Another one of those books I wish I could read but will never find the time to do so is Kevin Vanhoozer's The Drama of Doctrine.  This time it was mediated for me not by Books and Culture but via the insightful summary provide by Denis Haack in "Discernment 301: From Story to Drama," from the latest issue of Critique, the magazine of Ransom Fellowship.  Haack (who I can read) summarizes Vanhoozer like this:

[I]magine life as being in a play, a full drama unfolding on a stage before a watching world.  Think of the canon of the Scriptures as a script, in which we have a part to play.  The community of God's people then becomes the company of actors, pastors and elders are unit directors under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and theologians are specialists that help us make proper sense of the script.

Hacck notes the freedom in the script, how the actors, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, can improvise, going beyond the script (which is not fully fleshed out) but never against it.  In this drama, "faithfulness means being so steeped in God's word that our responses are shaped by its truth even when applied to situations not specifically addressed in any text in the Bible." As we live coram deo, we settle more deeply into the script, more fully into our part, until by God's grace we are so immersed in the role that we become the character.  We become ourselves.  We become who we were meant to be.

I love the idea of life as a play ever since I first picked this up from Frederick Buechner's Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale.  This play is epic: tragically marred by sin, wondrously redeemed by the comedy of grace, and full of the almost too good to believe fairy tale of hope --- that all will turn out all right in the end.

Excuse me while I learn my lines.   I have a long way to go.

I'm actually wondering, even before I write this short note, if its title,"Books, Culture, and Me," really fits.  I don't really hang out much with a bookish, scholarly crowd.  I often eat at places where law enforcement officers and construction workers eat.  Even tonight, having dinner with some co-workers, the conversation focused more on dogs, beer, and TV shows (not that I know anything about beer, mind you).

That's why I like to read above myself sometimes, like when I read Books and Culture.  I can't do it for long, as my eyes begin to glaze over or my head dips toward my chest as my eyes close, but I do it nonetheless for my betterment, for the sake of culture, because even if most of my friends don't read it or talk about the kind of things found in its pages, you never know. . . I might just meet someone somewhere who is really into such high-brow matters, who eschews sports for the movement of words on a page.  Mostly, I like that someone reads the books reviewed in its pages and interprets them for me.  At least sometimes I like that.  Sometimes I just wonder why they read these books at all or how they find the time.

Take this issue, for example.  Jeremy Begbie, whose brain set next to mine would be like placing Jupiter next to Pluto (he'd be Jupiter), writes a review of Christopher Page's apparently masterful and scholarly survey of the history of the Western church oh for about a piddling 1000 years (through AD 1000, that is) through the eyes of its singers, a book whose scope is daunting by its very title, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, all of this in a mere 692 pages.  As much as I would like to think I could read such a book, it's highly unlikely that I will or that I have the patience or time to stay with it.  And yet Begbie distills it down to a mere 1000 words for my pea-sized brain and challenged attention span.  I'm appreciative.  Just to pick up a thought like this one quoted by Begbie is enlightening: "The use of the voice is one of the principle continuities between the states of bodily life on either side of the grave."  He gives me a sentence I can ponder for quite some time.

Then there's another short review, "The Holy Gaze," where Frederic Mathewes-Green gives me a much deeper appreciation for the meaningfulness of iconography.  There's this wonder-provoking quote: "It has been said that God was the first iconographer, since we are living images of Him." Would I ever think of that?  Probably not.  And what are the ramifications of that truth?

Then there's Philip Yancey, in "Life in a Bubble," the bubble being the late 1960s fundamentalist Christian college in which he was educated.  He writes both with great appreciation and with a gentle critique, the kind of nuanced remembrance that makes me appreciate him and accord him credibility.  He opens up the world of such a school in that time so that it does not become a caricature for me to be dismissed but a place full of human beings doing what they thought best at that time to instill and conserve Christian values.  Where else could I hear such a voice?

And that's just for starters.  I'm only 16 pages into a meaty 46 pages issue.  There's more to come.

Wait'll the guys at the local greasy spoon hear about this.  Or don't.

[I highly recommend Books and Culture.  Wow your friends.  Impress people.  Or settle for the more modest goal of looking over the shoulders and through the minds of those who read the books we seldom read and think the thoughts we need to think.  Subscribe here.]

Until a few years ago, I had not seen nor read To Kill a Mockingbird.  That was to my great loss.  The book --- a sobering and yet ultimately life-affirming and hopeful story of racism --- is one of the great American novels.  The movie, a faithful retelling of the story with stellar acting by Gregory Peck and the supporting cast, particularly Mary Badham, who played "Scout," is also one of my perennial favorites.  The book and movie are a repository of virtuous character while at the same time contrasting that character with the impiety of religious hypocrisy and small-minded prejudice.

It is that repository of virtue that is ably mined by Matt Litton in The Mockingbird Parables: Tranforming Lives Through the Power of Story.  In ten meditations  on the characters and events of the book, filtered through his personal experiences, the author fleshes out the ramifications of these parables or stories for how we live in the world.  His avowed purpose is to help the reader "rediscover what it means to be a good neighbor --- and to experience the gospel message retold in modern language, unobscured by religious dogma."  For this reader, he succeeds.

From the outset Litton is all about de-familiarizing the gospel so as to bring its truth home to us.  For example, in the first chapter, "Discovering Our Divine Mysterious Neighbor," he analogizes the question that the movie asks, "Who is Boo Radley," to the question we all ask and keep asking in life, "Who is God?"  He addresses our tendency to domesticate God, taming Him, much as the townspeople of Maycomb, instead of accepting the mystery of Boo have "chosen instead to ignore define him, ignore him, and keep him in his place."  He speaks of seeking as being essential to our relationship with God, one that is never static, resting in a definition of God, but remains dynamic, as it must with a Being that is infinite and not fully comprehensible to us.  He is also one who is constantly pursuing us, a truth that the author says is pictured in Boo Radley's leaving items for the children in the knothole of an oak tree.

And so it goes, each chapter opening us up to another truth --- the responsibility to care for our neighbor and for Creation, courage, financial responsibility, parenting, and finally, in a powerful ending, in the way we communicate with one another, the very words we use.  I found this last chapter to be the most powerful in the book, a reminder of the divine nature of our communication, of the great power of words to hurt or heal, to build up or to tear down.  The model is Atticus Finch, a man the same at home as in public, a man who measures out his words carefully and always to build up or, when they must tear down (as when he exposes Mayella Ewell to be a liar), to serve a higher good never rejoicing in the tearing down but doing what must be down to preserve the truth.

Litton's words hit home.  The Christian community, whether politically left or right, can be some of the worst offenders in their use of language in the public square, having to have the last word, not listening, having to be vindicated to be right.  He commends instead the many scriptural admonitions to listen before speaking, to letting our conversations be full of grace, to letting our words build bridges rather than create division.  As he summarizes: "Atticus Finch affirms to us, and To Kill a Mockingbird reminds us, that it is the mission and deepest responsibility of the words we use to communicate hope, to spread truth, to be agents of grace and change to the hearts of our fellow men and women, and to speak God's reality of compassion into the souls of our neighbors."

As a result of reading this book, I can return to Harper Lee's novel with a new appreciation of how it resonates with the truth of the Gospel, and I can return to the Gospel narratives with the great analogies of the word-pictures of the novel to help put hands and feet to the meaning of scripture. Laced with scripture, memoir, and the images of the book and movie, I heartily recommend reading To Kill a Mockingbird, watching the movie, and then reading The Mockingbird Parables as a way of letting the overly familiar words of the Gospel become unfamiliar so as to become more real.

Having said all this, the one chapter that I felt was too polemical for the context of the book was the one on the role of women in faith.  That women are affirmed by Jesus and given high and equal stature to men by Jesus is unquestioned and the corrective offered by the author to any contrary notion is commendable and certainly evidenced by analogy in Harper Lee's book.  To then argue that women should be ordained and share in pastoral leadership is another matter, one on which Christians disagree.  Litton attempts to make that case but fails to account for the counter-arguments that are made, arguments that do not necessarily accord an inequality to women but a different role ascribed by scripture.  This chapter seemed out of place and weighed against the irenic spirit of the rest of the book.  All that being said, many of the insights here, as elsewhere in the book, are valuable and don't detract from the positive impact of the book as a whole.

I recommend The Mockingbird Parables.  Read it and be transformed through the power of story, through the power of the Gospel.

Whenever I travel out of town, and particularly when I travel alone, one of the first things I do is open the drawer of the bedside nightstand to see if there is a Gideons Bible placed there.  Often there is.  I take it out a place it on the table, not only so or even mainly because I will read it (I prefer a new translation), but because I want something there to testify to me that I am not alone, that I am accountable to God while I am away from home.  It keeps me from making excuses.  It may encourage me to read it.  It reminds me not to even turn on the television, which will inevitably result in a wasted evening.  

More than any of these things, however, it is a visible reminder of what Francis Shaeffer once said (and which is the title of a book he wrote): "He is there, and he is not silent."  Whether it is in the emptiness of a hotel room far from home, or in the absence you can sometimes feel when God seems distant or silent, the tangible Word is a reminder that the One who made the world did not just rest from his work and then leave us be.  He spoke.  He continues to sustain.  He continues to speak into our lives.  The heavens declare the glory of God. The face of Christ shines in a fellow believer.  And the Word is incarnate and weighty in the heft and hue of the printed Word.

I've taken to carrying the digital version of the Bible on my IPhone for ease.  It doesn't quite measure up.  Somehow, as convenient as this can be, its distinctiveness is lost.  It seems more ephemeral, less durable, less weighty.  When I pick up the Gideons Bible, I consider the effort someone had to make to place it there, and I'm reminded of how the Bible alone has saved many people and sustained many more.  For example, I still recall the testimony of Christian singer Barry McGuire, who began his career with the secular Sixties folk group, The New Christy Minstrels, of being alone in a hotel room, despairing of his life, and coming to faith through the words of a Gideons Bible.

He is there, and he is not silent.  Don't take for granted the intimacy and love of a Superior Being, one who needs nothing from us and yet who condescended to speak to us through words.  And then, amazingly, who became the Word living among us.

That book is indeed is a testament.  It bears witness.  And I need that, don't you?

"All that has happened in India is never out of mind.  But the story holds to a single course.  It looks out across the open frontier to the Country whose forces move unseen among us; for they are the things that matter most, 'and the life of the spirit has no borders.'"

(Amy Carmichael, in the Foreword to Gold Cord)

They are old books and not common these days to see on the shelves of a Christian bookstore, but nevertheless Amy Carmichael's writings are still in print and still read.  In cleaning out my mother's home for sale recently, I discovered one of her books, Gold Cord: The Story of a Fellowship, first published in 1932 but here in a 1974 printing.  I set it aside, until recently.  On the cover is a young Indian girl, her head wrapped in a scarf, a thoughtful look and slight smile on her face, hands together and fingers slightly, tentatively touching.  Her face has stared up at me from an open box of salvaged items for days.  Opening it, there is scale drawing of the Dohnavur Compound; in the back, a not to scale drawing of the Southern Corner of the Tinnevelly District, showing the "walled temples from which young children have been saved."  The names of towns are written in cursive, places like Sattan's Tank, Palamcottah, Sermadevi, and Vallioor.  The binding is remarkably intact, the glue showing signs of age and yet holding.  Letting the pages fan in front of my face, it has the smell of an old house or houses, the words aged through the decades.  I was 14 when this book was purchased.  It lay there all these years.

Carmichael, a Presbyterian missionary, went to India in the late 1880's after hearing Hudson Taylor, who started the China Inland Mission, speak about missionary life.  She founded the Dohnavur Fellowship in Tamil Nadu, 30 miles from the southern tip of India, to rescue Indian children, mostly young girls, who were forced into prostitution to support Hindu temple priests.  She saved thousands of children from a life like this and, even with all this, found time to write 35 books. 

That her life was inspiring is a well-known truth.  She likely moved hundreds of other men and women to give themselves to missionary work, including Jim and Elizabeth Eliot.  But what captured me as I began to read this book was the beauty of her prose.  I picked the book up as I passed by one day, on the way to my desk.  Before I knew it, I had read three chapters while standing. I don't usually read while standing.

She bgins not with theology or dry explanation but with story, told well, descriptively, with the senses, with feeling:

On a hot September day in 1918, some happy Indian children set out to trace their mountain river to its source.  After the rains in June and October, the river is a glory of rushing water pouring down a deep ravine; but in dry, burnt-up September, it is shallow and, from below, bare boulders as big as cottages looked like the steps of a giant staircase.  It would be easy, we thought, to find the source.

She goes on to use the stream as a metaphor  for the story of The Dohnavur Fellowship, flashing back to Sunday morning on a street in Belfast, recounting a calling there by God on her life, like a voice spoke to her, knowing that "[n]othing could ever happen again but the things that were eternal."  Back to the metaphor of water, she speaks of that moment as a source of all that was to come:

From this pool flowed the stream that is the story.  There are so many stories already in the world, and so many are splendid and great, that it is difficult to believe it can be worth the telling.  But if I can only tell it under direction, it will carry at least one quality of clear, running water --- sincerity.

This is a story artfully told, of an India that has changed, of a land still foreign to most of us, of a life of sacrifice daunting to even consider now, much less at the turn of the century.  It is, as she describes it, a gold cord, strung with beads, a linking of story to story in one greater narrative.  It is a story that "holds to a single course," one that "looks across the open frontier to a Country whose forces move unseen among us," a story not yet fully told, only anticipated

To honor this fine book, these golden words from yesterday, I think I'll read another chapter --- standing.  Perhaps you would as well.

The end of reading is not more books but more life. (Holbrook Jackson)

“I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book,” said Thomas a Kempis, and so might I say.  Readers are like that, you know.  As a child I remember one particular chair in one particular corner of our home, and the many books I read there.  I read through meals, sometimes as long as four hours or so at a time, emerging as if from some dream, somnolent, somewhere in the twilight between the imaginative world and reality.  It took some time to come home. But then my sister said something like sisters say, and I said something not so nice back, and the mashed potatoes were passed and reality re-cohered for me.  Yet I never came back quite the same. My life was changed in some inarticulable way.

I still have some of those childhood books, some pilfered from my mother's library.  In recently cleaning out her home for sale (she is in a nursing home now), we did not save much, and yet I did save many of her books, like Amy Carmichael's The Golden Cord, A.W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy, and Hannah Whithall Smith's The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life --- all nonfiction, and yet by age alone much less worthiness these books are our "elders," due a degree of respect.

I like looking up to my bookshelf of books, some of which I consider not just elders or mentors but dear “friends,” books that continue to speak to me and, I suspect, will continue to teach me the rest of my life.  Sometimes I re-read just the first page of Beryl Markham’s West With the Night: “How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’  But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names – Mwanza, Serengeti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakura.”   And then I feel the book tugging at me, saying, “Read on, read on,” and I find myself saying aloud those African names, just to hear them.  I will read it again, I say, another day, as I reluctantly place it back on the shelf. 

If you take the time to read this blog, you probably read books, as there is nothing much here for the pragmatic who have no use for books.  But in the interest of book-evangelism, of encouraging a ministry of words, let me tell you four reasons why reading good fiction is important to our understanding of ourselves, our relationship with God, and our relationship with others.

Good books enlarge our sense of reality.  They have the subtle effect of deepening our understanding of other people as we vicariously experience joy and sorrow through the lives of the characters.  In his novel (more recently, movie), No Country for Old Men, Colman McCarthey writes of a man who, while out hunting in a desolate part of East Texas, stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad, four men dead, and over $2 million dollars in a satchel and no one around.  He takes it, but how he takes it and how he wrestles with having it can teach us all about the insidious nature of greed.  Good fiction makes us more aware of what is real by presenting it in a fresh way.  We come to a greater understanding of others who, after all, are a lot like us.

Good books deepen our understanding of ourselves.  Joseph Epstein says that “we use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.”  What is true of the Bible is, to a lesser extent, also true of good fiction.  We read of all its rag-tag characters, the best of which are beset by sin, and we see ourselves.  But we begin to change.  We see who we really are.  We see our need for Jesus, the one who saves us every day from ourselves.  For example, I knew what I needed, who I needed when I read this bit of dialogue in Hwee Hwee Tan’s Foreign Bodies between Andy (a twenty-something student fresh off a Damascus Road conversion experience) and fellow student (and love interest) Clare, who attempts to rationalize and scientifically explain his conversion experience: “I want God.  Somewhere along the line they killed God, and I want him back.  I want God resurrected, living in me.  But I don’t want the hippy, new age, pop culture, user-friendly, thought of the day, Celestine prophecy, spiritual quest as narrated as an adventure novel. . . . I want God.  I want something that will fill all of me, every nook and cranny, touch every cell, course through the blood, fill the spaces of the mind, touch the unphysicality of the soul. . . . I want God.  I want it all back.”  Isn’t that what we all want?  Reading that, I realized how small I had made God and how much I was missing.

Good books deepen our relationship with God.  Sometimes there’s a problem with the Bible.  We’ve read it so much, heard the stories so many times, that it’s all become a bit too familiar to us, like a two-dimensional flannelboard.  The deep truth and reality of it can wash over us and yet not settle in our soul.  A good book can defamiliarize the familiar stories and let us see truth in a fresh way.  I think of Frederick Buechner’s Leo Bebb, from his Book of Bebb, a charlatan, a flim-flam artist, a pastor, a sinner among sinners – and yet, Leo Bebb continues to speak the truth to me, reminding me that God loves sinners, something that’s easy to acknowledge but difficult to believe (that is, that we are really so bad, or that God could really be so good).  Addressing his congregation, Bebb said “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a great feast.  That’s the way of it.  The Kingdom of Heaven is a love feast where nobody’s a stranger.  Like right here.  There’s strangers everywhere’s else you can think of. . . . There’s strangers got married and been climbing in and out of the same fourposter for thirty-five, forty years, and they’re strangers still. . . . But here in this place there’s no strangers, and Jesus, he isn’t a stranger either.  The Kingdom of Heaven’s like this.”  That’s the way Leo Bebb talks and keeps talking to me. 

Books cultivate virtues that, as Christians, we care deeply about.  Reading produces thoughtfulness, patience, good reasoning, humility (as we withhold judgment until we have all the facts, or have read all the way to the end), and solitude (as we do this thing mostly alone).  You can probably think of even more, but this is a good start.  Books, both in their content and in the very process of their reading, aid our spiritual growth.

Once upon a time.  Once, upon a time.  Can you really bear not to read on, not to see what story unfolds?  Frederick Buechner says “all beginnings have a legendary quality about them, a promise of magic,” and indeed they do.  So, pick up a good book this week.  Open to the first page.  It all begins here: Once upon a time. . . .

I spent a little time today reading a new journal that intrigued me.  I'm an early adopter when it comes to such new magazines or journals, particularly when (as is often) you cannot find them online or in the library.  

The Pedestrian is an unpretentious entry into what has to be a limited market.  It bills itself as a journal "that seeks to explore the ordinary," that, as the editors explain, "the people and things that are familiar – or have become too familiar – might be allowed to enchant."  In it you'l find a collection of classic essays from the past as well as new contributions that carry on the conversation, each issue exploring a common theme --- this one, empathy.
 

I'm holding Issue One --- yes, holding, because this is not primarily an online journal, though selected pieces from each journal are posted online.  Holding, because holding is believing for me, words having extra weight when they are etched in paper and touched and smelled.  Yes, smelled --- the ink on paper, newness, the aroma of ideas.

