Over in the DC area, I ran by a Goodwill store the other day to see what books they might have. I always enjoy scanning those shelves to see what I might mine for insights  (into both good and bad phenomena) and illustrations, what I might pass along to others, and, yes, what I might also add to my already overstocked library. (Think Imelda Marcos and her shoe closet.)

This time around, I got a box full (around $35) and have already given away three of them. Two were classics (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.) The third was a take on work in the Obama White House, which I gave to someone who worked in the Bush White House.

I’ve flipped through the others and picked up on a few things.  And yes, the title plays off the Matt Damon film, spelled differently. (The eight are shown in the photo, clockwise from the upper left.) As for the books not seen here, I’ll contribute some to the little neighborhood library box, toss and few, and then take a few home with me. 

Congressional Directory, 2019-2020, 116th Congress— My son-in-law clerked for two of the federal judges whose bios appear in this volume. I knew that Judge Richard J. Leon (D.C. District Court) was a counsel for the “Iran-Contra” hearings in 1987-88, but I didn’t know he was a counsel for the House’s banking committee during the “Whitewater” investigation in 1994. And then I learned that Judge Gregory Katsas (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals) clerked for Judge Clarence Thomas at both the Circuit Court and Supreme Court level.

Fear No Man: Living Without Compromise in an Intimidating World by George Reed, with Dave Hunt—Reed was chairman of the U.S. Board of Parole for twenty-three years, serving under appointment by five presidents. When I read the book title, I thought it would be about a modern day Eliot Ness, facing down an Al Capone. But then I noticed that the publisher was Christian (Harvest House) and that well-known believers had praised him—Senate chaplain Richard Halverson in the foreword and Senator Mark Hatfield on the jacket.

He did, indeed, face off with some tough customers, including “The Birdman of Alcatraz.” Burt Lancaster played him sympathetically in a movie, and he invited Reed to see it in hopes that it would tenderize the him, but Reed saw through the fictions, knowing full well that Robert Stroud was a very nasty piece of business. And a nutty one. At one hearing, he tried to hypnotize Reed by swaying back and forth.

An earnest Christian, Reed speaks freely of his faith in this book, and he connects the mercy he’s received in Christ to his work of pardoning (or not pardoning) federal inmates. He’s keener on the interests of antiseptic incarceration and rehabilitation than retribution—misjudgment in my estimation, but I’m very much impressed with this servant’s testimony and service. (I’ll draw on it my writing on justice.)

Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, by Maya Angelou—As I was growing up, my father, Raymond (BA, Mercer; BD, SBTS; PhD, Edinburgh) taught at four colleges related to Southern Baptist state conventions—Cumberland, Carson-Newman, and Belmont in Tennessee; Ouachita in Arkansas. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which such Baptist college did or did not hew to the founders’ religious purposes, with the great majority moving into secularism over the decades. In Wake Forest’s case, what began as a Baptist school with a pastor as president in 1834, gained its independence from the North Carolina convention in 1986. Such is the path taken by many of the East Coast schools, from Richmond down the coast to Stetson.

I mention this because Maya Angelou’s book on lessons assembles the counsel of a long-time Wake Forest faculty member not comfortable with orthodox Christianity. She expresses appreciation for the Unity Church, calls all people “children of God,” and goes off into some “Spirit” discourse on God that doesn’t pick up on His personhood as Father and Son. She has real trouble with the notion that Jews and Muslims are lost, and then wonders about whether she might find herself “resting in the bosom of Jesus,” to use James Weldon Johnson’s words.

The book is an amalgam of prompts to be nice, salted with feminist and racialist applications. Some of her verse reflects her multiple marriages and liaisons:

Men?

Yes, I’ll love them.

If they’ve got style,

To make me smile, 

I’ll love them. 

One selection picks up on her conviction that “racial peculiarities do exist, but . . . beneath the skin, beyond the differing features and into the true heart of being, fundamentally, we are more alike . . . than we are unalike.”

We love and lose in China,

We weep on England’s moors,

And laugh and moan in Guinea,

And thrive on Spanish shores.

We see success in Finland,

Are born and die in Maine,

In minor ways we differ,

In major we’re the same.

Nice.

(BTW, In the 1960s, I once led music for a revival meeting at FBC Stamps, Arkansas, a town in which she lived on two occasions, a total of ten years between 1931 and 1942.)

The Rise or Fall of America: What Believers Must Learn from the Rise and Fall of Israel, by Brother Quick—This self-published book was a pleasant surprise. The author’s name sounded contrived, but it turned out that it belongs to Tom Quick, who is a well-read writer and speaker with a degree from Columbia Bible College. He marshals scripture, historical vignettes, telling quotes, disturbing statistics, etc. to stress the need for national awakening and for our obligation to humble ourselves for its sake. (And yes, he gives prominence to 2 Chronicles 7:14).

I saw that this particular volume was inscribed with “Jahspeed!” to Democratic Congressman, Conor Lamb (from the northwestern suburbs of Pittsburgh). Since I bought this book in a DC area Goodwill store, I suppose Lamb passed it along to them while he was in town at work in the House of Representatives. Who knows if he read any of it. But one could only imagine the impact of a Conor Lamb on fire with the message of Quick’s book. I’m not holding my breath. But I’m not doubting God’s power to effect it should he please. 

Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man by Steve Harvey—I’m fascinated by the “wisdom” (some of it genuine, much of it bogus) passed along by celebrities. Thumbing through this volume, I came to a not-so-promising summary:

My mother father were married for sixty-four years. There is a simple explanation for the longevity of their marriage. My dad, Slick Harvey, recognized that he was not in charge and acted accordingly. This kept a smile on my mother’s face, my father reasonably happy, and the marriage intact.

He goes on to explain that Slick worked deals with her to get things he wanted, but we don’t see any grasp in either of them of biblical grounding, say, regarding male headship in the home. Yes, you’ll see some Bible echoes, as in Steve’s “Ten Commandments To Pleasing a Woman,” with #9 having a scriptural ring: “Thou Shalt Remember the Golden Rule”—but with the explication, “You can be happy or you can be right,” which brings us back to the above, “simple explanation” regarding his father. 

You get another religious touch in his “Twelve Ways To Tell If Your Man Is Ready To Commit,” when he lists, “He takes you to his place of worship,” but then adds down the way, “He knows your kids are crazy and ill-mannered but loves you anyway.” This latter word fits with other things he says about dating divorced women and the single woman’s need to find a good male role model for her fatherless sons, and thus you get glimpses of the plight of the majority of black homes in which the father is absent (around 80% in Chicago and Detroit the last I checked).  You look in vain for a biblical plumb line on these matters.

Of course, the book features some common sense rules and don’t-be-an-idiot cautions, but the directives are pragmatical and not in the least hermeneutical. And, lacking grounding in God’s special revelation, there’s no telling where you might end up.

Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking by Eric Lax— Back in the 1970s, I was more impressed with Woody Allen than I am now. What used to seem continually clever now strikes me as occasionally clever. And he too often seems to revel in his neuroses and off-putting quirks (albeit good material for a comedian) when he should be repenting and reforming. Also, though I’m glad that I’ve seen a batch of his films over the decades, the sum impression is that they exhibit a lot of self-indulgent nihilism.

This interview book spans a good deal of his creative work, and I was intrigued by the following tip, an antidote to writer’s block:

I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower, it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers. I’ll be down here [in the living room] and at an impasse and what will help me is to go upstairs and take a shower. It breaks up everything and relaxes me.

The shower is particularly good in cold weather. This sounds so silly, but I’ll be working dressed as I am and I’ll want to get into the shower for a creative stint. So I’ll take off some of my clothes and make myself an English muffin or something and try to give myself a little chill so I want to get in the shower . I’ll stand there with steaming hot water coming down for thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, just thinking out ideas and working on plot. Then I get out and dry myself and dress and then flop down on the bed and think there.

Also, to go out for a walk is a help.

Vows: The African-American Couples’ Guide to Designing a Sacred Ceremony by Harriette Cole—Speaking of marriage, this book urges couples to design their own ceremony, with special reference to their ethnicity. Well, sort of. Though Cole encourages them to go back to the “Motherland” (Africa) to claim “the essence of who [they] are . . . based on that history,” she also salts in Buddhist and Hindu options, the latter presenting “Seven Steps” from the Vedas for incorporation, e.g., “May the Lord lead us to good property.”

There’s some interesting stuff here. The premarital-counseling questions of James Forbes of Harlem’s Riverside Church includes, “Do you want to go first class just because you can, or do you want to go coach even if you could afford first class?” And while it’s gratifying to see that Forbes asks them, “Will you have prayer at home? Will you have a regular Bible reading?” you wonder what he makes of “unequal yoking” when he asks “How will you share in the richness of the other person’s practices if you do not share a faith tradition?”

The title speaks of a “Sacred Ceremony,” not a Christian ceremony, and though there are Bible verses quoted for possible usage, there’s a lot of other stuff that’s anti-biblical. In one spot, Cole features what she takes to be an edifying, Caribbean ceremony built around the “Khamatic teaching of the Husia, the oldest written spiritual document known to humans.” There were pagan purification rituals, offers of thanks to the four corners of the earth, and, yes, musical selections from Bob Marley.

In other words, this is a relativistic dog’s breakfast of notions, a delight to the spiritually addled.

Generation of Swine: Gonzo Papers Vol. 2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 1980s—Thompson was born in Louisville near Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1937 and after he committed suicide in Colorado in 2005, his ashes were blown out of a cannon, an event funded by his fellow Kentuckian Johnny Depp, born in 1963 in Owensboro, about a hundred miles down the Ohio River from Louisville.

Known for his love of drugs, firearms, and free-wheeling, excoriating, and imprecatory writing, he was a legendary character, the subject of two movies. In this volume, he took turns flaying and stomping on a wide range of characters, including religious figures Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Oral Roberts. I thought the collection might be more engaging, but it doesn’t age well, more dissolute than artful, unrelievedly dark, shedding precious little light. A little of it goes a long way. Here’s his take on the end of the 1988 election, when George Bush #1 defeated Michael Dukakis. Granted, election season can be a very unpleasant and wearying affair, but this?

October in the politics business is like drowning in scum or trying to hang on through the final hour of a bastinado punishment . . . The flesh is dying and the heart is full of hate: The winners are subpoenaed by divorce lawyers and the losers hole up in cheap motel rooms on the outskirts of town with a briefcase full of hypodermic needles and the certain knowledge that the next time their name gets in the newspapers will be when they are found dead and naked in a puddle of blood in the trunk of some filthy stolen car in an abandoned parking lot.