Josh Ritter, Bright’s Passage, 2011.

This blog is meant to be a journal: it’s a place for me to reflect on the book I read. At times that means entries are akin to reviews, with jottings to help me remember the book if I struggle to recall it; other times, I’m trying to work through ideas. With this novel, though, both tasks are made more complicated because of my fan-boy-ish adulation of Josh Ritter as a musican, song-writer, and story-teller. I’ve loved Ritter’s music since I first heard “Come and Find Me” as the end credits rolled on an episode of “Six Feet Under” many years ago: I rushed out and bought Golden Age of Radio the next morning.

There’s a rush of language in Ritter’s lyrics that delights and entrances. Sometimes the lyrics are almost cryptic (‘I keep you in a flower vase / with your fatalism and your crooked face / with the daisies and the violet brocades’); at other times, the narrative is funny and engaging (‘At this, Sir Galahad got angry, / “Angel,” he said, “don’t you tempt me. / I wish to go to heaven and not to hell. / So when stable boys look lonesome, / when the women call me handsome, I’ll hold me virtue very firmly by myself.”’). There’s an interesting tension between agnosticism and ire at God that’s frequently expressed as in “Thin Blue Flame” (‘If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room / the heavenly host are just the cold dark moons / He bent down and made the world in seven days / and ever since he’s been a’walking away’) and the ever-stunning “Girl in the War” ('... the keys to the Kingdom got lost inside the Kingdom / and the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them / I got a girl in the war Paul I know that they can hear me yell / if they can’t find a way to help her they can go to Hell'). And yet, the cadence and rhythm of scripture express themselves in deeply positive ways, too, as in the brilliant (and Paul Simon-influenced) “Lark”: ‘I am assured, yes I am assured yes / I am assured peace will come to me / A peace that can yes surpass the speed yes / Of my understanding and my need’.

Why go through those examples? Well, it’s impossible for me to read Bright’s Passage except through the lens of Ritter’s music that I have listened too so often and so carefully for a number of years now. Playful language, careful story-telling, and a deeply ambiguous sense of the numinous are as present in his first novel as they are in his songs.

Bright’s Passage follows Henry Bright. Just back to his home in West Virginia after serving in the First World War, Bright is coping with the death of his wife, Rachel, and his son’s birth as the story begins. That coping is complicated by an angel inhabiting the body of a horse who keeps giving Bright directions, and then made worse by the pursuit of both a nasty fire and the malicious father and sons of Bright’s dead bride. Interwoven with this story in the present is the story of Bright’s experiences fighting in France.

The writing is vivid and evocative in both time periods, and well-crafted. It’s spare, and uses details that make sense to Bright. The first sentence opens with the true freight of the book: “The baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier than a rabbit kit.” (3) This novel is about life and death and possibility, simultaneously attached and disconnected to the world that never does run away. The opening of the second chapter—a switch from West Virginia to France—functions similarly:

Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady dripping of blood and rain. (13)

There’s an obvious contrast between the crucified trees—and the entire passion that is the war—and the new birth of his son into an uncertain future that is the central tension of the novel: how can Bright enter a new future, leaving behind the cruelty and pain of the past? It’s a question intensified by the dubious quality of his memory, when we read of him seeing Rachel’s brothers cruelly kill fellow soldiers despite our certainty from our perspective as readers that they’d not have been in France. Bright is like a blind man, running unseeing from a terror that’s hunting him to a future that he’s unable to see. All is made worse by this peculiar angel with his own agenda—and angels are never easy or felicitous creatures in Ritter’s work! (I really do love the brilliance and humour of “Galahad” that offers another great example of why angels are to be feared, if they’re Ritter’s creations.)

It’s an impressive first novel, perhaps precisely because of Ritter’s care and practise of story-telling in so many other genres. It has some infelicities—it’s heavy-handed at times, and the ending is a little over-easy—but they’re easy to overlook whether you’re as fond of him as I or not. I’m looking forward to hearing what others make of it.

Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River, 2006.

Ferguson’s first novel is a road-trip good-time, a weird and wacky series of pastiches that is strongly reminiscent of the work of both Douglas Adams and Tom Robbins. Ostensibly the stories of two Glaswegians who were once friends, the story careens off into strange asides and amusing characters that one might well meet in Ferguson’s comedy (and bits and pieces from Ferguson’s own life, as you’ll discover in my next blog post on his American on Purpose). We follow George, a defence lawyer dying of cancer who falls in love, and Fraser, a disgraced televangelist seeking escape at a conference of his brother televangelists in the deep South. Along the way we meet the morbidly obese and extensively depraved Saul and his brother Leon, the singer cum actor. We meet crack-heads, anorexics, and snake handlers, and are reminded that bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly... and yet they do. Oh, and Carl Jung and Virgil are key figures, too. It’s a wise-cracking tour de force that touches on sex, suicide, addiction, sex, the stories that trap us, sex, and a deeply humane view of what it should mean to us to lead our lives. From chase-like sequences in RVs to the retelling of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, Ferguson’s writing is deeply entertaining and moving, never stepping away from a sharp comedic outlook while sharing interesting asides on myoclonic twitches and the etymology of “cutting to the chase”. The book is at its best in the set pieces, and three morality tales are particularly strong. It’s well worth a read: you’ll not regret it, in your own time between the bridge and the river.

Garrison Keillor, Life Among the Lutherans, 2009.

A collection of short pieces, some of the tales and anecdotes in this book are familiar and others are obscure. Many will know “The Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra” and “Pontoon Boat”, but “Ministers’ Retreat” and “Lorraine Turnblad’s Tombstone” are far less well known. Each story has its particular Woebegon-ian charm, and it’s an enjoyable book. My sole complaint is that, aside from Woebegon and/or vague references to Lutherans, the book suffers from a lack of organization: it’s not structured, even moving through seasons, and so it really is a book to pick up at discrete intervals. The reader is left only with a sense of the milieu, both of Lake Woebegon and, to a lesser extent, of the midwestern Lutheran mores of which Keillor is the principal hagiographer (or idolater?). It’s an enjoyable read, marked principally by moments of quiet hopefulness about the capacity (too rarely reached) of humans to offer and receive love in meaningful ways.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 2009.

I don’t keep this reading journal as a way of crowing about what I have read; the blog doesn’t exist to trumpet notches on a bookshelf. Yet there are some entries, when I come to gather my thoughts on a book, that I can’t help but beginning by celebrating the fact that I finished reading it – even, and perhaps especially, when I really enjoyed the book, as in this case!

I first saw reference to MacCulloch’s magisterial monograph in Bishop David Hamid’s blog in October; Bishop Hamid reposts each month (with permission), the reviews compiled for the House of Bishops of the Church of England by that House’s Theological Secretary, Dr Martin Davie. I’ve been very tempted by more than one of the reviews, and a couple of the books have found their ways onto my shelves. Church history is in some ways one of my weaker subjects. Of all of my courses in the subject at seminary, only one wasn’t cross-listed to the Theology department and that was only because it was a reading course. My background, then, is more in the history of ideas, with the various other aspects of history sweeping in only as they affected theological developments. Reading MacCulloch, I was surprised both by how much I already knew and how much I did not. It’s a staggering, 1016 page, work that begins in the period well before the Church in both of the prominent cultures which would influence its early development (Greek and Hebrew) and extends through to the present day. Despite its length, the book’s vast scope means that the pace through the material is breakneck. MacCulloch’s prose is lucid and concise, and deeply funny with a simultaneously scathing and affectionate dry wit offering asides (I’m still laughing at bits about Moravians and a fascination with trombones, and the treatment of Henry VIII’s marital miscellany, but the humour is omnipresent; make sure to read the footnotes and the lists of major sources for each period, where even funnier bits lurk).

To attempt to offer a summary of the book would be audacious, given that it is in many ways itself a compendium. One observation I would make is that MacCulloch is interested not just in Christianity as we tend to think of it – that is, as a monolithic faith, albeit splintered into sects – but as it has been in varied forms and in possibilities. Much of what was new to me was about aspects of Christianity under- or mis-represented in most treatments, especially around non-Chalcedonian offshoots and local inculturations. The discussion of the Arian church in Europe was particularly fascinating.

MacCulloch has a gift for making the material deeply engaging, and introducing the reader to the major sources and gists of the various periods and types of Christianities that he elucidates. Many chunks of the book might seem deeply uncomfortable to anyone who comes to it with faith convictions that do not allow for serious consideration of other convictions. I think, as a whole, it’s a book that rewards the reader who already has at least a fairly familiar grasp on the history of the faith: the pacing is such that some topics receive short shrift, and background knowledge can help one fill in gaps. At the same time, as Dr. Davie noted in his review, much the fun of the book is deciding whether one agrees with the view MacCulloch propounds – or, perhaps, how one would nuance it. The thought I had throughout was that, if one needed to assess someone’s knowledge of Church History, asking them to compile a list of what they’d want to emend from the book in their own re-telling of the stories would be a very good assignment indeed.

I am glad that I spent the time with this work that I have; it has been a long read, and it has rewarded me richly. I have to agree with MacCulloch’s concluding words, about my reading experience as well as about the future of the faith he studies:

Original sin is one of the more plausible concepts within the Western Christian package, corresponding all too accurately to everyday human experience. One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder. Even those who see the Christian story as just that – a series of stories – may find sanity in the experience of wonder: the ability to listen and contemplate. It would be very surprising if this religion, so youthful, yet so varied in its historical experience, had now revealed all its secrets. (1016)

Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, 2010.

Pullman’s book is a fascinating retelling of the gospels. He uses a twist so widely-reported (and so nearly explicit in the title) that I’ll not attempt circumlocutions here as I try to blog about this book: Mary had twins, Jesus and Christ. Pullman tells the story with the former as a devout and wise teacher, frustrated by his inability to hear God’s voice; and with the latter as a manipulative editor who fakes the post-resurrection appearances to reveal what he hopes an institutional Church will be able to use as it grows and leads. The story is well-told and compelling, even as it will leave most readers who have a commitment to the Jesus of the gospels discomfited to varying degrees. I want to note in this blog entry two facets of the book which I find particularly interesting: the style of the telling, and the argument Pullman makes about God in general, Jesus in particular, and the Church which he feels should be damned.

Pullman tells his story in short sentences as part of many short chapters. Stylistically, it reminded me of nothing so much as the gospel of Mark. There’s a distinct lack of the kind of descriptions present in most novels. As just one example, Joseph proclaims himself an old man when told to marry Mary–but we have no description of him, nor of the kind of flower that issues from his rod as a sign when Zacharias is trying to decide who should become Mary’s husband. There are also marked gaps in the story-telling: as Pullman relates the Annunciation, Mary allows an angel who “had assumed the appearance of a young man” in through her window. After his explanation that God wants Mary to have a child, there’s a glaring omission as the next paragraph simply relates that “And that very night she conceived a child, just as the angel foretold.” Implicit or at least strongly possible is the idea of a physical role for the angel; yet I find interesting what Pullman is willing to hint at when later in the story he explicitly changes famous sayings and stories about Jesus—or has a character change them. Is this early non-change-but-hint an attempt to keep the religious reader unoffended for a bit longer? Is the desire not to drastically alter key moments with vivid associations? Or is it to keep some element of mystery present about the possibility of God acting? While the book’s sentences are crisp and active, impelling the story along with enough speed that the book may be easily read at a single sitting (again, like the Gospel of Mark), some of the alterations to the canonical stories are made more or less obvious by the adopted style that’s more like that of a gospel than that of The Golden Compass.

I need to be perfectly clear when I speak about the argument Pullman advances in the book about God, Jesus, and Church. I am a priest, and my signed a solemn declaration at both my ordinations “that I do believe the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” I don’t mention that statement to excuse my issues with Pullman, or to explain them away, but to make clear that I come to an interesting book which I did enjoy with biases that show forth in what I am about to write.

I think that what I read in this book may justifiably be called an argument that Pullman advances in the book precisely because it is so continuous with what the reader encounters in the His Dark Materials cycle, and in Pullman’s varied public statements and interviews. And yet I find it less persuasive here because it seems too convenient, too easy: anything Pullman wants to explain away can be the editing or revising work of the scoundrel Christ rather than the good man Jesus. Moreover, a substantial chunk of what Pullman argues is fallacious even if continuous with widespread understanding. Enough generalities; some particulars. The character of Christ invents a dove and a voice saying “This is my beloved son” at Jesus’ baptism (compare Mt 3.13-17; Mk 1.9-11; Lk 3.21-22; Jn 1.29-34—I’m not going to give passages from all four for the rest of these examples, but just the one which I think Pullman is drawing from most heavily); Christ is the devil who tempts Jesus after his forty days in the wilderness—and, notably, changes the final temptation about temporal power to speak of a Church much like that of history as a means of control/help (Mt 4.1—11); Christ records the sharing of food as a miracle, the feeding of multitudes (John 6.1-5); Christ invents Peter’s assertion that Jesus is the Messiah, and that Peter has the keys of heaven (Mt 16.13-20); Christ invents the distinction between Mary and Martha’s roles (Lk 10.38-42); Christ plays the role of Judas from the gospels (Lk 22.47-53); and on, and on, and on, through the post-resurrection appearances (esp. Lk 24.1-12 and 24.13-35). This device of twins is a way of explaining away the miraculous, of keeping the anti-establishment teacher of Jesus as an honest man with no interest in Church—and clearly not as someone who would rise from the dead. As scribe and as actor, the character of Christ is a redactor who brings Church and faith in Jesus into being—and hence is the scoundrel of the title. It’s a device that explains away differences between the four gospels found in the New Testament, and which attempts to explain away an idea of a truth that is revealed rather than invented. In short, my problem with the argument is literary: it’s just too easy a solution, one that allows Pullman to craft a Jesus as an earthly teacher who’s politically naïve but essentially admirable who is then used by malevolent and/or self-interested others to their own ends of control. Pullman’s Jesus is a tool of hegemony, and it’s a much weaker story as he tells it than as I read in (especially) the canonical gospels and in other retellings.

My other issue is theological rather than literary. Pullman’s idea of prayer is speech; his idea of prayer answered is God’s voice speaking clearly to an individual. This vision of prayer is made explicit in his retelling of Jesus praying in the garden before the crucifixion. It’s a popular notion and shared widely—but it misses the essential point that prayer is the offering of self to God and opening of self to grace. It’s especially odd to me that he works from this mode as he quotes psalms: to have been immersed in the psalms and not have some sense of what prayer is smacks either of inattention or simple pushing of agenda. And so the whole overwrought chapter is a continuation of the argument I describe in the paragraph of above, of Jesus not wanting church to become and existing as hegemonic tool. I felt more discomfort after this chapter than after any other, for while the church on earth through history has certainly been that at times, Pullman is ignoring the idea that the Church may exist more broadly than that as well—and that it may well also be ideal that we strive for, as well as constantly falling short in its erring human existence.

Two long paragraphs of discontent might suggest that I disliked the book, despite my earlier assertion. I did enjoy it; I was challenged by it; I’m glad I read it. I’d certainly recommend it to others. If nothing else, it will ask the reader to return to Pullman’s sources and engage the Jesus one meets in those four remarkable sets of stories –each one of which is just as ideological and bound on conversion to a set of conclusions as is Pullman’s new book. Rowan Williams suggests a theme that he reads in the book that “the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision” can be very high in institutional terms, and that Christianity has paid too high a price. (On Start the Week, 5 April 2010)—and that he disagrees. I do too, but Pullman’s book is compelling nevertheless.

Shalom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament, 2007.

Reading this blog, you’d be forgiven this week if you think I pick what book to read next based on my compulsive listening to NPR’s This American Life. I first heard Auslander on an episode about the ten commandments. He described a period of his life when the rabbinical instructors at his Hebrew school yelled at him if he dared write his name on anything—from an atlas to a lunch bag: “Name of the Creator!” It’s a story both moving and sad; his voice, which sounds vaguely reminiscent of Eeyore, makes it impossible not to feel deep empathy for the mistreatment Shalom endured—and yet he tells the stories in a way that is funny, and wry. He happened to be on an episode of Tapestry the other weekend, so I placed a hold on his new book. I raced through it.

Foreskin’s Lament is a memoir about his relationship with God. He writes that his relationship with God “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please, followed by fuck it, fuck You, fuck off” (71). It was hearing that idea on Tapestry that made me want to read the book. Let me quote Auslander again, and try to explain what it is that I mean:

I do not keep Sabbath or pray three times a day or wait six hours between eating meat and milk. The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am not is observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumb-founded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose him. I’m failing miserably.
I believe in God.
It’s been a real problem for me. (71-72)

There are two things here which intrigue me. The first is that Auslander is not of the Sam Harris / Richard Dawkins school, suggesting that what’s wrong with the world is religion. He’s not convinced that religion won’t lead to the sort of abuse that he experienced, that Harris and Dawkins claim is normative and rail against. Rather, Auslander is quite clear: what’s wrong is how faith has been lived out. Maybe there’s a better way to live it, though likely not. So how do you survive with it? Secondly, there’s an intriguing notion, better described elsewhere when his wife Orli offers a felicitous description of an infelicitous upbringing: Auslander was theologically abused, by parents, teachers, and his societal group as a whole. Without suggesting any sort of equivalence, this latter idea made me wonder about people who have been brought up within a faith tradition and have fled it. Do they do so only because they perceive no relevancy, no connection? Or is there something else, some trauma or injustice, something which has driven them away? And in this latter case, what is the appropriate response of the faith community? Saying “It wasn’t us” or “That’s not who we are now” isn’t any more satisfying than saying “We’re sorry you went through that” to the injured. What is the justice making response, if any?

Reading Auslander, I’m left with more questions than answers. I don’t have a response to his writing that feels in any way adequate. I am genuinely sorry that he has such a tortured relationship with God, and that he had such an upbringing that has left him in this state. He’s very clear in his writing that what he experienced is not Judaism; and yet he’s far from sure that any faith--even one that turns again and again to the Shema--can escape such perversions. I was amused and engaged as I read his book; I felt drawn in, and present to his stories.

Ultimately, I’m left with something he said in the Tapestry interview. Tragedy, he argued, is the human response to the events of our lives: abject dejection, a sense that no good is entirely possible, that we’re too trapped by fate. Humour, in contrast, is God’s perspective: the way of looking back over events and seeing that there’s more than pain and suffering. It’s an interesting way of thinking about the two modes, and as Auslander plays with this idea, he privileges comedy in a way I’ve not encountered before.

It’s a book well worth a read; I hope it will leave you with more questions than answers, just as it left me.

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, 2007.

Lesley gave me this book as an ordination present; given the new job, I’m astonished I finished it within a month.

The premise is entirely contained in the book’s title. Jacobs writes in such an engaging manner that the steady stream of vignettes and reflections are riveting, regardless of whether each one is silly or serious. It’s not an academic work of theology, and no student of Biblical interpretation is going to be wildly excited by how Jacobs works through the questions that arise as he tries to ascertain just HOW to follow the Bible as literally as possible. At the same time, the vignettes can function as great conversation starters, allowing those questions to be raised for others. (I know of one rector in the diocese who has used the book successfully for a book study, though she found it more effective with selections of quotations, rather than the entire book.) Jacobs asks good, jargon-free questions about conflicting ways to take the Bible literally, and ultimately is far more concerned with how to read it seriously—his sympathies are far more with people like Marcus Borg than with the innumerable fundamentalists he encounters. What impressed me is that he maintains an unflinching sympathy and equitable portrayal of those with whom he disagrees, though he is clear and forthright about his own reactions.

There are a number of poignant moments in the book, and though I found myself having to concentrate harder in the last third of the year it describes, I was glad to read it. I enjoyed it sufficiently that I’m looking forward to reading his earlier memoir about reading through the Encyclopedia Brittanica (The Know-It-All).

Martin L. Smith, The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture, 1989.

I had this book recommended to me by my spiritual director quite a space back, and on first glance, fell in love with it. I read the first chapter, thought that it was bang-on, and then school interrupted my reading. I took advantage of another educational moment to read it in its entirety, and its initial lustre seems to have faded for me.
Smith begins with a relaxed and informal introduction to what prayer can be, how it can be the placing of ourselves into a position from which we can more easily listen for the movement of the Spirit in our lives. He engages and makes sense of popular misconceptions, and attempts to de-mystify prayer while retaining a sense of its necessity and rewards.
It’s the second part of the book that disappointed me. While the ideas are sound, I found myself reacting against the book: Smith feels prescriptive as he outlines meditation, lectio divina, and contemplation as options for prayer. Unsurprisingly, he privileges stillness in a way as to make my kinetic self deeply uncomfortable.
I need to give some of his ideas a fair chance, but this book is unlikely to be the wondrous tool for merging encountering scripture and prayer together that I at first hoped it would be. I think it's likely a great book for people who are just encountering these ideas for the first time, or for whom stillness is more likely to be a rewarding part of their prayer life, than it was for me.

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 1999.

I re-read, from time to time. You may, reading this entry, be interested in reading about the last time I read this book--though I said even less about it, then, in January of 2004.

There’s an elusiveness to Dillard’s musings. She presents an idea, and then a story. A reflection, and another story, and another idea. Seemingly unconnected they weave together with a lack of tangibility akin to the attempt to dance about architecture.

This book about life, and its essential nature as ephemeral. About death, and its pervasiveness. About meaning, in a life lived—and that lack of tangibility beyond a mere moment. About theodicy, and about what it means to believe, to be in relationship with God.

There is a striking beauty in this patchwork quilt of ideas, thoughts, and reflections. The spare-ness of Dillard’s writing combines with the weight of the subject and with her unflagging sense of wonder in the face of life, death, God, and existence, to create a book that is not sum-up-able in a short post on this blog. Rather, the book is an experience designed to awaken questions in the mind of the reader, and to provide an organising metaphor or two—to provide an image—that might help the reader struggle with these perennial questions. Dillard returns, time and again, to the prayers of thanksgiving of the Jewish community, at every aspect (both positive and negative) of life, and to the thought and wonder of the Jesuit geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I don’t know if the second will provide lasting insight for me. Certainly, the contrast between the vastness of time of geologic processes and the brevity of our lived experience is telling, but I feel a degree of being unsettled that makes me long for some of the unwoven threads of this book to be more neatly tied together. I don’t yet know if that’s a desire reflective of an incompleteness that should not be, or of an incompleteness that is me not yet fully engaged with the questions Dillard raises for me. I do know it’s a book to which I will need to return.

Paul Gibson, Discerning the Word: The Bible and Homosexuality in Anglican Debate, 2000.

I want to be Paul Gibson. Well, in fairness, it’d be more accurate to say that I have a deep and abiding respect for the Rev. Dr. Paul Gibson. He writes and speaks with astounding clarity and insight, and is to my mind the epitome of someone whose attempt to articulate issues of faith honestly and prayerfully, with the deepest possible commitment to engaging fully with scripture, reason, and tradition.

His book is interesting enough on the issue of homosexuality and the church, but what makes me appreciate it more deeply still is his care and sensitive approach to how scripture has been read, and how scripture should be read. For example:

It is possible to treat the Bible in exactly the way earlier generations of Christians treated the person of Jesus and the sacrament of the Last Supper. [that is, particularising one aspect in such detail as to move into heresy] It is possible to deny the human, the this-world dimension of the Bible and with the same devastating results.

Gibson offers a path for reading and engaging with scripture in a way that finds a via media between Bibliolatry and the dismissal of the Bible as mere human scratchings, and his path is a clear statement of how I myself think the Bible should be read. Someday, I’d like to be able to articulate such things as well as does the Rev. Dr. Gibson. It's a book well worth reading, to think about how to be with scripture.

For some online wisdom from the Rev. Dr. Gibson, read through his response to the St. Michael report.

Susan Howatch, Glamorous Powers, 1988.

I mentioned the first one in this series some weeks ago, and my thoughts about this one are much the same. It's a decent book, but not quite what I hoped for. Heavy on the Freudian analysis. Far less plausible than the first; I have trouble believing that the central character of this book, Jon Darrow, could have been so effective a spiritual director in the first book with his own self so unbalanced. The notion of glamorous powers is intriguing, though--and the book explores well how misused they can be in ministry and within the church.

I'm not convinced I'm going to read the other four novels any time soon, but we'll see. I'll want to relax with pulp this summer.

Essays and Reviews, 1860. Eds. Victor Shea and William Whitla (2000)

I’m nearing the end of my second year of a three-year program at Trinity College. That has not meant less reading, as the decrease in blog postings might suggest, but reflects a decision I made at the beginning of last year. I have not blogged about the books I have read for classes. There have been a large number of such books, but when one is writing essays and assignments, a blog is not the place in which to work out the beginnings of my thoughts about these texts.

This book, though, is one I started reading some time ago, and the sidebar of this blog advertised for a long time that I was reading it. Last term, I designed a reading course around it, and now that that course is out of the way, I felt it appropriate to blog about the book now.

Essays and Reviews is a massively important book to the history of Anglicanism. It reshaped how people thought about the Bible; it reshaped how people approached the discussion of religious norms. To describe its publication as beginning a revolution would not be an exercise in hyperbole.

Before I take a quick look at the seven essays and reviews which form this book, as it was first published in 1860, I want to discuss briefly the importance of this particular edition. William Whitla and Victor Shea, of York University, have produced an apparatus that brings this book back to life. The ideas of Essays and Reviews are far from daring in contemporary Anglican thought, and so the real value of reading the book now lies in the field of social history, or the history of ideas. It is difficult to do such a reading, though, because of a loss of context. The copious notes provided for each essay by Shea and Whitla restore this context: they translate the fragments included in original languages, left untranslated in other publications of Essays and Reviews; they explicate history and allusions; and they make clear which points were disputed and why, offering an entry into the ludicrously vast collection of secondary literature about this book. Their masterful introduction not only explicates the essays themselves and gives requisite biographical information about their respective authors, but also situates the book within the context of the Victorian church far better than many book length studies of the issues. (One might well argue that their writing is itself book-length! This tome, after all, with introduction, essays, supporting material, bibliography, and information about both the publication history and the heresy trials of the authors, weighs more than a large sack of sugar, and is more than 9.5” by 6.5” by 3”. It’s not light reading material!)

Seven pieces comprise the original text. Frederick Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury) contributed a piece entitled “The Education of the World,” a rather Victorian look at progress in humanity’s evolution and life of faith. Rowland Williams was tried for heresy for his review, “Bunsen’s Biblical Researches.” Nominally a look at a German theologian, Williams used Bunsen’s ideas as a basis for his own assertion of principles of higher criticism. Baden Powell’s essay, “On the Study of the Evidence of Christianity” is a rejection of the type of logic so inextricably associated with Paley. Henry Bristow Wilson’s interesting essay is called “Scéances Historique de Genève: The National Church,” a critical look at the Church of England. Charles Wycliffe Goodwin’s contribution, “Mosaic Cosmogony” is a look at the relevance of geological sciences and the accepted history of the world from a faith perspective (Ah, Archbishop Ussher and the world being created in exactly 4004 BC!). Benjamin Jowett's essay is about the proper interpretation of scripture. The final essay, and one of the most intriguing, is a brilliant work of history by Mark Pattison, “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750.”

None of the essays are particularly earth-shattering to modern ears, and it’s hard to feel the storm of excitement that arose because of this book. So why look for the excitement? Well, for two reasons. The first is that, in 1860, the world (by which I mean people in England who could read) cared—about poetry, science, and religion. They cared about ideas, and so it’s interesting to try to gain some sense of what that was like. The second reason is that the controversy around Essays and Reviews was largely confined to the Church of England, and was principally about how to read the Bible. It’s an argument in which the Anglican Church, now even more widespread, finds itself engaged. Moreover, the actual details of the argument have not shifted much. Does, then, Essays and Reviews offer us some solution? Certainly if history repeats itself, things would look bright for the more liberal side: some trials and tribulation, followed by an acceptance of correctness? While I doubt that things will fall out in quite so simple a repetition of the past, Essays and Reviews—in the remarkably large Shea & Whitla edition—is well worth the time it takes to engage with a fascinating period in the life of the Church.

Susan Howatch, Glittering Images, 1987.

DW suggested that I take a look at this series of six novels, telling me that each of the novels is a compelling read. It sounds uninteresting when described as a history of the Church of England in the twentieth century, told in specific narratives—but judging by this first volume, I agree with DW.

Glittering Images is the story of Dr. Charles Ashworth, a cathedral canon and Fellow at Laud’s College, Cambridge, and the protégé of ++Cantaur, Dr. William Cosmo Gordon Lang. Following a public spat in the House of Lords between the Archbishop and bishop of the fictional diocese of Starbridge, revolving around A.P. Herbert’s divorce bill, the Archbishop sends Ashworth to Starbridge ostensibly to investigate whether Bishop Jardine might be vulnerable to gossip in the tabloids. While there, Ashworth finds himself immersed in a familial mystery, and finds himself in a spiritual crisis. He retreats to an abbey, and the new abbot challenges him to deal with the traumas that have brought him to this point. I found Ashworth’s story compelling, and though the details of his journey are far different from my own, some odd similarities caused me to have a new look at my own spiritual life. Given tools to help him in his life, Ashworth re-emerges to grapple with the mystery and situation in which he finds himself immersed.

The novel is fascinating. Much of the story is told through dialogue, and certainly the novel has a greater appeal if one is passing familiar with both the history of the Church of England and theology. Regardless, it is a novel I read in a gulp, reluctant to pause, although I have marked passages to which I want to return. It is a romance, as much as anything else, and its only real flaw is that one might well think Ashworth’s recovery an easy path—akin to the psychiatrist who can cure a patient within a half-hour television episode—rather than the more difficult journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance that it actually represents. The book is, as well, a remarkable look at the church in the late ’30s, in the midst of trying to make sense of a great deal of change in social mores and behaviours. I’m quite looking forward to the second volume.

Gary Wills, What Paul Meant, 2006.

Wills romps through Paul’s writings in an effort to reclaim what he sees as the—too often occluded—true message of Paul. He argues that Paul did not “subvert” the true message of Jesus, but rather that Paul is transformed by his encounter with the risen Jesus, and so seeks constantly to find the fullness of his Jewish faith as expressed through Jesus. Much of the book is taken up with addressing the concerns of specific criticisms of Paul’s writing. Wills makes an effort to rebut those who charge Paul with anti-Semitism, misogyny; he offers another look at Paul’s relationships with Rome and with Jerusalem. It’s a much better book than Wills’ earlier book, What Jesus Meant, though it’s nowhere near as strong a book, for example, as Donald Akenson’s Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus—a book that accomplishes the same tasks, but with more depth. The difference between the two is that Wills’ book is aimed at a popular audience, and Akenson’s requires more of its readers.

Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant, 2006.

My systematic theology professor mentioned this short little book last year, as he tried to make sense for us of the relevance of the study of the historical Jesus to systematics.

The professor likes this book because it moves beyond the insipid WWJD crap that seems all too prevalent these days, and I like that about it too. Wills tries to get a sense of who Jesus is, and what he was saying. Wills answers return time and again to the idea of “heaven’s reign,” and he wrestles with the various parables to explain both how wondrous such a vision is, as well as how different it is, how difficult it is to wrap one’s mind around it.

My problem with the book is that, in many ways, it’s simplistic. The gospels are smushed together to create one story: from that story Wills extracts his conception of heaven’s reign, and builds a theological framework. The gospels, though, are both simultaneously one story and four-plus stories: they’re about God, and his interaction with us, but they have different concerns and say different things about who Jesus is. How can any worthwhile semblance of Christology be built without acknowledging that fact, and without showing an attempt to grapple with that difficulty?

I like the focus of the book; I like many of Wills’ conclusions. I’m looking forward to reading the book he wrote immediately afterwards, What Paul Meant. But I’m not expecting much more than a couple of hours of mild engagement. What I’m really looking forward to finally reading is my untouched copy of Wink's The Powers that Be.

Michael Schwartzentruber, ed., The Emerging Christian Way, 2006. Contributions from Marcus Borg, Tim Scorer, Tom Harpur, Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, Matthew Fox, Bruce Sanguin, Anne Squire, Bill Phipps, Mack MacLean, Bruce Harding, Susan Burt, Donald Grayston, Nancy Reeves, and the editor.

This is a decent collection of essays. It's one of those books that didn't particularly grab me, because I've read chunks of most of these authors before, and none of them really said anything new or dramatic--which is only to be expected, given that many of these pieces have been previously published elsewhere.

I enjoyed Borg's piece more than most of his books that I've read, perhaps because it articulates quite clearly a vision for which I have great sympathy, of faith-in-action, working to bring about the reign of God.

Harpur was Harpur, talking about the historic creeds as stumbling blocks, and the need for creeds more based on a faith that stresses the nature of our relationship with God as transformational. I thought that his offering of a new creed was weak, though he is clear that it's only a starting point. (A better couple of possible starting points, to my mind, can be found in the New Zealand prayer book.) Matthew

Fox's piece struck me as self-serving and egocentric. Bill Phipp's essay was quietly interesting, and worth further thought.

Grayston's thoughts on pastoral care--and really, about faith development--might well be the best thing in the book.

All in all, it's a spotty collection. It's one of those books to dip into, to get myself thinking, but not something that offers a lot of framework or leading ideas, nor really, anything but the questions I bring.

Philip Pulman, the trilogy "His Dark Materials":
The Golden Compass (1995, in Britain Northern Lights)
The Subtle Knife (1997)
The Amber Spyglass (2000).

I'd hesitate to call this brilliant fantasy series children's literature, as it seems to be received (the library copies I've read have bright, fluorescent green stickers that read "Teen"). Early on, you get brilliant descriptions of cultures that practice trepanation, and the books never seem to condescend. Pulman assumes that the reader, of whatever age, is going to be able to learn about this world akin to ours but so radically different.

The first book starts with Lyra, in Oxford, and her world changing around her. Children are disappearing, and Lyra is taken away from the College in which she grew up by Mrs. Coulter. She runs away, and is swept up with gypsies, and the story swirls through the remainder of the book and throughout the next two. The fantasy world revolves around the idea of many worlds, separated only slightly, and transitions between the various worlds. The story swirls around Lord Asriel, seemingly Lyra's uncle, who makes war on the Authority who is running the world. Describing the story, I feel the urge not to give anything away, and so I can't speak in more than generalities.

It's an incredibly well-written series. The allusions to Paradise Lost seem endless, but the story is clever, well-structured, well-told. The idea that the story is anti-Christian is patently ludicrous. There's a brilliant moment that I'll share that I'm still thinking about, about the nature of faith:

He closed the book.
"And that was how sin came into the world," he said, "sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed."
"But..." Lyra stuggled to find the words she wanted: "but it en't true, is it? Not like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale."
"The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally give to a free-thinker; it's his function to challenge the faith of the Scholars. Naturally he'd say that. But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it."
(The Golden Compass 327)

Read these three books. They're well worth the time.

Henri Nouwen, With Burning Hearts, 1994.

Nouwen’s meditation on the Eucharist was a useful thing for me to read. He says a number of things that are quite akin to my own thoughts about the importance of the Eucharist, ideas of inclusivity, and the challenges that the Eucharist offers, but he thinks about these things in quite different ways. I found it fun to learn how he approached the ideas, what stories he used. The story of the road to Emmaus is the basis for an extended meditation, and it made me begin to re-evaluate that story and my own conception of it. So, I was challenged to think more about the Eucharist from a different perspective, but the book also talked me out of making an idol out of Nouwen, given my differences from him. A useful thing indeed to happen when one reads a lot of one author at a time.

Kate Charles, Evil Intent, 2005.

A newly ordained, newly appointed curate enters life in a parish not sure what to make of female clergy: some of the parishoners won’t so much as shake her hand, the rector’s wife feels usurped in role—and is also worried that a romantic takeover of her husband’s affections is in hand—and the rector wants to use her to do the jobs he doesn’t want to do. (No concept of team ministry. Baffling to a Canadian church fellow like myself.) Making matters worse, a good chunk of the deanery’s priests seem to be against women joining there number, and Callie’s ex-fiancé just happens to be placed as curate in the next parish over. Thank heavens for her good friend, a chaplain at the hospital--who’s promptly accused of murdering another priest with his own stole.

Machinations abound in this relatively entertaining murder mystery. For my taste, there’s a bit too much of Callie’s romantic life and uncertainties, but the book loses all the appeal it has with its deus ex machina ending—far too neat, tidy, and convenient.

Convenient is not a word I care for in the realm of mysteries. I was disappointed that an otherwise well-written book should collapse so dramatically at the end.

Anne Hines, The Spiral Garden, 2005.

A Globe & Mail review from the same week as One Foot in Heaven pointed me to this book.

So. First of all, the basic plot is as follows: the Rev. Ruth Broggan, a (it's called something else, but it's quite obviously) United church minister moves--not of her own volition--to a much smaller and older church in Toronto than where she had been. She's met by inertia, not all that unusual for a parish: the parish is quite set in its ways, and resists any ideas she has for growth. She feels caught, snagged in a mire that seems hard to escape. The depth of her isolation is brought home in part by the way the story is told: what we read are her EMails and letters, her sermons and her thoughts--and we don't see replies thereto, but do read of her wanting to hear more from her friends, all of whom are at a distance. The story at this point is poignant, and seems to accurately capture the difficulties and challenges that face a minister who doesn't seem to meet the people of her congregation where they are. Perhaps the most interesting moment, for me, is when Ruth speaks of a talk with a neighbouring rabbi:
"As the rabbi got up to leave, he said, 'Well, if there's any way I can return the favour, just let me know.' And I said, 'Actually, there is a way. You can tell me how we know there really is a God.'" (79).
His response isn't what Ruth wants to hear, doesn't really help her--but the way the story is told, we know that not much can help Ruth. She retreats into her manse, promising to stay there until God speaks to her.

Then the television cameras and the reporters arrive on her lawn.

Much of the rest of the book is told--again in notes and messages, EMails and short and scattered writings--from the perspective of the people affected by her absence, and then her re-emergence. This section is where the book gets weird. The first part is almost a neat study of parish dynamics, and the second is an odd mix of hagiography and a postmodern, new-age-y mélange of feel-good, non-denominational (and inter-religious) spirituality. There's little I can say about this section without revealing too much, but there are some moving bits despite the oddness.

One of my favourite bits in this section are Kit's diaries. Kit is one of Ruth's best friends, who unrequitedly and erotically loves Ruth, and tells of what must be simultaneously both a lovely and a frustrating return of agape. The diaries are moving in their depiction of an interesting and thoroughly self-involved woman. The book then comes to an ending that is both unexpected and the only possible ending for such a story; I felt it to be thoroughly unsatisfying.

The book is very well written, and I'm glad I picked it up. I did, however, enjoy the first and more realistic part of it much more than the second that wanders into a weird example of magic realism that never quite anchors itself in a world other than our own, nor adequately critiques this world.