Tag Archives: Englewood Review of Books

Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World (A Review)

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Justin R. Phillips
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2021
Buy Now: [ IndieBound ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]

The following review was originally published in Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Tell It Slant editor, Jeanne Torrence Finley

In Know Your Place Justin Phillips examines the formative communities of his life: his racial community, white; his geographic community, southern; and his religious community, evangelical. He writes about how they shaped his racial imagination and about how the blind spots in each overlap and reinforce each other. The subtitle names both his main audience and his purpose:  “Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World.” He approaches his task as an insider who knows how to tell the truth in love to his fellow white, Southern evangelicals, and he does so with grace, eloquence, and vulnerability. As he wrote this book, he held in mind his childhood Sunday school teachers, the people he knew in the small northwest Tennessee community in which he grew up, the high school students he used to teach, and his grandparents, with whom he regrets not ever having a deep conversation about race. A consummate scholar and storyteller, Phillips is the executive editor of The Other Journal. He holds an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Fuller Theological Seminary, where his focus was on how white evangelicals in the South responded to the Civil Rights Movement. He has taught at the high school, college, and graduate levels.

Phillips structured Know Your Place around these communities—racial, southern, and evangelical. He starts with whiteness, then adds the layer of southernness, and finally turns to the evangelical layer. Bookending it all are stories about his grandparents.  A common theme in all three communities is represented by this formula: “Disembodiment + Division = Disorientation.”  Disembodiment names the idea that human beings are not bodies, nor do they have to pay attention to physical matters. If we don’t see a problem, then we have no responsibility to address it. Add to that a propensity toward division, and then we become so disoriented that we cannot “know our place.”

Phillips claims that being raised in whiteness promotes a sense of disembodiment through encouraging white people to be “colorblind” and therefore unaware that we do have a racial identity that works most of the time in our favor. When we experience whiteness as the norm, we tend to get defensive when our worldview is challenged by the history of slavery and by current conversations about white supremacy. In the last twenty years our nation has experienced an awakening about discrimination, both on personal and systemic levels, in ways that can disorient white, southern evangelicals and keep them from understanding their history.

For Phillips “racism is a problem of the imagination”(13). Having accumulated power and wealth, white men imagined that their skin color gave them the qualifications to rule and justification for their conquests, which then shaped the way they structured the world. According to their logic, race had nothing to do with being successful. They believed and perpetuated the lie that anyone who worked hard could be successful.

Being southern adds another layer of disembodiment and division. One reason is that we can’t agree on our boundaries. If our northern boundary is the Mason-Dixon line, then are D.C. and Maryland in the south? Is Texas? What about West Virginia and Missouri? Then within each state, there is diversity. Phillips says, “We are not, and never have been, one people” (55).  Echoing Wendell Berry’s writings about the concept of “place,” Phillips says that loyalty to place is good for human flourishing, but places are also subject to self-deception—for example, the South’s justifying slavery through the myth of the Lost Cause after having lost the Civil War. It allowed southerners to maintain white supremacy during the Reconstruction period and to shape their future by reframing their past.

Additionally, there’s the southern problem of having the skill to talk out of both sides of our mouths. As a white southerner, I both smiled and winced when I read this sentence: “Only a people so steeped in deploying ‘bless their heart’ as a fleet of stealth drones could easily say so much by attempting to say so little.”(70). The phrase “heritage, not hate” (in reference to Civil War monuments and symbols) is not simply “a failure of language. It’s a deception that begins with the soul”(70).

Phillips also explores the “siege mentality” of the southern imagination. It began with fear of freed slaves, continued throughout the Jim Crow era, and still hangs around. He contends that we are born resisters who are adept at finding enemies, such as Yankees and government intervention. The southern talent for resistance grew to gigantic proportions in1954 when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that maintaining racially segregated schools was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Phillips writes, “The Brown ruling was a crushing indictment of the South’s way of life, reinforcing their rejection of northern influence as equated with federal power. One need not understand the legal minutia of the Brown decision to see how white Southerners’ response to a foundation-shaking federal imposition was little more than a continuation of the original narrative of victimhood”(84).

