On Books

Review: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with Foreword by Russell Banks, Afterword by Tappan Wilder. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015 (originally published in 1927).

Summary: A friar witnesses the collapse of a woven rope bridge with five people falling to their deaths and tries to discern some reason why, in God’s providence, each of them died.

It’s the unanswerable question we struggle with in every untimely death. We try to find some reason to explain why the death or deaths occurred, often some version of “it was God’s time,” or “they were too good for earth,” or that there was some sinful reason why they died. In the end we are left with uncertainty–none of these rationalizations satisfy or comfort and most explanations seem cruel or trite.

That is the premise of this Thornton Wilder story, which launched his literary career, winning him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and creating the opportunity for him to live a life of teaching and writing. Brother Juniper has just come into view of the woven rope bridge over a river gorge between Lima and Cuzco when the bridge collapses, sending five people on the bridge to their death. As a theologically oriented religious man, he sets himself the task to find evidence in their lives that would demonstrate that this was God’s plan for each person.

After the opening chapter, which lays out the premise of the story, the next three represent the account of six years of research on the part of Brother Juniper, talking to everyone who knew those who fell. The first concerns Dona Maria, the Marquesa de Montemayor, a difficult woman estranged from her daughter, who lives in Spain, and her companion Pepita, a young girl being groomed by Madre Maria de Pilar, to succeed her in the work of abbess of the orphanage where Pepita grew up. The two go on pilgrimage to a shrine so that Dona Maria can pray for her pregnant daughter. While she is praying, Pepita writes a letter to Madre Maria that Dona Maria sees, of how difficult life is with her. Pepita destroys the letter before Dona Maria confronts her, deciding it was not brave. They reconcile, Dona Maria writes a “brave” letter to her daughter, and it is on their return that they die in the collapse.

The next character is Esteban, twin brother of Manuel. The two grew up in the orphanage and became scribes, writing for, among others, Camilla Perichole, a famous and rather vain actress. Manuel dies of an infection, and Esteban, grief stricken despairs of life, attempting suicide, prevented by the captain who wants to take him to sea to restore him. Esteban wants to make a present of the pay advanced to him to Madre Maria de Pilar and dies on the bridge enroute to the orphanage.

The final two are Uncle Pio, who had mentored Camilla Perichole, helping her to achieve fame, and Perichole’s son Jaime. When small pox disfigures her, her career is ended. Uncle Pio sees her one night and she refuses to see him again but agrees to let him mentor her son. Uncle Pio and Jaime are on the way to Lima when the bridge collapses.

The final chapter describes the completion of Brother Juniper’s book in which he even tries formulas that he applies to each life, to no avail. This all ends badly for Juniper who is declared a heretic, punishable by death.

The account of their lives, in very formal language, brings no conclusion, just facts of people with their loves, longings, loneliness, petty, and noble acts. It’s simply, this is the story of their lives…and then they died on the bridge. The closest Wilder gets in the novel to making sense of it all is at the funeral in the famous, oft-quoted closing line spoken by Abbess Madre Maria de Pilar: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

I cannot decide whether this is a beautiful or a trite thought. I suspect some find comfort in keeping their dead alive in loving memory which connects them to the loved ones they’ve lost. I have those memories, particularly of father and mother and dear friends who have died, but also the apprehension of the yawning void that separates us that love may bridge in thought but not reality. I’m not sure we ever find “meaning” in the death of anyone, even if they die in some cause. I wonder instead, and this reflects my Christian convictions, if what we may talk about is hope, the belief that they, and we, will “rise in glory” after resting in peace. It doesn’t offer a “meaning” to death, which my faith tells me is the “last enemy” but it consoles in loss and grief.

Review: The Artist and the Mathematician

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The Artist and the Mathematician, Amir D. Aczel. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.

Summary: The story of the Bourbaki, named after the greatest mathematician who never existed, who led a revolution in the emergence of the “new math,” introducing a new rigor into the field.

When I was in middle school, we were introduced to “the new math.” One of the things I was always curious about was why the first thing we did was learn about sets. I was reminded of this when I read this book, which explained why sets were foundational to the approach.

This is the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, who convened a group of mostly French mathematicians around him, creating a tremendously productive group that in its day revolutionized the practice and teaching of math. Aczel introduces us to the key figures in this group–Andre Weil (brother of philosopher Simone Weil, not to be confused, as I did, with Andrew Wiles, who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem), Laurent Swartz, Henri Cartan, Claude Chevally, Jean Delsarte and Jean Dieudonne. We are also introduced to Alexandre Grothendieck, perhaps the most brilliant and also eccentric of them.

