I have read five books so far in 2012. Two were by Martin Luther King – A Call to Conscience, a collection of speeches, and A Knock at Midnight, a collection of sermons – and a third book was Manning Marable’s recent biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. (I wrote a bit about the Marable book here and here.) I am now approximately four-fifths of the way through Eric Metaxas’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Not long after starting the Bonhoeffer biography, I realized that Bonhoeffer, Malcolm X, and Dr. King all have something in common: they all died – were killed – when they were 39 years old. Tomorrow, February 4, is Bonhoeffer’s birthday.

Eric Metaxas was the keynote speaker at the 60th annual National Prayer Breakfast, held last Wednesday. Metaxas gave President Obama a copy of his book, saying, “President George W. Bush read this. So…no pressure.”

I’m enjoying Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a fascinating subject, and Metaxas is a lively and engaging writer. Most of you probably know the story of how Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian, collaborated with the German resistance to try to assassinate Adolf Hitler. For this, Bonhoeffer was sent to the Buchenwald and Flossenbürg concentration camps, and executed one month before Germany lost the war.

Bonhoeffer played a key role in a different kind of resistance, working with the global ecumenical movement and the German Confessing Church to oppose the so-called Deutche Christen (“German Christians”), sycophants who tied themselves in theological knots to conform with Nazism’s antisemitic, nationalistic, and fascistic ideology. (Here is a link to the flag of the German Christians. If life was an Indiana Jones movie, there would be a hole where the swastika is.)

Dietrich’s faith and courage are on full display in the biography – as is the courage and “good cheer” of his parents and the entire, extraordinary Bonhoeffer family. Metaxas uses letters and diaries to give us an intimate look into what Dietrich was thinking and feeling when he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, visited black churches in Harlem and learned more about systemic racism against blacks in the American South (he saw parallels with the crescendoing antisemitism back home), pastored German-language churches in London, ran illegal seminaries for the Confessing Church in Germany, and became directly involved in counter-intelligence work.

My main complaint with Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is that Metaxas rarely talks about Bonhoeffer’s other enduring legacy: the books he wrote. Bonhoeffer’s most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship, appears nine times in 544 pages. Ethics is talked about just 14 times, though, to be fair, it is given its own subsection. (Metaxas writes, “The solution is to do the will of God, to do it radically and courageously and joyfully.”) Life Together, a devotional classic, is mentioned just four times. Metaxas almost never talks about how the books were written, only that they were being written at all. Most often, the books’ contents are described only when they directly relate to something happening in Bonhoeffer’s life.

This is a missed opportunity, and not only because I want to know more about how the books took shape. American evangelicals have the reputation of being anti-intellectual. That is painting with a broad brush, but the reputation is mostly deserved. Though I read historian Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind more than a decade ago, I’m still haunted by that book’s first line: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” I’m not belittling Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer as lightweight, merely a historical thriller or ripping good yarn. Far from it. This is a book of great substance. And Metaxas does a brilliant job of putting Bonhoeffer’s life in its historical and theological context.

But talking more about Bonhoeffer’s books would further remind modern evangelicals that they are, in Noll’s words, “the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind.” It would reinforce the fact that Bonhoeffer inspires and challenges us today not just as a man of action and modern martyr, but as a Christian who thought deeply about what it means to live faithfully as a follower of Jesus. I would like to see readers proceed from Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy to Bonhoeffer’s own Life Together or Cost of Discipleship.

One reason I’m surprised that Metaxas didn’t write more about Bonhoeffer’s books is that Metaxas obviously cares about the intersection of faith, culture, and intellectual vigor. He is the founder and host of Socrates in the City, a speakers series in New York City that has featured the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, Os Guiness, Sir John Polkinghorne, and N.T. Wright. Its tagline is “The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living.”

***

In other Bonhoeffer-related news: If you are in the Pacific Northwest (or are willing to travel), you should think about going to the Ekklesia Project’s Northwest Regional Meeting. The conference is in Portland later this month. The theme is “Engaging the Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

[This] conference is dedicated to fostering subversive Christian friendships in which Christians from a variety of denominational, cultural, and economic locations can find encouragement and edification from one another. The fundamental purpose of this meeting is to spur one another on to live faithfully into Christ’s call to radical discipleship.

Our speaker for this year is Barry Harvey. Barry is professor of theology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He is the author of Can These Bones Live? and Another City, and has written and spoken extensively on the witness and wisdom of Bonhoeffer.

There is one session on the evening of Friday the 17th. The topic that night is “Learning to Live Polyphonically in a World Come of Age.” Two sessions will be held on Saturday the 18th on the topics of “Praying the Psalms with Dietrich Bonhoeffer” and “A Tale of Two Pastors: Bonhoeffer’s Participation in the Plot Against Hitler.”

You can get more information about the conference at the event’s Facebook page or by contacting Michael Munk here: michaelmunk [at] earthlink.net.

I am going to be there. Are you?

Chris and I recently collaborated on an article about the political role of the local church for the upcoming February/March issue of Neue Magazine. In preparation for writing the article, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Miroslav Volf about politics, the local church, promoting human flourishing, and his most recent book, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. Dr. Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of numerous books, including Allah: A Christian Response (2011) and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998). His book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996) is a classic work. It won the prestigious University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award. It was also included, less prestigiously, in Besides the Bible as one of the 100 books every Christian should read.

The Neue article should be on newsstands any day. In the meantime, here is a transcript of my interview with Dr. Volf.

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…

In February 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro. The manifesto exalted the future over the past, violence and aggression over peace and ecstasy, immorality over morality, men over women, the young over the old, the machine over the land, and the known over the unknown. Marinetti also declared that “the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I am reading the late Dr. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which the New York Times chose as one of its Ten Best Books of 2011. One of the things that has been so striking for me is how “in process” Malcolm X was.

Today I learned more about the strategy Malcolm was beginning to formulate and initiate in his final months. He was making overtures to mainstream civil rights leaders and his rhetoric was far less violent. Yet his approach to civil rights didn’t fit neatly into either of the two dominant camps at that time: separatism or integration. Instead, Malcolm X’s strategy was one of internationalism, connecting the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the United States to human rights struggles around the world. He even planned on going to the United Nations to lodge a formal protest against the United States. This was brilliant. I’m not saying I prefer it over Dr. King’s philosophy of integration, but it is a good example of the “mind at work” I talked about yesterday. I know that South African apartheid (apartheid is Afrikaans for “apart-ness”) was part of the U.N. agenda from the very start. It never occurred to me that there might have been discussion about involving the U.N. in matters of American racial segregation.

In general, Malcolm preferred the term “human rights” over the term “civil rights.”

The problem, number one, of the black man in America is beyond America’s ability to solve. It’s a human problem, not an American problem or a Negro problem. And as a human problem, or a world problem, we feel that it should be taken out of the jurisdiction of the United States government and the United States courts and taken into the United Nations in the same manner as the problems of the black man in South Africa, Angola, and other parts of the world, and even the way they’re trying to bring the problems of the Jews in Russia into the United Nations because of violations of human rights. We believe that our problem is one not of civil rights but a violation of human rights. Not only are we denied the right to be a citizen in the United States, we are denied the right to be a human being.

Malcolm X talks about all this and more in an extraordinary clip from CBC-TV’s “Front Page Challenge,” filmed just weeks before his assassination. It’s less than eight minutes long and definitely worth watching.

1. Going into this book, I knew embarrassingly little about Malcolm X. Not only have I never read Malcolm’s autobiography, I haven’t seen the Spike Lee biopic…yet.

2. Malcolm was a leader, but he was also a follower. For years, he willingly submitted himself to his mentor and spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad, even when Malcolm began to learn how truly flawed Muhammad was. (Malcolm reached a breaking point, however, and rightly so.) He never seemed interested in wealth or fame or power for his own end. Malcolm X didn’t lack for confidence, but there was an admirable humility there too.

3. Maybe I’m being swayed by Dr. Marable’s thesis – his subject’s “life of reinvention” – but I’m struck by how “in process” Malcolm X was. His was a mind always at work. When he was assassinated at the age of 39, that process was cut short. A great loss.

