Review: Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice

February 27, 2026February 26, 2026 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice

Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice, Karen J. Johnson. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514009987) 2025.

Summary: Histories of five individuals and the communities they formed to pursue racial justice and reconciliation.

Heroes who do that to which we aspire are important as models. It’s even better when they are “ordinary,” because they offer hope that we can also be the change we want to see. Part of “ordinary” is understanding our heroes, both in their virtues and with all their warts. There is a difference between hagiography and good history.

Karen J. Johnson has written a history of four communities in the United States that pursued racial justice and reconciliation. She profiles the individual (in the first three) or pair of individuals (In the last instance) who formed these communities. Those profiled are Catherine de Hueck and the Friendship Houses of New York and Chicago, John Perkins and Mendenhall Ministries/Voice of Calvary in Mississippi, Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, and Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein at Rock of our Salvation/Circle Urban Ministries in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago.

Johnson is a historian of race and urban history and chair of the history department at Wheaton College. In addition, she and her husband lived for six years in the last of the four communities she profiles, albeit after the departure of its founders. She writes the book with three aims in mind. First, she writes about the recent racial past of the United States, identifying in these local histories larger, systemic patterns of racial dynamics, and how the church has been a part of these. Through the eyes of Catherine de Heuck, a Catholic refugee from Russia and naturalized citizen, we glimpse her vision of how Blacks were treated as second class citizens. John Perkins flees the racist South after his brother’s murder, then returns, having come to faith, to join the civil rights movement. He suffers and also models relocation, something he will preach.

Clarence Jordan challenges racial norms in establishing an interracial farm community at Koinonia Farm. As a Bible scholar, his Cotton Patch New Testament shows in the vernacular how the gospel goes against the grain of racism. Finally, when Raleigh and Paulette Washington joined Glen and Lonni Kehrein to build a multiracial congregation, they modeled how Black and White might live together in a recently integrated part of Chicago.

Second, Johnson models the work of doing history as a Christian with love, humility, and awe. She sees the hard work of piecing together a narrative from primary source material, on site visits, and interviews as a work of love, including love for the people whose lives you are narrating. This also means being honest. For example, former President Jimmy Carter claimed a long-standing relationship with Clarence Jordan. However, her search of various sources failed to confirm this relationship.

Third, Johnson believes the study of history with love, humility and awe leads to wisdom. In particular, it makes us aware that we live in a context. That context has been shaped by the past. And it shapes our default approaches to the present. She believes reading history in this way is worship and mind renewing (Romans 12:1-2).

As a good professor, she includes a “Questions and Implications” section at the conclusion of each chapter. These are not the vague, reflection questions you will find in some book. Rather, they reminded me of the essay questions I had to answer on college and seminary history exams. They forced me to formulate my own responses to the historical narrative. Your interaction with this text will be enhanced by taking some time to journal with these.

I appreciated this work for the quality of research Johnson invested. Her personal model of love, humility, and awe in writing about each of these ordinary heroes is evident throughout. She helped me appreciate the different forms of courage each exercised as well as the “long obedience” involved, punctuated with dry seasons and reverses. And I loved the carefully chosen images she included. For example, she includes an image of Clarence Jordan’s “shack” where he wrote his Cotton Patch translations and where he died. This work is a valuable resource for anyone committed to the long work of seeking racial justice.

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

Review: Kingdom Racial Change

November 20, 2025November 19, 2025 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Kingdom Racial Change

Kingdom Racial Change, Michael A. Evans, David L. McFadden, and Michael O. Emerson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing (ISBN: 9780802883728) 2025.

Summary: Three men tell their stories, analyze them using sociology, and propose strategies for Christians pursuing justice.

Michael A. Evans and David L. McFadden are Black and grew up in the same neighborhood and are friends from childhood. Michael is a pastor and director of the Developing Communities Project. David is a nephrologist serving Black community with a disproportionate level of kidney disease. Both men faced significant barriers in pursuing their call. For economic reasons Michael had to drop out of college to work, supporting his family. Despite being a gifted leader, he watched others promoted and paid better than he was. David struggled first to get accepted in a medical school, and then to convince those who supervised him of his ability, and later to obtain loans as he began his career.

Meanwhile, Michael O. Emerson grew up in a nearby, predominantly White community. It was expected that he would go to college, and when financial challenges arose, a mentor made it possible to complete an accelerated doctoral program. His life took a sharp turn at a Promise Keeper’s event that focused on racial reconciliation. He came to the unmistakable conclusion that his family was to live in a neighborhood where they were a racial minority, a commitment he and his family have kept over several decades in several academic appointments. When he came to Chicago, he joined Michael and David in the Unity Men’s Group of Chicago (appearing online as UnityInTheChurch.Org).

