Adam Shields

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/

Summary: An exploration of how images and metaphors influence Evangelical thought (or don't.)

The Evangelical Imagination is the fourth of Karen Swallow Prior's books I have read over the past 11 years, the sixth if you include the two classics in which she wrote the introduction. I have been in a private Facebook group and “friends” on social media for most of that time. I looked back, and basically, this is what I said to introduce the last books of hers that I read.

Part of what I appreciate about Karen's writing is that her writing is personal. She is not just writing abstract “Christian Living” books, theology, or literary criticism; she is a character in the story she shares as she is writing theology, literary criticism, and moral formation. In large part, her work explores virtue, and she uses her work as a literature professor to give tools to that exploration.

I could write a thousand words discussing Prior's past decade and the struggles she has been through, from very personal harassment by leaders within her denomination to leaving two jobs as a professor to literally being hit by a bus. (I understand everyone must include that line in a review of her work or an introduction to her in an interview.) I hope she will write a memoir sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, and I want people to read about The Evangelical Imagination, not my outsider's perspective of her life.

Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind will be 30 years old next year, and that is the book I think many will bring up as they discuss the Evangelical Imagination. Noll raised the question about whether there really was an Evangelical Mind and speculated about what it would take for proper attention to be paid to the life of the mind for the Evangelical. It was a book that almost everyone that wants to grapple with evangelicalism needs to have read. It is an important book, but James KA Smith's work has indirectly questioned Noll's thesis. It is not so much that Smith disagrees with Noll's assessment but that Smith is raising questions about what we should do because we are not simply “brains on a stick” but individuals with a more complicated relationship to our minds.

Prior is extending Smith's work and using Charles Taylor's idea of the Social Imaginary to explore how a stunted imagination impacts our ability to address what it means to think and see the world around us. We all know Abraham Maslow's quote, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This rough idea of the Christian Imagination was explored more than 20 years ago in Emerson and Smith's Divided by Faith. Emerson and Smith suggested that the reason Evangelicals cannot move past racial division is that their “toolkit” did not allow them to see the problem clearly but only through the lens of 1) freewill individualism, 2) relationalism, and 3) anti-structuralism. Smith and Emerson attempted to point out that the social imaginary of White Evangelicals impacted their ability to deal with race. Karen Swallow Prior is pointing out the social imaginary of Evangelicals more broadly and directly drawing parallels (for good and bad) to the Victorian age, where so much of the social imaginary of Evangelicals was developed. Most modern Evangelical do not know about those parallels and need someone to point them out.

As I was reading The Christian Imagination, I also listened to the audiobook of Mark Noll's recent history of the public use of the Bible, America's Book. In America's Book, Noll describes well how our imagination limits how we see the world with the example of slavery and the Bible.

In a word, what the Tappans, Grimké Weld, Cheever, Pennington, Douglass, and many others took from the Scriptures should have made proslavery advocates pause, since it came from the same divine authority they revered and interpreted with the same hermeneutical conventions they followed.

Proslavery, however, depicted all Bible-based antislavery as either dangerously liberal or outright heretical. Abolitionists like Albert Barnes and Daniel Goodwin insisted that they too honored the Scriptures. But when they drew on intuited truths from the moral sense to shape biblical interpretation, they seemed to their opponents to be doing self-consciously only what all abolitionists did un-wittingly-that is, abandoning the secure Word of God for heretical flights of egotistical presumption. (p 428, italics mine)

Summary: Anxiety is part of how we were created.

Like everyone (and in keeping with how anxiety is talked about in the book), I have anxiety. I hate conflict. I do everything I can to avoid situations where I might be in conflict, especially conflict with people close to me. Curtis Chang suggests that anxiety is part of how we were created. We should have anxiety because we care. Part of how care for the world and those around us expresses itself is being anxious over the fear of loss. No anxiety at all would not show that we have great control over our emotions, but instead, it would show that we may not have appropriate care or love.

“Love: We suffer anxiety because we are vulnerable to losing what we most love. This further explains why anxiety is unavoidable for anyone who is truly human. To be free of anxiety is to be free of any love (which is capable of being lost), which in turn would mean becoming inhuman.”

“CEOs tend to have high-functioning anxiety, like I do. Also, like me, they tend to default to fight mode. They often plunge forward with their own versions of firing off long emails to their staff at three in the morning. Too often, their colleagues don't push back. Team members don't realize their leader's behavior is anxiety-driven. Instead, they feel confused, insecure, guilty, and blamed. Anxiety spreads like a contagion throughout the entire organization.”

“Avoidance habits, like any addiction, become ingrained in our minds. Neuroscience has shown actual physical ingraining happens constantly in our brains. Any action establishes a neural pathway in our brain; repeated actions deepen that pathway. Addictions are like destructive pathways where the grooves have gotten etched deeply over time, and we become mired in those ruts...A key to breaking any addiction is stopping that etching process as much as we can and replacing it with new actions that lay alternative—and healthier—neural pathways. This “stop and replace” work rarely happens suddenly, which is why the practical goal is to decrease (versus immediately eliminate) avoidance habits over time.”

“Let's clarify one more time the relationship between anxiety and sin. Anxiety itself is not sin. It is an inevitable part of what it means to be humans living in the Now and Not Yet. And most avoidance habits—as dysfunctional as they are—are more accurately understood as “bad habits” than as outright sin. However, it is possible in some cases that the sin of idolatry can be lurking underneath anxious thoughts. This is precisely why the author of Psalm 139 asks God to “search my anxious thoughts” in order to ascertain if there is “any idolatrous way in me” (CEB).”

Summary: A helpful, somewhat personal look at how Christian Nationalism is a type of idolatry that distorts Christianity. 

I am very much on board with the idea that Christian Nationalism is one of the more significant problems facing both the US political reality and the US church. But I also think that some critics of the idea of Christian Nationalism have a point when they suggest that some presentations are vague and unclear. Part of the problem is that many critics are not sociologists, and so are resistant to the reality of social science working in tendencies toward behavior. I have an undergrad degree in sociology and understand that sociology and other similar social sciences work with correlations that are often only partially explanatory. Other factors are always at play. And even two people with the same history, culture, and even biology (twins) may not believe or behave the same way. Social science broadly works in tendencies. All things being equal, if these factors apply, this result is more likely than if these factors do not apply.

As an example from Christian Nationalism, those that rank higher on the Christian Nationalism scale tend to view the world through a lens of racial hierarchy. But if a person who ranks higher on the Christian Nationalism scale has a significant relationship with others of a different race (maybe through adoption or marriage or in a church setting), that individual may agree with many tenants of Christian Nationalism but not view the world through a lens of racial hierarchy. That individual does not mean that the correlation between Christian Nationalism and belief in the racial hierarchy is false more broadly; it just means that they have other factors in their life that combat that aspect of Christian Nationalism. This year, Justice Jackson wrote in a concurrence (highlighted by Sarah Isgur), “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions.” Jackson's phrase is precisely the point here, while tendencies remain, individual cases may not be the same because no two cases are perfectly identical; however, there is value in exploring the ways that the tendencies work.

I am also reading American Idolatry in light of two books and a podcast. I read American Idolatry in print and overlapped it with the audiobook of Mark Noll's history of the bible in the US from 1794 to 1911. Many of the uses of the bible in history would lend themselves to Christian Nationalist uses today. Some of those should be considered Christian Nationalism, and some should not. What is helpful about reading American Idolatry in light of America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911, is that longer trends both support and give pause to how we think of Christian Nationalism in this particular political moment. There have been points in US history that have had concerning Christian behavior. And the bible has long been used for political purposes (that is the point of Noll's book).

Andrew Whitehead is careful throughout the book not to label those that tend toward Christian Nationalism as something other than Christian. He wants to say that there may be “an idolatry” that is a problem in the use of Christian Nationalism for control and power, but that these people are still Christian. And I largely applaud him for that and think that “othering people” can dismiss the problem or our role in the problem. That is where the podcast I referenced comes in. I have long followed Michael Emerson and listened to his interview on the Know It, Own It, Change It podcast. Emerson has repeatedly said in several interviews and articles that his research indicates that many White Christians have ceased to be Christians and have begun following a Religion of Whiteness. And having read much from Emerson on this point, I agree that his evidence is persuasive (similar to Robert Jones.) Still, while I want to take seriously Emerson's (and Jones') points that there does seem to be a line across which you cease to be practicing Christianity and instead are practicing a different religion, the bias should be to consider these differences within Christianity.

Whitehead does not draw a parallel with how Kendi speaks about racism, but I think it is helpful. Kendi suggests we should not consider ‘racism' like a tattoo we are permanently labeled with. But instead, we should consider racism a sticky name tag that we can take on and off. Sometimes we communicate an idea that is racist, and sometimes we communicate an idea that opposes racism. One is not evidence that the other does not exist. Coming back to Christian Nationalism, we can communicate Christian Nationalism ideas at one point and at another point speak against Christian Nationalist ideas and still be a single person. People are complex.

