On Books

Review: The Long War

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The Long War, David Loyn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

Summary: A history of the war in Afghanistan from 9/11 until nearly the end of the U.S. presence in 2021.

It was America’s longest war. Yet I suspect many of us rarely noticed except for the early fight against al-Qaeda and the failed attempt to catch Bin Ladin, the death of Bin Ladin in 2011, and the scenes of the hectic withdrawal in the summer of 2021, eerily reminiscent of the departure of the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975.

David Loyn, a BBC reporter in Afghanistan, and for a year, communications adviser to President Ashraf Ghani, traces this long history. The recurring theme seems to be the lack of a sustained investment in what was needed to decisively defeat the Taliban, protect and invest in the development of the country, and effectively hand over to the indigenous government. It felt like being prescribed an antibiotic and taking it just enough to eliminate symptoms, then backing off, allowing the resurgence and resistance of the infection, complicated by the alternatives to the Taliban–governments reliant on the support of the country’s warlords, powerful and corrupt and resented by the people.

Loyn traces the problems back to decisions made early on. The Bush administration wanted a “light footprint,” reserving forces for the Iraq invasion, which was the military’s primary focus. This led to limited U.S participation in the pursuit of Bin Ladin, allowing his escape. Efforts to eliminate al-Qaeda’s allies, the Taliban, were hampered by the character of the international force and the complicated rules of engagement under which each company operated. Nevertheless, the Taliban was pushed back from Kabul and Kandahar and into the mountainous borders with Pakistan.

This allowed the Taliban a chance to re-group and take an insurgency approach, using IED’s and other disruptive measures against occupiers, gradually regaining ground rather than engaging in open warfare, protected by supposed US allies, the Pakistanis. By 2009, at the beginning of the Obama administration, it became clear a new strategy was needed. Special ops raids to strike key Taliban targets often resulted in civilian casualties and an increased hatred of the foreign presence. And as the US fell into disfavor with the Karzai government, the Taliban succeeded in recruiting disaffected Afghanis. And so the US “surged” troops, engaging in both counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism approaches under a succession of generals (McKiernan, McChrystal, and Petraeus). McChrystal continued to press for more troops, as much to protect the population as to kill terrorists. He got part of what he wanted and timetables for withdrawal, first by 2012 and then 2014, that hamstrung these efforts.

Both the Taliban and the U.S. began to explore talks, often cutting out the Afghan government, further rankling relations. As US and UN commanders sought to train Afghanis, the number of incidents rose of Afghanis turning on and killing their supposed allies. As the pullbacks continued, sometimes temporarily interrupted during the Trump administration, the Taliban continued to regain more of the country.

Loyn’s account ends before the hurried flight of the US from Afghanistan and the victory of the Taliban over the disappearing Afghan military and government. But it is pretty clear what was coming. It was the predictable end result of efforts to fight the war “on the cheap” (even though it ended up quite costly in money and lives). He shows the folly of unclear war aims, inadequate resources to do what needs to be done, ignorance of the nature of the culture, and a labyrinthine command and operational structure.

Loyn’s perspective seems to be that a longer term investment in counter insurgency with sufficient resources to defeat the enemy while winning the people and giving the young government breathing space would have led to a different outcome. We pretended not to be nation building until we were nation building, ambivalent in our investment of resources and troops and ignorant of the warlord structures that siphoned off so much of what we spent there. It seems to me that we were never quite clear why we were there, especially after the initial offensive against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That itself seems to be problematic.

I suspect all this will be debated for years to come. Loyn’s book is a good starting point, tracing the decisions made, the different parties to the war, and its unfolding over twenty years. Let us hope that after Vietnam and Afghanistan we will learn how to avoid embroiling ourselves in these things.

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

Review: Reformed Public Theology

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Reformed Public Theology, Edited by Matthew Kaemingk. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021.

Summary: A collection of 23 essays by leading Reformed thinkers articulating how Reformed theology bears on various aspects of public life.

One of the things that persuaded me to follow Christ was the discovery of how the Christian faith bore on various aspects of public life beyond the church walls. What stands out as I reflect on important books that have helped me is that many of these have been written by those shaped by Reformed thought. This volume is evidence that there is a robust community carrying on this intellectual heritage

The book is introduced by a marvelous statement by Matthew Kaemingk that articulates the marks of a Reformed public theology:

  1. Listening to the Laity.
  2. Dispersing Power–pushing power out and down.
  3. Temporal Awareness–conscious of “what time it is.”
  4. Historical humility
  5. Aesthetic neighborliness
  6. Culture Making
  7. Public Delight
  8. A Liturgical Life
  9. A Liberated Solidarity

The twenty-three essays that follow are organized into six parts:

Public Culture: Contributors range the world addressing immigration, language, decolonialism, euthanasia, and pluralism. The essay on euthanasia, considering the case of the Netherlands was particularly striking to me in its assertion of the sovereignty of God over medicine, the ministry of prayer, listening, and living with the ambiguity of waiting.

