David Fitch gives us
a (diet and decaf?) foretaste of his coming book
The End of Evangelicalism?

http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-caffeine-free-diet-coke-a-metaphor-for-evangelicalism-in-our-day/

Last week or so on facebook, some friends were giving me a hard time for comparing evangelicalism to an ‘empty’ Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. Of course I was referring to philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s famous cultural analyses found in his book, The Fragile Absolute (chapter 3). It’s an example I use in the intro to my upcoming book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission. There I use Zizek’s Coke illustration to ask questions about the current state of evangelicalism in N America. Allow me to explain.

Zizek narrates how coca-cola was originally concocted as a medicine (originally known as a nerve tonic, stimulant and headache remedy). It was eventually sweetened and its strange taste was made more palatable. Soon it became a popular drink during prohibition that still possessed those medicinal qualities (it was deemed “refreshing” as well as the perfect “temperance drink”). Over time, however, its sugar was replaced with sweetner, its caffeine extracted, and so today we are left with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: a drink that does not fulfil any of the concrete needs of a drink. The two reasons why anyone would drink anything: it quenches thirst/provides nutrition and it tastes good, have in Zizek’s words “been suspended.”

…

Read the full piece:
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-caffeine-free-diet-coke-a-metaphor-for-evangelicalism-in-our-day/

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=967

It has become all too common these days for discussions of North American evangelicalism to transpire solely in terms of disdain, so much so that the very word evangelical has almost become a slur. Obviously, this is not to say that there aren’t many grounds upon which the evangelical tradition, especially in its North American variety, can (and should) be critiqued. Many have balked at the seemingly evangelical idea that the major tragedies of the last decade, namely, 9/11, the tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina, and the recent earthquake in Haiti, were somehow divine retribution for homosexuality, idolatry, or general unbelief. In addition, one could consider the ongoing campaign among many evangelicals in the United States to “take back America” through a perverse wedding of white, middle/upper class, conservative evangelicalism and a Republican agenda. Marching ever onward, this group of evangelicals frequently ends up propagating an agenda that often seems more American than biblical.

The criticism could—and should—go on, but while such critique is always necessary for the healthy growth of the church, there is a world of difference between denigrating the evangelical movement and critiquing it from within as a sort of loyal opposition. Fortunately, this is a point not missed by James K. A. Smith in his recent book, The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts. In fact, this commitment serves as his starting point. Understanding his training as a philosopher as providing the platform for a diaconal vocation, a vocation of service to and for the church, Smith here offers a collection of essays directed toward the end of building up the body of Christ.

As is the case with any book of this sort, there is the inherent hurdle of overcoming the occasional nature of each piece in order to create some coherent whole. Smith’s book is no exception in this regard, and it suffers at times because of this. Nevertheless, at the risk of these various writings being reduced to mere cultural musings, Smith successfully manages to offer substantial insights and constructive critiques throughout the volume.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=967

The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays
on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts.
James K. A. Smith.
Paperback: Eerdmans, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_05.html

Philip Hoare’s account of his “search [for] the giants of the sea” is part travelogue, part history, part scientific discourse, and part elegy, all blended into a wonderful melange. He travels to New England in order to walk around whaling towns that Herman Melville  described in detail in Moby-Dick; discusses at great length the historical development of the whaling trade in both America and England; wanders about museums with various whale artifacts, taking in the immense grandeur of reconstructed whale skeletons dangling from ceilings; bemoans the massive destruction visited upon whale populations over the past century, threatening many species with utter extinction; and even goes into great detail about how ambergris — that rarest of whale treasures used in countless colognes throughout the ages for its distinctive aromatic quality — is actually created (it might lose a bit of its exotic luster when you find out).

All of this would be interesting enough on a strictly informational level, but it’s made especially poignant through Hoare’s eyes and fascination with his subject:

There is something about the sperm whale that leads me on, something that, even now, I find hard to describe. No matter how many pictures I might see, I cannot quite comprehend it. No matter how many times I might try to sketch it, its shape seems to elude me. None the less, my curiosity remains…

Hoare repeatedly mentions the mystical air surrounding these creatures that can dive deeper than any other mammal and who live so much of their lives hidden from our view despite their immense size. Theirs is a world ostensibly set apart from ours.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_05.html

THE WHALE: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare.
Hardback: Ecco, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

THE OTHER JOURNAL’S REVIEW OF
Daniel Bell’s JUST WAR AS CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=956

Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we have been told by both sides of the partisan fence that we now live in an “age of terrorism.” What is especially novel about our age, so we are told, is not so much that our world is torn apart by violence, but that the “enemy” has no moral compass, no concern for the flourishing of human life. We are told that our extraordinary times may demand that we take extraordinary measures in warfare. In other words, the rules that may have guided warfare in the past may no longer apply. The images of tortured prisoners, maimed Iraqi civilians, and the thousands of flag-wrapped caskets of dead U.S. soldiers remind us of the horrific consequences of the two U.S.-led wars launched against this elusive “terrorist” enemy. Although many Christians opposed the wars from the beginning, others have backed the wars without hesitation, and leaders and spokespersons on both sides of the debate have appealed to just war principles and criteria to support their respective positions. In the midst of polemically charged debates between Internet pundits, political ideologues, and partisan hacks, it has often been difficult to find the space to reflect on, at least with any moral seriousness and clarity, the question of justice with regard to these particular wars. Yet, too much is at stake in warfare—perhaps especially modern warfare—to simply let the pundits control the shape of public discourse, not to mention Christian discourse on war. Indeed, in our time of war and rumors of war, a time when uncritical support of war and nationalist fervor is all too common, not least among American Christians, we are desperately in need of a theologically robust and critical discourse about war.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=956

Just War as Christian Discipleship:
Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State.
Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/5350/

TONY HOAGLAND is not a poet who sees himself as above anything. Rather, he is inside it all: “I too am made of joists and stanchions, / of plasterboard and temperamental steel, / mortgage payments and severed index fingers, / ex-girlfriends and secret Kool-Aid-flavored dawns.” From pop culture to the mundane, from the glittering Britney Spears to the undeniable hulk of a cement truck, Hoagland wades through the noise and confusion of American material culture with a mixture of awe and disgust. His language—personal, inviting, unpretentiously graceful—pulls the trusting reader along behind, unsure at times whether to laugh or cry.

It would be hard not to see Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty as in many ways a critique of contemporary culture. Hoagland wanders through the grocery store and the mega-mall, seeing beneath all the Muzak and bright colors and splashy ads the fraught and complex web that strings across the globalized world.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/5350/

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty: Poems.
Tony Hoagland.
Paperback: Graywolf Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

BOOKS AND CULTURE Reviews
A New Book of Alexis De  Tocqueville.

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html

At a conference on Democracy in America several years ago, one of the speakers took up Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction that increased centralization and equality in the United States would produce the “soft despotism” of a “schoolmaster” state: “Above [the citizens] rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate,” Tocqueville writes.

It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment …. The sovereign power doesn’t break their wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action. It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as their shepherd.

Read the full review:

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html

Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.
Leo Damrosch.
Hardback: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html

One day, apparently before the rise of Google Book Search, Marilyn Johnson made an odd request at the New York Public Library. She needed to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “information sickness,” which she recollected from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney, “Easy Travel to Other Planets.” She couldn’t find her own copy, so a team of librarians went spelunking in the stacks, wearing miner’s helmets, as Johnson tells it. They surfaced with a copy preserved, strangely enough, on micro­film, and soon Johnson was reading the dimly remembered passage in which a woman keels over, blood gushing from her nose and ears as she raves about disconnected facts. When the woman recovers from her fugue state, she says: “I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html

THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE:
How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.
Marilyn Johnson.
Hardback: HarperCollins, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]

A Review of the Recent Movie
About the Latter Years of Leo Tolstoy’s Life
The Last Station,
From our Friends at Jesus Manifesto

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/04/the-last-station/

“Everything I know I know only because I love”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

This is the quote that opens The Last Station, a film based on the novel by Jay Perini. The Last Station chronicles the final years of perhaps the greatest writer of the 20th century, Leo Tolstoy. Featuring terrific performances by Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, it is a simple film and slightly specialized, but gives us a glimpse into the epic life and marriage Tolstoy had.

…

Read the full review:

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/04/the-last-station/

The Powells Books Review of
Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture
by Darrin Nordahl

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_04_20.html

America’s relationship with food is dysfunctional. Obesity, childhood malnourishment, fast-food addiction, E. coli and salmonella outbreaks — the list of problems is as familiar as it is dismaying. Though average Americans are fundamentally disconnected from the vast industrial networks that disgorge their daily meals, they were not always so removed from food production. Even after the United States converted from an agrarian to an industrial economy, there were periods when large numbers of the country’s citizens helped to grow the food they ate. During World War II, the public heeded the U.S. government’s call to raise “victory gardens” to ease the strain of supplying canned goods to overseas troops. In 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens yielded eight million tons of food.

In Public Produce, city designer Darrin Nordahl describes how towns and cities are working diligently to tap that spirit again and create civic cornucopias. He has more in mind than the occasional community garden. He wants the largest landlord in most cities — the municipal government — to expand the uses conceived of for public places beyond recreation and aesthetic pleasure to include farming.
…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_04_20.html

Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture
Darrin Nordahl.
Paperback: Isaland Press, 2010.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05secret.html

There is a lot to look at in “The Secret of Kells.” Nearly every frame of this 75-minute animated feature is dense with curlicued and cross-hatched patterns and figures. Your eye travels over Celtic crosses and through forest glades, studies architectural schematics and drinks in delicately washed landscapes. The human characters come in a variety of shapes and hues. Some are cute, some are sinister, some angular, some roly-poly. A few resemble science-fiction robots, while others look like pixies out of Japanese anime.

But you might take special notice of their hands, which are squared off and elongated in a way that suggests both crudeness and grace. These appendages are also large, appearing slightly out of proportion to the bodies, which makes sense given that the subject and method of this film is handicraft. “The Secret of Kells,” directed by Tomm Moore, concerns the Book of Kells, a medieval illuminated manuscript that ranks among the most important artifacts of Irish civilization. And it is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing — the almost sacred magic of color and line — should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.

…

Read the full review:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05secret.html

Now playing in select US cities…

BOOKS AND CULTURE reviews
Dominic Erdozain’s
The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html

Although he does not cite Neil Postman, Dominic Erdozain’s thesis is that the churches in late 19th-century Britain amused themselves to death. The background is the earlier evangelical war on pleasure. Evangelicals disproved of most forms of recreation—even sports were censured as unbecoming to the earnestness of a Christian man.

Evangelicals therefore gained a reputation for being killjoys, and eventually even they came to feel that some of their flat bans were untenable. Erdozain’s real story is about the disastrous overcorrection. With remarkable rapidity, evangelicals went from lifting the prohibition on sports to facilitating recreation through official church programs to replacing the real work of the church with entertainment.

…
Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html

The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.
Dominic Erdozain.
Hardback: Boydell Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets

In his introduction, editor and contributor David Yezzi suggests that this collection reconciles the traditional division in the poetry world between those who prefer classical forms and those who favor free verse. According to Yezzi, these thirty-five new poets (although many of the authors included here stretch the meaning of newcomer) have accomplished that balance within a “climate of extremes,” as they choose to write their poems utilizing a variety of forms.

“The old battle lines,” as he calls them, between the old and the new, the classic and the contemporary, have become entrenched. Arbitrary divisions lead to dogmatism, and from there, he says, there can be no forward movement.

Yezzi makes a good point about entrenchment. For many free-verse poets, the strictures of traditional form—the seemingly arbitrary and rigid adherence to line length, syllable counts, and end rhymes—often seem forced instead of found. Conversely, traditionalists bemoan the seeming “anything goes” milieu of the free-verse writers as sloppy, syntactically confused, loose lines.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets

The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.
David Yezzi, ed.
Paperback: Swallow Press, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

FLOURISH Magazine Reviews
Ragan Sutterfield’s New Book
FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE.

http://flourishonline.org/2010/03/flourish-book-review-farmin-as-a-spiritual-discipline-by-ragan-sutterfield/

Last week, I was listening to a scientist on public radio describe the mating calls of the amphibians she was studying. She said, only half-jokingly, that these frogs had been around for thousands of years and would still be around long after humans were gone.

This idea that humans are at best a trivial part of the natural world, and at worst “some sort of colossal mistake on the landscape,” is one of two “heresies of human alienation in creation” that Ragan Sutterfield describes in his small book of essays, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. The other heresy, one of which many Christians have been guilty, is that humans are masters of creation, and that nature is utterly submissive to the needs of humanity.

Sutterfield describes what should be our correct relationship with nature: that of creatures of a loving God who, by extension and Imago Dei, should love creation. Practically speaking, Sutterfield says that farming is a route to reconnecting with the ways of loving creation that we have forgotten.

…

Read the full review:
http://flourishonline.org/2010/03/flourish-book-review-farmin-as-a-spiritual-discipline-by-ragan-sutterfield/

FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE.
Ragan Sutterfield.
Paperback: Doulos Christou Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Press ]

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/foster032510.html

Some might consider Robert Hass to be the Dominating Golden General of contemporary American poetry, although any hint or taint of the tyrannous will seem remote from him. Hass is winsome, widely respected in the literary world, and his poems (and the voices speaking in them) are vastly appealing. These should be reasons enough to obtain and take pleasure in The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. In some volumes sharing this format, the new work is thin, serving mainly to garnish the literary buffet of several previous books. Hass’ existing readers will be pleased to know that the “new” section here is substantive—forty pages of elegies, a ballad, and notebook meditations. Also generous are the inclusions from Hass’ five prior books, including the seminal Praise and his last collection, the critically lauded Time and Materials. One of Hass’ best known poems appears in the former book, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” with its distinctive mix of discursiveness and poststructuralism (“The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea”) and love-making and bread and a clown-faced woodpecker and an assertion that, while paradoxical, still outlasted high theory: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.”

