Review of Inventing Hell, by Jon M. Sweeney

Christian, Nonfiction Review 0

Inventing Hell

Dante, the Bible, and Eternal Torment

by Jon M. Sweeney

ACTA Publications, second edition, 2017. First edition published in 2014. 206 pages.
Review written 02/02/2020 from my own copy, purchased via amazon.com

This book is about Dante’s Inferno, the book that more than any other – much more than the Bible, according to Jon Sweeney – shaped our current ideas about Hell. And he makes a strong case.

In the Prologue, the author describes what you’ll find in this book, so I’m going to copy his summary here.

Full of the mysteries of Greek mythology, philosophy, and ancient religions, Inventing Hell will:

— Show you that there was little agreement among Christians, before Dante, about the nature and extent of what we call Hell.

— Illuminate for you the concepts of afterlife that existed before Dante, from ancient Judaism, Virgil and Plato, the teachings of Jesus, the early church, Islam, and medieval theologians.

— Demonstrate that Dante had various medieval apocalyptic sources to help him create the elaborate architecture of Hell that most people know today.

— Shine a clearer light on the sort of Hell that Dante created.

— And reveal that Hell has nine descending circles (in the same way that the devil has hooves and a tail)!

Before we’re done, you may be shocked to realize that for seven hundred years we’ve simply taken Dante’s word for it….

My hope is that you will begin to see the many sources of this complex picture of the afterlife and how Dante’s Hell is a patchwork creation. You should become better able to dissect and appreciate what a magnificent and fantastic world Dante creates, and why it made sense to the people of the late Middle Ages. The world of his Inferno is revealed to be mythical not because Dante made it up. He didn’t. It’s mythical because it was intricately woven in the imagination of a great poet, using a variety of sources, replete with legend, upon which Western civilization once built its most basic understandings of itself. With any luck, you will also find that it does not ring true in the twenty-first century.

This book is especially fascinating in its look at what the ancients thought about the afterlife – even as reflected in the Hebrew Scriptures, but particularly Greek mythology and other sources. I would have liked a little more about what the Bible actually says about judgment after death.

The author does point out that Gehenna, which is translated “hell” in many English Bibles, referred to the Valley of Hinnom, a place outside the city where trash was incinerated. But he neglects to mention that the word translated “eternal” was aeonian and means “of the ages,” not “without end.” So he tends to downplay verses suggesting any kind of punishment after death as borrowing from pagan sources.

Here’s a section at the end of the book:

I haven’t had much to say about God in this book because God is almost beside the point of Dante’s Inferno. Hell is mostly about God’s absence. But one of the things I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that there is no single image or description of God that is the unvarnished truth. There isn’t even one single image of God in the Bible, and each religious tradition contains a variety of images for the divine. I’ve also come to accept that Christianity holds what seem to be contradictory images of God almost simultaneously. That’s why I’m convinced that each of us has to choose.

There is, for instance, the God that Jesus preaches about in the Sermon on the Mount, who blesses the humble, rewards the meek, and promises the Earth to those who make peace instead of war. This is the Good Shepherd who will expend every effort to save a lost sheep from danger. This is the God that Saint Paul writes about when he beautifully says, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

But then there is also the God of Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet (in Matthew 22 and Luke 14), in which the kingdom of Heaven is compared to a rich king putting on a wedding feast for his son. When none of the invited guests show up, he tells his servants to invite others to come; when they don’t come either, he tells the servants to go out to the road and tell every passing stranger that they are invited to a feast. Yet when one man among these last invited guests shows up wearing the wrong clothing, the king is furious. Jesus says, “Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen” (Mt. 22:13-14). This is the God who is compared to a king who rules his subjects, and who regards them as being like sheep and goats. This is the God we also encounter in Revelation, who seems to be looking forward to war and apocalypse, punishment, and the ultimate outpouring of divine fury.

The Inferno offers only one of these images of God, and it isn’t the one that I choose. All we have is a vivid, sad vision of a God who judges, punishes, tortures, and abandons. That doesn’t make sense to me, and although those who have used Dante to preach Hell over the centuries have been able to point to a few biblical passages to support their ideas, they’d still be better stewards of the material to pull out a lexicon of Greek mythology. Ultimately, I choose not Dante’s vengeful, predatory God who is anxious to tally faults, to reward and to punish. Instead I choose the God who creates and sustains us, who is incarnate and wants to be with and among us, and the God who inspires and comforts us. That God is the real one, the one I have come to know and understand and love, and that God has nothing to do with medieval Hell.

