Author: rtrube54

Review: Love in the Time of Coronavirus

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Love in the Time of Coronavirus, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2021.

Summary: A collection of poems written over the first year of the pandemic exploring the pilgrimage of those confined to their homes, exploring the ways we come to terms with endless days, the small gifts of love, and moment of hope amid the horror.

We all remember those days of 2020 when we discovered how an invisible virus changed our world–all the precautions, the lockdowns, the empty streets, and rising infections. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell lives in New York, which became the epicenter of horror last spring, with morgue trucks outside of hospital. Like most, the scope of her and her husband’s life narrowed down to the confines of an apartment. With the lockdown, she began a pilgrimage in words to chronicle her experience.

She takes us through the seasons of the first year of the pandemic: lockdown and rising cases, illness, recovery and relapse, staring at an unworn wardrobe, and finding herself oddly touched by the thank you’s of students on Zoom. The growing realization that this is not going away quickly, the relief of a contemporary lull, injuring oneself exercising in one’s apartment, Advent and the advent of a new wave of cases, standing in line for vaccines and the tentative steps of emerging into the world. We trace the church year from Easter to Advent, unchanging hope of resurrection and Christ’s coming in a changed and dying world.

The poems, nearly sixty, are written more or less in the form of sonnets. The songs capture both the small things of daily life and the horror of mass graves on Hart Island. The changing of the seasons reminds us of the resurgence of life as does the resurgence of wildlife in a world temporarily devoid of people. There is love. The lost love of the aged who have died too soon. There is the love for children one cannot visit, for students on a screen, for the small kindnesses of delivery. All this is dwarfed by the love in the ICU: “The old man who gave up his/breathing machine to the young man beside/him. The nurse who grieved him as he died./The EMT who knelt beside the body/long after the heart had ceased to beat.”

This collection captures the deep passion we have to live, to love, and to hope in the face of the most daunting challenge we have collectively faced in our lifetimes. We grieve, we tremble, we sicken, and hopefully recover. Then we enjoy the beauties we see in a simple walk. As the author concludes, “The virus can’t destroy/this urge to bless our life & praise/even these pandemic days.”

What is striking though is that this collection reflects a particular posture, a particular response to the pandemic. One that allows the pandemic to deepen and transform, a metamorphosis of sorts. Instead of clamoring and contending, there is a kind of quiet acceptance that the pandemic is what it is, but the things that truly make life worth living, goodness, truth, beauty, and faith, hope, and love only shine more brightly when the distracting noise of our pre-pandemic normal is silenced.

If we look back over the last year, and have second thoughts about our own responses, a new variant and another wave offer fresh chances to lean into the lessons of the pandemic. Someday our grandchildren will ask us about this time. Will we change the subject or share a glimpse of the depths we cultivated in these years? These poems give words to what all of us have experienced. We still have time, it appears, to be formed for better, or for worse. These poems invite us into the better. Will we follow?

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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: Perhaps

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Perhaps, Joshua M. McNall. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: Advances the idea of “perhapsing” that allows for the exploration of the space between doubt and dogmatism through close reading of scripture, asking hard questions, exercising imagination, and the practice of holy speculation.

Many of us feel pulled apart by the discourse of our times. On one hand, we encounter unbending and sometimes partisan dogmatism, and on the other unbridled doubt or an outright cynicism about truth. Then there are those who find ourselves in the middle of these extremes. We believe God and yet don’t possess either the certainty or the arrogance of the dogmatists. We don’t doubt in the sense of being in two minds or are we given over to the unwillingness to believe of the hardened cynic. We have questions. We wonder if there is room to wonder or set aside the pronouncements of the certain and the cynic to look afresh at the scriptures to hear its message through the noise and to use our imagination to explore how both/and might be possible when all we’ve been presented is either/or.

Joshua McNall affirms this longing for a space between doubt and dogmatism, proposing that this is the place of “perhaps.” He contends for the recovery of what some would consider a dangerous practice, that of holy speculation, a “faith seeking imagination” that is not without boundaries but opens us to be surprised by God. “Perhaps” may function to take us from a place of questions to the embrace of an orthodox faith. It may also give us the space to not feel we need to be certain about everything, particularly some of the important but contended questions that may be considered adiaphora.

McNall observes that this was the kind of speculative imagination necessary for monotheistic Jews to embrace the possibility that Jesus, come in human flesh was God and that, somehow, the One God was also Three. He then goes on to consider other instances of “perhapsing” in scripture. He considers what I think one of the toughest parts of scripture, Genesis 22. He proposes the possibility that Abraham, caught between the fulfilled promise of a son from two people as good as dead reproductively and the command to sacrifice his son, “perhapsed” that God could even raise the dead Isaac and so did receive him back from death (cf. Hebrews 11:17, 19). He then considers three historical exemplars, Origen, Julian of Norwich, and Jonathan Edwards. I found his treatment of Edwards especially fascinating. He notes how Edwards brings together the truths that God does all for his glory with the observation of the human longing of joy and that our greatest joy is the pursuit of God and his glory. He also notes Edwards’ distinctive thinking on immaterialism, occasionalism, and continual creation as other examples of a kind of holy and disciplined speculation.

McNall then talks about “guardrails” in our “perhapsing,” recognizing speculation can go off the cliff. He offers ten principles drawn from a dialogue between theologians from Augustine to Edwards with writers like Cormac McCarthy and E. M. Forster that is so good, I will not list the ten because it will not do justice to his exposition of them. One that I appreciated was Number eight: “Seek Noncontrastive Connections.” Later, he illustrates this in wrestling with the goodness of God and the existence of animal suffering and death before the fall.

Parts Two and Three contend against both dogmatism and doubt. He names the issue of the shrillness of dogmatism, contrasting it with the dancing and weeping of real prophetic Christianity. He shows how the quest for certainty often ends up in nihilism rather than obedient trust. Against the fashionability of doubt in our culture, he names the dividedness of heart that occurs when doubt becomes a way of life. Against this, he proposes the example of Martin Luther, ascending the steps of Santa Scala to pray for his grandfather in purgatory, assailed with questions about the steps, the power of relics and the reality of purgatory. McNall writes:

“Luther’s attitude is one of obedience. The question does not lead him to depart for a weeklong bender in the Roman brothels. Nor does it correspond directly to a repudiation of church tradition. This shift would come later through his outrage at indulgences, and by reading Paul. At the moment, Luther simply walks down the stairs. He descends Santa Scala–because a willingness to walk and wait and pray is the best response to doubt” (p. 126).

In the last part of the book he offers three examples of practicing “perhaps. As noted previously, he considers the suffering and death of animals before the fall, exploring three proposals that perhaps the significance may reside in some for of self-sacrificial instinct pointing toward a greater sacrifice. Second, he considers Romans 9:22-23, that some humans are “vessels prepared for destruction.” He notes how verse 23 breaks off mid-sentence and wonders if this might be a descriptive but not determinative statement, particularly in the context of Romans 11:32 which says, “God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” Then he turns to C. S. Lewis and his novel, The Great Divorce. It is a “perhaps” between rigid exclusivism and unbounded universalism. George MacDonald, who affirmed a kind of universalism is present as a character and witnesses the refusal of some of the residents of hell to believe. Yet not all turn away.

One of the distinctives of McNall’s account is his appeal to story and imagination even as he uses discursive reason. Interwoven in the chapters is the narrative of two young women, Eliza and Claire, one in the process of losing her faith and the other finding faith. It offers a narrative rendering of what “perhapsing” might be like. It also underscores a contention of McNall that the theological imagination of “perhaps” is cultivated by the reading not only of great theologians but great writers of fiction. He models this by literary references throughout and offers a specific challenge to these two types of reading in his conclusion.

Perhaps is an important word for all who teach and pastor in this divided age. McNall captures the distress of many young Christians I know who do not want to walk away from the goodness of Christ, but are disillusioned by the shrill dogmatism of so many of his followers in positions of leadership in the church. McNall cogently diagnoses the real dangers of the divided heart of disillusioned doubt. And he articulates the desperately needed third way for those of our generation, the way of perhaps that leads to an imaginative and supple orthodoxy without dogmatism that addresses the challenges of our age.

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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.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Alfred L. Bright

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Alfred L. Bright, Youngstown Vindicator, August 15, 1971 via Google News Archive

I was reminded of Al Bright about a year ago when reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. In the book she tells the story of a city championship Little League team that celebrated with a picnic and swimming outing at one of Youngstown’s pools. One member of that team was Black. He had to remain outside the fence, with teammates bringing him food. They couldn’t bring him the pool. After parents argued with the pool management, the boy was allowed to sit in a raft to be pulled around the pool by a lifeguard. For a few minutes. Everyone else had to exit the pool. The lifeguard whispered to him, “Whatever you do, don’t touch the water.” That Black Little Leaguer was Al Bright. The year was 1951. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald).

That was racism in Youngstown in 1951. That would have discouraged many others. Not Bright. The picture above is from a 50 year old news story in The Vindicator on August 15, 1971, noting that Bright was going to be the featured speaker at the National Junior Achievers Conference and was going to be awarded Speaker of the Year Award. The article also notes that he had joined Junior Achievers in 1958, was president of the chapter in 1959, and won the Achievers of the Year Award that same year. At the national conference in 1959, he was persuaded by the president of Colgate-Palmolive, S. Bayard Colgate, to go to college instead of barber school. He won a scholarship at Youngstown University and graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science. A year later, he added a Master of Arts in painting from Kent State.

He taught art and painting at Youngstown after graduation. Louis Zona, executive director of the Butler was one of his students! Then, in 1970, he established the Black Studies program at Youngstown State and directed it for 18 years. He was the first full-time Black faculty member at Youngstown. During this time, he hosted Alex Haley, Jesse Jackson, Maya Angelou, and Shirley Chisholm at the university. Marvin Haire, one of Bright’s first students in the program, wrote:

“[The black studies program] sought to infuse the systematic study of African people into university curriculum and do that in a way that provided exposure to a wide range of what we would call the black experience, including music, art, history, politics and education. So the original vision was to build a program that offered that kind global awareness to students who took courses.”

He never stopped painting and his works are part of permanent collections at The Butler Institute of American Art, the Kent State University Gallery, the Harmon and Harriet Kelly Collection of African-American Art, Canton Museum of Art. Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts and Northeastern University. He exhibited his art in more than 100 solo exhibitions over his career. In 2012, he painted “Portals in Time” to a live jazz performance at the Akron Art Museum.

He was awarded the the Distinguished Teaching Award from YSU in 2006. He died October 28, 2019 at age 79. For my last two years at Youngstown State, I worked in the Student Development Program. Bright spoke for the program regularly and helped open the eyes of this white guy from the Westside to the beauty of black culture and the outlines of black history. I was struck that I never was diminished in my own racial identity but enlarged in my appreciation of the culture and history of Blacks in Youngstown. He built bridges with people rather than walls. He could have been bitter. Instead, he was better, as a program founder, an artist, as a mentor to younger Black leaders. He was born and died in Youngstown. His life was a gift to the city.

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Review: Test Gods

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Test Gods, Nicholas Schmidle. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021.

Summary: An account of Virgin Galactic’s effort to become a space tourism company focusing on the intersection of Richard Branson’s vision and the work of test pilots and engineers to make it work.

On July 11, 2021, Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s space tourism company achieved its first fully crewed flight with Branson aboard. This was the culmination of a seventeen-year program that began when Branson joined forces with Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to design an air-launched space ship that would land like a plane. Test Gods traces this history through 2019, centered on one of the key test pilots throughout the program, Mark Stucky.

The author, Nicholas Schmidle, the son of an ace fighter pilot, was embedded with the company for four years, from 2014 to 2018 and became close to Stucky. He traces the design and testing of what was initially called Spaceship Two and the launch vehicle White Knight Two. Space vehicle development has been dotted with disasters and the Virgin Galactic program was no exception. He describes the tragedy of the fuel tank explosion during rocket development in 2007 in which three engineers died.

Then the testing program begins, first, captive flights, attached to White Knight Two, then glide flights and finally longer and longer rocket flights. Each pushes an unknown envelope that often comes with new control problems. Stucky does many of these, and the line between temporary losses of control or anomalies and disaster was a thin one. Each time leads to modifications that improve the vehicle.

Then came the setback that delayed the program several years and led to the separation of Virgin Galactic from Scaled Composites. On a flight Stucky did not fly in 2014, fellow test pilot Mike Alsbury had his first experience of going transonic in the vehicle, and in the exhilaration made the fatal error of deploying the “feather,” a kind of air brake that should not have been deployed during the transonic phase. Stucky saw it unfold in the control room, realized the fatal error that Alsbury was making, and witnessed the subsequent breakup of the vehicle. Alsbury died; his co-pilot Pete Siebold survived.

It wasn’t until 2016 that Virgin Galactic would fly. This gave time to address safety issues and pilot training arising from the crash. Stucky was a key, in setting a tone of rigor in flight training. Finally, on December 13, 2018, Stucky and co-pilot C.J. Sturckow reached Mach 3.0 and an altitude of 51.4 miles, and received their astronaut wings.

Schmidle explores what made Stucky so successful–the combination of risk and preparation. It turns out his most serious injuries were a couple paragliding episodes. His work destroyed his marriage and Schmidle explores his eventual reconciliation with his children, including son Dillon, present at that December 2018 flight. It also causes the author to reflect on his relationship with his own father, whose footsteps he didn’t follow.

One of the most fascinating interactions was that between test pilots and engineers. For the engineers, it was often the case that they always wanted to make things safer, especially after the crash, whereas the test pilots wanted to know if it was safe enough–they understood there was always risk, both known and unknown.

The material on Branson is interesting. On the one hand are his “vapor” promises of being able to do commercial flights as early as 2011, mostly to attract investors and customers. Yet he never compromised safety. And later on when Mohammed bin Salman offered him $1 billion, he left the money on the table. He would not take the money of the man who ordered the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Branson was the one who did all the interviews after the July flight. What this book fills out is the story of all those who contributed to that success, especially the test pilots (and their wives or partners who lived with the fear of every flight), and the engineers who built the rocket motors and space craft. This is a great inside look at one private space company, and what a challenging goal they have already achieved, albeit at great cost.

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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: Something Wicked This Way Comes

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Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town #2), Ray Bradbury. New York: Bantam Books, 1963 (Link is to a currently in print edition).

Summary: A carnival comes to Green Town out of season and two boys, Jim and Will fight to escape the clutches of the sinister carnival master Mr. Dark.

An odd lightning rod salesman cues us that this will be a dark story. It is October 23, but the storm he predicted never came and the lightning rod atop Jim Nightshade’s house wasn’t needed. Or was it. Something darker came to town that night–a mysterious carnival with proprietors Cooger and Dark. It’s an odd time of year for a carnival. The boys, Jim and and his friend Will Halloway, spy it out as it arrives at 3 am, taking shape out of the dark clouds of the night. Will’s father, a janitor at the library, who revels in spending his life among its books, senses something dark as well. Carnivals don’t come in October. Or do they?

They come back the next morning, spot Mrs. Foley, their teacher who emerges from a mirror maze not quite right. That’s all that’s not right. The carousel seems to be out of order. They explore only to be dragged off by Mr. Dark. Hiding, they see Mr. Cooger ride the carousel backward and become a boy, who wheedles his way into Mrs. Foley’s house, pretending to be her nephew.

The boys follow. Mrs. Foley is nowhere to be seen but as Cooger rides to return to his age, the boys jam the controls aging him past a hundred. And they are now on Mr. Dark’s radar. Dark lures people with their desires–and feeds upon them. A parade comes the next day through town while a little girl, the former Mrs. Foley, weeps in the bushes. Dark and his Witch search everywhere for Jim and Will but encounter only Will’s father, who becomes their enemy by laughing at them. All this sets up the climactic confrontation as Dark captures the boys and Halloway must confront the evil that has invaded Green Town.

Bradbury gives us a truly gripping and insightful portrayal of evil. It is more than transgressions. It is the darkness, the nothingness that consumes, that plays on and distorts human desire, shriveling lives. The story depicts the webs of illusion that hold those who give way to it. Yet Charles Halloway discovers that this dark nothingness may be defeated, that all its pretensions may be punctured by a little act, if only he can endure evil’s onslaught.

I missed this Bradbury as a kid, or don’t remember it. I may not have understood or liked it at the time. It is the darkest of his books, starkly in contrast to the first Green Town book, Dandelion Wine. Having seen more of the power of evil, its lures and the way it distorts and destroys, I appreciate Bradbury’s imaginative portrayal. We need those like Charles Halloway, who can discern evil, resist it, and recognize how it may be defeated.

Review: A Burning in My Bones

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A Burning in My Bones, Winn Collier. New York: WaterBrook, 2021.

Summary: The authorized biography of pastor-theologian and Bible translator Eugene Peterson.

He pastored a congregation for nearly thirty years. He preached thousands of sermons, wrote dozens of books, translated the Bible into vernacular English, welcomed hundreds, if not thousands into his and Jan’s home, including Bono. He never sought popularity or engaged in the polemics that roiled American evangelicalism. In the end, what mattered most was contemplating the wonders of God in the words of scripture and the beauty outside his Montana home, loving Jan and his children. That was Eugene Peterson.

I have roughly two feet of his books on my shelves. I cull many books. These remain. Why? Because, unlike many others, these seem to speak from a place beyond my generation. How did he come to write such works? Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson begins to give me some clues. Collier enjoyed access not only to Peterson during the last years of his life, but also to his papers. He is now the director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary. He offers a rendering of Peterson’s life that probes the formative influences of his life, the decisions he came to about pastoral integrity in his own ministry, the continued quest for congruence in his life, and the beautiful soul he became, amid both his flaws and longings.

We begin with his Montana upbringing, his boyhood in the beautiful country, his Pentecostal preacher mother and distant butcher father. We learn of his running career at Seattle Pacific that eventually culminated in a Boston Marathon and the beginnings of his writing career. After an aborted effort to plant a Pentecostal church, he headed off to seminary at Biblical Seminary in New York, and really discovered scripture as a narrative in which we encounter the living God, not a sourcebook for talking points. Then on to Maryland, studies with William Albright, where he would not only encounter biblical languages and archaeology, but Jan Stubbs, who would become his wife.

It appeared Peterson was headed toward an academic career when he turned down the chance to study at Yale with Brevard Childs to begin a church in Bel Air, a suburb outside Baltimore. The next choices of pastoral integrity came as he dealt with the conflict between his biblically informed intuitions of the work of a pastor and how he was being taught to “run the damn church” as he expressed it in his frustrations that came to a head when he uttered these words in a session meeting. In the end, the elders agreed to run the church, while he prayed, studied scripture, and cared for souls–and finally began to take the time he needed to with Jan and his children.

Collier doesn’t engage in hagiography. He discusses the trouble Eric, Peterson’s eldest had with knowing his father’s love, a consequence of Peterson’s absence in his early childhood. Peterson saw glimpses of his own struggles with his father but struggled to heal this wound. Then we learn of an incident in Peterson’s late fifties when a relationship with a spiritual directee in his church became emotionally if not physically intimate. Jan recognized this with some of the hardest conversations in their marriage to follow. Peterson broke off the relationship. Even the best of marriages are flawed and tested, as this one was.

He had the wisdom to recognize when the good thing of his pastoral ministry was coming to an end, even as his passion for writing was growing. His growing restlessness led to his resignation in 1991 and the beginnings of what became The Message. Collier goes into Peterson’s growing conviction that a translation in vernacular English that captured the unvarnished unsanitized language of scripture. As he did so, he moved on to teach at Regent College. Collier describes his unconventional teaching style, the raspy voice, the long silences, and his growing notoriety.

Once more, congruence called, and the retreat to the family cabin they named Selah House that became a kind of monastery. As Peterson’s fame grew with the completion of The Message (along with controversy about the translation), Peterson felt and inward and upward call. It was a call to cherish Jan and family, while still welcoming many, including Bono who made their way to his door. More and more he felt he was getting ready to die.

There is beauty and pathos in this story. Contemplation of the lake and the mountains, a final camping trip, reflections on the Psalms, writing that slowly came to a trickle after his five books of spiritual theology. He suffered a fall and head injury from which he was never quite the same. His valedictory book, As Kingfishers Catch Fire was marred by the controversial end to his interview with Jonathan Merritt where he confessed some of his personal struggles with the issue of homosexuality and if approached as a pastor, that he would perform a same sex marriage, only to subsequently retract this statement. At this point, Peterson’s vascular dementia was already advancing and Collier’s assessment was that “Eugene should never have been doing interviews at all.”

His end came a few years later. It was a good end that I won’t spoil because Collier’s telling is so rich and poignant. At one point in the book, the observation came up that Peterson only had one sermon. I only heard Peterson speak once, and what he said was indeed congruent with his books. He spoke to InterVarsity’s national staff after one of our largest Urbana conventions. He warned of the danger of success and the temptations that come with it and the quiet path of integrity, the “long obedience in the same direction” for which he was known. Collier captures all of this and a life lived with that deep congruity of love for God that loved both words fitly spoken or written and the silence that allowed others to let down and become themselves. Even as was the case with the things Peterson said and wrote, I will carry this biography in my mind and my heart for a long time as a precious gift.

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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: Hand in Glove

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Hand in Glove (Roderick Alleyn #22), Ngaio Marsh. New York: Felony & Mayhem Press, 2015 (originally published in 1962).

Summary: An April Fool’s scavenger hunt organized by Lady Bantling ends badly when a body is found under a drainage pipe in a ditch.

It all started at lunch. Nicola Maitland-Mayne had been escorted by Andrew Bantling, with whom she is quickly taken, to the home of Mr. Percival Pyke Period. She is employed to take dictation on Pyke Period’s book on etiquette. Mr. Pyke Period invites her to what ends up a disastrous lunch. Andrew has departed to Lady Bantling’s after an angry interview with Harold Cartell, his guardian who refuses to make over Andrew’s inheritance to him so he can pursue a career as an artist. He opposed Andrew’s decision to leave the Guards to pursue his art. Harold Cartell seems generally disagreeable, a lawyer who has moved in with Pyke Period to conserve costs. He makes a disagreeable allusion to Pyke Period’s ancestry. He also has a truly annoying dog, Pixie, which is always getting loose and bites. Also at the lunch is sad Connie Cartell, Harold’s spinster sister has taken a 20 year old orphan, “Moppet,” under her wing. Moppet is accompanied by Leonard Leiss, a flashy dresser with a criminal background. Harold Cartell has insisted Connie end her relationship with these ne’er-do-wells. The lunch ends with Leiss looking at a cigarette case owned by Pyke Period which subsequently goes missing.

The scene shifts to Lady Bantling’s, Harold Cartell’s former wife, now married to Bimbo Dodds, who it turns out has club connections with Leiss. She’s organizing one of her legendary parties for April Fool’s, a scavenger hunt. Leiss and the Moppet wrangle an invitation and Andrew invites Nicola to join the fun. Everyone is out at one point or another in the evening. The next morning, Harold Cartell is found in a drainage ditch being dug for Mr. Pyke Period, underneath a length of drain pipe that has shattered his skull. It seems someone moved boards over the ditch everyone used so that the board upturned, knocking Cartell into the ditch, along with a lantern. Also, Mr. Pyke Period’s cigarette case is lying nearby in the ditch.

Nicola’s friend, Roderick Alleyn and his assistant, Inspector Fox are called in. Now she is a front row witness. Nearly everyone mentioned here are possible suspects. Cartell was not a beloved man. It all comes down to some missing gloves, and the hands that had been in them, moving the plank and levering the pipe into the ditch, as well as a mix up in correspondence from Pyke Period.

The upper crust folk come off pretty unlikeable, although Lady Bantling is a character. Andrew and Nicola stand out. While Andrew had a motive, he’d sat with Nicola in the car and then returned with her to Lady Bantling’s at the end of the scavenger hunt. They also stand out as the two people who are actually working to make a living; he in his art, she in her secretarial work. Eventually, even Troy affirms his art. The others seem to live vacuous lives, as do most of the wealthy in the other of Marsh’s novels I’ve read. One can’t help but to see thinly-veiled social commentary in these depictions.

While all of Marsh’s books are decent reads, this felt more workmanlike than some when it came to solving the actual murder (and another murder attempt). The eccentric but somewhat one-dimensional characters seemed to dominate the plot more than the twists and turns of unraveling the murder. I do hope, however, that we haven’t seen the last of Andrew and Nicola.

Review: Recovering the Lost Art of Reading

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Recovering the Lost Art of Reading, Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021.

Summary: An invitation to artful reading, considering its decline, different kinds of literature and how we read them, and the art of reading well to discover goodness, truth, and beauty.

Much has been made over the supposed decline in reading, and contradictory statistics that show a rise in reading (especially during the pandemic). What is evident is that how and what we read has gone through changes. We read more on screens and audio and browse and scroll. There are questions about the loss of the ability to attend to longform writing.

The two authors of this book, one a literature professor, the other a professional writer, and both lovers of literature contend that what may be in decline is artful readers and have written this book to describe what it means to recover this art. They write:

“Reading a book immerses oneself into an extensive work. When this is done receptively and thoughtfully, it becomes artful reading. Some people call it “deep reading” and believe it is in deep trouble” (p. 23).

The authors believe that in our loss of artful or deep reading, we have lost leisure, self transcendence, contact with the past and with essential human experience, edification and an enlarged vision. The writers advocate for participation that both receives and responds to what the author has written, both actively listening (“obeying” in its original sense) and responding. It discerns both one’s own perspective and that of the author. In Dorothy Sayers words, there is the Book as Thought, the Book as Written, and the Book as Read.

Moving on from this introduction to artful reading, the authors consider what literature is in its different kinds. They note with sadness the shift from “literature” to “texts” in contemporary literary studies, but maintain the language of literature, distinguishing it from expository writing as concerned with the concrete rather than the abstract. The axiom of literature is to “show, not tell.” They further describe literature as experiential, concrete, universal, interpretive, and artistic. They defend the importance of literature as a portrayal of human experience, for seeing ideas rightly, and for the enjoyment of beauty. It transports us into imagined worlds, giving us renewed perspective on our own as well as refreshment.

They consider how we read different types of literature: story, poetry, novels, fantasy, children’s books, creative non-fiction and the Bible as a literary work. I so valued their simple instruction for poetry–slow down! In the reading of fantasy, they distinguish between escape and escapism, noting with C.S. Lewis that reading is always an escape, but one that ought give fresh perspective on the human condition. They address how to choose good books for children and the vital importance of reading and talking about books together.

The last part of the book returns to the recovery of the art of reading. Fundamentally, we recover by discovering good books and the good, the true, and the beautiful within them. We discern and assess the truth-claims in a book. We consider the moral perspective of the book–does it make the good or the evil attractive and who is valorized? We notice the use of language to point toward beauty, and the beautiful God. They describe excellence in beginnings, middles and ends.

All of this only makes sense in the context of our reading choices. They encourage us to embrace our freedom to read and observe in very practical terms the time thieves that rob us of precious hours. They consider how we choose good books and the role good literature plays in creativity and in one’s spiritual life.

I think one of the most valuable aspects of this book is the encouragement of leisurely, slow, and reflective engagement with good works, whatever their genre. They help us attend to plot, character, setting, and behind all this, the perspective of the author and the insights we gain into our common human condition. Their invitation to be participants in the work with the author while continuing to discern strikes a good balance.

I would have liked to see some book recommendations for those wanting to recover the art. Certainly, the authors mention books throughout, and the ones mentioned are worthwhile, but some bibliographies might have helped. Also while the authors discuss goodness and evil in literature, they don’t discuss beauty and ugliness, only beauty. The ugliness of the post-nuclear world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a crucial offset to the beauty of the love of father and son. Sometimes, Christian literature seems too beautiful, in ways trite and artificial. The beauty and the healing comfort of Lothlorien gains its power from the horrors of Moria and the loss of Gandalf.

Those who practice any art always have a sense they could be better at their art. Reading is also an art. This book reminded me of ways I may be ever-improving at that art. I can work to remove the distractions to attentive reading. I may slow down, especially to savor a poem. I may re-read great works. I may attend to the story and the questions it opens up about the universal human condition. I may allow the book to enlarge my perspective if I give myself to it both attentively and discerningly, both open and observant. Ryken and Mathes invite us, whether the neophyte or the seasoned reader, to an ever-growing practice of the art of reading. After all, it is not how much, but how well we read.

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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.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Consolidated Warehouse

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Consolidated Warehouse ad in the Youngstown Vindicator, August 7, 1961

One of my memories of growing up in Youngstown was Saturday morning trips to the Consolidate Warehouse in downtown Youngstown. It was located on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West Commerce Street, what is now the site of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and Jail. As you can see from the ad above, the building closest to Fifth Avenue was a six floor cube, connected by what looks like a two-story building and a third three-story building where loading docks were located. The downtown store also had a tire and paint sales facility across the street behind the downtown fire station.

As I recall, dad usually went there for whatever supplies he needed for household jobs–paint, tools, hardware, seal coat for the driveway, caulk–you name it. Mom usually gave him a list of cleaning supplies that often sold for better prices than at the local grocery. As their ad said “we are never undersold.” It was kind of an overwhelming place–you could find school clothes, casual clothes, work clothes, personal care items, appliances, automotive supplies, and garden supplies. It was the closest thing we had to Walmart. Sears was a pricier version. K-Mart, Almart, Montgomery Ward, Woolco, and Walmart were all in the future.

Eventually Consolidated opened stores, under the name Consolidated Discount Stores, at 5635 South Avenue, where Petiti’s Garden Center is located, and at 1729 S. Raccoon Rd, in the Wedgewood Plaza. Later on, they opened a store in Salem and after the downtown store closed in the early 1980’s, there was a store for a few years in the McGuffey Mall on the East side. This no longer appeared in their ads by 1984. Obviously these stores as well as the downtown store are long gone. I could not find information about when they finally went out of business. I suspect the buying power of the national stores who came into the area led to their closure.

Consolidated was way ahead of the times. In a way, it was the “proof of concept” for all these other stores. It wasn’t fancy. It was a warehouse. My memory is that it wasn’t brightly lit. It was no frills. It didn’t need to be. All that mattered for my parents was good prices. As far as I know, they were not undersold!

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Review: Red Rover

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Red Rover, Roger Wiens. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Summary: An insider account of over two decades of space exploration culminating in the Mars Rover Curiosity mission.

Perhaps you have seen the pictures of the Mars landscape taken by the Mars Rovers or even the helicopter flown off of the Mars Rover Perseverance, which landed on Mars February 18, 2021. One of the Project Leaders of both Perseverance and the previous Rover, Curiosity, is research scientist Roger Wiens. Wiens’ work is based at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, having previously worked at Cal Tech and the University of California.

Red Rover is an account of over two decades of Wiens’ involvement in space research using robotic devices. Most of the book is focused on two missions: Genesis, which collected particles from solar winds from the Sun and then returned to Earth, revealing new insights into the composition of the Sun, and Curiosity, the Mars Rover mission which landed nine years ago on August 5, 2012 at 10:32 pm Pacific Time (1:32 am ET, August 6, 2012).

The book opens with Wiens’ boyhood fascination with rocketry, space exploration, and astronomy, including the building of a telescope to observe Mars as it passed within 35 million miles of earth. Mars came up again in his graduate research, as he had a chance to study meteorites from Mars, analyzing gases trapped in the rock. After graduation, he put Mars in the rearview mirror, joining a team competing to be part of one of NASA’s new “Discovery” missions–nimble missions costing less than $150 million. His team worked on developing a proposal to collect solar wind to analyze aspects of the Sun and then return the collectors to earth. He describes the excitement of getting through early rounds only to be disappointed to learn they were not selected. He helped submit a new application for just before starting a new position at Los Alamos. This time they were selected.

Wiens takes us through all the challenges of building the collector, testing materials to see if they could endure the rigors of space, getting parts that didn’t work as deadlines approached. Then the launch, problems with overheating just short of the limits, and the return to earth. He recounts waiting in a Utah hangar only to hear the disastrous news that the chutes failed to deploy and it had plummeted like a rock into the Utah desert. Although the sample plates were broken, they were able to recover data that showed a dramatic difference in nitrogen isotopes between the Sun and the Earth due to photochemical shielding.

After this work, he began research on using lasers to analyze surfaces of airless objects, like on the Moon–or Mars. The remaining two-thirds of the book describes the development of what became ChemCam and the competition to get a laser sample analyzer onto the Rover Curiosity. He describes in detail the ins and outs of program reviews, cost-cutting directives, getting cut and then restored, collaboration with the French, the unique challenges of building instruments that will work after launch and landing and the conditions of Mars, and then working with the team of all Project Leads who had projects on the Rover and making it all work together.

Wiens gives an account of the odds of a project actually getting to the point of being able to collect data on Mars and all the barriers along the way from program cuts to equipment failures or catastrophic crashes (for example, the Rover was lowered to the surface by a hovering sky crane) to apparatus failure on the planet. What is so amazing is that nine years later, it continues to work, joined by the new, enhanced Perseverance. I’m struck, compared to our expenditures in so many other areas, how little this actually cost, and the amazing opportunities to push the boundaries of our knowledge of the cosmos we call home. I remember how our previous space explorations led to so many useful innovations, and wonder what fruit these explorations will bear.

This narrative gave me a sense of the rigorous and patient work over decades involved in moving from concept to data collection on the planet, and the unique kind of courage of researchers who invest all those years hoping to make ground-breaking findings, but also risking utter failure. Wiens offers an account of both competition and collaboration that results in the technological excellence required to achieve these results. Most of us have no idea what the life of a research scientist is like. He takes us through a two decade journey that offers an inside glimpse of that life and the passion for discovery that motivates it.

We see the amazing images from these Rovers of the surface of a planet that is only a bright red dot in the skies to most of us. Wiens offers an account that captures both the challenges to surmount and the incredible excitement and satisfaction that researchers experience when a project succeeds that returns pictures and a wealth of new data about the composition of that red planet. So much remains to be discovered. Was Mars ever habitable? Did any form of life arise on Mars? Could the planet be coaxed into habitability once again? These missions will give us crucial data toward answering these questions about our nearest neighbor.