May Reading Log

I read two very big books and three smaller ones this month, along with plenty of good stuff online (plus the daily barrage of bad news). On to the reviews!

4 Articles I Like This Month

"My Priceless, Worthless Baseball Cards" by Ryan Hockensmith, ESPN. 11 minutes.

A reflection, inspired by the author's collection of 150,000+ baseball cards, on what nostalgic creature comforts mean to us in this time of pandemic.

"Ordinary People Are Leading the Leaders" by David Brooks, The New York Times. 3 minutes.

When you're online, it probably feels like we're as divided as ever right now. But when you talk to people in person, you learn that, regardless of the stances of our various political leaders, the American public is mostly on the same page right now about how we're handling COVID-19. A refreshing take.

"The Day the Live Concert Returns" by Dave Grohl, The Atlantic. 6 minutes.

An ode to the live concert and why live music matters, not just for us as individuals but us as a society. Worth the read for the last paragraph alone.

"What if 'Roe' Had Not Needed to Lie?" by Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, The Dallas Morning News. 2 minutes.

In the wake of the bombshell revelation that Norma McCorvey, the famed 'Jane Roe' of Roe v. Wade who spent years after the case as a pro-life advocate, was being paid for her so-called "conversion" to the pro-life position, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa argues that being pro-life means being not just anti-abortion, but pro-woman.

THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD by N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright's work has been formative in my theological education. Thanks to him, I know far more about the first century world than I used to. Thanks to him, I better understand what it meant for Jesus to fulfill the Law rather than abolish it (i.e. how Christianity is related to Judaism.) But the debt I owe him is that, after years of reading his books at both the popular and academic level, I came to understand why the resurrection is such a big deal.

The Resurrection of the Son of God, the third part in Wright's series on "Christian Origins and the Question of God" (look for the fourth and final part in July's reading log...it'll take me 2 months to read all 1,500+ pages of that volume), is a tightly focused examination of what the first century world believed about resurrection, what the Bible says about it, and why it matters for Christian faith. Wright's final conclusion is that Christ really did rise from the grave, that in doing so he revealed himself to be Lord and Messiah, and that his resurrection is the firstfruits of God's new creation.

The most valuable thing this book does is thoroughly dismantle the popular notions about what Christians believe about life after death: that when you die, your soul goes up to heaven where you live with God for eternity. As Wright convincingly shows, that is not what anyone in the early church believed, and it is not what Jesus promised or Paul taught. The gospel witness is not about eternal disembodied bliss, but about resurrection, about a day to come when the dead shall rise, transformed and redeemed by the power of God to reign with Christ in a new creation.

In Wright's telling, resurrection is the glorious endpoint of all the metanarratives of Scripture—it is the restoration of creation, it is the end of Israel's exile, and it is the full fulfillment of the promise that God is with us. With meticulous attention to both the historical details surrounding the writing of Scripture and to the exegesis of the Bible's texts about resurrection, Wright makes his case compellingly, correcting popular misconceptions with a mountain of historical, biblical, and theological evidence.

For many, even many Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is simply a happy ending to the story of Jesus's passion, one final miracle before he ascended into heaven. But as Wright shows, the resurrection is where all the hopes of the faithful find their fulfillment; it is where God announces once and for all that he is doing something new. I cannot thank Wright enough for his work in this volume, which I would probably now count as the most personally influential theology book I've ever read. If you want to know why Easter matters, you'll find no shortage of answers here.

PARTING THE WATERS: AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch

The story we were taught in school about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s goes something like this: Rosa Parks, in an act of spontaneous outrage, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and was arrested. In response, Martin Luther King, Jr. led the black citizens of Montgomery to boycott the buses until the laws were changed. MLK then went from city to city throughout the south giving speeches and leading nonviolent marches, until he finally gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" in Washington D.C. and convinced the nation—and the White House—that America's black citizens deserved equal rights. His assassination in 1968 marked the end of the movement, if not the struggle for equality. The end.

