Hello friends! We hope your “festive period” (as Transport for London calls it) was delightful; ours was! You can just pretend this New Year’s post aligned perfectly with the beginning of 2012…
As we looked back on what we learned during 2011, we thought we’d share a slice of our thinking and show you what we’ve been reading. (As you may have guessed, we read a ton about East London, as well as a ton of books about following Jesus. And there’s a few things thrown in for fun…)
London Literature!
Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End is told through the eyes of Tarquin Hall, a posh West Ender who had no idea this side of London even existed. After moving back to London from abroad, he winds up living on Brick Lane in the 1990s, when it was the center of many of the East End’s urban problems. His year gives a good overview of this history and stories of both the more recent Bengali and former Jewish immigrant community life that has flourished on Brick Lane.
Despite the cheery-looking cover, Call the Midwife is actually pretty gritty. Jennifer Worth was being trained as a midwife by a group of nuns in the 1950s, and she delivers babies in the often shocking conditions of East London tenement homes. It’s hard for me to believe that only a few decades ago this is what life in our neighborhood was like (apparently the street we live on was frequented by “ladies of the night”) but you can still see the heart and spirit of the old East Enders she describes.
Londonstani is about a young man trying to fit in with the second generation Desi rudeboy gang in his hood—and it’s written almost entirely in the voice of his street slang. While Jas and his friends are very much at odds with their immigrant parents, they’re still proud of being Asian. They just want to do it on their own terms (i.e., while chasing after money, sex, cred, bling, and cars.) Sigh. Some things don’t change, whether they’re in the outer burbs borough of Hounslow like these boys, or the inner city borough we live in.
In 
White Teeth: A Novel, Zadie Smith explores how the choices parents make circle back to shape their children’s lives between family tragedy and the comedy of daily life. It’s a really well-written window into many of the tensions we’re learning to negotiate here ourselves, including Britain’s imperial past vs. its multicultural future and the expectations of first-generation parents vs. the longings of second-generation kids to fit in here in London.
About Islam
“Islamist” refers to a specific understanding of Islam that is highly political, and sees Islam as not just a personal spiritual belief, but an entire system of life, individually and communally. Within the Islamist community, there’s a radical anti-western subculture, and this is the story of one man’s experience falling deeper and deeper into it. The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left tells how Ed Husain was recruited, how these groups convince people they’re right, and gives perspective into how this subculture sees the world from someone who’s lived it, and left it.
The title of Between Naivety and Hostility: Uncovering the Best Christian Responses to Islam in Britain implies that most of society’s responses to Islam have not been helpful. Instead of being swayed by outrageous media coverage and political polemics, what are ways that Christians can respond to Islam that encourage healthy dialogue and learning from one another? (This book hasn’t been published in the US yet, but you can read it on Kindle or download a Kindle app for your computer.)
Jesus Things
You may not agree with everything Brian McLaren says, but that’s not the point—he’s wrestling with really important questions about the future of the way we follow Jesus together. He doesn’t claim to have all the answers (and indeed, when we saw him speak at Greenbelt, he often humbly responded to questions with more questions), but he also doesn’t shy away from starting difficult conversations the church needs to have about how to shift religious patterns that are more harmful than helpful. 
A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faithis partly a deconstruction of some stuck places in Christian dogma that have worn into an unhealthy rut, and partly a fresh perspective on how the church can move into the next millennia and be true to Jesus. (Liz sometimes says that McLaren is able to take all of the frustration with organized institutionalized Churchianity that’s swarming around in her brain and articulate it in a way other people can actually follow.)
Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline) is always inspiring because he takes the long view—he looks at the entire history of Christian practice, and reminds you that over thousands of years, the saints testify that intimacy with God is possible. Then he draws on their experience and his own, shows you how people who have gone before you have gotten to know God, and gently says, “It’s lovely that you’re reading this book, but you should really go and try it yourself.” 
Sanctuary of the Soul: Journey into Meditative Prayer focuses on the practice of lectio divina, or holy reading. And Foster’s not afraid to call out our modern-wired-short-attention-spans: he challenges us to unplug from all Internet gadgetry for one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year….
