Reconciling All Creation

A Brief Review of Edward Brown’s
Our Father’s World:
Mobilizing The Church to Care For Creation. by Chris Smith

Ed Brown’s Our Father’s World: Mobilizing The Church to Care for Creation is a good introduction to environmental issues for evangelical churches.  In the first half of the book, Brown makes a compelling biblical and theological case for caring for creation.  In latter half, he offers practical suggestions for our churches to demonstrate their creation-care.  The most significant contribution of Our Father’s World however, is that it finds its hope for better environmental care in the action, not of individuals, but of the Church.  Brown says: “The church can do the most good for the environmental crisis by simply being the church, as long as ‘being the church’ encompasses the comprehensive redemption that God has in mind” (104).  For those who have given some reflection to the church’s responsibility in environmental concerns, there is not much new here, but the book’s emphasis on the Church is a breath of fresh air in the stagnant, prevailing culture of individualism – a philosophy that has contributed greatly to the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves.  Brown is right that it is only by the cooperative efforts of church communities committed to demonstrating a different way that we will begin to find hope for the healing of the wounds that humanity has inflicted upon creation.

Edward Brown.
Our Father’s World:
Mobilizing The Church to Care For Creation.
Paperback. IVP. 2008.
Buy Now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $12 ] [ Amazon ]

Christianity Today interviews James Wilhoit
author of Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/juneweb-only/126-41.0.html 

“… Certainly you have those classic disciplines that [Richard ] Foster talks about [in Celebration of Discipline]. But the trouble with those disciplines is they can become kind of “quiet time only” activities. So I want to put emphasis those disciplines that are distinctively relational. We all are in the midst of being formed and challenged in relationships, and we just have to be intentional about that — about engaging people in the margin, about offering forgiveness to people that have hurt us. And so that has to be there.

Foster’s introduction is so helpful in emphasizing this, and a lot of people’s lives, like mine, were changed by it. But a lot of people read the book and practiced these activities in a way that never touches their life.

I want to emphasize the context as well as the practices. What I have seen with my students is if you take a legalist and teach them Richard Foster, they simply become a far more adroit legalist. We constantly need to go back to this theme that it is all about seeking to live out the gospel and live out of our brokenness. …”

Read the full interview:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/juneweb-only/126-41.0.html

James Wilhoit.
Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered.
Paperback. Baker Books. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $15 ] [ Amazon ]

“The reality of climate change is now beyond doubt in the scientific community. We also now know that it will take more than technological innovation to stave off its potentially devastating environmental consequences. As academic and laboratory squabbles about our planet’s ills begin to fade, the arduous task of correcting past and current negligence becomes, to a significant degree, an effort of rhetoric. Environmentalism today is in large part a campaign for the world’s hearts and minds, which makes the present a useful time to think deeply about the literature that addresses these concerns. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a 1,000-page anthology, represents a Herculean effort on the part of author and activist Bill McKibben, its editor, to bring together the texts most relevant to an audience unfamiliar with the topic. It is matchless in its heft, generous in scope (included are Sierra Club founder John Muir and Marvin Gaye), and, with a detailed chronology in its back matter, serviceable in its depth.

Environmental writing today stretches from detailed meditations on particular places, such as those written by Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, to assessments, by writers active in the environmental justice movement, of the social and economic inequalities that cause environmental burdens to be distributed unequally (think of Erin Brockovich’s lawsuits). The bulk of McKibben’s anthology leans marginally closer to the wonder-of-nature end of this spectrum, and likewise skews toward the present. But nearly all of the writers we associate with the movement, from the middle of the 19th century to the present, appear here… “

Read the full review:
http://metrotimes.com/editorial/review.asp?id=131056

American Earth: Environmental Writings Since Thoreau
Bill McKibben, editor.
Hardcover. Library of America. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $32 ] [ Amazon ]

“Late one night, a young scholar at Cambridge named Michael Ward reads “The Planets,” a minor poem by C.S. Lewis. In it he encounters a curious phrase about the influence of Jupiter: winter passed / And guilt forgiv’n. This, he notices, is exactly what happens in one of Lewis’ most famous works, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Could the poem and the book be connected somehow?

Ward quickly begins to notice connections between other books in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series and other planets in the poem. He remembers a line from Father Silouan, the nineteenth-century Orthodox monk, about how prayer is a participation in the Holy Spirit, and he hears an echo in Lewis’ own words—’In prayer, God speaks to God.’

