Adam Shields

Summary: Dalgliesh, recovering from surgery and a misdiagnosis of cancer, Adam heads to the coast to visit a family friend only to find that he had recently died.

I have almost forced myself to pick up fiction this year. I am unsure why, but I have barely read any fiction. I have been slowly working through a collection of the first six books of the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, which I purchased years ago. I don't love the series yet, but the most well-known books of the series are still to come, so I have been continuing to read, hoping that the series will engage me like Inspector Gamache or others.

In this book, Adam Dalgliesh is not on duty as a homicide detective. Instead, he is on sick leave and planning to resign once he has recovered. Dalgliesh was the son of a pastor. When he was a child, he knew a pastor who had retired to be the chaplain at an estate where the owner was trying to create a community that could care for disabled people who did not need the full care of a nursing home but could not live independently.

Adam felt some obligation to go to this retired pastor who reached out to him, but he also wanted to get away for his own reasons. By the time he arrives (pre-cell phone era), his friend has died of apparent natural causes and has been buried. There was another death, by apparent suicide, at about the same time. As the poet and book collector, Adam was left his friend's library. So he stays around to organize it and clean. But he is drawn into a community he is unsure he wants to be a part of. And his skills as a detective, which he is not sure he wants to use, seem to be needed.

This is another in the series that I did not love, but I liked it enough to keep going on. I own one more book in the series on Kindle. After that, I will check out some of the books from my library. My goal is to get to at least the 11th book before I decide whether to finish the series. But there are only 14 books in the series. So I probably will finish eventually.

Summary: Thirty-seven letters of varying lengths from Eugene Peterson to his son Eric about being a pastor.

Eugene Peterson has strongly influenced me, and I definitely have a tendency to idealize Peterson. Peterson's memoir and Winn Collier's biography helped humanize Peterson. Eugene Peterson was not perfect.

Letters to a Young Pastors is equally good at humanizing Peterson in a different way. There is tension here because these were private letters (I assume Eugene approved of being turned into a book before he passed away), and the very nature of private letters has personal details. Regularly throughout this book, there are comments about looking forward to getting together or talking about personal details, similar to how Paul talks about bringing his books and cloak in 2 Timothy 4. The humanization of Peterson in Letters to a Young Pastor is partly the details of personal life discussed here. The reader knows from this book that the Petersons had their grandkids over regularly and that they went to a local church where Eugene liked the pastor but didn't really like his preaching.

But the most important part of humanizing Peterson here is the open struggle expressed in the letters. Some of the struggle is trying to work through ideas that made it into his books, and if you have read a number of his books, it is easy to pick out those details even when they aren't explicit. Even in later years, Peterson was grappling with his vocation and faith, not in the sense of doubting God, but in the sense of trying to figure out how to live his faith in public best. He grappled with the difficulties of aging, and if you listen to the audiobook, the last half of the last letters is read by Peterson himself, and he sounds very old at that point.

I also appreciate how well Eugene encourages Eric by saying that, in many ways, Eugene thought that Eric was a better pastor. Some of that is just the rose-colored glasses of fatherhood. But it isn't all that; there are many specific examples in the letters of where, in his encouragement, he cites why and when differences in their ministry approach come into play. I am not sure that Eugene ever said or even understood, but it seems clear that in many places where Eric may have been a better pastor, it is because he was building on the foundation that Eugene laid. Good examples matter.

The 37 letters are of varying lengths, from just over a page to much longer. They started in 1999 and continued until 2010. Eugene passed away in 2018. His memoir, The Pastor, came out in 2011 and is mentioned in the last couple of letters. He has a book of poetry that came out in 2013. As Kingfishers Catch Fire was a collection of sermons that came out in 2017 and I think he was actively involved in the selection and editing of those. But the at least five books that have come out since then (not including the rerelease of several older books in new editions) were edited by others posthumously.

The introduction by Eric speaks about why he only included Eugene's letters and not his own, and I have to respect his thoughts there, but it is less of a dialogue because we only get one side. There are moments of gold here. One reason there is a temptation to idealize Eugene is that he was wise and saintly. That isn't to say perfect, but it is to say that he did develop character and wisdom throughout his life. It is also worth noting that at least part of what is valuable here is that many others did not show evidence of character or holiness in their later years.

Maybe I am just getting old, but Eric is about ten or so years older than I am. Letters to a Young Pastor was only published a couple of years ago. So, while I get the reference to the many other books that Letters to a Young...is referencing, Eric was in his late 30s and through to his late 40s when these letters were being written. There is value in them, but in some ways, the encouragement and detail are rooted in where he was at that point. These are letters to a pastor who is in the early stages of the middle of his career. There is a discussion of going on a sabbatical and the tendency for pastors to move to a different church when they are ten years or so into pastoring. And that type of advice is oriented toward the middle years of pastoring. The title is a good reference, but it may also be misleading. These are letters to a pastor in the middle of his career from a retired pastor near death. That is not a catchy title, but it would be more accurate.

I picked this up as an audiobook. It was the perfect length of chapters (letters) that I could listen to one or two on a walk with my dog. And that is what I would advise. Take one or two at a time and savor them. There is no perfection here. Some of the letters are far less interesting than others. But that is the way people are; we are not perfect, and our human limitations are the sign that we are just human. Those who never allow weakness to be seen are not showing us who they are.

If you are reading this on Dec 1, 2023, Letters to a Young Pastor is on sale for $2.13, which is a great price.

Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/letters-to-a-young-pastor/

Summary: A brief introduction to philosophy through jokes.

I have repeatedly commented about my lack of a philosophy background in my education. I have been reading books to make up for that for years. In some ways, I alternate between trying to get the main ideas and understanding the actual history. Both have some value but are not the same type of work.

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar is a book that tries to get the reader to the basic ideas of philosophy but does not have much interest in the history of philosophy and how or why different movements arose. The presentation is mostly topical, with chapters on logic, metaphors, existentialism, or ethics. And the format is fairly standard. There are “jokes,” and then the jokes are explained. Some of the jokes are actually funny. And some of them are less funny.

The problem is that while I got something from the philosophical explanations, it wasn't good enough to understand what they were explaining fully. And the jokes are funny enough to read for the humor. If you are doing what I was doing, using it to take another approach at the ideas and using this as a lighter method, then it does what it is supposed to do.

The audiobook is free if you have an Audible membership, and the Kindle edition was on sale last month. I alternated back and forth between the Kindle and the audio version. This short book has 4 hours of audio or about 200 pages of content, but there is some value. I wouldn't pay full price for the audio or the Kindle edition. And I am not disappointed that I read it. But it isn't going to be a highly recommended book either.

originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/plato-and-a-platypus/

Summary: A retelling of a Siberian folktale. 

I have come to The Carver and the Queen because I have begun to follow the work of Owl's Nest Publishers. It is a relatively new small publisher (about 2-3 years old). One of the founders is the author, KB Hoyle, and I am a big fan of her work. I have read her published novel-length works at least once. I have most enjoyed her fantasy Gateway Chronicles books, but I have also enjoyed her dystopian series (Breeder Cycle), the start of a science fiction series (Orion and the Starborn) and fairytale series (Son of the Deep) and her stand-alone book (Queen of Ebenezer). This has also led me to trust her judgment as an editor and publisher. I have started working through the other books that Owl's Nest has published.

The Carver and the Queen is a retelling of a Siberian folktale I did not know. I have enjoyed the modern reimagining of folk tales that I did know, Orson Scott Card's Enchanted, Neil Gaiman's work, and Son of the Deep. But I am unaware of another book that was consciously retelling a folk story I did not know. I have not read Russian literature widely. But I have read some, both modern and older. This retains a Russian feel to my sensibility but does not feel too distant.

The story opens with Petr, a teenage orphaned serf, being beaten for losing some cows he was supposed to be watching. It wasn't just the loss of the cows but the willingness to tell a magical reason for the loss and to keep to the story that led to such a severe beating. A teen girl, Lena, observes the beating, and when the boy and girl's eyes meet, a connection is made, and experienced readers will know that this is, at heart, a romantic fairytale.

Young adult literature is almost always about youth's naive optimism and bad decisions because they naively think that the bad things that happen to others won't happen to them. Young adults are trying to find their way apart from the protection of the adults around them. It is a necessary part of growing up, but as an adult, I grieve the lousy decision-making of youth. I know it is a natural and necessary part of maturing, but still, I can see the pain it will cause and wish there was another way.

Petr is gifted and independent. He teaches himself to play the flute, which is what gets him into trouble in the first place. And then, after the beating, he is eventually placed as an apprentice of a stone carver as a punishment. But that too is something that he is very good at. Tragedy is all around. This is set in 18th or 19th century Siberia, and everyone lives hard lives. Death is common. Systems are corrupt and unfair. And magic has a price.

I enjoy reading young adult fiction, but as my kids get older, I have started to read it more through the eyes of a parent instead of through the eyes of a former teen. That doesn't mean I enjoy it less, but I come at it differently. I have much more sympathy for the adults trying to protect and train the teens, and I wish the teens were more receptive to the well-meaning advice. I appreciate that young adult plotting keeps the story moving quickly, but there is still character development and young love, which are also essential parts of the genre.

One of the weaknesses of this book is that it needs a stronger sense of how communal identity was a self-protective feature of the culture. American individualism is still present in the book, and while all cultures have some individualism, I think the positive sense of communal identity needed a more significant role here.

