Reading a book by yourself is just different from reading it in a group. I read this a few years ago and I had a generally positive impression but it was a point when I was too busy and I didn’t previously write about it. This time, when reading it with a group I was much less positive about the book in part because the group helps to identify weaknesses that I wasn’t paying attention to in my first reading.

The second part of being less happy with this book on a second reading is that I read it at the same time as I was reading The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements by Jeremy Daniel Sims. They were not exactly the same thematically, but they had a lot of overlapping content. Sacred Fire is the middle book of a loose trilogy of books about spiritual formation. They do not need to be read as a trilogy, but they are about spiritual formation at three points in life. Sacred Fire is about spiritual formation in the middle years of life. Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years came out in 2026 and is about spiritual formation in later life and The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality is about early spiritual formation.

Rolheiser is a Catholic priest, and as a protestant there are going to be places where I disagree. But I think that it is helpful to read across traditions in part to help you understand your own tradition in contrast. The group I read this with is mostly Catholics with a handful of Episcopalians. My disagreements do have some to do with his Catholic theology. In many cases I agree with the conclusions that he reaches, but not how he got there. One of the clearest examples of that is in his framing of the third season of life he talks about how we need to learn to “give away our death” and then uses Jesus’ death as the example that we should follow. I don’t disagree with what he means about giving away our death, but I do not think that we should be following after Christ’s death as an example. Jesus’ death was a result of sin not something we should strive to emulate. I think he could have gotten to the same place with Phil 2 as his model and avoided the problem of making Jesus’ death something to emulate.

I think part of the problem is that he was framing this book as a type of apologetics, “I want a book on apologetics, but with a different bent,” but that is a framing problem for a book about spiritual formation. Apologetics has become a type of argument and spiritual formation is primarily about helping people to see a new perspective on life. Given his age and upbringing, it is not surprising that he defaults to a lot of stereotypical stories and illustrations, but it does become distracting how stereotypical that the book often is.

Another problem with the method of the book is that he often was trying to make nuanced points, but he did it by using two words that we tend to use as synonyms and then pitting them against one another. One example is that he suggested that we should be in “awe” but that we should not be “amazed” because awe was a type of wonder and amazement was a type of shock. I can understand the distinction he was trying to make, but the method was unhelpful.

Again, I ended up agreeing with a lot of conclusions, but so much of the book was framed as a type of command or argument that as a reader I ended up arguing with how he got there instead of seeing his point as an alternative to give me a broader perspective of the world. As I said to the group, The Way of The Spirit framed spiritual formation as an invitation that we are invited to participate in as a gift or a joy to be embraced. But Sacred Fire often felt like a command. One woman described it as like listening to her Uncle Joe that always was complaining about how everyone did everything. In another discussion I had with a Lutheran pastor I know, I described the book and he said it sounded like the Lutheran distinction between law and grace. I would not have described it that way myself, but I think it is a good distinction.

Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity by Ronald Rolheiser Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I do not remember when I first ran across Charlie Dates. I do not think I have ever met him, but I do know several people who know him. I know that I was well aware of him before 2018 because he was one of the reasons that I watched the MLK50 event that he describes in the book. So I think I have followed him from afar for at least 10 years. Charlie Dates is now the pastor of two Chicago churches, Progressive Baptist on the west side of Chicago and Salem Baptist on the south side of Chicago. I knew Rev Meeks who was the founder of Salem Baptist and Dates’ mentor because he was part of a group I worked with in the early 2000s. And I think it was in part because of Meeks that I paid attention to Dates initially.

I want to say that I both enjoyed What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness and I wanted a bit more from it. If you have followed my reading, you know that the Black Church is a special interest of mine and I have read widely about it. I think I would have more unqualified support if I had not read so widely. While I spent about 15 years living in Chicago, I have lived just outside of Atlanta for 20 years now. I picked up Raphael Warnock’s The Divided Mind of the Black Church because he is my Sentator.

I want to suggest The Divided Mind of the Black Church to people who read What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness. They are writing from different perspectives, but they have a complimentary message. Warnock is writing mostly from the perspective that the Black Church has always had a tension between the holiness tradition and the justice tradition, but he is advocating for a stronger connection to the justice tradition as a requirement for “black theology.” I have complaints about Warnock’s position for two main reasons. First, he has a narrow definition of Black Theology that only sees it as Liberation Theology since James Cone and that seems too restrictive. But second, his conclusion is that justice includes LBGTQ inclusion and I know that this is part of what Dates is opposing in this book.

