“A Robust Inheritance”

A Review of
The Art of the Sonnet
By Stephen Burt and David Mikics.

Reviewed by Brett Foster.

[ Read an excerpt from this book... ]

The Art of the Sonnet
Stephen Burt and David Mikics.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

This collection of one hundred representative sonnets, ranging from the early sixteenth-century English poet Thomas Wyatt to a sonnet published just last year by the San Francisco poet D. A. Powell, presents a series of diversities – chronological, geographical, stylistic – all surprisingly emerging from the same, seemingly straightforward form. Each of these lyric poems does its work in fourteen lines (usually, although even this identifier is open to exceptions, as in “tailed” sonnets or George Meredith’s sixteen-line sonnet sequence Modern Love). The poets also exhibit, as a kind of mental calling card that comes with the mere act of writing sonnets, a consistent engagement with the tradition of sonnets and sonnet writing.

To be clear: these engagements vary tremendously, some being, in Stephen Burt’s and David Mikic’s words, “self-consciously traditional” and others “decidedly impure” instead. Yet The Art of the Sonnet’s compilers and commentators take it as a given that any sonnet will be in communication, or maybe in the midst of a quarrel, with the form’s robust inheritance. For example, a poem such as Alison Brackenbury’s recent “Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?”, with its opening line, “There are too many sonnets about love,” is in fact highly sensitive and even beholden to the very tradition and subject it wishes to dismiss— its act of “writing off” remains an homage to this particular written form. This tenacious legacy involves the formal details of how a sonnet is written, as well as the subjects, tones, and values we readers expect to find in any poem we quickly recognize (Aha!) as a sonnet.

With its opening “How to Use These Sonnets” statement and an “Introduction” rich with historical context, this volume begins on a deeply informative note. This quality continues into the collection itself, and the format ensures this continuance. Either Burt or Mikics, both accomplished literary critics, supplies a short evaluative essay after each poem. (Readers can quickly identify the specific author by the initials concluding every essay.) These glosses, comprising eleven or twelve paragraphs, or four pages, on average, usually set up two tasks for themselves: to provide biographical, historical, and what we might call tradition-oriented details that are especially pertinent to the poem in question, and to model for readers superb examples of literary criticism. Especially on display here are the strengths of close reading: attention to word origins and their contemporary meanings and valences, explanations of formal effects within sonnets (developments from one part of a sonnet to another, changes in meter, the presence of caesuras or pauses, departures from expected rhyme schemes), and analyses of how these effects interact with a sonnet’s content, voice, and its meaning overall. Already, having itemized some poetic nuts and bolts here, I fear I do a disservice to the extremely readability of the authors’ essays. The book-flap copy speaks of them as “guides” to the sonnets, and tonally that captures their role nicely. The learning is apparent and persuasive, but it never comes at the expense of an invitational openness. Their enthusiasm for sonnets and poetry’s powers generally is never proprietary.

This reader-friendly attitude announces itself from the outset, when the authors say they don’t expect us to read the book straight through. Read favorite poems first, they suggest, or read all the poems sans commentaries, or read a single sonnet-plus-essay (called a “self-sufficient unit”) and move on from there. Taken together, these units provide a “partial history of the sonnet form.” Despite this nonchalance, casual poetry readers will find these opening sections incredibly helpful. After forecasting the second half of the book’s focus on contemporary poetry in a global English context, Burt and Mikics take care to offer definitions of the sonnet’s terminology and types.

The “Introduction” commences by praising the sonnet’s remarkable versatility— as a lyric form famous for personal meditation or confrontation, as well as capable of “verdicts on public events.” Whatever the case, its power resides in its crystallizing of experience, its making an occasion crucial, its “drive toward idealization.” The following historical survey first establishes the basic characteristics of the earliest sonnets, composed at the Sicilian court of Frederick II in the thirteenth century. The form differed from peasant songs by being asymmetrical in structure, private, and suited more to logic than music. Next, the survey treats the hugely influential Italian sonnets of Dante, in the Vita nuova, and Petrarch even more so, in his Rime sparse (or “scattered rhymes”). In these poets, we encounter the idealized beloved, the suffering lover, and the philosophical explorations of love, desire, and its effects, all of which will look familiar in the early poems in this volume, from the English Renaissance. That period receives generous treatment, with special focus naturally devoted to Shakespeare. He is credited with a “radical expansion” and even a “revolution” in sonnets in English, thanks to his new tonal ambiguities, increased dramatic qualities, refined use of concluding couplets (or rhyming lines), and a resilient mysteriousness overall.

