Reading Reviews

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I asked a question recently about how people use reviews to choose books and discovered that a number vehemently refuse to read reviews. I could not help but mentally cry “ouch” because that is one of my principle activities on this blog, having written roughly 1700 reviews over the last ten years. I write reviews with the hope that they will both help people find books they will love, and also avoid books that aren’t for them. I love sharing what I read for that reason.

Some people don’t share that love, I think, because they think choosing books is a very personal choice and they don’t want anyone else meddling with that. Some don’t want to know too much about their books before they read them. And some have been burnt by reviews that led them to books they could not finish, they were so bad. Some consider reviewers part of a literary set removed from life. I respect all of those reasons.

I’m also aware that I’m heeding reviews all the time, even when I’m not reading them in papers, literary review publications, or blogs. Part of it is that I’m around friends who read and they tell me about books and I’m always learning about books I’m interested in because my friends are interesting! On the Facebook page I host, people talk about books they are reading. They are not reviews, but sometimes, a book stands out, particularly if a number are talking about it. As I write, I’m reading Demon Copperhead, by Barbera Kingsolver, and loving the book. I don’t think I read a formal review about it–I’ve just heard a number of people rave about it. I will review it when I’m finished but I bet at least one person reading this just added this to their mental “I’m going to check this out” list.

So reviews come in lots of forms. I do read a number of review publications as well, including the New York Times Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Christianity Today. I also read a variety of newsletters. One of my favorites is Hearts and Minds Booknotes from bookstore owner Byron Borger. He’s steered me to many interesting books, including a number I’ve purchased from his store.

Booksellers and librarians actually can be trusted reviewers, especially if they’ve gotten to know our reading tastes. They know what’s out there and can suggest authors we’ve not explored based on some of the ones we like. I usually find them much better than an algorithm!

Sometimes I like to read reviews of a book after I’ve read it. Often, my own thoughts are still forming and a mental dialogue with a reviewer will crystallize my own assessment of a book, whether I agree or not or have a different take altogether. Sometimes I find myself wondering, “did we read the same book?” That makes me ask why I am asking that. If several reviewers are touching on a particular issue in or aspect of a book, that suggests that I might want to notice it, and when I write about the book, give my own thoughts on the matter.

I don’t pay much attention to either Amazon or Goodreads reviews (although in the interest of full disclosure, I post some Amazon reviews and copy all my reviews to my Goodreads account). Frankly, there are just too many instances where the system has been corrupted, often to the hurt of authors.

I try to follow reviewers who have steered me well in the past. I’ve been heartened when I hear from someone who read a book I reviewed and found the book helpful and follows my reviews because of that. That’s what I and any ethical reviewer strive for.

Like most readers, I’m eager to find the next “good read.” Some are repeat buys of authors I love. I don’t need a review and I’ll likely buy their books until they disappoint me. But I like discovering new books and new authors. Reviews, whether via the informal buzz of friends or a well written review in a publication help me sift from the welter of books the ones I want to check out.

So what do I say to those readers who don’t read reviews? Basically, if what you are doing to find books you love is working, who am I to say you should do any differently? But if you want to learn about books you might not have heard of that you might like, the reviewer is your friend. Any of them are readers just like you and love to talk books with anyone who will listen. And that, I think, is one of the coolest things about the bookish community.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Top Ten Fair Memories

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Father and son enjoying one of our favorite memories. ©Robert C. Trube

August 30, 2023 marks the beginning of the 177th Canfield Fair, the county fair for Mahoning County and one of the biggest in the country. Living away from the Youngstown area, we’ve not been able to get to the fair in recent years but I visit the fair in my memories. These are ten of my favorite fair memories–hard to keep it at just ten!

10. Getting our annual DiRusso’s Italian sausage sandwich with my son. When my son was growing up, we were at the fair every year and one of our first stops was DiRusso’s. As he got older, there was a rivalry of who would eat it the hottest.

9. A childhood memory was when my dad bought me a footlong hotdog. I’d never seen a hotdog so big, and a foot of all the fixins? Heaven on a bun.

8. The year of the strollers. We often met up with friends from YSU and there was one year when we all had small children in strollers. Hard to believe that those “kids” are now pushing 40!

