Books! Thoughts on some great '23 reads
bell hooks's Salvation and tracing the prophetic-contemplative tradition
[apologies to anyone receiving this for a second time, it looks like the first attempt only went to part of the mailing list. so trying again!]
Hello again friends,
A good year is a good reading year! AmIright?!?
The plan today is to share a list of my favorite reads from last year, then drop a couple short essays on books that I wanted to reflect on. The ones without essays aren’t books I liked less—in several cases I’d actually like to write a lot more about them so just holding myself back for now. At the end I included what I’m reading right now.
Initially I had three essays and a section about books I’m excited about for 2024, but it just got too long and I kept hearing some savvier newsletter person than me saying, “split this up Nathan! Make this easier on yourself!” So I’m going to send a Part II to this in another 10 days or so. Get excited I guess.
Enjoy and don’t forget to share your take on any of these books or your favorite reads and recommendations in the comments :)
Happy reading y’all,
Nathan
Favorite reads of 2023
Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks
On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Fight to Build a Union, Daisy Pitkin (reflection post coming May Day ‘24!)
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform your Life, Dacher Keltner
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Volokhonsky and Peavar translation)
The Following of Jesus: A Reply to The Imitation of Christ, Leonardo Boff
With Head and Heart: The Autobiography & The Creative Encounter, Howard Thurman
The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, Mark Peterson
Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness, Kevin Nye
We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, Gustavo Gutierrez
The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song, J. Kameron Carter
Teachings of the Christian Mystics, intro & ed. Andrew Harvey
Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Robert Perkinson
Salvation: Black People & Love by bell hooks
This is my third read by hooks in the past two years. I started with a collection of her essays on writing and the writer’s life call Remembered Rapture which I absolutely loved — there are a couple chapters in there about writing as political-spirituality that, oh my goodness, spoke to ever fiber of my soul. Listening to hooks is what I imagine it would be like to lie in a warm healing bath that drains toxins from your body. It stings sometimes but stings like it comes from some mentor-aunt who’s the wisest person you know and always speaks the truth in genuine love.
Salvation is the second installment in her nonfiction trilogy exploration of love. The first was All About Love: New Visions in which hooks offers some of the clearest descriptions of what truly-lived love means that I’ve encountered. She fearlessly maps what gets in the way of love and guides her readers through it with grace. Her goal is to make clear what love isn’t (“deep affection does not really adequately describe love’s meaning,” pg 3) and offer a thicker sense of how to actually embody it. Hooks draws on the work of psychologists Eric Fromm and M. Scott Peck to develop her definition and description. Quoting Peck, she agrees love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” and that ultimately “love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love” (3-4). She adds that “to truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (4). I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean to really act out that combination of words in my relationships for months. Unpacking the implications of truly living that way is the dazzling project of All About Love.
One of the most amazing experiences I’ve had was sitting at Mandy Patinkin’s breakfast table (yep, Mandy of “you killed my father, now prepare to die,” Criminal Minds, and Homeland) after staying the night at his cabin outside Creed, Colorado. We were on an organizing trip through the southwest corner of the state. Mandy, who a proud American Jew with a renound command of Yiddish, and my Palestinian coworker Imam did a shakshuka cook-off for a breakfast table that included the small western slope town’s local priest and rabbi, the rest of my Interfaith Alliance team, the Pentagon official on which Mandy’s Homeland character was based and his GI Joe Ken Doll son, Mandy’s wife the writer and actress Kathryn, and their remarkable adult son who at that time was doing health equity organizing in the area. The conversation around that table was unlike any other I’ve ever had. I can’t remember what the prompt was, but as we went around the table responding with honesty and empathy, it led to a conversation between father and son Patinkin that was honest, tender, wound exposing, and reconciling.
Reading Salvation as a white man is like sitting at someone else’s table as they consent to have their most honest and healing conversations right in front of you. It’s not about you, but it heals and changes you and even welcomes you into the family in the process.
hooks is concerned that Black individuals, communities, politics, and freedom movements have lost their way because they lost sight of love.
“[James] Baldwin and [Lorraine] Hansberry believed that black identity was forged in triumphant struggle to resist dehumanization, that the choice to love was a necessary dimension of liberation….As the quest for power subsumed the quest for liberation in antiracist struggle, there was little or no discussion of the purpose and meaning of love in black experience, of love in liberation struggle. The abandonment of a discourse on love, of strategies to create a foundation of self-esteem and self-worth that would undergird struggles for self-determination, laid the groundwork for the undermining of all our efforts to create a society where blackness could be loved, by black folks, by everyone.” xxi
The consequences of abandoning love were and continue to be felt most painfully be Black women. Her exploration of this is painful and crucial.
I could not agree with hooks more when she claims:
“If we do not create a foundation of love on which to build our struggles for freedom and self-determination, forces of evil, of greed, and of coruption undermine and ultimately destroy all our efforts.
Amen.
I’m looking forward to reading the final book in the series, Communion: The Female Search for Love, and another collection of her essays sitting on my shelf called Belonging: The Culture of Place.
The Following of Jesus by Leonardo Boff + With Head and Heart and The Creative Encounter by Howard Thurman + We Drink from Our Own Wells by Gustavo Gutierrez + The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song by J. Kameron Carter
There is a deep, broad, and pluralistic river which, I believe, is worth calling something like “the Christian tradition of engaged/prophetic/liberation mystical spirituality.”
By no means are these books saying the same thing. Carter in particular is trying to press beyond the limits (an-archicly, aka “against” [an-] the “order” [-arché]) of what’s been called Christian, so I don’t mean to entrap him by including him — definitely more thoughts on his incredible new work to come. Nevertheless a blues rhythm breaks out when you start reading these writers together. We need to attend to the ways this spirituality resonates with the traditional western-Christian mystical tradition, and the ways there are sharp dissonances, disagreements, resistances, and prophetic denunciations of that cannon. A different set of foundational presuppositions is often at work in these texts.
Part of the intellectual project I see myself participating in is helping us link this tradition together, taking it’s claims seriously as a subversive counter-tradition firmly within the way of Jesus, and through these resources grow less afraid to critique to the western (white) contemplative tradition that emerged in the late-middle ages into the early age of colonialism (see: St. John of the Cross wondering if he should go to Peru). The contemporary white contemplative world has some hero worship issues we need to wrestle with. We fall into the trap of believing these mystics are the enlightened ones, that their thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and so they’re beyond critique. And, sure, sometimes. This is not about abandoning humility. Quite the opposite. It is a matter of having more humility about the whole school of contemplation in which some of us have found ourselves—a school from which I count myself as one who has received profound gifts, healing, and rediscovery of God. But these venerated mystics are also dead Europeans who may have been having real spiritual experiences, but the way they described it theologically is rooted in metaphysics and politics we need to leave behind.
All the books pictured above agree that bodies matter; that earth and soil and creaturely life matter; that history and life in history matters; that our ethics of life with one another—particularly in relation with the poor and oppressed—are the primary measure of one’s spiritual life; that the poor and oppressed and exclude are where God reveal’s Godself; that God or Christ or the Divine is in fact incarnate in and as the oppressed, and in and as the communal struggle for life against and toward an alternative from colonial racial capitalism; that “union” with God is found in all of these places; that the spiritual life consists in this inward and outward dance.
So look. Meister Eckhart has some great things to say. The anonymous writer of the Cloud of Unknowing has some great things to say. St. John of the Cross had incredible things to say. Their books are sitting on my shelves well underlined too. But they are not saying all of that. Often they are saying the opposite. We need to stop pretending these traditions are easily reconcilable. I still believe there is plenty worthwhile to draw from the traditional Western mystic sources and ways to integrate their lessons (I do…for better or worse depending on your perspective). And I’m ready for an embodied prophetic contemplative movement of muddy mystics who are making texts like the ones on this list our primary guides. [**steps off soapbox**]
What I’m reading now
Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (I’ve been doing “a Russian a year” thing for the past few years which has been a lot more pleasant than I expected. Keepin’ it rollin’. A couple hundred pages in. The crime happened. Awaiting the punishment…)
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi (Devastating. I’m about half-way through. This is a readable, shattering people’s history from below we need to hear from right now.)
Confessions, Augustine (I’m pretty down on St. Augie. There’s a lot in here where I get to say, “oh, that’s where that f—d up theology comes from!” But there’s also some beautiful writing and moments of deep vulnerability. It’s the OG memoir, so it feels shockingly modern at times. Still don’t like most of his theology.)
Spirituality of Liberation, Jon Sobrino (It’s pretty rare that I can only read a couple paragraphs of a book at a time, but that’s been my experience with this one. It’s one of the best articulations of the kind of integrated spiritual-political theology / way of life I’ve come across. I just keep writing in the margin, “yes! that’s what I’ve been trying to say but didn’t know how!” Going to take me several months to finish at this rate…)
Do you have thoughts on any of these?
What were your favorite reads of 2023?
Man, do you set a delicious literary table before us. Gratitude!