The three books you get in prison? [My Answer]

About a week ago I asked folks a question: Supposing you had six months in prison with no guarantee of interaction with others, what are the three books you would want in prison. I wanted to take a minute and talk about responses I got from the folks at the Books to Prisoners project I volunteer with said and some of the reason folks gave for why their particular choices as well as to give my own answer.

I've been working with Books to Prisoners for going on two years now and so I've had a while to think about this one.

Another of the volunteers there easily had one of the best answers:
"I'd like to learn a new language and with 6 months, I got nothing but time. I'd get the biggest of those all-in-one language learning books that I could find."
Good call. As I've mentioned in the past I'm in a Spanish class and have been doing badly at Spanish for about 6 months now. With nothing but time I'll go with something that looks like it would be a bit of a struggle (because it's got to last me 6 months). Hopefully include some workbook materials, vocab, etc. that's a lot for any one book, this was the best I could find but it isn't a dictionary and that's going to create a struggle.

We all decided we needed a novel of some kind. There was also some agreement that it needed to be something that was insanely large and re-readable. The big contenders seemed to be Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Someone pointed out in this scenario they wanted a book that was written not to compete with TV and film but one where the author never had to worry about competing with the plug-in-drug.

So for me I'm choosing to take Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I recently ran across a lecture series in iTunes entitled Democracy: A Users Manual which included the first two lectures on this novel. While the lectures made it pretty clear to me that Dostoevsky and I probably wouldn't see eye to eye on politics, but I find it really intriguing that he was Dorothy Day's favorite novelists and that Sigmund Freud apparently refused to read his stuff because it felt to much like working with his patients.

Lastly, and this one sounds like a bit of a cop-out but I want a really big Bible. Ideally I'd love one that includes 1st Enoch and Shepherd of Hermas (both early contenders for inclusion into the cannon) but since those don't usually make it all into one volume (or a Study Bible made by the folks at Orbis Books...Please Orbis, make a Study Bible), one in a decent translation is all I ask (because I can only read so much in the King James). The prospect of having 6 months to read my Bible cover to cover without much in the way of distractions is actually a really exciting prospect. The last time I read the whole thing was ten years ago and the ways that I've grown to understand the Bible differently and the world fairly differently and I think things like "Blessed are the merciful" (Matthew 5:7) and ideas like forgiving a person who has wronged you not seven times but "Seventy times seven" (Matthew 8:22) would take on a significantly different flavor inside of prison.

So thats my list:
Giant Spanish Workbook
The Brothers Karamazov
Bible

What do you think? Good picks? Is there something I should be re-shelving?

The Diatesseron for Evangelicals

Currently my wife and I do church at a local Christian and Missionary Alliance church. It's in many ways your typical American Evangelical church. I go back and forth on whether or not I think it's a healthy place for me; on the one hand the people who attend are really nice, they hold a high value on table fellowship and the role that food should play in a church and while I have issues with the ideological underpinnings of how they talk about justice they actually put a lot of their money where their mouth is by housing the local food bank and regularly encouraging parishioners to be sure to donate coats/canned goods/socks/blankets/etc. in a near never ending drive. While I think this amounts more to charity than justice, that is a topic for another post.
My rub with this church is often more of an issue of hermeneutics - that is how we interpret or understand what the Bible means - or ecclesiastical practices. This isn't necessarily always a bad thing though. In many ways it keeps me on my toes. The sermon, which I rarely agree with, often draws on texts that I tend to gloss over and or would be easier to interpret if I was say a little more Reformed than I tend to be, just to pick one example. As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says "we are all selective fundamentalists who pick and choose a package of certitudes that will sustain a particular stance of faith in action in the world" (Redescribing Reality p.131). Brueggemann also points out that all of us do this with the Bible as well, we pick out the texts that we like and we come up with fancy (or not) ways of ignoring the parts of the Bible we don't like and instead spend our time waxing eloquently on the parts we do. It's a complex book, it's bound to happen.

(Finally He Gets Around to What Happened this Week)
On Sunday this week we were pointed one of the billion or so little inserts falling out of our program to one that talked about how we as a church were going to be going through the Gospels. "That's fantastic!" I thought and looked at the back of the sheet to find out how they had chosen to break up the readings. Which gospel will we go through first? Mark? That one really is my personal favorite and reading them chronologically as written would make a lot of sense. Maybe John? I'd grown to appreciate John a lot more after reading John's Gospel & the Renewal of the Church by Wes Howard-Brook which helped me see the conflict embedded in the text instead of a Jesus who is all puppies and sunshine and gets executed for being really really nice.


Nope. We are going through all of the gospels at once. This bothers me for a couple of reasons:

1. 1) The Early Church rejected attempts at gospel harmonization. The Diatessaron, an early attempt at harmonizing the gospels written by the Apologist Tatian was really popular and yet it was thrown out as a heresy (heresy or not isn't my litmus test - We're all heretics to someone). In my mind the church father's (sorry ladies) had the foresight to see the unique things that each of the Gospels had to bring. Which brings me right to my second point
2. We loose narrative functions and are unable to see unique properties of each book when we read them all at the same time. This is the same reason I don't like it when pastors pull verses from dozens of different sources throughout the Bible to make their points. It is important that we learn to read the author as if he weren't an idiot. This means, I think reading the Bible in bigger chunks (ever watched a movie in 5 min chunks? Think the narrative will stick with you as well as if you'd just watched it in one sitting? Think you'll catch all of the subtleties?) and assuming that the author of that particular text is actually saying something that can stand on it's own without needing to be buttressed from every angle.
3. I see this as being especially a problem for non-liturgical churches because we often times don't see the text in one large piece but will break the parables (for instance) off from the context in which they are being told. Who Jesus is interacting with seems like an afterthought as if Luke is writing down a parable going "Crap! Well were should Jesus say this? Hmmm, well I haven't put him by the sea in a while and let's have him talking to beggars"

What about you? Am I overstating my case? Are there benefits that I'm missing (Perhaps we are more likely to notice the distinctions when we read them side by side - "How many angels were there at the tomb? One or two")?