Bookwi.se

Summary: An exploration of how historical memory has changed over time using Charleston, SC, as an example. 

I have been fascinated with the concept of historical memory. I was introduced to the concept earlier, but the first book I read that concentrated on historical memory is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight. Since then, I have read several books that take on more aspects of historical memory, like Myth America and A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis.

Denmark Vesey’s Garden is similar to Race and Reunion. Still, instead of an expansive look at a shorter time (a national look at the 50 years after the Civil War in Race and Reunion), Denmark Vesey’s Garden was a narrow geography but went from the Antebellum era until the 2010s. This means they complement one another well. What I wanted more from Race and Reunion was a more extended period, and Denmark Vesey’s Garden was able to show not just the intentional misremembering of history but also the movement back toward a more accurate memory.

Read more

Summary: Maigret goes on vacation. It doesn’t go well. First his wife ends up in the hospital. Then, he gets an anonymous note asking him to visit someone at the hospital, but the woman dies, and he ends up seeking a killer on vacation.

I am not going to write a long review of this. I have been dipping in and out of Maigret for about six years. This is the 7th of the series I have read. I continue to enjoy them enough to keep reading. But I continue not to be blown away by them.

In this one, Maigret is on vacation with his wife. But she ends up in the hospital, and he is a bit lost.

I recently read The Black Tower by PD James (part of the Adam Dalgliesh series). In both books, the main character is a police homicide inspector. In The Black Tower, Dalgliesh himself is recovering from surgery, but both are officially off duty and are a bit irritated that their professional life seems to be following them. (The fourth Inspector Gamache is also about the inspector being on vacation and a murder happening.)

Read more

Summary: Spiritual and theological reflections on Christmas and its traditions. 

Emily Hunter McGowin’s Christmas is part of a series of books on the seasons of the liturgical calendar. Esau McAulley is the series editor and author of the book on Lent. The series also includes Tish Warren on Advent, Flemming Rutledge on Epiphany, and Emilio Alvarez on Pentecost.

Christmas is a nostalgic holiday and one that is relatively modern. It is not that the trope of Christmas being a pagan holiday is true (the book handles this well.) But our modern focus on gift giving and family and sentimentality is relatively recent. The Holy Post podcast recently had two episodes that talked about this. One was about St Nicholas, and the other was about David Taylor’s Christianity Today article on American Christmas. Taylor’s article is about how Christmas was not celebrated widely in the United States until the late 1800s. Congress met on Christmas when it fell on a weekday until the 1850s. Celebrating Christmas was against the law in Puritan New England from the mid-17th century because of its association with Catholicism and because of the history of how the celebration had been associated with debauchery in England.

But as Taylor points out, Queen Victoria and her German husband started using Christmas Trees to decorate and modeled a family-centered celebration of Christmas that was more common in Germany. A few years later, Charles Dickens published a Christmas Carol. And when it was published, few people would have had Christmas off of work. But the story’s popularity did shame employers into giving Christmas day off.

Read more

Summary: A satirically comic novel about scientists trying to understand the world around them.

I needed something different to read, an audiobook novel, preferably a funny one. I looked around in the Audible Plus Catalog (audiobooks free to members) and picked Bellwether mostly because I enjoyed the humor of the two previous novels I had read by Connie Willis (and that it was short).

Bellwether felt like a good Christopher Buckley novel. It was written in the mid-90s and feels like it was written in the mid-90s. Sandra Foster is a statistician who studies fads. Most fads have something that you can point to as the cause. New colors become popular because of a technological change in development (car colors, appliances, or ways to make LED lights that allow different colors.) But some fads become popular without an apparent cause. Sandra studies these unknown cause fads to understand how they start and how to stop those that are a problem. The central fad her research is focused on is the rise of the Bob haircut, which does not seem to be explainable through technology, media, or social events. A random wrong package delivery introduces Sandra to Bennett O’Reilly, a chaos theorist immune to fads. That eventually leads to them working together, and what the reader knows from the start will be a romance.

Read more

Summary: A discussion of the problem of disenchantment in Christianity. 

It has been several years since I have picked up one of Richard Beck’s books. I am a fan of his and would highly recommend the previous books I have read: Unclean (about hospitality), Slavery of Death (about the power of sin), Reviving Old Scratch (about the importance of the concept of evil) and Trains, Jesus and Johnny Cash (a gospel according to type of book).

Primarily, Hunting Magic Eels is about the problem of disenchantment in the modern world. There is an irony that we are disenchanted with Christianity, but not necessarily all enchantment (crystals, ghosts, etc.) He describes the problem well and in a way that others also have lamented. The traditional distant God as a watchmaker who created but is no longer needed or God in a two-story world (God exists but doesn’t interact except occasionally) is insufficient for historic Christianity.

Karl Rahner, in a famous sermon he preached in literal rubble at the end of the Second World War, has an even more famous quote: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not exist at all.” I read that sermon on mysticism in a class. What Rahner meant there was mystic in the sense of enchantment. A disenchanted Christianity is a purely intellectual or moral system. But Christianity, while having intellectual and moral aspects, believes that God is real and is relational. A religious system that is only moral and/or intellectual has ceased to be Christian because it has removed the relational aspects from the faith. This is the positive sense of the quote, “Christianity is about a relationship, not a religion.”

Read more