Reading Journal 2024: Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land
Author: Jacob Mikanowski

“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist.”
So begins the prologue of this much anticipated boook. Took me a while to get around to it, mostly due to the lengthy wait period at the library. Now that I’ve had the chance to read it, Mikanowski did not disappoint.

One of the reasons why I wanted to read this book is because, ever since our brief time in Ukraine, I’ve been endlessly fascinated by this region and its history. To me, this truly was a foreign land, an enigma fueled by a stereotypical portrait The author wastes little time etablishing the fact that even the label “Eastern Europe” is a stereotype, coined by outsiders in response to the second World War. One of the outcomes of this phrasing is that it becomes a barrier in two ways- for the people on the inside who “want to escape being associated with Eastern Europe”, and for the people on the outside failing to understand the intricacies and diversity of this region, something Mikanowski argues is its most defining characteristic.

There are three primary expressions of this diversity that carry through the book: Language, ethnicity, and its primary expression, faith/religion. It is this last one that represents the region’s greatest contrast with the West, and for that matter the East. Given how the region is positioned, the developing Empires on either side of it, something that never developed in this central region, caused it to become a space where different relgious expressions were forced to live and co-exist together. As the author puts it, “Eastern Europe thus became a haven for religious misfits and heretics.” Or, as he puts it, “a place for seekers”, where their “idols were poets and short story writers” rather than generals or saints.

From this emerged the distinct character of a region that existed in a disparte state, lacking a singular narrative or origins story, let alone a coherent collection of co-existing narratives and origin stories. And, as the author points out, without a real sense of their history, or histories. “Awarness of ones origins is ilike an anchor line plunged into the deep without which historical intuition is viritually impossible.”

Here in lies the paradox though, on two primary levels. First, what seems like a positive (religious diversity and coexistence) actually bears out something other than harmony. This lack of harmony just gets expressed in different ways within the regions localized nature, ways that are arguably more succeptible to the challenges of global and territorial unrest. Later on in the book he touches on how this would feed into the regions developing relationship with the West. With the West as one imposing Empire with interest in territorial allegiances and control, attmpts to influence and/or control Eastern Europe actually became a means for this region’s stubborn resistance to colonization to penetrate or push back on Western ideas and interests. Secondly, part of this stubborn resistance emerges from the simple nature of its lack of a clear origins story. As history tends to go, crisis binds people together, and that binding becomes a means of forming a narrative, or requires a narrative. And that narrative becomes the identity of a people and a place. What has been labeled Eastern Europe remained undefined partly because of the ways its pagan origins were never recorded. When Chrisianity penetrated the region, as it did most of the world, the end result was an unintended mashup of pagan traditions and Christian practices/beliefs. One of the most unique marks of the region, and something I experienced during my time in Ukraine, is its fusion style that emerges from the simple fact that paganism persisted there the way it did without anyone actually knowing anything about its origins and character in this region to this day. It created this odd paradox in that “pagan chieftans” became “Eastern Europe’s first Christian kings” and so on and so on. In a very real sense, if Christianity outside of Eastern Europe became easily coopted by politics and nationalism and Empire, within Eastern Europe the fusion allowed a pervasive belief in the supernatural to be the very thing that protected the area from this. However, this also kept it from forming a cohesive national identity.

One of the most expressive examples of this is the history of the Slavs, which we genuinely know next to nothing about in terms of origins, and yet have been at the heart of the push and pull of the region in either direction, both sides wanting to lay claim to this history.

The book goes on to detail the history of the three primary relgiions coexisting- Jews, Mustlims and Christians, including a subsection called “Heretics”, giving each group a historical overview. All of these histories help to explain further how this diveristy fostered a climate of necessary segregation within the regions different local expressions, fueled as it was, likewise, by the regions fascination with and worship of language. This then plays out into the more familiar narratives of the regions inevitable clash between communism and fascism. By and large the parimary threat to this region was facism, even though conceptions of the West, fostered as it is through the use of the label “Eastern Europe”, has tended to elevate communism in its narrative. If the regions three-fold charcterization of diveristy- language, diversity, religion- allowed it to tame and use communism through the cycles of revolutions and counter-revolutions (not to mention, the untamable nature of the central region became the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall, precisely because it had been imagined it as a gateway into the rest of the world), it had no such defence against fascism. Which is partly why the region became so particularly vulnerable in the second world war, and utlimately defined by it with a sort of intimacy the rest of the world can never truly understand.

