America

A Day Late and [Several] Dollar(s) Short V: Catching Up Edition

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From time to time, I [briefly] review movies. Not movies that are new, which the watching public may be eagerly awaiting information about, but usually movies that were new recently—and which I’ve finally gotten around to watching (most often on DVD, thanks to the local library). This time, a free month of Netflix, Prime, and a few weeks off from seminary studies helped expand the selections to some TV shows and documentaries as well. Here, in no particular order, are my thoughts.

Toy Story 4
Sequels are the worst. Unless, of course, they’re not. Toy Story 2 was arguably better than the original, and Toy Story 3 was excellent as well—if also a little dark and emotionally manipulative. Even with that track record, I didn’t hold out much hope for yet another installment. But, true to form, Woody, Buzz, & co. pulled out another improbable victory, sucking us back in and even giving new characters (Duke Kaboom!) room to come to life and shine for a moment. I guess we’re the ideal target audience for these films—Rachel & I were 11 (just like Andy) in 1995, and the movies have grown up with us, with themes (moving away from home in Toy Story 3; dealing with all our kids’ toys in Toy Story 4, etc.) that roughly parallel our life experience.

Shorter Toy Story 4: Maybe *I* am a sad, strange, little man.

The Rise of Skywalker
The one theater visit of this set of reviews, for good measure. The tradition of Star Wars on the big screen is almost as old as the tradition of Star Wars stringing along fans with a hope for an engaging storyline. If there’s a bright center to the universe of film, we’re on the planet that it’s farthest from. Even so, this final installment wasn’t unwatchably awful—some of it was actually quite good. If anything, the mistake here was J.J. Abrams trying to atone for all of the awful in the universe with a smorgasbord of fan service that doesn’t linger on anything long enough to let us savor it. There’s a nice enough bow on the ending that I think I can resist the temptation to ever spend money on this property again, no matter what Disney throws at us. Baby Yoda notwithstanding.

Shorter The Rise of Skywalker: Is it over?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Any movie released back in summer that can still hold its own with nominations and wins during awards season is usually worth exploring. I got snookered into watching Pulp Fiction nearly 20 years ago, and haven’t had the stomach for Tarantino since, but I’d heard enough people talking about Once Upon a Time to give it a try. Brad Pitt is truly astonishing in this movie, the whole thing is very funny, and the revisionist history of the violent death of the golden age is a nice thought experiment, but there are points where it all still seems like an elaborate excuse to commit footage of some gratuitous carnage to the archives. Here is a good plot and great acting that almost drowns in its excesses.

Shorter Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: The least Tarantino Tarantino film, but he still can’t help himself.

Ad Astra
On the subject of Brad Pitt being truly astonishing, I submit to you this movie. It is just as understated (not a word, I’ll grant, that often gets bestowed on space dramas) as Hollywood is garish. This is science fiction at its most visceral, and the space-as-blank-canvas-for-revealing-character motif at near perfect pitch. James Gray manages to use the entire solar system as a backdrop for a story about two people, only one of whom we really see much of—and most of his lines are delivered as internal dialogue.

Shorter Ad Astra: Good science fiction always points you back toward reality.

Chernobyl
I was able to catch up on this HBO miniseries via a few Delta flights last fall, and the intensity of this story didn’t lose anything to the tiny screen—if anything the setting amplified it, leaving me at least a few times wandering around an airport gasping for breath afterward. Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and the rest of the cast suck you into 1980s Soviet groupthink and sycophancy. Gut-wrenching visual effects make you feel their human and environmental costs. A parable for our time on the dark places truth-shading and lack of curiosity will lead us.

Shorter Chernobyl: Some of the best historical storytelling I’ve seen.

