David Fitch, professor of theology at Northern Seminary and author of The Great Giveaway, is tentatively lined up to do a workshop at the “Through the Consuming Fire” conference here in Indianapolis, Nov. 13-14.

Here is an excellent video clip of him defining the concept of a “missional order”:

Dave Fitch – the Cultivate Talk on Missional Orders from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

“AIDS:
Translating Numbers Into People”

A Review of
28: Stories of AIDS IN AFRICA
by Stephanie Nolen.

Reviewed by Laretta Benjamin

28: Stories of AIDS IN AFRICA
Stephanie Nolen.
Paperback: Walker and Co., 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $13 ]  [ Amazon ]

“I looked at AIDS in Africa for a long time before I understood what I was seeing.” (1)

Stephanie Nolen’s opening words, as quoted above,  seem to not only capture the reason for her writing but make a very insightful statement about many of us who live in this relatively safe and sheltered culture.  We are bombarded daily with images, articles, and reports depicting so many of the sorrows of this world…AIDS…hunger….war….refugee camps…genocide…but how many of us see without really seeing, hear without really hearing, and form very shallow thoughts and ideas about these issues with no real understanding.

As part of a group that spent several months studying the issue of AIDS, I have read several books dealing with the AIDS epidemic (which only serves to let one know how much that one really doesn’t know).  This book is by far one of the best.  Stephanie Nolen very powerfully puts a human face on all the numbing statistics and brings an incredibly deep human dimension to the “savage phenomenon” known as AIDS.  One of the very real struggles a great number of us have in attempting to wrap our minds around many of the crises of our time, of which AIDS certainly is one, is the ability to translate the numbers we hear into people – flesh and blood, feeling, suffering people.  Another struggle we have is in interpreting the numbers.  What do they say?  What do they mean? What is behind them?  What do they represent?  What are the effects, the consequences, the ramifications of the numbers?  How is life changed because of those numbers?    Ms. Nolen does an outstanding job in addressing both of these struggles.  Very simply, she helps us to really see, to really hear, to travel below the shallow surface where most of us are content to be and at least begin to understand.

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“LORD, it belongs not to my care, whether I die or live”

Richard Baxter
(1615-1691)

LORD, it belongs not to my care,
Whether I die or live;
To love and serve Thee is my share,
And this Thy grace must give.

If life be long I will be glad,
That I may long obey;
If short–yet why should I be sad
To soar to endless day?

Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than He went through before;
He that unto God ’s kingdom comes,
Must enter by this door.

Come, LORD , when grace has made me meet
Thy blesséd face to see;
For if Thy work on earth be sweet,
What will Thy glory be!

Then I shall end my sad complaints,
And weary, sinful days;
And join with the triumphant saints,
To sing JEHOVAH’s praise.

My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But ’tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with Him.

A Brief Review of Nature’s Second Chance:
Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm
by Steven Apfelbaum.

Review by Peter White.

In 1981, Steven Apfelbaum purchased 2.7 acres in southern Wisconsin. A trained ecologist, full of all the youthful idealism and enthusiasm a 26-year-old can contain, Apfelbaum sought out not only a place to call home, but a place to walk his environmental talk. Over the next two decades, he would eventually acquire the 80 surrounding acres and transform the landscape from abused and abandoned farmland to thriving ecosystem. Part memoir, part environmental treatise, his Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm is a book about land restoration and stewardship. In it, Apfelbaum develops a land ethic with a deep indebtedness to Aldo Leopold’s environmental classic, Sand County Almanac.

Apfelbaum divides his work into three acts. In the first he lays the foundation for his story, his ideas and his project. His prose is most relatable in his stories rather than the explanation of scientific ideas. His mother tenaciously navigates the real estate networks in first discovering the land. On their first visit, his boisterous younger brothers go for a tractor joyride through the neighbors’ cornfield leaving the more subdued Steven an awkward first meeting with said neighbors.

In the middle section Apfelbaum lays out just how he, along with his company Applied Ecological Services, his colleagues and his partner Susan, went about restoring the landscape of Stone Prairie Farm. Over time, they are able to engage their neighbors as partners rather than outsiders. In one incident, he describes how a neighbor spotted an endangered whooping crane and called everyone he knew. As the majestic bird captured the attention of a crowd for the majority of a Sunday morning, the farmer finally confessed, “If I could help guarantee that this bird would regain its health, I’d think about making some land available so it had a place to come back to each and every year.” In the final section, Apfelbaum outlines his vision for the future, including ideas ranging from conservation-oriented development to land community membership.

