January, February, and March 2022 in Review
Books
I finished five books in the first quarter of the year:
Letters to My White Male Friends by Dax-Devlon Ross (St. Martin’s Press, 2021)
Ross provides a LENS tool for conversations:
Listen to those with lived experiences in areas you are looking to grow
Empathize with people who are asking to be seen, heard, and meaningfully included
Notice your patterns and reactions to feedback and pushback
Speak from the heart
And the book concludes:
Can’t we just focus on doing better moving forward? No, I’m afraid we can not. Although our forward-looking orientation has served us well as a country, we must interrogate and integrate the injustices of our past into our current understanding of the problems we are trying to solve if we are ever going to reconcile.
Available from the publisher’s website.
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant (Alfred Knopf, 2017)
A quasi-memoir from the accomplished business executive Sheryl Sandberg. Available at various retailers via Grant's website.
Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson (Brazos Press, 2021)
This was a challenging book to read, and maybe that was part of the point. I definitely learned some things that I was never taught elsewhere about American history, American law, and American church history. Some excerpts:
We might think, The despoilment of African Americans is unfortunate but ultimately not my problem – it is their problem. Alas, with Cain, we retort, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” But the voice of his blood cries from the ground. Indeed, I am my brother’s keeper. His burdens are mine. Her injuries and losses are mine. Because of our common, image-bearing humanity. Because of covenantal solidarity. Because we are “we.” Reparations is, at its most basic, a call to be a neighbor.
The church must deliberately cultivate the capacity for humility. This is not as easy as it may seem. In spite of the American church’s broad affirmation of humility as a spiritual virtue, the painful fact of the matter is that one of the most broadly evident characteristics is pride: an intellectual pride that refuses to listen; a moral pride that hastens to condemn; and a political pride that beguiles us with the conviction that we are on the right side of history. Each of these forms of pride are not merely characteristics of a particular demographic or generation. In our experience, they are broadly characteristic of the church as a whole. The peril of pride is that it blinds us to the truth and closes us off from the interrogations of reality and the inconveniences of love. The remedy for this pride is the deliberate cultivation of a deep humility of the mind and heart – a willingness to stop, listen, consider, and change.
Transferring wealth will also require churches to cultivate new practices, specifically ceding authority. In many churches the model for economic support is that money is given away, but the terms, amount, and frequency remain largely determined by White institutions. While this is both understandable and conventional, it is not yet reparative. It might alleviate certain forms of Black suffering, but it is not yet creating Black wealth. In light of this, we call churches, as an expression of reparations, to enter into deliberate relationships with Black households, institutions, and communities and – having collaborated to build capacity and remove obstacles – to take the ultimately reparative step of transferring wealth into a context of Black ownership and Black control.
A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel J. Levitin (Penguin Random House, 2016)
A quick read, all about how to see through misleading statistics and the like. Available from various retailers via the publisher’s website.
The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency by John Dickerson (Random House, 2020)
I’d been wanting to read this book for a while and finally got around to it this winter. Dickerson’s trademark wit makes for engaging reading of anecdotes and analysis of presidencies from Washington to Trump. Available from various retailers via Dickerson’s website.
Concerts
I attended two concerts in the first three months of the year, both of them by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. (Thanks for the birthday present, Mom and Dad!)
The first, in early February, was with New Zealand conductor Gemma New leading a program including the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new violin concerto (I was actually there the first night of the weekend series, so it was the true world premiere) and my favorite symphony, Sibelius’ Fifth. I’d only heard Sibelius 5 in concert once before, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its home hall, and was looking forward to hearing it again. Sadly, the NSO was no match for the CSO and the performance was a bit lackluster. Sparsely attended, too, though the then-rampant omicron variant may have kept many people away.
But then in late March, I was in the Concert Hall again to hear a Michael Tilson Thomas-led performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection.” I’d only heard this symphony in an outdoor setting before, with the Grant Park Orchestra in Chicago’s Millennium Park, so was very much looking forward to a concert hall performance. And was looking forward, too, to a Tilson Thomas (“MTT”) performance. MTT has been battling cancer, including taking last fall off from conducting duties to recover from surgery, and has announced he will start limiting his work going forward. I’ve seen him conduct in Chicago and Miami and now in Washington and it is a little sobering to think it may have been the last time I will watch this lauded American conductor in action.
Suffice it to say that this was an excellent performance in all respects. The near-sellout audience gave MTT a standing ovation as he first walked on stage, and gave him along with the orchestra and Choral Arts Society of Washington a well-deserved standing ovation ninety minutes later.