Even as the writing styles and methods are different between Warnock and Dates’ books I do think that it is helpful to read them together. Warnock is primarily writing a historical theology book that traces the tension between holiness orientations and justice orientation in the Black Church, while Dates is primarily trying to make a biblical/pragmatic argument that the Black Church needs to maintain both parts of its message. Dates talks about the problems of not paying attention to either righteousness or justice as being incomplete. While Warnock really assumes that same idea and is tracing the history of how and why one or the other side hasn’t been appropriately emphasized.

I also think both have different intended audiences. Warnock is primarily writing to the Black Church. While I think Dates is writing to both Black and White readers, but he assumes that his readers are mostly theologically conservative. I think one of the problems of What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness is that it doesn’t engage with Warnock or other justice-oriented Christian perspectives well. I think Dates makes the case well that a justice movement without the Church, or at least some type of religious/ethical component has a hole in its mission. I am also reading Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited with a book group right now and it clearly was an influence on the Civil Rights movement’s approach that rooted protest in theological commitments. Dates is writing from his perspective of the justice movement of the past two decades being one that has not been rooted in the Black Church tradition and both pointing out the weaknesses of that as well as using that as a pragmatic argument for why the Black Church needs to emphasize justice more clearly and publicly.

While I think that Warnock and Dates agree on the vast majority of their positions, but I think that they have blindspots. Dates suggests that the modern justice movement does not want righteousness instead of grappling with different understandings of righteousness. And Warnock suggests that to be a part of the Black Church tradition requires LGBTQ inclusion and suggests that the only reasons to reject that is a type of bigotry. I don’t think either of those two makes sense of the other’s position because both of those positions have theological convictions behind them which are not fully grappled with.

I do think that part of this is Esau McCaulley’s shorthand of the three approaches to the Black Church tradition. Esau McCaulley wrote the intro to Dates’ book and used to attend Dates’ church before starting his own. McCaulley’s three approaches are revolutionary/nationalistic, reformist/transformist, and conformist. I think Warnock leans toward the revolutionary and Dates leans toward the reformist/transformist and both tend to reject the conformist approaches. But no one, and certainly not Dates nor Warnock, fully fit inside a single category.

I think that What Hath Justice To Do With Righteousness is a helpful book in this conversation about what the role of the Black Church is today. I think that it adds to the nuance of justice-oriented, theologically conservative Black Church pastors who are not conformist in orientation. (Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States by Walter R. Strickland is another in this vein.) I do think it has some weaknesses, primarily not addressing the progressive black church as having different understanding of righteousness instead of asserting that it is not interested in righteousness. But I will keep reading and listening to Charlie Dates because he is talking about something real that needs to be worked on.

What Hath Justice to Do with Righteousness?: Reclaiming the Intersection of Protest and Prayer by Charlie E. Dates Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

Writing about spiritual formation is hard for many reasons. Part of the difficulty is that it hard to write about something well that you have not experienced, and so a good writer on spiritual formation needs to be someone who has worked to develop their own spiritual life. But that introduces another problem with spiritual writing. Many spiritual writers turn their own experience into instructions and frame “the right way” to grow spiritually as an imitation of their own experience instead of one possible path. I think one of the biggest strengths of The Way of The Spirit is that Jeremy Sims is careful to not prescribe methods but rather open up opportunities. This is about the framing but it is an important part of good spiritual formation writing. A book that commands will naturally create a situation where the reader is arguing with the author about the details of the commands. Sims does a good job of framing the book as opening up the ideas of spiritual formation as an invitation.

As someone who has read a lot about spiritual formation, I want to say, in the best way possible, that there is little that is new here. The history of Christianity is all about seeking after God. It is not that we need new methods or paths to God. What we do need are new metaphors and emphases that address the particular needs of our current culture.

This quote from early in the book I think is exactly why The Way of The Spirit is a helpful book for spiritual formation today:

“We live in an age where attention has become our most endangered resource. Every sound, every scroll, every urgency competes for it. But what if the real threat to our spiritual lives isn’t disbelief, but distraction? What if the Spirit has not grown silent, but we have grown unable to hear? I’ve come to see that much of the Christian life is not about gaining more faith but giving better attention.” (p10)

Attention is particularly in short supply, but as is emphasized regularly, spiritual formation cannot happen if we do not pay attention to both the way that God is at work in and around us, but also that we need to have space for that awareness to seep into our souls.

