Absence of Mind

            Because I loved the way she wrote about the inward, spiritual life in Gilead and especially Home, I snuck Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Absence of Mind, in between the volumes of reading I have to get through for work this summer.  The published version of the 2009 Terry lectures “in religion, in the light of science and philosophy” that Robinson gave at Yale University, the book had received acclaim from Karen Armstrong, Rowan Williams, and a good number of other theologians and writers on religion that I respect, so I was excited to get to it.  I was sorely disappointed.

            Robinson’s choice of topic for the lectures—examining the conflict between science and religion as “certain modern scientists” (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and E.O. Wilson) present it—sounded like a great choice.  Each of these men argue that our minds are unreliable, that we’re driven by self-interest in our choices, and that real truth can only be discovered by subjecting it to science, i.e. scientific positivism. I use excerpts from two of these scientists’ writings in my Science and Religion course so I was psyched to learn her perspective on the topic.

            Robinson does take on the positivistic approach of these scientists in what she writes, showing how it limits what they can see and often causes them to fall into the same Cartesian fallacy that they claim fatally traps religion. She points out that seeing only through such positivism means that, in the process, those taking such a view lose both the beauty and the strangeness of the human soul.   She is of course correct, but the same point about a systematically reductionist view taken by some scientists has been made by a good number of other scholars.

            What was most disappointing was even the arguments presented, but the writing. As she makes her way through her polemic, there is very little beauty (and sometimes little clarity) in Robinson's words.  [The exception is a passage in the last of the lectures, in which she describes the soul as “that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.” (p. 110)].  The tone often comes across as strident, with the language extremely abstract and often very convoluted.  Given the stark, simple beauty of her writing that is reflected in her novels, Absence of Mind was a great disappointment.

2009 in Books

Here's a list of the books I've read in 2009. At a quick glance, it looks like it works out to be about 1/3 for classroom preparation, 1/3 for pastoral and church stuff, and 1/3 for fun, though I'm sure there's a lot of overlap there.