The most striking thing we learn is that the group formed around a mathematical joke upon which Weil built. Nicolas Bourbaki never existed except as a made up identity that reflected the collective effort of this group to rehabilitate and revolutionize mathematics in France that had fallen into the backwaters of German mathematics and science. These mathematicians met regularly and forged a consensus on how math would be practiced and taught in France that resulted in the prolific production of texts, revolutionized not only math education throughout the world, but touched a variety of other disciplines. Their approach was founded on set theory. They emphasized math in the abstract, focusing on mathematical proofs and rigor.

They were trying to articulate the structure of mathematics and this led to interesting interactions with pioneering anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, child psychologist Jean Piaget, linguistic theorists, and even writers including Italo Calvino. Aczel traces how structuralism for a time replaced existentialism in philosophy until the turn to the post-modern.

During the war Weil fled to America and stayed there, and gradually, his influence in Bourbaki waned. In the early 1950’s Alexandre Grothendieck joined for a time. His brilliance both stimulated the work of the Bourbaki and led to his departure as he recognized the weakness of set theory as a basis for Bourbaki, trying and failing to convince them of the idea of categories. Grothendieck differed from the Bourbaki, preferring to work alone.

The parting spelled a turning point for both. While Bourbaki continued to have a spreading influence for a time, it was more on the basis of past work. Grothendieck went on to do innovative work for a time, and directing students into significant problems. He held a position at the IHES, a French version of the Institute for Advance Study. Then he became more engaged in political and environmental causes, and when his efforts failed in these areas, he retreated to the Pyrenees, where his whereabouts remained unknown. After this work was published, he died in 2014 in Saint-Girons, Ariège.

The title of this work is a bit of a puzzle. Apart from a chapter on cubism, Braque, and Picasso, and its connections to antecedents to the Bourbaki, this is not a book about artists, unless this is a contrasting reference to Grothendieck and Weil, which was opaque to this reader. I found the organization of the book a bit labyrinthine. Nevertheless, it was an intriguing account of a movement in mathematics I’d never heard of. It was fascinating to see how productive this group was for a period and yet how significant the human factors were in the ultimate fate of Bourbaki.

Review: Together in Ministry

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Together in Ministry, Rob Dixon (Foreword by Ruth Haley Barton). Downers Grove: IVP Academic/Missio Alliance, 2021.

Summary: A field research-based approach to mixed-gender ministry collaboration identifying ten attributes for healthy partnerships.

Rob Dixon is a field ministry director who works closely with a number of female ministry colleagues in a collegiate ministry (in the interest of full disclosure, we work with the same ministry in different parts of the country). I welcome this book because it models and articulates the conditions for healthy mixed gender collaborations in a time of so much relational brokenness, patriarchy, and abuse in the church. Rob casts of vision of what many of us are experiencing in male-female partnerships where no one has to step back but all of us are encouraging each other in the pursuit of God’s mission.

Dixon introduces this by discussing that this has always been God’s intent. He, as others, observes that the “helper” God gives Adam in the form of Eve is an ezer, and far from implying subordination is the term most often used of God as our helper, and God is hardly subordinate to us! It can be argued that the Samaritan woman is Jesus’s first partner in mission, even before the disciples in bearing witness and gathering her village to hear Jesus. And we see a pattern of prominent women who work alongside men in the New Testament. Dixon then lays out his research methodology, which consisted of quantitative measures, interviews with roughly 60 people using an appreciative inquiry approach, as well as participant observation.

Out of his research he identified ten attributes that he clustered in three clusters:

The Inner Life Cluster:

An Authentic learners posture. This involves a mutual commitment to humility, to extend grace, to submit to one another, and curiosity.

Shared Convictions of Gender Equality. This consists of a shared biblical interpretation, an understanding that the Bible advocates full and equal partnership, and that collaborators treat this as a matter of conviction rather than as a pragmatic value.

Awareness of Gender Brokenness. Partners in mission are growing in self-awareness including sexual brokenness, undervaluing of female colleagues, and gender bias.

Community Culture Cluster:

Vision for Freely Shared Power: Rather than the control of power by men, there is a reciprocity between men and women, each affirming and advocating the other, reflected in equitable sharing of responsibilities.

Differences for the Sake of Mission: A recognition that we are equal but different, and that difference ought to be deployed in ways that advance mission, but that individual differences should be appreciated apart from gender stereotypes.

Value for Holistic Friendships: Healthy partnerships involve presence in each other’s lives beyond ministry situations–with families and as part of a community.

Corporate Sensitivity to Adverse Gender Dynamics: Recognizing and intentionally addressing the social dynamics in organizations that often favor men, excluding, discounting, blocking or putting at career risk, the women in an organization.

Intentional Practices Cluster:

Abundant Communication: This involves both quantity and quality and also is enhanced by regular debriefs of conversations.

Contextualized Boundaries: This chapter discussed “The Billy Graham Rule,” how this has not worked, how women have been hurt, and developing boundaries that allow for honest conversations of what is wise for each rooted in self-knowledge, what is situationally wise and, rather than a rigid rule, an understanding of the contexts where men and women can work with good boundaries with each other.

Public Affirmation and Modeling: The importance of leaders modeling their commitments to partnerships, celebrating publicly the work of each other, and good examples, and deliberately assessing how well up-front and other forms of leadership are shared.

Dixon devotes a chapter to each of these attributes discussing research findings about the attribute, the attribute in scripture, benefits of the attribute, barriers to implementing the attribute, and practical steps to develop the attribute. I found Dixon’s identification of barriers and practical steps especially helpful. I thought the taxonomy of sixteen different adverse gender dynamics in organizations especially significant–I think I’ve seen all of them and been guilty of contributing to or benefiting from more than a few! If I were Dixon, I think I might have figured out a way to cover the material on contextualized boundaries earlier, since I think many who read this book are thinking about that. But it kept me reading (or I suppose I could have skipped ahead!). Each chapter concludes with questions that groups working on ministry together can use to process and begin to implement these attributes in their communities.

One other element of this work that I appreciated was the missional focus of the discussion. So often, ministry situations I’ve witnessed are turned in on each other and it is easy to see how ministry partnerships may turn unhealthy. Dixon’s premise is that we have a mission given us by Christ in the world that is “all hands,” requiring the hands of men and women together. I so appreciate Dixon’s approach throughout, his own humility about mistakes, and the consistent effort to move from what is problematic in mixed-gender ministry to the opportunities for both people and ministries to flourish. We need more such voices and models.

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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: Braiding Sweetgrass

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Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Summary: A collection of essays centered around the culture of sweetgrass, combining indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an environmental biologist teaching in the SUNY system. She is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She has dedicated her career to the integration of scientific understanding of the environment with indigenous wisdom. The book is organized around the different aspects of sweetgrass culture: planting, tending, picking, braiding, and burning sweetgrass. The braiding of sweetgrass is a metaphor for the weaving of science and indigenous wisdom in understanding the gifts of the earth and how we give back–how humans and all living things sustain each other.

Listening to other living things, indeed all the elements of the earth and reciprocity are two themes that run through the quietly eloquent essays organized around these five aspects of sweetgrass culture. In “The Gift of Strawberries,” wild strawberries come as a gift, an early harvest, but gratitude and reciprocity involve clearing land for runners to establish new plants, resulting in an even greater gift of strawberries. Likewise with sweetgrass, which comes as a gift. One receives only what is needed, leaving half, which we learns results in sweetgrass flourishing more than if left alone. Usually some gift is left, perhaps a sprinkling of tobacco leaves. And these gifts in turn are braided, given to friends, and burned in ceremony. She reflects on the Thanksgiving address and the giving of thanks to all the living things from the Earth and the waters to the trees. In an essay titled “The Honorable Harvest” she brings together so much of this wisdom in a kind of credo:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
                                                    --Kimmerer, p. 183.

She writes of becoming indigenous to a place, one with its wisdom. This reminds me of the writings of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson who pay attention to what the land is saying and farm in harmony with what they learn.

One of the most enjoyable essays was her narrative of taking students for what she calls “shopping” in a cattail marsh–“Wal-marsh.” Materials for clothes and sleeping mats, rhizomes with carbs, stalks of pith for vegetables–even toilet paper! They learn both about the biology of a cattail marsh, and lessons about the tremendous gifts bestowed upon us. We say “thanks,” we care, and yet the earth gives us so much greater abundance.

