I heard the news a bit late, about the
lack of an indictment of the police officer who, against NYPD protocols,
used a choke-hold on and killed a non-threatening guy selling loose cigarettes in New York. As you surely know, the incident was caught on video tape and it was
exceptionally baffling to wonder why this officer was not held
accountable.  Was race involved in
how the man was handled? Was race involved in how the case was handled? It is a
large claim to make without evidence that it was due to race that this was so
mishandled, but it isn’t implausible to suggest so. 

On the heels of the decision in Ferguson, it has catapulted once again some very important issues onto the front burner of our national discourse.  

Ironically, I missed the breaking story earlier this week as we were away from the news media while we were
selling books at a gathering which was exploring the nature of subtle (and not
so subtle) racism in America, and how to create what our speaker called a “cosmopolitan
canopy.” 

What a week!

I can’t tell you how my
heart aches — as yours does, too, I’m sure — as I’ve listened to our speaker, Dr. Elijah
Anderson, a renowned black sociologist,
and read his most recent book, and heard the news about the Eric Garner trial, and
followed all manner of conversations on line about Ferguson and now NYC and the general state of race relations.  On PBS over the weekend, Beth and I watched a tribute to Bruce Springsteen, and I cried as I listened
to Jackson Browne’s moving rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s song about another
case of ethnically-charged police violence American Skin (41
Shots.)

Lord have mercy.

And just this morning I suggested in a class I’m teaching about incarnation, Advent, and missions, that this season is less a countdown to the Big Day, but a season to inhabit, not unlike Lent, to allow God to work on our longings, desires, laments. As I tried to write in my essay at The High Calling blog, Advent allows us to intensify our longings for the restoration of all things as we anticipate not so much a celebration of the first coming of Christ, but of the second coming of Christ.  

Come Lord Jesus. 

***

Our speaker at our event was Dr. Elijah
Anderson, who has taught sociology for three decades at the prestigious University
of Pennsylvania and, more recently, at Yale, and he walked us through some of
his academic work and then illuminated racial dynamics in American cities. He
told stories of how even middle class blacks who are often comfortable in
mixed-race or largely white social settings carry great stress because of the
inevitable “nigger moments” that they face.  Because of the history of racial injury in our country, even
slight episodes of disrespect are freighted with great and sometimes
debilitating emotion.  Of course we
talked about Ferguson, and the clergy that had gathered for this event talked
candidly among themselves about their own experiences of racial injustice.  It was sobering, but helpful.

I want to tell you about how very
important (and how very, very interesting) Dr. Anderson’s book,The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (Norton; $17.95) really is. But first, a bit of a report about our book-selling efforts at the event in New Jersey.

We were selling books as we do each
year at a clergy retreat for priests and church leaders of the Pennsylvania Diocese
(the greater Philadelphia area) of the Episcopal Church.  This is not my own tradition — what
again is a warden or canon or deanery and which Rite are we using, and whose feast day is it
today? — and I guess it shows. (And I thought my evangelical friends had a lot of in-house jargon!  Ha!)  But these exceptionally thoughtful pastors working in the
context of high church, liberal mainline Protestantism are good to Beth and me
and we have a lot of fun. They let
me tell them about books I love, and they often buy some of the ones I describe
in my presentations up front. (Thanks,
friends, for your rousing enthusiasm for my rousing books presentations! Nunc dimittis.)

From our “Book of the Year” (Steve
Garber’s Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good) to the new Biblical studies work by the
eminent New Testament scholar Kenneth Bailey, Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New
Testament, to a lovely new book on spiritual formation by Ruth Haley Barton
(Life Together in Christ: Experiencing
Transformation in Community) they were receptive and generous in their book
buying.

These priests ask good questions about
serious resources, and tease me just enough to show we’re welcomed. (And I tease them just enough to let
them know I feel at home with them.) I told them about St. John Before Breakfast by my pal Brian Walsh. They loved that he
does a morning Eucharistic service at the University of Toronto which he calls “Wine
Before Breakfast” and bought all the copies we had. Not too surprisingly, they
bought a bunch of Cathleen Falsani’s edited collection of “rants and readings
of the odd parts of the Bible” called Disquiet
Time.  We pushed We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation,
Reorientation, and Activation, the latest Brian McLaren book designed for
small groups to read the Bible through in a year; I am quite fond of it, and
recommended it to them. Of course I told them about our good time recently with
Chris Smith, with one of the authors of Slow
Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus and sold a number
of that.

We just figured you’d like to know what
these folks bought, and the kinds of things we’d promote at an event like
that.  It was a good time, even
though we had to pull an all-nighter to set everything up. It isn’t every group that buys J. I Packer alongside Joan Chittister,
Marcus Borg and Jamie Smith.

We are glad for friends there that
worship well, serve their parishes, and are working to be sure their people
grapple with the Bible, and the implications of the Bible. One of their
priests, Marek Zabriski, is nationally known for his effort to get parishes to
read the Bible through in a year. His edited guide to reading the Bible
through, accompanied by devotional-like readings, The Bible Challenge: Read the Bible in a Year (which is published
by Forward Movement and which we carry, of course) is a year’s worth of daily devotional
readings, written by authors as prominent as Walter Brueggemann and Barbara
Brown Taylor, which illumine the Biblical reading of the day.  There are guides to what to read (and
why) and reflection questions for personal or small group use. His effort — as documented in another
book called Doing the Bible Better and
the Transformation of the Episcopal Church — is remarkable, and the book is
a great tool for anyone wanting a moderate, balanced perspective on reading and
inhabiting the Biblical story in a coherent, contemporary way. 

So, yes, we were with mainline
Protestant clergy who were buying books about theology, the Bible, parish revitalization,
spirituality, missional service, liturgy, and more.  It was a great time in the lovely book room.

And our speaker, the aforementioned Dr.
Elijah Anderson, was gracious and kindly. His grandmother was a mid-wife (and
knowingly named him after a Biblical prophet) and his parents worked on a
plantation in the south, picking cotton in the years of Jim Crow and lynching
and horrors big and small, until they moved North in the great migration.  Dr.
Anderson himself came of age as cities were burning after the killing of
Martin King, and his own interest in people watching and trying to figure out
how and why things were happening in the “iconic ghetto” grew into a life
calling in urban sociology.  His
early books include the scholarly ethnographies, A Place on the Corner, Street Wise, and the remarkable study of
inner city Philadelphians, The Code of
the Street. His work is considered classic ethnography — serious sociology
which is also, in the words of People magazine,
“a people watcher’s delight.”

I have been reading his latest book and
have been blown away by how very interesting, and useful it is. I so hope
people come to study it – it offers really enlightening and nearly necessary
information in these days of complicated conversations about racism, white privilege,
police brutalities, and what is or isn’t plausible about racial aggressions in
modern North America.  It is called
The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and
Civility in Everyday Life and we highly, highly recommend
it.

Pages could be shared just reproducing the many, many rave
reviews this important book has accrued, such as Ellis Cose (who wrote The End of Anger) who called it, simply,
“An amazing achievement” or William Julius Wilson, the eminent urban
sociologist from Harvard, who said it is “Vintage Elijah Anderson – original,
creative, engaging, and thought provoking… a must-read.”

It isn’t every book about racial
disunity and the glimmers of hope found in truly cosmopolitan settings that
earns rave blurbs from authors as diverse as Cornel West and George Wills.  Have West and Wills ever agreed on
anything? 

It may be true, what Randall Collins,
president of the American Sociological Association, says, the Cosmopolitan Canopy is “the most
important book on race relations in many years.”

Two things you should know about this
book.

Firstly, it isn’t a rant against racism
– not at all like, say, the new Cornel West title which is called Black Prophetic Rage, a book of
interviews and up-to-date criticism of the current status quo in race relations
and public theology. Agree with him or not, Brother West is always worth
reading, and we commend it to you.

The Cosmopolitan Canopy is nuanced, and at times delightful.  One reviewer said that Anderson may be the nation’s leading “people
watcher” – and who doesn’t enjoy that? 
He is, here, attempting to offer a major reinterpretation of the racial
dynamics in America, by introducing terms such as the “cosmopolitan canopy” by
which he means islands of civility and cultural convergences existing amid the
ghettos, suburbs and ethnic enclaves in which segregation is the norm.  Of course, he identifies “the racial
fault lines that on occasion rend the ‘canopy’ and describes the ways in which
it recovers.”   His stories of racial injury,
discrimination, harm, are painful – in part because they are so commonplace and
believable.  (As the Springsteen
songs puts it, “It ain’t no secret…”) Yet, white folks too often haven’t talked
with their black friends enough about this, or haven’t immersed themselves in
the literature.  So reading this
sociological account could be very, very useful.

Dr. Anderson – even though he has
accumulated his experiences of demeaning discrimination over his lifetime –
seems relaxed, here.  Again, he is
a people-watcher and he is telling the stories; again, it is urban ethnography
and not very polemical.  He loves
the city, and he loves trying to understand the social boundaries, constructs,
institutions and social locations that help create a flourishing public space.
As a skilled ethnographer, he is exceptionally perceptive.  And he relishes his task as storyteller
and interpreter.

Here’s the second thing you should
know: not only does Anderson enjoy cities and telling the stories of their
inhabitants and their patterns of behavior, he particularly loves Philadelphia.
The
Cosmopolitan Canopy is a
study of race relations in the city of Brotherly love, and a tribute to the
unique public spaces in that city of neighborhoods.  Even if, like me, you do not know Philly all that well, you
will love these chapters on different places in the metropolitan area that seem
to invite greater civility and racial harmony.  Not unlike, say, James Howard Kunstler who tells of very
specific suburban messes, bad city planning and ugly architecture, you don’t
have to really know or care much about the particular place he is describing:
you get the picture. But the book is set in Philadelphia.

Doc Anderson takes readers through a
walking tour of Center City, and that first chapter is sheer delight, learning
how urban spaces do or don’t facilitate multi-ethnic diversity and
civility.  But then the real fun
begins, as he then moves to the Reading Terminal (a true “cosmopolitan canopy”
he says.) The Gallery Mall is a “ghetto downtown” and his look at Rittenhouse
Square offers a study of the practice of civility.

You see, Anderson is not just lamenting
the ghettos and the “white spaces” that dominate much American life, he is
pointing towards what works, how to create more democratic and safe spaces that
are civil and full of what he calls comity.

Anderson’s survey of those he calls “ethnos”
and “cosmos” is very, very illuminating. That is, there are those who chose to see themselves largely as part of
a particularized racial enclave (this can be whites, blacks, or others, of
course) and whose worldview is formed mostly by surrounding themselves mostly
by people who are just like them.  And there are those who have a more cosmopolitan vision, who
are truly multi-racial in their orientation, comfortable with diversity.  Of course there are those who have to
switch sensibilities – urban blacks who live in black neighborhoods, are formed
in black churches, and attend mostly black schools but who go to work in mostly
white career tracks or white institutions.  Some resent and find this very difficult while others seem
to relish this.

Don’t you just wonder about all of this?

Anderson explains for us the emotional
toil and drama of being “black middle class in public” and this part was
especially interesting for me.  If
most BookNotes readers are white, but who have black friends, it may be
surprising to you how your black friends may relate in the predominantly white
spaces, and how they may act in their own homes and neighborhoods.  All of this was very stimulating, if
hard, at times – I thought I knew a lot about this stuff, and I feel, now, as
if I’ve got so much more to learn!

Even as Anderson documents features of a healthy civic
society, and these places that are “cosmopolitan canopies” – thanks,
Philadelphia! – he follows with a powerful chapter called “The Color Line and
the Canopy.” (You may know that “the color line” phrase comes from W.E.B. Du Bois.)
 There is stuff about “provisional
status” that you must read, and an excellent bit about how many black employees
experience the mostly-white workplace. The Cosmopolitan
Canopy ends with some powerful stories that invite all readers to ask
if they are committed to civility and willing to resist those who are racist or
rude or uncivil. 

He writes,

Under the cosmopolitan canopy, city
dwellers learn new ways of interacting with people they do not know who are
visibly different from their own group. They become more comfortable with
diversity and discover new ways that people comfortable with diversity and
discover new ways that people express themselves in public. These experiences
may lead people to question and modify their negative presuppositions about
others. Even if they do not want to know those others intimately they practice
getting along with everyone. The canopy offers a taste of how inclusive and
civil social relationships could become. That people find such pleasure in
diversity is a positive sign of the possibilities of urban life in the twenty-first
century.

I could say more about this fabulous book of social observation, and
why BookNotes readers, especially, may find it useful. I am very eager to promote it, and glad
to have had the chance to listen in to these conversations facilitated by Dr. Elijah
Anderson and his good books.

The Pennsylvania  (Episcopal) Diocese is itself diverse –
there is a white pastor of a church made up of Africans and those from the
Caribbean where there are understandable regional tensions; there are clergy of
every ethnic background who serve various kinds of parishioners from blue
collar whites to African American professionals (etcetera, etcetera – we live
in such a colorfully diverse world, don’t we?)  Some who serve are GLBT or in other ways seen as minorities. Women priests continue to struggle in some places with ugly discrimination and
some live with great sadness and frustration for ways in which they’ve been
mistreated. These clergy friends are candid with one another about their own
sense of race relations within their collegial associations and in their own
relationships, and within their churches. Was the gathering itself “white space”
or “cosmopolitan”?  Again, you see,
just having people of different hues or backgrounds in the same room doesn’t
make it civil or safe, let alone cosmopolitan.

I admire any organization that desires to embody God’s will,
and which attempts to be attentive to the implications of the gospel; these
last days reminded me of the daunting task ahead if we are to be faithful and
fruitful responding to the call of the gospel to be agents of reconciliation. Dr.
Anderson and his talks about the social/racial dramas played out, day by day, especially among middle
class blacks, college students, professionals, and others living in places like
Philadelphia, helped focus our conversation in fresh ways. I suspect it could
be helpful to you, too, wherever you live and work, no matter what your race or
ethnicity or status.

In our book display we had dozens of
other books on racial reconciliation, ethnic diversity, growing a multi-ethnic
church. We have a lot of these
kinds of resources for nearly any kind of church; give us a call if you’d like
us to suggest some resources.

(By the way, if you write or call, knowing
something of the racial make-up, the history and fruitfulness of previous
conversations about this you may have had, and the theological tradition in
which you stand would be helpful as we help you by suggesting a few good
resources.)

For a very good overview of the changing
face of North American ethnicities, I really recommend, by the way, Many
Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church by Soong-Chan Rah (Moody
Press; $14.99) and it was fun selling it to my Episcopalian friends. If you’ve
followed BookNotes for long, you may know we are fond of Randy Woodley’s lovely
and challenging call to racial diversity in the Body of Christ, Living
in Color: Embracing God’s Passion for Ethnic Diversity (IVP; $18.00.) More
Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel by Spencer
Perkins and Chris Rice (IVP; $20.00) tells the story of one white guy
and one black guy who became friends, partners in ministry, and the struggles
they had at learning to work well together and move people towards “the beloved
community.” It remains a life-changing book for many.

***

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Spiegel & Grau; $28.00.)

In recent days I have had some difficult conversations with friends who do not
seem to trust the uprising against the apparent sense of
abuse felt by many people of color, especially when thinking about criminal
justice, the police, and so forth. I do not know how you’ve talked about
Ferguson, and if you are seeking a moderate, fair-minded, just approach – which
is to say, not knee-jerk reactionary one way or the other, but seeking
evidence, prudence, justice.  But
if you have had these conversations, I am sure you have met people (maybe you
yourself are one of them) who are suspicious of the claims that race is, without
a doubt, a factor in many of the situations of police violence and what seem to
be unjust verdicts and mishandling of evidence by the courts.

And so, I beg you to purchase (as soon
as you can!) and read this
amazingly moving book, a book I’ve been saying is one of the most important
books I have read in my entire life, the stunningly outrageous, very
interesting, page-turning, and finally inspiring work by Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy:
A Story of Justice and Redemption. I will
say a bit more about this when we announce our “Best Books of 2014” at the end
of the year, as this will be named. (You could check out his powerful TED talk, or his great NPR interview, too, or visit his Equal Justice Initiatives webpage at www.eji.org/.)  

For now, please read (or re-read) this review that I had
published (in an slightly edited version) in Capitol Commentary, a weekly on-line publication of the Center for Public Justice, for whom I write a monthly book
review column. I hope it inspires you to read the remarkable book.

For those who care to learn about the need for greater public
justice, and how legal practices, lower court rulings and higher court
appeals, and complex cultural attitudes about poverty and race in the United
States too often subvert “liberty and justice for all” there is simply no more
compelling way to be introduced to the painful realities of our land than to
take up the study of racially-charged mass incarceration and the inequities of
how poor people are treated by the criminal justice system. We can learn much
from the experiences of those courageous lawyers who toil over legal details at
low wages as they serve in legal aid clinics to help the under-represented get
a fair hearing in court. 

