All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg.
Culture Watch
Julie Polter 3-01-2011
For nearly six decades, Mavis Staples has been bringing the gospel truth to song.
Brittany Shoot 3-01-2011
A review of Why Love Will Always Be A Poor Investment: Marriage and Consumer Culture, by Kurt Armsrong; foreward by Aiden Enns. Wipf & Stock.
Julie Polter 3-01-2011
Reviews of The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman, Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made, Somebody's Daughter, and This Sacred Moment.
Gareth Higgins 2-01-2011
Preachers in American fiction are usually not to be trusted -- Elmer Gantry might steal from you, the priest in Mystic River might kidnap you, Robert Duvall’s Sonny i
Danny Duncan Collum 2-01-2011
In the past two years, the culture wars have been complicated on the Right by the rise of the "tea party." In a time of grave economic crisis and massive government action, the traditional right-wi
Carolyn McKinstry, Denise George 2-01-2011
On a September morning in 1963, terror came to the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Jess O. Hale 2-01-2011
Split Ticket: Independent Faith in a Time of Partisan Politics, edited by Amy Gopp, Christian Piatt, Brandon Gilvin. Chalice Press.
Elizabeth Palmberg 2-01-2011
Bio: Helps local women's groups in Central America, Mexico, and Haiti start and run grant-seeded community lending pools. Website: www.maryspence.org
Nancy Lukens 2-01-2011
Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings, his prophetic Christian witness amid criminal abuses of power, racial persecution, terror, and genocide by his own government, and his martyrdom for participating in the coup to overthrow Hitler continue to inspire and provoke important questions and actions. The global following for this German pastor and theologian includes agnostics and atheists, evangelicals and liberal Protestants, Catholics and Jews, and people of many political persuasions, young and old alike.
By the same token, Bonhoeffer has been claimed by quite different, indeed opposite, religious groups, individuals, and political leaders to support their purposes. George W. Bush invoked his name before the German parliament in 2002 to justify the invasion of Iraq. Nelson Mandela read him in prison on Robben Island before his release in 1990. East German youth sang verses of his prison poem "By Powers of Good" before the fall of communism, without necessarily knowing he was a Christian.
The very titles of two biographies of Bonhoeffer that appeared within a few weeks of each other in 2010 suggest the diversity of those who may be drawn to him. While Eric Metaxas' book title, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (Thomas Nelson), and his engaging style give his book the accessibility and appeal of a novel, it is stunningly flawed as a biography. Metaxas misleads readers both by his title and by his presentation of Bonhoeffer as a lone heroic figure. Yes, Bonhoeffer's covert position with a military intelligence office gave him the cover needed to travel abroad on behalf of the resistance, but a James-Bond-like "spy" he was not. Nor does Metaxas ever explain in the book the use of the term "righteous gentile" in the title. This designation is bestowed by Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, to those who aided Jews in the Holocaust. Does Metaxas know that Bonhoeffer has not been given this honor?
Betsy Shirley 2-01-2011
Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro. Zondervan.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove 1-01-2011
I grew up on gospel preaching the same way some of my peers grew up on Star Wars and E.T. In North Carolina's tobacco country, the church house was our local theater and preachers were not only pastors—they were our primary entertainment. In the Bible Belt in the 1980s, a small church was the center of my family's social life. I was a teenager before I realized that this wasn't the case for everyone.
But as much as I love the people who raised me, I'm not nostalgic for an idealized small church. Like all people, we had the good and bad mixed up in us. Most of the people I grew up with would give the shirt off their back to someone in real need, and they knew a hot summer afternoon was for making homemade ice cream and enjoying it together in the shade of a picnic shelter. But they were also generally suspicious of outsiders, given to petty disagreements, and blindly racist. I don’t think the church that raised me was perfect. But I do know that it saved me.
Which is why I was glad to read Jason Byassee's The Gifts of the Small Church. Jason made a name for himself as a religious journalist after finishing a Ph.D. in theology. Unlike many academics, he has a knack for spinning a good tale. While working for the mainline magazine The Christian Century, Byassee frequently published in the evangelical Christianity Today, because beyond his gift of story-telling he also has a keen eye for what God is up to in every place. Unwilling to simply accept the assumptions of an ideological camp, he's good at inviting his reader into a place where she can be surprised.
Richard Vernon 1-01-2011
I met Eliza Griswold in a Starbucks round the corner from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Thrumming with nervy energy, she comes off as smart, ambitious, charismatic, and intensely interested. Griswold has published one book of poetry, Wideawake Field (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her poetry and award-winning journalism have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Harper’s. Now in her mid-30s, Griswold grew up in various parts of Pennsylvania and moved to Chicago in 1987, when her father, Frank Griswold, an Episcopal priest, was consecrated as a bishop. (He would later serve as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in North America from 1997 to 2006.)
