Summer Reads
Probably only a few of us have read as much as we had hoped to during the spring lockdown. But there is still the summer ahead and our inveterate West Coast reviewers have some intriguing suggestions for us.
Julie Lane Gay is a writer and editor who lives in Vancouver with her husband Craig and their four children. She attends St John’s, Vancouver.
The Dutch House
Ann Patchett
Harper Collins, 2019
One of the highlights of summer is a good novel, a story that whisks us off into someone else’s world with likable characters uncovering deeper truths. The Dutch House is a fairy tale of sorts, complete with endearing, abandoned children and a wicked stepmother. It’s the fifty-year saga of siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy, growing up in an elegant Pennsylvanian home, a house where they start in one family, get shoved into another, and are then dropped into yet one more.
Danny, a smart, likable doctor – and the tale’s narrator – reflects often on the gravitational pull of the house, “…like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.” It’s his story of finding the clues that might have made their home and family stable. His search mirrors how relationships and houses morph into idols, giving them power to shape us. As Danny realizes, these ideals become a “misunderstanding that I knew wasn’t true but was still, for a moment, wildly convincing.” Isn’t that how idols work? The Dutch House is also the story of the goodness that can be found when we let go of the families and homes and lives we wanted and savour what arises in their stead.
Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life
W. David O. Taylor
Nelson Books, 2020
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, friends invited us to join them in saying Psalm 46 daily as an act of solidarity in faith. For me it segued into studying the Psalms every morning, and several friends suggested David Taylor’s Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide for Life. I was reluctant as Taylor (a theologian and Anglican priest) is a huge fan of the Bible paraphrase, The Message, and I’m not (though I love Eugene Peterson’s other books).
I’m glad I persevered. If you’re spending the summer traveling in the Psalms, this could be your annotated trail map. Taylor leads you in – making you at home in these poems – appealing to both your mind and your heart. He begins with short chapters covering the Psalms’ history, poetic form (my stumbling block), honesty, communal nature and models of prayer. He helps you over those hurdles of pleas for violence and rambunctious dancing in the temple.
Taylor delves into nine themes: sadness, anger, joy, enemies, justice, death, life, nations and creation. Each chapter combines personal reflection (including some fine passages on the author’s struggle with infertility), scriptural exegesis, biblical history, theology and cultural reflection. Taylor ends each chapter with questions and exercises (these would be great in a small group) as ways to settle in more deeply, to find God in the Psalms. One exercise in the chapter on the Nations suggested reading Psalm 91 aloud alongside headlines of world news – a valuable practice for me, if not the world.
Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy
Amy Peterson
W Publishing Group (an imprint of Thomas Nelson), 2020
People in the Evangelical “movement” of the last fifty years, particularly in North America, have made some poor choices–some were antithetical to Scripture. We have rightly been accused of idolizing marriage and family and electing political candidates whose immoral behavior was well documented. Too often we have modeled pragmatism and judgment instead of humility, generosity and forgiveness.
Amy Peterson is an American millennial who grew up “in a conservative, evangelical homeschooling family in the South…. You wouldn’t have thought we were weird, just maybe slightly outside the mainstream.” Where Goodness Still Grows is Peterson’s traverse from being deeply disheartened by Evangelical faith and culture to becoming a thoughtful activist to heal and cleanse it. She wants “to see virtue as a tool for cultivating wisdom, not a weapon to wield against enemies.”
Peterson has not left God, nor the Church. She is deeply committed to both, with great love. Her chapters cover nine biblical virtues – from hospitality to discernment to hope – and in each one, she “reimagines,” within the truth of Scripture, what each of these virtues are meant to look like, from inviting over the new co-worker, to gardening public spaces as a declaration of hope, to taking silent days so our speech might be more loving.
Where Goodness still Grows is an excellent book for understanding the disillusionment that many who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s feel toward Evangelicalism, and is a starting place for those of us still theologically-rooted in Evangelicalism to become vessels to support their way back.
