In this BookNotes we not only wish you a blessed and honest Advent — see last week’s post for some titles about coping with hardships and sorrows in this season — but I want to tell you about two great books, each that I found to be nothing short of spectacular. They are two of my favorite reads this year, one recent and one very new, and they feel somehow related although I won’t explore that here. I am grateful for the opportunity to tell you about them and hope you will find my enthusiasm persuasive. That is, I hope you send us orders for these (or other great books you are seeking; believe me, we appreciate any orders sent our way.) Please share this info, too, if you know anyone who needs to hear about these titles.

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Rags of Light: Leonard Cohen and the Landscape of Biblical Imagination Brian J. Walsh (Cascade) $23.00 // OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $18.40

The first book I’m going to highlight is written by a dear friend of mine — a writer, Scripture scholar, social / cultural activist, pastor, and farmer, Brian J. Walsh, now of Russet House Farm in Ontario. I’ll have to tell you more about him and his writing but for those who know his work, you won’t be surprised that he has just released a book on the poems and lyrics of Leonard Cohen. Again, it is called Rags of Light: Leonard Cohen and the Landscape of Biblical Imagination and, believe me, it’s an amazing and moving little work — one of my favorite books of the year. And that is saying a lot. The curious title is a line from the great Jewish poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen. Like Brian, I first encountered this oddly enchanting, mysterious, songwriter while still in high-school. Unlike Brian, I haven’t kept up, and, man, was this book an education! I had no idea.

I hope you’ll enjoy me reminiscing just a tiny bit about Brian’s other important books; I think naming them will help you place this book in the body of his ongoing work and help you realize what is going on in this tremendous new release.

But first, cutting to the chase, I will just say this: I hope you trust me when I say that I believe that Rags of Light will be enjoyed and appreciated at least by five kinds of readers. You’re bound to know more than one of these sorts of folks, so you very well may want to buy more than one.

First, obviously, it is a must for those who are Leonard Cohen fans. Those that have followed his prose and poetry or albums will know he is a serious (if combative) Jew and has more Biblical allusions in his poetry and music than U2 and Bruce Cockburn combined! He is more Biblical (and clear) than the great Bob Dylan, in whose league he stood. Those that are fans will have to have this (and it would make a great Christmas or Hanukkah gift since it is brand new and not well known yet.) To be clear, I don’t mean only the hard-core fans, but anyone who likes any of Leonard Cohen’s many albums and songs and poetry volumes.

Secondly, anyone who has followed Walsh’s books and teaching and ministry (and now, sustainable farming) — from back in the early days when he set the bar for books about a Christian world-and-life-view. (The Transforming Vision co-written with J. Richard Middleton remains a must-read in my view) and, also, the very strong follow-up, also with Richard — what to this day remains the best book on postmodernity, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be, which I cannot recommend more highly. You may know Brian’s own collection of sermons and talks — one of them delivered at the legendary Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh — called Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in a Dangerous Time, the first that had a forward by his friend and (then) little known Anglican Bible scholar, N.T. Wright, aka Tom. It is astute and thoughtful and serious and fiery and I read from it often.  I’ll tell you about the even more relevant, recent books he wrote or co-wrote in a minute, but just know that his many fans and friends should get this new Rags of LIght one, pronto.

(Just for fun, you can visit a BookNotes post I did a few years ago when a group of his former students and colleagues did a book in his honor called A Sort of Homecoming.)

Thirdly, it seems to me that anyone who is interested in the interplay of a Christian imagination and the popular arts — in this case folk-rock indie music and, of course, contemporary poetry — will love how Brian interprets Cohen’s lyrics and lines and will enjoy how a radical Christian with a wild Biblical imagination can interact with this profane Jewish saint. Who wouldn’t want to know which version (of the hundreds) covering Cohen’s Hallelujah, is the best? To read excerpts from interviews and documentaries and biographies? Rags of Light is part of the excellent “Short Theological Engagements with Popular Music “ series curated by Christian Scharen of Yale and it stands alongside — perhaps towering above — the other good ones in this line (which includes a nifty one on the Indigo Girls, by the way. Also Radiohead, Black Sabbath, The Roots, and one by the great Daniel White Hodge on Tupac.) Anyway, if you want to give a gift to somebody who is into serious pop music, or who reads stuff like David Darks Everyday Apocalypse or Steve Turner’s Pop-Cultured, this new book would be a great choice.

