Archive for October 2014
Book Review: Toxic Charity
Posted on: October 30, 2014
Robert D. Lupton, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It), New York: HarperOne, 2011, 191 pp.
I had been both intrigued and nervous about this book since it came out a few years ago. I have long wondered how many social service agencies and charities are in the business of eliminating hunger, poverty and injustice versus how many are in the business of making good business–which means securing and even increasing the number of people eligible for services, therefore growing their organization and its importance. Likewise, I share with Lupton a skepticism about how much church volunteerism serves the needs of church do-gooders versus how much it serves the needs of those supposedly being served. However, I am leery of those (generally right-leaning, Republican) thinkers who believe that all aid creates freeloaders and therefore we should eliminate all social programs, effectively punishing people who are poor or in crisis. I worried that Lupton would fall into that category, or at least support those arguments. I was hopeful that he would offer a scathing analysis of the injustice of our current economic system, including our reliance on charity for our social support system. I was fearful that he would ignore systemic injustice and insist that poverty was caused by entitlement and laziness.
Toxic Charity split the difference between my hope and my fear about it. Lupton does not blame poor people for their plight, or make claims that they should be abandoned to their own problems or “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” He acknowledges the injustice of major barriers like low wages, zones of urban blight and lack of childcare. He dismantles all our charitable endeavors and analyzes the culture of dependence they create, the submission they demand, and the way they often create more problems than they solve. This was excellent. However, the solutions he offers are all embedded in the same capitalist economic system that created the problems in the first place. Creating jobs and economic opportunity is a good thing, and I applaud Lupton’s work and writing–but I desperately wanted him to take it one more step and label our current economic system as unjust, to name the reality that capitalism depends on cheap labor and extracting value from some to send it to others. Instead, he rests with efforts to help people succeed in the system as it currently exists.
The greatest strength of Toxic Charity is its absolute take-down of our current system of charity. Lupton argues, convincingly, that few charitable institutions actually help solve the problems they were created to correct. Instead, they tend to perpetuate them or even make them worse. He criticizes this from a business and stewardship perspective, but more from the perspective of healthy relationships.
“Relationships based on need are seldom healthy. There is an implicit expectation (or at least hope) that the recipient of charity will use that assistance to better himself. … Unless the victim of misfortune exerts honest effort to regain self-reliance, the relationship between helper and helpee will tend to deteriorate. At some point accountability is required. The lack of full disclosure opens the door to suspicion and mistrust. … Relationships built on need do not reduce need. Rather, they require more and more need to continue. When one problem is solved, another must be presented in order for the relationship to continue. (60-61)
Healthy relationships require some equality between partners. Our current charitable endeavors encourage exactly the opposite–an ongoing pattern of giver and receiver, which means those relationships quickly become toxic for both parties.
His analysis extends especially deeply and well into short-term mission projects undertaken by churches. Whether it’s a day spent in a nearby inner city neighborhood, or an expensive trip overseas to build some needed house or well in a foreign country, Lupton names the reality that these journeys are far more about the needs and feelings of the givers than the receivers. They foster a culture of dependence, remove economic development opportunities from local economies, and waste millions of dollars on unnecessary travel to bring people with no expertise to do a job they are less equipped to handle than the local population. So why do we do it? What Lupton says: because it makes us feel good. What I want Lupton to go on to say: Because it makes us feel better about our own wealth. Because it helps us sleep at night. Because it relieves our guilt about benefiting from a system that is destroying others.
Lupton doesn’t tell us to stop giving money and time to help poor people. Instead, he says that giving time and money is the cheap, easy solution to help us feel better about being good people–it’s not actually about helping people succeed. (Again, this is where I wanted him to really lay down the systemic critique, to name the reality that our charity is subsidizing an economic system that is taking advantage of people and leaving them in the dust. He doesn’t do that, but it doesn’t take away the validity and import of what he does say.) He recommends ideas like helping establish co-ops for food or childcare, creating micro-lending opportunities, and engaging in economic development. He offers a basic guideline for charity. A crisis, whether personal or communal, requires direct provision of food, clothes, cash and other basic necessities. A chronic poverty need, however, requires a different response of engagement in the communal and personal factors causing the poverty. Otherwise, he says, “when we we respond to a chronic need as though it were a crisis, we can predict toxic results: dependency, dependence, disempowerment.” (56)
The kind of true engagement Lupton proposes requires a long-term investment in relationship, a deep risk-taking on behalf of a community, and a personal and corporate investment in doing with people, not for them. Lupton summarizes his approach in an “Oath for Compassionate Service:”
- Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves. [I know this as Saul Alinsky’s Iron Rule–JMK]
- Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
- Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
- Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.
- Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said–unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
- Above all, do no harm. (128)
Lupton’s book, even though I wish it had gone farther and been more critical of capitalism and injustice, should be required reading for non-profit boards and directors, church pastors and mission boards, and philanthropists of all kinds.
Book Review: Isaac’s Storm
Posted on: October 19, 2014
Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, New York: Vintage Books, 1999, 323 pp.
I loved Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City when I read it more than 10 years ago, and I have given it to at least a half-dozen other people who have loved it too. He has a way of mixing together historical reporting with narrative storytelling about a particular set of real-life characters that makes it feel like reading a novel. I was drawn to The Devil in the White City because I have always been fascinated by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I never dug deeper into Larson’s work because I was drawn more to the topic than the author, until one of those people to whom I had lent The Devil in the White City returned the favor by giving me Isaac’s Storm. I read the whole thing in two days, staying up until 2:00 a.m. because I couldn’t put it down.
Isaac’s Storm tells the story of the massive hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas in September 1900, particularly through the eyes of Isaac Cline, the chief weather bureau official in Galveston at the time. Larson follows a similar style to the one he used in The Devil in the White City, telling the story by laying out thick detail and behind the scenes portraits that point toward why things unfolded as they did. He begins by drawing a detailed picture of the city of Galveston at the time of the storm, especially its competition with Houston and its vision as an idyllic paradise for business or pleasure. He also offers an intricate accounting of the history, politics and embattled nature of the national weather bureau at the time. Weather bureau officials were terrified of making mistakes, eager to downplay danger, and in competition with each other for accurate predictions–without permission to use any words that implied a dangerous storm was afoot.
Larson then introduces us to several central characters, the people through whose eyes we will come to see this story. Isaac Cline is primary, along with his family, which includes his brother Joseph. Joseph and Isaac are estranged in the years after the hurricane. While there is no clear answer as to why, Larson offers some hints and ideas about the roots of the tension, including their disagreement about how they should be responding to the 1900 Galveston storm. We also meet several children who survived the storm (this is quickly evident, because their accounts would not be available otherwise), and several ship’s captains who rode out the storm as well.
The tension of the book is palpable, because we as readers know what the people in the story do not–that the hurricane is bearing down on them, and more than 6,000 people will lose their lives. As the story builds, Larson introduces us, with affection, to person after person, and each time you meet a new character you wonder if they will be one of the lucky ones who survive, or the many who perished. Larson tracks the individual choices–left or right, north or south, stay or go–that are the difference between life and death. Once the storm hit Galveston, I couldn’t stop reading until I knew who lived or died.
Isaac’s Storm was a great read for anyone who likes history, weather, science, survival or just a good story. I found it a fact-packed page-turner, and now I want to find more of Larson’s work again.
Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America, New York, Free Press, 2005, 206 pp.
This is the fourth in a series of four books about the Ten Commandments, which I purchased and read simultaneously, week by week, while I was preaching a sermon series on that topic. The sermons can be found here, June 22 through July 27. The rest of the book reviews will be posted sequentially here.
This was by far my favorite of all the Ten Commandments books I read for the sermon series. Chris Hedges is a powerful storyteller and critical thinker, and I enjoyed hearing his approach to the commandments.
Hedges approaches the commandments sideways, at an angle, in ways that make the connections sometimes less than obvious. The most memorable story, for me, came from his first chapter, where he told the story of his naive move into Boston’s Mission Hill with a heart for saving the neighborhood. As he found himself threatened and bullied by a group of young boys, he tried to hold on to hope and faith, but had to admit his failure, especially as his fear prompts him to respond with violence. It ends his relationship with the church, and shatters his faith.
