books

Nov 22, 2024 ∞

On Killing First and Loving Your Enemies

Last night I finished up reading Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s extensive history of Israel’s secret services. My friend Matt Burdette pointed me to the book and then gave me his copy to read. (Thanks, Matt!) It was enlightening for me, providing some adult perspective on events that linger vaguely in my childhood memories.

Matt’s comment when recommending the book was how careful the Israelis were about collateral damage. Indeed, Bergman’s sources recount many, many times when an attack on a target was either delayed or cancelled because the strike had the potential of killing wives, children, or bystanders. Regardless of where you fall on the morality of extrajudicial killing, this seems like a bare minimum of circumspection. Which makes Israel’s absolute destruction of Palestine this past year all the more striking in its wanton disregard. I’ll come back to that.

Israel’s history as a modern country is short and Bergman shows how intensely personal the mission of national protection and vengeance was to many early leaders of their security services. (One leader of the Mossad had on his office wall a picture of his grandfather, kneeling at gunpoint before Nazi soldiers, about to be shot. Imagine walking in to work every day and having that set the tone. Phew.) That fresh, personal link can make me sympathetic to the motivation for and justification of the long documented string of murders they committed. And yet I have some hesitancy.

To wade at all into the waters of discussion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a cause for trepidation, but let me see if I can (carefully) arrange a few thoughts about this tragic past century.

First, the persecution and expulsion of Jews from many lands where they had lived for generations, finally culminating in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Words fail to describe the horror. If any people could or should be forgiven for acts of vengeance, these people could and should.

Then the cycle of violent retribution begins. The Israelis begin their life as a country with the displacement of millions of Palestinians from their generational homes, sending them as refugees into unwelcoming neighboring countries and packing them into small enclaves. This causes Palestinian terror groups to strike back in truly horrible ways. Which in turn causes the Israelis to attack. And the cycle continues. At times over the past few decades it has seemed like peace had a chance to be established. Last year’s Hamas attack on Israel, though, followed by Israel’s unprecedented destruction of the Gaza Strip, leave even the most hopeful observers doubting that change can come.

I, of course, don’t have any good answers here. Both sides have been the victims of displacement and horrors; both sides have committed unspeakably violent acts. Whether one can try to put them in the balance to justify one side or the other is a question for ethicists and philosophers far wiser than me. Regardless, both sides are both victims and perpetrators. A century of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth has left far too many toothless and blind. The leaders and fighters on both sides are shaped by generations of unresolved trauma. Things don’t look good.

At the risk of bringing the world’s third major religion into the discussion and making too pat an end to this post: this book and historical reflection make the revolutionary nature of Jesus' teaching to love your enemies stand out to me in sharp contrast to the natural, justifiable inclinations for revenge. The Christian church throughout history has systemically done a really lousy job of following that teaching. But as individuals of all faiths, it seems to me that the path away from universal toothlessness and blindness starts with being willing to give it a try.

Oct 30, 2024 ∞

Life’s too short for uninteresting books

Nick Hornby, writing over at Lithub, says something that I am finding increasingly true: as you get older, life is too short to spend time on bad novels.

I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history.

Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.

It’s no secret that I read lots of books. For a long time my reading strategy has been one book at a time, in completionist fashion. Once I’ve put the effort in to give it a try, why not finish it so I can add it to my reading log? But more and more I pick up a book, almost always a novel, get a few chapters in, and decide I just can’t be arsed to finish it. So back it goes to the library. (Or, rarely, it gets resold to the used book store. Though I very rarely buy fiction any more when it can be borrowed instead.)

I’m at the point where my “to read” bookshelf has books that have been sitting there so long that I am no longer interested in the topics that were apparently interesting to me when I bought them. It feels like an entire next level of giving up to just throw those books in the resell pile, but, well, I’m getting older. Life’s too short to spend time in uninteresting books.

Sep 2, 2024 ∞

David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”

With some of my recent reading getting my mental wheels turning about the nature of who God is, I figured it was a reasonable time to pull The Experience of God off my shelf. Right off the bat in the introduction, Hart promises what I was hoping for: “My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’…” Unfortunately, 332 pages later, what David Bentley Hart has written isn’t at all simple, and approaches a definition of “God” only from an oblique angle.

Hart structures the book in three major parts. In the first, he clarifies that the “God” he is describing is the ultimate deity, the prime mover, from which all other creation and being have their source. It is here even in the beginning section that he starts taking aim at what appears to be his actual target with this book: the arguments of the popular atheists of the late 20th and early 21st century. (Richard Dawkins is a regular whipping boy.)

