summary: A retelling of some of the Jack and the Beanstalk stories. 

I have made my love of KB Hoyle’s writing well known. I have read every book she has written, most more than once. I have never met her in person, but we are both in the facebook group for Christ and Pop Culture magazine where she is a regular writer and we have interacted a lot over the years. Hopefully we will meet someday.

Part of what I love about her books is that they are literary and still written for middle grade or young adult readers. By literary, I don’t mean esoteric or abstract or hard to understand, but I mean that there is depth that invites rereading. There is always a surface story that moves the story along and engages the reader. But there is also always depth to the story in allusions and references and underlying themes that may not be apparent to a young adult reader on the first reading.

One of the things that drives my kids crazy (but I think it is still important) is that I frequently will stop a movie or pause in reading and ask about a scene and what is going on. Sometimes they have understood the reference or know what the word means, but a lot of the time they haven’t. Part of what I am trying to do is invite them to look for the meaning below the surface.

I have been hosting a zoom book club since 2020. Right now we are reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It is a compilation of four biographical essays. Baldwin is a master of references and allusions. Some are easier to spot than others, but it is clear that he isn’t only a writer, but a deep reader, of scripture, the classics and the current literature of his time. It is a joy to read that in a group because we have different histories and experiences and we catch different things.

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Summary: A reframing of the concept of racism, not as hatred on the basis of skin color, but as greed. 

Racial capitalism is a concept that I have been aware of, but not dived deeply into. I read part of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism by Jonathan Tran but put it aside when I had some other pressing things and never came back to it. I think, in part, I set it aside because I needed to grapple with some other things first. I have followed Malcolm Foley on social media (and his podcast) for a while. I have observed him from a distance coming across the concept of racial capitalism and how that shifted some of his language around racism. I pre-ordered The Anti-Greed Gospel a while ago precisely because I thought he could introduce the topic in a way that I could understand.

About a week before the book was released, Netgalley emailed and offered me an advance digital copy for review. The Anti-Greed Gospel fairly short. I read a chapter or so before bed and finished it in five days. (There are 8 chapters and the main text is about 165 pages. I had 55 highlights in my copy which you can see here.)

As I was reading I kept thinking that in some ways Critical Race Theory is centering how legal structures were the primary tool of racism while Racial Capitalism centered out greed and capitalism were the primary tool of racism. But that is both too simple and not nuanced enough. It is pretty well known that legal structures were essential to creating the concept of race. Race as we understand the modern category did not exist before the enlightenment when categorization became a mainstream tool of not just science, but also of economics and other areas of academics and culture. That is, of course, not to say that no one recognized that there were different skin colors, but to say that phenotypical skin color was not determinative of worth, value or identity in the way that scientific racism developed from the 18th to the 20th century.

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Summary: An exploration of the season of Epiphany, a celebration of the glory of Christ’s incarnation and revelation of himself to us.

I appreciate this book while also being a bit frustrated with it and I am not completely sure why. I started it last year during the Epiphany season and didn’t finish it. So I started it again right at the end of Christmas season so that I would have it done by the start of Epiphany. But again I didn’t finish and I really forced myself to finish. I have previously read Rutledge’s book on Advent, which is mostly a collection of sermons. And I read about 75% of Rutledge’s’ Crucifixion and I have dipped into several other of her sermon collections, but again, never finished them.

Sermon collections are not something that really are intended to read straight through. So dipping into them but not finishing is I think to be expected for the genre. But there is something else that I think feels off here. I very much appreciate Rutledge’s wisdom and attention to the tradition of the Episcopal church. She turns 87 later this year and we need to pay attention to elders who have seen changes in history. I also think that she is one of the best preachers I have ever heard. I have spent a lot of time watching her old sermons on youtube.

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Summary: An exploration of post-colonial practical theology in the Anglican world. 

I am a fan of reading widely, but in my wide ranging reading I do not always know how to really write about what I read. This is a book that I appreciated and recommend, but I also need to say up front I am not qualified to evaluate. I have some understanding of post-colonial theory, but my understanding is very cursory.

I grew up baptist and have always attended baptist or non-denominational churches until the past 18 months when I started attending an Episcopal church. I used the Book of Common Prayer for years, which is the pull part of moving toward the Anglican tradition. The push part of that decision is my practical and theological changes from autonomous local churches in the face of abuse scandals and leader misbehavior. Episcopal structures are not immune to abuse and leader misbehavior (see George Carey and Justin Welby‘s resignations and the variety of scandals in ANCA and TEC). But part of the differences is that episcopal systems of church governance have the theoretical possibility of addressing sinful leaders, autonomous non-denominational or baptist church systems often do not have any ability to address sinful leaders in a meaningful way.

One of the themes of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is that interaction is bidirectional. Yes, colonial harm went from the colonizer to the colonized, but there are other interactions. This is similar to the focus in David Swartz’s Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, which explores the ways that American Evangelicals were impacted by missions and interaction with world Christianity. Not all feedback is positive. In a complicated way, Swartz’s exploration of the Homogenous Unit Principle and the way that was brought back from the mission field and was used to uphold church segregation beyond when segregation in other cultural areas was frowned upon, is an example of how not all feedback is positive.

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Summary: How do you summarize a life like John Lewis’?

I am not new to the story of John Lewis, but this was the first full-length biography I have read about John Lewis. I have previously read the graphic novels (The March Trilogy and Run) and the short biography by Jon Meacham, as well as watching the documentary Good Trouble. And Lewis figures prominently in many biographies, memoirs, and Civil Rights era histories. But I had not read a full-length biography.

David Greenberg has previously written biographies of Nixon and Coolidge and two books about the presidency. This is a biography that used hundreds of interviews and personal papers. And I think perhaps most interesting to me is that the biography was only half finished when  Lewis was ousted from SNCC. The main difference is that everything I have previously watched or read primarily focused on Lewis’ early civil rights work prior to leaving SNCC.

“Lews found himself, at age 26, with no job, unmarried and unsure what to do with his life. The movement to which he had devoted his adult life was veering away from the ideals that had animated it. To remain in the struggle, he would have to find another path.”

Part of what has always previously struck me about Lewis was how young he was when he was thrust into leadership. He was a leader of the Nashville Student Movement before he was 20. He was one of the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington when he was 23. Stokley Carmichael replaced him as chairman of SNCC when Lewis was 26. Everything I had previously read about Lewis was how his orientation toward a belief in nonviolence as a principle, not just a strategy paired with his maturity as a young man. He was not inclined to date or drink or parties, but he did draw people to him.

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Summary: A brief book about the problems of education reform.

I picked this up because it was by Jonathan Kozol. I read several of his books in the 1990s and was a bit surprised that he had a new book out. Kozol turns 88 in Sept 2024 and his work on social justice and education should be celebrated. I am glad I read this because it was by Jonathan Kozol, but at the same time, if you are interested in the problems of education reform and especially how it negatively impacts Black or other racial minorities or poor students of all races, I would recommend Bettina Love’s recent book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. I read it last year but did not write up my thoughts at the time because I was in a busy season. But it is a very helpful book that I think should be more widely read, not just among educators, but also among politically active people of all types of backgrounds.

An End to Inequality covers a number of different problems with public education from the physical environment (lead in water or paint, poor air circulation, heating, air, etc.) to curriculum to problematic reforms. I think one of the main themes of Bettina Love’s book is handled well here. Generally, testing of educational reform programs is done at poor or minority schools. Any testing of educational reform at predominately white and higher income public schools are reforms that give students more options or freedom. While the reforms at lower-income and minority schools are reforms that are focused on more highly structured teaching models, narrower academic ranges of subjects, or economic efficiencies. Said another way, reforms at predominantly white and upper-income schools are designed to help students have more enjoyment at learning and reforms at lower-income and predominately minority schools tend to reduce educational enjoyment.

The main problem with this first third of the book is that the examples are presented anecdotally, not systemically. I completely believe that everything that he reports happened, but there isn’t a structure to tell the reader how widespread these problems are or if they really are disproportionately impacting low-income and minority students. I think they are, I think there is plenty of evidence available in other sources to show that they are, but Kozol’s standard format is to tell stories of particular students or teachers and that story-oriented structure tends to lack statistical underpinnings.

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