End of the year thoughts and recommendations

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2019 marks 10 years of blogging most of the books I have read. This year, like most years, I met some of my reading goals and not others. I read good books that have stuck with me and books that were less memorable.

Reading Goals

My main goal this year was to increase the diversity of authors and to keep the percent of White authors to less than 33%. I failed at that goal since my annual rate was 47%. Two contributing factors in the failure was starting a program to study spiritual direction and only having White authors assigned and only reading white authors as supplemental books to those assigned. I am sure there are books on spiritual direction written by non-White authors, I have not found them yet.

The second problem was just not being conscious enough of monitoring. I was conscious of focusing primarily on increasing Black authors, but that needs to be more than just in books about race. And in increasing the racial diversity I did not pay enough attention to gender and decreased my percent of women authors from 42% in 2018 to 31% in 2019.

2020 Goals

My goal next year will be to keep White authors to 45% or less while increasing the number of books by Asian, Latinx and Native American authors to at least 10% (a really small goal, but one I have not met for the past three years.) And I will try to get the gender balance to be actually balanced instead of overwhelmingly male.

I am going to have a goal to read a sermon a day. I am going to start with Fleming Rutledge, Howard Thurman, Eugene Peterson and then I will seek out some others. If you have any suggestions let me know.

Most impactful books

Last year I tried dividing the books that impacted me into different categories of how they impacted me. Last year’s categories do not really work this year. The books I find most impactful were fairly serious and generally either biography, history, theology or about racial issues. Mostly they were pointing out areas where I have blind spots, ignorance or weakness. I am going to have categories but I am not sure if they will be helpful or not.

Racial Ignorance

I have been reading fairly widely around racial issues for about five years now and I keep discovering new depths to my ignorance and bias, four books stand out here:

I have not written about Unsetting Truths yet because I want to read it again before I write about it, but as much as reading about slavery and the history around slavery impacted my understanding of racial history, Unsettling Truths and Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys and Andrea Smith’s chapter in Can “White” People Be Saved showed me how much I need to inspect my theology and understanding around colonialism, Native American history, and even basic historical facts.

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Healing Together: A Guide to Supporting Sexual Abuse Survivors by Anne Marie Miller

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Healing Together: A Guide to Supporting Sexual Abuse SurvivorsSummary: Part her own story of sexual abuse at the hands of a pastor and part guide to being with survivors of sexual abuse in your context. 

I have “˜known’ Anne Marie Miller for a very long time. I started reading her blog around 12 years ago. I have read all of her books. She ended up marrying the cousin of a high school friend of mine. I have appreciated being able to pray for her regularly as I follow along with her life via social media and the occasional email. I am not coming at Healing Together dispassionately. I was an early reader of one of her earlier books, one where she first detailed her sexual abuse.

Anne Miller is an example of a number of (primarily) women that have taken their abuse public because the desire for a better response by the church. Her abuse was at the hands of a church staff. Rachael Denhollander’s was at the hands of a sports doctor; others have been abused by teachers, parents, etc. Regardless of the context, the pain and trauma continue, and the context will be forever tainted. Church-based sexual abuse is particularly a problem because the church should be one of the places that are most responsive to sexual abuse survivors. But even a casual understanding of sexual abuse can see that churches often re-victimize abuse survivors.

Healing Together is doing several things. One is Anne’s own story. I primarily listened to the audiobook of Healing Together with Anne reading. I did that intentionally because I wanted to be able to hear her voice tell her own story. Anne is still recovering from a freak accident where she lost several teeth and has had to have multiple surgeries to reconstruct her jaw. Because I have known her for a while, I can hear some of that damage in her voice, but the audiobook is certainly still a good option for this Healing Together.

The second focus of Healing Together is understanding of what sexual abuse is, how the legal system works, simple definitions of terminology, and a guide on how to be in solidarity with abuse survivors. Her context is the church but this is not just a church-based guide. It is a guide that would be helpful for anyone, whether you are aware of abuse in your context or not. The reality is that whether you know it or not, you know people that have been sexually abused.

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Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever by Gavin Edwards

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kindness and wonder cover imageSummary: Half biography, half inspirational insights into how to learn from Mister Rogers. 

I am not unfamiliar with Mister Rogers’ story. In addition to regularly watching old episodes of his TV show with my four and six-year-olds, I have read four books by or about him over the past couple of years and watched several documentaries. But despite the familiarity, I continue to pick up books about him because, as the subtitle suggests, Mister Rogers continues to matter.