7. The rabbit and rooster barn. This was an annual stop for us–we couldn’t believe how many different varieties of these two creatures there were.

6. When I was young they had a double ferris wheel, the top of which was so high and at times not only would each wheel go around but also the whole hulking thing! A bit terrifying to look at and an absolute blast to ride!

5. The midways at night. All the lights, the haze in the air from both all the food being cooked and late summer humidity. All the wonderful sounds, the barkers at the “games of skill” booths.

4, A fresh made lemonade on a hot afternoon at the fair. Nothing was more thirst quenching–and all that sugar! Or a Strouss’s malt. Or an apple dumpling with a big scoop of ice cream. They were all good for cooling off.

3. Sharing an elephant ear among four or more of us as we strolled down a midway. Or Molnar fries.

2. Taking pictures outside the pumpkin exhibit, putting our heads into the pumpkin cutouts after being overwhelmed by the monstrous pumpkins inside.

1. Sharing the fair with friends as our annual re-union, and unwinding afterwards, staying up late and catching up on a whole year.

Actually, I’m just skimming the surface, but if I don’t share all my memories, that leaves plenty of room for you to share yours. There is so much to the Canfield Fair! A list of ten things just doesn’t cover it. And if you go to the fair this year, eat a DiRusso’s or an elephant ear for me!

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

Review: Faith Seeking Understanding, 4th Ed.

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Faith Seeking Understanding, Fourth Edition, Daniel L. Migliore. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023.

Summary: An introduction to theology, covering all the major topics of systematic theology.

Over the years, I’ve been tempted several times to pick up this volume. The seminary I attended used different introductory texts for its systematic theology sequence, which is the primary audience for this work, though hardly exclusively so. I would observe that the clear and highly readable coverage of all the major theological topics makes this a great introduction for any layperson willing to invest the effort to work through its pages. Since I have not read or have access to earlier editions, all I can note is that the author claims to have updated the text throughout, including the bibliographies at the end of each chapter. The text evidences engagement with current questions of the environment, global Christianity, and relating to other religious beliefs.

In my review, I will not attempt to discuss every chapter or topic in this work but rather make some basic observations. One is that the title Faith Seeking Understanding reflects the overriding approach of this book, shaped by the profound influence of Karl Barth interpretation of the Reformed tradition on the author. He contends that a mature faith is a questioning faith, turning to God’s self-disclosure in Christ and the scriptures for understanding.

Those who hold to conservative beliefs on the inspiration and infallibility of scripture will take exception with Migliore who would call this “biblicist.” He would argue for scripture as a witness to the living Word, especially through the narratives concerning Jesus, through which God encounters us authoritatively and transformatively.

The chapter on the Triune God is one of the best in the book and left me pausing to worship. With elegance, clarity, and concision, Migliore discusses the development of belief in the Triune God, the errors to which the councils responded, the attributes of God and election in light of the doctrine of the Trinity. He is emphatic that for Christians to speak of God, we must speak of the Triune God. In the following chapter on creation, the transcendence and immanence of the Triune God provides grounds for our care for a good but groaning creation.

The chapter on the person and work of Christ masterfully discusses both past and present issues of Christology. I was surprised to find that he collapses the discussion of models of the atonement to three: Christus Victor, satisfaction, and moral influence, collapsing the substitionary model under satisfaction. He notes that no single model is supported by the creeds, and commends that all be drawn upon. He offers a helpful response to the critique of violence and the cross in framing the cross as God’s response to human violence, to reconcile the violent to God. The author also includes a chapter on contextual Christologies, outlining Latin, Mujerista, Asian American, feminist, and Black Christologies. A new addition to this edition is a “Christ and Cosmos” addressing the critique of Christianity as detrimental to ecological concern, considering the implications of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection for our care of creation.

One of the highlights of the chapter on “The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life” is a succinct identification of the marks of Christian maturing: as hearers of the Word, in prayer, in the exercise of Christian freedom, in solidarity with all creatures, in thankfulness and joy, and in hope. Similarly, he offers a trenchant exposition of the marks of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. He offers a thoughtful discussion of Christian faith and other religions and the approaches of inclusion, exclusion, and pluralism. He contends that we ought relate with those of other faiths in confidence that God’s grace in Christ through the Spirit is at work, recognized or not. This requires both genuine dialogue and gospel faithfulness and ought happen at the grassroots, as part of everyday life.