Noll also makes a distinction between sectarian and custodial 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 is an overlap here with the idea of Christian Nationalism. But Noll argues that 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 (the point of Noll's book). Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. And he personally is a Presbyterian which tends toward a custodial view. But 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. Noll is not discussing modern Christian Nationalism, but in this distinction, we can see the origins of what Whitehead calls a type of idolatry or syncretism.

The second book I also read in conversation with American Ideology is Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. Prior is exploring how the evangelical imagination tends to work. Emerson uses the phrase “Evangelical toolkit” to talk about how the Evangelicals tend to have a narrow range of tools to handle racial ideas. Prior uses Charles Taylor's idea of the “Social Imaginary,” similar to Emerson's idea of the toolkit. She walks through a list of “tools” that shape how Evangelicals view the world.

Andrew Whitehead similarly walks through the toolkit or social imaginary of a Christian Nationalist worldview. It is easy to see how people can shift between the evangelical and Christian Nationalist toolkits because of overlapping ideas. In the more memoir-like sections, Whitehead hints at a similar social imaginary idea in discussing his exposure to many Christian Nationalist ideas as a child or young adult. But expanding his worldview, or imagination, allowed him to see how others viewed the world differently.

“In short, white Christian nationalism is a cultural framework asserting that civil life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity. Beyond any theological or religious beliefs associated with Christianity, white Christian nationalism brings with it a host of cultural assumptions, particularly a moral traditionalism predicated on maintaining social hierarchies, a comfort with (the “right kind” of) authoritarian social control that includes the threat and use of violence, and a desire for strict ethno-racial boundaries designating who can fully particulate in American civil life. As we'll explore later, it centers and privileges the white Christian experience because it essentially teaches that this country was founded by white, conservative Christian men for the benefit of white, conservative Christian citizens.”

“...the doxastic aspect that focuses on individual salvation alone–that hinders many American Christians from seeing how Christian nationalism betrays the life and teaching of Jesus in two important areas: racial inequality and xenophobia. In these two areas, white American Christians tend to ignore the practical aspect of the gospel, including justice for the oppressed, thinking that as long as we believe the correct theological claims and encourage others to embrace those theological claims as well that we are doing all we need to do.”

“...the Christianity of American Christan nationalism conveys particular forms of cultural baggage. Chief among these is how it privileges and centers the white experience. Christianity in the United States is inextricably tied to race.”

and later

“...the idol of power in Christian natonalism is a power employed for selfish reasons to behefit the in-group. To pursue justice, Chrsitians will have to see and use power. This employment of power should rather benefit all people, especially our neighbors who have been harmed or overlooked. Christian nationalism's vision and use of power, however, is focused solely on extending and protecting a particular subset of largely white Christians' cultural and economic interests. It is important to distinguish between the two uses of power to faithfully confront white Christain nationalism in our society and religious traditions.”

“...multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.”

Summary: One mysterious death, and then another, among nurses-in-training, brings Adam Dalgliesh to the John Carpenter Hospital and the Nightingale House, where the nurses live and train.

I am continuing to work through the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series slowly. I am not sure how long PD James wrote the series, but the books I am working on how were written in the late 1960s. So far the books have been fairly out of time. You know they are in the 20th century, but no cell phones or computers exist. It is only at the very end that there is a cultural reference that dates the book. It matters to the story, so I will not reveal the reference, but I have appreciated the writing being somewhat out of time.

The series is less physiological than my current favorite mystery series, Inspector Gamache, but I am enjoying the very slow development of Dalgliesh as a character. Part of what I thought about with this book is that Dalgliesh's moral and ethical character is essential. Moral and ethical character matter in almost every role in life, but particularly with positions of authority and justice, the person filling those roles matters. One of the officers working for Dalgliesh is a prominent character in this book, and that officer does not have exemplary character for the job. The comparison between them is being set up for what I assume with be a plot point in a later book.

I have just started Karen Swallow Prior's new book, The Evangelical Imagination. As a literature professor, she is approaching the role of the imagination in helping to define the social imaginary (Charles Taylor's term) of what is possible. Simple fiction books like this series give the reader a sense of what is possible. Murder mysteries, in particular, may raise fears about how prevalent murder is or how easy it is to catch murderers. But they also build connections of how people come to big crimes through smaller inactions. How we think about the world is shaped by the type and quality of books we read (or TV, movies, web videos, video games, etc.)

I think there is a reason that PD James is such a well-known author and that this series has been recommended by so many and I think the Evangelical Imagination is giving some hints as to why this more than 50-year-old series has stayed in print.

Summary: A biblical exploration of women's role in scripture. 

Again, as I have said before, I am approaching Tell Her Story as an egalitarian that supports women's ordination. I do not need to be convinced of the biblical record supporting women's ministry roles. But I picked up Tell Her Story for two reasons. One, I watched an interview on the Holy Post with Nijay Gupta, and I have wanted to read one of his books for a while (my father recommended a commentary he wrote, and I just have not gotten around to reading it yet.) Second, I want to understand what was different about this book so I can rightly recommend the right books to the right people. I am strongly oriented toward personalized book recommendations.

So I am writing here primarily about the purpose of Tell Her Story in the context of the other books I have read on overlapping themes. Tell Her Story is more focused on the broad biblical record of women. I had a class on women in the Bible a few years ago, and while the focus was different, there was not much new to me here. But I do think that many have not understood either the actual role of Deborah (where the book opens) or how many female names are part of Paul's letters or the broader New Testament.

I (I think like many evangelicals of my age) was largely taught formally and informally that Deborah held a place as the judge of Israel (ruler before kings were instituted) because men of Israel were in sin. Deborah was placed as a judge to shame men who were in sin for not leading. That is a common but harmful reading of the relevant passages. I do not remember ever hearing that Deborah was called the Mother of Israel before the class I took. The church I grew up in (where my father was a pastor) was egalitarian. Still, the youth group I attended with a friend and my college and general Christian media were dominated by complementarian views. So even as someone who grew up egalitarian and for women's ordination, I absorbed bad biblical teaching that undercut women in ministry.

Nijay Gupta (professor at Northern Seminary) opens the book with Deborah even though the book primarily focuses on the New Testament because she is an excellent example that while the cultures of the ancient near east where the Bible was set were predominately patriarchal, Deborah was a documented exception to that general trend.

If I summarize the broad argument of the book, it is that a reading of scripture that requires a universal ban on women in any formal ministerial roles has to ignore the women that scripture itself documents in formal ministry roles. Largely the women mentioned in scripture doing ministry work are not taught, and sometimes the literal gender of their names are hidden, as was familiar with Junia.

Gupta gives context to the New Testament culture, Jesus' connection to women, and what we know about women in the early church. But then, the last few chapters concentrate on telling the stories of women that are often ignored or forgotten in the biblical record.

One of the critical sections of Tell Her Story is about Romans 16. Romans 16 is unusual because there are so many names of people doing ministry that Paul is greeting or commending. Roughly 1/3 of the names mentioned are women. Not all of those have formal ministry roles, but some do. Junia appears to be an apostle. Phoebe was the one that was tasked with delivering the letter of Romans, which would have included reading and teaching the letter and answering questions about it to the church in Rome. And she was likely a church leader herself.

There are other examples, but I will not give away the whole book. The main point is that in context, reading 2 Tim 2 as a universal ban on all women in any ministry role has to ignore the rest of the Bible. If we assume that the Bible does not explicitly contradict itself, then we need to read the Bible in a way that makes sense of differences.

The main text of the book is about 150 pages. It is pitched to people familiar with the Bible, but it is not an academic book. It grapples with the text well, and while giving lots of context for the culture to give insight into the text, it is focused on the actual text of the Bible as its primary focus.

Two stand-alone essays as appendixes directly handle 2 Tim 2 and the Household Codes, the two most common methods of calling for women not to have any formal ministry role within the church. I understand why he does this, but because these are framed as stand-alone essays, there is a fair amount of repetition between the two essays and between the essays and the book's main text. It is a relatively minor complaint, but there is repetition there.

There are no other books I am familiar with that do what Gupta is doing here. Scot McKnight in Blue Parakeet teaches about hermeneutics and uses women in ministry as an example. In his book Surprised by Scripture, NT Wright has a chapter on women in ministry that is more pragmatic but has some overlapping themes. Intersectional Theology and Womanist Midrash both talk about how the questions we ask of theology and the biblical text matter to the answers we receive. Jesus Feminist again has some overlapping ideas, but it is more memoir oriented and more focused on Jesus' interactions with women. The late Rachel Held Evan's A Year of Biblical Womanhood attempts to take literal Biblical commands about being a woman.

The previous paragraph of books is mostly Biblical arguments. The next set of books are mostly theology, history, or memoir leaning pragmatic arguments. In Making Biblical Womanhood, Beth Allison Barr is primarily making a historical argument that the modern complementarian perspective is historically new by looking at earlier women in ministry (overlapping theme), and changes in Biblical translation changed how we understand women in ministry. How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals is the story of about 25 evangelical leaders who changed their minds about women in leadership. Still, those are primarily pragmatic and memoirs and only occasionally explicitly about the biblical text. (And frankly, several of those chapters are by now disgraced leaders.) Who's Tampering With the Trinity is a theology book about how the complementarian movement has been playing with trinitarian theology to justify gender hierarchy. Slaves, Women, and Homosexuality is a proposal for how we handle cultural shifts and progressive revelation to sometimes change theology and sometimes reject the change of theology. Webb is a soft complementarian who rejects full ordination in the book but also rejects stricter complementarian positions. Is the Bible Good for Women is a more conservative and complementarian-oriented book than I am but attempts to grapple with how the Bible has been mishandled to be bad for women. Jesus and John Wayne is a modern history of evangelicalism and gender, well worth reading, but almost no overlap between Tell Her Story and it.