The second section (comprising the bulk of the book) is structured around three characteristics which Hart points to as the core aspects of God: being, consciousness, and bliss. Each of these (long) chapters seems less interested in enlightening the reader on who God is than in disputing with the atheists and materialists. God is the root of being, declares Hart, and anyone who says differently is just stupid. There is no materialist explanation for consciousness, says Hart, and the materialists who argue for an evolutionary reason and dismiss God are illogical and foolish. There is no evolutionary reason for a search for beauty, truth, and goodness, says Hart, and those who would try to argue thus are intellectually dishonest. So it goes.

Hart’s arguments are at his strongest when he’s arguing for something instead of railing against something. The first part of his chapter on bliss was particularly good in that regard. Sadly, most of the book goes the other direction.

It’s very hard to review Hart without taking his blustery style into consideration. He’s never met a big word he didn’t like. He makes huge sweeping assertions without any hint of supporting justification. He seems to think that just by declaring something “obviously” wrong that it’s obvious to everyone and doesn’t need explained. In doing so he dismissively waves away not just the weak sauce of people like Dawkins but also more substantive scientists and thinkers who deserve better. Hart falls almost into self-parody at the beginning of chapter six: “[W]e should not mistake every pronouncement made in an authoritative tone of voice for an established truth.” While aiming this at popular atheists, it’s an argument that is equally valid against Hart himself.

There’s an old joke about a preacher, who at one point in his sermon notes has written: “weak point, pound pulpit”. As a lay theologian and not much of a philosopher at all, my trouble with Hart’s book is that he does so much pulpit pounding it makes me suspect the strength of his points. Even in places where I find myself in agreement with his conclusions I have a hard time feeling like the book was beneficial.

Aug 12, 2024 ∞

Henri Nouwen: An alert and aware spiritual life

Currently reading Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. What a wonderful little book! This bit in particular hit home today:

Not too long ago a priest told me that he cancelled his subscription to the New York Times because he felt that the endless stories about war, crime, power games, and political manipulation only disturbed his mind and heart and prevented him from meditation and prayer.

That is a sad story because it suggests that only by denying the world can you live in it, that only by surrounding yourself by an artificial, self-induced quietude can you live a spiritual life. A real spiritual life is exactly the opposite: it makes us so alert and aware of the world around us, that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and meditation and invites us to a free and fearless response.

As timely in 2024 as it was when Nouwen wrote it in 1975. And I both understand the plight of the priest in his story and desire to have, as Nouwen says, a free and fearless response to all that happens around me.

Jul 27, 2024 ∞

2024 Reads: Making All Things New by Ilia Delio

Making All Things New is the most complete and succinct compilation of Delio’s theology and philosophy that I’ve encountered so far. She’s strongest in her call to bring our theology into alignment with modern cosmology, and in exploring how the human brain works and interacts with others. (Let’s not forget she’s got a PhD in pharmacology, after all, and was doing research on ALS or Parkinson’s or something.)

I still think she’s way too bought into Kurzweil’s singularity and transhumanism, but I’ll forgive her that because I think the rest of it is bang on. Very manageable at 200 pages.

Jul 19, 2024 ∞

Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera

I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.

In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.

Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.

Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that

There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.

He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.

Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:

(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…

There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)

I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:

First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.

There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.

Jun 18, 2024 ∞

2024 Reads: A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes, OFM

I just finished up a slow read of a wonderful little book. A Window to the Divine: Creation Theology by Franciscan theologian Zachary Hayes draws from Teilhard and Whitehead to suggest that we need to recognize that our approach to synthesizing modern science and creation theology needs some updating. As he notes,

…the worldview mediated to both believer and unbeliever alike by our modern culture is radically different from that which provided some key structural elements for our familiar theological vision and language.

After all, he asks,

If scientific or prescientific views of the world inter into the structure of a theology in some way, and if believers forget where a style of theology has come from and what elements have entered into its structure, what would one expect to happen when the scientific vision of the world begins to change?

In the first chapter, Hayes examines the relationship between theology and science, noting that they exist to answer very different sorts of questions. They need not exist in opposition to each other, he says.

…we will not expect science to prove faith claims, nor will we expect theology to prove the claims of science. But we will attempt to allow religious faith to express itself in terms relevant to its cultural context, which, at least in the Western world of the present, is strongly conditioned by scientific insights.