It is in such a world that even stalwart conservatives like the late
Charles Colson have spoken out against the death penalty: in our terribly
broken legal systems, even what some might see as a legitimate task of the
state cannot be adjudicated justly.  And it is into just such a situation
that Bryan Stevenson has served in the deep American south, fighting unjust
incarceration, and what are often poorly handled legal cases involving poor,
usually black, often uneducated citizens who have been degraded and sometimes
abused in U.S. prisons. His Equal Justice Initiative is an extraordinary
organization, and those that have heard him speak — at gatherings such as
Jubilee or Q or The Justice Conference — have long awaited this fuller telling
of his heroic tale. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
is one of the most powerful, painful, informative and inspiring books that I
have ever read. It has been worth the wait for Stevenson to find time
(amidst a grueling schedule of life-and-death advocacy) to pen this must-read
memoir.

In this volume, we come to learn the excruciating details of several
key cases on which Stevenson worked.  We learn about the most egregious
miscarriages of justice, the most brutalizing treatment of people in prison,
and it is revealed how – in Alabama, particularly – bad laws and ugly practices
have continued on with little reform or safeguards that have been instituted in
most other states.  In some cases Alabama is one of the few places in the
country where certain choices (like putting young teens in with adult
prisoners, where rape and abuse is common) are still permitted. This book
documents outrage after outrage, and you will be troubled. This is an expose
that needs to be read; written in Stevenson’s first-person narrative, it is
nothing short of riveting.

Some of the racial inequity regarding mass incarceration and extreme
punishment has been documented in Michelle Alexander’s rightly famous The
New Jim Crow so it will come as no surprise to read her glowing
endorsement: “Bryan Stevenson is one my personal heroes, perhaps the most
inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is
extraordinary.” Desmond Tutu says that Stevenson is “America’s young
Nelson Mandela, a brilliant lawyer fighting with courage and conviction.” 
Southern Baptist bestseller, lawyer John Grisham says, “Not since Atticus Finch
has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American
South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan
Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the
poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with
no hope.”

Throughout some of these stories, ironically, Stevenson is working —
against compromised prosecutors, judges complicit in gross negligence and
sometimes overt, disturbing racism — in the very town made popular by the
filming of To Kill a Mockingbird. When Time magazine last month
asked Mr. Stevenson about the obvious comparison with Atticus Finch, he was
quick to note that Finch lost the famous fictional case. He realizes deep
in his bones that lives of real people are at stake; he dare not resign himself
to lose. He dare not rest in the popularity of his TED talks or NPR
interviews.  He simply must win more of these cases, prevent children from
prison abuse, staying the gruesome execution of the innocent, offering presence
and hope to the families of criminals and victims alike.

You will be hooked on this stunning story within the first few
pages, and by the end of the first dozen pages, you will be feeling things you
may not have felt in a long while, on the edge of your seat, wanting to know
how this young man from a poor village in rural Maryland, who attended a small
Christian college in Philadelphia, who was so unsure of himself at Harvard Law
School, ended up staring down crass injustice with little assistance and no
money in the dangerous South. You will be reminded of the awful last
chapter of Dubois’ Soul of Black Folk (“Of the Coming of John”) and you
will know that intimidation and even the fear of lynching remains a reality for
many of our fellow citizens here in America. Your heart will break when you
watch as Bryan visits in very poor homes with family whose loved ones have been
abused by the legal system, who say to him, “These people have broken our
hearts.”

How can it be that “these people” remain supportive of intransigent,
structural injustice, upheld by prosecutors, judges, prison officials (some who
appear gruff and abusive, some who appear kind and ashamed of the outcomes of
their work)? Why do not more cry out from within the legal system?
 What can citizens do?  What might Christian lawyers and legal
scholars do? This is the epic stuff of great literature, a grand story that
will engage you, inspire you. As Rev. Tutu writes, “It is as gripping to
read as any legal thriller, and what hangs in the balance is nothing less than
the soul of a great nation.”

As usual, we’ve listed the regular retail prices, but will deduct 20% off for BookNotes readers — just click on the Hearts & Minds website order form page at the link below (it is secure) to send us an order. Fill out the form, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks for reading our reviews, for caring about good books, for supporting our efforts.  We are grateful.

BookNotes

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I hope you saw last week’s list of good Advent resources, books to help you, as I put it
(rather cleverly, if I do say so myself), get ready to get ready.  

Included in that post last week, I offered links
to previous Advent and Christmas lists from older seasonal BookNotes. A few of those titles from other years may be out of print, but most are still available.  I enjoy
telling you about these kinds of helpful little books, and invite you to avoid the
malls and check out those book lists — I think reading book annotations is itself a nice, educational habit.

I want to note one quick point, now (and a book to go with it, of course) and
then revisit a previously published Advent/Christmas book that is one of our all time
favorites, which we have on an
extra special discount deal for a limited time or until we run out.

First, the quick point: it is said among those who study the liturgical
calender and church year that Advent is less a time of counting down to our
celebration of the incarnation at Christmas, but is a time of getting in touch
with our longings and hope for the final consummation of God’s plan for
history, the restoration of all things, at Christ’s glorious return.

Insofar as Advent includes creating space for naming our
waiting for the second coming (which in a mysterious way has already begun now as we inhabit
“the already and not yet”) it would be very apropos in Advent to study J. Richard Middleton’s new book
A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic; $26.99) which I raved about in a BookNotes review a week or so ago. It is one of the most impressive and
important books of Biblical scholarship I’ve seen in years. (Richard himself makes the connection with Advent overt in his week’s worth of Advent devotions in Advent of Justice [Wipf & Stock; $9.99] which was edited by Biblical scholar and farmer Dr. Sylvia Keesmaat, with contributions by Brian Walsh and Mark Vander Vennen.) I reviewed that here.  Reading Middleton this time of year would be great, I’m just saying.

If you want a more traditional, seasonal selection of readings with a warm and reflective tone, written by beautiful writers who have paid much attention to their own interior lives and the nature of seasonal practices in the church and world, allow us to remind you of what, when it was released 5 years ago, we said
was one of the best Advent books
we’ve seen in all our years of
book-selling. We don’t usually run
repeats of our reviews, but we have often done annotations of this one, and
wanted to edit a few of my earlier comments, and share them with you here.  If you know this book, you know how lovely it is.  And that it makes a
great gift as well. 

THIS ITEM IS NOW OUT OF PRINT — We don’t really want to take down our review, but please note we did say (in Advent 2014) “while supplies last.”  There are no more of the hardcover.  HOWEVER there is a new and quite lovely paperback edition, very richly produced, but with only a few art pieces. It is called GOD WITH US READERS EDITION and sells for $18.99. We will describe that in a future BookNotes blog, offering it there at our usual 20% off.)  Read on!

God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas 
edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory Wolfe (Paraclete) regular price $29.95  SALE PRICE 30% OFF = $21.00 

If
some of the previously mentioned ones have the great strength of including a diversity of authors,
theological and literary, and they include enough material to take you through
Epiphany in early January, this one has as its great strength two more wonderful
features: the stunning, gloriously reproduced, serious artwork through-out and
the quality of the five primary authors who offer five great chapters. (Five, of
course, because they wisely include the week after Advent, between Christmas and
Epiphany.) This is printed on high-quality, glossy paper, and includes a
ribbon marker, making it a glorious gift, a fabulous book to hold and
behold. 

The authors
include Scott Cairns, the Orthodox poet and eloquent contemplative, Emilie
Griffin, the wise Episcopalian writer who has done books on spiritual formation
(and serving God in the workplace),the  late Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran
scholar and pastor who became Roman Catholic in mid-life and founded the
rigorous public policy journal First Things,
the wonderful Presbyterian memoirist and essayist, Kathleen Norris, and the splendid poet and advocate for the
creative arts, Luci Shaw. There is a nice forward by Eugene Peterson and a nice page about the church calendar and an interesting appendix about Epiphany dates written by Beth Bevis. The page design and graphics nicely accentuates the accompanying art. My, my, this is a great
treasure.

Important, too, is that this work emerged from the mature writing in the pages
of our best literary journal, Image, a sophisticated, faith-based
quarterly of literature and art and criticism; Pennoyer & Wolfe are extraordinary thinkers and writers
themselves, and have put together what is without a doubt one of the most glorious books you could own. (Except, perhaps for the long-awaiting, luxurious sequel, God For Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent and Easter which Paraclete released this past Spring [regularly $29.95.] What a great set of books, so similarly produced.)

Eugene Peterson’s introduction to God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, is lengthy and
robust, wise and beautiful. Here is how he starts,

Birth: wonder…astonishment…adoration.  There can’t be very many of us for
whomn the sheer fact of existence hasn’t rocked us back on our heels. We take
off our sandals before the burning bush. We cath our breath at the sign of a
plummeting hawk. “Thank you, God.” We find ourselves in a lovish existence in
which we feel a deep sense of kinship – we belong
here; we say thanks with our lives to Life. And not just “Thanks” or “Thank
It” but ThankYou.“ Most of the people who have lived on
this planet earth have identified this You with God or gods. This is not just a
matter of learning our manners, the way children are taught to say thank you as
a social grace. It is the cultivation of adequateness within ourselves to the
nature of reality, developing the capacity to sustain an adequate response to
the overwhelming gift and goodness of life.

And then Pastor Pete continues,

Wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring this
fullness, this wholeness, of human life. Once a year, each Christmas, for a few
days at least, we and millions of our neighbors turn aside from our preoccupations
with life reduced to biology or economics or psychology and join together in a
community of wonder. The wonder keeps us 
open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can
account for, that always exceeds our calculations, that is always beyond
anything we can make.

He goes on from there to reflect on the meaning of this
season, the particularity of Jesus’ birth, and the relationship between
creation and incarnation, between God’s work and our own.  It is really, really rich, a wonderful
opening to this handsome, deep volume and deserves repeated readings.

Peterson eventually offers a few beautiful lines that are truly memorably (and quotable) and then
follows with a very astute observation. Notice: people in the first century were not credulous, even as they were influenced by their culture’s religious and political ways:

Birth, every human birth, is an occasion for local wonder.
In Jesus’ birth the wonder is extrapolated across the screen of all creation
and all history as the God-birth. “The Word became flesh and dwelth among us” –
moved into the neighborhood, so to speak. And for thirty years or so, men and
women saw God in speech and action in the entirely human person of Jesus as he
was subject, along with them, to the common historical conditions of, as
Charles Williams once put it, “Jewish religion, Roman order, and Greek
intellect.” These were not credulous people and it was not easy for them to
believe, but they did. That God was made incarnate as a human baby is still not
easy to believe, but people continue to do so. Many, even those who don’t
“believe,” find themselves happy to participate in the giving and receiving,
singing and celebrating of those who do.

Yes, even those who don’t believe “find themselves happy to participate…with those who do.”

I don’t need to tell most BookNotes readers that we disapprove of those Christian organizations that want to turn this holy season into a battle-ground against the secularists, protesting those who say “happy holidays” and whatnot. Ugh. We think being winsome, respectful, and gracious during this time of year is the better way, and, anyway — as Peterson has suggested — most people are at least vaguely interested in Christian Christmas practices. Rather than pick a fight, why not show some good will?  And be ready to explain the hope that is within us…

I have long thought that Christmas is a wonderful time for
natural, winsome evangelism, for showing that we live with hope and expectation. People really do sing theological truths in the
carols; even the malls blare songs with religiously-rich lyrics. People do ponder “the hopes and fears of all the years” in the quiet moments of December. People are truly open to getting gifts and cards. It is a great time to give books about the Christian faith to those with
whom you otherwise may not feel comfortable taking about
your faith.  It may be one of those
rare opportunities to share a book or CD with your un-churched friends and it
won’t seem intrusive.  Lots of people give books this time of year, and an Advent devotional of this literary and artistic tone would work well as a gift for nearly any educated friend. 

We are happy to sell this throughout the season at the customary 20% BookNotes discount, but for this week only — until December 5, 2014 — we have it at 30% off.

Or, until we run out — it’s “while supplies last” as they say.   You can order by clicking on the “order” link below. Or give us a call, if you’d like to talk.  

BookNotes

                                   Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333

Okay, friends, here it is, our annual description of new
Advent resources.  Don’t delay —
we are giving away a free Advent book if you order anything in the next 72
hours.

After that, all these fine
resources (and some that we’ve mentioned other years, here, here, or even here, if they are still in
print and still available) still qualify for the BookNotes reader’s 20%
discount. 

And don’t forget my review of the newly re-issued The Advent of Justice devotional by Sylvia Keesmaat, Brian Walsh, J. Richard Middleton, and Mark Vander Vennen, which I described here. 

So, if you order by the
end of day Sunday, we’ll toss in an Advent book or study (of our choice, something nice, with real value, as our gift to you.) After that, we still offer a 20% discount, deducted off the retail price that is shown.   

Spread the word, gather your group, send an email to Santa or do
whatever you have to do.  There is
something for almost anyone. We’re here, helping you get ready to get ready.

The Season of the Nativity: Confessions and Practices of an Advent,
Christmas & Epiphany Extremist Sybil MacBeth (Paraclete Press)
$17.99  Wow, what’s not to like
about this – written, as it is, by a self-professed season “extremist.”  Ha!  I love that! (And, as a good liturgical aficionado would,
this resource includes ample stuff for Epiphany!) The spiffy ad copy on the
back – with a design that looks warm and contemporary – says “Christmas
sparkles brighter – when you celebrate the season in all of its fullness.”  Okay, there’s an allusion to Advent,
Christmas, and Epiphany – but it
means more, I think.  Ms MacBeth,
you see, is the author of the very, very popular Praying in Color (and the pocket edition, and the kid’s edition)
that invites us to doodle and design and be creative in our playfully serious coloring
our prayers.  From colored pencils
to other creative options, that book, like this one, is fabulous for those who
can’t just sit still and read and meditate.  When this invites us to celebrate in “fullness” it means to
suggest a multi-dimensional, holistic kind of engagement.  And – kudos to the Sisters of Paraclete
Press – the design of this colorful book is as lovely as the idea.  It really is vibrant, colorful, and
winsome.

Listen to what Lauren Winner writes about it.  (She was, by the way, an early booster
of MacBeth’s earlier projects.)

This gorgeous book is going to remain at my reading chair, dog-eared
and bookmarked, all through the Yuletide season. It will also be under the tree
of just about everyone on my gift list. We will all have more interesting
winters, and greater intimacy with Jesus, because of it.

All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas Quinn G.
Caldwell (Abingdon) $15.99  Well,
somewhat like the Sybil MacBeth one, this looks cheery and upbeat, like one of
those bright red advertisements for chain department stores that are so
alluring this time of year (until you look carefully at the lower right corner.  Ha.)  But – but! – this is some pretty radical stuff, not
just a pretty package.  As the
author (a pastor of Plymouth Congregational UCC Church in Syracuse NY) writes,

“Let’s get one thing straight: this book is not going to help you ‘simplify the
season.’ It’s not going to help you throw a stress-free Christmas party or
create the Best Christmas Ever in five easy steps. I’m not here to simplify
anything for you.  Neither is God.
If you have too many cookie exchanges or whatever, you’re just going to have to
find a way to deal with that yourself. This book is actually designed to
complicate the season. It’s here to invite you to think and pray a little more
deeply about it.”

So, yeah, there’s that. 

As Lillian Daniel writes of it, “Accept this invitation to a
five-week birthday party for Jesus, populated by aggressive cousins, evil
dragons, and last-minute shoppers. Your Christmas is about to get hilariously
complicated.”  Or, listen to the
punchy, passionate Debbie Blue (you do know her crazy-good, very provocative Birds of the Bible don’t you?) “I love
that the suggestions are surprising (set something on fire, decorate garishly,
believe in a God that can co-opt the culture’s co-option.) It’s playful and
funny and theologically profound.” 
These readings are pretty amazing, sure to make you think, knock you off
balance a bit, maybe even knock some sense into us all.  As Stephanie Paulsell of Harvard says,
he “releases us from forced cheerfulness and invites us to relish the rich,
complex darkness of the season…” 

The Christmas Countdown: Creating 25 Days of New Advent Traditions for
Families Margie J. Harding (Paraclete Press) $15.99  I’m always a little suspicious when a
book promises “meaningful and fun activities” for families with children.  I’m not sure that most of these sorts
of earnest resources work that well. 
Maybe our family was just spiritually dull or religiously lazy (or, at
times, overwrought?) but we were often a bundle of antsy un-cooperation.  I wish we’d have had this handsome book
when our children were young: it combines moderate, ancient, solid theological
insight and interesting, earnest, maybe even fruitful activities, from word
puzzles and games to recipes and songs. 
There are readings, discussion questions, prayers. There are “action” steps for adults and
“prompts” for kids of varying ages, including an “onward” session for after
Christmas.  I don’t know how “new”
these traditions will be – but if you’ve not tried this sort of thing before,
or if you haven’t found it meaningful, well, this could be a good next step.   Very nicely done.

