MysteriousFaith

February 2005 Bookshelf

A shorter list this month due to other pressing obligations and being ill. The gems of the month are, without doubt, Brian McLaren’s newest book The Last Word and the Word After That and Ronald White’s The Eloquent President.

February 2005 Bookshelf

Willful Blindness: The Bush Administration and Iraq by Trudy Rubin

This book, a compilation of Trudy Rubin’s Philadelphia Inquirer columns on Iraq, goes back to the invasion of Iraq by the current Bush administration to current day. Because of its role really more as a bound chronology of columns, the book lacks the depth you will find in other works that analyze the theory and execution of the policies that led us into war. What you will find in this book is a view of how things unfolded in Iraq, written by an American who knows Iraq well. Perhaps more than anything else, I appreciated Rubin’s contribution to Americans understanding what the progressive voices within Iraq are struggling with and what they need in order to stabilize their society after years of tyrannical rule.

Between Jesus and the Market: Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America by Linda Kintz

I put this book down not quite 2/3 of the way through. Kintz’s analysis is an attempt to clearly articulate the logic, philosophy and worldview of those within the right wing without resorting to demagoguery. She is quite successful in this pursuit, always framing her observations from what I would label a sociological perspective versus a religious one. Her attitude is to ask herself why people within the Christian women’s movement - as evidenced in part through her analysis of Beverly LaHaye - resonate with the teaching. She prefers to believe people are seeking something for genuinely good reasons than to side with those who see all religious people as bigots and racists. Kintz’s analysis was, for me, hard to wade through which led me to ultimately put it down. It is not that her analysis is not probing, but that the writing itself seemed flat. I would enjoy going through this book with a group like a college class since the book is probably best suited to such a slower, more methodological approach.

The Broker by John Grisham

This was a Valentine’s Day gift from my sweetie. I love Grisham’s older books like The Firm when Grisham developed more complex plots and took the time to allow the complexities of his story line to wrap the characters up in problems that took a climactic set of events to resolve. His more recent books seem a little thin on the depth of his past work, but are still decent. The Broker is a plot line on par with his older materials, but I still wanted him to take a little more time and develop the main character in particular. The main character is really a fiend who we enjoy knowing is smarter than those he is running from; the transition he makes from fiend to quasi-hero is a bit abrupt and could use more time in developing. All in all, this was still a good book that I enjoyed for what it was.

The Last Word and the Word After That by Brian McLaren

I got The Last Word before it is actually published and finished it in two days; this is a fitting capstone on McLaren’s New Kind of Christian series. I am a little sad to see the series finish off, feeling that so much more could yet be explored by Neo & Dan. McLaren is probably one of the only authors that can touch me spiritually, emotionally and intellectually. Some find their way into one or maybe two of these niches, but rarely all at the same time. McLaren’s work is particularly healing and his voice is incredibly important as people need to know that more exists within the panorama of Christianity that what the more vocal advocates of it sometimes allow for. Having wrestled with the question of hell about two years ago, I found that part of the book pretty standard stuff (although I’m sure he’ll be threatened with hell because of his handling of the topic). The second part of the book was, to me, the most important.

I was particularly moved by his idea of a “knowing community.” To me, that is so much of what church should be about - I’m actually a lot more interested in the small group idea (his cabin in the woods) of church than the institution of church so maybe I’m a little far off from him in that realm. A part of me aches when he writes about that given the difficulty we’ve had in finding something like that in Indianapolis. His five queries were incredibly insightful, and something I am going to have to think about how to best incorporate into my life. I loved his new questions in relation to the old “if you died right now” (”If you lived for another 50 years, what kind of person would you like to become and how will you become that person?”).

The one area I’m really struggling with is how he incorporates what in the Bible is of man and what is of God. When he talked about the role the ancient Sumerian and Hellenic death rituals and afterlife beliefs played on the Jews, he readily admits and shows evidence for the effect these had on the Jews. But doesn’t that beg the question of how we discern what in the Bible is of God and what is of man? I really think this issue needs more time and attention - I felt that about chapter 10 (I believe) in his Generous Orthodoxy as well. It isn’t so much that he walks a fine line but that he seems, to me, to not follow through completely in a logical form on the implications to some of his ideas. I struggle with the realization that the vestiges of fundamentalism are still with me, looking for a level of specificity that perhaps just doesn’t exist or perhaps isn’t necessary; however, I’m a bit confused by that part of his theology.

In his notes on Chapter 14 he says, “Some readers may object to the inclusion of Dan’s reaction to the pile of shoes in the Holocaust Museum. They may argue that it constitutes a kind of ‘inadmissible evidence’ because Dan’s reaction is emotional and visceral, and theological matters should be evaluated only in light of rational analysis of the biblical text … Could the kind of emotional intelligence Dan demonstrates possibly be a God-given faculty along with intellectual intelligence? Might Jesus be relying on a similar kind of emotional intelligence in a passage like Luke 11:12-14?” I get confused by that because if I take McLaren’s argument here and transpose it into his treatment of the Canaanite genocide in C10 of Generous Orthodoxy I see a big disconnect and more importantly, an implication as to where our “emotional intelligence” would otherwise take us were it not for our need to have a transposed systematic theology.

The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through His Words by Ronald C. White, Jr.

Reflecting on how Lincoln formed his public speeches makes one ache for the time in our past when we gave our leaders the time they needed to prepare their thoughts, and when we were willing to wrestle with complexity in their presentations to us. As a reader of this book, it is inevitable that one does not desire modern-day presidents whose words are their own, whose ideas are the product of real insight, wisdom and knowledge. We have gone too long without a President like this man. We should rightly fear the future that will require us to again search for and find a man like this to lead us.

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next post: Question 5: Why is Homosexuality Such a Super-Sin?

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• March 2, 2005

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