There is always a tension in spiritual writing about the work we do to seek after God and the gift that we receive from God.

“…here’s the tension: Depth cannot be willed. The moment we try to force it, we move in the opposite direction. Depth resists control. It emerges not from grasping but from releasing. The more we strive for it, the more it slips through our fingers. Only a willingness to relinquish control can put us in a posture to receive what cannot be taken. So much of my life has been shaped by willpower. It’s effective, to a point. It helps me complete a task I don’t want to do, or push through a meeting when I’m tired, or drag myself out of bed on the kind of morning when everything feels heavier than it should. But Simone Weil is right: When it comes to the deeper work, the spiritual work, willpower falls short.” (p17)

In an era where self help is pervasive and we are all expected to do everything we can to maximize our efficiency and productively, Sims keeps reminding the reader that spiritual formation is not a listicle of “one little trick that will solve everything”.  Instead, “This is not a new hack. This is a new way of seeing.” (p16)

The Way of the Spirit is in three main sections. The first section primarily focuses on attention and naming. We need to pay attention to the ways that God is already at work around us. And we need to find metaphors and names of how God works, so that we can recognize what we are seeing.

“Language simply gives us the vocabulary to name it. When we name it, we begin to recognize it. When we recognize it, we’re no longer just observers. We become participants.” (p29)

and then soon after:

“As L’Engle writes, “We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.” That includes theological thinking, yes, but also spiritual reflection. More words don’t mean better performance. They mean greater vision. More precise noticing. Clearer participation. We don’t name to control. We name to recognize, to receive, to remember. And when we do, the ordinary world opens up like a field of wildflowers waiting to be seen.” (p31)

The second section is the largest part of the book. Sims takes us through seven waypoints where Sims introduces Christian mystics who model ways of seeking God. We all will not identify with all seven because each of us are constructed in different ways and we have different cultures and backgrounds. But these are map points that are common in the pathway of Christian spiritual formation. The seven Christians that Sims introduces us to are familiar. Many who will pick up a book on spiritual formation will have at least passing familiarity with them. The metaphors and images that Sims uses to help the reader see these figures and their importance as one possible way toward seeing God is what makes them new again. I could spend another 1000 words discussing what I found helpful in the second part of the book, but that is largely about what I found helpful. I will skip that and move onto the third section.

The third section goes back and revisits the naming and attention of the first section of the book. After spending time with those seven waypoints, Sims draws us back to the naming and recognition of God’s work around us and points out that this is not an individual process but a communal one. We will as individuals, see God at work. But it is the work of community to see what God is doing within the community as a whole. It is not just us as an individual that God is calling to be in relationship but the church communal.

But it is that last chapter that really sealed the brilliance of the book for me.

“FOLLOWING THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT has always been about attentiveness to the Spirit’s work. It is not about another list of spiritual tasks, a clever framework to master, or a ladder to climb. If we’re not careful, even the most sacred invitations can become another system to optimize, another formational plan to manage. Yet attention was never meant to be a strategy. It’s meant to be a way of life that draws us into communion with Jesus.” (p172)

and then

“The same danger exists with everything in this book. The waypoints are not meant to be mastered. They are meant to name and then invite. They are not checkpoints of accomplishment but invitations to recognize and join the Spirit’s ongoing work. They are meant to be companions on the journey, not trophies of spiritual achievement.” (p172)

and finally

“There will always be pressure to speed up what cannot be rushed—falling in love, raising a family, and most importantly, shaping the soul. You can microwave dinner, but you cannot microwave transformation. The Spirit does not move at the pace of our tools. The speed of the soul is slow. Formation is not knowledge acquisition. It’s not spiritual productivity. It’s not how much you’ve read or what you’ve accomplished in the name of God. It is slow trust built over years of staying with the work of God through every friction, silence, disappointment, and shift.” (p174)

I think that as I have walked with people as a spiritual director and paid attention to my own spiritual formation as an individual, the key insights are that the work is slow. But slow consistent work is how change happens. Every once in a while, it seems like someone does have a miraculous interaction with God and seems to change overnight. But if that every does really happen, it is rare. We change not because someone tells us to change, but because something shifts inside of us. “There is no shortcut for formation.”