There is so much that is attractive in what one finds her, and I think much we might all learn from this indigenous wisdom. Where I respectfully part as a Christian is with her “language of animacy,” really a form of animism that assumes a spirit or soul not only in all living things but even rock, water, cloud, and fire. What I respect is the attentive care and mindful use of all things–what I think implied in the “tending and keeping of the garden” in the early chapters of Genesis, or the knowledge of place we see in Berry and Jackson.

I am also impressed with the ways this professor integrates indigenous wisdom and science in her research and work with students. I wonder how many from other faith traditions make the effort to braid the wisdom of their faith with their research. Whether we accept everything about indigenous religion or not, I believe there is much that can be learned, and crucial wisdom in the American context for the care and renewal of the land we often have pillaged. Kimmerer has shared a gift from her own people. Will we receive it and listen and say “thank you” and share what we can in response? What could be braided together?

Review: Almost Everything

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Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, Anne Lamott. New York: Riverhead, 2018.

Summary: A series of “notes” or essays on hope, especially amid disturbing times.

“I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen.”

Anne Lamott

That’s how this collection of essays in which Lamott sums up why she lives with hope in apocalyptic times. She wrote this before COVID, George Floyd, the 2020 elections and their aftermath, and the invasion of Ukraine and a world staring at the possibility of World War Three, which is almost unthinkable. How did she know.

In “Prelude” Lamott describes this book as being written for her grandson and niece as almost everything she knows that might help. Then in typical Lamott style, she diverts and says that there are really only two things she knows–that she is mightily tempted to jump off of rooftops and out of speeding cars and that she has seen miracles.

She writes of the paradox of truth and how it affords hope when you hit bottom because there is something else, that bottom is only one side of the paradox. We really can’t change others or save them–it is an inside job. She writes, “Nor did I know about grace, that it meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.” There really is no fix in life, only forgiveness. We especially can’t change families–only live with them and forgive. Most things will work if we unplug them–even us. We need to surrender the impulse to return hate with hate. Empathy awakens us to how like we are to what we are tempted to hate. She derides diets that end with us gaining weight, suggesting kindness toward ourselves might be better.

There is probably little better writing advice than she gives a bunch of first graders, which was really writing one bad page after another until they became a book. She thinks that bitter chocolate is only good to balance wobbly chair legs and that we do better to carry Kisses in our backpacks to give away and make friends. She writes about death and accompanying the dying, comparing our lives to hen and chicks, with the belly button center that grows outward in glossy green leaves that eventually thin, fade, fall off and feed the soil. Contemplating death makes life richer.

One of the most moving chapter narrates the life of Kelly, an atheist friend who was in AA with her, and then out because she didn’t like the God part, her downward decline after a divorce and the death of her dog, their shared love of Survivor and the last, alcohol-ridden years where Anne hoped God would break through because nothing else could, and the final rest she found when she and a friend who was her last joy killed themselves together. She narrates the tragic fortress of alcoholism that led to her friend’s death when God came in the form of welcome and a cup of tea at an AA meeting.

She concludes with coming back to hope. No sweetness and sentimentality. We confront the terribleness of things, and yet glimpse the wonders of the world, the hush of a forest, and still have the sense that in the end, it will be well.

Lamott has this uncanny ability to puncture our pretensions and our certainties without leaving us bereft. In this context, of finding hope in the face of apocalypse, it comes down to the idea that there is always something beyond bad, that the story doesn’t end that way. Whatever we ground that in–God or intuition–it’s probably the best we have to hang onto in these days.

Review: The Last Professional

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The Last Professional, Ed Davis. Tijeras, NM: Artemesia Publishing, 2022.

Summary: A young man trying to find the tramp who assaulted him as an adolescent catches a freight and meets an old hobo running from a killer and the two form a friendship around the lure of riding the freights.

Lyndon works as a gifted programmer at a California tech firm in the early ’80’s. When an obnoxious boss attempts to sexually assault him, something snaps. He eludes the man, quits his job and hops a freight at the Roseville yard. It’s not the first time. The last was fifteen years ago as a twelve year old when “The Tramp” pulled him aboard the freight stopped behind his home as it started up. He’d seen and talked to him many times, a substitute for the father who had abandoned him. But this time was different–he was assaulted for two weeks. The author captures his ambivalence–someone who paid attention but forced himself upon him. He remembered his smell, and the distinctive, fist-shaped buckle he wore. Then he literally dumped him. But “The Tramp” never left him. And when he hops the train, he begins to wonder if he can find “The Tramp” and. . . .

