Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

It’ll soon be time to think about Christmas gifts. And what better gift than a good book.
Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zercher (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, $24.95) is an everything you wanted to know about Amish romances and more.

Weaver-Zercher combines research, literary theory and interviews with readers, publishers and authors to explore why this genre is so popular. An excerpt appeared in our April issue.

Blush: A Mennonite Girl Meets a Glittering World by Shirley Hershey Showalter (Herald Press, 2013, $15.99) is a memoir by the former professor of English and later president of Goshen (Ind.) College.

With graceful prose and a fine use of detail, Showalter recounts her origins and her childhood in Lancaster County, Pa. She captures the tension between her insular Mennonite upbringing and the allure of the wider world.

Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African by Lamin Sanneh (Eerdmans, 2012, $24) is a fascinating memoir of Sanneh’s growing up in a polygamous household in The Gambia, attending a Muslim boarding school and the impact of Helen Keller’s autobiography on his devotion to education and faith. Sanneh converted from Islam to Christianity and later pursued academia.

He is now professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale University. His story is detailed, compassionate and inspiring.

Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs (Herald Press, 2013, $21.99), collects essays and poetry from a variety of sources—both traditional and Christian, Native and non-Native—that address the destruction of Indigenous cultures and land by non-Native settlers and the different perspectives these groups represent.

Heinrichs calls this “a Jonah text” that speaks “a word to, against and for the dominant settler-colonial culture in North America.” Part of that call to “repent, resist, do something” relates to the ways that dominant culture has devastated the planet’s ecosystem. Those courageous enough to read it with an open posture will find new insights and challenges to their usual way of thinking.

A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives by David J. Neville (BakerAcademic, 2013, $24.99) explores this discrepancy in the New Testament: “although the canonical Gospels present a fairly uniform picture of Jesus as an advocate of peace and practitioner of nonretaliation, certain texts within these same Gospels and in other parts of the New Testament apparently anticipate future arrival, or parousia, of Jesus in the guise of a violent avenger.”

Neville looks at these contradictory texts honestly while arguing for a “shalom hermeneutic” to “complement the church’s earlier interpretive rules of faith and love.”

While quite academic, this important book is worth the effort. Neville concludes, “Nothing short of a peaceable hope, such as one finds in the vision of a new Jerusalem, does justice to what the story of Jesus reveals about God’s will and way in the world.”

More accessible if less groundbreaking is Jesus and Paul Before Christianity: Their World and Work in Retrospect by V. George Shillington (Cascade Books, 2011, $27).

Shillington, who teaches at Canadian Mennonite University, seeks to let Jesus and Paul act and speak out of their own contexts.

This is a good introduction to the topic.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.