Hayes goes on to briefly examine the creation texts, suggesting a theological interpretation of the beginning of Genesis that is focused far more on God as the source and origin of creation rather than on a scientific explanation of how things came into being. He takes a chapter to discuss the origin of humans (all from Adam? or from multiple parents?) and how that view interacts with Romans 5. (As in Adam all sinned, so in Christ all will be saved…) Hayes suggests that these texts, too, should be read etiologically, that is, as discussing the cause or origin of sin and salvation, not of some literal genetic propagation of sinfulness. He bogs down a bit in a very Roman Catholic discussion of Original Sin, trying to briefly address both Augustine and the Council of Trent.

The last chapter, though, is worth the whole read, as he pulls the threads together. I will quote more liberally here, it’s just too good.

First, about sin:

Human history is a history of response, both negative and positive, to the lure of God’s love… Sin is not a mere infringement of a law extrinsic to our nature. It is a failure to realize the potential of our nature itself. If our nature is fundamentally a potential to expand, sin is a contraction… Sin is the resistance to expansion through union with others. It is the attempt to create human history in alienation from the only end that we ultimately have… Sin is a failure in the collaborative effort to move toward full personalization in human community.

And then regarding grace:

The history of God’s grace and human response finds a distinctive form of self-consciousness in the history of the Bible, and an unsurpassed level of realization in the person and destiny of Jesus Christ… God, who is love community, calls forth love community in creation through free response of human persons to the offer of divine grace.

And then, finally, about the relation of theology and science, and why it matters:

Theology need not fear science nor tremble before the power of reason. Rather both theology and science need to stand in awe in the face of the mystery that is our world and in the even greater mystery of God to which the world points…

We have no reason to assume that the mere fact of human life is the goal of the universe. What is important above all is a quality of life, not the mere fact of life. With this in mind, we can see that it is a more significant question to ask whether this sort of world is apt for the accomplishment of God’s purpose. It is, indeed, a cosmos that challenges humanity in mind and in will, and that is capable of eliciting both awe and wonder. It is a cosmos that draws humanity out of the narrow point from which it begins to expand to the mystery of the world and thus to move towards the Ground of the world. It is a world apt to stretch the finite spirit to the limits of its possibility to bring forth not only the fact of life, but a Godlike quality of life that is a created sharing in the loving thought of God from which the whole of creation emerges.

Beautiful stuff.

Apr 27, 2024 ∞

Finished reading: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Robinson writing on Genesis, but I enjoy her writing enough it was definitely something I was going to read. Structured as a narrative commentary, Robinson doesn’t employ chapter breaks or other touchpoints within the text itself. It’s fascinating to read a commentary by a Christian writer who takes the text seriously but not necessarily literally. If there is a broad “point” to her book, it is to feature the uniqueness of Genesis among the Ancient Near Eastern texts, and to highlight the theme of unmerited grace that runs through it. From God’s forgiveness of Cain to Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Robinson tells us that Genesis is set apart from the other ANE texts this way.

I appreciated her book, but didn’t enjoy it as much as reading her essays. I need to pick them up for a re-read.

Mar 24, 2024 ∞

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

I just finished up reading Sarah McCammon’s new book The Exvangelicals and I need to take the time to recommend it here. McCammon, a 40-something NPR journalist, has written a book that’s part memoir and part explainer on where Exvangelicals have come from over the past decade, and, more importantly, why.

When I reviewed Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory earlier this year, I noted at the time that he was joining a list of kindred spirits who I found online or by reading their books, and who turned out to be fellow devout homeschooled kids who grew into adults questioning evangelical distinctives and dismayed by the devolution of white American evangelicalism into Fox News-watching Republican sheep. I named McCammon at this point as another one of those people. Little did I know how familiar her story would be.

I first encountered Sarah McCammon when she was a host on Iowa Public Radio. Eventually I followed her on Twitter, and continued to read and occasionally interact with her as she moved from Iowa to the east coast, eventually to work directly for NPR. Her reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign was nuanced and insightful. In hindsight, I should’ve known why.

In The Exvangelicals, McCammon unpacks her own story and uses it to illustrate the Exvangelical movement. She’s a few years younger than I am, but our stories run parallel tracks: growing up in the Midwest, a devout churchgoing family, culturally sheltered, homeschooled, evangelical youth groups, marrying young, eventually finding her own faith torn as she experienced the wider world. Eventually she left the church and faith fervor of her youth, getting divorced, becoming an Episcopalian, marrying a Jewish man. Despite so much Evangelical rhetoric saying the Exvangelicals are only leaving because they want to be free to enjoy sin, McCammon recognizes that it’s actually really painful:

Leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life’s most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of “answers” - about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It also means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you’re sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It’s often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.

She has summed up there in a single sentence my experience of the last dozen years.

