“A Robust Inheritance”

A Review of
The Art of the Sonnet
By Stephen Burt and David Mikics.

Reviewed by Brett Foster.

[ Read an excerpt from this book... ]

The Art of the Sonnet
Stephen Burt and David Mikics.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

This collection of one hundred representative sonnets, ranging from the early sixteenth-century English poet Thomas Wyatt to a sonnet published just last year by the San Francisco poet D. A. Powell, presents a series of diversities – chronological, geographical, stylistic – all surprisingly emerging from the same, seemingly straightforward form. Each of these lyric poems does its work in fourteen lines (usually, although even this identifier is open to exceptions, as in “tailed” sonnets or George Meredith’s sixteen-line sonnet sequence Modern Love). The poets also exhibit, as a kind of mental calling card that comes with the mere act of writing sonnets, a consistent engagement with the tradition of sonnets and sonnet writing.

To be clear: these engagements vary tremendously, some being, in Stephen Burt’s and David Mikic’s words, “self-consciously traditional” and others “decidedly impure” instead. Yet The Art of the Sonnet’s compilers and commentators take it as a given that any sonnet will be in communication, or maybe in the midst of a quarrel, with the form’s robust inheritance. For example, a poem such as Alison Brackenbury’s recent “Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?”, with its opening line, “There are too many sonnets about love,” is in fact highly sensitive and even beholden to the very tradition and subject it wishes to dismiss— its act of “writing off” remains an homage to this particular written form. This tenacious legacy involves the formal details of how a sonnet is written, as well as the subjects, tones, and values we readers expect to find in any poem we quickly recognize (Aha!) as a sonnet.

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“The Grotesque Nature of
Disembodied, Modern Christianity”

A Review of
The Christian Imagination:
Theology and the Origins of Race.
By Willie James Jennings.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The Christian Imagination:
Theology and the Origins of Race.
Willie James Jennings.
Hardback: Yale UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Many readers of The Englewood Review will recognize that there is something deeply wrong with Christianity in these early years of the twenty-first century and most of these readers would argue that these problems are hardly new and have plagued the church for decades if not centuries.  There are, of course, an abundance of books published each year that detail these shortcomings, and posit solutions for how we might repent of these sins.  Few books, however, offer as broad and holistic a picture of our brokenness as Willie Jennings’ new theological masterpiece, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, and even fewer books (perhaps none) can come close to the depth of Jennings’ historical account of how we wound up in the mess we are in today.  Jennings concisely sums up the aim of the book in his conclusion:  “I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place, and space, leaving such realities to the machinations of capitalistic calculations and the commodity chains of private property.  Such Christian identity can only inevitably lodge itself in the materiality of racial existence” (293). (more…)

“Crossing the Boundaries Between Communities”

A Review of
What We Love about the Black Church.
By William H. Crouch, Jr. and Joel C. Gregory.

Reviewed by Bob Cornwall.

What We Love about the Black Church.
William H. Crouch, Jr. and Joel C. Gregory.
Paperback: Judson, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

[ This review originally appeared on the reviewer's blog,
and is reprinted here with his permission. ]

Years ago I was invited to preach at a black church. I declined the offer, thinking that my style and personality might not match the expectations of the people in the pew. Later on, after I’d taken up a position as pastor of a local church, I did preach for the Latino congregation that rented space from our church. Maturity had set in by then, and I enjoyed my experience. Coming to metro-Detroit I’ve found that the majority of Disciple churches in the area are either black congregations or they are pastored by African-Americans. I’ve found my colleagues to be welcoming and supportive. So, when a colleague from Detroit invited me to bring my choir and preach at a revival scheduled for this fall, I knew that this was something I should, without any hesitation, do. What I didn’t realize back then, but have come to understand more recently, is that the congregation won’t expect me to be anything other than myself.

What strikes the reader most about Marcus Goodyear’s poetry is the immediate action of the poetry. The action is simultaneous with the writng, as if Goodyear was dictating the present in lines like a sportscaster gives a play-by-play on a baseball game. The effect of Goodyear’s poetry is not immediately deep or penetrating but matter-of-fact, a pronouncement of ordinary life in poetic lines.

This lack of impact is Goodyear’s modus operandi as he seeks to find meaning in the commonplace and mundane. If anything, the poetry in this collection testifies to the fact that anything, and I mean anything, can become sharp and fragrant with meaning when in the hands of a poet.

In order to capture the commonplace in his poetry Goodyear must deconstruct the sacramental into its common elements. He strips away the layers of meaning from figures of Christ and the Eucharist, leaving only “saltless crackers / and shots of grape juice” along with “Jesuses in the attic / after Christmas.” Goodyear removes the metaphorical in order to let the literal stand naked before us, and in a twist of his poetic prowess, he uses his steady syntax and phrasing to build up an image from the deconstructed literal. This is most evident in the titles of his poems, which give direction to the meaning that Goodyear delivers in his poetry of ordinary life.

Goodyear can accomplish this poetic game of stripping down to the literal and building up again because of his clever use of conceit. The reader (this review included) can so easily be lulled into the normalcy of Goodyear’s images, only to discover that in his recounting of a seemingly dull event there is a deep beauty and majesty to the everyday and ordinary. Goodyear showcases this deft skill in poems such as “Drought on the Open Road,” in which he writes:

Once the herd was so thirsty

they ate the burn right off

the interstate shoulder, two bites

from asphalt and cars flying

75 miles to nowhere.

Heat paralyzed cows

never look up.

In the singular image, which Goodyear commands so well, the poet offers up a commonplace moment that hinges on so much. In the isolated event of cows inching ever closer to the highway Goodyear pushes the reader to contemplate the chain reactions caused by a singular event. In essence, Goodyear’s simplicity of poetry is a conscious statement to the irreducible complexity of life, that complex weather systems can cause a drought that eventually leads a herd of cattle into the dangers lurking on an isolated patch of Texas highway.

The power of Goodyear’s poetry is thus in his ability to hold so much back, to be so reserved as a poet that he lets the multiple meanings of words burst out from the pages. In essence, he lets the poetry, and not the poet do the work. He does not seek to answer the mystery as other poets do, but stays in the realm of plain sight and plain poetry. As he himself writes, “Where the mystery is / too great, give us flesh.”

I hold the degree title of Master of Arts of Missional Leadership from George Fox Seminary, a relatively young cohort distance program.  Fox isn’t the only school starting up this MA, but many evangelical seminaries are introducing a missional leadership degree.  Explored in these programs are the typical missional works by Alan Hirsch, Leonard Sweet, perhaps Leslie Newbigin, and others.  Having at least one missional theology course is par for the degree.  Craig Ott and Stephen Strauss with the help of Timothy Tennent have written a definitive text on an Evangelical theology of mission.

Ott and Strauss, both Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) PhD’s, teach respectively at TEDS and Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS).  Both of these schools are bastions in more conservative Evangelical theological education, and I, while an Evangelical, lean more liberal in my theological studies.  That said, however, I was impressed by the TEDS and DTS professors here and their work in Encountering a Theology of Mission.  Published by Baker Academic, their book is a great text for an Evangelical perspective on the theology of mission.

As with any good text, the authors give a primer for the developments of a theology of mission, beginning with the Biblical foundation of mission.   They take a chronological view, beginning with the Old Testament to find God’s missional character.  Contrary to the popular understanding of missional, they explore that God’s missional character with His people as reflected in the OT as centripetal, where God and Israel attract people from the outside to come to the center.  Outsiders must come and worship at Zion.  They, however, emphasize the shift in God’s missional character as centrifugal in the New Testament where Jesus’s disciples were sent outward to the nations (44-45).

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The ERB will take a break for summer vacation next week and will return with our next issue on Friday August 13…

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This week’s Bargains:

	More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women By Joan M. Martin / Westminster John Knox Press $2.99 – Save 90%!!! Martin explores the experiences of enslaved women and the realities of their social world to uncover the inter-relationships, in the context of that environment , among moral agency, work, and human meaning. She then reflects ethically on the implications such a distinct perspective on labor might have for women in contemporary African-American communities and for broader discussions about the meaning of work in American society.
	Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit By Richard A. Horsley / Augsburg Fortress $1.29 – Save 87%!!! How has the interaction between religion, rhetoric, and politics shaped people’s lives over the centuries? Examining the relationship between religious discourse and empire-building, Horsley describes how religion is constructed by the power elite; the role it plays in resistance movements among subjugated people; and how it is used to legitimize empire. 151 pages, softcover from Fortress.
	Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities By Edited by Wes Avram / Baker $1.99 – Save 90%!!! In response to the 2002 foreign policy directive that changed America’s national security strategy, a denominationally diverse group (Mennonite, Catholic, Congregational, Catholic) of theologians, theorists, scholars, and pastors addresses the transnational nature of the church, loving neighbors in a globalized world, the use of Scripture in imperial rhetoric, and more. 218 pages, softcover from Brazos.
	The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea By David Dark / Westminster John Knox Press $3.99 – Save 73%!!! Under a broad pop-culture umbrella, using icons from music, literature, film, the media, and politics, David Dark hopes to provide fodder for lively conversation about what it means to be Christian and American in this “weird moment” in which we live. It is a moment when we are increasingly polarized along political and religious lines, a moment when we are too busy forming our response to listen to the one who is speaking. And yet we claim more than ever to be one nation, under God. What does this mean? The end result, he hopes, will be a better understanding that “there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures to which we belong,” the reality of the kingdom of God.”This well-read interpreter of popular culture probes the spiritual resonances of American culture from Hawthorne and Melville to Bob Dylan and David Lynch. Nearly every page has something to make readers pause, laugh, think, or pray,”—Publishers Weekly
	Red-Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith & Politics By Tony Campolo / Regal Books $4.99 – Save 75%!!! A new kind of politically concerned evangelical is emerging, somewhere between hard-right Republicans and far-left Democrats. “Red-Letter Christians” seek to live out Jesus’ words—the ones printed in red in many New Testaments. Examining the hot-button issues facing believers today, Campolo calls us to transcend partisan squabbles—and bring Christ’s radical message to our civic commitments. 224 pages, hardcover from Regal.

“Prayer”
by George Herbert
[ As featured in The Art of the Sonnet ]

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

An excerpt from the new book:

The Art of the Sonnet
Stephen Burt and David Mikics.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Read our review of this new book…

**** WEBSITE UPDATED THIS WEEK WITH
THE MAIN  SPEAKERS’ TOPICS !!!  *****

A Rooted People:
Church, Place and Agriculture
in an Urban World

Registration and more info: http://englewoodcc.com/rooted/

Spread the word with the Facebook e-vite…

Ours is a world in which transportation is becoming extremely costly (as was highlighted by the massive costs of the BP Oil Spill) and yet at the same time is a world that is becoming increasingly urban. Common sense would seem to indicate that these trends will impact in a major way our food systems and the way we eat. Given these factors, what is the church’s redemptive role in caring for the health and wholeness (shalom) of not just humanity, but all creation? Englewood Christian Church has invited several speakers with rich experiences in sustainable agriculture to lead a conversation reflecting on this question and related ones about church, place, food, community and agriculture, and we invite you to join us.

Speakers:
* Fred Bahnson: Writer and Co-founder of Anathoth Community Garden * Martin Price:
Former Director of Educational Concerns For Hunger Organization (ECHO)

* Ragan Sutterfield:
Arkansas Farmer/Writer, Author of FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

Workshops Lead By : Main speakers and others TBA

When: Friday Oct. 29 and Saturday Oct. 30, 2010

Where: Englewood Christian Church / Indianapolis

An Essay by Alan Jacobs on Book Culture
Written for (not surprisingly… ) BOOKS AND CULTURE

http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

It wasn’t until after I read Ted Striphas’ book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control that I realized that its title and subtitle are somewhat at odds with each other. As I began reading, it was the title that governed my expectations: coined by Jay David Bolter, the phrase “late age of print” is meant to be analogous to the Marxist concept of “late capitalism.” “Late” in this case suggests a highly developed, sophisticated set of structures that are beginning to fall into decadence—structures that have lost their essential motive energy and are living off capital generated long ago. With these thoughts in mind, I was expecting and hoping that Striphas would provide a kind of critical ethnography, and perhaps a diagnosis, of print culture in the past hundred years or so.

But no: the book really isn’t about print culture at all; it is rather, as the subtitle more reliably informs us, about book culture.

…

Read the full essay:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

After 18 years of pastoring a rather large American church, I would have to say that the second hardest challenge our leadership team has faced as we have labored to make disciples of weekend church attenders is getting people to commit to sharing life with others in a small group context. The hardest challenge, however, has been to get small groups to view themselves as distinctly kingdom communities who come together not simply to hang out or engage in an occasional Bible study, but to carry out the mission God has given us.

My friend Scott Boren, who is also the “Connecting Pastor” at Woodland Hills Church, has just published a book on this topic called Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World (Baker). Scott artfully places his assessment of the challenges facing small groups as well as his proposed solutions to these challenges in a narrative framework.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

Missional Small Groups:
Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World.
Scott Boren.
Paperback: Baker Books, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBooks.com ]