Light of Lights: Advent Devotions from The Upper Room Upper
Room (Abingdon) $10.00  This little
guy is a gem for a few reasons. It is brief, inexpensive, pocket-sized
(almost.)  It could be used
personally, as any devotional guide would be; the readings are mature,
contemplative, well-written, as you’d expect from the altogether lovely Upper
Room. But this is the main value and point: it is designed, really, to be a
resource to be used with an Advent wreath.  There are four weeks of devotions with the themes (of the
Advent wreath) of Hope, Love, Joy, Peace. There are some little tips for
including the tradition of the wreath in your home or congregation, and there
is a small group guide in the back, so it could be used in a small group,
Sunday school class, or other faith community setting. We highly recommend this
hands-on customer – especially if you have kids that like fire!  Light of Lights suggests a
flame-retardant artificial wreath, but we say “humbug!” to that.  Go get some fresh-smelling pine or
holly or anything real.  Let
Christ, the very God of very God, be your light of lights!

Not a Silent Night: Mary Looks Back to Bethlehem Adam Hamilton
(Abingdon) $16.99  I suppose by now
you know of this Kansas-based, United Methodist pastor, nearly a rock star, one
of the biggest selling religious authors these days, a passionate, powerful
speaker who appeals very widely. 
His previous studies of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and the
life of Jesus (see, The Journey and The Way) have been very useful, and are
purchased by individuals, families, and, of course, congregations.  Like many of the others he has done, this book (which can
be read as a stand-alone devotional) has a DVD, a leader’s guide, a youth
version, a children’s resource, even a little flash-drive full of
congregational ideas and preaching resources. We gave the different components, for sure!

Anyway, if you’ve read any of his other thoughtful, inspiring
books, you’ll want this. I suppose
the “spend Christmas with Mary” has been done before, but maybe you’ve not explored it — at least not like this, imagining
Jesus from Mary’s point of view. 
Hamilton starts at the end, with Mary at the crucifixion and
resurrection, and then travels back in time as she witnesses Jesus’ life and
ministry, and ends at the beginning, “with the Christ child born in a stable,
Mary’s beautiful baby.” Wow.

Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas Ann Voskamp (Tyndale) $24.99  Last year we raved about a very handsome hardback devotional by Ann Voskamp, the amazingly good writer of the very popular One Thousand Gifts.  It was called The Greatest Gift.  There is a fabulous DVD curriculum to use with it, which explores the great, rich tradition of “The Jesse Tree.”  We were fond of that book and DVD, too, but can hardly express how this material has generated yet another Advent book by Ms Voskamp — a full-color, oversized hardback with good, glossy pages, which beautifully helps families explore moving scenes from the Bible that lead us, step by step, through the history of redemption and towards the birth of Christ and the Advent of His Kingdom. Vivid, contemporary illustrations enhance the Scripture readings and questions and activities; links for downloadable ornaments are included that help communicate the stages of salvation history, starting with the Garden of Eden.  On the back cover of Unwrapping the Greatest Gift they invite us to “Celebrate the best love story of all time with your family!” Indeed, this helps your family retrace the linage of Jesus and fall in love with the story of God, unfolded bit by bit, with very nice artwork and these great downloadable ornaments. 

This is a beautiful book you will want to keep, because, we hope, it is one you will cherish.

Feasting on the Word Advent Companion: A Thematic Resource for Preaching and Worship edited by David L. Bartlett, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Kimberly Bracken Long (Westminster/John Knox) $25.00  You very well may know all four volumes, of all three liturgical cycles, all 12 of the Feasting on the Word preaching commentaries.  And you may have used some of the creative, helpful Feasting on the Word Worship Companion volumes which offer liturgical resources, prayers, litanies, and such, drawn from and inspired by the Feasting… project.  Well, the rumors are true: they’ve created one convenient volume for Advent (and Christmas eve and Christmas day) use, that includes preaching ideas as well as worship aids, with ideas on everything from Advent wreath litanies, suggested hymns and carols to children’s service ideas and ready-to-use options for a mid-week service.

I know we’ve mentioned this earlier in the season, but it is useful for those that need such an all in one pastor’s companion and deserves to be listed with the other best of 2014 Advent resources.

Every Valley: Advent with the Scriptures of Handel’s Messiah foreword by Albert L. Blackwell (Westminster/John Knox) $15.00  This is an amazing, wonderfully done hardback (at a great price, I might add) that prints the libretto from Messiah (crafted by GFH’s friend Charles Jennens) and the NRSV Biblical texts upon which they are based.  The 40 Biblical meditations are by a variety of pastors, scholars, and mainline denominational writers, adapted or drawn from the exegetical and theological material in — wait for it… — the preaching commentaries, Feasting on the Word Year A, B, and C.  Actually, this is a great idea, with sophisticated, brief theological reflections based on these classic texts, presented in a very nice devotional format. As it reminds us on the back cover, “These memorable words can easily be heard in a kind of sentimental haze, familiar from countless church choir concerts and Christmas eve services. But the Scriptures Handel set to music in his most beloved oratorio also tell as powerful story — of God’s promised one, from prophetic foretelling to birth, death, resurrection, and ultimate victory.  Find inspiration for your holiday season and year-round faith with these forty insightful meditations.”  Hallelujah! 

The Messiah: The Texts Behind Handel’s Masterpiece (Lifeguide Bible Study)  Douglas Connelly (IVP) $8.00  You may know that the Lifeguide Bible Studies are the most popular small group Bible study guides out there, basic, clear, thoughtful, inductive without being self-evident.  This doesn’t have too much about Handel or Messiah and so could be done by those who have little interest in classical music.  It examines in 8 sessions the key Bible texts that make up the grand oratorio.  Maybe you could even do a few weeks of it now, and safe the last portions for Lent or Eastertime.  There is a very nice suggestion at the end of each study (which they call “now or later”) which invites a careful listening to the music, attending to this feature or that characteristic of the performance. It would be fantastic to do that as a group – I favor the “now” rather than the “later” – but they realize not every group wants to do that.  This really is a nice part of this inexpensive study, and we highly recommend it.  Maybe this is a bit overstated, but on the back it suggests, “Perfect for Advent or Lent, this guide leads you through Scripture passages used in Handel’s Messiah that highlight who Jesus is and what he came to do. It might change the way you listen to Handel’s oratorio. Even more, it might change the way you live.”

In the Manger: 25 Inspirational Selections for Advent Max
Lucado (Nelson) $9.99  I think of
all the many, many great books and devotionals Max has done over the last 30
years, God Came Near is one of his
best, and remains a enduring, lovely, moving set of ruminations on the
incarnation.  In this handsomely
designed little hardback, we get short excerpts from this and other popular
books by the evocative author. 
Sentimental, challenging, insightful, worshipful, tender – each page is
a delight, nicely done, helpful.   Lucado has written a lot of beloved books over his career, and this little compilation is very nice, not pushy or heavy, but yet compelling.

 In the Manger is the kind of book that you will enjoy
if you are a fan of Max Lucado, and it is very nice book to give away to those
who may not know his rich, inspiring prose.  A perfect stocking stuffer or gift to tuck in with another
gift or greeting.

Under Wraps: The Gift We Never Expected Jessica LaGrone, Andy
Nixon, Rob Rendroe, Ed Robb 
(Abingdon) $12.99  Okay, the
“unwrapping” gifts has been done before in too many sermon series, Christmas
tracts, Advent devotionals. I know. 
I don’t even love the cover of this with the silly (retro?) type font.  But you know what? This is a truly
lovely book, handsomely designed with some very nice artful touches inside,
with mature and meaty insights, good reflection questions and eloquent prayers.  I like it a lot.

The writers have been teaching pastors
at The Woodlands United Methodist Church in Texas, and this is solid, accessible,
interesting stuff.  I was almost
bowled over by the simple paragraph that talked about God becoming incarnate in
Jesus “under wraps” and as I opened myself to reflecting on these short sets of
readings, concluded that this is a very faithful, very fine, easy-to-use
resource. The chapters attempt to reveal the attributes of God throughout redemptive
history, in chapters called “God is Expectant”, “God is Dangerous”, “God is
Jealous” and “God Is Faithful.” 
There is a final section for use during Christmas week called “A Season
of Joy.”

Besides this devotional, they’ve produced a DVD, a Leader’s Guide, a
youth study book, a children’s resource, even a worship planning flash drive
with lots of good stuff for sermons, PowerPoint, creative liturgical
resources.  Call us if you want more info, as we have all the various supplemental pieces, including the nice DVD.

Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer
for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany compiled by Sarah Arthur (Paraclete
Press) $18.99  Dare I tip my hand
and say that I intend to use this often this season?  It really is an extraordinary book, a literary and spiritual
feast full of fiction, poetry, and excerpts of great literature. The book is
elegantly designed with French folded covers, and an equally beautifully
tone.  Perhaps you know Arthur’s
previous one like this, At the Still
Point which was for use in Ordinary Time.  This includes a daily prayer which is most often a poem
(including some surprising choices) and then a Psalm, Scripture readings, and
then some daily offerings of poems and short excerpts of fiction.  If you believe in the holy coming to us
in the guise of literature, this is for you. 

As poet Luci Shaw writes of it, “Sarah Arthur illuminates
our whole year with the gift of flaming words. A treasure of
enlightenment.”  Just a thought:
even if you aren’t interested in Oscar Hijuelos or MacDonald’s Gifts of the Christ Child or Elizabeth
Barrett Browning or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Fred Buechner or Christiana
Rossetti, you surely know some lit-lovers, English majors, or aspiring poets
who don’t want a more customary Advent devotional.  This would make a beautiful, appreciated gift.

BookNotes

                                     Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333

Lots of great books keep coming in to the shop. Sales may be down in indie bookstores,
but the publishing world is strong, writers doing their thing, publishers releasing important work.  What a joy, what a gift, to be a reader
in these times.  Here are a few you
should consider for your own library, or maybe for your small group. At least you could put some on that Christmas list you know you’re making.  Or maybe you can’t wait for that.  Send us an order, today!

Rebel Souls: America’s First Bohemians  Justin Martin (De Capo) $27.99 I love
books that do social history, placing ideas and movements within a broader
context, that unlock the personalities of people (famous or less so) showing
how they reflected (and in some cases caused) features of our society that we
now take for granted. In Rebel
Souls Justin Martin tells us about Pfaffs, a storied 1850s bar in New
York City that became (quite knowingly) the first place in America to forge an
alt-community of artists and creative thinkers who called themselves bohemians. The word, coined in Paris a decade before, was inspired, in fact, by Puccini’s
classic opera, La Boheme (which, in
turn, inspired the long-running Rent,
set in the East Village.) Walt Whitman
was a nightly feature at Pfaffs, and the coterie of these creative, troubled
souls, had a reach that was stunning: into this story comes Emerson, Mark
Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and some very important, if lesser known folks, including, perhaps America’s first stand-up comic. They had
no word for stand-up comedy in the 1850s so they called the performances of
Artemus Ward “comic lectures.”

You may know Justin Martin from his nicely-written, very informative,
fascinating books such as the highly regarded Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted; he is a fine
historian and great writer. Pulitzer Prize winner Debby Applegate says about Rebel Souls,  “A terrific book about a magical
time and place in American history – Pfaff’s basement saloon on Broadway on the
eve of the Civil War, where boozers, brawlers, and barflies, journalists,
comics, actors, and poets came together to create a bohemian paradise.  Like the West Bank of Paris of the
1920s or Greenwich Village during the Beat Generation, Pfaff’s scene burned
brightly and then burned out…” 

If
space permitted, I’d tell you about the role of their writings and reviews, and the lasting significance. I’d tell you about the
Naked Lady, the guy who wrote the first book (a big seller, published by Harper
& Brothers!) on hashish, the role of theater in those years, the role of women, the Pffafians relationship with John Wilkes Booth, and –
of course – more about the one who became the Good Grey Poet himself. I learned so much, and enjoyed the story greatly.

Also, I’d be sure to tell you how important it is to
understand the ethos and orientation of bohemia for understanding today’s new
romantics, hipsters, neo-hippies, many artists and indie rockers, and some of
the emergent religious communities. 
As Martin tells us early in the book,

The Pfaff’s Bohemians were part of the transition from art
as a genteel profession to art as a soul-deep calling, centered on risk-taking,
honesty, and provocation. Everyone from Lady Gaga to George Carlin to Dave
Eggers owes a debt to these originals. They were also the forerunners of such
alternative artists groups as the Beats, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the
abstract expressionist painters who hung out during the 1950s at New York’s
Cedar Tavern. 

The pendulum continues to swing from rationalism to
romanticism, control to freedom, thinking to feeling, from the straight and narrow to the wild and
free (and it is not a stretch to say, red states and blue states.)  For at least one major
manifestation of a zeitgeist that still attracts, hang out a Pfaffs for a bit
with Whitman and his rag-tag crew of cultural creatives. Experience how this
bawdy group of writers and thinkers shaped, in some ways, the very way some
artists increasingly imagined their own vocations and work. Follow Whitman
after the Civil War to DC, and then to Camden NJ, even as he publishes yet
another edition of Leaves of Grass,
this time with “O Captain! My Captain!” included. Think of Robin Williams, even, and say a prayer.

This is a wonderful book about bohemian culture, a fascinating history that reverberates yet today.  Thanks to Mr. Martin for his painstaking research and the obvious care of his subject that come out so nicely in his writing.

Father Factor: American Christian Men on Fatherhood and Faith edited
by R. Anderson Campbell  (White
Cloud Press) $17.95  I do hope I
can write more extensively about this later, because it is truly a fabulous,
fabulous book, interesting, well-written, helpful. There is a small backstory
or two: The “I Speak for Myself” series of which this is a part includes two
books of young Muslim writers telling about their lives. These were helpful testimonials written by young Americans who were Muslims, one by women, one by men — lovely stuff.  The third in the series was Talking Taboo which we reviewed and
touted, a wonderful, important project of young Christina woman talking about
their experiences as women in the church. A host of important writers I admire
and a few friends were in that one, and we carried it around to many places
we’ve done book displays.  The new
fourth one is perhaps the best yet, with really, really good writing, and very,
very moving stories.  I happily
admit that Mr. Campbell is a friend I admire, and a dad I admire, and that two other former CCO staff
friends — Kurt Ro and Brian Shope — are included among these 30 writers under
30 years old. (I don’t think
my judgment is too clouded here) but their pieces are amongst the strongest in the
book.! Congrats, friends.

To summarize, these moving
pieces are ruminations on the fathers of these guys, or their own role as a
father, on knowing God as a father, and on this whole messy male business.  Sometimes, naturally, the
reflections include both recalling their own dads, and their being a dad; you can imagine.  A young dad wants to be just like his own father; another young dad
does not at all want to be like his own father.  There is joy and sadness and faith and rage and great grace
in these pieces and I truly recommend them.

Matthew Paul Turner notes that “In many ways, Father
Factor is a work of art, a beautiful collage of humanity and soul, a
thoughtful collection of stories detail the lives, dreams and fears of American
fathers. The essays in this book will make you laugh, bring you to tears, and
at all times, cause you to rethink your approach to parenting. But most of all,
Father
Factor will give you hope.

I was fortunate enough to get to offer a blurb, alongside
more famous and better writers, from Richard Mouw, Christena Cleveland,
Eboo Patel, to my friend Lisa Sharon Harper.  For what it’s worth,
here’s what I wrote:

I love memoirs — who doesn’t love a good story? — and these short
narratives are a joy to read, a reader’s delight, getting a glimpse into
the lives of others. There is wonder, loss, love, joy, pathos, romance
and laughter, a little cursing and a lot of praise. But there is more:
these are exceptionally brave stories from many different sorts of men
reflecting profoundly about God the father, their own fathers (for
better or for worse) and their own particular journeys into fatherhood.
This is not a self-help manual, but guys from all stages of life will learn much and be better fathers because of it. Highly recommended. -Byron Borger, Hearts & Minds Books, Dallastown, PA

Life Together in Christ: Experiencing Transformation in Community Ruth
Haley Barton (IVP//formation) $18.00 
Do you long to experience transformation in community?  Ponder that, and ponder it again. You know we’ve admired Ruth Haley Barton for years,
view her as nearly a spiritual mentor, and have read and commended all her many books
over the years. This, though, I must say, really, really touched me. I believe it was just what I needed, and it
may be what you need, too.  She offers a
concise, powerful, but sensible call to combine two things, two things we all long for, and yet are rarely adequately combined: community and spiritual growth, or, in other words, relationships and
transformation. 

