Scan barcode
adamrshields's reviews
1902 reviews
An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America by Jonathan Kozol
slow-paced
3.25
Summary: A brief book about the problems of education reform.
I picked this up because it was by Jonathan Kozol. I read several of his books in the 1990s and was a bit surprised that he had a new book out. Kozol turns 88 in Sept 2024 and his work on social justice and education should be celebrated. I am glad I read this because it was by Jonathan Kozol, but at the same time, if you are interested in the problems of education reform and especially how it negatively impacts Black or other racial minorities or poor students of all races, I would recommend Bettina Love's recent book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. I read it last year but did not write up my thoughts at the time because I was in a busy season. But it is a very helpful book that I think should be more widely read, not just among educators, but also among politically active people of all types of backgrounds.
An End to Inequality covers a number of different problems with public education from the physical environment (lead in water or paint, poor air circulation, heating, air, etc.) to curriculum to problematic reforms. I think one of the main themes of Bettina Love's book is handled well here. Generally, testing of educational reform programs is done at poor or minority schools. Any testing of educational reform at predominately white and higher income public schools are reforms that give students more options or freedom. While the reforms at lower-income and minority schools are reforms that are focused on more highly structured teaching models, narrower academic ranges of subjects, or economic efficiencies. Said another way, reforms at predominantly white and upper-income schools are designed to help students have more enjoyment at learning and reforms at lower-income and predominately minority schools tend to reduce educational enjoyment.
The main problem with this first third of the book is that the examples are presented anecdotally, not systemically. I completely believe that everything that he reports happened, but there isn't a structure to tell the reader how widespread these problems are or if they really are disproportionately impacting low-income and minority students. I think they are, I think there is plenty of evidence available in other sources to show that they are, but Kozol's standard format is to tell stories of particular students or teachers and that story-oriented structure tends to lack statistical underpinnings.
As he moves toward the policy prescriptions I think he blames administration (which deserves a lot of blame) too much. Toward the end of chapter five (Models of the Possible), he suggests that it isn't parents who oppose integration but administrators. This chapter largely recounts his time teaching in an optional school integration program in the 1970s. He had a supportive administrator who gave him flexibility with the curriculum and encouraged him to develop a love of learning. He describes what today would be called problem-based learning.
But I do think he is wrong about parents. While there are administrators who retrograde racial attitudes, I think the evidence is that parents play a significant role in maintaining segregation. School choice widens segregation. Parents' perception of school quality impacts housing values, and those perceptions are significantly impacted by how many minority students are in the school. Kozol notes that diverse schools are known to have better overall learning outcomes than segregated education, but that isn't the perception of parents. I think educators are likely to know that more than parents. However, like homework for elementary students, parents push for having elementary homework even as educators know it isn't helpful and can be harmful.
I agree with Kozol that the movement toward educational integration has largely stalled and that continuing school segregation, regardless of the cause, does harm to students. I think his comments about reparations are under-supported but still important. I am a regular listener to Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast that primarily focuses on Supreme Court and higher-level judicial opinions. Over the past few years that I have been listening, there have been a number of cases that impact school integration or affirmative action cases. And the two (pretty conservative) podcasters agree that racial issues are real within education and other segments of society. But that affirmative action and desegregation systems were designed mostly around fairness in access, not reparations. And current movements to reduce affirmative action or desegregation system are based on raw fairness now, not on historic reparations due to harm. The legal system understands repair, but that is not how affirmative action was largely framed as it came into being. I think Kozol is right that we need to reframe education reform around reparations and repair rather than fairness, but that is an underdeveloped topic in the book that I wish he had addressed more fully.
I listened to the audiobook and it was just over three hours with a Q & A at the end. If it were longer I probably would not have finished it. Again, if you are interested in school reform and willing to read about the problems of school reform, especially in how the reform movement can negatively impact students, read Punished for Dreaming instead.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/an-end-to-inequality/
I picked this up because it was by Jonathan Kozol. I read several of his books in the 1990s and was a bit surprised that he had a new book out. Kozol turns 88 in Sept 2024 and his work on social justice and education should be celebrated. I am glad I read this because it was by Jonathan Kozol, but at the same time, if you are interested in the problems of education reform and especially how it negatively impacts Black or other racial minorities or poor students of all races, I would recommend Bettina Love's recent book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. I read it last year but did not write up my thoughts at the time because I was in a busy season. But it is a very helpful book that I think should be more widely read, not just among educators, but also among politically active people of all types of backgrounds.
An End to Inequality covers a number of different problems with public education from the physical environment (lead in water or paint, poor air circulation, heating, air, etc.) to curriculum to problematic reforms. I think one of the main themes of Bettina Love's book is handled well here. Generally, testing of educational reform programs is done at poor or minority schools. Any testing of educational reform at predominately white and higher income public schools are reforms that give students more options or freedom. While the reforms at lower-income and minority schools are reforms that are focused on more highly structured teaching models, narrower academic ranges of subjects, or economic efficiencies. Said another way, reforms at predominantly white and upper-income schools are designed to help students have more enjoyment at learning and reforms at lower-income and predominately minority schools tend to reduce educational enjoyment.
The main problem with this first third of the book is that the examples are presented anecdotally, not systemically. I completely believe that everything that he reports happened, but there isn't a structure to tell the reader how widespread these problems are or if they really are disproportionately impacting low-income and minority students. I think they are, I think there is plenty of evidence available in other sources to show that they are, but Kozol's standard format is to tell stories of particular students or teachers and that story-oriented structure tends to lack statistical underpinnings.
As he moves toward the policy prescriptions I think he blames administration (which deserves a lot of blame) too much. Toward the end of chapter five (Models of the Possible), he suggests that it isn't parents who oppose integration but administrators. This chapter largely recounts his time teaching in an optional school integration program in the 1970s. He had a supportive administrator who gave him flexibility with the curriculum and encouraged him to develop a love of learning. He describes what today would be called problem-based learning.
But I do think he is wrong about parents. While there are administrators who retrograde racial attitudes, I think the evidence is that parents play a significant role in maintaining segregation. School choice widens segregation. Parents' perception of school quality impacts housing values, and those perceptions are significantly impacted by how many minority students are in the school. Kozol notes that diverse schools are known to have better overall learning outcomes than segregated education, but that isn't the perception of parents. I think educators are likely to know that more than parents. However, like homework for elementary students, parents push for having elementary homework even as educators know it isn't helpful and can be harmful.
I agree with Kozol that the movement toward educational integration has largely stalled and that continuing school segregation, regardless of the cause, does harm to students. I think his comments about reparations are under-supported but still important. I am a regular listener to Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast that primarily focuses on Supreme Court and higher-level judicial opinions. Over the past few years that I have been listening, there have been a number of cases that impact school integration or affirmative action cases. And the two (pretty conservative) podcasters agree that racial issues are real within education and other segments of society. But that affirmative action and desegregation systems were designed mostly around fairness in access, not reparations. And current movements to reduce affirmative action or desegregation system are based on raw fairness now, not on historic reparations due to harm. The legal system understands repair, but that is not how affirmative action was largely framed as it came into being. I think Kozol is right that we need to reframe education reform around reparations and repair rather than fairness, but that is an underdeveloped topic in the book that I wish he had addressed more fully.
I listened to the audiobook and it was just over three hours with a Q & A at the end. If it were longer I probably would not have finished it. Again, if you are interested in school reform and willing to read about the problems of school reform, especially in how the reform movement can negatively impact students, read Punished for Dreaming instead.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/an-end-to-inequality/
Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith by Elesha J. Coffman
4.25
Summary: An introduction to American Church history.
Mark Noll originally released his book Turning Points in Church History in 2001. (It is now in its 14th edition.) Elesha Coffman is writing a United States-focused version with the consent (and introduction) of Mark Noll. Noll is approaching 80 and still has the third in his history of the use of scripture series and several other books he is working on, and he says in the introduction that he didn't have the time or interest to do an American-focused turning points book.
As with any type of book like this, the choices of what are the turning points matter and will be debated. I think that this choices were good. She started with the Spanish Armada, which she framed as a starting point for English colonialism and a shift in global power. I might have started with the rise of Puritanism or the English Reformation, but all three of those starting points are related and led toward the English colonies in North America.
Coffman did a very good job contextualizing the different turning points. In this type of book, the turning points are a frame for looking at an era of history not just the thing itself. So Azusa Street Revival was not just about that event, but about the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the US and how they rippled through not just those denominations but also impacted Catholic and Episcopal charismatic reform movements as well.
She pays appropriate attention to women and minority Christian communities not just in discussion of the Black Church in chapter five (the founding of the first African American church at Silver Bluff) or the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the civil rights movement in chapter 12, but in all of the chapters. One of my complaints would be that I would have liked a chapter on the women’s rights movement. I probably would have chosen Sojourner Truth’s Aint' I a Woman speech as the framing device, but there are several appropriate alternatives.
I am also glad that she includes a chapter on Catholicism. Again, there always could be more. The problem with introductory survey books is limiting. I had a working knowledge of all of the areas, but I still learned something in every chapter. I think the “Muscular Missions” chapter on the student volunteer movement was well done and appropriately critical of the sexism and bias of the movement while speaking well of the positive intent of evangelism. I would have liked more discussion of how dispensationalism influenced much of that movement, but again, I know not everything can be included.
One last regret, again, I don’t think there was anything that should not have been included that was, but a discussion of the apocalyptic predictions of the end of the world with the Millerites I think was important. It was similarly placed with many new religious movements like the Mormons and the Christian Scientists and the Seventh Day Adventists and Shakers would have also been a helpful addition, but there already were 13 chapters those editorial decisions are hard.
I listened to this as an audiobook. It was something that I could dip in and out of so I spent a couple of months listening to a chapter here and there. I think mostly it was designed as a textbook, but this is very readable and especially if you do not have a lot of American church history, this is a very good place to start.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/turning-points-in-a...
Mark Noll originally released his book Turning Points in Church History in 2001. (It is now in its 14th edition.) Elesha Coffman is writing a United States-focused version with the consent (and introduction) of Mark Noll. Noll is approaching 80 and still has the third in his history of the use of scripture series and several other books he is working on, and he says in the introduction that he didn't have the time or interest to do an American-focused turning points book.
As with any type of book like this, the choices of what are the turning points matter and will be debated. I think that this choices were good. She started with the Spanish Armada, which she framed as a starting point for English colonialism and a shift in global power. I might have started with the rise of Puritanism or the English Reformation, but all three of those starting points are related and led toward the English colonies in North America.
Coffman did a very good job contextualizing the different turning points. In this type of book, the turning points are a frame for looking at an era of history not just the thing itself. So Azusa Street Revival was not just about that event, but about the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the US and how they rippled through not just those denominations but also impacted Catholic and Episcopal charismatic reform movements as well.
She pays appropriate attention to women and minority Christian communities not just in discussion of the Black Church in chapter five (the founding of the first African American church at Silver Bluff) or the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the civil rights movement in chapter 12, but in all of the chapters. One of my complaints would be that I would have liked a chapter on the women’s rights movement. I probably would have chosen Sojourner Truth’s Aint' I a Woman speech as the framing device, but there are several appropriate alternatives.