I read this over three days of Thanksgiving break, and it was precisely the type of relaxing read I was looking for.

Summary: A look at the ways that early Christians were “cultural Christians.” 

One of the ongoing discussions within the guild of historians (which I have observed from the outside since I have no academic training in history) is the role and method of writing history for contemporary use. Some believe that historians have an obligation to educate and draw connections between history and current events. Some historians go beyond that and become activists in their writing and historical work. Some historians believe that a historian's work should only involve history rather than connect that history to modern events or culture. (There is way more nuance and range of positions than this brief sketch can accurately represent.)

Cultural Christians in the Early Church is an unusual book by a historian. First, Nadya Williams is actively trying to draw spiritual connections from her historical work that can be used today. This is not activism, but it is more than what many historians are willing to do. As a non-historian who reads history explicitly because it is an integral part of understanding our current events and because I am a spiritual director interested in Christian formation, this book is right up my alley. Second, Williams is not only a good writer who keeps the reader engaged, she is also funny. Many academic writers attempt to be funny but are limited to bad Dad jokes. Cultural Christians in the Early Church has a lot of subtle but engaged humor.

One of the strengths of the book is that she has a pattern. Williams identifies and gives context about Roman cultural values. Then she gives an example of a Christian leader who understood the problem of the Christian value (for instance, Cyprian encouraging Christians to give to the poor for the sake of the poor and not just for the glory it would show to the giver). Then, she talks about the evidence that many of the Christians of the era did not live up to the Christian ideals that were present at the time and instead followed the Roman cultural ideals, not the Christian ones that they were called to. A reflection follows this up on how that subject area of cultural Christianity in the early church parallels the modern US church. That sounds more formulaic than it is in practice. There is subtlety and variation in presentation, but those components are present in almost every chapter.

The idea of cultural Christianity does shift a bit, and I am not sure I would identify cultural Christianity in the same ways. For instance, identifying that Romans went on tours of religious sites before Christianity and then Christians also went on tours of religious sites as Christians does tell us something about how Christians adapted their cultural values, but it is a different understanding of cultural Christianity than Christians not being willing to give to the poor or not seeing a problem with going to prostitutes. Culture shapes us. We cannot be Christians apart from culture because we can never entirely leave the reality of cultural influence. We can still work to become aware of how culture influences us. And it does not mean we cannot challenge culture (as many of the examples in the book show.) But it does mean that not all cultural adaptations influenced by culture oppose Christianity. (For instance, the styles of music that Christians sing are often culturally derived, and being able to sing in a culturally relevant mode is good.) The reality is that the ways that culture influences Christians are varied. While I think there are differences in how she uses the idea of cultural Christianity throughout the book, she points out essential aspects of how culture influences our practices of Christianity with the lens of the early church, which is very helpful.

The conclusion and its reflection on the “so what” of the previous chapters is helpful. Her status as an immigrant (coming to the US in high school) gives her a helpful status to be a part of the American Christian culture but also have a distance, which helps to see issues of cultural Christianity with different eyes from those that have not had cross-culture experience or spent time studying. I think that areas where I disagree with some of her framing of cultural Christianity are very likely the result of my blindspots around how I, as a Christian, relate to culture.

I am a part of an ongoing book discussion group. The previous book before the one we are working through right now was Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. While these two books' approaches are very different, they have complementary results of challenging the reader to introspectively look at our assumptions about Christianity and culture in ways that we may not have thought to inspect because we have not previously thought about the connections in those ways. This book would make for an excellent small group discussion because it challenges the reader and how different readers will be challenged differently, leading to a fruitful discussion.


Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/cultural-christians-in-the-early-church/

Summary: Well-written intro to theology text.

I picked up Practicing Christian Doctrine because I had an audiobook credit that had to be used before it expired, and I remembered a good podcast interview with Beth Felker Jones and decided to see what else she had written. All of that is to say I was not looking for a theology textbook; I was looking for a book by Jones, and the one I found happened to be an Intro to Theology textbook.

My last seminary theology class was more than 25 years ago. I read Erickson for my undergrad systematic theology class. My seminary systematic theology class was with Dwight Hopkins, and we read Reinhold Neibhur, Delores S. Williams, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and I think James Cone (or I read James Cone on my own at the time, I can't remember), among some others. Hopkins' class was focused on reading theologians not summary textbooks. I wish I could take that class again because I would get a lot more out of it now than I did. I remember at the time learning about a lot of perspectives in theology that I had not been exposed to. But I also remember thinking that I was glad I had had an undergrad course in systematic theology because I needed that grounding to understand what the authors we were reading were responding to.

Practicing Christian Doctrine is exactly the type of systematic theology book I would recommend to someone who does not have a seminary background but is interested. I listened to it as an audiobook, which is probably not ideal for this type of book, but it was ideal for me. There are several things that I really liked about it. First, Jones cited widely throughout history and around the world. She also included a note about when and where the author being cited was from. That is a very small feature, but it really helped to note that background matters in how a person approaches theology.

Another important feature of a book of this type is that there was a wide range of perspectives discussed and the perspectives I felt were presented well. There are theology books that are written from a particular background, and assume that readers will agree with them. But this isn't that type of book; this is an introductory textbook, and it needed to (and did) give a fair presentation to a range of thought. In many cases, undergraduate or seminary students using this book will not be familiar with the range of options on any given topic. They will be familiar with how their church understood a topic and not realize other options exist. That makes a fair presentation of the options even more important.

This may sound contradictory to the previous paragraph, but where there was a more clear perspective was the catholicity of the church. Jones made the case that the church is both diverse and unified in Christ. That is not to say that the church should be uniform, but that regardless of actions, the church is unified in Christ and should act like it. This came up in a number of places, but the chapter on escatology may have been the most clear presentation of the importance of the church's unity.

Practicing Christian Doctrine is written as a textbook, but it is a well-written textbook that has value outside of just the academy. And if you are someone who does have an interest in theology and is looking for an intro, this is a good choice.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/practicing-christian-doctrine/

Summary: A deep dive into Romans 8, making the case that it is centered on vocation and not soteriology.

This will not be a particularly helpful review, but my general tendency these days with NT Wright is to listen to the book to get the argument as a whole and then wait a bit and go back and reread it in print later. I listened to this quickly in the background and did not take any notes.  If you want a broad overview of the book in podcast form, Seminary Dropout and The Holy Post have good interviews. (Holy Post Interview starts at 57 minutes).

The broad summary of this deep dive into a single chapter of Romans is that Romans 8 talks about the vocation of the Christian, not salvation and heaven. That main point is important, and it is a good corrective. But maybe more important than that particular message of the book is how Wright uses this book on Romans 8 to teach how to slowly read and interpret the Bible, especially for those that do not have enough Greek to read the Bible on their own in the original language.

Into the Heart of Romans is a book about interpretation and showing the importance of original language and scholarship in the original languages, not just the “plain reading of scripture.” Wright uses a simple set of questions to examine how each part of the chapter relates to the part before it and how that fits into the argument of the chapter and the book.

I know many people are fans of verse-by-verse preaching. I am not particularly a fan of that style because it often distorts how we view scripture as a whole. There is value in close reading of scripture in study, but not from the pulpit over a long period of time. If you are interested in a close reading of scripture, especially because Romans tend to be such a beloved book by people who like theology, this book is particularly helpful.

Wright has been important in helping the modern church reimagine the importance of Christ's return and how the idea of heaven was distorted over the past couple hundred years. And I think Into The Heart of Romans furthers that by pointing out that the vocation of being a Christian is important, not just “believe the right things and go to heaven.”

One last point that is particularly helpful in Into the Heart of Romans is that throughout the book Wright is talking about how his current understanding of this chapter has changed relatively recently. This is a book about how he changed his mind about interpreting this chapter in response to several of his students' work. Again, there is real importance in this book illustrating the right way to respond to changing our minds in public, which is helpful beyond the actual main argument of the book.

This review was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/into-the-heart-of-romans/

Summary: If we want to address the crisis of loneliness and the lack of community in American society, we need to learn how to listen and know others.

Both of David Brooks' last two books I had decided not to read, and then I changed my mind once I read reviews of them. But both of them had significant weaknesses, and Brooks was not yet ready to write either book. He wrote the books because he was an author and because writing and research are part of how he processes his own issues. He published because he was on deadline, not because he was really finished processing them. Because of this history, I again did not intend to pick up How to Know a Person. But again, I was drawn to them because of two podcasts. Curt Thompson interviewed him on Faith Angle. And then, more personally, he was interviewed by his real-life friend Kate Bowler on her podcast Everything Happens. These are very different podcasts. Curt Thompson is a Psychiatrist who has written about spiritual formation, the soul, shame, and neuroscience. That conversation is more about the technical issues of friendship, what relationships do for us, and why we need them. But it is easy to tell that Kate and David are not just acquaintances but actual friends who really do get together regularly. They talked about calling one another and going over to each other's homes to talk when needed. And that very personal conversation showed the aspect of how David has put into practice what he has been writing about for the past decade. That “putting into practice what he has been learning” which made me want to pick up How to Know a Person.