It is knowledge of this darkness that alone makes faith possible. The church was my last refuge from God. In the shattering of that moral certitude I looked for forgiveness. Idols promise us power. God does not. Before God we all are powerless. We are all afraid. It is in this fear, this darkness, that I found God, even as I thought I was fleeing God. (36-37)
One of my favorite sideways approaches comes in a story Hedges tells about a private bar that attracts men who are immigrants. The bar is populated by women who make it their business to get the men to spend all their money there, with promises of love and words of affection. However, Hedges does not tie this story to the commandment about adultery, but to the one about lying.
These lies, the ones told in the bar, the ones told to us, create false communities. They weaken and destroy real communities. These false communities, which we must pay to enter, are a way to fight despair. We share this despair with these men. We share it with almost everyone around us, although we work hard to pretend it does not exist, this despair of living and dying, of not being the person we want to be, or what we want people to believe we are. (64)
Hedges offers one of the most nuanced and helpful accounts of what it means to “honor your mother and father” among all those I read. He grounds his analysis in the reality that our parents shape our lives, whether we want them to or not, by their action and inaction, presence or absence.
For to honor our parents is to honor our essence, the roots from which we sprung, and even the best parents have oppressive powers that must be broken. We must free ourselves from our parents to become fully formed individuals. The commandment to honor your parents is a commandment to honor yourself, honor the life force that created you, the good and the bad mingled within us, but not to honor abuse. (90)
I also appreciate the way Hedges connects the commandments about coveting not just to envy, but to greed, and, as is obvious if you know Hedges’ other work, his reflections on “thou shalt not kill” in circumstances of war.
As always, Hedges is a beautiful writer who tells stories that are compelling and evocative of the human condition. This time, he does so on the themes of the Ten Commandments, and Losing Moses on the Freeway provides reflections well worth reading.
Book Review: Broken Tablets
Posted on: October 13, 2014
Rachel S. Mikva, ed. Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1999, 148 pp.
This is the third in a series of four books about the Ten Commandments, which I purchased and read simultaneously, week by week, while I was preaching a sermon series on that topic. The sermons can be found here, June 22 through July 27. The rest of the book reviews will be posted sequentially here.
This anthology of reflections by some of the leading rabbis and Jewish scholars offered me a rich added perspective in my sermon series. It was compiled as a festschrift for Arnold Jacob Wolf, a leading Reform rabbi noted for his emphasis on peace and justice. However, the essays do not revolve around Wolf’s work, but around practical, justice-minded reflections on the Decalogue. Remember, the Jewish tradition divides the commandments differently from the Protestants (like Hauerwase & Willimon) and the Catholics (like Chittister)
Rabbi Mikva commences the reflection on each commandment with a few pages of commentary of her own, followed by a longer essay by another rabbi. All of the essays share a common attention to stories and rabbinic tales that shed light on interpretation, along with the Jewish scholarly pursuit of unanswered questions. It is always fascinating to me how different Jewish approaches, questions and even answers are from those methods used by Christian scholars.
For example, in her essay on the second commandment, Rabbi Mikva asks, “Is Judaism asserting itself as the one ‘true’ religion?” She answers thus:
It would be idolatrous to assert any human creation is the ‘one true religion.’ Judaism simply insists on faithfulness. A parable: A man who has to believe that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world has no wife, for he is constantly looking at other women to be sure that none may be more beautiful. … The purpose of religion is not to learn what is good, but to learn to do what is good, not to disclose secrets but to achieve persons. This is the discipline of living in faithfulness. (19)
One of my favorite essays was by Rabbi Leonard Fein, and focused on the fifth commandment, to honor your father and mother. He raises the question of whether all parents deserve to be honored. We all know their flaws, and some parents can be quite terrible. He then posits not unconditional love for parents, but unconditional honor.
