Bookwi.se

Summary: An attempt to use scripture to defend same sex relationships.

Discussion of the role of gay Christians within the church is fraught with difficulty. Any position is the wrong one with a significant group of Christians. But this is not something that can really be ignored. As pointed out in the very helpful book The End of White Christian America, culture has broadly moved on from gay marriage as a debatable topic. But within the conservative Evangelical world where a sizable minority supports same sex relationships, explicitly admitting it out loud can create a significant debate (as Jen Hatmaker’s recent interview and its fallout has shown.)

I picked up God and the Gay Christian reluctantly. I do not particularly want to wade into current hot button issues. But I thought it was something that I personally needed to explore more directly. And even though I seriously considered not blogging about it, I decided Bookwi.se had little left to lose (traffic is already down more than 90% from its high of a few years ago.) My one real concern is unintentional harm to those that I know personally that are on one side or another of the issue. That was a real concern before writing. But I decided that the potential for help is worth the potential for harm. But also please remember that I process through reading and writing. So all comments are about processing, not really a final position. So in the end I picked up God and the Gay Christian at the library on audiobook because it was there.

One of the weaknesses of this debate is the state of Protestantism as a whole. Christianity has always had placed a very strong value on individual affirmation of theological truth. Especially after the Reformation, and then with the decline of the state church and the rise of the free church, individual affirmation became the dominant form of decision making within the church. Catholic theology has a formal magisterium system with defined Catholic teaching. And other episcopal or presbyterian systems have a system of affirming the theology of the denomination. But those systems still operate within the broader culture of individualism that pervades Christianity in the United States.

Because of our theological free agency system of church membership, if we disagree we can simply move to another congregation, or stop attending church all together. So at this point, a 24 year old (the age he was when this book came out 2 years ago) without formal theological training, ordination or church position, can write a book about his theological ideas, and it can influence those who are willing to be influenced. That is not fundamentally different from many others that came before him. But it is different from the system of councils that was in place in the early church.

Read more

Summary: Marvel heroes reimagined in 1602 Elizabethan England.

I love a good reimagined work. I like cover songs. I like re-told fairy tales. I like alternate history. So even though it took me nearly a year to get around to it after a friend gave me the book, I was interested to read Marvel 1602.

Dr Strange is the court physician. Fury is the head spy. Some characters are a bit more vague than others. But the X-men are here as are the Fantastic Four, Dr Doom, Black Widow, Peter Parker, Daredevil and a few others. Something is messing with the weather, there is a plot on the Queen’s life and a great treasure (weapon?) is being smuggled from the Holy Land to England.

Gaiman is known for his Sandman comics series and his novels. He is one of my favorite novelists. But this didn’t quite do it for me. Mutants were considered witches and hunted by the inquisition (that part makes sense.) Political intrigues are hinted at but never really fully embraced as a story line. So much of the book was just establishing the characters in their new setting that the story felt rushed and thin.

Read more

Summary: The era of White (Protestant) Christian cultural, political, and demographic dominance of the United States is over.

The starkness of the message of The End of White Christian America is as clear as its cover. Demographically (and this is shared in detail), the United States is no longer dominantly White Protestant. The more controversial suggestion that the political and cultural dominance of White (Protestant) Christians is also over is also hard to argue with based on the evidence presented, but many Christians have not yet accepted that.

Whether you accept the two of these suggestions will probably depend on your geographic and cultural place in the US. The demographics are clear. However, many White Protestants continue to live in communities that are racially isolated. Especially those that are in rural or suburban communities. Culturally, shifts toward acceptance of gay marriage, the aging of second-generation immigrant communities, and the significant increase in White Americans who do not identify as Christian (nones) have, at the very least, limited the cultural dominance of White Christians.

Robert Jones is the head of the Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI is a well-regarded polling company. Much of the research cited in The End of White Christian America is from PRRI polls. I generally trust PRRI to do decent work, but I can understand the complaint that there is not more outside research cited in the book (although there is some.) Despite the heavy number focus, The End of White Christian America is quite readable. It is essentially public polling and demographic data combined with recent (mostly 20th and 21st century) cultural and religious history. The cultural and religious history is mostly done fairly well, but as with any historical accounting, there is room to quibble with the conclusions.

