“Facing Death Head On”

A Review of
Art of Dying:
Living Fully into the Life to Come
By Rob Moll.

Reviewed by Jasmine Wilson.

Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come
By Rob Moll.
Paperback: IVP Books, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

I once had a philosophy professor who started her Aquinas class on the virtues and vices by having her students write their own eulogy. Her purpose in this exercise is both to introduce students to thinking critically about life, but also to analyze where they are in terms of virtue development. What would people say about me if I were to die now? The second part of the exercise is to write the eulogy that you wish was delivered. What sort of person do I want to be when my life is complete that I perhaps am not right now?

Rob Moll’s book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come, has a similar mission. Moll argues that it is only by facing death head on that we can authentically live. His book is a well-balanced mix of historical information about how Christians have practiced death, personal story-telling from his experiences with the dying from his job in hospice and the stories others have shared with him, partly a how-to manual, and partly a foundation for contemplative conversation with friends, complete with a useful discussion guide. All these elements mix incredibly well together to encourage the reader, no matter what age, to think about the best way to die in a Christian manner, and to have conversations with others about it.

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“The Fundamentally Local Nature of Theology?”

A Review of
The Other Christs:
Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom.
By Candida Moss.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The Other Christs:
Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom.
Candida Moss.
Hardback: Oxford UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

For many years now, I have been intrigued by the martyrs of the Early Church era, their faith that did not waiver amidst threats of death and their significance in the life of the Church.  Thus, I was excited when I heard about Oxford University Press’s release of the new book The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom by Candida Moss, a professor of theology at Notre Dame.  This new work is a study of the “Acts of the Martyrs,” the mostly extra-canonical accounts of the deaths of the martyrs, and seeks to understand “the presentation of the martyrs in the early church, both the ways that the martyr acts interpret the person and death of Jesus and the manner in which this interpretation can inform our understanding of martyrdom in early Christianity” (vii).  Acknowledging that the act of martyrdom is generally accepted as following in the footsteps of Jesus, she notes that this sort of imitation has yet to be explored in depth, and undertakes to do so in this volume.

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“Humanizing Prayer”

A Review of
Mystically Wired: Exploring New Realms in Prayer.
By Ken Wilson.

Reviewed by Joshua Neds-Fox.

Mystically Wired: Exploring New Realms in Prayer.
Ken Wilson.
Hardback: Thomas Nelson, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Ken Wilson’s Mystically Wired: Exploring New Realms in Prayer is either a practical manual for mystic prayer or a mystical manual for practicing prayer, depending on whether you emphasize the ‘Wired’ or the ‘Mystically.’  Wendell Berry might argue that applying language like ‘wired’ to our biology is a bad idea, since equating human beings with electrical systems is, at the very least, dehumanizing, and probably not the best theology. But Wilson is the pastor of the Ann Arbor Vineyard, a community squarely in University of Michigan territory. For strong left-brain thinkers, mystical prayer looks a lot like a neuro/genetic coping mechanism for anxiety and stress.  It could use a bit of demystifying, and Wilson, a good pastor, is willing and able to extend grace to his community and see things through their eyes.  His message to them (and us) is that a receptivity to what we commonly think of as mystical prayer is actually strongly supported by our neurobiology.  He’s humanizing prayer—and by extension, faith—for the scientific set.

Wilson takes the ‘wired’ metaphor seriously: he places prayer in the Trinitarian reality, which he characterizes as a network of love:

“God is a connected and connecting Being. When we are brought into relationship with God through Jesus, we are, as Jesus said, grafted into a vine as branches are—an early network metaphor to describe the kingdom of heaven (John 15:1-17)… Prayer is a powerful way to put us in touch with the reality that we are profoundly connected, that to be alive is to be embedded in a network of connections.” (70, 82)

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“Fighting Words: On War and Language”

A Review of
War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914
By Cynthia Wachtell

Reviewed by Greg Schreur.

War No More:
The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914
By Cynthia Wachtell.
Hardback: LSU Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Robert E. Lee is credited with saying, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Lee recognized that in battle there is just enough heroism, valor, drama, and occasional righteous purpose that can lead some to whitewash over the horrible truth about war. Nearly everyone has their own beliefs on the morality of war even if we have never experienced battle ourselves, yet for most of us, our views rely not on firsthand experience but on the versions that are presented to us through news reports, books, and movies. It is important, then, that these reports not mislead us or ensconce us in blissful ignorance; on the other hand, what damage can be done when people’s opinions are swayed negatively by some of war’s more disturbing truths?