That it seeks to explore the ordinary doesn't mean that it is elementary.  Some of the entries take concentration, like the excerpt from C.S. Lewis' classic exploration of how to read literature or how to view visual art, "An Experiment in Criticism."  Like always, I find myself rereading Lewis' sentences, either because I am slow-witted, easily distracted, or simply overwhelmed by the profundity of his words.  Plus, some entries are simply longish, at least by today's standards, like Virginia Woolf's "Memories of a Working Women's Guild," her preface to a collection of letters written by working women in 1893, interesting but somewhat difficult to plow through, and oh so long.  But then there are concise pieces like that of actor Anthony Lawton's "A Book for My Son," where in less than four pages he manages to make a valid point: "To the extent that we use empathy as a first step in self-advancement, our hearts will be a savage place.  To the extent that we use empathy as the first step to charity, our hearts will be civilized." As he explains, it's just a little bit of the book he's writing to his son, a book about "everything," a book he believes will be about 900 pages in length.  Let's hope the world still reads such tomes when his son is of age.

G.K. Chesterton (on lamp-posts, of all things), Madeleine L'Engle (from A Circle of Quiet), and even Adam Smith. . . well, you see the variety of what lies here.  If you don't find an essay valuable, there is always another perspective, personality, or style --- just keep turning. I enjoy the mixture of old and new, the opportunity to focus on a single theme, the sense of wisdom imparted by the life experiences represented here, from authors of renown who speak to us from the grave to authors known and unknown who speak out of or into our time.

I recommend The Pedestrian, if you are willing to make the effort and take the time to absorb the words, if you're not seeking just information or titillation but, as I said, an opportunity to grow a little wiser from the reflections of others. For this pedestrian, just an ordinary guy, it was a good walk in words.  I can see my way just a little better now in their light.

It is fitting that Tony Woodlief's latest book --- indeed, the book of his life --- begins with a nod to Frederick Buechner.  Buechner, now in his Eighties, is a man who has spent his whole life trying to understand his childhood home, the inexplicable suicide of his father, and the implications of that for his life and, even more, how that home colors his vision of our final Home.  In Somewhere More Holy, Woodlief brings that Buechner way of seeing to his own home, seeing its sacredness, glimpsing Heaven in its rooms.

Somewhere More Holy is an open, authentic, and honest memoir of sin and salvation, of tragic loss, of depression and adultery and unbelief that came in the aftermath of that loss, and yet of the grace that sustained a man, a woman, and a home.  It is the story of two people orphaned in the sense that they never knew the semblance of a real home in their own upbringing, and who, once realizing their adoption by God, fumble toward family and home in God's grace, with fits and starts.  In its particulars, we find the universals that inevitably work themselves out in our own lives and homes, that remind us of our humanity.

When Woodlief cracks open the door to his heart and home, he doesn't hold back.  As he says about this honesty: "One of the things that Celeste and I have learned about building a home is that it will never feel safe until you scare your ghosts out into the open." And scare he does.  Sexual abuse and family cover-ups. Serial homes. Death. Divorce. Anger. Adultery. Unbelief.  Just to read of the suffering and death of his young daughter is painful enough, and yet the demons he wrestles with in the aftermath are even more frightening.  Reading it, you can't help but reflect back on your own life and wonder how you would deal with such loss, with a God who wounds in such a near fatal way.

And yet this isn't just one of those blood on the page memoirs with a litany of horrors endured, barely. Rather, there is a point to all this, a lesson Woodlief gives at the outset and shows working out through the remainder of the book.  The lesson is this:

We didn't understand that, however much he may love us, God allows his children to be wounded. We didn't yet see that home is a sacred place, and sacred places must be sanctified by the heart's own suffering. . . . Most importantly, we hadn't yet discovered that beyond these stony truths, grace abounds. A home, we are learning even now, can be built in spite of all that our ghosts and the world itself do to try to stop us. That is what we strive for, and perhaps what you strive for as well.

What greater wound could there be than watching your young daughter suffer and die from a brain tumor? It is a Job-like wounding that pushes Woodlief to the limit, nearly to breaking, and yet as the story unfolds you see that the God whose absence was palpable was never really far away.

And that's just the introduction.  After giving us the short version of the story and letting us see the end up front (perhaps so we do not lose hope), he goes on to develop the story via the framework provided by the rooms of his home.  Though the subject matter is serious (life is, after all serious business), the author's wit and humor buoys the spirit throughout, like when he writes about what it's like to have dinner with four young boys ("boy animals are the only creatures to transform eating into a spectator sport").

In the end, this is not just a memoir about one man's struggle with great tragedy, but one that shows us what a home is intended to be, a sacred place, "the place that makes us better than we ever could be alone," the place "where we learn grace, where we glimpse heaven."  Truly it is somewhere more holy.

I highly recommend Somewhere More Holy.  Read it and return to the rooms and corridors of your own home and see them for the hallowed places they really are.  And the places they can be by God's grace.

One of the kindest books I read this past Summer was A Welcome Shore, by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes. I say "kind" because to read the short narratives of this book is like having a friend take you by the arm for a walk and a long conversation, one that covers the little tragedies and comedies of life, one punctuated by the rejuvenating sound and air of the ocean.  It is, in short, a good and insightful walk in words, guided by a gifted wordsmith.

She begins in the fragile aftermath of divorce, of deep brokenness, and yet as her meditations on faith and life unfold, it is evident that the author's feet are on the solid ground of grace.  She draws vivid metaphors, like this one comparing her former weather-ravaged house to her dying marriage:

A house, a town, the natural world around her --- this is someone who knows the importance of place, the deep rootedness of life and the importance of our relationship to the immediate world around us.  She says that "Geography, the spaces on this 'pale blue dot,' cannot be understood apart from each of us in relation to the place where we have been set down, for the world was made the home of man and woman."  This particularity, this attention to place, extends not just to the natural world of birds, starfish, butterfly shells, and sea glass but also to the names and faces she encounters, people like Grandmother Lillian, Claire Evelyn, O.D and Ruth, and Delmas Jones, as if we have come upon them on our walk and, after making our greeting, are given given me the "backstory" on each of them.

In deep faith, she is a kindred spirit of Luci Shaw (who wrote the Forward for the book); in her keen observation, she recalls the seaside observations of Mary Oliver.  And yet the voice is uniquely her own, like her memories of houses in which she once lived, high school, visits with old friends, or moments with her husband.  There is a wonderful ordinariness about her stories.  If we haven't traveled her exact path, we can at least draw our parallels and nod knowingly at her tentative conclusions.

When it comes to faith, she has a provocative way of defamiliarizing the familiar.  For example, she says "prayer is pheasant-like," a phrase that sends me wondering to the encyclopedia to find out more about these birds.  Or "prayer is an embryo: unspoken, understood."  It is not Sunday morning language.  It's like being given a piece of treasured sea glass to hold, to enjoy, to wonder from where it came.

And that's how it goes.  A walk through the shoreline, tributaries, channels, and tide pools of her life. . . and ours, as we see in her experiences our own.

Near the end, there is this prayer: "Lord, keep me from the poverty of habitual sight."  Yes, Lord help us all.  But while you wait on the Lord, start here, with this kind book, this walk with someone who tends to see things new.

Read A Welcome Shore.  It's 117 pages of pure pleasure, a needed walk in Word and World.

"Language and magic.  Where is the connection?  Think about it this way: when we form letters to write words, we create something out of nothing, so that the still air or the empty space on a page fills with meaning, as if a wizard created a blizzard from a clear blue sky."

(Roy Peter Clark, in The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English)

Granted, Roy Peter Clark's new book on grammar does not contain the pithiness of that classic by Strunk and White, The Elements of Grammar, but the point is not so much instruction as it is romance.  Clark loves words, and he wants to share those words with us, to woo us with punctuation, pronouns, and apostrophes, to, in a way that the more staid William Strunk and E.B. White might not countenance, to give us a sense of the magic that lies in grammar.

Magic?  I cannot comment on the book as a whole quite yet, as I am only slowly making my way through it, but the phrase quoted above did jump off the page when I read it --- "when we form letters to create words, we create something out of nothing" --- and I thought immediately of the way God creates, creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), and how He spoke by word nonetheless into being all that exists.  Surely he could have just thought it, and yet he spoke it into being.  That's deep magic, to use Aslan's words in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  In making words there truly is magic.

In A Poetry Handbook, poet Mary Oliver says that there is a "part of the poem that is a written document, as opposed to a mystical document, which of course the poem is also."  When you read Oliver's poetry, the words are quite simple and accessible, and yet the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.  Perhaps that is what she intended to say, that somehow words on a page point to realities beyond our full experience, hinting at but not plumbing (indeed, unable to fully plumb) their depths.  Word are iconic, meaning they tend to represent something else to us, work only by way of analogy.

All that is true, but there is more to it.  Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, says that in our creating, in our word-making even, we are imaging the Creator.  Because He created, we create.  And even though we cannot create ex nihilo as could He, still we image that kind of creation faintly when we scratch words on a page, when we set them down in a way not exactly like any way set down before.  There may be nothing new under the sun, and yet there are new ways of combining the raw stuff of words into poetry and prose to make what seems new, to make what is fresh.  When we do that we participate in something divine, imitating the Creator, icons if you will (images, or likenesses) of that Creator.  Sayers even breaks it down further, seeing the full Godhead in the act of creating, the perfect idea representing the Father, the incarnation of that perfect idea the Son, and the movement of that idea and response by the reader as akin to the work of the Spirit.

Seeing words in this way gives them dignity.  Even a little word like "it," one common and ubiquitous in writing and speech, is important and can stand up to the boasts of a word like "irenic" or the headiness of a word like "ecclesiology," a word not bandied about by most construction workers in Taco Bell.  "It" has much more utility.  And yet, they are all important, all full of dignity.  And of course so are their makers.

You didn't know all that was going on when you open your mouth to utter a word or typed a word on the keyboard, did you?

Magic?  Certainly.  Glamour?  It's much more than glamour.  When we make words, skillfully or awkwardly, we represent a word-full Creator to the world.  We're all word-makers; the best handlers of words (like Tolkien) are world-makers; and God. . . well He cannot stop making worlds.  It's who He is.

So next time you open your mouth to speak or set pen to paper or finger to keypad to dash off an email, consider the weightiness of what you do. What Mary Oliver said of poetry can be true of anything well-written or said: "[They are] not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." Let's spend them well.

Francis Chan is a provocative God-lover who seems to think about only one thing: God.  And he seems to know me, that is, he knows how I think.  He’s knows himself so well and, thus, knows human nature, that at many times while reading this book I discovered that he had already anticipated my thoughts, my rationalizations, my deference to ambivalence, my dismissals of idealism --- that is, he’s authentic and right on target.  In other words, he’s a pain in the. . . well, you know what I mean.

Until recently the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California, Chan is the real deal.  A popular pastor of this megachurch and best-selling author, a profile in Christianity Today recently notes that in contrast to many of his ilk, he lives very modestly in a tract home in a down and out area of Simi Valley, and he gives away 90% of his income.  He what?  And he is leaving this successful church for what? (He doesn’t know yet.)  Doesn’t this make you want to read on?

Crazy Love, subtitled Overwhelmed By a Relentless God, is a call to a radical obedience to God motivated not by fear or guilt but by love.  Chan tells us that we need to run to God because He is all that matters or, at least, nothing else matters except in the light of what He says.  It is a call to take Scripture at face value, trust God, and do what it says.  For too long, he says, the Church has rationalized and excused the dramatic claims God makes on our lives.  When Jesus tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us, He means it.

He asks hard questions.  Like “why do I drive the car that I drive?”  Or “why do I live in the house in which I live?”  And yet he asks them not to produce a guilt-driven charity or even asceticism, but as a way of helping us examine ourself.  I appreciate his deep perception of human nature.  I love his rich use of Scripture.  I envy his love of God.  I am glad he gives us the freedom to respond to a loving God without making his experience a principle for our lives.  I read Rich Christian in a World of Hunger and just came away full of statistics and laden with guilt; I came away from this book longing to want to love God more.

In the first three chapters of the book Chan provides a picture of God’s majesty, his awesomeness, if you will, the idea being that we have lost a sense of how incredible a Being it is who desires a relationship with us.  With that settled, he turns to us.  I found particularly difficult the chapter which provides a profile of the lukewarm Christian.  He nailed me with this bullet: “Lukewarm people do not live by faith; their lives are structured so they never have to.”  God is satisfied with our leftovers, he says, but demands a total surrender.  Why do we hold back?

Even better, though, is is profile of those obsessed with Christ, consumed by their love for them.  He says they are lovers, risk-takers, friends of all, crazy ones, humble, servers, givers, sojourners, engrossed, unguarded, rooted, dedicators, and sacrificers. He says things like “People who are obsessed with Jesus aren’t consumed with their personal safety and comfort above all else.  Obsessed people care more about God’s kingdom coming to this earth than their own lives being shielded from pain or distress.”  In one chapter he gives short profiles of people who are living out this radical faith, from the well-known to the neighbor down the street.  

But in the end Chan wisely never tells us what to do, how to live our lives, but calls on us to go to Jesus, pray, and examine ourselves, asking: “Is this the most loving way to do life?  Am I loving my neighbor and my God by living where I live, by driving what I drive, by talking how I talk?”  They’re questions I’ll be asking.

I recommend the book.  It’s orthodox in doctrine, personal in appeal, full of grace, and deeply unsettling.

[I'm slow getting around to this book, published in 2008.  Chan already has a new book, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit.]

While many Christian readers are aware that J.R.R. Tolkien did not approve of allegory --- a disapproval pointedly directed at his friend C.S. Lewis's very successful Chronicles of Narnia series ---- the ability of allegory to speak to the common reader is unparalleled.  The more direct correspondence between allegorical characters, places, and events and real life events defamiliarize Christian truths or life experiences that can become cliche through their overuse.   Allegories are rich with symbolism and, given the direct correspondence with reality, very accessible to a wide range of readers.

Author Lisa M. Jeffey's first book, Stone City, is an effective allegory that explores the biblical themes of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration in what is really a short story interspersed with poems and drawings.  It chronicles the devastation and despair wrought by a stranger, Jaron, in the life of a young girl, Miranda, and on an entire city brought to hopelessness and near lifelessness in the aftermath of his visit.  Stone City is a place of drabness and despair where even the word "beauty" has been lost from memory.  This downward spiral is broken by the visit of a stranger, Santara, who built a place of beauty filled with fountains and wells, using water to refresh the people's bodies and spirits.  An awakening occurs both for Miranda and the people of the community as beauty and laughter are restored to Stone City.

Like any allegory, it's tempting to try and draw parallels between the characters and circumstances of the story and the life of the author, and given what her testimony reveals of her sexual abuse as a child and teen and her emotional isolation, surely such parallels exist.  And yet, like any good allegory, the story is meant not so much as autobiography but as a place where the reader can find connections to his or her own life.  In this, Stone City works, particularly if, like the author, you have a life experience that involved deep emotional trauma or depression.   And yet it works for all of us.  We all need a deliverer.  We all need a Santara.  This Christ-figure reminds us that that there is real hope, hope embodied in a person, and that restoration, though not complete in this life, is real, that healing can be substantial even now.

This is a modest story both in length and language.  Yet its simplicity commends it for a wide variety of readers.  Its brevity leaves me wanting more, which makes me think it needs not a sequel (which the author suggests is coming) but the more developed, longer, fuller, and deeper treatment of a novella or novel.  This author has more depths to plumb and more to say than is found here.  Let's hope she finds a way to say it.

 "My project, then.  To get good and old.  Spiritually to approach my losses with the same craft and talent and devotion which I bring to the writing of a novel, a poem, a sermon."

(Walter Wangerin, writing to his family and friends, in Letters from the Land of Cancer)

Walter Wangerin is dying.  Ever so conscious of his losses, the things he can no longer do, he is still able to write a line like the above, to not fall on bitterness and self-pity, a morbid introspection that makes him of no account to anyone.

I know nothing about such dying.  Yet the smaller health issues I have faced along the way, even the flu or common cold which I share with the rest of the world, provide glimpses of what I might be like in such circumstances. Maybe God gives me --- gives us all --- these small challenges in order to build our faith, to tell us who we are when sickness makes us focus on our ailment to the exclusion of others.  I can tell you I don't like what I see.

That's why I'm reading Wangerin's book, a collection of letters he sent to family and friends during his treatment for lung cancer.  I want to see how he approached these circumstances with grace, what he struggled with, how he persevered, and how he was able to get both good and old at the same time.  Mind you, Wangerin's no ordinary letter writer.  He's a masterful wordsmith, even in his letters, even in pain, and yet in all respects he is like his readers, subject to the same irritability and pettiness as all of us.

How do you get good and old?  Old is easy; I'm working on the good part.

Wangerin says his sickness --- indeed all sicknesses --- are "as creative a passage as any writer ever wrote.  And that grants it the possibility of depth, gravitas and fulfillments and joy."  His journey is one we will all make.  What better a time than now to get advice on how to walk that path.

I recommend this book as a kind of Hitchiker's Guide to the Rest of Life."  And death.

"I believe we have reduced the gospel from a dynamic and beautiful symphony of God's love for and in the world to a bare and strident monotone."

Go to any third-world country and the immensity of the need is overwhelming.  It's tempting to despair of making any difference.  When you leave and return home, normal routines can insulate you from this sea of lack, from the images, sounds, and smells of a world deprived of the most basic of necessities.  What are you to do?  Assuage your guilt by sponsoring a child?  Try not to think about it?

From his first trip to the third-world country of Uganda, Richard Stearns, President of the Christian relief organization, World Vision, has been asking that question: What do I do?  What, in fact, do we do?  The Hole In Our Gospel is his attempt to wrestle with those questions, challenging both himself and the American church to a whole gospel, to a gospel that puts feet to its words.  Part biography, part catalog of need, and part sermon, Stearns issues a wake up call to Christians in America.  By our pietistic emphasis and distraction by materialism, he says we have robbed the Gospel of its core, of it life-changing, society-renewing power.  Appropriately beginning with the Gospel, he demonstrates how it extends beyond just a simple transaction, a decision point of faith, to kingdom living.  Whatever else he says in the book, he roots his challenges in Scripture, in a Gospel of faith and works.

This is personal --- so much so that as the reader you never have the sense you're being lectured or talked down to.  The tendency not to trust God, not to act in faith and obedience, is one Stearns recounts from having lived it.  A Christian, a churchgoer, and the successful head of a major corporation, Stearns gave up a great deal to take the job as President of World Vision.  More than lost income, though, was lost pride, as he felt like he had nothing to offer the organization.  As successful as he was, he could not see what he had to offer the organization.  He felt scared and helpless.  But the question he wrestled with then is the same one for us all: Are we willing to be open to God's will for our life?

There are plenty of statistics here, numbers that numb the mind and stir the heart. 854 million people do not have enough food to sustain them.  25,000 people die each day of hunger.  Lacking access to clean water, five million people die each year to water-related illnesses.  One-third of the world's population is infected with the TB bacillus (that's two billion people).  And yet he balances this bad news with good news.  The under-five mortality rate has been cut in half since 1970.  Polio has been virtually eradicated.   Adult literacy has increased from 43 to 77 percent since 1970.  Shockingly, he points out that the tithe given by Christian churches averages two percent of income, demonstrating how adept we are at holding onto our money and yet how much need would be met if we simply gave the full tithe.  There's more, bad and good, but the point is that he doesn't beat us up with statistics but simply opens a window into the challenge, helping us take the focus off ourselves and our felt needs that pale in comparison.

