Adam Shields

Summary: After the death of his grandmother and the revelation that his mother (who he thought was dead) is behind a number of murders, Malik tries to settle into college and figure out how to try to have a normal life.

Blood at the Root was a bit of a surprise hit. I read it about 9 months after it released and a number of friends or acquaintances had been recommending it. Blood at the Root was a very good opening fantasy book. There was good world building and character development. I alternated between ebook and audiobook for that first book and then I just listened to the audiobook for this second book.

This series is clearly producing audiobooks with the intent of drawing in the YA audience that is used to TV and movies. I don't traditionally love sound effects and music in audiobooks because I think it often sounds cheesy. And there are definitely some aspects of the audiobook production that I think lean in (intentionally I think) to the cheese, especially during fight scenes where magic duels sounds like star wars blasters being shot back and forth.

As I skimmed through reviews on goodreads, there is a clear split between people who are five stars ("it was great") and those who thought it dragged. I both really enjoyed it as a whole and thought that the middle dragged and that the book as a whole was trying to do too much. This is a second book and they need to develop differently from first books. I get the point of why it was slow in the middle. It was oriented toward character development and complicating the story by exploring the motivations for a variety of characters to keep them from becoming too cardboard. But I think this is where Ladarrion Williams shows that he is a fairly new writer. He is skilled in plotting and I think he has great intentions with writing a complex story, which I appreciate; but that complexity needs to be shown without as much explicit explication. I agree that the middle of the book drags. (The second book is about 1/3 longer than the first book and I think with some better editing it would have been better if it had kept to the length of the first book.)

At the same time as I think that the middle of the book drags, I am all for the attention to mental health and breaking generational cycles. And I am all for the various storylines about the way that different forms of discrimination often are not addressed together. (I am also reading a book about Jim Crow era Black social gospel, and there are so many examples of opposing racism but being sexist or opposing racism but being elitist, or knowing that white supremacy is a problem but buying into various forms of respectability politics that are rooted in hierarchy.)

In a post-womanist world, Williams is paying attention both to the use and misuse of calls to move together against oppression in all forms. And paying attention to the need to do internal personal work to prepare for the work against systems of oppression. My problem isn't the politics, or the fact that this is a fantasy novel that is paying attention to political and social issues (all fantasy novels do this or don't do this in a way that reveals the politics of their authors.) My problem is that the political and social and psychological work that is is being done her can't bring the story to a grind. And there is only so much angst that a character can express before the reader gets a bit annoyed.

The novel opens with an author's note about the need to allow for novels about Black boys that allow them to be messy and grow. I think Williams is right both in the content of the note and right to have it at the start of the novel to remind the reader to do that here, not just have it as a theoretical possibility. I think one issue here is that I keep needing to be reminded that Malik is supposed to be 17 here. At the end of this novel, we are only about six months from the start of the first novel. I think it would feel more realistic to have spread the development of the book out over a couple years instead of a couple months. Malik barely got to know his grandmother before she died. Malik has not even finished a whole semester when the main action of the novel happens. The first novel was entirely during part of a summer school quarter. As much as a reader I am rooting for health and wholeness in Malik and those around him, as a guy in his 50s, I know that change takes real time and what has happened here hasn't been enough time.

One of the themes in the book is that as a 17 year old, Malik deserves to have a childhood. He is tired of having to fix things he didn't break. And all of that is true. But as a reader, it is conflict and resolution that generate interest, so while I agree that Malik deserved to have a childhood and do the fun developmentally appropriate stuff that a 17 year old should be done, we are reading the book because he isn't just any other teen.

I know that when I wrote about the last novel, I said I was going to pre-order this book and read it immediately. But I didn't get to it until almost a year after it released. But the third book is still four months away. I have enjoyed the audiobooks. But I think I will end up reading the third as a kindle book because the audiobook feels like it slows the book down a bit. This second book was nearly 20 hours (or 529 pages in print) and I think I could have read it faster and not have felt the drag in the middle as much.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/bones-at-the-crossroads/

Summary: An exploration of God’s mercy and the ways that God seems to change.

One of the reasons that I like to read widely is that I learn things in one area that has relevance to another area. That always means that I am potentially drawing inappropriate conclusions because I don’t know enough about multiple things to be an expert, and that if I knew more, I might not draw the same conclusion.

One of the areas that I have been fairly interested in recently is law, especially Supreme Court legal theory. Part of what interests me about that is that in some ways it is the study of Hermeneutics, but through a secular lens. I am a very avid listener of Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast. They primarily cover high level legal theory, more than working out individual cases. One of the things that is emphasized in legal theory is the limiting principle. Because so many concepts in law are not universally true at all times, the concept of the limiting principle tries to map out what the limits of the use of that concept is.

Right now, there is a discussion about the Unitary Executive. There are different versions of this concept, but overly simplistically, the Unitary Executive theory is that all of the power of the Executive Branch is vested in the single figure of the President. So there can’t be independent areas within the executive branch because there is only one president at a time. But that idea runs up against the concept of the limiting principle. Even in earlier generations, no one can really operate in all areas of the executive. There are some areas of expertise where we want career experts not just political appointments. There are other areas, like corruption investigations, where without some level of independence, the executive branch cannot do the job it has been tasked with.

My main complaint about The Widening of God’s Mercy is that there are no limiting principles. Broadly, that idea that God’s mercy seems to widen throughout scripture to include more people and more areas of grace, which I think is broadly true. I don’t love how they handle God changing God’s mind, which is a little more process theology oriented than I like. But the father and son team, with the son Christopher mostly writing about the Old Testament, and Richard, the father, mostly writing about the New Testament, are trying to limit themselves to biblical theology and there are limits to that approach.

I am solidly a lay person here. I don’t have enough language skills to ever be a biblical theologian. What training I do have is more theology than bible. But I do think that the method of orienting toward a lay readership and making the book fairly short and accessible, is part of the problem of the book. It is odd to complain that the book is not harder to read. But what I mean is that if I (as a lay person) know of critiques of ideas in the book, and I know there are critiques of the methods (and those were not dealt with in the text) then so did the authors. A more academic book would have had to been longer, but also would have had to grapple with their critics more robustly. Richard was dying as this book was being written. He passed away not long after the book was published. So it may be that they simply didn’t have time to write a more academic book.

One of the areas I would have like them to grapple with is William Webb’s Slaves, Women and Homosexuals. Webb was trying to work out a theological/hermeneutical system that took into account limiting principles. I don't love where Webb came out in the end either, but I think his point was trying to work out a system, more than trying to build evidence for a case.

Again, there is always more than can be said, so I don't want to complain too much about what wasn't said, but Webb grappled with ways that slavery was not explicitly condemned in the bible, but today Christianity largely condemns slavery. And there are explicit prohibitions around women in leadership in Paul, but also in Paul, he advocates women acting within leadership of the church and the church service, so Webb can draw conclusions from the trajectory of scripture that led toward a more inclusive positions (Webb is a soft complementarian). But Webb takes the main six passages on homosexuality and thinks that all six come down on one side and thinks that scripture speaks clearly. That is overly simplistic of his argument, but briefly it is a rough sketch. There isn't an equivalent in The Widening of God's Mercy.

There are several complaints in other reviews that the authors explicitly avoid the main "clobber passages" and are trying to draw evidence from the whole scope of scripture, not isolated passages. I appreciate this approach because so many other books concentrate on those passages. But it makes this book feel a bit tentative, because if your focus is on the broad, but the very narrow explicitly prohibits, then the case is still incomplete.

I am a couple of chapters into Biblical Critical Theory, and some of the tools of evaluation from that book I think would have helped, even if Watkins I think would come down on the opposite side as the Hays would. Similarly, I think Tom Holland's Dominion (which I have read, but I haven't finished writing about) is using history, not social theory or biblical theology, to trace how there is an ongoing tension within christianity toward mercy and individual rights which played an essential role in the development of western culture. Holland's main thesis I think is part of this discussion, even if it was outside of the scope of this book.

Generally, I think almost no one will change their mind as a result of reading The Widening of God's Mercy. I think it is a good meditation on mercy, but not a great defense of LGBTQ inclusion in the church. And honestly, of the books that I have read about this subject, on multiple sides, most have the same problem. I think David Gushee's book is the best at trying to present an argument that is accessible to people who disagree with his conclusions, but most books seem to be preaching to the choir, not addressing those who disagree with them.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-widening-of-god...

Summary: An exploration of the ways that misogyny impacts our world.

I reference this all the time, but George Yancy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2015, where he tried to discuss the problems of race in America by including himself within the problems of sexism. He developed that more in his book Backlash and I have come to use his framing as the best shorthand for how we are in a system, while still having the ability (and responsibility) to respond to the system. Using Yancy's ideas, I tell people all the time that when I was a stay at home nanny with my nieces and then a stay at home dad with my kids, I just got more support and affirmation as a man doing "women's work" than women do. I didn't ask for additional help in the grocery store, but it was given to me in ways that I could easily see that it wasn't being given to women in my same position. As a man, I think it is important to push back against sexism in big and small ways as much as I can. But I can't withdraw from the system that still misogynistic. Yancy then goes on the connect that to the problems of race. He says that just as he works to be anti-sexist, sexist (someone who as individual works to oppose sexism, but is still within a sexist society and still internalizes sexism in some ways) he also calls on white people to be anti-racist, racists (to be individually opposed to racism, while acknowledging the reality of continued racial hierarchy, both historically and currently.) And as a Christian and spiritual director, I think a third step of being an anti-sin, sinner is an important way to frame how we continue to be impacted by sin, while working to resist sin individually and corporately as well.

That simple framing of naming that as a Christian white male I am an anti-sexist, sexist and an anti-racist, racist and an anti-sin, sinner gives me a place to start reading Dorothy Littell Greco's book with the assumptions that as a man, the problems of sexism and misogyny are my problems to grapple with, not just "women's work."

The structure of For The Love of Women is familiar. She starts with pointing out that misogyny is in the very air we breathe and it is so incorporated to our culture that sometimes we need help seeing that it is there. And so the next several chapters point out how misogyny exists within healthcare, and the workplace, and in government, and in entertainment and the media and in marriage and sexual relationships and in the church.

There are many books that stop with simply pointing out the problem that the book is about. But there are two essential chapters that conclude the book. One talks about the wounds that are created by misogyny. Those wounds naturally impact women and girls, but they also impact men. The high normative assumptions about gender are restrictive to all of society, not just the naturally assumed victims. We don't have to ignore that the wounds are different to also say that wounds exist in many different people. (It is part of the really helpful critique of womanism is that we can't ignore the different types of harms that impact people because harm is almost always interrelated. The final chapter is about hope for a more healthy world and giving ideas to spark a new imagination to bring us to that world.

Over the past few years there has been a movement to criticize empathy. That may not seem to be a part of a discussion about sexism and misogyny, but when you dig into the anti-empathy movement, it is rooted in opposition to feminism. Joe Rigney's Sin of Empathy suggests that all the ways that empathy ends up being wrong are rooted in feminism. Rigney (and Doug Wilson, his mentor) believe that Christianity is inherently hierarchical and feminism's work to recognize women as having inherent dignity is a rejection of what he sees as God's created order.

Books like For the Love of Women remind the reader that if we believe in the Imago Dei, the belief that all people are created in the image of God and so have inherent worth and dignity, then we have to investigate the implications of that. It just is part of historic Christianity that the early church were influenced by their Greek influenced culture that understood women as deformed men. And if we don't grapple with the ways that Christian theology has been influenced by Greek hierarchical thinking that understood women to be deformed men and people being created to be slaves while others were created to rule, then we cannot live into the full understanding of liberation that Jesus is calling us toward.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/for-the-love-of-women/

Summary: A biography of the great Octavia Butler, but mostly focusing on her work more than her life.

I knew about Octavia Butler long before I read her. Around 2006 or 2007 I read the twilight books. I enjoyed them enough that I read the original Dracula and then I picked up Fledgling, Octavia Butler's last book, which was also a type of vampire story.

That led me to reading Kindred and then the Patternist series and then the Xenogenesis series and the Parable of the Sower and the short story collection. I still have not read the Parable of the Talents because I think that other than the book from the Patternist series that Butler worked to take out of print because she didn't like it, that is the last of her books that I have not read and I am reluctant to read it because of that.

I did not really know anything about Butler prior to Positive Obsession. Butler grew up in post WWII California. I knew that she started writing in part because she saw a really bad scifi movie as a pre-teen and thought she could do better. I knew that she struggled to sell books and worked to support herself by doing temp jobs so she could write for much of her career. And I knew she died too young. (I wish there was more about her death. It is definitely hinted at, that she died in part because of bad medical care and maybe more can't be written about that beyond that speculation, but I wanted more.)

Positive Obsession did fill in more of her story. The author, Susana Morris, identifies Butler as autistic. I learned more about her background and a lot about the books she wrote. But as a biography, I thought Positive Obsession wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. It wasn't badly written. If you see it on sale (right now it is $1.99 on kindle) I think it is worth reading. But I think it is more about her books than about Butler. The author had access to Butler's diaries and interviewed many. But there doesn't seem to be much about her and her life.

The book did make me want to reread all of her writing again. And I think I will do that eventually. I am a bit uncomfortable with the use of sex in many of the books. The Patternist and Xenogenesis series involve generational breeding programs. Rape and coerced sex is part of many of the books. I use coerced sex in addition to rape because even when "voluntary", it isn't always freely chosen or at least not always free to leave. (As one example in Fledgling, the vampire creates an addictive relationship to the harem that they create around themselves so that the vampire takes blood from the group of humans they draw around them, and in return the humans get an extended life and very pleasurable sex, but can't leave.)

Butler is writing novels, but also social commentary. Her characters are complex and messy. Issues of gender and race and class are essential components of her writing. I did learn things her about the books that will make rereading the books more meaningful. As much as I wanted Positive Obsession to be a bit better, it did make me want to read Butler again and I think I will get more out of it as a result of reading it. So the main purpose of the book has been met.

It is not very long, and if you can pick it up on sale, that makes it even easier to recommend.

This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/positive-obsession/

Summary: An anthropologist studies what factors white advocates of racial justice are in common among those who continue in racial justice work.

As someone who has been in racial justice circles for more than 30 years now, I can tell you that one of the most clear realities is that generally, white people often do not stick around for the long term. As is described here, one of the real problems with racial justice in the American church, is a problem with white people being continually at introductory levels of discussing and living out racial justice.

As a personal example, at my previous church I, and many others, spent years trying to get the church to pay attention to racial issues in and outside of the church. Finally around 2018, the church had a mid week series of classes over a couple of months. And then in 2020, they supported the creation of Be the Bridge groups and then small group book discussions around Jemar Tisby's Color of Compromise book. At each of those steps, there was reluctance to do anything else as a follow-up. The orientation was to get more people to do be introduced to racial justice as a necessary topic, but to actually oppose more exploration of the depth beyond the introductory levels.

There is a role for introduction level work, but real change doesn't happen with introductions, change happens as a result of depth. I was in a group that went rogue and went more into depth around racial justice. That core group has been together for about six years now, but only because it kept meeting outside of the institutional authority of the church. (The final person in the group that continued to attend the church is in process of moving out of state. So every member from that original group eventually gave up on that local church and left. Most attended the church from 10 to 15 years before leaving.)

Christine Jeske lays out a good description of this problem, and then through in-depth interviews she explores what is in common about white people who have continued on in racial justice work over the long haul. She is an anthropologist by training and she limited her exploration to a single geography (Madison, Wisconsin) so that she could use referrals to find those who were known for their work over time, not just those who wanted to self-refer. I think this method is important. In 2022, Jeske started with long form interviews with 30 people of color who led churches or organizations that had racial justice as a major focus. As part of those interviews (which were mostly about what those leaders thought mattered to long-term engagement with racial justice issues, she asked for examples of local white Christians who were examples of healthy long-term engagement. The second part of the study was interviews with 40 of the recommended white Christians who had been involved in racial justice over a long period of time. And then to counter the single geography, the third phase of the study included interview in different geographies with different demographic characteristics (a predominately Black urban area and a rural southern area and an area in South Africa where the author had previously worked.)

Early in the book Jeske lays out racial justice as a category and how white people tend to get introduced to it. Generally, there is a "collision" where a person runs into a reality that is different from their prior experience. Part of the discussion about collisions is a discussion of how the concept of social imaginaries work to give structure to how we perceive the world. The point of the collisions is that our social imaginary is challenged, and either we can reject the challenge and retain our previous social imaginary or we question the social imaginary. These sections about collision and the questioning are filled with stories from the interviews as well as background social science that gives structure and research backing.

Collisions can have multiple results that cause a person to investigate. One possibility is that a person will have an approximating experience that allows the person to use their different, but still somewhat similar experience to build empathy to cause a person to explore the injustice more fully. In my experience, the people who most commonly have continued on in racial justice, are women who have experienced and named sexism, or others who have a significant interracial relationship, especially a romantic relationship or cross-racial adoptive relationship. Moving toward a healthy long term response requires a level of choice and agency. White people have the choice to walk away, so those who continue to ask questions and learn and build relationships, have used their agency to choose to go deeper.

As part of this exploration of agency, Jeske explores the importance of learning. Gaining intellectual understanding, history and personal stories that challenge the social imaginary is an important step, but those who continued on also moved toward a type of embodied response. There was something that they did that changed as a result of what they learned. Those embodied responses could be quite varied, moving to a new community, or changing jobs, churches, schools, etc. The difficulty is that with an embodied response, complexity increased. Simple lists of "do this, but not that" were no longer good enough to ensure that the white Christians did the right thing. It is not necessarily described as discernment, but because I have made a study of discernment my special interest the past couple of years, I read this exploration of complexity through the lens of discernment. What Jeske is pointing out is that there is no simple solution and there has to be some level of responsibility for both not having to have everything right all the time time, but also knowing that solutions to the very large social problems of the world were also not going to have magic bullets. Based on what I heard from people who had grappled with these contradictions for years and decades, I believe that rather than translating into nothing, these contradictions point to a typical, run-of-the-mill, big problem. The nature of big problems is this: They demand careful contextualization and more why questions. Instead of writing off a seeming contradiction as an excuse to give up, a contextualized approach asks, “In what situations is one side of this contradiction appropriate and in what situations is the other?”

As with other steps along this process, those who learn to grapple with the contextualization and complexity continue on, but there are those who have difficulty with complexity. Again, it is not discussed, but theologically, I would like to ask a question about what correlations there are with faith and personality and those who continue on at this point. Faith that hasn't been explored to accept complexity, will not be part of a helpful toolkit in dealing with long term grappling of racial justice. It is also at this point that Jeske also brings in fear, shame, guilt and other similar emotional responses.

I have already written too much for most people and they will have stopped reading, but I haven't really talked about the main thread of the book. The book has a lot of discussion about hope. Early in the book the idea of hope was introduced, and why much of the discussion of hope in the Christian church around racial justice is a type of distorted "delusional hope." And then that discussion of hope becomes the main thread of the later parts of the book. I am wary of Christian discussions of hope around racial justice because of the ways that hope and grace and forgiveness get misused. In the case of this Racial Justice for the Long Haul, I had more tolerance for the discussion because of the earlier discussion of distorted hope.

In my church experience, I thought there was too much emphasis on grace and forgiveness by Black Christians toward white Christians without nuance and time. My church showed a documentary about forgiveness after the Charleston Nine and Dylan Roof and as much as I appreciated the documentary abstractly, it felt like it was manipulative in context of the actual work in the church. Jeske understands that tension and misuse of grace and speaks about it well in this long quote: Grace goes wrong. A lot. So let’s review. Grace can flow to and from people of all social locations. Everybody needs it. Grace is not a warm feeling. Grace is not a charitable handout from wealthy to poor. Grace is not the sole duty of those harmed by injustice. It must not be squeezed from them as a condition of survival. Grace is not a politician’s benevolent declaration over the heads of those harmed. Grace, in its ideal form, is given with free agency, though it is impossible to trace all the influential factors leading to any individual’s actions. Grace expands the freedom of the giver. Rather than fueling compassion fatigue, it lessens the fatigue of having no power over repeated offenses. Grace is not the only way people of color respond to racism, nor is it everything White people need to become advocates for justice. The struggle against racism is long and multifaceted. The history of racism produces a prior condition of indebtedness for White people. Many White people do not see their indebtedness. Others, upon seeing it, do not care. Learning the history of racism brings that indebtedness to light. This prior indebtedness is a setup for grace. People of color do give grace in that context of racial indebtedness, frequently and freely. Christians of color see God as their source for such grace, and teachings on grace and race abound in many predominantly non-White churches. Grace does not deny wrongs—it begins with a clear naming of wrongs. Grace is not a one-sided clause of a contract. It anticipates response. Responses might include gratitude, restitution, reparations, repentance, future relationship, or paying forward. Grace givers cannot demand response, and grace does not expire when it doesn’t elicit a certain response within a limited timeline. But grace does set in motion anticipation for more to happen. The fact that grace goes wrong doesn’t mean it can’t go right. People in this research often explicitly named differences between fake grace and a kind of real grace that works for long-term racial justice. They knew grace at an experiential level. They could point to moments in their own lives when they’d seen it happen, and they understood it as a principle that mattered in the wider context of justice and injustice. And because grace opens relationships, rather than closing off relationships, it becomes central to long-term perseverance and irrepressible hope.

I really do think that the naming of the ways that things go wrong is important to helping to see how they can go right. Jeske talks well about how she wasn't intending to write a book about hope but how the interviews kept moving toward hope as an essential part of long term racial justice work. But as in the quote above, the problem with hope and grace and the complexity of all of the interlocking parts of injustice in the world is that you can't build a simple class to take people through all the steps in an institutionalizes sense. This is why I personally have become a spiritual director because while that isn't what everyone needs, it is one tool to help people grapple with complexity in faith and living out their faith that I think will empower Christians to sustain work around justice in the long term.

As you might expect, there are no silver bullets here. But there are lots of stories and I can see how rightly grappling with how different people process the world differently can help to give space to healthy long term engagement with justice work and with faith. I thought Racial Justice for the Long Haul was helpful and I am going to suggest it for my book group to discuss in the future.

I was provided a copy of a PDF in advance to read, but I have purchased my own copy as well as buying another copy for a friend who works in a racial justice organization.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/racial-justice-for-...

Summary: Well written biography of a man that was interested in character and service to country.

Earlier this year, I read a biography of Jimmy Carter and I was struck by how much that I learned, even though I had read multiple books by or about Carter. A good biography, even if it appreciates the person (as Alter did appreciate Carter) still should complicate the presentation of the person. I have read Meacham's book on John Lewis and knew he was a good writer. I also, because of that book and some interviews, knew that Meacham was not going to write a fluffy biography.