The Crown—Season 3
The first two seasons of this show are so well done that I keep waiting for an inevitable letdown. The subject matter is just one bad script away from veering off into Downton Abbey banality—with the added soul-crushing value that these episodes are about real people and real politics. But Peter Morgan keeps pulling it off, bringing life and a real measure of relatability to one of the most recognizable and wealthy families on earth. Even the cast change this season wasn’t a net loss, with Tobias Menzies’ Prince Philip given many opportunities to steal the show (especially in “Moondust”).

Shorter The Crown: Fake people are people, too.

The Irishman
I’ve always liked Scorsese, but never his mob movies. This is, for film buffs everywhere, a heresy. Even so, this one rather insisted on being seen, perhaps a swan song of one of the great artists of our time. There were shortcomings—the incorporation of so many historical events in the backdrop made it feel a bit like Forrest Gump, but with a lot more blood—but most of the bold moves paid off. The 3.5 hour running time and much-vaunted de-aging technology are hardly noticeable as the story of men with too much money and too few outlets for healthy friendship and competition unrolls to its inevitably disastrous conclusions.

Shorter The Irishman: Death comes for us all, why not reflect on your life before then?

Marriage Story
Movies about divorce aren’t supposed to be cute and enjoyable, but this one had lots of quiet humor in the midst of a rolling disaster. The acting is superb top to bottom (and as a lifelong M*A*S*H fan, I’m always a sucker for Alan Alda bit parts), and the script is tight, never letting you lose sight of what a tragedy divorce and custody battles are, whatever the circumstances. The two leads are so well developed that it avoids simply retreading Kramer v. Kramer for a new generation. They’re so well developed in that their personalities hit me a little close to home. I nearly lost it when Charlie (Adam Driver’s character) breaks into “Being Alive” from Company at the end, not just because it’s inherently moving, but because belting out show tunes at karaoke seems about how I might process personal devestation.

Shorter Marriage Story: People are complex, broken, and all your feelings run together and come out at odd times. Also: this.

The Report
If you like to believe settled patterns of political life fall into neat ideological buckets, or worse, that there are more or less “good” guys and “bad” guys sorted tidily into partisan camps, don’t watch this movie. It takes an unblinking stare at the bowels of the CIA and U.S. foreign policy, and how people from other countries (even people with evil intentions and associations) are dehumanized by both parties (in this case, the Bush and Obama administrations) when it suits political needs at home. Easily the best political thriller since All the President’s Men, miraculously turning a 6,700-page government document into 2 hours of taut intrigue.

Shorter The Report: America is doomed. Also, does Adam Driver sleep?

American Factory
The flow of many familiar narratives is a journey from stasis to crisis to resolution. Sometimes, however, the bell curve inverts, and a story goes from despair to joy and back to despair. This is the case with American Factory—a multi-year tale of the shuttering of a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, and its re-opening as an auto glass manufacturing site for a Chinese corporation. The nature of work, family, just wages, unions, safety, intercultural cooperation, and hope are all explored in depth. The filmmakers capture candid conversation so well, you almost forget that it’s a documentary.

Shorter American Factory: America is doomed

Edge of Democracy
There are few things Americans are less well-versed in than political occurrences in other countries. For that reason alone, this fine documentary chronicling the rise and fall of the Brazilian Workers Party through the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff and speciously legal arrest and imprisonment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is worth your time. The lessons for a politically divided U.S. (and, more to the point, its sharpening class divide) are there for those with eyes to see. The film is that much more remarkable for director Petra Costa’s ability to see her own family’s entanglement in both sides of the conflict, giving its incisive political observations a personal edge.

Shorter Edge of Democracy: America is doomed

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The Coen Brothers are definitely part of the “love-’em-or-hate-’em” school—you can’t ignore their work if your like movies, but they’re not to everyone’s taste. In Buster Scruggs, this is on full display, not just once, but six times. The movie is really 6 narratively disconnected shorts in a classic Western style held together by themes of death, fear, greed, and pride with trademark Coen dark humor. If you like this (which I do), it works quite well as an allegory for many aspects of American life and culture. If you don’t (which my wife does not), it really just turns the stomach to no greater purpose.

Shorter The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: America is doomed, but probably in a piecemeal, individual-demises-pooling-into-disaster sort of way.

The Two Popes
The retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and ascension of Pope Francis in 2013 remains one of the most remarkable (and controversial) papal transitions in Roman Catholic history. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles explores this time in a fictionalized account of a visit between then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) and Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) at the papal estate, using this conversation to explore the church’s past and its future. The result is a dialogue between the need for openness, love, and evangelism and the need for structure, stability, and courage that shows the vitality and grace of Christianity, whatever tradition you examine.

Shorter The Two Popes: Tension is actually the key to hope.

The Good Place
I can’t remember the last time I felt like binge-watching a sitcom, but I got sucked into The Good Place last month, and decided to plow right through to the series finale (on Jan. 30). This is possible—because the whole series only has about 55 episodes—and probably a fine way to watch, since the story arc follows more of the pattern of a dramatic series even as it keeps the character-driven focus of a sitcom. While there are plenty of Hollywood tropes (primarily constant sexual references) that bog things down, the end result is a series that is incredibly funny, but also heartwarming and philosophical. The creators force viewers to think about morality, death, friendship, and the purpose of existence in the face of eternal ennui. In essence, the show provides a fine exploration of the unimaginative nature of many Americans’ vaguely Christian (or vaguely Buddhist) visions of heaven and hell. Mostly, I come away thankful for Jesus (as opposed to the show’s “point system” for determining one’s afterlife) and for a robust biblical vision of the new Jerusalem as a place of creative work in fellowship with God (as opposed to a “heaven” of eternal pleasure).

Shorter The Good Place: It’s telling that the only place this sort of conversation can break out in our culture is in a sitcom.

Header image: Rock in North Chickamauga Creek, March 2016.

A View from The End of the World

/ JRLonas / 2 Comments

Seeking “the meaning of life” is as human an activity as breathing, and wrestling with why things aren’t as good as they could (should?) be follows close behind. For better or for worse, I can’t stop reading books that propose to answer the pervasive sense of foreboding about the status quo that so many of us feel.

As someone who stands up in church every Sunday to confess that I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, this habit of watching for the end of a certain world seems a bit incongruous. I’d like to think I’m in good company with prophets (like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Micah) and apostles (like Peter and John) in looking for the Day of the Lord. They remind us that it is possible to raise up a Jeremiad with joy and to temper handwringing with hope.

So I keep reading and listening. This is true whether these works come from a political science perspective (like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed), a sociological perspective (like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart), a religious perspective (like Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option), a personal memoir (like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me), the agrarian (all of Wendell Berry’s work), the poetic (like W.H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety), the dystopian (like P.D. James’ Children of Men), and even the historical (like Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning). Look in any direction and it’s existential crises for days, but there’s always something to learn.

One thing all of these books have in common is an explanatory posture—they attempt to make sense of the loss and the dread and offer some semblance of a way to the good (looking back for some, forward for others, and grasping at things not yet seen for a few). Most start from a place of reminding the reader what society stands to lose if we’re not careful, a warning to the privileged that their inheritance is spending down faster than it is accruing value. Others point out that what we’ve inherited was never what we thought to begin with.

Of all the “here’s what’s gone wrong w/America” takes, however, Chris Arnade’s recent book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America is one of the most honest I’ve seen. Though the author (a former Wall-Street banker who also holds a Ph. D. in physics from Johns Hopkins) possesses greater privilege than many others in this group of writers, Dignity takes pains to  center with humility and humanness those for whom America has gone most wrong. Those who are being ground up get the focus and the voice here; those who’ve lost already, not those who merely fear what they may lose.

Some of this comes from the book’s format. It’s not an academic or even a narrative work, but rather a travelogue weaving episodes and itinerant thoughts with personal stories from all over the U.S. It’s also a sort of coffee-table book: Arnade is an accomplished photographer, and the faces and places he encounters feature prominently throughout the book, giving the words flesh and feeling.