By now anti-war movements and portrayals have become nearly ubiquitous and have existed long enough to develop their own stereotypes and clichés: the alcoholic Vietnam vet and the disillusioned soldier returning home, to name a pair. The history of the Vietnam War era is equal parts military and civil demonstration, soldier and protester. As Cynthia Wachtell demonstrates in War No More, that period was the diametric opposite of the years leading up to the Civil War, when war was still being grossly romanticized, blinding citizens and politicians and erstwhile recruits to the true horror of war, especially war in the post-industrial age.

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“Imagining Living Places
That Participate Within Their Contexts”

A Review of
Natural Houses:
The Residential Architecture of Andersson-Wise
and
Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture.

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

Natural Houses:
The Residential Architecture
of Andersson-Wise
Hardback: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Rematerial:
From Waste to Architecture.
Alejandro Bahamón and Maria Camila Sanjinés
Paperback: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

The city of Indianapolis – where I live – like many American cities has experienced huge amounts of suburban and exurban sprawl in the last decade. Within the last two years, it has been reported that for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural places, although those numbers owe much to these sprawling, never-ending bedroom cities, so far removed from the city core, and hardly fair to be categorized as ‘urban’ at all. Many of us have watched the cycle of a farm stripped of all features, leveled, pipes buried, roads and curbs laid, and anonymous, windowless, porchless beige boxes spring up in record time. This widespread, wasteful suburbanization is completely oblivious to the place where it exists, what has been displaced for it to be there, how the place might inform how it is developed, and on and on. Fortunately, there is an alternative, and two new architecture books that both take place, site-specificity and local resources as their starting place and help us to imagine living places that acknowledge and participate within their context are Natural Houses: The Residential Architecture of Andersson-Wise and Rematerial: From Waste to Architecture.

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“Shaping and Being Shaped”

A Review of
The Shallows:
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
By Nicholas Carr.

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler.

The Shallows:
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
By Nicholas Carr.
Hardback: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr fittingly quotes John Culkin: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us” (210). Culkin’s observation and Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” provide the thesis for The Shallows: The Internet is changing us for the worse.

Carr’s argument begins with anecdotal evidence. After frequent Internet use, he suspected that his mind was changing. He could no longer read lengthy articles and books with the same attention he was once able to devote. Was the Internet really causing this?

Carr provides several neurological studies and historical examples to prove the first part of his thesis. The neurological studies were especially fascinating, illustrating “neuroplasticity,” our brain’s ability to adapt to new situations and stimuli. (For example, people who have lost use of one of their senses often have their other senses heightened. The brain rewires itself, forming new connections, so that what was formerly used for the now-dormant sense can be used to boost the other, still-operating senses.) Another aspect of neuroplasticity is that the more an action is performed, the more connections between neurons are formed, and the skill is solidified. Repeated actions form habits, basically. From these more modern studies, Carr moves on to historical examples (the map, clock, and book, as well as others) in which new technologies changed behavior and the way people thought. He paraphrases Marshall McLuhan in saying that “technologies numb the very faculties they amplify. . . . alienation is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology” (212). By becoming used to a tool that makes things easier, we risk losing the skills and relationship with the work that we had before the tool.

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Since the release of his heralded book The End of Nature, almost twenty years ago, Bill McKibben has been leading the way in alerting us to the growing problem of climate change and pleading with us to change our consumerist ways.  Most recently, McKibben has been the spokesperson for 350, a non-profit that elevates this work of educating and calling for change.  McKibben’s new book, EAARTH: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, makes a case for the work of 350 and offers hope that we adapt to life in world where fossil fuels are not the predominant source of energy.  EAARTH (McKibben has said in interviews that we need to “channel our inner Schwarzenegger” in order to say the title: URRRTH) is basically divided into two parts, the first is an exposition of the problems that climate change is wreaking and will continue to wreak; in the second part of the book, he begins to imagine what a world less reliant on fossil fuels might look like.