The full biography, The Good Neighbor, released last year, gave the most complete picture of Mister Rogers’ full life, but it was not perfect. There is room for more biographies. Kindness and Wonder did not attempt to duplicate the work of The Good Neighbor. Still, even in the short length of the biographical section, Kindness and Wonder included details I had not heard before, and I went a bit deeper into some aspects of his life than The Good Neighbor did.

Kindness and Wonder engaged Fred Rogers’ Christianity well. Mister Rogers would not have been the same Mister Rogers without his faith, and that comes through clearly in the second section. The second section has ten lessons we should learn about Mister Rogers. This is the type of cultural engagement that I would like Christians to do better. It is not merely “do better” advice or self-help but attempting to prod the readers toward selfless maturity. Some lessons impacted me more than others.

Here is a quote:

Consider this passage by Fred Rogers: “How our words are understood doesn’t depend just on how we express our ideas. It also depends on how someone receives what we’re saying. I think the most important part about communicating is the listening we do beforehand. When we can truly respect what someone brings to what we’re offering, it makes the communication all the more meaningful.”

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Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God’s Image by Philip Yancey and Paul Brand

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Summary: An allegory about the body and the body of Christ.

Describing this as an allegory is not quite right, but I heard Yancey describe it as an allegory in a podcast interview and I think that gets at a truth that other descriptions do not. There is not an allegorical story here (like Pilgrim’s Progress), but the book is largely taking the wisdom of Paul Brand’s years as a surgeon and a researcher into Lepersy and uses that knowledge to apply to the individual Christian life and the body of Christ.

Philip Yancey has rewritten and modernized the two books Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image into a new and updated book, Fearfully and Wonderfully. The science and many of the illustrations are recent, but the wisdom and stories from Brand are those from the older books.

Even though I read the older ones as a teen, I still regularly think about the central ideas, especially around pain frequently. I am not sure I would have picked this book up if it were not part of the Renovare Book Club, but because it was, I started reading the hardback. I sent the hardback to a friend and finished the book in audiobook.

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The Radical King edited by Cornel West

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The Radical King cover imageSummary: If all you remember from Martin Luther King Jr is his “I have a dream” speech, The Radical King will round out his legacy.

Last week I finished up an audiobook collection of Howard Thurman’s sermons, prayers, and teachings. What I loved about it was that it was actually Thurman’s voice. The quality was not up to current standards, but there was value in hearing his actual voice. The problem with the collection was that it was mostly snippets of content, rarely more than 10 minutes of any particular talk.

The Radical King, edited by Cornel West, has the opposite problem. This is full-length sermons or speeches, but modern celebrity narrators read them. All of the narrators do a fine job, and the audio quality is excellent, but it is not King’s voice, and King’s voice is one of the most recognizable of the last century. The reality is that there are just limitations for both of these collections based on what is available. Cornel West is trying to give insight into the breadth of King’s thinking. Radical seems to promise a bit too much, King was radical for his time, but while there was an article celebrating Norman Thomas, a prominent socialist, there was also more than one instance of King showing why he was not a communist or socialist.

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The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman: A Visionary for Our Time

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The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman: A Visionary for Our TimeSummary: A collection of portions of Howard Thurman’s sermons, prayers, talks, and teaching.

Jesus and the Disinherited is Howard Thurman’s most influential book. It is the only book of Thurman’s I have read so far, but I have an autobiography and a collection of his meditations and sermons that I will get to eventually.

When I think of Thurman, I think of him primarily as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. And because King died in 1968, and Jesus and the Disinherited was published in 1949, I think of Thurman as someone from the first half of the 20th century, but Thurman lived until 1981.

The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman is a collection of sermons, prayers, and talks with introductions to different sections by Alice Walker, Vincent Harding, and several others. The openings were helpful because many of the contributors relate personal stories about Thurman as part of their sections.

Because these are all actual recordings of Thurman and not narrations of his written work, the quality is not as high as most audiobooks. However, the ability to hear him, in his voice, makes up for any weakness in audio quality. Many of these are from his time as pastor of the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples. This church was an early, intentionally interracial church, started in 1944 (before the Kneel in Protests across the country.) Thurman was co-pastor with Alfred Fisk, a White man, until 1953 when he became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston College.

The main negative of the collection is that there is very little content more than five to ten minutes long. I would have like many more full-length sermons. I am not sure if the choice to primarily collect snippets was in the interest of a broader range of content, or issues of audio quality. Whichever it was, the decision leaves the listener without full context in many cases.

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Be the Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation by Latasha Morrison

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Be the Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation by Latasha MorrisonSummary: A mix of Latasha Morrison’s personal story as well as the story of Be the Bridge.

