Egregious Reader

 If you didn't know, Bonhoeffer was in NYC as a Sloan Fellow at Union Theological. He was 24, post doctoral. It was 1930-31. He actually got involved at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and taught Sunday School there. "On Jan 12, 1931 ... an African American man was accused of rape in Maryville, Missouri, chained to a schoolhouse roof, and burned to death by a white mob. Bonhoeffer read the story of that lynching and viewed the graphic photographs." (22) I knew some of this from other biographies, but what Williams does is dive deeper into what Bonhoeffer was reading and where he traveled, as well as what was going on in Harlem -- Alan Locke's New Negro and what James Weldon Johnson called the Harlem Renaissance. Williams even sought and spoke with Albert Fisher's family for more insight. (Fisher was an black theology student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Harlem).  Williams also introduces us to Harlem and the movements taking place there (I am so excited that i...

Goza takes us back to foundational thinkers of Western Civilization and specifically those who are the roots from which the American experiment begins: Thomas Hobbes; John Locke and Adam Smith. Specifically, Goza wants to know what they said about slavery and what they say about the Bible. Smith is a little different from Locke and Hobbes, but the older thinkers essentially use reason to reduce the Bible to formula and a means of control/order. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Most people know the quote “the life of man is nasty, brutish and short.” This is from Leviathan where he takes such a dark view of human beings and the chaos they generate that he argues for a totalitarian tyranny to keep us from endless war. One of the instruments this tyrant finds useful is religion - “that feare of things invisible.” Goza also says that Hobbes, an Enlightenment thinker, turned to reason as the way forward, for individuals to basically handle ordering society like one would solve a geometry problem. ...

Derrick Bell was the first tenured African-American law professor at Harvard Law School. This happened in 1971. This book is his story of his protest for the Harvard Law School to tenure its first African-American woman. He announced his unpaid leave April 24, 1990.  Universities often have visiting professors, sometimes for multiple semesters, but these professors are not embraced until they are given tenure. Bell watched as qualified African-American professors who were teaching at Harvard were rejected or overlooked for tenure. Harvard did not enjoy his protest and ultimately, after three years, terminated his tenure.  Bell tells this story, but also uses it as an example to explore all the aspects of protest, especially a solitary one like this. In it, he walks us through the many ways status quo is maintained ... as he states in the conclusion - "After all, there is at Harvard, as in the rest of our modern world, a distressing commitment to the unwritten commandment: 'Tho...

I think this was my first "intellectual history". I picked it up as it came up in a search in my research into the year 1976. Ok, so civil religion is the combination of love of country with religion ... that God's judgement of your country is always GOOD. Intellectual History means that while Haberski will take us through the events of history from the cold war to the recent wars in the Middle East, his focus is on what the thinkers and writers of these times had to say.  The book introduced me to many thinkers and writers, particularly Will Herberg. He and Nieburhr both Will Herberg pointed to the danger of the hard Manichean terms everyone was talking as the cold war heated up. "The feared that the struggle against a foe as terrible as communism would create a one-dimensional moral world, in which those opposed to communism got to determine good and evil." (44). Herberg in 1955 became a prominent critic of civil religion with his book Protestant, Catholic, Je...

 What an incredible writer! And I feel like the style is gone, just don't feel like anyone writes with this kind of patience and detail, nor does anyone allow for such long monologues and so much philosophy, legal, science, etc. to be brought in. It is also shocking how similar it feels to Dickens and Austin, more Dickens in the horrors of poverty and Austin in the melo-dramatic and extravagently wordy mother-in-law and marry for love or money portion.  I never realized that this was a deep exploration into the Great Man Theory ... that there are some great men who get to transcend morality to accomplish their greatness. My mind, ignorantly and with only a popular understanding, jumps to Neitzsche, but it says its very unlikely that FD read him. More likely is that both FN and FD were reading the same things or some of the same things. Where FN embraced and took these ideas further, FD explored the dangers in this novel.  I did find the resolve unsatisfying though ... or ...

Sisters In The Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk  is a key work in womanist theology. Black women were not quite invited into two different movements in the seventies ... Black Theology and Feminist Theology. One was black, but male and other was female but white. What is more, the experiences that these two groups detail do not map onto the experiences of black women. A key and founding story for Black Liberation Theology is the exodus, a powerful key. Cone and others argue that Jesus is about the action of liberation and so the church should always be on the side of liberation.  Williams explores a different story, that of Hagar and Ishmael. Hagar is an Egyptian slave of Sarai, yes to become Sarah, wife of Abraham (yes, "Father Abraham had many sons ... ). Williams leads us to "reread [Genesis 16 and 21] with the slave woman Hagar as center of attention, Genesis 16:1-16 illustrates what the history of many African-American women taught them long ago; that is, t...

John Eastman wrote an opinion piece in Newsweek on Aug 12th 2020 asking questions about Kamala Harris's right to run as Vice President. Eastman is actually arguing what he wishes/wants to the law to say: that you are only a citizen by birth if your are parent was a citizen, AKA he is questioning birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship is one of the unique things about America and it massively contributes to our diversity as a nation.  It is also born out of the racist maneuvering of the laws around slavery. The famous Dred Scott case of 1857, which contributed to starting the civil war, resulted in a 7-2 decision that African American Dred Scott had no claim because he was not a citizen. In an opinion written by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court ruled that black people "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizen' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prodigy who grew up in the upper class of Berlin during WWI and decided to study theology and become a pastor. He traveled extensively and was deeply impacted by his year in NYC at Union. While there, he spent a lot of time in Harlem working with Abyssinian Baptist and reading the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. He was one of the few early voices warning about the danger of the Fuhrer Principle and of Hitler specifically. He, with others in his family, eventually became part of the attempted coup against Hitler. This led to his death by the state just before Germany surrendered.  One of his famous writings is a longer letter called After Ten Years that he wrote to friends and some fellow conspirators. It is an essay that explores their work and their country with encouragement to not see all their efforts as wasted.  One of the sections is called On Stupidity. He is not using the word in the normal bully put down way, like “Look at the blackboa...

Ideological Fortress (A Modest Explanation*) I have an idea for you all. The best way to keep your world intact is to mark off your own territory and never let yourself see outside of it. Why don’t you come up with a belief system that puts you at the center of salvation! Yes, that will be perfect. Now, the only reason you will ever talk to others is in hopes of converting them! The whole time they are trying to tell you about their life, you will not really be able to listen, right! You will just be looking for just the right door to jump in with your pitch! Actually, the best chance you will get is when people are scared or down on their luck. So you will always be waiting for that low moment or talking to someone who is struggling.** This will only further your ideas that it is people outside your four walls of ideology who need your salvation. You will never really hear from the strong ones right! And if you do, you will just think they are lying because they don’t have your salvat...

Stephen Haynes is a professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis. This is his fourth publication about the young German theologian who was famously killed for being part of the Abwehr conspiracy to kill Hitler. He felt compelled to write this book to address the outsized use of the “Bonhoeffer moment” language that Eric Metaxes utilized in pleading for evangelicals to vote for Trump , among other battles raging over this long dead young pastor/leader. To get us there, Haynes takes us back to 9/11 and the way Bonhoeffer was utilized to justify America's take down of Sadam Hussein. This was clear appropriation of the most general idea of who Bonhoeffer was. It shows the plasticity of Bonhoeffer in the hands of popular American writers and public figures. Much like Jesus or God is good to pull in to justify/rationalize what power wanted to do anyway. Actually, Bonhoeffer is an even better cloak because most people don’t know who Bonhoeffer is anyway so when they hear bi...