I alternated back and forth between audio and ebook. The audiobook was well done and clear. But I found myself moving back to the print particularly because I wanted to highlight and take notes. So there was nothing wrong with the audio, but I think this is a book that many will prefer in print because you will want to mull over the images or re-read the phrasing.

I am a big fan of the Inspector Gamache series, but I have been pretty critical of the recent books being more political thriller than mystery. Miss Wolcott’s Ghost is a return to the mystery genre and I think it is one of the better books of the last 10 volumes. Most of the parts of what makes the series one that I love, are here. This is a book that revolves around the humanity of the characters. Gamache and his team are fallible, but good at their jobs. They have relationships with the others that cause them to care for one another, while also having strengths and weaknesses. And the characters of Three Pines are present in the story, even if it can be a bit thrown-in at times.

Gamache is the main character here. He is woken up in the middle of the night with a call that tells him about a dead body. There are two storytelling methods I didn’t love here, but are present throughout the book. The first is the way that a character that we do not know is introduced through flashbacks into their relationship with Gamache. I spent some time looking to see if I was supposed to know the character from prior books because it felt like it was presented as someone I should already know. And there is a bit of unreliable narrator to the flashbacks, which I don’t mind, but I there needed to be some indication that this was a new character in the series.

The second storytelling method that I didn’t love, is the large number of dream sequences. Many of the characters had nightmares or dreams, and while that does a good job indicating trauma, I don’t love it as a method of creating tension.

What I did like is that Louise Penny created enough misdirection and leads to keep the book interesting without doing a hard curve at the last minute. I think we were supposed to know the killer fairly early on, but we were not hit over the head with the solution. The presentation of, “we think we know who did it, but not how and why” is an important part of a police procedural. And other books in the series have presented Gamache and others on a false trail so that didn’t need to be here.

This is not the first time that Penny has used real historical details to build a mystery around. She did a good introducing fictionalized history and at the same time not making it too unrealistic. Gamache is best when he gets to interact with the people around him, while thinking deep thoughts. And there are good ethics and complex storylines to keep me involved.

I do think that Isabelle was a bit under-utilized in this book and I don’t think that the addiction aspects of Jean-Guy’s character are very well written, but I still think this was the best Gamache book recently.

Miss Wolcott’s Ghost by Louise Penny (Inspector Gamache #19) Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I really do not like giving away spoilers in the middle of a series. When a book series is out and popular, it is pretty much inevitable that to discuss them, is to give spoilers away to someone.

I have generally enjoyed this series. And I have enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. If I understand correctly, Matt Dinniman self published the first book in Sept 2020 and then the audiobook, narrated by Jeff Hays, was released about 18 months later. But somehow the 2nd to the 5th books were all released initially in print/ebook from January 2021 until February 2022. The publication pace slowed down, the 6th book released in June 2023. the 7th in Nov 2024, and the 8th in May 2026. Ace picked up the publication rights (but Dinniman kept the ebook rights) in 2024.

As a self published series, I think these are really good. But I also think the audiobook production and narration quality is part of what has made these so popular. The audiobooks are among the best I have heard.

For a fairly simple main storyline, the books have developed well. But by the time I hit the middle of book five I was getting a bit bored. This is a series where the whole premise is that the earth was captured and mostly destroyed and almost all of those who survived the initial destruction have been force to pay in a game to their death. This isn’t quite Hunger Games where the last human alive wins, but rather the humans have to complete against fantasy monsters or aliens in a world filled with Non Playable Characters (NPCs) that also get killed at a pretty high rate.

The basic story proceeds with a different level at roughly one per book. Each level is different. The goals get changed. An AI, who is a bit crazy and who keeps making sexual harassing comments to Carl, is in control of the game. Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat (who gets transformed into human level intelligence almost immediately into the first book) are generally likable characters. They are good people at heart even if they know they are in a bad situations and they end up killing people all around them, while trying to protect actual humans.

I won’t write much about the books or the plot. The first and second book feel like they are really a single story that was split into two parts. The third has a fairly changed level and a lot of nuance is introduced to allow for a more complicated story being told. The fourth is the real start of Carl fighting back against the game. The fifth again is about Carl working to figure out the boundaries of what he can do, while still not dying or being set up by the AI for death.