The problem I have with the above is that I think the Bible teaches there will be a reckoning after death. I think he’s mischaracterizing that judgment and mischaracterizing the God of Matthew and Revelation. I think the judgment after death will not be permanent and will be for correction and restoration.

But I am completely and totally in agreement with him in rejecting the God of Dante’s Inferno. I do not believe that God engages in gratuitous torture. I do not believe that God has anything to do with Dante’s horrible imaginations of human suffering. This book points out that more of our ideas of Hell came from Dante than from the Bible. Whatever judgment there will be after death, I agree with this author that God has nothing to do with medieval Hell.

This book is worth reading to help you realize how much of our common conception of Hell is was either invented by Dante or popularized by him from stories common in his day.

I don’t mind trusting in an old book when it’s the Bible. But I certainly don’t want to trust in a picture of a place of torture invented seven hundred years ago by a poet. This eye-opening book was full of things I didn’t know about the sources Dante used to create his epic poetry. It all makes for great fiction but questionable theology.

actapublications.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/inventing_hell.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Tears We Cannot Stop, by Michael Eric Dyson

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Tears We Cannot Stop

A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

St. Martin’s Press, 2017. 228 pages.
Starred Review
Review written August 17, 2019, from a library book

First, thanks to the Racial Reconciliation Group at Floris United Methodist Church for recommending this book. I did not make it to the meeting where the book was discussed, but I did read it in time for the meeting. And I was deeply challenged to look at the world differently.

This isn’t a comfortable book for a white person to read. But I was challenged that my very comfort is something I take for granted because I’m white. I’ll let the author explain the book from his “Call to Worship”:

America is in trouble, and a lot of that trouble – perhaps most of it – has to do with race. Everywhere we turn, there is discord and division, death and destruction. When we survey the land, we see a country full of suffering that we cannot fully understand, and a history that we can no longer deny. Slavery casts a long shadow across our lives. The spoils we reaped from forcing people to work without wages and treating them with grievous inhumanity continue to haunt us in a racial gulf that seems impossible to overcome. Black and white people don’t merely have different experiences; we seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another. The merchants of racial despair easily peddle their wares in a marketplace riddled by white panic and fear. Black despair piles up with each body that gets snuffed on video and streamed on social media. We have, in the span of a few years, elected the nation’s first black president and placed in the Oval Office the scariest racial demagogue in a generation. The two may not be unrelated. The remarkable progress we seemed to make with the former has brought out the peril of the latter….

If you’re interested in my social analysis and my scholarly reflections on race, I’ve written plenty of other books for you to read. I tried to make this book one of them, but in the end, I couldn’t. I kept coming up short. I kept deleting words from the screen, a lot of them, enough of them to drive me to despair that I’d ever finish. I was stopped cold. I was trying to make the message fit the form, when it was the form itself that was the problem.

What I need to say can only be said as a sermon. I have no shame in that confession, because confession, and repentance, and redemption play a huge role in how we can make it through the long night of despair to the bright day of hope. Sermons are tough, not only to deliver, but, just as often, to hear. Yet, in my experience, if we stick with the sermon – through its pitiless recall of our sin, its relentless indictment of our flaws – we can make it to the uplifting expressions and redeeming practices that make our faith flow from the pulpit to the public, from darkness to light.

This book is challenging. It’s also eye-opening. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to someone speak so frankly about what it means to be black in America. Stories are told, history is detailed, statistics are listed. These are all things I’d rather not think about. I’d like to think America has grown past racism, but of course even I can’t think that given the behavior of our current president. So it’s time for me to listen to voices that aren’t white.

This book is a very good start.

The “Benediction” section does have some suggestions for action. One of those is cultivating empathy.

Beloved, all of what I have said should lead you to empathy. It sounds simple, but its benefits are profound. Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness. The siege of hate will not end until white folk imagine themselves as black folk – vulnerable despite our virtues. If enough of you, one by one, exercises your civic imagination, and puts yourself in the shoes of your black brothers and sisters, you might develop a democratic impatience for injustice, for the cruel disregard of black life, for the careless indifference to our plight.