How to Know a Person has a mix of scientific research about how to listen, seek out friends, and why that is important. But the emotional center of the book is the three chapters telling the story of the suicide of David's oldest friend a few years ago. The main chapter is a revision of an essay he wrote not too long after the suicide. He grappled with that suicide and told the story of his friend's depression and how he tried to help. The two additional chapters are about what he learned afterward about depression and suicide and what advice he would have now for those who are either grappling with depression and suicide or those who have loved ones who are. All of these chapters are well-written, careful, and helpful. There is no silver bullet, but some things may be helpful.

Even if suicide or depression are not a concern for you and those around you, this is a helpful book that will have to be put into practice to be helpful. It is not a “three simple steps to be a better person” book. But a framing of how he understands the world to work, along with some advice about how to approach life so that you have a better chance of being a good friend and having good friends.

How to Know a Person is not a perfect book, but it feels like a book he was fully ready to write, unlike the previous two. As a spiritual director who spends much time in one-on-one conversations about intense and personal things, I found the advice and approach helpful. It is a book that I would recommend to most people, especially if you spend much time in conversation or would like to spend more time in conversation.

This review was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/how-to-know-a-person/

Summary: Spiritual reflections on the life of Howard Thurman.

I have been reading books by or about Howard Thurman for about six years. I started with Jesus and the Disinherited, which I have read twice. I have also read three collections of sermons as well as an audiobook collection of recordings of Thurman, his memoir, and two biographies. I have much more to read because we are in a renaissance of interest in Thurman, like James Baldwin, Thurman is more relevant today than ever. I went to a book launch event with Lerita Coleman Brown hosted by Chanequa Walker-Barnes when What Makes You Come Alive first came out. But other things came up, and I never started the book until about a year later, when I saw that the Ignatius House (a local Catholic retreat center) was hosting a weekly book club discussing What Makes You Come Alive, and I joined.

This was the first in-person book club that I have ever joined. About 20 different people were involved, with about 15 on any given week. Because the book club met on Tuesday mornings at 10:15 AM, I was unsurprised that the group was mostly retirement-age women (one other man). I was the only new member of the group. Most had been meeting together for years, but I was very much welcomed to the group. I coincidentally knew two members because they used to work as teachers for my mother-in-law. Only a handful of people in the group had previously read anything by Howard Thurman. Most who did know of Thurman, were introduced to him by Richard Rohr's writing. Because most were cradle Catholics, I was not surprised that there was not a deep familiarity with the Black Church.

The book opens with an anecdote about the author going to speak at the Wild Goose Festival (a progressive Christian conference) about Howard Thurman. Lerita Coleman Brown is a spiritual director and a retired psychology professor. Her grappling with Thurman as a Black woman, often in predominately white spaces (such as the Wild Goose Festival), matters clearly to the book's thrust. As an all-white book group (most of whom grew up in still legally segregated South), I was somewhat skeptical of the group's ability to discuss the book well. There were times when the background of the group left it a bit ignorant of areas that I would have liked it to discuss. On the other hand, first-hand knowledge of segregation made it more aware of other issues the book brought up.

While you need not be deeply familiar with Thurman to read and profit from What Makes You Come Alive, I was glad I had a good background. There were places where I got more from the references because I had some background on Thurman. After the first week, I sent links to Emory's digital archive of Thurman's lectures and sermons. Thurman is not a traditional “Whooping” preacher of his era. I think the slow cadence and academic tone of much of his preaching matters to understanding who Thurman was as a Black Church leader. (If you are new to Thurman and want to watch a one-hour documentary, this one is free to watch on YouTube.)

Because this book generated a lot of discussion (in a good way) and I had a paper copy (unusual for me), I wrote a ton in this book. Mostly because I noted connections or additional details that might be worth discussing. But there were places that I really disagreed with as well. For example, in chapter eight, about responsibility and the inner authority of holy activism, I largely disagreed with how that chapter was framed and focused. My orientation is such that I want to rely on the Holy Spirit for prompting and direction. In contrast, Brown focused on Thurman's internal motivations and consciousness. Part of my concern is that Thurman was starting from a position of discrimination and oppression. But as a highly educated, middle-class white male, I am not discriminated against or oppressed. I do not trust my internal motivations to direct my activism accurately. Positionally, within culture, I overtly seek to be directed by the Holy Spirit and not through my internal motivations. But I also acknowledge that both Brown's and Thurman's internal consciousness have been developed in different ways than mine has, and so what she frames as learning to trust herself may just be different from my own work, where I distrust my default assumptions.

The chapter on Sacred Synchronicity similarly has truths that I know are real, but because I have a history of people around me misusing coincidence as a divine mandate, I am reluctant to allow for what I know is a way that God does act. She addresses this on page 94, “...just because the concept of divine intervention can be misused doesn't mean we should stop seeing and naming God's work in the world.” The internal arguing of that chapter largely died away with that acknowledgment on the last page of the chapter.

Part of what I appreciate about Thurman is his focus on the need for silence as a preparation to hear from God. We cannot control God, but we can prepare ourselves to hear from God. Thurman's book Meditations of the Heart, which I have been slowly reading for almost a year, is made up of short one to three-page reflections (mostly just a page or so.) These were originally written as meditations for his congregation during or before the service. Thurman often takes normal life events and looks at them differently, which is exactly what Jesus did in the parables. The second part of what I really like about Thurman is his focus on loving all because they are made in the image of God. Those two points and Thurman's significant writing on the study and practice of mysticism are present throughout the book.

I cannot separate my reading of the book from the group that I read the book with, but I did very much enjoy both the book and the group. And I looked forward to it each week. I hope to continue participating in the group next year when it starts again.

Summary: J. Edgar Hoover's understanding of Christianity significantly influenced his management of the FBI, and in turn, the FBI impacted the broader development of what has become the Christian Nationalist movement in a modern sense.

If Kristen Kobez DuMez had not (multiple times) recommended the Gospel of J Edgar Hoover and had not been briefly on sale as a Kindle book, I would not have picked it up. I have a limited interest in the FBI or Hoover. But her strong recommendation of the book's writing made me pick it up. In the opening pages, two stories frame the book nicely. First, the introduction talks about the legal maneuvers required to get the FBI to honor their FIOA requirements and how they initially did not honor their legal requirements and suffered no real consequences for violating FIOA requirements. The second early story in the book that I think matters is how a church stained-glass window was dedicated to Hoover. I read that description as meaning that it was a stained glass window of Hoover, but instead, it was a window dedicated to Hoover. I did not realize my mistake until I read a review of this book on Goodreads. That review linked to an image of the windows, which is helpful for context. (J Edgar Hoover window) I think I was primed to understand the window as images of Hoover because of Southwestern Baptist Seminary's stained glass windows (artist site), which were of many of SBC figures, including the seminary president who originally commissioned the windows and who was forced to resign several years ago.

Lenore Martin's perspective is evident throughout the book. The following is as good of a thesis statement as any:

“As FBI director from 1924 until his death in 1972, Hoover was a political constant, paying lip service to the Constitution, but establishing white Christian nationalism as the actual foundation of his FBI. It mattered little who was in office or which party was in control of Congress. Faith helped him determine the nation's enemies and how they should be attacked and defeated. He saw national security in cosmic terms. Nothing was more existential than national security, the very salvation of the nation's soul.” (p7)

and



“The FBI made it very clear: a secure and safe America was a Christian America, one in which white evangelicals and conservative white Catholics worked together to maintain the levers of cultural and political power.”

“SA [Special Agent] John P. Mohr, the Assistant Director in Charge of the Administrative Division, laughed when a young law school student inquired about the legality of the Bureau's labor. “You're still in law school—which means you're still an idealist,” he told the neophyte. The Bureau's number four man was in charge of the budget and all personnel matters. The man with the power to hire and fire fully expected and instructed special agents to break the law. He told the future special agent to always remember: extralegal and illegal methods were completely appropriate, because “When it's for the right reasons, the end does justify the means.” There was no ambiguity in Hoover's FBI, the message coming from the top was clear: faithful special agents knew the Bureau's righteous ends justified any and all means. These moral ends were determined by the Bureau's Christian nationalism, not the US Constitution. “And if the moral values ran into conflict with the legal principles,” one special agent noted, “the legal principles had to give way.” (p57)

“The FBI's religious commitments influenced the decision to begin a direct investigation of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. For years, J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that atheistic communism, not religious fervor, was fueling the fight for Black equality. “The Negro situation,” he testified before Congress in 1958, is “being exploited fully and continuously by Communists on a national scale.” Hoover viewed this purported communist infiltration not simply as a political debate, but as an attack on America's Christian heritage. It was the duty of the FBI, he told his employees in 1961, to “reaffirm” the Bureau's “Christian purpose ... to defend and perpetuate the dignity of the Nation's Christian endowment.” Christianity was the bedrock of the nation's heritage and the FBI was “the main line of resistance against all enemies of our heritage.” (p229)

Summary: More than 40 years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre gave us his version of why ethics and virtue are a problem in a post-enlightenment world. 

I am on a new quest in my reading. There are two parts to it. First, I am thinking about how to talk about and understand the idea of Christian discernment for individuals and groups in an age that mostly understands discernment as decision-making. Second, I am trying to understand the advocacy of virtue for Christians as a good in this life (not just the next) without turning it into an instrumental project. In other words, it is “easy” to encourage people to do something if they can see the positive result that will come about. Still, suppose they can only see the good because of how it positively impacts them. In that case, it becomes utilitarian or pragmatic, and virtues or moral stands will quickly melt away if the positive benefit is less clear.

This idea keeps coming up for me in the pragmatic advocacy of building relationships across boundaries. A typical example is that if you are a man, having cross-gender friendships will help you become a better man because you will have access to and learn from women who are not romantic partners and see that women can be fully human, not just a sexual object. While I think this is a real thing, and I would agree that this is a byproduct of cross-gender friendships, the instrumentalization of friendship means that the main focus becomes what you can get from the other person for your own sake, which inherently reduces the other to a benefit. Again, people with relationships across boundaries often gain insight into the role that boundary plays in the world, reducing the power of the boundary. However, the pragmatic argument is a problem because the expectation is for the good of the individual. When a relationship becomes more complex, as often happens at some point, the utilitarian will drop the relationship as not having independent value apart from what it can do to improve them as a person.

Christianity, in general, and virtue, in particular, are often presented similarly. If we are primarily drawn to Christianity because of what it can do to make us better people, it becomes a type of self-help project, not about the relationship with Jesus or the submission of our lives to Christ as Lord. People are drawn to faith for many reasons, but I worry about the ways that pragmatism and utilitarian presentations of faith will draw people for the wrong reasons that end up inoculating people against faith.

That lengthy introduction is partly why I picked up (the free audiobook) of this classic text on moral philosophy. I am not a philosopher. I do not have any skill or background to evaluate this more than 40-year-old book. I do think that the Wikipedia entry has a good summary. What I found helpful in a book that I did not fully understand (because quite a bit of it was referencing philosophers from history whom I did not know anything about) was the reframing of how others, over time, have thought about the grounding of virtue. I know that we cannot ever fully return to earlier ages and adopt a pre-enlightenment understanding of virtue. But giving language to how others across time and space have understood virtue gives clarity to how my current understanding of virtue has not been sufficiently explored. One of the lines in Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes was that an idea “went without being said” because it was such a central part of the culture that no one needed it to be named. When we read across time, space, and culture, we can insert our ideas into other concepts because what went without being said is different. But good guides, like MacIntyre, who can point out those points when we need to name what was not being explicitly said, we can gain insights into the areas within our own culture that need to be named for the purpose of explicit exploration.

I don't recommend that everyone go pick up After Virtue. But it was, for me, a free book to listen to. As an audiobook, I could dismiss areas that were over my head while getting some of the central ideas that were helpful background into thinking about the role of virtue in our current time and culture.

Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/after-virtue/

Summary: A modern classic about spiritual direction.

It would not be surprising to anyone who regularly reads my book reviews that I generally have a book in three broad areas going at almost all times: Spiritual direction/spiritual formation, history, and biography/memoir. I try not to have more than one of each category going at a time, but those three categories are about shaping the way I am in the world. I want to pay attention to my spiritual formation. I want to equip myself as a spiritual director. I want to understand how the world was shaped to be as it is now so I can think more clearly about the way forward. And I want to see how others have lived as a means to see how I can live well.

Holy Listening is a book I have had on my shelf for a while, but I have not read it. It is a modern classic on spiritual direction. First published in the early 1990s, when spiritual direction was starting to have a broader resurgence, Guenther wrote particularly as a female pastor and spiritual director in a way that was probably more radical than it feels now. There are many metaphors for spiritual direction that authors have used over time, but Guenther embraces the metaphor of spiritual directors as midwives. That is a particularly feminine metaphor. I think both men and women spiritual directors need various metaphors because any one metaphor breaks down when pressed too far. Guenther is aware that she is oriented toward a feminine metaphor and does defend it a bit, but essentially allows it to stand on its own.

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote a well-known essay in 1990 about exposing children to diverse books because books can be “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.” (The link is to a 2-minute video of Bishop describing her language.) Students can see themselves (mirror), they can see how others live in ways that they do not (windows), and they can immerse themselves in the experience of others (sliding glass doors). An important part of the essay is that Bishop argues that diverse books are important to white students who (even 30 years after the essay) mostly see themselves (mirrors) in the books that surround them. And that can create a distorting effect on those students, impacting the way that they see the world as normative for them.

The book ends with a more explicit discussion about women as spiritual directors and the need for the church to embrace women as spiritual directors and directees in part because women have been marginalized in church leadership, even as they often are the backbone of the church. I do not know if there are statistics about women and spiritual direction, but my anecdotal experience is that women are both more likely to seek spiritual formation experiences, they buy and read more books, they are more likely to attend church, they are more likely to serve, they are more likely to make up the larger percentage of spiritual direction programs. But most books are written by men with the assumption that men are the primary readers.

It is reasonably well known that men tend not to read women. Kaitlyn Schess, in her latest Getting Schooled video, speaks about the publishing reality that women authors tend to sell more books if they are marketed just to women. Women tend to read more, but when men read, they overwhelmingly read male authors (90% by one study). Women authors have overwhelmingly female audiences (about 80%). However, male authors still have a roughly even gender divide among their readers. Publishing has some responsibility here, but it seems that while women often read men, men do not read women at the same rates, even if both genders tend to read books by their same gender at higher rates.

This has mostly not been about the book itself. Still, as I read the book, I kept thinking about how the book seems to be consciously trying to speak to the reader to encourage both men and women to think differently about spiritual direction to expand what spiritual direction can be. The focus is to encourage people's spiritual lives. If we alienate women from spiritual formation or bias their understanding of spiritual formation in only gendered ways, we end up harming both men and women.

I have said it before, but we need to talk much more about becoming mature Christians and much less about becoming mature men or women. The point should be about maturity, and when we gender maturity, we harm not only the ideas of what maturity is but those that do not conform to stereotypical norms. I believe that part of why we currently embrace misogynistic Christian ideas among a too large group of Christians is because there has been a mistaken understanding of the pragmatic means of reaching men. (This is a gender impact of the Homogeneous Unit Principle.) Instead of addressing the problems of men only listening to men, many have doubled down and made it a theological requirement to become a toxic male to be a mature Christian man. And that, I think, is part of why women are leaving the church at more significant rates than men.

This review was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/holy-listening/

Summary: A biography of Nouwen by a late-in-life friend (and journalist), which helps to give context to Nouwen's prolific writing. 

Like many, I have been impacted by Nouwen's writing, but especially after reading several posthumously published books, I realized I needed more biographical context to understand what Nouwen was about.

It is incredible that more than 25 years after his death, new books are still being edited from his vast writing. (The most recent of which is Flying, Falling, Catching.) I am mixed on these posthumous books. I don't think any of the ones I have read stand up to the best of his books published while he was alive. But they are also better than the worst of his books as well. Nouwen wrote an enormous volume of books. According to Wikipedia, he published 42 books while alive, not including 35 additional books to which he contributed an introduction, afterward, or chapter. And there have been 31 additional books of posthumous work or compilations.

Part of what Ford makes clear is that while Nouwen strived to live up to his writing, there was a disconnect.

“It is also difficult to explain the author without acknowledging a certain disconnection between his writing and his living, not because of any scandalous gap between the two, but because he always managed to write way beyond what he himself could actually live. This was especially true in terms of what he said about solitude and community. Nouwen's spirit, mind, and body all ran ahead of him; his books were often reminders to himself of how he ought to be.” (Kindle location 180)

“To be a teacher means indeed to lay down your life for your friends, to become a ‘martyr' in the original sense of witness. To be a teacher means to offer your own faith experience, your loneliness and intimacy, your doubts and hopes, your failures and successes to your students as a context in which they can struggle with their own quest for meaning. To be a teacher means to have the same boldness as Paul, who said to the Corinthians: ‘Take me as a model as I take Christ' (1 Corinthians 11:1). To be a teacher means to say as those who want to learn what Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Come and see' (John 1:39).” (Kindle location 1898)

Summary: A memoir grappling with the role of Esau McCaulley's father, his growing up and maturity, and how his community of origin shaped him. 

I do not remember what first drew my attention to Esau McCauley, but it was a bit before he became a professor of New Testament at Wheaton (my alma mater). From that point, I have read Reading While Black, his children's book, and many articles he has written for the NYT and other places. (His book on Lent is on my to-read list.) Generally, if I notice an article that he has written, I make time to read it. If I see an interview or talk with him, I listen to it. I listened to all of the two seasons of his podcast. I have also done a Zoom class through Nashotah House that he taught. I do not “know” Esau McCaulley; he certainly does not know me, but I have a good sense of his writing style and general approach. The reality of the internet, social media, and writing is that one can feel closer to someone's story than they are. John Dyer has called this ambient intimacy. It isn't a real relationship or intimacy, but it feels real.

Good memoirs can create that sense of intimacy, but there is so much to the story that is never revealed in 200 or so pages. What makes a good memoir is editing what to share and what not to share. After I finished How Far To the Promise Land, I listened to McCaulley's interview on the Seminary Dropout Podcast. That interview did an excellent job of framing the memoir and what he was trying to do without retelling the whole story. I will commend Esau's writing and audiobook narration but avoid retelling many of the book's details.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece in Christ and Pop Culture Magazine about the problems of white readers reading black stories, and I always want to be careful with how I read and process black stories. The book was not written primarily for me, but that does not mean I cannot find appropriate value in reading it. One of the issues that McCaulley names in his interview with Shane Blackshear is that readers want to see material success as the happy ending (21-minute mark). McCauley grew up in poverty, the child of a disabled Black single mother. Today, he is a New Testament professor with a Ph.D. and has achieved much of that material success.

One of the book's themes is that racism is real, which has created structural hindrances to full flourishing, but that people are also capable of good and bad choices within those strictures. And that chance, or providence, plays an unknown role as well. It is never just one thing: the Heracio Alger hero story, the structural forces, or the chance occurrence. We all have all three and complicated histories that we may not understand ourselves. We all came from somewhere. And that location and people have influenced our lives in many ways that we will never fully understand, even if we attempt to investigate them. (And many of us will never investigate them.)

Early in the book, we know that Esau McCaulley's father died, and he would give his father's eulogy. He had to learn more about the man who played such an influential and mixed role in his life. A man that he did not really know. Again, from the podcast, McCaulley says that he was trying to point not just to himself as the main character of the memoir but to those around him. “These lives that you do not value, God was at work there.” God worked in his father's life, even if the result was not the perfect ending we might want. And the other family and friends that also grew up in Huntsville, AL, around McCaulley had value, whether society values them or not.

I am a couple of years older than McCauley. I can see how he tells a story that could be many people's. Life has not changed as much as many want to think that it has. In the podcast and the book, he references asking his grandfather what Brown v. Board meant to him. His grandfather said they didn't know about it. They didn't have a TV; nothing really changed in the short term. Esau's mother went to an integrated school, but it was a hostile integration. My mother was a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges, but the Louisville school district that she went to in early elementary while her father was in seminary did not integrate until the school year when I was born. Wheaton, where McCaulley now teaches, released a report on the history of race at the school yesterday, and the first black professor was not hired until the 1980s, just a few years before I started there. My memory says that there were six minority faculty in the early 1990s when I was there. This history of overt racism was recent.

I want to carefully hold the stories told in How Far to the Promised Land. McCaulley mentions that part of the impetus for writing this book was being asked at a panel discussion about the “most racist thing that has ever happened to you.” And I am wary of recounting black trauma as fodder for white education. How Far to the Promised Land is a story of joy, faith, and pain. It is a gift not just because it is well written but because it is framed as the type of story that attempts to present a fuller picture than simple stereotypes want to allow to be painted.

As I read it, I feel obligated to hear the story well so that it isn't just a story but an impetus toward the eschatological end where everything is made whole.

This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/how-far-to-the-promised-land/

Summary: Changing how we think of the starting date of US history can help us see different patterns. 

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy is the third book by Robert P. Jones that I have read (The End of White Christian America and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in Christian America.) More so than the other two books, this is narrative-focused and less demographically focused. Jones is known for his work in polling and demography, and that number-heavy writing style is essential for making the case for current shifts in culture. But The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy is primarily a book of history, not demographics, and the writing style is more narrative.

The book opens with a discussion of the 1619 Project and how Nicole Hannah Jones has shifted the conversation to include a greater focus on slavery in developing the US as a country. Jones is not debating the 1619 Project as much as suggesting that an earlier date also needs to be included as part of the discussion. That date is 1493 when Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull, “Inter Caetera.” This papal bull and several earlier bulls are jointly known as the Doctrines of Discovery and are still important precedents to international law.

The Doctrine of Discovery is not just a theological and legal justification for European Christians to take possession of land (already occupied and controlled by others) but also justified the enslavement of those viewed as “pagans.” The book's central thesis is that the Doctrine of Discovery undergirds much of American history because it was responsible for the European understanding of colocalization, land possession, and the enslavement of Native American indigenous people and Africans. Jones rightly notes early on in the book that the Louisiana Purchase is usually framed as one of the best real estate deals in history. Jones reframes the purchase not as a real estate deal but as the selling of the right to take possession (a subtle but vital distinction) directly rooted in the doctrine of discovery. The US, which was derived from Protestant England and officially a secular country, still recognized the legal authority of the Catholic Pope as an international lawgiver when it suited them.

After the introduction of the concept and the history, Jones moves on to three case studies of how traditional stories of anti-Black racism (Emmit Till, a lynching in Duluth, MN, and the 1921 Tulsa Riots) can be understood more fully by understanding the prior role of white supremacy (in the sense of racial hierarchy) concerning Native American land theft and violence that contributed to later anti-Black racism. With each case study, the narrative of the history leads into a more recent history of how various people came together to bring the repressed history of racial violence into the light and deal with the long-term implications of that history.

I was aware of the Doctrine of Discovery and all three incidents because of prior reading. Mark Charles and Soon Chan-Rah's Unsetting Truths is also about the Doctrine of Discovery. And in the comment section of the interview with Jones on the Holy Post podcast, many people recommended that book. Jones cites Unsettling Truths in the bibliography and notes and includes a note that I think is unnecessarily antagonistic:

“For reflections on the Doctrine of Discovery from a somewhat narrow and at times defensive evangelical Christian perspective, see the recent work of Mark Charles (Dine) and Soong-Chan Rah. While they denounce the Doctrine of Discovery, their commitment to defending a version of evangelical Christianity leads them to turn the term “colonization” into a metaphor as well as some tortured conclusions, such as the claim that legal abortion is “furthering colonialism.” Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumamzing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2019), 94.”

Summary: The bible has been widely misused. It takes intention to use it well, but it is worth the effort.

I do not know when I became aware of Kaitlyn Schiess. I am pretty sure it was during her time at Liberty University. I believe I came into contact with her via social media through Karen Swallow Prior and probably the Christ and Pop Culture Facebook group. I do not want to exaggerate our contact. I seriously doubt she knows who I am. However, I started to pay attention to her writing before her first book. I will embrace the creepy factor and say that I have watched her grow as a thinker and communicator over the past seven or so years with great expectations. She has continued to develop and illustrate wisdom and conscientious scholarship that takes her Christian faith seriously.

So I looked forward to The Ballot and the Bible and held off a little while on reading it because I wanted to get the audiobook that she narrated. But there were some delays, and when it became clear that the audiobook wasn't coming out soon, I picked up the Kindle and read it quickly. Like my thoughts on her first book, there is more going on than you might assume in a relatively short book. The Ballot and the Bible is about how to read and understand scripture (commonly called hermeneutics), how to listen to history and culture to see if you are imputing cultural values on the biblical message (cultural anthropology), a brief historical overview of ways that the Bible has been misused (through case studies) and a book on the role of discipleship and public life. If you read my reviews regularly, you may be aware that I have recently read several other books on the Bible, Christianity and culture, and politics, and those impact how I read The Ballot and the Bible.

Most directly, The Ballot and the Bible is worth reading paired with Mark Noll's America's Book, a history of the public use of the Bible from 1794 to 1911. I think Noll's book was published too recently to be included in The Ballot and the Bible, although several of Noll's other books are cited. The two books are very different in scope and purpose. Noll's book is an over 800-page history, while Schiess' book is an under 200-page book that is primarily theological. But the combination of them is useful. Noll gives more examples of the use and misuse of the Bible than Schiess could give in a book of her size. But her book also theologically evaluates the history of the use of the Bible in ways that Noll does not do as a historian.

The center point of what Schiess is trying to do is to get the reader to step back and evaluate politics not as a consumer of imagery but as a Christian thinker. The Bible is often used directly or indirectly as a prop to signal that “the Bible is on my side” of a particular issue. Most examples are not as blatant as Trump simply holding up a bible outside of St John's Episcopal Church without opening it, reading from it, or giving any purpose to its presence except as a prop. Many other examples throughout the book are more likely to be honest but unexplored use of the Bible to support the user's prior positions.

When Trump was asked if that was his bible that he was holding, he said, “It's a bible.”

“This book is motivated by the conviction that, for Christians, the answer to the question “Is that your Bible?” is an emphatic yes. The Bible is not a free-floating book of ageless wisdom, an interesting historical document, or a weapon that can be put in the service of any political goal. The Bible is a gift from God to the church, given for a particular purpose: to shape that community into the kind of people who can fulfill their commission to make disciples of all nations and steward God's good creation, anticipating its final redemption. As such, the Bible should be read as the book of the church, in the church. Our reading of Scripture should be informed both by the global historic church (receiving the theology handed down to us, learning from Christians throughout history and around the world) and by the church in a particular time and place.” (p4)

Summary: Mary matters, but the response to her is widely varied.

After finishing Jesus Wars, I wanted to pick up The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction because I was surprised at how large of a role Mary played in trinitarian debates of the early centuries of Christianity (the idea of Mary, not the actual person of Mary). I have always been Protestant, and while I have some understanding of Catholic theology, I often miss the nuances behind the differences. And I have even less understanding of Orthodox theology. This book, in combination with Jesus Wars (and my current reading of Medieval Christianity) have helped to understand some of the nuance I previously missed.

A significant part of the early trinitarian debates were those that wanted to emphasize Jesus' divinity, opposing those that wanted to emphasize his humanity. Almost everyone understood that Jesus was, in some sense, both human and divine. But the problem comes in figuring out how to talk about that. And when you add the culture of the era that was biased against women (some believed that women were malformed men) and that sexuality was inherently sinful (so how could God come from a sinful act, the Immaculate Conception is about Mary, not Jesus; to make Mary able to bear Jesus as a mother she needed to be conceived apart from sin) and that some of the philosophical conventions of the time also impacted these things could be talked about.

This book at least touches on these matters and how Mary's role changed over time with both Western and Eastern early Christianity and later post-reformation changes and her influence in Islam. There is also a necessary chapter on whether Mary is a goddess figure. My summary of that is that theologically, she is not a goddess; although there have been fringe movements that did want to move her into a more salvific or divine role, those have remained fringe. But throughout history, there were practices that kept placing her in a more divine role than what ecclesiological leaders would accept. This tension is, in part what has kept Mary prominent, but also kept Mary isolated out of the Protestant world.

Mary Joan Winn Leith is not Catholic, nor is she the first Protestant that makes the case that Protestants should have a higher view of Mary. Matthew Milliner's Mother of the Lamb more explicitly makes this case (according to interviews I have heard about it, it is still on my to-read list.) But there have been abuses of thinking and practice around Mary, and like in many other things, Mary has suffered an overcorrection. Amy Peeler, in Women and the Gender of God, speaks about the importance to our theology and anthropology in recovering a better understanding of Mary.

It is always hard in short books on big topics to cover it all. But The Virgin Mary touched on a wide range of topics, from theology and implications to trinitarian thought, to the role of Mary in art and church development and missionary work, and more. The Marian practices of the rosary make sense in light of congregational worship of the Middle Ages being largely clergy-focused and in a language that most did not even understand. And Mary, partly because of the Magnificant, is understood as being interested in the poor and dispossessed.

I was not completely new to the topic, but this was still helpful.

This is my full review, but it was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/virgin-mary/

Summary: A history of the early Christian political and theological history.

I am not sure that the book's subtitle, “How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years,” helped my perception of the book. I have read two previous books by Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. I am mixed, even as I am glad I read them. I bought Jesus Wars on Kindle years ago but never read it. I noticed it was free as part of my Audible membership, but it was leaving the free section soon, so I picked it up. 

Jesus Wars is part of my reading in response to Christian Nationalism, especially Noll's America's Book and Whitehead's American Idolatry. A point that many pro-Christian Nationalists attempt to make is that their expression of Christianity is more consistent with historic Christianity than those that oppose Christian Nationalism. If their point is narrow, that there have been some aspects of Christianity that are similar to their understanding of Christian Nationalism, then I think that is accurate. But not all expressions of Christianity should be emulated.

Philip Jenkins is a historian of Christianity who tends to look at significant trends and demographics. I appreciate how he draws attention to both geographies and times to parts of Christian history that are less well-known or ignored. In all three books I have read, he draws attention away from traditional Western (European and North American) Christianity and toward Christianity of Africa and Asia. He is not anti-orthodox (in the theological sense), but he believes that some of the lines drawn in the past were more about politics, language, and culture than theology. Jenkins wants to introduce the reader to what is often called Miasophite or Nestorian Christianity. The introduction discusses why those descriptions are inaccurate but still commonly used. He concludes that there were fundamental differences in approach with these early theological battles but that the disagreements were not only about theology but also language, culture, and politics. I think Jesus Wars and Christianity The First 3000 Years are examples of trying to do Christian history by primarily looking at the political and social history as a contributing factor to the theological history. This is important to Christian history because, so many times, Christian history is presented as solely spiritual. Christian history is messy, as Jesus Wars presents.

Jesus Wars is mainly a political and social history of about 400 to 800, focusing primarily on the later councils. If you have heard of the violence of European Christianity around the Reformation, the violence and persecution during this earlier era were just as bad. The Roman Empire was slowly breaking up, and the politics of that breakup influenced political involvement in theological and ecclesiological issues. There was a different understanding of the idea of covenant and God's role in the world. Gods were geographical, and as nation/states developed, the understanding of the gods' role was as a sponsor or patron of those entities. This is not how we generally conceive of the role of God today, but that change in understanding is relatively recent. Christendom understood the ecclesiology and politics as connected. Bad decisions politically had theological implications. If the state was allowed by God to wield the sword, then the church often was as well. And it wasn't just that there was the option, but an obligation to wield.

(As a side note, there has been a discussion on spanking within Christianity on Twitter recently. Many pro-spanking voices are not simply saying there is an option to spank as a type of parental discipline allowed within Christianity but that there is an obligation to spank. These voices seem to suggest that spanking is not one of several options that should be allowed but, in some way, a biblical mandate. I can't help but think that this is part of the discussion of Christian nationalism because of the exertion of power and authority that is associated with Christian nationalism. And as I said above, there is historical precedent for the wielding of power in this way. But there is also historical precedent for many other things like slavery and patriarchy, and the presentation of these as obligations is where the fundamental disagreement rests.)

Jenkins' presentation often revolves around the concept of Jesus and what his body was made of, how divinity and humanity related, and what the role of Mary in the making of that body was the surface-level fight. But underneath the surface, philosophy, previous cultural understanding of the role of the gods, and metaphysics in general were part of why the fight over Jesus was occurring. There is an ongoing “joke” that it is virtually impossible to talk about the Trinity without entering into some type of heresy. Jenkins wants the reader to understand that the characters fighting were often much closer in position than we tend to believe. Part of the problem in our current understanding is that we do not always know the positive views of different sides because we lack documentation. We only have the stereotype of losing views because positive views were repressed and often destroyed.

This led me to pick up The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction because I had not considered some of the aspects of the role of Mary in a number of these discussions. And then, I am starting Mideieval Christianity to explore further ideas that Jenkins brought up.

This post was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/jesus-wars-by-philip-jenkins/

Summary: Anne, an orphan, is adopted and becomes a beloved family member. But there are SOOOOO many long descriptive passages that make it a less-than-great read-aloud.

I am not great about reading to my kids, but we do tend always to have a book that we are slowly working through. And this one was very slow. I picked it primarily because I knew there were several TV and film adaptations, and that has previously been a motivator to keep reading.

I read at least this first book of the series as a teen, but I really did not remember it beyond the broad outline of the story. I think I probably remember more from the TV adaptations than the book. I wanted to read an old book in part because I knew the vocabulary would be more of a challenge, and I wanted to introduce my kids to vocabulary they would not get with more recent books. And I got the vocabulary. The annotated edition is helpful both because I was reading on Kindle, which has a built-in dictionary, but also because the annotations helped beyond the dictionary.

If it were just unfamiliar words, that would have been fine. But what I did not remember was the pages of descriptions and the super long run-on sentences within those pages of descriptions. There were many examples of sentences that were several lines long. And paragraphs that were more than a page long. This is something that when I am reading myself, I do not notice, but when reading out loud, it is very noticeable.

I think my kids may have been a hair on the young side (8 and 9), but they did not want to give up on the story even when I was tired of it. We have not started the Netflix series yet because we are almost done with the current series we watch as a family. But that will be the next thing we pick up. I do not think we read any more books in the series, but I may read them myself; I am pretty sure I did not read them previously.

My plan is to pick up A Wrinkle in Time for our next read-aloud.

Summary: A brief biography of Charles Johnson, a pastor in Meridian, Mississippi, and one of the witnesses in the Mississippi Burning Trial. 

I picked this up because it was free in the Audible Plus catalog. I am satisfied with the time I spent on the book because I was not aware of the story of Charles Johnson previously. But once I was about an hour into the book, I looked around for reviews to decide if I wanted to finish the book. This review discussed how this biography was framed as an old-fashioned missionary biography, giving me the language to accept the style. (I encourage you to read that link if you haven't.)

The book opens with Charles Johnson as a young child. A white salesman worked in his Black community of Orlando. In his spare time, that salesman encouraged youth, occasionally hired them, and eventually opened a community center. Through his work, Charles Johnson became a Christian. When Johnson felt the call to ministry, that salesman helped him attend a Nazarene seminary in West Virginia. As the review notes, the Nazarenes were segregated, including their seminaries. So the only seminary Johnson could have gone to within the Nazarene movement was the one in West Virginia. Bush notes denominational racism several times in the book. Still, the book's framing, even as it attempts to show how Johnson moved beyond the holiness pietism of the Nazarenes more generally, has that pietism in the background. He shows that Johnson kept to Nazarene pietism through the emphasis on evangelism toward the end of his life and in his rejection of acceptance of the invitation to the Carter inaugural ball because it served alcohol.

I have read many missionary biographies, and many of the genre's tropes are here. They tend to be short; this was less than four hours in audiobook. They emphasize supernatural calling and intervention. They focus on the action, not the interior life or mundane everyday work. And they always talk about what was given up to serve God, including losing family or spouse. And the story of one of the KKK members who was convicted for the killings became Christian in jail and personally came to ask for forgiveness from Charles Johnson after leaving jail fits the genre's tropes as well. I think of these types of books as hagiography. I can see how Chet Bush is attempting to subvert some of the genre by making Johnson the subject (he is Black in a predominately white denomination, and the story's location is the US, not the international mission field).

The problem with the genre is that it makes the Christian life into a hero story. This is a distortion of what it means to be a Christian. There is the additional problem of the limited view of the gospel, even though there was an attempt to subvert that in this book by emphasizing the work of addressing racism and poverty and the refrain of Charles Johnson about the gospel being for the “whole person.” But that refrain is not enough to counter the individualism and pietism that runs throughout the book.

Again, I do not think this is a bad book, and the review I linked above talks about how this was written when Chet Bush was a pastor in Mississippi and how he later went back to get his Ph.D. in history. I would pick up newly written books, even if Called to the Fire has weaknesses. I have not previously read anything written mainly about the Mississippi Burning case, so I wonder whether this book adds to other books about that story by emphasizing Charles Johnson. I categorize this as a book I am glad I have read, but I am hesitant to recommend it if you read it for biography or civil rights history. Many other books are better, especially if you are not well-read in either area.

Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/called-to-the-fire/

Summary: Theological discussion about God and gender.

Women and the Gender of God has been on my to-read list since it came out. I have watched or listened to several interviews with the author, including this one at Holy Post and the 40-minute bonus episode. I eventually picked up the audiobook. The author narrates it well, as I prefer. But this is a book that needs a second reading, at least for me. I am not completely new to the topic, but neither trinitarian theology nor gender theory are areas where I have expertise. I have enough background to understand but not enough background to evaluate.

I remember as a teen going to a national youth conference (summer of 1989 or 90), and on one of the conference days, God was primarily referred to with feminine pronouns. I was not disturbed by it because I was aware that God was not gendered in a human sense, but I do remember thinking that it was poorly handled because there was no explanation or teaching around it; they just did it. And I spent a while talking through it with some of the people I was with because they were disturbed by it. That was probably the point, but disturbing teens without discussion is not how to address a history of patriarchal teaching.

Good theology should be nuanced, and Women and the Gender of God is appropriately nuanced. That nuance means I probably should have read this in print, not listened to the audiobook. The advantage of audio is that you can get a broad overview quickly, but it is hard to flip back and reread sections to ensure you understand the nuance.

I do not think that the main point that God is not gendered in the sense that humans are gendered should be controversial, but it is in some circles. Peeler's style is to take objectives, explain them, and then address the concerns. Several reviews have taken passages wildly out of context and attributed those beliefs to Peeler. I honestly do not think that one review in particular (that I will not link to and which was written by a pastor who was at the time working at the same church) could in any way have been intended as anything other than a hit piece. Some traditionalists continue to refer to God in masculine terms (which is where Peeler ends up) but in a way that does attribute some sense of male priority to human males because of gendered language for God. Some want to suggest that the only reason for male references to God is patriarchal history. And the references to God are also part of discussions around transgender theory.

What I most love about reading theology is the questions that are raised. Good theologians push boundaries, even if they end up with traditional conclusions. Gender and the references to God are something I have thought about before. I do not end up exactly where Peeler does, although we are probably close. Peeler has a lot of grace for people who reference God in non-male terms because of a history of abuse or oppression. Still, she returns to holding the traditional language because that is the received language. Part of why I want to reread this is because I am not entirely convinced at that point.

I wish the Kindle and print editions were a bit cheaper because I primarily picked the audiobook because of the lower price. But I will pick it up in print eventually and read it again.

Summary: Many people know about Francois Clemmons because of his relationship with Mister Rogers, but this is Francois Clemmons' story.

I picked up a hardcover of Officer Clemmons when it came out several years ago, but I just never got around to reading it. I was looking for a change of pace and picked up the audiobook a couple of days ago, and the audiobook is the right choice for this book. I am highly in favor of authors reading their nonfiction books in most cases. And this is an excellent example of why. Francois Clemmons knows his own story, and he can narrate it with the right emotion and inflection. He occasionally (not as much as I would prefer) sings when discussing one of the songs in the book. The story comes alive in a way that I do not think would have happened for me in print.

I have read many books by or about Mister Rogers, as did Clemmons. He says in the opening that when he decided to tell his own story of Mister Rogers, he read every book he could find and determined that his contribution could be telling the story as a Black Gay man because none of the other books had that perspective. Officer Clemmons is primarily a book about Francois Clemmons, not Mister Rogers—several reviews I have seen complained about that point. Francois and Fred Rogers met when Francois was in graduate school in Pittsburg and had a job as a singer at the Rogers' church. It was Fred Rogers wife Joanne that Francois came to know first. And she and the music director at the church made sure that he met Fred. But that part of the story does not come until more than halfway through the book.

I am glad that there are many memoirs of people that were of the age to be in the civil rights era. People of that era are passing away quickly, and we must pay attention to their stories. Francois was born to a sharecropper family. The early violence, both racial and domestic violence, matters to his story. Early in the book, he tells the story of how the local landowners pressured his grandmother for sex for years. She complied because the threat of violence and repercussion were real. She was protecting her family and doing what the culture expected. At one point, her husband said she was not there when the landowner came to get her, and the landowners just shot him in cold blood. There was no legal intervention. No police came, and no inquiry was made. And this was not counted in any of the counts of lynching. At this point, Francois' grandmother had never lived anywhere other than that home, a home that had not been painted in her memory. There is more to the story that is also tragic and important, but the proximate cause of Clemmons' family to move from the south to Youngstown, OH, was ongoing domestic violence from his father. His grandmother tried to protect Francois' mother and siblings from the violence, including shooting and wounding his father when his father attempted to force them to move back home.

In many ways, Youngstown was better, but it was not perfect. Racism was still prevalent even though the schools had been desegregated. And domestic violence was still a factor in his life. Eventually, after his stepfather beat him quite severely for going to a concert, he moved out into a friend's home, a local pastor's family. His parents attempted to go to the school to force Francois to move back home about a month after that last beating, but Francois resisted. In front of the principal and his parents and the pastor, and his wife, that was allowing him to stay with him, he took off his shirt to show the scars and bruises of the beatings. The (white) principal negotiated for Francois to continue to live with the pastor and his wife and for his parents not to interfere with the threat of reporting the violence to the police.

There are too many stories to tell here about racism, poverty, and grappling with his sexuality. But I want to talk about the discussion of sexuality in the book. The book opens with the ongoing sexual assault of his grandmother. That story matters, even though it is a harrowing story to hear. And throughout the book, Clemmons' sexuality matters. It was not just that he was a black man coming of age in the 1960s; he was a black gay man coming of age in the 1960s. Discussion of his grappling with the desire for men and not women, and how his conservative Christian church influenced that understanding of sexuality matters. He discusses his sexual awakening, love for other men, and the need to hide that from the public. And he discusses how Fred Rogers told him he could not be openly gay if he were going to remain on the show. Sex is not discussed to titillate, but culturally some find the discussion that gay sex occurred to be inappropriate. And if that is you, you do not want to pick this book up.

It is also worth noting that while Clemmons accepts Christianity as a whole, he did move toward the Unitarian/Universalist community as an adult. I would have liked more about that, but all the reader gets is the acknowledgments where he thanks his church community. The Christianity of his childhood, while loved for its support of him and giving him the spirituals, does deserve the critique he gives. His stepfather and mother are prime examples. They oppose his coming out as gay and push him into marriage with a woman because of their understanding of Christian sexual ethics. But his stepfather literally forces him to go to a prostitute to try to “change” him straight, and Clemmons has to escape out of a bathroom window and run away. His mother again is concerned about his sexuality, but not about enough about his personhood to stop the violence against him. There are many Christians in the book that show Francois love and care. But there are also many people who rejected Christianity that also showed him love and care.

The book is heavily oriented toward Clemmons early years. About 2/3 of the book covers his first 25 years or so. There is very little about what it was like to be on the show. The portions about Fred Rogers were about Fred Rogers as a person and mentor, not really Fred Rogers as a tv personality. I would have liked more about his later years, but I also hate to complain about what authors focus on; it is their story to tell.

This review was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/officer-clemmons/

Because I mentioned them above, here are a few memoirs of people who lived through the civil rights era that are worth reading (links are to my reviews)

• Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person with Richard Rooker


• I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire by Melba Pattillo Beals (later memoir)


• March Forward, Girl: From Young Warrior to Little Rock Nine by Melba Pattillo Beals (YA memoir)


• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (YA memoir in verse)


• With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman


• While the World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry with Denise George


• Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian by James H Cone (later memoir)


• My Soul Looks Back by James H Cone (earlier memoir)


• Where the Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancey


• My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King with Barbara Reynolds


• No Name in the Street by James Baldwin


• Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March


• Black Cop's Kid: An Essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar


• They Called Us Enemy by George Takei


• Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography by Zora Neale Hurston


• Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter by Sidney Poitier

Summary: Discernment is an essential part of Christian life. 

I am very mixed about posthumously completed books, especially those that are edited together. On the one hand, there are books like Dorothy Sayers' Thrones, Dominations that was found years after her death and was edited and completed by Jill Paton Walsh and then continued on with books that were written only by Jill Paton Walsh, and I think that gave a new life to Peter Wimsey in a way I appreciate. But there are works that are not up to the author's quality during their lifetime.

This is my third posthumous book by/with Nouwen; in this case, the editor/authors may not have waited long enough before publishing it. Nouwen passed away in 1996. There have been several revelations about his sexuality and other issues that were not discussed during his life. I plan on picking up a biography soon because while I have read several of Nouwen's books, I only know his life from what he wrote in the books I have read, and I need more. (A post about the biography I read after this.)

For this book in particular, Nouwen spends a lot of time discussing the discernment about moving to L'Arche and the discernment of the people in leadership at L'Arche. All of that reads quite differently in light of the abuse that has been revealed over the past several years by Jean Vanier and others connected to him. Father Thomas Philippe was Vanier's spiritual mentor and the head of a heterodox and spiritually abusive group. The Vatican investigated Philippe in the 1950s, and he was forbidden from exercising any priestly ministry or giving spiritual guidance because the Vatican found the abuse allegations credible. But he continued to lead his group through Vanier and was known as the cofounder of L'Arche. Nouwen specifically mentions Philippe as a holy man and his teaching of how God speaks through those around you as part of the discernment process. Philippe used abusive practices to spiritually manipulate women into sexual relationships with himself and others in the group.

I would not have read this book if I had known the long section on L'Arche and Vanier and Philippe. But it may be good that I did. Discernment is a fallible process. One of the reasons that many Protestants have been wary of discernment is because it is not only possible but probably that we will get discernment wrong.

Nouwen was constantly questioning his discernment. And he was wrong about more than a few things. This line seems good, but read in the light of Philippe's similar belief that his impulses to use others were spiritually appropriate and even “good” is a warning.

“Discernment, on the other hand, is about listening and responding to that place within us where our deepest desires align with God's desire. As discerning people, we sift through our impulses, motives, and options to discover which ones lead us closer to divine love and compassion for ourselves and other people and which ones lead us further away.”

“The first task of a faith community is to create sacred time and space, when and where we can allow God to reshape our hearts and lives and communities.”

or

“To want to know God's plan and purpose without regular prayer and engagement with scripture and God's people is like trying to bake a cake without assembling the various ingredients. Discernment grows out of the life of faith rooted in community.”

Summary: A collection of sixteen sermons, an original introduction by Coretta Scott King, and a new introduction by Raphael Warnock. 

I have been slowly working through the audiobook of A Gift of Love for a couple of months. I tend to listen to a sermon about once a week as I am on a walk. I enjoy having audiobooks that I can dip into occasionally when I do not feel like anything else. Most of these sermons were compiled in 1963. And then, two more sermons were added along with a new introduction when it was re-released in the King Legacy edition. I have not looked to see which were the new sermons added.

None of the sermons in the collection are bad, but personally, the second half was more engaging than the first half. Some of King's sermons felt more like speeches instead of sermons. But most of them were clearly a sermon given to a church and were in the black theological tradition, not the progressive tradition. There is a difference in the discussion of sin and the role of hope that differs from the progressive and the black theological traditions. That is not to say that some do not merge those traditions well. But I think King was at his best in these sermons when he spoke clearly about the reality of sin in a Christian theological register. This was not fire and brimstone preaching but a clear acquaintance with the reality of how sin impacted the world. Sin was not abstract. Sin was real and it impacted people that King knew, himself included. This was also not just individual or personal sin; sin here was a system or a force, not just individual wrongdoing or animus.

But just as much as sin was real in many of these sermons, hope was also real. I understand the critique of misplaced hope or hope that ignores the day-to-day world. But that was not King's view of hope. Just as his pain at sin was real, so his hope was real. His home was bombed when his wife and infant daughter were home alone. But he had a personal spiritual encounter with Jesus not long after that still empowered him nearly a decade later when most of these sermons were written.

Many people have not read much that King wrote and primarily have only listened to a few of the more famous speeches. But there is a range that is helpful to get exposure to. If you have not read King widely, I would recommend starting with Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Then I think that Radical King is where I would recommend as a follow-up. This would probably be my fourth recommendation after Where Do We Go From Here.

I listened to this on audiobook, but the narration bothered me less, and I am unsure why. Maybe JD Jackson was just better at impersonating King's speaking than some of the other narrators of King's books. But I think it may also be that except for the Drum Major Instinct, which is in Radical King and one of his best-known speeches, many of the rest of these were much less familiar.

Originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/gift-of-love/

Summary: An exploration of the role of the Bible in American public life from the rise of the new country until just before WW1.

I have read Noll's work widely. And have had three classes with him in undergrad and graduate school. I am familiar with his work, and I respect him greatly. So it is not lightly that I think that America's Book I think is my favorite of his books. Part of this is that it is just masterfully done. I can't think of many books of this size that I read as voraciously. I have always appreciated Noll's writing, but this book felt more incisive, important, and better written. But as I was thinking about it as I was finishing the book, I realized that part of it was the framing of the story concerning race. Noll is not new to examining how race has impacted American religious history. He has written two books that were particularly about the role of race, God and Race and American Politics and The Civil War as Theological Crisis, but with In the Beginning Was The Word and now in America's Book, the history of American Christianity is much more intentionally the multicultural and multi-religious history of the US. The main focus of America's book is looking at the different ways over time that the Bible (primarily the KJV for most of this time) was used by different communities within the United States. So minority communities (whether it is minority religious communities or minority racial communities) are central to telling the story of the differences in how the Bible was used.

America's Book is the second in a planned trilogy. In the Beginning Was the Word looked at the public use of the Bible in North America before the American Revolution. Diversity of use was important to that story, but part of the thesis of this book is that after the revolution, there was an attempt to come together as a Bible culture. The American Bible Society (ABS) was founded early in the 19th century and became the dominant publisher, not just of Bibles, but of all books and pamphlets. (America's Book makes me want to read John Fea's history of the American Bible Society) There was a somewhat successful (depending on the region) push to get a bible in every home in the United States. The ABS was committed to publishing the KJV without notes or commentary, which prioritized the KJV (against the Catholic Douay Rheims and other translations) and was an attempt to avoid sectarian debate.

Noll sets up the main initial debate over the use of the Bible not between Catholics and Protestants (Catholics were a tiny minority initially) but between the “Custodial Protestants and the Sectarian Protestants”. In Noll's conception, Custodial Protestants are those that “took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests–as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors.”(p54). There was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church's role within the community fell apart, as did the bible's role. Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness.

That chosenness (my term) was part of the problem that arose as the discussion over slavery became more prominent. Slavery was the largest but not the only cause of the fracturing of how the Bible was used. As he points out in The Civil War as Theological Crisis, the Civil War broke more than just the legal entity of the United States, it was a theological fight as well. The other main fractures around the use of the Bible were its use in public schools and how Americans understood their self-conception. Early Americans saw themselves broadly as Christian and centered around a Protestant identity, which used the KJV as a rhetorical, literary, and cultural touchstone, but there was always more diversity than what that identity could hold. Noll has three successive chapters in the middle, all titled “Whose Bible?” that look at how Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Native Americans, Women, and other naysayers were not content with the status quo identity as a Protestant KJV-only social identity.

I listened to America's Book on audiobook as I read Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. The main point of her book is that Evangelicals have a social imaginary. Although many Evangelicals have not explored the social imaginary, their conception of how the world works matters to how they perceive the world around them. Prior suggests that Victorian Age culture has impacted the social imaginary of Evangelicals because that was the era when Evangelicalism originally arose. Prior is primarily pointing to British Victorian culture as she explores the social imaginary of modern Evangelicals, but Noll is exploring American Christians, and it is easy to see her point in the history that Noll is laying out. One easy example is that proslavery Christians largely could not conceive of a valid biblical argument for abolition. In my post about Evangelical Imagination, I shared a quote from America's Book where Noll points out that proslavery Christians could only conceive of abolitionist biblical arguments as either heretical readings or as abolitionists reading into the scripture that did not exist. While I do not love this article because of the way it centers Russell Moore as if he is saying something new (or even as if this were new for him), Christians rejecting Jesus' own words because of the way they are interpreting them politically, is a good modern example of the social imaginary that Prior is pointing out.

In discussing the changes in how the Bible was used in the post-Civil War era, we must talk about figures like Robert Dabney. This is because he is a good exemplar of the role that overtly Christian call for white supremacy played, but also he is an example of the turn to biblicist reading against the modernist turn in the understanding of the Bible. Noll does not note this, but Dabney is still recommended by John Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and other conservative evangelicals because of his commitment to the Bible. But Dabney's commitment to the Bible was a commitment to a type of bible reading that upheld overt white supremacy. (Again, this is a place where the social imaginary impacts biblical use and understanding.) Joel McDurmon has a good section in his book about the role of Christianity in slavery, discussing Dabney's post-Civil War support of white supremacy.

Returning again to reading America's Book in light of Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination and Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry, and while Noll does not make judgments about whether people like Dabney have distorted Christianity to the extent that they have ceased to be Christian, Dabney is an example of why Michael Emerson speaks about the need to distinguish between Christianity and a “Religion of Whiteness.” I do not know where the line should be drawn exactly, but the evidence throughout America's Book is that Christianity is not perfectly malleable; at some point, cultural influences on Christianity have changed it so much that it ceases to be Christianity. That is part of what the discussion around Christian Nationalism is about. Andrew Whitehead leans toward identifying Christian Nationalists as Christian (I think in part as a rhetorical tool to draw people toward a better Christianity.) And Michael Emerson leans toward rejecting the Christianity of those he thinks have started following a different religion. Both make good cases for their own choices.

The value of reading America's Book is to give historical grounding to the discussion of what it means to be a Christian in the US now. We can see that people have regularly used and misused Christianity and the Bible for political purposes, to enforce cultural purity, and for power in the past. Those more culturally distant uses may be easier to see than current examples. But when your social imaginary includes the type of history that Noll shares here, you are better prepared to follow Jesus.

This was originally posted on my blog at http://bookwi.se/americas-book/

Link to other reviews mentioned here: American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church by Andrew L. Whitehead https://bookwi.se/american-idolatry/

The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior https://bookwi.se/evangelical-imagination/