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The buzz on this one had been going around Twitter for a while, so I was glad to pick up a copy and read. Michael Wear is a young guy who, not even out of college, worked as the White House lead for evangelical outreach during President Obama’s first term. Reclaiming Hope is part memoir of those years and partly Wear’s suggestions for how to repair political engagement with religion.

On the whole, I think Wear did a good job of identifying points where both the right and left failed in opportunities to find common ground that could’ve made legitimate progress on issues important to religious conservatives. However, I think his admiration for President Obama causes him to pull his punches in the second half of the book.

In the first half of the book, Wear reveals himself as something of an Obama fan boy as he details all of the President’s speeches that reveal the depth to his personal faith. (I’m not disputing these - I have great admiration for Obama’s faith - but the tone is pretty fawning.) When Wear starts assigning blame in the second half of the book, though, the blame is never to Obama directly, but always to the “administration” or the “White House”.

Overall, it’s a good little memoir, and Wear has some good thoughts to share about how we might find progress forward on issues significant to people of faith.

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Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America

History, it is often said, is written by the winners. Zinn, though, undertakes to tell a history of America from the perspective of the losers, the poor, the oppressed. Think the arrival of the explorers from the perspective of the Native Americans. The colonial and early US history from the perspective of the slaves. The early 1900s from the perspective of poor workers banding together into labor unions.

Zinn is not trying to be even-handed here, but this volume would serve as an excellent companion to any more traditional history of the United States. It also serves as a good reminder that while things may seem bleak in our current political era, they have been much worse, and our country has withstood far more.

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A People’s History of the United States

John Halton’s review set me on this one, and I had much the same response to it that he did. Soggin’s work looks at the Old Testament from a historical perspective and dives heavily into textual criticism.

It is eye-opening for this conservative evangelical to see how far the academically-accepted historical background of the OT differs from the one we are taught by our church leaders, but rather than causing me to look askance at the OT now, it causes me to appreciate more how God has brought together these texts in a way that is meaningful for us as believers today. (It also cements in my mind that defining “infallibility” for the Scriptures is an impossible task, and that “inspired” or “God-breathed” makes much more sense.)

Glad I read this one… and ready for something a little less academic now as a palate cleanser.

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Introduction to the Old Testament

Read this one on a business trip this week. Having nothing to do with actual nautical survival skills, this book is Martin’s personal confessional and memoir of the breakup of his marriage and leaving the pastorate at his church.

Martin is a very talented writer, and while some of the initial Scripture applications are a stretch (Paul, after his shipwreck, told the people to eat, therefore, when our lives are in metaphorical shipwrecks, we should be sure we eat via participation in the Eucharist), the book shines in the latter chapters when he focuses in on grace in a way that will sound familiar to readers of Robert F. Capon.

There’s a part of me that’s skeptical of the value of an author writing this instructionally when he was clearly still in the midst of learning the lessons he’s communicating, but it was still an encouraging read. My prayer for Jonathan is that he continues to heal and grow in grace in the days to come.

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How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here

I got sucked into Griffin’s Badge of Honor series years ago. This is book #13, and the hero is still only 27 years old, and opens the story still suffering from the wound he suffered in book #12. Hey, if Griffin is still making money cranking these out at age 87, good for him. But let’s not pretend they’re any more substantive entertainment than your average 1.5-star franchise action movie. Meh.

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Broken Trust

Found this on the library shelf and was a challenging read to start the year. Is Kendi making an effort to be super-even-handed? Nope. But he has enough facts on his side to make a compelling account. From the first white settlers colonizing through the beginning of the 21st century, he highlights the terrifying history of racism in the USA. It can feel like a stretch at times - King Kong subliminally picturing white’s fear of blacks? sure, but the Rocky movies continuing to do so with the white hero taking on black opponents? Maybe from a certain point of view.

Some progressive reading isn’t gonna hurt me, I guess. (I just borrowed Zinn’s History from the library the other day.)

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Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

I’ve got a soft spot in my heart (and on my reading list) for science fiction. It probably started when I was reading Michael Crichton as a 12-year-old. OK, Crichton might not be the first one you think of when I said “science fiction”, but Crichton’s mix of legit science into thriller novels was an appealing first taste. (Jurassic Park? eh, fine. The Andromeda Strain? Better.)

There’s an awful lot that gets passed through in the name of “science fiction” these days, though. For some incomprehensible reason, our libraries lump sci-fi and fantasy together, which means you’ve gotta be careful or instead of picking up a hard-science space opera you’ll end up with some multi-volume epic starring sexy telepathic cat people on a far-away planet that resembles nothing so much as medieval England. But I digress.

I started with Crichton, but progressed quickly to Asimov and Arthur Clarke. Later on I enjoyed Stephen Baxter’s Manifold trilogy and some of Robert Sawyer’s stuff. I still browse the New Sci-fi shelf at the library on a regular basis, but most of the time when I pick up an interesting-looking volume, it turns out to be Volume 17 of some big space opera, and ain’t nobody got time for that.

A couple years ago, though, The Incomparable podcast devoted an episode to Hugo Award nominees, and somebody brought up Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. I was unacquainted with Liu, but found that this prolific Chinese author was finally getting a book translated into English. And what a book.

The Three Body trilogy continues with The Dark Forest and wraps up with Death’s End, the translation of which just released this fall. I finished reading Death’s End last night and wow, what a epic, sweeping trilogy. It begins as a current-day encounter with an alien race of such advanced technology they can hardly be understood, and traverses time and space to some distant future where the universe collapses in on itself only to explode again in another Big Bang.

Liu digs in to communication via gravitational waves, the survival strategies of intergalactic civilizations, and lightspeed travel, while telling a story expansive in spacetime in a way that hearkens back to Clarke and Asimov. The English translations are excellent, and while the books aren’t short, they kept me engaged through the final page.

If you’ve stuck with this post this far, The Three Body Problem might be one you want to pick up.

I haven’t been posting on every book I’ve read, but wow, this was a good one.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a history of what she calls “America’s great migration” - the movement of African Americans from the south to northern, midwestern, and western urban areas between 1930 and 1970. She follows three primary characters through their journeys from the Jim Crow south to new jobs and lives in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Wilkerson weaves together their stories with the bigger picture of a changing country, where racial discrimination stubbornly persisted (persists?) even in states where the Jim Crow laws didn’t exist.

Given the unrest in the country at present this was a timely read. It struck home more than history often does because its time frame was so close to the present. It’s easy for me to think of even the 1960s as an old, black-and-white time; each of the characters Wilkerson follows, though, live at least into the 1990s… which I remember well.

Our history in this country is short, and this book was a good reminder that the racial tension we have today isn’t far removed from a long history of racism and slavery. We have so much yet to learn.