Personally, George Herbert Walker Bush is on the edge of my memory. I remember the 1980 election, but I was 7 and only just remember it. I was in high school in 1988 and remember Bush very soundly defeating Michael Dukakis. And after having some memory of the 1984 blowout of Reagan over Mondale, I think I had the assumption that presidential elections would always have a very clear winner. I graduated from high school in 1991. I very much remember the first Gulf war because while it ended just before I turned 18, I remember discussion about the draft and registering for selective service with that in the background. I was a skeptic about the first Gulf War, not because I thought that Iraq should not be prevented from invading other countries, but because I didn't think that the US had the willingness to not counter invade Iraq in response. George HW Bush (in 1992) was the only presidential election that I have ever voted for a Republican. I thought that his willingness to change his mind and raise taxes, when he said he would not, was an act of character. He thought that taxes were bad, but that deficits were worse and that increased taxes were for the greater good, even if it was bad for him politically with his base. And I thought that not deposing Saddam Hussein, was at the time the right decision and showed restraint, that again, countered his base.

There was far more that I didn't know about Bush than I did know going into this biography. I, obviously, knew he was Vice President and President and the father of a President. I knew that he had been the head of the CIA. But I didn't realize he had been a Congressman or the Ambassador to the UN and China. He had far more political experience than I realized. I knew he came from an old family, but didn't realize his father was a Senator. I knew he made money in oil, but I didn't realize that he really started with very low skilled jobs to learn the business and he and Barbara were living very modestly in the early years.

One of the themes of the book is that Bush had connections that gave him a significant leg up, but his orientation toward service meant that while he did make money and live comfortably, he still worked hard both for his family but also for the common good. He made his money in oil in large part because he was the person responsible for getting investment and financing for his company, a job made significantly easier because of his family connections. His turn toward politics in his early 40s was also made much easier by the fact that his father was a sitting senator at the time and that he was by this time personally wealthy enough to invest the time and resources into politics. His later work in government service from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s rested on personal wealth.

The second main theme was that Bush was raised to believe in public service and the responsibility of those with resources to work for the good of all. He was not a social darwinist that blamed the poor for their poverty. He and I had different conceptions of the role of government with regard to poverty and social safety-net programs, but he believed in a social safety net. And while many poked fun at his 1000 Points of Light, his belief in the charity and community institutions is one that I wish more conservatives embraced now.

There is a tension with community service that was true not just of Bush and Carter, but of many. They believe that they can do good and that they amass power (often consciously) for the sake of doing good, but that can lead to justification of unethical strategies of winning. In the case of Carter, he used racial resentment strategies during the civil rights era to win the Governor's job and then led Georgia with very racially moderate to liberal policies. Bush allowed Lee Atwater to smear Dukakis in ways that I think were unethical, but Bush also pushed some of the most important environmental legislation and the Americans With Disabilities Act as well as structural reforms that led to much of Clinton's economic success. Bush did have some lines and he opposed targeting Clinton's affairs as a line of attack. (Meacham suggests that it was because Bush had a number of affairs alleged against him during elections, although there is no evidence presented that he ever had an affair.)

Part of what I think Meacham was doing is showing how the role of the president has changed. Bush had a caretaker's orientation. He believed in compromise to get things done. Carter did not like compromise and post-Gingrich, much of the tools of legislative compromise have been weakened and the systems continue to resist legislative compromise in ways that was not true prior to that time. Bush did not have the personality to grandly inspire the country. He was pretty good as a president, but not necessarily great at campaigning. And the job seems to now be more about long term campaigning than management.

This was a book that had access to all of George and Barbara Bush's diaries and letters and notes and Meacham had over a decade of interviews and access to family and staff which meant that this was not just reporting events, but included a lot of contemporaneous thoughts and motivations. So it was personal. Bush was not known as an expressive president, but this talks a lot about his tears, mostly shed privately. And his pride in his family that did not make him objective about them, but defensive.

I do think that Bush will continue to increase in stature over time. He was a man of character, even if he was not perfect. I disagreed with a lot of his politics, but appreciated his willingness to compromise and push back against his base. In most cases, it was his own GOP opposition that defined his presidency more than the weak Democratic opposition of the era. Again, that is something that has changed in the last 30-40 years. This was a personal biography that looked at the man more than the particular events. It did not focus on the day to day events of the presidency as much as the large currents of his life. I thought it was well worth reading.

These two quotes from very early in the book I think set the stage for the main themes of the book: Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound the trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader—quieter and less glamorous but no less significant—whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to the management of complexity than to the making of mass movements. Bush’s life code, as he once put it in a letter to his mother, was “Tell the truth. Don’t blame people. Be strong. Do your Best. Try hard. Forgive. Stay the course.” Simple propositions—deceptively simple, for such sentiments are more easily expressed than embodied in the arena of public life.

and This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. The pursuit of wealth was thus imbued with a sense of purpose. America, wrote the banker Henry Clews, was “the land of the self-made man.”

I posted this originally on my blog at https://bookwi.se/destiny-and-power/

Summary: An advanced (but young adult) book about the constitution.

I am fairly familiar with the constitution. I have previously read America's Constitution: A Biography and two books on the reconstitution amendments, as well as a variety of more general history books that included discussion of the constitution. I am an avid listener to Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast that regularly dives into constitutional issues. I did not realize when I bought Fault Lines in the Constitution was a young adult book. I listened to a podcast interview with the authors and I thought the idea of looking at the constitution as being a document that could have been constructed in other ways (every chapter has a discussion of either other country or state constitution that handled that topic in different ways) and a look at the ways that current debates are in large part a result of the way that the founders wrote the constitution was an interesting perspective.

In general, this didn't really feel like a "young adult" book in the sense of it being dumbed down or simplistic. The book feels like it is pitched to a high school advanced government or early college class with a few exceptions. The exceptions were times when it felt like the authors were trying to engage what they thought were young adult issues, primarily related to age for voting, minimum ages for office and military service. While I think there was good content in those sections, it felt pandering to me. I am in my mid 50s, so maybe those areas would not feel pandering to actual people in their late teens or early 20s, but I would have pitched those differently.

This is a legal history, part of discussing history is to contextualize why choices were made, to consider what other options could have happened, to make the ideas more complex (not to over simplify but to really understand the nuance.) I am simplifying the Five Cs of historical thinking, which this book does really well. The authors, as all authors do, have a perspective. But they do try to explore different perspectives and point out especially the perspectives that are more foreign to modern people. Culture, assumptions and language has changed since the constitution was written. The constitution was not a perfect document. It was changed, and changed almost from the very beginning. Part of the focus of the book is pointing out not just that the change occurred, but where it needed to be changed because of unintended consequences (the rise of political parties and the way that impacted the relationship between the president and vice president) or because of compromise (3/5 clause and other slavery related issues) or because they just didn’t want to deal with the issue explicitly.

Fault Lines in the Constitution is topical, so it does not need to be read straight through. It can be a source to understand a particular topic, for instance why the various post-civil war amendments were needed. I do think this is framed as an introduction. It also feels current because it has been updated several times to reference recent events. The current version of the book was released in Oct 2025 and references events after President Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

The work of Akhil Reed Amar in his trilogy of the history of the constitution is trying to develop depth that would be a good follow-up if someone is interested in that length. But most people do not want to read 2000 pages on the history of the constitution, so I think that Amar’s America’s Constitution would be a good follow up to this because the two books are framed so differently that the overlap in focus is minimal. While Fault Lines in the Constitution is a young adult book, I think most adults would do well to learn the content that is here to understand both what the constitution is and to understand how it might be different as a method of understanding what the constitution is trying to do and how it is limited in its approach.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/fault-lines-in-the-...

Summary: A historical fiction book about Marie de France, a nun and author in the late 12th century.

To say that we don’t know much about Marie de France is an understatement. There are four writings that are probably from her, but other than that, there is basically no documentation. Even her name is only taken from one of her writings that is basically, I am Marie and I was born in France. Contextually it is assumed that she was born in France but spent most of her life in England as a nun. She was highly educated and there is speculation that she is the half sister of King Henry II, but that is in part trying to make sense of how she was educated.

Matrix is the third historical fiction book about medieval nuns I have read recently. The first two were Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt and Revelations: A Novel by Mary Sharratt about Margery Kempe. But both of those were about women that there was much more historical data. Margery Kempe wrote what is probably the first autobiography of a woman in English. And Hildegard had much more contemporary writing and writing about her. And even so the fiction part of the historical fiction required a lot of creative imagination to create a readable story. But with Matrix the historical is almost nonexistent and it is all fiction because even what we know about Marie de France is mostly speculative.

One of the potential problem of historical fiction is writing the main character as a modern person who happens to be more advanced socially or culturally than those around them. In some cases that may be historically accurate because there was an "advance" that the person was responsible for innovating. But generally, most people are people "of their time" in the sense that they were culturally similar to those around them. I am not completely new to the era. Beth Allison Barr is a historian of the era and included good discussion of the role of women in that era as part of her evidence about how the modern gender role discussion is a modern invention. And a lot of discussion about mysticism is about the medieval era. So I have some context of women in the mediaeval era, although I am far from an expert.

There are choices that I think will irritate a lot of readers. Marie is framed as a child of rape who grew up on her mother's estate and then came to run the estate for several years as a teen after the death of her mother because women did not have inherence rights and the estate would be taken over by a distant relative if it were known that her mother had died. This (fictional) background justifies her experience in estate management and running a monastery as a woman in her early 20s. That is a very neat solution to why she became Abbess (or Matrix) of the house.

Early in the book, after she was removed from her estate, she came to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine and lived there for a while. But she was so tall and ugly (and independent) that Eleanor decides that she is only fit for being a nun and not marriage. The other reason that marriage is not suitable isn't really discussed, but underlies the rest of the book, is that Marie is a lesbian, having an affair with her maid in the court and having a crush on Eleanor that runs throughout the book. I am not going to suggest that there were no lesbians in convents in mediaeval world, but this feels like a too-easy category for a modern author to use to frame the book.

What I do like about the book is that it handles faith fairly well. Part of what we know about Marie from her writing is that she had mystical visions. So making her a mystic is required. But that doesn't mean that there is no human agency in her role as abbess or that faith was a pure given. Some of her "visions" were about protecting the women in her care and giving a vision for expanding the house and pressing people around the house to give to its care. But other visions were real gifts from God. The reader can see that pride and vanity were responsible for Marie not always being able to distinguish between her desires and the Holy Spirit, but that is also true of many of us. Actual faith was not particularly important to her prior to becoming a nun, but over time, she develops real faith. That progression is handled well.

Overall, I am not disappointed that I read the book, but I also don't think it was nearly as good as the two novels by Mary Sharratt. It was on Obama's best books he read on 2021 list and want a number of awards, but I thought it was just okay. I checked the audiobook out of the library, but read the kindle edition, which was on sale, for most of the book. The audiobook was fine, but it felt better in print to me.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/matrix/

first read John Scalzi because of Old Man's War, a book that reimagined Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers. That was a pretty standard sci-fi book that started a series that kept the main sci-fi conventions in place. It uses war and violence to critique war and violence. (Starship Troopers was originally published in 1959, after the Korean War and at the start of US involvement in Vietnam.) Heinlein is known now for his sexism and his embrace of eugenics and his rejection of traditional sexual morality in his books, so I have a hard time recommending Heinlein, even though I read a ton of him as a teen. But I do recommend Scalzi because he has learned from the classic scifi tropes and plays with them, but spins them on their head.