One of the final notes in the book recognizes the region’s tendency for forgetting. Of histories getting lost to history. And yet, in some odd way, this is precisely where history continues to get preserved and persists in the uniqueness of the region. A region that is still subservient in many ways to the Empires that lie on either side of it, but which also refuse to allow this to reshape them in an image not their own, even if that image is not always understood or articulated. It remains nevertheless embedded in the experiences of a localized people, enough so that it can wield a national identity amongst the reality of territorial sacrifice when necessary, but never at the expesnse of its diversity. Here the past continues to matter, but in ways that remain fluid and responsive. And, of course, complicated and complex.

Film Journal 2024: Immaculate
Directed by Michael Mohan

That final 5 minutes though. This is next level stuff from Sydney Sweeney.

For all the ways this checks conventional boxes, how it tells its story and some of the turns it takes makes this one a bit unconventional in its approach. Some of it works better than others. There is a significant shift that changes the direction of the story at just over the halfway point that I felt was rushed and a bit forced. The time it gives to Sydney Sweeney’s character, a nun who transfers to a convent in Italy, really worked for me, especially in the first half. I think it earns the gradual transformation we see her make, and it accentuates the different relationships in the convent in ways allow this to become something of a character study.

The horror worked for me too, built as it is on growing sense of paranoia. We see this take root in the opening 10 minutes, and when the truth does come to the surface, it’s ready to go all in. It leaves some space to weave in some existential quandaries about suffering and death, faith and miracles. There was room to do more with these aspects of the story, but they do add some substantive quality to the film.

I was glad to be able to see this one with a packed house. Defintiely the ideal way to see it. Especially for that ending. Did I mention the ending? It’s next level stuff.

Reading Journal 2024: Field Notes For the Wilderness: Practices For An Evolving Faith
Author: Sarah Bessey

We all bring ourselves to the things we read and watch. To try or want to remove ourselves from the equation so that we can speak to something truly objectively would be to miss the point of why we read and why we watch. We can not experience or grow if we fail to recognize where we sit as an essential part of the conversation.

This is especially the case with a book like this, which is bound to find people on all different points of the faith journey it wants to explore, namely those who have or are in the process of deconstructing and/or reconstructing (which she acknowledges is a tired phrase). If I may offer one small point of objective measure, I feel like I can rightly say that the book’s primary audience would be someone in the early parts of this journey. Field Notes For the Wilderness is very much a book for those who find themselves in a space they don’t know how to explain or describe, with its later chapters then describing to that audience, from the perspective of one well travelled wrtier, the sort of community of wilderness people they might expect to find.

So where do I find mysellf in all this? I’ve travelled the path she describes. I am of the generation who first encountered this notion of deconstruction in writers like Brian Mclaren and Rob Bell, and I am well versed in the larger community (the Evolving Faith community) Bessey has helped to foster and grow, including being an avid listener of Pete Enns and follower of Barbara Ann Taylor and the late Rachel Held Evans (who’s book Wholehearted Faith was nothing short of transformative).

What she has to say about the process she is engaging is deeply familiar to me, and much of this served as a reminder of the sorts of emotions and questions and challenges and experiences that first led me into that wildnerness space. I know first-hand what it is to experience those things and ask those questions and face those challenges and lose your sense of community and belonging in the process of simply attempting to be honest about where you are. The culture which I grew up in is one where you are either in or you are out based on your affirmation of a particular set of doctrinal beliefs, and to find yourself at odds with even one is to find yourself cast out. I’ve been called the devil. I’ve been called worse.

Here is the thing though. I’ve also experienced something similar from those in the wilderness. Don’t get me wrong, Bessey says all the appropriate things in the book. She speaks of making room for all, of remaining open, of learnning how to be for and not just against, of rejecting the notion that deconstuction/reconstruction (or her favored term, evolving faith) must look one way. The problem is, I’ve experienced enough to know this is not how the wilderness community gets established. Perhaps it comes with more than a little irony in tow, but I know first hand the singular way of thinking that one encounters in these communities, and how quickly one finds rejection if they don’t reject the right doctrines, tow the right lines, or if they take a slightly different path back into faith then the norm.

