Anthology

Review: Swing Low, Volume 2

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Cover image of "Swing Low, Volume 2), General Editor: Walter R. Strickland II

Swing Low, Volume 2: An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States, General Editor, Walter R. Strickland II, Associate Editors, Justin D. Clark, Yana Jenay Conner, and Courtlandt K. Perkins. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514004227) 2024.

Summary: An anthology of primary source writings on Black Christianity in America from the 1600’s to the present.

Last month I reviewed a new history of Black Christianity in the United States by Walter R. Strickland II (review at https://bobonbooks.com/2025/07/02/review-swing-low-volume-1/). So, this volume is a companion to that work, providing an anthology of readings to complement the historical narrative of the first volume. In other words, if you’ve studied history, you understand how important primary sources are. Therefore, this collection is a treasure trove, both for what is represented here and the more extensive sources to which they point.

For example, here are some of the readings included:

  • Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
  • Richard Allen “The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the R. Rev. Richard Allen…”
  • Francis Grimke, “Christianity and Race Prejudice”
  • Charles Octavius Boothe “Plain Theology for Plain People”
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our God is Able”
  • Howard Thurman, “Jesus and the Disinherited”
  • Fannie Lou Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography”
  • Tom Skinner, “Black and Free”
  • William E. Pannell, “My Friend, the Enemy”
  • James Cone, “A Black Theology of Liberation”
  • Samuel Proctor, “Samuel Proctor: My Moral Odyssey”

Like other anthologies, many of the readings are excerpts of key passages of longer works. In addition, each of the selections includes a brief biography of the author and the context in which it was written as well as the original source of the reading.

Moreover, the anthology follows the organization of Volume One, the history, in two ways. Firstly, the anthology annotates the readings with symbols for the five theological anchors Strickland elucidates in the first volume:

  • Anchor 1: Big God
  • Anchor 2: Jesus
  • Anchor 3: Conversion and Walking in the Spirit
  • Anchor 4: The Good Book
  • Anchor 5: Deliverance

Secondly, the sections follow the historical periods of volume one, making it well-suited for use as a companion volume in courses on Black Christianity. These sections are:

  1. Pre-emancipation: 1619-1865
  2. Reconstruction and Its Aftermath: 1865-1896
  3. Civil Rights Era 1896-1968
  4. Black Evangelicalism: 1963 and Beyond
  5. Black Theology: 1969 and Beyond
  6. Into the Twenty-First Century

Finally, the readings in each section are divided into four categories:

  • Sermons and Oratory
  • Theological Treatises
  • Worship and Liturgy
  • Personal Correspondence and Autobiography

I especially appreciated the Worship and Liturgy selections which included early spirituals like “Go Down Moses” and “Oh! Peter Go Ring Dem Bells,” Civil Rights protest songs like “We Shall Overcome.” and contemporary hip hop like Sho Baraka’s “Maybe Both, 1865.”

In conclusion, this volume is the ideal complement to the history of volume one. Not only that, the readings allow us to listen to Black Christians in their own words. In particular, I found both great comfort in the faith of these believers and great challenge as they spoke of the sins of slavery and racism. For example, consider this excerpt from William E. Pannell’s “My Friend, The Enemy”, from 1968:

“No, this man is a friend. He’s against the KKK, abhors violence, supports the Constitution and is for Negro voting rights. We read the same version, believe the same doctrines, probably have the same middle class tastes, but all he knows about me–or cares to know–is what he sees on the 6 o’clock news.… I wear a suit as good as his, yet he sees me looting a clothing store in Watts. He knows something of my temperament as its mirrored in the behavior of my sons, yet he identifies me with the muggings in Washington or Buffalo. To him, the cause of brotherhood, the disintegration of human relations–civil rights!–is my problem. Mine, because I created it and I perpetuate it.”

Certainly, it does not take a great deal of imagination to draw parallels to our own day. For this reason, this anthology is so valuable. Because the writers are believing Christians who speak biblically into their situation, they offer us a chance to shed our blinders. But will we?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Contemporary Catholic Poetry

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Cover image of "Contemporary Catholic Poetry" edited by April Lindner and Ryan Wilson

Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology, Edited by April Lindner and Ryan Wilson. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640606463), 2024.

Summary: An anthology of works in diverse styles, aesthetics, and forms from 23 Catholic poets born since 1950.

During the time I was savoring the poetry in this work, a friend of mine expressed the desire to read more poetry but didn’t know where to start. I suggested finding anthologies that allow one to sample the works of many poets to find those one likes. And this anthology is a great place to begin.