This is evident in Scalzi's rewriting of H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy. When that Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation came out, the audiobook of Little Fuzzy was included with the purchase of Fuzzy Nation so that the reader could understand the book that Scalzi was reinterpreting. The longer I have read Scalzi, the more I appreciate the role of humor in his writing. It is not that I don't like the traditional serious scifi like Old Man's War series, but I think the humor is what draws me back to him. Scalzi's first book was Agent to the Stars, a book about a Hollywood agent that is hired by aliens to coordinate the revelation of their species to humans. The premise was great and it was a good example of Scalzi taking his one central idea and allowing it to be the center of a book. In the case of Agent to the Stars, the aliens only communicate through smell and humans find the smells repulsive. But the aliens realize that they need a PR person to help them win over humans and what better PR person could be found than a Hollywood agent.

That was Scalzi's first book, but it was given away free until after Old Man's War when it was published traditionally. After that other humor book like Red Shirts (a send up of Star Trek where the below deck characters realize that they are slowly dying off on away missions and that the main characters always life and they are the ones being sacrificed. So they work to avoid ever going on away missions.)

For me, the Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are an audiobook team. Wheaton narrated Agent to the Stars and Redshirts and many other of Scalzi's humorous scifi. And it is a perfect duo. Wheaton gets the humor and dry timing. He plays it very straight so that the laughs really work. It has been several years since I last picked up a Scalzi/Wheaton book and I missed them. I saw Starter Villain was on sale on audible and I picked it up and couldn't put it down. I finished the audiobook in 48 hours.

The central idea in Starter Villain is that Charlie is a down on his luck laid off financial reporter. His wife divorced him, he is working as a substitute teacher, living in his recently deceased father's house and about to be homeless. But then his uncle, who he hasn't seen since he was five, dies. That starts a series of events that leads to Charlie realizing that there is a network of super villains around the world and his uncle was one of them. He ends up inheriting a volcano lair with super gadgets. But he also finds out that the super villains have all of their funds tied up in projects and they don't have any liquidity, so they are all essentially broke. And his background in financial reporting comes into play.

This is a very fun book. It is light, without being frivolous. It takes serious topics seriously, but also realizes that the world we live in is actually ridiculous in many ways. And the characters are ones you want to keep reading about.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/starter-villain-by-...

Summary: An exploration of what it means to seek racial reconciliation.

Christ Over Culture is a good book for the right reader. I have gone back and forth about writing about this book. Generally I write about almost all of the books I read for more than 15 years now. But I am always conflicted about writing about books of people that I know. And I both know Dan Crain fairly well and I have read multiple drafts of this book from early stages until just before the final draft to the publisher. So I am not objective or distant from the book. I am going to have two different threads to this post. A more positive one and then a bit more critical. I am not really critical about the book as much as I am wary of a good book in the hands of a bad reader.

First the positive, Christ Over Culture is a sincere and earnest book about what it means to seek after both racial reconciliation as a Christian and to honestly grapple with what it means to be part of a society that has historically embraced racial hierarchy; both parts of that matter. If we could wave a magic wand and be in a society that hasn’t embraced and fostered racial hierarchy, then the honest grappling with racial reconciliation as a Christian would be something very different. But we are in a society that has actively embraced racial hierarchy, and not just any racial hierarchy, but overt white superiority over all others. There are many other books that have explored the history, The Bible Told Them So is a good book about Christians that called for embracing white supremacy, in those terms. I think many have not really understood the extent to which our history has been shaped by distortions of Christianity to justify cultural preferences. Mark Noll’s series about the public use of scripture in the United States, especially America’s Book or Emerson and Bracey’s The Religion of Whiteness tells some of that story from different perspectives.

Dan Crain isn’t ignoring that history or those problems, but no single book can do everything, so he is primarily addressing the white Christian who is seeking to transform culture in light of their understanding of the gospel that calls them to respond to injustice. We have an unjust world in regard to the social construction of race, so what do we do now? His response is to take us on a journey to see how Christ is over all cultures, and how the gospel challenges and encourages us no matter where we are in history or what culture we have been raised in.

Personally, I like the way that George Yancy has described being in and impacted by a culture, but also trying to work to change that culture. He uses that language of “an anti-sexist, sexist” or “an anti-racist, racist”. I think as a Christian this is best thought of in terms of “an anti-sin, sinner.” Yancy isn’t writing to an explitly Christian audience and so doesn’t take that final step that I use, but Christians in their use of original sin doctrine, talk about the way that sin has impacted all of society and history. In context of Christ’s death and resurrection, the power of sin has been broken. But in this time, before Christ’s return where he finishes making all things new, we still still have to live with the reality of the impact of sin on us and those around us, even if we embrace the work that Christ has already done to break the power of sin over us. We are still sinners and in a world that has been impacted by sin, but we are in opposition to sin. We are anti-sin, but still honest in our assessment that we are in a society and world that has been impacted by sin. We personally sin, even as we attempt to discern how to oppose sin, in ourselves and in society. We are “anti-sin” both in opposition to sin, but in a positive sense of working to restore the effects of sin through restorative practices of community building and justice seeking.

I think Christi Over Culture is attempting to use a similar framework to acknowledge sin while seeking justice. Dan Crain works with Josh Clemons and Hazen Stephens who wrote the book Know, Own, Change which also is assuming a similar framework of working toward racial reconciliation, but doing it as a result of first knowing the history of race in the US, owing the reality of Christian complicity in that history, and then working to change society as a result. There is no one way forward. Part of why I personally have make a long term exploration of the concept of Christian discernment is because I think that personal and corporate discernment is part of what is necessary to take on big issues that are more than what a “silver bullet" can address.

As I said before, I am a bit wary, not of the book, but of bad reading of Christ Over Culture. I have been in communities that have attempted to address racial issues for more than 30 years. I attended Rock of Our Salvation Church while I was in college. Raleigh Washington and Glenn Kahrein wrote the book Breaking Down Walls out of the work that they were doing of racial reconciliation at Rock of Our Salvation and Circle Urban Ministries. Pastor Washington left the church to work full time at Promise Keepers on racial reconciliation right about the time I graduated from college and moved to go to grad school. I interviewed Glenn Kehrein a few years later as part of my Master’ thesis about how different Christian non-profits think about their interaction with community ministry and part of what I asked him (in slightly different language) was about the discernment that different groups use as they try to think about the way that they structure their organizations and approaches to community. Already by that time, it was apparent that the methodology of Promise Keepers had failed around racial issues. Emerson and Smith's Divided by Faith was still about 2 years away and the even more critical I Bring the Voice of My People by Chanequa Walker Barnes was nearly 2 decades away. But there was plenty to see about weaknesses of Evangelical approaches to race at the time.

In the years since, I have seen both very positive approaches and very negative approaches to thinking about how Christians discern how to grapple with injustice, especially around race. I am wary of approaches that do not spend enough time grappling with Christ’s general approach of inverting cultural assumptions about power. Jesus said that the last shall be first and demonstrated that the way that leaders lead, is by serving, as he modeled by washing feet. Paul illustrates this in Phil 2 that talks about how Jesus, as God, didn’t keep his own privilege and authority as God, but took on human weakness to show us how to truly live. One of the problems of trying to think about how to grapple with what is means to be white in a society that has created racial hierarchy is that I believe that the model of Christ is to work to invert hierarchy. I have known Dan Crain for more than six years and we have had many long conversations about this individually in and in large and small group settings. I trust him and believe that he is doing that in his work in this book and with his job at One Race.

But I also know that others do not believe that. Doug Wilson has said in many different ways that he believes that Christianity is fundamentally hierarchical and to oppose hierarchy is to deny Christian tenants. I am not going to link to explicit discussion of this, but it is easy to find. Wilson’s understanding of Christianity is that that hierarchy is not an expression of sin, but God-ordained reality that was in place before the fall and should be continued now as a requirement for Christians. Anyone with assumptions similar to Wilson’s will read books like Christ Over Culture as justification of domination of culture. This is why the publisher that Wilson founded published the book The Case for Christian Nationalism. Wilson has described himself as a paleo-confederate because while he thinks that slavery in the Confederacy included sinful harshness, he also think that there are ways that he thinks it rightly reflected hierarchy.

That may seem like an extreme position, and it is. But Wilson and his views are gaining purchase. Pete Hegseth attends a church started by Wilson. Wilson has been profiled recently by CNN and Politico and many other news organizations because of how he illustrates those who are positively using Christian Nationalism as a self descriptive term because they understand their role as Christians to dominate society and not just live in a hierarchical security, but to be on the dominate side of that hierarchy.

I am wary of even bringing up all of this in regard to Christ Over Culture because none of that is advocated in this book. But this has always been my wariness about even discussing questions like “how to be white” or “what is the role of the predominately white church in society.” Christ Over Culture grapples with the problem of “whiteness” (understood in the academic sense of the cultural belief in racial hierarchy where people commonly defined as White are racially superior), so I think for those who have eye to see, there are good answers to the questions raised here.

I have been a part of groups that have discussed race in the church for decades. And I have seen a regular (but small) stream of people who start to grapple with the reality of the social construction of race and the history of that within the church, but who then move toward a white nationalist position similar to Wilson’s. Christ Over Culture rejects that framing and is written explicitly against that, but in the wrong hands, there are people who distort the message of Christ and the gospel to be one of hierarchy, not one of freedom.

I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/christ-over-culture/

Summary: A mature Ged tries to save magic.

In the Farthest Shore, Ged, now mature and the Archmage (the head wizard of Roke) is on a quest with Prince Arren to discover why magic seems to be disappearing from Earthsea. Prince Arren is a teen and is in awe of Ged and quickly agrees to come along when Ged asks him to. In part this is the story of Arren coming of age and maturing.

I want to like The Farthest Shore much more than I do. But it seems unquestionably true that this is the weakest book of the series. I think there is a couple reasons for that. I think the first is that is feels a bit derivative. The Farthest Shore was published in 1972 and the buddy quest, especially the last part feels like Frodo and Sam's quest to get rid of the ring.

The other part is that Ged is a bit too powerful in the book. While Arren doesn't really understand why Ged doesn't use his power more often at the start of the book, that isn't because Ged is weak and can't do magic. This is similar to the Superman problem. If nothing can defeat Superman, then the conflict within the book falls flat. I think the strength of the first book was the psychological tension of Ged at war with himself. And when he is such a powerful wizard that there is no one else that can really take him on except himself, it makes it hard to have a real villain to the story.

That leads to a third problem, the villain here feels like a cardboard cutout. The villain in the first book was really Ged himself. The villain in the second book wasn't really the others in the temple that were trying to prevent Ged from recovering the magic artifact, but tradition that kept Tenar and the others trapped. But in this third book there is a villain and the villain isn't really up to the task. The conflict of the book is mostly the quest not the villain, but even though the book is mostly centered on Arren discovering himself in the quest, I think that either Le Guin needed to more fully embrace that, or needed a better villain.

This book is needed to set up what became the fourth book of the series. The Farthest Shore was published in 1972 and the fourth book, Tehanu, was not published until 1990. Tehanu has a smaller scope, but it is a better book.

This originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-farthest-shore/

Summary: A thematic look at the prophets, particularly looking at how those prophets can speak to today.

I have mentioned before that I participate in a couple of book groups. The Tears of Things was read with a book group that I participate in through Ignatius House, a Jesuit retreat center near me. That group meets on Tuesday mornings at 10:15 and in part because of the time, it is made up of mostly retired age people. I have participated in it for about 3 years now. I am the youngest, and this book was the only male in the group. There are about 20-25 people in the group with about 15-18 that are there on any given week. Most of the group are Catholic or Episcopal, but there are a few others. The group is a mix of people. Several are spiritual directors, there is a retired pastor, a former Catholic high school religion teacher and a number who are lifelong Christians but have no formal theological education. It is particularly that mix of background that I value, even though on the face of it, women in their mid 60s to early 80s do not seem very diverse.

