What I've Been Reading

I'll go back a ways - when I should have been reading for a class, I took an evening to read The Color Purple. It was a good read - and quick - but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others because of the nature of some of the subject material. I had seen the movie on tv - but not cable, mind you - and so was unprepared for some of the things I encountered. However, the voices of Alice Walker's characters are amazing; you are often told, when writing fiction, not to try and write in a vernacular. It's too easy to sound fake or to lose the interest of the reader. But Walker's writing is clear and often lyrical. The best line of the book is where the title comes from, in which one character expresses the belief that it must annoy God when a person walks by a field and ignores the color purple, doesn't stop to appreciate it for the wonderful gift it is. What a wonderful thought! I bought the book at the big book sale because it is one of those books that I imagine I really ought to read if I'm going into Literature. Certainly worth the 50 cents I spent.

In between I read a few more books for classes. I read God's Politics by Jim Wallis for a class called The Church and Social Responsibility. The class was good, the book was... interesting. I am very glad to have read the book. Wallis offers some unique and sometimes angering insights into the current impass between religion and politics, often appealing to the Federal Government to pay for programs or needs in local communities. Apart from the fact that he obviously dislikes George W. Bush (and he does have some good critiques of the presidents decisions) and that he seems to think that the Evangelical Church at large is peopled with ignorant, bigoted Pro-Life Republican-Moral-Majority-robots, Wallis at the very least offers two good things for Christians who take their faith seriously. First, there is a major problem with the Church today if we are ignoring the poor, the orphans and widows, the strangers and any person who is in need of bodily care. What Wallis forgets is that change is enacted through the work of Jesus Christ, though He will certainly use the state and government. The second nugget of goodness is that we cannot assume that if we legislate an answer to a problem (poverty, same-sex marriage, corporate corruption) it won't neccessarily solve the problem. We cannot assume that the problem will go away or that culture will change. If anything, it may only mushroom. Wallis' constant appeal to the Federal Government just feels as if he thinks they hold the golden touch and can turn straw into gold - where will they get the money if not from the taxpayers? But if nothing else, reading God's Politics is a good exercise in critical reading.

Ah, so many books, so little time...