The first half of the book consists of the personal stories of the three men. They bring sociological analysis to bear, identifying systemic instances of racial power, the social location of each that played such an important part in their stories, Black advantages and other sociological factors illustrated by their lives.

The second part of the book reflects their thinking about pursuing kingdom racial change. Successive chapters consider this at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. At the macro level, they address changing systemic systems, overcoming the link between race and class, and any factors creating inequality between God’s people. They explore the systemic issues around housing and education, proposing alternative loan systems and everything from pre-K to access to post secondary education for all, crucial for today’s workplace.

However, without repentance and repairing of wrongs, this fails to racism as a historic systemic reality. They even broach the explosive issue of reparations. The authors propose limits on the wealth that can be passed from one generation to the next that could easily meet the estimated cost of reparations (estimated at $14.3 trillion). They estimate that the current generation will pass along nearly $70 trillion to the next. A portion could cover that while still passing along ample wealth by limits to exemptions to estate taxes.

However churches, local schools and workplaces operate at the meso level. Thus the authors identify appropriate “building blocks” for change at this level. For example, they advocate leveraging Black advantages as well as White advantages, while rooting out the religion of whiteness. Then Christians can leverage their common faith to build networks across racial lines to help others thrive. They also address leveraging work in community organizations to achieve kingdom racial change. They illustrate this through the work of Unity in the Church.

Finally, they address the micro level. Paradoxically it is not about me and God’s will for my life but rather God’s will for the world, in which we are invited to participate. This calls for a renewal of the mind that begins with identifying deformed thinking centered around personal autonomy and that it’s all about us. Rather, the call is to loving obedience to Jesus.

The book at various points identifies Building Blocks of Racial Change but only lists all of these at the end of the book. A graphic employed in each chapter could have helped embed the building blocks more clearly in the reader’s mind. Also, the chapter on macro level change is honest about how hard this is and suggests focusing on one issue. But models of how meso level movements have networked to pursue macro level change, if such exist, would be helpful.

The strength of the book is the work of Unity in the Church and the examples of how it is working to pursue kingdom racial change in Chicago. They’ve helped renew minds, and leveraged community assets to promote flourishing. And while the three authors won’t directly admit it, they’ve modeled a ‘long obedience” and resilience in their own pursuit of the just and peaceable kingdom. While there are questions unanswered and much work to be done, the authors model the possible. And that is no small thing.

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

Review: Beyond Ethnic Loneliness

April 17, 2024April 16, 2024 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Cover image of "Beyond Ethnic Loneliness" by Prasanta Verma

Beyond Ethnic Loneliness, Prasanta Verma. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514007419), 2024.

Summary: An Indian American immigrant describes the distinctive experience of ethnic loneliness and steps those experiencing that loneliness and those who care for them can take toward healing.

” ‘Go back to Indiana, or wherever it is you came from!’ she hissed.

Imagine you are the little girl whose only memories are growing up in Alabama, whose family immigrated from India. It was a devastating message that the author of this work has never forgotten, even with the mistaken notion that Indian Americans must be from Indiana! She spoke English like an American but looked “different” from others. She found herself asking the question “What am I?” And in living in this place on the margins, it led to a peculiar kind of loneliness–ethnic loneliness. It is the loneliness that Blacks, Indigenous people, Latinos, Africans, Middle East and North Africans and Asian American and Pacific Islanders who live in a White majority country struggle with.

In Part One of the book, Prasanta Verma takes this question of “what are you” and delineates the particular nature of ethnic loneliness. In defining ethnic loneliness, one of the striking aspects to me was its chronic, rather than episodic nature that may be experienced as cultural isolation, lack of connection, identity conflicts, loss of cultural identity, social exclusion, marginalization, language barriers, and integration and assimilation. Verma discusses the experience of disbelonging, being uprooted from a place where one belongs to and with others. She poignantly describes her own struggle where her particular beauty clashed with the dominant white culture–she with dark skin without tanning and dark curly hair. She wrestles with identity theft, being the perpetual foreigner in America and a tourist with an American passport in India.

She shares what it is like to be isolated and othered in a racialized society–the racial stereotypes (in her case, the model Asian) and the microaggressions (“where are you from?” which is asked because of one’s different appearance). There is even the struggle of names–does one choose an American name to fit in, making one a traitor to one’s own ethnicity. She chronicles how ethnic minorities are marginalized in institutions: lack of diversity and representation, cultural insensitivity, discriminatory policies, microaggressions, lack of access, language barriers, and more. She concludes this part with summarizing the experience as one of exile. Throughout, Verma draws on how scripture addresses such loneliness, and here points out how God was with exiled Israel, the despised Samaritans and others on the margins.

