February Reading Log

For the month of February, I read 38 issues of the Fantastic Four, an influential book on church health, and two important books—one recent sociological work, one primary source—in commemoration of Black History Month. Plenty of good reading; take a look!

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #532-569

This month's reading was made up of three distinct writer-artist runs bridging the gap from the Waid-Weiringo years to the upcoming run by Jonathan Hickman and Co., which is beloved by many but that I found underwhelming. We'll see how it holds up on a second read soon enough.

First up this month was J. Michael Straczynski and Mike McKone's take on Marvel's First Family, an interpretation which would ultimately be shaped—fairly or not—by the Civil War crossover that dominated the Marvel Universe for the latter half of 2006. Throughout the run, JMS isn't shy about playing favorites, showing a clear preference for Reed Richards over the other members of the family, making the other three feel more like supporting characters than stars in their own right. Accompanied by Mike McKone's workmanlike art, this run brings things back down to earth after the off-the-wall, occasionally silly Waid-Weiringo run, injecting more realism into the book, albeit at the expense of some fun.

Next up is Dwayne McDuffie and Paul Pelletier, who are given the unenviable task of picking up the pieces after Civil War by helming an FF book that replaces Reed and Sue with Black Panther and Storm (who were married at the time.) While McDuffie and Pelletier tried their darnedest to bring back the wacky imagination of the Waid-Weiringo years in a series of cosmic story arcs, their run is hurt by a constant feeling of impermanence—you're fully aware the entire time that this lineup and its adventures are a bridge to the next big thing.

That next big thing comes when Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, the team who made The Ultimates a blockbuster, are handed the keys. To their credit, they immediately make the book feel important, imbuing it with a fresh sense of grandeur. Unfortunately, it always feels more like a Millar-Hitch production than like the Fantastic Four. Similar to when Chris Claremont was at the helm in the early 2000s, the book is good, but just feels off in their hands, like a square peg in a round hole.

Next up is the lengthy, legendary run by Jonathan Hickman. Look for that review in April's log though, not March's—after nothing but the FF for months on end I'm going to use the next month to take a break and read a different comic series.

NINE MARKS OF A HEALTHY CHURCH by Mark Dever

Many church health and revitalization books are so practical that they begin to feel more like books about marketing, management, and how to grow your small business in 60 days with this one simple trick. Those types of books may have a few things around the edges to teach us about church growth, but often when I read them I'm left cold, struggling to figure out how to connect the newest techniques to the New Testament, the trendy to the timeless.

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, the influential book by Mark Dever, a pastor and leading light for the Young-Restless-Reformed crowd, offers a response to the secular tips of the church growth crowd: what if we acted like a New Testament church instead? Dever offers nine suggestions drawn from scripture that, to his mind point toward the kind of church that took the world by storm in the Book of Acts. With old-fashioned things like expositional preaching, biblical evangelism, and even church discipline, Dever shines a light on the ways evangelical churches have departed from biblical ecclesiology and points readers back to our calling.

If I were to summarize his overall point, it might be this: make church demanding again. Dever describes repeatedly how the church, out of a desire not to offend current members and to attract new ones, has watered down its message and its discipleship. Reminding readers that Jesus called his followers from the beginning to deny themselves and take up their cross, Dever argues that, instead of making church as easy as possible, we ought to be up-front and honest about what it means to follow Jesus in the church. It's not supposed to be easy and commitment-free, it's supposed to be life-changing.

If I have one criticism of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, it is borne out more by what I've seen from Dever's YRR friends than from the content of the book itself. Dever's brand of ecclesiology requires congregations to place a lot of trust in the church generally and leadership specifically—and while that's fine when things are working as they should, it opens the door for abuse when one bad apple infiltrates the bushel. Churches and their pastors should be above reproach, but when they're not, there needs to be more oversight than Dever explicitly allows for in the book.

Despite this criticism, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is a breath of fresh air for anybody looking for biblical words about church health without the fluff of modern marketing. You won't find much in here about signage or web design—but you'll rediscover some things that are a lot more valuable.

THE 1619 PROJECT created by Nikole Hannah-Jones

This is a book that far more people have heard of than have read thanks to far-right reactionaries in the political and media spheres, who have used it as a cudgel since its original 2019 publishing in The New York Times. The 1619 Project, a collection of historical essays collected here as one hardback book, brought the ivory tower field of critical race theory into the town square, igniting a firestorm of debate that continues today in school board meetings, state legislatures, and cable TV studios. Doubtless you already have an opinion on The 1619 Project, whether you've read it or not—but since I hadn't yet, I decided there was no better time than Black History Month to do so.