Statistics and scripture are animated by abundant personal anecdotes, stories of families and children encountered in other countries and how simple things made a tremendous difference in their lives.  The cynic in us wants to say so what, what does one person matter, and yet some of these stories show the power of one person who does small things with great love.  He challenges us to take our time, talents (all that is uniquely ours), and our money and use them, to fill the hole in our Gospel by beginning where we are.  In the end it's a challenge to do two things:  Go, and give.  That's all.

So, will you?  Will I?  As I told a friend the other day, rather than asking why you should go, or why you should give, rather ask why you shouldn't go, and why you shouldn't give.  Presume that the love of Christ always pushes us out, even to the edge.  Let God stop us.  Let's begin here.  Now.

He took me a while to read this book.  It's not that it's long, but simply required self-examination along the way.  It comes with a helpful study guide that may make it suitable for missions committees or small groups.  Just read it.  You'll change.

In 1992, when journalist Bob Greene was 45, he received a letter that would change his life.  Gary Griffin, a musician in Jan and Dean's touring band, had picked up a copy of one of his books, Be True to Your School, and wrote to say how much he enjoyed it.  A phone call later and Griffin had invited Greene to come to one of the band's gigs.  Not only did Greene see the show, he ended up singing and playing guitar with the band for the next 15 years, something he would never have dreamed possible.  He did what journalists do: he wrote about it.

When We Get to Surf City is Greene's account of his summertime on again-off again touring with Jan and Dean --- part travelogue, part biography, and part memoir.  I thought it would be a sad book, the recordation of a declining over-the-hill duo playing to crowds either reliving nostalgic memories or oblivious to the legends before them.  I was wrong.  The book demonstrates the value of friendship, of working to be the best at something you are passionate about, and of the timeless value of good songs.  I finished it not sad but warmed by its humanity and by the common decency of the people that inhabit its pages.  Its humble prose suggests more about life than it articulates.

Jan and Dean were a promising duo in the early 1960s.  Contemporaries of The Beach Boys, they had a #1 hit with "Surf City" in 1963, a song that became their signature.  The chorus, "Surf City, here we come," became a mantra of longing for many landlocked high school kids who dreamed of hot rods, surfing, and endless summers --- of someplace ther than where they were.  They followed it with several more #1 hits before being overtaken by The Beach Boys and, of course, The Beatles. 

By the time Jan Berry had his tragic car accident in 1966, an accident that left him to a long recuperation and lasting damage, the duo were a footnote on the popular music scene.  Neverthess, they did not stop touring.  Berry fought his way back and partner Dean Torrance stood by him.  Despite a broken body, slurred speech, and a muddied memory, Jan retook the stage, even though he had to relearn his own songs before every concert.  They played everywhere --- state and county fairs, festivals in small and medium-sized towns, corporate events, and oldies shows with the likes of Chuck Berry, Fabian, Gary and the Pacemakers, Ben E. King, and more.  Winters became a mere interlude to be endured until summer and the real life of touring.

What I like about the book is not the fact that we get to peer into the lives of Jan and Dean, at Jan's difficulties and fears and the relationship he had with Dean.  Such a telling can feel like voyeurism, making me wonder what the person written about would think.  It is, after all, personal.  And yet the spotlight Greene shines on the duo has the effect of endearing them to us rather than destroying some ideal we had of them. In fact, given the decadent lives of most rock stars, Jan and Dean and band come off as hard-working, conservative, all-American guys.  In other words, they are much better human beings than we might otherwise have thought.  They are passionate about what they do, are conscientious, and, above all, value each other.  In fact, in the end, that's why they keep doing it.

And then there's the songs.  They are timeless.  The idea that you can go to a place like "Surf City" endures, as it captures a longing for an experience, time, or place where everything feels right.  Audiences continue to interact with that song and others sung by Jan and Dean because they tap into something universal, something that continues to resonate in the human soul.  Although the author may not speak of it as a spiritual longing, that is its essence --- a desire to transcend the mundane toil and troubles of the world, even if it is ephermeral. 

At one point Greene is riding with Ben E. King, and he asks him what he's thinking about when he looks out at an audience of middle-aged people who are past their prime, past high school dances, surfing, and late-night parties.  Listen to what he says about his songs:

On "Save the Last Dance for Me":  "You think about what the last dance used to mean to you --- all the dances you went to when you were young --- and then you think about all you've been through in life, what's behind you and what's ahead.  All your years of setbacks, all your years of hope."

On "Stand By Me":  "[M]akes me think. . .[a]bout how important it is to have at least one person in your life you can count on.  Someone you can call when there's no one else to talk to."

Timeless.  Seen the way Ben E. King sees them, or the way Jan and Dean see them, oldies take on a new glow, reapplied and fresh every night as they are sung by musicians who still believe what they say, who look upon an audience not as something to be endured but as human souls to be given a gift of understanding, of songs that connect to their deepest longings.

To the extent there are redundancies in this book, like the many times Greene proclaims his wonder that he is playing with Jan and Dean, he can be forgiven.  He is, after all, living a dream.  However, in all these summers of interaction, of sharing stages, meals, and hotel rooms, you would think that deeper questions about life would come up.  Jan and Dean and band were either oblivious to spiritual issues or, as is more likely, guardedly private about most areas of their life outside touring.  The later is likely the case.  Life on the road rarely intersected with life off the road.

In March 2004 Jan Berry died of a seizure, and Jan and Dean ceased to exist.  Nevertheless, Dean Torrance continued to tour under the moniker of the Surf City Allstars.  Good songs are, after all, timeless, and Surf City is forever on the horizon, a summer beyond our reach.

I recommend When We Get to Surf City.  It lives up to its subtitle as "A Jouney Through America in Search of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams."  It hints at a greater journey we are all on, a search for not just one more magic summer but a life when all is set right. 

Surf City? 

Here we come.

If you pick up a collection of modern poetry, you would probably not use the word "beautiful" to describe what you would find there.  The language can be coarse, the images jarring, the implicit and elitist assumption being that most people just won't "get it," so why bother.  At the risk of engaging in gross generalization (which it is), most modern poetry is dark and inaccessible and, even if you try to read it (which most people won't), the task is daunting and darkening.  However, there are exceptions, even wonderful exceptions, so if you do not read poetry and are willing to start, I recommend you begin with Mary Oliver or Jeanne Murray Walker.  Neither are prone to sentimentalism and both employ earthy imagery and craft words that scatter light from every page.

Oliver, now 74, imbues her poetry with images of the natural world informed by walks from her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Walking is, in her view, a part of the poetic process.  Her latest book, Evidence, is no exception to this pattern, as it is filled with images of yellow finches bathing, swans, creaking wings of buzzards, snowy egrets, rain, clouds, and trees, just to name a few, with Oliver maintaining an inner monologue reminiscent of Emily Dickenson, though with more accessibility.  In every poem there is a subtle meaning, a reflection, powerful in its slightness.  Often, she addresses the "Lord," or God, and yet her religion is likely not orthodox but more the mysticism of Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman.  Here is one pleasing example of her craft:

The Trees

Do you think of them as decoration?

Think again.

Here are maples, flashing.
And here are the oaks, holding on all winter
   to their dry leaves.
And here are the pines, that will never fail,
   until death, the instruction to be green.
And here are the willows, the first
   to pronounce a new year.

May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them?
Oh, Lord, how we are all for invention and
   advancement!
But I think
   it would do us good if we would think about
these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply.

The trees, the trees, just holding on
   to the old, holy ways.

Simple yet profound, accessible yet not pedestrian, Oliver's poems are rich with ponderings on the meaning of natural things and well worth spending time meditating on.  To truly enjoy them, read them aloud.  Poems become three-dimensional when you not only see but hear them.

While nearly all of Oliver's poems are rooted in nature, Jeanne Murray Walker's somewhat more complicated verse dips into relationships, emotions, normal everyday affairs like putting children on a school bus, as well as nature.  Reading through her latest offering, New Tracks, Night Falling,the first thing you notice is that the poems are often longer than those of Oliver, both in line length and total length.  This makes you slow down.  The other thing you observe is that the references to Christianity are more direct, though certainly religion is not the topic of most of the poems.

Staying on the topic of trees, you'll see some similarities and differences between Oliver and Walker:

What the Trees Say

At breakfast, the heart of the egg looks like pure
gold.  Sunlight lifts the morning like a lever,
and even before I step outside, I see a river
of sparrows rise and scatter through the dawn.

That's when I tell myself, Look here,
you don't have to hurry.  Don't have to arrive
anywhere on time.  Don't have to decide how far
to walk across the lawn or whether to carry on
into the woods.  I pull on my jacket.  Breezes scatter
the yellow leaves.  The trees are whispering,

It's fall.  Got to strip down.  Got to let the sky in here,
make a place for birds.  Got to reach further
down in the earth.  Got to hunker, children,
got to hold still enough to feel the wings flutter.

"Reading a poem is like following tracks to an interior realm," says Walker in the preface, a realm of deep questions like "why I am so prone to do what I don't want to do," or "how is it possible to overcome the deep loneliness of being a seaprate, conscious human being," or "why does grace sometimes visit us out of the blue?"  She describes poetry as a "wistful groping toward the truth" and poets as "organizers of the hunt."  She's right.  If you sit long enough with good poems, they raise questions that lead to the mysteries that only God has the key to, that only He can reveal or absolve by His presence with us.  In fact, the main tool I would pack for the hunt is a mind filled with God's words, a flashlight for the journey.  Not only that, I want God along, because I know that though I may not find all or many of the answers, I will have Him, and in Him I have all I need.

Read poems.  Start with Mary Oliver and Jeanne Murray Walker.  Read God's words as well.  Sift the poets' words with the words of the One who made us.  It may take time, but it's worth it.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Harare, Robert Ndlovu, has told the BBC that there are now at least a million orphans in Zimbabwe - with many facing sexual and physical abuse from their extended families.  With numbers like that, you could despair of being able to do anything about the destitute and dangerous lives these orphans lead, and if you multiply that number by the number of similarly situated countries in Africa, much less the world, the effect can be numbing.  And yet Russell Moore contends that if the church --- the whole church --- supported adoption and made it a priority, significant inroads could be made.  Many orphans could come home.

Moore's recent book, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches, is simply the best single book on adoption that has been published.  He roots adoption in the context of the Gospel, clearly setting forth its biblical parallel in our own adoption by God.  He says that "[a]doption would become a reality in our churches if our churches themselves saw our brotherhood and sisterhood in the church itself rather than in our fleshly identities."  "When we adopt," he says, "and when we encourage a culture of adoption in our churches and communities, we're picturing something that's true about God.  We, like Jesus, see what our Father is doing and do likewise (John 5:19).  And what our Father is doing, it turns out, is fighting for orphans [that's you and me], making them sons and daughters."  This could be dry theology, but it's not.  It's warmed and made personal by being rooted in Moore's own practical experience in adopting two Russian orphans.  That story in itself is compelling.

Beyond theology, the rich wisdom and practical advice Moore offers is tremendous.  In one chapter he takes on all that couples should think about as they consider adoption.  He deals gently and yet directly with the fears of those who believe they may be infertile, counseling against the notions that adoption is the "second-best option" or really just "long-term babysitting." He also deals with those who have existing families and are considering adoption.  Can they love the child they adopt as much as the ones they birth?  Sure, he says, "[y]our affection for the child and the permanence of your relationship will be as real to you as if you've birthed him or her yourself." 

Moving on, he considers and offers advice on all the practical aspects of the adoption process --- domestic or international, closed or open?  He discusses all the paperwork that will be needed, anticipating questions all adoptive couples have, and addresses the sometimes daunting challenge of paying for lawyers, home studies, and birth expenses.  It's all helpful and all relevant.  He even talks about what to do while you're waiting for the call, a not insignificant part of the process, and what to do when the child comes.  Finally, he addresses the difficult issues of race, health problems, and prejudice in entering the adoption process.

Most of this was not entirely new to me.  I have read it elsewhere, though never with quite the winsome mix of biblical theology, grace, wisdom, and practical advice that Moore offers.  However, one chapter should be mandatory reading for pastors and other church leaders. In "It Takes a Village to Adopt a Child: How Churches Can Encourage Adoption," the author makes a passionate call for creating an adoption culture in the church, encouraging pastors to preach in such a way as to allow people to "see the goodness and glory of adoption as an icon of the gospel they embrace."  More than that, he encourages pastors to preach with specificity on adoption, making it a priority.  For example, he encourages church leaders to highlight adoptions within the church and has practical suggestions about Mother's Day (a sensitive day for infertile couples), wedding ceremonies, small group ministry to adoptive couples, and financial assistance to adoptive couples.  More than this, he encourages pastors to "proclaim the fatherhood of God and concretize in. . . preaching what this fatherhood looks like."  He calls on churches to recognize adoption as a part of global mission, concluding that "it takes more than a village to adopt a child, at least for those of us in Christ.  It takes a church."

I recommend Adopted for Life as an excellent resource to potential adoptive couples.  More than that, though, it should be read by pastors, missionaries, mission ministry groups, and church leaders.  If we cosmic orphans can come home, so can the millions of orphans in Zimbabwe --- one child at a time.  It just takes a church that sees and does what the Father has done.

After the elections of 2006 in Uganda, it came to light that millions of dollars in aid given by the Global Fund to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and aids had been stolen, some to buy votes, some to line the pockets of aid bureaucrats.  The Fund requested an investigation and gave the government of Uganda money for the investigations and prosecutions.  Then came the revelation that even that money was stolen.  The scenario would be laughable were it not so serious.  As Charles Obbo opines in an article in Uganda's Daily Monitor, the entire aid bureaucracy is itself corrupt, with many aid workers complicit in kickbacks for projects they manage or outright pocketing funds.  Little aid money actually makes it to the people it is intended to help.

None of this would be news to Zambian-born economist Zambisa Moyo.  In the recently published Dead Aid, she makes a convincing case that the more than $1 trillion transferred from wealthy countries to Africa over the past several decades has not improved the lives of Africans but actually led to increased poverty, corruption, and dependency.  At the same time, nations that have ultimately rejected a dependency on aid --- like South Africa, Botswana, and Ghana --- are better off, seeing a reduction of poverty, less corruption, and better and more transparent governance.  Moyo argues not for a change to the aid regime but for its death.

The statistics are compelling.  With 700 million Africans living on less than $1 US per day, poverty has increased to the point where sub-Saharan Africa has over 50% of the world's people living in abject poverty.  Life expectancy has stagnated.  One in seven children die before the age of five.  Adult literacy has plummeted below pre-1980 levels.  Fifty per cent of the continent is under non-democratic rule.  The continent seems locked into a cycle of dysfunction.  While one might point to localized examples of change, on a macro level the aid model is an abysmal failure.  And while President Obama has paid lip service to the idea that, in his words, "the purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where its no longer needed," a sentiment often expressed by world leaders, the recent pledge of yet more aid by the G8 --- $20 billion dollars to help third-world farmers --- does not radically alter the fundamental assumptions of the aid model.

Moyo takes aim not at emergency aid or charity (though she notes that even they can be criticized as having unintended, harmful consequences) but at the large, systematic cash transfers from rich countries to African governments, whether concessional (below market rate) loans or grants.  Along the way, she provides an enlightening history of aid and its various foci over the years.  In the end, however, she concludes that while aid remains at the heart of the development agenda, there are compelling reasons to show that it "perpetuates the cycle of poverty and derails sustainable economic growth." With compelling anecdotal and statistical information, she demonstrates how aid is one of the greatest facilitators of corruption, reduces economic growth, leads to more poverty, and then leads to more need for aid.  Corruption analysts estimate that at least $10 billion --- nearly half of Africa's 2003 aid receipts --- departs the continent every years, stolen by corrupt leaders and funneled to private accounts.  She also shows how aid reduces savings and development, leads to inflation, chokes off the export sector, and creates dependency.  In short, with aid money flowing, African leaders need not look elsewhere for development strategies.

Having made her case for the negative impact of aid on development, Moyo devotes fully half of her short book to a prescription for a world without aid.  Her proposal envisions a gradual (but uncompromising) reduction in systematic aid over a five- to ten-year period.  First, she proposes that African governments access the international bond market, noting that the money is available and investor interest in emerging economies high, but simply awaits action by governments to secure appropriate credit ratings and woo the investors.  Uganda, for instance, is in a position to issue bonds (it has a credit rating), and yet thus far has failed to do so.  Why?  Likely because aid money is freely available and more easily misused without serious consequence.  A default on a bond issue can zap your credit rating and, at least for a time, have a chilling effect on investor willingness to lend.

A second opportunity is for African governments to open themselves to foreign direct investment, as in roads, railroads, power plants and other lasting investments, something the Chinese have done well.  But as long as aid is at the center of development strategy, few governments have the political will or incentive to take the steps necessary to improve the regulatory and infrastructure environment such that conditions will be friendly to such investors.

Third, Moyo suggests that trade should be a critical component of development, facilitated by better transportation infrastructure and western countries that will open their markets to African goods.  Exports increase tariffs and tax income, leading to a better stream of revenue for government.

Entrepreneurs will flourish, says Moyo, increasing trade, only when they have access to credit.  She advocates microfinance as the means by which people without assets (the unbankable) can obtain the small loans (not handouts) to finance their raw materials and tools of trade.  She notes that the default rate on these small loans (generally less than $100 US), is less than five percent.  Unlike aid, which either comes with no strings attached or with conditions that recipients know are often overlooked, nonpayment of these loans is rare because borrowers know that if they don't pay back the loans they have today, their lender will blacklist them, and they won't be able to borrow more tomorrow.  In addition, there is a community interest in ensuring repayment: loans are made to members in a group, and when default threatens, members of the group often repay the loan (with the idea that they will recover from the borrower later) in order to keep loans flowing to other members of the group.  This Grameen Bank model (pioneered by Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus) has been very successful and yet awaits more widespread implementation.

Two other stimuli to develop are remittances (money sent home by Africans living abroad) and savings (money saved by Africans and deposited in banks or invested).  She says that remittances tend to be relatively stable sources of income that play an important role in paying for imports and repaying debt.  In addition, they are even used by some banks to securitize loans, thus expanding access to credit.  However, middleman tap these funds, often taking up to 20%, making it important for African governments to find ways to facilitate cheaper ways to send money home.  As to savings, Moyo argues that there is a lot of untapped capital in the hands of Africans, often hidden and not banked where it could finance development and bring greater financial stability.

Thus, Moyo argues for an end to aid as we know it and a multi-pronged, market-based development model, something South Africa and Botswana have already embraced.  Given that most African countries have already hit "rock bottom" (her words), she questions:

Isn't it. . . likely that in a world freed of aid, economic life for the majority of Africans might actually improve, that corruption would fall, entrepreneurs would rise, and Africa's growth engine would start chugging?  This is the most probable outcome --- that where the real chance exists to make a better life for themselves, their children and Africa's future generations, Africans would grab it and go.

Rather than giving something for nothing --- an approach that has bred corruption and a coterie of profiteering elites, isn't it time for something more radical, something based on proven market forces?

I recommend Dead Aid as an informative, illuminating guide to the existing development model and a stimulus to thinking about what will really help the poverty stricken millions of Africa.  At 154 pages, it's a quick read, not laborious but sufficiently illustrated by anecdotes that the non-economist can follow it. 