The survey’s second half records a lapse in sonnet practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its reemergence as a “vehicle of nostalgia” later. Soon, though, the form blossoms: by the time Coleridge was writing in 1796, Burt and Mikics argue, it was “nearly the last moment” when even general criteria could be easily applied to sonnets. “The sonnet is suitable for everything,” Baudelaire was soon to write. Even greater diversification now set in, and more regular reactions to the sonnet’s sometimes burdensome conventions. The authors deservedly single out Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Victorian sequence, The House of Life, for encouraging a new sonnet “boom,” and the form’s standing changes again in the twentieth century. Some Modernists relegated the sonnet to a “domestic form, small-scale,” or even a “fascist form” (William Carlos Williams), yet all the while it was continually in play. What resulted was a “dense portfolio” of sonnets by Harlem Renaissance poets, British poets, post-war American poets— nearly everyone, really. This emphasis on variety reaches a crescendo in the last third of The Art of the Sonnet, where the authors seek “limit-cases and self-consciously debatable examples” to spur critical questions— What is a sonnet? How do we know?

And now a few words about specific poems . . . Readers may initially feel least excited about some of the early staples of the form, such as Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt” or Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”). The quality of the essays that follow these poems will disabuse them of these reservations. Mikics admits first thing that Shakespeare’s poem is often recited at weddings and “can be hard to read with fresh eyes,” but then proceeds to show how it is anything but the bland, certain, completed sonnet that its nuptial settings imply. Instead it is mightily suspenseful and paradoxical, insofar as “the mortar of doubt makes his poem more solid, rather than precarious.” The “fool” in the phrase “Love’s not Time’s fool,” means that Love is not the darling of Time, but also not its dupe (the sense clearer today). Love realizes that the two are “predator and victim” and yet presses on. Similarly, Mikics illuminates Wyatt’s poem by pressing its overall hunting metaphor into the mental oscillations of the hunter-lover. Thus, in the lines “Yet, may I by no means, my wearied mind / Draw from the deer,” he invites us to imagine the drawn mind as a figurative arrow affixed to the obsessed-over deer. Finally, in another early, but less known poem, from Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia, the commentary establishes a network of “seize the day” sources or influences (or rather, “you’re going to regret that the day was not seized” examples!) Placing beside Daniel a pair of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but also the Continental influences of Ronsard and Tasso, along with a modern imitator of Ronsard, William Butler Yeats— such a network substantiates effectively the book’s overall argument about the rich history of this form.

Stephen Burt provides a similarly revelatory reading of George Herbert’s powerful, uniquely structured sonnet “Prayer,” which, as Burt first informs us, is the “most accomplished sonnet in English to lack a main verb,” consisting as it does of twenty-seven nouns or noun phrases. He next asks interesting questions about the implications of the order of these objects or phrases meant to equate with, or stand in for, prayer’s peculiar powers, its purported recourses that are impossible to fathom. This curious poem will become newly accessible to readers who, following Burt, will approach the poem’s list as a series of accumulating or even self-correcting sections, relating to prayer’s language, then its force, and, in the sonnet’s turn, as something valued “for its own sake, its own end.” Burt later does heroic explicating work on a sonnet by the difficult but rewarding English poet Geoffrey Hill.

In the early selections especially, the essays introduce us to some intriguing personalities – “George Gascoigne was a scholar, a soldier, and by all accounts a well-known scoundrel”; “During his senior year at Harvard, he began to hear the voice of God” (Jones Very) – and existing poetry lovers will quickly appreciate some of the unusual, less anthologized selections here: a sonnet from Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Rome, less known poems by Keats and Coleridge, or the mere presence of the generally less known Joseph Blanco White or Alice Meynell. Numerous female poets (Mary Wroth, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith) nicely counter and revise the predominantly male cast of the early sonnet tradition as it is usually presented. Likewise, it is a pleasure to find here a pair of intense sibling sonnets by George Eliot, best known for her prose writing, as well as a far less quoted poem from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese— one where the love is not yet mutual, confirmed, and “perhaps already eternal,” but rather particular, excited an exciting, still in the uncertain grips of courtship.

The collection focuses almost exclusively on British and American poets, although very occasionally some crucial European examples appear, such as Baudelaire or Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The chance for a discovery or rediscovery is the most obvious benefit of a collection like this. For me, they included the remarkable sonnet from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life, reflecting the poet’s translation of Dante’s Vita nuova, as is said, but also, and even more germanely in this case, of Dante’s contemporary Guido Cavalcanti; Thomas Hardy’s “A Church Romance”; Wallace Stevens’ exuberant “Nomad Exquisite,” which he sent to Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe on a postcard; and Countee Cullen’s “At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.” This last poem shows, as few modern illustrations do, how sonnets derive their power from correspondences—here, between the Israelites and African Americans, who both need “their given place / To rehabilitate the overthrown,” but even more centrally, between the outer temple or wall and the inner reality to which it speaks, that “battered temple of the heart / That grief is harder on than time on stone.” That double correspondence there takes the breath away, or adds that breath to the prayers at the wall.

These happy discoveries will proliferate for most readers toward the end, in part because poetry readers are arguably less familiar with more contemporary, very recent verses, and partially because Burt and Mikics take pains to diversify the final poets and poems represented here. A good number of these poets have been associated with more avant-garde poetics or postmodern schools. (Burt frequently writes about them and knows that crowded landscape well.) Selections by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh and Ted Berrigan display memorably how the durability of sonnet form can raise to Homeric levels a “local row” or conflict, or capture for readers decades hence the exciting first days of an Oklahoman in New York City, complete with a bricolage sensibility. Finally, the Elizabethan virtuosity of Paul Muldoon and the immemorial warning of D. A. Powell (“o you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself”) become forceful reminders that, in the words of the “Introduction,” the “sonnet form works especially well when a poet wants to remind us that the present is surprisingly like the past[.]” This form has rarely felt as present as it does in The Art of the Sonnet.

———–

Brett Foster’s poetry and criticism have recently appeared in Books & Culture, Image, Kenyon Review, Poetry East, and Raritan. He teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at Wheaton College.

“The Grotesque Nature of
Disembodied, Modern Christianity”

A Review of
The Christian Imagination:
Theology and the Origins of Race.
By Willie James Jennings.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

The Christian Imagination:
Theology and the Origins of Race.
Willie James Jennings.
Hardback: Yale UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Many readers of The Englewood Review will recognize that there is something deeply wrong with Christianity in these early years of the twentieth century and most of these readers would argue that these problems are hardly new and have plagued the church for decades if not centuries.  There are, of course, an abundance of books published each year that detail these shortcomings, and posit solutions for how we might repent of these sins.  Few books, however, offer as broad and holistic a picture of our brokenness as Willie Jennings’ new theological masterpiece, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, and even fewer books (perhaps none) can come close to the depth of Jennings’ historical account of how we wound up in the mess we are in today.  Jennings concisely sums up the aim of the book in his conclusion:  “I want Christians to recognize the grotesque nature of a social performance of Christianity that imagines Christian identity floating above land, landscape, animals, place, and space, leaving such realities to the machinations of capitalistic calculations and the commodity chains of private property.  Such Christian identity can only inevitably lodge itself in the materiality of racial existence” (293).

Speaking of Jennings’ conclusion, I would highly recommend that readers begin with this conclusion and then loop back and read the rest of the book, as the conclusion not only offers a concise and poignant vision of our disconnectedness from one another, from the land and from all creation, but also points us in the direction that we will need to go in order to recover the intimacy for which we were created.  Reading the conclusion first in this way will help the reader to have a clearer sense of the argument that Jennings is making here.  The Christian Imagination is a decidedly historical work but Jennings has no illusion of writing a comprehensive history of how the Church’s social imagination has become diseased, but rather “to paint a portrait of a theological problem in order to suggest a way forward,” (9) which he approaches by telling a number of detailed theological stories from the era of Western colonialism that each illustrate distinct facets of this problem.   Most of the stories that Jennings narrates here are from the theological margins of the colonial that which have largely been ignored in the course of most Western theological education, and will likely be unfamiliar to most readers.  As Jennings observes, however, these stories are essential to our understanding the problem of our deep brokenness and also to our imagining how we can reorient our life together in church communities in such a way that God can begin to heal these wounds and transform us anew.

The first story that Jennings offers is that of Gomes Eanes de Azurara, otherwise known as Zurara, who was the royal chronicler of Prince Henry of Portugal, the Navigator.  Zurara played a key role in the theological narration of early Portuguese colonialism.  Jennings focuses specifically on Zurara’s account of a slave auction in Lagos in August 1444, and his account of the suffering of the Black Africans that were offered for sale.  Crucial to Zurara’s record of this event was not only that these Black Africans were being sold, but that they were being displaced (ripped out of the places that provided meaning for them) and sold.  Zurara’s telling the story in this way, Jennings argues, reveals a key facet of the theology of modernity: viz., that such accounts of displacement (and the actual displacements of conquest to which they refer) came to form modern persons, black and white, to think and act primarily in a disembodied fashion.  Jennings fleshes out his point here with stories of displacement of Native Americans as well as modern African tribes, which emphasize that the displacement of modern, Western thought is not a necessity.

Jennings’ second historical reflection focuses on the work of José de Acosta Porres, a Jesuit teacher who did his most significant theological work among the Andean peoples of colonial Peru in the sixteenth century.  Acosta’s work, Jennings states, “marks the theological beginning of imperialist modernity” (71).  Acosta is a significant figure because he redirects the theological vision of the Church Fathers and the philosophical tradition of the ancients away from placed, embodied reflections thus perpetrating a “loss of historical consciousness.” Third among Jennings’ narratives is that of John William Colenso, an Anglican bishop, who over the course of many years of translating theological works into the native languages of South Africa came to be converted to a faith that was resistant to colonial forms of theology.  The fourth and arguably the most familiar of the stories that Jennings recounts is that of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, whose slave narrative was not only perhaps one of the most authentic in that it survived the editorial colonialism to which many other slave narratives were subjected, but also exhibits some striking theological insights into colonial Christianity.  Equiano is, Jennings concludes: “a man of our time who uncovers the perils of our remade world and yet spies the possibilities of its unmaking” (203).

In the book’s final section, Jennings begins to imagine what it might look like to recover the intimacy with God and creation for which we were created.   Following, the key theme of language that he developed over the course of the book, Jennings advocates for literacy and for a deep theological engagement, namely “Christian faith receiving its heretofore undiscovered identities, which are found only through interaction with the social logics of language, landscape and peoples” (248).   Following the excellent work of his Duke colleague and “wonderful conversation partner” J. Kameron Carter, Jennings also emphasizes in this final section that the Christian faith should be aligned once again with the biblical people of Israel, in a process of creating a space of joining and communion through which we can in the struggles of our life together begin to recover some of the intimacy with God and creation which has been lost over centuries of racialism, capitalism and displacement.   The vision that Jennings offers here is a substantial one, offering us much to reflect upon and well-grounded in the narratives he developed over the book’s previous chapters.  However, one does wish that he would have explored more deeply how churches, as expressions of the Body of Christ in particular places, can begin to create such spaces of communion among their members and their neighbors.

In reviewing J. Kameron Carter’s book Race: A Theological Account, I surmised that it might be the most significant theological work of the decade, but perhaps Willie Jennings in The Christian Imagination has, in catching a glimpse of how the church might recover a healthy social imagination, outdone even Carter’s excellent work of criticism.   Indeed at the heart of Jennings vision of the Christian social imagination is a conviction that is of the utmost importance to us here at Englewood Christian church, that God’s mission is one of reconciling all things (note: I’m using scriptural language here, although Jennings has good reason for steering clear of the terminology of reconciliation in his text) and that God has called us to engage theologically with this mission in our specific location and according to the gifts and skills that each of us has been given.  At the close of the book, Jennings eloquently summarizes his vision:

A social imagination that begins to take place seriously begins to grasp the textures of the social in a comprehensive way.  At one level, I hope to open up a new dialogue between disciplines that rarely interact – geography, theology, postcolonial theory, race theory, ecology, Native American studies and so forth.  In this regard, I hope for a conversation between those deeply involved in the formation of space and those concerned with identity formation – urban planners, ecologists, scientists, real estate brokers, developers joined in conversation with theologians, ethicists, literary and postcolonial theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. … [My] hope is more than academic, by attending to the spatial dynamics at play in the formation of social existence, we would be able to imagine reconfigurations of living spaces that might promote more just societies.  Such living spaces may open up the possibilities of different ways of life that announce invitations for joining. (293-294).

Jennings has articulated excellently here the vision the Church’s mission that drives us forward each day here at Englewood Christian Church in our corner of urban Indianapolis, and the conversation that he describes here is precisely the sort of embodied, holistic and diverse conversation that we hope that The Englewood Review of Books can serve to spark – at least on occasion – in church communities around the world.

“Crossing the Boundaries Between Communities”

A Review of
What We Love about the Black Church.
By William H. Crouch, Jr. and Joel C. Gregory.

Reviewed by Bob Cornwall.

What We Love about the Black Church.
William H. Crouch, Jr. and Joel C. Gregory.
Paperback: Judson, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

[ This review originally appeared on the reviewer's blog,
and is reprinted here with his permission. ]

Years ago I was invited to preach at a black church. I declined the offer, thinking that my style and personality might not match the expectations of the people in the pew. Later on, after I’d taken up a position as pastor of a local church, I did preach for the Latino congregation that rented space from our church. Maturity had set in by then, and I enjoyed my experience. Coming to metro-Detroit I’ve found that the majority of Disciple churches in the area are either black congregations or they are pastored by African-Americans. I’ve found my colleagues to be welcoming and supportive. So, when a colleague from Detroit invited me to bring my choir and preach at a revival scheduled for this fall, I knew that this was something I should, without any hesitation, do. What I didn’t realize back then, but have come to understand more recently, is that the congregation won’t expect me to be anything other than myself.

We simply write as two seasoned ministers who affirm our own personal histories in the white church, yet we have become more fully human and effective ministers because of our experiences in the black church (p. xvi).

The black church has had to minister to the whole person because it rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. Consequently, the black church has typically focused on a much broader agenda, by addressing issues related to racism, poverty, economics, civil rights, and injustice, as well as issues of personal piety, holiness, ethics and righteousness (pp. 108-109).

What strikes the reader most about Marcus Goodyear’s poetry is the immediate action of the poetry. The action is simultaneous with the writng, as if Goodyear was dictating the present in lines like a sportscaster gives a play-by-play on a baseball game. The effect of Goodyear’s poetry is not immediately deep or penetrating but matter-of-fact, a pronouncement of ordinary life in poetic lines.

This lack of impact is Goodyear’s modus operandi as he seeks to find meaning in the commonplace and mundane. If anything, the poetry in this collection testifies to the fact that anything, and I mean anything, can become sharp and fragrant with meaning when in the hands of a poet.

In order to capture the commonplace in his poetry Goodyear must deconstruct the sacramental into its common elements. He strips away the layers of meaning from figures of Christ and the Eucharist, leaving only “saltless crackers / and shots of grape juice” along with “Jesuses in the attic / after Christmas.” Goodyear removes the metaphorical in order to let the literal stand naked before us, and in a twist of his poetic prowess, he uses his steady syntax and phrasing to build up an image from the deconstructed literal. This is most evident in the titles of his poems, which give direction to the meaning that Goodyear delivers in his poetry of ordinary life.

Goodyear can accomplish this poetic game of stripping down to the literal and building up again because of his clever use of conceit. The reader (this review included) can so easily be lulled into the normalcy of Goodyear’s images, only to discover that in his recounting of a seemingly dull event there is a deep beauty and majesty to the everyday and ordinary. Goodyear showcases this deft skill in poems such as “Drought on the Open Road,” in which he writes:

Once the herd was so thirsty

they ate the burn right off

the interstate shoulder, two bites

from asphalt and cars flying

75 miles to nowhere.

Heat paralyzed cows

never look up.

In the singular image, which Goodyear commands so well, the poet offers up a commonplace moment that hinges on so much. In the isolated event of cows inching ever closer to the highway Goodyear pushes the reader to contemplate the chain reactions caused by a singular event. In essence, Goodyear’s simplicity of poetry is a conscious statement to the irreducible complexity of life, that complex weather systems can cause a drought that eventually leads a herd of cattle into the dangers lurking on an isolated patch of Texas highway.

The power of Goodyear’s poetry is thus in his ability to hold so much back, to be so reserved as a poet that he lets the multiple meanings of words burst out from the pages. In essence, he lets the poetry, and not the poet do the work. He does not seek to answer the mystery as other poets do, but stays in the realm of plain sight and plain poetry. As he himself writes, “Where the mystery is / too great, give us flesh.”

I hold the degree title of Master of Arts of Missional Leadership from George Fox Seminary, a relatively young cohort distance program.  Fox isn’t the only school starting up this MA, but many evangelical seminaries are introducing a missional leadership degree.  Explored in these programs are the typical missional works by Alan Hirsch, Leonard Sweet, perhaps Leslie Newbigin, and others.  Having at least one missional theology course is par for the degree.  Craig Ott and Stephen Strauss with the help of Timothy Tennent have written a definitive text on an Evangelical theology of mission.

Ott and Strauss, both Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) PhD’s, teach respectively at TEDS and Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS).  Both of these schools are bastions in more conservative Evangelical theological education, and I, while an Evangelical, lean more liberal in my theological studies.  That said, however, I was impressed by the TEDS and DTS professors here and their work in Encountering a Theology of Mission.  Published by Baker Academic, their book is a great text for an Evangelical perspective on the theology of mission.

As with any good text, the authors give a primer for the developments of a theology of mission, beginning with the Biblical foundation of mission.   They take a chronological view, beginning with the Old Testament to find God’s missional character.  Contrary to the popular understanding of missional, they explore that God’s missional character with His people as reflected in the OT as centripetal, where God and Israel attract people from the outside to come to the center.  Outsiders must come and worship at Zion.  They, however, emphasize the shift in God’s missional character as centrifugal in the New Testament where Jesus’s disciples were sent outward to the nations (44-45).

An interesting chapter is their chapter on the Missio Dei.  The authors write about the development of Missio Dei thinking in theology, how it has been used and how its various interpretations have produced some significant differences in a theology of mission.  More liberal Protestants and conciliar branches of the Christian faith tended to take Missio Dei thinking solely to a social level, living just as Christ did, serving others’ immediate needs.  Evangelicals by in large used the Missio Dei concept to promote proclamation of God and His initiative.  While Ott, Strauss & Tennent do not shy from this proclamation understanding, the true Missio Dei for them encompasses both.  The separation of social service and proclamation of the Lordship of Christ is something the authors deal with throughout the majority of the chapters in the book.

The chapter on the “Purpose and Nature of Mission” heavily relies on Piper’s supposition that, “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church.  Worship is.  Missions exists because worship doesn’t…” (Quoted on 84).  This oft-used quote from Piper’s, Let the Nations Be Glad!, is the crux of their doxological purpose of mission.  Mission is worship, and missions are not ends in and of themselves.  The authors over-use Piper in this case throughout the book, however their exposition on the doxological purpose of mission in other Christian stems, such as the Orthodox and Catholic traditions (80-84) is helpful.

The historical background, the first chapter of the two “Task of Missions” chapters is a fascinating and great historical primer on missions and missional theology.  Without excusing the ills of missionaries and their work in decades (and centuries) past, Ott and Strauss remind their readers that often missionaries have been the scapegoats for the global initiatives at large that have often destroyed cultures.  They in fact repeatedly point out that missionaries, while colonizers with good intentions, often stood up against other and more devious colonial powers.  This chapter, for a missionary in an age where missions is distrusted, is a great chapter not condoning the history of missions, but putting it into perspective.

Part 2 of the book begins a deviation from missional and focuses more on missions.  The authors do not do an adequate job deciphering between mission and missions, and continually lean towards the missions side.  Perhaps because of their doxological approach, where the end is worship and missions is the means, they tend to be more missions minded than mission-based or missional.  Nonetheless, the remainder of the book is not just limited to the more confined view of missions, but can be applied to a missional understanding as well.

Part 2 of the book is the “Motives and Means for Mission.”  They write on the motivations, both positive and negative for going into missions.  They then move onto the helpful chapter of the nature of the church and mission.  Here their premise, evident throughout the book, is that the church’s mission is to be a kingdom-minded community that evidences worship in word and deed amidst a not-yet-redeemed people.  And thus the purpose for missions is to set up these kingdom-minded communities throughout creation.

Particularly unhelpful is chapter 10, “Spiritual Dynamics and Mission.”  This chapter deals mostly with spirits, evil and Satan.  While these are very important in mission, the overall lack of spirituality within this chapter, such as prayer, contemplation and other spiritual aspects is quite discouraging.  The authors’ chapter was incomplete and spent too much time on spiritual warfare.  It is here that their Evangelical subculture came out more than just their Evangelical philosophy.

The Evangelical philosophy, verses liberal Protestant or conciliar branches of the Christian faith, of the authors came out heavy in Part 2.  While they treated other Christian views fairly and critically, they retained a strong emphasis on a personal renunciation of sin and proclamation of faith for salvation.  Their primacy of Biblical text became their main focus as Evangelicals and heavily informed their constructive criticism of opposing views.  In all, Christology dictated their theological suppositions, over and above ecclesiology and others.  They did examine the many theological disciplines within systematic theology, but always deferred to Christology to inform them.  This may not be a mistake, but certainly colors the lenses with which they do theology through.

It is in Part 3 that they carry the Christological focus further as they related to the local and global communities.  This section became more of a recap on their previous chapters, and thus lengthened the book by a good 100 pages.  Good information can be found, however the impact of the book tends to drop and by the last chapter it becomes a bit redundant.

With the rise of missional leadership amongst Evangelical seminaries, this could be a principal textbook.  Likely it will not change the minds of many like the works of Bosch or Newbigin.  Ott, Strauss and Tennent are not pioneers here, but they give fair, just and critical treatment of missional theology as it stands today and from an Evangelical perspective.  As a missionary working in an Evangelical organization, I would feel comfortable for my co-workers to read this book.  I would have them read some differing materials as well, particularly from a conciliar perspective, but should all my co-laborers and my fellow graduate school graduates take Ott, Strauss and Tennent’s views, I could work very well with them.

The ERB will take a break for summer vacation next week and will return with our next issue on Friday August 13…

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	Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit By Richard A. Horsley / Augsburg Fortress $1.29 – Save 87%!!! How has the interaction between religion, rhetoric, and politics shaped people’s lives over the centuries? Examining the relationship between religious discourse and empire-building, Horsley describes how religion is constructed by the power elite; the role it plays in resistance movements among subjugated people; and how it is used to legitimize empire. 151 pages, softcover from Fortress.
	Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities By Edited by Wes Avram / Baker $1.99 – Save 90%!!! In response to the 2002 foreign policy directive that changed America’s national security strategy, a denominationally diverse group (Mennonite, Catholic, Congregational, Catholic) of theologians, theorists, scholars, and pastors addresses the transnational nature of the church, loving neighbors in a globalized world, the use of Scripture in imperial rhetoric, and more. 218 pages, softcover from Brazos.
	The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea By David Dark / Westminster John Knox Press $3.99 – Save 73%!!! Under a broad pop-culture umbrella, using icons from music, literature, film, the media, and politics, David Dark hopes to provide fodder for lively conversation about what it means to be Christian and American in this “weird moment” in which we live. It is a moment when we are increasingly polarized along political and religious lines, a moment when we are too busy forming our response to listen to the one who is speaking. And yet we claim more than ever to be one nation, under God. What does this mean? The end result, he hopes, will be a better understanding that “there is a reality more important, more lasting, and more infinite than the cultures to which we belong,” the reality of the kingdom of God.”This well-read interpreter of popular culture probes the spiritual resonances of American culture from Hawthorne and Melville to Bob Dylan and David Lynch. Nearly every page has something to make readers pause, laugh, think, or pray,”—Publishers Weekly
	Red-Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith & Politics By Tony Campolo / Regal Books $4.99 – Save 75%!!! A new kind of politically concerned evangelical is emerging, somewhere between hard-right Republicans and far-left Democrats. “Red-Letter Christians” seek to live out Jesus’ words—the ones printed in red in many New Testaments. Examining the hot-button issues facing believers today, Campolo calls us to transcend partisan squabbles—and bring Christ’s radical message to our civic commitments. 224 pages, hardcover from Regal.

