Bookwi.se

Summary: A companion book to the PBS documentary on Reinhold Niebuhr.

The past couple of months I keep running across Reinhold Niebuhr. While I read him in seminary, I have not directly read anything by him for several years. But Niebuhr has come back to the world again with modern politics.

The two strong points that Niebuhr makes to our current political and theological world is that systems are always broken. No matter how good the goals or purposes of any institution or organization is, that institution or organization is still made up of sinful humans and will eventually disappoint or harm.

The second related point, that primarily comes out in his Irony of American History, is that in addition to institutions be broken, organizations with good goals will often adopt bad means to accomplish those good goals and in some ways be more dangerous than the institutions that are openly negative. With good intentions, comes the thought that people working within good institutions to cut corners or harm people because of the greater good that accomplishing those good goals will bring.

Those two points keep coming up. So I picked up An American Conscience and then watched the documentary after I finished the book. This is a brief book, not even 200 pages. But it does a good job introducing Niebuhr to readers that were likely not even born when he passed away.

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Summary: An exploration of how the stories that Movies and TV tell us teach us about what it means to be human in a secular world. (With lots of reference to Charles Taylor)

I have referenced the web magazine Christ and Pop Culture a number of times over the past couple years that I have been a subscriber. I am going to do it yet again. Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at Vox (formerly at Christianity Today) and a professor of English and Humanities at King’s College in New York City. She also is a member of the CAPC private Facebook group and I have learned a ton about good criticism from reading her movie reviews and other writing.

After my recent Great Course exploration of modern Philosophy I decided to pick up How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Faith and Politics at the End of the World. The title may not really describe it well, but this a perfect example of why the magazine Christ and Pop Culture exists.

Christianity can sometimes ignore the importance of stories, in spite of the fact that Jesus (and the bible) seem to have primarily taught through stories. The Great Courses lecture on modern philosophy was occationally hard to track because it did not ground the philosophy enough in experiential examples so that the listener could understand why a particular philosophical idea mattered.

Wilkinson and her co-writer Robert Joustra have grounded their discussion of philosophy in the recent TV and movie obsession with the apocalypse and dystopian stories. Long explorations of Battlestar Galactica, the Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and a number of other shows give context to philosophy so that the reader can understand not only the philosophy being explored but also can understand how good media criticism can give insights into the stories in a way that isn’t possible with just casual watching.

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Summary: A multi-generational starship is attempting to build a human colony on another world.

One of the reasons that science fiction has been historically popular is that it in general a hopeful genre. Science fiction dreams of new worlds being discovered, the expansion of humanity across the galaxy, technological progress. Or at least that has been a strong part of the world of science fiction.

More recently science fiction has been more concerned with dystopian worlds. There is often still a thread of hopefulness, at least some people will survive the destruction of most of humanity. Space exploration is no longer a significant theme of science fiction. There are occasional books about exploring or creating world. But even the few that are out there are likely to be like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series that views humanity as a bit players in galactic politics.

Aurora is the story of an enormous starship. It can travel 10% of light speed, but that means it will take approximately 150 years to reach the planet Aurora (around Tau Ceti). The ship is an ark. It contains about 2000 people and as many different climate sections and animals and plants as can be squeezed onto the ship.

The books opens as they are in the last generation before the come into their new home. The ship is continually in need of maintenance and interventions. The interventions almost always have unintended consequence. But they are making it.

And that is about as happy as the book gets. The writing is well done, but this is “˜anti-science fiction’ (as one very spoiler filled review on Amazon put it.) The main theme of the book is why space colonies will never work. And tragedy and bad luck are continually present.

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Summary: Racism and injustice have to be important to Christians if our faith is relevant to relationships on this side of heaven.

Race, Injustice, Privilege and related ideas are common discussions in the political world. And that is part of the problem with discussing them inside the Christian church. Quite often our understanding of issues that have any relationship to politics are based more on our political bias and background than our Christianity. It is not that our Christianity is unimportant to our politics, but our politics matters to what we think is important within Christianity.

Ken Wytsma has a very clear purpose in writing. He is a White pastor writing primarily to White Christians about race and inequality. He is doing that because he thinks that at least some readers will listen to him in ways that they have not been listening to minority Christians talk about race and inequality.

Section one is mostly a summary of history and illustrations of why inequality exists. It is a very good summary of a numbers of issues, from government involvement in housing segregation and inequality to the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating inequality to migration patters since the civil war. Inequality is a vast and complex matter.

Wytsma is summarizing the work of others here. In a short section he can’t give the depth that books like Warmth of Other Suns or Slavery by Another Name or New Jim Crow or the host of other in books that have the space to look deeply at different aspects of history, race, inequality and injustice. As a summary, this section is one of the better looks at the variety of ways that inequality has come to be in place in just a few pages.

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