I am also glad that she includes a chapter on Catholicism. Again, there always could be more. The problem with introductory survey books is limiting. I had a working knowledge of all of the areas, but I still learned something in every chapter. I think the “Muscular Missions” chapter on the student volunteer movement was well done and appropriately critical of the sexism and bias of the movement while speaking well of the positive intent of evangelism. I would have liked more discussion of how dispensationalism influenced much of that movement, but again, I know not everything can be included.
One last regret, again, I don’t think there was anything that should not have been included that was, but a discussion of the apocalyptic predictions of the end of the world with the Millerites I think was important. It was similarly placed with many new religious movements like the Mormons and the Christian Scientists and the Seventh Day Adventists and Shakers would have also been a helpful addition, but there already were 13 chapters those editorial decisions are hard.
I listened to this as an audiobook. It was something that I could dip in and out of so I spent a couple of months listening to a chapter here and there. I think mostly it was designed as a textbook, but this is very readable and especially if you do not have a lot of American church history, this is a very good place to start.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/turning-points-in-a...
The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation by Michel Hendricks, Jim Wilder
4.0
Summary: A look at whole-brained discipleship which uses insights from recent neuroscience to help develop Christian maturity.
A good friend recommended The Other Half of the Church to me about a year ago, and I have only recently gotten around to reading it. Many insights were not new to me because of work that either my wife or I have done regarding parenting, trauma, and attachment, or child development. I want to start with the fact that overall, I am glad that this book was written, and I commend it, even if I am going to spend most of my time discussing areas where I have concerns. The insights here into character development, group identity and its role in correction, and deep relationships are all important. Because of my training as a spiritual director and a couple of professional associations of spiritual directors which I am a member of, I know that more academic books in similar areas are being written. No book can address all of the nuance and potential areas of misunderstanding, so I am looking forward to reading more books to address different aspects.
This is a book that is co-written by Jim Wilder and Michael Hendricks. Much of the book is written in Hendrick's voice, and he relates insights about spiritual formation and brain science from Jim Wilder. Part of what I appreciate about the framing of this book is that it is intentionally oriented toward a reader unfamiliar with the science. It is very accessible, and the authors know that stories are necessary to communicate not just the information but the meaning behind it.
Many will come to The Other Half of the Church with some background from gentle parenting (Whole Brained Child, Brain-Body Parenting, etc.) or insights from trauma, attachment, or adult emotional development. In many ways, I think discipleship is a bit late to the game with these insights. I also think that from my experience (which is obviously limited), many of my Gen X cohort or the Baby Boomers are less likely to have exposure to this type of whole-brained approach than the Millennial parents who have been at the forefront of the Gentle Parenting movement. Millennials are much more aware of trauma, abuse, and the science around those realities, which, again, have some overlap with the science discussed here.
The main content of the book is only about 200 pages. The first chapter describes the problem of how Christianity has shifted toward a right-brained, information-heavy orientation over the past several hundred years. Like many other chapters, I think this could have been much more developed. But again, I know this is designed as an introduction, and that whole books have been written in this area. However, one aspect that I think is not discussed and matters is that conscious theological and ecclesiastical decisions were made that oriented Christianity toward evangelism and away from a more holistic discipleship. Particularly because this was published by Moody Press (a historically dispensationalist publisher), I would have preferred at least some mention of how dispensationalism, especially an orientation toward the immanent return of Christ, fed into some of these discussions. (See Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism for more.)
Chapter two lays out the initial discussion about how people grow and introduces the metaphor of soil and plants that will carry through the whole book. I think this is a helpful metaphor. Plants grow not just because of light, water, and seed but the soil quality. The book suggests that many churches do not have healthy soil, so when people become Christians, it is not their fault for lack of growth because the soil they are in (the church community, theology, and people around them) is depleted of nutrients. This leads into the next three chapters of the different aspects of a healthy soil, joy, Hesed, and group identity. Again, all three could have more development, but they do have decent introductions. The Group Identity chapter (chapter 5) is my main complaint about the three.
As noted later in the book, group identity can be positive or negative. However, despite the later expansion of how group identity can be unhealthy, I do not think adequate attention has been paid to a more robust understanding of community and culture concerning group identity. In particular, Christians often have a very hierarchical understanding of Christianity (not what is presented in the book) that I think needs to be taken into account as part of what it means to have a safe Hesed community. Hierarchical thinking about race, culture, or gender is very common in Christian communities, and without addressing those directly, the later Healthy Correction chapter can’t work.
Again, I am not saying that the authors of The Other Half of the Church don’t know this, but that they are writing an introduction, and this is an area that I think needs to be developed more fully to implement the ideas in the book. NT Wright’s biography of Paul talks about how Paul encouraged boundary crossing, and the early church intentionally called Christians to view the boundaries between gender, economics or social status, and ethnicity as permeable within the Christian community. Paul was able to do this because he reframed their identity as being one in Christ. Today, some also try to do a similar thing, but they do it in a way that denies the existence of social divisions. Some go as far as claiming that to identify harm from social divisions is to deny Christ. Because of this reality, I think that a lack of grappling with those social realities does a disservice to women, racial or sexual minorities, people of different immigration or class backgrounds, etc.
Without a more robust understanding of how gender, economics, class, disability, race, and other issues work in the modern world, there can’t be a healthy community that can call people to a better group identity. One of my other concerns about group identity is that the history of the Homogenous Unit Principle within the church growth movement has a very sketchy history. It was very much used to perpetuate segregation, to enable white normative churches and culturally homogenous churches, not just as a method but as the only God-ordained way for churches to operate. The very nature of Hesed as it is being used here, I think, means that a church that is unwelcoming to a particular demographic would make me question whether it could be practicing Hesed as intended. But at the same time, many churches that have been discipling people for generations discipled them into belief in segregation. So there is a lot of history that has to be unpacked there.
One of the other red flags for me in The Other Half of The Church is the repeated and regular call to think of the church as a family. The family metaphor is common in scripture, and I don’t want to dismiss what the authors are trying to do by using the family metaphor, but it is hard not to see family as a red flag. Many unhealthy churches or Christian non-profits consciously use family language as a type of hierarchical dominance. That violates the principle of Hesed presented earlier in the book, but it has to be named.
Many unhealthy Christian communities use biblical language in unhealthy ways, which then impacts the ability to use that language in healthy ways. It is similar to the discussions of “evangelical.” Many who like the term evangelical point to the theological meaning, the root of the word, which means to share the gospel. But those who resist the term note that it is often understood now as a racially coded political marker or a consumer identity group. Again, the book does mention that group identities can be negative, but I think part of the nature of introductions to topics is that they can’t get into as much detail as is necessary if you were going to fully develop a concept. In this case, I suspect that many people who may be interested in the concepts of the book have not grappled enough with their understanding of race, gender, culture, or class and will attempt to incorporate cultural preferences within their group identity in ways that can harm other Christians.
The book's most important chapter is chapter six, which discusses how people develop character through health correction. I do not like the chapter's subtitle (stop being so nice), but I appreciate the main point. In summary, people need some “healthy or appropriate” shame to be motivated to change emotionally. When we focus on behavior management, it uses conscious thought as a means of behavior change. There can be some value to that, but the deeper, preconscious thought change that is possible has to be done at a deeper level than simply conscious behavior change. This requires engaging that deeper emotion, and that can only be done well if the “soil” (Hesed, joy, and group identity) allows a person to be safe in a relationship to know that the change they are being called to will draw them into the community not be shunned or alienated from the community.
I have many personal antidotes where I think this happened to me. I remember someone talking to me about not using the idea of all women being treated well because they were all someone’s “wife, sister, mother or daughter.” There was a sense of shame when he explained that it only gave them humanity through their relationship with other men. I had emotional resistance to correction, and at the moment, I do not think I responded well (although I don’t remember my response. What I remember was: 1) a sense of shame that I hadn’t already understood that. 2) clear knowledge that even if I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it, I knew he was right. 3) a conviction that I needed to change. I can remember corrections from a seminary professor and friends and a number of corrections from people on social media, where I also had similar reactions. While I do think that a close community is the best place for correction, I do think that when people are open to it, and it is framed as a call to identify (something like, “as Christians, we talk about people in this way”), it can still work without in-person relationship. (But I also know these things can go quite badly.)
The final two chapters—a good discussion of the problem of narcissism within the Christian community and a concluding chapter that pulls together all of the previous chapters—round out the book.
Again, I think this is a very helpful book. My complaints largely concern what is not here or not developed enough. But this is intended as an introduction, so I don’t want to complain about what is not here and that this was written to the audience that it was. I have some comments on several of my highlights that you can see here in places where I have concerns beyond what I have raised here. (I mostly listened to this as an audiobook, and I did not realize it wasn’t synced with the Kindle when I got it. So, all of the highlights and comments I made, I had to find in the Kindle.)
I also want to link to my post on Brain-Body Parenting because I am concerned about how whole-body parenting or discipleship can become a technique in the Ellul sense of the term. I think my concern there applies here as well.
Update: I wanted to add a quick update. On of the areas where I think there is a need for a follow up book or a book by someone else is to work through spiritual practices in light of neuroscience. I think this is part of what is going on with Trauma in the Pews where Janyne McConnaughey riffs off of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and talks about how traditional spiritual disciplines are impacted by developmental trauma. But I think there is a need for a more general book. The Other Half of the Church talks briefly about how spiritual practices are part of developing character but does not go into any details. One of the problems is that this book is written for Evangelicals, and many Evangelicals do not have a connection to the history of spiritual disciplines outside of those that may have been connected to Richard Foster or Renovaré. Part of what I think should be avoided in a book on spiritual disciplines and neuroscience is to think that we are rediscovering ancient practices as if the church hadn’t been doing them all along, or that it evaluates them solely on modern science. For instance, I think that The Prayer of Examen is a personal exercise that fits in with the understanding of corporate character development presented in The Other Half of the Church. When done in the traditional we invite God to help us, we reflect on our actions. This will include time to “metabolize shame,” as discussed here, and then we pray for grace to move forward as a new person. My experience is that Catholic presentations of the Prayer of Examen are much more oriented toward grace and less oriented toward “do better” framings than Evangelical presentations of the Prayer of Examen that I have seen. Mindfulness and contemplative prayer, as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing, are also examples of Christian spiritual disciplines which long predate modern understandings of neuroscience but which are doing things that neuroscience confirms as being helpful to maturity in Christ.
This was originally posted on my blog at: https://bookwi.se/the-other-half-of-the-church/
A good friend recommended The Other Half of the Church to me about a year ago, and I have only recently gotten around to reading it. Many insights were not new to me because of work that either my wife or I have done regarding parenting, trauma, and attachment, or child development. I want to start with the fact that overall, I am glad that this book was written, and I commend it, even if I am going to spend most of my time discussing areas where I have concerns. The insights here into character development, group identity and its role in correction, and deep relationships are all important. Because of my training as a spiritual director and a couple of professional associations of spiritual directors which I am a member of, I know that more academic books in similar areas are being written. No book can address all of the nuance and potential areas of misunderstanding, so I am looking forward to reading more books to address different aspects.