“Prayer”
by George Herbert
[ As featured in The Art of the Sonnet ]

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

An excerpt from the new book:

The Art of the Sonnet
Stephen Burt and David Mikics.
Hardback: Harvard UP, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Read our review of this new book…

**** WEBSITE UPDATED THIS WEEK WITH
THE MAIN  SPEAKERS’ TOPICS !!!  *****

A Rooted People:
Church, Place and Agriculture
in an Urban World

Registration and more info: http://englewoodcc.com/rooted/

Spread the word with the Facebook e-vite…

Ours is a world in which transportation is becoming extremely costly (as was highlighted by the massive costs of the BP Oil Spill) and yet at the same time is a world that is becoming increasingly urban. Common sense would seem to indicate that these trends will impact in a major way our food systems and the way we eat. Given these factors, what is the church’s redemptive role in caring for the health and wholeness (shalom) of not just humanity, but all creation? Englewood Christian Church has invited several speakers with rich experiences in sustainable agriculture to lead a conversation reflecting on this question and related ones about church, place, food, community and agriculture, and we invite you to join us.

Speakers:
* Fred Bahnson: Writer and Co-founder of Anathoth Community Garden * Martin Price:
Former Director of Educational Concerns For Hunger Organization (ECHO)

* Ragan Sutterfield:
Arkansas Farmer/Writer, Author of FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

Workshops Lead By : Main speakers and others TBA

When: Friday Oct. 29 and Saturday Oct. 30, 2010

Where: Englewood Christian Church / Indianapolis

An Essay by Alan Jacobs on Book Culture
Written for (not surprisingly… ) BOOKS AND CULTURE

http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

It wasn’t until after I read Ted Striphas’ book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control that I realized that its title and subtitle are somewhat at odds with each other. As I began reading, it was the title that governed my expectations: coined by Jay David Bolter, the phrase “late age of print” is meant to be analogous to the Marxist concept of “late capitalism.” “Late” in this case suggests a highly developed, sophisticated set of structures that are beginning to fall into decadence—structures that have lost their essential motive energy and are living off capital generated long ago. With these thoughts in mind, I was expecting and hoping that Striphas would provide a kind of critical ethnography, and perhaps a diagnosis, of print culture in the past hundred years or so.

But no: the book really isn’t about print culture at all; it is rather, as the subtitle more reliably informs us, about book culture.

…

Read the full essay:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

After 18 years of pastoring a rather large American church, I would have to say that the second hardest challenge our leadership team has faced as we have labored to make disciples of weekend church attenders is getting people to commit to sharing life with others in a small group context. The hardest challenge, however, has been to get small groups to view themselves as distinctly kingdom communities who come together not simply to hang out or engage in an occasional Bible study, but to carry out the mission God has given us.

My friend Scott Boren, who is also the “Connecting Pastor” at Woodland Hills Church, has just published a book on this topic called Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World (Baker). Scott artfully places his assessment of the challenges facing small groups as well as his proposed solutions to these challenges in a narrative framework.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

Missional Small Groups:
Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World.
Scott Boren.
Paperback: Baker Books, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBooks.com ]