It was interesting reading this book back-to-back with Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Lyz is another exvangelical, though I don’t know she’d describe herself that way, who writes with an acerbic fire about coming through her evangelical upbringing and a troubled marriage. (Lyz actually provides one of the blurbs on the back of McCammon’s book.) McCammon’s prose is more NPR, Lyz is more shock jock. McCammon makes me comfortably say “yes, this! Exactly this!”. Lyz makes me uncomfortably say “well, she’s not wrong…” They are both important voices whose words should be read and wrestled with.

The Exvangelicals is a book I would recommend for anyone outside the evangelical experience trying to understand where us weirdos are coming from, and for any one of us Exvangelical weirdos who wants to feel less alone.

Jan 7, 2024 ∞

My 2023 Reading in Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007…

I read 72 books for the year, which feels like a nice even number. There’s still a lot of theology and science fiction in the list, but I read more science this year, along with several memoirs.

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology

Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction by Bradley Jersak
On the Soul and the Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa
Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke L. Kwon
Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture by Chris E. W. Green
The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics by Stanley Hauerwas
Art and Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura
Not All Who Wander (Spiritually) Are Lost by Traci Rhodes
A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker J. Palmer
Trauma-Informed Evangelism: Cultivating Communities of Wounded Healers by Charles Kiser
Christ in Evolution by Ilia Delio
Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The New Being by Paul Tillich

Green is wonderful here. I posted a few excerpts while reading it that would be a good introduction.

Science and History

The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene by Jurgen Renn
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price
Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel J. Siegel
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey
Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis by George Monbiot
The Book of Genesis: A Biography by Ronald Hendel
Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric H. Cline
Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics by Mark Alan Smith
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
The Book of Job: A Biography by Mark Larrimore
On the Origina of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog
Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert
The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman

Memoir and Biography

Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by Jeremy Denk
Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir by Wil Wheaton
Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy by Damien Lewis
Heretic: A Memoir by Jeanna Kadlec
Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky
God on the Rocks: Distilling Religion, Savoring Faith by Phil Madeira
All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore
Mystics and Zen Masters by Thomas Merton
Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian by Ilia Delio
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann
Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

I posted some appreciation for Stewart before I got my hands on his memoir. The memoir did not disappoint. He’s an imperfect, lovely man. The book was a pleasure to read. Also, he’s a great example of why we need funding for arts and arts education. But I digress.

Other Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman
The Ultimate Quest: A Geek’s Gude to (The Episcopal) Church by Jordan Haynie Ware
Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges

Fiction

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (re-read)
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (re-read)
Dead Lions by Mick Herron
Don’t Cry for Me by Daniel Black
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
The Bayern Agenda by Dan Moren
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Hunting Time by Jeffrey Deaver
Ordinary Monsters by J. M. Miro
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgard
Babel by R. F. Kuang
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Average Jones by Samuel Hopkins Adams
The Odyssey by Homer, trans. Emily Wilson
Red Queen by Juan Gomez-Jurado
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Blackouts by Justin Torres
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy
Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
My Old Home: A Novel of Exile by Orville Schell
The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak
Time’s Mouth by Edan Lepucki
The Collector by Daniel Silva

Schell’s epic story following a young man’s life growing up in 20th century China is beautiful and tragic and very worth the read.

Summary

One of my goals from previous years was to read fewer books written by white guys. By my count, 24 of this year’s books meet that goal… which isn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be. That science section didn’t help in that regard. I made a stronger shift this year, though, away from theology and to science. That wasn’t super-intentional, but just where my interest was at the time.

On to 2024! I’m nearly halfway through my first book of the year.

Feb 23, 2023 ∞

Supernatural love, found within human love

Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss:

It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.

This is why I am, such as I am, a Christian, because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.

> My Bright Abyss, p. 164

Beautiful, and it resonates for me with the stuff I was reading from Chris Green a couple weeks ago — that the world experiences God’s love through us in the way God makes space for them in our lives.

Feb 20, 2023 ∞

A little poetry for Monday night

I’ve done a lot of reading so far this year. Tonight I started My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman. I’m not too far in but the writing (prose, punctuated with poetry) is dense and profound.

In the opening chapter he drops this little poem that resounds with truth in my ears. I leave it here for you as a gift.

Into the instant’s bliss never came one soul
Whose soul was not possessed by Christ,
Even in the eons Christ was not.

And still: some who cry the name of Christ
Live more remote from love
Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

– ‘After Dante’, Christian Wiman

Feb 13, 2023 ∞

Chris E. W. Green on the Beatitudes and Power

I’m still only in chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation, but this is too good to not share. Green takes a look at the Beatitudes and how Jesus embodies them. Then, he says, the Beatitudes show themselves to be concerned with power, though not perhaps in the way you’d think:

We can say that true power - the power of the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 1.4) - is first and foremost the power of unanxious and reconciling presence, a power brought to bear on behalf of those who suffer in isolation, those forgotten or ignored by the powers-that-be, whose only hope is ‘another body that comes and stands beside and in the midst… and will not move’. As our lives are made in even the smallest ways to be like Christ’s, we become noticeably less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and increasingly determined for others to be treated with the dignity that is theirs as God’s delight.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 39

If there’s something the church today needs to learn, this may be exactly it: to be less anxious, less needy, less defensive, and more for others. What a word.

Green continues, drawing on Stanley Hauerwas:

To this end, the church must be ‘a body of people who have learned the skills of presence’, skills that are developed only in a community ‘pledged not to fear the stranger’, where the practice of being present with those in suffering ‘has become the marrow of their habits’…

Sometimes the Spirit limns [colors, like a highlighter] our actions so that they body forth the power of Christ’s compassion and wisdom in ways that we and others can sense. But whether we or they can sense it or not, our confidence in God leads us to say that he is always everywhere at work doing good. So, by being there, but showing up and staying put, we ‘present our bodies as a living sacrifice’ (Rom. 12.1-2), which, when all is said and done, is probably the only way that truly overcomes evil with good (Rom. 12.21). Thus, that is the sacrifice with which God is pleased.

We often wrongly imagine sacrifice not as a gift but as forfeiture, not as self-giving but as self-destruction. Christ, however, reveals that God hates whatever destroys us, just as surely as he hates whatever we might do that destroys others. And, as the last sacrifice, his priestly ministry is the apocalyptic bringing-to-bear of the Great Commandment, which is why his sacrifice is the end of all sacrifice. Christ makes of himself a sacrifices, and so all sacrifices, if they are true to themselves must be what his was: a free and freeing gift of reconciliation and healing and blessing.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 40

I have felt both sides of this at times - the feeling that “showing up and staying put” is a sacrifice that is sometimes too much, to the point of my own detriment. Green says, though, that God wants us to stay put in ways that are reconciling, healing, and blessing to ourselves as well as those we are serving.

Feb 12, 2023 ∞

Chris E. W. Green on Christians as a temple for the sake of the world

Following up from yesterday’s post, here’s Chris Green again from chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation. In understanding our Christian vocation, Green says, we need to see our role as not against the world, but for the world. (Emphasis mine in the quote below.)

Often, when we are talking about the church as called out from the world, we imply a contrast between the humanity of believers and the humanity of non-believers. Truth be told, Scripture itself often seems to speak this way. For example, Ephesians 2 contrasts ‘the children of wrath’ - those who are ‘dead’ in sin, ‘following the course of the world’, dominated by the ‘passions of the flesh’ (Eph 2.1-3) - with the ‘one new humanity’, which is created in Christ’s body as the ‘household of God’ (Eph. 2.15, 19). If we are not careful, then, we leave the impression that the saints have a different humanity ‘in Christ’ than does the rest of the world ‘in Adam’.

But such a reading misses the point. The line of thought in Ephesians 2 does not end with the contrast between the family of God and the children of disobedience. Instead, Paul goes on to insist that this ‘one new humanity’ constituted in and as Christ’s body ‘is joined together and grows into a holy temple… a dwelling place for God’ (Eph. 2.21-22). What is this temple if not a holy ‘place’ set aside for the world to meet with its God and for God to act on the world? The church, participating in the renewed humanity created in Christ as a priestly people, opens a space in the midst of the world so that heaven and earth, the new creation and the old, can touch. We are made by the Spirit the temple for the sake of others, so they can encounter Christ in the room he has made for them in our lives.

–Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 31

That last sentence is a feast! It’s not a new teaching, or anything contradictory to things I’ve been taught before, but that particular color on it: that others would “encounter Christ” when they encounter me. Wowza.

Feb 11, 2023 ∞

Chris E. W. Green on Vocation

I’m just digging in to Chris E. W. Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, and while it’s a book I picked up because it was going to address Scriptural interpretation, I’m only two chapters in and blown away by his thoughts on human vocation. I’ve got several bits I’d like to share, but I’ll spread them out over several posts.

From Chapter 1, Green encourages us that the Christian vocation shouldn’t be distinguished too strongly from the human vocation:

I believe that a call to collaborate with God rests upon all of us just because we exist as the creatures we are. We are all of us as human beings made to mediate God’s holiness to the rest of creation, to work the works of God, to do what Jesus did, to be who Jesus is. To be human is to be burdened with this vocation. And in many ways - small and large, conscious and unconscious, intentional and inadvertent - all of us are more or less faithfully and lovingly in fact fulfilling our calling, although always only in part. In Christ, the Spirit places us under that burden, strengthening us for the bearing of it…

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 20

I love this thought that humans, even unknowingly, are frequently ‘faithfully and lovingly’ fulfilling the calling as humans to bring healing and reconciliation.

Green goes on to talk about the purpose of Christian vocation as something clarified or revealed from within the human vocation (emphasis mine in the quote below):

Our broadest vocation is not so much given to us at our baptism as we are at last truly given to it. Baptized into Christ, we are awakened to and sanctioned for the vocation we always already were meant to bear. Our narrower vocation - the work we are called to do as members of Christ’s body (e.g. bishop, pastor, or deacon; evangelist intercession, or teacher) - comes to us in our call to believe or is imparted to us in the event of ordination, but always with a view to the fulfillment of the natural human call. Within such an account, those outside the church are recognized to have the same broad vocation we do. For now, however, we find ourselves called out from them, but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for them. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others - never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or submit to the call. The elect are always elected for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.

Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 21

This is such a wonderful perspective. Would that the church saw their vocation, their service to God, never instead of others or against others, but always for the sake of others. The picture of the church as a temple and priests to bring God’s presence and message to the world, and the world to God’s presence and message, is one I’ll be chewing on for a while.

Jan 2, 2023 ∞

My 2022 Reading in Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007… argh, how did I miss some of those years?)

I got through 61 books this year, which feels like a bit of a down year. My “one book at a time” practice got me bogged down in some slow theology books, and then I got sucked into a cross-stitch project and a couple web projects at the end of the year which stole some of my reading time. (I finally came to grips with breaking up the long theology slogs with some fiction, and that helps a lot.)

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology

Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church - Bridget Eileen Rivera
Happiness and Contemplation - Josef Pieper
The Aryan Jesus - Susannah Heschel
The Joy of Being Wrong - James Alison
Attached to God: A Practical Guide to Deeper Spiritual Experience - Krispin Mayfield
The Emergent Christ - Ilia Delio
The Beatitudes Through the Ages - Rebekah Ann Eklund
Let the Light In: Healing from Distorted Images of God - Colin McCartney
In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb - Brad Jersak
Having the Mind of Christ - Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke
The Dark Interval - John Dominic Crossan
Love Over Fear - Dan White, Jr.
Faith Victorious - Lennart Pinomaa
History and Eschatology - N. T. Wright
Destined for Joy - Alvin F. Kimel
A Thicker Jesus - Glen Harold Stassen
Changing Our Mind - David P. Gushee

Dr. Ilia Delio’s The Emergent Christ is the one that had me thinking the most this year, and that will stick with me longer than any of the others. Her approach to thinking about God, evolution, and universal progress within a Christian framework blew my mind, and consistently challenges me to think about God and the universe differently.

Other Non-Fiction

Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
Music is History - Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith
The New Abolition - Gary Dorrien
Reading Evangelicals - Daniel Silliman
Fearful Symmetry - A. Zee
The Joshua Generation - Rachel Havrelock
Belabored - Lyz Lenz
The Method - Isaac Butler
The Dead Sea Scrolls - John J. Collins
Strange Rites - Tara Isabella Burton
A Different Kind of Animal - Robert Boyd
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
Bible Nation - Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden
Protestants Abroad - David A. Hollinger
Do I Make Myself Clear? - Harold Evans
White Flight - Kevin M. Kruse
How God Becomes Real - T. M. Luhrmann
Salty - Alissa Wilkinson
Blood In The Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks - Chris Herring
Searching for the Oldest Stars - Anna Frebel
This Here Flesh - Cole Arthur Riley
The Invention of Religion - Jan Assmann
The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr
The Late Medieval English Church - G. W. Bernard
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila - Carlos Eire
Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild

Three women’s books stand out here: Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, looking at how the current generation of young people are looking for religious experiences in places other than traditional religion; Cole Arthur Riley’s spiritual memoir This Here Flesh, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, describing a sociologist’s quest to understand Louisianans who have been devastatingly impacted by environmental destruction and yet persistently support the businesses and political causes behind that destruction.

Fiction

Unthinkable - Brad Parks
Lent - Jo Walton
The Last Commandment - Scott Shepherd
When We Cease To Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut
Everything Sad Is Untrue - Daniel Nayeri
Once A Thief - Christopher Reich
A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik
The Blue Diamond - Leonard Goldberg
A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
The Coffin Dancer - Jeffery Deaver
Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers
A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers (re-read)
Slow Horses - Mick Herron
The Last Agent - Robert Dugoni

Here the standout was author Becky Chambers. Her little Monk & Robot novellas sucked me in and made me happy. That prompted me to purchase her Small Angry Planet series and start in on a re-read. Chambers works in the best tradition of science fiction pushing for inclusion and acceptance of The Other and in using the exploration of a very different universe to make you think about how our own could be improved.

Coming Up…

I’ve continued to log on Goodreads this past year but I get the feeling it’s spooling down as it gets absorbed by Amazon. I’m working on a self-hosted book logging site - it’s actually live online right now if you know where to look but I’m going to do some cleanup on it before I publicize it. I’ll post here about it when I do!

Dec 30, 2022 ∞

Stanley Hauerwas on sin, character formation, and fear

From Chapter 3 of Stanley Hauerwas’ book on Christian ethics The Peaceable Kingdom, this wonderful insight into how we can think about sin as interacting with our own power, control, and self-direction (emphasis mine):

We are rooted in sin just to the extent we think we have the inherent power to claim our life - our character - as our particular achievement. In other words, our sin - our fundamental sin - is the assumption that we are the creators of the history through which we acquire and possess our character. Sin is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be “nobody” if we lose control of our lives.

Moreover our need to be in control is the basis for the violence of our lives. For since our “control” and “power” cannot help but be built on an insufficient basis, we must use force to maintain the illusion that we are in control. We are deeply afraid of losing what unity of self we have achieved. Any idea or person threatening that unity must be either manipulated or eliminated…

This helps us understand why we are so resistant to the training offered by the gospel, for we simply cannot believe that the self might be formed without fear of the other.

This gets to the heart of a lot of the discussions I’ve had with my Dad lately about the first step in making a positive spiritual change (which might be what Hauerwas here calls “the training offered by the gospel”) is to be freed from fear. One needs to be secure in their standing with God and with their community to be able to change and grow. (The counter-example here is frequently seen: spiritual communities that make any interest in ideas outside the accepted orthodoxy grounds for exclusion and expulsion.)

Hauerwas continues:

Our sin lies precisely in our unbelief - our distrust that we are creatures of a gracious creator known only to the extent we accept the invitation to become part of his kingdom. It is only be learning to make that story - that story of God - our own that we gain the freedom necessary to make our life our own. Only then can I learn to accept what has happened to me (which includes what I have done) without resentment. It is then that I am able to accept my body, my psychological conditioning, my implicit distrust of others and myself, as mine, as part of my story. And the acceptance of myself as a sinner is made possible only because it is an acceptance of God’s acceptance. This I am able to see myself as a sinner and yet to go on.

This does not mean that tragedy is eliminated from our lives; rather we have the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence. For finally our freedom is learning how to exist in the world, a violent world, in peace with ourselves and others. The violence of the world is but the mirror of the violence of our lives. We say we desire peace, but we have not the souls for it. We fear the boredom a commitment to peace would entail. As a result the more we seek to bring “under our control”, the more violent we have to become to protect what we have. And the more violent we allow ourselves to become, the more vulnerable we are to challenges.

This is growth toward wholeness: “the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence”.

For what does “peace with ourselves” involve? It surely does not mean that we will live untroubled - though it may be true that no one can really harm a just person. Nor does it mean that we are free of self-conflict, for we remain troubled sinners - indeed, that may well be the best description of the redeemed. To be “at peace with ourselves” means we have the confidence, gained through participation in the adventure we call God’s kingdom, to trust ourselves and others. Such confidence becomes the source of our character and our freedom as we are loosed from a debilitating preoccupation with ourselves. Moreover by learning to be at peace with ourselves, we find we can live at peace with one another. And this freedom, after all, is the only freedom worth having.

Feb 19, 2022 ∞

Eerie Parallels

Last night I started reading Dr. Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Having not gotten any further than the introduction there are eerie parallels between the support the German church gave to Nazism and the support the American evangelical church is giving to the MAGA movement. A few samples:

The German Christian movement was faction within the Protestant church of Germany, not a separate sect, and eventually attracted between a quarter and a third of Protestant church members. Enthusiastically pro-Nazi, the movement sought to demonstrate its support for Hitler by organizing itself after the model of the Nazi Party, placing a swastika on the altar next to the cross, giving the Nazi salute at its rallies, and celebrating Hitler as sent by God.

