“Following Jesus to the Cross”

A Review of
Two Recent Books
on Christian Martyrdom.

By Chris Smith.

The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom.
Tripp York.
Paperback: Herald Press, 2007.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $15]   [ Amazon ]

To Share in the Body:
A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church.
Craig Hovey.
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2008.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $18]   [ Amazon ]

Two recent books, The Purple Crown by Tripp York and To Share in the Body by Craig Hovey explore the question of what it means to be a martyr church in the present age.  Both authors work from the assumption that martyrdom is foreign to the Church in the United States, and indeed most of the Western world.  However, in exploring this question, York and Hovey take two different – and yet both helpful – approaches.  In To Share in the Body, Hovey works through the Gospel of Mark , forming a scriptural theology of martyrdom from the text of this Gospel.  York, on the other hand, works form the text of church history to develop a political understanding of Christian martyrdom.

                In To Share in the Body, Hovey works through the text of Mark, identifying six themes and images that are relevant to martyrdom.  The first of these images is baptism, the purpose of which, in Hovey’s words, is “to enact and declare membership with a martyr church” (23).  In baptism, we identify with the death and resurrection of Jesus (Romans 6).  Hovey keenly notes that just as the work of baptism is a divine one, so also the work of martyrdom is not primarily that of human will or action (33).  Hovey pointedly concludes this chapter: “The church’s failure to be a martyr-church is supremely seen in those cultures that continue to baptize the young for sentimentality’s sake.  For many, baptism involves neither incorporation into the life of the community of faith nor incorporation into the death and resurrection of Christ.  It is not a drowning in the surging waters, a participation in the suffering of Christ, a commitment to undergo the discipline of the church relative to its new life and mission made possible by Christ’s resurrection” (40).

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Full details are available on the above link…
(Contest ends at Noon on Dec 31, 2008)

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.

Eruption to Hope.
Jean Vanier.
Paperback: Griffin House, 1971.
Good Condition.  Binding tight, Clean Pages, Moderate Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $8 ]

JOHN CALVIN: A SIXTEENTH CENTURY PORTRAIT.
By William Bouwsma.
Paperback: Oxford UP, 1988.
Good Condition.  Binding tight, Very minimal highlighting, Moderate Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $7 ]

THE TROUBLE WITH THE CHURCH: A CALL FOR RENEWAL.
Helmut Thielicke.
Hardcover: Harper and Row, 1965. First edition.
Very Good Condition.  Solid Binding, Pages clean, Minimal Wear to exterior.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $10 ]

The Darkling Thrush

By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate

     When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

     The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

     Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

     Had sought their household fires. 

The land's sharp features seemed to be

     The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

     The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

     Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

     Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

     The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

     Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

     In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

     Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

     Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

     Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

     His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

     And I was unaware.

The Washington Post Reviews
THE MAGICIAN’s BOOK: A SKEPTIC’S ADVENTURES IN NARNIA

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/12/12/ST2008121203180.html

As a small girl growing up in California, Laura Miller did not just long to visit Narnia. So bewitched was she by that imagined realm — laid out in seven novels back in the 1950s by an eccentric English don — she was pretty sure that not being able to visit it in person would kill her. Along with its various sequels and prequels, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe brought her the purest sort of bliss. It was the book, she writes in this meandering but beguiling appreciation, “that made a reader out of me.”

When Miller was in her early teens, she discovered “what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism” and that the books that had been the cornerstone of her imaginative life were “really just the doctrines of the Church in disguise.”

Miller had been raised a Catholic (close enough, for literary purposes, to C.S. Lewis’s born-again Anglicanism), but she was left as cold as a Narnia winter by what she describes as the church’s “guilt-mongering and tedious rituals.” The sense of betrayal by Lewis was so great that for a long time she wanted nothing to do with his now “appallingly transfigured” fairy tale.

A lot of readers have felt that way about Narnia — and not just since Disney’s unsubtle blockbuster movie in 2005 left the whole series more or less hijacked by Christian fundamentalists. Lewis’s longtime friend J.R.R. Tolkien, the creator of Middle-earth and a self-described “devout Roman Catholic,” objected to what he considered the books’ heavy-handed Christian parallels, too.

Read the full review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/12/12/ST2008121203180.html

THE MAGICIAN’s BOOK:
A SKEPTIC’S ADVENTURES IN NARNIA
Laura Miller.
Hardcover: Little, Brown, 2008.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ] [ Amazon ]

To open Adam Zagajewski’s new book Eternal Enemies is to find oneself in motion. “To travel without baggage, sleep in the train / on a hard wooden bench, / forget your native land,” begins “En Route.” A few pages later the narrator wonders whether it was “worth waiting in consulates / for some clerk’s fleeting good humor” and “worth taking the underground / beneath I can’t recall what city” (”Was It”). Other poems find him in cars, imagining the “great ships that wandered the ocean,” on a plane flying over the arctic, on more trains, and occasionally on foot.

Often the motion is not just from one city or country to another, but from one historical era to another. In “Notes from a Trip to Famous Excavations,” for instance, the narrator sees “campaign slogans on the walls / and know[s] that the elections ended long ago,” yet when a gate swings open, the past becomes present as “wine returns to the pitchers, / and love comes back to the homesteads / where it once dwelled.” The poems move, as well, from concrete particular to the abstract and transcendent—from an epiphany, as Zagajewski once wrote in an essay, to the kitchen and “the envelope holding the telephone bill.”

Some of poems’ loveliest effects are achieved by juxtaposing one time or dimension with another, as in “Star,” the opening poem. “I’m not the young poet who wrote / too many lines,” the narrator recalls:

and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows
has touched my brow with his hand

Notice how the narrator links “narrow streets” with “illusions,” and “clocks” with “shadows.” Small gestures like these give this poem, like many in Eternal Enemies, a tone that is somehow both wistful and particular. So too do the precise, loving references to buildings and streets that will be unfamiliar to most American readers (such as “Long Street” and “Karmelicka Street” and “Staglieno”—the first two in Krakow, the third a graveyard in Genoa, Italy, if you’re wondering). Zagajewki’s places are always more than simply places. They are both mythical and real, a quality that will come through even for readers who are less traveled and don’t put down the book long enough to Google the names.

Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/novdec/18.15.html

ETERNAL ENEMIES (POEMS)
Adam Zagajewski.
Hardcover: FSG, 2008.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

With one holiday just past us and more on the way, it is a good bet that feelings of loneliness will register a sizable uptick in our emotional biorhythms. As we all know, a sense that one is isolated from the rest of humanity can descend at all sorts of times — not only on a bleak street at dawn, or in an out-of-town hotel room or during the kind of “solitary restaurant dinner” that F. Scott Fitzgerald saw as the epitome of “haunting loneliness.” The sense of loneliness can come upon us even at a raucous office party or a family dinner by a crackling fire or amid jostling crowds of bargain-hunting Christmas shoppers.

But why is this? In “Loneliness,” John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick try to explain. We all need to make three types of human connection, they say: with intimate or romantic partners, with close friends and with our “collectivity” — the community or nation as a whole. A failure on any one of these fronts is what produces loneliness.

But not only loneliness. For, as Mr. Cacioppo’s own research at the University of Chicago shows, feelings of loneliness and isolation are actually associated with a raft of social pathologies: everything from addiction, depression and uncontrollable anger to impaired cardiovascular functioning and damage to the brain’s “executive control” center. Studies even suggest that a rejection by humans “can increase the tendency to anthropomorphize one’s pet,” which sheds new light on the life of Leona Helmsley.

Messrs. Cacioppo and Patrick are thus arguing, among other things, that a concerted attack on loneliness would improve public health as well as individual happiness. The problem is that they take a scattershot view of what the attack should look like. They recommend everything from saying “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” to the grocer and taking therapy to prevent negative thoughts to finding human connection on the Internet. Which is all very well, except that a cautionary note is needed: Here, as elsewhere, a cure can sometimes be as costly as the disease.

Read the full review:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122792160204165843.html

Loneliness.
Cacioppo and Patrick.
Hardcover: Norton, 2008.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

Loneliness As a Way of Life.
Thomas Dumm.
Hardcover: Harvard UP, 2008.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

David Fitch (author of The Great Giveaway)

is coordinating an event in Ft. Wayne, IN

on Saturday January 3, 2009

SEEDING MISSIONAL COMMUNITIES:
A LEARNING COMMONS

Last year, we did this missional conference that is a non-conference kind of thing. We gathered, had very short presentations, nobody paid, some people brought food to share, and we talked all things missional. It was encouraging and informative. I think we can do it even better this year.

So… I am calling for another meeting of the “Seeding Missional Communities Learning Commons.” This year we’ ll meet in Fort Wayne Indiana on Saturday Jan 3rd. We will meet be at the place Ben Sternke’s community gathers in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We’ll gather and discuss an array of issues including a.) the merits of missional orders as a community-forming missional/evangelistic discipline, b.) the Sunday gathering as missional, and c.) the need for a missional evangelistic tool to nurture new conversions in our communities (read about that here). Now there is very little organization being done for this. We’ll gather, have different presenters and open discussion, and some time for decompression. THERE WILL BE NO CHARGE. No one will be selling books. We’re just getting together to encourage and commiserate for the gospel.

Read the full description from David’s blog:
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/2008/12/announcing-missional-nonconference.html

There is also a Facebook invite:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507258918#/event.php?eid=39687688561

A Brief Review of
The Big Sort:
Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart
By Bill Bishop

 By Chris Smith

Journalist Bill Bishop (in collaboration with sociologist Robert Cushing) has in his new book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing us Apart offered us a significant work of cultural analysis in a similar vein as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.  Over the course of the book, Bishop tells the story of how the neighborhoods of our land are becoming more and more homogeneous.  Bishop’s benchmark in this analysis is the 1976 presidential election and he notes that in the intervening thirty years, Americans – who are notoriously transient (4-5% move across a county line every year) – have been sorting themselves by moving into increasingly homogeneous neighborhoods.  Bishop’s criteria for measuring homogeneity throughout the book is that of electoral politics, and although my post-constantinian theology with Anabaptist roots leads me to be ambivalent about most electoral politics, there was two facets of The Big Sort that stood out to me.  First, I am intrigued by his thesis on a general level (i.e., broader than party politics), and I agree that there is great danger in cloistering ourselves among like-minded neighbors.  As he concludes the book, Bishop highlights this danger in a quote from J. Walker Smith: “I worry that the traditional democratic notion of accommodating differences through compromise in order to sustain a shared way of life is going to fade away” (302).  From a theological perspective, this danger could also be expressed in terms of losing sight of the unity of God’s creation, and of the love for all of God’s creatures to which we have been called.  When we settle into a social network of like-minded people, there is a great temptation to demonize those who are not “like us.”

            The second part of The Big Sort that was striking to me was the role of churches in the story of the big sort’s emergence.  Bishop begins his chapter on churches by noting that “American churches today are more culturally and politically segregated than our neighborhoods” (159).  Bishop attributes this segregation to the application of Donald McGavran’s homogeneous unit principle within the church growth movement, the result of which was the rise of the mega-church.  Toward the close of the book, however, Bishop returns to his examination of the role of churches in the big sort and looks at two emerging churches, noting their diversity and at the same time their ambivalence toward partisan politics and “America’s grand narrative”(301) in general.  He emphasizes that in these churches a change toward diversity is happening.  On a national level, however, Bishop is less optimistic.  The book’s final chapter, which covers the stories of these emerging churches, as well as Bishop’s conclusion, raises – perhaps unintentionally – a pointed question:  what role should churches play in working toward the healing of a fragmented national identity?   With the scriptural depiction of the church as its own nation ( I Peter 2:9 ) in mind, I am inclined to answer this question toward the minimal end of the spectrum.  However, I cannot forget our call to be peacemakers and lovers of our enemies, and these callings would seemingly lead us toward some larger co-operative groups, perhaps beyond the narrative of nation-states (or empires).

            Bishop’s work in The Big Sort, is to be lauded for its exposition of the cultural phenomena in our land that are driving us toward segregation.  In response, we as churches should reflect on this excellent work, confess our complicity in the sins that it names and prayerfully discern how we should start to move beyond homogeneity.

The Big Sort:
Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart
By Bill Bishop
Hardcover: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]

The Other Journal has recently published a wonderful two-part interview with Kathleen Norris about her new book Acedia and Me, which you do not want to miss!!!

The Other Journal (TOJ): Hi, Kathleen. We’re really interested in your new book Acedia and Me. Also, a lot of our readers are going into church leadership positions or are interested in current trends in theology, so we are really excited to hear your perspective on things. Thank you very much.

Kathleen Norris (KN): Oh, great! I am interested, of course, in anything that talks about theology and culture.

TOJ: When I read Acedia and Me, I found myself feeling two emotions: relief and astonishment. I was relieved that someone had named this thing and astounded at how pervasive acedia had become. It was a little bit like finding one ant in the bedroom and then on further investigation finding a million ants in the bedroom! The more I read this book, the more I really did agree with the nun that warned you about the danger of approaching acedia—¹

KN: Yes, I brought her up because to me, that’s it. Sometimes, some of the audiences I’ve had have said, “Is there anything positive about acedia that you can learn from it?” No. I think you just learn from the discipline. Like the desert monks say, “Prayer is warfare to the last breath.” So, there are some positive things, but I tell them that acedia is about the most negative thing I can imagine. It disconnects you from yourself, from other people, from God. It’s an incredibly negative thing. I really can’t think of a real positive spin on it. I can’t think of one.

TOJ: I was fascinated with the fact that it really is one of the most negative things yet also one of the most subtle and invisible things. It seems that it may also be the easiest thing to pass over; because it doesn’t wear a bright uniform, it blends in with the background really well.

KN: The best writing on acedia is really from the fourth century. You can’t beat Evagrius. He’s so good.

I, also, was so enchanted to find the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies’s statement—if you look at my “commonplace book,” at the end of the book, I’ve included an excerpt from him. He really captures it, exactly what acedia is and how it works.² He shows how it really kind of creeps up on us; we don’t quite know what it is and how devastating it is. And here he is, a fairly secular writer, I believe, in a speech he gave called “The Deadliest of the Sins,” and somehow, he understood what acedia was better than most—that is such a great description of acedia.

The reason that commonplace book exists, of course, is because I was collecting material on this for twenty years. I just kept finding things and then finding more things. That speech was actually a fairly late find for me. It was a speech he’d given, and it was collected in a book of his essays and speeches, miscellany kind of stuff.

TOJ: I remember following up on interviews with you over the years, and you occasionally mentioned that you were going to write a book on sloth.

KN: That was the easiest way to describe what I was trying to do, to talk about sloth, because if I said acedia, unless the person that I was talking to was Benedictine or a Trappist, they would have no idea what I meant. So that was the way I chose to talk about it. I would say sloth or spiritual sloth and then people could kind of connect, but normally the word acedia, for reasons I explain in the book, has been kind of lost to us. It’s not a familiar term.

 Read the full interview:

Part 1:   http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=494

Part 2:  http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=495

Acedia and Me:
A Marriage, Monks and A Writer’s Life.
Kathleen Norris.
Hardcover. Riverhead Books. 2008.
Buy now from: [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ] [ Amazon ]

“Toward True Economies of Goods and Words”

A Review of
Devices of the Soul:
Battling for Ourselves
in An Age of Machines.
by
Steve Talbott.

By Brent Aldrich.

Devices of the Soul:
Battling for Ourselves in An Age of Machines.
Steve Talbott.
Hardcover: O’Reilly Media, 2007.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $18]   [ Amazon ]

Recently, desiring what I assumed would be an ironic and out-dated read, I picked out from our recycling bin of books a book from 1984, Selecting the Church Computer, with a photograph on the cover of a computer older than I am. In reading and laughing at much of the text (“Did [God] have any inkling that with the passing of time his children would be using a creation of humankind’s knowledge called the computer to complete his work?”), it also began startlingly apparent how much faith was recommended in the computer for its use in education, developing software “to explain moral values and lead the church youth in a deeper understanding of the church’s mission and ministry” or in simulations of “real world” events such as “nuclear holocaust where the student must make the decision whether or not to push the button that sends the missiles.”

Although some questions as to the human work displaced by the computer are raised, notably absent are questions such as, “What will the church members do with the time they used to spend forming their youth?” Instead, the attitude is that “computers are here, and they are here to stay.” It is, it seems, our destiny. This technological acquiescence is the subject of Steve Talbott’s new book Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. Technologies, of course, are a result of our human devices, and as such can assist in our human workings; the trouble lies when this scenario is switched, when the human conforms to the machine, when the artifact or representation replaces the artificer, the real. This process of automation discretely grows and has grown to such a degree that our machines are increasingly defining us as human creatures. In that process, abstractions, disconnections, and placelessness become normative, and when turned back on humans presents a desolate outlook. As our mechanisms allow us to forget ourselves, our humanity is lost.

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“Redlights and Roundabouts”

A Review of
Traffic:
How We Drive
(and What it says About Us).
by
Tom Vanderbilt.

By Margaret Roark.

Traffic:How We Drive
(and What it says About Us).
Tom Vanderbilt.
Hardcover: Knopf, 2008.
Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ]  [ Amazon ]

My husband and I have a running argument that takes place in the car. Traveling down a busy street, we come to a stoplight, at a puny intersection, that is invariably red for an unnecessarily long time.  This steams him, and I counter by singing lyrics from Jonny Lang’s “Red Light”: “A chance to breathe while sitting at a red light/ You look around reflecting on your life.” I accuse him, as the song goes, of speeding through his whole life. Both of us are reacting, in our different ways, to the inordinate amount of time we spend in the car. In Traffic: How We Drive (and What It Says About Us), Tom Vanderbilt explores, in a fascinating and comprehensive way, the psychological impact of lives lived in traffic: the assumptions we make on the road; the dangers and distractions we tend to underestimate; the way our behavior changes when we get behind the wheel: in other words, all the “human factors” of driving that persist no matter how technology and engineering attempt improvements.

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