Public Markets: Essays here cover work, economics, and labor rights. Having studied the theology of work, I appreciated Katherine Leary Alsdorf’s essay on a Reformed theology of work in New York, recognizing the rich affirmation of work in Christ’s Lordship over all while challenging the idolatries of vocation.

Public Justice: Writers address ideologies, populism, and activism. Stephanie Summers shares how she was formed through her relationship with Jim Skillen, who helped her root her fiery activism in a framework that saw opponents as potential partners and gave her an understanding of the different institutions or spheres that constitute civil society and saw politics as an avenue to love neighbors. Her narrative is a rich account worth reading by every young (and not so young) activist.

Public Aesthetics: Makoto Fujimura writes on Japanese aesthetics, Jamie Smith on poetry, Robert S. Covolo on fashion, and Eric O. Jacobsen on cities. I was familiar with all but Covolo and have never thought about fashion through the eyes of faith. He looks at fashion as gift, as market commodity, as social force, as aesthetic play, and as social costume and argues for its being worth serious reflection.

Public Academy: As a campus minister, I was particularly eager to see the essays in this section. None disappointed. Bethany Jenkins shows how the Reformed framework enables one to engage every aspect of the pluralist campus. Nick Wolterstorff outlines five themes characteristic of the Reformed understanding of scholarship with a strong encouragement both to engage diverse worldviews as a Christian while engaging in “dialogic pluralism” that both learns from and contributes to the learning of others through active shared engagement. Jeff Liou offers a great service in a thoughtful, nuanced, and Reformed discussion of Critical Race Theory (CRT), explaining it (very necessary, because many fight something they don’t understand), drawing upon Reformed understandings of justice and culture, including neo-Calvinism’s critique of modernity and Western liberalism, and its affirmation of the wealth of every culture. He notes correspondences and differences between Reformed thought and CRT, and highlights the similarity of Boesak’s Reformed critique of South Africa and much of what is found in Critical Race Theory.

Public Worship: The final section focuses on the public of the various aspects of our worship: communion and the welcoming of immigrants, public prayer as a place to give voice to the traumas of the public square, baptism as it bears on racism and sexism, various forms of confession and our civil discourse, and piety, how we imitate Christ in public life. The final essay on piety names the dichotomy between good work and spirituality that has often signaled that work doesn’t matter, only church and argues that ‘the things of earth grow strangely clear (rather than dim)/In the light of his glory and grace.” Our work in the world has eternal significance in and through Christ.

I cannot do all the essays justice in this space. Running through them are the Kuyperian ideas of “every square inch” and “sphere sovereignty.” There is also a Reformed eschatology, emphasized by the Reformed theologian Richard Mouw, to whom this volume is dedicated, of Revelation 21-22, where the kings of the earth bring the wealth of the nations into the holy city. All our efforts in the public sphere gain significance as we look toward that day, and the full revealing of the common grace of God in the world.

There is rich fare to be found in these pages, often as introductions to more extensive works. For anyone looking for alternatives to the political ideologies often baptized as “Christian,” for anyone wanting to engage in public life in whatever way fits their calling, there are good resources that take us beyond being good, little Christians, that help us think about the purposes of God, the nature of human beings and society and institutions, that help us think in biblical categories about justice, and about the meaning of our worship as we look beyond the church doors. The essays bring in voices from every continent and social situation, belying stereotypes of Reformed thought being only white and western. This is the substantive content needed in adult education in our churches, in workplace ministries, among community organizers, among faculty and campus leaders, and Christians working inside the beltway, and not just in the halls of our seminaries.

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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: Black Hands, White House

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Black Hands, White House, Renee K. Harrison. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021.

Summary: A history of how enslaved peoples played a major role in the building of this country and the need to remember that work in our monuments and by other means.

A number of histories have detailed the slave experience in America. What is unique about this history is that it seeks to give an account of the contribution enslaved Blacks made to the building of this country and its economy. Not only that, it seeks to tell the story of people, often by name who made that contribution while enslaved. The author believes they need to be remembered for their important role. They are a part of America’s history and are worthy to be included.

The author begins with an overview of the economic impact enslaved Blacks made in the country especially through the production of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar. She also lists six pages of companies and institutions that benefited from American slavery, or directly from slave labor. These include the government — slaves built many of Washington’s buildings and infrastructure. Insurance companies insured slaves for their owners, various banks accepted slaves as collateral or owned slaves, newspapers advertised slave sales, universities were funded by slave owners and some used slave labor in their construction, railroads rented slave labor, mines employed slaves–even churches and seminaries owned slaves and used slave labor.

Succeeding chapters chronicle the role slaves played in specific building projects. Mount Vernon’s buildings and tobacco and wheat crops depended on slaves. The author lists the names and values of slaves inherited by or subsequently hired by Washington and their trades, spouses, and enslaved children. At least 150 are buried in unmarked graves there.

