Trying to follow

Last week I read the book, The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun. I’ve heard it recommend a handful of times as a telling story of China, modern day miracles, the persecuted church, and one man’s incredible testimony to God’s faithfulness. I found all that and more.

I want to be completely honest in this, but please don’t take offense at what I’m about to say. I really enjoyed reading this book. It was encouraging and challenging in many ways. However, I also at times, got tired of reading it. Brother Yun is constantly being beaten within an inch of his life, thrown in prison, and persecuted. I’m not saying it was okay for me to feel bored of reading about persecution, just that I did. It’s amazing to think that people have endured such intense and long lasting persecution even new.

I’ve subscribed to Voice of the Martyr’s magazine for a number of years. For the past couple years in Nashville I was just getting emails, and I honestly wasn’t reading them, but fortunately a good friend at church was always making efforts to remind others of the persecution going on in the world and encouraging us to pray. This book was another challenge to “Remember those in chains as if you yourselves where in chains.”

I’m going to make an effort to read, remember and pray for my brothers and sisters in chains for the Gospel.

I’m back at it, with another book review, which is still on track with a book a week, though I started lagging behind recently. This book comes recommended by my friend, Neeraj.

The book I read, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz is all about the paradox that the freedom of having more choices seems to make us less happy. I really enjoyed this book and its insights. He basically divides people into two main categories when it comes to making choices: Maximizers and Satisficers. Maximizers want to find the best option no matter what it takes, Satisficers are willing to settle for less then the best. Though, you might think it’s better to be a Maximizer, the reality is that with so many choices available you can never really be sure you’ve found the ‘best’ option and thus maximizer’s lead a life of constant choice seeking, regret at not making the right choice, comparing choices and more. Being a Satisficers allows people to not be captivated by choices but simply chose and continue about their lives focused on the more important things.

An example of this in my own life is when it comes to groceries. I shop at three different places: Cub, Aldi, and Hampden Park Coop. For ethical reasons there are certain things I buy only at the coop, for financial reasons there are things I generally buy only at Aldi, but then there is a wide range of things in between. I constantly agonize over where to purchase certain items, whether the price difference justifies going organic, and the possible ramifications of the options. And this is quite constant. So, as it relates to certain food items, I tend to be a maximizer, which when you think about it, is sort of ridiculous. The time I’ve spent thinking through the items and options, the mental anguish that’s taken toll at being unhappy with the choice I made and so forth is certainly not worth the small, almost insignificant price differences between many of the products. Now, you might have different areas that you ‘maximize’ in and sometimes that’s okay, but often it leaves us much less happy then we’d otherwise be.

If you just google the book title you’ll find some good summaries and thoughts on the book, so I won’t do too much summarizing here, but for my benefit and yours here are the areas I thought where interesting:

• We Spend Too Much Time Choosing- though we’ve always acknowledge that community and relationships are what makes us happy, in our consumer culture we are spending more and more time shopping, but at stores and online, looking for the best deals.
• Opportunity Cost Makes Us Regret- I’ve mentioned opportunity cost before, but it’s negative effect is that when we make a choice, even if we are happy with it, we will inevitably regret the missed opportunities of what we could have done with that same money. (i.e. a vacation at the beach, while regretting not being in the mountains)
• Social Comparison in a Global Society Leaves Us Longing- We constantly compare ourselves socially to others, and in small circles that’s usually okay as we’ll likely interact with people at similar socio-economic levels, but with internet, TV and advertising we are left constantly longing to be like that person whose richer than us.

There are a lot more tidbits and the studies he references are so interesting. I could write more but I’ll just leave you with some links and videos below. Next week I’ll try and write more about what I’m going to try and do with this new found knowledge.

20 minute summary at TED Conference (watch either this one or the next one, probably not both)

One Hour summary at Google
Interesting thoughts and summaries on the book:

Wikipedia
The Simple Dollar

I read The Other Side of the River this week. It was a really good book, recommended by my friend Jennie. It’s written by Alex Kotlowitz the author of There Are No Children Here, which I read in 2003 before serving in Atlanta with AmeriCorps. Both of the books where excellent.

I’m not sure exactly how to review The Other Side of the River since it’s basically a story. It’s Non-fiction, regarding a real life incident and it follows interviews and research done by the author. Here’s the back cover synopsis:

Separated by the St. Joseph River, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor are two Michigan towns that are geographically close, yet in every sense worlds apart. St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community, 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of Eric McGinnis, a black teenage boy from Benton Harbor, is found in the river, relations between the two communities grow increasingly strained as long-held misperceptions and attitudes surface. As family, friends, and the police struggle to find out how McGinnis died. Alex Kotlowitz uncovers layers of both evidence and opinion, and demonstrates that in many ways, the truth is shaped by which side of the river you call home.

