I have really been getting back into the works of Walter Brueggemann recently, his two newest books are fabulous ( An Unsettling God and Journey to the Common Good — click for our reviews) and I just picked up a used copy of his classic The Land while I was in Grand Rapids.

So, I was excited to find out about this six-part series (each segment is about an hour long) that Brueggemann gave last Fall on the book of Daniel and what it means for the people of God to be a holy people.   (H/T:  Ragan Sutterfield)

• Part 2 – October 7, 2009
  
• Part 3 – October 14, 2009
• Part 4 – October 21, 2009
• Part 5 – October 28, 2009
• Part 6 – November 4, 2009

This is the first in a new and intriguing series of little biographies from Thomas Nelson.

Jane Austen.
(Christian Encounters Series).
Peter Leithart.
Paperback: Thomas Nelson, 2010.
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]

“God’s Own Passion
for the Neighborhood “

A Review of
Journey to the Common Good.
by Walter Brueggemann.

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

Journey to the Common Good.
Walter Brueggemann.
Paperback: WJK Books.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

One of the things that we have worked really hard to do as Englewood Christian Church over the past two decades is to gather our neighbors for conversation on imagining what the common good for our neighborhood might look like.  So when the city of Indianapolis declared our neighborhood and the surrounding ones as a “redevelopment zone” several years ago, we played a key role in gathering neighbors to craft – over the course of a year – a specific plan for how we wanted to see our neighborhood improved in a way that would minimize gentrification and not drive out the neighbors who presently live here.  We work with our neighbors in this way because we believe that God is at work, redeeming creation, and that this work of redemption unfolds primarily through the faithfulness of church communities who imagine and discern God’s redemptive work in their specific places.  With these convictions and the experiences of our church community at the forefront of my mind, I was very eager to read Walter Brueggemann’s ideas in his newest book Journey to the Common Good.

I have read a number of Brueggemann’s previous works and have resonated with the basic points of his theological vision as expressed in these books.  In particular, I have a deep appreciation for his emphasis on the people of God (as a community) in God’s redemptive work, on the conversational relationships between God and the people of God (see his recent book An Unsettling God), on the importance of imagination in discerning God’s leading (see The Prophetic Imagination), and finally, on the significance that he places on land and place in the mission of God (see The Land).  All of these convictions are ones that are essential to our life together at Englewood Christian Church.

At the beginning of Journey to the Common Good, Brueggemann observes:  “We face a crisis about the common good [today] because there are powerful forces at work among us to resist the common good, to violate community solidarity, and to deny a common destiny.  Mature people, at their best, are people who are committed to the common good that reaches beyond private interest, transcends sectarian commitments, and offers human solidarity” (1).  From these initial convictions onward, I knew that this was going to be an important book.  Brueggemann structures the book around three Old Testament stories that he believes are essential to discerning our way forward as churches today toward the common good of God’s redemption.  These stories are that of the Exodus, of Jeremiah (and of Solomon and the Jerusalem establishment that Jeremiah would prophetically decry) and finally of Isaiah.

The first two chapters of the book – based on the first two of the Old Testament stories listed above – were compelling and delightful to read; Brueggemann moves seamlessly back and forth from Old Testament narrative to present day ethics.  In the first chapter, Brueggemann recounts the Exodus story – including, along the way, a fresh revisioning of the significance of the ten commandments as the basis of an alternative social ethic that is not rooted in scarcity, fear or oppression.  He summarizes his retelling of this biblical story with three strikingly relevant points for today:

1. Persons living in a system of anxiety and fear – and consequently greed – (as the Israelites did under Pharoah) have no time for the common good.  Defining anxiety focuses total attention on the self at the expense of the common good.
2. An immense act of generosity is required in order to break the death grip of the system of fear, anxiety and greed.  (God delivers the Israelites and sustains them abundantly in the wilderness).
3. Those who are immersed in such immense gifts of generosity are able to get their minds off themselves and can be about the work of the neighborhood. (28-29, parenthetical statements added to clarify the connection to the OT story).

Brueggemann further elaborates on the relevance of these points for today, observing that in Western culture the power of scarcity is experienced primarily through “entitled consumerism…in which we imagine that something more will make us more comfortable, safer and happier” (29-30).  The Church, Brueggemann argues, is at its best the people who are freed to work for the common good:  “When the church only echoes the world’s kingdom of scarcity, then it has failed in its vocation.  But the faithful church keeps at the task of living out a journey that points to the common good.” (32).

In the book’s second chapter Brueggemann recounts how Solomon perverted God’s mission for Israel and established in Jerusalem a kingdom built up on the essential elements of wealth, might and worldly wisdom.  As Israel’s story progresses, the task falls to Jeremiah to make sense of the destruction of this Jerusalem establishment in 587 BCE (a sort of “9/11 crisis” for the people of Israel).  In Jeremiah’s poem (Jeremiah 9:23-26), Brueggemann observes the prophet specifically countering the wealth, might and wisdom of Jerusalem with the action of God that is rooted in:

• hesed (“steadfast covenantal solidarity”)
• mispat (“justice that gives access & viability to the weak”) and
• sedaqah (“righteousness as intervention for social well-being”)

These three virtues of God’s character form a called cadence, “a minority voice of subversion and alternative” Brueggemann observes, to which we are to march as God’s people.

The book’s third and final chapter is more technical in its biblical scholarship and additionally the lessons that Brueggemann draws here are more general. As such this chapter is a more challenging read than the previous two.  Brueggemann here tells the story of Isaiah as a call for the people of God toward:

• Justice
• Membership (who is covenantly committed?)
• Worship
• Economics
• Vision of the reconciling mission of God
  (through which the previous 4 practices are understood)

The book concludes with an afterword that reflects on the themes of the book in the context of the immediate present (the Obama presidency, post-economic collapse).  Brueggemann offers some keen insights here, including: “Richard Dqwkins’s atheism notwithstanding, the truly toxic atheism is the assumption that neighborliness is an elective in a world of acquisitiveness.” (120)  He concludes on a reflective note:

These three chapters together bear witness to the urgent contemporaneity of the biblical tradition.  I believe that this exposition, insofar as it is faithful, attests that a biblical perception of reality is urgent for the imagination of the public community, especially if that public imagination has been enthralled for a very long time in the claims of Enlightenment rationality.  While there are huge gifts given in that rationality, what we cannot derive from the account of Enlightenment rationality is demanding, generous neighborliness grounded in God’s own passion for the neighborhood. (121)

Brueggemann’s work here is itself a work of prophecy, helping us to imagine the way forward toward “the common good” that is the ultimate redemption of God.  Journey to the Common Good is essential for churches who dare to resist the ubiquitous temptations of wealth, might and worldly wisdom, and who seek God’s transformation of their specific neighborhoods.  Brueggemann offers a scriptural call for all churches to move in this direction, and his words come as sweet encouragement to churches who already caught a glimpse of this redemptive vision and are starting to take baby steps in this direction.  Although sometimes a bit challenging in its form as well as its content, Journey to the Common Good is one book that all churches cannot afford NOT to read!

“Leave More Tracks Than Necessary“

A Review of
Practice Resurrection:
A Conversation on
Growing Up in Christ.
by Eugene Peterson.

Reviewed by Ragan Sutterfield.

Practice Resurrection:
A Conversation on
Growing Up in Christ.
Eugene Peterson.
Hardback: Eerdmans, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Looking at the church today we may well wonder what God was thinking.  Our congregations are filled with lax believers, pulled by the world, this way and that.  Looking around at the group of people filling the pews on a Sunday morning we think, surely this isn’t what God had in mind.  If only we could be like the early Church, we say, when Christianity was vibrant and authentic and not nearly so lazy and messy.