The most controversial part of The End of White Christian America, in my mind, is about the shift in attitudes toward gay marriage in particular and the theological understanding of homosexuality in general. The polling on this is clear. The shift toward acceptance is complete. Even within Evangelicalism, there is a large minority that either politically or theologically accepts gay marriage as a good. Outside of Evangelicalism, it is not a large minority but an actual majority. Jones makes the argument that the Evangelical church needs to both accept they have lost this battle and to accept the full integration of gay Christians into the church formally. I hope that won’t keep people from reading the book. Regardless of your theological convictions here, Jones is making a case that many others are also making, but primarily, Jones is making a demographic case, not a theological one.

Read more

Summary: NT Wright, using his traditional tools of biblical narrative theology and 1st-century Jewish/Christian cultural understanding, assesses some of the areas where our understanding of the atonement differs from early Christian understanding of the atonement.

The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion is most connected to Wright’s earlier Surprised by Hope. It is not quite a sequel to Surprised by Hope, but it is in the same thread of Wright’s work. Surprised by Hope pointed out the way that the theology of the afterlife (eschatology), especially dispensational theology, distorts not just our understanding of our Christianity but how we practice our Christianity.

The Day the Revolution began is attempting to do the same type of analysis with our theology of the atonement. Many of NT Wright’s traditional critics will also disapprove of this book. Wright’s minimization of Penal Substitution (which has been evident in much of Wright’s writing) is explicit here. Wright is not saying that Penal Substitution is wrong. He says that the focus on Penal Substitution as the primary or only way to look at the atonement distorts our understanding of what Jesus did on the Cross.

My traditional approach to Wright is to listen to the book on audiobook once, then re-read it again later in print. This allows me to get an overview of the argument and then to focus more clearly on the parts of the argument on the re-read. This is certainly a book I will need to re-read to understand, maybe twice fully.

One of the reasons that many get irritated with Wright is that he keeps presenting his ideas as either new or the first return to ‘correct’ understanding in hundreds of years. If you are irritated about that, you will be irritated here. Wright’s strength is connecting the broad narrative sweep of scripture and the 1st-century era culture. I think if he started working with a historical theologian who helped him connect his ideas explicitly to the historical theological work of theologians after the first century, it would help tone down that irritating tic and help readers connect his thought to its historical roots.

Wright wants to help people think clearly about how their theology connects to daily life. That is one of his strengths. But part of what the church today needs is a connection of its theology to the historical church. But his description of his work as either new or a rediscovery of what is lost minimizes the connection to the church’s historical teaching. This is particularly true for low-church fans of his who do not already have a solid connection to the traditional church. Maybe this is a blind spot that Wright has because of his British Anglican setting. Wright has a strong sense of history and the worldwide range of the church, but many of his readers (and biggest fans) do not. (My reading of Thomas Oden, in particular, has convinced me of the importance of viewing the theology of the church as a continuum with historical teaching and not new.)

Read more

Summary: The continued story of John Lewis and the broader Civil Rights movement from the Freedom Riders, to the March on Washington, to the voting rights movement Mississippi and Selma. 

The March trilogy is really one story broken into three books because of length. So it is hard to review them as separate books. The first book is clearly an introduction and its main focus is the lunch counter protests in Nashville.

Books two and three of the March Trilogy are longer, give a broader historical picture and also are darker. The movement as a whole, the longer into the Civil Rights era you get, the more controversy and frustration that is part of the history. A memorable line, when talking about the March on Washington, is Lewis’ noting that, of all of the speakers that day, only Lewis is still alive to talk about it.

John Lewis was committed, ideologically and strategically to non-violence. He was the leader of the younger, and somewhat more radical SNCC as opposed to the more moderate leaders that were under the NAACP or  SCLC. But the commitment to non-violence in the face of continued violence of police and others helped to divide the civil rights movement.