1. Lawrence Lessig's Remix

2. Charles Stross' Accelerando

3. Peter Senge's Presence

4. David Burrell's Deconstructing Theodicy

5. David Lindley's Uncertainty

6. Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

7. Marion Soards' The Speeches in Acts

8. Neil Gaimon's The Graveyard Book

9. Daniel Amen's Magnificent Mind at Any Age

10. Joy Jordan-Lake's Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous

11. Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind

12. Orson Scott Card's Ender in Exile

13. Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century

14. Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man & Immoral Society

15. John Grisham's The Associate

16. Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History

17. Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta

18. Deepak Chopra's Sacred Verses, Healing Sounds

19. Alan Moore's Watchmen

20. Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

21. Bhagavad Gita

22. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

23. Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

24. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People

25. Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest

26. Ayn Rand's Anthem

27. Stephen Millhauser's Enchanted Night

28. James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

29. Cornel West's Hope on a Tightrope

30. Cornel West's Democracy Matters

31. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus

32. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

33. Ayn Rand's For the New Intellectual

34. John Adams' Hallelujah Junction

35. Bart Ehrman's Jesus- Interrupted

36. Christopher Bennett's Over a Torrent Sea

37. Andrew Newberg's How God Changes Your Brain

38. Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness

39. Vigen Guroian's The Fragrance of God

40. Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

41. Don Tapscott's Grown up Digital

42. Henri Nouwen's Home Tonight: Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

43. Len Sweet's So Beautiful

44. C.J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel

45. Seth Godin's Unleashing the Ideavirus

46. C. J. Cherryh's Well of Shiuan

47. Margaret Wertheim's Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars

48. C.J. Cerryh's Fires of Azeroth

49. Gay Hendricks' The Big Leap

50. Robin Waterfield's Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths

51. Barbara Sher's Refuse to Choose

52. Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro

53. Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky

54. Huston Smith's Tales of Wonder

55. Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan's The First Paul

56. Henry David Thoreau's Walden

57. Kathy Ehrensperger's That We May be Mutually Encouraged

58. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

59. Kitty Ferguson's The Music of Pythagoras

60. Sonia Choquette's Trust Your Vibes

61. Swami Vivekananda's Pathways to Joy

62. C.S. Lewis' Perelandra

63. Katherine Rich's Dreaming in Hindi

64. Plato's The Republic

65. Jack Kornfield's After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

66. Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith

67. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

68. Dave Galanter's Troublesome Minds

69. Mary Vorse's Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle

70. Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising

71. Susan Cooper's Greenwitch

72. Susan Cooper's The Grey King

73. Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree

74. Cara Black's Murder in the Marais

75. Cara Black's Murder in the Latin Quarter

76. Jon Loomis' High Season

77. Jon Loomis' Mating Season

78. Michael Scott's The Alchemyst

79. Judith Orloff's Positive Energy

80. Thick Nhat Hahn's You Are Here

81. Judith Orloff's Emotional Freedom

82. T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death

83. Jack Kornfield's The Roots of Buddhist Psychology

84. Henri Nouwen's Behold the Beauty of the Lord

85. Cara Black's Murder onthe Ile Saint-Louis

86. Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness

87. T. Colin Campbell's The China Study

88. Clayton Christensen's Disrupting Class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns

89. Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch: rewiring the world

90. Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America

91. Stieg Larson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

92. Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart

93. David Benedictus' Return to the Hundred Acre Wood

94. Edmund Bourne's Global Shift

95.Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming to Our Senses

96. Edward Kennedy's True Compass

97. Cornel West's Brother West

98. Pema Chodron's How to Meditate

99. Kirsten Beyer's Full Circle

100. Lesley Hazleton's Jezebel

101. Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Fact

102. Davina Lopez' Apostle to the Conquered

103. Brigette Kahl's Galatians Reimagined

104. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

105. Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals

106. Neil Gaiman's Good Omens

107. Paul Knitter's Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian

108. Jim Henderson's Jim & Casper Go to Church

109. J.Russell Crabtree's The Fly in the Ointment

110. Apostolos Doxiadis' Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth.

111. Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt

Defining Moment

Over the past three months, I’ve spent what little reading time I could grab making my way through Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment. I began the book just as the presidential debates got underway and have just finished it as president-elect Obama announced his planned public works program as part of his solution to the present economic crisis and have found the overlaps between Alter’s book and the current events intriguing.

Alter’s book purports to be a report of Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office, but the book is much more (and much less) than that. It’s more of a reflection on the ways in which FDR reinvented the presidency as well as how and why he did so. Wile the book does go back to look briefly at Roosevelt’s upbringing, it spends most of its discussion on the deepening Depression with its focus beginning early 1933, when stock values had decreased, exports were at their lowest in decades, and unemployment was rapidly rising. Alter seems to focus on the ways in which Roosevelt used his acting abilities to communicate confidence to other politicians, journalists, and the public at large. He marshals his case that it was this acting ability that made FDR’s Fireside chats and other speeches work and also allowed him –by the end of 100 days—to have key programs for economic recovery set to go.

I particularly enjoyed the insights that Alter provided into how FDR and Eleanor together –intentionally and unintentionally- reshaped the role of the First Lady and why they did so. Alter also tells many of the standard Roosevelt stories from this period of time and delves into some of the more debatable issues (e.g. how much of various speeches were written by FDR himself and how much by several other members of his staff). Every once in a while, though, Alter’s comments got to me. At one point he said that, because FDR put Frances Perkins as a member of his cabinet and had sympathy for women’s rights, he might be considered “the first woman president.” You’ve got to be kidding me! Despite a few comments like these, the book was well-worth the time, giving me now only some new information on FDR’s first 100 days of presidency, but also new insight on current decisions being made by congress and the newly elected president.

From Spin to Axis

For the last two months, I’ve been working my way through Spin, Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo Award winning book, and its sequel, Axis. Both are great reads. The first, focusing on earth after it’s been surrounded by a barrier and the stars go out, also delves into how people react to major changes in life that seem outside of their control and the relationship of earth and time in our lives.

Axis takes up where Spin leaves off, introducing us to Equatoria, which can be reached through the Arch portal that Tyler Dupree (the narrator of Spin) and Diane Lawton go through toward the end of Spin. Except for one character from Spin who appears briefly in Axis, we’re introduced to a whole new cast of characters who are making their own guesses about who/what the hypotheticals are (if they exist at all) and how to respond to them. At times Axis reads like a good thriller, at times it’s a love story, and at times it’s a fantasy-- and almost all the way through it’s also a compelling, nuanced study in human psychology.

I’m not sure when Vortex, the last book in the trilogy, is due out, but I’ll be looking forward to it. And luckily, in the meanwhile, there’s Brisingr, the last volume in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance trilogy, to read!

Summer Reading

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve sat waiting for Becca to come out of various activities or been at airports waiting for planes to take off, I’ve finally had the chance to get a lot of “summer reading” done.

I’ve made through all four of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy. I really enjoyed the new world developed in Uglies and elaborated upon in Pretties a lot. By the time I got to Specials however, I’d sort of lost interest with what would happen to Tally Youngblood and her friend Shay since that volume didn’t seem to contain any more creative developments about the world in which they were living. Extras was exactly the opposite. The idea the fourth volume took on was a very creative one, but I just couldn’t get into it because none of the lead characters (all different from those in the first three books of the trilogy) really interested me. I’m glad, though, that I stayed with Extras to the end since the last part of it was the best.

I finally got the time to read Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels, a novel that does a superb job of capturing the personalities involved in the decisions at the Battle of Gettysburg and gives a much less textbooky feeling to the issues that drove the Civil War. I also read Rise to Revolution, the book about the beginnings of the Revolutionary War written by his son, Jeff Shaara. Of the two, I think I preferred the latter, though not because it was better written, but because I enjoy the time of Adams and Franklin with its international issues more than that of Buford, Longstreet, and Lee with their more narrow national focus.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad was a delightful change of pace! I loved the way she developed the story around the hanging of the twelve maids, played with the symbolisms throughout the Odyssey and brought several of the characters who were mere placeholders in Homer to life in her book. If I ever teach the Odyssey again, I think I’ll use it as a supplemental reading.

The Invention of Everything Else

Throughout the summer, whether at Maryknoll, sitting watching the laughing gulls at Chincoteague, or waiting at the train station for Becca, I’ve spent small snatches of time on Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else. Today I finished it and I’m not sure whether I loved it or am indifferent to it. That’s because the book is so uneven.

The dazzling and creative descriptions of life in New York City in 1943 that make up the background of much of the book were well-done, drawing the reader into what life at that time much have been like. And I found Nikola Tesla, who for most of the book, is an old man holed up in the Hotel New Yorker with his pigeons, fascinating. I really enjoyed both Hunt’s imaginings of what his inner thoughts were along with the flashbacks to his being exploited by Thomas Edison or beaten out of the Nobel Prize by Marchese Marconi, hanging out with Mark Twain, or sitting in the park with his pigeons.

But what I didn’t care much about was the other main character, Louisa Dewell, who is a 24-year-old main working at the hotel. I kept waiting to get interested in her life—in her relationship with her father and crazy uncle who wants to travel through time, in her romantic interests, in her pigeons, or even in her relationship with Tesla. It never happened. (And I’d expected the opposite, since reviews I read had said that Hunt was much better at describing the thoughts and feelings of the 24-year-old than the 86-year-old.)

So I'll have to ruminate some more on whether or not the book was worth my time. Right now I'm just not sure.

Tarot Tales

Over the past month or so, I’ve been reading two books that focus on Tarot cards—which I know almost nothing about—in various ways.

The first was Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps, which is about as quirky as the other Williams’ books that I’ve read in the past. Williams seems to assume the traditional Hermetic principle “As above, so below; as below, so above” in his storyline, so that what happens in the material world and the spiritual world, which seem dualistically separate, are interwoven and parallel. In order to understand the book at all (I still don’t feel like I’ve understood it well), I’ve spent time learning a bit about the significance of each of the Tarot cards that appear as the plot of the book develops. The ways in which Tarot cards reflect Jungian archetypes particularly intrigued me. I’ve also reread each chapter at least twice, trying to pick out what Williams is doing with the Tarot cards and with the story of Christianity, which is also woven deeply into the plot. Williams’ use of the dance and of hands as metaphors throughout the novel is intriguing since those are both favorite images of mine. His description of prayer—especially a scene where Sybil is in contemplation—also stood out. Perhaps that’s because Joanna and Sybil are both marvelously constructed, strong characters that have made me think again and again about the meaning of mystery and love.

Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies was the second book that had Tarot cards at its center. I’ve been working my way through Calvino’s writings little by little and it happened to be the next book in the pile so it was quite by chance that I began it as I was about half way through The Greater Trumps. Calvino uses the Tarot in an entirely different way, using the images on the face of the cards to tell the stories of the lives of people who are caught together staying at a castle or a tavern. The book as a whole is sort of a Canterbury Tales using Tarot cards in place of poetry. While the stories Calvino created were intriguing, the chapters I enjoyed best were those in which he retold well-known tales—of Faust, Hamlet, or King Lear for example—using only the images found on the Marseilles tarots.

Six Memos

Despite a weekend full of almost non-stop errands, I managed to stay up late and find some quiet time to finish reading Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. These five “memos” –Calvino never got to the sixth, which was to be called “Consistency”—were written to be delivered as the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, but Calvino had a sudden stroke and died just before he was to deliver them. Like much of Calvino’s fiction, they are a marvel of words that capture in their style the very essence of the five characteristics of writing that Calvino is celebrating—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—qualities that give us “the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.”

Calvino not only gives us autobiographical glimpses into his life and what he sees as the meaning of his various works, but he also illustrates his literary principles he’d like to carried throughout the 21^st century with such diverse sources as Borges, Bruno, Dante, Dickinson, Felix the Cat, Ovid, the Cabala, fairy tales, and Galileo. The reader gets a sense of which books and authors mean the most to him as well as the beautiful images in each work that Calvino cherishes and why he does so. When discussing lightness, for example, his beautifully constructed yet playful analysis of both Dante and Ovid made me want to rush out and reread both authors’ works.

Beyond what he’s trying to tell us about literature, Calvino’s writing appeals to me for its reverent approach to nature, an approach that I suspect comes from having two botanists as parents. While Calvino is in very many ways a postmodern writer who writes imaginary, in some cases futuristic, stories, his description of the world around him so often captures the passion of a man who has spent much time contemplating and loving the natural world in all its particularities.

And then there is Calvino’s quirky but encyclopedic breadth of reading and knowledge. His interest in tarot cards and the way they reflect both the Cabala and archetypal ideas which he says he's built into The Castle of Crossed Destinies (which seems to overlap nicely with what I'm finding as I read Charles' Williams' The Greater Trumps) makes me excited about reading it next.

Reader, I...

I’ve just finished Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a truly unusual book from its very first paragraph:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone."

While purportedly a novel in which two readers encounter parts of ten very different manuscripts, each written in a very different style— like Borges, like a pulp western, like Chekhov, and I’m sure given Calvino as the author, like lots of other authors I didn’t recognize— and each ending abruptly just as the reader becomes hooked in the story, If on a winter’s night actually seems like an archetype for a postmodern novel, being part short story, part philosophy, part novella, and part the reader reflecting on reading as the reader. Though I found myself losing interest in the individual manuscripts and eventually in the intertextual plot (if that’s the right word for the connecting storyline that’s not meant to be part of the story), the exploration of what it means to be reading—for example, the ways in which, no matter how much folks might try to overcome it, reading is a solitary activity; the relationship between a reader and a writer; how translations can change or lose the original author’s meaning—kept me reading if on a winter’s night through to the very end. All in all, I think If on a winter’s night a traveler might best be seen as the verbal equivalent of M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hand.

Friday Five: Read any good books lately?

For this week's "Friday Five", RevGalBlogPals asks five questions about books. Here they are with my answers:

1. What book have you read in the last six months that has really stayed with you? Why?
   Three very different books stand out from the past six months.
   
   They are Cormac McCarthy's The Road (for the stark beauty of the relationship between the father and the son), Shane Claiborne's The Irresistable Revolution (for its challenge to all of us about the role that Christians are called to play-- and could really play-- in today's society), and Geoffrey Thorne's Sword of Damocles (for its presentation of a universe that represents real diversity).
   


