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Nugent’s book is of special interest because it feeds into my current writing project, namely: “The Politics of the Nonviolent God” —one that might be seen as a sequel to Nugent’s Politics of Yahweh and to Yoder’s The Politics of [the Nonviolent] Jesus. My line of reasoning is that if Jesus was the fullest revelation of God (Yahweh) available to us, and if Jesus was nonviolent, then the God whom Jesus worshipped is nonviolent. Yet Yoder’s God is a “Warrior God,” and Nugent’s work is a thoroughgoing affirmation of Yoder’s Warrior God!

Herein lies the spiritual and ethical challenge for all of us: As long as we believe that Ultimate Power (our God, the God of Jesus of Nazareth) is characterized by violence, by the Warrior, then we as followers of Jesus, as pacifists, as citizens of a global humanity, will consciously or subconsciously support the instruments of violence as a necessarily essential part of our political institutions. But we now know (beyond the aid of the biblical canon) — that unless we learn to live together without violence, we will be destroyed by Violence.

—Ray Gingerich is professor emeritus of theology and ethics, Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA

This novel set in England is the story of a man who lived an unremarkable life. Harold and his wife Maureen had established a life and a routine which did not include exchange of warmth and affection.

Early in his retirement he received a letter which changed his life and his routine. It was a letter which told him that Queenie was near death in a nursing home in the north of England. Harold lived in the south of England. Queenie and Harold had both been employed by a company whose boss was a tyrant.

He wrote a letter to Queenie and went out the door of his home to post the letter. On the way to post the letter he met a young woman who told him how an act of kindness had given life to her grandmother. This conversation led him to think he had to do more than post a letter. He knew he had to visit Queenie.

This is a remarkable story about the meaning of a personal pilgrimage and what one can discover on a pilgrimage. Our reading group read this and had excellent conversation about it.

—Bernie Turner, retired pastor, McMinnville, OR

This is a fascinating story of a woman who was the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father. She was born and raised in New York, but growing up she never felt that she belonged. Her parents were very sophisticated people. Her father was a famous professor at Columbia and recognized around the world for his scholarship. She found her “place” as an actress. For several years now she has been doing a one-person performance of her own story. She has discovered that many young people struggle with the same issues she experienced. She and her family visited Lebanon many times where there was a large family of her mother’s. She ultimately came to feel at home in Beirut as much or more than she felt in New York.

I found this book particularly interesting because of our current political situation. How she found her “place” was truly remarkable. Most of us have engaged in a search for place but without the tensions she experienced. Her courage and determination in finding her path is inspiring.

—Bernie Turner, retired pastor, McMinnville, OR

Some books are inspirational; others are fun, yet others provide valuable information. Few books have the capacity to impact our very perception of reality. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is just such a book. I especially appreciated the opening and closing sections of the book. In the former, the author offers a rather protracted “parable” concerning the stark differences between seeing a forest from above, as the locus of commercial possibilities, and seeing a forest from its very midst, as the locus of an irreducibly complex web. In the closing section, Scott leads us through an epistemological reflection on the Greek concept of metis (μῆτις) (cunningness or wisdom, craft, skill) as a form of knowledge that is not replaceable by scientific knowledge. I found this reflection in particular to be eye-opening in areas as diverse as language instruction, politics, education, even parenting!

“The problem… is that certain practical choices cannot, ‘even in principle, be adequately captured in a system of universal rules’.” (p. 322). Anyone who has been a teacher or reared a child knows this all too well!

—Pedro Sandin, Brevard, NC

I read Walter J. Miller’s first book, A Canticle for Liebowitz, when I was about 12 years old. It’s the pilgrimage adventures of 17-year-old novice, Brother Frances Gerard, who is on silent retreat in the radiated desert of the American southwest in the middle of the 26th century. This summer I found a hardback of Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman for $1.50. Apparently, Miller had written two books in his life: The Canticle, published in 1959, and Saint Leibowitz, published nearly 40 years later.

Both are one epic science fiction story about the church of Rome (or New Rome), a community of Benedictine monks, and the ruling Empire after the catastrophic event of the Flame Deluge (nuclear holocaust). In the second, Brother Blacktooth St. George at Leibowitz Abbey is having a crisis of vocation:

“Blacktooth remembered clearly the first time he had asked to be released from his final vows as a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz. … It was the third year of Blacktooth’s work (assigned to him by Dom Jarad himself) of translating all seven volumes of the Venerable Boedullus’ Liber Originum, that scholarly but highly speculative attempt to reconstruct from the evidence of later events a plausible history of the darkest of all centuries, the twenty-first—of translating it from the old monastic author’s quaint Neo-Latin into the most improbable of languages, Brother Blacktooth’s own native tongue, the Grasshopper dialect of Plains Nomadic, for which not even a suitable phonetic alphabet existed prior to the conquests (3174 and 3175 A.D.) of Hannegan II in what had once been called Texas.”

When an influential cardinal takes Blacktooth under his wing to make use of his facility with native languages in tricky ecclesial-political negotiations, the story breaks out into questions of ethics, power, spiritual calling, nonviolence, hegemony, and love—where should our priorities lay? What is the moral responsibility of the Texark Empire to care for genetically deformed humans, whom the church has taken to calling “the Pope’s children”?

Walter Miller was a tail gunner in World War II. Among his 55 combat sorties was the one that destroyed the Abbey at Monte Cassino in Italy, established in 529 AD by St. Benedict himself. When Miller returned from war, he converted to Catholicism and wrote these two books as his way of working “out his salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).

—Rose Marie Berger, senior associate editor at Sojourners, is a Catholic activist and poet (www.rosemarieberger.com).

In the past ten or so years the concept of “empire” has emerged as a hermeneutical key to biblical texts. Our scriptural texts were written, edited and shaped by a people living in and under the great empires of history: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Vocabulary that was political has by out time become domesticated and lost the shock value that the Hebrew and early Christian communities experienced. For example, the titles we use for Jesus (Saviour, Lord) were the official titles of the Roman Caesar. “Empire” refers to the massive concentration of power which “permeates all aspects of life . . .. Empire seeks to extend control as far as possible; not only geographically, politically and economically . . . but also intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, culturally and religiously . . . with top down control. . . to domesticate Christ and anything else that poses a challenge to its power.” Being the Church seeks to identify the concepts of “empire” as embedded in current history and values, and what this entails for daily faithful living. Essays by contributors examine these ramifications, e.g., a theology of the cross rather than prosperity theology, the need for the church to concentrate on community rather than on power. The essays reflect the basic orientation of the contributors who are Lutheran, and whose theology of the cross articulates and focuses well the message of the biblical text.

—Vern Ratzlaff, pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

My most recent fad in biblical reading is on the perspective of empire as key to understanding the biblical text. ‘Issues of imperial rule and response to it run deep and wide through most books of the Bible’ (p 7). There is the double need: to see the theme of empire in order to understand the biblical text, and to see the nature of our response to that theme in our own culture and story. ‘The principal biblically based celebrations of both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues all focus on imperial oppression and G-d’s deliverance of the people. Passover commemorates the exodus from hard bondage under the pharaoh in Egypt. Hanukkah celebrates G-d’s deliverance of the Judeans struggling to resist the first attempts by a Western empire to suppress the Israelite-Judean traditional covenantal way of life.

Christmas celebrates the birth of a peasant child as the true ‘Saviour’ of a people who had been conquered and laid under tribute by Caesar, whom the whole world had already acclaimed as the ‘Saviour’ who had brought ‘peace and security’ to the world. It also commemorates the Roman client king’s dispatch of counterinsurgency forces to massacre the innocents in order to check the deliverance movement before it got started. Good Friday and Easter remember Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion by the Roman imperial rulers followed by his vindication by G-d as the true Lord and Saviour, as opposed to the imperial ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’. In the Shadow of Empire traces this theme closely in the stories of Jesus, in the writings of Paul, and in the books of Matthew, Acts and Revelation.

—Vern Ratzlaff, pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada