Bookwi.se

Summary: Wide ranging series of essays about faith, ethics, public morality and the theological concept of the common good.

Some authors are more aural in their writing style. They write in a method where reading it out loud is the best method. Neil Gaiman, Eugene Peterson, Rob Bell all are authors that I immediately go to the audiobook first. And then maybe later re-read their books in a print format.

Rowan Williams I have decided is the opposite. I do like his writing, but he writes in a style that has lots of asides and subtle nuance that makes audiobooks difficult. I am always assuming that there is a footnote or some other feature from the print book that would help make sense of the context that is unavailable to the audiobook listener. (Although some of these essays were originally lectures and those are much easier to hear and understand.) And that is unfortunate for me, both because for some reason almost all of Williams books are cheaper on audiobook than in print and because I tend to listen to more audiobooks these days.

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Summary: The story of a Trevor Noah’s birth and childhood at the end of the apartheid and early days of freedom in South Africa. A celebrity memoir that isn’t about celebrity. 

I do not read many celebrity memoirs, unless you include theology professors. But Born A Crime will now be ranked with Julie Andrew’s Home as the two best celebrity memoirs I have read.

Trevor Noah was born to a Black African mother in apartheid South Africa. It was illegal for any mixed race sexual relations to occur. And the very existence of Trevor was actually proof of a crime. His father was a white German ex-pat working in South Africa. His mother, the real force of the book, was going to live the life she wanted regardless of the political rule. Until the fall of apartheid, when he was about 5, Trevor could not be seen with either parent in public for fear of him saying Daddy or Mommy or someone thinking they may be connected.

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Summary: Zeus got mad at Apollo, so he sent the self centered God to Manhattan and made him mortal to learn a lesson.

I am an unabashed fan of Rick Riordan. Not every book is great, but most of them are quite fun and worth reading. The Hidden Oracle is the start of a new series in the same world and time as Percy Jackson. (Percy is in the the book briefly). Riordan is continuing to build on the story from other books. So there are references to other books and story lines that you will either need to remember or just accept without knowing.

Apollo is a self-centered narcissist. Everything is really primarily about him. And this is told in his voice, so especially the early book shows a former god that can’t understand why everyone isn’t doing more to help him. The reader understands that he is annoying. And readers of Riordan’s earlier books remember why Zeus was mad at Apollo in the first place and why the other characters are not particularly fond of him.

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Summary: Three increasingly fast movements are unsettling the world. Friedman, without minimizing the danger, gives an optimistic account of how we can survive and thrive.

I am broadly a fan of Thomas Friedman’s general worldview. He is a progressive (by the definition of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind‘s understanding). He is a globalist (in a non-pejorative sense.) He is fascinated with technology, and while not universally trusting in it, he thinks that technology is the way that many of the problems of our world have been and will be solved. He also thinks that government has a role is cushioning the problems of the global markets and regulating those markets for the benefit of the average person. He does not easily fit into a left/right dichotomy on issues of economics, social safety net, foreign policy or many other issues.

But it has been a few years since I have read one of his books and I am not a regular reader of the New York Times or his columns. Friedman is a bit of an outsider at this point. He falls into the general charge of technocrat and the problems with that label. He is deeply knowledgeable about world politics and for more immigration and more international cooperation, which again, is unfashionable. And Friedman is generally writing as an optimist with wonder about the world in an age that is more cynical and pessimistic.

Thank You for Being Late is broadly about the increasing (and Friedman uses the term exponential often) growth of three areas, computing (especially the movement toward big data), global market forces (and this is broad to include trade, immigration and migration and ideas) and climate change. Friedman is not shy about the fact that the world is scary. We know more about the world know than at any other time and we cannot and should not hide from that knowledge. But we also have limited capacity to absorb and process and change.

The title is from a phrase that Friedman frequently tells people that he interviews. “Thank you for being late”. He frequently meets people for early breakfasts to interview them. And because of traffic or bad planning or other reasons, it is not infrequent that his guests are late. He has started to say thank you because it is only in those unplanned free times that he can think and process. The quote from this section (and I listened to this on audiobook, so I believe this is accurate, but transcribed.)

“The ancients believed there is wisdom in patience, and that wisdom comes from patience. Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed, it was the space for reflection and thought. We are generating more knowledge than ever before…but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”

I like Friedman’s writing style, but he can tend to overwhelm the reader with examples and stories to make his point. So there is far too many fascinating stories and examples that prove his point to really mention. But starting in about 2007, there has been an exponential growth in the ability of technology to collect and harness data. Part of this is felt in the always connected worker. But it is also felt in the slightly too targeted ads that feel like someone is always watching you, and they are.

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I am reposting this 2015 review because Thomas Oden passed away yesterday at the age of 85.
Summary: A memoir of a theologican’s movement from classic liberalism to historic Christianity.