The first half of the book paints a stark picture: global temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting and there is an “historic level of CO2 in the atmosphere.”  And not only are these ecological problems escalating, their effects are being felt most powerfully among the poorest peoples of the world.  In spite of all the evidence that McKibben provides, some critics will likely accuse him of exaggeration.  The question that I would pose to such critics, and especially those who identify themselves as followers of Christ, is what good and selfless reason do we have for not reducing our consumption of fossil fuels?

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A Review of Saving the Seasons. How to Can, Freeze or Dry Almost Anything. Mary Clemens Meyer and Susanna Meyer. Paperback: Herald Press, 2010. Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ] Reviewed by Kate Roden.

Scroll down to the end of the review
for the recipe for Strawberry Freezer Jam
from this book!

Saving the Seasons is the newest cookbook from the publishers of the trifecta of beloved Mennonite cookbooks: Simply in Season, More with Less, and Extending the Table. This new work lives up to and expands the ideals of its predecessors.

In the nearly 35 years since More with Less first appeared on the scene, American kitchens have undergone some big changes, and not just in the shift from “autumn harvest” appliance colors to stainless steel.  In much of the country, the locavore movement is in full swing, folks are prioritizing where their food comes from and how it gets to them. They are looking for farmer’s markets and buying up farm shares and subscriptions on such sites as http://www.localharvest.org/csa/.   Vegetable gardens, chicken coops and beehives are popping up in urban neighborhoods, and with the current DIY climate, and the financial necessities many families are facing, the More with Less approach to homemaking has new relevance.

The upsurge in interest in various arts of domesticity and homesteading means this book comes out at exactly the right time for a new group of novice gardeners who are wondering what exactly they are supposed to do with the 10 pounds of pickling cucumbers they accidentally grew.

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“Journey Into Wholeness”

A Review of
Pilgrimage of a Soul:
Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life
By Phileena Heuertz

Reviewed by Margaret D. McGee.

[ Read an excerpt of this book here... ]

Pilgrimage of a Soul:
Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life
Phileena Heuertz.
Paperback: InterVarsity Press, 2010
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Change that ushers in a new way of life begins deep inside. Conceived when personal longings we’ve hardly noticed are touched by a boundless longing too great to be contained, the new way of life needs a period of gestation to grow and knit its parts together. Unfortunately, the old life with its long-established habits looks askance at this unasked-for pregnancy, tries to block the labor, and kicks the cradle every chance it gets. That’s one reason people go on pilgrimage or take a sabbatical far from home: to give incipient change a chance to take root and grow new habits that will bear fruit on the return to “normal life.”

In Pilgrimage of a Soul: Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life, Phileena Heuertz reports back on just such a journey. The daughter of a Bible-centered pastor, Heuertz describes growing up in a community where the roles of women in relationships, church, and professional life are viewed as subordinate to the roles of men. By the age of seventeen she knew she wanted to be a missionary. Her vocation found focus at college, where she met her future husband, Chris Heuertz. Inspired by his missionary experience, particularly his time serving with Mother Theresa  at the Home for the Dying in Kolkata (Calcutta), Phileena joined Chris on the core leadership team of Word Made Flesh, “an international community serving Christ among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor” (www.wordmadeflesh.org). In time she also entered into a practice of contemplative prayer and regular retreats which deepened her spiritual life while awakening her “true self”—a self that longed for mutuality rather than subordination in relationship.

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“A Renewed Appreciation
of God’s Love for his People”

A Review of
Julian of Norwich:
A Contemplative Biography.
By Amy Frykholm.

Reviewed by Mary Bowling.

Julian of Norwich:
A Contemplative Biography.
Amy Frykholm.
Paperback: Paraclete Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Why a “contemplative biography” instead of just a biography? Maybe just a biography of Julian of Norwich isn’t enough.  For one thing, so little of the actual person is known that to make a biography based only on the facts we have about Julian’s life would be a very short book indeed.  It would also, if it contained only facts about this woman‘s life, be somewhat of a lie in itself. Julian never intended her writing to be about herself or to point back to her in any way. She didn’t seek fame or recognition — quite the opposite. She spent the last many years of her life secluded in an anchorage essentially dead to the world.

So why then any biography at all, if she was an unknown, and such a recluse as to be dead to the world?  That we know almost nothing about her, is certainly as she wished, but we do know one thing. She received a series of revelations from God which she, despite many limitations, managed to write down in words and which became the first book written in the English language by a woman. It was a notable accomplishment, but not one that she sought.
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