2. What is one of your favorite childhood books? One? You've got to be kidding.
   Among favorites would be James Garfield's Follow My Leader (about a boy who is blinded and his seeing eye dog), Ruth Gannett's Elmer and the Dragon, Ethelyn Parkinson's series of books about Rupert Piper, and the Nancy Drew mysteries. And then there are my favorite books from my children's childhoods-- Where the Wild Things Are, Goodnight Moon, and The Clown of God.
   


3. Do you have a favorite book of the Bible? Do tell!
   It'd be a toss up between Jeremiah, Job, and the gospels (though over the past year or two I've become more and more fond of Acts as well).
   
   
4. What is one book you could read again and again?
   I reread lots of poetry, especially by Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, as well as books by Nikos Kazantzakis, Elie Wiesel, Annie Dillard, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
   


5. Is there a book you would suggest for Lenten reading? What is it and why?
   During Lent I often dip into the writing of Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and Rumi.
   

And because we all love bonus questions, if you were going to publish a book what would it be? Who would you want to write the jacket cover blurb expounding on your talent?
Over the years I've imagined writing lots of books-- among them a book exploring the early 13th century and how the lives of Francis of Assisi, Rumi and perhaps the Jewish mystics of the time interacted with religious institutions of the day, a novel that leaps off from a family mystery that's never been solved, a murder mystery that takes place in both a virtual world and the "real world" at the same time-- but I've never had the luxury of undisturbed time to write any of them, much less thought of who would do the blurb for the jacket cover.

In Defense of Food

Last year, I slowly made my way through Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and learned a lot as I read. I followed it up with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. All of it seemed to go hand-in-hard with our move into making our own jams and cheese and our addition of new vegetables to those grown in our garden. So, when Pollan’s new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto was announced for an early January 2008 release date, I preordered it. On the day it arrived, I sat down and read it—and was a bit disappointed.

It’s not that the general content of the book isn’t good; it is. And it’s not that Pollan doesn’t raise important issues; he does. It’s just that a lot of In Defense of Food contains simple stuff that we already know—don’t snack, eat food your great-grandmother would recognize (as opposed, for example, to Gogurts), and eat at the dining room table. Pollan may be right that people “would not have bought this book and read this far into it if your food culture was intact and healthy” but I’d hoped that, while adding its pragmatic focus, In Defense might have a bit more of the depth to it that Ominvore’s Dilemma did.

In his earlier books and essays on food, Pollan has often been called an elitist and some of that view continues to be felt in this book. At one point, for example, after arguing as Kingsolver does that it’s important to return to local, basic food, Pollan suggests we foragein the wild for our salad greens. Where in Westchester, for example, should I do that?

And yet, despite its shortcomings, In Defense of Food calls us back to some important truths—that trying to reduce food to its nutritional components misses a lot of what matters about eating, that we should “eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”, and that we should restore civility to the traditional idea of the meal, replacing fast food and eating out with the time and money it takes to cook and share a meal around a home dinner table. Such reminders, coupled with Pollan's enjoyable and easy-to-read style of writing makes the book entertaining and worthwhile.

The Cave

On the flight back from Portugal, I had the chance to read Jose Saramago’s The Cave, a novel that has a simple story with a predictable plot that’s set in the near future. It can, however, be read on a whole series of levels. The story centers around a 76-year-old potter, Cipriano Algor, who lives with his daughter and son-in-law in a simple home where he makes pottery in the same manner that his father and grandfather did. Unlike his ancestors, however, he sells his pottery exclusively to the Center, which Saramago presents as the ultimate corporation/shopping mall/ modern residential complex. The Center suddenly refuses to carry any more of Algor’s pottery, so he has to figure out some other way to support himself. As he’s dealing with that quandary, his son-in-law, Marcal, who is a security guard for the Center, is offered an apartment in the Center as part of his job promotion. But as he loses his connections with his pottery and his sense of himself as a potter, he gains new connections—with his daughter, with his recently met dog, Found, and ultimately even with his son-in-law. Algor struggles with whether or not to move with his family or carry on a new form of business until the Center pulls out of its offer on his new products as well. Feeling there is no other choice, he joins his family in their move to the apartment and then sneaks down to where his son-in-law is stationed one evening and makes a startling discovery.

