August 2018 Quick Lit: what I've been reading

Today I'm linking up with Modern Mrs. Darcy for Quick Lit, where we share short reviews of what we've been reading. This month I read two recently-released nonfiction books, both of which I'd highly recommend.

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown.  

In the past year or two I have been trying to read more fiction and nonfiction by people of colour. This memoir, released just three months ago, was excellent. As a child, the author learned that her parents had deliberately named her Austin so that future employers/interviewers might think she was a white man and be more likely to give her a chance. This sense that a black girl was not an advantageous thing to be in America pressed up against Brown's desire to explore, claim, and celebrate her blackness. In the book she chronicles her experiences as a black girl and woman navigating the unconscious biases and even open hostilities of white (and often fellow Christian) friends, colleagues, and strangers.

Brown asserts, "My story is not about condemning white people but about rejecting the assumption ... that white is right: closer to God, holy, chosen, the epitome of being.... I offer this story in hopes that we will embody a community eager to name whiteness, celebrate Blackness, and, in a world still governed by systems of racial oppression, begin to see that there's another way." 

The most powerful part for me was the final chapter, where Brown rejects white people's wish that she and other black Americans would be more positive and hopeful, declaring instead that she dwells "in the shadow of hope." 

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans. 

I've read and thoroughly enjoyed  Evans' previous books (Faith Unraveled, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Searching for Sunday), and this one may be her best yet. In Inspired, she explores the Bible's structure, its different genres, even its apparent contradictions -- showing that the Bible is not just a straightforward instruction manual but is far richer and even more meaningful than we may have realized.

She divides the book into sections with titles like "Origin Stories," "War Stories," and "Church Stories." In each section she talks about particular Bible passages/stories that challenge our assumptions and that reveal something interesting -- and perhaps new -- about God's workings on the world and His relationship with His people. Also, at the start of each section is a short imaginative piece (a brief story about Hagar, a modern-day play about Job, etc.) that sets the stage for our thinking about each of these sets of stories.

I love Evans' engaging, often funny, often self-deprecating style as well as her strong scholarship. Paradoxically, in this book she both demystifies and complicates the Bible for us: she gives background detail that enriches our understanding and knowledge, yet she also assures us that it's OK to ask questions, to not have everything perfectly figured out, to read a passage and feel that it just doesn't make sense or contradicts another passage. As she puts it, "Renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright compared Scripture to a five-act play, full of drama and surprise, wherein the people of God are invited into the story to improvise the unfinished, final act. Our ability to faithfully execute our roles in the drama depends on our willingness to enter the narrative ... to see how our own stories intersect with the grander epic of God's redemption of the world. Every page of scripture serves as an invitation -- to wonder, to wrestle, to surrender to the adventure." 

Evans' book shows how she has responded to that invitation and how we can, too. I loved it.