Finally, eschatology is framed around Christian hope. He considers the hope of the resurrection, both in time and in the eschaton. He discusses judgment and hell, contending we cannot be presumptuous in speaking for God or beyond what scripture discloses but also that we ought to hope in God.

One of the interesting features carried over from previous editions is found in the appendices, each of which are fictional dialogues between Karl Barth and other interlocutors on natural theology, the resurrection, political theology, and atheism. A fifth appendix is devoted to a theological glossary. Once again, Migliore excels in saying a lot with clarity in very little space.

I can see why this work is popular in seminary use. Migliore, while admittedly Barthian, writes a work that is generally fair-minded to different perspectives and represents these where Christians differ. His coverage of majority world theologies as well as western, classical approaches reflects our global Christian world. I do wish that he would not throw around the term “biblicist” for those whose view of scripture is more conservative than his and that he would have dealt with substitutionary atonement in greater depth. Yet this is a work that exalts God, is centered in Christ, envisions the greatness of Christ’s work in us, and the beauty of our future hope. For those who hunger to know what they believe as Christians, or to even understand what Christians believe, this is a good introduction, remarkably elegant and concise for the breadth it must cover. I’m glad that a copy finally came my way and to have read it and to have it for future reference.

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

Review: A Continuous Harmony

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A Continuous Harmony, Wendell Berry. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2012.

Summary: A collection of essays representing a cross-section on Berry’s critique of America’s consumptive culture as well as his ideas on good agriculture.

I suspect I am not the only one who thinks that all of Wendell Berry’s essays are just variations on a theme. But two things make “variations on a theme” either banale or briliant–the beauty of the theme and the skill of the composer. In the case of Berry, the theme is the utterly essential theme of living well in our place–our own patch of land, our community, our country, our planet. The variations include the disciplines that have shaped how we live in our place, the need to think little and local, the illusions of our industrial dreams, and the value of literacy and the importance of the language that we use.

The main entrée of the collection is an eleven part extended essay titled “Discipline and Hope.” Berry considers the various expressions of the industrial, exploitive disciplines of our technology–our focus on efficiency, consumption, the ways we abstract from the practical realities of the land. He contrasts our linear vision of progress with the cycles of birth, growth, fruit, decline, and death by which the earth is renewed each year. He calls for us to embrace at-one-ment.

He lays the basis for this in his opening essay, “A Secular Pilgrimage,” observing the seeming hatred of the creation by those professing belief in the Creator of all things, contrasting it with the testimony of “secular” nature poets who viewed the world with awe. This is followed by the appetizer of “Absence and Return,” in which he describes returning home from the West Coast and the renewed awareness as he walks his land that “everything is supposedly named and numbered and priced, are unlikely to know what lies out of sight of the paved roads.” Then we have a “sweet relish” essay paying tribute to another of those nature poets, William Carlos Williams, whose work he describes as “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word.”

The final two appetizers offer complementary tastes, perhaps salad dishes, around the idea of thinking local in “The Regional Motive” and “Think Little.” The latter essay first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and challenges the slogan to “Think Big.” He contends that while we are organizing trash cleanups, we need to pick some up ourselves, turn off lights, lower the thermostat, and refuse to buy the latest electric gadget, and grow some of your own food. “The Regional Motive” challenges our nomadic drive with one that stays home and lives in a way that preserves land for those who follow us.

Following the main essay, Berry offers two desserts that leave the taste of the whole meal with us. One, “In Defense of Literacy” argues for the practicality of literacy and the awareness of the importance of the words we use to describe what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary.” The other, “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” illustrates with the strip mining of Kentucky the philosophy playing out throughout the country of narrow measures of efficiency and profit that do not account for the people displaced, the soil polluted, the rivers ruined that cost as much or more to restore as the profits of the companies who inflicted these losses without requiring them to repay.

What is served up here is a wholesome country meal of Wendell Berry essays. Admittedly, some of the cultural references are dated, but people have turned up their noses to the hearty meal, preferring industrial fast food, as it were, to the wholesome messages in these essays. So, while the cultural references are dated, the underlying truths are not, and if anything, more desperately needed today. Everyone is still looking for technological fixes to our climate crisis that will allow us to preserve our consumptive lives. We have not heard Wendell Berry’s message calling us to a different way of living in our world, to a wholesome feast that is in “continuious harmony” with the life of our world.