It's not enough to want to do good.  We have to know what in the long-term will lead to a sustainable good.  We have to be wise and discerning do-gooders.  Hopefully Moyo will follow this book with a second where she offers a critique of the work of charities in Africa and a prescription for a charity that will build sustainable communities that rarely if ever need charity but, rather, are able to help others.  Regardless, her book will hopefully provide fuel for lasting change in Africa.

Most of us actually began to talk around the age of two, and by the time we enter kindergarten provide a running commentary on everything we do. However, some of us never learn how to truly have great conversations with people and may spend a lifetime trying to be something that we're not or confronting new social situations with either fear or swagger. Mike Bechtle's short book, Confident Conversation, is a very genuine, non-gimmicky approach to working on better communicating with people (which is another way of learning to love people), chock full of practical advice and practiced wisdom. I do not make it a habit of reading "how to" books, as I often find them tedious and discouraging, another list of things I need to do or change, but I like this one because of its human-centered orientation and simple, common-sense wisdom.

The author first orients us by telling us that the key to good communication (and good relationships) is to develop conversational skills that fit our personality style, to become more of who we really are. In other words, introverts need not try and become extroverts, something they don't do well anyway. He says that if we recognize who we are, then we can nurture that and enjoy the uniqueness of others. He also moves us from a me-centered engagement (a focus on what we supply to the conversation) to an other-centered orientation where we become explorers. He helps us see both the positive and negative attitudes we can bring to a conversation, identifying filters of background and culture that may become barriers to good conversation. Though unstated, the author is making a biblical case for looking to the interests of others before our own (Phil. 2:4) and building a winsome case for all the "love one anothers" of Scripture.

In succeeding chapters, he spells out the practical implications of this new orientation. Don't know what to do when you walk into a room of people that you do not know? He tells us how to begin conversations in this and other sometimes challenging situations. He advises preparing for conversations, telling us to think ahead as to what the person may be interested in or may respond to. He suggests taking notes after conversations as a way to honor people, to remember their names, family members, interests, or concerns. In none of this is the tool offered as a means of gaining power in the social encounter but, rather, as a way of honoring the dignity of people, of remembering them.

He also gives advice on being a good listener, part of which, as painful as it can be, is to give up our conversational agenda. He tells us how to ask good questions and foster a genuine curiosity that will help generate questions. Reading this chapter, I was reminded of Jesus' questioning, probing manner with the Samaritan woman at the well, and how so often in conversations I alternate between a self-absorbed inner dialogue and chatter that doesn't allow room for exploring the other person's interests or questions. Both are borne of discomfort.

Finally, he deals with the special conversational situations of "hard" conversations, that is, the ones you'd like to avoid or extricate yourself from, telephone conversations, and email dialogues. A lot of what he says is common sense, and yet reading all these tips together is like a summary of folk wisdom. Some people do all this reasonably well, but many do not and yet how many of us have actually tried to develop our conversational skills as a way of growing more into the image of Christ? A final chapter is titled "A Mini Course for Communication and summarizes the book, really, in four principles: function uniquely, prepare thoroughly, explore expectantly, and focus outwardly. He encourages us to set goals and to patiently work at bettering our interactions with people conversationally.

I recommend Confident Conversation to introverts and extroverts alike, regardless of age, who would like to have better, more meaningful conversations. You're never too old to learn to talk. . . again.

Most of us likely recall the 2006 shooting spree by Charles Roberts in an Amish schoolhouse.  That part we understand and lament.  However, doubtless most people regard what happened after that as a curious anomaly.  The Amish forgave Charles Roberts.  They set up a fund for the education of his young children.  And then they returned to their community to grieve and go on living as they always have.  Can their actions be excused as an oddity, unrealistic for normal people?

Catherine Claire Larson doesn’t think so.  In her recent book, As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, she recounts not simply the horrors of the genocide committed by the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1994, when over 500,000 Tutsi were hacked to death by their Hutu neighbors, people they had lived beside, worked with, and played with for years, but the profound reconciliation that is occurring between survivors and killers, many of whom now walk among the family and friends of those they killed.  Indeed, it’s not an anomaly but a common feature of Rwandan life.

Based on original interviews and research, both her own and that of Laura Waters Hinson, whose documentary film of the same title inspired the book, Larson tells the stories of both survivors and former killers. What these potent stories reveal is the power of forgiveness to change lives and communities.  It’s not easy.  She details the struggles that survivors have with feelings of revenge, of the process through which forgiveness comes.  She also looks at the killers’ struggles to come to grips with the truth about themselves, to confess and tell the truth, and to forgive themselves, of the day-to-day sadness that lingers but the joy that can break through as people forgive and attempt to make some restitution.

One story Larson tells is of a woman named Rosaria and a man named Saveri, who pummeled Rosaria’s sister, Christine, and her two small children with a spiked club.  Saveri is imprisoned, but when he confesses to his crime, he is released to the community.  Coming to faith in Christ, he eventually seeks out Rosaria, asking her forgiveness, confessing precisely what he had done. 

“I forgive you, said Rosaria softly.”If you have confessed your sin before God and truly changed, then I forgive you. 

Saveri searched for words, opened his mouth to speak them, but none came, only tears of relief.

“How can I refuse to forgive you when I did not make you?  Your crime” --- she paused, forming her thoughts carefully --- “your crime was against God, who created the people you killed.”

Saveri goes on to build a house for Rosaria and her child, a small measure of restitution for what he had done.  That’s just one story of several that Larson recounts.

Interspersed with the stories are short interludes that probe the meaning and process of forgiveness and reconciliation, truth telling and restitution.  She moves from atrocities like those experienced in the genocide of Rwanda to something as personal (and yet relative to genocide) minor as having your home broken into.  She’s hopeful about the possibilities of reconciliation, and yet sober in her assessment of the human capacity for evil and for rationalizing that evil.  She unfailingly finds the hope for healing in the Christian belief that God first forgives us and gives us the power to forgive others.

“Pain does not have to have the last word.  Forgiveness can push out the borders of what we believe possible.  Reconciliation can offer us a glimpse of the transfigured world to come.”

As We Forgive is a difficult book to read at times, and yet I recommend it.  We have all been wounded by some offense against person or property, some more than others.  If Rwandans can forgive neighbors who acted like beasts, killing friends and loved ones, perhaps we can forgive each other too.  Perhaps we can even forgive ourselves.

As of late I have noted that many people I admire are encouraging us to fast from a technology dominated lifestyle.  In recent news, the Pope and Italian bishops are encouraging youth to give up IPods, Facebook, and other technology for Lent.  Chuck Colson gives the same encouragement in today’s Breakpoint article, telling us to “take a technology sabbath.”  And my pastor has given up Facebook for Lent.  That I am reading Maggie Jackson’s new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, a probing study of our collective attention deficit disorder caused by digital technology, is, perhaps, a divine propinquity: God is trying to get my attention. 

To provide punctuation to these “coincidences,” last night I was reading a short story by Charles Dickens entitled ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary,” and an old sea captain, lost at sea with crew and passengers, has these thoughts: “O, what a thing it is, in a time of danger and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face!  I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph.  I admire machinery as much as any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us.  But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true.  Never try it for that.  It will break down like a straw.”  Like Jackson, like Colson, like the bishops and my pastor, all of this drives home the way in which our technology can reduce intimate, human contact, how we need to see a human face.

I can remember, of course, when all this was different.  I had no computer at home.  I had no cell phone.  I had no IPod or PDA.  And TV, while it provided a distraction, a bit of entertainment, was not omnipresent.  And yet it’s difficult to summon up the feel of that era.  Imagine:  If you wanted to know what someone was doing, you called them on the phone or went to see them, and besides, did you really want to know what they were doing all the time, or what they were thinking?  I never gave it a second thought --- then. What did I care what my friend was doing after dinner?  Nowadays, we know a lot more about a lot less.  We read blogs and Facebook pages and monitor Twitter feeds and text messages so we won’t miss anything.  That’s anything.  This need to be connected is a compulsive thing, really, the need to check in, to see what is happening. But the fact is, we were perfectly content, perhaps more content, when we weren’t so connected.

This hyper-connectivity is a compulsion for both introverts and extroverts.  Introverts, who prefer their own thoughts to the chatter of people, can pick who they interact with and when and on what level.  They can think before they speak. Extroverts can cultivate networks of “friends,” something which energizes them.  And yet both find themselves dehumanized by superficial contacts, perhaps even driven by the sense that they can control their relationships by removing someone from their friend list, or ignoring them for a time, or just saying things online that they’d never have the nerve to say in person.  Step back from it for a moment, a long moment, and you see at once how silly and yet how damaging it can be.  And yet most people don’t even know what’s happening to them.

Maggie Jackson believes we are either in the twilight of culture or one on the cusp of a renaissance of attention.  She says that “Twilight cultures begin to show a preference for veneer and form, not depth and content; a stubborn blindness to the consequences of actions, from the leadership on down.  In other words, an epidemic erosion of attention is a sure sign of an impending dark age.”  I don’t know if she’s right, but I do know that technology has not made us better or happier people, that it’s becoming amazingly difficult to have an undistracted conversation or, for that matter, moment with anyone, that we can live as families in one house and yet carry on most of our life in a virtual reality divorced of place: we can be anybody, anywhere, at any time in the netherworld of cyberspace.

I’ve said it before:  I’m no Luddite.  As the captain said, I admire machinery as much as any man, but no machine can substitute for the human face, the peril and promise of real, tangible places filled with real, live people. 

One of the many interviews that Jackson did for her book was one with an undertaker, Tom Lynch, who told her countless examples of how people don’t want to face the physicality of death --- one more indication of how we are preferring our own reality, a virtual one where we don’t have to face death, to a real and physical world.  Lynch read Jackson a quote from poet Robert Pogue Harrison, who noted that we must choose “an allegiance --- either to the post-human, the virtual and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities.”

I’ll take the earth, the real and, yes, the dead.  Dirt, mud, rain, sun, and people, washed and unwashed, liberal and conservative, winsome and weird.  That’s the right stuff.  Now, if I can just wean myself from the press of the machine.

[Stay tuned:  Ten Ways to Overcome Our Attention Deficit.  Coming Soon]

"Antonio, I busted in there as mad as a hornet, but you can't stay mad when you start thinking things like that.  Once you begin noticing the lines a man's got round his eyes and mouth and think about the way his folks gave a hopeful name to him when he was first born into this world, you might as well give up."

"I said, 'Virgil, the night is dark, and we are far from home.'  How come it was the words of that old hymn popped into my mind just then to say?  I don't know, but it did.  I said, 'The night is dark, Virgil Roebuck, and home's a long way off for both of us.'"  

(Leo Bebb, to Virgil Roebuck, in The Book of Bebb, by Frederick Buechner)

I revisited an old friend, Leo Bebb, this past weekend.  Bebb is the former con man, flim-flam artist, and most profound reverend at the center of Frederick Buechner's quartet of novels, collectively known as The Book of Bebb.  Bebb is a provocative mixture of the sacred and profane, a man who has seen it all, sinned much, and yet is all the more full of grace. His encounter with Roebuck --- his non-believing, bitter nemesis --- is indicative of the charitable way he viewed the unlovely, perhaps because he knew that he was not so much different than them.

What Bebb is referring to here is a conversation he had with Roebuck. It's one of the most profound "sermons" I have ever read or heard, painful in its honesty and rich in grace, and yet because of the profanity I doubt it'll be preached from any pulpit, and I cannot reprint it here. But take my word for it: Bebb reaches Roebuck in that moment because he understands what is behind the crusty exterior of the man. He knows something of his pain, and Roebuck knows it, and because he knows it, for a moment Bebb has credibility. Roebuck really listens.

I often watch people, but much less often do I regard them as does Bebb, "noticing the lines a man's got round his eyes and mouth," considering what particular struggles they have. I particularly have difficulty regarding those who are annoying or embittered in this way, people who are unpleasant to be around. Maybe even people who are not happy. We like happy people, you know. And yet these are just the people I need to take a better look at, because if I can have compassion for them then I should be able to have compassion for anyone.

It's said that if you pray for such people, you'll begin to have compassion for them. In other words, God will give you eyes to see what is behind their unpleasantness. But it's also true that if you write stories about them you will begin to know them as well. Indeed, the best stories are the ones that portray their characters as the complex people we all are. They help us see the hope in a name given by parents to a child, the promise and peril of being human.

There is a young woman I met in Africa named Fortunate. Can you imagine that? Her parents gave her a name that they hoped she might see fulfilled. Similarly with Grace and Faith, two other women I met. Names with promise.

Thanks to Bebb, I'm a little closer to seeing people for who they are and, maybe, a little more compassionate. I'm better seeing in the dark.

That Edith Schaeffer's 1992 book, The Life of Prayer, has long been out of print may be a sad commentary about the state of Christian publishing or, even, the state of evangelical spirituality.  I hope it’s the prior, and not the latter, but whatever direction I point to I ultimately must take the blame as well.  In a noisy culture where busyness is rewarded, prayer is easily marginalized.  I know, because I’ve done it.

The Life of Prayer, written by a woman in her mid-Seventies, after the death of her husband, and after a life of self-sacrifice and service, is rich with wisdom, creativity, and practical advice.  In other words, all that the writer says about prayer is rooted in her life experience.  This is invaluable.  At the moment I’m re-reading Chapter Two, “Affliction and Prayer – Suffering and Prayer,” where Edith says that “[i]t seems to me that there is a need to be aware of our suffering giving us a tiny measure of understanding of Christ’s suffering,” and I know that this is prose backed by the experience of her own sickness, that of her husband (who suffered and died of cancer), and her young son (who contracted polio).  In other words, it’s real.  She has lived it.  I don’t think the truth of her statement (which echoes that of the Apostle Paul, who speaks not of the removal of suffering but of what it produces in us --- a patient endurance and means of sharing in the far greater sufferings of Christ) is learned without experience.  That’s wisdom.

But there’s creativity too.  Flipping over to Chapter Six, entitled “When Pray?  Why Pray?,” she commends us to “examine the possibilities in our own days and nights.  There are waiting times --- for buses, trains, trams, planes, red lights. . . times that can be used to pray in the words of a remembered Psalm, or a hymn, or in asking for mercy and forgiveness, or in thanking God for his blessings, or in praying for someone who is on our mind.”  She speaks of being “alone” in the middle of a crowded city bus, and I remember reading that section many years ago as if it was a fresh insight.  So simple, and yet so easy to forget.  It makes me want to reclaim all of life’s margins for prayer.

Finally, there’s practical advice.  “Helps in Being Real in Prayer” is especially useful, as when talking with God we can, as silly as it seems, hold back.  One reading of the Psalms should illustrate how boldly (and even audaciously) we can approach the Father.  “If God is Sovereign, Why Pray?",” leaves us in mystery, and yet with deeply satisfying wonder at that truth which is just beyond our reach. There’s even advice and wisdom about fasting and prayer.

Reading Edith Schaeffer you have the sense that you are sitting across the table from the woman, and though she does ramble on (a fact I can personally testify to), she does so with a generous love and with great wisdom.  There’s a lot to learn from someone who has lived a life of prayer.  Find the book, if you can.  Read it.  Then live it.  It’s a lost gem.

Most of us, Christians included, take for granted the places in which we live and rarely get beyond superficial considerations about traffic and congestion or good restaurants or convenient shopping. Besides, more and more we are people who do most of our living on the interior --- in our automobiles, houses, and offices. The exterior, including the built environment around us, is simply the backdrop on which our interior lives are played out. Not so for Eric Jacoben. His 2003 book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, is a testimony to his passion for cities, his commitment to seeing our urban areas through the lens of Scripture, and his goal of bringing us into an attentive consideration of the places where we live.

A pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Missoula, Montana, Jacobsen is also a keen observer of and participant in city life. His book is divided into two parts. First, in a section entitled "Thinking About Our Cities, he shares a philosophical and theological perspective on cities, beginning with a consideration of how sprawl has affected our lives and ending with a section on "Learning to See Our Cities: A Theological Approach," where he roots our resurrection hope in community rather than the individual, relates stewardship not only to nature but to the built and cultural environment, and encourages the discipline of seeing city places as "gift-places," as holy sites where God meets us and reminds of the future hope of a New Jerusalem. To receive the blessings of cities, he says we need to "train our eyes to see the corner coffee shop and grocery in a neighborhood as the rare and beautiful species that they have become. We need to learn to stand back in awe at the broad, tree-lined avenue that has as a terminating vista a grand public building. . . . and take advantage of the pedestrian-friendly setting of the grid-pattern layout with ample sidewalks for walking (alone or with our children), treating each corner as a fresh opportunity for exploration and adventure. . . ." What he counsels is a settledness that requires reflection for a people often too busy to see the majesty of what is at hand.

In a second section, entitled "Markers of the City," he attempts to define what makes a city, using six markers: public spaces, mixed-use zoning, local economy, beauty and quality in the built environment, critical mass, and presence of strangers. He finds the markers helpful in suggesting what is good and valuable in existing cities and what needs to be repaired, relating the existence of public spaces, for example, to incarnational ministry, noting that public space requires sharing and, thus, an opportunity to practice love and kindness, promotes relationships, and facilitates communal discourse. He demonstrates the value of a local economy to local culture and community, lamenting the narrowness of our thinking about economic decisions, noting that "[w]e compare prices, and if we can get the same product for even a slightly lower price, we will do so. What we need to learn is to take one more step and say 'What else is being impacted by the purchase of this product?'" It's a good point, as not every cost is factored into our economic decisions. In other chapters he links density with connectivity and the existence of strangers with opportunities for hospitality, weaving in and out anecdotal strands that illustrate his points and challenging us to a New Urbanist perspective, one that values a rediscovery of the classic virtues of the city.

This is not always an easy book to absorb. There is a lot being said about things we don't usually give much thought to. Having finished the book, I have the sense that I need to read it again, carefully, or make it a part of a discussion group. But that's really a testament to the thoughtfulness of the project, to the many years the author has been engaged with the topic. I recommend the book for pastors, church planters, community leaders, and city planners, to anyone concerned with the nature and shape of our cities, for the ordinary places where we all live. As Eugene Peterson says in his foreword to the book, "Geography and theology are biblical bedfellows." Jacobsen shows us why.

As I gravitate toward a reading diet that focuses primarily on either theology or literary fiction, I was pleased to discover the 2002 book, The Heavenly Man, which is the autobiography of Brother Yun, a leader in the Chinese house church movement as well as one of the visionaries behind Chinese Christians’ goal of taking the Gospel “back to Jerusalem.”  Written with Paul Hathaway, Director of Asia Harvest, the book is a compelling story of Yun’s conversion and total commitment to Jesus Christ, a commitment that led him to suffering the great trials of poverty, imprisonment, torture, and separation from his family, and yet Yun’s story of complete dependence on God also demonstrates the many blessings of God even amongst suffering.

Like many of our time, I suffer from the twin plagues of cynicism and skepticism, and so I came to this book ready to question or even disbelieve its claims of miracles, looking for some skewed theology or sensationalistic claims.  Yet I found none.  What I did discover was a man who, despite his sufferings, maintained his humble reliance on God, was immersed in Scripture and prayer, was full of love for fellow prisoners and even captors, and received visions from the Lord and miraculous interventions that he did not seek and yet sorely needed.

