January Reading Log

I finished 5 very different books this month (along with a LOT of well written and well reported journalism), which I was pretty pleased with, especially with a newborn baby occupying a lot of the time I once gave to reading. Here's what I read:

THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES by St. Ignatius of Loyola

This ancient devotional text is one of those books I bought during seminary only to never open, so I decided to begin the new year by making up for lost time. Written by St. Ignatius of Loyola, a 16th century Spanish priest, it offers a 4-step devotional program (4 "weeks" in the book's parlance, though St. Ignatius makes clear to take however much time is needed) that is still used today for spiritual retreats, monasteries, etc. The program's primary goal is to help you better discern God's will through intense self-reflection, prayer, and Scripture reading.

There were many things to like about The Spiritual Exercises, starting with its demanding nature--for those wanting a way to get more out of their 5-minute morning devotionals, this is not the book for you. Following this program to the letter would take hours out of every day. That's not practical for most lifestyles, but to even attempt it seems, to me, like a good way to get more out of your prayer life and to grow closer to God. In a culture where busyness is a point of pride, a spiritual program that requires you to give God more than the time you already have to spare might be medicine that heals even while being tough to swallow.

I also simultaneously appreciated and was made uncomfortable by the focus on your own sinfulness in the first week--St. Ignatius demands that you dwell on your sins one by one, confronting your own depravity without regard for forgiveness. It seems to me that Christians often focus so much on the good news of God's forgiveness and grace that we lose sight of what makes that news so good and needed, i.e. our utter unworthiness apart from Christ. So focusing on your sins without allowing yourself to leapfrog to forgiveness seems like a helpful idea to me, albeit a painful exercise.

My fellow Protestant readers might be put off by some of the more overtly Catholic themes and practices in the book, from a heavy focus on Mary in certain prayers to the practice of penance. However, any Protestant wanting to undertake the spiritual exercises could, as I see it, easily adapt those sections and still get a lot out of the experience.

My only other warning about reading this as I did is that it is first and foremost a manual...and that doesn't always make for the most interesting reading. If you're looking for a page turner, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a daily devotional, look elsewhere. But if you're wanting a spiritual formation program, this one has withstood the test of time and is still used by many people today. Not a bad place to start.

THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION by Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is one of those names you can't get through seminary without learning, but I somehow managed to make it through my 3 years (not to mention the 3 in Baylor's religion department before that) without having read his most famous work, a slim but powerful testimony to the power of biblical prophecy and need for it in modern times. So this past month I rolled up my sleeves and slowly but surely dove in.

Brueggemann begins by analyzing Moses's role as a prophet for Israel before moving to other biblical prophets, from Jeremiah to Isaiah to ultimately Jesus Christ (who, while far more than a prophet, certainly served in that role as well.) In Brueggemann's analysis, the prophet's role is misunderstood by both conservative and liberal theologians: it is not merely to foretell the future (as conservative theologians tend to presume) nor merely to speak truth to power (as liberal theologians tend to say.) Rather, the prophet's role is a combination of the two which is empowered by the power of imagination--he challenges God's people to envision an alternative consciousness/future/way of living from what the world assumes and then to live in that reality instead of the world's. That alternative consciousness is ultimately embodied in Christ, who shows what the new way of being (i.e. the kingdom of God) looks like in his ministry and then triumphs over the old way of being through his death and resurrection.

I found Breuggemann's understanding of prophecy convincing and insightful--this was a book where I put my highlighter away after reading page 2 because I realized I was just going to be highlighting every other sentence. It is also an academic book, so I had to read slowly in order to understand and soak it all in--try to speedread this one at your own peril.

My only critique is that Brueggemann is, by his own admission, heavily influenced by liberation theology, an interpretation of Christian theology that pits God against the powers of this world and argues that God always sides with the poor and marginalized. While the roots of liberation theology are undoubtedly biblical (if uncomfortable for American readers like myself), its implications about God can be overly reductive in my estimation. I'm more sympathetic to liberation theology than your average Texas Baptist pastor, but Brueggemann was right on the line even for me at times. Then again, I'm a white, middle class, well educated, male American...if he didn't make me a little uncomfortable, he probably wouldn't have been doing his job.

With that grain of salt having been dropped in the review, I would definitely recommend this book to any Christian, and especially any pastor, who hasn't read it already. Christianity is riddled with self-styled "prophets", but it desperately needs more prophetic imagination.

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER by Barack Obama

One of my favorite micro-genres (I doubt that’s a real word, but it seems to fit here), is the presidential memoir. From Ulysses S. Grant to Harry Truman, many of our nation’s leaders have spent years of their post-presidential retirements crafting their accounts of what happened when they were in office, books that are partly defenses of their record, partly apologies for their mistakes, partly polemics against their enemies, partly stump speeches, and partly biographies. Writing such memoirs is now seen as an ex-president’s first order of business upon leaving office, and it’s a tradition every president since Lyndon B. Johnson has upheld.

What’s unusual is for a president to have already penned a memoir before having become commander-in-chief, much less before even having run for public office. Yet such was the case for Barack Obama, whose 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father became a bestseller and helped elevate him from community organizer to Illinois state senator. While I had read his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope in preparation for my first presidential election as a voter in 2008, Dreams From My Father was an Obama offering that never interested me much until I found it on clearance at a recent book sale. So with 20 days left in the Obama presidency, I decided at the beginning of January it was now or never and dusted it off.

My first impression: Barack Obama was clearly not running for president when he wrote this. It is deeply, uncomfortably honest about his fears, his prejudices, his problems, his temptations, and his dreams. The cynical part of me thinks that if every Obama voter had read this before voting for him in 2008, he never would have gotten past the primaries, because while he already possessed his trademark eloquence, here he pulls no punches—this is a rawer Obama than you’ll see in any speech from the last 8 years.

But it is exactly that honesty and vulnerability that makes the book fascinating. As he has said countless times since stepping into the national spotlight in 2004, his story is uniquely American. In following the story of his life, we travel from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago to Kenya, and each of those places deepens Obama’s understanding of who he is—a black man raised by his white mother and grandparents, a man who never knew his father, and a man who never had the opportunity to put roots down in one place. He is always on the move in this memoir—literally, spiritually, and emotionally—and that restlessness makes for a stirring account.

Divided into three parts—his early life in Hawaii and Indonesia, his time as a community organizer in Chicago, and his visit to Kenya to meet relatives from his father’s side of the family—my favorite section was about his efforts to connect with and help poor residents of Chicago organize for better housing. While there are things to criticize about President Obama’s policies, I have never understood why opponents of his used “community organizer” as a punchline, partly because, as a pastor, I think that’s part of my own job description! Reading about a young Barack Obama’s attempts to help folks in the projects come together and advocate for themselves was fascinating and certainly forecasted how he would later campaign, both for the presidency in general and for specific issues.

While I had always been told this book was about race, I found that it went deeper than that. Ultimately it was a book about identity, about Obama figuring out who he was and where he belonged, and it wasn’t until he was able to make peace with the various, seemingly contradictory strands of his family—his white mother, his black father, his old-fashioned grandparents, his Kenyan relatives—that he was able to find some sense of purpose. Especially for young people struggling to find their place in the world, for those with unusual heritages, and for people wanting an unvarnished look at what the young Barack Obama thought about the world, I recommend this book.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead

This was at the top of a lot of "Best Books of 2016" lists, won the National Book Award, and made Oprah's Book Club, so when I gave my family gift suggestions for Christmas, it sprang to mind pretty quickly. I was excited to receive it and more excited to read it.

The novel traces the story of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caesar, as they flee a Georgia plantation and make their way to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and eventually the North, with an evil slave catcher named Ridgeway hot on their trail. What sets the novel apart from other stories in that vein (many of which are not fictional), is the titular plot device of the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's imagining, the Railroad is not just a metaphor for freedom, but a literal infrastructure hidden beneath the earth's surface, with conductors and tracks and boxcars. Furthermore, Whitehead places fast and loose with time by having Cora and Caesar deal with struggles African-Americans faced many years after slavery's demise. These poetic licenses can be slightly confusing, especially if you go in expecting typical historical fiction, but they ably help tell the story of the countless tragedies and occasional triumphs of the African-American experience.

After finishing the book, my excitement had faded to a sort of admiring ambivalence. On the one hand, Whitehead is a deep thinker and writes some pretty amazing sentences. I don't typically read novels with a highlighter in hand, but if there were ever one worthy of breaking that rule, it would be this one. Whitehead's style is not flowery, but journalistic, almost matter-of-fact. Particularly when describing the horrors of slavery, that style is effective in two ways--it shows the banality of evil and it keeps the author innocent of torture porn sensationalism (something artists of all stripes can fall victim to in their efforts to condemn slavery's evils.) If anything, his short, staccato sentences and sparse detail about a slave being burned alive leaves you more horrified than if he'd spent pages describing it in painstaking detail.

For all the book's obvious strengths, there were weaknesses too. I thought the characterization of Cora, the main protagonist, was lacking, and the same was true for Caesar. Whitehead has occasional vignette chapters dealing with some of the supporting characters, even the evil Ridgeway, and ironically those chapters left me feeling like I knew the supporting characters' motivations better than I did the heroes'. This may have been done intentionally, since Cora and Caesar are ultimately intended to be avatars for the African-American experience (and therefore have to be generalized), but it left me a little cold.

My other problem with the book is likely my fault, not the author's--some of it went over my head. In reading a few reviews, there are themes, metaphors, and plot devices I simply didn't notice or understand, and while the author can be partially blamed for that, chances are I was reading too fast. The Underground Railroad has drawn a lot of comparisons to Toni Morrison's Beloved, and like that masterpiece, it is best read slowly and with a group of other people, so that you can all discuss it along the way and puzzle out its meanings.

Overall I'd recommend this novel, but know what you're getting into beforehand--there's a lot of depth here, it bends the facts of history in service of the story, and it is driven more by plot than characterization. Oh, and bring a highlighter...there are quotes in here you'll want to remember for later.

ESSENTIAL DOCTOR STRANGE VOL. 3 by Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, Gene Colan, Marv Wolfman, et al. 

As promised, I continued following the adventures of the Sorcerer Supreme this month thanks to my friend Morgan, who generously bought me this book after reading December's log. And while the song remains the same as for volumes 1 and 2 (excellent art, hit-or-miss writing, weird and wacky plots), this volume was my favorite of the three.

You may remember that the end of the second volume was what persuaded me to carry on, as writer Steve Englehart brought the book to new heights. He stays on for nearly 15 more issues, about half this volume, and many of those issues are illustrated by returning artist Gene Colan, whose work I admired in the first two volumes. The result is some darned good comics, featuring reliably interesting characters like Dormammu, Umar, and Eternity. My favorite storyline was actually a crossover with another Colan-drawn book, Tomb of Dracula, in which Dr. Strange goes toe to toe with the infamous vampire. The horror genre is a good match for the Sorcerer Supreme, and I enjoyed the goofy fun of seeing those two battle it out.

Speaking of goofy fun, there's also a story arc in this volume (after Englehart left the book) when Dr. Strange and his girlfriend/disciple Clea travel through time to different points in American history, battling sorcerers along the way and meeting Benjamin Franklin (who, in the weirdest moment of the whole book, actually falls in love with and seduces Clea. Yeah.) If you guessed that these stories were written during the celebration of the Bicentennial, you're correct.

Just like volume 2, this book has some filler you have to wade through, but it picks up at the end, when Roger Stern takes over the writing duties for the last four issues. I may eventually get volume 4 (the last one Marvel published before ending the Essential line), but for now I'm done with the good doctor...expect something different from the world of comics next month. It's been a fun ride, but I'm ready to spend some time with a different cast of characters!