Off the Shelf September/October 2011

O ff the Shelf Alone Together

by Sherry Turkle Basic Books Reviewed by Dale S. Kuehne Sherry Turkle wants to talk about technological attachments. Not files we attach to emails, not attachments that allow us to charge our iPod with our car’s cigarette lighter, not special lenses to attach to our iPhones. No, in her recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, she wants to talk about the deep and potentially troubling attachments we form with our email accounts, music devices, and smart phones.

As an MIT professor, Turkle has spent much of her career studying the psychological and social impact of technology on human life. Her particular interest is in studying how robotics and personal technological devices impact how we relate to others and ourselves. She approaches the subject with an appreciation and fascination with technology, and yet from that vantage point has discovered some chilling data concerning how technology is making it more and more difficult for us to be human.

She speaks of how robotics have advanced to the point that children often prefer virtual pets to real pets and how the elderly can find such comfort in virtual pets or robots that they don’t feel as much need for human companionship, including their children. She lets us know that the technology is advancing so rapidly that we will soon be able to create human robots that are so “human” and personally engaging that Scientific American is exploring legal marriage between humans and robots.

Turkle gives us a glimpse into how personal technology and social networking are changing our lives, and especially the lives of our children. For an increasing number of people the most important relationship in their life is with the device that gives them access to email, IMs, and Facebook.

So significant is the attachment we have to our technology that we are often unaware that we have developed an attachment stronger than we have with any person.

Alone Together is a well-written, widely accessible book that is a must read for anyone who wants to try to understand culturally where we are and where we are going, as well as understand how to work with the most at-risk group in our society—our children.

Turkle explains why I can’t go to a gathering of adults without finding a significant number of people, including me, texting and writing email while someone else is talking. Many of us are so attached to our technology that our brains have developed a biochemical addiction to the electronic stimulation of our devices. When that occurs—and youth are especially vulnerable to this due to their stage of development—what drives us is not the desire to be closer

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Book Reviews to the people to whom we are texting but our brain demanding the stimulation the screen is providing. Millions of us are unaware we should be in a new kind of 12-step program.

Turkle is not a Luddite. She appreciates the uses that can be made of the ever-advancing technology. She is trying to alert us to the danger that the technology presents, especially its addictive and antisocial dimensions. This is the greatest contribution of the book.

If an essential part of what it means to be human is to love and be loved, to love God, neighbor, and self, Alone Together introduces us to the profound threat that smart phones, personal computers, and social networking pose for us. As the title implies, this technology can hypnotize us into believing we are relating to others when we are in fact connecting to a technological device. Moreover, social networking provides us with the ability to remake ourselves into who we wish we were and to relate to the fictions of others, thereby further complicating the already difficult task of knowing self and others.

Turkle raises more questions than she answers, but they are the questions that help us put into perspective the challenge our culture faces.

Dale S. Kuehne is the Richard L. Bready Chair in Ethics, Economics, and the Common Good at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., where he is also a professor of politics. He is the author of Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationship beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker Academic, 2009).

Bonhoeffer

by Eric Metaxis Thomas Nelson Reviewed by John A. Sundquist In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, biographer Eric Metaxis tells with remarkable sensitivity the story of one man’s faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the forces that shaped him. Its 31 packed chapters are informed by extensive quotations from correspondence between Bonhoeffer and his large circle of family, friends, and colleagues as well as excerpts from sermons he preached and lectures he delivered.

The work surveys four major periods of Bonhoeffer’s life and work: his childhood and youth; his theological studies and early pastoral work in the ’20s; the rise of Nazism through the ’30s and Bonhoeffer’s opposition and leadership in the Confessing Church movement; and his involvement, in the early ’40s, in the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, leading to his arrest in 1943 and his execution

by the Gestapo in April 1945. Metaxis weaves his knowledge of Bonhoeffer into a vibrant and compelling narrative, opening a window onto the life of one of the most influential theologians of our time, a man who was able to transcend his birth into a privileged, well-connected family and use it to stand up against tyranny and oppression.