Review: Nobody’s Mother

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Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament, Sandra L. Glahn. IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: Through a study of literature, epigraphic, art, and architectural evidence, proposes that Artemis, far from being a fertility goddess, was a virgin, who aided women in childbirth, and considers the implications for our reading of 1 Timothy 2:11-15.

1 Timothy 2:11-15 is a critical text in discussions of the role of women in the church, and whether women may teach. The apparent prohibition and its tie to “being saved through childbirth” is alternately understood as a universal principle or occasional instruction based on the situation in Ephesus, where Timiothy is working to consolidate the ministry begun there during Paul’s time there. Those who would argue the context refer to Ephesus as the center of the worship of Artemis. A path-breaking work in that regard was Richard Clark Kroeger and Catherine Clark Kroeger’s I Suffer Not a Woman, arguing that the worship of Artemis as a fertility goddess led to false teaching with women asserting themselves, also referencing the goddess’s role in enabling childbirth. This offered a basis for treating these verses as “occasional” instruction to correct a particular abuse.

This work would make the same argument but from a very different assessment of the nature of Artemis worship. Glahn cites the explosion of epigraphic and inscriptional evidence in recent decades and the research tools to access the information as contributing to this very different portrayal of Artemis. The portrait is of a goddess whose painless birth was in contrast to her twin, Apollo, whose birth came after days of agonizing labor, leading Artemis to pursue a virgin life. She became the goddess who aided women as a midwife in labor, either reducing their pains in labor or granting them, through her arrows, a painless death or at least, a release from pain. She also considers the Artemis cult in Ephesus and the women who elaborately adorned her statue, and the women who served as priests. Women looked to Artemis to save them through childbirth.

But what about the statuary showing Artemis with a multitude of breasts, a symbol of fertility? Glahn argues that these are not breasts at all for anatomical reasons, but rather a type of necklace. With different nuances that arise from Artemis as a virgin and helper of women with child, she argues that this was what Paul had in mind when he referred to women being saved through childbirth. Where Christian converts might be tempted to revert to trusting Artemis, he argues for their trusting Christ. Offering this reading, she contends that 1 Timothy 2 is teaching specific to the situation in Ephesus, not an abiding teaching for the whole church, helping to explain why Paul himself speaks of women teaching and prophesying elsewhere in his letters, and of trusted co-workers who were women.

Glahn leads us through the literary, epigraphic, artistic, and architectural evidence from which this portrait of Artemis, the goddess especially worshipped in Ephesus, emerges. She also traces her own journey as a woman, wrestling with the interpretation and application of texts, and her growing realization that the story she’d always been told just wasn’t so. Her own research gave further warrant for that. For her, none of this led to a denial or diminishment of biblical authority, but rather a growing understanding of this contended text, and a growing sense of the liberating gospel of Christ for men and women.

Whether or not one agrees with Glahn’s conclusions, the study of Artemis is so important as a backdrop to Paul’s Ephesian ministry. Glahn points to a number of references in writings with an Ephesian audience that show the superiority of Christ to Artemis without ever mentioning the goddess. Her work acquaints us with the latest evidence that contradicts in important ways earlier understandings of Artemis. For all these reasons, this is a valuable study.

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

Review: The Six

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The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush. New York: Scribner, 2023.

Summary: Traces the story of the first six American women astronauts from their selection, through their training and missions, along with the special media attention they received.

I grew up with the early space program. I followed the Mercury Seven. I made models of the rockets they flew. I didn’t dream of being an astronaut–maybe an engineer in the space program. I did not think at the time that there were women who thought about going into space–as an early chapter of this book states: “But Only Men Can Be Astronauts.” I didn’t know about the Mercury Thirteen–women who passed the same physical screening as the men–but were excluded from consideration. And so it would go through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. But women continued to dream of going into space. When the new space shuttle program was announced, the electrifying announcement came that applications would be open to women.

