On Books

Review: The Covenant of Water

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The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese. New York: The Grove Press, 2023.

Summary: The story of three generations of the family of Big Ammachi of Parambil, the ever present reality of “the Condition” resulting in a drowning in every generation, a story both of love and the hope in advances in medicine.

Twelve year old Mariamma has been engaged in a brokered marriage to a forty year old widow, the owner of a 500 acre estate near the town of Parambil. Her mother tells her, “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding….After that, God willing, it gets better.” I began reading with a sense of foreboding of what would happen to this girl in the house of this man. And I was surprised. At the wedding, he runs away, mortified that she is a mere child. But they wed. And he leaves her to her own room, and lets her learn the management of the household, lets her mature, lets her bond with his son, JoJo, and lets her realize that he has loved her by providing her time to come to love him. And so begins this incredible story spanning three generations within the Mar Thoma Christian community of South India.

When JoJo falls into what is little more than a puddle and drowns, she learns of “The Condition.” It explains the distance of the house from the river, the fact that her husband will not travel on the water. She is shown a genealogy. Every generation has a death from drowning. And JoJo’s name is added. Eventually Mariamma, who has become Big Ammachi, a capable manager of her household, bears another child, a girl with a developmental difficulty leaving her a perpetual child. Baby Mol brings perpetual love and an uncanny prescience about events. Fifteen years pass, and at a point of giving up hope, Big Ammachi has a son, named Philipose.

Philipose has the condition. Sent to college in Madras, he soon quits due to deafness that impedes his ability to follow the lectures. On the carriage home, he meets Elsie Chandy, an artist, and is smitten. They’d had a brief encounter when Philipose risked his life carrying a dying child on a river barge during floods to the nearest hospital, and was given a ride home by Elsie and her father. He strives to educate himself and becomes a writer, producing a column, “The Ordinary Man” widely followed throughout the country. Eventually, through a broker, Elsie’s family agrees to the marriage. It seems like a beautiful love affair, that sadly ends with the tragic death of their child Ninan. They blame each other and Philipose, injured trying to rescue Ninan, falls into opium addiction. Elsie leaves but returns when she learns Baby Mol is pining for her, and in failing health. Philipose and Elsie are intimate once and it is soon evident that Elsie is pregnant. As she approaches delivery, she has a seizure. Big Ammachi assists in a difficult breech birth, nearly costing the mother her life.

The baby is named Mariamma, after her grandmother. Soon after her recovery, Elsie disappears after going to the river to bathe, her body never found. Philipose sorts out his life, becomes an exemplary father, and continues his writing work, turning over his estate to Shamuel, and eventually, Shamuel’s son Joppan, to operate. Big Ammachi has dreamed of both a hospital in Parambil, and that her grand-daughter would become a doctor and find the cause of “The Condition” that plagues her family.

The book also involves a parallel plot line in which a young Scottish doctor, Digby Kilgour, goes to India to acquire surgical experience. Working for an incompetent superior, he has an affair with the superior’s wife, ending in a tragic fire that only he survives, with his right hand badly burned. A couple, grateful for an earlier medical intervention on his part, shelter him and connect him with a doctor working with lepers, who operates on his hand. He is helped by a young girl who helps him recover fine movements in the hand through drawing. Through much of the novel, we wonder what the what the connection of this plotline is with the main plotline of Big Ammachi and her family. Hang in there. There is one.

The story spans the period from 1900 to 1977. India goes through huge transformations through this time that serve as a backdrop for the novel, from a British colony par excellence to an independent country, seeking to modernize amid political ferment, with the electrification of the countryside and advances in medicine and modern technology. We get some sense in the novel of how this presses against traditional caste divisions, particularly in the relations between the family of Big Ammachi and Shamuel and his son Joppan.

I found the writing particularly engaging. It felt to me that Abraham Verghese writes with the same reverence for his characters that he has for his patients (he is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford). One senses a deep sympathy for his characters, even as they struggle with tragedy, estrangement, and the vicissitudes of life and death. He portrays a community shaped by faith, love, and purpose. And he conveys the noble possibilities of the medical profession, evident in Rune Orquist, the doctor of a leper mission who operates on Kilgour’s hand, and in Mariamma, and the professors who train her. To read Verghese is to read a consummate story weaver who has thought deeply about the human condition in its frailty and fallibility, in the powerful bonds upon which our lives and loves depend, and in the hopes and holy aspirations that represent the best in human striving.

Review: Abraham’s Silence

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Abraham’s Silence, J. Richard Middleton. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021.

