Seven for Summer
It’s sandal weather and our West Coast reviewers, who can dip their toes in the Pacific, have some summer reads for us.
Julie Lane Gay is a writer and editor who lives in Vancouver. She and her husband, Craig, attend St John’s Vancouver where they also teach catechism.
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
Ecco Books, 2023
When I overheard someone comment that Remarkably Bright Creatures was “Charlotte’s Web or Babe, the Pig for grown-ups,” I was intrigued.
Sice then I have also heard it’s a great gift for fans of the 2020 award-winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher.
Marcellus McSquiggles, a 60-pound giant Pacific Octopus (three times the size of the octopus in the documentary), lives at the Sowell Bay Aquarium off the coast of Washington. He’s brilliant, funny, wise, curmudgeonly. He can “remember each and every human face that pauses to gaze at [his] tank” and his eight legs can accomplish an impressive range of feats. Unfortunately, Marcellus’s brilliance can’t increase the eighteen minutes he can survive out of water – or the 160 days he figures he has left of his 1460-day lifespan.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is the story of struggling souls who find goodness in surprising places. Tova Sullivan works as a night-shift cleaner at the aquarium and she knows which wolf eels will slither to the window of their tank when she cleans it. The widow doesn’t need the job but her work keeps her from ruminating over her adored 18-year-old son Erik who went missing years earlier. Cameron Cassmore is a young, drifting, musician-wanna-be who comes to Sowell Bay in a derelict truck to find his long-lost father. He does need a job. Ethan, a Scottish storekeeper and rock-n-roll expert, longs for a place for his love to land.
Part mystery, part resilience-tale – with some fascinating science writing woven in – Remarkably Bright Creatures is an octopus’s tale of playing detective and healing hearts.
A Short Guide to Reading the Bible Better
George H. Guthrie
G&H Publishing, 2022
General knowledge of the Bible has dropped in the last forty years; long-time church attenders often can’t explain which Gospel has the Sermon on the Mount, or where to find the Ten Commandments. Equally concerning, many Christians can’t tell you about how to read the Bible. Why does the Psalmist yell? How do we make sense of the differences among the four gospels?
Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart’s classic How to Read the Bible for all its Worth has been the ideal place to start, both for biblical knowledge and to make sense of Scripture’s context, genres, audiences and word choice. Its fourth edition was published in 2017. But in 2023, even this classic often assumes too much for beginners.
A new place to start – that assumes no prior knowledge – is New Testament scholar George H. Guthrie’s A Short Guide to Reading the Bible Better. It’s welcoming, easy to read – even fun. Guthrie introduces us to reading the Bible “relationally, rhythmically,” how to understand its literary context, “how a passage of Scripture fits and functions in the Bible.” In unpacking Jesus’s words, “For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” Guthrie writes:
We can understand that basic meaning of Jesus’s words in Luke 23:29 without knowing he was speaking of a specific historical event, the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans, but we get more of its force, the power of his words, if we understand more of its historical background and especially what he knew was coming. What Jesus was saying, in effect, was, “I am dying on a cross today, but if you think this is bad, you haven’t seen anything yet!”
This short introductory guide is stocked with discussion questions and practices – ones that lead us not only to becoming more adept at reading Scripture, but more eager and equipped to do so.
A Place at the Table: Faith, Hope and Hospitality
Miranda Harris and Jo Swinney
Hodder and Stoughton, 2022
Books with “hospitality” in the title make me uneasy. Even though I am keenly aware that we are all desperate for it, I’m better at cooking and cleaning than welcoming.
Thankfully, Miranda Harris and Jo Swinney’s book A Place at the Table is good at welcoming and, better still, there are no clichés, no shoulds. They are a likeable, humble mother-and-daughter team.
Yet A Place at the Table is more than a foray into the making of meals and welcoming the stranger. It’s a collection of personal reflections on daily life as the two women follow the way of Christ in their home, whether they’re weary, hopeful, needing to forgive, hoping to encourage. Writing about an older man who had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and apprehensively came over for a meal, Miranda watched her four-year-old daughter as “she tucked her small hand through his arm and laid her head against his shoulder. I realized this wordless gesture communicated more powerfully than anything I could have learnt in a hundred counselling courses.”
Miranda Harris, who died tragically in 2019, and her husband, Peter, are the founders of A Rocha, a Christian conservation organization that began in Portugal in 1983 and now has field study centres across the globe. Her journal reflections also include sage insights about starting an organization from scratch and the serious effects of climate change.
Jo, who’s an excellent writer, addresses the dilemmas of hospitality: introverted husbands, children with frenetic schedules, as well as the ever-present iPhone and rising food costs. She’s an observant come-alongsider rather than a woman with solutions. Her reflections at the end of each chapter are expanded narratives of biblical meals, such as Sarah with Abraham and his three visitors or Philip and Thomas as they prepare for the Last Supper, and are alone worth the price of the book.