“I did not shout ‘Eureka!’ and run naked down the street like Archimedes,” Ward explains, “but I did jump from my bed in a state of undress and begin to pull books from my shelves, chasing links from work to work.” Indeed, he writes, “I immediately and instinctively knew, though it took much longer to understand with clarity, that Lewis had cryptically designed the Chronicles so that the seven heavens spoke through them like a kind of language or song. He had translated the planets into plots, and the music of the spheres could be heard silently sounding (or tingling, as he would have said) in each work.”

In other words, in 2003, Michael Ward discovered the secret key to the Chronicles of Narnia, a key no one had found before: Each of the seven planets of the ancient celestial hierarchy provides the atmospheric superstructure for each of the seven books in Lewis’ series of children’s books.  …”

Read the full review:
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6208

Michael Ward. Planet Narnia:
The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis.
Hardcover. Oxford UP. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $29 ] [ Amazon ]

The Justice Kitchen Tour
(Jason and Brooke Evans)

will be coming to Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday August 13

Dinner (Local food with vegan option) starts at 5:45PM

Conversation at 7PM

Suggested donation:
$5 Adults / $2 Children (10& under) 

A flyer (in PDF format) is now available here:
http://www.englewoodcc.com/JK-Flyer.pdf
Feel free to distribute this flyer in print or electronically.

Registration is now open for the

Godspeed the Plough! conference

http://englewoodcc.com/plough/

Nov 7-8

Indianapolis

Keynote speaker:

Ragan Sutterfield (Blog here)

BONUS: The 1st 100 paid registrations will receive
a free copy of Ragan’s booklet “God’s Grandeur”

FACEBOOK USERS: There is now a Facebook event announcement.

“Exploring the Essence of a Place”

A Review of

Johnny Cash and

the Great American Contradiction:

Christianity and the Battle

for the Soul of a Nation,

by Rodney Clapp.

By Chris Smith.

Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction.
Rodney Clapp.
Paperback. WJK Books. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $14 ] [ Amazon ]

Rodney Clapp’s newest book Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction is a wonderful little book, but I must warn expectant readers that the book’s focus is on the latter part of its title, not the former. I picked up the book expecting a thorough examination of Cash’s music – like, for instance, Jonathan Gould’s recent Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America – so I was a bit disappointed to find that Cash’s life and works were merely used to illustrate the book’s larger themes of American cultural history. To be fair, Clapp does, in the introduction, do a good job of presenting Cash as a prime example of the sort of contradictions that he will explore throughout the remainder of the book. Unfortunately, however, after the brief introduction, Johnny Cash is relegated to the status of an occasional reference throughout the remainder of the book. Additionally, as a Gen X-er who has only re-discovered Cash in the last decade and who must admit the gaping holes in my knowledge of his work, I often wished that this book came with an accompanying cd, so that I could listen to the songs as they were discussed. It was only after I approached the book’s end that I realized that Clapp had provided a valuable appendix in which he compiles a list of many of the songs discussed and notes that he has set up an iMix list in iTunes that offers for download many of the songs listed in this appendix.

However, with these caveats out of the way, there was little else that I found disappointing about this book. Once I resigned myself to the fact that this was a book on American cultural history, and not music history, I was drawn into the story of our land that Clapp weaves here. (more…)

The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week. In this section we feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week. Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.

To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation.
Dorothee Soelle. Paperback. Fortress Press. 1989.
Fair Condition. Moderate wear. Lots of Highlighting.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $5]

Liberating the Church:
The Ecology of Church and Kingdom.
Howard Snyder.
Paperback. IVPress. 1983.
Very Good Condition. Clean pages, minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]

Earth Spirituality:
In the Catholic and Dominican Traditions.
Sharon Therese Zayac, O.P.
Paperback. Sor Juana Press. 2003.
Very Good Condition. Clean pages, minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $5 ]

Byron Borger reviews Bill Kauffman’s
Ain’t My America.

http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/booknotes/
aint_my_america_by_bill_kauffm/