Life Together in Christ  provides a model that is specifically created to help you be more intentional about your
journey into spiritual growth by being in the company of others.  I love her reflections (sometimes
fairly obvious and lovely, other times creative and extraordinary) on the
much-loved story of the two walking on the road to Emmaus. The back cover promises that she
“offers substantive teaching and direction for small groups of spiritual
companions who are ready to encounter Christ – right where they are on the road
of real life.”

There are some great conversation starters at the end of
each chapter, some things to ponder solo highlighted in sidebars and boxes, as
well as some resources for small group use, making this not only inspiring but
very practical.  Some of us don’t
value the “processing” stuff in these books, but for this one, it is essential.  As I’ve already pondered some of these
bits, I can am confident that they will be worth your time, valuable for you
and your group.

There are, not surprising, rave reviews here from authors as
diverse as Mark Labberton and Ronald Rolheiser, James Bryan Smith and J.R.
Briggs.  And they are right – this
is an excellent resource, a lovely book, and a sure guide to deepening one’s
life, by allowing God to bring transformation to a group walking together. 

Beloved Dust//Drawing Close to God By Discovering the Truth About
Yourself Jamin Goggin & Kyle Strobel (Nelson) $16.99  I have been pondering how to describe
this book; I had an advanced copy, as I respect these two thinkers
immensely.  Goggin edited one of
the best books of earlier this year, a serious, semi-scholarly work inviting
evangelicals (and others) to be more intentional and thoughtful as they take up
the best mystical and devotional classics; Stobel (who is, among other things,
a Jonathan Edwards scholar) has a real gift to take deep, sanctifying truth and
make it upbeat and helpful for readers who are perhaps not used to wading in
deep spiritual waters.  

At any
rate, Beloved Dust is a very contemporary book, with a self-awareness about life and
times, written in a witty and at times clever narrative way. But, but, believe me, this is remarkable material, including
some excellent Bible study and some guidance into patience, prayer, and
openheartedness. If you want to
truly know God, John Calvin taught, one must know oneself. And knowing ourselves as we are –
beloved dust – is the heart of this book about spiritual formation.  This is one of a great kind of book
I’ve noticed recently, a happy blend of pretty ancient, dare I say profound
stuff, presented as only young, contemporary pastors can. Maybe it’s the double-slashes in the title, maybe it’s the subtitle, artful cover.  But this is a cool book, but one that,
as cool as it is, has a degree of gravitas. Nice!

If you’re not sure if a heavy book of serious spiritual theology could be written in a very contemporary way, and be as solid as it is winsome and inviting, just check this out, and then come back and place an order with us.

What Your Body Knows About God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve,
and Thrive  Rob Moll (IVP)
$16.00  Where to begin to let you know how great this book is?  How about this: Christianity Today gave
this a very rare, exceptional five-star review.  Singer-songwriter Michael Card wrote a truly lovely,
well-written foreword. Scot McKnight and Richard Sterns and Katelyn Beaty and
other good writers have added their rave reviews. You really should know about this.

Or, get this, from the very smart Jamie Smith:

“The theologian Henri de Lubac once said that human beings
were created with a natural desire for the supernatural. This marvelous,
accessible book by Rob Moll picks up on this conviction brilliantly, inviting
us to embrace our bodies as the gifts they are. The incarnate God meets us in
our bodies and brains. An excellent exposition of the bodily basis of
discipleship.”

I loved Rob Moll’s 2010 IVP book The
Art Of Dying which was beautiful and wise and worthy of repeated reading. This new examination of neuroscience and brain studies and religion
is, without a doubt, the best one of this sort I’ve yet read (and there have been a good handful the last few years.) Moll tells a lot of very tender and
engaging stories, including a brave section about his wife and her mysterious chronic illness. He does mature and solid Bible study, he draw connections between all sorts of things
and invites us to take seriously that God has wired us for God’s own self,
which – get this! –  can release
stuff in the brain that literally can help us become more empathetic and kind. You will learn a bit about amino acids and the role of the brain and the body in our faith (even a chapter on worship.) You will learn that Moll works for World Vision and cares deeply not only about our own molecules and the mystery of our spiritual lives, but of the brokenness of the world, and efforts to bring redemption and hope. The title and subtitle of this important new book is very helpful to explain
what it is like and just what the book is about.  It is a real winner.  Spread the word!

Me and We: God’s New Social Gospel Leonard Sweet (Abingdon)
$17.99  I hope you know my
appreciation for Len Sweet, as a thinker, a writer, a leader, a public speaker,
preacher, and friend.  I’m a fan, and
that won’t easily change.  His
early books were important for me, his recent ones fantastic.  They are always energetic, playful,
learned, and always worth the price tag in part due to the truly extraordinary
amount of fascinating, unexpected, and important footnotes.  One can enhance one’s plan for being a
life-long learner just by reading carefully Sweet’s own reading recommendations
and sources.

Like most of the books on this little list, this new one
truly deserves a long and more attentive review.  Time and space do not allow, but I can say these few things,
too quickly.  If you like Sweet you
will like this, but you may have to, as with some of his books, overlook a few
jumps in logic, one ADHD leap from topic or illustration to another. Although
the “house and garden” metaphor, drawn from the magazine title, I guess, figures
prominently, I still don’t know what he means by that.  I track with most his stuff pretty
well, but I was left scratching my head on occasion, maybe moreso in this one
than in others.  (Take that as a
dare, friends, not a warning.)

Secondly, you might surmise this, but if you don’t know, you will learn
right away: Sweet may be seen as an edgy postmodern prophet, but in his
heart of hearts he’s an old school Wesleyan revivalist of the holiness tradition.  He has no patience for those who might
drift from a Bible-based, God-exalting, Christ-centered, cross-preaching,
church-going, soul-saving, true gospel. 
He is ruthless in dismissing the liberal social reformers of the early twentieth century, and, seemingly, as hard on the new century post-evangelical, hip, emergent folk
who seem to similarly allow their missional vision to become so attuned to (at
least the rhetoric, if not the work) of social justice that the first things of
the gospel are squeezed out. He
is, on this score, not unlike Scot McKnight or even John Piper.  As deeply as he swims in the waters of cultural studies, he does not sound like Brian McLaren, let alone the politico Jim Wallis. Yet, despite his apparent disapproval
of the so-called Christian left, he is adamant, as he always has been, that our
gospel work must be culturally-relevant, socially-engaged, communal, green.

It isn’t that complicated, but in Sweet’s witty, provocative
hands, this stuff sounds wildly innovative, perhaps a viable alternative
between the right and the left, the conservatives and the progressives.  Sweet cites Ivan Illich and Wendell Berry
a bit (and calls him “the world’s best living poet”) and he affirms some of the
passionate voices who critique consumerism and materialism. He offers some interesting ruminations
on racism, a little tirade against “simple living”, and some blunt observations
about the anti-globalization movement. A good part of the last half is about what
it might take to birth a new (Christ-like) economy.  He works creatively with Genesis — “tend and keep” (the garden) becomes “conserve and conceive.”  Whether you pick up on and draw energy from his endless
plays on words or whether you roll your eyes, his framing of the gospel as
both/and – me and we – is immensely helpful. His hinting at or briefly stopping to give a cursory critique to all kinds of stuff in light of his relational/holiness theology along the way is
evocative, and his weighing in on a few major day issues of the day is
important.  He invites us to see
the world in a very different way. When an author – through profound wisdom
or sheer literary elan, or a bit of
both – can do that, that, my friends, it is worth buying a few, gathering some
people together for a night or so, and chatting it up. 

In this case, it may be a bit of a roller-coaster ride, and you may be a little
dizzy when it is all done.  But
you’ll not only be glad you took the Sweet ride, you’ll be very glad for the
“we” that emerges from that shared experience.  Heaven knows we
need a social gospel.  A new kind
of social gospel. Me
and We: God’s New Social Gospel will make you think about that in ways you haven’t before. 

Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind
Gene Edward Veith, Jr. & Matthew Ristuccia (Crossway) $16.99  I have been waiting for this book for a
long time, and I think we need a Biblically and philosophically faithful
Christian view of imagination that is written in a way that ordinary people can
appreciate and learn and grow from it. 
This is that book, the best thing I’ve seen at an accessible level, and
no other book that I know of does quite what this does. Redeemer Presbyterian’s Center for
Faith and Work had Matt Ristuccia speak at their annual event a week or so ago,
and everyone raved.  The Executive
Director of CFW, David Kim, wrote about the book “Through their seasoned
pastoral and scholarly gifts, Veith and Ristuccia have done the church an
incredible service in lifting up the critical role of the imagination in the
Christian life.”  When a scholar of aesthetics and musician of the caliber of Jeremy Begbie says it deserves to be
widely read, you know it is important.

I’ll say just a few quick things.  Firstly, Vieth is clear and succinct in his unpacking of the
role of the imagination, which he insists is merely the ability of the mind to
create mental images.  I think he’s
a bit wrong about that, and his latent conservative rationalism colors this
book, as it has his others. Still, it’s an informative, instructional and even colorful read,
and his parts are a valuable contribution.   I’m pondering (among a whole lot of other things, the cover, too, by the way.  What is going on there? And what kind of cover would have been evoked to serve a book with a more robust, wild, less linear view of imagination? Just some kind of inchoate hunch here…)

This is not exactly the place to pick scholarly nits — imagine a mental image for that, if you will — and in any regard, I am not enough of a philosopher, I’m afraid, to do so. (I say this as I’m working on a long review of a new set of Calvin Seerveld books which I’ll publish soon, by the way, DV.  Dr. Seerveld, I would suppose, might not locate the human ability to imagine in the brain as simply as Veith & Ristuccia do.) If you like to think about these things, certainly you should get this book and let your mind run wild, as you consider what the imagination is and what it means for our daily life.

The second part of each chapter is written by Rev. Ristuccia, who does,
basically, a vibrant, evocative Bible study of Ezekiel, and it is quite good. (The few lines where he compares the different visions
of Ezekiel with different Beatles albums is, uh, spectacular!) This bit of prophetic imagination is splendid, solid, helpful, and makes for good reading. Three cheers, right there! 

If you are not drawn to a critical evaluation of the
assumptions about these things — is Veith right about what the imagination is, and how it works, and is Ristuccia right in bringing Ezekiel to the table like this? —  then, by all means, read the book happily, and
be glad that this literary scholar/professor and Bible scholar/pastor have
dreamed up this very interesting book. You will be glad to consider how things like remembering and planning,
learning and listening, dreaming and hoping, are contingent on a robust,
redeemed imagination. You will learn about the goodness of how God made us, be reminded of the vexing ways sin can disrupt and distort our imaginative capacities, and will be invited to open up your efforts to enhance this aspect of your God-given mindfulness. 

There is, finally, a nice concluding appendix which will be of special
appeal to some, a suggestive reflection on how paying more sustained attention
to the imagination (and the arts) can help in our apologetics.  There are full books on this, thank
goodness, and it is nice to have these few extra pages included in Imagination
Redeemed. This is good stuff, and we should be sharing this book widely
– it will help us embrace this too-often ill-considered gift of our human-ness,
this part of the mind that is a gift of God designed to bolster and deepen our
faith and lives.

Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
(Eerdmans) $14.00  It isn’t every
day that we get to announce a mature, thoughtful, but popular-level book
released from the prestigious philosophy department of Calvin College;  we are happy to note that Dr. DeYoung
is a stellar prof at that productive, legendary department. Her scholarly work
has been on Aquinas and a previous excellent book called Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Deadly Sins and Their Remedies was,
in my view, not as widely read or valued as it should have been. I suppose it is fair to say that this new
one is a bit of a follow-up, related, obviously, to her study of sin and dysfunction
in the human heart and how culture can reflect the sad situation.

The books starts in an eloquent, but nonetheless funny way:
she is to give the heady, respected Stob lectures, and is wondering if it is
prideful, or even vainglorious, to be glad about such a thing.  Should she tell of her own struggle
with vainglory as she explores the topic in the lecture (or is that, in itself,
vainglorious?) Does not talking about her own foibles imply she is above the
fray? Is that reflective of some
distorted desire? She ends up
inviting her students to check her, making lists of instances of pride,
vainglory, or hints of false humility. 
Ha – even those pages were a razor’s edge, and she navigated it
wonderfully.  I was hooked, knowing
she would be a thoughtful, nuanced, and pleasant, an honest guide.  Early on, I realized that she would be
candid, but not gooey, erudite, but easy to read, even as she was rigorous with
herself and her readers. The book
maintains these standards and seems to me to be a quintessentially excellent
Eerdmans release.

First, you should recall this: vainglory was one of the
earliest, deadliest sins in that nasty list, but was dropped somewhere along
the line. Through nuances of
definition and translation, we now more commonly talk about pride.  Or vanity. Vainglory, though, is a particular sin, and although we
don’t use the word, much, we all know the sin. In others, and, I suspect, too often, in ourselves.  Especially (as DeYoung explains in one
very good section) those of us who are public figures, teachers, preachers,
artists, writers, all whose job it is to publicly impress others.  I suspect not a few BookNotes readers may find this important to their own developing virtue.

It is always good – at least for our little corner of the
book world here at Hearts & Minds and our little BookNotes niche – to see philosophers,
spiritual directors and pastors all endorse a new book with equal
enthusiasm.  Robert Roberts (who I
seem to think is a Kierkegaard scholar) has written deeply about the spirituality
of emotions and the psychology of virtue, says “DeYoung’s Vainglory is the best
thing out there on the vices of pride. 
It’s profound, readable, witty, telling, historically informative, and pastorally helpful.”  William
Mattison notes that “DeYoung writes with the wisdom and expertise of a
theologian of psychologist, yet with the accessibility of a college roommate
discussing life over a meal in the dining hall.”

And then there is this from Richard Foster, who is judicious
in his endorsements:

At last a book that takes head-on what is perhaps the capital vice of modern culture.
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung draws from the classical tradition of Christian moral
thinking to introduce us to the life-giving virtues, which alone can free us from the plague of narcissism that is the cultural zeitgeist
of our day. I recommend this book highly.

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I know, I know, I’ve already declared (months ago) that
Steve Garber’s exquisite, profound, deeply thoughtful book Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good (IVP; $16.00) will surely be the Book of the Year, which we will properly announce in our Best of
2014 awards column at the end of the year. 

There have been so many other good
releases this year — there will be a handful of other true very honorable
mentions. 

It may be that the just
released A New Heaven and a New Earth:
Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology by J. Richard Middleton (Baker Academic; $26.99) is the most
important book in its field, a magnificent, innovative, lasting contribution
to the field of Biblical studies.  I can hardly understate just how significant this new book is. 

Walter Brueggemann says, “when his book catches on, it will have an immense
impact…” 

James K.A. Smith notes
that “Richard Middleton has been one of my most important teachers. Every
encounter changes me.  This book is
no different…. if as widely read as I hope, this book would transform North
American Christianity.”

Interestingly for many Hearts & Minds customers, this
book about God’s promises to renew all things, is actually not unrelated to Garber’s
important voice about recovering a sense of vocation in a fallen, complex
world.  It is also somewhat related to what
has become our biggest selling item in years, the colorful, nuanced, delightfully interesting, and very useful DVD curriculum published by the Acton Institute, For the Life of the World. All three have some connections to
Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies graduate school in the 70s where they
were, in one way or another,
influenced by the legendary Christian philosopher of aesthetics, Calvin
Seerveld, and the philosopher cum Bible scholar Al Wolters who wrote the
often-cited Creation Regained: The Biblical Basis for a Reformational Worldview.  Like Transforming Vision, which Richard Middleton co-authored in 1984,
these innovative reformational thinkers at ICS did their high level scholarship
in light of the inherent connection between different acts of the Biblical
drama: creation-fall-redemption-and restoration/consummation. 

Here, on the left, is how my dear friend, Bonnie Liefer, an artist working for the CCO (Coalition for Christian Outreach) has shown the Biblical story, inspired somewhat by these same teachers back in the 1970s. Notice the themes from Genesis 1 and 2, Genesis 3, Matthew 27 and Revelation 22.

Richard’s passion to explain a full-orbed and fully Biblical holistic eschatology, the last square on the lower right, so to speak — God restoring all creation, following the revealed trajectory in the Bible of a good creation, a radical fall into idolatry and distortion, a decisive redemption by Christ, and a creation-wide restoration — was nurtured by that story, taught by scholars in that place in those years.

Understanding the historical-redemptive unfolding of the
Biblical drama in light of this grand story has been one of the most popular
developments in popular-level Biblical literacy in this generation and nearly
any church plant (in this remarkable era of so many fresh church plants)
nowadays, besides cool graphics and nifty names, will invite people to find their story
and meaning in light of the big story of God’s redemptive work in
the world. From emergent to missional, from Acts 29, The Gospel Coalition, the Fresh Expressions movement, to the 1001 new projects the Presbyterians are working on, the language of story, and the appreciation for the vision of the Kingdom of God and this renewed emphasis of the overarching trajectory of the Biblical narrative is central. It seems
that all kinds of folks are surprised by hope these days.

