March and April Reading Log

  

Between preparing for Holy Week, an upcoming renovation of the church sanctuary, and a 2 week Italian vacation, my daily reading schedule looked a lot different the last couple of months than normal. In fact, I did something unthinkable while we were in Italy...I didn't bring a single book (instead I caught up on my daunting stack of unread New Yorker and Texas Monthly back issues).

Nevertheless, I made time for some books the past 2 months. Here's how I spent my reading time!

2 Articles I Like This Month

"Did We Forget What School Is For?" by George Packer, The Atlantic. 11 minutes.

Amidst school board battles over critical race theory and banned books, writer George Packer issues this impassioned reminder that education is not about indoctrination to one way of thinking, but about teaching children how to think by exposing them to different ideas.

"After 30 Years, There's Still Nothing Like Spring Training" by Jamey Newberg, D Magazine. 9 minutes.

One of my happy places is metropolitan Phoenix in March, where 15 MLB teams convene each year for spring training. In this article, longtime Texas Rangers blogger Jamey Newberg writes about what his annual treks to spring training have meant to him and his family.

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #271-300, Annual #18-19

This stretch of issues marks the final third of John Byrne's legendary run on the FF, a sequence that sees the series leaning into its place in the wider Marvel Universe to varying degrees of success. On the one hand, it's fun seeing guest star after guest star—Spider-Man! Daredevil! Phoenix! Nick Fury!—but on the other hand, after a while it starts feeling like the FF are no longer interesting enough to carry their own book. In retrospect, it seems clear that Byrne, who was already engaged in other projects at Marvel, had mentally moved on.

Nevertheless, his run's decline from the high point of issues #257-265 or so is almost imperceptible while you're reading it. The art is still clean, dynamic, and detailed, a look that would define Marvel in the 1980s. The plotting and dialogue are still miles ahead of anything the book had seen since the day of Lee and Kirby. And Byrne's reverence for those Silver Age stories continues to be the book's guiding star.

Which is not to say the book is just a nostalgia trip—in fact, Byrne makes several substantive changes in his last twenty issues. One that endures to this day is his elevation of Susan Storm Richards. In the early days of the FF, Sue was little more than a damsel in distress, whose passive powers did little to help the team. In Byrne's hands, she gradually grows into a more modern woman, renaming herself the Invisible Woman and proving herself to be arguably the most powerful member of the team. The other big change, which proves to be more of a misfire, is a whirlwind romance between the Human Torch and the longtime girlfriend of the Thing, Alicia Masters. While handled pretty well by Byrne, the idea is too cute by half, and while issue #300 sees the two get married, this marriage would eventually be retconned.

Though Byrne's six-year run on Fantastic Four ends with #293, that 300th issue marks a sort of unofficial page turn for the title, with temporary member She-Hulk shuttled back off the Avengers to make room for the Thing and with Johnny and Alicia wed. The next few years of the FF would be a mixed bag...check back in next month to see what awaits!

THE HOPE OF GLORY: REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST WORDS OF JESUS FROM THE CROSS by Jon Meacham

In preparation for a Lenten sermon series on the famous "Seven Last Word of Jesus," I picked up this slim book of devotional thoughts from historian and public intellectual Jon Meacham, a figure whose political takes I've long appreciated. As expected, what I got was a series of  well-written but surface-level expository thoughts, the kind of thing you might get from a talented but inexperienced Sunday School teacher—some good quotes, but not necessarily any new insights.

As you may have figured, each of Jesus's statements from the cross get a chapter, most clocking in at a mere 5-10 pages. Meacham's reflections cover everything from the concept of salvation to the humanity of Jesus to the nature of truth—weighty subjects to be sure, perhaps a bit too heavy for that kind of brevity to suffice. While I was grateful for a theology book that was so easy to swallow, I can't help but wonder whether we'd have been better off with a book twice as long. After all, Meacham's writing is excellent; a little more detail would have been nice.

One word of warning for anyone wanting to pick this up: in the book's introduction, Meacham makes clear that he is a mainline Christian, not an evangelical one—he doesn't believe faith in Jesus is the only way to eternal salvation, nor does he believe the Bible is inerrant or infallible. For some, that may render the entire book meritless. For my part, I like to read people on different spiritual wavelengths from me, and I found his perspective—that of a curious, searching, but ultimately faithful believer in Christ—worth overlooking our significant theological differences.

