June 2014: The Month in Reviews

July 1, 2014January 11, 2015 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

This past month I read the classic account of the sinking of the Titanic and a book on Christianity’s engagement with classical culture. I explored the idea of the Holy, and the idea of the humanities. I read about immigrant zoologist Louis Agassiz and a contemporary book on the opportunities to serve immigrants. And I explored the diffusion of Christianity around the world in the 20th century, and the fiscal and moral deficits in our federal budgets. Here’s the list of books I reviewed in June with links to the full review:

1. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto. Otto coined the term “numinous” and explores the “non-rational” aspects of our encounters with God.

2. The Humanities in Public Life edited by Peter Brooks. This book is the text of symposium presentations and discussions exploring the qualitative worth of the humanities in our public life when they are under fire on the grounds of their utility.

3. Fixing the Moral Deficit by Ronald J. Sider. Sider believes our federal budget deficits reveal a deep moral deficit and he makes faith-informed proposals for how these deficits may be addressed so we don’t bequeath a mess to our children and grand-children.

4. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism by Brian Stanley. Stanley explores the diffusion of evangelicalism in two senses–both its global spread as well as its increasingly incoherent identity at the end of this time.

5. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science by Edward Lurie. This biography of Agassiz spans his life and his passion for zoology, his emigration to the U.S. and his pivotal role in the American scientific establishment as well as the challenge presented to his leadership by evolutionary biology.

6. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. This is the classic account of the sinking of the Titanic, drawn from first hand accounts of survivors. Not recommended reading if you are going on a cruise!

7. Christianity and Classical Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan. This is the text of Pelikan’s magisterial Gifford Lectures on the interaction of the Cappadocian fathers (and Macrina) with Hellenistic influences in defining Christian orthodoxy.

8. Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration, and Mission by J.D. Payne. Payne chronicles the migrations occurring throughout the world and the implications for the mission of the church of hosting so many immigrants in our communities.

I read a few less books than usual this month–a combination of some long books like the Agassiz biography and the Pelikan book–and a major conference I was directing. But I hope in these reviews you will find something to your liking and look for more next month!

Review: Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission

June 30, 2014June 30, 2014 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission by J.D. Payne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Have you noticed how many people from other countries are living in your city? J.D. Payne thinks this is part of God’s providential work that creates great opportunities for mission if his people will have eyes to see it. My city, Columbus, Ohio, has the second largest Somali population in the U.S. with over 40,000 residing in our city. A whole network of shops, restaurants, places of worship (mostly Islamic) and businesses have developed in consequence.

People are moving for all sorts of reasons from country to country and Payne chronicles this movement with both stories and charts of data. There are refugees, migrants seeking better economic opportunities, students enrolling in our universities. And this is not just the case in the U.S. It is the case on every continent.

Payne has one simple contention and that is that those who come from a particular country, especially those not easily open to western missions, may make the best people to take the gospel back to these countries and plant churches. The basic issue is whether believing people in host countries will recognize the opportunity and respond.

Payne suggests a simple four part strategy consisting of Reach, Equip, Partner, and Send. One of the things he warns against is that without an intentional focus on sending, many will simply assimilate into a host culture and host believing communities. Contrary to some, he believes in real partnerships and that what Western churches have to offer is not all bad, even though paternalism in various guises is to be watched for. What he does observe is that Western partners with returning immigrants have much more access to the immigrant’s culture than they would on their own.

What I like about this book is that it refocuses the discussion on immigration from national policy debates to the kingdom implications of the immigration that is taking place. While the policy debates do matter and Christians should be involved in pursuing justice and mercy that welcomes the stranger we should also be wondering what is God up to in these global dispersions and how we might co-operate with God in what He is doing.

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So Whose America is it Anyway?

February 4, 2014August 27, 2025 / rtrube54 / 4 Comments

When my son was young, my wife had an awakening experience as she waited to pick him up from school and realized that she didn’t understand the conversations going on around her because of the different languages being spoken. Growing up, he interacted with students from every continent and most of the major faiths. Similarly, one of the things I love about our church is that we don’t worship God in just one language. And in the community choir I sing in, we are currently rehearsing music in four different languages (English, Hebrew, German and Spanish). I look forward to the day in the new heaven and earth when we will sing in all the languages of all the nations the praise of our one God. (Maybe I’ll be able to sing better in other languages then!)

So I have to admit to really being baffled by the reaction to Coke’s “America the Beautiful” commercial during an otherwise ho-hum SuperBowl. Singers in multiple languages sang this song while we saw images both of the beauty of our country and the incredible mosaic of peoples that make up our nation. The reaction wasn’t to marketing a soft drink with no health benefits but to the portrayal of who we’ve become as a country. And what surprised me most is that people seemed to overlook the clearly sung, “God shed his grace on thee”.

What troubles me in the reactions to this song are several things:

1. The song acknowledges that our land and our richly diverse nation is a gift of God. That may offend atheists, although I haven’t seen protests from them. We don’t own this country–we all are blessed by God to live here.

2. There are people who are citizens of this country from all the nations represented in the piece. If they have immigrated and naturalized, they have sworn an oath of allegiance to this country, something I never did other than the pledge of allegiance. They pay taxes, serve in our military, and enrich our economy. Just because their first language isn’t English (and most do, or their children do learn English) doesn’t make them any less Americans. Unless our own family line has only English speaking people it is likely that we had forebears whose first language wasn’t English either.

3. Some don’t like the idea of certain peoples singing a song with both Christian overtones and that is a stirring American anthem. Apart from the issues of “civil religion” which could be a post all its own, the critics ignore the fact that we often begin to aspire to the things we sing. Isn’t singing our songs part of how “us” and “them” become “we”?

4. Perhaps most important both as a national value, and a deeply held Christian principle is the call to welcome the immigrant and stranger. This poem, “The New Colossus”. by Emma Lazarus is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The statue with its uplifted torch, along with the words of this poem, have represented generations of immigrants. Equally for Christians, passages like these have inspired past and present efforts to welcome and care for immigrants:

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV)

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, (Matthew 25:35, ESV).

Our attitude to the immigrant is to be shaped by the fact that our spiritual story is an immigrant story. We remember Israel, once strangers in Egypt, and also remember that all of us were strangers to God apart from Christ’s reconciling work. Moreover, when we welcome the stranger, Jesus tells us that we welcome him. In fact the Matthew 25 passage warns of judgment for those who don’t welcome the stranger–that in our refusal to do so, we may be refusing to welcome Jesus.

I totally get that we have a broken immigration system and hard, substantive work needs to be done on this. I totally get that being a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-faith nation has its challenges. I am encouraged that the early church thrived, even in persecution, in such an environment. And I also realize that to some degree, this has always been the American experience. E pluribus unum means “out of the many, one”. Perhaps the recognition of these challenges and opportunities should cause us to cry afresh with the song, “God shed your grace on us.”