Part Two of the book explores what may be done. Her focus is on the ethnically lonely person and a key is moving from disbelonging to belonging.. She begins with the healing of different forms of racial trauma, which she names, as a kind of belonging to oneself. She also encourages finding people to be safe with while also setting healthy boundaries in one’s life. She emphasizes the importance of stories, including reading the stories of others, offering a great bibliography. A good rule in such situations (and especially for majority culture people) is: “Don’t deflect racism/Don’t defend racism/Don’t deny racism.” She discusses the ways individualism and fear create barriers to moving from disbelonging to belonging and offers an extremely helpful list of what churches and community organizations can do. Her concluding chapter describes living in the already/not yet of longing for “the better country” of Hebrews 11:13-16–the loneliness that opens us up to the beauty of community, the glimpses and the long haul to see the changes we dream of.

At the end of each chapter (along with questions and a writing prompt) is an answer in verse to the question “So, What are you?” which are wonderful meditations allowing the chapter’s truth to sink deeply into one’s life. Here is the one from the final chapter:

SO, WHAT ARE YOU?

You are beloved
You are not invisible
You are whole
You are wanted
You are seen
You are loved
Just the way you are
You belong to yourself
You belong to others
You belong to God
So, what are you?
You are a gift of joy
You eat at the table
Of belonging
You are a Home
Of belonging
To others
And yourself

Prasanta Verma addresses hard realities of loneliness and trauma with stories of her own life and those of others. She offers biblical re-framing and practical suggestions wrapped in beautiful rhythmic prose and verse. This is an important book not only for those who struggle with ethnic loneliness but for any who care enough to want to understand and accompany those who struggle. And I can’t help but wonder if the insights and practices in this book, if applied, might also begin to address the larger loneliness pervading our society.

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

Review: All God’s Children

July 13, 2023July 12, 2023 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

All God’s Children: How Confronting Buried History Can Build Racial Solidarity, Terence Lester. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: A plea that we need to confront the history we try to hide of racial injustice and that real reconciliation can only happen when we stand together in soliarity against racial injustices

Terence Lester leads the Atlanta-based Love Beyond Walls, a Christian community development organization addressing poverty, homelessness, and community development. He’s served as a pastor in both black and white churches and worked in the middle of efforts to address racial inequities and to foster racial reconciliation.

This book reflects the continued polarization in the United States around matters of race. The first part addresses our long-standing and currently increasing effort to suppress the history of racial inijustices and the contributions of Black Americans to our country’s history. Lester experienced this in his own education and it was only through reading and learning on his own that he understood more deeply the history of racial oppression beginning as early as 1619, running through the system of slavery in which both South and North were implicated, contributing to our young country’s economic prosperity, and continuing to control lives and livelihoods of Blacks through Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, school-to-prison pipelines, voter suppression efforts, and continued concentration of economic resources within powerful interests.

It’s a history many do not want to acknowledge or understand. Against the arguments that teaching this history only perpetuates racial division, he contends that only understanding can lead to Whites and Blacks joining in solidarity to advocate for more just policies and practices. He argues that God is not colorblind but likes gathering those of every color around his throne. It is folly to pretend that we are. He contends that we cannot have racial reconciliation without racial justice.

Solidarity is a key idea for Lester. Solidarity is more than posting a black square or “Black Lives Matter” on social media. It means that we arrange our lives to be in proximity with people of color. It means supporting businesses of people of color. It means recognizing bias, including the skepticism of the competence of leaders who are people of color (he recounts having to provide far more evidence of credentials and competence than White peers, for example). Solidarity means doing, volunteering alongside others and accepting their leadership. Solidarity means speaking up on behalf of the other as Mr. Rogers did with Officer Clemmons, sharing his wading pool, both in 1969 and 1993 as a powerful statement of racial solidarity. Solidarity means not just making space at our tables, it means truly letting it become their table. Token presence is not inclusion.

Lester describes the pain of those who have walked away from him as he spoke about racial justice. Yet this is a book filled with gritty hope, encouraged by friends, both Black and White, who have stood and worked in solidarity, who have stopped theorizing and temporizing and waded in with him to tackle challenging problems. It is also a hope nurtured through the way of the cross, that realizes that only the seed that dies bears fruit, that we only save our lives by losing them. Terence Lester’s passion, pain, and persisting hope in gospel-nourished solidarity in pursuit of justice reverberates throughout the pages of this book. One senses his deep longing that we not miss this moment as the people of God to seek the shalom of all God’s children.

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