I have never met Latasha Morrison, but several people I know have. I have never been a part of a Be the Bridge group, but again, many people that I know have, and speak very highly of the groups.

Be The Bridge is Latasha Morrison’s first book, and like many practitioners, the book is as much about her work and organization as anything else. This is not a negative; her passion for bridge-building between racial divisions within the Christians church is evident and essential work. Be The Bridge has a model of racial reconciliation, and while it is a useful model, it is not the only model.

There is no “˜perfect book’ for everyone when considering race issues in the US or in the church. However, Be the Bridge will probably be high on my list of books to recommend. I have spent much of the past five years or so reading widely on race. At this point, I have a couple of biases. First, while I do not exclusively read books on race by minority, especially Black authors, I do think I should read books primarily by minority, especially Black authors. Kyle Howard has a short thread on twitter about the problems of White people defining racism. Part of it was: “When the dominate culture claims sole ability to define what is racist, you will often find that they are never defined as being such…”

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Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie Glaude Jr

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Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie Glaude JrSummary: Democracy in Black addresses the ‘values gap’ between the claimed idealism of equity and democracy and the reality of history.

One of the problems with many White people in thinking about issues of race is that Black and other racial groups are still “˜other’. That “˜other’-ness is otherness in part because of the assumption of monolithic thinking. As with every topic, the more you know about an issue, the more nuance that you can see. The more comprehensive your approach to an item, the more variance within the subject that you can identify.

If you discuss Christianity, you have to ask what about Christianity is universal and what is particular to a subgroup. Catholic and Southern Baptist responses to one issue may be virtually identical, but nearly unrecognizably different in another. The very nature of worship and what the centerpiece of worship service of oriented around is different between Southern Baptist and Catholics, but they do still both worship the same God.

Democracy in Black is a political philosophy of societal change. Glaude is the Chair of the African American Studies Department at Princeton. He is the current president of the American Academy of Religion. His Ph.D. is in religious studies, and this is a book informed by Christianity. However, it is more focused on the methods and theory of cultural interaction and politics. In some ways, I think this is probably a book written a couple of years too early. It is rooted in a discussion of the role of race in the Obama era, and that is a critical discussion. But it does not fully engage with the racial backlash that gave rise to Trump.

Glaude wants to talk about values more than racism. It is not that racism is not shaping our values, but that the gap in our values is more extensive than mere racism, at least as many conceive of the meaning of racism.

“We talk about the achievement gap in education or the wealth gap between white Americans and other groups, but the value gap reflects something more basic: that no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we’ve made, white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of Americans. The value gap is in our national DNA.”

Merely discussing racial gaps in wealth, education, health, or other areas often reveals how we think about race. There are those that continue to deny that actual disparities exist. Some admit the variations but place most of the blame on individuals. Others suggest that racial differences are rooted in history, culture, systems, resources, or some mix of many different causes. But Glaude, while not glossing over the complexity, wants to ensure that we see that these disparities are not abnormal, but “˜who we are’.

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Blessed Broken Given: How Your Story Becomes Sacred in the Hands of Jesus by Glenn Packiam

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Blessed Broken Given: How Your Story Becomes Sacred in the Hands of JesusSummary: A book that attempts to tell the story of how Christ uses the common.

Blessed Broken Given has bread as the central metaphor of the book. Mostly that bread is directly referencing eucharistic bread. Occasionally it is more mundane, but because I have followed Glenn Packiam for years on twitter and read a couple other of his books, I know that even when he is directly referencing more mundane bread, he is still keeping the eucharistic bread in the frame. It is one of the tensions that I think Packiam’s ministry holds well. Glenn Packiam is the pastor of a local church that is part of a multi-site non-denominational mega-church. He is also an ordained Anglican clergy. He is high-church theologically in a low church setting. If I were local to him, I think I would want to be a member of his church. It is not distant from my theological position, while I also attend a multi-site non-denominational mega-church that I am not always in theological alignment with.

Blessed Broken Given is a book fo theological wisdom about what it means to be a Christian. It tells stories to teach as Packiam circles around his point from a couple of different directions. In a late chapter, where he starts talking about what it means to live in a Post-Christian society, one which no longer embraces Christianity as a central organizing metaphor, but one that also has not found a way to express itself outside of being no longer Christian, he has the following quote:

“This is the generation that wants justice but not any sense righteousness. We hunger for community but have no taste for the Cross. We want the goods of the good news without the Christ of the gospel. We want the life of the kingdom without the claims of the King. Maybe this is a reaction born of deep disappointment.”

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