Empathy must be cultivated. The practice of empathy means taking a moment to imagine how you might behave if you were in our positions. Do not tell us how we should act if we were you; imagine how you would act if you were us. Imagine living in a society where your white skin marks you for disgust, hate, and fear. Imagine that for many moments. Only when you see black folk as we are, and imagine yourselves as we have to live our lives, only then will the suffering stop, the hurt cease, the pain go away.

stmartins.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/tears_we_cannot_stop.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Louisiana’s Way Home, by Kate DiCamillo

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Louisiana’s Way Home

by Kate DiCamillo

Candlewick Press, 2018. 227 pages.
Starred Review
Review written August 27, 2018, from an advance reader copy.
2018 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#5 Historical Children’s Fiction

This is the first time Kate DiCamillo has returned to a character from one of her earlier books, and I find I like this second book even better than the first – but you don’t have to have read Raymie Nightingale to enjoy Louisiana’s Way Home.

Louisiana’s crazy granny has finally really gone nuts. She gets Louisiana up in the middle of the night and drives north. They cross the state line into Georgia, and still don’t stop.

But then Granny starts moaning. She needs a dentist. What’s a girl to do? Louisiana is nothing if not resourceful and drives the car herself until she finds a dentist in Richford, Georgia.

But after Granny has all her teeth removed, they need a place to stay. She arranges payment with Louisiana’s beautiful singing voice.

But Louisiana wants to get back home. And there are still more adventures, good and bad, ahead of her. And she finds out that the story she’s been telling of the Flying Elefantes is not precisely true.

As always, Kate DiCamillo’s characters are quirky yet lovable. (Either that, or quirky and annoying, like the organ player.) There’s a lot of warmth and compassion in this book – and Louisiana is up against great big odds.

Now, the final situation resolved itself maybe a little too easily – but I was happy with the result and happy with Louisiana’s choice.

And when all is said and done, she does find her way home.

Perhaps what matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down but who picks us up.

katedicamillostoriesconnectus.com
candlewick.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/louisianas_way_home.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of My Plain Jane, by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

Alternate History, Paranormal, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

My Plain Jane

by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

HarperTeen, 2018. 450 pages.
Starred Review
Review written July 1, 2018, based on a library book.
2018 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#5 Teen Speculative Fiction

Oh, I loved this book! Now this might be a good place to mention: Just because I loved this book, just because it made me laugh and smile – doesn’t mean I think it’s the most distinguished children’s literature of the year. (My disclaimer doesn’t mean I don’t think that either.) I’m writing this review before I have discussed the book with anyone, when I am simply full of how much just plain fun this book was to read.

Yes, this book reminded me very much of the authors’ earlier offering, My Lady Jane, which I also loved. Even though the premise was completely different. Okay, the authors were still purporting to tell the true story of something from England’s history – with a dose of magic, but the magic was quite different in this case. And the thing from history was the writing of a novel – Jane Eyre.

I recently read a retelling of Jane Eyre set in space, Brightly Burning, and in the age of the #MeToo movement, I’m a little disappointed with myself that I still find the story of Jane Eyre romantic. This book was not afraid to point out all the many ways Mr. Rochester was a totally inappropriate predator – so that eased my discomfort and made for a very satisfying story. (There were even extenuating circumstances!)

The story opens with Jane Eyre – and her friend Charlotte Bronte – as poor teachers at Lowood school. The evil Mr. Brocklehurst has just died (poisoned?). But there is a difference, besides Charlotte Bronte being on the scene. (This is how she got the idea, you see.) Jane is able to see and talk with ghosts. In fact her friend the sainted Helen Burns, who dies in the book, indeed died at Lowood, but now is Jane’s constant companion and beloved advisor.

The main plot of the book revolves around the Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits, in fact. Alexander Bell, the star agent of the society, learns that Jane has this gift as a seer, and tries to recruit her to join the society. But she doesn’t want to leave Thornfield and its fascinating master.

Charlotte, however, is more than eager to join the Society. Too bad she can’t see ghosts like her bumbling brother Branwell can. Antics ensue.

But the most fun part of this book is the commentary that ghost Helen Burns provides to Mr. Rochester’s inappropriate actions. I love that she notices that they’re inappropriate. (So do the narrators, for that matter.) There’s a different story behind the wife in the attic in this version, and I just love the way it all works out.

Great fun, earnest people trying to do good, lots of ghosts, and even some romance – much more satisfying than the original. We also see how Charlotte got the idea for her book!

Distinguished? I’ll let you judge for yourself. The plot is maybe not terribly likely. But this book unquestionably is a whole lot of fun and highly recommended and perhaps one of my favorite young adult books I’ve read this year.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/my_plain_jane.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Fry Bread, written by Kevin Noble Maillard, illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

Award Winners, Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Fry Bread

A Native American Family Story

written by Kevin Noble Maillard
illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal

Roaring Brook Press, 2019. 44 pages.
Starred Review
Review written February 11, 2020, from a library book
2020 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award Winner
2020 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor

Since this book won the Sibert Award, I’m going to list it on my Children’s Nonfiction page, but this book is really two things – a picture book with simple text and an informational book when you read the detailed eleven-page Author’s Note (with a recipe) at the back.

The picture book part is lovely. These spreads all begin with a caption “Fry Bread Is….” Fry bread is food, shape, sound, color, flavor, time, art, history place, nation, everything, us, and you. The pictures show a loving and joyful intergenerational group of American Indians making fry bread together. They’re a diverse group in appearance and skin tone, and have parents and elders guiding them and telling stories.

The pictures are joyful and evocative. I like the picture on the page “Fry Bread Is Sound” where you can almost hear the dough frying. The words are simple and could work in a story time.

Fry Bread Is Time

On weekdays and holidays
Supper or dinner
Powwows and festivals
Moments together
With family and friends

The Author’s Note brings it all together and explains the background and significance of the carefully-chosen details in the illustrations.

He begins the Author’s Note like this:

The story of fry bread is the story of American Indians: embracing community and culture in the face of opposition. It is commonly believed that the Navajo (Diné) were the first to make fry bread over 150 years ago. The basic ingredients may appear simple – flour, salt, water, and yeast – yet the history behind this community anchor is anything but.

Despite colonial efforts throughout American history to weaken tribal governments, fracture Indigenous communities, and forcibly take ancestral lands, Indian culture has proven resilient. In strange, unfamiliar lands, exiled Natives strived to retain those old traditions and they created new ones, especially for food. Survival meant adapting, and those ancestors, isolated from familiar meats, fruits, and vegetables, got by with what they had. Without the familiar indigenous crop of corn, historic farming practices and dietary traditions drastically changed.

Many tribes trace the origin of modern Indian cooking to this government-caused deprivation. From federal rations of powdered, canned, and other dry, government-issued foods, fry bread was born.

Then the note goes page by page, and along the way we learn that different tribes and different regions have different recipes and different traditions for fry bread.

Fry bread reflects the vast, deep diversity of Indian Country and there is no single way of making this special food. But it brings diverse Indigenous communities together through a shared culinary and cultural experience. That’s the beauty of fry bread.

There’s so much in this picture book. A story to enjoy combined with so much to learn about and celebrate.

kevinmaillard.com
juanamartinezneal.com
mackids.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/fry_bread.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of We Are Brothers, by Yves Nadon, illustrated by Jean Claverie

Contemporary, Picture Book Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

We Are Brothers

by Yves Nadon
illustrated by Jean Claverie

Creative Editions, Mankato, MN, 2018. 32 pages.
Starred Review
2018 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Other Picture Books

This picture book tells a simple story of two brothers who go to a swimming hole every summer. The big brother jumps off the big rock into the water. He tells the little brother it’s his turn this year.

The pictures are what make this wonderful. We see the rock from the little brother’s perspective, and it’s simply enormous, towering overhead.

Then, when it’s his turn, he climbs the rock like a cat. When he gets to the top –

Legs shaking, turning around, the water seems so far away. Too far. A breeze makes me shiver.

How does the illustrator manage to portray him standing there, shivering? There are no motion lines, but you see him hunched into himself, his legs looking thin and small and his eyes looking huge. He looks cold and small and afraid. The next spread pulls back and shows his big brother a tiny head and arms in the water below.

Then the jump.

And then, I am yelling, my arms circling, my legs running in the air. My hands stretch for the sky, while my feet call for water. My eyes find my brother’s.

I am bird.

Then the water, where he becomes fish.

And the book finishes with the brothers doing it all again – together.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it immerses you in the amazing and memorable moments of a boy’s first chance to do the great big thing – just like his brother. Time stops and starts as you read, and you’re right there.

So lovely.

thecreativecompany.us

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/we_are_brothers.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Eleventh Trade, by Alyssa Hollingsworth

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Eleventh Trade

by Alyssa Hollingsworth

Roaring Brook Press, 2018. 298 pages.
Starred Review
Review written November 4, 2018, from a book sent by the publisher
2018 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#4 Contemporary Children’s Fiction

Sami has newly arrived in Boston with his Baba from Afghanistan by way of Iran, Turkey, and Greece. His father had been an interpreter for the American army, which made him a target of the Taliban.

Baba’s rebab, a stringed instrument like a lute, is one of the only things they still have from Afghanistan, and Baba plays it in the subway station. But after Sami’s first day of school, he’s playing the rebab while Baba takes a break – and a thief snatches it out of his hands and gets away on the subway.

Well, Sami finds a new friend who looks up the instrument and finds the shop where the thief took it. But the shop wants $700 for it. It’s the start of Ramadan and Sami wants to get it back for Baba to give him at Eid al-Fitr. But Sami has no money.

Then a bully notices Sami’s Manchester United key chain. He’ll trade an ipod for it. Of course, then it turns out the ipod is broken. However that new friend of Sami’s knows how to figure out how to fix an ipod.

Thus begins a series of trades. If Sami can trade each thing for something a little better, maybe he can get that rebab back for Baba by the end of Ramadan.

This is the second book I’ve read recently about “elevator trades.” But in the other book, it was more of a scam. This book has heart. Sami doesn’t have to scam anyone – he finds what people want. And I love the way he builds connections with people as he finds out what they care about and what they want.

Along the way, we find out about Sami’s story, watch him join a soccer group, and see him learn about the power of friendship as he adjusts to this new place.

You end this book wishing all good things for Sami and his Baba. You also have a feeling they’ll find them.

Added later: Looking back at this book a year and a half later, I still have such warm feelings for this book and its characters. Just a wonderful book.

alyssahollingsworth.com
mackids.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/11th_trade.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Red Hood, by Elana K. Arnold

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

Balzer + Bray, 2020. 353 pages.
Review written April 11, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

Red Hood is an amazing and impressive book. It’s not a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, though you can almost think of it as standing the story on its head. And we do have wolves in the woods, a girl, and her grandmother.

But this girl in the woods is not prey, oh my, no! Instead she hunts down wolves – instinctively and fiercely.

For it turns out that sometimes, when there’s a full moon, men and boys turn into wolves. They attack and devour unsuspecting young women, who need a defender. Bisou turns out to be a ferocious defender.

But the book doesn’t begin that way. It begins with Bisou in the back of a truck, trying out sex with her boyfriend, whom she loves very much. But before the night is over, she’s in the woods alone, being attacked by a wolf – which she kills. The next morning, a boy is found dead in the woods where Bisou thought she left the wolf.

Now I loved Elana K. Arnold’s earlier book, Damsel. After going a little way into this book, I decided that both books were similar. Both books are very explicit about sex, almost clinically descriptive. Both books portray men cruelly exploiting women – but then meeting with vicious retribution – and that violent retribution is frighteningly satisfying.

However, by the time I was finished, I was super impressed with what the author pulled off here. Because not every boy turns into a wolf. Bisou has a wonderful relationship with her boyfriend, a loving and kind young man. There’s a point where Bisou has something to do having to do with hunting on a day when they usually have sex – and James is disappointed, but he doesn’t give her a hard time at all. I was waiting for it to all be a big trap and for him to turn into a wolf – and he remained a loving and kind person.

In fact, there’s another boy at their high school who harasses and abuses one of Bisou’s friends – and they deal with it without magical powers, and he never turns into a wolf. (I’m trying not to give spoilers. I don’t think this will ruin it for you.) I kept expecting every jerk to end up being a horrible wolf or the apparently loving individual to be a wolf at heart – and that just doesn’t happen here, and that impressed me.

What’s more, though the heroine of Damsel was basically alone, Bisou makes friends with other girls in this book. So as well as becoming a testament for girls standing up for themselves and standing against sexual violence, it also tells a beautiful story of the power of sisterhood and girls supporting each other as they do that standing.

I ended up so impressed with this book. It ends up being richly nuanced, telling a story of a girl gaining new powers to defend the weak against sexual violence, but not being alone as she navigates those new powers. It shows sexual violence as a horrible threat against women – but not a threat hiding in every man’s heart, and something that both men and women are willing to help destroy.

elanakarnold.com
epicreads.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/red_hood.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Resurrecting Easter, by John Dominic Crossan & Sarah Sexton Crossan

Christian, History, Nonfiction Review, True Stories 0

Resurrecting Easter

How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision

by John Dominic Crossan & Sarah Sexton Crossan

HarperOne, 2018. 213 pages.
Review written March 3, 2020, from a library book

I’d originally checked this book out and tried to read it in 2018, but eventually gave up. (I was busy with Newbery reading, anyway.) But after Richard Rohr referred to it in The Universal Christ, I checked it out again and this time made a concentrated effort to read the whole thing.

It’s a very academic work, so that’s why it’s hard to get through, but becomes fascinating the more you pay attention to what the authors are saying. It’s a book about early Christian art portraying the Resurrection of Christ – and how it developed in two different directions.

But instead of just talking about it, the authors show you exactly what they’re talking about. They have traveled the world to collect photos of the art, and they’re on display in color on the large pages of this beautiful book. The authors also tell about their travels to old churches with mosaics and to monasteries with old manuscripts. We come to understand the timeline as they carefully date each picture and show how the iconography progressed.

As they lay out the two categories of images of Christ’s Resurrection – Individual and Universal, they also show us the different types within each category, and show how the types developed.

Here’s how the authors explain the Universal Resurrection Tradition in their Prologue:

Instead of arising alone, Christ raises all of humanity with him. He reaches out toward Adam and Eve, the biblical parents and symbols for humanity itself, raises them up, and leads them out of Hades, the prison of death.

This is presented in contrast to the Individual Resurrection Tradition, where Christ is pictured rising alone in splendor and triumph. The authors give two reasons for spending more time on the Universal Resurrection Tradition:

One is that the individual version becomes, by the second millennium, the official Easter icon of Western Christianity. As such, it is the one we know best as Westerners, and we may even presume, mistaking part for whole, that it is the only one present throughout Christian history. In this book, therefore, the emphasis is on universal over individual iconography for Christ’s Resurrection as remedial education for Western Christians. During the last fifteen years, it has been precisely that for us.

Another – and much more important – reason for emphasizing the universal resurrection tradition is based on these two final questions as the fourth and fifth themes of Resurrecting Easter. We emphasize them here and now, and we ask you to keep them in mind throughout the book, but we will only answer them at the very end of the book.

First, is the individual or universal vision in closer continuity with the New Testament’s understanding of “Resurrection” and in better conformity with the Gospels’ conception of Easter? For example, when Paul speaks of Christ’s Resurrection, is he imagining it as individual or universal? Or again, when 1 Corinthians 15:20 and Matthew 27:52 refer, using the same Greek term, to the resurrection of “those who have fallen asleep,” who exactly are those sleepers?

Second, whether you understand Christ’s Resurrection as a historical event or a theological interpretation; whether you accept it as myth or parable, symbol or metaphor; and whether you accept it religiously or reject it absolutely, what does it claim and what does that mean? How can someone or something that happens once at a certain time and in a specific place influence or change the whole human race – not just forward to the end of time, but backward to its start?…

What does it mean, whether or not it is credible, to depict Christ’s Resurrection as humanity’s liberation from death – all humanity, past, present and future?

So that gives you a feel for what’s explored in this book. Besides being a beautifully photographed book, it’s a major work of scholarship, gathering images made of Christ’s Resurrection from as early as the 700s, and placing them in chronological order and historical context.

As a universalist myself, I wouldn’t have minded if the authors had drawn more conclusions. But I personally took comfort in this confirmation that my belief that Christ redeemed all of humanity and “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” — that this belief is bolstered by Christian art created centuries ago. Beautiful and inspiring.

ResurrectingEasterBook.com
harperone.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/resurrecting_easter.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Shameless, by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Relationships, Starred Review 0

Shameless

A Case for Not Feeling Bad About Feeling Good (About Sex)

by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Convergent Books, 2019. 200 pages.
Review written March 29, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Christian Nonfiction

I wasn’t sure about this book. It’s a book about sexuality and spirituality and how the church’s teachings on sexuality have harmed people.

I saved sex for marriage and married my first boyfriend. I was proud of that. So pleased that we did it “right” and followed God’s best plan. I even thought that the fact we waited for marriage proved the guy had self-control and wouldn’t ever have an affair. Well, that didn’t work out; he had an affair, left me, and now I’m divorced. And there are some who read the Bible to say that means God doesn’t want me to ever have sex again. What do I do with that?

Here’s a bit from the Introduction:

In the ten years I’ve been pastor at HFASS, I’ve known young married couples who did what the church told them and “waited,” only to discover that they could not, on the day of their wedding, flip a switch in their brains and in their bodies and suddenly go from relating to sex as sinful and dirty and dangerous to relating to sex as joyful and natural and God-given. I’ve known single women who didn’t have sex until they were forty and now have absolutely no idea how to manage the emotional aspect of a sexual relationship. I’ve heard middle-aged women admit that they still can’t make themselves wear a V-neck because as teenagers they were told female modesty was the best protection from unwanted male sexual advances. I’ve seen gay men who never reported the sexual abuse they experienced in the church because the church told them being gay was a sin. I’ve heard stories from women who experienced marital rape after getting married at twenty years old (because if you have to wait until marriage to have sex, then you hurry that shit up) but got the message from their church that because there is a verse in the Bible that says women should be subject to their husbands, it was not actually rape.

It doesn’t feel very difficult to draw a direct line between the messages many of us received from the church and the harm we’ve experienced in our bodies and spirits as a result. So my argument in this book is this: we should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.

So I wasn’t sure what I’d think about this book – but what I found was a message of grace. And insights I’d never thought about before.

She talks about purity systems – rules and regulations to keep us pure. She says it’s natural for us to make them, because we want to be holy.

But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable….

The desire to live a holy life that is pleasing to God is understandable, but this desire is also fraught with pitfalls.

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.

She explores lots of ideas here, and they surprised me by how lovely these ideas were. She’s not just questioning rules and systems and teachings, she’s also talking about what does healthy sexuality look like? One fascinating insight is that sexuality and spirituality have much in common.

She doesn’t give us a list of new rules in this book. She explores and she asks questions and she gets us thinking about the bodies God gave us, what pleases Him and what pleases us.

The point is, it all calls for attention. Does something enhance my life and relationships, or does it take it over? Is my behavior compulsive? When I or my partner experience this pleasure, is it bringing me or my partner more deeply into the moment, into the sacred, into our bodies, or is it separating one or both of us from these things?

Here’s another insight:

Jesus, we know, was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton, a friend of prostitutes and tax collectors. His first miracle was to keep the wine flowing at a party he was attending. So the guy was not afraid of pleasure. But he also fasted for forty days in the desert and would often go to a mountain to pray alone. He seemed to live an integrated life of feasting and fasting.

I like so much in this book, and it’s hard to describe and hard to explain. I like the connection she makes that good sexual connection comes when we can put aside our shame. When we can see each other as we truly are and reveal ourselves with all our scars.

Too often, the diagram that religion draws up for explaining sex takes the snake’s-eye view – it names only the physics of fear, threat, and control, but none of the magic. Likewise, media and advertising thrust the commodification of sex our way, and sex becomes either something to trade in or just another aspect of life in which we are judged and found lacking. But neither of these approaches is enough. Neither points to the whole truth. Because there is also magic.

This magic is what God placed in us at creation. It is the spark of divine creativity, the desire to be known, body and soul, and to connect deeply to God and to another person. This magic is the juiciest part of us, and the most hurtable. This magic was breathed into us when God emptied God’s lungs to give us life, saying, “Take what I have and who I am.” This magic is what snakes seek to darken with shame. This magic was what was sanctified for all time and all people when Jesus took on human form and gave of himself, saying, “Take and eat, this is my body given for you.”

This book isn’t about rules and regulations. It’s about finding shamelessness, magic, and a closer connection with God and others. It took me by surprise.

nadiabolzweber.com
convergentbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/shameless.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?