Fourthly, if you know anything about Cohen, and Walsh, you might know that both are pressing us towards lament and attending to our sadness, honoring the brokenness of this life, and somehow — even in doubt and despair — finding a glimmer of hope among the detritus of a corrupt civilization. For Walsh, the covenantal nature of reality, the God-upheld glory of creation that was created by the love of the Triune God, even as it is despoiled by sin and disrupted by idolatry, points us to Jesus and — surprise! — this odd Jewish folk/rock star himself sings and writes much about the Rabbi from Nazareth.

But Cohen and Walsh will have nothing of cheap or sentimental faith or disengaged piety that shields us from the harsh realities of this warring world. I had no idea how bitterly (viciously?) critical Cohen could be of the idols of secularized modernity, and it fires Brian up to preach like Jeremiah and Isaiah and Amos about impending doom and our contemporary ecological and social injustices. If you are hurting, if you are tired of cheap faith, if you are concerned about the immoral nonsense happening all over the world (but certainly in what some call Trumpworld and the ungodly nationalism that drives it) you will want to have Cohen along for this part of the journey. And Walsh is doubtlessly the best interpreter we’ve got, about the nature of our idolatrous, covenant-breaking, living-in-exile times and of how Cohen points us through it. But, again, this is no cheesy spiritual claptrap. Cohen’s last album, released right before his death in 2016, was called You Want It Darker. Yep. This book will be true light for some who knows well our cultural darkness, or even their own dark days. Without being jaded or cynical, but with great pathos, it speaks the truth about hard things. Some readers really need just such a book.

Fifth, if you or someone you know is on that journey that has come to be called “deconstruction” — that is tearing down old pieties and theological views to deconstruct evangelical truism (and maybe the Christian faith all together) then you simply have to read this book. While not aimed solely at those engaged in doubt or in the deconstruction posture, it necessarily comes up, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, on almost every other page. If you are a leader of this movement — and some of my friends are podcasters and authors and seem like deconstruction gurus, these days — I beg of you to pick up Rags of Light. ( suspect you know who you are; I could name a dozen of you and, again, you need this in your toolkit to help others in their critical journey.)

There is so much in Cohen’s oeuvre and there is such wisdom and candor in how Walsh reads him, that it will be a brilliant companion for those moving away from conventional faith. But here is the thing: Walsh has always invited the abused and the seekers and the skeptics and the marginalized to the table of God’s fellowship, knowing in his own broken bones that Christ himself receives those who perhaps His church would not. He has never advanced a toxic sort of right wing faith or abstract doctrinal truisms, so he has long been a passionate voice useful for those deconstructing. It seems to me that Brian has consistently held out a counter-cultural faith that is built on covenant, relationship, a recognition of our hurts and frailty, and a rage-against-the-machine sort of prophetic denunciation of church and state. His powerful chapter in Rags of Light about Cohen the prophet — Cohen studied Isaiah diligently as a youth with his Talmudic scholar grandfather — will blow you away and bring tears to your eyes and make you want this kind of faith, a full-on, deep Biblical communal discipleship shaped by a prophetic imagination. Anyway, give it to anybody in the throes of this sort of deconstruction of conventional religiosity. They will thank you.

Leonard Cohen fans, Brian Walsh fans, pop music fans, those who are hurting, and those who are in doubt or deconstructing, are the five sorts of readers I believe would most greatly benefit from this book. Oh, yes, maybe Hearts & Minds fans; if you care about our curated book lists and my taste in stuff, you can be sure this is one I’d recommend with gusto. And I’m hardly a Cohen fan, to be honest. I still loved this book so much.

Two more things you should know about Rags of Light.

First, the Biblical insights on every page of this book examining the (often quite Biblical) poetry and lyrics from this Jewish singer-songwriter are stellar. Wow. Not unlike Walsh’s 2011 book putting the lyrics of Bruce Cockburn into conversation with a Biblical imagination (Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination), Rags of Light is like a Biblical study of the sort you don’t get in most Sunday school classes or (on the other hand) in abstract, technical commentaries. Walsh’s reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament is stunning — on target, wise and informed, relevant and radical and life-giving. If you find Bible reading a chore or ho-hum, I dare you to pick up this little volume and let Brian and Mr. Cohen stimulate your Scriptural imagination just a bit.

You can see Walsh’s great familiarity with the Bible in the recently reissued major work (co-written with Steve Bouma-Predigar) Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement where Brian does exceedingly good Biblical work on themes of home and homemaking, home-breaking and homecoming (and, yes, the concern for the unhoused.) (Here is a BookNotes reflection I did on their book earlier this year.) For those familiar with the increasingly well-known telling of the plot of the Bible using the lingo of creation-fall-redemption-restoration, Walsh explores Old and New Testaments with this similiar angle of original shalom and homemaking, alienation and exile from one’s place, and (glorious, if sobered) return and homecoming. In an age of broken homes and, importantly, increasing hostility to migration and immigrants, this theme of exile and displacement and hospitality and homecoming is so very important and nobody plumbs the depths of Scriptures about this better than Walsh (admittedly, often, with co-authors like ecological scholar Bouma-Predigar and Old Testament prof Richard Middleton, and New Testament scholar extraordinaire, Sylvia Keesmaat.) All of his books are very, very engaged in astute and creative reading, hearing, wrestling, and application of Scripture.

Walsh hints at his particular framing of the Biblical narrative throughout Rags of Light and even if you frankly don’t know much about Cohen the controversial Jewish activist or Cohen the published poet who is esteemed in the world of letters, or Cohen the rock star, believe me, the Bible stuff here (illuminated by Cohen’s lyrics and speeches) is generative. Of course, I have often said that my two favorite Bible commentaries — even ahead of Walter Brueggemann’s fine work and the great N.T. Wright — are the two that Brain did with his own life partner, Biblical scholar Sylvia Keesmaat: Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire and Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire / Demanding Justice. If you love the Bible and want to have its story shape and drive your own story, living it out in our contemporary culture, and you’ve not struggled with these two works, you really, really should. They are paradigm changing and truly transformational — and the most creatively done Bible commentaries you’ve ever seen, I promise. Rags of Light is a nice little start towards this distinctive, even idiosyncratic reading of the Holy Bible, and I wanted you to know that the subtitle about “the Landscape of the Biblical Imagination” really is at the heart of this book.

Along with my appreciation of Brian’s extraordinary enthusiasm for the Biblical texts and their overarching narrative and trajectory, I also am impressed with how he has developed this nearly one-of-a-kind propensity to use pop music in liturgy that is deep and wide and honest and faithful. Anybody can quote a poem or a rock song to spice up their preaching, but Brian very deeply intertwines the ancient words and the contemporary poets. It is not cheesy or simplistic. He does it prayerfully, even. With a team of others that came together in the more than a decade when he worked at the University of Toronto for the CRC as campus minister and pastored a group they called Wine Before Breakfast, he self-published two books of their very creative liturgies. We are thrilled to be one of the few bookstores that carry these and we very highly recommend them. They are Habakkuk Before Breakfast and St. John Before Breakfast. I wrote about them extensively here and here and we have them both on sale for 20% off. There is nothing like them in print!

Secondly, the format and flow of this lovely study into the dark and troubling lyrics (and the healing and finally hopeful beauty of Mr. Cohen’s vision, as well) is to show how Cohen works with a few major themes; Rags of Light offers a good rubric to categorize different impulses and perspectives evident in his work. After a tremendously honoring, very interesting foreword by Biblical scholar and professor J. Richard Middleton (who, like Brian, uses music in his classes, from the aforementioned Cockburn to Bob Marley and the Wailers from his native Jamaica) there is a breathtaking overview in a preface in which Walsh very appropriately compares and contrasts two Jewish spokespersons, prophets, sinners, and rock stars, King David of Biblical fame and Leonard Cohen of Montreal. Brilliant!

And then, the close reading of texts begins (starting with the very early and famous song “Suzanne”) under the chapter title: “You think maybe you will trust him: Cohen and the Promise of Jesus.” Who knew this Jewish poet wrote and sang so much throughout his career about Jesus? Wow.

The next chapter is important for anyone wanting a vibrant and engaging overview of the covenantal Biblical imagination, called “Lover, Lover, Come Back to Me: Cohen and the Biblical Landscape of Covenant.” That is followed by some of the most compelling pages I’ve read all year about the prophetic calling (in the Bible and perhaps in our own lives) called “When they said “Repent,” I wondered what they meant: Cohen and the Prophetic Voice.” I am not exaggerating but this is stunning, as hard-hitting as any Biblical prophet.  And, lastly, there is an amazing chapter— I had tears in my eyes, feeling like I was given a fresh call to conversion, a postmodern altar call, if you will — which explores how Mr. Cohen has noted how his name stems from the ancient tribe of Levi, the priestly class. Indeed, it is explored with beauty and allusive grace in the chapter called, “If if be your will: Cohen and the Priestly Calling,” As you may know or guess, each chapter title is drawn from an important Cohen song or poem. The last postscript is a rumination on that final album, “You Want It Darker.”

And so, let’s go. Order some books.  As a favorite Walsh line from Cohen puts it, let’s dance — “to the end of love.”

Owing to his own familiarity with the biblical landscape as a Christian pastor, Brian Walsh ably shows that Cohen is best understood not as a secular saint, but as a post-secular poet who spoke both prophetic and priestly truths. The many Cohen fans who are also people of faith or spiritual seekers will find much to enjoy in this book. –Christian Raab, OSB, associate professor of theology, Saint Meinrad Seminary, author of Walk the Line: Rock Music and the Christian Imagination

Brian Walsh knows that the highest order of interpretation is responsive making. In Rags of Light, Walsh not only recognizes and argues for Leonard Cohen’s prophetic and priestly role, but makes Cohen’s music a usable liturgy–one profoundly helpful in our cultural moment. I emerge from its pages in song and prayer–ready to make my way through a landscape of both wonder and ruin–and not unaccompanied.  — Tiffany Eberle Kriner, associate professor of English, Wheaton College, author of the memoir, In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm

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The second book that I finished this week that has left be breathless, excited, stunned, even, for the fine writing and good storytelling and near-brilliant, extraordinary insight, is a work of upbeat sociology, I guess, immersive journalism by a woman who wanted to know (again) why mostly poor rural folks would vote for Donald Trump and embrace the MAGA worldview when, on the face of it, is seems that the rich, divorced, New Yorker who owned casinos and caroused with Playboy Bunnies, was anything but a hero for the rural and the poor. Arlie Russell Hochschild is an accomplished, older woman writer — a died in the wool liberal, now from Berkeley — who grew to great fame when she wrote a bestseller and award-winning study of this same theme (how the working class and often marginalized poor would come to support the Presidential bid of Mr. Trump) in her Strangers in Their Own Land, set amidst oil rig workers and shrimpers in coastal Louisiana. She has written widely on topics such as the intimacy of Homelife in a world of second shift work and the “time bind” many feel as they balanced Homelife and work. Years ago we stocked her social study of work itself called The Cultural Study of Work. This new one is the most readable and powerful book, yet.

Stolen Pride: Loss Shame, and the Rise of the Right Arlie Russell Hochschild (The New Press) $30.99 OUR SALE PRICE = $24.79

In Stolen Pride, Ms Hochschild’s newest work (which was years in the making) she seems to be revisiting the methodology and agenda of her previous serious study, Strangers in Their Own Land, again trying to piece together the social imagination and worldview, if you like, of working class conservative Americans. In this case she visits and studies what is one of the whitest counties and the second poorest Congressional District in the country, focusing on a patriotic, Republican-voting town in the heart of Appalachia, Pikeville, Kentucky.  There are stories galore about this impoverished but culturally rich region — the place where the legendary Hatfields and McCoys had their generations-long, murderous feuds and where coal companies did dastardly things for nearly a century. (Cue “Paradise” by John Prine, at least, and recall John Sayle’s great film, Matewan or the classic documentary of near-by Harlan County.)

Hochschild goes to Pikeville about the time the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach planned a far-right wing and neo-Nazi (with the less radical KKK helping) march through the town, perhaps as a dry run for what would become the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, of which he was a prime architect. She wanted to know what this mostly white, very rural, Appalachian town thought of this upcoming event and, perhaps to her surprise, most folk were disinterested (to say the least.) Whatever Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party, the KKK, and the neo-Nazi’s had in mind, many of the good folks of the area simply weren’t buying it. The conversations Hochschild has about this are remarkable (and the friendship she develops with Heimbach is itself extraordinary. I’ve read a bit about this guy, who attended Towson University near us for a bit and made a splash there with his White Civilization stuff.) His unexpected appearances in this book about Appalachia were fascinating and the way Pikeville police and others responded is told well. One of her black respondents talks about the connection between “the hood and the holler.” The local college plays a role in things, but many or underemployed, at best. There’s black lung and other ailments. It’s a decent sized town surrounded by mountains and valleys, and legendary roads leading to rustbelt towns in Ohio — not unlike described in Hillbilly Elegy. Stolen Pride is a superb book and not a few reviewers have called it essential for our times.

