Well, I’m in full swing writing my next two chapters, but I did manage to finish off a few things.
1. Commonwealth by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.
I haven’t come across any really positive reviews of this book (John Gray, for example, finds it hardly even worth discussing).  However, I’m going to go out on a limb and state that I really did enjoy it.  In fact, I’ve enjoyed this entire trilogy (Empire, Multitude, and finally Commonwealth) quite a lot.  In the first volume, the authors explore the rise of the transnational empire of global capitalism.  In the second volume they look to the multitude — the plurality of subjectivities working together towards a better life free from the constraints of empire.  In this final volume, they look at those things which both work against and towards the creation of “the commons” as a way of structuring life together outside of the constraints of private propety.  Of course, I’m aware of the criticisms raised against Hardt and Negri’s project.  Yes, they repeat themselves a fair bit.  Yes, they can be frustratingly vague or overly simplistic in their analysis and in their proposed solutions.  Yes, they can be overly romantic.  Fair enough.
However, despite these criticisms, there is a lot of real value in this volume.  In particular, I really enjoyed their reflections on the development of parliamentary democracy as the republic of capital, their desire to have resistance movements move beyond identity politics, their cautious suggestions about the need to institutionalize the revolution, and their restoration of love to this conversation.  Further, although their concluding remarks about joy and laughter have been treated disdainfully by others, it is interesting to note a point of resonance with the Latin American liberation theologians.  Something worth pursuing further, I reckon.
Anyway, this book and the whole trilogy are recommended reading.  They provoke a lot of good thought and have the potential to open up positive trajectories in a person’s life.  I know they have had that impact upon me.
2. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon by George Woodcock.
After reading Kropotkin’s autobiography last year, I decided I would (very slowly) begin to work my way through biographies related to the birth of the anarchist movement.  I finished a biography of Herzen last year, and this book on Proudhon was the next installment.
It was a very good book.  Woodcock knows his subject matter very well and is able to relate the events of Proudhon’s life (during the fall-out of the French Revolution and Jacobinism), demonstrate the ways in which his life and writing are interconnected, and explain the (sometimes complex) social and economic theories Proudhon developed.
I must say, I am more than ever convinced that anarchism is the best way of trying to organize our life together.  It seems to me that it has the possibility to attain to the goals of both democracy and communism, while avoiding both of their flaws.  And, as far as I can tell, it also seems to be in keeping with the way of Jesus Christ.
Recommended reading, for those who desire to learn more about these things.
3. Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time Vol. 2) by Marcel Proust.
I really enjoyed this installment of In Search of Lost Time.  I think I’ve become accustomed to Proust’s narrative voice and his long, tangential sentences.  His insight into our interactions with others, our perceptions of ourselves and even his way of describing and exploring what it is like to get drunk and lose oneself in the company of others are all really delightful.  A few samples:
Each of our friends has his defects, to such an extent that to continue to love him we are obliged to console ourselves for them–by thinking of his talent, his kindness, his affection–or rather by ignoring them, for which we need to deploy all our good will.  Unfortunately our obstinacy in refusing to see the defect of our friend is surpassed by the obstinacy with which he persists in that defect, from his own blindness to it or the blindness that he attributes to other people.  For he does not notice it himself or imagines it is not noticed.  Since the risk of giving offense arises principally from the difficulty of appreciating what does and does not pass unnoticed, we ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.