The storyline, clearly meant to be an allegory, is not what stands out in The Cave. Instead it’s Saramago’s stream-of-consciousness style that captures the reader as he fills in the characters’ motivations and reactions to events around them or interrupts the story with side discussions about storytelling, family foibles, or the meaning of literature. Amidst it all there are retellings of creation myths, the story of Adam and Eve, and Plato’s myth of the cave, which is retold several different times in different contexts. In several places The Cave and The Matrix echoed off each other in interesting ways. All of this is going on while Saramago is of course also making a point regularly found in his writing, critiquing the evils of corporate capitalism and consumer culture.

If I was allowed to choose my own texts for courses I teach, The Cave would be ideal to assign to my introductory philosophy class that spends 2/3rds of the semester reading Plato as a postmodern reading of the ancient myth. It'd give them a sense of how the dialogues they've been studying continue to live in newer settings. With standardized texts, though, all I can do is mention it as worth reading when we get to the part of the course on The Republic.

The Future of the Supreme Court

I’ve just finished Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, one of the books I’d asked for for Christmas. While I’d read his New Yorker account of the Martha Stewart trial, I’ve had no other experience with his writing before this. On the back of the book’s jacket, Doris Goodwin, whose writing on Lincoln I’ve enjoyed, calls The Nine “a remarkable riveting book… (where) the justices and their inner world are brought vividly to life” and she’s right. The book not only captures the history of key individual cases and the workings of the court, but also gives a strong sense of the personalities and quirks of each specific justice. Throughout the book, Toobin makes the ways in which extreme conservatism has shaped the justices’ decisions—in the 90s by causing Republican appointed Justices O’Connor and Kennedy to move further left in response to the extremism, but then, since 2005 and the appointment of the very conservative Alito and the almost as conservative (though clearly more personable) Roberts, by expanding the role of the executive and ignoring the principle of stare decisis in recent cases.

The Nine made me fonder of Tony Kennedy and his penchant for international law than I’d been in the past and upheld my appreciation for some of what Sandra Day O’Connor accomplished for women (though I still can’t warm up to some of her individual states’ rights rulings) while reinforcing my dislike for Nino Scalia. And it made clear how the only factor that will determine whether the Supreme Court will continue to limit and ultimately reverse such decisions as Miranda, Brown, and Roe is a political one. It makes this next presidential election even more crucial than before, since several of the justices— including the more liberal Ginsburg and Stevens—will probably resign during the next eight years.

Resquilleur

Last night, since Heroes is currently in a lull “between seasons”, I decide to sit down and read straight through Bernard Chenez’s Le Resquilleur du Louvre. It’s a relatively short novel—a little more than 100 pages—about a man who has lost several blue collar jobs in a row and finds himself homeless. Because he loves art and because he’s looking for “a shelter for the soul”, he decides to make his home in the Louvre. He makes his home in a room used to store workmen’s supplies, lining up some wooden cases and felt blankets to make a mattress and using bubble wrap as a comforter. As he gets to know the room a bit, he discovers a museum employee’s schedule and badge and begins to use the latter to travel around the museum, ostensibly doing work while in reality finding ways to acquire pocket change and see the works of art.

Not only does the book give an interesting view of the daily workings of the Louvre, but it also interweaves famous art –especially the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet and the Barbizon school (of which he –and I suspect the author—is particularly fond) with flashbacks in the life of and moods of the resquilleur. (Neither ‘squatter’ nor ‘gate-crasher’ seem a good translation of resquilleur, if it’s trying to capture this man’s personality and life in the museum).

Chenez writes the novel in a stream of consciousness style that takes a little while to get into, but grows on you as you read. The one thing I found myself wishing as I read was that pictures of the actual parts of and works from the Louvre that Chenez has the resquilleur refer to were included with the story line. Some of the art—La Gioconda or Winged Victory, for example—and their locations in the Louvre are easy to recall, but even though I’ve been to the Louvre several times, the actual locations of some of the other work (including Millet) don’t stand out in my mind. Even a map of the Louvre or thumbnails of the art would help that.