Richard Rohr is a particular favorite of the group. This is likely the fourth or fifth book of Rohr’s that has been read by the group since it started and the second since I started three years ago. I have a mixed relationship with Rohr. I think he stirs things up in mostly helpful ways. His Center for Contemplation and Action is like my intent on being a spiritual director. He talks about why he founded it in this book and I resonate with trying to tie activism to spiritual depth and contemplation. But on the negative side, I think he can be vague and obtuse and my history is that Rohr’s non-dualistic thinking, in the wrong hands, often ends up being a cover for pietism or inactive moderation. It is unfair of me to get irritated with Rohr for the bad reading of Rohr, but that bad reading I think does have a relationship to his vague writing style.

That ambivalent background on Rohr aside, this is one of the better books by Rohr and is unlike any other book I have read by Rohr. It is essentially a thematic look at the Old Testament prophets. It was commented on several times that people in the group have not really read or studied the prophets. Almost everyone in the group is part of a liturgical tradition that reads a lot of scripture, and the prophets are regularly in the lectionary readings. But those lectionary readings of the prophets tend to take passages out of context and not lend themselves to understanding the prophets in their whole context. This is not a book on any particular prophetic book, but instead is a book on how to read the prophets and why reading the prophets is important.

If I have a quibble, I think it may have been a good idea for Rohr to do the overview that he did but also take a shorter book and do a deeper dive into that particular one to give a better idea on how to practically read and study a prophetic book. But instead, he did keep this a fairly high view of the prophets as a whole.

Where I am less comfortable with the book is that Rohr is evaluating the prophets on their anger. He creates a color scale of anger to love and suggests that the reader read the prophets and use colored highlighters to evaluate the message of the prophets. As an exercise, that does get people to read the prophets. But this is particularly the type of thing that I think Rohr falls into where he creates a dichotomy while trying to opposes dualistic thinking. Where I think this approach is helpful is that it emphasizes that the bible was written by humans and the human authors had a voice, it was not simply God direct verbal inspiration without any influence of the human author. Rohr’s point here is that as we are prophetic today, our spiritual and relational maturity does influence the way we are heard by others. Rohr is calling on the reader to primarily love and that our prophetic words are best with spoken out of love and lamentation as opposed to anger. I think that point is right, but I am not sure that his method of evaluating the prophets gets at that point quite in the right way.

I wish he had spent a bit more time on lamentation and grief as a driving force of the prophets, but what he did do was good. And generally, I think that is mostly my feelings about the book as a whole. I got a lot out of the book because of the discussion of the book. And I tend to appreciate more attention to the prophets, the bible as a whole and the intention of tying our activism to our spiritual lives. And especially the importance of spiritual, emotional, and relational maturity within activism. But at the same time, I still am not sure that Rohr is the right voice for me. I tend to be more attracted to the Black church tradition and voices like Howard Thurman and womanist theologians who I think do a better job at calling us to more robust ethical thinking that avoids unhelpful dualism without demonizing those that have different positions than Rohr.

Summary: The previous case continues to unfold

I am a long term fan of the series. Most of the books I have read more than once. But starting at about the eighth book there has been a shift from a mystery series to a thriller series. There are some books in the last dozen that have had more mystery elements than thriller elements, but most of those books have shifted from mysteries where Gamache and those around him follow clues and psychologically gain an understanding of the perpetrator, to thriller elements where the point is unfolding tension. Along with that thriller element, a natrual shift has been to make Gamache more and more of a traditional hero.

Part of what I loved is that the early books portrayed Gamache is using his brain, his love of others, the empathy he gained from his own tragic history and his experience with previous cases to solve crimes. But a lot of the recent stories have been focused on action hero tropes, luck, or the willingness of Gamache to bend the rules to stop others who have no regard for the rules. I am glad for series like this to grapple with the moral complexities of any job. And police work has plenty of moral complexities. And this series has grappled with the ways that bending rules because you think you are in the right can lead to bending rules because the rules are getting in your way. One of the things that gets tedious in John le Carré's books is that there are often no characters that are actually doing the right thing for the right reasons. It is all about power. There may be some realitiy to that, but it doesn't make for very compelling reading.

As the Gamache books have become more about conspiracy theories and less about crime, they fall into the trap of needing to be larger and larger conspiracies. This is a spoiler, but there is an author's note at the beginning that hints at the spoiler because the book was written prior to the most recent US Presidental election even if it wasn't published until Oct 2025. Early in Trump's presidency there was a lot of language about Canada becoming the 51st state of the US. The story here is about a conspiracy to invade Canada, or maybe a conspiracy to invade the US by Canada. Or maybe all of that is a ruse for other purposes. At times this feels a bit too "ripped from the headlines."

As it is, I think it is a fine thriller. It is really the second part of a two book arc, and I am not convinced that there won't be a third book in the arc. But even if it is a fine thriller, much of the elments of the series that I love, the people, the character development, the complex portayals of characters that I have grown to love are missing. While Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste are all throughout the book, they feel more cardboard than normal. They have become arms of Gamache more than indpendent characters.

I will keep reading Louise Penny, but I do wish she would return to the smaller, cozy style that was the reason I started reading her.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/black-wolf/

Summary: Tracing the story of "Freedom School" as one of the backbones of the Civil Rights movement.

When I first heard about Spell Freedom, I thought it was a history of the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School played an important part in establishing the early freedom schools and eventually moved their teacher training program (and main Freedom school staff person, Septima Clark) to the SCLC. As is made clear in the book, the Highlander Folk School played an important behind the scenes role in the Civil Rights Movement. By the early 1950s, when Septima Clark attended her first training program, Highlander had been around for nearly 30 years. It was consciously integrated from early on, but its work shifted from labor organizing to civil rights organizing in the late 1940s. Clark quickly started leading training sessions and soon after, was forced out of her teaching job in Charleston SC because she was a member of the NAACP and in leadership of the local chapter.

The most likely reason that someone may know about Highlander Folk School is because Rosa Park attended one of Clark's early training session in the summer of 1954, just before she prompted Montgomery Bus Boycott. Clark and Parks became life long friends. And it was not long after that Septima Clark first met Ella Baker. At the time Ella Baker was an organizer for the SCLC and their voting right program was floundering. The Nashville sit-in movement came to Highlander for training and Ella Baker used Highlander regularly as SNCC was developed. But about this time, the state of Tennessee was able to confiscate the property and shut down the Highlander Folk School, forcing it to move and reincorporate.

While Ella Baker had left the SCLC and become the primary advisor for the development of SNCC, the SCLC took over Highlander's freedom school program and brought Septima Clark on staff and she became the first female board member. The sexism of the SCLC was frustrating to Clark, as it had been to Baker, but Clark continued to develop the freedom schools and work for voting rights, including playing a significant role in Selma. Hundreds of thousands of people were registered to vote as an indirect result of the freedom schools. Many of the major leaders of the Civil Rights era were either trained at Highlander, or in one of the freedom schools that were taught by volunteers that were trained by Clark or her staff at either Highlander or SCLC. (This includes John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Stokley Carmichael, and many more.)

As with many other histories of the Civil Rights era, there is a lot of overlap because different books are telling different facets of the same broad story. One of the facets here that is important is the role of radical white supporters of integration who helped to train Black civil rights leaders. Myles and Zilphia Mae Horton, as the founders of Highlander, and then later Guy Carawan and his wife Candy were strongly involved, but also seemed, at least in this telling, to understand their role to primarily be empowering Black leadership. Zilphia Mae understood the role of song as both ice breaker and encouragement and the civil rights movement and the Black church tradition also used music well. But again, even if helping, appropriation can be easy. Zilphia taught We Shall Overcome to participants at Highlander, but she didn't write it, she learned it from Black women who sang a version of it during labor strikes. Zilphia did standardize some of the lyrics and then Guy Carawan, Pete Seager and Joan Baez recorded versions of it that became more widely known as a protest song. The arrangement was copyrighted by Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger in 1960 and copyright lawsuits continue around the song until 2017 when a ruling finally placed it in the public domain.

Spell Freedom is a good narrative history of an aspect of the Civil Rights movement that is less known than the demonstrations and protests. But without training of the Highlander School and the grass roots work of local organizing with the freedom schools, much of the more public works would have been less effective.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/spell-freedom/

Summary: A continued exploration of coming to find out that everything you thought you know is wrong.

I have been looking forward to reading To Clutch a Razor since this spring when I read the first book of the series. I jumped at a chance to get an advance copy of the audiobook through Netgalley. While I have read Dresden Files and a few other urban fantasy books, this is not really my genre. But the themes of family curses and generational trauma and responsibility for repair are really what draw me to the book.

Dymitr is a knight of an old order centered on killing monsters. His family is the center of the leadership of the Polish arm of the order. Dymitr is different because while he has killed and he is highly capable, from a young age he thought that what they were doing was wrong. The last book he attempted to put a stop to his role, but through the work of others, he was given a new task.

This is a book that is basically impossible to discuss without spoilers. From here on out, there are spoilers. If you have not read the first book, then stop reading here. This is the link to the post about the first book, which also has marked spoilers. But you need to read that post and book first.

When Dymitr became a knight the process splits his soul and his body and his spine becomes a bone sword that he literally has to rip out of his body each time he uses it. It is a painful process but as is discussed more in this book, the Knigth's magic is rooted in pain and it is a perfect symbol of what it means to be a knight. When Baba Jaga agrees to change him to break the curse against his friend Ala, she takes his sword in payment. The sword is the physical manifestation of half of his soul and it creates a longing that, if he can't win it back, will eventually cause him to go mad. Baba Jaga places a series of tasks on him to get the sword back and those tasks start with killing his own grandmother, the head of his order.

Ala has taken Dymitr in because he saved her. She has nursed him back to health and given him a place to stay, and along the way she has taught him how to be "a monster" since he is no longer human as a result of the magic. But he is also still a knight. There is a real tension between them because as much as Dymitr has shown his desire to change, he did kill her cousin in his past. Her family was cursed because of his grandmother. His work to break the curse against her, as much as it cost him, does not fully overcome the reality that she still suffers memories of the curse.

This is a straight forward book and while a bit longer than the first, it still more long novella than full length novel. The main story follows Dymitr and Ala going to his home to try to figure out how to get his bone sword back without killing anyone. Dymitr has changed, not just physically (he is no longer human), but he also sees more about the reality of his family. There is both shame and horror at how he participated in the the mistreatment of others and how much he didn't see before.

This is a book that has more violence than I really wanted. That is often present in urban fantasy, but I still don't really want that much violence, even as I liked the book as a whole. There is a romance element to the story. Dymitr and Niko have an attraction. But neither of them is quite willing to give into the attraction. So at this point in the series, there is little more to it than longing and a couple of kisses.

Veronica Roth is exploring Polish folk tales in these books. I don't have enough familiarity to know how much is based on older stories and how much is new. These two books are definitely in the adult oriented fantasy and not the YA fantasy bucket. Not the books are inappropriate to older teens, but that the themes are just of interest to people who are older. YA is often coming of age stories of some sort. But this series is more world weary grappling with our own complicity in wrong. There is also light gay romance and very real violence. But that isn't something that would be inappropriate in more YA focused books if the themes were different. Roth is mostly known for her Divergent series and that is more YA. So the reader should not assume that just because she is the author that the books will also be YA.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/to-clutch-a-razor-by-veronica-roth-curse-bearer-2/

Summary: An introduction to Howard Thurman focusing on the role of radical inclusivity in his work.