And here’s a quotation which I think would be worth comparing to Rilke’s opening lines in his first Elegy:
For beauty is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown.
And here’s one on drinking:
I was enclosed in the present, like heroes and drunkards; momentarily eclipsed, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call our future; placing the goal of my life no longer in the realisation of dreams of the past, but in the felicity of the present moment, I could see no further than it.  So that, by a contradiction which was only apparent, it was at the very moment in which I was experiencing an exceptional pleasure, in which I felt that my life might yet be happy, in which it should have become more precious in my sight, it was at this very moment that, delivered from the anxieties which it had hitherto inspired in me, I unhesitatingly abandoned it to the risk of accident.  But after all, I was doing no more than concentrate in a single evening the carelessness that, for most men, is diluted throughout their whole existence.
One more:
“There is no man, ” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it.  And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.  I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays.  They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives… but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.  We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world… I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life.  But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived.
I’m very glad I decided to read this hell-damn-ass long book. Hopefully typing out these quotes might inspire a few others to do the same.
4. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.
For some reason, this book got mentioned a few times in things I was reading.  I had heard that Banks was sort of being represented as the current voice in Scottish literature and that he was utilizing some elements of Scottish horror or macabre.  When I was very young I remember looking at a collection of Scottish ghost stories my Grandfather had and my Scottish relatives also had some… interesting… ghost and alien stories of their own.  So I thought I would check out The Wasp Factory.
The story itself was decent — it’s about a young boy who is some sort of sociopath (he has killed three other children, as he lets you know early on) and what happens when his older brother escapes from an insane assylum and begins to work his way back home.  A lot of reviewers seem quite appalled about all of this, and the way in which it is related, but I wasn’t too put off by the subject matter.  I suppose I have encountered enough appalling things in real life.  That said, I found the ending to be fairly disappointing.  The big twist at the end was decent enough but then Banks seemed to feel the need to psychologize and explicitly explain how everything was related to that twist.  To me, that felt like he was overdoing things.  The reader should have been able to make the connections he makes and I think the story would have been better served if he left a lot more unsaid at the end.
As I was reading, I was thinking that the narrator’s voice sounded a lot like the voice employed in Ender’s Game (which I reviewed a month ago).  Couple that with Banks’ remarks in the preface that he wanted to be a science fiction writer and it has left me wondering if there is a certain (juvenile?) voice that is common to that genre.  Then again, maybe the similarity is that both books are about young males with sociopathic tendencies.
All in all, I don’t think this book was all it was cracked up to be.  Pretty ho-hum.
Monthly Mix-Tape
1. Handel, Lascia Ch’io Pianga (stumbled onto this stunningly beautiful song thanks to the first five minutes of Triers’ “Antichrist”); 2. A Perfect Circle, The Nurse Who Loved Me; 3. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Black Water (going to see this band later today!); 4. Roky Erickson with Okkervil River, Goodbye Sweet Dreams; 5. Great Lake Swimmers, Various Stages; 6. The National, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks; 7. Shearwater, Black Eyes; 8. Mumford and Sons, Sigh No More; 9. Band of Horses, On My Way Back Home; 10. MGMT, I Found A Whistle; 11. Pink Floyd, Pigs On A Wing.