At first, Arnade appears to be launching into memoir as he recounts the beginnings of this project in his long walks in New York, farther and farther afield from his Manhattan office. At some level, he never leaves this mode, stickA1UfDx8SR9L copying around to narrate, to tie together disparate interviews, and to offer an epilogue of his visit back to his hometown.

His voice, though, isn’t the thing you take with you. It’s the words of Takeesha, Imani, Luther, Jeanette, Beauty, Fowisa, Jo-Jo (all street names or pseudonyms to protect their identities), and the others you meet in these pages. It’s the drugs, chemicals of every kind that can be swallowed, snorted, smoked, or shot up. It’s the emptiness of homes, factories, cities, and towns that once held a fuller life. It’s the inexplicable persistence of community in McDonald’s, churches, bars, abandoned buildings, and parks. It’s the clear-eyed pictures of racial injustice that still pervade America and the ways its evil seeps into and drives other class and culture issues.

The photos-and-snippets motif Arnade chose invites comparisons to Depression-era narrative shapers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. He is justly in their company in terms of his photographic eye, but his artistic aims are more subdued. He paints people not as victims in need of assistance or pawns in a political game, but as they are—human beings, broken and beautiful, navigating the life they’ve got with the tools they have. This gives the book a strikingly agenda-less quality. Yes, he addresses globalization, crony capitalism, automation, family fragmentation, drug policy and other macro-level trends that have contributed to the plight of his subjects in some way, but he shies away from any prescriptive action steps. Some may find this (and the attendant lack of concrete “solutions” to “problems”) frustrating, but I think it is a critical posture for the observations Arnade makes to be taken seriously.

Throughout the book, he presents the key divide in American society as that between the “front row” (educated, workaholic, powerful, cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile, rootless) and the “back row” (underemployed, powerless, bound to place, loyal, struggling). Arnade uses these terms descriptively, but neither is intended derisively—front row and back row America both have values and vices, but their cultural currencies and drugs of choice differ widely. Both can provide meaning and community, but both battle despair and can be toxic to outsiders.

It is in the question of values—or rather value—where Arnade makes his most helpful contribution to our national conversation. The front row, he says, lives by “credentialed” value. A person is welcomed into that community based on their gifts and abilities, their degrees, their accomplishments, and their contributions to others’ well-being and success. This world is competitive and rewarding, but also insecure. In the back row, value is “non-credentialed.” Your identity and worth comes from things you are born with (family, ethnicity, work-ethic, local roots) or from belonging to groups that are accessible to almost anyone willing to join (a church, a drug community, a gang, becoming a parent).

At present, the high places of cultural influence and power are open only to the front row, and the non-credentialed bona fides of the back row aren’t likely to earn you a seat at the table or a steady job. If there is an ax to grind here, it is Arnade’s persistent message to his fellow front-row-ites that the meritocracy at the helm of American society today is a much, much more closed system than they’d like to believe. His forays into the back row—whether in Bakersfield, Calif., Johnson City, Tenn., Selma, Ala., Portsmouth, Ohio, or even neighborhoods of front-row cities like New York—demonstrate how the solutions of the front row (“get an education,” “move away,” “get clean,” “learn new skills,” etc.) are much higher mountains to climb from this different perspective. What seems like common sense to one group is to another group a command to turn one’s back on everything they’ve ever known. The repetition of this theme comes both from his desire to make this known, but also because his interviewees so frequently have been confronted by this stark divide.

Dignity matters, not as another explainer of “how we got Trump” or a push for better government and nonprofit programs for poverty alleviation (though it has implications for those discussions), but as a step toward helping us as a country see all of our neighbors as brothers and sisters. Arnade does not claim to be a Christian, but he is implicitly calling us to recover the imago dei as the final arbiter of one another’s value.