Even as I wrap up this book, Malcolm X remains a complicated figure for me. He seemed adept at diagnosing the illness in the soul of America, the heart disease of racism. But I have rarely agreed with Malcolm’s remedies – or at least the remedies he often called for publicly in his first 38 years: violence, vengeance, and separation. It’s understandable why he would reach these conclusions, but I still can’t agree with them. And yet, along with all of the other changes in the last year of his life, Malcolm seemed to be rethinking remedies too. That process was cut short too.

I cried myself to sleep the night Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. I was 14—too young to vote but old enough to know America had, at the ballot, formally turned its back on God. I implored God not to turn His back on America. When I woke in the morning, I was surprised how bright it was, even a little offended the sun had risen at all, as if it didn’t know the world was ending.

I pulled the lever for Dole in ’96, hoping to rescue what Rush Limbaugh called “America Held Hostage.” I stayed up all night watching Round One of the Bush/Gore election on a big-screen TV in the church where I was serving as youth pastor. In 2003, bombs rained on Baghdad, and I raised a glass to toast the military might of the United States. In 2007, I was arrested in front of the White House as part of the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I voted for John Kerry, a decision a few of my Christian friends and family interpreted not as the sum of a complicated political equation but as spiritual rebellion.

Continue reading at the Relevant Magazine website…

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published five books in his lifetime; a sixth was released after he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. They are all seminal works for American Christians.Stride Toward Freedom (1958) tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Measure of a Man (1959) is a slim volume explaining the theological and philosophical roots of nonviolent activism. Why We Can’t Wait(1964) is a history of the civil rights movement in general, and the 1963 Birmingham Campaign in particular. This book includes his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was addressed to eight clergymen and urged the church to join the struggle for racial justice. King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? is a clear-eyed look at the state of race relations at a moment when the civil rights movement was in disarray. The book also makes a provocative connection between the bankrupt ideology of systemic discrimination, and the literal impoverishment of millions of Americans, white and black. The five speeches that make up The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously in 1968, link the evils of poverty, militarism and racism, and call for nothing less than a nonviolent revolution.

However, the book we’ll focus on here is Strength to Love, a collection of King’s sermons first published in 1963. Reverend Dr. King liked to say that he was, above all else, a clergyman. Everything else he was—civil rights leader, antiwar activist, labor activist, advocate for the poor, writer, public intellectual and Nobel Laureate—flowed from his primary vocation as a Baptist preacher, the son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist preachers.

Continue reading at Relevant Magazine…

Sometimes when I’m reading a good book, I come to a particular sentence or phrase that seems to have around it an aura of origin-ality. I can’t help but wonder if this line might have sparked the creative fire that ended up as the book in my hands. I’m struggling this morning to come up with an example from my recent reading. But I can give a ridiculous example from my own writing life.

The first piece of mine published in a newspaper as an adult was a humorous essay I wrote about Y2K for the Opinion page of the Omaha World-Herald. It was published in September 1999. The essay was not premeditated; I didn’t think I had anything to say on the subject of Y2K. Instead, the piece grew out of a misunderstood song lyric. The third verse of Beck’s “Tropicalia” goes like this:

You’re out of luck
You’re singing funeral songs
To the studs
They’re anabolic and bronze
They seem to strut
In their millennial fogs
‘Til they fall down and deflate

For the longest time, I misheard the phrase “millennial fogs” as “millennial thongs.” When I realized my mistake, I decided “millennial thongs” was too interesting to not be used somewhere, so I started constructing an essay around it. Near the middle of the piece, I imagined what my parents, my brothers, and I would be doing on December 31, 1999:

The five of us boys will be gathered around the Scrabble board tiling words like “apocalypse” and “cataclysm” for triple-word scores. Dad will be in the living room reading what could be the last paper (headline: “See You Tomorrow, We Hope”) or doing what could be his last crossword puzzle. Mom will be in the kitchen tidying up, declaring, “If the world as we know it ends today, there is no way I am going to enter the dark ages with a messy house.” It’ll get messy when the looters come anyway, I think to myself but of course do not dare say out loud.

The television will be on, but there will be little to choose from. The Family Channel will be running a Little House on the Prairie marathon. The Cooking Channel will be airing special programming like Fun with Dried Foods and The Joy of Cooking with Fire. Nickelodeon will air symbolic episodes of Bosom Buddies, while UPN and Lifetime, unaware that anything really noteworthy is going on, will be running its regularly scheduled programs. MTV is presenting its first annual “Rock the New Third World” Beach Blast featuring music by Cher and U2 and a thousand slightly inebriated co-eds running around Pismo Beach in their millennial thongs.

Ahem.

Last year, I re-read Gilead, a novel by Marilynne Robinson, and I read for the first time, Home, which is a companion novel to Gilead. Both novels are set in 1957 in the town of Gilead, Iowa. Gilead is written from the perspective of John Ames, an aging and ailing Congregationalist minister. It is in the form of a letter to his very young son. Home centers on the family of Robert Boughton, a retired Presbyterian minister who is Ames’s best friend. The two novels deal with many of the same events and themes. Specifically, they are about the way the lives of John Ames and the Boughton family are shaken when Rev. Boughton’s prodigal son, Jack, returns to Gilead after fleeing in disgrace twenty years earlier.

I think I heard Robinson say somewhere that Gilead started with Ames’s voice. And I think she said somewhere that she wrote Home because the characters in the Boughton family refused to go away. But reading Home – and here I am getting back to my point – I wondered if the novel was in part also a way for Robinson, an admirer of John Calvin, to explore, through the character of Jack Boughton, the more problematic aspects of the doctrine of predestination.

Then a couple days ago, I was reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s fun little book, Why Read Moby-Dick? Philbrick tells the story of when Herman Melville went to Liverpool to visit his friend and literary hero Nathaniel Hawthorne:

It was November, and the two friends went for a walk on the beach in the windy sunshine. They found a sheltered spot amid the dunes and sat down for a smoke. “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity,” Hawthorne recorded in his journal, “and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, not be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

The last sentences of Hawthorne’s journal remind me so much of Jack Boughton that I can’t help but wonder if they served as some inspiration for Robinson. (Robinson studied 19th century American literature, and her first novel,Housekeeping, began as a series of prose exercises inspired by Melville, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson.)

Speculating about the origin of a book or essay or poem is interesting to me both as a writer and reader. Speculation is all it can ever be, unless I have the chance to ask the author someday. Still, those moments are valuable reminders that most creative works don’t present themselves whole-cloth to the creator; they are the end result of a process that includes both inspiration and perspiration, the genesis of an idea as well as the perseverance, discipline, care, and craftsmanship to give that idea form.

What does all this have to do with Slow Church? Besides the obvious – that I’m starting to write another book – I am still considering some answers to this question. I wanted to post something here in the meantime because this has been on my mind. Do you have similar moments when you are reading, listening to music, etc.?

1. Steve Jobs is a valuable book, if we let it be. For all sorts of folks: business leaders, church leaders, lay people, writers and artists, consumers and producers, everyone.

2. Isaacson follows Jobs from his early childhood (he was given up for adoption at birth) and precociously brilliant teenage years, to the creation of Apple, his fall from the top, the success of Pixar, Jobs’s re-ascendence at Apple, and his final battle with cancer. Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews over two years with the famously private Jobs, and he describes the moral, technological, and business failures, as well as the “passion for perfection and ferocious drive,” that determined the shape of Jobs’s success—success that would revolutionize six industries (personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing).

Continue reading at the Slow Church blog…

Maybe the only things better than reading a great book are talking about a great book with someone who has read it too, and recommending a great book to someone you just know will love it. Reading a great book may begin as a solitary experience, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Here, then, are our picks for the 10 best books of the year, along with five very honorable mentions. Leave a comment to let us know if you agree or disagree. And be sure to give us your recommendations for the year’s best book. There’s always a book-shaped hole to fill in the suitcase we’re taking to grandma’s house for the holidays.

Continue reading at Relevant Magazine…