[The Bookshelf #60] Time, Place, People
Understanding the forces that shape our world—and our lives
Last Saturday on the blog, I briefly noted three books I read earlier this year that are helping me better understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
None of us knew exactly how the war would unfold. But the authors of these books—Timothy Snyder in particular—saw patterns unfolding before the rest of us did. The Road to Unfreedom was published four years ago (ancient history!), but Snyder’s analysis has proven prescient.
As I note in that post, “Reading these books has not made me an expert on Russia, Ukraine, or anything else. They won’t make you one either. But they offer clues.”
Put another way, becoming geopolitical experts isn’t the point. Cultivating curiosity and compassion while resisting manipulation—seems to me that’s the task before us right now. That, and becoming conversant in the language of the imprecatory psalms.
What I’ve Read Recently
“Combining restlessness with evangelicalism has been the story of my adult life.”
That relatable line comes from Richard Mouw in his 2019 book on the question of whether—and how—to hold onto the “evangelical” label, given what we might call The Circumstances. “I don’t see how I could have survived in the evangelical movement without the freedom made possible by the restlessness,” Mouw continues. “And I see a marvelous kind of restlessness in evangelicalism’s younger generation.”
That spirit of evangelical restlessness is alive and well in Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay (IVP, 2021) by Dan Stringer. Indeed, it is Mouw, Stringer’s mentor, who writes the foreword. And there’s another admirable Mouwist quality to Stringer’s writing: a refusal to take cheap shots, even when critiquing, lamenting, and wrestling, which is so much of what this book does.
Evangelicalism is famously decentralized and amorphous. There’s no Protestant Pope in a polo shirt issuing televised decrees from a balcony in Wheaton—or from somewhere in Nairobi or Seoul or Tegucigalpa. Evangelical statements of the theological variety are made always and everywhere by those who represent, at best, a minority stake in evangelicalism. And that’s before we even get to political statements, where definitions of evangelicalism all too often begin and end.
It may sound strange to those raised outside of the movement, but a lot of people—including Stringer—grew up in evangelicalism without realizing it, without ever really owning the label, much less considering disowning it. Eventually Stringer recognized that in a theological, missional, and ecclesiological sense, evangelicalism was indeed his home. Or, as he puts it in this book, he could no longer avoid the fact that evangelicalism was his mother.
It’s complicated, though. As we’ve said, evangelicalism is understood in different quarters in competing, often contradictory ways. White American evangelicalism can look quite different from African, Asian, and Latin American evangelicalism. And not all evangelicals in the United States are white, nor do evangelicals anywhere agree on everything. Different people use the label differently. So if we can’t agree on what evangelicalism is, what does it look like to contemplate leaving? Can we ever be sure that we’ve left? (Yeah, I’m asking for a friend.)
Stringer writes as a TCK, someone accustomed to living between cultures. And it’s that perpetual insider-outsider viewpoint, in my estimation, that makes this book so helpful and so interesting. It’s not giving too much away to say that Stringer chooses to stay (it’s right there in the subtitle), even if he first rehearses the many, many reasons it would be easy to leave—and why so many people are doing just that.
Stringer writes with hope. And not the naive kind. He wants us to pay attention to where we came from and to be clear-eyed about where we’re headed. “It can be easy to forget how evangelicalism got here and what it has given us,” he writes. “If there was no evangelicalism, perhaps we would not have been invited to follow Jesus or have a reason to engage the question of how to cultivate a healthier, less toxic evangelicalism.”
One gets the impression that this story is far from over. Like Stringer, evangelicals everywhere will continue to wrestle with the meaning of the word and to assess their place within that sprawling, evolving movement. What other choice do we have?
What I’m Reading Now
I grew up devouring Ken Burns’ 18.5-hour Baseball documentary series. My grandparents in New Jersey taped all nine episodes when the series aired on PBS in September 1994 and sent them to me in Guatemala. Those VHS tapes may not work anymore, but whenever I’ve moved they’ve come with me. They remain prized possessions.
It was in that documentary that I first encountered, through interviews, people whose books I would later read: Roger Angell, Buck O'Neil, Doris Kearns Goodwin, George Will, Bud Selig, John Thorn, Thomas Boswell, Donald Hall.
Now, with A Whole Different Ball Game (Ivan R. Dee; 1991, 2004), we can add Marvin Miller to the list. I like to read a baseball book in the spring, and given the lamentable situation vis-à-vis the MLB lockout, I thought I’d finally pick up this memoir by the former executive director of the players’ union to better understand the fraught history of labor relations in baseball.
I’m still in the early going, but the first few chapters of the book survey the events that shaped Miller into the man who would be so instrumental in bringing about “a whole different ball game.”
Here’s one interesting example. When Miller initially thought of leaving his prestigious post as chief economist for the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh to take the helm of the fledgling Players Association in New York, his colleagues wondered if he’d lost his mind. The union he worked for was large and powerful, doing important work. Unions in sports were a joke. And Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax weren’t exactly blue collar workers. So much for a moral commitment to the underdog, right?
But Miller soon found an answer that conveyed more than any rational explanation ever could. “I grew up in Brooklyn,” he would say, “not far from Ebbets Field.” He loved going to games, “one of the countless kids who felt intimately connected to the fortunes of the Dodgers,” who could “recite the vital statistics of every Dodger—and of most of their competition too.” He was a baseball fan. And as a baseball fan, he loved baseball players.
Miller was 33 when Walter O'Malley took control of the team and 40 when O’Malley moved the Brooklyn Dodgers as far away as he possibly could: to Los Angeles. For O’Malley, it was a lucrative business move. To the fans, it was a betrayal. Later, then, when Miller became executive director of the Players Association, his childhood Dodger fandom—and O'Malley’s subsequent betrayal—had a lot to do with it.
Time, place, people: the forces that made Marvin Miller who he was. Forces that shape every one of us.
What I Might Read Next
One of the highlights of last summer was the opportunity to copy edit a wonderful book called Lily Packed a Facemask (Wipf and Stock, 2021). The author, a long-time pastor of Lutheran churches near Los Angeles and Seattle, also happens to be my uncle, Larry Thomas.
When the world first went into lockdown, he and my aunt Ann were visiting their kids and grandkids in Texas. Even after they returned home to Washington, the church was unable to meet in person for some time. So pastoral care took the form of letters—a practice he continued through the end of that pandemic year.
It’s fitting that the first pastoral letter in this collection was written during Lent, the liturgical season when we refrain from saying alleluia. Living through the pandemic has been a lenten experience for many of us. What we needed then—what we need now—is pastoral care.
It’s one thing to accompany people in the good times: confirmations, weddings, baptisms. Celebration is good! But not all of life is joyous. So a hallmark of true pastoral care is a willingness to walk with people through the darkness, to name the darkness for what it is, and together, to watch for the light. Pastor Larry does that in this book, which is why I’m eager to read it again this Lent.
As always, thanks for reading.
Tim
+++
“We should not confuse a blinkered nationalism and its rejection of the Other, always the seed of violence, with patriotism, a salutary, generous feeling of love for the land where we were born, where our ancestors lived, where our first dreams were forged, a familiar landscape of geographies, loved ones, and events that are transformed into signposts of memory and defenses against solitude. Homeland is not flags, anthems, or apodictic speeches about emblematic heroes, but a handful of places and people that populate our memories and tinge them with melancholy, the warm sensation that no matter where we are, there is a home for us to return to.”
– Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of Reading and Fiction