Bookwi.se

Summary: A pop-culture infused brief biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I am fascinated by the Supreme Court. I have read a number of books about the history of the court and some biographies of individual justices that have been on the court. So I picked this up when it was on sale last week.

The Notorious RBG is a brief biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is currently the oldest member of the Supreme Court (83) and was the second woman appointed to the court.

This book started as a tumblr account. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a barely 5 ft and tiny Jewish grandmother being compared to the Notorious BIG, a large African American rapper who was shot and killed when he was 24 (in 1997), is sufficiently incongruent to generate attention. RBG, especially in the past few years, has stepped up her dissents and become more vocal as the court has shifted to the right.

RBG is on the left of the court, but as a lower court jurist, she was not known for her radical stances. In fact the biggest concern when she was nominated was that she was not left enough. She served for a number of years with Robert Bork in the US Appeals Court and she voted with him 85% of the time when they were on the same cases. She also had a very public friendship with Antonin Scalia one of the most conservative justices on the court prior to his death this past spring.

Read more

I am reposting this review from earlier this year because the Kindle Edition has dropped to $6.99. I am planning on re-reading this in December in prepreation for the movie, which will be released in limited release in December and wide release in January. If you have not read about the movie this is a good article from New York Magazine.
Summary: Silence and Beauty is a profound reflection on the book Silence by Shusaku Endo, the role of art and beauty in Christianity, and a reflection of the impact of Christianity on the culture of Japan.

Silence by Shusaku Endo is one of those books that is not easily forgotten. I read it a couple years ago and I rarely go more than a couple weeks without referencing it.

Makoto Fujimura is a very well known artist, famous in many Evangelical circles for being a famous artist that is well known outside of Christian circles. Fujimura grew up in the US, but after college was accepted into a Japanese graduate program to study art. The first student to ever be accepted into this graduate program that did not grow up through the Japanese national art system. Fujimura became a Christian while studying art in Japan, a country with a very few Christians.

Silence and Beauty is fascinating. It opens with a bit is spiritual memoir. Fujimura details how  Shusaku Endo and his book Silence impacted his early faith. And unsurprisingly there is a long exploration of both Endo and his book Silence (as well as some of Endo’s other books.) That is done in the context of a rich sociological and historical study of Japan. And all of that is wrapped up in a defense of beauty and art as essential to Christianity. (I was reminded at times of of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic and Brian Zhand’s Beauty Will Save the World.)

Read more

Summary: A young woman in a dystopian world strives to build a life, a community, and a faith, in the midst of chaos.

I have been slowly working my way through Octavia Bulter’s book since I first read her nearly a decade ago. I have two full length novels and her short story collections yet to read.

Parable of the Sower, like most of her books, is a dystopian novel. Butler published from 1976 until her untimely death in 2006 (she was 58.) Her dystopian was not part of the recent trend. Parable of the Sower was published in 1995. It feels closest to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), but while just as bleak in description, Parable of the Sower is the story of a young woman, Lauren Olamina, that actually is trying to build something.

The story starts when Lauren is 15, living in a walled community in the remnants of Los Angeles. The novel develops her character and generates the setting while giving us a glimpse of the religious system that she is developing. Lauren is a writer. What she is writing is the philosophy of her religion, Earthseed. Which, when told she is creating a religion, she responds that a person that describes something they found, such as a rock, did not create the wrong, but merely describes it. Earthseed is humanist. It is a philosophy, a way of living. God may exist in it, but that god is distant and not present in the reality of the dystopian world she is living in.

The main story is a travel story. The climate has shifted and drought it perpetual. Water is one of the most lucrative commodities and homelessness, slavery, and drugs are prevalent. The government and police exist in name, but not in ability to maintain structure or order. They are simply another gang that will rob you if you let them. Similarly to Walker Percy’s Love in Ruins (which was written about a decade before Parable of the Sower), this dystopian world is divided by race. And like most of Butler’s books, the main character is an African American woman.

