Books in August (2023)
Finally, a sensible amount
Last month I told you that I was trying to read less books, undermined by the absurd number that I finished in July. But here we are!
(For those who like such things, there is now an index post for all books and book-reviews. It’s here, and gets updated monthly)
We Go On, John Onwuchekwa. (A rambling review of sorts)
The Lord’s Supper, Jonathan Black. (Review)
Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation, Robert Chao Romero & Jeff M. Liou.
I really enjoyed this book. It intelligently engages actual CRT, criticising it where it conflicts with and fails Christianity, appreciating and appropriating its insights where they are valuable. It utilises CRT within a framework of Christianity, rather than vice versa. I’ve put a long quote from this book at the end of this post.
The Coming of the Holy Spirit, Philip D. Jensen. (Review)
Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, Russell Moore. (Review)
King: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jonathan Eig. (Review)
Australians, as a whole, do not receive any formal schooling in US History. I’d certainly never read a full biography of King, but I thought I ought to. This is a tremendous work, vivid, full of research. It has its own angles and pre-occupations, but it brought MLK to life for me. It helps put all the big moments (Montgomery, Birmingham, Washington DC, Selma, Memphis) into a context of a life and a person.
Around the web:
Here are some other things/people I’ve been reading.
I enjoyed this reflection from Brad East on ‘tiers of Christian/theological publishing’. It made me think a bit about the tiers of books I read and review. Really I want to be reading and recommending tier 2, and reading and reviewing tier 3. I can read a tier 2 book in a few days, given the time; I can read and digest a tier 3 book in a couple of weeks. I read some tier 4 work, but it rarely turns up here and it’s not really the kind of thing I’m likely to bring to bear on a space like this. It much more often connects to the bits of scholarly work I’m still engaged in.
Scot McKnight’s blog has lots of things I don’t tremendously care for, but this sermon by Amanda Holm Rosengren put into words something that for a while now I’ve thought about in the Joseph narrative, something not often highlighted. That is, the way that Joseph deliberately subjects his brothers to tests, which ironically and dramatically relive his own betrayal. Will his brothers sacrifice Benjamin into slavery to save their own skins? Have they changed from the people who sold him into slavery 22 years ago?
(The other aspect of the Joseph narrative that I don’t think gets a lot of airtime, is that God doesn’t simply work through Joseph’s suffering for Joseph’s good, but he works through the sin of the brothers to save them. That is, God works through even the evil that we ourselves do, for our own good. Gen 50:20 points out as much, that it’s not just about Joseph’s personal triumph, it’s the “saving of many lives”)
Reactionary Colour-Blindness
Color blindness is harmful not only because it deprives us of the diverse leadership needed to successfully navigate our current racial moment but also because it denies, and thereby perpetuates, racialized structures of inequality in the United States. CRT scholar Ian Haney López refers to this as “reactionary” color blindness. … [R]eactionary color blindness opposes proactive measures aimed at remedying the effects of past racial injustice and denies the present existence of structural or systemic racism. It goes further, however, by creating a false moral equivalence between explicitly racist laws and policies of the Jim Crow era and contemporary laws and policies aimed at fostering greater opportunity for ethnic minorities. According to Haney López, such reactionary color blindness misappropriates the language of the civil rights movement in order to maintain the racial status quo and preserve the privileged socioeconomic and political privilege of whites in the United States: “[Color blindness] self-righteously wraps itself up in the raiment of the civil rights movement . . . and defines discrimination strictly in terms of explicit references to race. . . . Thus, it is ‘racism’ when society uses affirmative race conscious measures to respond to gross inequalities, but there is no racial harm no matter how strongly disparities in health care, education, residential segregation, or incarceration correlate to race, so long as no one has uttered a racial word.” The logic, or illogic, of reactionary color blindness goes something like this: “We should no longer consider color or ethnic heritage as a factor in employment, educational admissions, or government contracts, because we are all the same. Martin Luther King Jr. had it right—racial segregation and discrimination were wrong (even though most Christians opposed him at the time). Thankfully, racism is a thing of the past and no longer exists on a structural or systemic level in our churches, seminaries, colleges, public education system, health care system, or elsewhere. Where it does exist, it’s usually against whites as reverse discrimination. Because structural racism does not exist, laws and policies designed to foster equal opportunities for ethnic minorities are unnecessary and constitute ‘preferential treatment.’ Two wrongs don’t make a right, and laws designed to help minorities are just as bad as the laws that condoned slavery, segregation, and discrimination. I’m not racist, but I think that Hispanics and blacks need to stop making excuses, living off government welfare, and being so lazy.”1
Romero, Robert Chao; Liou, Jeff M.. Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation (pp. 133-135). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.