And to be sure, it is every bit as lonely of an experience as challenging your old paradigms to begin with. You might not be called the devil, or worse, but it can feel like you are being deemed a figurative version of the same thing. Most common is simply silence. The quiet rejection that tells you that you are not of one mind, and therefore there will be no theological conversation. The lines have been drawn between conservative evangelical/reformed christiantiy and progressive christianity, with no liveable space outside of these circles.

I have no doubt that Bessey is a great, well meaning person. I’ve benefited from her podcasts and speaking and writings. Similar for many within the wilderness community. There is much in this book that resonated for me and helped reframe things I thought I knew (permission to not be the perpetual cycnic is a good one). There was also some portions that reminded me of my personal struggles, despite Bessey doing a good job of attempting to counter a good deal of what I described above. The problem is, she fits firmly within that evolving faith community. She shares a language, shares in that experience and the “evolved faith” that emerged from it. I don’t quite belong. I know that. Even as I also don’t belong in those same ways within the communities she and others deconsructed from.

Of course, none of that is a direct criticism of the book. It is well written, very aware, and I have no doubt many will find it extremely helful.

Film Journal 2024: The Promised Land
Directed by Nikolaj Arcel

If nothing else, I would hope this period western helps bolster a case for The Datk Tower adaptation being desperately underrated. As it’s own accomplishment however, The Promised Land is an exceptional film, operating on a whole other level. If it is possible for Mad Mikkelsen to still surprise and catch me off guard, he certainly does that here, delivering an embodied and commanding performance befitting a revenge drama. It also boasts a memorable villain, elevating the drama to a studied and tension filled exploration of its themes. A film rife with real emotional presence befitting the genre.

Essential viewing and exceptional filmmaking.

Reading Journal 2024: Ireland: A Novel
Author: Frank Delaney

Delaney’s imaginative exploration of the identity and history of Ireland hinges on this one, single conviction- you cannot come to know Ireland simply through a distant and cold articulation of historical facts, you can only truly know Ireland by hearing and experiencing its stories. The stories of its people, the stories of its places. If the blurring of lines between facts and imagination might leave a modern reader uncomfortable, it is perhaps the modern reader that has become resistant and incapable of grappling with truth. This is, after all, the nature of myth and myth telling, not to anchor us in untruths, but to open us up to something that is more true, about ourselves, our world, about the greater realities that shape our world… about Ireland.

History can never be understood as facts, it can only be rightly be understood as story.

Delaney frames his novel about Irelands storied history around an interconnected relationship between a young boy and a traveling storyteller. As this young boy listens to the storyteller, he learns about Ireland. And as he learns about Ireland, he learns about himself. And as he finds himself in the story of Ireland, he comes  to learn about the world.

The book is structured around different stand alone stories that form its chapters, with the story of the storyteller and this young boy forming a connective piece between the chapters (stories). As the novel progresses, the boy grows into a man, and with this Ireland grows into a people and a country. Disconnected stories come alive in a singular narrative arc.

As someone with Irish blood, and as someone who has yet to have the privilege of visiting this land, I have long understood the Irish connection to this land. The story is one rooted in the cycles of exodus and return, but just as this connection persevered the imagination and the art of storytelling in the midst of one of the worlds darkest periods, so does it preserve this same imagination today. One of the most remarkable things about Ireland is its undying sense of preservation and its unique spirit in the face of change. I often wonder if this spirit is ingrained, even in those with Irish heritage who have never set foot on the land, in some connective fashion. When I encounter its story, something in me feels heard and understood. As though my love of story, my fascination with the spirit, my longing for myth to recapture my imagination and liberate it from the trappings of modernity, has a root and a reason. Where this need to fiercely hold on to wonder understands its nature as having a context.

This is the stuff Delaney helps to bring to the page. I have to imagine that this book is meant to be heard rather than read. A way of recovering that deeply held connection between Ireland’s literary history and its surviving oral culture. Perhaps when I revisit it I will take this approach.

Reading Journal 2024: Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood
Author: Gary Paulsen

There are a handful of books that I would call formative when it comes to my love of reading as a young child. Hatchet was one of those books.

What was it about Hatchet that captured my imagination? The adventure? The survival? A few years back when my son had to read it for his English class, reaquainting myself with the story left me thinking that it was connection that I felt with this young boy, captured at least in inspiration from Paulsen’s own life story, that endeared me to it.