Bill Reimer is the manager, and has been for many years, of the Regent College Bookstore, one of North America’s largest surviving theological bookstores. He attends St John’s Vancouver.
Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Andrew Roberts
Penguin, 2018
In the long line of Churchill biographies, this is one to be reckoned with. Weighing in at 3.6 pounds, I could only sample sections of the book before returning it to the readers’-in-waiting line at the Vancouver Public Library. The “Destiny” in the title makes one wonder if Andrew Roberts is using it as a proxy for Providence, even if he only admits to using it in a deistic sense of fate. In the introduction, the author quotes a one-time minister in Churchill’s war cabinet as saying after the war that the one instance in which he thought that he could “see the finger of God in contemporary history” was Churchill’s arrival as Prime Minister at a “precise moment in 1940.” Hmm. Roberts is guarded on this and emphasizes that Churchill was skeptical of Christianity although he allows that on at least one occasion, his wife Clementine recalled that when he became Prime Minister, Churchill said “God had created him for that purpose.”
For the Christian reader Churchill can be an enigma. The pacifist would be quick to condemn the area bombing of German cities during World War II while others would never forgive his part in the Gallipoli fiasco. Some Christians will be open to seeing God at work in Churchill’s life in the way that it was preserved, the leadership training that he received in both the triumphs and failures of his younger years, and then in that great moment when he came to power at a time when Hitler needed to be stopped. On this side of the demise of the British Empire, Churchill is out-of-step in his advocacy of it. But one could ask counterfactually whether Hitler could have been stopped apart from that empire? Certainly America would have been a barrier to world domination but the question begs to be asked. Roberts coyly points out the span and complexity of Churchill’s life: “In the year that Churchill was born a British general forced King Koffee of the Ashanti to end human sacrifice; in 1965, the year he died, the Beatles released “Ticket to Ride.” Yes, “Interesting Times” writ large. For a different take on Churchill’s faith by his grandson see: God & Churchill: How the Great Leader’s Sense of Divine Destiny Changed His Troubled World and Offers Hope for Ours by Jonathan Sandys & Wallace Henley, Tyndale, 2015.
To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Movement
Charles E. Cotherman
IVP, 2020
The 1960s saw a Baby Boom come of age at a time of cultural crisis. While many shed the Christian beliefs that they had grown up with, those who remained, along with some who were coverts to the faith, often yearned for more authentic expressions of thoughtful and historic Christianity. Two meccas for such young folk were L’Abri in Switzerland, led by an American pastor, Francis Schaeffer, and Regent College in Vancouver, led by the Oxford geographer, James Houston. While differing in important ways, both sought to be places of study within communal settings that placed emphasis upon the “personal” and places where students were free to ask questions, since “all truth was God’s truth.” Both Schaeffer and Houston were deeply pastoral and emphasized the importance of prayer, with Houston placing a special emphasis on friendship with God, knowledge of the self and, out of this, an openness to one another. Neither were places of training for professional clergy, although Regent was a graduate school with a formal course of studies designed for laity. The late 1960s and early 1970s were times of a host of “start-up” activities including efforts to reproduce variations of a L’Abri or a Regent in other settings. “Study centres” is a flexible description that Cotherman uses to describe The Ligonier Valley Study Centre in Pennsylvania, established in 1971, The C.S. Lewis Institute in College Park, Maryland established in 1976, New College established in Berkeley in 1978, and on down to the present which has seen a cluster of study centres being planted on the periphery of major universities in the U.S. Cotherman has told a faith-filled story of a quest to “think Christianly.” May this story help inspire a new generation of young Christians to plant communities of learning and devotion that are adapted to new and challenging times.
Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus: Exploring the World and Wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Laura Fabrycky
Fortress, 2020
In the summer of 2016, Laura Fabrycky moved with her husband, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and her young children to Berlin. Finding that they lived a short distance from the Bonhoeffer Haus – Marienburger Allee no. 43 – she made an appointment for her family to have a tour, the week of the US Presidential Election. Rather than a museum, Fabrycky sensed a home. On her fourth visit she joked to the guide that she was visiting so often that she should become a guide herself. The guide responded that, “Yes!” she should. Before long she was handed the key to the house and began her work as a volunteer. The book is a record of her reflections on her own life and story through her encounter with the life of Bonhoeffer. While the reader learns details about Bonhoeffer, the book is a spiritual memoir. Her collected insights she metaphorically calls “keys” – for example: When we hold on to the truth, we find the truth holds on to us, even when we are tempted to despair. She takes us through the house and beyond to important places in Bonheoffer’s life. “Place” is a constant theme as is the importance of “civic housekeeping”–love of neighbour, including those different from us, is expressed in the small details of life. Fabrycky’s training in political theory adds nuance to her cultural insights both past and present. There is much for a Christian to ponder in the pages of this finely written book. An immediate takeaway for me was that I purchased an English copy of the annual daily meditation book, Die Losungen, published by the Moravian community and used faithfully by Bonhoeffer, that pairs an Old Testament and a New Testament verse. Daily meditation on short scriptural passages was a practice of Bonhoeffer and his circle of Confessing Church pastors, and is one for us to continue in these times. TAP
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Caring for Our Planet
As concerned as I am about the environment, books about the degradation of our planet often leave me paralyzed. It’s so hard to hear all the horrific facts. Yet when I read about the wonders of our planet – trees, air, plants, animals, stars – I find myself not just cheered and awed by God’s creativity but revitalized, ready to persevere in preserving this planet. –J.L.G.
What It’s Like to be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing – What Birds are Doing and Why
David Allen Sibley
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020
What It’s Like to be a Bird is written and illustrated by renowned ornithologist and artist David Allen Sibley. His famous field guides reside on most birders’ shelves but this one is a hybrid: a fun introduction and a reference book. Sibley offers an extensive annotated list of birds’ traits – vision, feathers, foraging, migration and more – and follows these with short essays on ninety-six species of well-known birds. Who knew that the Wild Turkey can crush walnuts in its gizzard and the Surf Scoter can crush clams?
Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects
Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (Translated by Lucy Moffatt)
Simon and Schuster, 2019
I dislike mosquitos (though I’m quite sure they like me), but Buzz, Sting, Bite raises them from annoying (and sometimes lethal) pests to truly interesting subjects. Did you know that mosquitos have mutated such that there are different varieties living in London’s Piccadilly Line than in the Tube’s Central Line? For readers of the Old Testament, there’s a look at the Israelite’s manna. Dragonflies led the way to inventing drones and Black Fire Beetles offer ways to detect rising heat. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, a professor of conservation biology in Norway, makes bugs fun.
First, Catch: Study of a Spring Meal
Thomas Eagle
Grove Press, 2020
First, Catch is a poetic meander through the preparation of an elaborate spring feast, which pauses to look at not just the ingredients, but also traditions such as pickling and fermentation, farming practices and changing food preferences. Thomas Eagle, a British chef and fermenter (did you know that was a profession?) is an appealing enthusiast of salt, vegetables, anchovies and vinegar. He makes a strong case for eating rabbits and deer rather than chicken and cows — and insists they are equally delicious. For the foodie in your life who loves to read, First, Catch is a wonderful present.
Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters
Sandra L. Richter
InterVarsity Academic, 2020
If you care about the planet, consider Sandra Richter’s excellent introduction and overview. She’s an Old Testament professor at Westmont College with a deep knowledge of Scripture, as well as environmental history and practices. She’s familiar with the ways we both harm and care for our planet, but she isn’t depressing. As Richter reiterates in her brief appendix, we need to carry on with hope, and she follows this with an excellent list of how we can start or broaden our efforts. TAP