Apfelbaum’s book succeeds in communicating the deep need to consider the relationship between humans and the natural world. Land is more than pretty scenery. It is a living and dynamic part of our community that will thrive or die according to our lifestyle choices. He is able to avoid the man-versus-nature cliches of the genre with his consistent anecdotes that emphasize the human element–from the practicalities of running the business office out of the farmhouse to later living with a family on the land. In this way the narrative tempers his scientific idealism. If the book lacks anything, it’s in the practical application for the reader. Apfelbaum is an expert in his field (literally, in this case). But what about the rest of us? The book is unlikely to win new converts. However, those with even a passing curiosity in the care of Creation will find in Apfelbaum a worthwhile voice.

Nature’s Second Chance:
Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm
Steven Apfelbaum.
Hardcover: Beacon Press, 2009.
Buy now:   [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ]  [ Amazon ]

A Brief Review of Richard Horsley’s
Jesus in Context: Power, People and Performance.

Review by Chase Roden.

Richard A. Horsley has spent his career complicating the Bible — or at least prevailing interpretations of it.  In this collection of ten reworked and expanded essays, the professor emeritus presents an overview of a few aspects of his work, looking back at the fragmentation of biblical studies of the last few decades while suggesting avenues of advancement for future scholars integrating literary and sociological approaches to the Bible.

The book’s sub-title alludes to Horsley’s particular areas of interest — “power” referring to dynamics between the ruling class and commoners in the biblical era, “people” to Horsley’s desire to reveal the stories of common people in Mark and Q (the hypothetical source for large sections of Matthew and Luke’s gospels), and “performance”
to the idea that Mark and Q were primarily transmitted orally. Horsley works these themes into arguments against several notions common to biblical studies of the last 50 years, such as the idea of a monolithic “Judaism” from which Jesus sought to break away, the dominance of the verse or “saying” over the larger story, and the assumption of general literacy among the early church.

The book’s strongest sections deal with Mark and Q as “people’s histories” of the Jesus movement.  Horsley attempts to separate the narratives of the “great tradition” — that is, history as dictated by the ruling classes — and the “little tradition” of the common people,
presenting a compelling portrait of Judea and Galilee of antiquity as a political landscape of oppression by foreign occupiers and the “temple-state complex.”  The author believes that modern biblical-historical scholarship has created anachronistic divisions among economics, religion, and politics, which the ancients would have seen as one in the same.  The Jesus movement is then less about founding a new religious system than it is a peaceful peasant uprising seeking just treatment from the ruling class, which includes religious authorities.

Horsley builds his argument for Mark and Q as people’s histories on the idea that literacy was extremely limited in the world of the Bible; written sources such as Josephus and even much of the Hebrew Bible are generally suspect, as the very act of writing places an
author in the ruling class.  Horsley finds evidence of oral transmission in Mark and Q and thus finds it possible that we have in these writings a rare example of a written history sympathetic to the peasant class.

The primary shortcoming of this book is that it does not interact significantly with Biblical scholarship of the last 20-30 years.  Horsley argues against J. D. Crossan’s portrayal of Jesus as a Cynic-like sage — stating that Crossan presents a Jesus with no cultural memory and no Israelite identity — but then seems to assume naively that Biblical scholars persist in seeing Jesus’s mission as one of starting a new religion over and against a monolithic “Judaism.”  Horsley also seems only vaguely aware that Biblical scholarship has largely moved away from interpretation on the “micro” level of individual verses and “sayings” and into the realm of the full narrative and canonical criticism.

This book would best be used in an undergraduate-level class or an advanced adult education class in a church with a teacher willing to explain the terms and concepts to a lay audience.

Jesus in Context: Power, People and Performance.
Richard Horsley.
Hardcover: Fortress Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ]   [ Amazon ]

“The true goal of the bourgeois life [is] diversion”
A Review of Alain De Botton’s
THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/bourgeois-life-work-botton

There is a story about an aged playboy who, when a conversation with a friend is interrupted by a telephone call, asks incredulously: “You mean, when that thing rings, you answer it?” Few people have ever been able to afford to be so insouciant: for nearly everyone, work is a burden from which there is no escape. Still, the playboy’s reaction is not as flippant as it might seem. If most people’s everyday experience is the test, it is the idea that work is the chief route to personal fulfilment that seems frivolous.