Back in 2021, Paulsen released this memoir. I could now read his story. Sadly, he passed away soon after its release, leaving only one more book to release in his name. Fittingly, it would seem, a book that has been advertised as Hatchet on the ocean. A book that brings this inspiration full cirucle. For me, it would be this memoir that gives his long career its appropriate context, and for me, it helped me to unerstand why I felt that coinnection to his stories as a young child. Not because my story is similar, but because he understood what it was to be a child looking in at the world from the outisde, unable to articulate the stuff in his head in a way that would make sense and be understood. Likewise, I was someone who found freedom in my discovery of books, of story, who’s life was marked by my own version of the “librarian” who handed me my notebook and pencil. I might trade love for the woods for a love of culture, but in truth, what informs Paulsen’s story is a young boy escaped to the woods so as to find his way back into the world with a greater sense of his own place in it. I connected deeply all those years ago to Paulsen’s journey from finding it hard to connect with people but finding friendship with the creatures. A connection that allowed him to connect the crueler parts of nature with the violence he saw and experienced in the world.

What’s interesting too, about thinking back to my son’s reading assignment, is how much of his own story I can see in the pages of this memoir as well. A young boy having seen and experienced things that he could not adequately express or describe to his new Canadian home. A young kid whom, in those early years, often found himself imagining disappearing into the woods and off the grid, a young kid who’s room is still adorned with pictures of wolves. A young kid who struggled with school, who found some familiarity in the concept of the trades, who was handed by some the sugggestion of the military. All parts of Paulsen’s story that I think would be an equal connection for him.

There are those books that are less about artistic merit and more about connection and inspiration. This is one of them. Perhaps most inspiring is the fact that he finished the story of his childhood at eighty years old. A reminer that its never too late for any of us to understand where it is we come from, to understand who it is we are.

Film Journal 2024: Bob Marley: One Love
Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

A rough and uneven first half finds its footing in the final 40 minutes. I think part of the issue is that it struggles early on to figure out what kind of film it wants to be and how to tell what is a bit of a sprawling story. We get misplaced flashbacks, and the potential to focus on the civil unrest paired with the decision to ultimately keep our attention firmly and directly on Marley’s progression and the song writing. It doesn’t help that the compelling aspects of the story is the stuff that surrounds Marley, including the wider Jamaican culture, and where we only get nods to its lingering presence, the vast majority of the first half is spent simply moving Marley’s career from point a to point b.

Marley’s story is most interesting once it approaches the climatic moment, which definitely benefits the back half of the film. That’s where we start getting the richer character development stuff and relationship drama, along with some more cinematic choices.

The spirit of the movement is there though, and it’s a message the feels timely in terms of the different political tensions right now around the world.

I will add, my theater experience was interesting. There were a lot of young people, which was somewhat surprising, and a mix of fascination and restlessness, including some hostilities. I heard one person after the viewing suggest that they needed to apply Marley’s message to that circumstance. If a film can evoke that, that’s certainly worth something.

Film Journal 2024: Madame Web
Directed by S.J. Clarkson

I keep waiting for the cynicism to die, but alas, here we are. Another fringe Marvel film left having to dig itself out of a pre-dug hole before it even releases. Sunk before it even had a chance to swim, and not likely to find its way above water after its release either.

For my money, this is a fair degree better than the cynicism would have you believe, thanks in large part to an enjoyable and endearing performance by Johnson, some good chemistry, and the decision to keep things relatively simple. If this thing had a chance, I think it would serve a younger (and it does ever younger), female audience quite well.

The nearly non-existent villain is its biggest weakness, but thankfully he barely gets any screen time, so that kind of balances out. Its slightly uneven too when it comes to the dialogue, which does make the decision to go for simplicity weigh on the parts that need to establish the larger story. We see this mostly in the third act when it needs to bring all the threads together. But where it works is when Johnson is on screen trying to figure things out, and that is most of the film.

Suggested to me a blend of Blue Beetle and Captain Marvel, just dialed back. It has some nice thematic resonances that play through the film, book-ending it with an sense of purpose and message. And I also enjoyed how they employed Madame Web’s powers on a visual level.

Didn’t regret taking a chance on this one. It’s a solid middle grade outing that had me engaged and interested, which is what I hoped for.