Well, my reviews ended up being a little more sustained this month.  That makes me happy.
1. World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age by C. Kavin Rowe.
This book has received praise from some top-notch scholars (like Robert Jenson, Markus Bockmuehl and Michael Gorman) and has also received glowing reviews in journals (as diverse as First Things and RBL) and on some other great biblioblogs (see, for example, J. R. Daniel Kirk’s two part series here and here).  Needless to say, this book has received a lot of positive attention and it is very well-deserved.
In World Upside Down, Rowe challenges the traditional reading of Acts (that sees Acts as an apologia to the Powers, and that also sees Acts as speaking highly of the Roman Empire).  Instead, Rowe argues, Acts posits a world that has been turned upside down — a world wherein the culture and politics bound up with (imperial) pagan theology are undermined by the embodied, communal proclamation of the revelation of Israel’s God in the crucified and resurrected person of Jesus.  Rowe makes this case carefully, exegetically, and persuasively.
Of course, anybody familiar with Luke’s Gospel should not be surprised by this.  The thoroughly subversive nature of Luke’s first volume has often been noted (to take the most well-known example, compare Luke’s more ‘material’ version of the Beautitudes with the more ‘spiritual’ version found in Matthew) and one would expect to find that theme continued in Luke’s second volume.  Indeed, I have often wondered how scholars could hold such differing views about Luke’s two volumes given that they are actually a single work of writing.
Therefore, Rowe presents us with a reading of Acts that fits well with the narrative trajectory and themes already begun in Luke’s Gospel.  I won’t go into detail as to what he argues — one can read the links provided above for that — but Rowe basically begins with an initial chapter dealing with definitions and how one reads Acts.
In the second chapter, he explores the ‘collision’ the occurs between Christian theology and its concomitant practical outworkings (‘ecclesial life’ which is ‘the cultural explication of God’s identity’) and paganism and its concomitant outworkings.
In the third chapter, Rowe looks at moments of conflict that result in Paul being questioned by the State authorities.  I found this chapter to be quite rich, especially when compared to the superficial analysis of these events provided by Seyoon Kim in his recent book, Christ and Caesar.  Kim argues that the imperial authorities regularly find Paul innocent because Paul is, in fact, engaging in a form of theopolitics that is not at all threatening or radical (of course, I find it puzzling that Kim takes these authorities as reliable guides, especially considering that these authorities decided to crucify Jesus… and would later on kill Paul and the other apostles).  Rowe, on the other hand, agrees that Paul is not trying to orchestrate a coup or engage in something that is fundamentally anti-state for the sake of being anti-state.  However, Rowe argues, this does not mean that Christianity did not carry revolutionary implications for the state of things under Roman power.  For, he writes, ‘the rejection of insurrection does not simultaneously entail endorsement’ and, furthermore, ‘the state is not equipped to discern theological truth… the gentiles attempt to see with closed eyes… they are under the [power and authority] of Satan’.
Turning to the fourth chapter, Rowe looks more at the upside down nature of the world of the early Christians and spends time contrasting the lordship of Caesar with the lordship of Jesus.  What Rowe argues is that both of these lords offer a different understanding of that which is contained in the notion of ‘lordship’.  Jesus demonstrates lordship by establishing peace through crucifixion, subversion, service and suffering, while Caesar seeks to attain lordship by establishing peace through pacification and ruthless military dominion (NB: relating the creation of peace to lordship was especially important in Luke’s Roman context given the way in which the Empire had been devastated by a series of civil wars — the one who would be able to restore peace to the Empire, would be the one with a rightful claim to lordship, and this becomes a fundamental part of Augustan ideology).  Thus, not so much contradicting those who engage in counter-imperial readings of Paul, but nuancing them in an important way, Rowe argues that Jesus is not raised up to challenge the status of Caesar; rather, Caesar is the upstart and the rival, ‘Jesus lordship is primary–ontologically and politically–not Caesar’s’.
Finally, in the last chapter, Rowe explores the implications of reading Acts for engaging in what he refers to as ‘the politics of truth’ in our contemporary context.  Here, I very much appreciated the way in which Rowe links exegesis and application — simply to read Acts is to already engage in application and these things cannot be separated.  Therefore, Rowe spends the bulk of this chapter exploring what reading Acts means in relation to themes of tolerance and bearing witness to truth.  Here, in order to avoid both shallow appeals to tolerance and oppressive appeals to exclusivity, Rowe argues that the politics of truth are fundamentally shaped by the nature of lordship as it is embodied by Jesus.  Witnessing is not just proclamation, it is also ‘living out the pattern of life that culminates in resurrection’.  Unfortunately, I found this chapter a little disappointing (‘tolerance’, or some such related subject, seems to be the go-to subject for application when it comes to NT scholars these days… at this point, this strikes me as done to death and makes me wonder about the lack of imagination or the lack of awareness of one’s own historical context that this might reveal).  I was hoping Rowe would link his reading to more contemporary matters related to socio-economic issues, but I hope to press him more on his thoughts in this regard in the near future, so I will close here.
Suffice to say, this book is very highly recommended reading.
2. Paul, Philosophy and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others edited by Douglas Harink.
Many thanks to Christian at Wipf & Stock for this review copy!
It’s always hard to do justice to essay collections in these short blog reviews, and it is especially difficult in this case because there are so many fascinating essays contained in this book.  However, in the introduction, Douglas Harink does a fine job of summarizing that which ties these pieces together.  He writes:

The messianic event, as the interruption, qualification, and transfiguration of all discourses, marks the common theme of the essays of this volume… Put theologically (which is the primary discourse of most of the essays here), what creates Paul as a subject and interrupts the “previous regime of discourses” is an apokalypsis… the philosophers studied here have found in Paul’s apocalyptic messianism a point of departure for a fundamental criticism of modern philosophy.

After Harink’s introduction, Part One of the book (‘From Apocalypse to Philosophy’) is an essay by J. Louis Martyn  exploring the ways in which Paul’s gospel proclamation invades the philosophical context of his day.  Over against philosophical systems, Martyn claims that:

The gospel is not one phantasia among others.  The gospel is the dynamis theou, the present, powerful, intrusive act of the God who raised his crucified Son from the grave.  The gospel is the specific apocalypse of Christ as God’s own end-time act.

This, then, is why the gospel generates a new community that is ‘God’s new moral agent’ and that engages in the same form of cruciform love that was expressed by Jesus in opposition to the ‘anti-God powers’ that rule over this present age.
Following Martyn, in Part Two of the book, we are presented with three papers that focus upon the ways in which Nietzche, Heidegger, and Benjamin engage with Paul (although we still see a fair amount of reflection relating to Badiou, Taubes and Agamben, anticipating later parts of the book).  I didn’t find any of these essays to be particularly mind-blowing but they were still quite fun to read.  Although these essays might not have provided me with any new insights related to Paul, I did find their reviews of the philosophers at hand to be clear and quite useful.  Alas, too my shame, I have not spent nearly enough time reading any of these big three.
In Part Three, we receive two essays that are focused upon engaging Badiou’s reflections upon Paul, and a third essay that engages with both Badiou and Žižek.  I found this section to be quite strong.  Further, in my own reading, I have mostly plundered Badiou (especially) but also Žižek (but less so) and have mostly just exploited them as points of inspiration rather than trying to follow them or engage them more systematically.  Consequently, the more thorough and systematic engagement that occurs here was quite useful and it was interesting to compare it to my own reflections.
Neil Elliott’s essay, ‘Ideological Closure in the Christ-Event: A Marxist Response to Alain Badiou’s Paul’, was excellent and one of the real stand-out essays of the book (of course, I might be unduly biased, given how much I have appreciated what Elliott has written elsewhere!).  When asking why Paul, who has traditionally been seen as the opponent and not the ally of emancipatory politics, is suddenly gaining so much interest amongst continental philosophers, Elliott suggests the following:

When Badiou declares that Paul is “our contemporary,” it is in part because he finds a precise parallel between Paul’s situation and ours.  But it is also because he find in Paul the ideological gesture, the performance of a “universal truth” that militates against the ideological constraints of Paul’s situation and our own.

Both Paul’s situation and ours are characterized, Badiou declares, by “the destruction of all politics,” evident then in the legal usurpation by the principate of the political structures of the Republic, and in our own day by a parliamentary-democratic system that carefully insulates the economic order from popular will, that is, from politics.

Now, for Elliott reading Paul in such a context, and in apocalyptic terms, leads to this conclusion:

Paul’s proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection means, inevitably I think, that the biopower of the state is not sovereign, that its totalizing claims can be resisted… The formation of a community whose collective subjectivity depends upon the failure of the state’s totalizing claims over their allegiance is inherently subversive.  For such a community to practice an economic mutualism that crossed, and thus annulled, the distinctions of slave vs. free or, implicitly, conqueror vs. conquered, would have constituted the performance of a genuine collective universalism such as Badiou describes.

However, Elliott immediately points out, Badiou does not engage in much detail with such political readings of Paul’s focused upon Jesus’s death and resurrection.  Rather, Badiou still seems bound by the standard issue that has dominated traditional Protestant readings of Paul, i.e. Paul’s understanding of the Law and its relation to Jews and Gentiles.  Thus, Elliott charges Badiou with making the same mistake that has been made by many Protestant scholars: a falsely constructed opposition to Judaism, Jewish identity, and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Jewish law are made central to Paul’s thinking.
In opposition to this, Elliott posits a less abstractly ‘philosophical’ and more actively ‘political’ focus in Paul and returns to the theme of Jesus’s death and resurrection.  Consequently, drawing from Jon Sobrino, Elliott argues that “the universal truth at the heart of the Pauline gospel is no philosophical abstraction but is realized in an alternative politics, the civilization of human solidarity that is the civilization of poverty”.
Moving to Part Four of the book, we have two essays that focus upon Agamben.  Paul J. Griffiths’ piece, ‘The Cross as the Fulcrum of Politics: Expropriating Agamben on Paul’, was another one of the stand-out pieces in the book.  First of all, Griffiths provides a very clear and even exciting overview of the central themes in Agamben’s philosophical project and the ways in which his explicit reflections upon Paul fit within that project.  Thus, he explores Agamben’s reflections upon zoe and bios, citizenship and humanity, the law and violence, the messianic vocation and messianic time.
Griffiths then wants to try to intensify Agamben’s reflections and propel them in a more Christian direction.  He does this by first emphasizing that the messianic call does not merely revoke our vocation, but that it does so by crucifying it and so the “vocation’s revocation involves death.”  This then leads Griffiths to suggest that “the revoked and crucified vocation of the Christian citizen should be evident in quietist political action”.  Note, that this position is both quietist and active.  So, while Griffiths had triggered my alarm bells and had me thinking he was going to reassert a more traditional reading of Paul, he does not actually do this.  He explains:

It is a quietism… only of interest in the outcome of such action: that, and only that, is what is renounced by the citizen whose vocation as such has been revoked.  What gets put to rest by this quietism is a particular set of consequentialist interests, and what gets liberated is a genuinely Christian political agent.

Further, this Christian political agent is also marked by skepticism, hope, and lament.  This combination of factors, according to Griffiths, carries a number of advantages.  First, it provides a ‘more accurate understanding of the limits of our capacity to make accurate prospective judgments’; second, it allows these people to not be discouraged by claims that their political proposals won’t produce the goals they desire (‘Eschewing consequentialist judgments about a proposal’s enactment… may very easily be extended in the direction of eschewing such judgments about the likelihood of a proposal’s enactment’); third, this then permits continued advocacy regardless of both consequentialist and utopian objections; and, fourth, such people can abandon pretence.
Now, what is interesting to me, is that Griffiths seems to be trying to create a bit of a bridge between those who take after Niebuhr and those who take after Hauerwas and Yoder.  Thus, we have a deep skepticism and political (or perhaps historical or anthropological) realism coupled with a form of political action that is committed to a certain way of being, regardless of whether or not that way of being can actually ever be implemented or embodied.  To be honest, I am quite suspicious of what Griffiths is proposing (for example, I think we need to become more rigorously consequentialist in our political action, not less so, but this leads me in a different direction than both Griffiths and those to whom he is opposed… although Griffiths is frustratingly vague about ‘the particular set of consequentialist interests’ that he seeks to counter).  However, he certainly got me thinking and left me with some good questions to pursue.
Finally, in Part Five, we have three essays that, as far as I can tell, didn’t fit as well into the other categories and got lumped together at the end.  The first, by Jens Zimmerman, is a helpful analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary philosophical readings of Paul, coupled with an alternate proposal rooted in the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  The second, by Gordon Zerbe, is also a very helpful look at the type of communities that are being called into being (or not) by Agamben, Taubes, Badiou, Žižek, and Paul.  Last of all, Douglas Harink, concludes the volume with an essay exploring assumptions made by commentators about the notions of time and history and how those assumptions impact one’s ability to read Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Thus, he looks at Robert Jewett as a strong representative of a “historicist’ or ‘modern’ notion of time, at N. T. Wright as a representative of the ‘salvation-historical’ group, at Barth for a ‘time-and-eternity dialectical notion’ and at Agamben for a ‘messianic’ notion of time.
So, I realize I didn’t touch on all the essays in this book but hopefully this sampling gives the reader a good idea of the quality of material contained herein.  I strongly recommend this book to readers of Paul (I’ve been trying to get those who read Paul to engage ‘outside’ voices, like the continental philosophers, not because I think they are always right, but because I think they often see important things that we miss because of the ‘insider’ lenses that we bring to the texts.  These lenses make us think we already know what Paul is writing about when, in fact, we often do not already know anything of the sort).  Further, for those who are curious about what is going on in philosophy and its relationship to Paul, but are unsure of where to start, this would be a very helpful guide.  Recommended reading.
3. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the tale of a brother who impregnates his sister and then, after she gives birth, takes the baby and disposes of it in the woods.  A wandering tinker discovers the child, the sister sets off in pursuit of the tinker and child, and the brother pursues the sister.  Meanwhile, three other figures are also wandering the land living off of the lives of others… and, somewhere along the way, a herd of pig stampedes into the waters.  But, as with other McCarthy novels, that doesn’t mean any demons have been cast out.
I’m noticing another theme that seems to run through McCarthy’s novels.  Violence, of course, is the first and most obvious theme.  Violence, paired with both the glorious and the grotesque.  Violence that is neither good nor evil.  Violence that simply is.
However, another theme appears in several prominent characters — from the Sheriff in No Country, to the Kid in Blood Meridian, the brother in Outer Dark, Lester Ballard in Child of God, and the Man (or perhaps the reader?) in The Road — and I think this only became clear to me after reading this last book.  I think this is the theme of being caught up in a world that is vast, unreliable, monstrous and beautiful.  But, such a swirl is it all that one can never be sure if the monstrous is beautiful or if the beautiful is monstrous, or if they are one and the same thing.  So, these characters sit perched on the cusp of the world, coming close (at times) to understanding things — perhaps they even did understand things at one point — but ultimately they are unable to do so.  And, in the end, they are all devastated.
4. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.
Cornelius Suttree was born into some wealth and, unlike many, received an education, but he turned his back on that life (as well as on his family) in order to live amongst the down-and-outs in Knoxville in the 1950s.  As usual, in narrating this story, McCarthy summons an eclectic but electrifying cast of characters.  What I find interesting about this (especially in light of the remarks I just made about characters standing on the edge of a world they cannot comprehend), is that Suttree appears to have come very close to some form of comprehension.  Granted some events still stagger him, but the challenge for Suttree is not arriving at understanding; rather, it is the realization that understanding doesn’t count for much.  Thus, near the end of the novel, when Suttree makes the only remark that comes close to explaining why he has chosen the lifestyle that he has, he states (in a conversation with himself):

Of what would you repent?
Nothing.
Nothing?
One thing.  I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name.  Of that vanity I recant all.

And, really, it makes me wonder: would we all be better served if we recanted our efforts to attain to meaning, or something meaningful, in our own lives?  I wonder how much my own efforts are leading me down a path akin to Suttree’s…
5. The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison by Warren Fellows.
This is Warren Fellows’ (semi-autobiographical) account of the time he served in a Thai prison after being busted on heroin trafficking charges.  In the book, he spends some time explaining how he got into trafficking, what his time in prison was like (the bulk of the novel), and then what it was like transitioning back into ‘normal’ life in Australia.  It was a pretty intense and gripping story.  The opening scene — wherein Fellows cuts open an egg-sized boil on another inmate’s neck, only to see a bunch of worms spill out — is pretty much burned into my brain.
Mental Note: never go to prison in Thailand (yet another country to cross off the list… yeah, Russia, I’m looking at you).
Monthly Mix-Tape
1. The Veils, Under the Folding Branches; 2. A Perfect Circle, Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Sound of the War Drums; 3. Sunset Rubdown, The Empty Threats of Little Lord; 4. The xx, Shelter; 5. Titus Andronicus, To Old Friends and New; 6. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Home; 7. The Antlers, Two; 8. Mumford and Sons, Blank White Page; 9. Broken Bells, The High Road; 10. Blink-182, Stay Together for the Kids.

[Lots of typing… will edit later.]
So, I never got around to posting my February reviews, so I guess I’ll do these together.  Thankfully, when I was traveling at the start of March, I will able to finish off a number of books I started awhile ago, so it’s always nice when my whole stack turns over and I get to start a number of new books at once!  Anyway, I don’t have the books at hand while writing this post, so the reviews may be a bit shoddier than usual… mea culpa.
1. Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Kelly D. Liebengood.
I usually don’t spend a lot of time reading essay collections.  I often find the quality of the pieces collected to be hit-and-miss or find that the essays are so narrowly focused upon a specific sub-sub-sub-topic as to be of little interest (to me, anyway).
However, with just one or two exceptions, this collection of essays is extremely strong and was exciting to read (for me, anyway).  I really love the ways in which NT scholarship is advancing in its understanding of the early followers of Jesus in relation to the socio-political and economic context in which they lived.
What comes through very strongly in this series of essays is the way in which the economic mutualism of the early Christians entailed a practice that was very different than the models of ‘love patriarchalism’ and bourgeois forms of charity and ownership that have come to dominate NT studies over the last several decades.  Of course, this means that NT Christianity posits some pretty serious challenges to the ways in which we live as Christians today… but I reckon that is as it should be.
Very strongly recommended.
2. In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance edited by Richard A. Horsley.
I’m really quite excited to see the ways in which ‘political’ or ‘counter-imperial’ readings the the New Testament have matured over the years.  Not only is this true in general, as one scholar builds on the work of another, but it is also true of the writings of specific scholars, like Richard Horsley and Neil Elliott (both of whom have contributed essays for this volume, along with others like Norman Gottwald, Walter Brueggemann, and Warren Carter).
Given that so much of my reading in this area has been around Jesus and Paul, it was fun for me to read some of the other essays, particularly Gottwald’s reading of the Exodus story and of “early Israel as an anti-imperial community”.
As I stated above, I normally find essay collections to be pretty hit-and-miss, but this compilation is quite strong and well worth reading.
3. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History by Denis Feeney.
This book was a really great resource for the work I’m doing on Pauline eschatology and the way in which it contrasts with what I understand to be the eschatology of Roman imperialism.  What Feeney does is demonstrate the ways in which Roman constructions of both history and time are formed in order to create and sustain an embodied ideology of sacred imperial power.  This then also ends up being a handy compliment to contemporary theologians (whom I tend to associate with Hauerwas and the Duke school of thought) who have been seeking to recover the liturgy and the Church calendar in order to embody and fortify a certain contemporary Christian ideology.  Feeney reminds the reader that all of our constructions of history and time are ideologically-loaded and so hopefully somebody will do with our contemporary calendar what Feeney has done with the Roman calendar (actually, I’ll be doing some of this in my forthcoming work on Paul and politics but the more the merrier, right?).
Another helpful corrective in Feeney’s book is the emphasis that all cultures tend to hold to both cyclical and linear conceptions of time, and this is helpful in overcoming (or nuancing) the common binary found in NT studies (i.e. that Greek or Roman or ancient conceptions of time were cyclical whereas Jewish or Christian conceptions were linear).
Anyway, I would say this is recommended reading, but only for those who are interested in this particular field of study.
4. A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
There has already been a ton written about this book around the blogosphere, and I don’t have much to add to that discussion.  However, the respect that this book has garnered is well deserved (as is the controversy, but I’ll not bother engaging those debates here).  Basically, in this book, Taylor asks why a person’s default position (500 years ago) was to believe certain things about God and the cosmos, and why that default position is different today.  What changed along the way?  Well, a lot of things did (hence the length of the book).  However, what I especially appreciated about this book is the way in which Taylor provided a historical narrative that helped me make sense of my own historical situation and of the conflicting cross-currents I find myself experiencing.  I have read very few books that have helped me make sense of these things to the degree that occurs in A Secular Age.  Highly recommended.
5. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang.
For some of us, stating that ‘free trade’ is not free, and never has been free, comes as no surprise.  However, for others who have been indoctrinated into the ideology of global capitalism this statement seems shocking.  Thus, a reading of Ha-Joon Chang’s book is strongly recommended.  Chang is an economist who certainly knows his subject matter, but who is also able to communicate well with the broader public, so the book isn’t hard going.  What he demonstrates is the reality behind the rhetoric, and what becomes clear is the ways in which global capitalism is structured in order to favour and advance the power of those who already have power, while simultaneously slowing the advance of those who are trying to develop or rise out of poverty.  He covers a broad range of topics and, as I said before, this is recommended reading.
6. Twenty-First Century Capitalism (CBC Massey Lectures Series) by Robert Heilbroner.
Of the Massey Lectures that I have read thus far, I would say Heilbroner’s are the weakest.  This is not to say that this is a particularly bad book — it’s just that all the other contributions I’ve read were extremely strong.
Anyway, in this contribution, I feel like Heilbroner mostly restates and compacts themes that he has spoken of in more detail elsewhere (like inThe Worldly Philosophers).  Thus, he begins by trying to gain a bit of critical distance from outside capitalism in order to understand what defines capitalism, and he then goes on to look at capital, politics, and the market.
Heilbroner then concludes by cautiously positing some scenarios for the future (NB: the lectures were delivered in 1992).  Capitalism, Heilbroner, is too deeply ingrained into our way of life to be overcome in the twenty-first century.  Instead, he asserts, the best we can hope for is the deliberate creation of governments and other civic or political structures that are able to curb the excesses and counter the violence and exploitation that comes when capitalism is left unchecked.  Now, I should note that Heilbroner is particularly fond of his own prognosis… it’s just that he doesn’t think that the search for a “postcapitalist society” will be successful in the twenty-first century.  However, he does believe that it is important for us to hold onto the dream of such a society.  He believes that the tensions and failures of capitalism will only worsen in the days ahead and so he concludes that, in such a future, “it will help to have another social destination in our imaginations.”
7. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends by Michael White and David Epston.
Therapy tends to get looked down upon in certain academic theological circles.  You know, pastors aren’t counselors, it’s just a symptom of our self-centred “I’m the victim” culture, it’s a superficial effort at a quick fix, and all that jazz.  Of course, there is some truth in these criticisms and I remain quite critical of medical and (supposedly scientific) psychiatric models of care.  However, there are others, like White and Epston, who are doing really fabulous and exciting things via therapy (in fact, White and Epston sound a lot like Hauerwas and those who helped to develop a narrative-based approach to theology, as well as reminding me of scholars who are working with a more literary approach to biblical studies).
In this book, the authors draw heavily upon the writings up Michel Foucault in order to develop an approach to therapy that helps people to narrate and re-narrate their lives in ways that are more meaningful and life-giving.  They begin with much of the theory behind the work (and for those unfamiliar with Foucault the first part of the book may be difficult) and then move into concrete examples of how they engage in this practice.  Prominent amongst their techniques is the use of letter writing.  I found this practice to be quite exciting and have begun to employ it in my own work with street-involved young adults and have found it to be very fruitful.
All in all, a very good book, and one I would recommend to those who live and work in ways that might relate to this.
8. Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison.
This book is a first-hand account of Harrison’s experience of being a soldier in the First World War.  Apparently it made some waves when it was first released because, rather than praising the war or the heroism or valour of those involved therein, it tells (as much as possible) the nitty-gritty reality of what it’s like to be a soldier in trench warfare.  Not a pretty picture, to say the least (for example, to single out just one episode, Harrison speaks of his bayonet getting stuck in the chest of a German soldier and both he and the German end up screaming and trying to pull the bayonet out).  I couldn’t put this book down… although I do sometimes wonder what it is that draws me to stories like these…
9. Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time Volume 1) by Marcel Proust.
Yep, I’ve finally decided to knuckle down and read Proust.  Thankfully, I am enjoying him so far.  His prose, although requiring the reader to read slowly, is quite beautiful (even if his sentences can take up whole pages).  Basically, In Search of Lost Time, is the rambling story of the narrator’s life, told in a way that dwells upon themes of time and memory (amongst a host of other things).  It’s nice to just chip away at it and lose myself a little in the words.
10. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
This book was lent to me by a friend who stated that he has read it at least once a year for several years.  I’ve never been much of a sci-fi reader, so I thought I would give Ender’s Game a shot but based upon this friend’s recommendation and because I’ve other others mention the book.  It was a fun and mindless read — the story is about the fear of an(other) alien invasion and a boy, Ender, upon whom the fate of humanity depends.  If I was a ten year old boy again, this book would probably have fueled my fantasy life for months… but I was too busy reading about knights, wizards and pirates at that age.  Oh well.
11. Creature by Andrew Zuckerman.
This book was a birthday present from a friend and it is a fantastic collection of animal photos that were taken by Zuckerman.  The book and and the photos are really gorgeous — Zuckerman has a fantastic eye, and placing each picture on a plain white background works well.  The gift was a great reminder of the beauty and wonder that fills our world… and made me regret going back on my childhood dream of being a vet.
New Addition: Monthly Mix-Tape
So, I’ve been making mix-tapes for myself for awhile, and I’ve decided to add my ‘monthly mix-tape’ to my monthly book reviews.  Here are the songs that were rocking my world in March:
(1) Devotchka, How It Ends; (2) Pedro the Lion, June 18, 1976; (3) The Hold Steady, Your Little Hoodrat Friend; (4) Shearwater, The World in 1984; (5) Gary Jules, Mad World; (6) The Mountain Goats, Deut 2.10; (7) The Arcade Fire, Sonata; (8) The National, Cardinal Song; (9) Damien Jurado, Tonight I Will Retire; (10) Titus Andronicus, Four Score and Seven; (11) Over the Rhine, Idea #21 (It’s Not Too Late).