New for November 2009

Just for a change, I thought I’d offer you a list of what’s new and notable on the religion shelves for November 2009.

Controversial guru Joel Osteen has a new one out titled It’s Your Time. According to PW, it’s pretty much the same as all his others. Nice smile, though.

Presbyterian-turned-Catholic Scott Hahn is popular in some quarters, and his new one is titled Signs of Life: 40 Catholic Customs and Their Biblical Roots. From the subtitle, I’m guessing it has an apologetics as well as inspirational perspective.

Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius have authored Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. I’m not sure why we need yet another book on neuroscience and religion, but there you go.

Finally, Wayne Dyer offers wisdom from the Chinese classic in A New Way of Thinking, A New Way of Being: Experiencing the Tao Te ching. This looks like one of those “gift” books with only one sentence per artfully designed page. Perfect for the baby-boomer in your life.

The Novice

The main problem with this book is that it’s far too long. The author takes two hundred pages to describe the minutiae of his life before he gets to the point where he becomes a monk. The blow-by-blow accounts of events and conversations then continue for another hundred pages until he leaves to become a writer. There’s a story in here somewhere, but this book would need severe pruning to reveal it.

Stephen Schettini. The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit, and What I Learned. Austin, Tex.: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2009. Hardcover. 349 pages. ISBN 1608320057. $24.95.

The Cross and the Switchblade

Julia Duin’s book prompted me to read David Wilkerson’s 1963 The Cross and the Switchblade, which sold 15 million copies and was made into a movie.

One evening in 1958, small-town pentecostal pastor David Wilkerson felt the urge to sell his television. He planned on praying during the hours he would normally have watched TV. This he did.

Once into his prayer routine, he received an even more significant prompting: to go to New York City to help members of a teenage gang he’d read about in Life magazine. They were on trial for a savage attack on a cripple.

When David Wilkerson got to New York, his inability to even make contact with the gang members forced him to abandon this mission. Not only that, but a photo of him holding up a Bible at the trial was featured on the front pages of the papers — the rube pastor making a fool of himself in the sophisticated city. He returned home, the laughing stock of the region.

Despite this humiliation, a line from the Bible (“all things work together for good”) persuaded him to return to New York — though for no reason he knew of. Once he got there, he was walking down the street one evening when suddenly some members of a rival gang recognized him from the photo that had been in the newspapers.

Wilkerson befriended the gang and was introduced to a world of heroin addicts, switchblade fights, and violence for thrills. His picture in the papers gave him an entry everywhere he went. And so began his street-ministry in the city — an eight-hour trip in each direction.

On the streets of New York, gang leaders got down on their knees to pray with him. When the police stopped him from preaching on the streets, it only gave him added credibility in the eyes of the gangs he was trying to help. A large-scale youth rally was followed by Wilkerson moving to New York full-time. His converts made a 13-week TV series with him. He founded the Teen Challenge Center, a safe place for the gang members to come to. And, since this book was written, the Teen Challenge format has been duplicated in over four hundred other cities.

In the tradition of the big bestseller, this is both a powerful book and an easy read. And I liked the cover, with its simple and refreshing type-only design in the style common in the 70s.

David Wilkerson. The Cross and the Switchblade. 1963. Reprint, New York: Jove Books (Penguin), 1977. Paperback. 176 pages. ISBN 0515090255. $5.99.

Working with Koans

I never understood the point of those Zen koans. Until now, that is. In this ebook Albert Low offers the only intelligible explanation of Zen koans I’ve ever heard. Words seduce us away from reality into an artificial world of their own, he says. The point of koan practice is to break out of this artificiality, and then to demonstrate this achievement by responding from reality itself rather than from its counterfeit. Except, of course, that the reality was there all along and didn’t need to be “achieved” in the first place. Worth a read — and the price is right, too.

Albert Low. Working with Koans. Los Gatos, Calif.: Smashwords, 2009. Ebook. 10,470 words. No ISBN. $0.00.

Days of Fire and Glory

I couldn’t put this book down! Once I’d started, I read all 300+ pages in less than twenty-four hours.

Graham Pulkingham was an Episcopal priest in Houston, overwhelmed by the problems of serving a decaying neighborhood. He received what he took to be a message from God telling him to go to New York. There, at the hands of David Wilkerson (The Cross and the Switchblade), he received a pentecostal-style baptism in the Spirit. When Pulkingham returned to Houston, he discovered he had the power to bring about miraculous healings. Crutches were left at the altar rail. Incurable diseased were pronounced cured.