Eliza Griswold’s first full-length prose work is The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In it she recounts her journeys within Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The text, although nicely larded with statistics and historical background, focuses particularly on her encounters with the men and women most vigorously engaged, on one side or the other, in the frequently violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in those countries. Where the book shines is in the way it allows you to take tea with a Jihadi leader and notice his odd habitual gestures, or the fact that he laughs less than the first time we met him. The big picture is illuminated through such exquisitely detailed miniatures.
Julie Polter 1-01-2011
Nonviolent Power
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC gathers powerful oral histories from 52 women, "northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina" who were on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. University of Illinois Press
Tell Me, Tell Me
In a Winnipeg, Manitoba, high school where 58 languages were spoken among the student body, a teacher started an after-school storytelling project to bridge the gaps between immigrant and Canadian students. The documentary The Storytelling Class tells of the students' experience. Bullfrog Films
Lauren F. Winner 1-01-2011
In Blessed Are the Organized, Princeton University's Jeffrey Stout argues that democracy is imperiled: "The imbalance of power between ordinary citizens and the new ruling class has ... reached crisis proportions." He means crisis in the medical sense—the moment when the patient will either get better or die.
Stout's prescription? "[M]any more institutions and communities [must] commit themselves to getting democratically organized." We need to do a lot more old-fashioned, face-to-face organizing. More broadly, we need to engage the basic practices of democratic citizenship -- voting, but also listening to one another as we describe our struggles and our deepest concerns; peacefully assembling; and petitioning for redress of grievances.
Stout offers portraits of effective grassroots organizing in places as diverse as post-Katrina New Orleans and Marin County, California. Stout finds a marvelous example of the democratic practice of assembly among Katrina survivors gathered in the Houston Astrodome. The scene there was "surreal." The PA system was dominated by celebrities such as T.D. Jakes, with his apolitical message about God's provision. Organizers realized that they needed to get microphones into someone else's hands. Eventually, a less famous pastor took a microphone and preached a different kind of sermon: "I believe God expects us to do our part of the work too ... So if you've been a leader in New Orleans ... come forward and have a conversation ... about what's happening, and about doing something." In that moment, the PA system was transformed into a means of genuinely public address. Here, Stout argues, "we see ... a motley collection of displaced citizens reconstructing the rudiments of a democratic culture on the fly."
Becky Garrison 1-01-2011
In the documentary Earth Made of Glass, director Deborah Scranton weaves together the stories of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Jean Pierre Sagahutu, two men who struggled to seek the truth about what really happened in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. How could thousands of people die every day for three months while the Western world stood silent? At the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, Becky Garrison, author of Jesus Died for This?, sat down with Deborah Scranton (director/producer), Reid Carolin (producer), and Jean Pierre Sagahutu to dicuss how this film can shed light on a story that has gone underreported in the United States.
Becky Garrison: Why do you feel the Rwandan genocide received so little attention in 1994?
Reid Carolin: We had just come off Mogadishu [the "Black Hawk down" incident in October 1993], and that was a colossal disaster for the U.S. Some responsibility should fall on the media for generally misreporting what was actually going on in Rwanda. The real tragedy is to go back there 15 years later and look through all the reports and see what isn't true. The coverage was so poor that this story has not been understood correctly.
Gareth Higgins 1-01-2011
It's a golden age for documentaries. Michael Moore kick-started the era with crusading films such as Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, fusing serious social commentary with a protagonist who could be identified with by a wider audience than the "God's-eye view" used in magnificent PBS films by Ken Burns, such as The Civil War and Jazz. Burns seeks a resonant "objective" perspective, relating tales of U.S. history as if our lives depended on it (which of course, if you accept that those who forget are doomed to repeat, it does). Moore wants to place us at the story’s center, revealing the insecurities at the heart of American social strife as something that we could all do something about.
Moore and Burns are only the most popular and widely seen of recent documentarians. They stand alongside Errol Morris, whose treatment of the life of Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, may be the best analysis of how political rhetoric can mask horrific action; Michael Apted, whose Up series, following the lives of several people since their seventh birthdays in 1964, constitutes a social history of the past 50 years; and most of all the Maysles Brothers, who were among those who invented the form, with films such as Salesman, an astonishing vision of the corruption of commerce and religion, and Grey Gardens, which serves as a mirror image to the myths of Camelot that surround JFK's presidency. All of these films paved the way for recent works fusing factual cinema with an ethical eye.