What I thought about long and hard while reading and after finishing was who I might recommend a book like this to. Reading the Afterword of the book, it was really encouraging to see that through the telling of this story and the different perspectives, the people (real life people) seemed to recognize the division there was between the towns and have begun making slow steps toward understanding. But, I wonder if this book, those who are affected and challenged by it (both readers and those personally involved in that town), are mostly those who were already open to the questions and challenges that the book raises.

What I mean is, those who find that this book and others like it challenge their stereotypes and open their eyes to the racism that exist in their society and even in their own lives, are those who are already open and willing to have those things challenged. For those who aren’t open to the challenges, I wonder if a book like this simply reinforces their stereotypes because they ignore the parts that would challenge them and focus their attention and memory on the parts that reinforce the stereotypes they already believe. The jury is still out on that one.

This book takes place in the 90’s, it is not decades old. The attitudes of the people, the racial divisions, the misunderstandings, these are not new occurrences or even all that rare in the United States. When we live, continually isolated geographically from people who are culturally different from us, there is an extremely high probability we will misunderstand each other.

I just finished reading a book, The God of Intimacy and Action, by Tony Campolo and Mary Albert Darling. It was recommended, via an article Joshua Case posted a few weeks ago. I’ll be brief in my review of this one.

The book discussed both issues of justice (Action) and that of Christian Mysticism (Intimacy). The goal of the book, I think, was to offer a collaborative discussion regarding spiritual disciplines that often seem mutually exclusive, at least in personal examples. Those who are socially active are often spiritually lacking, and those who are spiritually intimate at times lack any real action expressing that spirit. The book combined the insight of Darling and Campolo to offer an option for both groups.

I found the Mystic stuff, which is mostly forms of prayer, to be interesting. It’s nothing bizarre or new agey, in fact it’s centuries old. The stories of the faith of different heroes of the faith, St. Francis, Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena and others are really encouraging. Reading the book made me recognize that my prayer life is seriously lacking and that these more formulated guides to praying might be of some help and encouragement to me. The three types of prayer are called: Centering prayer, Lectio Divina, and The Prayer of Examen.

I just finished Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. I really enjoyed this book, and I’ve been waiting about 7 years to read it. Truth.

The summer after I graduated high school, I attended DC/LA, a big youth event in Washington DC (And in Los Angeles). Besides getting my jaw stuck open for the first time, I went to hear an incredible speaker named Bart Campolo who talked about Mission Year and said ‘groovy’ a lot. I really enjoyed his talk and one of the books he mentioned was Jesus and the Disinherited. Since that time I’ve tried putting the book on hold through numerous Inter Library Loans and never managed to get it and sit down and read it until now. Turns out a new neighbor did Mission Year and this was required reading, so I borrowed his book.

The book is only about 100 pages so I’d definitely recommend you pick it up yourself. Thurman wrote it in 1949, well before the Civil Rights Movement, in a country boiling with racial tension. His book seeks to address what Christianity and Jesus in particular have to say to the ‘man with his back against the wall.’ It’s a brilliant little book. The reality is Jesus’ primary audience were a group of people with their backs against the wall, they were the disinherited. Unfortunately, the assumption in the church then and today seems to be that Christianity is more of a guide for what to do to the disinherited, rather then acknowledging them as the main audience of the gospel.

My suggestion would be that you read the book, I’m sure I’ll extrapolate more, but for now I’ll just leave you with some of my favorite quotes:

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself? (preface)

It is the sin of pride and arrogance that has tended to vitiate the missionary impulse and to make of it an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other. p. 12-13

A man’s conviction that he is God’s child automatically tends to shift the basis of his relationship with all his fellows. He recognizes at once that to fear a man, whatever may be that man’s power over him, is a basic denial of the integrity of his very life. It lifts that mere man to a place of pre-eminence that belongs to God and to God alone. He who fears is literally delivered to destruction. To the child of God, a scale of values becomes available by which men are measured and their true significance determined. Even the threat of violence, with the possibility of death that it carries, is recognized for what it is–merely the threat of violence with a death potential. Such a man recognizes that death cannot possibly be the worst thing in the world. There are some things that are worse than death. To deny one’s own integrity of personality in the presence of the human challenge is one of those things. ‘Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do,’ says Jesus.” p. 52-53

One last part that struck me was how he made clear how radical the story of the Roman captain coming to Jesus to ask for help was. Roman’s regarded themselves as superior, that was the system that was set up, so when he comes to Jesus to ask for help he’s broken some major cultural and societal walls that were in place:

The fact that he had come to Jesus was in itself evidence to warrant the conclusion that he had put aside the pride of race and status which would have caused him to regard himself as superior to Jesus… The Roman was confronted with an insistence that made it impossible for him to remain a Roman, or even a captain. He had to take his place alongside all the rest of humanity and mingle his desires with the longing of all the desperate people of all the ages. When this happened, it was possible at once for him to scale with Jesus any height of understanding, fellowship, and love. The final barrier between the strong and the weak, between ruler and ruled, disappeared.

(thanks for already typing the quotes, just a google search away)