When Phillips turns to white evangelicalism, his critique is wide-ranging and incisive. After providing a brief history that culminates in the ties between evangelicals and the contemporary Republican party, he attends to how evangelical theology promotes disembodiment—heavenly mindedness and earthly neglect. Evangelicalism’s huge emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus inhibits its ability to understand how love of neighbor involves grappling with systemic evil and working for justice. In other words, white southern evangelicalism has become so disoriented that it cannot see racial injustice.

In Know Your Place, Phillips makes a convincing argument yet keeps the tone invitational.  When he was a high school teacher, he learned the art of translating the material so that high school students could grasp it. That’s the approach he takes here. He knows that language matters, and he models how to engage in conversations about race that will make a difference. In an interview with Brian Allain, he said, “I wanted to begin to provide language that readers could translate for people they love and to begin to help them have tough conversations.” He has succeeded.

The phrase “know your place” has often been an admonishment to recognize one’s place in the social hierarchy and not to step out of it, but that’s not what Phillips means. He wants readers to know and claim the history of their region and to have the courage to talk about it in constructive ways.  When Know Your Place was published a year ago, it addressed a pressing need in our society. That need is even more dire now as our country witnesses increased voter restrictions, book banning, and political pressure to keep teachers from telling the truth about white supremacy. Thank you, Justin Phillips, for this gift.

Bad Faith: A Review

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The following review was originally published in Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Tell It Slant editor, Jeanne Torrence Finley

Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right
Randall Balmer
Hardback: Eerdmans, 2021

Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right disabuses the commonly held notion that the Religious Right originally coalesced around what he calls “the abortion myth.” Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, knows the evangelical subculture as the son of an evangelical pastor, a graduate of an evangelical college and seminary, and the author of numerous books on the history of evangelicalism in the United States.

In 1990 Balmer was invited to a gathering in Washington, D.C. that celebrated the tenth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election. It changed the course of his scholarship for the next three decades. There, Balmer found himself among major leaders of the Religious Right, including Paul Weyrich, who made the startling statement that abortion had nothing to do with his movement’s origins. Later Balmer questioned him to be sure he’d heard correctly. Weyrich said yes, that he’d been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to arouse evangelicals’ interest in politics and mobilize them as a political group. He’d tried all sorts of issues:  abortion, school prayer, the Equal Rights Amendment, pornography, but none had grabbed the attention of evangelicals.

Balmer’s research on the origins of the Religious Right concurred with Weyrich’s statement. The Religious Right was not formed in response to the 1973 Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, but in response to the 1971 Green V. Connally decision, which challenged the tax-exempt status of segregationist academies and universities, most notably Bob Jones University.

It will come as a surprise to many readers, including a large percentage of evangelicals, that there was a period in the 19th and early 20th centuries when “evangelicals were engaged in a broad spectrum of social reform efforts, many of them directed toward those on the margins of society” (3). They included public education, peace, the abolition of slavery, prison reform, and women’s rights. Theologically, these efforts were related to postmillennialism, the doctrine– according to an evangelical interpretation of the book of Revelation—that Jesus will return after the millennium, a thousand year period of righteousness and peace. This doctrine led them to work “to reform society and pave the way for the ‘second coming’ of Jesus” (9). Balmer points out that progressive evangelicalism then and now—it still exists—has more affinity with the political left than with the political right.

Progressive evangelicalism started to crumble in the U.S. under the influence of John Nelson Darby’s doctrine of premillennialism (the belief that Jesus would return before the millennium), “which meant that Christians could anticipate the second coming at any moment, at which time they would be ‘raptured’ into heaven and those ‘left behind’ would face divine judgment” (11). Darby, an Anglo-Irish Bible teacher, popularized the doctrine in the 1830s in the U.K, but its influence in the U.S. was delayed until the 20th century when the Scofield Reference Bible became popular. This doctrine influenced its adherents to abandon responsibility for social reform. Why make the world a better place if Jesus might return at any moment?  Their only responsibility was to focus on individual salvation and win souls to Christ.

