Off the Shelf March/April 2011

O ff the Shelf

Book Reviews

Exodus from Hunger

by David Beckman Westminster John Knox Press

The Spirit of Food Edited by Leslie Leyland Fields Wipf & Stock Publishers

Reviewed by Christine Jeske

Reviewed by Stephanie S. Smith

David Beckman opens his book on world poverty not with a tear-jerking story about orphans scraping out survival in a dump nor with a mind-boggling assessment of how to reshape global trade. Instead he opens with a simple story of how US government policies are changing lives in remote Mtimbe, Mozambique. Exodus from Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger presents an optimistic picture of how government policies have affected—and can continue to affect—the world for the better and how we can be involved. Beckman sincerely expects to see the number of hungry people in the world drop dramatically in his lifetime.

It’s so optimistic it’s almost unnerving. And yet it is believable. Beckman sees the enormity of the task before us, but he has also seen with his own eyes evidence that justifies his confidence. Beckman knows personally a whole train of people—from obscure Alabama moms to international rock stars, presidents, and billionaires—whose single-hearted efforts have profoundly improved the lives of millions of people in poverty both in the US and around the world. He writes with a humble, wisdom-seeking, and non-partisan stance, giving credit to a wide range of political figures rather than harping on what more could have been done. He draws on years of experience with the World Bank, working among people experiencing poverty in the US and abroad, and most recently as president for the Christian advocacy agency Bread for the World.

If we are concerned about justice in the world, every one of us can look at our own lives and find some strings to pull, starting right in our own neighborhoods. When we look at justice from a global picture, though, we see that many of the biggest strings, the real ropes that swing lives in and out of poverty en masse, are pulled in relatively small circles of government and international organizations.

Many of us look at those big ropes and throw up hands in defeat.

How could we possibly keep up with legislative decisions that affect people in poverty, much less influence those decisions?

But that’s what Bread for the World does, and it does it for us.

Bread works in Washington and around the world influencing major decisions on farm bills, heavily indebted poor countries, US nutritional programs, and more. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a part to play. Beckman insists that people who care about hunger and poverty will need to push ferociously for change. The book offers concrete steps, such as how to communicate with legislators, join networks, and influence our church and community.

As Beckman writes, “Some people end up doing very little for people in need because they know they don’t have the commitment of a Mother Theresa. Awareness of God’s forgiveness allows us to reflect God’s goodness in our own halting ways, and God uses even modest acts of faith and compassion to make big changes in the world. God invites us all—gently, patiently—to be part of the great exodus of our time.”

Christine Jeske wrote Into the Mud: Inspiration for Everyday Activists (Moody, 2009). She teaches economic development for Eastern University.

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The wedding party was dressed to the nines, and the photographer was telling us to wade into a swampy soybean field. Unfamiliar with protocol for North Dakota prairie weddings, we obeyed. The bridesmaids hoisted the sheer layer of our gowns above our heads as makeshift mosquito nets and forged through the waist-tall stalks. As the photographer posed the happy couple against the setting sun, I noticed a figure moving along the tree line. Here was the proverbial farmer and shotgun— minus the shotgun—walking deliberately toward us. He informed us not only that we were damaging expensive crops but also that agricultural trespassing is a major offense. His final comment convicted me the most: “This is sacred ground.”

This is the same kind of sacramental—and surprising—language that is threaded throughout The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God. The contributors commonly find holy ground in the kitchen, pasture, or garden, and Anne Voskamp suggests that “the priest in the sacraments” and “the farmer in the soil” are the two vocations to whom God reveals his face. This creative compilation of essays focuses on the relationship between physicality and spirituality, life sprung from the earth and life cultivated in the soul. These writers bring diverse stories to the table, from organic beekeeping to church potlucks, from mobile relief kitchens to kosher cuisine. And all of them, from the gourmet chef to the backyard tomato gardener, write in the hushed, reverential tones of a priest about to enter the inner court.

Contributors such as Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, and Suzanne Wolf know that they are not just rubbing a chicken with oil—they are baptizing it. Robert Farrar Capon is not fooled by the common onion—he knows it is a physical representation of the glory to come. Lauren Winner sees the calendar of the Farmer’s Almanac as a liturgical cycle, teaching us the significance of appointed times, both seasonal and spiritual.