Lyndon discovers he’s not alone. There’s an old hobo on the train–calls himself The Duke. Where Lyndon is trying to find someone, The Duke is running from someone. Someone from his past. He’d barely escaped him in the Colton jungle (the encampment of hobos), when Short Arm left another man dead. He was there when Short arm that name–a arm lost in a train accident–and The Duke left him for dead. Short Arm doesn’t leave anyone alive who crosses him, including two of The Duke’s friends who lie about The Duke’s whereabouts. Their paths crisscross throughout the book and The Duke knows Short Arm will find him. It’s only a matter of time

Lyndon (now nicknamed “Frisco Lyndy”) and The Duke travel, The Duke orienting him to the life of a hobo. He’s a “Profesh,” one of the last of a breed, with a code of his own and a knowledge of every yard, jungle, and good place to eat cheaply in the country. He schools Lyndon on eluding the “bulls,” the yard security, and the ins and outs of riding every kind of car and how to avoid getting killed. More than that, they just talk about life, and the draw of the freights. The Duke tells him, “These freights let you ride. They don’t let you go.”

“These freights let you ride. They don’t let you go.”

Ed Davis, The Last Professional

They talk about the man Lyndon is trying to find and the man The Duke is running from. The belt buckle identifies The Tramp as a Johnson, a group of outlaw hobos that one has to kill someone to be part of. Short Arm is also a Johnson. The Duke, partly out of protectiveness, suggests that the two couldn’t be the same person. Short Arm is the last of the Johnson’s. But Lyndon wonders. And at any rate, he won’t abandon The Duke. The Duke is the only man who hasn’t abandoned or hurt him.

In some ways, this is the railroad equivalent of Kerouac’s On The Road. The two get into scrapes and adventures as they cross the country. What separates it from Kerouac is two things. One is the friendship that forms between these two men, and the other is that Davis captures for us the hobo’s life. The narrative is broken up with numbered “Tracks” (e.g. Track #10) that are conversations on various subjects from our illusions of safety to sex to death.

Ed Davis has served up a story that builds to a powerful ending, an unusual friendship between a younger and older man, and a description of a life that is mostly in the historical past (though this article suggests there are still a few riding the rails). The illustrations by Colin Elgie both fit and created the images formed by the story in my head. I had a tough time putting it down.

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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: The Samaritan Woman’s Story

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The Samaritan Woman’s Story, Caryn A. Reeder. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022.

Summary: Challenges the view of the Samaritan woman as a sexual sinner, considering how this has been read in the church, and the realities of the life of women and marriage that points to a very different reading.

The narrative of the Samaritan woman in John 4:4-42 is one of my favorite gospel narratives. Over the years I’ve given countless talks and led numerous Bible studies on this passage. I’ve always portrayed the woman as of “questionable repute,” having gone through a string of marriages and living with a man who is not her legal husband. I suspect that’s how you’ve heard the story as well. Caryn A. Reeder argues that we’ve gotten the story wrong and that this both reflects and reinforces unhealthy attitudes toward women in the church that thwarts real partnership between men and women in the gospel, contributing purity cultures, fear of women as temptresses, and even offering license to men to sexually abuse.

Let me talk about the second part of the book first, in which Reeder looks at the social world of the Samaritan woman. First she discusses the life of a woman in Jesus’s world. She begins with the lesser worth of girls, who are mainly an expense in terms of dowries. Some baby girls were exposed and left to die. Unless coming from upper classes, girls were taught to manage the household and all its tasks–cooking, cleaning, family businesses, farms and gardens, and specialized trades. They were married young, usually around age twelve to an older man and their primary value, in addition to the household, was bearing children, often a significant number because of those who died in infancy and childhood. Of course, many women died young. Women were married young and kept in the restricted space of the home to protect paternity. Marriages were contracted between the woman’s father and the bridegroom with the bride able to consent to or decline the marriage.

This is important in the case of the Samaritan woman. She was not hopping from the bed of one husband to another. Her five marriages were ones her family was involved with, suggesting the possibility of significant financial resources and status. The marriages may well have ended with the death of a spouse or because of divorce. In either case, women were expected to marry again. Also, men and women often lived together during the period between when a marriage was contracted and formalized. No one would have blinked an eye at this.

Two other things are important to note in the passage. One is that Jesus never speaks to her of sin or pronounces her forgiven, saying “go and sin no more” as in John 7:53-8:11. Nor do the people in town shun her when she testifies about Jesus. Rather they believe her or at least come, and then believe Jesus. Reeder also discusses her noon time visit to the well in the full light of day, contrasting it to Nicodemus’s night time visit in secret. Reeder also contrasts the two dialogues. She is far more engaged, and far more intelligently so than Nicodemus, continuing to question and learn, and she is the first to know that he is the Messiah. She understands what Nicodemus fails to perceive and models discipleship both as a learner and a witness bringing others to Jesus.

Why do I, why do we, not tell the story this way? Reeder traces this to an interpretive history of this story, largely written by men, who perceive her as a sexual sinner, shaped by the perception at times that sex was somehow unclean, even in marriage, that men needed to be wary of temptation by women, and that objectified women as objects of male desire. In successive chapters in the first part of the book she traces this through the early fathers (Tertullian, Origen, and John Chrysostom), Reformation Protestantism from Calvin (who identified her as an adultress) to Clare Lucas Balfour and Moody (who saw the woman as a prostitute, though an effective evangelist), and the present. Liz Curtis Higgs treats her as a sexual sinner after the deaths of her husbands, Barbara J. Essex describes her as having a shady past but as the first missionary, and John Piper identifies her as a adulterer and prostitute who needed the protection of a gender patriarchy.

What was striking to me is that this interpretive history obscured in my own eyes things I should have readily noted in the socio-historical context, important to careful exegesis. I ignored the role of families in contracting marriages and read contemporary practice back into the text. I ignored the betrothal practices (that played into Mary and Joseph’s story) and made her a loose woman living in sin. I ignored the immediate context of Jesus conversation with Nicodemus. And with the sexual sinner aspect so large in my view, I diminished both Jesus and the woman, in terms of the conversation that led to her being the first to see Jesus as Messiah and then bring so many others to him. I missed what “living water” would have meant to a woman who had suffered and witnessed, perhaps, the deaths of multiple husbands.

In her conclusion Reeder discusses contemporary views of women in the age of #MeToo and #ChurchToo. She argues that how we tell these stories does color our views of women in the present–how we honor their worth and their voices. The story challenges men committed to Christlikeness to be like Jesus in this story–not afraid to be with her and respecting her enough to engage her in thoughtful conversation that invites her to explore and question. He takes her intelligence, worth, and voice seriously enough, that, despite barriers of gender and ethnicity, she joins him as a partner in mission.

One thing for sure. I will never tell the story the same way again.

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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: George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles

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George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles (The Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship Series), Timothy Larsen. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

Summary: Three lectures on the works of George MacDonald with responses that focus on the miraculous in these works, particularly with regard to the incarnation, faith amid doubt, and the re-enchantment of life.

Wheaton College is the home of the Marion E. Wade Center, which houses materials by and about seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy l. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Each year the center hosts an annual lecture series named in honor of Ken and Jean Hansen, who were instrumental in establishing the center, which honors the founder of ServiceMaster, with whom Ken Hansen worked.

That is background to this book, containing the 2018 lectures by Timothy Larsen, a professor of history and Christian Thought at Wheaton, and three responses by Wheaton colleagues. The lectures focus broadly on the theme of the miraculous.

The first of these centers on the incarnation. Larsen notes a theological shift in the nineteenth century from a focus on the atonement, the death of Christ and its implications, to the incarnation, the coming of Christ in the flesh. Once consequence was a shift in focus from Easter to Christmas being the great Christian holiday and Larsen notes how this is evident in many of MacDonald’s work focusing around Christmas. Accompanying this is a focus on the love of God in MacDonald’s works. James Edward Beitler III in his response elaborates the theme of incarnation in Phantastes, the two natures of Christ, and the idea of embodied thought.

The second lecture considers doubt and the idea of “the crisis of doubt” in Victorian writing. MacDonald believed in honest or holy doubt that was an expression of faith and maintained strong friendships with notorious doubts like Tennyson (e.g. “In Memoriam”). He proposes that this is integral to a process of reaching a deeper, more settled Christian faith, as occurs in his character Thomas Wingfold. Most significant for MacDonald are the times his characters trust and obey in the face of doubt. In MacDonald’s own life, this process accounts for his profound belief in miracles, including the resurrection, which sustained him in the loss of two children. Richard Hughes Gibson responds in considering how this works out in MacDonald’s ideas about poetry.