It may be difficult for non-evangelicals to imagine the influence that rapture theology had among evangelicals– especially among young people– in the 1970s and 80s. Balmer describes an extremely popular film among evangelical audiences. Produced in 1972,   A Thief in the Night  opens with a scene in which a woman awakens to the sound of “her husband’s shaver buzzing in the bathroom sink.” He has been raptured. The film preaches “the imminent return of Jesus, warning that anyone who is not saved will be damned” (13) and features composer Larry Norman’s song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”

Premillennialism, which Balmer calls “a theology of despair” (11), led to political apathy among evangelical voters. Another influence in that direction was the Scopes trial of 1925 in which a high school teacher was found guilty for teaching evolution, in defiance of Tennessee law. Evangelicals won the battle, but they “lost decisively in the larger courtroom of public opinion” (17). The event symbolically marked an evangelical retreat from politics and the larger culture that had been happening for years. During the 1920s and 30s evangelicals began to build a distinct subculture—”an interlocking network of congregations, denominations, Bible camps, Bible institutes, colleges, seminaries, missionary societies, and publishing houses” that provided “a refuge from the dangers of an increasingly secular society” (18).

Many readers of Bad Faith will be surprised to learn that evangelical leaders in the 1970s had diverse opinions on abortion. Two successive editors of Christianity Today magazine voiced support for the legality of abortion. In 1971 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that  called  Southern Baptists to support legislation allowing the possibility of abortion in some circumstances. There was room for nuanced conversations on the ethics of abortion. The change started to occur during the 1978 midterm elections in which Democrats were frontrunners for all four available Senate seats. On the weekend before the election pro-life Catholics leafleted church parking lots in those states and all four democratic candidates lost. That’s when Paul Weyrich realized that he had found the issue that would take his movement’s focus off of defending racial segregation.

The practical result of the Religious Right’s embrace of the abortion myth was seen in the 1980 election, when evangelicals rejected a “born again Sunday school teacher, Jimmy Carter, and supported instead a Hollywood actor whose campaign rhetoric included “racially coded language and gestures would appeal to voters—including, perhaps, newly enfranchised Religious Right voters” (71).

Readers familiar with Balmer’s work know that he’s been writing about the abortion myth for a long time. Bad Faith is different in that it’s a short, focused primer on the subject.  Another difference is that it takes into account the 2016 and 2020 elections, which are a clear indication of why the abortion myth matters. It helped elect a president in 2016 and continues to encourage single-issue voting, thus preventing thoughtful discussion of other important issues.

Balmer’s argument is not that all evangelicals are racist, but rather that the leaders of the Religious Right have made the movement more appealing “by rallying behind such high-minded issues as opposition to abortion . . . but that does not change the inconvenient fact that the founders of the movement in the 1970s rallied to allow evangelical institutions to perpetuate their policy of racial exclusion.” He points out that a building can be made beautiful in all sorts of ways, but if the timbers that make up its foundation are rotten, the entire structure is compromised (80).

Balmer writes as a friend of evangelicalism, one who loves the tradition deeply enough to seek its redemption and to be one of its best critics. Bad Faith shows how important basic knowledge of church history and theology is to understanding aspects of politics and culture. Leaders of the Religious Right have managed to ignore– or never to learn about— their forebears who were social justice activists. The same can be said of the evangelicals influenced by these leaders and of people—religious or not—who are shocked  that in 2016 a large percentage of white evangelicals helped elect a president whose behavior and values stand in stark contradiction of the teachings and example of Jesus. History matters. Theology matters. Bad Faith is a good place to explore the reasons why.

Speaking in the Public Square: A Review of Exploring a Wesleyan Political Theology

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The following review was originally published on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. Reviewed by Jeanne Torrence Finley.

In October 2017 Wesley Theological Seminary hosted the Wesleyan Political Theology Project, a conference which brought together the scholars represented in Exploring a Wesleyan Political Theology  [Ryan Nicholas Danker, General Ed., Wesley’s Foundery Books, General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, 2020] to explore what it means as Wesleyan Christians to speak in the public square. In the online promotional video for the conference, Michael McCurry, a professor at Wesley, spoke of the bitterness, polarization, and division in our country, and said, “We want people to come away from this conference knowing how to have gentle, loving conversations within their ministry settings.” Hopefully the participants did that, but this book falls short of such a practical concern.