Yes, Surprised By
Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne; $24.99) by the
former Anglican Bishop, N.T. Wright, may have popularized these themes more than
early books of Wolters, Middleton, et al, but there is no doubt that Wright
himself was influenced by them (and was in conversation with them in the late 70s via his
friendship with Middleton’s co-author, Brian Walsh, whose recent work I
highlighted just a week or so ago, here.) 

If you do not know the magisterial, much-discussed Surprised by Hope you should know
it. It is surely one of my all time favorite books.  If you aren’t much of a
serious reader, the Surprised by Hope DVD curriculum expertly produced by Zondervan, is an informative, clear-headed, lecture series with N.T. Wright and is very creatively
produced.  I cannot recommend it enough.  Both the book and the DVD remind us,
to put it simply, that many of our most cherished assumptions (and much of our
popular vocabulary) about heaven and the afterlife are not Biblical.  

Of course it is more complicated, and
there are perplexing Biblical texts and notions from church history – for better
or worse – that must be examined, but the short version is sensible, but counter-intuitive for many, still: God’s Kingdom comes “on Earth as it is in
Heaven” and the end of the grand Biblical narrative (Revelation 21-22) is not about us leaving the Earth, but Emmanuel, again, God with us, in a restored, healed cosmos.  That is, Left Behind and
Hal Lindsey and apocalyptic bumper-stickers about the rapture notwithstanding, we don’t go to
heaven to live forever.  Heaven
comes to Earth.  The meek inherit the Earth. As Paul Marshall puts it in his tremendous book about living out the Christian life in various arenas and sides of life, “heaven is not my home.”

This is the carefully argued thesis of A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, Richard Middleton’s careful, complex, book of fascinating Biblical study.

SO IMPORTANT

I can hardly tell you (based on my own intentional
observations about these things for nearly 40 years) just how important this all is.  It is not arcane or an eccentric little side matter. In what feels like a lifetime
ago, I considered writing a book about it. 

WHAT GETS YOU UP IN THE MORNING?

You see, it is almost always the case that people live their lives in
light of some sense of what they expect in the future. Garber lapses into Latin and talks beautifully
about our telos.  “Why do you get up in the morning”
is a more playful way of asking it, he notes in the powerful first chapter of his
first book, Fabric of Faithfulness:
Weaving Together Believe and Behavior (IVP; $17.00.) What gets us up, our
sense of what matters, the goal of our purpose driven lives, our telos, always animates and
guides and informs and shapes how we live.  That is, our view of the end of things matters a lot.

When speaking on this very theme at Montreat College in
North Carolina last week – at a symposium for students on work and vocation,
arranged around keynote talks exploring themes of
creation/fall/redemption/restoration – I cited, I think, Romans 8, that
mentions that the whole creation is groaning, awaiting the salvation of
humankind so that the creation itself can be healed. John 3:16, I reminded them, uses the Greek word cosmos for world, which is to say that when Jesus
says “God so loved the world” He means just that. (And Leonard Sweet once quipped, if God so loves the world,
why don’t we?)  

Yes, we should care
about God’s good, if fallen world, because God loves it, and intends to rescue
it. The verse does not say that for God so loved our souls, or for God so loved our churches.  Cosmos.

When more than one professor thanked me profusely after that talk at Montreat, I shared
my own little concern: am I just firing people up with my natural talent for
enthusiasm, but not really saying much new? Maybe my big insight that God died
to save the universe, that the new creation is really this world restored, that (as C.S. Lewis put it) “matter matters,”
is really just a lot of stuff we all know, dressed up as some big paradigm
shift. But just not that urgent to keep saying, over and over, as I tend to.

But — and this is the
point, for now — both professors insisted that they hear “all the time” people
saying that we need not care for this Earth since “it’s all going to burn,
anyway.”  Yep, we live inspired by our view of the end, and if we think God is whisking us off to some other place — we’re “only visiting this planet” as one famous Christian rocker said — then why care about current events, or much of daily life, really?  I was once scolded (one can’t make this stuff up) for caring about world hunger because, as my critic explained, the worse things get here on Earth, the sooner Jesus will come back to carry us home to heaven.  So, let ’em starve was the take-away of that awful eschatology. And it made a difference in that person’s daily living, including a blatant disregard for the poor and starving.

One professor of environmental studies at Montreat says he oddly gets asked from
evangelical church folks why a Christian college would teach ecology (again, since it is all going to burn.) Interestingly, he has also been asked this by secular colleagues from state universities as well. Why indeed would you (at your Christian college) teach environmental studies, they wondered, if your religion tells you it is all going to burn?  Odd, both the skeptics from the church
and the secular university each assumed that a Christian college wouldn’t care about
caring about the Earth. Because God is going to destroy it all anyway and “take us to heaven to live with him there” as the beloved carol Silent Night puts it.

Which is just one example of why we’ve got work to do to
give a better account, to the church and to the world, of God’s gracious (Triune)
goodness in creating the world, blessing it, sustaining it, and – after our rebellion and tragic fall from
grace, the “vandalization of shalom” as Cornelius Plantinga put it in his
excellent Not The Way It’s Supposed to Be
– Christ’s own redemptive work to reclaim and restore the world He so
loves. That “salvation is creation
healed” (as Howard Snyder and Joel Scandrett put it in their great book of that
title) needs to be proclaimed with Christ-exalting clarity. That God is not scraping the covenant
made with all the critters (see Genesis 9) and nuke the creation, but intends to
remain faithful to the promises, and will remake and restore and heal the world is a
major theological truth that must be understood and explained, taught and
preached, appreciated and lived.

J. RICHARD MIDDLETON: AN AUTHOR YOU SHOULD KNOW

Enter Dr. J. Richard Middleton, (PhD, Free University of
Amsterdam), whose new book will help us more than any other serious study yet
done on this topic. 

Middleton is professor of Biblical worldview and exegesis
at Northeastern Seminary and adjunct professor of theology at Roberts Wesleyan
College. (He has also taught at
Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School for a season.) I have already mentioned that he co-wrote The Transforming Vision and its sequel, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be with Brian Walsh. His large, scholarly work on what it
means to be human, exploring the nature and consequences of the Biblical
teaching about the imago dei is
called The Liberating Image (Brazos Press;
$27.00) and it has been considered by some to be the definitive book on the
subject. Heavy as it may be, it is
an extraordinary work, with vast implications, and should be on the shelf of
anyone with serious interested in Biblical theology. It is that important.

A New Heaven and a New Earth is also a bit hefty, over 300 pages, some of it fairly
detailed.  But it is not designed
only for the guild, or Bible professors or even clergy, but is offered as a
serious gift for anyone who wants to read and study and learn. It is, like Liberating Image, so significant in its research and so fresh in its
articulation, that it might be considered definitive. The great wordsmith and thoughtful preacher Cornelius
Plantinga observes that it is “comprehensive, learned, accessible, and
exciting.”  Al Wolters says he is inclined to call it “magnificent.”  Terence Fretheim of Luther Seminary
says it “deserves wide attention.”

We helped “launch” this book at the very first place it was sold, last weekend’s conference on imagination and innovation in the workplace at Redeemer Presbyterian’s NYC Center for Faith and Work. Apparently Keller’s team there thought it was important enough to have him speak at their famous yearly gathering about this brand new book.

The book opens with a poignant story of Richard as a young man, sitting with a friend atop a glorious mountain in his Jamaican homeland. They climbed there to enjoy a beautiful
sunrise, and were deeply taken by the sublime beauty of it all.  As they praised God for this moment,
Richard’s friend said “what a shame it is all going to burn up.”  Even as a young guy, he recoiled. A strong evangelical Christian with early familiarity and love for the Bible, Richard sensed that this was
not so.  He set himself, he tells
us, to explore this theme in the Bible, and it has been a passion of his ever since.

HYMNS WITH BAD LINES AND BAD IDEAS

He pokes at bit at some old hymns that talk about going to
heaven, to live there forever. 
From obvious examples like “I’ll Fly Away” or “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” to lines in “Love Divine, All Love Excelling” or “My Jesus, I Love Thee” to “Silent Night” and
many others, he documents our fuzzy thinking about all this. (Wasn’t it the revival preacher A.W.
Tozer who said the church doesn’t have to tell lies, we just get together and
sing them?) I have my own
list of stupid lines that I find detrimental, and these few pages are striking and will cause us to think.  Again, we have our work cut out for us
if we are going to unlearn centuries of poor articulation and outright unbiblical
ideas.

After this opening foray in Part 1, sharing the journey “from creation to
eschaton” and showing the real plot of the Biblical storyline, Middleton walks us
through in Part 2 what he calls “holistic salvation” in the Old Testament.  From “the exodus as a paradigm of
salvation” to “earthly flourishing in law, wisdom, and prophecy,” and even the
nature of the coming of God in both judgment and salvation, he offers
excellent, illuminating, clear Bible study, including some formulations that
may be new to some.  This is rich, fresh, solid stuff.

Whether you
are at a mainline church or an independent, evangelical one, whether you are
highly liturgical or less so, I am convinced some of this material will simply
rock your world. You will be made to reconsider shibboleths and sacred cows and you will have “aha” moments.There are
fascinating and useful footnotes, too (a lot of them — hooray!) and Richard’s passionate insight about the
Biblical text is matched by his fluency in the most important literature, old
and recent, scholarly and popular.

In the next 50 or so pages, Middleton offers in Part 3 two
strong chapters under the headline “The New Testament’s Vision of Cosmic
Renewal” and here he echoes N.T. Wright’s good work about how the resurrection
of the body implies so very much about our future hope.  (Middleton also explores “the
restoration of rule” which is excellent and generative, drawing somewhat on his previous work on our task as image bearers) even as he points us to
what it means to say that God intends “the restoration of all things.”  Again, this is dynamic, fresh, and for some, new, radical material. I have not read a book about the Bible as exciting as this in years!

For what it is worth, I had an advanced copy of the manuscript, which is how I had the good fortune of getting to study this long before it arrived this week.

BUT WHAT ABOUT…

Part 4 of A New Heaven and a New Earth looks helpfully at problem texts for holistic
eschatology.  After my presentation at
Montreat College’s symposium on this topic last week folks
lined up to talk about the rapture, the curious I Peter passage about the
elements being destroyed (or does it say “disclosed” as any good study Bible
will note?) and other contested texts. This part of the book is immensely helpful, and you will need it if you are using the creation-fall-redemption-restoration drama as part of your own spiritual formation work.  If you see salvation not as an escape plan from the world, but as a “homecoming” and restoration to our place in a (re)new(ed) earth, these few problem passage must be addressed.

The Greek word used in the popular “all things new” promise of
Revelation 22 is the word that means re-newed (not “brand new.” They had a
word for that, but that isn’t what John saw in his vision; it is a restored earth, not a brand new earth, indicating some continuity, between, as they say, this world and the next.

Why do we continue to think of eternal life as some ethereal place for
disembodied souls (and worse yet, why do we say dumb stuff when a child dies,
like “God needed another angel” as if humans ever become angels?) The Biblical tradition is does not
offer some dream-world, some woo-woo spiritual soup into which we all merge — Christians give a different account for our hope than do Hindus, Buddhists or Platonists.  

We care about the environment because God has pledged his Holy Self to it. 

And Jesus entered it, and died for it.  He — remember Colossians 1 — holds it all together, and is reconciling “all things” through the blood of His cross.

The Bible teaches that this
good world will be saved and restored and renewed and transformed as we, in renewed,
resurrection bodies, rule once again in some kind of culturally developed paradise.  As the very good book on technology and digital culture by John Dyer (who did a workshop Montreat) puts it, we move “from the garden to the city.”

SO WHAT?

Does all of this really matter that much?  I will give you my short answer, and tell you about how
Richard answers it, as well.

As I tried to develop in my passionate Montreat College
talk, I am convinced (as I wrote earlier) that how we think of the future does
indeed effect the tone and vision of our contemporary lifestyles. It’s that telos thing mentioned previously: how we think about the future, our end-goal, colors the sort of hope we have now, which shapes the kind of life we live, the things we invest in, the stuff we do, and how we do it, and how we explain it to others.

When a couple finds themselves to be
pregnant, it slowly changes everything: the birth which is to come starts to
effect daily choices, from nutritional decisions to economic ones to even legal matters. The couple grows closer in their love
as they dream together about the good future they will share with their
offspring. They start preparing
the baby’s room, shopping for a crib, picking names. Oh yes, this future blessing has present consequences.  The reality of what is to come rubs off in the here and now,
and nothing is ever the same. The
present itself is pregnant and the future is like a magnet, pulling us toward
its hope.  As we sing at
Christmastime, “the hopes and fears of all the years” are met in Christ. This alludes to our past longings and
anxieties, but perhaps also to those regarding the years yet to come. I truly believe that our daily
discipleship is deepened and enhanced and given direction by a proper
understanding of the new creation God has promised to bring into our
midst. We start to live in the “already” even though we know the Kingdom’s fullness is “not yet.”

N.T. Wright assures us of the confidence we can have, given that Christ Himself has walked into and through death, and come out alive on the other side, in the reality of new creation. It is, he says, like a call we may get in the middle of the night from an earlier time zone.  It may seem like night to us, but — in fact! — the caller is calling us from the future, and it is bright as day there.  Yes, with Christ’s Easter victory and ascension, we know the future is assured.  He is risen, in the body, a first hint of the new creation which is ours.

David Arms offers this artful rendering of the creation/fall/redemption/restoration story:

As Marva Dawn and Tom Wright and Brian Walsh have all
written, our current-day faith communities can be seen as actors doing
improvisation, acting out a missing scene or two in coherent ways, inspired and
informed by the parts of the play we have: the first part and the last
part. We know how the playwright worked in the past.  We know how the story resolves. Here in the middle of time,
we improvise, knowing the plot of which we are a part, and knowing how that
story ends. 

Understanding the
ending correctly is essential for getting our daily work now right. This stuff really does matter, and it matters a lot.  Which is why I think this book is so very right for our times, when there is renewed interest in the fate of the Earth and the full picture of the Story of God.

Here is how our friend Sylvia Keesmaat (co-author of Colossians Remixed and editor of The Advent of Justice) puts it, in her rave review blurb inside the front pages:

Richard Middleton is talking about a revolution! Why should Christians settle for the anemic goal of eternity spent in heaven when the Bible’s robust vision is one of a resurrected humanity on the new earth? Set your imagination free from the chains of other-worldly dualism, and enter into the brilliant and fascinating world of the biblical story, where the vision of all things redeemed breathes new life into our discipleship.

Richard Middleton also wants to show how this has vast consequences; almost like he’s talking about a revolution. He ends A
New Heaven and a New Earth with a major section exploring how this all
might matter now. 

He calls this
section (perhaps unwisely, in my view) “The Ethics of the Kingdom.”  He does not mean only ethics as some
might think of that word – what we are to believe about euthanasia or lying or genetic engineering or sexuality)
but he means how we live out our daily life, in a full-orbed, multi-faceted,
way that is animated by a Kingdom vision, embodied in society. 
He starts with Luke 4, that famous passage where Jesus reads from an
Isaiah passage which alludes to the Year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25.  This Nazareth manifesto insists that
Jesus is the long-awaited God of Israel who is bringing this new era of shalom and grace
to the culture. Richard’s explication of the implications of this Jubilee
theme is remarkable.

He begins the second chapter in this last section like this:

In the receding chapter I argued that Jesus’s proclamation
of the kingdom of God in his sermon at Nazareth was good news because it
addressed his hearer’s full-bodied, concrete earthly needs. But the episode at
Nazareth did not end on a positive note, with the praise of his audience. It is
the burden of this chapter to explore how Jesus went on to complicate this good
news, so that it would not be understood superficially and self-righteously.
Rather, the good news of the kingdom can be grasped only through a radical
challenge that requires a fundamental reorientation of life.

I wish I could summarize this provocative chapter where he
does close readings of many gospel passages, and draws out important mandates for our Jubilee vision. He is both prophetic and pastoral, here, and I appreciate how he warns us – including
those who are fond of worldview education, and kingdom language – to seek God’s
Spirit to guide us in these perilous days ahead. I have read this chapter twice, now, and commend it to you
as an excellent way to end this extraordinary, vital work.

Ahh, but that isn’t even the end. 

There is an appendix that will appeal to those interested in
Christian scholarship, in other books on this topic, and on recent church history. The appendix is called “Whatever Happened to the New Earth”
and there Middleton annotates a variety of books and schools of thought, explaining in this
literature review the twists and turns of the story where we’ve tended to get
this topic so very wrong.  He does
review Wright, and Randy Alcorn, and others who have in recent years reminded
us that (as Wright put it in our
backyard a few years ago, preaching from his book How God Became King) “Orthodox Christian doctrine affirms the
rescue of the created order itself, rather than the rescue of saved souls from the created order.”

