adamrshields's reviews
1923 reviews

Summary: A look at the process of change as we age and mature.

I am in a Tuesday morning book group at my local Ignatius retreat house. The group meets for about 8 to 10 weeks twice a year. There are about 20 people who are involved, usually about 15-16 people a week are present. Because the group meets at 10:15 AM on a Tuesday, it is mostly people who are retirement age. The group is primarily Catholic and female, although not entirely. I very much value the group and I will continue to read whatever the group picks. But I was not looking forward to reading Falling Upward. I have previously read it twice in 2011 and in 2016. I liked it less each time I read it. But there is something helpful about reading a book in a group because you gain the perspective of others as you read it. I tend to like books less if I previously liked them when rereading them in a group. But I also tend to like books more when rereading with a group if I didn't like them previously. In both cases, it is because different perspectives give me insight into aspects of the book that I did not have when reading alone.

Part of what I found interesting is that about a third of the group was new to the book. But most of the group had read it two or three times previously. Almost everyone who found the book valuable had read it multiple times. I continue to think that Rohr is less clear than he should be. And I continue to think he is trying to read too large of an audience. I both found the book more helpful and more limited with this reading.

On the negative side, I think that his use of the archetype narrative (The Oddesy and other similar stories) has the problem of orienting the discussion of the second half of life in a male-oriented way. I know Rohr is a Catholic priest and a man, but over and over again, I found his illustrations and framing to be overly limited. One of the main themes of the book is how part of maturity is rejecting false dualism and embracing the Both/And. But then he would create evaluative dualism between the first and second half of life. I probably can't be Rohr, but I would like to see someone else write about archetypal narrative in a similar way, but add in many more illustrations that are rooted in female archetypes.

On the positive side, I do think that reading this nearly 15 years after the first reading I have more life experience and maturity and I can see areas where I can make sense of his point in ways that I couldn't before. But I also think that there are many areas where he will continue to be misunderstood either because he was not clear or because the audience that is reading isn't who he was addressing. Over and over again, I ran into comments or advice or illustrations where it made sense, but there was a level of health that is assumed that may not be present. This is similar to my complaints about A Loving Life by Paul Miller. Miller calls on people to tolerate suffering and abuse to lead others toward repentance but does not spend nearly enough time talking about the reality of abuse and the harm that comes about because of abuse. There were many places where the advice or illustration works in one setting, but not in another. That discernment of how to apply wisdom like this requires a level of maturity that I am not sure applies to everyone reading the book.

I am glad I read it again, at least I was glad that I read it with the group. I do not think it is an essential book.

I originally posted my review on my blog at https://bookwi.se/falling-upward-2/

Summary: A book biography of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.

I have been aware of Miriam Dixon (Mimi) for a while. I assume it was a Renovare podcast that I first became aware of her. She was a pastor for 40 years, retiring in 2019, 34 of those years as the pastor of a single church in Colorado. She has been on the board of director for Renovare for quite awhile.

And I have been aware of Celebration of Discipline for decades. I think I read it while I was in college or seminary for the first time. And I think I read it again about 15-20 years ago. And I have read portions of it when I needed to refer to a spiritual discipline since then. But it wasn't until Worth Celebrating and Celebration of Discipline where choosen for the Renovare Book Club that I picked it up again.

As is clear from Worth Celebrating, Celebration of Disciple was a very influential book. Many evangelicals and other conservative protestants were resistant to spiritual disciplines because they felt "too Catholic" or thought they were a repudiation of the concept of grace. Foster as an outsider to the evangelical world, but with enough awareness of the evangelical world was able to frame spiritual disciplines in a way that was attractive and helpful.

I have listened to a number of interviews with both Richard Foster and Mimi Dixon. Foster did not want an academic to write the book biography of Celebration of Discipline, he wanted a pastor who had worked to form people spiritually to write it. I think there is some wisdom to that, but I also think that I have appreciated book biographies by people like Alan Jacobs, George Marsden and Martin Marty. I am less reluctant to have academic who are familiar with the subject write book biographies than Foster is and I am not sure at the end if I think Dixon was the right choice. She is enthusiastic, she was personally formed by Celebration of Discipline. She already had a relationship with Foster being on the Renovare board of directors.

It is more in the inteviews than the book, but Dixon was tickled by the idea of a book biography. It was new to her. She did real archival research and a ton of interviews. Worth Celebrating isn't a bad book, but I also don't think it is a great book. That being said, I reread all the reviews of book biographies that I have written about and the concept is pretty formulaic and the quality mostly pretty dry. I think Jacobs' biography of the Book of Common Prayer is probably the best, but it also has the longest history.

I do think it is interesting to understand context and how a book was recieved. CS Lewis was not naturally a darling of American Evangelicals, but he became one. Bonhoeffer has been distorted by many, but that story of how he was introducted to the large Christian world after his death does matter to how he is read now. And in the case of Worth Celebrating, if you are under 50, you probably have always been aware of the spiritual formation movement, but it is a fairly recent movement and it is unlikely that we would have Eugene Peterson or Dallas Willard or the host of younger authors and pastors and speakers without Richard Foster.

I do think that a bit more distance may have helped Worth Celebrating be a little bit better of a book. But, again, there is some value in writing about the book of an author who is still alive and who known well. Worth Celebrating is a short book. If you haven't read Celebration of Discipline I would recommend that over jumping into Worth Celebrating first. But there is value in understanding the context and culture to which the book was published and how it has impacted people in the nearly 45 years since it was published. For those who find that interesting, this is worth reading.

Two quotes that I think sum up why it may have been important for Mimi Dixon to have written it as opposed to a more academic author:

and

I think Dixon did discern and write about the problems of mistaking the disciplines as seeking after God and she was well aware that Foster is not trying to overwhelm people, but introduce them to the range of spiritual disciplines.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/worth-celebrating/

Summary: This books is a series of essays about protest, racism, violence and was the last book published before his death.

I decided to read Faith and Violence after reading Daniel Horan's book on Merton earlier this year. I probably should have just bought a used copy of the book (which is what I think is probably the best and certainly the cheapest option), but instead I used interlibrary loan. The book I received was a first edition hardcover. There is something interesting in reading a first edition  book that came out just over 50 years ago and which clearly had been read, but not by all that many people.

I didn't have time to read the whole book. It came about a week before I went on vacation and I was busy getting ready for vacation or I was actually on vacation. Almost all of the reading I did (about half the book) was in the car. I was primed to read it with a view toward modern use of Merton's ideas because of Horan's essays. And it felt like he was writing with a more contemporary approach toward activism and faith and social problems than some other contemporaries of the era. Part of what I appreciated about Horan's essays is that he both talked about how we can use Merton in contemporary thought and how Merton was a person of his time and limited in some ways by that historical position.

What I was most interested in is how much Merton approached social issues as systems not individual acts or the acts of unattached individuals. This is not just a book about violence "out there" but a discussion with other Christians about how we as Christians uphold violence. In the introduction he explicitly calls out Reinhold Niebuhr's "realism" as justifying the use of force and violence. Merton is calling for nonviolent resistance to injustice. Faith and Violence would have been published just before Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. That whole year, and really since 1963, the role of nonviolence resistance was being questioned in the civil rights movement. And in 1968, the resistance to the war in Vietnam was strengthening.

conversationMany who write about nonviolent resistance do so with the explicit understanding that injustice harms both the oppressed and the oppressor. Nonviolence is a means of love for the oppressor.

Earlier this year I read a biography of John Lewis and I previously have read a biography of Stokely Carmichael, their fundamental disagreement was about nonviolence. Lewis believed in it as a methodology and ideology, while Carmichael only saw it as a tactic. And once nonviolence was not achieving the goal at the speed he wanted, he dropped it as a tactic. It is very much in this conversation that Merton is writing. Lewis resigned from SNCC in late 1966 by early 1968, Lewis was working for RFK's presidential campaign, until RFK's own assassination.

Merton continues in that essay on to discussed the problem of doing the right thing for the wrong reason or by the wrong means. This is a continual problem with fighting injustice. There is a standard that those who fight injustice must hold themselves to that is different from those who uphold injustice.

The book continues discussion of Black Power, Vietnam, and a fourth section that I did not get to. That fourth section may have been more integrated than I think, but the death of God, the book Honest to God, and "godless Christianity" all feel quite different from the earlier discussions of nonviolence, Black power and Vietnam.

I have seen several copies of Faith and Violence in used book stores for under $5. At some point I will probably come back to it, but I am regularly surprised about accessible many older books are.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/faith-and-violence/

Summary: A historical look at how Christian mystics understood mysticism and how that has changed.

Anyone reading along with my reviews is probably aware that I am about 18 months into a reading project on the idea of Christian discernment. And while I have not ended that exploration of discernment, I am at the point of a deep dive where I need to explore the connected ideas to discernment so that I can better understand how to proceed.

A number of years ago I was exploring the trinity and I realized that in exploring the trinity I needed to better understand the concept of hermeneutics and I think I ended up reading more books about hermeneutics than I did about the trinity. That exploration of the trinity comes up because one of the most helpful books for me in exploring the trinity was The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church by Franz Dunzl. What made it so helpful was that it traced the early doctrine of the trinity but in doing so, Dunzl showed that part of the development of the language around the trinity was linguistic (there was a shift from Greek to Latin as the lingua franca) and part of the development of the langauge around the trinity was about shifts in philosophy and the language of philosophy.

If you have traced Christian doctrine over time, the way that cultural issues shift the way that we think of theology is common. Part of what mattered in the reformation was that thee was a shift in how we think of the state and how we think of legal realities and this corresponded to the increasing use of legal language in regard to the doctrines of salvation. In a more modern example, the shifts in understanding about gender and gender roles have shifted the language that some are using in regard to trinitarian theology with regard to the rise of supporters of the The Eternal Subordination of the Son or the The Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son and in a different area some of the changes in language and meaning of the economic trinity or social trinitarian theology.

I bring all of this up because Baxter's Introduction to Christian Mysticism has played a bit of a similar role as Dunzl for me. Mysticism is a notoriously difficult subject to discuss because the very nature of mysticism is discussion about what is "super natural" or what is above or outside of the natural realm. Because language is often referential, referring to something that is outside of nature makes it difficult to draw metaphors or analogy. Part of the differences in the way that we think of mysticism over time are differences of what is culturally being responded to as well as differences in philosophy and language. (The Mystery of God was a very helpful book on the right and wrong use of mystery within theological exploration.)

I picked up An Introduction to Christian Mysticism because I have recently read Baxter's book on CS Lewis and how his writing and thinking were influenced by medieval thinking. And as I think is appropriate, much of An Introduction to Christian Mysticism is concerned with the same broad time period. A short introduction like this cannot grapple with everything, but this is a good illustration as to how mysticism relates to knowledge, negative theology (or Apophatic theology), the role of action and contemplation with regard to mysticism. I think most importantly to my project, Baxter traces some of the ways that the changing understanding of the interiority of the human being (the inner self, personality, pyschology, etc.) influence the ways that we speak of mysticism. It is too strong to say that to know yourself is to know God, but that is how some mystics have come to see contemplation.

An Introduction to Christian Mysticism opens with a discussion of the rediscovery of mysticism in the 20th and 21st century. I have been reading The Celebration of Discipline and a book biography of Celebration of Disciple, Worth Celebrating by Miriam Dixon with the Renovare book club and they both also discuss this rediscovery. It has come in several waves, the Azuza revival brought a wave of interest in Pentecostal and charismatic worship and the Holy Spirit. Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and AW Tozer, among others prompted a revival of evangelical and protestant awareness of the history of the mystics. And Celebration of Discipline and other books in the spiritual formation movement has brought about increased attention to the practices of mysticism. Baxter is almost entirely focused on the intellectual history of mysticism. It is not that he is unaware of the role of the practices, but that while he acknowledges the practices and discussed the role of a type of muscular Christianity in his discussion of the desert fathers and of St Francis, that isn't his main focus.

After the introduction to the topic of mysticism and its revival, Baxter traces both thematically and temporally from Plato and other pagans of antiquity to Augustine, the mystics interested in negative theology (Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and Meister Echhart), before returning to the desert fathers. And then returns to the later medieval world with lectio divina and the ways that Christian contemplation relates to God through contemplation of his word.

I listened to this as an audiobook and while the narrator was fine, this is a book that probably is not well suited to audio. Much of the book is oriented around ideas and Baxter is, as much as possible, oriented toward allowing earlier Christians to speak for themselves about mysticism. The sheer number of quotes and the way that Baxter mixes the quotes with his interpretive gloss means that it is very hard at times to know where the quote ends and where Baxter's commentary starts. And many of these quotes are either dense or coming from a very different cultural perspective and it would be helpful to read this in print so that you can go back and reread sections.

My plan is to watch the book price and pick it up the next time it goes on sale. But in the meantime, I am going to pick up some Evelyn Underhill and some of the older mystical books to read directly. I am still convinced that there is a very important role for understanding discernment in modern Christian discipleship. But I also think that without an understanding of mysticism and how we connect to a spiritual God, there is a limit to what we can say about discernment. Discernment involves understanding emotion, but it is not simply emotion. Discernment very much is interested in hearing from God and relating to God, but one of the important aspects of that is enough self awareness to grapple with what is ourselves and what is God. And then there is the ever-present question about what to do in the face of a God who appears distant or is not there when we feel like we want him to be there. All three of those questions and more have an aspect of mysticism in them.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/an-introduction-to-christian-mysticism/

Summary: An exploration of post-colonial practical theology in the Anglican world.

I am a fan of reading widely, but in my wide ranging reading I do not always know how to really write about what I read. This is a book that I appreciated and recommend, but I also need to say up front I am not qualified to evaluate. I have some understanding of post-colonial theory, but my understanding is very cursory.

I grew up baptist and have always attended baptist or non-denominational churches until the past 18 months when I started attending an Episcopal church. I used the Book of Common Prayer for years, which is the pull part of moving toward the Anglican tradition. The push part of that decision is my practical and theological changes from autonomous local churches in the face of abuse scandals and leader misbehavior. Episcopal structures are not immune to abuse and leader misbehavior (see George Carey and Justin Welby's resignations and the variety of scandals in ANCA and TEC). But part of the differences is that episcopal systems of church governance have the theoretical possibility of addressing sinful leaders, autonomous non-denominational or baptist church systems often do not have any ability to address sinful leaders in a meaningful way.

One of the themes of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is that interaction is bidirectional. Yes, colonial harm went from the colonizer to the colonized, but there are other interactions. This is similar to the focus in David Swartz's Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, which explores the ways that American Evangelicals were impacted by missions and interaction with world Christianity. Not all feedback is positive. In a complicated way, Swartz's exploration of the Homogenous Unit Principle and the way that was brought back from the mission field and was used to uphold church segregation beyond when segregation in other cultural areas was frowned upon, is an example of how not all feedback is positive.

But many areas of cross fertilization are positive. One of the examples in The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective is the fact that women's ordination occurred in Hong Kong about 50 years before it was approved in England. Women's ordination in Hong Kong and then China was a result of the realities of World War II. From that practical expediency movement on women's ordination moved first to other global south areas and then to the United States and the UK.

Postcolonial theory is particularly relevant to the anglican world. The Church of England was a state church and that state church was the state church of an empire that was one of the most extensive in global history. And that empire still has aspects of it in place and within the living memory of many, it was much more widespread. Post colonial analysis of the way that the global communion interacts and works makes a lot of sense, especially because of the stresses on that global communion.

The United States revolution changed the way that the Church of England related to the churches outside the geography of the UK. In 1867 the Lambeth Conference first met. There were several reasons for why the global Anglican communion were called together, but one of them was to discuss how and whether to accept polygamous men into church membership and if they were allowed to attend services, whether they should be baptized and given communion. It is not exactly parallel with the concerns around LGBTQ inclusion in the anglican communion now, but there are issues of sexuality and culture that are part of that discussion. The connection between sexuality and inculturation and local authority of the bishop has been at play in many of the meetings (that happen every decade) since that first meeting about 150 years ago.

I think like a good academic book, The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective complicates the narrative. It is not only that the global south is universally more conservative around sexuality than the US and UK. There are very conservative movements within the US and UK and there are inclusive areas of the global south. The issues are complex and listening to the whole church and paying attention to areas of post colonial theory as the global communion meets and discusses these complex and complicated issues is no silver bullet solution. But the reality is that the anglican communion was shaped by colonialism. And that has to be part of understanding the way forward.

Kwok Pui-Lan is herself from the global south but often working and teaching in the western contexts. She is rightly raising issues and pointing out areas of disagreement while noting the history which matters to how we proceed.

The past Archbishops of Canterbury have all have a level of taint or controversy from LGBTQ, sexual abuse and gender issues. Welby has resigned and the process of a new archbishop will be difficult. Rowan Williams certainly tried to find a way forward, but his academic chops did not seem to be up to the backdoor political wrangling. (I recently watched the movie Conclave and it does seem to be a relevant movie to the context.) And recently the George Carey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002) resigned his priesthood because mishandling of sex abuse investigations.). Before Carey, Robert Runcie was the archbishop from 1980 to 1991 and oversaw the official recognition of women as priests in the UK. Every archbishop has had significant controversy around issues of gender and sexuality.

The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective by Kwok Pui-Lan will be too academic for some readers. It is not a difficult book to read, but may require a level of background theology, church history and other disciplines to fully understand some of the context. That being said, if people are interested in the issues, the very fact that they are interested probably means that they have the background to be able to read the book and will profit from it.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-anglican-tradition/