November 2009: Books Read

1. The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne. I bought this book at a small used book shop in Hanapepe, when Mary and I were on Kauai for our honeymoon. It is very engaging and story-driven, which made it a very fast read, and I finished it on the plane ride home.

Shane, who grew up a Christian in Tennessee, is part of the Simple Way community that lives among the poor in inner-city Philadelphia. I found his account of this life, and how he got there, to be fascinating and compelling. I agree with much of what he wrote in this book about the life-transforming power of the gospel, about how Christianity has been married to political power, and about the biblical mandate to serve the poor.

But I didn’t like everything about this book. It may seem like a small thing, but Claiborne’s folksy tone (literally – he uses the word “folks” on nearly every page) was annoying after a while. I mean, did he really have to call Mother Teresa “Momma T”? I also got the impression that he looked down on his fellow Christians who were rich, or who were Republicans. He seemed quite willing to love his enemies when they had names like Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh, but I was left with some doubt as to whether he loved his enemies named George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. This was unfortunate, given the fact that Claiborne’s activist lifestyle by no means requires him to look with scorn on other people. Last summer I read Dorothy Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, and I did not detect a self-righteous tone in her at all. Even though Claiborne’s irresistible revolution is in many ways compelling, and what the church in North America deeply needs – the tone he sometimes adopts isn’t.

2. The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. The premise: Roose, a student and aspiring writer at Brown University, decides that he wants to spend a “semester abroad” at conservative evangelical Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell. Though raised in a household he identifies as Quaker, Roose seems thoroughly secular in his outlook at the beginning of the book. While working as an assistant to A.J. Jacobs (author of The Year of Living Biblically), he visits Liberty and comes to think that spending some time at Liberty would be a good way to understand the evangelical Christian subculture in America (and a good premise for a book).

The result: a highly entertaining read. I did not attend a Christian university, but I am an evangelical Christian, and I understand the sort of subculture that Roose enters when he enrolls at Liberty. I found his outsider’s observations about dating life (he finds that the option of sex being off the table is strangely freeing – i.e., two people can just get to know each other without ulterior motives), battling with lust (he visits a support group for what he calls “chronic masturbators”) and evangelical attitudes toward homosexuality (he finds that the subject comes up way more often at Liberty than at Brown, where there actually are gay students) to be illuminating and, at times, hilarious. My favorite passages in the book are his account of going on a Spring Break mission trip to Daytona Beach with a group of his fellow students, and his account of meeting Falwell himself and interviewing him for the school paper – just a few weeks before his death in May of 2007.

Roose is surprised to find some diversity at Liberty, including students who experience doubt and regularly break the social rules. He is also surprisingly charitable toward the people at Liberty, with whom he ultimately disagrees about many things. He even has kind words for Falwell, about whom he writes,

Realizing that Dr. Falwell isn’t a fraud – as troubling a notion as that is – has helped me solve one of the great mysteries of this semester. For months now, I’ve been puzzled by the thousands of good, kindhearted believers at Liberty who follow a man who seems, to my mind, to be almost unredeemable. They like him, I’ve learned, because he’s a straight shooter. In half a century of preaching, Dr. Falwell has said some outrageous things, and he’s angered Christians and non-Christians alike, but he’s never revealed himself as a hypocrite. He’s never been caught in sexual sin, and he’s been as transparent in his financial dealings as you could reasonably expect. And in the world of televangelism, a world filled to the brim with hucksters and charlatans and Elmer Gantry-type swindlers, a little sincerity goes a long way. (261)

All in all, this was a highly entertaining book and a compulsive read; I was sad when I reached the end. I’ll certainly take a look at Kevin Roose’s next book.

3. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall. Lyall is an American journalist who has lived in England for several years, is married to an Englishman, and has two daughters. Her book pokes fun at various British idiosyncrasies, such as their attitude toward sex (covered in a chapter titled, “Naughty Boys and Rumpy Pumpy) poor dental hygiene (“I Snapped It Out Myself”), the House of Lords (“Lawmakers from Another Planet”), and their stiff upper lips (“By God, Sir, I’ve Lost My Leg!”).

Mary took this book along on our honeymoon for some light beach reading, and it certainly fit the bill. I found many passages to be incredibly funny. I also found some of them to be discomforting, such as those on drunkenness and sex. It isn’t that I’m particularly prudish (that is, I’m not shocked at what I read). Rather, what made me uncomfortable is that those passages depict the British to be singularly unattractive. Also, Lyall doesn’t use profanity in her narration, but she certainly doesn’t shy away from reporting what others say, especially in her chapter on British journalists.

The question that I was primarily left with at the end of the book was, “Is it accurate? Or is she merely embellishing on her own experience in order to get a laugh?” Not being British, and never having even traveled to Britain, I can’t say. I can only say that, having lived for a year in Prague, I found her description of British stag and hen parties (in the chapter “Distressed British Nationals”) devastatingly accurate. Almost every time I walked around the city center at night, I would see (and more often, hear) a crowd of drunken, boorish men, often dressed alike (except for the groom-to-be, who was more often than not in drag), making lewd comments to passing women and generally making fools of themselves. They were always, ALWAYS British. So perhaps her descriptions of Britons are accurate, but in the same way that descriptions of “Ugly Americans” are accurate. That is, there is an uncomfortably large slice of the population in both countries that makes everyone else look bad. A more accurate title for this book would have been Ugly Britons. But that probably wouldn’t sell.

October 2009: Books Read

October was a light reading month for me – you know, because of getting married on the 24th and all. I did manage to finish a couple of books, though (and both of them on the honeymoon).

1. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling. A lot of people have heard of The Jungle Book from the Disney movie of the same name, so you may be wondering why the title of this book is plural (at least, I was when I picked it up). The reason for this is that Kipling wrote two Jungle Books: one in 1894, and a sequel in 1895. Both are collections of short stories, and both deal primarily (but not exclusively) with the world of Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves. The edition that I read combined both of them in one volume.

The book is a fun read. It is fascinating to enter into the jungles of colonial India and learn about the various animals. Kipling is very good at giving the animals voices and personalities of their own. His great gift in these books is to imaginatively project himself into the world of animals, and show how they would talk if they had human personalities and emotions.

As I said, not all the stories deal with Mowgli and his world. A couple of the stories are not set in India at all, but the Arctic. My favorite of all the stories is one that was also translated into a cartoon: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the story of the pet mongoose who becomes a hero to an English family.

2. The Heart of a Goof by P.G. Wodehouse. This is a collection of nine stories about golf by that great master of the English language, P.G. Wodehouse. They all start out in a fictional country club, in which the Oldest Member relates a story to a reluctant hearer. As with so many of Wodehouse’s stories, many of them involve a couple who nearly does not get together, but eventually does. In this collection, the thing that generally gets them together one way or another is golf.

I’ve read enough P.G. Wodehouse books by now to be able to say what I liked and didn’t like about each one (which is hard, since so many of them involve such similar characters). While I found this collection entertaining, I don’t know that I would recommend it to someone who was just getting to know Wodehouse. There is, in my opinion, too much golf jargon intruding on the plots. This may appeal to an avid golfer, but I much prefer his stories about Blandings Castle or Jeeves, which are (deservedly, I think) more popular.

Why Did the Wall Fall?

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down. I don’t remember it. That is, I don’t remember it being a single cataclysmic event which I have a distinct recollection of hearing about, but I do remember hearing about it over and over for months. Perhaps I would have understood its significance more if I had not been 10 years old at the time.

Even if I don’t have a distinct memory of how significant it was, I am now aware of the various causes that people have attributed it to. I read an article today in the NY Times that talks about various answers to the question, “What made the Berlin Wall fall down?” (and what triggered the fall of communism throughout Eastern Europe?)

The article says that “different groups in different countries see the anniversary differently, usually from their own ideological points of view.” The two main points of view mentioned in the article are these:

1. The fall of Communism can be attributed to Ronald Reagan, with his “aggressive military spending and antagonism toward Communism.” Most people in the United States tend toward this view, according to the article.

2. On the other hand, most people in Europe don’t think that Communism fell because the West was hard – they think it happened because the East was soft. It was really Ostpolitik and West German TV that brought about the softening and eventual collapse.

I’m not going to argue for which of these is the correct interpretation. But as a Christian, I wonder: where is the spiritual interpretation of events? I don’t expect the New York Times to come forward with it, so here is a quote from a different article found on a Reuters blog called FaithWorld:

The many anniversary celebrations, documentaries and discussions now underway across Germany seem to focus mostly on how fearless street protesters and astute politicians pulled off the “peaceful revolution” that ended communism. Films and photos of dissidents packed into the Gethsemane Church in East Berlin or Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche), the leading houses of worship that sheltered them until the Wall opened, are among the trademark images. But those crowded “peace prayer” evenings were only the tip of the iceberg of behind-the-scenes work by pastors and lay people who considered it their Christian duty to promote civil rights and human dignity in a rigid communist society.

This article was about Christians in Germany. I have read a couple of biographies of Pope John Paul II, and I cannot help but think that the millions of Poles who greeted him on his official visit to Poland in 1979 with chants of “We want God!” had something to do with the fall of Communism in that country (Peggy Noonan wrote an article about it shortly after John Paul’s death in 2005).

When I lived in Hungary, I also learned about Jozsef Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic Church and an adamant opponent of Communism.

And I read this in Revelation 8:3-5:

Another angel,​​ who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people,​​ on the golden altar​ before the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God​​ from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar,​​ and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder,​​ rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake.​

In other words, this passage teaches us that the prayers of God’s people are taken up, filled with fire, and hurled back onto the earth. How many people, both inside and outside of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, prayed for the end of Communism?

I don’t think that we will ever know beyond argument what caused the fall of the Berlin Wall. But in all of these debates about who or what caused Communism in Eastern Europe to end, let us not forget the prayers and efforts of thousands of Christians all over the world. They believed that each human being is made in the image of God, and they believed that that image was being squashed by Communism. Before we declare an unqualified victory for Reagan or militarism or Ostpolitik or anything else, let’s remember that.