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Book Reviews

Prostitutes, Virgins and Mothers: Questioning Teachings About Biblical Women

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In Prostitutes, Virgins and Mothers: Questioning Teachings About Biblical Women (Personhood Press, $16.95), Dr. Paula Trimble-Familetti sets out to do nothing less than overturn six thousand years of patriarchy, misogyny, and marginalization of women within Judaism and Christianity.

Does she succeed? Of course not: no single book can undo what has become so ingrained in our culture and religion. But she does add a powerful voice to the on-going fight for gender equality within the church, providing an accessible, thorough and Christocentric presentation of feminist theology.

Dr. Trimble-Familetti’s book tackles the issue head-on by re-telling, re-contextualizing, and re-interpreting the stories of virtually every woman in the Bible. Her calling to tell these stories is a passionate one:

I am fed up with traditional interpretations of Scripture. I believe there are different ways to interpret the Scriptures, interpretations from the perspective of a twenty-first century woman, a perspective vastly different from that of a first-, second- or any other -century man. I write this book because my God, my Creator, in whose image and likeness I am created, has called me to write it.

Trimble-Familetti crafts first-person narratives that wrestle with the issues and challenges faced by women in the Bible. Though the accounts are necessarily speculative, she nevertheless strives to retain fidelity to the text as we have received it as well as the socio-historical context in… [Read more…] about Prostitutes, Virgins and Mothers: Questioning Teachings About Biblical Women

A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the poetry of Spencer Reece

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Poet and Episcopal priest Spencer Reece’s recent book, The Road To Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24.00), is a warm and generous collection of narrative poems that explores life with humble insight and restrained brilliance.

Reece writes about his family’s history, a relationship formed in a coming-out support group, friendship with his AA sponsor, seminary life, and his experiences as a hospital and prison chaplain. Poetry about love and death and God risks succumbing to saccharine sentimentality, but Reece approaches these subjects with an honest clarity and gentle lyricism that is refreshing. Re-reading passages in preparation for this review, I found myself again and again being pulled into these poems, poems that after only a few readings already feel intimately familiar.

Lines such as these from the book’s opening poem “ICU” linger and haunt:

In the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,
blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes.
A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,
their eyelids the film on old water in a well,
their faces resigned in plastic attics,
their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.
It is correct to love even at the wrong time.
On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one
like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:
I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

Reece’s poetry is accessible without being trite, full of evocative imagery, intriguing personalities, and compelling stories. This collection is a thoughtful exploration of the… [Read more…] about A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the poetry of Spencer Reece

Got Religion?

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Defying the potentially tedious nature of analyzing the decline in religious participation among young people, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s new book, “Got Religion?: How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back,” offers an engaging blend of statistical analysis and on-the-scene reporting about the rapidly shifting demographics of American religious involvement.

Riley spent time getting to know the leadership and participants in eight religious groups that are trying to succeed where so many others are failing. She provides an inside view into how these groups are addressing the decline in youth participation by exploring the ministries of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, MECA: Muslims Establishing Communities in America, the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), Birthright Israel, Mormon Young Single Adult (YSA) Wards, the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens and Charlotte ONE.

All of these organizations are seeking to foster a sense of community, to bring young people together, to allow personal relationships to grow and to lay the groundwork for even greater things. This is the underlying theme of Riley’s book: how can religion create and sustain community when young people are increasingly abandoning these institutions as hopelessly boring, irrelevant and out-of-touch?

Unfortunately, Riley treads softly when it comes to divisive issues impacting the American religious landscape: marriage equality, abortion, women’s rights and homosexuality… [Read more…] about Got Religion?

The Cross and Gendercide

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In the United States one out of every four women has experienced domestic violence and one out of six has experience attempted or completed rape.

Throughout the world, millions of girls have undergone the brutal practice of female genital mutilation. Millions of women have been forced to undergo sex-selective abortions. Millions more have experienced the horror of sex trafficking.

More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.

These statistics are the very definition of gendercide: the intentional effort to harm and injure millions of women and girls based on their gender. Elizabeth Gerhardt’s new book The Cross and Gendercide: A Theological Response to Global Violence Against Women and Girls offers a Christian response to the heart-wrenching plight of women across the globe by engaging with the cultural, religious, historical and political context of this violence and offering a proposal for how the church can work toward ending these heinous crimes.

Gerhardt readily acknowledges that Christianity has failed to meaningfully engage the problem of gendercide. Within the church violence against women is all too often treated as an ethical issue that receives only token acknowledgment. And though there is clearly value in pragmatic and direct responses to violence against women, given the pervasive and systemic nature of these crimes… [Read more…] about The Cross and Gendercide

Which story are you in?

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“Which story are you in? Have you chosen your story wisely? Have you challenged the story you tell yourself, if it doesn’t align with reality?”

So asks C.S. Lewis during an imagined lunchtime conversation in Alister McGrath’s new book “If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis.” (Tyndale House, 2014) McGrath uses Lewis’s writings and biography as a springboard to explore important questions of life and faith.

In chapter 3, “A Story-Shaped World,” he examines how and why Lewis came to write the Chronicles of Narnia and the importance of the Narnia stories as representations of the Christian story.

