Reviews for The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era

The average rating for The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-17 00:00:00 Dana Samarelli This book feels a bit like it was born as an academic paper, but like all of Hauerwas' books it is as human as it is scholarly. The book walks through three other books, summarizing them extensively. The first chapter covers Peter DeVries' "The Blood of the Lamb". The second chapter looks at "Where is God When a Child Suffers?" by Penny Giesbrecht, and the third chapter covers the incredible anthropological work "The Private Worlds of Dying Children". I was only familiar with the third book, but the three stories forward the "argument" of the book very well. Hauerwas argues against theodicy as a theoretical enterprise, and passingly destroys "When Bad Things Happen to Good People". The book compellingly argues that "it is only as we are able to locate our lives in relation to those lives which manifest God's glory that we are graced with the resources necessary to live with our silences."

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-18 00:00:00 C David H Harris I'm overdue for a reread of this short, well-written trio of essays. Hauerwas overturns 1st-world expectations that modern medicine will be godlike in its ability to hold back death and relieve suffering. He argues that holding drugs, devices, and doctors to a divine standard, while limiting recognition of divine activity to medical intervention, means missing out on the good work both are really doing.