shanesaxon.org

Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of the books that I read

  • Becoming Dallas Willard by Gary Moon

    Over the last ten years the tide of Young Restless and Reformed evangelicalism has noticeably subsided as a new day has dawned. The best-seller list is now dotted by a few pastors and authors who are also drawing hordes of evangelicals to large conferences that have surpassed Desiring God, T4G, or G3, like the Holy Spirit Conference 2025 hosted by Bridgetown Church. These authors–John Mark Comer, Tyler Staton, Tim Mackie, and Jon Tyson, among others–share a brand of charismatic evangelicalism that focuses on spirituality and owes significant debt to authors from the previous generation like Richard Foster and Eugene Peterson. But, if influence can be weighted by citations in books and podcast episodes, then perhaps no figure is more influential to this new movement than Dallas Willard.

    Dallas Willard grew up in poverty in the midwest, and faced significant adversity in his upbringing. His mother died when he was two and his father remarried a woman who didn’t want anything to do with him. Willard would mostly be raised by his older brother and sister-in-law who were both committed Southern Baptists and fundamentalists. Willard eventually went to a fundamentalist bible college Tennessee Temple where he met his wife and graduated with a degree in psychology (a new discipline at the time). After graduation he began to serve in pastoral ministry, but all the while was reading widely in theology and Christian history. His personal reading led him to question whether he was truly equipped to provide answers to the questions his parishioners faced.

    He convinced his wife that he needed more education and moved to Baylor where he began to study philosophy. Oddly when he first began his education at Baylor he worked for John R Rice and Jack Hyles, famed fundamentalist church-growth experts of the sixties and seventies, but quickly realized he had little in common with these men. After graduating from Baylor, he pursued a PhD in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison. There he discovered the work of Edmund Husserl who would become the subject of most of his academic work.

    During his PhD, he arrived at a few theological convictions that informed his work as a pastor. First, Willard believed that the Kingdom of God was a here and now reality. He believed that embracing the gospel should directly inform and impact a person’s daily life. Second, Willard believed that salvation was life with God and that it couldn’t be reduced to a decision or a moment in time. And, finally, Willard believed that ancient spiritual practices were a way to objectively pursue spiritual formation.

    With these new found convictions, Willard found tremendous joy ministering to a small congregation outside of Madison. After he completed his studies, he labored over the decision as to whether he should pursue academic work or ministry, but someone told him that if he stayed in the academy the churches doors would always be open, but the same couldn’t be said in reverse. After his doctoral work, he took up a post as a professor of philosophy at USC and taught there until his retirement.

    Willard is hardly known today as a philosopher, but instead as a guru of spiritual formation. The two aspects of his work, however, are deeply intertwined. Moon identifies four key themes in Willard’s thinking. First is metaphysical realism. Willard became an professional philosopher because of his interest in classical philosophy. He was interested in answering the big questions, but he found success in the academy because he latched onto a modern philosopher, in Husserl, who was attempting to carve out a path for realism. Willard’s interest in realism was applied to concepts like soul, Kingdom of Heaven, and God as he insisted that they really existed and should be contemplated as such. His book Divine Conspiracy applied metaphysical realism to spiritual concepts. Divine Conspiracy also explores his second major theme: epistemic realism. Willard believed that human persons had direct unmediated knowledge of reality.

    The third major theme of his work was the need for a coherent and integrated anthropology. Willard believed that it was essential for Christian theologians and ministers to think deeply about the human condition and articulate the nature of spiritual formation in light of a sophisticated portrait of human nature. Renovation of the Heart is Willard’s book on spiritual formation and human nature. The fourth theme is the objectivity of spiritual disciplines. Willard believed that the spiritual disciplines were an objective and observable process by which human persons can change. His book on spiritual disciplines is Knowing Christ Today.

    All of Willard’s thinking flowed from the big four questions: how can one be happy, what is the good, how does one know anything, and what’s real. Jonathan Pennington in his book Jesus the Great Philosopher argues that today very few people are attempting to wrestle with these questions systematically or with any depth. Willard was an exception as a man who brought significant intellectual ability and genuine spiritual sincerity to the task. Though Moon’s biography borders on hagiography at times, it told his story in a compelling and clear way. I’m eager to read more of Willard’s work.

  • Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

    Wallace Stegner’s pulitzer prize winning novel, Angle of Repose, is a story told from the vantage point of Lyman Ward, a fifty-eight year old former history professor crippled by a degenerative bone condition. The novel presents as a collection of his voice recordings about a season in his life where he is dedicated to telling the story of his grandmother Susan Ward and her husband Oliver. 

    Susan Ward is an artist and author who gains some notoriety for cataloging her adventures in the west with her husband Oliver. Oliver, an engineer, bounces from one remote late nineteenth century western location to the next attempting to find work. Throughout the novel, Oliver is described as a quiet and honest man; he’s honest to a fault seemingly unperturbed by the modern world and its degrading tendency, but also never civilized or cultivated to the tastes of his wife Susan. With her immense talent, Susan could have earned a place among the literary elite in the east alongside her childhood friends Augusta and Thomas, but her life becomes an exile away from civilization because of her Quaker influenced commitment to her husband. 

    As the story progresses, Susan’s resentments of her husband’s failure to provide her the life that she wishes grows despite his honesty and the purity of his intentions. In the shadow of her resentment, lurks Oliver’s best friend and sidekick Frank Sargent. The story of Susan climaxes as she capitulates to her bitterness and takes solace in Frank who has professed his undying love for her. Lyman Ward speculates that while Susan and Frank were together was when Oliver and Susan’s youngest daughter Agnus drowned. The next day Frank killed himself and Oliver retaliated against Susan by ripping up all of her rose bushes. 

    This story is stitched together by Lyman’s reflections on his own life. As the book careens towards its end, I realized that Lyman’s own life is in many ways illustrated by the story of Susan and Oliver. Lyman’s wife Ellen had left Lyman when he was diagnosed with his condition to be with his surgeon who mysteriously disappeared later. Lyman carries a deep resentment and bitterness for a betrayal that he could never have imagined. 

    The book ends with wild dream sequence where Lyman imagines his wife returning to make peace with him, but he’s attacked by his assistant because Ada has fallen ill. Lyman reflects on the dream as the book closes imagining whether he will ever be able to forgive his wife Ellen or if he should to merely have the contact. 

    The book is ambitious in how it paints a portrait of the western frontier through the eyes of a woman through the eyes of her grandson. The picture painted is bleak, but visceral. The emotional dynamics are similar; bleak, but visceral. In characteristic Stegner fashion, there’s a sequence in the book where Shelly tells Lyman that she plans to move to a hippy commune. Lyman sounds off on the inanity of hippy ideologies. A common theme for Stegner he finds the pseudo-romantic notions of the hippies offensive to people who have deeply thought about the flaws and faults of the modern west.

    Angle of Repose is the angle at which dirt no longer rolls. It’s a metaphor for the body that’s lying prone because it’s dead or dying. But Lyman’s closing reflection is that it is only a matter of perspective. The angle of repose is death to one person, but seen vertically it’s the posture of someone who is standing straight despite the pain of life.

  • Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

    “Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.” And how beautiful that temporary survival is. Crossing to Safety tells a profound story of friendship and hardship as two couples struggle to survive. And it is definitely a survival worth reading about. I can commend a lot about this story, but here are some of the highlights.

    First I loved Stegner’s impeccable sense of place. One of the main settings is Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison–back when you could still drive down State Street–Larry Morgan and his wife Sally face the challenges of professional life for the first time. There they meet their lifelong friends, the Lang’s, who help them explore Lake Manona and force them to take long walks in the cool Midwestern fall. Stegner skillfully highlights Madison’s ironic power; it’s here, in this small city, Midwestern dairy farmers would study under the world’s best and brightest without even leaving the state. Having spent quite a bit of time in Madison, I think he nailed it. Overall I deeply enjoyed my journey back between the lakes with these new companions. 

    Also I profoundly appreciated Stegner’s portrayal of friendship. CS Lewis in the Four Loves said, “In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company.” Stegner captures Lewis’s idea of grace in friendship through Larry and Sid, the protagonists of Crossing to Safety. Larry admires Sid’s natural grace and powerful presence, and mutually Sid admires Larry’s genuine artistic genius in writing. But they both think that they don’t deserve the other’s friendship. Fundamentally they feel that grace is the foundation of their friendship, and it’s this grace which unites them till the end. 

    Last I appreciated how Crossing to Safety wrestled with the most difficult questions of life. For instance, near the end of the novel, Larry glimpses his disabled wife, Sally, from a distance. She has braces on her legs and can barely walk, but she is hobbling after her terminally ill best friend trying to help. This image outrages Larry, and he reflects on what he is angry at, 

    “at it, at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was.”
    – Wallace Stegner

    The author expresses how he must have felt years before as he nursed his own mother while she lay dying of cancer. Stegner had risen from poor nomad to distinguished literary hero. But no amount of literary success could assuage the cruel ache of his temporary survival.

    For Christians, Stegner’s written rage is a gift. We have spent too much time reading sanitized Christian fiction, cheering for Kirk Cameron and hanging old Thomas Kincaid’s. Stegner might not have had all the answers but at least he hated the enemy.

    Overall I loved Crossing to Safety. It was compelling and provocative, and I would recommend it to anyone.