Many of his fellow Episcopalians were appalled by the charismatic direction Pulkingham’s spirituality had taken. Some questioned his sanity. Long-time members left the parish. But encouraged by prophetic utterances, Graham Pulkingham persisted. He formed a daily 5:30 a.m. prayer group, to which several dozen people committed themselves, despite their full-time jobs. People sold large homes to move to small apartments nearer his newly charismatic church and care for the poor of the neighborhood. Above all, there was praying in tongues.

Pulkingham’s church attracted more and more people. The weekday schedule grew to include two morning prayer meetings as well as Bible study and interpretation. They opened a street ministry and a coffee house. The young musicians at the coffee house made successful records. Many churchgoers formed communal households. People from out of town came to visit Redeemer church to see what was going on. CBS made an hour-long documentary about them. Graham Pulkington himself wrote the first of several books. Sunday attendance, which had once been 200 people, grew to 2,000 people. Even a Friday evening service would attract 800. People came from as far away as Europe.

And then, ever so slowly, things started to go wrong. The communal households became increasingly cult-like and dictatorial. Community became an end in itself rather than a means to an end. The church became so intensely inward-looking that some members only met outsiders a few times each year. As outreach locations were founded, the Redeemer leaders, including Graham Pulkingham, spread themselves too thinly. And money was tight. A household might have only three wage-earners to support two dozen people. The mentally ill were counseled by volunteers with no professional training.

In 1978, Redeemer church made televion news again — this time for a very different reason. The community was charged with holding young people against their will. When the parents brought a court case, a TV station ran a weeklong series branding Redeemer a cult.

Marriages broke down under the strain of such an intense and demanding life. While the church and its members had formerly seemed to be under divine protection in this rough neighborhood, robberies and even home invasions began to occur. Women were raped. After having spent several years absent from the church on a mission to the UK, Graham Pulkingham left Houston again, this time to move to Colorado. His replacement as leader seemed unable to cope with the responsibilities and stopped returning phone calls. Allegations of child abuse surfaced. People drifted away from Redeemer church and its problems.

Finally, in 1992 the truth about Graham Pulkingham himself emerged. Despite being married, he had been persuading the men he counseled to have homosexual sex with him. A year later, he was dead of a heart attack.

So what conclusions we can draw from this tale of disappointed hopes, with its cast of hundreds? Author Julia Duin had her own experience of living in a Christian community, and she describes community life as “so hard . . . the cost would be staggering.” Her book is published by the Crossland Foundation, who “seek to identify the causes for these disorders and the ways that these disorders can be eliminated from the church.”

Julia Duin. Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community. Baltimore, Md.: Crossland Press, 2009. Hardcover. 368 pages. ISBN 0979027977. $24.95.

A Journey to the Retreat Centers of British Columbia

On Rhiannon Frater’s blog, I read about a site called Smashwords, which allows you to publish your writing in multiple ebook formats. It takes a while to understand the formatting they require, and because they’re so busy, the conversion process even after upload takes another hour. Once done, though, you can either make your book free, or you can charge for it. My offering describes a journey from the Pacific to the Rockies staying at the retreat centers of British Columbia. Clicking on the cover image allows you to read it on Smashwords.

Rapture Ready!

More on Christians as consumers. Daniel Radosh tours the world of Christian tradeshows, books, music, T-shirts, “gifts,” Christian theme parks — and, of course, Christian pro wrestling. There’s Gospel Golf Balls, Scripture Candy, Testamints, Oil of Gladness anointing oil, and a self-help book on how to be more intolerant. The players in this industry are well aware that their products raise outsiders’ eyebrows; in their defense, they say their enterprises are a form of ministry.

Daniel Radosh. Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. New York: Scribner, 2008. Hardcover. 316 pages. ISBN 0743297709. $25.00.

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America

In the 1920s and ’30s Aimee Semple McPherson was the most famous preacher in America.

In many respects, she was an odd mix. Theologically conservative, her dramatic style of presentation was anything but. Her Angelus Temple in Los Angeles was a 5,000-seat megachurch that looked more like a plush theater than a church. This was the woman who brought Hollywood to religion and put the fun into fundamentalism.

Then there are other contradictions. Like a liberal, she worked for racial unity, but like a right-winger she promulgated the fear that communists lurked everywhere. Her physical presence was said to have been womanly, yet some of the photos in this book show her with a distinctly mannish face.

Her multiple divorces were topped by a bizarre incident in which she claimed to have been kidnapped for a month, though the evidence points to her having been shacked up with a secret lover the whole time. To date, the real facts remain a mystery.

So buzzed would she be after preaching to crowds that she started taking prescription sleeping pills. Finally, like a ’60s rockstar, she died of a drug overdose.

After reading this book I had the impression that I knew the public persona but not the woman inside. If I ever come across her autobiography, I’d like to get her story in her own words.

Matthew Avery Sutton. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Harvard University Press, 2009. Paperback. 361 pages. ISBN 0674032535. $18.95.

Ugly as Sin

Why don’t Catholic churches look like churches any more? That’s the question Michael Rose sets out to answer in Ugly as Sin.

The book begins with a meditation on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to illustrate the principles of sacred architecture. The author then leads us on a guided tour of a traditional church, starting from the facade and proceeding all the way inside up to the altar and the tabernacle at the front. Along the way, he gives us the history of each architecural feature — much of which was new to me.

Then we come to modern churches. Why do they look so bland? According to this book, it’s largely due to a group of people called liturgical design consultants, aided by a document titled Environment and Art in Catholic Worship — a provisional subcommittee report widely misunderstood to be some sort of official directive from Rome.

So can a sense of the sacred be restored? Michael Rose thinks so, and he points to examples of modern interiors that have been transformed by renovations. As for the exteriors, he says, we will simply have to abandon the existing modern buildings and start again. The book is amply illustrated with photographs demonstrating his points.

Michael S. Rose. Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Change Them Back Again. Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute, 2009. Paperback. 256 pages. ISBN 1933184442. $18.95.

Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

A collection of essays for you this morning. The authors of these studies of American religious literature are academics, but they write here in an accessible and sometimes even zippy manner. Some of the articles are broad surveys of the Bibles, tracts, and paperbacks produced over the years; others focus on specific topics. The cover gives a good flavor of what’s inside. That In His Steps is a 1973 comic-book version of the nineteenth-century novel that popularized the expression “What Would Jesus Do?” Megiddo Message (who could resist a cover like that? Click on the thumbnail to see it in more detail) was the output of an early twentieth-century sect whose literature reeled in devoted followers from around the world.

Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, eds. Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America. University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Paperback. 392 pages. ISBN 0299225747. $29.95.

Quitting Church

A few posts back, I mentioned a book describing how protestant churches have turned themselves into businesses. The consequences are inevitable: congregations have begun to think of themselves as consumers. And, boy, are there some unhappy customers out there.

According to journalist Julia Duin, people aren’t leaving just because they’ve become “no religion” or “spiritual but not religious.” They’re leaving because they’re not satisfied with the product on offer.

Churches, says Duin, don’t speak to the way people actually live and work today. They never get to grips with the really difficult issues. They over-promise and under-deliver on community. While 81 percent of pastors think their own preaching excellent, only 44 percent of their congregations agree. And with so many people working and raising children at the same time, Sundays have become too valuable to spend in church — especially in a church that fails to nourish.

So what’s to be done? Duin sees a few isolated bright spots, but for the most part, she says, the churches ain’t gonna change.

BTW, comments on book covers are also welcome on my blog. How do you like the “new plain” look that’s appeared over the last few years?

Julia Duin. Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2008. Paperback. 186 pages. ISBN 0801072271. $12.99.

The Masonic Myth

I must admit, before reading this book I didn’t know very much about the masons. Just the usual stuff about the secret handshakes, the aprons, and the rolled-up trouser legs. But who better to guide us through the murky waters of freemasonry than Jay Kinney, former editor of Gnosis magazine, author of two books on esoterica, and, as we learn here, something of an apronista himself.

The received story goes that modern masonry evolved from guilds of real medieval stoneworkers. The problem with this theory is that there isn’t actually very much evidence for it. Masonry as we know it appears suddenly in London, and there is no obvious line of development from the working masons of Scotland — nor, for that matter, from the historical Knights Templar. From London it spread higgledy-piggledy to continental Europe and to eighteenth-century America.

Having surveyed the history (and the myths about it), Kinney introduces us to the structure and rites of freemasonry. Those 33rd degree masons you hear about are not, in fact, thirty ranks above ordinary master masons. The additional orders represent only possible lines of development for a mason. In any case, they are a late addition. The author then explains the rituals and the system of progressing from degree to degree, and goes on to discuss some of the symbols and, indeed, the whole question of symbolism as a system of development.

The theme of the book is dismissing the myths surrounding freemasonry. Kinney returns to this theme when he fills us in on the Illuminati, who, he says, died out in the late eighteenth century and remained dead until they were resurrected by twentieth-century conspiracy theorists.

Most interesting is a 1638 Scottish poem he quotes that refers to both the Rosicrucians and the masons: “For we be Brethren of the Rosie Crosse; We have the Mason word, and second sight.” The tone, he remarks, is satirical, and shows that masons already held a place in the popular imagination, at least in Scotland.

A final chapter asks where masonry will go in the future in light of a declining and ageing membership.

Kinney’s book is lucid and well-informed and comes with informative and often charming period illustrations. It’s also very timely, given the release of Dan Brown’s recent megaseller, The Lost Symbol. Yet today’s public has a pretty short attention span. Today I learned that Dan Brown had already been knocked off Amazon’s #1 spot — by Sarah Palin.

Jay Kinney. The Masonic Myth: Unlocking the Truth About the Symbols, the Secret Rites, and the History of Freemasonry. HarperOne, 2009. Paperback. 288 pages. ISBN 0060822562. $15.99.

As the World Dies: Siege

Normally, this blog is a just a list of the books I’ve read, but on the blogosphere recently I came across a story that’s so amazing, I just have to tell you about it. Self-publishing fiction is said to be waste of time. This is a story of one writer who made it work.

Rhiannon Frater writes horror novels — not something I’d read myself, but wait till you hear her story. (You can read it in full on her blog, where she kindly shares a record of every step she took.)

She started off by posting one chapter at a time, as she wrote them, on a couple of internet forums. The stuff she was writing must have been head and shoulders above everyone else, because she started getting rave reviews and building a fanbase.

When she approached agents and publishers, though, all she got were form rejection letters. So then she started reading up on self-publishing. Again, the whole story is on her blog. After getting the cold shoulder for so long, she finally decided to go independent.

Rhiannon kept writing, kept blogging, and commissioned a cover painting for the print version of her book. She got the book copyedited and then inexpensively published on Amazon.

With the fanbase she had built up over several years, she started selling thousands and thousands of copies of her books. Now she’s again posting a chapter a day, this time on a special-purpose blog she set up for a limited time only.

I don’t like to clutter my posts here with links, but I’ve added a link to her blog on the right-hand side of the page if you want to read more. And, of course, I’m sure she’d be very happy if you went over to Amazon to check out her offering!

Rhiannon Frater. As The World Dies: Siege: A Zombie Trilogy. CreateSpace, 2009. Paperback. 398 pages. ISBN 1441405178. $16.95.

The Search for God and Guinness

This is the story of Arthur Guinness and his famous dark beer.

Beer has been much more central to society than most people realize. One historian even speculates that the need for organized beer-making provided the original motivation for humans to group themselves together into stable agricultural settlements. And did you know that the Puritan ship Arbella carried with it over 10,000 gallons of beer for thirsty Pilgrims in the New World? No, I didn’t either. But so we learn in the first chapter.

And then we come to Arthur Guinness himself. He was not the first to brew a dark beer, but his father Richard perfected the recipe. Having learned his trade from his father, Arthur Guinness then opened the brewery in Dublin that would one day lead to the establishment of a global brand.

There’s more to this than a financial success story, though. Arthur Guinness was deeply Christian and one who walked his talk in both his charitable and his business endeavors. Not only this, but he passed his strong faith down through many generations in the form of his son John Grattan Guinness and his descendants. These were the nineteenth-century Guinness missionaries, preachers, and founders of charities.

Finally, we come to the twentieth century. Guinness begins to advertise for the first time and the famous dark beer goes global. In a concluding chapter, the author draws some moral maxims from the Guinness story — and very good they are, too.

Author Stephen Mansfield appears to be a man of immense energy — not only a writer but also a pastor, radio show host, and founder of a book packaging company. He writes with a down-to-earth sense of humor (and includes tourist snaps of himself at Guinness locations in Ireland!), and he marshals his facts with the sure touch of a master.

The results are splendid and throughly entertaining.

Stephen Mansfield. The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. Hardcover. 304 pages. ISBN 1595552693. $24.99.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit

At one time, self-publishing meant commissioning a printer to make up 5,000 copies of your book, then storing them in your basement until you sold them. Not any more. CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon, will print just a single copy of your book at a time, and only in response to a customer order on Amazon. Christy Pinheiro’s and Nick Russell’s text walks you through the steps of self-publishing in this new and digital way.

The authors encourage you to think of self-publishing as a business venture. This means they give all the steps necessary to register and plan a business, and at the same time, they discourage the publication of fiction, memoirs, and personal opinions that really aren’t viable as commercial propositions.

This is a very practical book — precisely the kind of specialized how-to guide the authors say the CreateSpace process works best for. The only thing missing, I felt, was information on book design and typesetting, for which the authors refer the reader to volumes covering these subjects. All in all, this is an excellent guide for the publishing beginner who wants to be walked through the process of self-publishing from conception and planning to production and marketing.

C. Pinheiro and Nick Russell. The Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Publishing for Profit! Start Your Own Home-Based Publishing Company and Publish Your Non-Fiction Book with CreateSpace and Amazon. Pineapple Publications, 2009. Paperback. 189 pages. ISBN 0982266006. $18.95.

Zen and the Kingdom of Heaven

There are dozens of books out there on the Catholic encounter with Zen. Most of them are either introductions to Zen for Christians or relatively intellectual comparative studies. What I liked about this one is that the first part, at least, is solidly rooted in the nitty-gritty of practice. For Tom Chetwynd, the encounter between Zen and Christianity is a personal one, and includes juggling family responsibilities as well as beliefs. Not only that, but he tells his story with an engaging sense of humor. The second part of the book is far less satisfying than the first, since the historical comparison presented relies largely on speculation. Still, the author has an interesting point of view.

Tom Chetwynd. Zen and the Kingdom of Heaven. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001. Paperback. 169 pages. ISBN 0861711874. $16.95.

Shopping for God

You’ve probably noticed the way protestant churches have become more and more like businesses over the years. This is a study of the phenomenon by advertising professor James B. Twitchell. One of the earliest examples he notes are those church signs with moveable letters aimed drumming up business. They began to appear in the 1950s. From there it was on to the Christian merchandising, the branding, the paid advertising, and the slickly packaged megachurches. Twitchell’s research included field trips to study the “products” on offer along Route 21 in Florida. Although an academic, he writes here in a breezy and bemused journalistic style. The results are entertaining, though (for me) somewhat shocking, too.

James B. Twitchell. Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Hardcover. 336 pages. ISBN 0743292871. $26.00.

True Meditation

Back to Adyashanti. After reading the book mentioned a few posts ago, I bought this audio CD set. (Confusingly, he also has another book out with the same title as this 3-CD set.)

I found these audio CDs just as precise in their analysis as the End of Your World book but even more powerful.

On the first CD, Adyashanti talks about a form of meditation where one “allows things to be as they are,” without any other agenda. This allows unresolved psychological material to come to the surface. But beyond this, he says, is an even deeper level of awareness.

On the second CD he discusses a practice he says will avoid the problem of meditation leading to disengagement. He calls it “meditative inquiry.” Here one investigates a question while speaking only directly from experience. I must admit I got lost in the discussion that followed. Also, I was expecting it to be like the inquiry into thoughts and feelings he discusses in the End of Your World book (pp. 54–55), but I don’t think that is actually what he intends here.

The third CD is the one that has the guided meditations on it. The first involves sitting down just to see what happens when you don’t try to make anything in particular happen. The second is about differentiating between the will of the mind and what he calls the “heart’s will.” The final meditation is his “meditative self-inquiry.” This last one I found least interesting, as it turned out to be more like a lecture than a guided meditation.

I found the first CD and the first of the guided meditations very, very powerful.

Adyashanti. True Meditation. Sounds True, 2006. 3 Audio CDs. 3.5 hours. ISBN 1591794617. $24.95.

A Victorian Publisher

It’s all here. The bidding wars over books that haven’t even been written yet. The “me too” titles designed to milk popular trends. The books written very quickly for money. The ones with extra leading to make them look longer than they really are. This was the publishing scene in the 1830s. Printing technology may have changed, but human nature hasn’t.

Speaking of which, have you notice how writers of a certain sort like to complain about how the public’s literary taste has deteriorated over the years? Samuel Johnson noted writers doing the exact same thing — in a piece for the Idler dated March 29, 1760.

Royal A. Gettman. A Victorian Publisher. Cambridge University Press, 1960. No ISBN. Spotted on Oak Knoll Books at $50.00.

A New Earth

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I read a whole bunch of this kind of material. Reading Eckhart now is like taking a walk down memory lane. Given that so little of what he says is original, how come his books have become so popular? I think it’s because he writes with such admirable clarity. He expresses himself in simple sentences and ordinary words. His work, particularly The Power of Now, has the feel of a modern classic. I can see people still reading it decades from now.

Eckhart Tolle. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. New York: Penguin, 2006. Paperback. 336 pages. ISBN 0452289963. $14.00.