The Spirit of Food is true to its title, eloquently integrating a theology of body and spirit and likewise dismantling the dualism that has sneaked into our evangelical tradition. The church has long taught that flesh and spirit are tiered in virtue, that our bodies are mere “earth-suits” that will be purged once we enter our heavenly state, yet the adverse side-effect of this perspective is often neglect of the physical life. According to Leslie Leyland Fields, however, paying attention to what goes into our bodies becomes a spiritual act as we learn to feed ourselves in both body and soul.

To anyone who has struggled to reconcile the flesh with the spirit, The Spirit of Food is a jubilant reawakening of the senses, inviting us as Christ did to taste and see, to take and eat, and to meet God at his table.

Stephanie S. Smith is a freelance book publicist and writer through (In) dialogue Communications (StephanieSSmith.com). She serves as editorial assistant for Relief Journal: A Christian Literary Expression.

Generous Justice

by Timothy Keller Dutton Reviewed by Tim Høiland If you have experienced the grace of God, Tim Keller argues convincingly in his latest book, Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, it is inevitable that your life will be marked by a passion for doing justice among the poor and marginalized.

Keller, who for more than two decades has pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, is well known for his bestselling work of apologetics, The Reason for God, and for his leadership of Redeemer City to City, an organization supporting church planters in New York City and elsewhere.

While Keller is a preacher and has devoted much of his vocational energy to evangelism and church planting, he considers justice an equally essential calling of the church. “The biblical idea of justice,” Keller writes, “is part and parcel of what God is doing in history. God is reconciling humanity to himself—and as a result of this great transaction, he is reconciling all things to himself.”

This argument is rooted in Keller’s well-articulated theology of shalom, which he defines as “complete reconciliation, a state of the fullest flourishing in every dimension—physical, emotional, social, and spiritual—because all relationships are right, perfect, and filled with joy.” He describes shalom as a tapestry in which thousands upon thousands of interwoven threads are perfectly arranged. Doing justice, then, is an essential part of how Christians begin to reweave that shalom in the world as a grateful response to the grace we have freely received from God. It is no secret that the theme of social justice has enjoyed a renaissance among evangelicals in recent years, but it is clear that Generous Justice isn’t a vain attempt by Keller to jump on an already loud and well-crowded bandwagon. Keller points to the genesis of his justice thinking by describing his experience as a conflicted college student 40 years ago, seeing that while his secular friends were active in the civil rights movement, the Christians he knew viewed Martin Luther King, Jr. with suspicion and fear. Through involvement with a small group of Christians intent on exploring the relationship between justice and the Christian faith, however, Keller came to see that the Bible provided the very basis for social justice in general and the civil rights movement in particular.

While pursuing a doctoral degree at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Keller studied the office of deacons and how it had evolved over the years. “Deacons,” Keller discovered, “had historically been designated to work with the poor and needy in the community, but over the years this legacy had been lost, and instead they had evolved into janitors and treasurers.” Shortly after completing these studies, Keller was asked by his denomination to start a church in metro New York, providing him an opportunity to test this newfound understanding in a context where injustice and need were in no short supply.

While Keller celebrates the trend of increased concern for the poor and oppressed, especially among young Christians, he notes that all too often it coexists paradoxically with an unquestioned consumerism that “undermines self-denial and delayed gratification.” This is why Keller so passionately points to our need for the gospel: It is the beauty of Christ—

not statistics, not guilt, not even flashy do-gooder social media campaigns—that will compel us joyfully and consistently toward justice and the denial of self for the greater good.

For churches, small groups, and individuals in search of a deeper, more generous, more theologically integrated practice of justice, this is a book long overdue.

Tim Høiland is an independent writer and international development professional. He blogs about the intersections of faith, justice, and peace in the Americas at TJHoiland.com.

Common Prayer

by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro Zondervan Reviewed by Amanda Kaminski “Some liturgical types smile when evangelicals discover the ‘miracle’ of liturgy,” write Wilson-Hartgrove, Claiborne, and Okoro in their new book, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. Christ followers possess varying levels of familiarity with the liturgical life, and this book purposes to serve people from all walks of the faith—from high church to no church. Common Prayer offers a compilation of morning, midday, and evening liturgies for families, communities, coworkers, dorm mates, and individuals. The liturgies are designed to be prayed in community but allow those outside of physical communion to know that their prayers are part of a canticle of praise being offered to God from around the world.

