This and That

Book Title: With some help from historian Brian M. Ingrassia (Brian and his wife live two doors down from us), I've come up with the following proposed title for my book manuscript: Making Disciples in the Chickasaw Nation: One Woman's Spiritual Odyssey in Indian Territory and Early Oklahoma. What do you think?

Sleep! The research keeps accumulating. It all says the same thing. If you want to function well, you need to get plenty of sleep. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal ("How Your Brain Recovers From Sleep Deprivation," by Aylin Woodward), when you sleep, your body conducts what might be described as housekeeping for your brain. Useless cells get taken out and, in general, the brain gets a cleaning of sorts. When you don't sleep well, the next day your body is doing some of that housekeeping work. But that means it can't do its ordinary, "awake" sort of work. It's like trying to do math problems while vacuuming. These two sorts of tasks don't go together. (If you can do math problems while vacuuming, just shut up). During the day after little to no sleep, your body and brain actually sort of shut down in order for the cleaning process to take place. It's like you came to work one morning, but the overnight cleaning crew never showed up the night before. This is why sleep deprived people often have car wrecks. The driver wasn't necessarily being negligent. It's as if the driver was temporarily asleep! So, pay attention to what's now called "sleep hygiene." Your brain, your body, and everybody else will thank you. 

Memories of Connecticut: I first arrived in Wallingford, Connecticut, in August 1993. As the new preacher for the Ward Street Church of Christ there, I was coming from a world where one's opinions about Rubel Shelley and what was known as "the new hermeneutic" would quickly peg you as being one sort of preacher or the other. I did not mention or talk about any of those things. I just wanted to help the congregation to have a positive view of Christian life. Above all, I wanted them to love and admire Jesus more and more. My first series of Sunday-morning sermons was about Him. The titles were basic: "Jesus: A Friend of Sinners" and "Jesus: Our Great High Priest." Stuff like that. After a few weeks, it dawned on me that what were "big issues" among Churches of Christ in the Mid-South were no issues at all in Connecticut. In fact, the members of the congregation didn't even know about those things. And I wasn't about to tell them! Finally, here was a church where pursuing the goals of pleasing God, becoming more like Christ, studying the Bible for all it's worth, etc., was the entire point. That's what people wanted, and that's what they were doing. The only thing I had to do was to teach them and provide the best example I could. For several years prior to the demise of my first marriage, it was glorious stuff, a golden age in my life.

Dr. Fulkerson: When I was a student at Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee (1984-86), one of the star professors there was Dr. Raymond Gerald Fulkerson (1941-2019). On campus, at a time when relatively-few faculty members at F-HC held a terminal degree, he was "Dr. Fulkerson." He taught courses in Communication. As I remember, he was chair of the Communication Department at F-HC. In my first semester there, I took the basic Speech Communication class, with Fulkerson as the instructor. It was obvious to me that this man "knew his stuff.." Although I was majoring in Bible, I thought he would be a good person to study with because, after all, my future would have a lot to do with communicating. In my senior year, I took what was a capstone course for all students majoring in Communication. I believe the course title was "Survey of Rhetorical Theory." That class was quite a challenge, and Demosthenes became something of a hero to me. I decided to take yet another class with Fulkerson, one titled "World Public Address." It wasn't required for Communication majors. So there were relatively few students in that class. I believe that just a few years later the title was changed to "Great Speeches," or something very close to that. Anyway, although I did not know him well, Fulkerson made a real impression on me. One thing I walked away with was the idea that speeches and sermons always have a "rhetorical situation," the context of the place and moment. Consider, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered before a huge gathering in the nation's capital during the March on Washington for civil rights. As a preacher, the idea made me wonder: What is the rhetorical situation in a church on an ordinary Sunday?

Race and Civil Rights in 20th-Century U.S. History

If you're interested in exploring how race and civil rights played out in America during the last 100 years, you could hardly find three better books than these. To follow the story chronologically, you would read Boyle, then Branch, and finally Brilliant.

Boyle tells a story from 1920s Detroit. Branch focuses on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights movement from 1954 to 1963. Brilliant looks at civil rights in California between 1941 and 1978.
The tight monograph in the group is Brilliant. In my opinion, due to book size and literary style, the easiest to read is Boyle. Here's a taste of each one:

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

The first thing readers should know is that Taylor Branch has a serious "man crush" on Martin Luther King, Jr. His obvious bias is just fine with me mainly because (a) it's understandable and (b) it's nice when an author doesn't attempt to hide what he really thinks. The second thing to know is that this door-stop of a book is just the first of three volumes chronicling the life and times of MLK. Branch begins with the assumption that the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. "is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years" (xii). For obvious reasons, he also asserts that any biography of King must relate the story of the civil rights movement. Branch gives some attention to King's predecessors, his family of origin, and his early years. However, this lengthy, engaging narrative really takes off in 1954, when King became the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. It ends in 1963 with the March on Washington and, finally, the assassination of President Kennedy. Branch’s focus on King has drawn criticism from those who see the leadership of the civil rights movement through a much wider lens. This book won a Pulitzer Prize.

Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Picador, 2004.

Ask any well-informed American what the 1920s were all about, and the answer will likely include flappers, speakeasies, dancing the Charleston, the Harlem Renaissance, and the growth of jazz. Arc of Justice reveals that the answer should also include the presence of deadly racism in America, even in a northern city like Detroit. Boyle sets out to tell the story of one Ossian Sweet, his family and friends, and the incident and subsequent trial that made him a significant historical figure. A fine piece of journalistic and popular history, this book does not begin with a thesis statement per se. As Boyle continues, however, it appears that he wants to drive home the point that although the saga of Ossian Sweet is a compelling story, one that should be told, of greatest significance is the story's context, an American racism that often seems to recognize no restraint or limit. In that sense, it might be possible to categorize Arc of Justice as a work of microhistory.

Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

The main title of this book quotes the insightful lawyer and author Carey McWilliams (1905-1980), who made the observation as early as 1943. McWilliams was referring to a racial diversity in America that simply did not match up with the standard black/white binary conception of racial differences and interests. It was significant that McWilliams lived for many years in California, home to large numbers of Asian-, Mexican-, and Native Americans. Brilliant's book "examines the civil rights consequences of California's racial diversity--how America's 'racial frontier' became America's civil rights frontier" (5). Its coverage begins in 1941, the year the U.S. was dragged into the Second World War, an event that was soon followed by the internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. The book concludes in 1978 with the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke "reverse discrimination" case.