Book Review: Three Cups of Deceit

Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Forget Alanis! Want to teach your students about irony? Have them read Jon Krakauer's latest book, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. Ironies abound in this slim, whistle-blowing volume, dedicated to stripping Mortenson of his Indiana-Jones-Meets-Mother-Theresa facade. For a man who portrays himself as a crusader against anti-Muslim sentiments, he sure does spread a lot of fear-mongering with his fabricated tales of run-ins with the Taliban. And, for a man who presents himself as dedicated to the cause of alleviating the sufferings of others, he sure does fly on a lot of chartered jets, at the expense of his fundraising organization, the CAI. And, for a man who exhorts kids in the U.S. to give up their lunch money in order to provide educational opportunities for children in the Middle East, he sure has left a lot of empty school buildings languishing without supplies and staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's about time someone exposed this guy for the fraud that he seems to be.

I found myself having two reactions while reading this book. On the one hand, there was something very satisfying about watching Jon Krakauer bring this over-inflated guy down. There's a certain justice in it, mixed with a bit of reality-TV-like entertainment. On the other hand, I felt very humbled by this morality tale. If we're being honest with ourselves, we all have a tendency to self-aggrandize to some degree. The only difference between normal people and guys like Greg Mortenson (or Ergun Caner, for those of you who followed that fiasco) is a little bit of audacity and luck. Greg Mortenson's story served to remind me yet again of the fallibility of human nature.




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Book Review: A Meal with Jesus

A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission around the Table by Tim Chester

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


People will often say that Gandhi and Jesus had a lot in common. While I'm sure some similarities exist, I think such a view betrays a superficial understanding of both men. Take one example: their diverging attitudes about food. Gandhi appeared to have a rather strained and fickle relationship with food. He held the view that one's taste for food was inextricably linked with one's sexual appetite – and both were inherently vulgar, debased, impure – desires to be squelched. In his mind, the disciplined man lives in a state of perpetual "partial fasting," relying only on scant portions in his "grim fight against the inherited and acquired habit of eating for pleasure" (Gandhi quoted in Joseph Lelyveld's book Great Soul).

"The Son of Man," rather, "came eating and drinking..." (Luke 7:34). This astonishing truth about Christ, along with the Bible's repeated use of food and feast related imagery, is the subject of Tim Chester's fantastic book, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community & Mission around the Table. Chester's main burdens in this book are as follows: to explain the startling significance of Christ's desire to eat with sinners and Pharisees alike; to reveal the deeper spiritual realities that these shared meals with Christ point to; and to encourage us as Christians to make the sharing of meals an integral part of our fellowship with others, so as to regularly enact and reflect upon the grace that Christ so freely gave to us.

This is a neat book because it addresses some of the concerns commonly raised by the emergent church – our lack of connectedness, our desire for authentic community, the need for social justice and equality, the call for the church to reflect people from every tribe, tongue and nation. And yet, it does all this in a completely gospel-centered way, a way that does not depart from historic Protestantism. This is a book about food and fellowship, yes, but, ultimately, this book is unabashedly about the gospel. It's about substitutionary atonement. So, how does Chester connect the topics of food and fellowship with the cross?

Chester demonstrates that hospitality is a recurring theme in God's story. From the forbidden fruit of Genesis to the banquet imagery of Revelation, food and feasting – or lack thereof – is symbolic of our standing before a holy God. In the Old Testament, when Israel enjoyed peace with God, food was abundant. And, conversely, in times of judgment, the reality was famine. But, though we deserve the famine, God demonstrates his faithful love to undeserving people through abundant feasting, made possible only by the free distribution of his grace. Chester cites a rich and beautiful passage in Isaiah that embodies this gospel reality:

"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined…"

But, how can that be, when our sin separates us from God? Here’s the best part!

"…And [the Lord] will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth…" (Isa. 25: 6-8)

Chester explains: "No one need ever leave this feast. In Isaiah 25 death itself is on the menu – God himself will swallow it up. So this is a perpetual feast" (59).

How beautiful and coherent the Bible is, that we see substitutionary atonement in the Old Testament, God taking the sin of his people onto himself, so that they can be reconciled to him. We eat good food; God eats death. And all of this points to the cross. Throughout his book, Chester just relishes this fact.

It should, then, come as no surprise to us that Jesus is the host of and a participant in many shared meals, as he prepares a way for us to have fellowship with God. "Jesus is the Passover lamb. His blood is daubed over our lives; the Lord passes over us, and we’re redeemed…so we can come to the mountain of God, and eat and drink with God" (113).

Chester, then, charges us to live in light of this gospel reality, inviting others, particularly those we are in the habit of rejecting, to join us around the table. I loved this book. I’ve been resisting this cheesy cliché, but, what the heck; it truly was “food for the soul.”

So, while I appreciate Gandhi’s aversion to gluttony and his desire to see hungry people fed, I have to disagree with his assertion that a full meal is "a crime against God and man." For people who put their faith in Christ, a full meal – especially one shared with others – is symbolic of our reconciled relationship with God through Christ, and a pointer to the feast to come.




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Book Review: Modern Times

Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


While working at a public high school in New Jersey I observed a rather interesting pedagogical practice. It looked a little something like this: a band of students acting as undercover ambassadors of their history class would approach an unsuspecting non-history teacher with a historical or geographical trivia question. If the stunned teacher could not, say, identify a particular world destination on a blank map, or name a particular African dictator responsible for such and such event, the students would then report this failure back to their history class, sneering all the way at the ignorance of that unfortunate teacher, who was then labeled by the history class as being representative of a larger pattern of ignorance within our culture.

I'm not here to debate the merits of this type of assignment (although, someone should point out to the annoyingly arrogant students that the only reason why they know the answer is because their history teacher just talked about it last period...). I simply wish to share that the knowledge that, at any time, these students could be on the prowl struck a chord of fear in my heart. Commanding proper attention and authority as a young, female teacher is hard enough as it is; the last thing I need is to not be able to point out the Republic of Djibouti on a blank map in front of my entire class.

I've always been a bit insecure about my flimsy knowledge of historical and world happenings. The last time I took a proper world history class, I was a sophomore in high school. And, it was taught by the high school football coach, whose favorite technique was to distribute pastel colored worksheets, which we were then told to complete on our own. Needless to say, not a whole lot stuck. I can't blame all my ignorance on Coach Small, though. If I had spent my college summer vacations reading about history instead of playing countless hours of Tropico, I would be a much better person today.

Reading Modern Times by Paul Johnson constituted an attempt to better my historically-challenged self. This is not a people’s history, nor does it focus in depth on any one particular person or event. Rather, it's the story of the 20th's century's world leaders, the various ideologies they represented and the bloodshed that resulted when utopian visions inevitably imploded. Johnson seems to be particularly fascinated by the 20th century's unique propensity for producing charismatic revolutionaries, visionaries and messiahs whose often whimsical and ill-conceived decisions tragically influenced the lives of millions of people. The law of unintended consequences is a key theme in this book.

One characteristic of Modern Times that I appreciated is that Johnson doesn’t claim he’s done the impossible task of presenting the cold facts of history in an objective manner, completely free from bias. Rather, he unabashedly analyzes history, massaging the landscape of the 20th century into a narrative arc, replete with characters, themes and tragedies. His basic premise, which drives his analysis, is that Nietzsche’s prediction for the 20th came true, that at the dawn of modern times “the belief in the Christian God [was] no longer be tenable.” The vacuum left behind by God’s absence inevitably needed to be filled. Johnson goes on to argue, “Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which offered a more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance” (48).

The fact that a traditional Judeo-Christian worldview undergirds Johnson’s argument might not sit well with some readers who disagree with his presuppositions (namely, that a moral fabric is woven into the universe and that man, despite his best efforts and often good intentions, is inherently weak and easily corruptible, which is why attempts at social engineering are doomed to fail). But to those who are open to Johnson’s particular angle, Modern Times will prove to be an informative and enlightening read. If I had to take a multiple choice test on it right now, I would likely score no better than a 9%, and I probably still can’t find the Republic of Djibouti on a map. So, you might be wondering why I devoted four months of my life to reading this long, boring book. What I can say is that the impoverished picture of the 20th century that I had in my mind prior reading this book has now been edified and enriched, and most importantly, it gave me a solid foundation onto which I will hopefully build.




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