Slowly Creating Well

A Feature Review of

Making Manifest: On Faith Creativity and the Kingdom at Hand
Dave Harrity

Paperback: Seedbed Publishing, 2013
Buy now:  [ Seedbed ]

Reviewed by Sam Edgin

Dave Harrity’s Making Manifest had two strikes against it by the time I had finished the introduction (“to begin” on pp. xi-xv). First, it is arranged as a combined group study and personal devotional. This form –  a youth group staple –  specializes mainly in covers splashed with either neon or explosions, faux-edgy graphic design swirling about cool praying teens, and a troubling overuse of phrases like “chew,” “the meat,” and “on-fire.”  It also has an unhealthy preoccupation with the almighty “you,” and with writing on pre-printed lines at the end of each day/chapter.

My second – and I admit, needlessly personal –  issue with Making Manifest is that latter feature. I hate writing in books. Anything that mars the original condition of a book flares compulsion within me. Dog-earing is a cardinal sin; highlighting, an offense to nature. I read trade paperbacks through a thin V of pages in order to avoid breaking spines. Within the introduction of Making Manifest Dave Harrity asked me to do all those things. “There’s space for you to write… crack the spine so the book rests flat, dog-ear, sketch and scratch,” He says (xiv). I almost flipped the book to the floor in frustration.

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Reexamining Paul’s Missiology in the 21^st Century

A Feature Review of

Paul’s Missionary Methods: In His Time and Ours
Robert L. Plummer & John Mark Terry, editors

IVP Academic, 2012
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]

Reviewed by Chris Schoon

There are two temptations when engaging works from a previous generation. The first is a persnickety tendency to elevate the perspectives of those with whom we resonate in a way that prevents us from seeing where their contributions leave room for further development. At the same time, we also face the temptation of a naïve ahistorical hubris that blindly critiques our predecessors for failing to fully conform to our common sensibilities. Such are the dual challenges faced by Plummer and Terry in Paul’s Missionary Methods, which celebrates, extends, and deepens conversations initiated by Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods 100 years ago.

For the past century, Allen’s Missionary Methods has served as one of the central introductory textbooks for exploring a biblical model of mission, catalyzing a wide range of New Testament studies and contextualized mission conversations in the process. Allen’s reflections have empowered several generations of New Testament scholars, missiologists, and practicing missionaries to take not only the words of the gospel seriously but also to carefully consider the manner in which the Apostle Paul carried out his calling. Drawing together a strong cohort of evangelical scholars and practitioners, Plummer and Terry’s editorial work reasserts Allen’s argument for seeing Paul as the “exemplary model not for us to blindly follow, but to appropriate and replicate intelligently.”(28)

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Closer to Home.

A Feature Review of

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life
Rod Dreher

Hardback: Grand Central, 2013.
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Reviewed by Ellen Painter Dollar.

In November 1995, my then-boyfriend’s, now-husband’s brother died suddenly. A few weeks later, I preached a sermon at my little coffee-house church about how Jimmy’s death made me impatient with all of the outward-focused ministries for which my church (part of the venerable Washington, DC-based Church of the Saviour) was known. People affiliated with my church were doing wonderful things for DC’s poorest citizens—day care centers and GED prep and long-term supportive housing for those with HIV/AIDS. Good stuff.

But, I admitted, loving Daniel as he mourned his brother drew my focus a bit closer to home. I realized that we Christians are called not simply to do big things for Jesus “out there” in the world, but also to offer sacrificial love—Christ-like love—in our homes and families and friendships, where the needs can be just as big and desperate as those on our city streets or in undeveloped overseas locales.

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A Biblically Rooted Ethic of Life

The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World’s Future.
David Gushee. 

Reviewed by Bob Cornwall.

(This review originally appeared on the reviewer’s blog, and is re-published here with permission.)

What does it mean to call human life sacred?  Is it just a word or does it have implications?  If you turn on the news, it would appear that life is anything but sacred.  Every day people are assaulted, killed, raped, maimed, and degraded.  Humans are enslaved and trafficked.  They’re forced to work and live in horrid conditions.  So, is human life really sacred?

If we were to take seriously the message delivered by David Gushee in his new book The Sacredness of Life, then things would be different.  The message is pretty simple – because God has pronounced life to be sacred, then we should treat each other with a respect and a love that is fitting someone or something that is consecrated by God.
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Something Bigger than You.

A Feature Review of

Where’d You Go, Bernadette: A Novel
Maria Semple

Paperback: Back Bay Books, 2013
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Reviewed by D.L. Mayfield

I recently moved from the Pacific northwest to the midwest, so forgive me if this seems a bit sentimental. But there is something to be said about the supreme silliness of the sister cities of Portland and Seattle, the expectation for every one of its citizens to embrace nerdery of the relatively unimportant: coffee, visually appealing technology, recumbent bikes, etc. They are the embodiment of cities where the most prominent citizens are busy engaging in the top part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, seemingly on one long continual quest for self-actualization. There is so much to make fun of, and so very much to miss.

Seattle itself hangs around like a character in Maria Semple’s newest novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. It is a symbol of the title character’s mental state: gray, dreary, prone to fits of self-absorption and inertia—but also quirky, whip-smart, and resolutely itself.

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A Land of Possibility and Community

A Feature review of

Places of Possibility: Property, Nature, and Community Land Ownership
A. Fiona Mackenzie

Paperback: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013
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Reviewed by Sam Edgin

Generally we speak of ownership – especially property ownership – in binary terms. A house, a hillside, or a stretch of farmland is owned either privately or publicly. As there is little else we know, we are largely incapable of thinking otherwise. A mountain is either the property of the government, who will probably preserve it as public land or stick some military installation or communications array on top of it (but more popularly the former); or it is owned privately with farmland running along its base or ski slopes splayed across its face. Or, to boil it down a bit more, we generally see land turned towards conservation in an attempt to preserve the natural resources, or employed for what we think of as “human” use, that is, for building or energy or farming. In Places of Possibility: Property, Nature, and Community Land Ownership A. Fiona Mackenzie presents a stream of qualitative research that wants us to believe there is another way.

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A Challenge to the American Christian Public System.

A Feature Review of

A New Evangelical Manifesto:  A Kingdom Vision for the Common Good
David Gushee

Paperback: Chalice Press, 2012.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]  [ Kindle ]
 
Reviewed by Alex Dye
 
No matter how many times I read about evangelicals, their history, their theology and their current work, I find myself struggling to piece it all together, to explain who they are and how they came to be.  Perhaps it is because it is not a centrally defined movement and so much of its history and faith is nebulous in that it started in different places by different people who acted in different ways with similar core beliefs.  In the introduction to A New Evangelical Manifesto:  A Kingdom Vision for the Common Good, editor David P. Gushee offers his definition of evangelicalism as a foundation for the essays that are to come:

    “…evangelicals are spiritually serious, theologically orthodox, evangelistically engaged, morally earnest Protestant Christians, members of hundreds of particular denominational traditions and tens of thousands of congregations all over the country.  (You will find other ways of defining evangelicals in this book.  But that’s good enough for now.”( ix)

In this characterization, Gushee does not explain what evangelicals believe but rather wishes to define the movement as a wide variety of adherents apart from the most radical sects within, usually identified as right wing conservatives and fundamentalists.

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Beautiful and Terrible Things

A Review of

Ordinary Grace: A Novel
William Kent Krueger

Hardback: Atria Books, 2013
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Reviewed by Timothy Stege

Editor’s note: I’ve had this review sitting on my desk for over a week now, but as I picked it up this morning, I was struck by how relevant this novel is in the wake of a tragedy like yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing.  Thanks to Tim Stege for this poignant review!

William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace, nestled snugly in 1960s small town Minnesota, is one boy’s recollections, forty years later, of his thirteenth summer. Like most coming-of-age stories, it is a story of family and life and growth and change, but Krueger employs death and loss as the vehicle through which the growth and change travel. This approach is not in itself unique, but what is interesting is the perspective of the grace of God as both beautiful and ugly, comforting and terrifying, sacred and profane. Life can be both beautiful and terrible, and sometimes there is no way to separate the two, as Frederick Buechner writes in his Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” This could rightly serve as an epigraph for the novel, as a series of terrible events unfold that seem to increase in tragedy, and yet somehow there are still moments of hope and beauty and a grace perhaps ordinary, perhaps amazing, perhaps a bit awful.

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The Intricate Dance of Our True and False Selves

A Feature Review of

Immortal Diamond: Searching For Our True Self
Richard Rohr

Hardback: Jossey-Bass, 2013
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Reviewed by David Nash

Country recording artist John Anderson once sang, “I’m just an old chunk of coal, but I’m gonna be a diamond some day.”  Fr. Richard Rohr, in this book, describes the process by which one is transformed into a diamond.
 

Richard Rohr is becoming a spiritual guide for this generation.  He is a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and serves as its Founding Director.  He claims the spiritual master Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk, as his mentor. In Immortal Diamond, Rohr follows and expands on Merton’s concept of the False Self and the True Self.  It was Merton who first used the language of the “False Self” and “True Self.”

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Prose Poems Composed in Lieu of Sleep

A Review of

New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012
Charles Simic

Hardback: HMH Books, 2013.
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Reviewed by J. Ted Voigt

The world of Charles Simic’s poetry is full of night but no sleep, nakedness but no romance, and god but no faith.  These strands weave through not only the small section of new poetry but this entire volume of Simic’s selected works.
 
This book is an impressive collection, if for no other reason than this: here in one volume we see over fifty years of work.  In the same span of time, sixty-seven sovereign nations were formed.  When the first of these poems were published, it most likely involved at least one typewriter.  Now you can buy the whole collection, plus fourteen of his previous books, for an e-reader of your choice.  How things have changed for Charles Simic’s craft during his career.

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