This is the fourth book by or about Thurman I have read this year. I am pretty familiar with Thurman at this point, but I find that many of the book written about him are mostly introductory, but often do not overlap significantly. This is an incredible reality for Thurman because his work was often so diverse, that many people can write introductions to his work from various perspectives and yet not overlap with much of their focus.

Howard Thurman was a theological and philosophical forerunner of the civil rights movement and a spiritual director and mentor to its leadership. But he was also an expert in mysticism, interfaith cooperation and learning, the role of non-violence, personal spiritual disciples and other areas. As has often been reported, he was advised by an early white mentor to avoid the academic study of racial issues because it would cause people to pigeonhole him into only being “a race man.” Thurman both understood why that advice was given and resented the advice (and somewhat followed it.)

Thurman’s work simply was influenced by his social location and experience. That is not a controversial statement, but there is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by being primarily raised by a grandmother who had been enslaved or by having to be a boarding student for high school because there were no local high schools that admitted black students. There is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by the ways that he broke color barriers throughout his life. As Thurman pointed out in his memoir, the White mentor thought that it was possible for Thurman to not center race in his work, but didn’t really understand how race had been centered in the experience of the whole United States.

Come Go With Me has biography, and it covers many of the themes of Thurman’s books. And it traces how Thurman’s work both broke new ground and was rooted in the tradition of the Black Church in the US. It is not a straight biography and not a straight thematic review of Thurman’s literary work. It is primarily a reflection on how this theme of radical inclusivity can be something that we learn from today while giving enough background to understand the role that Thurman played in helping to construct a movement of racial inclusivity.

It is very much not overlapping with Raphael Warnock’s Divided Mind of the Black Church, but the two books do complement one another by approaching their subjects in very different ways but giving supplementary information to the reader. Warnock is doing historical theology by tracing the historical development and themes of Black theology over time. Warnock’s conclusion is that true Black theology is radically inclusive and there is always a tension between that movement toward racial inclusivity and pietism.

C. Anthony Hunt does contextualize Thurman, but he is primarily looking at Thurman as an individual, not as a representative of the whole Black church. Thurman was a mystic and that mysticism and orientation to embracing God as an unexplainable other was part of what left Thurman open to learning. He was a voracious reader and had a brilliant mind, but he didn’t limit his work to pure academic study. He traveled to India and met with Gandhi was forever shaped by the experience of travel and people that were different from him. He was experientially a mystic from a very young age, but he also studied that from different traditions academically. He didn’t just teach and lead, he acted to start a radically inclusive church in San Francisco in the mid 1940s.

I think the whole book is helpful, but it is a book that is designed to teach for a purpose. There is a clear culmination in the final chapter that is exploring what we can take from learning about Thurman today. I am going to quote two passage, not as summary, but as two of the takeaways that I personally though were important.

Thomas Merton pointed out that the test of our sincerity in human association in the practice of nonviolence and movement toward radically inclusive community is: “are we willing to learn something from our adversaries?” If a new truth is made known, will we accept it? The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be “converted” – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we may find that in viewing things from a basically different perspective we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideals more realistically. (p156)

and

Religion is to be viewed as a process, and must now be understood in global context. It is no longer an option to confine religious thinking and practice to narrow and particular cultural contexts. In postmodernity, cultures are brought into closer contact by technology. Cousins offered the illustration of an astronaut who travels into space for the first time, and looks down upon the earth. The astronaut is overwhelmed with what they see, as they now view the earth from a new and broader perspective. Likewise, a new global reality causes us to view the world from a different (perhaps broader) perspective. (p158)

There is always a danger in books like this that they can distort the subject for the purposes of the author. But I have read enough of Thurman to know that Come Go With Me is handing the subject well. There is a very close reading of Thurman and his life. Hunt has done the work to understand him well so that he can explore how we might also learn from him well. This is not hagiography, but it is honoring of an elder that I wish more people knew more about.

_____

This is not really part of the main post, but I did see that the audiobook was a AI generated audiobook that was only a $0.99 add on to the kindle book and I decided to try it out for one chapter. I generally am not a fan of AI narration and this did not change my mind. I understand the value of AI reading for those who need narration for one reason or another. But as good as the technology is, it isn’t as good as a good narrator who is familiar with the subject. Words were mispronounced, pauses ended up in the wrong place. And the very nature of AI means that real narrators who had done good work, had their work taken without any compensation or acknowledgment. (a type of theft). I am not a fan of this type of work, but I do also understand why people get it. It is cheap, it is “good enough” and it can serve as a necessary point of access for people with disabilities or other constraints that can’t read the print text for one reason or another. But I will not be persuaded to support AI narration as a widespread practice.

Summary: An agnostic explores the history and philosophy of Christian mysticism to understand how mystical experience seems to be a part of being human.

This is an odd book. Simon Critchley is an agnostic philosopher writing primarily about Christian mysticism because he wants to explore the ways that mystical experience inform what it means to be human without really grappling with whether God is involved. I am going to start at the end because I think that helps to make sense of the project. Critchley moves to modern art, particularly punk music, as a type of mystical experience that he has felt, that transcends the traditional rational categories of philosophy and experience.

In some ways he is coming at the argument that Dallas Willard makes about the reality of a category of spiritual knowledge in reverse. Willard wants to suggest that divine revelation and experience are trustworthy types of knowledge and experience. I think in both Critchley and Willard's books, the rough point that the category exists has been made sufficiently to agree. But the next step is harder. Once you agree that there is a category, what do you do with it? Willard is mostly arguing against a type of hyper rationalism that I don't think carries much weight. And Critchley is arguing that the mystical experience of feeling one with "God" or the world or those around us, while also getting a sense of divine love and belonging that he associates with the mystical experience in part of the human experience and a good that draws us away from hyper individualism and maybe even depression and loneliness.

My on-going reading project on Christian discernment had little help from this book because my project is at least in part about the evaluation of that mystical experience or Willard's spiritual knowledge and I have just naturally assumed that they already exist when I am asking the question about how we evaluate them.

There was an interesting discussion of mystical experience that draws one into a relationship with the divine or infinite and the type of mystical experience that results in the annihilation of the self within the divine. Historically within the Christian tradition, both of these metaphors have been used, but I personally think the former is more aligned with the Christian tradition than the later. This can somewhat be connected to apophatic and cataphatic conceptions of our understanding of God and whether we can really use description to speak of either God or mystical experience or can we only talk about what is not. In this sense, these are philosophical questions, but at the same time, philosophy apart from theology has limits to what it can say.

Critchley is not overtly making a Christian argument and he is (by his own admission) using Christian terms and history because he and the Western philosophical tradition has been shaped by Christianity more than eastern philosophy and he has less connection to those traditions. But as a Christian, some of the discussion seems to just miss the point because he isn't going to that next step. There is no real discussion of eschatology here and I think that matters to the way he talks about mysticism. For instance when he discusses Julian of Norwich's negation of creation to affirm it, the tension that he was trying to draw is minimized by affirming creation, but holding it loosely because of the greater "realness" of the coming world.

One of the other reviewers on Goodreads talks about the way that CS Lewis uses Joy as a type of mystical reality, and I agree but I also think that Lewis' description of heaven in The Great Divorce as being more real is also a type of understanding of the way that mystical experience is a revealing in part of how the world and human experience will be "more" not just a negation of the creatureliness of the physical world.

Critchley does not ignore the modern world. He has good discussion of TS Elliot and Annie Dillard, but he speaks of them as writing about the mystical world and nature not experiencing it. The experience of the mystical that is an experience of a personal God and not just an experience of oneness with nature or beauty would require more than what Critchley can give because of his agnosticism, or at least his reluctance to fully embrace Christianity. For him, that mystical experience of God is not part of the modern discussion of mysticism.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/on-mysticism/

Summary: After winning nearly unimaginable wealth and power at the end of the last book, things do not really go that well, that is until there is another quest.

I really enjoyed Ready Player One. I liked all the references to cultural history. I enjoyed the story, the light romance, the YA feel. But I just never got around to reading this second book. I bought a kindle version years ago. I finally started it this summer when the audiobook was buy one get one free with a book I wanted and nothing else to get free that I wanted other than this. I went in with very low expectations. Just looking at the star ratings of my Goodreads friends made me keep those expectations low. A few people liked it, but most were in the 1 to 3 range.

I am not going to give away many spoilers, but I do think this had more depth than I expected. The set up to the second book is long and I think while I understand that complaint, it was a necessary part of the story. Wade at the end of the first book is barely out of his teens, but he just won a company that is worth billions. He was a likable kid when he had nothing. But when he had fame, power and resources, he quickly becomes unlikable, not just to the reader, but to everyone around him. I understand why people didn't like that choice, but I think it does make sense to the story arc.

When Wade is at his best, he is on a quest. He works with his friends, and they can accomplish the impossible together. But as an individual trying to make his way in the world, he is awful. He doesn't have the skills to run a trillion dollar company. He doesn't have the ethical development to understand the implications of new technology. He doesn't have the emotional and relational development to be attractive to Samantha (the love interest in the first book.) I appreciate that this book dropped some of the YA feel. The protagonist isn't a late teen any longer and the hedonistic approach to life that is part of the story line requires at least touching on the world of hedonism.

So the long intro made sense to me even as I understand why so many didn't like it. But the main focus is the quest. The quest is why I read books like this. I enjoy the cultural exploration of John Hughes movies and Prince music. It isn't particularly deep, it is supposed to be fun. But along the way I did think that the grappling with weaknesses and outright harm in our heroes to have a greater depth in the story line than I expected from the book.

I did not love the ending. I think the whole book raised questions about AI, life in a virtual world, the problems with a lack of attention to human interactions and then the ending just seems to forget all of the questions raised earlier and embraced technological solution as a good.

I don't really know how to evaluate the book. I understand why many didn't like the parts they didn't like. I thought it was unexpected to get good reflections on the problems of heroes and those who are really great in one area of life and really awful in other areas of life. I appreciated, in a sci-fi book, the warnings about rejection of human interactions and the problems of looking to technology to solve all our problems. But I also did thought the ending really ruined the earlier thoughtful parts. So....maybe read it with low expectations.

I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/ready-player-two/

Summary: The story of two couples, a shared pastorate and their wives in mid 20th century NYC.

There are not many books that I stay up too late on multiple nights in a row to finish, but The Dearly Beloved is one of them. It has the feel of Gilead or the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch but it did not quite rise to that level. This is a book that I devoured in audio and I will come back and read again in print. But I wanted more.

The Dearly Beloved opens with the death of one of the four, but we don't know until the epilogue when that death occurs. After the brief initial opening, we go back and the four characters are developed from their origin stories until about the midpoint of the book where the two men are jointly called to be co-pastors in the mid 1960s New York City. I could not help but think of Eugene Peterson as I read about their early years as pastors. Eugene Peterson was also Presbyterian and also was a young pastor in NYC as he worked on his PhD and tried to decide if he was going to be an academic or a pastor. Both of these pastors in the story had their PhDs, and one of the wives also had a PhD in Literature and in the opening years of their ministry she was a professor at The New School. Eugene Peterson planted his suburban Maryland church in 1962, right about the same time as these two were coming to their 100 year old church that had seen better days.