Read more

Summary: A brilliant physicist leaves his insular utopian community to study in the world that his world rebelled against. And he learns the weaknesses of both political systems. 

Anarres is a desert moon to Urras. Several hundred years ago, miners rebelled against their home world and created their own anarchist utopia, a ‘non-authoritarian communism’ where there is no property, but there is a shared sense of cooperation against the harsh world. Urras, is a rich and beautiful world, but where virtual slavery controls the vast majority of the population and where women are restricted to the home.

Except for minor trading and some scientific conversations, there is no contact between the worlds. Shevek, a brilliant physicist seeking to understand the connection between time and space, is given a physics prize by Urras and becomes the first person to travel between the worlds since the separation.

This is largely a book of political ideas. It is a critique of both communism and capitalism unchecked. It is a critique of feminism and anti-feminist ideas. It is a critique of the split between individualism and the forced common good. There is a plot and some action at the end of the book. But primarily this is the story of Shevek, starting with his travel to Urras and proceeding to the future with flashback to his early life.

Published in 1974, this is a cold war book. Both worlds are unrealized utopias. The Anarrians have taught shared responsibility, every 10 days they have to contribute a day of work to the common good, a computer matches each person to the type of work they want to do, or they can choose to do no work at all. From their childhood they are taught shared responsibility and the evils of property. They are raised in kibbutz like dormitories. Adults, usually live in adult dormitories. Sex is free, but consensual. Marriage is possible but rare (it is thought of as a sort of privatized relationship, as is parents directly raising children).

Read more

Summary: A somewhat repetitive, although important call, to focus on the important things in life, and not get overwhelmed attempting to do everything or make everything perfect.

I like Shuana Niequist’s writing. Yes, it is very female focused, but men should read more things focused on women. Yes, there are a lot of similar themes of change and finding yourself from book to book, but we are continually changing and finding ourselves throughout life. Yes, I can’t completely comprehend her life of food and family and vacations and friends, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get the points. In the end, Shauna Niequist’s voice is an important voice that continually reminds us of the need for spiritual, emotional and physical health in a world that wants to push us toward giving everything for a goal.

Niequist has a clear heart to follow Jesus. She thinks about the normal stuff of life as an example of the harder things of life. She is a good illustration that simply growing up in the church does not make one comfortable with faith. She is also a good illustration of the problem of telling people, not only can you do anything you put your mind to, but you should do everything that  you can put your mind to.

One of the important trends in evangelical theology that seems to keep being brought out is a real worked out theology of human limitations. It may be one of the most important things that the church needs to be illustrating through out discipleship and evangelism. I think people naturally come to understand limitations as they age. But it is amazing to me how often I read or hear something like, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ be spoken about as if the second phrase were not the primarily emphasis.

Present over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living is pretty similar to both Bread and Wine and Savor but she seems to feel like there was something fundamentally different about the life that she was living when she wrote those books. As a reader, the calls to slow down and focus on family and the important things seem to be much the same, or at least very similar.

Read more

Summary: Jesus’ time on earth was more than just preparation for his death and resurrection.

I originally bought How God Became King when it was on sale for Kindle nearly three years ago. At the time I was at the end of a long NT Wright kick and picked it up. Last week it was released as an  audiobook and I decided to re-purchase it in that format (not whisper synced unfortunately).

Part of what drove me to pick it up again is the recent public discussions of the Benedict Option and several private discussions about poorly catechized Christians. I vaguely knew that How God Became King was at least in part about how Wright viewed the creeds (even though I wasn’t sure what that meant.)

The problem Wright is addressing in How God Became King is that we usually tell the story of Jesus, especially when we use the creeds, by saying that Jesus was born (became incarnated) and then died and was raised again. The incarnation becomes important only for the ability for Jesus to die and be raised again.

Wright’s concern is that we have used the creeds to interpret the gospels, or just as problematically, used the creeds as our sole syllabus for determining what should be taught about Jesus and the Christian faith. Section one of the book is mostly introduction to the problem (and if you have read much Wright, a lot of repetition.)

Read more