The three ideological prongs of the German Christian movement within the Protestant church, as Doris Bergen has delineated, were its opposition to church doctrine, its antisemitism, and its effort to craft a “manly” church…

German Christians appropriated Nazi rhetoric and symbols into the church to give its Christianity a contemporary resonance.

Theological conclusions regarding Jesus’s teachings and his interactions with the Jews of his day were shaped into a rhetoric that endorsed Nazi ideology, making Nazism appear to be realizing in the political sphere what Christians taught in the religious sphere.

On to chapter 1….

Jan 1, 2022 ∞

My 2021 Reading in Review

With 2022 well underway (for the past 10 hours or so) it’s time to review my reading in 2021. As usual, my entire reading log for last year is over on Goodreads. This year my reading was influenced by a reading group I joined that focused on books by black, indigenous, and queer authors. (It was a fantastic group, and I’m sad to see it end.)

Running the numbers

I finished 79 books this year, which is in my usual neighborhood. Of those, 34/78 were written by women, but only 17/78 were written by non-white people. As a friend put it when posting his reading lists yesterday, let’s just say that leaves lots of opportunity for reading in 2022!

Top Non-Fiction

Hard to rank these, but some very good ones:

All About Love, bell hooks (RIP)
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Ilia Delio
Redeeming Power, Diane Langberg

Of these, hooks spoke about love in beautiful ways, Langberg spoke truth about the mess in the evangelical church, and Rovelli and Delio made my mind hurt in the best ways talking about time and quantum theory and evolution.

Top Religion / Theology

This is a big enough chunk of reading to be its own category. Recommended here:

A More Christlike Word, Bradley Jersak
Jesus of the East, Phuc Luu
Latina Evangelicas, Loida I. Martell, Zaida Maldonado Perez, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier
The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Beth Allison Barr

The gentle Canadian Jersak again focuses us on Jesus; Luu explores the similarities between a Jesus-centered Christianity and the tenets of Eastern spirituality; Martell, Perez, and Conde-Frazier write a short systematic theology from a Latina perspective, and Barr writes a challenging history of “Biblical womanhood”.

Top Fiction

This is fiction that I read this year, not necessarily published this year. I always have catching up to do…

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
The Just City, Jo Walton

I could order the first two either way. The Sparrow is broadly about Jesuits sending missionaries to an alien planet and more directly about outsiders assuming they know best and wrestling with what God really wants. Transcendent Kingdom is a stunning exploration of race, depression, addiction, and immigration. And The Just City explores what would happen if a city were set up based on the principles of Plato’s Republic. So much creativity and imagination, so little reading time.

Books that you probably won’t entirely agree with but will challenge you

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi — Is there a more controversial topic the past couple years in this country than race? Kendi speaks strongly about the need to be actively anti-racist, in a “if you’re not actively with us then you’re against us” sort of way. Challenging.

The Inescapable Love of God, Thomas Talbott — Talbott (an ethics professor and theologian) makes his case for universal reconciliation in Christ. I found his arguments compelling. I read through the back-and-forth that he and John Piper had after the fact; I found Piper’s arguments much less compelling.

The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan — Sharp, wonderfully-written essays by a young woman exploring the dynamics and ethics of sex and power in the 21st century.

Queer Theology, Linn Marie Tonstad — I’m sorry to confess that I would’ve been highly unlikely to pick up a book titled “Queer Theology” if my book club hadn’t pushed me to do so. Boy am I glad I did, though. I hope that I have grown enough this year that I would not be put off again.

So that’s my 2021 reading sorted. Pretty sure I could read 80 books in 2022 and still not have my to-read shelf cleared off. Happy reading, friends!

ChrisHubbs.com

books

On Killing First and Loving Your Enemies

Life’s too short for uninteresting books

David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”

Henri Nouwen: An alert and aware spiritual life

2024 Reads: Making All Things New by Ilia Delio

Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera

2024 Reads: A Window to the Divine by Zachary Hayes, OFM

Finished reading: Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

Recommended Reading: The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory by Tim Alberta

My 2023 Reading in Review

Theology

Science and History

Memoir and Biography

Other Miscellaneous Non-Fiction

Fiction

Summary

Supernatural love, found within human love

A little poetry for Monday night

Chris E. W. Green on the Beatitudes and Power

Chris E. W. Green on Christians as a temple for the sake of the world

Chris E. W. Green on Vocation

My 2022 Reading in Review

Theology

Other Non-Fiction

Fiction

Coming Up…

Stanley Hauerwas on sin, character formation, and fear

Eerie Parallels

My 2021 Reading in Review

Running the numbers

Top Non-Fiction

Top Religion / Theology

Top Fiction

Books that you probably won’t entirely agree with but will challenge you