The third and final lecture focuses on the theme of re-enchantment and centers on the image of the “rosefire” in The Princess and the Goblin. MacDonald connected this image to God’s sanctifying work, the love that purifies and explores how this idea runs through MacDonald’s fantasies. Along the way, we also learn about his unhappy clerical career and his ideas about purgation, if not purgatory. Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner keys off two mentions of poetry and draws in the work of Luther, Donne, Blake, Richard John Neuhaus, and Frederick Buechner to show how fairy tales were a way into reality, particularly the reality of eschatological hope, for MacDonald.

This is a delightful addition to the library of any MacDonald fan. It struck me that it offers yet another example of the truth we often find in fiction. Personally, the second lecture on doubt spoke the most to me. I work with those whose research leads, as it would any thinking person, to questions and doubts. Too often, I believe, we confuse faith with certainty, which is faith’s opposite. We miss how honest or even holy doubt itself, especially when accompanied by the obedience that trusts that what one has believed is so, even in the face of questions, is perhaps a singular form of faith.

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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: Translating Your Past

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Translating Your Past, Michelle Van Loon. Harrisburg: Herald Press, 2021.

Summary: A guide to making sense of one’s past and how our family history, traumas in previous generations, our genetic makeup, and for many, how adoption help us understand our lives and place in the world.

For many of us, our family stories have chapters or whole parts that are opaque to us. Or some of the pages are missing. Yet our families literally have made us who we are right down to our genetic material. The stories include the good, the bad, and the ugly, and known or unknown to us, have contributed to who we are. Knowing those stories give us a better sense of our place in the world and a better self-understanding. It might be something as simple as the baldness that runs in my family to a propensity for alcoholism or particular health issues. Tragedies in previous generations get passed down and color our existence. Yet the stories are often gibberish to us. We need help “translating.” That’s what this book is about.

Michelle Van Loon shares out of her own journey including the traumas that touched her grandmother and mother. She acknowledges that we might not always want to know our family’s past but observes that what remains concealed cannot be healed and we miss out on the treasures, the gifts that have come to us through our forebears. She argues for the importance of our family histories from scriptures that make so much of genealogies and family history. In some way, the whole Bible may be read as a family story culminating in Jesus the Messiah, and leading to our eventual incorporation into that family.

She discusses genetic testing, the predispositions to certain diseases they may reveal and the surprises for those who discover their genetic heritage is not what they thought. Yet this genetic code reveals the unique way our inheritance from two different people makes us utterly unique creatures in the image of God, a source of wonder. We also receive unwanted gifts in the form of intergenerational traumas that may be transmitted in epigenetic expression, activating genes that may otherwise be silent. It can be hard to understand why God permitted this trauma, but Van Loon addresses finding hope that these need not have the last word in our lives. There are also patterns that often repeat from generation to generation. In the case where these are unhealthy, understanding is the first step, an important one of honesty. This may make sense of the unwritten “vows” we make. And this offers the chance of breaking free, of establishing new patterns. Sometimes the “gaps” reflect hard things, and the perpetuation of the family a certain resilience.

Adoption creates a unique situation as one comes to grips with both the birth families from which one arises and the family that has given a home and their love. She discusses the core issues adoptees face: loss, rejection, shame and guilt, grief, identity, intimacy, mastery and control and the options adoptees now have to relate to both families. The question of who our people are takes us as well into our race and ethnicity, and how these have shaped us.

Van Loon expands “family” to our faith communities, and doing so makes me wonder whether the physical communities that our families have inhabited also shape our stories. My wife and I grew up in the same town and have become aware of the values and outlooks that came from growing up in that town and their influence on our families and our shared family.

Ultimately, Van Loon believes our stories, even with their hard parts, may speak of the story God is writing in our lives and encourage us. I find this so. Both of my grandmothers’ Bibles sit close at hand as I write. My one grandmother died when I was very young and I have no memory of her, the other later, but to know of their faith, and to have heard stories of my one grandmother’s prayers for me from those who knew her, and to see how God has answered those is powerful–how God has worked across generations. I am not simply the genetic inheritance I’ve received from them, but I share in their spiritual inheritance as well, a source of profound thanksgiving. I’m grateful for this reminder from Van Loon’s book.

Her book includes two helpful appendices–a toolkit which may be used to discuss or personally reflect on the chapters as well as a second that provides specific resources for tracing our family histories.

Genealogy research has grown in popularity over the years. The genetic tools add a new dimension. What Van Loon offers is perspective that helps us translate information into meaning–leading to healing and growth in some instances, pride and thanksgiving in others, and a greater sense of our place in God’s world.

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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: Death and the Dancing Footman

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Death and the Dancing Footman (Roderick Alleyn #11), Ngaio Marsh. New York: Felony & Mayhem Press, 2012 (originally published in 1941).

Summary: A staged house-party amid a snowstorm consisting of mutual enemies ends in a death and a suicide that Alleyn must sort out.

Now doesn’t this sound like fun? Gather a group of people who despise each other, only they do not know that their enemies will be present. Then mix them up for a weekend and see what drama results. Add a blizzard that snows them in, allowing no escape, and what do you have. Jonathan Royal of Highfold Manner thinks he has created the perfect drama for his playwright friend, Aubrey Mandrake. Events will sadly unfold otherwise.

Royal has invited Sandra Compline, a wealthy but disfigured widow, and her two sons, William and Nicholas. Nicholas is the playboy, the “flash” one who attracts the ladies, William, the diligent elder son. Nicholas is his mother’s favorite. William brings along his fiance’, Chloris Wynne, who had been engaged to Nicholas but couldn’t abide his skirt chasing. Sandra disapproves of Chloris because she broke the engagement to her beloved Nicholas. Lady Hersey Amblington is a distant cousin of Jonathan who owns a beauty salon. Jonathan has also invited her rival, Madame Elise Lisse, who has been stealing Lady Amblington’s cousins. Completing the number is Dr. Francis Hart, an accomplished plastic surgeon, who accompanied Madame Lisse and appears romantically connected to her. Under a slightly different name, Dr. Hart many years earlier was the young surgeon whose mistake left Sandra Compline’s face permanently disfigured.

Things begin badly despite Jonathan’s ministrations as Nicholas pays undue attention to Madame Lisse, enflaming Dr. Hart. Later, in a table game, Nicholas receives an extra game sheet with a threatening warning. Later in the evening Nicholas accepts a not-so-friendly bet from his brother William involving an early morning dip in the outdoor pool in the winter cold despite mother’s fears for his heart. Mandrake goes to witness and is pushed by someone from behind into the deep end of the pool. He was wearing a cape similar to Nicholas, and Nicholas and others believe it was meant that he be pushed into the deep end, where he couldn’t swim. Having received a threat and seen his friend in the drink, he tries to leave in the snowstorm to no avail. Then later in the day, after a rendezvous with Madame Lisse in her room, Nicholas returns to his own to be struck on the arm, narrowly missing his head, with a brass Buddha set atop the door as a booby trap. Alibis point the finger at the jealous Dr. Hart.

Hart separates from the company, going to the “boudoir” and returning to his rooms. Shortly before 10 pm, Nicholas and William talk in the smoking room. Nicholas leaves William alone, joining others in the adjacent library. They ask William to turn on the war news. It’s early and a rousing dance song, plays on the radio, annoying Hart in the adjacent boudoir so that he goes to bed. A few minutes later, Lady Amblington takes a drink in to find William dead, the back of his head bashed in with one of the weapons Jonathan Royal’s family had collected that had been hanging on the wall.

Once again, it is believed to have been a case of mistaken identity with Nicholas the target. Despite his denials, most believe it is Dr. Hart, even with his heroic but futile efforts to save Sandra Compline, who has taken a fatal dose of sedatives and dies, leaving a note to her son Nicholas.

Perhaps the most edge of the seat part of the story is the attempt of Mandrake, Chloris Wynne, and James Bewling, and outside hand, to make their way to Great Chipping, where Alleyn and Troy are staying with the rector, whose portrait Troy is rendering. Bereft for a time of his team of Fox, Thompson, and Bailey, who eventually arrive, Alleyn begins to investigate the scene and interview the party. Surprisingly, one of the most interesting interviews is with Thomas, a young footman who danced outside the library when the music came on. Who he saw and didn’t were very important to the case as well as giving us our title.

This story seemed to take a lot of time to develop and the endless tabulating of alibis by the guests, who perhaps had nothing else to distract them from their enemies than to play amateur detective, seemed to drag out this story. Alleyn doesn’t come on the scene until two-thirds of the way through. Perhaps this was intended to simulate the interminable day of all these murder attempts in this household of enemies shut up with each other, but it seemed a bit drawn out.

There was a lesson in all this. Don’t try this at home. Don’t play with people’s lives, thinking it will be amusing and come out fine. People with a settled enmity may be civil, but with the right provocation, it can mean murder. That everyone in this party could be a suspect says something. Even the best of us are capable of murder.