Richard is not alone in making a case for a very robust,
very multi-dimensional, very “this worldly” sense of God’s rescue plan.  He is not alone in insisting that this
is exactly what the Bible teaches, misunderstandings and heresies and bad pop
theology notwithstanding. But with A New
Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology he has become the
preeminent scholar who has given us the preeminent work on this vexing, vital
subject.  It is my hope that every
Bible teacher, every pastor and preacher, and every Christian who longs for a
more coherent, meaningful, faithful daily discipleship struggles long and hard
with the content of this book. It is that important.  Our visions of the future, and our faithfulness to the
Biblical story, matters more than we may know. 

Getting this right is urgent.  This book will help.

AND A FREE BOOK —  A $15.00 VALUE. OFFER GOOD UNTIL 11-16-14

To sweeten the deal just a bit, if you buy this book now at our sale price we will –  this week only
– send you also a free copy of one of my all time favorite books, a little book that
is as life-changing as any I know on these topics, Richard Mouw’s lovely When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah
and the New Jerusalem (Eerdmans; $15.00.) 

You know (and you will know better, if you read the Richards — Middleton and Mouw) that humankind was given the grand task to “tend
and keep the garden” which, as Genesis 1 puts it, means we are to “fill the
Earth.” This so-called “cultural mandate” implies God wants us to cultivate or “fill”
creation by developing its glorious potential. From schools to CD players, from games to governments, art to astrophysics, humankind
has filled the Earth. Mouw reminds us that the Psalmist claims that the Earth
is the Lords and the “fullness thereof” which is an allusion to the
“filling” – which is to say, the development of human culture, skyscrapers and all. God must love the Beatles and Monet and chocolate and ipads,
perhaps. In the famous “wealth of
the nations” passage of Isaiah 60, this filling, this stuff, the cultural
artifacts (like lumber from Lebanon) are renewed and purified for the new
creation, another signal that we are not destined to inhabit some disembodied
heaven singing worship songs for eternity. Isaiah and John imagine a new city filled with good
stuff, animals and culture and restored civic life. “What are [the international commercial vessels] the ships of Tarsish doing here?” Mouw asks?

I hope you wonder that, too. Knowing at least a bit about what God is working towards will help us discern norms and patterns for our engagement in culture, now.  We will give you this great book for free if you order
Richard Middleton’s A New Heaven and a
New Earth right away. While
supplies last, naturally — we’re not in the new Earth yet, so we have some limits. Our offer ends November 16, 2014. 

The BookNotes offer of 20% OFF A New Heaven and a New Earth remains indefinitely, of course,
but we can only give away the Mouw book for the next few days. I hope you agree that these two books, one on sale and one for free, could be very helpful for you and yours.

BookNotes

                   Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333

Crazy.  That’s what we sometimes call our busy schedule, schlepping books here and there, serving others with a few boxes selected for a small event, or a truck load for a larger gig, often two or more events at the same time, and, all the while, keeping the shop open, six days a week. Of course Beth and I enjoy this “on the road” aspect of our work (and we couldn’t do it without our dedicated staff who work hard each and every day in Dallastown.) Sometimes, though, we grow weary. I’ve heard people say that they get tired just listening to our wacky schedules.  We sometimes wonder if it is healthy, being stretched and stressed, juggling a too few many balls in the air some months, so often in a hurry. 

We loved our time at Montreat College this week, and respect the remarkably good work they are doing there at that small, liberal arts college tucked into a mountainous cove in the Black Mountains of North Carolina.  Doing workshops and selling books and speaking there, serving their “Faith and Vocation Symposium,” was surely one of the most memorable and rewarding things we’ve done this year. Thanks to folks there for hospitality and receptivity (and for help with the book packing!)  It was a whirlwind event, but very meaningful for us.

Yes, we are having an author appearance, book reading, and slow church conversation with Chris, starting at 7:00 pm over at the nearby Living Word Community Church, 2530 Cape Horn Road, Red Lion, PA. (We’re very grateful for their support of our occasional projects, and their great coffee bar, free parking and warm space to host a book signing like this.)

conventional agriculture experts view the soil as merely a convenient way to hold up the plant while it is fed from the top in the form of ever-increasing doses of chemical fertilizers.  He describes this process as superimposing a mechanistic mindset onto a biological world.  Nature, in contrast, feeds the plants from the bottom up, through the soil. Thus, for the conscientious farmer, the health of the soil is a top priority.

Western Christianity has similarly adopted shortcuts that are the church equivalent of imposing a mechanistic mindset onto a biological world. When evaluated in terms of efficiency — defined as the easiest way to get someone from here to there, from unsaved to saved, from unchurched to churched — these top-down inputs seem to yield impressive short-term results: they can sometimes pack the pews. So, on the upside, the church has been busy.

But then, this: “on the downside, it’s not clear at what long-term costs these methods have been employed or how helpful and sustainable they will be going forward.”

It is clear that even those of us with very good intentions, who have read books about slowing down, practicing spiritual disciplines, keeping Sabbath, focusing on quality, being deeply faithful rather then merely popular, we too often are undone by our own bad habits and co-opted imaginations. (Alan Fadling’s An Unhurried Life: Following Jesus’ Rhythms of Work and Rest is just one recent book that I found very, very helpful and wise in this area.)  As Jamie Smith has reminded us in his stunningly important Desiring the Kingdom, our passions and desires and habits and practices are most often informed more by the secular liturgies of the world than the often thin formation generated within the local church.

Thanks to those who have extended very warm words about my fast and furious closing plenary talk at the Montreat Faith and Vocation Symposium. I hear they might post videos at the Montreat College website of all four talks, each which were quite good. The first was on creation/vocation, by Tom Nelson, author of Work Matters;  then the fall and sorrow was explore profoundly by Steve Garber, author of Fabric of Faithfulness and Visions of Vocation (starting with a Mumford & Sons song); next, a broad and decisive redemption was gloriously proclaimed, eloquently and powerfully spoken by Messiah College chaplain, Donald Opitz, co-author of Learning for the Love of God: A Guide to Academic Faithfulness; lastly, there was yours truly, preaching about the adventure of living out this hope of a restored creation, the implications of this kind of big gospel, a closing with a meditation on “Standing in the Breech” from the new album by that name by Jackson Browne.  This grand Biblical story that calls us to work in the world, for the life of the world, by realizing that God’s Kingdom is best known as the creation regained, is not only taught by the books I drew upon in my final talk —  When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem by Richard J. Mouw and Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church — but, interestingly enough, also in this wonderful Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus.  The vision of a wholistic worldview, if you will, shaped and informed by the epic rescue plan portrayed in the flow of the drama of Scripture, is what we talked about with the students and faculty at Montreat (especially applying it to college life, majors, callings, and careers.)  It is also what Smith and Patterson remind us of in the dynamic and evocative middle part of Slow Church and apply it to the nature of the local church.

Just listen to the conversation topics in the “second course” of this meal (in keeping with their slow food theme, each unit of the book is envisioned as one of a three course meal.)

I hope you saw our last BookNotes post — they are all archived here at the website, of course.  Some have subscribed and get them coming into their inbox each week, others just click through to the website from twitter or facebook.  The formatting is always a little ragged when it goes out via email, but if you click on the top headline, it will take you to the somewhat nicer viewing on the real page.

Last time I told you about my affection for Brian Walsh, his books co-authored with Richard Middleton (Transforming Vision, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be), Steve Bouma-Predigar (Beyond Homelessness) and Sylvia Keesmaat, (Colossians Remixed.) I think these are stunningly important, well-written, passionate and wise.

But, per usual, that was the set up, the background, helping you realize a bit of the backstory of the three new ones I told you about. 

I explained about an important, if lesser known book that had been out of print and has just been newly reprinted in an updated version, Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in Dangerous Times (Wipf & Stock) and a newly re-issued set of daily readings for Advent (co written with three others, including Richard and Sylvia) called Advent of Justice.  I closed with a summary of the brand new St. John Before Breakfast, homilies, reflections and some liturgies that have emerged from Brian’s work with a campus community at the University of Toronto.  It is provocative, powerful, and generative.  Again, it isn’t terribly well known (self-published as it is by their little Wine Before Breakfast worshiping community) which makes my short review so important.  We need to help get the word out about it, and these other rich resources. I sincerely hope you were pleased to hear about these remarkable books, although the pleasure was mine to get to write about them a bit.

You can read or re-read it here; perhaps you could pass it on or share the news…

Between chasing a chipmunk out of the store today — you should have seen the little rascal scurrying and literally jumping off of a big stack of Old Testament texts, doing a little flip — and packing our rented van to head to our next venture (speaking and selling books at a symposium on faith, vocation, and work for college students at Montreat College in North Carolina) and getting ready for our evening with Chris Smith (author of Slow Church) next Friday, November 7th, I realized a ton of great new books have arrived. 

They are the kind of books that I simply cannot not tell you about.  Beth and I will be on the road, and if I don’t post something now about them, I’ll be thinking about it non-stop for the next nine hours as we drive down the edge of the now snowy Appalachians.

So, then.  Here ya go:  we list the regular price.  We’ll deduct the BookNotes sale discount of 20% off if you order them from us. The order form page is secure — just type in what you want. Easy.

The Way of Tea and Justice: Rescuing the World’s Favorite Beverage From It’s Violent History Becca Stevens (Jericho Books) $22.00   Maybe you know the deep, profound, tender, feisty writings of this strong woman, who has given us lovely, thoughtful, good books in the past.  Her own memoir, called Thistle was powerful and wonderfully written.  Here she tells the story of her cafe and soap-making business that employs former prostitutes and addicts, giving them a new lease on life.  Who knew this work with Thistle Farms and the Thistle Stop Cafe would end up not only being central to new stories and new lives for countless woman who have been abused, trafficked, silenced, but has become part of an astonishing movement to bring freedom and fair wages to women producers worldwide where tea and trafficking are linked by oppression and the opiate wars. As it says on the inside cover, “in this journey of triumph for impoverished tea laborers, hope for cafe workers, and insight into the history of tea, Becca sets out to defy the odds and prove that love is the most powerful force for transformation on Earth.”

Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God Timothy Keller (Dutton) $26.95  I probably don’t need to tell you that Tim is a thoughtful and articulate spokesperson for historic, Reformed faith, and is situated in Manhattan doing successful ministry with some of the world’s leading artists, financiers, designers, movers and shakers, along with the ordinary, forgetaboutit New Yawkers. Skeptic, seeker, struggler — anyone wanting a mature, no-nonsense, theologically mature exploration on the meaning and practice of Christian prayer will find this exceptionally valuable.  Given that Tim’s own wife and he himself have suffered serious health issues (not to mention the stress of such a high-profile, demanding leadership calling) it should not come as a surprise that they have learned to practice daily prayer, and have considered its meaning, carefully, deeply.  What might be surprising is how it didn’t come naturally, and how he has had to ponder, think, study, and obey the commands (and take in the promises) of the God of the Bible.  Rev. Keller, as you might guess, is not fully comfortable with some of the more subjective mysticism floating around out there, and he does a good job distinguishing Christian spirituality that is wise and grounded from more trendy sorts of fascination with the inner life. More should be said, but this is an important book, a rare substantive contribution to a field that is loaded with titles, some good, some less so.  Agree with all his conclusions or not, take up all his suggestions or not, this is very higly recommended.

Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More — Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist Karen Swallow Prior (Nelson) $24.99  Oh my, where to begin? I want to read this because I don’t know much about the remarkable woman who came alongside William Wilberforce in his on-going struggle against slavery (perhaps you recall her small role in the film Amazing Grace.) I am sure such a valiant woman’s story will be very, very valuable to many, and I for one need to know more about this era, and her role.   Secondly, Karen Swallow Prior is the smart and sassy author — her first book was a memoir about influential books in her life — and I think I’d line up to buy whatever book she had on offer after that brilliant debut. And, then there are these magnificent, ebullient blurbs: sometimes you pick up a book just because so many people you really respect rave about it.  From the foreword by Eric Metaxas (whose earlier book on Wilberforce was fantastic) to Richard Mouw to Mark Noll to Ann Voskamp to Leonard Sweet, many are insisting it is one of the best of the year.  Sweet (who knows a thing or two about the Brits in this era, by the way) writes, “Here is that rarity of a book: scholarship of impeccable rigor that’s also a compulsive page-turner. Reading Karen Swallow Prior feels like a privilege.” Yes!

The Drama of Living: Becoming Wise in the Spirit  David F. Ford (Brazos Press) $19.99 

Again, with this release, Brazos shows themselves to be one of the most important presses in the North American religious publishing landscape. I’ve been waiting for this sequel to The Shape of Living for, oh, gee, maybe fifteen years.  I read that book about the time my father died in car wreck (not realizing there was a chapter on death) and it took my breath away.  Subtle, nuanced, deep, beautiful without being flamboyant, this wise, thoughtful theologian has given us practical theology and a spirituality of life itself. It isn’t simple, but it is eloquent.

Endorsements for the US edition are from the likes of Ellen Charry of Princeton, Geoffrey Wainwright of Duke, and the award-winning poet Micheal O’Siadhail (to whom the book is dedicated, by the way, and whose poems enhance the text.)  In the acknowledgements he thanks (among many, many others) Rowan Williams, Richard Hays, Jean Vanier, Randi Raskover, (formerly of York College here – hey, hey) and the Irish Presbyterian mystic and Wild Goose songwriter John Bell.  Kudos to Brazos editors Bob Hosack and Lisa Ann Cockrel for working on this project.  I cannot wait to spend some slow, quiet time with this.

The ZimZum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage Rob and Kristen Bell (HarperOne) $24.99  I suppose you know Bell’s pushing the boundaries, very creative, delightfully interesting and poetic writing style. I think you know he speaks to and for many, many people of diverse faith.  I think he brings a lot of very helpful, Biblically-informed insight, and here he writes — perhaps almost like he did in that amazing little book on grief (Drops Like Stars) about a very personal, human situation: marriage. Tzimtzum is a Hebrew word, used at least in the Rabbinic traditions, as a way of getting at this energy of of creation. It’s about mutuality, and I suppose it is fair to say this new book includes a little sciency stuff, a little theology, a little self-help practical advise rooted in the deeper mysteries of grace, something built deep into the very fabric of the universe.  There are some funny dialogues between Rob and his wife, and one I read touched me right away. 

Do a google video search and you’ll find a number of promo video clips with Rob and Kristen talking about this “space between” a couple — big, wild, heart-breaking, sacred.  He’s going on tour with Oprah, too.

Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, And How They Can Change Your Life Eric Metaxas

(Dutton) $27.95  I am sure you know: this guy is a way too talented follow, an amazing writer, a great conversationalists, a fabulously entertaining storyteller, funny as all get out (yes, it is true, he used to write for Veggie Tales) and his early books were very clever, straight one questions-and-replies for seekers and skeptics.  This sort of brings all of this together in an amazingly energetic study and apologetic for that one-word title that has been appropriated by everybody from C.S. Lewis (always worth re-reading) to the smarmy tele-evangelist that is hardly worth watching for a moment.  Yes, this topic has been done and redone, explored well, and poorly.  This books has tons of fun and exemplary endorsements — from the hilarious Susan Isaacs and very smart actress to the artist Makoto Fujimura to the Daily Beast journalists Kirsten Powers. 

Novelist Brett Lott says it has “the cool rain of intelligent truth.”  This is storytelling, science, and a bit of journalistic magic: profound, curious, honest.  As one author put it, “As a secular reader, I come to such books with a certain resistance. Metaxas won me over instantly by meeting me where I live. His intellectual honesty, coupled with an openhearted wonder at the sheer breadth of human experience, is irresistible.”  You should buy two: one for yourself, and one to give to that person you are thinking of right now. You know who.

God’s Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation Robert K. Johnston (Baker Academic) $25.99  Wow, I have got to get to this, and soon. Johnston is one of the premier faith and film scholars, having written widely about the common grace that comes to us through engagement with the arts, and specifically, the art of cinema. As Michael Frost says, “Johnston weaves a marvelously rich tapestry that opens up our understanding of how God’ whispers to us through nature, conscience, and culture. Who else could reference baroque art, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ingmar Bergman, C.S. Lewis, and Star Wars in such a scholarly and yet readable fashion. I thoroughly enjoyed every page.”

Richard Peace (who himself has a lovely book in hearing God’s voice in natural surroundings, among others, in service, in solitude and the like) says it is “seminal., one that greatly enlarges our understanding of the multiple ways in which God is present in the world.” Amos Young says this “reconsideration of general revelation moves the discussion  light years beyond the sterile binaries” and says it is “a new starting point for twenty-first century theological reflection on important matters regarding the human experience of and encounter with God.”