Summary: Challenges the traditional reading of the binding of Isaac that valorizes Abraham’s silence as unquestioning obedience and faith, contending that God wanted more than silent obedience.

Abraham is held up as an exemplar of faith, who believed God and was reckoned righteous. Perhaps nowhere is this view of Abraham held up more than in the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, known to Jewish readers as the Aqedah, from the Hebrew “to bind.” Abraham’s unquestioning obedience is upheld as a model of faith, that “God would provide the lamb,” that Abraham believed that he and Isaac would return to the servants. and the testimony of Hebrews 11:17-19 that Abraham believed “God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.”

Yet many thoughtful readers find this narrative disturbing. The idea that God would command such a sacrifice, even as a test, disturbs (although it must be noted that God prevents the act, subsequently forbidding all child sacrifice, in contrast to the gods of surrounding peoples.) Yet the images of the bound Isaac, and the raised knife shake us. What also disturbs J. Richard Middleton is the silence of Abraham. The narrative record does not record Abraham saying anything to God. He rises early the next morning (perhaps to avoid Sarah?), packs up the donkey with wood, and leaves with Isaac and two servants. No plea to spare his son for the sake of the promise. No plea to take him rather than the child of the promise. No nothing. Middleton proposes that part of the test is whether Abraham would talk back to God.

Middleton makes the case that there is a strong element running through scripture of “lament with an edge.” This is seen throughout the Psalms where God’s people cry out to God in pain and suffering that it doesn’t seem that God sees or hears, wondering how long he will permit this. Moses challenges God, convincing God to spare Israel despite their idolatry, pleading God’s reputation among the nations. He refuses to settle for less than God’s presence with him. And God accedes to all this and reveals himself as the God of steadfast love and faithfulness.

Much of the book, Part Two, is devoted to the exemplar par excellence of talking back to God–Job. He contends that Job’s vigorous protest is approved by God, in contrast to the counsel of his “comforters.” The fact that God speaks twice indicates he wants Job to speak back

Against this Old Testament backdrop, Middleton contends Abraham stands out in his silence. He acknowledges the scholarship of Walter Moberly and Jon Levenson that rules out criticisms of Abraham because these are external to the text. Middleton credits this precept but contends there are subtle textual cues to suggest that God wanted more than silent obedience. He notes the shift from YHWH to elohim, suggesting the test involved whether Abraham would perceive something different about the God of the covenant from the gods (elohim) of surrounding peoples. He notes the early departure, perhaps to avoid discussion with Sarah, and the three-day silent journey to a location that should have taken a day (Abraham doesn’t want to do this, but says nothing, just drags his feet), And there are the words to Isaac, “God will provide the lamb, my son.” Middleton says we assume the comma but what if this was not in Abraham’s mind? Middleton includes an amusing comic here to make the point.

Perhaps most striking is that afterward, Isaac parts from Abraham, returning only to bury Abraham. Sarah is also recorded as living apart from Abraham. Isaac’ life in many ways is a parenthesis between Abraham and Jacob. Middleton wonders how different this would have been if Abraham advocated for his son. For example in Jacob’s eyes, the God of Abraham is the fear of Isaac. Middleton wonders if the family dysfunctions of this family began at this time.

Middleton proposes that Abraham barely passes the test, maybe a “C”–he obeys–but that God wanted more. He wanted to see if Abraham would actively speak back, to advocate for the son and for the promise. Sadly, he did not, and also failed to see the richness of God’s mercy.

There is much to be said for this proposal. There is a pattern of Abraham’s willingness to put others at jeopardy–Sarah, Ishmael, and Hagar. In each instance God bales them out, as he does with Isaac. The exception seems to be Lot and Sodom, in Genesis 18, where Abraham pleads from fifty to ten righteous to save the city. Middleton notes that even here, he stops, though Lot and his family number less than ten. Fearing to anger God (although God showed no anger with his pleading), he fails discover how far God’s mercy would go. All he sees is the destruction of the cities, not knowing of Lot’s rescue…and he just moves on. Would Abraham go further in pleading for “his only son, the son he loved”? He doesn’t.

There is also the fallout of the binding in the fracturing of the family, and the likely trauma to Isaac. God works redemptively over the generations, but was this what God intended? Middleton raises profound questions that make us look afresh at this narrative.

Yet I find Middleton unconvincing on several counts. There are Abraham’s utterances to Isaac and the servants. Middleton treats these as brave but unbelieving when in fact they prove out. There is the specific approbation of the angel of the Lord and the restatement of the promise of blessing. Middleton notes subtleties in the language that in his mind qualify this approbation. I found them unconvincing.

I also looked for a discussion of Hebrews 11:17-19 in the text. Christians “valorize” (to use Middleton’s term) Abraham at least in part because of this text, taking our cue for how we read the story from the inspired writer of Hebrews. Middleton’s discussion was not to be found in the text but only in a footnote (59) on page 213-214. He writes:

“The New Testament also seems to validate Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac. In Heb. 11:17-19, Abraham is praised for his faith in the resurrection (he believed God could raise Isaac), which is the reason why he went ahead with the sacrifice of his son. Beyond noting that the explicit doctrine of the resurrection did not arise until after the exile. I would point to Heb. 11:32, which list none other than Jephthah as a hero of faith (in contrast to his portrayal as an unsavory character in Judg. 11). This is clearly based on extra-biblical tradition and not on the biblical text itself.“

Middleton’s argument is to find one questionable element (Jephthah) in the Hebrews 11 account to throw shade on the account of Abraham. This, to me is not an adequate argument for why Christians should not heed the testimony of Hebrews 11 concerning Abraham, and placing such an argument in a footnote reflects to me a reluctance to address evidence that contradicts his argument.

What Middleton does for me is make me look afresh at this challenging text. Along with him, I find myself wondering at Abraham’s silence toward God. I’m less certain than Middleton that Abraham barely passed the test but I do find myself wondering “what if?” I find myself wondering about the “cost” of this test to Abraham’s family. Yes, God did provide the sacrifice but Abraham, at least in a relational sense, lost a son (and, it seems, Sarah as well). What Middleton does is offer a challenge to address these costs for traditional views that valorize Abraham. He also offers the examples of vigorous prayers that take God seriously enough to lament and to contend with God. Whatever my questions about his reading of Abraham, this is a contribution I can wholeheartedly affirm.

Review: The Prophets and the Apostolic Witness

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The Prophets and the Apostolic Witness, Edited by Andrew T. Abernethy, William R. Osborne, and Paul D. Wegner. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: An exploration of how Christians should read Old Testament prophets in light of the work of Christ and of how the apostolic witnesses read them.

In my Jesus movement days, we read prophecy in one hand and the newspaper in the other, looking for how prophets were speaking to our day. In seminary, I learned hermeneutic principles and historico-critical methods that sought to understand the prophets in their own historic context and in terms of what the prophets would have meant for their intended readers to understand.

But in reading the gospels, I became aware of another way of reading the prophets. Both Jesus himself, and the apostles whose witness constitute the New Testament, saw the prophets fulfilled in Christ. There is the sense that the prophets spoke of more than they knew, that there was a fuller sense (sensus plenior) to their testimony that the apostles understood in the light of Christ. The question is, is it legitimate for us to read the prophets this way, and if so, what safeguards protect us from idiosyncratic interpretations that depart not only from the Old Testament text but legitimate readings in light of the apostolic witness? It is with this question that this book deals.

The approach the authors take is to focus on the major prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. For each prophet, there are five chapters focused on these topics, each from a different contributor:

  • How the Apostles Read the Major Prophets as Christian Scripture
  • Limits on Reading the Major Prophets as Christian Scripture
  • Reading the Major Prophets in the Footsteps of the Apostles
  • The History of Interpretation of the Major Prophets as Christian Scripture
  • Preaching the Major Prophets as Christian Scripture

Because all these prophets are long books, the contributors focus in on one key text, cited in the New Testament, addressing it in terms of their topic. The passages are the Servant Song of Isaiah 42:1-4, the New Covenant passage in Jeremiah 31: 31-34, and the valley of dry bones passage in Ezekiel 37:1-14.

The authors differ in approach. A number favor following the apostles in reading the prophets in a fuller sense in light of the work of Christ. Some are more cautious, willing to endorse the apostles readings but careful about going further. A basic principle they follow is that while a passage may mean more than the prophet intended, it can never mean less–the prophet’s intent is always the starting point. All, in varying degrees, support interpreting passages Christologically.

One of the most valuable aspects of the book are the chapters on the history of interpretation. Understanding this history and why certain approaches were later rejected is instructive to our own interpretive readings and the differences among us. One of the editors, William R. Osborne, observes, “In fact, if we believe the Word of God has been given to the people of God, communal reading and interpretation is foundational to the humble pursuit of truth” (p. 313). The strength of this work is not only the communal reading among the fifteen contributors but also their inclusion of the history of interpretation of these texts, include in the bibliographic references provided.