Stolen Pride works as a book of embedded journalism, a creative-nonfiction work of artful storytelling, explaining her time out of her own comfort zone, becoming empathetic friends to many of those who started out as interviewees and subjects. I adored how she came to care about Appalachian people, including — I must add — those who have been addicted to opioids, and with those in the booming recovery business, and with more than one incarcerated prisoner. She hung out with fundamentalist country preachers (the role of religion shows up often) and with a rather progressive chaplain at the local community college. She talked with working women and men and those who are chronically unemployed and the aged. She visited diners and doctors offices and fire halls. She connects with the few immigrant Muslims (who are loved and respected —  one is a caring doctor) and with black farmers. She included a wide swath of the population, believe me, and for anyone trying to expand our awareness of our fellow Americans, this book takes you into the ups and downs of this intriguing community through the stories of its mountain people. And their family histories, pains, loves, and achievements. I couldn’t put it down and highly recommend it.

But here is what sets it apart from other such behind-the-scenes journalistic accounts of rural America; she is exploring a theory that she is developing about what is really going on when poorer folks support this unlikely candidate who has little in common with their Appalachian experience. Her theory — which by the end of the book she was discussing with everybody she met — is about shame the very title, Stolen Shame, is important.

Perhaps in many places, but certainly in rugged, individualistic, rural Appalachia, there is a wholesome pride that is manifest and it includes pride in doing hard, even dangerous work in the coal mines, in fueling American growth and industry, about unique Appalachian cultural stuff, about God and country and church and state and self-reliance and more. It comes as no surprise that these are a proud people who, when industry declined and the coal mines were running down (and the outside company’s started blowing the tops of the people’s beloved mountaintops and poisoning their streams and waterways) something akin to (and sometimes directly related to) shame developed. Poor folks who for generations have fended for themselves in a region often cut off from the larger trends in American culture, lost their ability to care for their own and the shame became debilitating. The stories she listens to are poignant and often powerful. It starts to make sense.

But here is the thing: I cannot explain it simply, here, but throughout the book, as the author asks more and more folks about all this, she comes to realize that a strong man, bully figure (a false savior some would say) is just what these ashamed people desire. They see in Trump a person who can, in a sense, give the finger to those who shame them (the so-called comedy of mocking hillbillies is a common theme in these shame-enhancing stories. Whether Trump and his Towers and his ultra-rich, Miami Beach parties mock the mountain folks is almost beside the point, it seems. ) And then, in a four-step pattern that Hochschild developed, Trump, by being accused of shameful things and not caring, can vicariously atone for their shame, can carry it for them. Without a single citation of the scapegoating theories of Rene Girard there is a bold and compelling bit of insight she is developing and bouncing off some of her conversation partners in this congressional district. She sees Trump as they see him, one who can carry and vindicate their (undeserved) sense of shame.

There is no cheap psychologizing here, even as she talks about unrecognized grief and the like. I found it to be a fascinating read and encouraging, gracious, even, and very helpful as I try to make sense of things in our polarized culture. Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right offers a caring and I’d say profound insight about the moral emotions of pride and shame (that, in the world of Michael Sandel, who endorses the book) “animate the resentment that roils our politics.”

Sandel continues:

This is the best book yet on the moral and political psychology of the new right, a masterclass in the art of listening across our cultural and political divides.

That is something we need, and it comes to us in an entertaining and captivating story of this scholars visits and friendships in Pike County, Kentucky. There’s a sharp and wise Appendix called “Upper and Lower Decks of the Empathy Bridge” that will come in very handy for anyone doing peace-making or common ground exercises. I recommend this well researched book highly.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Stolen Pride is a masterpiece of epic proportions. Her account of a small, struggling Appalachian community’s response to a parade of out-of-state white nationalists provides a glimmer of hope for our fragile democracy, even in the face of political polarization, economic inequality, racism, and the nonrational, emotional dimensions of political identity and mobilization. My advice to everyone is: read this book. –Shaunna L. Scott, professor emerita of sociology, University of Kentucky, and former president of the Appalachian Studies Association

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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