Bonhoeffer’s parents rarely went to church, but in hiring two sisters from the Herrhut Moravian community as governesses, they introduced spiritual formation into their children’s lives—perhaps more than they intended. Hymn singing, Bible reading, and personal encounters with the living God made up the air that young Dietrich breathed. At 10 he composed a cantata, and at 14 he decided to become a theologian. Although his father resisted that idea, Bonhoeffer’s call to ministry was not a childhood impulse but a bold declaration of what God was doing in his life.

Bonhoeffer’s struggle with the teachings and prejudices of early 20th-century German society began while he was still quite young. The author depicts an 18-yearold Bonhoeffer, on a visit to Rome, being challenged by the church’s transcendence of race and national identity.

There he was moved by the figure of God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, “who reverberates with colossal peace and tender love,” themes which came to dominate his own life and ministry. These themes were further shaped by his time at Berlin University, where, under the tutelage of Schleiermacher and von Harnack, he developed his critical thinking and his growing resistance to Nazism.

Metaxis takes us by ship to New York City, vividly painting Bonhoeffer’s time there—from his distress over the lifeless German church and the liberal but empty gospel preached at Union Theological Seminary, to the joy he discovered at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where he heard Adam Clayton Powell Sr. preach.

Revealing the complexities of a life lived in the real world, the author depicts how Bonhoeffer, as part of the Confessing Church, became “a lightning rod for controversy” and yet was able to become a member of the Abwehr (German military intelligence).

Understanding the forces at play in Nazi Germany and how they led to the end of Bonhoeffer’s life offers a poignant portrait of how God uses history to shape our faith and invites our faith to shape history. Metaxis’ work is essential to any serious study of Bonhoeffer or the interplay of theology and history.

John A. Sundquist was executive director of American Baptist International Ministries from 1988 to 2003 and is an adjunct professor of global Christianity and mission at Northern Theological Seminary in Lombard, Ill. Do you find our reviews helpful? What kinds of titles would you like to see reviewed here? Write to the editor at KKomarni@Eastern.edu to let us know.

Little Princes

by Conor Grennan HarperCollins Reviewed by Tim Høiland Conor Grennan never set out to be a hero. Indeed, how could he have known that what began as a sort of guilt-induced public relations stunt to appease his friends and impress girls would in fact radically alter the course of his life and the lives of countless others?

Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal is Grennan’s story, starting with his arrival as a volunteer at Little Princes Children’s Home outside Kathmandu, intended as a three-month humanitarian stopover on the way to his real adventures elsewhere. But when he came to learn that many of the children in the orphanage—with whom he now shared a deep bond—were in fact not orphans at all, he was presented with a situation he found impossible to ignore.

In a book that is equal parts memoir, cultural study, and love story, Grennan recounts what ensued after this discovery. He tells of trekking through the Himalayas, battling nature and fatigue, facing off against traffickers, forming unlikely alliances, falling in love, and ultimately helping to reunite a good number of these children with their parents in Humla—the far-off, nearly inaccessible part of the country from which they had originally come.

The story is rooted in Nepal’s decade-long civil war, in which Maoist rebels—unable to operate in or near the capital, which remained under the control of those loyal to the king—targeted poor families in rural areas for conscription into their army, often abducting young children. In this context, poor families were presented with the opportunity to pay a large sum of money to a man who would take their children out of harm’s way and into Kathmandu where, he assured them, they would be well cared for. Out of desperation, and wanting a better future for their children whatever the cost, many parents agreed.

Unfortunately, this man was in fact a trafficker, and while some children eventually ended up in orphanages like Little Princes Children’s Home where they received love and care, many others remained on the streets, completely vulnerable to disease, hunger, and worse.

Today, through an organization Grennan cofounded called Next Generation Nepal, trafficked children are placed in safe transitional homes where they are cared for and educated until, ideally, they can be reunited with their families.

But Grennan’s approach is clearly no panacea. It would take a lot more than this to tackle the root causes of trafficking in Nepal at any sort of a structural level. Doing so would require a systematic overhaul of what appears to be a largely corrupt law enforcement system that fails to protect the

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vulnerable and a close examination of the equally important and enduring issue of rural poverty, which makes these families easy targets for traffickers in the first place.