For those looking for bite-sized insights into the cross, this is a quick, easy-to-read offering from an intelligent, eloquent author. For those looking to jump into the theological deep end, you'll have to look elsewhere. The Hope of Glory is a spiritual snack—it may not stick with you long, but it tastes good going down.

CROSS-SHATTERED CHRIST: MEDITATIONS ON THE SEVEN LAST WORDS by Stanley Hauerwas

Same song, second verse: this is another brief set of devotional thoughts about the Seven Last Words, this one courtesy of theologian Stanley Hauerwas. And in a sense, this one commits the opposite sin of Meacham's book, going so theologically deep in its brief reflections that you're sometimes left wondering if he missed the forest for the trees.

In his introduction, Hauerwas explains that his goal is to exposit the last words of Christ from a strictly theological view, not an anthropological view. In other words, he doesn't want to explain what they teach us about ourselves, but what they teach us about God—"how does this apply to my life?" is not a question he's interested in for this book. On its face, this premise creates some interesting questions about Trinitarian dynamics, how the Father relates to the Son in the person of the Godhead.

But in practice, the essays are uneven, as some of the statements from the cross lend themselves more naturally to this limitation than others. When Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" or says, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," the premise is a good one, and yields some interesting thoughts. But when Jesus begs forgiveness for his oppressors, you can feel Hauerwas straining to turn the attention away from humanity—who is, after all, the object of Jesus' plea.

There are good insights and some memorable quotes in this brief little volume, and I found it helpful in my sermon preparation. Nevertheless, I felt that Hauerwas' premise unnecessarily hamstrung him from some opportunities for application. After all, isn't that part of the point of a devotional book?

THE BASEBALL 100 by Joe Posnanski

In the spring and early summer of 2020, with the professional baseball season delayed by a pandemic that had shut down the whole world, award-winning sportswriter Joe Posnanski challenged himself: every day he would write an essay, published by The Athletic, about one of the baseball players he deemed to be in the top 100 of all time. The project swallowed every available minute of his time; he would later confess to researching and writing for 12+ hours per day at various points But when the countdown drew to its conclusion (and the COVID-shortened baseball season finally began), Posnanski had far more than just a a fun series of articles—he had an 800+ page book.

The Baseball 100 is, at least to this point, the pinnacle of my favorite sportswriter's career; it's an instant classic full of wonderful anecdotes, mini biographies, statistical anomalies, and more. Whether writing about Deadball players like Eddie Collins and Nap Lajoie, golden era titans like Ted Williams and Willie Mays, or modern phenoms like Barry Bonds and Mike Trout, Posanski infuses every essay with the information to justify the player's inclusion and the heart to make their stories sing.

Certain themes run throughout the essays, themes familiar to fans of America's pastime. Expect lots of stories about fathers and sons, the lifeblood of the game. Expect plenty of discussion about how racism kept the greatest players out of the game for decades, how those players persevered with their own Negro Leagues, and how the heroic Jackie Robinson finally burst the dam of segregation and opened the game to everyone. Expect controversies from labor wars to steroid use to be addressed, and to read about how those controversies affected players' legacies.

But most of all, prepared to be moved by Posnanski's beautiful, makes-it-look-easy prose, the kind of superb writing you don't get often in sports books. I challenge any baseball fan to make it through the whole book without getting teary-eyed at least once. It's a challenge I lost several times.

Oh, and the rankings? They're just a construct; don't take them too seriously. After all, as Posnanski reminds the reader in the book's final words, baseball is ultimately not life or death, it's a game. It should be fun. And this book, rest assured, is fun.

ALL OF THE MARVELS by Douglas Wolk

If you read this book log every month, then you know I like to take up ambitious reading projects: collecting and reading all 172 Essential Marvel volumes, reading all the presidential memoirs, reading through every issue of the Fantastic Four, etc. Douglas Wolk put those projects to shame: over a 3 year period, he read every Marvel comic published between 1961, when Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands, through the completion of the 2015 Secret Wars crossover.

All of the Marvels is his account of that experience and his synthesis of the Marvel Universe as a whole. The nature of serialized storytelling is that creators come and go, but the characters remain relatively stable; Wolk seeks to identify what Marvel's most significant characters are all about. These analyses are remarkably insightful, with Wolk serving as a sort of tour guide through the universe, showing which comics are true "must reads" and which runs are inessential.

