No one knows more about books at the interface of Christian faith and … well … everything, than Byron Borger! And it is always Byron’s review of my work that I look most forward to reading. And so, I offer you Byron’s review of my most recent book, poached from his always epic BookNotes review page for his Hearts and Minds bookstore in Dallastown, Pennsylvania.
Of Prophets, Priests, and Poets: Christian Formation at the Gates of Hell Brian J. Walsh (Cascade) $23.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $18.40
I want to lead off with this because it may be the book I care most about this new season. As some of you know, Brian is a friend and a writer I respect deeply. He was influential in my life when I was in my mid-twenties, and he was one of the early people we brought to Hearts & Minds, back when The Transforming Vision came out, the seminal work he did with Richard Middleton. (If you follow our “Three Books from Hearts & Minds” podcast you may recall my naming it a few episodes ago as an important book for those of us who have worked on the Jubilee collegiate conference in Pittsburgh.) Anyway, this is a new collection of a handful of very important sermons, essays, speeches. It is, as always, creatively written, astute, provocative, and righteous.
Last year Brian did a book I reviewed at BookNotes and then re-reviewed in my Best Books list a month ago. We really do recommend Rags of Light: Leonard Cohen and the Landscape of the Biblical Imagination Cascade; $23.00 // OUR 20% OFF SALE PRICE = $18.40) and I can’t say enough about its nearly brilliant insight into both Cohen and the Bib
le.
You may know that I’ve touted the two big Bible commentaries he co-authored with his wife, Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed and Romans Disarmed. Both are unlike anything you’ve ever read, I promise you. I return to them regularly.
A number of years ago Brian left his innovative work in campus and urban ministry. The first chapter (and the book’s title) comes from his autobiographical reflections shared among his campus ministry friends when he retired which was later posted at the Empire Remixed website. I had read it there and was blown away. If you have anything to do with campus ministry, it’s a must-read; check it out either there online or in this valuable little volume.
The rest includes previously published stuff on public justice, on poverty, or the Bible (always the Bible) and a few are important discussions about the way in which the world “worldview” has changed over recent decades and his own disillusionment with some of the conversations about relating faith and learning.(A fabulous piece from The Christian Scholars Review co-done by ecologist Steven Bouma-Prediger is nicely included.) There’s a great fictional conversation about trying to “think Christianly” without a clarity about living the gospel, even in hard places.
Resisting the idols of the culture is a Biblical call that is important to him — perhaps more than anyone I know, which says a lot — and a critique of ideologies and unsustainable practices pervades the book’s prophetic insight and fuels its prophetic power.
There is, of course, as Brian has long known, power in the arts and the imagination. (He gets some of this from The Prophetic Imagination but has been teased about the regular Bruce Cockburn quotes in his early books, although he has done brilliant sermons inspired by texts from other bands and singers and poets.) So it doesn’t surprise us that he does his modern-day equivalent of the ancient Jewish preaching technique known as targums — a live (improvised?) and relevant, expansive updating of Scripture, and, man, his poetic targums are something. The last one, inspired by verses in Colossians after the election of Donald Trump, made me weep.
As socially incisive and prophetic as this book is, it is, deeply, a book of joy and a book of love. As he ruminates about the need for a less thin sort of discipleship, for a process of being formed into a Christ-like community, he both explains his passion for the displaced and homeless, and offers a better vision for us all, about homecoming and joy.
I cannot explain all of this now, but I know there are those longing for some sane way out of the idols of white Christian nationalism and the ungodly stuff many American evangelicals have fallen for. The Spirit is calling us to join God’s work in repairing the world. This book will inspire us to get going in these disorienting times. It is dedicated to his good friend and academic colleague when there were at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, James Olthius. Nice!
