Bookwi.se

Summary: Modern translation/paraphrase of the spiritual direction letters of François Fénelon.

As I regularly say, I appreciate book clubs in part because they make me read things I might not read on my own. This was the second book in this year’s Renovare book club.  Generally I do not participate in any of the online message boards for the book club and I do not go to any of the in person meetings that I could go to. But I do listen to the podcasts about the book. This one was with Winn Collier, who was responsible for editing this book.

Spiritual direction is an old practice. And I think that many people met with their spiritual directors in person, but we only have records of spiritual direction that was done by letter because no one as the audio or video of spiritual direction from the 16th century. And except in the cases of spiritual direction supervision, which often has the practice of the spiritual director transcribing their memory of the sessions for purposes of discussion and learning, spiritual direction is intended to be private. As a spiritual director I don’t share about the people I meet with except with my own spiritual director who occasionally gives me advice. I occasionally do write about my work of spiritual direction because I find writing to be helpful as I clarify to myself what I think about things. But I tend to get rid of those writings immediately because I want to honor people’s privacy.

I have read several other collections of spiritual direction writing from Henri Nouwen and Evelyn Underhill and some others, but I just don’t tend to like the type of short writing that letter collections tend to be. I get bored and I rarely finish them. I did finish this one, but it took me about four months. I rarely read more than two letters at a sitting. I tended to read them at night before I go to bed. I often read a couple chapters of whatever I am currently reading until I am too tired to read and for this book I would often read one or two of these and then do my regular reading. The problem with this is that I am not giving myself time to think about them. It would be better if I read them and then went on a walk and was able to reflect on them for a while.

Read more

Summary: A secular historian’s perspective on what impact Christianity made on the world.

Dominion is not a new book. It has been out for about seven years at this point. I have been hearing people praise it since it came out. And it is not the kind of book that has a corner of Christianity praising it. I have seen progressive process theologian Tripp Fuller and SBC seminary president Al Mohler praise it. And it largely seems to be well received in the secular and academic world as well. This very long and detailed review on the History for Atheists blog closely read the book and traces the nuances of the argument well.

But I mostly was avoiding Dominion because I kept seeing it used badly as either a type of apologetics or as a defense of Christian dominionism support. Those who are now largely labeled as Christian Nationalists tend to believe that the western world and its culture was shaped by Christianity. Which is a simple form of Holland’s thesis. Holland is suggesting that the world that Christianity arose in (Greek influenced Roman world) was shaped by power, wealth and a rejection of care for the poor and vulnerable. It is anachronistic, but the section on Friedrich Nietzsche details why Nietzsche was rejecting Christianity as being weak precisely because of the cultural influence that Holland is describing.

One of the points that is made several times in the book, but it most effectively made in chapter five, is that charity is seen by the Roman authorities who opposed the church as an effective tool to persuade the people. There are some letters from Roman officials to non-Christian religious figures that they should start engaging in charitable work as part of their religious duties (which they had not done before) because by the 3rd century or so, common people started to see how the early Christians were caring not only for their own people, but also for the broader community. That movement, to see charity for people outside of your group as a good, is a significant shift in the culture of the era, but it is also important to note that the evaluation here isn’t because people are worth caring for broadly, but because it shifted public opinion. While Holland’s evidence here is outside of the church, you can see how this works inside the church in the centuries since then. Pragmatism, not theological conviction, often is the main driving force in cultural change.

Holland is not presenting a simplistic narrative. Christianity and the west did not actually follow the principles of Christianity quite often. But there were many times where it did. One of the good examples of this is Alcuin was an advisor to Charlemagne. Alcuin not only became an advisor to Charlemagne, but convinced him that killing non-Christians was a violation of Christian ethics. Alcuin instead encouraged education and missionaries who could persuade people to become Christians voluntarily because Alcuin argued that you can force people to be baptized, but not to believe. Charlemagne revoked the death penalty for not being Christian and stopped using war as a means of conversion.

Read more

Summary: An exploration of God’s mercy and the ways that God seems to change.

One of the reasons that I like to read widely is that I learn things in one area that has relevance to another area. That always means that I am potentially drawing inappropriate conclusions because I don’t know enough about multiple things to be an expert, and that if I knew more, I might not draw the same conclusion.

One of the areas that I have been fairly interested in recently is law, especially Supreme Court legal theory. Part of what interests me about that is that in some ways it is the study of Hermeneutics, but through a secular lens. I am a very avid listener of Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast. They primarily cover high level legal theory, more than working out individual cases. One of the things that is emphasized in legal theory is the limiting principle. Because so many concepts in law are not universally true at all times, the concept of the limiting principle tries to map out what the limits of the use of that concept is.

Right now, there is a discussion about the Unitary Executive. There are different versions of this concept, but overly simplistically, the Unitary Executive theory is that all of the power of the Executive Branch is vested in the single figure of the President. So there can’t be independent areas within the executive branch because there is only one president at a time. But that idea runs up against the concept of the limiting principle. Even in earlier generations, no one can really operate in all areas of the executive. There are some areas of expertise where we want career experts not just political appointments. There are other areas, like corruption investigations, where without some level of independence, the executive branch cannot do the job it has been tasked with.

Read more

Summary: A collection of essays that either point out philosophical ideas within Ted Lasso, use Ted Lasso to teach philosophical concepts or more broadly use philosophy as part of classic art (TV?) criticism. 