I have been vaguely aware of Thomas Oden but I have not previously read anything by him.

I was first aware of his books on early African Christianity such as The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing the Early Church Tradition. I was not really aware that he was also the driving force behind the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.

People I know of kept mentioning how good this memoir was and when I had some Amazon promotional credit I bought it (it is the most expensive memoir I have ever purchased, which is why I have not read it previously.)

Oden is similar in age to Eugene Peterson, Kalistos Ware, Pope Benedict, Martin Marty and Richard John Neuhaus. All of these theologians lived through a strange time. They were born between the wold wars in a global recession. The first wave of progressive modernity had passed with the world wars and a new death of god liberalism came to the fore with their adulthood.

Oden fully embraced liberal theology as an academic theologian (and unusual for then, but not today, also a working pastor). In his late 30s he started to struggle with the weaknesses of the liberal movement, ecumenism (as illustrated by the World Council of Churches) and his own faith.

A major turning point was his first sabbatical, which he spent in Europe interacting with many of his theological heroes and as an observer with Vatican II. Over the next decade he started promoting “classical Christianity” through “paleo-orthodoxy,” a theological method that rejected innovation but instead relied on early church (Patristic) sources.

Once committed to paleo-orthodoxy (he was differentiating from neo-orthodoxy), he pledged to not intentionally write anything new. For Oden, the way forward was by fully understanding those that were closest to the time of Jesus. These early writers were following in the steps of Paul in 2 Cor 2:2 by saying nothing new about Jesus.  Oden is also committed to the consensus teaching. One of his other projects was to determine exactly what is agreed upon by different groups.  So one book project was taking over 100 evangelical statements of faith and determining what was affirmed by all of them. (And this was really what at the heart of the Ancient Christian Commentary series as well.)

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Summary: A WWII soldier tells his story.

As I have said with most of the graphic novels I have read this year, Alan’s War was a recommendation from Seth Hahne (check out his blog Good Ok Bad). I picked it up based on my enjoyment of graphic novel as history book in the March trilogy.

Alan’s War is the story of Alan Cope. The artist Emmanuel Guibert met him by accident on a beach in France and they struck up a five year friendship until Cope’s death in 1999. Alan Cope fought in Europe in WWII, and after a brief return to the US, he spent the rest of his life in Europe. Originally written in French and translated into English, Alan’s War was released in the US in 2008.

Alan Cope was young. He didn’t turn 18 until the middle of the war. Right at the end of the war, just as he turned 20, he was transferred to Europe. Cope did not see any real battles, but the horrors of the war were still all around him.

Roughly the first half of the book is about World War II. But the rest of the book about his life after the war. He did see battle, so I do not think a PTSD like armchair diagnosis is appropriate. But war does not just effect soldiers through PTSD.

Part of the benefit, and I think part of the problem for Cope is the exposure to the world in a way that broke many of his preconceptions. He seems to have been a gregarious and outgoing person. Most of the stories are about people. Those people introduced him to new ways of thinking, new ideas and new things things. In the army, in Europe, and  in US after the war, he met both good and not so good people. Many of those good people rejected Christianity and eventually so did Cope (who was studying to become a pastor after the war.)

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Summary: A Christian Ethicist makes a case for full inclusion of LGBT Christians within the church.

This is the second of my books trying to explore the arguments for and against full acceptance of LBGT Christians within the church. I finished this over a week ago and I am not sure how to write the review.

As a book I think this is overall better than Matthew Vine’s God and the Gay Christian, although the one thing I thought that Vine’s book did better was trace the cultural category of ‘gay’ over time.

Gushee is an ethicist and an Evangelical historically. The second edition of Changing Our Mind, which is what I read, ends with the text of a speech where he traces the history of how Christians changed their views about the status of non-Christian Jews theologically after the Holocaust. That brief description (it was Gushee’s dissertation project) is a good summary of the book as a whole.

Gushee, in the main book, has 20 short chapters (in 149 pages) that lay out his biblical, cultural, ethical and historic case for why the church should reject its historical teaching about homosexuality as a categorical sin and instead fully welcome gay Christians that are committed to monogamous covenanted (married) relationships or celibacy outside of marriage.

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Summary: A Fictionalized history of the real Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish prayer book for the Passover Seder that is now around 500 years old.

Geraldine Brooks is one of those authors I keep meaning to read, but had not.  I borrowed People of the Book from my library on audio.  As with many fiction books I read, I had not even read the summary before I started the book.

The People of The Book is a historical fiction that is based on what is actually known of the Sarajevo Haggadah with fictionalized history to fill in what is not known.  Brooks wrote an article in the New Yorker just before the book came out with some of the known history.

The real history sounds like fiction.  Two different times, during World War II and during the Bosnian War, muslim curators of the museum where it was kept hid the book away to keep it safe.  I will not detail the real history, but you can read it at the above link.

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