Loren Grush, a space reporter for Bloomberg News, brings us a well-researched account for the first six women who won places in the program in 1978–Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon. She begins by describing their astronaut dreams and the competencies they brought to the new group of astronauts–doctors, an oceanographer, engineers, a chemist among them. We follow each of the women as they learn of the opening, their decision to apply, and then as they participate in the finalist interviews and medical testing. Then came the call from George Abbey asking, “are you still interested in coming to work for NASA?”

Grush describes the media attention, the lame jokes by Johnny Carson and the questions no male astronaut would be asked. Ironically, the men felt kind of left out for once. The training began in earnest, and, with it, the challenge to convince everyone there that they could do the job. We see the deftness of several women in manipulating the robot arms that would be crucial in launching satellites and observatory platforms. They match the men, except none can fly in the front seat of the T-38s–women had not yet been allowed to qualify as military jet pilots–and so all were mission specialists and could not pilot a shuttle.

The question though was “who would be first.” While all counted it a privilege to be on any mission, only one could be first. While all the women are covered, particularly Judy Resnik, who later died on Challenger, Grush focuses special attention on Sally Ride as the first, the media pressure she faced, her growing ability to cope with it, and the success of the mission. We learn of her troubled marriage, and her awakening to her love for Tam O’Shaughnessy, making her the first LGBTQ+ person in space, as well as America’s first woman. Ride also played key roles in the Challenger investigation, including passing along crucial engineering information she’d been given focusing attention on the flawed O-rings that led to the fatal burn-through and explosion. She also played a crucial role in redefining NASA’s mission, including a focus on studying changes to our own planet, crucial in the decades of climate change ahead.

Grush offers accounts of the missions each woman was on, including Anna Fisher’s MacGyvered fix that was used to attempt to activate a satellite that did not activate as it should have and Kathy Sullivan and Dave Leetsma’s space walk practicing a delicate satellite fueling operation. The women demonstrated that they could handle whatever was assigned them. And there was evidence that Judy Resnik was the one who activated Captain Dick Scobee’s emergency oxygen, possibly giving him some extra moments of life as the Challenger cabin tumbled to the sea.

The Challenger accident comes toward the end of the book and the reactions of each of the surviving women is described. The shuttle program was paused as boosters were re-designed and safety protocols were reviewed. The women had done their work. Additional women joined the astronaut corp subsequent to the accident, including one who would pilot a shuttle. Grush traces the subsequent careers of the surviving five.

Grush has given us an account that is combination of history and six biographies. It is an account that shows six women spotlighted because they were women who simply wanted to do a job–which they did. Some were mothers and people questioned whether it was proper for them to be astronauts–something no one asked of the men who were fathers. They were a part of a generation who went from being excluded from jobs or paid less because of their gender to moving the needle toward a greater parity, something we have not totally achieved yet. But they showed there was no reason but our prejudices to keep women from reaching for the stars. Grush helps us realize just how much these women accomplished toward that dream.

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

Review: Catching Fire, Becoming Flame

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Catching Fire, Becoming Flame (Revised and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition), Albert Haase, OFM. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2023.

Summary: If God is the fire and spark who sets our lives aflame, how do we prepare the kindling for the transforming and empowering work of God?

The premise of this rich study in spiritual transformation is that “it starts with God throwing a divine spark on the tinder of the heart.” The rest of book explores the nature of that spark from God, how we may prepare the kindling, how through prayer we catch fire, the practices of discernment that fan the flames in our lives, and the ongoing commitments that over the course of our lives cause the flame to burn even brighter until we become “all flame.”

Albert Haase, OFM has been a guide to many along the path of spiritual transformation, even as he has traveled this road himself. In a work with short chapters, simply written, Haase offers brief lessons describing the process by which God sets our lives aflame with his love.

The work is divided into five parts. It begins with the initiative of God, his spark in our lives, working through his Spirit, forming us in the image of Christ, a lifetime process. It starts as God awakens desire in us. We go through three stages: purgation, in which the CPR of community, prayer, and repentance orients our lives toward God, arranging the kindling; illumination, in which we realize God is closer than we ever imagined and surrender to the presence of God; and union, in which God’s desires become ours. We recognize our weaknesses and sins and bring them to God. Likewise, we grow in awareness of bad habits, understand their triggers, and learn to short circuit those triggers. We see the evidence of progress not merely in obeying commands but in the kindling in our lives of growing love for God and others.