In his introduction, editor Ryan Nicholas Danker, who teaches Methodist studies at Wesley, acknowledges Methodism’s history of political engagement and raises the question that the essays in this book seek to address: Is it possible to identify “a distinct Wesleyan political theology or political characteristics informed by its mission to ‘spread scriptural holiness across the land’” (8). If so, it must take into account Wesley’s “overwhelmingly optimistic view of Grace,” the accountability at the heart of the early Methodist movement, and Wesley’s concern for the poor (3).

The opening essay from McCurry, former press secretary in the Clinton administration, offers a partly autobiographical “practitioner’s view” on Wesleyan political theology. Of all the writers in this volume, he appears to have the most on-the-job credibility to address the polarization in our society and the inability of many churches “to maintain membership and relevance.” He also has the courage to say, “I believe that part of the dilemma is the failure of the church to connect the good news of the gospel to the very matters that the congregation sees playing out in the controversies that swirl in the public square” (25-26).

In “Big Appetites and No Teeth,” William J. Abraham, who teaches at Perkins School of Theology, confesses that “like most United Methodists when it comes to politics, I have a big appetite and no teeth. I want to see the world transformed, but when it comes to getting my teeth into the details and into the causal stories involved, then it’s another story.” That is my favorite quote in the whole collection, but Abrabam bites off more than he can chew when he uses his 15 pages to commend Theodore Weber’s Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics as a way to understand the thought of Edmund Burke “refracted through a Wesleyan lens” (43).

Ryan Nicholas Danker’s chapter, “Early Methodist Societies as an Embodied Politic,” makes the case for discerning a Wesleyan political theology through studying “the political context in which early Methodism arose and the place of Methodist societies within that context . . . .”(48). They are “the key to early Methodist political engagement” and “the means by which both holiness of heart and life and concern for the other were combined in holistic, relational community” (51). He contends that politics ”was never the focus of the Wesleyan movement, but rather of Methodist politics was an aftershock of the overwhelming emphasis of early Methodists on the experience of holiness” (61). In other words, “[a] Wesleyan political vision depends on the power of transformed human hearts engaged in community”(10).

In her essay, “Salvation and Social Engagement,” Laceye Warner of Duke Divinity School describes the contributions of three Southern Methodist women –Mary McCloud Bethune, Belle Harris Bennett, and Dorothy Ripley–who exhibited an expansive view of evangelism in their ministries. Warner writes, “Evangelism at times suffers from a disconnect between its personal and social components because of too-narrow biblical interpretations and the ideological lines drawn by the Fundamentalist-Modernist split of the early twentieth century”(70). She concludes, “ The representative evangelistic practices of these women resemble the integration of ministries of word and deed commissioned by Jesus Christ in the Gospels” (95).

James Thobaben, who teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary, draws the attention of contemporary Methodists to Wesley’s main mission, the conversion of souls. Granting that the early Wesleyan-Methodist movement in England and the American colonies did result in social and economic change, he argues that “to prioritize social justice over evangelism or above the immediate faith community is to misorder Wesley’s priorities” (100). Contending that since mission of early Methodism was not “to change society but to convert people, and that would, consequently, change the culture” (115), Thobaben wants modern Methodists to practice an “engaged sectarianism,” one that is “marked by personal and local practices of purity, mercy, and justice” (123).

The last section of the book treats “Methodism and Other Traditions.” In his essay the “The Word of Reconciliation,” Edgardo Colón-Emeric, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, writes that the church’s divine vocation is to speak the word of reconciliation and engage in acts of reconciliation. As an example of one who lived out the ministry of reconciliation, Colón-Emeric lifts up Oscar Romero as “an exemplar of the practical divinity Methodists aspire to embody” (135) and comments that “like Wesley’s, Romero’s theology is grounded in the life of the church and has a popular orientation” (136). Both had a theological approach that allowed them to communicate to the academy and to non-academic people. In describing Romero’s ministry of reconciliation in El Salvador, Colón-Emeric practices the practical divinity he so admires in Wesley.

In the final and most practical, thought-provoking chapter of the book, “The Meaning of Pentecost,” Luther Oconer critiques a form of Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity in the U.S. that has “espoused an uncritical form of nationalism” (156) steming from “dominion theology,” which “teaches that Christians need to exercise full authority or ‘dominion’ in all areas of life, including politics” (169). Oconer’s critique of “dominion” theology and its drive toward “restoration of a Christian hegemony” (169) in the U.S. sheds much light on the Christian right’s support of President Trump. Oconer notes that half of the presidential evangelical advisory council is made up of people with ties to Pentecostalism, a movement with strong historical and theological links to the Wesleyan movement. Not only does Oconer critique Pentecostal/Charismatic politics, but provides an understanding of Wesley’s political theology, one in which Jesus’ incarnation as “the ultimate expression of God’s love” (169) is the motivation.

This book was written and edited before the COVID-19 pandemic, before growing awareness of the depth of our nation’s racism, and before the rancor and polarization of the 2020 election reached fever pitch. From the perspective of now, many of these essays lack passion and connection with the public square. Wesley was a practical theologian. I wish that some of these seminary professors had tried harder to expand their potential audience by following his lead.

Review of Shea Tuttle’s Exactly as You Are

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Exactly as You Are

Fred Rogers was an overweight, shy, lonely, and often sick child who seemed to attract bullies. At home he felt safe and comfortable, enjoying his puppets and piano, which became a means of expressing feelings of sadness and loneliness, but school was another matter.

Early in her new book Exactly the Way You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers (Eerdmans, 2019), Shea Tuttle makes the point that Fred never forgot those bullies. “ ‘I resented the pain. I resented those kids for not seeing beyond my fatness or my shyness,’ he told audiences sixty years later, marveling at how well he still remembered that day” (11). Her book shows how he transformed experiences such as this into an internationally beloved children’s television program that in multiple ways told millions of children during its 33-year run that they are loved just as they are.

Shea Tuttle was one of those children, and she brings her love of and fascination with Mister Rogers, her role as the mother of two children in grade school, and her theological training (M.Div., Candler School of Theology, Emory University) to her exploration of his life and faith.

Tuttle makes clear that there were many positive formative factors in Rogers’s life, including loving parents, a vibrant church, and a passion for music. His parents were leaders in their town of LaTrobe, Pennsylvania, which gave him a model of what a neighborhood could be. His father was an industrialist who respected and valued his employees. Both parents were people whose faith was expressed in serving their community and helping those in need. The local Presbyterian church was central in their family life, and Tuttle shows how its liturgy formed Rogers’s understanding of a disciplined life and the importance of a stable routine for children’s development. She also emphasizes the importance of music in his formation: “Very early on, music began to carry a meaning in his life that his other important hobbies—his puppet play and photography, hosting friends and helping in the community—couldn’t touch. When he was bullied at age eight, he “explored his grief at the piano” (31) and as a homesick college student he found solace in the “ancient tradition of expressing raw emotion through music” (33). It’s no wonder that music became such an integral part of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

After highlighting aspects of Rogers’s growing-up years that shaped his character and sense of vocation, Tuttle focuses on how he became Mister Rogers and continued to develop Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as long as it was in production. Chief among his mentors were Dr. William Orr, a professor at Western Theological Seminary (now Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), and Margaret McFarland, an acclaimed expert on child development.

Tuttle says the core of Bill Orr’s theology “began with the biblical assertion that God’s creation, including humanity, is good (Gen. 1:31). Upon that foundation Orr laid the belief that we are therefore lovable.” She continues, “Put another way, if we are lovable and acceptable because we are God’s, then our neighbor, who is equally God’s, is also lovable and acceptable. And we are called into the work of that loving and accepting” (59).

Orr’s example spoke as strongly to Rogers as his academic teaching did. Tuttle relates Rogers’ comment that “when you see someone go out to lunch on a winter’s day and come back without his overcoat because he had given it to a person who was cold, you have a growing understanding of ‘living theologically.’ When we asked Dr. Orr about the coat, he said, ‘Oh, I have one other at home,’ and that was all he said about it” (56).

Just as Dr. Orr, through his example and teaching, influenced Rogers’s concept of neighborliness, so Dr. Margaret McFarland helped form his philosophy of child development and children’s programming. “Anything human is mentionable,” she taught, “and anything mentionable is manageable.” Tuttle explains that Rogers, absorbing this lesson, “worked to mention his feelings rather than deny them. He knew that, acknowledged or not, revealed or not, his feelings would find their ways to expression. And he wrote a song [“The Truth Will Make Me Free”] about that belief for the Neighborhood. The song ends with these lines:

I’m happy, learning
Exactly how I feel inside of me.
I’m learning to know the truth,
I’m learning to tell the truth.
Discovering the truth will make me free (149).  

It’s safe to say that many viewers weren’t aware of the biblical foundation for Rogers’s love of neighbor and the other the theological principles that informed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. That was by design. Although he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, Rogers was reticent to talk explicitly about his faith. Tuttle relates a conversation between Terry Gross and Fred Rogers when Fresh Air was still a local show. Gross said, “Obviously you’re very religious, but . . . it’s not a denominational program, and I’m sure that’s intentional on your part.”

Fred replied, “It’s far from denominational and far from overtly religious. The last thing in the world that I would want to do would be something that’s exclusive. I would hate to think that a child would feel excluded from the Neighborhood by something that I said or did” (78).

Rogers often quoted this line from his favorite book, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince: “What is essential is invisible to the eye” (126). That notion permeated the life-lessons Rogers shared daily with children through his television show. This bedrock wisdom was applicable to regard for neighbor—be cautious about assuming what is essential in other people.

Tuttle’s biography reflects that same kind of regard of her subject. While there is no doubt that she did thorough, impeccable research and thought deeply and creatively about Fred’s life and faith, her approach to the material is humble and respectful. In an interview on the podcast Things Not Seen, she said, “I can’t figure him out, even after spending a whole lot of time working on his writings or listening to people talk about him or watching the show. Part of what draws me to him is that he is unusual and complicated. I want to figure him out so I keep looking. I think that was part of his power, and that remains part of his power.” (1)

Part of the power of Exactly as You Are is that it offers deep insight into the life and faith of Fred Rogers while not pretending to know all about him. At a time when politicians and pundits and ordinary people with a social media platform routinely make definitive statements about the motives of others, Tuttle succeeds in honoring both his complexity and his core message that each of us should be loved exactly as we are.  

(1) “The Magnetic Strangeness of Fred Rogers: Shea Tuttle, Things Not Seen podcast #1923 (40:30-41:20)  https://www.thingsnotseenradio.com/shows/1923-tuttle

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This review was originally published in the Advent 2019 issue–the last print edition– of Englewood Review of Books.    It is available online at https://englewoodreview.org/shea-tuttle-exactly-as-you-are-feature-review/ 

Celebrating Incarnation

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sshr-cover

Yesterday Englewood Review of Books published my review of   Somethin’ Special:  A Noel Paul Stookey Holiday Recollection  (Neworld Media, 2018).   I’ve also created a video of one of the tracks on the album  “There’s Still My Joy.”

Very few pop Christmas albums help us to celebrate incarnation, the central affirmation of Christianity, but I find in Somethin’ Special:  A Noel Paul Stookey Holiday Recollection many songs that point in that direction and offer a most moving encouragement to reclaim that connection.  This new full-length holiday CD released in early November presents the new, the traditional, and the disquietingly ordinary and says “Look in these stories and in these places. God is right before your eyes.”

Stookey, one third of the iconic folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, took on a solo career as singer/guitarist /songwriter in the early 70s after the group began a seven-year leave of absence from each other.  Since reuniting and performing with Peter and Mary until her death in 2009, he has written songs for 21 solo albums and continues to perform solo and with Peter Yarrow in concerts around the country.  His songs are not just folk, but eclectic in content and style, and many of them speak of the Divine in metaphorical terms, central of which is Love with a capital L.

“A recollection can be a distant memory – suddenly recalled – or in this instance, a gathering of childhood stories, unique to the holidays,” Stookey states in his liner notes.  “Some are highly personal, some are musical remembrances of Christmases in concert with Peter, Paul and Mary, but most of the songs reflect an evolving appreciation of the expression and the reason for the holiday: the birth of Christ.”  Truly, he seems to be re-collecting carols, his own compositions (old and new), and others into a new appreciation of meaning of Christmas and the larger holiday season.

Many people want to divide life into the secular and the sacred.  It’s a convenient tactic of church folk who protest any mention of social justice in their congregations.  “You’re getting too political, pastor. Stick to spiritual things.” This notion gets press every December when some Christians step up on soap boxes about putting Christ back in to Christmas.  Similarly the secular notion of Santa Claus usually ignores its lineage to Saint Nicholas, who was born to wealthy parents in the third century in what is now Turkey.  His Christian devotion led him to spend his whole inheritance on attention to the poor and defenseless, particularly as a protector of children. His generosity and compassion led to the custom of gift-giving during the holidays.

With this recording Stookey is suggesting compatibility.  Why not have both Santa Claus and nativity scenes?   There’s a theological reason for having both Santa and Jesus in our year-end celebrations.  After all, some scholars say the root of the word religion means to bind together or to connect–a meaning that is ironically obscured in our current cultural, political, and religious divide–and Christmas, more than any other part of the liturgical year, affirms the connection of heaven and earth, divine and human, spirit and matter.

The incarnation is the ultimate reason for rejoining that which has been broken asunder by misguided religiosity.  This baby Jesus grew up to be a carpenter and a friend of the marginalized–including prostitutes, tax collectors, women, and those hated Samaritans. He healed the sick, played with children, and hung out with fisher folk. He concerned himself with practical parts of living–meals, friends, health, community, respect for others, shelter, cooperation, love, and bread and wine.  Are these things not sacred?

Somethin’ Special celebrates the binding together of what our culture wants to divide into the secular and the sacred. Three of the songs about childhood are Stookey’s own compositions. In “For Christmas” a department store Santa Claus gains a new life after talking with the last child on Christmas Eve.  In “Christmas Dinner” an orphan boy of the streets and a woman old enough to be his grandmother share “the happiest Christmas” in town. “Somethin’ Special,” the title song, is a recollection from Stookey’s own childhood when his creative parents gave him “the gift of patience, the gift of faith.”  To this listener these reveal the sacred value of love and connection without mention of the baby Jesus.

In Stookey’s treatment of traditional carols, there is new appreciation of the sensory and the material as well as a bit of reframing.  The sound of uilleann pipes that open “In the Bleak Midwinter” take us to the cold desolation of Scottish moors and make us wonder about the song’s metaphorical message for times such as these.  Stookey adds lines to “Away in a Manger”:  “Across a great desert three wise men they came / Seeking a king though they knew not his name / A heavenly light, bright shining and blest / Had led to the stable where Jesus did rest.”  How often have I been too literal minded to see these visitors from the East as representative of those who know not Jesus’ name but are drawn to this sacred baby born in the most earthy of places, an animal stall? Another new verse shows forth the sacredness of the most ordinary acts in a household–comforting children, praying, and keeping watch over a cradle.  Who can know the results of these faithful actions?

“Still My Joy”–written by Melissa Manchester, Beth Nielsen Chapman, and Matthew Charles Rollings– is the sparking gem of the album, holding in tension joy and grief.  I think of the treble range of a piano as silver and the sound of a cello as gold.  It is keyboardist Michael McInnis’ genius to bring the two together. The piano is bright and hopeful and underlines the “still my JOY” and the cello is the gravitas, the honest facing of the inevitable losses that come the longer we live.  It is the gold of wisdom standing in creative tension with the joy that makes the joy credible. Stookey sings the song with such emotional range, grace, and vulnerability that it becomes an invitation for listeners to enter its safe space to feel and hold together both grief and joy. What a gift!

Richard Rohr writes, “I believe our inability to recognize and love God in what is right in front of us has made us separate religion from our actual lives.”   Stookey’s album encourages us to recognize God in what is right in front of us.   Without saying so, it is about incarnation, the scandalous notion that in God came in a baby born in a stable and continues to dwell among us mere mortals.

God with us indeed!