I also appreciate that the authors differentiate from a reader-oriented approach that asks “what does this prophet mean for our community?” by taking a redemptive-canonical approach that asks that asks “what does this prophet mean in light of our crucified, risen, and ascended Lord Jesus?” (cf. p. 317). The fuller reading of the prophets doesn’t mean anything goes (as could be the case in my Jesus movement days) but a fuller reading guided by the New Testament itself.

This is a valuable reference for those who would teach or preach these prophets (there is even advice on this) as well as those concerned with the apostolic and historic interpretation of these texts. The scholars contributing to this volume are experts in the material on which they write (John N. Oswalt in Isaiah, for example). Since these three major prophets are so often quoted or alluded to throughout the New Testament, working through the issues of interpretation in this book will enhance our reading of the New Testament. Place this alongside your best commentaries on Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

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

Review: The Devil’s Novice

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The Devil’s Novice (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael #8), Ellis Peters. New York: Mysterious Press/Open Road Media, 2014 (Originally published in 1983).

Summary: Meriet Aspley is called the “Devil’s Novice” for his nightmares, his awkwardness among the brothers, and an attack leaving him consigned to Brother Mark, where he finds the body of a man he later confesses to have murdered.

Even Meriet Aspley’s arrival at Saints Peter and Paul is awkward from the cold and distant parting from his father to his over-zealousness to be received as a monk. Then there are the nightmares, calmed by Cadfael but arousing talk of him being the “devil’s novice.” When found with a girl’s ornament, he nearly chokes Brother Jerome to death when the brother takes it from him and burns it. For punishment, he is sent to the lazar house to work with Brother Mark, work he takes to well.

Meanwhile, news arrives that Pieter Clemence, a church emissary who had visited the Aspley manor has gone missing, and subsequently his horse is found near boggy ground. Clemence is assumed dead. Hugh Beringar as sheriff helps to investigate. Cadfael, as an emissary from the abbey helps both abbot and Hugh by visiting the Aspley manor. He meets Janyn, the twin of Roswithia, who is to marry Nigel, the favored son of Leoric Aspley, Nigel and Meriet’s father. He learns nothing of Clemence except that he was escorted on his way for a short distance by the father and two servants. He does learn of the affection of Isouda Foriet, from another neighboring manor, for Meriet, and that she is determined to marry him and doubts his call as a monk.

Subsequently, on a mission to gather wood for the lazar house, Meriet leads them to a place he knew where his family stored wood to make charcoal. They discover the remains of a man with a cross and ring that identify him as Clemence. They also find an arrow in his chest. Hugh is looking for a murderer. When a beggar as apprehended for theft, he is carrying a dagger that belonged to Clemence. They hold but don’t charge him for murder but allow word to get out. When Meriet hears that the beggar has been charged, he surprises everyone with a confession. The father had agreed to cover things up, sending Meriet to the abbey. Yet Meriet’s story doesn’t add up. Cadfael and Beringar suspect someone else.

All the possible “persons of interest” will be at the wedding of Roswithia and Nigel and so Hugh and Cadfael bide their time. Amid all this, we have the resolute and ingenious Isouda, who conspires with Cadfael to visit Meriet and later uncovers a key piece of evidence. Her character brought a needed contrast to the seriousness of Meriet and his father, Leoric.

Why Clemence was murdered remains a puzzle. When the answer comes, it will reveal larger conspiracies and lead to another murder attempt. But what of Meriet and Isouda? You’ll just have to read the book to find out!

Review: Holiness

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Holiness: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Theology, Matt Ayars, Christopher T. Bounds, and Caleb T. Friedeman. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: A biblical, historical, and theological argument within the Wesleyan tradition for holiness understood as “entire sanctification” or Christian perfection, able not to sin and to wholeheartedly love God and neighbor.

This book caught my attention for the simple reason that it seems to have fallen out of fashion to speak of Christian holiness, often equated with a “holier than thou” attitude and a kind of Pharisaism of outer holiness and inner corruption. It is far more “authentic” to be honest about our sins than to discuss our longing to grow in Christlike holiness.

This is a book by a group of Wesleyan scholars who take seriously statements like “be holy as I am holy,” “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” and “may the God of peace sanctify you entirely.” They refuse to believe that these only refer to some post-mortem state but are possible to fulfill within this lifetime. They argue that this is not an idea only first propounded by John Wesley but is grounded in scripture and present throughout the history of the church. They also examine versions of holiness theology and argue for a “semi-Augustinian” theology and a “middle way” of seeking until one receives, recognizing the priority of divine grace.