One of my favorite parts of the book was Jane, the church administrator/secretary who trained the two to be pastors together. She understood the church and the community and what it needed. She loved the church and loved the two pastors. She had her own weaknesses and biases, but she helped them find their way and kept them together as they knitted together "a call."

The book is structured in three parts, the early years of the characters and how each of them met and married. The second part is the early years of ministry and the ways that their history and faith and personality came together (or didn't). The third part is the crisis and resolution. The crisis and resolution makes sense internally, but I also felt like it was too simple for the first two parts, it ended the book too early. I don't like complaining about what is not in a book, but the build up of character and background felt like it was too big for the main crisis and resolution to be only a four year period of the late 1960s. I think there needed to be at least two additional parts that followed the couples into middle age. It is not that people do not have significant life struggle in their 30s, but when there is significant life struggle, the resolution of their 30s or early 40s will not maintain equilibrium into their 50s and 60s or beyond.

But for the weakness, this was a book that took faith, and lack of faith seriously. This was not a "christian novel" that talks about faith. This was literature that took faith seriously as part of what it means to be human. Lilly, the wife with a PhD, never found faith. Her parents died when she was a teen and the trauma of that death and the ongoing grief of their loss shaped her throughout the book. It gave her strength, but also fragility. In many ways I think that she was coded as potentially on the autism spectrum in the way that she liked order and was internal with her emotion and interactions. But as the book goes on, I think what seemed to be initially coded as autism was trauma.

Lilly was married to Charles, the privileged child of a Harvard professor and a debutant mother. There was family money, but not love. He came to faith in college and his father thought that faith was simply a way to get out from under his father's shadow. James was very different. He grew up in Chicago, the child of an abusive alcoholic WW2 vet with PTSD. His mother was an immigrant and pledged to keep that family together, but James would do anything to get out. He married Nan, a pastor's child from Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. Her father wanted her to get out of Mississippi and understand the world and sent her to Wheaton Conservatory to study music. James and Nan met when she was filling in for an accompanist at a concert at the University of Chicago. James fell for Nan, but Nan was a Christian and to be with Nan, James went to church.

The characters were archetypes of faith. Nana initially never questioned faith. Faith was just part of the water of her life. Charles was the evangelical with an adult conversion experience and the traditional biblical evangelical faith of the midcentury moderate. James was the activist who understood faith as a calling to make the world a better place., no cause was inadequate to work on, but doubt was his constant companion. Lilly was mad at God intellectually never understood the purpose of faith until a later crisis.

I like novels that explore ideas as well as people. I don't need a strong plot if there are good ideas and good characters. I understood these characters and wanted to know them more. This is in part why I wanted a longer story with them. But I think the desire for a plot to focus the build up of the character's back story, short cut the development of the story more than I wanted it to.

The ideas in the background were largely around tragedy and faith. How, or if, God was with us in that tragedy. As the couples are thrown together and the men become deeply bonded, the women, who are not temperamentally compatible, do have to relate to one another. Under the initial tutelage of Jane, it is clear that the two men fit together, and cannot work apart. Their pastorate is a package deal. And if one goes, the other would also have to go. That development of church as shared reality is part of what makes that third section work, but what does not work about it is that the crisis is too big and I don't think that Cara Wall could figure out how to keep telling the story as the couples would have gone into their 40s and 50s, so the story jumps to their 70s for the end and it feels unfinished. Every novel like this is unfinished. There is always more that could be said. The crisis that was here was developed well and told an important story. But for most people, there is not a big crisis, but many little ones. It is life in the little struggles that build upon one another the lead to the life well lived.

This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-dearly-beloved/

Summary: A graphic novel adaptation of a 1940s Superman radio drama.

I don’t remember who recommended this, but when I saw the recommendation I reserved a copy at our library for my son and I to read. I picked it up at the library and my son finished it in a single sitting. I read it that night after he went to bed.

Part of why I wanted to get it was that my son, who is a big graphic novel fan, has no real connection to super hero stories. I keep trying to get him interested in super hero movies so that he would also add some super hero comics to his reading but the closest he gets is Duck Tales.

Another part of why I wanted him to read this is that I continually try to find ways to help him see the world around him. My 10 year old will be starting 5th grade in a couple weeks. My kids have gone to the school where my wife works since they started school. It is about 15 minutes from our house and not the school we are zoned for, but we choose it in particular because we want our kids in a diverse school. The school is about 10% non-Hispanic white students and about 70% low income. My kids have a diverse set of friends that I did not have when I was growing up.

My kids are sensitive and do not particularly like super hero stories because they tend to be too violent for them. I was concerned about this whether this would be too much, but he read it before I had a chance to. When he was about 2/3 of the way through the story he came up to me and asked if the Klan was a real thing or if it was just a super hero villain that was made up. It is a very real question and I stopped my work and we had a 15 minute history lesson about what the Klan was and the three eras of the KKK.

Part of what I appreciate about this story is that it is both about the Klan and an immigration story. The Klan in different part of the country did have different targets and the Klan in the 2nd and 3rd eras (after WW1 and after WW2) was active in every state. There were millions of people who were enrolled in state level Klan organization in the 2nd generation (roughly 1915 to the 1940s). What many do not understand is that during this era where were nearly 4 times as many members in Indiana as there was in Georgia. This second generation Klan was started after the Birth of a Nation movie and grew quickly over the next ten years. But then a major figure in the leadership was convicted of murder and the growth slowed. The IRS essentially shut down the formal membership structure in the late 1940s for failure to pay taxes.

But the radio drama that this Superman story is based on also played a role in decreasing the interest in the Klan. There are several pages of history at the back of the book that details the original story and the adaptation to the comic book form in this book.

This story is about a Chinese family that moves out of Chinatown after the father gets a good job with the public health department. The son is a good baseball player and is recruited to pitch for the local little league baseball team that Jimmy Olson helps to coach. The previous pitcher resents being displaced by a Chinese boy and complains to his uncle. The uncle is a leader in the local KKK and they burn a cross in the front yard of home of the new residents. The story continues with an attempted lynching.

The daughter of the family uses her skills of watching what is going on around her as she tries to fit in to understand who was behind the Klan and works with Jimmy Olson to get Superman involved in saving her brother.

I won’t spoil the whole story (although that is the main story arc) but I do want to note that part of Superman’s early stories were fighting Nazis. In this book, Superman has to fight a nazi after the end of WW2 who is in a super suit powered by Kryptonite. In my recent book club, we read White Flight about Atlanta and part of the opposition to integrated housing came from an openly white supremacist nazi group in the late 1940s, right about the same time that this story was set. It was amazing to me that so soon after the end of WW2 there were nazi groups that arose around the country. Much of the opposition to MLK Jr in Chicago was from an openly Nazi group in Chicago, but that was in 1966, not 1946.

I think that graphic novels are particularly good at telling history for kids. While this is not only oriented for kids, I think it is a bit more kid friendly than the March series about John Lewis. That series I think is still too old for my 10 year old because it is a more complex presentation of history. Superman Smashes the Klan worked just fine for my 10 year old to read on his own and for me to read on my own and we both appreciated it.

Because it was available at my library, I also got my son the first book in the Secret Coders’ series by the same author. It is a mystery series using logic puzzles in a graphic novel format and my son devoured that book as well. I will get him the rest of that series soon.

This was originally posted at my blog at https://bookwi.se/superman/

Summary: A memoir of Union Seminary professor, ethicist, community organizer and theologian Gary Dorrien.

I picked up Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel at some point when it was on sale, but I never started it (in part because it is over 900 pages.) I knew that it was the second in a trilogy of the theology of the Black church and social gospel and so I wondered if I should start with the first book so I just never started it. I needed something different and I tend to like to read near end of life memoirs of theologians because I am interested in how they appraise their life and work. Because I do not really know Gary Dorrien's work, this was a bit of a a blind pick. But it is currently on sale for kindle and hardcover and it was a low barrier to entry.

Gary Dorrien grew up in a poor rural Michigan family. He was the grandchild of a mixed Native American and White couple, but did not have much contact with his Native American heritage, but did feel some of the impact of the discrimination of his family. Dorrien's mother started college but only completed a year before deciding to get married. So Gary Dorrien was the first of his family to complete college. And going on to graduate school and a PhD was very new to the family.

I am sympathetic to Dorrien's work as an organizer and a Democratic Socialist and his long work as a college chaplain before going to Union. But it is honestly quite amazing to me the number of mammoth tomes that he completed in a relatively short period after starting at Union. He had written several books before that point, but when he started at Union, his wife had passed away, his daughter had started college and he wasn't working without a break year-round running multiple programs at his college.

I also was interested to know his close relationships with James Cone and Cornel West and a number of others who I was more familiar with as authors or academics or public intellectuals. In part I think I respect his work more after reading this because he was primarily focused on doing behind the scenes organizing and intellectual history which allowed others to take a more prominent role.

Some memoirs are about life development and experiences. This memoir does includes those things. We know about his daughter and his wife being a pastor and eventually dying of cancer relatively young. But this is a book that is more about his intellectual development and his interaction with the ideas and movements of his academic career.

Some people will not be interested in that type of a memoir. But for me, this is exactly the type of book that helps me to make connections. I am currently also reading Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism by Robin Lovin. Lovin was one of his grad school friends that is mentioned multiple times in the book. These intellectual connections between people do matter in the way that their ideas develop. And things like James Cone encouraging Dorrien to write his three volume history of the Black social gospel while Dorrien also had a three volume history of liberal theology tells me that this is not just a white academic studying the Black church, but someone with context and history in and outside of the Black church.

I am not as connected to Dorrien's political orientation, but I am very sympathetic to his organization, desire to ground organizing in both Christian faith and good social and philosophical theory, and his desire for local church connection. I did not know he also has books on Anglican/Episcopal denominational history and theology. I don't love reading 800 page tomes, but I am now excited to pick up a number of Dorrien's books. I will start with Breaking White Supremacy because that is what I already have. But I try to pick up at least one other this year.

Many who lean left do not feel that connected to their Christian background. This quote from close to the end I think is a good illustration of how that connection still is important.

On the road, at Columbia, and even at Union, I meet people for whom Christianity is a ruined word. They ask me nicely, or with puzzlement, or hostility, why I am a Christian. I try to explain that I was drawn long ago into the spirit and way of Jesus, which draws me like a magnet into its gravitational force. I was caught by the gospel picture of the divine Word entering the world. I am held by the subversive peace and grace of Christ, the meaning of suffering, the challenge to oppose every form of exploitation and violence, the willingness to give my life to others, and the promise of new life that it brings. These experiences shape my understanding of how I should live. To say with Paul that faith, hope, and love remain, these three, doesn’t mean the evidence is in their favor. It means they remain, they abide, regardless of the evidence. Faith is trust and commitment. Hope gives you courage, helps you face another day. Love makes you care, makes you angry, throws you into the struggle. I need all the faith, hope, and love I can get, and I cannot get any of it on my own. Only through the ties of faith and love with others that grace my life do I have any capacity for hope. We are not in control, so it isn’t up to us to make history come out right. In drawing closer to the divine, we are thrown into work that allows others to share in the harvest, which is enough. Love divine calls out from created things the love for which all things are created to be, pouring through all the processes of life across all boundaries, exceeding what we understand. We enter the mystery of the divine by its grace, beginning in faith with that which transcends faith and draws it forth.

This was originally posted at my blog at https://bookwi.se/over-from-union-road/

Summary: The son of a judge investigates his death.

Very often during the summer I get way behind on writing about the books I read. My kids are home, I do stuff with them, I still have to get some work done, we travel, etc. I finished The Emperor of Ocean Park about a month ago but I have just not made time to write about it. I have known of the book for years but I have never made time to read it. This year I have been trying to keep more fiction in my reading diet and trying to read books that I already owned and decided now was the time to actually start reading this one.

I alternated between audio and kindle versions, but mostly read the book. The audio was well done, but it felt like it was just too slow to listen instead of read. This is not a fast book and it is quite long, so I think that also contributed to me mostly reading it.

The rough story is that Talcott Garland, a law professor at a fictional ivy league school, has to investigate his father’s death. His father was a famous judge in conservative circles. He was nominated to the Supreme Court, but had to resign from the nomination as a result of a connection with his friend. That left him embittered and more connected to the conspiracy theory aspects of the conservative world.

Stephen L Carter is a lawyer and law professor at Yale in real life. His grandmother was an influential lawyer in her own right, but this is a book of fiction. That being said, I think part of what makes this book compelling is that it explores racial realities in the upper reaches of society. The characters are Supreme Court justices, and presidents, and influential lawyers and professors and business people. But race does still influence the way the world works.

This is a well-written slow-burn mystery. The people around Talcott need him to figure out what is going on, but it is unclear if it is the good guys, or the bad guys want him to solve the mystery. There are clearly a couple different groups that are vying for information. And there are personal issues as well. Part of what I enjoyed about the book is that while this isn’t a “Christian” novel, it is a novel that takes faith aspects of Black culture seriously.

I did not know until I started writing this post that this was made into a 10 episode TV series. I have not watched that and it is not currently playing on anything that I am subscribed to, but I will look forward to watching it in the future. This is the first book of a trilogy. The trilogy is not about the same characters, but it is set in the same fictional world. I read about 1/3 of the second book, but it didn’t engage me nearly as much as the first book did. I will come back to it later, but because it does not seem to be directly tied to the first book’s characters, I think I can come back to it later without any loss.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-emperor-of-ocean-park/

Summary: "...the truth that God is love lies at the heart of all divine revelation."

I am often reluctant to write about books where I know the authors. It is not because the books are not good, they often are very good. But sometimes it hard to separate the book from the larger lifework of the person that you know outside of just the book.

I didn't meet John Armstrong until about 15 years ago. We had lots of mutual friends because we were both in the Chicago area and were connected to Wheaton College. But it wasn't until I moved to suburban Atlanta that we actually met during an ecumenical meeting here that John hosted and then another conference on friendship in Chicago. We have kept in connect and I try to participate as much as possible in The Initiative, an ecumenical group that grew out of John's earlier work.

I think in many ways The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is a natural outgrowth of John Armstrong's story and his focus on Missional-Ecumenism. Part of what John Armstrong is doing in the The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is narrating his story of how his interaction with both God and other christians moved him from a more closed faith to a more open faith that both recognizes the contributions of other streams of Christianity and recognizes the importance of cooperation and understanding between those steams to become the whole Church.

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is not a memoir, but he does use his story to illustrate his point. I read Byron Borger's review in his column at Hearts and Minds books and I think that Borger gets it right that The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is interested in not just whether God is love is a true statement, but what we do with the reality of God's love in understanding our theology and our view of the transformation of the Christian's life. I also agree with Borger's point that part of the value of Armstrong's book is that it introduces the reader to the breadth of Christian theology. This is quite quote from Borger:

Love is the key, and he uses everyone from the most dense Orthodox thinkers to dear Max Lucado to sophisticated solid writers like Fleming Rutledge to flesh this out, to underscore its centrality to our faith. He draws on so many great writers that this book actually serves as an introduction to some of the finest thinkers in church history — from the ancient fathers to Kallistos Ware to Frederick Buechner to Karl Rahner to Brad Jersak.

(I have picked up three books that were mentioned or cited so far.)

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is going to be best for someone that has some background in theology. Not necessarily degrees, but someone who has done some reading in theology. It is not a hard book as much as it is a book that takes seriously theology, not because he sees Christianity as an intellectual exercise, but because Armstrong is grappling with the ways that we have used theology to avoid the call to love.

I think the discussion of God's love and sacrifice is helpful because it raises the problem of starting with the greek philosophical concept of perfection as being unchangeable and "without passions."

Following the greatest Greek philosophers—Aristotle, the Stoics and even the Epicureans—it was argued that “God was without passions.” Tertullian even said, “The Father is incapable of suffering in company with another.” Centuries later Anselm wrote: “Without doubt the divine nature is impassible.” Thomas Aquinas said God cannot “repent, nor be angry or sorrowful, since all these denote passion and defect.” (Note the consistent proximity of emotion with defect.) Shortly after the Protestant Reformation the idea of divine impassibility was confessed in catechisms and confessions. The Westminster Confession (1647), to cite one example, states: “There is but one living and true God, infinite in being and perfection, a most pure Spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions." (p105)

As he develops this case that this historic framing of perfection as being without emotion or unchanging has impacted the way that we understand God's love, he takes seriously the history of that understanding and the ways that our modern understanding critique the older Greek view of perfection.

On the way to exploring how John Armstrong's understanding of God's love has changed over time he there are sections on thinking about God's love in scripture, in creation, through the problem of evil, through the incarnation, the trinity, and other areas. I think that most discussions of God's love end up either with an abstract theological discussion or they end up with a discussion of mysticism or the mystics, or they end up with some type of discussion of the Church as an expression of of God's love for us.

Because of Armstrong's long history of ecumenism and his other books, I am not surprised by some of the ways he talks about the church or mysticism as modes of connection to God. This is a theological book that is trying to make the case that theology is only useful to the extent that it helps us to relationally connect with God. I am going to end with two brief quotes that reflect the point of the book.

Balthasar constantly argued that Christians often treat God’s love as a truth but only in an abstract sense. (As you’ve seen this is what I did for several decades.) Balthasar reasons that for many of us love is not a truth that we allow to impact our daily lives. This is the very thesis of my book. We must allow God’s love to radically impact our lives every day, all the time. (p185)

and

The unnamed author of the classic The Cloud of Unknowing put this well. God can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. (p247)

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-transforming-fi...

Summary: An exploration of Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court in 1967 as way to both give a biography and context to Marshall’s work and to explore the ways that that hearing was a preview of later Supreme Court nomination fights.

I picked Showdown up because (it was on sale and) I have not previously read anything specifically about either Thurgood Marshall or Brown v Board. I have read many civil rights era histories that mention both, but none that were explicitly about just those subjects. I have been reminded several times recently about how our story of the civil rights movement is framed as Brown v Board, Emmitt Till, Rosa Parks, Birmingham, March on Washington, 1964 Civil Rights Bill, assignation of MLK Jr and the 1968 civil rights bills as if they were all self contained.

Thurgood Marshall graduated from law school in 1933 in just a few years he was working for NAACP and then also joined the board of directors of the ACLU in 1939. It is Brown v Board that he is most well known for, but as Showdown explains, there was a significant number of cases that Marshall and others argued that laid the groundwork for Brown. The work to end white-only primary systems across the country took 20 years and three Supreme Court decisions. Each one widen the crack just a bit more. The ending of the white only primary system and then the various one person, one vote decisions that ended Georgia's county unit system and requiring both regular redistricting and relatively equal size districts as well as the 1965 Voting Rights acts were decades in the making and none of those brought about a perfect democracy, but each slowly changed political realities.

Showdown is quite meandering, but that is part of the point because the context of Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court has wide context. Marshall was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 1961, but that took 8 months from nomination until approval. In 1965 he was nominated and quickly approved as the US Solicitor General. But it was the nearly 4 months to approve Marshall to the Supreme Court that is the main focus of the book.

As Solicitar General Marshall argued to end the poll tax, Miranda, and several cases defending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as other cases. It was more these cases than his earlier civil rights work that he was questioned about in his nomination. Marshall was not directly involved with the Loving case, but the decision was handed down during the nomination process. Marshall himself married a Filipino woman in 1955, Cecilia Suyat Marshall, after the death of his first wife. Being questioned about the constitutionality of interracial marriage, while being in an interracial marriage with his wife sitting right behind him was a detail that really does matter to the context of that nomination process. As much as I read civil rights history and know that we have not moved as far could be hoped, I also know that there have been changes.

This is not an essential book, but it is one that filled in a few areas that I had not previously learned about. Overall, I am not sure that the thesis quite holds up, but I do think that there is at least a point here that the problems with the current nomination process did not start with Bork or Thomas or the cases like Roe v Wade or Bob Jones, but there is a wide influence from many streams.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/showdown/

Summary: An alternate history of the midwest in the 1920s.

This is the third novel of Francis Spufford that I have read. They have all been historical fiction of one sort or another. Golden Hill was set in 1746 New York City and has a plot twist at the very end that really made the book. It was written and tightly plotted, but that main twist and some other minor plots twists moved the book from good to excellent. Light Perpetual is also an alternative history that follows a group of children who were killed by a German rocket in WWII as if they had not died. My only real complaint about the book is that the book could have been written as a straight novel without the alternate history. I bring that up because Cahokia Jazz does not have that problem.

Cahokia Jazz is set in the 1920s. The alternative history is not really explained well, but as I explored other reviews, I discovered that the central change is that a less virulent form of small pox was introduced by early Spanish explorers and that instead of approximately 90% of Native Americans at the time dying from European diseases, a much smaller percentage died. The result is that by the 1920s, instead of a minuscule Native American population, there is really three cultural groupings in this midwestern city that is roughly the same area as St Louis. The book opens with a note telling the reader that there are three racial/ethnic groups in the book and the book uses the local terms to describe them. They are, takouma (Native Americans), takata (European Americans), and taklousa (African Americans). I knew in my head the terms and I knew by the story which group was which in terms of cultural power and significance, but I think his renaming these racial/ethnic terms was a savvy way to disguise some of the plot points.

As with other Spufford books there is a top level story, but there is depth that below that. Cahokia Jazz is a classic noir detective novel. The gritty cop finds a body and has to do the hard things to solve the crime. That gritty cop doesn't like following rules and has his own history that influences the case. Joe Barrow is a gifted jazz pianist, but has become a murder detective. His partner, Phineas Drummond, who he met in "the war" is a classic dirty cop who also has PTSD.

Much of the culture and history is familiar. This is the 1920s, prohibition has led to crime and gangs. Tommy guns still shape that violence. The US exists, but the development of it is different because of the precarious nature of a multilingual and multi cultural country. The racial reality matters here. White supremacy is still assumed, but the cultural history of the Native Americans, who are now mostly Catholic, but still are influence by the cultural history. Barrow was an orphaned mixed racial man. He is part takouma who was never taught a language other than English and doesn't know any of the stories and history of his Native American side, but has connected with the jazz and culture of his taklousa side. His partner, a takata, naturally assumes leadership because of the assumptions of white supremacy.

The city has an uncomfortable equilibrium. It is primarily a takouma city with a traditional leadership structure, but while he would be a type of king, the official authority structures have changed and modern economics are attempting to take over the traditional communal systems. Race, economics, power, traditional all come together to tell a story that is both familiar, but different enough to make sense as an alternate history.

I think this is a book that is less focused on the plot twists and more focused on the front end alternate history to be the twist. As much as I can see the through line of Spufford's writing, his ability to write books that feel completely different from one another is something that I don't see from most other writers. Most other writers stick to a genre and become known for that genre. If anything I think Spufford may be known for not sticking to a genre and writing books that feel completely different from all the other books he has previously written. But all of these books are beautifully written with compelling characters.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/cahokia-jazz/