I could cite other rave reviews and interesting observations about this brand new, fresh release. I think it is going to be much discussed, and you should know about it.

Rumours of Glory: A Memoir Bruce Cockburn (HarperOne) $28.99

I zipped through the more than 500 pages of this in a few days over a weekend — my friend Jeff blessed me generously by giving me an early manuscript that he somehow acquired, and I’ve hardly been happier all year. What a read! How fun to revisit old songs and earlier albums, learning about them all.

Although, truth be told, my musical hero comes across as I feared: Mr. Cockburn no longer calls himself a Christian (although he is very, very candid about the earnest and thoughtful faith he held for years) and he is a bit spicy in his language (nothing new there.) He’s an eccentric dude, we know, and I realized this more and more in this very revealing memoir. He is honest about a handful of romantic relationships that haven’t worked out. Like many artists, he’s got some issues; he is also a remarkably virtuous person in many ways.  His narrations of making music, writing songs, preforming with other great musicians, his production of his many albums — I know each one by heart! — is fantastic and a must for true fans. If you are interested in popular music, or care at all about this telling of his tale, this really is a great book.

Cockburn’s well known lefty activism, his philanthropy, his reporting from all over the globe, his travel-based research and bearing witness to repression, war, poverty, ecological crisis, and more makes the book not just entertaining and a good read, it is riveting, vital, important, deeply moving at times. We need to hear this stuff — from the awful ways in which the US funded torturers and death squads in Central America to the way the “radium rain” came down after Chernobyl to the land mind issues in Cambodia and Africa… one really learns a lot from this, and his explanations are often first hand and come from solid research. This is first hand story-telling, with politics and prayer, romance and sex, fear and bravado, song-writing and art, mixed together in a life story of one of the more important pop singers of our time.

Jackson Browne (who appears in it, of course) says

This is the story of the development of one of the most astute and compelling songwriters in the English language. Bruce Cockburn’s journey, both as a musician and as a thinker, draws us with him into spiritual and political realms and becomes a chronicle of his engagement in the major issues of the past thirty years. Rumours of Glory is highly personal account by one whose quest for expression engages the most important social questions of our time. 

Lewis Hyde, author of that amazing book on creativity and generosity, The Gift (which inspired Bruce’s great song of that same name) says “Cockburn gives us a finely-grained account of the ground from which he harvested some of the finest songs of his generation.” 

I have written elsewhere about my appreciation for Cockburn, and I’ve reviewed at BookNotes Brian Walsh’s book Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination, but I might add here, for those reading along — I first discovered Brennan Manning through the liner notes of Cockburn’s Big Circumstance album, and I once gave Cockburn a bi-lingual collection of some Nicaraguan poetry, while back stage chatting with him, Sam Phillips and Mark Heard. Unforgettable.  Not in the book, though. 

Let us know if you are interested in the huge, autographed, numbered box set of CDs that go along with this (8 CDs, one an entire disc of previously unreleased or rare releases) and a video of concert footage, as well as a 90-some page booklet that is said to be beautiful. It retails for $149.99 but we will sell it on sale, for $20.00 less– $129.99, if you just have to have it.  It, too, is called Rumours of Glory: Limited Edition Boxed Set.

Small Talk: Learning from My Children About What Matters Most Amy Julia Becker (Zondervan) $15.99  Becker writes about faith, family, and disability for parents.com, the  New Yorker Times, The Christian Century, Huffington Post, etc. Her first book (A Good and Perfect Gift about “a little girl named Penny” was excellent, and widely admired. (It was named one of the Top Ten Religious Books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly.)  This just came in today, so I haven’t yet read any of it, but we all know that sometimes God uses the smallest voices to teach us great truths.  The three main parts of these essays are “Holding On” “Letting Go” and “Growing Up” and I think it looks very, very good. excellent writers I admire give rave reviews — women like Margot Starbuck, Rachel Marie Stone, Ellen Painter Dollar, Rebekah Lyons. Looking for a smart, entertaining,reminder of the joys and issues of parenting, by a beautiful, thoughtful writer. This looks fabulous!

Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life  Marjorie J. Thompson (Westminster/John Knox) $17.00  This newly revised, expanded, updated edition just came out, and I’m glad it did.  It carries a new foreword by the always eloquent Barbara Brown Taylor (as well as the classic one by Henri Nouwen.)  Whenever anyone asks about good primers on spiritual formation, or a handbook for deeper growth, this is always one of the first I think of.  From the contemplative practices of meditation to the corporate practice of worship, from Bible study to prayer, this offers nuanced, wise insights and helpful, good advice. She worked for over a decade as the Director of Congregational Ministry with Upper Room Ministries.  We recommend this as a tool for your work, or, as Taylor says, “a map to living water, along with a packing list of what you might need…”

BookNotes

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Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in a Dangerous Time  Second Edition  Brian J. Walsh (Wipf & Stock) $15.00  

A few weeks ago the prominent mainline denominational magazine Christian Century did an interview with me, an honor in which we are still delighting. In that interview I was asked to name some authors that would appeal to the Century readership that they may not know well. I named the spiritual formation author Ruth Haley Barton, the Biblical scholar and philosopher of aesthetics Calvin Seerveld, and a few others they needed to edit out due to space constraints.  I was quick to mention the astute and provocative writings of Brian Walsh.  His several works are among my favorite books, each for different reasons. 

I am not sure if Subversive Christianity, a small paperback published in 1992, was the first book on which I was invited provide feedback on the manuscript, or if it was the first book that mentioned me in the acknowledgements, but I think it was. So I feel pretty connected to this, and hope our friends and customers will take notice of this brand new edition. The first edition has been long out of print – until now, with this new reprinted, expanded version.  My old copy was certainly one of my most prized possessions.  That is, until I gave it away, or maybe sold it out from under myself.  I’ve been personally awaiting this reprint for more than a decade!

The first edition of the book was published by a faithful little indie press, but was never well known. It was just four meaty chapters, each given as speeches or keynote talks, all delivered in the harsh Cold War years following the seminal Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview, co-authored by Walsh with Richard Middleton in 1984.  Brian was carefully reading Walter Brueggemann – your welcome, Brian, for turning you on to The Prophetic Imagination, which for some deluded reason I fancy having done, even though I suppose it isn’t even true, since you thank Richard Middleton for that lead. On some pages, Subversive Christianity could be called “Brueggemann-esque.” With a tone of lament and pathos and a profound belief in how the Biblical text can serve as a counter-narrative to imperial design, evoking a new imagination, it offers fresh energy to break out of the accommodated captivity of the people of God. 

Transforming Vision, published by InterVarsity Press is still considered by many to be the best book on the development of a Christian worldview, and the socio-religious / cultural critique is strong there. (The brief history of dualism and rise of secular idols is exceedingly helpful.)  But it becomes even more incisive and impassioned in Subversive…  In some ways Walsh was following the journey of his favorite Canadian rock star, whose Humans and Inner City Front albums documented his shift from a pleasant, folkie vibe informed by his evangelical conversion (“Wondering Where the Lions Are” you know) to a multi-ethnic, urban neighborhood and the music’s increasing awareness of the deep brokenness in our lives, personally and culturally.  Cockburn was singing more about “the falling dark,” about regret and toxic pollution, social injustice, his divorce, even as Walsh took up similar concerns. Brian was involved in the work of urban mission and public justice, trying to say no to the idols of the age (so clearly explained in The Transforming Vision) and immersing himself in the edgy discourse that eventually found voice in Truth Is Stranger Than it Used to Be (still the best book on postmodernism, and a must read for those interested in the pain of our times and an authentic gospel response.)

Eventually, this engaged pathos and socio-cultural resistance was explored in Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (still the best commentary on Colossians, perhaps the best commentary on any Biblical book I’ve ever experienced reading!) Although separated by two decades it isn’t that big of a jump from the punchy, succinct Subversive Christianity: Imaging God in Babylon (catch that important sub-title) and the dense, wide-ranging, spectacular bit of analysis of the dislocating pressures of our nomadic culture in Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement coauthored with Hope College environmental science professor, Stephen Bouma-Predigar.

Subversive Christianity reveals a challenging style of faith that emerged from Walsh’s worldview studies at the Institute for Christian Studies, perhaps his frustrations with the more rigid dogmatism of some of the more strict Calvinists in his circles, his friendship with Dutch economist Bob Gouzdwaard and his brilliant work in reforming the fundamental assumption about economics and growth, his deep, deep love for the Bible, and his Cockburn-inspired poetic honesty about both (to cite Cockburn songs) the “Lord of the Starfields” and the rim of the “Broken Wheel.” That is, Walsh understood in those years, as now, both glory and pain, creation and fall, goodness and grief. (I don’t think I know anyone who reminds us of this so candidly, especially in recent years on his Empire Remixed blog from his current faith community at the University of Toronto and their Wine Before Breakfast services.) 

As is clear in these four original chapters, Walsh thinks the true gospel of God’s Kingdom offers a radical deconstruction of the wrong ideologies and hurtful ideas and sinful structures that are the idols of our time and that have facilitated human folly and dysfunction and dis-ease. The reign of God – the journey out of exile and through the desert and towards a new Jerusalem – is the penultimate story (Christ, his Jubilee inauguration, his move towards the cross, his passion and resurrection being the ultimate story) which should shape the imaginations and lifestyles of the people of God, and such a drama is truly a subversive message.  One cannot build a glad new world, or, more precisely, testify to its promised coming, unless one firstly renounces the grim news of the false gods, deconstructing and resisting the dominant narrative of the American dream and its bankrupt ideals.  Which is to say this gospel story subverts the (ab)normal, frames our lives with new hopes and desires and dreams, which, of course, brings into greater clarity the cost of discipleship.  Being counter-intuitive, counter-cultural, subversive, revolutionary, even, is hard.  But such a discipleship, grounded in real life and real hope bears fruit in lasting, deep joy (even through shed tears.) 

The shift from grief to hope, from Good Friday to Easter, isn’t easy, but it is the arc of the Biblical story, even though too many churches and Christian TV preachers and Christian books don’t push us too deeply to consider these things. This book helps us with that, immensely so.

In the first pages of Subversive Christianity Walsh confesses to not dealing much with suffering in Transforming Vision and this personal remark is important. Indeed, the third chapter, about grief and lament, was delivered the night of the death of a dear colleague, an IVCF staff worker at Brock University; again the pathos is palpable, as we lament the human condition, our own souls, and particularly the sadnesses of a culture bent on war and materialism, led by scholars and leaders who promote false hopes and harmful ideas. This critical demeanor, grounded in grief, is abundantly clear in Walsh’s feisty insistence that there is a malaise loose in the land, and that it is urgent to name it.  And name it he does.

From the false prophecy of uber-conservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama to the far left politics of Bruce Cockburn, Walsh draws on contemporary thinkers, artists, ideas and trends, to bring into focus the fundamentally subversive power of the Biblical texts that erode all false gods and upset all false hopes. These passionate, playful, creative, powerful sermons were worth their weight in gold, and became a life-line for some of us who rarely heard such evangelical faith proclaimed with such verve and guts.  This wasn’t merely Marxist liberation theology, it wasn’t inspirational humanism or the incipient social gospel, this was full on evangelical Bible study, Christ-honoring, orthodox stuff.  Walsh’s good friend Tom Wright wrote the foreword, saying it is a “powerful little book.” After extolling his study of contemporary culture and his patient academic work, Wright says of Brian, “he has also drunk deeply from biblical theology, and provides clear and creative exegesis of several passages in a way which breathes new life into them. Walsh brings together the Bible and the modern world in a way which is as original as it is compelling.”  

This is exactly right, and these chapters do indeed bring together very insightful cultural studies and socio-political analysis with tremendous, exciting Bible exposition.

The first of the four chapters is titled “Imaging God in Babylon” about which he summarizes, “Christianity is a subversive cultural movement; the Christian community and worldview conflict; we are called to image God.” He offers a contextual rehearing of Genesis 1:26 – 28 that is nothing short of brilliant.  I’m sure he thanks Richard Middleton for some of this (who later went on to write the magisterial Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 which is now footnoted in the updated edition.) This chapter may be a seminal project for those that know the importance of Richard’s Liberating Image text and I’d guess they worked some of this out together.  Brian preaches it really well! (And had nicely dedicated the book to Richard.)

Chapter two is called “Beyond Worldview to Way of Life: A Diagnosis.” Here he explores the “worldview/way of life gap.” There is a profound diagnosis of Western culture (by way of Cockburn’s song “The Candy Man’s Gone” and Bob Goudzwaard. Here, he invites a truly prophetic response and pushes us to realize that merely getting a new “worldview” – incanting stuff against dualism, affirming a wholistic gospel, realizing the connection between creation/fall/redemption and the like – simply doesn’t seem to carry the capacity to change lives and lifestyles.  This frustrating gap between a multi-dimensional, Kingdom worldview and the way those who hold to such broad visions still live in the world – captive? — is named and explored. (Did Jamie Smith read this long before he cooked up his good stuff in Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom?  Surely, yes, since Smith was with Walsh at the Institute for Christian Studies in those years. Smith’s criticisms about how some quarters define and explore worldview may be related to Walsh’s own concerns, preached so well, here.)

By the way, I think this talk was first delivered at the Jubilee conference in Pittsburgh.  Besides dancing with Brian to “Brown Eyed Girl” that year, this talk was a true highlight in the history of great Jubilee talks.

The third chapter of Subversive… is “Waiting for a Miracle: Christian Grief at the End of History” and, as you might guess if you followed much-discussed books from those years, he contrasts the then-popular scholar Francis Fukuyma who released The End of History that year (and who has another new much-discussed wonky book out this month, by the way) at first with Bruce Cockburn’s song inspired by Central American peasants, “Waiting for a Miracle,”  but then, surprisingly, in a brilliant section, with the true prophet, Jeremiah.  This is a fabulous example of an incisive critique of a modern scholar and his role in shaping North American political and economic policy, and then a shift to profound Biblical lament.  

It is hard to say which of the chapters in this book is my favorite, but each offer profound insight, and reward repeated readings. And this one is stunning.

The last chapter is “Waiting for a Miracle: Christian Hope at the End of History” (notice the one-word switch in the sub-title.) In this chapter he cites Cockburn’s “pilloried saints” and Jeremiah (again.) I love the “real estate at the end of history” piece, about the stunt where Jeremiah buys land behind enemy lines, and how Brian uses that as a parable for our times.  Wow! He insists we are all still “waiting for a miracle” but this time, with hope, hope that we can embody and live into.  

I have to admit when we got the new edition in a week ago, I turned to this chapter first. 

This brand new expanded edition offers a new chapter, oddly called a “post script” which offers much more than a post script, but which is a full on, serious piece.  This   new chapter brings us up-to-date and                                                                               Jeremiah Mourns Over Destruction of Jerusalem  Rembrandt

is called “Subversive Christianity 22 Years Later.” Here Brian asks “what time was it” and “what time is it?”                

These questions about our social location and the ethos of the age sets him up for amazingly rich, thoughtful, Bible-infused social criticism,. (And, yes, Bruce Cockburn’s recent work comes in to play once again.  Walsh has written a whole book on Cockburn, after all, so you can’t blame him using that rock poet as an inspiration.) I rarely say this about new editions, revised and updated books that have a meager new foreword or afterward, but I will now: even if you have the first edition, that thin black paperback, it is well worth it to get this new one, if only for this new last chapter.

My goodness, am I glad this new edition has been released! (The abstract oil painting on canvas on the cover isn’t given justice in the thumbnail above — it works well on the real cover and you should ponder it.) The new chapter is good – strident, passionate, honest, but yet full of Biblical hope. His work on Josiah (applied to the regime of President Obama, event) is fantastic, I think.  Walsh amazes me; his ability to name gross sins and profound cultural disorientation, and yet call us to a joyful and upbeat kind of new way of life is unique. 

Look, I read a lot of books (and many of you do too.) And most of us listen to a lot of speakers, take in weekly sermons. There is hardly anybody who writes or preaches like Walsh does, and I am more than happy to commend this — I am compelled to.  It might shock you, you might not agree, you may be driven to ponder your own faith community and its cultural accommodation and the maturity of its prophetic imagination. I know this is touchy stuff, and I don’t mean to sound negative or critical, but the diagnosis and re-envisioning going on here is so very useful. You will be better for it, I am sure of it.

Here is the last paragraph of the last page of the new post script, Jeremiah Revisited, so to speak:

Build houses in a culture of homelessness. Plant gardens in polluted and contested soil. Get married in a culture of sexual consumerism. Make commitments in a world where we want to always keep our options open. Multiply in a world of dept. Have children at the end of history. Seek shalom in a violent world of geo-political conflict and economic disparity. This is Jeremiah’s word to the exiles. This is Jeremiah’s subversive word to us. And in this vision we just might see, with Jeremiah, a future with hope. (Jer. 29:11.) This is what is means to work and wait for a miracle. This remains at the heart of a subversive Christianity.

This was an inspiring, important, under-recognized book when it came out more than 20 years ago.  It is a great grace that it is now available again, expanded just a bit, and I hope our friends and fans buy it, share it, study it, discuss it.

May its inspired, subversive resistance to the idols of the age motivate you to say no.  May its joyful, costly hope of a cultural restoration based on Christ’s Kingdom coming motivate you to say yes.  No and yes.  Lament and hope. Guilt and grace. This book is a gift. Thanks be to God.

Brian’s meager royalties from this book, by the way, all go to our friends Rob & Kirstin Vander Geissen-Reitsma and their creative community development work through *cino and their Huss Project in Three Rivers Michigan.

TWO MORE, BRAND NEW:

ANOTHER NEW REPRINT AND A SET OF REFLECTIONS ON JOHN

Advent of Justice Brian J. Walsh, J. Richard Middleton, Mark Vander Vennen, Sylvia Keesmaat (Wipf & Stock) $10.00 

I have long said that there is no other Advent devotional like this, nothing in print that comes close.  It has been out of print for a few years, and we are glad it has been re-issued, with a nicer, full-color cover. (Otherwise, the inside, the handsome fonts and nicely designed pages with a few art pieces by Willem Hart remain.)  

This is a set of 4 week’s worth of daily readings, studies of lectionary texts (mostly from Isaiah coupled with seasonal NT texts) with a serious contextualized reading of these passages.  Some of the Isaiah passages are familiar to us while a few may be less so.  The hard-to-pronounce names of kings and prophets, nations and armies, are made more clear, brought into focus so we realize what was going on, geo-politically and religiously among the divided kingdoms and such.  That they invite us to ponder this and to apply the lessons to our own times, indeed our own lives, is a great holiday gift.  It is not sentimental and there is nothing about Christmas ornaments or hot cider or snowy winterscapes. This is Bible study with cultural analysis.  Dare I say it is an urgent antidote to some of the ways we’ve, well, you know… One friend who appreciated it a lot called it “Advent with a Vengeance.”  Well, sort of.

I have read through these short pieces many times, and get something new with each reading.  Walsh brings the big picture gospel to bear, as always, and Middleton especially explains the intricacies and drama of Old Testament politics.  Mark Vander Vennen – an old pal and peace activist from our days in Pittsburgh, now a wise and respected family therapist – brings his own well-trained Old Testament scholarship to the plot, with very nicely written daily meditations, journeying with us as we wait expectantly.  The last week New Testament scholar (and organic farmer) Sylvia Keesmaat eloquently brings it all together. Dr. Keesmaat, by the way, served as chief editor for this whole project, and brings the touch of a scholar and creative wordsmith. 

This thin book is not light-weight, and for those not used to Old Testament prophetic literature, or for Advent being a time to inhabit the broad Biblical drama, this may even be challenging. Not surprisingly, it has some themes of social criticism, a faithful emphasis on justice and the common good, even as the texts point us towards these concerns.  That Advent of Justice was firstly produced to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of a Canadian social justice advocacy group – the Citizens for Public Justice (formerly the Committee for Justice & Liberty) – is fitting. Old heroes of mine, such as the late, great Gerald Vandezande, led that ministry for decades, and this little devotional reminds us of the rich Biblical heritage that served to shape CJL and CPJ.  These authors live this stuff, and their own rich Biblical reflections have emerged out of their own engagement with issues in the public square, service to the marginalized, and taking stands for public justice and the common good.

Still, even though this is dedicated to the justice activists and citizen advocates of CPJ and brings themes of justice to the fore, it is – let me be clear – an advent Bible devotional, short readings, day by day.  They invites us to read the Bible text first, spend time pondering their explication, and then to return to the Bible text again, reading and hearing it with new eyes and ears.  They do this to help us have a meaningful and joyous holiday season, to await well, to make time for God’s Word during Advent. They really do hope you have a good holiday season. May it help you wait well.

St. John Before Breakfast  Brian J. Walsh and the Wine Before Breakfast Community (Books Before Breakfast) $18.00 

Wow — we are just jazzed to tell you about this.  We may be one of the very first bookstores to carry this, and it is an honor to be in on its distribution.

St. John Before Breakfast is a self-published set of studies/reflections done mostly by Brian Walsh for his “Wine Before Breakfast” early morning Eucharistic service among his rag-tag “Empire Remixed” community at the University of Toronto.  Walsh is a campus minister for the Christian Reformed Church and has developed a band and worshiping community that meets before classes once a week (and others times, too, of course.) I have followed (as you may have) their “Empire Remixed” blog, and some of Brian’s poetic ruminations on the Scriptures there have been simply stunning. (This past summer they did a weekly reflection on the book of James which was some of the best stuff I’ve ever read from that popular New Testament prophet.)  

Brian does a passionate and wise pastoral letter to his friends in the academic community at U of T right before Holy Week each year, inviting people to attend to spiritual practices that week – to read and re-read the gospel accounts, to attend church, to grief and wait and watch and pray as we move towards Resurrection Sunday and our joyful celebration of Christ’s Victory.  It is my own Holy Week custom to read and re-read Brian’s letters and these are doubtlessly the best stuff I read every year.

And they remind us of the pathos and power and truth of Scripture.

Which is to say I am sure these Biblical ruminations – some written in free verses, as poetically delivered, live — will be potent, powerful, maybe a bit controversial, perhaps. As is his custom, he offers creative, contemporary exegesis of the Biblical text — yes, the gospel according to John —  in engagement with pop culture.  One week it is a set of Joni Mitchell songs, maybe Leonard Cohen, maybe Springsteen or U2 or Mumford & Sons.  But mostly John, opened up and read and proclaimed with an edgy honesty.  Walsh loves the Scriptures, believes the book is subversive and, properly opened up, God’s Word to subvert and challenge, heal and offer hope.  

On the back cover it asks, “How does the Word made flesh take on new flesh in the urban heart of a city like Toronto? What happens when you allow the evocative narratives, symbols and imagery of this gospel to direct your prayers, shape your liturgy and transform your life?”

I can’t wait to read this self-published, handsome volume of “Wine Before Breakfast” Johannine messages.  I hope you are curious, too.

Each chapter of St. John Before Breakfast includes an opening reflection, maybe a story, setting the stage, sometimes using the music or something from the news of the week) and then a homily on the passage.  Many weeks there is a litany, a responsive reading, some sort of liturgical/poetic response. (These are very useful, by the way, and could be used or adapted in your own group or church service.)  A few of the chapters are offered by other “Wine Before Breakfast” members and friends. It is truly amazing stuff and I am hard pressed to think of any other book quite like it.  

This self-produced book is a fund-raiser for Walsh’s campus outreach there, and we are glad to be able to help him sell it. It is a nicely done project, not widely available.  We hope that as you consider ordering Subversive Christianity or The Advent of Justice you will also consider picking up this, trusting that it will draw you into the extraordinary story John tells of this extraordinary Messiah, fully God, fully human, a suffering servant and healer of the cosmos.  John, who points us to Jesus.  A transforming vision, indeed.

BookNotes

                   Hearts & Minds 234 East Main Street  Dallastown, PA  17313     717-246-3333

So I spent some of my extra time today working again on a review that I wanted to improve, to better express my enthusiasm for a book or two by an author I deeply respect and whose new work — a recently-revised reprint and a new self-published book — you might not be aware of. Man, I’m eager to release this impassioned review of these pair of powerhouse books.  But then, like Christmas morning, in comes some spectacular new books here at the shop, most which I ordered pre-publication maybe months ago.  When such a truck load of remarkable titles shows up somewhat unexpectedly, I feel almost jittery to tell somebody who cares.

Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happened to the Good News? Philip Yancey (Zondervan) $22.99  It isn’t every day that a Zondervan book gets a wondrous blurb on the back from rock star St. Bono and evangelical popularizer Max Lucado.  Mr. Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace was nearly a landmark book and this could be seen as a long-awaited sequel to that contemporary classic. This new one showcases his trademark journalistic style, story-filled, thoughtful, accessible yet with no fluff. I am confident that it will be very, very compelling.  The back jacket says “Yancey explores how grace can bridge the gap between Christian faith and a world increasingly suspicious of it.” Oh my.

There will soon be a DVD curriculum, too, which will be well made and eloquent and which we will stock.

Why Suffering? Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn’t Make Sense Ravi Zacharias & Vince Vitale (FaithWords) $22.00  Many people have wished for a book like this from Ravi, one of the most articulate, thoughtful and elegant apologists of our time. A convert (in his young adult years, after considering many, many world religions and philosophies) from Hinduism, he has been a caring, if rigorous, evangelist.  Not every evangelical leader grapples so honestly with Nietzsche, drawing on Alvin Plantinga and other stunning thought leaders. And (for any old Pittsburgh friends who may be reading) he cites Bill Rowe, who taught for a season at ICS in Toronto.  A great cover, too, for this moving hardback.

Jesus Prom: Life Gets Fun When You Love People Like God Does Jon Weece (Nelson) $16.99  My Nelson sale representative is a good man, and patient with me as I ply him with questions, sometimes needlessly snarky ones, suspicious as I am of some pop evangelical books these days.  “Jesus Prom”?  I almost cussed.  What in the heck does that even mean? And why does a book about Jesus need a disco ball on the cover? My ever-patient salesman pointed out the foreword by Bob Goff, a man I admire immensely. And then he explained that at the heart of this book is the story of a church that holds a full-on, big time prom for students with special needs. I almost cried hearing about it, glad for a church like this, doing stuff like this. Jesus loves people. Wouldn’t it make sense, Weece asks, “that those who claim to love Jesus would love the same people Jesus loves?” This central Kentucky church pulls off this extraordinary event, and if Goff says it’s the real deal, I believe him. I can’t wait to read this, and am eager to promote the new DVD curriculum, too. When Beth and I used to work for an Easter Seal Society Camp in the summers, by the way, dancing with wheelchair-bound kids and young adults at the “Final Banquet” was a highlight of each week and, if truth be told, remains a highlight of my life. This book, I’m telling ya, will touch your heart.

God is in the City: Encounters of Grace and Transformation Shawn Casselberry (Mission Year Life Resources) $17.00  Aww, I’ve been waiting for this. I hope you know Mission Year, an organization Tony Campolo started back in the day, that invites young adults to take a year to live in community in really rough ghetto neighborhoods, and share life with the poor, walk alongside those who are disenfranchised, and experience God in solidarity there, maybe bringing some fresh gospel light to often broken communities.  A hero/acquaintance of ours, Leroy Barber, was their Executive Director for years, and wrote a book or two that we have truly loved. (I hope you saw my review of Red, Brown, Yellow, Black, White…) How folks come to learn neighborliness, and find goodness in raw places has been a theme in Mission Year — it isn’t about suburban college kids coming in to save the lost, poor people.  Shawn Cassleberry is an advocate for God’s justice and the current head of Mission Year and this handsome volume (which is really attractively designed, and produced by them as a fund-raiser) looks splendid. 

Whether you live in an urban area or not, this book helps us understand many of our fellow citizens, dissuades us of dumb stereotypes, and will help you appreciate not only the hardships but joys of doing relational ministry in a fallen world. This is a fantastic glimpse into God’s work, sort of a “Chicken Soup for the Soul” with guts and grit and true grace. You will thrill to read these stories, be glad for the hard work of these folk, and be glad — inspired, even! — that there are such stories afoot in the world. Dr. John Perkins, who wrote the foreword, says “I urge you to read this book. You will be inspired and transformed by what you encounter.” Amen.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Bryan Stevenson (Spiegel & Grau) $28.00 Speaking of Campolo: years ago we heard Tony tell the story of an African American boy who grew up poor and ended up through God’s grace at Harvard Law School.  He could land any prestigious job he wanted, a top-of-the-class black man with such a prestigious degree. The graduate eschewed worldly success and fame and wealth, though, discipled into the ways of Christ as he was, and went back to poor, rural Alabama, and served the oppressed there, working, then, with organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and helping get those who claimed innocence a fair trail, often off of death row.  A friend of mine and I asked Campolo po
int blank if this was a real story — Tony’s stories are so flamboyantly told and so very moving the rumor is he makes some of them up (which isn’t at all true!) Of course this story was indeed true and the kid’s name was Bryan Stevenson. The CCO hosted him at their Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh years ago and even then, some of us realized that Mr. Stevenson was more than the real deal, he was one of the truly great people of our era. (Will he be nominated for something like the Nobel Prize one wonders.)  He now runs the Equal Justice Initiative, and has a deep passion about children who are in jail, cravenly tried as adults.

Just Mercy is his brand new book, carrying extraordinary rave reviews from top literary lights the likes of Desmond Tutu, Tracy Kidder, Michelle Alexander and Isabel Wilkerson, and a stunning quote on the front cover by the best-selling Baptist lawyer, John Grisham. Beth and I were incredibly moved when she saw that this came, feeling the great joy and privilege of carrying such books.  We were glad to see him on the popular back page of Time magazine this week.  I assure you that this will be one of the much-discussed, highly regarded, public affairs books of the year, a man lead to Christian faith who related his convictions to his sense of calling, and now is doing vital, powerful work in the world.  You really should read this book.  See what he says when folks compare him to Atticus Finch, here.

Disquiet Time: Rants and Reflections on the Good Book by the Skeptical, the Faithful, and a Few Scoundrels edited by Jennifer Grant and Cathleen Falsani (Jericho Books) $24.00  Well. This will absolutely need a longer review, but know this much: it is a wild and woolly anthology of all sorts of little pieces — some remarkably well written, some really funny (Susan Isaacs) some a bit snarky (okay, a lot snarky) — asking whether this or that weird part of the Bible is really so, or may somehow not, or something other, or whatever it all may mean. “The Bible is full of not-so-precious moments” they say (and if that doesn’t win you over, you may not get the allusion to those awful little cutesy figurines.) From murder to mayhem to sex and slavery, the Bible is perplexing. Instead of turning a blind eye to the difficult (“and entertaining,” they slyly note) passages, these authors take ’em head on.

I hope you saw our Hearts & Minds Facebook page where I thanked the salt of the Earth folks from small and struggling churches who we served again this year at Wee Kirk — Scottish Presbyterian-ese for small church. Every year we gather at the great Laurelville Mennonite camp in Mt. Pleasant, PA, and hear great speakers, take in important workshops, and eat lots of food, laughing and worshiping with mostly rural and small town Presbyterians friends.  They buy a lot of books from us, and we thought we’d share a few of the best sellers, or at least some that were nicely discussed.  I have to be quick — let us know if you have questions, or want other such resources.                                 

Shrink: Faithful Ministry in a Church-Growth Culture Tim Suttle (Zondervan) $16.99  I raved about this from up front, indicating how very well written it was, about how great the foreword by Scot McKnight was, and for all the great pull quotes on nearly every page that are themselves great gems for those who aren’t serious readers. It is dedicated to pastors of small churches, and carries endorsements such as this by Chris Smith (author of Slow Church), “Shrink is one of the wisest and most significant evangelical books that I’ve read in the last decade; it is essential reading for every pastor and church leader!”  I agree. This book is extraordinary, offering critique to our fascination with bigness and growth, and calling us to fidelity and maturity.

Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison (IVP) $16.00  Okay, maybe I was a little prideful, showing off when I announced this, since our BookNotes blog was one of the first places to review this amazing book, and we are hosting Chris Smith to speak  here on November 7th.  But my own gushing aside, Wee Kirk folks — who may or may not have heard of the “slow food movement” — intuit that church is about quality, not quantity, and that relationships and patience are the way of the Kingdom.  We celebrated this good book, assured the gathering that it was perfect for book clubs and classes in their own small congregations, and — yes — it will challenge them, since even small churches often try to row faster, work harder, fret more then they should, trying to give the appearance of success.  This counter-cultural book commends a radical critique of the modernist worldview and the typical American “fast food” franchise habits, re-framing the way we even think about our lives, and re-imagining the very nature of the faith community. Slow Church is one of the most radical church books I’ve read, utterly faithful, and brilliant.

A Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope in the Midst of Brokenness  Marlene Graves (Brazos) $15.99  Two things we find everywhere we go: many people are hurting, or have been through serious anguish in their lives, and people of faith long for greater experiences of God, and are interested in practicing spiritual disciplines which make room for God to work in their lives.  That is, the two things this book is about — spirituality during hard times — is exactly what folks need. Marlena (who grew up in rural North-Western Pennsylvania, where many of our Wee Kirk friends are from) has been through a lot, tells her story well, and offers Biblical insight about God making a way in the wilderness.  Beth and I knew it would be a hit.