Reflecting on Nostalgia, Loss, and Flight

A Featured Review of

Poetry in America

Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Paperback: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
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Reviewed By Alex Dye.

There is a universal longing, a part of the human condition, which causes one to reflect on and desire for the past.  Whether a Christmas in which all of the siblings, uncles, and cousins attended and nobody was belligerently drunk, or that great Sunday afternoon movie spent in pajamas on the couch.  We enjoy remembering our families, for better or for worse, and those influences which helped to shape us.   And yet along with that nostalgia is a natural sense of loss, moments that cannot be recaptured or changed.  In Poetry in America, author Julia Spicher Kasdorf writes on the paradoxical longing and loss by interweaving stories of the past and present with self -reflections on her person as an author, artist, mother, and woman.

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A Review of

Crafting a Rule of Life: An Invitation to the Well-Ordered Way

Stephen A. Macchia.

Paperback: IVP Books, 2012
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Reviewed by Jennifer Burns Lewis

I am devouring books on Benedictine practices like they’re ice cream flavors at my local store. As one who has explored oblate programs affiliated with Benedictine orders, I am enthusiastic about every opportunity to learn more about the Rule of St. Benedict and the myriad options to put into daily practice the simple, beautiful, practical guidance the Rule offers for the living of our days. Stephen Macchia’s Crafting a Rule of Life provides wisdom, guidance, resources galore and beautiful thoughts about living one’s faith with integrity, but only provides one of those tiny, pink sample spoon tastes of Benedictine thought.

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Women and Men Flourishing Together In God’s Kingdom

A Feature Review of

Unladylike: Resisting the Injustice of Inequality in the Church.

Pam Hogeweide.

Paperback: Civitas Press, 2012.
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Reviewed by Jasmine Wilson.

“The insistence to relegate church roles based on gender, rather than gifting has meant the minimizing of untold numbers of women solely because of their femininity.” So says writer Pam Hogeweide, both from personal experience and from hearing the stories of many other women.  Those are the stories she tells in Unladylike: Resisting the Injustice of Inequality in the Church.

Hogeweide explained how she had always tried to stay neutral regarding the issue of women teaching, preaching and leading in the church, being “ladylike” and polite for fear of causing discord in her various church communities.  Until one day she heard an inspiring teaching by a woman named Rose. Rose’s passion for equality in the church spurred on Hogeweide, with comments like “[Gender inequality] puts us in preconceived roles of what a man’s role should be and what a woman’s role should be. That doesn’t give us any room for what God has created us to be.”

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History from the Middle—
Can Experts Lead Us to the Promised Land?

A Featured Review of

The Creative Society– and the Price Americans Paid for It

Louis Galambos

Paperback: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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By Jess O. Hale, Jr.

Historians often serve as a society’s quasi-official storytellers as they narrate the story of a society or its neighbors or its ancestors in ways that give a society, or at least relevant parts of one, an interpretive framework for understanding the world (or at least part of it).  Some stories focus on “great men” and their exploits while others focus on social movements.  Some stories may focus on elites and be told from above while other stories, in Bonhoeffer’s phrase, are told “from below”.  In The Creative Society, historian Louis Galambos tells a moderately optimistic story of American society that focuses on the role of professionals in creatively crafting practical solutions to challenging societal problems.  As servants to elites who not infrequently arose by education from families on the margins, this story of professionals is not told from above or from below, but from the middle.  Galambos tells a sometimes gallant story of the American middle class to that middle class.

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The Gift of Resurrection Life

A Feature Review of

Gandhi and the Unspeakable:
His Final Experiment With Truth
By James W. Douglass
Hardback: Orbis, 2012
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Reviewed by Tim Høiland

If I were to describe an unassuming Indian man with wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a white robe, sitting at his spinning wheel, you’d know exactly who I had in mind: Mohandas Gandhi, one of the most celebrated figures of the twentieth century, who remains an international icon of freedom and peace. He inspired the likes of Martin Luther King and countless other nonviolent activists throughout the world. You can even get a mug with a quote attributed to him at Starbucks.

You’re probably not going to find any coffee shop souvenirs with quotes from Vinayak Savarkar, however, and his name likely doesn’t ring any bells. Yet he and Gandhi were contemporaries, both pushing for India’s independence from the British Empire, both trying to win over the hearts and minds of fellow Indians… but through very different means.

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A Review of

A Silence of Mockingbirds:

The Memoir of a Murder.

Karen Spears Zacharias

Hardback: MacAdam/Cage, 2012.
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Reviewed by Matt Miles.

I knew two things about the subject of Karen Spears Zacharias’ new book A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder going in: it was about the brutal murder of an innocent child, and this murder was preventable. This wasn’t going to be light reading, but I knew it was necessary. Especially as a former educator, I felt the weight of responsibility to see signs of abuse others had missed. This wouldn’t be pleasant, but hopefully it would be informative and in that sense, redemptive.

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Insight into the Adolescent Mind
of a Young Beat Writer

A Feature Review of

The Sea is My Brother:

The Lost Novel.

Jack Kerouac.

Hardback: De Capo Press, 2012.
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Reviewed by Amber Baker.

A young man searches for meaning to his life, trying to find a place for all his philosophies and ideals. Leaving his home for another, he is faced with what it means to act out convictions versus simply discussing them.
The Sea is My Brother is author and poet Jack Kerouac‘s first novel, written in 1942 after his eight day stint as a sailor for the US Merchant Marines. Kerouac considered it to be a complete waste of time, and never sent the manuscript to publishers. In 1992, Kerouac’s brother-in-law discovered the manuscript sketches amongst the author’s papers. The novel remained unpublished until 2011. The novel is short, a mere one-hundred and fifty-eight pages, but when Kerouac’s style is considered, brevity doesn’t necessarily mean a simple read.

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“Expanding the Table”

A Review of

Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom:

The Legacy of Alan and Eleanor Kreider.

edited by James R. Krabill and Stuart Murray
Paperback: Herald Press, 2011.
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Reviewed by Josh Wallace

I’ve been to a few weddings. Weddings and other rites of passage (births, anniversaries, retirements, funerals) gather us together. The far-flung corners of the honoree’s social network bump into one another. Gathered around a table or a punch bowl, we ask a seeming stranger, “How do you know so-and-so?” And as they respond, we see a new perspective on our loved one opening up to us.

Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom: The Legacy of Alan and Eleanor Kreider is one such gathering, here in literary form. James R. Krabill and Stuart Murray invite conversation and reflection from the scores of individuals connected to and shaped by the Kreiders, whether through their speaking, writing, or their warm invitation to the dinner table at the London Mennonite Center or in their present home in Elkhart, Indiana. The list of contributors to the volume includes academics and activists, pastors and entrepreneurs and farmers. Keeping with Eleanor Kreider’s plea for “multi-voiced worship,” Krabill and Murray arrange what they style a “veritable multivoiced choir, counting almost fifty in number.”

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Poetry, Percussion and Politics.

A Feature Review of

The Last Holiday: A Memoir.

Gil Scott-Heron.

Hardback: Grove Press, 2012.
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Reviewed by Denise Frame Harlan.

Although Gil Scott-Heron is often called “the godfather of rap,” he never wanted that title. Like contemporary rap artists, he spoke biting social commentary, repeating refrains for emphasis, but his performances showcased the musicality of the spoken word, set against an ensemble of bluesmen. Scott-Heron considered himself a “bluesologist,” a verbal Coltrane of poetry, percussion and politics.

In many ways, this man’s meteoric rise is worthy of a celebrity memoir: Gil Scott-Heron made waves. As a child, he was one of three African-Americans to integrate a middle school in his small Tennessee town. When he moved to New York with his mother, Scott-Heron was one of five students chosen for a scholarship at an exclusive white prep school. At age 19, Gil Scott-Heron wrote his first novel The Vulture, while skipping his sophomore year of college. Upon his return, he organized a classroom boycott over medical care for students. In 1970, at age 21, he sold a volume of poetry and landed a recording contract for Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox, which includes the hit “The Revolution will Not be Televised.” Before he completed his undergraduate degree, Johns Hopkins University recruited him for its masters program in creative writing. At age 24, Gil Scott-Heron taught high school writing in Washington D.C., until he could perform full-time.

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A Beautiful, Bountiful Passover Table

New American Haggadah

Jonathan Safran Foer, editor

Hardcover: Little, Brown &Co., 2012.
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Reviewed by Michelle Van Loon

As I read through The New American Haggadah, I had the distinct sense that I was at a beautiful, bountiful Passover table with a lively mix of friends old and new.  Together we journeyed through the ritual retelling of the story of God’s miraculous deliverance of the Jewish people from the oppression of Pharaoh. Exodus 1-13 contains the account of this deliverance, and a Haggadah (which means “narration”) offers a guide by which Jewish people can gather around a table and obey the command in Leviticus 23:4-8 to celebrate this sacred feast.

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