Reading Journal 2024: The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels
Author: Beth Lincoln

It’s definitely fun, quirky, even cheeky when it comes to its use of the dictionary and word play. And for all the ways it caters to its upbeat and carefree nature, it also takes on some big ideas. It explores that intersection between free will and determined- are we who the world determines us to be, or do we become who we determine ourselves to be. It takes on the nature of language and words- does the dictionary define what words must mean, or does it capture what they mean in their common usage. And wherein, then, is language and words free to change and grow and evolve with time and context. Further yet, as words and language change, what sort of window does this create for the societies which give these words their present meaning and usage (it is here where the book delves into the specifics of gender roles and identity, for example)

And yes, this is a book written for teens. I did wonder at times whether an adult writing from their own vantage point and context but reflecting the voice of a younger generation might be able to adequately detach themselves from imposing their own definitions and understanding of words into a context not their own. Which would of course beg the question of the role of influence in the realm of social formation. Where the book is at its best is when it is striving to establish a universal foundation that can apply in a timeless sense. There are moments when it seems to lose sight of this. But for the most part I think it does a good job of striking that balance,

Full disclosure. Mysteries and who-dunnits are not my favorite genre. I generally steer away from them. This is, beyond the bigger ideas of its premise, a straight up mystery and who-dunnit. If that’s your cup of tea this will likely resonate more for you than it did for me,

Reading Journal 2024: Stride Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Author: Martin Luther King, Jr.

“One of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self-criticism.”

• Martin Luther King, Jr. (Stride Toward Freedom)

For as prominant a figure as Martin Luther King, Jr. was (and is), he writes with the sure handed and grounded nature of someone who simply speaks from lived experience. You can feel the articulate and academic nature of his words dripping off the page as he tells his story of Montgomery, and yet this personal memoir, equally the story of a movement of people, of a collective experience and a whole voice, breathes like a candid and personable conversation. As though he was sitting across the room on the couch sipping coffee out of your mug and musing about the state of the world. Which then somehow would spin in to the state of himself. The state of oureslves.

I loved it. More than that I was inpsired by it. I was educated by it. I was changed by it. Having recently visited the South, and partituclarly the streets of Montgomery, King helped to bring the story of these streets alive.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is the path King travelled back to Montgomery. Sensing a moment, he sacrificed much of his life to be where he felt God wanted him to be- in the midst of this moment doing what he can to contribute. Driven by a passion for his southern roots, he would become not just a Pastor of a Church, but of a city, and of a movement. A movement that, through much anguish, would come to define one of his most committed convictions, that of the way of non-violence.

The chapter on non-violence is worth the price of this book alone. He notes it as a pilgrimage, citing the voices that shaped him through a process of learning and discovery (Thoreau, Rauschenbusch, Gandhi, Brightman, DeWolf, Muste, Mueler, Chalmers, Niebuhr, Johnson, and of course his religious conviction, Jesus). As he writes, “The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.” Or his recolection of the famous saying, “A religion that ends with the individual, ends.” For King, he hinged his methodology and practice on the simple truth that it is better, always better, to be a recipient of violence than the inflicter of it. If one can note problems and potential evils within pacificism, non-violence remains the lesser of two evils. This philsophy, in the powerful final third of this book, eventually bears witness in the fruit of this movement in Montgomery. Without this philosophy, the movement likely would have died in the same streets tread by those protesting the oppresssion of segregation.

For King, “a religiion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social condition.” Without this concern, a relgion becomes a “one way road” between those who have power and the God they evoke in order to wield such power. What keeps us beholden to God, something the powerless know better than anyone, is our concern for the powerless and the systems that keep them enslaved, the cross-section of that two way street. “Religion”, King insists, deals with “both earth and heaven.” God “still works through history His wonders to perform… pull(ing) down mountains of evil and level hilltops of injustice.” The hard truth of this fact, which we can see in the movement that emerges from the streets of Montgomery, is that God works through those “willing to subsstitute tired feet for tired souls.” What happened in Montgomery has the undeniable mark of God’s hand for King, and yet the two way street finds the strenght of the people who formed this movement pointing him to God, while seeing God in this movement points him to the people.

It remains such a privilege to have visited these streets recently. The story Montgomery tells remains as important today as it was in Kings day. This book is equally timeless. It is a model, a patterned discourse that can teach us what it looks like to note injustice, to care about injustice, and to do something about injustice. More so, its a powerful critique of dead faith, helping to breathe new life into a religious conviction, a religious truth, that demands hands and feet.