Some examples may help give one a flavor of what life was like for Yun.  During Yun’s first imprisonment, where he was subjected to beatings and electric shocks, he was somehow miraculously able to fast from both water and food for 75 days, earning the respect of both fellow cellmates (who were generally cruel to him) and prison guards. Not humanly possible, of course, but his own account is corroborated by his wife and another prisoner.  It led to him being called “The Heavenly Man.”  Yun later escaped from a heavily guarded prison by simply walking out, past guards who did not see him, through a gate that was inexplicably standing wide open, and into a taxi that took him away into hiding.  Whenever I doubted the story, I was reminded that nothing occurred to Yun that did not have a precedent in Scripture and was corroborated by at least one (and often more than one) witness.

Yun is also forthright about his own failings.  He admits, for example, that his last imprisonment, in Myanmar (Burma) would not have happened if he had heeded his wife’s wisdom and prompting by the Lord, that he placed to much trust in his having a German passport.  He also admits that his own busyness and refusal to rest had at times alienated him from his family and led him to make unwise decisions.

Yun maintains that “how we mature as Christians largely depends on the attitude we have when we’re faced with suffering,” that the Lord “gives us these trials to keep us humble and dependent on him for sustenance.”  That being said, Yun is frank about the agony as well as the discouragement and bitterness he faced at times.  Even in this, he was Job-like, crying out to God in his distress and suffering and yet remaining faithful, continuing to trust the One who saves us from our captors (whoever or whatever they may be) and gives us joy in the midst of suffering.

The Heavenly Man is not a difficult book to read, and yet its content is emotionally charged.  It’s 347 pages of life at the edge of faith, about a life fully dependent on God.  As Western Christians, I doubt many of us know anything like what Brother Yun experienced, and yet we can be challenged to a deeper faith and walk by his example.  Read it to be challenged.  Read it to be informed.  It’s an uncomfortable, holy provocation.

[For a more detailed survey of the mushrooming growth of Chinese Christianity, I recommend David Aikman’s Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power.  Aikman, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, and a Christian, believes Christians will make up 20 to 30 percent of the population of China within just a few years.  Perhaps the most arresting chapter highlights the growing role of Christians among the educated elite - artists, writers, intellectuals, even Party members.  It’s rich with detail and yet is a bit dry at times.]

Although Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling goes on a bit too long, he provides a helpful way of looking at culture that goes beyond the paradigm of "culture wars" and provokes Christians to pursue a new and more positive roll in cultural formation. His question is what we as Christians are supposed to do in the world, and where do we begin. In three sections he looks at culture, gospel, and calling --- concluding that our role is both more modest and significant than we might think, that God transforms cultures while we humbly and communally put our gifts to work in glorifying God and serving others. The sense I had at the end of the book was more humility and awe than call to action.

There were a couple of chapters that were very helpful. In "Cultivation and Creation" he argues that the only way to change culture is to make more of it, asserting that our role is not simply to condemn, critique, copy, or consume culture, though we rightly and by necessity do all of these at one time or the other, but we are to create new cultural goods and cultivate the good that is here. The emphasis is not on tearing down but on building up what good is here. It's a helpful corrective to our tendency to spend all our time taking potshots at the bad while mimicking the culture with our own "safe" subculture (aka "contemporary Christian music"). In another related chapter, "Gestures and Postures," he posits the idea that while our response to culture should consist of appropriate gestures, sometimes condemning (as in misogynist rap music), sometimes critiquing (as with a movie that has both good and bad elements), sometimes copying (importing into church organization a helpful business principle, for example), and sometimes consuming (an inevitable part of living in the world), our default position, that is, our posture, should be one of cultivation and creation, making new things and preserving the good already here.

I found particularly unhelpful his entire Gospel section, which consists of a kind of whirlwind cultural survey of both the Old and New Testaments. My problem was not that it had any inaccuracy but, rather, that it did not seem to relate well to the rest of what he says in the book. I would rather have seen a better integration of Scripture and his sections of culture and calling, as what he had to say in those sections was certainly biblically based. In fact, I think Crouch could have made his case with expanded versions of the chapters I mention above --- making for a much shorter, cogent argument. Despite the fact that Tim Keller recommends this book (admittedly, a credible voice), I cannot recommend it for most laymen. I do commend its purpose and aim and suggest that the author continue to hammer away at this theme in more focused writing.

In Peter Godwin’s memoir of Africa, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, one image serves as a potent metaphor for the political, economic, and social meltdown of Zimbabwe. Godwin’s aged parents, who lived in a house on the edge of Harare, had carefully cultivated a hedge around their home that shielded them from the hawkers, homeless, and thieves who plied the road in front of their home. One evening, after retiring to bed, he is awoken by the smell of smoke. The bougainvillea hedge surrounding their home is burning. As the fire engine takes more than an hour to arrive, the hedge is destroyed and, along with it, their cultivated privacy and sense of security from the near anarchy outside. As Godwin says: “[A]s the day lightens, we see that we are completely exposed, looking directly into the hawker’s camp and the busy throng of curious passersby beyond. . . . My parents have spent the last fifteen years tending this barrier against the huddled masses outside, reinforcing it until they have judged it impregnable, and it has been incinerated in an hour.” The barrier is gone, and with it the illusion of security. They are exposed.

Better than anyone I have yet read, Peter Godwin is able to vividly and personably record the sights and sounds of an unraveling civilization, of the impending collapse of a society. An African-born white Zimbabwean, Godwin grew up in a white-ruled Rhodesia under siege from guerilla forces. After white Rhodesians conceded to majority black rule under still governing Robert Mugabe, it initially seemed as if a multi-party, multi-racial democracy might work. Soon, however, Mugabe began “awarding” productive white-run farms to “wovits” (war veterans) and party loyalists. Productivity came to a standstill and, by some accounts, because of famine and oppression, over half the population left the country. Infrastructure fell into disrepair. Opposition political groups were targeted. And while Godwin’s account ends with his father’s death in 2004, we know that nothing has improved since that time.

Godwin is able to document this decline well, but more than serving as a political history, the memoir is also a family history. He comes to grip with a secret his father has withheld from him that deeply affects his own identity. He portrays how his parents coped with their decline in status in a society that no longer wanted “colonialists” around. Ultimately, he records his emotional journey to exile from his own country, a sense that his country has been stolen from him and he can longer live there and yet never feel at home anywhere else.

With all this misery, there’s not a lot of hope available, particularly for someone who does not embrace Christian faith. Yet, even here, there are both white and black people who demonstrate hope and heroism. In a grocery store line one day, his father finds that he is short of cash. As he begins to give the clerk items to put back on the shelves, a black woman he does not know that is farther back in the line pays the remainder due, something he had done for other black Africans in better times. Faced with an epileptic homeless man outside the gate to his parents’ home one day, Godwin himself sets aside the real danger of AIDS and reaches in the man’s mouth and pulls out his tongue, whereupon his fit settles. There are more such examples, and yet all this is like a narrow crack of light in darkness. The overwhelming emotion that can overtake you in reading such an account is deep sadness over the inhumanity of man, of his great capacity for evil, and of the awesome challenge of bringing hope to a place so charred by despair.

While there may not be a prescription here for how to effect change in a country and continent racked by disease, warfare, and corrupt and inept governments, it is a reminder that individual acts of love and charity matter. No amount of financial aid will cure Africa’s troubles. They are desperately in need of not just revival but of a deep and wide reformation that will extend to family, social, economic, and political life. This book is a compellingly human, richly detailed, deeply personal, and richly informative account of a world gone wrong. Yet for hope and salvation, one must look elsewhere.

As an admirer of Francis Schaeffer, one of the saddest things I have witnessed during the last few years is the attempts by both his own son and by other detractors to impugn his integrity or, at least, to redefine him as something he was not.  Reading son Frank Schaeffer’s memoir, both father and mother are portrayed negatively, Francis as a reclusive, depressed, sometimes suicidal man and Edith as a perfectionist nut.  Well, perhaps the title says it all --- “Crazy for God.”  This book by biographer Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life, should set the record straight. 

Colin Duriez is sympathetic toward the Schaeffers and deeply appreciative of the time he studied under Francis, yet at the same time he is engaged in writing an authentic and carefully researched biography, of telling “true Truth” (to use Schaeffer’s nomenclature) about this extraordinary pastor, author, apologist, and founder of L’Abri, a worldwide ministry to seekers of truth.  While noting Frank Schaeffer’s very subjective memoir, and even quoting from it on occasion, he acknowledges that it added little to what he already knew (little, that is, that can be documented, that actually squares with reality).  What he takes issue with is Frank’s contention that his father kept up a “facade of conviction” in his latter years, something he says is not borne out by the evidence.  And that’s about all we hear of the strange memoir until near the end of the book where, in a footnote, Duriez cannot seem to restrain his feelings, noting that “he [Frank] is at times in error over fact or interpretation . . . in his unashamedly subjective and at times bizarre memoir.”  That’s a restrained critique by a historian. 

But enough of what the book is not.  What it is is the best biographical treatment of the man and his mission that has ever been written --- scholarly, without being pedantic or lifeless; sufficiently nuanced, without chasing every thread of the man’s life and work; sympathetic, and yet not avoiding the truth about the man’s weaknesses and struggles.  If you want to feel what animated Francis and Edith Schaeffer, to be caught up in the emotion of what they felt, read Edith’s Tapestry and L’Abri.  (Set aside sufficient time for their combined 906 pages, however!)  But this is the biography for most to read, as it is concise and yet comprehensive enough not to miss any important detail of their story.

In eight chapters and a total of 208 pages, Duriez covers Schaeffer from birth in 1912 until death in 1984 from cancer.  Along the way he speaks of his conversion, his years as a pastor, his involvement with the separatist movement and subsequent divergence from it, the L’Abri years, and the latter years of films and more political involvement.  What emerges is a portrait of a man who, like any Christian, matured in faith and whose understanding of scripture and culture developed.  And yet, looking at Francis Schaeffer’s whole life, there no sense that he was a wholly different person in 1975 than in 1955.  What comes across is his integrity and consistency.  And while Duriez acknowledges Schaeffer’s occasional anger or impatience, and even his depression, none of this does anything to damage his reputation.  They endear him to us, demonstrating his humanity and his honesty (as these failings and struggles were acknowledged by him to those who knew him).

For most who are familiar with the Schaeffers and who have, perhaps, read Tapestry and L’Abri, much of what is written here will be familiar and unsurprising.  What Duriez’s succinct book does, however, is provide a kind of condensation for those much longer stories.  I found myself drawn back into memories of some details contained in those books that were not included here, a very helpful effect.  But the book is more than a revised Tapestry.  It also contains excerpts of fresh interviews with the daughters of Francis and Edith Schaeffer: Priscilla, Susan, and Debbie.  Once again, there are no surprises, and yet it is helpful to hear their memories and to hear the respect they had for their parents.  Then are many other interviews as well, with L’Abri workers like Os Guinness and Dick and Marti Keyes, and perhaps going back farther than any other, with Hurvey and Dorothy Woodson (who actually had a L’Abri in Italy in the late 1950s).  Dorothy said that “When Mr. Schaeffer would talk to you, there was nothing else in the world that was going on.  He was totally focused on you and what you were talking about. . . .”  Great comment.  And that’s how it goes.  Real insights are given into the character of the man.  Much is there to emulate.

I recommend Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life.  If you think you already know him, this summary study of his character will sharpen your appreciation for him.  If you don’t know much about him, you’ll meet someone you want to know better.  And if all you’ve read is Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, remedy ignorance: get the “true Truth” here.

Sometimes it’s helpful to read something geared to a different age level as a means of simply enjoying and not analyzing a story, as well as of a way of seeing the world from a different perspective.  In that respect, you cannot go wrong with Katherine Paterson’s 2006 historical novel, Bread and Roses, Too.  Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia (also made into a movie by Walden Media), is adept in writing about or from the perspective of tweens or young teens, serving up stories that speak to their longings for friendship, family, and meaning --- and this book does not disappoint.

The story is based on real events surrounding a 1912 strike by mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, mostly immigrants recruited by textile mill owners from poverty-stricken areas of Europe, lured by promises of wealth in America.  Rosa, one of the main characters, finds herself in the midst of the unfolding events surrounding the strike, worried that her mother and sister will become involved, conflicted about their involvement.  Enter Jake, street-wise son of an alcoholic father, who meets Rosa while scrounging in the garbage near her home.  The destinies of these two unlikely acquaintances become intertwined when Rosa is sent to a small village in Vermont while the strike heats up.

While the book deals with harsh realities like exploitation of workers, death, and bigotry, the story Paterson tells is moral one.  The poor overcome the rich.  Love conquers a hardened heart.  People care for others.  Strangers show kindness.  Paterson presents children in peril and, while not removing the peril, always surrounds them with those who care, with hope.

I recommend the book for tweens and young teens.  It might not titillate the imagination like Harry Potter, but in many ways it goes much farther in that it’s rooted in reality and, therefore, more true to the life of the reader.  Oh, Jake frequently uses a mild profanity, “Hells Bells” (which is not commended but condemned by Rosa) and there is the mention of a killing and violence against strikers without, however, any graphic details.  These two cautions aside, the book is a good read for youth. . . and for this adult.

There was a time that I fancied that, in my best moments, my writing was a bit like that of Frederick Buechner.  Though I can detect a touch of his cadence in my prose, Buechner is, however, masterful at turning a phrase, knocking off essays, poetry, sermons, and fiction with what appears to be effortless literacy.  Find him remembering, and he is at his best.  He and perhaps Annie Dillard are head and shoulders above others when it comes to memoir, to reconstructing the places, people, and events clouded over by time.

In The Yellow Leaves: A Miscellany, his latest book, his gift truly shows.  A slender volume collecting essays, remembrances, and poetry, Buechner woos us with his attention to detail, his generosity of spirit, and a recordation of what amounts to a very interesting life.  Somewhat apologetically, he explains that for several years he has found himself able to write sentences and paragraphs but, now eighty, has been unable to manage a book.  Thus, miscellany.  In this case Buechner’s table scraps are a feast for his fans and maybe a few others as well.

Mostly, but not solely, these are essays and poems remembering family, teachers, and friends.  In “Our Last Drive Together” he recounts the last time he drove his mother, then aged, to her home, as well as her last breath.  “Johnny” is about his brother-in-law, a man who was an invalid but always treated with honor nonetheless, as if he was the man of the house, a man with a radiant smile who spent most of his life working wooden puzzles.  In other essays he remembers presidents he met, albeit briefly (“Presidents I Have Known”), as well as his post-WWII journey to Europe where he wrote his second and least successful book, The Seasons’ Difference (“Wunderjahr”), as well as presents an endearing portrait of his teachers at his Lawrenceville boarding school, men who became like fathers to him (“Fathers and Teachers”).

But it’s not just family and teachers he remembers.  In “The Laughter Barrel” he recalls spending time with Maya Angelou, an African-American poet who told him that, “given the chance, we could be real friends."  Or in “Gertrude Conover Remembers” he has the misguided if refreshingly candid theosophist recounting her past lives in detail or addressing the unusual relationship she and her husband Harold enjoyed.  In his generosity, Buechner just lets her rattle on, and it makes for entertaining reading.  Finally, Buechner turns to poetry, writing poems about various family members such as his great-grandfather Adam Kuhn, who missed an opportunity to partner with a man named Woolworth, or Aunt Doozie’s tumultuous trip to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, or finally, the “Lawrenceville Fiftieth Reunion,” which closes the poem and book with good words: “Remember Love?  For starters try/ Remembering back.  God bless them all.  Goodbye.”

In the end, of course, Buechner would say that he cannot understand why anyone would want to read any of this, why anyone would be interested.  I know why.  We read these stories of people we have never met and see in them the family members, teachers, and friends who have come in and out of our lives.  We listen to Frederick Buechner’s life and hear the sound of our own.  His is a prompt to, in his words, “remembering back,” to telling our own stories if to no one else but ourselves.

I recommend The Yellow Leaves as a complement to Buechner’s trilogy of memoirs.  Reading it we know what it is to remember well and to then tell it well.

At the recent Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, I attended a workshop led by Brian Doyle.  Though the precise topic of the workshop is lost to me now, the experience is not.  Doyle told story after story, became emotional, and in general was one of the most animated of writers I have ever experienced.  So, I was hooked.  I bought his latest book, Epiphanies & Elegies, a collection of, as he says, "very short stories," which, naturally, they are, although they present as free verse poems, most barely taking up a page of the book.  Perhaps they best qualify as "prose-poems," though once you read a few it hardly matters what you call them.

Certainly these are not inaccessible poems or stories.  Like Doyle himself, they are rich in color and emotion, with language easily understandable and descriptions of events to which most can relate.  There are poems about animals and children, war poems, Irish poems (Doyle is of Irish-Catholic background), and prayers.  While he doesn't shrink from darker subjects (try "Death of a Phoebe," where a deceased bird leads him to contemplate his own mortality), his humor is remains intact, with poems like "Instructions for the New Puppy" and "Wiping Paul."  There's soccer games, confession (the Catholic kind), sitting in church, children crawling in bed with parents, and all other kinds of ordinary, everyday life experiences --- all presented honestly, artfully, and with emotion.  Bottom line:  You want Brian Doyle as your friend, as someone to hang out with, or failing that, you want him at your party.  But enough generalizing.  Try a Doyle poem for yourself:

Things I Know About
Children I Don't Know
As Told To Me By My Twin Sons
Sprawled Like Trout In The Bathtub

Randall loves rocks and is a liar.
Jack can blow bubbles with bubble gum
And can make the bubble go in and out
Of his mouth without popping it.
Ian is the fastest runner.
Kate is the best reader in the class.
Laura is the best writer, though.
She can even write in cursive.
Anthony will only play with John.
John steps on people's feet on purpose
And he'll kick you when he's angry.
Joe's brother died last year in his sleep.
Amy's dad died this year. He was a doctor.
Alex wears the same shirt every day.
Zachary is mean to Cole all the time.
Cole is funny but no one plays with him.
Kevin says he smoked a cigarette once
But no one believes him, not even a little bit.
Victoria has really cool sunglasses.
Elizabeth's mom and dad are divorced.
Justin's mom is very fat.
Robert's dad yells at him in front of everybody.
He even yelled at the principal once.
Melissa's sister kisses boys in the sixth grade.
Allison is allowed to walk home alone from school.
Corey says he can do things that he can't,
Like ride a bike and do tricks on a skateboard.
Carl wears glasses and loses his temper.
Ariadne likes to draw rabbits.
We don't know anything about Molly.

Doyle is the Editor of Portland Magazine, author of some seven books, and a contributing essayist and poet to magazines such as Harpers and The Atlantic Monthly (which, alas, is no more.)  But honestly, he's just like us, really.  Sometimes he cries when he reads stories.  Or he yells for joy and laughs out loud.  He has kids that do crazy things.  He worries about things, prays a lot, and loves animals dearly.  He's passionate about life.  And he'd make a good friend. . . in small doses.

Since one of my favorite books of all time is Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, I was eager to read his second and just-published novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, to see if the story lived up to the that first novel, a New York Times bestseller.  I'm happy to say that it largely succeeds, even though there isn't a character quite as compelling as either of the children in that first novel.  But in a sense, it's unfair to compare.  It is, after all, a different story.

In this novel, Enger tells the story of an aging train robber who, having retired from a life of crime, decides to seek out the forgiveness of a young wife he abandoned many years before.  Writer Monet Becket, who somehow managed to write a successful first novel, is struggling, not able to write a follow-up, with success long behind him.  Monte and his wife and his young son, Redstart (who immediately makes you think of the kids in Peace Like a River), live simply in 1915 Minnesota, where he befriends the aging outlaw, Glendon Hale, and then decides to accompany him on his quest.  Much happens as they seek to escape the ex-Pinkerton, Charles Siringo, a man who is relentless in pursuit even as his own health is failing.  Along the way there are many adventures and just as many characters, none completely bad and none completely good.  In the end, both Monte and Glendon come to terms with life, understanding what they need to do and who they are.  Both encounter grace.

Enger writes prose that is lyrical and yet very accessible.  Characters and scenes are richly drawn, and the story is one I did not want to lay down until the end, even then wondering how their lives continued.  There's a bit of irony here in the writing of the story, with Enger perhaps telling us about himself, about the difficulty of writing a second novel when your first was hailed as a great success.  And yet Enger is not Monte Becket; he does succeed.  The other surprise about the novel: there is no coarse language or sexual situations presented.  They are not missed, of course.  Good novels do not need them, and yet given the prevalence of such writing, it is a welcome surprise.

I recommend So Brave, Young, and Handsome.  Don't compare.  Read it for the story that it is.  Maybe you'll just take your own quest.

When I opened the cover of The Miracle at Speedy Motors, the eighth novel in Alexander McCall Smith's hugely popular #1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, it was like seeing old friends after being apart.  I missed them.  I'm glad to know what they have been doing.  I don't want them to leave.

If you don't know the series, its chief protagonist is the "traditionally-built" (that is, somewhat overweight) Precious Ramotswe, owner and founder of the #1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Gaborone, the only woman detective in all Botswana.  Precious is married to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, owner of the auto repair shop Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where Mma Ramotswe and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, also have an office.  The stories are about the people and problems confronting Mma Ramotswe, as well as the life of Mma Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and their two adopted children, as well as Mma Makutsi, her fiance, and Charlie, the shop apprentice.  If all this sounds unexciting, you'd be right, in a way, and yet none of that matters here.  What oozes from these stories is nothing less than a panoply of Christian virtues:  love, mercy, respect for others, forgiveness, hope, and plenty of good humor.  There's no preaching here, yet the narrator allows us to listen in on the thought processes of the characters, their struggles to do right, their humble self-doubt, and their reminding themselves of their convictions.  Because the characters are so human, and yet are often virtuous, you grow to love them.  You even want to emulate them.

In this eighth installment, the primary case that Precious Ramotswe is investigating is that of a woman who is looking for her family, even though she doesn't know her real name or if any members of her family are living.  The case takes some unusual twists, and its conclusion is a demonstration of how what we may perceive as failure may ultimately be reckoned as success.  Meanwhile, Phuti Radiphuti, fiance of Mma Makuti, has bought a new bed for their life together, yet tragedy strikes.  And Mma Ramotswe begins receiving threatening letters in the mail.  And finally, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni is given false hope that his daughter's medical condition might be miraculously cured.  Yet in the end, they all discover that the biggest miracles are often the smallest ones.

There are so many incidents in the book that testify to me of grace, but I'll just mention one.  Mma Makutsi, indignant at an evil that Mma Ramotswe has suffered, is brought up short by Mma Ramotswe's decision to answer hatred with love:

Mma Makutsi laid aside her pencil and stared across the room at her employer.  She opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again.  There was much she wanted to say, but even these few moments of contemplation of what Mma Ramotswe had said had shown her that everything that she, Mma Makutsi, would have said was wrong.  Mma Ramotswe was right: evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair.

I commend these books to you.  The are full of grace, and yet not sentimental but about real people who make mistakes and yet who often demonstrate wisdom, kindness, and love.  They remind you that everyday miracles abound if you look for them.

Sometimes God gives us what we ask for not for the reason we ask for it but for another, better reason.  That's the lesson of Reepicheep, the valiant if small mouse warrior that we first meet in Prince Caspian.  If you recall, Reepicheep is an Old Narnian, a talking mouse, somewhat proud, deeply concerned about his honor and dignity, passionate, possessing a temerity larger than his size, loyal to the High King always, a true believer from the beginning.

Near the end of Prince Caspian, a battle is fought between the Old Narnians, headed by King Peter, and the Telmarines, with the imposter king Miraz.  The battle is a success, yet in the process Reepicheep loses his tail.  He asks Aslan to restore the tail.  Listen in to the dialogue:

     "But what do you want with a tail?" asked Aslan.
     "Sir," said the Mouse, "I can eat and sleep and die for my King without one [note the melodrama of the Mouse].  But a tail is the honor and glory of a Mouse."
     "I have sometimes wondered, friend," said Aslan, "whether you do not think too much about your honor."

In other words, Aslan is not unsympathetic to the request of Reepicheep to have his tail restored, but he is gently critical of the motive.  And yet Reepicheep is defensive, reminding Aslan, as if he needed reminding, of his small stature, and continuing a bit of bluster about how he would take on anyone who mentioned things like "traps" in his presence.  But then there is this moving scene:

     "Why have your followers all drawn their swords, may I ask?" said Aslan.
     "May it please your High Majesty," said the second Mouse, whose name was Peepiceek, "we are all waiting to cut off our own tails if our Chief must go without his.  We will not bear the shame of wearing an honor which is denied to the High Mouse."
     "Ah!" roared Aslan.  "You have conquered me.  You have great hearts.  Not for the sake of your dignity, Reepicheep, but for the love that is between you and your people, and still more for the kindness your people showed me long ago when you ate away the cords that bound me on the Stone Table (and it was then, though you have long forgotten it, that you began to be Talking Mice), you shall have your tail again."

And so, for love, Reepicheep's petition is granted by the Great Lion.  Isn't that the case with so many of our requests to God?  We ask for something, our motives impure or mixed, and yet we receive it for another reason all together, for love, for the sake of others, or for some other hidden reason that only Providence knows. What it reminds me is that I need to ask, even if I don't know if my reason is a good one or my motives pure.  I still need to ask, to boldly ask.  Not only did Reepicheep have his request granted, in the asking he also learned that dignity and honor were not as important as love.  When we ask, we too can be gently instructed by God that our motives are impure, and yet Love gives us what we need anyway.

What I note in Lewis's writing about the talking animals of Narnia, including Reepicheep, is that whenever he uses their common name, like Mouse, he always capitalizes it.  I think it's his way of showing honor, of recognizing the dignity of the talking animals of Narnia, creatures who, in that world at least, are made in the image of their Creator.  In addition, did you note the name of the second Mouse, Peepiceek?  It's a sign of love and honor that his given name even sounds like his Chief's, Reepicheep.

The authors of A Reader's Guide to Prince Caspian note C.S. Lewis's fascination with mice, his great love for animals.  They report that, in writing to a young child about Reepicheep, Lewis declared: "I love real mice.  There are lots in my rooms in College but I have never set a trap.  When I sit up late working they poke their heads out from behind the curtains as if they were saying, 'Hi! Time for you to go to bed.  We want to come out and play.'"

I'm looking forward to meeting Reepicheep in the upcoming movie.  His courage, passion, loyalty, and love remind me that there are no little people. . . or mice, provided they are God's People. . . or Aslan's Mice.

One of the bibles of the music business is the multi-authored This Business of Music, now in its tenth edition.  Billed as the "definitive guide to the music industry," the prose is dry and often pedantic, frustratingly anecdoteless, just the kind of thing you avoid reading at bedtime (or maybe you do read it, as a sleep-aid).  And yet there are a precious few light moments in this encyclopedic tome, or more to point, some thought-provoking comments.

On the very first page, for example, there is a quote from sociologist Marshal McLuhan, who said that "The medium is the message."  Though the writers seem oblivious to what the quote really means, as it is disconnected with what follows, it made me realize, sadly, that form has trumped content, that image and sound mark one out as belonging to a particular "tribe," and the lyric has (except in folk music, the poor stepchild of the music family) been neglected.  Being, looking, and sounding like Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus) is more important to tweens than that which she sings about.  McLuhan's comment, like his disciple Neil Postman's follow-up work (Amusing Ourselves to Death) has proven prophetic.

In a section on Independent record producers, there is a very helpful categorization of producers offered by Jerry Wexler, renowned producer and former co-owner of Atlantic Records.  Wexler (who ought to know) said there are three types of producers --- the documentarian, the project leader, and the studio superstar.  The documentarian simply tries to capture what is there, unadorned and real; the project leader tires to enhance what is there, to get the best out of the artist; and the studio superstar, as you can imagine, takes center stage.  Every record the studio superstar producer makes sounds uncannily just like. . . him.  For some reason this may be the predominant type in the Contemporary Christian Music business, though I won't name any names.  Maybe the three producer types are really just reflections of personalities in the general culture --- those who simply take it in for what it is (a refreshing kind of person to be around, though quite frustrating if you need to get something done), those who accept what is and yet interact with and try to transform it, and those who simply think they are what is, the kind of people that seem to suck all the air out of a room when they enter it.  All this makes it so critical that the artist matches the producer; two superstars in the studio are incendiary; two documentarians spend a lot of money and get nowhere fast; and two project leaders (enhancers) may lose sight of what it is they are enhancing, lose focus.  What is your spouse?  What are you?  Somehow I sense that the somnolent wanderings of The Grateful Dead and Jerry Wexler's production must have been an expensive marriage.

The chapter on copyright infringement yielded some interesting anecdotes, if only that they were court cases.  There's Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., which allowed Creedence Clearwater Revival's leader to recover attorney fees from his record company.  Oh my.  It reminds how litigation can sap a life.  Fogerty spent years fighting Fantasy, never releasing a record, sounding more bitter all the time.  A little foresight and better advice and he might have seen a "bad moon arising."

The most dissatisfying chapter of the book was the one on agents and managers.  Now this special breed of prima donnas deserves better.  There's so much material to work with!  I didn't work with many, but one I worked with was a crazy alcoholic who sent me hand-typed single page sizzling faxes at midnight with (count 'em) sometimes as many as 50 profanities on a page.  Listen to the understatement of this sentence: "The close and often difficult relationship between artists and managers during the years of active management makes it desirable that the parties involved be sure of their compatibility before entering into binding contracts."  No, no, no.   These "parties" need marriage counseling before working together, and the manager may need a personality profile.  They tend to be controlling, all-consuming players in an artist's life.  There should be a big stop sign here in the book.

I could go on, but I might bore you.  The music business is a lot more interesting than this book, full of sin, wretched in its on peculiar way, and redeemed the same way anything else in this world is redeemed, by the power of love (love of music) and, in the end, by the One who loves His Creation.  I'm shelving the book.  I don't want to think about copyrights and managers, whining artists and super star producers, lawsuits and licenses.  Just give me the music.  Somehow that never fails me, because even the bad music still reminds me of a Music that just may come, some day soon.

I've just completed doing something that I often say I will do but rarely actually do.  I re-read C.S. Lewis's Prince Caspian, prior to the release of the movie on May 16th.  Not only that, I read Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead's A Reader's Guide to Caspian: A Journey into C.S. Lewis's Narnia.  I thoroughly enjoyed both.

If you haven't read the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, it's not too late to start.  These children's stories are remarkably deep.  Like all good stories, they operate on multiple levels, as enjoyable for adults as for children.  I first read the novels when I was introduced to them by my 9th Grade Modern Grammar teacher, an eccentric, slightly strange spinster who read The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe aloud to us, and then encouraged me to read all the books.  I quickly read them, and yet I completely missed the clear Gospel allusions.  When she told me of this, I re-read them.  I have kept reading them every few years, including reading them aloud to both my children.  As Lewis (or was it Tolkien) said, every good book should be re-read every five years.  And yet, reading Prince Caspian again, I was amazed at how much I had forgotten, as well as at what a good tale it really is.

If you don't recall, Prince Caspian is about the return of the Pevensie children --- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy --- to Narnia, called there by Caspian's blowing of Susan's horn.  Arriving there, they find that several hundred years have passed in Narnia (yet only one year in their own time), and the Old Narnia they ruled has been corrupted, the trees asleep (they used to talk), the animals mostly non-talking, and the land ruled by King Miraz, a Telmarine --- human, but not of Narnia at all.  The Pevensies quickly learn what has happened and proceed to journey to assist Caspian in re-establishing a proper rule over Narnia (with a lot of help from Aslan, the lion, Christ in that world).

The book is fantastical in may ways, and yet the most delightful part of it is the characters themselves and the narrative.  It's an adventure, a quest, enjoyable simply on that level alone, and yet it's much more.  It's about faith, the children learning once more to believe in Aslan, to trust him, and in so doing they begin to see him.  It is, in Lewis's own summary, about the restoration of true religion and even the substantial restoration of Aslan's rule and of nature itself.  There's a moving section with Aslan moving through the countryside, awakening the trees, healing an elderly woman, and more.  What Lewis does so well is give voice to our own longing that things be set right.  And yet there is no preaching here, just story, and story told with great attention to particularities, like what the children eat (or don't eat).  It's an enjoyable and quick read, and yet there's much to come back to and savor.

To help you savor it (only after reading it), utilize A Reader's Guide to Caspian.  In this  book, Ryken (English Professor at Wheaton College) and Mead (Associate Director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton, where you will find Lewis's "wardrobe" and his papers), do a number of things for readers.  Part One is a guided tour through the book, offering short synopses, numerous questions for reflection or discussion, various tidbits of information (like where the names "Cair Paravel" or "Caspian" came from, or why Lewis was so fascinated with mice a/k/a Reepicheep).  On the whole, these guides help us reflect on the book as literature --- something I do not naturally do.  Part Two  of the book is a collection of various background materials --- including very helpful articles on "Are the Narnian Sories Allegorical" (the answer is quite disputed) and "The Christian Vision of Prince Caspian," the later examining how the Christian themes of, for example, providence, faith, and discipleship weave throughout the story.  Finally, there are excerpts of contemporary reviews of Prince Caspian (that is, reviews published around the time of its publication), summaries of critical commentary on the book, a review of the success of attempts to bring The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe to screen, and a guide to using the book with reading groups or with home-schoolers.  All in all, it's a great resource, and, to some extent, you will get out of it whatever you choose to.  I plan on spending a little more time with the questions, reading back over chapters in the next few weeks, as I think it all a help to spiritual growth and a good preparation for the movie.

In conclusion, I commend both Prince Caspian and A Reader's Guide to Prince Caspian to you.  If you read them, the movie will not only entertain but will heighten the insights you already have from this great story.

Pastor Tim Keller has had a lot of experience talking to non-believers and skeptical seekers.  After all, Keller lives and pastors in the sophisticated urban world of New York City, where a plethora of belief systems are available (or not).  In The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Keller manages to do two things well.  First, he winsomely confronts the questions and arguments raised by doubters, including "There can't be one true religion," or "How could a good God allow suffering?" or "Science has disproved Christianity."  Second, he offers reasons for faith, challenging skeptics to examine the clues for God, the problem of sin, the reality of the cross, and the resurrection.  What I particularly enjoyed about the book is that Keller never overstates his case, always admits truth in skeptic's arguments, and is never shrill or combative in tone.  It's an excellent book for Christians who desire to understand the questions of those nonbelievers they may relate to on a day-to-day basis, as well as for seekers who desire to explore the arguments for faith.

Throughout the book, Keller acknowledges a great debt to the work of C.S. Lewis, and yet Keller is more accessible than Lewis, more American, and more conversational.  There are liberal quotations from Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce, among other works.  Keller also (yet more subtly) pays homage to Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards, his Reformed faith permeating the book and undergirding all that he says.  And yet his writing is informed by his own experience in talking with people, as evidenced by the many quotes from real conversations he has had with skeptics.

When taking on the new atheists --- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others --- he contends that their arguments are based on what some call "strong rationalism," a belief that "no one should believe a proposition unless it can be proved rationally by logic or empirically by sense experience."  As Keller says, most philosophers reject "strong rationality" as an impossible standard to meet.  His approach is that of "critical rationality," which "assumes that some systems of belief are more reasonable than others, but that all arguments are rationally avoidable in the end."  We don't insist on  irrefutable proofs but look for the system of belief which has the most explanatory power, which best makes sense of reality.  This is a helpful distinction that avoids the pitfalls of strong rationality and relativism.

Keller writes pastorally --- with intelligence and warmth.  His arguments are cogent, his prose sufficiently personal and animated to hold interest, and his love of God evident.  I heartily recommend the book.

One of the challenges in fully absorbing and appreciating the setting, characters, and dialogue of Scripture is our own disconnect with the pre-modern world in which Jesus lived and moved. Without serious study of ancient history, original languages (Greek and Hebrew), and, perhaps, archaeology, the characters in Scripture can sometimes appear flat rather than rounded, not fully human, not fully like us.

In The Road to Cana, the second installment in Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord series (the initial offering was Out of Egypt), the author attempts to remedy this by filling in the interstices of Scripture while remaining faithful to the words of Scripture. While any such attempt is fraught with pitfalls, in large measure Rice succeeds in presenting a Jesus who is very human and yet, at the same time, divine and without sin.  It's not that we need such writing to help us read Scripture rightly, as the message of the Gospel is perspicuous.  Nevertheless, well-done retellings such as Rice's make unfamiliar what has become too familiar and, thus, too flat to us.  We can return to Scripture with new eyes.

The Road to Cana begins during the last winter before Christ's baptism in the Jordan and concludes with the miracle at Cana.  There are even remembrances of earlier periods of his life.  One likely controversial portion is Jesus' (or Yeshua's) love for a woman in Nazareth, Avigail, with whom he was tempted but did not sin.  It was a healthy reminder that Jesus was fully human, and yet Rice never allows Yeshua to lust, desire to possess Avigail, or entertain for long any intention of marriage (though he experienced pressure to marry).

Another portion some reviewers have remarked on is Jesus' temptation in the desert.  Rice has Satan appear to Jesus as a look-a-like, only Satan has a fine robe and beautiful features.  Wouldn't that be a temptation --- to be yourself and yet be godlike?

There's much more --- John the Baptist, Mary and Joseph, aunts, uncles, cousins, and brother James; prose that is descriptive but driven along at a good pace by Jesus himself, the narrator; and a real Christ, human and divine, full of emotion and yet full of divine portent: "I've entered history for the whole of it.  And I won't be stopped.  And I go now, disappointing you, yes, and to what village and town I head next, I don't know, only that I go proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is on us, that the Kingdom of God is with us, that all must turn and take heed, and I will declare it where the Father tells me I must, and I will find before me the listeners --- and the surprises --- He has in store."

You can object to it on principle (and yet be consistent and reject all literary and film depictions of Jesus).  You can quibble over details and nuances.  But Anne Rice, recent convert and former novelist of vampires, has given us a rounded Jesus.  And I'm thankful.

Why I often end up reading books about women, most assuredly marketed to women, I don't know.  Perhaps it is the fact that I grew up with sisters, or maybe I appreciate the better-articulated emotional life of women (men are reticent to emote).  Whatever it is, I picked up Durham, North Carolina author Haven Kimmel's This Used World because it had the look of an emotionally complex tale, something on the order of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees.  I was right.  With some cautionary notes, and a few criticisms, this is a fine book.