This is a book that is co-written by Jim Wilder and Michael Hendricks. Much of the book is written in Hendrick's voice, and he relates insights about spiritual formation and brain science from Jim Wilder. Part of what I appreciate about the framing of this book is that it is intentionally oriented toward a reader unfamiliar with the science. It is very accessible, and the authors know that stories are necessary to communicate not just the information but the meaning behind it.
Many will come to The Other Half of the Church with some background from gentle parenting (Whole Brained Child, Brain-Body Parenting, etc.) or insights from trauma, attachment, or adult emotional development. In many ways, I think discipleship is a bit late to the game with these insights. I also think that from my experience (which is obviously limited), many of my Gen X cohort or the Baby Boomers are less likely to have exposure to this type of whole-brained approach than the Millennial parents who have been at the forefront of the Gentle Parenting movement. Millennials are much more aware of trauma, abuse, and the science around those realities, which, again, have some overlap with the science discussed here.
The main content of the book is only about 200 pages. The first chapter describes the problem of how Christianity has shifted toward a right-brained, information-heavy orientation over the past several hundred years. Like many other chapters, I think this could have been much more developed. But again, I know this is designed as an introduction, and that whole books have been written in this area. However, one aspect that I think is not discussed and matters is that conscious theological and ecclesiastical decisions were made that oriented Christianity toward evangelism and away from a more holistic discipleship. Particularly because this was published by Moody Press (a historically dispensationalist publisher), I would have preferred at least some mention of how dispensationalism, especially an orientation toward the immanent return of Christ, fed into some of these discussions. (See Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism for more.)
Chapter two lays out the initial discussion about how people grow and introduces the metaphor of soil and plants that will carry through the whole book. I think this is a helpful metaphor. Plants grow not just because of light, water, and seed but the soil quality. The book suggests that many churches do not have healthy soil, so when people become Christians, it is not their fault for lack of growth because the soil they are in (the church community, theology, and people around them) is depleted of nutrients. This leads into the next three chapters of the different aspects of a healthy soil, joy, Hesed, and group identity. Again, all three could have more development, but they do have decent introductions. The Group Identity chapter (chapter 5) is my main complaint about the three.
As noted later in the book, group identity can be positive or negative. However, despite the later expansion of how group identity can be unhealthy, I do not think adequate attention has been paid to a more robust understanding of community and culture concerning group identity. In particular, Christians often have a very hierarchical understanding of Christianity (not what is presented in the book) that I think needs to be taken into account as part of what it means to have a safe Hesed community. Hierarchical thinking about race, culture, or gender is very common in Christian communities, and without addressing those directly, the later Healthy Correction chapter can’t work.
Again, I am not saying that the authors of The Other Half of the Church don’t know this, but that they are writing an introduction, and this is an area that I think needs to be developed more fully to implement the ideas in the book. NT Wright’s biography of Paul talks about how Paul encouraged boundary crossing, and the early church intentionally called Christians to view the boundaries between gender, economics or social status, and ethnicity as permeable within the Christian community. Paul was able to do this because he reframed their identity as being one in Christ. Today, some also try to do a similar thing, but they do it in a way that denies the existence of social divisions. Some go as far as claiming that to identify harm from social divisions is to deny Christ. Because of this reality, I think that a lack of grappling with those social realities does a disservice to women, racial or sexual minorities, people of different immigration or class backgrounds, etc.
Without a more robust understanding of how gender, economics, class, disability, race, and other issues work in the modern world, there can’t be a healthy community that can call people to a better group identity. One of my other concerns about group identity is that the history of the Homogenous Unit Principle within the church growth movement has a very sketchy history. It was very much used to perpetuate segregation, to enable white normative churches and culturally homogenous churches, not just as a method but as the only God-ordained way for churches to operate. The very nature of Hesed as it is being used here, I think, means that a church that is unwelcoming to a particular demographic would make me question whether it could be practicing Hesed as intended. But at the same time, many churches that have been discipling people for generations discipled them into belief in segregation. So there is a lot of history that has to be unpacked there.
One of the other red flags for me in The Other Half of The Church is the repeated and regular call to think of the church as a family. The family metaphor is common in scripture, and I don’t want to dismiss what the authors are trying to do by using the family metaphor, but it is hard not to see family as a red flag. Many unhealthy churches or Christian non-profits consciously use family language as a type of hierarchical dominance. That violates the principle of Hesed presented earlier in the book, but it has to be named.
Many unhealthy Christian communities use biblical language in unhealthy ways, which then impacts the ability to use that language in healthy ways. It is similar to the discussions of “evangelical.” Many who like the term evangelical point to the theological meaning, the root of the word, which means to share the gospel. But those who resist the term note that it is often understood now as a racially coded political marker or a consumer identity group. Again, the book does mention that group identities can be negative, but I think part of the nature of introductions to topics is that they can’t get into as much detail as is necessary if you were going to fully develop a concept. In this case, I suspect that many people who may be interested in the concepts of the book have not grappled enough with their understanding of race, gender, culture, or class and will attempt to incorporate cultural preferences within their group identity in ways that can harm other Christians.
The book's most important chapter is chapter six, which discusses how people develop character through health correction. I do not like the chapter's subtitle (stop being so nice), but I appreciate the main point. In summary, people need some “healthy or appropriate” shame to be motivated to change emotionally. When we focus on behavior management, it uses conscious thought as a means of behavior change. There can be some value to that, but the deeper, preconscious thought change that is possible has to be done at a deeper level than simply conscious behavior change. This requires engaging that deeper emotion, and that can only be done well if the “soil” (Hesed, joy, and group identity) allows a person to be safe in a relationship to know that the change they are being called to will draw them into the community not be shunned or alienated from the community.
I have many personal antidotes where I think this happened to me. I remember someone talking to me about not using the idea of all women being treated well because they were all someone’s “wife, sister, mother or daughter.” There was a sense of shame when he explained that it only gave them humanity through their relationship with other men. I had emotional resistance to correction, and at the moment, I do not think I responded well (although I don’t remember my response. What I remember was: 1) a sense of shame that I hadn’t already understood that. 2) clear knowledge that even if I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it, I knew he was right. 3) a conviction that I needed to change. I can remember corrections from a seminary professor and friends and a number of corrections from people on social media, where I also had similar reactions. While I do think that a close community is the best place for correction, I do think that when people are open to it, and it is framed as a call to identify (something like, “as Christians, we talk about people in this way”), it can still work without in-person relationship. (But I also know these things can go quite badly.)
The final two chapters—a good discussion of the problem of narcissism within the Christian community and a concluding chapter that pulls together all of the previous chapters—round out the book.
Again, I think this is a very helpful book. My complaints largely concern what is not here or not developed enough. But this is intended as an introduction, so I don’t want to complain about what is not here and that this was written to the audience that it was. I have some comments on several of my highlights that you can see here in places where I have concerns beyond what I have raised here. (I mostly listened to this as an audiobook, and I did not realize it wasn’t synced with the Kindle when I got it. So, all of the highlights and comments I made, I had to find in the Kindle.)
I also want to link to my post on Brain-Body Parenting because I am concerned about how whole-body parenting or discipleship can become a technique in the Ellul sense of the term. I think my concern there applies here as well.
Update: I wanted to add a quick update. On of the areas where I think there is a need for a follow up book or a book by someone else is to work through spiritual practices in light of neuroscience. I think this is part of what is going on with Trauma in the Pews where Janyne McConnaughey riffs off of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and talks about how traditional spiritual disciplines are impacted by developmental trauma. But I think there is a need for a more general book. The Other Half of the Church talks briefly about how spiritual practices are part of developing character but does not go into any details. One of the problems is that this book is written for Evangelicals, and many Evangelicals do not have a connection to the history of spiritual disciplines outside of those that may have been connected to Richard Foster or Renovaré. Part of what I think should be avoided in a book on spiritual disciplines and neuroscience is to think that we are rediscovering ancient practices as if the church hadn’t been doing them all along, or that it evaluates them solely on modern science. For instance, I think that The Prayer of Examen is a personal exercise that fits in with the understanding of corporate character development presented in The Other Half of the Church. When done in the traditional we invite God to help us, we reflect on our actions. This will include time to “metabolize shame,” as discussed here, and then we pray for grace to move forward as a new person. My experience is that Catholic presentations of the Prayer of Examen are much more oriented toward grace and less oriented toward “do better” framings than Evangelical presentations of the Prayer of Examen that I have seen. Mindfulness and contemplative prayer, as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing, are also examples of Christian spiritual disciplines which long predate modern understandings of neuroscience but which are doing things that neuroscience confirms as being helpful to maturity in Christ.
This was originally posted on my blog at: https://bookwi.se/the-other-half-of-the-church/
Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation by Cindy S. Lee
4.5
Summary: Exploring how our spiritual formation needs to be decoupled from western culture.
I am not sure I can describe Our Unforming better than an edited quote from the introduction.
“For all my life, I’ve read books on spiritual formation written by white authors and internalized their experiences of God as the norm and even as the authority. In recent centuries, our spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions. In that process, Western voices have generalized what spiritual formation is for all of us. The way we teach formation in the church is heavily influenced by Western values—such as individuality, dualism, and linear thinking—and Western history like colonialism, the Enlightenment, and industrialization. Even the African roots of early church fathers and mothers have often been ignored when interpreted through a white male lens…I want to untangle and de-westernize the ways my soul has been distorted by the disproportionate influence of Western authority in the church. This does not mean disregarding our long and rich history of Christian spiritual traditions. Rather, we need to recognize that our current understanding of spiritual formation is limited because it was developed under a dominant Western cultural tradition.
Our Unforming is largely written to racial minority Christians who are grappling with the ways that they have distorted themselves to fit into western or white molds. But Cindy Lee is also writing for people like me (a middle-aged, middle-class, white, male, heterosexual, seminary-trained spiritual director). She is pointing out areas where our language and practice of spiritual formation may be more culturally constrained than we understand. It complements books like Karen Swallow Prior’s Evangelical Imagination (about how many of our Evangelical norms are rooted in Victorian culture) or Barbara Holmes’Joy Unspeakable about the particular contemplative practices of the Black church. And if pastors or spiritual directors are going to work in diverse communities, they need to be aware of where their biases toward white or western normative ideas or practices are constraining their ability to serve the people they serve.
I believe we need a more robust spirituality for our times. Our spiritual practices need to be reimagined as our communities become increasingly diverse. We need a spirituality not detached from reality but one that takes seriously the injustices and disparities of our societies. We also need to be re-formed in order to discover the sacred in one another. Sadly, voices are missing from this conversation. We need to hear from one another and make space for one another so we can evolve and mature into a more dynamic spiritual community.
Books like this make explicit the ways that we constrain people by not exploring our biases. The quick vignette below reveals one way our culture denies our human limitations.
I still remember the words that began my unforming. An Asian American pastor and mentor, Dan, once said to me, “One day you’ll make a big mistake, but the people around you will love you anyway. On that day, you’ll be free, and you’ll be able to more fully receive God’s love for you.” These words continue to resonate in my soul. They reveal to me how easily I can get caught up in the drive for flawless performance, even in spiritual things. The push for perfection in performance is not just a Western trait, but it has become the standard for modern culture, no matter where we are in the world. The strength of a linear cultural orientation in spirituality is that it is optimistic, hopeful, and focused on growth. Even in suffering and grief, we can soothe our pain with the belief that God can use our sufferings for good. We expect positivity and growth even in the deepest of sufferings. The drawback of a linear orientation is when things don’t go as planned, when life turns messy and complicated, we lack the spiritual vocabulary and depth needed to navigate.
One of the main refrains that I keep at the front of my thoughts when I think about my spiritual direction practice is that grace has to be the center. As Cindy Lee says, “A “just work harder” society creates a “just work harder” religion.” We need to help people see that while spiritual practices have value, western default thinking about spiritual practices tends to think of them as work to be completed so we can achieve self-mastery. A grace-centered orientation doesn’t try to get people to work harder to find God, but that is explicitly what many western Christians say.
A well-known Christian leader that everyone would know directly said in his book on prayer that people who know more pray better. Cindy Lee rightly counters by pointing out this weakness:
…the Western church has tried to limit spirituality to the mind by suppressing or neglecting the body. Western Christianity starts with the premise that forming right beliefs will lead to right practices, right morals, and a right society.
It is not just the explicit orientation toward knowledge that is a problem. Even relatively aware Christians who have studied missiology and culture often default to hierarchical thinking that biases western thought by assuming “contextualization” is a type of translation that makes western ideals local instead.
The work ahead to unform our spirituality, however, requires that we break free from these Western parameters. Sometimes this task is referred to as “contextualization.” Contextualizing, however, still assumes that the Western way is the standard way, and all other ways are creative deviations. The work of unforming and re-forming our souls is not contextualization. We are not taking Western norms and adding ethnic expressions. We are going back to what the missionaries should have done in the first place, to allow our experiences of God to be fundamentally changed by sitting and learning from one another. Carvalhaes writes that historically colonized communities still find subversive and creative ways to reimagine worship and liturgy, and we need to learn from these expressions. He writes, “While empires and colonization processes tried to fix rituals as a way of controlling senses, understandings, and bodies, colonized people have always intervened in these processes, creating, rebelling, challenging, undoing, and redoing.” These practices are ways in which colonized people have tried to break free from Western-controlled spaces. Carvalhaes states that we can reclaim our spiritual practices through other forms of knowing, such as attending to our bodily movements, senses, and emotions as expressions of our spirituality.
I could easily continue this as a long quote review, but I will only share one more. Over the past year, I have been researching Christian discernment in particular. There is a good chapter that is largely about discernment that I very much commend. But central to that chapter is this important reminder. “The practice of listening to ourselves is a reminder that we are worthy of being listened to.” Lee rightly notes that one of the largest problems of western default thinking is that it creates hierarchical assumptions where non-white or non-western people are taught to mistrust their own thoughts because they are not white or western. It is central to discernment to learn to trust our own thoughts and feelings and rightly name them so that we can begin to discern where God is speaking to us.
This is a brief book but I intentionally did not read more than a chapter at a time because it is a book that I needed to think about and not just quickly move on to the next idea.
One additional note: This is not a “deconstruction book,” but I do think that it would be helpful for many people who are consciously in a deconstruction mode to think through how their assumptions may be culturally constrained and while they may be aware of how politics or relational abuse or other issues have impacted them, that deconstruction work should also look at areas of faith and spirituality where they may be less conscious of work that needs to be done. Books like this I think can help make the deconstruction process easier in the long term because it gets at underlying issues, not just those issues which are most visible.
The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation by Daniel G. Hummel
The early teachers of what became dispensationalism were dissenters, and that is a deep irony about what became a populist movement.
It was not multiple generations from original teaching to a more populist movement but an almost immediate shift.
What stuck was the premillennialism, the literal hermeneutic of bible reading, the idea of dispensations (especially the part that we were living in the most important dispensation before Christ’s return), and an adaptation of covenantal thinking that viewed American exceptionalism as a type of covenant with God. Tied with this in many cases was a supersessionism that viewed Christianity or even American Christians as a new Israel, all the while seeking for Israel to gain its own country again to make the second coming of Christ happen. Again, there is a lot of nuance here that I can’t detail, but it does make the book well worth reading.
The rise of what became dispensationalism in the US was very much tied to the context of the post-Civil War conflict. White sectional reconciliation fits well with dispensationalist teaching.
The reality of race and gender, as I have mentioned, was important to the way that dispensationalism developed, but also so were technological innovations like the development of bible concordances, radio evangelism, and the money from extractive industries which helped to fund dispensationalist institutions.
The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is already a fairly long book, but I still wanted more at points. I think that the explanatory power of the sectional reconciliation efforts after the Civil War is important, but having read David Blight’s Race and Reunion, I was somewhat surprised about how much the two books complemented one another with so very little overlap. Race and Reunion had very little on religion, and The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism could have used more political and social history to give details on the social reasons for dispensationalism's spread.
I always want more people to know about the problematic parts of Evangelical history. I am connected with Moody Church. I have worked consulting with a non-profit started out of Moody Church for over 20 years. One of the pastors of Moody Church (A. Clarence Dixon) was Thomas Dixon's brother. Thomas Dixon was also a pastor, but he is better known as the author of The Clansman, the book on which the movie The Birth of a Nation was based. That deeply racist book and movie gave rise to the rebirth of the second generation of the KKK.
I can't easily summarize the history shared in a more than 500-page history, but I do want to skip to the end for a few small points. First, there is a difference between the "Scholastic Dispensationalism," which is taught as a system and attempts to be theologically consistent, and the pop culture dispensationalism of the Left Behind books or movies. Hummel argues (and it is hard to dispute) that the last gasp of the more theologically sophisticated dispensationalism was in the 1990s. Dallas Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School are no longer strongly dispensational. The Evangelical Free Church denomination removed requirements for dispensational premillennialism from its statement of faith. At the same time that the more theologically sophisticated dispensationalism was dying off, the more pop-culture-oriented vague premillennialism, which did not have a coherent theological system, spread but also had less theological impact.
There are many lessons to be learned here. Similar to my thoughts on Hot Protestants, we are not in as unique of a time as many think. When we attempt to change culture through media and expressions of power, we often are more changed by culture than we realize. And backlash is real. I am slowly working through a history of Prohibition, and dispensational theology that influenced that movement. There were a variety of groups that worked together for prohibition, and many had good motives. But they did not work to build wide consensus as much as use tricks to get bills passed that alienated opponents. That comes up here inside the church as well as in secular politics. Race, gender, class and other power issues need to be paid attention to. Those categories (and others) are often blind spots to the church but still impact how theology and church structures develop.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/dispensationalism/
4.5
Summary: A history of Dispensationalism from Darby to pop culture.
I did not grow up in a strongly dispensationalist church. But as I reflected throughout the book, I was surprised to learn how many institutions, communities, and preachers who were important to me were influenced by dispensationalism. The strength of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is that it does not fall into caricature but is carefully nuanced about the various streams of Christianity influenced by dispensationalism.
As someone who was a child and teen in the late 70s and early '80s, I was aware of movies like The Thief in the Night, even if I was too young to be strongly influenced by them. I know several people who were freaked out by the scare tactics of that era of dispensationalism, but I tended toward questions or avoidance rather than direct fear. I was more attracted to “Scholastic Dispensationalism” than pop culture dispensationalism. A friend of mine’s was a pastor’s kid at a local Evangelical Free Church. I went to a lot of their youth group activities, and I can remember going to their annual “prophecy conferences” and can remember the charts and explanations of the details of the end times as a teen and preteen. That nearly gnostic idea of the secrets that you can learn if you only follow the right teachers were more of a temptation to me.
I am hesitant to simplify because the complex story is so interesting, but the overly simplified story is that from Darby to Moody to fundamentalism to the rise of the scholastic Dispensationalists to the pop culture dispensationalists, there was an almost continual simplification of the ideas of dispensationalism from a complex system of anti-institutionalist thought toward simpler and simpler premillennialism. That simplified story is too simple, but there is a thread there that as people found parts of the theological ideas to accept and parts to discard, the beloved parts by the earlier generation were usually discarded in favor of an easier-to-explain system.
A simple chart or image is more attractive than a complex multi-page chart. But the thicker theological thinking went in the opposite direction. Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind, but that does seem to be what is shown here. While movements tried to take the more theological seriously, the dominant streams of dispensationalism were the imagery of an imminent return of Christ, which contributed to a passion to evangelize and reach the world for Christ.
The complex picture here takes seriously the problems of race, gender, and class while not distorting the more positive intent of evangelism. I had so many highlights, including very long highlights, because the nuanced story is complex. This long quote I think, gives a good sense of the story that this book attempts to tell:
I did not grow up in a strongly dispensationalist church. But as I reflected throughout the book, I was surprised to learn how many institutions, communities, and preachers who were important to me were influenced by dispensationalism. The strength of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is that it does not fall into caricature but is carefully nuanced about the various streams of Christianity influenced by dispensationalism.
As someone who was a child and teen in the late 70s and early '80s, I was aware of movies like The Thief in the Night, even if I was too young to be strongly influenced by them. I know several people who were freaked out by the scare tactics of that era of dispensationalism, but I tended toward questions or avoidance rather than direct fear. I was more attracted to “Scholastic Dispensationalism” than pop culture dispensationalism. A friend of mine’s was a pastor’s kid at a local Evangelical Free Church. I went to a lot of their youth group activities, and I can remember going to their annual “prophecy conferences” and can remember the charts and explanations of the details of the end times as a teen and preteen. That nearly gnostic idea of the secrets that you can learn if you only follow the right teachers were more of a temptation to me.
I am hesitant to simplify because the complex story is so interesting, but the overly simplified story is that from Darby to Moody to fundamentalism to the rise of the scholastic Dispensationalists to the pop culture dispensationalists, there was an almost continual simplification of the ideas of dispensationalism from a complex system of anti-institutionalist thought toward simpler and simpler premillennialism. That simplified story is too simple, but there is a thread there that as people found parts of the theological ideas to accept and parts to discard, the beloved parts by the earlier generation were usually discarded in favor of an easier-to-explain system.
A simple chart or image is more attractive than a complex multi-page chart. But the thicker theological thinking went in the opposite direction. Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind, but that does seem to be what is shown here. While movements tried to take the more theological seriously, the dominant streams of dispensationalism were the imagery of an imminent return of Christ, which contributed to a passion to evangelize and reach the world for Christ.
The complex picture here takes seriously the problems of race, gender, and class while not distorting the more positive intent of evangelism. I had so many highlights, including very long highlights, because the nuanced story is complex. This long quote I think, gives a good sense of the story that this book attempts to tell:
A notoriously difficult group to define, evangelicals in America have been categorized as much by the tensions they manage between “head” and “heart” religion, and between populist and establishment aspirations, as by the theological commitments they profess or the sociological profile they share. And yet a history of dispensationalism, which has played a decisive role as a system of theology and a subculture, recasts our understanding of evangelicalism in at least two important ways. First, dispensationalism brings to the fore the interdependent relationship between theology and culture that has shaped American evangelicalism…Second, a focus on dispensationalism illuminates contemporary trends toward polarization that have plagued evangelicalism in recent decades. These trends, I contend, are deeply intertwined with the “rise and fall” narrative of dispensationalism. While it was never the only theological tradition among fundamentalists or evangelicals, dispensationalism supplied at least four generations of white conservative Protestants, stretching from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, with a theological framework to read the Bible and understand the world. Insiders and outsiders differed over how accurate or helpful dispensationalism was, but its teachings supplied a reference point to millions of Christians all the same. With the fall of dispensationalism as a formal theological system in the 1990s, the white conservative Protestant community has deepened an ongoing crisis in theological identity, with many outside observers now questioning whether theology has much to do with evangelicalism at all. Rather than treat the current state of affairs as normative, a study of dispensationalism reveals the historical development of a theologically thin, while politically robust, popular evangelical culture. Conservative white Protestantism has always had other theological contenders, but the inherited theological tradition of dispensationalism, which now has fewer living theological proponents, played a significant role in shaping the “evangelical mind” until very recently. (p22-23)
The early teachers of what became dispensationalism were dissenters, and that is a deep irony about what became a populist movement.
The original dissenters were unique for teaching that all of history was divided into a series of dispensations that inevitably ended with the failure of humans to fulfill their obligations to God. They taught that the current dispensation was nearly complete, revealing the failure of organized Christianity, and that soon the state churches and the societies they enabled in Europe and North America, which they called Christendom, would be destroyed. These dissenters originally congregated in cities like Dublin and London, with one of their largest assemblies in the southwestern English port city of Plymouth. As a group they refused to be called anything but “Christian,” so they became known as “the brethren from Plymouth.” The name stuck, and they became known as the Plymouth Brethren. (p23)
It was not multiple generations from original teaching to a more populist movement but an almost immediate shift.
The story of dispensationalism invariably begins with Darby and his teachings, but it would be a mistake to think that dispensationalism was a simple transmission of Darby’s teachings. True, key parts of what would become dispensationalism originated in Brethren thinking, but other aspects of Brethren teachings (such as radical separation from all denominations) found almost no resonance with dispensationalists. Americans used Brethren ideas to meet their own needs. To mention some examples, Americans held their own interests in religion and revivalism, in certain conceptions of geography, economics, race, class, gender, and American power, that supplied their interpretations of “dispensational time” with unique significance.
What stuck was the premillennialism, the literal hermeneutic of bible reading, the idea of dispensations (especially the part that we were living in the most important dispensation before Christ’s return), and an adaptation of covenantal thinking that viewed American exceptionalism as a type of covenant with God. Tied with this in many cases was a supersessionism that viewed Christianity or even American Christians as a new Israel, all the while seeking for Israel to gain its own country again to make the second coming of Christ happen. Again, there is a lot of nuance here that I can’t detail, but it does make the book well worth reading.
The rise of what became dispensationalism in the US was very much tied to the context of the post-Civil War conflict. White sectional reconciliation fits well with dispensationalist teaching.
The institutional and theological structures of dispensationalism in the nineteenth century were forged by white evangelicals who privileged the goal of white reconciliation after the Civil War over the aims of Reconstruction. While the project of reconciliation achieved astounding success in creating a broad coalition of white evangelicals, it also killed a potential (if unlikely) future of a racially diverse dispensational tradition. Later generations exacerbated earlier decisions, and with few exceptions dispensationalists have never led in advocating for social or political equality. In many cases they actively supported such discriminatory measures as racial segregation. They often did so for expediency and for reasons unrelated to the specific theological commitments of dispensationalism. But sometimes they did connect social attitudes to their theology. It is in these examples, which span from responses to Reconstruction to Cold War anticommunism, that dispensationalism’s social and political location is most visible. The geographical spread of dispensationalism is tied to its demographics, too. A remarkable subplot in the story of dispensationalism is how its teachings originally gathered a regional following in the Great Lakes basin and then, over time, spread to the South and the West Coast while retreating from New England. By and large, the South slowly and only haltingly adopted dispensationalism, and then in ways that accommodated other southern-specific factors. For the most part, dispensationalists were eager to gain new adherents in the South, even if that meant accommodating white southern attitudes on race and segregation. The demographic and geographic dimensions of dispensationalism are also connected to its economic story. Who funded the expansion of dispensationalism? It is difficult to give one answer. In the nineteenth century, and stretching to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, the broader institutional complex that housed dispensational teachings was funded by industrial profits. For example, the oil money of Milton and Lyman Stewart funded the founding of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and the publication and distribution of The Fundamentals. (p35-36)
The reality of race and gender, as I have mentioned, was important to the way that dispensationalism developed, but also so were technological innovations like the development of bible concordances, radio evangelism, and the money from extractive industries which helped to fund dispensationalist institutions.
The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is already a fairly long book, but I still wanted more at points. I think that the explanatory power of the sectional reconciliation efforts after the Civil War is important, but having read David Blight’s Race and Reunion, I was somewhat surprised about how much the two books complemented one another with so very little overlap. Race and Reunion had very little on religion, and The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism could have used more political and social history to give details on the social reasons for dispensationalism's spread.
I always want more people to know about the problematic parts of Evangelical history. I am connected with Moody Church. I have worked consulting with a non-profit started out of Moody Church for over 20 years. One of the pastors of Moody Church (A. Clarence Dixon) was Thomas Dixon's brother. Thomas Dixon was also a pastor, but he is better known as the author of The Clansman, the book on which the movie The Birth of a Nation was based. That deeply racist book and movie gave rise to the rebirth of the second generation of the KKK.
The distinction between individual and social agency, and between spiritual and corporeal brotherhood, allowed Dixon to wax about spiritual equality while ignoring social racism in his midst. Northerners as well as Southerners inhabited cities stratified by race and material inequality, yet Dixon was muted on why such a situation existed. The “solidarity of the race” was God’s intention, Dixon preached, but sin broke it. “Now God is making a new solidarity which begins at Calvary and is based upon the new creation,” and yet the plane of transformation was narrowly spiritual. “Only the cross can make the confusion of Babel give way to the fusion of Pentecost,” he taught, referencing God’s act of dispersing humanity into separate tribes and language groups, and the latter coming of the Holy Spirit to diverse early followers. “Only in this fire of God’s love can races be molded into one family with the spirit of true brotherhood.” Clarence was no Thomas, yet the distinctions he made fueled new premillennialist views of racial difference. (p184)
I can't easily summarize the history shared in a more than 500-page history, but I do want to skip to the end for a few small points. First, there is a difference between the "Scholastic Dispensationalism," which is taught as a system and attempts to be theologically consistent, and the pop culture dispensationalism of the Left Behind books or movies. Hummel argues (and it is hard to dispute) that the last gasp of the more theologically sophisticated dispensationalism was in the 1990s. Dallas Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School are no longer strongly dispensational. The Evangelical Free Church denomination removed requirements for dispensational premillennialism from its statement of faith. At the same time that the more theologically sophisticated dispensationalism was dying off, the more pop-culture-oriented vague premillennialism, which did not have a coherent theological system, spread but also had less theological impact.
There are many lessons to be learned here. Similar to my thoughts on Hot Protestants, we are not in as unique of a time as many think. When we attempt to change culture through media and expressions of power, we often are more changed by culture than we realize. And backlash is real. I am slowly working through a history of Prohibition, and dispensational theology that influenced that movement. There were a variety of groups that worked together for prohibition, and many had good motives. But they did not work to build wide consensus as much as use tricks to get bills passed that alienated opponents. That comes up here inside the church as well as in secular politics. Race, gender, class and other power issues need to be paid attention to. Those categories (and others) are often blind spots to the church but still impact how theology and church structures develop.
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/dispensationalism/
The Enneagram of Discernment: The Way of Vocation, Wisdom, and Practice by Drew Moser
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/enneagram-of-discernment/
3.75
Summary: Helpful thinking about the ways that enneagram impacts discernment.
In my ongoing reading about discernment, this was a book that I found on Kindle Unlimited. I have a subscription to Kindle Unlimited, but mostly it is used by my parents or kids, who share my Kindle account. But there are cases like this where I find a book in my reading area and it is always nice to borrow it instead of purchasing.
I am mixed on the enneagram. I think that to the extent that someone thinks that it is helpful and accurate in describing them, then it can be helpful to give language around personality types. On the other hand, I also think there is not a lot underlying enneagram and any system of categories has limitations because no system like this will perfectly describe someone. It is about tendencies and rough categories.
What I like about the enneagram is that it intentionally is focuses on health, moving toward healthy interactions, not simply description. It also recognizes that those aspects of personality that are strengths are also weaknesses when pushed or taken too far. There are healthy expressions of personality and our internal tendencies and unhealthy expressions.
The format of this book is unique and helpful. You can get a general book that has everything for all types. Or you can get a type-specific book that has the main content of the book but also has an end section focusing on just that type. In my case, I got the type 5 book and it has about 160 pages of main content and then a chapter that summarizes and focuses on just type five (or your specific type.) I think type five describes me pretty well, and so I read the whole book, but for those who are just interested in your type, especially if you are borrowing it from Kindle Unlimited, the focused chapter on your type is about 30 pages of summary that I think you can get most of the understanding from in a short time. You will get more detail if you read the whole book and you will see how your type fits into the larger system of the enneagram. If you are aware of spouses, friends or coworkers’ enneagram types, then the larger book can also help you see how your type and their types interact.
Broadly, I think the Enneagram of Discernment is thinking about discernment and vocation in similar ways to how I have been thinking about it. Moser uses this definition:
“working definition of discernment: Discernment is the gift and practice of living our lives from a deep sense of vocation, with wisdom, in the fullness of time.” (p33)
Discernment in this book is a process of understanding the world around us in cooperation with vocation.
Palmer [Parker] perhaps says it best when he describes vocation “not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess.” (p72)
If you skip to the end, I think you will miss the helpful framing. Chapter One is about general barriers to discernment. Some of those will apply to all of us. But there are also specific notes about how some types are more susceptible to different barriers than others. We live in a digital age and one of the main barriers to discernment today is mistaking knowledge for discernment or resisting the time it takes to reflect and do the discernment. Or spending the time practicing discernment to move toward wisdom. The digital world trains us to “skim and scan” (p43) and not reflect and contemplate.
Chapter Two is about how different enneagram types think of vocation as identity, purpose, and direction. Chapter Three talks about how different enneagram types understand wisdom, through doing, feeling and thinking. And chapter Four encouraging us to understand how our enneagram type relates to time (past, present and future.)
I am not going to share here, but I highlighted a lot of the chapter on my type. While it took me a while to get through those early chapters, once I did, the end chapter on type five made a lot of sense, and I read it quickly because was essentially a summary of the previous 150 pages focusing on just my type. This summary quote from the end I think is right.
“Way of Discernment is no express lane. While it can provide momentary help in times of decision, it’s a longsuffering journey. So, when the next decision comes, journey through The Way of Discernment. Hear the call to go back and get it, and discern your life with flourishing abundance.”
This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/enneagram-of-discernment/
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment are much more nuanced about how temptation works. In particular, Ignatius talks about two different types of temptation. One type is similar to what Sandoz is suggesting. We can be tempted on two sides of the same coin by thinking that the life of a Christian is too hard or that there is more pleasure in not following the path we think is God's will. But there is another type of temptation, and Ignatius suggests that this second type is more likely to be used against more mature Christians. It is when people are tempted to do too much because God needs them, and they can’t depend on others. Taking on another role or changing jobs to get more prestige, or diluting our time with many things instead of focusing on the more important things. The main point of this second type of temptation is that it either detracts us from our relational connection to God because of our busyness or it feeds our pride by making us think that only we can do the things that are necessary around us and that God has no one else to share the load.
Mary Doria Russell, I think under concieves of how the reality of satan or the concept of evil work in these two books, which does impact how she approaches the problem of evil.
I am going to quote again from later in that same discussion. I understand the point that is trying to be made here—finding meaning in the suffering—but I do not think it is theologically accurate.
Later in the book another character (John) from The Sparrow is reflecting on the problem of evil and how Sandoz is handling his pain.
I really do appreciate and recommend these two books. There is value in thinking through the problem of evil. And in spite of the fact that I do not think that Mary Doria Russell understands the Ignatian Rules of Discernment, I do think you can read this with an eye on how the characters think about what it means to understand God and the world around them.
Between the two books, this is a 900-page story, so it is not a quick read. There are lots of tragedies and traumas. But I do think it is a theologically rich look at actual pain that we should not ignore as Christians.
This post was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/children-of-god-2/
_________
Short Review: This is the sequel to The Sparrow. These two books really should be thought of as a single large book, because even thought the Sparrow ends, The Children of God picks up almost immediately after.
I think, once I finished, that the combined books are a meditation on Job. The problem of evil is discussed throughout (the author is Jewish but most of the characters are Jesuit priests). The Sparrow is often compared to The Book of Strange New Things, which I really liked. But other than both being about Christian missions to alien worlds and tragedy, they are very different books.
A note on format, because this is a book that has some strong language, discussion of rape and sex and war and death, I moved from audio to kindle for most of the book because I often have little ears running around that pick up more than I want them to. I also think that the kindle edition made it easier to track the story. The format of the book is a lot of jumping back in forth in time and space and the audio makes that harder to track. Also the alien and non-English names are easier for me to handle and track in print than in audio.
My full review, no spoilers, is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/children-of-god/
4.5
A second reading:
Summary: The second half of the story of The Sparrow.
When I first read The Sparrow, I did not realize that Children of God was actually part two of the book. I thought it was a sequel, but instead, it should be considered the second half of a single story. Because of this, I did not read Children of God until two years after I read The Sparrow. It was not until re-reading that I realized how much those two years impacted my understanding. This is a single story.
The book opens immediately after the end of The Sparrow. The reader and the characters think that they understand what happened on Rahkat (the other world that they traveled to.) But one way you should prepare to read Children of God is to think of it as an explanation of all the things misunderstood in The Sparrow. This is an alien contact story. Culture and biology are different. And even when Sandoz thinks he understands the language as a linguist, there are mistakes and misunderstandings.
Sandoz was traumatized in The Sparrow, and multiple stages of healing come throughout the Children of God. It is not that he “forgets” his pain and trauma. But he does come to terms with it in some ways over time. This does bring up my main concern about The Children of God. In my post about The Sparrow, I somewhat minimized this as a book about the problem of evil, which is still a significant theme within The Children of God. I do not believe there is a solution to the problem of evil. However, one method of dealing with the problem of evil is to suggest that God was behind everything to accomplish the greater good. While I think there is some space for seeing a different plan than what we had or that we misunderstood God’s plan, I get concerned with “making things come out right.”
I have two main concerns with it. First, I do not think that God ordains evil. I think God can work to redeem the results of evil, but that is different from thinking that God has a plan from the beginning where evil is required to be done, which results in God’s plan being accomplished. The problem with how I conceive of this is that it limits God’s power, knowledge, or willingness to intervene. I think God is all-powerful, has knowledge, and wants good to happen for all of us. However, evidence from history shows that evil still occurs. So, I cannot explain the problem of evil. I can only say that God, in his incarnation, chose to be with us in our pain to show us a way forward. And while I think that is true, I do not think it is a great answer pastorally.
I still think that these two books lack consideration of the role of evil or an embodied Satan (see Reviving Old Scratchfor more). There is a brief exchange in Children of God that acknowledges the problem and, I think, shows Russell's lack of familiarity with Ignatius. This exchange is between Sean (a Jesuit from Northern Ireland) and Sandoz.
Summary: The second half of the story of The Sparrow.
When I first read The Sparrow, I did not realize that Children of God was actually part two of the book. I thought it was a sequel, but instead, it should be considered the second half of a single story. Because of this, I did not read Children of God until two years after I read The Sparrow. It was not until re-reading that I realized how much those two years impacted my understanding. This is a single story.
The book opens immediately after the end of The Sparrow. The reader and the characters think that they understand what happened on Rahkat (the other world that they traveled to.) But one way you should prepare to read Children of God is to think of it as an explanation of all the things misunderstood in The Sparrow. This is an alien contact story. Culture and biology are different. And even when Sandoz thinks he understands the language as a linguist, there are mistakes and misunderstandings.
Sandoz was traumatized in The Sparrow, and multiple stages of healing come throughout the Children of God. It is not that he “forgets” his pain and trauma. But he does come to terms with it in some ways over time. This does bring up my main concern about The Children of God. In my post about The Sparrow, I somewhat minimized this as a book about the problem of evil, which is still a significant theme within The Children of God. I do not believe there is a solution to the problem of evil. However, one method of dealing with the problem of evil is to suggest that God was behind everything to accomplish the greater good. While I think there is some space for seeing a different plan than what we had or that we misunderstood God’s plan, I get concerned with “making things come out right.”
I have two main concerns with it. First, I do not think that God ordains evil. I think God can work to redeem the results of evil, but that is different from thinking that God has a plan from the beginning where evil is required to be done, which results in God’s plan being accomplished. The problem with how I conceive of this is that it limits God’s power, knowledge, or willingness to intervene. I think God is all-powerful, has knowledge, and wants good to happen for all of us. However, evidence from history shows that evil still occurs. So, I cannot explain the problem of evil. I can only say that God, in his incarnation, chose to be with us in our pain to show us a way forward. And while I think that is true, I do not think it is a great answer pastorally.
I still think that these two books lack consideration of the role of evil or an embodied Satan (see Reviving Old Scratchfor more). There is a brief exchange in Children of God that acknowledges the problem and, I think, shows Russell's lack of familiarity with Ignatius. This exchange is between Sean (a Jesuit from Northern Ireland) and Sandoz.
“I’m told y’blame God for what happened on Rakhat. Why not blame Satan? Do y’believe in the devil, then, Sandoz?” “But that is irrelevant,” Sandoz said lightly. “Satan ruins people by tempting them to take an easy or pleasurable path.” He was on his feet, taking his mug and plate to the galley.
“Spoken like a good Jesuit,” Sean called to him. “And there was nothin’ easy nor pleasurable in what happened to you.”
Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment are much more nuanced about how temptation works. In particular, Ignatius talks about two different types of temptation. One type is similar to what Sandoz is suggesting. We can be tempted on two sides of the same coin by thinking that the life of a Christian is too hard or that there is more pleasure in not following the path we think is God's will. But there is another type of temptation, and Ignatius suggests that this second type is more likely to be used against more mature Christians. It is when people are tempted to do too much because God needs them, and they can’t depend on others. Taking on another role or changing jobs to get more prestige, or diluting our time with many things instead of focusing on the more important things. The main point of this second type of temptation is that it either detracts us from our relational connection to God because of our busyness or it feeds our pride by making us think that only we can do the things that are necessary around us and that God has no one else to share the load.
Mary Doria Russell, I think under concieves of how the reality of satan or the concept of evil work in these two books, which does impact how she approaches the problem of evil.
I am going to quote again from later in that same discussion. I understand the point that is trying to be made here—finding meaning in the suffering—but I do not think it is theologically accurate.
“You were a priest for decades,” Sean said with quiet insistence, “and a good one. Think like a priest, Sandoz. Think like a Jesuit! What did Jesus add to the canon, man? If the Jews deserved one thing, it was a better answer to sufferin’ than the piss-poor one Job got. If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God’s own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.”
and slightly later
Sandoz closed his eyes, but Sean’s voice went on, with its hard r’s and the flat, unmusical poetry of Belfast. “Pity the poor, wee souls who live a life of watered milk—all blandness and pleasantry—and die nicely asleep in ripe old age. Water and milk, Sandoz. They live half a life and never know the strength they might have had. Show God what yer made of, man. Pucker up and kiss the cross. Make it your own. Make all this mean something. Redeem it.”
Later in the book another character (John) from The Sparrow is reflecting on the problem of evil and how Sandoz is handling his pain.
He thought of all the ways of coping with undeserved pain. Offer it up. Remember Jesus on the cross. The bromides: God never gives us a burden we cannot bear. Everything happens for a reason. John Candotti knew for a fact that the old sayings worked for some people. But as a parish priest, he had often observed that trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit had happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God’s love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened.
I really do appreciate and recommend these two books. There is value in thinking through the problem of evil. And in spite of the fact that I do not think that Mary Doria Russell understands the Ignatian Rules of Discernment, I do think you can read this with an eye on how the characters think about what it means to understand God and the world around them.
Between the two books, this is a 900-page story, so it is not a quick read. There are lots of tragedies and traumas. But I do think it is a theologically rich look at actual pain that we should not ignore as Christians.
This post was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/children-of-god-2/
_________
Short Review: This is the sequel to The Sparrow. These two books really should be thought of as a single large book, because even thought the Sparrow ends, The Children of God picks up almost immediately after.
I think, once I finished, that the combined books are a meditation on Job. The problem of evil is discussed throughout (the author is Jewish but most of the characters are Jesuit priests). The Sparrow is often compared to The Book of Strange New Things, which I really liked. But other than both being about Christian missions to alien worlds and tragedy, they are very different books.
A note on format, because this is a book that has some strong language, discussion of rape and sex and war and death, I moved from audio to kindle for most of the book because I often have little ears running around that pick up more than I want them to. I also think that the kindle edition made it easier to track the story. The format of the book is a lot of jumping back in forth in time and space and the audio makes that harder to track. Also the alien and non-English names are easier for me to handle and track in print than in audio.
My full review, no spoilers, is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/children-of-god/
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
My reading of The Sparrow is that Emilio feels trauma because of betrayal, not abstractly as a problem of evil, but because he has followed an Ignatian sense of discernment. At the end of that discernment, things do not go as he thought they should. His friends are dead; he was being held as a sex slave and brutally raped by aliens after having been medically tortured in an alien ritual that left him disfigured and unable to use his hands and on the edge of death. That trauma is reinforced when another party of humans finds him on that alien planet, misunderstands the situation, accuses him of murder and prostitution, and sends him back to Earth all alone without adequate medical care or support. The storytelling method of The Sparrow is an informal defense trial within the Jesuit structure to determine whether he had committed murder and prostitution.
Betrayal trauma is throughout the book, both from the human rescuer’s response, the Jesuit official response, and his understanding of God having rejected him or betrayed him.
But this brings up another aspect I missed on my first reading. Mary Doria Russell converted from Catholic to Jewish due to writing The Sparrow, her first book. Anne, an agnostic doctor who reluctantly came on the trip because of her friendship with Emilio twice, says in The Sparrow that her problem with God is that people always give God credit for the good but never responsibility for the bad. There is some reality to that, and it is one of the reasons that many have for rejecting a strong Calvinist position of double predestination, where both the saved and the not-saved have been specifically destined for their fates by God from before the start of time.
But the book of Job and traditional Christian theology has a role for “the accuser” or the enemy or a personified Satan. It is not God who tortures Job for God’s own pleasure, but the accuser who tortures Job to see if Job will reject God when things get hard. I did not realize in my first reading that The Sparrow has no Satan or concept of an evil force. Anne’s rejection of God is in part because she has no concept of a role for Satan. I do think there are some problems with the saying that Satan can be blamed for clearly natural results of our sin. There is no perfect answer to the problem of evil. But at least part of the answer has been that God is not the originator of evil and that God does not cause evil things to happen. Whether Christians believe in a personified evil (Satan) or a more abstract evil force, Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch is all about the need for a concept of evil in order to make sense of God.
Part of the problem of discernment in The Sparrow is that Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment are not abstract principles of decision-making but Rules of Discernment of the Spirits. He is trying to help those doing his spiritual exercises discern whether the spiritual messages they are understanding are from God or from evil spirits. At least in Ignatius’ system, discernment without a concept of evil makes no sense.
The strength of The Sparrow concerning discernment is that it makes clear that we are fallible in our understanding of God’s direction. Everything may seem to lead us in one direction, but we may still be wrong and it may not be from God. The problem with the presentation of discernment in The Sparrow is that there is no enemy.
Review of Children of God
Note: I drafted this whole post immediately after reading The Sparrow, but because of travel and work, I did not post until I finished the second book, The Children of God. These are intended to be read as a single story in two parts. I do not think at this point in my post about The Sparrow that it is a spoiler to say that, in large part, The Children of God explains what was misunderstood in The Sparrow. While I gave spoilers in this discussion, I tried to write my post on The Children of God with as few spoilers as possible.
This post originally was posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-sparrow/
4.5
A post on my second reading:
Summary: A group mostly made up of Jesuits discovers that another world with intelligent creatures exists and secretly decides to visit it; tragedy ensues.
I previously read The Sparrow about six years ago. In my ongoing reading about Discernment, it was a fiction book that was suggested to me as one that looks at discernment, so I put it back on my list to reread, but a Holy Post discussion about The Sparrow made me decide to pick it up when I did.
As I have been reading various ways to think about Discernment, I keep coming up against the tension between those who see discernment primarily as Christian decision-making, those who see it as a set of tools or a process that includes decision-making, and those who see it primarily as seeking after God. I am definitely in the latter camp. I know these are not mutually exclusive ways to think about discernment, but I do tend to think of them as the three modes where one is prioritized.
I started a book on discernment a couple of weeks ago, and I could not make it through the first chapter because it approached discernment as a tool that was more similar to an incantation to control God or to get God to reveal himself more than a method to help us understand who God is. This problem is part of why I have been reading about discernment, to help figure out where it seems to go wrong. Discernment is often invoked in discussions of spiritual warfare, and people who regularly talk about spiritual warfare seem more likely to believe in various conspiracy theories. The very nature of belief in conspiracy theories makes me distrust your perception of discernment.
Skye and Kaitlyn's podcast discussion of the Sparrow took the standard approach of considering it primarily a discussion of the problem of evil or a meditation on the Book of Job. That is an aspect of the book, but Skye said that he did not think it involved discernment much at all. That is why I picked up the book right now. I was reading it to see why it was both recommended to me because I was looking for fiction about discernment, and Skye said that it didn’t really discuss discernment.
As I read it, I thought two things were going on. First, many people do not have a background in Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment. The Sparrow, even though it is primarily about Jesuits, never explicitly invokes the rules of discernment. And I think this is what Skye meant. For a book about Jesuits, written by an author who grew up Catholic, I thought there should have been a more explicit discussion of the rules.
That being said, I think discernment is in the background of The Sparrow but not explicitly invoked. I think I am going to say that while it is not, not about the Problem of Evil, I think the more nuanced take is that it is interested in the problem of evil regarding the process of discernment, especially when you are no longer sure of the validity of your discernment.
Because of the story structure, with the book starting at the end and then telling the story in flashback, it is not a spoiler to say that the main character has a crisis of faith because he was attempting to follow God but had all of his mission members die, except for himself. I continue to come across the concept of Betrayal Trauma in religious settings. David Swanson’s interview with Dr Glen Bracey about Bracey and Emerson’s book,The Religion of Whiteness, again touched on Betrayal Trauma and especially the problem of Christians who are racial minorities who feel a call toward racial reconciliation and then feel rejected in that process, and who feel a type of betrayal trauma as a result. They identify a call, attempt to live out that call, feel rejected or unsuccessful in the calling, and they end up having to reject part of themselves (either their culture or background or calling), causing a trauma response.
The main character in The Sparrow, Emilio Sandoz, is having a trauma response. He is medically broken but also psychologically and spiritually broken as well. It is a spoiler to discuss why Betrayal Trauma might be a good way to discuss Emilio’s pain. If you do not want spoilers, you should stop reading here. I don’t love the way that sexual violence, rape, and prostitution are used in The Sparrow to evoke trauma and pain, and I do want to give a warning about that.
Last night, I started the second book, Children of God. It picks up immediately after the end of The Sparrow, and in the prologue, it summarizes the ending of The Sparrow this way:
Summary: A group mostly made up of Jesuits discovers that another world with intelligent creatures exists and secretly decides to visit it; tragedy ensues.
I previously read The Sparrow about six years ago. In my ongoing reading about Discernment, it was a fiction book that was suggested to me as one that looks at discernment, so I put it back on my list to reread, but a Holy Post discussion about The Sparrow made me decide to pick it up when I did.
As I have been reading various ways to think about Discernment, I keep coming up against the tension between those who see discernment primarily as Christian decision-making, those who see it as a set of tools or a process that includes decision-making, and those who see it primarily as seeking after God. I am definitely in the latter camp. I know these are not mutually exclusive ways to think about discernment, but I do tend to think of them as the three modes where one is prioritized.
I started a book on discernment a couple of weeks ago, and I could not make it through the first chapter because it approached discernment as a tool that was more similar to an incantation to control God or to get God to reveal himself more than a method to help us understand who God is. This problem is part of why I have been reading about discernment, to help figure out where it seems to go wrong. Discernment is often invoked in discussions of spiritual warfare, and people who regularly talk about spiritual warfare seem more likely to believe in various conspiracy theories. The very nature of belief in conspiracy theories makes me distrust your perception of discernment.
Skye and Kaitlyn's podcast discussion of the Sparrow took the standard approach of considering it primarily a discussion of the problem of evil or a meditation on the Book of Job. That is an aspect of the book, but Skye said that he did not think it involved discernment much at all. That is why I picked up the book right now. I was reading it to see why it was both recommended to me because I was looking for fiction about discernment, and Skye said that it didn’t really discuss discernment.
As I read it, I thought two things were going on. First, many people do not have a background in Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment. The Sparrow, even though it is primarily about Jesuits, never explicitly invokes the rules of discernment. And I think this is what Skye meant. For a book about Jesuits, written by an author who grew up Catholic, I thought there should have been a more explicit discussion of the rules.
That being said, I think discernment is in the background of The Sparrow but not explicitly invoked. I think I am going to say that while it is not, not about the Problem of Evil, I think the more nuanced take is that it is interested in the problem of evil regarding the process of discernment, especially when you are no longer sure of the validity of your discernment.
Because of the story structure, with the book starting at the end and then telling the story in flashback, it is not a spoiler to say that the main character has a crisis of faith because he was attempting to follow God but had all of his mission members die, except for himself. I continue to come across the concept of Betrayal Trauma in religious settings. David Swanson’s interview with Dr Glen Bracey about Bracey and Emerson’s book,The Religion of Whiteness, again touched on Betrayal Trauma and especially the problem of Christians who are racial minorities who feel a call toward racial reconciliation and then feel rejected in that process, and who feel a type of betrayal trauma as a result. They identify a call, attempt to live out that call, feel rejected or unsuccessful in the calling, and they end up having to reject part of themselves (either their culture or background or calling), causing a trauma response.
The main character in The Sparrow, Emilio Sandoz, is having a trauma response. He is medically broken but also psychologically and spiritually broken as well. It is a spoiler to discuss why Betrayal Trauma might be a good way to discuss Emilio’s pain. If you do not want spoilers, you should stop reading here. I don’t love the way that sexual violence, rape, and prostitution are used in The Sparrow to evoke trauma and pain, and I do want to give a warning about that.
Last night, I started the second book, Children of God. It picks up immediately after the end of The Sparrow, and in the prologue, it summarizes the ending of The Sparrow this way:
“Do you know what I thought, just before I was used the first time? I am in God’s hands,” Emilio had said, when his resistance finally shattered on a golden August afternoon. “I loved God and I trusted in His love. Amusing, isn’t it. I laid down all my defenses. I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped. I was naked before God and I was raped.” [and then just a few lines later another character thinks] “Emilio Sandoz was not sinless; indeed, he held himself guilty of a great deal, and yet … “If I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, then the rest of it was God’s will too and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness,” Sandoz had told them. “But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances, is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”
My reading of The Sparrow is that Emilio feels trauma because of betrayal, not abstractly as a problem of evil, but because he has followed an Ignatian sense of discernment. At the end of that discernment, things do not go as he thought they should. His friends are dead; he was being held as a sex slave and brutally raped by aliens after having been medically tortured in an alien ritual that left him disfigured and unable to use his hands and on the edge of death. That trauma is reinforced when another party of humans finds him on that alien planet, misunderstands the situation, accuses him of murder and prostitution, and sends him back to Earth all alone without adequate medical care or support. The storytelling method of The Sparrow is an informal defense trial within the Jesuit structure to determine whether he had committed murder and prostitution.
Betrayal trauma is throughout the book, both from the human rescuer’s response, the Jesuit official response, and his understanding of God having rejected him or betrayed him.
But this brings up another aspect I missed on my first reading. Mary Doria Russell converted from Catholic to Jewish due to writing The Sparrow, her first book. Anne, an agnostic doctor who reluctantly came on the trip because of her friendship with Emilio twice, says in The Sparrow that her problem with God is that people always give God credit for the good but never responsibility for the bad. There is some reality to that, and it is one of the reasons that many have for rejecting a strong Calvinist position of double predestination, where both the saved and the not-saved have been specifically destined for their fates by God from before the start of time.
But the book of Job and traditional Christian theology has a role for “the accuser” or the enemy or a personified Satan. It is not God who tortures Job for God’s own pleasure, but the accuser who tortures Job to see if Job will reject God when things get hard. I did not realize in my first reading that The Sparrow has no Satan or concept of an evil force. Anne’s rejection of God is in part because she has no concept of a role for Satan. I do think there are some problems with the saying that Satan can be blamed for clearly natural results of our sin. There is no perfect answer to the problem of evil. But at least part of the answer has been that God is not the originator of evil and that God does not cause evil things to happen. Whether Christians believe in a personified evil (Satan) or a more abstract evil force, Richard Beck’s Reviving Old Scratch is all about the need for a concept of evil in order to make sense of God.
Part of the problem of discernment in The Sparrow is that Ignatius’ Rules of Discernment are not abstract principles of decision-making but Rules of Discernment of the Spirits. He is trying to help those doing his spiritual exercises discern whether the spiritual messages they are understanding are from God or from evil spirits. At least in Ignatius’ system, discernment without a concept of evil makes no sense.
The strength of The Sparrow concerning discernment is that it makes clear that we are fallible in our understanding of God’s direction. Everything may seem to lead us in one direction, but we may still be wrong and it may not be from God. The problem with the presentation of discernment in The Sparrow is that there is no enemy.
Review of Children of God
Note: I drafted this whole post immediately after reading The Sparrow, but because of travel and work, I did not post until I finished the second book, The Children of God. These are intended to be read as a single story in two parts. I do not think at this point in my post about The Sparrow that it is a spoiler to say that, in large part, The Children of God explains what was misunderstood in The Sparrow. While I gave spoilers in this discussion, I tried to write my post on The Children of God with as few spoilers as possible.
This post originally was posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-sparrow/
C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 by Karen Johnson, Kirk D. Farney, Mark A. Noll, Mark A. Noll
4.0
Summary: Tracking the history of how Lewis was received in the United States.
Not using these words, it seems that Noll is making the case that while Evangelicals may be defined as those who love Billy Graham, ecumenicals may be defined as those who love CS Lewis. Noll traces the response in the United States over three chapters. US Catholics first promoted (and published) Lewis in the US. The secular media and academy also responded to Lewis. And then mainline Protestants and finally, the Fundamentalists and Neo-Orthodox. Noll didn’t explicitly say that ecumenical Christians are the ones who like Lewis, but that does seem to be his point. Within Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and fundamentalists, some are less interested in moving outside of their own circle of Christians. But in some ways, the Neo-Evangelicals that were breaking away from Fundamentalists were, as a movement, more ecumenical, and while they found Lewis later, their embrace was in some ways because of Lewis’ ecumenical approach that sought to use common reasoning and logic and public intellectual resources to make the case for Christianity.
Again, this was not a part of Noll’s book, but I do think that it is relevant to talk about the recent movements within SBC, PCA, and ANCA to adopt more theologically conservative positions on women in ministry as an example of a movement toward fundamentalist positions. I had Noll for three classes between college and seminary. When I was in seminary, working for a local SBC association and going to a mainline seminary, there was a discussion about whether SBC should be considered Evangelical or Fundamentalist. Even in the mid-90s, some people in SBC embraced the term fundamentalist. Many of the sociologists of religion who were commenting on the question at the time (as I remember it) were noting the tensions between those SBC Evangelicals who were more ecumenical in orientation and those SBC fundamentalists who were not sure of the Christianity of those outside of SBC.
I believe that what happened was that the SBC fundamentalists adopted the term evangelical because of the negative association of fundamentalism, not because of a change in theological position. And now, 30 years later, increasingly hard lines are drawn because the impulse toward ecumenism isn’t seen as embracing the larger body of Christ but as being “liberal.” Noll’s earlier work on the life of the mind is an undercurrent behind CS Lewis in America because the extent to which CS Lewis was embraced reflected the embrace of the life of the mind as a goal.
This book is part of the Hansen Lecture series by the Wade Center. I have previously read The Everlasting People and I have on my list to read Community: Action, Faith, and Joy in the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers. I do not know if other books in the series have responses to each chapter, but I liked that in this book. Karen Johnson, who has a good book on Black Catholics in Chicago, responded to the chapter on Catholic reception. Kirk Farney responds to the chapter on secular and mainstream media. And Amy Black responds to the chapter on Protestant reception. I thought those responses were helpful. Although I did not think they always responded well to his points, they did give additional context.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/cs-lewis-in-america...
Not using these words, it seems that Noll is making the case that while Evangelicals may be defined as those who love Billy Graham, ecumenicals may be defined as those who love CS Lewis. Noll traces the response in the United States over three chapters. US Catholics first promoted (and published) Lewis in the US. The secular media and academy also responded to Lewis. And then mainline Protestants and finally, the Fundamentalists and Neo-Orthodox. Noll didn’t explicitly say that ecumenical Christians are the ones who like Lewis, but that does seem to be his point. Within Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and fundamentalists, some are less interested in moving outside of their own circle of Christians. But in some ways, the Neo-Evangelicals that were breaking away from Fundamentalists were, as a movement, more ecumenical, and while they found Lewis later, their embrace was in some ways because of Lewis’ ecumenical approach that sought to use common reasoning and logic and public intellectual resources to make the case for Christianity.
Again, this was not a part of Noll’s book, but I do think that it is relevant to talk about the recent movements within SBC, PCA, and ANCA to adopt more theologically conservative positions on women in ministry as an example of a movement toward fundamentalist positions. I had Noll for three classes between college and seminary. When I was in seminary, working for a local SBC association and going to a mainline seminary, there was a discussion about whether SBC should be considered Evangelical or Fundamentalist. Even in the mid-90s, some people in SBC embraced the term fundamentalist. Many of the sociologists of religion who were commenting on the question at the time (as I remember it) were noting the tensions between those SBC Evangelicals who were more ecumenical in orientation and those SBC fundamentalists who were not sure of the Christianity of those outside of SBC.
I believe that what happened was that the SBC fundamentalists adopted the term evangelical because of the negative association of fundamentalism, not because of a change in theological position. And now, 30 years later, increasingly hard lines are drawn because the impulse toward ecumenism isn’t seen as embracing the larger body of Christ but as being “liberal.” Noll’s earlier work on the life of the mind is an undercurrent behind CS Lewis in America because the extent to which CS Lewis was embraced reflected the embrace of the life of the mind as a goal.
This book is part of the Hansen Lecture series by the Wade Center. I have previously read The Everlasting People and I have on my list to read Community: Action, Faith, and Joy in the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers. I do not know if other books in the series have responses to each chapter, but I liked that in this book. Karen Johnson, who has a good book on Black Catholics in Chicago, responded to the chapter on Catholic reception. Kirk Farney responds to the chapter on secular and mainstream media. And Amy Black responds to the chapter on Protestant reception. I thought those responses were helpful. Although I did not think they always responded well to his points, they did give additional context.
This was originally posted to my blog at https://bookwi.se/cs-lewis-in-america...
The Proof of the Pudding by Rhys Bowen
4.0
Summary: A very pregnant Georgie hosts her first dinner party with her new chef and that leads to a new mystery.
I enjoy reading long series as long as I do not get too bored with the characters. The Royal Spyness series is in the 17th book, similar to the Inspector Gamache series. They are very different types of mysteries. The Royal Spyness series is very much a light cozy mystery series. There is almost always a murder, but Bowen leans into cozy feel of the series. The series took a long time to get from Georgie having a romantic interest to marriage and now her first baby. I am enjoying a more confident Georgie.
Rhys Bowen has referenced classic mysteries before, there are several references to Dorothy Sayers books. And this one both references Agatha Christie’s books and has Agatha Christie as a dinner party guest who helps to solve the mystery. That could feel gimmicky, but it is handled well here, and I thought it helped move Georgie to a more healthy, maturing adult. She is not in her early 20s anymore. She is married and will have a baby by the end of this book (that is really not a spoiler).
I appriciate that Darcy (her husband who works as an off the books spy for the British Foreign Office) does not try to protect her and keep her away from murder here, but instead encourages her to solve the crime. There is a balance between realism of a woman in the 1930s and the reality of a modern reader who expects women to be able to act without supervision at all times.
This is definately a light series. I am not reading it for great intellectual depth. But it is a good light book that I enjoy. I mostly am listening to the series and I enjoy the narration. I think the narration highlights that there is a lot of repetition in the book. The books could be cut a bit without any loss. The books are told as if she were writing in a diary, and that method doesn’t always work. “I don’t really have time to write, I am having a baby” or “Still June 20th….” isn’t really necessary and it feels like it fluffs up the book more than necessary. But on the whole I enjoy the series and I think that the post wedding books have found a new equilibrium that I am enjoying.
This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-proof-of-the-pudding/
I enjoy reading long series as long as I do not get too bored with the characters. The Royal Spyness series is in the 17th book, similar to the Inspector Gamache series. They are very different types of mysteries. The Royal Spyness series is very much a light cozy mystery series. There is almost always a murder, but Bowen leans into cozy feel of the series. The series took a long time to get from Georgie having a romantic interest to marriage and now her first baby. I am enjoying a more confident Georgie.
Rhys Bowen has referenced classic mysteries before, there are several references to Dorothy Sayers books. And this one both references Agatha Christie’s books and has Agatha Christie as a dinner party guest who helps to solve the mystery. That could feel gimmicky, but it is handled well here, and I thought it helped move Georgie to a more healthy, maturing adult. She is not in her early 20s anymore. She is married and will have a baby by the end of this book (that is really not a spoiler).
I appriciate that Darcy (her husband who works as an off the books spy for the British Foreign Office) does not try to protect her and keep her away from murder here, but instead encourages her to solve the crime. There is a balance between realism of a woman in the 1930s and the reality of a modern reader who expects women to be able to act without supervision at all times.
This is definately a light series. I am not reading it for great intellectual depth. But it is a good light book that I enjoy. I mostly am listening to the series and I enjoy the narration. I think the narration highlights that there is a lot of repetition in the book. The books could be cut a bit without any loss. The books are told as if she were writing in a diary, and that method doesn’t always work. “I don’t really have time to write, I am having a baby” or “Still June 20th….” isn’t really necessary and it feels like it fluffs up the book more than necessary. But on the whole I enjoy the series and I think that the post wedding books have found a new equilibrium that I am enjoying.
This was originally published on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-proof-of-the-pudding/