I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (MAY 2024 EDITION)

[defrog]

Well, thank goodness for class reading assignments, eh?

Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World by Grace Ji-Sun Kim

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people on Goodreads (apparently), I read this as part of an assignment for a class that is deep-diving on the Old Testament within the context of a multicultural framework. In that sense, this book is appropriate as it is, at heart, a manifesto urging the Christian church to embrace multiculturalism so that it can better become an positive force in healing the world’s broken humanity. It’s also a direct critique of the church – specifically, the American church – in not only failing to tackle the biggest symptoms of our broken humanity (racism, sexism, white privilege, social injustice, etc) but also being part of the problem.

The basic thesis of the book is that the church can become a positive force for good – not by seizing political power, but by moral example and conviction based on Jesus’ description of the kingdom of God. But in order to do that, it must first lament its shortcomings, repent of its failures and complicity in injustice, relinquish all political and socioeconomic power, restore jutice where it has been denied, extend hospitality to all, reinforce agency for those who have been denied it, and reconcile relationships at all levels of society. The book calls for the church to be reimagined as the “new humanity” that, ideally, resembles the kingdom described by Jesus in the Beatitudes. Phew!

I personally don’t disagree with any of that, but there are a couple of problems here. One is that Kim and Hill jam so many ideas in under 200 pages that a lot of the necessary nuance to process a lot of this is buried in the text. More problematic is that Kim and Hill cite examples of injustices that embody issues that have been radically politicized in recent years –especially issues such as immigration, BLM and #MeToo that arose during the first Trump administration. This makes it difficult to read this through an apolitical lens. It’s not their fault these issues are heavily politicized now, and certainly all of their examples can be criticized solely in terms of the values that Jesus taught. But the book paradoxically falls into the same trap by seeming to pretend the political lens that readers will inevitably bring to the discussion is irrelevant. This might be technically true, yet many conservative Christians will inevitably associate the arguments here with liberal talking points they’ve been encouraged to hate, which arguably undermines the book’s own call for inclusiveness.

That said, again, I do agree with the basic thesis and the authors’ prescription for moving forward. It sounds impossible in this age of toxic polarized politics, but you gotta start somewhere. If nothing else, the exercises and practices recommended at the end of each chapter are as good a starting point as any. Anyway, it’s interesting and ambitious, but it’s a book that requires a very open mind, politically speaking. I’m all for speaking uncomfortable truths to people who need to hear them, but I also think it’s important to read the room and understand how to best get your message across.


The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is Grahame Greene’s final novel, and it’s a bit of a headscratcher, though not necessarily in a bad way. The story is narrated by Victor Baxter, who starts the story by recalling how, when he was 12, a man calling himself The Captain arrived at his school and claimed he was now Victor’s guardian, having won him from his father in a game of backgammon. Victor – who is bullied at school, and whose only living relations are an overbearing aunt and a father he calls “The Devil” – accepts this new arrangement without question, especially as The Captain removes him from the school to stay with him and his lover Liza in a basement flat in Camden. Right away, Victor – renamed Jim by his new guardian – realizes that The Captain is a shady character and a con artist at the very least.

The first part of the book is Jim’s recollection of his childhood, which is spent mostly in the flat with Liza, as The Captain is away most of the time, possibly engaging in criminal activity to raise money to take care of Liza. In the second part, it’s ten years later and Jim is a reporter who has drifted away from Liza, though he stays in touch. The Captain, now in Panama, sends her a large cheque and invites her and Jim to come to Panama to stay with him. Liza doesn’t go for reasons I won’t give away, but Jim does and discovers what The Captain is up to, which has attracted the attention of both the Panamanian authorities and the CIA, and Jim finds himself caught in the middle.

It sounds more adventurous than it actually is. The criminal and espionage angles are really just backdrops to explore the relationship between Jim, The Captain and Liza. Jim struggles to understand whether The Captain and Liza are in love or not, in part because he’s an emotionally detached person who doesn’t really understand what love is himself. Much of the enigmas surrounding The Captain are left vaguely explained, if only because it’s told from Jim’s POV. Which might be frustrating when it comes to the adventure bits, but you can’t say it’s unrealistic – we often go through life never finding out the answers to certain mysteries, etc. And it does lend itself to a darkly humorous epilogue that reminded me of the end of the Coen Bros’ Burn After Reading. Anyway, it’s not Greene’s best work, but it’s strangely compelling.

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O captain my captain,

This is dF