book review

The Seller of Secrets – You Should Buy This Book

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

It’s happened – we have a published author in our family. Sheri, the wife of my next younger brother, Daniel, has done the hard work needed to accomplish that feat. So this is me promoting The Seller of Secrets to my (tens of) readers. If you are based in the US, you can buy it here, and if you live in Europe, try this link. In the following post, you can read Sheri’s response to a few questions I put to her. Again, fair play to her on the publication of her debut novel, and may there be more to come.

Wow, what a tale. Your finished story can seem like it dropped out of the sky, but I’m sure a lot of work went on behind the scenes. How much did you plot everything out before you began writing, and how much did characters take on a life of their own?

My process changes and clarifies with each book I write. The Seller of Secrets shifted quite a bit over the years as I worked on it, hired an editor, and then edited with my agent. I didn’t outline very well to begin with, especially regarding character interaction and growth, and the magic system. I paid for that later when my (very sharp-eyed) agent was picking through it. Thankfully, she saw the potential and had the skills to help me fix inconsistencies and relational issues, and create a finished product that caught the eye of a publisher!

With my next novels I’m plotting more ahead of time, and during the plotting is when I hold my characters loosely and let them change if they need to. 

You’ve written The Seller of Secrets at a time when reading books is on the decline. How much did you take that into consideration? Did your imaginary reader have a smart phone nearby?

Not at all, haha. I know people say that, but I and most of my writing friends are reading more than ever. It may be affecting how many books get super popular with teenagers, but it’s not making us slow down as writers at all. It does make me grateful my publisher is launching all formats (e-book, paperback, and hardcover) at once so the reader who needs those options can choose. An audiobook is in the plans, but I’m not sure when that will happen. 

I’m in a writing class at the moment and the teacher says to approach all writing in a spirit of play. Does that resonate with you?

Hmm, I wouldn’t say it quite like that, but perhaps. I think I want to approach my writing in a spirit of joy, as in, remembering why I love stories. Perhaps play fits into that, but to me, joy fits better with everything I’m writing. Sad or painful scenes don’t feel like play, ever. 

For me, listening to good music (Gregory Alan Isakov, right now) is helpful to get me in a creative mood. It’s always something I’ve listened to over and over though, so it’s not distracting. Although, with lyrics like his, sometimes a phrase catches my attention anew and I stop and sit with it. I sense joy in his music as well, and it feeds mine while writing. 

Some of your characters are very vivid, especially Bell’s dialogue and thought processes. To what degree are they composites of people from real life?

The main characters are probably always going to be a little bit of me. The Seller of Secrets was my way of thinking through what it means to have power and accept the responsibilty to use it well, so some of Bell’s thought processes there are similar to mine. But I craft the finished character from various elements that I know the whole cast needs. As the side characters grow and develop in my mind, the main character might shift a bit to meet them to the best effect. 

Your description of potions and scents is believable. How much time and energy did you have to spend researching it?

I’m glad to hear that! It’s hard to calculate how much I spent on those descriptions. I usually start out with spare descriptions, then add a little more with each pass through. My agent and then all the different editors that get the book read often asked for clarification of one detail or another. It’s such an arduous process that I’m not even sure when some of the details were added. 

The book will be a success/failure if…

A tough question. I like to dream big, but my main dream is to reach readers that need this story. It’s hard to know where a debut novel is going to go, but I will view it as a success if I can build a loyal reader base for my next novels. 

I think I’m beyond failure being possible, by those standards. 🙂 I’m really proud of the story and the work I and others put into it, and I’ve already heard enough good things from readers to feel like it was a success. 

My Review of Jesus and John Wayne

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

A provocative new book, Shepherds for Sale, by Megan Basham of The Daily Wire, argues that many Christian leaders are leading the American church astray by promoting heretical views on sexuality, gender, race, and environmental issues.

After listening to part of an interview with Basham and reading some reviews, I decided not to read her book but to download another one that I’ve wanted to read for years: Jesus and John Wayne. Though this book also deals with heresy, its author, Dr. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, sees the main threat as coming from misogynistic patriarchy instead of “progressive” Christians.

If I’m honest, part of my choice was driven by a desire to bolster my beliefs and exchange rah-rahs with my tribe before tackling a book by a Daily Wire staff member. I find it much easier to sympathize with Du Mez, who argues that evangelical leaders who maintain the status quo are far more effective assassins of the faith than progressives could ever hope to be.

Du Mez is first a storyteller. From the beginning, it’s clear the book will culminate with the question, “How did so many American evangelicals come to support Trump?” Yet, she unravels the narrative deftly, making it feel more like a political thriller than a history lesson. She begins in the 1950s, exploring how evangelical views on masculinity evolved over time.

The book kept me guessing (in a good way) about its thesis, though I could tell early on that it had something to do with the evangelical obsession with male power and the paranoia about female leadership. I was initially skeptical that Du Mez could connect such diffuse figures as Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Phyllis Schlafly, and John Eldredge into a cohesive narrative. And while some case studies were weaker than others, Du Mez’s thorough research and deep immersion in her subjects’ lives were evident. She is a first-rate scholar.

The most difficult part of the book was reading about the crimes against women and the numerous cover-ups by revered evangelical leaders. Du Mez rigorously documents these incidents, highlighting how leaders used scripture and Christianese to justify their actions, making it difficult for victims to recognize abuse. In the end, I boil her thesis down to this: the evangelical church’s hardnosed insistence on complementarianism has led to its moral downfall, culminating in its support for Trump.