It's not an entirely inaccurate story, to be sure, but it's awfully oversimplified. The true story of African-Americans' movement for civil rights began long before Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, and even once King became its de facto leader, he was not some messianic figure acting alone. The protests of the movement were not universally welcomed, nor were they all successful. And while the White House—Kennedy and later Johnson—put the wheels in motion to ensure that the movement's righteous purpose resulted in legislation, it was only after years doing their best to duck the issue altogether.

In short, the story of the Civil Rights Movement is a lot more complicated than you might think, and Parting the Waters, the 900+ page first book in Taylor Branch's trilogy on the movement, provides all the painstaking details you could want. Exhaustively researched and written matter-of-factly, Branch introduces readers to figures who don't make the front cover of the history books even as his spotlight remains on Dr. King. His blow-by-blow accounts of all the conflicts the movement had to endure—between King's SCLC and the more established NAACP, between King and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and between King and the Kennedy administration (especially Attorney General Robert Kennedy)—show how miraculous it is that the movement accomplished anything at all, given the headwinds it was facing.

Parting the Waters has a lot of ground to cover, and occasionally gets so deep in the details that you start to lose the forest for the trees, but there can be no disputing its value as a resource for students of history. Check back next month as I read part 2 in the trilogy, Pillar of Fire.

HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

Given the length of Parting the Waters, I needed to make sure that the classic novel I read this month (you may recall that I've committed to reading one each month in 2020) would be short. At less than 100 pages, Heart of Darkness seemed to fit the bill. Little did I know how long it would take me to trudge through those pages.

Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, a steamboat captain who travels into the Congo in search of a mysterious trader named Mr. Kurtz. Marlow's obsession with Kurtz, the foreignness of the land, and the assistance and conflict he finds from the African natives on his journey serve to show the reader that darkness is something which transcends civilization and is present within each of us.

Unfortunately, Heart of Darkness is the perfect example of the kind of book which is more fun to discuss than to read. Joseph Conrad is a big fan of the loooong paragraph and doesn't use a lot of dialogue, so I found myself frequently losing the thread. What's more, there are long stretches where nothing really happens in the story and where he's instead letting nature provide the symbolism—again, that can be fun to discuss, but it's a drag to read.

Sometimes called "the first modern novel," Heart of Darkness has a great deal to say about race, colonialism, sin, and power. I just wish those things were a little easier to find on the page instead of having to learn about them in the Cliff Notes.

ESSENTIAL HULK VOL. 7

This is my third (and final) reading log in a row featuring Bronze Age Hulk stories, so you'll pardon me if I keep this one short. Roger Stern's writing run is tremendous fun; the rest is forgettable. The art isn't anything worthy of praise or condemnation. Plot-wise, this volume sees General "Thunderbolt" Ross suffer a nervous breakdown, the divorce of Glenn Talbot and Betty Ross, and the death of Hulk's one-time love Jarella.

But mostly, Hulk smashes. And what more could you ask for than that?

ESSENTIAL MONSTER OF FRANKENSTEIN VOL. 1 by Gary Friedrich, Doug Moench, Mike Ploog, John Buscema, et al.

Would you have guessed that a mute, hulking monster out of Victorian literature would make for a decent comic book protagonist? Yeah, me neither, but that's 1970s Marvel for you, full of surprises.

This collection of stories began as a simple retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but after a few issues the story continues as Frankenstein's monster seeks revenge on his creator. From there you get a few more stories about the monster's travails in Victorian Europe before he is frozen in Arctic waters and then reawakened from suspended animation in modern times. It's at that point that the book starts to resemble The Incredible Hulk, with the monster taking on various antagonists even as he also deals with persecution from a society that fears and misunderstands him.

To be honest with you, I was kind of dreading reading this particular Essential, since I have no connection to the source material and had a hard time imagining Frankenstein's monster carrying a solo title. But as Marvel horror goes, this book was closer to Tomb of Dracula (some of the best Marvel Bronze Age stuff in any genre) than it was Brother Voodoo or The Scarecrow. The stories are strong, the characters interesting, and the titular monster acts less as a protagonist than a catalyst, which serves the stories well. As 1970s Marvel horror goes, this is worth the small time investment it takes to read it.