Eugene Peterson’s new book, Practice Resurrection, answers exactly these sorts of concerns and he does it by wiping away any of our ideas about some authentic, pure Christianity in the early church.  His task is to show us what it means to grow up in Christ, in the churches we have, and his guide for how we do this is Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.  The question is how Paul could say such grand things about the work of the Holy Spirit in that Ephesus when the church was clearly a mess?  “Obviously, the church is not an ideal community that everyone takes one look at and asks, ‘How do I get in?’” Peterson writes, “Clearly, the church is not making much headway in eliminating what is wrong in the world and making everything right.  So what’s left?”  What, indeed.

First, Peterson suggests that just maybe, “God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church.”  What we must understand is that the church is, indeed, a place where we can “grow up in Christ” and what makes it that is not what we see on the surface, but the Holy Spirit working in the background and depths—like the life in the soil that makes the life on the surface possible.

What happens in church, if we open ourselves to it, is that our lives are redefined, “as creatures of God, saved by Jesus, formed for holiness by the Spirit.”  In Ephesians, Paul is “retraining our imaginations to understand ourselves not in terms of how we feel about ourselves and not in terms of our parents or teachers…Not in terms derived from our employment or our education or our physical appearance or our achievements or our failures, but God.”  God, it turns out, is what church is all about, and what the church must do, is become “actively passive.”  Get out of the way so God can help us grow.

If we can do this, if we can let God be God and realize ourselves as his creatures then we will enter into the world of grace.  This requires us to set aside our ambition, as Peterson writes, “Competitive ambition and the accompanying disciplines that bring about its achievement can be pursued, and more often than not are pursued, without generosity, without righteousness, without holiness.  Which is to say, quite apart from maturity.”  We must set all of this aside to live in and through grace and when we do this we are able to properly do our work because “Work is first of all what God does, not what we do.”  By realizing this, our day to day work is transformed—we are not just doing work, we are “God’s work and doing God’s work.”  This transforms our work into a whole new economy, an economy of gifts.

Gifts are of course worthless if we have no one to share them with, and the church is nothing if not a community, a community in which we are learning to “practice resurrection”—waking up to a new life in Christ.  As Peterson writes, “Church is the gift of a community of Christians in which we rehearse and orient ourselves in the practice of resurrection.  It is never an abstraction, never anonymous, never a problem to be fixed, never a romantic ideal to be fantasized.”  The church is rather the place where we are guided by the Spirit in the work of dying so that we can be raised, again and again, by Christ.

Eugene Peterson’s work has long been a gift to the church, and the series of books on spiritual theology that this volume completes, is perhaps his best.  Practice Resurrection is a testament from a man who has indeed tried to practice resurrection in and with many imperfect churches.  And the closing lines of Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”, from which Peterson takes his book’s title, properly summarizes the stance we must all continue to take in the church:

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Possibilities Deeply Seeded Within the World“

A Review of
Bird Watching
by Paula McCartney

and

Urbanisms
by Steven Holl.

Reviewed by Brent Aldrich.

Bird Watching.
Paula McCartney.
Hardback: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Urbanisms: Working With Doubt.
Steven Holl.
Hardback: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

I first saw Paula McCartney’s Bird Watching images as large prints, framed with their identification cards (including the birds’ name, location, date, size, coloring, and remarks) and I was hooked with the Spotted Wren, photographed on the Southern Oregon Coast, “golden crown, spotted back and wings” with “a field of daisies was the perfect backdrop for this little bird.” The image is saturated green, interspersed with the yellow and white daisy heads, and the matching yellow and white of the wren. It is as perfect an image as I might hope for. By the second photograph, something was awry, and looking back again at the wren, it was clear: these are model birds, wires holding them onto their perches, painted feathers, glued-on eyes. And having realized this artifice, the images are all the more enticing. First, there is the simple joy of recognition, which is a result of careful looking, and not afforded to anyone breezing past the surface of the photographs. Furthermore, though, there is a significant conceptual shift that complicates these images, asking questions about photography and looking at nature.