In the second part, Haase discusses the spiritual concepts that provide excellent kindling for God’s spark. He begins with our images of God and how they may hinder or help his spark to catch. We consider the nature of prayer and praying as we can and from where we are, and progressing from words to silence. We learn the importance of a grateful heart and obstacles to gratitude. He explores the divine milieu in which we encounter God in word and sacrament, in creation and “thin” places. The false self and its energy centers are distinguished from the true self that rests in Christ. Haase concludes this section with the experience of suffering and our responses of crying out and surrender.

Part three explores with greater focus how we are set afire through various practices of prayer including the examen, meditation and contemplation, the Jesus prayer, lectio divina, imaginative prayer, wonder-ing with creation, praying the stations of the cross, and praying the Lord’s prayer. He offers very practical instructions for each, a discussion of the heart issues involved in the practice, and with the Lord’s prayer, explications of each phrase.

Discerning the desires of God to further fan the flames is the focus of part four. He begins with the discernment of good and evil spirits in our experiences of consolation and desolation (although I wonder if one can always make this correlation). He speaks of the place of our past, present, potential and our passions in discerning God’s will. He discusses the experiences of dryness, darkness, and depression and what we might make of these. He describes spiritual direction and the qualities of good directees and directors, including the idea that a director may be helpful for a season and then someone else may better serve. He encourages self-care of mind, body, heart, and spirit saying “blessed are the balanced.” He urges the value of a rule of life, offering an example.

The final part of this work speaks of the dynamic commitments by which we “become all flame.” He commends the self-reflective work of the examination of conscience–different from the daily examen. He speaks of the practice of forgiving ourselves and others. He discusses how we might experience inner healing from past hurtful events in our lives in the presence of Christ. Haase explores how we go about resisting various types of temptation, eight of which he identifies from scripture. He teaches us about surrender and abandonment to God and revealing all to God through journalling. Another chapter encourages the regular practice of retreats and the different types of retreats one might take. There are chapters on sabbath, hospitality, living in the present moment, and soul training.

Following his metaphor of fire and flame, he concludes with an encouragement:

“Catching fire and becoming flame require more than the spark of the Spirit and our well-chosen kindling. They also demand an ongoing perseverance and a long-term patience forged from the awareness that God fervently desires to see us blaze with godly enthusiasm. That enthusiasm flares up as we willingly surrender to the communal process of being transformed by the Spirit of God sent to lovingly respond to the unmet need or required duty of the present moment.”

Albert Haase, OFM has described for us the process by which God set our lives aflame with his holy love. He’s encouraged us the wonderful news that God is present and wants to do this in our lives, the God takes the initiative. He offers the wonderful analogy of our spiritual practices as “arranging the kindlng” as one does in preparing to set a fire and instructed us how we may keep on burning, ever brighter and more purely. This is a book to carry with one for a lifetime. Have it handy in times of review and reflection for the questions it poses. Take it on retreat. Discuss it in community and with a director. While not scripture, it is founded in the initiative of God, soaked with biblical reflection, and reflects centuries of wisdom. I’m glad to have this companion on the journey.

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

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — The Valley Park Hotel

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Scan of stationary for the Valley Park Drive-In Hotel at 525 Wick Ave from 1956.

I’m getting a reputation. A friend from Wisconsin was cleaning out his mother-in-law’s place and came across some ephemera from Youngstown and wondered if I’d be interested. He sent a photograph, and I realized that the pictured stationary was the old Arts and Sciences Offices at Youngstown State, at 525 Wick Avenue, across the street from the Butler. This week, the pictured stationary and the original matching wax envelope enclosing the stationary arrived in the mail.

As a freshman, I remembered going there to meet my professor to discuss my first draft of a term paper on Perelandra. I visited the building several times during my first years at YSU. It was also the home of WYSU, the campus Public Radio station. I saw the studios and found myself envious of the record collection! We always entered the building from an entrance off the driveway passing through the center of the building to parking behind the building. The building was torn down about the time we graduated to make way for Bliss Hall for the Performing Arts and the McDonough Museum of Art. In 1977, the College of Arts and Sciences moved into the newly built DeBartolo Hall.