The author of The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith
spent twelve years as an urban church planter in our borough of Tower Hamlets. He wrote this book primarily to introduce the central elements of current Anabaptist faith and theology to a UK audience. He pulls from existing North American traditions (Mennonites, Brethren, Hutterites) as well as UK Churches who see through Anabaptist-oriented lenses, in order to share an alternative approach to faith and practice with Christians. We attended a Mennonite church in Chicago, and the core of our theology is grounded in Anabaptism. If you’d like to know more about Anabaptism or have more succinct ways of explaining it, this is a useful broad overview.
Scot McKnight is angry, and as he rightly should be. “Who says that translations are not political?” he asks. Grab your Bible and look up Romans 16:7. Go on. I’ll wait. Does it say “Junias” or “Junia”? That little letter “s” makes a world of difference, because it’s the difference between Junia being a male or female apostle (and an outstanding one at that.) It’s the difference between having a biblically recognized woman in church leadership, or having women’s voices and calling deliberately silenced. That’s right—McKnight is angry because in the 1920s the Greek composite text translators use was deliberately changed from a woman’s name to a man’s name, because some people had issues with a woman being an apostle. Junia Is Not Alone is a short essay that lays out the scholarship behind this verse and why it’s really important for the church to get this right. (This $2.99 essay is only available digitally, but if you don’t have a Kindle, it is absolutely worth downloading a free Kindle app to read this on your electronic thing of choice.)
We’ve got bookmarks marking our progress in several other great books by N. T. Wright, but in the meantime we’d like to highly recommend his commentary series The New Testament for Everyone. N. T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, a scholar and theologian who really knows his stuff, but he’s written these books for a popular audience. They’re personable, engaging, extremely accessible, with his own fresh translations of Scripture, and he blends key context and kingdom theology in a way that cuts to the heart of Scripture. The link is to the entire series (yup, we have them all) but you can also search for the individual books (i.e., Matthew for Everyone, 
Mark for Everyone
) as they’d make a great small group study.
We actually re-read this book this year, so I’m gonna quote our good friend Tim on Submerge: Living Deep in a Shallow World: “How an Ivy-Leaguer quit the rat-race to become a good Samaritan, accidentally started a missionary order—and what to do about it… When someone decides to take Jesus at his word and love the poor, what does it look like? John Hayes [our teammate in London] journeys from being a Rich Young Ruler as a successful businessman in Japan to becoming a neighbor in the inner city of Santa Ana. The Order, InnerCHANGE, that has grown from John’s work, is an expression of what it means to love the poor as next door neighbors, not as short term volunteers. It’s great to read from the experience of someone who’s done it for more than 20 years, rather than from people who think about what it could look like.”
Fabulous Fiction
After we saw the movie trailer, we decided it was finally time to read The Hunger Games Trilogy, and we both blitzed through all three books in record time. These are fast-moving thrillers set in a future dystopia, where children are forced to kill each other on live reality television. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds—indeed, the scary thing is when you start to see just how possible this is. There’s enough discussion fodder in here for weeks: thought-provoking stuff on the role of the media, construction of propaganda, how people are shaped by their environments, how much choice you have in your own decisions. Her world is full of issues of power: who controls it, how they maintain it, the systematic institutionalization of poverty and oppression, how this determines who lives, who eats, who dies. You’ve got til March 23 til the first movie comes out…
I doubt you’ve read a book quite like 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time before. The blurb says: “Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.” As Christopher sets about solving the mystery of the neighbor’s dead dog, the author does a remarkable job of letting see the world through his gifts and limitations, the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what a person with such a brain thinks and feels. It’s a really well told story (and, bonus, it’s set in London.)
If you’ve never read Neil Gaiman before, well, you should. It’s a bit like falling down the rabbit hole, where everything is just slightly twisted. Neverwhere tells the story of a man who falls through the cracks of London Above into London Below—the dark, gritty, surreal urban world in the tunnels and abandoned tube stations under London’s streets. Turns out the Earl really does live at Earl’s Court station, and there are actual Black Friars guarding the way at Blackfriars (and oh, you do not want to mess with either…)
I picked up Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life at a friend’s house, and didn’t stop reading til about 2 am. It is, indeed, about writing, and about life, and dealing with both. But it’s also about things that are true, and things that are worth working for, and things that are worth saying yes to. (Plus it is funny, because Anne Lamott does not think taking herself too seriously is worth it.)
Just a note: all the links above are Amazon Affiliate links, so if you purchase anything using these links you’re helping to support our work! [FAQ here]. If you wind up reading any of these, let us know what you thought!