Bird Watching has also existed as an edition of hand-made books by McCartney, and has just been published as a full monograph of these clever and beautiful prints, with identification texts and accompanying essays. Located in several locations in the US, McCartney’s birds exist in immaculate landscapes in which the birds complete the scene, and are often described in language questioning our own expectations of ‘nature,’ or the conventions we might expect nature to offer up to our looking (e.g., the sublime, the picturesque). To that end, two Barn Swallows “elegantly turn their heads toward the camera,” Vermillion Flycatchers are “enjoying the view by the lake,” and an Aqua Tanager “stopped and patiently posed for his portrait.”

Constructing these photographs, McCartney acknowledges a desire for a romanticized view of the land and nearly gives it to us, but by including these fake birds, acknowledges that this romanticism is something of an ideal itself. It is in this disclosure, though, that Bird Watching is so successful. Consider: McCartney discloses all of her manipulations as a photographer, and leaves traces of her construction within the image, suggesting both the ideal beauty of the subject, but also the translation into representation, the human perception. On the other hand, much nature photography exists by promoting the illusion that it is not an illusion; by obscuring the photographer or the camera, those images ask for belief in a ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ or ‘unspoiled’ world that exists somehow apart from any influence, such as being photographed.

So in constructing for the camera, McCartney, it would seem, acknowledges the whole picture, as it were, and allows for a complete vision beyond what a ‘straight’ picture can accomplish. The moments McCartney photographs seem, therefore, to be about the same condition of which Wendell Berry writes in Leavings:

Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded
within the world. It is
the way the world is sometimes.

Reading nearly any book about urban design or planning, and not far from my mind is Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” in which he introduces “the walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write.” Viewing the city from the level of the walkers affords a fluid and relational experience, rather than one dictated by generalizing city grids, superblocks, or other master plans that ignore the particularizing experience of the street. Steven Holl’s Urbanisms: Working with Doubt describes a vision of urban design based on such principles, combing landscape, urbanism, and architecture, and aiming for “an architecture of deep connections to site, culture, and climate.”

Several introductory essays introduce general working principles of this urbanism, such as “Experiential Phenomena” which includes “qualities of light, color, sound, and smell,” “the music, art, and poetry of urban experience,” “relational values;” or “Urban Porosity” (similar to Jane Jacobs’ freedom of pedestrian movement), “the experiential phenomena of spatial sequences with, around, and between.” The bulk of Urbanisms is case studies of Holl’s projects from around the world. Illustrated in maps, conceptual drawings, floor plans and elevations, models, and photographs, these projects are the physical realizations of Holl’s theories, and as such require quite a lot of study, comparing aerial footprints to renderings, and in the best cases – such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History, the Linked Hybrid in Beijing, or the Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu, China – with photographs of the completed structures.

The designs are often so unlike the standard building-box, favoring the walker on the street in their overall shape, flexibility of access, and openness, that I often hope for slightly more text to orient what I am looking at throughout the illustrations; nonetheless, this integration of architecture/urbanism/landscape proves for some radical designs that will help shape the way we understand inhabiting the city.

In our continuing effort to fund the publication and free distribution of The Englewood Review, we are going to be collaborating more intentionally with Christian Book Distributors. Primarily, we will be offering you the opportunity to buy bargain books from CBD that we think of are interest. Buying books this way is a win / win / win proposition. You get great books for a great price, CBD gets the sale and we get an excellent referral fee from CBD.

This week’s bargain books (Click to learn more/purchase):

	Why Church Matters: Worship, Ministry, and Mission in Practice By Jonathan R. Wilson / Baker $2.99 (Save 85%!!!)
	The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church By Gregory A. Boyd $1.99 (Save 90%!!! )
	Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth About Christianity? By N.T. Wright $1.99 (Save 90%!!! )

A Brief Review of

Hear No Evil:
My Story of Innocence, Music, and the Holy Ghost.
Matthew Paul Turner.
Paperback: WaterBrook, 2010.
Buy now: [ ChristianBook.com ]

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler.

Hear No Evil chronicles former CCM editor Matthew Paul Turner’s life following the common thread of music. Raised in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist family, Turner tells stories that are by turns laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, and scarier than a Jack Chick tract. Turner’s honest memoir does not offer easy answers or canned take-aways, but his winsome writing, sharp wit, and keen observations provide enough material to laugh and think about for days after the book is closed.

Hear No Evil is comprised of fifteen memoir-essays on faith and music. While they are all variations on the same theme and are in roughly chronological order, each essay serves as a snapshot rather than a continuation. There is little connection between one essay and another. (This is not a David Copperfield kind of memoir. Its closer kin is David Sedaris’s books.) Because of this, “the point” may be hard to find, and at times the essays close without resolution. This lack of closure may be a turn-off for some readers, but I found the open-endedness refreshing. Like Jesus’ parables, we are told what happened up to a point; the rest is left for the reader to decide how he or she will live.

I mentioned that “the point” may be hard to find—but I certainly am not referring to the sharpness of the writing. Turner uses humor to examine his life in music so far. He relates the crush he had on Sandi Patty (which he had to hide from the members of his church), the excitement at hearing George Michael’s “Faith” on the radio and wondering if it was a Christian song, the purchase/guilt cycle he experienced when he bought/threw away Amy Grant’s album Heart in Motion several times, and God’s calling on his life to be the Christian Michael Jackson.

Humor is double-edged, and the line between surgery and stabbing is sometimes hard to discern, but Turner does a surprisingly good job walking the fine line between destructive and constructive uses. Turner’s first essay of the book, “Overture,” is probably the most cynical and made me unsure of the contents of the rest of the book. (In the essay he describes what could be an almost typical occurrence at a Nashville coffee shop: He sees someone come in, ill at ease in his rock-star regalia, and immediately pegs him as a “Christian rocker.”) This essay caused unease at the beginning of the book, but by the end, I could understand much better where Turner was coming from.

Turner’s essays are laced with vivid nostalgia. There were several times while reading this book that I was taken back to my own childhood in the church, and while the names of the congregants are different, I could picture these people in my own life. And Turner treats them like people. They are not stark images or abstract ideas to make a point (“Jim is Greed, Sandy is Fame, Bill is Hypocrisy,” and so on); they are paradoxes wrapped in flesh, as all humans are. His sensitive treatment of his “subjects” is what makes Hear No Evil work. Instead of a rant (which a book like this could have easily become), it is a rehabilitation.

Turner clearly loves the church—spots, wrinkles, blemishes, and all—and while he laughs at its foibles, it’s the kind of laughter that comes from the inside, not the outside—laughing with, not laughing at. Hear No Evil may not resonate with everyone (it seems to be aimed at twenty/thirty-somethings), but I thoroughly enjoyed it for its honesty and wit and reveled through the therapy of all 225 pages.

One of the things we like most about books is the opportunity they create for conversation.  While most of the books we review are brand new and our reviews serve primarily to inform people of these books (which is not particularly conducive to conversation), we thought we would throw a discussion question into the mix every Friday to get people thinking and talking about what they’re reading.

As most long-time readers of The Englewood Review will recognize, we have a deep appreciation for the works of Wendell Berry.  So, our first discussion question is:

What is your favorite Wendell Berry book? And why?  Do you find yourself reading more of his fiction, his essays or his poetry?

Please use the comments below to discuss.  Note: We do get hit with a good deal of spam, so we have to moderate your comments.  We ask your patience, as we try to get your comments moderated as quickly as possible.

A Brief Review of

When You Reach Me.
Rebecca Stead.
2010 Newbery Award Winner.
Hardback: Random House, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Jeni Newswanger Smith.

In Rebecca Stead’s 2010 Newbery Award winning novel, When You Reach Me, Miranda is a twelve year old navigating sixth grade alone after the confusing and sudden end to her longtime friendship with Sal.  Making new friends comes fairly easily, but Miranda’s new stability is thrown off when mysterious notes begin appearing (”I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own…The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.”)  They frighten her, of course, but she finds herself unable to share them with her mother after the first, bewildering one.  Thus begins Miranda’s introduction into the confusing world of time-bending adventure.  An adventure she’s not excited to be part of, despite her love of Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Award-winning classic A Wrinkle in Time.

Miranda’s voice is smart, well-educated, clear, but she’s not very exciting.  I find her refreshing. The larger story, fantastical though it is, is surpassed by the  heart of the story, which is simple: a young girl making sense of a world that keeps growing bigger and more confusing.  In other words–she grows up. Miranda becomes aware of her mother as a real person with failed dreams, and her own responsibilities in regard to meeting the needs of those around her–including friends, enemies and the crazy man on her street corner.

Jumbling together time travel, the $20,000 Pyramid, and pre-teenhood, Stead could have easily fallen into writing the typical quirky-charactered young adult novel (a formula the Newbery Award committee likes to reward).  But despite unusual, frightening, and, yes, quirky circumstances, Stead’s characters are flawed, sometimes unusual, but completely believable–a trait fans of A Wrinkle in Time might recognize.

Stead makes numerous references to A Wrinkle in Time throughout her book and L’Engle fans have been understandably drawn to it, with mixed responses.  While When you Reach Me is a pleasant, easy read, and even a little thought provoking and mind-bending, it lacks the richness and insight that has kept A Wrinkle in Time on teachers’ must-read lists for nearly 50 years.

“Spring Rivulet”
Liberty Hyde Bailey

(From WIND AND WEATHER: POEMS
Doulos Christou Press, 2008 edition)

When the March suns come
And meadows are free
And the waters start
A-way to the sea,
Far back in the fields
When the keen winds blow
I follow a rill
From a bank of snow.
There the last drift lies
In a fence-row hedge
And an inch-wide thread
Drops out of its edge;
And the, day-old pools
Ice-rimmed on the grass
Seep into the stream
As its waters pass.
Sparkle and sparkle the streamlets roam,
Grasses and twigs are pointing from home.

Oh winter, my winter, you have left me again;
The snow’s gone from the hillsides and meadows are bare,
The orchards are vacant and all stark is the glen,
The highways are drying and the woodlands are spare.

Through the pastures high
Now free of their snows
On gray matted sod
The rivulet grows,—
Dips under a root
Falls over a stone
Slips under a bank
With a muffled tone,
Shines out in the sun
Then sweeps round a knoll
And spreads clear and still
In a weed-edged bowl.
It drains the mud slews
In the fields of wheat
And lays down the silt
Where the currents meet.

Bubble and bubble tumbles the foam,
Grasses and twigs will find a new home.

Oh robin, my robin, you are with me again;
The sap’s in the maple and the wood-twigs are bright,
The fence-rows are waking and afield are the men,
The March-winds are roaming and the willows are white.

It follows a groove
Turned out by the share
Then digs to the rocks
And washes them bare;
Then into high swales
’Mongst the cat-tail reeds
Where the bushes dip
With burden of weeds;
And over a cliff
It splinters and falls
And dashes its spray
On the frost-work walls;
Then on to the flats
Where the frogs will peep
And the pebbles shine
In its bottoms deep.
Silent and silent under the loam,
Grasses and twigs at last are at home.

Oh willow, my willow, you have come once again;
The sun’s on the marshes and the brooksides are green,
The lowlands are warming and astir is the fen,
The red-wing is calling and the marsh-pools are clean.

When the June days come
And the growths have spread
I pick out the course
Of the dry stream bed;—
A pathway of stones
A dip in the land
A basin of silt
A handful of sand;
A wisp of dry grass
Hung over the brim
A log-jam of sticks
Where the stream was slim;—
Its life was as full
For a week or day
As rivers that roll
To the sea always.
Babble and babble next spring ’twill roam,
Grasses and twigs will again sail home.