What is Contemporary Catholic Poetry? The editors define “contemporary” as born after 1950, writing between the mid-1970’s and the present. A “Catholic” is one who was baptized Catholic and has not renounced their faith. It does not have to do with content, which ranges widely over human experience. Nevertheless, the editors note that Catholic poetry may be characterized as having a sacramental view of reality. That is true of this collection. Finally, poetry covers a variety of forms. There is political and personal poetry; performative and meditative poetry.

In all, twenty-three poets appear in this anthology, organized alphabetically by last name with three to eight poems by each writer. The editors introduce each poet with a brief biography. A date appears at the end of each poem indicating when it was first published. Generally the works are shorter. Ned Balbo’s “Hart Island” is a notable exception spanning ten pages. He chronicles the history of this island off New York harbor that served as a prisoner of war camp, prison, “Madhouse, workhouse, women’s hospital.”

I cannot possibly summarize all the poets, even less all the works that appear here. Without intending to slight any, I’ll single out a few that caught my attention. I’ve long been familiar with the name of Dana Gioia, first poet to head the national Endowment for the Arts. But this is my first time to read his poetry, and I bought more of it as a result. In “Interrogations at Noon” he writes, “Just before noon I often hear a voice, / Cool and insistent, whispering in my head. / It is a better man I might have been, / Who chronicles the life I’ve never led.” I felt like he was listening to the voice in my head!

Julia Alvarez’s “Folding My Clothes” writes of the mother who carefully folded her clothes “which she found so much easier to love.” Marie Howe, in “Prayer” writes of all the aspirations and distractions any of us experience who try to pray. “Fontanel”, by April Lindner, a co-editor, is a tender meditation on the “Canvas-thin” “stretch of skin” on a newborn’s head whose skull bones have not yet fused. In “Castizo” by Orlando Ricardo Menes, the poet reflects on his mother’s aspirations that he prove himself of “good stock,” unlike his father, a manual laborer. Instead, he asserts that all our handiwork “is charged with grace.”

I liked Daniel Tobin’s work. “Aftermath” is a spare reflection on 9/11. He likens the ascent of souls to the pervasive ashes visible in the floodlit night. David Yezzi, the last poet in this collection reflects on the triumph of weeds in his garden and words of his grandmother.

In summary, the editors speak of giving this book as a gift, hoping it will be a welcome one. I certainly found it so on many levels. It introduced me to some great poets I hope to read more of. The poems both evoked realities I’ve not experienced and resonated with ones that I have. Finally, like so many great poems, these served as windows offering glimpses of transcendent realities in the commonplaces of life.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Thunder in the Soul

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Thunder in the Soul (Plough Spiritual Guides), Abraham Joshua Heschel. (Edited by Robert Erlwine). Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2020.

Summary: A collection of the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concerning the life of knowing and being known by God.

The Plough Spiritual Guides are a great little series collecting the thoughts of some of the great spiritual thinkers of the last century. This latest is no exception. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was truly one of the great spiritual figures of the twentieth century. He escaped to London from Poland trying to get family members visas before the coming Holocaust. Before he could succeed, they died. He went on as a Conservative Jewish leader whose life and works transcended his own faith community. I was in a seminar just the other day where his book The Sabbath was extensively referenced. He wrote towering works bringing spiritual insight to Jew and Christian, believer and skeptic alike: Man is Not Alone, Man’s Quest for God, God in Search of Man, and The Prophets. After the assault on Blacks at Selma in March 1965, he joined Dr. King in the march to Montgomery, earning himself a place on an FBI watchlist. He was close friends with Reinhold Niebuhr and delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1971, following him in death a year later.

This little book collects excerpts of his writing that read as a seamless whole, a tribute to Robert Erlwine’s editing. These come under twelve headings:

  1. Every Moment Touches Eternity
  2. The Only Life Worth Living
  3. In the Presence of Mystery
  4. The Prophets Show us God Cares
  5. God Demands Justice
  6. Modernity Has Forfeited the Spirit
  7. Prayer is Being Known by God
  8. A Pattern for Living
  9. The Deed is Wiser than the Heart
  10. Something is Asked of Us
  11. Faith is an Act of the Spirit
  12. Not Our Vision of God but God’s Vision of Us

Reading the headings alone offers material for extended reflection. Often I like to select a quote or two from a book. This was a book where nearly every sentence could be a quote pull, and occasion to stop and think before one moves on. One of the big ideas that run through this selection is that we search for God only to discover that God seeks us. Heschel writes:

“When self-assertion is no more; when realizing that wonder is not our own achievement; that it is not by our own power alone that we are shuddered with radical amazement, it is not with our power anymore to assume the role of an examiner of a subject in search of an object, such as we are in search of a cause when perceiving thunder. Ultimate wonder is not the same as curiosity. Curiosity is the state of a mind in search of knowledge, while ultimate wonder is the state of knowledge in search of a mind; it is the thought of God in search of a soul.“

This search of God for us is the source of our worth. Heschel observes:

“We must continue to ask: What is man that God should care for him? And we must continue to remember that it is precisely God’s care for man that constitutes the greatness of man.”

Another key idea is that of faith as faithfulness, a response in every moment in how we live our life to the reality of God. Faith is not centered around the doctrine or dogmas of prior generations, which he considers “spiritual plagiarism.” Faith moves beyond our own reason and wisdom. “In faith, we do not seek to decipher, to articulate in our own terms, but to rise above our own wisdom, to think of the world in terms of God, to live in accord with what is relevant to God.” The life of faith is shaped by the law and the prophets. “The good is not an abstract idea but a commandment, and the ultimate meaning of its fulfillment is in its being an answer to God.”

Finally, Heschel talks about the paradigm shift of knowing God. We do not so much think about God as think within God. He explains:

“His is the call, ours the paraphrase; His is the creation, ours a reflection. He is not an object to be comprehended, a thesis to be endorsed, neither the sum of all that is (facts) nor a digest of all that ought to be (ideals). He is the ultimate subject.”

Some speak of God as Ultimate Reality. Often this sounds like an abstraction, but what I think Heschel would say is that God is the most Real, the really Real, by whom all else is understood.

This is a taste of what you will find here. Strong stuff. J. B. Phillips wrote a book titled Your God is too Small. I think Heschel would agree and this little book is a gateway to his thought. What is troubling to me is how rarely I encounter writing like this coming out of Christian publishing houses or in Christian media. This deceptively little book is, as the Wardrobe in C.S. Lewis, much bigger on the inside than the outside. Read slowly and be filled.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Gospel in Dorothy Sayers

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Sayers

The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy L. Sayers with an Appreciation by C. S. Lewis, edited by Carole Vanderhoof. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2018.

Summary: An anthology of Sayers’ work organized by theological topics, drawing on her detective fiction, plays, and essays.

This work is the latest installment in Plough Publishing’s The Gospel in Great Writers series, and it is a gem. Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Her experience in an ad agency became a resource for a series of Lord Peter Wimsey (and Harriet Vane) detective mysteries. As a committed Christian, and friend of the Inklings, she was called upon by the BBC to speak and write about the Christian faith. She published several plays that brought the gospel accounts to life. She was an essayist, and her extended essay on The Mind of the Maker, simultaneously served as a work of Christian aesthetics, and a reflection on the Trinity. Many consider her translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Paradiso completed posthumously by Barbara Reynolds) to be one of the best.

In this anthology, we have material from many of her works, that introduces the reader both to the different facets of her writing and the deep theological insight to be found. The material is organized into twenty chapters, each on a particular them, and combining either her fiction or plays with essay material on the same themes. Themes range from Conscience to Covetousness to Despair and Hope to Work and finally Time and Eternity.

What struck me afresh in reading this collection was how delightfully frank and able to cut through pretense Dorothy could be–the counterpart of Harriet Vane in her detective stories.

In writing about Judgement, she notes:

“It is the inevitable consequence of man’s attempt to regulate life and society on a system that runs counter to the facts of his own nature.”

In her essay, The Dogma is the Drama, she concludes:

“Let us, in Heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious–others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven before them.”

In her play The Man Who Would Be King, she uses informal language to describe the crucifixion of Jesus. The Bishop of Winchester protested this. Here is Dorothy’s reply:

“I’ve made all the alterations required so far, but now I’m entering a formal protest, which I have tried to make a mild one, without threatenings and slaughters. But if the contemporary world is not much moved by the execution of God it is partly because pious phrases and reverent language have made it a more dignified crime than it was. It was a dirty piece of work, tell the Bishop.”

In her essay Why Work?, she makes this trenchant observation:

“How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?”

This work is rich in such observations and often the essay excerpts are a good reflection of the key ideas in those essays. If there is any flaw, the excerpts from the detective fiction do not sufficiently reflect these works as a whole, even if they are connected thematically to the other pieces in the chapter. Hopefully, something of the character of Lord Peter Wimsey shows through, which develops over the course of Sayers fiction. The only remedy for this is that you need to read the works in their entirety, often available in inexpensive print or electronic editions.

A bonus to this volume comes in the form of “A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers” by C.S. Lewis, written following her death. I think she would have most appreciated this comment:

“There is in reality no cleavage between the detective stories and her other works. In them, as in it, she is first and foremost the craftsman, the professional. She always saw herself as one who had learned a trade, and respects it, and demands respect for it from others.”

For those who only have heard of Dorothy L. Sayers, this volume is a wonderful introduction to her broad range of writings, and her acute thinking about theology and art. For those who have read her works, it is a wonderful review that serves to connect the dots between her different genres of work. For all of us, this work gives us a chance to think along with one of the great theological minds of the twentieth century.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Review: Joni: The Anthology

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Joni

Joni: The Anthology, Barney Hoskins (ed.). New York: Picador, 2017.

Summary: A retrospective on the life, music, art, and performances of Joni Mitchell through reviews and articles from the popular music press, chronologically organized.

Yes, I went through a Joni Mitchell phase. Part of it was songs like “Woodstock” or “Big Yellow Taxi” that were anthems for my generation. And part of it was that Mitchell epitomized a certain ideal of artistry and beauty–this willowy woman with long, straight blonde hair and high cheek bones who could write and sing, albeit some of her “yodels” were a bit strange! The last Joni Mitchell I bought was The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Her music and my tastes were changing, and not in the same direction. I have to admit that I more or less stopped following her career except for hearing about an album she did with Charles Mingus before he died, one that seemed to be panned by many critics. Then a couple years ago, her name surfaced again when I heard the news that she had nearly died from a brain aneurysm. (At the time of writing, she is still living, has gone through rehabilitation, and made a couple of public appearances).

This new anthology, edited by popular music writer tells the story of Mitchell’s work and life through a collection of music press articles and reviews of her albums and concerts, arranged chronologically. Hoskins writes in his introduction:

“Her words and her ‘weird chords’ you can read about at length in the pieces pulled together in this compendium. Included in Joni are some of the most open and thoughtful interviews Mitchell has ever given, as well as some of the finest snapshots of her complex, often spiky personality. Here are reviews of (almost) all her albums – the consensus masterworks, the curate’s eggs – and of live appearances she’s made in tiny clubs and glitzy concert halls. Here are the words of writers who’ve fallen, as I did, under the spell of her piercing honesty, her tingling musical intimacy, her coolly nuanced moods: Americans and Brits alike, men and women who know how uniquely brilliant she is.”

The collection begins with an article by Nicholas Jennings tracing her life from her beginnings in Alberta and Saskatchewan, her early singing attempts, her time in Toronto’s club scene, her brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell, the recognition of her writing, performed by others like Judy Collins, the move to New York, and then L.A. and her subsequent success in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We read of her various liaisons, most notably with Graham Nash, and the role David Crosby played in her early work. We learn about her unconventional practice of “open tuning”, her gradual move toward more of a jazz idiom, beginning with Court and Spark, and, after the Mingus album, a decline in the commercial success of her work, until her Grammy award-winning Turbulent Indigo (1994) garnered her renewed attention.

The strength of the articles that follow is that they trace the development of Mitchell’s career from its early days until her last album in 2007, giving us a taste of the mixture of critical opinion about her work throughout her career, and her own increasing disenchantment with a music world that failed to recognize her brand of creativity. I learned of albums I had never heard of, as well as her long relationship with Larry Klein. Nearly all her album covers bore her artistic work, and we learn of her continuing growth and recognition as a visual artist. Throughout her career from 1970 on, we read of periodic retreats from writing and performing (the later she has never enjoyed), with a return to the studio time again, even after her “retirement” in 2002.

The downside of this collection is that, while you get a kaleidoscope of perspectives, you also get a good deal of repetition, particularly concerning her early life. At the same time, Hoskins has unearthed some of the best writing about Mitchell over the course of her career. By not editing out repetitive material, you get the full impact of each piece.

I found myself with mixed feelings about Mitchell the person, who seemed to become more “hardbitten” as she matured, and Mitchell the artist, who developed in some interesting ways, while continuing to do some of the best writing around. I totally missed Turbulent Indigo. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate jazz far more, so I may want to go back to the Mingus album and others. If nothing else, the book filled in the gaps in my understanding of her work and life through some of the best things written about her.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.