Lewis saw stories as a means to better understand the deep truths of life and as a way of “sneak[ing] past the ‘watchful dragons’ of a dogmatic rationalism.” For Lewis, stories are able to make theological ideas intelligible, making them “real” in a way that dry exposition never could.

As a young man Lewis struggled to understand what story he inhabited and what relevance Christianity had to his life. It was through his friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he came to understand Christianity as a “true myth,” a story that “unifies and transcends” the “fragmentary and imperfect insights” of our lives.

McGrath says that “For Tolkien, the Gospels narrate ‘a story of a larger kind,’ which embraces what is good, true, and beautiful in the great myths of literature, expressing it as ‘a far-off gleam or echo of the evangelium in the real world.’” It was this conception of Christianity that captured… [Read more…] about Which story are you in?

What can movies tell us about the afterlife?

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What do our stories tell us about who we are? What do our songs, our books, our paintings and our movies reveal about the reality of our existence? Do our artistic expressions point toward deeper truths that lie beyond the merely physical, or is our creative output only a subjective reflection of our innate longings and desires?

In “Death at the Movies: Hollywood’s Guide to the Hereafter” (Quest Books), Lyn and Tom Davis Genelli wrestle with these questions through an exploration of cinema’s metaphysical side, examining what our movies have to say about life, death and beyond.

The Genellis focus on “transit” films: movies that explore a “transition or change, as to a spiritual existence at death.” (3) In their understanding, “the essence of the transit film is to show characters learning and developing, mastering their limitations in an essential way.” (80) These cinematic narratives thereby function as “vehicles for the subconscious infusion of perennial mystical/spiritual concepts about death.” (3)

The authors think that such films reveal important metaphysical truths and set out to show “how popular motion pictures have intuited transit through their visions of death and the afterlife, and how those visions play out their largely unconscious role in the evolution and guidance of human consciousness toward understanding the meaning and purpose of death.” (3)

The Genellis walk us through the metaphysical insights of movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life,… [Read more…] about What can movies tell us about the afterlife?

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Challenge to the Church

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“Race, as both a social construct and a visible reality, is the gigantic elephant in the American living room that some insist will disappear if only we would just ignore it.” So says Edward Gilbreath in the opening pages of his book “Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church” (InterVarsity Press).

Gilbreath goes on to explore the history of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.’s pivotal role in that movement and the ongoing challenges that America still faces regarding race. Through the lens of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Gilbreath offers an extended reflection on where we’ve come from and where we still have to go in terms of race and the church.

In his Birmingham letter, King opined:

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Those timeless words offer a challenge that many responded to in 1963, but has all too often been ignored by today’s Christians. Gilbreath wrestles with that loss, interacting with present-day civil rights and church leaders and examining the challenges we have overcome and the lessons that history can teach us.

“Birmingham Revolution” isn’t… [Read more…] about Martin Luther King Jr.'s Challenge to the Church

Review: "The Showings of Julian of Norwich"

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Julian of Norwich freaks me out. Are her writings actual supernatural revelations from God as conveyed to a 14th-century English woman? Or merely fever-induced hallucinations that should be set aside in favor of a safer orthodoxy? Reading Julian and pondering these possibilities leaves me with a sense of unease and exhilaration not far removed from the feeling induced by that delicious pause at the top of a roller coaster.

What weight should we give to the spiritual visions of a woman living in the Middle Ages? If someone today had such experiences, we’d refer her to a psychiatrist, not pore over her words seeking spiritual truth. Does God really reveal himself in such ways? Is there divine truth contained in these 600-year-old words?

Mystical versions of Christianity confound me — they’re simply not part of my personal experience — and I think it’s wise to evaluate such accounts of the supernatural with a generous dose of skepticism. But despite my misgivings, Julian’s thoughts still resonate with me, as they have with so many others over the centuries. Her words merit critical reflection and offer important challenges to common conceptions of God.

Julian’s biography is thin — we don’t even know her real name, only that she was born in England in the mid-14th century, and that, at the age of 30, she was taken ill, and while near-death she experienced sixteen visions, or “showings” from God. She went on to become an anchoress, dedicating her life to God through… [Read more…] about Review: "The Showings of Julian of Norwich"

Review: "The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World"

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In the West, Islam is popularly depicted as a religion rooted in hate and violence, as a belief system inherently antagonistic towards other religions — particularly Christianity — and as synonymous with terrorism and totalitarian theocratic rule.

But there is another face of Islam, a face that garners little attention on the evening news and is virtually ignored by those who traffic in — and profit from — divisive fear mongering. This is an Islam practiced by millions around the world, an Islam defined not by violence but by respect, an Islam that remains true to its founder’s revelation.

In The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World (Angelico Press), John Andrew Morrow sets out to offer concrete textual reasons, from the Prophet Mohammed himself, for an understanding of Islam that moves beyond stereotypes and reasserts the truly inclusive foundations of Islamic belief.

Morrow presents six covenants written by Muhammad to Christian communities and argues that these letters and treaties, which proclaim and define peaceful and mutually respectful relationships with Christians, have the potential to serve as a foundational source of Islamic belief and practice, on equal footing with the Koran and the hadiths.

Bringing modern historical scholarship and textual criticism to bear in his study of these rare and largely forgotten documents, Morrow refutes the notion that Muslims and Christians necessarily stand at odds with one another,… [Read more…] about Review: "The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World"