The book is organized into four parts;

Holiness In the Old Testament. in successive chapters they examine the teaching on holiness in the Pentateuch, the Historical books and the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature. The emphasis is on holiness as otherness and Israel’s inability to fulfill the law and the prophecy of a new covenant writing this law on the hear, empowering what is commanded.

Holiness in the New Testament. Chapters are devoted to holiness in the Gospels and Acts, the Letters of Paul, and the General Epistles and Revelation. The holiness of Jesus and his command to be perfect are discussed, the latter best understood as being fully developed in a moral sense through the work of Jesus and the power of the Spirit. Likewise, while Paul recognizes that people do sin, holiness is the norm, meant to be worked out in every aspect of life (entire sanctification) as the Spirit works within us and bears his fruit in our lives. The authors point to similar calls to holiness in the General Epistles and Revelation.

Holiness in Christian History. Three chapters discuss in succession early Christian history, the Middle Ages, and the Pre-modern and Modern Eras. They examine the differing ideas of the patristic writers and the shared sense that the love of God leads to freedom from sin, obedience to Christ and love of neighbor. They note the confining of perfection to the monastics in the Middle Ages and a renewed focus in the Reformation, culminating in Wesleyan and Anabaptist/Pietist Circles.

A Theology of Holiness. Three chapters discuss holiness and human sin, holiness and redemption, and the when and how of holiness. They begin with God’s intention for us, and the guilt power and being of sin. They discuss justification, sanctification, and glorification, and the possibility of entire sanctification, being perfect in love for God and neighbor, and allow that within such sanctification, there may be continuing progress toward maturity, as well as falling back. Finally they discuss the three ways–shorter, middle, and longer, rejecting the former as too dependent on human initiative, and the latter reflecting insufficient faith in the grace of God to transform.

I think this book makes an important contribution to highlighting the call of God for his people to be holy and for God’s empowering of the life to which we are called in Christ. It offers an attractive vision of unreservedly loving God and neighbor as within reach of the ordinary believer. They rightly observe that we can be far too accepting of sin that God would have us put to death.

I still find myself with questions that I would love to discuss with Wesleyan believers. Where is discussion of the idea of total depravity in the doctrine of sin (it is only mentioned in the final chapter in the context of discussing “semi-Augustinianism”), terminology that is avoided in the authors discussion? The pervasive presence of sin in every aspect of human existence raises question for me about the “perfection” of love. I recognize the ways I’m blind to sin apart from God revealing that sin, and the ways I self-deceive. How are such aspects of sin reckoned with in a doctrine of entire sanctification?

Likewise, I’m puzzled by “semi-Augustinianism.” Can something be semi-Augustinian without also being semi-Pelagian? It seems that the distinction is the role of prevenient grace in empowering human will. It points up to me a question that still would seem to distinguish Wesleyan from Reformed doctrines of sanctification, namely between those that prioritize grace, as do these authors and those that would contend that our sanctification, as is our justification, is all of grace.

At the same time, none of this should prevent the believer in the pursuit of a holy life and to experience liberty from not only sin’s guilt but its power in one’s life. Likewise, the authors emphasize not only what we are freed from but what we are freed and empowered to–namely the unrestrained love of God and neighbor–and that this is God’s intention for us in Christ. This is part of our rich inheritance in Christ that seems neglected or even denigrated in some quarters. I’m grateful for these Wesleyan voices bringing these matters for wider consideration.

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

Review: A Quiet Life

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A Quiet Life, Kenzaburo Oe (Translators: Kunioki Yanagishita, William Wetherall). New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Summary: Ma-chan, a quiet, college age woman is left to care for her older brother who has a neurological disorder and younger, college-bound brother while her father, a famous writer, sorts out his life and faith in California on a writer’s residency.

All Ma-Chan wants is to live a quiet life, writing her thesis on Celine, a French novelist, while caring for her brother, nicknamed Eeyore, who suffers from epileptic fits that have caused brain damage, yet left him with an unusual musical talent. She has been more or less marginalized, an orphan even before her parents left Japan for California. Her parents tended to focus on the afflictions of the older brother and the promise of the younger brother, O-Chan, preparing for his college entrance exams while his parents are in America, Her father, a famous writer, has left for a writer’s residency in California. In reality, he is suffering from a “pinch” of the spirit, having suffered a loss of faith that causes him to wonder “how is a faithless person to cope with life?”

Ma-Chan is left to cope at a more practical level. She has to help her older brother deal with his sexual urges in socially appropriate ways while seeing that he gets to his sheltered workshop each day. She has to help others understand her brother’s seizures and resist their mockery of him, often in internal cries of “Hell no! Hell no!” She also takes him to the Shigetos, who help Eeyore discover and develop his unique gift for musical composition. One of these is titled “Sutego” or orphan. Both brother and sister are orphans together.