Benjamin Banneker, a free black son of a slave was a self taught astronomer who was part of the survey team laying out boundaries, his role being to place the boundary markers for the new capital city. Slaves fired and laid many of the bricks and cut and hauled much of the stone for buildings in Washington. Slave markets often existed in the shadow of builds rising as shrines to democracy and freedom.

Both the White House and Capitol building were built with slave labor–and slaves re-built the White House after it was burned in the War of 1812. Of the first eighteen presidents, only two never owned slaves and publicly opposed slavery. Eight brought slaves they owned into the White House, four others owned slaves but did not have them at the White House. Four others, including Lincoln, did not own slaves but had ambiguous positions on slavery.

A similar story may be told of the Capitol. On page 175, the author lists 100 people who were “rented” for the construction of the Capitol building, a partial list. Philip Reid, a slave from Charleston, South Carolina, figured out how to cast Clark Mills Statue of Freedom in sections and install it atop the Capitol dome. His owner received most of the wages, apart from $41.25, for his work.

She goes on to describe slave involvement in the construction of the Supreme Court building, the Treasury building, the Smithsonian castle, Georgetown University, and the Library of Congress. At the core of the Library is the collection of Thomas Jefferson’s library. John Hemings fashioned the pine bookshelves and the portable book boxes in which the books were transported, Burwell Colbert painted the carriage that transported the books and Joseph Fossett fashioned the ironwork on the carriage.

Harrison believes it is past time to recognize in our nation’s monuments, particularly on the National Mall, the history of slavery, the vast machine of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the contribution that peoples forcibly removed from their own countries made in ours. She chronicles the inadequate attempt to do so with the Freedman’s Memorial, funded by former slaves but appropriated by white directors who chose the design, Abraham Lincoln towering over a kneeling slave who had been freed. Frederick Douglass, in a speech at its dedication, acknowledged the bravery associated with Emancipation but also the white self-interest.

The author describes the memorial as a pattern of absolution without accountability that has run from the end of the Civil War to the relatives of the Charleston Nine. A monument alone will not satisfy all the needs for accountability but a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers would mark a beginning–a tribute to their labors that also helped build our country, a remembrance of the people whose names and work are often absent from the pages of our histories. It’s part of a larger conversation of acknowledgement of harm and accountability and appropriate restitution without which our national wounds associated with slavery and racism cannot be healed.

This is a compelling history that moves beyond the indignities done to Black bodies to the dignity of their work, already evident in many of our national landmarks. They nourished the economy of an infant nation. I thought the idea of a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers was quite appropriate. I was surprised to find no way to help with the funding of such an effort or petition for such a monument. The University of Virginia was the only place (one mentioned in her list of institutions) where such a thing has been done. I could find no website to advocate for a national memorial. I hope the author will persist and find others to mobilize a national effort toward this end, one worthy of the many she has written of by name and the many nameless others.

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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: Jesus’s Final Week

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Jesus’s Final Week, William F. Cook III. Nashville: B & H Academic, 2022.

Summary: A day-by-day discussion of the events in Jesus’s life from the triumphal entry until the empty tomb, using a “harmony of the gospels” approach.

The final week of the life of Jesus before the resurrection occupies a disproportionate part of each of our four gospels. In fact, some observers have described the gospels as “Passion narratives with long introductions.”

We often read these accounts in different gospels, which can be confusing as we try to imagine how events mentioned in one gospel mesh with those of another. Scholars use these differences to highlight the unique emphases of each gospel writer. Cook takes a different approach, which he describes as “horizontal,” using a “harmony of the gospels” resource to arrange all the events into a day-by-day chronological account that begins with the triumphal entry and ends with the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances.

For each day, he offers concise discussions that offer helpful background, explain any Old Testament scripture quoted or otherwise relevant, summarize key points in the day’s events and their significance, and then offers concluding reflections, often offering applications for our lives. For example, Cook concludes his chapter on The Triumphal Entry with this:

” We should ask ourselves how often we are overcome with emotion when we consider that many people we love and care about are on the precipice of God’s judgment. I fear we sometimes get used to loved ones and friends not knowing Jesus. We need to shed more tears and pray more passionate prayers for their salvation.”

Cook, p. 12.

We often overlook the temple controversies on Tuesday. I thought Cook’s discussion quite helpful of the four questions asked of Jesus and the final question Jesus asks of the religious leaders. The events of Thursday and Friday are given more space with a chapter each devoted to the last supper, including Jesus’s prayer in John, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Jewish Trial, The Roman Trial, and the crucifixion and death of Jesus. The final chapter discusses the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and evidence for the resurrection.

One of the nice features of each chapter was to include a hymn related to the material in the chapter. I often found myself at least mentally singing through the hymn. One of the things this ought suggest is that this is a wonderful devotional resource as one prepares to remember Passion Week. It also makes for a good Lenten study and includes a study guide for groups. There’s still time to get this for this year or to have on hand for the next.

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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: When We Stand

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When We Stand, Terence Lester (Foreword Father Gregory Boyle). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: Makes a motivational case for mobilizing with other to pursue follow Christ in the pursuit of justice.

We see so many things that are not “the way it’s meant to be.” The problems seem so big. We seem so small. Until we find others to walk together with us, where we are part of a mobilized community where everyone’s gifts multiply our impact. Terence Lester has been there and formed an organization called Love Beyond Walls focused on poverty awareness and community mobilization. He makes the case that we are better together than separate when pursuing justice causes. He writes this book to motivate us to mobilize in community and shows us how it is done.

It begins with getting out of our bubbles and figuring out who is proximate–our near neighbor in need. It requires making more time, doing a reset on our lives and figuring out what our “let go” list is to make space for others. Often we are absorbed with the pursuit of ephemeral success when we have the opportunity to devote ourselves to pursue something real, of eternal value. Lester describes two friends who sold a nice home for one that wasn’t as nice but well-suited to caring for foster children. He calls us to be willing to unlearn our previous notions, particularly around poverty, race, and justice. It may mean changing our way of living or even how we lead.

One of the shifts in our thinking is a shift from me to we, to be willing to collaborate to pursue social change. He notes how such collaboration means a willingness to die to what Dr. King called “the drum major instinct.” At the same time, this doesn’t mean we deny what we have to offer, even if it is the basic skill of cleaning and stocking a hand-washing station for the homeless during a COVID epidemic. Often, it begins with a modest first step, like the beginning of Love Beyond Walls out of the Lesters’ garage.

Lester comes back to the idea of time in a chapter on “living intentionally.” Far from the vision of the harried activist, his call is for margin, for deliberate thought about our schedules and what we do best when. He also reprises the “we” idea, encouraging us to bring others with us, to look for partners, to share the weight, and invite people into community. He urges us to maximize our impact through assessing our “social capital” and to play our part in God’s interconnected world.

Most of each chapter consist of stories Lester relates to share his point. This makes for an easy read and one that is inspiring as well as instructive. He tells a story of a man who stepped out and cared for someone proximate to him. Lester came out of a troubled home, often spending time away, sometimes on the streets. One night, he called a friend, Erik, who checked with his father, coming back on the line, saying, “Yeah, come on over–my family loves you.” He then describes how that love changed his life when he arrived at Erik’s home, and Mr. Moore came out to greet him:

“When I arrived at their family home after a long drive, Mr. Moore came out to my car, carrying food for me. I remember him looking at me and asking me to look at him….

“He looked at me earnestly and called me a leader.

“A leader?

“The word didn’t seem to fit at all…

“But when Mr. Moore said it, he meant it. He said that he saw something in me that no one else had. He’d seen the makings of a leader within me and had decided to speak to this capability.”

Lester, p. 28.

A friend’s father who opened his home, who noticed, and who shared what he saw. Someone who came alongside a homeless youth and practiced “we.” It changed a life and launched a young man on a life of community organizing.

Lester offers us stories like this throughout the book in a challenging and inspiring argument for mobilizing together. He leaves me with two questions that I will consider: who is the proximate for me, and who will I join or invite to join me?

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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: A Better Man

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A Better Man (Chief Inspector Gamache #15), Louise Penny. New York: Minotaur Books, 2019.

Summary: Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste are together again, searching for a missing girl amid rising floods and a flood of social media attacks against Gamache and the art of Clara Morrow.

We left Gamache removed from his position as Chief Superintendent after his daring and legally questionable tactics to quash the drug trade. Jean Guy, who had taken his old position of Chief Inspector of Homicide is headed for a private sector job in Paris in a couple weeks. And Armand? He accepts the one position no one thought he would take–his old job as Chief Inspector. And for two weeks, he is working under Jean Guy, his protege’ and son-in law. Awkward, eh?

During a meeting where Gamache is deferential to his new boss, Agent Cloutier discusses a call she received from Homer Godin, the father of her godchild Vivienne. Vivienne, married to an abusive husband, is missing after she had called to say she was leaving and coming to him. Beauvoir assigns him and Cloutier to have a look around, and their encounter with the husband, Carl Tracy, only amplifies their fears.

A larger fear is looming as well. There is a rapid thaw combined with spring rains throughout Quebec. Ice jams threaten bridges, rivers are rising everywhere, including the Bella Bella running through Three Pines, and the giant dams in the north are under stress. Gamache, called back to Montreal for a meeting of top civic leaders, quietly upstages the premier by recommending a drastic, but ultimately effective strategy. He’s dismissed from the meeting, and discovers something else is rising–a social media storm of criticism against him that jeopardizes even his current demoted status. Will Chief Superintendent Toussaint, who Gamache had recommended, protect herself and abandon Gamache to the sharks?

A similar social media storm is surrounding Clara Morrow, whose latest exhibit of miniatures have been panned, causing critics to re-evaluate her past art. Ruth, thinking to help, invites Dominica Oddly, the one New York art critic who has never reviewed Clara’s work to Clara’s studio. And while Oddly speaks glowingly of Clara’s past work, she considers the miniatures–well, as they say in French, merde and proceeds to write a review to that effect and then discovers what it means to tell all the truth with malice, while Clara faces the truth about these works and the wreckage of her career.

Isabelle Lacoste, at loose ends until her new assignment is finalized, joins the investigation to find Vivienne, working with Cloutier, who she has mentored. Then Beauvoir comes down to Three Pines when news of the flooding of the Bella Bella reaches him, and the three team up on the investigation. Amid the harrowing moments of narrowly averting the flooding of Three Pines using the tactics Gamache has recommended elsewhere, they find Vivienne’s body and a bag of her belongings, searched as her husband turns up and demands that they stop.

More and more, the evidence points to Carl Tracy, the husband. Cloutier gains access to a private Instagram account of Tracy’s through his sometime lover and assistant in marketing his pottery, and finds incriminating evidence. But when Tracy is arraigned, with Vivienne’s father present, it all goes sidewise due to the judge’s rulings that errors in procedure mean the whole evidence trail is poisoned fruit and cannot be used. Tracy goes scot-free while Gamache works to restrain Homer Godin from killing him.

It looks like Beauvoir’s last case with Gamache is going to hell. Are all the tweets true? And it has gotten worse. The real video that showed Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste in the factory ambush has been doctored to make Gamache look like a child killer. Then someone under the name @dumbass, who Gamache thinks is Ruth after her stunt with Dominica Oddly, posts the real video, bringing up old wounds for all involved.

What will they do? They go back and look at the evidence. What do they have that isn’t poisoned? And as they do, it takes them in unexpected directions and surprise revelations. The end of this one gets very twisty indeed.

There is a question running throughout, asked most desperately by Homer Godin, filled with grief and revenge, that Gamache and others face–what if it were your daughter, your child? What would you do? Do you try to murder the man who is your daughter’s abuser and killer? Do you let someone do so, when he is as vile as Tracy comes across? Ought the pursuit of justice, often hampered by procedures that protect the rights of the accused, step aside to allow revenge?

There is also a theme of mentors and mentees that runs through the book: Gamache and Beauvoir and their reversed roles and changing relationship as Beauvoir prepares to leave, Isabelle and Cloutier, particularly when Cloutier screws up, and Gamache and a young agent, Bob Cameron, a former football player who lost his job for repeatedly holding to protect his quarterback. Because of a relationship with the victim, he is even a possible suspect, yet we see Gamache beginning to teach, and I suspect we will see more of Bob Cameron.

We also see characters wrestle with the theme of what they will do when they screw up, or are perceived to do by vicious social media. Will Gamache be “a better man”? Will Clara become a better artist? Meanwhile, we are left wondering whether things between Myrna and Billy Williams will go anywhere and stand in amazement at the drunken old poet Ruth as she leads the effort to sandbag the river frontage against rising floods, and whispers wise comfort to Homer at his most murderous.

I continue to love these books as an extended exploration of the character of leadership and the communal decency of this small village. This one had so many layers that wove seamlessly together in a twisting and fascinating plot that I’ve come to recognize as a mark of Penny’s genius.

Review: Becoming Native To This Place

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Becoming Native To This Place, Wes Jackson. New York: Counterpoint Press, 1996.

Summary: Six essays advocating agricultural practices that reflect close attention to the character of a particular place.

Wes Jackson thinks universities ought to focus their work on preparing their students for “homecomings”–not to assume that success consists in leaving home but rather becoming native to these places–fully appreciating the character of the place and conforming one’s life in that place to its character. He elaborates this idea of becoming native to one’s place in the six essays that make up this book.

He begins by asking a probing question. Archaeological evidence indicates that at one time over 25,000 indigenous persons lived in the boundaries of Rice County, Kansas. By 1990, only 10,400 could sustain their livelihoods there. Why this population decline? Why did so many families fail where the native peoples once thrived? Why, in a place where buffalo roamed amid native grasses could an economy based on wheat farming fail?

Jackson argues that the assumption that nature must be subdued and ignored had a lot to do with it. Farm plots laid out in squares, disregarding the location of creeks and rivers, the fencing of prairie that offered common grazing ground along with hunting led to the decimation of the buffalo, a food source rich in calories, well-adapted to the prairies. Instead of studying what worked, farmers in tandem with agricultural scientists sought to bend nature to their will. Nature would not be bent.

He offers an interesting case of the conflict between Lysenko and Vavilov, two Soviet scientists. On the science, Lysenko was wrong on many counts and power hungry as well. But he was right to listen to peasant wisdom rather than the proponents of the collective, who wrecked agriculture. Rather than the objectification and control of nature, he urges what Wendell Berry calls a “conversation with nature.” One honors water, forest animals, savanna grazers and the prairie. One pays attention to the topography of land, allowing grasses to hold the soil on slopes. Out of this “conversation,” Jackson launched the Land Institute to develop practices appropriate to the place, an approach that seeks to “mimic” the nature of the place.

More than that, he dreams of what a community might be that did this, describing the community that once was in his location. Sustainability is not just about preserving wilderness, but loving the ordinary of prairie farmland, and even our cities. This loving of place is a task for all of us, and without it, even the most wild places cannot be hoped to survive. It means paying attention to the succession of a place, how in a healthy ecosystem, whether a marsh or a forest, nothing is wasted.

He describes his find forty years programs of New Century Club, a women’s group and their discussions of local wisdom, and the gradual decline even as modern agriculture advanced, but fewer could afford to live there. From beautiful program covers, the programs declined to mimeographs on construction paper. It was evidence that the people of that place had lived closer to the land in those early years than later, with all their technical advances.

Jackson concludes with a call to a kind of ecological patriotism–of love of one’s land, of our place that doesn’t turn the clock back but uses what we know to go forward, though not as conquerors, but those who have finally learned that the land is our teacher, and if we are to care for it well, we must learn from it.

I reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass recently on the integrating of indigenous and ecological wisdom. It strikes me that Jackson is engaged in a similar project. Many argue that we cannot afford the less “efficient” approaches of Robin Wall Kimmerer, or the Land Institute, or places like Polyface Farm, or even Wendell Berry’s own farm. If Wes Jackson and these others are right, we cannot afford our current, unsustainable life, where the hidden costs of our supposed efficiency are becoming increasingly evident. The question is whether we will start learning the lessons of our place on earth while those places can still teach us?

Review: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew

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Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew, Hans Boersma (Foreword by Scot McKnight). Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: In an effort to foster understanding between the two disciplines, a theologian outlines five areas for biblical scholars to understand about theology as it bears upon the Bible.

In the theological academy the study of scripture and theology are treated as two separate disciplines. Yet each depend crucially upon the other. Scripture sources our theological understanding while theological premises inform our reading of scripture. In this work, Hans Boersma approaches scripture sacramentally, as a means of grace, and not “as a mere repository of historical and doctrinal truths.” This leads Boersma to express his “five things” in the form “No______, No Scripture, devoting a chapter to each of these. Each of the five express theological realities that make possible the grace of scripture.

No Christ, No Scripture. Christ is the heart of scripture, the one to whom the scriptures point. Christ’s presence is essential to its authority. Boersma notes how historical-critical exegesis often brackets out Christ, and thus the one who speaks with authority through these texts.

No Plato, No Scripture. While not asserting that Plato has equivalent authority to Christ, Boersma argues that all approaches to scripture assume some form of metaphysic. If we attempt a pura scriptura approach, we will unconsciously import the prevailing metaphysic of our culture. Boersma asserts the essential character of Christian Platonism is due to its antimaterialism, antimechanism, antinominalism, antirelativism, and antiskepticism.

No Providence, No Scripture. Scripture is an expression of God’s providential care for us as his uniquely authoritative witness to Himself and to the blessed life in relation to Him. God has provided the words of scripture to make present the Word of God, the incarnate Son to us.

No Church, No Scripture. The church and not the theological academy is the primary center for the reading of scripture. This argues against individualist and elitist readings. This nourished by canonical, liturgical, and creedal reading. One of the most soaringly beautiful statements in the book is found where Boersma writes:

“We arrive at genuine Christian teaching only when we have been in the presence of angels and saints and the triune God himself. Only in the presence of divine light of the Spirit do the scriptures begin to make sense to us.”

Boersma, p. 107.

No Heaven, No Scripture. Finally, Boersma contends that biblical scholars cannot read scripture without considering its spiritual end, the heavenly contemplation of God in Christ. In this, he argues for the primacy of contemplation over action–that good action can only follow from contemplation. He also offers a trenchant critique of political readings of scripture that fail to originate in contemplation. Rather, he focuses on the cultivation of virtue in life as the fruit of contemplation.

Boersma’s sacramental approach is hardly generic evangelical theology but reflective of his Anglican tradition (he teaches theology at Nashotah House). Actually, this approach is a corrective to Enlightenment-influenced historical-critical exegesis that treats Holy Scripture as one more ancient text to be dissected. His Platonism comes as a surprise but challenges our presumption that we can come to scripture free of metaphysical premises. We cannot, so better to be explicit about them. More than this, his focus on Christ, on God’s providence, on reading with the church, and on the contemplation of heavenly realities all remind us of the joyous gift of scripture, which leads us to the Incarnate Word and His blessed eternal purposes of his people.

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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.

Scot McKnight has written a companion volume, Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew which is reviewed here.

Review: On Consolation

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On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.

Summary: On how significant figures through the ages have found comfort amid tragedy and hard times, enabling them to press on with hope and equanimity.

Finding consolation, the solace that enables us to face tragedy and not relent nor give way to despair, has not been a theoretical exercise in the past pandemic years. Many of us have grieved the untimely deaths of friends and loved ones, and the rancorous discord of our public health debates, while healthcare workers dealt with multiple deaths every day during the peak of the pandemic.

In On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff, novelist, columnist, sometime politician, and historian of ideas, explores how people through the ages have found solace when faced with the worst life can throw at one–war, plague, tragic deaths. Ignatieff writes his book particularly with those in mind who reject the comfort offered by traditional religion. How do those who do not embrace a religious faith find consolation? He would contend that many have and that we may find help from them.

He begins with Job and the Psalms of lament. These do not offer answers for Ignatieff, but model the “doubt that is intrinsic to belief” and their preservation affirms that we are not the first to ask these questions. He then turns to Paul, contending that when Paul, as an aging man realized he may not live to see the return of the Messiah, turned to love as the sign of what the God he does not see is like (even though the text Ignatieff cites is one of Paul’s earliest letters, written at a time he was bidding people to be watchful for Messiah’s return). I think Ignatieff misinterprets Paul, though noting the theme of love that remains is an important observation, and one that runs through all Paul’s letters.

He explores the great conflict in Cicero’s loss of his daughter between the self-command of Stoicism that did not allow the show of emotion and his deep grief. Consolation comes from one’s male peers for that self-command. And sadly, men have been holding back their tears since. For Marcus Aurelius, consolation came from fulfilling his duties, even amid loneliness and loss. Boethius, facing execution contemplates his death and his fear of how it would come and finds consolation in his writing, both in the knowing of himself and the contemplation of God that enabled him to endure. And he hoped that he would be remembered, and he is.

In Goya’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, Ignatieff identifies our longing for timelessness in the elongated figures of Goya. Montaigne points us in the other direction. We find consolation in our love of life, the succession of pleasures, pains, and indignities of our embodied existence that signals we are yet alive. For David Hume, consolation came in the form of an unsent letter as death approached, summing up his life and that he had been true to his ambitions.

Condorcet, facing his own death in the French revolution, found hope in the idea of historical progress and the progressive perfectibility of man. Marx was similar in some ways, envisioning a utopia beyond capitalism, and a materialist grasp of life in which consolation was no longer necessary if a just world order can be attained. Lincoln found consolation in the humility that renounced vengeance for reconciliation, drawing upon a store of biblical wisdom.

For Mahler, he worked out consolation in his music, supremely perhaps in the Kindertotenleider, adapting five Ruckert poems and the lieder style, to trace a journey of coming to acceptance of the death of a child. For Weber, consolation took the form of finding meaning with one’s calling, in a world without God, where calling may only arise from within the self. For several, Akhmatova, Levi, and Radnoti, consolation as survivors of the Holocaust came in the form of faithful witness. Camus wrestled with what it was to live outside the grace that offers final consolation, concluding that living with the grace that accompanies another at life’s extremities is the consolation afforded us.

The final individual focused on is Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern hospice movement. Her consolation was the compassion that relentlessly sought to create the conditions physically, socially, psychologically, and spiritually. Her watchword was that of Christ in Gethsemane: “Watch with me” and she created a setting where one could reflect on the shape of one’s live among their loved ones. She helped people find closure and console those from whom they would soon be parted.

This book might have been called “the varieties of consolation” and what this suggests to me is that in a world where transcendent belief has waned, consolation is something each must find for oneself, and often it is within the contours of one’s particular life, experience, and, especially, relationships. The book offers the consolation that whatever we experience, whatever we ask, we are not the first, which may be some comfort. Ignatieff argues in the end that it is not in doctrine but in people that we find consolation:

“It is not doctrines that console us in the end, but people: their example, their singularity, their courage and steadfastness, their being with us when we need them most. In dark times, nothing so abstract as faith in History, Progress, Salvation, or Revolution will do us much good. These are doctrines. It is people we need, people whose examples show us what it means to go on, to keep going, despite everything.”

Ignatieff, p. 259.

I think there is much in what Ignatieff says. “Presence” that walks with one in the hardest times, sometimes the “presences” of those who have gone before, are deep sources of consolation. Yet there is something that Ignatieff, in his “age of unbelief” fails to account for, I believe. That is faith incarnated in believing people. Ignatieff speaks of how the dying console others. This happened on a visit to my grandmother in the last weeks of her painful death from cancer. Through the pain, she spoke of her faith in life everlasting. I’m sure my love meant something to her but her embodied faith has touched my life and my view of dying to this day, 57 years later. Faith ceased being an abstraction for me that day. Ignatieff has written with eloquence of the consolation found apart from transcendent belief, a vital concern in our day. Perhaps for those who find consolation in our doctrines as well as our community, writing a similar work may be a timely contribution to the discussion Ignatieff has initiated so well.

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

Review: Smart Suits, Tattered Boots

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Smart Suits, Tattered Boots, Korie Little Edwards and Michelle Oyakawa. New York: New York University Press, 2022.

Summary: A study, using interviews of Black Ohio religious leaders and research studies of mobilization efforts to explore whether Black religious leaders are still able to mobilize civil rights efforts, and if so, how, when, and why they do.

The story of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s to 1970’s is a story of a religious movement–marchers mobilized, trained, and inspired in churches, from which many of the marches began, voting rights efforts encouraged by churches, and almost invariably led by Black men in suits, white dress shirts, and dark ties (with many women contributing mightily to the effort).

Fifty years later, it is a new time, where systemic injustices against Blacks remain in different forms–mass incarceration of Black men, police-involved shootings or killings of Blacks, new voting restrictions and redistricting that on analysis seem directed to prevent or dilute the Black vote. The authors of this study ask the question of whether and where Black religious leadership figures into addressing these injustices. The study centers in on Ohio, where the two researchers live, using a case study of the 2012 presidential election and Black voter mobilization efforts as well as interviews with 54 black clergy and eleven faith-based community organization (FBCO) and race-based civic organization heads. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms as are most of the organizations mentioned.

The study discovered that the 2012 election was an example where religious leaders served to effectively mobilize efforts to register and get out the vote. Principal leaders in the religious communities were key–people who were widely respected by other clergy in their networks. When these leaders said to others that they should give their efforts to mobilizing the vote, they did. Furthermore, the researchers learned that a key motivation was actually not re-electing a Black president but rather countering efforts being made to block Black access to the vote, rolling back a key achievement of the civil rights movement.

The researchers also found that Black clergy tended to mobilize in their religious networks around historic civil rights issues but tended to address other effects of systemic racism that disadvantaged Blacks by placing blame on Blacks for failures and urging stronger Black work ethics, rather than addressing the systemic issues. The term this “the Black Protestant ethic.”

They found that the historic influence of Black civic organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, and others has waned in their organizing capacities, and that many Black religious leaders have turned to FBCOs instead. The difficulty is that these efforts are multi-racial, often directed by whites without sufficient grasp of the community issues, and are funded by foundations, who often are focused on quick, short-term results rather than longer term substantive change.

Consequently, many Black clergy may engage for a time and discover that the amount of work and the real impact do not warrant their continued engagement. This is exemplified in chapter six of the book, which profiles three highly influential leaders (under pseudonyms)–one a civil rights era principal leader, the general, one described as the warrior, who took on racial injustices in his city until he was both excluded and burned out and needed to take care of himself. The third, called the protege’ was a younger leader in the early years of engaging justice issues, and who was both passionate, but also somewhat abstracted in his language.

What I found most striking was the contrast between the general, “Wyoming Brashear,” and the others. The researchers also noted it:

“Brashear stands out from others in this study because he consistently and intentionally aimed to reconcile his worldview, one that was historically and globally situated, with his Christian faith, drawing on biblical references to provide theological bases for his positions. This suggests that Brashear pondered matters, that his positions were not taken for granted. It was uncommon for the pastors in this study to reference specific Bible scriptures when explaining their social or theological views” (p.114).

I thought this significant. “Brashear” was one of those who had been part of the Civil Rights movement, one of the criteria for being a principal leader. In addition to the shared experience, which gave credibility, I wondered if there was a shared ethos of biblically and theologically informed activism tracing back to King, son and father, and beyond them to the likes of Howard Thurman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Frederick Douglass.

One of the questions discussed in the conclusion is whether this religious leader influence will continue when those of the Civil Rights era pass. The researchers propose that one direction is expanding the remit from civil rights to freedom. I think that could be an interesting and important direction. I also find myself wondering if a recovery and renewal of the biblically, theologically, and spiritually informed impetus that fired religious leaders in past mobilization efforts might also be important. I think the researchers raise important questions about the Black Protestant Ethic. This may need to be both deconstructed and re-imagined. I wonder though, if there is to be power to mobilize within the Black Church, whether it must be done within a biblical and theological framework rather than bifurcating spirituality and social activism.

Smart Suits, Tattered Boots raises important questions in the face of movements like #BlackLivesMatter that have arisen outside the church. Has the day of clergy-led, church-based mobilizing efforts passed? What role should faith-based community organizations play? Are movements like #BlackLivesMatter a new wineskin for mobilizing? What if any part should Black religious leaders play? This book has me wondering about all these things.

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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.