We honor our parents because it is they who gave us life. If they are loveable, we may love them. But whether or not they are loveable, we must honor them. (70)
I also appreciated the reflection by Rabbi Richard M. Levy on not stealing. He extends the prohibition against theft into a mandate for generosity.
Stealing is a serious crime in Jewish tradition. So is the sin of encouraging stealing by refusing to share the bounty God has temporarily entrusted to us. (108)
Because each essay was so tightly crafted and each argument so bound together, I found it difficult to pull excerpts or insights that directly informed my preaching, or to quote the rabbis, even at length. However, I know my thinking was deeply enriched and I found great joy in reading this volume.
Joan Chittister, The Ten Commandments: Laws of the Heart, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis books, 2006, 152 pp.
This is the second in a series of four books about the Ten Commandments, which I purchased and read simultaneously, week by week, while I was preaching a sermon series on that topic. The sermons can be found here, June 22 through July 27. The rest of the book reviews will be posted sequentially here.
Joan Chittister’s subtitle to her book on the ten commandments suits her style and contribution. Chittister, as always, speaks to the issues of the heart and soul, looking at the commandments with an eye on the spiritual dimension and attention to the call for justice in the world.
In the introduction, she writes:
The Ten Commandments are laws of the heart, not laws of the commonwealth. They are laws that are intended to lead to the fullness of life, not simply to the well-ordered life. … The Ten Commandments are, then, an adventure in human growth. We are not so much convicted by them as we are to be transformed by them. (10-11)
Chapter by chapter, commandment by commandment, Chittister examines each in three ways: historically, examining what it meant in the context of early Judaism; in application, imagining how it applies to life today; and reflectively, proposing ways that we can reflect on what it means for each of us to follow the commandments today.
For example, in the first commandment, she explains that the ban on material images was a part of making God bigger than every before, because this Yahweh God was “more than matter, above matter, beyond matter.”(18) She then applies the commandment: “This is the commandment that decides the orientation of our whole lives. This one asks us who or what we are making God now.” (20) Finally, she provokes with a question:
Whatever it is that you give your life to is the shrine at which you adore. The question is, Is this a big enough god for anyone to spend a life on? (22)
I found this book among the most helpful I read in transforming the commandments from exhortative sermons of “Thou shalt not!” into probing questions about the depths of human relationships. Here are some examples:
The fourth commandment reminds us that we are not worlds unto ourselves. We all came from somebody somewhere and we owe them the gratitude that comes with those gifts, however limited they may at first sight be. It is the requirement of this commandment that saves us from the terminal disease of immediacy. This commandment demands we respect the past. (54-55)
“You shall not steal” has been reduced to mean no shoplifting, no pilfering, no pickpockets, no burglary, no petty theft. It has become the province of poor people, sick people, immature people. But the stealing the Decalogue really has in mind, is really concerned about, has actually become the sin of rich people, powerful people, people in a position to say, “take it or leave it” to those who seek a living wage or subsidized housing or medical benefits and pensions. (92)
If I had only one book of these four to recommend to preachers, Chittister’s would be the one. She helps unlock the fixed nature of the commandments and open them to new ways of illuminating our sins and our possibilities.
Book Review: The Truth About God
Posted on: October 13, 2014
Stanley M. Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, The Truth about God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999, 144 pp.
This is the first in a series of four books about the Ten Commandments, which I purchased and read simultaneously, week by week, while I was preaching a sermon series on that topic. The sermons can be found here, June 22 through July 27. The rest of the book reviews will be posted sequentially here.
I posted this on Facebook midway through this book:
I keep reading their (Hauerwas & Willimon’s) books, but I need to stop. For every compelling and enlightening sentence, there are two that make me want to throw it against the wall. There’s some good stuff in there, but it’s all so tangled up with garbage. The chapter on adultery was ridiculously bad and out of touch. Oh, the arrogance! The arrogance of these two!
This remains my assessment of the book as a whole.
First, some of the good stuff. Hauerwas and Willimon’s take on the Ten Commandments is that they are a central showcase for God’s saving work in the world. True to their Methodist roots, they see obedience to the commandments as a path toward sanctification, a response to God’s grace with a willingness to follow.
We live by the commandments as a way of worshiping the true God. When we thus worship the true God, we show forth to the world the sort of people God is able to produce. (17)
This makes the commandments not a generalized set of rules that apply to everyone, but a unique covenant initiated by God in relationship to the people.
God knows that Israel, left to its own devices in the wilderness, is prone to reestablish Pharoah’s rule in different forms. So the commandments are given as a basis for a radically alternative society that is counter to all that the empire demands. (27)
We don’t need God–we worship God. That is the first commandment, to stop attempting to get something out of God and instead to bend our lives toward God. (34)
Unfortunately, this interesting chapter quickly becomes a screed against scholars who question how this exclusionary God can hamper interfaith relationships, against a major denominational leader who questions Jesus’ divinity, and even (somehow) against parents who help their teenagers access birth control. As I said, for every good point, there are two that make me want to throw the book into a wall.
There were two main reasons I kept reading. First, Hauerwas and Willimon did detailed research that saved me a lot of work. Each chapter addresses one commandment, and they quote extensively from Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther and other historical theologians. It is helpful to read those commentaries without having to track them down separately. Second, there remained regular appearances of good and insightful observations, like these:
On “Thou Shall Not Kill”: They (the Religious Right) seize upon the Ten Commandments as a universal, general code of conduct for every thinking American and forget how exceptional the community is rendered by the Decalogue. That our society is so terribly violent is in great part the result of the church’s failure to be a community of nonviolence as a byproduct of our worship of the God of peace. (88-89)
On “Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness”: The church must be a testimony that the truth is known by people who have learned how to trust one another through sharing goods, committing one another to lifelong fidelity, the practice of nonviolence, who do these things because they know they are creatures of a gracious God who would have them worship him in truth. (123)
However, you must also put up with obnoxious, arrogant and clueless conclusions they draw. The chapter on adultery is especially heinous.
The only good Christian reason to get married is the conviction that you can live out your baptismal vocation better within marriage than without. Furthermore, we believe that love is the fruit of marriage, the result of our faithful commitment to one another rather than its cause. (98)
The term “planned parenthood” doesn’t quite fit how Christians ought to have children, for children are not our choice as much as they are God’s choice of us. (100)
You have never had good sex until you have had it with a Christian. (100)
However, it’s not limited to that one. They make gross generalizations about the misery of rich people and call out whole congregations for spoiling their children. Then you get this commentary on government, which somehow emerges from their commentary on lying.
There can be no freedom that does not acknowledge God. The Constitution attempted to construct a government without God… Democracy is an attempt to get around the necessity for a hierarchy of virtue by majority vote. (126-127)
So, there you go. Hauerwas and Willimon being their usual selves. They are full of scholarship and insight into the meaning of the commandments, in their richness and connection to God. They are also full of themselves and their own arrogant and outdated opinions, which they then try to argue emerge from the biblical text. My original Facebook assessment stands.
David J. Lose, Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World–and Our Preaching–is Changing, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013, 112 pp.
I have been a huge fan of David Lose’s regular column, Dear Working Preacher, for many years. It feels like he is writing a personalized letter to me, as a preacher sitting with the text in my community, urging me on and starting a productive conversation about how to bring the good news to my congregation. (Karoline Lewis has been writing for the last several months, perhaps due to a sabbatical, and she is also excellent.)
I was hoping for that same conversational style and collaborative tone in his reflections about the craft of preaching itself, and I found it. I have been pondering for the last several years (with many others) whether preaching itself is in danger, or how preaching must change and adapt to changing circumstances. I was eager to engage Lose as a wise conversation partner on that topic, and this book did just that.
Lose identifies three primary forces at work in our context that have major implications for preaching: postmodernism, secularism and pluralism. He devotes two chapters to each–one explaining how that epistemological reality impacts preachers and listeners, and another exploring strategies to respond in our sermon writing and delivery. One of the things I appreciated most, from the start, was his commentary on the last 50 years of “fixes” for preaching. There has been movement after movement that labels preaching as “broken,” and proposes a way to fix it–moving from lecture to narrative, moving from pulpit authority to conversational style, moving from verbal communication only to the use of images on a screen. He quotes theologian Joseph Sittler in his insistence that preaching can’t be fixed: “‘Of course preaching is in trouble. Whence did we ever manufacture the assumption it was ever to be anything but trouble’ if it is to be relevant to a changing world and faithful to the troubling gospel of Jesus Christ?” (3)
In the section on postmodernism, he identifies the core problem of preaching in a postmodern context as the constant skepticism and crisis of legitimacy. How can we claim to speak truth in a world that doubts all claims of truth? He replaces the modern equation of truth with provability with a faithful claim of truth modeled on confession. Legitimacy then proceeds not from provability, but from the integrity of the confession itself–from the confessor’s honesty and from the confession’s connection to lived experience. In practice, he proposes reinvigorating Sachkritik, or “content criticism,” where interpreters “understand discrete passages of Scripture in relation to the core testimony of the biblical witness.” (36) This makes room for both an hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust, and invites engagement from listeners in a conversation.
Our primary question when approaching a passage is not “Where did it come from?” or “What did it mean?” but rather “What might it do to the community that gathers around it when next heard?” This postmodern focus on the ability of language not just to say something but to do something has important implications for preaching. (42)
Preaching, from this point of view, is meant to be provocative, eliciting conversation and questions, faith or disbelief, but always striving to make a claim worth responding to. (45)
Moving on to the reality of secularism, Lose identifies the primary problem with our secular culture as a crisis of hope. With the death of transcendence, “we, both inside the church and out, have lost hope–hope that there is something more than meets the eye, hope that some values exist beyond those we can construct, hope that our actions and lives are rooted in a larger framework of meaning.” (52) Our response as preachers, Lose argues, must be to draw people into the Christian story of resurrection hope, helping them to see their lives and vocations as part of a larger and more meaningful narrative.
If we can imagine the purpose of Sunday is not simply to have an encounter with God, but rather to have the encounter clarify our vision and increase our ability to see God in all dimensions of our lives, then we may also experience the centrifugal force of being propelled from worship on Sunday to lives of meaning, purpose, and faith in the world throughout the week. (77)
That is a tall order, to be sure, but it is indeed what we ought to strive for in our preaching and worship experiences.
The final theme Lose identifies is pluralism, specifically “digital pluralism,” a world in which multiple and competing realities are immediately available for easy access via digital means. (87) Our congregations no longer dwell securely in the biblical narrative worldview. They may get a glimpse of it for an hour on Sundays, but the rest of their lives is dominated by other metanarratives, like consumer capitalism or fearful nationalism.
Increasingly, if often unconsciously, we find ourselves offering interpretations of a narrative that few in the congregation know well enough to be able even to appreciate our interpretations, let alone apply them to life outside the congregation’s walls. Such effort can feel like swimming upstream: it is cold and exhausting, and it yields little progress. (101)
This gives voice to one of my deep apprehensions and frustrations with preaching these days. I get people to step into this worldview for one hour every week. Even if they are convinced and convicted by it, Fox News and CNN and the world of advertisement gets them for the other 167 hours of every week. I can be persuasive that the biblical narrative matters, that it impacts their persons and politics, but I can’t do it in isolation.
Lose urges us to move our congregations toward not just biblical literacy, but biblical fluency, “the ability to think–without thinking–in the target language.” In order to do this, we need to not just teach the biblical narrative, but engage people in a participatory way in contemplating how the story impacts their lives, so that they can do what we preachers do–interpret scripture for themselves. He urges participatory practices, visitation to parishioner’s workplaces, and online conversations to this end.
Preaching at the Crossroads sets forth a high standard and an enormous amount of work to do. Yet I end the book feeling both challenged and encouraged, as I always do when I read Lose’s work. I also feel much less alone. It is not just me and my preaching that are struggling with these issues–it is all of us who weekly strive to deliver the good news to those who come into our sanctuaries. I recommend this book to all who care about that endeavor.
Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography, Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1983, 316 pp.
I’ve known who Antoinette Brown Blackwell was for many years–she was the first woman ordained to the Christian ministry since the New Testament days. She was ordained in 1853 by the historical predecessors of my denomination, the Congregationalists that are now part of the United Church of Christ. I’ve cheered for that history, shouted her name in triumph, and celebrated its connection to our denomination for a long time. However, I’ve never known anything else about Antoinette Brown Blackwell. 
Recently, I was asked to serve on a team re-imagining the UCC’s Antoinette Brown Award, and subsequently submitted a proposal for an article about her to Common Lot, the UCC women’s magazine. That article was accepted, and tells more about my journey to get to know the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell. (Link to be posted when article, called “Deciphering Antoinette,” is published in November.) The first thing I did was order this book, and I am grateful it was still available. This review will be brief, because most of my reflections on the material covered in the book are discussed in that article.
Cazden’s biography was immediately recognizable to me in its genre and date. It was part of the movement in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to reclaim women’s history, to recover and rescue women from historical invisibility. Many new historical works were written in this period, and I read many of them in my undergraduate years as a student of history and women’s studies. Returning to this work showed me how well works like these have withstood the test of time, as Cazden’s portrait did not feel dated in any way. The information presented and the style of the story she told were simple and fascinating. She draws her material from the extensive writings of Antoinette Brown Blackwell herself, including her correspondence, her speeches and her journals.
One of the pieces of her story that was most interesting to me was her connection to the 19th century suffragettes. I had imagined her to be deeply pious, and somehow because of that apolitical. She was indeed pious, but she lived out her faith through concrete engagement in the major political issues of her day–abolition, suffrage, temperance and more. I have long studied the lives of those political women like Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe–but never before had I placed Antoinette Brown Blackwell into their milieu. In fact, I learned from Cazden, they were her closest friends and companions. That changed my perception of her remarkably, and for the better.
Two other things stood out for me because they were strikingly true for women in ministry still today, more than 150 years later. First, Antoinette Brown Blackwell did not fit easily with the suffragettes because of her faith, nor did she fit neatly in the church because of her feminism. This remains true today, as female clergy find that their Christianity is alien among activists who reject religion as patriarchal, and their political activism is alien among clergy who focus on church-related issues. The difference, however, is that there are now many, many more of us. We may not fit easily into those groups, but we have each other as sisters in ministry, and we hold tightly to one another.
Second, Antoinette Brown Blackwell struggled mightily and publicly to renegotiate the roles of women and men in the household, arguing that liberating women to have careers of their own required men to step up and take on more responsibility for family and home life. Again, this struggle rings true even 150 years later. While most of the women in ministry I know who are married and/or mothers intentionally sought partners willing to share the load, it is still a constant source of stress, guilt and compromise.
As I say more extensively in the article, Cazden’s biography was a gift because it makes Antoinette Brown Blackwell come alive with a depth and richness of personality, struggle, courage and quirks. I am grateful for Cazden and for her subject.
Book Review: The New Parish
Posted on: October 13, 2014
Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens and Dwight J. Friesen, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community, InterVarsity Press, 2014, 206 pp.
A colleague selected The New Parish for our clergy book group. I was intrigued by the title, because the church I serve is in many ways a neighborhood church. The endorsements on the book included such luminaries as Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren and Walter Brueggemann, all of whom offered glowing comments about the innovations it offered. However, I found it to be a helpful encapsulation of many things I had already been doing as a pastor in a neighborhood church, and description of much of the work we are already doing as a congregation. It is a good and helpful resource, but it did not live up to its description as “groundbreaking.”
The New Parish emerges from a group of congregations known as The Parish Collective. These churches commit themselves to living and serving as congregations in and with a particular neighborhood, basing their ministries on the needs and relationships with that locality. I found this to be an old idea made new again–for centuries of Christianity, parish-based ministry was the way of the church, with a church seeing itself as the primary vehicle for social service and spiritual care for a particular neighborhood or village. The difference today is that there are likely multiple faith communities and social service agencies in that same locality, and so partnership rather than possessiveness becomes more important. In my congregation, we see ourselves as a part of the downtown neighborhood in our small town, and we regularly engage in ministries connected to our neighborhood. We do so in partnership with a group of downtown churches, all located within a few blocks of one another.
I especially appreciated the insights the book offered about the ways that this new idea of parish ministry combats “the two most fragmenting forces of our day. The first can be called ‘the myth of the individual’ and the second ‘living above place.'” (23) We falsely believe that individuals exist autonomously, which is aided by our distance from firsthand experience of the impact of our existence (i.e., buying food disconnected from the reality of where it came from). The idea of the new parish returns the church to the location where it resides, and presses it into careful attention to the relationships in a particular place, overcoming the myth of the individual and stepping deeply into the place rather than living above it. Churches that belong to their neighborhoods avoid being places of homogeneity and consumer-oriented religion. They live out an incarnational theology, “just as Christ ‘became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.'” (27, quoting John 1:14 in The Message)
The book traces a history of the church in prepositions: the church in (a particular community), the church of (a region, usually political), the church for (a missionary territory), the church with (a particular segment of society, like seekers). The idea of the new parish seeks to make the church “within and in-with,” meaning “within its place while collaborating with others in that place.” (45-46) The authors then offer a multitude of strategies, from walking the neighborhood to attending local functions to getting to know local business owners. This, in particular, was what I found less than innovative. Those are all things I have done throughout my ministry, in my current small town and even as an associate at a large urban church in a major city. In fact, a walking or dashboard survey of the neighborhood is the first assignment the seminary gives to every field education student I’ve ever supervised. Every few years, our church council participates, too. Perhaps the evangelical context, with its large buildings at the edge of town or by the highway, does not share that sensibility, which is why this appears more novel.
Another helpful section was the chapter on leadership. In a neighborhood parish, charisma, extroversion and high performance quality are less important in qualified leaders. Instead, the question becomes, “What is worth following?” The answer: “Character is king.”(166-167) A neighborhood leader must live with integrity, to be the same in front of a group as they are walking down the street, approachable and open and honest. I have found this to be very true in my context. My authority does not come from the polish and cleverness of my sermons, but from my day-to-day walking alongside people in their lives. Leadership, the authors say, takes the form of designing experiences that bring people together, conducting so as to bring together parts of the whole, and coaching with encouragement to all those engaged in ministry together.
As I said, I think The New Parish is helpful and insightful, even if I did not find it revolutionary. Perhaps the idea of neighborhood ministry will be novel to some, however. I recommend it for its insight into ministry in a parish setting–new or old–and its ideas for how to better engage an authentic, rooted congregational ministry.
Book Review: Embers
Posted on: October 7, 2014
Sandor Marai, Embers, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, Vintage International, 2008, 213 pp.
This novel was originally written in Hungarian in 1942, and somehow drew my eye on the library shelf. There was something dark and haunting about the cover, and the title, Embers, seemed to speak of something smoldering, a dormant heat that made me curious to read more.
The story is a beautiful and agonizing account of an old man confronting his past, in the form of a lifelong friendship turned estranged and a long-dead conflict that effectively ended the man’s joy many, many years before. The novel is a study in the interior life of a man betrayed, who spends the rest of his days plotting a quiet revenge and resolution. It is a book in which very little action happens, but the General at the center of the story narrates–slowly, carefully–the unfolding of his soul as it has been wracked by the events of his friend Konrad.
The book is a study in relationships, guilt, betrayal and patience. The details of the past wounds drip out at a painstaking pace, but as a reader, I was hooked on the beauty of the language and the power of the General’s depth of self-analysis. The book distills more than 50 years of contemplation into a single conversation, the texture of a memory that has been handled and re-handled over and over again, every possible angle and outcome fully known. I am finding it difficult to even describe the book without giving away too much, or failing to convey the weighty beauty of it. It is extraordinary.
I recommend this book highly, for its depth of an interior journey, for the way it traces a man’s thoughts over decades, for the way it unpacks the tangle of guilt and betrayal, all in the fascinating context of the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I’m glad someone made this translation, and Vintage has brought this book into circulation. It is not easy, fun or gentle to read, but it is magnificent.
For The Someday Book 