The story revolves around the lives of three women in small-town Jonah, Indiana.  Hazel, who appears to be the oldest, is the eccentric (yet not elderly) proprietor of The Used World, an antiques shop.  Her two employees are Claudia, an unusually tall and strapping androgynous looking woman, and Rebekah, a petite (and younger) woman recovering from  some kind of extremely harsh Pentecostal background from which she is shunned by her own father and other church members because of her relationship with a man outside of the community.  Their stories become intertwined with one another and the past, as well as babies, dogs, and cats (not necessarily in that order) in a well-written story with rich dialogue and some surprising conclusions I won't give away.  Throughout the story, their complex relationships are wrapped in further complexity by periodic flashbacks to the past, to Hazel's relationship with a childhood friend Finny and her adequate but emotionally distant parents; to Claudia's mother, Ludie; and to Rebekah's life with her cousins and church family.  And that's for starters.   In the end, there is an emotional tension that builds, underlain by faith (of a feel-good kind, I'm afraid), and, in the end, by hope.

However, two criticisms can be levied.  First, the many flashbacks with different characters and times all become quite confusing,  breaking up the plot line.  It's a bit much for one who simply wants an enjoyable read.  Second, while we have a strong sense of place we never quite know enough about these characters.  We do not know their ages.  They seem to exist in a time of their own.  I could have identified better with them if I could have rooted them in space and time.  Finally, a word of caution:  the storyline deals with the topics of abortion and lesbianism, the latter of which caught me completely unawares.  However, I wouldn't say it promotes either or is excessive or gratuitous in its portrayal of either.  It's just that the subject matter is mature.  Interestingly, whether Kimmel intended it or not, she confirmed that homosexual tendencies are deeply rooted in broken relationships between children and the parent of the opposite sex.  These women had poor relationships or non-relationships with (you guessed it) men because they had poor relationships with their own fathers.  And yet rather than just label them, we come to see them as simply broken human beings desperate for love.

I recommend the book for a mature reader, one not squeamish about the subject matter and willing to put a little more concentration into a complex (and sometimes) confusing story.  It confirms what we know:  it's a bent world but not one without hope.

Like most of his books, Chuck Colson's The Faith abounds with poignant stories of faith, real people living out the radical claims of Christianity in the world.  I think that this is what makes his books so readable.  He doesn't so much fill his books with "lite" anecdotes as with a series of short stories meant to heighten our awareness of what the faith is all about.  When he relates the story of the courage of Amish schoolgirl Barbie Fisher, who asked to be sacrificed so that the other girls might be spared, we're moved by this almost otherworldly behavior. Or he tells the older story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who, though he could have stayed safely in America, went back to Nazi Germany to be among his people and ultimately die because of his faith.  Then there was a story I did not know, that of Jesus Amado Sarria, a man who headed up a network of assassins on behalf of the Cali drug cartel in Columbia and yet came to faith and forgave those who murdered his wife.  Colson offers these stories of love, courage, and forgiveness to demonstrate the practical outworking of the faith in our lives.

His purpose in writing the book is to combat the growing and pervasive ignorance about the Christian faith --- even among Christians --- in an era of anti-theism, neo-paganism, and a resurgent Islam.  It's a primer on basic truths of the faith for Christians who, while they may focus on a relationship with Christ, have not come to understand how the faith is a comprehensive view of the world and our place in it.  Colson moves through chapters on God and the Faith, where he covers themes like Creation, Fall, Redemption, Revelation, Truth, and the Trinity, and on to Faith and Life, where he discusses Reconciliation, the Church, Sanctification, the Sanctity of Life, and Last Things.  It's a highly readable, non-controversial "mere Christianity," fleshed out in the many stories that no doubt co-author Harold Fickett helps him tell so well. 

I recommend this book for new Christians, as an inspiring and yet meaty introduction to a Christian worldview.  For those already schooled in Christian worldview, the book may not only be a good reminder of what we believe but the stories will remind us why we believe as we do and why and how it matters.  As Colson says: "The orthodox Christian faith is the one source that can renew culture because it relies on a wisdom far beyond humankind's own that can yet be known by reason.  It constantly calls people to the practice of virtue and charity guided by this greater wisdom."  The challenge, as always, is living out what we say we believe.

For many years I've been an unabashed fan of pastor, teacher, and writer Frederick Beuchner.  Sometimes I even find that things I have written are stylistically like what he writes.  I'd like to think so, but the fact is he is simply an inspiration for me and his writing is something I aspire to.

I was pleased recently to discover that a Frederick Buechner Institute has been founded at King College In Bristol, Tennessee, the initial Director being former Calvin College professor Dale Brown.  A number of years ago Brown wrote a book entitled Of Faith and Fiction: Twelve American Writers Talk About Their Vision and Work, interviewing writers like Doris Betts, Garrison Keillor, Walter Wangerin, Clyde Edgerton, and, of course Frederick Buechner, and his survey of Buechner's fiction,  The Book of Buechner: A Journey Through His Writings, has just been released.  Although the Institute has only begun its work, already it has posted various articles, sermons, and essays by Buechner, as well as a video of Buechner reading three of his sermons at National Cathedral in 2006.  It's the only time I have ever seen a video of him.

If you have never read Buechner, I suggest for fiction that you begin with Godric, his Pulitzer prize winning novel of a very human and yet godly Irish monk.  For memoir, I suggest The Sacred Journey, particularly the first few pages.  I love Buechner's earthy and yet spiritually-charged writing, his attention to the world around him, and his great mining of memory for meaning.  Reading his memoirs is an education in paying attention to your life and, really, seeing Providence at work.  Theologically, he is imprecise; although I believe him largely orthodox in his mere Christianity, he would not consider himself an evangelical, and his opinions on homosexuality would cause a stir in conservative Christian circles (and also illustrate the squishy nature of his theology).  That aside, there's no one quite like Buechner.

I believe what he says is true: "There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, al the more compellingly and hauntingly."  So that's what he has taught me --- to look for God in every memory, every face, every tree and field and place. . . to listen to my life and the life of the world.  For that I'll always be thankful.

This is a story that has waited over 60 years to be told.  Drawing on personal diaries, journals and other historical sources, Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife recreates the story of Polish Christian zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski's efforts to save over 300 people during the Nazi invasion and occupation of Warsaw.  She ably forms a narrative around this courageous couple, melding it with background historical material to create a captivating story.

Antonina and Jan operated the Warsaw zoo.  When the animals were moved by the Nazis, or killed in the bombings, the Zabinskis, who lived in a modernist-looking villa on the premises, began hiding Jews in empty cages, in their villa, and in underground rooms, often naming the refugees for the animals whose cages they occupied.  While her husband was more active in the Resistance, sabotaging Nazi installations and smuggling food to refugees, Antonina looked after the guests with aplomb, narrowly averting detection by her calm demeanor in tense situations and her seeming ability to bring out the best in those she dealt with, whether a Nazi officer who walked through her residence or a Polish policeman.  By Ackerman's account, she had the same calming manner with people as she did with animals.  And she needed to.  Not only did her villa house six to ten refugees on any one occasion, it also held several animals as well, the antics of which provided humor in an otherwise dark time.

I found the telling of this story engaging.  It's not written as a biography but as if it is historical fiction.  Conversations are recounted.  Feelings and emotion are ascribed to Antonina (around whom the story focuses).  And yet, as the author recounts in the Author's Note, she made every attempt never to ascribe feelings to the Zabinskis that they do not document in their memoirs.  The result is an accurate account of one family's compassion and courage in horrific circumstances.  They simply did the right thing.

One thing that puzzled me, however, was that while the Zabinskis were noted to be Christians, there was little to no discussion of what, if any, bearing this had upon the decision they made to assist the Jews, or how their faith helped them persevere in such difficult times.  Either it was not a significant factor in their motivation, or else the author chose to overlook it.  It is also possible that Antonina kept her religion to herself, as Jan himself was an atheist.  So, as much as her diary gives, it may also hold back.

That shortcoming aside, I recommend the book.  It's an interesting bit of history, and Antonina is quite an inspiration for what selfless love of neighbor looks like.

Frank Schaeffer, only son of the late Francis and Edith Schaeffer, can't seem to shake God.  Early on in his recent memoir, Crazy for God, he puts it this way: "Every action, every thought, every moment I stumble into is judged by some inner voice.  Everything seems to have a moral component: eating --- because there are hungry people; sex --- don't even start.  What I write, don't write, who I talk to, don't talk to, and how I raised my children, their characters, accomplishments, failures, whether they 'love the Lord' or not, everything points to my relationship with God, real or imagined."  Raised in a home and larger social community where Christianity was taken seriously as having implications for all of life, he has spent most of his life alternatively embracing, questioning, and castigating that faith.  In Crazy for God he continues this tortured ambivalence, using memoir as his form rather than the veiled and semi-autobiographical fiction of his trilogy of Calvin Becker novels --- Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma.

Frank Schaeffer grew up as the fourth child and only son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, founders of a ministry known as L'Abri.  Though both were Americans, they relocated to Switzerland in the late 1940s, shortly after WWII, with a two-fold charge from their mission board: to help strengthen the church from the tide of theological liberalism sweeping Europe, and to continue a ministry to children, called Children for Christ, a teaching ministry actually begun in the United States when Schaeffer was a pastor of Bible Presbyterian Church in St. Louis.  Tiring of the rancor and divisive arguments in his denomination, the Schaeffers left the mission in 1955 and founded L'Abri (French for "shelter").  They began opening their home to whoever came, offering discussions of art, social problems, and politics, all from the standpoint of biblical Christianity.  Eventually, both Francis and Edith published bestseller books which grew out of the L'Abri discussions.  Frank lived in the midst of this budding community of discussion, with upwards of  20 to 30 people staying in his home, Chalet le Melezes, at any one time, with regular late-night discussions--- a constant milieu of faith expressed in word and deed, 24/7, punctuated only by their annual family vacations to Italy.

Frank's memoir is roughly chronological, though there are flashbacks and more polemical asides (which are sometimes lengthy) along the way.  By Frank's account, his father had a "vicious temper," was sometimes verbally (and on occasion, physically) abusive toward his mother, and was chronically depressed and occasionally suicidal.  He describes his mother as a "high-powered nut" and control freak who portrayed his father as an "ogre" and herself as a "long-suffering heroine." He spends a significant amount of time detailing his own sexual exploits and the various forms his rebellion took, but along the way, he not only tells his story but that of his sisters, brothers-in-law, and parents as well, portraying his family as dysfunctional, L'Abri as riven by disputes (such as that surrounding the allegedly unorthodox teaching of his brother-in-law, John Sandri), and family reunions as usually ending in arguments.  There is an acerbic tone to much of what is said, manifesting itself in mockery ("When Mom met people, then told her children about her encounters, the story line was always the same: They were lost, and Mom saved them"),  anger (railing against a "Reformed Calvinist God" who struck down people for "not believing right"), and ridicule of evangelical personalities (describing Billy Graham as "just plain bizarre" and "a very weird man indeed," James Dobson as "the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met," and Jerry Falwell as an unreconstructed bigot reactionar[y]").  Neither the tone of the book nor the revelations are  shocking by today's low standards, when tell-all memoirs are ubiquitous.  However, these assertions will likely come as a surprise to many admirers of the Schaeffers and, presumably, to many of the workers at L'Abri as well, and have already evoked an understandable emotional response. 

To be fair to Frank, it must be noted that, while likely understated given his propensity to be critical, he does express admiration for his parents even while criticizing them, noting that "Mom was often on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors, rising at four in the morning to pray and then to type up the dictation she'd taken from Dad as his secretary of the day before, or spending hours talking to and counseling the guests and students."  He regarded his "parents' compassion [as] sincere and consistent," noting his mother's consistent treatment of everyone the same, from a hotel chambermaid to the President of the United States and the selfless way in which they opened their home.  Furthermore, Frank recognizes his own complicity in his difficulties --- his rebellious attitude, promiscuity, stealing, and poor treatment of his own wife and children.  In fact, perhaps he takes on too much blame, crediting himself with contributing significantly to the rise of the Religious Right and steering his father, in his later years, into their influence, something he now deeply regrets.  He's often funny as well.  For example, his description of life in the chalet occupied by Jane Stuart Smith (a former opera singer) and Betty Carlson (Chapter 8) is hilarious, true or not.  Thus, reading the memoir is a wild and passionate ride, because Frank has a tendency never to understate but often overstate his case, with gross generalizations and hyperbole, and contradictory images of his parents that either betray his own ambivalence or their complexity, or both.

Frank's memoir, though sure to incite controversy and an emotional response with the claims he makes, has to be evaluated as would any work of art or literature:  First, is it technically excellent, that is, does it meet the standards of the genre?  In other words, is it good writing?  Second, is it true, that is, does it substantially correspond to reality?  Memoirs have been written that are technically excellent and yet untrue, as in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a bestseller memoir that was ultimately determined to be a complete fabrication.  Even though a memoir is, by its nature, a story that unfolds from a person's subjective experience, incomplete and biased, we expect it to be rooted in an objective reality.  After we experience it as a well-told story, we want to know if it's true --- not a perfect recollection but, at least, not substantially inconsistent with what others would confirm as basically true.  Sadly, on neither count does Frank's memoir fully hold up.

In his introduction to Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser says that a good memoir requires two elements: integrity of intention, that is, a serious quest by an author to understand his life, and carpentry, that is, a successful imposition of a narrative structure (or framework) onto a jumble of half-remembered events.  Frank Schaeffer is at his best when he is writing about his memories of events he witnessed, that he experienced.  At least facially, he seems intent at understanding himself, and though his style is rambling, it has a narrative structure that is not difficult to follow.  So, in this respect, it functions as a good memoir, representative of the genre.  However, the difficulty with concluding that this is a good memoir is the inclusion of material critiquing the Religious Right, where he lapses into sermonizing and unfounded generalizations tangential to his story.  Is he playing to a target audience of disaffected evangelicals and secularists who would group Christians together with Islamic terrorists?  It's difficult to say, but the odd inclusion of this material detracts from the memoir and raises some doubt as to the integrity of his intention.  At the very least, this material should have been left for another book where he could maintain a more sustained (and perhaps supported) argument against the Christian right.  It's almost as if he added the material in order to make the book fit its extended subtitle, which itself may have been added to stoke the interest of critics of Christianity.  So, this is a memoir which simply veers off course, diminishing its credibility and impact.

The second standard of judgment, whether the memoir is true, is even more problematic.  The Prologue to the book contains a telling qualification when Frank states that his book is not "objective history," and "[w]hat I've written comes from a memory deformed by time, prejudice, flawed recall, and emotion."  Of course.  And yet why say this unless you lack the confidence to say "this is the objective truth, as best I can discern it?"  And why include letters from his sisters when it's his memoir, not theirs', unless he is seeking to buttress his own assertions about his parents, that is, to assert that what he says is in fact objective history?  And finally, if some of his more outrageous assertions are true (like his claim that his father physically abused his mother, or that his father talked about hanging himself), where are the other witnesses?  Hundreds of workers and guests passed through L'Abri over its many years when the Schaeffers were in residence, many living in the same home with Francis and Edith.  It was an open community, not a cult, and there was no fear of reprisal for breaking any implied code of silence.  That the Schaeffers were imperfect is well-documented in Edith's own biography of their life, entitled Tapestry, though given the reserve of her generation, family matters were not aired publicly.  Yet to my knowledge, no one has supported some of the more lurid allegations made by Frank.

In addition, the objective truthfulness of the memoir is called into question by the patently false conclusion Frank draws about the marriage of Gigi Graham, daughter of Billy Graham, to a man twenty years her elder.  Frank states that "Billy --- like some Middle Eastern potentate --- arranged for his seventeen-year-old daughter's marriage to the son of a particularly wealthy donor who lived up the road from us in the ski resort of Villars," and that "he'd plucked [her] out of her first semester at Wheaton College to marry a man almost twenty years older than her whom she had never met until Billy introduced them?"  That unsupported allegation is patently false, the daughter, Gigi Graham Tchividjian, having asserted in interviews that it was she who insisted on getting married, over her parents' objections!  Such careless accusations and demeaning language cast a shadow over the other assertions made by Frank, some unverifiable (like private conversations with his mother or father), others disputable.

In the end, however, it's impossible to come to any final conclusions about Frank's truthfulness.  The difficulty is evident in the contrast between two different recent statements about the book.  In a carefully-crafted statement in the August edition of the newsletter of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, Udo Middleman notes that he (and presumably Debbie, Frank's sister) enjoyed Franks book, noting that "[a]s a memoir of an imperfect childhood, it has a personal perspective and will forever be incomplete" and is "very honest, touching, at times funny, and always passionate."  (Note that he didn't say it was true or that he agreed with it!)  On the other hand, Os Guinness, who lived with the Schaeffers for five years in the late 1960s, calls what Frank has written a "tissue of falseness, distortion, and unchecked allegations," and notes that "Francis Schaeffer had his flaws, and he certainly had his enemies. But no one has done more damage to Schaeffer's reputation, and to the things for which he stood and fought, than his own son whom he adored."  Frank accentuates the imperfections of his family life, giving you an overall negative impression of the family and ministry, when in actuality, his perspective is an inverted one, quite in contrast to what most who knew the Schaeffers would say.

In the end, of course, this imperfect memoir will not dissuade anyone who knew and loved the Schaeffers from continuing in their admiration of them.  It may even serve as a helpful reminder of their humanity, if we even need it, and further endear them to us.  I know it only strengthened my admiration for them.  Frank himself, even if bitter at times, cannot help but love and admire his parents, and he cannot escape their impact on him.  In the end, the real story is more about Frank Schaeffer's lifelong struggle with God than about his parents and L'Abri.  That story is not yet over.

At the age of seven, Edgar Mint’s head is run over by a mailman. Given up for dead, Edgar subsequently recovers and lives on to tell his story --- from the substandard hospital to a horrific Indian reservation boarding school, to the almost sunny home of an outwardly devout (but inwardly troubled) Mormon family, to adulthood. Edgar is a half breed, the product of a drunken Apache mother and white cowboy wannabee, with a half-crazy grandmother. The miracle is not only his survival of the accident, but his persevering through every difficulty that comes his way.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a sufficiently long first novel by Brady Udall to draw you in, though it never becomes tedious. Udall allows Edgar to narrate the story, though at times he addresses himself in the third-person, a curious twist that you quickly become used to and one, perhaps, not unusual for someone who has suffered brain damage.

Despite all the difficulties Edgar experiences --- the being alone in the world, the taunts and bullying at the boarding school, the sense of aloneness even in the midst of life with his foster family --- he comes to faith in God, and though it is in a Mormon context, the language used makes it sound like the experience of any convert to evangelical Christianity. I like the genuineness of it, the plain-spoken description:

Before they [the Mormon missionaries] left, they asked if they could give me a blessing. . . . [T]hey came up behind me and put their hands on my head, their fingertips lightly touching my scalp. . . . In a near shout Elder Stafford called on the name of God and immediately I felt a warmth at the crown of my head, a light, liquid tingling that slowly moved down into my head and chest. . . . In a daze I headed out across the parade grounds toward the dormitory, feeling like the top of my head had been shot off.  I started to climb the steps and it hit me right there, there was no doubt: Edgar had been touched by God.

Part of the novel is about Edgar's grappling with the reality of that faith and the essential goodness of God in a world where so many things go wrong.  The honest, non-patronizing or caricatured approach to faith is refreshing and believable, and as crazy as life gets Edgar never stops believing in God.

But don't draw the conclusion that you will find this book in a Christian bookstore.  While the description of faith is more real and believable than that which you sometimes find in Christian novels, it is in a Mormon context.  Furthermore, there are gritty descriptions of the kind of Lord of the Flies milieu of the boarding school and the wondering (and wanderings) of a typical adolescent coming of age.

You'll love Edgar.  You'll find yourself rooting for him.  He's funny, tragic, and mostly an optimist.  And in the end, after all his troubles, he can say "I am not too jaded or proud to thank God for small favors, to count my blessings."  Now that's a miracle.

[I found out about this book and several others I have read and enjoyed from Calvin College's Faith and Writing project.  Take a look at their recommendations here.]

I’m hardly qualified as an expert on South or East Africa. After all, I only visited there with my wife for three weeks in 1987, and then only in a kind of surreal Hemingway-style photographic safari unknown to practically all Africans, white and black. And yet even now I can remember its sounds, sights, smells, and tastes --- lions growling in the chill night, liquid sounds of Africans talking softly around the campfire, the musty earthy smell of the city in Nairobi, the smiling begging faces of the children --- all just photographs for me, a brief vacation. But for some, it’s home; it’s where they grew up.

For whatever reason, the most evocative books of Africa for me are those written by women --- white Africans. Early on it was Isak Denison’s Out of Africa, of course, and then Beryl Markham’s West With the Night. Then there was Elspeth Huxley’s Flame Trees of Thika. All were made into movies or mini-series. Now, I can add two more fine memoirs to the collection: Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Lauren St. John’s Rainbow’s End. Both deal with growing up in a white African family in rural (what was then) Rhodesia, both during a civil war and after independence. Both document the sad dysfunctionality of a family under strain, the insecurity of being African and yet not ultimately being welcome in your own country, and, of course, the rich and varied landscape of Africa. I can recommend both.

Alexandra Fuller grew up in a tobacco farming family in Rhodesia, living on the perilous land mine-strewn and rebel-infested east border with Mozambique. Her mother and father are hardy people, and Bobo (her nickname) and older sister Van learn to ride horses, shoot guns, do basic first aid, and entertain themselves, the neighborhood not being full of children. Her Dad goes off for weeks at a time to fight with the Rhodesian army against the rebels seeking to overthrow the white minority government. Her mother manages. They become tough and resilient, and yet underneath she struggles with insecurity, with a mother that is manic-depressive and given to drink, and the sense that she is responsible for the death of her young sister, who fell in a pool at the young age of two under her watch. She attends boarding school, first for whites, and, after independence, with black Africans. After independence, they move to Malawi, and then to Zambia, her dad soldiering on, working, and her mother ultimately, after a stay in a mental institution, released under medicine to control her manic-depressive episodes.

Fuller tells her story in relatively short, dialog-rich chapters with colorful descriptions of the people and places where she lived. I found it compelling and, while at times sad, mostly a testament to the resilience of hardy people who adapted to the changes that came to them in life. I enjoyed the dynamic immediacy of her language:

If we perch on the rocks around the ghost camps we can look out and see what the guerillas must have seen when they were camped there. We see that they have watched us, that they must know where we go every day,our favorite walks, the way we ride. They can see me running down to the dairy first thing in the morning, and Mum and me leaving the house (too late to be back before it is dark) for her evening walk. They have seen Vanessa alone in the garden painting and reading. They have seen Dad striding down to the barns or kicking up sand as he scuds off on his motorbike. Still, they have not swooped down from the hills and killed us, leaving us lipless, eyelidless, bleeding, dead.

There is a remarkable similarity in these books.  Lauren St. John also grew up on a farm in Gatooma, east of Salisbury (present day Harare).  She too had a sister, a Dad who fought in the Rhodesian army, a family also somewhat dysfunctional, and the experience of boarding school.  Here too the same experience of being outcasts in your own country creates an identity crisis --- when all that you thought was true of the world turns out not quite so.

St. John's prose is denser, less immediate, but still richly descriptive of her life in Africa and the emotions she felt:

The sense of disillusionment I felt was total.  The country I had loved so much that at times I almost wished I could die for it was not the country I had thought it was.  We had repressed people, oppressed people, tortured people, and murdered people for the worst of possible reasons: the color of their skin.  Twenty thousand people had died in our war, apparently for nothing. . . . I felt like an earthquake had taken place in my head.

Both St. John and Fuller have a profound alienation from all they knew, their world turned upside down.  Interestingly, both professed faith in Christ during their teenage years but, presumably, finding no support for their faith at home, did not continue in faith.  What we are left with is two women who survived, who even came to some peace with family and past, but, in the end, may not have a basis for genuine hope.

These books were moving memoirs --- testaments to a time now lost.  They stick with you, the images haunting my thoughts even today.

When I was 10 years old, at most, I was a card-carrying member of the Science Fiction Book Club.  Those days I seemed to read all the time, at least in this genre of fiction --- greats like Ray Bradbury, Robert Henlein, and Issac Asimov were a steady diet.  There was a floral pattern set of soft chairs in my mother's living room (still there but much faded now) in which I would recline, sometimes for as much as four or five hours at a stretch, ignoring calls for dinner, deep into other worlds, dreamily lazing my way through long afternoons.  When I finally put the books down --- because, finally, my mother could not be ignored, or bedtime was nigh, or a friend came calling --- I sometimes couldn't wrench myself from the imaginary world and into this world.  I didn't hear what people said to me sometimes.  Or I walked around for a half hour or so feeling profoundly alienated, voices sounding strange to me, muffled, and the houses and streets pale and mundane, a great let down after where I had been.  Sometime around then I happened to read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, a tale of a twelve-year old boy's coming to life one summer, discovering the wonder of the world around him.  I was disappointed it was not science fiction, and yet reading it I knew I had stumbled on something grand.  And perhaps it was a part of my own coming alive.

After that, I don't remember reading fiction again, that is, merely for my own pleasure and not as an assignment, until I read a series of Christian novels by Bodie Thoene sometime after higher education.  They were entertaining and certainly passable writing, but looking back at them, I realize that they were not great literature.  I read them because I found them in a Christian bookstore, the same place I found much of the music I listened to at the time.  The message music and message books I trafficked in at the time seemed like sanitized versions of other popular novels.  Thoene's historical fiction reminded me of James Michener's heavily-researched historical fiction, for example.  I didn't really know good literature from bad literature.  But the books in the Christian bookstore seemed safe.  There were no sex scenes and not a trace of profanity.  Furthermore, they had neat resolutions --- perhaps a conversion, a reconciliation, or a new understanding of and reliance on God.  They were not bad, but they were not good enough, not nearly good enough.  So, with few exceptions, I stopped reading Christian lit and took up with better literature by pagans and Catholics and theologically suspect Christians, people like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Frederick Buechner, and J.R.R. Tolkien (who I read, enjoyed, and really didn't understand back in high school).  I can't settle for merely passable writing any longer when there are greats to be read, masters of storytelling, authors who capture the human story in their fiction.

I am reminded of this because of the excellent article by Donald T. Williams in the most recent Touchstone Magazine entitled Writers Cramped.  His question is where are the evangelical Christian writers who are of the caliber of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, or Flannery O'Connor, just to name a few.  O'Connor provides the substance of his analysis of their absence, in her observation that "[t]he sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate human reality" and her conclusion that "[y]our beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing."  As Williams notes, when this distinction is not understood, "Christian fiction becomes mere religious propaganda."  O'Connor was nourished by a worldview which was orthodox and true and which informed all she wrote, by a church that recognized and appreciated her vocation as an artist, and by the sense of mystery that the sacramental focus of Catholicism provided and which carried forward into the mysteries that writers explore.

Williams concludes with a challenge for evangelicals to recover biblical emphases that nurture the arts and artists:

Our failure to encourage our people to apply doctrine to the realities of life; our failure to include in our theology the whole counsel of the God who called Bezalel and Oholiab and gifted them as artists; and our pragmatism, an uncritical reflection of American culture rather than a biblical mandate, with our mystery-impoverished worship tradition are all simple failure to be what we claim to be, faithful to Scripture.  They could be changed without threatening any of the doctrinal emphases that we think we have been right about.

Next time I visit my mother I may take along a copy of Dandelion Wine, sink my middle-aged body in that seemingly shrunken chair, and remember what it was like to be twelve, so I can better remember what it's like to be 49, to be human, to have a sense of wonder at life.  I'm done with passable writing; I want the best, I want the ones who can truly see.

Given its context of Stalinist Russia, I knew that it was unlikely that The Archivist’s Story would be a happy or humorous novel, and I was right. Travis Holland has captured the deadening effect of collectivization on the Russia people and the inhumanity of a society where trust and friendship are rare and fear of authority a daily concern. And yet, it’s a story of the power of one man to act courageously in the face of such fear and reprisal, treating decently and humanely even one who hates him.

Pavel Dubrov is a former teacher now assigned to the archives of the infamous Lubyanka Prison, the hellhole into which countless political dissidents, intellectuals, and writers are cast. Pavel works under the insufferable Lieutenant Kutyrev, a true believer in the Revolution. Every day he organizes files containing the manuscripts of writers imprisoned in the Lubyanka, and then, one by one, carries files to the incinerator. It’s a particularly distressing task for a teacher, for one who loves books, and it comes to a head over his encounter with an unknown manuscript written by Issac Babel, the well-known writer of Red Calvary. Holland chronicles Pavel’s lonely and anguished existence well,  contrasting it with the continued humanity he exhibits. For example, when Kutyrec becomes ill, Pavel escorts him home to his family, even over Kutyrec’s objections:

“I don’t want your help,” Kutyrec says.

“What are you going to do, stand around for God knows how long in your condition waiting at some bus stop? In this weather? Be sensible. Let me help you.”

“Why?”

Why would you help me? That is the deeper meaning behind Kutyrec’s question. Because you need my help, Pavel thinks. Because you are human.

This colloquy illustrates the fundamental theme of the story: one man’s attempt to reclaim his humanity in the face of the gross inhumanity of a police state. When events appear to seal Pavel’s fate, when he loses most of what is dear to him, he takes action, not only preserving Babel’s words but also the letters of his friend and, at least temporarily, the manuscripts of many of the files he was tasked with archiving.  His actions testify to the importance of words, their enduring value.

In the end, the story is not all sadness, and affection grows for the characters even as the author propels us to what we sense is a bittersweet conclusion. When I can say, at the end of a story, that I miss its main character, as I did here, I know the reading has been worth it.

Travis Holland has done well. His prose is accessible and persuasive in rendering 1939 Moscow and lives caught in that place and time. It’s a profound first novel and one I recommend. And to think --- I bought the book without a recommendation but solely based on a reading of the jacket notes and first paragraph. Sometimes the risk is worth it.

If you have enjoyed essays by E.B. White, Annie Dillard or Wendell Berry, you'll likely enjoy these essays by Westmont College English Professor Paul Willis.  Willis writes warmly, descriptively, and authentically, whether writing about his faith or about mountain climbing.  In this 2005 collection of essays, entitled Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild, most previously published,  Willis covers a range of topics, with the majority split between his largely positive (if sometimes peculiar) life in and amongst the evangelical subculture and his second great love, the mountains of the Western United States.

For example, in the title essay, "Bright Shoots of Everlastingness," he speaks warmly of his conversion at the early age of nine and a somewhat mystical experience of that day:

In that moment of coming through the door [to the balcony of the church] I walked into a presence that had been there, I was quite sure, all along.  It was quiet, powerful, good, and deep.  It was a presence that included me, and all things around me.  The clock at the back of the sanctuary, the miserably worn rug in the aisle, the chipped wooden balcony seats, the faded red curtains behind them --- all things were permeated by whatever this quiet, ongoing presence was.  They were not different, but more themselves, transfigured in their everyday best.  I had not come to a different place but was seeing the place as it always was.  Every minute of perception up to this point had just been bumping about in the dark.

There's humor as well, as in his essay on dancing ("Care to Dance?"), a frowned upon practice that he finds initially exciting but ultimately less interesting than reading or a walk in the forest, not a moral choice at all but a choice between good and better:

The world was a different place than I had ever thought it --- a good place, on the whole, and I would choose the best parts, and conscience would not equally matter for every choosing.  Or maybe conscience did matter, and the most important moral choice was to separate strong pleasure from weak, the good from the banal.  The trick was to enjoy something a long time --- maybe forever.

And then there's the mountain climbing, essays descriptive not only of the climbing but of the natural and social environment of the climbing, not only the what of climbing but the wondering why of climbing.  In this context, there are difficult things, like the loss by his brother Dave of fingers and portions of his feet during a climb-gone-bad of challenging Mount McKinley and then later of his horse-mate Sonya ("One Fine Morning").  There are alsothe musings on life that percolate to the mind's surface while climbing in the San Rafael Wilderness of California ("A Wilderness Journal"):

I camp beside Santa Cruz Creek, in a hollow beneath huge oaks, interwoven, arch within arch.  Alone at my table, writing by candlelight, I think I hear voices --- in the wind, the water, the leaves, the crickets.  Why do I hear them?  Because I want to, or because I am afraid to?

As with any collection of essays written at diverse times and for diverse publications, it's difficult for a publisher to know quite what to include and how to sequence them, and whether, in fact, they stand together, thematically, or should be read as simply a diverse collection.  Despite the subtitle of the book, and despite the attempt to organize it in sections called The Shores, the Mountain, The Valley, The Hills, and Epilogues, ultimately the stories did not work collectively but singularly for me.  And that's OK.  I did, however, think the subtitle a bit misleading, as "Essays on Faith, the American Wild, or Other Things" or, simply, "Essays," would have been more accurate.  Willis also addresses faith in certain essays, but he generally doesn't explicitly integrate faith with his experience of nature in his nature essays.  I expected more integration, as in Cindy Crosby's By Willoway Brook, a book which better integrates the inward and outward journey.  But this is a small criticism, really, as I am happy to read each essay and take it for what it is --- an experience in nature, an honest observation on the journey of faith, or simply an interesting issue for C.S. Lewis fans ("The Wardrobe Wars").

A bit more unsettling for me was a statement (unnecessary I think) included in the short introduction: "So far, the God of my youth has not gone away.  He --- or she --- still roams the peaks and meadows of memory and imagination" (emphasis mine).  Yes, He does, but She doesn't.  If Willis is uncertain about how to address God (though Scripture seems perfectly clear on this point), then of what else is he uncertain?  The theological point does not discount the value of the fine writing here, but it does mean I do not read it for theological clarity nor can I assume that Willis is orthodox in his faith (though he may well be).  I suspect that's as it should be anyway.  He doesn't need to validate his faith, but he could have avoided the unnecessary comment which was momentarily off-putting.

It's simply good to see a collection of essays by a Christian writer like Willis.  This book probably won't make it to the shelves of your local Christian bookstore, but I'll put my copy where it should be --- right next to E.B. White's Collected Essays. They're that good.

A new volume of poetry or, for that matter, any writing by John Leax is always a treat, and his latest, Tabloid News, does not disappoint.  The fifteen poems included in this slim volume had their genesis in a great "what if" question, the kind good writers ask.  Finding himself in front of the tabloids that line the supermarket checkout lines everywhere, Leax asked "what if the stories under the headlines were true?"  What if, to quote one headline, "leaping turtles" did invade the United States?

The resulting poems --- meditations (if you will) on the fear and longing that likely lurk beneath the radar of the stories --- are often funny, as you might expect, but also quite thoughtful, probing the reasons why some of us are, to one degree or another, are attracted to such outrageous stories.  Reading poems with titles like "Bat Boy is Missing" or "I Want to Have a Space Alien's Baby," I had the same sense one has in seeing the oddities or freaks on the midway at the fair --- curiosity, disbelief, shock, repulsion, and pity.  Do we read because we desire to know if there is something beyond our mundane existence?  Or maybe because the loneliness or strangeness the characters that people these stories feel may reflect some of our own sense of alienation, our own sense of being alone in our own peculiarities.  Whatever the reason, such stories of the strange and bizarre never seem to leave us, and Leax does good work by helping us see them from the inside out.

One of my favorite of these poems is entitled "Bizarre Creature Spotted in Louisiana Bayou," about a half-human half-alligator creature:

He has no memory of birth.
He does not know if his mother
clawed away the steaming vegetation
of her nest when he began to squeal
and peck his fingernails against
a shell or if she cried at a sudden,
gripping pain and labored
through a night to push him
headlong into life.

The poem goes on to recount his discovery of his bodily oddity and the lonely existence he was consigned to and yet not altogether unhappy with:

Some afternoons, when he is sure
of his hiddenness, he heaves himself
upright, a tripod, balanced on hind legs
and tail, and sings.  Around him the birds
grow still, their silence an underscore
to the breaking joy of his risen hope.

However good some of the poems are, however, others make we wonder if their incarnation as poems is entirely apt.  Some, like "Duck Hunters Shoot Angel," seem to beg for a short story format --- short shorts perhaps.  I think what is missing in some, as I read them aloud, is a certain cadence, a music, one of the ingredients that, for me, typifies a poem as opposed to a bit of prose.  Missing too is the economy of language, the compression of meaning into few words that typifies a poem.  Thus, in a handful of these stories, I sense that Leax chose the wrong vehicle to tell a great story.  Still, this is an inventive package, right down to the tabloid-spoofing cover with the quip "As Seen in Books and Culture!"  Kudos to publisher Wordfarm for risking precious time and funds on poetry and good packaging.

Read Tabloid News.  After doing so, you won't need the real tabloids.  You might even find yourself mirrored in the bizarre characters Leax brings to life.  All because a writer asked "what if."

Occasionally I will read a recommended children's book, both because I relish a simply told story and because I may have had enough of deep and thought-provoking literature with complex and conflicted characters.  I want to read  a well-told yarn --- exciting, colorful, and inspiring --- without having to dash through sex scenes and gratuitous obscenity.  (Yes, there are books still worth reading even though they may have both.)  Leepike Ridge, N.D. Wilson's first novel for the youth market, manages to avoid the sex and obscenity in an adventure involving lost caves, treasure, murder, and family, and teaching us about loyalty, courage, perseverance, and greed.  It's a great story for most pre-teen boys, or even girls, and at 49 I must still have enough yearning for adventure that I enjoyed it as well.

Thomas Hammond lives with his mother in a house on a ridge by a stream, his house chained to the rock for some inexplicable reason.  Tom is still suffering the loss of his father in an apparent airplane crash, and though his mother Elizabeth is good to him she is lately being wooed by Jeffrey Veatch, whose last name (which rhymes with leech) is some indication of his nature.  When it becomes clear that Veatch is intent on marrying his mother, Tom runs away, unintentionally losing himself in the caves lying under the ridge, caves rumored to have hidden treasure. 

And that's where the real adventure begins.  Enter the greedy treasure seekers, a dog named Argus, a flashlight, and other cave-dwellers, dead and alive.  In the course of trying to get home Tom deals with his fears, learns to survive, and exercises hope --- learning a great deal about himself in the process.

Wilson, who teaches classical rhetoric to freshmen at New Saint Andrews College, writes adeptly, conveying lessons about virtue and vice without any moralizing.  Rather, he focuses on telling a good story --- one just fantastic enough to be fun.  He's obviously lived in the worlds of Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, and King Solomon's Mines enough to spin his story out of the same fiber.  And perhaps he's listened well to his own four children, as all children can tell a good story from a bad one.

Have some fun.  Read this story.  Share it with your children.  There's a bit of blood, a dead body, and some bad characters (portrayed as such), but older children will appreciate an exciting story and learn something in the process.