But again, as Grennan makes clear, he never set out to save the world. His connection to Nepal is a personal one, and because of his work—and through the stories in his book—many readers will feel inspired and compelled to find ways to support these families who have endured so much.

One certainly hopes that structural change will come to Nepal in time, but at least for 300 children and their families, being reunited is more than enough for now.

A regular contributor to PRISM, Tim Høiland blogs about the intersections of faith, development, justice, and peace in the Americas at tjhoiland.com.

Ministry with Prisoners & Families Edited by W. Wilson Goode Sr, Charles E. Lewis Jr, and Harold Dean Trulear Judson Press Reviewed by Samuel K. Atchison I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century engaged in hardcore urban ministry—feeding the hungry, many of them returning offenders; housing the homeless (some of the same folks), finding employment for the unemployed (yep, you got it), and serving as a chaplain to the incarcerated. Interestingly, it was my involvement in the first three activities which led me to the fourth.

After doing what amounted to prison aftercare for several years (the term “re-entry” was not in use at that time), I began working as a chaplain at the Mercer County (NJ) Correction Center in July 1993, with the intention of winning inmates to the Lord, helping to disciple them, and assisting them in a systematic way to return to the community, find gainful housing and employment, and avoid getting rearrested.

What I learned, of course, was that though well-intentioned church folk (pollster George Gallup Jr. calls them “the saints among us”) had been engaged in such service for years, there was little appreciation for their work beyond the street level, minimal recognition of what has become known as “the faith factor” in inmate rehabilitation, and no comprehensive policy governing the reintegration of returning prisoners.

In pursuit of the above, I began to seek, find, and make common cause with like-minded individuals such as Gallup, social scientist John DiIulio, religion researcher Harold Dean Trulear, and former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode.

Over the years, they, along with several others, have become my friends, colleagues, mentors, and, in the case of both DiIulio and Goode, my employers.

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Thus, in reading Ministry with Prisoners & Families: The Way Forward, I am reminded of how far the prison ministry enterprise has come. Edited by Goode, Trulear, and social work professor-cum-congressional aide Charles E. Lewis, Ministry with Prisoners & Families is a compilation of essays by a variety of experts addressing the broad scope of issues affecting prison inmates, their families, and society as a whole Two features separate this book from similar works addressing these issues. First, the efficacy of faith as a motivating factor in the lives of prisoners, their families, and the volunteers that serve them is seen as a given. This is huge when one considers that barely 20 years ago researchers considered faith too subjective to be measured.

Yet Baylor sociologist Byron Johnson, who has reviewed more than 270 studies examining the relationship between faith and delinquency (and whose recent book, More God, Less Crime, could be read as a companion volume to Ministry with Prisoners & Families), has noted that secular social scientists have now begun to recognize the need for a motivational “trigger” for inmates to change their behavior, and they see that religious conversion can be such a trigger.

Second, each issue the authors address—whether discussing programs aimed at averting incarceration (preentry in Lewis’s words), substance abuse ministry, prisoner re-entry programs, policy advocacy, or chaplaincy—ultimately focuses on a role for the local church. This is especially true of the articles describing Amachi, the mentoring program Goode runs, and Healing Communities, which is directed by Trulear; both programs depend on and are extensions of congregational ministry.

While such congregational emphasis can be seen as focusing the biblical mandate to serve “the least of these,” writ large the book envisions a far more activist role for the church than many may feel comfortable with. Moreover, as a result of the nation’s current fiscal crisis, federal funding of many faith-friendly programs has been cut or eliminated altogether. This, in turn, may serve as a disincentive for some churches that might otherwise become engaged in the struggle.

Such observations should not be seen as a shortcoming of the book, but simply a reflection of reality. In truth, Ministry with Prisoners & Families raises the bar in terms of our collective understanding of society’s most vulnerable stakeholders. It is an important book for those who take such service seriously.

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.

Sexual Sabotage

by Judith A. Reisman WND Books Reviewed by William M. Struthers In her newest book, Sexual Sabotage, Dr. Judith Reisman pulls no punches in her war with sexologists, pedophiles, pornographers, and pharmaceutical companies. Lined up in her crosshairs is Alfred Kinsey, the father of modern-day sexology. Sexual Sabotage reads as Reisman’s magnum opus, which gives and takes no quarter with the sex-industrial complex and those who seek to promote a worldview that goes against traditional sexual ethics. It does so by coming at the issue from a variety of levels, ranging from a personal psychological analysis of Kinsey to the broad sociological effects from World War II to the advent of the internet and modern pharmacology.

The book is interlaced with religious, social, political, legal, and historical arguments that can occasionally be difficult to tie together, but for those who can track with her, Sexual Sabotage offers a fascinating answer to the question “How did it come to this?”

Reisman’s main thesis is that the groundwork for the radical shift in sexual morality occurred during the World War II era, when Alfred Kinsey began conducting his now famous texts, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Kinsey’s research, she argues, was based on sexual predators and sexual deviants who were not representative of the general public but whose data would advance a view of sexual immorality in which Kinsey was personally invested. The effects of these reports on the culture would culminate in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and contribute to the decline of traditional morality for generations to come.

Kinsey’s reports presented sexually deviant behaviors as norms and, Reisman argues, is a critical tipping point for the cultural acceptance of rape, incest, and the sexualization of children. Capitalizing on academia’s infatuation with contrarianism, Kinsey expanded his influence to the intellectual elites who then began utilizing the label of “science” as a way to protect themselves from criticism. Whether for personal or professional reasons, today’s sex researchers, Reisman argues, are complicit in Kinsey’s agenda by refusing to return to the original data or acknowledge the limitations, legitimacy, and moral questions which surround his “research.” By refusing to do so, a broad agenda of sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and pedophilia have been cultivated over the last half century, says Reisman, who offers an astonishing number of arguments and amounts of data as evidence. The more than 1,100 citations, references, and endnotes can be overwhelming at times and range from scientific studies, popular press articles and in-

terviews, and a variety of data from multiple media forms.

The book has a clear and unapologetic agenda. Occasionally strident, but meticulous in its detail, Reisman’s work should give pause to those who refer to Kinsey’s research as part of the canon on human sexuality. “The fact is that Kinsey’s deviants and psychopaths betrayed our nation,” writes Reisman, “seducing us into ‘hate America’ and gutting a moral system that had brought our nation unparalleled health and prosperity, and into rejecting our traditional moral standards. With dishonest, mendacious research and a secret psychosexual agenda, Kinsey and his cadre of eugenicists led the sexual revolution—to eliminate babies, love, and family, to destroy our God-based morals, and to allow unfettered access to the bodies and minds of innocent children.”

The primary criticism that many might have of Sexual Sabotage is that Reisman’s explicit anti-pornography agenda colors the tenor of how the data is presented. But it is at least honest and explicit about the agenda, rather than disingenuous and subversive. To raise this as a concern is to miss Reisman’s primary point—that the way Kinsey presented his data is not agenda-free (regardless of whether or not one considers this agenda to be explicit or implicit).

To adopt a Pollyanna attitude about Kinsey’s research as bias-free and objective without regard to the additional contextual data presented is irresponsible.

Make no mistake—this is no conspiracy theory, hatchet job, or anti-porn manifesto; it is, however, a clarion call to those who would sit by and do nothing. Rather than be lulled into assuming that the commodification of children and sexuality is a lost cause, she champions a critical reexamination of Kinsey’s research and the cultural and economic forces that have influenced notions of human sexuality over the past six decades. Occasionally disturbing in its content and uncompromising in its rhetoric, Reisman’s book should not be dismissed. Instead it should wake us all up to the fact that sexuality is not just an appetite that requires feeding but a unique aspect of human beings that is both sacred and integral to our spiritual and social health.

William M. Struthers is associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., and the author of Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (IVP, 2009).

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