Chemins de fer

I’m not quite sure yet what I think of Benoit Duteurtre’s Chemins de fer. The storyline of the novel is straightforward. A fiftyish woman, Florence, splits her time between Paris (where she runs a public relations company) and a small charming village in the mountainous part of the Vosges, most often spending weekdays in the city and weekends in the country. She is, that is, a rurbaine. (I’m not sure if there’s an English word that has the same meaning.) She loves her modern, exciting life in the city, but she also treasures her time chopping wood, listening to the radio, sitting in the pub, and living alone in the family home she visited as a child. Little by little, however, the modern begins to encroach in her “traditional” village, first with electric street lights and then with recycling bins. At the same time, the SNCF first lets the secondary rail line Florence rides between her homes deteriorate and then cuts back on the services as part of their “modern improvements.” As these changes happen, Florence’s journal entries (the format for most of the novel) express not only her upset at the intrusive changes and then zeal for keeping things the way they were while also capturing how the locals look forward to what they see as the beginning of progress and perhaps even increased tourist business.

Duteurtre’s writing can at times be very beautiful, especially when he is describing some of the rural scenes. He also does a good job capturing some of the tension of Florence’s choice to live between these two worlds, one in which she happily accepts and benefits from (and ultimately even advocates for) technological progress and one in which she detests the way in which she sees them ruining the authenticity of her country home.

Because of that, Duteurtre had me with him almost until the end of the book. Almost. When he switched back to the third person narrator (a device he’d used at the very beginning of the book) to give us the last dreamlike scene, he lost me. I’m sure he meant for the ending to play out on several levels but it just didn’t work for me. I put down the book very disappointed in its conclusion. What I haven’t yet decided is whether or not those last eight pages are such a disappointment that I wouldn’t recommend the book to others or whether the well-done descriptive scenes (and the generally enjoyable storyline that raises an issue we must all struggle with on one level or another) outweigh it.

Church in the World

I recently finished reading Brian McLaren’s new book Everything Must Change. In it McLaren seems to be taking the next step in his emerging church work, moving from an emphasis on those who will be in the church to what the church should be doing. He calls on the church to refocus the metanarrative of Jesus in a way that moves from an individualistic, “me and my soul on its way to heaven” approach to a more societal “me and my community involved in building the kingdom of God on earth” approach. This basic story would then move from being a place where we don’t focus on ourselves as imperfect and the world around us as something bad to be afraid of, but on ourselves as hopeful, creative changing people of God who live in a benevolent world that provides for our basic needs if we’ll let it.

McLaren critiques the theocapitalist worldview that the modern church has taken, emphasizing its four laws:

1)progress through rapid growth;

2) security through possession and consumption;

3) salvation through competition alone; and

4) freedom to prosper through unaccountable corporations.

Then McLaren contrasts those laws with Jesus’ gospel:

1) the law of good deeds for common good, where the aim is not to build up capital but to emphasize care for people, especially the poor;

2) the law of satisfaction through gratitude and sharing. In this section McLaren shows how, beginning with the primeval narratives in Genesis, evil and consumption are closely linked. (Adam and Eve, says McLaren, get in trouble for wanting and then consuming the fruit. Abel and Cain get into a class war based on kinds of consumption. Etc.) Gratitude in contrast, becomes an act of defiance, celebrating not what we want to consume but what we have and are content with.

3) the law of salvation through seeking justice; and

4) the law of freedom to prosper by building better communities.

Toward the end of the book he also does a nice refocusing of the New Jerusalem away from a “the world is bad, we’ve got to end it and start over” apocalypse toward a more transformative eschatology.

I didn’t find much that was new in McLaren’s book, though I agree wholeheartedly with much of his argument. What I did find, as I read, however, was a yearning for the presence of congregations that were consistently speaking to the overconsumption crisis. Especially during this church stewardship season, they seem so rare, that I find myself wondering what would happen if congregations put even half the energy that they put into raising funds for their budgets into doing similar work on combating overconsumption.

unChristian

A comment from a classmate last week reminded me of a book I got earlier in the month, began to read, and then put aside when I got pressed for time. In the last few days I’ve gone back to it and finished reading it. It’s called unchristian and is written by David Kinnaman, the president of the evangelical research group The Barna Institute. The book writes up the findings of a fairly extensive research project done with Mosaics (born between 1984 and 2002) and Busters (born between 1965-1983) examining their views of Christianity.

