Culture Watch

John Schramm 12-01-1994
Ordinary experience and extraordinary insight.
Richard Vernon 12-01-1994
The Vigilantes of Love's views on the American Dream
Jeremy Lloyd 12-01-1994
Public forgiveness and TV Scandal.
Rose Marie Berger 12-01-1994
Small groups and the renewal of the church.
Franzmeier 12-01-1994

Books for pleasure and meaning.

A novel of political and personal transformation.
Mark Gauvreau Judge 11-01-1994
The generation that is -- maybe.
David Batstone 11-01-1994
A Conversation with musician T Bone Burnett
Carol LeMasters 11-01-1994
Discerning abuse and recovery.
Shane Helmer 9-01-1994
The truth of one's own life.
The blues met modernism.
David A. Fagan 9-01-1994
When gangs become family.
Bob Hulteen 9-01-1994

1994 thus far has been a momentous summer.

The civil rights struggle goes Cuban
Dan Heath 9-01-1994
The value of continuing dialogue.
Cheryl J. Sanders 8-01-1994

Three books recently published by Orbis Books together represent a major breakthrough in African-American women’s theological scholarship. Each is a first of sorts—Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness is the first book-length womanist theology, Kelly Brown Douglas’ The Black Christ is the first womanist christology focused upon the black Christ image and idea, and Emilie Townes’ anthology, A Troubling in My Soul, is the first published collection of writings by womanist theological scholars.

The three books have as their common point of departure the womanist idea, a creation of writer Alice Walker who coined the term in the preface to her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist means black feminist, and a growing number of black women religious scholars are appropriating this concept for their own work. It appeals especially to black women who do not wish to be identified along with black men as black theologians, or who see themselves as different from the white women who are feminist theologians. Thus, womanist theology has a distinctive identity of its own. And these three new books contribute mightily toward giving further shape and content to womanist theology as a body of religious scholarship.

Douglas’ The Black Christ essentially follows the approach developed by James Cone (beginning in 1969) to create a black theology rooted in the idea of a black Christ. She introduces the book with a biographical statement regarding her encounters with the black Christ through the faith of her grandmother and the thought of James Cone.

Arthur P. Boers 8-01-1994

When Tom Harpur says the medical establishment is sick, he is neither trite nor merely ironic. Harpur, a force to be reckoned with here in the Great White North, is worth hearing on both sides of the border. He is Canada’s most popular religious columnist and a television commentator; his books are often Canadian best sellers. This former Rhodes Scholar was previously an Anglican priest and New Testament seminary professor.

He says the medical establishment is ill, not just economically and bureaucratically, but because of over-reliance on a medical model that sees the body as merely a machine. The church is also sick unto death, as reflected in dwindling numbers and its overlooking of the mandate to heal.

Harpur cites the January 28, 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine report that "a surprising 34 percent of Americans, or approximately 61 million people, used...unconventional therapies or forms of non-medical healing in 1990." Many of those people were well-educated and most did not tell their doctors that they resorted to acupuncture, chiropractors, homeopathy, massage, self-help groups, relaxation response, meditation, biofeedback, prayer, or laying-on of hands.

Yet Harpur told me: "Doctors are moving. They’ve been dealing first of all with body-as-machine and then psychosomatic body-and-mind (usually in a disapproving way, the negative effect of the mind on the body). Now they are realizing the positive effect of the mind as well....Then we’ll have a whole person again that we’re dealing with, rather than this truncated one."

Gordon Houser 8-01-1994

A historian looks for facts, while a novelist probes for the hidden truth of a story. In her non-fiction novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler, Mary Glazener incorporates elements of both disciplines, but the historian dominates.

Based on more than 10 years of research, The Cup of Wrath is a compelling story of the young German theologian’s courageous attempt to be faithful to God during Hitler’s repressive regime. The question Bonhoeffer struggled with was one many face today, though for us it’s mostly theoretical: How do you resist evil as a Christian without disobeying Christ’s commands to act nonviolently?

The irony of Bonhoeffer’s witness is that he was almost alone among contemporary Lutherans in his pacifism, yet he felt compelled to take part in a plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler, a plot that developed into an attempt to assassinate the self-proclaimed Fuhrer.

You can read this book as an apology directed at those who glibly criticize Bonhoeffer for dropping his pacifist beliefs and acting violently. Glazener shows both the overwhelming evil of Hitler’s regime and the agonizing process of Bonhoeffer’s decision to take action to stop evil instead of separating himself from the problem in order to remain pure.

Bonhoeffer spent some time in the United States before the war. Paul Lehmann of Elmhurst College tried to talk him into staying instead of returning to Germany. Lehmann asks, "Isn’t what you have to say more important than what you might do in the conflict at home?" Bonhoeffer replies, "No. If I stayed here and war came, I’d have nothing to say. I would have compromised my witness."

Joseph E. Agne 8-01-1994

Recently during a worship service I heard the prayer, "God, help us to sit not so much in scrutiny of each other but rather in company with each other." As I read, studied, and prayed about these three books on racial reconciliation—Breaking Down Walls, by Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein, More Than Equals, by Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice, and He’s My Brother, by John Perkins and Thomas Tarrants—my temptation was to scrutinize rather than accompany these authors as they share their stories.

Within the books are many negative references to events and strategies of the last 30 years of which I have been a part. Much of the ministry I have shared with so many people is dismissed as "liberal," not a term I claim or find meaningful. As I read I was aware of my separation from persons and communities that understand themselves to be the "evangelical" church. I grew up in the Evangelical United Brethren Church and yet am now sidelined as not evangelical.

Once a Zimbabwe pastor said, "The reason Christians in the United States want to argue about what is more important, evangelism or social action, is that they don’t want to do either." One part of Christ’s church in the United States focuses on racial reconciliation emphasizing relationship. Another part seeks racial justice stressing institutional change. These two parts don’t talk to each other, but we continually make our cases for the importance of one over the other. Maybe we don’t really want to do either effectively.