The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler (July 2020)

Board member Andrea Humphries’ book review column is back for 2020! Here’s her reflection on July 2020:

I was still a smidge short of my goal for July (5 books, instead of 6), but all in all, it was a much more typical reading month for me. Four books I loved and one was a bit of a slog, if I’m being honest, but I’m still glad to have read it.

First up, July’s book by a Black author was The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper. My Goodreads history tells me that I first marked this as something I wanted to read in August 2017. By January 2018, I had bought a copy. Then in April 2018, I got to hear Harper speak (along with Kathy Khang and Marlena Proper Graves) at the Festival of Faith and Writing. It’s one of a handful of sessions from the Festival that have stuck with me because it was so powerful. I’m honestly not sure why it’s taken me so long to finally pick up her book, but I’m so glad I finally did. It is fantastic. Straight-up, no qualifications. The Very Good Gospel is an exploration of the fact that God’s original design for creation can be encapsulated in the concept of shalom, which is so much more than our modern idea of peace. She examines what shalom looked like originally and all that meant, how it is deeply broken in every area of our lives, and what it might look like to work to restore it. Throughout the book, Harper addresses the myriad ways that racism has broken and continues to break shalom. It was extremely helpful to see how it impacts so many areas of our lives and not have it restricted to the single chapter where it’s the primary focus. I highly recommend that you grab a copy of this book (and don’t wait two-and-a-half years to read it). I’m also going to veer from the typical here and strongly suggest that you also listen to these two podcast episodes and watch this video. The first is an episode where Jen Hatmaker had Harper as a guest on her podcast and the second is an episode of Harper’s Freedom Road podcast. The video is a live conversation that Harper and Hatmaker had in June amidst the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. All three are well worth the time and effort to push through the discomfort you may feel.

I became Twitter friends with Megan Westra through some mutual friends. She’s smart, caring in a deeply practical way, and loves the Church. That combination bleeds through on almost every page of her now-released book, Born Again and Again: Jesus’ Call to Radical Transformation. Megan challenges the (North American) evangelical church’s focus on individual salvation to the exclusion of all else, demonstrating the variety of ways in which that narrow focus leads to unbiblical neglect of the Christian call to community, interdependence, and practical, embodied love of neighbor. In each chapter, she tackles a different major area of our communal life and examines how we got here, the story we’ve been told, what the Bible says, and what a better, truer way forward can look like. She invites the reader to learn, explore, question, and envision, not from the position of one who has it all worked out and is dogmatically convinced that they’ve found all the answers, but as a fellow traveller, beckoning the reader to join her on this journey. Through all of this, she interweaves her own story and that of others whose perspectives are offered as valuable correctives, revealing blind spots, and enriching the body of Christ. This one was really interesting to read right after having finished Kaitlyn Schiess’ The Liturgy of Politics, as there are plenty of parallels and overlap despite Megan and Kaitlyn coming from, at times, very different theological perspectives.

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscover God by Kaitlin B. Curtice is a profoundly beautiful, thought-provoking book. Framed by the Potawatomi flood story, Curtice invites her reader into a journey of discovery - what it means for her to be a white-coded, Christian citizen of the Potawatami Nation, what it means to confront the rampant racism in our history and culture, what it looks like to decolonize our faith, and how hard and beautiful the journey is. I'm deeply grateful to Curtice for the way her work teaches the reader to discern between the racist, colonial superstructures, doctrines, and practices that have been erected over the Bible and what Scripture actually teaches us. I’m also very grateful for the questions that reading Native raised for me as I worked through the book. I find that sometimes, not being sure whether I agree with an author and taking the time to delve into that uncertainty is more helpful, in the long run, than reading an author that I completely agree with.

Most Christians I know are at least vaguely familiar with the quote, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” What many don’t necessarily know is that it comes from the medieval work, Revelations of Divine Love, written by Julian of Norwich. Revelations is Julian’s account of a series of sixteen visions that she received from God and the further insight she was given of their meaning over the course of the thirty years (give or take) that followed. Since it was written in Middle English (think Chaucer), to read it in the 21st century means, for the vast majority, reading a translation. I’m not unfamiliar with this type of writing, nor do I typically have any issues getting through it, but despite some beautiful passages and some profound insights that Julian had, it was rough going to make it to the end. I bought the book and started reading it as part of Joy Clarkson’s Patreon book club, but I’ll be honest, I finished it because I’d invested the time and I wanted to be able to say that I’ve read the whole thing.

And now for something fun to wrap up: I’ve spent months raving about the brilliance of Jodi Taylor and whichever installment of The Chronicles of St. Mary’s I was on at the time. Then I got caught up and there were no more St. Mary’s books to listen to. (Seriously, Zara Ramm is tied with James Marsters in my personal rankings for best audiobook narrator ever.) Luckily for me, there’s a spinoff series! Doing Time is the first of The Time Police books. It has a fairly simple premise: three misfits, each with their own issues and problems, join the Time Police, a militarized organization responsible for policing the timeline and apprehending anyone who breaks the time (travel) laws. Shenanigans, conspiracies, and hilarity ensue, with a murder and an attempted mutiny thrown in for good measure.There’s a great mix of characters that St. Mary’s readers are familiar with and new ones to fall in love with. As per usual with Jodi Taylor’s books, I’m sure I looked like an absolute loony to anyone driving past me as I listened. I laughed, cheered, cringed, laughed, yelled emphatically at the characters (and possibly, Ms. Taylor, too), and then laughed some more. I’m thrilled that the next book in the series, Hard Time, will be out in October.