Summary: A brief exploration of a complicated topic.

I am not adequately trained to discuss poststructuralism (or any philosophical idea.) But that is one reason that I like these Very Short Introduction books. They give an introduction to the concept so that you have a broad idea of the concept, which allows you to pursue it more fully later (or not.)

Like most of these books, the main content is about 150 pages. I listened to this on audiobook, which may not have been the best choice, but it is what I had. I did not realize when I picked it up that a new edition had been published. In something as recent as Poststructuralism, the 20-year-old 1st edition was likely dated in ways I do not understand.

The second edition has an additional chapter, and chapter 2 is expanded and chapter 3 is restructured or retitled. Overall I feel like I have a helpful introduction to the subject, but I would not attempt to try to really write about my understanding or evaluate how well the author did in the presentation. The content seemed to be clear, and there was some good humor, but that is as far as I feel like I can go.

[caption id=”attachment_60367” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”] 1st Edition[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_60368” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”] 2nd Edition[/caption]

Summary: Scotland Yard Inspector Adam Dalgliesh visits his aunt at her remote home for a vacation after a long case, and he is confronted with another murder but isn't in charge of the investigation.

I have been reading too much non-fiction, so while on vacation, I scanned through some of my books and decided to pick back up the PD James series about the Scotland Yard inspector. I read the first two about five years ago. I wouldn't say I liked either of those as much as I liked her Children of Men book, but because I found a cheap edition with the first six books, I figured I should give them another try.

I do not really feel like I have enough of a sense of the main character, Adam Dalgliesh, going into this. First, it has been five years since I read the last book, but also, after reading back over those posts, I did not feel all that connected to the character. This was not much better, but it was an enjoyable enough mystery. Last year I re-read the whole Inspector Ganache series, and one of the things that stood out to me is that as much as I enjoy the series as a whole, a lot of the books need the rest of the series to make sense. Individually, especially in the early books, they can feel fairly weak regarding the characters. But over a series of nearly 20 books, the series becomes stronger because it is a long series that is allowed to develop over time. I cannot expect individual books to have the same characterization as a long series.

Adam Dalgliesh is tired. He has just finished a long and complicated case and is trying to rest and discern whether it is time to propose to his girlfriend. He likes his aunt. She never married and has become a successful writer and lives in a remote coastal community that is full of writers. Almost immediately, one of those writers goes missing. He is eventually found, apparently dead of natural causes, but with his hands cut off. As a reader, you know it is murder, but it takes a while for Dalgliesh to figure out how it is murder, and why the murder was done.

Part of the strength of the writing is that the series is out of time. It is officially set in the 1960s, but the time setting does not stand out. It could have been anywhere from the 1930s to the late 80s with just a few details that narrowed time. Dalgliesh is a good inspector, but there were plenty of dead ends here and he was far from a “superhero.” Unnatural Causes was plenty enough to keep me engaged. I mostly read a chapter or so after my kids were in bed during a trip to Disney or visiting my mother-in-law. The first two books I listened to on audiobook, this one I read entirely on Kindle. I have already started the next one on Kindle, but my library has the first eight books on audiobook, so I am alternating between audio and Kindle.

Summary: Historians take on mostly conservative talking points. 

Historians have been having an internal battle about their public role in current events. Much of the discussion is framed around Presentism, which is “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences.” Part of the reality of history as a social science is that interpretation is a necessary part of what it means to “do history.” I am not a historian, although I do read a lot of history and respect historians that are on different sides of this debate.

I think Myth America has two problems, and presentism is one of them. Kevin Kruze and Julian Zelizer are Myth America's editors, both historians of recent American history. The last book I read from them was Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, which was worth reading, but the problem with recent history is that it is harder to have a broad perspective on that history because it is so recent. Most of the essays are framed around current myths about history that impact current politics, which is precisely the concern over presentism.

Carol Anderson's chapter on voter fraud takes the concerns around the 2020 election and frames them historically about why we have a current concern about election fraud. That historical framing is helpful to see why we have a current obsession with voter fraud without any evidence of it actually being a problem in most elections. But the book's very nature is mostly to address current political concerns, leaving the book open to critique of political bias.

The reality is that this is a left-leaning book because the editors are activist historians who believe that there is a role for historians to address politics. Not every chapter is overtly left-leaning, but discussing immigration, America First, American Exceptionalism, The New Deal, The Reagan Revolution, White Backlash to Civil Rights, Police Violence, The Southern Strategy, etc., are overwhelmingly left-leaning takes on history.

I am not calling for a both-sided type of book; I think this is a book worth reading as it is. But as a book trying to persuade, it falls short in drawing in moderate to conservative voters who believe many of the myths being discussed. There is a role for books that educate the left-leaning, but that isn't primarily persuasion.

At the same time, I do think that part of the politicization of history also shows that some of these topics are now seen as highly political in ways that they would not have been 10 or 20 years ago.

Summary: An autobiography from Sojourner Truth as told to Olive Gilbert.

This year's final book for the Renovaré Book Club was Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Because I did not really have any background with Sojourner Truth, I read the new We Will be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth by Nacy Koester as background before starting the autobiography.

One of the parts of the Renovare Book Club that I most appreciate is the podcast/video interviews and weekly emails with links to information and background. In the first podcast, in preparation for reading Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the host suggested that we come at the Narrative without other background materiaial, so as to understand her words on their own terms. This is common advice and not entirely wrong. But at the same time, this advice is influenced by the “plain reading of the text.” And as much as I appreciate that advice, it needs to be tempered because there is real value in expertise, and experts can give you far more information and background than what is possible when reading without the assistance of experts.

In this case, I do not think reading the Narrative without any background would have been helpful for me. Sojourner Truth was a complex figure outside the standard Southern slave narrative. She spoke only Dutch until the age of 9 and spoke with a Dutch accent her whole life. Her most famous speech, Aint' I A Woman, was transcribed with a Southern slave dialect and likely was significantly distorted in form because of that.

And I think that there are nuances about the cultural movements around her that I would not have understood without Koester's biography, especially the influence of utopian religious communities and groups like the Seventh Day Adventists and Millerenites. At the same time, I understand the impulse to encourage direct access to historical documents. Older texts are more challenging to understand than current books and biographies. But without direct access to historical documents, we lose out because our understanding of history is always mediated through interpreters. I do not want to discount the importance of those interpreters because they provide value. But as we gain access to historical tools, we can better understand those historical documents in context and in ways that give regard to what they meant at the time without distorting them.

Summary: A very Lutheran perspective on spiritual disciplines, which is helpful for non-Lutherans to read as a different perspective.

When I picked up Ragged, I knew nothing about the book or author other than several people I know recommended it.  I have been trying to prioritize reading women authors this year. And I have been trying to work through different language around spiritual disciplines because so much of the Evangelical orientation toward spiritual disciplines uses pragmatic self-improvement as a motivation.

The introduction was my favorite part of the book, not that I didn't like the rest of the book, just that her framing of spiritual disciplines was precisely what I was looking for. Ronnevik is a homeschooling mother of six, wife of a farmer, and survivor of a severe car crash that has left her with chronic pain. She directly takes on the type of perfectionistic, strongly ordered approach to spiritual disciplines that deters too many from even attempting regular disciplines. Disciplines are to draw us toward God, not to prove ourselves worthy of God.

After the helpful introduction, each chapter is a different discipline. I understand that approach, but it was not the best move. The positive of that approach is that you can go to disciplines that you are more interested in. The negative of that approach is that it is a type of list of disciplines that we are all familiar with. In many cases, Ronnevik reframes the discipline to make them more approachable, but I still feel like a knowledge presentation of disciplines. Each of those chapters are filled with stories to draw the reader in and be relatable. And I think this is a book that will be particularly helpful for people that struggle with disciplines as a competition to make themselves better.

One of the people I meet with for spiritual direction is a Lutheran pastor, and I do not know if I would have understood the discussions of Law and Grace as much as I did without some of the discussions I have had. Law and Grace are central to Lutheran theology and spirituality. It has been a few years since I tried to read outside of my theological tradition as a regular discipline, but this book is an excellent example of why that is important. I am not Lutheran, but the different framing helps me to see my tradition through a different theological facet and helps me better understand another Christian tradition.

Part of what I love about this book is that it is a book that imparts hard-won wisdom from an experienced Christian. More important than specific disciplines is the orientation to the Christian life that pays attention to wisdom and experience. I alternated between reading this in print and listening to the audiobook. The narration was fine, and I could always understand what was said. But the choice of narrators was wrong for the book. The narrator was a young woman. Because the book drew so clearly from Ronnevik's life as a woman and mother, it needed to be a woman, but it would have been better for the voice to have more age to communicate the book's wisdom.

Summary: A novel that I am not sure I fully understood. 

I am a big fan of Vodolazkin's earlier novel, Laurus, so when I heard the general positive buzz about this new novel, I picked it up soon after it came out because I was in the mood for some fiction. But I think this novel requires more background knowledge to understand the satire than I have. After I started the book, Current posted a review. I try to avoid reviews until after I finish a book, but I read this one because I was a bit bored with the novel and needed some motivation to finish.

It meandered, and I could tell it referenced historical events, but I was unsure what the references meant. At least a part of the target of the satire is the myth of the progress of history. There is progress; we do not have half of our children die before the age of five. And the rate of absolute subsistence poverty has dropped. But progress has not brought about some other promises, radical egalitarianism, an end to poverty, more just institutions, etc.

The book opens as a medieval history written by monks of an island kingdom. After reading for a while, we realize that the commentary on the history is from the King and Queen, who are eventually introduced into the story when their lives are prophecied. They are born, married, and begin to rule. This is a book that slowly unfolds. Parfeny and Ksenia were born in a medieval world, but they have remained alive for over 300 years to also live in the modern world. From the vantage point of their long life, they have perspective. They ruled, and they were ruled, they lived in splendor, and they lived in poverty.

I was more engaged once I understood what was happening, but that took me a little while. It was less narrative than I would have liked because there was a mix of history and commentary on the history and then modern narrative alongside the history. I probably would benefit from reading it again and reading a brief overview of Russian and maybe European history before I do it again.

I have two more of Vodolazkin's novels that I will get to eventually. His settings seem to have almost nothing to do with one another. So there is no hurry to get to the next novel before I forget the last one.

Summary: A short history of the feminist movement, primarily focusing on first and second-wave feminism within England, with a follow-up chapter on feminism in other geographical areas.

Because women's role in the church has been an active conversation lately, I have been thinking about feminism. A tweet (there were several in the same vein) suggested that part of the issue with the discussion today is that feminism has changed the discussion. Today all except a few want to assert that women are equal, but roles are different. Historically the church fathers, until recently, were influenced by Greek thought that understood women as flawed men or lesser creations. Feminism has changed the terms so that even though hard patriarchalists continue to exist and have influence, most will at least say women are equal in value and Imago Dei.

The book opens with a chapter on the religious roots of feminism starting in the middle ages. And then following is a chapter on secular approaches to feminism. This is followed by a chapter on 18th-century women writers. And then two chapters on the 19th century.

Because voting rights were so central to the women's rights movement, there were two chapters on voting rights. The last three chapters are about first-wave feminism in the 20th century. Then second-wave feminism in the late 20th century. And then, a chapter on feminists worldwide lightly touches on the critiques of first and second-wave feminism. The afterward lightly touches on continued changes to feminism. Kaitlyn Schiess has a good video on her Getting Schooled series, Feminism 101, that covers similar material in about 40 minutes.

One of the problems of the early feminist movement is that it also agreed to hierarchy as a default cultural assumption. Sojourner Truth's famous Aint I a Woman speech raised concerns about how White women sought to make suffrage (voting rights) a competition between White women and Black men. In the book, which is primarily about English feminism, there are examples of educated White English women being offended that lower-class men, immigrants, and criminals were allowed to vote but educated, land-owning women were not allowed to vote. This is a hierarchical argument that voting is based on the worth of the voter, not on inherent dignity.

At least part of the movement toward universal suffrage of men is that part of what drove women's suffrage. But the suffrage movement started being taken more seriously as photography became more widely used. The sexism of women being the “weaker sex” was part of what suffragettes used to raise awareness. Images of privileged women being carried by police due to women's demonstrations raised objections. But even that gave way to violence and vandalism to express frustration when non-violent demonstrations did not work. At least three castles, several churches, a significant library, and many homes were destroyed by arson as part of the protests in England.

One of the aspects that I did not know is that consciousness-raising was coined by feminist groups in the late 1960s. I was aware of the other origin because, at the same time, Critical consciousness, conscientization or consciousness-raising was coined by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written in 1967 and translated into English in 1970).

Overall this is a helpful, quick introduction to feminism. But because it was published in 2006, it is limited because the 3rd and 4th wave of feminists were too new or after its publication. And I think that the critique I saw in several reviews about the early parts of the book being too oriented on mini-biographies is true. I think there is value in learning about early feminists, but the format of such reliance on those biographical sketches feels a bit like “great man” history.

I also think that the focus on England as a geographical source of the story (a reasonable limitation given the size of the book) makes it harder to discuss the critiques of CRT about intersectionality, which isn't even mentioned in the book. Every Very Short Introduction has to make difficult choices about what to include, and the focus on England, first and second-wave feminism, and then a short global survey was a reasonable choice. Still, I want a follow-up book to expand the focus.

Summary: Can men have a non-toxic masculinity, and what would that look like?

Non-Toxic Masculinity is a book that I decided not to read initially. And then Josh Butler's book and TGC article came out. And Patrick Miller stonewalled Sheila Wray Gregoire and then eventually apologized. So many other things happened recently that are mainly about toxic masculinity that I decided to accept a review copy.

Up front, I am not the target audience here. I am 50 and have spent nearly 15 years as a stay-at-home uncle and then dad. I have not once earned more than my wife. I am firmly in favor of women's ordination. My senior sociology project in the mid-90s was about the acceptance of rape myths among students at evangelical colleges. I have long thought that many men are toxic. I read Everyman's Battle on a friend's recommendation and immediately threw it away as trash precisely because it treated women as the problem instead of rightly paying attention to evangelical sin avoidance as the problem. I favor men working toward being less toxic, but I am highly suspect of any gendered approach to discipleship for men.

I was too old for the main purity culture teaching; I had been married for several years when I Kissed Dating Goodbye came out. The term dodging a bullet is probably too weak of a statement when I have talked to people about the harm of purity culture. In my mid-20s, despite being a fairly outspoken egalitarian, a seminary professor and a friend separately challenged me because they thought I was adopting a kinder, gentler form of sexism. I can remember talking about the problems of porn (and this was long before smartphones) and suggesting that part of breaking the power of porn was to firmly establish that women in those videos should be treated as “mother, sister, daughter.” My friend challenged me to think about how that framing still established women in relation to men and not as a child of God or imago dei. My professor challenged me to think about how I was thinking of marriage as a means of equipping me for others things. I argued with both of them but eventually came to realize that they were right.

It wasn't good enough to be a kinder, gentler sexist that categorizes women by their relationship to other men (by default, still maintaining a gender hierarchy). And it was not good enough to think of marriage as a means of maturity building. I do not live up to my ideals, but from that point, I have attempted to live as if all hierarchy violates God's good creation, whether it be gender, race, class, or other types of hierarchy.

While I appreciate the open discussion of the harm of purity culture, the problems with the way that the church has created a “sexual prosperity gospel” (if you avoid premarital sex, then you will be rewarded with “mind-blowing” sex in your marriage), the problems of both porn and the problematic ways that the church has handled porn and many other topics, my main problem with most books written toward men is still present. I do not believe that men and women are simply interchangeable, but I do think that men and women are far more alike than they are different.

In many cases, books written to men about “how to be a man” are not really about masculinity, they are about maturity. I think mistaking instructions on maturity for instructions on masculinity harms both men and women. Both men and women should be encouraged toward maturity. And if you are speaking to men about maturity, then you should not be framing maturity as if it were particularly masculine (or feminine).

This is often true in discussions of the fruits of the spirit within gendered books. There is no gender in fruits of the spirit, both men and women should embody fruits of the spirit. Toward the end of the book, Wagner connects masculinity to fatherhood. Wagner's main point was that a broad view of fatherhood, not just biological fatherhood but the care of others, is part of being masculine.

“Every time a man seeks to take responsibility for, cultivate, nurture, protect, repair, renew, or redeem his corner of creation, he is acting like a father and living out the chief end of his sexuality.”

“Male sexuality is relational. Fatherhood is a particular type of relationship made possible by our sexual bodies. Our bodies are intended to serve us in forming connections with other people too. Romanic relationships are not the only context in which our sexuality is relevant; they show us we are relational creatures. Through sexual embodiment, we are connected to everyone who shares our bloodline–siblings, children, parents, grandparents, cousins, and beyond.”

Summary: A long lecture or short book on ways to prevent tyranny based on 20th-century history.

I have looked at but not read On Tyranny several times. It came out about six years ago. But I decided to pick it up after a tweet from Samuel Perry about regularly rereading it and teaching it. I looked it up again and saw the audiobook was on sale for $3 and was less than 2 hours. (It is $4.50 as I am writing this.)

This formatted too quickly read. Each chapter is only a few pages; the longest chapter is nine pages. While most sermons or commencement addresses won't have 20 points, it is that type of approach. These are short pieces of advice with brief historical references. Chapter one is Do Not Obey in Advance. That may seem like it doesn't need to be said, but if we look at history, there are many examples of trying to appease by preemptively doing what you think they would like done. Appeasement may work in some cases, but not in cases of tyranny. In cases of tyranny, it just cements power.

Many of the pieces of advice are about understanding truth or learning. These are always helpful whether we are talking about tyranny or not. Other is more specific like Make Eye Contact and Small Talk. This is primarily a “know your neighbors” idea.

I could easily list and discuss all of the chapters, but this is a short book. I want to make three comments and recommend the book as helpful. I went back and forth between thinking this occasionally was too much fear-mongering and wishing there were different examples. On Tyranny was published in 2017, and the previous president is referenced regularly. Many of the concerns did not come to pass either because institutions pushed back or because of ineptness. But in some cases, the concerns raised were too weak. There is value in reading a book like this later so that we, as readers, can see how its predictions played out.

At the same time, most of the examples of 20th-century tyranny were European, either Soviet or Putin-led Russia or Nazi Germany. And when those are the examples, many assume these things cannot happen here. I wish Snyder had expanded the historical lens and focused more on US history because this book will primarily be read in the US. When he talks about the rise of paramilitaries, I instantly thought about the rise of the KKK during Reconstruction and how there were literal coupes toward the end of the Reconstitution era, where elections were overthrown, and there was a concerted effort to intimidate voters with violence. Not only could it happen here in the US, it did happen here.

That being said, for years, those that have studied Nazi Germany of Soviet Russia have raised concerns about US politics. One book that I recommend is The Battle for Bonhoeffer by Stephen Haynes. Primarily Haynes is writing about the misuse of historical figures for current political ends. But at the end of the book, he has a section on legitimate concerns that Bonhoeffer scholars have about modern US politics. He tries to be very moderate in raising concerns, but the limited approach may be more helpful than a too-strong approach, and On Tyranny may sometimes verge into being too strong.

This is a short book. I listened to it on two long walks. There is value, but those aware of the history probably do not need it, and those unaware of the history may not believe it or will not pick it up.

Summary: A clinical psychologist discussed how our bodies and brains relate to one another (in an integrated way) and how that applies to helping children develop and mature.

I have sat with Brain-Body Parenting for over a week, trying to put my thoughts into words. My short review is that it is one of the best books I have read on parenting, and it is written with a tone of grace and encouragement. The chapter on self-care as a parent is excellent, and the ideas should be in most parenting books. And the broader message of the book that parenting is in large part helping children learn to regulate their emotions and responses, not to repress emotions or feelings but to express them well and appropriately is a great message. And naturally, if we as adults are going to help children regulate themselves, we need to work to address our own dysregulation. This is the central message of Raising White Kids and many other parenting or spiritual formation books.

All of that is good, but I still had a reaction to the book that was not entirely positive. I remember reading The Whole-Brain Child nearly a decade ago and being overwhelmed with how much work it felt like it was always to be taking into account everything all the time. NYT's article titled Welcome to the Era of Very Earnest Parenting a few days ago captures a part of my concern. The article takes seriously how seriously many Millennials are taking parenting. They want to get it right, in part because they think that their parents did not get it right. They felt misunderstood and wanted to understand their children.

But I am not a millennial. I am solidly Gen-X, even if my kids are still young. And I am concerned about the era of very earnest parenting, even if I support both the goals and the methods. There is nothing in Brain-Body parenting that I significantly object to. Taking children's developmental stages into account is essential. Helping them to name and regulate their emotions is important. Helping children process emotions properly to internalize change is better than fear-based punishment. All of that I want to support.

But as much as I am supportive and want to incorporate all of these things into my parenting and my dealing with others (children or adults), there is still a nagging sense that we have fallen into a technocratic ditch. Jacques Ellul raised concern about how modern society relies on technique or technology to solve problems. The goal of problems being solved is good. But the use of technique and technology to solve every problem and become ever more efficient and autonomous can make us less human. Ellul was concerned that instead of humans using tools to adapt the world around us to humanity, the tools would instead shape us to their ends. There is some anthropomorphizing there, but we can see it happening if we look at our smartphones. We are literally changing our bodies in response to our desire to use them as a tool.

Part of why this is coming up is my work in spiritual direction and formation. I believe in spiritual disciplines and the use of them to grow closer to God. We should be working internally on being formed to be like Christ. I think rightly done, “Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”

But at the same time, we often do not rightly do spiritual formation. Instead, we fall into the dangers of spiritual formation and attempt to manipulate God into blessing us in the ways we want to be blessed. We can use spiritual formation as a type of magic or enchantment to make God do our bidding instead of being formed to be more like Christ.

Our push toward being more efficient and “good at” everything can have the unintended result of making us less human when what it should do is make us more like Christ, the model of humanity.

I want to affirm again, this is an excellent book on parenting. I want to become a better parent because I want to help my children be better people. But I want to do it in the right way that doesn't make them into less human people. Humanity, by its very nature, is a limiting reality. There are no perfect people because humans are limited. James KA Smith's book The Fall of Interpretation helped affirm that while we are limited by sin, our limitation is a part of our created reality, not just a part of our fallen reality. If there were no sin in the world, we still would be limited. That means that if there were no sin in the world, we still would not have the capacity to be perfect parents because we cannot be all things to all people at all times. We have limitations.

I really want to help raise “joyful, resilient kids.” But in doing that and doing my best, I also need to accept that I will never be perfect at it. And that message really does come through in Mona Delahooke's writing. She writes with so much grace toward parents that are trying their best. But even as she writes on the page that you can only do what you can do as imperfect people, we have to actually internalize that part of the message, not just the “you can do better” part.

I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/brain-body-parenting/

Summary: Beatrice tries to understand this kingdom that she has awoken to. 

I am a fan of KB Hoyle's work. I have read everything she has written (at least the book-length work). I read or re-read eight of her books last year. I trust her to write books that I am going to enjoy.

Almost two months ago, she announced a surprise book. Around two years ago, she cofounded a small publishing house to focus on middle-grade books. I guess being a publisher and an author, you can quietly release a book without any advance notice if you want to. Because it was a surprise and I have been busy, it has taken me almost two months to read it.

I don't know how to write about The Queen of Ebenezer. In the description, The Queen of Ebenezer is compared to Piranesi, which is an accurate comparison. In both books, the main character does not know what is going on, so the reader is also lost because they rely on the main character's perspective. I have no issues with that style of book, but it makes it hard to write about because this is a book that spoilers will spoil.

There are two subtle things I want to note that are precisely what I like about Hoyle's writing. Plots are always well done with Hoyle; they are tight, there is always movement, and the plots are going somewhere. A good middle-grade or YA book must go somewhere to keep the reader engaged. The title uses a somewhat obscure word Ebenezer to name the land where Beatrice finds herself. Ebenezer is derived from Hebrew, and it is probably unknown among modern readers that are not Jewish or Christian. An Ebenezer is a mark of memory, especially a mark of divine help that you want to remember. In a book where the main character starts without a memory, the land of Ebenezer is a clue.

The second subtle nod is the name Beatrice as the main character. Beatrice is the name of the real woman to whom Dante dedicated the Divine Comedy to; and is the name of the fictional guide in the Paradiso portion of the poem. As a guide, she is showing the character of Dante in the poem divine grace as she shows him paradise or heaven. Most middle-grade or young adult readers will miss these two references, but Hoyle writes with depth that adult readers will find enticing. I have re-read most of Hoyles' books and always notice more in the books the second or third time.

I am only going to hint at the story. Beatrice awakens on an island and does not understand what is going on. It is a magical world that she knows is magical. But she does not remember a life previous to where she is now. But because she knows that the world is different from her expectations, she assumes she has lived elsewhere. Time doesn't work normally. And the boy she finds eventually does not seem to know how strange Ebenezer is. Beatrice has a role; when danger comes, she has to figure out what that role is.

The Queen of Ebenezer is a novella-length book that is relatively standard for the intended age range. I read it in three short sessions before bed. As always, I am looking forward to reading more by Hoyle.

Summary: A contextual and narrative history of the Plessey V Ferguson Supreme Court Ruling.

Part of what I appreciate about the framing of Separate is that Luxenberg takes great pains to point out segregation's national history, not just its Southern history. It is undoubtedly true that Plessy was arrested in Louisiana, and the movement in the 1880s and 90s for southern segregation was a response to the political realities and white supremacy of the post-reconstruction era. But segregated rail cars were first established in the 1840s in Massachusetts. Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Robert Small, and many other abolitions were removed (often forcefully and with significant harm) either from the train or to segregated cars. There is a good discussion of this history in the biographies linked above, but also a good part of Until Justice Be Done, about the movement for civil rights before the Civil War, is about the role of civil rights in transportation. Before the mid-20th century, virtually everyone that traveled used some paid transportation. Individual vehicles or even private horses or carriages were incapable of long-distance travel either because of cost or effort.

Like Heart of Atlanta: Five Black Pastors and the Supreme Court Victory for Integration by Ronnie Greene, also a book on a civil rights Supreme Court case written by a journalist, most of the book is about the context and facts of the case, not the legal decision. In fact, the discussion of the actual case and ruling doesn't happen until the final section, about 90 percent of the way through the book. This feature is both the best and worst part of the book. The extensive context is framed primarily around the biographies of Justice John Harlan (who wrote the dissent), Albion Tourgee, lead counsel for Plessy, and Henry Billings Brown, the author of the majority opinion. There were also biographical portions for Louis Martinet (who conceived of the suit as a test case) and Homer Plessy (the man who was arrested as part of the test case). And, of course, the history of segregated transportation and the New Orleans Creole community, which drove the case.

At the end of the book, I appreciate why Steve Luxenberg gave us all of the context, but the moving back and forth between the three main characters was sometimes confusing. (This is probably because I mostly listened to this on audiobook). And I very much appreciate the reality that Luxenberg points out that what killed reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and caused the result of Plessy was the actions of moderate Republicans as much as pro-segregationist southern Democrats. John Marshall Harlan's dissent in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 case was a preview of Plessy and is discussed in light of that. But in both cases, the only dissenter was Harlan, who was also the only Southerner on the court at the time.

Prior to reading Separate, I was not aware of most of the characters. I knew of Plessy by name and of the legacy of John Marshall Harlan, but I could not have named Henry Johnson as the author of the majority opinion, nor had I even heard of Albion Tourgee or Louis Martinet. The view that the federal government does not have the right to uphold the rights of Black citizens against state law with the power of the 13th, 14th or 15th Amendments I was familiar with because of Foner's exploration of the Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments in The Second Founding, but I think many alive today would not recognize the change in legal opinion since that time. That being said, the discussion is increasingly on the table again.

Anti-DEI laws, like what has recently been passed in Florida and what was passed last year in Georgia in a weaker form, places the rights of black and white students in conflict. It is not usually framed this way, but in Georgia (where I live and I am more familiar), state teacher certification rules have recently changed, removing the obligation of teachers to learn about diversity issues in education. Nationally approximately 80% of teachers are white, but only 45% of students are white. Removing the requirements of teachers to learn about teaching diverse student bodies would seem to violate the equal protection of students potentially. But the framing of the anti-DEI rules is that are protecting the rights of white students.

These issues will not be easy to solve going forward. But understanding the history of how we have gotten here, is important to understanding how we will move forward.

Summary: A history of the loosely defined movement known as the Underground Railroad in and around New York City.

Eric Foner is one of the preeminent historians of the Reconstruction era. His book on Reconstruction and his book on the Constitutional Amendments passed during Reconstruction are both well worth reading. I would classify Gateway to Freedom as a less critical but still helpful book. There is a lot of mythology around the Underground Railroad. Gateway to Freedom is working to demythologize how organized it was (it wasn't very organized) while maintaining that the work that was done was dangerous, especially for Black people (whether free or formerly enslaved).

Gateway to Freedom concentrates on New York City. It may not be well known, but New York City broadly supported slavery. The mayor of NYC at the start of the Civil War floated the idea of joining the Confederacy, mainly because so much of the economy of NYC was centered on slavery or products derived from slavery. According to another book I am currently reading, while there were many Black residents of NYC, Philadelphia had the largest Black population of any city in the US until well after the Civil War.

Several books I have read this year overlap with Gateway to Freedom in part. A new biography of Sojourner Truth has a lot of overlap because Sojourner Truth was a slave in New York until she left her enslaver and she sued for the freedom of her child. And she remained in New York for years later. Christian Slavery discusses several of the exact same events, most importantly, a slave rebellion in NYC and the movement of Christians to evangelize those who were enslaved, especially through educational outreach in NYC. Until Justice Be Done is about the movement for civil rights between the US Revolution and the start of Reconstruction, which is precisely the same period as Gateway to Freedom. Both books touch on issues of transportation, fugitive slave laws, and citizenship rights. And the biography of Thaddeus Stevens, even though he was not ever a resident of NYC, his biography also touches on similar issues. The ability to get different nuances of overlapping issues is very helpful.

Similar to one of my observations from reading fairly widely about the 20th-century civil rights movement, many of the important figures are fairly unknown. Many people know at least the names of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. But names like William Still and Sydney Gay are unknown to almost anyone. Trying to help free the enslaved was dangerous, but part of the story is the investment of their own time and financial resources, which meant they could not use that time or resources for other purposes. Those who worked with the Underground Railroad were often on the edge of poverty (if not in significant poverty themselves) because they gave their time and money to those needing help instead of keeping it for themselves.

Another point that keeps coming up in histories of this era is that while many white figures did give time and money, they often still did not face the same potential for physical violence. Legal processes were just different between racial groups. Also, many abolitionists opposed slavery but not white superiority. Few wanted to mix socially, for instance. A final brief point is that legal representation matters. One of the problems of the fugitive slave laws was that there were no due process rules in many cases. This allowed many people to be kidnapped into slavery because the assumption was that all Black people were presumed to be former slaves, and the courts, especially after the Dred Scott decision, did not accept any testimony of Black people. That being said, white lawyers like the Jay family, who did represent those that were being accused of being runaway slaves or those that were being discriminated against on public transportation, were significantly crucial to changing laws and public opinion. The law has always been both important to maintaining slavery, segregation, and discrimination as well as important to bringing an end to them.

Summary: A return to Narnia by the original four children, for them a year later.

After I read My Side of the Mountain and thought it wasn't quite right as a read-aloud for my kids, I picked up Prince Caspian. I have previously read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and we started, but they got bored with, The Horse and His Boy.

Prince Caspian has never been my favorite of the series, and it has been a long time since I have read it. The four Pevensie children were on their way back to their boarding schools roughly a year after their original trip to Narnia, and they were “called” back to Narnia. They discover eventually that it has been hundreds, if not thousands of years since their glorious reign. The country is now governed by a caretaker King who is part of a line that invaded Narnia and killed off many talking animals and magical creatures and who have largely lost the memory of the golden age.

Caspian is the rightful king in the line of the invaders. But his uncle is trying to take over. We discover that Caspian's father was killed by his uncle, and now that his uncle has had his own child, he plans to kill Caspian as well. But Caspian's tutor helps him escape. Their private tutoring sessions about the real history of Narnia have prepared Caspian to seek out the magical creatures. And together, they attempt to rebel against Caspian's uncle and recreate the type of kingdom that it was before. Much of the understanding of magic has gone. And Aslan has been largely forgotten, even by the Dwarfs and magical creatures.

In some ways, this feels like a story of the adoption of Prince Caspian into the story of Narnia. Caspian's family were invaders. They were not of the line of humans that have been part of Narnia. But Caspian is grafted into the line of the human kings. The imagery of adoption into the story feels like the adoption of Gentiles into the Jewish story. But there are problems with this reading. Narnia requires a human as ruler. So it feels to me like there is a level of supersessionism if this is the intended imagery of the story. I also tend to think that reading this with a post-colonial lens means that the talking animals and other magical creatures are often treated like colonized people who are incapable of self-rule and probably never will be because of a lack of capacity.

Caspian is a better story than I remember. I enjoyed it as a quick read to get me out of a reading slump I have been in. It is a good reminder that reading old books has benefits and problems. But there is value in being reminded of both.

Summary: A rhetorical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, I think, has had a minor renaissance in the public's imagination over the past few years. Kate Clifford Larson (who also has a biography of Harriet Tubman), Keisha Blain, and Maegan Parker Brooks all have new biographies of her in the last three years. There is also a children's picture book only a couple of years older. And PBS documentary of Hamer in 2022. Maybe it is more about who I am listening to and the era I tend to read about. (Jemar Tisby, who lives in the Mississippi Delta area and is a historian of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, talks about Hamer as one of his heroes).

I read Keisha Blain's short biography of Fannie Lou Hamer just over a year ago. Hamer was also a significant player in the biography of Stokley Carmichael. And many of the broader histories of the civil rights movement include discussions of Hamer's work and influence. But A Voice That Could Stir an Army is the most detailed look at her life, especially the rhetoric I have read so far. Blain's biography was intended to be a short, accessible introduction to Hamer at only 135 pages of the main text. Brooks' biography is just over 100 pages longer, and while much of the difference is a close analysis of Hamer's speeches, many details here help to round out Hamer's legacy.

I have not read a biography like A Voice That Could Stir an Army. It has traditional biographical details, but the main focus of the biography is understanding Hamer's rhetoric and how that rhetoric fits within the broader Black Freedom Movement. Hamer's participation in the civil rights movement came later than Rosa Parks or Ella Baker, although Hamer was only 3 and 14 years younger than they were.

Fannie Lou Hamer was tricked into signing an employment contract as a sharecropper at the age of six. She attended school between picking seasons; Black schools had a short school year to encourage children to work in cotton fields. At 12, she dropped out of school to help support her parents (although there was little access to high school for Black students then.) In 1944, she became the time and record keeper and soon after married her husband, Perry (Pap) Hamer. Fannie Lou was sterilized without her permission while being treated for a tumor, but they eventually adopted four children and partially raised a child from Pap's first marriage.

Hamer first heard a speech by Bob Moses of SNCC in 1962 at her local church. Moses was recruiting people to register to vote. This was Hamer's first understanding that voting was possible for her as a Black woman in Mississippi. She soon attempted to register to vote and was immediately fired from her job as a sharecropper. She attempted to register again and was forced to temporarily leave the county because of threats of violence against her and her family. It was her third attempt when she was allowed to register.

One of the details that I think many modern readers of that history will be surprised to learn is that the names of those attempting to register and who actually registered to vote were printed in local newspapers. This was very clearly intended as an intimidation tactic. Those that registered would lose their jobs and their future potential for jobs. Hamer's employer was called when she left the county courthouse on that first attempt. Her husband, who knew about the attempt, was notified of her firing and their eviction from their house before she could return from the county courthouse. Fannie Lou Hamer never again had a regular job in Sunflower County. She was hired by SNCC as a field organizer in part because there was no other work available to her.

Part of what is helpful about this biography is that Brooks traces some of the rhetorical shifts of the later civil rights era. Economics was always a part of the reality of racism. And the 1963 March on Washington was for “Jobs and Freedom.” But as legal segregation was dismantled, economic issues became more salient. It was not just that you could be individually economically retaliated against for attempting to vote but also that systems existed to maintain economic control. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer was initially able to get a contract for Head Start, and that program was managed and controlled by the black community. But while the Head Start continued, local and state officials worked to make the Head Start organization a contractor that worked under a white-controlled agency instead of being an independent nonprofit. It exactly points like this that eventually gave rise to Critical Race Theory, which looked explicitly at systems, not just individual actions. (And why Christians should understand Critical Race Theory well.)

Fannie Lou Hamer is somewhat of a tragic figure, not unlike Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks spent years in desperate poverty and in fear of violent retaliation after the bus boycott. Fannie Lou Hamer died at 59 of cancer, 15 years after starting to work on voting rights. She and her husband struggled to make ends meet. She did not seek care for her cancer earlier enough because of their poverty. One of her daughters died; she was denied treatment for internal bleeding because she was Fannie Lou Hamer's daughter. Fannie and Pap then raised their children as their adopted children because their father was disabled from injuries in the Vietnam War. Fannie Lou Hamer's last remaining (grand) child died of cancer just a few weeks ago at 56 years old. The other children died at 47, 53, and 64. (You can see family pictures here.)

Brooks paints a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer that is complex and nuanced. Hamer never wanted to be called a feminist. But as Brooks shows, her work paid attention to issues of gender and race in ways that could be considered an early version of intersectionality. She sought to help people with jobs by creating the Freedom Farm and Head Start program, but some of the management decisions (and the systems of the community as a whole) did not lead to long-term viability. Hamer pointed out issues of class both inside and outside of the Black community and was able to change national elections systems, but was not able to win any of the elections where she ran. He fought for health care for others but did not seek health care for herself early enough. As illustrated in At The Dark End of the Street, Hamer's life was an example of how sexism and sexual violence were part of the reality of Jim Crow-styled segregation and the civil rights movement.

Maegan Parker Brooks raises good questions about how Fannie Lou Hamer is often flattened in our memory of her. She is made into both a hero and an everyman persona. She is remembered for her speeches at the Democratic National Convention but less remembered for her lawsuits trying to force recognition of Black elected officials. She is remembered as a gifted speaker but is often portrayed as only speaking extemporaneously instead of working to develop her speaking skills and hone her speeches over time.

I look forward to reading another biography or two of Hamer in the future because the different retellings of her story do matter. But I strongly recommend this biography because it so clearly presents her as a figure with agency.

Summary: A young teen decides to escape his overcrowded NYC apartment and move to some family land in the Catskill Mountains. 

My children have not yet adopted my love of reading. I have started reading to them as we drive and am trying to find books I think they may enjoy. We are currently reading Anne of Green Gables, which they enjoy, but it has such long passages of flowery descriptive language. I picked up My Side of the Mountain recently when it was on sale and decided to read it to refresh my memory. I read it as a pre-teen, but I don't think I read it more than once or twice and not more recently than 35 years ago.

My Side of the Mountain follows Sam Gribley and his attempt to live on his own in the wilderness of the Catskills Mountains. He is living on abandoned family land, but it is remote. It is a long walk to the closest small town. The fantasy of running away is a common one for kids. I wondered what my children would think about a teen running away and his parents not seeking after him, at least not for months.

In some ways, I think the rash of TV devoted to survivalists over the past 20 years might have normalized this book in ways that it wasn't for my original reading. The problems solving is interesting. As an adult, it is a little too neat. Yes, he has read books about how to make a fishing hook, but putting that into practice is probably harder than it seems. The book opens with his difficulty building a fire and being taught how to do it. But there are few challenges that do not easily get solved. This is a book oriented toward late elementary or middle school. So there needs to be tension, but I don't expect to read tragedy.

Most of the book is about Sam, alone with his thoughts and a few animals. He is less lonely than I think many kids would be, but loneliness is a significant part of the book and its resolution. Visitors, and the modern world, spoil his fun. But this is framed as a book that is conscious of being part of the modern world but looking romantically back to an earlier age. I do not want to push books for not being what they are not intended to be. I don't think this would be written in this way if it were written today. No book written 50 years later would be precisely the same. But the absence of authorities being concerned for his welfare, not just parents, but also social services, would have to be accounted for somehow. There is no real place that is apart from the internet these days. If he could walk to a local town in a couple of hours, he would have cell service. And that would change the framing of the story.

As with almost all books I read as an adult that I first read as a child or teen, I am struck by how short this book is. It is listed as 208 pages on paper, but I think it took me about 3 hours to read. I was interested that there are more books in the series I did not know about, but they do not appear to have Kindle editions.

Summary: Two academics with pastoral experience process the potential help that Critical Race Theory can bring to the church.

If you are “very online” and active on social media, you likely have encountered discussions about Critical Race Theory. Similarly, if you are active in local school board meetings, you have likely seen community comments about the dangers of critical race theory in education. If this is true for you, you likely already know Christopher Rufo's work opposing CRT, which seems to have prompted Trump's executive order on CRT. And it is even more likely that you are aware of Rufo's tweets where he is explicit about rebranding CRT. One of those tweets says, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Rufo was late to the concern about CRT. Christians like Neil Shenvi started raising concerns about the related but different Critical Theory more than two years earlier, which resulted in a resolution from the SBC around Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality in 2019. And all of this was following the backlash to the increasing interest in addressing racism within the Evangelical Christian world. In 2018, The Gospel Coalition and the SBC public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, jointly hosted the MLK50 Conference on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This was closely followed by the Together for the Gospel Conference (T4G) giving significant time on the program to addressing racism, like this talk by Ligon Duncan.

Looking back, it appears that 2018 was the high point of the Evangelical church's willingness to speak publicly about race, and since that time, race has become a more complex topic to address publicly. However, even the 2018 conferences were too late because a month before the MLK50, the New York Times had an influential article about the Black exodus from predominately white Evangelical churches and institutions following the overwhelming support of Donald Trump by White Evangelicals.

This is probably too long of an introduction, but I think the context is essential to how I am reading Christianity and Critical Race Theory. I am no one important, but I have been involved in discussions around racial issues and the evangelical church for a long time. And I was active in those early online discussions about Critical Race Theory. I watched MLK50 and took my (then) three and four-year-old kids to the 50th anniversary of MLK's funeral in Atlanta. I spent years trying to get my predominately white church to more directly address racial issues more and have small groups and training on race. (I have been leading a small group that started as a Be the Bridge Group and continued for several years.) I have read books and articles by Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Crenshaw, and others.

I think many will not come with my background in Christianity and Critical Race Theory, and I can't read the book as if I did not have the background that I do. Christianity and Critical Race Theory's authors are particularly well positioned to write this book. Robert Chao Romero and Jeff Liou are both pastors. Both of them have an academic background that is relevant to the book. Romero has a Law degree and Ph.D. and is a Chicano/a and Central American Studies professor at UCLA. Jeff Liou is the director of theological formation for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and is a professor of Christian Ethics with a background in political theology, race, and justice. These authors are Christian Evangelical insiders with academic backgrounds involved in Critical Race Theory long before the recent interest. Romero has a good history of Latino Theology published by Intervarsity. And Liou's position with Intervarsity also shows his insider status.

The format of the book is a traditional reformed structure. The four main chapters examine how Critical Race Theory looks at Creation, Fall (sin), Redemption, and Consummation (Eschatology). There is a significant introduction and conclusion as well. But this is a brief book. As complicated as Critical Race Theory is, this is a good introduction in only 180 pages of the main text.

Like the authors, I think the real strength of Critical Race Theory, in its relationship to Christianity, is in identifying wrong (sin). Of course, CRT does not identify everything Christianity does as sin and vice versa. But that would be asking more than any one sociological approach could accomplish. But the fact that sin is identified, I think, is one of the most directly Christian things about CRT.

The first chapter (creation) is oriented toward diversity as a created reality of God, which will also be part of an eschatological reality. The main point of this first chapter is that all cultures and ethnicities have honor and, in some (limited) sense, reflect God's glory because they are made up of people who are created in the image of God. What is being pushed back against here is a hierarchy of culture as being part of the created order. CRT suggests that race is not a biological but a sociological reality. The creation of race was partly about creating cultural hierarchy, and the church largely embraced that understanding of culture. CRT can help see why that understanding is harmful and theologically wrong.

Chapter three, Redemption, is mainly about how as Christians, we need to see institutions as part of the created order. The authors do not phrase it this way, but Curtis Chang of the Good Faith Podcast regularly talks about institutions being made in the image of God, not just individuals. And I think CRT, because it is oriented toward institutions and systems, not individuals, fits in with Chang's description. This chapter mainly discusses Christian colleges and other Christian institutions and how they can help and harm. But, again, CRT is primarily a diagnostic tool and can help identify how our Christian institutions harm people of color, women, and other minority groups.

The final main chapter is about escatology and the Beloved Community. This is when the authors think CRT has the least to offer Christianity because they view it as lacking hope. This reminds me of Thabiti Anyabwile and Ta-Nehisi Coates's conversation about the role of hope back in 2015. I came away from that conversation thinking that while I theologically mostly agree with Thabiti, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates won the day because he suggests that he does not think that race relations in the US will fundamentally change in either his or his son's lifetime. However, he still works toward change even though he does not think the change will happen. Working toward change that you think will not happen in a hundred years is a type of hope that I think is undervalued. I believe theoretically in the eschatological end where Christ makes everything right. But similar to how I came away from the linked conversation, this chapter feels like it places too much value on the expectation of a future as being a particularly Christian ideal. In many ways, secular and religious people that are not Christians also have hope, even if it is not expressed in the same eschatological language.

I was on board before I started reading Christianity and Critical Race Theory. This book primarily reflects what I believe. I think the message should be read widely, especially by those who are overtly for a Christian view of social justice but have been influenced by the anti-CRT discussion. I have quibbles, but I think this is a book that does well reflecting orthodox Christian belief and an excellent academic understanding of Critical Race Theory.

The publisher provided me with an advance (PDF) copy of the book for purposes of review.

Summary: A good biography about a woman that many recognize but don't know much about.

For the past several years, I have joined the Renovare Book Club. The current book they are reading is The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. I was broadly aware of Sojourner Truth. I knew she was born enslaved, and at some point, she left slavery and sued for the freedom of a child. She won that case, one of the earliest examples of a formerly enslaved person winning a court case against a white person. I also was aware of her work as an abolitionist and feminist speaker and her most famous speech, “Ain't I a Woman.” But besides the very broad strokes, I was unfamiliar with her story. Because I knew her book was coming up, I picked up this recent addition to the Library of Religious Biography series to get some background.

Nancy Koester is a Christian history professor specializing in the 19th century, especially in how women participated in reform movements as a way of social uplift and ministry. Koester also has another volume in the Library of Religious Biography series on Harriet Beecher Stowe, which I have not read but put on my to-read list.

As I said yesterday in my review of Gateway to Freedom by Eric Foner about the Underground Railroad, several books I have read this year have overlapped in theme and content. Sojourner Truth was a character that was present in many 19th-century events. She was an abolitionist speaker who shared a stage with Garrison and Frederick Douglass. She was a part of early women's suffrage movements like the Akron Ohio Women's Convention in 1851, where she gave the Ain't I a Woman speech. She was involved in various Christian reform and utopian movements, including the Prophet Mathias, the Millerite Adventist camp meetings, the interracial commune-like Northampton Association of Education and Industry, and the later utopian communities around Battle Creek, Michigan.

Part of what struck me about her association with these utopian and perfectionist movements was that only these fringe movements would allow her to speak as a woman. She believed that soon after she originally left slavery with her infant daughter, she had a vision from Jesus that called her to preach. Her initial preaching was more spiritually oriented calls to repentance. But over time, justice and reform became a large part of her message, although she always understood her work as a type of ministry.

She was very interested in self-improvement as a formerly enslaved woman who worked with many former slaves before and after the Civil War. Sojourner Truth was enslaved in New York, where there were many slaves, but slavery there tended to be smaller and less specialized work. She cooked, cleaned, cared for children, and worked in the fields and with animals. In her later work for the Freedman's Beaurea, she realized that southern slavery was more specialized, leaving those former slaves less prepared for independent work because of the specialization and orientation toward field labor and less general labor. After the Civil War, when she was in her mid-60s, she continued to support herself through speaking and sales of her book, but like many others who had given their lives to the work of justice, she had not saved much for her later years, and by that point three of her five children had died, and the remaining two were more likely to need her support than able to support their mother.

The sexism and white superiority within both the abolitionist movement and the women's suffrage movement meant that Sojourner Truth often worked as a housekeeper to support her speaking instead of her speaking being enough to support her own livelihood. Before escaping slavery, she had five children. But as was common, children were sold. Koester has some details, but her children were likely the result of informal marriage and rape.

Her first partner, Robert, lived on a nearby farm. His enslaver objected to the relationship because Sojourner's enslaver would own any children. (At the time, Sojourner went by the name Isabell; it was only later that she chose Sojourner Truth.) Robert's owner and son beat Robert badly when he snuck to see Sojourner and forbid them from meeting again. Her enslaver, John Dumont, intervened to stop them from killing Roberts, but she never saw Robert again. He died a few years later, likely in his late 20s or early 30s. Truth's son, James, was the result of that relationship. Diana was the result of rape not long after but died in childhood. The final three children were with another enslaved man, Thomas, which seems likely to have been an arranged marriage by her enslaver.

John Dumont promised Isabell/Sojourner that if she continued to work well, he would free her a year before he was legally required to free her. After the birth of her youngest child, it became clear that Dumont would not free her as he had promised. One morning, just before dawn, Isabel/Sojourner took her daughter and just started walking. She eventually came to Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen's home, and they took her in. She worked for them until Dumont discovered her. Van Wagener paid Dumont $25 to keep him from taking her and the baby.

Not long after, Sojourner discovered that Dumont had sold her five-year-old son to an enslaver in Alabama, an act prohibited by the law. Sojourner walked to the courthouse and eventually found a lawyer willing to sue Dumont and the new owner to return her son. It took months, but he was returned, although he had been badly mistreated during that time. Soon after, she moved to New York City to earn more money to support herself and her children, although it doesn't appear that she ever had custody of all of her children at once.

Truth's story is far too long to recount fully, but it is extraordinary. I am about halfway through the Narrative of Sojourner Truth now. This autobiography was told in the third person (not unusual), but because Truth never learned to read or write, it was told to Olive Gilbert, who wrote the dictated autobiography. I am glad I am reading it with the additional context of reading a longer biography first. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is widely available since it is in the public domain. It is around 100 pages, although a few different versions are available.

One last note is that at the end of this biography, there are three different editions of Truth's speech Aint' I a Woman, along with a discussion about that context. The most well-known version uses a ‘slave dialect' more commonly associated with southern slave speech. Sojourner Truth was from New York, and her first language was Dutch. She didn't learn English until she was about nine years old, and the accent that she did have was a Dutch accent. Later editions have attempted to recreate the speech as it may have been without that interpretive lens.


My original review was posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/we-will-be-free/

Summary: A posthumously edited collection of sermons on Revelation, most from 1984. 

I am a big fan of Eugene Peterson. By my count, this is the 14th of Peterson's books I have read. And many of those I have read more than once. I will probably continue to pick up his books. This Halleluah Banquet was published in 2021. And four books are being published this year in his name (two devotionals that are edited from his writing and sermons, a sermon collection, and a new edition along with the audiobook of his book on David, Leap Over a Wall.)

I am not opposed to books being posthumously edited and released. I really enjoyed reading the novel Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy Sayers. It was not finished and lost until about 60 years after she died. It was found in some files of her lawyer and finished by Jill Paton Walsh. Similarly, I have picked up several books that the students of Henri Nouwen compiled from a mix of his notes, class lectures, and other materials. But at the same time, these edited works often lack the vitality of books written directly by the author.

Parts of This Hallelujah Banquet are worth reading (or listening to as I did). I largely agree with the interpretation of Revelation that is being taught here. It is far more common to be hearing about Revelation as guidance for living in oppression today than it would have been in 1984. Earlier generations of teaching about Revelation would have been oriented toward dispensationalism and seeking to “break the code” of the future prophecy. I remember attending “Prophecy Conferences” at a friend's church when I was a teen. Those conferences were full-on dispensational teaching with charts and images trying to show listeners how our current events fulfilled a 2000-year-old prophecy.

But at roughly the same time I was in those prophecy conferences, Eugene Peterson was teaching his church about Revelation not as a secret code for hidden spiritual knowledge but as insight on what it means to be human and Christian within an empire that was not oriented toward you. It took me years later to start hearing NT Wright and others reorient my approach to Revelation. If I had heard these sermons in 1984-91 when I was a pre-teen or high school student, they might have been new insights. But as a 50-year-old, these are no longer really particularly new insights.

I have not read Scot McKnight's new book on Revelation, but based on interviews I have read, I think I would probably recommend that book instead of this one. There is nothing wrong here. Even mediocre Eugene Peterson has some value. But it just didn't really carry the voice of Peterson's best works.