I am not a violence guy. These books are violent and characters are constantly dying. There is a lot of humor, but it is uneven and I think there are stretches where the fighting and the violence go on too long without enough humor. I appreciate that Dinniman is pushing back against modern culture, while telling a pretty good story. But he really could use an editor. The first book was 464 pages. Then 384 pages, then 544, 608 and 720 pages. Books 7 and 8 are 832 and 724 pages. At least a quarter of each book could be cut I think.

As much as I have enjoyed them I think I likely will put them down for a while and read/listen to something else for a while before returning to read them again.

My 11 year old is a big video game player. If these were not so adult in terms of the violence and humor, I think he would love them. But I think they are a bit too mature for him even if topically, they are right up his alley.

I have been a part of a book group that has met on and off, with slightly different membership since 2019. The group had read about 4-5 books a year over the last 6 to 7 years. Over the past year it has mostly been about racial history. We read James by Percival Everett (fictional retelling of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective). We read a book about James Baldwin and then The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. WEB Du Bois came up a number of times as we read about Baldwin, and so our last book was The Souls of Black Folk. I was interested in rereading this in part because I recently read The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary J. Dorrien and as we started Souls of Black Folk I read the first half of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race, which brought me up to a few years past when Du Bois published this.

I previously listened to an audiobook of this Souls of Black Folk, so I picked up the Norton Annotated edition for background. I read three different introductions to the book to get some other perspectives, but this introduction by Jesse McCarthy was a solid introduction. Du Bois’ biography and the context of the world he was writing in really do help illuminate this book. I have a hard time recommending David Levering Lewis’ two-volume biography because few people will want to read nearly 2000 pages and even the single-volume consolidated biography by Lewis is over 900 pages. (Although Lewis is a good writer and it is worth reading, most people just won’t want to read that much.)

Du Bois was born just a few years after the end of the Civil War and became one of the most educated men in the US. He was an academic who revolutionized sociology, ethnography and data presentation. (There is an interesting book about how his work at the world’s fair changed data presentation.) He moved from just being an academic to helping to found the Niagria movement which eventually grew into the NAACP and he moved from writing with academic distance to becoming an advocate as the editor of The Crisis (the publication of the NAACP). Eventually Du Bois became frustrated with the US and gave up his citizenship and moved to Africa in his 90s and died the day of the 1963 March on Washington. His death was announced during the speeches that day.

Most of the essays were either edited versions of his research articles that were published in various journals or more popular-level articles published in places like the Atlantic. The mix of writing styes really is an interesting aspect of the book. There is a short story, a personal essay talking about his own experience as a teacher in regard to the importance of education, or a reflection about one of his mentors or a very personal essay about about the death of his son as a toddler, in part because of a lack of medical care. In the years around when most of these essays were written, he was teaching at Atlanta University and doing research of racism, economics and sociology of the Black Belt areas of the South.

As with any essay collection there are stronger and weaker chapters. I thought the ending chapter on the spirituals was a very weak chapter. (James Cone or Howard Thurman’s books on the spirituals are better.) But I continue to be interested in how much my book club has enjoyed reading original documents like this and The Fire Next Time. We have had great discussions. It can sometimes get to be too much about current events as we read historic events. But there is always a mix of shock about how much things are different and how much things are similar.

I also want to note again that the annotated version was helpful here. I am pretty well read in US racial history. I know many of the referenced characters. I knew quite a bit about the chapters that were opposing Booker T Washington (which is what a lot of people know about this book without having read it.) But the annotations are helpful to draw attention to references other poetry or Biblical allusions or events of the time that I didn’t know about. There is always going to be questions about what did or did not have an annotation. I personally do not need annotations about the things that I already know about. But there are other things that I wanted an annotation for and I had to look it up on my own. Generally, I think the annotations were well done, even if I always want more of them.

From here we are going on to the next book in a couple weeks. If anyone want to join, we meet at 8 PM Eastern on zoom. Just message me to get a link if you are interested. The next book will be Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (The Norton Library Annotated Edition) Paperback, Kindle Edition

I read Jesus and John Wayne not long after it first came out. And then I read it again with a book club in 2023. The history in Jesus and John Wayne and now in Live Laugh Love is largely familiar to me. I have read the books and known about the people and followed the news and even met a couple of the people who are mentioned.