It is only in modern times that work has been seen as the definitively human activity. The ancient Greeks believed fulfilment was to be found in leisure, and for that reason would never be achieved by the mass of humanity. The nearly universal rejection of this view today is a consequence of the triumph of the bourgeois notion – notably endorsed by Marx – that happiness is found in work. As Alain de Botton writes, “The bourgeois thinkers turned Aristotle’s formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes.” Bourgeois life promises to all the fulfilment that has historically been the privilege of a few. What it offers, however, is not idleness, a life of pleasure of the sort cultivated by leisured minorities in the past. Instead, it is the prospect – or illusion – that labour can be made intrinsically satisfying, a type of self-expression that everyone can enjoy.

Read the full review:
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/bourgeois-life-work-botton

THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK
Alain De Botton
(Coming to the US, June 2009)
Hardcover: Pantheon, 2009.
Pre-order now:  [ Amazon ]

The economics profession has been greatly embarrassed by the economic crisis. The crisis began last September, with the crash of the banking industry (broadly defined, as it should be in this deregulatory era, to include investment banks and other financial intermediaries besides commercial banks), and of the stock market and other financial markets. It has since grown into the first depression since the 1930s, if one may judge from its global sweep, the pervasive anxiety that it has engendered among government officials as well as the business community and the public at large, and the trillions of dollars that nations have desperately committed to fighting it. The economists had assured us that there would never be another depression in the United States, because economics had discovered how to prevent depressions: if economic activity dropped, the Federal Reserve had only to push down interest rates, for this would induce banks to lend and consumers and businessmen to borrow, and the borrowed money would be used to finance consumption and production, restoring output to its level before the crash. Academic and government economists specializing in the business cycle were as surprised by the September collapse and the ensuing downward spiral of the economy as anyone, and were unprepared with plans for arresting it. Six months later they cannot agree on what should be done to recover from it. Not knowing what will work, the government is trying everything.

The idea that monetary policy — raising interest rates (and therefore reducing the amount of money in circulation, because interest is the price of putting money into circulation rather than hoarding it) to check inflation, and lowering interest rates to check economic downturns — holds the key to moderating the business cycle, and therefore to preventing depressions as well as inflations, has been falsified. The Federal Reserve has pushed interest rates way down, but the amount of lending has been tepid and economic activity has continued to fall — hence the bailouts of banks and other financial institutions and the $787 billion stimulus package recently enacted by Congress. The stimulus, a program of deficit spending, seeks to replace the loss of private demand, and the resulting decline in economic activity, brought about by the economic crisis. It seeks to do this by public works, such as the construction and repair of highways and other transportation infrastructure, designed to increase employment, and by tax cuts and welfare payments, which are intended to increase incomes directly and by doing so to stimulate spending.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2009_04_16.html

ANIMAL SPIRITS:
HOW HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DRIVES THE ECONOMY
George Akerlof.
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ]  [ Amazon ]

When Billy Graham went to Flushing Meadows in 2005 for what was billed as the last revival in his 60-year career, he was joined on the platform by his fellow Southerner Bill Clinton. Clinton told the crowd how his Sunday school class had attended a Graham revival in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959. Despite the objections of local leaders, the former president recalled, Graham refused to segregate his services, inviting blacks and whites to worship together at a time when harmony between the races seemed impossible. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton said, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.”

This is one of the stories that can be told about Billy Graham and the civil rights era — a narrative that portrays the preacher’s role in his native South’s reluctant abandonment of segregation as essentially heroic. Graham’s rise to prominence as an evangelist coincided with the turbulent years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, and throughout that decade he wrote and sermonized in favor of racial harmony, staged desegregated rallies in balkanized cities, and counseled obedience to court rulings and legislation that many of his fellow Southerners were determined to resist. As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity.

That’s one story. But there’s another story as well, one that paints Graham as a coward and an apologist for racial backlash. He supported desegregation but took few risks on its behalf; he cultivated a studied moderation in a time that cried out for moral clarity; he was more interested in flattering the white South’s self-regard than in calling his region to true repentance. As a steadfast supporter of Richard Nixon’s career, from the 1950s down through Watergate, he simultaneously enabled and embodied Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which shut civil rights liberalism out of power and turned the region Republican for a generation.

…

Read the full reivew:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/books/review/Douthat-t.html?_r=1

BILLY GRAHAM AND THE REPUBLICAN SOUTH
Steven P. Miller.
Hardcover: University of Penn Press, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Doulos Christou Books $24 ]  [ Amazon ]

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
will be at Englewood Christian Church
Wednesday evening May 6

Leading a conversation on his book:
NEW MONASTICISM:
WHAT IT HAS TO SAY TO TODAY’S CHURCH

Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=50272647267

Mark Your Calendars!!!

THROUGH THE CONSUMING FIRE:
ECONOMIC FAITHFULNESS IN AN AGE OF CONSUMERISM
COMMUNITY – CONTENTMENT – CREATIVITY
Friday Nov. 13 and Saturday Nov. 14
Englewood Christian Church
57 N. Rural St. Indianapolis
Main Speakers:
Shane Claiborne   –   Will Samson    –  Kelly Johnson

www.englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/  ( Coming Soon…)
Online registration opens May 1!

Consumerism is one of the greatest challenges facing the church in North America today.  Ultimately, consumerism is a form of self-indulgence that does great harm to our brothers and sisters around the world and indeed to all of Creation.  At the Through the Consuming Fire conference, we will explore what economic faithfulness would look like – particularly as shaped by denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Jesus. 

Facebook Invite and More details:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=73979927805&ref=share#/event.php?eid=70646854370

Here are four video segments of Walter Brueggemann at the 2004 Emergent Conversation.  (The video is fuzzy, but the audio is pretty clear…)

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“My Heart is Full of Love
Even Though Nothing Went As Planned”

A Review of
The Passion of Mary-Margaret
by Lisa Samson

Reviewed by Brittany Sanders

The Passion of Mary-Margaret (A Novel)
Lisa Samson
Paperback: Thomas Nelson, 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $12 ]  [ Amazon ]

In 2009, amidst a culture dependent on text messages, iPhones and a faster pace of life than ever before, few would consider the lifestyle of a Catholic nun to be more exciting than their own. But in her newest novel, The Passion of Mary-Margaret, Lisa Samson manages to portray a heroine and a story that even the most modern-minded readers will find intriguing and compelling.
From the start, several elements set Samson’s novel apart from (and above) the average piece of Christian fiction. First, there is the non-traditional story structure. Based on the premise of recently discovered memoirs written by the now-deceased religious sister Mary-Margaret, the chapters follow multiple chronologies at once, tracing Mary-Margaret’s life during the time of the writings (at age seventy) while relating the story of her younger years in carefully chosen episodes. This fresh approach provides the double advantage of keeping the reader on his or her toes and avoiding the overused “flashback” technique, which can easily slip from conventional to clichéd. In this way, the plot unfolds not forward, nor backward, but inward, by increasing degrees of clarity. The destination is no secret; it’s the journey that becomes mysterious as readers wonder not “what will happen in the end?” but “how will the end happen?”

Mary-Margaret reveals early on that she has a son, John, but there is no explanation given as to how this religious sister came by her offspring. Left to assume that she will marry, but not yet getting to that point in the story, the reader hangs in an unusual tension—and a unique opportunity for the author to fill in the gaps. Since the heart of the story is the fluctuating romance between Mary-Margaret and her childhood friend, Jude, it is not difficult to guess who John’s father is. But by unfolding the circumstances piece-by-piece while shifting between present and past, Mary-Margaret and Jude’s relationship feels deeper and more meaningful at every turn. To bring them together, the hand of Providence must overcome deeper wounds and darker secrets than anyone would expect. The result is not a surprise ending but a conclusion all the more satisfying for its inevitability. Loose ends are tied up out of impossibly tangled lives, and an elegant and unexpected symmetry appears. This conclusion gives The Passion of Mary-Margaret an old-fashioned, almost classical sense of unity. (more…)

Another Spring
Christina Rosetti
1830 – 1894

If I might see another Spring
I’d not plant summer flowers and wait:
I’d have my crocuses at once,
My leafless pink mezereons,
My chill-veined snowdrops, choicer yet
My white or azure violet,
Leaf-nested primrose; anything
To blow at once, not late.

If I might see another Spring
I’d listen to the daylight birds
That build their nests and pair and sing,
Nor wait for mateless nightingale;
I’d listen to the lusty herds,
The ewes with lambs as white as snow,
I’d find out music in the hail
And all the winds that blow.

If I might see another Spring—
Oh stinging comment on my past
That all my past results in ‘if’—
If I might see another Spring
I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;
I would not wait for anything:
I’d use to-day that cannot last,
Be glad to-day and sing.