I know about this book because of the online magazine, Christ and Pop Culture. I have been a reader for about a decade or so and a participant in their facebook discussion group for most of that time. Two of the members of that group were a married couple who taught philosophy and english. David and Marybeth Baggett have since left teaching and both started law school, but before they left they co-edited Ted Lasso and Philosophy.

Ted Lasso and Philosophy is a collection of twenty essays. With any essay collection, there is always some unevenness. But I think naturally when three different types of essays are included, any reader will have more attraction to a particular type of essay that they like more so this isn’t as much about some essays being weaker than others as much as it is that some people will be attracted to different styles.

Personally I think I like the more classic art criticism essays that use philosophical reasoning to expose the depth of writing and acting in the series. That is related but not quite the same as the essays that are exposing philosophical ideas in the show. And neither of those are the same as the essays that are really 101 introductions to philosophical concepts that uses the show as illustrations for the concepts.

One example of the later is the chapter on Stoicism that uses Rebecca as an example of what a stoic believes or the exploration of whether or not Ted fits the definition of a Egoist or if Isaac is an example of the concept of Dao. Or if Beard’s statement about the world just being an AI simulation is potentially true.

Read more

Summary: An exploration of the ways that misogyny impacts our world.

I reference this all the time, but George Yancy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2015, where he tried to discuss the problems of race in America by including himself within the problems of sexism. He developed that more in his book Backlash and I have come to use his framing as the best shorthand for how we are in a system, while still having the ability (and responsibility) to respond to the system. Using Yancy’s ideas, I tell people all the time that when I was a stay at home nanny with my nieces and then a stay at home dad with my kids, I just got more support and affirmation as a man doing “women’s work” than women do. I didn’t ask for additional help in the grocery store, but it was given to me in ways that I could easily see that it wasn’t being given to women in my same position. As a man, I think it is important to push back against sexism in big and small ways as much as I can. But I can’t withdraw from the system that still misogynistic. Yancy then goes on the connect that to the problems of race. He says that just as he works to be anti-sexist, sexist (someone who as individual works to oppose sexism, but is still within a sexist society and still internalizes sexism in some ways) he also calls on white people to be anti-racist, racists (to be individually opposed to racism, while acknowledging the reality of continued racial hierarchy, both historically and currently.) And as a Christian and spiritual director, I think a third step of being an anti-sin, sinner is an important way to frame how we continue to be impacted by sin, while working to resist sin individually and corporately as well.

That simple framing of naming that as a Christian white male I am an anti-sexist, sexist and an anti-racist, racist and an anti-sin, sinner gives me a place to start reading Dorothy Littell Greco’s book with the assumptions that as a man, the problems of sexism and misogyny are my problems to grapple with, not just “women’s work.”

Read more

Summary: A late mediaeval Russian retelling of Rumplestiltskin.

I have said before that I am a fan of remakes. I like retellings of stories, fairytales in particular. I think that KB Hoyle’s series of fairytale retellings are some of my favorites. This is a retelling of Rumplestiltskin, but with a very Russian or Slavic perspective. My sample size is too small, but I think there may be a trend of more eastern European stories being retold. I got bogged down and never finished The Witch and the Tsar but I did finish the two novellas from Veronica Roth that are consciously based on Polish folktales and the Siberian folktale retelling of The Carver and the Queen Emma C. Fox and the Russian novel Laurus and much older, Orson Scott Card’s retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Enchanted.

Spinning Silver is set in Russia late enough that there were Tsars, but before any modern technology like trains. I don’t know if I would classify this as a feminist novel, but it is a female centered novel. There are four main female characters. The book opens with the peasant teen girl, Wanda. Her mother died and her father borrowed money from the local Jewish money lenders to pay for doctors. But her father spent most of the borrowed money on alcohol. Wanda had to grow up and care for her two younger brothers and avoid her father’s abuse.

Miryem is the daughter of a small village Jewish money lender. When her mother is sick and her father distracted, she starts to take over the business. She realizes she is good at business and collects the payments and turns the goods that she accepts in payment into other good and creates trade. She hires Wanda to care for her mother and do work around the house to give herself time to handle other aspects of the business. Miryem eventually connects back with her grandfather who runs a bank at the city a days ride away.

Read more

Summary: A biography of the great Octavia Butler, but mostly focusing on her work more than her life. 

I knew about Octavia Butler long before I read her. Around 2006 or 2007 I read the twilight books. I enjoyed them enough that I read the original Dracula and then I picked up Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last book, which was also a type of vampire story.

That led me to reading Kindred and then the Patternist series and then the Xenogenesis series and the Parable of the Sower and the short story collection. I still have not read the Parable of the Talents because I think that other than the book from the Patternist series that Butler worked to take out of print because she didn’t like it, that is the last of her books that I have not read and I am reluctant to read it because of that.

I did not really know anything about Butler prior to Positive Obsession. Butler grew up in post WWII California. I knew that she started writing in part because she saw a really bad scifi movie as a pre-teen and thought she could do better. I knew that she struggled to sell books and worked to support herself by doing temp jobs so she could write for much of her career. And I knew she died too young. (I wish there was more about her death. It is definitely hinted at, that she died in part because of bad medical care and maybe more can’t be written about that beyond that speculation, but I wanted more.)

Positive Obsession did fill in more of her story. The author, Susana Morris, identifies Butler as autistic. I learned more about her background and a lot about the books she wrote. But as a biography, I thought Positive Obsession wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. It wasn’t badly written. If you see it on sale (right now it is $1.99 on kindle) I think it is worth reading. But I think it is more about her books than about Butler. The author had access to Butler’s diaries and interviewed many. But there doesn’t seem to be much about her and her life.

Read more