I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a bad year of reading, but if there is, this wasn’t it. I got to review some very interesting books: The 21 (see below), Passionate for Justice, and The Color of Life for The Englewood Review of Books and Whole and Reconciled for Missio Alliance which, along with I Bring the Voices of My People (see below), has influenced my perspective on racial reconciliation. A friend recommended Beyond the Abortion Wars which I in turn also recommend for tender and charitable engagement about a reality which can seem impossible to talk about in mixed company. I loved David Blight’s biography about Frederick Douglass and I learned so much from The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer’s stark and beautiful reminder that Native American life continues with a diversity of expressions all over this country. I could go on: N.T. Wright’s biography about Paul was the perfect companion for our travels in Greece, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates surpassed my high expectations, and I finally got to Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. I’ve been doing a bit of bird watching and Maggie gave me God’s of the Morning as a birthday gift. Oh, and I finished The Crucifixion by Flemming Rutledge early in the year. A genuine masterpiece!

So, as I do each year, here are five of my favorites from a list full of favorites. There is biography, theology, history, and whatever The 21 is on this list. I hope there’s something here that piques your readerly interest.

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The 21 by Martin Mosebach (2019).

When I wrote a review of The 21 for The Englewood Review of Books earlier this year, I began with this:

I am ashamed to admit that I had forgotten about the twenty-one men whose beheading in Libya by ISIS fighters was broadcast around the world in 2015. In the ensuing years my memory has constricted to the frenetic pace of our world’s rolling timeline of disasters and tragedies, whether close to home or, as with those young men kneeling before their masked captors, on a lonely beach on the other side of the world. It was the cover image on Martin Mosebach’s recently translated book, The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs, that jostled my mind. On it we see a procession of bound men in orange jumpsuits, their heads bent under the heavy hands of their captors, dressed head to toe in black. Even those readers who had forgotten this story, or had somehow managed to miss it the first time, will understand that this choreographed march will end terribly for the men in orange.

Of all the books I read this year, this may be the one that has most stayed with me. Mosebach’s account of the men’s deaths and their lives has worked its way into my memory. I’ve found myself mentioning these stories throughout the year, awed by the Coptic Church’s risky witness to Jesus.

Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in African and the West by Esther E. Acolatse (2018).

Originally from Ghana, Esther E. Acolatse brings her perceptive eye to this study on the different ways Christians in the West and global South think about supernatural realities. Engaging with theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, Walter Wink, and Karl Barth, the author holds up western assumptions about the spiritual life against the experience and perspective of churches in Africa. Seeing these differences as one of the major points of distance between these regions, this is a project worth undertaking.

Acolatse wants to call all Christians back to accounts of spiritual warfare found in Scripture. “Accounts of evil from the global South currently lack appropriate attention to personal complicity and guilt as well as structural dimensions; but accounts from the global North also emphasize the individual and structural dimensions without giving sufficient attention to extra human components.” It’s this larger hermeneutic of the spiritual powers that she is after in these pages.

This is an academic book with all of the accompanying analysis. But Acolatse is not a dispassionate observer; there is a conviction that runs through the book, occasionally erupting in passion. A longer quote will illustrate this.

It is probably that the lack of knowledge and experience of the presence of the demonic in modern times – through to our current times – has made it easy to turn Christianity into a primarily cerebral, morality-infusing code for civilizing humanity, rather than the life-transforming, Satan-crushing, God-Glorifying powerful religion or lifestyle that was intended… We seem to have exegeted (almost exorcised) the power out of the Logos and propped it up with philosophy.

I’ve come to think that, for those of us engaged in the work of racial reconciliation, a strong emphases on the spiritual nature of evil and oppression is vital. Forgetting this leaves us confused about the true nature of our fight. Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit is a helpful and at times jarring reminder.

A Surprised Queenood in the New Black Sun by Angela Jackson(2017).

I like the idea of reading poetry more than I actually like reading poetry. But that has changed some in recent years and the poet who is responsible for this is Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks was a life-long resident in the communities where we live and do ministry and reading her helps me not only imagine what the neighborhoods were like fifty or sixty years ago, but also what I have missed today.

In A Surprised Queenhood the author, also a poet, tells us Brooks’ story. This was a woman seemingly born a poet; it was the thing she always wanted to be. We learn too about her community, Bronzeville, and the many currents then shaping this community to which black citizens were migrating from racial terror in the south. We also see how Brooks’ conception of being a black poet changed over the years, how younger artists and poets shaped her vision and voice.

An older pastor once told a gathering of pastors that each of us should have “our” poet. By this I think he meant we should have that one poet whose work we continue to turn to for help in gaining some perspective about our own lives and circumstances and our own small place in the world. This is what Brooks has done for me. As a small example, here’s one of her short poems, provoked by the lynching of Emmett Till. And be sure to watch this creative rendition of what is probably her best-known poem, “We Real Cool.”

The Last Quatrain Of The Ballad Of Emmett Till

(after the murder,
after the burial)
Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
through a red prairie.

The War Before the War by Andrew Delbanco (2018).

I began the year with David Blight’s really great biography of Frederick Douglass and ended it with Delbanco’s history of the Fugitive Slave Act. In fact, I’ve recently found myself spending a lot of time in the years surrounding the Civil War. The more I learn about the debates and political maneuverings leading up to the war and the responses and betrayals following it, the more I feel that I understand some of the instincts motivating our own fraught American moment.

Delbanco takes the Fugitive Slave Act, passed eleven years before the war began, as a lens through which to view and interpret the roiling debates and civic, religious, and cultural clashes leading to it. At the heart of these debates is the simple question of personhood: Can an enslaved person who liberates herself be thought of as having stolen herself? Can you be held accountable for freeing yourself when the place you were held captive never saw you as fully human? To most in the south the answer was clear and the demand that fugitives be prosecuted and returned rang loud and clear. To many in the north the answer was murkier. Even those who found slavery reprehensible were often willing to accept the status quo as a matter of law and order. Delbanco reminds us that the war between the states, and the horror which led to it, implicated both the north and south.

I Bring the Voices of My People by Chanequa Walker-Barnes (2019).

Chanequa Walker-Barnes is a uniquely qualified guide to the world of Christian racial reconciliation. Having led in these spaces, she now reflects from a theological vantage point that finds much to critique. For example, with other students of the movement, she views multi-ethnic churches as regularly defaulting to white cultural norms and inevitably avoiding the sources of racial injustice. This is an important and very necessary criticism.

But Walker-Barnes is not content only to level critique. Rather, this book is a vision of what reconciliation could be, especially if the voices and experiences of women of color were to lead the way. So, for example, this way forward is unafraid to identify white supremacy as the source of racial injustice, rather than the relatively benign relational separateness that is so often the focus in white-led reconciliation ministries. (I couldn’t help rehearsing my own book as I was reading. While I can’t be sure, I think that my own suggestions about addressing racial injustice fall in line with Walker-Barnes’ justice focus.)

Throughout the book I wondered if the author would ever abandon the language of reconciliation. Such has been the tendency over the past 3-5 years in the circles I travel. But no.

For me and many others, only one thing keeps us on a journey in which we are destined to encounter people who devalue our personhood: captivity. That is, we are held captive by the understanding that reconciliation is core to the gospel, that it reflects God’s intention for humanity, and that it is central to our identity as Christians.

Amen.