The building began its life after World War II when “motor hotels” or “motels” were built across a country rapidly being connected by a road system to accommodate growing automobile travel. The Butler as well as downtown Youngstown with its mix of theaters and shopping, and a growing college provided the incentive to build this tastefully constructed red brick two-story motel on Wick Avenue across from the Butler and overlooking Smoky Hollow.

Wax translucent envelope enclosing the stationary, listing other motels in the chain

The envelope enclosing the stationary lists three other motels that are part of this chain of “motor hotels.” The Noble Motel and the Town House Motel were both in Cleveland and the Rest Motor Hotel was in North Randall, probably near the race track.

Postcards I found of the motel describe it as follows:

The Most Modern Motorist Hotel in Ohio 70 Units – Completely Air-Conditioned 24-Hour Telephone Service Coffee Shop on Premises Two Minutes’ Walk from Downtown On State Route No. 7 and U.S. Route No. 62 525 WICK AVENUE – YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO. AAA Approved. Telephone: RIverside 3-1141 (from Pinterest).

Another post card indicates that at one time, it also featured a steak house and a swimming pool.

Two minutes is pretty optimistic to walk from that location to downtown, but it plainly was walkable as we did many times during college. For someone who didn’t want the hassle of parking and traffic downtown, which could be considerable in Youngstown’s heyday, the motel provided a comfortable alternative.

At some later time, the motel was known as the Wick Avenue Motel, probably reflecting a change in ownership. I suspect the growth of suburban motels in the 1960’s brought competition. I could not find a date when the university acquired the building. By 1970, university maps show the building as “ASO” or “Arts and Sciences Offices.”

Many of us who went to YSU in the 1970’s will remember this building as a place of meeting for advising or course discussions with professors. Others will have memories of when it was a motel, a forerunner of motels including chains like Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson’s that eventually sprang up along the highways of a nation with a love affair with travel–including some folks who lived in Wisconsin who found their way to Youngstown, stashed away some stationary, that over half a century later brought to life another Youngstown memory.

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

Review: The Last of the Fathers

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The Last of the Fathers, Thomas Merton. New York: HarperOne, 1981 (originally published in 1954).

Summary: A brief life of Bernard of Clairvaux, published following the encyclical, Doctor Mellifluous, celebrating the eighth centenary of the death of Bernard, on August 20, 1153.

It was not planned but this review nearly coincides with the Feast Day of Bernard of Clairvaux, who died on August 20, 1153. The book, by Thomas Merton, was first published in 1954, the year following an encyclical by Pope Pius XII, Doctor Mellifluus, celebrating Bernard as a Father or Doctor of the church, eight centuries after his death. He is the last to bear this designation, and the encyclical, as Merton observes, is an argument based on the life and theology of Bernard, to put this beyond question.

After a brief preface, which discusses the occasion for this work and touches on the different “Bernards” united in the person of this last Father of the Church, this work is divided into four parts. The first is a brief life of Bernard, born in Cluny and having access to power and choosing instead the monastic life. Merton takes snapshots of his life at three points: 1115 as the young abbot of a new foundation at Citeaux sent out to begin a new work at Clairvaux with twelve men living in wood shacks; 1124, as he closes his own formation as an abbot and is tested by defections from the order, including Arnold, abbot of Morimond, resulting not in dissolution of the Order but reorganization and a great time of growth; and 1145, when a fellow Cistercian is Pope Eugene III and Bernard accepts the assignment of preaching a Crusade, one that sadly ends in failure–not his but those who led but with which he is associated. Merton observes that these Bernards are not at war but express a singular vision of the greatness of God and his order, communicated through the church to the world. Bernard’s preaching of the Crusade was accompanied by miracles wherever he went, including his overcoming of sickness. Just 21 years after his death, in 1174, he was canonized as a saint by Alexander III.

The second part of the work overviews the writings that warrant the title “Doctor of the Church.” Many focus on the greatness of God and God’s love, evoking the love for God of his children. He envisions a soul made in God’s image and destined for perfect likeness to God in love, captured in his treatise “On the Love of God.” He also wrote on free will, an Apologia challenging the comforts and extravagance of the Benedictines, calling for reform, a number of works on Mary, and De Conversione, on our continuing conversion as grace works in the soul. While many of his works and his life reflective contemplation on God and the spiritual life, he could also engage in discursive theology in writing “Against the Errors of Peter Abelard” whose views of the person of Christ, his Pelagianism, and his views of the work of Christ were deficient. Then there are the eight-six sermons on the Canticle of Canticles exploring the mysteries of God’s love and the mystery of godliness.