“… Bill Kauffman’s new one is called Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (Metropolitian Books; $25.) As the title implies, it tells the tale of the a movement and tradition, a longstanding tradition, that most of us simply haven’t heard of. In what few American history classes we’ve had and in the typical civics lessons we’ve learned, and even in the somewhat sophisticated PBS current affairs shows we watch, we are lead to believe that conservatives are hawks and liberals are doves. The cultural picture, nearly iconic, of the free-lovin’ 60s counter-cultural peaceniks opposing the gray-suited businessmen of the military-minded technocracy only reinforces this simplistic and often wrong-headed perspective. From the earliest days of our country, there were true patriots—some of the Founding Fathers, for crying out loud, who warned against foreign entanglements; today there is serious debate and voices against the Bush administrations Iraqi war have been raging on the political right. Conservatives have a notable history, if one can take note of it, of being against foreign wars. Bill Kauffman, one who finds his joyful stand on his own small town front porch as he supports his local soft ball team and cares conservatively for the historic preservation of his upstate New York region, helps us take very detailed note. Who knew? …”

Read the full review:
http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/booknotes/
aint_my_america_by_bill_kauffm/

Bill Kauffman.
Ain’t My America.
Hardcover. Metropolitan Books. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

“The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such ‘biofuels’ as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that ‘science will find an answer.’ The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are ‘free’ to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as ‘higher animals.’ But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: ‘I am that I am.’

… “

Read the full review:
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/90468/?page=2

The Populist Vision. Charles Postel.
Hardcover. Oxford University Press. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $35 ] [ Amazon ]

“Of the making of books about Jesus there seems to be no end. These two books commend themselves because each author walks the narrow path between scholarship and the needs of ordinary folks who want to be apprized of the findings of scholarship without being overwhelmed by the details.

Yoder Neufeld is aware that his is a delicate task. On the one hand, there are the skeptical scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and others in the Jesus Seminar, along with the implied skepticism of the students he teaches. On the other hand, he is committed to being faithful to the tradition as indicated by the subtitle.

…

Kenneth Bailey’s unique contribution to scriptural interpretation comes from having been born in the Middle East and spending his professional life there. In her endorsement of the book, Edith M. Humphrey of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary writes, ‘Kenneth Bailey does not offer new perspectives, but ideas frequently as old as the earliest church and as the ancient church fathers, that may well be new to many of his Western readers.’  …”

Read the full review:
http://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/dsm/summer08/hertda.htm

Thomas Yoder Neufeld. Recovering Jesus:
The Witness of the New Testament.
Paperback. Brazos Press. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $18] [ Amazon ]

Kenneth Bailey.
Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes.
Paperback. IVP Academic. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $18] [ Amazon ]

The Justice Kitchen Tour
(Jason and Brooke Evans)

will be coming to Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday August 13

Dinner (Local food with vegan option) starts at 5:45PM

Conversation at 7PM

Suggested donation: $5

More info here: http://ecclesiacollective.org/summer-road-trip

Registration is now open for the

Godspeed the Plough! conference

http://englewoodcc.com/plough/

Nov 7-8

Indianapolis

Keynote speaker:

Ragan Sutterfield (Blog here)

BONUS: The 1st 100 paid registrations will receive

a free copy of Ragan’s booklet “God’s Grandeur”

FACEBOOK USERS: There is now a Facebook event announcement.

“Visible Identification

with the Politics of Jesus”

A Review of

Electing not to Vote:

Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting,

Ted Lewis, Editor.

By Brent Aldrich.

Electing Not to Vote:
Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting.
Ted Lewis, Editor.
Paperback. Cascade Books. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $15 ]

With the Fourth of July just a week gone and the presidential elections looming ahead, nationalism has been on full display, literally exploding in the night sky. Given the divisive political context of the presidential race coupled with the celebratory patriotism of July 4th, Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting offers the Church words of caution as it addresses the question of Christian engagement with the state – specifically the practice of voting. However, it also functions as a call for commitment on the part of the Church to find her primary identity within the kingdom of God. As a people whose identity is found in bearing witness to the truth of Jesus, how shall we participate with the principalities and powers of the world? How shall our allegiances and identity be made manifest, and in what do we place our hope? These foundational questions underlie the essays of this book, and in the introduction, editor Ted Lewis names the root question tackled by these gathered writers: “How does Christian faith inform the way we engage the practice of voting? And more specifically, might there be legitimate, faith-based reasons for electing not to vote?” This is indeed the central question of the book, although in its entirety, the most immediate concern is the cry for the Church to see “the new humanity rooted in nothing less that the cross of Jesus, as its source as well as its identity” (Tato Sumantri 98). (more…)

The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week. In this section we feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week. Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.

The Community Called Church.
Juan Luis Segundo. Paperback. Orbis Books. 1973.
Very Good Condition. Clean pages, moderate wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8]

The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy
and Change in the Caribbean.
Clive Thomas.
Paperback. Monthly Review Press. 1988.
Very Good Condition. Clean pages, minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $6 ]

Honeysuckle Sipping: The Plant Lore of Childhood.
Jeanne Chesanow.
Paperback. Down East Books. 1987.
Very Good Condition. Clean pages, minimal wear.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $5 ]

Greg Boyd Reviews the popular Christian
novel The Shack.

http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2008/06/shack-review.html

“Over the last few months I’ve had at least a dozen people tell me I needed to read the novel The Shack by William P. Young. “It’s your theology in narrative form,” one person told me. Now, I rarely read novels, especially Christian novels. And in my experience, Christian novels that try to get theological are the worst. But, giving the pattern of enthusiastic recommendations and given that someone had given me a free copy begging me to read it, I decided to give it a two or three chapter trial on a plane ride the other day.

…

I felt like the portrait of God in this novel was beautiful and reflective of what we find revealed in the New Testament. And the theological and psychological insights of this book were at times profound and consistently communicated in brilliantly simple ways. A good deal of the dialogue is about the problem of evil, but the novel touches on everything from the Trinity, Incarnation and the nature of free will to the nature of relationships, forgiveness and even the role of our imagination in staying anchored in “the Now.” In fact, Young even addresses (at length) the nature of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This was the section that impressed me most. Young fleshes out how our tendency to judge God, others and ourselves lies at the root of our sin and misery. It was amazing. Those who have read my Repenting of Religion will have no trouble understanding why I was so excited about this material.

Now, you might think that a book with all this theology would be pretty boring, but it’s not — at all. It’s actually a page turner. …”

Read the full review:
http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2008/06/shack-review.html

William P. Young.
The Shack.
Paperback. Windblown Media. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $12 ] [ Amazon ]

[Okay, so this isn't a review, but it is a piece that everyone should read!]

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082022

“The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such ‘biofuels’ as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that ‘science will find an answer.’ The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are ‘free’ to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as ‘higher animals.’ But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: ‘I am that I am.’

… “

Read the full essay:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082022

The Life and Work of Wendell Berry.
Hardcover. University Press of Kentucky. 2007.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $28 ] [ Amazon ]

“John Howard Yoder (1927-1997), who was a professor of theology at Notre Dame and a Mennonite, outlines in 80 pages five practices that should be central to every church’s life together. He argues that congregations need to recover these practices that are described in the New Testament and have since become distorted. This book grew out of a 1986 lecture at Duke Divinity School entitled “Sacrament as Social Process: Christ the Transformer of Culture,” later published in his book The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical. In Body Politics, Yoder describes the five practices this way:
(1) Binding and Loosing
(2) Disciples Break Bread Together / Eucharist
(3) Baptism and the New Humanity / Baptism
(4) The Fullness of Christ / Multiplicity of gifts
(5) The Rule of Paul / Open meeting

…”

Read the full review:
http://www.andyrowell.net/andy_rowell/2008/07/a-
recommendation-body-politics-by-john-howard-yoder.html

John Howard Yoder. Body Politics:
Five Practices of the Christian Community
Before the Watching World.
Paperback. Herald Press. 2001.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $12] [ Amazon ]

“If you find yourself in the children’s section at a bookstore and you happen to cross paths with a savvy third-grade boy who’s asking a salesperson for “The Adventures of Captain Underpants,” or a seventh-grade girl, cross-legged in the aisle, who’s engrossed in “Cut,” a first-person account of self-mutilating behavior, you might think to yourself (depending upon how old you are), what happened to the good old days? Where’s “Charlotte’s Web”? Where are “Aesop’s Fables”?In “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History From Aesop to Harry Potter,” Seth Lerer answers that question, guiding us through the canons of children’s literature, with an emphasis on English. (Lerer is a Stanford professor and the author of “Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language.”) As the subtitle suggests, he focuses on the reader’s history, not the writer’s. He covers not only literature that was intended for children, but also literature that was intended for adults and ended up being read by children, or adapted for them. In ancient Greece, teachers excerpted passages from Homer’s “Iliad” for schoolbooks. And “Aesop’s Fables” (approximately 600 BCE) were not only read by adults, but also existed at the heart of Greek education. …”

Read the full review:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/06/RVC610B9SO.DTL

Seth Lerer. Children’s Literature:
A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
Hardback. Univ. of Chicago Press. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $24 ] [ Amazon ]