Arnade’s lack of professed faith also makes his assessment of the real value of congregational life and earnest beliefs in the churches (and mosques) of the back row that much more remarkable. In an excerpt from the book published in First Things, he writes: “My biases were limiting a deeper understanding: that perhaps religion was right, or at least as right as anything could be…. On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know.”

His chapter on religion hit closest to home for me and the work that I do. The churches he visited in the back row certainly don’t check all the theological or cultural boxes front row Christians deem necessary, but they all reflect the person of Jesus Christ in loving their neighbors and being faithfully present with them. Too often, front-row Christianity (whether conservative or liberal in theology, whether high-church or low-church in polity) has trouble doing this—we’re not quite sure what we’d do if someone from the cultural back row walked in and wanted to join. We don’t often have a story of change that would work for them. Doctrine, expected behaviors, and appropriate political positions we can get our minds around; Jesus gives us heartburn.

So where do we go from here? How do we build up? As I said, Dignity is long on observation and short on solutions. Many others are starting to digest the realities on the ground and work toward tying some of these threads together in ways that can repair the breach and bring people back to the wholeness we were designed to experience together. I’ve highlighted some of these on Twitter (that paragon of civil discourse), and in other writings, and I’m sure it’s a theme I’ll take up again. Moreover, this is no small part of the mission of the ministry where I work.

For now, though, let Dignity soak in and open your heart to those you might otherwise be tempted to forget.

Image: Abandoned farm equipment, Channel Islands National Park, California, June 2019

 

The Color of Compromise

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The story of relationship between ethnicities in the U. S. is typically thought of by white Americans as something of a three-act play.

Act I starts 400 years ago, when English colonists in Virginia bought 20 or so men and women from Africa. These people had been stolen from their homes (likely in Angola) by the Portuguese before being seized by English pirates on the high seas and then traded unceremoniously for food on the shores of a strange land. They, their descendants, and millions of other captives would spend the next 246 years being defined down from human beings to chattels, governed not by inalienable rights but laws concerning property, treated with all manner of cruelty and made to extract untold wealth from North America for their captors. Even at that, we’re pretty sure it was mostly a Southern problem, and the national figures from that region that “owned” humans (like 5 of the first 7 presidents) were at least deeply unsettled about the morality of it, though they almost never felt the need to actually act on that feeling.

While we’re all (mostly at least) pretty certain that Act I is evil, we’d rather not really talk about it much. Act II begins with the Emancipation proclamation, the sainted martyr Abraham Lincoln, and the virtuous northern states defeating the menace of slavery in a fair contest on the cathartic battlefields of the Civil War. This is where things began to get particularly fuzzy. As the institution of slavery gave way to other forms of oppression, with the emergence of Jim Crow and the sharecropper system, we tend to localize blame in the South. And even though Southerners spent those decades mythologizing Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, that must’ve been just remembering martial glories (and maybe licking their wounds a bit), so it’s probably OK that this habit continues into the present even though I’m not willing to participate in it personally. Because this was the time period that gave the world the Harlem Renaissance and DuBois and Hughes and Hurston and Jazz, though, life in the North must’ve been tolerable, right?

Act III looks like Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and we’re all fine now, right? Sure, Martin (and Malcolm, and Medgar, and…) was killed in the fight, and sure, some of my black acquaintances still talk about the ways their concerns aren’t being heard, and sure, the news keeps talking about the deaths of innocents, and sure, it seems like the legal system can’t wait to ruin a black man’s life. But racism is just an attitude, and if I don’t have that attitude personally, I’ve done all I can for the struggle (never mind the things Grandma says at Thanksgiving). Can’t we all just get along?

Of course, if you can’t tell from the tongue-in-cheek tone there, this isn’t a terribly accurate or complete telling. But it’s not all that different from a general narrative I absorbed growing up in the 90s, and one I’m sure I’ve parroted in full or in part until fairly recently. The real story starts long before 1619, and it’s not over yet, but to speak even these simple facts can stir controversy.

This is why, one of the best tools for shining a light on the African American experience (which is inextricably intertwined with systemic sins on a massive scale in the United States and the general history of this continent) is to look into the past. In the prudent exercise of history, the issues of today can be given context, and thus, their proper weight and understanding.

This is of particular value to the church, where most discussions of cross-cultural reconciliation have been carried on in the realm of theology, sociology, or personal narratives—all of which have tremendous value (would that we had all believed Galatians 3:28 and countless other passages firmly enough to avoid the mistakes of the past!). To avoid the roots of why there hasn’t been “conciliation” all along, though, it is necessary to understand the breadth and depth of sins committed in the past—sins of individuals and evil or cowardly actions taken by groups that flowed out of those sins. Only in this way can we really begin to build toward a humble, honest, unity in the family of God.

TTisby Coverhis is the task that historian (and trained theologian) Jemar Tisby sets his hand to in The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. If that provocative title invites a spark of indignation, it’s already doing some of work of the book as Tisby sets out to disabuse us of the notion that the church somehow floats above the historical currents in a society, untainted by the fray. Moreover, he pushes hard into examining how the church oftentimes shaped, not just reflected, the culture’s attitudes toward racial distinctions and white supremacy and the systems that have propped them up over the past four centuries.

Covering so much ground in a slim volume is ambitious, and Tisby, for the most part, pulls it off. He starts off with a short discourse about the discipline of history and acknowledges that his project here is to offer a survey, a necessarily shallow introduction to a massive subject. His goal is to illuminate the big arc of the story and encourage readers to go “upstream” into the multiplicity of deeper sources he cites.

Along the way, Tisby invites readers to consider the origins of chattel slavery in the Colonial and Revolutionary period, and how theories of racial stratification took hold in the Antebellum era as a way to justify continued enslavement and brutality. He critiques the ways that powerful outpourings of the Spirit during the First and Second Great Awakenings were channelled away from applying the Gospel’s implications toward justice for enslaved people, even as God raised up African American preachers, churches, and denominations. He excoriates Southern churches for their support of slavery and secession during the run up to the Civil War and their support of segregation during the development of the Jim Crow system (not to mention their damning silence on lynchings and KKK terrorism). At the same time, he breaks down the narrative of Northern virtue, detailing institutionalization of racism through redlining, real-estate covenants, etc., following the Great Migration.

Tisby is at his strongest in exploring the second half of the 20th century. His overview of the Civil Rights movement looks at how the church (North and South) began to shift from overt racial attitudes to a “moderation” (with Billy Graham and the beginnings of modern evangelicalism standing in as representatives for this phenomenon) that too-often shied away from supporting justice. His chapter on the development of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 80s carefully explains how there was much more continuity with segregation than the received narrative of the pro-life movement has been willing to acknowledge. This part is most helpful, perhaps because it has been most under-examined.

He concludes the book from there, tying together the political shift of much of the church toward the Republican party with a growing tone-deafness of American Christians toward the real-world concerns of our African American brothers and sisters in an age of mass incarceration, police brutality, poverty, and other systemic injustices from the 1990s to the present. His closing argument is for the church to stare this history in the eye, repent of the ways that we continue to ignore it, to lament the sins of our fathers, and learn anew to weep with those who weep so that we can also rejoice and glorify God together.

As a whole, Tisby succeeds admirably in his aims, producing a very accessible popular-level introduction to a vitally important topic. It is very engaging, and overall strikes a much more humble and conciliatory tone than I imagine that I would be able to muster covering such painful facts. If anything, though, I think the book’s length may be a slight disadvantage, as its attempt to be thorough in scope leaves many aspects of the story so abbreviated as to undercut some of the dramatic force of his arguments. My hunch as an editor is that there was a lot left on the cutting room floor—a few minor mistakes that slipped into the finished copy (i.e. last names stated before people are introduced, chopped sentences, etc) seem to indicate content removed and rearranged.

I know that publishing is a tricky game, and testing readers’ appetites for such a hard subject probably makes brevity the path of prudence. Still, I hope that Tisby (or others) will continue this project in greater detail. I would have enjoyed seeing a hundred more pages in this volume, and would gladly pay for a much more in-depth book from Tisby on the history of the Religious Right alone.

The audience that most needs to hear this story—theologically conservative Christians who profess a reticence to engage with justice issues and insist on a personally “colorblind” outlook on racial issues—may not receive it well, but I hope many among that group give it a hearing and respond with reflection and prayer. Public and private lament requires a knowledge of the depth and breadth of sins committed. We need to learn the story before we can bring it to God in the fullness of sorrow and hope, and experience the godly grief that leads to “fruit in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:8).

Tisby very effectively asks why this subject tends to stand out as a blind spot for the majority of American Christians and urges us to look into the abyss not just to convict but to rejoice in the ways that God has preserved the witness of Christ among a people who had every reason to reject the religion of their oppressors. In particular, he asks readers to hold in tension the contributions of our ancestors and an honest reckoning with their sins.

Christians of all people should be able to understand this, for “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” and it’s always possible to turn the orthodox religious observance into a sacrifice that God does not desire (see Isaiah 1, for instance). In many ways, we are denying the essence of the Gospel when we refuse to acknowledge that God has used, does use, and will use imperfect vessels (e.g. slaveholders like Whitefield and Edwards) to proclaim His truths—one can both appreciate and critique public figures whose sins become as well-known as their accomplishments, but continuing to whitewash their participation in evil as a way of “protecting” their reputation ultimately leads to people rejecting both message and messenger.

There is more I could say, but this is already a long review and I’d rather people read the book for themselves than have me explain it all. Perhaps the unstated message of The Color of Compromise is that we lose a lot when we fail to listen to our brothers and sisters from other cultures. Few if any of the insights Tisby lists here are unique to him. The evidence has been in plain sight all along, if we were willing to hear the voices that were calling out for us to listen. The fact that a book like this still needs to be written in 2019 is proof enough that hard hearts and stopped ears are more common in our houses of worship than we want to admit.

Image: Aaron Douglas, Harriet Tubman, 1931, oil on canvas. On loan to North Carolina Museum of Art from Bennet College for Women Collection, Greensboro, N.C. Photo by me, January 2019.

Unpack That

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Caravan was original, Chrysler
Trying to get us to buy the dodge,
Artfully labeled to imply transit
Of all the baggage of forty camels.
This we need, if our children are to be
Properly attired, prepared for all
Weather and all events required for fun.

Aerostar was Ford’s offer. Trapezoid
In motion, with endearing manual
Transmission perfect for those who need one
More thing to think about inside a box
Filled with children, hurtling through traffic,
Like the valkyrie or sprite evoked by
Its spectacularly ambitious name.

Not to be outdone, Chevrolet bestowed
An Astro, with all the aesthetics of
Houston’s eponymous dome and all the
Responsiveness of George Jetson’s Great Dane.
It was called after the stars, I presume,
Since it would not move outside a vacuum,
A high cube tossed about by every wind.

Japan wants us now to believe this act
Of folding entire households onto
Wheels for a routine trip to the ball-field,
Walmart, or grandma’s should be an epic—
An Odyssey or Quest. Heaven forbid
We suffer shame from traveling light or
Shell out for a cross-continental flight.

Chrysler now is at it again, duping
Into unceasing violence of packing
And unpacking a Pacifica the
Unsuspecting American with the
Great inconvenient convenience
Only a false sense of ownership can
Properly convey to one’s thinned billfold.

Life in these United States is a game,
A never-ending level of Tetris
Played in Conestogas made of steel.
When you’ve got all you need, you can’t bear to
Leave any bits behind. Our minivans,
Quaint and manifest density of hope,
Rattling around from sea to shining sea.