Eventually, it is recommended that Eeyore take swim lessons to channel some of his physical energies. It is here that they meet Mr. Arai, a shady character who agrees to teach Eeyore to swim. And he is very good at it and a bond develops between them, even as everything in us screams “predator!” Mr Shigeto starts watching out for them until a confrontation with Arai in which Mr. Shigeto is severely beaten, opening the way for Mr. Arai to pursue his designs.

The “quiet life” Ma-Chan wants comes at the cost of submerging her own selfhood. She describes herself as “robotizing.” She sees herself as a skinny thing with stick legs, oblivious of her own sexuality and that others might notice her. Yet there are her “Hell Nos” and her “Diary of Life,” written that “her papa might remember he has a family.” One comes to the end of this novel wondering whether Ma-Chan will find her voice and her self in more than a diary and her internal monologue. Will she heed the self that says “Hell No!” or let her father treat her as an orphan while he pursues an esoteric spiritual search? Will she emerge as the scholar in her own right?

Many of us want a quiet life. Life doesn’t always permit this, and more than that, at what price do we secure such a life? Is it at the price of our selves? Must we robotize? It seems these are the questions Oe’s novel asks of us. Meanwhile, he seems to take a swipe at the pretensions of literary figures who think their existential “pinches” more important than the real pinches they make those around them endure.

Review: The Science of the Good Samaritan

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The Science of the Good Samaritan, Dr. Emily Smith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books, 2023.

Summary: A book that looks at what it means to love our neighbor through the lens of global public health.

I first encountered Dr. Emily Smith through posts on Facebook under the title of “The Friendly Neighborhood Epidemiologist” (which later migrated to Substack). This was during the Covid epidemic when many of us were searching for accurate and understandable information and perspective to get us through a time when bodies were being stored in refrigerated trailers in our major cities. As an epidemiologist, Dr. Smith gave us daily doses of good information about infection rates, measures for staying healthy, what to do if we got sick, and how to protect our vulnerable loved ones.

But more than that, as the political divisions arose, she rose above them and helped us to think as Christians rather than partisans about how we might live and love through this horror. A recurring theme was what neighbor love meant and could be practically expressed. She drew on her training as an epidemiologist, knowing how airborne viruses spread, and helped us think about decisions about masking, family gatherings, and in-person worship. She wrote as both a scientist and as the wife of a pastor, and for me, brought those two worlds together seamlessly. Sadly, like so many, especially women, in public health, she paid with death threats to herself and her family as others tried prevent her from rising above partisan politics by asking what it meant to love our neighbors, like the good Samaritan.

In this book she continues to explore that question. It is not a re-hash of her Covid experience although she does reference it at points. Rather she asks the question of what it means to be a modern day Good Samaritan. Principally, it means a concern for others beyond our own groups. She explores what it means to care about those who experience greater mortality rates simply because of their race or national origin. She describes how the calibration of devices as simple as pulse oximeters ignored differences of race, giving false readings for people of color. She describes the care she received for preeclampsia during a pregnancy, treatment unavailable to many women in the world who die without it.

Along the way she introduces to neighbors who model that concern, like Edna Adan Ismail, Somalia’s first midwife, a WHO official who used her retirement income to buid a hospital in war-torn Somaliland amid the communal dump because that was the only land given her. It was a hospital among the most marginalized. She describes the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, who identified a child needing surgery as the key factor in many parts of the world that submerges families below the poverty line. She shows the cost effectiveness of investing in child surgery and describes her own work with a team of Tanzanians to remove barriers for children with cancer to receive treatment. This is what happens when people refuse to walk by but stop and care.

This lens motivates her to address issues evangelicals (of which she is one) want to remain silent about. Runaway capitalism results in wide income disparities placing much of the world at risk due to lack of access to affordable health care, Climate change expands the range of vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and Zika. She raises the challenging issue of equity in health care–that if we truly notice the person on the side of the road and are to be neighbor to them, it means directing more resources to the least-served. In Paul Farmer’s words this means the five S’s of staff, stuff, space, social support, and systems (as in good referral systems).

A side story of this book is her journey as a woman in science. Her life reflects the importance of door openers like the university prof who worked with her and invited her into her lab as a high school student, and of models and mentors, like her research mentor Dr. Henry Rice, an ongoing collaborator who invited her to give testimony at the United Nations.

Dr. Smith’s passion for her work is evident but also friendly and vulnerable. In her book, she invites us to pull up a seat as it were, at her table, to talk. I also discovered that she is a changed person from the person I encountered online during Covid. She talks honestly about the year-and-a-half struggle with migraines where she lived in darkened rooms. She learned to “untether,’ to go slower, and to know that she was loved by the One who also suffered.

I reflected as I read on the parallels between Dr. Emily Smith and Dr. Katherine Hayhoe. both Christian women in science bringing faith and scholarship together around the existential issues of the day, climate and public health. Both have husbands who are pastors. Both have winsomely pushed against evangelical resistance to their work in science. Both are posing the very questions Jesus posed in answering the question of “who is the neighbor I’m required to love?” Who is it, lying at the side of the road, in our world? What is the care they need? And who will be the Good Samaritan?

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

Review: Now I Lay Me Down to Fight

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Now I Lay Me Down to Fight, Katy Bowser Hutson (Foreword by Tish Harrison Warren). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: Poems and essays tracing one woman’s cancer journey and how she encountered God amid the brokenness of her body.

You are going about your life. Attending a writers workshop. Caring for children. Looking forward to the return of a husband who has been on the road. Then you notice alarming symptoms. And the world turns over in a day as you learn you have inflammatory breast cancer, a particularly deadly form of breast cancer. Within a week you’ve begun chemotherapy.

This, in outline is the beginning of Katy Bowser Hutson’s breast cancer journey. A poet, Bowser invites us into her journey through short essays and poems. A survivor, she bears scars of body and spirit from peripheral neuropathy to the ever present possibility of recurrence.

Her treatment involved intensive chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation. Her poems take us through the fatigue of chemotherapy in which you fight by resting and letting the chemo kill. She grieves the loss of hair. Hutson writes that she will “cipher meaning/Siphoning liquid beauty that seeps from the edges/Into a tiny vial.” Poetry is her resistance. She acknowledges the ugliness of the treatment and the strange paradox that this may give her her life. She thanks God for everything from herceptin to those who surround her with love while her body is being devastated. In “Potty Mouth” she vents against all the indignities of a digestive tract wracked by chemo.

She takes us through her process of coming to terms with the loss of the breasts that caught the eyes of boys and nursed her children. She gives us a glimpse of her thoughts on the eve of surgery and after recovery. At times, all she can do is send words “running across the page.” Amid it all she notes that a benefit of cancer is that people tell you they are glad you’re alive. They don’t usually do that.

Then radiation. Daily bursts of radiation five days a week for six weeks. Like sunburn, reddening, inflaming, and blistering skin and introducing a new type of fatigue. A daily routine with caring people inflicting a new form of hurt…until its over and you are really done with treatment, nine or so months after you began. And then another year for your body to recover to a new normal. And then the finish line moves for her as she has ovaries removed to suppress the estrogen that feeds her cancer.

She writes of her struggles with God and her sense that God comes near the broken and brokenhearted. She describes the living of a kind of death to know resurrection. Throughout she renders honestly both the struggle with what she is facing and the place of surrender to which she comes.

I am the husband of a fourteen year survivor of a different form of breast cancer. While no two cancers or cancer journeys are the same, there was so much that rang true. My wife’s treatment process was similar to Katy’s: chemo, surgery, radiation. I relived my wife’s journey as I read, and perhaps it is good not to forget. She captures the devastation cancer treatment wreaks upon the body. The old saw is that “to kill cancer you need to mostly kill the rest of you.” She captures the duration of treatment that most who haven’t been through it don’t understand. She expresses the ups and downs of spiritual life and the exhaustion that says “all I want to do is rest” and says that is OK. All this in a little book of 86 pages.

This is a book that helps someone going through treatment to know he or she is not alone. It helps caregivers understand what those they love are going through. But the group this book may be especially helpful for are those who have a friend who has received a cancer diagnosis and they have not known someone close to them with cancer. Katy Bowser Hutson helps readers wrestle with the mortal danger of cancer and the bodily indignities of treatment and the “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” that is the spiritual journey of many.

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

Review: Every Book Its Reader

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Every Book Its Reader, Nicholas A. Basbanes. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Summary: A celebration of those who compiled book lists and made recommendations, the impact of books on various individuals, and the reading lives of famous individuals.

For bibliophiles, Nicholas A. Basbanes is a godsend. He has published at least five books about books and those who are dedicated readers and collectors. I’ve previously reviewed A Gentle Madness, Basbanes celebration of book collectors. This, I believe has a wider appeal. The premise of this work is to explore the impact books have had on their readers and he takes us on a fascinating tour of the lives and libraries of the famous.

He begins with the history of those who recommend books and it was delightful to find that Bob on Books follows a long and honorable tradition. We learn of the great popularity of May Lamberton Becker and her “Readers Guide” columns of the late 1800’s, spanning a wide array of interests. Most delightful is the story of a rural reader with limited access to books asking for books that “had made her [Becker] sit up at night” that she could order by mail order. Becker sent her a package of books that arrived after she’d had surgery for a terminal condition. She wrote back, “With books I slip out of my life and am with the choicest company.”

Basbanes discusses the various attempts to compile lists of “greatest books,” a literary canon, including the efforts of Anita Silvey, who has read over 125,000 children’s books and compiled a list of 100 best books for children. We learn of the efforts of the Lilly Library to identify and collect the books people will be reading in 300 years.

Much of the book is concerned with famous readers and how they interacted with their books. We learn of “the silent witneeses,” the notes Henry James jotted in his books. Basbanes goes on with this theme in a whole chapter on “Marginalia,” the notes readers jot in the margins of their books–a horror to librarians and a trove of information for those studying the history of reading.

We’re introduced to David McCullough, an ardent reader who tells the story of Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox, brilliant Revolutionary war leaders who learned strategy and tactics from books! We learn how Lincoln, Adams, and others carried books with them wherever they went. Basbanes traces the artistry of translators. He chronicles the biblical scholarship of Elaine Pagels. He introduces us to the child psychologist Robert Coles, a former literature major who came to recognize the power of stories for children and the rest of us. We meet Daniel Aaron, the man responsible for my bookcase full of Library of America volumes, doing for American writers what other series have done for Europeans. We visit the libraries of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, inventors nourished by their reading.

The book concludes by featuring the Changing Lives Through Literature program, and the transformative influence books have had on the lives of the imprisoned. (Sadly, access to literature for prisoners is being curbed in many states.) What Basbanes does throughout is explore the significance of books on our lives. Reading him both confirms my own deep sense of the value of reading and inspires me to grow as a reader, to truly attend to what I read.

Review: Police at the Funeral

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Police at the Funeral (Albert Campion #4), Margery Allingham. New York: Open Road Media, 2023 (Originally published in 1931).

Summary: A request to find a missing uncle turns into a multiple murder investigation in an unhappy Cambridge manor.

Campion has a meeting with the fiancee of an old friend in a secluded location called the Sanctuary when he encounters Inspector Stanislaus Oakes. Oakes is trying to elude someone who is following him. The young woman, Joyce Blount, has seen and knows him but won’t say who it is. Turns out she has a reason. Her uncle, Andrew Faraday, is missing. Her fiance, Marcus Featherstone, a friend of Campion, is Andrew’s solicitor. They want someone with Campion’s skills to help find him.

Campion arrives at Socrates Close, the family manor, to learn that Andrew has been found by two students–dead. Floating in the river, legs and hands bound, his head blown off with a bullet between the eyes. Inspector Oakes joins the investigation.

It turns out Andrew was a black sheep, a gambler, erratic and disliked by the family, including his brother William, his sister Julia, and Great Aunt Caroline, a formidable old woman who heads the household. Then, there is the man who had followed Oates, Cousin George Faraday, whereabouts unknown. Great Aunt Caroline immediately takes a liking to Campion and hires him to investigate the death.

Death soon becomes deaths. Aunt Julia dies the next morning after her morning tea. It’s poison. Suspicion, at least for Andrew’s death, falls on William. He was the last with Andrew, walking home from church with him, parting when Andrew went the long way home. But William also was late getting back and can’t account for the time due to amnesia, which he claims he has seen a doctor for. But his service revolver is missing, as is some as well as some cord from a window pull.

More bizarre things happen. William is wounded and faints from what looks like a knife wound. He recovers but Campion suspects more poison, just not enough. A huge barefoot footprint appears in a bed outside the house and a giant “B” appears on a window. Then George appears, has a conference with Caroline, and takes over the house. He has something on her, connected with Andrew’s death. The next morning, he’s dead–cyanide poisoning.

Both Oates and Campion keep searching for who could be responsible for all these deaths. Then the answer comes in an overnight fight between Campion and the barefoot stalker…

It’s fascinating to see the tie between Great Aunt Caroline and Campion. It seems to come down to discretion toward an old, if not particularly attractive family. Likewise with William under a cloud of suspicion. Under Campion’s eccentricity, there is a certain decency. But will it mislead him and endanger his own life in a house where everyone under the roof seems to be coming to an early death?