This guidebook leads disciples into a rhythm of daily prayer situated within weekly cycles that make up the larger annual series of biblical seasons: from Advent through Christmas, to Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and with “Ordinary Time” in between.

Intentional prayer, responsive reading, Scripture meditation, and song are the “heartbeat for the global church,” and the authors invite us to recenter the Christian life around God’s story, over and against schedules and lives dictated by pop culture, busyness, or even national calendars.

Participating in these timeless petitions, songs, and observances, the church finds herself swept up in the dance of God’s history and involved in God’s ongoing work. Liturgy interrupts our life and focuses us by reshaping “our perceptions and lives with new rhythms, new holy days, a whole new story.” These disciplined gatherings and exercises join us together with the saints, the persecuted church, and the global body.

The authors frame the liturgies with beautiful art, functional tips, reflections, and action ideas to stir the imaginations of participants and inspire faith in deed. Many of the morning prayers offer a glimpse of church history through quotes or vignettes. Each month also proposes a list of further readings, inviting readers to dive deeper and discover practical applications. An additional section offers special prayers for events—such as planting or harvest, healing, commissioning or dedication of the home or workplace—where through intentional liturgical ritual believers can invoke divine blessing or express gratitude for and grow in awareness of God’s active presence in the world. Want even more? A comprehensive database is available at CommonPrayer.net.

From Australia to Brazil, from India to Sierra Leone, and in 37 US

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Book Reviews states so far, Christians have hosted about 150 gatherings of ordinary radicals to celebrate the launch of the book through candlelit services and multilingual worship, demonstrating the timely publication of this muchneeded guide into “life with common prayer at its center.”

Amanda Kaminski earned her M.Div. from Palmer Seminary and her masters in international economic development from the Campolo College of Graduate Studies, both at Eastern University.

The New Jim Crow

by Michelle Alexander New Press Reviewed by Samuel K. Atchison During my youth in the 1970s, it was common among some African Americans to refer knowingly to what was then termed the “master plan.” While the phrase was never clearly defined for the uninitiated, the context within which it was used suggested that “the white man” had a grand scheme to continually subvert, oppress, and ultimately destroy the black race. A typical expression of this mindset can be seen in the 1974 film Three the Hard Way, in which white supremacists release into the nation’s water supply a toxin that is deadly to blacks but has no effect on whites. Notwithstanding the chuckles such apparent silliness engenders, as attorney and scholar Michelle Alexander observes, “[T]he word on the street turned out to be right, at least to a point.”

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In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander suggests, for example, that the CIA’s admission that it effectively permitted Nicaraguan rebels to smuggle drugs into the US during the Reagan years and distribute them in inner-city neighborhoods lends credence to urban conspiracy theorists who see a Nazi-like “final solution” in such actions. “Conspiracy theorists,” Alexander writes, “must surely be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide, in light of the devastation wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug war had been declared.”

Thus does Alexander lay the foundation for her central thesis vis-àvis the nation’s criminal justice system: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In point of fact, The New Jim Crow is but the latest in a series of books and papers attempting to grapple with the conundrum that is mass incarceration. In the main, these studies review the same basic research, cite many of the same sources, and reach the same broad conclusions: To wit, mass incarceration dehumanizes those labeled as felons (and, by extension, their families) by denying them basic citizenship rights such as the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and access to employment, public assistance, subsidized housing, and the like.

Moreover, though some come close, such studies tend to frame their conclusions in terms that fall short of accusing Uncle Sam of having a “master plan.” In other words, however harmful they deem the nation’s crime policies to be, the authors’ focus is chiefly on the policies’ effect, not on malicious intent.

Alexander, however, is different. In summarizing the impact of her experiences as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union on her

view of the criminal justice system, she writes, “Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.”

The leap from recognizing mass incarceration’s effect to alleging its intent is legally significant and, as a civil rights attorney, Alexander is well aware of its implications.

For more than a generation, the US Supreme Court has held that with respect to Fifth Amendment (due process) and employment discrimination claims, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to establish that the actions of the defendant—in this case, the nation’s criminal justice system—were discriminatory in both effect and intent. Thus, Alexander’s statement that “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” is as provocative as it is damning.

The question is, does she prove her point?

To be sure, she makes a compelling argument. Alexander is particularly effective when recounting the pattern by which the subjugation of African Americans—through chattel slavery, the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction period, and, more recently, the so-called War on Crime—has, since the nation’s founding, served the political and economic needs of the power elite.

She maintains that the passage of civil rights legislation and the subsequent evolution of political correctness have rendered race-specific expressions of discrimination both illegal and culturally unpopular. Such expressions, she argues, have been replaced by (1) race-neutral language that achieves the same discriminatory ends; and (2) a series of court decisions designed to limit the impact of the legislation.

Such perniciousness, I fear, may likewise limit the impact of Alexander’s book. To be sure, her stated goal for writing it—“to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States”—has already been achieved.

Yet, in reading it, I was reminded of a statement from Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in McClesky v.

Kemp, a case which Alexander also cites. Writing for the majority, Powell determined that the overwhelming racial disparity of blacks versus whites on Georgia’s death row did not reflect unequal treatment under the law and was thus not unconstitutional. As Alexander notes, the effect of the decision was to render irrelevant clear statistical evidence of discrimination in application of the death penalty.

Broadly applied, the court’s don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts reasoning suggests that no matter how convincing her evidence—and it is persuasive—Alexander’s argument might ultimately be rejected. Thus, Powell’s conclusion in McClesky could also be applied to Alexander’s book: that her “claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.”

Indeed it does.

Samuel K. Atchison has served as a welfare policy analyst, social services administrator, social policy consultant, and prison chaplain. He is the president of the Trenton Ecumenical Area Ministry and a community partnership manager with the Amachi Mentoring Coalition Project (AMCP), a program of the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation that provides mentoring to children impacted by incarceration.

The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor

by Mark Labberton InterVarsity Press Reviewed by Sam Van Eman Getting uninvolved citizens to recognize and respond to injustice in the world is like getting my trash collector to put the lid back on the can. Mark Labberton is asking nonetheless. In The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus, this West Coast pastor-professor calls readers to perceive (“see and assess one another”), name (“frame and position one another”), and act (“engage one another”) in kingdom of God ways. All three are necessary for us to grow in love, and twice while reading I actually set the book on my lap and cried out to God for human justice. Yet with his pastoral experience, global travel, and work with the International Justice Mission, I believe Labberton could have elicited this response many more times, and I wish he had.

I was tempted to do more revising of this book than reviewing.

Frustrated with yet another cumbersome paragraph, I finally remembered what an editor once told me regarding pastors: They write the way they preach—they love lists of three and have trouble avoiding the cadence that makes them effective in the pulpit but awkward in print. So I read the paragraph again, this time out loud with my best preaching voice. Lo and behold, it worked. I even imagined enjoying the sermon.

But I had trouble elsewhere, too. I wanted more from many of his stories and less from what I read between them. Openers such as, “I remember a crossroads in my own self-perception” pricked my anticipation but left me dissatisfied when no details followed. Conversely, the first chapter would have been great at a quarter of its length.

Labberton’s introduction about the developing understanding that his street address was really part of a large and complex planet—and that he had, before this realization, been quite unable to see others in a just manner—was insightful, but it was one nutritious grain amidst too much chaff.

I’m being tough on Labberton because the library is packed with calls to love our neighbor. Adding another volume requires something extra special. I will give him this: While the section on perceiving felt too familiar, the section on naming was worth the price of the book.

Implications of this biblical concept had me referring to it the very next day. From naming animals to naming our children to naming those we disregard like trash can lids, names have a power that we underestimate and it is clear that God wants us to use this power well.

Small groups and patient readers may benefit from the reflection questions. The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor has potential as an education tool or possibly as a reminder for the lackadaisical among us.

Sam Van Eman is a staff specialist for the Coalition for Christian Outreach. He wrote On Earth As It Is in Advertising? Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope (Wipf & Stock, 2010) and serves as culture editor for TheHighCalling.org.

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