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Summary: This books is a series of essays about protest, racism, violence and was the last book published before his death.

I decided to read Faith and Violence after reading Daniel Horan’s book on Merton earlier this year. I probably should have just bought a used copy of the book (which is what I think is probably the best and certainly the cheapest option), but instead I used interlibrary loan. The book I received was a first edition hardcover. There is something interesting in reading a first edition  book that came out just over 50 years ago and which clearly had been read, but not by all that many people.

I didn’t have time to read the whole book. It came about a week before I went on vacation and I was busy getting ready for vacation or I was actually on vacation. Almost all of the reading I did (about half the book) was in the car. I was primed to read it with a view toward modern use of Merton’s ideas because of Horan’s essays. And it felt like he was writing with a more contemporary approach toward activism and faith and social problems than some other contemporaries of the era. Part of what I appreciated about Horan’s essays is that he both talked about how we can use Merton in contemporary thought and how Merton was a person of his time and limited in some ways by that historical position.

What I was most interested in is how much Merton approached social issues as systems not individual acts or the acts of unattached individuals. This is not just a book about violence “out there” but a discussion with other Christians about how we as Christians uphold violence. In the introduction he explicitly calls out Reinhold Niebuhr’s “realism” as justifying the use of force and violence. Merton is calling for nonviolent resistance to injustice. Faith and Violence would have been published just before Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. That whole year, and really since 1963, the role of nonviolence resistance was being questioned in the civil rights movement. And in 1968, the resistance to the war in Vietnam was strengthening.

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Summary: A Wheaton College task force released its report on Wheaton’s history of racial issues on campus. 

I am a 1995 alumni of Wheaton College, and since my time at Wheaton, I have been interested in racial issues at the school. Part of recent interest was sparked by reading Jesse Curtis’ The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era. It was only then that the history of Wheaton that I thought I knew was wrong. I was aware of my experience of Wheaton in the 1990s, and I have followed many events on campus since that time, including the firing of Dr. Hawkins. (There is a feature-length documentary that can be widely streamed.)

Wheaton was one of several Christian colleges that initially accepted Black and other racial minority students and then segregated in the early 20th century before desegregating in the post-Brown v. Board era. During my time at Wheaton, I was never aware of a period of segregation; I was only aware of its early history as an early abolitionist school that accepted black students from its founding. The main reason for this report is that Wheaton is attempting to grapple with that largely forgotten or repressed history. I am highly supportive of initiatives like this, and I am well aware that many supporters of Wheaton do not like initiatives like this because it reveals a less flattering history. There is a real risk to the school and the potential for growth.

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This is my annual best of 2016 list. (Way late I know.) This is my list of the books that at the end of the year I still think about. They are not all from 2016 (most are not) and they may not be the “˜best’ books that I have read. Some years my best list has been more heavily fiction oriented. And some years I have split it up into a fiction list and a non-fiction list. But this year I am going to keep it all together (fiction is at the bottom). This is my list, roughly in order. I am not sure how you really compare books of widely different genres. So think of it as an approximation.

Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering by Makoto Fujimura The new Martin Scorsesee movie Silence, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo goes into wide release next weekend. You theoretically have time to read the original Endo novel and then this book, which is Fujimura’s reflection on the novel and his reflections his and Endo’s Christian faith and the culture of Japan. Silence is not for the faint of heart. It is a novel about Christians that renounce their faith in the face of persecution. I think it is an important book and I think Fujimura’s book is the best book I have read this year. I am in the middle of re-reading it right now.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah is the most unexpected book on the list. I have liked Noah when I watched The Daily Show, but I don’t watch it often. And I tend to not pick up many celebrity memoirs, so if this has not been offered for free on audiobook I would not have picked it up. But it is very well written and a fascinating look at a culture and country that I do not know much about. Growing up in post-apartheid South Africa is not a particularly funny subject. But Noah handle it with humility, appropriate weight for the subjects and with lots of humor. I will pre-order anything else that he writes.

The March Trilogy by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin with illustrator Nate Powell deserves it accolades (National Book Award and Goodreads Graphic Novel of the Year among others.) I have read a number of comic book/graphic novels this year. I have become acquainted with Seth Hahne who is behind the Goodokbad blog. He has shown me that there is so much more than traditional superhero or Manga. A lot of history is particularly well suited to graphic novel format. And the story of the Civil Rights movement through the biography of John Lewis, hits all the right notes.

Another very good graphic novel is Vision by Tom King. Vision is a member of the Avengers, but this is more a comic book about his family and what it means to love in difficult situations than about superheroes.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes was my light pick of the year. I tend toward heavy fiction and lots of non-fiction. But I can’t only read those. I need funny books and lighters books as well. I am a huge fan of the Princess Bride movie and book. But I had not picked it up until it was on sale several years after I heard about it. This is a book that should be listened to. Elwes is not only an excellent narrator, who does great impressions of the other stars in the movie, but many of the others involved in the movie participated in reading their sections of the book as well.

Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times by Soon-Chan Rah is the best biblical book I read this year. It is both a commentary on the book of Lamentations and a call to bring the concept of lamentations back to Evangelical worship and a commentary on how Christians should think about social issues. Soon-Chan Rah is a former pastor/church planter and now a professor at Northpark Seminary. He is a prime example of why we need more diversity not only in our seminaries, but in our reading and thinking about scripture as well. Diversity is not simply about making minority Christians feel represented but about becoming the whole body of Christ. Also related and worth reading is The End of White Christian America by Robert Jones. It is a book about demographics and polling more than theology, but it just serves to reenforce the need for a more diverse understanding of the church.

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