The third part of the work is “Notes on the Encyclical Doctor Mellifluus in which he comments on the different aspects of the encyclical beginning with its tribute to the sanctity and wisdom, arising from Bernard’s continual meditation on the scriptures and the Fathers. His theology was not stuffy, or intellectually arid, but flowed from devotion, love that discerned truth. Pius then commends particular works, especially the Canticles. He stresses the hope expressed in these sermons that every sinner might find not only pardon and mercy, but perfect union with God, elaborating the particular gracious workings of God to bring this about. We gain a picture of the unique balance of contemplation and action in the life of this vigorous saint. Part four, then, which follows is the text of the actual encyclical.

This little book by Merton uses the occasion of Pius XII’s encyclical to highlight for Cistercians of his own day and others, the ways that life and theology, contemplation and action, sanctity yoked to wisdom and learning combined in the life of Bernard. What might seem in conflict were rather qualities that walked together in the life of this man. Merton mentions how Bernard’s life came at the time of the early stirrings that would contribute to the rise of universities. For Bernard, knowledge and faith, study and practical leadership were part of a seamless life. Perhaps he may serve as an inspiration to all of us who believe that the love of God and the love of learning may walk hand in hand. And so, as the Feast Day of St. Bernard of Clairvaux approaches, I close with thanksgiving for this Father and Doctor of the Church.

Review: Good Catastrophe

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Good Catastrophe, Benjamin Windle. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2023.

Summary: Drawing upon the Book of Job and Tolkien’s idea of “eucastrophe,” proposes that when we face pain and adversity, we are at the place where great good can occur.

The American dream of the good life is an illusion. Despite our curated Instagrams, life often goes sideways in painful ways. A parent loses a child. A disaster destroys a home. You experience a series of financial reverses. A friend is diagnosed with a serious or terminal illness. We struggle with a chronic affliction for which there seems to be no remedy. If you live long enough, you discover that a good life of peace, health, family accord, great friends, and prosperity comes undone. What hope have we in the face of the inevitable catastrophes of life?

Benjamin Windle has faced painful adversity from a dangerous dog attack on a child to the loss of a brother to cancer and fire at one business property and flooding at another in the same year. As he wrestled with these matters, he turned to the book of Job and studied J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of the “eucatastrophe”–the good catastrophe–when seemingly terrible things bring out qualities of courage, resilience, and hope in the lives of those who suffer and face adversity.

He begins with Job’s self-description of the stump that at “the scent of water” buds to life (Job 14:7-9). When we face devastation, do we seek “the scent of water”? That doesn’t mean we are not honest about our brokenness, our pain, our failures. Alluding to Leonard Cohen, he observes that “It’s the cracks that let the light in.” With Tolkien, he argues that pain and hope are not opposites but close relatives. Sometimes, it simply comes down to practicing hope in the ordinary, not unlike Stephan Curry’s practice in a rough backyard court where he determined to make shots rather than chase the missed ones.

Windle tells great stories to illustrate the great good that often accompanies adversity. He recounts the Keith Jarrett performance in Paris, a best-selling recording, where he learns that the piano he requested was not available and the old one available was out of tune with sticking keys. He ended up improvising one of the most amazing performances of his life. To illustrate how friendships can sustain us in adversity, he describes the two hundred hands that passed children hand to hand out of flooded caves in Thailand.

Ultimately hope is rooted in the character of God and our everlasting destiny. Adversity draws us to lean deeply into these realities. Windle offers us a framework for leaning into that hope beginning with sitting in the pain, mining the good, and seeing eternity. He doesn’t inundate us with cliches and sentimentality but he does call our attention to how pain and hope meet in many lives, from Job’s to his own. The chapters are short, easily read with artwork and quotes that tastefully introduce each chapter. This is a good book to read if the dream of a good life has become a nightmare, and you are wondering how to live with hope when everything is going wrong.

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