Trying to follow

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)

I read the book White Man’s Grave by Richard Dooling. It is a fiction book that was recommended in the previous book I read, Serving With Eyes Wide Open. This will be a brief book review because it’s fiction and hard to explain without giving away too much about the setting.

The setting of the book is Sierra Leone where Michael Killigan, a PeaceCorps member has gone missing. The Point of View of the book is from the perspective of Michael’s friend who goes trekking out into the bush of Sierra Leone to try and find his friend, and also from the perspective of Killigan’s Dad, a wealthy hot-shot lawyer working his connections from the United States to try and find his son.

The book does a really good job of teaching you about the culture and perspective of the native people in the bush of Sierra Leone (though Dooling notes at the end that it is still a work of fiction, based on anthropological studies and his own experience living in the country). I won’t explain the twists, but I will say that it does an excellent job of raising some interesting critiques of our ‘American’ culture.

It’s a family weekend, so I’m going to end this here, but if your interested in a decent fiction book, White Man’s Grave is worth the read.

This past week I read the book, Serving With Eyes Wide Open, by David A. Livermore. I had picked up this book at the suggestion of some people I attend church with in Nashville. We had been having a discussion about what ‘missions’ looked like for the church and about the decision to take a short term trip to Brazil. I got in a little bit of trouble for it, mainly because I was asking questions about the decisions. The suggestion was for me to read this book to get a better understanding of some of the thought process and decisions behind going. I in turn suggested they read the book, Revolution in World Missions. Unfortunately, I’ve finished the book, but no one seems interested in dialogging with me about it. Oh well, on with the review.

The book is split up into three parts. First we get a broad global perspective, then we focus on short term missions as they are currently done, then it discusses CQ (like IQ) or Cultural Intelligence and how to go about doing cross-cultural ministry properly.

I really like the information presented in the book. The first section regarding a global perspective is a glimpse into the harsh realities of the world we live in. Everything from the stories and statistics of global poverty to the impact of globalization. It was poignant and accurate.

The second section discussed the shortcomings of our current short term missions. This section was excellent. It raised important questions and provided some tough realities about the ignorance and naivety many short-termer’s bring when they travel abroad. It talked about the underlying motivations of adventure concealed in the guise of altruistic motives in our trips. I might post some quotes and further discussion later in the week.

The third section is a suggestion of how to do Short-term missions intelligently. It was valuable information. The kind of things you’d probably learn in a sociology class regarding culture. It is the type of information that is helpful for everyone, whether you ever leave the country or stay right where you are. We constantly are encountering people from different backgrounds and cultures and it would do us well to be conscience of our cultural assumptions.

Overall, I felt like this was a good book. However, I don’t feel like the third section regarding how to do short term missions effectively, in any way negates the concerns brought up in section two of the book. The reality is we spend far too much on short term missions as a international church, it is often ineffective, often motivated by much more then pure motives to help others and spread the gospel, and often is a complete waste of valuable resources that could be used to further the kingdom through the people who have the desire and the skills, but simply lack the financial resources (native missionaries).

This is a good book for us as individuals in a multicultural society to read, it does not, however, serve as a certification to then embark on short term missions without seriously considering the purposes, motivations, impact, and other possibilities within the body of Christ.