The project's name comes from the year that founder and Howard University professor (then a New York Times journalist) Nikole Hannah-Jones argues is the true date America was founded: the year 20+ Africans were brought to the New World to work as unpaid labor for the white men who kidnapped them. In the telling of Hannah-Jones and the other contributors to this project, slavery preceded democracy in the United States and its roots run deeper, and 400 years later, slavery continues to impact the daily life of African-Americans even so many years after emancipation.

This book is an anthology of essays about those effects, essays which originally ran in The New York Times Magazine as one of its bestselling issues ever. The essays describe how slavery historically impacted everything from big-picture topics like democracy and justice to meat-and-potatoes things like health care and traffic, and how the modern America we know continues to bear slavery's marks. Each essay has a similar structure, first laying out the history and then pointing—sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully—toward what concrete steps must be taken to redeem America from its original sin.

There are two major criticisms of the project, one which deserves to be addressed and the other which, in my opinion, is not offered in good faith and should be dismissed as such. The valid criticism is that Hannah-Jones and other contributors sometimes prioritize advocacy over historical accuracy to the point where facts are manipulated in the service of a larger point. The examples that have been cited in various opinion pieces since 2019 are indeed concerning, and a project of this magnitude ought to be above reproach, but I will say this: part of the work of the historian is interpreting and framing history, presenting it as a narrative instead of a list of disparate facts. So long as sources are cited, the narrative conclusions are a matter for debate, even fierce debate—but not for outright dismissal.

The second criticism is the one that, to my mind, is at the root of right-wing reaction to the book, from Tucker Carlson to Donald Trump: the 1619 Project is mean to white people. With words like "unpatriotic," they dismiss the project as revisionist history, saying it denigrates America and dismisses all the progress African-Americans have made for the last 400 years. For me, that accusation is unadulterated hogwash, the defensive reaction of people who don't appreciate being reminded of a history they'd rather forget.

As Hannah-Jones and her fellow contributors persuasively point out in this anthology, the desire to simply "move on" is at the heart of America's problem with racism: we keep trying to run past our original sin without redeeming it. That may be fine for white people—look, we're better now!—but it is patently unfair to the African-Americans who inherited poverty instead of generational wealth, who never got so much as the 40 acres and a mule the federal government promised. Slavery, this book says, may be a dead institution, but it still has victims today, and they have never received restitution.

We'd all like to live in the America of political ads, an exceptional, divinely blessed nation that shines as a beacon of freedom throughout the globe. But any time we present that lily-white (pun intended) story, we ignore the dark truth lurking beneath—this nation was built on sacred ideals, but it was built by enslaved bodies. Slavery, like it or not, is part of our history, and we have to reckon with it now, because in many ways we never really have. What the 1619 Project argues, at its core, is simple: history isn't something you move on from, even and especially when it's painful. It's something you learn from.

INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL by Harriet Jacobs

When Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in 1861, it served as a companion piece of sorts for books like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Uncle Tom's Cabin, abolitionist texts meant to shame those sympathetic to the 'plight' of nervous slaveholders and remind people of the humanity of enslaved African-Americans. But in some ways, Harriet Jacobs (writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent) did her job too well—many refused to believe a slave could possibly write so well.

Jacobs' story recounts her childhood as a slave, the sexual harassment and domineering she experienced at the hands of her enslaver, the seven years she spent in hiding following her escape, and her eventual flight to freedom. Reminiscent of both Twelve Years a Slave and The Diary of Anne Frank, Jacobs is matter-of-fact in the telling of her story, but reflective about how her experiences matched those of other slaves.

What makes Jacobs' narrative stand alone amidst other famous slave memoirs is that she was not physically beaten by her enslavers, yet was still unquestionably scarred by the experience. While many assume the whip was the most feared punishment for slaves, Jacobs writes with foreboding about how, for women, it was catching the lustful eye of the master. In a post-Me Too world, Jacobs' story has more relevance than ever.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is certainly not a pleasant read, but it is an important one, and it thankfully ends happily, with Jacobs finally purchasing her freedom and embarking upon a new life in the North, not as a fugitive slave but as a free woman. For those interested skeptical of The 1619 Project and its conclusions, this primary source offers a compelling reminder: slavery is truly our nation's original sin. and we owe it to ourselves to never forget its victims.