The graphic novel format I think is particularly helpful in telling the Civil Rights story. Not just because the story keeps moving and the action can be visualized so easily. But also because there is something more real about violence when it is visualized. Even though Nate Powell’s art is not particularly graphic, adults armed with clubs or fire hoses racing at children or adults that are not fighting back carries an impact.

Read more

Summary: A semi-autobiographical tale of a white and black family that decide to intentionally become friends in the context of 1967 Houston protests.

I picked The Silence of our Friends up because it was Nate Powell’s art. Nate Powell is the artist on the March trilogy. Silence of Our Friends was published two years before the first book of the March Trilogy.

This is a smaller and more intimate graphic novel in many ways. Instead of intentionally being a biography of the Civil Rights movement as a whole, Silence of Our Friends attempts to tells the story of two men, and their families, during a relatively small period in one city.

It is in many ways hard to describe any significant incident in the Civil Rights era as small. Lives were changed, people were killed. But unless you are a pretty close student of the Civil Rights era, this protest, the police response, the deaths associated with it were not a “first” or “greatest” or particular incident in most respects. In some ways, I think that makes the story more important because it was more mundane. It is also an interesting story because like the end of the third book of the March trilogy, it recounts the shift of the Civil Rights era into the Black Power movement.

Read more

Summary: Vision creates a family, moves to the suburbs and eventually faces reality.

Comics, and the broader Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, are often best when they present a story that is more than just the surface action. The top level story can be enjoyed but there is a satire element that is underneath for those that are able to understand. The X-Men have frequently have underlying themes of race and social exclusion. It is almost cliché at this point for superhero stories to really be about what it means to want to fit in.

Vision is not a character I am familiar with. I never got around to seeing Age of Ultron, so I did not see his movie introduction. And I have not previous read any of his comics. But I poked around a little bit for enough background to understand. Vision (as I understand it) was created by Ultron to be a synthetic human. Vision turned on his creator and jointed the Avengers. But like many synthetic creatures in sci fi history, we as human assume that the perfect physical being really wants to be like us, a limited human.

In Little Worse Than a Man, Vision has created a family. Vision, and the members of his family are synthetic humans, but required the brainwaves of a particular human to give them personality and emotion. Vision’s brainwaves were taken by Ultron from a human (and that human’s brother became The Grim Reaper in order to kill off Vision to avenge his brother.) Where the brainwaves for Virginia (wife), Viv (daughter) and Vin (son) came from is not revealed in this book.

Read more

Summary: First in a trilogy of autobiographical graphic novels on Civil Rights leader John Lewis.

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to Christ and Pop Culture Magazine. The primary illustrator there (he also works with Christianity Today and other organizations) has an comic book review site. Because of his advocacy for comics and graphics novels I have picked up several well reviewed graphic novels. This week will be graphic novel week at Bookwi.se.

March has been on my radar for a while, but I picked it up on Friday because it was (and is as of posting) for $4 on Kindle. I read it in a sitting and immediately purchased the whole trilogy on paper to give to a friend.

John Lewis was a Civil Rights leader, chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, one of the original Freedom Riders, one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington and more. In 1986 he was elected to Congress and continues to serve as Georgia 5th Congressional District Representative.

March book one tells the early history of John Lewis growing up, going to college, meeting Martin Luther King Jr and the Nashville Lunch counter sit in. I am a fan of Nate Powell‘s art (most of the graphic novels I read this week were by Nate Powell). But some of the lettering gets a little bit small in the paperback version (or it needs to be enlarged to read on kindle.) With that one minor complaint, this is an excellent book and I will soon finish reading the next two books in the trilogy.

Read more

I am reposting this 2009 review because The Good Book is on sale for $.99 for the Kindle Edition and audiobook is $3.99 with purchase of the Kindle Edition.

Summary: A non-practicing Jew reads the Old Testament and blogs his way through it.

The Good Book was interesting, maybe the last chapter the most interesting of all. The author is Jewish, although not really practicing. So when he starts reading the Hebrew Bible (or the Christian Old Testament) it is not in the same way that many others would read it.

Plotz is a friend of the text, he doesn’t deconstruct it or tear it apart. Instead he reads it, mostly as a person with very little history with the text. He is amazed, delighted and horrified by it.

Read more