Bill Reimer recently retired as the manager of the Regent College Book Store in Vancouver. He and his wife, Dorcas, attend St John’s Vancouver.
Amazing Grace: The Life of John Newton and the Surprising Story Behind His Song
Bruce Hindmarsh and Craig Borlase.
Thomas Nelson, 2023
While reading like fiction, this is essentially a biography stitched together at points with some fictional but entirely plausible dialogue and scenes – constructed from a deep familiarity with all available sources on the life of John Newton, pastor and former slaveholder. The occasion for the book is the 250th anniversary of the first public singing of “Amazing Grace” in Olney England in 1773. Written by Newton, the lyrics of the hymn plumb the depths of the depravity that Newton experienced on five voyages as a participant in the Atlantic slave trade. For years Newton remained silent on his complicity but as the abolition movement gained momentum, Newton, now a prominent London pastor, chose to testify in Parliament in 1789 against the execrable trade in human bodies. Contained within the biography is the love story of John and Mary Newton, itself a story of grace. In an afterword, Hindmarsh and Borlase point out four profound truths that the life of Newton teaches the reader about God’s grace: I can be forgiven, I can be deceived, I can make amends, I can be more like Jesus. This is a spiritual biography that invites multiple readings over time and even in groups.
Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms and Profits are Hurting the Church
Katelyn Beaty
Brazos Press, 2022
As a young teenager in the late 1990s, Beaty came to faith within an American Christianity that featured celebrity preachers, best
selling writers and rock stars. “Fame, passion, and tech savvy for kingdom purposes” has marked the evangelical movement with roots that reach back to Billy Graham crusades, nineteenth-century revivalism, and even earlier. (Graham and many of the revivalists, including D.L. Moody, lived exemplary lives without even a whiff of scandal, even if later regretting some public figures with whom they associated.) But technology and mass media have increasingly turned “icons” into “idols.” These idols have exacted a human price and so often have abused power and fallen from grace in spectacular and highly publicized fashion. Institutions and ministries, with boards packed with “buddies” or fans, have looked the other way. Leaders driven to perform experience burnout. In the face of such celebrity dysfunction and temptation to power, even for herself as a writer with some acclaim, Beaty emphasizes that church leaders need to pursue “ordinary faithfulness” and, using a term coined by C.S. Lewis, advocates that the church needs to make disciples into “little Christs.” The antidote for the abuse of power is the “primacy of in-person relationships” and friendship. While I am not entirely sure that celebrity culture has the dominance of the church on view here, this is wise analysis from a young journalist and blogger.
The Decline and Renewal of the American Church
Tim Keller
Gospel In Life, 2022
Free online
In this PDF booklet, pastor Tim Keller asks the urgent post-Covid question: “What is wrong with the American Christian Church and can its life and ministry be renewed?” The decline has been staggering. In 1952 a record 75% of Americans said that religion was personally “very important” while in the late 1950s almost half of Americans were regularly attending church. The drop in attendance was precipitous, beginning in the late 1960s and then accelerating. To explain this drop, Keller first picks up the sociological explanation of Dean Kelley who argued that the Protestant mainline chose to focus on political activity rather than build the faith of those in the pews. For a second explanation, Keller points to the theological critique of J. Gresham Machen who argued that theological liberalism had created a “de-supernaturalized” Christianity. Finally, Keller highlights the cultural explanation of the historian George Marsden who pointed out that the Protestant mainline had attached itself to a “secular moral consensus that was inherently unstable.” Who then needs the church? Today we are left with a fragmented society in which even evangelicalism is in steep decline. Next Keller highlights the need for a new Christian movement that practices love and justice. Keller is optimistic that this public gospel message can take root and is hopeful that the non-fundamentalist evangelical church can grow from 10% of the US population to 20%. Annual new church plants need to increase from a current 3-4,000 to 6-8,000 per year. These are ambitious goals, but Keller looks to a revival movement of the Holy Spirit. The essay ends with a dense, two-chapter roadmap on how to accomplish the task that lies ahead. This is a challenging document that surely applies to the Canadian church even if nuanced for our own context.
The Nicene Creed: An Introduction
Phillip Cary
Lexham Press, 2023
This is a little gem of a book that explores this important Christian statement that came into being in 325 AD as a response to the fourth century heretic, Arius, who taught that “there was once when he [Christ] was not.” But Cary’s focus is not on the Arian heresy but on the truth: “the gospel of Jesus Christ taught by the Creed that grew out of the faith of Nicaea” [in modern-day Turkey]. Cary has written a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Creed and gives the reader access to the layers beneath terms such as “incarnate.” There is a joyful spirit to this book and one that invites worship:
The good news is that in Christ, God has done these things, and by his life-giving Spirit, he has made them ours. The Nicene Creed is a blessing and a joy, for it is a confession of faith in this good news.
Cary has taught undergraduates for decades and out of this setting has been gifted with a passion to communicate the riches of the classical Christian tradition. I would also recommend his recently expanded Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do. Brazos, revised, 2022. TAP
