“The Egregious Brokenness of
Consumer Culture”

A Review of
Cheap:
The High Cost of Discount Culture.
by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

 Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Cheap:
The High Cost of Consumer Culture.
Ellen Ruppel Shell
Hardback: The Penguin Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

With a story that parallels Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s new book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture exposes our Western addiction to low priced goods and the toll that this addiction takes on humanity as a whole and on the environment.  No stranger to this sort of critical journalism, Shell offered us in her most recent previous book The Hungry Gene, a pointed critique of American obesity.  Over the course of Cheap, Shell approaches our craving for low prices from a number of different angles.  She begins by laying a historical framework that explains in careful detail how we ended up in our present discount shopping predicament.  Shell’s historical context begins with the industrial revolution, through which goods came to be manufactured more quickly and at lower costs.  She proceeds to explore the origins of discount stores and here focuses on the retail empires launched by John Wanamaker and Frank Woolworth, names that will likely be familiar to many of our readers.  In particular, she credits Wanamaker with – among other retail innovations – the use of the price tag as a standard part of retail operations.  The price tag:

 [fixed prices] so that pauper and king, insider and naïf, all paid equally, at least in theory.  The tags did not foreclose the possibility of negotiation, of course, but they did set an upper limit, making it more difficult for merchants to overcharge and more likely they would set the lowest possible prices to attract customers (14).

These two factors, mass production and the fixing and lowering of prices led to the establishment in the early decades of the twentieth century of a sort of “consumer’s republic” – to use a phrase coined by Harvard University historian Lizabeth Cohen – the culture of which was rooted in ever-greater consumption on the basis of “an enhanced material life and to the promise of greater freedom, democracy and equality” (21-22).  Thus, it should not be surprising that in the 1960s and 1970s, the modern discount center would arise out of this culture that was on a trajectory of ever-increasing consumption.  These discount centers, epitomized in Wal-Mart, went to great lengths, as Shell describes, to lower their overhead costs in personnel and facilities and to increase their purchasing leverage so that the even lower prices could be passed on to customer. (more…)

“Memory’s Broken Time Machine”

A Review of
Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea.
by Dunya Mikhail.

 Reviewed by Matthew Kaul.

Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea.
by Dunya Mikhail.
Translated by Elizabeth Winslow and Dunya Mikhail.
Paperback: New Directions Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Literary critic Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Task of the Translator,” writes that the translator’s task cannot be the simple rote movement between two “sterile, dead languages” (after all, we have Google’s translation bots to complete that task for us today). Rather, the translator is charged with continuing the very life of the original work. Translation, far from being a simple act of clumsy and mindless copying, is itself a creative, poetic act.

Benjamin’s thesis on translation is born out in Mikhail’s fascinating volume Diary of a Wave outside the Sea, a prose-poetic memoir of her life growing up as a poet in war-ravaged Iraq. In her preface to this translated volume, Mikhail writes that “poetry was not on my mind when I wrote this book;” but that her “partner in translation, Elizabeth Winslow, had originally transformed the unbroken, prose-poetry lines of my Arabic into a poetic broken-lined English” (vii). The book in its English incarnation, then, has taken on a form it did not previously possess.

Winslow’s translation of both word and genre works particularly well in the first of the book’s two parts, written during the first Iraq war in Baghdad and first published in Arabic in 1995. In this first part, Mikhail employs an elusive, shifting voice and a constant movement between opposed themes in her attempt to convey the singularity of war’s intrusion on her life. As Pascal noted, the human being is oddly and uncomfortably situated between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and it is the uniqueness of our situation that provokes poetry. The initial section of Mikhail’s volume deals explicitly with this theme, particularly in a time of war. Mikhail employs a series of Pascalian meditations on the ambiguity of human experience, moving between depictions of unbearable burden and levity, of alienated exile and the sweet comforts of home, and of vivid memory and the ambiguities of forgetting.

Such meditations take as their focus the year 1991, the start of the first Gulf War. Mikhail has been reflecting upon the contingencies of history that separate people from each other, and that provoke them to divide themselves into opposite camps–”we are the good, they are the evil; we have the light, they wallow in darkness”–while at the same time recognizing that such stark oppositions rely upon each other. She writes, “The chemist Paul Derek confirms this, saying that / the electron and its opposite are born together / at the same place and same instant, / and they die together whenever and wherever they meet.” She continues,

I thought of this when the Allied forces dropped
eighty-eight thousand tons of bombs
on the land of the two rivers
and made a spectrum in the air
at the speed of light or fear
leaving an indestructible energy.     (38)
(more…)

A Brief Review of
Drops Like Stars:
A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering.
Rob Bell.
Oversized Hardback: Zondervan, 2009.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Rob Bell has offered us in his new book DROPS LIKE STARS — which is likely the most innovatively designed and elegant book produced in the Christian market this year — a challenging essay on the centrality of suffering in human life.  In his own words, the heart of Bell’s argument is that:

The ache is universal.
The ache reminds us that things aren’t how they’re supposed to be.
The ache cuts through all the static,
all the ways we avoid actually having to feel things.
The ache reassures us that we’re not the only ones who feel this way (53).

and

The cross, it turns out, is about the mysterious work of God
which begins not with big plans
and carefully laid out timetables
but in pain and anguish and death (116-117).

Like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone — or in the case of DROPS LIKE STARS, bars of soap — God allows suffering to chip away at us, compelling us “to eliminate the unnecessary, the trivial, the superficial” (91).  Having been well-acquainted with suffering myself in the last couple of years, losing a daughter and watching my four-year-old son battle cancer, Bell’s words here ring true, especially his insights in the early pages of the book about the ways in which suffering disorients us and removes the “insulators” that provide context and thereby meaning for us in daily life.   Bell demonstrates a keen sense of the shared human experience of both suffering and our tendency to avoid suffering, and describes these experiences in sharp, vivid prose that is reminiscent of the theological works of Frederick Buechner.

This is a beautiful book in every aspect, from Bell’s streamlined, poetic prose to the over-sized photography throughout to the creative design that permeates every inch of every page.  However, there is a theological tension in this work that rises to a crescendo near the end of the text.  Bell is certainly correct in emphasizing the centrality of the cross and suffering in the Christian life (and perhaps, one could say, in all human life).  It seems though that Bell here diverges from the scriptural narrative that he fleshed out in JESUS WANTS TO SAVE CHRISTIANS.  Over the course of DROPS LIKE STARS, it seems that the basic narrative that Bell is working from is the culturally-dominant one of individualism.  Bell’s objective here unfortunately seems to be little more than to offer his own prescription, albeit more theologically refined than other such prescriptions, for finding one’s best life now.  Consider the point toward which Bell is driving (as quoted from Abraham Joshua Heschel):

When you’re young, start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Bell is absolutely right that suffering can bring about beauty and even redemption, but insofar as God allows suffering, its end is not the redemption of us as individuals — making us better, or more creative — but rather the redemption of the people of God and eventually all creation.  In the scriptural story, I have died (or at least am dying) to myself and the question of whether I become a better person is irrelevant. Bell’s gospel of self-improvement, especially when packaged in such artistic finery will sell and sell well in the marketplace (especially, I imagine, among the young, Christian hipster demographic), dominated as it is by individualism.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ that has redeemed and is transforming all creation, “foolishness to the Greeks” as it is called by some, is much less marketable, though no less beautiful.  I’m saddened that this exceedingly beautiful book and Bell’s finely crafted descriptions of the twistedness of human nature were muddied with the narrative of self-improvement as the work progressed into its prescriptions about how should handle our broken state of affairs.

The 911 Campaign for the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

By Shane Claiborne / Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
26 August 2009

As we remember the eighth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, we join our voices with the psalmist in a cry of lament: “How long, O Lord, until Abel’s blood stops crying, until justice rolls down like waters, until the lion can lay down with the lamb in a restored creation?” We lament the violence suffered by 9/11 victims and their families. And we lament the violence that people in Afghanistan and Iraq have suffered these past eight years. We cry out against the violence, and we want to act now for peace.

A couple of decades ago our brother Ron Sider made the following statement: “Making peace is as costly as waging war. Unless we are prepared to pay the cost of peacemaking, we have no right to claim the label or preach the message.” Before long the Christian Peacemaker Teams was born. CPT has been interrupting injustice and respectfully partnering with local nonviolent movements in some of the toughest corners on the planet for years. CPTers radiate the sort of courage and imagination we need if we are to expect folks to take our cross seriously in a world riddled with terror and smart bombs. For this reason, many of us have joined delegations like the one we went to Iraq with in March of 2003.

This sort of Christian “witness” is marked by the truth at the center of the Christian message – greater love has no one than those who are willing to lay down their lives for others. There is something worth dying for, but nothing worth killing for. No doubt, CPT is a new face of global missions in a world of omnipresent war—a witness to the God that loves evildoers so much he died for them, for us. These days, the cross presents a beautiful alternative to the sword. (more…)

A Brief Review of
THE HAWK AND THE WOLF.
Mark Adderley.
Hardback: WestBank Publishing, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler.

    The Hawk and the Wolf is the first in Mark Adderley’s The Matter of Britain series and follows young Emrys (Merlin) as he wanders about Britain searching for the lost sword Excalibur, pining for his forbidden love, Boudicea, and learning how to use his gift of “the Sight.”

    The book, as Adderley describes in his useful introduction, does not seek to recover the “historical Merlin,” as the horrid King Arthur (2004) film did for its namesake, nor does he attempt a rehash of Merlin the mythic character. Adderley’s tale and world is his own. Merlin’s Britain in The Hawk and the Wolf is situated somewhere between the mystical world of legend and the cold world of modern historical imaginings. (Adderley says his “aim is to tell the kind of story that would have been told in the Middle Ages,” xi.) He also chooses a unique setting for the story—the first century AD—which allows him to weave in the story of Boudicea, the doomed warrior princess on a mission to save her homeland. Adderley has certainly done his homework (and, for the reader’s benefit, he suggests some further reading), which infuses the story with rich detail.

    The story of Merlin is, in the popular consciousness, closely tied to Arthurian legend. For this reason, I find Adderley’s choice to place The Hawk and the Wolf in the first century fascinating. Throughout the book references are made to a man who endured “a triple death” (scourging, hanging, and being pierced by a spear; 158) or to warriors who “all wore the same symbol, like a tree but stylized, formalized, and upon it hung a man” (175). I am uncertain where Adderley’s future volumes will go—whether they will transport Arthur back to this historical setting or leave him out completely—but Adderley’s allusions lead to the inescapable comparison of two Messianic figures and make for interesting speculation while reading.

    Adderley chooses a setting when there is certainly a lot that happens, which keeps the story moving at a suitable pace. What didn’t work so well for me was his method of telling it (which hinges on Merlin’s age). The narration is in third-person and follows Merlin wherever he goes. Merlin is cast as an angsty teenager, and his emotions continually draw him this way and that. His abilities allow him to feel what others are feeling, but because his wanderings (and his age) necessitate it, his stay is brief wherever he goes. This makes it difficult for the reader to empathize in the same way. Merlin may have an attachment to characters (as even a brief encounter with other humans is liable to have an impact), but in the written word, attachments are not so easily formed. In this way, I felt left outside the drama at certain points in the story. I’m assuming the reader’s emotional distance from Merlin will lessen in future books as Merlin grows older and more stable.

    Despite this quibble, Adderley has written an entertaining and engaging story, one that is likely to get more interesting and intense as it continues over the forthcoming books. He has a clear enthusiasm for his subject (which is not always the case, but is always refreshing), making The Hawk and the Wolf ripe reading material for Merlin enthusiasts and lovers of fantasy.

It’s not too late to enter if you haven’t already!!!

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new school year by giving away books!

We have seven book prizes that we’re giving away:

• Two books by Liberty Hyde Bailey (THE HOLY EARTH and WIND AND WEATHER:POEMS)  — two sets to give away.
• First two books in Zondervan’s Ancient Context, Ancient Faith Series   — two sets to give away.
• A Cross Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching by Stanley Hauerwas  (Brazos Press 2009)
• Ambassadors of Reconciliation: NT Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns (Orbis Books 2009)
• Water, Faith and Wood: Stories of the Early Church’s Witness for Today by Chris Smith

To win, you must:

1. Be a subscriber to the free, email edition of the ERB (Go here to subscribe).  Your subscription must be active in order to be eligible.
2. Post the following message to your blog, facebook page or twitter account:
   I just entered The Englewood Review’s (@ERBks) Back-to-school contest to win free books. You can enter too:  http://bit.ly/MvJJS   #BTSERB09 
3. Drop us an email e d i t o r [ at ] englewood review [ dot ] o r g  or DM us on Twitter with your email address and a link to where you posted the above message.

The contest will run from now until Monday August 31 at 11:59PM EST.

On September 1, we will draw winners at random from all eligible entrants.

In our continuing effort to fund the publication and free distribution of The Englewood Review, we are going to be collaborating more intentionally with Christian Book Distributors.  Primarily, we will be offering you the opportunity to buy bargain books from CBD that we think of are interest.  Buying books this way is a win / win / win proposition.  You get great books for a great price,  CBD gets the sale and we get an excellent referral fee from CBD.  These books make great gifts!

This week’s bargain books (Click to learn more/purchase):

Chicago
Carl Sandburg

        Hog Butcher for the World,
        Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
        Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
        Stormy, husky, brawling,
        City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
     painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen
     the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
     and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
     city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
     alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
     bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
     against the wilderness,
        Bareheaded,
        Shoveling,
        Wrecking,
        Planning,
        Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
     ribs the heart of the people,
             Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
     sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
     Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

A Review of Ernst Bloch’s
ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY

http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/08/ernst-blochs-atheism-in-christianity-a-review.html

Since its original publication in 1968, Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom has been the book to deal with by any serious quester after knowledge of the deep symbiotic relationship between those über-’Others’, Christianity and Atheism. As an unabashed utopian Marxist thinker philosopher, Bloch (1885 – 1977) eschews that ‘excess of hyper-rationalism or dogmatic materialism’ his more prosaic musular atheist stable mates generally bring to discussions of religion. In the words of Peter Thompson, Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, in his excellent Introduction to this long unavailable classic, ‘Ernst Bloch and the Quantum Mechanics of Hope’ (i – xxx, i):

(R)eligion as both debate and way of life has not crumbled in the face of an apparently inexorable rationalist, scientific, modernising Enlightenment and the globalisation of the market economy, but retains a potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain.

Bloch himself rubbed shoulders with that unique coterie of enlightened radical Marxists – Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, for example. Perhaps we have the embryo of some such today in Eagleton, Badiou, Žižek, Habermas and others for whom religion-averse aggressive sorts of atheistic fundamentalism are as intellectually uncongenial as the ‘exclusively modern phenomenon’ (Habermas 2001: 10) of their religion counterparts. Marx’s own dialectical understanding of religiosity, captured well in his open-minded insight into ‘the opium of the masses, the heart of the heartless world’ pervades Bloch’s ‘detective work’, as he himself called it, on the emancipatory – for which, read ‘heretical’, a favourite Blochian trope – potential within Christianity. Bloch’s exegesis of the Bible is an insider’s hermeneutic, unlike that verstehen-free religion-cynical spleen of Hitchens, Dawkins, Gray and other high priests of resurgent Darwinism.

Read the full review:
http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2009/08/ernst-blochs-atheism-in-christianity-a-review.html

ATHEISM IN CHRISTIANITY.
Ernst Bloch.
Paperback: Verso, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

I have a keen interest in the healing dimensions of space, and in particular the role of landscape architecture and exterior spaces to provide this function. This comes from doing a lot of work and research in the realm of therapeutic garden design over the years in hospital, hospice, and eldercare facilities. I first became interested in the phenomenon while doing my undergraduate final project related to a cemetery design that utilized physical space design to aid in the bereavement process, and was fascinated by the connection between environmental design and health. There is an innate connection between space and health – but sometimes the connections, both physiologically and spatially, are a bit fuzzy. There are a number of successful examples in literature and design, but often there is either dismissal of designs as unscientific by the medical community, or by inadequate application and understanding of scientific concepts and mechanisms by designers – resulting in poor or partially realized applications.

That’s where Ms. Sternberg’s book shines. It is not neccesarily a ‘how-to’ (there are a growing number of resources out there in this genre), but more aptly a bridge between the scientific research of the concept of healing and how this work in the design of spaces. The book spans the available research, starting with some of the more intuitive architectural concepts of Wright, Aalto, and Neutra, touching on the pioneering work of Ulrich, and expanding on the growing design-science connections being made by collaborations between space design and health research, and looking specifically at both the microcosm of hospitals, and the macro-scale of cities, and the range of designs that this thinking can inform.

…

Read the full review:
http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2009/08/reading-list-healing-spaces.html

HEALING SPACES:
THE SCIENCE OF PLACE AND WELL-BEING
Esther Sternberg.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Lev Grossman’s third novel, The Magicians, pulls liberally from a grab bag of very familiar fantasy tropes: the troubled boy–turned–master conjurer; the school of wizardry, hidden by spellcraft in plain sight; the sinister presence that haunts the students’ nightmares; even a sport played, tournament-style, exclusively by young mages. As the book opens, seventeen-year-old Quentin Coldwater is preparing to leave his bucolic Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood for the greener lawns of the Ivy League. He has a small circle of friends, kind but distant parents, and a GPA “higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be.”

And yet something is awry. Although Quentin has “painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness . . . happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.” On a bitter winter day, he stumbles through one of Park Slope’s myriad community gardens, past “the corpses of gladiolas, petunias, shoulder-high sunflowers, rosebushes,” and onto the campus of Brakebills College. Here, on an aging country estate, Quentin has been summoned to learn magic from an eclectic cast of master wizards. “First things first: magic is real,” the dean of Brakebills tells him shortly after his arrival. “This isn’t summer school, Quentin. This is . . . the whole shebang.”

…

Read the full review:
http://bookforum.com/review/4167

THE MAGICIANS: A NOVEL.
Lev Grossman.
Hardback: Viking, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Register Now!

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

The website is now up and registration is open!
http://www.englewoodcc.com/consumingfire/  

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