I think one of the problems that Mark Noll identified in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and that which I have heard Pete Enns and many other Christian academics expand on, is the problem of the role of intellectualism within Evangelicalism. To tell the story of evangelicalism from a slightly different tack from Du Mez, Neo-evangelicalism’s founders were trying to break away from the fundamentalism’s antagonism toward not only culture, but the tools of the culture. And fundamentalism fought back against evangelicalism with the charge that it was trying to make culture like it and build clout. But over time, those who were fundamentalist in orientation against the broader culture, adopted the evangelical label and many of those who would have been apart of the original neo-evangelical orientation either were pushed out, or left in disgust.

I have seen a number of people dismiss Du Mez broadly over the past week or so with some version of “she is just a marxist.” Early in the book she says, “Ultimately, this book is about power–about women’s power to define their own lives, men’s power over women, and the power women wield over one another. It is about discipleship and devotion, authority and submission, manipulation, cruelty, and control.” (I read a prerelease version provided by Netgalley for purposes of review so I will not give a page number to the quote because my version is likely not paginated as the released version.)

That quote rightly says that she is studying how power impact Christianity. That is not to say that the only thing in the book is power, but to pretend that post-marxian scholars cannot look at power without being “marxist” is like saying that post-Adam Smith economists cannot look at the role of wealth without being capitalists or that biologists can’t look at biological change without being darwinists. Once the a tool has been released into the world, that tool exists and to not use it because of a fear of a label is exactly the type of anti-intellectualism that Noll was rightly concerned about in evangelicalism.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez knows how to write a narrative. She weaves together historical threads that tell a compelling story. If every historian was as good of a writer as Du Mez, I think a lot more people would read more history. But what I think is important to say here for the non-historian (I am not a historian by training, but I have read a fair about about historiography) is that being a historian is not simply telling a story that has connection to historical facts. A historian is researching connections and through-lines and how things are connected. The historian is not just forming a narrative, but trying to explore the connections that already exists and reveal them to the reader. Where historians will disagree is the weight given to various connections or if there are other connection that have more explanatory power, etc.

One of the clearest examples of the connections that already exist, but need pointing out, is that Hannah Whitall Smith’s The Christian Secret of a Happy Life (1875) was cited by Marabel Morgan who wrote The Total Woman in 1973, which was very clearly a repackaging of the Fascinating Womanhood self improvement class, which she had taken and was a facilitator for. Fascinating Womanhood, book and the classes, were written by Helen Andelin, a Mormon, which were inspired by Fascinating Womanhood booklets which were by Elizabeth Towne (also Mormon) in 1922. So one of the best selling Evangelical women’s books in history explicitly cited Hannah Whitall Smith, but then also largely plagiarized Towne and Andelin for the main content of the book without citation.

When Smith’s teachings were mixed with EW Kenyon teachings, which appropriated “New Thought” teachings and the holiness revival movement which had some influence on those who came out of the Pentecostal Azuza Street revival, the result was a type of prosperity gospel. One of the weaknesses of the book, or at least one of the areas where I wanted more, was that Hannah Whitall Smith was oriented toward how the use of the will allowed one to overcome sin. But over time there was a cultural shift which shifted the orientation from seeking after God’s will to change our will to a more amorphous idea of feelings which we then shared with God for what we want. That is a subtle shift, but an important one. Expanding on it would have helped draw connections to why what can too casually be labeled as prosperity gospel is so influential, while being something that almost no one will claim for themselves.

I am going to be too brief here, but the “will” is about aligning ourselves to God and in the Ignatian sense the individual or group of Christians may work toward something they feel called to, but the main orientation is toward seeking after God’s will not their own. In English, the term from Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises is usually translated “indifferent” which isn’t quite right in modern usage. But that problem of translation is part of what I think needs to be explored more here because in all of these books there is no “indifference’ toward our own will or feelings. Instead these books seek to help people understand their desires so that they can bring them about.

One of the main threads of the book is how this “New Thought” movement mixed in with evangelical theology and practice. New Thought was trying to imagine a result and that act of imagination would bring it about. This the what underlies “The Power of Positive Thinking” or “The Secret.” You can see how Ignatius understanding of indifference to our own will in the light of God’s will, and then Hannah Whitall Smith’s Quaker upbringing prioritized her inner voice, which kept morphing in the 150 years since it was written.

I can’t summarize the whole book but I think there are two threads in Live Laugh Love that are worth attention. The first is how common women’s ministry has emphasized an ideal that the main proponents did not live. Many of the women in this book became rich and/or influential selling their ideas and that required work outside of the home. But many of the ideas being sold were about why women should seek after a domestic ideal. The “prosperity gospel” aspects of this, “if you do this, then God will bless you,” were quite often not present in the lives of many advocates. There is a very good long section on Elizabeth Elliot whose Passion and Purity helped to launch the modern purity movement. She spoke about submitting to God and her husband. But her first husband was a martyred missionary. Her second husband died fairly young with health issues. And her third husband was emotionally and physically abusive starting almost immediately after their wedding was over. She advocated leaning into an ideal of womanhood and family, both because she thought it was the right thing to do, but also because she thought that it would bring about good results in this life in a way that she didn’t experience herself.

The second thread is that there really is a desire in not just Evangelicalism, but both US culture and I think all of humanity, to assume that simple formulas will bring about the results that we desire instead of grappling with the reality that formulas don’t work. Reality is much more complicated and while there is value in doing the right thing for its own sake, doing the right thing will not get us what we want every time. Where I think the “prosperity gospel” label is unhelpful is that there really is value in doing the right thing. And sometimes our mixing of “do the right thing” with “so you will get…” is where the problem lies. As Du Mez shows over and over again, formulas almost never work for most people. But those who sell formulas, often make a lot of money. Those who use the formulas rarely find the results that they want.

In an interview with The Holy Post, Du Mez was directly asked if she thought many of the people who were profiting off of the ideas discussed in the book were simply grifters. She said that she knows that there are grifters in this world. And that there are true believers who are simply attempting to follow what they think is God’s direction. But she can’t get to the internal motivation that would distinguish between the two. She can only point to the results.

There will be lots of complaints about Live Laugh Love (like Bonnie Kristian’s review at Christianity Today) which complain about Du Mez being too negative about Evangelical Christianity. But I think we really do need to grapple with why so many people want the simple formulas for how to live life that are discussed in the book. Those who didn’t like Jesus and John Wayne are unlikely to like Live Laugh Love. But I do think that Live Laugh Love is a more nuanced and mature book. And I hope it finds just as large of an audience as her earlier book did.

Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have known about Dungeon Crawler Carl for about a year. It started showing up in recommendations for great audiobooks and what to read if you like Project Hail Mary or the Murderbot series. I have been reading a lot of fiction lately, in part because my paying job has been so busy that I have not had the brain power for other types of books. I finally decided to pick them up when a good friend and his wife said they were listening to them as an audiobook on a long drive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl knows it is not great and important literature. It is funny, crass, way too violent, but engaging. At this point I am in the middle of the third book in a bit over a week. The kindle books are in the Kindle unlimited library so I have borrowed them and then had the kindle discount to get the audiobook for under $5 each.

This is a book describing a live action role playing game. It is inspired by first person shooters and Dungeons and Dragons and the wide variety of other games. In some ways I think this is like a more adult oriented version of Ready Player One, except Ready Player One was an immersive video game who was on a quest to solve problems using cultural history. Dungeon Crawler Carl is supposed to be more D&D inspired fantasy where the “real” person dies and there is (from my perspective) entirely too much description of blood and guts from the fights.

The writing style is self consciously insider jokey that understands the ridiculousness of the premise. I think that is similar to the Ready Player One style of writing without the love of 80s and 90s culture. There was a lot of complaints about the constant references of music, movies and video games from the 80s and 90s in Ready Player One, but that isn’t here. There is references to mythology and D&D and alien movies, but it is much more moderate and not oriented toward the nerd level knowledge.

I think a lot of people will like the series but there is genuine content warning. The audiobooks are very well done, but the writing style of the book has lots of examples of the characters texting back in forth because the live action role playing game is a galaxy wide TV shows with trillions of people watching. So lots of communication says one thing out loud and another thing is texted. That is signified using audio distortions in the audiobook, but it is easier to follow that in text. Generally, I don’t love sound effect or music in audiobooks, but here it is important to give context to what is going on. But I also am not listening to this if anyone else is in the room without using headphones. The swearing isn’t too extreme, but it is consistent. The descriptions of the violence and gore is mostly what is what I don’t love. There is sexual innuendo, but as of the middle of the third book right now, there hasn’t ben any actual sex. There is A LOT of death. Much of it is abstract. Billions of people on earth die in the opening pages of the book. The game starts with about 10 million characters and by the end of the first book, about 90% of those have died. But they are not all abstract. Characters that are known die.