While I appreciated his character summaries, my favorite part of the book was probably the first three chapters, where he talked about the actual experience of deciding what he would and wouldn't read (basic rule: if it was part of the "Marvel Universe," he had to read it; Marvel titles outside the universe, like Conan the Barbarian, could be waived) and how he acquired those issues (mostly through the Marvel Unlimited digital app, though with plenty of help from back issue boxes and collected editions.) Wolk's experience reading literally everything Marvel had to offer—the good, the bad, and the ugly—appealed to my completionist tendencies, and even had me tempted for a moment to replicate his feat. I'm not going to, but I thought about it!

For comics fans, especially of Marvel, this is a blast to read, and I highly recommend it. And for fans of the Marvel movies, this is well worth your time to get a feel for the source material for the universe that has taken over Hollywood. As Stan Lee used to say, Make Mine Marvel!

RELENTLESS: FROM GOOD TO GREAT TO UNSTOPPABLE by Tim S. Grover with Shari Lesser Wenk

W1NNING: THE UNFORGIVING RACE TO GREATNESS by Tim S. Grover with Shari Lesser Wenk

This pair of books was an admitted departure from my usual reading. I'm not a big fan of the self-help genre, which often relies on generalities, clichés, and folk wisdom more than true insight. But an Internet rabbit hole led me to this pair of books by Tim Grover, personal trainer to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and a series of other NBA athletes, and his win-at-all-costs approach to work, what Kobe called the "Mamba Mentality."

Let's start with the good: Grover is a professional motivational speaker, and these books will indeed motivate you to work harder, to focus in on what really matters to you and pursue it with single-minded intensity. Focus is really the key word here; Grover persuasively argues that in a world rife with distractions, what sets winners apart is their ability to set everything else aside and give their all to what matters most. He tells story after story about Michael Jordan's ferocious competitive spirit and about Kobe's inexhaustible work ethic, and challenges the reader that, while you can't match their talent, you can imitate their approach.

Now the bad: these books are essentially advocating workaholism, and unapologetically so. To Grover, work begins when you wake up in the morning—the earlier the better; Kobe starting taking shots in the gym at 4 AM—and doesn't end until you go to bed. He talks again and again about the need to sacrifice time with friends, family, and other "distractions" in pursuit of your work. He's not only a skeptic, but an outright opponent of the idea of "work-life balance," saying that winners must be imbalanced in order to set themselves apart. To him, life is work and work is life.

Since at least the days of Michael Jordan, sports fans have long been fascinated by the  ruthless singlemindedness of athletes like MJ, Kobe, Tiger Woods, and Tom Brady, men whose entire lives were built around their goals. Their obsessiveness is fascinating—heck, curiosity about it is why I picked up these books—but it's far from healthy. Michael Jordan is a winner, yes. But if you watched The Last Dance, then you tell me: is he happy?

ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN MARVEL VOL. 1-2 by Roy Thomas, Arnold Drake, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, Gil Kane, et al.

If you know Captain Marvel as Brie Larson's Carol Danvers, this character may be new to you. Indeed when the Kree soldier Mar-Vell was introduced in the Captain Marvel movie, they changed the comic character's gender and virtually everything else about him. Unfortunately, that gives you an idea how memorable the original character was.

This title really goes through three different phases in the 46 issues these volumes cover. The first introduces Mar-Vell as a Kree soldier acting as a double agent on Earth. Sent by his superior officer and archrival Yon-Rogg to scout out Earth as a potential Kree target, he instead sabotages the Kree's attempts at conquest time and again, serving simultaneously as a conflicted Kree soldier and a protector of humans.

While an intriguing premise, it's hard to keep a monthly serialized comic going with that structure, so after about a dozen issues, the character is radically reimagined. In a shameless ripoff of DC's Captain Marvel (now known, after a series of complicated lawsuits, as Shazam) Mar-Vell comes to share a body with perennial Marvel sidekick Rick Jones. When Jones slams his two metal Nega-Bands together, he is shuttled off to the Negative Zone and replaced by Mar-Vell. This change grounds the character more, but something still feels off about it all.

So, when artist Jim Starlin also takes over the writing duties, Marvel allows him to get weird. In his hands, Mar-Vell goes from a superhero to a more intergalactic "Protector of the Universe," equipped with the strange-as-it-sounds power of "cosmic awareness." More importantly, Mar-Vell is brought into the world of Starlin's favorite characters: Adam Warlock, Drax the Destroyer, and, most importantly, Thanos. With Starlin at the wheel, the book goes from a traditional superhero book to a space opera.

Unfortunately, while the book gets better with each of these three phases, it never quite clicks, owing largely to Mar-Vell's lack of a dynamic personality. There's just not a lot there; he's a blank slate without any real charisma. In a team book, that's forgivable, but it gets to be a drag when the star of the show isn't shining.

It's been said that Mar-Vell's greatest story was his last, the Starlin-penned Death of Captain Marvel. After 40+ issues of the character's original series, I'm inclined to agree. These Essentials may be important reading for Starlin fans or Marvel completionists, but they can mostly be skipped by casual readers.

Chatting in the Chapel (Friday Devotional)

 

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

- Acts 2:42

When we entered the Sistine Chapel last Friday, we were given two strict instructions: no photographs and no talking. So serious is the Vatican about maintaining a sense of reverence in that holy space that a guard repeated the instructions over a microphone when the murmurs of the crowd became too loud.

I’m a rule follower by nature, so I kept my phone in my pocket and my lips sealed. But as I made my way through the chapel, admiring the beauty of its legendary ceiling, I was momentarily distracted by a pair of guards. Unlike the man who’d sought to enforce the Vatican’s noise policy, these two were carrying on a friendly conversation right in the middle of the room. Talking about the events of the day, laughing at shared jokes, maybe enjoying some water cooler gossip—whatever they were discussing in Italian, it was clear they weren’t critiquing Michelangelo’s masterpiece. 

Initially, something about this felt wrong to me. This was a sacred place, a holy site. They should have more respect, more reverence! Couldn’t they talk about football scores somewhere else? 

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that they were offering a picture of what fellowship is supposed to look like: life together in the presence of God. Sometimes our conception of fellowship leans too hard to one side or the other of that definition—friendship without holiness or worship without shared life. But God neither calls his church to be a social club nor a monastery—he calls us to be a community knit together by faith.

Believers serve together and play together, we sing together and laugh together, we exchange prayer requests and recipes. In doing so, we show ourselves to be not just many members, but one body. When our lives are shared in Christ, we are made better by that communion.

A sanctuary is not only a place for God, but for his people. So let’s worship there—and, yes, let’s chat there too.

Seating Charts (Friday Devotional)

 

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you? You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

- James 2:1-8

As I’m writing this, my family and I are currently on a 2-week vacation through Italy, starting in Rome before making our way to Florence, Venice, and Milan. Yesterday’s morning was spent in the Colosseum, where gladiators famously battled to the death in front of cheering crowds and where prisoners (including many Christian martyrs) were fed to lions and other wild beasts.

One thing that struck my interest was the seating arrangement in the Colosseum. The bottom level was reserved for the emperor, senators, and other politicians and dignitaries. One level up was reserved for wealthy nobles. Above them sat the common people. And finally, at the top level, were the women, children, and slaves.

With such a system in place, it’s no wonder Christians soon became enemies of the empire. Christ taught that the kingdom of heaven belonged to the poor, not just the rich. Apostles like Peter, Paul, and James welcomed people of all stripes to the Lord’s table. Most of all, the church taught that God Himself showed no partiality.

Almost 2000 years later, we still have some work to do to fully apply these teachings. Our nation remains mired in racial strife, unwilling to fully reckon with its original sin of slavery. Our world is seeing economic disparities grow wider, not smaller, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And even in our own lives, we too often forget that our God shows no partiality, caring more about a person’s status than their soul.

The days of the Colosseum are over, praise be to God. So let’s throw out the old seating charts and replace them, in our hearts and in our lives, with the one Jesus drew up. Everybody’s welcome to his table.

This Was God's Son (Good Friday Devotional)

 

Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

- Mark 15:37-39

With the benefit of hindsight, Jesus’s identity seems plain to us when we read the gospels. How did so many people miss it?

It starts with Jesus’s conception by the Holy Spirit, his birth by the Virgin Mary. Who else but God’s Son would come into this world in such a way? Who else would an angel chorus celebrate in a starry Bethlehem sky? Who else would magi from the east travel so far to honor?

When Jesus’s ministry begins, we are again stunned that no one recognized him. Did they not hear the voice from heaven when he was baptized; did they not see the Holy Spirit descend like a dove? What about when he fed 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish—did they think it was just a neat trick? What about when he gave sight to the blind; what about when he healed people’s diseases? What about when he raised Lazarus from the dead?

For his disciples especially, there seems to be no excuse. They’d been with him since the beginning, heard every God-given word he’d spoken and witnessed every miraculous act. Peter and James and John saw him transfigured on a mountain, saw him confer with Moses and Elijah. All twelve disciples watched him bring a raging thunderstorm to a whimper with a word.

But after all that—all the sermons, all the miracles, all the power and authority—Jesus was seized by the jealous religious leaders, sentenced by Pilate, and hung on a cross to suffer and die. If people thought him a king-in-waiting, they surely knew better now. If they expected any more from him than from all the would-be messiahs who’d preceded him, they were sorely disappointed. Jesus was nobody special after all.

And then, as he breathed his last, the curtain of the temple tore in two. The fabric which separated God from His worshippers, the curtain that protected the Holy of Holies from everyone but the high priest, was torn asunder. The symbol of God’s transcendence, his mystery, his distance was no more. And it was in that moment that a Roman centurion, of all people, said with awe, “Truly, this man was God’s Son.”

Jesus’s birth showed he is Immanuel, God with us. His life showed us his love and power, his character and his glory. But his death is what brought us salvation. It was in the moment of his greatest humiliation that he was glorified. It was on the cross that he fully revealed himself to us.

Jesus suffered, bled, and died so that God’s will could be accomplished—so that we could be saved. On the cross, Jesus paid a debt we could never repay ourselves. He gave himself for us. Truly, this man was God’s Son.

Weeds or Flowers? (Friday Devotional)

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.

- 1 John 3:1

When we’re out for a walk or playing in the front yard, sometimes one of my kids will cry out with excitement and rush over to the grass, bending down to grab something. When they turn back to me, I’ll see what they found: a bright yellow dandelion. Sometimes, they’ll even pick a “bouquet” of dandelions to give to their mom, fully expecting her to put them in a vase the same way she would with tulips or roses.

To adults, this is the kind of childish behavior that makes us smile condescendingly at the sweet, naïve children who don’t know any better. Dandelions, after all, aren’t flowers—they’re weeds. They’re not something to be treasured, they’re something to be mowed down. You don’t admire dandelions, you exterminate them.

But then I got to thinking, and I looked at it from my kids’ point of view. Dandelions have a stem and petals, just like a flower. They grow out of the ground like a flower. They have a sweet smell like a flower. And most importantly, they have the same bright sunny color as a daisy or a sunflower; they add another shade of color to an otherwise monochromatic green lawn. Are my kids so wrong to see a flower where I see only a weed?

When we look at other people, we often see only the bad, keying in quickly on their failures and flaws, criticizing and judging. We’re quick to dismiss people as lost causes, unworthy of our time and energy. In dark moments, you may even see yourself through that lens, finding more to disparage than to praise.

But when you see someone broken beyond repair, God sees someone He created in His own perfect, holy image. Where you see a failure, God sees an opportunity for redemption. What you see as unworthy, God gave his Son to save.

Beauty can be found in the most unlikely, broken places—and the most unlikely, broken people. For where we see only weeds, God sees flowers.

April Fools (Friday Devotional)

 

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

- 1 Corinthians 1:20-25

Today, as you may have already learned the hard way, is April Fool’s Day. On this day, friends and coworkers prank each other with gags ranging from the innocent (a whoopee cushion in your chair) to the tasteless (“I’m pregnant!” or “You’re fired!”). Corporations announce kooky new initiatives only to reveal them as fictional by the end of the day. It’s a day for lighthearted silliness, a day when you can’t take anything someone says completely seriously.

But tomorrow, April 2, the sun will rise and we’ll go back to normal, to a world where we understand what’s real and what isn’t, what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable, what’s possible and what’s impossible. All the shenanigans of April Fool’s Day will be set aside and we’ll go back to the serious business of life, where everybody knows the rules.

But for Christians, there must be a recognition that those worldly rules, those earthly expectations, are off kilter from what Jesus revealed about the kingdom of God. Our world tells us that your worth is found in your success—but the Bible tells us you are created in the image of God, that you are endowed from birth with dignity and value. Our world tells you that you are made righteous by your good deeds—but Scripture tells us that you are a sinner in need of salvation, that salvation that can only come by the grace of God. Our world tells you that it’s every man for himself, that only the strong survive—but the Word of God tells a different story indeed.

In the gospel we see a God who reveals His power by becoming vulnerable, a Lord who saves by suffering, a Christ who conquers by dying. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God puts to shame so many of the stories our world tells us and proves that He is the God of the impossible.

To believe His story over the world’s, to believe in resurrection in a world of death, is to be deemed a fool. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. With Easter only 2 weeks away, may we all be April Fools.