While I share Du Mez’s egalitarian views (insofar as terms like egalitarian and complementarian are helpful), I’m left wondering, “What now?” Should we all go out and vote Democrat? Take the high moral ground over those who refuse to confront power dynamics? While I give Du Mez top marks for her research, I’m more reserved about her obviously judgmental attitude toward the “other.” For most of the book, she disciplines herself and avoids value judgments, but toward the end, she sometimes slips gratuitously into a tone bordering on contempt. For example, she calls someone a “pseudo-intellectual”; is she a bona fide intellectual?

Although she is writing as a historian–and her thorough documentation is commendable–she might have reached a wider audience by showing more compassion and shared humanity toward those she critiques; by remembering, as Solzhenitsyn once said, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. For instance, she briefly mentions John Piper’s refusal to support Trump—a noble stance that could have been highlighted as an example of courage.

Perhaps the unadorned brutality of her narrative is more effective for changing some readers’ minds. Personally, although it confirmed more of my beliefs than it challenged, I’m glad I read it. It helps me understand why so many kind and decent people I know could embrace Trumpism. They are swimming, we are swimming, in cultural waters whose floodgates were opened decades ago.

It also provided a refresher on American history and taught me the proper use of the author’s favourite adjective: nascent.

Overall rating: 3.5/5 stars.

Book Review: When Everything’s on Fire, by Brian Zahnd

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

Recently a grizzled friend was sounding off about people who deconstruct their received religious beliefs. Though not overly rigid in his own belief system, he thinks it frivolous to engage in theological naval gazing while children starve in Yemen. The world needs more people to live their faith, not lose it.

There’s truth in that.

But is doubt something we choose or is it something that happens to us? In his book When Everything’s on Fire, Brian Zahnd writes that being angry at people who doubt is like “being angry at medieval people for dying of the plague” (pg. 14). Most people do not find it very frivolous, after all, to embark on a path that leads to ostracization from their faith community and even financial precarity.

Zahnd believes that instead of sweeping our doubts under the carpet we should seek to understand them. Our individual and collective spiritual crises arise from a convergence of factors, many of them far greater than our personal beliefs and choices.

In the 19th century the philosophies of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud challenged many basic assumptions about human existence. While these three atheistic “Masters of Doubt” are all different, what they had in common was their suspicion of the church’s claim that in Christ “people can be truly motivated by the love of God and love of neighbour” (pg 21). Subtly, they supplanted the Christian story with powerful new meta-explanations for human behaviour, namely power (Nietzsche), money (Marx), and sex (Freud). We are still trying to come to terms with the reverberations.

Zahnd’s point throughout is not to demonize secular philosophers and atheists but to understand why people are deconstructing. Some atheists, he says, are in fact Protest Atheists, honest seekers who object to the humanly-constructed deities that are morally capricious or anti-intellectual.

Moreover, Zahnd does not shy away from critiquing the church. His list of catalysts for deconstruction from within the church is fearlessly non-partisan and brutally honest. Here is a sampling:

  • Sham apologetics. Maintaing and selling a faith that’s based on Fundamentalism and biblical literalism (pg 96).
  • Disdain for historical Christianity. Explaining away the substance of the Jesus story by allegorizing the heck out of it (Chapter 2).
  • Religious fanaticism. It often leads to power-mongering, intimidation and spiritual boasting (pg 121).
  • Christian nationalism. He hints at having been complicit in this at one point.
  • Textual deconstruction for its own sake. This one may be rare, but sometimes people really do deconstruct as an end in itself. Texts may need to be deconstructed, but they do mean something.

This is indeed a sordid litany of secular and religious pitfalls, again, many of them greater than our personal choices and beliefs. In all of them, Zahnd insists that the narrow path forward is to keep a mystical relationship with Jesus Christ. Stay immersed in the church’s liturgies and sacraments, especially during periods of doubt. Seek an experiential faith in which it is normative for God to speak to us. He recommends reading the Gospels on your knees for six months and asking Jesus to reveal himself, a practice my wife and I have since implemented. Zahnd has some respect for the Charismatic “mysticism for the masses” (pg. 127) but he seems to favour the more wholistic Contemplative mysticism of Hildegaard von Bingen and Thomas Merton.

Recently a spate of dreary alarmist books have attributed the loss of healthy religion to attacks from atheists and/or so-called liberal Christians. On the other side, authors react to a rigid church tradition. Building on the sure foundation of a provocative podcast, they put all the blame on those deluded Fundamentalists. Zahnd’s book probes deeply and manages (mostly) to steer clear of incendiary and simplistic language on both sides, with a certain generosity of spirit for everyone.

I take a perverse pleasure in subjecting books to my version of the Hippocratic Oath—does it avoid doing harm and does the good outweigh the bad? Unfortunately, not all the books I’ve read in the past few years have passed my somewhat arbitrary test. When Everything’s on Fire, however, passes resoundingly. In fact, I place it in the elite category of ‘Book We Had Been Missing.’

Why? Because it presents a vision for the Christian faith that stays true to its ancient mahogany feel—whose sacraments and creeds predate the catacombs—but is at the same time averse to stagnation and unimaginative living. Like Jacob in Genesis it invites wrestling and is dynamic and ever capable of transforming. Idols, as the book makes clear, are static, but God is on the move.

Or, in the words of Zahnd, “Complacency, not doubt, is the great enemy of spiritual development.” And in a time when everything is truly on fire, his book provides a path for developing spiritually despite, and even through, our greatest doubts.