I also think there are conceptual problems. Carl wakes up in the middle of the night and goes outside because his girlfriend’s cat escapes out of the house. It is about 2:30 AM and everyone who is inside a building is killed instantly. So if it is 2:30 AM in the US, then it will be the middle of the day in much of Russia or the UAE or India. So many more people should be alive from Asia but that isn’t reflected in the book. This is a book, but it is a real conceptual problem created by the author not thinking through his set up.

The 8th book in the series was released in March 2026. And according to an interview earlier this year, the author plans to conclude the series with the 9th book. This was originally self published, but Ace picket up the rights in 2024. The series has been optioned by Peacock for a tv seres. The audiobooks are an audible exclusive and the main narrator has given unique voices to over 200 characters, it is an impressive range of voices and accents that do not sound like a single person and it is part of why so many have embraced the series. According to the series wikipedia page, the audiobook sales have surpassed the print or ebook sales, which is unusual.

At this point i don’t know if I will do a post on every book or not. My problem with writing about series fiction is that inevitably spoilers have to be discussed.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I can’t remember if it was when I was reading about Chosen Ones or in Chosen Ones or something else entirely, but I saw a recommendation for Invincible and found a copy at my library. The version I read was probably 300 pages and had a real ending. But clearly it is just the start of these comics.

There is very clear spoofing of the DC world. Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, Flash, etc all have there versions here. I know there is an Amazon produce TV show about this, but I have not seen that. I am no comic book expert. I read two or three graphic novels/comic series a year at most. And I never was into the deep lore.

But the last Superman novel I read was similar in theme to the large storyline which I won’t give away. I am not blown away by this, but I do think it is worth reading another couple hundred pages if I can get it from my library.

Invincible: The Ultimate Connection Vol 1 Kindle Edition (I am linking to the Compendium 1, which as vol 1-43. I got a library hardcover which has vol 1-13.)

A last year, I stumbled on When Among Crows by Veronica Roth and then I read the second of that series To Clutch a Razor. I had not read any of Roth’s books in a decade, but she has been writing, so I decided I would pick up some of her books when I ran across them on sale.

The Chosen Ones has a premise that I was interested in. A group of “chosen ones” was found as early teens after magic started happening and an enemy arose. That story is the backstory to this book but flashbacks do tell us part of that story.

This book is about those heroes as the most famous people on earth and how they have adapted to that, or not. The story primarily focuses on Sloane. She is dating Matt, the team’s leader, but she has not recovered from the trauma of that original fight. It is this part of the book that I liked the most. I wanted to understand what it was like to grapple with regret for what you had done, while the world treats you as a hero. I didn’t really want the book to only stay there, but that was where I liked the book most.

I am not going to spoil the story, but I can understand why a number of people didn’t like the book, or at least thought it was mediocre. The story was a little slow and it meandered around a bit. I liked the book and I have appreciated the grappling with the emotional and other costs of being a hero. It felt to me like While the World Watched, which was the memoir of the last girl to leave the bathroom before the bomb went off that killed the four girls in the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. She grappled with the cost that she and those around her paid for participating in the civil rights movement. Her brother clearly had PTSD and died young. She grappled with alcoholism and nearly divorced before moving back to Birmingham and working with the museum before she retired.

The Chosen Ones is obviously fantasy, but I do think as fiction it does try to grapple with the ways that there is often a cost to doing good that we don’t grapple with in advance. Mostly because we are not making choices in advance to do good, but merely responding to an immediate need. There is a twist in Project Hail Mary about Grace’s courage or lack of it and the way that he redeems himself because he has someone that he really loves that drives him to be courageous. There is an overlapping but different story here that I think complements that one. Project Hail Mary is a very optimistic story, which is part of why people like it. Chosen Ones is a far less optimistic story, which I think is part of why people like it less. But I think both are stories that need to be told.

Mental health and trauma are important and I am glad that fiction is picking up on that more over the past couple of decades. There is issues with turning real categories of psychology into “pop” usage and culturally adapting it in ways that are unhelpful. (I haven’t read it yet, but Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond by Matthew Loftus is about this.)

This is an adult oriented book in the sense that there is language and violence and trauma and some off screen sex, but most in the sense that it is about emotional and psychologically adult issues. The book is about now adults who were once early teens who were “chosen ones.” The Divergent/Harry Potter/Hunger Games characters didn’t stay teens. They grew up. And when they grew up, they likely would have had to grapple with their lost childhood and what they had to do. This is one version of that story.

The Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook