ERB, Vol 1 , #10

The Englewood Review of Books

Vol. 1, No. 10  -  7 March 2008

Diving for pearls in the endless stream of books (Eccles. 12:12B)

Chris Smith, editor

 

 

 

“Engagement

in a Time of Crisis”

 

A Review of  

The Hope Factor: 

Engaging the Church in the HIV/AIDS Crisis.

(Tetsunao Yamamori, David Dageforde, Tina Bruner, eds.)

By Laretta Benjamin.

 

It’s hard to know where to begin with a powerful little book such as this one; it is one of those brilliant examples of the wisdom that can be gained when God’s people come together to work toward a common purpose, sharing their insights, experiences and understanding.  The book’s title captures its theme well as its pages offer a much-needed message of exhortation and encouragement to those of us who number ourselves among the people of God. 

 HIV/AIDS has become of the great crises of our day.  In 2004, when the book was published, there were over 40,000,000 infected worldwide and 25 million had already died.  The continent of Africa has been one of the hardest hit with almost an entire generation being wiped out in some areas.  This book is full of statistics but as one of its writers explains: “The responsible person engaged in the fight against HIV should handle statistics with care because statistics represent people.” Another says “Numbers alone do not tell the story.  HIV/AIDS is devastating the very fabric of the societies where its victims live… for every person who dies, there are usually six to ten family members directly affected by the loss of income and leadership, drained resources, and less available labor.”  The book does a great job putting faces on the numbers.  What role has the church played to this point?  How is God calling His people to engage?  Is the church really the “hope factor” in the midst of it all?  These are all questions the contributors to this book attempt to answer and, in my estimation, they do it exceptionally well.  The Hope Factor is a collection of essays written by those on the frontlines of the battle against HIV/AIDS.  Their training, experiences and fields of work are many and varied, and they all bring differing perspectives to the issue while sharing a similar passion.  Their heart-felt passion is quite obvious to the reader. 

 The church has come far in its response to HIV/AIDS.  From an attitude of judgment and condemnation to not responding at all, this book does an incredible job of helping to bring it all into perspective.  One contributor writes, “We must recognize that just as failure is collective, so are the answers.  Until we all admit our failure to act, our failure to be the family God designed us to be, we cannot work together to address the consequence.”  Stories of broken lives, broken families, and broken communities are shared with us.  But, so are stories of restoration, redemption, self-sacrifice, and servanthood.  Case studies, country studies, medical treatments, misconceptions about the disease… all these topics and many more are touched upon in this deeply informative book.  The church truly is the hope factor in the HIV/AIDS crisis – as well as every other crisis on this earth.  And God surely is calling His people to engage…to be the church in the midst of this modern-day crisis.  

The Hope Factor: 

Engaging the Church in the HIV/AIDS Crisis.

           Tetsunao Yamamori, David Dageforde, Tina Bruner, eds.

Paperback.  Authentic Media.  2004. 

              Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $15 ]      [ Amazon.com ]

 

 

[ A note on buying books: We offer you the opportunity to buy the books listed here, either directly from our little independent bookstore (Doulos Christou Books), or through amazon.com.  The prices listed for our bookstore do not include shipping or Indiana sales tax.  Local folks can arrange to pick up their books from either our Lockerbie or Englewood stores.  If you want to buy a book and are having trouble with the links in this email, drop us an email – douloschristou@gmail.com – and we’ll see that you get the book(s) you want. ]

 

 

 

Used Book Finds

 

The bread-n-butter of our bookstore business is the sale of used books, and we do a fair amount of scouting around for used books each week.  In this section we will feature some of the interesting books that we have found in the past week.  Generally, we will only have a single copy of these books, so if you want one (or more) of them, you’ll need to respond quickly.

 

 

100 Garden Tips and Timesavers.

A Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guide.

              Trade Paperback.   2005.

            Very Good Condition.  Clean Pages. Minimal wear.

            Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $5 ]

 

 

Endangered: Your Child in a Hostile World.

Johann Christoph Arnold. Trade Paperback.

              Plough Books.  2000.  Good. X-library copy.

              Clean pages / Minimal wear.

            Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $4 ]

 

 

Family Farming: A New Economic Vision.

              Marty Strange.

Trade Paperback.  1988. Very Good/Good.

              Almost completely clean pages / Minimal wear.

            Buy now from:  [ Doulos Christou Books $6 ]

 

 

 

Reviewed Elsewhere

 

“Jerome, in the Library, with a Pen”

Brad Gregory reviews The Monk and the Book.

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/002/6.12.html

“In the last generation, intellectual history has become incarnate. Overlapping histories of the book, of reading practices, and of the practice of scholarship itself have transformed the history of ideas. Approaches initiated by historians studying the influence of moveable type and the circulation of printed books in early modern Europe have been adapted and extended backward to the ancient world and forward to our own age of wireless laptops. To be sure, leading intellectual historians have long recognized the importance of contextualizing texts, reconstructing the circumstances in which thinkers wrote so as to illuminate their ideas. But they rarely paid much attention to the material culture of books and manuscripts, the physical layout of classrooms or salons, the costs and connotations of education, or the ways in which scholars garnered financial support and were able, in concrete terms, to disseminate their ideas. That intellectuals of every time and place are flesh-and-blood human beings apparently seemed a fact too banal to be significant. It turns out that it’s not. For as the societies, institutions, and technological realities within which intellectuals work have varied enormously in the West from the ancient Mediterranean world through the Middle Ages to the present, so have their constraints, opportunities, and experiences diverged. In The Monk and the Book, Megan Hale Williams applies this sort of deeply contextualized intellectual history to Jerome (c.347-419), the formidably learned late antique scholar and irascible ascetic behind the Vulgate Bible, the text that would stand at the center of Christian civilization for more than a millennium.

Two principal objectives run throughout Williams’ book. First, she seeks to reconstruct the social circumstances and material realities within which Jerome worked as a biblical scholar, from his education in Rome during the 360s until his death at the Bethlehem monastery in 419. Williams integrates a wide range of scholarship on late antique education, the culture of manuscript production and dissemination, scholarly patronage, and the nature of ancient libraries in order to explore the distinctive character of Jerome’s own scholarly resources and methods. Jerome’s élite, classical education—like the schooling of Augustine and other learned male Christian contemporaries—stressed the mastery of rhetoric and composition, modeled on thorough familiarity with a canon of traditional Latin authors. The library at the Bethlehem monastery, where after leaving Rome Jerome lived and worked as a biblical translator and commentator beginning in late 385, was extensive, almost certainly containing more than a thousand substantial volumes. Because all such books were copied by hand—primarily as papyrus codices, a particularly late antique book form—they were expensive. As an exegete, Jerome worked especially from Greek and Hebrew sources at his disposal, sometimes translating and incorporating without attribution, sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes thoroughly reworking materials from multiple authors. Like other learned writers in late antiquity, he often composed by dictation and used assistants who read aloud to him; over several decades, he also employed Jewish teachers to aid him with philological and contextual issues in the Hebrew texts to which he devoted so much scholarly energy. Williams’ painstaking reconstructions enable us to get behind the famous Renaissance portraits of the biblical translator anachronistically ensconced in an idealized, late medieval monastic cell.

Williams’ second principal concern is to interpret Jerome’s biblical scholarship in the context of his identity as both late antique érudit and ascetic Christian monk: ‘The tension between the classical literary culture of the imperial elite, and the ascetic Christian focus on the Bible that emerged in its shadow, shaped everything Jerome did, thought, and wrote.’  …”

   Read the full review:
               http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/002/6.12.html

Megan Hale Williams. The Monk and the Book:

        Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. 

        Hardcover.  University of Chicago Press.  2006.

        Buy now from:     [ Amazon.com ]

 

 

The New York Times reviews

Song Yet Sung, a new novel by James McBride.

            http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Bell-t.html

“SONG YET SUNG is the second novel by James McBride, best known until now for THE COLOR OF WATER, his memoir of growing up as the black son of a white mother. Defining the son of a white mother as 100 percent black is a special device of American racism that has defied logic for more than 200 years. His unusual position may well give McBride an advantage in writing this antebellum story of fugitive slaves. Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride’s portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing.

 

SONG YET SUNG isn’t flawless. There are moments, though fortunately not many, when McBride’s expositions of the Underground Railroad’s communication code look as if he’s grappling with a Rubik’s Cube. Some elements in the generally masterly plot have to be battered into place at the end — when it seems that McBride, steering clear of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s viscous sentimentality, overcorrects by applying more tough-minded restraint than is strictly necessary. But these defects are too small and peripheral to seriously detract from the pleasure or value of this book.

 

The story takes place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — Harriet Tubman’s territory. Tubman herself never makes it into the novel, though she is present in the characters’ minds as the “Moses” who leads escaping slaves to the promised land of freedom. McBride’s heroine, Liz Spocott, has some things in common with Tubman: both women become visionaries after being bashed in the head with a chunk of iron in the course of somebody else’s quarrel.  …”

Read the full review: 
          http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Bell-t.html

James McBride. Song Yet Sung.
        Hardcover.  Riverhead Books.  2008.
        Buy now from:    [ Doulos Christou Books $21 ]       [ Amazon.com ]

 

Becky Garrison Reviews Carrie Newcomer’s new cd:
           The Geography of Light.

           http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/03/carrie-newcomers-songs-for-cha.html

“On Jan. 22, 2008, I headed down to Joe’s Pub in New York City to celebrate the launch of Quaker singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer’s CD The Geography of Light. Newcomer’s lyrics, grounded in her faith formed by a Midwestern sensibility, reminded me of The Power of Song, a documentary that I saw at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. When I reflected on that film on the God’s Politics blog, I asked if, in today’s cynical world, we could enact positive social change through artistic self-expression – or if this notion is simply a relic of a bygone era.

While Newcomer’s lyrics echo songs penned by folk legends such as Seeger, she explores the themes of justice, forgiveness, and redemption from a 21^st century lens. Instead of hitting one over the head with a social justice jackhammer, Newcomer gently carries the listener on a hopeful journey where the spiritual can often be found unexpectedly in the seemingly mundane.

For example, in ‘Geodes,’ Newcomer uses these mysterious brown Indiana rock formations to remind us how: ‘All these things that we call familiar are just miracles clothed in the commonplace. You’ll see it if you try in the next stranger’s eyes. God walks around in muddy boots, sometimes rags and that’s the truth, you can’t always tell, but sometimes you just know.’ …”

Read the full review:
    http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/03/carrie-newcomers-songs-for-cha.html

Carrie Newcomer. The Geography of Light.
        Buy now from:    [ Amazon.com ]