The results of the study weren’t very surprising to me but are a real indictment of 20^th and 21^st century Christianity, both evangelical and progressive. Teens and young adults (in or outside the church) are critical of contemporary Christianity for its being (from the greatest perception down) antihomosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical. Christianity--or better, Christians and their congregations-- are insensitive to others, boring, and out of touch with reality. And these opinions are not coming from teens and 20s who have never experienced what Christianity is offering. More than four out of every five have gone to church at some time in their life, though few would say they have ever experienced God through the church. (I wonder if that figure would really be very different among those who are older. I somehow doubt it.)

So what do we do about the message we’re conveying (and the lives we’re living that don’t reflect the teachings of Jesus)? While Kinnaman offers several suggestions – learning to love those who are not members of the “insiders” club, being genuine and transparent, demonstrating loving relationships both in and outside the church, making faith connect with a changing world-- to me a line in the conclusion becomes the clearest and most poignant solution: “It comes down to this: we must become Christlike again.”

A War of Gifts

It's been about two years since there's been anything new to read in the Ender Wiggens science fiction saga. But last week Tor books finally came out with Orson Scott Card's short novel A War of Gifts, which not not only deals with new members of the battle school squad that Ender is in, but also introduces the theme of how and when it's appropriate to practice religious observances from a religious tradition not shared by everybody. The story line is pretty straightforward A boy raised in a very conservative form of Christianity is, though a conscientious objector/pacifist, forced to atttend battle school and, while there, gets upset about the fact that (against school rules) several of the other members of his squad are exchanging Santa Claus presents during the month of December. I got the book as soon as it came out and read through it in two brief settings, thoroughly enjoying the way in which Card dealt in sensitive, nuanced ways with issues of religious fundamentalism and religious tolerance.

The Plague

I’ve just finished rereading Albert Camus’ The Plague. This time through, as I read the latter part of the book I seemed to hear it echoed in Joni Mitchell’s newish song “If I Had a Heart”. I continue to be so moved by Tarrou’s lautobiographical speech in Part 4 and by the later reflection of Dr. Rieux – a quote that I’ve carried with me over all the years since my first reading as a teenager and has resonated each time I've reread the book-- that “…a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”

On Her Way to Sainthood?

I’ve just finished Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light and feel as ambivalent to the book as I do to Mother Teresa herself. Based on everything I’d heard about the book—one reviewer even compared Come Be My Light to Merton’s Seven-Storey Mountain and Augustine’s Confessions-- I’d expected a collection of letters and diary entries of Mother Teresa showing her struggles starting the Missionaries of Charity and wresting with the dark nights of the soul the reviews said she endured. I’d hoped it would give me a different view of this woman so many consider a saint. Instead what I found in the book were short excerpts from her letters and journals surrounded by running commentary from the priest who is making the case for Mother Teresa’s canonization, all of which takes the tone of “even in her struggles with faith she was a saint.”

Although I wanted to put the book down over and over, I read it through to the end, hoping that somewhere along the way that I’d begin to feel some sympathy for this woman. Instead what I found was a woman with a huge ego—even the quotation at the beginning of the book (a quotation much overused throughout the book) makes that clear when Mother Teresa writes “if I ever become a saint…” No matter how faithful we struggle to be, how many of us think so well of ourselves that we’d imagine becoming a saint? Throughout the book, it feels like Mother Teresa is posturing all the time, talking about how unworthy she is while really not believing it herself. Her concern seems to be, not that she has felt no faith or relationship with God for many years of her life, but that others might get a hold of her writing or learn of this lack on her part, becoming disillusioned with her. I’m not a big Christopher Hitchens fan at all, but an objective reading of Mother Teresa’s writing (if you ignore Kolodiejchuk’s attempt to couch all of the texts in “the lives of a faithful saint”) is found in Hitchens’ summary that Mother Teresa was “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”.