…

Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/foster032510.html

The Apple Trees at Olema:
New and Selected Poems.
Robert Hass.
Hardback: Ecco, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“Texts and Context”
Michiko Kakutani in the NY TIMES on
The State of Reading Today

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

Read the full essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_03_18.html

Pay attention is the message of Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature  by Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosophy professor at Oregon State University and the director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word.

This collection of essays, reveries and meditations interweaves keen observations of the natural world with descriptions of wilderness travel, conversations, stories and philosophical musings.

“I had begun to write about happiness,” Moore shares on the first page, “but events overtook me.”

Friends and family died by drowning, disease and accident, and, as Moore admits, “my life became an experiment in sadness.”

She turned to the natural world for solace.

“The earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.”

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_03_18.html

WILD COMFORT: THE SOLACE OF NATURE.
Kathleen Dean Moore.
Paperback: Trumpeter, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

THE OTHER JOURNAL:
J. Kameron Carter on
“Haiti and The God Question.”

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=932

…

In a nutshell, my problem here is not with the God-and-suffering or the theodicy question as such. My problem is with the way the God-and-suffering question is usually posed and with the presumptions that come with it. As a starting point, I will address how the God-and-suffering question, or the God-and-evil question, is often posed and how it works in the public imagination.

Often, the way the God-and-suffering question is posed prevents us from asking other important social, cultural, and political questions. By concentrating on the God-and-suffering question, we overlook questions about how the painful effects of natural disaster, such as the earthquake in Haiti, have been made worse due to certain social, cultural, and political factors. And I don’t mean social and political factors simply within Haiti itself—this isn’t about blaming the Haitians. I mean to call attention to how Haiti has come to be positioned internationally among the community of nations over a quite long period of time.

…

Read the full essay:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=932

[ Our review of J. Kameron Carter's
RACE: A THEOLOGICAL ACCOUNT ]

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/asortoficon.html

Among the works of art that one finds in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland is Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. Painted in 1521, it remains a stark, almost shocking image to this day. The dead, nearly colorless Christ lies in profile with gangrenous wounds visible in his hands, feet, and side. With a tilted head and half-open eyes, his face is turned slightly away from the viewer. The dramatic effect of the painting is heightened by the fact that it is a life-size depiction, stretching across the wall the full length of Christ’s body, but with a height of no more than that of a coffin (200 cm x 30.5 cm). Moreover, the painting is encompassed by a tomb-like border with the traditional inscription that reads, in Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Holbein’s achievement is an austere representation of Holy Saturday, the day on which one cannot evade the fact that Christ died on Good Friday and before one can celebrate his resurrection on Easter morning.

This painting makes a memorable appearance in The Idiot, one of the major works by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the story, Prince Myshkin, an enigmatic Christ-like figure who becomes embroiled in the lives of those he meets upon his return to Russia, encounters a reproduction of the picture in a friend’s home. The painting makes a profound impression upon Myshkin, who goes so far as to suggest that it could destroy a believer’s faith.

According to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who analyzes the author’s life and work in his latest book, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, the painting functions as “a kind of anti-icon, a religious image which is a nonpresence or a presence of the negative.” As Williams explains, in the Orthodox tradition, icons confront the viewer with a direct gaze as worshippers seek to encounter the divine through the icon. Within Orthodox iconography, he states, the only figures ever represented in profile are demons and, sometimes, Judas Iscariot. Thus, it is unsurprising that Myshkin, whose own physical description is “plainly modeled on the traditional Orthodox iconography of the Savior,” would be so shaken by Holbein’s depiction of the lifeless Christ.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/asortoficon.html

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
(Making of the Christian Imagination)
Rowan Williams.
Hardback: Baylor University Press, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/books/10garner.html

The word taxidermy derives from two innocent Greek roots — taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin) — that when combined suggest something slightly sinister. Taxidermy was Norman Bates’s hobby in “Psycho.” Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, practiced it on his neighbor’s pets. In horror movies, taxidermy often crowds the walls, derangement made manifest.

As Melissa Milgrom writes in her oddball first book, “Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy,” many people still dismiss the field as “a creepy sideline of the ‘Deliverance’ set.” And taxidermy’s problems go deeper than public relations. Many museums, eager to snag the “iCarly” demographic, are ditching their taxidermy collections in favor of Imax movies and robotic beasties. A lot of dusty, moth-eaten stuffed animals have piled up in a lot of half-forgotten museum closets. Beware which door you open.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/books/10garner.html

STILL LIFE: Adventures in Taxidermy.
Melissa Milgrom.
Hardback: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Sustainablog Review of
Scott Sabin’s new book
Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.

http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

…

For the environmentalist who doesn’t ground his/her passion, advocacy, and work in faith, Tending to Eden is replete with stories of eco-effectiveness. Plant with Purpose serves rural communities in the developing world, and much of their work focuses on replenishing depleted resources that keep farmers from producing enough to feed their families and communities.

For Sabin and his organization, that often comes down to a focus on deforestation. Whether trees are cut by large, industrial-scale timber operations or by indigenous farmers clearing land for crops, or turning wood into charcoal, the results are the same: degraded soils and watersheds that make even subsistence farming nearly impossible. Various kinds of reforestation activities serve to provide food, expand economic opportunity, and allow local residents to take a longer view towards their own survival.

Read the full review:
http://blog.sustainablog.org/creation-care-scott-sabin-tending-to-eden/

Tending to Eden:
Environmental Stewardship for God’s People.
Scott Sabin.
Paperback: Judson Press, 2010.
Buy now:  [  Amaz0n ]

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

…
The jobs that Gabriel Thompson writes about in Working in the Shadows: A Year Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do make even the worst jobs I’ve held seem like a month at the country club. Donning workingman’s clothes, Thompson tackles jobs that, frankly, I wouldn’t even consider before reaching a significant level of desperation. In the course of picking lettuce in the fields of Yuma, Arizona, and hauling chicken parts around a processing facility in Russellville, Alabama, (among other occupations) Thompson explores this segment of American labor like a latter-day E. P. Thompson, relating their lives and working conditions with a minimum of editorial intrusion.

Gabriel Thompson’s agenda is neither one of the white man’s burden or migrant worker agitprop. Rather, he simply takes these jobs and reveals to the reader their backbreaking and often mentally stultifying requirements, at times performed in harsh (but not inhuman) environments. After weeks of picking lettuce, Thompson hasn’t gotten that much better at the job nor gotten past the pain that bending over repeatedly in the hot sun creates as much as he has “[forgotten] what it’s like to not be sore.” While working in the frigid poultry plant, he aspires to be promoted to the de-boning department, which, while more toilsome and monotonous, is less physically demanding than hauling around buckets full of chicken remains.
…
Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_27.html

Working in the Shadows:
A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.
Gabriel Thompson.
Hardback: The Nation Books, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Patricia Ward’s meticulously researched history uncovers a surprisingly extensive vein of Protestant (usually, evangelical Protestant) engagement with the mystical piety of late 17th-century French Roman Catholics. An early leader of that engagement was John Wesley, who attended to the French mystics carefully on the question of assurance and who later excerpted works of Madame Jeanne Guyon and François Fénelon for the Christian Library he prepared so his Methodist itinerants could read while they rode. In the 19th century, appreciative readers included the Presbyterian minister William E. Boardman, the moral philosopher Thomas Upham, and the pioneering holiness preacher Phoebe Palmer. In the 20th century, A. W. Tozer included several poems of Madame Guyon in his anthology, The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, and Moody Press was one of several evangelical publishers who kept her works in print.

…
Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/marknoll030210.html

Experimental Theology in America:
Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and Their Readers.
Patricia A. Ward.
Hardback: Baylor University Press, 2009
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

David Fitch Reflects on
Brian Mclaren’s New Book
A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY

http://ow.ly/1bJZB

It feels a bit ominous to read the blog reviews of Brian McLaren’s latest – A New Kind of Christianity. The book is raising quite a stink. No surprise eh? One gets the sense there is something different going on this time versus the last couple book releases of Brian’s: The Secret Message and Everything Must Change. One gets the impression we are at a pivot point, a moment that upsets the whole terrain of theological allegiances having to do with the post evangelical emerging church developments of the last ten-fifteen years. It’s like Brian is shaking up the foundations of post evangelical theology. I read the book on my flight home from the ecclesia network national gathering  last week and here are some initial observations.

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Read the full review:
http://ow.ly/1bJZB

A NEW KIND OF CHRISTIANITY.
Brian McLaren.
Hardback: HarperOne, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data — cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like pinballs in cyberspace.

The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s next target.

This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a veritable greenhouse of exposure.

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Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/books/23watchers.html

THE WATCHERS:
The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.
Shane Harris.
Hardback: The Penguin Press, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon ]